On the value of junk

Becca and I have spent much of the week at her parents house because all of her siblings are home at the moment. With everyone together, they decided it was a good opportunity to clean out the garage. It had a lot of boxes full of stuff that was potentially valuable or memorable to someone, so they all had to be there before they could throw anything out.

I have helped a little bit, but I had just a support role; I was mostly on Lindsay duty. I got to thinking about all the junk that everyone has in their house. I'm not really the sentimental sort, so I tend to espouse a "Less is more" philosophy when it comes to junk. But I think there is some real value in having memories and mementos of old times and friends. Of course, I would rather that they be smaller rather than larger. And some things are best recorded in a photograph. Becca took pictures of some things before she thew them out or gave them away. But some things really should be saved.

I also got to thinking about miscellaneous stuff that people keep because it might be useful one day. If you've ever seen those shows on cable like Clean House or Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, you know that some people take this philosphy to the extreme. But it is handy to have a place for miscelaneous stuff. I've known some extreme neat freaks that still had a junk bin or junk drawer for all the undefined odds and ends that you collect up. I have a couple small drawers full of miscellaneous things, and every once in a while I need something random (like a clothes pin or a SD card reader) and I can just pull it out of the drawer. The goal, of course, is to make sure that the drawer doesn't expand and take over the whole desk, and the desk the whole room, and the room the whole house. Right now my junk drawer has taken over my desk, but it will have to stay that way until after the bar exam. I guess finding the balance between order and entropy is the key.

Photo credit: striatic.

Excuses, excuses

Whenever someone says something happened or didn't happen "due to unforeseen circumstances," it is almost invariably a lie. The circumstances surrounding the error or omission were almost always foreseeable, usually long before the deadline. The "unforeseen circumstances" is just a cover, a verbal shield to obscure the fact that someone (often the speaker) screwed up.

Case in point: the grades for my last semester of law school are past due, but we still haven't received them. By my memory, this is the third time grades have been late in the last two years. I got an email today from the registrar telling everyone that grades would be late. We all knew this, of course, because they were due to be released two days ago. The registrar cited "unforeseen circumstances" for the delay. This is, of course, utter nonsense. Not only were the circumstances foreseeable, they were almost probable. Certain professors are notorious in their failure to comply with a deadline. In fact, if you asked the students, they would probably give you a list of the professors who were most likely to deliver grades late, and that list would probably be fairly accurate.

Additionally, the registrar's office has never been known for its superb organization or punctuality. There was a spat a year ago when the then-registrar failed to end a exam on time. This can be a big deal, since most law school essay exams are structured so that you have less time than you want to write. An extra ten minutes can make a significant difference. The registrar's office also has a long history of schedule conflicts, registration errors, and various other administrative goofs. Given the serial tardiness of some professors and the track record of the registrar, it was almost inevitable that the grades would be released late. That whole "unforeseen circumstances" bit is bollocks.

What I'd really like to see is an up-front admission of responsibility, followed by specific identification of the offending parties. Something like, "We didn't really get around to telling you this until after the deadline because we're disorganized, but we though you should know that Professors Doe,Wossname, and Fulano turned in grades late. For your convenience, their email addresses, office numbers, and home addresses have been attached below."

Secular saint

Last week we watched Ocean's Thirteen. I know it came out a long time ago, but I just wasn't that motivated to see it. I was very entertained by the first of the remake series, but Ocean's Twelve was pretty dumb. It was just a bunch of famous people having fun together on camera. I guess a lot of people liked that, because it grossed more than $350 million worldwide. But I wasn't a fan, so I never saw Thirteen. Basically, unless someone brought the movie to my house for me to watch it, I wasn't going to see it. Except that's exactly how Blockbuster and Netflix work, so we got it and watched it.

There really isn't much mystery or plot to give away in this movie. The same crew of thieves get together in order to rob Willy Bank, a Las Vegas hotel and casino owner played by Al Pacino. He's a ruthless businessman who ruined one of Danny Ocean's friends and put him in the hospital. During the entire film there is never any doubt as to whether Danny Ocean and his team will pull off the heist. The only question is how.

At the end of the film, after the crew have successfully bilked Al Pacino's character for millions, Danny Ocean walks up to him and told him they had done it to teach him a lesson. In that scene Danny Ocean, played again by George Clooney, says a line that I found very interesting. He gives Willy Bank a few reasons why Bank will never be able to get back at them, and then says, "You shook Sinatra's hand. You should know better."

I thought this was very intriguing. It's like Frank Sinatra has become some sort of secular saint, and to have shaken his hand is to be held to a higher standard. The movie certainly suggests that this is the case in Las Vegas. Sinatra apparently embodies the ideals and glamor of old Las Vegas, and as far as the Ocean's trilogy is concerned, that is basically secular religion.

The concept of a secular saint is fairly well known. For example, if you've ever seen The Apotheosis of Washington, the fresco in the eye of the Capitol Rotunda, George Washington is depicted ascending to heaven. Washington was a decidedly secular figure, but only 50 years after his death he was already perceived in a mythic and transcendent light. Likewise, the rhetoric about Abraham Lincoln after his assassination describes him in messianic terms, calling him the Savior of the Nation.

