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Elisabeth Moss wasn't quite as present in this season of "Mad Men" as she was in the first two, as the show focused heavily on the Draper marriage. When called to serve, though, she was outstanding, whether showing Peggy beginning to assert her professional and sexual independence, or suffering undeserved verbal abuse from mentor Don. With Joan leaving the firm midway through the season, Christina Hendricks was also absent quite a bit, but she was wonderful at showing Joan's growing realization that the life she'd strived for years to get was a colossal disappointment. Plus, she played the accordion! And the hospital waiting room conversation between Joan and Don is on my short list of "I'd nominate this person based on nothing else but that scene."

I came close to doing three pairs for this category, with Sandra Oh and Chandra Wilson from "Grey's Anatomy," but ultimately decided this was a baby I'd feel okay splitting, and went with just Oh. Not that Wilson isn't always fantastic, and particularly in the finale; I just think Oh was given better material throughout the season as Cristina wavered between what was good for her love life and for her career, and she consistently nailed it. And she was also pretty spectacular during the Seattle Grace Under Fire finale.

When "Friday Night Lights" began, Aimee Teegarden wasn't an obvious weak link the way Minka Kelly and Taylor Kitsch were (and Kitsch would, of course, evolve into one of the show's most essential performers), but nor did she stand out in a very deep ensemble. That's no longer the case. Julie Taylor can be as maddening and inconstant as any typical teenage girl, but Teegarden sells the hell out of her shifts and swings, and she had a lot to work with this year as Julie prepared to say goodbye to her parents, her boyfriend, and her town.

Tough omissions: Lisa Edelstein from "House," Ginnifer Goodwin and Chloe Sevigny from "Big Love," Sharon Gless from "Burn Notice," Yunjin Kim from "Lost," Archie Panjabi from "The Good Wife," Maggie Siff and Ally Walker from "Sons of Anarchy," Mae Whitman from "Parenthood" and Chandra Wilson from "Grey's Anatomy."

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at sepinwall@hitfix.com

If I had an Emmy ballot: Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Posted on Tuesday, Jun 15, 2010 By Alan Sepinwall

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Can Alison Brie from "Community" shoot her way into Emmy contention? Credit: NBC

Emmy Nominations Week continues here at HitFix, in which Fienberg and I attack the possible nominees from two angles: Dan speculates on who will be nominated, while I pretend like I have an Emmy ballot and say who should be.

(Here's Dan's take on drama supporting actor and actress from yesterday, as well as my actor and actress takes.)

Today, it's time for the comedy sidekicks. While I was sleeping, Dan posted his thoughts on the probable nominees for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a comedy, and if you click through you'll have my hypothetical ballot...

If the picture above wasn't enough of a giveaway, and if my writing about her early and often in discussing "Community" wasn't, either, my first nominee choice (and my probable favorite if I had a hypothetical vote) is Alison Brie. She took a character who was a broadly-sketched cartoon and managed to simultaneously embrace that side of things while giving Annie some real depth and humanity. Anything they ask her to do, she nails, and that includes completely upsetting the apple cart with her chemistry with Joel McHale. Bonus points for one of the funniest "Mad Men" moments of the season, when Trudy asked Pete to come join her in the kitchen.

This was not a very good season for "The Office," for reasons both too long and too depressing to go into here. One of the few bright spots, though, was Ellie Kemper, who owned every scene she was in as the chipper-to-the-point-of-mental-instability Erin. She was so good I may even one day rewatch "Scott's Tots," which otherwise was one of the most excruciating, tone-deaf episodes in the show's history, just to watch Erin cluelessly cheer Michael on. I'm annoyed Jenna Fischer has yet to win one of these things, but if any performer on "The Office" was Emmy-worthy this year, it was Kemper.

Y'all know I don't love "Glee." The point of this exercise, though, isn't to pick the best performances from my favorite shows, but to pick the best performances, period, and Jane Lynch (who's the clear favorite to win the non-hypothetical Emmy) was fabulous, even as the writers kept waffling on exactly how human they wanted to let Sue be.

The massive season-to-season improvement of "Parks and Recreation" was one of the year's most pleasant surprises, and Aubrey Plaza's role within that was one of the biggest sub-surprises. We knew she could nail the deadpan sarcastic thing (any scene of Plaza and Nick Offerman trying to out-minimalist each other was a delight), but for guarded, cynical April to become the romantic heart of the series? Her work with Chris Pratt was terrific, but she was nearly as good when matched with any member of the ensemble.

Yvonne Strahovski is a weird case. The show she's on is rightfully classified as a comedy, yet most of her contributions to it are on the dramatic side of the ledger. Still, the work she does in giving emotional weight to the world of "Chuck" makes a lot of the silliness possible. And on those rare occasions when she's called upon to do so (like "Chuck vs. the Honeymooners"), she's shown that she can be funny, even if her job description largely requires her to make you believe any of this could be happening while having crazy chemistry with Zachary Levi.

If this category were solely about who makes me laugh the most, my clear favorite would have to be Merritt Wever. There were times in season two of "Nurse Jackie" where I stuck with the show almost entirely to see what Wever would do and say next. That show's producers clearly recognized what they had in her and gave her even more material this year, showing that a slightly more street-wise Zoe would be no less funny than the naive nursing student from the start of the series.

Tough omissions: Jane Adams from "Hung," Yvette Nicole Brown from "Community," Lizzy Caplan from "Party Down," Rosemarie DeWitt from "United States of Tara," Busy Philipps from "Cougar Town," Sofia Vergara from "Modern Family."

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at sepinwall@hitfix.com

Good Wife") and Daniel Zelman ("Damages"). Photos by Dan Busta Awards Watch: Emmy Roundtable -- Drama Showrunners

By Matthew Belloni

June 12, 2010, 06:47 PM ET

"Are you trying to get us fired?" Matt Nix joked when asked how he handles disputes with his "Burn Notice" actors. Relationships and compromises -- with their co-writers, networks and rabid fans -- were a common theme during the hourlong discussion with our panel of Emmy-worthy drama showrunners.

The Hollywood Reporter: What do you say when people outside the business ask you what your job is?

Michelle King: That's assuming any of us talk to people outside the business. (Laughs.) I don't think most of us leave the office much.

Matt Nix: I say writer. If they're curious, I say writer-producer. If they're really curious, writer, producer, casting.

THR: "Manager" doesn't make it in?

Nix: You end up sounding like a douchebag if you say "I'm the manager."

Daniel Zelman: I lead with writer. The other stuff would be impossible to explain. Really what I feel like what I do is put out fires constantly. And it would be hard to describe what those fires are and what goes into putting them out. Sometimes I start a few of my own, as well.

Vince Gilligan: There are so many fires to put out. So much of it is about money. We don't have enough to blow up this car or paint the wall blue, sometimes. There's so little money in basic cable.

Zelman: Scheduling actors--for some reason on our show the actors seem to be working constantly on five different shows at once so we can never get them on the days we need to get them. That's a huge part of what goes into every day, just getting a production schedule together. As well as the money, of course.

Damon Lindelof: (Shooting in Hawaii), we're enormously blessed on the fire front because the war is being fought (there). We're piloting the drones (in L.A.) but we're dropping bombs elsewhere. We have two executive producers in Hawaii dealing with the day-to-day headaches, and we (Lindelof and fellow executive producer Carlton Cuse) get to stay in L.A. for the most part and focus on writing the show, editing the show. We spend two to three hours a day on the phone with Hawaii. We're dealing with the same thing you are where, we'll write a script, the number comes in, and it's like, "All right, cut 10 pages, nine less explosions, we have two units going so this actor has to be in three less scenes." So you have to creatively compromise all the time. If we were shooting on a stage right next to the writers' offices, you'd get sucked into that drama. We recently went to Hawaii, shooting the final episode, and even with four days left of production you get sucked into the drama. It's like, "You guys have done so well without us all the time." And suddenly, mommy and daddy are back and Mary Poppins is -- "F*** her, we need your ear!"

Gilligan: Our Season 1, I spent most of my time in Albuquerque (where the show shoots) instead of in the writers' room. If the writers strike hadn't come, we were headed for a shutdown because I was just farting around on the set all day long. It's better to be 800 miles away because I'll just waste all my time saying, "This prop isn't quite right."

King: We're on the opposite coast (from shooting in New York) and we still spend all our time e-mailing and phoning trying to put out the fires and the schedule. Maybe Hawaii is better. There are fewer distractions there. They can't go do a Broadway show there. They can't do another series.

Lindelof: It's an island prison in a lot of ways. (Laughs.)

Zelman: We've got the Broadway show problem in a big way.

Lindelof: Do you guys have directing producers on your shows? Because that's the other thing. If we didn't have Jack Bender, who's our directing producer -- he has literally been there all six years of the show. He directs every third episode and supervises the visiting directors. He's making decisions that we trust him to make; he doesn't have to call us and say, "What should I do with this person's hair?" There's stuff that we micromanage, but for the most part, he has total autonomy. The first season of the show, Carlton and I were commuting to Hawaii, and we were having the same problem that you describe. When you're on the set, you cannot call the writers room and be like, "What do you got?"

Nix: You can, but they don't have it. (Laughs.)

Gilligan: I tried to do that.

Nix: On both "Burn Notice" and "The Good Guys," we send writers out to the set. But we ended up with this weird thing where it actually influenced the hiring, because we basically have to hire staff writers whom we can deputize with the power of executive producer. Like, "Staff writer, you are in charge of everything. You are the voice of God." It's a weird thing to call people who have been on other shows and say "No no, this executive story editor can fire you."

THR: When you watch the final cut of your shows, what bothers you most?

Nix: For me it's geography. In the crush of making things manageable, there's always this tendency to be like, "OK, these two things could be just a little bit closer." On set, nobody wants to put the brakes on it and say, "You know what? It makes no sense that that person is hiding from that other person and they're five feet away."

Zelman: Props. In our show, a lot of story points are made through props, and a lot of our props can all look the same when we're trying to tell a very specific story with one prop. There's one file, one envelope-- it's a quasi-legal show, so files and envelopes and documents are very important -- and they all end up looking exactly the same. We're trying to trace once prop over a whole season sometimes and four others can come in that look exactly like it.

Lindelof: We run into the same thing. We want to say, "This is really important later but we can't tell you why."?

Zelman: For us, our schedules are crazy and we're on a basic-cable budget. There are very few writers, there's no directing producer, so if it slips through our hands, it's gone.

Lindelof: For us, the thing that is hardest is we can feel really rushed in our storytelling. We have 14 series regulars and each one of them has their own story and we have 42 minutes now (per episode); that's all that's left, and we have to break it into six acts. That's an average of a seven-minute act. You can't really get a lot of moments in seven minutes of storytelling. You get into the editing room and you're six minutes over your 42 minutes and it's still feeling rushed. We've got to lose scenes to let others breathe. The experience of watching it on the air is really sucky for us because you're like, "Why would anyone watch television this way, with commercials?" (To Gilligan) I cannot watch even your show ("Breaking Bad") with commercials, I have to watch it in other ways. It would be like watching the first 15 minutes of "The Hurt Locker,"then they turn off the movie and you just sit there for two minutes.

Awards Watch: Emmy Roundtable -- Drama Showrunners

By Matthew Belloni

June 12, 2010, 06:47 PM ET

Nix: For the purposes of your network, let me just say I watch the commercials and purchase the items advertised. (Laughs.)

Gilligan: We have three act structure (with a teaser) and we have 47 minutes. I wrote one episode for ABC five years ago of "The Nightstalker," and when (producer) Frank Spotnitz said it was a six, seven-act structure, I was like, "What the f***?" God bless you guys, I don't know how you do it.

Nix: "Burn Notice" is a teaser, four acts and a button, so it's not six acts: It's a teaser, four acts and a button. (Laughs.)

THR: What's your proudest moment as a showrunner?

Lindelof: That we negotiated an end date for the show. Three years ago, it became very clear to us and the audience that a show that was fundamentally based on a mystery engine needed to build toward a drawing room scene where you're telling the audience you're going to get some resolution. And in that same conversation we said we should make fewer episodes. Why are cable shows so good? Why is the bar so much higher if they have less money to produce their shows? The answer is that some stories shouldn't be told over 24 (episodes). I can't imagine a season of "Damages" that's 20 episodes long.

Zelman: I'd kill myself.

Lindelof: But also, the audience's brain capacity to track what you do and the emotional capacity of your show has to be finite.

THR: What's your advice to TV writers hoping to make the jump to showrunner?

Matt Nix, left, and Damon Lindelof

Lindelof: It's different for everybody. I did so much bad writing in my 20s. I got hired as a professional writer for the first time when I was 28 or 29, and I literally have thousands of pages of s***. A lot of people aren't willing to write s***, or they write two pages of s*** and then they stop. You have to plow through it.

King: Some people have the trust of the network. Even if they haven't created the show, they're recognized as being spectacular managers.

THR: But how do you get that trust?

King: Grown-ups. There's just a comfort level with the executives if you seem like someone who is going to show up at the office, get the work done and not create a lot of headaches. They prefer to avoid the drama and the crazy if they can.

Nix: All (network execs) want is to be able to look at somebody and say, "That person is responsible for the show. I can yell at that person if the show's not good. When I started "Burn Notice" I thought, OK, it's like an English class, everyone has homework and I have the most homework. But then I realized three episodes in that nobody else has homework. I have homework and I have people who can help me with my homework, but if they don't do their homework, I've got to do their homework. And I've got to grade their homework.

THR: But how did you get to the point where you were the one doing the grading?

Nix: I had never written an episode of television before I started running "Burn Notice," but I had worked as a feature writer for eight years and I had never been unemployed because I pitched on every single thing there was. When I looked over my old hard drive, I had like 75 movie pitches. I pitched on two different movies in which children have superpowers that are viewed as defects. It was ridiculous! I've done so much story breaking that when I started the show -- one of the biggest skills is putting out fires with writing. Anyone can say, "OK, let's do a stupid explosion or something lame that blows the scene and hurts the show." But what it comes down to is, can you get in there and come up with a creative solution that doesn't ruin the show?

THR: When you fight with your networks, what do you fight about?

Gilligan: Money.

THR: Casting?

Zelman: No, FX has been unbelievable. Early on, Ted Danson felt like an experiment, but looking back on it, it feels like a no-brainer. Once that happened, they trusted us. Probably the biggest thing we fought about was marketing. Our show is a very complicated show to market, so that has a lot to do with it. What is our show? Is it a legal show or is it a thriller? I can't tell you. I can just tell you how hard it is to make.

THR: How about spoilers in marketing?

Lindelof: They're not arguments, they're "combative discussions." (Laughs.) You respect that their job is to get people to watch your show and they respect that you want to protect your show. If the numbers go down, those are the people getting yelled at -- not me, ironically, because it's our job to make good television.

Zelman: I had the experience of stuff being in promos that wasn't in the next episode. Stuff that was cut.

King: Are you finding spoilers ending up on the Web? On "Good Wife," we would finish a script and six hours later it would end up on the Web.

THR: Nobody talks about "Lost" on the Internet, actually.

Lindelof: You can do two tacks, you can try to keep everything secret, and the effect of that is that you tell the people you work with every day that you don't trust them. Or you say, there are people out there who are going to want to know what happens on the end of the show, but there is nothing I can do to stop them. We've done a little bit like you guys do (on "Damages"), which is flip to the end, show me what happens to Tate Donovan, so now the show isn't about this shocking thing, it's about building to it.

Zelman: Early on, people became so into guessing the outcome. Their guesses became so wild, the most surprising thing became to do the most obvious thing. That actually ended up satisfying people, in a weird way.

THR: How do you feel about the the rise in the cult of the showrunner in recent years?

Lindelof: There was something starting to happen at the turn of the millennium when I was a fan of these shows and Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams were very much on my radar. At that time, certainly David Kelley was on my radar and (Aaron) Sorkin, but they weren't plugged into the geek culture the same way J.J. and Joss were. And the thing about Sorkin and Kelley was, they were like the J.D. Salingers of TV writers. They weren't interested in having a dialogue with fans. But J.J. and Joss were going on the Internet and having dialogues with people and showing up at Comic-Con and you could ask them questions. They created that thing that a lot of celebrities have where you feel like you know them. With "Lost," within a couple of seasons it became necessary for us to start a dialogue with the fans because they were getting so frustrated. Someone needed to say, "Hey, it's going to be OK and if you're mad, be mad at us, don't be mad at the show." Like with any sports team, you're either a hero or a goat.

Gilligan: I never go online. Ever. I mean, I go online for porn but I never look up the show online. (Laughs.) It's not because I'm not interested, it's because I'm too interested.

Zelman: I'm just like you, but I'm lucky enough to have a partner who's obsessed, so anything I need to know he tells me.

Lindelof: Carlton is like, "Stay away from that s***, it's toxic." But I'm kind of a geek, so I'm interested in going to those sites to see the new "Iron Man" trailer; and, in trying to track it down, there's a post that says, "Why 'Lost' sucks" and I have to go, "Oh, why does it suck?" (Laughs.) This contradiction has emerged. The two questions we get asked the most often: "Are you making it up as you go along?" And they want the answer to be that we have a total plan, we're not winging any of it. But the second question is, "How much input do the fans have?" And they want the answer to be a lot. How can both be true?

THR: The primetime audience majority is women. Why aren't there more female showrunners?

King: I have no idea. I work with my husband, so I don't think I can speak for what the female showrunner experience is, like what Shonda Rhimes is going through (on "Grey's Anatomy"). That seems like a different matter. It's probably just a numbers game; there weren't that many females hired as baby writers, so they haven't had the same opportunities to come up. What's ironic is you go into these meetings with network execs and there are a lot of women, perhaps not in the very top jobs, but oftentimes (King's husband) Robert will be the only guy in the room.

'Firefly' Rewind - Episode 2: 'The Train Job' Posted on Tuesday, Jun 15, 2010 By Alan Sepinwall

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Jayne dons some fashionable headgear on "Firefly." Credit: FOX

Once again, we're spending Tuesdays this summer revisiting episodes of Joss Whedon's "Firefly." (You can find last week's review here.) This week, it's time for "The Train Job," with spoilers coming up just as soon as my story has an odor to it...

"Time for some thrilling heroics." -Jayne

There's a school of thought in the TV business - and Joss Whedon says in the DVD commentary for this episode that he belongs to it - that after you make your pilot episode, you do variations on it five or six times in a row to get people used to your show, and to create an easier entry point for anyone who might have missed your premiere and checked in later. I'm not a fan of that philosophy, as it tends to lead to a bunch of really boring episodes that often scare away the people who were watching from the beginning before the show ever gets out of repetition mode and gets to the good stuff.

"The Train Job," though, is an unusual case of this. As discussed last week, Fox executives decided they didn't want to lead off with "Serenity," and they gave Whedon and Tim Minear a two-day weekend to write an entirely new script for an episode that could function as the series debut.

Hence, "The Train Job," in which every major character beat and piece of backstory has to be replayed or explained in exhausting detail.

So we open with Mal, Zoe and Jayne at a bar to again explain about the civil war with the Alliance, and to try to again establish the show's mix of Western, Eastern and sci-fi. We get another scene of Inara complaining that Mal enters her shuttle unannounced, as well as more awkward flirting between Kaylee and Simon. And we get exposition ladled on top of exposition ladled on top of exposition, so that viewers would understand why this outlaw ship is also home to a hooker, a preacher, a doctor and his crazy but brilliant sister. Etc.

And on top of all that, Whedon and Minear's script has to actually tell a story, as we see the crew of the Serenity tackle an old Western trope (the train heist) in a sci-fi manner (flying the ship overhead to steal the cargo).

It's kind of a no-win scenario. I had already seen most of "Serenity" before I watched this, and I know some of you first watched the series in the DVD order, so all the exposition and repetition sticks out like a sore thumb. And for those who came to "The Train Job" first back in the fall of '02, the backstory of, say, Simon and River isn't nearly as emotionally compelling as recounted by Shepherd Book as it was when we saw Simon take River out of the box in "Serenity."

Short of pretending "Serenity" didn't exist and starting from scratch - which may not have been

Chapter 2

a possibility (that pilot was a very expensive sunk cost that Fox intended to air at some point) - I don't know what else Whedon and Minear could have done. But the parts of "The Train Job" that are good - and there are a bunch of those parts - come whenever the episode gets away from having to make lemonade out of lemons and can just tell the story of Mal, Niska, Crow, Sheriff Bourne and a planet full of sick people.

Michael Fairman is marvelously creepy as Niska, playing him like a Jewish immigrant movie studio chief like Jack Warner, only if Warner were really a sadistic gangster. The introductory scene with Niska and Crow nicely establishes the jeopardy Mal is risking by going to work for the man, as well as the desperate state of the Serenity that he would find it necessary. Mal and Zoe's arrest creates some good conflict among the rest of the crew about who runs things when mom and dad are away (and lets Adam Baldwin do a great stoned pratfall as Jayne), and when the cargo turns out to be badly-needed medicine, we see that even our thief has some lines he won't cross.

That's all fun stuff, highlighted by the actual heist sequence, with Jayne and his silly earflap hat hanging down from the ship to grab the goods(*), and then by the hilarious, macabre punchline to Crow's threat to hunt down and kill Mal. In your run-of-the-mill TV adventure series, that threat is followed by our hero boasting that the bad guy is certainly welcome to try. On this show, in this world, with this man, it's followed instead by a good swift kick into Serenity's engine, followed immediately (and even more hilariously) by Mal making the same offer to the next goon, who understandably agrees to shut up and take the money back to Niska.

(*) It's so well-put-together that even chatterboxes Whedon and Minear essentially shut up during that portion of the commentary so they can just watch it.

With the extra burden of having to explain a pilot nobody saw out of the way, later episodes will be able to spend more time on the missions, and on seeing the interactions deepen among the crew and passengers. Still, given the absurd limitations "The Train Job" had to work with, it's not a bad start.

Some other thoughts: Shepherd Book seems to bear a particularly heavy load of the exposition, and I don't know whether that's because Ron Glass is a good talker, or because (as even he admits with the "I do feel awfully useless line) he's the character without an obvious plot function. (The crew members have their respective jobs, Simon patches up the wounded, Inara smooths over certain diplomatic issues, and River is leading the Alliance to chase Serenity.) But we do get yet another hint that Book wasn't always a preacher, as he's heard of Niska before and has some sense of how the man's mind works. Whedon and Minear were also under pressure to make Mal and the show a bit more jovial than in "Serenity" (though Mal kicking Crow into the engine is just as dark in its comedy as Mal shooting Dobson in the face), and so there's even more Whedon-brand banter than before. Most of it's of the quality you'd expect from these guys, but I always cringe at Mal's "I'm thinking we'll rise again" joke right before Serenity rises (get it!) up from below the ridge. Too corny and on-the-nose. On the other hand, Zoe's, "Sir, I think you have a problem with your brain being missing" is perfect in every way, from the word choice and order to Gina Torres' dry delivery of it. "Two by two, hands of blue." So River not only know everything (like the make and model of Serenity), but has some kind of psychic abilities as well. Hmmm...

Up next: More fun and excitement with the Reavers in "Bushwhacked."

What did everybody else think?

bike box via Word Spy on 6/15/10 bike box n. A traffic light intersection feature that creates a designated area for bicycles to stop in front of cars when the light is red.

Example Citations: Located at the entrance of the intersection, a bike box is a demarcated area that straddles the bike lane plus one or two vehicle lanes, and is basically designed to give cyclists a head start when the light turns green. Well-used in Europe, bike boxes can't work without right-on-red restrictions. (For a schematic, see: http://bikingtoronto.com/2010-toronto-cycling-map-adds-bike-boxes/.) �John Lorinc, "Toronto's worst intersection?," The Globe and Mail, June 13, 2010

ax's starred items James Manos at Banff, Part One via Complications Ensue: The Crafty TV and Screenwriting Blog by Alex Epstein on 6/15/10

I sat in on James Manos�s �master class� at the Banff Worldwide Television Festival. Manos, the creator of DEXTER, talks a mile a minute, but I was able to scribble down some of the most important points.

Backstory

Manos avoided a career in pro basketball when he realized that at 5� 10� he was going to have to work too hard to keep up with the other players. He went into acting, did summer stock, and wound up at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London.

He says he �wasn�t intending to be an actor,� but �it�s imperative to know what you�re asking someone to do.� (I found the same thing: one of the most useful writing and directing classes I took was two years at the Joanne Baron Studio studying Meisner Technique acting. I didn�t want to act either, but it taught me a lot about how scenes work, and it helps me listen to my characters.)

I would not necessarily be surprised if he was eliding a few fits and starts here � no one likes to talk about things that didn�t work � but soon he read about a Texas mom who allegedly tried to help her daughter get on the cheerleading squad by hiring a hit man to kill her daughter�s rival�s mom. Figuring he was never going to get into Hollywood unless he had something that everyone else wanted, he �borrowed $150,000 from a friend� and went down to Channelview Texas, wondering if there was something in the air that made everyone down there nuts. He was surprised to discover the town flooded with limousines � Hollywood producers who were also down there to buy the story. But he got the rights.

If I scribbled this down correctly, he wrote up a 20 page treatment and took it to Bob Cooper at HBO, who immediately optioned it, and they hired a writer, and Manos was off to the races � as a producer.

To be continued...

Random Rules Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub Donald Milne Donald Milne by Jason Heller June 15, 2010 Article Tools Twitter Facebook Digg StumbleUpon Reddit Email This Print This More Random Rules Nelson George Angela Gossow of Arch Enemy Alasdair MacLean of The Clientele Jim Elkington of The Horse�s Ha

The shuffler: Norman Blake, singer-guitarist of veteran Scottish pop outfit Teenage Fanclub. Since forming the band in 1989 and playing on classics like 1991�s Bandwagonesque and 1997�s Songs From Northern Britain, Blake has also collaborated, both solo and with the group, with everyone from the Pastels to Jad Fair to former Gorky�s Zygotic Mynci frontman Euros Childs, with whom Blake currently plays in the duo Jonny In Edinburgh. Teenage Fanclub�s 10th full-length, Shadows, is out this month on Merge Records.

Wire, �Straight Line�

Norman Blake: This is great. I don�t have the name here, but it�s one of the really short tracks from Pink Flag.

The A.V. Club: They�re all pretty short.

NB: Yeah. [Laughs.] This one�s 44 seconds long. Pink Flag is an amazing LP, even if it�s over before you know it. It�s one of the seminal punk-rock albums. All the songs on it are great.

AVC: Do you remember the first time you heard Pink Flag?

NB: The first Wire record I remember hearing is Chairs Missing, the one after Pink Flag. �Outdoor Miner� was the single from that album, and I loved that single. That would have been in 1979 or �80.

AVC: What did you make of Wire at the time?

NB: It was way more sophisticated than most punk-rock bands. The punk music that I liked then was, like, the Buzzcocks. Those Wire records are very melodic, too. They have these great little songs on them. I�ve actually bought a lot of their later albums after they got back together in the �80s, but they�re quite different.

AVC: Would you say that Wire or punk in general influenced the way you write songs?

NB: I suppose indirectly. Most of the punk music I liked then was melodic. I think when I started writing songs, I always started with melody rather than making some kind of noise or whatever. That was of more interest to me.

Honeybus, �How Long�

NB: I don�t know if Honeybus was popular in the U.S. It was this British �60s pop group. It had a big hit with a song called �I Can�t Let Maggie Go.� [Sings.] �She flies like a bird in the sky�� They had a couple of hits over here. This song is on my iPod because I do a bit of work with [Creation Records co-founder] Joe Foster of Rev-Ola Records, and he reissues lots of stuff like this. One of the things we remastered recently is a collection of Honeybus singles. �How Long� is on it, and it�s a really fantastic pop song. I�m not even entirely sure if it was a big hit in the UK, but it�s so incredible. They were fronted by a guy called Pete Dello, and he went on to make his own records. With a lot of these lost classics, I can almost see why they weren�t so popular or successful. They might have only a couple of decent songs. But Honeybus was really fabulous. It�s almost like The Left Banke or one of those things. But you can tell Honeybus is English. There�s just something about it. It has this kind of pastoral aspect, you know? There are also elements of groups like The Creation in there, but they�re more of a pop band. The Creation had a little more of an edge.

AVC: Have you always been into �60s music?

NB: The first music I was really into was punk rock, because that�s what was happening when I was a young teenager. I loved that. But when I got a little bit older, the Postcard groups came along in Glasgow, and they totally opened my eyes to music. The one depressing thing about the post-punk period was the idea that all the music made before 1977 was irrelevant, which was clearly nonsense. But when you�re young and easily influenced, you may listen to that kind of idea. So along came Orange Juice and said, �The Buzzcocks are amazing. Punk rock is amazing. But so is Al Green and Love and The Seeds and The 13th Floor Elevators.� That�s how I discovered that music, because Orange Juice came along and said it was okay to listen to it. I would go and track down all the bands they always talked about.

AVC: What was it like being in the middle of the Postcard scene as it was happening?

NB: It was amazing. We were asked to play last year with Edwyn Collins. We did a couple of other shows with him, old Orange Juice songs, and it was great. When I first started a band, Orange Juice was the template. I wanted my band to be like them. It was the greatest band around, for me. It was great to see those bands back then: I saw Aztec Camera, Josef K, and later The Pastels, which I ended up joining. That was really the start of the Glasgow music scene.

Kit And The Outlaws, �Don�t Tread On Me�

NB: This is from one of the Songs The Cramps Taught Us compilations, the ones with all the old �50s and �60s songs The Cramps covered. They�re amazing. I�ve bought all of them. This is a pretty good one, actually, but there are so many good tracks on these compilations. I�m a 7-inch-single person, so I like to track these down on records. It�s very difficult. I did track one down recently, a single called �Whiplash� by The Shells. It�s a great kind of dance record. It�s really scratched and beat up, but I like to deejay with it.

AVC: You�re a fan of The Cramps, then?

NB: I love The Cramps. The first record I bought of theirs was the �Garbage Man� single. On the sleeve of that record, if you look at Bryan Gregory, he looks as if he�s half-man, half-leather. He looks as if he�s some beast from the underworld. [Laughs.] It�s a good look. And Lux Interior, Poison Ivy� What�s not to love? That�s a proper legend, that is.

Jonathan Richman, �That Summer Feeling�

NB: I love Jonathan Richman. I love everything he�s done. �That Summer Feeling� is one of those incredible songs. The lyrics��When the teenage car gets the cop down on it, when the flat of the land has got the crop down on it, when the catamaran has got the top down on it��just unbelievably brilliant, you know? The last time I saw Jonathan was about six months ago, and he just gets better and better. I�ve got this little story: A friend of mine was promoting a show of Jonathan�s, and he came up to me and said, �You�ll never guess what Jonathan Richman�s rider was.� I said, �I don�t know, what was it?� And he said, �The rider was: a glass of tap water onstage at the side of the microphone. That was it.� [Laughs.] It had to be tap water.

AVC: Do you keep up with his newer albums?

NB: Oh yeah. A more recent Jonathan song I love is �My Baby Love Love Loves Me.� He did it live the last time he was in Glasgow, and he had everyone in the room singing for 10 minutes. There were 300 people in this room worshipping at the temple of Jonathan.

The A.V. Club Blog Great Job, Internet!: The Internet was built for Cageflix

by Josh Modell June 14, 2010

We sit in front of our computers most of the day, connected to our friends and co-workers by the series of pipes, strings, and nimbostratus zackets called the Internet. Many times per day, things flash before our eyes�videos, photos, songs, sites�that are funny or strange enough to warrant sharing with other people. We salute them with a hearty "Great job, Internet!"

Internet entrepreneurs are everywhere, and as with every other aspect of life, there are stupid people and smart people involved. Sometimes you come upon a genius of the rare type that mixes peanut butter with chocolate. Well, the world has found yet another combination: Netflix and Nicolas Cage. Genevieve just sent me the link to Cageflix (which she found via Videogum), which smashes those two amazing concepts together. With the touch of a button, you can add EVERY Nicolas Cage movie to your Netflix queue. You're a little bit tempted, aren't you? Here's the link. Do we smell a book deal?

Barbara

B by Marc Hawthorne June 15, 2010

We Are Scientists Barbara Masterswan/Megaforce Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

B av club rating Related Reviews We Are Scientists: With Love And Squalor We Are Scientists: Brain Thrust Mastery

For a band that shares its name with a Cap�n Jazz song, We Are Scientists sports a pretty straightforward sound, channeling any emo impulses it might have into well-polished, tidy little dance-rock tunes. And really, frontman Keith Murray seems more comfortable when he�s flaunting his bad-boy skills and blaming things on the a-a-a-a-a-alcohol than when he�s letting his emotions get in the way. (Really, lines like �Although it may seem unconventional / sometimes indiscretion is worth a try� sound better atop a catchy groove than under a pile of unhinged post-hardcore.) Barbara is the latest addition to the New York outfit�s solid discography, and if things seem kind of familiar around here, it�s because the trio hasn�t bothered to fix something that isn�t broken. (One change is that WAS has a new drummer, and proving how much bigger the band is in the UK, it�s an Englishman named Andy Burrows, formerly of Razorlight.) Highlights tend to emerge around elevated tempos, including the ones found in �Nice Guys� (which, in an emo twist, sounds a bit like The Get Up Kids circa Something To Write Home About) and the Killers-esque �You Should Learn,� though WAS also pulls off a nice mid-tempo move in �Ambition,� whose guitar hook brings to mind Fleetwood Mac�s �As Long As You Follow.� Dance, pop, and you don�t stop.

Thank Me Later

B+ by Nathan Rabin June 15, 2010

Drake Thank Me Later Cash Money Rate It Submit A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F - login to rate

B+ av club rating D- reader rating based on 2 ratings

It seems strange to single out rappers for rapping about themselves, since that�s one of the most explored and abused subjects in hip-hop. Heck, most rappers rap about nothing but themselves, but in the wake of Kanye West�s success, a new wave of rappers like B.o.B, Kid Cudi, and now Drake have filled albums with an intimate form of introspection far removed from typical rap braggadocio. West�s breakthrough, The College Dropout, was about becoming a man, but it was equally concerned with the joys and hardships of becoming a star. That subject dominates Thank Me Later, the eagerly anticipated Cash Money debut of rapper-actor-singer Drake. From �Fireworks,� the opening track, Thank Me Later is filled with profound ambivalence about the process that transformed Drake from a supporting player in a Canadian high-school soap opera into one of the hottest acts in music. That introspection could easily have devolved into navel-gazing, but Drake has a clear-eyed, nuanced take on his evolution from an aspiring artist to a superstar who�s exhilarated but spooked by the prospect of cultural ubiquity. Musically, Drake favors warm washes of synthesizers that create a melancholy, fragile mood redolent of 808s & Heartbreak, and the album boasts a guest roster packed with big names like Jay-Z, T.I., The-Dream, Young Jeezy, and mentor/label boss Lil Wayne. Drake may be powerfully conflicted about stardom, but on his cohesive, bittersweet, assured debut, he proves himself worthy of the sometimes-blinding spotlight.

Megan Fox deflects 'Transformers' controversy at 'Jonah Hex' press conference Posted on Tuesday, Jun 15, 2010 By Drew McWeeny

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Megan Fox and Josh Brolin, seen here in their new film 'Jonah Hex,' were part of a press conference on Sunday morning in West Hollywood. Credit: Warner Bros.

10:00 AM doesn't sound intolerably early, but I'm a night owl by nature, and this was a Sunday morning following four or five 8:30 AM mornings in a row, with a 6:30 AM morning in there for good measure.

I just barely made it to the Four Seasons in time, grabbed a quick glass of juice and bacon, because YOU DO NOT TURN DOWN FREE BACON,and took a seat in the back of the conference room. They brought in Jimmy Hayward, the director of the film, as well as Megan Fox, Josh Brolin, and producer Andrew Lazar. They got seated quickly and we jumped right into Q&A that lasted for 40 fairly spirited minutes.

The first question set the tenor for much of what followed, particularly where Megan Fox was concerned. She's on the spot right now because she's not going to be in "Transformers 3," and there's controversy about whether she left or she was fired. Josh was asked what it was like to play a comic book character who is not as well known to the public, so there's room for him to offer up his own interpretation without the crushing weight of expectation, and Megan was asked, "How is it to get away from the robots?" Yeah, nothing leading about that.

"What robots?" asked Brolin to the first of many waves of laughter during the press conference. "Coming from a comic book that refused to die... allowed us to do what we wanted to do." He went on to talk about how the core of the character is what they worked to preserve while playing loose with the details. Then all attention turned to Fox, who has a reputation for being outspoken in the past and less than political at times.

"I like working on action movies, and I like working on movies that are comic-book based," she said, "and these are the types of things I loved watching as a kid. So it wasn't about getting away from the robots, if that's what you're saying. I enjoyed making both films." She smiled, refusing to offer up even a hint of negativity towards the franchise that launched her career.

Well-played.

Asked about the parallels between John Malkovich's bad guy character in the film, Quintin Turnbull, and modern-day domestic terrorism, both Hayward and Lazar talked about the idea as one that evolved as they worked on the film, and not the original notion for the villain. They said it wasn't meant to stand in for any one thing, but just show someone who wanted to tear down institutions, someone who could be a real threat.

Brolin was asked about working in the elaborate make-up and talked about taking the opportunity to do a Lon Chaney role, and how it was much harder than he expected. "We did three hours of make-up a day. It was very tough," and he had to maintain a half-beard and half-moustache for the duration of the shoot. He talked about how wearing the make-up and going through that process helped him play up the curmudgeonly side of the character. "Would I do it again? Sure. It's like having a baby. I look at the end result now and think, 'That's pretty cool.'"

As the laughter settled, Hayward was asked about making the jump from CGI animation (he directed "Horton Hears A Who" before this) to live-action. "Those are big expensive films where you have to manage a large number of people, so I think it shows you can do that." Discussing the casting of the film, Hayward credited Brolin with being the anchor on the film. "A lot of these people are friends of his."

Lazar talked about how they had to go back to Brolin repeatedly before they talked him into playing the role. And regarding the casting of Megan Fox, Brolin just gestured to her, head to toe. "Why? Hello." Lazar talked about how she was an early name that came up in casting, and then Brolin brought her up as well. He liked her presence in interviews, the way she had a bit of a rebellious image, and he talked about being curious to see what she was capable of. He talked about how much she did to convince them on-set, playing each scene different ways, giving them options for how to cut the role. "I just wanted to make sure she was the real deal, a scrapper. And she's definitely got a truck driver mentality."

She blushed at the description. "I think it's wonderful what they're saying, and I'm humbled by it." The next question was for her regarding the action in the film, which she says is far more elaborate than anything she had to do on "Transformers." "The gunfights were hard for me because I have tiny little baby hands, and those guns are so heavy." She also talked about the corset she wears in the film, which is extreme, to say the least, and how much she enjoyed wearing it.

"The real question," Brolin growled, looking the reporter who answered, "is how did YOU feel about the corset. Don't project that on her, man."

Fox and Brolin talked about building out a "Beauty and the Beast" vibe in the relationship, playing the older/younger dynamic, and how they both built these characters as very broken people, and there was some discussion about the last minute fine-tuning that was required to get the film from R to PG-13. "You know how the MPAA is. 'Can you have him punch the guy three times instead of five?'" Brolin talked about how the film never feels gratuitous in the PG-13 cut, which he prefers, actually.

Someone asked Josh and Megan if they have ever sought retribution in their personal lives, since it's a major theme in the film. "You mean against you?" Brolin asked the guy in return. "Look, here's how I'll bullshit my way through this answer." He brought up all of the great Leone westerns, and how much he loved Jackie Chan in "Rumble In The Bronx," and the classic Bronson and Eastwood films. He talked about how movies allow you to feel empowered in a way that life rarely does, and how "Jonah Hex" is his attempt to live that sort of character for once.

"Retribution? I'm all full of candy canes and lollipops," Fox said. "I don't even know what that means."

A reporter asked Brolin if "Jonah Hex" is a sort of middle ground between the real-life characters he's played and the totally fictional characters in other films, since Jonah's not real but there's still some reference people have that they will carry in with them. Brolin brought up the fact that Hex is, at best, a cult character and how most people have no idea what to expect from it, so he's doing his own sort of classic laconic cowboy character.

Asked how she's handled the last few years in terms of the demands of fame, Fox said she's going out of her way to stay very domestic and keep the people around her who were there before the fame. "I distance myself from the Hollywood crowd. I don't really go out and socialize that way." And then Brolin was asked to tell his favorite Malkovich story from t

Chapter 3

he film. "The great thing about John is that he's so in character, but doesn't have to stay in character. So you can be doing a take and be totally in the moment, and then they call cut and he's like, 'So, um, what are you doing later?'" His Malkovich was dead-on perfect, too. He got the cadence right, the sound of Malkovich's voice. Brolin's a very funny mimic. So evidently during one of the fight sequences, they called cut and Malkovich called him over and said, "So, um, can you pull my finger?" Brolin was reluctant for obvious reasons, but finally did, and there was a loud, awful CRRACK when he did. "Yeah, I think you broke it ."

More questions about Fox's fame, confirmations of facts that had already been confirmed (yes, Brolin reeeeeally is in "Men In Black 3" as a young Tommy Lee Jones), and a preposterously dirty riff on the word "Woody" by Brolin padded out the rest of the press conference, and Hayward seemed uncomfortable discussing the way Francis Lawrence was brought on to help supervise the additional photography that went into the film late in the production process. Fox talked briefly about "Passion Play," another film she has coming out this year where she plays a carnival freak with angel wings who ends up in love with Mickey Rourke, and Brolin said he's got several things that are coming together that excite him, but he's not able to give those titles yet. Fox also had a moment where she talked about the difficulty in pleasing comic book fans, and how she's a "Lord of the Rings" nerd and reads message board conversations "where someone gets mad because Frodo was eating the Lambas bread outside Mordor instead of the Mines Of Moria," and as she said it, you could see every nerd in the room lean forward, suddenly convinced they might have a chance.

Overall, it was a chance for Brolin to nail some one-liners and for Fox to prove that she can give an interview where she doesn't burn down every bridge in the entertainment industry, and we were out before 11:00. I'll have my sit-down on-camera interview with Josh Brolin later this week, and I've got a pretty great story about Brolin and his encounter with my son, who joined me at the junket. I'll also have a review for you before the film opens this weekend.

"Jonah Hex" opens June 18 in theaters everywhere.

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The Kindness of Strangers by Ransom Riggs - June 14, 2010 - 12:35 PM

I was out of town at a wedding last weekend, and when I got back, I found a strange thing on my doorstep � a bag with a bottle of wine in it, on which was written:

Leaving aside the fact that I wasn�t around to be annoyed by whatever driveway-blocking may have taken place over the weekend, I�d say that�s pretty much the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for me. A bottle of wine? I have to assume that the three other apartments in my building, who all share my driveway, found similar goodie bags on their doorsteps. What a gentleman (or woman)!

Let�s start the week off with some feel-good vibes: what�s the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you?

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One day a couple of months ago, I decided to stop by a Starbucks for a morning cup of coffee. When I go to the drive-thru window to pay, the lady said that they are having a Pass-It-On relay. The person in front of me paid for my drink and I would pay for the person behind me. Well I didn�t have a cheap order and all I paid for was the person�s order behind which came out to $2.50. I thought that was a great idea and it made my day.

posted by Colene on 6-14-2010 at 12:43 pm

One year for Valentine�s Day my then-boyfriend and I went to a pretty nice French restaurant. It was our first time in such a nice place and I�m sure we looked it. We were sitting next to a much older couple for most of the meal, and when it came time to pay, we learned that the other couple had payed for our main dishes and left. We were so touched that they would make that day even more special for a couple of broke high schoolers.

posted by Gina on 6-14-2010 at 12:44 pm

Colene: I haven�t heard pass-it-on, but I�ve had the person in front of me at a drivethru at Starbucks pay for my coffee. It has since become something I try to do at least once a month.

posted by Susannah on 6-14-2010 at 12:49 pm

When I was 8 or so, I got lost at a sand castle festival at the beach. I had been following close behind my mom, who was holding my younger sister�s hand, and just got separated from them. I promptly forgot everything I was supposed to do if I got lost (stay in one place, or find a policeman, etc) and took off running down the boardwalk to try to find them. I knew there was a Lost Kids booth, but I didn�t know where it was and I never asked anyone for help because I was afraid to talk to strangers.

After half an hour, I was completely panicked and had no idea where I was. I sat down on the curb and started crying. A few minutes later, a woman and her husband stopped and asked me if was ok. They calmed me down and said they would help me find the lost kids area. Running toward my mom when we finally got there is the most vivid memory of my childhood.

I have no idea who the people were, but I�ll always be grateful to them for helping me during the most terrifying hour of my life!

posted by Christina on 6-14-2010 at 12:54 pm

While honeymooning in Disneyworld, my husband and I ducked into a �pub� in the England park at Epcot to avoid the rain. We sat at the only empty table in the place, but noticed an older couple and their granddaughter come in from the rain looking for a place to sit. I offered to share our little table with them, and we had a really great conversation (funny thing was�they were actually from England.)The couple was very kind and bought my husband and I a drink to toast our marriage. It was one of the highlights of the whole trip.

posted by Emilee on 6-14-2010 at 12:58 pm

At 11 I was standing in the hallway of a hospital outside the ICU unti where my grandfather was. He had been on a ventalator and couldn�t talk but he kept mouthing the words �I want to go home� I was so upset I had to leave his room. As I walked out in the hall I saw a group of 3 women and a man who had obviously just come from church. I didn�t want them to see me upset so I hurried past and hid behind a wall pillar. It didn�t work and before long the 3 women were huddled around me hugging me and letting me cry on their shoulders. I�m always moved to tears when I remember how concerned they were about a little girl crying in a hallway.

posted by Rachel on 6-14-2010 at 1:03 pm

I was at Sesame Place a few weeks ago. While searching for a place on the character parade route, I could hear someone behind me screaming, �Excuse me! Sir! Excuse me!� I assumed I wasn�t his target, but all of a sudden, he was right there in front of me, handing me my wallet. �It fell out of your pants way back there,� he said.

I didn�t have even a dollar in it to thank him, so I tried to find an ATM to give him a reward. �Don�t worry about it,� he said. �Maybe one day when I lose my wallet, someone will track me down, too.� I sure hope so.

It makes me want to go looking for lost wallets to pay it forward.

posted by Jason English on 6-14-2010 at 1:05 pm

Several years ago my husband and I went to a popular mexican restaurant for dinner with another couple. We had never been there before and were very impressed with both the food and the staff. After my husband asked to see the manager to tell him what a great time we were having, our server came back with a bill for just our drinks! She said the manager was so impressed that we took the time to comment and seemed to be having so much fun, he decided to pick up our tab. What a wonderful evening, and a memory we will always have.

posted by Shane on 6-14-2010 at 1:06 pm

Someone parked in my driveway this weekend.. I cussed him out.

Its funny to read this story now.

I think if it wasn�t a douche bro truck in my parking spot and a bottle of wine instead, I would have behaved differently.

posted by Chrystani on 6-14-2010 at 1:09 pm

When I was about 16, I had missed my train at Grand Central Station in New York. I had maybe 50 cents on me and was incredibly hungry. A man saw me looking at bagels in a display and asked me what looked good that morning. I can�t recall my reply, but after thinking he had ordered for himself, he handed me a bagel with cream cheese and a lemonade. He told me his name was Nico and that he hoped the rest of my day was better. I�ve never forgotten how kind he was.

posted by Jen on 6-14-2010 at 1:13 pm

In college I was driving home to Seattle from my school in San Francisco, either at Christmas or summer break. The drive required one toll bridge crossing and the lady in front of me paid my bridge toll. As a poor college student, and even now almost 10 years later, that�s one of the nicest things a stranger has done for me.

posted by k on 6-14-2010 at 1:17 pm

He probably stole the wine from the wedding. ;)

posted by dan1101 on 6-14-2010 at 1:19 pm

I was on vacation in NY in October 1998 and wanted to see a Yankees playoff game. I didn�t have a ticket and there was no one anywhere scalping tickets. I wrote on a cardboard sign �Need 1 ticket� and then this guy came up to me and gave me his spare ticket � for free. I sat right next to him and his sons and we all enjoyed a great game. Only in New York�

posted by Marcel on 6-14-2010 at 1:22 pm

@Jen: I�m glad to hear your story in particular. I�m from the south and I didn�t make it to NYC until my early 20�s. Down here, most people speak very poorly of those �damn yankees�. (It�s true, some South Carolinians still use that term, I swear). I had always heard horror stories about how rude New Yorkers were and the first time I went to the city, I was very surprised at their politeness. Some of you may disagree, but I�ve been there countless times since then and have always found New Yorkers to be polite, courteous, and well mannered. Maybe I�ve just been lucky, but I have several memories of being in NY and getting very unexpected kindness from strangers.

posted by Eric on 6-14-2010 at 1:31 pm

During a vacation weekend to a very busy state park in southern OK. 2 of my children were swept off a rock and into deep water by a swift current. I had to look away to watch my step trying to reach them as fast as possible, when I got to the water, they were nowhere to be seen. A flash of orange caught my attention from the corner of my eye and when I turned around I noticed a lifeguard pulling my children onto a rock. I know it�s their job, but that kid (no older than 16 or 17) will probably never understand he impact that he had in my life.

posted by Jenn on 6-14-2010 at 1:32 pm

Marcel, I made my comment before I got a chance to read yours. Just goes to prove my point a little more. Weird.

posted by Eric on 6-14-2010 at 1:33 pm

I was in London for a study abroad theatre program. I needed to get to the West End to see a show (my grade depended on it!) But I had wandered way far out of the tube zone that my pass was good for.

I think I had little money on me, and as I sat in the underground station staring at the map, trying to find out how to walk to the West End, a stranger came up to me and said �Take my pass, I�m done with it.� and gave me his all zone pass.

I made the show in time.

posted by Kevin on 6-14-2010 at 1:38 pm

@eric: I�m glad to hear of others having positive experiences in NYC. I am a New Yorker myself these days and I find that living amongst so many either makes one significantly kinder to strangers or significantly nastier.

Not to toot my own horn, but I�m still feeling energized from having jumped in front of a moving car in Chinatown to save a baby in a stroller from being killed on Saturday. Of course, I was the one who got yelled at, but the sincere thank you from the father will keep me going for a long time to come.

posted by Jen on 6-14-2010 at 1:39 pm

My kindness of strangers story is also set in NYC. It was my first time there in 2007 and late at night, after seeing a Broadway show, I walked to the Waldorf Astoria because I love grand hotels and I�ve always wanted to see it.

I peeked into the bar and sat down for a bit and I fell into conversation with two gentlemen next to me. When they heard it was my first time in the city and in the hotel, they bought me a drink to toast my first (and hopefully) not my last time in the city.

It�s still one of my favourite memories of that holiday!

posted by Loulou on 6-14-2010 at 1:40 pm

Christmas before last was financially draining. I am widowed and have 3 elementary school age children. There was no money for Christmas. I used the utility and heat money to buy Christmas for the kids. I figured we would somehow get through the short fall. It was 10 PM and I had just finished �playing� Santa Claus when the door bell rang. Kind of scary � I looked through the door � a petite woman was standing outside. She handed me an envelope, said Merry Christmas and left in a van waiting at the curb. I had never seen her in my life and haven�t since. The envelope was empty except for 3 crisp 100 dollar bills! My own Christmas miracle.

posted by Hummer on 6-14-2010 at 1:42 pm

earlier this year, I let a guy in our apartmet complex borrow a shovel to dig his car out of the foot of snow surrounding it. when i got home from work later in the day, i found a six pack of really good beer and a thank you note. it was defintely too much for letting someone in need use a shovel.

posted by mike on 6-14-2010 at 1:44 pm

When my daughter was young, I worked to instill in her patriotism and respect. During our specially recognized veterans day during our county fair about 6 years ago, my daughter (then age 6) hunted for people wearing those special ribbons marked �Veteran.� Each one she found, she offered them a sincere thank for protecting us. Unknown to us at the time, a local reporter was chatting with one of the veterans she found. A short mention of her and her thank yous were placed in the paper� which lead to some of the most amazing letters I have ever read. My daughter received some letters from veterans-many that brought tears to my eyes. She received a $100 check from one of these veterans for her college fund. These letters are proudly displayed in her scrapbook and show me just how amazing people can be.

posted by Lynne on 6-14-2010 at 1:47 pm

On my first big trip alone to San Francisco I was having doubts about the trip and thought for sure I would just turn around after passing the Golden Gate Bridge and drive home. When I drove up to pay for the bridge toll the car in front of me had paid for my toll! After that I headed into the city for a great day. When I see college kids or younger in a car, I make sure to pay for them into SF.

posted by Diane on 6-14-2010 at 1:53 pm

I feel like I am a very fortunate person and have had a fair share of random, kind acts directed toward me. One that stands out from recent memory was when my husband and I were busing around Ireland last year. The bus left us off in Athlone but unbeknownst to us, our bed and breakfast was miles outside of town. We attempted to walk with our luggage, but we didn�t know exactly where we were going and it was starting to rain. So we trekked back to town, ate lunch at a cafe and then asked the owner if she knew where we could hail a taxi. A customer spoke up and said, �If you can wait until I�m done with my lunch, I�d be happy to drive you out there.� He wouldn�t take money for gas or anything. He was just a kind and warmhearted fellow who left us with a very happy memory.

I love this article, by the way!

posted by Renee on 6-14-2010 at 1:58 pm

i was at bonnaroo this weekend and lost my wallet. i didnt have any cash at all and both my credit cards were inside, thus, if i didnt find it i was going to have to beg for money to get home.

i went to lost and found the next morning and found my wallet with a note inside from the founder wishing me a happy rest of bonnaroo and that he hoped that i would get my wallet back. he also let me a dollar bill (i think may be he thought someone had taken money out of it but there wasnt any in there to start with). i was so happy that such a nice person had found my wallet and other bonnarooers were happy to hear such a charitable story totally in keeping with the goal of the festival.

posted by englishbreakfast on 6-14-2010 at 2:03 pm

My dog Bartlet started to break out of yard a few months back. Poor guy was suffering from separation anxiety. He would get out and try to find us. Luckily we have some great neighbors who called to tell us they had him. One couple was on their way to the hospital for some procedures and they grabbed him when he was running into a pretty heavy traffic area. I�m so grateful to them. I would be lost without my little friend. (Incidentally we got him a little friend to keep him company, Bartlet and Leo now spend their time when we�re not home eating our couch).

posted by Brit on 6-14-2010 at 2:11 pm

@hummer: youre story made me choke up a bit. THAT is what the holidays are about. no matter if you are religious or not, i think that having a season to recognize your love for your family and neighbors is v important. i would love for it to happen all year but if just a couple months make people remember those around them, ill take it.

posted by englishbreakfast on 6-14-2010 at 2:12 pm

@Renee

The nicest people I�ve ever met were in Ireland. I had more random conversations with strangers in my two weeks there than I�ve ever had here in the states. I had a great night in a pub with two old ladies named Helen and Peg! Cheers ladies!

posted by Brit on 6-14-2010 at 2:15 pm

Once I did a very very bad thing which was only noticed by one person afterwards.

Instead of making my behaviour public and ridicule me in front of everyone he later talked to me about what was wrong with what I did.

I�m a better person thanks to his kind ways of handling a potentially delicate situation.

posted by Jim on 6-14-2010 at 2:16 pm

@Brit You are a West Wing fan, I�m assuming

posted by Tini on 6-14-2010 at 2:23 pm

When I was in college, I had gone out in Portland, Maine to a concert one night. A couple of days later, I opened my mailbox and there was an envelope. In the envelope was my ATM card with a note saying they could have had a fun night with this but instead will be my angel instead. I never found out who found it or how they got my mailing address but I was super grateful.

posted by Susan on 6-14-2010 at 2:30 pm

We were camping at Stone Mountain for Spring Break in 2002 and the alternator in my car went out. Thankflly I had AAA but had to find a way to get to the shop to pick it up. The father of the very nice family across from my sons and I drove me to the repair shop and wouldn�t even take any gas money. I remember he worked for Fedex, so if I am shipping anything, that is who I use.

posted by Mary on 6-14-2010 at 2:37 pm

I was stuck in a hotel room outside of Dallas with my family for over a month after Katrina. One of the janitors we came to know by name gave used two of his vacation days to pay for our room one weekend. We later found out he only gets two vacation days per year and he gave them both to us. The kitchen staff also wouldn�t let us pay for breakfast on several occasions.

posted by Steve on 6-14-2010 at 2:44 pm

When I was a college student back in the late �70�s, I was taking a train to get home for Christmas from New England. I had to change trains in Philadelphia and was waiting on the track for my train. I wasn�t feeling very well, so I was huddled on a bench half asleep. After a while, I started wondering why my train wasn�t there yet. I found a railroad employee who told me I was on the wrong track. My train was several tracks over and almost ready to leave. He grabbed my luggage and told me to follow him. He got me to the train just as it was leaving and I got on. If he hadn�t carried my luggage I never could have gotten there in time. That was so nice of him!

posted by jean on 6-14-2010 at 2:49 pm

Many strangers have been kind to me (and vice versa, I hope!), but this memory sticks out:

My best friend and I were studying abroad in France and we went down to Nice for my 21st birthday. I didn�t want a lot of fanfare, just a little sunshine! We went to dinner and were seated next to an older British couple; upon discovering our shared language, we had a delightful conversation that lasted throughout our respective meals.

At one point, the waiter came out carrying two glasses of champagne. The couple wanted treated me on my birthday �just because� and made my day that much more memorable!

posted by Beth on 6-14-2010 at 2:56 pm

Once I was at Steak�n'Shake with my cast-mates after a play. There were at least 12 of us there, and we all ordered full meals, even thought it was late at night. When we got our food we noticed someone driving by our window very slowly and nodding his head. It was kind of scary, but then the waitress came and told us he�d paid for every single one of our orders! He ended up coming back in later and we were able to thank him and had a long conversation with him. He said his grandfather would always pay for someone else�s meal, and he was carrying on the tradition. Definitely one of the most memorable nights of my life!

posted by Grobanite33 on 6-14-2010 at 2:58 pm

I was driving back home from college for winter break. I was almost home when I noticed my car started to stall out and putter for lack of gas. Of course I had no cash, only checks (and no ATM or credit/debit card- old school!). I was holding up the line pleading with the cashier to let me pay with a check, showed him 8 forms of ID, and was almost in tears. A man behind me handed the cashier a $20, asked him to fill my tank up, and wished me Merry Christmas.

posted by A on 6-14-2010 at 3:01 pm

One evening around Christmas time, I apparently had dropped my wallet in the Walmart parking lot and didn�t even know it. I got home and about an hour later there was a knock on my door. It turned out that a lady found my wallet, looked up my address, and personally returned it to me. It was the nicest thing ever, esp since I was flying out of town the next day. I was so shocked that i never offered her a reward and I regret it to this day.

posted by kaisharif on 6-14-2010 at 3:06 pm

In 1995, I was walking outside the NAU library and my heel got caught in the heating grate. Two burly men bent down and gently pulled it out. I almost cried. It was so tender. As little as it sounds, it restored a lot of faith in humanity at the time. I pray they are both blessed today.

posted by Helenann on 6-14-2010 at 3:12 pm

My mother often told me a story from when I was baby: my family was driving through upstate New York at night in a snowstorm, when the car slid off the road and into a ditch. My parents found themselves stranded in a rural area with a three year old and a baby, and didn�t know what to do. Fortunately they were able to hike to a nearby house and knocked on the door. An older couple opened the door and promptly took us in and fed us all hot milk and coffee and Oreo cookies, then let us spend the night. In the morning, the husband helped my father dig the car out and got us on our way. To this day my mother loves Oreos because they remind her of the kindness of strangers.

She also has fond memories of our next door neighbor from that time. While she was pregnant with me, she was worrying about how she would get the snow shoveled off the driveway before my father came home, when she heard a noise coming from outside. When she looked outside, she saw our neighbor (a retired postman) using his snow blower to shovel our driveway for her.

posted by Jina on 6-14-2010 at 3:28 pm

That is what I call a �God Test�. Last Christmas I found a women�s purse in the shopping cart in the parking lot. Looked around but didn�t see anyone in a panic. The voice in my head said �This is a God Test�. Took the purse to the service desk & told the employees where I had found it. They looked at me like I was from a different planet. I slept good that night.

po

Chapter 4

sted by DL on 6-14-2010 at 3:29 pm

I�m a server at a nice restaurant in California and whenever I get a big BIG tip (over 20%) I always feel so humbled and grateful for their generosity. There was one night in particular I was serving a a large party that were loud Italian/New Yorkers and they kept apologizing for how loud they were being, but I told them not to worry about it, it was so fun serving them because they were so loud it made it easier to be my real self around them (not my �staged� server self). I even had a few tables leave because of how loud they were�but at the end of the evening their bill had an automatic gratuity of $200, and they left me with an extra $200! A $400 tip! I wanted to cry I was so grateful!

posted by Caterina on 6-14-2010 at 3:37 pm

When I was in my early 20s, I flew out to the Bay area for a wedding, arriving a day ahead of my family. I was on my own for dinner, and went to the restaurant next door to my hotel. I was still on East Coast time, and starving at 4:30 p.m. The restaurant didn�t open until 5:00, but the waitress who met me at the door seated me anyway and got me some bread. I had never eaten in a restaurant by myself, and had never felt so alone in public. The waitress, whose name was Kelly, chatted with me and asked me questions about New England, and made sure I felt comfortable. She even comped me a glass of wine. I was so grateful that I left her a $20 for a $14 tab, and she chased after me to tell me I had tipped her too much. I assured her that the overtipping was intentional, because she had been so awesome � and even more deserved since she tried to give it back.

posted by Christina on 6-14-2010 at 3:38 pm

Back in 1991, My father, Grandfather, and I were all going on a long motorcycle ride. We stopped at Mcdonalds to get cofee and we were all arguing who would pay. Ya know�It�s on me, no it�s on me� The cashier, said �No it�s on me� Knowing what they make, that was just very nice of him!

posted by Jesse on 6-14-2010 at 3:41 pm

I studied abroad for a semester in college. Although I enjoyed the experience I was very homesick by the time the term was over. While ariving at the airport and checking my baggage, my bags were overweight (I had been gone 16 weeks of course I had a lot to bring back). The charges would have cost $50. The woman working the counter told me to have a nice day and to forget the charges. As a homesick, broke college student I could not have been more grateful. I broke down in tears at the counter and thanked her for making my day!

posted by Lauren B on 6-14-2010 at 3:45 pm

Is anyone else getting teared up reading all of these? :) I concur with an earlier comment: what a great way to start the week, Ransom!

posted by Helenann on 6-14-2010 at 3:48 pm

@Helenann: I am! Tears are running down my cheeks. Best. Thread. Ever.

posted by loripop on 6-14-2010 at 4:04 pm

This past Christmas was very hard on my family, my husband out of a job and I on a meager salary. We could not afford presents for our children or each other. Through our church, we were able to sign up for a Christmas Angels program, where we filled out what ages our children were and what toys or other things interested them. We were also able to say one thing for my spouse and I. When we were handed those gifts, my heart was so full! I have vowed that this coming Christmas we will buy a family the presents it needs, to pass on the gift.

posted by Jessica on 6-14-2010 at 4:05 pm

I was buying some books at the local bookstore a few years ago and once I got to the till, the cashier informed me that my books are free. When I asked why, she told me of an old man that had just died and he used part of his estate to buy strangers books. I had never met him but when I see those books on my bookshelf I think of him.

posted by Matt on 6-14-2010 at 4:16 pm

I was sick and the meds they gave me caused a reaction that made me cry about everything! I had a follow up Dr. appt and went out to my car to go, and the car wouldn�t start. I was sitting there with my head on the steering wheel crying when my neighbor (that I didn�t know all that well) came out to ask what was wrong. She then offered to take me to the dr. And insisted on waiting for me even though my sister would have come to get me. She believed in doing at least one good deed every day. I need to do that.

posted by Hyacinth on 6-14-2010 at 4:16 pm

Last summer, my wife, my infant daughter & I were at the Detroit Zoo. If you�ve ever been there you�ll know it is a LOOOONG hike from the back to the front, which is why they have the train.

We waited in line in the hot sun for 30 minutes with a crying, hungry baby to buy our tickets, only to find out it was CASH ONLY. Not having more then $3 or $4 on me, we quickly got out of line and began the long trek back to our car. The family behind us would hear none of it, and spent $15 on the tickets for us. Probably one of the nicest things a stranger has done for me ever.

posted by Joe from the D on 6-14-2010 at 4:18 pm

In the middle of winter after a big snow storm I was driving to work when some jerk ran me off the road (HATE people who cannot stay on their side of the road) This left me stuck in a big mound of snow. I called everyone I knew and not one person answered their phone � it was 7am on a Sunday. AAA said it would be four hours before a tow truck could get to me. After twenty minutes of freaking out, someone finally drove down the road. They drove past, backed up and got out. Two men went right to the back of my truck, lifted up the back end (yes, lifted) and got me back onto the road. I never got to thank them or found out who they were and will forever be grateful.

posted by Christina on 6-14-2010 at 4:20 pm

My college roommate and I took a day trip to New Orleans back in the early 90�s. On our way, we spun out on a wet on-ramp getting on the interstate. We missed hitting the yield sign by inches, but ended up in a ditch. Some great guys ran over from a convenience store parking lot and pushed us out of the ditch. Later, when we were in the Quarter at a lunch counter trying to figure out what we could afford to eat, another customer bought us two po� boys. Then, as we were walking down Decatur toward the car, a bartender just leaving work started a conversation with us. When we told him where we had parked (kind of sketchy area), he insisted he walk with us to make sure we got to the car safely. We tried to turn his offer down�we were a little afraid that he didn�t have such chivalrous intentions. But he walked us just to the perimeter of the lot and watched us to make sure we got on the road safely. New Orleans is a great city.

posted by Christry on 6-14-2010 at 4:22 pm

I was stationed in Germany in the 1970�s. Upon returning from leave I got on the wrong train and ended up back in Frankfort. I found a conductor, who spoke a little English, and explained my situation. I did not have enough cash for another ticket. He took me to the office, spoke to a supervisor, printed a new ticket, and walked me to the right train. He then told me to stay on until my destination, as I did not have to change trains this time.

posted by gus on 6-14-2010 at 4:24 pm

I was in a bar one night waiting for my friend to show up to celebrate her birthday. It was an unfamiliar place in a town I had never been in and so I sat at the bar by myself and ordered a drink. My friend ended up being over an hour late, and as time ticked past and I sat there by myself, all the single guys in the bar ignoring me, I will admit I started to feel sorry for myself and lonely. An older gentleman from across the bar got up to leave and walked towards me. All he said to me was: �You are a beautiful woman and I hope you have a wonderful night.� That was it, and he left. He wanted nothing else, and it made me feel so happy even though it wasn�t �some young guy�.

posted by Gussiebuns on 6-14-2010 at 4:33 pm

In May 2001, I traveled by myself to Tubingen, Germany by myself to meet a friend who was studying abroad there. After I met my friend, we went to the local grocery to get food. While there, the stress of traveling that day caught up with me and I got a stomach ache, insisting that I needed to go back to her apt stat! She was in the middle of shopping and I left my money and ID with her and took her apt keys, claiming that I knew how to get back to her apt. (Yes, in retrospect, this was a horrible idea, but I was 19 at the time and didn�t know better.)

Of course, I got lost going back to her apt and had no address. Being an exchange student, she wasn�t listed. It was the INCREDIBLE kindness of several strangers who took me back to their apt and spent several hours calming me down and helping me find her. I didn�t get their names and don�t know if I could ever thank them enough for their generosity. (Looking back, I should have made sure I did more to thank them.)

They did show me how powerful the simple kindness of strangers can be and I�ve tried to pay it forward. (And yes, within 48 hours I made sure I knew how to get from the train station and town square to the friend�s apt.)

posted by Christi on 6-14-2010 at 4:36 pm

This is such a little thing, but this discussion makes me stop, think of this person, and say a little prayer for her� on a flight to Tacoma 20 or more years ago, this flight attendent noticed I was looking a little shakey � I�m afraid of flying and any amount of turbulance wakes up my stomach � and she brough me a cold, wet towel to wrap around my neck. With that, I managed not to toss my cookies.

posted by Alix on 6-14-2010 at 4:42 pm

I have had my wallet and purse returned to me countless times. Once I somehow dropped my wallet at the Greenmarket in Union Square in NYC. I had already bought some things, but suddenly had no money to get home. I approached several of the vendors to ask if I could return my items & get the money back just so I could get subway fare home. All of them gave me my money back & told me to keep the item. I was so touched! My wallet was found by an architect who returned it with everything intact.

Another time I lost it at a Long Island Railroad station. A plant worker found it, called me & returned it with everything in it.

A third time I had driven off after a wedding in Baltimore and left my clutch purse on the roof of my car, where of course it promptly slid off. I didn�t notice until I was halfway back to New York. A woman called me on the phone and mailed the entire purse to me, again with everything intact. I was young and poor, but I did send her $15 for her trouble.

I have been very fortunate in the kindness of strangers!

posted by Lady G on 6-14-2010 at 4:43 pm

I took some friends up to Vancouver one Sunday, and after a day of fun we got back to my car to realize I had locked my keys in it. All the car places and towing companies were closed and we didn�t know what to do! We finally wandered down to a motorcycle shop that was a about to close and a guy there said he would help us out. He called his insurance company and told them I was his cousin, and they came and got my keys out for free. The nice guy waited with us and got us bottled water. Thank goodness for the kindness of strangers in Canada!

posted by Suzanne on 6-14-2010 at 4:43 pm

I have another, I lost my wallet and wrote if off, along with $14. About a week later a small box arrived in the , with no return address. Of course, it contained my wallet and the $14.

As to the Christmas stories, when I was a kid, with a single mom, we got presents from several organizations. In 1968 my Mom was crying because the pile was rather sparse, even for us. On Christmas Eve the local Methodist preacher came to our door with bags of gifts. We did not attend his church, but he said he heard we were in need. Due to that I try to help out at Christmas. I fell very strongly about the Salvation Army Angel Tree program. I urge everyone who can to help out. You pica a tag from the tree and buy far a specific child. I tend to buy for boys who want some type of tech.

posted by gus on 6-14-2010 at 4:43 pm

@ Ransom, this is byfar your best article!!

posted by gus on 6-14-2010 at 4:46 pm

Sorry this is so long, but it�s actually the short version.

In 2001, myself and my boyfriend at the time were traveling across the United States in a cargo van we had converted. About 2 months into the trip, we were visiting the Navajo reservation to see the Canyon de Chelly. Many miles from anything, the universal joint broke and the entire drive shaft of the van was laying on the road. After only 5 minutes, a man named Davin stopped for us. No mechanics were open that late on a Sunday, so he towed us to his home and the next day sent a friend to Gallup to get the part we needed. He fixed the van for $11, the cost of the part, and replaced our broken stereo with the one from his own truck. He taught at the local elementary school and we stayed with him and his daughters for more than two weeks. He said the only way we could possibly offend him was if we did not make ourselves completely at home. He treated us like family from the moment we met. Never in my life have I encountered a more generous, selfless human being. He taught me more than I can ever put into words. This, without question, was the single most amazing experience of my life.

We also had the van repaired in the Columbia River valley for a six-pack of Miller tall boys! There are amazing people everywhere.

posted by Jen on 6-14-2010 at 5:08 pm

As an Army family, we move every few years and thus are constantly relying on the kindness of strangers. From borrowing a cup of flour, to some blankets, to a quick playdate for the kids, we have been blessed by some remarkable neighbors who have often gone on to be remarkable friends.

Probably the best instance of this is when we moved to Germany several years ago. In the military, you always get a �sponsor� when you move, to help orient you to the new area and get you through any official business. It�s even more important when you move overseas, as they can help you acclimate to the new culture. Our sponsors picked us and two cats up at the airport (which was almost 2 hours away), found a hotel for us, and drove us onto post almost every day until we were able to pick up our own car. All they had were our names and email before we met them, but they are now our best friends.

posted by Emily on 6-14-2010 at 5:09 pm

One morning, I found back window broken out. I was late for class (and it wasn�t raining yet) so I drove to school and parked. It started raining while in class & I just dreaded the mess I would face when I left. Someone had taped a plastic bag over the window.

posted by Jenna on 6-14-2010 at 5:10 pm

I had heard of the �pass it on� at coffee drive-ups, and I noticed a much younger girl behind me that I recognized from work. I bought her coffee, and we eventually became great friends. She was killed in a car accident recently and I am always glad I did that.

posted by lt on 6-14-2010 at 5:16 pm

Last year I went to a baseball game in Minneapolis. After a trip to the restroom I immediately discovered my wallett missing. After searching the floor of the ladies room on my hands and knees, I did not find it. Almost in tears, I asked a woman working the gate where I could find the lost and found. After hearing my story she gave me $5 of her own money to make sure I could take the train back to my car. Someone had found my wallet, and turned it into security � completely intact and nothing missing. I found the gate worker and returned the $5, begging her to please pay it forward again. Restores your faith in humanity!

posted by Anne on 6-14-2010 at 5:21 pm

Wow. Some of these stories are amazing, some are just a person going a bit out of their way to make somebody�s day. I�m going to do my best to be that somebody when the opportunity arises.

What a great thread!

posted by Elly Vortex on 6-14-2010 at 5:29 pm

I remember when I was 10, I was on my electric scooter, and I fell and broke my arm, And it had fallen on me so I couldn�t get up. I remember I was crying and yelling for help. This nice lady helped me up and home. I never figured out who she was, I really wanted to thank her, so I said a prayer.

posted by Haley on 6-14-2010 at 5:31 pm

As a college student, I was driving home (7 hours to Florida) when I got caught in wicked downpour. I topped a hill and in a little depression on the other side there was a rather large amount of standing water. My car hydroplaned and I did a complete 360 and I ended up in the median stuck in the grass. A man in a suit saw the whole thing, stopped, got out of his car (in the pouring rain) and helped me get my car out of the median. He then followed me to a gas station because he saw how shaken up I was. Sadly he left before I realized it so I never got to thank him.

posted by Clarence on 6-14-2010 at 5:58 pm

I was in college and running late for class, searching for a parking spot in front of the school. I happened to find one right in front of where I needed to be but I had to parallel park, which I am terrible at! After trying for almost 10 minutes and only a moment before class, an ambulance stopped behind me, an EMT got out, and parked my car perfectly. I couldn�t believe it! I was so impressed and thankful that they would take the time to stop the car and help a poor college kid out. That is now one of my favorite stories to tell people =)

posted by ry on 6-14-2010 at 5:59 pm

The Toronto Star publishes stories called Little Acts of Kindness everyday. (Link in my name!) The collections are heartwarming and I always turn to them when I�m feeling particularly down. There are years and years of archives up.

posted by Kat on 6-14-2010 at 6:49 pm

I remember once when my and my parents were struck in a snow ditch. A person stopped by to inquire regarding our well being. Later on two military personnel arrived and pulled our car from the ditch. It was a wonderful feeling.

posted by ABC on 6-14-2010 at 7:20 pm

2 days ago i was on a toll road. Came to an automated gate, exact change only. I only had $1�s, and digging around the car turned up nothing. I saw a truck pull up behind me and instead of making him wait I pulled out the envelope to send in payment. He got out, tossed in the 25 cents waved and jumped back in the truck. Such a little thing, but totally made my day.

Last year my dad and I were out running around, and got the car towed. It looked like a vacant lot, the sign and box to deposit money were not very conspicuous. We got back, realized our mistake and tried to call the number for the towing service. My phone battery died. Then it started to rain. Florida rain, so we were drenched in 2 seconds flat. These people that had parked in the same lot asked us if we were ok, ended up letting us use their phone and hung out while we waited to find out where the car was (about 20 minutes), they drove us to the towing yard, and even offered us bong hits. Dropped us off, we said thanks, they took off and never saw �em again. They were so soooper cool, it ended up being a real fun afternoon.

posted by ashley on 6-14-2010 at 7:22 pm

I know that I�ve probably experienced more random acts of kindness than this, but there are 2 that stick out in my mind. For 3 years during college I worked at a small family run coffee shop. In my last few weeks after graduation before moving, my boss�s father gave me a $100! I had only met him a few times and I doubt he knew my name. I was broke and about to move to San Francisco without a job so it really meant a lot. While working at my first job in San Francisco, I moved to a new apartment and no longer had a couch. A woman that worked on my floor gave us her couch (which was very nice), all we had to do was pick it up. I know it took her months to find a replacement. Later when I was laid off from that job, the same woman offered me a job at her company and paid me under the table until I found something more stable. I never would have been able to stay in this city if it wasn�t for her.

posted by eryn on 6-14-2010 at 7:37 pm

This past Friday I was pretty lit up and at the mercy of another friend who drove me to the bar. He was very drunk and was insiting on staying longer so I figured I�d walk the 1.5 miles home. I got out to the intersection and realized how far 1.5 miles looked late at night when drunk. Not one second after I finished that thought some dude pulled up and offered a ride. I can take care of myself so I wasn�t worried about my safety and so I hopped in. Have no idea who he was but I have to figure he saw me at the bar trying to get my friend to leave and since he was leaving at the same time and going the same way� Not the ideal thing to hitch a ride but where I live it can�t be all bad. I feel very grateful to him and will try to pay it forward soon.

posted by Hurricane on 6-14-2010 at 7:53 pm

I�ve had several pretty amazing experiences, but one stands out � it twentieth birthday, while I was an exchange student in Israel. My parents sent me a care package but I was having the hardest time finding the post office, so I finally hailed a cab. The driver, who was in his sixties or seventies, upon hearing I had no family with me for my birthday, turned off the meter when we got back to my dormitory and then drove around the corner to a bakery � came out with a pastry with a lighted candle! Sang me happy birthday and told me he would be my family for today.

Back in the late thirties, my great-grandfather, who owned a dress factory, took his entire staff off of work one day to make clothing, sheets, curtains, etc. for a gentile family, strangers, who had lost everything in a Nazi bombing and were moving to Amsterdam to start over. Several years later, when my great grandparents were taken to the concentration camps, that same family took in my grandmother, hid her and saved her life, at great risk to themselves. Just goes to show that you never know where an act of kindness will lead you.

posted by Bekka on 6-14-2010 at 8:12 pm

a few years ago, my car got broken into and my wallet was stolen. it had my drivers license, and i was bummed about having to go to the DOL to replace it. about a week later, i got a letter in the mail with my drivers license and a note saying �found this while walking, i figured you would like to know where it is� that�s the nicest thing a stranger has done for me =]

posted by beth on 6-14-2010 at 8:26 pm

This involves multiple strangers, actually. About three years ago I was in a bad crash. No other cars were involved, but I crashed through the guardrails on interstate � my car was totaled, but I escaped with nothing more than some cuts and whiplash.

Within no time of my car stopping there were about seven cars that had already pulled off the road to help. I was trapped in the car and in shock, so a couple guys pulled the driver�s side door off so I could get out. I don�t remember how many people were there, but they stayed with me until the police � and my family � got to the site. When they finally left, several said I�d be in their prayers.

I don�t remember their faces but I will never, ever forget their kindness to a very scared and shaken girl.

posted by ST on 6-14-2010 at 9:24 pm

When I was a kid we went to Orlando with my family. I was obsessed with baseball and when we got to our hotel my parents let me call every minor league team in the phone book to ask if any players were around (which was quite indulgent as well, looking back at it). Anyways, it wasn�t baseball season or spring training time, so nobody answered anywhere, until I called the Orlando Twins. A man answered and invited us down to the ballpark. He turned out to be a man named Bob Willis, the general manager of the team. He let us in and let us run around the bases and take a bunch of pictures.

That was kind enough. But soon after we got back home we got a big package from him in the mail, filled with Twins baseball bats, balls, hats, shirts, and other promotional stuff. I�ll never forget that.

posted by Easy on 6-14-2010 at 9:30 pm

One evening near Christmas, my husband and I had tickets to see a production of The Nutcracker. This was a special treat for us � my husband was in a wheelchair, and our �nights on the town� were limited. It was a bitterly cold night and we thought a bite to eat before the ballet would warm us. But every restaurant we went to was filled, and most had nothing that we could maneuver a wheelchair to. At the last spot we tried, we joked with the hostess that we were much like Mary and Joseph � there was no roo

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m at the inn. At that point, a man in a cashmere overcoat snapped his fingers and told us to wait. He directed the waiters to shove several tables (complete with diners) aside and made a small nook for us with a tiny table at the front of the restaurant. We had a delicious meal, and when we finished, he sent an apertif to our table. He did not own the restaurant, but ate there frequently and just took things into his own hands to make an accomodation no one else was willing to do.

posted by Abi on 6-14-2010 at 9:48 pm

A few years ago, my town and the town across the river held a joint 4th of July party, complete with free bus service to both towns. I parked in my town and went over to the opposite town�just to learn after the fireworks were over that the bus service hadn�t been planned to last that long, leaving me stuck in the wrong town. Thankfully, a very nice woman with her two kids (sons I think) were waiting nearby for her husband to get their car and pick them up. We started chatting and I told her my predicament. When her husband arrived, she told him the story and they offered to drive me back to my town, and to my car.

Also years before that, when I still had my previous car, I stalled out while driving in nasty rainy weather and couldn�t get the car started again. I think I was still in high school at the time, well before I had a cell phone. But while I was panicking in my car, a van pulled up behind me, and a guy got out, found out what the problem was, and let me use his cellphone to call for help. To a scared young driver, he was a angel.

posted by Amanda on 6-14-2010 at 10:05 pm

My husband�s in the army. We decided to go out to eat one day, but he got home later than he expected so he didn�t change out of his uniform before we left for the restaurant. A lady at another table, on her way out, gave us 2 gift cards to the restaurant to pay for our meal. They added up to $70. That paid for our meal, and the next time we went out too. :) She wanted us to know how thankful she was that he was serving. I�ll always remember her kindness.

posted by Sandi on 6-14-2010 at 10:59 pm

While visiting Rome in July last summer, my husband and I were exhausted, hot, sweaty, and desperately in need of a Coke with ice. We stopped in a McDonald�s on a corner in hopes of a quick break. While he went to buy our drinks, I went looking for a table. The place was packed, with a line just to sit down. I found a family about ready to leave and asked if I could have their seats when they were finished. They told me they had seen the staff kick other people out of tables if they didn�t have food, so they sat with me for 30 minutes while I waited on my husband. We compared notes on our respective trips and what we did back home. It wasn�t a big thing, but I really, really appreciated it!

posted by Amber on 6-14-2010 at 11:05 pm

@Bekka

Wow! What a great family legacy!

posted by Amber on 6-14-2010 at 11:08 pm

I drove to PA to pick up my friend from school and bring her home for a weekend. I got terribly lost on the way down and on the way back. I pulled off the highway into this town that I didn�t know and while I was driving around to find our way back I blew out my tire. I felt so bad for my friend because it was so late at night and we had no idea where we were. Fortunately we pulled into a driveway of a car workshop and a guy walked out. He said that his boss said he could unscrew and tighten the screws from the bad tire but nothing else or he�d have to charge us. It was winter and freezing but he stayed while we fitted the spare on and then tightened the screws for us. I was only 18 and now wish I would�ve given him something for it.

Also the same night my older sister drove all the way out to help us�at least an hour out. She had us follow her at 55mph with my hazards on all the way home. The only reason she knew where we were was because her friend had gone to school where we were!!

:o)

posted by Lindsey on 6-14-2010 at 11:09 pm

All of these stories really inspire me to do something meaningful for someone else. Does anyone have any good ways to help people/families on a personal level? (I don�t really like large faceless charity organizations)

posted by Alan on 6-14-2010 at 11:14 pm

This isn�t so much a random act, but one of kindness nonetheless. When I was in college, I was driving back from te Thanksgiving holiday on a Sunday night. I got into a car accident on the highway and had to have someone come pick me up (and the carload of crap I was driving) since my car had to be towed. Not one of my friends or dormmates was willing to come get me, so in desperation, I called one of my professors. In the middle of dinnertime, on a Sunday night, this man drove out to some ridiculous highway, loaded up his tiny car with my SUC�s worth of stuff, and drove me to my dorm. He then proceeded to help me talk to my parents AND unpack all of my things into the lobby of my building. I can never thank that man enough. I am a teacher now, and always try to pay it forward with my own students.

posted by LadyG612 on 6-14-2010 at 11:18 pm

A couple of years ago, I traveled to Germany to meet my husband, who was there for military training. The town he was in was a couple of hours from the Frankfurt airport, and he couldn�t get off duty to pick me up. I decided to take the train, which would involve 3 transfers to get there. At the 2nd transfer, I missed my train. I got on the next train to the same destination, not realizing that it would take a much more circuitous route to get there and would result in me missing the last train of the day from there to my final destination. When the conductor looked at my ticket, he went away and came back with his timetable book. He sat down next to me and figured out what to do. He said I should get off at a different stop and then take a different train, and told me how many stops it would be. Then at every stop, he checked back in with me and told me how many more stops. When we reached my new stop, he scribbled something on my ticket, walked me off the train and to the correct track, and told me to take the very next train that arrived and how many stops before I needed to get off that one. I have no idea how I would have made it to my final destination without his help.

posted by Jenn on 6-14-2010 at 11:25 pm

A few weeks ago, I was on my first date with a guy whom I had recently met. It was nice outside, so we decided to go for a walk in the park before we got dinner. We walked along a trail in a very dense patch of woods. After we had walked for about 45 minutes, it was nearing dusk. So, I suggested that we turn around and head back to the car. �No,� he insisted, �the trail goes in a circle. We�ll be back where we started in no time.�

Guess what�the trail wasn�t a circle. Just as night fell, we were on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, completely lost. I tried to use the GPS on my BlackBerry to figure out where we were, but no service. We happened upon a lady out for a walk with her 12-year-old son, and we asked her how to get back to the park entrance. �I�m not letting you guys walk there by yourselves,� she said. �Follow us back to our house and I�ll give you a ride back to your car.�

The kind stranger gave us a ride back to my date�s car. After this incidence of getting lost, I was pretty pissed off. I demanded that the guy drive me back to my apartment immediately. I have not spoken to him since, but I am thankful that the stranger lady helped us out. Too bad I wasn�t on a date with her�

posted by Sandy on 6-15-2010 at 12:24 am

A couple of years ago I went to Home Depot to buy some wood for a project at my house. I don�t have a truck or SUV, but I thought it would fit into the trunk of my car. After trying to get it into the car for several minutes I stood there realizing that it wasn�t going to fit. My friend (who has a truck) wasn�t answering her phone. Then the nicest couple pulled up to me in their truck and asked me if they could take the wood somewhere for me. I live about 12 miles from the Home Depot. I was so grateful. I didn�t have any money so I gave them a gift card that I had to a local restaurant. It is probably the nicest thing that a stranger has ever done for me.

posted by sumgrl on 6-15-2010 at 12:57 am

Several years ago I had my wallet stolen on my way to work. Along with the cash and a couple of credit cards, I was carrying my national ID and my social security card. Getting new credit cards is easy, but replacing the ID�s implies having to deal with the local bureaucracy� I shudder at the thought! Anyway, I kept postponing it for at least two weeks; then when I was finally on my way to the ID office, Mom calls me saying my ID�s had been found.

Now here�s the story� apparently the thief kept the valuables and tossed the ID�s away. A lady found them on the street in front of her workplace, and called the social security office to see if they could provide her with my contact info. The clerk at the SS office said they weren�t authorized to do so, due to security policies; however, he took her phone number and actually bothered to call my home and relay the information. The lady�s workplace turned out to be just 4 blocks away from my office; sadly, when I went to pick up my ID�s, I was told that she had been transferred to another site, so I never had the chance to thank her personally�

posted by FlyingAce on 6-15-2010 at 4:30 am

After reading all these stories I can only pledge to try to give at least one act of kindness a day , no matter how small, sometimes the smallest things are the ones with the greater impact

posted by dennis on 6-15-2010 at 4:31 am

My husband and I are both in the Army. A couple of months ago, we were still back at homestation working around the clock with last minute preparations for a year long deployment to Afghanistan. We got out of work one day at 8:30 pm, after being on the clock for over 14 hours, and went to a Chinese Buffet because we were too exhausted to cook, and most of our dishes were in storage. We were both in uniform, and some older woman paid for our meal. We didn�t even know it to thank her until after she had left! I was so tired and aggitated with work that the gesture meant a lot to me.

posted by Niki on 6-15-2010 at 4:33 am

In June of 2007, I met my husband in London for his 2 weeks of leave from Iraq. After a wonderful and amazing two weeks, we parted ways at the airport, his flight leaving 9 hours before mine. I bummed around the airport, trying to push the thought that my only chance to see my husband (and touch and speak to him without a 2 second delay) was over.

I sat down at the bar of a TGI Friday�s to drown my sorrows with some Irish cider. The man next to me at the bar started chatting with me and I learned he was a chaplain in the Canadian Royal Army. He thanked my husband and I for our service (don�t get that one a lot! It�s usually just him!) and told me I was a strong, beautiful woman. He even insisted I eat something although I had no appetite and paid for my whole tab! He definitely made the day of a lonely Army wife in an airport far from home 1,000x better. I only wish I had been able to thank him more.

posted by kate on 6-15-2010 at 5:39 am

Once I was trying to get to Target to buy some necessities, and I got on the wrong bus and didn�t realize it until it was well off campus. My college is in the middle of nowhere and I don�t know the surrounding areas at all, so I thought I�d just have to stay on the bus for an hour until it got back to campus. I was the only person on the bus, so the driver made a detour to another stop and radioed another bus to make sure they they would wait for me so I could get where I needed to go. Bus drivers on our campus usually have a reputation for being grumpy and rude, but now I know different!

posted by Jessica on 6-15-2010 at 8:06 am

My wife and I were on our honeymoon driving through San Fransisco. A homeless man noticed our �Just Married� car and came up to us at a stoplight. He motioned for me to roll down my window. I did not want to, I also did not want to look like a jerk to my new wife. When I rolled down the window he searched through his pockets to find an old matchbook. He handed me that matchbook and said �Light her fire�. We wrote it on the underside of the matchbook and put it in our wedding scrapbook.

posted by Dave on 6-15-2010 at 9:13 am

This is an amazing thread.

Three instances come to mind:

When I was about 12, I was at a friend�s birthday party at a local lake. I�d been swimming way out in the middle of the lake, and when I started to go back to shore suddenly I couldn�t swim anymore and started to go under. My mom saw me and started heading in my direction, but before she reached me a young guy came out of nowhere, lifted me up, and swam with me to the shore. He set me down and swam off without a word. I never even got a chance to thank him. I remain convinced he saved my life.

A few years ago when I was in Japan on a school trip, I got lost in Tokyo station. I could see the track where I needed to be, but couldn�t get there without buying a ticket, and I couldn�t find where to buy a ticket. I sat down against the wall and just started crying. Then a Japanese man came up to me, asked if I was okay in very limited English, then proceeded to find a station employee, explain my situation, and get me the right ticket, all though a language barrier. He made such a difference to a lost and confused foreigner.

Finally, after I graduated college I had this old clunker of a car that was constantly sliding off the road and into ditches. I got stuck in my driveway nearly every day. It was horrible. But every time I got stuck, someone would come by and tow me out. By the end of that winter, I seriously considered putting an ad in the paper saying thank you to the hundreds of people who towed me out of the ditch that year.

posted by BlueAloe on 6-15-2010 at 9:54 am

I love these stories!

I was about to graduate college and on my way to an interview when I got my first ever flat tire. I maneuvered over four lanes to the side and then for some reason chose to exit the highway and pull into a creepy, abandoned gas station parking lot. Right as I was getting out to inspect the damage, a sketchy looking van pulled up and an equally sketchy looking man got out. This was when cell phones were still pretty new technology and I did not yet have one. I was thinking the worst of the situation (young girl, abandoned gas station, sketchy guy & van), but the stranger changed my tire in record time while he let me use his cell phone to call ahead to the interview and let them know I�d be late. Even after all that, I didn�t get the job but my parents did make sure I got a cell phone ASAP. I definitely learned a lesson about prejudging people that day!

posted by Morgan on 6-15-2010 at 10:09 am

I was going to post one of many stories of extreme kindness I received while I lived in Japan, but then I read one story that seemed rather familiar. I�m pretty sure that I was the benefactor (though it could have been another person doing the same nice thing.) So: as of right now, the nicest thing anyone�s done for me is to thank me and pass on what I did for someone� knowing that not only what I did was appreciated but that I�m now part of one person�s �folklore� makes me feel incredibly good about it.

posted by CJ on 6-15-2010 at 10:19 am

I loved all of these posts so much, I didn�t want the thread to end! Thank you to every one who wrote in something uplifting. I�m starting to think that I live in a grumpy area or that I don�t get out much, because I can�t think of any acts of kindness bestowed on me :(

@Bekka, your story gave me chills!

posted by Elissa on 6-15-2010 at 11:13 am

I have been incredibly easily moved to tears during this season of life, and many many beautiful things move me to tears. I also work in a small public school in Kansas�and our students are great. :) I am often moved to tears just to see small actions of kindness students do to each other�especially older ones to younger ones. I especially enjoy going to our high school concerts and tear up frequently when our kids sing beautifully.

All of that for this: This story thread is one of the most beautiful symphonies I have ever heard.

Yeah�many tears. ;)

posted by sappymom on 6-15-2010 at 11:27 am

Many years ago I was waitressing and having a tough time with a table full of rowdy guys who were drinking a lot and having a fun time teasing me and making extra work for me. I was young and new to the job, so I didn�t want to go to the manager. When the guys finally left, I blinked back tears when I saw that they hadn�t left me a tip. Moments later, the elderly couple at the next table handed me $10 and said, �No one should have to put up with what you just did.� Then I REALLY had to hold back the tears!

posted by Karen on 6-15-2010 at 11:39 am

On a honeymoon cruise in the Caribbean, our first excursion (booked on-island) on Aruba was rained out. We�d been a bit taken advantage of by the booking guy, so we consoled ourselves at the bar where we were stuck. While drinking down a couple Balashi we met an American expat who lives in St. Thomas. He offered to show us the island when our ship docked in a few days.

He gave us a royal tour, and he and his family have since given us the best vacation of our married lives when we visited a second time. We�ll be friends for life.

And to think it all started with a shifty character being, well, shifty.

posted by Ben on 6-15-2010 at 11:40 am

Whilst holidaying in NYC, a guy gave me and my friend this warming note as we got off the L-Train in Brooklyn � http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3599/3449588251_c6363530be_o.jpg

posted by Ewan on 6-15-2010 at 11:46 am

Two stories come to mind:

A few Decembers ago on a cold rainy night my kitten fell out my bedroom window two floors onto the laundry room roof below. Being in an apartment building, none of my neighbors had a ladder. Several of them spent about 30 minutes (in the rain!) helping me coax him down, but it didn�t work. Finally, a passing stranger pointed out that a truck parked on the next street had a ladder and suggested I talk to the homeowner. I did, and the man, his wife, and son went out of their way to help me get the cat down. They even tried to give me cat food out of their own stash to get him. A few days later, I left a large box of chocolate on their front door.

Last night, I was having dinner with a friend in a very empty restaurant to celebrate my birthday. Our server was 16, tops, and very friendly and attentive. For most of our meal we were the only customers. My friend paid, and left him a 25% tip ($12 on a $48 tab). This is about 6 times what that kid earns per hour as a waiter in Virginia. Even though it didn�t affect me directly, I think of it as one of the nicest birthday presents I could have received.

posted by maggie on 6-15-2010 at 11:48 am

About six years ago, I was fresh out of college and driving a crap-tastic old car around. I�d been up to a town about three hours north of me visiting friends and was driving back home. Well, first I got a flat tire. I had AAA, so I made the call, and while I was waiting a nice man stopped and helped me put the donut on. It was all country roads, no interstates, so I could drive a bit slower and be OK. I called off the AAA.

Well, then, about 45 minutes north of my destination, my battery light came on. Being a dumb girl, I ignored it, thinking that if I just kept driving I�d make it home. Nope. Alternator died, and I was stranded, the daylight fading, with no lights, no power, on the side of a rural US highway, waiting an hour for AAA.

First, a very nice elderly man stopped his car behind mine with the lights on to wait for the tow truck, so I wouldn�t get hit, sitting there on the shoulder.

Then, the tow truck driver drove me to AutoZone in the little nearby town and, after confirming it was the alternator, PUT THE NEW ONE IN FOR ME, insisting the whole while that he would help me get home even if it meant towing me across the Ohio River.

Those three men were my guardian angels that day, especially the tow truck driver, and I�m so sorry to this day that I did not get his name.

posted by that_girl on 6-15-2010 at 11:48 am

On one of my first ever business trips, age 22, to NYC I had a free day to explore the city. My trek carried me all over the city, and an unexpected and very long detour through Central Park. I basically wandered around lost for nearly 2 hours. By the time I found my way out I had no idea where I was or how to get back to my hotel and the shoes I was wearing had given me such bad blisters on my feet that they were bleeding. Sitting on a park bench with tears streaming down my face I tried to figure out what I was going to do to get back to the hotel with no cash. The next thing I know a man is standing beside me asking if I�m ok and if I need help. Between my sobs he managed to figure out where my hotel was. He asked me to wait on the bench, and he went and bought me Band-Aids from the drug store on the corner. Like that�s not enough � he actually cleaned off my feet, put Band-Aids on them and then hailed a cab and paid for my fare back to my hotel. His name was John, I�ll never forget his face and the kindness he extended. Just goes to show, New Yorkers have good hearts too.

posted by JulieM on 6-15-2010 at 11:48 am

i had a similar wallet incident at a Phish show in indianapolis, IN Last summer. It was pouring the rain after the show and i could not find my car in the sea of vehicles and the blinding rain. After wandering aimlessly for about and hour and a half i finally found the car along with my 3 friends who had been standing there waiting for me to come unlock it so they could find some shelter from the storm. As i polpped down in the drivers seat i realized my wallet was not in my pocket! I knew i had had it inside the venue because i had bought a beer only 45 mins before the end of the show. Soaking wet and extremely depressed (I had 3 more shows to go to and now no cash or credit cards) To make a long story short i was able to take a small loan from a friend who was also traveling and had my girlfriend wire me cash the next day and i was able to salvage the rest of the trip from imminent disater. When i made it back to my apt in WV about a week later i had a certified mail slip in my mailbox. Not expecting a lettter i went to the bank to find a package containing my wallet, credit cards and the $450 that was in there when i lost it. It was caked with mud and there was a note in the package that said �I fouind your wallet in a mudhole @ deercreek after a Phish show. I saw your ticket stubs in there from the 3 shows you made it to before this one and felt like it was my duty to make sure you got everything back. I did take a $5 out of there to pay for shipping, hope you had a good vacation on Phish tour!� that guy really went out of his way to make sure i got it back, and i couldnt beleive that my cash and cards were still in there! It goes to show that the people and you meet (and also the ones you don�t meet) on the road feel a common commraderie with each other and look out for each other whenever they can!

posted by Johnnychronic on 6-15-2010 at 11:52 am

On a trip to Walt Disney World a few years back, just as myself, sister, mum and dad entered, three complete strangers came up and gave us all free �skip to the front of the queue� tickets to all the rides.

Made it the most memorable holiday we�ve ever taken.

posted by Ryan on 6-15-2010 at 11:53 am

Twice someone has stopped for me�

I was leaving work one winter when I noticed the flat tire. I made it to the gas station, and they did have fix a flat, so I tried to get it going but was having a difficult time making it work right. It was early December here in Ohio, and of course I was in heels (had to go to a hearing) and the weather was awful freezing rain and getting colder fast. A man stopped and asked if he could help, he was a truck driver and had fixed this kind of problem before. He fixed the flat enough to get me home. He said he had two daughters just younger than me, and hoped that someone would stop to help them if they were in distress

My daughter was born with a hemangioma (strawberry birthmark) on her lower lip. It was over half the lip and looked worse than it was (she still ate fine). We were at a bookstore cafe when she was 4-6 weeks old, when the woman in line in front of me notice Cassie. �Oh, she has a hemangioma� and told me about her neice who was in her late teens with the exact

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same birthmark in the exact same place. Now that she is grown, it is on the inside of her lip and noone ever notices it. I made up my mind that day we would do nothing until Cassie was grown unless the hemangioma became a problem. She doesn�t notice it at all now (9 years old), and almost none of her classmates do either. Sometimes one of her classmates will ask if she got hurt. To this day, I thank that woman for giving me the courage to tell all the well meaning physicians that we are doing nothing right now, we will wait to see what happens, when they are just itching to �fix� her �problem�.

