Stop Crapping On My Magazine

I don't listen to talk radio, of any political persuasion. Well, I do listen to NPR, mostly because I can't abide commercials on the radio, but when any given show gets to the "call-in" part of the program, I tend to turn the volume down and whistle. There's something grating to me about having some group of people who know something about any given subject give their spiels, and then inviting people who may potentially know squat about the subject call in and offer their insights and opinions.

Yes, I'm an elitist and a meritocrat - I believe that there tend to be experts in any given field and I'm quite willing to shut up, let them talk, and think about what they said. And I don't see how "opening the phones" necessarily improves the quality of what they have to say, or my own private deliberations on what was said.

But at least in talk radio, there's someone (presumably the person who answers the phone) who winnows out the real flakes. It isn't full peer review by any means, but at least the screening process tends to weed out some of the most incomprehensible commentators. But this doesn't exist on the Internet - anyone can say anything they want, wherever they want, and reading their comments is often very bad for my health.

Some comments are just completely incomprehensible, and lead me to suggest that drinking a fifth of Jack Daniels may not be the right way to prepare for writing a comment on an Internet news story. Others are so poorly written I can't figure out what they're saying, usually because the commentator is either illiterate or has lapsed into some kind of Twitterspeak that I can't follow. I'm no Hemingway, but even I get twitchy when I see comments like "r u kddng me". Come on, people, written language is one of the greatest things we're capable of, and you treat it like an outhouse. Then there are the people for whom everything devolves into an exercise in ideology - you're reading a story about paleontology, and some yahoo diverts it into a name-calling exercise in politics. And then there are the foil-hatters, the people for whom everything, literally everything, is either a conspiracy or a cover-up. And there's the contingent of people who don't know a damn thing about the subject, but still think they have the right, nay, the obligation, to utter some ridiculous nonsense, as though the First Amendment isn't just a guarantee of free speech, but an actual moral imperative to exercise it.

It drives me up the wall.

But the ones that really annoy me are the ones who poop on my magazines. Let me explain. Once I was lying in bed reading an issue of a magazine. It happened to be Sky & Telescope, but the name doesn't matter. Being tired, I laid the magazine on the floor and went to sleep. During the night, my dog came along and pooped on my magazine. I know it wasn't malicious - she probably figured she'd get in less trouble if she pooped on something disposable instead of on the carpet - but still, it was hard to not imagine that she was saying "Stop reading that stupid magazine and pay attention to ME!"

Internet comments abound with this sort of thing, people who metaphorically poop on your magazine because they don't think they're getting enough attention. A good example are the NASA-bashers. These guys go to the trouble of reading NASA news stories or feeds, and then post long, often moronic comments expressing their black hatred of NASA and everything it stands for. They're just pooping on our magazines - hating whatever they read simply so they can hear their own voices and get a little attention. NASA is certainly not above criticism, but simply crapping on the magazine because you're unhappy with life doesn't count as criticism.

Some people are idiots, and they can't help that. Some people are apparently genetically predisposed to like conspiracy theories, and they can't help that. Some people just can't spell or write a coherent sentence, in the same way that I just can't pole-vault - it just isn't in my makeup. I can understand all that, up to a point. But when some idiot intentionally craps on my magazine because he's unhappy with his life and wants attention, that bugs me.

The Unrounded Man

Robert Heinlein once wrote "Specialization is for insects." That was actually the payoff line for a much longer thing, a list of all the things that Big Daddy Heinlein imagined that a well-rounded man should be able to do. I don't remember the list exactly, but was things like ride a horse, raise a child, write a song, defend the weak, skin an animal, use differential equations, join a comically inept left-wing revolutionary movement, drive a nail, program a computer, sew well, die well... Oh, I don't remember what all.

Apparently I'm not so well-rounded, because it turns out that I can't do a lot of things that a man, a REAL man, should probably be able to do.

