Tree of life

A few folks have just passed on to me Kabbalah ... with Britney and Madonna.

Madonna: Its complement is Gevurah. You’ll see that image is from I’m Breathless.

Britney: Pardon me?

Madonna: The soundtrack to Dick Tracy?

Britney: I’m sorry. It’s not ringing a bell.

Madonna: Never mind. Tracy is a lawman; my single, "Hanky Panky" was all about punishment, spanking. Gevurah shows us order and restraint; it keeps things as they are. Chesed and Gevurah are at odds and in balance. It’s difficult to explain, my sweet, perhaps because you’re not yet a woman of grand experie …

Britney: Is it like when you reinvent yourself as a more adult performer, perhaps with an r’n’b edge, but you have to make sure that you don’t alienate your core demographic?

Madonna: You are a fine pupil, Britney, wise beyond your years.

Let me add that Colin Low has done the same thing for us, using Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Worf is a brilliant depiction of Gevurah. His dominating motivations are duty and honour, so his behaviour is tightly constrained by whatever he considers to be dutiful and honourable. He is not afraid to die upholding duty and honour and exhibits something close to a death urge --- he would make a good Kamikaze.

And I have at least a picture of the RHPS execution of the Tree.

Chaos Magicians tend to be very (you guessed it!) chaotic people. The kind of people who would dream up things like this Rocky Horror Picture Show Cabbala (pictured to the right). Yep, that was designed by one of the most famous chaos magicians out there: Phil Hine (it's scanned from my (signed) copy of Condensed Chaos).

I'm still working on my own superhero tree-of-life and Firefly tree-of-life. I'll let you know.

Penalized

Stanley "Tookie" Williams III
1953 - 2005
Not a martyr

He founded a deadly and ruthless street gang. He apologized for doing it. He was a committed and effective anti-gang activist. There are plausible reasons to think that he was innocent of the crime he was convicted of committing. He was certainly not an innocent man. He was loyal to his friends. Some of those friends were bad, bad men.

Judge not, lest ye be judged? But we live in a world in which we must exercise judgement; to refrain from judgement is itself a judgement. Yet the world conspires to baffle our judgement. What to make of Mr. Williams' life?

People called for clemency. People called for the most severe punishment. Personally, I felt sympathy with both arguments. I am baffled.

We cannot step into the same river twice. We cannot punish the same person who committed a crime, nor can we reward the same person who did a good deed. We are all the inheritors of the legacy of our younger selves. Yet only a fool would say that we should neither punish crimes nor reward good deeds.

There's a lot I don't know about Mr. Williams, and how we should respond to him. In a baffling world, I want to know what he would have made of the rest of his life. And in a baffling world, I don't want the State of California to have the power of life and death over its citizens. But I don't know much more than that.

Update: Daphne Gottleib commemorates the moment with a poem that will take your breath away.

Klingon karaoke

I kid you not.

My favourite is the Klingon version of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," which ends with:

baHHa' wejlogh nIHoch
Daq beySbol QujlIj

misfire three times, they kill you
at our baseball game

Reading the page, I learn that there are Klingon karaoke competitions.

Incompetent design

Via Monkeyboy's Linkblog, I offer you a new competitor to Darwinism, Creationism, Intelligent Design, Unintelligent Design, and Flying Spaghetti Monsterism. The new kid on the block: Incompetent Design.

Oh, and be sure and roll over the wiggly thing in the upper left corner of the page with the Incompetent Design article.

Geeky yet irresistable

BrickQuest, "Fantasy Boardgaming in an ABS Universe," is a game in which you enact brave heroes meandering through dungeons slaying terrible monsters and stealing their treasure. With Legos.

It's so geeky that it collapses into a geek singularity and falls behind the geek event horizon. But you gotta click that link and check out the little Lego monsters.

Via Poor Mojo.

Comic

Richard Pryor
1940 - 2005
American poet

In the event that you've only been exposed to him in the form of his stupid later films, mark the day by finding one of his old standup routines on CD or DVD and go see him invent contemporary stand-up comedy.

There's a whole generation of comics now who learned his trick of digging into the dark places of pain, anguish, race, sex, violence to win laughter from an audience. Most of them are using that trick for cheap laughs, while Pryor earned those laughs the hard way. You paid for them, listening to him. And he paid, himself --- he paid dearly. And was ten times funnier than almost everybody in the business in the process.