Thank you for reading�.may we all be this kind as often as we can.

posted by Laurel on 6-15-2010 at 11:58 am

While standing in the parking lot of my gym talking to a friend after a workout, a nice, well-dressed man came up to us and asked if �this is one of yours� and in his hand, he had my cell phone which had fallen out of my pocket unbeknonst to me!

And to think that it could�ve been run over, and since it is my only phone, I don�t know how I would�ve gone about going about calling to locate it!

Thank you!

posted by Marty on 6-15-2010 at 12:04 pm

When I was very small my parents had a job that required them to drive across the country and since this was before I started school I would go with them. One trip took us through the desert in California. Before the trip my father made sure the van we traveled in was in good working order. Of course the van broke down in the middle of the desert. Apparently a hose from the radiator had somehow slipped off during our trip. This was definitely before cell phones and there wasn�t any home or business to walk to for help. We were stranded, and we hadn�t seen any other cars pass. Thankfully, after sitting there for about 2 hours trying to figure out what to do, another motorist approached. They happened to have several jugs of water in their car and they filled up the radiator for us. At the time I didn�t understand how bad the situation was because I was only about 4, but looking back I can see how terrifing the situation would have been for my parents.

posted by Nicole T. on 6-15-2010 at 12:06 pm

This Easter, we were heading to a local park to do family pictures, and I left the diaper bag (with my expensive camera) on top of the car, and didn�t realize until we reached the park. We retraced our steps back home, and found a guy standing on our front porch with the bag in his hand. He had seen it in the road, stopped to pick it up, looked in my wallet for my address, and brought it back to our house for me. So, so kind!

posted by Louise on 6-15-2010 at 12:08 pm

I was heading north to take the GREs on a saturday morning. I had brought enough money for one subway trip, and I stayed with a friend on the north side of town so I could arrive fresh for the exam in the morning. What I didn�t realize was that actually there were a few more subway stops to go between my friend�s apartment and where I needed to get to. My friend had left before I did, and the apartment had locked behind me. I had no choice but to try to bum $1.50 for the subway. People looked at me very much askance, and finally one fellow in a suit said �well, we can�t have you not get into *grad* *school*� and he paid my fare. Now I�m a professor. Thanks, dude!

posted by Astroprof on 6-15-2010 at 12:16 pm

thank you all for these wonderful stories of your angels! this was just what i needed today, so you have all given me a kindness! i have been blessed to have so many angels help me out randomly over the years, there�s not enough room to list all the tales. wouldn�t it be wonderful if the media focused on all the good things going on in the world instead of the bad? have a beautiful day!

posted by hansen on 6-15-2010 at 12:22 pm

I was alone and on my way home from my brother�s house one evening and, about 2 1/2 hours away from home, my tire went flat. It was about 45 minutes until nightfall. As I poked around trying to find all that I needed to try to change the tire (I�ve done it once in my life) I discovered I didn�t have a lug wrench. Immediately after making that discovery, I looked up and two young men were heading my way in the parking lot. They had seen my car from the other side of the highway and had made a u-turn to come help. Not only were they willing to help, they had a rolling jack and�a lug wrench!! Twenty minutes later I was on my way. A side note: I had encountered a detour on my way home and I realized later that the delay I experienced served to put me in the exact spot where I needed to be later in the trip.

posted by Elaine on 6-15-2010 at 12:24 pm

I have been lucky to have encountered many acts of kindness. ex. a bus-fare was paid when i didn�t have money on me. my little sister (years ago) had lost her little purse with play money in it and paperwork she had gathered throughout the house. Later in the evening a senior citizen had taken the bus just to return the purse (apparently it had a house bill as part of her collection in it haha)�. Many other things that are small to others, but have warmed my heart. Recently, i was donated a mere 10bux to Wildlife fund and i see a log stating that Katties critters from new york (non prof small animal shelter) donated 100 bux to Wildlife funds assisting the BP oil spill; when in fact this shelter is also in dire need of funds (this is a private home that is taking in small animals)! just opened my heart and I will be always thinking of Katties critters and how i can help them instead of buying personal junk :) THANKS UNIVERSE FOR CROSSING GOODNESS IN MY PATH :)

posted by Crystal on 6-15-2010 at 12:24 pm

When my mom was pregnant with me, she lived in California while my dad was in Vietnam. One day, John Wayne was in her area making public appearances. She managed to get close enough to ask for an autograph, but neither one of them had a pen. He fished around in his pockets, looking for some pre-autographed cards, but couldn�t find any. His people ushered him on down the line, leaving my mom rather disappointed. A few minutes later, she saw him running back toward her, shouting, �Honey! Hey, honey! I found �em! I found �em!� He pressed a handful of autographed cards into her hands, grinning and totally making her day.

Different story: a few years ago, my husband and I were both out of work with bills coming due and Christmas approaching. We got some wonderful help from friends, but also received anonymous gifts � a $1500 cashier�s check and an envelope filled with $900 on christmas eve.

posted by Dawn on 6-15-2010 at 12:26 pm

Just wanted to say that this thread completely made my day. Possibly my month. And the fact that I keep hitting refresh and more and more stories appear makes it that much better. :)

posted by Heather on 6-15-2010 at 12:40 pm

My mother, son, and I were eating at a favorite restaurant when we noticed our dentist and his wife. We said hello and commented on how nice it must be to have a date night w/out their four kids. Later as they left, they said good-bye. Simply. At the end of our meal, the manager came to tell us our dentist had paid for our meal. My 70 year old mother said to me chuckling, �Of all the nights to order the most expensive meal!� He gets ALL my referals. (Dr. Majors/Wichita KS)

Another day we were at brunch, and I noticed a table next to us with a mother, son, and daughter. They had the BEST manners. There was single elderly lady across the table from our two tables. The table next to us had paid for her meal. I often thought of doing that, but I wonder if a kinder gesture would be to invite a single elderly individual to have dinner with my family?

posted by Mandela'sMom on 6-15-2010 at 12:41 pm

While biking through a local park in 2005, I heard a woman screaming. I immediately biked over to see what was wrong and saw than an elderly woman�s old German Shepherd had swam out too far and was stuggling to stay above water. I pulled off my gloves and helmet and swam out to the dog and was able to tow it back in. The woman was extremely thankful and her dog was exhausted but fine. When I hoped back on my bike I realized in the process my wedding ring fell off. Several strangers helped me scour the beach for the ring for several days to know avail and I finally gave up. Two years later, I received an envelope in the mail with my ring inside and a not that simply said �I believe this belongs to you�. Evidently they were able to track me down from an inscription my wife put inside the ring. I still don�t know who found it and sent it to me, but thank you!

posted by Spanky on 6-15-2010 at 12:43 pm

When my wife was pregnant with our first child, we decided to take a roadtrip from our then-home in Milwaukee to my college town of Minneapolis. On the way back, my car died and we rolled into a gas station. It was cold and there was a ton of snow coming down. The station manager said he�d jump our car�but for $150. A bunch of skater kids (who I had mistakenly pre-judged), said �that�s BS, man� and offered to jump us.

They continued to jump our car every 10-15 miles�from Sparta to Madison(where we left the car at a Sears store). On top of that, they gave us a ride to Milwaukee and even dropped us off at our house. They wanted no money and thought we were overly grateful.

Well�12 years later, I�m still grateful for both their help and the lesson they taught us.

posted by SouthTexGopher on 6-15-2010 at 12:52 pm

I got out of work one day to see that my car was pretty well snowed in; it had been snowing all day. I set to work cleaning it off and clearing it out when I noticed a group of young teenagers walking up and down the street with shovels, brooms, and car scrapers. They asked if I wanted help and I accepted, thinking they were just a group of kids looking to make an honest buck. However, they steadfastly refused to take any money from me. I watched them continue up the street and clear every car that needed clearing. That was over ten years ago but it is still so fresh in my mind.

posted by Lisa on 6-15-2010 at 12:55 pm

A few years ago my husband called me and told me that his company shut down and he needed to look for a job. I had just quit my job to stay home with our daughter so I was terrified. Later that day my daughter cut huge chunks of her hair off and I could feel my stress level rising. At the grocery store my little girl was throwing an epic tantrum and I was almost in tears. An older lady walked up, put her hand on my shoulder and said �trust me, it all gets better. These days don�t last�. I looked up at her and she pulled me in for a hug and let me cry. I have no idea who she was, I don�t know if I even said thank you. But I think about her when days get rough.

posted by amanda on 6-15-2010 at 12:59 pm

I�ve been the recipient of kindness on several occasions. I took my three kids out to dinner at Shoney�s. We didn�t have a lot of money. We struck up conversation with a man and two women at nearby tables, and they were very entertained by my children. The two women paid for our meal.

Another time my car broke down on the side of the road, and I was pregnant with the third and trying to walk up the interstate with the other two. I couldn�t reach my husband via cell, and his co-workers said he hadn�t arrived at work yet. A man pulled over to give me a ride to the gas station and had to be convinced to leave me!

One night I was driving home with my daughter. It was raining, and I hit a slick patch of road going a little too fast probably and went into a ditch. My car was stuck fast, and I had no AAA. The people whose yard I drove into came out, very concerned. They called the police and some friends of theirs who came by and towed me out.

One last story: I was about to get on the toll road, and I got in the wrong lane�the one for exact change. All I had was a dollar. I couldn�t get the attention of the toll booth operator no matter how many times I pressed the help button. The guy behind me was screaming obscenities and honking. I already felt foolish, and he was making it so much worse. I started crying, and scrounging around on the ground to see if there was any change anyone had dropped. I found some, but as I looked up, behind the screaming guy, I saw this kind woman walking toward me with change. I will never forget the look on her face. I waved her away because I found the change I needed, but it was nice to be reminded not everyone behind me hated me for making a stupid mistake.

posted by Dana Huff on 6-15-2010 at 1:03 pm

Despite the occasionally indifferent service, I�ve always been really impressed by the airline employees working the baggage desk. I went to college overseas, and coming home had way too much luggage. One time my flight was so horrendously delayed I missed my connection and, the woman compped all my baggage. Another time, they didn�t charge me for a third bag because it didn�t weigh very much and she let me take a slightly overweight carry-on onto the plane because I had a camera, laptop, and computer supplies in it I couldn�t check. I also missed an international flight from SFO once due to a horrible accident on the Bay Bridge, and the airline (whose codeshare I�d missed), not only tried to get me the first flight to my destination, which turned out to be two days later, but also offered to fly my into another airport in the relative region if that wasn�t soon enough. They didn�t charge me anything for this either. (I guess my hysterical sobbing helped? I was just worried I was going to fail my essay because I couldn�t be at school on time to turn it in!)

Finally, the one time I flew with a broken foot, the airline AND airport employees couldn�t have been nicer and more helpful getting my bags checked and helping me to the gate. Other passengers on the plane practically fought each other for the right to help me with my crutches. It was really, really kind. That same day on the way to the airport, trying to drag my bag down the sidewalk while on crutches, a homeless man had also shouted from across the street that he hoped my leg got better soon!

posted by B on 6-15-2010 at 1:04 pm

My husband, a retired Navy sailor, was at an airport restaurant on business related travel. As he ate his dinner, he watched a Navy sailor, in uniform, dine with, what looked like, his new bride. My husband could see that he was a 3rd class, new to the service, probably splurging just eating there. Well, my husband remembers those days. He grabbed the waiter and told him that he wanted to pay for sailor and his wife�s meal, but anonymously. As the newlywed couple tried to pay their bill, the waiter shook his head. The sailor and his wife looked around and tried to figure out who paid for their meal to no avail. They slowly got up from their table and cautiously looked around as if it was some kind of joke. Hopefully, they will pay it forward. My husband enjoyed every minute of it.

posted by Michele on 6-15-2010 at 1:07 pm

My father used to own a pool hall in the 60�s. In the 90�s, he found an envelope with an anonymous note on his desk.

The author of the note explained that he had stolen $55 from the register at the pool hall 30 years earlier. There was an apology and a promise that he�d turned his life around.

Inside the envelope was $55.

posted by Steve D. on 6-15-2010 at 1:10 pm

A few years ago two of my friends and I went to visit yet another friend living in the suburbs of Chicago. She hadn�t lived there long and rarely went to the city. We ended up somewhere downtown lost (in the rain) and couldn�t figure out how to get to the train station. We finally decided to ask a man walking by for directions. He thought for a moment, then said well, it�s pretty far away� Let me give you a ride. The four of us girls looked at eachother, thought we probably shouldn�t do this, shrugged and followed the guy to a decent looking sedan. We all stopped, but he kept going to the next car, which was a LIMO! We couldn�t believe out luck. I had never been in a limo before and haven�t been in one since. We did have the presence of mind to pay the guy. Thanks again Chicago Limo Driver!

posted by Brandy on 6-15-2010 at 1:13 pm

Oh, I can�t believe I forgot to mention that when I was kindergarten, the very first time my mother let me walk home from school alone, I of course got lost. I was yelling for my mother, when it occurred to me that a lot of women probably answered to that name, so I started calling out my mother�s name. A woman called me into her house, asked if I was lost, and I said yes. She found my contact information on an ID bracelet I was wearing and called my mom. Right before the TV was due to start broadcasting missing child reports about me.

posted by Dana Huff on 6-15-2010 at 1:15 pm

I was visiting Italy as a student in 2004 and was to return to the US via a Sunday afternoon flight. My plan was to take the train to the airport, but when I arrived at the station the train was cancelled (or didn�t run on Sundays). I remember I had a giant red suitcase and in my panic I just sat on it and cried. All of my friends had already left, my flight took off in an hour, and I could not afford a cab fare, much less a hotel room or a new plane ticket. An older american couple, who I would later learn lived just blocks from me in New York City, approached me. They said that they, too, were running to catch their plane, and offered me and my big red suitcase a ride in their cab, free of charge. So we all packed in and I made it home. I still have no idea how I would have managed without their charity.

posted by El on 6-15-2010 at 1:15 pm

Last May, my sister moved from South Carolina to Seattle. She and her husband planned a weeklong drive out there and couldn�t take their animals. My parents took her cats to the airport a few weeks later, butthe airline didn�t fasten one of the cats cages. One worker saw him jumping out of the cargo bay and run off the runway into the woods. My sister flew home and she and my mom spent the next two weeks looking for him without success. She finally had to go back to Seattle. About a month later I got an email. I had a placed an ad on craigslist for the cat and she emailed that she had seen a posting for a found cat and wanted to make sure I�d seen it too. It was Jasper! It had been so long that I had stopped checking craigslist and probably wouldn�t have caught it. He flew back to Seattle on my sister�s lap!

posted by spc on 6-15-2010 at 1:18 pm

It was christmastime and I was six or seven years old. My mom had taken me shopping and I was so excited. I had my own little girly purse and a wallet with photos and a handwritten ID card it. I even had a little bit of money to buy presents with. Somewhere that day, I lost my purse. I was pretty sad about it and we tried to retrace our steps to see if it had been turned in at any of the stores we�d been in, but no luck. A few days later a package came in the mail. Inside was my purse, and everything else was still in it, along with a note from Santa and his reindeer!

posted by Autumn on 6-15-2010 at 1:24 pm

Recently I was driving a rural road in the rain, really having a hard time finding my destination. Trying to make a tight u-turn, I hit the muddy shoulder and was pulled into the ditch. Because my car only has front wheel drive, I was stuck, front tires in the mud, back tires in the road. Before I had time to even assess my situation, a big truck pulled up behind me. A middle aged woman got out barefoot in the pouring rain and without a word hooked a chain to my car and pulled me onto the road. It happened so fast and with such little fanfare that I would have sworn she was an apparition. It would have been so easy for her to pass me by because it was raining and she didn�t have shoes on, but she just jumped out and got right to it. People are wonderful sometimes. I definitely look forward to buying a 4-wheel drive vehicle and paying it forward when the opportunity presents itself.

posted by El on 6-15-2010 at 1:34 pm

When I was 16, I briefly lost control of my car on a 2 lane highway and ended up looking into oncoming traffic. Not wanting to hit someone, I over-compensated in turning the steering wheel back and ended up in a 6' ditch. My seatbelt didn�t catch, and I hit my head against the windshield 3x, breaking the rearview mirror and cracking the windshield. Immediately, I had at least 3 strangers stop to try and help. One let us use their car phone (before everyone had a cell phone), one was a retired firefighter that just talked to me calmly and asked me questions to keep me conscious, and lastly was the woman who was driving behind me who stayed to tell the police what happened (I was in shock and not really making a lot of sense). I have no idea who any of these people were, but each of them had part in my rescue and I will always remember their kindness.

posted by Jen on 6-15-2010 at 1:50 pm

A couple summers ago, my hubby and I were in Paris for a one day trip. Long hours in the hot sun and a LOT of walking had made us bleary eyed, sweaty and tired. We stopped to rest on a bench and set down all of our belongings while we tried to enjoy the shade. When we packed up to leave, neither of us grabbed our very expensive camera that was sitting on the bench. I assumed he had it, and he assumed I was going to pick it up. After 10 minutes of walking, we decided to stop for a bottle of water. Just as we reached the counter, I heard a female voice yelling in French. She spoke no English, but it was clear that she had sees our camera and had followed us down the street trying to catch us for those 10 minutes! I was so overjoyed that this woman would go to such heroic efforts to return our camera to us. Now, when I look at the pictures from that trip, I always think of that lovely French woman that saved the day for us. Truly amazing!

posted by Amber on 6-15-2010 at 1:50 pm

First kindness: Several years ago, my mom took a bus to visit her sister. She got stranded in a city about 90 minutes away and I couldn�t pick her up. She called an old friend she only saw at high school reunions, who invited her to her home for the night.

Second: Next day, I had a tire blow on the way to pick her up. I pulled over in the WORST place possible�a small median between the freeway and a highway exit with no stop light. So cars were whizzing by at 70 mph on either side of me.

A man stopped his car behind me, told me to stay in the car, changed my tire at a risk to his life, and sent me on my way. I, too, should have repaid him in some manner.

posted by Laura T. on 6-15-2010 at 1:56 pm

Sorry, Ransom, but that was neither kindness nor consideration. Assuming that your driveway is easily visible, the driver knowingly parked there, thereby denying you the use of your property, and simply assumed that a bottle of wine would cover the value that you attach to access to your driveway. Say you weren�t home? No matter. The driver had no idea what your plans were (as a matter of fact, he assumed that you were home, or at least had knowledge of his rudeness, as evidenced by his gratitude that you chose not to tow him): What if you decided to return early, or someone was going to house-sit for you, or you were going to pick up sme extra cash by letting someone use the space your driveway affords? Such plans would be at best crimped and at worst dashed.

This fails the �kind stranger� test as the driver willfully imposed on you and then dictated to you the cost of the imposition. It was a coward�s way out, and the driver is and remains a douche.

posted by lmnop on 6-15-2010 at 2:06 pm

Imnop, I don�t think many here care whether or not the wine was justified. I think we�re just encouraged by the kindness in a chaotic world.

I don�t even know if anyone meant to be kind to me, but this morning I woke up later tired from moving over the weekend and when I went down to my car parked on the side of Main St. downtown only to realize that I should have had a ticket an hour earlier based on the signs posted. What a great way to start out the day by avoiding the consequences of a silly mistake!

I personally love to pay for the people behind me in a fast food/coffee line. Typically people are so frustrated they�re probably mad, but a free meal may just change their whole day!

posted by Megan on 6-15-2010 at 2:14 pm

My family has a dog that is TERRIBLY frightened by loud noises. During a particularly violent storm a few winters ago she managed to escape, running down the road, most likely out of her mind with fear. At about 10:30 that night we got a phone call from a college student who had seen our dog running down the h

Chapter 7

ighway in the rain. She�d pulled over and managed to wrangle the smelly, wet beast into her car. When we went to pick her up she was hiding behind the couch, still wet, but cozy on their white carpet! We are forever indebted to the girl who could have very easily just kept driving instead of saving our beloved family member.

posted by Dom on 6-15-2010 at 2:22 pm

Four months after uprooting my life to take an advertising job in Birmingham, AL, I got unceremoniously fired. I cried all the next day, but on the third day, I pulled myself together and walked to the local coffee shop. Ahead of me in line was a new acquaintance with some coworkers of his and I blubbered my story to them. One of the coworkers invited me to brunch with them, saying there was someone there I should meet. The brunch led to meeting the man who would help me get hired at a competing ad agency a mere 10 days later. Which led to another agency a few years down the road, which led to the doors of mental_floss magazine a few years after that. I have an angel to thank for taking pity on the sniffling, red-eyed kid and making the rest of my life fall into place, but I�ve never seen her since, and I can�t remember her name. Hope she�s reading this!

posted by Terri on 6-15-2010 at 2:22 pm

One stranger gave me a $5 gift card for the bakery we were at because I said something about special needs kids at the PO the day before, in front of her mean neighbor who always picked on her own special needs son. I was flabbergasted�I do casual disability education to strangers who seem to have a need for that info.

One of the co-owners of that bakery comped my birthday cake order on an especially hard birthday when I was deep in a depression cycle.

I loved that bakery (Gayle�s Bakery in Capitola CA)�I moved away & only get there occasionally now.

posted by A. Marina Fournier on 6-15-2010 at 2:27 pm

My boyfriend (now my fianc�and I had gone to see a movie at a theater several miles from my house. It was winter, late in the evening, and a Saturday night. On the way there, his car (never in the best shape) began veering, and we realized that the tire was busted and very quickly going flat. His answer was to turn around and drive back ten miles in the snow and ice, and I told him we�d never make it. We pulled off into the shopping center where the theater was, and dug out his car manual to figure out how to change his tire.

I was directing him (as he�d never had to do it himself), and as he was using a regular jack to slowly ratchet the car up enough to change the tire, a guy about our age pulls over and offers to help us out. He has a hydraulic jack, and gets the tire changed very fast, telling us that had we kept on with the regular jack, the car would have fallen on my boyfriend, or we would have punched a hole in the car. We had no money to pay him, and I offered to buy him dinner with my debit card, but he declined. We never did go to see the movie, but are incredibly thankful for that guy�s help.

I�ve also seen small acts of kindness that make up for the mean and nasty people; just last week, I was ringing up a woman in uniform � her beret said �air force� and she was in fatigues. There was a guy hovering around behind her, but he didn�t need to purchase anything. He waited until she was done, and her items bagged and ready to go, stopped her, and shook her hand, and thanked her.

posted by Day on 6-15-2010 at 2:27 pm

A couple of years ago, I was asked to leave my parents house after not being able to provide for myself. The first few days were very hard on me. I felt as if nothing would ever be the same, let alone worth it.

I had a few dollars to spare, and needed somewhere warm for the night, so I decided to hop into a Denny�s to get cozy and get something cheap. I ordered an English muffin and a coffee, as it was all I could afford.

After I was done with my meal, I headed up to the register to pay, only to learn that the older couple sitting behind me had payed for my meal. I am forever grateful to those kind souls.

posted by Lenny on 6-15-2010 at 2:30 pm

I have two:

One day I was coming back from vacation in a rental car and was cutting it close to make it to work that day. About an hour outside of town, in the middle of nowhere, the car slid off into a very muddy ditch. I couldn�t get the car back on the road and had no reception to call for help. After 20 minutes, a guy in a pickup came by and, after connecting a chain from his truck to my rental car, pulled the car back on the road. Thanks to him, I made it back home in time to go to work.

I was moving to Columbia, SC from out of state and needed to put a deposit down on an apartment. All I had were checks (no ATM card) and the apartment complex would only take money orders or cashier�s checks. I went to the nearest bank (my bank did not have any branches in SC) and they would not cash a check for me. I was getting very upset because I needed to put down a deposit and had no way of getting access to my money. A nice gentleman (a lawyer as it turns out) overheard my problem, and offered to give me the cash ($150) if I wrote him a check. He had no way of knowing if I even had the money in my account, but he was willing to take the chance. Thanks to him, I got my apartment and had a warm welcome to my new state.

posted by Tiffany on 6-15-2010 at 2:32 pm

3 years ago I was heart broken, homesick and in Oregon I had the worst experiences ever one of them� I was living with a terrible host family who will never apreciate what I use to do for them one day my friend and I (she was in the same situation as me) decided to go for a walk and we didn�t realize how far we were, maybe more than 12 miles, in the way back we ask for a ride and no body stop to pick us up, this day I lost all my faith on people, we decided to move to other state, I lost my best friend because we suppose to find new families and we found them but in different states. When I was at the airport one of my lugagges were overweight and I was ready to star throwing my belongings because I didn�t have enought money to pay for that�and the man in the counter let my lugagge go I will always remember him because is the only good memory that I have from Oregon.

posted by Sandra on 6-15-2010 at 2:35 pm

Many years ago, I was driving from NC to CT, just ahead of a major winter storm moving up the east coast (mid 90s). I was due to spend the night in DC at a friend�s house, and when I reached the city, it was 9pm on a sloppy, frigid night.

As I exited 395 at the 12th St tunnel, I could see a huge pothole in front of me. There was a transport truck on my left and zero room between the driving lane and the cement guardwall on my right, so I hit the pothole and hoped for the best. But no luck; by the time I�d made it even halfway under the Mall, I knew I had a flat.

If you�ve ever been to DC, you know there�s pretty much nothing downtown around the Mall, at least not until the past few years. Certainly no gas stations/repair shops! I pulled over between the IRS and EPA buildings on the far side of the Mall, and got out of my car to assess the damage.

So here I am, middle of downtown DC, late at night, nobody around. This was before cell phones really became super-common, so I didn�t have one and didn�t see any pay phones anywhere in the area. Well-dressed businessmen kept walking past me, and I�d beg to borrow their cell phone for a moment or ask them if they knew how far a walk it might be to a gas station, and they all ignored me. (Keep in mind, I was a mid-20s girl, dressed decently but not flashy or trashy.) I had almost no cash on me, didn�t see an ATM around � not that it mattered; I had almost no money in my bank, either � and it was continuing to sleet around me. I was starting to feel a little panic, and was getting mad that not one of these people would show the kindness of a few moments or minutes to even let me make a phone call from their cell phone.

I opened my trunk and yanked out my tire jack. My parents made sure there were certain things I knew how to do as a driver; fix a flat was high on the list. As I was getting ready to pull out the spare, this homeless guy who had been laying down on a bench nearby surprised me, saying, �Let me help you.�

He refused to let me help him, pulling my spare out, and getting down in the dirty, slush-filled street to change my tire as sleet continued to fall.

Afterwards, he offered me a �God bless� and prepared to walk away, not even trying to ask for anything in return.

Of course I stopped him. I had almost nothing to offer him in thanks, except a few dollars in cash, and a bag full of food (fruit, snacks) I�d been carrying in the car. He seemed grateful and surprised that I would give him all this, but he had just selflessly done far more for me than any of the suits who kept walking past and ignoring us did.

I never forgot that. Here was a guy who had nothing to give, helping me out in a miserable, scary moment in my life, when people with everything just kept passing by and ignoring me.

posted by Meryddian on 6-15-2010 at 2:39 pm

One time my car ran out of gas on the highway a couple of miles from the nearest exit with a gas station. My gas gage was broken, so I wasn�t expecting it to happen. I realized that I didn�t have a gas can in my trunk and I only had a couple of bucks, so I wouldn�t have been able to buy a gas can and gas. My plan was to get to a phone and hopefully get a hold of a friend to come get me and bring a gas can. I hadn�t even walked more than a hundred yards, when a car pulled of the highway ahead of me. They were an elderly couple and offered to drive me to the gas station. On the way, they asked if I had a gas can, then offered to let me use theirs when we got to the gas station. While I was pumping gas into the can, the elderly gentleman went inside and paid for my gas (without me even knowing) and bought another gas can for me to keep in my car and also filled that one up too. When I thanked him, he said that he couldn�t let me get back on the road without knowing that I would have that in case my car ran out of gas again in the future. When they dropped me off at my car, I offered what little money I had, but they refused and told me to pay it forward. That was ten years ago, and I still have that little gas can and have used it more than once.

posted by Amy on 6-15-2010 at 2:43 pm

We�ve taken to a new tradition at my workplace. During the holidays we used to buy everyone in the office a gift. Regardless of how little you spend, buying 15 people something can get expensive. So instead, we decided to draw names and perform random acts of kindness. Basically you did something nice in honor of the person you picked. Then we had a small party and presented our gifts to the whole group. There were gifts ranging from paying for someones tolls to donating money to the WWF. I�ve never had a more fufilling Christmas and there was not a dry eye in our office that day.

posted by Cait on 6-15-2010 at 2:45 pm

My sophomore year of college I had the most insane finals week right before Christmas break. I was extremely homesick, lonely, stressed beyond belief and living in the library. It was Thursday of finals week and I can�t actually remember the last time I had showered. But when I was deep in thought, cramming for a final that I had in two hours, a guy dropped a note in front of me as he exited the library. At first I was REALLY annoyed, but I opened it and all it said was, �You are the most beautiful girl I have ever seen, good luck on your finals. Don�t stress, you will do great!� There was no signature and I NEVER saw him again. I still have that note and look at it from time to time. It amazes me that someone wanted to give me such encouragement with no expected return. Lord knows I needed it! I wish I could thank him now!

posted by McKinley on 6-15-2010 at 2:50 pm

About a decade ago, I had just moved to New York City to start my first �real� job after college. I�d never spent more than a few weeks in the city before, and I�d moved there over the objections of my mother, who seemed to be convinced I�d be mugged and/or killed. So with all the changes and stress I was dealing with, I was feeling rather scared and unsure of whether I�d made the right decision. As I was walking to work one morning, about a week after I�d made the big move, I heard someone shouting behind me: �Miss! Miss!� I didn�t turn around, certain the voice wasn�t meant for me, and just kept up my brisk, city-girl pace. But then I felt someone tap my shoulder. �Miss!� I turned, and a woman was next to me, panting slightly. �This fell off your coat,� she said, and handed me a button. She�d chased me half a block to give it to me. That was when I knew I�d made the right decision after all.

And a bonus story: Not quite a year after that, I met my two roommates for dinner on my birthday at an Irish bar in lower Manhattan. When we were nearly finished with our meals, our waitress told us our check had been taken care of by an elderly Irish gentleman, one of the bar�s regulars. He stopped by our table and accepted our thanks; he�d overheard it was my birthday and wanted to treat the three young ladies. �Just make sure you give your waitress a nice tip,� he said with a wink.

No one will ever be able to convince me that New Yorkers are not some of the nicest people in the world.

posted by Laura on 6-15-2010 at 2:52 pm

A similar theme to other stories, but: when I was 16 my parents sent me to Paris to stay with a family for a couple weeks and work on my French. By the end of the trip, I was homesick, stressed out and exhausted from trying to understand a different language for the last two weeks. My host mother dropped me off at the airport a little late and by the time I got to the gate, the woman at the counter told me I didn�t have a seat and wouldn�t be able to fly out that day. I instantly panicked- I had nowhere to go, no one was home at my host family�s house and wouldn�t be for hours (this was pre-cellphones), and something complicated was happening with my parents- I think they were picking me up at the airport on their way home from a trip themselves. I must have had a horrible, close-to-tears look on my face because I didn�t even have a chance to say anything- she just looked up at me and then followed up with, �Let me work on it.� She sweetly sat me down nearby, and after much discussion with staffers and other passengers in French on my behalf, I had a seat on the plane and got home when I was supposed to. That attendant saved me (and my parents and my host family) so much worry and stress- ever since I�ve tried to be as polite and friendly as possible to people in travel and service industries, and I�m always amazed when people in increasingly thankless lines of work like that do things above and beyond the call of duty. I was so worried and tired of speaking French that I doubt I showed that attendant the level of gratitude she deserved, but now I always remember when my travel doesn�t go as planned that when I was helpless someone helped me, and I�m not helpless anymore!

posted by Kelly on 6-15-2010 at 2:53 pm

My uncle had just died in the AIDS unit and I was crying alone in the waiting room when a man who was on his way out from visiting a friend in the unit saw me and talked to me. He was very understanding.

posted by Lisa on 6-15-2010 at 2:55 pm

When I was growing up, it was just my mom and me. We were dirt poor, and my mom worked her butt off to make sure I didn�t know it. Then, one Christmas Eve, long after I was asleep, a stranger dropped off a box of gifts for us. Toys and clothes for me, much needed gloves and a sweater for my mom. She doesn�t know who did it, but even 30 years later she gets choked up thinking about the random act of kindness.

In later, much more stable years, we were able to return the favor for some families in need. They never found out who was the sponsor of their Christmas either. I swear to you, if you ever get the chance, do this for someone. There is no better feeling.

posted by Liz on 6-15-2010 at 3:01 pm Comment

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It Gets Worse: Apple Censors a Gay Kiss in Oscar Wilde Comic

By Kevin Kelleher Posted Saturday, June 12, 2010 - 7:48pm

Update: Apple says it's asked the developers of The Importance of Being Earnest and Ulysses Seen apps to resubmit their original content. In an email, Apple spokesperson Trudy Miller said:

"We made a mistake. When the art panel edits of the Ulysses Seen app and the graphic novel adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest app were brought to our attention, we offered the developers the opportunity to resubmit their original drawings and update their apps."

Apple's crusade to free all owners of iPhones and iPads from the terrible burden of seeing a nude figure is having some comically absurd results. There's its insistence that a grahic-novel iPad app based on Ulysses remove some tame nudity - while remaining oblivious to the historical ironies. There's the lampooning that some pranskters engaged in even as Steve Jobs was gushing over the iPhone 4 this week.

But the more examples I see of Apple's capricious censoring, the less funny it is. Apple not only censored an iPad app based on Ulysses, it blacked out multiple panels in another graphic novel for the iPad based on Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. The app's apparent sin: images of two men kissing.

I bought that app for my iPad. It's based on an award-winning print graphic novel that Tom Bouden published in 2001. Bouden, a Belgian comic artist, made some significant changes to Wilde's play, giving it a contemporary setting and changing some female characters into male ones - effectively making it a gay sex farce.

Before I downloaded it, I had to jump through one of Apple's silly hoops, agreeing that I was over 17. It's another Apple joke, so unenforceable as to be completely ineffective, but I suppose it lets Apple cover its corporate ass. I wished Apple had given me a different warning: That the black squares it insisted on adding defaced a perfectly good graphic novel to the point of nearly ruining it. I want my money back.

A thoughtful article on Prism Comics' site shows the censored images, juxtaposed with their defacements. I had a hard time seeing what the fuss was about. The nudity is partial, no genitals are displayed. There are other panels of men in underwear that weren't blacked out, which led me to conclude that what really bothered Apple's censors was the idea of two men kissing. (Apple did not respond to an email asking them to explain the censorship.)

Peter Bonte, the publisher of the Earnest app, told Prism Comics that Apple initially rejected even the censored app, but eventually relented. On a Picasa page, he posted some full pages from the original book, as well as one page from another comic book (from Kick-Ass) of a heterosexual couple. Apple apparently didn't have a problem with that image. Kick-Ass can be bought, uncensored, on iTunes through the iVerse comic reader.

As I've said before, I don't necessarily object to Apple not allowing pornographic images in its App Store. I understand that many parents want to buy iPhones for their kids without worrying about them downloading sexual images. I get that. What I object to is demanding that artists weaken or even deface their work.

The message that these black boxes send to Apple's customers isn't: hey, kids, don't look at porn. The message is that the sight of two men kissing is a bad thing, and that homophobia is a good thing. For allowing Apple to send that message, Steve Jobs should be ashamed of himself. Kevin Kelleher is a writer living in the San Francisc

Book Club. Pick up your copy today... or get Cirtus County and Arkansas in our John Brandon Bundle.

- - - -

S H O R T I M A G I N E D M O N O L O G U E S .

- - - - I'm Comic Sans, Asshole. BY MIKE LACHER

- - - -

Listen up. I know the shit you've been saying behind my back. You think I'm stupid. You think I'm immature. You think I'm a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I'm Comic Sans, and I'm the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.

You don't like that your coworker used me on that note about stealing her yogurt from the break room fridge? You don't like that I'm all over your sister-in-law's blog? You don't like that I'm on the sign for that new Thai place? You think I'm pedestrian and tacky? Guess the fuck what, Picasso. We don't all have seventy-three weights of stick-up-my-ass Helvetica sitting on our seventeen-inch MacBook Pros. Sorry the entire world can't all be done in stark Eurotrash Swiss type. Sorry some people like to have fun. Sorry I'm standing in the way of your minimalist Bauhaus-esque fascist snoozefest. Maybe sometime you should take off your black turtleneck, stop compulsively adjusting your Tumblr theme, and lighten the fuck up for once.

People love me. Why? Because I'm fun. I'm the life of the party. I bring levity to any situation. Need to soften the blow of a harsh message about restroom etiquette? SLAM. There I am. Need to spice up the directions to your graduation party? WHAM. There again. Need to convey your fun-loving, approachable nature on your business' website? SMACK. Like daffodils in motherfucking spring.

When people need to kick back, have fun, and party, I will be there, unlike your pathetic fonts. While Gotham is at the science fair, I'm banging the prom queen behind the woodshop. While Avenir is practicing the clarinet, I'm shredding Reign In Blood on my double-necked Stratocaster. While Univers is refilling his allergy prescriptions, I'm racing my tricked-out, nitrous-laden Honda Civic against Tokyo gangsters who'll kill me if I don't cross the finish line first. I am a sans serif Superman and my only kryptonite is pretentious buzzkills like you.

It doesn't even matter what you think. You know why, jagoff? Cause I'm famous. I am on every major operating system since Microsoft fucking Bob. I'm in your signs. I'm in your browsers. I'm in your instant messengers. I'm not just a font. I am a force of motherfucking nature and I will not rest until every uptight armchair typographer cock-hat like you is surrounded by my lovable, comic-book inspired, sans-serif badassery.

Enough of this bullshit. I'm gonna go get hammered with Papyrus.

Published on Sunday, June 13, 2010 - 2:25pm Christopher Nolan speaks out about 3-D, Inception, Superman, Batman, writing and much more from the Hero Complex Film Festival!Ahoy, squirts! Quint here.

Geoff Boucher�s Hero Complex Film Festival continued last night with a double feature of INSOMNIA and THE DARK KNIGHT. The two features were split by the Q&A with Nolan and he had some really cool stuff to say about all things filmmaking. I�m especially fond of his scientific distrust of 3-D as a viable and ongoing format.

But first let�s go back and look at the two flicks shown tonight. I missed INSOMNIA when it first hit theaters for some reason. It could have been due to travel� I don�t remember, but I know I didn�t see it until it hit DVD where it really struck a chord with me. I loved the atmosphere, the slow descent into sleep deprived semi-insanity by the main character, the wonderfully flawed Will Dormer (Al Pacino) and the pitch perfect serious turn by Robin Williams.

Watching it on the big screen really underlined the fantastic work by everybody involved, specifically Pacino and Williams, and made Wally Pfister�s photography pop in a way that isn�t possible on standard def DVDs (and few Blu-Ray transfers to be completely honest).

Part of that is due to the amazing location work in BC and Alaska (the setting of this little tale) and the rest is because of Pfister�s sheer magical talent at capturing images. The man must have trapped a leprechaun or discovered a magic lamp or something even more ridiculous. There�s no way a regular guy can be this good at photography.

Pacino plays a detective who is incredibly good at his job, but is also under investigation by internal affairs, so his bosses kinda throw him a murder case up in Alaska to get him out from the prying eyes of the agency.

What starts out as a Silence of the Lambs rip-off quickly morphs into something a billion times more interesting and nuanced. We know Pacino�s partner has decided to cut a deal with IA, a deal that most likely would mean throwing Pacino�s fame and record into question, and that he�s not happy about it. So when Pacino shoots his partner while searching through the white mist for the cornere

Chapter 8

d killer we don�t really know if it is an accident.

Which is perfect because after a few sleepless nights, neither does Pacino.

�A good cop can�t sleep at night because he�s missing a piece of the puzzle. And a bad cop can�t sleep because his conscience won�t let him.� That�s a quote attributed to Pacino�s character, recited by Hilary Swank�s Detective Ellie Burr, an Alaskan officer who idolizes the famous LA detective.

So, which is causing Pacino�s insomnia? Is it guilt or his inability to make all the pieces of the murder he�s there to solve come together? Both? Maybe it�s just the constant sunlight and lack of night that does it.

At a certain point Pacino�s forced to cover his ass when the shooting death of his partner starts being thoroughly explored. He soon discovers there was only one witness to the accident/murder� the fleeing murderer of the 17 year old girl that brought him to Alaska in the first place.

Williams, of course, is the murderer and doesn�t play anything for laughs here. The light is still in his eyes and he turns in one of the most nuanced performances of his career. It might not be particularly Oscar bait-ish, but it�s perfectly balanced. His Walter Finch is a deeply troubled soul that is just barely sane enough to believe he was justified in murdering this girl and not realize how fucking crazy he sounds trying to bond with Pacino.

There are a lot of layers to this film, to each character and to the plot as it unravels. If you haven�t given it a spin in a while, throw the fucker on. You�ll be impressed all over again. I was.

And what can possibly be said about The Dark Knight that hasn�t been said already? Two years out and it still gave me goosebumps. When Heath Ledger�s Joker is video taping the fake Batman and turns on a dime from the laughing clown to the threatening lunatic (�Look at me� LOOK AT ME!!!�) I get chills. I have every single time I�ve seen the movie� whether on Blu or the big screen.

I love that the movie is all about small victories. In reality The Joker wins here. At every moment he�s right where he wants to be. The only time he seems genuinely surprised is when the two ferries don�t blow up, the biggest victory of the movie for our heroes and one that Batman really has nothing to do with (if you don�t consider the positive impact he�s had on the citizens of Gotham).

The way the Nolans and David Goyer structured the film is dark as shit. The Joker is one of the most iconic comic book characters ever created and they make him one of the best realized screen villains in the history of the moving pictures. Smart, unstable, unpredictable, The Joker is the perfect villain for Bats. He has figured Batman out and I love that at a certain point he has no interest whatsoever in killing the hero. Instead it becomes all about HURTING him. Kind of Khan-like in that regard when you think about it. �I�ve done far worse than kill you, Admiral. I�ve hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you.�

But unlike Khan The Joker�s attacks are more at breaking down Batman�s moral code, which he is unable to do, but that forces Bats to be on the defensive the whole movie. Even at the end he has to make an impossible decision.

Everything is running at top efficiency here. Nolan�s direction, all the performances from Christian Bale to Aaron Eckhart to Michael Caine to Morgan Freeman to Heath Ledger just pop off the screen, Wally Pfister�s cinematography is unreal, the score is pitch perfect (I noticed this time out that they use the high screech of The Joker�s theme much like John Williams used the Jaws main theme to always indicate when The Joker�s around. I didn�t notice it ever popping up when he isn�t on screen or just off screen) and the whole just feels effortlessly epic.

I�ve noticed it�s become kind of trendy to dismiss this film, but that really kind of blows my mind. I can�t even fathom that point of view. I�m not saying it�s wrong to have an opinion, but I just can�t imagine not being in awe of this film.

There are my thoughts upon revisiting those two films tonight. Let�s get into the Nolan Q&A, shall we?

- Nolan considers Robin Williams� work in Insomnia �flawless.� �I wound up watching the film a hundred times as we cut it, as we nailed it down, and I never hit that point in the performances where you see the acting.�

- Discussion turned to similar projects kind of haunting Nolan�s work. When The Prestige came out, The Illusionist was right around the corner. When Insomnia came out, it beat Mark Romanek�s One Hour Photo, another dark Robin Williams performance. And when Memento was being shopped around Scott Franks� The Lookout was making the rounds as well. That film would later be made starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

- Nolan prefers editing to production. �There�s a point during production which you�re really almost doing a paint-by-numbers thing; you�re almost just fulfilling a set of creative obligations that you�ve set up for yourself in prep. So, even though some of it can be fun, and it�s where a lot of interesting and amazing things can happen, there�s a point where you just want to be done with it and get into the edit suite and mess around with what you�ve shot.�

- Nolan has one week of finishing touches on Inception.

- �I�ve always had a belief that however sophisticated a process of animation is, the audience can always, on some level, tell the difference between something that has been photographed and something that has been animated by an artist.�

- Nolan cited an example from Batman Begins where his visual effects crew pushed for more digital work. Nolan pulled off a shot of Bale landing at the bottom of the staircase in Arkham Asylum and told the team to match it. They came back with two videos, one was the CG test and the other the original take. Nolan said they were close, �but I could tell which one was the effect� which upset them a little bit.� But he realized it was close because they had a real shot to match to. When they had to do shots from nothing the level of reality was �far, far lower.�

- The trailer shot in Inception with the buildings crumbling into the sea is a combination CG and practical effects shot. They went to Morocco, shot the actors walking up from the water, with the waves coming in and some small representation of buildings to give the CG guys something to start with. So, he always tries to do always do something in camera to give the CG guys something to build on.

- Nolan first pitched Inception to Warner Bros right after Insomnia. They liked it, wanted him to write it, but he realized he couldn�t write it on assignment, that he�d have to do it on spec and come back with the finished thing. �So, I went off to write it figuring it would take me a couple of months and it took me ten years!�

- Ever since Nolan was a kid he wanted to make a movie about dreams. 10 years ago he settled on the concept of a heist movie set around the idea of a technology that allows people to share dreams.

- Nolan was struggling with the script so much because he said he didn�t have a strong emotional connection to the material. �I had written a heist film and heist movies it turns out, and it�s not something I really realized, tend to be deliberately superficial. They tend to be glamorous and fun and procedural based. They tend not to have massive emotional shifts and that wasn�t really enough for me to move forward.� He ultimately did, but that�s why it took so long.

- Leonardo DiCaprio had the task of �finding the emotional truth� to the character in the film, much like Guy Pearce did in Memento. Nolan spent months with DiCaprio to find emotional logic for every moment and every decision in the story.

- The interrogation scene between Batman and The Joker in The Dark Knight is Nolan�s favorite scene in the movie. He shot screen tests of the Joker make-up and the new Batsuit on that set, which is very much how he wanted it to look.

- He tussled with his DP, Wally Pfister, over the lighting of the interrogation room. Nolan didn�t want to do the typical dark and shadowy interrogation scene, so instead he insisted on very hot key lighting (five stops over for you camera nerds).

- Said one of the biggest technical challenges of doing that was making the Batsuit look good fully lit. �We could never have done that scene with the Batsuit that we used for Batman Begins. It simply didn�t have the quality for the one we built for The Dark Knight.�

- This scene was also put early in the schedule. Nolan talked to Heath about it and felt strongly that by putting one of the big Joker scenes early in the shoot would be a great way of breaking the ice and, hopefully, give him and all of them the confidence that they were going in the right direction with the character. They shot the interrogation scene in the second week.

- So, Nolan loves this scene for all those reasons plus it�s the first time we really get to see just how fueled by rage Batman is as a character.

- They built that set in a building in London. It was the police station in Batman Begins, went back for The Dark Knight and then shot there again with Inception. �It�s just a good, old building with a lot of texture.�

- �Heath was in awe of Gary (Oldman), as all young actors are.�

- Nolan�s films have been about haunted figures to a film� so how was he drawn to produce Superman? �As you said, it�s something I�m doing as a producer. Obviously I�m not directing it, but my involvement in it is quite specific. While David Goyer and myself were wrestling with the story for another Batman film as we got stuck he said to me, kind of out of the blue one day, that he had a great idea for how to take on Superman. I thought it was terrific and I just felt like I didn�t want it to not get done, so I went to the studio and said, �Let�s have a crack at this.� That�s the nature of my involvement.�

- Speaking of, Richard Donner�s Superman was very influential to Nolan on Batman Begins. �I literally pitched the studio my take on Batman by saying I wanted to make the Batman film that had never been made in 1978 or 1979.� He was attracted to the Dick Donner take of putting an extraordinary hero in an ordinary world.

- He told the studio he wanted to shoot just like they did (in an American city for locations and then in English studios), he wanted to cast like they did, build an ensemble. �Now all these superhero movies come out and they have these great casts, but when we did Batman Begins I was looking back at that movie. They had Gene Hackman and Marlon Brando and Glenn Ford and all these incredible actors around the principals. That�s how I got permission from the studio to cast up this comic book movie.�

- On Tim Burton�s Batman: �I think what Tim Burton did with Batman was absolutely extraordinary, but it was very idiosyncratic. It�s really kind of a mad studio film, really.�

- Nolan is obsessed with Blade Runner. �That�s a film I�ve seen hundreds of times. I�m one of those people that knows every single detail of that movie.� Blade Runner spoke to Nolan at an early age (he saw it when he was 13) and it kind of defined the kind of movie Nolan wanted to make. He loves how it rewards multiple viewings, how you�ll see something new each time you watch it.

- Nolan screened Pink Floyd�s The Wall to the cast and crew before they started shooting Inception. He does that a lot, screens movies for the crew and see if that inspires anything for the project they�re working on.

- He�s able to use a screening room at Warner Bros. �That�s a good part of being a film director. You can call up a studio and get a film print of a movie!�

- Is Michael Caine Nolan�s lucky charm? �He claims to be my lucky charm. The problem I�ve faced, and the reason he�s in Inception, is that once someone has said that to you what are you going to do?� Lots of laughs. �He�s actually just a terrific person to work with. His movie star charisma is just extraordinary. He�s a lovely, professional guy to work with and the crew and the young cast all behave much better when he�s around. He�s very valuable!�

- Cillian Murphy gave a killer screen test when he can in to read for the Batman role on Batman Begins. So good, in fact, that when Nolan suggested him for the villain role the studio said okay right away, which he thought was unheard of for a major villain in a Batman movie to be such an unknown (to the masses, obviously) actor.

- Chris Nolan doesn�t look at the internet. �I think I realized at a very early stage on Batman Begins that it wouldn�t be helpful to look at what everybody was saying.� Nolan felt like all he could do was deliver the movie he wanted to see and if he tried to accommodate everybody the movie would have been a mess.

- And no, Cher is not in the next Batman movie.

- He doesn�t have email or cell phone. �It gives me a little more time to think.�

- Ed Brubaker asked the first question from the audience. He read a lot of Nolan�s screenplays and complimented them as being some of the tightest screenplays Brubaker has ever read. He wanted to know more about that process.

- Nolan wanted to point out that when you�re reading a published screenplay �you�re reading something that�s 14 or 15 drafts in because they publish the shooting draft which includes all the revisions from production.�

- Nolan doesn�t have a writing credit on Insomnia, but he wrote the last draft himself.

- Nolan�s first drafts very rarely get read (�in fact they very rarely leave my house!�). He called his first drafts �rambling.�

- He doesn�t outline and generally starts from page one and tries to write in a linear fashion. Even when the story is non-linear.

- Nolan�s first film, Following, was written chronologically and then, at the script stage, he edited it to make it non-linear as he had diagramed it out. He found that very difficult because there was an enormous amount of rewriting to make it flow right together.

- When it came to Memento, he thought it was important to write the film the way the audience would see it unfold, instead of doing it like he did Following.

- While he doesn�t outline, Nolan does draw a lot of diagrams and sticks stuff all over his walls. �It all gets a bit Beautiful Mind by the end of it.�

- �I always start with story rather than characters. When I write I try to write from the point of view of defining a character through action. That way having the narrative shifts define what we think of the characters. That�s why I love film noir crime fiction because double-crosses, twists and turns� you�re constantly readdressing your opinion of the characters and you�re reassessing who you think those people are. I find that a really interesting and very strong form of characterization, but it means putting story first and then just seeing where that leads the characters.�

- When it comes to writing dialogue, like the Joker�s multiple origin stories in The Dark Knight, Nolan tends to write it free-form and it can go on for three or four pages. Then he spends days and days editing it down. �I try not to stop an idea before it is born. In this way I throw it all out there and then edit it down. It really is like editing. You write a bunch of dailies and then you edit it together into a comprehensible form.�

- Nolan attributes The Dark Knight�s success to people liking Batman Begins. When BB was released the idea of rebooting a franchise was new and they didn�t know exactly how to market it� plus it hadn�t been that long since the previous Batman movies and there was some distrust (read: people thought it could be another shitty Batman movie) from the audience.

- He also says Heath Ledger�s performance was also a large factor. He noticed when people started seeing glimpses of his performance they could already tell it was going to be extraordinary.

- Christopher Nolan on 3-D: He�s not a huge fan of 3-D (which got a lot of cheers, surprisingly), but said that if people want to watch stereoscopic imaging then there�s no question that�s what the studios are going to make and that�s what he�ll be doing.

- He thinks 3-D vs. 2-D is a misnomer. �The whole point of cinematic imagery is that it is three dimensional. We work in three dimensions. 95% of our depth cues come from resolution and color and so forth, so I think the idea of called a movie a 2-D movie a 2-D movie is a little misleading.�

- They did post-conversion tests on Inception and �it worked quite well, actually. It looked really good, in fact, but it takes some time and we didn�t have time to do it to the standard I would be happy with.�

- �On a technical level I think it�s fascinating. On an experiential level I find the dimness of the image extremely alienating. The truth of it is, when you watch a film you�re looking at 16 foot-lamberts. When you watch it through any of the conventional 3-D processes you get about 3 foot-lamberts. It�s a massive difference.

You�re not that aware of it because once you�re in that world your eye compensates, but having struggled for years to get theaters to get up to the proper brightness you�re now sticking polarized filters into this thing and we�re going back worse than we were.�

- Also from a shooting standpoint, Nolan has even more issues with 3-D: �It requires shooting on video, if you mask it to 2.40 you�re only getting 800 or 900 lines of resolution. You have to use a beam-splitter.�

- Nolan doesn�t use use zoom lenses, only primes, because the image quality isn�t sharp enough on the long end of a zoom, so the idea of shooting a whole film through a beam-splitter doesn�t appeal to him. �There are enormous compromises, in other words.�

- Post-conversion 3-D he believes is the only way he�d be able to work with the format, �but it�s really up to the audience to decide what they want to see and how they watch their films.�

I don�t particularly love 3-D and I don�t hate it, either, but I gotta say hearing Christopher Nolan speak about it from the point of view of making a movie and watching a movie really kind of hit home with me. The dude won�t compromise the image on the screen and I LOVE that about his work.

Hope you guys enjoyed the piece. Now I�m off to see Ridley Scott screen Alien and Blade Runner!!!

-Quint quint@aintitcool.com Follow Me On Twitter

You can change someone's day with a smile, you never know what a difference being nice can make, random acts of kindness, blah blah blah... Yeah, I get kind of sick of hearing it too. Greeting card/ bumper sticker philosophy, right?

Except it's true.

Running multiple errands with a cranky two year old is not fun. I try to make it as fun as possible, but eventually, the baby gets as tired of it as I do. The last stop of the day is always the most trying. I just wanted to get the stuff I needed and get out of there. Which, in Costco, is nearly impossible. For whatever reason, as soon as people set foot in wholesale warehouses, they have the inexplicable urge to park 3 carts abreast across the aisle, and/ or wander aimlessly, apparently wearing blinders. Then there are the lines. It is one of the Five Rules of Costco that if you have fewer than ten items in your cart, everyone in every line in front of you will be stocking up for the impending zombie apocalypse.

So after getting the stuff I needed, going back to the sample lady a third time for "TOAST!!!!" for the baby (I wasn't even embarrassed at that point), and once again practicing staunch self-denial (ever try using the bathroom in a Costco once you have stuff in your cart?), I got in line.

Then I remembered I needed to my glasses fixed and adjusted. So I went and did that, and got back in the same line. The same lady as before was STILL unloading her cart. It was full of canned food, biodegradable toilet paper and battery-operated appliances. You tell me.

Finally, it was my turn. I unloaded my few items and sighed. Oh.. backstory, here. I had just gotten off the phone with my 9 year old who is visiting her Dad for the summer. It was the first time we'd talked in a week. I was missing her terribly. Mind you, I wasn't bawling my eyes out in the Costco. I was just... not exactly smiling a lot, either.

I look up and see my cashier. She smiles a lovely, genuine smile at me, reaches over and puts the CLOSED sign on her line, and then asks me how I'm doing as if she really wants to know. I said, "Oh, okay..". I think she could tell I wasn't, really. And instead of being nosy, she struck up a conversation on how much she adored saffron (it was on sale), and how adorable my baby was (reminded her of her girls), and how nice I looked in my green summer dress and how she genuinely hoped I would have a good day. She even turned around to say goodbye to us as we walked away.

A lot of people would say she was just doing her job. And maybe she was. Maybe she's one of those incredibly rare customer service people who sees being friendly as one of the terms of their employment.

But I think it goes beyond that. I think she's one of those incredibly rare people who sees being friendly, genuinely, even to a stranger, as one of the terms of being a decent human being.

I loaded up the car and drove home with a smile in my heart. Not just on my face. This random cashier at the wholesale store had uplifted my spirit. She gave me hope that maybe not everyone is self-absorbed and uninterested. That real kindness is not conditional upon a pre-existing relationship. She shook me out of that modern American cynicism that seems to permeate everything.

In other words, she changed my day with a smile, had no idea what a difference her being nice made, and committed a beautiful, wonderful, random act of kindness (and made me want to pass it on).

I'm not a rude person. As a Southern woman of the Old School, I'd faint in my ruffly underthings if I thought anyone saw me as impolite, even to strangers. But after this encounter, I hereby resolve to step it up a notch. I resolve to be genuinely kind and not just generically polite. If it made this much of a difference for me... maybe I can help someone else out of a funk, too.

Magazine Preview | Smarter Than You Think What Is I.B.M.�s Watson?

Danielle Levitt for The New York Times

A part of Watson�s ��brain,�� located in a room near the mock ��Jeopardy!�� set. By CLIVE THOMPSON Published: June 14, 2010 Facebook comments (55) Sign In to E-Mail Print Reprints Share

�Toured the Burj in this U.A.E. city. They say it�s the tallest tower in the world; looked over the ledge and lost my lunch.� Multimedia Interactive Feature The Watson Trivia Challenge

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Danielle Levitt for The New York Times

MASTERMIND The one behind Watson�s mastermind, that is: David Ferrucci of I.B.M., who himself is not a huge �Jeopardy!� fan. Enlarge This Image

Danielle Levitt for The New York Times

THE ��FANS�� I.B.M. employees (including Ferrucci, front row, far right) who worked on the project, during one of the test �Jeopardy!� matches in January. Enlarge This Image

Danielle Levitt for The New York Times

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This is the quintessential sort of clue you hear on the TV game show �Jeopardy!� It�s witty (the clue�s category is �Postcards From the Edge� ), demands a large store of trivia and requires contestants to make confident, split-second decisions. This particular clue appeared in a mock version of the game in December, held in Hawthorne, N.Y. at one of I.B.M.�s research labs. Two contestants � Dorothy Gilmartin, a health teacher with her hair tied back in a ponytail, and Alison Kolani, a copy editor � furrowed their brows in concentration. Who would be the first to answer?

Neither, as it turned out. Both were beaten to the buzzer by the third combatant: Watson, a supercomputer.

For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world�s most advanced �question answering� machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution � �natural language,� as computer scientists call it � and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited

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to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled �Jeopardy!� because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.

With Watson, I.B.M. claims it has cracked the problem � and aims to prove as much on national TV. The producers of �Jeopardy!� have agreed to pit Watson against some of the game�s best former players as early as this fall. To test Watson�s capabilities against actual humans, I.B.M.�s scientists began holding live matches last winter. They mocked up a conference room to resemble the actual �Jeopardy!� set, including buzzers and stations for the human contestants, brought in former contestants from the show and even hired a host for the occasion: Todd Alan Crain, who plays a newscaster on the satirical Onion News Network.

Technically speaking, Watson wasn�t in the room. It was one floor up and consisted of a roomful of servers working at speeds thousands of times faster than most ordinary desktops. Over its three-year life, Watson stored the content of tens of millions of documents, which it now accessed to answer questions about almost anything. (Watson is not connected to the Internet; like all �Jeopardy!� competitors, it knows only what is already in its �brain.�) During the sparring matches, Watson received the questions as electronic texts at the same moment they were made visible to the human players; to answer a question, Watson spoke in a machine-synthesized voice through a small black speaker on the game-show set. When it answered the Burj clue � �What is Dubai?� (�Jeopardy!� answers must be phrased as questions) � it sounded like a perkier cousin of the computer in the movie �WarGames� that nearly destroyed the world by trying to start a nuclear war.

This time, though, the computer was doing the right thing. Watson won $1,000 (in pretend money, anyway), pulled ahead and eventually defeated Gilmartin and Kolani soundly, winning $18,400 to their $12,000 each.

�Watson,� Crain shouted, �is our new champion!�

It was just the beginning. Over the rest of the day, Watson went on a tear, winning four of six games. It displayed remarkable facility with cultural trivia (�This action flick starring Roy Scheider in a high-tech police helicopter was also briefly a TV series� � �What is �Blue Thunder�?�), science (�The greyhound originated more than 5,000 years ago in this African country, where it was used to hunt gazelles� � �What is Egypt?�) and sophisticated wordplay (�Classic candy bar that�s a female Supreme Court justice� � �What is Baby Ruth Ginsburg?�).

By the end of the day, the seven human contestants were impressed, and even slightly unnerved, by Watson. Several made references to Skynet, the computer system in the �Terminator� movies that achieves consciousness and decides humanity should be destroyed. �My husband and I talked about what my role in this was,� Samantha Boardman, a graduate student, told me jokingly. �Was I the thing that was going to help the A.I. become aware of itself?� She had distinguished herself with her swift responses to the �Rhyme Time� puzzles in one of her games, winning nearly all of them before Watson could figure out the clues, but it didn�t help. The computer still beat her three times. In one game, she finished with no money.

�He plays to win,� Boardman said, shaking her head. �He�s really not messing around!� Like most of the contestants, she had started calling Watson �he.�

WE LIVE IN AN AGE of increasingly smart machines. In recent years, engineers have pushed into areas, from voice recognition to robotics to search engines, that once seemed to be the preserve of humans. But I.B.M. has a particular knack for pitting man against machine. In 1997, the company�s supercomputer Deep Blue famously beat the grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess, a feat that generated enormous publicity for I.B.M. It did not, however, produce a marketable product; the technical accomplishment � playing chess really well � didn�t translate to real-world business problems and so produced little direct profit for I.B.M. In the mid �00s, the company�s top executives were looking for another high-profile project that would provide a similar flood of global publicity. But this time, they wanted a �grand challenge� (as they call it internally), that would meet a real-world need.

Question-answering seemed to be a good fit. In the last decade, question-answering systems have become increasingly important for firms dealing with mountains of documents. Legal firms, for example, need to quickly sift through case law to find a useful precedent or citation; help-desk workers often have to negotiate enormous databases of product information to find an answer for an agitated customer on the line. In situations like these, speed can often be of the essence; in the case of help desks, labor is billed by the minute, so high-tech firms with slender margins often lose their profits providing telephone support. How could I.B.M. push question-answering technology further?

When one I.B.M. executive suggested taking on �Jeopardy!� he was immediately pooh-poohed. Deep Blue was able to play chess well because the game is perfectly logical, with fairly simple rules; it can be reduced easily to math, which computers handle superbly. But the rules of language are much trickier. At the time, the very best question-answering systems � some created by software firms, some by university researchers � could sort through news articles on their own and answer questions about the content, but they understood only questions stated in very simple language (�What is the capital of Russia?�); in government-run competitions, the top systems answered correctly only about 70 percent of the time, and many were far worse. �Jeopardy!� with its witty, punning questions, seemed beyond their capabilities. What�s more, winning on �Jeopardy!� requires finding an answer in a few seconds. The top question-answering machines often spent longer, even entire minutes, doing the same thing.

�The reaction was basically, �No, it�s too hard, forget it, no way can you do it,� � David Ferrucci told me not long ago. Ferrucci, I.B.M.�s senior manager for its Semantic Analysis and Integration department, heads the Watson project, and I met him for the first time last November at I.B.M.�s lab. An artificial-intelligence researcher who has long specialized in question-answering systems, Ferrucci chafed at the slow progress in the field. A fixture in the office in the evenings and on weekends, he is witty, voluble and intense. While dining out recently, his wife asked the waiter if Ferrucci�s meal included any dairy. �Is he lactose intolerant?� the waiter inquired. �Yes,� his wife replied, �and just generally intolerable.� Ferrucci told me he was recently prescribed a mouth guard because the stress of watching Watson play had him clenching his teeth excessively.

Ferrucci was never an aficionado of �Jeopardy!� (�I�ve certainly seen it,� he said with a shrug. �I�m not a big fan.�) But he craved an ambitious goal that would impel him to break new ground, that would verge on science fiction, and this fit the bill. �The computer on �Star Trek� is a question-answering machine,� he says. �It understands what you�re asking and provides just the right chunk of response that you needed. When is the computer going to get to a point where the computer knows how to talk to you? That�s my question.�

What makes language so hard for computers, Ferrucci explained, is that it�s full of �intended meaning.� When people decode what someone else is saying, we can easily unpack the many nuanced allusions and connotations in every sentence. He gave me an example in the form of a �Jeopardy!� clue: �The name of this hat is elementary, my dear contestant.� People readily detect the wordplay here � the echo of �elementary, my dear Watson,� the famous phrase associated with Sherlock Holmes � and immediately recall that the Hollywood version of Holmes sports a deerstalker hat. But for a computer, there is no simple way to identify �elementary, my dear contestant� as wordplay. Cleverly matching different keywords, and even different fragments of the sentence � which in part is how most search engines work these days � isn�t enough, either. (Type that clue into Google, and you�ll get first-page referrals to �elementary, my dear watson� but none to deerstalker hats.)

What�s more, even if a computer determines that the actual underlying question is �What sort of hat does Sherlock Holmes wear?� its data may not be stored in such a way that enables it to extract a precise answer. For years, computer scientists built question-answering systems by creating specialized databases, in which certain facts about the world were recorded and linked together. You could do this with Sherlock Holmes by building a database that includes connections between catchphrases and his hat and his violin-playing. But that database would be pretty narrow; it wouldn�t be able to answer questions about nuclear power, or fish species, or the history of France. Those would require their own hand-made databases. Pretty soon you�d face the impossible task of organizing all the information known to man � of �boiling the ocean,� as Ferrucci put it. In computer science, this is known as a �bottleneck� problem. And even if you could get past it, you might then face the issue of �brittleness�: if your database contains only facts you input manually, it breaks any time you ask it a question about something beyond that material. There�s no way to hand-write a database that would include the answer to every �Jeopardy!� clue, because the subject matter is potentially all human knowledge.

The great shift in artificial intelligence began in the last 10 years, when computer scientists began using statistics to analyze huge piles of documents, like books and news stories. They wrote algorithms that could take any subject and automatically learn what types of words are, statistically speaking, most (and least) associated with it. Using this method, you could put hundreds of articles and books and movie reviews discussing Sherlock Holmes into the computer, and it would calculate that the words �deerstalker hat� and �Professor Moriarty� and �opium� are frequently correlated with one another, but not with, say, the Super Bowl. So at that point you could present the computer with a question that didn�t mention Sherlock Holmes by name, but if the machine detected certain associated words, it could conclude that Holmes was the probable subject � and it could also identify hundreds of other concepts and words that weren�t present but that were likely to be related to Holmes, like �Baker Street� and �chemistry.�

In theory, this sort of statistical computation has been possible for decades, but it was impractical. Computers weren�t fast enough, memory wasn�t expansive enough and in any case there was no easy way to put millions of documents into a computer. All that changed in the early �00s. Computer power became drastically cheaper, and the amount of online text exploded as millions of people wrote blogs and wikis about anything and everything; news organizations and academic journals also began putting all their works in digital format. What�s more, question-answering experts spent the previous couple of decades creating several linguistic tools that helped computers puzzle through language � like rhyming dictionaries, bulky synonym finders and �classifiers� that recognized the parts of speech.

Still, the era�s best question-answering systems remained nowhere near being able to take on �Jeopardy!� In 2006, Ferrucci tested I.B.M.�s most advanced system � it wasn�t the best in its field but near the top � by giving it 500 questions from previous shows. The results were dismal. He showed me a chart, prepared by I.B.M., of how real-life �Jeopardy!� champions perform on the TV show. They are clustered at the top in what Ferrucci calls �the winner�s cloud,� which consists of individuals who are the first to hit the buzzer about 50 percent of the time and, after having �won� the buzz, solve on average 85 to 95 percent of the clues. In contrast, the I.B.M. system languished at the bottom of the chart. It was rarely confident enough to answer a question, and when it was, it got the right answer only 15 percent of the time. Humans were fast and smart; I.B.M.�s machine was slow and dumb.

�Humans are just � boom! � they�re just plowing through this in just seconds,� Ferrucci said excitedly. �They�re getting the questions, they�re breaking them down, they�re interpreting them, they�re getting the right interpretation, they�re looking this up in their memory, they�re scoring, they�re doing all this just instantly.�

But Ferrucci argued that I.B.M. could be the one to finally play �Jeopardy!� If the firm focused its computer firepower � including its new �BlueGene� servers � on the challenge, Ferrucci could conduct experiments dozens of times faster than anyone had before, allowing him to feed more information into Watson and test new algorithms more quickly. Ferrucci was ambitious for personal reasons too: if he didn�t try this, another computer scientist might � �and then bang, you are irrelevant,� he told me.

�I had no interest spending the next five years of my life pursuing things in the small,� he said. �I wanted to push the limits.� If they could succeed at �Jeopardy!� soon after that they could bring the underlying technology to market as customizable question-answering systems. In 2007, his bosses gave him three to five years and increased his team to 15 people.

FERRUCCI�S MAIN breakthrough was not the design of any single, brilliant new technique for analyzing language. Indeed, many of the statistical techniques Watson employs were already well known by computer scientists. One important thing that makes Watson so different is its enormous speed and memory. Taking advantage of I.B.M.�s supercomputing heft, Ferrucci�s team input millions of documents into Watson to build up its knowledge base � including, he says, �books, reference material, any sort of dictionary, thesauri, folksonomies, taxonomies, encyclopedias, any kind of reference material you can imagine getting your hands on or licensing. Novels, bibles, plays.�

Watson�s speed allows it to try thousands of ways of simultaneously tackling a �Jeopardy!� clue. Most question-answering systems rely on a handful of algorithms, but Ferrucci decided this was why those systems do not work very well: no single algorithm can simulate the human ability to parse language and facts. Instead, Watson uses more than a hundred algorithms at the same time to analyze a question in different ways, generating hundreds of possible solutions. Another set of algorithms ranks these answers according to plausibility; for example, if dozens of algorithms working in different directions all arrive at the same answer, it�s more likely to be the right one. In essence, Watson thinks in probabilities. It produces not one single �right� answer, but an enormous number of possibilities, then ranks them by assessing how likely each one is to answer the question.

Ferrucci showed me how Watson handled this sample �Jeopardy!� clue: �He was presidentially pardoned on Sept. 8, 1974.� In the first pass, the algorithms came up with �Nixon.� To evaluate whether �Nixon� was the best response, Watson performed a clever trick: it inserted the answer into the original phrase � �Nixon was presidentially pardoned on Sept. 8, 1974� � and then ran it as a new search, to see if it also produced results that supported �Nixon� as the right answer. (It did. The new search returned the result �Ford pardoned Nixon on Sept. 8, 1974,� a phrasing so similar to the original clue that it helped make �Nixon� the top-ranked solution.)

Other times, Watson uses algorithms that can perform basic cross-checks against time or space to help detect which answer seems better. When the computer analyzed the clue �In 1594 he took a job as a tax collector in Andalusia,� the two most likely answers generated were �Thoreau� and �Cervantes.� Watson assessed �Thoreau� and discovered his birth year was 1817, at which point the computer ruled him out, because he wasn�t alive in 1594. �Cervantes� became the top-ranked choice.

When Watson is playing a game, Ferrucci lets the audience peek into the computer�s analysis. A monitor shows Watson�s top five answers to a question, with a bar graph beside each indicating its confidence. During one of my visits, the host read the clue �Thousands of prisoners in the Philippines re-enacted the moves of the video of this Michael Jackson hit.� On the monitor, I could see that Watson�s top pick was �Thriller,� with a confidence level of roughly 80 percent. This answer was correct, and Watson buzzed first, so it won $800. Watson�s next four choices � �Music video,� �Billie Jean,� �Smooth Criminal� and �MTV� � had only slivers for their bar graphs. It was a fascinating glimpse into the machine�s workings, because you could spy the connective thread running between the possibilities, even the wrong ones. �Billie Jean� and �Smooth Criminal� were also major hits by Michael Jackson, and �MTV� was the main venue for his videos. But it�s very likely that none of those correlated well with �Philippines.�

After a year, Watson�s performance had moved halfway up to the �winner�s cloud.� By 2008, it had edged into the cloud; on paper, anyway, it could beat some of the lesser �Jeopardy!� champions. Confident they could actually compete on TV, I.B.M. executives called up Harry Friedman, the executive producer of �Jeopardy!� and raised the possibility of putting Watson on the air.

Friedman told me he and his fellow executives were surprised: nobody had ever suggested anything like this. But they quickly accepted the challenge. �Because it�s I.B.M., we took it seriously,� Friedman said. �They had the experience with Deep Blue and the chess match that became legendary.�

WHEN THEY FIRST showed up to play Watson, many of the contestants worried that they didn�t stand a chance. Human memory is frail. In a high-stakes game like �Jeopardy!� players can panic, becoming unable to recall facts they would otherwise remember without difficulty. Watson doesn�t have this problem. It might have trouble with its analysis or be unable to logically connect a relevant piece of text to a question. But it doesn�t forget things. Plus, it has lightning-fast reactions � wouldn�t it simply beat the humans to the buzzer every time?

�We�re relying on nerves � old nerves,� Dorothy Gilmartin complained, halfway through her first game, when it seemed that Watson was winning almost every buzz.

Yet the truth is, in more than 20 games I witnessed between Watson and former �Jeopardy!� players, humans frequently beat Watson to the buzzer. Their advantage lay in the way the game is set up. On �Jeopardy!� when a new clue is given, it pops up on screen visible to all. (Watson gets the text electronically at the same moment.) But contestants are not allowed to hit the buzzer until the host is finished reading the question aloud; on average, it takes the host about six or seven seconds to read the clue.

Players use this precious interval to figure out whether or not they have enough confidence in their answers to hazard hitting the buzzer. After all, buzzing carries a risk: someone who wins the buzz on a $1,000 question but answers it incorrectly loses $1,000.

Often those six or seven seconds weren�t enough time for Watson. The humans reacted more quickly. For example, in one game an $800 clue was �In Poland, pick up some kalafjor if you crave this broccoli relative.� A human contestant jumped on the buzzer as soon as he could. Watson, meanwhile, was still processing. Its top five answers hadn�t appeared on the screen yet. When these finally came up, I could see why it took so long. Something about the question had confused the computer, and its answers came with mere slivers of confidence. The top two were �vegetable� and �cabbage�; the correct answer � �cauliflower� � was the third guess.

To avoid losing money � Watson doesn�t care about the money, obviously; winnings are simply a way for I.B.M. to see how fast and accurately its system is performing � Ferrucci�s team has programmed Watson generally not to buzz until it arrives at an answer with a high confidence level. In this regard, Watson is actually at a disadvantage, because the best �Jeopardy!� players regularly hit the buzzer as soon as it�s possible to do so, even if it�s before they�ve figured out the clue. �Jeopardy!� rules give them five seconds to answer after winning the buzz. So long as they have a good feeling in their gut, they�ll pounce on the buzzer, trusting that in those few extra seconds the answer will pop into their heads. Ferrucci told me that the best human contestants he had brought in to play against Watson were amazingly fast. �They can buzz in 10 milliseconds,� he said, sounding astonished. �Zero milliseconds!�

On the third day I watched Watson play, it did quite poorly, losing four of seven games, in one case without any winnings at all. Often Watson appeared to misunderstand the clue and offered answers so inexplicable that the audience erupted in laughter. Faced with the clue �This �insect� of a gangster was a real-life hit man for Murder Incorporated in the 1930s & �40s,� Watson responded with �James Cagney.� Up on the screen, I could see that none of its lesser choices were the correct one, �Bugsy Siegel.� Later, when asked to complete the phrase �Toto, I�ve a feeling we�re not in Ka�,� Watson offered �not in Kansas anymore,� which was incorrect, since the precise phrasing was simply �Kansas anymore,� and �Jeopardy!� is strict about phrasings. When I looked at the screen, I noticed that the answers Watson had ranked lower were pretty odd, including �Steve Porcaro,� the keyboardist for the band Toto (which made a vague sort of sense), and �Jackie Chan� (which really didn�t). In another game, Watson�s logic appeared to fall down some odd semantic rabbit hole, repeatedly giving the answer �Tommy Lee Jones� � the name of the Hollywood actor � to several clues that had nothing to do with him.

In the corner of the conference room, Ferrucci sat typing into a laptop. Whenever Watson got a question wrong, Ferrucci winced and stamped his feet in frustration, like a college-football coach watching dropped passes. �This is torture,� he added, laughing.

Seeing Watson�s errors, you can sometimes get a sense of its cognitive shortcomings. For example, in �Jeopardy!� the category heading often includes a bit of wordplay that explains how the clues are to be addressed. Watson sometimes appeared to mistakenly analyze the entire category and thus botch every clue in it. One game included the category �Stately Botanical Gardens,� which indicated that every clue would list several gardens, and the answer was the relevant state. Watson clearly didn�t grasp this; it answered �botanic garden� repeatedly. I also noticed that when Watson was faced with very short clues � ones with only a word or two � it often seemed to lose the race to the buzzer, possibly because the host read the clues so quickly that Watson didn�t have enough time to do its full calculations. The humans, in contrast, simply trusted their guts and jumped.

Ferrucci refused to talk on the record about Watson�s blind spots. He�s aware of them; indeed, his team does �error analysis� after each game, tracing how and why Watson messed up. But he is terrified that if competitors knew what types of questions Watson was bad at, they could prepare by boning up in specific areas. I.B.M. required all its sparring-match contestants to sign nondisclosure agreements prohibiting them from discussing their own observations on what, precisely, Watson was good and bad at. I signed no such agreement, so I was free to describe what I saw; but Ferrucci wasn�t about to make it easier for me by cataloguing Watson�s vulnerabilities.

Computer scientists I spoke to agreed that witty, allusive clues will probably be Watson�s weak point. �Retrieval of obscure Italian poets is easy � [Watson] will never forget that one,� Peter Norvig, the director of research at Google, told me. �But �Jeopardy!� tends to have a lot of wordplay, and that�s going to be a challenge.� Certainly on many occasions this seemed to be true. Still, at other times I was startled by Watson�s eerily humanlike ability to untangle astonishingly coy clues. During one game, a category was �All-Eddie Before & After,� indicating that the clue would hint at two different things that need to be blended together, one of which included

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the name �Eddie.� The $2,000 clue was �A �Green Acres� star goes existential (& French) as the author of �The Fall.� � Watson nailed it perfectly: �Who is Eddie Albert Camus?�

Ultimately, Watson�s greatest edge at �Jeopardy!� probably isn�t its perfect memory or lightning speed. It is the computer�s lack of emotion. �Managing your emotions is an enormous part of doing well� on �Jeopardy!� Bob Harris, a five-time champion, told me. �Every single time I�ve ever missed a Daily Double, I always miss the next clue, because I�m still kicking myself.� Because there is only a short period before the next clue comes along, the stress can carry over. Similarly, humans can become much more intimidated by a $2,000 clue than a $200 one, because the more expensive clues are presumably written to be much harder.

Whether Watson will win when it goes on TV in a real �Jeopardy!� match depends on whom �Jeopardy!� pits against the computer. Watson will not appear as a contestant on the regular show; instead, �Jeopardy!� will hold a special match pitting Watson against one or more famous winners from the past. If the contest includes Ken Jennings � the best player in �Jeopardy!� history, who won 74 games in a row in 2004 � Watson will lose if its performance doesn�t improve. It�s pretty far up in the winner�s cloud, but it�s not yet at Jennings�s level; in the sparring matches, Watson was beaten several times by opponents who did nowhere near as well as Jennings. (Indeed, it sometimes lost to people who hadn�t placed first in their own appearances on the show.) The show�s executive producer, Harry Friedman, will not say whom it is picking to play against Watson, but he refused to let Jennings be interviewed for this story, which is suggestive.

Ferrucci says his team will continue to fine-tune Watson, but improving its performance is getting harder. �When we first started, we�d add a new algorithm and it would improve the performance by 10 percent, 15 percent,� he says. �Now it�ll be like half a percent is a good improvement.�

Ferrucci�s attitude toward winning is conflicted. I could see that he hungers to win. And losing badly on national TV might mean negative publicity for I.B.M. But Ferrucci also argued that Watson might lose merely because of bad luck. Should one of Watson�s opponents land on both Daily Doubles, for example, that player might double his or her money and vault beyond Watson�s ability to catch up, even if the computer never flubs another question.

Ultimately, Ferrucci claimed not to worry about winning or losing. He told me he�s happy that I.B.M. has simply pushed this far and produced a system that performs so well at answering questions. Even a televised flameout, he said, won�t diminish the street cred Watson will give I.B.M. in the computer-science field. �I don�t really care about �Jeopardy!� � he told me, shrugging.

I.B.M. PLANS TObegin selling versions of Watson to companies in the next year or two. John Kelly, the head of I.B.M.�s research labs, says that Watson could help decision-makers sift through enormous piles of written material in seconds. Kelly says that its speed and quality could make it part of rapid-fire decision-making, with users talking to Watson to guide their thinking process.

�I want to create a medical version of this,� he adds. �A Watson M.D., if you will.� He imagines a hospital feeding Watson every new medical paper in existence, then having it answer questions during split-second emergency-room crises. �The problem right now is the procedures, the new procedures, the new medicines, the new capability is being generated faster than physicians can absorb on the front lines and it can be deployed.� He also envisions using Watson to produce virtual call centers, where the computer would talk directly to the customer and generally be the first line of defense, because, �as you�ve seen, this thing can answer a question faster and more accurately than most human beings.�

�I want to create something that I can take into every other retail industry, in the transportation industry, you name it, the banking industry,� Kelly goes on to say. �Any place where time is critical and you need to get advanced state-of-the-art information to the front of decision-makers. Computers need to go from just being back-office calculating machines to improving the intelligence of people making decisions.� At first, a Watson system could cost several million dollars, because it needs to run on at least one $1 million I.B.M. server. But Kelly predicts that within 10 years an artificial brain like Watson could run on a much cheaper server, affordable by any small firm, and a few years after that, on a laptop.

Ted Senator, a vice president of SAIC � a high-tech firm that frequently helps design government systems � is a former �Jeopardy!� champion and has followed Watson�s development closely; in October he visited I.B.M. and played against Watson himself. (He lost.) He says that Watson-level artificial intelligence could make it significantly easier for citizens to get answers quickly from massive, ponderous bureaucracies. He points to the recent �cash for clunkers� program. He tried to participate, but when he went to the government site to see if his car qualified, he couldn�t figure it out: his model, a 1995 Saab 9000, was listed twice, each time with different mileage-per-gallon statistics. What he needed was probably buried deep inside some government database, but the bureaucrats hadn�t presented the information clearly enough. �So I gave up,� he says. This is precisely the sort of task a Watson-like artificial intelligence can assist in, he says. �You can imagine if I�m applying for health insurance, having to explain the details of my personal situation, or if I�m trying to figure out if I�m eligible for a particular tax deduction. Any place there�s massive data that surpasses the human�s ability to sort through it, and there�s a time constraint on getting an answer.�

Many experts imagine even quirkier ways that everyday life might be transformed as question-answering technology becomes more powerful and widespread. Andrew Hickl, the C.E.O. of Language Computer Corporation, which makes question-answering systems, among other things, for businesses, was recently asked by a client to make a �contradiction engine�: if you tell it a statement, it tries to find evidence on the Web that contradicts it. �It�s like, �I believe that Dallas is the most beautiful city in the United States,� and I want to find all the evidence on the Web that contradicts that.� (It produced results that were only 70 percent relevant, which satisfied his client.) Hickl imagines people using this sort of tool to read through the daily news. �We could take something that Harry Reid says and immediately figure out what contradicts it. Or somebody tweets something that�s wrong, and we could automatically post a tweet saying, �No, actually, that�s wrong, and here�s proof.� �

CULTURALLY, OF COURSE, advances like Watson are bound to provoke nervous concerns too. High-tech critics have begun to wonder about the wisdom of relying on artificial-intelligence systems in the face of complex reality. Many Wall Street firms, for example, now rely on �millisecond trading� computers, which detect deviations in prices and order trades far faster than humans ever could; but these are now regarded as a possible culprit in the seemingly irrational hourlong stock-market plunge of the spring. Would doctors in an E.R. feel comfortable taking action based on a split-second factual answer from a Watson M.D.? And while service companies can clearly save money by relying more on question-answering systems, they are precisely the sort of labor-saving advance deplored by unions � and customers who crave the ability to talk to a real, intelligent human on the phone.

Some scientists, moreover, argue that Watson has serious limitations that could hamper its ability to grapple with the real world. It can analyze texts and draw basic conclusions from the facts it finds, like figuring out if one event happened later than another. But many questions we want answered require more complex forms of analysis. Last year, the computer scientist Stephen Wolfram released �Wolfram Alpha,� a question-answering engine that can do mathematical calculations about the real world. Ask it to �compare the populations of New York City and Cincinnati,� for example, and it will not only give you their populations � 8.4 million versus 333,336 � it will also create a bar graph comparing them visually and calculate their ratio (25.09 to 1) and the percentage relationship between them (New York is 2,409 percent larger). But this sort of automated calculation is only possible because Wolfram and his team spent years painstakingly hand-crafting databases in a fashion that enables a computer to perform this sort of analysis � by typing in the populations of New York and Cincinnati, for example, and tagging them both as �cities� so that the engine can compare them. This, Wolfram says, is the deep challenge of artificial intelligence: a lot of human knowledge isn�t represented in words alone, and a computer won�t learn that stuff just by encoding English language texts, as Watson does. The only way to program a computer to do this type of mathematical reasoning might be to do precisely what Ferrucci doesn�t want to do � sit down and slowly teach it about the world, one fact at a time.

�Not to take anything away from this �Jeopardy!� thing, but I don�t think Watson really is answering questions � it�s not like the �Star Trek� computer,� Wolfram says. (Of course, Wolfram Alpha cannot answer the sort of broad-ranging trivia questions that Watson can, either, because Wolfram didn�t design it for that purpose.) What�s more, Watson can answer only questions asking for an objectively knowable fact. It cannot produce an answer that requires judgment. It cannot offer a new, unique answer to questions like �What�s the best high-tech company to invest in?� or �When will there be peace in the Middle East?� All it will do is look for source material in its database that appears to have addressed those issues and then collate and compose a string of text that seems to be a statistically likely answer. Neither Watson nor Wolfram Alpha, in other words, comes close to replicating human wisdom.

At best, Ferrucci suspects that Watson might be simulating, in a stripped-down fashion, some of the ways that our human brains process language. Modern neuroscience has found that our brain is highly �parallel�: it uses many different parts simultaneously, harnessing billions of neurons whenever we talk or listen to words. �I�m no cognitive scientist, so this is just speculation,� Ferrucci says, but Watson�s approach � tackling a question in thousands of different ways � may succeed precisely because it mimics the same approach. Watson doesn�t come up with an answer to a question so much as make an educated guess, based on similarities to things it has been exposed to. �I have young children, you can see them guessing at the meaning of words, you can see them guessing at grammatical structure,� he notes.

This is why Watson often seemed most human not when it was performing flawlessly but when it wasn�t. Many of the human opponents found the computer most endearing when it was clearly misfiring � misinterpreting the clue, making weird mistakes, rather as we do when we�re put on the spot.

During one game, the category was, coincidentally, �I.B.M.� The questions seemed like no-brainers for the computer (for example, �Though it�s gone beyond the corporate world, I.B.M. stands for this� � �International Business Machines�). But for some reason, Watson performed poorly. It came up with answers that were wrong or in which it had little confidence. The audience, composed mostly of I.B.M. employees who had come to watch the action, seemed mesmerized by the spectacle.

Then came the final, $2,000 clue in the category: �It�s the last name of father and son Thomas Sr. and Jr., who led I.B.M. for more than 50 years.� This time the computer pounced. �Who is Watson?� it declared in its synthesized voice, and the crowd erupted in cheers. At least it knew its own name.

Clive Thompson, a contributing writer for the magazine, writes frequently about technology and science.

SMARTER THAN YOU THINK Articles in this series, appearing in The New York Times in the coming months, will examine the recent advances in artificial intelligence and robotics and their potential impact on society.

13 June 2010 14:21 The Good Girl - Reilly Humiliated By Aniston Sex Scene

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Reilly Humiliated By Aniston Sex Scene

Actor JOHN C. REILLY was left red-faced on the set of romantic comedy THE GOOD GIRL when he had to simulate sex with a clearly-uncomfortable JENNIFER ANISTON.

The pair star as husband and wife in the 2002 film and one scene sees the odd movie couple get intimate in the bedroom.

But Reilly admits what was meant to be a sexy scene was far from steamy because Aniston insisted on covering up from head-to-toe and using a prop cushion to ensure the stars didn't get too close for comfort.

He says, "It's all dark and she's a little tense 'cause a sex scene is going to happen. So I get there and she's under the covers and I'm like, 'OK, I guess they just want me to get in position here.' So I climb into the bed, she opens up the sheet and I swear, she had two pairs of sweatpants on, winter socks, a long-sleeved T-shirt. Her body is basically like a burqa from the neck down.

"And I go, 'OK, I guess I'll just get on top of you now', and she's like, 'Can I get the chastity pillow please?' I'm like what the hell is a chastity pillow? And they bring out this big black pillow that she puts between her legs. And from that moment on, I went from Robert Palmer to the Hunchback of Notre-Dame. 'I'm sorry, I guess I'll just hump the pillow!'"

Scenic Routes Children Of Men

by Mike D'Angelo November 23, 2009 Article Tools Twitter Facebook Digg StumbleUpon Reddit Email This Print This More Scenic Routes The Small Back Room �The Wrong Trousers� Citizen Ruth Badlands Road To Perdition

Back in the late 1940s, Alfred Hitchcock, perhaps still addled from the war, came up with one of the all-time stupid movie ideas: shooting an entire feature that appears to be a single continuous take. At that time, of course, actually doing so was impossible�film cameras were decidedly analog, and could only shoot for about 10 minutes before the magazine had to be reloaded. Nor was digital compositing available to Hitch, which meant that he had no choice but to hide his cuts by clumsily zooming into an actor�s suit jacket for no apparent reason. Rope remains somewhat watchable today, but that�s entirely a testament to its cast (Jimmy Stewart in particular), its screenplay, and our enduring fascination with Leopold and Loeb; as a technical exercise, it was a resounding failure, adding nothing but cheap curiosity to the viewing experience. And that was that� until half a century later, when the advent of digital cinema suddenly reawakened the ludicrous dream of dispensing with editing altogether.

As you may have gathered, this is a pet peeve of mine. I have nothing against lengthy shots per se�there are certainly times when a steady, unblinking gaze is the most effective choice, even if I believe to my core that the essential power of cinema lies in how shot A cuts with shot B. No, what riles me are pointless stunts that serve only to make viewers aware of how hard the director and crew are working behind the camera. Movies may be magic, but individual shots shouldn�t come across as miniature magic tricks�at least not in a film with pretensions to seriousness. (If you�re Brian De Palma making Snake Eyes, do what you like.) To my mind, the most grievous offender in this regard over the past few years is Alfonso Cuar� Children Of Men, a dystopian nightmare in which the palpable sense of unease and terror is constantly undermined by hotshot looka-me cinematography. There are at least four shots that bug me, but I�ve chosen to address what seems to be the most celebrated: a �bravura� automobile ambush. Take a look.

Watching this sequence again, it occurs to me that it�s a somewhat unusual example of the phenomenon I�m decrying, in that the average viewer most likely wouldn�t even recognize its technical virtuosity, save for big moments like the motorcycle bouncing off the fender, which was actually added in post-production. If I were showing the scene to my mom or dad�both wonderful people, but not exactly sophisticated when it comes to the ol� mise-en-sc��I�d have to stop the DVD at certain points and ask them, �Okay, so if the camera is there, then where exactly is Clive Owen at this exact moment? Remember, it�s a speeding car.� I might even have to show them a photo of the insanely complicated rig invented strictly for this shot.

But that only makes me wonder all the more why Cuar�nd his DP, Emmanuel Lubezki, bothered to go to so much trouble. For most people, the shot�s stunning aspects will go unnoticed. And for the rest of us�at least for me, at any rate�they�re a distraction. Instead of worrying about the safety of the miraculously pregnant teenager in the back seat, or whether Julianne Moore has been killed or just badly wounded, I�m wondering how the hell the actors are getting out of the way every few seconds, and trying to guess how many times they had to rehearse this whole thing to get the choreography just right. I�m now watching a magic trick, not a movie.

Granted, it�s an impressive trick. The actors deserve enormous credit for maintaining character throughout despite having to repeatedly duck into a reclining position on cue, and the abrupt shift from casual chatter to mounting hysteria is exquisitely timed�as a setpiece, it�s exemplary. But I fail to see how shooting the whole thing in a single take, rather than in an equally expert conventional shot-sequence, makes it any more tense, riveting, or even claustrophobic. The main difference, as far as I can determine, is that we gradually become conscious of how many things could have gone wrong, and how hard the crew must be busting its ass to pull this off. It�s as if we�re expected to be emotionally overwhelmed by the degree of difficulty, rather than by what�s actually happening onscreen. Which is really just the tech equivalent of giving the award to the actor who gains or loses 50 pounds, or switches genders.

When I�ve argued this subject with friends over the years�and I should note that they all love this scene, and voted it the best of 2006 in an annual movie-nerd poll I conduct�they invariably argue that the absence of discernible cuts creates more of a �documentary� feel, heightening the sense that what we�re seeing is actually happening rather than being carefully manufactured. Obviously, I disagree, since the camera constantly moving into a position where one of the characters ought to be doesn�t scream �untampered� to my eye. More than that, though, I think these folks suffer from a basic misunderstanding about just how cinema�and the human visual system, for that matter�works. They perceive every cut as a little lie, and have the notion that not cutting somehow more closely represents the way we actually see the world. But our visual field does not operate like a Steadicam. If a cut represents a shift in time or location, e.g. flying prehistoric bone to monolithic future space station, that�s one thing. (Yes, I know 2001 is no longer the future.) But if it merely represents a shift in angle, as most cuts within a given scene do, we tend to perceive it as continuity, so long as it isn�t deliberately jarring in some way. Traditional montage works precisely because it�s what we�re accustomed to in real life.

Look to your extreme left, then immediately look to your extreme right. (Really do this.) Did you register everything in between? I don�t. To me, that�s much closer to a cut from one shot to another than it is to a whip-pan. If you happen to blink along the way, as we all do about every six seconds on average, then it�s literally a visual disjunction�a cut. One of the more fascinating visual phenomena is the saccade, in which your eyes jump from one focal point to another without you necessarily being consciously aware of it. In one experiment, researchers had subjects read an electronic text through an apparatus that could track the tiny, rapid movements of their eyeballs, then proceeded to change all the words, but only during saccades. The subjects had no idea whatsoever that it was happening, even though someone looking over their shoulders would see the page completely transform several times per second. The illusion works because when you shift focus, you�re effectively blind for that instant, though your brain disguises the fact from you, just as it fills in your two blind spots.

Between blinks and saccades, we exist in a world where unconsciously interrupted vision is the norm. Hence there�s no real justification for these ever-more-strenuous attempts to create an ostensibly unbroken chunk of �real time,� unless your primary goal is to wow the viewer with the sheer awesomeness of your technique. Which, let me stress again, can be a perfectly laudable goal in some contexts�nobody�s running out to see 2012, for example, with any desire except to see how convincingly this year�s cutting-edge F/X can destroy world landmarks. But if you�re actually trying to move people, or make some kind of sincere sociopolitical statement, or depict, say, mankind�s potential extinction, you might want to refrain from just showing off.

Go Back Print this page Music The �Thriller� Diaries

Michael Jackson�s 1983 �Thriller� remains the most popular music video of all time: a 14-minute horror spoof that changed the business. Behind the scenes it gave its star a temporary home with director John Landis, sparked a near romance with actress Ola Ray, and revealed how damaged the young pop idol already was. Plus: Read more about the King of Pop in our Michael Jackson archive, and see more music coverage. By Nancy Griffin July 2010

Michael Jackson in zombie mode. Photo excerpted from Michael Jackson: The Making of �Thriller�/Four Days/1983, by Douglas Kirkland, to be published in November by Filipacchi; � 2010 by Douglas Kirkland.

OCTOBER 13, 1983; EIGHT p.m Downtown Los Angeles.

On a chilly autumn night, gaffers rig motion-picture lights around the entrance to the Palace Theatre, which bears the title �Thriller� on its marquee. A cascade of shrieks��Michael! Michael!��drifts on the breeze from a few blocks away, where hundreds of fans strain against police barricades for a glimpse of their idol. Although everyone involved in the production has been sworn to secrecy, word of tonight�s shoot has leaked and been broadcast on local radio. Security guards patrol the set.

Michael Jackson, a shy pixie in a red leather jacket and jeans, stands in shadow in the theater�s entryway, talking with actress Ola Ray and director John Landis. The camera crew is making final preparations for a crane shot that will pan down from the marquee as Jackson and Ray, playing a couple on a date, emerge from the theater. Judging from the saucy looks she is sending his way, Ray is clearly besotted by her leading man, who responds by casually throwing an arm around her shoulders.

I am on set covering the shoot for Life magazine. Landis says that he needs a �ticket girl� in the background and orders me to sit in the booth�a prime spot from which to watch the performances.

Just before calling �Action,� Landis fortifies his actors with boisterous encouragement.

�How are you going to be in this shot?� he shouts.

�Wonderful,� Jackson chirps, barely audibly.

Seconds later Jackson steps into his nimbus of light, and it is as if he flips on an internal switch: he smiles, he glows, he mesmerizes. Landis executes the long crane shot, then moves in for close-ups and dialogue. �It�s only a movie,� Jackson reassures his date. �You were scared, weren�t you?�

Landis calls for another take and coaxes: �Make it sexy this time.�

�How?� asks Jackson.

�You know, as if you want to fuck her.�

Chapter 11

The star flinches and licks his lips uncomfortably, then gazes earnestly into Ray�s eyes. Landis gets the shot he wants and calls for the next setup, satisfied. He whispers to me, �I bet it will be sexy.�

The world certainly thought so, and apparently still does. The campy horror-fest with dancing zombies that is �Michael Jackson�s Thriller,� originally conceived as a 14-minute short film, is the most popular and influential music video of all time. In January of this year it was designated a national treasure by the Library of Congress, the first music video to be inducted into the National Film Registry.

Slide show: Michael Jackson in his own words.

Unlike forgotten favorites from MTV�s heyday (Duran Duran�s �Hungry Like the Wolf,� anyone?), �Thriller� is thriving on YouTube, where one can view, along with the original, scores of �Thriller� dance tutorials and re-enactments by Bollywood actors and Bar Mitzvah celebrants. The dance has become an annual tribal ritual in major cities around the world, with initiates in ghoul makeup aping Michael�s moves en masse; the current record for largest dance of the undead is 12,937, held by Mexico City. A YouTube 41-million-hit sensation features more than 1,500 inmates in a Philippines prison yard executing the funky footwork as part of a rehab program designed to �turn dregs into human beings�; the prison, in the city of Cebu, has become a T-shirt-selling tourist attraction.

None of this was imaginable back at the Palace Theatre 27 years ago. Jackson then was a na�, preternaturally gifted 25-year-old �who wanted to be turned into a monster, just for fun,� as Landis recently told me�and had the money to make it happen. �Thriller� marked the most incandescent moment in Jackson�s life, his apex creatively as well as commercially. He would spend the rest of his career trying to surpass it. �In the Off the Wall/Thriller era, Michael was in a constant state of becoming,� says Glen Brunman, then Jackson�s publicist at his record company Epic. �It was all about the music, until it also became about the sales and the awards, and something changed forever.�

It was the �Thriller� video that pushed Jackson over the top, consolidating his position as the King of Pop, a royal title he encouraged and Elizabeth Taylor helped popularize. �Thriller� was the seventh and last single and third video (after �Billie Jean� and �Beat It�) to be released from the album of the same name, which had already been on the charts for almost a year since its release, in November 1982. The video�s frenzied reception, whipped up by round-the-clock showings on MTV, would more than double album sales, driving Thriller into the record books as the No. 1 LP of all time, a distinction it maintains today. But, for anyone paying close attention during the making of the �Thriller� video�and Jackson�s collaborators were�the outlines of subsequent tragedies were already painfully visible.

Read more about the King of Pop in VF.com�s Michael Jackson archive.

