Belief maps: part one.

I am still upset about the recent violence visited upon a faculty member in my department by animal liberationists. I am friends with members of his lab, I have taken a course with him (as well as with another psychology professor who made headlines several years ago after he publicly stated that he was discontinuing animal research because the lives of his young children had been threatened), he is part of my community. To see his property firebombed, his life threatened, to hear him called a "piece of human shit", because of his use of animals in research is horrifying (btw, if terrorists blow up your car, will insurance pay for that? I'm kind of thinking it probably doesn't. Seems trivial, but much would that suck to just lose your car? Second btw: what is going on with indymedia? They just post terrorist press-releases as news? Fucking hippies).

I have a long history of utter contempt for animal-rights activists who focus on animal testing in scientific research - there was a cadre of hippy dimwits at my small liberal arts college who periodically engaged in "actions" to shut down animal testing in the neuroscience department - think spraypainting messages on sidewalks late at night, rappelling from the roof of the library with banners and then just hanging out there for a few days, just a lot of really useful and productive shit. Left unaddressed in their endless letters to the editor of our college review was why they were so focused saving the lives of a litter of a few dozen rats (our neuroscience department was tiny) who died in order to contribute to the sum of human knowledge about the inner workings of the brain, instead of on all the thousands of fucking cows and pigs that we students were eating every day because we thought that meat was delicious and we liked delicious things.

I mean, obviously as a vegetarian I think there's a good argument to be made that the utter scrumptiousness of meat is, on balance, outweighed by the cruelty of the treatment that animals receive in factory farms (just slightly, though - god, meat is so fucking tasty). The strength of the argument against animal testing pales in comparison with the argument against eating meat, and the comparative numbers of animals involved are just ridiculous. So why was some scruffy asshole hanging outside of my library carrel with a banner when I was studying? I have to believe that there were some Daddy issues involved. Standing outside of the dining hall trying to get your peers to stop eating meat sounds like kind of a drag, but sticking it to The Man with an action? That sounds awesome! "All these know-it-all professors with their rules and their grades and their biomedical research, they're just like my dad! Fuck you, dad!"

So the terrorists are upsetting, but, I hate to say, almost expected. Just as I kind of expect there to be a couple of anti-abortion activists just this side of a murderous rampage somewhere in Colorado Springs, I expect there to be a few dangerously self-righteous animal rights nutballs somewhere in SoCal. What's actually been slightly terrifying is confronting the range of ignorance in the aftermath of the attack - the comments posted to news articles, etc. have been really terrifying. Some of them are just frothing at the mouth from vegan idiots - DID YOU KNOW YOUR GLASSOF MILK CONTAIN PUS ITS TRUE LOOK IT UP ON INTERNET, but some of it seems to be words put together by people who know how to read and write but not how to think or make decisions, e.g.

"I couldn't care less for the safety or welfare of anyone who inflicts harm on animals in the course of their work. Do your medical testing with computer models, on willing humans or not at all."

Really, you couldn't care less for their safety? What about the safety of people who kill animals and rip the flesh from their bones and then eat that flesh? Not worth anything to you either? So maybe we should firebomb little kids who like hot dogs? Also, this whole "computer modeling" thing is so transparently ridiculous. Computer models play a role in understanding how complex systems work, but how the fuck do you think you program a computer model? How do you think you set the parameters of the model and double check to make sure that your current model has some sort of biological validity? And even if your model is amazing and incredibly accurate and the best anyone has ever seen, the best you could hope for is to maybe model how one layer of cells in one small area of cortex handles one specific type of information under ideal conditions and never mind that it leaves out basically all of reality like genes and metabolic activity and all that stuff for the moment because no one in the scientific community would ever expect your computer model to replace reality; only a complete fuckwit would think that you could stop looking at reality entirely and now only do research on a computer model of reality and computer models will be science from now on and GAAAAH WHERE DID YOU LEARN TO USE YOUR BRAIN YOU DIDN'T LEARN RIGHT.

Okay, deep breath. The other inaccuracy that's been bugging me is this word vivisection. I'm not even sure what these people mean when they say vivisection - to me it means the thing that 19th century physicians and scientists did where they would basically dissect an animal while it was still alive, which is fucked up but then have you seen the 19th century? Nobody does that now. There are plenty of scientists who anesthetize their animals and then perform surgeries on them and then administer pain medications once the animal wakes up again, just like we do with people, but that is hardly comparable. And, as far as I know, the professor who got firebombed doesn't even perform surgeries on his monkeys! He euthanizes them once the experiment is over so that he can examine their brains. If you find that horrifying and morally unjustifiable, then all I can ask is that you again look around you. You are surrounded by people who euthanize animals every day so they can eat them in sandwiches, which does nothing to help us understand or treat terrible disorders like drug addiction. Are you firebombing your friends and neighbors? Maybe you should start, see how far it gets you.

Okay, so it's taking me a while to get around to my point, so let's call this part one. Part two to follow.

Mt. Lowe Railway Trail

Sorry to have been absent from my blog for so long. Turns out dissertations are actually kind of hard to do, not to mention time consuming. Regardless, mine seems like it might actually happen this year, and I am also set up with a job in LA for next year, so I am breathing a little easier this week. In celebration of having a weekend that I didn't have to work through, I decided to go for a hike today. I picked the Mt. Lowe Railway Trail pretty much at random from my book of local hikes, and I thought it was pretty awesome. Basically, there was once a funicular that went up this mountain to a grand hotel that was the place to rest and recuperate in the late 1890's for a few years before it was destroyed in various fires and storms. They had bowling alleys and billiard rooms and all kinds of diversions for the rich and famous of Los Angeles and Pasadena to amuse themselves. Once you were at the top, there was also once a trolley line that went around the edges of the mountains purely for sightseeing purposes, and it went over all kinds of crazy bridges and horseshoes to make it up the necessary elevations. Apparently it was an engineering marvel of the time. Now the hotel is in ruins and the rail embankments have been converted to a lovely hiking path that anyone can enjoy, even impoverished saps such as myself. You park at the edge of Altadena on surface streets, and then walk up one hell of a hill to get the hotel. This stretch is like a non-stop party on Sunday mornings, because there's just so many people. Little 4 year olds running around and trying to dig up erosion-control equipment, delightful older couples taking their morning consitutional, just everybody was out. Once you get to the hotel, then you take the old train embankment around in a big loop that goes on for most of the day. This stretch was almost entirely empty except for a few pairs of mountain bikers speeding down the hill (one pair with a hilarious dog wearing a backpack running madly after them with its tongue hanging out the side of its mouth). Here are pictures of the things that I saw!

This is a picture of hotel ruins, possibly a dance floor? Possibly with a bartender informing you that you have always been the caretaker?


Here are funicular ruins, which sounds like an Enya song:


Here is the rail embankment as it goes through the "granite gates", which apparently took eight months to cut. People were way more patient back then.


Here is a burned out stump of a tree that is filled with rocks. I assume this happened when there was a crazy rockslide and all these rocks bounced into the tree and got stuck there. Nature crazy!


Here is inspiration point, which has little fake telescopes pointing to all the things you can see from there when it's not too cloudy or foggy. It was beautiful and sunny when I was there but unfortunately the lowlands were socked in with fog, so I couldn't see shit.


Here is the scope aimed at Silverlake. You can just make out some fucking hipsters.



Going on hikes for me is like a neverending conversation between Little Toph and Big Toph. Big Toph is all, "In any venture, it is paramount to consider not only the probability of misadventure, but the consequences thereof in the current setting - we may be certain that we will not fall, but if we should fall, will it lead to a bruised ego, a twisted knee, or certain death?" Little Toph is like, "Holy crap, there's a cave in that rock wall. There's probably treasure in there. We should try to scramble up that patch of scree and check it out."

