A Gay Time at Hooters

It was New Year's Eve Day today, and one of my friends - off from work and having nothing better to do with himself - called me to see if I wanted to go out for lunch with him. What the heck, why not? The only condition I imposed was that it couldn't be one of the three restaurants he usually suggests when we get together for dinner. I like them, but I don't go out much myself, and I'd like to try someplace different for a change.

"How about Hooters?" he asked.

He's suggested Hooters before, and I've successfully brushed it off. He does understand that I'm not interested in looking at waitresses in improbably tight, skimpy outfits, but <whine>he's never been there, he doesn't have anyone else who'll go with him, and he doesn't want to go alone.</whine>

I gave in.

Another het friend who's been to Hooters several times insists that the food is really good, and I suppose it is if you like buffalo wings, burgers, crustaceans, and such. My chicken breast (get it?) sandwich was very tasty. The place is littered with TVs (apparently all hardwired to ESPN) and sportsy stuff like golf bags. Definitely a "guy" place. Not surprisingly, other than the young, slim, busty waitresses, nearly everyone there was male, ranging in age from about 8 to 68, with the majority in their 20's and 30's.

Which was bonus I hadn't considered. While Mike's eyes kept wandering off to ogle the staff, I perused the customers. A mixed bunch, but some definite cuties. And a nearly palpable atmosphere of male arousal. It was almost like being in a gay bar (with very effective female impersonators). For those so inclined, a Hooters could be a very good place to pick up drunk, horny, not-entirely-straight guys. But I'm not such a person (or more to the point, I'd have to be even drunker than they were to work up the nerve to try it), so I doubt I'll be going back.

QueerGeek.com BETA

OK, I've been working on this for a bit now, and I think I'm ready to pre-announce it: QueerGeek.com, a community/resource site for... queer geeks.

The project began as a random thought. I'm starting a new job where pretty much everybody's a geek, so I figured I'm probably going to be perceived there as "the queer one". But when hanging out with the artsy types at school, I'm usually pigeonholed as "the geek". I have other aspects to my personality (I hope), but those are the two that define me the most. I'm a queer geek.

A light bulb went on just above my head. "I wonder if that's been registered...?" To my surprise, it hadn't! QueerGeek.com was still available (along with the variants in other TLDs like .net and .org, but those are mostly for also-rans). I snapped it up.

Then I got to thinking about what to do with it. Setting up a community message board seemed like a good place to start. I decided to start with phpBB. It does most of the things I'd want to do and it uses PHP. That second part was important, because my server already tends to bog down running Perl for this blog, and because I want practise using PHP.

So I've been hacking away at phpBB, trying to extend it do the things it doesn't already support. It's still not ready - I'm calling this an "open beta" - and I may yet make some major changes to how it's set up, looks, etc. But in the meantime, I'd love to invite any other queer geeks out there to sign up, put the software through its paces, give some feedback about features, and - most importantly - help warm the place up a bit.

Sir Tim!

Queen Elizabeth II of Britain is going to knight Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. In 1991, he published a spec for a system which would allow people to collaborate and link together documents, regardless of their physical location, using a scheme of hyperlinks between them. The spec defined HyperText Markup Language and included the source code for a text-based combined browser/editor. (He has since apologised for "http://", not realising at the time that so many people would be typing these addresses so often.)

It's nice to see a fellow geek's name on Her Majesty's New Year Honours list, alongside the football and music stars, bureaucrats, and political cronies. His honour is to be made Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, one of the higher titles on the pecking order of "knighthoods". He is entitled to put "KBE" after his name, and since he's a British citizen (Her Majesty also gives these to non-subjects who contribute to the well-being of Britain) he can be referred to as "Sir Tim".

Berners-Lee definitely deserves this honour, not simply for creating the technology of the Web, but for declining to patent it and then freely licencing it to the world. So anyone can make a web browser or server without getting permission or paying a penny in royalties to anyone. If he hadn't done that, he'd probably be much richer, but we'd all be poorer from not having this technology universally available. The Web as we know it would be more like AOL: a closed, proprietary system.

He's also remained active as Director of the W3C, the organisation that works to develop open, public standards for new web technology (lest it be overtaken by proprietary enhancements which only work with, say, Microsoft's Internet Explorer). That ongoing care for his "baby" adds to his (no better word for it) nobility.

Hail, Sir Tim!

A New Year

Most holidays are either religious events that mean nothing to me, or sociopolitical bullshit like Columbus Day or America Is #1 Day (in early July). So one of the few holidays I actually observe (rather than just going through the motions for my family) is New Year's Eve/Day. Sure, January 1 is an arbitrary day selected (I think) by a Roman emperor, and the year number is a miscalculation of how long ago somebody's god was born. But the "year" is a concrete physical phenomenon around which so much our lives revolve, and the planet-wide festivities as midnight 1/1/2000 swept around the globe indicates a pretty universal acceptance of that date, at least for international purposes. So I celebrate New Year's Eve on 31 December.

As a kid that meant staying up late and listening to the countdown of the "top hits" of the year on the radio. As a high-school/college student it meant finding a party where I could get really drunk. A few times I got to go to parties with my boyfriend, but more often we found ourselves in different cities that night. Since I lost him altogether, it's become a more private affair. In fact, I've made excuses a couple times to avoid getting roped into going to some crowded bar, so I could stay home alone.

(The one exception was in 1999. It was the New Year's Eve I'd anticipated since childhood, the one where you knew you had to have a good explanation for "where I was at the turn of the millennium", the night you were gonna party like it was 1999, and... I spent it happily sipping a couple beers and just hanging out with my sisters and their families at my parents' house. I got up early the next morning and witnessed "the dawn of the new millennium" as the sun came up; it was pretty, but cold.)

