Marriage and/or Marriage

Don Fox has some interesting comments about gay marriage and civil unions. "In fact, this would be a good time to make the real distinction between civil marriage and religious marriage," he suggests.

I've tried to make that point many times in the past, and mostly got blank stares. I don't think most people have even considered the notion that the typical "marriage" consists of two things: a legal contract and a religious rite. Sure, it's fairly obvious to those of us who think about - and care about - the distinction between church and state. But when you've got ministers droning on about the power vested in them by the State of Fillintheblank, and nobody even cocks their eyebrow in puzzlement, people are clearly taking it for granted that it's all one thing.

It's kind of like orgasm and ejaculation. We (and by this I mostly mean "men") tend to think of them as the same thing. They usually happen at the same time, give or take a heartbeat. We tend to like them both. But they're actually two entirely different phenomena. One's the mixing and pumping of semen from your glands out through your dick. The other is a neuro-electric discharge that makes your brain register intense amount of pleasure. You can have an orgasm without an ejaculation - ask any woman with a libido. And you can have an ejaculation without an orgasm - I've had that happen on several occasions myself.

Likewise, you can go get a marriage licence and have a civil ceremony without involving any religious rituals. And you can have your religious authority figure perform a joining ceremony, with no state certificates of any kind. (The local Metropolitan Community Church has done them for years.)

I don't think the American public get this, and they probably won't until some of these nasty amendments go into effect, and there's a court case in which a government official tries to apply such a "ban on gay marriage" to religious ceremonies... ones without any civil dimension to them. At that point it'll be obvious that the government is trying to stick its nose into religious matters, and the public will finally catch on. It won't directly fix the bans on gay civil marriages, but at least it'll teach them the terms of the debate.

Wacky Packages

Although I'm officially contemptuous of popular culture (when I'm not oblivious to it)... especially consumer culture... I was not always thus. I was a kid once, too, believe it or not.

One of the passing fancies of my childhood were Wacky Packages. These were baseball-card-sized stickers featuring parodies of well-known consumer goods, the kind a typical kid would know from going shopping with Mom or at least seeing them around the house. They all had insulting sound-alike names that worked on the playground-name-calling level, and the more inspired ones tied the product's advertising slogans and the rest of the packaging into the theme. They included stuff like "Crust" toothpaste, "Badzooka" bubblegum, and "Belch's" jelly.

As I was thumbing through the latest Previews (the monthly ordering catalog for comicbook specialty stores, essential for any comics reader who doesn't want to be limited to the mainstream stuff his local retailer orders), a card fell out. "Oh brother, another stupid 'collectible card game' or - even stupider - line of trading cards," I thought. Then I looked at it. Topps (purveyors of many of the the aforementioned stupid cards) is bringing back Wacky Packages. The sample card included in my catalog was for "Mr. Coffin" and it bears all the hallmarks of the Wacky Packages of my youth.

On one hand, it's sad that marketing materials are what pass for cultural references in our society... both when I was a kid, and today. And it's gotten far worse today, when people are willing to pay top dollar to wear advertisements on their chests. But I think Wacky Packages - by lampooning these mercantile identities - help to deflate them a bit. They're not exactly AdBusters, but they're at least second cousins once removed.

But I have to admit that the main reason I got a kick out of seeing Wacky Packages coming back into production was the treacle of nostalgia. They remind me of a time when none of the boys I knew liked girls, when I could count on my parents to be able to take care of any bad thing that happened, when I was blissfully unaware of just how much crap goes on in the world... when "Slopicana" orange juice was still enough to make me laugh.

Kiddie Porn, Snuff Films, Hate Crimes...

Getting right to the point: We should get rid of laws against possession of kiddie porn, sale of snuff films, hate crimes, use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, transporting a minor across state lines for immoral purposes, and any other laws that are redundant, criminalize something that isn't harmful in and of itself, or turn one kind of crime into something else.

It's hard to argue in favor of (for example) snuff films. Although they're mostly the stuff of urban legend, movies of people actually being killed (or assaulted) to satisfy people's morbid fascination, are a rather disgusting thing. But just being disgusting doesn't mean we have any ethical right to fine someone or lock them up for selling them. The movie itself - that VHS cassette or DVD - isn't killing anyone.

Most of the alleged snuff films out there are little more than low-budget slasher flicks. They're fake. Sometimes it's obvious, other times it's not. If you're arguing that a "snuff film" - in and of itself - is harmful, then a guy who makes really convincing fakes should be treated the same as someone who makes movies of real murders. Which seems a bit irrational to me.

You might argue that it desensitizes the person who watches it to the inhumanity of murder, that it glorifies violence, and so on. OK, but then so do fake snuff films, like Friday the 13th, Dirty Harry , Terminator, and Saving Private Ryan. "But Saving Private Ryan had artistic merit, and used the violence to make a point about..." Maybe to you. Some people felt that the scenes of soliders being turned into ground chuck were gratuitous. Giving a film "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" shouldn't work like in Imperial Rome, when the former meant you got to go free, and the latter meant you... didn't.

Coming at it from ther other side of the coin, there are also very legitimate - even necessary - reasons for making films of actual people being killed. It's called "journalism". When a person takes a camera to the jungles of Vietnam, the mountains of Afghanistan, or the streets of Los Angeles, and makes pictures of people being killed, he's quite likely doing something very valuable to society, the very thing that the First Amendment was created for. And if some sick fucker out there gets off watching video of soliders dying, or of motorists being beaten by cops, that's hardly the fault of the person recording it.

"But what about the people who actually set out to stage snuff films?" you ask. Well, last I checked, killing someone was already a serious crime, and being an accomplice in the planning, execution, and cover-up of that activity (which is what a snuff-film-maker would be) was a pretty serious crime as well. Heck, the perps of such a crime should be fairly easy to convict, what with it being caught on tape and all.