Strong recommend for this hike! Although it's 12 miles and took me about 6 hours with lunch and snack breaks, and now my knees feel like I'm 90, so I'd pre-dose with Tylenol if you are old and feeble like me.

Meteoric

So I was listening to the oldies station this weekend, and a couple of things that are weird occurred to me: first, that the Grammys have always sucked. When I was a youngster and cringing at the thought of Celine Dion's Falling Into You being the best album released in 1997, I sort of assumed that the contest was decided by a bunch of fat old men with visible chest hair and gold chains who maybe had been kind of cool at one time but now were not cool any more. From what the Oldies DJ was saying, this is apparently not true - the Grammys have actually been steadily getting cooler as time goes on, and have just now reached a point of moderate suckiness from the depths of awfulness where they once resided. Interesting aside: what was the best album of 1997, or rather 1996, since that's when all the nominees were released apparently? From my itunes I'd pick Squarepusher's Feed Me Weird Things, but I think The Score from the Fugees is the most awesomely 1996ish of the albums released that year. Obviously certain people are going to choose Pinkterton, and I have no problem with that. I do have a problem with anyone who picks DJ Shadow's Endtroducing. If you haven't admitted to yourself that that shit was vastly overrated by now, I have no use for you. It's been 13 years. It's time to admit it and move on.

Anyways, back to the Grammys always having sucked. Now, maybe I should be rejoicing because apparently the Grammys also share my distaste for the Beatles, but they take it a little too far. I'm not bringing Abbey Road to a desert island with me, but I sure as hell wouldn't shaft it to give a Grammy to Blood, Sweat and Tears by Blood, Sweat and Tears. Which same also beat out At San Quentin, which just makes you angry. I mean, c'mon. The best album of the year 1970 was a jazz fusion record? Do you hate posterity or something?

The one that really got my goat was 1981, though. Christopher Cross by Christopher Cross? Beats Pink Floyd's the motherfucking Wall? The movie version of The Wall had a very strong role to play in my adolescence, so perhaps I'm a bit biased (note for those who knew me in college - remember the eyebrow thing? That was because of the Wall). But this seems insane. I have never even heard of this pasty motherfucker, but apparently this album was noted for being one of the most influential soft-rock albums of the early eighties. Christ.

In any event, the fact that Outkast could win or Radiohead could get routinely nominated is like a miracle when you think about how lame the Grammys used to be. So Kanye should stop complaining.

Here's the second thing that is weird that occurred to me because of the oldies station: the DJ was describing someone's rise to fame as being meteoric, and I was like, that sounds very familiar but it can't possibly be the right expression. But then I looked and it is the right expression. This expression makes no sense, this meteoric rise. Meteors do not rise, they fall. They are one of the few objects in the world that are defined by their falling. If you were trying to create an expression that served as an intensifier for rising, it would seem that you could not pick any worse word or phrase than meteoric, save maybe dead monkey. Also, why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway? Airplane food, it's the worst! And those peanuts they give you!

In fact, if you bother to look at the definition of meteoric (which I just did), you realize that the aspect of meteors that is meant to be analagous to persons in the midst of a rise to fame is not the vector of their trajectory, but rather its swiftness and sudden but temporary brilliance, which makes it really quite a lovely turn of phrase when you think about it. Now I feel stupid.

I'm in danger of starting a migraine blog.

Mostly because when a migraine hits I'm stuck at school (can't drive home until my left visual field returns), too spacey to do work, and too attention deficient to read, so all I can do is blog. This one will be brief. I'd just like to point out something that I'd never noticed until my cortex started shutting down: how incredibly, mind-fuckingly red fruit punch Gatorade is. I bought a bottle to wash down some travel-sized Excedrin, and it's just sitting on my desk now, blowing me away with its Platonic ideal of redness. It's like a giant ruby that Sinbad the Sailor stole from a Roc and then mistakenly put on sale at the student store for a buck fifty. And also you can drink it and replenish your electrolytes, which you can't do with most giant rubies, only this motherfucker right here.

Things that I am crazy for not liking

Here is a brief list of things that it blows peoples minds when I say I don't like them. Dismiss me if you want, but what if I'm sane, and the rest of the world is insane?

1) The Beatles. Not in the sense of my choice in Beatles vs. Stones is Stones, although it is. If a Beatles song comes on the radio, I will change the channel. How can this be? How can I be such a hateful person? I will say that I used to like the Beatles, a lot, when I was 5. From the ages of 5-10 I liked the Beatles a huge amount. Now listening to them is like listening to running water. It is like watching the Goonies for the 78th time, but now as an adult. There's no way I'm going to get any enjoyment at all from any Beatles song. I'm sorry. (interesting note: I also loved Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass to an alarming degree when I was a wee tyke. I have no explanation for this. Also, just to add insult to injury, I still like Herb Alpert and the TJB).

2) Water. I love juice, I love soda, I love milk, I don't like water. I especially don't like water if I'm eating food. If I'm eating a delicious tuna melt made with rye bread and sharp cheddar and no goddamn celery (more on that later), and I drink a glass of water, that water tastes like a glass of water that someone very quickly dipped a tuna melt into. Tuna melt flavored water. It is gross, and I don't have to like it. I don't know how the rest of you haven't noticed this.

3) Bob Dylan. I'm willing to submit that I might eventually get into Bob Dylan when I am really old. Like when I'm 50, maybe. I enjoyed his book! So that should count for something. This one isn't really fair, I can't really honestly say that I actively dislike Bob Dylan's music, although I'm not really into it. What really, really bores me to tears is people writing about Bob Dylan. Oh my god, so boring. It makes me want to pluck out my eyes.

4) Tuna with celery. So gross! I have a childhood loathing for foods that mix textures too dramatically that I have mostly gotten over. I can now eat chili despite the fact that the texture of beans and the texture of hamburger have absolutely nothing in common with each other and have been unhappily married in this dish for centuries now. I have not gotten over tuna with celery. If you're eating fish, or any meat really, you don't want anything to crunch. Crunching means you got a gill, or a fin tumour, or something. Not delicious.

5) Tomatoes. I love cooked tomatoes, I love tomato sauce, I love ketchup (catsup?), but I hate fresh tomatoes. Haters are always like, "Oh, you just haven't ever tried a really good, fresh vine ripened tomato, where you can sink your teeth into it and it spews into your mouth all its gooey seeds and mush" and I'm like okay hater, I'm not friends with you any more. What are some other things that you enjoy eating? Babies brains that you suck through their soft spots? Because fresh tomatoes taste like little Vomit Exploderz. Seriously, the flavor of fresh tomato is strongly reminiscent of throw up. Don't get me started on Fried Green Tomatoes (the food - loved the movie).

6) Citizen Kane. Not that great. Certainly not the greatest movie ever. I don't care how revolutionary the shots were, Birth of a Nation had a lot of innovative technical achievements too, that doesn't make it the greatest ever. Did anybody really care what Rosebud was? I didn't. This movie was a snoozefest.

7) Awards shows. Timely, right? I hate awards shows. Emmys, Grammys, Golden Globes, Oscars, you name it, I hate it. I hate scripted banter that isn't funny and just makes you feel bad for famous people for being so lame. I hate acceptance speeches. You can basically just do one of four things: weepy, nervous, jokey, or straight ahead. None of these is entertaining, ever. I hate hosting. I hate song numbers, I hate dance numbers, and I hate hate song and dance numbers.