While we're here: As I was trawling for a quote for this post, I stumbled across an amazing story about him working with Lily Tomlin. It says this about his work:

Instead of adapting to the white perspective, he forced white audiences to follow him into his own experience. Pryor didn't manipulate his audiences' white guilt or their black moral outrage. If he played the race card, it was only to show how funny he looked when he tried to shuffle the deck.

And then it says a whole lot more. Check it out.

Update: Digby says some fine things about Pryor.

He was right up front, saying it all clearly and without restraint. He wasn't being polite and pretending that race wasn't an issue. And it didn't matter. Nobody, not one person, in that audience was angry. In fact, not one person in that audience was anything but doubled over in paroxysms of hysterical laughter. He had our number, all of us, the whole flawed species.

Also long, also worth a read.

Tempting fate

Even if there's only a 1 in 5500 chance that it will hit the Earth, when you learn about a wayward asteroid 40 times the diameter of the one that probably leveled a big chunk of Siberia, no matter how clever you think it is, don't go naming it Apophis. Okay?

Via Warren Ellis.

Dream

I don't ordinarily do the dream diary thing here, but I just woke up from a weird one, and have to share.

I get drafted by the Space Marines. I'm me, only in a you-can-get-drafted-by-the-Space-Marines world. After a lot of shuffling around from room to room as I'm processed into the system, I get deposited into a military based disguised as a large disused old fire station together with the rest of my unit, all dressed in our civvies as we wait for what's next. Most of us are in our Hi-Viz Lime Yellow Aerostitch Roadcrafter one-piece motorcycling suits.

Before we find out what fiendish psychological experiment has brought us all together, I wake up.

Evil

Folks on the right sometimes tar lefties like me as Stalin apologists. I have no idea where this comes from. For the record, in my book, Stalin was evil, okay? Big league evil.

I tend to think that there was a certain artistic genius to Nazi evil that makes it worse than Stalin's reign in an important way. But I won't argue with folks who call Stalin worse than Hitler, since Stalin killed more people, which is an imprortant metric that transcends questions of style. On the other hand, I'm not letting Pol Pot off the hook; the Khmer Rouge may have killed piddling numbers of people by Hitler and Stalin standards, but there are ways in which they make even the Nazis look like the Boy Scouts of America.

If you are going to go by the numbers, though, I learned recently that Mao is the champion of twentieth century evil. So Uncle Joe has at least that much going for him.

---

Capturing a longer rant which I fell into elsewhere on social media, where smeone said the Soviets killed ~200 million people while the Nazis only killed six million:

I must object to the tally provided here as demonstration that communism is categorically more evil than fascism. The Nazis did not kill six million people. The Nazis genocided six million Jews, mostly in murder factories. In the same murder factory system they also killed five million other people: Roma, communists and other political dissidents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses (!), et cetera.

They also started the bloodiest war in human history. They killed 20 or 30 million people in the Soviet Union. They also killed about 1.5 million people or so on the Western front, but on the big tally that is practically a rounding error.

And they wanted to kill more. Why, in a murder factory, do you run a kitchen that serves enough food to keep the inmates just barely above starvation? Because it was the cheapest way to manage the problem of disposing of the bodies. They were killing as fast as they could run the ovens and dump the ash.

And they were just getting started in Russia. The plan was to conquer the entire Soviet Union and murder or enslave EVERYONE (another 150 million people or so).

So the low number of 30 million dead did not reflect that the Nazis were not evil enough. They were JUST GETTING STARTED, but they were fuckups who bit off more than they could chew and got invaded for their trouble after only having about a decade to soak the earth with blood.

I’m not saying the Soviets were not evil, but it took them seventy years to gulag and starve all those people. Pikers, in comparison. Heck, after Stalin kicked the bucket it was barely like they were even making a real effort.

If you really want to get communism at the top of the Big List of Evil, you have to talk about Mao. But even Mao had an unfair advantage in racking up the numbers: he had decades to run a country of half a billion people, half of whom were half-starving to start with.

(And again, if you ask me, pound-for-pound you have to give the Maximum Evil prize to the Khmer Rouge; compared to them, the Nazis look like the Girl Scouts.)

Say it again

I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.

Tip of the hat to TNH, of course.

Medical care

Kevin Drum is puzzled. Medicare for the elderly and medicaid for the poor seem to work pretty well.

