Political Self Gratification (2)

MAOTE: We're doing this again? Jesus. Jimmy Rabbit never interviewed himself this much.

DN: I have a great many things to say about politics at the moment, like every other blogger on the Internet, and this particular format will let me ramble about nearly all of it to my hearts content. So deal with it.

MAOTE: Yes sir. Dealing, sir. Okay. You have a great many things to say about politics. Hit me.

DN: Okay. First... yes, I'm getting as stressed and pissy as anyone else about how long this goddam Democratic primary is taking to resolve.

MAOTE: But, you have a 'but'.

DN: Of course I have a 'but'. But, I think maybe it could be useful if more people remembered that this is exactly what many of us demanded, back at the start of primary season.

MAOTE: Wait. What? 'Many of us demanded' a protracted primary between two truculent showboats that may well end up destroying the eventual victor's chances of actual election, and that is certainly going to at least substantially weaken that electibility?

DN: Well, I grant you, that's not how we put it. What we were all whining and bitching and screaming and kicking our feet about was the primary scheduling system that made most of our votes pointless and redundant. What we wanted was a primary where our votes would actually count. Well, we got one. Usually, the nominees for both parties are decided by Super Tuesday at the latest, and everyone who lives in a state that holds primaries afterwards has more influence over the winner of AMERICAN IDOL than they do over who will be running for President. This primary season, that's all changed. We wanted a primary where our votes would count, this season, our votes will count.

MAOTE: Okay, but... we didn't want this. We just wanted every state to have its primaries on the same day, say, in March, so everyone's vote would count.

DN: Many of us wanted that, but I distinctly remember several of the wonkier poli-bloggers gushing about how cool it would be if things remained undecided up to the convention, how that hadn't happened in a long time and it would really shake things up in a healthy way for the whole political apparatus in America.

MAOTE: Okay, well, those guys were assholes.

DN: Big time. Still, it's important to keep in mind, as we rant and rave that Clinton or Obama should drop out and stop hurting the Democrats' chances to take the White House... we wanted this. We begged for it. We yearned for a primary season where our votes, every single one of them, would be important to the outcome. And here we are.

MAOTE: Be careful what you wish for.

DN: Yes infuckingdeed. To underscore this we need do nothing more than look at the arguments currently being made by Clinton's camp against premature declaration of loyalties by the superdelegates. Their premiere point is that there are millions of Democratic votes still uncounted, and to effectively end the primary season here by locking down the superdelegate votes would be to disenfranchise all those poor voters. Of course, (a) those primaries will still be held and people will still get to vote, it's just that, like nearly every other election year, their votes will effectively be meaningless, and (b) if Clinton were leading the delegate count and confident the superdelegates were going to go her way, she'd be leading the 'shut this primary down now' pack her damn self. Nonetheless, it's the very fact that so many people screamed so long and so hard for a primary season where their votes would actually make a difference that is empowering Clinton now. She's spinning this so that by not dropping out, she's a champion of the people who wants ALL the votes counted, instead of a petulant, entitled brat throwing the world's biggest and potentially most destructive hissy fit because she has actually lost a tough, well contested primary instead of sailing smoothly and without serious opposition through what she feels should have been an anointment to power.

MAOTE: Okay. So while we're bitching about the extended primary season this year, and wishing to God that one or the other of the candidates would just stand down and concede it to the other one, we should remember that this is the kind of primary we thought we wanted, back before we actually had it.

DN: Yeah. And it's interesting to consider parallels to the 2000 Presidential election too. I remember feeling exactly this way back then, during the endless weeks after election day when we still had no clearly announced winner. "Dammit, somebody needs to man up and concede... as long as it's Bush".

MAOTE: Heh. Yeah, I remember that feeling. So, we need to remember, when we're bitching about it, this is what we wanted.

DN: And that's not all. Yeah, it's frustrating having this thing drag on for so long, but consider this... as a general rule, Presidential candidates run to the extremes of their political spectrum in order to get their party's nomination, and as soon as they have it, they move immediately to the center. The classic thinking is, okay, I have the Republican or Democratic nomination, so all the hardcore members of that party are going to vote for me. Now I need to pick up the moderates and the undecideds, so I need to run to the center. And if you look at both Obama and Clinton, both of them were very clearly positioning themselves to sprint back to the center the instant they locked down the nomination. McCain was, too... hell, so was Huckabee. Romney campaigned from much closer to the center than any of them.

MAOTE: So, you're saying that the long, drawn out primary is good because it's kept both Obama and Clinton over on the left.

DN: I wouldn't use the word 'good'. I'm pointing out that this dark cloud has a silver lining, and that if the candidate of your preference had locked down the Democratic nomination two months ago, and you're any kind of real liberal or progressive, you'd be pulling your hair out right now and screaming bloody murder about how suddenly Clinton/Obama has turned into a raving Republican. And they wouldn't have, but, well, they'd be courting the center very aggressively, taking for granted that the left wing of the Democratic party may grumble and bitch, but, in the end, they'll dutifully roll out and vote for the Democratic nominee. The drawn out primary has prevented that, although I will say that Clinton is so clearly itching to run back towards the right that she's inching back there almost unconsciously, probably despite everything that everyone else in her campaign is telling her to do. She can't afford to run as a Republican right now, which is pretty much what she's doing... although, since her campaign is on life support and she's praying for a miracle anyway, I guess she might as well do what comes natural to her.

MAOTE: Okay. So, as you're an Obama man, I presume you come down on the 'Hilary should drop out of the race' side of the controversy...

DN: First, I'm not an Obama man, I'm a Nader man. Obama is very much the lesser of several evils.

MAOTE: You're not going to vote for Nader again...

DN: No, destroying the world once is plenty for one lifetime. But while I like Obama more than I like Clinton, especially given the way Clinton has behaved over the past six, seven weeks of campaigning, and I like both of them much, much better than I like John McCain, still, I think all of them are pretty much entirely bought and paid for by the Powers That Be. Obama may do some good things should he get into office... Clinton might, too... and McCain certainly won't... and unfortunately that's pragmatically what we have to base our decisions as voters on. Some good things, probably; some good things, maybe; or no good things and a great deal of shit. But neither Obama nor Clinton are going to do any of the good things that really NEED to be done.

MAOTE: Which are...?

DN: Well, many specific things, but in general they all come down to, seeing to the fair collection and distribution of wealth and resources. Which is, honestly, government's only real and valid purpose, anyway.

MAOTE: Can you be more specific...? Say you get elected President. What do you do?

DN: Begin immediate troop withdrawals from Iraq, as well as any place else where the native populace doesn't want our troops stationed. Appoint a lot of special prosecutors to investigate government corruption on every level. Declassify everything Bush and Cheney classified and start faxing documents to every media outlet in the world. Tell the IRS to start looking hard at American corporations doing business overseas, and especially at overseas accounts and transactions. Overhaul the Federal tax code so everyone can understand it without hiring an expert. Crack down hard on every single special interest that has spent a great deal of money lobbying the Federal government for special favors in the last 20 years. Design and implement a decent universal health care plan. Get some really good forensic accountants, give them special prosecutor powers, and have them start a comprehensive, utterly transparent audit of the Federal budget system.

MAOTE: Okay, you even try that last one and somebody will shoot you in the head.

DN: Probably somebody in the Secret Service who's actually on the NSA payroll, yes. But, still, it's something that has to be done. It won't be, probably not ever, but if we're ever going to have a chance at really cleaning up our government, we have to open the books. Not half assed, we have to do it for real.

MAOTE: Well... okay, I agree with you, but it ain't gonna happen, cap'n. What else would you do? Any specific program or policy proposals you like?

DN: I'd like to see the Federal government buy every house in America that has been on the market for six months or longer, and then give those houses away to combat veterans and/ or their surviving families. Kind of like EXTREME MAKEOVER: HOME EDITION on a massive scale. I'd like to issue an Executive Order requiring every elected and appointed official to submit to a polygraph test and answer questions written by their constituents, no more than twice a year.

MAOTE: Whew. They will shoot you many, many times. Okay, anything else?

DN: Yeah. No more political advertising on the public airwaves. Create another C-SPAN channel and give Congress access to something like a public access TV studio. They do all their campaigning for free there.

MAOTE: What about freedom of speech?

DN: Oh, bullshit. There is no freedom of speech on the public airwaves; we regulate content on every broadcast TV channel there is. If the government can tell private citizens what they can and cannot say or show in commercial advertisements and commercial programming, we can sure as hell regulate political speech. You want to scream 'freedom of speech' for paid political attack ads that are mostly horseshit anyway, that's fine, but you also need to let FOX put on AMERICA'S UP AND COMING PORN STARS, or let Budweiser advertise their beer with topless models. And if that's indecent, then what the hell is lying to the American people about who they should and shouldn't elect to positions of authority over them?

MAOTE: Um... okay. Anything else?


DN: I'd like to see Congress work a little longer and a little harder, too. And I'd like to appoint a citizens' board that reviews all government salaries, perks, and proposed pay raises... or, hell, lets just put that stuff up to a national referendum. In fact, I'd like to see a great many things taken away from Congress and the Executive Branch and put up to national referendums.

MAOTE: Like declaring war?