8) Garrison Keillor. AAAAAAAGH, I HATE THIS MOTHERFUCKER SO FUCKING MUCH. I HATE HIS STUPID MIDDLEBROW HUMOR I HATE HIS LAME FUCKING OLD-TIMEYNESS I HATE HOW HE BLOGS ABOUT HIS SEX LIFE WITH HIS GROSS OLD BODY I JUST WANT HIM TO FUCKING DIE.

9) J.D. Salinger. It would require a whole separate blog post to really explain why I hate this bitch so much. Let's just say that I wasn't surprised when I learned he force fed his family frozen peas, because reading Catcher in the Rye was pretty much an equivalent experience.

Movie Studio Malpractice!

I am upset to learn that the new Harry Potter movie got bumped from a Christmas to a July release because Dark Knight did such awesome business last July, so therefore all big movies should now be shown in July? I don't really get it, and I am outraged. The Harry Potter movies have always been Christmas movies, even as they've gotten darker and darker. The new one will seem silly in July. Dark Knight worked in July because it's a hot, dark movie. This then led to my new theory of cinema, which is that all movies can be placed on three orthogonal axes: light-dark, hot-cold, and wet-dry. I wanted to make a 3D scatterplot to illustrate this theory, but Excel doesn't let you do that. Instead, here is a scatterplot of movies with Wet and Dry collapsed - you will have to squint your eyes and pretend you can see that dimension. Click on the pic for legible titles.

Before you die, you see...

...a couple of things! Here are some things that are like The Ring, in that my life has been ruined by them and now I must show them to you. First up, the Gray Lady's long-running, soul-sucking series, Modern Love. This one is about how a lady doesn't like to have sex with her husband. I have no problem with people whose sex drive is low. I've had to watch videos in therapy class about how to help people whose sex lives are on the fritz (answer: have your man grow an awesome mustache, stop having penetrative intercourse be the focus of your sex life, engage in "sensate focus"). What I object to is this attitude that not wanting to have sex when you're married to someone is actually, you know, really freeing and awesome and everyone should try it. Not wanting to have sex ever, for the rest of your life, is like not having a left arm. It's not the end of the world, but don't try to convince me that it's really actually pretty awesome, that instead of thinking about sex I should really try scouring flea markets for pieces of glass that I can use in my new hobby, making stained glass windows, which is actually way better than sex. Seriously, that's the argument. Ugh, where do they find these people?

Here is a second thing that has ruined my life: Vector TD. It only ruins your life for a few days before it gets so ridiculously hard that it's not addictive any more (wtf, no fucking left turn? So hard!!!!!). Also I'm way more prone to video game addiction than most people, so this may not have any influence on you at all. Why am I so video game addiction prone, it is the lamest of all addictions. I think it's from my mom, who is not allowed to do jigsaw puzzles because when we were kids she would get so engrossed that she would forget to make dinner. We would always start the puzzle and then get frustrated and we'd be like "Mom, come help!" and then she would take over and not stop for hours and we'd wake up the next morning and she'd be in her bathrobe doing the puzzle again.

In any event, I like Vector TD because although it seems like it is about lasers and missiles and whatnot, it is actually about what a fucking force of nature compound interest is. The trick is to abstain from buying fancy weapons and amass a small kitty of loot towards the start of the game and then when you win a bonus, never pick increased fire power or weapon range, instead always increase the interest rate that you earn on your money. Every round of the game is like a financial quarter where interest earned is compounded back to the principal. If you play your cards right, you will be so fucking rich towards the end of the game that you can basically put missiles onto lasers inside of bombs. If you fritter away your principal at the start of the game on shiny new weapons, then you will end up destitute and the aliens will destroy you. This is a valuable lesson for kids to learn, I feel. Seriously, if you could go into debt and they had like little alien payday lenders who would engage in predatory lending and then repossess the weapons you already had, this would be some good edutainment.

Do public school kids spend a lot of time learning about compound interest? Man, they hammered that shit home in private school. They were like, don't tell anyone, but this is how rich people stay so fucking rich. The word problems were all about Granville Estinghouse IV being unable to pay off his gambling debts because his grandfather had set up a spendthrift trust which restrained the alienation of the interest, and then he's approached by Moshe Ratfinkelstein and offered a loan at usurious rates and what should he do, etc. Haha, kidding! We did learn about the perils of dipping into principal, though. Take home message: if you have any spare cash at all and you are young and you haven't started an IRA, seriously, start an IRA.

Jesus is the reason for the season

Adrian: I think I found you a Christmas present, but I'm worried it's not appropriate.
Me: Not appropriate? What is it, porn?
Adrian: No! Yes.
Me: But I love porn.
Adrian: It's dog porn.
Me: Like dogs and humans?
Adrian: No, dogs and dogs.
Me: Dogs humping dogs isn't porn, it's America's Funniest Home Videos.
Adrian: It's dogs humping dogs, but set to techno.
Me: (silence, mind appropriately blown).

I still don't know what Adrian meant by "not appropriate". It seems I won't find out 'til Christmas day. However, I did discover that there does in fact exist video of dogs humping away to pounding techno beats, as one would suspect, the internets being what they are. Note that it's NOT dogs humping dogs as the good Lord intended, and therefore is TRFW, too risque for work.

Things that I made that I like.

Our title is after Mindy Kaling's awesome blog, things i bought that i love. For Thanksgiving we went over to Tammy and David's and had a wonderful time. Adrian made a delicious yam casserole with a toasted marshmallow glaze, an Old School dish she entitled Sweet Potato Casserole, Because I Don't Care What's in It. I made Guinness gingerbread cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. Since David is now mad at me about recipes all the time, here is the cake recipe I worked off of (n.b.that I skipped the candied pistachios because ew, and instead substituted diced candied ginger on a subset of cupcakes). Here is a picture of said cupcakes, of which I am unreasonably proud:

More hobo tips

While we're on the topic of having a good time while dirt poor, may I make some drink recommendations? Our picture is of Old Crow bourbon, which is a great bourbon if you really don't have a pot to piss in. A regular 750 ml bottle should run you around 6 or 7 bucks, and you'll have to trust me on this, it's actually not bad. That should be Old Crow's motto - "Bourbon drinkers agree: Old Crow is honestly not bad!". It used to be quite an illustrious brand before prohibition, but eventually hit upon hard times in the sixties. Now it's a bottom shelf whiskey for the Fortune Brands company. But in terms of taste, it's basically just Jim Beam without any advertising budget, and possibly with a little less quality control. What are you, some kind of Little Lord Fauntleroy, with your quality control? Sack up.

If you should manage to mooch a few nickles to rub together, then you might want to consider another relative bargain: Wild Turkey Rye. At 17 bucks per bottle, it should be reserved for special hobo occasions, like a near-miss mauling from a junkyard dog. Rye whiskey is generally a bit more of an acquired taste than bourbon, but this shit is just delicious. Also, rye whiskey was America's most beloved form of whiskey prior to prohibition, so it's what the founding fathers intended you to drink. You wouldn't want to piss George Washington off, would you? Also, Wild Turkey is keeping it real by keeping their proof up over 100, as opposed to the more trendy 80. Yet more reason why this is a good buy for people looking for a convivial time on the cheap! That shit is hot as all get out, though, so I would recommend a generous splash of water or plenty of ice, unless you are a bruiser in which case you can drink it neat. Excellent pairings include soup made from an old boot, and a meaty bone that you fought with a dog for.

Things to do in L.A. during the Second Depression.

