Allergies have returned with a vengeance. A heavy medical cocktail - two snoots of Nasonex, 10 mg of Zyrtec and some prescription eye drops - have staved off the worst of it so far. This morning, I merely felt severely congested and only one eye looked red enough to merit suspicions of a drug test. Which I would have passed, thank you. Winners don’t use, because users don’t win.
The weather gizmo on my desktop says yesterday’s high was 78. Today’s: 58. New England - the cradle of our nation, folks!
Several people have asked what I think of the economy in the past week or so. I don’t have any insight that you couldn’t draw from reading any major paper. Things grow worse. Once I get some money to move around I intend to invest in a mix of ETFs from Vanguard. But you shouldn’t necessarily take my advice on where to put money. How the economy’s doing and how I’m doing don’t always go hand in hand - and that’s presuming I even get the first part right.
Plus, my ideas change constantly. I used to want to save up enough to buy my own place. But then someone (either Julian Sanchez or Will Wilkinson) made the point that young, single people rarely improve their lot by buying a house. Once you get tied to a significant investment of real estate, you can’t pack up and move on a month’s notice. Now’s the time I should be chasing job opportunities, crazy projects or hot blondes with a passion for Chandler novels, 70s movies and straight whiskey. Call the difference between my rent and a mortgage (less interest deductions) a flexibility premium. I’m happy to pay.
My point: listen to me if you like, but don’t follow me out onto the lake.
A rare end-week media blow: The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. I don’t suppose I need to lend my voice to the volumes of critical praise for this novel, other then: yeah, that. Flynngrrl had a post once about a Supreme Court decision on abortion. In it, she made the point that the question of abortion rights comes down to one fundamental fork in the road: either you believe a woman owns her body or you don’t. Either a woman has an inherent value outside of her social role as Childbearer, or she doesn’t. The Handmaid’s Tale gives us a world where this question has been decided.
I don’t think it presents a realistic view of how religious fundamentalists would seize control of the United States (I hardly think they’d need to gun down Congress). But it doesn’t have to. Good science-fiction doesn’t look for the most likely future outcome starting from today’s events. Rather, it starts from a What If (no matter how outlandish), grounds it in verisimilitude, then rolls from there. And Atwood pulls that off beautifully.
And not only does Handmaid move and inform and signify (yeah, yeah, trivial accomplishments, those), but Atwood’s style amazed me, too. She uses a remarkable economy of language to describe the protagonist’s conflicted emotions - her loathing of her captors, her fearful desire to obey, her absolute and paranoid despair, her nostalgia for an admittedly troubled past, and so forth. Finding a novel this powerful leaves an impression on you; finding a novel this well-written delights you.
My writing style tends to imitate whoever I’ve read most recently. This process smooths out over time, and if I read a lot of different styles in rapid succession, such that I’m no longer a total slave. Picture a blank canvas: you start with red strokes, fear the final product will have too much red in it, then add in more colors until the final product looks rich and real. Then you tear it off the easel, hide it in your closet behind the winter coats, and go play Bejeweled instead. Anyhow, take a look at the twenty-one books I’ve read so far this year, then try to guess what my writing sounds like as a result. Bonus points if your answer incorporates needless French expressions (e.g., melange, fait accompli, pret-a-porter, mise-en-scene, and so forth).
A significant portion of my ideas come from the unconscious: random word associations or images that flit into my mind at odd hours. I vividly recall floating in the hypnagogic haze between wakefulness and dozing during a presentation at The Company when the word library planet appeared in my head. Those of you who’ve read “The Archivist” will recognize the result. My current project, which some of you have seen, came to me from the phrase murder kit. What goes into a murder kit, I wondered? And who would come up with that list? And why?
When I start writing and really hit the proverbial “zone,” I find myself in a sort of trance state. I become hyper-conscious of the sensory content of the world I’m writing, as perceived by the narrator or protagonist. Some people write best with music on or in a coffeeshop; I can’t stand the slightest surprising noise. Traffic and birds and crickets, yes; doors opening and people talking, no.