DN: No, declaring war should stay with Congress. However, maybe we could let the people en masse vote on when to end wars... say, if we've been in a state of active aggressive war for 12 months, then the people get to vote on whether we continue with it, or we get the hell out.

MAOTE: Hmm. Any other shit you want to stir up in the brief moments you'll be sitting in the Executive Office before the missiles hit?

DN: We need to get serious about anti-trust laws, especially as regards our print and broadcast media. Several huge media conglomerates need to be broken into tiny little pieces.

MAOTE: Yeah, okay. And anything else?

DN: I'd like a serious review of any kind of top secret technology the government may have that hasn't been released to the public. I sincerely doubt we actually have working fusion or functional anti-grav, but maybe we do and the economic Powers That Be are sitting on it because, as Westinghouse once said to Tesla, there's no place to put the meter. If we have the technology to solve our energy crisis, or to let people have safe flying cars, well, fine. You move ahead. Stalling progress because somebody's stock market portfolio is going to take a hit doesn't work for me.

MAOTE: Okay. You realize, pretty much ANY of those will get any President who pursues them a bullet in the brain.

DN: Yeah. By definition. But those are the things that need to be done, and which aren't going to be. Call that my 'bullet points' list.

Blue baiting

In yesterday's email, from my deeply conservative Uncle Rick:



From: [somebody or other]
Sent: Monday, April 14, 2008 12:46 AM
To: [a whole lot of people]

Subject: Subject: Subject: History Lesson! You Guys all know that [somebody I don't know but won't name here anyway] wants to be a history teacher. He has outlined his First Lesson to be given at his debut class at Columbia University.

Today's history lesson

For those that don't know much about history...... here is a condensed version.

Humans originally existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunters/gatherers. They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer and would go to the coast and live on fish and lobster in the winter.

The two most important events in all of history were:

1. The invention of beer, and

2. The invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer. (Thus most car people are conservative)

These were the foundation of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into two distinct subgroups:

1. Liberals

2. Conservatives.

Once beer was discovered, it required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can were invented yet, so while our early humans were sitting around waiting for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the brewery. That's how villages were formed.

Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to B-B-Q at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as the Conservative movement.

Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting learned to live off the Conservatives by showing up for the nightly B-B-Q's and doing the sewing, fetching, and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement.

Some of these Liberal men eventually evolved into women. The rest became known as girlie-men.

Some noteworthy Liberal achievements include the domestication of cats, the invention of group therapy, group hugs, and the concept of Democratic voting to decide how to divide the meat and beer that Conservatives provided.

Over the years Conservatives came to be symbolized by the largest, most powerful land animal on earth, the elephant. Liberals are and were always symbolized by the jackass.

Modern liberals like imported beer (with lime added), but most prefer white wine or imported bottled water. They eat raw fish but like their beef well done. Sushi, tofu, and French food are standard liberal fare. Another interesting evolutionary side note: Most of their women have higher testosterone levels than their men. Most social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists, dreamers in Hollywood and group therapists are Liberals. Liberals invented the designated hitter rule because it wasn't fair to make the pitcher also bat.

Conservatives drink domestic beer. They eat red meat and still provide for their women. Conservatives are big-game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers, firemen, medical doctors, police officers, corporate executives, athletes, Marines, and generally anyone who works productively. Conservatives who own companies hire other Conservatives who want to work for a living.

Liberals produce little or nothing. They like to govern the producers and decide what to do with the production. Liberals believe that Europeans are more enlightened than Americans. That is why most of the Liberals remained in Europe when Conservatives were coming to America. They crept in after the Wild West was tamed and created a business of trying to get more for nothing.

Here ends today's lesson in world history.......

It should be noted that a Liberal may have a momentary urge to angrily respond to the above before forwarding it.

A Conservative will simply laugh and be so convinced of the absolute truth of this history that it will be forwarded immediately to other true believers and to more liberals just to piss them off....

* * * *

I honestly can't think of anything to add here. Conservatives are a bunch of people who, since prehistory, have largely done nothing except kill shit, eat it, get drunk, and whine about what those goddam pansy liberals wear. Liberals, by default, have pretty much had to do everything else (including invent all the stuff the conservatives immediately adopt and enjoy, like fire-making technology, agriculture, fermentation, distillation, and barbecue sauce).

As a final note, though, I do wa -- wait wait wait hold ON a second here --

::sound of screeching breaks, boinging sound of eyepopping double take::

"Some of these Liberal men eventually evolved into women. The rest became known as girlie-men."

It... I... whoa. Did he just say women evolved out of liberals?

So... all women are liberals?

So... um... no women are conservatives?

Which means, no conservatives are women?

Fuck, I knew Ann Coulter was a man.

And I suspected Michelle Malkin of the same thing.

Birth of a Norton

Today is Mike Norton's birthday. He seems to have been swallowed whole by some nameless leviathan, but, still, you can go over to his blog and wish him a Happy Birthday if you've a mind to.

I'll do it here, although Superwife and I already sent him a present and a nice card, which I'm hoping he has received and at least somewhat enjoyed by now.

Happy Birthday, Mike.

Happy Tax Day to all the rest o' youse. SuperWife finished mine last week; I had nice big returns coming, until we figured in my Unemployment from last year, which did not have taxes deducted from it. That entirely wiped out everything I would have gotten back and ended up with me writing relatively small checks back to the government. Still, it could have been worse.

A week from today is me and SuperWife's first anniversary as a married couple. We have a family celebration planned which I will probably go into excruciating detail regarding once it's come and gone. Or maybe I'll have mercy on you. I guess it depends on my mood at the time.

Good night, internet.

KILLQUEST: the next reincarnation

For backstory on KILLQUEST, go here. It's one of my old blogs, which was stone knives and bearskins compared to this one, so there are no permalinks embedded, and you'll have to scroll down the page until you get to the entry titled KILLQUEST. (Nobody reading this is ever going to do this, but, hey, I put the link up, your unwillingness to click on it is entirely on you.)

As I mention there, the first KILLQUEST was created by Jeff Webb and I back in college, and ever since then, I have occasionally felt the urge to take the basic idea out and tinker with it again. Here's my latest concept for it:

There's a box, see. It's about, I don't know, seven inches square and three inches thick. It says KILLQUEST on it in big gaudy letters, and BASIC SET underneath that in somewhat smaller ones, and is decorated with graphics showing various different kinds of warriors and fighter types from throughout human history in combat with each other.

So you take the lid off the box and inside there are:

* 4 six sided dice

* 10 little plastic stands, 5 red, 5 blue, each of which has a number 1,2,3,4, or 5 on it. These stands are such that a normal playing card could be slid into the holder on top of them, and the playing card would then stand upright on a flat surface.

* 10 coin shaped markers, 5 red, 5 blue, each with corresponding numbers on them.

* 1 rules pamphlet

* 1 48" x 48" sheet of heavy paper, folded, with a different full color map/playing field printed on either side

* 2 decks of 85 cards each

The top 5 cards of each deck are blank except for numbers on each (1 through 5) and a question mark. 5 of these cards are printed in blue ink, 5 in red.

Underneath these cards are three other types of cards:

Character cards - There are 50 character cards. These feature on one side a picture of a generic fighter/combatant type. There are at least 100 of these different cards, combatant types include colorful character representatives from every era of human history: samurai, cavemen, pirates, ninjas, minutemen, gangsters from the Roaring 20s, Roman centurions, motorcycle stunt riders, baseball players, cowboys, Indians, banditos... anything and everything you might possibly conceive of from any point in human history that anyone might want to see fighting someone else.

On the other side of the card are listed statistics, like BARE HANDS ATTACK/DEFENSE, and any particular skills or ratings that combatant may have, like STEALTH: Roll 2d6; if a 5 or 6 is rolled on either die, this character cannot be seen by opponents unless they are in an adjacent square, or APTITUDE: This character may be equipped with a Tommygun for free.

Also listed will be the character's COST to play. The more useful a character is at game related functions, the more expensive that character would be. For example, the Spy would be Stealthy, but probably have poor ATTACK AND DEFENSE and no APTITUDES for equipment. The PRIVATE EYE would have some Stealth (probably not as good as the Spy) but would also have a better Attack and Defense and maybe would be able to be equipped with a .45 automatic for free. Because the PRIVATE EYE would be more versatile than the SPY, he would also cost more points to put on your team.

Equipment cards - On one side is a picture, on the other side is what the equipment does and what it costs. These would mostly be weapons, ranging from a KATANA for the samurai up through a TOMMYGUN for the Gangster. However, there could be other equipment as well, like a ROPE WITH GRAPPLING HOOK, or a MOTORCYCLE, or maybe even a JET PACK.

Happening cards - Things that change the way the game is played. These would be optional, and would have to be bought at the start with build points for your team, but could be played at any time during the game. These would be cards like SUDDEN DARKNESS, where suddenly all characters must make non-visual perception rolls before they can attack an opponent, or EVERYBODY WAS KUNG FU FIGHTING, in which no weapons can be employed, or NO WAY, JOSE cards, which would negate a card being played by an opponent.