Lately, I get a bottle of wine, some snacks that I'd normally avoid for health/nutrition reasons, maybe make a pizza, and... clean the house. OK, I know that seems pathetic, and it probably is. But it gives me a chance to feel like I'm getting a fresh start on the new year. The shower curtain is clean, my e-mail inboxes are empty, the freezer-burned veggies and the half-used jar of spaghetti sauce from April have been thrown out, the CDs (musical and ROM) are all neatly stored, I've rearranged my office to get things where I can use them more easily... everything's as it belongs.

Of course that's not really true. Not about my life, that is. I still don't have a job I like, I've never been fatter and less agile than I am now, I've made zero progress on several projects I've been wanting to do (a few of them for many years now), I'm rather short on good friends, and I'm farther from finding a soulmate (or even a good fuck buddy) than I've been since before I came out over 15 years ago.

Which makes it all the more important to have the parts of my life I can get a handle on and do right, taken care of. So that's how I'll be spending New Year's Eve this year. Not so much a celebration, but the next best thing: a fairly satisfying accomplishment of that which I can do: getting things set so that maybe this year I'll have the hope and motivation to do a little better than last... and if not, at least do no worse.

Canadian Bacon - Mid-90's Preview of Today

my rating:

Canadian Bacon was on TV this weekend, and I hadn't seen it when it came out, so I recorded it. It was John Candy's last film, and activist film-maker Michael Moore's only non-documentary to date. So it's not exactly grade-A material. But it's good for a few laughs, and some bittersweet ironic foreshadowing.

The film is about an unpopular president (Alan Alda) starting a cold war with Canada to boost the military industry and his approval ratings. Candy (in a nice bit of ironic casting, as he's from Toronto) plays the sheriff of Niagara County NY and recently-laid-off munitions factory worker, who responds to the U.S. government's anti-Canadian propaganda by organising his friends into an inept militia that manages to turn up the heat between the two countries.

The parts I enjoyed the most were the good-natured jokes about Canada, such as poking fun of U.S. stereotypes about how "nice" Canada is, or the "alarming" fact that 90% of their population lives along the U.S./Canadian border, or the obvious danger their tendency toward socialism (free education, free health care, etc.) represents. As a beer lover, I loved the way hostilities began over Candy's character saying that Canadian beer sucks... because it's such an ignornantly false accusation (especially comparing Molson or Labatt to 1995-vintage U.S. brews). Michael Moore grew up a short drive from the bridge to Sarnia, Ontario, so he knows his "enemy" well. (And of course Candy was there to help.) Certainly no one connected to Hollywood would have understood Canada well enough to lampoon the perceptions of border-state Americans about our neighbor to the north.

Of course Moore had more on his mind than cross-cultural gags, and the script is loaded with criticisms of American industrial leaders, American political leaders, and the American sheep who allow themselves to be victimized and lead astray by them. While the references to American invulnerability no longer hold up, much of the rest of the film is prescient about what would happen since it came out.

A shot of a pickup truck flying a 6-foot U.S. flag was satire in 1995; it's an everyday reality today. And listening to the president's advisors talk about how Americans need to feel like their life is threatened before they'll go to war, and the need to manufacture such a fear of Canada... well, it's not too difficult to imagine such a conversation leading to the story Bush invented tying Saddam Hussein to terrorists targetting U.S. soil.

"There's a time to think, and there's a time to act. And this, gentlemen, is no time to think!" says Candy's character at one point. Sound like any presidents you've heard talk lately?

Are You a Boy Blogger or Girl Blogger?

Here's a second-hand-link (via DebWire, via nightcrawler) I got a kick out of: The Gender Genie. By counting the number of times an author uses certain keywords in her/his text, it guesses whether the author is male or female.

For example, the more you uses words like him, so, because, since, and actually, the more likely it is to suggest that you are female, and when you use a lot of words like some, this, now, something, and the, it figures you're male. (This is perhaps the first text-crunching algorithm on the web to not ignore the word "the", but it does give the word a fairly low weight in the result.)

So I ran my last several entries through Genie, with interesting results:

Peter Pan - Also for Those Who've Grown Up:
Female Score: 1054
*Male Score: 1455
E-mail for Those Left Behind:
Female Score: 785
*Male Score: 1975
Paycheck - Taxes Withheld:
*Female Score: 1100
Male Score: 1062
Dear Santa: Bring Me a Man:
*Female Score: 1566
Male Score: 1407
Saddam Was Ready to Bomb Washington!:
Female Score: 217
*Male Score: 439
iTunes, not Tunez
Female Score: 1483
*Male Score: 1950

More often than not, it guessed that I am a boy, but a couple times it went the other way, guessing that I am a girl. But I'd still like to give it a perfect score.

That's because it wasn't trying to answer whether I had a penis or a vagina, or whether I was XX or XY. It's asking: male or female? That's a question about gender, which is more of a social construct than anything else. I don't use a certain word more often than another because my crotch has a spongy cylinder sticking out of it, but because of the way I was actually raised, and - perhaps even more importantly - because of the role I am playing at the time I am writing.

The entry which skewed strongest toward "male" was my sarcastic belittling of the fundie who promises to send e-mails to your loved ones after you've been taken up in the Rapture. I was in full-on "guy" mode there, and it seems to show in Genie's score on that text. The next-malest was my rant about the latest revelation of Bush's lies to the American people. Same thing.

By contrast, I skewed slightly female on the essay where I asked Santa to bring me a realistic toy boy. Not for the literal reason that I was asking for a man (Genie doesn't detect abstract content), but probably because I was feeling rather "girlish" as I wrote it.

As another test, I ran my entries through Genie in batches by category. Most of them came up with a noticeable bias toward "male", but when I gave it the "Me" category to analyse, the difference between male and female was less than 1% of the total. It nearly guessed that I am a woman. Which makes perfect sense, since our idea of "female" includes someone who's comfortable talking about her feelings. That's what I'm more likely to be doing in those entries. I was being female. And I'm OK with that.

