Tea Leaves

Here’s a photo of a 1949 political billboard from Pittsburgh. The photo, courtesy of the Pittsburgh Courier Archives, is by Charles “Teeny” Harris, who took over 80,000 pictures depicting black life in Pittsburgh. The billboard is by the Republican party, which I guess hasn’t changed much in fifty years. I originally saw this on Orcinus, who credits d. eaton with pointing it out to him.

I think this image serves as a cogent and simple reminder that the political appeals to fear — by either party — are not some sort of new technique. They’re not a unique outlier of a type that has never been seen before. They are part of the grand and sordid tradition of American politics. In a very real way, the terrorists of September 11th are the best friends of those in power in the US; they’ve provided a new set of images for our leaders to use to try to keep us scared and docile.

If those images weren’t here, our leaders would use other images — whether it’s Democrats talking about my Social Security being taken away, or Republicans talking about how protecting the environment from being poisoned will somehow make me lose my job.

The only question I really want to know the answer to is: how do they sleep at night?

Due to a power outage at our ISP, followed by a hard drive crash, Tea Leaves was unavailable for most of the day. But, thanks to the hard work and dedication of the folks at Telerama Internet, we’re back online without even having lost any data (other than perhaps a few comments.)

Here’s a big plusplus going out to the team at Telerama. Thanks, guys!

My first Red Sox World Series experience was in 1975 against the Reds. My dad didn’t let me stay up for game 6 and Carlton Fisk’s home run. Of course, they lost game 7.

In 1986, I was in school and didn’t even realize the Sox were in the series until we tuned in on game 6. For game 7 I was at a Billy Joel concert. He’s a Mets fan.

Last year, I picked up the Sox again in the ALCS, and remember thinking that we had it locked just as it all fell apart.

I tried to watch the playoffs this year with a certain detached optimism. Time after time it looked like it would all fall apart again, and yet somehow this year it was always the other team that had Red Sox Moments. We get two calls reversed in Yankee Stadium? We get that fateful ground rule double that keeps the score tied in game 5. We get the Cardinals making weird base running errors. And, we survive eight errors in the first two games of the World Series against one of the best offensive teams in the league.

But ultimately, in the last two games I think the Red Sox showed that they were just playing better baseball. Great hitting, great pitching and great defense. A thing of beauty all around.

Let’s hope we don’t have to wait 86 years for the next one. It would be cool if my son could see this happen before he’s 38.

Strange and Norrell

I’m currently reading Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I’d characterize as Jane Austen meets Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.

Most reviewers have compared the book to the Harry Potter series, undoubtedly because the book is “about” magic, and takes place in England. This isn’t any more accurate than comparing Catch-22 to A Farewell to Arms simply because both are “about” war and take place in Italy. Stylistically, the books could not be farther apart. Where Potter is breathless and credulous (not unreasonable attributes for a public school coming-of-age story), Strange & Norrell is sophisticated and subtle. It’s quite enjoyable and would make a fine addition to anyone’s winter reading list.

Without going in to enough detail to ruin the plot, let me discuss the broad outline of the book. The year is 1806. For many years, magic had been a potent force in the North of England, with the coming of a fierce, faerie-raised youth, known as the Raven King, in the 1400s. Since the departure of the Raven King, magic has been in steady decline. At the time the book opens, there are no known practicing magicians in the realm. All is theory. Until, that is, a challenge is issued to a reclusive scholar, one Mr. Norrell. Mr. Norrell accepts, and literally makes the statues in York’s cathedral talk and sing. The notoriety gained from this demonstration helps establish Norrell in London society, and enables him to pursue his dream of restoring English magic. The novel is the story of dour, somewhat cautious Norrell and — later — his bolder and more impulsive protogé, Jonathan Strange, and how these two men work with, and against, each other.

It is very mannered novel. This isn’t an unreserved compliment. What readers like about Austen is not, in the final analysis, simply the look she gives into the Regency era. There are plenty of novels that do that, most of them unreadable. What makes Austen compelling, at least to me, is the drama. The drama comes because for Austen’s characters, finding a financially secure husband is a matter of life or abject poverty, not merely an issue of creature comfort. The seriousness with which Austen takes these issues is reflected in the moods of her works. Clarke’s writing is wrapped in the trappings of the day, but not actually concerned with them. There are many descriptions of London parties, eligible young gentlemen who have livings of 1000 pounds a year, etc., etc., but there’s no impact behind it. It’s not a life being lived; it’s a mere mise-en-scene.