I never offer much in the way of description because I never go much for description in what I read. I frequently glaze over large blocks of text in order to get to dialogue; quote marks act as highlighter for me. Raymond Chandler and writers in his vein have proven the only exception, and you could make the argument that his particular method of description (”… the hole in her face where she unzippered her teeth …”) counts as dialogue anyway.
I never do a lot of research before I start writing, and I never break the trance once I get going. If I find something that I cannot reasonably fake, I’ll leave a note in brackets (”the total came to [[INSERT DOLLAR VALUE HERE]]; I paid in plastic”) and come back later. On occasion this gets me in trouble, as I’ll forget who I named what and pay for it later. That’s why I still need friends; that and the whole human thing.
Laptops work for some folks; not for me. At the end of an hour my lap feels too warm, and if I’m writing on a table I might as well have a desktop. I never write outside of my room (see above re: coffeeshops). I try not to write on my bed; it doesn’t have great lower back support when I’m sitting up and it confuses my body as to bedtime. And I prefer a larger screen and a higher resolution anyway: easier on the eyes.
I worry most about being melodramatic or grotesque, or about the picture in my mind being depicted clearly on the page. I worry least about being boring.
Two thousand words counts as a good night’s work for me, though I’m comfortable with anything over fifteen hundred. I can produce this in about an hour. Two nights of this a week means 3000-4000 words per week. Presuming you miss some nights and, on average, only stick to schedule 75% of the time, that’s still 112,500 words in 50 weeks. I give you two weeks’ vacation and one night in four off and you can still turn out a pretty thick novel in a year.
The best writing teacher I ever had, Dr. Vincent Fitzpatrick, always cautioned us against “writing abstractly about an abstraction.” I’ve just done that for about six hundred and fifty words here. All apologies.
Jesus Made Me Puke: Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone goes undercover at a Texas megachurch’s “Encounter Weekend.” The text speaks for itself:
“Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Why do alcoholics give birth to alcoholics? Why do the fatherless give birth to the fatherless?” He paused. “There are some people out there who will tell you it’s genetics. It’s in our genes, they say. Well, I tell you, it’s not genetics. It’s a generational curse!”
Fortenberry then started in on a rant against science and against scientific explanations for cycles of sin. “Take homosexuals,” he said. “Every single homosexual is a sexual-abuse victim. They are not born. They are created — by pedophiles.”
The crowd swallowed that one whole. One thing about this world: Once a preacher says it, it’s true. No one is going to look up anything the preacher says, cross-check his facts, raise an eyebrow at something that might sound a little off. Some weeks later, I would be at a Sunday service in which Pastor John Hagee himself would assert that the Bible predicts that Jesus Christ is going to return to Earth bearing a “rod of iron” to discipline the ACLU. It goes without saying that the ACLU was not mentioned in the passage in Ezekiel he was citing — but the audience ate it up anyway. When they’re away from the cameras, the preachers feel even less obligated to shackle themselves to facts of any kind. That’s because they know that their audience doesn’t give a shit. So long as you’re telling them what they want to hear, there’s no danger; your crowd will angrily dismiss any alternative explanations anyway as demonic subversion.
A team of twenty of the world’s leading scientists wouldn’t be able to convince so much as one person in this crowd that homosexuals are not created by pedophiles.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Can you name one economist, a credible economist who supports the [gas tax] suspension?
CLINTON: Well, you know, George, I think we’ve been for the last seven years seeing a tremendous amount of government power and elite opinion basically behind policies that haven’t worked well for the middle class and hard-working Americans. From the moment I started this campaign, I’ve said that I am absolutely determined that we’re going to reverse the trends that have been going on in our government and in our political system, because what I have seen is that the rich have gotten richer. A vast majority — I think something like 90 percent — of the wealth gains over the last seven years have gone to the top 10 percent of wage earners in America.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But can you name an economist who thinks this makes sense?
CLINTON: Well, I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.
Couple this with her support for the autism/vaccination link and we finally have the pure Anti-Science candidate that this country has been aching for since its inception.