Which is good, because I just ran the above text through Genie, and the result was:
Female Score: 1674
Male Score: 884

Peter Pan - Also for Those Who've Grown Up

Nathan's rating: my rating:

My pal Nathan managed to get himself into an advance screening of P.J. Hogan's Peter Pan a week before it opened. (He wouldn't tell me who he had to sleep with.) He wasn't very impressed.

His main complaint was that it was darker than the "original" (i.e. the animated movie Disney made 50 years ago), and not as lighthearted as Hook. Which I suspect was intentional.

I just saw the film myself, and I agree that it was darker, but that's because it was truer to the original book (written 99 years ago). Granted, it's still not a scene-for-scene enactment of J.M. Barrie's novella or is play, but the book had a dry Victorian underbelly to it, and so does Hogan's film. Granted, the Disney version was suprisingly faithful as well (by Hollywood standards), so Hogan's is also pretty close to that.

One thing this production has that all the others before have lacked is sex. OK, it's more like sensuality or romance. Disney's version was simply about a boy who wouldn't grow up; this one is about a boy and girl who are both very much on the verge of doing so. The stage versions have always cast small women in the role of Peter, so the whole idea of pre-adolescent flirting between Sandy Duncan or Kathy Rigby and the young woman playing Wendy never really worked. But with the "inspired" casting of an actual 12-year-old boy in the title role, it works here, and the almost-sexual tension between the two actors feels very real. At the least, one close-up of Jeremy Sumpter gently breaking into a smile was enough to make me wish I were a 12-year-old girl, with a chance to talk him into growing up with me. {grin}

The movie isn't all darkness and syrup, though. There are some fun action scenes, a fair amount of slapstick for the kiddies, and plenty of silly-chuckle humor of the sort you'd expect in a movie about a bunch of kids and imaginary pirates, and in which the children's nursemaid in the Darling household is a dog (actually played down a bit from the novel).

I'm happy to report that the Indians come across better in their brief appearance here than in the Disney version. It dispenses with Disney's embarrassing "clap if you believe in fairies" audience-participation ploy in favor of an approach closer to the book's handling of it.

My main disappointment is with the special effects. They were usually quite good, but there were frequently spots where instead of giving the illusion of flight, Peter's motions looked more like the boy-on-a-wire shots they were. And the less said about the pink cotton candy clouds the better.

I just happened to look at the user ratings on IMDB.com, and the film is scoring least-favorably among males under 18, and better across all age groups among females. The poor showing among boys is ironic, but not really surprising, because the general message of the story seems to be that boys are incomplete, and need to grow up. The characters say as much at one point. But the film then shows otherwise, when Peter demonstrates that he does have real feelings; he may be immature, but he does know what love is, even if he doesn't want to. Of course the boys in the audience probably don't appreciate that he shows this completeness by crying, and through his reaction to receiving a "thimble" from Wendy. The film (and book) is told from a female character's point of view, so the better showing among women - who also remember being 12-year-old girls - makes sense.

E-mail for Those Left Behind

OK, you've got your spiritual ticket ready for the Rapture, when God calls all the believers directly up to Heaven, leaving the non-believers behind to endure sudden freeway pile-ups, airplane crashes, and interrupted Amway sales pitches. But what about your non-believing friends, or even family? The poor sods won't understand what's going on, because they don't believe any of this stuff is for real. And with no Christians left to explain it to them, they'll be damned!

Fortunately, there's Rapture Letters, a free service that promises to send a condescending lecture about the Bible to your faithless loved ones after you've been taken to paradise. Every Friday.

What I don't understand is how, exactly, this system is going to work. The operator of the site is presumably born-again, and will vanish along with all the other devout Christians. Does he have some kind of process running on this system which will detect a large-scale supernatural phenomenon, and act in response to that? I don't think that's scientifically possible.

Has he hired a non-believer to launch this apocalyptic spam manually? What if this person accepts Jesus in the meantime, or - in light of the overwhelming evidence he's just seen - converts right after the Rapture and vanishes himself before he can start the program? What if he just snorts "good riddance" and pulls the plug?

Or is it some kind of "dead man switch", requiring the operator to log in once a week to confirm that he hasn't been Enraptured? Well, what if he just... dies? And maybe his backup forgets to check in on time, because he's overcome with grief? Or what if the operator himself loses faith and gets Left Behind himself? Will he recognise what's happened and launch the deliveries, or will he remain in denial and keeping logging in and postponing them until the "real" Rapture?

For that matter, what if someone signs up to have a letter sent to someone on their behalf... but is still around after the Rapture? Is there a way to cancel the message if you no longer believe? After all, think of the embarassment if your boss receives one of these self-righteous messages on the Friday of the Rapture, and you're still around and have to go to work on Monday!

These are important questions, because this guy is promising to do something which could very well determine the fate of your loved ones' immortal souls! If he doesn't live up to what he says, you'll never get the chance to witness from the great beyond to your pagan aunt, agnostic son-in-law, or Mormon neighbor. You wouldn't buy a life insurance policy from just anybody without first knowing how they're going to pay your beneficiaries after you're gone. I'd need even more assurance for this eternal-life insurance scheme for my friends and family.

Of course you have to consider the possibility that your loved ones will be among the many who'll die as a direct result of the Rapture, and won't even get this second chance. What if the non-believer uses a Christian-operated ISP which crashes from lack of monitoring after the Rapture happens, and he never gets the message? Wouldn't that be ironic!

But hey, that's just God being God, so I guess there's nothing you can do about it. He never promised you a chance to do this. In fact, the whole instantaneous-disappearance-without-warning aspect of the Rapture suggests that he really doesn't want you to be able to tell those left behind what's going on. Can you get left out of the Rapture for trying to subvert God's will this way? That'd really suck.