That being said, it may just be a mise en scene, but it’s a fun one. What Strange and Norrell brings to the depiction of magic is a sense of true menace and mystery. It’s this element that some critics (notably Byatt) have found lacking in the Potter stories. The most apposite comparison of the magic in the novel would be that found in the works of Neil Gaiman. Gaiman’s magic, with its emphasis on the inhuman lands Faerie, and the dire consequences of transgressing against rules you may know nothing of. In the world of Strange and Norrell, magic is not merely an expression of forces beyond human power, but also of worlds beyond human morality. It is in this context that the quotidian setting of early 19th century Britain is effective. The fastidiousness of the actors serves to throw the wildness of the hidden world into sharp relief.

Strange and Norrell will appeal to those who like their books thick and fast. For although it is 800 pages long, it reads quickly. It’s not, in the final analysis, Great Writing; 10 years from now, I won’t be waking up in the middle of the night with my head ringing with the power of Clarke’s prose. You can be haunted by the magic of Rushdie or Garcia-Marquez, or oppressed and elated by the eloquence of Martin Amis, or hear echoes of Italo Calvino as you wander through daily life. Clarke’s writing will engender no such emotions. But that’s OK: I’m praising with faint damn. If I only read books by writers with the power of Garcia-Marquez I would read very few books indeed. Clarke is telling a great story, and telling it well.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is almost certainly available at your local library, bookstore, or from amazon.com.

One of the best features of the Xbox home console system is that you can rip music from music CDs to the hard disk. Some games then allow you to play that music back in-game. The classic street racer Project Gotham Racing is one such game. One of the first things I did upon acquiring an Xbox was to rip a whole bunch of surf music on to the hard drive. Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet. Los Straitjackets. Huevos Rancheros. And a small, barely known band called Barbacoa, who have a song called Northern Spy which, as you would expect, was a sort of Canadianish James Bond-y sort of thing.

It wasn’t until many years later that I learned that “Northern Spy” is actually the name of a variety of apple. I’d certainly never tasted one. I decided I wanted one because, well, y’know. It’s called Northern Spy. It has to be great! They seem to be very hard to find — everyplace I’ve asked has just said that they don’t carry them, or that they’re sold out. But tonight, at Whole Foods, I found a cache of Northern Spys. So I brought some home.

They’re a blotchy red and green, and quite large. The flesh has the texture of a Red Delicious, but the skin is much thinner and thus not so intrusive. They’re on the tart side, which I consider to be a virtue — not as tart as a Granny Smith, but nearly so, and much juicier. They’re apparently considered a “pie apple,” presumably because people only like eating super-sweet things out of hand. But I enjoyed the one I’ve eaten in hand so far. I intend to eat more.

I’ve looked online to find someone who specializes in interesting and unusual apples, but haven’t had any luck, at least at reasonable prices (I found one place offering to send me a box of 15 Stayman-Winesaps for something like $40. No, thanks.) Mail order is fine, but I’d be willing to take a road trip, too. If you know of any place like that, please add a comment, below.

Additional Resources

• Christina recently recommended “honeycrisp” apples, another variety I’ve never tried (although I have had Macouns, of which they are a hybrid, and I enjoy those very much).
• If you’re in the Pittsburgh area, in addition to Giant Eagle, you can try some of the local orchards. The most well-known include Soergel’s in the North Hills, Trax Farms to the south, in Finleyville, and Schramm’s Farms to the east, near Greensburg. The availability of different varieties changes often, so call before going.
• To this day, Project Gotham Racing just doesn’t feel right unless I’m listening to surf music. I drive especially well if the song is a Canadianish James Bond-y sort of thing (500 kb mp3 excerpt). The Barbacoa CD is woefully unavailable unless you go to one of their shows, but you can buy a compilation of surf music which has Northern Spy on it.

This morning on the way in to work I made the mistake of tuning in to NPR. Steve Inskeep was interviewing Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) about partisanship. In so doing, Frist made the point that the Democrats have blocked 10 Federal Circuit Court nominees from consideration and that, and I quote, “the blocking of 10 justices, has never been done in the history of this country.”

My mouth dropped open, because this is a lie.

It’s not a little lie. It’s not even a big lie. This goes past “big,” all the way into “pathological” territory. This is a lie that says “I’m lying, I know I’m lying, and I think the people listening to me are complete morons.” It shows not just disrespect for truth, but disrespect for the people he’s talking to. That would be you and me.

To his credit, NPR commentator Steve Inskeep immediately sought a clarification, disbelief evident in his voice:

Inskeep: “I’m sorry, blocking of 10 justices has never been done?”

Frist: “Yes! Absolutely. We have for the first time in 200 years a party, that is the Democratic party, has refused to allow the Senate to give ‘advice and consent’ on circuit court nominees from the President of the United States. It’s never been done.”

Inskeep: “If I may, Senator [...] Republicans, when President Clinton was in control, blocked many many judges using other methods.”

When confronted by the truth (and he knows full well that over 60 of Clinton’s judicial appointees were stuffed down in committee) Frist stumbled, and then went on to repeat the talking point.

What disgusts me is not that Frist lied. What disgusts me that he thought he would get away with it.