Jackson would dominate pop culture for the remainder of the decade, owning the 80s as Elvis had owned the 50s and the Beatles the 60s. To rule the entertainment universe had been his dream since he belted out �I Want You Back� on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1969 as the precocious lead singer of the Jackson 5. Under the strict, physically and psychologically abusive tutelage of his father, Joseph, he had sacrificed his childhood to make money for the family and Motown Records. He would later describe his boyhood as a blur of tour buses and tutors, and rehearsals that his father supervised with a belt in his hand, ready to whip any son who stepped out of line. Joe reserved especially harsh treatment for his most gifted and defiant son; although extremely sensitive by nature, Michael was also quietly stubborn and frequently clashed with his father. The brief moments Michael spent onstage were when he felt happiest. �I remember singing at the top of my voice and dancing with real joy and working too hard for a child,� he recalled in his autobiography, Moonwalk.

His mother, Katherine, whom he adored, called him �the special one.� A musical savant, young Michael hungrily devoured show-business knowledge and studied favorite entertainers from Fred Astaire to James Brown to the Beatles. Ron Weisner, hired by Joe Jackson in �76 to co-manage the Jacksons, recalls that on tour Michael�exhibiting the insomnia that plagued him throughout his life (and would be a factor in the drug overdose that killed him)�stayed up late after each show. �We�d be on the bus and we had a little TV and VHS player. He would watch tapes of James Brown and Jackie Wilson over and over until his brothers were screaming and cursing him and throwing things at the TV. The next day they would hide the tape, and Michael would be crying. He would never, never, never stop.�

Obsessive about tracking his sales figures, Jackson compared them constantly with those of Prince and Madonna.

As he grew older he pulled away from his family to venture into solo projects, notably the 1979 funk-disco smash Off the Wall, which he layered with lush grooves and falsetto vocals with the help of producing partner Quincy Jones. The pair teamed up again three years later for Thriller. This time Jackson�s aim was nothing less than a Beatles-like domination of the charts that would lay waste to the divisions between rock, soul, and pop. The strategy was to compile a succession of hit singles that would offer something for everyone: the first release was the ballad �The Girl Is Mine,� a duet with Paul McCartney. Second up was the funky anthem �Billie Jean.� Third was the rocker �Beat It,� which featured a blistering Eddie Van Halen guitar solo. Executives at Epic pushed the LP tirelessly, pressuring a range of radio formats to play it and marketing it as a mainstream disc.

Most serendipitously, Jackson was the ideal video star. Not only did he radiate an epicene glamour that was at once innocent and intensely erotic, but he was also conceptually inventive, a great dancer, and a sartorial trendsetter. He judged the quality of what the fledgling rock network MTV was airing to be poor, and felt he could do better. He hired the best directors and choreographers and applied everything he had soaked up from watching Gene Kelly and Astaire movies. In a black jacket and pink shirt he slid and spun his way down a surreal city street in the �Billie Jean� video�an electrifying, transformative performance. Although the song�s thumping bass line and synthesizers excluded it from MTV�s definition of a rock song, the network knew a hit when it saw one and put the clip into heavy rotation. The �Beat It� video was grittier, an homage to West Side Story, with Jackson strutting and spinning in a red-orange leather jacket in the midst of 20 dancers and genuine recruited gang members.

More than any other artist, Jackson ushered in the heyday of the music video, demonstrating its promotional power, raising the bar creatively, and paving the way for greater acceptance of black musicians on MTV. But the Thriller campaign, concocted by the album�s brain trust�Jackson; his lawyer and closest adviser, John Branca; CBS Records chief Walter Yetnikoff; and Epic head of promotion Frank DiLeo�did not include plans for a third video, and certainly not a video of the title track, which wasn�t even going to be released as a single. �Who wants a single about monsters?� says Yetnikoff, summing up how the group felt at the time about the song�s potential.

But in June of 1983 the album, after four months as No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, was bumped from the top slot by the Flashdance soundtrack. It briefly regained the top position in July, then was toppled again, this time by Synchronicity, by the Police. The three remaining planned singles��Wanna Be Startin� Somethin�,� just released in May, �Human Nature,� scheduled for July, and �P.Y.T.� for September�were not expected to drive album sales as �Billie Jean� and �Beat It� had, nor were they suitable for videos.

Jackson was upset. Obsessive about tracking his sales figures, he compared them constantly with those of his competitors in the top echelon, including Prince and Madonna. �He enjoyed being on top,� says Larry Stessel, Epic�s West Coast marketing executive, who worked closely with the star. �He reveled in it. He didn�t like it when it ended.� With his own album making history, Jackson yearned to shatter records held by the Fab Four. �It was all about the Beatles,� says Stessel. �He knew in his heart of hearts that he would never be bigger than the Beatles, but he had such tremendous respect for them, and he certainly wanted to come as close as he could.�

In the summer of �83, Yetnikoff and Stessel answered calls at all hours of the night from Jackson. �Walter, the record isn�t No. 1 anymore,� Yetnikoff remembers Jackson saying. �What are we going to do about it?� �We�re going to go to sleep and deal with it tomorrow,� Yetnikoff told him. It was DiLeo who first mentioned the idea of making a third video, and pressed Jackson to consider the album�s title track. �It�s simple�all you�ve got to do is dance, sing, and make it scary,� DiLeo recalls telling Jackson.

Jackson had known episodes of real-life terror. His father once put on a fright mask and crawled into Michael�s bedroom, screaming.

In some ways �Thriller,� written by Rod Temperton, is the album�s sore thumb, a semi-novelty song with sound effects of creaking doors and eerie footsteps and bwah-ha-ha narration by Vincent Price. Horror was a genre with which Jackson had an ambivalent relationship. As a child, he had known episodes of real-life terror. Michael�s biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli recounted that Joe Jackson had once put on a fright mask and crawled into Michael�s bedroom through a window at night, screaming; Joe Jackson said his purpose was to teach his son to keep the window closed when he slept. For years afterward Michael suffered nightmares about being kidnapped from his room, and said that whenever he saw his father he felt nauseated.

Jackson had reason to be fascinated by scary disguises and things that go bump in the night, but he didn�t want them to seem too real. His tastes generally ran to benign Disney-esque fantasies where people were nice and children were safe. �I never was a horror fan,� he said. �I was too scared.� He would make sure that the tone of his �Thriller� film was creepy-comical, not genuinely terrifying.

In early August, John Landis, whose most successful films had been National Lampoon�s Animal House and Trading Places, picked up the phone and heard Jackson�s wee voice on the line. The star told Landis how much he had enjoyed the director�s horror spoof An American Werewolf in London. Would he be willing to direct Jackson in a music video with a spooky story line that had him transform into a werewolf? At the time, making music videos was not something feature directors did. But Landis was intrigued enough by Jackson�s entreaty to take a meeting.

On the afternoon of August 20, Landis and his producing partner, George Folsey Jr., drove through the gates of Hayvenhurst, the high-walled mock-Tudor estate in Encino where the family had moved when Jackson was 13, and where he still lived with his parents and sisters LaToya and Janet. In 1981, Jackson had purchased the house from his parents and rebuilt it, installing such diversions as an exotic-animal farm stocked with llamas, a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs diorama, and a 32-seat screening room with a popcorn machine. In the corner of his second-story bedroom suite stood his �friends,� five life-size, fully dressed female mannequins.

At the time, Jackson was a practicing Jehovah�s Witness who obeyed his religion�s mandate to spread the faith by knocking on doors in his neighborhood, wearing a crude disguise of mustache and glasses. He attended services at the local Kingdom Hall and abstained from drinking, swearing, sex before marriage, and, supposedly, R-rated movies. The gregarious Landis teased Jackson about having watched the R-rated An American Werewolf in London. �I said, �Michael, what about the sex?� He said, �I closed my eyes.��

Landis told Jackson that he would not direct �Thriller� as a music video, proposing instead that they collaborate on a short narrative film that could be released in theaters�reviving that endangered species, the short subject�before it went to video. Landis would write a story line, inspired by the song, about a cute young guy on a date who turns into a monster. The short would be shot on 35-mm. film with feature-film production values, including great locations and an impressive dance number. Landis would call in a favor from Rick Baker, the Oscar-winning makeup wizard who had created the title creature for An American Werewolf in London, and get him to design Jackson�s transformation makeup. Jackson was enthusiastic about Landis�s vision and immediately said, �Let�s do it.�

Although CBS/Epic had ponied up $250,000 for the �Billie Jean� video, Yetnikoff had refused to underwrite �Beat It,� so Jackson had paid $150,000 out of his own pocket. When Folsey and Landis worked up the budget for �Thriller,� they put it at an estimated $900,000. Landis and Jackson placed a call to �Uncle Walter,� as Jackson referred to him, to explain the �Thriller� concept and what it would cost. Landis says that Yetnikoff screamed so loudly that the director had to hold the phone away from his ear. �I�ve only heard three or four people swear like that in my life,� he says. When Landis hung up the phone, Jackson said calmly, �It�s O.K. I�ll pay for it.� Eventually Yetnikoff agreed that the record company would contribute $100,000 to pay for the video, but that left a long way to go and Jackson�s collaborators didn�t want the star to be on the hook.

It was Folsey and John Branca, Jackson�s lawyer, who put their heads together to solve the budget shortfall. Although cable TV was a new phenomenon and the home-video market had yet to explode, they decided to film behind the scenes on 16-mm. for a nearly 45-minute documentary, Making Michael Jackson�s Thriller, which, bundled with the �Thriller� video, could be sold to cable. MTV agreed to pay $250,000 and Showtime $300,000 for the one-hour package; Jackson would cover some up-front production costs and be reimbursed. Then Vestron came in and offered to distribute Making Michael Jackson�s Thriller as a $29.95 �sell-through� video on VHS and Betamax, a pioneering deal of its kind. (Most videos were then sold for far higher prices to rental stores, rather than directly to consumers.) �You have to remember, back in those days none of us realized quite what home video was going to become,� says Folsey. �The studios treated it pretty much the way they treated television in the 50s and 60s, with total disdain. They had no idea that the home-video business was going to save Hollywood�it never crossed their minds.�

Landis had the opposite of �I won�t grow up� in mind: he wanted Jackson to satisfy his female fans by showing some virility.

With the financing in place and only six weeks before the first shooting day, October 11, the team moved swiftly into an accelerated pre-production. Landis hired his director of photography from Trading Places, Robert Paynter, and drafted his own wife, Deborah Nadoolman Landis, best known for putting Harrison Ford in a fedora and leather jacket for Raiders of the Lost Ark, as costume designer. �Beat It� choreographer Michael Peters was brought in and began auditioning dancers and developing street-hip dance phrases for the zombie choreography. Folsey crewed up, securing locations and equipment.

Jackson was driven by the pop star�s occupational affliction: the desire to be a movie star. He had met and befriended Steven Spielberg when he narrated the soundtrack album and audiobook for E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. (Jackson cried when recording the part where E.T. dies.) He and Spielberg were in discussions about Jackson�s playing the lead in a filmed musical version of J. M. Barrie�s Peter Pan.

But Landis had precisely the opposite of �I won�t grow up� in mind: he wanted Jackson to satisfy his young female fans by showing some virility. He wrote a script that loosely spoofed I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Michael would go on a date with a sexy girl in two separate time periods, the 50s and 80s. There would be dialogue interspersed with music. As the 50s guy, Michael would ask his girl to go steady, tell her, �I�m not like other guys,� then transform into a werewolf and terrorize her. As the 80s guy, he would woo her with seductive dance moves before turning into a ghoul. �The big thing was to give him a girl,� says Landis, pointing out that Jackson hadn�t interacted with females in the videos for �Billie Jean� or �Beat It.� �That was the big breakthrough.�

After Jennifer Beals of Flashdance turned down an offer to co-star, Landis cast an unknown 23-year-old former Playboy Playmate named Ola Ray. �I auditioned a lot of girls and this girl Ola Ray�first of all, she was crazy for Michael,� Landis says. �She had such a great smile. I didn�t know she was a Playmate.� Jackson signed off on Ray, then reconsidered the seemliness of cavorting with an ex-Playmate and came close to derailing the casting. According to Landis, �I said, �Michael, she�s a Playmate, but so what? She�s not a Playmate in this.� He went, �O.K., whatever you want.� I have to tell you, I got along great with Michael.�

It was Deborah Landis�s job to play up Jackson�s masculinity while dressing him in hip, casual clothes that were comfortable for dancing. Since the video would be shot at night in a mostly somber palette, she says, �I felt that red would really pop in front of the ghouls.� She chose the same color for both his jacket and jeans to emphasize a vertical line, making his five-foot-seven-inch, 100-pound frame appear taller. �The socks and the shoes were his own,� she says. �He took that directly from Fred Astaire, who always wore soft leather loafers to dance in, and socks. And Michael was elegant. I worked with David Bowie, who was also that same body frame, again very, very slim. Fred Astaire was a 36 regular; Michael was a 36 regular. David and Michael and Fred Astaire�you could literally put them in anything, and they would carry themselves with a distinction and with confidence and with sexuality.�

OCTOBER 13, 1983; 10:30 p.m. Downtown Los Angeles.

On a desolate city street, Jackson lipsynchs to a playback of �Thriller� as he dances and skitters playfully around Ray. Landis has barely rehearsed the scene because he is hoping for some spontaneous sexual energy between his actors and has asked Jackson to improvise. Ray, who looks deliriously smitten, is supposed to keep the beat with each footstep. Landis puts his hand over his eyes and quietly shakes his head as she repeatedly messes up the tempo, necessitating many takes. Jackson remains charmingly frisky in every one, hugging her as he sings, �Now is the time for you and I to cuddle close together � �

Ray has made it clear to Jackson and everyone else that she wants the cuddling to continue after the �Cut!� �Michael is very special, not like any other guy I�ve met,� she says, kicking off her high heels and settling into her set chair after the scene wraps. �Since we�ve been working together we�ve been getting closer. He was a very shy person, but he�s opened up. I think he�s lived a sheltered life. He knows a lot of entertainers, but he needs friends that he can go out and relax and enjoy himself with, instead of talking to his mannequins in his room.�

The congenial atmosphere on �Thriller� seemed to have a salutary effect on Jackson. He delighted the crew by hanging out on the set between shots, and although he didn�t say much, he responded graciously to anyone who approached. Landis frequently got him giggling with horseplay, once lifting him up by the ankles and shaking him upside down while Jackson shrieked, �Put me down, you punk!�

He would also enjoy a secret interlude with Ola Ray. The actress had her makeup done each day at a studio where Jane Fonda happened to be shooting a workout video. Ray engaged in girl talk with Fonda, a friend of Jackson�s, and solicited tips on how to pique Jackson�s romantic interest. As Ray remembers, �Miss Fonda said, �Be yourself�just be sweet and talk to him about things he might be interested in or like to do. He�s a Jehovah�s Witness, so you should talk to him about religion. Maybe he will want you to go to church with him one day.��

Arriving at the set, Ray would sit outside her trailer and finish touching up her makeup. �Every day Michael came and sat and watched me,� she says. �He was in awe of me. He was always in my face trying to learn to do things with makeup like I did.� When he asked her to come give pointers to his own makeup person, saying, �I have a shine on my nose that I can�t get off,� she agreed. �So I�m seriously talking to his makeup artist, trying to explain what to do, and she looked at me and said, �Girl, don�t you know that no matter how much powder I put on his nose it�s going to shine? Do you know how many nose jobs he�s had?� Then Michael started laughing, because I didn�t know he had had nose jobs! I guess the whole world knew.�

�I dealt with Michael as I would have a really gifted child,� says Landis. �He was emotionally damaged, but so sweet and so talented.�

The flirtation progressed. �I had some intimate moments with him in his trailer,� says Ray. How intimate? �Let me see how I can say this without, you know, being too �� She pauses. �I won�t say that I have seen him in his birthday suit but close enough,� she says, laughing. Because he was shy, she tried not to scare him by coming on too strong. �What we had was such like a little kindergarten thing going on. I thought it was important for him to be around someone who would make him feel comfortable, and that was my main objective.� Did they make out? �Kissing and puppy-love make-out sessions,� she confirms, �and a little more than that.� That is all she cares to divulge. �I�ve already told you more than I�ve ever told anyone!�

Ray watched Jackson switch seamlessly from silly to sober for business meetings. When Jacqueline Onassis�s white limousine pulled up, he greeted the Doubleday Books editor, who had flown out from New York to discuss publishing Jackson�s memoir (which eventually became Moonwalk), with courtly professionalism. Landis says that he barged unknowingly into Jackson�s trailer, and the star coolly said, �John, have you met Mrs. Onassis?�

An eclectic assortment of luminaries appeared on the set to see Jackson. Fred Astaire and Rock Hudson both dropped by. Quincy Jones, watching the filming of the zombie dance, mused about Jackson�s ability to maintain his child-like quality: �It takes a lot of maturity to control all that innocence.� Perhaps the most unlikely visitor to appear was Marlon Brando, who, Landis learned, was slipping acting advice to Jackson. One day when Landis admonished him for not knowing his lines, Jackson said, �Marlon told me to always go for the truth, not the words.� When MTV executive Les Garland arrived for a scheduled visit, he waited in the living room of Jackson�s trailer, chatting with a couple of female assistants. Then �a pair of socks came bouncing out from the bedroom and landed by me,� says Garland. �One of the ladies said, �That means Michael is up and ready to see you now.� I said, �Oh, that�s unique.��

If his spirit on the set seemed carefree, behind the scenes Jackson was emotionally stressed by long-simmering family and business pressures. As he grew to trust some of his �Thriller� collaborators, including Landis, Baker, and Stessel, he opened up about his loneliness, his perception that he had been robbed of his childhood, and his troubled relationship with his father.

Jackson faced a critical moment in his personal development: would his new mega-success and wealth spur him to grow, becoming more confident and independent, or to withdraw further into his gilded fantasy world? His �Thriller� friends marveled at his paradoxical qualities: simultaneously sophisticated as an artist, canny to the point of ruthlessness in business dealings, and breathtakingly immature about relationships. �I dealt with Michael as I would have a really gifted child,� says Landis, �because that�s what he was at that moment. He was emotionally damaged, but so sweet and so talented.�

More than once Landis found himself caught up in the twisted dynamics of the Jackson family. One night when Joseph and Katherine Jackson visited the set, the director recalls, �Michael asked me to have Joe removed. He said, �Would you please ask my father to leave?� So I go over to Mr.

Chapter 12

Jackson. �Mr. Jackson, I�m sorry, but can you please � ?� �Who are you?� �I�m John Landis. I�m directing this.� �Well, I�m Joe Jackson. I do what I please.� I said, �I�ll have to ask security to remove you if you don�t leave now.� � Landis says he had a policeman escort Joe Jackson off the set, which Jackson, through his lawyer, denies.

Distancing himself from his father was a theme in Michael Jackson�s life. He had to approve the reams of promotional materials that Epic generated to support �Thriller,� and one day he called the record label�s art department and asked an art director if she could retouch his nose on a famous photo of him as a child. �I want you to slim the wings of my nose,� Jackson told her. �O.K., but why, Michael?� she asked, and tried to reassure him that his face looked fine just the way it was. �I don�t want to look like my father,� Jackson replied. �Every time I look at that photograph I think I look like my father.�

Although he was no longer Michael�s manager, Joe Jackson remained an intimidating and powerful presence in his life. In the summer of �83, Jackson relied on his close adviser John Branca to communicate with his father about business matters, avoiding direct confrontation with Joe whenever possible. �Michael was scared to death of Joseph,� says Larry Stessel, who vividly recalls an evening when Joe walked into the room at the Encino house and Michael literally moved behind Stessel to hide, cowering. (Not until a 1993 interview with Oprah Winfrey would Michael publicly acknowledge how his father had brutalized him as a child.)

Michael was the Jackson family�s golden goose, and ever since he emancipated himself, at the age of 21, Joe had been hostile to his solo endeavors. Now, with millions of Thriller dollars flowing in Michael�s direction, Joe and Katherine and the brothers�all of whom needed money, thanks partly to extravagant spending habits�felt entitled to cash in. They set about organizing a Jacksons �Victory� reunion tour to take place the following summer, railroading Michael into serving as the star attraction. Joseph sent his secret weapon, Katherine, to implore her �special one� to do right by the family, knowing that Michael could not say no to his mother. �Michael did not want to tour,� says Stessel. �He said to them, �I will do this for you this once, but don�t come and ask me for money again. After this I have to do my own projects.� �

At Hayvenhurst, Jackson led a strange, cocooned existence. A round-the-clock security team kept the ever increasing swarms of fans outside from breaching the walls. Inside, the family�s interactions were gothic and tense. While Katherine had filed for divorce the previous year following revelations of her husband�s infidelity (he had fathered an out-of-wedlock daughter, Joh�Vonnie, whom he visited regularly), Joe had simply moved into a bedroom down the hall rather than move out. Michael tried to make his mother�s life more pleasant and avoid colliding with his father. �Michael would lock his bedroom door,� remembers Branca, �and Joe would threaten to bang it in.� (Joe Jackson, through his lawyer, denies this account.)

Michael transcended the oppressive atmosphere with bursts of musical creativity. He once described his songwriting process as �a gestation, almost like a pregnancy or something. It�s an explosion of something so beautiful, you go, Wow!� When a song was ready to be birthed, he drafted siblings to help him record demos in his home studio; Janet sang backup on the first version of �Billie Jean.� The night before his now legendary appearance on the Motown 25th-anniversary TV special on NBC, where he introduced the Moonwalk, he had choreographed and rehearsed his performance in the kitchen.

On Sundays, Jackson observed the Sabbath with fasting and hours of cathartic ritual dancing. �It was the most sacred way I could spend my time: developing the talents that God gave me,� he later said. Sometimes he invited young street dancers to come show him the latest moves; that was how he learned the Moonwalk.

Jackson would ask startlingly ignorant questions about sex��simple, biological, stupid 12-year-old questions.�

Jackson also reveled in the company of children at Hayvenhurst, which was like a warm-up for Neverland, a kids� paradise, which he loved sharing. He had struck up a friendship with the four-foot-three-inch television star Emmanuel Lewis, 12, with whom he would invent games and roll around on the grass, laughing. When George Folsey�s son, Ryan, 13, accompanied his father to meetings at the Jackson home, Michael behaved like a kid who was bored hanging out with the adults, jumping up to show Ryan around. They would feed the llamas, play the video game Frogger, and drive toy Model T�s around the grounds. �Michael was 25, but I�d say that he was 13,� says Ryan. �Mentally, he was 12 to 15 years behind. He could relate to me because he was my age.�

Ryan hung out with Michael in his bedroom, which had a mattress on the floor, toys everywhere, and illustrations of Peter Pan on the walls. They talked about music��I was amazed that Michael didn�t know who U2 was��and the girls they had crushes on. Jackson revealed how discombobulated he had been by Ola Ray�s sexual allure after a dance rehearsal with her. �He started getting all nervous and stuff,� says Ryan. �He said, �She�s adorable, she�s adorable. She�s so hot!� It was just so funny seeing him that way.�

No one knew if Jackson, who told Landis he was a virgin, was practicing abstinence for religious reasons, or because he had gotten spooked about women by the obsessed fan who accused him of fathering her child (inspiring �Billie Jean,� according to some reports), or because he was simply too shy to date. Vince Paterson, who helped with the choreography in �Thriller,� says that Jackson would ask him startlingly ignorant questions about sex��simple, biological, stupid 12-year-old questions.� He adds, �I never saw Michael as a sexual creature. He was always sort of asexual to me�some people are like that. I never had one vibe, as dynamic and electric and powerful as he was. He was like nobody I had ever met in my life. On the one hand he was so socially retarded, and on the other hand he was a creative genius.�

Paterson remembers Jackson asked him once after a dance rehearsal, � �Where are you going?� I said, �I�m just going to a party with some friends. Do you want to come?� �No, I�ve never been to a party. If I ever went to a party I would just want to go stand behind the curtain and be able to peek out and watch what people do.� �

�Friendship is a thing I am just beginning to learn about,� Jackson told Ebony magazine in 1982. �I was raised on the stage and that is where I am comfortable. And everything else is, like, foreign to me.� Jackson had high-profile showbiz buddies such as Brooke Shields, Elizabeth Taylor, and Diana Ross, whom he could gossip with on the phone or invite to be his date for a public function. But when �Thriller� colleagues invited him for dinner and suggested that he bring a friend, he showed up alone. He frequently hung out at John and Deborah Landis�s house. �I liked Mike,� says John. �He used to come over to our house all the time and just stay there. I think he was so lonely. He and I got along fine, watching television until three or four in the morning, or looking at books. Deborah [called me into] the kitchen once, and she said to me, �John, the most famous human being on the planet is in the library, and I want you to get him the fuck out. Tell him he has to go home!� �

OCTOBER 23, 1983; 9:45 a.m. Rick Baker�s studio, North Hollywood.

�He�s completely unreliable,� sputters Landis, fuming and pacing as Baker, the makeup creator, arranges werewolf ears, paws, and teeth on his worktable. (Actually, given Jackson�s delicate features, Baker has created a look that is more along the lines of a werecat.) Jackson was scheduled to arrive 45 minutes ago to be made up for his grisly metamorphosis sequence. Finally the star�s black Rolls pulls up outside. Jackson trots in and plunks himself down in the chair. He is wearing a yellow T-shirt, black pants short enough to show his argyle socks, and black loafers with one sole flapping loose. He is carrying the book How to Be a Jewish Mother with a copy of the Jehovah�s Witnesses magazine, The Watchtower, inside.

As Baker hovers over him, working meticulously, Jackson sits silently with his hands folded in his lap. An assistant arrives carrying a yellow pillowcase with something lumpy inside and puts it down in the outer room. �Say Say Say� comes on the radio, the latest Jackson hit single, another duet with Paul McCartney, this one appearing on McCartney�s album Pipes of Peace. Jackson yawns. �I have to tinkle,� he says, and gets up for a bathroom break.

He returns carrying an eight-foot boa constrictor�retrieved from that yellow pillowcase�which he has named Muscles. He wraps the snake around my neck. �Don�t be afraid�Muscles won�t hurt you,� he says in a feathery voice.

When shooting was finished, Landis and Folsey worked every night in an editing room on the Universal Studios lot; after the original editor departed for another project, Folsey took over cutting. Jackson liked to hang out with Landis and Folsey while they worked, driving himself and arriving in the editing room at about nine P.M. They�d bring in his preferred dinner of salad and brown rice and vegetables. �We�d look at cut footage and talk about things, and it was always fun,� says Folsey. �He was very appreciative and had good ideas.� All three were pleased with the way the short film was shaping up, and looked forward to the premiere at the Crest Theatre, in Westwood, on November 14. When Jackson departed at one or two in the morning, he�d find mash notes on the windshield of his Rolls.

About two weeks before the premiere, Jackson called Branca and, hyperventilating and speaking in a halting voice, ordered him to destroy the negative of �Thriller.� After much cajoling he revealed the reason for his decision. �He said the Jehovah�s Witnesses heard he was doing a werewolf video,� Branca recalls. �They told him that it promoted demonology and they were going to excommunicate him.� Branca conferred with Folsey and Landis, and all agreed that the �Thriller� negative had to be safeguarded. Landis immediately removed the film canisters from the lab and delivered them to Branca�s office, where they were locked up.

Next, according to Landis, he got a call from Jackson�s security chief, Bill Bray, who reported that the singer had been in his room with the door locked for three days, refusing to come out. Landis drove to the Encino estate. �Bill and I kicked in the door, knocked it down, and Michael was lying there. He said, �I feel so bad.� I said, �Michael, have you eaten?� He hadn�t eaten. It was weird. I just said, �Look, I want you to see a doctor right now.� �

Landis returned to see Jackson the next day and found him at Frank DiLeo�s house, a few blocks from the Encino estate, in a more cheerful state. He apologized for issuing the order to destroy �Thriller�: �I�m sorry, John. I�m embarrassed.� Landis then informed the star that his directive had been ignored. �I said, �Michael, I wouldn�t let it be destroyed.� He went, �Really? Because I think it�s really good.� I go, �Michael, it�s great and you�re great.� �

Still, Jackson was concerned about the video�s content. Branca, desperate to mollify his client, invented a ruse. �I said, �Mike, did you ever watch Bela Lugosi in Dracula?� He goes, �Why?� I said, �Do you know that he was a devout Christian?� I was just making it up. And I said, �Did you ever notice there were, like, disclaimers on those movies?� He goes, �No.� �So, Michael, before we destroy this film, let�s put a disclaimer on it saying that this does not reflect the personal convictions of Michael Jackson.� �Oh!� He liked it.� Problem solved. Says Landis, �You know, what�s wonderful about Michael�this is where genius comes in. No matter how wacky something was, it always had some amazing benefit. That disclaimer caused a lot of talk, and it generated a lot of interest.�

The A-list turned out for the premiere at the 500-seat historic Crest Theatre: Diana Ross, Warren Beatty, Prince, Eddie Murphy. �I�ve been to the Oscars, the BAFTAs, the Emmys, and the Golden Globes, and I had never seen anything like this,� remembers Landis. Ola Ray looked for Jackson before the lights went down and found him in the projection booth. He told her that she looked beautiful, but refused her entreaty to come sit in the audience. �This is your night,� he told her. �You go enjoy yourself.� Landis warmed up the audience with a new print of the Mickey Mouse cartoon �The Band Concert.� Then came �Thriller,� with its sound mix cranked up to top volume. Fourteen minutes later the crowd was on its feet, applauding and crying, �Encore! Encore!� Eddie Murphy shouted, �Show the goddamn thing again!� And they did.

As the December 2 MTV debut of �Thriller� approached, there was massive audience anticipation. Former MTV executive Les Garland says the network settled on a saturation strategy he describes as � �Every time we play �Thriller,� let�s tell them when we are going to play it again.� We played it three to five times a day. We were getting audience ratings 10 times the usual when we popped �Thriller.� �

Showtime aired Making Michael Jackson�s Thriller six times in February. Within months the Vestron release had sold a million copies, making it at the time the biggest-selling home-video release ever.

Landis�s dream for �Thriller� to have an international theatrical run, like the short films from Hollywood�s golden age, would not be fulfilled. In a sense, he became a victim of his own success: Yetnikoff and DiLeo killed any chance of that when they realized that the video was a spectacular marketing tool. �Epic gave away the video free all over the world, to every television station that wanted it,� says Landis. �There was a month when you couldn�t turn the television on and not see �Thriller.� � Since Landis and Folsey together owned 50 percent of both �Thriller� and Making Michael Jackson�s Thriller, they had the legal right to be consulted. �I don�t think it was very kosher,� says Landis, �but it was the right thing for CBS Records to do.�

Having transformed a fun but marginal song into a heroic and historic video, Michael Jackson rode �Thriller� to the mountaintop. The video sent the album�s sales back into the stratosphere, with Epic shipping a million copies a week; by the end of 1984, the album had sold 33 million copies in the U.S. Since then, Thriller has remained unchallenged as the No. 1 album of all time (current sales worldwide: an estimated 110 million).

Jackson grew accustomed to shattering records, collecting spoils and statuettes. On February 28, 1984, he dressed like American royalty in a spangled military jacket to escort Brooke Shields to the Grammy Awards at the Shrine Auditorium, where he picked up an unprecedented eight trophies for Thriller. By this time he was a fabulously wealthy man, thanks to the industry�s highest royalty rate, more than $2 per record, which Branca had negotiated for him.

Thriller had profound consequences on Jackson�s life and subsequent career: it was both a source of his greatest pride, and his curse. Like most entertainers, he was happiest during the heady days of the upward trajectory, and hated the downward journey; his story became uniquely tragic because he viewed everything that came afterward as a failure, and the satisfactions of his private life were not sufficient to compensate. �Michael didn�t see Thriller as a phenomenon,� says Brunman. �He saw it as a stepping-stone to even greater things. We were ecstatic when [his next album] Bad shot past the 20 million mark. Michael was disappointed.�

�To me what happened with Michael is he felt like he needed to top himself,� says Branca, who represented Jackson on and off for the rest of the star�s life and has been named a co-executor of his estate. �That was a lot of pressure. I remember we were in Hong Kong on vacation after Thriller, and I said to him, �Mike, you should think about doing an album of the songs that inspired you.� He said, �Why would I do that?� �Well, it would take the pressure off you. Nobody would expect you to have to top Thriller.� And he looked at me like I was from Mars. And he said, �Branca, the next album is going to sell 100 million.� �

In January 2009, six months before the star�s death, John Landis and George Folsey filed suit against Michael Jackson and his company Optimum Productions for breach of contract, alleging that they had not been paid their 50 percent of royalties in many years, and accusing Jackson of �fraudulent, malicious and oppressive conduct.� Landis says that over the years he had spoken with Jackson many times to complain that he, Landis, was not receiving the royalties due him, and that Jackson promised to correct the matter. But the entertainer�s financial affairs were chaotic for the last decade of his life as he continually shuffled his business managers. Branca and his own attorney Howard Weitzman report that the �Thriller� video�s accounting records are currently being audited as part of the executor�s obligation to settle the Jackson estate�s debts. �From our perspective Landis and Folsey are priorities,� says Weitzman. �They will definitely get paid what they are owed.�

Ola Ray also sued Jackson, on May 5, 2009, for nonpayment of royalties. �I got the fame� from �Thriller,� she says, �but I didn�t get the fortune.� (The suit is ongoing.) In 1998 she fled Los Angeles and the casting-couch syndrome she says plagued her during the years following �Thriller.� �There were so many big-name directors who told me that if I wanted to do films I had to sleep with them,� she says. She moved to Sacramento to be closer to her family, and is today a stay-at-home mom to her 15-year-old daughter. Ray enjoys hearing from Michael Jackson fans on Facebook and Twitter. �I can�t walk down the street without people recognizing me,� she says.

Ray thinks about Jackson every day, with considerable regret. �I just wish I would have had the opportunity to be a little bit more in his life. I bet he would have been happy with me. It would have taken someone like me who would not put pressure on him or play him for his money or anything other than that I wanted to be with him for who he was,� she says. �I had no other agenda than that.�

Ola Ray and I strongly agree on one thing: we both like to remember Michael Jackson the way he was on the night of October 13, 1983. I can�t forget the way he looked as I peered at him through the glass of the ticket booth at the Palace Theatre: elfin, radiant, ascendant. To me, Thriller seems like the last time that everyone on the planet got excited at the same time by the same thing: no matter where you went in the world, they were playing those songs, and you could dance to them. Since then, the fragmentation of pop culture has destroyed our sense of collective exhilaration, and I miss that.

For Ray, the scene with Jackson later that evening, as he scampered adoringly around her, was a defining experience. �That walk with Michael, when he was dancing around me and singing, I felt like I was the most, I don�t know, blessed girl in the world. Being able to do that and being able to play with Michael, and having him play around me. I felt so in love that night. You can see it in my eyes. You can see it for sure.� Keywords Hollywood, Music, Michael Jackson, Culture

Aliens �R Us: The Ten Errors of Science Fiction

Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. - 6/27/2010

In all works of science fiction, there are ten hidden assumptions regarding alien races. None of these assumptions is a necessity. None of them makes immanent or inevitable sense. Yet, when we read a sci-fi novel or watch a sci-fi movie we tend to accept all of them as inescapable. They amount to a frame of reference and to a language without which we seem to be unable to relate to all manner of exobiology. We evidently believe that life on Earth is a representative sample and that we can extrapolate its properties and mechanisms of action wide and far across the Universe. The principles of symmetry, isotropy, and homogeneity apply to the physical cosmos: Hydrogen behaves identically in our local galactic neighbourhood as it does in the furthest reaches of the Cosmos. Why shouldn�t life be the same?

Which leads us to the first fallacy:

1. Life in the Universe

Alien beings may not be alive in any sense of this ambiguous and loaded word. They may not eat, drink, excrete, reproduce, grow, die, process information, or move. Even here, on Earth, we have examples of such entities (viruses, for instance). Why assume that extrasolar creatures must be endowed with a biology of some kind?

But isn�t life as we know it an unavoidable outcome of the growing complexity of organisms? This is begging the question. Multi-cellular entities on Earth are manifestations of Carbon-based biology. We cannot imagine beings whose complexity does not spring from some material (or energy) lattice. But our inability to imagine something, even in principle, is no proof that it cannot or does not exist.

2. The Concept of Structure

Aliens in science fiction are typically anthropomorphic in body and in psyche. They sport a central trunk out of which protrude extremities and a head that rests on a variant of our neck. They possess and are possessed by emotions. They reason and debate exactly as we do. The rare few who bear no resemblance to Homo sapiens are usually pure energy. But, even these are arranged in a matrix that is in principle visible or otherwise measurable. We cannot conceive of entities that completely lack organisation.

Yet, structure and organization are mere language elements. They are �in our head� so to speak. They do not exist in reality. They are the results of our limitations: our inability to grasp the whole at once. We use time, space, and form to cope with the immense amount of information that constitutes the Universe. Our minds slice the world and shape it into manageable bits that can be classified and catalogued. We then postulate the existence of interactions to account for our sense of inexorable time. Other inhabitants of the Cosmos may be completely shapeless, lack boundaries or size, be devoid of structure, and be totally inert.

But isn�t structure a precondition for complexity? The answer is a resounding no (see my article �The Complexity of Simplicity�). Additionally, why assume that sentient beings must be complex? Complexity is one solution. Simplicity is another. Our evolution �chose� the former. Processes in other corners of the Galaxy may prefer the latter.

Even the concept of �race� or �species� is doubtful. Why would aliens have to belong to such taxonomic categories? Why can�t we imagine a group of astrobiological specimen, each one constituting a distinct species, sui generis, �custom-made�? Why presume that they all must share the same genetic heritage? For that matter, why should they have a genetic make-up at all? Is our DNA the most efficient method of propagating data across time? This is an extremely chauvinistic supposition.

3. Communication and Interaction

Slaves to our (false) sensation of time, we deny the possibility of simultaneity and require that information travels a finite distance in any given period. This precondition requires us to communicate and interact in order to affect changes in our environment and in our interlocutors: we are forced to transfer and transport information by a variety of means from one point in spacetime to another.

Certain sci-fi works introduce �telepathy� into their imaginary worlds: the instant evocation of content in one mind by another�s brain acting on it. But telepathy still assumes some kind of transport mechanism and the separateness of sender and recipient in space and, sometimes in time. No matter how imaginative and creative our literary and scientific endeavours, we are unable to convincingly describe a truly timeless, eventless ecosystem where things don�t happen and information is immediately available everywhere, vitiating the need for communication and interaction.

Yet, modern Quantum Mechanics provides us with exactly this insight: that time and space are illusions, linguistic conventions that are the outcomes of our idiosyncratic (not to say inferior) mental apparatus. The foundations of our reality at the particle level are such that simultaneity is common (entanglement) and even the concept of location is gravely challenged (the Uncertainty Principles; tunnelling and other quantum phenomena). Superior beings

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may not have to communicate or interact at all.

4. Location

In sci-fi works, aliens are always somewhere, in a given location. Granted, some of them project their image. Others can be in multiple places at the same moment or be part of a colony-like hive. But all extraterrestrial life forms occupy space and time and can be pinpointed to a reasonable degree using scientific instrumentation or human sense organs.

Yet, location � like space and time themselves � is a mere convention. At the particle level, knowing one�s location is a tricky business as it precludes information about other properties of the object being observed. Embryonic quantum machines and quantum computers already make use of this fact: that the building blocks of our world cannot be effectively located in either space or time (a phenomenon known as entanglement).

ET may not have a �home�. His �place� may be everywhere and nowhere at the same �time�. We can�t wrap our head around these possibilities because our cerebral computer comes equipped (at least according to Kant) with software that limits us to its parameters and procedures. Moreover: location is an essential component of our sense of identity and individuality.

5. Separateness

It is impossible for us to deny our separation � physical, temporal, and psychological - from other people. We are individuals with a specific mindset, needs, fears, emotions, priorities, personal history, wishes, and place in the world. Our language is ill-equipped to cope with a different reality. We cannot conceive of sharing a body � let alone a mind - with someone else. Even when we discuss multi-organism coordinated and directional hyperstructures, such as ant or bee colonies, we still distinguish between the components comprising them in terms of individuals. We (at least in the West) insist that we not illusory manifestations of an underlying and more fundamental whole.

Yet, as Eastern philosophy and modern physics tell us our separateness may indeed by nothing more than an illusion, a convenient organizing principle and an operational unit, akin to the cell in a human body. Aliens may have long discarded such amenity, if they availed themselves of it to start with. Non-terrestrials may have dispensed with the notions of individuals and separateness, �whole� and �parts� and may have supplanted them with the � to us � unimaginable.

6. Transportation

If location and separateness are deceptive, what need there is of transportation? Of what use are spaceships? Even if location and separateness are real, why would advanced species need to travel anywhere? Why not simply project themselves or induce action at a distance? We don�t travel to our bank � we use online banking. We remote control our televisions, power stations, cranes, and numerous other machines. We videoconference. Why reduce supposedly superior races to the travails of physical, galaxy-hopping missions? The classical answer is: in order to manipulate the environment and control it one needs to be physically present there. But why presuppose that Aliens are interested in manipulating or controlling their surroundings (nature)? Even more fundamentally: why think that Aliens have a will at all?

7. Will and Intention

In all sci-fi works, extraterrestrials want something, desire it, or wish for it. They form intentions and act directionally to achieve their goals. These literary devices pose two related problems: (a) we cannot be sure that the actions of alien beings signify � let alone prove � the existence of volition; and (b) we cannot be sure that aliens lack will and intent even if they do not act at all. Put concisely: actions teach us nothing about the existence or absence of intelligence, volition, intent, planning, foresight, and utilitarian thinking. We don�t know if and cannot prove that animals (such as pets) are possessed of a will even when they are acting wilfully. Imagine how much more difficult it would be with visitors from outer space. Attributing will and directionality to ET is a prime example of teleology (the belief that causes are preceded by their effects) and anthropomorphosis (attributing human qualities, motives, emotions, and conduct to non-humans).

Throughout this discussion, it would seem that a goal necessarily implies the existence of an intention (to realize it). A lack of intent leaves only one plausible course of action: automatism. Any action taken in the absence of a manifest intention to act is, by definition, an automatic action.

The converse is also true: automatism prescribes the existence of a sole possible mode of action, a sole possible Nature. With an automatic action, no choice is available, there are no degrees of freedom, or freedom of action. Automatic actions are, ipso facto, deterministic.

Still, the distinction between volitional and automatic actions is not clear-cut.

Consider, for instance, house pets. They engage in a variety of acts. They are goal oriented (seek food, drink, etc.). Are they possessed of a conscious, directional, volition (intent)? Many philosophers argued against such a supposition. Moreover, sometimes end-results and by-products are mistaken for goals. Is the goal of objects to fall down? Gravity is a function of the structure of space-time. When we roll a ball down a slope (which is really what gravitation is all about, according to the General Theory of Relativity) is its "goal" to come to a rest at the bottom? Evidently not. Natural processes are considered to be witless reactions. No intent can be attributed to them because no intelligence can be ascribed to them. Yet, this is true but only at times.

8. Intelligence

We cannot safely deduce that Aliens are intelligent from merely observing their behaviour. It is a fallacy to insist that technology and collaboration are predicated on intelligence. Even on Earth, with a limited sample of Life, we have examples of directional (goal-oriented) and technology-empowered behaviour by non-sentient entities (computers, for instance). Intelligence as we understand it requires introspection and self-awareness and, probably a concept of �self� (see item 5 above: �Separateness�).

Still, Aliens � like us � are part of Nature. Is Nature as a whole intelligent (as we humans understand intelligence)? Was it designed by an intelligent being (the "watchmaker" hypothesis)? If it was, is each and every part of Nature endowed with this "watchmaker" intelligence?

Intelligence is hard to define. Still, the most comprehensive approach would be to describe it as the synergetic sum of a host of mental processes (some conscious, some not). These mental processes are concerned with information: its gathering, its accumulation, classification, inter-relation, association, analysis, synthesis, integration, and all other modes of processing and manipulation.

But is this manipulation of information not what natural processes are all about? And if nature is the sum total of all natural processes, aren't we forced to admit that nature is (intrinsically, inherently, of itself) intelligent? The intuitive reaction to these suggestions is bound to be negative. When we use the term "intelligence", we seem not to be concerned with just any kind of intelligence - but with intelligence that is separate from and external to what has to be explained. If both the intelligence and the item that needs explaining are members of the same set, we tend to disregard the intelligence involved and label it as "natural" and, therefore, irrelevant.

Moreover, not everything that is created by an intelligence (however "relevant", or external) is intelligent in itself. Some automatic products of intelligent beings are inanimate and non-intelligent. On the other hand, as any Artificial Intelligence buff would confirm, automata can become intelligent, having crossed a certain quantitative or qualitative level of complexity. The weaker form of this statement is that, beyond a certain quantitative or qualitative level of complexity, it is impossible to tell the automatic from the intelligent. Is Nature automatic, is it intelligent, or on the seam between automata and intelligence?

Nature contains everything and, therefore, contains multiple intelligences. That which contains intelligence is not necessarily intelligent, unless the intelligences contained are functional determinants of the container. Quantum Mechanics (rather, its Copenhagen interpretation) implies that this, precisely, is the case. Intelligent, conscious, observers determine the very existence of subatomic particles, the constituents of all matter-energy. Human (intelligent) activity determines the shape, contents and functioning of the habitat Earth. If other intelligent races populate the universe, this could be the rule, rather than the exception. Nature may, indeed, be intelligent in the sense that it is determined by the intelligent races it contains.

Indeed, goal-orientated behaviour (or behavior that could be explained as goal-orientated) is Nature's hallmark. The question whether automatic or intelligent mechanisms are at work, really deals with an underlying issue, that of consciousness. Are these mechanisms self-aware, introspective? Is intelligence possible without such self-awareness, without the internalized understanding of what it is doing?

9. Artificial vs. Natural

Sci-fi authors sometimes suggest or state that �their� Aliens are natural beings, not machines or artificial entities. They tout the complexity of these life forms to prove that they have emerged naturally and are intelligent. In the apocalyptic works that depict a takeover of Earth by man-made or extraterrestrial automata, the marauders or invaders are described as artificial and, therefore, simpler than the natural species that they are challenging. In many respects, these devices are not intelligent.

Conflating the natural with the complex and the intelligent is wrong, however.

Indeed, complexity rises spontaneously in nature through processes such as self-organization. Emergent phenomena are common as are emergent traits: both are not reducible to basic components, interactions, or properties. Yet, complexity does not indicate the existence of a designer or a design. Complexity does not imply the existence of intelligence and sentient beings. On the contrary, complexity usually points towards a natural source and a random origin.

It is also true that complexity and artificiality are often incompatible. Artificial designs and objects are found only in unexpected ("unnatural") contexts and environments. Natural objects are totally predictable and expected. Artificial creations are efficient and, therefore, simple and parsimonious. Natural objects and processes are not.

As Seth Shostak notes in his excellent essay, titled "SETI and Intelligent Design", evolution experiments with numerous dead ends before it yields a single adapted biological entity. DNA is far from optimized: it contains inordinate amounts of junk. Our bodies come replete with dysfunctional appendages and redundant organs. Lightning bolts emit energy all over the electromagnetic spectrum. Pulsars and interstellar gas clouds spew radiation over the entire radio spectrum. The energy of the Sun is ubiquitous over the entire optical and thermal range. No intelligent engineer - human or not - would be so wasteful.

10. Leadership

Finally and perhaps the most preposterous aspect of the vast majority of the sci-fi oeuvre is the imposition of human social structures and predilections on our galactic roommates. They all seem to have leaders, for instance. Yet, even on Earth we have numerous examples of life forms with no leadership or hierarchy and in which decision-making is decentralized in a kind of parallel processing (consider bacteria and plants for instance). Why do all extraterrestrial species resemble the Nazi party is beyond me.

The Six Arguments against SETI

The various projects that comprise the 45-years old Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) raise two important issues:

(1) Do Aliens exist and

(2) Can we communicate with them?

If they do and we can, how come we never encountered an extraterrestrial, let alone spoken to or corresponded with one?

There are six basic explanations to this apparent conundrum and they are not mutually exclusive:

(1) That Aliens do not exist - click HERE to read the response

(2) That the technology they use is far too advanced to be detected by us and, the flip side of this hypothesis, that the technology we us is insufficiently advanced to be noticed by them - click HERE to read the response

(3) That we are looking for extraterrestrials at the wrong places - click HERE to read the response

(4) That the Aliens are life forms so different to us that we fail to recognize them as sentient beings or to communicate with them - click HERE to read the response

(5) That Aliens are trying to communicate with us but constantly fail due to a variety of hindrances, some structural and some circumstantial - click HERE to read the response

(6) That they are avoiding us because of our misconduct (example: the alleged destruction of the environment) or because of our traits (for instance, our innate belligerence) or because of ethical considerations - click HERE to read the response

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Argument Number 1: Aliens do not exist (the Fermi Principle)

The assumption that life has arisen only on Earth is both counterintuitive and unlikely. Rather, it is highly probable that life is an extensive parameter of the Universe. In other words, that it is as pervasive and ubiquitous as are other generative phenomena, such as star formation.

This does not mean that extraterrestrial life and life on Earth are necessarily similar. Environmental determinism and the panspermia hypothesis are far from proven. There is no guarantee that we are not unique, as per the Rare Earth hypothesis. But the likelihood of finding life in one form or another elsewhere and everywhere in the Universe is high.

The widely-accepted mediocrity principle (Earth is a typical planet) and its reification, the controversial Drake (or Sagan) Equation usually predicts the existence of thousands of Alien civilizations - though only a vanishingly small fraction of these are likely to communicate with us.

But, if this is true, to quote Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi: "where are they?� Fermi postulated that ubiquitous technologically advanced civilizations should be detectable - yet they are not! (The Fermi Paradox).

This paucity of observational evidence may be owing to the fact that our galaxy is old. In ten billion years of its existence, the majority of Alien races are likely to have simply died out or been extinguished by various cataclysmic events. Or maybe older and presumably wiser races are not as bent as we are on acquiring colonies. Remote exploration may have supplanted material probes and physical visits to wild locales such as Earth.

Aliens exist on our very planet. The minds of newborn babies and of animals are as inaccessible to us as would be the minds of little green men and antenna-wielding adductors. Moreover, as we demonstrated in the previous chapter, even adult human beings from the same cultural background are as aliens to one another. Language is an inadequate and blunt instrument when it comes to communicating our inner worlds.

Argument Number 2: Their technology is too advanced

If Aliens really want to communicate with us, why would they use technologies that are incompatible with our level of technological progress? When we discover primitive tribes in the Amazon, do we communicate with them via e-mail or video conferencing - or do we strive to learn their language and modes of communication and emulate them to the best of our ability?

Of course there is always the possibility that we are as far removed from Alien species as ants are from us. We do not attempt to interface with insects. If the gap between us and Alien races in the galaxy is too wide, they are unlikely to want to communicate with us at all.

Argument Number 3: We are looking in all the wrong places

If life is, indeed, a defining feature (an extensive property) of our Universe, it should be anisotropically, symmetrically, and equally distributed throughout the vast expanse of space. In other words, never mind where we turn our scientific instruments, we should be able to detect life or traces of life.

Still, technological and budgetary constraints have served to dramatically narrow the scope of the search for intelligent transmissions. Vast swathes of the sky have been omitted from the research agenda as have been many spectrum frequencies. SETI scientists assume that Alien species are as concerned with efficiency as we are and, therefore, unlikely to use certain wasteful methods and frequencies to communicate with us. This assumption of interstellar scarcity is, of course, dubious.

Argument Number 4: Aliens are too alien to be recognized

Carbon-based life forms may be an aberration or the rule, no one knows. The diversionist and convergionist schools of evolution are equally speculative as are the basic assumptions of both astrobiology and xenobiology. The rest of the universe may be populated with silicon, or nitrogen-phosphorus based races or with information-waves or contain numerous, non-interacting "shadow biospheres".

Recent discoveries of extremophile unicellular organisms lend credence to the belief that life can exist almost under any circumstances and in all conditions and that the range of planetary habitability is much larger than thought.

But whatever their chemical composition, most Alien species are likely to be sentient and intelligent. Intelligence is bound to be the great equalizer and the Universal Translator in our Universe. We may fail to recognize certain extragalactic races as life-forms but we are unlikely to mistake their intelligence for a naturally occurring phenomenon. We are equipped to know other sentient intelligent species regardless of how advanced and different they are - and they are equally fitted to acknowledge us as such.

Even so, should we ever encounter them, aliens are likely to strike as being childish and immature. Inevitably, they will find our planet strange. They will experience a learning curve (perhaps even a lengthy one). Similar to infants, they are likely to wander around, tumbling and gaping and clumsily reaching for objects, mute and possibly blinded by the light. They may be hampered by any number of things: gravity, the level of oxygen, radiation, and winds. Far from being a threat, at first they may require our assistance merely to survive the ordeal.

Argument Number 5: We are failing to communicate with Aliens

The hidden assumption underlying CETI/METI (Communication with ETI/Messaging to ETI) is that Aliens, like humans, are inclined to communicate. This may be untrue. The propensity for interpersonal communication (let alone the inter-species variety) may not be universal. Additionally, Aliens may not possess the same sense organs that we do (eyes) and may not be acquainted with our mathematics and geometry. Reality can be successfully described and captured by alternative mathematical systems and geometries.

Additionally, we often confuse complexity or orderliness with artificiality. As the example of quasars teaches us, not all regular or constant or strong or complex signals are artificial. Even the very use of language may be a uniquely human phenomenon - though most xenolinguists contest such exclusivity.

Moreover, as Wittgenstein observed, language is an essentially private affair: if a lion were to suddenly speak, we would not have understood it. Modern verificationist and referentialist linguistic theories seek to isolate the universals of language, so as to render all languages capable of translation - but they are still a long way off. Clarke's Third Law says that Alien civilizations well in advance of humanity may be deploying investigative methods and communicating in dialects undetectable even in principle by humans.

Argument Number 6: They are avoiding us

Advanced Alien civilizations may have found ways to circumvent the upper limit of the speed of light (for instance, by using wormholes). If they have and if UFO sightings are mere hoaxes and bunk (as is widely believed by most scientists), then we are back to Fermi's "where are they".

One possible answer is they are avoiding us because of our misconduct (example: the alleged destruction of the environment) or because of our traits (for instance, our innate belligerence). Or maybe the Earth is a galactic wildlife reserve or a zoo or a laboratory (the Zoo hypothesis) and the Aliens do not wish to contaminate us or subvert our natural development. This falsely assumes that all Alien civilizations operate in unison and under a single code (the Uniformity of Motive fallacy).

But how would they know to avoid contact with us? How would they know of our misdeeds and bad character?

Our earliest radio signals have traversed no more than 130 light years omnidirectionally. Out television emissions are even closer to home. What other source of information could Aliens have except our own self-incriminating transmissions? None. In other words, it is extremely unlikely that our reputation precedes us. Luckily for us, we are virtual unknowns.

As early as 1960, the implications of an encounter with an ETI were clear:

"Evidences of its existence might also be found in artifacts left on the moon or other planets. The consequences for attitudes and values are unpredictable, but would vary profoundly in different cultures and between groups within complex societies; a crucial factor would be the nature of the communication between us and the other beings. Whether or not earth would be inspired to an all-out space effort by such a discovery is moot: societies sure of their own place in the universe have disintegrated when confronted by a superior society, and others have survived even though changed. Clearly, the better we can come to understand the factors involved in responding to such crises the better prepared we may be."

(Brookins Institute - Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs, 1960)

Perhaps we should not be looking forward to the First Encounter. It may also be our last.

the secret to becoming a successful published writer: putting the �deliberate� into �deliberate practice� Jump to Comments

You might love or hate Malcolm Gladwell, but since his book OUTLIERS came out the idea of �10,000 hours� has entered mainstream culture.

Gladwell argues:

When we look at any kind of cognitively complex field � for example, playing chess, writing fiction or being a neurosurgeon � we find that you are unlikely to master it unless you have practiced for 10,000 hours. That�s 20 hours a week for 10 years.

I first heard this idea not from Gladwell but a writing teacher over twenty years ago, when I was 13 (and just starting to form some serious ambitions of my own). �Fiction writing,� she told me, �has a ten-year apprenticeship.� Years later, attending a workshop in San Diego as an unpublished writer, I heard this echoed in the words of a published novelist I went to dinner with: �It takes at least ten years to figure out what you�re doing,� he told me, �and in many cases, fifteen.�

Ten thousand hours equals�guess what? Ten years.

�Practice�, though, turns out to be too general a term. If twenty years of experience can mean the same year of experience times twenty, then Gladwell�s rule can mean the same hour of crappy, half-hearted practice times ten thousand.

And that won�t get you very far.

It has to be the right kind of practice.

It�s called �deliberate practice�.

And according to Geoff Colvin,deliberate practice matters way more than talent (hence the title of his book about peak achievers, TALENT IS OVERRATED):

Understand that talent doesn�t mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It�s an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well. British-based researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson and John A. Sluboda conclude in an extensive study, �The evidence we have surveyed � does not support the [notion that] excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts.�

To see how the researchers could reach such a conclusion, consider the problem they were trying to solve. In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, an

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d go on to greatness.

What separates the great from the rest is no secret. It�s like your mama told you. Nose to the grindstone.

�.even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule�and as John Horn of the University of Southern California and Hiromi Masunaga of California State University observe, �The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average.� In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 20 or 30 years� experience before hitting their zenith.

Except it has to be a particular type of grindstone.

Cal Newport has an excellent post at his blog Study Hacks that lists the characteristics defining DP, which he regards as �the most important (and most under-appreciated) step toward building a remarkable life.�

THE SIX CHARACTERISTICS OF DELIBERATE PRACTICE:

1. It�s designed to improve performance. �The essence of deliberate practice is continually stretching an individual just beyond his or her current abilities. That may sound obvious, but most of us don�t do it in the activities we think of as practice.�

2. It�s repeated a lot. �High repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice of a task and performing the task for real, when it counts.�

3. Feedback on results is continuously available. �You may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was flawless, but your opinion isn�t what counts.�

4. It�s highly demanding mentally. �Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it �deliberate,� as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in.�

5. It�s hard. �Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that�s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands.�

6. It requires (good) goals. �The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but rather about the process of reaching the outcome.�

(The characteristics of deliberate practice, as I pointed out in a blog post of my own, feed directly into �the zone� or �state of flow�, where time disappears and you lose yourself in what you�re doing�which makes those ten thousand hours fly by a lot faster.)

Newport observes that

�most active professionals will get better with experience until they reach an �acceptable level,� but beyond this point continued �experience in [their field] is a poor predictor of attained performance.�

It seems, then, that if you integrate any amount of DP into your regular schedule, you�ll be able to punch through the acceptable-level plateau holding back your peers. And breaking through this plateau is exactly what is required to train an ability that�s both rare and valuable

Because as Colvin observes: ��. the opportunities for achieving advantage by adopting the principles of great performance are huge.�

So what does �deliberate practice� look like if you want to be a fiction writer in the twenty first century?

I sold three novels to two major publishers (Penguin and Simon & Schuster) and I�m still putting in a lot of deliberate practice of my own. I wrote my first novel when I was 14. I am now 37. And I�m just beginning to feel confident that I know what I�m doing.

If I could go back and give my younger self a blueprint for DP, it would look like the following. Some of this, I always did. Some of it, I could have done sooner and more often, and I would now be further ahead as a result.

�CONTINUED TOMORROW�

how to get ahead as a writer: putting the deliberate into deliberate practice, part two Jump to Comments

Part One is here

1. READ. Reading is so non-negotiable that I wrote what is practically a manifesto about this� and I�m not talking casual, three-books-a-year reading, or even three books a month. John D MacDonald put the standard at three books a week (tip: it helps to get rid of your TV set). Stephen King says that reading �is the creative center of a writer�s life.�

Read books. Lots of books. Especially the type of books you think you want to write.

And honestly, so few aspiring writers actually do this � read enough � that to commit yourself to this kind of reading will give you a huge competitive advantage. Huge.

2. WRITE. Okay. I�m stating the obvious here, but everybody who wants to write knows how easy it is not to do it. I am no exception. I procrastinate like hell. But writing is like sex (or at least good sex): the more you get, the more you tend to want. Find the time. Write around �the edges of your life� as one successful novelist put it. Work it into your schedule and make it part of your routine, so that sitting down and starting to write becomes as reflexive as any other habit. Establish rituals that will anchor you. I write at the same place every day and listen to music. As soon as I�m at my desk, confronting my laptop, and turning on iTunes, I can feel my writingmind leap to attention. It knows it�s bidness time.

There are two elements to your writing practice:

a) Voice. The more you write, the more you develop it, and a fresh, killer voice is what editors want and need. Your voice is your signature. It stamps everything you do. The great thing is, you don�t have to struggle to �learn� your voice � you shouldn�t be consciously thinking about your �voice� at all. Your voice is everything you read and think and dream about filtered through the unique prism of your personality and developed naturally over the course of (say it with me boys and girls) ten thousand hours. Any type of writing will help you find your �voice�, whether it�s journaling, blogging, commenting in online forums, even emailing (one reason why I adore my writer friends: they give great email).

b) Storytelling. Good writing and good storytelling are two different things. Writing is the medium through which the principles of storytelling make themselves manifest; writing is the how, and storytelling is the what. If you put in ten years of journalism or business writing, you might have developed an ease with language and a distinctive voice, but it doesn�t mean you�re experienced in the ways of plot, character, tone, pacing, etc. If you want to write fiction, you need to be practicing the art of writing fiction. There is no substitute.

3. SEEK OUT THE BEST CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM. REVISE ACCORDINGLY. Most aspiring writers don�t or can�t do this. Which, like reading, is a chance to vault yourself into a subset of aspiring writers who have a much greater chance of success.

Show your work. Learn to take criticism. Learn to love criticism, because great criticism is probably the one and only �shortcut� (I use the word loosely) to becoming a much better writer.

Do yourself a favor and be �teachable�.

Criticism itself is a skill. Your ability to give constructive criticism, to identify why a piece isn�t working and how to change that, grows with your knowledge of craft (and vice versa).

You also need to learn how to absorb the criticism you receive. You must recognize what is relevant to your work and what you can safely cast aside. Although a lot � if not most � of the criticism will indeed prove fairly useless, the ego throws up all sorts of defense mechanisms that can obscure your judgment and enable you to create these deluded explanations about why your piece is perfect and other people don�t know what they�re talking about. I once watched a writer receive what I thought was excellent advice from a prominent agent regarding his manuscript, that nonetheless would have required a massive rewrite he didn�t want to do (he �didn�t have the time�). He rejected the agent�s advice, saying that he was following his own artistic vision and refused to compromise, yadda yadda. Did the agent represent him? No. Did the book sell? No. Did the book deserve to sell? In my opinion, no � but it had amazing potential, and if he had opened his mind to the agent�s advice I think he would have had something remarkable.

The ability to write well includes the ability to revise � to treat your work as fluid, shifting, organic. Your original vision is never set in stone. Allow me to emphasize this: IT IS NEVER SET IN STONE.

Revision = re/vision = re/envisioning your manuscript. The best ideas are rarely if ever your first ideas. Give your story a chance to surface the real, true vision of what it needs to be.

4. RINSE AND REPEAT.

Self-explanatory.

And, because this is 2010, I would add a fifth step:

5. BLOG.

If you want to be a successful writer, do you need a blog? In a word, yes.

The future is here, and more future is coming at us fast. There will no doubt be exceptions that prove the rule, but success will go to those who can connect with their readers online (and continue to grow their readerbase). When I discover a new writer I like, I find that I now expect him or her to have some kind of online presence � and if they don�t, I get annoyed. I feel unloved. And I�m not the only one.

Blogging is a skill and an art all its own, and a great fiction writer who becomes a great blogger, and knows how to move around online, will be mighty like a Jedi. Blogging is also so new that you don�t have to log 10,000 hours to become among the best at it. But, like anything else, it has a learning curve, and requires practice.

I might be biased because I love to blog almost as much as I love to write fiction, but I also think blogging helps you write better fiction. That, however, is a post for another day.

Why women can�t vote with their dollars in film and TV by Jennifer Kesler October 4, 2006

UPDATED: Chris Buchanan�s opinion on Firefly�s cancellation.

I�ve talked before about the film/tv industry�s standard rhetoric for why they can�t make shows and movies women want to see: that women are hard to influence through commercials, so why waste your advertising dollar chasing them when young men will buy anything? Sounds sensible, if it�s true. But is it? Let�s look at this alternative view offered by a 1999 article from the Village Voice, on the spending habits of ad agencies buying TV spots:

All that cash buys �eyeballs�"�or viewers. But not all eyes are equal, at least not to the mavens of the marketing game. Networks charge far more for men�s eyeballs than for women�s, especially when it comes to prime-time shows. �This year, you could reach a thousand guys, 18 to 34, on a minute of network prime time, for 60 bucks,� says Erwin Effron, a leading ad-industry researcher. �Women of the same age group would cost you $47.�

This gender gap may seem unfair to women who were raised to believe �You�ve come a long way, baby.� But it stems from the conventional ad-agency wisdom that women are easy. �More women watch television, and more are available in prime time,� says Peter Chrisanthopoulos, president of broadcasting and programming at Ogilvy & Mather, �and that impacts on the cost to reach them.�

�Conventional ad-agency widsom.� Isn�t �conventional wisdom� a term for ideas that have been handed down from generation to generation for so long no one knows the logic behind them anymore? And the bottom line from the Village Voice article:

�TV is, after all, a group activity,� says James Webster, a professor of communications at Northwestern University, �and along the lines that girls will play with GI Joes but boys don�t play with Barbie, you find that women will watch what men want to watch.�

It�s not hard to read between the lines: if we don�t watch male programming, our tastes won�t be allowed to influence those shows. But if we do watch male programming, our tastes still won�t be allowed to influence those shows. The industry blindly accepts �conventional wisdom� as fact, and since no properly interpreted data can indicate something which contradicts fact, they find ways to interpret the data that fit these �facts�. But that�s where they�ve gone off the rails. Gravity is a fact. �Women don�t like sci-fi, but will watch it for their boyfriends� is not a fact. It�s a supposition, and one I think you�d be hard-pressed to prove with anything resembling a well-constructed study.

Here are some examples of the phenomenon that I�ve thought of. If you can think of other shows that were canceled for suspicious-sounding reasons, or movies that supposedly didn�t appeal to one gender but were beloved by every member of that gender you know, please add them in the comments. I want to see how many we can come up with. When women dropped over half a billion to see Titanic, frequently citing Kate Winslet and/or her character as their reason (and the special effects in more than a few cases), it was dismissed as a fluke. The biggest gross-earner of all time, and we�re not allowed to learn anything from its success because it was just a fluke. And why was it a fluke? Uh, something about when it was released, and what else was out, and er, stuff. Conventional wisdom. Don�t question it. When huge numbers of women attended the Matrix movies, the industry refused to accept this as proof that women liked action movies, sci-fi, a kick-ass female lead who sometimes rescues the guys, or lots of guns. Or even gawking at Keanu Reeves. Nope, it had to be that we were attending with boyfriends, husbands and male friends � thus proving once more that only men determine the success of a movie, and women�s tastes can safely be ignored without anyone being accused of prejudice. When Firefly proved more popular with women than men, that should�ve helped industry pros alerted by the appeal to women of Titanic and the Matrix movies narrow down just what it was we were digging: that we love special effects and action as much as men, if you just give us at least one relatable female character. Instead, it was recognized as �proof� that Firefly wasn�t cutting it as an action series and needed to be axed. When Buffy the Vampire Slayer drew plenty of male viewers (7 men to every 10 women), it should�ve proven that guys will indeed watch female action heroes. But instead, the fact that the show targeted female viewers put it right out of the running for any consideration about male viewing habits. Which is kind of like saying if a non-Christian kid chooses to go to a private Christian school because it�s providing a better education than the public schools in his area, his choice and its results don�t merit consideration because the school was targeting Christians.

Got any others?

Why film schools teach screenwriters not to pass the Bechdel test by Jennifer Kesler June 30, 2008

While writing Female characters exist to promote male leads for network profits, I realized something I had never quite put together in so many words. It�s important enough to deserve its own article (thanks, Bellatrys!), so here it is: my screenwriting professors taught me not to write scripts that passed the Bechdel/Mo Movie Measure/�Dykes To Watch Out For� test, and I can tell you why, and this needs to be known.

"So we've covered men and babies." "Yep, guess we should call it a day."

The �Dykes to Watch Out For� test, formerly coined as the �Mo Movie Measure� test and Bechdel Test, was named for the comic strip it came from, penned by Alison Bechdel � but Bechdel credits a friend named Liz Wallace, so maybe it really should be called the Liz Wallace Test�? Anyway, the test is much simpler than the name. To pass it your movie must have the following:

1) there are at least two named female characters, who

2) talk to each other about

3) something other than a man.

So simple, and yet as you go through all your favorite movies (and most of your favorite TV shows, though there�s a little more variety in TV), you find very few movies pass this test.

It�s not a coincidence. It�s not that there aren�t enough women behind the camera (there aren�t, but that�s not the reason). Here�s what we�re up against (and for those who have requested a single post that summarizes my experiences in film for linking reference, now you�ve got it).

When I started taking film classes at UCLA, I was quickly informed I had what it took to go all the way in film. I was a damn good writer, but more importantly (yeah, you didn�t think good writing was a main prerequisite in this industry, did you?) I understood the process of rewriting to cope with budget (and other) limitations. I didn�t hesitate to rip out my most beloved scenes when necessary. I also did a lot of research and taught myself how to write well-paced action/adventure films that would be remarkably cheap to film � that was pure gold.

There was just one little problem.

I had to understand that the audience only wanted white, straight, male leads. I was assured that as long as I made the white, straight men in my scripts prominent, I could still offer groundbreaking characters of other descriptions (fascinating, significant women, men of color, etc.) � as long as they didn�t distract the audience from the white men they really paid their money to see.

I was stunned. I�d just moved from a state that still held Ku Klux Klan rallies only to find an even more insidious form of bigotry in California � running an industry that shaped our entire culture. But they kept telling me lots of filmmakers wanted to see the same changes I did, and if I did what it took to get into the industry and accrue some power, then I could start pushing the envelope and maybe, just maybe, change would finally happen. So I gave their advice a shot.

Only to learn there was still something wrong with my writing, something unanticipated by my professors. My scripts had multiple women with names. Talking to each other. About something other than men. That, they explained nervously, was not okay. I asked why. Well, it would be more accurate to say I politely demanded a thorough, logical explanation that made sense for a change (I�d found the �audience won�t watch women!� argument pretty questionable, with its ever-shifting reasons and parameters).

At first I got several tentative murmurings about how it distracted from the flow or point of the story. I went through this with more than one professor, more than one industry professional. Finally, I got one blessedly telling explanation from an industry pro: �The audience doesn�t want to listen to a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about.�

�Not even if it advances the story?� I asked. That�s rule number one in screenwriting, though you�d never know it from watching most movies: every moment in a script should reveal another chunk of the story and keep it moving.

He just looked embarrassed and said, �I mean, that�s not how I see it, that�s how they see it.�

Right. A bunch of self-back-slapping professed liberals wouldn�t want you to think they routinely dismiss women in between writing checks to Greenpeace. Gosh, no � it was they. The audience. Those unsophisticated jackasses we effectively worked for when we made films. They were making us do this awful thing. They, the man behind the screen. They, the six-foot-tall invisible rabbit. We knew they existed because there were spreadsheets with numbers, and no matter how the numbers computed, they never added up to, �Oh, hey, look � men and boys are totally watching Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley like it�s no big deal they�re chicks instead of guys.� They always somehow added up to �Oh, hey, look � those effects/that Arnold�s so awesome, men and boys saw this movie despite some chick in a lead role.�

According to Hollywood, if two women came on screen and started talking, the target male audience�s brain would glaze over and assume the women were talking about nail polish or shoes or something that didn�t pertain to the story. Only if they heard the name of a man in the story would they tune back in. By having women talk to each other about something other than men, I was �losing the audience.�

Was I?

There certainly are still men in this world who tune out women when we talk, but � as I and other students pointed out � this was getting less common with every generation, and weren�t we supposed to be targeting the youngest generation? These young men had grown up with women imparting news on national TV (even I can remember when that was rare), prescribing them medicine, representing people around them in court, doling out mortgages and loans. Those boys wouldn�t understand those early �80s movies where women were denied promotions because �the clients want to deal with men� or �who would take a woman doctor/lawyer/cop seriously�? A lot of these kids would need it explained to them why Cagney & Lacey was revolutionary, because many of their moms had worked in fields once dominated by men.

We had a whole generation too young to remember why we needed second wave feminism, for cryin� out loud, and here we were adhering to rules from the 1950s. I called bullshit, and left film for good, opting to fight the system from without. There was no way Hollywood really believed what it was saying about boys who�d grown up with Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor as action heroes, and so there was no way to change the system from within. I concluded Hollywood was was dominated by perpetual pre-adolescent boys making the movies they wanted to see, and using the �target audience� � a construct based on partial truths and twisted math � to perpetuate their own desires. Having never grown up, they still saw women the way Peter Pan saw Wendy: a fascinating Other to be captured, treasured and stuffed into a gilded cage. Where we didn�t talk. To each other. About anything other than men.

Follow-up post: Why discriminate if it doesn�t profit?

Why the iPad Falls Short 36 comments | April 05, 2010 | about: AAPL

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I tweeted earlier that after having slept with her (Ms. iPad), I woke up with morning-after regrets. She�s sweet and pretty but shallow and vapid.

Cute line, appropriate for retweets. But as my hangover settles in, I realize that there�s something much more basic and profound that worries me about the Apple (AAPL) iPad � and not just the iPad but the architecture upon which it is built. I see danger in moving from the web to apps.

The iPad is retrograde. It tries to turn us back into an audience again. That is why media companies and advertisers are embracing it so fervently, because they think it returns us all to their good old days when we just consumed, we didn�t create, when they controlled our media experience and business models and we came to them. The most absurd, extreme illustration is Time Magazine�s app, which is essentially a PDF of the magazine (with the odd video snippet). It�s worse than the web: we can�t comment, we can�t remix, we can�t click out, we can�t link in, and they think this is worth $4.99 a week. But the pictures are pretty.

That�s what we keep hearing about the iPad as the justification for all its purposeful limitations: it�s meant for consumption, we�re told, not creation. We also hear, as in David Pogue�s review, that this is our grandma�s computer. That cant is inherently snobbish and insulting. It assumes grandma has nothing to say. But after 15 years of the web, we know she does. I�ve long said that the remote control, cable box, and VCR gave us control of the consumption of media; the internet gave us control of its creation. Pew says that a third of us create web content. But all of us comment on content, whether through email or across a Denny�s table. At one level or another, we all spread, react, remix, or create. Just not on the iPad.

The iPad�s architecture supports these limitations in a few ways:

First, in its hardware design, it does not include a camera � the easiest and in some ways most democratic means of creation (you don�t have to write well) � even though its smaller cousin, the iPhone, has one. Equally important, it does not include a simple USB port, which means that I can�t bring in and take out content easily. If I want to edit a document in Apple�s Pages, I have to go through many hoops of moving and syncing and emailing or using Apple�s own services. Cloud? I see no cloud, just Apple�s blue skies. Why no USB? Well, I can only imagine that Apple doesn�t want us to think what Walt Mossberg did in his review � the polar opposite of Pogue�s � that this pad could replace its more expensive laptops. The iPad is purposely handicapped, but it doesn�t need to be. See the German WePad, which comes with USB port(s!), a camera, mu

Chapter 15

ltitasking, and the more open Android operating system and marketplace.

Second, the iPad is built on apps. So are phones, Apple�s and others�. Apps can be wonderful things because they are built to a purpose. I�m not anti-app, let�s be clear. But I also want to stop and examine the impact of shifting from a page- and site-based internet to one built on apps. I�ve been arguing that we are, indeed, moving past a page-, site-, and search-based web to one also built on streams and flows, to a distributed web where you can�t expect people to come to you but you must go to them; you must get yourself into their streams. This shift to apps is a move in precisely the opposite direction. Apps are more closed, contained, controlling. That, again, is why media companies like them. But they don�t interoperate � they don�t play well � with other apps and with the web itself; they are hostile to links and search. What we do in apps is less open to the world. I just want to consider the consequences.

So I see the iPad as a Bizarro Trojan Horse. Instead of importing soldiers into the kingdom to break down its walls, in this horse, we, the people, are stuffed inside and wheeled into the old walls; the gate is shut and we�re welcomed back into the kingdom of controlling media that we left almost a generation ago.

There are alternatives. I now see the battle between Apple and Google Android in clearer focus. At Davos, Eric Schmidt said that phones (and he saw the iPad as just a big phone� which it is, just without the phone and a few other things) will be defined by their apps. The mobile (that is to say, constantly connected) war will be won on apps. Google is competing with openness, Apple with control; Google will have countless manufacturers and brands spreading its OS, Apple will have media and fanboys (including me) do the work for it.

But Google has a long way to go if it hopes to win this war. I�m using my Nexus One phone (which I also had morning-after doubts about) and generally liking it but I still find it awkward. Google (GOOG) has lost its way, its devotion to profound simplicity. Google Wave and Buzz are confusing and generally unusable messes; Android needed to be thought through more (I shouldn�t have to think about what a button does in this case before using it); Google Docs could be more elegant; YouTube�s redesign is halfway to clean. Still, Google and Apple�s competition presents us with choices.

I find it interesting that though many commercial brands � from Amazon (AMZN) to Bank of America (BAC) to Fandango � have written for both Apple and Android, many media brands � most notable The New York Times (NYT) and my Guardian � have written only for Apple and they now are devoting many resources to recreating apps for the iPad. The audience on Android is bigger than the audience on iPad but the sexiness and control Apple offers is alluring. This, I think, is why Salon CEO Richard Gingras calls the iPad a fatal distraction for publishers. They are deluding themselves into thinking that the future lies in their past.

On This Week in Google last night, I went too far slathering over the iPad and some of its very neat apps (ABC�s is great; I watched the Modern Family about the iPad on the iPad and smugly loved being so meta). I am a toy boy at heart and didn�t stop to cast a critical eye, as TWiG�s iPadless Gina Trapani did. This morning on Twitter, I went too far the other way kvetching about the inconveniences of the iPad�s limitations (just a f***ing USB, please!) in compensation. That�s the problem with Twitter, at least for my readers: it�s thinking out loud.

I�ll sleep with the iPad a few more nights. I might well rebox and return it; I don�t have $500 to throw away. But considering what I do for a living, I perhaps should hold onto it so I can understand its implications. And that�s the real point of this post: there are implications.

: MORE: Of course, I must link to Cory Doctorow�s eloquent examination of the infantilization of technology. I�m not quite as principled, I guess, as Cory is on the topic; I�m not telling people they should not buy the iPad; I don�t much like that verb in any context. But on the merits and demerits, we agree.

And Dave Winer: �Today it�s something to play with, not something to use. That�s the kind way to say it. The direct way: It�s a toy.�

: By the way, back in the day, about a decade ago, I worked with Intel (through my employer, Advance) on a web pad that was meant to be used to consume in the home (we knew then that the on-screen keyboard sucked; it was meant to be a couch satellite to the desk�s PC). Intel lost nerve and didn�t launch it. Besides, the technology was early (they built the wireless on Intel Anypoint, not wi-fi or even bluetooth). Here�s the pad in the flesh. I have it in my basement museum of dead technlogy, next to my CueCat.

Verdict after one day

By Dave Winer on Saturday, April 03, 2010 at 8:50 PM.

After an intense day of play and exploration and question-asking, some conclusions on the iPad I bought:

1. I will carry it with me on the trip I'm about to take to California.

2. I will also bring my netbook. When I watch movies on the airplane, it'll be on the netbook. I'm right now working my way through an excellent series about World War II, produced in 1974. I have AVI files. It isn't worth the trouble to re-process the files so I can watch them on the iPad. (I may buy a movie in the iTunes store to see what it's like. Thinking of getting Fantastic Mr. Fox, which I saw in theaters, three times. It's one of those movies, like Fargo and The Big Lebowski that gets better as you watch it more times.)

3. I love the way maps work on the iPad. Much better than on the iPhone. In some ways not as good as on the Droid (after all that's a Google product and the maps are from Google).

3a. I could have loved the way news works on this thing, if the NY Times and been willing to ship a beautiful reverse-chronologic view of their whole news stream. They chickened out with a little mini-dip-into the stream. It's like sipping the news from an espresso cup when I want to be inundated by Niagara Falls. (I said to Derek Gottfried this evening that the motto of the Times is "All the news..." not "A teentsy taste of news..." A company whose mission was news and who was clear on that mission could never have shipped so little news. But then Apple is supposed to be a company that loves computers. See the next section on iTunes.)

4. iTunes is a crazy way to connect something as powerful as this device to local resources. A nightmare. Whoever thought up this way of doing things hates users. It's as mean as anything Microsoft ever foisted on its customers.

5. As explained in the excellent Engadget review, I am one of those people who use a few apps in my work. They all run on my Asus, most of them don't run on the iPad. And even if they did, they can't run at the same time on the iPad, so for my work, the machine isn't a fit. The usual fanboy rebuttal is that it is not designed for what I do. Absolutely correct.

6. However, I have a mind and a lot of experience using computers, and designing software for them, and helping people use them. I also work with people who are not very deeply skilled in computer technology, exactly the kind of people this product is supposedly for. It won't work for them, because they need to multi-task too. We learned a long time ago that inexpert users don't use less resources, they just use them differently. The argument that the Mac wasn't a serious computer was nonsense. I was there when all these arguments were fresh. This is not a replay. Keep dreaming if you want, but if you give the iPad to your mother expect the light to go on for you. At that exact moment you will realize how poorly prepared it is for that.

7. I'm going to demo it for my mother tomorrow. I expect to wow her with the map application. But in so many ways it could not replace her Mac, although her Mac is terribly inadequate and confusing, with so many layers of contradictions. Too bad this product is so far from being able to replace it for her. I am, however, going to keep trying to get her to try an iPhone.

8. I promised a verdict, so here it is. With the caveat that it's after one day and I reserve the right to change it at any time: Today's iPad, the one that I just bought, is just a demo of something that could be very nice and useful at some point in the future. Today it's something to play with, not something to use. That's the kind way to say it. The direct way: It's a toy.

Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either)

Cory Doctorow at 5:23 AM April 2, 2010

I've spent ten years now on Boing Boing, finding cool things that people have done and made and writing about them. Most of the really exciting stuff hasn't come from big corporations with enormous budgets, it's come from experimentalist amateurs. These people were able to make stuff and put it in the public's eye and even sell it without having to submit to the whims of a single company that had declared itself gatekeeper for your phone and other personal technology.

Danny O'Brien does a very good job of explaining why I'm completely uninterested in buying an iPad -- it really feels like the second coming of the CD-ROM "revolution" in which "content" people proclaimed that they were going to remake media by producing expensive (to make and to buy) products. I was a CD-ROM programmer at the start of my tech career, and I felt that excitement, too, and lived through it to see how wrong I was, how open platforms and experimental amateurs would eventually beat out the spendy, slick pros.

I remember the early days of the web -- and the last days of CD ROM -- when there was this mainstream consensus that the web and PCs were too durned geeky and difficult and unpredictable for "my mom" (it's amazing how many tech people have an incredibly low opinion of their mothers). If I had a share of AOL for every time someone told me that the web would die because AOL was so easy and the web was full of garbage, I'd have a lot of AOL shares.

And they wouldn't be worth much.

Incumbents made bad revolutionaries Relying on incumbents to produce your revolutions is not a good strategy. They're apt to take all the stuff that makes their products great and try to use technology to charge you extra for it, or prohibit it altogether.

I mean, look at that Marvel app (just look at it). I was a comic-book kid, and I'm a comic-book grownup, and the thing that made comics for me was sharing them. If there was ever a medium that relied on kids swapping their purchases around to build an audience, it was comics. And the used market for comics! It was -- and is -- huge, and vital. I can't even count how many times I've gone spelunking in the used comic-bins at a great and musty store to find back issues that I'd missed, or sample new titles on the cheap. (It's part of a multigenerational tradition in my family -- my mom's father used to take her and her sibs down to Dragon Lady Comics on Queen Street in Toronto every weekend to swap their old comics for credit and get new ones).

So what does Marvel do to "enhance" its comics? They take away the right to give, sell or loan your comics. What an improvement. Way to take the joyous, marvellous sharing and bonding experience of comic reading and turn it into a passive, lonely undertaking that isolates, rather than unites. Nice one, Misney.

Infantalizing hardware Then there's the device itself: clearly there's a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there's also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe -- really believe -- in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can't open it, you don't own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+.

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple's model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of "that's too complicated for my mom" (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn't too complicated for their poor old mothers).

The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a "consumer," what William Gibson memorably described as "something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth... no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote."

The way you improve your iPad isn't to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn't a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it's a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

Dale Dougherty's piece on Hypercard and its influence on a generation of young hackers is a must-read on this. I got my start as a Hypercard programmer, and it was Hypercard's gentle and intuitive introduction to the idea of remaking the world that made me consider a career in computers.

Wal-Martization of the software channel And let's look at the iStore. For a company whose CEO professes a hatred of DRM, Apple sure has made DRM its alpha and omega. Having gotten into business with the two industries that most believe that you shouldn't be able to modify your hardware, load your own software on it, write software for it, override instructions given to it by the mothership (the entertainment industry and the phone companies), Apple has defined its business around these principles. It uses DRM to control what can run on your devices, which means that Apple's customers can't take their "iContent" with them to competing devices, and Apple developers can't sell on their own terms.

The iStore lock-in doesn't make life better for Apple's customers or Apple's developers. As an adult, I want to be able to choose whose stuff I buy and whom I trust to evaluate that stuff. I don't want my universe of apps constrained to the stuff that the Cupertino Politburo decides to allow for its platform. And as a copyright holder and creator, I don't want a single, Wal-Mart-like channel that controls access to my audience and dictates what is and is not acceptable material for me to create. The last time I posted about this, we got a string of apologies for Apple's abusive contractual terms for developers, but the best one was, "Did you think that access to a platform where you can make a fortune would come without strings attached?" I read it in Don Corleone's voice and it sounded just right. Of course I believe in a market where competition can take place without bending my knee to a company that has erected a drawbridge between me and my customers!

Journalism is looking for a daddy figure I think that the press has been all over the iPad because Apple puts on a good show, and because everyone in journalism-land is looking for a daddy figure who'll promise them that their audience will go back to paying for their stuff. The reason people have stopped paying for a lot of "content" isn't just that they can get it for free, though: it's that they can get lots of competing stuff for free, too. The open platform has allowed for an explosion of new material, some of it rough-hewn, some of it slick as the pros, most of it targetted more narrowly than the old media ever managed. Rupert Murdoch can rattle his saber all he likes about taking his content out of Google, but I say do it, Rupert. We'll miss your fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the Web so little that we'll hardly notice it, and we'll have no trouble finding material to fill the void.

Just like the gadget press is full of devices that gadget bloggers need (and that no one else cares about), the mainstream press is full of stories that affirm the internal media consensus. Yesterday's empires do something sacred and vital and most of all grown up, and that other adults will eventually come along to move us all away from the kids' playground that is the wild web, with its amateur content and lack of proprietary channels where exclusive deals can be made. We'll move back into the walled gardens that best return shareholder value to the investors who haven't updated their portfolios since before eTrade came online.

But the real economics of iPad publishing tell a different story: even a stellar iPad sales performance isn't going to do much to stanch the bleeding from traditional publishing. Wishful thinking and a nostalgia for the good old days of lockdown won't bring customers back through the door.

Gadgets come and gadgets go Gadgets come and gadgets go. The iPad you buy today will be e-waste in a year or two (less, if you decide not to pay to have the battery changed for you). The real issue isn't the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it.

If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad isn't for you.

If you want to live in the fair world where you get to keep (or give away) the stuff you buy, the iPad isn't for you.

If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you're going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn't for you.

Pitfalls of Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy, General Useful Information, & Other Opinionated Comments by Vonda N. McIntyre

Read This First! McIntyre�s First Law: Under the right circumstances, anything I tell you could be wrong.

Table of Contents

Pitfall #1: The Expository Lump

Pitfall #2: It�s Almost Writing

Pitfall #3: Subjunctive Tension

Pitfall #4: Rampant Capitals

Pitfall #5: Species v. Specie

Pitfall #6: McIntyre�s Laws of Titles

Pitfall #7: Neologisms

Pitfall #8: It Looks Like Seem or Appear!

Pitfall #9: Department of Redundancy Department

Pitfall #10: An Activity Almost Like Writing

Pitfall #11: Literal v. Figurative

Pitfall #12: �I Am an Amateur�

Pitfall #1: The Expository Lump, or, �As You Know, George, the Space Station�s Orbit Is Degrading Rapidly, and We�re Running out of Air.�

Every sf story contains information that the reader must know. Getting that information across gracefully is difficult, but rewarding. Handing it to the reader in the narrative can be done carefully. Handing it to the reader in a lump of expository dialogue is generally not graceful.

Detection trick: If the phrase �As you know,� or �As you should know� would make sense in a line of dialogue, the dialogue is probably an expository lump.

Under no circumstances (except for broad humor) should you insert the phrase �As you know� into a line of dialogue, even if it would make sense. Especially if it would make sense! If the only way to get information to the reader (after you�ve sweated trying to get it in some other way) is by having one character tell it to another who already knows it, for heaven�s sake don�t draw attention to the fact by adding �as you know.�

Useful technique: It�s easier to describe something if it�s broken. If something is broken, then you notice it. If it�s working right, it just sits there being invisible doing its job. Not to be overused!

Pitfall #2: It�s Almost Writing, or, Half Baked Weasels

Almost and half (half-smile, &c.) are weasel words that allow you to evade the responsibility of being precise. Their use will drain the life from your prose. Some people litter their pages with these words to no purpose. Beware!

Pitfall #3: Subjunctive Tension, or, �Don�t Mince Words, Bones, Tell Me What You Really Mean!�

Samuel R. Delany coined the term Subjunctive Tension, which is the difference between what you mean and what you actually say. In �realistic� fiction you can get away with a lot of metaphorical (not to say sloppy) phrasings that, in science fiction, can bring the reader up short.

ExamplesHis eyes fell to the floor. (Boing! boing!) She screwed up her face. (To the ceiling? Owie!) He ran through the door. (Able to penetrate strong oak in a single bound! Might one possibly mean the doorway?) She strained her eyes through the viewscreen. (My all-time fave.)

Pitfall #4: Rampant Capitals, or, The Nouns of Doom

Be careful about capitalizing words in order to indicate their importance. Several problems attend rampant capitalization.

First, extraneous capitalization tries and fails to conceal a lack of intensity, style, substance, or all those qualities, in your prose.

Second, if you capitalize Many of the Nouns in your Sentences, your Prose your Wish a Story in German to write will read. (In German you capitalize all the nouns.)(And the verbs come last, but that�s a different Pitfall.)

Third, when you sell your novel, the cover blurb will contain every single word you�ve capitalized. Here is a possible result: On the Plains of Mystery, Prince Greeb of the Empire of Thorns rides his WindHorse, Fred, to challenge the TrollBugs to a FireDuel!

You get my drift. It looks dumb. Don�t set yourself up for it.

Pitfall #5: Species v. Specie, or, How Much for Just That Species?

A species is a group of living things reproductively isolated from other groups. The plural of species is species. Specie means money, specifically, coined money.

Other false singulars: Phenomena is plural; its singular is phenomenon. Series is both singular and plural; the singular is not serie. Bacterium is the singular; bacteria is the plural. Biceps is the singular. Bicepses is the plural, though you can use biceps if you insist. There is no such thing as a bicep.

Pitfall #6: Ygdylc�haafuk�s Revenge, or, McIntyre�s Laws of Titles

Never use a title that is (a) impossible to pronounce or (b) embarrassing to say. Doing either causes people to find it awkward to discuss your book. For example, Superluminal (a book of mine) has been misspelled and mispronounced by everybody, up to and including the New York Times (�...her novel Superliminal, which she says means �faster than light.��)

Pitfall #7: Neologisms, or, Calling a Rabbit a Smeerp, or, This Essay Almost Made My Spell-Checker Toss Its Cookies

Neologisms are made-up words. Be very careful with them. If you�re good at them, terrific. (Heinlein was great at them. I got all the way through The Moon is a Harsh Mistress before I realized that tanstaafl wasn�t a perfectly good Dutch word, and I used to live in the Netherlands.) If you aren�t, you can make yourself sound silly.

In particular, watch out for what Damon Knight calls �calling a rabbit a smeerp.� Just because you call a long-eared short-tailed lagomorphic mammal with long hind legs a �smeerp� doesn�t make it alien. We all write sf in standard English, unless we are Anthony Burgess (who did made-up dialect well), or some other people who do it not so well. There�s no particular reason to translate words for time, distance, and food into gibberish. (I don�t know why time, distance, and food are so susceptible to this in science fiction, but they are.) If your characters are drinking coffee, have them drink coffee, not �klaa� or �jav.� Coffee�s been around for more than a millennium. It�s probably going to last.

Besides, as a linguistically oriented friend of mine pointed out with some exasperation, almost all the made-up words in science fiction written by English speakers sound like made-up words derived from English.

Pitfall #8: It Looks Like Seem or Appear! or, These Seem to Be More Weasels

Be very careful about the use of words such as �seem� and �appear,� especially in science fiction. As Samuel R. Delany pointed out, in sf things can happen that are unlikely to happen in real life or in realistic (�mainstream�) fiction. Therefore, if you use �seem,� you should mean �seem.� As in, �This is what it looked like but this isn�t really what�s going on, so pay attention!� A percepti

Chapter 16

ve reader will note �seem� or �appear� or �looked like,� perk up their ears, and wait for you to tell them what really is going on. If nothing other than the superficial action is going on, the reader is going to be irritated. Eventually the reader will quit trusting you.

Pitfall #9: Department of Redundancy Department, or, Department of Redundancy Department

Samuel R. Delany�s technique for determining whether a phrase is redundant (if you have any question): choose one of the words you suspect of being redundant. Switch it to its antonym. If the resulting construction is inherently ridiculous, an oxymoron, you have redundancy. For example, a �large giant.� As opposed to a small giant? Other common speech-habit redundancies include rich heiresses and consensus of opinion.

Hyperbole is a fine and respected literary tradition, and speech habits are indispensable for creating characters. (Think of Stephen Maturin�s charming habit of saying �little small.�)

But when you use these techniques, be sure you know you�re doing it -- and why.

Pitfall #10: An Activity Almost Like Writing, or, Something Resembling Weasels

A current, curious, fad among writers who should know better is the construction �[Character] felt something like [emotion].� Example: �He felt something like annoyance.� Extreme example: �She felt something almost like amusement.� Over-the-top example: �He felt something vaguely approaching absurdity.�

One possible explanation for avoiding accurate description is that the writer doesn�t know what the character is experiencing, and can�t take the trouble to figure it out.

In some cases, the writer has grasped at a metaphor and clutched an illusion.

When I encounter this construction, I�m always left with the impression that the character (or more likely, the writer) has such refined sensibilities and lofty feelings that I, the lowly reader, can�t be expected to comprehend them... so why should the writer bother trying to describe them?

Pitfall #11: Literal v. Figurative, or "His Head Literally Exploded!"

"Figuratively" means that you are speaking metaphorically or symbolically. "Literally" means that you are speaking with precision and realism, that you are saying what exactly happened. "Literally" is not a generic intensifier. If you are talking about someone's headache, "figuratively exploded" is the phrase you're looking for -- at least in comparison to "literally exploded."

Pitfall # 12: �I Am an Amateur,� or, Seven Ways to Get Your Manuscript Rejected: Turn Page 100 upside-down or surreptitiously dog-ear pages 8 & 9 together to be sure the editor has read the whole typescript. (All editors have seen these tricks; some find them so insulting that they'll leave the pages turned upside-down or dog-eared even if they have read that far.) Beg the editor to buy your story so you can pay for your mother's operation. Track down the editor's email address and email your manuscript, even though the publication's guidelines ask you not to. Send an editor hate mail to inform them how stupid they are for having rejected your story. Quibble with every comment they took the time to make. This is a fine technique for getting future manuscripts rejected. Ostentatiously display a copyright � notice (on every single page!) so the editor will know not to steal your ideas. (Ideas are easy, and parallel evolution of story lines is common. It's what you do with the ideas that counts.) Warn the editor outright not to steal your ideas, because you have (or are) a hotshot lawyer. (See #5. Plagiarism does happen -- but it's rare, editors have not, to my knowledge, been the perpetrators, and it always blows up in the plagiarist's face. Editors aren't interested in stealing anyone's stories to make themselves look good. What makes editors look good is finding writers who can write good stories, and publishing them.) Send a non-standard manuscript "so it will stand out." Pink paper with purple type. Perfect-bound camera-ready manuscripts. Typeset text. If the editor sends you information on proper manuscript format -- by all means, argue with the old fuddy-duddy.

Home

40460 since 001029 Update Monday September 08 2003

How Bad is M. Night Shyamalan's New Movie? (Really Bad.)

Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan has a new movie out. It's called The Last Airbender; it is apparently based on some kind of cartoon; and it really, truly sucks. Like, "4 per cent 'fresh' on Rotten Tomatoes" sucks.

This is probably not very surprising to anyone who was unfortunate enough to see Shyamalan's last movie, The Happening, or his movie before that, The Lady in the Water, or, for that matter, the one before that, The Village, or its predecessor Signs, or, let's be honest, the movie before that one, Unbreakable. It may be surprising to the movie executives who signed off this project, because I assume they have not seen any of those movies, due to, if you had, you would not have allowed this to happen.

The Last Airbender is the tale of, oh, who the hell knows. It is basically Star Wars with a Buddhist "theme," and it stars Aasif Mandvi from The Daily Show. You may remember when this movie was being made there was a fair amount of controversy about the cast being largely white, when the characters in the source material were Asian. Attention, Asian community: You seem to have dodged a bullet.

What is wrong with this movie? Besides being directed by M. Night Shyalaman, I mean. Well: The script sucks, albeit hilariously, according to The Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan:

In fact, if there is anything that is intended to resonate with adults, at least parents of the New Age persuasion, it is the philosophical truisms that dot the dialogue, lines like "water teaches us acceptance," "you must let anger go," "there is no love without sacrifice" and the ever-popular, "is there a spiritual place where I can meditate?"

Do you mind if I just copy and paste some of that again, just for, you know, emphasis?

"water teaches us acceptance," "you must let anger go," "there is no love without sacrifice" and the ever-popular, "is there a spiritual place where I can meditate?"

Oh, wow! Maybe those lines can be redeemed by the acting? Ha. Ha! No, says Keith Phipps at the A.V. Club:

Shyamalan lets his unimpressive special effects do the work for him while coaxing performances from his young cast that make Jake Lloyd's performance in The Phantom Menace look studied.

Keith Phipps just went there. You must let anger go, Keith!

What else sucks about this movie, besides that it is worse than The Phantom Menace? Apparently it is quite dark, according to A.O. Scott of the New York Times. Not "dark," like, "mature and serious." "Dark," like, "you can't see a goddamn thing":

The movie is so dim and fuzzy that you might mistake your disposable 3-D glasses for someone else's prescription shades. And Mr. Shyamalan's fondness for shallow-focus techniques, with a figure in the foreground presented with sharp clarity against a blurred background, is completely out of place in the deep-focus world of modern 3-D.

Roger Ebert sums it up:

"The Last Airbender" is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here.

Aw, poor Ebert. Is the a spiritual place where you can go meditate, maybe?

[Rotten Tomatoes; Metacritic]

Send an email to Max Read, the author of this post, at max@gawker.com.

Amazon, Woot, and You: But Mostly Woot News by Woot! on June 30, 2010 at 3:30 PM

To be uncharacteristically serious for half a nanosecond, yes, Woot has signed an agreement to be acquired by Amazon. It shouldn't change anything much for us or you after the deal closes, we just figured you�d like to know a few details. You see, when two companies meet over drinks and some light jazz and decide they'd like to get to know each other better� You know what? Our CEO said it best in his letter to us employees...

Date: Weds, 30 June 2010 From: Matt Rutledge (CEO � Woot.com) To: All Woot Employees Subject: Woot and Amazon

I know I say this every time I find a picture of an adorable kitten, but please set aside 20 minutes to carefully read this entire email. Today is a big day in Woot history. This morning, I woke up to find Jeff Bezos the Mighty had seized our magic sword. Using the Arthurian model as a corporate structure was something our CFO had warned against from the very beginning, but now that�s water under the bridge. What is important is that our company is on the verge of becoming a part of the Amazon.com dynasty. And our plans for Grail.Woot are on indefinite hold.