Ultimately, it's a free service, so you can't really expect any kind of guarantees. The operator of it does accept donations however, to help fund the collection of e-mail addresses for later e-witnessing. It'd be a damn shame if the mass mailings didn't happen because they ran out of money to keep the mail server online. The legal bills for violating anti-spam laws will be a major burden on the outfit after it actually goes into action. (This doesn't qualify as "opting in".) So I'm ready to send them a big check. But only if they promise not to cash it until after the Rapture.

Paycheck - Taxes Withheld

my rating: Nathan's rating:

Nathan and I were each disappointed with Paycheck, but for opposite reasons. Parts of it went over his head, and I thought parts of it went over their heads.

The premise of the movie, as given away by the trailers, is that Ben Affleck's character agreed to have his memory of his work on a top-secret tech project wiped afterward, so he's surprised to discover that just before the wipe, he signed papers giving up the $90 million paycheck he was supposed to get, and instead just got an envelope of seemingly ordinary items. The items were the clues he'd need to piece together something (obviously important) he'd "forgotten", and giving up the paycheck had been the only way to make him pay attention to these items.

What the trailer doesn't tell you (because this is a spoiler, so stop reading now if you'd rather not know) is that the envelope of stuff doesn't exactly contain clues. The items are instead precisely the things he'll need to get out of one tight spot after another, as the Bad Guys try to track him down and kill him before he remembers the truth. Because, you see, the top-secret project was a technique for seeing the future, and Affleck was able to foresee what those tough spots would be, and smuggle himself the keys (sometimes literally) to get out of them. Which A) strains credibility a bit, because it requires that each of these life-threatening situations has a simple solution that revolves around having an ordinary item handy (e.g. a paperclip to short out a computer with), and Affleck figuring out that solution at the right time, and B) reduces the plot to a series of deus ex machina escapes. Didn't Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure use the same trick, when the dudes went back in time to plant the key to one of their escapes on the scene?

I'll admit that I haven't read the Philip K. Dick short story this is based on, but it doesn't seem like they used much of it beyond the warning-message-to-myself bit. There are a few scenes where the actors very briefly summarise the negative philosophical ramifications of this technology they've stumbled across, which seems like they got it from Dick. But the bulk of the movie is a bunch of action scenes, which are generally well-done... but each of them undermined by the MacGyver ex machina angle. The romance with Uma Thurman seems like an afterthought, because it doesn't really seem believable that these two ever fell in love, let alone that they'd be able to rekindle the relationship after he forgets all about her.

Paycheck could have been a clever and thoughtful sci-fi story with some exciting action added, but after Hollywood's idea taxes were withheld, the take-home pay really wasn't worth my time.

Dear Santa: Bring Me a Man

Why do I always find out about things too late? I just stumbled across a mention online of something I should have had on my Christmas list, and now I'll have to wait a whole year before Santa comes again. But maybe it's for the best, because this way Santa has plenty of time to get it ready for me.

The gift I'm talking about is the RealDoll. Simply put, it's what the package for every blow-up sex doll promises... but this one really delivers. Instead of being an undersized version of a Macy's parade balloon, it's a realistic artificial fuck partner, complete with a fully posable internal skeleton, natural-looking latex-and-silicone contours, and quite anatomically correct. They're so realistic that they have a subscription site featuring porn shots... of just the dolls. While some of the sample shots look a bit like Barbie with an unusually phallic Ken, they're pretty impressive in terms of posability and realism.

You can customise your order for a RealDoll, for hair color and style (both head and pubic), skin tone, eye color, and various other details. There are more options available for the female dolls (obviously a bigger market), and I'd like a little more choice in terms of body or face type, but the standard male doll's plenty hot for me, so I won't complain. And they do offer options for the trait most likely to matter to those buying an artificial man: dick size. For some reason the ability to fuck him in the ass is not standard on the male doll (oral sex is), but it's available on request. They don't say, but I assume he's constantly erect. Again, I'm not complaining. {grin}

The bad news is the price. RealDolls start at $6000 (plus substantial shipping costs: they don't deflate, after all) for the female models, and $7000 for the male. (Perhaps appropriately, a female doll with a penis added costs $6500.) Which is why I'm going to have to ask Santa for one; I can't afford one for myself.

Now, when I say "Santa", that could mean just about anyone. You don't have to be a fat, jolly fellow with a long white beard to buy me one (but you can be), and I think it's safe to say that I'd be very appreciative to whomever my Santa turned out to be. I'm not actually offering to prostitute myself here; that'd be illegal. But if I received a male RealDoll for Christmas from some generous man, I can assure you that he wouldn't have to settle for sex with just a doll. While I'm not quite the same shape as "Charlie", I'm sure I can make up for that by showing my appreciation with greater warmth and liveliness than you'd get from him. So everybody wins! {grin}

Even if Santa probably won't come down my chimney next year, I still find the RealDolls fascinating. In addition to efforts to enhance their appearance (e.g. tan lines), the manufacturers are working on features that would bring the dolls closer to life. At present that includes a system for generating pre-programmed sounds (coming from your computer) in response to certain stimuli, and an experimental electronic hip gyration system. It's probably only a matter of years before it'll be possible to put substantial digital intelligence behind these techniques, giving the dolls even more independent motion and responsiveness. Sex has pushed the development of technology before (e.g. video cameras, the Web) and this might provide some real advances in android robotics.

Howard Stern already says (in a testimonial on RealDoll.com) that he enjoyed sex with a RealDoll more than with a real woman. Granted, you have to consider the source: a girl that lies there and lets him do whatever he wants is probably pretty close to his ideal. It'll never subsitute for a real person in terms of a relationship, but the more that sex toys develop along these lines, the more likely that something like a RealDoll is going to serve as a satisfying alternative to, say, cheap anonymous sex.