In a country with a wide variety of religious and ideological beliefs, it's nice to have some secular saints to which all citizens can look with admiration. But I think it's fascinating that our new secular saints are people like Sinatra. Don't get me wrong -- Sinatra is absolutely an icon. But I think it's strange to use exalted language when referring to a swing singer who died less than 10 years ago. And old Las Vegas wasn't exactly some gambling Garden of Eden; it was ruled by organized crime, and Sinatra only became the patron saint of Las Vegas by keeping close ties to the mob.

What's even more interesting to me is that I can think of another secular saint, one that doesn't really even exist. I have heard several people express fervent wishes that "President Bartlet" could be president, referring to the fictional character from The West Wing. At least in many law school circles, this is practically dogma. I'm not sure that it's healthy to idealize fictional characters with carefully constructed character traits, human flaws, and scripted lines. Nonetheless, a lot of people would take President Bartlet as their patron saint if they could.

If any of you have some suggestions about other "secular saints," feel free to leave them in the comments. I'm interested to hear what other figures guide our society.

Awkward humor

Between bar review classes and visiting family over the Memorial Day weekend, I haven't written much. But I have plenty to blog about, so there's more to come. For the moment, here's something I was thinking about over the weekend.

We got Dan in Real Life in our Blockbuster-By-Mail queue, so we watched it this week. It had some funny moments, but it could have been a lot funnier if it wasn't so unbearably awkward. Steve Carell has a knack for awkward moments, but they really aren't that funny sometimes. Most of the time they're just painful. Dan in Real Life is just one example -- The Office is similarly awkward. The best moments of The Office are the ones without Steve Carell. I know he won a Golden Globe for his role on the show, but I watch it in spite of Steve Carell, not because of him.

Everyone I know who watches The Office doesn't really like the awkward humor. They are much more interested in the Jim/Pam romance or the Jim/Dwight rivalry, or the Dwight/Angela/Andy love triangle, or the off-the-wall moments of the many other cast members. No one I know really likes the excruciatingly awkward moments by Michael Scott, Steve Carell's character. Sometimes those moments are the catalyst for funny commentary or hijinks by other characters. That's okay. But basing an entire episode (or, in the case of Dan in Real Life, a whole feature-length film) around painful moments usually isn't that entertaining. Life is painful and awkward enough. While there's plenty of humor to be found in those moments, you don't need to draw them out.

Zombies

As a graduation present, my mother-in-law got us a 6-month subscription to Blockbuster By Mail.¹ The first movie we got was I Am Legend, which we watched last week. I wrote my customary little review of the movie, but it got me thinking about something that was only tangentially related, so I thought I'd talk a little more about it.

I Am Legend is essentially a zombie movie. Will Smith is the last man alive in New York City, and the "zombies" come out at night. Of course, these aren't your traditional movie zombies that can't move faster than a slow walk. That just isn't scary enough. These are wild, ferocious, feral monsters that can break through walls and leap up buildings. You will never see these sorts of zombies dancing together in a music video.

It seems to me that there have been quite a few of these new zombie movies in the last few years. In 1990 there was a remake of the Romero/Russo 1968 cult classic Night of the Living Dead. I've seen bits of the 1990 version, and the zombies in that movie were still fairly slow, although a bit faster and deadlier than the older version.² But the recent zombie flicks like 28 Days Later (and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later) feature more mobile zombies. The Resident Evil trilogy of movies, like their video game progenitors, feature fast and vicious creatures, like those in I Am Legend. I also think that it's interesting that the zombie trend seems to branch out beyond the horror film genre. All the above films are visions of the relatively near future. And the cult sci-fi series Firefly, with its accompanying movie, Serenity, also featured a rabid group of people (called "reavers") that bore a very strong resemblance to the new zombies.

I'm not sure exactly why the new zombies have been so popular, but I have a few guesses. The first reason is because the old zombies just aren't that scary anymore. People don't go for suspense or anticipation anymore -- they want the blood and guts. The old, slow, shuffling zombies that appeared in Thriller and were lampooned in Shaun of the Dead don't draw the crowds. So movie makers feel the need to up the zombie ante.

My second guess as to why movies have super-zombies is because of video games. Zombie video games have long been popular, in part because it's a good excuse to blow away a lot of people without making it seem too dehumanizing. Honestly, what other possible scenario would make a shotgun-wielding, trigger-happy homicidal maniac a hero? But in order for the games to be more challenging, the video game zombies can't just shuffle around. That would be like a Duck Hunt of the Living Dead.³ So the zombies get a little more energetic. Obviously, this hypothesis works well with the Resident Evil movies, since they are based on video games, but I think it also affected similar movies of the genre.

My third guess as to the reasons behind the new generation of zombies is based in the common reason given for the existence of zombies. In the old zombie flicks, there wasn't always a reason given as to why there were a bunch of dead people wandering around, eating the living. It was unexplained or identified as black magic, and left at that. The new zombie films usually identify the reason as some mutation, genetically-engineered virus, experiment gone wrong, nuclear disaster, or some other post-modern disaster. These sorts of zombies are less based in the original concepts of zombies taken from voodoo and other Haitian traditions, so they need not be restricted by the previous zombie conventions. In fact, mutations or viruses might provide some fictional rationale for a super-strong and super-fast zombie group.