Here are the percentages of Americans who say they are "fairly or very satisfied" with their own health system:

• Poor: 45%
• Elderly: 61%
• Everyone else: 34%

...
Americans in general are highly dissatisfied with their healthcare system --- the one that's supposedly the "best healthcare in the world" --- and yet they've been conned into thinking that a national healthcare system would be even worse. This is despite the fact that people in America who are enrolled in a national healthcare system (most of whom have previous experience with private employer programs) like it better than the working stiffs who have private coverage.

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein reflects on the propaganda triumph thus puzzle represents.

We've so fully demonized government-run health care that we won't even believe it can work when it already is. The totality of propaganda's triumph over not just the facts, but our subjective interpretation of the facts (i.e, how satisfied we are with our health care) is truly stunning.

Having done some recent work for foks in the insurance biz, I have to say that I'm convinced that the government could not possibly screw things up any worse than the current system. I doubt even the Bush administration could find a way to do it.

Racism and social insurance

A while ago I blogged Digby explaining how American's resistance to government social insurance — like healthcare — is rooted in racism, the fear that those brown people will get “more than their share.”

our commitment to civil rights cannot be separated from our commitment to reasonable taxation in service of a stable society. In our culture they are inextricably bound to one another and we will never achieve one without achieving the other. As I wrote in my earlier post on this topic, racism is America's original sin. Until we politically and socially emasculate it, we will continue to be shackled by a fantasy of individualism and a Hobbesian worldview that can no longer be ameliorated by an endless frontier or global economic dominance.

If you didn't check it out then, I recommend taking a look now.

I'm reminded of it by a post on the same subject from Cervantes, who blogs about health care policy.

Almost everyone in Fishtown claimed to be a conservative, and expressed scathing contempt for liberals. So what were some of their conservative ideas? .... nationalizing the oil companies ... government sponsored health care, a higher minimum wage ... massive investments in public transportation ... cleaning up the air pollution — all kinds of radical right wing ideas.
....
What's going on? I confess I have left out the most important issue that the good people of Fishtown were worried about. In their own words, it was the niggers. They were all on welfare, and they were taking all the jobs. (That's right, I often got that in consecutive sentences. And by the way, I would estimate that 1/4 of the households in Fishtown consisted of single mothers on welfare, or disability pensioners.)
....
Racism has divided the working class, and made the white majority mistrust social programs which they have been persuaded somehow favor the other at their expense.

I don't know whether this makes my head or my heart hurt more.

Bad example

I love a good pagan invocation as much as the next guy. And I'm not too picky about form. And though it's generally not my thing, I'm capable of appreciating rap. But Zeus does not rap.

I be Zeus! King of the clan
You talk to me you talkin to The Man
Got gods and goddesses up the yin-yang
Mess wit me you messin wit a gang.

There's more, if you follow the link. But ow, it hurt my brain.

Yes, Virginia

Blog against racism

I'd hoped to find time to write something more elaborate in honour of the day, but fortune intervened.

Instead, I offer you Peggy McIntosh's essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. If any of my white readers are not familiar with it, they should have a look at it --- at least the middle section, "daily effects of white privilege." The sections bookending it may not be so digestible for someone who hasn't drunk pretty deeply from feminist or lefty culture, but the list is necessary reading for any white American.

34. I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.

35. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.

36. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it had racial overtones.

Sobering stuff.

Ascot

I just wanted to get this into print, so later I can say I told you so.

The ascot is due for a comeback. I give it a year or two.

I'm not quite sure why I think this. I have a general sense that the plain open collar has played itself out and is getting stale, and there's too much resistance to a necktie comeback --- it's too symbolic of bourgouis '50s conformity --- so there aren't a lot of places to go.

Maybe the ascot will surface by way of hip-hop bling; it's got the right sort of fancy cartoonish aristocratic feel to go with the homburgs and the canes. Maybe we'll get a hit movie set in the 1920s with Jude Law looking good in one. Maybe some fashion designer will just decide it's time.

But it's coming. You heard it here first.

404

Ha!

Joss on Mal

I have another interview with Joss Whedon for y’all, if you’re interested. This one is quite long, and focuses on Serenity.