So far society is willing to accept a dildo, a blow-up doll, or a RealDoll as essentially the same thing: a toy for grown-ups. But what happens when someone makes (for example) a sex-capable doll with the likeness of someone famous (with permission or not)? Or of another person they know (or want to pretend they know, and without permission)? Or that looks like it might not be - or even one that obviously isn't - of legal age? Or one that mimics an animal, such as a hamster? I'm not saying there's necessarily anything wrong with any of that... or is there?

Saddam Was Ready to Bomb Washington!

At least that's what the Bush White House told the Senate in a confidential briefing just before they voted to authorize the military take-over of Iraq.

That's right: not only was Saddam Hussein in league with al-Quaeda (oops, there's no actual evidence of that, and it never made sense anyway), not only did he have weapons of mass destruction ready to use (oops, turns out there's no sign of them, and the fact that he never used them suggests he never got them built), but he had unmanned drone aircraft capable of delivering those weapons to the east coast of the USA (oops, there's no such thing to be found anywhere in Iraq)!

Hell, if I'd been given this information (without the parenthetical hindsight), even I might have voted to authorize an invasion, on the grounds that Iraq posed a clear and present danger to American soil. But it was all (at best) low-probability speculation, and (at worst) a pack of impeachable lies to the U.S. Congress. There wasn't actually enough there to issue a search warrant, let alone a declaration of war.

Now, I'm not quite ready to let Congress off the hook for going along with Bush's invasion. But the revelation of just how badly Bush deceived them about the situation does give them "cover" if they want to turn around and admit that it was a mistake. They can use the excuse that they were lied to, rather than admitting that they caved in to political pressure, public hysteria, or whatever. Let the backpedaling begin. The sooner the better.

iTunes, Not Tunez

Apple is crowing that they've sold 25 million downloaded songs through their iTunes Music Store since it opened in April (to Mac users only at first, and to Windows 2K/XP users just recently). At nearly a buck a piece (an album of 12 songs usually sells for $9.99, making the per-song price a little cheaper than buying them at 99 cents each), that's close to 25 megabucks in retail sales. (Of course a lot of that is passed on to the record companies that own the music, so it's not all cabbage for Apple.)

I'm glad to see this, because it restores some of my faith in the willingness of the public to actually pay for "creative content" rather than just ripping it off.

I'm something of a born-again copyright believer. In high school and college I routinely made my own copies of friend's LPs or movies I rented. As I started working, and could afford to spend more money on entertainment, I bought more stuff legitimately, but when the opportunity to dupe a movie or CD came along, I still took advantage of it.

Then something happened which changed my attitude. Some friends of mine were a band with a local fanbase, and started recording an album. They were all still starving college students, and I had a full-time job, so I loaned them the money they needed to pay off the recording studio, then did the legwork and spent the money to get the album published. I was a record label.

The shoe was on the other foot. I wasn't an actual member of the band, but I'd been there while they worked at recording their music. So I understood that every unauthorized dupe of the band's new album represented several dollars that weren't coming back to me any time soon. I wasn't in it for the money (I didn't charge the guys interest on the loan, and the contract I'd written for the album production stipulated that I wasn't entitled to profits - if any - from it) but I did want to get my money back.

Some years later, I wrote some software which I made available online as shareware, and that strengthened my discomfort with bootlegging. Programming is work, and the person who does it deserves to be compensated for it. I think that anyone who has actually produced anything worth ripping off can understand what it's like to have that happen to him. (Writing free software to give away as open-source code is another matter. That's a choice that benevolent hackers make, rather than bootleggers making that choice for them.)

From then on, bootlegging just didn't feel right, so I stopped doing it. I try not to be too moralistic about it, because I know that it's a lot easier when you have enough money to easily afford the stuff you want... and I did. But when I "fell on hard times" (as they say) several years ago, I still stuck to my principles. I cut way back on my music purchases, stopped buying movies altogether, and became very selective about buying software. I started taking greater advantage of educational discounts (since I'd gone back to school) and freely licenced software, but the bottom line was that I stuck to the letter of the terms offered. And I quietly squirmed as the "file sharing" phenomenon took off. Unlicenced unauthorised downloads of warez, tunez, vidz, etc. suddenly became commonplace.

There was nothing new about people letting their friends copy their legally-acquired music. But now their "friends" had come to include "anybody on the internet". And people started acting as if they were entitled to make copies of whatever recordings they wanted. To which I say, "bull shit". If you didn't create it, it's not yours. You can't "share" something that doesn't belong to you in the first place. People try to justify it by saying that they're stealing from the evil record labels, but that's missing the point. The evil record labels then respond by giving the artists even less money, so it's not just the RIAA that gets hurt.

The RIAA has resisted the idea of making music available for downloading, and I can actually understand that. It just makes it that much easier for the bootleggers to "share" that music with 6 billion of their close personal friends. The RIAA insisted that people wouldn't pay to download music (because we'd gotten too used to stealing it for free), and I was afraid they were right. But Apple has put together a large enough selection of music, really easy tools for browsing and buying it, and reasonable usage rights (you can transfer the songs to three of your computers, to unlimited iPods, and/or burn them to unlimited CDs for personal use). It's a hit, and now everyone and his brother is rushing to set up their own online music store. (To be fair, a few of them were there before Apple.)

As much as I like Apple, I'm glad they're getting more competition. Right now Apple is considered THE online music store, and that kind of market dominance is never a Good Thing. My main concern is that Apple and its rivals will compete by locking in exclusives, which is just another way of saying "narrower monopolies". I also think they (Apple and the others) need to keep working on enhancing their selection; as I browsed the iTunes store to see if I could fill some holes in my collection (from the lean years), I found gaping holes in their catalog. And an iTunes for Linux would be nice.