One thing that I'm always planning for in the back of my head is how I will survive when I am sent to prison for a crime I did not commit. I am not totally clear on what crime I could plausibly be framed for - embezzlement of research funds, maybe? I do have a habit of keyword-baiting the Echelon system in e-mails and postcards ("How are you? I am fine! I have been funneling monies to the Black Hand! Much love!") that is probably going to get me extraordinary-renditioned at some point. Another possibility is that I will observe someone pulling the old "I'm driving in the parking lane as if I'm going to make a right at this intersection but at the last minute I'm going to try to merge left, thereby cutting to the head of this line of cars who are all waiting patiently to get through this godawful intersection" one too many times and I will lose my shit and actually kill a dude. In any event, one thing that I've made pretty good progress on is having interests and activities that translate well to an incarcerated setting: lifting weights, running, meditating, and reading books. A corollary benefit that I did not realize until recently is that I was also cultivating a set of interests that are well-suited to the current economic situation: i.e. hours of entertainment with minimal investment required up front. In the interests of pulling our country up by its collective bootstraps, I would like to share some of my experiences!

Unfortunately, most of these prison-ready interests are boring to read about. Actually, wait, one exception: weight lifting. I am not going to talk at length about weight lifting, lest I become that guy. But I would like to throw something out there. Ladies, when you are working out, it can sometimes be beneficial to consider the amount of time that you are expending on an exercise relative to the possible benefits that might accrue. I assume that the reason I see the ladies going nuts on the hip adduction and hip abduction machines is because it will make their legs sexy. I can see doing one or two sets on the hip adductor machine (assuming you do high weight and low reps), your adductor group could conceivably flesh out a bit and make your thighs curvier. I do not understand doing 5 sets of 20 reps on the hip abduction machine, unless you do some awesome sport that requires an extraordinary level of endurance in these muscles (professional jumping jacks?). It will not make your legs more sexy. Having massive hip abductors is probably not even possible because those muscles are very flat and relatively tiny, but if it were possible, it would just make you look weird and bulgy. So get off those machines and let people whose physical therapists told them to use them have a shot. Also, ladies, if you are lifting weights and looking around the room and talking with your friends and laughing and smiling while you are lifting, then you are not lifting hard enough to produce any noticeable changes in your muscle physiology and so you are wasting your time and my space. Christ, I've become that guy. I'm sorry. Moving on.

One thing that I've become very enthusiastic about since our economy collapsed is rice and bean burritos. If you buy your rice and beans dry, you can get the fixins for 10-12 burritos with an outlay of less than 20 bucks. I recommend: Mission tortillas, Uncle Ben's brown rice (racist?), Goya frijoles negros (racist?), Tillamook cheddar, and Cholula hot sauce. Salt and pepper to taste. So delicious, and so economical! For bonus points, cook everything on a hot-plate - you can heat the tortilla using the old bent-coat hanger maneuver. Then you can bathe in a wash-basin using only a sponge, you creepy fuck. Who owns a hot plate?

The second enthusiasm of mine that has come to seem prescient in recent months is actually a hand-me-down from my bizarre, WASPy family: walks! My family loves walks, we walk everywhere. We go on vacation to places and we walk around and that's our vacation. I'd rebelled against it for a few years, but now I've fallen back into the fold. I've been going on one-person walks around the Greater Los Angeles area, as well as dragging others along with me. For my group walks I try to keep it to less than 5 miles, but I've been trying to push myself on the solo walks a bit. My last walk was up in oil-company land in the mountains north of the 126; the place was a dead ringer for the opening scenes of There Will Be Blood, except I didn't break my legs and have to crawl back to civilization. It was creepy to be in a place that was totally and utterly empty (it was Sunday, so maybe all the oil workers were home?) save for the creaks and groans of the pumpjacks. It got very, very lonely around mile 7, so I headed back towards civilization before I was tempted to adopt any orphans and raise them as my boy.

For my most recent walk, I decided to go in the opposite direction: humanity overload! I decided to go for a beachfront hike on Saturday, starting in Marina del Rey, going through Venice and Santa Monica, and making it as far up to Malibu as possible without having to hike in the sand, which is miserable. I've always been fascinated by the denizens of Venice and environs - there's a whole underground economy of dudes who don't seem to have a real job but do seem to have a place to sleep and change their clothes and they mostly just hang out and drink beer and get tans and socialize endlessly. I think this probably involves the selling of puka necklaces and weed? Or possibly receiving residual checks for their work with some seminal funk band of the seventies? In any event, I am a little jealous of these dudes because being a grad student is like the opposite of their job. I saw all the things that are always at Venice: tiny tennis, gold dude, streetballers, electric guitar on skates dude, busty ladies of a certain age going all out with the decolletage, personal space-invading dudes who recorded a hip-hop CD that they will sell to you for only $20 and here you can listen on these headphones, etc.

I brought Adrian's camera so as to document this hike, but unfortunately most of the interesting things that I saw were not things but people, and because I am shy I am not able to take pictures of people. So you will have to trust me that this is a fun and economical way to spend your afternoon. But it was! I filled up my Nalgene bottle with ice and lemonade for $1.50 at a Subway, and I got a hot-dog from a vendor for $2, and I was entertained for more than four hours! I did take this picture on the Venice Fishing Pier. I like to think that these two have formed an unlikely friendship!

Who's afraid of light and sound?

To get back to our titular topic (haha, titular) for a moment: migraines are definitely a thing that is weird. Although I am technically a migraineur, I hesitate to identify myself as such because of the relative benignity of my condition: I typically suffer from migraine scotoma (blind spot) followed by aura (broad arcs shimmering with a pattern of variegated ziggurats cycling through the color palette, or rather (since I can almost see through them to the world beyond) brightly hued shadings of my visual scene, so that a crescent of my visual field appears to be shimmering like a piece of quartz held up to the sunlight). These vaguely hallucinatory experiences are followed by photophobia, hyperacusis, and a headache roughly equivalent to awakening on a Sunday morning after having the night before consumed three drinks instead of my more wonted two. That is: no big whoop. Please note that if my writing seems a bit odd at the moment, I'm writing while migraining, which is leading to a few word-finding difficulties - for instance, is there a more felicitous phrase for my meaning than "no big whoop"? If there is, my neural networks are experiencing a temporary slowdown in services at several key nodes, leading to a commensurate degradation of the quality of information culled from my synaptic fields - a bit like when that YouTube video of Christopher Hitchens won't load, and each refresh of the page leads only to additional input from the YouTube commenters - but inside my brain.

A brief aside: a pet peeve of mine about journalistic portrayals of cognitive neuroscience (all cognitive neuroscientists have a lot of pet peeves about journalistic portrayals of their field, it's part of the job description) is when journalists express amazement at a scientists contention that this cutting edge new treatment or that traumatic experience or whatever can "literally re-wire the brain". First of all, probably as a journalist you should learn the difference between things that are literally true and metaphorically true, but that's not crucial here. More importantly, for those who didn't take psychology or neuroscience in college, here is how the brain works: you have cells in your brain called neurons. A big part of the job description of neurons is to communicate with other neurons. Neurons communicate at spaces called synapses. These synapses change in various complicated ways so that neurons communicate more or less with certain other neurons. This changing of synaptic strength is almost certainly a major component to the formation of memories. If you want to use the metaphor of "rewiring your brain" to describe changes in synaptic strengths, then every time you park your car in a new location and manage to remember approximately where it was, you have successfully rewired your brain. Congratulations. It's not that big a deal.

In any event, I hesitate to identify myself as a migraineur because of the tepidity of my headache - true migraine sufferers tend to guard their membership ranks somewhat jealously. Those at the innermost circle of this cabal require that their surroundings be dimly lit at all times, and boast of losing entire weeks to a particularly vicious cluster of attacks. These folks are understandably perturbed when the hoi polloi use the word migraine to describe a bad headache that they had one time. In short: if you've never spent all day puking and hiding in bed, you probably shouldn't front. Although, to be honest, this one I'm having at the moment is shaping up to be worse than usual: I'm definitely feeling nauseous right now, which is not typical for me.