So you buy the game and you agree with your buddy how many points you can each use to build a force and then you put your force together. You start with the question cards in the little coin shaped holders. You put the combatant cards face down next to the map, with one of the coin shaped markers on each of them so you know which question card represents which of your combatants. You start your question cards at the various spots on the map where combatants enter the arena. Each combatant will have a different move stat; each player takes turns moving one character at a time. When characters reach places on the map where they could see each other, you replace the question card with the corresponding combatant card, each player thus revealing one member of their force to their opponent. (Assuming, of course, that one of the combatants doesn't make a STEALTH roll, in which case, they would not be seen by the opponent, although the opponent would have to reveal the identity of the card the Stealthy enemy had seen.)

This is the latest version of KILLQUEST.

One more little twist -- while all you need is the basic set to play very enjoyable matches, you can, if you want, purchase booster packs containing randomly packed combatant, equipment, and happening cards... more interesting and effective cards than the simpler ones in the basic set. The characters would have proper names (instead of a generic Roaring 20s Gangster you might get Al Capone or Babyface Nelson) and better stats and more useful attributes; the equipment would be more varied and useful, the happenings more interesting and effective.

If this game proved popular, it could have any number of expansions. Robots. Monsters. Sword and Sorcery. Galactic Empires. Celebrities. Superheroes. Eventually, you could build teams consisting of a killer robot, a werewolf, a blaster packing starship pilot, Blackbeard the Pirate, and Paula Abdul.

Obviously, I couldn't create this version of the game myself; it's the sort of thing I'd need to sell to an actual gaming company to get a good working version of, or win a Powerball to capitalize myself. And I have no idea if anyone would really enjoy playing it. But I think it mostly captures the overall spirit of the original KILLQUEST.

Okay, I have to go to bed now.

Water, rust, and pyrites

So I finally plowed through ICE, IRON AND GOLD, an anthology of various short stories by best selling author and occasional blog commenter S.M. Stirling.

The scoop:

"Riding Shotgun To Armageddon" is 16 pages set in the offshoot Bronze Age of the "Islander" novels. If you've read the "Islander" novels, well, it won't hurt you to read this, but it adds nothing and you'll live just as long and die just as happy if you never trouble yourself over it, either. Nicely written and ultimately pointless, other than, I suppose, as a hook to sell the anthology.

"Three Walls - 32nd Campaign" is from one of those crappy David Drake edited anthologies about ancient military units kidnapped by aliens and taken off to fight on distant planets. I enjoyed reading the story, but I have a hard time believing aliens with this kind of advanced technology have much use for a timelost Roman legion.

"Cops and Robbers" is a type-by-the-numbers alternate timeline story. If it's the very first parallel timeline story you've ever read, you may find it charming. If, on the other hand, you've read H.Beam Piper's PARATIME and every other alternate world story Stirling himself has written, from the Draka novels through CONQUISTADOR and PESHAWAR LANCERS, this particular 8 pages is going to seem like pretty thin gruel... sort of Draka-lite, with an ending so cliche as to actually elicit a groan from me. That Stirling has to date been paid for this dopey thing twice, while I'm getting my stuff bounced by editors who probably don't even read it, makes me crazy.

"Roachstompers" - I enjoyed this one wholeheartedly, although, again, if you've read pretty much everything else Stirling has written (as I have) this is going to seem largely like a rerun of other, bigger, better stuff. This one seems more like a novel fragment Stirling gave up on rather than finished story, but it's fun to read.

"Constant Never" is okay. It reminded me a lot of something Poul Anderson might have co-plotted with Neil Gaiman, and I think Stirling was straining too hard to come up with some kind of unpredictable twist ending when he wrote this, but, still, it's a pretty cool little story.

"Taking Freedom" is yet another story I found to be very flavored by Gaiman. Still, it's a good read for all of that, even if it seemed obvious to me that the evil sorceress was being an idiot for the entire plot. She got what she deserved, certainly, but anyone stupid enough to cast that should have blown herself to bits decades before this story could ever take place.

"Lost Legion", "Ancestral Voices", and "The Sixth Sun" add up to a decent sized multigenerational Bolo novella. Unfortunately, only the first installment is really worth reading; after that, what charm and interest there is to the thing runs downhill fast. This isn't entirely Stirling's fault -- the basic formula for a Bolo story is "There's this Bolo, see. And there are these people who don't like the Bolo very much. But they get in a lot of trouble and the Bolo saves them. Then they like the Bolo fine. The End." Sometimes towards the last part of the arc you get to wedge in 'and the Bolo heroically sacrifices itself to save the people in trouble, so the people are sad'. Either way, what makes a Bolo story work well or not is elements like setting and characterization, which Stirling handles extremely well in the first story. However, by the time I was three pages into the second story my interest had ebbed almost entirely, and I honestly couldn't make myself do more than skim the third story, where all the original characters (except the Bolo itself) are dead and we're supposed to care about their idiot kids. (I did find the villain of the first story kind of interesting, though -- the guy was so straight out of a Peter O'Donnell story that I kept looking around for Modesty and Willie to skydive in from a Cessna Piper and kick his ass with a jury rigged blowgun or a crudely carved boomerang or something.)

"The Apotheosis of Martin Padway" rocks. It just fucking ROCKS. I don't know if I'd like it anywhere near as much if I weren't such a devoted L. Sprague DeCamp fan and if LEST DARKNESS FALL weren't one of my all time favorite SF novels, but I am and it is so it's pretty much a moot point to me. I suspect one could enjoy this story hugely (because it's really just that cool) even if one hadn't read LEST DARKNESS FALL, but who'd be crazy enough to want to?

"Compadres" is okay. Honestly, it didn't do much for me, but I don't have anything against it, either. It's one of those strange alternate timeline explorations that you have to be an insanely devoted history buff to really appreciate, and, well, I'm not.

"The Charge of Lee's Brigade" is yet another alternate timeline story, and it's interesting, but, again, as I'm not an insanely devoted history buff, I can't say much more for or against it than that.

"Something For Yew" annoyed me, not just because of the crappy pun in the title, but also because it seems to be little more than a teaser/commercial for Emberverse novels I haven't had a chance to read yet.

In summation -- this anthology is priced at around $27, which leaves me with very mixed feelings. On the one hand, I love S.M. Stirling's work and I'm an anal, obsessive collector and completist so I'm very pleased to have this as my very own, especially as it was a gift from Tony Collett (thanks, Tony!) so I didn't pay a damn thing for it. On the other hand, if I'd bought it myself and brought it home, I might think that $27 was a pretty steep price to pay for one amazingly cool story in amidst a lot of predictable filler. But, on the gripping hand, as it were, it WAS a very goddam cool story and maybe it was worth $27. I don't know. Ultimately, reading this helped me kill a lot of break time on my new job when otherwise I would have been enormously bored, and I didn't pay anything for it, so I shouldn't complain. I am not sure I can recommend it to anyone who is going to pay anything like full price for it, though.

Don't let that stop you from buying Stirling's novels, though. I'm behind two right now (THE SUNRISE LANDS and IN THE COURTS OF THE CRIMSON KINGS, assuming both came out on schedule) but now that I'm working again, I'll snatch them up as soon as may be. Stirling's novels occasionally don't measure up to his very best work (SNOWBROTHER and CONQUISTADOR, for example, were't as top notchas, say, THE CAGE or ISLAND IN THE SEA OF THE TIME or PESHAWAR LANCERS, and DRAKON and the TERMINATOR novels were apparently written mostly while Stirling was badly hung over for purposes of making timely house payments) but the stuff that he himself obviously cares about is all very much worth reading. (Mental note: see about picking up a copy of SHADOW'S DAUGHTER by Shirley Meier sometime soon, too.)

The dead yet live!

Did you know George Romero had done a new zombie film? No, not LAND OF THE DEAD, I mean, a new zombie film, effectively rebooting the entire 'zombie apocalypse' franchise he originally began with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, lo these many decades ago?

I was vaguely aware that something was supposed to be in the pipeline, but, honestly, I paid little attention. I enjoyed LAND OF THE DEAD in a sort of absent minded way, and think it was a decent coda to Romero's original zombie arc, while feeling that the underlying theme -- living humanity has reached an evolutionary dead end, and now, the dead have inherited the Earth -- was actually pretty fucking stupid. What with that, and the very deeply mixed feelings I have for Zack Snyder's DAWN OF THE DEAD remake, well, I'd felt I was pretty much DEADed out.

But yesterday SuperWife got an email from our local college which stated that they were going to be showing the new George Romeo movie DIARY OF THE DEAD in an exclusive local engagement this weekend, starting last night. Did I want to check it out? Why yes... yes I did. So off we went to campus, where I happily shelled out the princely sum of $6 for two tickets, two popcorns, and two sodas, and we sat and thrilled to the latest magnum opus by the master of zombie horror himself.

WARNING: If you're the sort of person who shrieks and weeps and cries and stomps your widdle foot when reading articles about movies or TV show episodes or books or comics that you haven't watched or read or otherwise audited yet, and those articles give away details of said object's presentation that you feel should not have been given away to you without your express permission because, you know, nothing in the world is allowed to exist that you might in any way find even remotely objectionable on even a sub-microscopic level, well, there may be some of that stuff you whine and cry and scream and wave your tiny fists in the air over called 'spoilers' in this article. You have been so advised.