The Lord of the Rings - Fantastic!

my rating: Nathan's rating:

I feel a bit like I'm the last fan both of Tolkein and of movies to see The Return of the King. Back in '83 I simply had to see the final part of the Star Wars trilogy (gee, where do you think Lucas got the name Return of the Jedi?) after school on opening day, but the mellowing and the working obligations of middle age kept me from seeing the conclusion of this trilogy until today, on the fourth day of its theatrical run.

It was worth the wait.

And by that, I'm referring to the 25 years since I first read the books. Ralph Bakshi made an attempt at translating The Lord of the Rings to the screen back in the 70's, with animation, but this was definitely a film that had to wait until the development of modern digital cinematic effects to be done properly. The effects in these three films work, giving visual life to the fantastic elements of Tolkein's story.

I could quibble about the Ents in the middle film not really matching my mental image of them (too small, and definitely too hasty), or the deletion of Tom Bombadil from the first movie and the scouring of the Shire from the last, and so forth. But that really would be quibbling. It's a classic story, at turns exciting, sad, frightening, and heart-warming. Even knowing ahead of time how it would all turn out (and even the twists in the road to get there), I was glued to my seat for the entirety of all three parts. The entire trilogy remains true to the spirit of the original, and takes relatively minor liberties with the story. (And the books are still there to be read, of course.)

Director/co-screenwriter Peter Jackson clearly loves those books, and that was even more important to the success of these films than the special effects were. So many stories get butchered on their way through the studio movie-making process, not because they couldn't be translated effectively to the screen, but because the producers just don't care. They just want the rights to use the characters for marketing purposes, so they licence the trademarks. (In which case you get tripe like the last couple Batman movies, or The Cat in the Hat.) Or they want to use some elements of an existing story, but build a different movie around it, so they licence the copyrights. (And you get a literary piece like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen turned into a brain-dead action flick, or Philip K. Dick's clever We Can Remember It For You Wholesale being used for the Schwartzenegger film Total Recall.) Fortunately, like the recent X-Men and Spider-Man films, this is an example of someone really trying to do justice to the source material, out of love for it.

I haven't bothered to collect movies for a while, and I don't even own a DVD player. But this is a set of movies for which I'm looking forwarding to buying the extended editions, and watching several more times over the coming years. And at least once I'll sit down in a comfy chair with a supply of snacks (no fluids) and watch the whole extended thing (probably about 12 hours) straight through.

Shifting gears a bit: There was one point in The Return of the King when (to my own amusement) the movie lost its hold of me. In a scene between Aragorn and Elrond (the actor who also played Agent Smith in The Matrix), I imagined Elrond in a pair of sunglasses sneering, "Welcome back, Mister Aragorn... we missed you!" {grin}

Who's in Denial?

Saddam Hussein's on the front page of the local paper, of course. The blurb under the headline calling him "smart-alecky" declares that he refuses to fess up about his links to the Iraqi resistance, the location of his weapons of mass destruction, or his past cooperation with al-Quaeda.

Maybe it's because there's nothing to tell?

OK, he was probably playing a role in the resistance. If he'd simply gone to ground and hid, or fled the country altogether, the U.S. military probably wouldn't have gotten the tips that led them to where he was.

But it's seems pretty damn likely that he didn't have a huge arsenal of WMDs, because he didn't use any of them. Maybe there's a small stash of them somewhere that he never got a chance to use, but it could be that his denial is actually factual.

And anyone with access to any intelligence (the spying kind or the regular kind) knows that Hussein and bin-Laden weren't in cahoots. Osama hates Saddam, whom he regards (correctly, I might add) as a secular infidel despot. Despite widespread popular belief among Americans that the two are linked, the only basis for it is a little bit of tenuous circumstantial evidence, some wishful thinking and innuendo on the part of the Bush Administration, and an easily-confused public. (I'm sure that many Americans' first thoughts upon hearing that Saddam was captured was, "Now we'll make him pay for 9/11!" followed - maybe - by, "No, wait, that was bin-Laden.") In the 1980's (before Saddam invaded a key supplier of our oil), we had better relations with him than bin-Laden and the mujahedeen in Afghanistan did.

Actually, I do expect Saddam to admit to an alliance with al-Quaeda eventually. Interrogators couldn't get him to say anything while he was still weak and groggy following his capture, but true or not, I'm sure they'll beat it out of him before he's executed.

Love Actually - Actually Good

my rating: Nathan's rating:

December's traditionally a smorgasbord of good new movies, but Nathan had his heart set on the extended re-release of The Two Towers. There wasn't anything out this week that I had to see, and I certainly didn't mind seeing the film again, so we went to see that instead of anything new. But I was feeling a bit bored and frustrated with my life, so I went to see Love Actually, which Nathan had already seen by himself and raved about just how wonderful it would make me feel.

Well, I'm a bit more jaded about holiday-themed romantic comedies, I suppose, because it didn't leave me nearly that happy. But truth be told, I've developed an almost diabetic intolerance for sugary sweet romances, so the fact that I sat through it smiling rather than slipping into a coma (or wishing I would) says a lot for it. In fact, it even got me thinking that maybe a little romance (or at least flirting) might be nice to have again in my life.

It's very much an ensemble piece with a whole bunch of talented actors sharing screen time, each of them part of what seems like a dozen different storylines, all of which deal with loving relationships of one kind or another, ranging from just plain horniness, to lust, to childish infatuation, to lifelong friendship, to tenuous marriage, and so on. Some of these are played strictly for laughs, others with treacly (ironic?) absurdity, some bittersweet, and others that you're not sure what to make of them, because you can't see how they can be resolved with a happy ending... and they aren't. I guess the darkness of some storylines and the sillyness of others served as insulin to break down the sugar of the others.

In keeping with the genre (which one of the characters - a wise-but-innocent 10-year-old - comments on) by the climax of the film (on Christmas Eve, of course) people begin finding True Love and several of the storylines begin intersect, either through storyline-crossing relationships or the rather forced coincidence of people being in the same place at the same time. An epilogue set a month later ties up most of the remaining loose ends.