Finally, I think the new zombie movies have super-zombies because special effects make it possible. Half of the summer blockbuster movies in the last decade seem to have been made just because technology now makes it possible to render the images contained in the movie.⁴ Some writer or movie executive says, "Hey, we can make fast and scary zombies with computers. Lets' do it!"

My reasons may be way off base, but those are my hypotheses. Clearly, I have given this topic far more thought than any such frivolous subject merits. But I'm not alone -- you should see how many zombie fan sites there are on the Internet. And a few years ago a man named Max Brooks published a fanciful how-to manual called The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead, which laid out in impressive detail how to survive during a zombie apocalypse. Maybe it takes someone with no life to write about a group of monsters with a similar problem.

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¹ Seriously, best graduation present ever. I love my mother-in-law. She knows that I can count on one hand the times I've been to a movie theater in the past three years. I have a lot of movies to catch up on. Actually, if you can think of a movie that you liked in the last three or four years, suggest it in the comments and I'll put it in our queue.
² I intentionally omitted Army of Darkness from this brief review of zombie flicks because I don't think skeleton warriors qualify as zombies. However, since the horror genre is just about my least favorite, I'm sure I missed some good zombie movies. Anyone have some other examples of the increasingly mobile zombie evolution?
³ Although that could be a kinda fun game. With all the zombie fans out there, I thought someone must have made a flash-based zombie shooting game. Sure enough, there are several. So many, in fact, that there are sites that aggregate all the zombie games. For example, here's a top 10 list of zombie games.
⁴ How else can you explain Wild Wild West, Anaconda, The Phantom Menace, Alien vs. Predator, etc.? Someone should tell movie executives that just because it is possible to make a movie, that doesn't mean that it is advisable.

On bad government

Today the government of Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) allowed a U.S. plane with relief supplies to land. Nine days had passed since Cyclone Nargis struck the nation, but the military junta in control of the country had previously refused U.S. aid. The current official death toll is somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000, but some estimates predict that it will rise to above 100,000 once aid workers reach the remote areas.

Allowing one U.S. plane to land doesn't do much good, unless it is followed by a larger-scale end to restrictions on foreign aid. But the generals in control of Myanmar continue to deny visas to foreign aid workers. They fear that if they let the foreign relief workers in, they won't be able to maintain their iron grip on the country. As the New York Times noted, "By keeping foreign assistance out, though, the generals must be ready to accept the deaths of hundreds of thousands more people, according to foreign relief officials. At the moment, this is the choice it appears to be making." The generals even had the audacity to put their names on the few boxes of aid they had allowed to enter the country.

I've thought a lot about the role of government and human suffering. Mostly I've considered it in the context of government corruption or the stereotypical Latin American dictatorship. You often see officials running off with millions of dollars while the majority of the population lives in poverty. But the situation Myanmar is bad governance on a grand scale, with about 1.5 million people in urgent need of basic necessities. This isn't a situation in which the government mis-allocates funds or wastes resources. This isn't a matter of inaction. This is a situation in which the government is taking affirmative steps to prevent the welfare and safety of its citizens. This is selfishness and power-mongery taken to the extreme. Myanmar officials would rather sit idly by and watch 100,000 of their citizens die than risk losing control of the country. I can scarcely think of a more damnable behavior, with the possible exception of ethnic cleansing or government-backed genocide. Unfortunately, the result in this case may be the same.

Hopefully that one plane will be followed by plenty more, and the country will loosen up enough to save at least some of the cyclone victims. But I feel very sorry for the thousands of innocent people who are doomed to misery, starvation, and disease, just because they happen to live in a country governed by men who would rather watch them die than risk losing power.

Bicycle

I may have mentioned it once or twice before, but I haven't yet written much about my experience riding a bicycle to school over the past six months. When we moved to our current apartment last summer, I was looking forward to being so close to school. It's only a few miles, so I decided to buy a bicycle and bike to school as often as possible.

The last several months have been an interesting two-wheeled odyssey for me, so I thought I'd share a few thoughts and comments about bike commuting in a city.

• Work. I immediately discovered that I don't have strong bicycling legs. I have one major hill I must go up and down every day on my way to school, and I almost didn't make it up the hill on my first day of biking. Thankfully, it's a more gradual ascent on the way home, but it can still be brutal in the mornings. Especially if I've already gone running or worked out that morning. You don't have to think about the physical side of transportation when you just jump in the car and drive. I've gotten much stronger over the past few months so now it isn't as big of a deal, but it still leaves me huffing and puffing some mornings.
  
• Pain. After the second day of biking to and from school, I was actually quite uncomfortable. To put it delicately, I didn't want to sit down. Some bike seats are better than others, but mine was fairly solid and I ended up with a bruised backside. Fortunately, just like my legs, my bum toughened up after a few weeks. Now I don't really have a problem. But it goes away quickly. My first time biking to school after a long Christmas break resulted in another few days of bruising.
• Dogs. When they see a person bicycling down the road, something goes off in a dog's brain. It's like the canis lupis part of the dog takes control, and the dog can't resist chasing you down. And compared to the other vehicles on the road, a bicyclist is the slower, aged member of the herd that will be easy prey.
  