Over the next few days, you will probably read headlines that say �Matt Rutledge revealed to be monstrous pseudo-human creation of Jeff Bezos.� You might even see this photo making the rounds. Rest assured that these rumors have nothing to do with our final decision. We think now is the right time to join with Amazon because, quite simply, every company that becomes a subsidiary gets two free downloads until the end of July, and we very much need that new thing with Trent Reznor�s wife on our iPods.

Other than that, we plan to continue to run Woot the way we have always run Woot � with a wall of ideas and a dartboard. From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are simply adding one person to the organizational hierarchy, except that one person will just happen to be a billion-dollar company that could buy and sell each and every one of you like you were office furniture. Nevertheless, don�t worry that our culture will suddenly take a leap forward and become cutting-edge. We�re still going to be the same old bottom-feeders our customers and readers have come to know and love, and each and every one of their pre-written insult macros will still be just as valid in a week, two weeks, or even next year. For Woot, our vision remains the same: somehow earning a living on snarky commentary and junk.

We are excited about doing this for all sorts of reasons. One, our business model is so vague that there�s no way Amazon can possibly change what it is we�re truly doing: preparing the way for the rise of the Lava Men in 2012. Also, our deal means that Jason Toon will finally be released from that Mexican jail owned by Zappos honcho Tony Hsieh. No, don�t lie, Tony, we�ve seen the paperwork. And we need a powerful ally in case Steve Jobs finally breaks down and comes after us for all our Apple jokes over the years. Don�t think of it as a buyout; think of it as NATO!

I will go through each of the above points in more detail later, but first, let me get to the top 5 burning questions that I�m guessing many of you will have.

TOP 5 BURNING QUESTIONS:

Q: F1RST!!!! A: Okay, that�s not a question, but it is a good place to mention that our forums will still be policed by a team of moderators, as before. And also, Woot�s previous and always-in-effect privacy policy will still be just as always-in-effect, so don�t worry, there are no plans to suddenly give up or merge your forum data.

Q: Is Snapster leaving? A: Are you kidding? He�s out the door about ten seconds after that check clea- that is to say, Snapster will continue as Woot.com CEO, just like before, and the rest of our staff�s not going anywhere either. Woot and all our various sites will continue to be an independently operated company full of horrible, useless products and an untalented jerkface writing staff, same as it ever was.

Q: Will the Woot culture change? A: Amazon is interested in us because they recognize the value of our people, our brand, and our unique style of deep-tissue, toxin-releasing massage. And they don't want to start changing things now. Amazon's hoping our nutty Woot steez continues to grow and develop (and perhaps even rubs off on them a little). They�re not looking to have their folks come in and run Woot unless we ask them to, which incidentally you can do by turning off the bathroom lights and saying the word �Kindle� three times; a helpful Amazon employee will appear in the mirror. That said, Amazon clearly knows what they're doing in a lot of areas, so we�re geeked about the opportunities to tap into that knowledge and those resources, especially on the technology side. This is about making the Woot brand, culture, and business even stronger than it is today, and we expect that any changes will be for the better or we wouldn't bother with this endless paperwork.

Q: Where can I get one of those vuvuzelas? A: Are you even paying attention?

Several months ago, when we were all sitting on Jeff Bezos�s bumper drinking orange Mad Dog and trying not to be noticed, we heard a voice in the distance yelling �You kids better not scratch my Mercedes or I�m calling the cops!� We ran. It was later that night when Amazon came by the house and said they liked our style and also wanted to get that money we owed them for messing up the chrome. We like to think that our relationship with Amazon will continue at this level for many, many, many years to come.

But we here at Woot are still a thoughtful company, so, at the end of the day, I watched the sunset, and its golden-hued glory made me think about two questions:

1) Is there really a universal deity?

2) Does such a thing preclude free will or are we humans in control of our own destiny?

After spending a lot of time falling asleep at the library while facing the philosophy books, I determined that the concept of destiny is a construct that allows man a gentle release from facing the terror of his existence, and that a Hyundai full of twenties would pretty much offer the same benefits. And so, I ultimately said YES!

This is definitely an emotional day for me. The feelings I�m experiencing are similar to what I felt in college on graduation day: excitement about getting a check from my folks combined with nausea from a hellacious bender the night before. I remember fondly that time when an RA turned on the lights and yelled �WHO OWNS THESE PANTS?� Except this time, the pants are a company, and the RA is you, and the sixty five hours of community service is a deal that will ensure the Woot.com experience can continue to grow for years and years and years, like a black mold behind the Gold Box. Join us, because together, we can rule the galaxy as father and son. Also, there will be six muffins waiting in the company break room, courtesy of the nice folks at Amazon.com. Welcome to the family!

Matt Rutledge CEO, Woot

Why Team Jacob always has to lose in Twilight By Annalee Newitz, Jun 30, 2010 06:51 PM

Watching Twilight: Eclipse in the theater is like going to a sporting event. There are teams; there is cheering. But one team is always doomed to lose. What fantasy is being fed by this strange competition?

I will confess up front: I am Team Jacob, all the way. Have been since the first movie, when Jake was a skinny kid from the wrong side of the treeline. Though Twilight and New Moon showed main character Bella torn between vampy Edward and wolfy Jacob, Eclipse is all about how and why she rejects Jacob for the last time. When evil vamp Victoria raises an army of newborn vamps to slaughter Bella, the local wolf pack has to work with the vampire Cullen family to drive the menace out of Forks. And that drives Bella toward Jacob in a way she's never been before.

The reasons why she rejects him are key to understanding what Eclipse is really about.

Team You Are Not Allowed To Have An Interracial Relationship

Jacob represents humanity, warmth, frank eroticism . . . and an interracial relationship. Though Jacob's tribal identity has played a part in previous films, it's in Eclipse that we learn what that means. At one point, Jacob brings Bella to a tribal meeting where one of the pack leaders tells us a story that unfolds in flashback like a cross between Dances With Wolves and Dark Shadows. "When the cold ones came," he explains, they fought the native wolves. We see a white vampire in European garb slaughtering native wolves. Then when the wolves kill him, his wife comes to their village, destroying everyone in a blaze of fire and imperialist nastiness.

In case you had any doubts before, it's now abundantly clear that "the cold ones," the vampires, are the Europeans who destroyed the lives of innocent natives. Most of the vampires are blond to the point of absurdity (seriously - they couldn't afford decent wigs?). One of the Cullens fought for the South in the Civil War, and it doesn't get whiter than that.

But wait, you say - wasn't Victoria's (now dead) lieutenant Laurent a black guy? Yes he was, and in New Moon he and the white Victoria were a pair of mega-evil vampires who had to be stopped. Their relationship is what led to Bella being in terrible danger in the first place. First they wanted to eat Bella, but then the wolves killed Laurent and Edward murdered Victoria's white boyfriend James. Of course now Victoria wants to kill Bella even more.

Team You Must Be Controlled By An Older Man Who Hates Sex

When Bella rejects Jacob, she is solidifying a distaste these films have for interracial relationships (sexual or otherwise) that began with Laurent and Victoria. So what does Bella trade in her potential native boyfriend for? Edward is so white that he sparkles in sunlight, but she's not exactly making a KKK choice here. Actually what she wants is a daddy in a hot young boy's body.

Remember, Edward is old enough to be Bella's great-grandfather, and most of the time he treats Bella like his little girl. He watches over her when she sleeps, tells her who she should hang out with, and (at one point) grounds her from using her car because he's not happy with her intention to see Jacob. Compare that to her father's behavior. The movie begins with Bella having been grounded by her father, who also insists that she not see Edward so much (he's Team Jacob). So basically Edward's behavior seems to mirror her father's. In fact, it turns out that Bella's cop father is actually tracking the very same vampire that the Cullen family is tracking - Victoria's lieutenant in the newborn army.

One night before the Cullens and the pack are going to have their showdown with Victoria's army, they go out hunting and leave Edward and Bella alone in the house all night. Alice practically winks and leers when she tells Bella that she'll have Edward all alone in the house.

Pretty much as soon as they are together, Bella asks Edward if he'll have sex with her, and tries to get him to take off his clothes. He makes a "yuck" face and refuses, claiming he does want to but that he comes from an era when he would court her and ask her father's permission to marry her. Then he gets on one knee and proposes, giving her what my great-grandmother would have called a "dinner ring," a giant, Victorian-style sparkle monstrosity. She says yes, and they hug. Nobody gets laid. And now Bella has pledged her entire (eternal) future to Edward, who has already told her that he won't turn her into a vampire the way she wants unless she marries him.

Of course, if Edward is Bella's daddy, then it's probably a good thing that he's grossed out by having sex with her.

Team Don't Date The Guy Who Wants Sex As Much As You Do

In Eclipse, as in the previous two films, Bella is full of sexual desire - for Edward primarily, but also for Jacob, whose shirtless body is put on display for us pretty much every time he's on screen. There is a terrific moment in Eclipse where Jacob has to carry Bella through the forest, and he tells her he can feel how nervous he makes her - he knows she wants him. And she has to admit it's true. We know that if Bella were to choose Jacob there would be no icky faces when she tries to have sex. He doesn't reject her sexual desire - he welcomes it.

Rejecting Jacob is a way of rejecting the consummation of her desire. It's a rejection of the man who finds her unambiguously appealing, and isn't horrified by his own desires either. (Edward is always insisting that if he had sex with Bella it could kill her.) "Being with me would be as easy as breathing," Jacob tells Bella. But she doesn't want to breathe, or even be alive. She wants to remain frozen in unrequited desire, lusting after a man who finds lust disgusting.

Team Choose Not To Choose

To choose Edward, Bella also has to reject all the trappings of human life for reasons that seem inexplicable. Though the Cullen kids go to high school, for some reason we're given to understand that Bella's transformation into a vampire means she won't be able to go to college. And though the Cullens hang out with other people in Forks - even throwing a giant graduation party - Bella is going to have to leave her family behind forever when Edward turns her.

Her "choice" of Edward is a foreclosure of so many other choices that go beyond losing a chance to make it with wolf boy. And we're reminded of this constantly, as if the movie itself wants to alert us to how problematic Bella's choice really is. Her best human friend gives a speech at graduation that's about how being young means making lots of bad choices before figuring out who you want to be. Meanwhile, members of the Cullen family explain to Bella how they were dragged into vampirism against their wills, and how horrible it is to lead a life that is so devoid of choice and opportunity and hope.

Toward the end of the film, Bella finally admits that she's choosing Edward not just because she loves him, but also because she wants to be a vampire. She "feels different." She wants superpowers. But mostly she wants Edward - the boy who is her daddy, the sex object who rejects sex, the "cold one" whose brethren are masters of coercion.

Why does Team Jacob always have to lose? Because Eclipse is a movie about rejecting adulthood, not just as a person but also as a culture. It's about rejecting adult relationships between men and women, but also between people of different races and between people from the city (like Victoria's army) and people from Forks. It's about never crossing boundaries, never leaving home.

That's why I'm Team I Can't Wait To See What The Fuck Happens In The Next Movie. Because that's when the boundaries come down, big time. That's when you'll see what this fantasy called Twilight really means.

'Wow, what a long engagement that was!'

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A lengthy engagement During a chance second encounter in Baltimore in 1945, Henry Schalizki, 88, and Bob Davis, 89, met and fell in love. More than six decades later, the couple finally legalized their union. � LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY Network News X Profile View More Activity TOOLBOX Resize Print E-mail Yahoo! Buzz Reprints

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By Ellen McCarthy Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, June 27, 2010

The way Henry Schalizki tells it, his second encounter with Bob Davis came in 1945, when his fellow serviceman arrived in Hawaii to entertain the troops with the USO. This Story On Love: 'Wow, what a long engagement that was!' A lengthy engagement Monday at 2 p.m. ET: Post Magazine: What every couple should know about marriage View All Items in This Story

"You can be a little more elegant about it," Bob interjects. "I was starring in a play -- not entertaining the troops! The play was 'Room Service,' and I had the pivotal role."

They'd met three years before at a little restaurant in the Providence Biltmore Hotel. Boris Karloff was also there, but the two spent the evening talking to each other.

When a poster went up advertising the play's run in Hawaii, Henry recognized the photo of Bob. During intermission, he went backstage to reintroduce himself, and invited Bob out for a drink. Bob agreed and, once the curtain fell, hurried to remove his makeup and get to the lobby.

Fifteen minutes passed, then 20. No Henry. "I was very toasted that day," recalls Henry, now 88. "I walked out on his show."

"And I've never really forgotten that," says Bob, 89. "I was so good in the second act!"

Still, three years later, when Henry walked into a Baltimore bar where Bob was sitting alone, they quickly retraced their acquaintance. Bob had just moved to town for a job as a personality on a fledgling television station. Henry had grown up in Charm City and returned after the war to take a job with the B&O railroad administration.

When Henry learned Bob was staying at a seedy boarding house, he invitedhim to stay the night in his guest room, saying, "tomorrow we'll find you something."

But that never happened. They fell in l

Chapter 17

ove, and Bob "stayed and stayed" -- through good times and bad, sickness and health, through Stonewall and Vietnam, through the terms of 12 U.S. presidents, starting with Harry Truman. Through the loss of more friends than they care to count. They stayed together long enough to witness what they thought was impossible: Last Sunday, they exercised their newfound right, exchanging vows on a rooftop overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, turning their six-decade relationship into a marriage.

"Wow, what a long engagement that was!" Bob said to their guests. "Sixty-two years! Something had to give."

"We needed each other," Bob said recently from a wingback chair in their Chevy Chase penthouse.

From the beginning, they traveled and socialized and spurred on each other's early passion for the theater. In his childhood, Henry had escaped an impoverished, dysfunctional life on the afternoons when his grandmother took him to a Baltimore matinee. Bob, always looking for an audience, began acting as a boy, working his way up to community theater and trying to make it in New York before becoming a broadcaster. Now they were devoted patrons, hitting every opening in town.

'Wow, what a long engagement that was!'

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A lengthy engagement During a chance second encounter in Baltimore in 1945, Henry Schalizki, 88, and Bob Davis, 89, met and fell in love. More than six decades later, the couple finally legalized their union. � LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY Network News X Profile View More Activity TOOLBOX Resize Print E-mail Yahoo! Buzz Reprints

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The two never shared their affection openly, nor did they completely hide it. Bob was always invited along to dinner parties at the homes of Henry's railroad colleagues. Henry regularly attended Bob's social engagements. This Story On Love: 'Wow, what a long engagement that was!' A lengthy engagement Monday at 2 p.m. ET: Post Magazine: What every couple should know about marriage View All Items in This Story

"We were considered a couple, curiously enough, considering the homophobia in existence at the time," Bob says. "They seemed to enjoy our company."

And while bigotry never dominated the couple's lives, the relationship they held most sacred was never fully acknowledged. "What they don't know won't hurt them,' " Bob remembers thinking. "Let's not antagonize people."

Even among their families, it was never discussed. At the end of his life, however, Henry's dad wrote a letter instructing the two to take care of each other. Bob's mother always adored them both.

Being gay, even in the 1950s when they moved to Washington, was never their biggest relationship challenge. In the beginning, Henry's drinking held that title, until Bob called in two men from Alcoholic's Anonymous to stage an intervention in 1957. Henry agreed to go to meetings -- always accompanied by Bob -- and never touched a drink again.

Since then, their conflicts have been more mundane. "We still have disagreements. You should have disagreements," Henry says. "It keeps it healthy." Just this month, Henry was in the hot seat for wearing white socks to a formal dinner party. "He said, 'Well, Van Johnson wore red socks,' " Bob recalls. "And I said, 'Well, you're no Van Johnson.' "

"It's hard to live with yourself sometimes," Henry says. "Never mind for two strangers to live together and get used to each other."

In Washington, Henry launched a successful career in real estate. Bob landed at WGMS radio, where he often covered theater and movies, hosting a lunchtime interview show at the Kennedy Center that afforded them the opportunity to become friendly with such stars as Lena Horne and Angela Lansbury. They bought and sold houses and collected paintings and sculptures that now fill their two-bedroom condo.

"Everything in this apartment has a story," Henry says. "And if you have about 50 years, we'll tell you all of them."

In 2008, they were awarded a Helen Hayes Governor's Award for their support of local theater companies -- they'd attended 6,000 openings by then. It was there, before a black-tie crowd, Bob says, that Henry outed them.

"I have been greatly loved," he said in his acceptance speech, while looking at Bob. "And I've loved greatly in return."

"I thought, 'Oh my God,' " Bob says. "We're out now, and it's all your fault. I felt badly about it -- angry at first."

Of course, it wasn't much of a revelation to a theater crowd that had seen them together for years. The speech got a standing ovation, and for months people approached to tell the couple they'd become a source of inspiration. This Story On Love: 'Wow, what a long engagement that was!' A lengthy engagement Monday at 2 p.m. ET: Post Magazine: What every couple should know about marriage View All Items in This Story

"I think the reason it was so moving is that there were many in that audience who realized a relationship like ours could exist," Bob says. "There was still hope that they could accumulate enough love between two people to make it last."

And it really has lasted, Henry says. "We're not only friends, we're lovers, we're brothers and, incidentally, along the way, in 1990, I legally adopted Bob."

True story. When Henry was 69, he legally adopted Bob, who was 70. It gave them legal protections, offered an advantageous inheritance tax rate and made the pair into a family.

They think a lot about death -- Bob especially. He takes solace in a prediction from a numerologist that they'll die together, but every time Henry comes home late or doesn't pick up the phone, Bob worries something has happened. And plenty has already happened. Henry has suffered colon cancer and a detached retina. He has had a quadruple bypass and a titanium rod inserted into his spine. Bob's had prostate surgery, serious heart trouble and ailments that necessitate a daily rainbow of pills.

Acting as bookends to memoirs of Tony Bennett and Lucille Ball and a dozen other volumes are two urns engraved with Bob and Henry's names. They're made from the same slate as Jackie Kennedy's gravestone, Henry explains. And until they're placed side by side at Arlington National Cemetery, Bob adds, "they're good for holding M&Ms."

These six decades together have gone "like that!" Henry says, snapping his fingers. "It's like life goes. My advice to anybody is, 'For God's sakes, enjoy your life.' "

When gay marriage became legal in the District, Henry set his sights on a wedding. Bob wanted no part of it. "We're accepted as two human beings, always as a couple. I said, 'I don't see any reason for it,' " he recalls. "Besides that, Vera Wang will never make a gown for me to wear."

Henry reminded Bob of the reaction to the Helen Hayes Awards speech. Their shared life is the contribution they've made to the gay rights movement, he argued, and marriage solidifies that. "We've been an example," he says.

So on June 20, at 5 p.m., the white-haired men walked out onto the balcony of the presidential suite of the J.W. Marriott and faced each other under an arch of billowing silk and saffron-colored flowers. Sixty-two years -- to the hour -- after they got together in that Baltimore bar, Bob and Henry were wed. (The adoption had been nullified several weeks before.)

Their 60 guests, including Councilman Jim Graham and Helen Hayes Awards Chairman Victor Shargai, gathered around a grand piano as local actor Will Gartshore sang show tunes during cocktail hour.

Later, as the sun lit the sky over Washington in pinks and purples, their maid of honor, Linda Levy Grossman, Helen Hayes Awards president and chief executive, stood to toast the couple. "They have never, ever, ever needed a label for their love," she said. "They are simply the air that each other breathes."+

The Woo of Lost Reviewed by Adam Roberts

05 July 2010

1.

A transfer is "lossy" if the amount of information encoded in an original becomes markedly depleted in the process of copying it. This might happen for many reasons. So, for example: transferring a six-season, 120-hour TV drama (including dozens of main and scores of minor characters, a welter of interlacing plotlines, complex internal mythology, and huge fan paranarrative) into a short review article for an online venue. That's going to be lossy.

That said, now that the show is over this process has become markedly less lossy. That's because whilst Lost was ongoing, there was no way of knowing which of the blizzard of details, plotlines, characters, and so on had a bearing on the central mystery of the show. Now the finale has aired, a lot of those earlier data�all of it at the time earnestly pawed over by fans, held up to the light, microscopically interpreted for possible meanings�have simply dropped out of the picture. Was it all about the numbers? About the Dharma Initiative? About time travel? About polar bears? Well, now, we know the answer. If ever a spoiler warning were needful, it's here and now. For this review, like Caesar's Gaul, is divided into four parts. Part 2 attempts to summarise the show's tangled storylines; part 3 offers some general observations; and in part 4 I discuss the show's finale. At that point I spoil without compunction. Be warned.

But perhaps there is a danger in attempting to respond to a series like Lost after the end. The main motor of the show, the hook upon which were painfully suspended so many millions of fans, myself included, was "What's it all about?" (alloyed with a little "What's going to happen next?"). The last few episodes of season 6 provided the definitive answer to the first of these questions, and that answer will now inevitably colour memories of the show. More: that answer will tend to diminish the show�as we all knew it would, even before we had an inkling of what it was�not only in the sense that it closes down the other avenues of possible interpretation, but because it involves a kind of optical illusion of coherence. We need to hold in mind just how wonderfully streaked, freaked, spattered, and dribbled this show used to be. How superbly it resisted the stare-eyed hermeneutic obsessions of its fanbase (myself included), not with mere opacity but by a sort of glorious promiscuity of more "meaning" than even we could stomach.

A point of comparison might be The X-Files, a similarly multiseason show about the search for meaning in a world in which conventional, scientific reality is interpenetrated in various dramatic ways by the supernatural and superscientific. But to make the comparison is straight away to be struck by the tonal difference between the two shows: The X-Files was low-lit, nocturne-coloured, over-focussed, earnest to the point of po-facedness, and in the final analysis risible. Lost, on the other hand, lives in the memory as luminous, inventive, effortlessly surprising and compelling; stupid but in a creative, engaging sense.

The X-Files started out with a neat conceptual reversal: a man and a woman investigate strange goings-on, but it's the man who's all intuitive and emotional and credulous, and the woman who's all skeptical and scientific and rigorous. But The X-Files couldn't sustain its integrity, perhaps because it was focussed too tightly on just two main characters�but more probably, I think, because the longer it went on the more fatally diffuse its mythology became. In individual episodes, The X-Files treated many various aspects of supernatural folklore, but as the series went on these aggregated to a point where the show was committed to a view of the world in which everything was true, no matter how absurdly boneheaded: UFOs, ghosts, Bigfoot, ESP, government conspiracy, anything and everything.

Lost has worked the other way, turning and turning in a tightening gyre as the aggregating revelations channelled viewers along towards a conclusion rather than simply an ending. But it also managed to be an inclusive text, welcoming and beguiling where The X-Files became increasingly rebarbative. It was, at its best, less a show about finding answers to puzzling questions and more about coping with extraordinary, supernatural circumstances�coping as a group, being-in-the-world with friends. Although it seems a strange thing to say, given how violent and extreme much of the drama was, it was this friendliness that underpinned the show's enormous commercial success.

2.

Whether you've followed the series or not, you'll have some sense of the general ambit. We start with the crash of a passenger airplane (Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 from Sydney�a nice injoke about-turn one-upping of one of Tintin's better adventures, Vol 714 pour Sydney) upon a tropical Pacific island. This island is a place with some very unusual features: a strange poltergeist force that kills people; apparitions of the dead; polar bears. There are, we discover, others on the island, a secretive and dangerous bunch. There is a radio transmitter broadcasting a sequence of numbers�4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42�that as the series progresses appear in various guises, possessing (it is implied) a mystic significance.

The show has a large ensemble cast, but certain characters came quickly to the fore: Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox), a spinal surgeon; Sawyer (Josh Holloway; we later learn this character's real name is "James Ford"), a louche Texan con-artist; Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly), a prisoner wanted for murder; and wheelchair-bound John Locke (Terry O'Quinn). Other characters include Charlie Pace (played by hobbit-actor Dominic Monaghan) a drug-addicted British rockstar; Claire (Emilie de Ravin), a heavily pregnant Australian with whom Charlie falls in love; Michael Dawson (Harold Perrineau), an American separated from his wife and his young son Walt (Malcolm David Kelley); Sayid Jarrah (Naveen Andrews), a former Iraqi National Guard torturer; Sun-Hwa Kwon (Yunjin Kim), a wealthy Korean woman and her husband Jin-Soo (Daniel Dae Kim), who speaks no English; and Hugo "Hurley" Reyes (Jorge Garcia), a laid-back dude from California. We learn about these characters, and others, in great detail, in part through their interactions with one another on the island, but more because the show is built upon a lamination of on-island narrative interspersed with flashbacks to characters' pre-island lives.

Much of the first season is given over to the day-to-day business of surviving�building shelters, hunting and gathering food and so on�with the flashbacks, though sometimes crudely handled, on balance adding impressive roundedness to the ensemble. Folded into this are various inexplicable developments. John Locke's incurable spinal injury is miraculously cured. The survivors spot an incongruous polar bear. Jack Shephard sees the ghost of his father. A terrifying worm-shaped cloud of black smoke occasionally flies out of the jungle and kills people. Locke discovers a strange hatch-door embedded in the ground, and becomes convinced not only that the island is magical (and he and the other survivors "special") but that if he can only open the hatch, all his questions will be answered. The hatch, however, resists his efforts.

Indeed, the "hatch" storyline was drawn out to the point where it became actively annoying. It was the writers' way of parsing what they evidently took to be a core theme of the show: faith. Locke's groundless belief that the hatch would provide him with answers, and his faith in the island more generally, functioned as a figure for "religious faith" more generally; and was opposed to Jack's empirical scepticism. Jack, the de facto leader of the survivors, doesn't think the island is special; he just wants to get everybody away and home. Rescue, though, doesn't arrive, and the writers' thumbs were in the balance from the get-go. Locke's "faith," though without rational basis, gifts him a luminous surety and existential focus; Jack's faithless practical goal only emphasises how hollow and miserable his existence is�unsatisfied in his job, separated from his wife, bereft at the loss of his remote father.

Once the premise was established, watching Lost became mostly a matter of attending to the narrative moves made by the writers, each of which took us closer to or further away from the "solution" to the island's mystery, which viewers in effect marked, as with a kind of mental chess notation, "?" or "!," or occasionally as "?!" The slow revelation that there were others living on the island, called, logically enough, "The Others," merited !. The decision to draw out the Locke/hatch storyline for so long, on the other hand, was "?"�although the final opening of the hatch, which turns out to be marked with the mystic 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 numbers, was one of the highlights of the series. (In Hurley's flashback we discovered that he had been propelled from happy poverty to a miserable, indeed cursed wealth by winning the lottery with these exact numbers. "The numbers are bad!" is his succinct judgment upon them.) At the bottom of the hatch is a 1980s bunker, furnished with supplies by its builders, the mysterious "Dharma Initiative," and inside is Desmond (played by Henry Ian Cusick). Desmond must type "the numbers" (that is, 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42) into an antique computer terminal every 108 minutes. If he doesn't, he has been told that he island will explode. Will it? Who knows? The excellence of this narrative conceit is in its neat embodiment of ontological arbitrariness; that point where unfounded faith and unfounded doubt bite hard into life�having to adjust the whole of one's existence to adapt to an inflexible 108-minute cycle, all the time wondering whether you are simply wasting your time. At any rate the Flight 815 survivors move into this bunker and take shifts at the button. This has the unfortunate consequence that Desmond's character can be moved into a much less dramatically fruitful star-crossed lovers' storyline.

After a sluggish, "?"-heavy second season�which, it seems, helped shed quite a proportion of the show's audience�Lost picked up again for the third. There were further mysteries: an ancient sailing galleon marooned far from the sea in the middle of the island; the Dharma Initiative's extensive spread of now-mysteriously-abandoned hatches and buildings contained further clues, not least an "orientation film" for new members of the Initiative (!). A second set of survivors, who were in the tail section of the plane when it crashed, are discovered, rather needlessly complicating the ensemble (?). Amongst the survivors, a love triangle is clunkingly elaborated: Jack and bad-boy conman Sawyer both fall for pert Kate, despite (or perhaps because of) her murderously dark past. She in turn loves one, or other, or both; the writers spin it out. I found this all very ??, but I know fans for whom the whole Jack/Sawyer/Kate thing was thoroughly !!. It is revealed that Yemi, the brother of Flight 815 passenger and Nigerian drug-lord "Mr Eko" (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), crashed on the island (in a short-range propeller aircraft that has somehow made it all the way from Africa to the mid-Pacific) and died. Mr Eko's flashbacks make it clear that, like many characters, he has done very bad things in his life. Now that he's on the island he builds a chapel, to point up the writers' interest in religious faith and atonement, and then is randomly killed by the black-smoke monster (??). Indeed, throughout all six seasons the writers demonstrate an almost psychotically cavalier attitude to killing off characters, something undertaken in the first instance in the interest of dramatic intensity and what Aristotle called peripeteia.

The "Others" send an individual called Ben Linus (played by the excellent Michael Emerson) to infiltrate the survivors' camp, but they rumble him, lock him in a cell, and torture him. There's a good deal of torture in the show, actually, and it is handled with pretty much the same moral idiocy found in�say�24: ethical scruples are simply overridden by a spurious urgency that is actually only the formal motor of serial TV entertainment (that the plot move on, that viewers not be bored). Nevertheless, the introduction of Ben was a "!!!" move by the writers. For we discover that Ben is actually the leader of the Others, and his ruthless yet queerly heartbroken Machiavellian manoeuvrings, which range from manipulating people and emotional blackmail all the way up the scale to murder and indeed mass-murder, illuminate not only the rationale of the "Dharma Initiative" (of which he used to be a part, but which he himself brought to an end via the expedience of murdering all the staff with poison gas) and the island itself. Everything Ben does, he does "for" the island, about which he has a faith even more fundamentalist than John Locke.

Ben, though, describes himself as only a deputy. He works for the guy really in charge, a mysterious individual nobody has met called "Jacob" ("a great man," according to Ben). In one splendidly oddball scene, Ben takes various people to Jacob's house, a ramshackle hut ringed by a trail of grey dust on the ground. When they go inside the place seems empty, but then the furniture starts flying about, a shadowy figure is very fleetingly glimpsed moaning (was it?) "Help me," and everything goes quiet. The "Who is Jacob?" question was a perfectly pitched narrative chess move.

We eventually discover what happens if the numbers are not entered in the Dharma Initiative's machine�a huge explosion and bright light in the sky that wreaks some kind of nonspecific havoc. Jack is still focussed on getting the survivors off the island, and Ben is focussed on keeping them there. An obstetrics-themed plot is introduced: the island has magical healing powers, but by the same token it rebuts birth, and pregnant women spontaneously abort. Ben's "people'�the "Others"�have attempted to overcome this in various ways, not least by shipping in a pregnancy specialist called Juliet Burke (played by Elizabeth Mitchell). But two of the survivors�Australian Claire and Korean Sun-Hwa Kwon�give birth to babies (?!). An Australian billionaire called Charles Widmore, played by Alan Dale ("Jim from Neighbours" to millions of Oz and UK fans) is looking for the island, for his own reasons, and sends in a team of mercenaries, one of whom kills Ben's daughter. We're at the end of season 3 now, and as the plotlines began to become impacted, like a bad tooth, the writers played one of their intermittently brilliant moves. Against a creakily melodramatic plotline of bombs in freighters, fights and flights, and the culmination of Jack's efforts to get his people home, Ben moves the island. He does this by descending into an icy subterranean chamber and turning a giant wheel set horizontally into the wall. This makes the island vanish; and incidentally ejects Ben Linus through space/time into the Sahara desert. For sheer bravura unexpectedness, I annotate this "!!!."

My reproduction of the series in review-summary form is growing lossier and lossier, I'm afraid. Season 4, broadly, concerned the fates of those Losties who followed Jack off the island. In a nutshell, they were not happy. A bizarre-even-for-Lost conspiracy by Charles Widmore's people sunk a fake Flight 815 at sea (??), from which the returned Losties are presented to the world's media as the only survivors�a fiction they acceded in to keep the island secret and their friends still there safe. But Jack is miserable, despite living an outwardly happy L.A. life with Kate raising Claire's baby as their own. He becomes convinced they must all return to the island. John Locke has similar ambitions, and has been travelling around trying to persuade the returnees to reband and go back. Suicidally demoralised by his failure to do so, he decides to hang himself. Ben Linus turns up, talks him out of self-murder, extracts some information from him, and then throttles him with the cord (!!!). Not for the first time waning viewer interest in a too-messy tangle of plotlines is redeemed by a strikingly pitched surprise development. At any rate, with an improbable series of contrivances, the off-island Losties are returned to the island, John Locke's corpse included. Once there the dead Locke apparently comes back to life.

Season 5, broadly, manoeuvred the show in an explicitly SFnal direction with a dose of time travel. A handful of key characters, including Sawyer, Juliet, Sayyid, Hurley, and a new guy with the ability to commune, spirit-medium like, with dead people (Miles Straume, played by Ken Leung), are all thrown back in time to the 1970s, and the height of the Dharma Initiative's presence on the island. They assume false id

Chapter 18

entities and become, improbably enough, key members of the initiative; Sawyer and Juliet fall in love and live idyllically together for several years. But their true identities are eventually revealed. The season ends with a farrago of nonsensical plotting about schlepping a 1950s atomic bomb (miraculously portable) to an energy rift in the island that the Dharma Initiative is excavating. Jack believes that detonating the former in the latter would cancel out the initial crash of Flight 815 and permit everybody to get on with their lives. Narrative obstacles are placed in the way of this move, but in a fairly desultory way, since we never doubt the Chekhovian dramatic principle by which an atom bomb, once introduced into the narrative, must be used. And so it goes: the bomb goes off; Juliet is killed; Sawyer is heartbroken; and the Losties are blown back to the present day, although not (as Jack believed they would be) into a timeline in which the plane never crashed.

Like the unopened hatch in the first two seasons, the time-travel storyline in season 5 feels in retrospect like a massive piece of narrative padding. But�to repeat myself�that probably says more about the problem of hindsight than anything else. In the moment, and despite myriad cheesinesses, it was superbly absorbing stuff. More, the writers announced that season 6 would be the last, winning over at least some of those fans who had become disillusioned with the thought that a solution to the show's core mysteries would be endlessly deferred. On the other hand, season 6 made plain a shift away from the basically science-fictional narrative logic of season 5. We moved into rather self-consciously mythic, supernatural imaginative topographies; and the "Big Themes" of "faith" and "atonement" with which the writers had flirted in the earlier seasons came galumphing back in to stamp all over the finale with hobnailed boots. Discussing these will entail spoilers, so before I get to that let me put down a few more general observations.

3.

Any potted account of Lost's main storylines, such as the above, must tend to make one thing clear: that it was at root a ludicrous show. Daft, implausible, hyperactive, given to lurching shifts of focus and scale of positively Van Vogtian proportions. To say so is not to dismiss it, of course. Ludicrous is not the same thing as risible. The show's genius was in the way it fully inhabited its ludicrousness, the way it turned the clunky paraphernalia of TV melodrama into a near-perfect simulacrum-fable of profundity. It did this by playing with the grain of its daftness; always ingenuously in tune with its own absurdity, neither too archly knowing nor embarrassed by it. Narrative contrivances a first-year screenwriting student would dismiss as too hokey were deployed not once but many times�the literal ticking bomb, for instance; the Mexican standoff; the run-and-chase. The scriptwriters enjoyed the metaphorical narrative sugar-rush of killing off major characters (or in one variant of this: of introducing a new character in such a way as to make it plain s/he will be a new major player, only to kill him/her before they even get going). In small doses this can be joltingly effective, textually speaking; but it became so totally a feature of the Lost universe that it ended up creating a weirdly parodic version of humanity. Everybody on the island, it seemed�no matter what other traits their characters displayed�everybody was only ever a moment away from punching somebody, torturing somebody for information, or shooting somebody else dead. I think only Hurley and Charlie, amongst the major characters, abstained from the social performance of murderous violence. For everybody else it was a mundane business; the pistol whipping, the rifle shot to the chest, the thrown knife into somebody's back. Cumulatively this created the vibe that pretty much all the people on the island were terrible terrible people. Picture a world as a tropical island paradise wholly populated by conscience-free, violently disposed supermodels. Et�viol�

Nor was the show helped by its codes of representation. The opening episode (in its day the most expensive TV pilot ever made) set the bar high: a wham-bam launch with properly cinematic production values. But as the show went on, the cracks increasingly began to show. A half dozen Hawaiian locations had to serve for the whole island, and several of these became debilitatingly over-familiar with reuse, however cleverly the set-dressers attempted to disguise them as new. Budgets were pared as the overall viewing figures declined. The plane in the first episode looked like (because it was) a real smashed-up airliner; the plane in the last episode looked like (because it was) CGI, and cheap CGI at that.

Then there's the acting. With only two exceptions, the acting was awful throughout. This was, I think, because most of the players were cast for their looks rather than their acting chops. Matthew Fox, for instance, is a very handsome if slightly squirrel-eyed man, but as Jack his performance was staggeringly one-note�a sort of strangulated, doe-eyed miserable intensity all the time, regardless of situation. Evangeline Lilly is very comely, but her "Kate" completely failed to communicate the conflicted depths of an abuse-survivor and murderer, achieving instead only a sort of simpering tangle-haired prettiness. Josh Holloway is also very comely�better looking than Jack, actually�but his performance as Sawyer consisted wholly of scowling. No matter what his character was supposed to be feeling or doing, Holloway buckled his handsome brow in to a scowl and bit off his dialogue. One need not be Stanislavski to see that "acting" and "scowling" are not the same thing.

Yunjin Kim's comeliness is of a more soulful sort, although her role, especially her scenes off-island, required much more than she could give, acting-wise. Daniel Dae Kim, another good looking man, may or may not be a proper actor; his role didn't give him the chance to show us. Naveen Andrews' Sayyid was little more than a fake "foreign" accent and a lot of moody positioning of his handsome mug and sculpted body. And worst of all was Claire. Her part needed an actress who could convincingly portray a young woman robbed of her child passing through murderous insanity and back into the light. Emilie de Ravin could do nothing more than stand there angling her undeniably pretty face at the camera and blinking slowly. The principle at work was that of U.S. daytime soaps, viz: "When you look as good as I do, who needs acting?" There will be fans who disagree with this assessment, and champion the acting ability evident in the portrayal of one or other of the characters. This is because they fancy the actor in question.

There were two exceptions, but even they struggled with the scripts they were given. First off, Michael Emerson did something very memorable with Ben Linus; a wonderfully nuanced balance of needy weediness and a steel-tough resilience. When, as he often did, he resorted to murderous violence, we believed it completely, but Emerson's acting was such that even the most brutal behaviour did not alienate us from him. And this was a problem in the long run, because the writers didn't know what to do with him, whether to spin him as hateable or loveable. They plumped for the latter, and it tangled foolishly with the fact that Ben was responsible for more murder on the island than anybody else.

And secondly, in Terry O'Quinn's John Locke the show found an actor with a remarkable screen-presence. That said, Locke only really came into his own in the final season, where he played not Locke but the evil alt-Locke. Here O'Quinn's effortlessly carried, slightly sinister charisma, his ability to combine charm and menace, worked superbly. But this in turn brought out the problem in the earlier seasons. In life Locke was fundamentally a pitiable character�a loser�and O'Quinn struggled to fit his larger-than-loser presence into the role.

Putting all these beautiful people (Ben, Charlie, and Hurley excepted) through the over-caffeinated bounceabout contortions of plot also meant that the show as a whole kept losing its focus. It toyed with Robinson Crusoe, or Tempest, allusions, but they sputtered into nothing. It picked up the notion that everything might be an SFnal material novum, and then entirely Lost interest in that. It seemed to be saying something obliquely about 9-11�from the world being changed by a catastrophic plane-crash at the start of season 1, to the sight in season 6 of Iraqi Sayyid's death by suicide-bombing (he grabs an about-to-explode bomb and runs off down a corridor, blowing himself up for the greater good of his friends). But no ideological coherence emerges from that sort of reading. Characters are named after famous philosophers (Locke, Bentham, Rousseau, Hume) but without any actual philosophical content behind the gesture.

A fan who even dipped a toe into the para-material generated by fans could see that part of the appeal of the show was in its tantalising detail, any one of which could be the key that explained everything. In an important sense, the point of the show was the elevation of this kind of detail to a new aesthetic prominence. When its big reveal finally came, as it must, part of it would be to dissolve much of this beautiful tracery. And so it was. Bye-bye mystic numbers, Dharma Initiative, polar bears, big-wheel-for-moving-the-island and wholly-unresolved-why-can't-people-give-birth-on-the-island storyline. Hello Jacob, smoke monster, and mystical fable of faith and atonement. Boo.

4.

This review has been lossy; but the series's finale was lossier still. Almost everything that made the show compelling was filtered away. Instead we were left to chew on the ship's biscuit of one dry, stodgy fabulation: Jacob brought the Flight 815 survivors to the islands as "candidates." He had been surveilling their lives remotely for decades so as to select them. The revivified John Locke is revealed as the smoke monster in human form. The monster has a murderous animus against Jacob, and a desire to get off the island; but an unspecified rule or charm prevents him killing Jacob directly. So he persuades Ben Linus to kill him instead. There's a weird narrative cul-de-sac concerning a temple staffed by various quasi-religious types, hitherto unmentioned in the series; but Smoke Monster Locke, unfettered now that Jacob is dead, kills most of the occupants of this, and persuades most of the Losties that they must all leave together.

It's a ruse, though. Smoke Monster Locke actually wants to destroy the island and everybody on it. There are vague but dire warnings that if he escapes from the island it will be the end of the world. Meanwhile, interspersed in almost every episode, are what the scriptwriters rather wincingly call "flash-sideways," glimpses of a timeline in which Flight 815 never crashed, and all the main characters, living notably improved lives, interact with one another in L.A.

The antepenultimate episode, "Across the Sea," finally and rather disappointingly revealed the kernel of the series mythology. We go back to the island, in A.D. 44. A Latin-speaking unnamed character (played by The West Wing's Allison Janney) rescues a heavily pregnant shipwrecked woman, delivers her twin baby boys, and kills her. She raises the children as her own: one�Jacob�dressed in a conveniently allegorical white tunic, the other, unnamed, in a black one. Her business is guarding the island, or more specifically guarding a particular magical cave full of magical light. This, we're told, is "the source, the heart of the island." Her intention is for the son-in-black to take over her guardianship when the time comes; but he instead becomes obsessed with leaving the island, and collaborates with the tribe that inhabits the place to that end. For some reason, though we're not told what, he must not leave the island. So mother knocks him out, kills the entire tribe (yet another unremarked, casual, small-scale genocide) and instead gives the job of guarding the source to a reluctant Jacob. Angry, the son-in-black stabs his mother to death, and in retaliation Jacob throws him into the magic cave, killing him but transforming his spirit into the smoke monster.

We are asked to believe that all the shenanigans of the previous seasons have actually been the circuitous process by which Jacob chooses to recruit his replacement�after two thousand years, and for unstated reasons. He has narrowed this down to six: Kate, Hugo, Sawyer, Jack, and the Kwons. He manages to explain the state of affairs to these six, despite being dead. After hearing his explanation, Jack volunteers to replace him. In the final episode the characters all converge on the heart of the island; Desmond descends into the cave of light to discover an antique temple, a pool of glowing water, and in the middle a large stone bung. Removing this makes all the magic water drain down the plughole, causing the island to start to sink into the sea. It also robs Smoke Monster Locke of his invulnerability, which means that Jack is able to kill him, although he himself suffers a fatal wound in the process. Jack drags himself back to the magic cave, reinserts the bung, and restores the island's magic before finally expiring. Hurley, it seems, must take over Jacob's role. The startled viewer mentally pencils in a "??" to annotate this plot-move before the nature of the flash-sideways is revealed�it is a timeless space created by all the characters, who are all dead, so that they can "find themselves" before moving on�and "??" becomes "???"

The initial objection to this denouement is that it's shit. A more nuanced response is that it is anticlimactic, underpowered, and doesn't make sense. Pugatory here is all the main characters flying into an early-twenty-first century L.A. knowing neither that they are dead, nor that they ever knew one another or ever went to the island in life. They did go to the island; the narrative conceit is the island was "real" and this flash-sideways not. But they must "find one another" by coincidentally bumping into the others until some significant contact triggers a memory of their time on the island, and with it the knowledge that they are dead. As to why some characters are present in this purgatory and some not, or why some are present but (like Locke's father) in a vegetative state, or why dying entails temporary amnesia of life until you meet some but not other dead people, or why Desmond has been given the job of orchestrating a final grand get-together at a church�which job he undertakes in part by running Locke down in his car�none of this is clear. At the church, Jack is the last to understand the true state of affairs. Only when he discovers his father's coffin to be empty, and has a chinwag with his old man's revivified person, does he realise. He comes into the main body of the church where, teary-eyed and grinning, the entire main cast is assembled. The series then ends on a gag-reflex-tickling group hug. Indeed, as a couple of reviewers noted, the final scene looks much more like a Hollywood wrap party than anything that belonged in the show itself.

The point of this ending is not religious, actually; or not specifically doctrinally religious. That is to say, the show went out of its way to present its notionally purgatorial afterlife as inclusively non-denominational. Jack's Dad may be called "Christian Shephard" ("Really?" Kate asks, with a knowing smirk); but when he appears to his son he stands before a stained glass window devoted upon which we see the Muslim Crescent, Jewish Star, Hindu Wheel�and for all I know the Scientological volcano and Flying Squid Monster's noodly appendage�as well as the Christian cross. The same rather superstitious ecumenicalism was presumably behind the decision to set the death/rebirth/atonement "Across the Sea" episode not in A.D. 33 but in A.D. 44.

This is important, actually. The show's lurch into the post-mortem existences of its cast was not so much a religious move as it was a laying the writers' cards on the table. Whilst the show ran I, like many fans, believed the ultimate resolution would be science-fictional�material, pseudo-scientific. I was wrong. The finale makes plain that the idiom of the show all along was magic.

This, in the absence of any more specific explanations, covers the "answer" to the many unexplained loose ends. Why was Miles able to commune with dead people? It was magic. How could it be that the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 cropped up so significantly, coincidentally and ubiquitously? It was magic. How was Ben Linus able to spin a wheel and make an entire Pacific island (all the stuff below the waterline, we assume, as well as all the stuff above) vanish and reappear somewhere else? Magic. How were the brothers' lives (and the lives of some other characters) so lengthily extended? Magic. What, in the final analysis, was Lost about? The finale makes the answer to this question plain: it was about magical thinking.

Perhaps that looks dismissive, but I don't mean it to be. "Magic" here is not a catch-all or non-specific term. In fact, understanding that the show is about magical thinking enables us to be more specific about the emotional focus of the show. Lost was about magic in a general sense, but more specifically it was about bereavement as magical thinking.

I'll conclude this review by expanding upon this last point a little, and I'll do that by quoting from Roger Luckhurst's excellent New Formations review-essay "Reflections on Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking" [pdf].

"Magical thinking," Luckhurst points out, "is in fact an incredibly hot topic in empirical psychological research." However rationally scientific and material we might think our lives to be, "magical thinking" is a palpable and very significant social-cultural fact. Research into this aspect of our lives retains much of the intellectual framework set up by J. G. Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890), in which sympathetic magic works through the laws of similarity and contiguity ("things which have been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed"). Beliefs about who can and cannot catch AIDS and from what objects, for instance, differ around the world but consistently privilege magical and moral pollutions over the facts of viral transmission. . . . Research has also targeted how stressful situations reduce the ability to control cognitive operations and thus amplify magical thinking, a process in which "individuals may generate solutions that increase their control over the sources of stress."

Luckhurst notes that "Modernity" (we might particularly include "science fiction" here) "has defined its rationality through the suppression of magical thought." This is what Weberian rationality means: "the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means." Belief in magical agencies becomes aligned to the primitive and the child. Edward Tylor, one of the first professional anthropologists in England, argued in 1871 that the function of anthropology was to seek out and eliminate "survivals" of primitive thought, the "pernicious delusions" such as magic that could only be associated with "the lowest known stages of civilisation." Frazer's study of magic was conceived within the same evolutionary framework. Magic was the most primitive set of human beliefs, "a spurious system of natural law" that hadn't yet advanced to the more conceptually sophisticated delusion of religious belief, which was in turn finally overthrown by a rational understanding of causation. Freud propped himself on Tylor and Frazer's model for his discussion of animism, magic and the omnipotence of thought in Totem and Taboo.

Luckhurst goes on to note that "every one of these theorists, however, was perplexed by the brute persistence of magical thinking into the heart of modernity." He cites a number of subsequent writers who have addressed this. Simon During, for instance, has examined the rise of "secular magic" in modernity, the imperfect stamping out of superstition creating instead "a fuzzy and variegated vernacular modern magic" that is a strange mix of superstition, religious sentiment, and a knowing suspension of disbelief. This describes the milieu of Lost pretty well; and I'd say it makes more sense to read the show's fascination with "belief" as being about "enchantment" rather than adumbrating a specifically religious agenda.

The key context for all this, as Luckhurst notes, is bereavement. Confronting death's radical discontinuity "prompts all kinds of magical evasion and beliefs in forms of posthumous survival." Grief plays "magic tricks" on our subjectivity and cognition. "In Charles Taylor's terms, the modern self is 'buffered, ' yet traumatic events puncture that protective sphere and return us instantly to the pre-modern self which is 'porous, ' and thus open to all kinds of belief in occult transmissions and sympathetic magic . . . the psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi believed the same thing. 'In the moment of trauma, ' Ferenczi said in the early 1930s, 'some sort of omniscience about the world . . . makes the person . . . more or less clairvoyant.'"

Lost, as a show, begins with a massive dramatic externalisation of the traumatic event�the plane crash�which is in turn the symbolic articulation of a specific bereavement: Jack is on Flight 815 carrying back the dead body of his father. The key players have similar paternal bereavement experiences: Sawyer became a con-man himself because of a traumatic childhood experience in which a con-man (whose name Sawyer adopts) resulted in the death of his father. Kate is herself responsible for the traumatic death of her abusive father. This triad is at the emotional heart of the show, flanked by Locke�whose own abusive father abandoned him, tricked him into giving up his organs, and tried to kill him�and Ben Linus, whose father was a sadsack alcoholic whom he eventually killed. All these father-oriented storylines find their nexus in the symbolic father of the island, the man with the Biblically patriarchal name "Jacob" (who himself, significantly enough, is revealed to be fatherless). The murder of this father-figure, and his replacement, is where the show reveals itself as having been going all along.

Lost is not about "fathers" in a general sense, then. It is more specifically about the death of fathers; about how we live when our father has passed away. Fathers are what is Lost in Lost; and negotiating the process of bereavement is what orchestrates the various sorts of magical thinking on display in the narratives. The nice irony is that the show, by staging its own finale, has enacted its theme. What's Lost for fans of the show now is precisely Lost; we are bereaved of our weekly fix of island magic. This is what gives the Onion skit at the end of this link its force.

That's how this deeply addictive, daft, yet sadly missed show worked.

Copyright � 2010 Adam Roberts

Tuesday, July 6, 2010 Dog A lingering fear of mine was confirmed last night: My dog might be slightly retarded.

I've wondered about her intelligence ever since I adopted her and subsequently discovered that she was unable to figure out how stairs worked.

I blamed her ineptitude on the fact that she'd spent most of her life confined to a small kennel because her previous owners couldn't control her. I figured that maybe she just hadn't been exposed to stairs yet. Accepting the noble responsibility of educating this poor, underprivileged creature, I spent hours tenderly guiding her up and down the staircase - placing biscuits on each step to lure her and celebrating any sign of progress. When she still couldn't successfully navigate the stairs at the end of her first week with me, I blamed it on her extreme lack of motor control. This dog is uncoordinated in a way that would suggest her canine lineage is tainted with traces of a species with a different number of legs - like maybe a starfish or some sort of primitive snake.

The next clue came when I started trying to train her. I am no stranger to training dogs - much of my childhood was spent working with various canines because I lacked the social skills to interact successfully with people. With so many years of experience behind me, I was sure that training this new dog would be a very simple task.

I was wrong. Not only is training my dog outlandishly difficult, it is also heartbreaking. She wants so badly to please me. Every fiber of her being quivers with the desire to do a good job.

She tries really hard.

Chapter 19

But when turning her head at an extreme angle fails to produce a life-altering epiphany, she usually just short-circuits and rolls on her back.

Over the past two months, she's made some progress, but it's been painfully slow and is easily forgotten. Still, I was living under the assumption that maybe my dog just had a hidden capacity for intelligence - that all I had to do was work hard enough and maybe she'd wake up one day and be smart and capable like a normal dog. Until last night.

Last night I was sitting on my couch mindlessly surfing the internet when I looked up and noticed my dog licking the floor. Just licking and licking. At first I though maybe I'd spilled something there, but her licking did not seem to be localized to one spot. Rather, she was walking around the room licking seemingly at random. She lay down on her side and kept licking out of the side of her mouth while staring directly at me.

At that moment I realized that I needed to know for sure whether my dog was retarded or not.

I Googled "how to tell if your dog is retarded" and after a bit of research, I found a dog IQ test that looked fairly legitimate. It involved testing your dog's ability to solve a few very basic problems, like figuring out how to get out from underneath a blanket.

I gathered the necessary supplies and began testing.

The first test asked me to call my dog using a variety of words that were not her name to gauge whether she could tell the difference. I called out "refrigerator!" and was pleased to see that my dog did not respond. She also failed to respond to "movie," "dishwasher" and "banana." I was beginning to feel very proud of her. Then came the crucial step: I called her name. Nothing. I called it a few more times to be sure. Still nothing.

The words hung like a neon sign broadcasting my dog's failure. "It's okay," I thought. "She'll do better on the next one."

In the second test, I had to put a blanket over my dog and time her to see how long it took her to get out. I threw the blanket over her and started my stopwatch. She made some cursory attempts at freeing herself, but as the seconds ticked by, it became clear that she was not going to pass.

Still, I gave her the benefit of the doubt and assumed that she just enjoyed being under there and could get out if she wanted to. I added an extra couple points to her tally for faith's sake.

After flagrantly failing three more tests, it came down to the final trial. If she could score five out of five possible points on this section of the test, she could bump herself out of the bottom category into "below average."

First, I had to make her sit, which was a test in and of itself. Then I was supposed to show her a biscuit, let her sniff it, then - after making sure she was watching - place the biscuit on the ground and put a plastic cup over it. If she knocked over the cup to get the biscuit within a certain amount of time, she'd pass the test.

I put the biscuit under the cup and started the timer.

My dog ran over to the cup and sniffed it. She walked around it once and then looked up at me like I was some sort of wizard. I pointed to the cup. I knew it was cheating, but I wanted to help my dog pass her test.

She didn't understand, but she knew she was supposed to do something, so she just started frantically doing things because maybe - just maybe - one of those things would be the right thing and the magical wizard cup would let her know where the treat went.

After five minutes of watching my dog aimlessly tear around the house, I finally accepted that she was not going to pass any part of the test and yes, she was most likely mentally challenged. But damn it, I was not going to let my poor, retarded dog feel like she failed.

Olivia Munn: "I'm easy to hate. I get it" The newest "Daily Show" star opens up about her big break -- and the mini-furor it's caused among feminists By Sarah Hepola

YouTube screen shot

It's a rather stressful time to be Olivia Munn. In June, the 30-year-old landed one of the most coveted spots in late-night, as a female correspondent on "The Daily Show," an accomplishment that unleashed a surprising geyser of commentary and criticism about women and comedy, starting with a post on Jezebel that sniffed at her credentials and accused the liberal sacred cow "The Daily Show" of sexism. (The post elicited a saucy rebuttal from the show's female staffers on Wednesday.)

"Looking back, it was ridiculous of me to even prepare!" one "Daily Show" hopeful complained to Jezebel. "Should I have gone to the gym more? Done Playboy? It's such a joke."

The level of ire testifies not only to the delicate politics of feminism in the comedy world but also to Munn's status as provocateur -- she has appeared on the cover of Playboy (in a bikini, thank you very much) and when she hosted G4's games-and-gadgets orgy "Attack of the Show!," she was beloved for such stunts as jumping into a giant pie wearing a French maid's outfit and gobbling a raw hot dog dangling on a string. On "The Daily Show," which has certainly boosted the careers of good-looking people -- its handsome host among them -- Munn stands out among the cast as something altogether different: an unapologetic sex bomb. And yet all the controversy about what she looks like, where she came from and who she is obscures the only relevant question: Is she funny?

Munn has only made two appearances on the show, her somewhat underwhelming debut as senior Asian correspondent (Munn is half-Chinese) and a far more promising recent segment, poking fun at the Russian espionage saga. But it's too early to judge; she has yet to hit her stride. On Thursday, the show airs her first field assignment (though she couldn't say much about it, she did say it took place in Arizona). "It was a hard one," she says. "But Jon [Stewart] told me, 'I purposefully sent you to do a hard one, because I want people to see that you're the real deal.'"

When she met me for lunch on Wednesday, Munn was tired from a grueling schedule and a bit bruised by the storm that has erupted around her lucky break. (Near the end of the interview, she teared up.) But she had an easygoing charm and a sly, flirty banter as she comfortably held forth about posing for Playboy, her abusive upbringing, her new memoir, "Suck It, Wonder Woman!" -- and why the haters just need a good fuck.

So you've been at the center of some controversy lately ...

About hoverboards?

Yes, exactly. That's where I was going.

[mock important voice] Well, people don't know, but Jon Stewart is actually at the forefront of that, making affordable hoverboards for every man, woman and child.

Are you tired of talking about the Jezebel story?

No. But I would really like to make a point that no one knew what the fuck Jezebel was before that story came out.

Well, I knew what Jezebel was.

You do, it's in your world. But people in Hollywood didn't know what Jezebel was. "The Daily Show" didn't know what Jezebel was. But this article was picked up and pushed out and these women sit behind this very thin veil that I can see right through, this idea that "we stand up for women." If you stand up for women, then don't bash me.

This woman at Slate wrote a very interesting article that all my friends at G4 have been e-mailing me [Emily Gould's piece, "How feminist blogs gin up page views"]. I kept seeing this over and over -- they're attaching my name to things to get more hits. But what's more frustrating is that they've been given some kind of power as the voice of women, and they are not. If they were, then they would have done a better of job of interviewing people actually currently working on the show.

The interviews were with people who worked there seven years ago. There were people who weren't even regulars. And at the end of the day, the reason why you don't know who any of those people are is because "The Daily Show" didn't find them funny.

That story hurt a lot of people's feelings. I'm not talking about Jon Stewart. I'm talking about the women who work there and the women who came before me. "Oh, I'm the pretty girl who came in?" That means that Nancy Carell isn't gorgeous? Like all these other women who have been there aren't beautiful women? Jon Stewart hires people that he thinks are funny. That's it. That's the only requirement.

But the controversy points to how important this topic is, because there's just such a narrow berth for women in comedy. Of course people are furious about who gets what. There are just so few spots.

There are so few roles for everyone, period. That's just how it is. But if having pretty women on TV was all you needed to make it sell, then Playboy TV, which is actually a channel, would be the No. 1 channel in the world, and it's not. And if "The Daily Show" weren't funny, just in general funny, it wouldn't be where it is. It's not about guys or girls. The best man or woman wins the role.

Surely part of the resentment must come from the fact that you didn't come through traditional comedy channels. I�ll be honest with you, if I was trying out for that part, if I was a female comedian, I would hate you.

I'm easy to hate. I get it. When I first came to L.A., I would go to these commercial auditions for Target. I'm 110 pounds now, but I used to be 135. And I would go to these auditions and these girls would be, like, in that effortless L.A. look: T-shirt, jeans and flats. So thin they'd just walk with a shuffle. I know what it�s like to not think it�s fair for someone to look a certain way and also get the dream job. But it's ridiculous to say that a woman can't be funny and also be sexy.

Lots of funny women are pretty. Lucille Ball was pretty. Tina Fey is pretty. I don�t care how many times "30 Rock" tells me she's ugly, she's not. But I wonder if people bristle about you because we don�t often see women who are sexy and funny. Because a lot of funniness is about awkwardness in your own body. You know, I cannot imagine Tina Fey, for instance, posing in a bikini.

Here�s the thing: My NBC show ["Perfect Couples," a sitcom debuting midseason], I got that show because Tina Fey recommended me. Because they asked her, who are the funniest actresses out there right now? I do not think that Tina Fey was looking at my boobs. I do not think she was thinking, "Oh, Olivia is eye candy." I think that Tina said, "She�s funny."

Are you someone who's comfortable in a bikini?

I'm someone who knows how to look comfortable. But I know what my angles are, because that�s the job of it.

There is some part of your persona that is tough. And I mean, like, someone who seems like they�ve always had to fight. And it comes across in different ways. For one thing, you cuss a lot. And I wondered where that came from.

It sounds better. Nothing says "bitch" like "bitch." "Cunt" is a great word. Underused and overanalyzed.

You can see the defensiveness in other ways, too, though. Like there is a post on your blog after the Maxim cover shoot where you say, " If you have any problems with me in this spread, I have two things to say to you: 1. Just don�t look. And 2. You sound like you just need a good fuck."

Because at that time I was in my last relationship [with "Star Trek" actor Chris Pine], and I was fed up with comments on the blogs, when girls I�d never met were like, she�s only dating him because he�s a movie star. And I really still believe that anybody who's sitting there judging my relationship does need to get the shit fucked out of them.

But is there any part of you that understands an objection to your being on the cover of Maxim? Even like a maternal instinct that would say, hey, this is a talented girl. Why is she putting this part of herself first and foremost? The idea that it might diminish your gifts.

Yes, I can see that. But I would like to hope we can get to a place where it�s OK to be funny and sexy and be on the cover of a magazine and you can still be on "The Daily Show."

I wanted to talk about the story you write in your memoir about the Playboy shoot. [Munn agreed to pose for Playboy on the condition there would be no nudity but found herself continually nudged toward it by an overzealous photographer and stylist. She never did take off her clothes, but it was a constant struggle.] It's a lighthearted piece, but it made me uncomfortable. I really felt for you -- stuck between what you had clearly consented to and what these other people wanted, how you were trying to be sexy and keep it together while clearly anxious and upset that some nip slip was going to be snapped and published.

And the photographer kept going, "Be comfortable, be comfortable," and I'm like, "I'm not comfortable, because I don't know you. And I don't like you."

When I went in to approve the photos, I literally had to have a conversation with my lawyers, my publicist, my manager, saying: Is that her vagina, or is that not her vagina? It's tricky if you're clean-shaven, because what determines a vagina is pubic hair. It brings up a lot of emotions for me to even say it that way. I know all that some people will see in that sentence is: "clean shaven"! But I remember sitting on the stairs, feeling so violated afterward. I was sobbing. [The eventual Playboy cover did not feature nudity but a picture of Munn in a red bikini.]

Amanda Hess on a blog called the Sexist wrote that the story was a case study in how magazines like that coerce women.

I don't find myself to be the kind of person who is easily swayed. I could see what this guy was doing. But if I pose for Maxim, I know that if my nipple accidentally slips out, they can't publish that. With Playboy it's different. I understand that the criticism is: "Yeah, but she posed for it anyway." Well, that's like saying, "Oh, you were asking for it cause you dressed a certain way."

It did mean something for me to be on the cover. There's such an image of what beauty is: Women get their lips done, and their boobs done. But I'm multiethnic. I've got smaller boobs. I'm 5-foot-4. If they're saying that's what sexy is, then I think it's a better image to perpetuate than the stuff that still influences me to the point that I wonder: Should I get my lips done?

I'm very open about the fact that it's nice when someone says you're pretty. Especially for someone like me. I have a vivid memory of my stepfather saying to my mom, "Olivia isn't very pretty, is she?" I remember looking at myself in the mirror that night and hitting myself over and over, looking at my eyes, because they looked more Asian. Literally slapping my face and trying to change it. When people are like, "Oh, I don't care that I'm pretty," it's a disservice to what people really go through. And I know that I wasn't alone. So when I do these magazines, yeah, it's nice. It's nice to feel power for doing it. It's nice that someone like Jon Stewart can watch a video of me and not have ever seen me in a Wonder Woman outfit and say, "She's funny."

You mentioned your first stepfather. [Munn has a second stepfather now, whom she talks about glowingly.] I've heard you talk vaguely about being in an abusive family. But what does that mean?

It's one of those things where I've made a conscious decision not to go into details about it. I never wanted to be marked by that. My mom remarried this military guy. On the outside, he was very good-looking. Tall, handsome, and my mom was a very pretty Asian woman. And this guy actually would only marry Asian women, I think, because he thought they were oppressed and seemed submissive. I've started to speak out about it in ambiguous ways because I thought maybe young girls and boys, I wanted to let them know that whatever they're going through, I understand. But the specifics of it, I just want to keep private.

Your book is comic, but actually, my favorite piece is not funny at all. It's about your grandmother's death. [She died at home when Munn was living with her after high school. Part of the story details Munn's slowness calling 911 and her inability to perform CPR]. And the reason I like it is that it has a nice honesty about it. I like that you admit the last thing you said to her was some snappy remark and that you didn't get to apologize, which happens all the time.

They wanted to take that piece out. I said that I would not promote the book if it wasn't in there. That's what my life is. My life has to have levity to it. [pause, tears up]

Ever since yesterday, I've been on the verge of crying. I'm so thankful for where I've been and I felt so bad to see some of the women who were so frazzled by this whole thing, wanting to defend themselves and defend the show and defend Jon. I saw that unnecessary energy, and it made me feel so bad, and I actually said it out loud, that I knew I was the reason they were having to go through that. And I felt like, I just have so much appreciation for where I am right now. I can't believe the things I'm doing. I'm realizing dreams I was afraid to dream.

But that's my life -- in horrible situations there's also a lot of laughter. When something's tough, I make it into a joke. People always want to make themselves sound better. But I can live with myself better if I don't sit here and pretend that I'm someone I'm not. Like you know how in all those magazine profiles, it always starts off with the woman ordering a big burger and eating it unapologetically. Like all of this is so effortless. And the thing is, I do want that, but I also feel like it's important to say that I don't know that I can be that, and I want to tell you my insecurities about not being able to eat whatever I want.

I think about my grandma all the time. You know how people ask if you could go back and do one thing over, what would it be? That's where I would go. I sometimes wonder: Would I save her? Because I literally froze [before calling 911]. Life is so quick. That's why I just feel like: Just let me do my thing.

by Nathan Rabin April 28, 2010 Article Tools Twitter Facebook Digg StumbleUpon Reddit Email This Print This More Random Roles Aasif Mandvi John Hawkes William Zabka Terry Crews Louis Gossett Jr.

The actor: Danny Trejo has played a lot of colorful roles over the course of his prolific career, but few are as dramatic and larger-than-life as the actor playing them. Trejo was a teenage drug addict, a bank robber, and a convict before going straight, turning his life around, and becoming a drug counselor, a position he holds today. Working as an extra on 1985�s Runaway Train led to a bigger gig as Eric Roberts� boxing coach, and a larger role in the film. Trejo hasn�t stopped working in film and television since. Along with Cheech Marin, he�s a core member of Robert Rodriguez�s repertory troupe, appearing in Desperado, Planet Terror, the Spy Kids movies, and just about everything Rodriguez has been involved in. In 2006, Trejo got rave reviews for a rare dramatic role as a recovering drug addict who hooks up with Maggie Gyllenhaal in SherryBaby. After decades of bit and supporting parts, Trejo makes an unexpected but long-overdue transition to much-buzzed-about leading man/action hero in Rodriguez�s Machete, the feature-film version of the trailer of the same name that appeared in Grindhouse. In the feverishly anticipated film, Trejo toplines a cast that includes Robert De Niro, Steven Seagal, Jessica Alba, Don Johnson, Cheech Marin, Lindsay Lohan, and Michelle Rodriguez. In addition, Trejo is re-teaming with Rodriguez for Predators, the second Predator sequel�Rodriguez is producing, Nimr�ntal is directing�and he recently took small but memorable roles on Breaking Bad and in the 2010 kids� film Justin Time, which has just been released on DVD.

Predators (2010)��Cuchillo�

Danny Trejo: Predators is the movie starring Adrien Brody. He took over the Arnold Schwarzenegger part. Well, there�s a big difference between Arnold and Adrien. Arnold�s like steroid muscles, you know what I mean? Adrien uses his mind. Every time this camera�s on him, you can almost hear him thinking about how we�re going to kill this predator. There�s a line where Alice Braga says, �We have to work like a team.� And we�re all assassins, right? So I look at her and say, �Does this look like a team-oriented group of individuals?� And Adrien says, �We might have to work another way.� But he�s always thinking. I actually like his character better. The first Predator was more about �How big�s my bicep?� The second one was fighting aliens. This is one is about an actual plan and an actual war on how to beat these things.

The A.V. Club: People were surprised when Adrien Brody was cast in the lead, and when Topher Grace was added.

DT: They did great. Adrien was great. Adrien�s a hog, straight out. I�ll put him on my team any time. Topher� he�s cute. [Laughs.] But his role, he was very serious about. And me, I won�t do it unless I can have some fun, and I had a lot of fun with it.

The Expendables (2010)�no actual role

DT: Let me tell you about The Expendables. [Writer-director Sylvester] Stallone said I was in The Expendables so he could raise his money, you know what I mean? [Laughs.] Because I bring in the Latin audience. So I was in The Expendables all the way up until the time they started casting. I�m not in The Expendables. That�s one of Hollywood�s ploys to� how do you say it? They have this huge cast, and then all of a sudden, when it comes time to cast, the people that actually raised the money aren�t in it.

AVC: Forest Whitaker and 50 Cent were also supposedly in it at some point. Do you feel like Sylvester Stallone used you?

DT: Of course. Come on, man. [Laughs.] All them guys�supplements are making them nuts.

Runaway Train (1985)��Boxer�

DT: I walked on that movie set as a drug counselor. I was helping this kid I was counseling. He called me up and said, �Hey, there�s a lot of blow down here.� It was 1985, and cocaine was running rampant in the movie industry. It was crazy. You�d walk into production and there�d be lines on the table. He just asked me to come down and support him, because that�s what I did. I still do it. I�m going over on an intervention right now to one of our Hollywood actors. I went onto this movie set, and he was a PA, and I thought it was cute. I had never been on a movie set in my life. All these guys were dressed up as inmates, and they were all trying to act tough. They all had these fake tattoos. I kept smearing these tattoos. I had to say, �Oh shit, I�m sorry. That stuff smears.�

This guy asked me if I wanted to be in a movie, and I said, �What do I gotta do?� And he said, �Do you want to be an extra?� And I said, �An extra what?� And he said, �Can you act like a convict?� I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever heard. I�d been in every penitentiary in the state. I looked at him and I said, �Well, I�ll give it a shot.� He gave me a blue shirt, and I took off my shirt, and I have that big tattoo on my chest. He said �Leave your shirt off.� Then this other guy comes over and says, �Hey, you�re Danny Trejo. I saw you win the lightweight and welterweight title up in San Quentin.� And I go, �Yeah. You�re Eddie Bunker.� I had been in prison with him. And he was a writer. We started talking, and he asked, �Are you still boxing?� And I go, �Well, I still train.� And he said, �Do you want a job? We need someone to train one of the actors how to box.� And I said, �I got a job. They�re going to give me 15 bucks for acting like a convict. What�s this pay?� He said, �It pays $320 a day.� So I said, �How bad do you want this guy beat up? Shit, for 320 bucks�� And he goes, �No, you have to be really careful, this actor�s really high-strung. He�s already socked a couple of people.� I said, �For $320, man, give him a stick. I�ll fight Godzilla for 320 bucks.� I started training Eric Roberts how to box. Eric wanted to learn how to box, and I think he was scared of me, so he�d do whatever I told him to do. Andrey Konchalovskiy, the director, saw that he would do whatever I told him to do. I guess Andrey had some problems with it. So Andrey comes over and hires me. He says, �You be in the movie. You fight Eric in the movie.� And that�s where it started. From that day until right now, I�ve got 183 movies.

AVC: How are you able to be so prolific?

DT: I love doing it. Let me tell you something. When I was young, I was an armed robber. I did robberies. And there�s no adrenaline rush like that. When you�re using drugs and doing robberies, it�s hard to distinguish whether you�re doing robberies to support your drug habit, or doing drugs to support your robbery habit. Those guys that flip

Chapter 20

on motorcycles�it�s like the same kind of adrenaline. It�s unreal. The only time I ever felt that was when I heard Andrey Konchalovskiy yell, �Action!� And then I was like, �Wow. Here we are again. This whole adrenaline�� But this time I didn�t have a gun. I was like, �Wow. This is awesome.� I just totally got hooked. I found my calling. And then when I got my check, I said, �Fuck.� [Laughs.] �Wait a minute. For the first half of my life, I went to prison for being a bad guy. Now they�re paying me to be a bad guy.�

AVC: Did you take acting classes?

DT: In 1985 it was a little different. I would just go with the extras and the director would see me. I was always Inmate No. 1, and I always had one line like, �Kill �em all.� [Laughs.] It was like, �I can do this.� I remember a director handed me a shotgun and he said, �Kick in this door and take control.� There was a poker game going inside, and the director said there would be a couple of stunt people inside. He said to improvise. So I kick in the door, somebody jumps up, I bash them with the shotgun, and I ask this guy, �Oh, you wanna die, huh?� This lady starts screaming, and I put this gun right in her face. So the director yells, �Cut! Cut! God, Danny, where did you study?� I said, �Let me see. Von�s. Safeway. Thrifty Mart.� [Laughs.] So all this stuff I was doing, I just knew. You�ve got to remember, I was Inmate No. 1 for the first five years of my career. So shit, I know how to be an inmate.

AVC: You were a Method actor.

DT: [Laughs.] So I was really having a blast, and then I was getting paid. I�m still a drug counselor. I still go to high schools. We just left Sylmar Juvenile Hall. We did last night, speaking to about 60 kids. I still do that.

The Hidden (1987)��Prisoner�

DT: Shit! That was actually a little sleeper movie. That was a little movie that they did about some monster that got inside people�s bodies. I couldn�t believe the money that was made on that movie. It was this little movie that was �Blah blah blah blah blah,� then all the sudden it was like, �The Hidden, The Hidden, The Hidden!� Wow. That was fun. What did I say? �Whoa, hippie! What kind of dude are you?� [Laughs.]

Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects (1989)��Prison Inmate�

DT: You know what? I did a movie with Charles Bronson before that, Death Wish 4. I met him, and one of the guys on the movie, one of the young guys, got shitty with an old character actor named Perry Lopez, who was like 80 years old and had emphysema. He couldn�t even blow out a candle on a cake. He�s been in the movies since like the �30s. He was trying to set up our little scene, and then all of the sudden, out of the clear blue sky, this guy who thought he was cute says, �Who the fuck nominated you director?� And I laughed; I thought he was joking. This guy�s 80 years old. Perry says, �No, no, I�m trying to set up this little scene so we all won�t be standing here.�

So this punk comes up, he says, �I went to blah blah,� just some, I don�t know what the hell it is, Lee Strasberg or some bullshit training, �and I don�t need no has-been actor to give me direction.� Then I realized this guy wasn�t kidding. I�m thinking, �This guy�s 80. Anybody over 40 is an older person. You better give them some respect.� So I just jacked this punk up and told him, �You know what, bitch? I�ll beat your ass. I nominated him director. Now fuck you. Do whatever he says.� This guy looks at me, almost starts crying, and says, �Hey, I�m trying to stay in character.� I was, �Well, your character�s about to get his ass beat.�

So then I turn around. Charles Bronson is standing right behind me, and he�s watching this. And the last thing you want anybody to see is that you could be violent on a movie set. I look at Charlie, and he saw what I was doing. But he says, �You know, Danny. I like the way you deal with people.� [Laughs.] And then he walked away. Then, about two months later, he called me and said, �Danny, I�ve got this little movie, Forbidden Subjects. You want a little role in it?� I go, �Yeah, sure.� I�ll never forget that. We had a long talk. Charlie was cool. He was awesome.

AVC: He was fairly old at that point, too, wasn�t he? In his 60s?

DT: Oh, yeah. He was in great shape. He wasn�t buffed up, but he was slim and cut up pretty good. That�s the way I try to stay.

AVC: The joke was that he�d keep on making Death Wish sequels until he was 80 and in a wheelchair.

DT: It�s really funny, because he changed. I saw him about a month before Jill [Ireland] passed away, and he looked healthy, then she passed away, and man, he just got old. You talk about soulmates. I just saw him get really old right away once she passed away.

Marked For Death (1990)��Hector�

DT: Steven Seagal. [Laughs.] He was cool. He�s all macho, �I got bigger nuts than you.� But he was cool. He was all right. He kept trying to get me to do my own stunts. I went, �Ah, hell no. They got this guy who looks just like me.� At times he would get overzealous, you know what I mean? You do your own stunts as an actor, and you end up getting hurt. It�s not your job. You�ve got stunt guys. Stunt guys make a lot of money.

Baywatch (1991-1992)��Carlos Urueta�

DT: Wow. [Laughs.] Red bathing suits. [Laughs.] I couldn�t believe that show. I�d be sitting in Venice, looking at all these girls running around and thinking, �They�re paying me for this. Thank you, Jesus.� [Laughs.] You know what I mean? �I wish the guys in prison could see me right now.� But what was amazing was about five years later, I went to Paris, and there�s this big crowd at the airport. They�re all waiting to see me. I�m thinking one of my movies, right? They know me from Baywatch. �You were on Baywatch!� I believe that thing was all over the world.

AVC: They say it�s one of the most popular TV shows internationally of all time.

DT: It�s amazing. I did a favor for David Hasselhoff, before he got Baywatch. I was in this little movie called W.B., Blue And The Bean. He asked me �Would you do this?� and I said �Sure.� And then bang, bang, when he got Baywatch, he got me two episodes.

Desperado (1995)��Navajas�

DT: Desperado. That was the one. Boy, that thing was amazing, because that character was so strong, and never said a word. I kept asking Robert, �Come on, give me a line, man,� and he wouldn�t. �No, no. This is heavy. I�m telling you, Danny, you�re so strong.� �Give me a line!� I�m screaming at him. �No.� So, after the movie came out, we were in front of Sony, we were talking in this big group over at Sony, and somebody raises their hand and says, �You know, Danny, in that movie, your character was so strong and never said a line. Was that an actor�s choice?� I looked right in Robert�s eye and said, �Yes it was.� He gave me the finger. [Laughs.]

He was awesome. Robert is just�you know what? The directors I�ve been working with, let me tell you, I�ve been working with Nimr�Antal], with Rob Zombie. And they all kind of come under the umbrella of Robert Rodriguez. They�ve all read [Rodriguez�s memoir about the making of El Mariachi] Rebel Without A Crew, and they all shoot like Robert. I love the way they shoot. They know what they want. They don�t have to see what they want. A director that has to see what he wants has got you doing seven, eight, nine takes. Then, �That�s it! That�s what I want!� But a director that knows what he wants, bang. Two takes, three takes, �Let�s go, move it on.� He knows where he�s going to cut. I love that. I love that about Robert, I love that about Nimr�I love that about Rob Zombie. Rob is so laid-back. He�s like, �Eh, we got it.�

Heat (1995)��Trejo�

DT: Yeah, that was the shit. That was unreal. Me and Eddie Bunker walked on that set as armed-robbery consultants. What a job. [Laughs.] I ran into Michael Mann, and he knew me from a movie called Drug Wars: The Camarena Story that me and him did years ago. Then he also knew my uncle who�s in Folsom, because he did a movie called The Jericho Mile. So Michael Mann says, �Come on, Danny, I want you to meet a couple of guys you�re going to be working with.� I walk into a room with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Val Kilmer, Jon Voight. I just said, �Wow.� [Laughs.] I could not believe it. And then he says, �Here,� and that�s where I got that role.

AVC: What does an armed-robbery consultant do?

DT: You just make it look real. You show somebody how to hold a gun. You show somebody how to walk into a bank. You show somebody how to take control. Everybody has an idea of what an armed robbery is supposed to be, and the reality is, you have to scare people up until a point. If you scare them too much, you will lose control, because they will freak out. That�s the last thing you want. So some people will come in, �All right, you motherfuckers! Everybody get up against the fucking�� and it�s like, �Dude, they�re going to blow. You understand what I�m saying?� But if you walk up to somebody and say, �Look, I�ve got a gun, and if you make one move, I�ll kill you.� All of a sudden, they take that in, okay, they�ve taken that into their senses, and they�re saying, �I better not move.� It�s like a horse. If you run up to a horse, you�re going to scare it. It�s going to jump. So you just walk up to him real slow and then put a saddle on him or whatever you want.

AVC: If you�re too aggressive, people will feel like they have nothing to lose. They�re probably thinking, �If I�m going to die anyway, I might as well be a hero.�

DT: Exactly. You�ve got it. Wow, you�d make a good armed robber. [Laughs.]

From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)��Razor Charlie�

DT: Yeah, that was great. I got to work with George Clooney, who is the man. George Clooney was cool. He was a lot of fun. But you�ve got to watch him, because he is a prankster. If he ain�t having fun, he won�t do it. It�s got to be fun, or he�ll be, �Hell no, let�s not do it. That�s not fun.� Me and him had a blast, man. I just saw him at the premi� of Up In The Air. You know what? Actually a good movie. It�s a chick flick, but it�s a good movie. Don�t tell anybody I watched it.

Anaconda (1997)��Poacher�

DT: We got to go to Brazil on that. We�re in Brazil on the Amazon River. The funny thing is, I used to have a fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Henley, who was anal about the Amazon River. She would always be crazy about it. She would say, �The Amazon this� and �The Amazon that,� and I�m like, �Who gives a shit? I didn�t care about the Amazon River. Forty years later, I�m doing Anaconda on the damn Amazon River. [Laughs.] I�m sitting there, and Jon Voight, J. Lo, Ice Cube are all asking questions, and I knew all the answers. They thought I was the smart guy. I know all about this! Thank you, Mrs. Henley.

Con Air (1997)��Johnny �Johnny-23� Baca�

DT: Con Air. You don�t know how many people scream that to me at Target. �Hey! Johnny-23!� So a lot of people watched that movie. That was a lot of fun. The only problem: the biggest case of testosterone I�ve ever been in. It was 30 guys all trying to be bad-asses. It was so weird. If you would spit, somebody would spit a little farther. Pretty soon, you�ve got 40 people trying to see how far they can spit. If you did a push-up, somebody would do two, then three, then four. It was like a competition of who was the baddest ass. It was funny.

AVC: Who do you think won the competition to see who could be the baddest ass on Con Air?

DT: I�m going to tell you something: Nicolas Cage? He�s in shape. That guy, when we did Con Air, he was in great, great shape.

AVC: He had all those scenes where he was exercising in prison.

DT: John Malkovich wasn�t too much for push-ups. [Laughs.]

AVC: That was one of Dave Chappelle�s first really big roles.

DT: Yeah, Dave Chappelle. He was funny, man. Dave Chappelle is a riot. He�s a riot to be around. Nice guy.

Six Days Seven Nights (1998)��Pierce�

DT: Yeah, that was funny. We were on Kauai for about three months. I was a pirate. I was working with two Australian guys. No, from that island around Australia. New Zealand. They were pretty cool. I got to meet Harrison Ford, and that�s a big dog. That was real fun; we hung out a little bit. I met Anne Heche. Ellen [DeGeneres] came to visit her, so I got to meet Ellen.

Walker, Texas Ranger (1998-1999)��Joe Lopez�

DT: Walker, Texas Ranger. Big Chuck Norris. That�s it, man. �Chuck Norris doesn�t do push-ups, he pushes the world down.� I remember those jokes. Now they�re saying �Chuck Norris dresses up like Danny Trejo on Halloween.�

xXx (2002)��El Jefe�

DT: Yeah, xXx. That was with Vin Diesel. I actually met Vin Diesel when we were doing Reindeer Games with Charlize Theron and Ben Affleck. We did that up in Canada, and Vin Diesel actually had a role, but he was going to miss another role. He was going to go do The Fast And The Furious. And Reindeer Games wasn�t right for him anyway. Donal Logue ended up taking the role. Vin Diesel was torn between staying there and going to do The Fast And The Furious. I was, �What the fuck�s wrong? That�s a no-brainer. Get the fuck out of here!� He said, �Man, I don�t want to leave.� I said, �You haven�t been on film yet! They haven�t got you on film. They�ll get another sucker up here right now.� So he called up and said, �Hey, you know what? I�m leaving.� He went back to do The Fast And The Furious, and Donal Logue, who�s one of my best, best friends, came up and played Pug in Reindeer Games.

AVC: So Vin Diesel made the right choice.

DT: Absolutely. Dear God, are you kidding? Come on. I think his agency was doing a favor for somebody sending him. I said, �Man, fuck �em. Are you kidding?� It�s like, if I�m going to star in a movie, or I�m going to do this shit�and Reindeer Games is a great movie, don�t get me wrong�but I�m saying, you�ve got this little role where you�re playing a goofy little guy�he didn�t fit it anyway! Vin Diesel isn�t a goofy, silly little guy. He�s an action hero. Good guy, too. Really nice guy. And he�s very, very loyal. When he did xXx, he called me direct and said, �Danny, come on. I want us to do this. I owe you.� I said, �Okay,� and I went and did xXx.

AVC: He�s supposedly coming back for xXx 3.

DT: I don�t know what they�re going to do. I don�t keep up with Hollywood. My philosophy is, �Call me if you need me.�

Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy and Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie (2004)��Bartender�

DT: Anchorman. That was Will Ferrell. Funny, funny guy. When he walks in the room, everybody starts laughing. He�s just got a funny aura. He�s a funny dude. I bet he got beat up a lot in school.

The Devil�s Rejects (2005)��Rondo�

DT: Yeah. Diamond Dallas Page. DDP! That was a lot of fun. That�s where I met Rob Zombie. Rob was just a sweetheart. His wife Sheri, another sweetheart. Two great people. Like I said, they like to work like Robert Rodriguez. It�s laid back. I brought my kids on the set. It�s not like everybody�s real serious about getting this� It�s about �Hey, let�s have fun doing it.�

SherryBaby (2006)��Dean Walker�

DT: I didn�t want that role. I didn�t really want to do that. It was my agent, Gloria, just, �Come on, do it. You�ve got to do this. Do this, do that.� So I went and did it and got to go all over the world with that movie. Everywhere they premi�d it, they wanted us there. I got to go to Prague, to Paris, to Germany.

AVC: Why were you reluctant to take the role?

DT: Well, it was a drama. [Laughs.] But once I got into it, it was awesome. It was heavy. Unbelievable actress; it was a joy to work with her anyway. I kept asking Laurie [Collyer], the director, �Come on, let me at least slap her.� All she did was come and cry on my shoulder. Let me pull hair or something, right? Everyone else is abused.� But no, I am the nice guy. It worked out really well.

Smiley Face (2007)��Albert�

AVC: A year later�you have a very eclectic filmography here�you played Albert in Smiley Face.

DT: Yeah, Smiley Face, that was funny. That was just a cute movie. Oh, God. What did I play in Smiley Face? [Long pause.] I don�t remember.

AVC: [Laughs.] You have 183 credits.

DT: [Laughs.] I can forget a couple.

Delta Farce (2007)��Carlos Santana�

AVC: In 2007, you portrayed Carlos Santana in Delta Farce.

DT: Oh, man. Larry The Cable Guy. What a farce. That was so funny. Me and Larry, we just kept cracking up every day. We would just tell each other jokes all day long, because I love to laugh. Making him laugh was just like my joy, like, �Wow! I made Larry The Cable Guy laugh!� [Laughs.]

Grindhouse (2007)��Machete�

DT: I play the Uncle Machete in Spy Kids. He�s the mysterious uncle with all the gadgets. He�s a scientist. But Machete, the movie Machete, Robert talked about when we were doing Desperado. He said, �I want to use you for this character�� He had that idea then. Then when we did the trailer to Machete, I said, �So this is going to happen?� He goes, �I think so.� So they put the trailer for Machete in Grindhouse. Then the trades said that Machete was the best thing in Grindhouse, that trailer. It was a really exciting trailer. The movie just got a mind of its own. It was unreal. You got Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Lindsay Lohan, Michelle Rodriguez, Don Johnson, Steven Seagal, Jeff Fahey, Cheech Marin, and a couple of other people. The twins, the two twins that are in Grindhouse [Electra and Elise Avellan as The Crazy Babysitter Twins], are also in Machete. My son and daughter are in Machete. My two best friends are in Machete. It just kept on and on, and it�s an action-packed movie from start to finish. I think it�s a culmination of everything Robert Rodriguez has done.

AVC: Do you think it�s a culmination of everything you�ve done as well?

DT: Well� yeah. I think so. If you�re looking for literary value, don�t go. If you�re looking for action-packed, it is from start to finish. And I get to kiss Jessica Alba. That�s my love interest. And Michelle Rodriguez.

AVC: Is it surreal being the leading man after playing so many supporting roles? After playing so many prisoners, was it surreal to be the star of such a big movie?

DT: You know what? You�ve got to do the same job. It doesn�t matter. When Robert De Niro came up, because I worked with him in Heat, he looked at me and said, �Danny! It�s your starring role, man. I�m really proud of you. I knew you were going to make it when we were doing Heat. You had it.� I looked him right in the eyes and said, �Can I get you some coffee, Mr. De Niro?� [Laughs.] He says, �No, we�ve got people to get us coffee.� [Laughs.]

The Young And The Restless (2008)��Bartender�

DT: Let me tell you something: my mother did not believe I had a job until I did those episodes of The Young And The Restless. When I walked into her house after she saw them, she said, �Oh, you finally made it!� She was so proud of me. She was calling all her friends. �Danny�s going to be on The Young And The Restless!� That was hilarious.

AVC: Did you get to beat anybody up as the bartender?

DT: No. I was helping� I forget the star of that, the one guy, I got my mom his picture. He�s been on there for 30 years or whatever.

AVC: It was your first soap opera, wasn�t it? Was filming a soap opera different from your usual roles?

DT: Soap operas, they�re going a mile a minute. It�s bang, bang. When you�re shooting this scene, they�re setting up the next scene on another stage. It�s go, go, go, go, go. It�s not like a film where you�re shooting a scene, then you shoot another scene, then you rest. It is a mile a minute.

King Of The Hill (2003-2008)��Enrique�

DT: That�s a lot of fun, because you�re working in front of a microphone, so you can show up in your pajamas if you want. So I got to be pretty good friends with the little girl that passed away, Brittany Murphy. I got to meet her. You sit in the green room for a while, you�re just talking to see what�s happening. It�s real sad, but Hollywood�s full of tragedies.

Breaking Bad (2009-2010)��Tortuga�

DT: Tortuga. �The Turtle.� That was funny. My head ends up on top of a turtle, so people try to tease me. They say, �Hey! We saw your head on top of a turtle!� I tell them, �Yeah, well, my body was at the bank.� [Laughs.]

AVC: Did they have to make a mask of your face for that?

DT: Of the whole thing. They put this cast stuff all over you, and you come out with this perfect bust of your head.

AVC: That had to be very strange, to see your head on top of a turtle.

DT: Yeah. [Laughs.] �What did you do today?� �My head was on top of a turtle.�

Tim And Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! (2010)��Criminal�

Death Race: Frankenstein Lives (2011)��Goldberg�

AVC: This year, you portrayed Criminal in an episode of Tim And Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!

DT: I don�t remember that. I�ve done quite a bit this year. I just finished doing Death Race 2 for seven weeks in South Africa. That spun my mind. I don�t think my mind�s right yet from the time difference.

AVC: Is it a big role?

DT: Yeah. I play the lead mechanic in Death Race 2. The only person I know who�s in it is a gorgeous girl, Tanit [Phoenix]. She�s an African actor. She�s absolutely beautiful. She�s up for the role of Wonder Woman. If she doesn�t get it, they�re idiots. She�s perfect. She almost looks like Lynda Carter. But naturally Hollywood�s probably got some little bimbo they want. I couldn�t believe she was like as, I even told her, �God, you look like Lynda Carter.� And this guy Fred Koehler, who was in Death Race, the first one, and so anyway, I just finished that one.

Vengeance (2010)��Jack�

DT: Go to vengeancearmy.com and you can get that movie.

AVC: Also known as Danny Trejo�s Vengeance. What can you say about that?

DT: Remember I told you that I love Charles Bronson? Charles Bronson was doing movies called Death Wish, where they kill his family and he becomes a vigilante. That is basically the storyline: They kill my wife and daughter, and I take revenge, vengeance, on criminals. I kill people that are jaywalking.

AVC: Really? Is it a comedy?

DT: No, no, no. It�s a really serious vigilante flick.

AVC: And 50 Cent and Jason Mewes are in it?

DT: 50 Cent, Jason Mewes, Diamond Dallas Page, Donal Logue, Baby Bash, Tech Nine, Houston Alexander, and Rashad Evans. We�ve got some monsters in it.

'Axe Cop' Coming to Print at Dark Horse Comics [Exclusive] Dark HorseInterviewsNews4 Comments Printed bad guys are doomed. Starting this December, the brother team of writer Malachai and artist Ethan Nicolle are taking their explosively popular hero Axe Cop beyond the Web with a printed collection of its online material, followed by an all-new, full-color three-issue miniseries due Spring 2011 from Dark Horse Comics.

Created during brotherly playtime this past December, the Nicolle brothers' collaboration achieved almost instant online fame by fusing the imagination of the then-5-year-old Malachai with 29-year-old Ethan's Eisner-nominated cartooning in one intense Webcomic package. Seven months, and loosely 100 online pages of content later, "Axe Cop" continues its kinetic rampage into the hearts of new fans.

Read on as the brothers discuss Axe Cop's future at Dark Horse, the ins-and-outs of their creative process, plus Malachai's idea for what could be the most mind-blowing collected edition of a comic that the world has ever seen (featuring exclusive art by Ethan).

ComicsAlliance: I heard one of your next stories is about time travel. Can you tell us anything about the places Axe Cop will be traveling through time?

Malachai Nicolle: The Land of Dinosaurs, the Land When There's Only Animals (before humans), Viking Land and what's that sword place called?

Ethan Nicolle: The Age of Swords?

MN: Yeah, The Age of Swords. And that's all, right?

EN: That's a bunch of them, yeah. That's most of the time travel places. They also go to other planets too. They have this gun that can take them pretty much anywhere � in time or in space � anywhere.

CA: Are you excited to read "Axe Cop" as a book instead of on the computer?

MN: Yeah.

EN: What kind of book do you think [Dark Horse] should make it?

MN: A comic book that has color.

EN: How many pages do you want it to have in it?

MN: A lot. 1,000!

EN: Do you want it to be softcover or hardcover?

MN: Hardcover.

EN: With pop-ups?

MN: Yeah, with pop-ups where people pop up and you can move them. And I want a real "Axe Cop" game, just with Axe Cop. The "Axe Cop" game is on the very back of the book.

EN: Can you play it on the book? Is there a screen on the book? Like the book is a little iPod Touch? Like an iPad?

MN: Yeah, right on the back.

CA: Can the book be turned into a weapon to fight bad guys?

MN: Not really, but it ca

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n transform into something awesome!

EN: Like what?

MN: A giant robot. Like a giant robot that you can get in. A giant robot suit with a head.

EN: What's it called?

MN: The AWESOME! Know what? One of it's attacks � it can blast like Iron Man, but gianter. And one different thing, it can put down its own army.

EN: Where does the army come out of?

MN: He's got packs that you get that army guys jump in, then he grabs a bunch and puts them down on the ground and then they fight for him so he can save the people. Do you want to give the first book to me? Because I really like it. I think it's super awesome.

EN: Well, I don't know if Dark Horse will be able to meet all of those demands, but I think they'll try. What did you think of Dark Horse? Remember when we went? What did you think of the stuff they make?

MN: It was awesome. I loved it. They were nice. They gave us some books. And they gave me a stuffed animal � that ninja rabbit.

EN: Oh yeah, the Usagi Yojimbo one. They gave me a "The Goon" lunchbox.

[We say goodbye to Malachai]

EN: You totally just got a glimpse into what it's like writing with Malachai.

CA: I feel like I just sat in on an "Axe Cop" comic being written.

CA: What's it been like to see your early "Axe Cop" stories go from a sort of Internet phenomenon to a merchandised ongoing series with a print component?

EN: It couldn't have been more unexpected. In my experience in the comics industry it's so hard to get anybody to even look at anything you do. And the industry itself is such a niche industry. I didn't know anything about Webcomics, so I didn't know there was much of a community out there. I didn't follow "Penny Arcade" or "Dr. McNinja" or any of the Webcomics that have a following, so I didn't know how many readers there were. So I just kind of threw this out there more as practice than anything, because I was thinking I should try to get into Webcomics. It's been crazy to see how fast it's happened, how many people have read ["Axe Cop"]. It's not something where I thought, "On a really good day it might happen." It was more something I thought couldn't happen. It wasn't on the list of options for what I thought the future of "Axe Cop" would be, so it's been quite an adventure.

CA: Have you found, since you've started "Axe Cop," that you've started reading more webcomics or gotten more involved in that community?

EN: I've read a little bit. I've tried to at least get educated on what the more well-known ones are. I've e-mailed and talked to some of the people who do them. We're actually � hopefully this will happen � we're doing an Axe Cop team-up with Dr. McNinja. I haven't told anybody about this yet. I've been talking to Chris Hastings and he kind of worked out a storyline, so this will actually be written by both him and Malachai and he'll draw it.

And I'm going to have some guest episodes go up while I'm at Comic-Con, so Doug TenNapel ("Earthworm Jim") is going to do another one. I've got some cool stuff happening while I'm gone.

CA: What've you got planned for Comic-Con this year?

EN: This is my first year having my own booth, which I'll actually be sharing with Doug TenNapel. He's been a good friend and he's got a corner booth in the independent area and so we're just splitting it. It's also my first year at Dark Horse, so that's exciting. I'll have some posters, I'll have a new volume of my sketch book with some "Axe Cop" art in it that's never been seen before from my month with Malachai I just spent. With Dark Horse we're going to have the "Axe Can," an ashcan of the favorites of "Axe Cop" as a 16-page minicomic sampler especially for new people who haven't seen it yet. It's something to collect, basically the first-ever printed "Axe Cop" thing.

CA: With everything that's going on, have you made "Axe Cop" your full time gig now?

EN: Yeah, it is my full time gig. It's a modest living at the moment, but there's a lot of stuff on the horizon and I figure it's better to keep putting all I can into it now while it's where it's at. There are a lot of possibilities. There've been some toy companies and game companies and TV and movie interest � nothing solid, but there has been interest from all sorts of people. I figure rather than making "Axe Cop" a hobby that I do after I come home from a 9-5, I'd rather keep it hot.

CA: As you've made the transition form working a day job to doing comics full time, you've kind of become more invested in the site and running the other aspects of a Webcomic. How did you get used to some of the negative things that go along with running a Web site and a Webcomic that a lot of people read? (Trolls, spam, unreasonable readers)

EN: I've been impressed, actually. Most people are really respectful of the idea that it's written by a 5-year-old. I try to keep the language clean and stuff on the site. And most people do. Usually if somebody slips a cuss word, usually they do it just because they aren't paying attention and all the other people who are commenting get on their case before I can even say anything. In general it's been a great community. People are very supportive of keeping things clean and keeping Malachai innocent.

CA: How have you quantified what your core demographic of readers is right now? Who do you think reads "Axe Cop?"

EN: It's mainly guys. My best and easiest way of finding that out is on Facebook. We have our insights [for our "Axe Cop" page] on Facebook. We just went over 12,000 fans today. Our biggest demographic is 18-24. Our second biggest is 25-34. So you know, guys out of high school and in college and I think it's really big with the techie kind of guys. You know [an "Axe Cop" poster] was just on "The IT Crowd." An "Axe Cop" poster is on the set of the living room of the main character.

CA: Was that pretty surreal for you?

EN: Yeah, it was pretty cool. I've experienced so many cool things since "Axe Cop" hit. I knew that [the show] had asked for a poster. Somebody had been asking, but I kept missing the e-mails. In my mind it was just somebody who worked on the set � like somebody who worked on lighting � and they just wanted something to hang in the break room. Then some fans told me that someone from the show was trying to get it for the set so I sent it to them, but I still had my doubts. In the end it was pretty crazy to actually see it framed right there on the wall of the main set. I've been getting e-mails every day from people, "Did you know your poster is on 'The IT Crowd?'"

CA: What are some of the other weirder experiences that have happened to you since the comic's been a hit? What are some of your favorites?