I want to share one quote with you, because it speaks directly to something that struck me about the Firefly pilot episode. I started out quite disliking Malcolm Reynolds, and when I watched it a second time, I realized why. He’s rude to both Inara and Book in an early scene, when Inara is introduced, and finds more opportunities to disrespect them as the episode progresses. I recognize that it’s a bit peculiar of me, but in my values system, priests and prostitutes are at the top of the list of folks who deserve polite, respectful treatment. And given what I know about Joss, I presume that he feels the same way. I figure that part of his plan was to earn the audience's respect for Mal the hard way. Which he did.

In the interview, he affirmed my guess about how he felt about Mal, and took it somewhere else.

Mal is somebody that I knew, as I created him, I would not get along with. I don't think we have the same politics. But that's sort of the point. I mean, if the movie's about anything, it's about the right to be wrong. It's about the messiness of people. And if you try to eradicate that, you eradicate them.

Which is food for thought. Elsewhere in the interview, Joss underlines that the Alliance isn’t an evil empire. But if you love the show, some moral complexity in Joss’ thinking about it should come as no surprise.

Update

We are now mad at Whedon and critical of Firefly for very good reasons, but I want to observe that the point in this post is underlined by a scene in which the show demonstrates who the real hero is on the crew.

Opportunity

Astonishing Ann Koi is looking for an artist to work from a comics script she has. Her description makes it sound as provocative, challenging, and interesting as the intense Ms. Koi herself. She provides a long list of disconcerting things which "the illustrator must be comfortable with" which may entertain folks who have no interest in taking the gig. And the artist will even get paid.

If you are good at this sort of thing, or know someone who is, drop her a line. I want to read the book when it's done.

LOL WTF

I'm a fan of gratuituous use of ligatures --- as my recent post about encyclopædias demonstrates. Via Monkeyboy's Linkblog, I find a discussion of ligatures for some common abbreviations of the digital age.

Encyclopedias

I'm sure that many of my readers already know about Wikipedia, the online encyclopædia. But some of you might not, so let me introduce you to it, because it's one of the most useful things on the web.

Wikipedia is an encyclopædia built using a set of web authoring tools called a wiki, authored by countless volunteer contributors. First and foremost, it's a pretty good encyclopædia, so if I need to know when and where Harry S Truman was born, I can look it up there. If you need an encyclopædia-style précis on something, it's usally a much better source than a general web search like Google.

The article coverage is astonishingly broad. Most justices to the Canadian Supreme Court, for instance, have at least a brief listing. But the depth of articles can be a little random, and subjects of nerdy interest tend to get better coverage. For instance, the entry for the trumpeter swan is good enough, but quite brief, while there's rather more about using reverse polish notation for arithmetic, and the page on Gundam is very elaborate, with links to numerous supporting pages.

Gundam is one of the longest running meta-series of anime featuring giant robots. Gundam is the collective term for the Universal Century (UC) series like Mobile Suit Gundam and series in alternative timelines, such as Gundam Wing, made by Sunrise Inc.. The name "Gundam" itself stems from a variety of theoretical sources, most commonly attributed to a need to conform with common giant robot naming conventions during the 1970s.

This is one consequence of the fact that anyone can create or edit any page. Subjects that draw the attention of folks with obsessive interests, time on their hands, and a willingness to dig into web authoring tools are more likely to get more material --- hence the completeness of nerd-oriented entries.

Another, more important, consequence of this shared authoring is how Wikipedia handles controversial subjects. You would think that if anyone can edit any page, some subjects would be intractable. Who's going to write the entry on abortion? Surprisingly, it turns out that Wikipedia is actually a very useful resource on those kinds of subjects, because it becomes a place where folks can agree about the nature of the disagreement. This is a result of some clever structuring of the editing process, which keeps articles from collapsing in the face of rapid churn from partisans, and because of a philosophical commitment to what wikipedians call the "neutral point of view."

Articles should be written without bias, representing all majority and significant minority views fairly. This is the neutral point of view policy.

The policy is easily misunderstood. It doesn't assume that writing an article from a single, unbiased, objective point of view is possible. Instead it says to fairly represent all sides of a dispute by not making articles state, imply, or insinuate that only one side is correct. Crucially, a great merit of Wikipedia is that Wikipedians work together to make articles unbiased.

Writing unbiased text requires practice. Contributors who have mastered the art of NPOV are invited to help develop the neutrality tutorial.

It may be tempting at times to 'balance' a perceivedly biased article by creating an additional article on the same subject but biased the other way. Such articles are often referred to as "POV forks". Please do not do this. Instead, consider joining discussion (or requesting comments) on the biased article to make it represent all sides fairly.