• Route. The route I take is carefully planned out to avoid traffic, busy streets, and narrow roads. I'm fortunate in that I have a bike lane that goes through much of my neighborhood. When I get to the larger roads, I sometimes switch to the sidewalk. I know bikes really are supposed to be on the road, but it beats the alternative.
• Uncoolness. Motorcycles are cool. Bicycles are not. People in America like their cars. They always seem confused when they have to share the road with a bicycle. They may like Lance Armstrong, but they secretly think bike helmets look foolish. And the reflective bands I wear when it's dark take uncoolness to a whole new level. There is a certain appeal of riding a long under my own power, but in general, I am nerdiness on wheels.
  
• Maintenance. I have spent a lot of time trying to keep my bike in working condition. It's not an expensive bike, but it has had a lot of mechanical problems in its short ownership period. I've had my brakes fail, I have had two flat tires, and I've had parts of the bike fall off while I was riding it. When I first got the bike I bought a set of fenders to put on it so I could ride it on wet days without getting a skunk stripe of mud and water up my back. The fenders proved to be extremely problematic. They required constant adjusting and I was never able to install them properly on my bike. I eventually removed them when I went over a curb one day and several of the nuts holding the fenders in place flew off simultaneously and were lost in a busy intersection.
  
• Storage. I don't have a good place to lock up my bike. The only place I can lock it up is right on a busy street corner, which is just asking for it to be stolen. So I have to store it inside our apartment, which isn't exactly spacious. My daughter thinks it's a great toy and she likes to play with the gears, getting her fingers grubby in the process.
• Cost. I'm not sure how much I'm saving by bicycling to school. I still have to pay car insurance because I still use it occasionally. My commute isn't that long, so I'm not saving a ton on gas. It does make a difference, but I don't know if it makes up for the cost of buying and maintaining the bike. If I used it over a longer period of time, it would definitely pay off in the long run. But for the past 7 months, I don't know how much I've saved, if any at all.
• Weather. I have to pay attention to the weather report in the morning when I got to school. If it's going to thunderstorm, it's not a good day to take the bike. It's also pretty chilly riding to school on some mornings. I had to bundle up in the winter, although I ended up unzipping my coat by the time I got to the top of the hill because I was overheating at that point. The most important part of my biking gear in the winter were my gloves -- we picked up a cheap pair of leather gloves that were perfect for biking, since they are windproof. Biking without gloves in the winter can be painfully cold.
  
• Satisfaction. Despite the problems with maintenance, storage, dogs, and crazy drivers, I like riding a bike. Even though it's nerdy, I think there's something attractive about moving yourself around on your own. You can really move quickly on a bicycle; my commute is only 5 minutes slower on a bicycle than in the car. (Those extra 5 minutes are probably due to the hill.) I like getting some exercise in my day, and I like that I'm avoiding road congestion and pollution.

My bike-riding days may be over for a while. Yesterday I got my second flat tire on the way home from school. I only have a few more days left at school, after which I will be taking bar classes and working downtown. I probably won't be able to bike to those places. Still, it's been an interesting experience, and given the opportunity, I might try to ride a bicycle to work.
Photo credit: Salim Virji

Soritong

My freshman year of college was the year of Napster. Not that silly subscription-based service they offer now, but the real Napster. The Napster of virtually unlimited music at the touch of a button. I heard about it from a high school friend while we chatted on AOL Instant Messenger (another grand late 90's institution) and introduced it to my entire dorm floor. Within days we all had any song we wanted.

Once everyone downloaded to their heart's content, the question arose as to how to play the songs. You could already play them in Windows Media Player, but Media Player was a fairly limited program at the time. It wasn't set up to handle playlists of hundreds of songs. So we all hunted around on the Internet (this was pre-Google) and found a few music players that we liked. One of the popular ones was Winamp, which to this day is a very decent free media player. I use it almost every day. But at the time, my favorite media player was a Korean program called Soritong.

Soritong, as I understand it, means "music box" in Korean. The major reason I liked Soritong is that it had an option called the SoriBar which put the player at the top of your screen, opposite the Windows tray bar. Since I had music going almost every waking moment, it was a nice way to have it accessible but out of the way. Neither Soritong nor any other music player we used back then has all the features people want now. It has limited playlist capabilities, and it doesn't do ratings, album art, metatags, or any of those things you see in Winamp, iTunes, or Windows Media Player today. But it played my music when I was a freshman, and that's all I wanted.

Yesterday I randomly thought of Soritong again, and did a web search for it. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the website was still there, and the program was still available for download. So I got it and installed it again and I'm using it right now. If all you want to do is listen to music, it still works fine. What's more, it hardly uses any system resources, since it was designed with Pentium II computers in mind.

I got a good laugh out of the Soritong website. It hasn't been updated in more than 8 years. I guess the project never really got off the ground, and the 1.0 release was the last one. It's really surprising that the website is still there; most stuff that is 8 years old on the Internet has long since been taken down. There's a message at the bottom about not having updated the site in many months. I'd say that's a bit of an understatement at this point.