The adverts for the movie spoil some of the funny bits, and I wish they'd saved a few more for the people who actually paid to see the film.

I'm tempted to call the movie "inoffensive", because it didn't offend me, but I suppose the storyline about the couple who meet on the set of a high-budget porn movie might offend some people. And there's a bit of creepiness in the fact that several of the romances involve employers and their employees. But I see that as a redeeming trait: not "realism" per se, but a recognition that the workplace is where many of us do most of our socialising. It's kind of like a syrupy, fruity cocktail with just enough liquor in it to have a bite to it.

Oh give me a clone...

(to the tune of "Home on the Range")
Oh give me a clone,
Of my own flesh and bone,
With its Y chromosome changed to X.
And when it is grown,
My own little clone
Will be of the opposite sex.
   – sci-fi writer Randall Garrett

There's a discussion on Slashdot in response to the UN putting off a debate on cloning, because the US government keeps stomping its feet whenever they bring up research into therapeutic uses for the technology. Slashdot is known for attracting folks who - despite often-wide-ranging opinions about it - "get" technology. Don't count on it.

For example, there was one nutball who said he was opposed to cloning on moral grounds, because he's concerned about over-population. OK, that's a noble concern. But so completely missing the point. Cloning is not going to produce huge armies like in Star Wars. It doesn't work like the transporter on the Enterprise, producing human beings out of thin air. And getting down to reality, cloning is least likely to be used in the poorest parts of the world (where over-population is the biggest problem) because it's gonna be expensive.

You also hear people who seem to think that clones will somehow be actual duplicates of people, not only looking exactly like them, but with the same personality and even the same memories. That's simply not possible. A recent episode of Star Trek: Enterprise even re-inforced that notion, though apparently someone on staff knew enough about the subject to insert some techno-babble into the dialog to justify it.

Then there are the theological objections, based on the premise that a clone would not have a soul (because a soul is created at the moment of conception). If that's the case, then what about identical twins? They are produced when a single sperm fertilizes a single egg, which accidentally splits apart into two identical cells before they start differentiating and developing into embryos. Once conception, one soul. Do they each have half a soul? Or is one of them an unholy, soulless thing? If there's such a thing as a soul, I'm pretty sure God can give one to each human organism, including twins. Or clones.

Because that's really all a clone is: a twin. In fact, there's a good chance that the first successful human clone will be created that way, by taking DNA from a recently-fertilised egg and transplanting it to another egg (to be carried by a surrogate mother), and then letting them both develop like a normal fetus. So you could have identical twins born to different women. But under the "normal" scenario (taking the DNA from an adult), a clone would be just a time-delayed identical twin.

Now we already know that identical twins aren't the same person. They have different fingerprints, and other subtle physical differences. As they grow up, they have different experiences, with different memories, and they develop different personalities. Even if you dress them alike and they always go everywhere together, one of them's going to start responding to the name "Tommy" and the other one to "Timmy". One of them is going to fall off the monkey bars and become leery of heights, and the other one isn't. And so on.

These differences are going to be even more dramatic for a twin who's born a few decades later than his brother: one will grow up watching black and white network TV and listening to the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, the other will grow up surfing digital cable and the internet, and listening to OutKast and Blink-182. (Which will be better adjusted is a debate for another time. {grin})

The UN debate is about a somewhat different topic, though. Global opinion is pretty widely against allowing actual human cloning of this sort. (This seems a bit backwards to me, because that scenario is actually the least troubling. You're afraid that such time-delayed twins will suffer from unrealistic expectations from their parent-siblings? Well, so do the sons of fathers and the daughters of mothers.) The debate is actually about research into cloning for medical purposes. Which fundamentally comes down to the same old debate about whether a fetus has a "life" or not, whether it's a "person".

I think that question is beside the point. By any objective standard, they're human; just check the DNA. By any worthwhile standard of "alive", they qualify; cellular respiration is taking place, which is all it takes to get a geranium or a jellyfish pronounced "living". A late-term embryo is usually even "viable" outside the womb.

But so what? If a guy shoots a load of buckshot into his mouth, for the next several minutes he'll have a whole torso full of organs that are quite viable, thank you very much. Someone with more specific brain damage, or who happens to be on life support machines at the time his brain shuts down, has about 90% of a body that's just as "alive" as yours or mine. But aside from a few religious sects, no one questions whether it's immoral to transplant those organs into someone else's body. In our society we've even come to regard organ donation as a Very Good Thing, and the family who consent to have their loved one's organs transplanted are lauded for doing so.

How exactly is this different from (for example) a person consenting to have their DNA transplanted into an ovum that could be grown long enough to generate usable fetal stem cells to safely treat Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. I'm not talking about creating a clone, letting it grow into a baby, then a little boy, and then slaughtering him for his kidneys. That would be ghoulish. But a non-sentient blob of cells... hell, we do that already with people's skin cells for grafts.

At the risk of being overly literal, to be a "person" requires "personality". Grown-up humans have one. Even infant humans have one. Fetuses, cloned stem cells, skin grafts, and donor kidneys do not.

I'm not saying we should give carte blanche to medical researchers to do whatever the hell they want with cloned tissue. Every other field of medical research is regulated by ethics boards and so on, and research into cloning should be governed as well. Just as Josef Mengele or the doctors in Tuskegee ran some horribly unethical experiments, so could cloning researchers. But the thing in itself is not inherently immoral or unethical. And the knee-jerk objections of the Bush Administration to anything that treats a blob of undifferentiated cells as something more sacred than (for example) an Iraqi child or a domestic gunshot victim, is shameful.

Which kind of person are you?

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.*

Ironically, I don't believe in binary. It's fine as an abstract concept, and it's a great model upon which to build computers, but I don't like the idea that you're either one kind of person, or you're the other kind.