Most of the same thinking applies to kiddie porn. The crime (at least the part that should be a crime) is the physical and sexual abuse involved in staging the scenes in the first place. That's where there's an actual identifiable victim, and anyone who takes advantage of his power (physical and/or emotional) over a child - whether it's to make a movie, or just for his own personal pleasure - should be convicted accordingly.

But just distributing or possessing images of that activity shouldn't be a crime. The usual argument for why it should be is that it creates a demand for these images, which leads to more children being abused. But that overlooks the fact that most of this stuff isn't commercial anyway. It's all bootlegged. If you think the music industry is having a difficult time collecting money from music fans, it can't be anything compared to he difficulty of getting kiddie porn afficionados to stop downloading and trading stuff for free through the internet.

Another problem with the "criminal possession" concept relates back to the fake-snuff-film phenomenon. A substantial amount of alleged kiddie porn features adult (or at least age-of-sexual-consent) actors as the "kids". Give small-breasted 18-year-old Britney a pubic shave, an age-inappropriate haircut, and coach her to giggle a lot, and she'll pass for 14. Which has led to laws against porn that merely looks like kiddie porn. In other words: acting.

Statutes against child pornography go even further than that: into fantasy. The legislation and case law varies from place to place, but it's possible to face criminal charges for writing - or even possessing - fiction or art that prosecutors consider to be a pornographic depiction of minors. I remember an exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe photos which contained a few images of naked children, which some people considered pornographic... but which I found perfectly innocent. I hestitated to finish the attached illustration - of three people of different generations in a gym shower - for fear that some might call it porn, which (because one of them is clearly not an adult) would make it "kiddie porn".

I did use models for this illustration, by the way. Digital models. Virtual reality is (I expect) where the future of kiddie porn would lie if not for the criminalisation of its possession (and perhaps it will anyway). If Wing Nut and New Line can create nasty little Gollum, there's no technological barrier to virtual little boys and girls doing nasty things on film. That's led to laws specifically criminalising digital images of this kind. Not to protect any actual children from being raped and abused, but to prevent this material - and with it the very idea of children being sexually active - from existing.

Which is pretty much the same thing that legislators are trying to do about racism and other forms of bigotry, when they pass laws against so-called hate crimes. They want to erase the idea of racism (and anti-semitism, etc.) from public consciousness. That's certainly a noble goal. But it's impossible, and these laws are the wrong way at it in any case.

For the record, I've argued (and still do) for the inclusion of gay-bashing in hate crimes statutes. But that's only because the laws are there on the books, and as long as they are, they should be applied consistently. To say that it's OK to attack a person because he's gay, but it's not OK to attack a person because he's black, is an implicit endorsement of gay-bashing.

But I'd rather those laws were off the books entirely. Yes, fag-bashing (and nigger-bashing, and kike-bashing, and so on) is simply evil. Not just because it involves violence against a human being, but because of the reason for it. But that's not a good enough reason to make a law against it. Sure, it has repercussions beyond just the obvious direct victim, as a form of "ethnic intimidation" that oppresses whole groups of people with fear. It's harmful to society. But so - in my opinion - is voting a straight-party ballot for the Republicans. But I would never support any kind of law against it.

Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney hated Matthew Shephard (and all other gay people), and it's their moral right to feel that way. On the other hand, they brutally attacked him and left him to die, and they should spend the rest of their lives in jail for that... regardless of why they did it. Charging them with murder and with "ethnic intimidation" or whatever term you might use for it, is a bit like double jeopardy, in which you're charged more than once for the same crime. (The U.S. Constitution forbids double jeopardy.) The only purpose it serves is to ratchet up the sentence, which is just a way to satisfy our thirst for revenge.

I'm definitely not ally of the pro-gun lobby. If it were up to me we'd register and license the use of the damn things at least as carefully as we do with other lethal weapons like cars. But carrying a gun is (with some limitations) legal. Unless you're committing a felony (such as a robbery) at the same time. Then you can be charged not just with the felony, but with carrying a firearm. Which would otherwise be legal. If you're a racist white person and the victim is black, your bigotry just became criminal. Toss in a drawing of a naked boy and a video tape of something that looks like a snuff film and you're probably going to fry. When all you really did was take someone's money.

Additional laws intended to pile additional penalties onto the perpetrator are redundant. We don't need them, to punish the perpetrators of gay-bashing, nigger-lynching, or any other hate-inspired crime of violence. If a person commits an actual harm-causing crime - such as killing someone, abusing a child, bashing a stranger on the street, etc. - then let's convict them of that crime, and not criminalise the otherwise-innocent things they've done - such as filming it or doing it for hateful reasons, or holding a firearm - in the process.

Because once we've done that, we've marginalised all of those things: making movies, having opinions, thinking and recording unconventional thoughts, etc. They become semi-criminal activities. And that's the end of freedom.

Open the Presidential Auditions

I just gave in on one of my chief badges of iconoclasm. I have cable TV service. Not one of those $100/month digital packages, but just Basic Cable, which includes only the channels required by the local cable monopolies, plus some all-shopping and all-ads channels. I got sick of trying to pull in weak signals with rabbit ears.

So I sat down last night and watched a little CSPAN. There was Alan Keyes (the anti-gay, anti-choice, pro-capital-punishment, pro-flat-tax, anti-public-education, black Republican candidate) talking. "Oh, fucking great..." I thought. "I thought we were rid of him." But you know what? He was making perfect sense. He was appearing in a press conference for Open Debates, who are filing a complaint with the FEC over the Commission on Presidential Debates' handling of televised debates. On the dais with him were a handful of other "fringe" politicos whose viewpoints have been locked out of the presidential debate process. (I missed the beginning of the conference, so I don't know who the others were.)