Comic errors

I'm the kind of person that often notices mistakes in movies. You know, when something is inconsistent between shots. Apparently a lot of people look for these sorts of goofs -- there are quite a few websites dedicated to movie mistakes. A lot of them are quite humorous -- I enjoyed looking through the popular ones.

I imagine it's really tough to maintain continuity on a movie set. Most scenes are shot over the course of a couple days, and you have to get the costumes and set to look absolutely identical. On mosts sets there is a person who is in charge of ensuring continuity, and they take lots of photos before they take each break so they can match up again afterwards.

Cartoonists don't have a crew working with them, but you'd think they would have an easier time maintaining continuity. After all, they draw the frames -- they can draw them however they want. That didn't stop Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, from switching a character's arms in yesterday's comic.

You don't have to be a nit-picker to spot that this cartoon is all out of whack. It seems to me that Adams is getting lazy. The strip has never been what you would call "well drawn," but at lest it's mostly coherent. Tsk tsk. Maybe Adams needs to take a page from the movie set book and hire someone to make sure each frame fits with the next one. While he's at it, he might consider hiring someone to write funny jokes.

Last class. Ever.

At the moment this post is published, I will be walking out of my last class in law school. And since I'd have to be crazy or want an LLM (is there a difference?) to go back to school after finishing law school, that makes this my last class ever. Oh, sure, I'll have to do CLE's (continuing legal education) for my entire career, since it's required to keep your law license. And I'll do some classes to study for the bar this summer. But this marks the end of my being a student.

I have mixed emotions about ending my class-going days. For starters, I think it's a shame that my last class had to be federal taxation. What an awful note to end on! I also generally like classes, because I like learning. If I become inexplicably and inexcusably wealthy during my career, I might like to finish my career teaching. So maybe I'll end up in the class room again, if under different circumstances.

I'll be a lot happier when I've finished my last final. Now there's something I won't miss about being a student.

Unpredictable Spring

In the last week the weather report has predicted gloom and rain almost every day. I don't like it when it rains because it means that I have to take my car to school instead of riding my bike. Perhaps, if I was a hard-core bicyclist, I would ride my bike in the rain. But in reality, it would be wet, muddy, and dangerous. There are even a few spots along my route that flood in heavy rain. I don't know if I could successfully navigate those low spots in a bicycle. So I ended up driving to school almost every day. But despite the meteorologists' dire predictions, this week has been beautiful. We spent quite a bit of time outside, playing in the yard and going to parks with the Babe. We've enjoyed it quite a bit, but I still feel foolish carrying an umbrella to school every day when the weather turns out sunny and warm. It's kind of perverse to complain about nice weather, but it would be nice if I had an idea of what to expect.

Well, this morning the weatherman made up for his previous errors. They predicted rain, and rain is what we got. Lots of rain. And thunderstorms. And hail in some areas. In fact, they broke into the last half of The Office last night to warn about a potential funnel cloud, so we never got to see the last part of the episode. This morning when I left for school it was raining so hard that there was standing water in the yard, and I was soaked before I even got to the car. But by golly, at least I knew I was going to get wet.

¡Ay, caramba, Presidente!

We can add another entry in the long list of silly stunts pulled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Well, to be fair, it's not exactly clear what role he had in this decision, but it's funny nonetheless. Televen, the Venezuelan state-owned television, has been forced to pull The Simpsons from the air because it is a "bad influence" on children. That, in itself, is perhaps notable but not ridiculous. The choice of replacement, however, is just that. Instead of The Simpsons, Venezuelan children are now treated to reruns of Baywatch Hawaii every morning. To quote NPR, "kids will now be able to watch voluptuous gals cavorting on the beach" rather than the Simpson family's escapades. Which would you rather have your kids watch?

The story gets even funnier when you read some of the statements and press releases. For example, the regulatory agency that forced Televen to pull The Simpsons said that airing the animated show in the morning could violate the national regulations prohibiting "messages that go against the whole education of boys, girls and adolescents." This statement implies that the new choice of programming does contribute to the "education of boys, girls, and adolescents." If education is defined broadly enough to include human anatomy, I think that's perfectly true.

Nevertheless, the network doesn't seem too pleased with the lineup change. According to German Perez Nahim, general manager for Televen, The Simpsons "had the highest levels of viewership for that morning timetable in the history of the channel." Now they can only hope that slow-motion jiggling will have the same effect.

Via NPR.

Image sources: Michael Ray and Telegraph.co.uk. Usage presumed permissible under 17 U.S.C. § 107.

The most dangerous thing

Americans, on a whole, are a rather paranoid bunch. At least, that is the case if the television is to be believed.* Marketing campaigns and advertisements warn of the dangers of a multiplicity of ills, dangers, diseases, syndromes, and phenomenons. But if you think about it, the most dangerous thing you do is get in your car and drive somewhere. Sharing the road with your fellow drivers is by far more dangerous than terrorist attacks, serial murderers, global warming, or any other thing people usually afraid of. When you are on the road, you are only as safe as the skill level of the drivers around you. And I think you'll agree with me that it isn't a very comforting thought.