I cannot, for example, come up with good impromptu Halloween costumes. Some people, you give them a half an hour and some paper plates, aluminum foil and socks, and they transform themselves into Bib Fortuna, complete with tentacles. But me? Pfft. A houseful of clothes and craft stuff, and the best I can do is put on a cowboy hat and tell people "I'm going as me, assuming I had ever been in Lonesome Dove." (Not to digress, but the best move you can make on Halloween, guys, is to rent the largest, fluffiest, pinkest rabbit costume you can find. You'll be mocked mercilessly on the way to the Halloween party, but once the sun goes down and all the girls in the skimpy witch and vampire costumes start getting cold, who do you think they're going to want to hug? That's right, the guy in the fluffy, warm rabbit costume. Trust me.)

This extends into other forms of weekend craft, such as making "macaroni art". Some people can pull off a pretty good copy of "The Last Supper" on a cookie sheet. Me, my macaroni art looks like either a Rothko or a Pollock, depending on how much coffee I've had. And while Rothko and Pollock got away with it in the world of high art, showing up at the county fair with a macaroni version of a Rothko just doesn't cut much mustard.

Some men - manly men, I guess - can wear cowboy boots. I cannot. Actually, I can wear them okay, I guess, I just can't get them back off. They stick as though they've been super-glued to my feet. I watch westerns on TV where guys pull off their boots without so much as a grunt. How do they do that? Me, I'm there with a bench vise, a can of WD-40 and a knife, and I still can't get them off. This probably just means that all the cowboy boots I've ever owned were the wrong size. But I have a new problem these days: my left foot is now larger than my right foot. A while back I sent an order in to a specialist boot-maker who claimed that they could and would make any kind of cowboy boot you could ever want, no matter how big, small, deformed, or mismatched your feet were. So I sent in an order and included the measurements of my feet. About a week later they cancelled the order by email with the apology "Maybe you'd be better off with flip-flops." If I had been a cowboy, I would most likely have died with my boots on, because I wouldn't have been able to get the damned things off.

Not that I can wear flip-flops either. After about six steps they always turn sideways, heels outboard, and threaten to trip me. Some people can wear flip-flops for hours. Some people can probably run a marathon in flip-flops. Me, I can't get from the pool to the back door without something going horribly awry. And I tend to leave my flip-flops outside. Normally I don't spend much time worrying about being stung by insects. I don't LIKE being stung, but it isn't something I really worry about very much. But somehow, I look at my flip-flops lying out on the patio and I know, I just know, that something hideous lurks within them, that I'll end up having to go to the ER with some kind of mutant scorpion stinger hanging out of my foot. Most times, I just leave the flip-flops alone and take my chances barefoot (once I got stung on the testicle by a wasp, and remember thinking "If this turns into a serious problem and I have to go the ER, there's simply no good way to explain how this happened.")

And I'm not good with revolutionary movements of any sort. "Come, brother," the leader says. "It's time to storm la Bastille!" And I purse my lips and say "But, Star Trek is coming up in an hour, and it's the one with the Yangs and the Kohms, and I haven't seen it in ages!"

And, despite all the nails I've driven in my life, I'm just no good at all at driving nails. Period. For a while I thought I just had crappy hammers, so I bought several new ones, of varying design and weight. For a while I thought I was being tormented by crappy nails, so I bought bigger nails. Nothing helped. At least a quarter of the time something goes horribly awry. The nail shoots off into the lower stratosphere, never to be seen again. The nail bends. The nail falls out. The board splits. I miss the nail entirely and mash a half-moon-shaped dent in the wood (or, if I'm using the framing hammer, I convert a circular region of the wood into a passable simulation of cube steak). People have actually tried to help me with this. Some urge me to choke up on the hammer and not swing so hard. Others tell me to get a bigger hammer and just wallop the thing, the theory apparently being that if you can sink the nail in two blows, there are fewer opportunities for it to bend. Nothing helped. Though these days, I AM better at not hitting myself with the hammer. (Once I was mowing a field of alfalfa and bent one of the triangular cutting blades in the windrower. I took the blade off and laid it on the drawbar, thinking I'd pound it flat with a big hammer. But every time I hit it, the bent tooth jumped ten feet in the air. So I thought "I'll hold it down with just the very tip of my left thumb." I ended up hitting my thumb so hard I tore my thumbnail off. My grampa also took off his left thumbnail with an axe, so maybe there's a genetic component to my futility with hammers.)