In one of his few positive contributions to the 1996 campaign (aside from the mere fact of being black and in the race), Keyes was arrested for trying to join a televised debate between Republican candidates. Here he was talking about the larger problem of how democracy is being subverted by a process that reduces the options before the voters even get a chance to act. As a speaker, he's no Jesse Jackson, but he had some good analogies, comparing horse races (where we're betting on the outcome) to presidential races (where the same thing happens, but we're supposed to be determining the outcome). He compared our system to that of the old Soviet Union, where 99% of the people voted, but the candidates had all been pre-selected , so the "democracy" was a sham.

He blamed the Commission on Presidential Debates - a cartel created by the two major parties - for making their events so deadly dull that people don't even bother watching them. Which is exactly what the Big Two's leaderships want: to keep people out of the electoral process, so that it's easier for small groups (such as them, or the corporations who fund the CPD and most major elections) to determine the outcome. It's a "keep out the vote" program. And there's a growing list of people from all over the political map who are willing to say so.

Keyes only hinted at what his own political agenda is, and he acknowledged (without ridiculing) the very different agendas of some of the others behind this complaint. Keyes mentioned Ralph Nader a few times as someone who should have been included in 2000, not because he likes Nader's positions, but because that's what it takes to make our electoral system work properly. Nader (who wasn't there) presumably feels likewise about Keyes. I certainly do. I was pissed that Keyes was locked out of that debate, and I'm pissed that the CPD is already planning to keep this year's debates limited to Bush and (presumedly) Kerry.

(I'm also more than a little disgusted at the primary process that's already appointed Kerry to be the nominee. I live in one of the states with a relatively early primary, and the list of candidates I got to chose from was already shortened from the original. The one I wanted to vote for (Kucinich) was still there, but that's only because he and Sharpton aren't playing the game by the rules, and sticking with it even though they're not "winning". If you're a Democrat and you like Gephart or Lieberman or Clark or Braun, that's just too damn bad because the pundits analysing the results from Iowa, New Hampshire, and so on have forced them to bow out. They've pretty much crippled Dean as well.)

People have been saying for years that the debates are no longer even debates. At best they're joint press conferences, and they're really closer to auditions for Martin Sheen's role on The West Wing. Maybe that's inevitable with the nature of the presidency today. But at the least they should be open auditions, with room for a variety of viewpoints, not just the moderate-liberals and the moderate-conservatives, both trying to look like just-plain-moderates.

Right on!... but Wrong

I'm suffering from philosophical whiplash here. My attention was recently directed toward the Freenet Project, and my initial reaction was "Cool! How do I get involved?" This was so what I was all about! Then I read further. And my mood cooled about 50 degrees. Celsius.

For those of a certain age (like mine), this is not about a "freenet" of the kind you're thinking of, where some outfit offers no-charge access to the internet as a community service. This is about free (as in "free speech") not free (as in "free beer"). It's a system that tries to ensure freedom of speech by offering anonymity, based on the rationale that many people need anonymity to exercise true freedom of speech.

As someone who uses a penname online to avoid employers, potential employers, and such Googling me, I can buy that argument. If my name were attached to every article I post, I'd have to censor myself. And when the Freenet Project people argue that "freedom of speech" has to cover unpopular (and maybe even immoral) topics like racism, terrorism, kiddie porn, etc. I'm inclined to agree.

But where I found myself parting company with the Freenet Project philosophy was with their statement, "You cannot guarantee freedom of speech and enforce copyright law." As a practical matter, that may in fact be true. But Freenet founder Ian Clarke just asserts it as some kind of moral truism, and then goes on with a bunch of willfully naive bullshit poo-poo-ing the whole idea of copyright.

His first attempt to dismiss it out of hand is to declare that freedom is more important. That is no more than an expression of his own personal values. I can respect his point of view, but I would expect him to respect others', which he does not.

He then sets up the strawman that people "claim that we would have no art" without copyright, and then pushes that strawman over by stating the obvious fact that people will create things regardless. Of course they will. But when they're forced to do in their spare time because it's impossible to make a living as a creator without the tool of copyright, that's a form of de facto censorship right there.

Next up is the old argument that copyright is already being widely ignored, so why bother with it? Which is the logical equivalent of saying that widespread killing means we shouldn't bother outlawing murder. Maybe we could instead using some of that vaunted free speech to persuade people to stop killing other people instead of just legalising it?

He points at the RIAA cartel to make his case. The RIAA is an abomination (my own characterisation, not his) and deserves to die immediately for the way they've routinely raped recording artists and then charged them for the privilege. Without them the music industry would be a much better place, with musicians actually reaping the benefits of their creative work rather than having their work co-opted by record labels which will proceed to suck them dry.

But that's a problem with the RIAA, not with copyright. In fact, copyright is perhaps the only tool that gives musicians some leverage to fight back against the RIAA. They could start withholding their copyrights from the RIAA, and retake control of their commercial and artistic destiny. Damned if I know why they haven't... but they could.

Astonishingly, Clarke presents the old system of patronage as a better alternative to copyright, as a way to finance the production of creative works. Patronage boils down to: people who have money dictate to people with creativity what they'll create, and they (the creators) have no actual say in the matter. They're just servants who know how to work a brush and paint. It's so astonishingly contrary to the whole concept of free speech that I'm surprised Clarke can suggest it without his head exploding. Artists struggled for centuries to be rid of it. They eventually made their way into the mercantile system, and as the technology for mass reproduction developed, they relied on the ability to charge people for the right to make copies (i.e. copyright) to make that financially viable.