(I kid, of course - none of them are that great)
Bridging the gap between mathematics and civil liberties, Radley Balko talks about the problem of DNA databases. Knowing that a test has a 99.9996% (or whatever) accuracy rate does not tell you all you need to know - you also need to know the actual incidence of what’s being tested for within the population. Few people know that. Hell, I still need to remind myself from time to time. Bayes’ Theorem in action.
Let’s say the U.S. adopts a Great Britain policy on collecting DNA–basically a move toward, at some point in the future, having DNA on file for everyone in the country. Well now the 1 in 1.1 million odds against the suspect in the L.A. Times case are being run against a database of 380 million people. The numbers say that you’re going to pull up about 345 matches in the U.S. alone. In the California case, the database is obviously much smaller than the entire U.S. population, and only one of those 345 people showed up from the 330,000-person FBI DNA database–the (admittedly unsympathetic) subject of the article. But any of the other 344 potential matches in the U.S. (or the 2,200 matches worldwide) could have committed the crime. They just weren’t in the database.
To put it another way: if I run an anabolic steroids test with 99% accuracy in a nursing home with 400 residents, I’m going to get at least 4 positive results. Does this mean that 4 octogenarians shoot themselves in the butt with parabolan every morning? Probably not.
Finally, for all my cheerleading about globalization, it helps to have a saner mind like IOZ put me right once in a while:
So, you know, on one hand “there were once nation-states,” but now there are “dynamos like India and China,” which are, what, anarchoprimitive agricollectives? The idea that some sort of stateless transnational borderless economic singularity is swiftly ripping away borders like stagehands rip up gaff tape on load-out is plain kooky. I am of course for the free movement of labor and capital. Call me the next time you hit Charles de Gaulle, or Beijing Capital International Airport for that fucking matter, without a passport. I’m just saying.
# Waiting in line for a scrip at the Target Pharmacy, I glanced down the aisle and saw a sign for Insolence Aids. Useful little niche, I thought. Use Dr. Fulghum’s Patented Mollifying Tonic for Ages 3 to 13. Same great formula for over one hundred years. Guaranteed to cut back-sass, pouting and tantrums by fifty percent. Then I realized I’d conflated the words Incontinence Aids and Insoles in a hasty skimming, a mistake I can’t be the first to have made.
# I went to a co-worker’s party in Brighton on Friday night. Folks I never saw played Beirut (which I always clarify as “beer pong,” because I don’t know that everyone uses that name) in the kitchen, while I sat in on several heated discussions to the rules of Asshole in the living room. We watched the Celtics lose Game 6 (”you’ve got to go for the percentage shots,” I kept yelling at the TV). I danced to an amateur DJ’s relatively small 90s crate and smoked a clove cigarette outside. Good times.
# I have a variety of exciting new bruises on my forearms from jiu-jitsu on Saturday. One’s about the size of a White Castle slider; the second, maybe a silver dollar. Another student got nicked in the temple with the point of a wooden knife. It bled worse than it turned out to be but, if the divot below my right index knuckle indicates anything, he’ll have an exciting new scar in about a week. Look out, ladies!
# I attended a Kentucky Derby party on Saturday! I don’t know if I made myself a mint julep, but I combined bourbon, ice, seltzer, syrup and mint leaves in a combination I found tasty. Gentlemen lounged around in suits and ascots; ladies preened and cooed under floppy sun hats. I missed the entirety of the actual race due to the smallness of the living room, but had an excellent time regardless. I hope to see everyone involved again some time soon.
# Allow me to confess some petty larcenies. FIRST: while driving through a McDonald’s on Saturday morning, I arrived at the first pay window with a dollar held out expectantly. The lady inside didn’t even glance my way in the thirty seconds I idled, fussing with an umbrella. Presuming I’d picked the wrong window - sometimes the drive-through uses one window, sometimes two - I motored up to the next one, where a young man thrust a cheeseburger on me. So I got a McDonald’s double cheeseburger without paying. SECOND: I trust the laundromat on my corner enough to leave stuff in the washer or dryer without sitting in front of it. You can always see a staff member hovering inside while the ‘mat has its doors open. On my third and final trip to the ‘mat on Sunday, the shy Asian lady behind the counter shuffled up and pressed a crumpled dollar bill on me, nodding and smiling. I looked at her in confusion until another customer translated: “you left it in the machine.” “Thank you,” I said, unsure how to explain to someone who apparently spoke no English that I hadn’t laundered anything that day other than bedding. So I’m up $2 on the weekend.
# I somehow took the exact same Red Line train car to and from Park Street on Sunday night, four hours apart. How do I know? The train compartment smelled vaguely of shit; it got so I didn’t mind it. That’s the worst thing that I can confess.
# “Does the bet still pay off if they shoot the horse?”
“Yes, it does.”
“The system works!”
# Finally, congratulations to ImprovBoston for holding a fantastic date auction at Venu on Sunday night. IB raised, if Sasha’s math can be trusted, just over $6000 from the auctions and raffles alone. Special congratulations to Serpico and Christine, friends and regulars both, for their fund-raising efforts. The whole night really felt like a grown-up prom, with classy folks parading on stage for the crowd’s approval and a late night dance party in formal wear. I had to practically tear myself away at 11:30 but could have stayed later.
Jon Favreau directed perhaps the best superhero movie I’ve ever seen (short of The Incredibles). I suspect he pulled this off because he made a priority of making a good movie first, and a superhero movie second. Favreau wandered through the same minefield that every superhero movie does but emerged unscathed. Let’s take a look:
Tedious Origin Story: Robert Downey Jr, as playboy millionaire Tony Stark, spends the first half of the movie inventing his suit, testing its powers and reveling in his new identity. Why does this work, when it failed for other movies? Because Tony Stark makes Iron Man. He didn’t wake up one morning with super-strength and wall-stickiness. He didn’t get struck by lightning after being dosed by chemicals. The process of experimentation and forging invests us more than following the blithe adventures of a lucky idiot.
Wacky Villains: When you adapt a comic book to the big screen, you realize that guys in blue tights or villains in green and yellow costumes look ridiculous in the real world. Seriously. They look like cartoons. No one would take them seriously. Favreau avoids this by retaining the same names and general ideas, but completely revamping them for a modern story. I won’t spoil the connections for comic book purists - just pay close attention to what people say.
I … Will Avenge … You: As fun as Spider-Man was, I had a hard time with a movie where everyone took everything they said so seriously. Tobey Maguire couldn’t tell someone he needed milk from the store without a wistful look in his eyes and stern resolution in his jawline. But Downey, Terence Howard and Jeff Bridges talk just like regular people talk. They talk over each other, sometimes. They throw off-hand remarks. They’re regular people who just happen to have access to incredible weaponry.
Well, My Work Here Is Done: I never realized how weak the traditional superhero origin story sounded until walking out of Iron Man. Okay, I have super powers. I’m going to put on a costume to avenge my parents’ / family’s / neighbor’s death. Having finished that, rather than return to a normal life, I’ll keep doing this, going after lower and lower stakes until I die or get tired of it. Stark’s purpose in becoming Iron Man doesn’t stop after the first film’s villain buys it, though. He has a clear goal in mind: ridding the world of the weaponry his company created. That goal may expand (it’ll probably have to, to keep the franchise going), but at least he starts with a logical reason for superheroics.
Flip the Script: In addition to surviving and improving on all the standard superhero movie tropes, Iron Man flips several on its head. These will not only entertain your average comic book fan, but will keep the casual moviegoer from rolling their eyes at the awkward suspension of disbelief.
I recommend this film without qualification.
I may discuss some spoilers in the comments, so tread with care.
For this week’s Friday Feedback, I want Songs That Tire You After The First Forty-Five Seconds:
My top picks:
Enter Sandman - Metallica. That mildly dissonant riff, followed by the pounding drums after a few measures, really ramps up my adrenaline. Then the song becomes, well, the foundation of every metal song for the next 20 years, and I lose interest. Bonus points: James Hetfield may be a cool motherfucker, but in this video he’s everything that’s wrong with the 80s. “Say a prayer / just for once / or I’ll tow your truck / from the Arby’s parking lotttttt-TA!”