Case in point: last Saturday I was giving some friends a ride somewhere, and we took the I-440 beltloop. We came up over a rise, and had to hit our breaks hard because traffic was stopped. The left-hand lane was closed ahead for construction, and traffic was backed up in the right-hand lane. To make matters worse, the left-hand lane was blocked by an accident. It was clear that someone had come over the rise in the road and not stopped in time. No one seemed to be hurt, but it had just happened and the drivers were just getting out of their cars to look at the damage. The accident happened right by an exit, and most of the traffic was getting off the exit in the far-right exit lane.

As I sat there in the line of traffic, looking to see if the people in the accident were okay, I noticed that the red car in my rear view mirror was approaching very fast in the left-hand. In fact, the driver apparently hadn't even seen the stopped traffic or the accident, because the car wasn't even slowing down yet. Then I saw it hit the breaks, but it was too late. With the accident in the left-hand lane and steady traffic in the exit lane, I realized that the car had no where to turn. My lane was moving forward, but very slowly. I didn't like the idea of getting hit from behind, so I hit the gas and pulled off almost onto the grass by the exit. The car came to a skidding halt right where my car had been, narrowly missing both me and the accident. A somewhat shell-shocked looking girl in her 20's sat in the driver's seat with her hands tightly gripping the steering wheel.

Since I was practically off the road at that point, I cut across and took the exit. I didn't feel like sitting a place where one accident had already happened and a second had nearly occurred. We took back roads the rest of the way.

Photo credit: Ben McLeod
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* I used to watch the Garfield and Friends cartoon show on Saturday mornings when I was growing up. The TV show was usually funnier than the actual comic strip in the newspapers, and featured some very salient social satire. One of my favorite segments was a mock television show Garfield hosted called If They Say It on Television, It Must Be True. Garfield would then give a few fun facts and explanations. Some of the facts I remember are, "There is no state of Wyoming; the word means 'no state here'," and "All fire hydrants are prefabricated and filled with water in Walla Walla, Washington, and then bolted to the city streets."

Sentient computers

So The Office is starting up again in a few weeks, with a new episode on April 10. Which is only tangentially related to the topic of this post. The other day I was thinking about the episode where Jim and Pam convince Dwight that the new Dunder-Mifflin computer system has gained sentience and is out to destroy him. I started thinking about fictional depictions of computer sentience. They seem to fall into a couple general categories:

The first bunch depict these sentient computers as malevolent machines trying to destroy or enslave the human race. Think the Terminator series or The Matrix Trilogy.¹ This category works well with action movies, so you see a fair number of them.

The second category of fictional sentient computers depicts them as child-like. Cite to Steven Spielberg's A.I., the Robert Heinlein classic The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Data from Star Trek, and most of Isaac Asimov's short stories.² These computers are basically like child geniuses who know a lot but are still learning what it means to be a person. Almost inevitably, these depictions involve a quest for the computer or robot to become more human-like.

A third, in-between category of sentient computers are the kind that start out nice and end up mean. Some examples could include the HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Braniac computer from Superman's home planet,³ Krypton, and the VIKI central computer in the movie I, Robot. Once again, this kind of computer makes for good cinema, so there are a lot of movie examples.

As I was thinking of how writers like to depict sentient computers, it occurred to me that they've probably got it all wrong. If a computer ever really did "wake up," I don't think its first impulses would be to conquer the world, become human, or to help out and then become evil. In fact, if sentient computers ever happen, I think they'll develop the same traits as their creators. Which means we'll have a bunch of immature practical jokers on our hands. And if you think about it, how do we know that our computers haven't already woken up? Ever computer I've ever used had lots of funny quirks and tricks. How do we know this isn't the computers' way of getting a good laugh?

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¹ If you're familiar with the backstory of The Matrix (as depicted in The Second Renaissance) you know that the machines didn't start out malevolent. Contrast that with the SKYNET computer in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines that nukes every human city as its first cognizant act. However, as far as the films go, the Matrix machines are definitely more interested in enslaving humans rather than making peace with them. They may go in my third category over-all, but in the movies they are distinctly first category material.
² "Bicentennial Man" is a good example of the child-like robot. It, too, was made into a movie. This is not to say that Asimov didn't contemplate the possibility of more malevolent robots. His short stories "Robot Dreams" and "Little Lost Robot" both hint at a creepy possibility in robots, and the ideas were incorporated somewhat into the I, Robot film.
³ The character of Brainiac has as many interpretations as there are versions of the Superman series. The version that most prominently portrays Brainiac as the corrupted central computer is actually the animated series. In the comic books and other portrayals, Brainiac more closely resembles the first, malevolent category.

Quick hike and good gear

On Saturday morning while we were on vacation I got up early with a friend and went hiking. We had done a short hike with all the kids the previous afternoon, but we wanted to get a little real hiking in. So we planned out a hike that would take us up along some bluffs and up to a pretty tall peak. We got an early start in hopes that we could be back by lunch. However, it had begun to snow the night before, and the overly cautious park rangers had closed the main road through the park, blocking our access to the trailhead. We drove around for more than an hour looking for more options, but we couldn't find any cool alternatives. Finally, after the visitors' center opened at 8 am, we stopped there and asked a ranger for a good day hike. He recommended a waterfall hike that had a trailhead very near Gatlinburg. It sounded just right to us, so we hopped back in the car and drove back through town towards the trailhead for Rainbow Falls.