EN: I'm a big "Mystery Science Theater 3000" nerd, I love that show. I'm not a nerd for a lot of things � even though I work in comics, there's not many I collect and I'm not really into superhero comics � but "Mystery Science Theater" I'm kind of a geek for. I noticed somebody buying a shirt one day named Kevin Murphy (Tom Servo) and I thought "Well it can't be that Kevin Murphy." Then later I saw the same name had bought another shirt. Then I saw on Twitter Kevin Murphy had posted, "Check out the new shirt I bought," and there was a link to an Axe Cop shirt. So then I had to e-mail the address on the order and ask "Is this that Kevin Murphy?" And he said "yes," so we e-mailed back-and-forth and he wants to meet up at Comic-Con. I love Kevin Murphy, so that was exciting.

Also, Simon Pegg ("Shaun of the Dead," "Hot Fuzz") � I had nothing to do with it � was kind of getting spammed by some followers on Twitter about "Axe Cop" nonstop, so the next morning he was like, "Everybody is telling me to read 'Axe Cop.' Fine, I'll read it." Then he posted later in the day that he loved it and said it was brilliant and then he posted again down the road and said it was awesome or something. It's amazing the surge of readers we get every time he says something about Axe Cop.

CA: You've told us before that you try not to pressure Malachai and just let him do his thing and be creative. What's that process been like for you since you started?

EN: It's a matter of learning to ask the right questions and learning what gets him going and what gets him on the right track. So generally I have to balance and make the most of my time with him. Usually I can get him for anywhere from a half hour on the phone to an hour and a half on the phone. If he really gets going he'll just go and go, but I have to keep him on track and do a lot of planning before I call him and write down as many questions as I can and figure out what I need. Usually it's like I'll get a chunk of answers from him that form a story and then I'll find all the plot holes and call him back the next week. So I kind of have to set the calls up that way. This most recent story, there's actually kind of two plots going back-to-back switching between the Baby Man story and the story of Axe Cop and his team. It gives me two different stories to work on with Malachai so that when he's kind of not into one he can work on the other one. Learning all of these little strategies has been helpful.

CA: Do you feel like this process has given you insights into being a comic book editor at a major publisher?

EN: I never thought about it like that.

CA: It's like chasing down a freelancer and getting them to focus and hit deadlines. That's kind of what this sounds like to me.

EN: *Laughs* I don't guide the story in the sense that I write it, but I guide it in the sense that you wouldn't have these stories if I didn't ask and ask questions and get pretty thorough. So it is almost like I'm a super intense proofreader who finds plot holes and stuff.

CA: Have you gotten any feedback from people who are more involved in Malachai's day-to-day life? Teachers, your dad, people like that?

EN: I don't think it's changed him much. I haven't heard anything bad or good, really. The only thing I've heard is from his sisters. They're a little frustrated that I call all the time and it's always for him. I talk to them about as much as we talked before. I've always made a point to try to visit at least three times a year. This is just a new thing in our family where I'm in a working relationship with Malachai and I have to be on the phone with him often. They're just a different age. So it's affected his sisters more than him, I think, since they're 12 and 13. They have a much more clear understanding of the success he's experiencing than he does. He doesn't get it, still. He'll say that we're famous and that everyone in the world loves us, but I don't think he really knows what he means by that.

CA: As a comic creator, do you ever look at the technology and things that Malachai has at his fingertips to do creative things and think, "I wish I would have had that when I was his age."

EN: Yeah, he's exposed to a lot more because things are so much easier to get to. When I was his age Nintendo wasn't even out � I didn't even have one until I was 7 or 8 � so maybe I was playing Atari at his age? That's crazy. Even just going to the days of Nintendo - That was a big deal having an NES in your room. But now you can play any old game for free online if you download roms. There's all these free Web sites with Flash games you can play. He plays Flash games all the time, so his pool of influences � where he gets all this stuff for "Axe Cop" � he's got so many different outlets. He watches "Ben 10" and he watches all these shows my dad gets on DVD. They don't have cable there. They have a Wii, but they don't have many games on it. Our dad was relatively old when he had me. I think he was 40. So my dad's hitting 70 now and he's pretty old-fashioned and he doesn't really get the need for all these things. When you're a kid and all these things are coming out you've got to have it, but he doesn't get why. So they don't get quite as many luxuries as kids with younger parents.

CA: Do you think that's helped Malachai's creativity at all?

EN: I think it probably has. They're also just a really good family. People on the Internet will say, "All these violent things Malachai are saying � he must be a really troubled child. He must be exposed to horror movies!" He's not at all. His parents are really strict about what he gets to watch and it's probably my fault that he runs into some of the more gory stuff because he plays video games on my iPod Touch. I have some zombie games on there. I take an idea that he says like, "This guy has a fire attack. He shoots the fire and burns them," and I draw the reality of the guy getting burned and turning into a charred skeleton. It's not like he tells me in gruesome detail what the guy's supposed to look like after he dies. He's such a bright-eyed, happy and friendly and warm kid. He wants to make people happy. He wants to be a friend. It's just the kind of guy he is. He's been loved a lot. We all love him. He's the kid, like when you go to a softball game, he's the one kid in the outfield spinning on his head and doing little flips. He's got super energy and he's always trying to make people laugh and he's hilarious.

CA: Have you started working on the Dark Horse miniseries yet?

EN: I was actually just up with Malachai for a month and we worked on that. I was there working specifically on the story for the miniseries, so we came up with a ton of material. We've got tons of sketches and notes. We'd play and have a bunch of toys and draw maps out. We've got this big, crazy story that I'm going to try to break down into a three-part miniseries. So it's mostly written. It will probably change a lot by the time it hits the page, but it's planned. I'm excited for it. I've always been more of a paper comics guy than a Webcomic guy. I'll enjoy the freedom of not always having pressure on every single page to entertain everybody as a single unit. I've been running into that with the Baby Man story, which I think would be read a lot better [released all at once] since it's got a fast-paced, cat-and-mouse chase. It's kind of been rough releasing it a page at a time, because it feels like it gets really slow.

CA: Can you tell us about the "Axe Cop" collection?

EN: It'll be in black and white. It'll basically be a collection of everything up to the end of the current chapter we're on with all the "Ask Axe Cops" and everything that's in the first three chapters of "Axe Cop" will all be in it. It'll be a pretty sizeable book of Axe Cop comics.

CA: Are there any changes that you'd like to make to "Axe Cop" as you get more resources and more attention to the site? (Like Color, a faster release schedule, etc.)

EN: The only way we could do color is if I could hire a colorist. It's so much work for me and I just don't enjoy it enough to do it as much. The more people that buy the comic and the more money that goes into the site the more we can afford to do things like add colorists. For sure the miniseries will be in color, so I'm excited about that.

CA: The second "Axe Cop" motion comic came out not too long ago. Do you have any other plans for multimedia components to the site?

EN: We have another motion comic coming out in August. It'll probably be mid-to-late August and those have been very cool. Other than that, there's been interest, but nothing solid. I would love to see an "Axe Cop" video game. That would be awesome.

CA: Are you looking forward to seeing any Axe Cop cosplay or some of the t-shirts you've sold over the past year at Comic-Con?

EN: Yeah. I know for sure someone's going to have a Baby Man costume they made. It looks really cool. They posted it on our forums, so I'm excited to see that and excited for whoever comes. This is my first year that anyone's dressed up as a character I've created.

Drug Czar Warns of �Black Market� for Marijuana By: Michael Whitney Monday July 19, 2010 10:02 am Tweet81 Share 179

Not what a black market looks like. (via Curtis Gregory Perry on Flickr)

Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske fears the creation of �a black market that would come into play� if California votes to legalize marijuana. Question for Kerli: what the hell would you consider the $45 billion annual industry in the US that exists despite marijuana prohibition?

Kerlikowske made the curious remarks to NPR�s Michel Martin on Friday when questioned about the administration�s stance on marijuana legalization. Here�s a transcript of the exchange:

MARTIN: One of the arguments, though, that many people make is that just our whole philosophy toward drug use is just flawed, that there are those who of course who favor a dramatic liberalization of drug laws.

That they argue really the issue is prohibition and that if we have the same attitude toward illegal drugs now that we had to with prohibition, it didn�t work then, it�s not going to work now. And what do you say to that?

Mr. KERLIKOWSKE: Well, we know that certainly California is poised to and will be voting on legalizing small amounts of marijuana. And that vote is scheduled for November of this year.

There are a number of studies and a number of pieces of information that really throw that into the light of saying that, look, California is not going to solve its budget problems, that they have more increase or availability if drugs were, or marijuana, was to become legalized. That in fact you would see more use. That you would also see a black market that would come into play. Because why wouldn�t in heaven�s name would somebody want to spend money on tax money for marijuana when they could either use the underground market or they could in fact grow their own.

So there are a whole lot of good reasons why we don�t want to see drugs legalized. And that�s why the Obama administration has a very clear and direct opinion on that.

There�s a lot in here, but let�s start with the basics. Marijuana production is a $45 billion annual industry in the United States, very little of which any state considers legal, and that the federal government considers totally illegal. If that�s not a black market, what is? Either Drug Czar Kerlikowske is ignorant of this reality, which is doubtful, or he considers both the domestic cultivation and sale of marijuana, and the invading Mexican drug cartels, something other than a �black market.�

If marijuana were legalized, regulated, and taxed, as California�s Prop 19 would do, the �black market� that currently exists for the sale of marijuana would be largely irrelevant. A black market exists, by definition, for illegal transactions. Prop 19 would bring this huge industry out of the shadows, where the millions of current marijuana users could make their purchases from legitimate, regulated businesses, as opposed to from dealers that more likely than not buy their pot from Mexican drug cartels. Those cartels, in turn, would see their cash crop of marijuana dry up and defund the rest of the cartels� dirty work. Marijuana legalization is the ultimate killer of black markets.

The second part of the Drug Czar�s argument seems to be that if marijuana were legalized, California wouldn�t see much, if any, tax revenue; that marijuana usage would increase; and that people would evade taxes on marijuana. All those false conclusions appear to be based on a recent study from the RAND Corporation. That study blared dire headlines about the use and cost of marijuana, though the substance of the study stated quite differently.

An analysis of the study by Drug War Rant found that the study�s author�s grossly spinned the actual findings.

There have been a lot of media reports in the past few days talking about the new RAND study that shows how California legalization will result in as much as an 80% decrease in marijuana prices and doubling of marijuana use.

Except, of course, that the RAND report doesn�t really say that at all.

It�s a 55 page report with lots of interesting stuff in it, but when it comes to an actual projection of change in marijuana use with legalization, they have absolutely no idea.

The report was covered with caveats like �unclear,� �uncertain,� �hard to answer,� �for the sake of exposition,� �readers should not interpret our use,� and �the absence of marijuana-specific information.� Basically, the whole damn report is one big question mark, authored by anti-legalization crusader Rosalie Pacula.

Without RAND, and without unfounded fears of a �black market� under legalization, Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske is left with nothing in his argument against legalization aside from the government�s need to continue to spend $15 billion every year to fight drugs like marijuana. Which makes Kerlikowske�s answer to fighting marijuana even more hilarious:

My colleagues, including Ed and others, don�t talk about a war on drugs. They talk about, we can�t arrest our way out of the drug problem in this country. So we have to focus on reducing demand.

Good luck with that, Kerli.

Bow Before Craig Ferguson's Robot Sidekick

Categories: Television

06:30 am

April 5, 2010 E-mail Share Print Comments (15) Recommend (34)

by Linda Holmes Grant Imahara

Grant Imahara is building Craig Ferguson's robot skeleton sidekick � an "entertainment robot" that poses no threat to mankind, he claims.

A little over a month ago, the best news in the history of television (well, if you happen to be me) broke: Grant Imahara, the robot guru of Mythbusters (who previously worked for George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic), agreed to build a robot sidekick for Craig Ferguson. And it was to be a robot skeleton sidekick, just as Ferguson calls his fans on Twitter the Robot Skeleton Army. Grant Imahara

The best part of Grant's sketch of the roboskeleton is the mohawk.

After a whirlwind manufacturing process, the sidekick is debuting on tonight's The Late Late Show � the show airs at 12:35 a.m. Eastern, after David Letterman, so now's the time to think about brewing a thermos of coffee or setting your alarm clock. (Note: As one of our wise commenters pointed out, you might also want to pad your recording time generously, if you go that route, because it could be delayed by the NCAA basketball championship final.)

Meanwhile, I spoke to Grant to ply him for hints about the roboskeleton's creation. I also investigated what Grant calls its capabilities for a "complete sidekick experience," and asked about the machine's potential to become our evil overlord.

How did this Mythbusters/Craig Ferguson relationship get off the ground?

It's interesting, because Craig is really, genuinely a huge fan of the show. He talks about the show a lot, and he had Adam [Savage] and Jamie [Hyneman] on before, and then in January, Kari [Byron], Tory [Belleci] and I went on the show, and that's pretty much how we met. Being a fan of the show, he sort of knows what all of our skills are. And so he had the idea to create a robotic sidekick, and asked me if I wanted to do it. How could I refuse?

What can you tell me about what he's made of?

Craig's original concept was to have a little box on his desk with a bunch of buttons. And he would push a button, and then the sidekick would respond with a pre-programmed phrase, like, "You're the man, Craig," or "That's awesome."

But his show, one of the things he does is that he's very self-deprecating. So he talks about himself, and his set, and CBS, and so he's like, "I don't want a Terminator skeleton. I just want a plastic one." So pretty much, the skeleton served out its life as a plastic skeleton, and I've just taken that and augmented some of the bones with aluminum, put servo motors on, and made an aluminum plate backing to connect everything together.

So he's a souped-up biology-class skeleton.

Yes, he's a biology-class skeleton on steroids.

The roboskeleton's special abilities, and the inevitable question of his potential to turn on us, after the jump.

Does he have special abilities?

Yes. He can say up to seven phrases that come through, you push a button and it repeats the phrase from the skeleton � the skeleton has an on-board amplifier, and a sound board, and so it can play back the phrase. In addition, there is a microcontroller that I'll program with the synchronized movements. So it'll be a complete sidekick experience along with movement, and he can move his jaw, his eyes light up, his head turns, and he can raise one arm.

The raising of the one arm is very important. I've seen the pointing.

Yes, yes. That was definitely identified early on as something that he wanted to do. Grant Imahara

As you can see, this is a sidekick that can point.

So is he still named Geoff Peterson?

He's named Geoff Peterson. And I have no idea where that name comes from. In fact, according to my i

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nformation, nobody knows where the name comes from, except for Craig.

Originally, I thought there was some other names, more robot-skeleton-type names, and then all of a sudden...

Yeah. I think that he came up with that name. There was sort of a Twitter online poll as to what the name for the robot would be. And some people were saying "Roboskelly," some people were "Fergbot," there was probably about half a dozen names that people were talking about. And Craig just said, "No, the name is Geoff Peterson."

That surprised me at the time, because I thought, if you're going to bother having a robot skeleton...but now he sounds like he's just your pal. Maybe it's the desire for a true sidekick. A true friend.

Yeah, I think it's all part of his grand plan. Grant Imahara

"Part of his grand plan," indeed.

Are there other elements of the grand plan?

I have no idea, although I suspect that this is just the beginning of...once he has Geoff Peterson, then he'll probably move on to getting a band, in an effort to be more like the other shows. Next could be a robot band. You never know.

I think everybody will want to know whether you have been careful in building Geoff Peterson to make sure that he cannot turn on us.

Right, right. Yes, I've gotten a lot of messages from the Robot Skeleton Army on Twitter, urging me to be careful that Geoff Peterson does not become self-aware and turn on humanity. I can guarantee you that I've put in place programming to prevent that from happening.

So his eighth phrase is not "Kneel before me, I am Geoff Peterson."

I certainly hope not. He's already got his seven phrases � which were recorded by Craig himself. So when Geoff speaks, it's actually a processed version of Craig's own voice. "Bow before me, humanity" is not one of the phrases.

That's a relief. I'm sure the entire army will be very relieved that they don't have to worry about Geoff turning on Craig.

There have been a lot of references to Terminator, and people from the future coming to stop me from building Geoff. It's all in good fun.

So Geoff represents no threat, is what you're saying.

That's right. Geoff is an entertainment robot. He has no armaments.

He has no weapons.

That's right. He is not armed, he contains no weapons, and his servo motor is only capable of lifting 27 pounds. Grant Imahara

Does this shoulder mechanism look dangerous?

Is it more fun to design a robot that is designed to live a long time, as opposed to potentially getting smashed, blown up, or dropped off a building?

You know, it's varying degrees of fun. Before, I worked on the Energizer Bunny and R2D2. And those are fun, because you get to see them. They are around a long time. And whenever I see the Energizer commercial, I think back fondly to working on the bunny � the third generation of Energizer bunnies was done through ILM, so I programmed the circuit that beats the bunny's arms. So whenever I see those commercials, I think back fondly on when I worked on the bunny and drove the Energizer bunny for several years.

But when you make something for Battlebots, it's a totally different type of fun, because that is sort of more like a party, and your robot is your ticket to play this game where you know going in that there's a high likelihood that it's going to be damaged, but that's all part of the fun. So I think they're different that way.

But hopefully, Geoff will have a long and fruitful life.

Yes, yes. During the build process, every couple of days, Craig would come back with a new idea � can he do this, can he do this � so I think that he's got big plans for this sidekick.

The �Heavy� Follower July 20, 2010

Over the years, I have come to believe that one of the least helpful pieces of advice a follower can get is to be told she is simply �too heavy.�

�Are you calling me fat?� My partner Kate asks, with a straight face, whenever someone says this. People have freaked out slightly, backtracking and apologizing before she suddenly can�t hold it anymore and starts to crack up.

Telling a follower she�s �heavy� is like describing an animal as �wounded� and expecting that to be enough information for the blind vet (weird analogy.) If a follower is described as �heavy,� there are several different possibilities of what�s going wrong, some of which could be the leader�s fault. I�m going to try to collect them here, starting with these 12. I�ll keep adding and editing this post, too, as I continue my research.

Before we get to those, however, I want to address the problem at its root. A follower�s goal is not simply to be �light���light� doesn�t necessarily mean �better.� A follower�s goal should be to give exactly what the leader�s asking for. Many advanced leads will sometimes do moves that require a lot of counterbalance�and expect a follower to respond as such, which could easily be described as �heavy.� A great follower is someone who can dance like a feather or a lead zeppelin, depending on what the lead requests at that moment. Possible Reasons Why a Follower Might Be Described as �Heavy.�

1. Follower in general carrying more tension in arm than needed. This one is tricky�it can easily be the problem itself, or, more likely, a symptom of some greater problem. For instance, almost any issue with the follower�s posture can result in the follower using her arms to compensate. But first, let�s address the problem as if it�s the only problem.

It only takes a little bit of tension in small parts of the arm to create a �heavier� follower. Just your fingers might be tense. Or your elbow. That�s all. Make sure all the arm muscles have a natural give and take throughout your dancing�that none of them are rigid, or become rigid at a certain point through their motions.

2. A follower is using her arms to create stretch� Now for some more specific arm tension-related problems. Let�s say a leader with a relaxed frame sits away from his follower and asks for some form of counterbalance�if she doesn�t know how to match that by moving her own body, then she will probably result to using her arm muscles to keep the couple balanced�which means she�s pulling on the guy, and thus �heavy.�

Our arm muscles are small and frail compared to the muscle network of the back, core, and shoulders. In dancing, we can accomplish so much more, and with much greater comfort to ourselves and our partners, if we let that muscle network handle as much as possible.

3. Follower is using her arm to pull herself in (for instance, the 1-2-3 of a swingout.) This is a specific problem, and is often linked to number 4 on the list. Basically, a follower is asked to come in on a swing out or turn, or something that moves the follower, and the follower pulls on the leader�s hand in order to do so.

4. A follower�s pelvis is in front of her shoulders. Aside from this looking as if a follower is attacking you with her crotch on the first half of a swing out, in its subtler forms, it might not even be noticeable. Basically, this will feel like the follower is countering the lead with the top half of her body. It might feel slightly like a �falling backward effect� for the follower, and thus the leader feels he has to hold her up to some extent, hence �heavy.�

BTW, Nina Gilkenson has a great impression of a follower attacking a leader with her crotch.

5. A Follower allows her arm to get fully extended at the end of movements. Sort of the opposite of the �too much arm tension problem,� this happens when a follower allows her arm to fully extend at the end of movements. As a default, this has several problems: it means at the end of the movement, you�re a lot further out than the leader expected, and so he has to move you sooner/quicker/hold tension in his arm and all sorts of other things in order to compensate. Stretch can die, you won�t respond as specifically to momentum requests, etc.

6. Follower�s posture is fine, feet too close to leader This is rare to see, but bringing the feet forward is an old school (and awesome) way to create counterbalance. (Check out this picture of Dean and Jewel, for instance.) The only problem is, if the leader isn�t asking for that counter balance, you will definitely come off as �heavy.�

Dean Collins-studier David Rehm first pointed this out to me, which I�ve always thought is a really cool idea of counterbalance.

As you�ve probably noticed by now, most of the times a follower feels heavy is either (1) when the dance is stretching and asking for some form of counter balance (like the end of a swing out) or (2) when the leader tries to move the follower, usually from the stretch. So, number 6 is just a very specific way of saying�

7. Follower is perfectly fine mechanically, but asks for more counterbalance than Lead is offering. A follower might chose a default stretch or counterbalance that is greater than the leader they are dancing with, the result being that at the end of every move, the follower feels heavy. Though a follower should try as a default to match exactly the amount of counterbalance asked for, she can also use this as a neat trick: If she wants to, say, really work her swivels at a certain part of the music, she can ask for a lot of counterbalance, and a good leader will be there to adjust his own and give it to her.

8. In closed position, or in the middle of a swing out, a follower is seeking connection with the wrong part of her back. The very obvious example of this is a follower who is used to having a leader�s hand high on her back(or shoulder) during a swing out. She then dances with a leader who prefers a mid or lower back connection during the closed position. The follower, not used to responding with her lower back, suddenly arches her back when the leader connects in closed. She feels he�s clothes-lining her, he feels she�s heavy. A follower should be prepared to respond with whatever part of the back the leader asks for during closed position.

9. Leader expects follower to move even though he doesn�t give her what she needs to move. Some times, if a Leader is used to dancing with girls who are eager to move and finish all the movements, he will, unawares, become lazy. He won�t lead the follower to move, expecting her to do so. When he comes along a follower who doesn�t move without the proper leads, she will feel heavy. He has been living the life of luxury, having had followers do half of his leading for him.

10. Leader is asking follower to be heavier than he expects; doesn�t realize it. On the other flip side (�the other flip side?�), if a leader has been dancing almost only with follower�s who are always light, he might be asking his follower to be heavy and not expect it. Or, if the dance floor is slippier than usual, he might be compensating weirdly and will ask the follower to be heavier than he expected (this happened to me a few months ago. In trying to stay grounded with slippery shoes, I tensed up weird and took my follower down with me (into the land of heaviness, that is.))

11. Follower is putting too much momentum into the ground. Perhaps the product of trying to �sit into it� or put a pulse into the ground, some followers will find themselves sunk up to their hips into the dance floor, and all movements feel sluggish.

But please don�t compensate by dancing out of the ground. The way you walk/run are probably good determinations of how much weight to put into the ground and how to find your natural downward pulse.

12. Follower is trying to protect herself; dancing with gorilla If a follower is dancing with a leader who is using a lot of brute force, a follower might protect herself by tensing up, clamping up, trying to keep things under control. But, if such a leader thinks such a follower is �heavy,� she probably will be better off not correcting him. At least, if he thinks she�s heavy, she�ll never have to dance with him again.

Conclusion Though there are many different ways and reasons a follower can be �heavy,� you can sense some common themes: tension, weird posture, inability to counterbalance, and often, all three mixed together. Another common theme is giving the leader more than he asks for, or giving him weight in places he�s not asking for.

A Quick Note on the inherent sex generalizations in dance language: All followers in this text are referred to as �she,� though this is only for the sake of clear understanding and flow throughout the writing. �He/She� �or �She/He� felt too clunky, and using �it� only adds to the sexist problem. Also, in all the diagrams, I have given my follower a rather charming 1937 blonde hair cut (those are the yellow bumps). This is, again, so I can use generalization for clarity�s sake.

In truth, almost every male-follower I�ve ever danced with could be described as a �heavy� follower�mainly for reasons mentioned below. This leads me to� A Quick note on actual follower size (Or Physics: Our Best Friend, Our Worst Enemy.)

Kate�s �Are you calling me fat?� joke is just that. A joke. But, as a way of coming full circle, I do want to talk about relative size. If you are an eighty-pound winged pixie follower, you might have many of these problems to small degrees and have never been called �heavy.� Ironically, all people probably say to you is �I bet you�d be great at aerials!�**

If you are a lumbering 250 pound guy with the exact same problems as the 80-pound pixie winged follower, and to the exact same extent, you will be the one getting the �you�re too heavy� comments. Only because physics has magnified the problem.

So, if you�re an 80-pound winged pixie follower, beware that many of these things might apply to you even though you�ve never been called �heavy.� And if you truly want to be a great follower, you�ll probably often have to check in and see what problems you�re getting away with because of your size.

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**�Another thing I�m annoyed by is when some guy introduces me to his beginner dancer 80 pound winged pixie partner and says �I now have someone to do aerials with.� I usually want to tell them �You�ve always had plenty of people to throw around. For instance, the three or four advanced followers you dance with all the time, that would love to do aerials.�

What he�s thinking is that now he has less weight to throw around. Now he can learn aerials faster because he won�t have to concentrate on technique as much. Now, he can really get some height out of those flips.

He hasn�t taken into account that a follower has to be a good follower to do an air step consistently and safely. That she has to do a lot of intricate work herself to make things happen effortlessly. That, in most aerials done well, physics does the bulk of the heavy lifting, so what you really want out of an aerial partner is a girl who knows how to control her body, whatever body that may be.

And, what is more annoying, is that he usually hasn�t once thought about the idea of going to a gym himself.

Until other leaders around him start going to the gym, that is. But I don�t worry about it. Sooner or later he will realize just how heavy 80 pounds can be.

However, a follower�s guide to aerials is another essay topic unto itself. Coming soon to Swungover?

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated) Rubbish Free Year A textbook example for employees during the recession Five Good Pieces of Advice Posted by jackthevampire Filed in Essay �Tags: lindy hop, aerials, heavy follower, weight, elephant, diagrams, dean, jewel, arms, 80 pound pixie winged followers, aerial advice, man follower, male follower, guy follower 6 Comments �

The Illusion of Transparency July 14, 2010 tags: elizabeth newton, performance anxiety, Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec, Kenneth Savitsky by David McRaney

The Misconception: When your emotions run high, people can look at you and tell what you are thinking and feeling.

The Truth: Your subjective experience is not observable, and you overestimate how much you telegraph your inner thoughts and emotions.

You stand in front of your speech class with your outline centered on the lectern, your stomach performing gymnastics.

You sat through all the other speeches, tapping the floor, transferring nervous energy into the tiles through a restless foot, periodically wiping your hands on the top of your pants to wick away the sweat.

Each time the speaker summed up and the class applauded, you clapped along with everyone else, and as it subsided you realized how loud your heart was thumping when a fresh silence settled.

Finally, the instructor called your name, and your eyes cranked open. You felt as if you had eaten a spoonful of sawdust as you walked up to the blackboard planting each foot carefully so as not to stumble.

As you begin to speak the lines you�ve rehearsed, you search the faces of your classmates.

�Why is he smiling? What is she scribbling? Is that a frown?�

�Oh no,� you think, �they can see how nervous I am.�

I must look like an idiot. I�m bombing, aren�t I? This is horrible. Please let a meteor hit this classroom before I have to say another word.

�I�m sorry,� you say to the audience. �Let me start over.�

Now it�s even worse. What kind of moron apologizes in the middle of a speech?

Your voice quavers. Flop sweat gathers behind your neck. You become certain your skin must be glowing red and everyone in the room is holding back laughter.

Except, they aren�t.

They are just bored. Your anxiety is peaking, and it feels like waves of emotional energy must be radiating from your head like some sort of despair halo, but there is nothing to see on the outside other than your facial expressions. Keep those under control and you are home free.

�If you�re quiet at a party, people don�t know if it�s because you�re arrogant and you think you�re better than everyone else or because you�re shy and don�t know how to talk to people�but you know, because you know your thoughts and feelings. So things like anxiety, optimism and pessimism, your tendency to daydream, and your general level of happiness�what�s going on inside of you, rather than things you do�those are things other people have a hard time knowing.�

- Simine Vazire from a 2009 interview in Psychology Today conducted by Sam Gosling

To get information out of one head and into another, it has to be transmitted through some sort of communication. Faces, sounds, gestures, words like the ones you are reading now � we must depend on these clunky tools because no matter how strong an emotion or how powerful an idea, it never seems as intense or potent to the world outside your mind as it does to the one within.

This is the illusion of transparency.

You know what you are feeling, what you are thinking, and you tend to believe those thoughts and emotions are leaking out of your pores, visible to the world, perceivable to the outside.

You overestimate how obvious what you truly think must be and fail to recognize other people in your life are in their own bubbles, thinking the same thing about their inner worlds.

Source: tvtropes.org

When you try to imagine what other people are thinking, you have no choice but to start from inside your noggin. In there, with your perturbations pushing up against you, among your inescapable self, you think your thoughts and feelings must be evident.

Sure, when people are paying attention, they can read you to an extent, but you grossly overestimate how much so.

You can test the illusion of transparency using a method created by Elizabeth Newton.

Pick a song everyone knows, like your national anthem, and have someone else sit across from you. Now, tap out the song with your fingertips.

After a verse or two, ask the other person what you were tapping.

In your mind, you can hear every note, every instrument. In their mind, they can hear your fingers tapping.

(If you record a video performing this experiment yourself and post it on YouTube, I�ll add it to this post if you send me the link.)

Pause here and try it out. I�ll wait.

Ok. I�m going to assume you�ve been tapping. How did you do? Did they figure out what you were trying to play?

Probably not. How confident were you? Was it frustrating?

In Newton�s study, the tappers predicted the listeners would be able to guess the tune half of the time, but the listeners correctly guessed about 3 percent of the songs.

The rich, complex experience of being you is impossible to see. Your subjective experience is wholly unobservable to anyone but yourself.

Yet, much of the time, you assume this isn�t so, that what you think and feel must be apparent.

The huge discrepancy between what you think people will understand and what they really do has probably lead to all sorts of mistakes in text messages and emails.

If you are like me, you often have to back up and restate your case, or answer questions about your tone, or reword everything and try sending it again.

We always know what we mean by our words, and so we expect others to know it too. Reading our own writing, the intended interpretation falls easily into place, guided by our knowledge of what we really meant. It�s hard to empathize with someone who must interpret blindly, guided only by the words.

- Eliezer Yudowsky from Lesswrong.com

On the Internet, people often include �/s� at the end of a statement to indicate sarcasm. It was so hard to communicate tone online we had to create a new punctuation mark.

Getting an idea out of one head and into another is difficult, and much can be lost in the information transfer. An insight which slams into you like an avalanche won�t have the same impact coming out of your mouth or fingertips.

In 1998, Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec and Kenneth Savitsky published their research on the illusion of transparency in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

They reasoned your subjective experience, or phenomenology, was so potent you would have a hard time seeing beyond it when you were in a heightened emotional state.

Their hypothesis was based on the spotlight effect � the belief everyone is looking right at you, judging your actions and appearance, when in reality you disappear into the background most of the time.

Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky figured the effect was so powerful it made you feel as if the imaginary spotlight could penetrate your gestures, words and expressions and reveal your private world as well.

They had Cornell students divide into groups. An audience would listen as individuals read questions from index cards and then answered them out loud. They either lied or told the truth based on what the card said to do on a label only they could see.

Source: Ms L

Audience members were told they would get prizes based on how many liars they detected.

Liars would say something like, �I have met David Letterman.�

They then had to guess how many people could tell they had lied while the audience tried to figure out who out of the five was fibbing.

The results? Half of the liars thought they had been caught, but only a quarter were � they strongly overestimated their transparency.

In subsequent experiments the variables were shuffled around and the lies presented in other ways; the results were nearly identical.

Studies all throughout the 1980s showed you are confident in your ability to see through liars, yet you are actually terrible at it. On the other side, you think your lies will be easy to detect, that you are more transparent than you are.

Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky moved on to another experiment.

They sat students down in front of a video camera and a row of 15 cups filled with red liquid. They asked to students to hide their expressions as they tasted the beverages because five of the drinks were going to be rat nasty.

They then had 10 people watch the tape and asked the students who did the tasting to estimate how many of the observers would be able to tell when they had imbibed something gross.

On average, they guessed about half of the observers would see their revulsion, but only 3.5 percent could.

Pushing ahead, they tried another experiment based on the research of Miller and McFarland on the bystander effect (the more people who witness an emergency, the less likely any one person will leap into action).

�When confronted with a potential emergency, people typically play it cool, adopt a look of nonchalance, and monitor the reactions of others to determine if a crisis is really at hand. No one wants to overreact, after all, if it might not be a true emergency. However, because each individual holds back, looks nonchalant, and monitors the reactions of others, sometimes everyone concludes (perhaps erroneously)

Chapter 23

that the situation is not an emergency and hence does not require intervention.�

- Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky from their study of The Illusion of Transparency

Once again, their research showed when people were in a situation in which they felt concerned and alarmed, they assumed it was written all over their faces when it reality it wasn�t. In turn, they thought if other people were freaking out, they would be able to see it.

In 2003, Kenneth Savitsky and Thomas Gilovich conducted a study to determine if they could short-circuit the illusion of transparency.

They had people give public speeches on the spot and then rate how nervous they thought they looked to their audience. Sure enough, they said they looked like a wreck, but the onlookers didn�t notice it.

Still, in this experiment some people got stuck in a feedback loop. They thought they appeared nervous, so they started to try and compensate, and then they thought the compensation was noticeable and tried to cover that up which they then felt was more obvious, and so on until they worked themselves up into a state where they were obviously freaking out.

They decided to run the experiment again, but this time they explained the illusion of transparency to some of the subjects, telling them they might feel like everyone could see them losing it, but they probably couldn�t.

This time, the feedback loop was broken. Those told about the illusion felt less stressed, gave better speeches and the audiences said they were more composed.

Our results thus lend credence to the notion that �the truth can set you free�: Knowing the truth about the illusion of transparency set participants free from the cycle of anxiety�

- Kenneth Savitsky and Thomas Gilovich

When your emotions take over, when your own mental state becomes the focus of your attention, your ability to gauge what other people are experiencing gets muted. If you are trying to see yourself through their eyes, you will fail.

Knowing this, you can plan for the effect and overcome it.

When you get near the person you have a crush on and feel the war drums in your gut, don�t freak out. You don�t look as nervous as you feel.

When you stand in front of an audience or get interviewed on camera, there might be a thunderstorm of anxiety in your brain, but it can�t get out; you look far more composed than you believe. Smile.

When your mother-in-law cooks a meal better fit for a dog bowl, she can�t hear your brain stem begging you to spit it out.

If you are trying to communicate something complex, or you have vast knowledge of a subject someone else does not, realize it is going to be difficult to put yourself in their shoes. The explanation process may become thorny, but don�t take it out on them. Just because they can�t see inside your mind doesn�t mean they are not so smart.

You don�t suddenly become telepathic when angry, anxious or alarmed. Keep calm and carry on.

Links:

Tuesday, July 20, 2010 SLEDGEHAMMER AND WHORE This is the story of a Procedural.

So I'm at a meeting with a producer the other day and he's pitching me a tv idea. As way of emphasizing why I need him and his idea, he brings forth a piece of paper. On it, my credits. He doesn't actually hand it over to me but he says this:

PRODUCER: I've been looking over your credits, pretty impressive. ME: Thanks, we try. PRODUCER: Seems to me you're just missing one thing from these credits. And I'm gonna tell you what it is. ME: Please do.

At which point he turns the piece of paper towards me and I see he's written in bold black marker near the top, pointing to the list: BIG FUCKING HIT TV SHOW.

ME: Well, yes, I am missing that. Very true. I think about that a lot.

PRODUCER: That's all right. Because I'm here to change all that.

At which point he launches into his pitch for what may or not be "my big fucking hit tv show."

Now, I leave it to you to debate whether pointing out my shortcomings is a good or bad sales strategy (it rarely works for my dad but often for my wife), and I'll leave it to me to decide whether or not the idea he pitched me was the answer to my problems.

I will say this about the idea, however: IT WAS ENORMOUS. The concept, the scope, the budget, it was resolutely and irresponsibly EPIC and for that I was totally grateful. Because if I'd been pitched one more aspirational character-driven procedural you were going to have to peel me off the Barham asphalt.

Not that I don't understand the impulse for procedurals. They're the golden retrievers of television. They're cheap. They're endearing. Not too hard to understand. And they won't cost 3.5 million per ep, pull in a 1.4 rating, and pee on your favorite tauntaun sleeping bag.

On the other hand, there's been a lot of recent attempts at "event" television and almost all have been utter failures. Even some of the ones still on the air stagger around like a drunk who woke up with a Season 2 and have no idea who drove them there or how to get home (I'm looking at you, V.).

With the death of Lost and 24, we find ourselves looking for the next bit of pop culture big-fucking-dealness that we can get ourselves all worked up for. And when I say "we" I'm referring to Fans of TV with a capital F and not simply those for whom TV is the thing that occupies the space between dinner and the sleep apnea machine. We Fans of TV want that Big Sexy Going Down the Rabbit Hole Feeling and no matter how much my mother loves Simon Baker, The Mentalist just isn't going to do it for us.

The Mentalist, is, however, going to make a shitload of money for all involved. It's easy on the eyes and is habit-forming much in the same way two glasses of red wine a night is: you'll get a nice, warm buzz but you're not gonna get really wasted and wake up with Cobb's malevolent freight train blasting through your cortex. The Mentalist isn't the best sex you've ever had, but it's also not likely to leave you to finish yourself off while your partner falls asleep to reruns of "Cheaters".

The Character-driven Procedural works for a number of reasons, but the biggest and the best of them is this: they almost never get picked up to series without a Serious Asswhipping Actor in the lead. Simon Baker. Hugh Laurie. Tony Shaloub. Kyra Sedgwick. Angie Harmon. These are legitimate cleanup hitters in any TV lineup. They might not be the favorites of the genre crowd. You might not stand in line for their autograph. And you are not going to see them down at Comic-Con doing funny panels with Jeff "Doc" Jensen. Why? Because they are too busy making the other twenty million people who watch tv every night love them.

"Event" television, on the other hand (and here we can probably insert the word "genre" or "science fiction"), usually demands a big canvas, a big cast of characters, and a large concept that often dominates. It's ideas first, characters second, and that, dear friends, is often a recipe for tv disaster. FlashForward tried to balance a lot of character work on the big bouncing back of their elephantine idea but the show never found a proper stride and a lot of people were knocked off into the pachyderm shit. Warehouse 13 works for SyFy because it's what X-Files would be if Mulder and Scully took Ecstasy and dry-humped their way through a Freak of the Week. Which is to say, a quirky procedural.

Aaah, but what about Lost, you say? Explain Lost, or at the very least, explain Lost's success? Big ideas, lots of characters, no big alpha stars, lots of story, lots of...lots?

I'm not the first to say this, but Lost is a freak show that will never be repeated. It's the Michael Jackson of television. No one should try to deconstruct the Lost phenomenon ever again. There is nothing to be gained from studying Lost's success. It's a Black Swan, or an Outlier, or one of many other books on my Kindle I'll never read now because, let's be honest, it's on my Kindle.

You can't construct a phenomenon from the outside-in. You can't will a show into the public's consciousness. Both of this year's breakout hits, Glee and Modern Family, had big buzz coming into the season. But that's because people who'd seen them knew they were good. They didn't just decide they needed them to be good and then set out to market them so, they actually KNEW they were. Both shows also have very strong creators who know television, know their own minds, and know what show they're making. These are not shows that could've been created by anybody--and that's not something you can say about most television. They are also decidedly NOT procedurals.

The stories I love often involve world-building. But most people working in the tv business are terrified of building worlds. They want shows that are relatable and recognizable. They want real worlds with real people that will under no condition make viewers uncomfortable or remind them of anything remotely strange and unknown. No Ordinary Family is a perfect example of this: the family is Absolutely Ordinary until they're NOT. And when they're NOT, they respond to that very NOT-ness just as any other Ordinary Family would.

But much of our most successful and daring television is, if looked at broadly, Fantastic with a capital F. Ryan Murphy is a world-builder, Matt Weiner is a world-builder, Vince Gilligan is an 800 lb world builder. Breaking Bad exists in a strange Albuquerque Dream State that is at once the most surreal and also the most achingly real drama I've ever watched. These are "genre" shows, maybe not exactly science fiction, but certainly not traditional "dramas", either. They are as weird and off-putting and daring and out there as any "space ship show" that the networks refuse to put on every year. And that was even before mother and daughter sang "Poker Face" to each other across a grand piano.

But I digress.

This is a story of a Procedural. Specifically, mine.

Last Sunday night the wife and I were sound asleep at 1145pm after a night of Entourage, True Blood and Schadenfreude. Because I have the iPhone4 and thus cannot use it as a phone, I had forwarded my cell phone to our home phone. At approximately 11:47:52, the phone rings and my wife answers it. Here is the call as has been best reconstructed:

WIFE: Hello...Who is this? WOMAN: I need to speak to Josh. WIFE: What? Why? Who is this? WOMAN: Let me speak to Josh. He owes me money. WIFE: Money? Call back in the morning. WOMAN: I need to talk to him now. I'm in his office. He owes me money. WIFE: (to me, handing over the phone) It's for you.

WOMAN: Josh? I need my money. I'm in your office. ME: I don't know what the fuck you are talking about. What office? WOMAN: Your office. In Larchmont. I'm there. ME: You're in my office? At midnight. On Sunday? Describe my office.

At which point the woman gives me a very detailed description of my writing office--a second floor one room/one bathroom space that I rent because as much as I love my family...well, The Shining.

ME: Okay, fine, you're in my office. Why? And again, who are you? WOMAN: You know why I'm in your office, Josh. You've been here with me for the last three or four hours. ME: Lady, I don't know who you've been with in my office, but I haven't been there for two weeks. I mean that's a problem itself, my lack of motivation, but lets get back to what you're doing there? WOMAN: Well...I met someone claiming to be you on the internet and he paid me to come to your office and have sex with him. Only he didn't pay me. He left. And now I've wasted my whole fucking night.

At which point I write the word "hooker" on the bottom of the envelope I'm using to take notes and hold it up for the wife. Now, it is perhaps a testimony or a condemnation to the way that I've lived my life that at no point during my conversation with this hooker calling me from my office and asking for payment does my wife for EVEN AN INSTANT think that perhaps, yes, she should be concerned that a hooker is calling her husband at home asking for payment.

Now I don't know about the rest of you, but this is a first for me, and my mind is racing. What to do? What information do I need? How do I go about getting it? I'm proud of myself for writing "hooker" on the envelope but I know I've got to do better than that. What pops into my head is: WHAT WOULD THE MENTALIST DO?

So I begin asking questions, trying to extract as much information from her as I can. Eventually I convince her that I am Not the John She is Looking For. At which point she says:

WOMAN: Well, now I'm feeling creeped out. Someone in here was pretending to be you. I think I'm gonna leave and go to my car. ME: Great idea!

I ask her for the description of the guy:

WOMAN: Six two, white, clean cut, good haircut, nice jeans, cool Adidas sneakers, purple with green stripes, like the African soccer team. And by the way...can I say...I'm not proud of of what I do, but I'm not ashamed, either. I'm in school, single mom, two kids. I do what I've gotta do.

ME: I understand.

(Holy shit, really? Could she really have a heart of gold?)

ME: Could I have your full name and your phone number. In case the police need to talk to you?

WOMAN: Sure.

At which point she gives me HER FULL NAME AND HER PHONE NUMBER. My God. The woman really does have a heart of gold. But I can imagine the network notes:

NETWORK NOTES: We don't find the prostitute character believable. She's so helpful and well-adjusted. I don't think any prostitutes act like that. And the kid thing is so cliche. Shouldn't our cop have to earn that phone number with a little more detective work? ME: First of all, the guy's not a cop. He's a quirky amateur who's also the victim in this case. NETWORK NOTES: Feels a little premise-y. I thought we weren't doing a premise pilot. ME: Second, go fuck yourself.

Finally I hang up with the plucky hooker and call the LAPD, pumped up by my amateur detective skills and excited to HAND THEM A FULLY MADE CASE.

What follows is fifteen of the most Kafka-esque minutes I've ever spent on the phone:

ME: A hooker and a john pretending to be me had sex in my office tonight. I need a patrol car to go to my office. COP: How do you know? ME: The hooker called me and told me. COP: How does she have your number? ME: I don't know. She's spent four hours in my office with a guy pretending to be me. COP: You need to go to your office and see if anything's been taken. See if a crime has been committed. Then call us and we'll come out there. ME: People are fucking in my office. In the middle of the night. For money. Without my permission. Certainly there's a crime there. And it's a brand new Ikea leather couch. I would say the couch's innocence has been taken if nothing else. COP: You need to go up there and see. ME: I'm scared. COP: It's Larchmont, sir. It's safe. ME: I'm gonna beg to differ.

Eventually the officer and I come to an agreement: I will not go to my office by myself in the middle of the night and see if the mysterious woman on the phone was telling the truth about why she was in my office and he will absolutely not send a car over there to check it out.

NETWORK NOTES: We don't really like the cop here. He's not very sympathetic. ME: Agreed. But that's the law. There's a shortage of cars and they can't be sending them all willy-nilly everywhere. NETWORK NOTES: Well someone should say that somewhere. Have the cop say he would go but the regulations won't let him. It's the system. ME: That's not what the story is about. NETWORK NOTES: And, you come off as a real pussy. ME: No argument there. I'll see what I can do.

The next morning in the warm light of day I decide to go to my office and investigate. It's 8:30 am, and I'm feeling much braver after a full night's sleep and a lumberjack's portion of Ativan. My office entrance is on the exterior of a two story building with an outside set of stairs, ostensibly the only way into my office, in case you wanted to break in and screw a hooker and then ditch her.

I turn the doorknob, it's open. I curse my favorite hooker for not locking up afterwards but I understand she was a little spooked when she left. As I step into the office, A MAN steps out of my bathroom.

This is the moment time freezes: he is across the room and I immediately do a tilt-pan from head to toe, like the third act of a thriller when the hero is confronting the murderer: Tall, white, good haircut, nice jeans...wait for it...purple and green Adidas sneakers!

He is certainly as unhappy about this encounter as I am, but as he's probably had more experience playing the bad guy then I have playing the quirky amateur detective, he speaks first:

MAN: Oh..hey..Sorry...my buddy said to wait for him in his office...Is this the wrong office...? Damn. Sorry...

Watching someone lie and hope to get away with it is a fascinating experience. You know the answers to the test that he's currently trying to bullshit his way through, but you want to give off the impression that maybe you're buying it so you don't let him know that the jig is completely up. Which, of course, it most certainly is.

But then he does something downright creepy: he edges his way to my desk, sits down at my computer, and begins clicking keys and closing windows.

ME: DUDE. Are you fucking kidding me? Get off my computer! MAN: Sorry. I was just surfing while I was waiting for my friend-- ME: DUDE. Do you have ID on you? Name? Anything? MAN: Yea, of course. Wallet...Hmmm...can't find it. Shit...

He stands...

I know that at different times in this blog I've referred to myself as a fat, lazy fuck. But in truth...who am I kidding. That's exactly what I am. However, in the last year I've become a less fat, less lazy fuck. I've hired a trainer, mostly at the behest of my wife, who doesn't want me to die young and leave my child fatherless. My own motivation for working out is mostly to postpone my death at least until my wife is old enough that she can't remarry anyone that would sexually threaten me when I watch them fucking from Heaven.

For the last year I've only done one kind of exercise, three times a week: I'VE BOXED. And if my trainer is to be believed, and why wouldn't you believe a man who spent five years on British Gladiators and is nicknamed RHINO, I have a right hook like a SLEDGEHAMMER.

So as the tall man stands up from my computer, holding up his hands in a "no problem' kind of gesture, I'm thinking to myself: release the sledgehammer, Josh. Release the fucking sledgehammer. He doesn't know you're onto him, step in as if to shake his hand, pull him close and drop him like a rock...That's what any good hero of any decent show would do...release the fucking sledgehammer...

Here is also what is going on in my head: I'm gonna have to put my backpack down...but my iPad's in my backpack. What if he grabs that and swings it at me? What if he has a knife in those jeans of his, what if he guts me like a fish? For what? If I swing at him will my new iPhone fall out of my shorts pocket? It falls out all the time in the car, these shorts pockets are so shallow, I should've gotten the case for the phone, then it'd be less likely to fall out and break...if I had the case I probably would get better reception in my house and wouldn't have forwarded the call to the home phone...I never would've answered the phone last night...I wouldn't be here face to face with this guy...Bring the sledgehammer, Josh...

Here's what I said:

ME: Why don't we go outside and talk? I need to make a phone call. MAN: Sure.

At this point I notice he's got a skateboard leaning against the wall. He casually grabs it as we head outside, down the stairs and down the long driveway to the street. I'm hoping someone else will be out there so maybe I can grab him and a mob will form and help me hold him down, but no one's there...He keeps repeating one phrase over and over as he edges to the street:

MAN: I don't want any trouble, I don't want any trouble...

I finally snap, screaming: "IF YOU DON'T WANT ANY TROUBLE YOU SHOULD STOP FUCKING HOOKERS IN MY OFFICE AND NOT PAYING THEM!"

His eyes go wide and he stumbles onto his skateboard, paddling for the street. I half-heartedly jog after him, trying vainly to take a picture of him with my iphone4, yelling nonsensical things like: "Come back here and I will fuck you up!"

He does not come back.

NETWORK NOTES: We don't like the detective very much here. He doesn't stop the bad guy, has no plan, and at the end sort of just puffs after him yelling like an idiot. ME: It's real. It's what really happens when people are confronted with these types of things. Especially quirky amateurs. NETWORK NOTES: Again, seems like a pussy. ME: I get that. Maybe he'll just seem flawed but in an endearing way. NETWORK NOTES: We also don't understand why he says the part about not paying the hooker. Why does he consider that to be relevant to all this? ME: He's got a good heart. The hooker seemed so nice and he feels for her. NETWORK NOTES: He's not gonna do something stupid in the next episode is he? Like call the hooker and meet her at a coffee shop and pay her the money she's owed. ME: Ummmmm...No.

I return to my office and call the police. Two and a half hours later they arrive, turning my USA detective show into a hard-boiled network cop series. Two female uniforms, serious women, women who clearly do not want to be hearing from some jackass waving an envelope with the word HOOKER! written on the bottom.

I detail my story, knowing how impressed they're going to be by the number of clues I've already amassed...

COP: Sir. Before you continue...I want to say something to you. ME: Of course, officer. COP: I need you to understand that it is against the law to file a false police report sir. It is a crime. ME: Are you kidding me? COP: I am not. ME: Are you suggesting I'm making this up? Why? To cover up for the fact that a hooker has called my home demanding money from me? Do you think I'm a whore-r? (sp?) COP: It's a strange story, sir. Very strange. Doesn't add up. They seem to know a lot about you. ME: They were in my office for four hours! I'm pretty sure they weren't having sex the whole time. God knows I couldn't.

NETWORK NOTES: We like this part. Conflict between our guy and the system. Of course they would suspect that. Maybe our guy did do it. Maybe it's all a scam. Like Usual Suspects. We love that movie. People wouldn't expect that. ME: He didn't do it. There's security camera footage which shows the plucky hooker and the big tall John. NETWORK NOTES: We need to see that. Security camera footage is always cool.

So there I was: scanning security camera footage with one cop while the other one took the phone number for the hooker and called her to confirm my story. There was definitely a moment of panic when I considered that the hooker was going to deny the whole thing and make me look foolish, but God bless her she SANG LIKE A CANARY!

I am not making that up. That is what the police officer said when she got off:

COP: My God. That woman SANG LIKE A CANARY."

(For those of you who've never hear that line in real life, trust me, it's even better than you imagine it would be.)

So between my new best hooker friend and the security tape footage, the police finally believe my story. (Another FYI: the security camera adds, like, fifteen pounds.)

So what do they do?

They do nothing. Wait. That's not true: they leave.

ME: But...I've got a glass here with his fingerprints on it! He left a shirt! It's wet! Full of DNA! There's a muddy footprint! Don't you want to take a cast? COP: We're good, sir. Nothing's been taken. No property damage. We'll pass it along to the detectives but...I don't even know what we'd charge... ME: Breaking and entering? Unlawful sex and non-remuneration of a prostitute? COP: Sir. ME: Well, are you going to send a forensic computer expert out to go through my computer? See what he was poking around in? See if he's stolen my identity for real? COP: Nah. You can go on your computer. It's fine. ME: Really. COP: Really.

NETWORK NOTES: Well that just seems like lazy writing. ME: But that's what happened. NETWORK NOTES: It's not satisfying. The amateur sleuth's gotta go on the computer, use his own sleuthing skills, figure out the perp. You know. MacGyver it. We need more of that. More MacGyvering. Less being a pussy.

So that's what I did. For the rest of the day, another tv writer friend and I scoured the office and computer for clues, photographing footprints, analyzing the back window of the office for smudges...We discovered that the end of the paper towel roll I'd left over there had gotten caught in the window, obviously evidence that the window had been opened an

Chapter 24

d shut (never by me). We found a print by the window, a smudge on the sill, we discerned the wet shirt was from the rain the Saturday before, also explaining the muddy footprint...We created a timeline of entry, cross-referencing with the time codes from the security footage...He'd come in off the adjacent roof, through the window...bringing the weather with him...

We went through my computer and discovered he'd gone through every one of my files only a half hour before I caught him in the office. This included deal memos, accounting emails, pictures of my family. You name it, he'd seen it. I canceled all of my credit cards, alerted the credit unions...

We went through my browser--he hadn't had time to erase his history--and found that he'd spent a good portion of the morning ordering ANOTHER HOOKER. We blew up stills of webpages, recovering a possible email account...I imagined how impressed the detectives would be with me when I provided them with all of these new leads...I was an amateur forensic genius profiling motherfucker...

We found out that my hooker with a heart of gold had spent some time the previous night doing what many of us do while waiting for a john to return from a smoke break: editing photos on facebook. A few clicks and we'd learned that everything she said was true: she was a single mother of two, attending college...Her photos were full of friends and family and happy memories, and I couldn't help but wonder about a world where this woman would do what she did and then retreat back into her world, if only through photos...

NETWORK NOTES: Too much. The whole photo thing while waiting for the john. Ick. Maudlin. It makes me feel sorry for her and now I'm getting a little creeped out by the detective. This is not blue sky. This is the opposite of blue sky. ME: I was thinking of a Coldplay song over a montage. NETWORK NOTES: Oh we love Coldplay. That'd be really powerful. ME: So that's how it'll end: The amateur detective mooning over the hooker with the Coldplay song in the background, pushing his way forward all alone, the system ignoring him, looking for a break that may never come. NETWORK NOTES: But not dark or serialized or anything like that, right? ME: It'll be case of the week. Like The Mentalist. NETWORK NOTES: We love Simon Baker. ME: Who doesn't. NETWORK NOTES: Does it have a title? ME: Yep.

MY BIG FUCKING HIT TV SHOW.

7.26.2010 The Broadus Effect? Social Desirability Bias and California Proposition 19 by Nate Silver @ 10:39 PM Share This Content

This November, Californians will vote on Proposition 19, which would legalize, tax and regulate marijuana for recreational consumption. Six polls have been conducted since the measure made the ballot in March. Three -- one from Public Policy Polling and two from SurveyUSA -- used automated scripts ("robopolls") to conduct their interviews. The other three, from Field, PPIC, and Reuters/Ipsos -- used live human operators.

The methodologies split in the support they show for the initiative. The three automated surveys all have Prop 19 passing by a double-digit margin. The human-operator polls, meanwhile, each show it trailing narrowly.

Although some of these polls contain incomplete demographic information, the split appears to be driven more by minority voters than by whites. The three automated polls each show the initiative leading by between 28 and 38 among black voters, for instance. But the one traditional poll to break out numbers among African-Americans had it trailing by 12.

Likewise, the traditional polls show Proposition 19 trailing by about 25 points among Hispanics. But the robopolls show support among Hispanics being about even. Even though the margins of error associated with these subgroups are quite large -- especially for blacks, who constitute a relatively small portion of California's population -- the differences are highly statistically significant.

These effects are also evident in two recent national polls on marijuana legalization, from Rasmussen (automated) and Pew (human), respectively. Although Rasmussen's robots posit higher support for marijuana legalization among all racial groups, the differences are much larger for blacks and Hispanics (which Rasmussen lumps into "other" along with groups like Asians).

There are a couple of reasons why these discrepancies might have arisen. One might be that the automated surveys are having difficulty getting a representative sample of minorities. Automated surveys generally have lower response rates, and that impact may be most felt among minorities, who are usually harder to get on the phone.

Nevertheless, this is a relatively highly-rated group of automated surveys, particularly SurveyUSA and PPP, which don't take as many of the shortcuts that some of their competitors do. And so it raises another possibility:

What if voters are more likely to admit their tolerance for marijuana to an automated script, which may create the feeling of greater anonymity? Marijuana usage remains fairly stigmatized in polite society in America, enough so that even liberal politicians like Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Jerry Brown and Barack Obama have refused to state their support for legalizing the drug. But as most Americans between ages 20 and 55 have smoked marijuana, they may not consider it such a big deal in the privacy of their homes -- or the privacy of the ballot booth.

This might also explain why the split is larger among black and Hispanic voters. Marijuana usage is almost certainly more stigmatized when associated with minorities, and drug possession arrests occur much more frequently in minority communities. This is in spite of the fact that rates of marijuana consumption are only a smidgen higher among blacks than among whites, and are somewhat lower among Hispanics. (Although, note that the link I just pointed you to is also based on survey data, and so could be subject to some of the same biases.)

Perhaps this hypothesis is overstated, and drug use does not carry the same stigma in California that it does elsewhere in the country. When I visited San Francisco for four days last winter, I twice saw people quite nonchalantly smoking joints in bars, something you'll only see once in a blue moon in New York or Chicago (or maybe I've just been going out to the wrong places).

Nevertheless, it's possible that we're seeing some sort of Bradley effect in reverse, which I've reluctantly dubbed the "Broadus Effect" after the given name of the rapper Snoop Dogg, himself a frequent consumer of cannabinoid-rich products.

The original Bradley Effect, named for former Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, occurs when respondents in surveys are asked about socially desirable behaviors, such as being free from racial prejudice. Although the racial version of Bradley effect itself is probably a thing of the past, social desirability bias may manifest itself in other ways. Automated polls have sometimes shown relatively lower levels support for gay marriage initiatives, for instance, in states like Maine and California. Homophobia is fairly common, but has become socially undesirable; the purveyors of the automated polls have sometimes claimed that their respondents are free to be more honest when there's not another human being on the line. If the theory holds, automated polls might also provide a setting for voters to be more honest about their feelings on marijuana use, another behavior that is probably more widespread (and privately tolerated) than it is socially acceptable. If so, that would be good news for Prop 19.

Ive been told to just be myself with men. Well what are you supposed to do when none of them are liking who you are? How are you supposed to be confident when you have nothing to be confident about? I'm average. Nothing special. John DeVore answered this question on July 27, 2010 9:40 AM

I'm not going to tell you that you're special. You've had enough of that. We all have. I was told I was special by teachers who would pat me on the head, and then move on to tell another kid that he was special. How can I be special if the goblin next to me, the one who'd hide Lincoln logs in his cheeks "for a rainy day," is also special? Are some people special-er than others? What the fudge, I'd think. What the fudge.

I'm not special. I'm just like everybody else. I don't deserve a prize or attention for trying to do the right things in life, which as far as I can tell is what average people do. Average people share French fries, blankets, and hugs. Normal, everyday, average human beings follow certain rules. At night, use the buddy system. He who smelt it, dealt it. You break it, you fix it. Average people make mistakes. They try. They fail. They try. They fail again. They try. And if they win, they don't walk around the playground showing off their gold star. The full spectrum of human emotion passes through average people like a rainbow colonic.

It's not easy being human. Those runty princes and princesses who think they're special are at a disadvantage. They are not special. They're just like you and me. Insecure. Hopeful. A blemish here, a doubt there. A heart that's a secret lock box of whispers and giggles. Those swaggering aristobrats are just as full of fear and joy as the rest of us. In the summer, they are stinky. In the winter, they might wear their socks two days in a row.

Which is the best reason to just be yourself. And why not? Even those people who think they're the love child of Zeus and a unicorn are just being themselves. Usually, those people behave like they're special and are therefore easy to avoid. Avoid them! And start looking for average people just like you. They're out there, and they're probably looking for you too.

Be average. But don't be a coward. Bravely be just you. Don't feel gorgeous? On days where I feel fat or dumpy or just unlovable, you know what I do? I don't wait for life to make me feel anymore gross than I already feel. I take the fight to life. I go out. I buy a nice shirt. I avoid mirrors or reflective surfaces. I hang out with other average friends, and laugh, and try to go to bed with a smile. Then I wake up and do it all over again. I fail. I try. I win. I fail.

Being average is hard work.

What it's really like to be copy-edited

Jul 26th 2010, 17:38 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK

HAVING recently had my forthcoming book copy-edited, I jumped right on the link (at Andrew Sullivan) to read Lori Fradkin's "What It's Really Like To Be A Copy Editor". I'd struggled for hours with my manuscript, wondering what to stet and what not to stet, marvelling both at my copy editor's care and at the confusion she introduced in places. So I was eager to see what Ms Fradkin had to say about the other side of this relationship.

The piece starts inauspiciously, though:

The word is douche bag. Douche space bag. People will insist that it's one closed-up word�douchebag�but they are wrong.

There it is. A statement of fact, black and white. What evidence does she offer? "The dictionary". Which dictionary? Merriam-Webster, she says. Odd, because my Random House Webster's College Dictionary (1999) has "douchebag". (Three other dictionaries in my office don't include it at all.)

The point here isn't that "douchebag" should be written closed up. Ms Fradkin's piece is otherwise entertaining (read it alone for how she made the executive decision on hyphenating "finger-blasting"). But the attitude in that opening passage�this is Wrong, because the Dictionary says so�is all too common among copy editors, and is irritating for reasons that bear some explaining.

Many interesting things can be said about compounds. They come in noun-noun ("kitchen-table issues"), adjective-noun ("private-sector wages"), adjective-adjective ("blue-green flowers") and other varieties. In writing, they tend to enter the language as two words. If they survive and are used frequently, they often pass through a period of hyphenation before fusing. (My 1933 OED includes only "year-book", not "yearbook", the latter now nearly universal.) In (English) speech, we know that a compound has begun to be fused, with a specific meaning, when the stress moves to the first syllable. When photographers first began developing glass plates, they looked for a dark room; now, they use a specialised room, a d�room, which (as Steven Pinker notes) can be lit, just as a blackboard can be green.

All this�how language works�is fascinating stuff. And that's why I really far prefer it to the mechanised assault that is "'Webster's (or 'The Chicago Manual of Style' or 'the MLA') says..., and that's that." In the English-speaking world, no dictionary maker (or should that be dictionary-maker?) gets to rule on these things for all of us for all time. In France and in other countries, an official academy does so, but that is an authoritarian approach the Anglosphere has (largely) avoided.

This is not to say "everything is right" and to get back into the tired prescriptivist-descriptivist debate. A debate about hyphens or compounds should have something useful to say about language itself. For example, The Economist hyphenates compounds when they are used as modifiers: interest-rate hikes, balance-of-payments crises, and so forth. These aren't hyphenated when used as nouns. ("Interest rates must go up.") I like this hyphenation. It helps prevent so-called garden-path misanalysis, by letting the reader know that even though he's seeing two nouns in a row, they should be understood as a compound modifier, and another noun is coming up. In other words, if someone asked me why I hyphenate "interest-rate hikes", this is what I'd tell them, and not "Because the style book says so." The latter answer is worse than wrong; it's not interesting.

In some cases I might disagree with our style book. I obey it nonetheless, because rulings, even when arbitrary, keep a style consistent, so readers aren't finding "Web sites" here and "websites" there in the same article. Readers expect and enjoy uniformity as a mark of quality. We close up "-makers" when they make things with one syllable: "carmakers", "peacemakers" and so on. We hyphenate them when they make things with multiple syllables, so my above query should be answered with "dictionary-makers". Is this because doing otherwise is just wrong? No. Our style-book entry on hyphenations spans nine pages. It begins, accurately, with "There is no firm rule to help you decide which words are run together, hyphenated or left separate." And it ends, sagely, with a quotation from the Oxford University Press style manual: "If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad." In other words, consistency is good; "a foolish consistency", Emerson's "hobgoblin of little minds", is not.

Addendum: I just have to promote this nice catch by a commenter, AcrossTheStreet, to the main post:

You realize that your example of "interest-rate hikes" violates the Economist style guide with its last word, right? "Hikes are walks, not increases", as you quoted three weeks ago: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2010/07/americanisms

culture Is Comic-Con Really Hurting Nerd Culture? By Wil Wheaton on July 28, 2010

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The first time I went to Comic-Con, the entire thing fit in about one half of what is currently the exhibitor's hall. It wasn't quite a longbox show, but it wasn't that far removed from it, either. There was no viral marketing, no multi-story booths, no Hollywood presence at all, and though it was a lot of fun, it didn't feel like the event it has become.

Over the years, the con grew. I remember the first year we expanded to the second floor, and how huge the whole thing seemed. I remember the first time I saw a Games Workshop booth that wasn't promoting 40K or Warhammer Fantasy Battle, but was promoting the then-unreleased Lord of the Rings minis game. I clearly recall telling my friend who was with me, �this is cool, because I love GW games, but what does this have to do with comic books?�

(More on Techland: Top 10 Must-See Trailers Out of Comic-Con)

I'm not entirely sure if that was 2001 or 2002, but it was the first time I was keenly aware of Comic-Con changing. �I really don't like how the entertainment industry is co-opting our culture,� I said, later that day.

Since that con, eight or nine years ago (!), I hear the same lament from my friends every single year: Comic-Con sucks. Comic-Con is too big. Comic-Con has been taken over by Hollywood. Comic-Con isn't about comics, anymore. When do passes go on sale for the next Comic-Con?

Yesterday, I was talking on Twitter with Scott Kurtz (creator of PVP, and one of my very good friends) about Comic-Con. Scott quoted @leverus: "Comic-Con is hurting nerd culture, in a broad and systemic and probably permanent way."

I replied: @pvponline Disagree. Nerd Culture has survived and endured for decades. Comic-con doesn't define us; we make it possible.

Scott said: @wilw I disagree. The people who make it possible are being shoved into corners and trampled by lines for hall H. #nerdfight

And I said: @pvponline Oh, I agree. What I mean is that our larger culture isn't going to be destroyed by it. We will endure. #disappointingnerdfight

And then, because it made me laugh: *stabs you in the eye with a pen* _Now_ it's a #nerdfight, sukka! (h/t @damnglitch)

What I was trying to say to Scott, and what I wanted to communicate to my fellow nerds, is that even though Comic-Con has changed (if it's for the better is certainly debatable), I don't see how those changes can hurt us, as much as they disappoint us. But I think we have to be honest with ourselves: are we really upset that Comic-Con is hurting our culture, or are we upset that something that belonged exclusively to us for so long clearly doesn't, anymore?

(More on Techland: Comic-Con: S%&^ Gets Unreal at the Cosplay Masquerade)

I hate the douchey agents and development people who are swarming all over the con as much as anyone. Like a lot of my friends, I wonder why shows that have nothing at all to do with what's traditionally considered geek culture have panels and booths. I'm not thrilled when I sit in the lobby of my hotel, I see twenty fancypants Hollywood types for every authentic geek. But there's a trade off: all of that means that Comic-Con has become so important to studios and networks, they'll spend the money to make Flynn's Arcade and Cafe Diem. They'll bring out the people who make things we love, and we're willing to spend a loooooooong time in line, we can meet them.

There's something else to consider, too, when we ask ourselves if this is causing lasting damage to nerd culture: A generation of nerds who started going to Comic-con around the Lord of the Rings and Spiderman years have been going for almost a decade. They have grown up with a Comic-con that has always been like this � and they don't care. They enjoy the same things we do, the same way we always have, and if they see a panel or a booth for something that's nerd-adjacent at best � they ignore it. They are the future caretakers of our culture, and they - like us - simply tune out the things they don't care about (speaking as the father of two teenage geeks, I have experience in this regard.)

Maybe I'm missing something, but I just don't see how Comic-Con's evolution is hurting our culture. Disappointing to some of us? Sure. Exploiting some of us? I guess you could make that argument, but I don't know if I'd completely agree with you. I tell you what: we can talk about it next year, while we're waiting to get into Hall H to see that thing we don't even know exists right now.

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No Great Work of Art Can Be "Spoiled" by David Haglund posted @5:00 PM

Now that we've done the history of "Spoiler Alert," let's discuss appropriate and/or civically obligatory uses.

The (previously, of course) definitive guide to spoiler alert usage was written by Awl contributor Dan Kois for New York magazine's Vulture blog in 2008. The whole guide is worth reading, as is the accompanying manifesto calling for a return to a "water cooler culture," in which people who really care about a show or book or movie make an effort to read or watch it as soon as they can, so they can then discuss it with their co-workers (or whomever) in person.

Spoilers, in this account, are allowed after a brief but reasonable interval that allows for anyone who truly cares to watch or read the show or movie or book in question. Spoilers are allowed in the text of articles more quickly than in headlines, because people can simply choose not to read articles for a few days to avoid spoilers, if they must, but it can be hard to miss a headline.

Furthermore, the rules vary for different media: you should give people a few extra hours to watch a TV show, a few days to see a movie, and a few months to read a book. Reality shows can be spoiled immediately upon conclusion, as they are essentially sporting events. Operas are never, under any circumstances, to be spoiled. (I'm pretty sure that last one is a joke.)

All of which is well and good and probably necessary to lay out on a blog such as Vulture where people are writing about shows and movies and books and the reactions thereto several times every weekday. And the accompanying manifesto really is terrific; you should read it (after you finish this; or at least come right back).

But the guidelines, I regret to say, are flawed. They are both too severe and not severe enough. That is because they ignore a crucial factor: artistic ambition.

That probably sounds snobbish, and I suspect (though Dan is welcome to correct me) that an aversion to snobbishness is at least partly responsible for this oversight�just as an assumption of snobbishness is probably the reason Ron Rosenbaum also failed to make this distinction (in his own pro-spoiler blog post from 2006, cited by Kois in his manifesto). Put simply, a truly ambitious and successful work of narrative art is spoiler-proof. If a show or movie or book is really, truly great, you can watch it again and again and again, well after you know what's going to happen, and the aesthetic pleasure you derive therefrom will not diminish. It may even increase. This is an essential part of the work's greatness.

Consider this: Alfred Hitchcock knew as much about creating suspense as perhaps any narrative artist of the past century; and when he made what is, hands down, his most artistically ambitious movie, Vertigo, he went out of his way to spoil the mystery halfway through. Vertigo is the story of one woman pretending to be another in an effort to deceive a man, and Hitchcock easily could have preserved the mystery of that woman's identity until the end of the film.

But the pleasures and satisfactions of Vertigo don't depend on not knowing a basic aspect of the plot. They derive from the movie's brilliant illustration of love and desire and the ways we idealize and romanticize particular human beings and then become disappointed or even disgusted by their simple, physical humanity. It's the best thing Hitchcock ever did, and knowing who is actually who doesn't change that.

On the other hand you have The Usual Suspects, which, after you have learned the identity of Keyser Soze, really isn't very good.

(By the way: Hitchcock's deliberate avoidance of narrative suspense in Vertigo is one of the reasons it is better than the truly excellent but not greatest-ever-made film Citizen Kane�no matter what some fancy poll says�which employs the narrative crutch of withheld knowledge and then bestows that knowledge in a corny and not very satisfactory way at the end.)

So if you're discussing something like The Usual Suspects, you should not try not to reveal the ending unless absolutely necessary (even now), and, if you must, a warning is in order. If you're talking about, say, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the rules are different. It's actually more okay to spoil something the better it is�and this rule comes with good cultural consequences: should we really spend that much time talking about The Usual Suspects? Let's talk about the things that can't be spoiled, no matter how many plot points we give away.

Your own artistic ambitions as a critic are relevant here, too: if you're writing a blog post you consider more or less ephemeral, then, what, you can't be bothered to throw in the silly but really rather simple phrase "spoiler alert"? But if you're aiming for something more lasting, then yeah, it's not really fair for readers to get mad at you for

Chapter 25

not using what is honestly kind of an embarrassing cliche. Editors can follow this principle as well: is your publication for the next three days or "forever"? Edit accordingly. Readers could then approach a publication with the appropriate degree of caution.

With that established, the other question: Why is imperviousness to spoilers an essential aspect of truly great narrative art? I'm not really sure. I have a theory, though, one that is at present about quarter-baked at best and will probably sound even more pretentious than everything I've written so far (which, considering the repeated use of the phrase "narrative art" and the appearance of both "thereto"and "therefrom" is, I imagine, saying something). I think it has to do with life and death and the way the former leads inevitably to the latter. That is: Life is not a mystery. We know how it ends. And if a work of art can be "spoiled" when we know the ending, it can't really have that much to say about life, can it?

David Haglund is the managing editor of PEN America and has recently written for Bookforum, Slate and The National. He is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.

egnalfomas 279 points 15 hours ago[-]

I don't think anyone has really touched on the core of why she's not liked among philosophers: she has a very dogmatic, black-and-white way of looking at the world. Most philosophers want to be able to ask questions and ponder the foundations of things (such as ethics). In Rand, this does not happen. Instead, she provides the foundation, the axioms, out of the box, and spends most of her time working out the implications. If she had been more introspective about her core values, then maybe people would be more willing to listen. However, she comes out and says "There is an Objective ethical system, this is what it is, everything else is stupid/crap!". If you think her axioms are wrong or at least not obvious, then it's like sitting in church listening to a long sermon when you're not even on board with the basic premise. This is why philosophers hate Rand. It's like a sermon and we don't get to debate anything because it's based on core axioms that you're not allowed to question.

As an aside, I personally think egoism has a lot of light to shed on ethics, but there are lots of really serious concerns in ethics and meta-ethics and it's not entirely clear that there is an objective value system to be had. If you study the history of philosophy, you may notice that value systems change in time and are increasingly viewed with skepticism by philosophers (e.g. Hume, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, etc.) to the point where it became pretty much a sign of real stupidity to even suggest that philosophy could meaningfully discuss objective value. Black and white thinkers will pipe up and insist "well, of course there is RIGHT and WRONG, or of course there is GOOD and EVIL" but show me the proof. Anyone can make assertions, it's how you back them up that counts in philosophy. Does Rand ever prove this or is just asserted because it's obvious to her? What I get from Rand is this: "REASON GOOD", "SELF-INTEREST GOOD", "CAPITALISM GOOD!" You can't just assert that and then write fiction to prove how it works out to be true. You can't just say "OH, WELL, COMMUNISM FAILED, SO IT'S BASED ON THE REAL WORLD". Because it's not some black and white system where you only have two options. Maybe there are good AND bad aspects to capitalism! I happen to think so.

I say this as someone extremely sympathetic to libertarian ideas. I just don't like the dogmatic "it's obvious and so easy" attitude as though there were no problems or as though the foundation was perfect and unquestionable. The foundation is precisely what philosophers are interested in questioning because if it's wrong, then you're whole fucking system is garbage. In practice this means you will in fact find different stripes of libertarians, some more right-wing, some more left-wing, some that care more about drugs, some that care more about guns, some that oppose any taxes whatsoever, and some that don't believe in property rights (kind of socialist, huh). So, yeah, the ideas can be made to work, but at that point why hang on to the label "Randian/Objectivist" when you can just be a lower case 'l' libertarian and laugh at all the fools who believe there is "ONE TRUE WAY" (very dogmatic/religious overtones I might add, which is why people often say she created a "cult").

To recap a bit: it's the arrogant/dogmatic tone of having all the answers to ethical problems (and by extension political problems), but more importantly it's the lack of introspection, nuance, and attempt to engage other philosophers. Does she grapple with contemporary ethical or political philosophy? How does she solve the Is-Ought problem? I don't have a problem with atheism or libertarianism, it's a natural progression of free thinkers to come to these conclusions, but it's really odd that she clings onto objective ethics when most other philosophers in the 20th century were moving past all that. It's like she doesn't go far enough. If she had written her ideas in the 1700s, it would been like, OK, good job. But by the 20th century it's kind of like she didn't do her homework or isn't up to speed, you know? I'd love her opinion on Nietzsche's take on morals. Because frankly he makes a hell of a lot more sense than her despite predating her by a century. I think she even read his work but apparently she missed the boat in understanding him, which is too bad. So, she's a bit anachronistic to me, I'd judge her much more favorably if she wrote in an earlier time. I really mean that.

I don't know. Actually, to be honest she doesn't bother me that much and I could definitely recommend her to high school students or people not into philosophy as food for thought, but hopefully I've conveyed why some of the bashing happens.

Monday, August 09, 2010 Yesterday I read an article about non-monogamy in New York magazine by bloggers/sex-advice-givers Em and Lo entitled "The New Monogamy". It seriously annoyed me, and I�m going to critique it, so this post won�t make a lot of sense unless you read that first. So go do that.

Em and Lo offended me pretty much right out of the chute, with their talk about their ideas about what non-monogamy for their boyfriends would look like.

�We each recently began toying with the idea� of arranging happy endings for our boyfriends at a Chinatown massage parlor, as a sort of gift in honor of long-term monogamy. Who knows where the idea came from? Was it something in the air? Pure generosity? Or a way to beta-test an idea? And could we go through with it? Probably, if we handled the arrangements, we agreed over a bottle of red one night at a Brooklyn wine bar. Naturally, we imagined the most clinical of hand jobs administered by wizened, grandmotherly ladies. But still, we took it as a sign of the times and of our evolution.�

Aside from the fact that I know a number of super-hot-looking women who are, in fact, grandmothers � are Em and Lo really of the opinion that arranging for your lover to be given a hand-job by a woman you�re strongly implying will be not-very-attractive is evolved? Really? Wow. To me this implies that Em and Lo�s partners are so sex-starved and indiscriminate that pretty much any female would excite them, which flatters no one in the equation. And I wonder how Em and Lo would feel if their boyfriends arranged for them to be gotten off by some wizened, grandfatherly men? Would that be evolved, too?

But tacky remarks about sex workers aside, I have a huge issue with the title and premise of this article. Saying that couples having sexual contact with other people is �The New Monogyny� is flatly absurd. Monogamy is when you don�t have sex with other people. When you do, that�s non-monogamy. Neither of these concepts are new, but apparently the existing lexicon isn�t cool enough for Em and Lo. Because when you say the word polyamory, Em and Lo explain that:

��in most people�s imaginations, you�ve got on the one hand your earnest, hairy polyamorists (see San Francisco) and on the other, doughy, middle-aged swingers (see Minnesota or HBO). These are the bogeymen of today�s hipster open relationships�if we swing tonight, can a purple muumuu and a relocation west be far behind?� Some of the people Em and Lo discuss in this piece are being monogamous. They simply acknowledge to their partners that they have sexual thoughts about other people, and share their fantasies. Which I think is just fine. But, in a stunning example of Orwellian newspeak, people who do actually have sex with more than one partner are described by Em and Lo as �the new monogamists�.

The New Monogomy looks much like the old in some ways: Em and Lo are blandly confident that the One Penis Policy is the only viable way to do open, honest non-monogamy. Because they didn�t meet anyone who they thought was attractive who was doing anything else. Sexual attractiveness seems to play a very large role in who Em and Lo think is a New Monogamist. Don�t be a grandmother, apparently, and don�t be hairy, or "doughy". This how they described their meeting with one pair of New Monogamists:

�To our pleasant surprise, however, there is absolutely nothing skeevy about Siege and Katie. They�re smart, funny, polite, hip, attractive, self-deprecating, and affectionate with one another. And that�s the most disconcerting thing of all. Call us snobs, but it�s easy to dismiss suburban swingers who show up at orgies with a Tupperware container or Bay Area hippies missing the irony gene. But when a couple like Siege and Katie decry strict monogamy? It makes you wonder, How old-fashioned, socially programmed, and ass-backward am I?�

Um, yeah, since you asked � you�re snobs, ladies, and you are indeed pretty ass-backwards. The one-line disclaimer you tagged on at the end about how, oh, okay, you�ve learned your lesson and you won�t make fun of those crazy swingers anymore? I�m unimpressed. You are not qualified to write knowledgeably about a minority sexual community, because your outlook is provincial, your research is shallow, and you don�t even try to hide, let alone really examine, your bias. Stick to tips on blowjobs and pubic hairstyles, that�s about your speed.

Labels: kink/sex in the news, polyamory

Interview Max Brooks The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks by Leonard Pierce July 9, 2010 Article Tools Twitter Facebook Digg StumbleUpon Reddit Email This Print This More Interview Terry Zwigoff Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet author David Mitchell Dean Wareham Adam McKay

Max Brooks, son of director Mel Brooks and actor Anne Bancroft, followed his parents� path into show business with minor acting roles and a two-year stint as a staff writer on Saturday Night Live before he published his first book, 2003�s The Zombie Survival Guide. Formatted as a how-to guide for living through a plague of the undead, it went on to sell a million copies. He followed it up with World War Z, a well-received novel depicting an epic global war against zombies told from multiple perspectives, and presented as an oral history. A movie version is in the works. Meanwhile, Brooks has moved on to comics, with The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks, a visceral adaptation of some of the material in his debut, and now a series of engaging studies of G.I. Joe characters titled Hearts And Minds. He recently spoke to The A.V. Club about the unexpected success of his work, the timely qualities of World War Z, and how zombie burnout may strangle the next great zombie masterpiece.

The A.V. Club: You�ve sold a million copies of a how-to guide for a nonexistent situation. That�s a pretty unique accomplishment.

Max Brooks: And no one is more surprised than me. If you ever find the warehouse that has the million copes my father bought, let me know. [Laughs.] Yeah, it�s really unusual, especially since I never thought it would even be published.

AVC: It was marketed in a strange way, too: It�s usually sold as a humor book, but the subject is presented with total seriousness. It�s almost more absurd than funny.

MB: I think if there�s a joke, the joke is on me. The joke is that I actually wrote it, that some doofus said �I�m gonna sit down and write a real book on how to fight something that isn�t real.� I never intended it to be funny. I wrote it because I�ve always been into zombies, and I thought, �Well, if they really did exist, here�s how you would fight them.� It�s that simple.

AVC: That�s why it�s so odd that it was marketed as humor: it�s so straight-faced.

MB: I think �absurd� is a really good way to put it. In a way, my whole career is absurd, because that�s the kind of stuff I do. I�m not very good at gauging what other people would like, and when I try, I usually fall on my face. So I usually stick to the stuff I�m into, and hope I�m not the only one who�s into it. I wrote [The Zombie Survival Guide] in �98, �99, and then I stuck it in a drawer for years. I thought it was a nice exercise, but come on, no one�s going to be into that. So when Ed Victor, my book agent, said, �I can get this published,� I was like, �Uh, yeah, you do that.� And when it came out, and they told me �Yeah, we�re printing 17,000 copies,� I thought �Oh, shit. Now I actually have to go out and try to sell these things.� But eventually I thought, �Wow, how cool is this? I actually get to see my little passion project in print! I can go and see it in bookstores for a few months. And then I can go get a real job.� I never, ever expected this.

AVC: How do you research a book like that? Was it all culled from watching zombie movies? Did you talk to real experts?

MB: I can tell you honestly, nothing was pulled out of my ass. It�s all�this is why I say if there�s a joke, it�s on me�I wrote an actual disaster preparedness book. I did real research. Reams of research, stacks of books�some of it was taken from my own personal experience. I can tell you for a fact that dehydration is more serious than any external threat. I remember when I was on a field-training exercise for ROTC in �91 how the biggest guy in our unit got floored, taken out by dehydration. That�s the kind of lesson you don�t forget. I can tell you from personal experience of training on the M-16�bad gun. It jams. It was probably invented by Ho Chi Minh. I think that�s why it�s been so successful; if you take the zombies out, it still works. The zombies are the only things in there that are supernatural. There�s no lightsabers, there�s no force fields; it�s literally just �What can you do with the tools at your disposal?�

AVC: If there ever really is a zombie apocalypse, you�ll get all kinds of credit.

MB: Oh yeah. I keep having this fantasy of the government showing up at my door saying �You knew! Come with us.�

AVC: Did you plan on writing World War Z as a sort of pseudo-sequel?

MB: No, I had no idea. What happened was, I wrote The Zombie Survival Guide in �99, it came out in �03, and I was thinking about what kind of book to write next. I had a few false starts, and then I thought, �What do I want to read?� That�s sort of my best guide. And I realized that all the zombie books that were starting to come out, and all the zombie movies I had seen, they were all about one story. They were all about one group, or one guy, in one area. And I�ve always thought big-picture. I�m one of those guys who won�t let you enjoy a movie, because I have to just pick it apart. So I thought, �Well, what about the rest of the world? What about Russia, China, Africa? And forget about soldiers� how would refugees deal? How would you organize the economy? How would you feed people?� I really wanted to tell the story of the planet, and the template was The Good War by Studs Terkel.

AVC: That sort of pseudo-documentary, oral-history approach is very different from most genre fiction. Was that hard to pull off?

MB: That was easy for me. The hard part was the research. The irony was that for a book of fake interviews, I had to do just as many real interviews with real people who do those real jobs to get at it. It was almost more a work of journalism than of fiction.

AVC: How�s the movie coming along? There was a big bidding war when the book came out in 2006, but we haven�t heard much about it lately.

MB: It�s never stalled. It�s just in development. Which is maddening, because development takes forever. They�ve always been full steam ahead on it; I think the problem is that if they�re going to make it, it�s going to have to be a really big movie, and I think that has made them very conscious of trying to get it right. They got a writer who did a kick-ass job. They brought in another writer who I hear is doing another kick-ass job. They brought in [director] Marc Forster, thank God. I was terrified they�d bring in some guy who had done some MTV videos, and they thought would be perfect for it. But the fact that they brought in Forster (Monster�s Ball, Quantum Of Solace) I thought was amazing�we had lunch and talked about it, and he gets it. He gets what I was trying to do with the book.

AVC: Do you have any day-to-day involvement with the production?

MB: Nope. You know more about it than I do.

AVC: Was it hard to let go of it when you sold the rights, and leave it to hope that the studio would do right by the book?

MB: No. My attitude was, I wrote the best zombie book I could write. Now it�s up to them to make the best zombie movie they can make. As far as sticking close to my book, I don�t think that�s so important. It�s more important to me that they just make a good zombie movie. I would only be nervous if somehow they had the right to rewrite my book. I mean, my book is done. People can see what I can do. And that�s fine with me. I�ve had my artistic moment. Now it�s up to them.

AVC: It�s a very cinematically written book for something that�s framed as a sort of documentary. Did having a director for a father have any influence on you when you started writing fiction?

MB: Well, I don�t have a director for a father. I have a writer/comedian for a father, who happens to direct his own movies. There are people who are directors�that�s what they do, that�s where they live, and they think visually every day of their lives. That�s not who my dad is. He only directed his movies to protect them from other directors. He�s turned down really big directing jobs. He turned down The Beatles. They wanted him to direct Help!, and he said, �Nope. I don�t direct other people�s stuff.� My dad was instrumental only in being true to your work. That�s where he made a big difference. He�s always been very big on that. He told me, �The important thing is to be true to yourself, because if you don�t like it and they don�t like it, then you�ve failed. But if you like it, then at least you did the best you could.� That�s sort of been my touchstone. I have to like what I�m doing first.

AVC: A lot of World War Z�s expressly political and socioeconomic material should be dated by now, but it doesn�t really seem that way. The themes of incompetence in high places and lack of preparedness never get old.

MB: Yeah, definitely. And, you know, just to show you what a frickin� weirdo I am�I don�t mind it being dated. I don�t mind my work being a record of the time it was written in. When Dawn Of The Dead came out�it�s a wonderful document of the death of the Baby Boomers. I always thought it should be marketed alongside Easy Rider: the Baby Boomers, the beginning and end.

AVC: It has a real Carter-era malaise to it, aside from all its other qualities.

MB: Yeah! I think you�re exactly right, and I like that stuff. I wouldn�t mind if, 20 years from now, somebody picked up World War Z and said �Here�s a book that somebody wrote during the Bush era, and you can see it reflected in his work.� When I read Frank Miller�s The Dark Knight Returns, I think it�s a wonderful record of the Reagan era. I think it�s amazing. This is the time I lived in.

AVC: You�ve moved into comics yourself now, not only with Recorded Attacks, but now with your G.I. Joe series. How did that come about?

MB: It�s something I always wanted to do. I went to a bunch of comic-book companies and nobody would touch it, nobody wanted anything to do with it, until finally someone came to me and said, �Hey, do you want to do a zombie comic book?� That was a huge education for me. I probably worked harder on that than anything I�d ever done. You really have to change your way of thinking, and what�s amazing is how much work you do that the reader will never see. You have to do pages of description for just one panel of artwork. So it�s a lot of drudgery in the shadows, but it didn�t bother me, because I think the artist, Ibraim Roberson, is just stunning. He made my subsequent comics work a lot easier.

AVC: What made you take the approach you did to your G.I. Joe comics?

MB: I think G.I. Joe is a perfect example of how I�m the world�s worst businessman. If I were smart, I�d be writing World War Z Part 12, but I have to go where the muse leads, and I�ve always been a huge G.I. Joe fan. I always wanted to know more about these characters, these little plastic figures I played with as a kid. As I got older, I wanted to give them the adult issues that the rest of us have to deal with. I initially gave a writing sample to IDW, and they liked it so much that they gave me the miniseries, and it�s not traditional. I�m stunned that as many people like it as they do. It�s not traditional narrative�it�s just these little character studies, going deeper and giving biographical information or day-in-the-life stories about them. I wish I had the kind of brain that could tell traditional action stories, but I don�t. This is the kind of thing I want to know about the G.I. Joe characters.

AVC: Well, since you brought it up, what about a World War Z sequel? Are we ever going to see one?

MB: Maybe! It�ll happen when I think of it. The thing I don�t wanna do is World War Z, Part 2: The Search For More Money. If I do another World War Z book, it�s got to be because I have to get the story out of my head. I wrote The Zombie Survival Guide because I wanted to read it, and nobody else was writing it. All I�ve been doing with everything I�ve written is answering questions that I had.

AVC: Between the time The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z came out and today, there�s been a huge deluge of zombie-related books, comics, movies, videogames, etc. How do you feel about that? Has it affected you either as a creator or as a consumer of zombie fiction?

MB: You know, that�s a really good question. Honestly, I don�t think there�s a lot of good-quality stuff coming out right now. There might be, no question, but I think for every one really genuine zombie story coming out, there�s a tsunami of hackwork by people who were never into zombies, aren�t interested in them, never cared about them, but they smell money and they�re just trying to cash in. It doesn�t affect me. My books are selling as well as they�ve ever sold; it can only help me. But it does really bother me as a consumer.

A few years ago, a decade ago, if you were looking for a zombie book or a zombie movie, there were so few out there that you knew that if you found one, somebody really, really wanted to make it. There was just a ton of passion behind every zombie project coming out. And I think it�s been so diluted by this point that quality is hard to find; there are so many cash-in products out there that, as a reader, how do you know what�s good? You can�t read them all. But what�s more upsetting to me is the possibility of burnout. And again, this doesn�t affect me as a writer. I�ve sold more books than I ever deserve to sell. But as a reader, I think there�s somebody out there who�s thinking up the next great zombie story. There�s somebody right now writing something that will just blow World War Z out of the water, something so passionate and so perfect and so right. And what worries me is that by the time they finish it, the country will have moved on, publishers will have moved on, and they�ll be told, �We�re done with zombies. We�ve been done with zombies for a while now.� I worry that this glut will crush the next great zombie masterpiece that someone like me would love to read.

My friend Jeffery got a bike for his sixth birthday. Soon afterward, he learned how to ride without his training wheels and became the coolest kid at school. Sometimes I went to Jeffery's house when my mom was at work. Jeffery never wanted to draw pictures with me or play tag. Instead, he would ride his bike really fa

Chapter 26

st up and down his driveway and make motorcycle noises while I stood in front of his house and watched him.

One day, I got tired of just sitting and watching Jeffery be cool. I wanted to be cool too. I wanted Jeffery to teach me how to ride his bike. It looked easy enough.

He showed me how to get up on the seat and how to pedal. He pushed the bike while I sat on it. It was almost like I was riding it by myself! I began to feel fairly confident that I was going to be the best bike-rider in the world.

We teetered slowly up and down the driveway a couple times. But on our third time out, Jeffery suddenly veered us off to the left and said "Hey! I wonder if you can make it down this hill!!" Then he gave me a shove and sent me rolling down a steep, grassy incline toward an oak tree.

I careened down the hill at chaotic speed and slammed into the tree, at which point I was launched off Jeffery's bike straight into a fence post.

As I was lying there at the bottom of the hill, bleeding from my face, I decided that bikes were fucking dangerous and should be avoided at any cost. I don't know how or why my five-year-old mind came to the conclusion that the bike was at fault for my injuries, but on that day, I became convinced that bicycles were deadly satan-machines that would eventually destroy me.

My sixth birthday was a few months later, and when it finally came, I could barely contain my excitement. I had asked for roller-skates or a pony and I was pretty confident about my chances of at least getting roller-skates. As soon as I woke up, I raced into the kitchen where my parents were already waiting.

When my mom told me to look outside for my present, it gave me reason to believe that I would be getting a pony, which was at least nine times better than roller-skates. I was so ecstatic about the possibility of getting a real, live, ride-able animal that I temporarily forgot where the door was and began pinging around the house like a gnat on meth.

Once I was able to control myself enough to find my way out of the house, I ran to the backyard fully expecting to find a tiny horse standing there in the grass. Imagine my surprise when I rounded the corner and was instead confronted by a bicycle. In a matter of seconds, I went from overjoyed birthday-mode to feeling like my parents were trying to kill me.

I ran screaming and crying from my birthday present. It was not the reaction my parents were expecting.

My parents had apparently underestimated how traumatized I was by my first biking experience. They immediately went into damage-control mode. In a tone of voice that was so enthusiastic it was almost condescending, my dad said "How about I teach you how to ride your new bike, Allie?!" I buried my face in my mom's skirt and cried harder. "Well, do you want to go for a ride on my bike?" My dad continued. "You can sit on the bar while I pedal! It'll be fun!"

I don't know how he finally convinced me, but the next thing I can remember is sitting on the cross bar of my dad's bike, clinging to him in unadulterated terror.

My dad pedaled slowly and safely around the block, doing his best to reassure me that bikes are fun and they are not dangerous satan beasts that want all of my blood. Five minutes had passed and I still hadn't been brutally murdered by the bike, so I began to relax a little. My mom stood in our driveway and watched with adoration. For a little while, it was the perfect family moment.

The next few seconds were a real turning point in my life. My dad and I were failure in motion, drifting slowly toward our fate like a miniature Hindenburg. In my memory, I hear his voice in warped slow-motion saying "Haaaaaa... haaaaaa... haaaaaaa... thiiiiissss iiiisssssss fffuuuuuuuuuuuunnnn! Hoooorrrraaaaaaaayyyyyyy! Leeeeeeet'ssss goooooooo riiiide oooonnn thhheeee grrrraaaaaaaaasssss!"

In what I imagine was an attempt to enrich my biking experience with different riding surfaces, my dad veered off onto a little strip of grass.

I don't know how we hit the rock and why we were both catapulted over the handlebars when it happened; we certainly weren't traveling at an outrageous speed. What I do know is when my dad's front tire hit the rock, my hard-earned trust shriveled up like an injured banana slug.

All 220 pounds of my dad came down on top of me elbow-first. I struggled free from underneath his crumpled body and ran to my mom. My dad just lay there face-down in the road, like a Hefty bag full of shame.

My fear of bicycles stuck with me for over a decade. While all my friends were riding their awesome bikes around town making badass motorcycle noises and popping mad wheelies, I was the weird kid running behind them, trying but failing to maintain some semblance of dignity.

WHAT makes a Muslim in Britain or America wake up and decide that he is no longer a Briton or American but an Islamic �soldier� fighting a holy war against the infidel? Part of it must be pull: the lure of jihadism. Part is presumably push: a feeling that he no longer belongs to the place where he lives. Either way, the results can be lethal. A chilling feature of the suicide video left by Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the band that killed more than 50 people in London in July, 2005, was the homely Yorkshire accent in which he told his countrymen that �your� government is at war with �my people�.

For a while America seemed less vulnerable than Europe to home-grown jihadism. The Pew Research Centre reported three years ago that most Muslim Americans were �largely assimilated, happy with their lives� and decidedly American in their outlook, values and attitudes.� Since then it has become clear that American Muslims can be converted to terrorism too. Nidal Malik Hassan, born in America and an army major, killed 13 of his comrades in a shooting spree at Fort Hood. Faisal Shahzad, a legal immigrant, tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square. But something about America�the fact that it is a nation of immigrants, perhaps, or its greater religiosity, or the separation of church and state, or the opportunities to rise�still seems to make it an easier place than Europe for Muslims to feel accepted and at home.

It was in part to preserve this feeling that George Bush repeated like a scratched gramophone record that Americans were at war with the terrorists who had attacked them on 9/11, not at war with Islam. Barack Obama has followed suit: the White House national security strategy published in May says that one way to guard against radicalisation at home is to stress that �diversity is part of our strength�not a source of division or insecurity.� This is hardly rocket science. America is plainly safer if its Muslims feel part of �us� and not, like Mohammad Sidique Khan, part of �them�. And that means reminding Americans of the difference�a real one, by the way, not one fabricated for the purposes of political correctness�between Islam, a religion with a billion adherents, and al-Qaeda, a terrorist outfit that claims to speak in Islam�s name but has absolutely no right or mandate to do so.

Why would any responsible American politician want to erase that vital distinction? Good question. Ask Sarah Palin, or Newt Gingrich, or the many others who have lately clambered aboard the offensive campaign to stop Cordoba House, a proposed community centre and mosque, from being built in New York two blocks from the site of the twin towers. Every single argument put forward for blocking this project leans in some way on the misconceived notion that all Muslims, and Islam itself, share the responsibility for, or are tainted by, the atrocities of 9/11.

In a tweet last month from Alaska, Ms Palin called on �peaceful Muslims� to �refudiate� the �ground-zero mosque� because it would �stab� American hearts. But why should it? Cordoba House is not being built by al-Qaeda. To the contrary, it is the brainchild of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, a well-meaning American cleric who has spent years trying to promote interfaith understanding, not an apostle of religious war like Osama bin Laden. He is modelling his project on New York�s 92nd Street Y, a Jewish community centre that reaches out to other religions. The site was selected in part precisely so that it might heal some of the wounds opened by the felling of the twin towers and all that followed. True, some relatives of 9/11 victims are hurt by the idea of a mosque going up near the site. But that feeling of hurt makes sense only if they too buy the false idea that Muslims in general were perpetrators of the crime. Besides, what about the feelings, and for that matter the rights, of America�s Muslims�some of whom also perished in the atrocity?

Ms Palin�s argument does at least have one mitigating virtue: it concentrates on the impact the centre might have, without impugning the motives of those who want to build it. The same half-defence can be made of the Anti-Defamation League, a venerable Jewish organisation created to fight anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry. To the dismay of many liberal Jews, the ADL has also urged the centre�s backers to seek another site in order to spare the feelings of families of the 9/11 victims. But at least it concedes that they have every right to build at this site�and that they might (only might, since the ADL hints at vague concerns about their ideology and finances) genuinely have chosen it in order to send a positive message about Islam.

The Saudi non-sequitur

No such plea of mitigation can be entered on behalf of Mr Gingrich. The former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives may or may not have presidential pretensions, but he certainly has intellectual ones. That makes it impossible to excuse the mean spirit and scrambled logic of his assertion that �there should be no mosque near ground zero so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia�. Come again? Why hold the rights of Americans who happen to be Muslim hostage to the policy of a foreign country that happens also to be Muslim? To Mr Gingrich, it seems, an American Muslim is a Muslim first and an American second. Al-Qaeda would doubtless concur.

Mr Gingrich also objects to the centre�s name. Imam Feisal says he chose �Cordoba� in recollection of a time when the rest of Europe had sunk into the Dark Ages but Muslims, Jews and Christians created an oasis of art, culture and science. Mr Gingrich sees only a �deliberate insult�, a reminder of a period when Muslim conquerors ruled Spain. Like Mr bin Laden, Mr Gingrich is apparently still relitigating the victories and defeats of religious wars fought in Europe and the Middle East centuries ago. He should rejoin the modern world, before he does real harm.