Clarke then ridicules those who ridicule this intellectual discontinuity, by contradicting one of his early arguments. After stating that nobody gives a damn about copyright these days (as evidenced by the rampant "sharing" and downloading of other people's works), he makes the willfully naive claim that people will freely give cash to creators they believe in. Too bad they don't. Sure, some do, but obviously huge numbers of them do not.

Instead Clarke advocates an idea called "fairshare", which - with no apparent connection between the nice-sounding term and what it describes - basically amounts to artists selling stock in themselves, allowing those who buy into them to reap dividends when (through some kind of undescribed voodoo economics) that artist becomes financially "successful". Which is pretty damn difficult to do when the only source of actual income they have for writing songs (for example) are these venture capitalists he wants them to prostitute their creativity to. (A singer/songwriter might be able to make a living by performing, but that doesn't help a just-plain-songwriter, or a musician whose music doesn't lend itself to live performances.)

So what looked at first to be someone championing the right of people to speak their own mind, and to create and publish their own (perhaps very unpopular) ideas on the internet, turns out to be yet another intellectually dishonest attempt to rationalise why people shouldn't have to pay people for their work. It's not about free speech, but a justification for compulsory free beer. As appealing as this may be to the anarcho-libertarian crowd, the reliance of this argument on archaic plutocratic economic models sweeps whatever principles its author may be half-heartedly sympathetic to, effectively irrelevant.

Helen Thomas, National Treasure

Courtesy of The 18½ Minute Gap, is a transcript of G.W. Bush's press secretary trying very very hard not to answer a simple yes/no/I-don't-know question about the president's alleged military service record. The transcript doesn't identify who the various reporters posing questions were (they're all listed as "Q"), but even if McClellan hadn't addressed the main questioner as "Helen", I would've guessed that this was Helen Thomas in action.

Way back before I was born, Helen Thomas was important for simply being a woman assigned to cover the White House. In the meantime, she became important for being such a fixture there (and following every president since Kennedy on trips abroad), probably making her the most-recognised journalist (not counting anchors and weather reporters) in the world. And finally she's distinguished herself for standing up to yet another president and demanding the respect - and answers - she deserves... even though this has led to her banishment (by the most cowardly president of our age) from the front row to the back of the room during his rare appearances in the briefing room.

The issue she was asking about - whether the president was ever required to take time out from his duties in the Guard to perform community service - is important, but the how and why of that is self-evident. The value of Helen Thomas is probably self-evident as well, but I wanted to mention it anyway while I was thinking about it.

In Praise of Older Computers

On the occasion of the Macintosh's 20th birthday, I found myself in a discussion about those primal Macs. Despite the innovation of their point-and-click interface, the hardware was a product of the early 1980's. The earliest models didn't even have a hard drive, and ambled along at 8MHz. When a model with half a megabyte of RAM - think about that number for a moment - was introduced, it was popularly nicknamed (over the protests of a certain fast food chain) the "big Mac". We snicker at that level of hardware now, but 20 years ago it was state of the art, and a lot of people shelled out two and a half grand for one.

A first-gen Mac is really good for only two things nowadays: a museum piece or converting into a Macquarium. They'd been discontinued well before the internet (and the software that uses it) came into widespread use, and most of the software developers of the day are gone as well. There's just very little common ground between them and modern systems, kind of like Neanderthal and Cro Magnon, who simply couldn't reproduce together. The same is true of the typical IBM-PC-class systems of the 1980's, whose 8088 and 80286 processors are incompatible with the 386-or-better instruction set modern software uses.

But the story begins to change a bit when you get into the 1990's. 386's were commonplace and the 486 was taking over. Microsoft had finally hammered Windows into something usable by then. Over in the Mac realm, the Motorola 68040 provided similar 32-bit operation and floating-point arithmetic. Although 64-bit processors are now emerging, we're still using fundamentally the same kind of 32-bit technology today. Which makes a 10-year-old computer still fairly useful.

In fact, that discussion prompted me to pull out of storage an old Mac Quadra 630 I'd bought years ago. It has a 68040 processor, 20MB RAM, a 250MB hard drive, and an ethernet card. In other words: it's an internet-era machine. It took a little work to get some of the software installed (machines of this era didn't come out of the box ready for the web, and most of the software had to be downloaded: a catch-22) but I now have it setup with a current web browser (iCab), and even web server software (MacHTTP). It's not as snappy as my roughly-gigaHertz-class machines with nearly-gigabyte banks of RAM, but it does pretty well, thanks. In fact, I'm using it right now to write this article.

I also have another machine of similar vintage that I've been using as a mission-critical component of my network for a few years now. It's a compact desktop Dell 433 Netplex, with a 33MHz 486DX cpu, a floppy drive, and a couple ethernet cards. It runs Coyote Linux and serves as a firewall and router, allowing all the other computers on my local network to access the internet through it, and blocking a whole variety of attempts to crack the security on my systems.

There's something I find appealing about these systems. Sure, they're sluggish if you try to run modern software on them, and the software they run well doesn't have all the photographic icons, animated helpers, and whatnot. But they have a certain elegant economy to them. And they're simple enough to be knowable. I haven't poked in all of the corners of it, but I know that Coyote Linux system pretty darn well. That Mac Quadra's operating system, with its Extensions folder, its Control Panels folder, etc. is pretty easy to get a handle on.

Going back a little further, I also have an old Macintosh SE, which is pretty much the same as the original Mac, but with an internal hard drive and a whopping 4MB RAM. The 9-inch black-and-white screen is a bit cramped, but other than that it's a decent little word processor. I just plugged it in and powered it on, and that hard drive holds a mere 121 files, including the entire operating system, extensions to operate the 100MB Zip drive I used to use with it, a word processing/spreadsheet/database program, and a bunch of documents. () Looking at that you can start to believe (again) that a complete operating system could fit on a diskette.