So here I stand, a man in full, but decidedly unrounded. Big Daddy Heinlein would be SO disappointed.

Well, I Liked It...

I don't read many movie reviews, and I can't remember the last time I bothered to "keep score" on Hollywood by looking up how much money this or that movie made, or lost. I also hate the word "engage", which I often hear on NPR from Brooklynite artist types who bestir themselves to leave their trendy digs and venture out into the real world to witness people "really engaging with the tornado" or "really engaging with the wildfire".

I hate that use of the word "engage". But I'll go ahead and use it anyway, in this context: I don't "engage" with movies as a business, or as harbingers of trends, or as some kind of pithy social commentary. I "engage" with them as a means of entertainment.

So when I read that Cowboys & Aliens has been officially declared "under-performing" or even "tanking", I couldn't care less, because hey, I liked it. And it doesn't matter to me what the critics said about it, or what the box-office bean counters came up with. I like westerns, I like science fiction movies, and hey, sometimes I like loud movies that don't make a lot of objective sense. Must every movie be a heartfelt examination of loss and redemption, or a heartwarming tale of love and acceptance? Can't I go see a movie that features Daniel Craig blowing big smoking holes in four-armed aliens once in a while? Can't I go see a movie that doesn't star Jennifer Aniston or Seth Rogan every now and then?

Sure I can. And I did. So put that in your box office totals and smoke it.

I can't seem to turn the news on lately without hearing someone tell me how "9/11 was when we lost our sense of safety and security."

Who's "we", kemosabe?

I have to say, up front, that I think there's something a little disturbing and histrionic about our fascination with 9/11. It was a tragedy, absolutely, and to the people who lost loved ones in the attacks, it's a tragedy that will never wane. But the unprecedented contemplation of the national navel this week... I don't know. It just bugs me.

It bugs me when they say "we lost our sense of security and safety" and have to live in fear now. We did? And we do?

If you thought the borders of the United States somehow granted us magical protection from harm and 9/11 jolted you out of your naive innocence, then you're just deluded. You didn't lose your sense of security; you lost your comfortable illusion of security. I grew up during the Cold War, when the 1,500+ ICBMs of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces were no more than about fifteen minutes away at any time. This wasn't the unformed dread of some bearded guy in a cave in Afghanistan planning to knock down a few buildings; this was over a thousand ballistic missiles armed with nuclear weapons, multiple nuclear weapons in many cases, to say nothing at all of the Soviet Navy's SLBMs or Tu-26 Backfire bombers carrying out "kamikaze" attacks. This would not have resulted in the loss of a few thousand people. This would have resulted in the loss of a few tens of millions of people, probably a few hundreds of millions of people, and the general collapse of anything resembling modern technological civilization.

Remember those days? Remember being taught to hide under your school desk? Remember people building fallout shelters in their back yards? Remember civil defense shelters? Remember how it felt when we deployed Pershing II missiles to Europe? Remember when the imminent introduction of neutron bombs appeared to coat the slippery slope toward nuclear immolation with Teflon? Remember when the cornerstone of US nuclear strategy was the principle of Mutual Assured Destruction? Remember when nuclear strategists argued that hardening the civilian population would actually destabilize deterrence? Remember when acronyms like MAD and ABM and ICBM and MIRV and FOBS weren't just alphabet soup nonsense but really stood for really serious shit? Remember when the movie Fail-Safe scared the crap out of you because it could happen?

There's your insecurity for you. How quickly we forget.

Experts can argue about when the Cold War really ended. The USSR fell apart in 1991, and one could argue that the real Cold War was over before even that, when the Soviets withdrew the bulk of their SSBNs from launch stations off the coasts of the United States. But just for the sake of discussion, let's say that the Cold War and the possibility of a spasm nuclear exchange between the USA and the USSR ended in 1991. 9/11 happened in 2001. Unless you were younger than ten years old at the time of 9/11, you lived at least part of your life under the specter of full-scale nuclear war with the Soviets. Against that backdrop, claims that 9/11 destroyed our sense of security seem just a little overwrought to me.