How Black People Use Twitter The latest research on race and microblogging. By Farhad Manjoo Posted Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2010, at 4:45 PM ET

As far as I can tell, the Twitter hashtag #wordsthatleadtotrouble got started at about 11 a.m. Pacific Time on Sunday morning, when a user named Kookeyy posted this short message: "#wordsthatleadtotrouble 'Don't Worry I gotchu." A couple minutes later, Kookeyy posted another take on the same theme: "#wordsthatleadtotrouble - I Love Yuh *kiss teeth*." On Twitter, people append hashtags to categorize their messages�the tags make it easier to search for posts on a certain topic, and they can sometimes lead to worldwide call-and-response conversations in which people compete to outdo each other with ever more hilarious, bizarre, or profane posts. A woman in South Africa named Tigress_Lee moved the chatter in that direction: "#wordsthatleadtotrouble 'the condom broke'!" she wrote. From there, the meme took off. "We need to talk #wordsthatleadtotrouble," declared BigJamaal (11,920 followers), and then he proceeded to post a blizzard of suggestions, including "#wordsthatleadtotrouble I dont know why you got that Magnum in your wallet you clearly live a Durex lifestyle."

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Over the next few hours, thousands of people added to the meme. According to Trendtistic, a site that monitors and archives hot Twitter topics, #wordsthatleadtotrouble was one of Twitter's top 20 hashtags on Sunday, and it was the top tag that was not based on some real-life event (like the Teen Choice Awards or football). By Monday morning, Twitter was displaying #wordsthatleadtotrouble on its list of "trending topics." If you'd clicked on the tag, you would have noticed that contributions to the meme ranged from the completely banal ("#wordsthatleadtotrouble we just going out with friends!") to the slightly less so ("#wordsthatleadtotrouble I didn't know she was your sister"). If you clicked when the meme was at its peak�that is, before it spread widely beyond the cluster of people who started it�you would have also noticed something else: To judge from their Twitter avatars, nearly everyone participating in #wordsthatleadtotrouble was black.

Call #wordsthatleadtotrouble a "blacktag"�a trending topic initiated by a young African-American woman in Hollywood, pushed to a wider audience by a black woman in South Africa, and then pushed over the top by thousands of contributions from who appear to be black teenagers all over the United States. This story is not at all out of the ordinary on Twitter. #wordsthatleadtotrouble was one of a few such tags that hit the trending topics list on Monday�others included #ilaugheverytime and #annoyingquestion�and it's typical of the sort of tag that pops up almost daily. (A new one, #wheniwaslittle, hit Tuesday morning.) Advertisement

The prevalence of these tags has long puzzled nonblack observers and sparked lots of sometimes uncomfortable questions about "how black people use Twitter." As the Awl's Choire Sicha wrote last fall, "At the risk of getting randomly harshed on by the Internet, I cannot keep quiet about my obsession with Late Night Black People Twitter, an obsession I know some of you other white people share, because it is awesome."

As a nonwhite person, I must concur: It is awesome�although I'm less interested in the content of these tags than in the fact that they keep getting so popular. What explains the rise of tags like #wordsthatleadtotrouble? Are black people participating in these types of conversations more often than nonblacks? Are other identifiable groups starting similar kinds of hashtags, but it's only those initiated by African-Americans that are hitting the trending topics list? If that's true, what is it about the way black people use Twitter that makes their conversations so popular? Then there's the apparent segregation in these tags. While you begin to see some nonblack faces after a trending topic hits Twitter's home page, the early participants in these tags are almost all black. Does this suggest a break between blacks and nonblacks on Twitter�that real-life segregation is being mirrored online?

After watching several of these hashtags from start to finish and talking to a few researchers who've studied trends on Twitter, I've got some potential answers to these questions. Black people�specifically, young black people�do seem to use Twitter differently from everyone else on the service. They form tighter clusters on the network�they follow one another more readily, they retweet each other more often, and more of their posts are @-replies�posts directed at other users. It's this behavior, intentional or not, that gives black people�and in particular, black teenagers�the means to dominate the conversation on Twitter.

There are loads of caveats to this analysis, which I'll get to in a moment. But first, a digression into one of the leading explanations for these memes�the theory that the hashtags are sparked by something particular to black culture. "There's a long oral dissing tradition in black communities," says Baratunde Thurston, the Web editor of the Onion, whose funny presentation at this year's South by Southwest conference, "How To Be Black Online," argued that blacktags were a new take on the Dozens. "Twitter works very naturally with that call-and-response tradition�it's so short, so economical, and you get an instant signal validating the quality of your contribution." (If people like what you say, they retweet it.)

To me, the Dozens theory is compelling but not airtight. For one thing, a lot of these tags don't really fit the format of the Dozens�they don't feature people one-upping one another with witty insults. Instead, the ones that seem to hit big are those that comment on race, love, sex, and stereotypes about black culture. Many read like Jeff Foxworthy's "You might be a redneck �" routine applied to black people�for instance, last December's #ifsantawasblack (among the tamer contributions: "#ifsantawasblack he wouldnt say ho ho ho, he would say yo yo yo") or July's #ghettobabynames (e.g., "#ghettobabynames Weavequisha.") The bigger reason why the Dozens theory isn't a silver bullet is that a lot of people of all races insult one another online generally, and on Twitter specifically. We don't usually see those trends hit the top spot. Why do only black people's tweets get popular?

In April, Edison Media Research released a survey which found that nearly one-quarter of people on Twitter are African-American; the firm noted this was "approximately double the percentage of African-Americans in the current U.S. population." That survey has been widely cited as an explanation for the popularity of blacktags, but as Fred Stutzman later pointed out, Edison's survey had a high margin of error, and thus didn't really tell us much about how many black people use Twitter. In general, it's difficult to get demographic information about Twitter users�you don't have to tell the service your age, race, ethnicity, or geographic location when you join. As such, when we talk about black Twitter users, we're usually talking about people who've chosen photos of black people as their avatars. This lack of reliable demographic information has hampered many efforts to get to the bottom of this phenomenon.

Nevertheless, Brendan Meeder thinks he's got a good hypothesis about what's going on. Meeder, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University, has downloaded the tweets of more than 100 million users. (Twitter gave him special permission to do so for research purposes.) He's been probing this collection to see how Twitter users interact with one another; he's particularly interested in how trends begin and spread through a social network. While analyzing his database a few months ago, Meeder noticed something strange�he found a cluster of hundreds of users whose profiles were connected to one another. When he looked up the users, he noticed that a lot of them were black. It's in exactly these kinds of tight-knit groups that Twitter memes flourish, Meeder says. "It's my impression that these hashtags start in dense communities�people who are highly connected to each other," Meeder says. "If you have 50 of these people talking about it, think about the number of outsiders who follow at least one of those 50�it's pretty high at that point. So you can actually get a pretty big network effect by having high density."

Not only are the people who start these trends more tightly clustered on the network, they're also using the network differently. Most people on Twitter have fewer followers than the number of people they're following�that is, they're following celebrities, journalists, news organizations, and other big institutions that aren't following them back. But according to Meeder, the users who initiate blacktags seem to have more reciprocal relationships�they're following everyone who follows them. Tigress_Lee, the user who helped spark #wordsthatleadtotrouble, has 1,825 followers, and she's following 1,873. BigJamaal has 11,962 followers, and he's following 11,203. These patterns suggest that the black people who start these tags "are using Twitter as a social tool," Meeder says. "They're using Twitter like a public instant messenger"�using the service to talk to one another rather than broadcast a message to the world.

Now for the caveats. There is an obvious problem with talking about how black people use Twitter, as many of the black Twitter users I spoke to took pains to point out: Not all black people on the service are participating in these hashtags, and there are probably a great many who are indifferent to or actively dislike the tags. "It's the same issue I have with certain black comedy shows," says Elon James White, a comedian who runs the site This Week in Blackness. "They put out these ideas of blackness that�if it were someone of another race saying them�you'd go, 'Whoa, that's racist!' I remember when #ifsantawasblack hit, I lost my shit. I was freaking out. It was literally a game of, What's the most racist thing we can say? And it was black people saying it!"

Omar Wasow, a co-founder of BlackPlanet.com and a contributor to Slate's sister publication The Root, was one of several black people who told me that he rarely sees the people in his timeline joining these hashtags. "If you're not a teen or twentysomething and probably working class, you're likely not following these people, and you're out of the loop," he says. Like me, Wasow says he only notices these conversations when they hit Twitter's trending lists.

Given that these hashtags are occurring in a subgroup of black people online, it is probably a mistake to take them as representative of anything larger about black culture. "For people who aren't on the inside, it's sort of an inside look at a slice of the black American modes of thought," says Jonathan Pitts-Wiley, also a former writer at The Root. "I want to be particular about that�it's just a slice of it. Unfortunately, it may be a slice that confirms what many people already think they know about black culture."

Tuesday, Jun 8, 2010 13:10 ET Why "Glee" is this century's "Twin Peaks" As the last episode of Season 1 airs tonight, we look back on this apparently shallow sitcom's radical sincerity By Matt Zoller Seitz

Fox.com Kurt Hummel (Chris Colfer) in "Glee"

Fox's "Glee," which ends its first season tonight, is one of the most stylistically bold broadcast network shows since "Twin Peaks." That might seem an unlikely claim on first glance: "Glee" is a feather-light comedy at least 70 percent of the time, and a glib, mannered one at that. From its wistful-kooky incidental music to its subtext-as-text quips (Noah "Puck" Puckerman: "That Rachel chick makes me wanna light myself on fire, but she can sing"), "Glee" is shellacked in cuteness. And its subject matter -- the private and public melodramas of high school students and teachers -- is the stuff that dismissive reactions are made of.

What's radical about the series -- which was created by "Nip/Tuck" mastermind Ryan Murphy -- is its direct, at times nearly primordial sincerity, expressed mostly in its musical numbers. The musical moments seem indebted to English writer-producer Dennis Potter ("Pennies From Heaven"), who used fantasy lip-sync interludes to explore the feelings that repressed middle-class English citizens could not otherwise show. Similar moments on "Glee" stand in opposition to the majority of American popular culture, which fears simple, sincere expressions of feeling the way little boys fear cooties. It also stands in contrast to the rest of "Glee" itself -- a series that, like so many contemporary TV shows and films, is relentlessly arch and shallow, forever strip-mining that bitchy/glib screwball vein that made writer-producer David E. Kelley ("Ally McBeal," "Boston Legal") a multimillionaire, and that Murphy continued in such series as "Popular" and "Nip/Tuck." Surprises are few and far between, unless you count the little ones: wacky costumes, a crueler-than-expected insult, or a stray moment of authentic human contact not mediated by six decades' worth of sitcom and soap opera clich�(the relationship between the gay teenager Kurt and his straight, blue-collar father, Burt, is far and away the most original and affecting subplot).

There has always been an imagination gap between the musical sequences and the rest of "Glee," with its incessant insult humor, "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids"-style, "Let's all summarize the lesson we just learned" monologues, and sometimes-clever, sometimes-lame metafictional gags (Sue Sylvester narrating her diary entry in voice-over, briefly pausing to note that she's narrating a diary entry in voice-over). That gap became a chasm when the show returned this spring. Between the lather-rinse-repeat mechanics of the "If

Chapter 27

X doesn't happen, we'll lose the glee club!" device to the bumper crop of recent plots twists that seem nonsensical even by "Glee" standards (perpetually soul-searching nice guy Will plotting to seduce and abandon Sue, for example), the non-musical parts of "Glee" feel like chores that viewers have to plod through to get to the good stuff.

Qualitatively, the musical numbers on "Glee" have always been all over the map, from haunting and beautiful to cruise-ship perfunctory. And yet -- like the mostly trashy, ADD-edited musical numbers in Baz Luhrmann's "Moulin Rouge" and Rob Marshall's "Chicago" and "Nine" -- they still have the power to absorb and transport viewers because they understand the function of musical numbers: to slough off the shackles of "reality" and express and embrace raw, complicated emotions that might be diminished by regular dialogue. The first 13 episodes generated musical/psychological moments of startling power. Although every viewer has his or her own favorites, I'm partial to "Somebody to Love," "Don't Rain on My Parade," "Don't Stop Believing" (which the show managed to reinvigorate yet again, two years after one assumed that it had been stamped "Property of �The Sopranos'" and retired forever) and the football field riff on "Single Ladies" (also a great Kurt-and-his-dad moment).

Since coming back from its break, however, "Glee" has brought even more cleverness -- and more undiluted emotion -- to its musical sequences. The paraplegic Artie's fantasy of spontaneously performing "The Safety Dance" in a shopping mall was Dennis Potter-worthy. But it was elevated to another conceptual level through its filmmaking: Halfway through the number we started seeing the performance captured via the rough-and-ready imagery of flip phones, connecting this handsomely produced network series with the YouTube/Facebook/Twitter culture that made it a smash.

The first season's all-around musical high point, though, was the Madonna episode. From Sue's "Vogue" fantasy (playfully re-staging that fabulous Madonna video while letting Sue's neurotic reality intrude) to the cross-cutting between three attempted seductions set to "Like a Virgin," to that pharaoh's army of gospel singers appearing out of nowhere in the "Like a Prayer" finale (a ludicrous-wonderful indulgence in the same vein as that that Busby Berkeley soundstage materializing behind Kate Capshaw in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom"), the episode kept topping itself. It also boasted the highest music-to-nonmusic ratio of any episode aired to date; long stretches were practically an extended musical fantasia -- a sight rarely seen on American TV, unless you count the occasional sung-through novelty episode of an otherwise traditional show. (The gold standard in that department is "Once More With Feeling," from season six of Joss Whedon's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." The recent "Glee" guest shot by Neil Patrick Harris, star of Whedon's "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," sparked hopes for a similarly rip-roaring, old fashioned musical indulgence; it never quite happened, but that too-short "Piano Man" duet was lovely.)

There have been stinkers, of course; for my money, the worst number since the show's return was the library rampage scored to "Can't Touch This" (an already silly, pointless bit made worse by indifferent choreography and singing). On the whole, though, the best numbers in the freshman season's so-called "back nine" are so unexpected in their conception, and so heartfelt, that they make the rest of the series feel like Will's description of Vocal Adrenaline as "a machine; a collective, synthesized, soulless beat."

The series came back from its break emboldened by positive reviews and a fan base so rabid that it turned the "Glee" live tour into the 21st century version of Beatlemania. Murphy and company had a mandate to swagger, and they did. Their "What the hell, let's try it!" confidence is most vividly expressed in musical numbers that casually blur the boundaries between "reality" and "fantasy" with retro verve.

"Glee" always saw this boundary as somewhat fungible -- witness the never-gets-old running gag of a character telling Will for the very first time what song she's about to perform, whereupon the camera pans to reveal, say, an eight-piece ensemble that includes four Julliard-caliber string players. But the wall was always there. Not so much now, though. The "Like a Virgin" setpiece is one example. It's impossible to justify as any one character's fantasy, unless you buy that all six characters would be thinking of that particular Madonna song at the same time. It seems more like a cousin of that moment in the film version of "West Side Story" that crosscuts between several key characters singing overlapping snippets of the score's most famous tunes. You can't explain it or classify it or explicate it. You just have to accept it and respond to it.

Even better is Kurt's performance of "Rose's Turn" from "Gypsy." It begins with Burt Hummel walking away from his son in a high school hallway, moments after wounding him by revealing that he was about to take Finn (his new girlfriend's son) out for some straight-guy bonding adventures. Reality gives way to fantasy incrementally, almost imperceptibly (Kurt begins singing the song in the hallway, in "reality," and concludes it on a stage backed by his name in lights) and then eases back into "reality" again (Kurt's father, who secretly saw the whole thing, applauds him, and tells him, "That was some serious singing, kid"). The entire sequence occurs in a space that's more psychological than geographical: Music Land.

Moments when a character burst into song without preparation or explanation were common in American popular culture until the 1970s, when the traditional musical began to disappear from movie screens, and the musical variety series faded from TV. It was the moment that prose gave way to poetry, and it's been a tad galling to see supposed "returns" of the musical (Luhrmann, Marshall, even the thoroughly beguiling "Once") bend over backwards trying to justify such moments. (Potter, Bob Fosse and MTV all bear a lot of responsibility for this change, as positively influential as they were in other ways.)

Perhaps the traditional musical moment is a casualty of modern life, which seems increasingly hostile to poetry in all its permutations. We're collectively too damned cool for any form of expression that's directly communicates deep feeling -- with any outpouring of emotion not placed in a context that hangs a label on it and thereby tames it (thus the post-MTV obsession with justifying why characters conceivably might burst into song -- the mania for justifying it as a live performance, or fantasy or whatever).

The culture-wide battle between sincerity and cool is encoded in "Glee" itself. The show's predominant tone is hostile to poetry, to real empathy. For every hug there are five or six pot shots. It grinds the characters down the way the school establishment (epitomized by Sue) grinds them down. It makes fun of them before you can (presuming that you will -- and who says you would?). It spells out every issue and emotion in pop-psych dialogue, and encloses the entire tale within gigantic neon quote marks. The song-and-dance numbers tear down the quote marks like triumphant insurgents toppling the statues of a hated dictator -- and as soon as the music stops, the statues go right back up again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The great accomplishment of "Glee" is its success at creating a zone where a bomber-crew assortment of contemporary Americans can live, however briefly, without the encumbrance of quote marks, forget context and logic and justifications of any sort, and let rip with a pop smash or a Broadway show tune. The difference between adequate escapist fluff and transcendent popular art is the difference between the moments where "Glee" characters talk and the moments when they sing. When the characters talk, they replicate faddish modes of expression and sound like what they are: stereotypes of one kind or another, slaves to commerce doing and saying whatever the show's writers need them to do and say at any given moment. When they sing, they assert their uniqueness, their bravery, their indestructible purity of heart.

Did 'Star Wars' become a toy story? Producer Gary Kurtz looks back August 12, 2010 | 5:00 am

Here is a longer version of my story on Gary Kurtz that appears in Wednesday's Calendar section.

�Star Wars� was born a long time ago, but not all that far, far away. In 1972, filmmakers George Lucas and Gary Kurtz were toiling on �American Graffiti� in their San Rafael office when they began daydreaming about a throwback sci-fi adventure that channeled the old �Flash Gordon� serials as opposed to the bleak �message� movies that had taken over the genre. �We had no idea what we were starting,� said Kurtz, who was the producer of the first two �Star Wars� films and also a second-unit director. �That simple concept changed Hollywood in a way....�

There was a bittersweet tinge to Kurtz�s voice, and it�s no surprise. This year is the 30th anniversary of �The Empire Strikes Back,� the �Star Wars� sequel that many fans consider the pinnacle moment in a franchise that has pulled in $16 billion in box office and merchandising. But 1980 was also the year that Kurtz and Lucas realized the Jedi universe wasn�t big enough for the both of them. �I could see where things were headed,� Kurtz said. �The toy business began to drive the [Lucasfilm] empire. It�s a shame. They make three times as much on toys as they do on films. It�s natural to make decisions that protect the toy business, but that�s not the best thing for making quality films.�

He added: �The first film and �Empire� were about story and character, but I could see that George�s priorities were changing.�

This weekend, Kurtz steps back into the �Star Wars� galaxy as a special guest at Star Wars Celebration V, a massive convention in Orlando, Fla., organized by Lucasfilm and expected to draw thousands of fans who will come to buy collectibles, attend panels, get cast-member autographs or even visit the event�s themed tattoo parlor or wedding chapel. Kurtz�s presence speaks to his vital role in the franchise�s history � he is, for instance, the one who came up with the title for �The Empire Strikes Back� � but the Lucasfilm leadership is already fretting about the Jedi galaxy expatriate�s appearance. They may have good reason; during a recent visit to Los Angeles, the filmmaker, who just turned 70, showed a willingness to speak out against the priorities of an old partner.

�The emphasis on the toys, it�s like the cart driving the horse,� Kurtz said. �If it wasn�t for that the films would be done for their own merits. The creative team wouldn�t be looking over their shoulder all the time.� No fan of conflict, Kurtz has remained relatively quiet through the years but over coffee on a sunny Southern California afternoon he spoke at length about his lightsaber days.

Like many fans, Kurtz � who characterizes his relationship with Lucas as �professional� � was too invested in the �Star Wars� universe to skip the second trilogy: 1999�s �Star Wars: Episode I � The Phantom Menace,� 2002�s �Star Wars: Episode II � Attack of the Clones� and 2005�s �Star Wars: Episode III � Revenge of the Sith.� (Lucas retitled the three original movies as �Star Wars: Episode IV � A New Hope,� �Star Wars: Episode V � The Empire Strikes Back� and �Star Wars: Episode VI � Return of the Jedi.�) But as he sat in the dark with the follow-up �Star Wars� films, he squirmed in his seat.

�I don�t like the idea of prequels, they make the filmmakers back in to material they�ve already covered and it boxes in the story,� Kurtz said. �I think they did a pretty good job with them although I have to admit I never liked Hayden Christensen in the role of Anakin Skywalker. I just wished the stories had been stronger and that the dialogue had been stronger. It gets meek. I�m not sure the characters ever felt real like they did in �Empire.�"

A spokeswoman for George Lucas said he was unavailable for comment.

Kurtz�s sentiments speak to a churning pop-culture debate about the enduring legacy of Lucas and the trajectory of his still-unfolding �Star Wars� mythology. The first trilogy of films ended in 1983 with �Return of the Jedi� and the second trilogy brought a whole new generation into the universe but also left many fans of the original feeling sour or disengaged. A seventh feature film, an animated movie called �The Clone Wars,� was released in 2008, which, along with video games and toys, speaks to a young 21st century constituency that may be only vaguely aware of the 1977 film.

The same passion pulling fans to Orlando also stokes the debate about Lucas and his creation. Alexandre Philippe is the director of �The People vs. George Lucas,� a documentary that just had its West Coast premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival. He says that Kurtz has become a figure of integrity to the fans who believe that Lucas has followed the wrong path.

Philippe said the departure of Kurtz was a major moment in �Star Wars� history and deeply unsettling to all involved. �The cast and crew were crushed when George and Gary went their separate ways,� said Philippe, who added that Mark Hamill, who portrayed Luke Skywalker, later explained it in broken-family terminology. �He said it was like mom and dad getting a divorce. They were both equally loved and respected on the set.� For Kurtz, the popular notion that �Star Wars� was always planned as a multi-film epic is laughable. He says that he and Lucas, both USC film school grads who met through mutual friend Francis Ford Coppola in the late 1960s, first sought to do a simple adaptation of �Flash Gordon,� the comic-strip hero who had been featured in movie serials that both filmmakers found charming.

�We tried to buy the rights to �Flash Gordon� from King Features but the deal would have been prohibitive,� Kurtz said. �They wanted too much money, too much control, so starting over and creating from scratch was the answer.�

Lucas came up with a sprawling treatment that pulled from �Flash Gordon,� Arthurian legend, �The Hidden Fortress� and other influences. The document would have required a five-hour film but there was a middle portion that could be carved out as a stand-alone movie. Kurtz championed the project in pitch meetings with studios and worked intensely on casting, scouting locations and finding a way to create a believable alien universe on a tight budget.

�Star Wars� opened with a title sequence that announced it as �Episode IV� as a winking nod to the old serials, not a film franchise underway, Kurtz said.

�Our plan was to do �Star Wars� and then make �Apocalypse Now� and do a black comedy in the vein of �M*A*S*H*,�" Kurtz said. �Fox insisted on a sequel or maybe two [to �Star Wars�]. Francis [Ford Coppola] � had bought the ["Apocalypse Now"] rights so George could make it. He eventually got tired of waiting and did it on his own, of course.�

The team of Lucas and Kurtz would not hold together during their own journey through the jungles of collaborative filmmaking. Kurtz chooses his words carefully on the topic of their split.

After the release of �Empire� (which was shaped by material left over from that first Lucas treatment), talk turned to a third film and after a decade and a half the partners could no longer find a middle ground.

�We had an outline and George changed everything in it," Kurtz said. �Instead of bittersweet and poignant he wanted a euphoric ending with everybody happy. The original idea was that they would recover [the kidnapped] Han Solo in the early part of the story and that he would then die in the middle part of the film in a raid on an Imperial base. George then decided he didn�t want any of the principals killed. By that time there were really big toy sales and that was a reason.� The discussed ending of the film that Kurtz favored presented the rebel forces in tatters, Leia grappling with her new duties as queen and Luke walking off alone �like Clint Eastwood in the spaghetti westerns,� as Kurtz put it.

Kurtz said that ending would have been a more emotionally nuanced finale to an epic adventure than the forest celebration of the Ewoks that essentially ended the trilogy with a teddy bear luau. He was especially disdainful of the Lucas idea of a second Death Star, which he felt would be too derivative of the 1977 film. �So we agreed that I should probably leave.�

Kurtz went straight over to �The Dark Crystal,� a three-year project with old friend Jim Henson, whom Kurtz had brought in on the creation of Yoda for �Empire.�

After that he shifted into a lower gear as far as his career and, relocating to England, turned to British television productions. He�s now working on a ramping feature-film project called �Panzer 88� that he says will begin filming later this year and will feature visual effects by Weta, the same New Zealand outfit that populated Middle-earth in the �Lord of the Rings� trilogy.

The producer said that huge films hold little allure for him now and that he is more interested in smaller, more nimble productions that put an emphasis on �human stories.� That might speak to his alienation from the "Star Wars" universe, but when he talks about Lucas and their shared history the stories are still tinted by nostalgia, admiration and affection.

On casting the 1977 film: �We had a lot of people, hundreds, that we saw. It was quick and dirty. You talk to each person, jot down a note or two. Are they a score of five or higher? Do they deserve a callback? On those lists were a lot of interesting people � John Travolta, Sly Stallone � who were great but just not right. I went to New York to do an interview with Jodie Foster, for instance, but she was just too young for Leia. A lot of it comes down to luck and timing.�

On Harrison Ford, who became a Hollywood icon after �Star Wars� but keeps the fervent fandom at arm�s length: �He�s always been somewhat cynical, since the beginning of his career, about everything. In a way he tried not to take notoriety or the fans too seriously. Movies are movies and real life is his ranch.�

On the moment he knew that �Star Wars� was becoming a pop-culture sensation: �On opening day I was on the East Coast and I did the morning-show circuit � �Good Morning America� and �Today� � in the afternoon I did a radio call-in show in Washington and this guy, this caller, was really enthusiastic and talking about the movie in really deep detail. I said, �You know a lot abut the film.� He said, �Yeah, yeah, I�ve seen it four times already.� And that was opening day. I knew something was happening.� Kurtz isn�t sure what to expect in Orlando but he says that �Empire� may be the shining moment of his career, the confluence of commercial and artistic success. His work as a second-unit director and his hands-on efforts with the visual effects make him especially proud.

�I took a master class with Billy Wilder once and he said that in the first act of a story you put your character up in a tree and the second act you set the tree on fire and then in the third you get him down,� Kurtz said. � �Empire� was the tree on fire. The first movie was like a comic book, a fantasy, but �Empire� felt darker and more compelling. It�s the one, for me, where everything went right. And it was my goodbye to a big part of my life.�

-- Geoff Boucher

The Illustrious Bundle: a lost classic, the notebooks of a Pulitzer Prize-winner, a full-color broadsheet featuring today's best comic artists, and a do-it-yourself paper rocket�all 50% off! You'll want to get your hands on this most graphic of bundles.

- - - - Getting Outside the Box: Lateral Thinking Puzzles, Corporate Edition. BY KEVIN HYDE

- - - -

1. An associate vice president is found in the break room with ten dot matrix printers surrounding his lifeless body. There is a puddle of ink directly below his head and ink dripping from his mouth. No one in the company has used a dot matrix printer in more than twenty years. Old Man Murphy, the boss, wants answers. The forensic accounting department has nothing. How did the associate vice president die?

Obviously the dot matrix printers were stacked by a careless worker in the corner of a warehouse near a couple boxes of radium. This allowed the printers to attain self-awareness, and their first action, after gorging themselves on ink, was to take revenge on the man who, as a procurement officer twenty years before, had rendered them obsolete by pushing for cutting-edge laser printers. Nobody puts the Scandia Metric 8300R in a corner.

Action-item: Provide latex gloves, trash bags, directions on handling radium to summer interns; cordon off the break room; check OSHA regulations in re Death by Cognizant Machine, Malicious.

- - -

2. Halfway through a pleasant STAR interview, certain salient information comes to light about the job candidate during the Greatest Strengths and Weaknesses Q & A. Upon hearing the candidate's answers, the human resources representative screams, "I can't hire this person, it's a conflict of interests!" then runs out of the room and into the churning metal of the printing presses where he murders himself professionally albeit gorily. Why?

Obviously the human resources person possessed the candidate's Myers-Briggs profile, a profile that in formal representation was the perfect opposite of his own. Having been trained in personality algebra, the human resources rep. knew that, under the empirical umbrella of certain circumstances, he and the candidate would cancel each other out with respect to their characteristics, which would, in a metaphysical or even physical sense, create a singularity within the workplace and render them null as both employees and people�essentially indistinguishable from the office furniture. As it turns out, when the candidate said her greatest weakness was organization (the HR rep.'s greatest strength), and her greatest strength was rationality (the HR rep.'s greatest weakness), the human resources representative had no choice but to allocate his own human resource, i.e. his personhood, to oblivion.

Action-item: Shrug.

- - -

3. Someone has laid down an enfilade of farts in the fancy conference room and the smell will not dissipate. Old Man Murphy, preparing for his sit-down with the Board of Directors, has walked into and out of the conference room at least ten times, dry-heaving in progressively more violent ways. "Round up the usual suspects," he commands. The usual suspects are the two new interns�reputed to survive solely on vending machine beef jerky, bean curd, and warm soda�who were meeting with their mentors in the conference room earlier that morning. Someone drags the interns down to the wet sub-basement for a chat. Murphy's ready to declare martial law. However, as it turns out, you ascend to the Presidency by Board appointment. How did this happen?

Obviously the cheap in-home dry-cleaning process used by the interns on their Marshall's and TJ Maxx dress pants and shirts has reacted poorly with the upholstery and batting of the chairs in the conference room, producing a noxious, low-hanging cloud of insolent stench. While the interns are being interrogated in the sub-basement, the Board of Directors arrives to find Old Man Murphy in a high pitch of panic. The Board meets secretly in the still-cordoned-off break room to discuss the drastic measures needed to stem the recent uptick in on-site homicides, suicides, and toxic events. They decide to vote you in as President pro tempore, replacing Old Man Murphy.

Action-item: Radiate smugness. Punish those who do not chuckle when you say, "Truly, the Board works in mysterious ways."

- - -

4. In your first week as President pro tempore, your secretary, Ms. Toothsome, a handsome woman, complains to you about the lewd attitude she's been getting from the office artwork and nearby potted ferns. "Excuse me?" you say, hoping that the person who handles your correspondence, scheduling, and banking has merely misspoken and neither actually perceives nor feels offended by the non-existent male gaze of paintings and plants. Perhaps she ingested some stray radium... "They keep saying stuff like 'I like the way your body is, girl'," she explains, tearfully. "Or they say, 'The weatherman told me you should expect six to eight inches later tonight.' How does a fern even know I love snow?" Indeed, how does a fern know?

Obviously, the artwork and plant life are not making passes at your secretary, no matter how attractive she is, and even if they were, there is no room in your co

Chapter 28

mpany for trans-zoic sexual harassment.

After hours of tense one-on-one meetings with the entire staff, it turns out that one of your direct reports has a talent for ventriloquism and had been throwing his voice in an attempt to put Ms. Toothsome into a state of bewilderment-cum-lust. The direct report confesses that his feelings are wholesome, though his macking methods were, admittedly, sinister.

Action-item: Cultivate a collection of fine micro-ulcers. Soothe your despair by drinking and driving around in your Ultra Hummer (double-decker Hummer with regular Hummer as sidecar).

How the Google/Verizon proposal could kill the internet in 5 years

Earlier this week Google and Verizon pledged to uphold a set of network principles that could transform the internet into a husk of its former self. Let's look down the barrel of the Googlezon* future.

Keep in mind that the two-page Googlezon proposal, which you can read here, isn't law, though both companies have requested that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) turn it into a formal regulation. Even if it isn't law, though, Googlezon has stated it will follow the proposal's principles. And mostly those principles are harbingers of a dystopian media future.

Quick backgrounder on net neutrality The Googlezon agreement was written partly in response to public interest groups and lawmakers lobbying for the US government to mandate "net neutrality." In a nutshell, net neutrality means that internet service providers like Verizon have to deliver everything � data, services, whatever � in a "neutral" way. For example, if we had net neutrality laws in the US, Verizon wouldn't be allowed to do things like make Gmail run faster than Facebook. Neither would Verizon be able to "prejudice" its consumers against certain services, for example by making any peer-to-peer traffic run really slowly.

Google has always been a staunch supporter of net neutrality, since its income depends on people being able to access the company's services quickly online. Imagine if Verizon demanded that Google pay extra to prevent YouTube from giving you the annoying twirly circle. Google's business model would be crippled, and you would probably have to start paying for YouTube access.

But nobody has successfully implemented net neutrality laws in the US. So if Google wants to protect its business, it has to make deals with companies like Verizon. And here's where things get ugly.

The internet becomes a pay-to-play medium The the Googlezon agreement includes a section where both companies pledge to keep the "public internet" completely neutral. Verizon says it won't privilege some services over others (unless they are "special services" or "mobile services," but we'll get to that). And for its part, Google pledges that it will keep all of its services on the public internet.

But what the hell is this "public internet"? Isn't all of the internet public? Obviously there are internal business and government intranets that are private, and pay-to-play services, but the internet itself is by definition public. So why all this talk from Googlezon about how they'll keep the public internet neutral?

One simple answer, my friend: Googlezon is redefining the internet as a tiered service, like cable. And this new thing called the public internet is the lowest tier. Kind of like network television is the lowest tier in your television service options. From here on out, you will start to see the internet equivalent of cable service online: For an extra ten dollars, you can get the "movie lovers" package, where your ISP privileges Netflix and Hulu traffic, giving them to you super-fast. For another ten dollars, you can get the "concerned parent" package, which blocks peer-to-peer traffic as well as websites that they consider to be pornographic. And so on.

[image via shot from the hip]

The "public internet" is for the poor Pledging to keep the "public internet" neutral is great, but what happens when companies stop wanting to offer their services on it? Googlezon has the answer: In their proposal, they say that it's perfectly OK for companies and consumers to buy non-neutral, non-public "special services" online. If you're a media company that streams videogames, for example, your customers want a guarantee that the game won't stall out because of a crappy "public internet" connection. So you make your game available only to people with the special service "gamer package." Your customers pay you; you pay Googlezon; now there's a superfast connection for the privileged few with money to burn.

And what happens when news websites start delivering their pretty pictures and infographics in 3D? Verizon has already suggested 3D is a perfect "special service" to deliver in a non-neutral way. In five years, the public internet is going to look boring and obsolete. Where's the 3D? Where are all the cool games and streaming viddies? The public internet? Yeah, that's just for poor people.

But guess what's going to remain on the public net, the place where you go when you don't have money? Certainly there will be educational resources like Wikipedia. But mostly it's going to be advertisement-saturated free content from major entertainment companies. And of course there will be many opportunities to give your personal information to Facebook, or gamble away your non-existent savings on Zynga games. (Sorry - did I say gamble? I meant "pay for premium poker game content.") Put in brick-and-mortar terms: There won't be any produce markets on the public internet, but there will be plenty of liquor stores.

[image via Glasstire]

Big corporations truly rule the web Though few businesses start without any seed money, it is still possible for a somebody with a good idea to launch their project online and attract investors once it becomes popular. When the internet is a tiered service, however, this will no longer be possible.

As Columbia law professor Tim Wu points out in the New York Times:

Just consider the power and public role of firms like Verizon or Google (especially if they work together). Sitting atop the web, they can influence what firms succeed or fail � by making sites load faster or slower, or end up on page 10 of search results. It goes further � in subtle ways, the information carriers have the power to influence elections and even censor speech they don't like.

What he's suggesting is that Googlezon will be a gatekeeper not just for new web services but also for content. The companies can choose to support services from any small business they like, and block others. Same goes for sites providing news or entertainment. Googlezon might make an agreement with the New York Times to load its pages faster than the Washington Post. And Googlezon might not load io9 at all, unless of course you're reading this blog via the Google Reader (as part of the "special service" package called "blogs and podcasts").

Googlezon could even strike a bargain with democratic political candidates to carry only their websites and block others. They could justify this by saying that people who want to get political information from conservatives can switch to another network that doesn't block them - or they can subscribe to the special "conservative service" package.

Your mobile is a battleground Perhaps the most disturbing part of the Googlezon agreement is the companies' statement that there will be no net neutrality on mobile networks. Given that mobile networks are the future of how most people will go online, this section of the agreement is the most pertinent to any prediction about how this agreement will affect the internet.

Quite simply, the Googlezon agreement means that if you access the internet via your Android phone (or other mobile device), there will be no public internet at all. Your access to the web will be determined by your carrier, who may or may not offer special services - and who may decide to block any content it likes.

Googlezon proposes that every carrier or ISP will have to be transparent about what services it's privileging or blocking. But that doesn't mean these companies won't obfuscate their policies behind legalese. And even if your ISP honestly says, "We are blocking all websites run by Republicans," you may be locked into a three-year contract with them already.

Consumer choice when it comes to mobile networks is almost non-existent. Yes, you can sometimes switch networks, but in many areas of the world there is only one network that has coverage in your area. Besides, even if you research the local networks and choose the one whose policies fit your needs, there is no guarantee they won't change what they block once you're locked into a contract. And you could get locked into hardware platforms too - "get our movies and games package at half price when you buy a Droid!"

[image via TechDigest]

A burning vision of the internet in 2016 The public internet is basically overrun with 4Chan-like social networks that run very slowly and are drenched in advertising and spyware. You can watch some TV on the public internet, if you're willing to wait through long "buffering" times and bad commercials. You can play casual games, especially if you want to fork over a few bucks. There's webmail, though sometimes all your saved messages disappear - for "guaranteed backups" you need to subscribe to the special mail service via Googlezon. Plus, the only way to get to the public internet is with an unwieldy laptop, which sucks.

Most people go online with their mobiles. Anybody who wants to get access to games, movies, news, or other services online has to buy separate "special service" packages to make sure they run fast. Premium services guarantee you can watch movies on your Droid, or do your mail and calendaring on your Nexus SE234. An informal market in special service minutes springs up anywhere that people are too poor to get a mobile that does more than make phone calls.

Ironically, the public internet is the least public place online: It's an antisocial space, a crumbling, unsupported legacy network, full of ads and graffiti. Googlezon has succeeded in creating a caste system in the online world, and the public is the lowest caste of all.

Top image via English Russia.

Friday, August 13, 2010 Adventure, an Atari 2600 experience Adventure, an Atari 2600 experience For my second look back on Atari 2600 games from my youth, I wanted to play a game I fondly remembered, and not something like E.T. that was just horrid even when it was new. I picked Adventure, easily my favorite 2600 game from my childhood. It had replayability issues, so it wasn't a constantly played game, but I never traded it.

I decided to have my kids play Adventure, to see how they'd react to the game fresh. When I first played it to prep for the blog, I realized that I hadn't 'lost' anything. I knew my way through all the mazes, and even how to find the magic dot and enter the secret room. I didn't think it would be a very interesting 'look back' to just go 'Look, I can still beat a game that I could beat 30 years ago'.

Last night while I was preparing dinner, I asked my 8-year old daughter if she wanted to play a game that I played when I was her age. She was interested, despite not being a serious video game player. Her primary experience with video games comes from her DS, where she tends to play Nintendogs, Petz, Pokemon, Animal Crossing, and Hello Kitty games. She's just started getting interested in D&D because of her brother, and is still more at the 'Cowboys and Indians' level of imagination play (although for her, it's actually 'Harry Potter' complete with robes sewn by her grandmother and a wooden wand her grandfather and I made).

Your adventure starts here, Sir Square of Gold Castle.

I set her up with Adventure, on Level 1. I told her 'This is a game where you try to get a glowing Chalice and bring it back to your Gold Castle. You move with this, and this button lets you drop things. You pick things up just by touching them' and let her go. [She picks up the gold key.] 'This is cool. I want this game on my computer.'

[She moves down a screen, holding the key] 'Oooh! I got a new level. This one is green.'

[Moves up, presses key against the gold gate and watches it open, then goes in the gold castle.] 'It lets me go in! Can I pick up the arrow?' (I say yes) 'Do I get a bow later?' (I ask her what she thinks she'll do with the 'arrow' if she doesn't get a bow.) 'I don't know... I guess I'd throw it at a monster.'

[She moves away, having dropped the key to get the sword.] 'Can I only carry around one thing at a time?' (I say yes again) 'Huh. Why can't I have a backpack or something?'

[She drops the key and moves to the sword.] 'Now I have the arrow! Now I'll go to the green place.'

[She moves down into the hall and goes toward the maze and the dragon guarding it.] 'Oopsies! He ate me (laughing) Bad Birdy!'

(I explain that the reset leaves everything like it was put restarts her at the gold castle, and reset) 'So I don't have my arrow? That's not fair.'

[She goes back to the yellow dragon, tries to get the sword, and dies again.] 'NO! BAD BIRDY!'

[She dies again.] 'RUN AWAY! Doh. I don't like this bird.'

[She gets away but doesn't kill the yellow dragon, and then goes to the area where the green dragon is guarding the black key.] 'Oh! A Black Key! And another bird.'

[The green dragon eats her. She resets, and it eats her two more times.] 'I don't like this game any more. Can you play a while and gain me some levels so I can get past the bird?'

[I explain how to kill the dragon with the sword. She listens, and this time moves around the dragon, who impales itself on the sword in the floor.] 'Cool! I killed the green dragon! But there's still a yellow one.' (This is the only time she calls it a dragon, by the way.) 'I want to go get the Black Key. Can you play this now? (I say no, just keep playing, you're doing fine.) I'm going to kill the yellow bird before I get the key.'

[She picks up the sword and tries to walk into the force wall] 'How can my arrow go through things but I can't? Does it puncture them?' 'You are writing down everything I say. Are you going to give this to Mommy?'

[Gives up trying to go through the force wall and goes up, looking for the dragon.] 'Cool! Is this some kind of maze? AWESOME.'

[She wanders the maze for a couple minutes. She gives up on killing the dragon, goes and gets the black key, and keeps wandering, trying to get through it.] I don't like this maze. Can you play for me now?

[I get her through the maze with the black key, but the yellow dragon is still alive] 'Ooh. I thought it was black, but this is orange. I want that arch!'

[She drops the black key, watches it move towards the magnet.] 'OH! It's a magnet!'

[She moves up into the treasure room, and is eaten by the dragon... reset. She tells me to get her through the maze again. She grabs the chalice and starts running with it.] 'I think the Birdy is addicted to the color changing thing.' (This makes me laugh out loud, and she turns to me indignantly) 'Well, he is! He won't stop chasing after it.'

[She dies several times to the dragon trying to get the chalice. I help her get past the dragon and out of the castle with the chalice.] 'I made it! Oh no, I lost my way.'

[I talk her through the maze, back to the main hall.] 'What now? There's no where else to go.'

[I ask her 'Do you think you might have the chalice?'] 'Oh! The color-changy thing is the treasure!'

[She runs to the gold castle.] 'I DID IT! (waits) Is that it? Why can't I move anymore?'

[I explain that she won the game and would need to start over to play again, and ask if she would like to try again.] 'No.'

She walks off to go make a karate robe for one of her Littlest Pet Shop toys. I'm tickled by some of her gaming conceits... specifically the idea of a backpack to hold items, and 'leveling up' to get past something that is too hard. I also like that the colors of rooms and hallways are important to her.

After she was done, though, it was time to expose my 15-year old son to Adventure, for the second time in his life. The first time was about 6 years previously, where he played for about 45 seconds before declaring the game 'a stupid game about ducks' and went back to his PlayStation. We'll see his views on the game tomorrow.

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August 12, 2010 Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer�s By GINA KOLATA

In 2003, a group of scientists and executives from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the drug and medical-imaging industries, universities and nonprofit groups joined in a project that experts say had no precedent: a collaborative effort to find the biological markers that show the progression of Alzheimer�s disease in the human brain.

Now, the effort is bearing fruit with a wealth of recent scientific papers on the early diagnosis of Alzheimer�s using methods like PET scans and tests of spinal fluid. More than 100 studies are under way to test drugs that might slow or stop the disease.

And the collaboration is already serving as a model for similar efforts against Parkinson�s disease. A $40 million project to look for biomarkers for Parkinson�s, sponsored by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, plans to enroll 600 study subjects in the United States and Europe.

The work on Alzheimer�s �is the precedent,� said Holly Barkhymer, a spokeswoman for the foundation. �We�re really excited.�

The key to the Alzheimer�s project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world.

No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort.

�It was unbelievable,� said Dr. John Q. Trojanowski, an Alzheimer�s researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. �It�s not science the way most of us have practiced it in our careers. But we all realized that we would never get biomarkers unless all of us parked our egos and intellectual-property noses outside the door and agreed that all of our data would be public immediately.�

Biomarkers are not necessarily definitive. It remains to be seen how many people who have them actually get the disease. But that is part of the research project.

The idea for the collaboration, known as ADNI, for Alzheimer�s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, emerged about 10 years ago during a casual conversation in a car.

Neil S. Buckholtz, chief of the Dementias of Aging Branch at the National Institute on Aging, was in Indianapolis, and Dr. William Potter, a neuroscientist at Eli Lilly and his longtime friend, was driving him to the airport.

Dr. Potter had recently left the National Institutes of Health and he had been thinking about how to speed the glacial progress of Alzheimer�s drug research.

�We wanted to get out of what I called 19th-century drug development � give a drug and hope it does something,� Dr. Potter recalled in an interview on Thursday. �What was needed was to find some way of seeing what was happening in the brain as Alzheimer�s progressed and asking if experimental drugs could alter that progression.�

Scientists were looking for biomarkers, but they were not getting very far.

�The problem in the field was that you had many different scientists in many different universities doing their own research with their own patients and with their own methods,� said Dr. Michael W. Weiner of the San Francisco Department of Veterans Affairs, who directs ADNI. �Different people using different methods on different subjects in different places were getting different results, which is not surprising. What was needed was to get everyone together and to get a common data set.�

But that would require a huge effort. No company could do it alone, and neither could individual researchers. The project would require 800 subjects, some with normal memories, some with memory impairment, some with Alzheimer�s, who would be tested for possible biomarkers and followed for years to see whether these markers signaled the disease�s progression.

Suddenly, in the car as he drove Dr. Buckholtz to the airport, �everything just jelled,� Dr. Potter said, adding, �Maybe this was important enough to get people to work together and coordinate in a way that hadn�t been possible before.�

The idea, Dr. Buckholtz said, was that the government�s National Institutes of Health �could serve as an honest broker between the pharmaceutical industry and academia.�

Soon, Dr. Richard J. Hodes, the director of the National Institute on Aging, was on the phone with Dr. Steven M. Paul, a former scientific director at the National Institute of Mental Health who had recently left to head central-nervous-system research at Eli Lilly. Dr. Paul offered to ask other drug companies to raise money.

It turned out to be relatively easy to get companies to agree, Dr. Paul said. It had become clear that the problem of finding good diagnostic tools was huge and complex. �We were better off working together than individually,� he said.

A critical aspect of the project was the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, which was set up by Congress to raise private funds on behalf of the institutes. Dr. Paul was on its board.

In the end, the National Institute on Aging agreed to pay $41 million, other institutes contributed $2.4 million, and 20 companies and two nonprofit groups contributed an additional $27 million to get the project going and sustain it for the first six years. Late last year, the institute contributed an additional $24 million and the foundation was working on a renewal of the project for another five years that would involve federal and private contributions of the same magnitude as the initial ones.

At first, the collaboration struck many scientists as worrisome � they would be giving up ownership of data, and anyone could use it, publish papers, maybe even misinterpret it and publish information that was wrong.

But Alzheimer�s researchers and drug companies realized they had little choice.

�Companies were caught in a prisoner�s dilemma,� said Dr. Jason Karlawish, an Alzheimer�s researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. �They all wanted to move the field forward, but no one wanted to take the risks of doing it.�

Many people look askance at collaborations with drug companies, and often that attitude is justified, Dr. Karlawish said.

But not in this case. To those who are skeptical, he says, �My answer to them is �get over it.� �

He went on: �This one makes sense. The development of reliable and valid measures of Alzheimer�s disease requires such large science with such limited returns on the investment that it was in no one company�s interest to pursue it.�

Companies as well as academic researchers are using the data. There have been more than 3,200 downloads of the entire massive data set and almost a million downloads of the data sets containing images from brain scans.

And Dr. Buckholtz says he is pleasantly surprised by the way things are turning out.

�We weren�t sure, frankly, how it would work out having data available to everyone,� he said. �But we felt that the good that could come out of it was overwhelming. And that�s what�s happened.�

More in Research (1 of 31 articles) Spinal-Fluid Test Is Found to Predict Alzheimer�s

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NEW YORK � In the 1987 film Wall Street, the character Gordon Gekko famously declared, �Greed is good.� His creed became the ethos of a decade of corporate and financial-sector excesses that ended in the late 1980�s collapse of the junk-bond market and the Savings & Loan crisis. Gekko himself was packed off to prison.

A generation later, the sequel to Wall Street � to be released next month � sees Gekko released from jail and returned to the financial world. His reappearance comes just as the credit bubble fueled by the sub-prime mortgage boom is about to burst, triggering the worst financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The �Greed is good� mentality is a regular

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feature of financial crises. But were the traders and bankers of the sub-prime saga more greedy, arrogant, and immoral than the Gekkos of the 1980�s? Not really, because greed and amorality in financial markets have been common throughout the ages.

Teaching morality and values in business schools will not tame such behavior, but changing the incentives that reward short-term profits and lead bankers and traders to take excessive risks will. The bankers and traders of the latest crisis responded rationally to compensation and bonus schemes that allowed them to assume a lot of leverage and ensured large bonuses, but that were almost guaranteed to bankrupt a large number of financial institutions in the end.

To avoid such excesses, it is not enough to rely on better regulation and supervision, for three reasons:

� Smart and greedy bankers and traders will always find ways to circumvent new rules;

� CEOs and boards of directors of financial firms � let alone regulators and supervisors � cannot effectively monitor the risks and behaviors of thousands of separate profit and loss centers in a firm, as each trader and banker is a separate P&L with its own capital at risk;

� CEOs and boards are themselves subject to major conflicts of interest, because they don�t represent the true interest of their firms� ultimate shareholders.

As a result, any reform of regulation and supervision will fail to control bubbles and excesses unless several other fundamental aspects of the financial system are changed.

First, compensation schemes must be radically altered through regulation, as banks will not do it themselves for fear of losing talented people to competitors. In particular, bonuses based on medium-term results of risky trades and investments must supplant bonuses based on short-term outcomes.

Second, repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking, was a mistake. The old model of private partnerships � in which partners had an incentive to monitor each other to avoid reckless investments � gave way to one of public companies aggressively competing with each other and with commercial banks to achieve ever-rising profitability, which was achievable only with reckless levels of leverage.

Similarly, the move from a lending model of �originate and hold� to one of �originate and distribute� based on securitization led to a massive transfer of risk. No player but the last in the securitization chain was exposed to the ultimate credit risk; the rest simply raked in high fees and commissions.

Third, financial markets and financial firms have become a nexus of conflicts of interest that must be unwound. These conflicts are inbuilt, because firms that engage in commercial banking, investment banking, proprietary trading, market making and dealing, insurance, asset management, private equity, hedge-fund activities, and other services are on every side of every deal (the recent case of Goldman Sachs was just the tip of the iceberg).

There are also massive agency problems in the financial system, because principals (such as shareholders) cannot properly monitor the actions of agents (CEOs, managers, traders, bankers) that pursue their own interest. Moreover, the problem is not just that long-term shareholders are shafted by greedy short-term agents; even the shareholders have agency problems. If financial institutions do not have enough capital, and shareholders don�t have enough of their own skin in the game, they will push CEOs and bankers to take on too much leverage and risks, because their own net worth is not at stake.

At the same time, there is a double agency problem, as the ultimate shareholders � individual shareholders � don�t directly control boards and CEOs. These shareholders are represented by institutional investors (pension funds, etc.) whose interests, agendas, and cozy relationships often align them more closely with firms� CEOs and managers. Thus, repeated financial crises are also the result of a failed system of corporate governance.

Fourth, greed cannot be controlled by any appeal to morality and values. Greed has to be controlled by fear of loss, which derives from knowledge that the reckless institutions and agents will not be bailed out. The systematic bailouts of the latest crisis � however necessary to avoid a global meltdown � worsened this moral-hazard problem. Not only were �too big to fail� financial institutions bailed out, but the distortion has become worse as these institutions have become � via financial-sector consolidation � even bigger. If an institution is too big to fail, it is too big and should be broken up.

Unless we make these radical reforms, new Gordon Gekkos � and Charles Ponzis � will emerge. For each chastised and born-again Gekko � as the Gekko in the new Wall Street is � hundreds of meaner and greedier ones will be born.

To infinity and beyond: The struggle to save arithmetic 16 August 2010 by Richard Elwes Magazine issue 2773. Subscribe and save

Mathematicians are facing a stark choice � embrace monstrous infinite entities or admit the basic rules of arithmetic are broken

IF YOU were forced to learn long division at school, you might have had cause to curse whoever invented arithmetic. A wearisome whirl of divisors and dividends, of bringing the next digit down and multiplying by the number you first thought of, it almost always went wrong somewhere. And all the while you were plagued by that subversive thought- provided you were at school when such things existed- that any sensible person would just use a calculator.

Well, here's an even more subversive thought: are the rules of arithmetic, the basic logical premises underlying things like long division, unsound? Implausible, you might think. After all, human error aside, our number system delivers pretty reliable results. Yet the closer mathematicians peer beneath the hood of arithmetic, the more they are becoming convinced that something about numbers doesn't quite add up. The motor might be still running, but some essential parts seem to be missing- and we're not sure where to find the spares.

From the 11-dimensional geometry of superstrings to the subtleties of game theory, mathematicians investigate many strange and exotic things. But the system of natural numbers- 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on ad infinitum- and the arithmetical rules used to manipulate them retain an exalted status as mathematics' oldest and most fundamental tool.

Thinkers such as Euclid around 300 BC and Diophantus of Alexandria in the 3rd century AD were already probing the deeper reaches of number theory. It was not until the late 19th century, though, that the Italian Giuseppe Peano produced something like a complete set of rules for arithmetic: precise logical axioms from which the more complex behaviour of numbers can be derived. For the most part, Peano's rules seem self-evident, consisting of assertions such as if x = y, then y = x and x + 1 = y + 1. It was nevertheless a historic achievement, and it unleashed a wave of interest in the logical foundations of number theory that persists to this day.

It was 1931 when a young Austrian mathematician called Kurt G� threw an almighty spanner in the works. He proved the existence of "undecidable" statements about numbers that could neither be proved nor disproved starting from Peano's rules. What was worse, no conceivable extension of the rules would be able to deal with all of these statements. No matter how many carefully drafted clauses you added to the rule book, undecidable statements would always be there (see "Bound not to work").

G�'s now-notorious incompleteness theorems were a disconcerting blow. Mathematics prides itself on being the purest route to knowledge of the world around us. It formulates basic axioms and, applying the tools of uncompromising logic, uses them to deduce a succession of ever grander theorems. Yet this approach was doomed to failure when applied to the basic system of natural numbers, G� showed. There could be no assumption that a "true" or "false" answer exists. Instead, there was always the awkward possibility that the laws of arithmetic might not supply a definitive answer at all. G� revealed the awkward possibility that arithmetic sometimes could not supply any answers at all

A blow though it was, at first it seemed it was not a mortal one. Although several examples of undecidable statements were unearthed in the years that followed, they were all rather technical and abstruse: fascinating to logicians, to be sure, but of seemingly little relevance to everyday arithmetic. One plus one was still equal to two; Peano's rules, though technically incomplete, were adequate for all practical purposes.

In 1977, though, Jeff Paris of the University of Manchester, UK, and Leo Harrington of the University of California, Berkeley, unearthed a statement concerning the different ways collections of numbers could be assigned a colour. It could be simply expressed in the language of arithmetic, but proving it to be true for all the infinitely many possible collections of numbers and colourings turned out to be impossible starting from Peano's axioms (see "The colour of numbers").

The immediate question was how far beyond Peano's rules the statement lay. The answer seemed reassuring: only a slight extension of the rule book was needed to encompass it. It was a close thing, but G�'s chickens had once again missed the roost.

Now, though, they seem finally to have found their way home. In a forthcoming book, Boolean Relation Theory and Incompleteness, the distinguished logician Harvey Friedman of Ohio State University in Columbus identifies an entirely new form of arithmetical incompleteness. Like Paris and Harrington's theorem, these new instances, the culmination of more than ten years' work, involve simple statements about familiar items from number theory. Unlike Paris and Harrington's theorem, they lie completely out of sight of Peano's rule book.

To begin to understand what this new incompleteness is about, we must delve into the world of functions. In this context, a function is any rule that takes one or a string of natural numbers as an input and gives another number as an output. If we have the numbers x = 14, y = 201 and z = 876 as the input, for example, the function x + y + z + 1 will produce the output 1092, and the function xyz + 1 will give 2,465,065.

These simple functions belong to a sub-class known as strictly dominating functions, meaning that their output is always bigger than their inputs. A striking fact, known as the complementation theorem, holds for all such functions. It says there is always an infinite collection of inputs that when fed into the function will produce a collection of outputs that is precisely the non-inputs. That is to say, the inputs and outputs do not overlap- they are "disjoint sets" - and can be combined to form the entire collection of natural numbers. Delayed triumph

As an example, consider the basic strictly dominating function that takes a single number as its input and adds 1 to it. Here, if you take the infinite set of even numbers 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10... as the inputs, the corresponding outputs are the odd numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11... Between them, these inputs and outputs cover every natural number with no overlap. The complementation theorem assures us that a configuration like this always exists for any strictly dominating function, a fact that can be deduced from Peano's rules.

Friedman's work entails adjusting the complementation theorem to pairs of a specific class of strictly dominating function known as expansive linear growth (ELG) functions. Friedman identified 6561 relationships between inputs and outputs that a pair of ELG functions could exhibit in principle. For every one of these relationships, he tested the hypothesis that it would be shown by every possible pair of ELG functions.

Friedman found that Peano's rules gave a definitive yes or no answer in almost all cases. The relationship either popped up with every pair of ELG functions, or he found a specific pair whose inputs and outputs could not be linked in that way. In 12 cases, however, he drew a blank: the hypothesis could neither be proved nor disproved using Peano's axioms. What's more, it could not be proved using any reasonable extension of conventional arithmetic. With Friedman's work, it seems G�'s delayed triumph has arrived: the final proof that if there is a universal grammar of numbers in which all facets of their behaviour can be expressed, it lies beyond our ken.

What does this mean for mathematics, and for fields such as physics that rely on the exactitude of mathematics? In the case of physics, probably not much. "Friedman's work is beautiful stuff, and it is obviously an important step to find unprovable statements that refer to concrete structures rather than to logical abstractions," says theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey. "But mathematics and physics are both open systems with many uncertainties, and I do not see the uncertainties as being the same for both." The clocks won't stop or apples cease to fall just because there are questions we cannot answer about numbers.

The most severe implications are philosophical. The result means that the rules we use to manipulate numbers cannot be assumed to represent the pure and perfect truth. Rather, they are something more akin to a scientific theory such as the "standard model" that particle physicists use to predict the workings of particles and forces: our best approximation to reality, well supported by experimental data, but at the same time manifestly incomplete and subject to continuous and possibly radical reappraisal as fresh information comes in. The rules we use to manipulate numbers might not be universal truths, but just our best approximation of reality Cardinal sins

That is an undoubted strike at mathematicians' self-image. Friedman's work does offer a face-saving measure, but it too is something that many mathematicians are reluctant to countenance. The only way that Friedman's undecidable statements can be tamed, and the integrity of arithmetic restored, is to expand Peano's rule book to include "large cardinals"- monstrous infinite quantities whose existence can only ever be assumed rather than logically deduced (see "A ladder of infinities").

Large cardinals have been studied by logicians for a century, but their intangibility means they have seldom featured in mainstream mathematics. A notable exception is the most celebrated result of recent years, the proof of Fermat's last theorem by the British mathematician Andrew Wiles in 1994. This theorem states that Pythagoras's formula for determining the hypotenuse of a right angled triangle, a2+ b2 = c2, does not work for any set of whole numbers a, b and c when the power is increased to 3 or any larger number.

To complete his proof, Wiles assumed the existence of a type of large cardinal known as an inaccessible cardinal, technically overstepping the bounds of conventional arithmetic. But there is a general consensus among mathematicians that this was just a convenient short cut rather than a logical necessity. With a little work, Wiles's proof should be translatable into Peano arithmetic or some slight extension of it.

Friedman's configurations, on the other hand, lay down an ultimatum: either admit large cardinals into the axioms of arithmetic, or accept that those axioms will always contain glaring holes. Friedman's own answer is unequivocal. "In the future, large cardinals will be systematically used for a wide variety of concrete mathematics in an essential, unremovable way," he says.

Not everyone is happy to take that lying down. "Friedman's work is beautiful mathematics, but pure fiction," says Doron Zeilberger of Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. He has a radically different take. The problems highlighted by Friedman and others, he says, start when they consider infinite collections of objects and realise they need ever more grotesque infinite quantities to patch the resulting logical holes. The answer, he says, is that the concept of infinity itself is wrong. "Infinite sets are a paradise of fools," he says. "Infinite mathematics is meaningless because it is abstract nonsense."

Rather than patching each hole with ever more dubious infinities, Zeilberger says we should focus our efforts on the only place where we really be sure of our footholds - strictly finite mathematics. When we do that, the incompleteness that creeps in at the infinite level will dissolve, and we can hope for a complete and consistent, albeit truncated, theory of arithmetic. "We have to kick the misleading word 'undecidable' from the mathematical lingo, since it tacitly assumes that infinity is real," he says. "We should rather replace it by the phrase 'not even wrong'. In other words, 'utter nonsense' ".

Such "finitist" views are nothing new. They appeared as soon as Georg Cantor started to investigate the nature of infinity back in the late 19th century. It was a contemporary of Cantor's, Leopold Kronecker, who coined the finitist motto: "God created the integers; all else is the work of man." But can we dismiss infinity that easily? Many mathematicians believe not, but we now know that even by accepting even the lowliest, most manageable form of infinity- that embodied by the "countable" set of natural numbers- we usher in a legion of undecidable statements, which in turn can only be tamed by introducing the true giants of the infinite world, the large cardinals.

The debate will rage on. The two possible conclusions are equally unpalatable. We can deny the existence of infinity, a quantity that pervades modern mathematics, or we must resign ourselves to the idea that there are certain things about numbers we are destined never to know. Bound not to work

In the 1920s, David Hilbert laid down a grand challenge to his fellow mathematicians: to produce a framework for studying arithmetic, meaning the natural numbers together with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, with Giuseppe Peano's axioms as its backbone. Such a framework, Hilbert said, should be consistent, so it should never produce a contradiction such as 2 + 2 = 3. And it should be complete, meaning that every true statement about numbers should be provable within the framework.

Kurt G�'s first incompleteness theorem, published in 1931, killed that aspiration dead by encoding in arithmetical terms the statement "this statement is unprovable". If the statement could be proved using arithmetical rules, then the statement itself is untrue, so the underlying framework is inconsistent. If it could not be proved, the statement is undeniably true, but that means the framework is incomplete.

In a further blow, G� showed that even mere consistency is too much to ask for. His second incompleteness theorem says that no consistent framework for arithmetic can ever be proved consistent under its own rules.

The coup de gr� was delivered a few years later, when Briton Alan Turing and American Alonzo Church independently proved that another of Hilbert's demands, that of "computability", could not be fulfilled: it turns out to be impossible to devise a general computational procedure that can determine whether any statement in number theory is true or false. The colour of numbers

When Jeff Paris and Leo Harrington got their glimpse of arithmetical incompleteness in 1977, they were considering a variant on a classic mathematical result called Ramsey's theorem. Suppose we have some scheme for assigning one of two colours, either red or blue, to every possible set of four natural numbers. So {1, 5, 8, 101} might be red for example, and {101, 187, 188, 189} might be blue. It is quite possible, then, that any given number will occur in some red sets and some blue sets. What Ramsey's theorem says is that, despite this, we can always find an infinite collection of numbers that is monochromatic - coloured entirely red or blue. There's nothing magic about sets of four numbers or two colours: change those to any figures you like, and the same thing works.

The theorem means order can be recovered even from highly disordered situations: even if you invent some horribly complex rule to colour your sets of numbers, you will always be able to extract an infinite monochromatic set. In theoretical computer science, for example, that permits algorithms to be constructed that allow the transfer of information through noisy channels where errors can creep in.

The variant of Ramsey's theorem considered by Paris and Harrington deals with sets of numbers that are "big", meaning that their smallest entry is less than the number of members in the set. So the set of four numbers {5, 7, 8, 100} is not deemed big as its smallest entry is 5, while the set {3, 8, 12, 100} is. If we start with a very big (but not infinite) set of natural numbers A, and again assign every set of four numbers within A either the colour red or blue, the modified version of Ramsey's theorem says we can find a monochromatic subset of A that is big. Again, the same result should hold with the numbers four and two replaced with any other numbers.

Therein lies the problem. Paris and Harrington showed that for the theorem to hold, the set A must be mind-bogglingly large- too huge, in fact, to be described by arithmetical procedures stemming only from Peano's rules. A ladder of infinities

How big is infinity? A silly question, you might say, as infinity is infinitely big. Perhaps, but as the 19th-century German mathematician Georg Cantor proved to his contemporaries' dismay, the infinite comes in different sizes.

Take the natural numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... You can go on counting these till kingdom come, so there's no doubting that the set of natural numbers is infinite. But this "countable" infinity occupies only the lowest rung of an infinite ladder. Ironically, larger infinities arise when you break down the natural numbers into subsets: the numbers 1 to 1,000,000, for example, or the odd numbers, the prime numbers, or pairs of numbers such as four and 1296.

How many such subsets are there altogether? An infinite number, of course. Cantor was able to prove that this infinity is bigger than the original countable set. This second level of infinity is the "continuum", and it is where many important mathematical objects live: the set of real numbers (the integers and all the fractional and irrational numbers that lie between them) and the complex numbers too.

And so it goes on. By looking at the collection of all possible subsets of real numbers, you find a still higher level of infinity, and so on ad infinitum. Infinity is not a single entity, but an infinite ladder of infinities, with each rung infinitely higher than the one below. Mathematicians call these different levels the "infinite cardinals".

In 1908, another German mathematician, Felix Hausdorff, conceived the idea of "large cardinals". These dwarf even the hugest of Cantor's original cardinals and are blessed with a hierarchy all their own. They are too far up even to be seen from below, and whether or not they exist is a question utterly beyond the range of all the ordinary rules of mathematics. Small wonder, then, that many mathematicians baulk at the claim that large cardinals could rescue the logical foundations of arithmetic (see main story).

Richard Elwes is a visiting fellow at the University of Leeds in the UK and the author of Maths 1001: Absolutely Everything That Matters in Mathematics (Quercus, 2010)

My mom, perhaps the greatest feminist influence I�ll ever have, wanted to be a veterinarian when she was a little girl. (I won�t tell her age because she�ll kill me, but suffice it to say this would�ve been in the early to mid 50�s.) She definitely could have been one, too � she�s great with all animals, even ones I won�t touch, and she�s good at math and science. Her grandmother, though, told her to get that idea right out of her head. Ladies, she said, did NOT become veterinarians. Which was true, I guess, at least in Shreveport, Louisiana. Mom�s only viable options were Nurse, Teacher, Model, Stewardess or Secretary.

Well, Mom likes people a lot less than she does animals; she likes children even less; she�s about five feet tall in her stocking feet; and she doesn�t particularly like to fly.

Secretary it was. Starting in about 1965, right smack in the middle of Mad Men territory.

She wore a hat and gloves to work every day, along with the ubiquitous girdle. She hated to miss work for anything, because when she came back, the m

Chapter 30

en (and almost everyone she worked with was male) would tease her about having her period. She was a damn good secretary � over the years, she got promoted to work for a series of increasingly powerful men � but like most other women at the time, she was largely looked over, disregarded and ignored.

�-

That�s why it irritates me so much when people � especially women � claim they�re �anti-feminist.� They blame the feminist movement that started in the 60�s for the decay of morality and the erosion of �family values.� But if you have a college education, if you own your own business, if you can get a prescription for birth control pills without the doctor lecturing you about becoming a slut, if you can report a rape at the police station and get taken seriously, if you can divorce your abusive husband without being ostracized by your entire community and if you can have any career you want, INCLUDING Secretary, then you have the feminist movement to thank. It�s exactly that simple.

Mom didn�t burn her bra or anything, but she sure as shit made sure I knew who Gloria Steinem, Camille Paglia and Betty Friedan were. I like to say I knew who Helen Gurley Brown was before I knew �Jesus Loves Me.� That might be a slight exaggeration, but neither of us are entirely sure.

�-

I�ve been wearing my red lipstick a little more often, and this fall, I might buy a few pencil skirts and tight sweaters. Heck, I may even get myself a pen necklace.

But all things considered, I�m pretty glad my bosses are women, and they�ll never ask me to make them martinis unless I�m making one for myself, too.

Your refreshingly retro Kel

P.S. The Guy asked me to tell you all that he doesn�t care if a woman never makes him a martini at work.

He doesn�t care if it�s a man OR a woman. He just wants a martini at work.

Allstars, Bachelor Boys, Hammer and a Nail, I Shoulda Majored in Womyn's Studies, Runs in the Family, The Gret Stet of Looseeanna, Uncategorized

Aug 19th 2010 By: Chris Sims 'Tarot' #63 Explains What Breasts Are For to Naked Lady Werewolves [Review] IndieWTF11 Comments I've been reading Jim Balent's "Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose" for the majority of its ten-year (and counting) run, and in that time it's been the most consistently amazing comic book on the stands. Admittedly, this isn't quite the traditional definition of "amazing," but it always leaves me pretty amazed. And the most recent installment, #63, is the best/worst/best-again issue in quite some time.

I've discussed the series before, but for those of you who aren't familiar with it, here's the quick rundown: "Tarot" is about the title character, a witch with incredibly large breasts (even for comics) who defends the mortal world from supernatural threats, which mostly involve her sister (who has even larger breasts) and the occasional super-villain with nuclear bombs implanted in her even larger breasts. I'm more or less obsessed with the book to the point where I even got a sketch of Tarot by Colleen Coover, because it is frequently the craziest damn thing I've ever seen in my life.

I talked about this issue a bit back when it was solicited, because the variant cover featured Jim Balent drawing a naked lady and then just cold dropping Courage Wolf's head onto her neck, but it's even crazier than I could've hoped. Tarot herself barely appears in this issue -- for newcomers, that's not her on the cover, but I'll get to that in a minute -- but it offered something even better: A story that focused on her boyfriend, Jon Webb.

Much like Tarot, Jon has supernatural powers. In his case, it's the ability to see and talk to ghosts, which has led him to become The Skeleton Man, who is unquestionably the worst super-hero of all time. Far more often than not, he plays the bumbling, often-imperiled sidekick/love interest to Tarot who is often tied up and molested by sexy monsters and/or supporting cast members, and I gotta be honest, that's actually the one thing I like about the book completely without irony. It'd be a fantastic subversion of traditional adventure story gender roles, if, you know, most of the stories didn't involve Tarot getting tied up, stripped, and occasionally raped and literally milked. Seriously. That happened in #45.

Anyway, the fact that Jon's even worse at having adventures begs the question of why I was excited to get an issue about him, and that's easy. Because the last time we got a story about Jon, this happened:

Incidentally, that's also the story where Jon had to give up chasing down a cadre of murderous ghosts because they would not tell him the address of the next person they were planning to kill. That's how that story ended. I wasn't kidding when I said he was the worst super-hero ever.

And that brings us to this issue, and while it doesn't quite measure up to the standards of the haunted vagina, we are way down the rabbit hole right from page one. Well, actually, if you want to get right down to it, we've entered the world of Jim Balent's mind on the inside front cover, where colorist/letterer/BroadSword Comics Vice President Holly Golightly is cosplaying as Princess Leia. You can tell because she has her hair in the little cinnamon rolls and she's holding a blaster, which is handy because otherwise, she's naked. For "Tarot," this is actually not an unusual occurrence.

But it's page one that sets up the story proper, as the Skeleton Man steps in to stop a mortician from raping a dead body.

When I hit a guy making necrophilia porn on page one, I honestly considered just closing the comic there and calling it a night, but I figured after that, there's pretty much nowhere to go but up. And I was right, because this is about when this issue gets completely insane. No sooner has Jon left the morgue when he runs across a werewolf!

Now, given the enduring popularity of werewolves in horror fiction and movies -- especially given the recent boost in popularity from "Twilight" and the Harry Potter books -- you probably think you've got a pretty good handle on what a werewolf looks like and how they tend to work. But you are not Jim Balent, and you have not achieved the transcendant consciousness that he has. You do not live on his world.

And on Earth-Balent...

...lady werewolves are just naked women who have absolutely hilarious wolf-heads and tails.

Again, that's not actually that out of the ordinary for "Tarot." The dragons are naked women, sea monsters are naked women, the gingerbread golems are naked women -- even Jim Balent's mermaids, which are already half-naked women, have scaly legs that join together to form fins at the feet, but are essentially regular ol' legs from the ankles up, so that he can draw both mer-breasts and mer-ginas.

Even so, considering that one of the main characters of the book is a werecat who has fur all over (on the off chance that you thought there was a fetish this book might not cater to), you'd think the same would hold true for werewolves. Especially since the dude werewolves are totally just wolfmen in Incredible Hulk outfits.

There's a gender discrepancy here, and while that might be something one would expect from a book that's little more than a supernatural porn, but "Tarot" is a book that both prides itself and has built a substantial readership on the pretense that it showcases strong female characters.

Not that this is a revelation; even if you discount the aforementioned events of #45 because Tarot eventually overcomes her assailant and the fact that he makes butter out of her bodily fluids so that he can eat magickal toast (I swear that is exactly what happens), there's also the issue where she fights her male counterpart and he's so much better than she is at swordfighting that he's able to strip her naked, which causes her to become aroused, which makes him pause long enough for her to be rescued by Skeleton Man, who as we have already established is the worst super-hero ever.

It just doesn't add up the way he thinks it does. Either way, the fact that he's just cold drawing a clearly photo-referenced wolf head on a naked lady never stops being hilarious.

Getting back to the plot, matters are complicated with the werewolves with the introduction of a new character, Vera VanGuard: Werewolf Hunter, who is based on a real-life model friend of Balent's named, as you might expect, Vera VanGuard. Balent's been doing this a lot over the past few years, drawing friends and fans into stories, and the when the photorealism is dropped next to his somewhat distinctive art style, it tends to come off as a little weird. Of course, that might just be because people tend to show up in scenes where they're being brutally butchered by dragon witches or something, but it's pretty much just a one-way ticket to the Uncanny Valley for me.

Vera, as her name suggests, has been hunting down werewolves, but the key factor here is that she shows up and almost immediately says the best line to grace the pages of "Tarot" in almost two years:

Oh is that what they're for! You know, I've been wondering.

For the record, Vera's breasts aren't merely convenient handles, they're actually a cunning trap: Her black vinyl bra and fishnet bodice are actually wired with enough electricity to kill the two werewolves, while leaving her more or less unharmed. Which... Okay, look, I know this is a book about witches and ghosts and werewolves and that's fine, but I'm pretty sure that an sending a hundred thousand volts through one's own electric bra would probably be a phenomenally bad idea. Just sayin'. But then, that's what they're there for.

I'd like to point out that when this happens, we're not even halfway through the book, but clearly, we have peaked. The rest of the book is mostly devoted to werewolf combat, although there's another high point in this panel...

..which features:

a) Vera explaining her origin in the format of Sailor Moon's "in the name of the Moon," speech, b) a sword that is also a gun, and c) Jim Balent doing his level best to draw a sexy pouty lady face... on a wolf head.

And then the Skeleton Man gets punched so hard that his face gets ripped off.

One would think that this would be the dramatic climax of the issue, as what narrative structure there is that isn't based entirely on breasts is about Jon's reluctance in becoming the Skeleton Man and how he decided to use his powers to help people even after they were killed. Having him suffer for his actions would actually provide a bit of a character arc for him that could play out in future issues, much like what happened with Tarot herself a few years back when she got stabbed. That seems like the logical conclusion to everything going on here.

So of course, that's not what happens at all.

Instead, he gets dumped into a combination Lazarus Pit/Hot Tub and Boo has sex with him while he's unconscious.

"Tarot, Witch of the Black Rose" everybody. It might not hit the high/lowlights of a man telling a woman that she has to get away from her own reproductive system because it's become infested with ghosts, but truly it can be said, this one's got it all.

And that's not always a good thing.

Anonymous asked: What advice would you give to a graphic design student?

Design does not equal client work.

It�s hard to make purple work in a design. The things your teachers tell you in class are not gospel. You will get conflicting information. It means that both are wrong. Or both are true. This never stops. Most decisions are gray, and everything lives on a spectrum of correctness and suitability.

Look people in the eyes when you are talking or listening to them. The best teachers are the ones who treat their classrooms like a workplace, and the worst ones are the ones who treat their classroom like a classroom as we�ve come to expect it. Eat breakfast. Realize that you are learning a trade, so craft matters more than most say. Realize that design is also a liberal art. Quiet is always an option, even if everyone is yelling. Libraries are a good place. The books are free there, and it smells great.

If you can�t draw as well as someone, or use the software as well, or if you do not have as much money to buy supplies, or if you do not have access to the tools they have, beat them by being more thoughtful. Thoughtfulness is free and burns on time and empathy.

The best communicators are gift-givers.

Don�t become dependent on having other people pull it out of you while you�re in school. If you do, you�re hosed once you graduate. Keep two books on your nightstand at all times: one fiction, one non-fiction.

Buy lightly used. Patina is a pretty word, and a beautiful concept.

Develop a point of view. Think about what experiences you have that many others do not. Then, think of what experiences you have that almost everyone else has. Then, mix those two things and try to make someone cry or laugh or feel understood.

Design doesn�t have to sell. Although, that�s usually its job.

Think of every project as an opportunity to learn, but also an opportunity to teach. Univers is a great typeface and white usually works and grids are nice and usually necessary, but they�re not a style. Helvetica is nice too, but it won�t turn water to wine.

Take things away until you cry. Accept most things, and reject most of your initial ideas. Print it out, chop it up, put it back together. When you�re aimlessly pushing things around on a computer screen, print it out and push it around in real space. Change contexts when you�re stuck. Draw wrong-handed and upside down and backwards. Find a good seat outside.

Design is just a language, it�s not a message. If you say �retro� too much you will get hives and maybe die. Learn your design history. Know that design changes when technology changes, and its been that way since the 1400s. Adobe software never stops being frustrating. Learn to write, and not school-style writing. A text editor is a perfectly viable design tool. Graphic design has just as much to do with words as it does with pictures, and a lot of my favorite designers come to design from the world of words instead of the world of pictures.

If you meet a person who cares about the same obscure things you do, hold on to them for dear life. Sympathy is medicine.

Scissors are good, music is better, and mixed drinks with friends are best. Start brave and brash: you can always make things more conservative, but it�s hard to make things more radical. Edit yourself, but let someone else censor you. When you ride the bus, imagine that you are looking at everything from the point of view of someone else on the ride. If you walk, look up on the way there and down on the way back. Aesthetics are fleeting, the only things with longevity are ideas. Read Bringhurst and one of those novels they made you read in high school cover to cover every few years. (Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby.)

Stop trying to be cool: it is stifling.

Most important things happen at a table. Food, friends, discussion, ideas, work, peace talks, and war plans. It is okay to romanticize things a little bit every now and then: it gives you hope.

Everything is interesting to someone. That thing that you think is bad is probably just not for you. Be wary of minimalism as an aesthetic decision without cause. Simple is almost a dirty word now. Almost. Tools don�t matter very much, all you need is a sharp knife, but everyone has their own mise en place. If you need an analogy, use an animal. If you see a ladder in a piece of design or illustration, it means the deadline was short. Red, white, black, and gray always go together. Negative space. Size contrast. Directional contrast. Compositional foundations.

Success is generating an emotion. Failure is a million different things. Second-person writing is usually heavy-handed, like all of this.

Seeking advice is addicting and can become a proxy for action. Giving it can also be addicting in a potentially pretentious, soul-rotting sort of way, and can replace experimenting because you think you know how things work. Be suspicious of lists, advice, and lists of advice.

Everyone is just making it up as they go along.

This about sums up everything I know.

3 Reasons the �Ground Zero Mosque� Debate Makes No Sense By: Gladstone August 20th, 2010 141,137 views

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I don�t usually write about politics. It�s important, but something I want no part of � kind of like a raw sewage treatment facility. But frankly, I haven�t been this upset in a long time. And it�s due to the logic-hating, herd-mentality rhetoric that some have been flinging in opposition to the so-called �Ground Zero Mosque.� For the uninitiated, there are plans to construct an Islamic Community center in lower Manhattan. And, of course, lower Manhattan is where the World Trade Center stood before terrorists destroyed it, thereby murdering 3,000 Americans. I was working in New York City at the time. As was my father. As was my pregnant wife. I remember the day well. And the days that followed. I think most of all, I remember standing on the Staten Island Ferry, coming home with 200 other silent, reverent New Yorkers of every age, race, and religion, as we watched our city still smoldering a full week later. And it is with this backdrop that I can say to every politician spouting off and opposing the construction of this Islamic community center: �Shut up. Go away. You hate America.�

I�m talking about people like professional political tumor, Newt Gingrich, and future worst President ever, Sarah Palin, who have both slammed supporters of the Islamic community center with rhetoric so flawed, I�m afraid even linking to it might impair your computer�s higher functioning circuits. But it�s not just them. Due to the wave of misinformation being spread, apparently 68% of Americans also oppose the mosque.

How did this happen? Well, basically a complacent or a complicit media helped perpetuate three ideas that are either outright lies or intellectually dishonest arguments designed to bring out the very worst in all of us. And as you continue to hear them�and you will�take out this column which you will have already printed and laminated, and recite thusly: 1. It�s Not at Ground Zero

The proposed structure is not on the hallowed ground of the former World Trade Center. It�s at an abandoned and private building blocks away that used to be the Burlington Coat Factory. That means that if every one of the �g�s� that Sarah Palin drops when she�s talkin� folksy were 10 by10 feet large, you could still stack over 120 of them from Ground Zero to this community center. Easy.

That sort of makes all the difference, doesn�t it? I know, when I first heard they were building a mosque at Ground Zero, I literally said, �What the fuck.� Like out loud and everything. I didn�t even pull a �WTF� despite years of writing for the Internet. That�s because for the last nine years, we New Yorkers have listened to countless proposals and plans and ideas of how to best rebuild the area while honoring the memories of those who died. And suddenly it seemed we were being told, �Yep, it�s all decided. Mosque. We want a mosque here. Just feels right.�

So yeah, of course, no one was on board. That just made no sense. What happened to that proposed waterfall and wall of names? Nothing happened. Because no one was ever building a mosque on that site. It�s just a lie that was told to you by people who wanted you to be afraid, upset, and hurt. People who wanted to manipulate your tender emotions to inspire contempt for the government. It�s about as intellectually dishonest as manipulating debate footage to make it appear that �Drill, baby, drill� is Sarah Palin�s stance on partial birth abortions. It�s just wrong.

And to those who say that any location in lower Manhattan is too close for a Muslim structure, let me remind you that right now, in the shadow of what would be the former World Trade Center, there�s a Halal Meat Hot Truck with a multi-denominational line that wraps around my building every day at lunch time. And I�m positive that�s owned by a Muslim. And I�ve even suffered at his hands. (Spoiler alert: avoid the goat rhoti). Should he move a few more blocks away too? Of course, not. That would just be silly, right? Is it different? Why? Because mosques are religious and the 911 terrorists perverted Islam into something violent and hateful? Guess what? Those knights did the same thing to Christianity for the 300 years of the Crusades, and no one�s saying that churches shouldn�t be built anywhere in � Europe. 2. It�s Not Strictly A Mosque

A mosque by definition is a purely religious structure. This is a large proposed community center, open to the public and set to house, among other things, a basketball court. Yes there will be a prayer space inside it as well, but you don�t call St. Mary�s Hospital a church because it happens to have a chapel inside it, do you? Well, maybe you do. You read about politics on the Internet from a guy who claims not to write about politics, so maybe you�re functionally illiterate. But the point is, you shouldn�t.

But �Islamic Community Center open to the public� doesn�t have the same ability to scare people the way �mosque� does. I mean, you hear �mosque� you think mosquito, you think STING! You hear �mosque� you think �mask,� you think DECEPTION! You hear �community center� you think �OK. One more place I�ll never go.� So, yeah, clearly the decision was made by those who hate you to call this the �Ground Zero Mosque� even though it�s not at Ground Zero and not technically a mosque. Why are we still discussing this? Why haven�t you already asked Sarah Palin if she�s the devil on her Twitter account? Oh, that�s right. Because the devil is supposed to be good at lying. 3. You Can�t Simultaneously Acknowledge A Right And Insist That Your Government Suppress It

But the real reason I�m writing is not just because of people like Sarah Palin, but because of shameful, spineless panderers like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Here�s a statement from each of them designed to give the appearance of being tolerant while adhering to good old-fashioned common sense values:

From Sarah Palin�s Twitter Feed:

�We all know that they have the right to do it, but should they?�

And from Harry Reid�s spokesperson:

While respecting that Muslims have a First Amendment right to religious freedom, Reid �thinks this mosque should be built some place else,� his spokesman Jim Manley said Monday.

Let me make something clear. In order to make these statements you must hate two things: logic and America. There is NO way to say that an individual has a protected right to do something and simultaneously criticize your government for not suppressing the execution of that right. There is no way for President Obama or any other president to put a stumbling block in the way of the free exercise of religion without violating the sanctity of that freedom. Should I say it more simply? OK.

You can�t legally stop people from obeying the law.

The Burlington Coat factory is private property. Those who want to build on it are private citizens. They are violating no law in wanting to build a community center. Under what authority do you propose we stop them? There is no �unless you�re a Muslim within X yards of a national tragedy exception� to the free exercise of religion. Do the Gingrichs and Palins and Reids want to start a precedent where you can compel people not to exercise the freedoms guaranteed under our Constitution provided enough people don�t like you?

And what are we saying to Muslims? That if they were good Americans they would willingly give up their rights? I can�t think of anything less American than that? This is America. We do what we want. And all you have to do to have that right is be a citizen here. And if you�re a traitor, well then we will prosecute you for treason and penalize you for taking up arms against the greatest country in the world, but we will NOT start curtailing your freedoms based on mere speculation fueled by lies about what you�re building and where you�re building it.

In the days following 911 it was very popular to say that we couldn�t do anything differently in America or �the terrorists would win.� We can�t stop driving gas guzzling cars. We can�t stop supporting dictators in other parts of the world for financial or political gain. We can�t vote for a Democrat. Most of that was rhetoric. Some of it was probably true. But one thing is definitely true: if we ask our leaders to start dishonoring the freedoms that make this country great, the terrorists surely will have won. And I don�t want to see

Chapter 31

that. Because unlike those with power and influence who would lie to you, I love America.

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August 21, 2010 The Overconfidence Problem in Forecasting By RICHARD H. THALER

BUSINESSES in nearly every industry were caught off guard by the Great Recession. Few leaders in business � or government, for that matter � seem to have even considered the possibility that an economic downturn of this magnitude could happen.

What was wrong with their thinking? These decision-makers may have been betrayed by a flaw that has been documented in hundreds of studies: overconfidence.

Most of us think that we are �better than average� in most things. We are also �miscalibrated,� meaning that our sense of the probability of events doesn�t line up with reality. When we say we are sure about a certain fact, for example, we may well be right only half the time.

To see how it works, try this little quiz: Give two estimates of the diameter of the moon in miles � a high and a low one, so that there is about a 10 percent chance that the moon is bigger than the upper estimate and a 10 percent chance that it is smaller than the lower one. It is easy to be 100 percent sure by making your low guess zero and your high guess a trillion, so don�t cheat. Write down your answers before reading further.

When faced with questions like this in experiments, people tend to give confidence bounds, or limits, that are too narrow. In other words, the correct answer is outside their limits much more than 20 percent of the time, creating too many surprises. (The answer to the moon question, by the way, is 2,160 miles. Were you surprised?)

Some economists have questioned whether such experimental findings are relevant in competitive markets. They suggest that students, who often serve as guinea pigs in such tests, are overconfident, but that the top managers in large companies are well calibrated. A recent paper, however, reveals that this hopeful view is itself overconfident.

In that paper, three financial economists � Itzhak Ben-David of Ohio State University and John R. Graham and Campbell R. Harvey of Duke � found that chief financial officers of major American corporations are not very good at forecasting the future. The authors� investigation used a quarterly survey of C.F.O.�s that Duke has been running since 2001. Among other things, the C.F.O.�s were asked about their expectations for the return of the Standard & Poor�s 500-stock index for the next year � both their best guess and their 80 percent confidence limit. This means that in the example above, there would be a 10 percent chance that the return would be higher than the upper bound, and a 10 percent chance that it would be less than the lower one.

It turns out that C.F.O.�s, as a group, display terrible calibration. The actual market return over the next year fell between their 80 percent confidence limits only a third of the time, so these executives weren�t particularly good at forecasting the stock market. In fact, their predictions were negatively correlated with actual returns. For example, in the survey conducted on Feb. 26, 2009, the C.F.O.�s made their most pessimistic predictions, expecting a market return of just 2.0 percent, with a lower bound of minus 10.2 percent. In fact, the market soared 42.6 percent over the next year.

It may be neither troubling nor surprising that C.F.O.�s can�t accurately predict the stock market�s path. If they could, they�d be running hedge funds and making billions. What is troubling, though, is that as a group, many of these executives apparently don�t realize that they lack forecasting ability. And, just as important, they don�t seem to be aware of how volatile the market can be, even in �normal� times.

Another intriguing finding is that their confidence limits widen after bear markets, mostly because estimates at the lower bound become more pessimistic. This puts a new light on the recent comment by Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, that the economic outlook was �unusually uncertain.� Although I instinctively share that assessment, these results suggest that it may be an illusion: Yes, things feel more uncertain after bad times, but severe market downturns tend to occur after long bull markets when we are feeling least uncertain. In the C.F.O. survey conducted in mid-2007, for example, the average lower bound was for a market return of 0.2 percent in the next year. In other words, the worst-case scenario anticipated by the group was a flat market. Of course, the market was soon to begin its plunge.

Just like C.F.O.�s, chief executives often suffer from overconfidence, which can cause them to act unwisely. For example, in a 1986 paper, the economist Richard Roll of the University of California, Los Angeles, suggested that overconfidence, or what he called hubris, could explain why companies pay large premiums to take over other businesses. These premiums seem puzzling because the acquiring companies often don�t seem to profit from the takeovers. Professor Roll pointed out that the acquirers have typically done very well in the recent past, leading their C.E.O.�s to the mistaken belief that their success can be replicated in takeover targets once they are in charge of them.

PROFESSOR ROLL recently wrote another paper on this topic with three French collaborators. In this case, they investigated a particular form of hubris � narcissism � by using a simple and unobtrusive gauge that has been validated by psychologists: just count the number of times a person uses the first-person pronoun in communication. They found that the more narcissistic C.E.O.�s make more aggressive takeovers at higher prices than their more self-effacing brethren do, and that these aggressive takeovers aren�t as well received by the stock market.

Two lessons emerge from these papers. First, we shouldn�t expect that the competition to become a top manager will weed out overconfidence. In fact, the competition may tend to select overconfident people. One route to the corner office is to combine overconfidence with luck, which can be hard to distinguish from skill. C.E.O.�s who make it to the top this way will often stumble when their luck runs out.

The second lesson comes from Mark Twain: �It ain�t what you don�t know that gets you into trouble. It�s what you know for sure that just ain�t so.�

Richard H. Thaler is a professor of economics and behavioral science at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.

More in Economy (17 of 23 articles) U.S. Mortgage Relief Effort Is Falling Short of Its Goal

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In short, the house, and all the stuff in it, hadn�t been shaped by any real force of will, but just by the random movements of time and laziness. The things in the house weren�t bad (in fact, some of there were AWESOME), and the house itself had charm. But I was just sort of along for the ride, accepting whatever life threw my way as the way things were.

About a week and a half ago, my wife and I decided to try and declutter and redecorate the house. We�ve decided to do that before, but this time it stuck. Down came the paper dragon, down came the shelves. Up went new storage spaces, wiring concealers, bread boxes, and so forth.

And now the more we do, the more we can breathe. The more it feels like the house I�ve always wanted it to be.

And you know, strangely enough, it�s the same way with the theater.

I�ve been one of the owners of The Hideout Theatre for about a year and a half now. From the very beginning we said that we wouldn�t do anything because that was the way it�s always been done before� that we would look at every part of the business and make it work the way we felt it should. But it takes time.

We�ve been working hard at expanding the variety of the types of shows we do, while at the same time maintaining quality. We�ve expanded our advertising, pushing into the markets that makes sense to us (The Alamo Drafthouse guides, The Onion, Facebook, etc�). We�ve expanded our class offerings from 3 to 5 so that we can get more in depth into the performance side of improv.

In short, we�re doing our best to make purposeful decisions, rather than riding the wave of the theater�s 11 year history without considering where the wave is heading.

And you know what? It�s paying off. Ticket sales are up. Class attendance is up. Awareness of the the theater is up. And now that we�ve taken the day-to-day operations in hand, and it�s been organized, we can focus on next level stuff� like increasing the performance, socializing, and learning opportunities for students and graduates of the improv school� and pursuing deeper, more ambitious shows and projects.

In my freelancing work, I�ve also had the pleasure recently of using Subversion for the first time. Subversion is a version control system, which means it�s something that programmers check their source code, their HTML files, their whatevers into, so that it�s all properly stored, backed up and controlled. If something goes wrong, you can restore an earlier version and save the day.

Without a good source control system like Subversion, you wind up making ad-hoc backups. You do stuff like making a copy of a file called index.html, and calling the copy index.roy.backup.

That�s fine, but eventually you wind up with like 5 different versions of the same file from different times. And if you�re coding with someone else, they might have an entirely different naming scheme.

In short, the files and the code get cluttered and build up, not because of any great plan, but through random decisions and thoughts.

What all this boils down to is that to live the life I want to lead, and to translate my actions into the greatest possible successes, I need to make deliberate decisions, clean out the clutter, and move with purpose.

It�s proving true for my theater, my programming endeavors, and my personal life.

What do you do to declutter your life?

America: Land of Loners? by Daniel Akst

Americans, plugged in and on the move, are confiding in their pets, their computers, and their spouses. What they need is to rediscover the value of friendship.

Science-fiction writers make the best seers. In the late 1950s far-sighted Isaac Asimov imagined a sunny planet called Solaria, on which a scant 20,000 humans dwelt on far-flung estates and visited one another only virtually, by materializing as �trimensional images��avatars, in other words. �They live completely apart,� a helpful robot explained to a visiting earthling, �and never see one another except under the most extraordinary circumstances.�

We have not, of course, turned into Solarians here on earth, strictly limiting our numbers and shunning our fellow humans in revulsion. Yet it�s hard not to see some Solarian parallels in modern life. Since Asimov wrote The Naked Sun, Americans have been engaged in wholesale flight from one another, decamping for suburbs and Sunbelt, splintering into ever smaller households, and conducting more and more of their relationships online, where avatars flourish. The churn rate of domestic relations is especially remarkable, and has rendered family life in the United States uniquely unstable. �No other comparable nation,� the sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin observes, �has such a high level of multiple marital and cohabiting unions.�

Oceans of ink have been spilled on these developments, yet hardly any attention is paid to the one institution�friendship�that could pick up some of the interpersonal slack. But while sizzling eros hogs the spotlight these days�sex sells, after all�too many of us overlook philia, the slower-burning and longer-lasting complement. That�s ironic, because today �friends� are everywhere in our culture�the average Facebook user has 130�and friendship, of a diluted kind, is our most characteristic relationship: voluntary, flexible, a �lite� alternative to the caloric meshugaas of family life.

But in restricting ourselves to the thin gruel of modern friendships, we miss out on the more nourishing fare that deeper ones have to offer. Aristotle, who saw friendship as essential to human flourishing, shrewdly observed that it comes in three distinct flavors: those based on usefulness (contacts), on pleasure (drinking buddies), and on a shared pursuit of virtue�the highest form of all. True friends, he contended, are simply drawn to the goodness in one another, goodness that today we might define in terms of common passions and sensibilities.

It�s possible that Aristotle took all this too seriously, but today the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, and in our culture we take friendship�a state of strong mutual affection in which sex or kinship isn�t primary�far too lightly. We�re good at currying contacts and we may have lots of pals, but by falling short on Aristotle�s third and most important category of friendship, we�ve left a hole in our lives. Now that family life is in turmoil, reinvigorating our notion of friendship�to mean something more than mere familiarity�could help fill some of the void left by disintegrating household arrangements and social connections frayed by the stubborn individualism of our times.

Friendship is uniquely suited to fill this void because, unlike matrimony or parenthood, it�s available to everyone, offering concord and even intimacy without aspiring to be all-consuming. Friends do things for us that hardly anybody else can, yet ask nothing more than friendship in return (though this can be a steep price if we take friendship as seriously as we should). The genius of friendship rests firmly on its limitations, which are better understood as boundaries. Think of it as the moderate passion�constrained, yet also critical. If friendship, as hardheaded Lord Byron would have it, really is �love without his wings,� we can all be grateful for its earthbound nature.

But we live now in a climate in which friends appear dispensable. While most of us wouldn�t last long outside the intricate web of interdependence that supplies all our physical needs�imagine no electricity, money, or sewers�we�ve come to demand of ourselves truly radical levels of emotional self-sufficiency. In America today, half of adults are unmarried, and more than a quarter live alone. As Robert Putnam showed in his 2000 book Bowling Alone, civic involvement and private associations were on the wane at the end of the 20th century. Several years later, social scientists made headlines with a survey showing that Americans had a third fewer nonfamily confidants than two decades earlier. A quarter of us had no such confidants at all.

In a separate study, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, authors of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (2009), surveyed more than 3,000 randomly chosen Americans and found they had an average of four �close social contacts� with whom they could discuss important matters or spend free time. But only half of these contacts were solely friends; the rest were a variety of others, including spouses and children.

Here, as on so many fronts, we often buy what we need. The affluent commonly hire confidants in the form of talk therapists, with whom they may maintain enduring (if remunerated) relationships conducted on a first-name basis. The number of household pets has exploded throughout the Western world, suggesting that not just dogs but cats, rats, and parakeets are often people�s best friends. John Cacioppo, a University of Chicago psychologist who studies loneliness, says he�s convinced that more Americans are lonely�not because we have fewer social contacts, but because the ones we have are more harried and less meaningful.

Developing meaningful friendships�having the kind of people in your life who were once known as �intimates��takes time, but too many of us are locked in what social critic Barbara Ehrenreich has called �the cult of conspicuous busyness,� from which we seem to derive status and a certain perverse comfort even as it alienates us from one another. Throw in two careers and some kids, and something�s got to give. The poet Kenneth Koch, whose friends included the brilliant but childless John Ashbery and Frank O�Hara, laid out the problem in verse:

You want a social life, with friends.

A passionate love life and as well

To work hard every day. What�s true

Is of these three you may have two.

If time is a problem, so is space. Although Americans have been relocating less often lately, perhaps as a result of the recession, we still move around quite a bit�for work, sunshine, retirement, or to be near family�and this process of uprooting dissolves friendships and discourages those that haven�t yet formed. Few of us would turn down a tempting new job in a far-off city to stay near friends, possibly for the sensible reason that those friends might move away six months later anyway.

Divorce also takes its toll; most of us over the age of 30 are familiar with the social consequences that ripple outward from a split-up, as foursomes for dinner or bridge are destroyed and friends may find themselves having to pick sides. Marital dissolution usually costs each spouse some precious connections, including in-laws who might once have been important friends.