Meant to be a 'reboot' of the franchise, DIARY updates the beginning of the end from occurring in the late 60s to the early 21st Century, showing how the multiplicity of video recorders in the hands of the public leads to a global saturation of video recorded zombie carnage, uploaded to websites like YouTube and FaceBook for the entire world to see the truth of what is actually occurring as the recently dead return to life -- or, at least, feral ambulation -- and prey on the flesh of the living.

Whereas Romero's previous zombie epics could only feature 'mainstream' media coverage of the ongoing chaos due to the technological limitations of the late 20th Century, in DIARY, we see amateur videos from all over the world, downloaded and cut into the central narrative being shot as it unfolds by a student filmmaker who was out in the woods with some friends making a horror movie for film class on the night everything went to hell.

Unlike Romero's previous zombie stories, this one does not show a random mob of strangers coming together in a fortified building, where, trapped by insatiable hordes of walking dead outside, they gradually tear themselves to pieces from within. DIARY is a road movie, featuring a group of students trying to get back to their respective homes in a camper van, and the various ordeals each has to survive (or, you know, not so much) on their journey through a world suddenly overwhelmed by the relentless onslaught of flesh devouring zombies.

There is no omniscient third person camera in this film, and as a consequence, we are not allowed to watch it from a comfortable distance. Every frame of this movie is shot by one of the characters in it, or by security cameras in various buildings they enter on their journey. The perspective is entirely internal and harrowingly personal, and if the protagonists of the film often seem to be acting irrationally, well, I think it's difficult for members of an audience to really understand just how shocking and bewildering it would be to suddenly find oneself immersed in horrific events of this scale and nature. Certainly I'd like to think that I'd do things more sensibly (posting lookouts on top of the van whenever we're stopped for any reason, avoiding specific locations that are almost certain to be infested with newly reanimated corpses like hospitals, searching each new building carefully for lurking dead before relaxing behind locked, heavily reinforced doors, etc) but I'm sure that for the bulk of the several days the film covers, most if not all of the cast are deep in shock, with their thought processes numbed into near non-existence.

One of the interesting points about films like this (at least, to me) is that while they take place in the 'real world', these are worlds where, obviously, certain pervasive and influential pop culture artifacts have never existed. In a SPIDER-MAN movie, for example, there have never been any Spider-Man comics, TV shows, or movies. That's usually not a particularly important difference, but in a movie about a zombie apocalypse that occurs in the year 2006, the absence of people (especially film students) who are knowledgeable about various details of the attendant mythology (to kill a zombie you have to shoot it in the head, anyone bitten by a zombie will die within hours and then come back as a zombie almost immediately) is striking. Nobody in this movie, apparently, has seen any George Romero zombie movies, or RESIDENT EVIL, or any of the multiplicity of zombie offshoots. Everybody has to learn the mythology from scratch.

More striking to me is that nobody in any zombie movie I've ever seen ever mentions what must be a frankly horrendous stench accompanying the presence of the living dead. Leaving aside specific things like how awful it should smell when an eviscerated corpse sits up and all its intestines spill out on the floor (something that seems to happen at least once in every zombie movie since the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD), nonetheless, Romero is at pains to show that his zombies continue to rot even after being reanimated. The stink from even one zombie should be (as one of my one time drill sergeants would put it) "enough to knock a buzzard off a shit wagon"; the dense cloud of choking reek emanating from a horde of the shambling dead should be a miasma from hell. Yet apparently it's not so; zombies sneak up on the unwary constantly in these movies, and nobody ever comments on how bad they smell.

Regardless of all this, I enjoyed DIARY OF THE DEAD enormously and strongly recommend it to any true zombie fans that may be reading this -- or just to anyone who enjoys seeing deaf Amish farmers named Samuel kill zombies with a deftly lobbed stick of dynamite and a skillfully wielded scythe.

And any time a zombie clown shows up at a kids' birthday party, you just know whacky, hilarious hijinx are going to ensue.

Denied

Dear D.A.,

Thanks for showing us your story "Power 2 the Peepz." It's jam-packed with ideas and I liked your use of language, but in the end I found the format a bit off-putting--the screenplay-like nature made the read a bit too disjointed for me. I'm going to pass on this one, then, but good luck to you with it, and I look forward to seeing more from you.

Best,
[editor's name]
Fiction Editor, Futurismic

For what it's worth (very little -- when a writer finds him or herself explaining their work to an audience who didn't 'get' it, that writer has already failed to do their job entirely), POWER 2 THE PEEPZ was meant to be a cyberpunk epistolary -- which is to say, a story told through messages and communications. Classic epistolary stories are generally told through various pieces of correspondence, and/or excerpts from journals or diaries. I wanted to take that classic literary conceit and update it for the SF, and specifically the cyberpunk, genre.

Along with that, I was very influenced while writing the story by the
recent film THE PRESTIGE. I greatly enjoyed THE PRESTIGE's decidedly
non-linear presentation of the narrative, where each bit of 'business'
presented in the film gave the attentive viewer just enough
information to place the next, disjointed, scene in some kind of
temporal context. That's what I was trying to do with P2TP -- I
essentially wrote each 'piece' of the narrative in a separate file,
then mixed and matched them almost like pieces of a puzzle until I got
what I thought was a result that worked.

The problem with all of that is that when you're trying to tell a cyberpunk epistolary tale in text, you end up having to describe sights and sounds with, well, text. A cyberpunk epistolary tale really SHOULD be presented in a VA medium, and, most likely, allowing a film like THE PRESTIGE to influence a textual narrative isn't the best idea, either. One can certainly present non-linear narratives in text -- Robert Anton Wilson is just one name that leaps to mind as being a master of that sort of thing -- but it may well be one of the understatements of the age for me to admit I am no Robert Anton Wilson.

I'm up in the air as to ASTONISHING ADVENTURES #3. I've been told my Doc Nebula story has been accepted, more than once, but it's longer than they usually like to accept, and they're now trying to pay for stories on a tight budget, so I'm thinking, if something gets the axe, it's going to be that story.

Ah well. At least I currently have a day job not to give up.

When bad things happen to good artists

Both Jim Mooney and Dave Stevens have died recently. I enjoyed the artwork of both men enormously and am saddened at the thought that neither will ever produce any more original work. Jim Mooney is especially meaningful to me for his work on Supergirl and Man-Thing (now there's an odd team), while Dave Steven will always be Mr. Rocketeer to me... although he did some wonderful covers for Mark Evanier and Dan Spiegel's late, great, and much missed CROSSFIRE title, as well.

I have little more to say than this, although I will note I learned of both sad events through Mark Evanier's blog, which is always worth reading.

Two days in the Highlands

Busy weekend.

After a pretty grueling week in training downtown, I was looking to unwind and chillax a bit this weekend. Unfortunately, the weekend was stacked pretty high with scheduled chores, mostly, shopping for some boring, mundane necessary household items (like a pair of new shoes for me) that we'd been putting off and letting amass into a sizeable list for months.

Pleasantly, a couple of friends from out of town, the Colletts, rolled in for a few hours on Saturday, giving us all a much needed break from the usual day to day living stress. We played some Wii Bowling (where we all discovered that Tony has a wild and wicked right hook, and I somehow managed to hold on to my always tentative Pro status despite bowling two spectacularly mediocre games) and some Apples to Apples on either side of a wonderful dinner created by SuperWife (her own uniquely delicious Salisbury steaks, mashed potatoes, and peas), before Tony and his charming wife Kathy were off again to meet yet another group of their friends elsewhere in River City.

Prior to that, I'd been able to help my oldest stepdaughter resolve a banking snafu she'd gotten pulled into, which felt good.

Sunday, we did pretty much all the shopping we'd been putting off for some time, which was grueling but satisfying to get done. I'm sporting new shoes which nearly fit, and look much better than my previous pair. Alas and alack, the DVD player in the living room has given up the ghost exactly the same way as its predecessor did almost a year ago, making me think that the manufacturers deliberately build these cheap little machines with a self destruct timer inside them. So we'll be back out getting a new DVD player soon, which makes me sad.

Sorry for the boring blog entry, but, well, that's life in the big city sometimes.

The word for world is 'thief'

I was always pretty much a hard science fiction fan -- I liked Laumer, I liked Heinlein, I liked Niven, I liked Morrissey, I liked Gunn. I had the occasional childhood excursion into the fluffy bunny rabbit land of sword and sorcery fantasy stuff -- LOTR, of course, and a Conan story or two (I had read probably forty separate issues of Marvel's CONAN THE BARBARIAN comic book by that time, but other than the John Buscema artwork, I never saw much to like in that particular series) and some of Andre Norton's Witch World stuff (especially YEAR OF THE UNICORN, a book I read and reread almost literally to tatters in my teens) but even there, it's probably worth pointing out that what led me to Norton's more swordy/spelly stuff was her classic post-Apocalypse teen soaper STAR MAN'S SON (known as DAYBREAK 2024 in the edition I first read), which is very nearly as hard as hard science fiction gets. Yeah, I liked the space ships, the ray guns, the suspended animation tanks, the faster than light drives, the bug eyed aliens, the Earth-born drifter named Dumarest, wandering deeper and deeper into the furthest reaches of the galaxy on a perpetual quest for the rundown, all but forgotten planet of his birth, which every other human dwelling within the Far Stars believed was merely a myth.