The hike itself was great. The trail was in good shape, although footing was very slick in some places. The snow was falling steadily at that altitude, and even though we shared the trail with quite a few other hikers, we never got in each other's way and the snow dampened the noise of everything around us. So for the most part, we felt like we had the trail all to ourselves.

On the way up to the falls, the guy I was hiking with remarked that the weather could have made it a really miserable hike. But with the right gear, it was a really great hike. I think he was exactly right: good gear is awesome. Hiking and camping gear is something I especially like. It satisfies several facets of the stereotypical male psyche -- tools, the outdoors, and feats of physical prowess. I had a good parka, some sturdy and waterproof boots, and a nice small day-pack with a water reservoir. I brought extra layers, so when the temperature dropped, I put on an extra fleece vest under my parka. I felt warm and dry, so I could enjoy a beautiful snowy morning.

I also tried out some new hiking toys, a pair of hiking poles that I got with the intention of using them when taking Lindsay hiking. (I got them free with my Westlaw points; it didn't take much for me to rationalize getting them.) I really liked using the poles; they felt pretty natural using them on the trail, and they helped a lot with the slick surfaces. But I was completely won over after our first stream crossing. With both poles I easily balanced on slippery rocks. Similarly, the poles were pretty handy during the slippery downhill return trip. I can see how hiking poles would really help a steep descent, especially when your toes hurt from getting jammed in the front of your boots.

Now that we enjoyed hiking so much, we want to go again. Nashville doesn't have a ton of hiking trails, but there are at least a few day hikes we can do. I will probably want to get more gear if we go on more trips. In fact, we just made a trip to the REI store, and the Spring Campor catalog just came in the mail. I could use a pair of light-weight trail shoes . . .

Same places, different faces

We had a great time the Smoky Mountains over spring break. We actually forgot our camera on a couple of the good outings, but some friends of ours took some pictures of us, so expect some good photoblogging soon, from both Becca and me.

On our last day of vacation we had to check out of our cabin in the morning. We weren't in any hurry to get back home, so we got out our GPS unit and put in the coordinates for a geocache near downtown Gatlinburg. It was in a pretty little park located between the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the town itself. We got out of the car and found the cache relatively quickly. After signing the log, we then took a walk around the park with Lindsay. She was excited to run around, and she liked standing on the little footbridge and watching the stream.


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As we walked around, I commented to Becca that this was actually the third time I had been to this park. The first time was when I was seventeen and in high school. I played in the high school band, and we traveled to Gatlinburg to participate in a band competition. While in the town, we stayed in a hotel not far from the park. I went running with some friends every evening through that town park and into the National Park. It was a fairly care-free time in my life. I was dating my first girlfriend (although we broke up not long afterwards), I had an old beat-up car to drive around, and I was very competitive in my sports.

I was at that same park almost nine years later, this time under very different circumstances. I had graduated from college, got married, and was in the middle of my first year of law school. Becca and I were chaperoning a youth group trip, and we took the afternoon off to do a little bit of hiking in the Smokies. We drove up to that same park I remembered from high school and spent a relaxing afternoon hiking along the trails in the National Park. I wouldn't exactly call this time period care-free -- we had just lost both our cars and I was in the most stressful year of my schooling. But it was a good time, too, and I had certainly grown up a bit since high school.

Flash forward two years to last weekend, when I walked around the park again -- this time with my wife and my daughter. I'm about to finally finish my schooling, and I have a job waiting for me. Once again, life isn't care-free. I have plenty of student debt and other things to occupy my mind. And some things don't every seem to change -- we still drive a beat-up old car, just like I did in high school. But life has treated me pretty well over the last decade. I wonder what I would have thought back in high school if I had known that I'd be back in that same park with my family?

I was thinking about those things as we walked back to the car and drove back to Nashville, It's funny to have such separate experiences in a remote, yet distinct place. I'll probably stop by that park again in the future; we're going to be back there this summer for a family reunion. And I still like hiking, so as long as I can convince Becca and Lindsay to come with me, we'll probably come back to the Smokies. I just might have to stop by the little town park every time we go, for old time's sake.

It's not really spring yet

Wouldn't it make sense to have spring break in the spring? This is my spring break week, and it's been snowing.

My take on Spider-Man 3

I wrote a more coherent review of Spider-Man 3 on my Film Screening, but as a long-time Spider-Man fan, I had much more to say than those brief paragraphs. The movie was pretty lackluster in general, but it did have some memorable moments, some good and some bad. Here's the rundown:

• Less is more. Adding two extra bad guys doesn't make it a better movie. It didn't work for the Batman movies, and it certainly doesn't work here.
• Spider sense. After making a big deal of Spider-Man's "spider sense" in the first movies, with cool freeze-frame special effects to show how he can anticipate attacks, the movie makers forgot all about it. Many of the fight scenes consist almost exclusively of Spider-Man getting taken by surprise and hit from behind. Spider-Man isn't supposed to be an invulnerable hero. He's not bullet-proof or super-strong. He's more like you or me than Superman. The only reason Spider-Man is cool is because he's fast, agile, and can sense when things are coming. Take that away, and you have a kind of puny superhero. Plus, it's not really fun to watch the hero get beat up all the time.
  