Our longstanding reverence for self-sufficiency hasn�t helped matters. Ralph Waldo Emerson gave us a sharp shove down this road with his famous essay �Self-Reliance,� and Cole Porter lyricized the uniquely American claustrophobia that danced off the tongues of a parade of popular crooners: �Let me be by myself in the evenin� breeze/And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees/Send me off forever but I ask you please/Don�t fence me in.� Frontier-oriented American mythology is studded with exemplars of the lone hero, from Daniel Boone to Amelia Earhart, to say nothing of the protagonists of Hollywood westerns such as High Noon (1952). Male buddy films date back to Laurel and Hardy, but their profusion in the past three decades�including box-office franchises ranging from Beverly Hills Cop to Harold & Kumar�is a strong social contra-indicator, like the lavish outfits and interiors of movies made during the Great Depression. If something desirable is missing in life, people like to see it on the screen.

Friendship has also suffered from the remorseless eroticization of human relations that was bequeathed to us by Sigmund Freud. The culture stands particularly ready to sexualize men�s friendships since the gay liberation movement mercifully swept away taboos against discussing same-sex relationships. In 2005 The New York Times laid claim to coining the term �man date� in a story�under a woman�s byline�about the anxiety two straight men supposedly experience if they brave a restaurant or museum together and run the risk that people will think they are gay. The �bromance� theme, once strictly a collegiate sport among scholars scouring the letters of passionate 19th-century friends for signs of physical intimacy, has since made its way into popular culture. The pathetic state of male friendship�and the general suspicion that men who seek close friends might be looking for something more�was captured in last year�s film I Love You, Man, in which a guy decides to get married, realizes he has no one to be his best man, and must embark on a series of �man dates� to find one.

The irony is that straight men could learn a thing or two from their gay brethren, as Andrew Sullivan implied in his insightful book on the AIDS crisis, Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival (1998). Often estranged from their natural families and barred from forming legally acknowledged new ones of their own, gay men, Sullivan observed, learned to rely not on the kindness of strangers but the loyalty of friends: �Insofar as friendship was an incalculable strength of homosexuals during the calamity of AIDS, it merely showed, I think, how great a loss is our culture�s general underestimation of this central human virtue.�

We make this mistake in part because we�ve allowed our wildly inflated view of matrimony to subsume much of the territory once occupied by friendship. Your BFF nowadays�at least until the divorce�is supposed to be your spouse, a plausible idea in this age of assortative mating, except that spouses and friends fill different needs, and cultivating some close extramarital friendships might even take some of the pressure off at home. Yet the married men I know seem overwhelmingly dependent on their wives for emotional connection, even as their wives take pleasure in friends to whom they don�t happen to be wed. The Beatles� immortal lonely heart Eleanor Rigby and novelist Anita Brookner�s socially isolated heroines notwithstanding, the fact is that all the women I know are better at friendships�spend more time on them, take more pleasure in them, and value them more highly�than any of the straight men.

Forgive me, guys, but we are lousy at this, and while it may seem to us that our casual approach is perfectly normal, in fact it�s odd. Among people whose lives are more like those of our ancestors, for example, friendship is taken far more seriously. In some cultures, close friends pledge themselves to one another in bonding rituals that involve the spilling of blood. The Bangwa people in Cameroon traditionally considered friendship so important that many families assigned a best friend to a newborn right along with a spouse.

There was a time when platonic friendship was exalted�if not idealized�in the West, perhaps in part because of religious paranoia about sex. The myth of Damon and Pythias and the biblical story of David and Jonathan resonated across the centuries, and in the Middle Ages knights bound themselves in ceremonies to comrades in arms. Cicero, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sir Francis Bacon, Michel de Montaigne, William Wordsworth�the list of Western luminaries who have waxed rhapsodic over friendship is long enough to fill anthologies from both Norton and Oxford.

In the 19th century, friendship was the subject of panegyrics by the likes of Emerson, who wrote that �the moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed: there is no winter and no night: all tragedies, all ennuies vanish.� His buddy Henry David Thoreau, lamenting that to most people a friend is simply someone who is not an enemy, declared, perhaps wishfully, �Friends do not live in harmony, merely, as some say, but in melody.� Mary Wollstonecraft might have spoken for the lot when she noted that while eros is transient, �the most holy bond of society is friendship.�

A grain of salt is in order: Friendship, like baseball, always seems to send intellectuals off the deep end. Yet there is more biological justification for our predecessors� paeans to friendship than for our modern-day tepidity. Friendship exists in all the world�s cultures, likely as a result of natural selection. People have always needed allies to help out in times of trouble, raise their status, and join with them against their enemies. It doesn�t seem much of a stretch to conclude that a talent for making friends would bestow an evolutionary advantage by corralling others into the project of promoting and protecting one�s kids�and thereby ensuring the survival of one�s genes.

If we evolved to make friends, we also evolved to tell them things. Humans have an irrepressible need to divulge, and often friends can tell one another what they can�t tell anyone else, a function that has come in especially handy since the Protestant Reformation put so many beyond the reach of the confessional. Less grandly, trading gossip is probably one of the main reasons people evolved into such friend makers, since information (and reputation) have always been valuable�even in the evolutionary environment.

Alliances and inside dope are two of the ways people derive power from friendships, which is why tyrannies are sometimes so hostile to them. Private affiliations of all kinds are a countervailing force against the great weight of government, but Aristotle reminds us that friendship also maintains the state. Friendships, after all, entail mutual regard, respect for others, a certain amount of agreeableness, and a willingness to rise above the ties of kinship in order to knit society into a web of trust and reciprocation�qualities more likely, in a state, to produce Denmark than Iraq.

Living in a

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society of friends has many advantages. Friendship can moderate our behavior (unless, like the television mobster Tony Soprano, you happen to choose immoderate friends). Friends help us establish and maintain norms and can tell us if we�re running off the rails when others don�t notice, won�t break the news, or lack the necessary credibility. Both our relatives and our friends, the psychologist Howard Rachlin writes, �are essential mirrors of the patterns of our behavior over long periods�mirrors of our souls. They are the magic �mirrors on the wall� who can tell us whether this drink, this cigarette, this ice-cream sundae, this line of cocaine, is more likely to be part of a new future or an old past.�

Indeed, the influence of friends and associates is profound. Social scientists Christakis and Fowler, working with data from the multidecade Framingham Heart Study, found that if you become obese, the odds increase by 71 percent that your same-sex friend will do likewise�a bigger impact than was measured among siblings. On the other hand, when you become happy, a friend living within a mile has a 25 percent greater chance of becoming happy as well�and even a friend of a friend has a 10 percent greater chance. Encouragingly for those who know a sourpuss or two, misery was not comparably contagious.

Friendship can even prolong our lives. For loneliness, the experts tell us, has to do more with the quality of our relationships than the quantity. And we now know that loneliness is associated with all sorts of problems, including depression, high blood pressure and cholesterol, Alzheimer�s disease, poor diet, drug and alcohol abuse, bulimia, and suicide. Lonely people have a harder time concentrating, are more likely to divorce, and get into more conflicts with neighbors and coworkers.

But of course friends are not vitamins, to be taken in daily doses in hopes of cheating the Grim Reaper. The real reason to prize our friends is that they help us lead good and satisfying lives, enriched by mutual understanding. This special way of knowing one another was once exalted as �sympathy,� and Adam Smith described it as �changing places in fancy.� As Caleb Crain made plain in his excellent book American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (2001), the 18th and 19th centuries were the heyday of sympathy, when the fervor of friends was evident in their letters as well as their comportment. Sympathy persisted in popular discourse and was studied as a scientific fact under various guises until, in the 19th century, Charles Darwin came along to replace cooperation with competition in the intellectual armament of the day.

Sympathy�s long-ago advocates were onto something when they reckoned friendship one of life�s highest pleasures, and they felt themselves freer than we do to revel in it. It�s time for us to ease up on friending, rethink our downgrade of ex-lovers to �just� friends, and resist moving far away from everyone we know merely because it rains less elsewhere. In Asimov�s vision, Solaria was a lonely planet that humans settled with the help of robots. People weren�t made to live there.

Full text PDF available here.

Do-Gooders Get Voted Off Island First: People Don't Really Like Unselfish Colleagues, Psychologists Find

ScienceDaily (Aug. 23, 2010) � You know those goody-two-shoes who volunteer for every task and thanklessly take on the annoying details nobody else wants to deal with? See Also: Mind & Brain Social Psychology Relationships Consumer Behavior Science & Society Industrial Relations Racial Disparity Scientific Conduct Reference Attribution theory Self image Illusion of control Competition

That's right: Other people really can't stand them.

Four separate studies led by a Washington State University social psychologist have found that unselfish workers who are the first to throw their hat in the ring are also among those that coworkers most want to, in effect, vote off the island.

"It's not hard to find examples but we were the first to show this happens and have explanations for why," said Craig Parks, lead author of "The Desire to Expel Unselfish Members from the Group" in the current Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The phenomenon has implications for business work groups, volunteer organizations, non-profit projects, military units, and environmental efforts, an interest of Parks' coauthor and former PhD student, Asako Stone.

Parks and Stone found that unselfish colleagues come to be resented because they "raise the bar" for what is expected of everyone. As a result, workers feel the new standard will make everyone else look bad.

It doesn't matter that the overall welfare of the group or the task at hand is better served by someone's unselfish behavior, Parks said.

"What is objectively good, you see as subjectively bad," he said.

The do-gooders are also seen as deviant rule breakers. It's as if they're giving away Monopoly money so someone can stay in the game, irking other players to no end.

The studies gave participants -- introductory psychology students -- pools of points that they could keep or give up for an immediate reward of meal service vouchers. Participants were also told that giving up points would improve the group's chance of receiving a monetary reward.

In reality, the participants were playing in fake groups of five. Most of the fictitious four would make seemingly fair swaps of one point for each voucher, but one of the four would often make lopsided exchanges -- greedily giving up no points and taking a lot of vouchers, or unselfishly giving up a lot of points and taking few vouchers.

Most participants later said they would not want to work with the greedy colleague again -- an expected result seen in previous studies.

But a majority of participants also said they would not want to work with the unselfish colleague again. They frequently said, "the person is making me look bad" or is breaking the rules. Occasionally, they would suspect the person had ulterior motives.

Parks said he would now like to look at how the do-gooders themselves react to being rejected. While some may indeed have ulterior motives, he said it's more likely they actually are working for the good of an organization.

Excluded from the group, they may say, "enough already" and simply give up.

"But it's also possible," he said, "that they may actually try even harder."

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August 24, 2010 Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime By MATT RICHTEL

SAN FRANCISCO � It�s 1 p.m. on a Thursday and Dianne Bates, 40, juggles three screens. She listens to a few songs on her iPod, then taps out a quick e-mail on her iPhone and turns her attention to the high-definition television.

Just another day at the gym.

As Ms. Bates multitasks, she is also churning her legs in fast loops on an elliptical machine in a downtown fitness center. She is in good company. In gyms and elsewhere, people use phones and other electronic devices to get work done � and as a reliable antidote to boredom.

Cellphones, which in the last few years have become full-fledged computers with high-speed Internet connections, let people relieve the tedium of exercising, the grocery store line, stoplights or lulls in the dinner conversation.

The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.

Ms. Bates, for example, might be clearer-headed if she went for a run outside, away from her devices, research suggests.

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.

The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.

�Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it�s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,� said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, �you prevent this learning process.�

At the University of Michigan, a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued.

Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, scientists say.

�People think they�re refreshing themselves, but they�re fatiguing themselves,� said Marc Berman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist.

Regardless, there is now a whole industry of mobile software developers competing to help people scratch the entertainment itch. Flurry, a company that tracks the use of apps, has found that mobile games are typically played for 6.3 minutes, but that many are played for much shorter intervals. One popular game that involves stacking blocks gets played for 2.2 minutes on average.

Today�s game makers are trying to fill small bits of free time, said Sebastien de Halleux, a co-founder of PlayFish, a game company owned by the industry giant Electronic Arts.

�Instead of having long relaxing breaks, like taking two hours for lunch, we have a lot of these micro-moments,� he said. Game makers like Electronic Arts, he added, �have reinvented the game experience to fit into micro-moments.�

Many business people, of course, have good reason to be constantly checking their phones. But this can take a mental toll. Henry Chen, 26, a self-employed auto mechanic in San Francisco, has mixed feelings about his BlackBerry habits.

�I check it a lot, whenever there is downtime,� Mr. Chen said. Moments earlier, he was texting with a friend while he stood in line at a bagel shop; he stopped only when the woman behind the counter interrupted him to ask for his order.

Mr. Chen, who recently started his business, doesn�t want to miss a potential customer. Yet he says that since he upgraded his phone a year ago to a feature-rich BlackBerry, he can feel stressed out by what he described as internal pressure to constantly stay in contact.

�It�s become a demand. Not necessarily a demand of the customer, but a demand of my head,� he said. �I told my girlfriend that I�m more tired since I got this thing.�

In the parking lot outside the bagel shop, others were filling up moments with their phones. While Eddie Umadhay, 59, a construction inspector, sat in his car waiting for his wife to grocery shop, he deleted old e-mail while listening to news on the radio. On a bench outside a coffee house, Ossie Gabriel, 44, a nurse practitioner, waited for a friend and checked e-mail �to kill time.�

Crossing the street from the grocery store to his car, David Alvarado pushed his 2-year-old daughter in a cart filled with shopping bags, his phone pressed to his ear.

He was talking to a colleague about work scheduling, noting that he wanted to steal a moment to make the call between paying for the groceries and driving.

�I wanted to take advantage of the little gap,� said Mr. Alvarado, 30, a facilities manager at a community center.

For many such people, the little digital asides come on top of heavy use of computers during the day. Take Ms. Bates, the exercising multitasker at the expansive Bakar Fitness and Recreation Center. She wakes up and peeks at her iPhone before she gets out of bed. At her job in advertising, she spends all day in front of her laptop.

But, far from wanting a break from screens when she exercises, she says she couldn�t possibly spend 55 minutes on the elliptical machine without �lots of things to do.� This includes relentless channel surfing.

�I switch constantly,� she said. �I can�t stand commercials. I have to flip around unless I�m watching �Project Runway� or something I�m really into.�

Some researchers say that whatever downside there is to not resting the brain, it pales in comparison to the benefits technology can bring in motivating people to sweat.

�Exercise needs to be part of our lives in the sedentary world we�re immersed in. Anything that helps us move is beneficial,� said John J. Ratey, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and author of �Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.�

But all things being equal, Mr. Ratey said, he would prefer to see people do their workouts away from their devices: �There is more bang for your buck doing it outside, for your mood and working memory.�

Of the 70 cardio machines on the main floor at Bakar Fitness, 67 have televisions attached. Most of them also have iPod docks and displays showing workout performance, and a few have games, like a rope-climbing machine that shows an animated character climbing the rope while the live human does so too.

A few months ago, the cable TV went out and some patrons were apoplectic. �It was an uproar. People said: �That�s what we�re paying for,� � said Leeane Jensen, 28, the fitness manager.

At least one exerciser has a different take. Two stories up from the main floor, Peter Colley, 23, churns away on one of the several dozen elliptical machines without a TV. Instead, they are bathed in sunlight, looking out onto the pool and palm trees.

�I look at the wind on the trees. I watch the swimmers go back and forth,� Mr. Colley said. �I usually come here to clear my head.�

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Whooping cough outbreak could be worst in 50 years 13:15 25 August 2010 by Alison Motluk For similar stories, visit the Epidemics and Pandemics Topic Guide

An outbreak of whooping cough in California could be the worst in 50 years, the state's Department of Public Health said last week.

The disease, caused by the bacterium Bordetella pertussis, is spread via coughing or sneezing and is highly contagious. On average, one infected person can spread the disease to 12 to 17 others, says Lynnette Mazur at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston.

Eight people have died of it in California so far this year, and some 3000 cases have been reported � seven times the number over the same period last year. Idaho, Texas, South Carolina and Michigan have also reported increases.

James Cherry at the University of California, Los Angeles, Medical Center says this looks set to be a particularly large outbreak, but it is not totally unexpected. Outbreaks occur every two to five years because the vaccine given to children is only 80 per cent effective and only protects up to about age 10, he says. What's more, few adults receive boosters.

The greatest danger is to unvaccinated infants: seven of the eight deaths in California were babies under two months of age.

Some areas of California are vaccinating all family members who might be in routine contact with a baby in its first months � a strategy called "cocooning". But all adults could do their part to minimise the outbreak, says Mazur. "Take a look at your immunisation record," she says.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010 posted by Jen at 8/25/2010 02:02:00 PM

I�m back!

I survived my book tour. I met a lot of wonderful readers, ate a lot of delicious cupcakes, have been thrilled with the way FLY AWAY HOME�s been received in the world (and BEST FRIENDS FOREVER, too, which has been having a wonderful run in paperback this summer). Thanks so much to everyone who bought a book, came to a reading, sent me a funny tweet or Facebook message and has made me feel like It�s All Worth Something.

Meanwhile! Maybe you�ve heard that Jonathan Franzen has a new book out?

Franzen, you�ll recall, is the author of the 2001 critically beloved blockbuster THE CORRECTIONS. Around my house, he�s perhaps even better known for being the Man Who Turned Down Oprah, and pissed off a great many other writers with his public hand-wringing over what her imprimatur and down-market, daytime-TV watching (largely female) audience would mean for his reputation.

Well, he�s back! On the cover of Time! In the pages of Vogue! Reviewed, glowingly, not once but twice in the New York Times! Which has also devoted a news story and an inside-the-list column to FREEDOM, even though it won�t come out �til next week!

Jodi Picoult, number-one bestseller of quote-unquote commercial fiction (full disclosure: she and I attended the same college and are published by the same house), has a problem with that. Last week, she tweeted about all of the attention the Times gives to its white male literary darlings, at the expense of the hundreds of thousands of other writers � some of them literary, some of them quote-unquote genre writers � who get no love at all.

If you know me, you know that I�ve long taken issue with who the Times chooses to endorse and how its coverage unfolds and why, for example, formerly hot women who write memoirs get consigned to the Style section where totally un-hot men who write about their addictions get respectful full-length reviews.

I�ve been tweeting up a storm under the hashtag #franzenfreude, and have, it seems, stirred up a bit of a tempest. What can I say? �Bachelor Pad� is boring, my other programs don�t start for another few weeks, and I can�t talk about my work-in-progress or any of the other exciting developments going on. So I�ve turned a bemused (but not too bitter) eye toward the Franzen frenzy, which has quickly become the hash-tag heard �round the reading world.

The Guardian�s blogged about the contretemps. So has Laura Lippman, weighing in with some smart things to say about which writers get covered, and how.

NPR got in on the story. So did The Forward.

Of course, not everyone was pleased at a potential disruption of the status quo, or uppity bestselling lady writers even noticing that the status quo could maybe use some disrupting.

Lorin Stein, of Sidwell Friends, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Farrar Straus Giroux and The Paris Review, took to The Atlantic's blog to accuse Jodi Picoult and I of "false populism." (Want to buy a made-to-measure shirt to wear the next time YOU accuse someone of false populism? Mr. Stein told New York Magazine that he gets his here).

The New York Times crib sheet made note of the "Franzenfreude movement" (sic) and suggested that interested parties could meet "in front of Jennifer's TV during Oprah." Because, you know, silly ladies, with their Oprah. Except the New York Times does not know where I live! So suck it, New York Times!

Meanwhile, the Sun-Sentinel�s Chauncey Mabe said we're suffering from Jodi and I of ressentiment, which I believe is French for PMS. The Washington Post�s Ron Charles� review of FREEDOM led off with an uncredited rewording of one of my tweets. Which means that I am now being taken seriously by a big-deal big-city book critic! Or not.

It�s all very exciting�and a little frustrating. Ten years into my publishing career, ten years of pointing out the same problems, and very little has changed. Boy books -- spy novels, thrillers, satire, sci-fi -- write one of those, and maybe you'll at least get mentioned in a Sunday round-up in the Times. Write chick-lit/beach-books/insert-your-own-perjorative, and it's off to the back of the bus, with nothing. Except, of course, your big, giant check (one of Mr. Mabe's readers suggested that Jodi and I should go off and cry into our mink hankies, and I know I should have been offended, but instead I thought, 'Does someone really make those?')

Anyhow. FREEDOM drops next Tuesday. Jason Pinter interviewed me for a piece on Franzen, gender and genre, and I�ll post our entire Q and A tomorrow, including some Super Sad Bookscan statistics about what the Times' love and affection will actually do for the sales of a much-hyped literary novel, and why it actually could help literary writers if critics would actually take quote-unquote beach books a little more seriously.

Stay tuned. And do come join the fun on Twitter, where I am, as ever, right here.

Hayao Miyazaki wants to make a sequel to his flying pig flick Porco Rosso

In an interview with Japan's Cut Magazine, Hayao Miyazaki admitted that he's planning a sequel to his 1992 porcine sky ace film Porco Rosso, and that Studio Ghibli's future depends on the success of its next film, The Borrower Arrietty.

Here are the highlights from the interview in Cut as translated by Nausicaa.Net. It's not exactly clear when Porco Rosso: The Last Sortie will see release or how well The Borrower Arrietty must do in the box office. But hey, the promise of another Porco Rosso flick is just enough to brighten my Sunday:

"[We're] making a dissolution program for Ghibli. No joke, we talked about it the other day." This dissolution program changes if Arrietty succeeds. [...] "For example, Ghibli should be able to continue with about five staff members as a copyright management company even if we smash the studio. So, Ghibli can say 'We stop film production. Goodbye'. I do not have to be there." [...] Miyazaki is always thinking about a tragic story of a boy. However, he wants to escape to "Porco Rosso: The Last Sortie" because a tragic boy's story is very difficult. Miyazaki says, "But it (Porco) is not connected in the future." [...] "I think that I must think about only a movie of a boy." "I do not need to make a movie if it is not a tragic story of a boy." "So I want to escape to "Porco Rosso: The Last Sortie". I have all its materials." "It should be interesting." "It is set for Spanish Civil War."

Here's an absolutely lovely scene from the original. Miyazaki, make it happen.

Facebook Study Finds Narcissistic Users Spend Most Time On Site

Huffington Post | Catharine Smith First Posted: 08-25-10 02:47 PM | Updated: 08-25-10 03:11 PM What's Your Reaction?

Inspiring Funny Obsolete Scary Must-Have Amazing Innovative Nerdy Read More: Facebook Shockmd, Facebook Study, Facebook Study Status, Facebook Studying Status, Facebook Usage, Facebook Users, Technology News

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Social networking websites keep people connected with friends, co-workers and acquaintances. But new research suggests that online profiles can also feed narcissistic tendencies and highlights a disconnect between one's real-world personality and curated online identity.

The blog All Facebook reports the findings from a study called "Self-Presentation 2.0: Narcissism and Self-Esteem on Facebook," which investigated 100 Facebook users' profiles and analyzed the subjects' real-world personality traits.

Lead by York University psychologist Soraya Mehdizadeh, researchers randomly selected 50 male and 50 female students to participate. All Facebook describes the methodology: [A]fter having the students answer questions about their demographics, facebook activity, self-esteem, and narcissism [...] Mehdizadeh looked at the "About Me" section, the profile photo, the first 20 pictures in the "View Photos of Me" section, the notes, and the status updates of each student, rating each page based on extent it self-promotes the user.

The results showed that students with comparatively lower self-esteem scores and higher narcissism scores not only spent spent more time on Facebook, but also tended to "self-promote" more than the students with higher self-esteem scores and lower narcissism scores. Facebook "self promotion" is described by ShockMD.com as "any descriptive or visual information that appeared to attempt to persuade others about one's own positive qualities. For instance posting 'My Celebrity Look-alikes'. Use of picture enhancement etc."

Therefore, the study concludes, a person's Facebook profile does not necessarily provide an accurate representation of the person creating the page. A user who constantly updates his or her status, obsessively

Chapter 33

uploads new photos and excessively posts or comments on others' walls, for instance, may be exhibiting narcissistic tendencies and battling issues of low self-esteem--or as All Facebook puts it, "those "cool" Facebook friends you have who keep spamming your news feed with constant information about themselves and how awesome they are may not be too awesome after all."

To read a full version of the study, "Narcissism and Self-Esteem on Facebook," click here.

By Claire Canavan

SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Updated: 12:24 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 26, 2010

Published: 12:00 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 25, 2010 Post a Comment E-mail Print Share Larger Type

As anyone who's ever cracked a joke can attest, you never know what will make someone laugh. Some people love pratfalls and pies in the face while others prefer deadpan humor.

Whatever tickles your funny bone, you are likely to find it at the Out of Bounds Comedy Festival, which runs Labor Day weekend and offers 500 performers from around the country (and a few international acts) performing improv, sketch and stand-up comedy at multiple Austin venues.

There's a duo made up of a dad and his teenage daughter (Grandma Hates Technology), an Israeli improv troupe (Three Falling), and a group that improvises in the style of Tennessee Williams (Kind Strangers). If you were a fan of Kids in the Hall, check out Kevin McDonald's show, and if you like political satire, don't miss Will Durst. Overwhelmed yet? Here are four acts to get you started.

FrankenMatt

Comedy duos are usually a classic pairing of opposite styles, like Abbott and Costello, or Laurel and Hardy. In the case of Los Angeles-based FrankenMatt, a two-man comedy ensemble made up of Matt Craig and Frank Caeti, the two might be physical opposites (Craig is tall while Caeti is short) but they pride themselves on being able to trade off between highly physical characters and more intellectual types.

The two first worked together at Chicago's Second City, where some of today's most popular comedians (Tina Fey, Steve Carell) started. They have impressive comedy credits on their own � Caeti was on �MADtv' and Craig appeared on �The Office' � but formed FrankenMatt in 2007 in part for the challenge of working in a two-man group.

�We're an atypical two-man group because we don't do slower scenes, we do an insane free-fall of a show,' Craig said. �We end up being pretty sweaty and crazy by the end of our shows.'

FrankenMatt does long-form improvisation, which is entirely made up on the spot, as well as sketch comedy, which usually has more of a polished quality.

In their sketch show, the two start out playing characters close to themselves who are taking a road trip. But they quickly introduce all kinds of zany characters. �You'll definitely meet Charlemagne Leroy,' Caeti said. �He's a bombastic jerk who has a "To Kill a Mockingbird"-esque courtroom scene.'

�You'll probably meet a gnome,' Craig added. �And maybe also a SWAT team.'

They haven't decided what to do for their second festival show yet, but don't worry. They'll improvise.

FrankenMatt perform at 8:30 p.m. Sept. 4 at Salvage Vanguard Apples Stage (sketch) and at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 5 at La Zona Rosa (improv).

The Reckoning

Hailing from Chicago's iO theater, another top breeding ground for comedy talent, the Reckoning is a 10-member group known for seamless long-form improvisation, particularly using a form called the Harold.

In a classic Harold there are three acts, each with three scenes. The acts are interspersed with group games, and the goal is for all the scenes to somehow converge in the end. The Reckoning, though inspired by the Harold, has developed a slightly looser approach in eight years of performing together.

Jet Eveleth described their style as �more experimental, a little bit more like theater.' From Eveleth's perspective, the most important aspects of the Harold are including scenic and non-scenic moments, as well as looking for patterns of three that can return again. �Some people look at long form as unfolding, and some people see it as storytelling,' she said. �I see it as unfolding.'

As for what's unique about the Reckoning, Eveleth said, �We're actors interested in playing dark and strange, and that's why it's comedic. After shows we feel great when there's a feeling left onstage, a mood, rather than just a few funny moments.'

The Reckoning will perform in Austin with a smaller group, including Eveleth, Eric Hunicutt, Eddie Pina and Jake Schneider. �We can't promise anything with improv,' Eveleth said, �but history suggests it will be a unique theatrical experience.'

The Reckoning perform at 8:30 p.m. Sept. 4 at the Hideout Theatre and at 8 p.m. Sept. 6 at Salvage Vanguard Apples Stage.

The Frank Mills

It's no secret that Austin's improv scene has exploded lately, and the Frank Mills, an ensemble made up of two married couples (Rachel Madorsky and Dave Buckman; Erika May and Bob McNichol) and one of their friends (Todd Schanbacher) are thriving in the burgeoning comedy scene. They have a weekly Saturday night show at ColdTowne Theater (along with Midnight Society, also appearing at Out of Bounds).

Before moving to Austin, members of the Frank Mills trained at iO, Second City and ComedySportz, and Buckman served as the artistic director of Boom Chicago in Amsterdam.

Buckman described their work as �grounded, realistic, grown-up improvisation. We pride ourselves on not going for the laugh but going for real character emotion.'

They often begin a long-form show by asking, �What's been on your mind lately?' This open-ended beginning can lead to some pretty challenging prompts, such as when a brainy audience member responded with �computational linguistics.'

The Frank Mills weren't thrown by this potentially confusing topic. Instead, with patience and grace, they invested in their characters and turned the performance into a surprisingly hilarious meditation on the interaction between people and machines.

�Frank Mills shows redefine for people what they think improv is,' Buckman said. �It can be smart and challenging and engaging and really honest.'

The Frank Mills perform at 9 p.m. Sept. 3 at the Hideout Theatre.

Venn Diaphragm

A Venn diagram is a set of overlapping circles that shows how certain data intersects. The punnily named Venn Diaphragm, an up-and-coming Austin improv group, chose their name because they are made up of �equal parts silly and smart,' according to group member Erica Lies.

Indeed, the name tells a lot about them. It's vaguely intellectual (the group formed when three of the members, along with this writer, were graduate students at UT's Department of Theatre and Dance) and yet displays a cheeky sense of humor (members have trained at New York's Upright Citizens Brigade and Chicago's iO).

The four-person group, which includes Lies, Nat Miller, Nitra Gutierrez and Pierce Purselley, all started as actors, so their long form shows begin with grounded, realistic scene work that turns sillier as the night goes on.

Their experiences in graduate school also show up in their improvisation in unexpected ways. �We talk about feminism and race and postmodernism, but in a really wrong way,' Gutierrez joked. �For a while, we had a lot of scenes about children and existentialism,' Lies added.

Venn Diaphragm used to begin shows by asking for a word from the English language. �For a while all we got was pizza, bologna, ham, sausage,' Gutierrez said. �It was all meat for a long time.' So lately the group has been experimenting with a new form that asks for three locations.

However they decide to kick off their show, you're likely to see improvisation based on smart and detailed character work. �It's about watching people and their behaviors,' Lies said. �People are strange beings, and we relate to each other in bizarre ways.'

Venn Diaphragm perform at 8 p.m. Wednesday at Salvage Vanguard Oranges Stage.

The Out of Bounds Comedy Festival

When:Tuesday through Sept. 6.

Where:Multiple venues.

For full show information, workshop listings, and tickets, visit www.outof boundscomedy.com .

Kevin McDonald of Kids in the Hall performs at 5:30 p.m. Sept. 5 at Salvage Vanguard Apples Stage and 9:30 later that night at La Zona Rosa.

Will Durst performs at 8 p,m. Sept. 3 at the Velveeta Room (part of a set); and at 7 p.m. Sept. 4 at Salvage Vanguard Apples Stage.

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August 24, 2010 Opening Ceremony Reinvents the Fashion Wheel By CINTRA WILSON

I INCREASINGLY admire the curatorial talents of certain people who, blessed with arcane knowledge and enviable taste, are able to assemble a bunch of unrelated stuff beneath a sure-eyed, all-encompassing ethos, and create a little world that is more than the sum of its parts. It�s a kind of visual bartending � an understanding of how to balance the alchemical tensions and interplays within a vocabulary of distilled spirits, and mix a rare and intoxicating mood.

Occasionally, such artistes can create new territory in familiar spaces � like the doorways to new rooms in your house that you find in your dreams. They can evoke that uncanny mind-tilt of the familiar/unfamiliar: How could I have gone so long without knowing this?

Generally speaking, if something is ultra-cool, it isn�t very comfortable; or if it�s ultra-comfortable, it isn�t very cool. Occasionally, if you�re lucky, you may find rule-breaking exceptions.

The right way to do the Ace Hotel New York, if one has the means and inclination, would be to wander in off the street with no luggage, abruptly decide to loiter for four or five days, and buy everything you�d need to do it right on the premises.

The lobby answers the question of what it might look like if art-school anarchists took over the Harvard Club � a poshly decadent, convivial clubhouse-cum-gallery-cum-rumpus lounge. A communal table is full of napalm-eyed intellects bashing on computers. Bear rugs and Moroccan cushions top a maze of vintage filth-sheened suede sectional couches. Some groups converse seriously in important eyewear. Others, a few more drinks into the afternoon, are almost too relaxed. Shoes are off; bare legs are sprawled over other legs.

The chosen retail spaces, a natural extrusion of this Situationist movement of a boutique hotel, are � but of course, dahling � satellites of two of the most insider-y retail joints in town. Fans of the too-hip-for-hipness Project No. 8 will be pleased to find its mini-store spinoff, No. 8a. The main retail space belongs to Opening Ceremony, a high-concept line that has been quietly reinventing the fashion wheel in smart and happy ways for the last several years.

The founders, college friends Carol Lim and Humberto Leon, cultivated their retail superpowers by thinking about fashion in a kind of syndicalist, collective way, and collaborating with a blend of established fashion institutions like Levi�s and Pendleton, lesser-known rising-star designers like Alexandre Herchcovitch, influential style leaders like Chlo�evigny, and outfits somewhere in the middle of all that, like the British mega-trend outlet Topshop, and The Row, the line created by the eerily fashion-slavish Olsen twins.

The resulting retail experiment fills a necessary niche. It�s something like Maxfield in Los Angeles, but a lot less serious, and affordable by persons other than the Olsen twins themselves. Opening Ceremony in the Ace is a small but vital collection of merchandise unified by an adventurous vibe of intelligent newness and otherness.

One walks past the video-art projected in the hall outside, showing roaring Oregon forest fires; then, once through the glass doors, into a bundle of interesting contradictions. Tumi luggage and men�s swim trunks are juxtaposed with Mylar packs of Gummi bears and British prawn crisps. Men�s shoes, like Rachel Comey�s rather brilliant mash-ups of classic men�s oxfords with incongruous red rubber soles ($350), are placed on shelves next to a section of crucial DVDs, including heartbreakingly stylish wonders from the Criterion Collection like Michelangelo Antonioni�s �L�Avventura� and Louis Malle�s �Elevator to the Gallows.�

In the center of the room, there is a large display case full of French rock star sunglasses, Comme des Gar�s platonically ideal zipper wallets, those Repetto ballet flats so beloved by some ladies, Doc Martens platform lace-up boots ($150, sadly not in my size) and a collection of OC�s fairly killer platform collaborations with the footwear aristocrat Robert Clergerie, in velvets and patent leathers.

Since the store is small, the speed of inventory turnover is somewhat dizzying; that day, there was a fresh batch of stupefyingly comfortable loungewear items by Alexander Wang and Tsumori Chisato � super-soft, generously long cotton things more or less evocative of total collapse in a hammock woven of baby hair and opium (Tsumori Chisato big cocoon sweatshirt, $385).

I confess: I bought an Alexander Wang T-shirt.

I know what you�ll think, and you�re right: an $89 T-shirt is a crime against humanity, and people who buy them ought to be pelted to death with $18 stainless-steel water bottles.

But I kept coming back to rub my fingers on it. It was so soft, it was making my brain flood with dopamine, like a security blanket.

You can�t compare the prices of perfect T-shirts and ordinary T-shirts. An $89 T-shirt that you love beyond reason is easily worth five sensible shirts in the $18 range that will never make you feel a transgressive shiver as you slide them over your person. There are superior design merits to consider: narcotic softness, ideal weight, the not-too-close hug of the torso, the not-too-low scoop of the V-neck, the optimum charcoal dye job (deep and inky with an extra shot of blue). It�s not a T-shirt; it�s a zone I�ll always feel passionately kissed in. A postcard from a higher intelligence; a valentine from a super-sexy future.

Whenever I got a new pair of shoes as a kid, I would stage them right next to my bed so they would be the first thing I saw when I woke up � because a world where you get to be the person rocking those shoes is the right world. This time, I did myself one better: I unwrapped my brand-new $89 T-shirt from its adorable bandanna-print tissue paper, and decided to sleep in it.

A new room sometimes opens up within a familiar room, already thought to have been looted of all future discoveries.

Ha, I said, showing my new fist to the twinkling night, while closing the blinds. Behold, ye suffering fashionisti. Behold, ye sensibly fleeced. I sleep to conquer. I am my own anarcho-luxurist syndicate. I am the Golden Mean.

Opening Ceremony at the Ace Hotel

1190-1192 Broadway (29th Street); (646) 695-5680.

SOAPENING Opening Ceremony�s forward-thinking model is a way out of the consumer tar pit of luxury-conglomerate brand worship. It�s personal, low tech and modern, in all the best old-fashioned ways.

DOPENING The staff is an open-minded, fun-loving bunch. I spent 10 minutes trying to persuade Tyler Mahowald to buy the same T-shirt he had just sold me � a kinky retail role-reversal I�ve never tried before.

UTOPENING OC and its community of collaborators deliver good, constantly refreshed trends that aren�t too temporal: an Acne shearling jacket ($1,799) will age nicely and look edgy for another 20 years.

More in Fashion & Style (7 of 21 articles) Skin Deep | Fall Fashion: A �60s Bee Updates Its Hive

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Posted: Monday, August 23 2010 at 06:19 pm CT by Bob Sullivan

I hope you have nothing but good, trustworthy friends. If you don't, they might tell the world you are in some pretty crazy, or even disturbing, places, thanks to Facebook's new "Places" tool.

An angry "friend", for example, can broadcast to everyone (including your boss) that you are in a coffee shop, museum or airport -- even if you are sitting in your cubicle working. Even if you haven't agreed to use Facebook's location service. And even if you aren't logged in to Facebook.

The new Places tool, which is integrated into the standard Facebook mobile application, was released last week with much fanfare and some hand-wringing about its privacy implications. For the most part, however, Places offers users lot of control over when they tell others where they are. Users must actively check-in -- as opposed to being automatically checked in -- as they move around.

But there�s an exception: By default, friends can "check you in" whenever they want, and wherever they happen to be. While checked-in friends don�t appear in the Places tool without their approval, the check-ins are announced to the world on the friend�s wall through status updates. Further, those updates are controlled by your friend�s privacy policies, not yours.

In other words, Facebook's tool makes violating your friends' privacy easy.

"I think it�s quite Orwellian. We have literally become each others� Big Brothers," said Alessandro Acquisti, a privacy expert at Carnegie Mellon University.

There is a way to turn this feature off (instructions below). And checked-in friends receive notice that they've been "tagged" as present in a place, and have the opportunity to remove the tag. By then, however, the damage could be done.

Last year, a Web site named "PleaseRobMe.com" created a stir when it poked fun at location-disclosure Web sites like Foursquare.com as creating opportunities for would-be home burglars by making it easy to determine when users were not home. But at least Foursquare users decide for themselves when they will reveal where they are.

Now, if you are my friend, Facebook lets me tell my friends -- and with some tweaks, everyone -- that you are with me, wherever I am.

Facebook has so far responded to this complaint by saying there is no problem. Friends who are checked in don�t appear in Places until they consent. And publishing location information in status updates is no big deal, according to the social networking site.

�People have always been able to tell others where they�ve seen friends,� said Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt. For example, I can update my status by saying, "Reader Jane Doe is with me at this Seattle coffee shop," even if that were a lie. But that's a false analogy, warns Acquisti.

"People usually don�t broadcast to hundreds of friends, as well as strangers, at the same time your current, or presumed, location," he said.

Also, Facebook Places creates a level of validation that a mere status update would not. Users have to be near the place they check in -- location-based services in a mobile device verify that -- so when a Places user tells the world, "I'm at the Bellevue movie theater with LeBron," it's far more believable.

Finally, users who are spooked by a Places status update, but who log in infrequently, won�t receive notice for days, or even weeks.

Debate about the friends� check-in issue has been raging at an information ethics blog run by Michael Zimmer, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Facebook�s Schnitt has even jumped into the conversation there, arguing that new Places tools actually provide users even greater control over personal information than they�ve had before.

But Zimmer isn�t buying it.

�While I understand that users could always mention someone else in status updates, there's a meaningful difference with regard to Places,� Zimmer told me. �Facebook has provided an official and automated means of sharing someone�s location, where users can now be systematically linked to a specific set of coordinates. These new check-ins could be potentially logged into a database, archived, mined... This is a significant change from just mentioning someone. The concern here is that locational data needs to be treated differently than just an average status update. This is why Facebook has tried to design the system so that, in their terms, no one can be checked in to a location �without their explicit permission�. Unfortunately, they fell short.�

Facebook's business plan Why would Facebook stubbornly keep this spooky feature in its new tool, and enable it by default, over the wide-eyed objections of privacy advocates?

There are two ways to create a fast-growing new business:

1. Create a new product that's so useful, millions of people rush to use it.

2. Have an existing business that millions of people use, and force them to use your new product.

Here, Facebook has picked technique No. 2. Its Places feature must play catch-up to a host of existing location services like Foursquare. There's no better way to catch up to a first-mover than tying your new feature into your existing product. And one way to make consumers use that product is to compel them to do so. Facebook is counting on its amazing network effects and help from early adopters, who will drag otherwise indifferent users into its location tool, like this: "What? Someone's telling everyone else where I am? I'd better check out this new 'Places,' thing."

My colleague Wilson Rothman offered a compelling argument last week that Facebook is the new Google. People use Facebook to find things more than ever. But if I were Facebook, I'd be worried about the Justice Department seeing Facebook as the new Microsoft, attacking small competitors with its dominant market position, forcing users to adopt a product that subsumes another start-up -- and doing it with an aloof, take-no-prisoners attitude that will someday wrinkle the nose of the wrong U.S. Senator.

Places, like so many Facebook tools, is clever, well-designed, integrated nicely with the rest of the service, and can be fun to use. It's hard to imagine a better way to find friends when you arrive in a city for a convention or family wedding. You can simply ask your mobile phone, "Who's nearby?� or "Who's in my favorite Irish bar down the corner?" Used deftly, it might even help you avoid an awkward meeting with an old girlfriend.

But the way it's been designed for maximum network effect, Places is just as likely to help an old boyfriend's stalking efforts. All it takes is a random friend attempting to check in the former girlfriend.

Consumers have long had a tortured relationship with privacy -- most say it�s important to them, but few actually behave that way. That�s because it�s often hard to predict the future consequences of a privacy-related transaction, Acquisti says.

�Giving someone your privacy is like giving someone a blank check,� he says. �You never know what amount might be filled in when it comes back to you.�

Dealing with location information should create an extra level of caution, Zimmer says.

�Not to be paranoid, but there are serious concerns about this,� he said. �People don't think about (location information) much, but it can reveal quite a bit about you. When you start piecing information together, you can start figuring out what kind of person someone is -- say if they are in a particular church, or they are at a location near a women's health clinic. It might reveal something about you, or assumptions might be made about you that are not really true.�

Red Tape Wrestling Tips While there are several privacy layers available for use with the Places tool, the simplest way to avoid Places headaches is to opt out of automatic placement by friends. It's relatively simple, though I wish it were simpler. Visit Facebook.com, click on account, and then "privacy settings." Then, at the bottom of that page, click on the word "customize settings." Under the category, "Things others share," find "Friends can check me in to Places," and select "Disabled." While you are there, review your other settings and make sure you are comfortable with them.

To fine-tune your Places settings even more, look under "Things I share," and select who can see the places you check in to, and decide if you want others to see you in the "People Here Now" area. But remember, even if you limit the number of people who can see you after you check yourself in, you haven't controlled who can know if you've been checked in by a friend -- that's controlled by your friend's privacy settings, not yours. In this scenario, even if you have opted out of broadcasting your places setting, while you won't appear in the "People Here Now" area, your presence will be disclosed on

Chapter 34

your Friend's wall post unless you�ve disabled �Friends can check me in.�

Finally, as with all privacy issues, it�s often true that information which seems meaningless today might be valuable, and used against you, tomorrow. Divorce lawyers, for example, regularly subpoena supermarket loyalty cards while fighting child custody cases (�Look at all this junk food he buys, your honor!�). It makes sense to limit your use of any tool that helps build a database of location-based information while we all learn what the long-term implications might be.

The Conversation: College Rankings That Make Parents Blush Want to Know the Top School for a 'Walk of Shame'? Unigo.com CEO Jordan Goldman Has a List for You

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Picking a college is serious business, but it comes down all too often to information from glossy campus brochures and rankings from U.S. News and World Report.

Want to know the top school for a "Walk of Shame?" Unigo.com has a list.

That needs to change, said Jordan Goldman, the CEO of college information website Unigo.com.

Goldman's site gathered information from about 30,000 students at colleges across America, sharing their opinions on their schools. Using that data, Unigo.com has compiled some unconventional "Top Ten" lists that it will release in the coming days.

"Walk of Shame Hall of Fame" is one list, where students report it's not that difficult to get "lucky." And then there's the "No Last Call" list, where "Animal House" is considered tame, Unigo's website says.

"We thought if that's important to you personally when you're choosing a college, here are some schools where you might want to look into," Goldman said.

But the lists aren't entirely about debauchery, Goldman said, adding that students deserve to have a variety of information before they commit to the schools where they'll spend four years and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"We went straight to the students," Goldman said, "to tell us what it's like to live and learn in these places.

"These are lists that are both more specific to actual students and created not by administrators and journalists who dont' know what it's like to go to these schools for four years, but created entirely by the students in those campuses," he added.

Goldman spoke with ABC News' Aaron Katersky for an interesting Conversation today that could come in handy if you're looking at schools or want to see where your alma mater ranks. Click play to watch and find out.

American Apparel: The public won't wear it

In the end, the clothing company wasn't defeated by too much sex, but by undermining its own ethical capital

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Sarah Ditum guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 August 2010 15.13 BST Article history

American Apparel styles on a poster. Photograph: David Mcnew/Getty Images

American Apparel is going down as a legendary brand failure, a business screw-up as total and devastating as New Coke or Sony Betamax. Founded as a wholesale business in 1998 by Dov Charney, in 2000 it moved into retail, and by 2005 it was a hot brand � and expanding fast. Too fast, apparently: sales dipped with the recession, debts built up, and now the company is waiting on its backers to see if it can get the additional investment it desperately needs to survive.

There's clearly still some value in the label � otherwise, it would have already been pushed into receivership � but what? American Apparel does a great line in cotton jersey basics, and its regular appearances in Grazia's Style Hunter feature or on fashion blogger Tavi show that the brand appeals to people who really care about the cut of their T-shirt. (I'm very partial to its racer-back vests.) But the products are only a portion of the brand. American Apparel justified its mark-up with added value in two areas: more sex, and less exploitation. And in the last 12 months, the company has taken a ferocious knock on both counts.

Charney's perviness was hardly new news. There were the sexual harassment cases, the masturbating in front of a reporter for Jane Magazine, and the style of American Apparel's advertising, which had the fresh-faced sleaze of an intimate session at home with the digital camera. ("Oh dear, I've forgotten to wear a bra with my running shorts.") He even managed to imagine the moment of sale (to a female customer) as an erotic exchange. So far, so unlikely to take a bite out of the M&S market � but then, it's possible for a company to survive with a less-than-wholesome CEO.

What changed at American Apparel was that Charney's libido gave the appearance of having permeated the entire structure of his company, from head office to shop floor, with a series of stories in Gawker about the exacting personal requirements that American Apparel was putting on its service staff. No matter that all clothing companies have dress codes: for American Apparel, this meant that its styling stopped looking like a cheekily oversexed asset and became a kind of unpalatable harassment experience. It was now a vertically integrated company that seemed dedicated to getting women horizontal.

It turns out that, even in the fashion business, there's such a thing as too much sex. In the same way that American Apparel couldn't expand much beyond the core range of basics it was known for, it became trapped by its porny advertising. It was never going to win round the people who found the explicitness degrading or off-putting, but that didn't matter so much as the fact that it only had one look to sell.

Alone, the sex stuff might not have completely undermined the ethical capital accrued on the back of the company's sweatshop-free policy. But the crackdown on illegal immigrants in LA last year � in which 1,500 of American Apparel's employees were found to be working illegally � probably was. American Apparel deserved credit for trying to avoid the exploitative working practices which are endemic in fashion, but hiring people without proper papers hardly sounds like ethical business. Nor, for that matter, do the kind of balance sheets that make your auditor pull a face and back away, as Deloitte & Touche has from American Apparel. Carney has always called himself a hustler, and in the end, his company's guilt-free image is looking like the biggest hustle of them all.

Michael Cera v the world. I'm with the world

The star of Scott Pilgrim Vs the World is a listless man-boy who exhibits the dramatic range of an insole

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Leading man-boy ... Michael Cera in Scott Pilgrim Vs the World. Photograph: Universal/Everett/Rex Features

Among the various indignities of getting older, I have found I can now at least keep my bugbears under control. In general, with only occasional lapses, I'm becoming able to avoid giving myself an aneurysm fuming about things that rationally shouldn't bother me, especially when I know deep down it's me, not them. Which is why I was concerned lately to find that I've started to dislike Michael Cera. Scott Pilgrim Vs the World Production year: 2010 Country: USA Cert (UK): 12A Runtime: 112 mins Directors: Edgar Wright Cast: Alison Pill, Anna Kendrick, Brandon Routh, Chris Evans, Jason Schwartzman, Kieran Culkin, Mark Webber, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Michael Cera More on this film

It's a problem that's become more urgent given the release of Edgar Wright's dinkily spectacular Scott Pilgrim Vs the World, its popularity only cementing that of Cera as its star. In the movie culture of summer 2010, he is ubiquitous. So the fact that he's started to bring me out in hives is that much more of a headache, given I was already troubled over why I might have developed an aversion to such a gifted and affable comic talent. Danny, I tell myself, snap out of it � how can you not like Michael Cera? This was George Michael. Think of his little face. It's like taking exception to a sneezing baby panda.

But I will admit to finding Cera's rise trying in as much as it so pointedly celebrates the general cultural triumph of the listless man-boy. With his constant embrace of the path of least resistance and endless supply of faux-vintage T-shirts, there's something so wilfully callow about him that he may as well be conducting a one-man campaign against puberty. No one's suggesting every male under 25 in the movies has to be a potential cast member of Dog Pound � but it's still odd to find the current template for young leading men one whose default response to the world is a wan shrug, his persona so eternally wispy that Scott Pilgrim can be read as one giant riff on his perceived inability to make his way out of the proverbial paper bag. Likewise, his best movie (the wry Youth in Revolt) yucks it up at the mere idea of any character played by him mustering anything approaching a proper teenage rebellion.

And that wouldn't besmirch my opinion of Michael Cera, promising young actor, if he hadn't brought himself to the brink of self-parody with his choice of roles. Over at Green Cine Daily this week, Vadim Rizov mounted a spirited defence of Cera, protesting at the way he's unfavourably compared to Jesse Eisenberg, star of the impending The Social Network and a league more versatile than his peer, arguing that the measure of an actor shouldn't be variety alone. But while Rizov makes some good points sticking up for Cera, it's also undeniable that as a screen performer he's exhibited the dramatic range of an insole, making it impossible to picture him doing anything from here on in except more of what he's done already. No lie, Zac Efron has proved himself a chameleon by contrast.

So maybe that's my problem � because so much of his personality feels so much like a shtick. I will say now that I have never met Michael Cera. I am sure in real life that he's a charming and genuine young man. He may, more to the point, be one who nurtures a fierce desire to take his calling to wild and unexpected places. But given that you never see a trace of that on screen, surely it would be all the more reason to grab him by the shoulders like his insouciant alter-ego Fran�s Dillinger in Youth in Revolt and shake some tough love career guidance into him � persuading him to let no further time slip by before taking a role as a morbidly obese Punch and Judy man, or an astronaut serial killer with a fondness for free jazz.

Or perhaps I'm just jealous. Not of Cera himself � bitter pill that it was, I gave up my hopes of being a teen idol some time ago. But I am aware that for all my sniffy condescension here, if I was 16 again, I'd be deeply grateful for his mere existence. And that does make me wonder if on some sorry level I'm just irked because, when I actually was 16, his counterparts were River Phoenix and Johnny Depp � true film stars both, but not much help as role models to a post-adolescent pleb with bad skin and difficult tastes in music. Whereas the whole point of Michael Cera is that if there's hope for a kid like him, there's surely hope for anyone. And I mean that, however it might sound, as a compliment.

Overthinking is Toxic August 30th, 2010

(I posted on Twitter yesterday that this would be called �Overthinking is Masturbation�, and it is, but I had further thoughts this morning. Heh.)

One of my many flaws is that I procrastinate in the form of �thinking about what I need to do.� I like to take long walks and muse about shit: story ideas, game mechanics, blog posts, personal stuff, whatever it is that�s on my mind. And there�s a degree to which this is helpful.

That degree is the excuse I use to keep doing it far, far beyond usefulness. Because (and here�s where we get into the original title) thinking, as an act, is pleasurable. Being clever or intelligent or whatever it is we�re doing when we�re thinking to ourselves about something fires off neurons in our�well, at least my�head that reward me for this activity. I find it calming, relaxing to just think about something. For hours. For fucking days.

Only it�s not useful to �just think� that long. After a bit, because nothing is recorded or submitted to others for feedback or anything that would take me beyond �just thinking,� I come around to the same thoughts over and over. Sometimes I realize it and explore new tangents. Sometimes I don�t until much later. Either way, now I�m wasting my time and preventing myself from moving onto the next action I need to do.

Sometimes these thoughts are about worrying about said action. So I analyze over and over what I feel I should do to mitigate a problem. Sometimes these thoughts are about a hard action, like a tough bit of writing or designing or editing that I need to do. So I think about it over and over. There are different reasons I�ll spend time just thinking, and they�re almost all excuses.

(The ones that aren�t excuses, unfortunately, justify this activity for the ones that are.)

I�m started to read, slowly, Getting Things Done. One of the things mentioned early on is to write down on paper things in your mind, so that you can free your mind up from fixating on them. It hit home yesterday, and a little more this morning (when I changed the title of this post) how the ways I�ve already been doing that have helped me, and how I need to do a better job at it still.

Since I got my iPhone a few years back, I have absolutely fallen in love with quickly typing notes and emailing them to myself. Or occasionally doing a voice memo. I told people within two months of having my phone that it changed my life. I would have a quick idea, type a note, email it to myself, and did that so often that I have a tag in GMail called �Notes to Self� that I routinely go back and search through.

Suddenly I could remember small ideas that would hit me minutes after going to bed. And by typing them out, I was suddenly able to sleep better. My mind wasn�t chewing on this idea over and over � it was allowed to set it aside.

Productivity ensued.

Now, I realize I need to get better at this, not just for the �I�m walking and oh that�s a good mechanic idea I should write it down� moments, but for everything. I can �just think� about a short story for a day, at most, but the next day I need to write things down. The act of writing makes an idea concrete, something I can better explore because I have made it tangible, and something I can then put down without fearing losing the idea � the very reason my mind keeps obsessing about overthinking.

That frees up my mind, my mental bandwidth, for other things it needs to work on. And for working on whatever that thing is more efficiently.

I mentioned why I considered �Overthinking is Masturbation� above, with the brain reward cycle element, but here�s why it�s toxic: once you�re done with the initial thinking you need to do, you�re wasting time. Your thoughts will become better once you write them down. And better still once they come into contact with someone else. The move from pure thought to action is profound, sometimes intimidating, but necessary. And the longer we delay that move, well, none of us are getting any younger.

There are so many excuses we do to keep us from acting. I�ll address some of my own past ones now: I only have part of an idea. Congrats, that means you have an idea. You�ll have more if you make your brain explore it by writing it down. I don�t know where to start. Actually, you do, it�s just not where you want to start. That�s okay. Start in the middle, or wherever words flow best. You needn�t be linear. My idea sucks. Then stop thinking about it? Can�t? Probably means that it�s actually your confidence that sucks. And that�s something that takes practice. So, practice by writing this idea down. I�m not ready to write it down. You never are really ready to do anything until some time after you�ve done it. Don�t wait to be ready. Make yourself ready by doing it. I�m tired now. I�ll do it tomorrow. Really? You can�t just make a few notes right now, before going to bed? You can�t suck it up for ten minutes? I don�t think I can hack it. That�s honest. And you might not be able to right now. But if you never act, you�ll never be able to. Yoda was full of shit: there is a �try.� I�m afraid of what I�ll write down. Yep. But that fear doesn�t go away if you ignore the action. It just eats at you. So, suck it up and write. And move on. It�s easier to do so if you act than if you don�t.

When we overthink, when we allow our minds to keep us from moving forward, we�re losing precious hours and days that we could spend creating. We�re losing precious time we could spend learning how to be more confident in our efforts, in how to recover from the mistakes we will invariably make, in all those things that it takes to be a creator.

I�m not telling you not to think. But instead of procrastinating, allow yourself to enter an upward spiral of thinking-acting-thinking-acting. You�re allowed to go back to thinking after you�ve acted. I promise you that. And I promise you that in each iteration of that spiral, your thoughts will be even more awesome and more rewarding.

- Ryan

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Granted, these glass, plastic, polycarbonate or polymer blanks must be ground to fit frames and prescriptions, and this takes work, but it's not rocket science. Typically, lens grinding is done by optical laboratory technicians. According to PayScale.com, OLTs in the United States earn between $9.73 and $14.40 per hour. Most learn on the job, and have only a high-school diploma or a GED. No specific certification is required.

The fleecing, Mitchell says, is just as bad on frames.

"A consumer-level frame costs significantly less than $10 to manufacture. The rest is operations, licensing and profit. Think about that the next time you pick up an average $150 frame. These aren't markedly different or superior to the $30 glasses available from reputable online dealers � and those include lenses, probably the same ones you were just about to pay $200 for in the store."

A key to the industry-standard overpricing is the fact that a single corporation � Luxottica, the world's largest eyewear firm � owns many retail eyewear chains and many popular eyewear brands. Based in Milan, Italy, Luxottica owns and operates LensCrafters, Sears Optical, Target Optical, Pearle Vision, Sunglass Hut, Ilori, and other chains in the United States, along with yet more chains throughout Asia, Europe, Africa, India, the Antipodes and the Middle East.

Luxottica owns Ray-Ban, Oakley, Oliver Peoples, Vogue, and other brands, and makes glasses under license for over a dozen designer labels including Versace, Prada, Bulgari, DKNY, Burberry, Ralph Lauren, Dolce & Gabbana, Donna Karan, Tiffany, and more. As if that isn't enough, Luxottica is also the parent company of a vision-care benefits program, EyeMed.

Eyewear prices in brick-and-mortar stores stay artificially high, Mitchell says, due to "the lack of real competition, inasmuch as Luxottica owns massive manufacturing, licensing, retailing and insurance interests" � albeit EyeMed is "not so much insurance as a marketing ploy to get people to buy from their stores at a discount and to force the remaining independent stores to buy Luxottica controlled frames. But, again, most people are unaware of this."

Because one company holds a near-monopoly on brick-and-mortar eyewear stores, "pricing models are somewhat static across the lot of them. They also have a knack for using the mattress sale model ... constantly running sales that seem too good to pass up when in reality they're still making enormous profits."

"Semi-Annual 50% Off Sales Event," reads a current LensCrafters ad. But the frames in question range from around $100 to around $300, and that's without lenses.

"People pay what the brick-and-mortars are asking, primarily because the vast majority don't know there are better, cheaper options," Mitchell says.

As with any purchase � in fact more than with most purchases, as this involves eyesight � it pays to research each company's delivery and return policies, Better Business Bureau status, and accessibility. Does its Web site list a phone number? If not, why not? If so, call it. Can you reach live people? Are they knowledgeable about your prescription? Does the company have its own in-house optometrists? It should. If you care about brand names, can you ascertain that the logo-bearing frames sold by any given company aren't counterfeits? Factories churn out fakes.

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While many online outfits sell real and bogus designer frames, the least expensive frames available online are unapologetically nameless generics: current and classic styles, sans logo. As is true with most consumer products, they're not necessarily worse than their name-brand counterparts. After a year-plus of daily use, my $44 generics still look new. (That being said, I should have paid a few dollars more for higher-quality polycarbonate lenses and I should have sought bifocals with a wider middle-vision band, but these errors were my own, not the company's.)

"Very high-priced frames may have somewhat better materials," Mitchell says, "but from my experience, the no-names have been very well made." Having owned dozens of generic pairs, he's experienced "no more issues with them than with the name brands from LensCrafters. I think they're pretty much on par."

These days, he notes, "there are a lot more online retailers now than at the end of 2006. There aren't a whole lot more reputable ones, however. I've shopped at over a dozen, and narrowed things down to about three or four that I feel comfortable recommending to others. As this is a fully custom market, mistakes can enter the process anywhere from the initial customer entering prescription information to the production process. I've found that a few of the sites do a better job than others at fixing mistakes. Some do better at this than the traditional stores.

"Prices haven't dropped at all in the traditional brick-and-mortars, but downward price pressure from Wal-Mart will undoubtedly start to make an impact in certain parts of the country. I saw a sign in a

Wal-Mart recently for $38 glasses. The selection was tiny, but we're starting to see a price intersection."

The first online eyeglasses company was Houston-based FramesDirect. In 1992, optometrists Dhavid Cooper and Guy Hodgson closed their several Texas brick-and-mortar shops, then pondered their future.

"We knew that we wanted to sell eyewear in all fifty states 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year," Hodgson says. "We had no idea how to do this." Renting a small office, they installed computers.

"When you talked about the Internet in those days, no one knew what you meant. Search engines were in their absolute infancy. We thought a 56k modem was blisteringly fast."

Cooper had won a Surgeon General�s Commendation Award in his native South Africa for creating a program providing the poor with recycled glasses for free. Hodgson specialized in treating the nearly blind. Barely fluent in email, the pair created a basic Web site, offering designer glasses at low prices because, unlike brick-and-mortar opticians, they needed to pay neither storefront rent nor employees' salaries, nor did they need to keep large quantities of merchandise in stock.

"Everyone around us thought we were completely mad: Eye doctors, giving up their lucrative practices to go into this weird thing," Hodgson laughs. But once orders started pouring in, "The whole optical industry completely shunned us. They said we were ruining them."

At eyewear conventions, he and Cooper wore their nametags backward to avoid verbal abuse. Since then, dozens of imitators have emerged, many based overseas and most able to offer even lower prices because they sell generics. Buying prescription eyewear is like buying prescription drugs: It's cheaper online. It's cheaper when it comes from outside the U.S. GlassesUnlimited, for instance, can afford to sell hundreds of different stylish frames fitted with prescription lenses for only $9.99 because its entire operation is based in Thailand.

"We don't have big margins here. That's how we are serving our clientele. That's why we're getting hundreds of orders on a daily basis, 70 percent of which come from the U.S. and Canada," GU manager Sam Davis tells me. "We have virtually no expenses. We have our own home brand and do our own production. We don't outsource anything."

Based in the U.S., FramesDirect still undercuts retail-store prices for guaranteed designer good

Chapter 35

s.

"What we sell and what the brick-and-mortar stores sell are the exact same products," Guy Hodgson says. "How can they afford to charge the prices they charge?"

August 2010

Feature Article Under Pressure by Shana Merlin

I had an audition and I wasn't in the mood.

I was tired, and I didn't have a lot of time because it was right before I had to teach a class. Plus, it was just 2 lines. I signed in, sat down, and was ready for the usual long wait.

But surprisingly, they called me in after just about 5 minutes, gave me clear instructions, and I did it. I nailed it. As they said action, I looked at the camera and real emotion welled up. After 30 seconds they called scene and said, "She's adorable!" Right away they booked me for a callback audition the next evening. And as I got in my car to drive to work, I was tickled. I had a call back for a day player role on My Generation, an hour-long TV drama on ABC debuting next month.

And that's when what always happens happens. I start to care. I start to think about it. And then I try to make myself not care and not think about it. And when I go to my callback audition the next night, and they say action, I look at the camera and I can feel the tension in my eyes and face, even as I try to mask it and do whatever I did last time. What WAS I doing before? The audition is very short and I get a "Thank you" and that's pretty much it.

This is one of the most frustrating paradoxes about performance. The more you want to do well and the harder you try, the worse you perform. Especially on tasks that you already naturally excel at because they are easy or familiar.

Daniel Gilbert , author of the excellent Stumbling on Happiness, wrote a great Op-Ed piece in the New York Times about this exact phenomenon. In his article he was talking about even bigger stakes--Alex Rodriguez working this summer to hit is record 600th home run. On July 22nd he hit his 599th home run. In the next 17 consecutive at-bats over the next 12 days, he was completely hitless. It wasn't until almost 2 weeks and 46 at bats later (the longest it took anyone to go from 599 to 600) that he became the seventh player in major league history to reach the 600 career home run milestone.

What gives? Gilbert explains:

"One of the ironies of human psychology is that desperately wanting something can make attaining that thing all the more difficult. When stakes go up, performance often goes down. In one study, subjects practiced sinking a putt and got better as they went along--better, that is, until the experimenter offered them a cash reward for their next shot, at which point their performance took a nosedive.

This is because we pay close attention to what we're doing when what we're doing matters, and though close attention is helpful when our task is novel or complex, it is positively destructive when our task is simple and well practiced...

The lesson from the laboratory is clear: thinking about tasks that don't require thought isn't just pointless, it's debilitating."

This is one of the great gifts of improv training: learning to quiet the mind and letting your best self show up and perform. Most of us are natural storytellers and performers, given the right environment. Improv helps train us to relax when we are on the spot so we can let our skills and talents show up and do the work for us. If you can be relaxed onstage with no script, no plans, and no safety net, the results can be captivating. But as soon as you have to be funny or brilliant, your talent will leave you as fast as A-Rod's home run.

I had a funny moment in Improv 501 class a few weeks ago that demonstrated this exact thing. The students had been doing a great job playing the "Voicemail" game. In this activity, one person steps forward to be the "hero" of the story and says the outgoing message on their voicemail: "This is Rhonda. Hugs and kisses. Leave me a message." Then one at a time the players step forward and introduce a character in that hero's life, leaving a message on her voicemail.

"Hi Rhonda, this is Marcus. I had a great time last night. I'll see you at Toastmasters tomorrow."

"This is a message for Rhonda Ackerman, your insurance rejected your refill for your anti-anxiety medication. So give us a call at CVS if you have any questions."

"Rhonda. This is your mother. I had a fight with your father. He won't tuck his shirt in right and I've had it. I'm coming to stay with you for a few days. I hope you got rid of that cat."

And so on. They were having a great time building the world for that character and setting the hero up for an exciting and hilarious journey..

After a few successful rounds, I told them we were going to do it again, except this time it was going to be the opening scene of a 25-minute longform. And suddenly the players that had been confidently bounding forward and making huge character offers were suddenly hesitant. They were slow to step out and made middling offers and the story was off to a dragging start.

It's because I had suddenly raised the stakes on them, making their scene much more important because it was now the foundation of a narrative longform show. But sadly, this was going to make their longform much worse. So I stopped them right then and there. Had them shake out, and play it again, as if nothing was going to come after. Just focus on the moment and take care of the next scene when you get there.

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In This Issue Feature Article Classes Shows Blog & Buzz Favorites Getting Started

Blog & Buzz

NEXT ROUND OF IMPROV CLASSES: The next round of improv classes is starting up at the end of September. Register by September 15th and save $25. Free Intro to Improv Sunday September 12th 2:30 - 4:30pm. Bring your friends! Improv 101 Mondays 6pm - 8pm October 4 - November 22 with Shana Merlin and Aden Kirschner Improv 201 Saturdays 12pm - 2pm October 2 - November 20 with Shana Merlin and Aden Krischner Improv Singing 201 Wednesdays 8pm - 10pm September 29 - November 17 with Aden Kirschner, Shana Merlin, Michael Brockman, and Jason Laney Improv 301 Mondays 8pm - 10pm October 4 - November 22 with Shannon McCormick and Shana Merlin Improv 401 Saturdays 2:30pm - 4:30pm October 2 - November 20 with Ted Rutherford and Shana Merlin Improv 601 Wednesdays 6pm - 8pm September 29 - November 17 with Shana Merlin and Ted Rutherford

To Register or for more information visit our website.

INTERGALACTIC NEMESIS at the LONG CENTER: The scripted 1930's science fiction radio drama I was touring the country with last year is now a comic book and a live-action graphic novel. We'll be performing the full show in the Dell Concert Hall at the Long Center For the Performing Arts September 3rd and 4th. There's a great writeup about the show in this week's Chronicle and Statesman.

OUT OF BOUNDS COMEDY FESTIVAL: It's the biggest week of comedy in Austin for the whole year. August 31 - September 6th. Top notch troupes from around the country and around the world descend upon Austin for shows, classes, parties, and more. It's so big it takes over SVT and we don't have any MW improv classes that week. All three of my projects will be performing: Dusk: Improvised Tween Erotica Sept 1st at 8pm at SVT, Girls Girls Girls Improvised Musicals Sept 3rd at The Hideout, and Get Up Sept 4th at SVT. More detailed OOB recommendations on my blog. Full festival schedule at outofboundscomedy.com

HELP ME RESEARCH MY IMPROV BOOK: Did you know I'm writing a book with best-selling author Liz Alexander? We'll be exploring how improv techniques can be used to help anyone have a more fun, successful, and creative life and career. My hope is this book will help share the joy of improv with a larger audience. As part of our research we've designed an online survey about how improv training changes people's lives. So if you have any improv experience (as a student or a performer) and 10 minutes, Go to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/prequelbook, Enter the password: improv Complete the survey. This will also enter you for a drawing for $50 Amazon.com gift certificate. Thanks already!

Be my Facebook Fan: I have 962 friends on Facebook but only 130 Merlin Works Fans. So head on over to my Merlin Works Facebook Page, click "like" and become our fan! Get updates about shows, classes and more. Thanks!

MERLIN WORKS IS GROWING!: Merlin Works is getting bigger--more classes, more teachers, more students, more graduations. We are excited to announce the addition of a new staff member who will be helping with office administration for the Merlin Works Institute for Improvisation. And who could we find that would fit so well with the Merlin Works team? A Merlin of course! My sister, Hilary Merlin is now on staff. Hilary is an amazingly productive, responsible, and smart worker. Plus, we go back pretty far. So don't be surprised if you start getting some emails from classes@merlin-works.com about classes, registration, and such. Please welcome her aboard.

MERLIN WORKS IMPROV MIXER: It's a chance to mingle, play and audition again at Merlin Works. Along with our regular instructor-led warm-up and scene work jam, it will also serve as open auditions for upcoming Gnap! Theater Projects shows and troupes. Sunday October 17th 12pm - 2pm at SVT. RSVP to me

IMPROV BLOG: Out of Bounds is huger than huge and I give you some pointers on what shows and classes are not to be missed. That and more is on my improv blog.

SEE YOU IN SEPTEMBER: Between class sessions, I'll be travelling to Atlanta with Get Up for the Black Box Comedy Festival September 15-18 and then from Atlanta I'll be heading to Hawaii with Girls Girls Girls Improvised Musicals for Improvaganza September 23 - 26. I will be in town for a few shows. Sept 11th at 10pm at SVT is Erin Molson's last GGG show. And starting in October I'll be the team captain for "The Chosen Ones" an all-Jewish team for the Theatersports Tournament at The Hideout.

GNAP! SHOWS AT SVT: Next up for Gnap! it's , Just Like The Rodeo, a festival of hybrid performance running Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm September 10 - October 2nd. All the other Gnap! Shows will be running: Saturdays at 10pm with two acts is The Saturday Night Special and 1st Fridays is No Shame Theater, an open mike performance series. For tickets and show information go to the fancy new gnaptheater.org.

This is part of why being present is so important. Because the more you think about the future and what is riding on this moment, the more paralyzed and fearful you become. We have to get out of our own way and let the part of us that knows what it's doing do it's job. We'll take care of the future when we get there.

It's an easy lesson to learn and a hard one to apply. (See TV Audition Call Backs, above.) I have a show this week on one of the biggest stage in Austin, the Dell Concert Hall at the Long Center for the Performing Arts. And I'll be out of my comfort zone, performing in a scripted piece, The Intergalactic Nemesis: a Live-Action Graphic Novel. Will I be able to chill? Will I try hard and do worse? You'll just have to come see the show to find out.

American Apparel: a postmodern cautionary tale

The brand's hipster credentials proved an empty promise as its mash-up of fashion subcultures gave way to mere consumerism

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Colin Horgan guardian.co.uk, Saturday 28 August 2010 15.00 BST Article history

American Apprarel, the Los Angeles-based hipster fashion company that built a global following has seen its financial health tank. Photograph: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

Amelia Hill noted earlier this week in her chronicle of the recent financial troubles at American Apparel that the brand was not so long ago the darling of the fashion industry, known for making fashions that were once considered simple into trendy high-street couture. That stellar rise was pushed along by hipsters, a subset of early 21st-century western culture, who as a group adopted American Apparel as a cultural uniform.

But that symbiotic relationship may have led not only to American Apparel's lack of innovation, but also, perhaps, to its demise.

Dov Charney, the maligned, allegedly perverted founder of American Apparel had good timing. He hitched his brand to a narcissistic generation bored with the over-zealous marketing of the 90s, but who had been fully immersed in the dream of bottom-up capitalism � untroubled by the prospect of co-option as long as it equalled easy consumption.

American Apparel became the uniform of a subset of an inherently apolitical youth raised not on ideals, but marketing wizardry that had convinced us each of our special little place in the world, earned only by virtue of being a target demographic. That knowing acceptance of our generation's role in the capitalist meta-narrative lent itself to the now tired irony of 21st-century hipsterism.

Unlike earlier versions, the current hipster trend is an apathetic postmodern capitalist sigh, breathing out the recycled air from a million forgotten advertising campaigns in one big stale cloud. Modern hipsterism is a death spiral of a co-opted public relentlessly co-opting itself, doing all the advertising work for the advertisers.

Hipsters adopted American Apparel as our generation adopted anything: the branding strategy was cool but not too cool, the company was clean but not too clean. Far from the leather jackets or motorcycles of 20th-century hipsters, modern hipster rebellion was never designed to make anyone an outsider. In fact, American Apparel made everyone part of the clan, opening shops quickly all over the world, giving a false sense of empowerment and reach to the hipster look, and lending legitimacy to the idea of hipsterism as a global, generational movement.

Along with the company's early commitment to pay livable wages in its factories, it presented itself as a kind of branded anti-brand, hawking fashions that deliberately harked back to a mythical pre-branded past. It quickly established and perpetuated the hipster fashion mash-up of endless cultural reference points � from punk to beat to hippie.

The problem is that hipsters are nothing like their namesake predecessors who attempted to operate outside convention with distinct agenda of cultural and social change. Nothing about the modern hipster is anti-anything. Rather, hipsters now are a manifestation of late capitalism run amok, forever feeding itself on the shininess of the Now: an impatient, forgetful mob taught to discard their products as quickly as they adopt them. They are not a cultural movement, but a generation of pure consumers. If capitalism were to really be altered in any way, the hipster as we know it would lose its raison d'etre.

This is why the movement can't innovate and, in some ways, why American Apparel can't either. That the fashions in American Apparel stores anywhere in the world haven't changed in years says more about the cultural movement it helped create than the store itself. It is a cultural uniform in the simplest terms: bound by strict rules and rarely changing.

So American Apparel may always have been doomed: doomed by its owner's sexual antics; doomed by its judgmental hiring policies; and doomed by the globalisation that it attempted to disrupt. Ultimately, though, it was doomed above all by its culturally stagnant consumer base.

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August 30, 2010 They Crawl, They Bite, They Baffle Scientists By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Don�t be too quick to dismiss the common bedbug as merely a pestiferous six-legged blood-sucker.

Think of it, rather, as Cimex lectularius, international arthropod of mystery.

In comparison to other insects that bite man, or even only walk across man�s food, nibble man�s crops or bite man�s farm animals, very little is known about the creature whose Latin name means � go figure � �bug of the bed.� Only a handful of entomologists specialize in it, and until recently it has been low on the government�s research agenda because it does not transmit disease. Most study grants come from the pesticide industry and ask only one question: What kills it?

But now that it�s The Bug That Ate New York, Not to Mention Other Shocked American Cities, that may change.

This month, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a joint statement on bedbug control. It was not, however, a declaration of war nor a plan of action. It was an acknowledgment that the problem is big, a reminder that federal agencies mostly give advice, plus some advice: try a mix of vacuuming, crevice-sealing, heat and chemicals to kill the things.

It also noted, twice, that bedbug research �has been very limited over the past several decades.�

Ask any expert why the bugs disappeared for 40 years, why they came roaring back in the late 1990s, even why they do not spread disease, and you hear one answer: �Good question.�

�The first time I saw one that wasn�t dated 1957 and mounted on a microscope slide was in 2001,� said Dini M. Miller, a Virginia Tech cockroach expert who has added bedbugs to her repertoire.

The bugs have probably been biting our ancestors since they moved from trees to caves. The bugs are �nest parasites� that fed on bats and cave birds like swallows before man moved in.

That makes their disease-free status even more baffling.

(The bites itch, and can cause anaphylactic shock in rare cases, and dust containing feces and molted shells has triggered asthma attacks, but these are all allergic reactions, not disease.)

Bats are sources of rabies, Ebola, SARS and Nipah virus. And other biting bugs are disease carriers � mosquitoes for malaria and West Nile, ticks for Lyme and babesiosis, lice for typhus, fleas for plague, tsetse flies for sleeping sickness, kissing bugs for Chagas. Even nonbiting bugs like houseflies and cockroaches transmit disease by carrying bacteria on their feet or in their feces or vomit.

But bedbugs, despite the ick factor, are clean.

Actually it is safer to say that no one has proved they aren�t, said Jerome Goddard, a Mississippi State entomologist.

But not for lack of trying. South African researchers have fed them blood with the AIDS virus, but the virus died. They have shown that bugs can retain hepatitis B virus for weeks, but when they bite chimpanzees, the infection does not take. Brazilian researchers have come closest, getting bedbugs to transfer the Chagas parasite from a wild mouse to lab mice.

�Someday, somebody may come along with a better experiment,� Dr. Goddard said.

That lingering uncertainty has led to one change in lab practice. The classic bedbug strain that all newly caught bugs are compared against is a colony originally from Fort Dix, N.J., that a researcher kept alive for 30 years by letting it feed on him.

But Stephen A. Kells, a University of Minnesota entomologist, said he �prefers not to play with that risk.�

He feeds his bugs expired blood-bank blood through parafilm, which he describes as �waxy Saran Wrap.�

Coby Schal of North Carolina State said he formerly used condoms filled with rabbit blood, but switched to parafilm because his condom budget raised eyebrows with university auditors.

Why the bugs disappeared for so long and exploded so fast after they reappeared is another question. The conventional answer � that DDT was banned � is inadequate. After all, mosquitoes, roaches and other insects rebounded long ago.

Much has to do with the bugs� habits. Before central heating arrived in the early 1900s, they died back in winter. People who frequently restuffed their mattresses or dismantled their beds to pour on boiling water � easier for those with servants � suffered less, said the bedbug historian Michael F. Potter of the University of Kentucky.

Early remedies were risky: igniting gunpowder on mattresses or soaking them with gasoline, fumigating buildings with burning sulfur or cyanide gas. (The best-known brand was Zyklon B, which later became infamous at Auschwitz.)

Success finally arrived in the 1950s as the bugs were hit first with DDT and then with malathion, diazinon, lindane, chlordane and dichlorovos, as resistance to each developed. In those days, mattresses were sprayed, DDT dust was sprinkled into the sheets, nurseries were lined with DDT-impregnated wallpaper.

In North America and Western Europe, �the slate was virtually wiped clean,� said Dr. Potter, who has surveyed pest-control experts in 43 countries. In South America, the Middle East and Africa, populations fell but never vanished.

The bugs also persisted on domestic poultry farms and in a few human habitations.

One theory is that domestic bedbugs surged after pest control companies stopped spraying for cockroaches in the 1980s and switched to poisoned baits, which bedbugs do not eat.

But the prevailing theory is that new bugs were introduced from overseas, because the ones found in cities now are resistant to different insecticides from those used on poultry or cockroaches.

Exactly where they came from is a mystery. Dr. Schal is now building a �world bedbug collection� and hopes to produce a global map of variations in their genes, which might answer the question.

Experts say they�ve heard blame pinned on many foreign ethnic groups and on historic events from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Persian Gulf war to the spread of mosquito nets in Africa. Every theory has holes, and many are simply racist.

(For example, Dr. Potter said, he has heard Mexicans blamed, but Mexican pest control companies he contacted said they rarely see the bugs except in the homes of people returning from the United States, often with scavenged furniture.)

Pest-control companies say hotels, especially airport business hotels and resorts attracting foreign tourists, had the first outbreaks, said both Dr. Potter and Richard Cooper, a pest-control specialist.

Whatever the source, the future is grim, experts agreed.

Many pesticides don�t work, and some that do are banned � though whether people should fear the bug or the bug-killer more is open to debate.

�I�d like to take some of these groups and lock them in an apartment building full of bugs and see what they say then,� Dr. Potter said of environmentalists.

Treatment, including dismantling furniture and ripping up rugs, is expensive. Rather than actively hunting for bugs, hotels and landlords often deny having them.

Many people are not alert enough. (Both Mr. Cooper and Dr. Goddard said they routinely pull apart beds and even headboards when they check into hotels. Dr. Goddard keeps his luggage in the bathroom. Mr. Cooper heat-treats his when he gets home.)

Some people overreact, even developing delusional parasitosis, the illusion that bugs are crawling on them.

�People call me all the time, losing their minds, like it�s a curse from God,� Dr. Miller said.

The reasonable course, Dr. Goddard said, is to recognize that we are, in effect, back in the 1920s �Sleep tight, don�t let the bedbugs bite� era. People should be aware, but not panicky.

However, he added, �I don�t even know what to say about them being in theaters. That�s kind of spooky.�

Well, he was asked � can you feel them bite?

�No,� he said. �If I put them on my arm and close my eyes, I never feel them. But I once got my children to put them on my face, and I did. Maybe there are more nerve endings.�

Why in the world, he was asked, would he ask kids to do that?

�Oh, you know,� he said. �Bug people are crazy.�

More in Science (3 of 37 articles) Nobel Winners Sign Letter Backing Obama Space Plan

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August 31, 2010 Google�s Earth By WILLIAM GIBSON

Vancouver, British Columbia

�I ACTUALLY think most people don�t want Google to answer their questions,� said the search giant�s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial intervi

Chapter 36

ew. �They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.� Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in �2001: A Space Odyssey,� will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable � before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

We have yet to take Google�s measure. We�ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google.

Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products. And still we balk at Mr. Schmidt�s claim that we want Google to tell us what to do next. Is he saying that when we search for dinner recommendations, Google might recommend a movie instead? If our genie recommended the movie, I imagine we�d go, intrigued. If Google did that, I imagine, we�d bridle, then begin our next search.

We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. We also seldom imagined (in spite of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do. In a world characterized by technologically driven change, we necessarily legislate after the fact, perpetually scrambling to catch up, while the core architectures of the future, increasingly, are erected by entities like Google.

Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires and nation-states weren�t organs of global human perception. They had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn�t constitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species.

Jeremy Bentham�s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn�t really suit an entity like Google. Bentham�s all-seeing eye looks down from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory. We are part of a post-geographical, post-national super-state, one that handily says no to China. Or yes, depending on profit considerations and strategy. But we do not participate in Google on that level. We�re citizens, but without rights.

Much of the discussion of Mr. Schmidt�s interview centered on another comment: his suggestion that young people who catastrophically expose their private lives via social networking sites might need to be granted a name change and a fresh identity as adults. This, interestingly, is a matter of Google letting societal chips fall where they may, to be tidied by lawmakers and legislation as best they can, while the erection of new world architecture continues apace.

If Google were sufficiently concerned about this, perhaps the company should issue children with free �training wheels� identities at birth, terminating at the age of majority. One could then either opt to connect one�s adult identity to one�s childhood identity, or not. Childhoodlessness, being obviously suspect on a r�m�would give birth to an industry providing faux adolescences, expensively retro-inserted, the creation of which would gainfully employ a great many writers of fiction. So there would be a silver lining of sorts.

To be sure, I don�t find this a very realistic idea, however much the prospect of millions of people living out their lives in individual witness protection programs, prisoners of their own youthful folly, appeals to my novelistic Kafka glands. Nor do I take much comfort in the thought that Google itself would have to be trusted never to link one�s sober adulthood to one�s wild youth, which surely the search engine, wielding as yet unimagined tools of transparency, eventually could and would do.

I imagine that those who are indiscreet on the Web will continue to have to make the best of it, while sharper cookies, pocketing nyms and proxy cascades (as sharper cookies already do), slouch toward an ever more Googleable future, one in which Google, to some even greater extent than it does now, helps us decide what we�ll do next.

William Gibson is the author of the forthcoming novel �Zero History.�

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The Great App Bubble BY FC Expert Blogger Aaron ShapiroFri Aug 20, 2010 This blog is written by a member of our expert blogging community and expresses that expert's views alone. Eight signs we're in an App Bubble.

When I recently received my new iPhone 4, I took great delight in organizing my apps into folders, finding new apps in the app store, and seeing how beautiful various apps looked on the new screen. Then I used it for a couple of days and realized, not counting pre-loaded Apple software, I use exactly five apps: The New York Times, Dropbox, Pandora, MenuPages, and Skype. Why am I wasting time collecting and organizing all these apps? We're in an app bubble.

My app library--littered with exactly 87 apps I used once and never touched again--now reminds me of a graveyard of defunct company logos from the dot com boom. Like the go-go days of 1999 when everyone had to have a Web site, today everyone wants an app. iPhone, iPad, Android apps for all, plus Blackberry for the very ambitious.

Here are eight signs we're in an app bubble: Apps don't generate profit for developers. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has said, the App Store has generated more than $1 billion in revenue for developers. That sounds like a big number. But in this context it's not. One billion dollars in revenue for the approximately 225,000 apps is $4,444 per app--significantly less than an app costs to develop. In a well thought-out analysis of the economics of iPhone apps, authors Tomi T. Ahonen and Alan Moore paint a bleak picture. A typical iPhone app costs $35,000 to develop. The median paid app earns $682 per year after Apple takes its cut. With these calculations for the typical paid app, it takes 51 years to break even. It's not any better for free apps. A free app also costs about $35,000 to develop. But there are so many free iPhone apps that at a rate of 2 second per app, it would take approximately 34 hours for someone to check out each one. That's not great odds for a revenue model based on advertising. Apps aren't very profitable for Apple either. According to Apple Insider, "Apple has long maintained that the App Store isn't meant to be a profit generator, as much as a means of attracting customers to the iPhone and iPod touch." The App Store's gross profits amount to just 1 percent of Apple's total gross profits. iPhone users don't find their apps very valuable. In 2009, analytics start-up Pinch Media reported that people barely use the majority of apps they download. Only 20 percent of consumers utilize a free app the day after they download it. By 30 days out, less than 5 percent of consumers are still using it. Paid apps (page 13 of the company's fascinating 33-page slideshow) have a slightly better performance record, but they still get hit with a steep drop in usage within a period of 11 days. The value of most apps may be in satisfying the curiosity of what the app can do, not in its usefulness or relevance in a user's daily life. Apple brags more about the value of their app mass, than the value of the apps themselves. This is the case both on the App Store page, iPad advertising and in a recent keynote speech where Steve Jobs said people have downloaded 5 billion apps in the last two years. Meanwhile only a handful of apps have been featured for their usefulness. Ditto for Android advertising. I feel like I'm back in the days when Alta Vista bragged about spidering more Web pages than Lycos. Marketers are spending money on iDevice apps at the expense of improving their mobile Web sites that everyone with a smart phone can access. According to Ahonen and Moore, iDevice app development actually costs 10 times more and reach is 50 times worse. Sex appeal will only trump pragmatic reach for so long. Venture capital is flooding into the app economy in spite of the questionable ROI proposition. Prior to the iPad launch, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers doubled the size of its "iFund investment pool" to $200 million, Reuters reported. Recently CNET, an E! Online co-founder, and a couple of other partners teamed up to form AppFund, a company that provides funding and direction for app developers. And there are plenty more Internet funds spending much of their bankroll on app startups. There are so many apps, finding the one you want takes time and effort-- time and effort that could be spent getting the information in a faster way. The iPhone 4 can display 2,149 apps. That's 2,144 more than I need;1,969 more than could be displayed via iOS3; and 2,001 more apps than could be displayed by earlier versions of the operating system. Graph out this increase in app display capacity and it looks like an obelisk. But still 2,149 is only 0.96 percent of the 225,000 available iDevice apps. Steve Jobs has said 15,000 apps are submitted to the App Store each week. With this many apps to sort through, finding new, useful ones to download can be a painstaking task. Then on my phone, if I want to find an app I don't regularly use or a new one, I need to use the search function to find it. Can you think of a faster way to get information? The browser. Once mobile Internet gets faster, apps as the key to on-the-go information and tools will be on the outs.

Does this mean companies should stop making apps? Unfortunately, no. Until the bubble bursts, apps are the only mobile game in town. And without a doubt the future of digital is the ubiquitous, pocket-sized screen. What's needed are apps tied to real business models that have real ROI. And,companies should build apps with their eyes open about what they should realistically expect to accomplish with what they develop. Having an app for an app's sake is not enough.

Hurts: Happiness

Hurts have the backstory and the image down pat, but the songs just don't stick, says Alexis Petridis

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Alexis Petridis guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 September 2010 15.29 BST Article history

Hurts

Anyone concerned about the veracity of information found on the internet might look long and hard at the case of the Wanky Balls festival. According to a recent feature in the Independent, this was the name under which The Big Chill started life, before understandably rebranding itself. Alas, the Wanky Balls festival existed only in the mind of an online mischief-maker: here was an object lesson in not just copying your information from Wikipedia without checking it first.

Some coverage of the Mancunian duo Hurts has had what you might call a touch of the Wanky Balls about it as well. At first glance, they appear to be another in a line of 80s-inspired pop wannabes. Their videos resemble a Guinness World Records attempt to cram as many Thatcher-era visual cliches into three minutes of film as possible: you watch the trenchcoat-clad figures trudging through snowy Mitteleuropean cities and women in black cocktail dresses and fascinators throwing meaningful shapes by swimming pools, and you are gripped by the certainty that Max Headroom is about to appear and start walking like an Egyptian. But Hurts claim their sound is actually inspired by an early-90s Italian genre called disco lento, which according to its Wikipedia page, featured "heavily electronic, slow emotional ballads".

The world of Italian pop is often wildly alien to British audiences: until recently, hardly anyone here knew about the bizarre 80s cult of cosmic disco, which involved northern Italian DJs playing reggae, Heaven 17 and Mike Oldfield records at the wrong speed. Peculiar as it sounds, cosmic disco existed, which doesn't seem to be something you can say about disco lento. Every internet reference to it appeared around the same time Hurts began to get attention. Some of the artists they cite are real � it's testament to the weirdness of Italian electronic pop that there really was a singer who called himself Gazebo and had hits called I Like Chopin, Ladies! and Trotsky Burger � but none of them described their music as lento. Others don't check out at all.

Depending on your perspective, their invention of a genre either places Hurts into a grand tradition of pop theorists and pranksters � such as the KLF and the ZTT label in its Paul Morley�helmed heyday � or smacks of dressing up something to appear more cool and interesting than it actually is. Certainly, there's nothing particularly weird about Hurts' music, unless you count a brief hidden track featuring an opera singer doing his nut, or the fact that elsewhere, it frequently recalls an area of pop's past previously unrevived: the glossy, late-80s sound of Go West, Climie Fisher and Johnny Hates Jazz. There are boom-clank electronic rhythms, dramatic orchestral synth stabs and the kind of impassioned mid-Atlantic vocal style in which emotional emphasis is signified by the appearance of an extra letter "a" on the end of words ("I found another girl to mess-a me around," cries singer Theo Hutchcraft, like one of those puppets that advertises Dolmio, but in the throes of a romantic crisis) and someone called Chew is continually addressed. Sometimes Chew's absence is mourned: "Here I am without Chew." On other occasions, Chew is cruelly dismissed: "I need to forget about Chew."

What Chew make of a Johnny Hates Jazz revival may dictate your feelings towards Happiness as a whole, although it's worth pointing out that's not the only thing the album evokes. Hurts' big idea involves welding post-Oasis mass singalong choruses to electronic pop. It's not a bad idea, but nor is it a particularly novel one, which explains why Happiness also regularly brings to mind both Robbie Williams and the sort of material a TV talent show finalist might dish up on their debut album, the former impression bolstered by a lot of self-obsessed lyrical soul searching in which Hutchcraft announces he needs Chew to help him resist various dark temptations, the latter by the presence of Fame Academy winner David Sneddon among the songwriters.

In fairness, when it works, it pushes buttons with an undeniable accuracy. Wonderful Life and Better Than Love would be fantastic pop songs whether they were by a Simon Cowell-approved moppet or a pair of arch, 80s-obsessed postmodernists. When the songs are flimsy and commonplace, as on Sunday and Illuminated, the constant striving for booming sonic grandeur begins to grate � every track sounds like a climax, and, as is common knowledge, all climax and no build-up is bound to end in frustration � and all but the most ardent Johnny Hates Jazz fan might start to wonder what the point is.

You get the feeling Hurts have spent more time making their backstory interesting than their music, which is a shame: pop music could do with more theorists and pranksters. But there's no point in theorising if the songs don't stick: that way lies a VIP ticket to Wanky Balls.

Preview and Interview: Kevin McDonald's Hammy and the Kids at Out Of Bounds [Comedy]

Out of Bounds Comedy Festival Kevin McDonald�s Hammy and the Kids Sunday September 5 La Zona Rosa (612 W. 4th Street) $25, 9:30 pm [info] | [tickets]

Kevin McDonald headlines this year's Out of Bounds Comedy Festival with his one-man show, Hammy and The Kids. In the show, McDonald explores his relationship with his alcoholic father and with his influential sketch comedy comedy troupe/television show, The Kids in the Hall. After touring in 2000 and again in 2008, their new television show Death Comes to Town premiered earlier this year in Canada. Austinist caught up with McDonald to talk about his show, wherein he discusses the difficulties he faced with his father and with the Kids, especially during the process of making the troupe's feature film, Brain Candy. McDonald told Austinist about the origins of his show, checking out some music in Austin, and why he's funnier to rape than Bruce McCulloch.

How has the show changed over time?

I debuted the show in L.A. a few years ago, and at the time it was running over what most one-man shows run. For some reason, they're always an hour and fifteen, but mine was an hour forty-something at first. So, I said, "Well it just has to be that way. It's that long. That's the way it is." That's my Scott Thompson impression, by the way. That's not how Scott really talks, but that's how his soul talks. So I impersonate his soul. And then in Montreal, I was there for like 12 nights for "Just for Laughs" in the summer of 2007, and the first two shows, people were liking it, but they weren't laughing, they were crying.

Not the usual response to a comedy show.

The way I see it, it's a total comedy, but I do talk about my drunk dad. I see it as a total comedy, but because it was longer, I said, "Oh, they're taking it sadder than it really is." So that night, I woke up at three in the morning after the second show, thinking, "I want them to laugh, not cry." So at six in the morning I made cuts, and I got it down to the magic hour and fifteen. And then next night it was total laughs. It was like that way for the rest of the run. For the past three years it's been little changes, nips and tucks. Most of the changes were that night between 3:00 and 6:00 in the morning.

What made you decide to do a one man show about this?

Well, one night in 2006 -- I remember years -- Do you know Carl Arnheiter from UCB? He does this thing where he goes to different Upright Citizens Brigade theaters in New York and LA, and he interviews comedians like David Cross or Bob Odenkirk or Carrot Top. I'm making up Carrot Top. What he does is he brings you in front of a live audience, and he asks you questions for an hour. It's called The Inside Joke. Anyway, he got me there, and for an hour he asked me questions. He asked me a lot about my dad. He asked me a lot about Kids in the Hall, and for the whole hour I got a giant amount of laughs. And basically I was telling stories that I've been telling for 20 years. Then the next night, again, I think I woke up at three in the morning, though I probably woke up at eight in the morning, and I thought, "Wow, those stories always get laughs, and I'm tired of saying them. What if I did a one man show, organizing those stories together, getting sort of a story-behind-the-stories, and then I would never have to tell those stories again. My dad had just died, so I could tell them now. Thankfully, my dad had died. So I could tell those again. That day I started writing a one man show. It was sort of based on that Inside Joke interview I did with Carl.

Has writing and performing this particular show affected your processing or dealing with all that past history?

It's funny, because I had gone to a therapist before that, and you feel a little better. Then a few months later, you forget about it. Doing this all the time, it feels like I've totally dealt with it. I don't know if that's true, but it feels that way. I feel that he's laughing at it, and that we're both laughing at it. It feels like it doesn't matter anymore, and the pain can't affect me anymore, the pain of having an alcoholic dad. And I made a show out of it. I make a little tiny bit of money from it, more than I make a creative expression out of it. And I don't want it to affect me adversely anymore. I think the show has helped me get towards that path.

In 2008, the Kids in the Hall did a tour, and you guys opened that tour with a video sketch where the group is thinking of new ideas and they decide to rape you. Is that sketch related to your show?

[laughs] That's a good question. It actually isn't. It was just an idea that Bruce [McCulloch] had. He called me one day a couple years before that, and he told me about it. And I laughed my head off. That's when, for a couple of years, we were meeting every 4 or 5 months in Los Angeles to work on new material, because we wanted the tour to be new material. So he told me that and then for a while it looked like we weren't going to get together to do the tour. So he formed his own troupe, a Bruce McCulloch troupe. He had so many sketches he wanted to get out of his system. So he did a thing but he made it rape Bruce because it was him and 4 or 5 other people. And it was kind of funny, but I always thought in the back of my mind, Bruce isn't that funny to rape. I'm funny to rape. And then we did get back together to work on the tour. We would write new stuff Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday and perform Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Then at the end of two or three years we'd pick the best stuff. One particular week we were a little light on sketches. So I said to Bruce, "Remember that rape Bruce thing? Why don't we do that?" I didn't say rape Kevin. I didn't want to be an ego maniac. "Rape me, I'm the star!" So we start rehearsing it and then, during rehearsal, Dave [Foley], not even knowing the history the sketch, says, "You know what? it gets funnier if we rape Kevin." I'm just a funny guy to rape, I guess. So Bruce says, "Oh, that's funny, it was originally rape Kevin." And Dave says, "Oh yeah, Kevin's the guy we have to rape." I don't want to use that word so much.

Fair enough. What are some of the differences between when you guys are writing the original series and writing for that tour and Death Comes To Town?

I was going to say the writing process has evolved over the years, but it hasn't really evolved. It's just changed due to different circumstances. For example, in the mid 80's, when we were just a stage troupe, what we would do is come to the theater on rehearsal days. Each of us would have an idea, we'd tell the idea and if people didn't hate it, we'd rehearse it over and over until it was written. We never wrote anything down, we just basically wrote it through improv. And then when we got the TV show we couldn't do that. We had to have scripts and props and wardrobe, hair and make-up, and know what to do. So they introduced us to this new thing called computers and we had to actually write down the scripts. And then we started writing in groups of one or two or three. Dave and I wrote together a lot. Bruce would write with Mark [McKinney] sometimes, Scott wrote by himself. And then we started hiring more friends to write with us. I would write with Norm Hiscock. Sometimes Norm, Dave and I would write. Brian Hartt would write with Bruce, but very rarely was it more than three people. Then when we did Brain Candy, we were, all five of us, plus Norm Hishcock, in the same room. It was horrible. We could hardly turn the page unless we all agreed on the previous page, and we never ever, ever, agreed on the previous page. As I say in my one man show... So it took forever. It took fifteen months, and when we started filming, we still didn't have the last act, which was really hard and slow.

But now, Bruce has experience. He had an ABC show that he created, Carpoolers, a few years ago. He's been in charge of TV shows, so Bruce was in charge of Death Comes to Town, and basically he and I, between the charts, sort of wrote it. Scott was in there for a little bit, Dave and Mark were busy, but at the end, they put their two cents in. But basically Bruce and I -- with Bruce still being in charge -- sort of wrote it with every o

Chapter 37

ne's input, and that was the easiest and the quickest way to write it. I think it's really good, and I know in my heart of hearts, the best way to get Kids in the Hall stuff is to get all five of us together in units to groups. We're old men now, and we're still trying to figure out the correct process to write movies and sketches. We've got sketches down. We know how to do that. But the story process -- I think it's some meeting in different groups of two and three.

Is there anything in particular you're looking to do while you're in Austin this time around?

Uh, what's the famous street where all the cops are?

Sixth Street.