Fantasy... feh. Fantasy was soft stuff; fantasy was for babies. I may well have felt that way, despite enjoying the Tolkien I'd read and being a big fan of Gillan & Co, because sometime in my senior year of high school Heather Dougan recommended THE SWORD OF SHANNARA by Terry Brooks to me, and I tried it, and it was to fantasy novels as SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE is to film, which is to say, I am still amazed I managed to read as much of it as I did without clawing my own eyes out with a hay rake. So perhaps that experience put me off sword and sorcery, I don't know.(It should certainly have put me off Heather Dougan had I had a functional cerebrum, but, well, when you're 17 years old and terminally besotted, there isn't much that 3 pounds of pulsating gray protein pudding can do about it, no matter how crappy the object of your unrequited passion's taste in literature may be.)

So fantasy was a big 'nuh uh' for me when I headed off to college. However, somewhere in the mid 80s everyone in my college clique had graduated and I had no one to talk about superhero comics with any more, or play superhero RPGs with, either, and one of the guys I was sharing a house with played in about four separate fantasy roleplaying campaigns, you know, with the elves and the orcs and the swords and the sorcery and the clerics and the hobbits and the whatever the hell all else they all had back then, and he invited me along to a session, and I was bored, so off I went. A couple of the campaigns he played in were mediocre at best, but one was tremendous and excellent and awesome, so I started playing in that one. And, for really the first time, I started hanging around with a subset of geeks who were more into fantasy than hard SF (and who mostly didn't read comic books at all, which was a very new experience for me, as prior to that everybody I'd interacted with had been a pretty hardcore comics fan).

Many of my new acquaintances were bibliophiles like I, except they were older and had much, much larger personal libraries than I did. Within that group books tended to get loaned out and traded around a lot. As I wasn't particularly experienced with the sword and sorcery subgenre of fantasy fiction, I got hit with a lot of "Oh, you HAVE to read this book" recommendations, and ended up listening to more than a few of them. So it was that I began to make my way through the 'Must Have' list for young fantasy fan/book collectors circa 1984 or so... the books that you HAD to own, or, at least, had to have read, in order to have any kind of meaningful conversation with anyone else you might be gaming with at that time and in that place.

Stuff on this list would include Barbara Hambly's TIME OF THE DARK trilogy, Saberhagen's seemingly endless BOOK(s) OF SWORDS series, Steve Brust's first Taltos book JHEREG, Zelazney's first AMBER sequence along with LORD OF LIGHT, S.M. Stirling's SNOWBROTHER, L. Sprague deCamp's Krishna stuff, and nearly anything by Piers Anthony. I can't honestly say this period was anything like a heyday for sword and sorcery, since much of what was out back then was crap of the purest ray serene (this would include nearly all the Piers Anthony rubbish, and, of course, Terry Brooks was excreting another five pound volume of human waste product every year or so back then) and some of the best high fantasy had yet to be written in the mid 80s (most of Barbara Hambly's output, all of Lois McMaster Bujold's, and George R.R. Martin's fabulous SONG OF ICE AND FIRE was none of them even a twinkle in a fanboy's eye back then).

And you could add one more title to that theoretical Fantasy Geek of the mid 80s Must Read list -- the first THIEVES' WORLD anthology by Robert Asprin.

THIEVES' WORLD may mean nothing to you, or, if you've heard of it at all, it may make you roll your eyes wearily as you remember the endless sequels, offshoots, and merchandise with a THIEVES WORLD logo that rolled out in geek shops across America from the late 80s through the early 90s. And it can't be denied; once it became obvious that there was some serious interest in the franchise, Robert Asprin and all his various hangers on rode that horse right into the ground. Collections, comic books, roleplaying games, official THIEVES' WORLD gaming dice, and I don't know what the hell all else hit geek stores like some kind of relentless and unending plague over about a five year period, and it all very quickly became a monotonous, nearly nauseating blur to me.

However, the first THIEVES' WORLD volume came out in 1979, and up through the mid 1980s you could not be a fantasy gaming geek if you did not own a copy... or, at the very least, if you could not converse meaningfully as regards the evil of One Thumb, the heroism of Jamie the Red, the innate rogueish charm of Shadowspawn, well, you were a mere hanger on, a trifler and a dabbler, and no one that anyone of consequence could possibly take seriously.

I never owned a copy of THIEVES' WORLD but I shared a house with a guy named Mike Schechter for several years and he had one and I read his several times during that period. I enjoyed most of the stories, although I should probably note at least in passing that I apparently didn't dig them so much that I ever bothered to read any of the sequels or spin offs. The first book did it for me just fine.

A few months ago, SuperWife and I were in a secondhand bookstore looking for Christmas presents, and I found a rather beat up copy of THIEVES' WORLD. I remembered enjoying it twenty years ago, and it was priced to move well south of a buck, so I added it to the stack I was amassing in the crook of my left arm (which, with that addition, at that point came up just about to my nose). I was half afraid that like many of my childhood or early adulthood favorites, this one wasn't going to hold up well to a sudden reappraisal twenty years later (yeah, I'm talking to you, Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath -- there is no hell deep, dark, or hot enough for you and those crappy crappy STAR TREK "Phoenix" Black Omni 'novels')... but, as it turns out, I was wrong. THIEVES' WORLD still, for the most part at least, reads just fine... which wouldn't have surprised me at all, if I'd been able to remember the actual authors I'd find within (or troubled to look at the TOC, as far as that goes).

The book opens with a few introductory pages which I presume are by editor and contributor Asprin, outlining the history of the anthology's setting city, Sanctuary, as well as recapping the current political situation there. Then we move right into John Brunner's "Sentences of Death", a nifty little tale that introduces us to several of Sanctuary's most colorful citizenry, especially that inadvertent shapeshifter and oft accursed wizard Enas Yorl.

From Brunner's deftly woven tale we hie over a couple of avenues so Lynn Abbey can show us a little bit about the lives of Dubro the smith and Illyra the fortune teller, in a story impelled by the charmingly prosaic motivation of those two character's sudden need to secure a replacement for Dubro's broken iron anvil. And while I normally like little of Poul Anderson's output, his story 'The Gate of Flying Knives' is pretty cool, as is his character, the minstrel Cappan Varra.

Following that, Andrew Offutt acquaints us with the quirkily interesting gutter thief Shadowspawn, after which Robert Asprin unfortunately lowers the entire tone of the enterprise with a fairly tedious and not particularly well plotted tale called "The Price of Doing Business". (Apparently, if you want to read a THIEVES' WORLD anthology, the 'price of doing business' is you have to wade through what results when Asprin decides to pay himself as a contributor in addition to the paycheck he's pocketing as editor. Asprin's character Jubal, an ex-gladiator turned ruthless crime boss, is without a doubt the most boring creation in the entire book, as is the story surrounding him. Asprin also has no compunctions about throwing similar charity to his girlfriend of the time, the previously unpublished Lynn Abbey, but as I've already noted, Ms. Abbey's story was much more than merely readable, which is about the best one could say for Asprin's contribution.)

After Asprin finally stops fucking around, the pace picks up again (and fucking how) as we swing into "Blood Brothers", Joe Haldeman's tale of murder, drug running, rape, wizardly intrigue and overall depravity, featuring the relentlessly vicious One Thumb, whose deservedly gruesome end makes for a far more satisfyingly just fictional resolution than S.M. Stirling ever gave us in any Draka novel.

Next up it's Christine DeWees, and if you've never heard of Christine DeWees don't feel bad. I'm fairly sure she's never been published anywhere but in a THIEVES' WORLD anthology, and she is less an accomplished author than she is a walking talking breathing typing avatar of the truism regarding who you know being far more important than what. Asprin advises in his essay on how the book came into existence that with a deadline looming and several stories from big name contributors having been withdrawn or postponed, he turned to some old lady with a motorcycle he knew who liked to write amateur fantasy. She cranked out a story centering around someone else's character, and while it's not a bad story, again, all I can say is, it pays to cultivate editors, because based on my own experiences, neither this thing of DeWees nor the story Asprin himself wrote would have ever sold to any other professional editor anywhere.

Last up we have Marion Zimmer Bradley telling us the story of Lythande the Star-Browed, and if you can't figure out three paragraphs in from the way Bradley carefully positions her pronouns exactly what Lythande's big secret is, you're just not paying close enough attention. Although, having said that, I think the ending hit me as much more of a surprise the first time I read the story, some twenty five years ago.

So that's THIEVES' WORLD, and now that I really think of it, I believe I must have read at least one more volume in the series, because I can vaguely recall some sort of Andrew Offutt story about a weird cult that worshipped a god of spiders, and I'm pretty sure that was a Thieves' World story, and it sure isn't in this volume.

Maybe I'll keep an eye out for that one, too.

Gunshot wounds

So here's the situation: I'm out driving around River City when I see a young man loitering on a street corner. Another young man approaches him and what is obviously an illegal transaction involving the sale of controlled and/or prohibited substances takes place. I call the local police dispatcher and ask for a unit to be sent out to the scene, then get out of my car, draw my legally permitted side arm, and order the drug dealer to put his hands up. Instead, he turns and begins to flee. I warn him to stop or I'll shoot. He continues to beat feet. I shoot him in the back. He dies.

How do we feel about that?

Okay, now, suppose I'm a trained police officer with a badge, in uniform, in my patrol car, on my designated beat, when all this jumps off. Does that change how we feel about it?

If it does, then... why? How is the situation changed if I'm wearing a uniform and have a badge?

Would the situation change again if I was still a cop but out of uniform? If I was off duty? If I was a trained police officer from the city of Chicago, out of my jurisdiction, visiting my sick aunt in Louisville, when I decide to throw down on a drug dealer in my aunt's neighborhood?

And, again, if it does... why?

What is it that, in the eyes of some people, makes it okay for me to kill someone under a specific set of circumstances if I am in uniform under the color of authority, and that makes it reprehensible if I am a private citizen?

The situation hasn't changed. I'm still an adult individual citizen pointing a weapon at another citizen whom I have directly witnessed committing a crime. I have still ordered that other citizen to surrender, and he has still refused to obey my order, and turned to flee. I have warned him that if he does not surrender I will shoot him. And then, when he does not surrender, I still shot him, and he still died.

I shot him. He was in the act of running away from me. He was not threatening me or anyone else. I rolled up on him, pointed a gun at him, ordered him to hold still, and when he refused, and began running away from the guy pointing a gun at him, I shot him, and I killed him.

This is shocking and reprehensible if I am just a private citizen concerned about young men dealing drugs on street corners in my neighborhood, but it is perfectly acceptable, if somewhat regrettable, if I have a badge and a uniform and a police union card in my wallet.

Is it because as a private citizen I have no right to exert any sort of authority over another private citizen, even one I have seen committing a crime? While, on the other hand, as a police officer I have not only the right but the actual duty to enforce the law whenever I see it being violated?

Well, that sounds good. But if that's the case, shouldn't I have tried to arrest the drug dealer's customer along with the drug dealer? Shouldn't I be running in every prostitute I see? Cops routinely choose not to do this; if cops arrested every drug buyer or every hooker they encountered on their daily patrols, the courts would be paralyzed and overwhelmed by the resultant glut of perpetrators.

If cops are allowed... if, in fact, cops are actively encouraged... to turn a blind eye to certain illegal acts, if they are allowed, or even required, to use their judgement in such matters as who they will arrest and who they will not arrest, how much more important is it for us to expect an armed officer of the law to apply that same level of judgement and discrimination to decisions involving who they will shoot, and under what circumstances they will shoot them?

If a cop sees a guy dealing drugs on a street corner, yes, he's seen a crime being committed, and yes, there's a legitimate public service involved in bringing the perpetrator of that crime to justice. But the cop has not witnessed a violent crime. The cop is not in any danger to life or limb, nor is anyone else around him in any reasonable danger from a drug dealer who is running away up the street. Under those circumstances, I am not convinced it is justifiable for a police officer to use lethal force. No overt act of violence. No credible threat to himself or others. Just a drug dealer disobeying an order to surrender, but, geez, if somebody pointed a gun at you, wouldn't you be tempted to run away from them?

There is an argument that can be made that the police officer in question has a right, if not a duty, to enforce not only his own authority, but the authority of all police everywhere. That if he chooses not to shoot, or, worse, if he shoots and some judge rules that he shouldn't have, that in this circumstance he was not justified in taking potentially lethal action, then people, and especially criminals, will cease to respect the police. That if people know they can run away from armed police officers with impunity, armed police officers will have a very difficult time arresting perpetrators.

I understand that argument, and I even respect it to an extent.

I'm simply not certain, or convinced, that the weight of that argument outweighs the sanctity of human life.

I'm not at all sure we should have different rules for different people, as regards the act of taking a human life.

This is an old, old debate. I remember twenty years ago, I was outraged when somebody explained to me that in New York State, if I walked in on a burglar carrying my TV set out my window, I wasn't allowed to shoot him. Absent a threat to my safety or wellbeing, I was considered to have no right to use lethal force on a person who had broken into my home and was in the process of stealing my private property. This struck me as insane, and yet, today I find myself arguing for this essential principle -- after all, isn't the life of a human being, even one in the process of committing a crime, worth more than a TV set or a busted lock?

There's a principle involved here, and it's a slippery, shady one. That principle is, if you go out and commit a crime, especially a violent crime, you have placed yourself outside the normal considerations of society. You no longer have a right to life and liberty and the safety of your own person. By breaking into someone's house, by committing an assault, by stealing, by threatening with violence, by performing an unacceptably antisocial act, you have placed yourself in a position whereby other, more law-abiding members of society may disregard considerations of your safety and employ whatever force is necessary to defend themselves against your depredations and/or make themselves whole from whatever damages you may have inflicted on them.

This sounds great when one takes the point of view of the victim of a violent crime.

And yet... in the particular situation I've outlined above, the criminal in question has not committed a violent crime, He poses no immediate credible threat to the police officer pointing a gun at him, or anyone else. He didn't break in to anyone's house and he isn't running off with anyone's property. All he is doing is running away from an armed human being who is pointing a gun at him.

How is it justifiable to shoot him in the back? How is it acceptable that he's dead? Because a man pointed a gun at him and ordered him to hold still, and he refused?

Because the man with a gun had a badge, too?

I guess I can see that. I guess if you're in for a penny, you're in for a pound, and if you believe that a criminal running away from one kind of crime scene can be gunned down and killed by an armed authority, then pretty much any criminal has to expect the same.

Emotionally, though, it just sits wrong with me, that somebody can be killed simply for disobeying a man with a gun, and that's legal, and it's acceptable, and we're supposed to be okay with it, if the guy with a gun also has a badge. That seems like a pretty crappy way to run things to me.

* * *

Full disclosure: the above musings were triggered by a recent discussion we had at our house, which was triggered by SuperWife's recollections of an incident that occurred several years ago in River City, where a black teenager named James Newby was shot several times in the back, and killed, by a white cop in plainclothes named McKenzie Mattingly.

SuperWife couldn't recollect all the details of the incident, although she did remember that the young black man in question had apparently been caught in the act of dealing drugs by the white cop and had attempted to flee, at which point, the cop had shot him in the back and killed him. SuperWife's contention was that the cop had ordered the man to stop, warning him that he would shoot if the man did not comply.

The crux of our difference of opinion was that SuperWife ardently and vehemently believes that police officers are charged by our society with enforcing the law and keeping order, and if a cop issues an order, the person he is giving that order to had better know that they need to obey that order, or they're at risk of taking a bullet. And I understand where she's coming from. If people start to believe that a cop can only shoot them if they are threatening him in some way, and is legally constrained from shooting them in any other circumstances, then criminals will feel they can ignore an order from an armed policeman to surrender. They will be able to flee with little fear of any consequences, which will make it difficult to capture any criminal who is inclined to make a run for it. SuperWife honestly believes that this will introduce a degree of chaos and lawlessness into our society that is not acceptable to the world our children will have to live in, so as far as she's concerned, if a cop says "stop or I'll shoot", you'd be stop, and if you don't, you get what you get. That may not be pleasant, but she regards it as a necessary cost of doing business in a world that is already dangerous enough.

I can respect that point of view. My feelings are more complex. I started out at a point where I adamantly insisted that cops should be no different from anyone else in our society as regards the rules that govern the use of lethal force -- a cop could shoot at someone who was posing an immediate, obvious threat to the life or safety of another person (obviously, including the cop him or herself) just like any of the rest of us could... but if a cop were to shoot someone who wasn't in any way threatening anyone with any kind of violence, well, that would be reckless homicide, or premeditated murder, just as it would with anyone else, badge or no badge.

Since them I've come off that a bit. Human life is precious, but, yeah, if the courts start thowing cops in jail for murder when they shoot people who disobey lawful commands, that's going to be a problem. Everyone is quickly going to figure out that as long as you don't make any kind of threatening gesture to a cop, they CAN'T shoot you, and cops will start to find it extremely difficult to manage a potentially dangerous situation. So, yeah, a cop should be able to say 'stop or I'll shoot', and, if you don't stop, then they should be able to shoot.

Of course, no police officer should ever issue any such command, or any other kind of order, unless there is a very good reason for it. And, personally, I myself would much rather that the police who patrol our neighborhoods with guns in their hands be men and women of sufficient good judgment that they would not necessarily blast in the back just anyone who ignored a police command to raise their hands. Absent any kind of perception of violent confrontation or any other real threat, I would like to see people on our police force who won't simply gun a non-violent offender down for running away. (Violent offenders are an entirely different matter; if someone is trying to leave the scene of an armed robbery or some kind of violent assault, and they won't stop when they're told to, shoot zem. Shoot zem both.)

Having said all of that, if you check out the link I've already embedded, or this one, or this one, or this one, or this one, you'll find that at no point does the Officer Mattlingly ever claim he ordered Newby to surrender. What he says, over and over again, is that Newby turned and walked towards the hood of his car, that Newby kept 'pulling up his shirt and reaching for his waistband', that Newby kept looking back at him and glaring at him, and that Newby's actions made him afraid for his life.