Or on a ROM chip. If I go back all the way to "the beginning", there's my old Commodore 64 and Atari 400, which were limited to floppies and cassette tapes, respectively, and had only 64KB and 16KB of RAM. But I knew the track-and-sector format used for storing data on those floppies, and I learned just what every byte of that address space was for. The whole machine was within my grasp.

Contrast that with today, with my OS X, Mandrake Linux 9.2, and (already out of date) Windows 98 powerhouses. I like to think I have a pretty good handle on how these systems work, but the truth is that there's so much there that I'll never learn more than a fraction of it. Which also means that if something goes wrong, there's less I can do to fix it myself. Perhaps someday I'll look back with fondness for the simplicity of OS X. But for now, I'm enjoying just tinkering with my vintage systems.

50 First Dates - Short Term Memory Loss in the Movies

my rating:

I'm going to toss out any journalistic integrity I might have had, and review a movie I haven't seen. I might rent it someday out of morbid curiosity, but I really don't want to see 50 First Dates, despite the fact that there's something about it that draws me in.

It's not that I have a thing for Sandler... Quite the contrary. I haven't enjoyed an Adam Sandler movie since The Wedding Singer (and I've been dragged to a bunch of them), and I think that one was just a fluke. I'm convinced that one has to have a streak of self-loathing masochism to enjoy sitting through two hours of Sandler screaming and whining and smirking and thinking it's cute, like an over-sized 11-year-old. (Ditto for any moview with Rob Schneider, who doesn't even have Sandler's not-so-bad looks.) The previews for this movie send a pretty clear message of what this movie will be like. The fact that it's opening "unopposed" as the Valentine's "date movie" for 2004 is disturbing on so many levels.

No, I'm drawn to this movie because of Drew. No, not Ms. Barrymore, but Andrew, my former boyfriend.

Andy suffers from short-term memory loss. Like Barrymore's character in this film, he doesn't remember yesterday. He doesn't even remember an hour ago. He lives constantly in the present, and almost entirely in the past. In his case it's due to brain damage from a bleeding blood vessel in his brain. (The character in the movie got hers from an accident of some kind.)

Another key difference is that Andy's brain trauma happened after we'd been boyfriends for 6 or 7 years, and the movie character's happens before Sandler's character first meets her. The schtick of the film is that he falls in love with her without knowing that she won't remember him the next day, so he spends the whole movie getting her to fall in love with him (starting from scratch) every time they meet. "Aw, isn't that sweet!" we're to say, as the doofy schlep carries on his sysiphean burden.

As if.

Short-term memory loss doesn't work like some kind of Groundhog Day effect, in which the person goes to sleep and forgets the day's events overnight. Someone without short-term memory never remembers things in the first place. She (or he) lives in a state of ongoing disorientation, unable to follow a conversation, or engage in anything that requires paying attention. We've all lost our train of thought, forgetting what we were going to say, or what we'd just been talking about, or what we went into the other room to get, because of a distraction. That's what short-term memory loss is like... all the time. So if Barrymore had it, even a complete dork like Sandler would notice. And unless he was merely fixated on her appearance, I doubt he could really fall in love with her.

Don't get me wrong: I still love Andy. But that's because we already had a relationship before his cerebral hemorrhage. Like I said, someone in his condition lives mostly in the past, and we still have that in common. So everytime we'd see each other after his stroke, his response would be "Hi, love! {kiss}", not "Who are you?" It's hard enough to live with an unchanging status quo of affection; not even the stupid loser which is Sandler's only "acting" persona would tolerate day after day of complete indifference. He'd give up. He'd have to.

I did. To a large extent it was forced on me: his family hated me, and they eventually made it impossible for me to remain part of his life. But even during the time I was still able to see him, I could see that - short of a miracle cure - our relationship was at best stagnant. I would grow and change, and he would not. You don't need Dear Abby, Joyce Brothers, or Dan Savage to tell you that won't work very well.

Of course this is by no means the first time Hollywood has used memory loss as a hook for entertainment. Most of the time they use variations on "retrograde amnesia", in which a person loses their past memories and tries to either recover them or move forward without them, or they lose the memory of a specific incident or period of time. Only a few have tackled characters with short-term memory loss, which is sometimes referred to as "anterograde amensia" referring to that the lost memories are from after the trauma, not before it.

my rating:

The first movie I'm aware of that dealt with anterograde amnesia is a minor Dana Carvey flick named Clean Slate. I haven't seen it (Carvey isn't as repellent as Sandler, but he doesn't exactly inspire me to see a film) but I know it's about a detective whose memory suffers from the overnight erasures of 50 First Dates, so he has to record notes to himself to keep track of his progress. This is probably where the writers of Sandler's movie did their "research" about short-term memory loss.

my rating:

It also sounds similar enough to the schtick of Memento that I suspect it provided some of the inspiration for that later movie. It's about an insurance investigator (played by Guy Pearce) who is trying to track down and take revenge upon the killer of his wife, despite the short-term memory loss he suffered in the incident. He compensates for his inability to form new memories by writing notes to himself, taking Polaroid photos of people and places he wants to remember, and for the most important "memories" having them tattooed on his skin.

This takes some artistic liberties with realism, because someone with memory loss as profound as Pearce's (he routinely has no idea where he is or how he got there) would not be able to function as well as he does. It's not that his memo-to-self trick couldn't work. An actual adaptive mechanism for people with short-term memory loss is to put reminder notes for them in key locations (e.g. "put food back in fridge" on the doorway out of the kitchen). But he'd have too much difficulty learning the trick. The big huge Catch-22 of short-term memory loss is that the person may not even understand that they have it.

