Tea Leaves

Here’s how it works:

1. Previews of GTA IV appear in every magazine and weblog on the internet. Afraid of being attacked by mobs bearing torches and pitchforks, they universally give it 10/10, 5 stars, whatever the rating is that means “Jesus has returned to earth in the form of a videogame.”
2. Everyone buys GTA IV, including all of your 12 year old cousins.
3. Eventually, you give in to the hype and buy it too.
4. At this point, you realize that the “innovative” gameplay all of the reviewers in Step 1 talked about is, in fact, nothing more than the exact same gameplay from the past 5 games, only now with more pixels.
5. After about a week, you put the game down and never play it again.

Lather, rinse, and repeat with whatever other hit titles our corporate masters want to sell you in a given month.

I suppose people are probably expecting me to tear into the ethics behind GTA IV. I’ve certainly done the same with respect to other games. This time, I won’t bother for a few reasons. First, I haven’t played the game, and have no intention of playing the game. Second, and more importantly other people are making the argument for me, which I take to be a very healthy sign.

The more interesting question, to me, is: should I pick up Mario Kart for the Wii?

Dottie’s True Blue Cafe is a small place in San Francisco that sits right where the gentrification of Union Square ends and the Tenderloin begins. It is a neighborhood place that has become a destination through well-deserved appearances in every publication that has an opinion on where to eat in San Francisco. As such, you don’t really need me to tell you to go there. But I will anyway.

The next time you are staying the night in downtown SF, you should get up early and get to Dottie’s door by 7:20am so you can get in with the first group. Kurt, the owner and chef, will then serve you the best American breakfast you have ever had. If this does not happen, I will personally pay your bill.

As I have pontificated before, good breakfast is deceivingly simple. All you need to do is combine good eggs, good meat, good starch and good coffee together into a synergistic mix of calorific ecstasy. Unfortunately, it is exceedingly rare to find a place that does all of these things well. Dottie’s is one such place, but it is much more than this.

First, Dottie’s not only gets the basics right, but also manages to keep up a constant stream of interesting specials that are all variations on the eggs, meat and starch theme. Once in a while, one of these may sound overly pretentious (e.g. a scramble with whiskey fennel sausage, spinach, and roasted garlic), but they are universally excellent. Where others pile too many stupid ingredients on top of overcooked eggs, Dottie’s gives you just enough on top of eggs that are cooked perfectly. Not runny, not tough, and not bland. I even had chicken-apple sausage at Dottie’s once before it became a sad Whole Foods cliché. I’d do it again too.

If you want something more down to earth, you can get hamburger, sweet peppers, onions and salsa. Or smoked trout. Or get your eggs next to those black bean cakes with a couple of tortillas. Not only is there toast, but also the wonderful grilled jalapeno corn bread, or muffins, or coffee cake. In addition to the transcendent buttermilk pancakes (with just a touch of ginger and cinnamon), there were also cornmeal blueberry pancakes when we were in there last week. The list goes on and on.

Dottie’s

Second, not only is all the food executed perfectly, but this ballet of short order cooking perfection happens in a space that is no larger than your master bathroom, only stuffed with a full cook top and griddle. Get lucky enough to sit at the counter, and you can watch miracles happen in this tiny space. One minute the stove is empty. The next, there are two pans of omelet fillings, and one with sunny side eggs on the stove next to three pancakes on the griddle. Next, the eggs go into the omelets, there is some stirring, some mixing, some shuffling of pans. Then, one by one the eggs, omelets and pancakes are off the stove and on to plates next to a scoop of home fries off the grill and whatever other sides belong in the order. All at once, four plates of food are ready for a single table, all finished and delivered at precisely the right time. Kurt and his crew do this hundreds of times a day, six days a week for as long as I can remember. It’s simply inspiring to watch if you are any kind of food dork.

Third, and finally, Dottie’s is a place and an experience. A lot of little things go into this. The coffee mugs are a pleasing shape and neither too big nor too small. There are interesting things to look at on the walls. The service protocol is well defined and well understood by the staff, so you always know where you stand. The music never sucks. In fact, the music is always excellent. I think it’s one of two restaurants on Earth where I have actually enjoyed the background music after I started paying attention to it.