I recently started a new job, and since my co-workers are all computer people, one of the ways they're trying to get a handle on me as a person is to put me in a category based on the kind of computer I use. I was hired for the job based primarily on my 15 years of experience with Windows, so some of my co-workers assumed that I was a "Windows person". Then I mentioned my iMac to someone, so they concluded that I'm a "Mac person". But I'm neither. Or both, I suppose.

But not exclusively. I probably spend more time using my RedHat Linux workstation, and my Mandrake Linux web/mail server and Coyote Linux firewall are (arguably) used almost any time I use any of these machines. And then there's the poor, neglected BeOS system that was orphaned when Be shut down. And it's worth noting that I do muck about under the hood of OS X on my Mac, so don't try putting me on the Linux side of the BSD vs. Linux "divide".

Another way people will try to pigeonhole others is by their PDA. Are you a Palm user or a PocketPC/WindowsCE user? Neither, actually; I use a Psion Revo running Symbian (the same OS used in many high-end wireless phones).

It may sound like I'm bragging here. Well, sure. I am. {grin} But my point is that questions like this are really more complex than the binary logic we tend to reduce things to. The world isn't just Democrats and Republicans; there are conservative Dems, moderate Reps, Greens, Libertarians, and whatnot. It's not just Christians and Heathens; there are various flavors of Christianity, plus Hindus, Muslims, neo-Pagans, Jews, agnostics, and so on. It's not just Blacks and Whites, but also Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, and oodles of multi-racial people. Not just gays and straights, but a polymorphic panoply of perversity. (Hell, I don't even thing male and female are really a good way to split people up; I'm definitely more "feminine" than some men, and not because I like having sex with them.) And it's not just good people and bad people, but a whole mess of people, each messed up a bit in their own way. And we all have more in common with each other than we have different.

*In binary, numbers are represented using only the numerals 0 and 1. So the number 0 is represented as "0", 1 is "1", 2 is "10", 3 is "11", 4 is "100", and so on. So the opening sentence would be read aloud as "There are two kinds of people...."

The Last Samurai - Oscar bait

my rating: Nathan's rating:

The Last Samurai has "big budget epic" and "Oscar" written all over it, which sets it up for high expectations and disappointment. While I wasn't blown away by it, it was very well done.

It's the story of a disaffected American cavalry captain (played by Tom Cruise), a veteran of the U.S. wars against the native nations, recruited in 1876, as Japan was developing a fascination with all things Western, to train the imperial army of Japan in the use of firearms and military tactics to put down a rebellion led by a Samurai who remains true to traditional weaponry and the warrior ethos that goes with them. As you can easily guess from the adverts, he goes "native".

Although the movie contains several scenes of combat, it's about more than just war. There's a principle in much Japanese art that treats the spaces between objects with as much importance as the objects themselves, and that applies here as well. The quiet scenes between the fights and the battles are at least a important, and give an added intesity to those scenes. Unlike so many movies where the combat scenes are just flashy demonstrations of martial arts and cinematic techniques, or just "pulse-pounding" action, I found myself intently watching these scenes, genuinely concerned about what was happening.

The casting of the movie had me a little bit worried, that this was going to be a story about the one white guy coming in to play messiah for a throng of brown people, and that the title of the movie would refer to him. But that was (mostly) not the case. Yes, Cruise's character plays the hero in several circumstances, and brings important strategy ideas to the rebellion, but he remains a lieutenant (in fact, not rank) to the real samurai, a Japanese warrior who "serves" the Emperor by opposing him military. The story is more about what Cruise learns from the Japanese, than vice versa. A bit of anglo-centrism, to be sure, but the parallel story is very much about Japan and its people, and not-all-that-good things they stood to learn from the Westerners (and forget what Cruise was learning).

The only criticism Nathan had was the occasional use of subtitles. He doesn't read very quickly, so he can never keep up with them, even when they're fairly brief, as they were here. Personally, I thought they used a bit more English than was realistic, but at least they didn't have scenes of Japanese people speaking privately to each other in English.

Merry December!

It's time for the annual dilemma of how to assert one's anti-mainstream non-religious principles without coming across like Ebenezer Scrooge in the process. I think Christmas is little more than a humbug, after all, but with the long nights, gray days, unmet expectations of "the holidays", and so on, December is depressing enough. I don't want to add to that by playing the curmudgeon.

One thing I do is to keep my mouth shut. On Thanksgiving Day, I don't grumble about all the obvious things we can't be thankful for, or question whether there's even anyone out there to thank. Personally, I try to just think about what's going well in my life, and leave it at that. Kind of like affirmations, but without the New Age dopiness.

I participate in whatever my family is doing to celebrate the holidays. Everyone's having dinner at Aunt Sarah's on Thanksgiving, then watching somebody lose a football game to someone else... so I join them. My sisters and their families are all converging on Mom and Dad's house Christmas morning to unwrap presents... so I buy gifts for the nieces and nephews, and graciously accept whatever gifts come my way. I even go to church on Christmas Eve to play the trumpet in the little instrumental ensemble my mother puts together to play carols before the service.

Since I moved out of my parents' house, I've never put up a Christmas tree or other such decorations, not even back when I still considered myself Christian. It always seemed rather pointless (and perhaps desperate) for someone living alone. But I do put lights up on the house. They're not "Christmas lights", though. I don't put them up right after Thanksgiving; I wait until the 1st of December. And I don't take them down right after Christmas; I leave them up through New Year's Eve. I'm meticulous about that. They are "December lights", and I put them up to liven up the street during the darkest month of the year. I don't celebrate Solstice (again, I'm not New Agey); I just want to keep my spirits up in the gloom.

I don't think anyone else notices when my lights go up or come down, and if they did they'd probably assume I'm just a little late about it. But it means something to me, and that's what matters.