What redeems Memento from this is the brilliant technique it uses to give the viewer a sense of Pearce's disability. The scenes of the story are played in reverse order, which means that in any given scene we have the same memories to work with as he does: none. All we have are the photos and tattoos made in "previous" scenes, with their imperfect and easily misunderstood clues of what's gone before. So when Pearce finds himself playing cat and mouse with a bad guy, not remembering whether he was chasing the man or the man was chasing him, we don't know, either. We understand later when we see the previous scene (though Pearce does not), but by that point we're scratching our heads trying to figure out what's going on and who's who in that scene. When the motel owner jokes with Pearce about being able to cheat him by asking him to (re?)pay his rent every time they see each other, we don't know if that's what he's doing. Others have use the flashforward/back technique to keep the audience in the dark, but writer/directory Christopher Nolan manages it for an entire film, to very good effect.

my rating:

In case anyone thinks that my beef with 50 First Dates is the fact that it's a comedy, I offer Finding Nemo as my pick of the best portrayal of short-term memory loss on the screen. For those who've denied themselves the pleasure of seeing this excellent movie, it's about Marlin, a widower fish (voice by Albert Brooks) trying to find his only son, accompanied by Dory (voice by Ellen Degeneres), a tropical fish with no short-term memory. She's very funny, in much the same way that a person with the same disability can be funny. Yes, we're laughing, but it's mostly laughing about the disability, not laughing at her.

The setting and choice of characters here gives it a leg-up in the realism department because "a tropical fish with no short-term memory" is (I assume) redundant. It's really not much of a handicap when your life consists of little more than swimming around, eating, fleeing from preditors, and reproducing when the opportunity arises. Her behavior actually fits with how a human with the condition might act.

For example, to remember a bit of information long enough to relay it to Marlin, she recites it over and over. With some prompting she manages to remember it again later. I tried this with Andy. We went out to dinner at a local restaurant, and as we were leaving I pointed out the sign and asked him where we'd eaten. He told me, rolling his eyes at being asked such an easy question. The rest of the way back to his parents' house, I kept asking him where we'd eaten. He'd tell me. (He didn't get sick of the game, because he didn't remember how long we'd been playing it.) Later that evening, I asked him to tell his parents where we'd eaten. He drew a blank. I said the first letter. He remembered it.

But overall, Dory develops no permanent memories. As long as she stays with Marlin she remembers him, because he's "always" been there. But when they get separated, she forgets him... mostly. When she sees him again, and he reintroduces himself, this time she comments that Marlin is a nice name. She has a vague emotional memory of someone like him, just not him in particular. And near the end of the movie when they separate again... oh, go see it yourself.

It's ironic that an all-ages computer-animated film about fish contains cinema's most realistic depiction of short-term memory loss in humans. Though of course it's no surprise, considering that it was made by Pixar, whose kiddie cartoons have more depth and intelligence than your typical "restricted to adults" comedy starring human actors.

Still, 50 First Dates will probably do boffo box office, thanks to the throngs of unsophisticated movie-goers out there. So expect more memory-themed movies to be made, both good and bad. Given the prominence of Alzheimer's Disease in our society - which is similar in many ways to short-term memory loss - I'd expect it to be a topic of a movie or two before long... though I suppose Hollywood's aversion to making movies of/by/for old people might prevent that. In the meantime, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (opening in a few months), a surreal film about a man who chooses to have his recent memories erased but then changes his mind, looks like it could fall on the "good" side of the bi-polar screen career of Jim Carrey.

Michigan Web Comics

I did something a bit different from my usual Saturday routine today: I drove to the other side of the state and hung out at a Panera Bread franchise. I didn't go all that way for the cuisine (there's at least a couple Panera's here in town), but because I was invited by one of the founders of the new Michigan Web Comics group to come talk about their web-hosting needs.

It was an interesting bunch of people, and despite my chronic discomfort in unfamiliar social situations (heck, I'd never even been to a Panera before), I had a swell time.

The most golly-gee-whiz aspect of it was that I found myself sitting across the table from Matt Feazell. He's something of a fixture of the mini-comics scene, in which he's been active for over 20 years. His stick-figure cartoons featuring the Amazing Cynicalman and a host of other characters are legendary. He's also been published by "real" publishers, such as pieces in Disney Adventures. And here we sat, smiling at each other.

Matt's the kind of artist who (apparently) never stops drawing. He'd brought along a sketchbook and was filling little boxes with images as we all talked. As the people present were going around the table introducing ourselves, I was shocked to see that he was doodling a cartoon of me (with my name next to it), in his hyper-simplified style.

He wasn't the only one drawing. There were some "jam" pieces making their way around, including one single page illustration and an add-another-panel "story" that bounced in one direction after another. I nearly choked when I was handed a half-filled page of doodling (including some of Feazell's work) and was invited to add to it. I scratched my head a bit and finally came up with something.

I'm really not a very creative person. I have creative tendencies, and I bring some creativity to the things I do that other people might not, but I'm not the kind of person who can easily just produce something on the spot out of thin air. I'm better at it than I used to be, and I suppose if I did more of it I'd be even better. I'm just too easily distracted by all the other things around me.

Anyway, it was a fun time, and worth the nearly-four-hour round trip. I walked away with a fistful of minicomics (for web cartoonists, they sure do put a lot of stuff onto little folded pieces of paper). I'm going to try to stay involved in this, to see what kind of creative stimulus and motivation I can get out of it, and of course whatever (beyond plain geek services) I can contribute.