This approach has big advantages and big disadvantages. The advantages are pretty obvious, but the disadvantages are serious. This approach is the root of the "Opinions on Shape of Earth Differ" problem in the press corps. Wikipedia's vigorous statement of this as policy is a kind of strategic retreat on the question of objective fact, and I leave an analysis of this being a reflection of the postmodern condition as an exercise for the reader.

I find that the upshot of this is that Wikipedia does not deliver the last word on controversial subjects, but it provides a very useful first word for getting yourself oriented. When I encounter folks who have just stepped into the dangerous waters of the history of Israel, I point them at the now-legendary Wikipedia resources on the Arab-Israeli conflict and Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

There are other group web encyclopædia efforts, of course, though none so successful. I'm a bit of a fan of Everything₂, which started at an attempt at an encyclopædia but quickly evolved into a forum for odd personal essays about things like sea monkeys, the low-intensity conflict between the sexes, and the virtues of soy. There are lots of serious essays, too, but it just doesn't function an encyclopædia.

Taking a different tack, the Uncyclopedia harnesses that impulse toward whimsy in a parody of the Wikipedia, built using the same tools, that is nothing more than a massive edifice of pointless fiction. For instance, the entry on Lord Byron summarizes his career thus ...

George "Flash" Gordon Byron XII aka The Byronic Man, more commonly known as Lord Byron, was a landlord, poet, crack addict, dolphin trainer, cross-dresser, community college graduate, and, most notably, Oscar Wilde's fiercest rival.

... and goes on to explain the Byronic Hero ...

The Byronic Hero is two pounds of thinly sliced turkey, honey-glazed ham, cannabis, salami, marijuana, and cheese on rye and is typically served with some of those cute party toothpicks with little olives on the end. It is usually characterised by rebellion and a distaste for society, yet a haughty appreciation for tasty lunchmeats and hallucinogenic drugs.

Some people have too much free time on their hands.

Just as Wikipedia offers advice on the neutral point of view, Uncyclopedia offers some good advice on how to be funny and not stupid when creating a new article. But as with the Wikipedia advice, that this advice about humour is necessary is a sign of the issues which the Uncyclopedia is struggling with.

T-Shirt

As you may recall, I keep an eye on conservative t-shirt iconograpy. I recently stumbled across another web retailer of conservative t-shirts, and there's the usual creepy stuff, including some spooky examples of the violent eliminationist rhetoric toward the left that is disconcertingly common on the right. But I have to admit, they did have one that I think is very witty.

Swanwick

Michael Swanwick rules.

I first discovered him through his novel The Iron Dragon's Daughter. I was at the SF bookstore buying some Very Serious Stuff — I remember Samuel R. Delaney in the mix — and the clerk recommended Dragon. This was the original pocket edition, with cover art that just screamed “trashy fantasy novel” to someone versed in the nuances of such things. I was skeptical. The clerk described how it was set in a world of fairies who have a strange parallel to modern society, where college students take classes in Alchemy 101 and they sacrifice a virgin on the 50 yard line at the homecoming game. I was still skeptical. But I was a sucker, and bought the book.

I'm glad I did. It's dark, scary, smart, and has a wicked sense of humour. It's one of those things where every character you meet has a story to tell. And the “elves at the mall” shtick works much better than it sounds, especially if you know a thing or three about classical science.

Even better is his Jack Faust. I'm a guy with over a dozen Faust adaptations on his bookshelf, and this one is my favourite. It follows Gœthe's structure, with one major twist: when Mephistopholes reveals secrets to Faustus, central to them are the secrets of modern physics — and technology — meaning that Faust fast-forwards Europe through the industrial revolution back in the 14th Century.

Things don't work out so well for Faust.

I'm thinking of him because a little while ago, Teresa Neilsen Hayden posted a cool anecdote about him. And I've been meaning for quite some time to link to his online short short story collection The Periodic Table of Science Fiction. The doubled “short short” in my last sentence was intentional; you can read most of the stories in a minute or two.

But there's a hundred of them. Set aside some time.

What do you mean "strategy," Kemo Sabe?

Today's wise comment on our President's muddled thinking about Iraq is from Mark A. R. Kleiman.