He never says he was aware that Newby had a gun, or that he'd seen a gun. One witness advises that after Newby was shot, when the police turned Newby over, he saw that Newby had a gun, but he also advises that ""I see the weapon after they rolled the kid over, and the weapon was down in his slacks, nestled inside of them". How someone sees a weapon 'down in his slacks, nestled inside of them' from any kind of distance I couldn't begin to tell you, but, never mind. It seems clear that the police officer who shot Newby never actually saw a gun prior to shooting him. He just felt afraid, and because he felt afraid, he shot a 19 year old man in the back three times, killing him.

Maybe there have to be different rules for cops, especially for defining specifically when they can draw their weapons and when they can fire them. Maybe cops need more leeway. Maybe they have to be able to use lethal force in circumstances when deploying such force would be illegal and unacceptable for a civilian.

Still, I'm thinking, any time a cop ends up shooting someone three times in the back, and they apparently cannot state with any certainty that they ever saw a gun or any other kind of weapon to feel threatened by, I am thinking that, at the very least, this cop does not have the kind of judgment I'd like to see in a person wandering around my community with a badge and a gun. That's 'at least'. At most, I will say that the story told by Officer Mattingly stinks like hell, and I myself have profound doubts that what actually occurred between him and James Newby that night bears more than a superficial resemblance to the account we've been given.

* * *

On a related subject, a sharp young man named Charles who sits next to me in my training class came up with a solution to the whole gun control mess that strikes me as being nothing short of brilliant: okay, you can't wave a magic wand and get rid of every existing gun in the world. And to me, this has always been a powerful argument against limiting people's access to firearms, because, well, you can't make everybody who already has them give them up, so, that being the case, people who don't have them yet should be able to get them if they want them, to defend themselves against all the other people who already have them.

But what Charles says is, to hell with the guns -- just ban manufacturing bullets.

Honestly, I just think that's amazingly intelligent. Yeah, you can have all the guns you want... you just can't get any ammunition for them.

Works for me. Of course, it will be a while before all the crazy white militias run through their ammo stockpiles, I'm sure...

Of course, as SuperWife points out, a lot of people make their own bullets. So it's not a perfect solution. But if nobody legally sells bullets, then there will be little to no demand for new handguns, so stores won't stock them, which will make it much harder for crazy people to get them... and if they do, it will be harder still for them to get ammunition for them. So I think, while it might not be a perfect solution, it's still a pretty good one.

Time for the penguin on your television to explode

After a brief intermission known locally as 'Tuesday', Monday has continued unabated throughout this week.

We need a montage:

It's Wednesday afternoon, and the minivan decides to start getting cranky right in SuperWife's face as she's driving home for lunch. She nurses its herky-jerkying progress the last few blocks to the parking lot behind our house, where it sits all afternoon while a tattooed bald man who is supposedly a very skilled mechanic, and who looks like someone you would never want to share a prison cell with, pokes and prods at it. His final diagnosis -- the transmission. Or maybe the computer that controls the transmission. Or maybe the transmission filter.

Thursday, my training class finally gets our regular trainer back. She looks and sounds like she's in the final stages of lung cancer, but swears she's nearly fully recovered from a bronchial infection, and certainly isn't contagious. Over the course of the day, she manages to contradict probably 80% of what the substitute, a woman who has actually been doing this job with a high level of expertise for five years, has taught us for the last three days.

Also on Thursday, SuperWife has the van towed over to a garage for diagnostic testing. They confirm it's the transmission, and due to their association with the dealership that sold us the thing, they'll throw us a discount and do the rebuild for only $1200. That sound you heard about 30 hours ago was the anguished shriek of our bank account bursting into flames and then suddenly imploding into nothingness.

All that, and my first week's pay does not show up via the usual direct deposit in my bank account.

Friday, I still have no pay, and SuperWife finds that she has no direct deposit either, and there seems to be some uncertainty as to whether she or anyone else in her office will be receiving paper checks, either. Such are the vagueries of many businesses, but given how our savings account has just evaporated into our van's transmission, it's a pretty crappy week for neither of us to get paid. Also, it's raining, which normally ain't no thang, but, you know, with the van h'ors combat, we're proceeding on foot to and from bus stops. Also, our class's regular trainer continues to blithely teach us how to do things that the woman who subbed for her at the start of the week entirely contradicts when she drops in after lunch to give us a few more practical lessons in what is soon to be our job. Additionally, I call my bank on break and am assured no attempt to do a direct deposit has been made by anyone. I call my agency, and am told that it's likely I will get a paper check in the mail today at home, but, you know, the guy I'm speaking with can't be sure, and the person who might be sure is on another call.

Finally, 4:30 rolls around and I take the bus home without further incident. Once home, I'm watching TV with SuperWife when the phone rings. It's my agency, and to my enormous relief, they aren't telling me I'm fired. To my even greater delight, they advise me that they've 'cut an emergency check' for me, and if they'd called me or sent me an email while I was at work downtown, I probably could have walked over and picked it up, but, since they waited until I'd taken the bus home and we have no car at the moment, well, I'm going to have to wait until Monday to pick it up. Still, it's a relief to know it's waiting for me. Maybe last Monday is finally over.

A few minutes after that, SuperWife and I adjourn to the bedroom, showing that, yeah, last Monday has at long last given up the ghost.

Whew. That was one long goddam Monday.

We hope to have the van back by this Tuesday. I s'pose I'll keep y'all posted on that.

Quest for Tire

Just another manic Monday... if by 'manic' you mean, 'an apparently unending series of aggravations, frustrations, irritations, and exasperations'.

It started with no hot water. I had no idea why it started with no hot water. I checked the water heater in the basement, and, more meaningfully, so did SuperWife. She affirms the pilot light was on, I myself can testify that the water heater had not exploded nor was the basement flooded. But, no hot water. So, no morning shower, so, I spent the entire day at my new job feeling greasy and grungy in steadily increasing increments as said workday wound onward.

Said workday was even more of a chore than the usual workday, in that our usual trainer called in sick with a sinus infection, and we had a junior trainer who had no real idea how to teach us what we needed to know, and a tech specialist from the department I will eventually be working in coming down to help her out. Now, the junior trainer and the tech specialist between them were swell folks and very earnest about doing their very best for us, but it made for a long, dry, tedious eight and a half hours, as neither of them were particularly good at that peculiar subset of skills, talents, and techniques mankind labels 'teaching'. And the job I'm being trained for is both complex and deeply boring, so trying to teach it when you have no clue how to teach it well is, essentially, like unleashing the Grim Reaper's coma ray on an unsuspecting class room.

So, it's Monday and I'm itchy and unwashed, with my hair growing perceptibly greasier with each passing femtosecond, I'm feeling utterly bewildered and frustrated and stultified by what I'm now not-learning about my new job, and the clock is crawling like a broke-dick quadraplegic worming his anguished way through a canted concrete conduit studded with broken bottles.

Monday, Monday, hellish hellish Monday.

But then a miracle occurs, and it's 4:30, and I'm a moving unit, heading up the street to meet SuperWife at her office prior to rolling home to a long lazy evening at home, doin' nothin' and piling it up.

So we're in the new van and we're digging on the radio and rolling out of the parking lot and then SuperWife is pulling over and saying "I think we have a flat or something." And I'm getting out of the van and dread and trepidation are springing up in my heart like twin tigers of torment and terror, and, yes indeedlie-do, the left front tire is just as flat as my hopes for a peaceful pleasant dinner and a long nap in the daddy chair.

And why? Why? Because the monster of fucking Frankenstein has misplaced one of his fucking neckbolts in one of our fucking tires, that's why.

So, we called everyone, which means, we called SuperWife's niece who is somewhat handy with car stuff, and we called Nate because he's all like mechanically inclined and shit, and meanwhile, with a crappy pair of pliers SuperWife managed to hork from work, I spent thirty minutes on my back under the rear of the van trying to get a goddam screw to turn so I could get the spare from underneath where it was mounted and out to where it could do us some good, an effort ultimately futile in every regard except as it inspired me in my comprehensive scatological abuses, profanities, blasphemies, and verbal assaults upon everything ever associated with spare tires, minivans, screws that would turn but would not come off, and goddam monster of Frankenstein neck bolts that can't keep to their proper fucking place.

Then Nate arrived, and he had all these amazing tools, and he got down on the ground and rassled around with that goddam spare tire securing bolt for twenty minutes, and he eventually gave up on it too.

And then SuperWife's niece showed up and as nobody could get the goddam spare tire off we formulated another plan, whereby we'd jack up the van and pull the tire and Nate and SuperWife would roll out to a nearby Big O Tire and get the puncture patched and then come back, hopefully within an hour or so. Meanwhile, me and The Niece stayed behind to guard the van, which looked pretty vulnerable standing there with one wheel missing, quite literally all jacked up.

Half an hour later SuperWife and Nate came rolling back. I was not fooled: "It was closed?" I asked, astutely, to which my beloved spouse merely nodded.