I'm not arguing that the Cold War was good. I'm not arguing that nuclear war against the Soviets was ever likely (though at times, such as during the Yom Kippur War or the ghastly Soviet misinterpretation of a NATO military exercise in the 1980s, we got close). The entire Cold War was a horrid waste of resources and lives, and we'd all have been better off if saner heads had prevailed, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But they didn't. And the reality was that for many years, both we and the Soviets were armed to the teeth, and all we needed was one accident, one misreading of intention, one madman, to burn down the whole world. And we knew it.

So you'll pardon me if your "loss of safety" doesn't move me very much. I feel far, far more secure now than I ever did during the Cold War, thank you very much. I'll take my chances with a terrorist armed with a box cutter. That's something I might be able to do something about, in the unlikely event that said terrorist ever conceives the notion that a yokel like me in the rural Arizona countryside is worth attacking. But a MIRVed SS-18 cold-launched out of a silo in some grim Soviet ICBM complex? Nothing I can do about that but wait for the end.

Calm Down

The other day I mentioned to someone that I never watch music videos. The reaction was something akin to horrified disgust, as if I had said I never changed my socks. The guy said "I can't believe what a dull, drab, lifeless life you must lead without music!"

I wonder what part of the American educational system failed him that he can't fathom the distinction between watching and listening. One you do with your eyes. The other you do with your ears. And it's true, I almost never watch videos. But I often listen to music. Confused? You shouldn't be.

But I guess we've become so used to the idea of watching things that we don't do anything else. The other day I saw a commercial for some tablet computer. The commercial briefly showed some kind of text, as though to highlight the fact that the tablet could be used as an e-reader, but then the disembodied hand came in, dashed away the text, and replaced it with a video of some guy surfing. Yeah, we can't be bothered with words, get that intellectual crap out of here, there are videos to be watched! We have media to consume!

I try not to have a lot of pet peeves, because I try not to be too peevish in general. But there is one thing about modern life that makes me clench my teeth so hard I think I'm going to break all my teeth. It's being dragged into someone's cubicle at work to watch a YouTube video. There's something about having to stand behind someone and watch a video over their shoulder that drives me right to the brink of physical violence. It doesn't even matter what the video is. It could be something really fun, like Scarlett Johansson in a leather bikini explaining the shock wave interactions in the exhaust nozzle of a Rocketdyne F-1 rocket engine, and it would still gall me. Send me the link and I'll look at it later, but please, I beg you, don't drag me into your cubicle and make me watch a Sesame Street video. Ever.

I don't trust computers that don't have keyboards. But I guess that explains a lot about me, me and my stodgy old-fashioned refusal to watch videos and my insistence that tweeting something like "i 8 2 much sicky sick" isn't writing. I don't tweet anything, actually. Writing this blog is about as self-important as I can get. I don't really think anyone cares about what I write about here, and I can imagine even less that anyone would read tweets from me like "I saw a bird" or "Is it lunch yet?" (Considering that apologizing for inappropriate tweets now seems to take up about 40% of the average celebrity's time, is tweeting anything at all a good idea? Though when I was going through chemo, I did seriously consider - for about five minutes - the idea of tweeting "I'm throwing up" every time I did, just so everyone could understand what it's like to throw up every half-hour or so.)

But it isn't a case of me making a stand for artistic integrity. I just happen to think that most of the videos I've ever really watched were kind of dumb. The chief exception to that being Dethklok videos, and they're parodies anyway. Death metal videos are especially obnoxious. I don't mind the ones that just show the band windmilling their hair - watching that holds a kind of sick fascination for me. But my idea of fun isn't watching some scrawny, heavily be-tattooed yokel who couldn't defeat a Subway six-inch tuna on white in a grudge match grimace for the camera. That's just stupid. Almost as stupid as the "hellish image" videos, where we're supposed to be jolted out of our smug bourgeois sensibilities by flying skulls and whatnot.

Just play the music, chief, and spare me your edgy video.