And I don’t know that I blame the Senate Majority Leader for that because, frankly, when he first uttered the lie, I thought he would get away with it, too.

I think this is exactly the sort of thing that Jon Stewart has been talking about when he criticizes the media for their lack of analysis. If Frist had been on Hardball, or Crossfire, or Meet the Press, it seems likely to me that he would have delivered his lie, and no reporter would have challenged him on it, even if they knew it was false. When Inskeep called him on his lie, you could hear that Frist was stunned. “How dare he?” I imagine him thinking. “How dare he?”

Frist is responsible for his own lies. But our media — by which I mean “every reporter who acts as a conduit for an untruth and doesn’t identify it as such for his readers, listeners, or viewers” — is responsible for creating an environment in which political liars can have a good faith belief that their deception will probably go unchallenged.

I’m glad that Inskeep was willing to call the Senator on his patent deception. I’ll be more glad when that’s the journalistic norm, and not the exception. I don’t want my journalists to be nothing more than conduits for the propaganda of any political party — even a party I support. If I want to read press releases or public relations, I can go to the party’s website and get that. To quote Jon Stewart: we need their help. There is too much information for readers to know what is true or untrue.

We need journalists to do their jobs.

In the days when the Soviet Union was still Communist (or, for that matter, still around), two of their major newspapers were Pravda (literally “Truth”), which was the Communist Party newspaper, and Izvestia (literally “News”), which was the official government newspaper. A popular aphorism for many years was “There is no pravda in izvestia, and there is no izvestia in pravda.” Please, CNN. Please, New York Times. Please, Fox News. Please, freelance and full-time journalists everywhere. We need more pravda in our izvestia. We need it now.

Additional Resources

• You can hear the entirety of the interview between Steve Inskeep and Bill Frist here. The exchange I quoted starts at around 1 minute 55 seconds in to the segment.
• You can read the English-language edition of Pravda online, although I’m told that the American edition has higher production values. Izvestia is online also, but only in Russian
• If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I mention John Stewart’s push for media accountability, you can read this article.

The Red Sox are in the World Series. That’s pretty cool.

I really, really, really don’t like Tcl. Here are some of the reasons why.

1. The syntax for basic language elements is broken and inconsistent. Look, go ahead and put dollar signs in front of variables. Or don’t put dollar signs in front of variables. I don’t really care. But make up your mind; don’t make me have to figure out which syntax I need to use from context.

2. No syntax checking until the program actually executes a given line of code. Look, guys, maybe this made sense twenty years ago when you were running on a DECstation 2100, but those few extra milliseconds really aren’t going to kill us. Conversely, the interpreter is forced to reparse all syntactic blocks (for loops, if statements, and so on), every single time they are executed. So you spend cycles reparsing the syntactic blocks that actually execute at runtime, yet I still have no confidence that the syntax of every line in my script is correct, unless I use some external tool like procheck. Way to go, boys! Welcome to 1986!

3. The backtraces. Oh my god, the backtraces. Python has backtraces, and yet somehow they’re useful. No one has ever, in the entire history of Tcl, fixed a bug based on its unreadable and baroque backtraces.

4. A special case of item 3: if you’re taking the trouble to tell me what line offset in a given function the bug you encountered was, maybe you could spend another thirty bytes or so and mention, casually, what file the error was in? No, that would make too much goddamn sense.

5. Idiomatically, the existence of exceptions in the language is used to excuse lousy programming. Here’s how every Tcl program in the world that has ever been written since the beginning of time handles exceptions:

6. Tcl wants to use { and } in places where God intended us to use ( and ).

7. The “expr” construct is hateful. Which of these makes more sense?
value = value ^ 2
or
set value [expr $value ^ 2]“?

8. You have to explicitly invoke expr, except it’s automatic in if and while conditions, which is pretty much the one place where you don’t want it.

9. No real data structures to speak of. Everything is a string.

10. Tcl doesn’t actually have scoping “rules.” Really, they’re more like scoping “polite suggestions.” You can examine and change (!) variables in your caller’s stack frame (upvar). You can execute blocks of code in your caller’s context (uplevel). You can tear your own face off with your toenails and devour it, ending your life as a slavering, pathetic beast, whimpering in a pool of your own blood.

In summary: I really, really, really don’t like Tcl. Thank you, and good night.

What are all the cool kids playing on their consoles today? Katamari Damacy!

It’s the sort of game that only comes along once every few years, where the controls, theme, and tone all coalesce perfectly to create a kind of Platonic gaming mood. Katamari Damacy is a Namco release for the Sony Playstation 2.