I'm bringing my girlfriend and my guitars. We're gonna go up and down Sixth Street and listen to some bands. I know what happens I'm in the back. I'm enjoying a Tex-Mex band, I go, "This is really good." Then some person from Austin recognizes me and says, "Oh man, this isn't a really good Tex-Mex band, they were good twenty years ago when they weren't trying to be a Tex-Mex band." And I say, "Well, basically I'm from Toronto. It's Tex-Mex to me."

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September 6, 2010 Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits By BENEDICT CAREY

Every September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies).

And check out the classroom. Does Junior�s learning style match the new teacher�s approach? Or the school�s philosophy? Maybe the child isn�t �a good fit� for the school.

Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn�t offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely interact; so do personalities and at-home rules. The trouble is, no one can predict how.

Yet there are effective approaches to learning, at least for those who are motivated. In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying.

The findings can help anyone, from a fourth grader doing long division to a retiree taking on a new language. But they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on.

For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.

�We have known these principles for some time, and it�s intriguing that schools don�t pick them up, or that people don�t learn them by trial and error,� said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. �Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.�

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are �visual learners� and others are auditory; some are �left-brain� students, others �right-brain.� In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. �The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,� the researchers concluded.

Ditto for teaching styles, researchers say. Some excellent instructors caper in front of the blackboard like summer-theater Falstaffs; others are reserved to the point of shyness. �We have yet to identify the common threads between teachers who create a constructive learning atmosphere,� said Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of the book �Why Don�t Students Like School?�

But individual learning is another matter, and psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite. In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms � one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard � did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics.

The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.

�What we think is happening here is that, when the outside context is varied, the information is enriched, and this slows down forgetting,� said Dr. Bjork, the senior author of the two-room experiment.

Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting � alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language � seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time. Musicians have known this for years, and their practice sessions often include a mix of scales, musical pieces and rhythmic work. Many athletes, too, routinely mix their workouts with strength, speed and skill drills.

The advantages of this approach to studying can be striking, in some topic areas. In a study recently posted online by the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, Doug Rohrer and Kelli Taylor of the University of South Florida taught a group of fourth graders four equations, each to calculate a different dimension of a prism. Half of the children learned by studying repeated examples of one equation, say, calculating the number of prism faces when given the number of sides at the base, then moving on to the next type of calculation, studying repeated examples of that. The other half studied mixed problem sets, which included examples all four types of calculations grouped together. Both groups solved sample problems along the way, as they studied.

A day later, the researchers gave all of the students a test on the material, presenting new problems of the same type. The children who had studied mixed sets did twice as well as the others, outscoring them 77 percent to 38 percent. The researchers have found the same in experiments involving adults and younger children.

�When students see a list of problems, all of the same kind, they know the strategy to use before they even read the problem,� said Dr. Rohrer. �That�s like riding a bike with training wheels.� With mixed practice, he added, �each problem is different from the last one, which means kids must learn how to choose the appropriate procedure � just like they had to do on the test.�

These findings extend well beyond math, even to aesthetic intuitive learning. In an experiment published last month in the journal Psychology and Aging, researchers found that college students and adults of retirement age were better able to distinguish the painting styles of 12 unfamiliar artists after viewing mixed collections (assortments, including works from all 12) than after viewing a dozen works from one artist, all together, then moving on to the next painter.

The finding undermines the common assumption that intensive immersion is the best way to really master a particular genre, or type of creative work, said Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College and the lead author of the study. �What seems to be happening in this case is that the brain is picking up deeper patterns when seeing assortments of paintings; it�s picking up what�s similar and what�s different about them,� often subconsciously.

Cognitive scientists do not deny that honest-to-goodness cramming can lead to a better grade on a given exam. But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn � it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out.

�With many students, it�s not like they can�t remember the material� when they move to a more advanced class, said Henry L. Roediger III, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis. �It�s like they�ve never seen it before.�

When the neural suitcase is packed carefully and gradually, it holds its contents for far, far longer. An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now: such so-called spacing improves later recall, without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found.

No one knows for sure why. It may be that the brain, when it revisits material at a later time, has to relearn some of what it has absorbed before adding new stuff � and that that process is itself self-reinforcing.

�The idea is that forgetting is the friend of learning,� said Dr. Kornell. �When you forget something, it allows you to relearn, and do so effectively, the next time you see it.�

That�s one reason cognitive scientists see testing itself � or practice tests and quizzes � as a powerful tool of learning, rather than merely assessment. The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future.

Dr. Roediger uses the analogy of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics, which holds that the act of measuring a property of a particle alters that property: �Testing not only measures knowledge but changes it,� he says � and, happily, in the direction of more certainty, not less.

In one of his own experiments, Dr. Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, also of Washington University, had college students study science passages from a reading comprehension test, in short study periods. When students studied the same material twice, in back-to-back sessions, they did very well on a test given immediately afterward, then began to forget the material.

But if they studied the passage just once and did a practice test in the second session, they did very well on one test two days later, and another given a week later.

�Testing has such bad connotation; people think of standardized testing or teaching to the test,� Dr. Roediger said. �Maybe we need to call it something else, but this is one of the most powerful learning tools we have.�

Of course, one reason the thought of testing tightens people�s stomachs is that tests are so often hard. Paradoxically, it is just this difficulty that makes them such effective study tools, research suggests. The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget. This effect, which researchers call �desirable difficulty,� is evident in daily life. The name of the actor who played Linc in �The Mod Squad�? Francie�s brother in �A Tree Grows in Brooklyn�? The name of the co-discoverer, with Newton, of calculus?

The more mental sweat it takes to dig it out, the more securely it will be subsequently anchored.

None of which is to suggest that these techniques � alternating study environments, mixing content, spacing study sessions, self-testing or all the above � will turn a grade-A slacker into a grade-A student. Motivation matters. So do impressing friends, making the hockey team and finding the nerve to text the cute student in social studies.

�In lab experiments, you�re able to control for all factors except the one you�re studying,� said Dr. Willingham. �Not true in the classroom, in real life. All of these things are interacting at the same time.�

But at the very least, the cognitive techniques give parents and students, young and old, something many did not have before: a study plan based on evidence, not schoolyard folk wisdom, or empty theorizing.

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Apple's new review guidelines: Thoughts on fart apps

By Ed Bott | September 12, 2010, 8:00pm PDT Summary

Do Apple�s new App Store review guidelines inadvertently confirm some of the worst suspicions developers have about the company�s review process? And is Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who famously wrote Thoughts on Music and Thoughts on Flash, now giving us Thoughts on Fart Apps? Topics Developer, Steve Jobs, Apple Inc., App, iWiz, Ed Bott Blogger Info Ed Bott Bio Contact

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Apple CEO Steve Jobs doesn�t blog much, but when he does, his words command attention. Last week, Apple published new App Store review guidelines. The seven-page document is unsigned, but some astute Apple observers argue that it�s one long Jobs blog post. Yes, the same Steve Jobs who famously wrote Thoughts on Music and Thoughts on Flash is now giving us Thoughts on Fart Apps.

There�s no question that Steve Jobs approved every word of Apple�s new App Store review guidelines. Do those guidelines inadvertently confirm some of the worst suspicions developers have about the company�s review process?

That�s an important question. With Google making huge gains on its Android platform and Microsoft aggressively wooing developers for its upcoming Windows Phone 7 platform, Apple suddenly has formidable competition and is under pressure to be more friendly to developers. One result of that pressure is that they have finally released guidelines explaining how the App Store review process works. Well, sort of.

The guidelines themselves are only available to registered Apple developers, and they�re written more like a blog post than an SDK. Jon Gruber, an astute observer of Apple and its politics, says, �This new document is written in remarkably casual language,� and he offers this speculation: �Much of the introduction sounds as though it were written by Steve Jobs.�

Indeed, the introduction to those guidelines spells out what Apple wants developers to keep in mind when submitting an app, starting with a bulleted list of �some of our broader themes.� Here is the second item on that list:

We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don�t need any more Fart apps.

That�s objectively true. I just looked in the App Store, where a search for fart turns up 772 apps sprawling over five pages. One of those apps, called Animal Farts, boasts in its approved App Store listing: �If you like iFart or Pull My Finger you will love this application.�

That app was published by Graynoodle LLC, which was founded by one Phillip Shoemaker. Ironically, Shoemaker is Apple�s Director of Applications Technology and �runs the App Store process,� according to a story published last month by Brian X. Chen of Wired.com. (An earlier post at Valleywag has more salacious details about Shoemaker and a tweet from his personal account confirming his role in the app store process. Valleywag has an interesting follow-up as well.)

So just how helpful are the new review guidelines? It�s worth reading Gruber�s uncharacteristically lengthy post on the subject at his Daring Fireball blog. He quotes the following bullet points, taken directly from that same set of �broader themes� in Apple�s documentation and addressed directly to developers: If your app doesn�t do something useful or provide some form of lasting entertainment, it may not be accepted. If your App looks like it was cobbled together in a few days, or you�re trying to get your first practice App into the store to impress your friends, please brace yourself for rejection. We have lots of serious developers who don�t want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour. We will reject Apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, �I�ll know it when I see it�. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.

Some of those items are repeated in the formal section of the guidelines. For example, under the Functionality heading, Sections 2.13 and 2.14 say: Apps that duplicate apps already in the App Store may be rejected, particularly if there are many of them Apps that are not very useful or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected

If I were an iOS developer, those guidelines would drive me to drink. My app has to be �very useful� or have �lasting entertainment value,� in the opinion of an anonymous reviewer. It has to look like it was created by a �serious developer� and has to be a �quality app,� whatever that means. And it can�t contain any content or behavior that crosses a line that is completely undefined.

And what is a would-be App Store merchant to make of section 10.6?

Apple and our customers place a high value on simple, refined, creative, well thought through interfaces. They take more work but are worth it. Apple sets a high bar. If your user interface is complex or less than very good it may be rejected.

So, even if I write a perfectly adequate, functional interface for my useful app, it might be rejected because it�s �less than very good�? Really, Apple? Really?

I used to live in a community where the homeowners association had similarly arbitrary design guidelines. Building and landscaping plans had to be approved by a committee that was infamous for its inconsistency. Eventually, architects and landscapers began trying to second-guess the committee so they could get through the process on the first try and not have to do expensive revisions. Even then, half of them guessed wrong, especially if they weren�t part of the good ol� boy network of builders who ran the community. That�s what Apple�s review process reminds me of. I do not envy developers who have to make a living in a world like that.

This is the bullet point that was most telling, though: If your app is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to. If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps. [emphasis added]

That first sentence is completely reasonable. Fair, even. The second, however, is an extraordinary (and unintentionally revealing) admission. No, it says in the unmistakable voice of Steve Jobs, Apple�s process is inconsistent, and yes, dammit, there�s a personal component to it. Do not piss us off or we just might figure out a reason to reject you. And, conversely, if you keep your mouth shut and don�t publicly criticize us, maybe we�ll look more kindly on your submission.

Apple's new review guidelines: Thoughts on fart apps

By Ed Bott | September 12, 2010, 8:00pm PDT Summary

Do Apple�s new App Store review guidelines inadvertently confirm some of the worst suspicions developers have about the company�s review process? And is Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who famously wrote Thoughts on Music and Thoughts on Flash, now giving us Thoughts on Fart Apps? Topics Developer, Steve Jobs, Apple Inc., App, iWiz, Ed Bott Blogger Info Ed Bott Bio Contact

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It would be easy to dismiss that fear as over-the-top speculation, even paranoia, except for the real-world example that the guy who runs the App Store review process unthinkingly provided earlier this year. Phillip Shoemaker deleted his @graynoodle Twitter account in August, after Wired published its expose of his colorful collection of apps. But he forgot to remove the archive of that Twitter feed from his old blog page. The tweet highlighted in yellow below was sent on April 28, seven weeks after he joined Apple. It does not send a comforting message to developers:

That�s a direct, shockingly public, petty, and vindictive response (�you are full of sh**�) from Apple�s Director of Applications Technology, the guy who apparently runs the app store process. It was aimed at Vanity Fair columnist and newser.com blogger Michael Wolff, who had complained in a blog post the day before that his app had been rejected by Apple. A search of the App Store today finds no sign of Wolff�s app. Meanwhile, Shoemaker�s iWiz, released the same month, after he had joined Apple as an employee, is still available. Here�s what its listing promises:

Simulate the experience of urinating for a long time. Convince your friends that you�ll never stop. iWiz allows you to simulate urination: faster, slower, or just a trickle.

I actually understand and sympathize with some of Apple�s larger concerns here. Those same concerns apply to whoever is charged with curating the app stores for the Android and Windows Phone platforms.

If you run an app store, and that is the only outlet for customers to get apps for your platform, you have a duty to those customers to test incoming apps. If they crash, or cause your device to experience performance problems, or introduce security risks, then you should reject that app, giving the developer an opportunity to cure the problem and resubmit the app.

There are also legitimate reasons to evaluate the content of an app. If it�s pornographic, violent, illegal, dangerous, or filled with hate speech, those are potentially good reasons to reject an app as well.

But Apple wants to go further. In addition to those technical and legal concerns, they also want to make esthetic judgments about the look, feel, and even the very purpose of an app. They want a �curated� app store, where ugly apps are not welcome. (Maybe Apple needs to add an �Ugly� check box to the App Store. Visit the App Store and you�ll see only those apps that Apple thinks are useful and serious. But click the �Ugly� box and you can see the whole collection.)

As the voice of Steve Jobs notes in the introduction, somewhat defensively:

If it sounds like we�re control freaks, well, maybe it�s because we�re so committed to our users and making sure they have a quality experience with our products. Just like almost all of you are too.

Actually, no. You sound like control freaks because you are. Otherwise most of those 772 fart apps would have been booted long ago. Unless you want to make the case that they are �very useful� or have �lasting entertainment value.�

Getting the app review process right is tricky. Apple has, finally, made a decent step in the right direction by publishing a first draft of their review guidelines. But it�s only a start, and an inadequate one at that. As the guidelines note, the seven-page document represents �a formidable list of what not to do,� and it leaves many questions unanswered. Crucially, while this document explains (at least in part) how Apple reviews submitted apps, it includes no details or commitments about the review process itself. Most of the developer complaints I�ve heard express frustration over how long the approval process takes and the lack of detailed feedback from Apple when an app is rejected.

I hope whoever is in charge of the Windows Phone App Store is paying attention. This is a great place to think different.

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Austin most sexually active city in America, magazine says

By Robert Quigley | Monday, September 13, 2010, 02:09 PM

Apparently, everything is bigger in Texas, including our sexual appetite.

Not only is Austin the Live Music Capital of the World � it�s also the �Capital of Copulation,� at least according to Men�s Health magazine�s October issue.

Austin has also spread the, er, love to Dallas, which is ranked No. 2. As Texans know, size does matter: the second-largest state in the union has seven of the top 15 sexually charged cities on the list, which is appropriately called �America�s Hotbeds of Sex.�

The magazine says Austin is, ahem, on top based on condom sales, birth rates, sex toy sales, and rates of STDs.

Looking for a vacation from the Austin heat and horm

Chapter 38

ones? Head to Portland, Maine, the lowest-ranked city on the survey.

At the Statesman, we�re a little skeptical of the results because of the placement of the Big Easy and Sin City. New Orleans (46th) and Las Vegas (70th!) both are prude compared to Salt Lake City (23rd) and Wichita, Kan. (30th).

We do note that a lot of the cities on the list are college towns. Maybe there�s a correlation? Go figure. Either way, the heat is on in Texas � but you already knew that.

Here�s the full list:

No. 1. Austin, TX

No. 2. Dallas, TX

No. 3. Columbus, OH

No. 4. Durham, NC

No. 5. Denver, CO

No. 6. Indianapolis, IN

No. 7. Arlington, TX

No. 8. Oklahoma City, OK

No. 9. Bakersfield, CA

No. 10. Houston, TX

No. 11. Lubbock, TX

No. 12. Fort Worth, TX

No. 13. Charlotte, NC

No. 14. Fresno, CA

No. 15. San Antonio, TX

No. 16. Richmond, VA

No. 17. Anchorage, AK

No. 18. Nashville, TN

No. 19. Memphis, TN

No. 20. Kansas City, MO

No. 21. Atlanta, GA

No. 22. Omaha, NE

No. 23. Salt Lake City, UT

No. 24. Milwaukee, WI

No. 25. Jackson, MS

No. 26. Washington, DC

No. 27. El Paso, TX

No. 28. Baltimore, MD

No. 29. Raleigh, NC

No. 30. Wichita, KS

No. 31. Montgomery, AL

No. 32. Columbia, SC

No. 33. Philadelphia, PA

No. 34. Cincinnati, OH

No. 35. St. Paul, MN

No. 36. Sacramento, CA

No. 37. Grand Rapids, MI

No. 38. Tulsa, OK

No. 39. Modesto, CA

No. 40. Sioux Falls, SD

No. 41. Chicago, IL

No. 42. Fort Wayne, IN

No. 43. San Diego, CA

No. 44. Des Moines, IA

No. 45. Phoenix, AZ

No. 46. New Orleans, LA

No. 47. Lincoln, NE

No. 48. Little Rock, AR

No. 49. Birmingham, AL

No. 50. Minneapolis, MN

No. 51. Jacksonville, FL

No. 52. Colorado Springs, CO

No. 53. Corpus Christi, TX

No. 54. Los Angeles, CA

No. 55. Virginia Beach, VA

No. 56. Fargo, ND

No. 57. Albuquerque, NM

No. 58. St. Louis, MO

No. 59. Portland, OR

No. 60. Boise, ID

No. 61. Aurora, CO

No. 62. Toledo, OH

No. 63. Greensboro, NC

No. 64. Riverside, CA

No. 65. Detroit, MI

No. 66. Lexington, KY

No. 67. Providence, RI

No. 68. Madison, WI

No. 69. Newark, NJ

No. 70. Las Vegas, NV

No. 71. Orlando, FL

No. 72. Louisville, KY

No. 73. New York, NY

No. 74. San Francisco, CA

No. 75. Rochester, NY

No. 76. Boston, MA

No. 77. Cheyenne, WY

No. 78. Seattle, WA

No. 79. Spokane, WA

No. 80. Cleveland, OH

No. 81. San Jose, CA

No. 82. Honolulu, HI

No. 83. Tampa, FL

No. 84. Oakland, CA

No. 85. Anaheim, CA

No. 86. Tucson, AZ

No. 87. Jersey City, NJ

No. 88. Miami, FL

No. 89. Pittsburgh, PA

No. 90. Wilmington, DE

No. 91. Billings, MT

No. 92. Reno, NV

No. 93. Buffalo, NY

No. 94. Hartford, CT

No. 95. St. Petersburg, FL

No. 96. Manchester, NH

No. 97. Charleston, WV

No. 98. Yonkers, NY

No. 99. Burlington, VT

No. 100. Portland, ME

Artists Make More Money in File-Sharing Age Than Before It Written by Ernesto on September 14, 2010

An extensive study into the effect of digitalization on the music industry in Norway has shed an interesting light on the position of artists today, compared to 1999. While the music industry often talks about artists being on the brink of bankruptcy due to illicit file-sharing, the study found that the number of artists as well as their average income has seen a major increase in the last decade.

Every other month a new study addressing the link between music piracy and music revenues surfaces, but only a few really stand out. One of the most elaborate and complete studies conducted in recent times is the master thesis of Norwegian School of Management students Anders S�and Richard Bjerk� In their thesis, the students take a detailed look at the different revenue streams of the music industry between 1999 and 2009. By doing so, they aim to answer the question of how the digitization of music � and the most common side-effect, piracy � have changed the economic position of the Norwegian music industry and Norwegian artists. The results are striking.

After crunching the music industry�s numbers the researchers found that total industry revenue grew from 1.4 billion Norwegian kronor in 1999 to 1.9 billion in 2009. After adjusting this figure for inflation this comes down to a 4% increase in revenues for the music industry in this time period. Admittedly, this is not much of a growth, but things get more interesting when the research zooms in on artist revenue. Music industry revenue corrected for inflation

In the same period when the overall revenues of the industry grew by only 4%, the revenue for artists alone more than doubled with an increase of 114%. After an inflation adjustment, artist revenue went up from 255 million in 1999 to 545 million kronor in 2009.

Some of the growth can be attributed to the fact that the number of artists increased by 28% in the same time period. However, per artist the yearly income still saw a 66% increase from 80,000 to 133,000 kronor between 1999 and 2009. In conclusion, one could say that artists are far better off now than they were before the digitization of music started. Artist revenue corrected for inflation

Aside from looking at the reported revenue, the researchers also polled the artists themselves to find out what their income sources are. Here, it was found that record sales have never been a large part of the annual revenue of artists. In 1999, 70% of the artists made less than 9% of their total income from record sales, and in 2009 this went down to 50%.

Live performances are the major source of income for most artists. 37% of Norwegian artists made more than 50% of their income from live performances in 2009, up from 25% in 1999. That said, it has to be noted that only a few artists make a full living off their music, as most have other jobs aside.

In conclusion, the study refutes some of the most common misconceptions about the music industry in the digital age. Musicians are making more money than ever before. It is true that the revenues from record sales are dwindling, but that can be just as easily attributed to iTunes as The Pirate Bay.

The bottom line is that the music industry as a whole is thriving. Record labels may report a dip in their income from record sales, but more money is going to artists at the same time. Is that really such a bad outcome? Well, that depends on who you�re listening to.

If you like Jewel Staite as Kaylee from Firefly and Serenity and Dr. Jennifer Keller from Stargate: Atlantis, you'll love the REAL Jewel Staite! That's why we're so pleased she's agreed to join us regularly here at Blastr to answer your questions and share whatever happens to be on her mind.

Welcome to my Blastr blog #2! That's right, friends! Because all of you faithfully followed my online links and shameless plugs and so very loyally told all of your friends to read it too, this blog was a small success and they let me write another one! So where do we start??

Oh, I know. How about Dragon*Con?

So, let's just explain for those of you living under a rock/in a cave/in David Hewlett's house exactly what Dragon*Con is: If San Diego Comic Con is your handsome older brother with a Phd wearing a fancy suit and driving a Prius, Dragon*Con is your loud-mouthed sister who's dressed just a tad inappropriately and most likely coming off a bender in Vegas. My kinda girl. It's a wild and wonderful four-day pop culture extravaganza with thousands upon thousands of people ready to party down.

In costume. Or in chain mail. Or just body paint. This is the only place where you can find yourself in an impromptu stormtrooper "elevator party" (I've never been so afraid of an elevator breaking down in my life), walk into a secret Star Trek cast reunion (nerdgasm!), eat lunch next to zombies, have a conversation with "the keeper of the unicorns" (whatever you say, lady), and get prank-called by Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk in front of 2,000 people.

Suffice it to say, we had a blast, and a huge thank-you goes out to all of you who attended and made it one of the most memorable weekends I've ever had. Except a lot of it I can't remember, because some nut kept putting bottles of champagne at my Q&A podium. Can we keep doing that, please?? But I digress.

I vowed to answer your questions. And answer I shall!

#1: What is your most embarrassing acting-related moment?

And how right you are to assume I have one! Or several! However, because I'm a bit of a modest girl (I can hear the collective snorts across the internet), I'm much too proud to divulge every little detail of my most embarrassing moment. I will say it involved a rehearsal room full of actor dudes who were too infantile to save me from my embarrassment, and me wearing a tube top and not paying too much attention to how far south my top had fallen. I'm sure you can imagine what happened, and I will never live that boob down.

#2: Which wines go best with watching which one of your shows?

Excellent question, as this encourages the consumption of alcohol while watching my acting. I'd say a nice Zaca Mesa cuvee for "Firefly", a beautiful Perrier Jouet champagne for "Serenity", a lovely Joie: A Noble Blend from British Columbia for "Stargate: Atlantis", and a bottle of moonshine for "Mothman". Cheers!

#3: Do you consider yourself a good cook and, if so, what's your favorite dish to make?

Here's the thing: I'm a really good reader, and I'm great at following directions. Meaning if you give me enough time, I can cook an all right meal. However, I am a much, much better eater. Such a great eater in fact that sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't get paid for it. I've been known to throw myself at a croque madam, well up over a beautiful plate of pasta, and swoon at the sight of a cheese souffl�I'm the type of person that makes lists of the restaurants I want to visit, in order of greatest to least-greatest. And if for some unconscionable reason the acting bug were to leave my being, I would become a professional food critic, just so I could eat and eat, all the live-long day. And my pilates instructors would become even richer than they already are.

#4: And that quite happily leads us to.... How cranky is David Hewlett when he isn't fed?

Have you ever seen a mini-horse?

A couple hours drive from our house in LA is an actual mini-horse farm. These furry mini creatures spend their days frolicking in their pasture, nipping at each other's backsides and flipping their funny little hair do's around. (When we shared a house with Paul McGillion, I almost spent the $1500 just to put one in his bedroom when he was away for a weekend. I was going to call it Dr. Beckett.) They look cute and cuddly, but let me assure you: catch them at a bad time, and they're anything but. They sort of stick their little pot bellies out and wait for you to be stupid enough to get close so they can take a chunk out of your hand. David hungry = mini horse. (Let's hope he's eaten when he reads this.)

#5: How would YOU have wanted Firefly to end?

Well, I wouldn't have, now would I? But in my perfect imagination, it ends a little something like this: Nine glorious seasons later, Kaylee and Simon have had several beautiful brunette babies, a couple of which have turned out to be crazy geniuses like their Auntie River (Firefly: the Next Generation?), and one who mysteriously looks a lot like Matthew Fox, who became a regular cast member in season six. River has finally found her marbles and is now captaining her own ship with her loyal second-in-command, Jayne, who claims that River is the best captain he's ever known. Saffron is now their mercenary, and Jayne's lover. And because this is the future and vast discoveries have been made in the world of medicine, Jayne is pregnant with their first child. Inara and Mal finally profess their undying love for each other while Inara is, well, dying in his arms (something gruesome, lotsa blood), and Mal finally realizes that life is short. And promptly confesses his (other) undying love to Zoe. And she promptly punches him in the face.

Come on, somebody pick up that show for a second season already! We can come up with the budget! I've got 20 bucks in my pocket right now!

And that concludes blog #2. Be sure to send me your weird/wild/wonderful questions on Twitter to @jewelstaite for next time.

Until then, dear reader,

Warren: A Huge Win What's Your Reaction: Important Funny Typical Scary Outrageous Amazing Innovative Finally Read More: Elizabeth Warren , Elizabeth Warren Appointment , Obama Elizabeth Warren , Treasury , Warren Appointment , Politics News

4 0 views Get Politics Alerts

Email Comments 21 The early Administration leaks about Elizabeth Warren serving as an "interim" appointee to set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were equivocal. In one version of the story, she would be a counselor to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. In others, this appointment would be an alternative to her even being considered for the job on a permanent basis -- a wink and a nod to the financial industry.

But that scenario turned out to be wrong, and underestimated Warren's own tenacity. It is now clear that the indefatigable Warren will be both a senior presidential adviser with direct access to Obama when she needs it, as well as a Treasury employee. In an administration dominated by Rubinistas, Warren will literally be the first financial progressive with both a personal connection to the president as well as an independent power base.

This strategy is a win-win, on several grounds. It gives Warren full authority to set up the agency, without having to run the gantlet of confirmation hearings and a likely Republican filibuster.

This way, Warren will be able to get the agency quickly up and running in a manner that serves both consumers and progressive politics. Early directives to bring greater simplicity and transparency to credit documents will be extremely popular. Politically, the carping by the banking industry and its Republican allies will remind the public which side the GOP is on.

This will take a lot of the wind out of the Republican claim that they opposed the bailout and share popular backlash against Wall Street. It will belatedly put the administration vividly on the side of regular Americans when it comes to banking issues.

And as Warren continues to be the remarkably popular champion of struggling families, it will become more difficult to deny her the job on a permanent basis if she wants it. And it will be more costly, even for a more Republican senate in the next Congress, to make her their nemesis.

Those like Sen. Chris Dodd who claimed Warren had little experience running things underestimated the lady. They certainly underestimated her as an astute political player. This appointment was delayed for several weeks because extensive discussions were necessary to produce terms that worked for both the White House and for Warren personally.

Credit for this victory is should be shared several ways. The progressive movement did not relent on this one. Denying Warren the job would have been a demoralizing slap at a Democratic activist base that was already in a state of near-despair.

It is hard to recall another case when a public pressure campaign for a particular nomination, with the tacit support of the would-be nominee, did not backfire. This success signals progressives to keep prodding Obama to be the leader we hoped we were electing.

Shahien Nasiripour in Huffington Post also gets credit for being the first one to suggest this interim tactic, back in July.

Credit also goes to President Obama himself. Despite nay-saying from the wing of his administration that is too cozy with Wall Street, the president is a good enough politician and has enough progressive instincts to recognize the Warren appointment as shrewd politics and smart on the merits.

But the most credit goes to Warren herself, for never pulling her punches either as head of the Congressional Oversight Panel or as a broader spokeswoman for financial reform. In an age of few progressive heroes, it took amazing combination of persistence, principle, political shrewdness and personal grace to make herself the indispensable woman.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos. His new book is "A Presidency in Peril."

Is the Internet Making You Lose Your Mind? Have you ever noticed how often you surf the net or check e-mail when you feel bored or restless or depressed, as if relief is just a click away? September 15, 2010 |

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Let's face it: whatever expert opinion may say, we all know that the Internet is addictive. Of course, you can substitute "seductive" or "habit forming" to avoid the overused diagnostic buzzword, but have you ever noticed how often you visit your favorite site or check e-mail whenever you get stuck with a work-related problem or feel bored or restless or anxious or depressed? Relief is just a click away! Does this remind you of the cigarette break you used to take when you were still smoking, and for the same self-soothing reasons?

The Internet doesn't just provide information or social connection: it can be its own form of cybercoke. You can get a reasonably good high just zooming from alluring link to link, following the ever-receding golden thread of "one more hit," saving sites to your "Favorites," promising each in turn that it's the one you really want, the most important one�only to find your faithless eyes drawn to the next online charmer, and the next, and the next. Spend a few feverish hours mining quotes, opinions, and factoids about postcolonial African literature, Goldman Sachs's role in the Greek financial meltdown, Schoenberg's invention of the 12-tone scale, or even pondering the travails of poor Lindsay Lohan, and you get the heady sensation that you must be acquiring enormous erudition of some sort, even wisdom�and in such a short time period.

At this point in your search for the perfect website, you may take a quick break to check into your Facebook page. There you find something like a huge, noisy, festive bash being held at your house, only nobody told you about it, and so when you unlock your door, you see 50 or 100 or 500 extremely cheerful people, most of whom you don't know and haven't invited to a party you weren't aware you were throwing. But you hang around and have a few (virtual) drinks, noodle with your profile, decide which of the new people who've mysteriously turned up on your page you want to get to know, follow various links, and before you know it, an hour or two have passed.

Refreshed by all that cyber-pressing of the flesh, you return to more serious tasks and allow yourself to be sucked back into the encyclopedic Internet tsunami of all human knowledge�yours to plunder at will! It's like getting very rich very fast�the more you see, skim over, or save for "later," the more intellectual capital you feel you're accumulating, the higher the number in your IQ portfolio, the bigger your brain balance. You speed along faster and faster, doing so many things at once�researching the article, checking into the Huffington Post, reading and sending e-mails, ordering a cute jacket that's on sale, talking on the phone, eating a sandwich�a regular Olympiad of multitasking! You can practically hear the crackle of your brain's neural networks prodigiously expanding at the speed of light.

And then the crash. Not the computer's, but yours. You notice that you're losing it�"it" being your mind. Somewhere in that mishmash�print-outs littering your desk, dozens of online articles, book chapters and blogs "saved" in Favorites, different programs, apps, e-mails, the uncompleted order for that jacket, all stacked up in layers of windows on your screen like planes endlessly circling the airport in the fog�you and your mind just disappear. Instead of feeling smarter, more in control, you just feel . . . depleted, numbed out, zombified. All of those threads you were following are now hopelessly tangled in a big, fuzzy ball where your brain used to be.

You turn off everything, including the lights, and sit quietly in the dark�no, wait! That's what you should do. Instead, you keep on mindlessly clicking, foregoing food, sleep, and bathroom breaks, following links randomly, who cares where or to what�weather report, Alternet, perezhilton, movie trailers, recipes, CNN, Travelocity, Ebay, Craigslist, zillow, Google Earth, cute cat videos (a genre, not a site), yourporn (a site, as well as a genre), and farther afield to ever-wilder Internet shores. Eventually, your body shrivels up to a little, wizened homunculus, with one hand still folded over the mouse, clicking, clicking, clicking. . . .

Just kidding! But melodrama aside, the Internet can be way too much of a good thing, its use deceptively easy as it encourages fantasies of both omniscience and omnipotence. On the one hand, searching the Internet actually increases brain function in older adults, according to a UCLA study led by neuroscientist Gary Small, activating areas devoted to decision-making and complex reasoning that aren't engaged by simply reading a book. But in contrast, multitasking�Googling, telephoning, e-mailing, talking, driving, or any combination thereof (you know who you are)�only makes us feel sharper and more mentally efficient, giving us a false sense of confidence in our mental acuity. Multitasking is basically imposing continual distraction and interruption on our brains: it isn't good for thinking deep thoughts, or really any thoughts.

In a review of two dozen studies about the impact of different media technologies on our cognitive abilities, reported in Science in 2009, developmental psychologist Patricia Greenfield noted that the rapid shift of focus in multitasking did improve facility at some tasks requiring the ability to keep track of lots of simultaneous signals�like air-traffic control and, presumably, military firefights. Unfortunately, multitasking weakened "higher-order cognitive processes"�little things like "abstract vocabulary, mindfulness, reflection, inductive problem-solving, critical thinking, and imagination." All that stuff just takes so much time.

Adding digital insult to cyber-injury, multitaskers even seem to get worse at multitasking. Heavy-duty multitaskers are "suckers for irrelevancy, Everything distracts them," says Clifford Nass, psychology professor at Stanford University, who directed a study in 2009 on the impact of media multitasking. Coauthor Eyal Ophir added, "They couldn't help thinking about the task they weren't doing. The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can't keep things separate in their minds."

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, argues that we're in danger of succumbing to terminal distractibility, unable to engage in any mental task that requires control, discipline, and extended focus (like actually reading a book). Several professors at the University of Michigan, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and who knows where else are so tired of trying to lecture to students who are texting, Googling, e-mailing, Facebooking, tweeting, ordering stuff online, and passing laptops back and forth (so others in class can take a look at their screens) that they've banned Internet use in class or even switched off wireless networks during class time.

If we're literally losing our minds to the Internet, we might be losing our hearts and souls, as well. Earlier this past spring, a South Korean couple was arrested for letting their 3-month-old baby starve to death while they spent 12 hours every night at the country's ubiquitous Internet games cafes (30,000 in the country, one on almost every street corner.) They were apparently obsessed with raising a "virtual daughter" via an interactive role-playing game. That same month, a 20-year-old Korean man was sentenced to 20 years in prison for clubbing his mother to death when she complained about his Internet habit. And about a year ago, another young guy killed his mother because she was so addicted to the web that, he thought, she wasn't being a good mom. It's worth noting that Korea has the fastest and most developed Internet system in the world�90 percent of homes are fitted with high-speed connections, half the population regularly plays comput

Chapter 39

er games, and 1 in 10 online users is addicted, according to the government.

It's well known that the anonymity of the Internet "disinhibits" the kind of behavior that might shame people if others knew they were doing it. In the communal free-for-all that comprises the online reader responses to media articles, for example, some people seem to luxuriate in uncontrolled, mouth-foaming viciousness�as if having waited all their lives for this opportunity to just let loose and spew venom. The occasion hardly seems to matter; many a mild-mannered, perfectly unobjectionable little journalistic endeavor (an article about, oh, the federal deficit) has provoked the verbal equivalent of a dirty bomb. Maybe off the Net, these virtual cyber-terrorists are mild-mannered Clark Kents, never uttering a rude peep. Or maybe, they're less dangerous (we hope) equivalents of serial murderers. Actually, maybe the fact that they have a place to vent online prevents them from becoming mass murderers.

In any case, science writer Kathleen Taylor, author of Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain, when asked by a New York Times writer why the Internet was such a cruel playground, theorized that humans had evolved to be "face-to-face creatures," getting "constant feedback from others, telling us if it was OK to be saying what we're saying. On the Internet, you get nothing, no body language, no gesture. So you get this feeling of unlimited power because there is nothing stopping you, no instant feedback." And there is something exhilarating about flaming somebody. Who's going to know it's you? It's like the perfect crime, except it isn't even a crime to explode at someone online.

More insidious is the impact of the electronic culture on the way kids grow up. According to a poster session presented at last summer's Association for Psychological Science, American college students today are 40 percent less empathetic�less able to take the perspective or imagine the perspective of others, sympathize with others' misfortunes, or identify with fictional characters�than 30 years ago, with the biggest drop occurring since 2000. The exact causes aren't known, but the paper's authors noted that the perceived excess of narcissism, competitiveness, and unjustified self-confidence in young adults may stem in part from the vastly increased exposure to Internet media. Violent media�first-person shooter games, for example�numb people to the pain of others, while the explosion in social media encourages casual, shallow, relatively meaningless relationships with online "friends." Hypercompetition and inflated expectations of success may be nurtured, the authors suggest, by ubiquitous reality shows for which tireless ambition and ruthless self-promotion are at least as important as genuine talent or ability.

Is the Internet causing a widespread decline of moral, civil, and civic accountability? Probably not�the world has always had its share of haters, grousers, bashers, scoffers, whiners, screamers, and otherwise unfun people. But, today, when the Net is truly the world's first genuinely open-source free-expression zone, when just about anybody can get online and say just about anything, we necessarily have more of the not-so-nice backside of humanity pushed into our faces. The invective that once might have exhausted itself in a small-town bar late at night is now playing to an audience that's rapidly approaching two billion Internet users.

Still, as Carr writes in The Shallows, too much stimulation too fast doesn't seem to be good for what we quaintly call the more "humane" qualities of our species. Brain research is beginning to show that the sophisticated mental processes needed for empathy and compassion require a calm, attentive mind, and take time to unfold. "The more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience the subtlest, most distinctively human forms of empathy, compassion, and other emotions," Carr writes. He quotes philosopher Martin Heidegger, writing in the 1950s about the oncoming "tide of technological revolution," which could "so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking." The capacity for meditation and contemplation�what Heidegger thought was the essence of humanity�he feared could be lost.

It was perhaps a good thing that he didn't live to see Kate Moore, a 16-year-old Iowa girl, win the $50,000 first prize at the 2009 LG U.S. National Texting Championship for thumb-typing on her hand-held phone (the Verizon LG enV3, if you must know) the words, "Zippity Dooo Dahh Zippity Ayy. . . MY oh MY, what a wonderful day! Plenty of sunshine Comin' my way. . . Zippitty Do Dah Zippity Aay! WondeRful Feeling Wonderful day!"

Heidegger worried that the "frenziedness of technology" would "entrench itself everywhere." He didn't know the half of it!

F1 designer Gordon Murray unveils lightweight city car By Jorn Madslien Business reporter, BBC News, Shalford, Surrey

Imagine a car so narrow that two can drive next to each other in one lane; a car so small and short that three can park in one parking space. Continue reading the main story Global Car Industry Congestion solved? Massive Mini targets families Formula 1 sponsors form alliance Fiat agrees to split its business

Now imagine that the car is built in a shed from glass fibre, recycled plastic bottles and hollow steel tubes, using just a fifth of the material required to build a conventional car.

Such a vehicle would have the potential to prevent gridlock on the world's roads as the number of cars quadruples to 2.5 billion by 2020.

It could also help hundreds of millions of people achieve their dream of owning a car, without depleting scarce resources such as water, energy or steel.

Well, that car has been made.

It seats three, weighs just 575kg, has a top speed of almost 100mph and is expected to cost about �6,000 ($9,000).

Legendary cars

The man behind the project is Professor Gordon Murray, long hailed by speed-loving petrolheads as an automotive hero.

During the 70s and early 80s, Prof Murray earned his spurs as a Formula 1 racing car designer, churning out cars that won a string of Grand Prix races and World Championships for Bernie Ecclestone's Brabham.

Prof Murray earned his spurs designing Formula 1 and supercars for the road

Next he joined McLaren where he repeated the exercise, producing the Formula 1 car that earned Ayrton Senna his first championship, before penning two legendary road cars: The F1, which held the title as the world's fastest road car for years, and the gull-winged Mercedes SLR McLaren.

But six years ago, Prof Murray stepped off the Formula 1 merry-go-round to pursue a dream - one that he hopes could change forever the way cars are being built.

"I had made enough racing cars and sports cars by then," he says.

"I'm the sort of person who needs a new challenge all the time. I like to take something and disrupt it."

'Formula 1 thinking'

The embodiment of Prof Murray's dream is tucked away in a modest brick building on an industrial site in Surrey.

Here, Prof Murray's team - the same one that he worked with at McLaren - has built a tiny city car - the T.25.

"Over a 15-year period at McLaren, that team became probably the most powerful roadcar team on the planet, and now I've got them all here," he grins.

The T.25 has no doors; instead it opens as the front tilts forward

The T.25 copies the F1 supercar's three-seat interior design, with the driver in the middle and the passengers behind.

And like the F1, the citycar is built using composite materials - only cheaper ones.

The body panels and the monocoque, or base, of the car are reinforced with glass, which costs a fraction of carbon, Prof Murray says.

"Some of the fibres are random, some are woven and some are unidirectional, and that's Formula 1 thinking," he explains.

It all sits on a flimsy steel tube frame that Prof Murray acknowledges "is nowhere near strong enough on its own".

But once the monocoque is glued into the frame, in a process similar to how a windscreen is glued into a car body, it becomes "as sturdy and safe as a conventional car".

Intellectual property

The real clue to why Prof Murray feels his invention can change the way cars are built can be found in his workshop, which is no larger than a filling station forecourt.

Here, some of his 30-strong staff are secretly developing a number of different vehicles based on the T.25 manufacturing principles.

"A five-seater, an eight-seater, a bus, or a two-seater," Prof Murray says, insisting anything is possible. "We are very flexible."

For although the T.25 is a groundbreaking car in its own right - one that might well enter mass production soon - its main aim is to show the world what the team can do.

"This is the confusion, I think, with the outside world," he says.

"I'm known as a designer, my team forms an engineering company, but actually our core business is intellectual property."

Flexible manufacturing

Prof Murray's team is already developing future models based on the iStream method

Prof Murray has come up with a way of producing cars that does away with the most polluting parts used in conventional factories - such as large stamping presses to make steel body parts, welding robots or paint shops.

"We don't need any of that," he says.

"We dig very little steel out of the ground. We use a tiny bit - about 35 euros ($45; �29) worth per car - of low energy mild steel, which is a very low energy process. It's about 60kg of steel in a T.25. That's it."

The manufacturing method, called iStream, is incredibly flexible.

Modifying the size of the frame or the shape and colour of the body panels can be done simply by rewriting the software, so on the same production line you can have "any body you like, on the same day", he explains.

And by simply changing the shape of the monocoque, a manufacturer can slot in pretty much any engine, whether a conventional one using petrol or diesel or an electric motor powered by batteries or hydrogen fuel cells.

Massive cost savings

Using fewer and cheaper parts to build cars provides manufacturers with tremendous cost savings, but perhaps more importantly it reduces investment risk as less money is required upfront to get a project started, according to Prof Murray.

In the future, car factories could be smaller, cheaper and less polluting than they are today

"I love efficiencies in design, but I love efficiencies in business even more," he says.

"The actual factory that builds an iStream car - no matter what shape it is, no matter what size it is - is about 20% of the capital investment and 20% of the size of a conventional car manufacturing plant - and about half the energy."

Such arguments are slowly winning over both conventional carmakers and companies that have never sold cars before, so Prof Murray is hoping a number of them will soon be manufacturing cars using his team's know-how.

"What we want to do is to sell as many iStream licences to as many people for as many different cars as possible, all around the world," Prof Murray says, hoping to kick-start an automotive revolution.

"It's not a small step forward, it's a massive step," he says.

"We've really ripped up the rule book and thrown it out of the window."

creative pairs Two of Us Inside the Lennon/McCartney connection, part 3. By Joshua Wolf Shenk Updated Friday, Sept. 17, 2010, at 7:14 AM ET

From: Joshua Wolf Shenk Subject: Inside the Lennon/McCartney Connection, Part 1 Posted Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2010, at 7:54 PM ET

This article is part of a series on creative pairs. To read the introduction, click here.

"I thought, 'If I take him on, what will happen?' "�John Lennon

How did John Lennon and Paul McCartney make magic together? On the surface, it seems simple�they covered for each other's deficits and created outlets for each other's strengths. Paul's melodic sunshine smoothed out John's bluesy growls, while John's soulful depth gave ballast to Paul and kept him from floating away.

These points are true so far as they go. John and Paul did balance and complement each other magnificently, and we can pile example on example. When they were writing "I Saw Her Standing There," Paul offered this opening verse:

"She was just seventeen Never been a beauty queen."

"You're joking about that line," John shot back, "aren't you?" He offered this revision:

"She was just seventeen You know what I mean"

There it is: Innocence meets sin�an inviting, simple image takes a lusty, poetic leap.

Lennon and McCartney did, to use the precious phrase, complete each other. "Paul's presence did serve to keep John from drifting too far into obscurity and self-indulgence," said Pete Shotton, a Liverpool boy who stayed in the Beatles' circle, "just as John's influence held in check the more facile and sentimental aspects of Paul's songwriting."

But images of completion and balance miss an essential energy between Lennon and McCartney�the potential energy of creative partnerships that they, as much as any pair in history, exemplify and illustrate. We tend to think of them in terms of arithmetic: Two people added together yield magnificence. This is the idea of partnership as chocolate and peanut butter�tasty, obvious, easy.

But Lennon and McCartney were more like an oyster and a grain of sand. Their power together didn't derive simply from individual ingredients but from a dynamic of constant mutual influence. Indeed, even "influence" understates the case, as it suggests two distinct actors operating on each other. Lennon and McCartney did affect each other, change each other, goad, inspire, madden, and wound each other. But they also each contributed to something that went beyond either individual, a charged, mutual space of creation�those pearls your ear probably recognizes and leans toward as much as to your parents' voices.

On a warm, humid July day in 1957, 15-year-old Paul McCartney came around to see a local band called the Quarry Men play in the fields behind St. Peter's Church in the suburbs of Liverpool, England.

John Lennon, who was 20 months older, fronted the six-piece band. He had his glasses off as usual�he was vain like that, though his vision was lousy. His hair was piled up and greased back in the style of post-Elvis "Teddy Boys." He played banjo chords on his guitar, ignoring the two bottom strings. For much of the set�part rock and part "skiffle" (a flavor of 1950s folk)�he passed over chord changes he didn't know and made up lyrics as he went along. When he did the Del-Vikings doo-wop "Come Go With Me," he threw in an image from the blues: "Come and go with me � down to the penitentiary." McCartney thought it was ingenious.

Creative Pairs: Lennon and McCartney

Afterward, in the church social hall, Paul picked up a guitar himself, flipped it over to play left-handed and showed off the songs he knew�Eddie Cochran, Carl Perkins, Little Richard.* He had the lyrics down (including the complete lines to Cochran's "Twenty Flight Rock," a song others had a hard time even deciphering) and knocked off the chords perfectly (including a quick and delicate shift from a G to an F chord that made jaws drop). Then he went over to the piano and pounded out some Jerry Lee Lewis. The boy had polish and heat. He wore a white jacket with silver threads�he looked like Elvis, John thought. "Right off, I could see John checking this kid out," said Shotton (who played the washboards for the Quarry Men). Another friend said that John and Paul "circled each other like cats."

Clearly, these two boys had chemistry�that ineffable quality of attraction that feels like a primal, physical force and that often descends like a lightning strike. As with the passion of love, or the nature of creativity itself, science has struggled to account for chemistry. Humans may, or may not, have pheromones that affect connection (though smell does demonstrably play a role in sexual attraction). Mirror neurons may, or may not, play a role in empathy and rapport. In their new book, Click, Ori and Rom Brafman offer many powerful stories of what chemistry looks like, but when it comes to analyzing it, their first adjective is "magical." Hardly the stuff of white coats and laboratories.

Of course, we celebrate, even venerate, these "chemical" connections�and for good reason. They give us a big kick. MRIs show the brain region responsible for dopamine absorption lights up in couples that say they are in love, comparable to the influence of narcotics. By contrast, social disconnection provokes activity in the region responsible for physical pain.

But intense connection also brings a peculiar discomfort. People "madly" in love show symptoms directly comparable to mania, depression, anorexia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Serotonin levels actually fall in passionate love (which, not incidentally, has a short lifespan, as opposed to the mellower, longer lasting "companionate love").

The behavior in passion also carries profound psychological risk. Arthur and Elaine Aron's experiments on what they call self-expansion show that people literally lose a sense of distinction between themselves and a close other. And as the psychologist Sandra Murray has shown, love wouldn't work at all without "cognitive restructuring," or helpful illusions that dispel the inherent fear of rejection and pain.

John Lennon saw the two sides of his attraction to Paul McCartney quickly and clearly. "I dug him," he said, and he wanted him in the band.

But he had his concerns. "I half thought to myself, 'He's as good as me,'" he told the journalist Hunter Davies in 1967. "I'd been kingpin up to then. Now, I thought, 'If I take him on, what will happen?' " (In one sense, Lennon obviously meant: "If I invite him to join the group." But the double meaning of "take him on" is worth noticing.) In a 1970 interview with Jann Wenner, Lennon described his dilemma even more plainly: "I had a group. I was the singer and the leader; then I met Paul, and I had to make a decision: Was it better to have a guy who was better than the guy I had in? To make the group stronger, or to let me be stronger?"

With hindsight, it's clear that it wasn't an either/or. Bringing Paul aboard made the group much stronger and it made John much stronger. It gave him part ownership of a priceless enterprise. That math adds up to infinite value.

But we're missing the point if we look at Lennon's thinking as a mistake. Actually, he put his finger right on the core emotional dynamic. What Paul represented to John�for good and for ill, for excitement and for fear�was a loss of control. All through his relationship with McCartney, the power between them would be fluid�a charged, creative exchange that fueled them and frustrated them, leading to creative peaks and valleys of recrimination and estrangement.

And it can all be traced to their first encounter. "The decision was made to make the group stronger," Lennon told Wenner. Had he decided to keep the power all to himself, he probably would have forsaken his power entirely.

In a 1995 interview, Mick Jagger was asked how he and Keith Richards lasted so long as songwriting partners, when Lennon and McCartney split. His answer was simple: A team needs a leader. (He didn't go so far as to explicitly identify himself as that leader, but he made it perfectly clear.)

By contrast, John and Paul, Jagger said, "seemed to be very competitive over leadership of the band. � If there are 10 things, they both wanted to be in charge of nine of them. You're not gonna make a relationship like that work, are you?"

His point sounds like an M.B.A. case study�fitting, maybe, from a rock and roller who studied at the London School of Economics.

But successful creative pairs suggest that power roles are often murky. The domineering and dynamic Gertrude Stein seemed to run over her mousy, housekeeping partner Alice B. Toklas. Stein literally appropriated her partner's identity�wrote in her name�to create a self-serving portrait of herself. But close observers often saw Toklas take Stein by the lapel, directing her as deftly and surely as an actor onstage. In many ways, Stein's creative life began when Toklas recognized her�when, in Stein's words, Toklas said "yes" to her work.

Sometimes, apparently rigid power roles actually facilitate something more open. Quayle Hodek and Kris Lotlikar, co-founders of a leading renewable energy firm, decided at the start that one of them would be CEO and have the final say. This, Hodek told me, allows them to operate without fear of paralyzing conflict. The irony, he says, is that his ostensible deputy calls many more shots day-to-day.

Even Mick Jagger and Keith Richards at times operated more fluidly than Jagger claimed. The masterpiece Exile on Main Street was recorded in Richards' house in the south of France, and on the terms he preferred (a loose arrangement, edging into chaos, built on jams and endless takes). Many consider this album the team's masterpiece.

But no pair illustrates the fluidity of power�and the power of fluidity�better than John and Paul. At its worst, theirs was an alienating, enervating struggle. But at its best, the dynamic was playful and organic. Jagger is probably right that it led to their split. But who said you measure the strength of a collaboration by its longevity?

The tension between Lennon and McCartney was rooted in their distinct styles and personalities. As a boy, the precocious and creative John Lennon always needed, he said, "a little gang of guys who would play various roles in my life, supportive and, you know, subservient." "I wanted everybody to do what I told them to do," he said, "to laugh at my jokes and let me be the boss." He needed both to connect and to dominate. "Though I have yet to encounter a personality as strong and individual as John's," said his friend Pete Shotton, "he always had to have a partner." (John so entwined himself with Pete that he called them "Shennon and Lotton.")

When John put a band together, he brought his mates in�often simply because they were his mates�but left no doubt about his status. Shotton, for example, didn't have a particular talent for music and didn't like it much. When he told Lennon he needed out of the band, John broke Pete's washboard over his head. It's not likely we could find a clearer display of power with primates on the savannah.

For some time after Paul joined, John stayed out front. Among the band's many early names were "Johnny and the Moondogs" and "Long John and the Silver Beetles." When "The Beatles" went to Hamburg, Germany, the contract named John as the payee. In the late 1950s, Paul pitched a journalist on the band; he began his description of the boys with John, "who leads the group � " But the letter itself�a piece of Paul's relentless promotion�speaks to his own power style. He was more social, more affable, more outwardly and consistently energetic. Where John oscillated between intense shyness and raw aggression (he beat his girlfriend, for example), Paul had a knack for working people that was savvy as it was sweet.

From the start, Paul looked up to John�"posing and strutting with his hair slicked back," remembered Cynthia Lennon, "to prove that he was cool." But he also took the microphone and worked the crowd. In Hamburg, "most people among the fans looked upon [Paul] as the leader," said Astrid Kirchherr, a German student who befriended the band. "John of course was the leader," Astrid continued. "He was far and away the strongest."

What's interesting, though, isn't the question of who ran the show, but the subtlety of strength itself, the many ways power can be exercised between partners.

Consider the moment Paul's brother Michael cited as an illustration of his "innate sense of diplomacy." It was in Paris in 1963. The Beatles' producer George Martin had arranged for them to record "She Loves You" in German. When the band missed their studio appointment, Martin came around to their suite at the George V hotel. They played slapstick and dived under the tables to avoid him.

"Are you coming to do it or not?" Martin said.

"No," Lennon said. George and Ringo echoed him. Paul said nothing, and they went back to eating.

"Then a bit later," Michael said, "Paul suddenly turned to John and said, 'Heh, you know that so and so line, what if we did it this way? John listened to what Paul said, thought a bit, and said, 'Yeah, that's it.' And they headed to the studio."

How would we chart the lines of authority for this decision? You could say Lennon made t

Chapter 40

he call to refuse the recording session, then reversed himself�the band following him both times. But it was actually Paul who shaped the course the band took. His move to avoid a direct confrontation�to let John stay nominally in control�only underscores his operational strength.

Just as shorter people are more aware of height, Paul seems to have noticed the power dynamic more acutely. In a 1967 conversation about the band's Hamburg days, Lennon said that Paul had just recently told him about fights they had over who led the band. "I can't remember them," Lennon said. "It had stopped mattering by then. I wasn't so determined to be the leader at all costs." This is crucial. He had decided he didn't need to be the leader at all costs�itself a leadership claim. As the band rocketed to success, Lennon would increasingly acquiesce to Paul's ideas, much as a king in tumultuous times will defer to his counsel. But he never gave up the idea that he could, when he wanted, return straight to his throne.

Read Part 2 in the Beatles series.

Correction, Sept. 15, 2010: This sentence originally misidentified Carl Perkins as Chet Perkins. (Return.)

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From: Joshua Wolf Shenk Subject: Inside the Lennon/McCartney Connection, Part 2 Posted Wednesday, Sept. 15, 2010, at 7:51 PM ET

This article is part of a series on creative pairs. To read the introduction, click here. To read the first part of the Beatles essay, click here.

"The tension between the two of them made for the bond." �George Martin

To the public, Lennon and McCartney famously declared themselves a fused pair. As soon as they began to write together, they decided to share credit regardless of individual contribution. At the top of their music sheets, they would write, "Another Lennon/McCartney original." They collapsed the space between them�not even an "and" would divide their names, just a slash.

But the joint credit also served as balm on the cuts of a constant, intense�though often joyful�competition. "Imagine two people pulling on a rope," said George Martin, "smiling at each other and pulling all the time with all their might. The tension between the two of them made for the bond."

Martin's image is perfect. John and Paul constantly pulled away from each other�and moved closer at the same time. Their competition actually enhanced their individual differences, even as it brought them into a relationship that was itself a third entity, the space where two circles overlap.

Even in their early years, when, as John said, they wrote "nose to nose" and "eyeball to eyeball" Lennon/McCartney songs clearly bore the stamp of their primary creators�John usually dwelling on betrayal and loneliness ("Tell me why you cried/ And why you lied to me") and Paul on devotion and connection ("There's really nothing else I'd rather do/ 'Cause I'm happy just to dance with you").

At the same time, the songs clearly evolved through a shared vision�at first, for engaging, infectious, emotionally direct pop, later for more ambitious, far-reaching ideas and sounds. Their harmonies make the chemistry and connection palpable, along with an implicit communication that extended to the whole band� "just being able to sort of blink," Lennon said, "or make a certain noise and I know they'll all know where we are going."

Creative Pairs: Lennon and McCartney

The nature of John and Paul's intimacy evolved over the years. In the early days, the partners were hardly ever apart. In Hamburg, the Beatles famously played for hours at a time (adding up, as Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out, to the famous 10,000 hours of "deliberate practice" that Anders Ericsson has determined leads to true mastery.) Paul and John essentially lived together on the road; even on days off, they got together to write.

After August 1966, when they stopped touring, their lives were more separate. John lived in a mansion in the suburbs of London with his wife and son. Paul lived in London, first with his girlfriend Jane Asher's family, and then in a townhouse not far from the EMI studios on Abbey Road.

In part because each man grew as an artist, in part because they marinated in wild, innovative scenes, in part because they turned so much of their ferocious energy into a meticulous, relentless and inventive use of studio technology, the songs, beginning with the album Revolver, began to take on new color and oddity and elegance. Lennon wrote the lyrics for "Tomorrow Never Knows" after reading The Psychedelic Experience and following its instructions on an LSD trip: "Turn off your mind relax and float downstream." When it came time to record the song, he told George Martin that he wanted the sound of a hundred chanting Tibetan monks. He also suggested that he be suspended from a rope, get a good push and sing while spinning around the mike.

McCartney, meanwhile, edged into an almost operatic narrative style with "Eleanor Rigby," and his infectious pop developed new layers as with "Got To Get You Into My Life."

According to the conventional wisdom, their drift apart had begun. But the increased distance sometimes functioned like the space between boxers in a ring�giving more room for a powerful shot. "He'd write 'Strawberry fields,' I'd go away and write 'Penny Lane,' " McCartney said. "If I'd write 'I'm Down,' he'd go away and write something similar to that. To compete with each other. But it was very friendly competition because we were both going to share in the rewards anyway."

Friendly, but with a sharp edge. "I would bring in a song and you could sort of see John stiffen a bit," Paul said. "Next day he'd bring in a song and I'd sort of stiffen. And it was like, 'Oh, you're going to do that, are you? Right. You wait till I come up with something tomorrow.' "

The favorite back-and-forth�who was the real genius in the pair?�looks to set one on a pedestal. But when we look closely at the back and forth, that debate's most cherished assumptions come into question�for example, that John charged ahead with the musical avant-garde while Paul nurtured traditional elements of melody and symmetry. It's true that John tended to stick his finger in the audience's eye while Paul usually preferred to coo to them. John's "Revolution 9" may be the oddest, most dissonant thing ever laid down on a big pop album and Paul's "Let It Be" and "Hey Jude" set a standard for sweetness and formal perfection.

But in some ways, it was Paul who forged the frontier and John who raced to catch and exceed him. From 1966 to '68, John lived a weird, sleepy, deeply interior life. He spent days on end dropping acid and watching television. Paul, meanwhile, threw himself into the London art world and its "happenings"�performances that blurred the boundary between artist and audience. In 1965, their music publisher Dick James gave them each a Brenell Mark 5 tape recorder. While John used his to record rough demos, Paul, immersed in the experimental work of composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, jiggered the machine to disable the erase head and make tape loops of layered sounds. He brought these to the Beatles sessions to create the sound for "Tomorrow Never Knows," the famous "John" song.

"I lived a very urbane life in London," McCartney remembered. "John used to come in from Weybridge � and I'd tell him what I'd been doing: 'Last night I saw a Bertolucci film and I went down the Open Space, they're doing a new play there.' "*

Paul said John would reply: "God man, I really envy you."

In 1966, a far-out artist named Yoko Ono moved to London from New York City. Paul not only met her first; he had helped create the India Gallery where she and Lennon met. Though it took several years to ripen, Lennon eventually threw himself into the relationship�he literally asked people to consider them JohnandYoko. (Yoko made for the third person, following Pete Shotton and Paul McCartney, with whom he collapsed his name.)

Joined with her, John left no doubt who would be master of the avant garde. Where Paul had merely attended happenings, John and Yoko staged them. Where Paul used his tape loops to extend the pop form and kept his wildest, most experimental recordings in the can, John insisted that "Revolution 9" go on a Beatles record.

The point here isn't to identify whether John or Paul was the "real" edge, but to underscore how keenly they watched each other. Indeed, Paul's dive into the London art scene may itself have been a reaction to his image as the "cute" Beatle, compared with John, the "smart" one.

This constant give and take took a decisive shift in August 1967, when the band's manager Brian Epstein died. For some time, Epstein had been more figurehead than real leader�and it is telling that, by the mid-1960s at least, he deferred to Paul far more than to the others. But in a tenuous democracy led in strange fashion by two principals, he gave cover, the way even a weak parent will for squabbling boys.

Paul had asserted control before Epstein's death, when he conceived of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and dominated the sessions. With Brian gone, Paul's role as a de facto manager became far more obvious�and far more threatening to John's own sense of control. "Paul had a tendency to come along and say well he's written these ten songs, let's record now," John said, claiming that he and George became "side men for Paul." But this bitter language came later. And for a long while, he acquiesced. He was too checked out to do much of anything else.

The traditional story is that John withdrew from the band even further when he took up with Yoko. She is cast as usurper�provoking rifts that led to the band's demise. But on closer look, we have to ask whether John actually used her to assert his dominance�to claim his rightful, incontestable leadership. To the others, John's insistence that Yoko be treated as an equal seemed preposterous. But for John�however aware of his audaciousness�it all still fit: It was his band. He could bring in new members the same way he'd brought in Pete Shotton, the way he replaced Bill Smith with Len Garry�the way he brought in Paul. As strange as it might sound, even John's dramatic break with the band can be seen as a power move�a backhanded form of engagement. In September 1969, as Paul urged that the Beatles get back to their roots and play live shows, John shot back, in the account given by biographer Bob Spitz, "I think you're daft. I wasn't going to tell you, but I'm breaking the group up."

The language is key. John's leaving the band would mean its dissolution. He later made the claim explicit: "I started the band. I disbanded it. It's as simple as that."

But the break was hardly simple. It's not even clear that Lennon wanted a final break. For all his bluster in the band meeting, he never made his decision public�which is to say, he never made it real. To the contrary, just months after he told Paul he wanted a "divorce," he talked publicly about the band recording again and even touring. "It'll probably be a rebirth, you know, for all of us," he said. Perhaps John needed to believe he could end the band in order to stick with it.

At first, Paul showed signs that he would step back and let John get what he needed. He saw the choice, he said later, to accept Yoko or to lose John, and he chose the former: "When you find yourself in times of trouble � let it be."

But now, at a moment of great turmoil, two new factors came into play. For years, George Harrison had been the "quiet Beatle" at the side. Literally, as John and Paul faced the crowd side-to-side in performance, he stood far off facing them. But as he grew into his own�writing songs like "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun"�he bristled at Paul's bossiness and grew positively indignant at taking instructions from John's wife. At one point, according to George Martin, he and Lennon even came to blows. His energy made the tenuous balance between John and Paul much less stable.

Meanwhile, the Beatles, as a business, were in such a freefall that John predicted they could go completely broke. Someone needed to take control at Apple Corps, a wildly ambitious holding company that had turned to chaos. Paul wanted his new bride Linda's father and brother, Lee and John Eastman, to run Apple. But in another impetuous power move, John summarily signed with Allen Klein, a brash manager with a reputation for bullying record companies for higher royalties. (Klein was also a questionable character; he basically stole ownership of the Rolling Stones' catalog and later went to jail for tax fraud.)

George and Ringo followed John and signed with Klein. Paul held out. But for all his defiance, his vulnerability came strongly into play, as well. He had never yielded his essential devotion to John�and the rejections devastated him. "John's in love with Yoko," he said. "He's no longer in love with us."

As Paul wrote in "Let It Be," the light always shined on him, even on cloudy nights. But now, as a storm raged, he fell into a profound depression. He stayed in bed and drank through the day. "Boy, you're going to carry that weight a long time"�this grew out of his despair, he said. But he also wrote, in what seems a plea to his partner, "You and I have memories, longer than the road that stretches up ahead."

In the spring of 1970, with tensions among the four Beatles still at a fever pitch, Paul released a solo album and included a short Q&A that he authored with his publicist. It included this exchange.

Q: Are you planning a new album or single with the Beatles?

PAUL: No.

Q: Is this album a rest away from the Beatles or the start of a solo career?

PAUL: Time will tell. Being a solo means it's "the start of a solo career �" and not being done with the Beatles means it's just a rest. So it's both really.

Like John, Paul hardly said the band had broken up for good. "It's just a rest," he said.

But newspapers seized on the first public acknowledgment of the band's rumored troubles. "McCartney Breaks Off With Beatles," ran the New York Times headline on April 11, 1970. This loss of face�the public acknowledgment of a coup�was more than John could stand. "I was cursing," he said, "because I hadn't done it. I wanted to do it, I should have done it. Ah, damn, shit, what a fool I was."

The time had long passed where he could just take a washboard and break it over a mate's head. The fight between these two partners now had the whole world in thrall. They would never work together again. But the history of their partnership was just beginning to be written. Hardly a straightforward account, it would be another winding road on their path together.

Read the third and final piece in the Beatles series.

Correction, Sept. 20, 2010: This sentence originally misspelled the name of the town of Weybridge. (Return.)

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From: Joshua Wolf Shenk Subject: Inside the Lennon/McCartney Connection, Part 3 Posted Thursday, Sept. 16, 2010, at 9:57 PM ET

This article is part of a series on creative pairs. To read the introduction, click here. To read the first part of the Beatles essay, click here.

"It's like there was me, then the Beatles phase, and now I'm me again" �Paul McCartney

It's supremely odd how history would play the collaboration between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The result of one of the most intertwined partnerships in music history, their work would consistently be reduced to static roles. It's almost as if, faced with the bound pair, a culture obsessed with individualism found a way to cleave them in two.

Take, for example, the relentless focus on "John" songs versus "Paul" songs�or sections of songs, or single lines�as though that's the skeleton key to the Beatles' inner workings.

Actually, this tradition has an impeccable source: John and Paul themselves. The irony is that the way they came to tell their own story, after their split, may speak less to the way they separated and more to the way that they remained connected.

First, consider the usual take. "Now your songs were co-credited, you know, in the Beatles era," Terry Gross said to Paul in a 2001 interview. "My understanding is, correct me if I'm wrong, that many of the songs were written by one of you or the other, although the other would do some editing on the song, but that few of the songs were actually true collaborations."

"Is that right?" she asked. "Is that accurate?"

In response, Paul gave what has become a kind of official history: In the early days, he said, he and John were constantly in each other's presence, and "everything was co-written; we hardly ever wrote things separate."

Then, after a few years, as we got a bit of success with the Beatles and didn't actually live together or weren't just always on the road together sharing hotel rooms, then we had the luxury of writing things separately. So John would write something like "Nowhere Man," sort of separately in his house outside London, and I would write something like "Yesterday" quite separately on my own, and as you say we would come together and check 'em out against each other. Sometimes we would edit a line of each other's. More often, we'd just sort of say, "Yeah, that's great."

This bit�clear, ordered, and apparently airtight�is typical of McCartney. Lennon delivered basically the same message in a 1970 interview with Jann Wenner and, typical for him, he both far overstated the case and then doubled around to underscore its true ambiguity.

"When did your songwriting partnership with Paul end?" Wenner asked.

"That ended," Lennon jumped in quickly, and then he paused for several seconds. "I don't know, around 1962, or something." He laughed, and it sounds like a nervous laugh, or maybe he was announcing a joke: 1962 is when Paul and John first began laying their compositions down on studio tape for George Martin at EMI. "I don't know," Lennon went on. "I mean, if you give me the albums I can tell you exactly who wrote what, you know, and which line. I mean, we sometimes wrote together and sometimes didn't but all our best work�apart from the early days, like 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' we wrote together and things like that�we wrote apart always, you know."

Then he returned to the question and contradicted himself. "We always wrote separately," he said, "but we wrote together because � because we enjoyed it a lot sometimes, and also because they'd say, 'Well, you're going to make an album?' We'd get together and knock off a few songs, you know, just like a job."

John's statement sounds like nonsense: "We always wrote separately but we wrote together." It's impossible to straighten into a literal meaning. But it actually captures the reality of their collaboration quite well.

Sometimes, it's true, songs tumbled out of their creators in whole. It's telling that McCartney seized the two clearest examples�"Yesterday" and "Nowhere Man"�when he described the collaboration to Terry Gross. On waking one morning, Paul sat down and practically transcribed the music for "Yesterday" on piano, using nonsense lyrics at first�"Scrambled egg � ." "Nowhere Man" has a parallel story. After five hours trying to write a song, and failing, John gave up in frustration. "Then," he told Playboy in 1980, " 'Nowhere Man' came, words and music, the whole damn thing as I lay down."

Neither experience was typical. For one thing, even when John and Paul were apart, they were constantly in touch, according to Cynthia Lennon's account of John's process. (She had a firsthand view through mid-1968). John had a studio in their attic and he went there at all odd times. "Then," Cynthia wrote, "there would be phone calls back and forth to Paul, as they played and sang to each other over the phone."

John and Paul also met frequently to work. In 1967, the journalist Hunter Davies sat in on several of those sessions. One priceless account shows the slow, ambling course of discovery on the way toward "A Little Help From My Friends."

They started around 2 p.m. in Paul's workroom, a narrow, rectangular space full of instruments and amps and modern art. The previous afternoon, they'd gotten the tune for the song. Now they were trying to polish the melody and write lyrics. John took up his guitar and Paul banged at the piano. "Each seemed to be in a trance," Davies wrote, "until the other came up with something good, then he would pluck it out of a mass of noises and try it himself."

"Are you afraid when you turn out the light?" John offered.

Paul repeated the line, agreeing it was good. John said they could begin each of the verses with a question. He offered another one. "Do you believe in love at first sight?" "No," he interrupted himself. "It hasn't got the right number of syllables." He tried singing the line breaking it in two between "believe" and "in love."

"How about 'Do you believe in a love at first sight?' " Paul offered. John sang that, and instantly added another line. "Yes I'm certain that it happens all the time." They repeated these three lines over and over again. It was now five o'clock. Some others came by, and as they bantered about, Paul started doodling on the piano before breaking out into "Can't Buy Me Love." John joined in, shouting and laughing. Then they both shouted out "Tequila."

"Remember in Germany?" John said. "We used to shout out everything." They did the song again, with John throwing in words in every pause�"Knickers" and "Duke of Edinburgh" and "Hitler."

"Then, as suddenly as it had started," Davies wrote, "they both went back to the work at hand."

John sang a slight modification of the line they'd agreed on. "What do you see when you turn out the light?" Then he answered the question: "I can't tell you, but I know it's mine." Paul said that would do and wrote the four lines on a piece of exercise paper propped up on the piano. Then they broke for cake.

Had Jann Wenner picked up Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, pointed to the second track, and took Lennon up on his offer to say "exactly who wrote what, you know, and which line," could Lennon have said honestly he had written that day's material? Sure. The only explicit edit of Paul's was the indefinite article "a."

Yet, looking for concrete divisions in their labor, though not irrelevant, can certainly seem myopic. It feels, from Davies' account, as though the two men were bound by a thousand invisible strings.

Davies looked on at the partners before Yoko, before The White Album� "the tension album" Paul said. But tension had always been key to their work. The strings connecting them hardly dissolved, even in the times when the collaboration was adversarial, the kind of exchange that Andre Agassi described when he said that, if he hadn't faced Pete Sampras, he'd have a better record, "but I'd be less." Picking up on that incisive line, Michael Kimmelman wrote in his review of Agassi's book Open that "rivalry � [is] the heart of sports, and, for athletes, no matter how bitter or fierce, something strangely akin to love: two vulnerable protagonists for a time lifted up not despite their differences but because of them."

But even in the hardest times, it's hardly true that John and Paul stopped working together. In what was, ostensibly, the nadir of their partnership in January 1969, their concert on the Apple rooftop shows the two men in profound sympathy. At one point, John forgot a verse to "Don't Let Me Down." He and Paul proceeded in perfect sync as John sang nonsense lyrics, then returned to the top of the verse as if nothing had happened. You can see on the film how John shoots Paul a look of pure boyish glee. Several months later, when John wrote "The Ballad of John and Yoko," he rushed to Paul's doorstep. With George and Ringo out of town, he insisted they go straight to the studio. They cut the song in one long day, John taking the guitars and lead vocal, Paul on bass, drums, piano, maracas�and coming in with breathtaking harmonies.

We typically look back on a broken partnership and assume it suffered from distance and alienation. But as Arthur and Elaine Aron have shown, relationships can suffer just as much from too much closeness and the consequent loss of control or identity. People describing these kinds of relationships use words like suffocating, smothering, overwhelming. They've lost too much of their individual distinction into a shared whole.

There's good reason to believe this happened with John and Paul. To understand why, we need to consider the reality of the early 1970s. Today, with Wikipedia and mountains of Beatles books, we have fantastic detail on the minutiae of their individual contributions. But when they worked together, and when they split, they were, as writers, just as they appeared in their credits: Lennon/McCartney. When John took tea at the Plaza Hotel in the 1970s, the pianist would serenade him with "Yesterday." On a TV show, the band played "Michelle" during a break. "At least I wrote the middle eight on that one," John said.

It was as though the partners had deposited every asset of reputation and identity into a joint bank account. After their split, they stood in line, day after day, to take the maximum withdrawal. Of course, there were literal bank accounts�immense financial and practical complications of their divorce. But what's interesting here is their self-conception�their desperate need to individuate. One of their most common words after the split was me. From Paul's self-questionnaire in April 1970:

Q: Did you enjoy working as a solo?

PAUL: Very much. I only had me to ask for a decision, and I generally agreed with me.

The next year, John told Jann Wenner that his first solo album was the "best thing I've ever done." "Now I wrote all about me and that's why I like it," he said. "It's me! And nobody else. That's why I like it." Paul got to the identity question even more directly in an interview with Life magazine. "It's like there was me, then the Beatles phase, and now I'm me again."

As they gave their history, John and Paul became relentless in dissecting their own work. This formed the bedrock of the history of their collaboration. Asked about the songs, they often used the possessive: "That's John's," Paul would say, or "That's mine." John would do the same. It's telling that two men with notoriously poor memories�neither knew how many times they'd been to Hamburg, for example�left in doubt the authorship of only a single melody in a single song ("In My Life").

Of course, they did make many distinct and identifiable contributions. But with the ferocity of their claims for singular ownership, did they protest too much?

Even their bitterness after the split speaks to connection. After Paul's press release, and his public shot at his ex-partner's exhibitions ("too many people preaching practices"), Lennon wrote a song called "How Do You Sleep" with the lines "Those freaks was right when they said you was dead" and "The only thing you done was Yesterday" and "The sound you make is Muzak to my ears."

This is nasty stuff. But the opposite of intimacy isn't conflict. It's indifference. The relationship between Paul and John had always been a tug of war�and that hardly stopped when they ceased to collaborate directly. Asked what he thought Paul would make of his first solo album, Lennon said, "I think it'll probably scare him into doing something decent, and then he'll scare me into doing something decent, like that."

Predictably, Paul took a mostly sunny air in interviews after the breakup�and he returned to an admiring view of John that would grow over the years. He even thanked his ex-partner for ushering in a new and vital phase of life. "I sort of picked up on his lead," Paul said in 1971. "John had said, 'Look, I don't want to be that anymore. I'm going to be this.' And I thought, 'That's great.' I liked the fact he'd done it, and so I'll do it with my thing. He's given the okay."

With John, the basic ambiguity came through�his loving Paul, and needing to stay separate. On The Mike Douglas Show in 1972, a young man in the audience asked John if "How Do You Sleep" was "vicious." John at first denied it, saying he had just had dinner with Paul who was laughing and smiling. "If I can't have a fight with my best friend," he said, "I don't know who I can have a fight with."

Douglas was just moderating, but it seems he couldn't resist this striking declaration. He turned to Lennon. "Is he your best friend, Paul?"

"I guess in the male sex he," John stammered, "� he was. I don't know about now, because I don't see much of him, you know."

Two years later, John would mix up his tenses when describing Paul in an even more revealing way. It was Thanksgiving night in 1974, when he joined Elton John at a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden.

Lennon wore a black silk shirt, a black jacket, and a necklace that dangled a flower over his chest. He had on his usual "granny" glasses with dark lenses. His thin, brown hair fell down past his shoulders. After storming through "Whatever Gets You Through the Night" and "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," Lennon came to the microphone to round out the set.

"I'd like to thank Elton and the boys for having me on tonight," he said. "We tried to think of a number to finish off with so I can get out of here and be sick, and we thought we'd do a number of an old, estranged fiance of mine, called Paul. This is one I never sang. It's an old Beatle number and we just about know it."

The song was "I Saw Her Standing There."

Though he lived another six years, John Lennon never took the stage for a major show again. His strange words have a peculiar and lasting echo. By then, Paul and John had been the most famous exes in the world for four years. But somehow, they were still "fiances"�prospective spouses. As much as had passed, the energy between them was always in front of them�always, somehow, in the future.

Coming next week: "Meet the Idiots," an artist-illustrator pair put their partnership under the microscope. If you haven't already, read the introduction the creative pairs series: "Two Is the Magic Number."

Like Slate on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter. Joshua Wolf Shenk, a Slate correspondent, is the author of Lincoln's Melancholy and a contributor to the Atlantic and other magazines. Follow him on Twitter and like his Creative Pairs group on Facebook.

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O Captain, Our Captain Sir Patrick Stewart on coaxing Trekkies to try a little Shakespeare or, this time, Mamet.

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By Jada Yuan Published Sep 19, 2010 ShareThis (Photo: Robert Ascroft)

N ormally, on a morning like this one, Patrick Stewart would be walking briskly up West 4th Street, muttering to himself. The 70-year-old Shakespearean master, better known as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, is finishing rehearsals for David Mamet�s two-man play A Life in the Theatre, and he likes to use his morning commute from Soho to the Atlantic Theater�s rehearsal space on 15th Street to run his lines. �I totally fit in in New York,� he says. �Here, you mutter on the street, and people just assume you�re crazy or you�re an actor. As long as I cover my head, I can go anywhere I like.� He�s wearing a newsboy cap.

Stewart prefers a �very regimented� daily routine. He wakes up early, makes his tea, reads the newspaper, listens to BBC�s �World at One� radio news as he showers, and walks to rehearsals, to which he is never, ever, late. He is so unwavering that when we walk into the local newsstand, the clerk immediately whips out a copy of the Guardian from behind the register. �We sold out this morning,� says the clerk, who adds that he always sets aside papers to protect regulars against a sudden influx of London tourists. �I think when I first came in, they thought I was just passing through,� says Stewart, �but now they�ve been persuaded that I will show up. I�ll be here, hopefully, for months��Life is booked through January 2��and,� he adds for the clerk�s benefit, �I get the Sunday Observer.�

Today, Stewart has allowed himself leeway to meander with a journalist, even though our leisurely pace seems to stress him out. He will stop for coffee and a bagel at the Grey Dog and take me by his favorite architectural finds. Back home, he�s spent the last five years channeling his passion for pediments into remodeling a ten-acre property outside London; here, he spends a lot of time reading historic-building plaques. �Look at this fountain!� he exclaims, as he exclaims each time we pass a fountain, this one at Jackson Square. �It�s glorious! And it�s working! In England it would just be gathering dust and dirt and leaves.� Also on Stewart�s tour: the door of a townhouse built by Revolutionary War general John Sullivan, and the church of Our Lady of Guadalupe at St. Bernard�s.

Stewart first came to New York in 1971 for Peter Brook�s famous �White Box� production of A Midsummer Night�s Dream. �But that doesn�t count,� he says, explaining that his real time as an honorary New Yorker began when he started making regular trips here for theater and films in 1990. Every time he comes back, he tries out a new neighborhood. Last time it was Tribeca, for easy access across the Brooklyn Bridge to BAM, where he was playing Macbeth. Directed by Rupert Goold and set in a regime resembling the Cold War Soviet Union, that production went to Broadway. It was also filmed for PBS, where it will premiere October 6. The production was a triumph for Stewart, who says he had to figure out how to play a role usually taken by a 40-year-old. His thinking: �Macbeth was lacking in the hunger for power that would ultimately lead him to murder and mayhem, but was married to a much younger, sexy woman with drive and ambition whom he was crazy for, and wanted to make her happy in every way.� It is entirely coincidental that Stewart met his girlfriend of two years, 32-year-old Brooklyn jazz singer Sunny Ozell, at the end of the BAM run. Though, you know, good for him, and�given how Stewart looks today in a snug Brooklyn Industries T-shirt�good for her. (Stewart�s sexiness is no surprise to Star Trek fans, of course.)

A Life in the Theatre�s themes likewise resonate with Stewart�s experience. It�s about the relationship between a young, talented actor (played by T.?R. Knight) and an older, more experienced one, and we see it develop over the course of 90 minutes and 26 scenes. Stewart first played the role in the West End five years ago, as part of a concentrated effort (five Shakespeare plays, Ibsen�s The Master Builder,Waiting for Godot) to revive his London stage career. He says he enjoyed Life so much that, after the London run, he shot off a note to Mamet asking him to keep him in mind if it went to New York. Nine months ago, Mamet got in touch. After overseeing the first rehearsals, he gave Stewart a T-shirt bearing the logo of Yorkshire Gold tea, because he�d seen him drink it constantly.

And speaking of single-minded enthusiasms: Yes, Stewart expects that a percentage of Life�s audience will be fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as it always is. His Trek co-stars and producers, with whom he is still close after nearly 25 years, also will come to see it, as they always do. In the past year, Stewart has gone to two Star Trek conventions in the U.K., and others in Sydney, Melbourne, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. He enjoys the travel and the reunions with colleagues, but he also sees the conventions as a great tool for audience recruitment. �I always spend time talking about the theater that I�ve been doing, encouraging them to come and see me if they can,� he says. He believes his solo adaptation of A Christmas Carol�opened on Broadway in 1991, then remounted in six Decembers�owes its success to buzz built through Star Trek fan clubs, which sold out the first weeks. �I am completely pragmatic,� he says. �Without Next Generation, nobody would have put me alone on a Broadway stage in a suit with a few bits of furniture performing a 150-year-old script.�

Once Life ends, Sir Patrick, who was knighted this past June, will go back to film and television, and to preside over the youth-development program of the Huddersfield Town soccer club in his native West Yorkshire. He�s also occasionally teaching at the University of Huddersfield, where he is chancellor and two years ago became a professor in the drama department, �which, given that I left school at 15, is quite ironic,� he says.

On the corner opposite the rehearsal space, Stewart, as he�s been doing all morning, puts out his arm to block me, then checks both ways before gesturing me across. He has what he describes as a �real phobia of getting knocked down in an American street, lying there, looking at the sky, and being really cross that I wasn�t dying in the U.K.� He threw caution to the wind just once, earlier in the morning, upon seeing two giant inflatable rats on Spring Street. Once he learned they were not ads for exterminators but a labor protest, he jaywalked over to learn more. Two workers handed him a flyer and explained their complaints against Bernini Construction. �Well, I have a long history of being a union man. My father and me,� said Stewart. �So I give you my support.� �Appreciate it,� said one of the workers, then leaned in to get a better look under Stewart�s cap. �Hey, did anyone ever tell you you look like that actor?� �All the time,� said Stewart, gesturing at their shiny bald heads. �You look a lot like him, too.�

What Netflix CEO hopes U.S. won't notice 'Self-absorbed' Americans may ignore Canada price disparity By Etan Vlessing Share 446

Sept 23, 2010, 08:00 AM ET

Reed Hastings (Getty) Related Netflix Canada cheaper than U.S. service Netflix busted for posing actors as consumers Netflix to unveil Canadian service

Netflix is now in Canada, offering local subscribers an online movie and TV streaming service for $7.99 a month. The move marks the first international foray for the California-based online streaming/DVD-by-mail giant. Etan Vlessing caught up with Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings in Toronto as he reaches beyond his 15 million American subscribers to start rolling out his online subscription service around the world.

The Hollywood Reporter: You're looking beyond the U.S. border for growth. Where will you expand next after Canada? [Related: Netflix hires actors to pose as consumers at Canadian launch event.]

Reed Hastings: For now we're focused on Canada. If we succeed in Canada, we will certainly look at other markets. But each market is unique, and what attracted us to Canada is great broadband, and a great love of movies and TV shows.

THR: American services when they enter the Canadian market typically charge the locals more than they charge stateside. Why the discount for Canadians?

Hastings: We want to provide an incredible value for Canadians, and it's the lowest price we have anywhere in the world for unlimited screenings. And anyone can try it for free for a month. It's pretty addictive.

THR: Are you concerned that American Netflix subscribers will look north and ask for the same discount Canadians get at $7.99?

Hastings: How much has it been your experience that Americans follow what happens in the world? It's something we'll monitor, but Americans are somewhat self-absorbed.

THR: How will you will measure success for Netflix Canada?

Hastings: I'm certain we'll succeed, so it's kind of a matter of degree. We're not quantifying that in terms of subscriber numbers or profitability. What we're focused on is getting out there. We've got to get out on all of the devices, get the word out, and we need to be such a good service that people not only stay with us but rave to their friends about it.

THR: After Canada, where else will Netflix expand internationally?

Hastings: We're really open-minded, whether that's western Europe, Latin America, Asia or Russia. It's unlikely to be Africa, but other than that, all continents are open.

THR: The knock on Netflix is you offer mostly library content. Are you looking for more Canadian subscription revenue before you pay out for newer content? [Related: The network that won't stream its shows on Netflix.]

Hastings: Yes and no. In the States, it's mostly older content also on streaming, and it's been wildly successful. And where we add unique value, a new option, is making the great TV shows and the great movies from around the world available. When we just do the new hot show that's already on TV, and anybody can get it there, there's less added value for us. And we're not trying to be the only option that Canadians use. We're trying to be one more supplemental option, so Canadians will watch some over-the-air TV, have cable or IPTV, and rent or buy DVDs.

THR: Your new Canadian competitors like broadcasters and cable operators offer sports. Any chance Netflix will offer that?

Hastings: Very unlikely. Our brand at Netflix is really focused on movies and TV shows. And sport rights are a very different group of rights. In the States, there's ESPN3, and each country has different options, and other than premiere league football, there tends to be very little global content. And movie and TV rights are pretty broad content.

THR: Is the Canadian market any different than the U.S. in terms of consumer patterns?

Hastings: No, it's pretty universal, the attraction to great value and the low price, and the unlimited. And I can't emphasize the unlimited enough. To be able to do the on-demand for a flat fee is just wonderful for people. And I think that will be true in nations around the world, including the States and Canada.

THR: So the U.S. and Canadian Netflix services are identical?

Hastings: It's identical in terms of interface and how you sign up. The content is unique to Canada as we have to license it separately. And in the States, there's also the DVD-by-mail part, which will only be in the States.

THR: Why not expand the physical DVD delivery service into Canada?

Hastings: There's a finite market for DVD-by-mail, and the growth over the next 10 years will be in streaming. If we were starting out in the States now, we would do the same thing and focus on streaming.

Annals of Obvious: College Guys Would Prefer to Bang Hot Chicks According to an article in yesterday's Daily Texan, "Science says men like shapely ladies." To wit, David Lewis, one of (surprise, surprise) David Buss's graduate students offered this explanation of a research article published this month in Evolution and Human Behavior: "I would say that a male strategy of searching for cues to immediate fertility in a potential short-term mate, and cues to long-term reproductive value in a long-term mate, would have been favored by natural selection." Well thanks for that lesson in evolutionary psychobabble, David. I think what you mean is that what men want for short-term sex is, you know, a phat ass while what they look for in a long-term mate is a lady in the street but a freak in the bed (apologies to Ludacris).

Here is what the study actually measured. I know because I read the whole thing.

A mere 381 University of Texas students, 194 male, 187 female, were asked to look at a single picture that was covered up by two boxes: a face box and a body box. When the dudes (whose average age was 18.85, SD=1.29) were told to consider whether the gal would be suitable for a one night stand, more of them uncovered the body whereas when told to look for a 'long term committed relationship' more bros uncovered the face. The conclusion? 18.85 year old dudebros, when forced to choose one or the other, look at a girl's body if they want to fuck her.

Evolutionary psychology has the most hilariously narrow definition of "health" and "attractiveness" that it shouldn't surprise anyone that, as usual, they are providing evidence for something that sells magazines (hot models) but does not really play out in real life (men having the opportunity to fuck hot models). Their claims of how tall/hot/thinness indicates health: Health-correlated cues of reproductive value [future reproductive potential] can be conveyed through both the face and the body. Pocked-marked facial skin, for example, reveals a history of disease (Buss, 1994), while increased leg length is correlated with a multitude of health benefits: lower risks of cardiovascular disease (Gunnell, Whitley, et al, 2003), diabetes (Davey Smith et al, 2001) and cancer (Gunnell, May, et al, 2003). Finally, age-dependent cues also related to reproductive value, such as taut facial skin and firm breasts (Symons, 1979) can be diagnosed through a woman's face and body.(p 349) Hear that ladies? All those chick mag articles about how tall skinny people aren't healthy are LIES. So keep buying that foundation and keep working out. And if you're short? Guess you have no value.

While the authors include in their discussion the caveat that, because the sample was all college students, this research should be replicated with a more diverse population so women can feel like they aren't good enough for a wider variety of men, not just college dudebros, they don't acknowledge the huge limitation of only working with 17-20 year old college kids. In my experience, the vast majority of college guys haven't had much experience with short OR long term 'mating,' and many college students, despite their reports to the contrary, are really just interested in short-term sex. "Long term," in a college relationship, could mean two weeks.

For the record, this is a real study that was published in a real journal. "More than just a pretty face: men's priority shifts toward bodily attractiveness in short-term versus long-term mating contexts." Jaime C. Confer, Carin Perilloux, David M. Buss Evolution & Human Behavior - September 2010 (Vol. 31, Issue 5, Pages 348-353, DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2010.04.002)

The Sad Science of Hipsterism The Psychology of Indie Bands, PBR and Weird Facial Hair Published on September 8, 2010

Behold the hipster, the stylishly disaffected breed of twentysomethings whose fog of twee whimsy envelopes Williamsburg and the East Village. Most who encounter the hipster in its natural habitat respond in one of two ways: derision or ridicule.

But science does not cast judgment. Its goal is to explore and explain dispassionately, whether the object of study be the noble eagle or the lowly nematode. So what does science have to tell us about this fascinatingly misunderstood breed, the indigenous North American hipster?

Surprisingly much.

In a paper in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Consumer Research entitled "Demythologizing Consumption Practices: How Consumers Protect Their Field- Dependent Identity Investments from Devaluing Marketplace Myths," authors Zeynep Arsel and Craig J. Thompson delve deep into the phenomenon of hipsterism, and in particular its most abiding mystery: if everyone hates hipsters, why would anyone want to be one? Related Links The Onion Gets It Right, Volume 1 The Name Game Kleptomania: London on Zero Pounds a Day Description to Prescription Lady Gaga's Great and Insincere Persuasion

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The long and short of it is that they don't.

In general, psychologists who study consumers understand that people are largely motivated to spend money not just on things that they materially need, but that bolster their sense of identity. They purchase not just goods and services, but mythologies. Imagining themselves as rugged, rebellious patriots, they buy a Harley-Davidson. Imagining themselves as respected and well-heeled, they buy a Lexus.

Hipsters, though, follow a different paradigm. Their problem is that their purchases tend to place them within a category whose mythology they despise. That's right: Nobody likes hipsters, not even hipsters.

As Arsel and Thompson put it, the beats of the '50s and hippies of the '60s and '70s, both of which had an admirable authenticity about them even if you didn't care for the particulars, eventually gave rise to "the millennial hipster," which "came to be represented as an uberconsumer of trends and as a new, and rather gullible, target market that consumes cool rather than creating it." As examples of the dorkification they cite online parodies of the iconic Mac v. PC ads and this viral YouTube video.

The upshot being that any people who legitimately enjoy all the trappings on hipsterhood -- the authors mention Pabst Blue Ribbon, Puma, and the trucker hat -- must psychologically distance themselves from the demographic group of which they are so clearly a part. And so their subconscious brains have to work double time so that they can convince themselves that the things they buy do not reflect on their true character.

Arsel and Thompson interviewed hipsters and asked them how they dealt with the problem of being identified as such. The answer, they found, was to "demythologize" the hipster experience, that is, to psychologically reclassify their own behavior as being separate from the aggregate activity that the rest of the world lumps together as "hipster." They interviewed one consumer, identified as Scarlet, who told them:

I'm not gonna lie, I shop at Urban [Outfitters] sometimes, only when it's on sale of course... I like doing a lot of the things that are the hipster thing to do, but I do them because I like to do them, not because they're the cool thing to do. And because I am immersed in the social scene where there are a lot of hipsters, people mistake me for being one of them."

The deeper irony is that those who try to assert their independence from the commodification of identity wind up tapping into another marketplace myth, what the authors call "the myth of consumer sovereignty." This is the idea that by assiduously selecting from all the identity markers available for purchase, a person can assemble one that authentically reflects their true self independent of the marketplace. Some of the hipsters that Arsel and Thompson talked to are well aware of the futility of this project. Said one, identified as "Tom":

I don't necessarily know every single weird obscure band. I don't necessarily want to. But I mean, yeah, who do I hang out with? I hang out with like a bunch of tattooed indie dorks. So, yeah, I guess I am but I wouldn't self-identify, I think. I'd listen to stuff that's outside the mainstream or it's like I dress weird compared to the majority of the population. I just try not to think about it too much. The minute you start identifying with a subculture... you kind of lose individuality, surrender part of your identity, and we don't wanna do that.

This, then, is the essence of being a hipster. Pretending you aren't one.

UPDATE: For more PT-inflected insight into hipsterology, check out news editor Andrea Bartz's side project, Stuff Hipsters Hate, a blog that is now also out in book form.

UPDATE 2: Those seeking a more serious exposition of the hipster culture-space might wish to examine Hipster Runoff, an examination of alt-dom by a thoughtful and perspicacious insider.

Fire up Those Neurons for Positive Thinking What's Your Reaction: Inspiring Enlightening Crazy Scary Helpful Amazing Innovative Important Read More: Brain Neurons , Negative Thinking , Negative Thoughts , Neuropsychology , Positive Thinking , Power Of Positive Thinking , Taking In The Good , Unplug And Recharge , Living News

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Scientists believe that your brain has a built in "negativity bias." In other words, as we evolved over millions of years, dodging sticks and chasing carrots, it was a lot more important to notice, react to and remember sticks than it was for carrots.

That's because -- in the tough environments in which our ancestors lived -- if they missed out on a carrot, they usually had a shot at another one later on. But if they failed to avoid a stick -- a predator, a natural hazard or aggression from others of their species -- Wham, no more chances to pass on their genes.

The negativity bias shows up in lots of ways. For example, studies have found that: In a relationship, it typically takes five good interactions to make up for a single bad one.

People will work much harder to avoid losing100 than they will work to gain the same amount of money.

Painful experiences are much more memorable than pleasurable ones.

In your own mind, what do you usually think about at the end of the day? The 50 things that went right, or the one that went wrong? Like the guy who cut you off in traffic, what you wish you had said differently to a coworker, or the one thing on your To Do list that didn't get done ...

In effect, the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive ones. That shades implicit memory -- your underlying expectations, beliefs, action strategies and mood -- in an increasingly negative direction.

And that's just not fair, since probably most of the facts in your life are positive or neutral. Every day, lots of good things happen, such as a lovely sunset, someone is nice to you, you finish a batch of emails or you learn something new. And lots of other good things are ongoing aspects of your world (e.g., your children are healthy, life is peaceful in your corner of the planet) or yourself (e.g., personal qualities like determination, sincerity, fairness, kindness).

Besides the sheer injustice of it, acquiring a big pile of negative experiences in implicit memory banks, naturally makes a person more anxious, irritable and blue. Plus it makes it harder to be patient and giving toward others.

In evolution, Mother Nature only cares about passing on genes -- by any means necessary. She doesn't care if we happen to suffer along the way -- from subtle worries to intense feelings of sorrow, worthlessness or anger -- or create suffering for others.

The result: a brain that is tilted against lasting contentment and fulfillment.

But you don't have to accept this bias! By tilting toward the good -- "good" in the practical sense of that which brings more happiness to oneself and more helpfulness to others -- you merely level the playing field.

You'll still see the tough parts of life. In fact, you'll become better able to change them or bear them if you tilt toward the good, since that will help put challenges in perspective, lift your energy and spirits, highlight useful resources, and fill up your own cup so you have more to offer to others.

And now, tilted toward absorbing the good, instead of positive experiences washing through you like water through a sieve, they'll collect in implicit memory deep down in your brain. In the famous saying, "neurons that fire together, wire together." The more you get your neurons firing about positive facts, the more they'll be wiring up positive neural structures.

Taking in the good is a brain-science savvy and psychologically skillful way to improve how you feel, get things done and treat others. It is among the top five personal growth methods I know. In addition to being good for adults, it's great for children -- helping them to become more resilient, confident and happy.

Three simple steps to taking in the good:

1. Look for good facts, and turn them into good experiences. Good facts include positive events -- like the taste of good coffee or getting an unexpected compliment -- and positive aspects of the world and yourself. When you notice something good, let yourself feel good about it.

Try to do this at least a half dozen times a day. There are lots of opportunities to notice good events, and you can always recognize good things about the world and yourself. Each time takes just 30 seconds or so. It's private; no one needs to know you are taking in the good. You can do it on the fly in daily life, or at special times of reflection, like just before falling asleep (when the brain is especially receptive to new learning).

Notice any reluctance to feeling good. Such as thinking that you don't deserve to, or that it's selfish, vain or even shameful to feel pleasure. Or that if you feel good, you will lower your guard and let bad things happen.

Barriers to feeling good are common and understandable; but they get in the way of you taking in the resources you need to feel better, have more strength and have more inside to give to others. So acknowledge them to yourself, and then turn your attention back to the good news. Keep opening up to it, breathing and relaxing, letting the good facts affect you.

It's like sitting down to a meal: don't just look at it -- taste it!

2. Really enjoy the experience. Most of the time, a good experience is pretty mild, and that's fine. But try to stay with it for 20 or 30 seconds in a row -- instead of getting distracted by something else.

As you can, sense that it is filling your body becoming a rich experience. As Marc Lewis and other researchers have shown, the longer that something is held in awareness and the more emotionally stimulating it is, the more neurons that fire and thus wire together, and the stronger the trace in memory.

You are not craving or clinging to positive experiences, since that would ultimately lead to tension and disappointment. Actually, you are doing the opposite. By taking them in and filling yourself up with them, you will increasingly feel less fragile or needy inside, and less dependent on external supplies; your happiness and love will become more unconditional, based on an inner fullness rather than on whether the momentary facts in your life happen to be good ones.

3. Intend and sense that the good experience is sinking into you. People do this in different ways. Some feel it in their body like a warm glow spreading through their chest like the warmth of a cup of hot cocoa on a cold wintry day. Others visualize things like a golden syrup sinking down inside, bringing good feelings and soothing old places of hurt, filling in old holes of loss or yearning. A child might imagine a jewel going into a treasure chest in her heart. And some might simply know conceptually, that while this good experience is held in awareness, its neurons are firing busily away, and gradually wiring together

Any single time you do this will make only a little difference. But over time, those little differences will add up, gradually weaving positive experiences into the fabric of your brain and your self.

(For more on "Taking in the Good," please see Chapter 4 in Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom)