Every day a little closer

What's in store for us? I don't know, and neither does anyone else. This is one of the reasons I love reading old science fiction. It's fun to see all the things they got wrong. But I suppose that's the problem with trying to see what's coming. We're too mired in the present. We'll get there eventually, but in the meantime we are truly clueless.

"People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better." ~ Ray Bradbury

I want better, too. But while I wait for the future to get here, I do enjoy escaping from the present. Any of my fellow escapists might enjoy reading this list of the most commonly envisioned futures, and the reasons why they won't happen. (Found at GeekPress.)

Contentious optimists (or optimistic pessimists) should feel free to post comments below explaining how we'll get to utopia (or the apocalypse). Me, I think we might be there already.

--SOLOMON MBANASO

Test confirms the obvious

So, I took an online test that said I am a conservative. I am posting the results here not because they are interesting (they are not), but to interest you, my imaginary readers, in testing yourselves.



The test is really about which moral values you find to be most important. People of all political persuasions are motivated by moral principles-- the big difference is which moral principles (equality, justice, freedom) move them most. I found it enlightening. Perhaps you will as well.

Of course, taking tests of this sort is a bit like reading tea leaves, or the I Ching. The test doesn't have the answers you seek. It doesn't know you, doesn't know anything about the world. You're the one with the answers, and you know them already. So it's really just a novel way of asking yourself questions, in the hopes of tricking yourself into accidentally having an interesting thought.

Good luck!

--PAN YUE-HAN

Nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills, computer hacking skills...

So, courtesy of Times and Seasons, I found this list of 25 things every man should know. (The list comes from Popular Mechanics magazine, FYI.)

Lists of this sort interest me. I'm a single boy, and I want to be a married man. And like Napoleon Dynamite, I have noticed that women are looking for men with skills. They make their own lists of desirable attributes and skills, and compare potential mates to the lists. (Tell me it ain't so, ladies.) So when I see a list like this, no matter how stupid, I usually stop and compare myself.

Now, here's the list:

1. Patch a radiator hose
2. Protect your computer
3. Rescue a boater who has capsized
4. Frame a wall
5. Retouch digital photos
6. Back up a trailer
7. Build a campfire
8. Fix a dead outlet
9. Navigate with a map and compass
10. Use a torque wrench
11. Sharpen a knife
12. Perform CPR
13. Fillet a fish
14. Maneuver a car out of a skid
15. Get a car unstuck
16. Back up data
17. Paint a room
18. Mix concrete
19. Clean a bolt-action rifle
20. Change oil and filter
21. Hook up an HDTV
22. Bleed brakes
23. Paddle a canoe
24. Fix a bike flat
25. Extend your wireless network

Wow. Rough. I have no idea how to even start about three-quarters of these. In my defense, I think most guys would not do a lot better. For instance, even combining efforts with my four brothers, I think we only have about 70% of this list covered. And I think we're a pretty capable crew.

But I do think there are some things that every man should be able to do that aren't on this list. Especially when I start thinking about my dad, who to me is the pinnacle of manliness. So here are some things I think are necessary for a good dad, and a good husband.

* Grill (It's even better to actually be able to cook, but grilling is a must.)
* Soothe a crying baby (My dad has the magic touch on this one. You put a baby in his hands, and crying just stops.)
* Dance (I can't do this one at all. My bones rebel.)
* Fight (Haven't done this in years, but I think the power to defend yourself and your family is an important part of being a man.)
* Tie a tie (If someone else has to tie it for you, you are still a boy.)
* Play sports (Not all sports, but you should be able to throw a pass, hit a pitch, sink a jumpshot, etc. I feel confident about swimming, frisbee, soccer, and a few others, but I cringe thinking of the day when my brother-in-law told me I threw a baseball like a girl. The shame!)
* Garden (Real men grow food.)

There are probably more, but I think this is a good start. And I wouldn't even know how to begin a list of skills necessary for a woman. But maybe you, my imaginary readers, have some ideas.

--REDBEARD

He'll pass a non-binding resolution whenever there's trouble...

So, they're making a movie in which, G.I. Joe, a real American hero, is no longer American. That's right. I said, G.I. Joe is no longer AMERICAN!!!

Paramount has confirmed that in the movie, the name G.I. Joe will become an acronym for "Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity" — an international, coed task force charged with defeating bad guys. It will no longer stand for government issued, as in issued by the American government.

The studio won't elaborate, saying filming hasn't begun and details are still in the works, but the behind-the-scenes rumblings are that the producers have decided to change the nature of G.I. Joe in order to appeal to a wider, more international audience.

The word is that in the current political climate, they're afraid that a heroic U.S. soldier won't fly.

So, G.I. Joe, which is supposed to be about kicking foreign terrorist butt, is now part of the UN or something. Words fail me.

But, for you, my imaginary readers, I will try hard to describe my feelings. It's like... It's like finding out they've decided the Boston Red Sox are going to be a soccer team in Argentina, coached by King George III. Or that Mom's homemade apple pie is 40% animal waste. And that Mom is really a big hairy biker dude. Or coming to a 4th of July picnic and finding out that they replaced the hamburgers and fireworks with a platoon of the SS-Totenkopfverbände and a quick trip into a freshly-dug mass grave. And in that grave, already cold and dead: Santa Claus.

Seriously, I don't even know if I can go in to work tomorrow.

--MAJOR BLUDD


(UPDATE 09/14 : Yesterday evening after my haircut, I walked by the nerd store and decided to stop in. On a whim, I inquired about G.I. Joe, and a helpful regular customer pointed me to the 25-cent bin in the basement. Long story short, I walked out with 31 issues of the old Marvel classic G.I. Joe comic book. Awesome. Yo Joe!)

RIP Luciano Pavarotti

Dici che il fiume
Trova la via al mare
E come il fiume
Giungerai a me
Oltre i confini
E le terre assetate...

--SAN GIOVANNI UMILIATO

5 points of an art film

Just sent Federico Fellini's Oscar-winning classic 8 1/2 back to Netflix. This is one of the top ten films of all time, according to a lot of critics. Myself, I didn't finish it. I thought it was terrible. I gave it two stars, and that's because of Claudia Cardinale.

I think it is appropriate at this time for me to reveal my five-point profile of an art film. An art film is a film in which: (1) Miserable people (2) sit around talking (3) and smoking (4) and committing adultery (5) but nothing really happens.

1) The people in art films are bored and unhappy. They hate their lives, even though generally they are materially well off. Life bores them, the world has nothing left to offer them, they are weary of everything and everyone. It helps if they are European.

2) In art films, people talk a lot. And the conversations are very important and very carefully crafted, although they don't really advance the plot. (See #5.) So you have lots of people sitting around talking for long stretches about very ordinary things, and they interrupt each other and talk over each other, as people do in real life. Also as in real life, most of the talking is not very interesting. (That's why people go to the movies.)

3) Everybody smokes in art films. And they smoke a lot. And the camera lingers on the cigarettes and the smoke in that artsy kind of way. I don't know why this is thought to be such a sophisticated, beautiful thing-- smoking is gross.

4) In art films, it's important for everyone to be mired in adultery. And it's never pre-marital hanky-panky-- it's always people cheating on their spouses. But not in a sexy way. In a bored, disappointed, world-weary sort of way. In 8 1/2, for instance, perhaps since it was made fifty years ago, there are scenes of lovers embracing, or passionate kisses (again, perhaps due to #3). But there is a scene of a mistress demanding a job for her husband from the married protagonist.

5) Most importantly, nothing really happens in an art film. There really is no plot. If I had to sum up the plot of 8 1/2, I would have to say something like: A movie director is tired of the movie business. But that's not a plot. It's a setup. It's a premise. You start with that, and move on. Like this: A movie director is bored of the movie business...

...AND SO HE quits and follows his dream to become a professional hockey player.
...AND SO HE makes the best film ever and changes Hollywood forever.
...AND SO HE joins the CIA and becomes a spy with the perfect cover story.
...BUT THEN HE falls in love and rekindles his love of life.
...BUT THEN HE is approached by a mysterious stranger who says she is from the future, and that only he can prevent the robo-pocalypse.
...BUT THEN HE has his world turned upside down by the boss from hell-- literally-- when he discovers that his producer is Lucifer, prince of darkness.

Something should happen! But not in an art film. In an art film, nothing should happen, except the talking and the smoking and the miserable, unfaithful people gradually becoming more and more bored with their lives. I don't see why this kind of movie is so popular in certain circles, but it doesn't do it for me.

Lots of critics gave 8 1/2 5 stars; I give it 5/5 on my art-house disaster scale. I recommend seeing it only if you think your life is too thrilling and happy-- like if you just won a gold medal in awesome at the rock and roll Olympics-- and you can't afford depressants in pill form.

--ABDUL ALEM

The candidating game

So, my brother emailed me this quiz that compares your views with the positions staked out by US presidential candidates and tells you which candidates match up with you best.

Here are my results, starting with the candidates who got a positive score:

Hunter +34
Romney +30
Giuliani +29
Huckabee +26
McCain +23
Tancredo +20
Cox +14
Thompson +13
Brownback +7

And then we get into negative numbers...

Richardson -15
Obama -15
Biden -16
Paul -17
Clinton -18
Dodd -19
Edwards -19
Gravel -28
Kucinich -30

This actually is pretty close match to my own perceptions of the candidates, especially given the very simple nature of the test. I'm surprised and impressed with how well this works. (I am especially pleased to see that the program figured out that I dislike Ron Paul almost as much as Hillary Clinton. Nice.) Makes me want to go read up on Duncan Hunter...

But it's definitely a very simplistic test. I did it in two minutes, without thinking about it too much, and was surprised with how well its predictions matched my own previous feelings about the candidates. But I think it's not going to be very helpful for people who are still sorting out their own positions on the issues.

I'm lucky. The issues I care most about are pretty clear-cut. For instance, I think that for our intervention in Iraq to succeed, we need a lot of people there for a long time. The way I read history, anything else leaves the place in absolute chaos. So I support more troops in Iraq for a longer time. And all the candidates have a pretty clear stand on that issue at this point. Now, things could be a lot more complicated. For instance, if the surge were yielding obviously spectacular successes, lots of candidates would shift their positions to agree with mine, at least at that level of detail. And then I would have to get a lot more fine-grained, and tease out much more subtle differences.

That's where the health care issue is, to my way of thinking. Some candidates have positions that are widely divergent, but most of them are pretty close, and you have to get into the nuances to see what the differences are, in lots of cases. For instance, Mitt Romney got a sort of universal health care system started in Massachusetts, but it's not the same kind of universal health care system that Hillary Clinton tried to get passed in 1993. But that was 14 years ago. When she says she wants to reform the health care system now, how different will her plan be from Romney's? And then we have people whose position is much less clear, and much more based in platitudes that obscure these small, nuanced differences-- like Barack Obama.

As I say, I'm lucky. There are a few issues that matter more to me than the rest, and the candidates have staked out pretty clear (and different) positions on those few issues. There are a few other issues like this (I have a friend who decides entirely on what kind of Supreme Court justices the candidate is likely to nominate.) but most are not. I'm just glad I'm not deciding on education policy, or something like that. After quickly eliminating the ones who are way out there at the extreme, I'd be left with the muddled middle. And I'd never be able to figure out who to support.

So, I'd probably just do what I did last time, and support a beltway outsider.

--EL DOLOR

Onward, Christian babies

So, yesterday I saw this link to an opinion piece at SFGate.com, a website affiliated with the San Francisco Chronicle. The piece is incredibly vitriolic and nasty. You have to read it to believe it.

It is written in response to news stories about a family in Arkansas that just welcomed their 17th child. As far as I can tell, their children are clean, cheerful, polite, and well-spoken. The family is Christian, conservative, traditional, and not very hip. These facts sent columnist Mark Morford into a hysterical, frothing, raving fit. Here's a sample of his despite:

Perhaps the point is this: Why does this sort of bizarre hyperbreeding only seem to afflict antiseptic megareligious families from the Midwest? In other words -- assuming Michelle and Jim Bob and their massive brood of cookie-cutter Christian kidbots will all be, as the charming photo suggests, never allowed near a decent pair of designer jeans or a tolerable haircut from a recent decade, and assuming that they will all be tragically encoded with the values of the homophobic asexual Christian right -- where are the forces that shall help neutralize their effect on the culture? Where is the counterbalance, to offset the damage?

Where is, in other words, the funky tattooed intellectual poetess who, along with her genius anarchist husband, is popping out 16 funky progressive intellectually curious fashion-forward pagan offspring to answer the Duggar's squad of über-white future Wal-Mart shoppers? Where is the liberal, spiritualized, pro-sex flip side? Verily I say unto thee, it ain't lookin' good.

Perhaps this the scariest aspect of our squishy birthin' tale: Maybe the scales are tipping to the neoconservative, homogenous right in our culture simply because they tend not to give much of a damn for the ramifications of wanton breeding and environmental destruction and pious sanctimony, whereas those on the left actually seem to give a whit for the health of the planet and the dire effects of overpopulation. Is that an oversimplification?

Although Morford's column overflows with so much berserk hate that I wonder if he is, perhaps, rabid, he is pointing out an important phenomenon in contemporary American society. The number of conservative people in the US continues to increase because these people tend to have more children. Conversely, progressives tend to have few children, and often no children.

This fact is often pointed out by right-leaning pundits, who make a couple of related observations. First, as James Taranto notes about once a week, pro-choice women in particular fail to pass along their preferences, aborting the children who would otherwise grow up in their homes, and likely share their political viewpoint. He calls this the "Roe effect", and claims that it helps explain why public opinion has shifted dramatically in the pro-life direction since the legalization of abortion in 1973. Second, the numbers of progressives would be dwindling even more quickly if they didn't have the ability to persuade lots of kids to lean left after leaving home.

People like Mark Morford should probably realize that if they want policy change, they need a majority of voters to support their views. (In America, this is called "democracy.") So, they either need to propagate, or propagate their views. And I think the progressive effort is not helped by this kind of bile:

Let us be clear: I don't care what sort of God you believe in, it's a safe bet that hysterical breeding does not top her list of desirables. God does not want more children per acre than there are ants or mice or garter snakes or repressed pedophilic priests. We already have three billion humans on the planet who subsist on less than two dollars a day. Every other child in the world (one billion of them) lives in abject poverty. We are burning through the planet's resources faster than a Republican can eat an endangered caribou stew. Note to Michelle Duggar: If God wanted you to have a massive pile of children, she'd have given your uterus a hydraulic pump and a revolving door. Stop it now.

In fact, I think it quite likely that if the Duggar family were to read what Morford wrote about them, it would only strengthen their determination to bring more good Christian children into this wicked world. Good for them.

--JACQUES LE PEN

Wonderful spam!

I love gmail, but it has disappointed me this weekend. Friday an old friend called me and told me she had emailed me a couple of notes to which I had not responded. Lo and behold, gmail had put them in my spam folder. So today, on impulse, I decided to wade around a bit and see if any of my other friends' notes were getting mis-labeled.

In my spam-wading, I learned three things:

1) The emails sent by Blogger to automatically notify me when someone comments on a blog post here have all been shunted off to the spam graveyard. Quel désastre! (I have taken steps to rectify this, but if any of you, my imaginary readers, worry that I have not noticed your clever, clever comments, feel free to notify me here.)

2) There are a lot of nice Russian girls who are bored this evening and who would (thus) like to chat with me, and perhaps send me pictures. All of them seem to be using email addresses with the names of American men, for some reason. Odd, that.

3) My loan application has been approved many hundreds of times. Also, denied.

Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!

--JUAN PENA

What kind of fool am I?

Okay, that's a retarded title, but what else should I have used? Anyway, here's the results of the latest time-wasting quiz (found via Dean's World). Apparently, I'm a warmonger. Check it:

My Conservative Identity:

You are a Freedom Crusader, also known as a neoconservative. You believe in taking the fight directly to the enemy, whether it’s terrorists abroad or the liberal terrorist appeasers at home who give them aid and comfort.

Take the quiz at www.FightLiberals.com

W00t! Neocons No. 1!

--YAHYA AL-RIIFI