Put all these things together and you get a place that you will go back to repeatedly over the long haul. We’ve been going every time we are in San Francisco for about the last 15 years. We stay in hotels that are close by so we can get there at opening to get the counter seats. Of all the places we love in SF, there are only two places that we absolutely cannot miss whenever we visit: Dottie’s for breakfast and Yank Sing for Dim Sum.

If forced to choose, I’d probably go to Dottie’s first. I know how to make good pot stickers, but I can’t make breakfast as well as Kurt. Not even close.

I had to place a special order with the PLCB the other day to get a bottle of something for my mom. So, as long as I was placing the order, I ordered a bottle of Advocaat. Egg liqueur.

When you say the words “egg liqueur” most people will, instinctively, recoil in horror. There’s no need to do this: the liqueur can’t actually get you if you don’t open the bottle.

I’ve had egg-based liqueurs in the past. In Italy, several of the popular egg liqueurs don’t really taste anything like egg. They’re more like zabaglione in a bottle. This is not such a bad thing.

Advocaat is a bit simpler. When the drink was first made in the New World, it was made with avocado, which gave it the requisite thickness. Avacados being in short supply in Spain, some enterprising experimenter substituted eggs, and the name was changed, over time, due to misunderstanding. The flavor profile is, essentially, eggs, brandy, and sugar. There’s a slightly medicinal tang which I found to be a bit unpleasant, but not overwhelmingly so. It’s an interesting drink. I could imagine breaking it out around the holidays. But the real question raised by the existence of Advocaat — a question raised by so many liqueurs — is “why not just mix the source ingredients yourself?” If you did that with eggs, brandy, and sugar, you’d have a wonderful-tasting (and fresh) egg nog.

As thoroughly OK as Advocaat is, there’s no avoiding the answer: “if you did it yourself, it would taste better.” So there you have it: I drank some Advocaat so that you don’t have to.

And now, a word about the process of actually getting the stuff.

Mindful of the suggestion some have made that special ordering via phone is easy and convenient, I gave it a shot. Out of the 4 things I wanted, only 2 of them were available unless I was willing to order 6 bottles. One of the items I wanted had a 7 bottle minimum if I wanted to pick it up in Butler county, but only a 1 bottle minimum if I wanted to pick it up in Allegheny county.

Color me unimpressed.

On the plus side, the nice lady taking my order was polite, competent, and the entire transaction was completed relatively painlessly, once we slogged through answering the difficult question of what, exactly, I could and could not order.

So, like Advocaat, the online special ordering system was not an abject failure, but not as satisfying as I wanted it to be.

Somehow, that’s apropos.

Because I’m a glutton for punishment, occasionally I’ll read a thread at some internet forum or other. Often in game forums, but also in more surprising places like this, the topic of software piracy comes up. These threads inevitably result in 20 pages of back-and-forth involving hundreds of people which reduce, in the end, to this exchange:

Person 1: “Hey, stop stealing software. That’s wrong.”

Person 2: “Don’t call me a thief! Copyright violation isn’t theft. Anyway, I really need to use this software, so that makes it OK.”

Beyond the obvious observation — that Person 2 is a dickhead — there’s something more subtle going on here. Today, it dawned on me. The Person 2s of the world aren’t just pirating software because they are bad people. They’re pirating software because they haven’t learned how to not pirate software. It’s not simply an ethical issue, it’s a personal failing, sort of like not knowing how to stop after one or two drinks.

Therefore, today, I’m going to teach you how to not be a software pirate. Let’s call today “Come Clean Friday”. Today’s the day you’re going to become a better person. I’m going to help.

Step 1: Take Inventory

Take a look at the list of programs you have installed on your machine. For each application, ask yourself: “Was this commercial (or shareware)? Did I pay for this?” Jot down the names of any (commercial) software that you haven’t yet paid for.

Step 2: Do You Need It?

For each unpaid program on your list, ask yourself: “Have I ever actually used this, other than starting it up once after downloading it to make sure it works? How many times have I run it? Do I use it on a regular basis?” On your list, mark down “Yes” next to each program that you actually use.

Step 3: Delete What You Don’t Need

For every program on your list that you didn’t actually use, delete it. Should the need arise for that program some day, you will have an opportunity to purchase it then. In the meantime, deleting the program not only improves your life ethically, it saves on disk space and organizational clutter as well.

Step 4: Make Right What You Do Need

Now you’re left with a (hopefully small) list of for-pay programs that you haven’t paid for but that you really, honestly need. For each of the programs on your list, do one of the following things:

Option A: Search for a free alternative to the program in question. Download that alternative, delete the commercial program, and use the alternative instead. For example, if you’ve pirated Photoshop, download the GIMP instead and delete your illegal copy of Photoshop.

Option B: Order a copy of the commercial program in question. Now you have every right to use the program, and can stop acting defensive on internet message boards.

Option C: Delete the program even though you feel you “need it”. Go without. If you don’t actually want to pay $19.99 to some shareware developer for his game, then you should seriously consider not playing it, for reasons I’ll go into in more detail below.

“But I really need Photoshop, and I don’t have the money to buy it!” some people say. For those people, I offer options D and E:

Option D: Seek a cheaper version of the program. If you are a student, you may qualify for an educational discount. If you have a friend who works at the company, they may be able to get you a discounted copy at the company store. You may be able to find older versions of the program in question on eBay.

Option E: Delete the commercial program in question. Start saving money each week; set a budget, put away a specified amount of money, and when you have enough, buy the program. There’s a hidden bonus to doing this: you may find, after you’ve amassed the $1999 necessary to buy Autodesk Maya Complete 7, that you would rather use the money for something else, like a mortgage payment, or a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches. In this case, you’ve not only improved your ethics, but you’ve learned something valuable about the meaning of the word “need”. Sometimes learning to do without presents us with valuable opportunities for personal growth.

Stupid Arguments That I Absolutely Guarantee Will Be Made In The Comments Section, Below

“Copyright violation isn’t theft!”

When someone makes this technically true but completely-missing-the-point sort of argument, I can only assume that they’re the sort of dickhead who will argue “Lo, but I am not actually the glans of a penis!” when someone correctly informs them that they are a dickhead.

“I only use this because the Evil (Microsoft/Adobe/Apple/Beagle Bros.) Monopoly forces me to do it.”

We are each, all of us, responsible for our own actions. No one made you do anything. To the extent that there is any justification that drives me up a wall, this one is it. (To the extent that there is any justification that I’m almost willing to say “OK, at least you’re honest”, it would be “I pirate software because I don’t feel bad about taking things that aren’t mine and I’m pretty sure I won’t get caught.”)

“I would buy this software if it was cheaper, but it’s just too expensive!”

The first response to this is: it isn’t true. You wouldn’t buy it if it was cheaper. The second response is to observe that life is full of difficult ethical choices, and in our world it’s generally sellers who have the privilege of setting the price of a product. Not buying a product that’s too expensive is a perfectly reasonable way of applying market pressure to encourage the seller to lower the price. Stealing the product is not reasonable.

“I pirate programs to decide if they are worth buying. I need to try them out first.”

This response is especially poignant when it’s offered to justify copying applications and games for which the publisher already offers a free demo. The claim then morphs to “Sure, there’s a demo, but it doesn’t support all the features”, or else “The time limit wasn’t enough to evaluate it properly,” at which point we’re clearly in the land of ex post facto justifications for bad behavior.

But let’s say the publisher doesn’t offer a demo. Surely, there are programs out there for which that is true. Is stealing the product really your only response? Off the top of my head I can think of other, less ethically challenged responses. You could write to the publisher, explain the situation, and ask them for an evaluation version for a limited time (and yes, I’ve found that many software developers and publishers are happy to do this.) You could find a friend who has already bought the software, and ask to try it out on their machine. Stealing something just to “try it out” is, in my mind, the pinnacle of lame justifications.

Why This Matters

Neither I, nor anyone else, can force you to not pirate software. The odds are good that the Software Police are never going to break down your door and bust you for stealing something that you don’t have the right to use. At the end of the day, the issue is purely one of personal ethics: do you want to be a good person, or do you want to be a bad person? Good people pay for the (commercial) products they use. Bad people don’t.

Paying for all the software you use may seem like a hardship, especially if you’ve spent years becoming used to, as they say, “riding in the black”. I grew up at a time when pirating Apple II games was the norm, so I’m not unsympathetic to the feeling of wanting to “collect” every cool program in the world, but not having enough money to buy them all. But in the end, each day we wake up and ask ourselves “What kind of a person am I?” I want to suggest to you, dear software pirate, that being the sort of person who pays for what they use is a better kind of person to be.

I’m not saying you should pay for your software because it’s better for the software industry.

I’m saying you should pay for your software because it is better for you.

I keep trying to write collections of short snippets about games, but they keep running long. So tonight, self-discipline will take over and I’ll keep it short. Really.

Game Demos Make You Think the Game Sucks

Over at Gamers with Jobs they are quoting a study that indicates that games with demos sell worse than games without. It seems to me this should surprise no one. Here are some games that I decided not to buy based on the strength of their demos:

1. PREY.
2. The EA NCAA game.
3. F.E.A.R. Actually I think I rented this, but I only played a demo-sized piece of it before I threw it away.
4. Dozens of games on XBLA.
5. Uncharted.
6. Blue Dragon.
7. The Darkness.

Here is a list of games I bought on the strength of the demo that I might not have bought otherwise:

1. Bioshock.

That’s it. It’s clear why game demos have this effect. The truth is that you can tell if you are going to want to play a game in about 10-20 minutes of gameplay. If the 10-20 minute demo sucks, it is nearly impossible to convince yourself to then go out and buy the game. To make things worse, it’s really hard to boil down the good parts of a game into a single short demo. What you usually get is a part of and opening level just as it appears in the final game, out of context. So it sucks. So you don’t buy the game. Game over.

MLB 08: The Show

Tarted up for the PS3, this game still plays great even as they have worked to make it look a lot better. As I mentioned before, I like the pseudo-RPG mode that they put in this game called “Road to the Show” where you create a player and move him from AA to AAA to the majors over a period of several seasons.

Sony has refined this mode in this iteration to try and make it more directed and more interesting. Unfortunately, the result is broken in a subtle way. The refinement is to add “advancement goals” to the regular goals that you get points for. These advancement goals tell you which of your attributes you should be trying to increase during a given time period. This is a strange mechanic, since you’d think they’d let me distribute my points however I want. But here’s the thing that’s really broken. If you fail to advance in the right areas, you get negative feedback, so your level of play goes down, so you get fewer training points, so you can’t advance in the right areas, and you get negative feedback. The result is that it is easy to build a character that simply cannot advance. Relief pitchers are hard because they don’t play enough innings to collect a lot of training, for example. Starting pitchers are really the only class that works well, because you play most of a game and generate a ton of training points to avoid the feedback loop.

So, letter to Sony: get rid of the advancement goals. They are broken and being trapped in the minor leagues is no fun.

Mass Effect

I finally found this used at a pretty good price. The game mostly follows the standard Bioware formula. There is a lot of dialog. There is a lot of good voice work. A lot of it is well written. Some of it is really stupid. The combat is hit or miss. I feel like I’d rather be playing Halo. The character build system is neither too fussy or two simple. People complained about the inventory screens a lot. I don’t really see the problem, although the UI for weapons upgrades is retarded.

I can see myself playing this just to see how the plot turns out. However, the game does break a couple of important game design rules that should never be broken:

1. If I have to run long distances on foot, you have to give me some kind of jump or roll move to keep me amused.

2. Under no circumstances should there ever be NPCs dancing in the game.

God Of War/PSP

I just got this today to take on a trip to CA next week. The game looks to be God of War shrunk down to pocket size. Everything is pretty and smooth. All the moves are the same. I expect there to be an offensive human sacrifice puzzle somewhere. It’s a bit astounding that you can achieve this level of technical excellence in a hand-held game.

I’ll bring Disgaea too though.

While there are many German words that I know, the one that I think is most apropos here is schadenfreude.

Auf wiedersehen, liebchen.

There are two universal rules about people who work in software:

1. Inexperience breeds an unrealistic optimism towards the power of new tools.

2. To offset (1), experience breeds an unrealistic hatred of all tools.

We have seen this cycle play out over and over again in the design, implementation and adoption of instruction sets (remember when those still mattered?), programming languages, operating systems, and end user applications. Back when I was younger and more optimistic about the power of new tools, I used to tinker a lot with scripting languages of various kinds. Over about ten years or so what this experience taught me was very valuable in my later career. The main lesson was this: pick one, learn it, and then stop paying attention. The one I picked to use most at the time was perl. Since then, perl has become a popular punching bag for newer and shinier scripting tools, but I have stuck to my guns. I know perl, therefore there is no reason to learn another scripting language.

Most of the languages that I am concerned with come from the tradition of batch systems on time sharing computers. These allow users to create simple scripts of tasks that they may want to run over and over again and submit them as a whole unit, saving a lot of typing and waiting in front of the terminal. The UNIX shell languages and the scripting tools that evolved from them certainly have this heritage.

Perl, in particular, is nothing if not a utility that combines the functionality of what were historically separate tools (sh, awk, sed, grep) in the UNIX world into a single more efficient and easy to use package if what you needed was a tool to scan and process huge amounts of text in various forms in order to transform it into text in some other form. Perl follows a few simple rules:

1. Don’t get in my way with a lot of extraneous glue that I don’t care about. Perl is very direct. No compilers, no linkers, no type checking.

2. Process text well. This is my “equal twiddle” rule, referring to the operator in perl (=~) that triggers regular expression matching and replacement of text. In my mind, a script language must have a concise way to do this. I don’t want to have to type out regularExpression.matchThisStringPlease() when I mean =~.

3. Handle iteration and files well. Most tasks that perl is well suited for involve processing large areas of the file system. Make sure this is streamlined.

4. Simple general purpose data structures. In other words, hash tables.

5. Make every feature useful. I’m not going to learn how to use all of them, but if I do there should be a good reason for it.

At their core, scripting languages are all designed around one idea: making writing quick programs easier. A high level of utility is prioritized over cleaner syntax, rich type systems with rigorous type checking, and features that are needed to scale the size of programs or the teams working on them. In my opinion, the designer of perl understood these tradeoffs almost intuitively and usually made the right choices in the core of the language itself. Yes there are warts, but find me any system without them.

With this background, it is clear why I stopped paying attention to scripting languages. They are all designed with these tradeoffs in mind. Therefore, they all make weird compromises to increase the utility to code density. Therefore, you are guaranteed to have to learn some idiosyncratic way of thinking or working in order to deal with these tradeoffs. Therefore, you should only do it once.

There are certainly many other scripting languages. Some, like tcl, are not worth mentioning except to spit in the face of anyone who ever worked to propagate that particular demon seed. Others, like python and ruby claim to be “like perl only cleaner”. And yet these claims never hold up. Once the rubber hits the road, every one of these newer tools has some brain damage of its own, and each of them falls backwards on the utility scale by breaking one of the rules above. In particular, most fail the equal twiddle rule, but there are other examples. Python has its psychotic use of white space to determine lexical scope. Ruby has a lot of useless tinkering with modern language features like closures and continuations, except that it does not get them right. So why bother?

But, don’t let me make your decisions for you. I picked up perl because at the time I did there was nothing else that did as much as easily. You young people have a wider variety of choices to make, so go out and pick something that appeals to your sense of aesthetics and design. Just make sure you remember two things:

1. When push comes to shove, not having =~ will piss you off.

2. Whatever you do, only learn one. It’s just not worth the time and the brain space to do more.

My cat just gnawed through the wire to my Wii sensor bar.

Good thing you can find replacement sensor bars everywhere! Oh wait. YOU CAN’T.

Edit: It looks like I can order a replacement sensor bar from Nintendo for $10, or pay $20 at a local Gamestop for a battery-powered one with no wire. Guess which one I’ll be doing.

In the past few weeks the Tivo appears to have exhausted the current stock of Good Eats shows that are in heavy rotation. Rather than three or four a night, we are down to just a few per week. My original impressions of the show still stand, but I have one relatively minor complaint. He really doesn’t know anything about rice.

Maybe it’s his upbringing. Maybe it’s because there are no Chinese restaurants of any quality in The South. Whatever the reason, one is forced to this conclusion after watching his show about rice. The show begins with a loving tribute to risotto, a tribute which is well-deserved. Risotto is one of the few Western rice dishes that is actually worth eating. He then takes a bizarre tangent into brown rice salad. Why I don’t know. Why eat brown rice? More importantly, why eat it cold? The only discussion of proper white rice comes when he dismisses the rice that you would get at a Chinese takeout joint as “tasteless long grain white rice.”

Now, I don’t know what passes for Chinese food in Atlanta, but if you get long grain white rice at a Chinese restaurant I suggest you find another Chinese restaurant. Such a thing is unthinkable. That’s like getting Olive Garden pasta and declaring that the Italians don’t know much about noodles. Good rice is short (or medium short) grain and cooked so it sticks together but is not mushy.

The pinnacle of good rice, in my not so humble opinion, is sushi rice, which gets no mention at all in this show. Note, I don’t mean the gluey crap that you get at most places in the U.S. I mean, in the U.S. people make sushi with brown rice. We are not to be trusted. I mean the ethereal little balls of perfectly cooked rice, seasoned with whatever they season it with and rolled lightly under a perfect piece of fish to add just that little bit of zing and texture. You bite into it, it’s there, and then it just disappears at the same time as the fish.

Good sushi rice is so important that you have to apprentice for years in sushi restaurants in Japan before you are even allowed to touch the rice. This, my friends, is the most important ingredient on the plate. Not just some “tasteless” white side dish of limited character. It is the main attraction!

So, I’m tired of the abuse that white rice gets from the food industry at large. I’m tired of “alternative grains”. And most of all, I’m tired of being served really bad rice. I think Alton and the rest of the U.S. food industry could stand to do a little more studying on this subject. I’m hoping he has covered these issues in a show that I haven’t managed to see yet. After all, if we can’t spread a true understanding of good rice to the public at large, the Italians might take over with their fancy pasta, in all those strange awkward shapes. And we can’t have that.

This is a favorite that started out as an accident in graduate school. Obtain 2 full snapper filets. The best way to do this is to go to a good store and have them filet a whole snapper for you. In Pittsburgh, this means you should go to the Penn Avenue Fish Company in the strip, because no other store in Pittsburgh is even half as good. When you get the fish home you will note that it is in two filets, each about 4 or 5 inches long. The pieces have a V-shaped indentation on one end. Use a knife to cut along that indentation to get two or three pieces out of each filet. Go for pieces of uniform thickness.

Now we’re going to bread the fish and fry it.

Bread the fish as follows: flour on a plate, 1 beaten egg mixed with room tepid (not warm, not cool) water, bread crumbs on a plate. Dredge in the flour, then dip in the egg then dredge in the bread crumbs.

Fry the fish in enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the pan and come up a little on the fish. Do this on medium to medium low heat. You don’t want to burn the outside, but you want it to brown nicely and leave some brown bits in the plan.

Three or four minutes per side should be enough depending on how thick the fish is. I do this in a 10 inch frying pan, so it takes two batches to get all the fish done. Store the fish in a warm baking dish or something to keep it warm while you do the second batch.

After the fish is all fried, deglaze the pan with white wine. Add a chopped garlic glove, a bit of salt, a little water or broth, and a few grinds of pepper. Turn the heat to high and let this reduce then melt a small chunk of butter in the mixture and mix it around to emulsify it.

Serve the fish with the sauce and whatever you like. I like Bok Choy and Whole Foods Tater Tots (really!). Pasta also works. Rice also works (and is better than pasta, because I’m Chinese).

I typically avoid making political posts because, first, they tend to be boring, and second, they violate Peterb’s First Law of Human Nature, which, expressed concisely, is:

“You can never tell anyone anything.”

Lately, however, it has become impossible to turn a corner in Pennsylvania without hearing people discuss politics, and in particular the politics of personality that surround Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I think that these discussions are emblematic of a particular failure of the Democratic party, and will be the proximate cause of their close-but-no-cigar heartbreaking loss to John McCain in November. Since I’d rather not live under another 8 years of Republican misrule, I’m going to violate my own no-politics guideline and spend a few minutes talking to the world at large, and hope that it makes some small, hopefully positive, difference.

First, let me show my own personal biases: I do not care whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee. I would, happily, vote for a moldy wheel of cheddar cheese if it was running against the Republicans.

Some partisans and fans of Obama and Clinton devoutly, and honestly, believe that only their candidate can triumph in November. These people also seem to believe that John Kerry lost to George Bush because he performed poorly as a candidate. Both of these beliefs are false. The election, such as it is, will already be won (or, more likely, lost) well before the party convention blesses one or the other candidate. The Kerry election was lost long before the party convention blessed him as a candidate.

The issue causing the Democrats to fumble ineffectually for their car keys in the zombie-infested parking lot of modern American politics can be reduced to a single sentence: The Republican party, and its operatives, have a clear and consistent message, and the Democratic party, and its operatives, are busy having arguments with themselves.

Note that the argument I’m referring to is not “Clinton vs. Obama.” The Republicans have (and have always had) plenty of vicious infighting about which dog will get the choicest bone. Rather, I’m saying the Democratic party still has not figured out its message.

In political terms, this is absolute death. Voters, like bees, can sense fear. Obviously there are certain political third-rails that even the Republicans dare not touch, but by and large the average voter does not feel too strongly about most issues. For those issues, the average voter cares less about what your position is, but just that you have a position at all, and that he knows what it is.

Let’s pretend that there is a brand new Republican mayor in your town. His name is Wilford Q. Forsythe. That’s all you know about him. Where do you think Wilford stands on the following issues: abortion, what to do about the War in Iraq, tighter regulation of the airlines, NAFTA, school choice, and gun control?

Go ahead. Take a minute and answer those questions in your head. They’re easy questions to answer, aren’t they?

Now imagine that there’s a Democratic mayor, Marilyn Q. Impatiens. Where does she stand on those same issues? The answer is obvious: you have no idea whatsoever.

The point here is not that Republican candidates are hopelessly, tragically evil in all of their political beliefs (although, of course, they are). The point is that — for the most part — those positions are part of the package, and that frees Republican commentators and partisans to work on targeting and shaping their message years before the Democrats have even decided whether, say, they intend on supporting free trade this month. And yes, I’m aware that one can always find a Republican candidate who is an outlier on one issue or another. But compared to the utter chaos on the other side of the aisle, those are mere eccentricities and outliers.

This consistency of message is something that resonates very deeply with the American public. George Bush didn’t win because John Kerry was an idiot. He won because the American people had a perfect understanding of the nature of the pig they were buying. The Democrats — not Kerry — were unable to explain why America should buy their soy protein pig instead. Bill Clinton was able to close the sale on his candidacy by focusing the entire Democratic party on one singular, simple, easy-to-understand question: “How much money is in your pocket?” and constantly hammering home the easy-to-understand answer: “I’ll make sure you have more.”

I can’t say for sure what issue will electrify the electorate this cycle. Perhaps it will be the war in Iraq. Perhaps it is our collapsing economy.

What I can say for sure, however, is that the Democrats are doomed to yet another humiliating and ignominious defeat unless they stop trying to convince people who to support, and start trying to convince people why the Democratic party is the right choice.

I didn’t mention it earlier, but this post has a soundtrack. Enjoy. See you at the wake in November.

Seriously, everyone, your little April Fools’ Day fake news articles aren’t funny and you’re killing me. Let this holiday die. Please. I beg of you.