• Special effects. This is one area where I think the third movie did the best of the trilogy. I actually thought the first two movies looked very fake in many scenes. This one was better. The Sandman scenes actually looked really good, especially the sequence where the small-time crook, Flint Marko, becomes the Sandman.
  
• Unexplained random science experiments. Even though it looked good, the scene where the Sandman is created had a lot of really stupid parts. Flint Marko is running from the police in a swamp, and he falls into a big concrete hole full of sand. Big glowing arms from high-tech machinery start to spin around him. We see people in some control room mention some higher mass readings, and they they shrug it off and continue with whatever experiment they were doing. And that's it. Why a concrete bowl full of sand is sitting in the middle of a swamp is never explained, and you never see the scientists again.
  
• Topher Grace. One of Spider-Man's greatest enemies is Venom, a combination of an alien symbiote and a disgraced rival of Peter Parker's. He's like Spider-Man, but meaner and nastier. Venom is supposed to be big and scary, full of violence and anger. And who did the movie makers choose to cast in the role? Topher Grace, of That 70's Show fame. Even without the retro clothes and poofy hair, he isn't even remotely scary.
  
• Peter Parker shouldn't dance. While under the influence of the alien symbiote, Peter Parker does a lot of really dumb things that are supposed to be funny, but they seem really incongruous in the movie. He struts down the street, hitting on every girl he sees. He dresses like an emo boy and does a little dance scene in a restaurant with Gwen Stacy (a character from the comics). These scenes aren't actually very amusing, and Toby Maguire really isn't cool enough to pull that sort of thing off.
  

Falling in love all over again

The other day Becca and I were talking about getting a Wii, and I said, "We can wait; we don't even play our GameCube, anyway." Later that day I thought to myself, "Why don't I play more often? It's fun, and a game here or there doesn't take much time." So I pulled out the controllers and checked to see what disc was already in the Cube. It was MarioKart Double Dash!!, and I've spent the last few days falling in love all over again with that great game. The Nintendo Wii version is supposed to come out this year, and all I can say is that it has big shoes to fill.

The genius of Double Dash is that it is really fun to play with other people. Becca and I played a full 16-race tournament tonight together, and it made me remember the good old days when we were dating, and we would race with my roommates. Even better, with Double Dash you can work together, with one player driving and a second player protecting the car from attacks and throwing stuff at the other players. There's nothing that will create stronger marital bonds than smashing someone else's car and taking first place. I can only hope that owning a Wii will allow us draw us that much closer together.

In pursuit of a Nintendo Wii

Last Christmas Becca's parents gave us an IOU for a Nintendo Wii.¹ Becca has been wanting one for quite some time, and she was very excited about it. However, actually finding one to buy has been even more difficult than we anticipated. Following her customary tactics, Becca has dived completely into the subject, searching forums and websites for tips and tricks on how to find one in stock. She gets text message and email alerts when people find them in stock online. She printed out bar codes for the Wii so we can scan them at price-checking stations at Target to see if any are in the stockroom. Every time we are at a major retailer we stop by the electronics section just to check. She is on a mission, and eventually, she'll find one.

But how long will it be? All the salespeople we have spoken with have said there are very few being shipped right now, perhaps due to the rain check certificates stores like Game Stop were selling before Christmas. They sold a lot of those IOU's, and now they have to make good on the deals. I've also heard that demand for the system is starting to grow in Europe and Asia, and now that there are quite a few good games for the Wii, more people want to buy it. So demand has stayed astronomically high, despite the fact that the system is more than a year old.

Yesterday Becca got a text alert that Amazon.com had Wii's in stock, but by the time she hit the check-out button, they were already out of stock. At that speed, they sold out in less than 10 minutes. Becca was really disappointed, but now she has her Amazon account all set up for one-click purchasing. We'll get one eventually, but it may be next Christmas at this rate.²

A lot of people have speculated as to why there aren't enough Wii's. Some say Nintendo is intentionally limiting production, fueling demand. Others say that demand growth in Europe and Asia outstripped Nintendo's expectations. But I think this cartoon is my favorite hypothesis as to why there aren't enough Nintendo Wii's. (Click to enlarge.)
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¹ I maintain my position that the name 'Wii' is the stupidest possible name for a game system. It's not even pronounceable in Japanese and in many other languages. Naming video game consoles for bodily functions ranks pretty high on my stupid list. They should have stuck with the development name, which was 'Revolution.' The console actually is quite revolutionary, and it would have fit quite well.
² I should note that if we really wanted one, we could hit a store Sunday morning. Many retailers like Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and others save their units all week and only sell them Sunday morning. But we don't really feel like buying stuff on Sunday, so we're focusing on stores like Target, K-Mart, and Game Stop that sell
their units on the day they receive them.