You know the noise machine is sputtering when the lies aren't even good anymore. In reaction to John Murtha's call for a phased 6-month redeployment in Iraq, the President said "as long as I am commander in chief, our strategy in Iraq will be driven by the sober judgment of our military commanders on the ground."

Let's put aside for the moment the fact that this is a lie: the "sober judgment" of Gen. Eric Shinseki was that we needed more troops, and he was fired for his sobriety.

Instead, let's assume it's true: it still demonstrates manifest incompetence. Military commanders do not, and should not, determine our "strategy in Iraq" that job is for those who purport to be our political leaders. Iraq is a political problem: if our strategy is being driven solely by the military, it shows that we do not understand it.

A major reason why the Bush-Cheney strategy is so criminally incompetent is that it assumes that if we just blow up enough people, then we'll win. The job of creating a stable Iraq so far transcends that that it's little wonder we have been so unsuccessful. The Marines entered Baghdad, the statue came down, and we figured it was over. There was no political strategy following up because everything was entrusted to the military.

This also points to the wisdom of Murtha's saying that the military has done everything it could do: his point is that the military cannot be expected to solve a political problem. The Administration does not understand this.

Clearly, military necessities have to be an element in developing a coherent political strategy. But the political strategy drives the military, not vice-versa.

It's kind of a one-two punch: it's a lie, and it's a lie claiming something that would actually be bad if it were true ... or even made sense.

Turkey instructions

OK, one more thing today, for fun, in honour of Thanksgiving. President Bartlett's phone call with the Butterball hotline, from The West Wing

Operator: Hello, welcome to the Butterball Hotline.

Toby: What the hell is ...

Bartlet: Shhhh. Hello!!

Operator: How can I help you, sir?

Bartlet: Well, first let me say, I think this is a wonderful service you provide.

Operator: Well, thank you. May I have your name please?

Bartlet: I'm a citizen.

Operator: I'm sure you are, sir, but if I have your name I can put your comments in our customer feedback form.

Bartlet: [sighs] I'm Joe Betherson ... sen. That's one 't', and with an 'h' in there.

Operator: And your address?

Bartlet: Fargo.

Operator: Your street address, please?

Toby: [picks up another phone, into it] Zip code, Fargo, North Dakota, right now. [hangs up]

Bartlet: [with evident strain] My street address is 114 ... 54 Pruder Street, and it's very important that you put 'street' down there because sometimes it gets confused with Pruder Way and Pruder Lane. Apartment 23 R... Fargo, North Dakota ... [Charlie walks in with a piece of paper, Bartlet grabs it.] Zip code 50504.

Operator: Thank you. Your voice sounds very familiar to me.

Bartlet: I do radio commercials for ... products.

Operator: And how can I help you?

Bartlet: [sits down] Stuffing should be stuffed inside the turkey, am I correct?

Operator: It can also be baked in a casserole dish.

Bartlet: Well, then we'd have to call it something else, wouldn't we? [Toby sits down and puts his hand under his chin.]

Operator: I suppose.

Bartlet: If I cook it inside the turkey, is there a chance I could kill my guests? I'm not saying that's necessarily a deal-breaker.

Operator: Well, there are some concerns. Two main bacterial problems are salmonella and camplyobacter jejuna.

Bartlet: All right. Well, first of all, I think you made the second bacteria up, and second of all, how do I avoid it?

Operator: Make sure all the ingredients are cooked first. Sauté any vegetables, fried sausage, oysters, etc.

Bartlet: Excellent! Let's talk temperature.

Operator: One hundred and sixty-five degrees.

Bartlet: No, see, I was testing you! The USDA calls for turkeys to be cooked to an internal temperature of 180 to 185 degrees.

Operator: Yes, sir, I was talking about the stuffing which you want to cook to 165 to avoid health risks.

Bartlet: Okay. Good testing!

Operator: Do you have an accurate thermometer?

Bartlet: Oh yeah. It was presented to me as a gift from the personal sous chef to the King of ... [Toby raises his hand] auto sales in ...

Toby: [whispering] Fargo.

Bartlet: Fargo. Phil Baharnd. The man can sell a car like ... well, like anything.

Operator: Very good, sir. You have a good Thanksgiving!

Bartlet: And you do, too. Thanks a lot! [hangs up the phone] That was excellent! We should do that once a week.

Sorry. I've had dialogue screenwriting on the brain lately. Back to regular scheduled programming tomorrow.