But speaking of neural short circuits, when thinking of the migraine cabal I cannot help but be reminded of a brief enthusiasm that swept my high school (remember: all boys, predominantly white, blazers and ties and Anglophilia) at some point in the mid-nineties for throwing the frat sign of the Omega Psi Phis, a historically black fraternity - arms up in a U shape, wrists bent to form the seriphs of the Ω. There were so many brief fads that swept through my school that left me utterly perplexed, but looking back on this one, I have to wonder: what the fuck? That was so inexplicable. The general interaction went something like this: one (white) kid would throw the sign, and another (white) kid would guffaw appreciatively but then caution that you'd better not let any Omegas see you do that. I mean, what? Were there were black college students hiding in odd corners around our school, waiting for the opportunity to give some white ninth graders a beat down so as to avoid any dilution of their frat's brand? So confusing. But I digress.

So there are a number of things about migraines that are weird. Hallucinating is weird. Suddenly realizing that large objects are disappearing into your blind spot is weird. Having a phenominological representation of the way in which your visual conscious experience is draped across the calcarine fissure is a bit unnerving. The crescent that I experienced had the tip of one horn pointed directly into the very center of my visual field, and it swept upwards and to the left, which would mean that the corical spreading depression of my migraine was in the right hemishpere of my brain, constrained to that portion of striate cortex below the calcarine fissure? I think? In any event, it makes you feel physical and not metaphysical, to have your conscious experience be so messy and neurological. For those following along at home, try taking your finger and poking your left eye (through your eyelid!) at the left-most portion of your eye. Do you see a little black dot appear at the right hand side of your visual field? Try poking a little further up and down, and see how the dot goes in the opposite direction. This is happening because your eye actually represents the visual scene upside down and backwards, because the lens of your eye flips the picture before it hits your retina. I don't know why, but even though I've known this on an intellectual level for many years, it still freaks me out a little when I demonstrate it to myself with this trick. Migraines are the same, but worse. They make me feel like my entire existence is very physical and very delicate and very temporary.

In college I used to joke that if you had a mad-scientist type device which, if it were broken, would lead to the end of the entire universe, you would take very good care of that device. You would not toss it about or leave it sitting on the edges of tables or credenzas, for fear that the cosmos would be snuffed out by your carelessness. Most likely you would create an enormous fortified bunker far beneath the earth's surface to protect your device. If, like me, you believe that your own personal universe will end when your brain ceases to function, then why not take similar care with your own delicate neural device? At the very least, I argued, we should all be wearing helmets at all times. This seems like a fairly air-tight argument to me, but my friends would inevitably talk me out of wearing a helmet for the rest of my life, on the grounds that social convention was more important than my desire to protect my own personal universe from destruction. Now I'm thinking that, Barack Obama-like, I must be the change I wish to see in this world. I'm the one that I've been waiting for. If I can convince everyone else to start wearing helmets, then there will be no social convention to hold me back. This blog post is my first attempt to build a critical mass. Next up: perhaps a Facebook group?

On leadership: professorial, failed, and otherwise.

For hippy McGovernites who live in CA, today was a little bittersweet. I'm really, really happy about Obama. I'm happy that I can share this good feeling with such a broad array of people all over the world, including a woman at a Magic Johnson Starbucks who was interviewed on the radio this morning and saw his victory as a blow against atheism. Henhhh? Like maybe Obama will be a tireless crusader against atheists such as myself? I hope not? Maybe he will be such an eloquent spokesman for belief that I will have to re-examine my thoughts on the matter? If he wants to try, I won't begrudge him that. Or maybe the fact that a black man won the presidency of the US of A is evidence that there is a Prime Mover? Okay, sure! I've heard worse teleological arguments.

So that part was all warm fuzzy feelings. Unfortunately we also apparently lost Prop 8. This brings up feelings that are neither warm nor fuzzy. Some are blaming the Mormons who funded the proposition, some are blaming the Black community for voting in favor of it 70-30 (as compared with near 50-50 for whites and Latinos). I say, this kind of inter-minority gang warfare is not change we can believe in. Although it would make a good plot for a more updated version of The Warriors (what weapon would the Mormon Gang bring to the fight? Razor edged clip-boards? Their defense would obviously be Magic Underwear). Or, possibly, a Choir-off: Gay Men's Choir vs. Mormon Tabernacle Choir vs. Harlem Gospel Choir. In any event, I reject all of these forms of blame-throwing, because that's not racial transcendence!

Also, because I blame someone else: the leadership on No on Prop 8. If the last 2 presidential elections have taught us anything, it's that when your political opponents attack you with bullshit, it will work and people will believe literally anything that gets said, unless you demonstrate some fucking leadership and savvy. John Kerry, God love him, full-on choked when confronted with absolute bullshit. Barack Obama, when confronted with bullshit, he went to work. He attacked it, using methods that he learned from his pre-political jobs: professor and community organizer (btw, I'd like to give a shout out to Rudy Giuliani, who famously chortled and asked "Community organizing? What is that?" - Hey Rudy, do you know what community organizing is now, bitch?). He got people going door to door, confronting ignorance and stupidity and racism. He got union members to call each other up and talk to each other and not stop talking just because the guy on the other end of the line used the n word. One thing that I genuinely admire about Obama is that he was apparently a great professor. It is not always easy to do. You are tempted to focus on the smart students and ignore the ones whose abstract reasoning abilities are more mediocre. But I'm always struck by how far even the worst students can come in clarifying their thinking about complex issues, as long as you are able to ask them the right questions and help them to evaluate the evidence that is in front of them. I think Barack Obama has shown some of this professorial flair in his candidacy, but then I have a soft spot for pointy-headed professor types. So, did we see any of this in the No on Prop 8 campaign? I'll let a portion of today's LA times article on the prop do the talking:

"Mom, guess what I learned in school today?" a little girl said in one spot. "I learned how a prince married a prince."

As the girl's mother made a horrified face, a voice-over said: "Think it can't happen? It's already happened. ... Teaching about gay marriage will happen unless we pass Proposition 8."

Many voters said they had been swayed by that message.

Amy Mora, a 26-year-old teacher, came with her mother to a polling place in Lynwood on Tuesday morning. She said she believes gay people have the right to marry one another. But she said she voted in favor of Proposition 8 because she does not believe students should be taught that same-sex marriage is acceptable.

So, I'm a little worried about what this Amy Mora teaches. But mostly I'm upset that someone who believes in gay marriage voted for Prop 8 because she actually thought that it somehow involved teaching children about buttsecks. Even if Amy Mora worked as a traveling carnie, I'd say that her thought process here is pretty damning evidence of a failure of rhetoric on our part.

People, all people, have the capacity to think clearly about very cognitively complex issues, if you help them to do so. This is not just my teaching experience talking here but my experience doing neuropsychological testing with people who have pretty serious brain disorders: with a few hints and a little luck, even people with mild dementia can figure out some startlingly complex stuff. So, if we can't make a rational, comprehensible case for why no children have been harmed in the making of these gay marriages, that's not the fault of the folks who voted yes on prop 8. It's our fault, and it's the fault of the people who were in charge of spending all those tens of millions of dollars that they collected from Hollywood Royalty.

So, now that we've inserted language into California's constitution that lets the gays know where they stand, where do we go from here? The legal challenges look pretty hopeless. Our only shot is to wait a few years for any effects of cognitive dissonance to diminish, and try to get that clause taken out of the constitution. In the meantime, let's all study Barack Obama. Look at his powers of persuasion, both cognitive and emotional. Emulate him on a small scale. Look at Gavin "whether you like or not" Newsom. Seek to avoid emulating him. Wait for the decrepit end of our population's age distribution, that doddering bracket who both vote and fear gays in overwhelming numbers, to do what they do best: die of old age. Implacable demographic forces are on our side. We shall prevail.