Barbershop 2: Back in for a Touch-Up

my rating: Nathan's rating:

The original Barbershop was one of those occasional movies that no one expected much of, but which managed to do fairly well for itself, both critically and commercially. It opened during a "slow" month, had a good dose of both charm and "message", and the somewhat controversial character of Cedric the Entertainer's "Eddie" (an aging fixture of the shop, with rather unorthodox opinions about leaders of the black community) helped give it some publicity. It was no tour de force, but an entertaining yarn about a young man (Calvin Jr, played with surprising depth and subtlety by Ice Cube) who discovers his calling to preserve the neighborhood barbershop his father left him.

Barbershop 2 is return visit. The main plot device is similar to before - this time it's a national haircutting franchise moving into the neighborhood and threatening to put Calvin Jr's shop out of business - and it rolls along in the background as a fairly foregone conclusion of how it will come out. Meanwhile, Ice Cube and Cedric do their respective things in the foreground. This time it's Eddie who gets fleshed out the most, mostly through a series of flashbacks to the 1960's showing the role Calvin Sr's barbershop had in turning his life around, and the rather dramatic role he had in returning the favor. And most of the cast of supporting characters are back, each getting some screen time to develop their own personal subplots.

All of this serves to underscore the main point of both films: the value of neighborhood businesses and the people who run them to any community. Which is oh so very true. In both movies the little guy wins, in the first one through some clever maneuvering, and in this one... well, just because Calvin Jr stood up for his principles. In reality, it doesn't usually work that way. Small "mom and pop" businesses usually lose to the chains and franchises, with their better marketing and discounted pricing.

Devout Mercantilists say this is just free enterprise working to give consumers lower prices and stockholders bigger dividends. That may be, but as the Barbershop films point out, there's more to life and to a community than can be put in a balance sheet. Just in my lifetime I've seen more local businesses than I can count vanish or get taken over. The bank where my sister works has gone from local ownership, to being part of a statewide bank, then a regional bank, then national, and now they're merging with an international "financial services" corporation whose name I can't even remember. They still sponsor local charities and such, but only because it's good PR; the original local execs used to do it because they personally cared about those charities and their contributions to the cities in which they lived.

The independent hardware store down the street is gone, having lost too much business to the chain-affiliated store a couple miles away, and the big-box retailers out on the strip in the suburbs. A CVS drugstore displaced several entrepreneurial shops (most of which never re-materialised elsewhere) and with is cutting into the business of a couple local party stores, whose owners do more than provide jobs in our community; they're part of our community. Without them, the neighborhood simply wouldn't be the same place, and it wouldn't be a change for the better.

This is the message that Barbershop 2. it doesn't belabor the point - chosing to focus more on the characters and some opportunties for just plain for-the-fun-of-it comedy - but it's the sort of depth that makes it (like its predecessor) more than just a generic wacky comedy.

Large Fries and a Diet Coke

Every so often, I hear someone snort derisively about an overweight person who will go to a restaurant (especially a fast-food joint), and order some high-calorie meal, and get a diet soft drink to go with it. These critics think it's the height of stupidity and pointlessness.

Hardly.

Granted, an overwight person probably shouldn't be ordering that fattening meal. (Odds are the bigger problem isn't their eating habits but their exercise habits, but that's another topic.) But they - OK... at 200lbs+, I should say "we" - do it anyway. We all like to eat food we enjoy, and some of us give in to that desire more than others. Given that fact, substituting a diet soft drink isn't stupidity. It isn't hypocrisy. It's moderation.

We know it's not going to make us any thinner. That's not the point. The point is that it's not going to make us any fatter. If I'd ordered a non-"diet" drink, I'd have to give up those yummy fries to make up for that. And in comparison to someone ordering that same caloric meal with a large syrupy-sugared cola (which often describes the above-mentioned critics), it's downright smart.

Cell Phone Users: Are You People Crazy?

Despite being a techie, I avoided owning or even using a mobile phone (except maybe once or twice when someone handed me theirs) until last year. It was a combination of not liking them, and not needing them.

For one thing, I hate talking to people on phones in general. My shaky geeky social skills require visual feedback to give me a better idea of how I'm doing with people. I also do better when I can communicate non-verbally, such as showing that I'm listening and understand what they're saying rather than trying to communicate that with verbal grunts.

Also, the idea of being accessible to other people all the time was not that attractive. I like to get away from people sometimes. And I never felt any need to call people from wherever I happened to be. "So, uh, where are you? Whatcha doin'?" Spare me. Anything I might want to call someone about can wait until I get home. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but "call me when you get there" seems like a perfectly sensible sentence to me.

Ironically, it was when I became unemployed - staying at home even more than I'd like, and not having extra funds to spend on luxuries - that I finally gave in and got a mobile. The issue was that my biweekly appointment for calling the Unemployment Office's automated check-in system was in the middle of one of my classes (one of the few time periods actually blocked in on my weekly schedule). With no pay phone handy enough for the few minutes I'd have during the mid-class break - public pay phones being a casualty of the spread of mobiles - I figured I'd need to bring my own.

So I got a cheap phone with pre-paid service, the cheapest option available, especially for someone who's not going to use the thing much. And over the course of the school term, I successfully reported in and got all my checks. But, gods, the sound quality on that thing was horrible! Even standing by an open window on the 7th floor of the building. There were times the system didn't even recognise my button-pushes.

Now in my new job, I'm expected to carry a mobile phone with me everywhere during working hours, especially in the evenings when I'm the only tech on duty, and people need to be able to contact me even when I'm out fixing stuff. The college outfitted me with a fancy PDA-plus-phone-plus-web-browser gadget. And you know what? The sound quality is horrible. I often can't make out what the other people are saying, and they can't understand me very well. And if they're on a mobile phone too... it's sometimes impossible to communicate. And you people are embracing this?!

With wireless technology it's like telephony has taken a huge step backward into the early 20th century again. Maybe it shouldn't surprise me so much, what with all those "can you hear me now?" adverts on TV. But I thought those were just jokes about gaps in coverage. I assumed that if so many people were using these things, not just when they had to, but all the time... if people are even discontinuing their "land lines" in favor of all-wireless service... that the service had to be better than this! Decades of gradual improvement in the nation's telephonic infrastructure had gotten us to the point of that "hear a pin drop" advert a couple decades ago. And you people have just thrown that all away. I don't get it.

Moving Thoughts

One of my friends has been making a lot of "Don't you hate this weather?" and "I bet you're glad you don't have to do deliveries again this winter," comments lately... even more than one normally hears this time of year around here. Yesterday I found out why. He wants to move someplace warmer. And he wants me to move with him.

I'm not sure if the recent barrage of comments about the climate were a conscious attempt to "warm me up" to the idea before he said it aloud, or just him expressing what was on his mind. Same difference, ultimately.

Apparently he's been thinking about this quite a bit lately. He figures we can get an apartment together, build a killer home network, find jobs (maybe even at the same place), and somehow things would be better for us both there.

There are certain parts of this plan of his that I can rule out, categorically. We cannot be roommates. It would not work. It isn't so much that he's straight, and I like having a calendar in the kitchen featuring photos of nekkid 18-year-old boys with hard-ons (though that's part of it). It's stuff like his approach to housekeeping not having changed since he was 14.

Every item of clothing he owns - except for a few things that need to be on hangers - is in a pile on his couch. The one Queer-Eye-for-the-Straight-Guy thing I attempted was to give him a trash can to put next to his TV-watching chair, because the only other place he had to throw things away was a plastic garbage bag in the corner of the kitchen. He doesn't use it. My own apartment is a long way from House Beautiful, I admit, but it's a fairly subdued level of chaos that I can tolerate, and I know (from painful experience when my boyfriend moved in... briefly) that I can't deal with any more than that.

There'd also be issues with him believing that he should go to church every Sunday (even though I can tell he'd rather not), and me knowing for damn sure that I'm not going to, no matter who prods me to (not even my family).

I already have a "killer home network", and I don't want a Windows box loaded with spyware and other security vulnerabilities sharing a segment with my servers.

And that's to say nothing of the fact that I like living by myself. I like the quiet. The solitude. I like being able to get out of bed, fix breakfast, check some web sites and e-mail, all wearing nothing but a wristwatch. I like being able to watch whatever I want on the living room TV, whenever I want... even if it's a kinky gay porn video and I've got toys to play with while I watch. I'd try to compromise on stuff like this for the right person (there are certainly benefits to sharing a home with somone like that, and I'm not only thinking about the sex)... but not for merely "a friend".

Which still leaves the possibility of moving, and maybe the two of us being neighbors. I've considered moving out of Grand Rapids at times, for various reasons. Granted, the climate is one. I do like the fact that Michigan has such variety of weather over the course of the year, and I love the excitement of a good blizzard, but I'd welcome a shorter winter, perhaps with longer days and more sunlight in general. Not because of the hardship or discomfort, but just the depressiveness of short gloomy days.

I've also pretty much had to at least consider moving out of here, for professional reasons. I spent most of last year looking for a job, and what I got isn't all that great. If I want to get into anything that really takes advantage of the Digital Media degree I'm about to finish (plus my Comp Sci degree), there really isn't much of that going on around here.

One thing I run into a lot that makes me question why I live here is the right-wing closed-mindedness. It's not so bad in my neighborhood, but most of the city is overrun by flag-waving, money-worshipping, Republican-venerating, Bible-thumping retards. I had a job offer revoked when I inquired whether being openly gay was going to cause me any difficulties. The place I work now actually has a policy against anti-gay discrimination, but there are already "Bush Cheney 2004" stickers on several of my coworkers' doors. It gets tiring swimming against the tide all the time.

If I'd grown up in Mayberry or in the Big Apple, I'd probably be more comfortable in a place like one of those. But I grew up in a mid-sized city. In particular, I grew up in this one. This one is "home". I shop at the same Meijer grocery store where I used to ride the mechanical horse for a penny as a kid. I live in a house that I used to ride past every weekday on the way to and from school. The building where I went to high school is gone, but in its place is a building housing several of the computer labs I'm responsible for in my current job. I know the neighborhoods. I know the suburbs. I know the highways. I even know some of the people.

My social network sucks, but at least here I have one. For starters, my parents, my sisters, their families, my grandmother, and some of the extended family are all here. Most of the few friends I've stayed in touch with over the years are here. I'm generally content with little-to-no social life, but I know I need a network of this sort for professional reasons. Here I have classmates, former instructors from college, and a whole bunch of former co-workers who could possibly serve as contacts or informal references for job opportunities. Starting over in a new city I'd have none of that (except for one friend in the same boat), and the reason my social network sucks is that I'm so poor at building them. I don't know how I'd start one from scratch.

I suppose there's an element of insecurity involved. But there's a lot to be said for security. There have been a few times in my life it seemed like the whole world was unstable, and it felt like I'd lost every anchor point I knew, such as my lover or my livelihood. But at least I was on familiar turf. I could draw strength from that... I suppose a bit like a sports team benefits from playing on their home field.

Ultimately, I think what it would take to get me to move is continued failure to find a job I enjoy around here, and landing an exciting, interesting job somewhere else, and for that "somewhere else" to be the kind of place I wouldn't mind living. A warmer or brighter climate would be nice, or a more open and tolerant sociopolitical climate would be attractive. But neither would be enough by itself (or even combined) to entice me to give up the comforts of "home".