Thanksgiving

I have lots to be thankful for. To spread it around, I won't be posting anything depressing about politics today.

Jeffy, Lord of Chaos

Via EricRed, who observes that this re-captioning trick is an old one, H. P. Lovecraft's Family Circus.

Sorkin

Warren Ellis has dirt on Studio 7, the series Aaron Sorkin is working on about a Saturday-Night-Live-ish comedy show.

The whole thing comes wrapped, of course, in that wonderful dialogue. Sorkin has a few phrases he loves the sound of, that I suspect come from his family or friends: "I hate his breathing guts" is a phrase that’s turned up in Wing (with a "your" in there), that always leaps out at me because I’ve never heard anyone else say it. Every writer has a few of those. It’s a nice little signature on the work, to be honest; it says there’s a single voice on the work, not a committee.

I'd actually never noticed that one. For serious Sorkin fans --- you know who you are --- a little Googling on that phrase reveals a lot of tiresome fan fiction, but also episode citatations.

In the Sports Night episode "April is the Cruelest Month," Natalie says

I hate Jeremy's breathing guts, but I love him like I've never loved anyone.

In The West Wing episode "17 People," we get this exchange, which I will reproduce for you because I'm a big fan.

Donna: Hello.
Josh: How ya doin'?
Donna: Fine.
Josh: Did you get the flowers?
Donna: Yes I did.
Josh: Did you like them?
Donna: They were very pretty.
Josh: Do you know why I sent them?
Donna: I know why you think you sent them.
Josh: It's our anniversary.
Donna: No it's not.
Josh: I'm the sort of guy who remembers those things.
Donna: No, you're the sort of guy who sends a woman flowers to be mean, and you're really the only person I ever met who can do that.
Josh: I'm really quite something.
Donna: Yes.
Josh: I sent them to mark an occasion ...
Donna: Are we really going to do this every year?
Josh: ... for I am a man of occasion.
Donna: I started working for you in February, this is April, and you are an idiot!
Josh: Well, you started working for me once in February and you stopped for a while.
Donna: Yes.
Josh: Then you started working for me again in April. That's the one I choose to celebrate, because its the only one were you started working for me, and it wasn't followed by not working, but rather going back to your boyfriend, and how in comparison to that and him you can call me mean is simply another in a long series of examples.
Donna: Oh shut up! Honest to God, do you ever get tired of the sound of your own voice?
Josh: No. No ... no.
Donna: Wha --- Where are you going now?
Josh: Sam am I are going to punch up the thing for tomorrow. Hey! We need funny people.
Donna: Yeah?
Josh: Do you know any? See, right there is a joke, it's the oldest joke in the book.
Donna: I'll say.
Josh: You know what, Ado Annie? I sent you flowers. I think what you are trying to say is, "Why Thank you Josh! They're beautiful! How very thoughtful of you! Not many bosses would have been that thoughtful!"
Donna: Really, because what I think I was trying to say was shove it!
Josh: OK, well then I guessed wrong.
Donna: (sigh) Do you want help with the thing?
Josh: Yes I do, because you are such an hysterically funny person. Did you notice how I used "an" there properly?
Donna: Yes I did.
Josh: You crack me up.
Donna: You know there are times ...
Josh: Yeah?
Donna: When I put it quite simply, I hate your breathing guts.
Josh: So the flowers really did the trick, huh?
Donna: Oh, yeah.

I was able to figure this out because some people are even bigger fans that I am, and maintain a list of parallel dialogue between The West Wing and Sports Night.

Procrastination

Not as cool as my superhero form, but being a South Park character offers its own amusements.

You can make your own, of course.

Blog Against Racism

Chris Clarke at Creek Running North has a proposal

declaring December 1, 2005 --- the 50th anniversary of Rosa Parks' heroic act of civil disobedience on that Montgomery bus --- "Blog Against Racism" day, in which people post something on the very broad and complex subject of racism. You don't need to have a political blog to participate. Race, after all, affects almost every aspect of life in one way or another. Your post might be literary in nature, or historical, or concern current issues in need of political attention. You might take the opportunity to debunk scientific racism, or write poetry or essays about personal experiences, uplifting or depressing.

With luck, the discussion engendered will endure past midnight on December 2.

To participate, announce the date in your blog sometime soon to encourage others to take part. And then on December 1, 2005, Blog Against Racism!

Count me in.