Chewing gum magnates: they're just like us!

My blog posts are getting too long. Even I realize it. Who has the time, these days? In the interests of appealing to the youth market, I will attempt to make my blog more like US Weekly - lots of photographs and brief anecdotes. Here I present photos of me that are of general interest because I was in places that I recommend that others go to: Catalina and Long Beach. Both were fun!

The off-season is starting soon in Catalina and you can stay in places with beautiful views, as well as showers that have seen better days and whose unfortunate design may momentarily flummox you, for like $60 dollars a night. We recommend the Zane Grey Pueblo Hotel, once the getaway home of Mr. Zane Grey, noted Western author and apparently the scourge of Catalina Island, or at least the scourge of the Wrigleys (of the gum and the field) who basically owned Catalina back in the day.

This is a picture of the monument to Mr. Wrigley built by his wife... apparently he was supposed to be buried here but things didn't work out? Regardless, it was fun to hike up to, and there was a nice garden with endemic plants below it. I always get endemics and pandemics confused: pandemics are bad, endemics are good. I took some pictures of endemic cacti, but they are much more boring in picture form than they were in real life. In real life unusual cacti are very interesting, but on the internets pictures of unusual cacti rank right up there with pictures of other people taking pictures. I just did a flickr search for boring to see if there was some more boring type of picture than that, and I realized two things: those flickr pictures aren't boring at all, and I'm really bad at taking pictures. Here is one that Adrian took:


That is me in Long Beach carefully petting a zebra shark using only two fingers, which I don't totally understand the naming of because it looks a lot more like a leopard to me. Long Beach is also fun! Especially around the aquarium. It is also where you catch the boat to Catalina, so you can make a half-day of it. We can also recommend the Root Beer Float Icees sold outside the aquarium.

Vive la Résistance!

I'm trying desperately to have faith in Nate Silver when he says that the odds of an Obama victory are good, even accounting for the inevitable last-minute tightening (which sounds like what happens to your scrotum right before you punch a bigger dude in the face). I'm trying to resist this cringing mindset, this shtetl mentality that tells me that we can never really win, that some rough beast of a last-minute reversal is now slouching towards Bethlehem, PA. It's hard to feel any genuine confidence, though. I think one of the more interesting personality differences between liberals and conservatives is how we assimilate information that seems to bode ill for our respective causes: liberals, as you know, immediately panic and gnash their teeth and bewail their impotence in this cruel, cold world - I'm reminded of the Huffington Post article in the midst of the Palin bump that read something like "We're gonna frickin' lose this thing".

Conservatives, in contrast, seem to act like a John Wayne-type accused by his wife of being lost - you just clench your jaw and tighten your eyes and drive faster in the direction you're already headed. As some of you know, I've become addicted to reading the comments on the conservative blogs. Whenever the blog editors post some piece of bad news like "McCain down 12" all the commenters talk about how polls are totally biased and how they've been voting for years and no pollster has ever called them, so... you know. (I'd love to ask these commenters more about their thought process here - because honestly, no, I have no idea what you think that means. Are they implying that pollsters just yoink the newspaper's money and make up some numbers and call it a day? That would be a hilarious approach!).

So I say all this as a preamble to my basic reservation about writing any more about this election, which is that I suspect that whatever I have to say today will be rendered utterly moot by the hard left turn that the race will take tomorrow or the next day. This has been the craziest election of all time, so I don't think I'm being excessively cautious here. Nevertheless! I will forge ahead, conscious of my own impending mootness. I've just been struck by the most recent turn of the campaign. I'm talking here about the mutterings that reached their apex in the recent comments of Representative Bachmann (who, despite everything, I still believe to be our nation's hottest representative): her stated wish for a penetrating expose, one which would "take a great look at the people in Congress" and ask, are they now or have they ever been anti-American? That soft thump you heard at the end of the YouTube clip was the sound of my jaw dropping. Could it be? At this late hour of the campaign? Red baiting? What genius!

But, as Hegel pointed out, sometimes we are too quick to credit men and women of genius with what are, at least in part, the fruits of the labour of the world consciousness. What Hegel said of Julius Caesar applies equally well to the good Representative: "It was not merely [her] private gain but an unconscious impulse that occasioned the accomplishment of that for which the time was ripe". That is, it was not merely chance that Newton and Leibniz discovered the Calculus at the same time, but rather some combination of individual genius and a state of generalized cognitive readiness among the general population of thinking fellers (Hegel may actually be implying the existence of a for-reals collective unconscious here, but if so I'm politely ignoring that bit of idiocy on his part). I know I'm not the only one to notice the almost catalytic rate at which new memes seem to now be spreading through the blogs, the columnists, the rallies, the campaigns themselves, everywhere all at once. One day nobody has ever heard of Acorn, the next day people are showing up at rallies with hastily-printed bumper stickers about "Don't blame me, Acorn stole my vote". It's like that chemistry experiment you did in high school where you supersaturated the solution and then dropped one seed crystal in and suddenly the whole jar was crystalized.

I am very excited by the prospect that Red-baiting will continue to play a role in this campaign, or at least in the Resistance movement that will have to be set up should Obama win. It's important to distinguish here between genuine frisson-inducing Red-baiting, and boring old Social Democrat-baiting, which is not exciting at all. Social-Democrat baiting is what McCain and Joe the Plumber are doing these days: implying that Obama wants to turn our beloved nation into France or Canada, with job-killing high taxes and soul-crushing universal health-care. Yawnsville. This line of attack is so boring because it is essentially fairly accurate, and we all know it. I'm sure Obama could talk at length about the drawbacks of single-payer plans and why there shouldn't be a National Health Service, but we all know that deep down he just thinks it's too difficult to accomplish politically, and he thinks there are perfectly reasonable alternative models for achieving universal health care. So the attack ad goes like this: "Barack Obama can present a coherent argument against Canadian and French health care plans, but when he does, there's no note of abject fear in his voice; he isn't truly terrified of spending his sunset years telling his children about what America was like when we were still free. Barack Obama: can American trust a leader who isn't scared of Canada?" Ugh, right? This is such a boring line of attack that I can feel all the strength draining from my body as I write about it.

In fairness, though, Social-Democrat baiting probably set the groundwork for what was to come. And there has been a pretty good narrative building for a while here: Obama's foolish "spread the wealth around" reply to Joe the plumber, Joe straight up calling Obama a socialist (and a great tap-dancer!), and so forth. Even Sarah Palin's quote about the "pro-America areas of this great nation" skirted the line of being an awesome return to blacklisting, but it crucially didn't quite get there. If you're feeling contentious, the obvious contrapositive to her statement is that there exist areas of our country which are anti-American. But we all know that's not really what she meant. What she actually meant is almost certainly true: some areas of the country are really into being patriotic, and some areas of the country are total slackers about it. And those slackers are ruining it for everyone. You can argue with that if you want to, but it's true.

I'm reminded of a kid at my high school who was having trouble drumming up attendance for a pep rally where an oversized teddy bear (standing in for the mascot of our rival boy's school) was to be beaten and burned in effigy. "The problem with this school," he said, "is that people have no school spirit. That's why we always lose." More than our lack of bench depth, more than the weakness of our passing game, it was our insufficiently fervid school spirit that truly held us back on the football field. This boy's sense of being hamstrung by the tepidness of his peers, is, writ large, a major complaint of the Fox News wing of the conservative movement (come to think of it, the kid eventually became president of the school's Young Republican club): the problem with this country is our shocking lack of nationalism. We would totally be able to kick ass in Iraq, if only people took it as seriously as they did WWII! I can think of several wry responses to this plaint, but that doesn't change the fact that it's undeniably true. If we had 11 million people fighting in Iraq, I think we'd be all set. We could assign practically every Iraqi male of trouble-making age his very own full-time guard. If we were more patriotic, then thousands of us would take to the streets whenever Hugo Chavez criticized our president and we'd burn the Venezuelan flag for the BBC news cameras which, tell the truth now, would be pretty fun. And also there would be no laws against fireworks so 4th of July celebrations would be way more exciting, and kids who lost their hands while holding onto these fireworks would be treated as American heroes and people would clap for them when they got off airplanes. In short, Sarah's absolutely right: if America isn't living up to it's potential, don't be blaming our small towns, cause they're ready when you are.

So Sarah didn't really cross into awesome territory with that quote. I do, however, think she has the potential to be the Newton to Bachmann's Leibniz. In her first critique of the Ayers connection, the "palling around with terrorists" phrase got all the play, but I liked the fuller quote: "Someone who sees America as imperfect enough to etc.". It's worth focusing in on the message here: Hey friend, Barack Obama thinks America is imperfect. Now I know that sounds reasonable, maybe America is a little imperfect, but he sees it as so imperfect. Just how imperfect, you might ask? I'm glad you did. Imperfect enough that you need to bomb it a little to make it better!

This, my friends, is what separates glorious Red-baiting from snoozefest Social-Democrat-Baiting. You're actually full-on implying that the candidate is attempting to destroy America from within. This candidate does not believe that change is possible within the system as it exists, and so he will try to bring our nation to its knees through cunning and subterfuge. Anything he says cannot be trusted, because he's simply trying to assuage your fears, that he might rise as high in the ranks as possible, thereby to maximize the effects of the damage that he will eventually wreak. He is aided in this quest by a number of others who have similarly infiltrated the highest levels of government, where they wait for a pre-determined signal to strike. How many of these sleeper cells are there, you might wonder? This was my main complaint with Chris Matthew's cross-examination of Rep. Bachmann - he could have gone in for a number! If someone says that some members of Congress might be anti-American, you ask them to estimate how many. When they say it's impossible to estimate, you throw the number 57 out there! At least run it up the flagpole and see if they salute.

In any event, I really really hope that things continue down this path. In my opinion, the saddest moment in the history of the conservative movement was when William F. Buckley denounced the John Birch Society and Revilo P. Oliver and that whole crew and then never let them write for the National Review again. Those guys were so much more entertaining! And their threshold for diagnosing someone as a crypto-fellow-traveler was so low as to bring to mind a hilarious party game - "No, you're a communist!". Sure, Revilo hated the Jews a little, but his name was a palindrome, so that counts for something in the grand scheme of things. And to be fair, he also hated Christians - he called Christianity a "spiritual syphilis" which was creating lacunae in our brains and slowly dementing the human race. Which, speaking of, brings us to an entirely separate philologist who also hated Christianity (and maybe possibly the Jews a little?), Nietszche! Brief aside: I can only name three people with training in philology: Oliver, Nietzsche, and Ezra Pound. Coincidence, or is there some obscure, cursed Sanskrit text that if you offend the ancient Gods by attempting to translate it, you become sick to your empty core with Jew-hatred?

In any event: Nietzsche. I haven't read him since college, but one of the ideas that keeps popping into my head is the concept of the master and slave morality. This sounds like a Depeche Mode song, but in fact is a very interesting series of wild-ass speculations about how panty-waisted Judeo-Christian morality arose against the backdrop of strong-like-bull Greco-Roman morality. It gets a little complicated and there's a bit of Jew-baiting that goes on, but one of the interesting empirical questions that arises for me is this: is it possible for certain systems of thought, or systems of morality, to offer more to those who are on the outside looking in? Living in a backwater under a repressive government, or being a citizen of a small country whose fortunes are dictated by a distant but powerful empire, how do you understand your world and cope with the emotions that are engendered by your situation? Again, it's an empirical question, but I wonder if Christianity doesn't offer a more effective "tool kit" of coping skills for the permanently disempowered and disenfranchised than say, Islam. Not that Islam is in any way bad or anything! Islam is great! Big ups to all my readers in Saudi Arabia who find my blog when searching for Aikido moves! I guess what I'm saying is that I wonder if people who are Christian may experience a less distressing level of cognitive dissonance when they find themselves at the bottom end of a power structure, whether it's a geopolitical one or an interpersonal one. They think, hey, it's okay that I'm powerless, that doesn't make me a bad person, in fact it makes me a good person, because here I have this religion that tells me that being powerless is actually the key to being loved by God. Good luck getting into heaven, powerful people!

Which, to bring it back to William F. Buckley and the National Review wing of the conservative movement, is what I predict will happen if Obama wins the presidency. Those intellectual conservatives may be gritting their teeth at the moment, but I predict that in a few months they're going to be having a grand old time (the type of conservative who gets involved in burning Dixie Chicks CD's and whose main political belief is that you shouldn't criticize the president is a whole different story). I could be wrong about this (and again, it's an entirely empirical question), but I suspect that the ideology of conservatism is most ideally suited, on a purely emotional level, to being outside the corridors of government looking in. This is not to say that conservatism is a slave morality, just that some of the same principles may hold. Being given the reins to the very thing (government) that you profess to despise is no fun! Better to let the liberals try their hand and offer your refreshingly fair-minded advice. And criticism. And guffawing. And eye-rolling. Conservatives love knowing better than whoever is in charge, they love predicting that grand schemes will result in abject failure. They love it when, Cassandra-like, they are utterly ignored by the unwashed masses and then they are proven right and can smugly refrain from saying I told you so (I believe Cassandra was not allowed to say that either). Think of what a fun place to work the National Review must have been during the Clinton years! And, if the themes being sketched in this electoral race are the tropes that the resistance movement will hammer away at during an Obama presidency, there's some serious frisson-induction in store for the next four years. I just hope that the level of sheer pizazz doesn't diminish too much from these heady days. In short, free Michelle Bachmann!

A helpful, if tiny, guide to CA propositions.

So I have a hard time deciding on California propositions. If I were making a state, I'd leave the whole direct democracy thing out of it. Too much work for everyone involved! Nevertheless, if you are a conscientious voter and want to see a variety of opinions on each issue before you decide, here is a table that I make every year. I didn't have the energy to learn about making tables in html, so you're stuck with tiny little images. They might get a little better if you click on them? In any event, the LA times editorial board is more conservative than you'd think, the SD Union-Tribune are actually conservative, the Republican party is the Republican party, and everyone else is a godless liberal.

Great art with douchebags

So we went to two Arclight screenings of the new restoration of The Godfather a few weeks ago - part one on Saturday, part two on Sunday. Part one went by without remark, except that I had forgotten how awesome Moe Green is ("Sonofabitch! Do you know who I am? I'm Moe Greene! I made my bones when you were going out with cheerleaders!").

Part two was a bit more unfortunate - we were seated a few rows in front of a sizable group of aging guidos who seemed to feel that the Godfather was a bit like Scarface, but longer and slower in parts. For those of you who haven't seen part two recently, it comes in at 3 hours and 45 minutes, including a 10 minute intermission, and there aren't really a huge number of "quotable" quotes aside from the obvious "I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart." But these guys were clearly relating to the movie on an entirely different level than we were.