Sweet Child of Mine - Guns ‘n Roses. Really? Can you get that excited to hear Axl Rose sing? Really? Admit it - this song coasts off of enthusiasm after Slash rocks us all the way out in the first minute. It never really reaches those heights again until the “Where do we go-wo” part near the end.
Hot’lanta - Allman Brothers Band. Starts off really strong, then descends into the unidentifiable mish-mash of every jam session. Better than the Grateful Dead, at least.
Now that I’ve made my half-assed attempts at music criticism, I’d like to hear yours. What songs never live up to the promise of their first few seconds? List a song that’s not even worth downloading off iTunes so long as there’s a free sample. Take your shot.
# For as much work as I do on grappling, throwing and joint locks, I definitely need to drill old-fashioned stand up boxing. Tuesday night’s class proved that, even if a decent boxer only landed one jab in four on me, he could drive me across a room thanks to my piss-poor defense. I need to work parrying, shuffling or fading without moving backward. I can’t think of a better way to do this other than to get someone I trust, stand them exactly two feet away from me, verify that they can touch but not pound my skull with a jab at full extension, and say, “Just go until I say stop.”
# One of the students in our Tuesday night class got in a fight over the weekend. I won’t go into details (per the student, “an investigation is pending”), but the circumstances reminded me of how much the classroom environment differs from a real street fight. I hope that I’d acquit myself well. I know that when the adrenaline’s pumping I react aggressively, not passively, and I know that I can take a hit and keep moving. Because of those two factors - not because of any fancy techniques - I trust I’d do okay. But I want more than trust.
# I still have rugburn on the back of my wrists this morning. Now before you go making any snide comments, I got it from a grappling drill on the rug-covered mats at our school. So I got rugburn from a two-hundred and fifty pound man mounting me and pinning my hands to the ground. There. Try and find something lewd in that; I dare you.
# Finally got my hand X-rayed yesterday, since the jammed finger I got on March 12th has still been bothering me on occasion. The diagnosis: broken! “I had to zoom it 8x,” the doctor said, pointing at my X-ray. “See this tiny line here?” Apparently the ligament around one of my joints has a bit of a crack, and the capsule that protects those ligaments has swelled as a result. I still have full range of motion, but it could take six months for the swelling to entirely disappear. “I get more martial artists coming in here six weeks after their injury,” the doctor said.
Police in southern China have discovered a factory manufacturing Free Tibet flags, media reports say.
The factory in Guangdong had been completing overseas orders for the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile.
Workers said they thought they were just making colourful flags and did not realise their meaning.
But then some of them saw TV images of protesters holding the emblem and they alerted the authorities, according to Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper.
I never limit myself to one meaning when I can encompass two or more, so take away the following from this story:
Globalization commands a lot of power;
You can find irony anywhere if you know where to look, and;
Propaganda permeates the civilized mind in ways outsiders can’t comprehend. The police didn’t uproot this factory in an undercover sting - workers voluntarily turned themselves and their employer in. Tibet never did anything to harm these guys, but they so thoroughly believe the Chinese government’s gospel of Tibet As Guerilla Radical that they went out of their way to make the State’s job easier. Fortunately, in the free and enlightened West we don’t have that problem.
Speaking of, how goes the campaign to nuke Iran, Senator Clinton?
Got it - thanks!
Meanwhile, black males took a bump down to Junior-Level Citizenship in New York on Monday, when three NYPD detectives were acquitted of killing an unarmed black man whom they “feared” might be threatening them. Fifty shots it took, which places the 18- to 35-year-old Black Male somewhere between a charging African Rhino and Wolverine of the X-Men in the Scared White Guy Hierarchy of Indestructability. Remember, black people: you don’t have an inherent right to life as such while in the city of New York. You exist on the sufferance of every paranoid cop.