Katamari Damacy

The plot is a tissue thin excuse to justify the madness. Your father, the Lord of All Creation, got drunk and accidentally destroyed all of the stars in the sky. Your job is to go to Earth and roll around a small ball, called a katamari. Anything smaller than the katamari sticks to it. As more and more objects stick to it, the katamari gets bigger, and can pick up more items. So you’ll start off the size of a thimble, able to pick up things like thumbtacks, chessboard pieces, the occasional butterfly, and the like. As you grow, you’ll be able to pick up larger and larger items — teapots, small dogs, children, people, bicycles, cars, islands, and so on. After each level, you’re graded on your performance and, if you collected enough stuff your katamari (and everything it picked up) is turned into a star.

The best thing about the game is it’s simplicity. There’s basically one rule: if it’s smaller than you, it sticks, and if it’s bigger than you, you bounce off (possibly knocking parts of you off). Likewise, the controls are elegant. No buttons are absolutely necessary to play: just use the two thumbsticks, and drive like a tank. Push both forward, and the katamari rolls forward. Pull them back, it rolls backwards. Push one stick forward and the other back, and you turn. There’s initially some emotional guilt the first time you pick up a mouse, or a kitten, but soon enough you are lost in the sheer joy of it, and you’re gleefully chasing a shrieking Mrs. Tanaka down the street on the way back from her grocery shopping. Amusingly, the game also gives you a brief description of every object you pick up, and a biography of every person you ruthlessly murder reunite with the cosmos.

Visually, the game is whimsical and charming, without being cloyingly sweet. It’s pretty clear that hallucinogens played at least an inspirational role in the game’s design. Lines are crisp and cartoony, with a rich and varied palette, polygons are blocky in a Fisher-Price sort of way. It’s clear that Toy Commander for the Dreamcast was a big influence on the developers. The problem with Toy Commander, though, was that it was much too difficult. Katamari Damacy imports the best parts of that earlier game, and leaves the hugely complicated game mechanics at the door. The mechanisms of the game itself also suggest Atari’s Marble Madness at times, although this is a much more chaotic, open-ended, and less abstract game than that arcade puzzler.

The reason the simple controls work so well is that the gameplay is so subtle. The fact that your katamari changes in scale during each level is transformative in and of itself. So in the early parts of a level, larger objects are effectively obstacles, and serve to delineate the landscape in which you move. By the time you’ve tripled in size, you can simply roll over them and absorb them. In this way the landscape manages to be dynamic even when no objects in it are moving. Effectively, you’re playing in four dimensions.

The soundtrack is infectious and simple. The starting theme song (listen to a brief sample here) has been lodged in my brain all day (only being driven out when I occasionally play The Girl from Ipanema). There’s a variety of other songs in the game itself, and if there’s a soundtrack album, I’m buying it. The music is eclectic, jazzy, infectious, and perfectly appropriate. Here’s another brief sample for your enjoyment.

Lastly, one of the best aspects of Katamari Damacy is that it is available, retail, for a mere $20. (I guarantee you that someone at Namco, right now, is kicking themselves repeatedly). At that price, there’s no excuse to not get it if you have a PS2.

Many of the strangest Japanese games don’t make it to the US market. I’m hoping that the wild (and perhaps unprecedented) success of Katamari Damacy is the thin edge of a wedge that opens us up to more strange and delightful things. American publishers and distributors, take note.

Additional Resources

• Ron Gilbert (yes, that Ron Gilbert) has an excellent review of Katamari Damacy where he reveals that it is all a metaphor for our capitalist consumer economy. And, if I may digress, as long as you’re at Grumpy Gamer you should also read his insightful and interesting analysis of the costs of producing and selling a 2D adventure game in today’s marketplace.
• There’s an official Katamari Damacy web site
• Tilt has a nice summary capsule review
• Toy Commander was an extremely innovative (and much too difficult) game for the Sega Dreamcast.

My mom is convinced that John Kerry is going to win the election.

I think she couldn’t be more wrong. I’d like for John Kerry to win. I’d like for George Bush to lose. But I don’t see it happening. I do have to say that her logic is pretty compelling: she says that I’m a guaranteed jinx when it comes to politics, and since I’m so certain that Bush is going to win, he won’t.

She was pretty sure, though, so I got her to put her money where her mouth is, and we made a bet. If John Kerry wins, as she says he will, I have to buy her a couple of bottles of the Nippozano Reserva Chianti by Frescobaldi (plus maybe a few bottles of Two-Buck Chuck), totally about $50. If George Bush wins, as I bet he will, she has to buy me the videogame of my choice, up to a value of $50.

It turns out that Halo 2 will be out the week after the election. So if Kerry wins, I’ll be thrilled to send my mom the wine she wants. And if Bush wins, at least it will mean that I’m getting a free copy of Halo 2. Even if you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, I’m still going to try.

At 8 pm on Tuesday, November 2nd, as election returns roll in, I plan on not watching them, but will instead be online playing Counterstrike. Drop me a line if you’d like to join our little group of people shooting each other and shouting “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” at the electorate.