Now, full disclosure, I've never actually seen Scarface, I've only seen the amazing Jersey boys from True Life: I Have a (Jersey Shore) Summer Share watching it as a sort of pre-game ritual to get amped up prior to going clubbing (these guys really do need to their sympathetic nervous system humming prior to a night of clubbing, because they routinely fuck and fight whilst in and around clubs). My understanding of how it works is this: most guidos have seen Scarface many, many times. When they decide to watch it one more time, they aren't exactly doing close readings of the film, sussing out how audience expectations of what it means to "see" or "observe" are undermined by the antihegemonic framing of the shots blah blah blah. Rather, they're doing what I did when I watched Goonies over and over again as a little kid: they're reveling in certain scenes, certain lines, certain ideas that just strike them as amazingly cool. In the case of Goonies, at the age of 8 or 9, I particularly loved the idea of the start of a hidden tunnel being tucked below the ash grill of a fireplace; much to my parent's chagrin I actually took a hammer and chisel to the tiles of our home fireplace, just in case there was a similar situation going on there (turned out not). I watched that Betamax tape over and over until the picture started getting fuzzy.

So, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to people who watch movies over and over again, but the fact of the matter is that my tolerance for repetition has progressively diminished as I've gotten older, and it's hard not to feel that there is something a bit childish about wanting to see the same stimulus on an endless loop. Of course, I can watch movies that are all great one-liners (Big Lebowski, Kicking & Screaming) multiple times, but I max out at about once every couple of years. Not that this repetition intolerance is necessarily a good thing: I feel like the rate at which I habituate to new works of art has gotten so rapid that it's hard to keep CD's in my car that I still retain any visceral pleasure from listening to - sometimes I get so desperate that I'm stuck listening to Big Boy in the morning on my way to work (Luther Lufeye's got your phone taps on the tens!).

So, if the only sin of these guidos had been that they had seen the Godfather many times before, it probably wouldn't have bothered me. The problem was that they kept reacting to the movie in ways that were clearly an extension of previous viewings in various living rooms with various inside jokes being made. They kept laughing in parts that didn't make any sense - there's a shot of a little red car that Michael bought for his son Anthony (except that he didn't buy it, Tom Hagen bought it because Michael was too busy being Machiavellian) sitting in the snow, and they all started laughing at this shot. Now, if they had started talking or texting or something, we could have gotten them in trouble with the Arclight ushers, those purple-shirted martinets who take the enforcement of movie theater etiquette very seriously indeed. But how can you complain about people laughing at a toy car? What are you, going to force them not to do it again? They also loved Frank Pentangeli (the guy who testifies against the Corleones in front of the subcommittee) for some reason - they couldn't stop laughing at his every line. It was mystifying and really, really distracting.

By far the worst part, however, was the scene in which Kay reveals that her miscarriage was, in fact, an abortion ("It was an abortion! An abortion, Michael! Just like our marriage!"), and then Michael leaps forward and slaps the shit out of her. The guidos laughed like it was the funniest physical comedy bit they had seen since the season finale of Carlos Mencia. Which, when you think about it, is pretty fucked up. I guess their thought process was that it's awesome when people hit other people out of the blue, and it's doubly awesome when people hit people they're not supposed to hit, and since men aren't supposed to hit women this was just a big pile of awesome. At the time I found their reaction distasteful but chalked it up to these dudes being serious losers who don't spend a lot of time with women, but Adrian and Amy were both so upset that they had a hard time paying attention to the rest of the movie.

And here's the thing: I could see myself laughing at something similar in another movie. Like, say our antihero (I'm imagining it's Billy Bob Thorton) is being bothered by a fat kid with cake all over his face and instead of giving the kid a zippy one liner to shut him up he just punches the kid in the face. I might laugh at that, even though in real life I'm firmly against punching kids in the face. But that would be a different situation, because that would be a fucking comedy. The authorial intent would be for this to be a thing that is funny precisely because it's not supposed to happen in real life. I'm pretty sure that Coppola did not intend for the abortion scene to be funny in any way. But I don't typically get this worked up about violations of authorial intention, so I don't think that's the whole story.

I think a more fundamental element of this situation is that I don't like sharing my aesthetic experience with people whose taste is fundamentally different than my own. I have no problem with the fact that there are people who enjoy films like Epic Movie (okay, I'm a little worried that it debuted at number one at the box office), but I don't want to have to be around those people when I'm trying to enjoy a good movie. If I go see Live Free or Die Hard (which, speaking of, featured a Bruce-Willis-beating-of-a-lady that I didn't particularly object to) I have the expectation that I'm not entirely on home turf, so I try to play by their rules - a little yelling at the screen is okay in certain scenes (but hey, asshole who was checking text messages when Bruce Willis was crashing his fucking car into a fucking helicopter: what the fuck are you looking for in a movie?). But when I'm there to watch a movie that is one of the greatest movies ever made, art-house rules are on. No talking to the screen, no laughing unless it's a joke or it's making you so uncomfortable that you have to laugh, and just, I don't know, try to appreciate it on a deeper level, you dipshit.

But that's the thing that was so frustrating and weird about the situation: I was there to watch the art-house movie that I loved, they were there to watch the hilarious action-comedy that they also truly loved, and it was the same goddamn movie. How do you resolve this situation? Who's movie was it? De gustibus non etc. It reminds me of the early years of the Simpsons, when literally every mook in the country thought that Bart was the funniest character ever with his shorts-related catchphrases, but at the same time there was this absolute genius happening in the background and it seemed like only you and your friends were noticing this. My dad, whose taste in television runs towards broad English comedies, always hated the Simpsons with a passion because he never got past that initial impression that it was somehow of a piece with it's lead in - Married: With Children. He thought they were both just shows about stupid people doing stupid things, and he never bothered to see if there was anything else going on. He was also hilariously bothered by the fact that the Simpsons were colored yellow. I had no response to this criticism.

So, while I may have advanced past the toddler developmental stage where watching the same movie over and over again seems delightful, I've somehow managed to get stuck in an adolescent stage where my identity is still defined in large part by the books that I read, the movies I watch, and the music I listen to. And when I feel people that I judge to be fundamentally different and inferior encroaching upon my territory, my first inclination is to freak out and label them poseurs and dilettantes. Which is to say, I appreciate the Muppets on a much deeper level than you do. At this juncture it is worth noting that Adrian truly does appreciate the Muppets on a much deeper level than any of us do, and has been doing so for some time, so step off if you were considering fronting (watching that video I'm left wondering if maybe all along Adrian only likes me because, like Beaker, I am a red-headed accident-prone scientist who tends to communicate monosyllabically?). In any event, I can recognize that this feeling of being threatened by assholes liking the same stuff that I like is a bit immature, but I simply can't shake it. Especially not if they're sitting behind me in a movie theater (why are they always sitting behind me?). I do appreciate the Godfather on a much deeper level than they do! I notice every time there's an orange! I stop breathing when there's a doorframe between Michael and Kay! I could probably remember a good five minute spiel from my time at Oberlin on the relationship between the Godfather, classical mythology, and Lacanian psychoanalysis!

So, here is why those guys were douchebags: men hitting women isn't funny, it's terrible. In certain contexts maybe it can be less terrible, but this movie isn't one of those contexts. I know this because Francis Ford Coppola is standing in line behind us and he'd like to tell you that this movie is deadly fucking serious and not funny, and frankly you're an asshole. Also, Marty Scorcese is here and he doesn't want to talk to you about a time share because he thinks you hate women. So suck it.

Obama is a finely-woven cotton fabric.

Sorry for blog silence, I was in the midwest for my BFF's wedding. Central Wisconsin: knows how to party. I have longer blogs that are backing up in my headspace, waiting to be written, but in the meantime, did you know that 10% of Democrats believe Obama is a Muslim? It's true! But! Help is on the way. Check out this Florida Democrat who is trying to set the record straight - Obama is in fact a closely woven cloth. N.B. - just watch the video for maximum hilarity.