Kai Wright talks a little more about the Sean Bell shooting here, and also sheds some light on the mystery of New York’s falling crime rate over the last decade. If you believe that Giuliani’s “broken windows” theory of Better Living through Petty Harassment reeks of bullshit - as I always have - then the drop in crime looks like a mystery. But Wright points out the following:
[B]lacks accounted for 66 percent of those killed by New York City police between 2000 and 2007 (New York is a perennial leader in police fatalities, averaging 12 a year over those years). And while the violent crime rate plunged to historically low levels in that time period, the number of people killed by police has not budged—indeed, the number of cop bullets fired has skyrocketed. And it’s happened with impunity. Out of 88 fatal shootings, including at least 12 in which victims were unarmed, in only one instance was an officer convicted of criminal wrongdoing.
So Giuliani didn’t reduce violence so much as outsource it to the NYPD. Juking the numbers, if you will.
In other news, rice continues to get more expensive - and more scarce, which really means the same thing - all around the world. Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution offers his take on why in the New York Times:
The damage that trade restrictions cause is probably most evident in the case of rice. Although rice is the major foodstuff for about half of the world, it is highly protected and regulated. Only about 5 to 7 percent of the world’s rice production is traded across borders; that’s unusually low for an agricultural commodity.
So when the price goes up — indeed, many varieties of rice have roughly doubled in price since 2007 — this highly segmented market means that the trade in rice doesn’t flow to the places of highest demand.
Poor rice yields are not the major problem. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that global rice production increased by 1 percent last year and says that it is expected to increase 1.8 percent this year. That’s not impressive, but it shouldn’t cause starvation.
The more telling figure is that over the next year, international trade in rice is expected to decline more than 3 percent, when it should be expanding. The decline is attributable mainly to recent restrictions on rice exports in rice-producing countries like India, Indonesia, Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Egypt.
Tariffs and export restrictions choke off valuable goods and services. You can’t call arguments for free trade a trivial academic debate anymore, like whether a country profits more from cheaper cars or more domestic jobs. Open trade across borders will save the Third World from starvation. Fortunately, in the free and enlightened West we don’t have that problem.
Speaking of, how goes the effort to dismantle NAFTA, Senator Obama?
Finally, on a somewhat upbeat note, Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody) talks about the growing wealth of a globalizing economy, the surplus of free time that results, and how we spend that time:
I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–”How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”
So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first–hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn’t be a surplus, would it? It’s precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.
I have always measured wealth in units of Time I Can Spend Doing What Makes Me Happy. It pleases me to see that that calculation works on a social level as well.
# After buying Fraley dinner and drinks on Friday, we retired to Katie’s house in Davis Square. Melissa and Christine gave him a lactose-free crepe to blow out for his birthday wish. Then we all read the latest Cosmo for “Ten Secret Ways to Blow Please Your Man.” I should warn you: they’re no longer secret. I’ve read them.
# I’ve been playing a lot of Diplomacy online lately, either on Facebook or on PHPDiplomacy. The Facebook game sloppily ports the latter, so I greatly prefer PHPDiplo. I haven’t played for long enough to see whether my skills have atrophied, although twenty-four hours will reveal the outcome of my latest ambitious move (France attacking England and Italy simultaneously, with Germany’s aid). So we’ll see. If you want to play me on Facebook or on PHP, let me know and I’ll set something up. If you have any love of game theory or European history, or just a general ill-defined distrust of fellow humans, you owe it to yourself to try.
# Out of nowhere, and unbidden by man nor beast, I finally came to terms with the ending of the Bale/Crowe remake of 3:10 to Yuma while driving to work yesterday.
There is Shadow and there is Substance, and this is the root of all things. Of Substance, there is only Amber, the real city, upon the real Earth, which contains everything. Of Shadow, there is an infinitude of things. Every possibility exists somewhere as a Shadow of the real. [...]
If one is a prince or princess of the blood, then one may walk, crossing through Shadows, forcing one’s environment to change as one passes, until it is finally in precisely the shape one desires it, and there stop.
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Posted by Professor Coldheart