So, the new plan was, SuperWife and Nate would roll out to a Wal-Mart that was about twenty minutes away, where hopefully the Wal-Mart autoshop could effect tire repairs. So off they went, and there the Niece and I sat, comparing notes on Quentin Tarantino movies and Showtime TV shows and Stephen King books and I can't recollect what all else and it was a reasonably pleasant forty minutes or so until SuperWife's phone rang in my jacket pocket and upon answering it I heard her advise me that the nearby Wal-Mart had closed their autoshop early and they were going to have to head on further out to another more distant Wal-Mart and it was going to take much, much longer. So the Niece and I sat there longer and bullshit some more and after a little while longer the Niece decided she had to take a shot at getting that spare tire off so she crawled underneath the back of the van and after twenty minutes crawled back out again, the spare tire securing screw as yet undefeated.

Right about then the phone rang again and SuperWife advised me that they'd reached the Wal-Mart and the garage was still open and the mechanic there would fix the tire but it would take another two hours because there were five people ahead of them in line. So she and Nate dropped off the tire and were on their way back to pick me up and we'd all go out and get something to eat and then go back and pick up the tire again.

Right about then, the Niece realized she had a Triple A membership! Whoops of joy! So she got out her card and called up the local auto club and much to my shock and surprise, I found out that if you have a Triple A membership, Triple A will actually come out and work on a car that isn't even yours that you just happen to be standing next to, if you call and ask them nicely. So the Triple A guy came out and showed me how you take the handle from our van's built in jack and you pull up this little patch of carpet and you fit the jack handle into this little socket and crank it round and round and round and that nut that secures the spare tire to the underside of the car and that WILL NOT COME OFF lowers down very nicely and the spare tire comes to a gentle rest on the ground, after which you can yank it right out and put it where you need it.

See, if one of us had known that or been able to figure it out hours earlier... yeah, you saw that already, right?

So the Triple A guy put the donut on for us and we thanked him profusely and he went away and the Niece went away too and the remainder of us rolled out to the distant Wal-Mart and got the tire and took the donut off in the parking lot and put the fixed tire on and SuperWife wasn't happy with how it looked so we went over to a neighboring service station and put air in the tire and then the key wouldn't turn in the van ignition and I screamed, I screamed a LOT, I screamed like a hot blonde chick in a slasher movie because it JUST WOULDN'T STOP BEING MONDAY and I wanted to eat something and go home and take a shower and go to bed.

So then Nate did something to the steering wheel and the ignition unlocked and we drove to Ryan's Roadhouse and it had just closed so we walked across the parking lot to this Asian Buffet that was still open and it was like the Asian Buffet That H.P. Lovecraft Built, I kid you not, I'm pretty sure N'yaarlahotep the Goat With A Thousand Young was portioned out in several steam trays with various sauces and the Cthulhu Rangoon was pretty distinctive, too. Which is to say, the food was not so much bad as it was a horror from the nether depths the likes of which one cannot truly imagine without tottering on the brink of homicidal derangement. Which made it the perfect ending of a perfect Monday.

So after that, we finally got home and I got to take a shower and do a blog post and go to bed.

Apocalypse Watch (second installment of many to come, until, you know, we all die)

Well, here's this:

"We know we are being exposed to other people's drugs through our drinking water, and that can't be good," says Dr. David Carpenter, who directs the Institute for Health and the Environment of the State University of New York at Albany...

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows... To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe...

But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

In the course of a five-month inquiry, the AP discovered that drugs have been detected in the drinking water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas — from Southern California to Northern New Jersey, from Detroit to Louisville, KY...

And while researchers do not yet understand the exact risks from decades of persistent exposure to random combinations of low levels of pharmaceuticals, recent studies — which have gone virtually unnoticed by the general public — have found alarming effects on human cells and wildlife.

Here are some of the key test results obtained by the AP:

_Officials in Philadelphia said testing there discovered 56 pharmaceuticals or byproducts in treated drinking water, including medicines for pain, infection, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness and heart problems. Sixty-three pharmaceuticals or byproducts were found in the city's watersheds.

_Anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety medications were detected in a portion of the treated drinking water for 18.5 million people in Southern California.

_Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey analyzed a Passaic Valley Water Commission drinking water treatment plant, which serves 850,000 people in Northern New Jersey, and found a metabolized angina medicine and the mood-stabilizing carbamazepine in drinking water.

_A sex hormone was detected in San Francisco's drinking water.

_The drinking water for Washington, D.C., and surrounding areas tested positive for six pharmaceuticals.

_Three medications, including an antibiotic, were found in drinking water supplied to Tucson, Ariz.

The situation is undoubtedly worse than suggested by the positive test results in the major population centers documented by the AP.

The federal government doesn't require any testing and hasn't set safety limits for drugs in water... Some providers screen only for one or two pharmaceuticals, leaving open the possibility that others are present.

The New York state health department and the USGS tested the source of the city's water, upstate. They found trace concentrations of heart medicine, infection fighters, estrogen, anti-convulsants, a mood stabilizer and a tranquilizer.

City water officials declined repeated requests for an interview. In a statement, they insisted that "New York City's drinking water continues to meet all federal and state regulations regarding drinking water quality in the watershed and the distribution system" — regulations that do not address trace pharmaceuticals.

In several cases, officials at municipal or regional water providers told the AP that pharmaceuticals had not been detected, but the AP obtained the results of tests conducted by independent researchers that showed otherwise...

Rural consumers who draw water from their own wells aren't in the clear either, experts say.

The Stroud Water Research Center, in Avondale, Pa., has measured water samples from New York City's upstate watershed for caffeine, a common contaminant that scientists often look for as a possible signal for the presence of other pharmaceuticals. Though more caffeine was detected at suburban sites, researcher Anthony Aufdenkampe was struck by the relatively high levels even in less populated areas.

He suspects it escapes from failed septic tanks, maybe with other drugs. "Septic systems are essentially small treatment plants that are essentially unmanaged and therefore tend to fail," Aufdenkampe said.

Even users of bottled water and home filtration systems don't necessarily avoid exposure. Bottlers, some of which simply repackage tap water, do not typically treat or test for pharmaceuticals, according to the industry's main trade group. The same goes for the makers of home filtration systems.

Some drugs, including widely used cholesterol fighters, tranquilizers and anti-epileptic medications, resist modern drinking water and wastewater treatment processes. Plus, the EPA says there are no sewage treatment systems specifically engineered to remove pharmaceuticals.

One technology, reverse osmosis, removes virtually all pharmaceutical contaminants but is very expensive for large-scale use and leaves several gallons of polluted water for every one that is made drinkable.

Another issue: There's evidence that adding chlorine, a common process in conventional drinking water treatment plants, makes some pharmaceuticals more toxic...

Human waste isn't the only source of contamination. Cattle, for example, are given ear implants that provide a slow release of trenbolone, an anabolic steroid used by some bodybuilders, which causes cattle to bulk up. But not all the trenbolone circulating in a steer is metabolized. A German study showed 10 percent of the steroid passed right through the animals.

Water sampled downstream of a Nebraska feedlot had steroid levels four times as high as the water taken upstream. Male fathead minnows living in that downstream area had low testosterone levels and small heads...

Ask the pharmaceutical industry whether the contamination of water supplies is a problem, and officials will tell you no...

But at a conference last summer, Mary Buzby — director of environmental technology for drug maker Merck & Co. Inc. — said: "There's no doubt about it, pharmaceuticals are being detected in the environment and there is genuine concern that these compounds, in the small concentrations that they're at, could be causing impacts to human health or to aquatic organisms."

Recent laboratory research has found that small amounts of medication have affected human embryonic kidney cells, human blood cells and human breast cancer cells. The cancer cells proliferated too quickly; the kidney cells grew too slowly; and the blood cells showed biological activity associated with inflammation.

Also, pharmaceuticals in waterways are damaging wildlife across the nation and around the globe, research shows. Notably, male fish are being feminized, creating egg yolk proteins, a process usually restricted to females. Pharmaceuticals also are affecting sentinel species at the foundation of the pyramid of life — such as earth worms in the wild and zooplankton in the laboratory, studies show.

Some scientists stress that the research is extremely limited, and there are too many unknowns. They say, though, that the documented health problems in wildlife are disconcerting...

There's growing concern in the scientific community, meanwhile, that certain drugs — or combinations of drugs — may harm humans over decades because water, unlike most specific foods, is consumed in sizable amounts every day...

Our bodies may shrug off a relatively big one-time dose, yet suffer from a smaller amount delivered continuously over a half century, perhaps subtly stirring allergies or nerve damage...

Many concerns about chronic low-level exposure focus on certain drug classes: chemotherapy that can act as a powerful poison; hormones that can hamper reproduction or development; medicines for depression and epilepsy that can damage the brain or change behavior; antibiotics that can allow human germs to mutate into more dangerous forms; pain relievers and blood-pressure diuretics...

However, some experts say medications may pose a unique danger because, unlike most pollutants, they were crafted to act on the human body.

And while drugs are tested to be safe for humans, the timeframe is usually over a matter of months, not a lifetime. Pharmaceuticals also can produce side effects and interact with other drugs at normal medical doses....

Then, of course, there's the recent unprecedented global proliferation of poisonous jellyfish.

Follow the links. Read all about it. And then, if you're like me, go sit in a dark room and gibber in terror for about half an hour.

Drive by

New job started Monday. No Internet access at work. All is chaos. You might get updates here on weekends, but, y'know, no promises.

Peace out.