Passage

If you have any doubt that computer games are a valid and potentially serious art form, try playing Jason Rohrer's little gem, Passage. It's free and it takes mere seconds to download, and only a few minutes to play all the way through.

Though I guarantee you'll play it at least a second time.

Joel Johnson at bOING bOING Stuff says:

Where most games tell a story, Passage is just a sentence. But what a pregnant, forlorn sentence.

From start to finish, the game can be completed in five minutes. But there's no rush.

At Play This Thing the99th calls it “The Game That Almost Made Me Cry,” saying:

I'm talking about 8-color pixel sprites making me feel something that Final Fantasy could only pull off non-interactively with cheap (read: extremely expensive) parlor tricks of CG and professional voice acting.

Anthony Burch has a long review worth your time as well.

Mr Rohrer provides a creator's statement which is worth checking out, but don't make reading it a substitute for playing the game. He starts it by saying:

Your interpretation of the game is more important than my intentions. Please play the game before you read this.

Right.

The philosophy and psychology of fonts

Rands of Rands In Repose offers a Nerd Handbook for people conducting relationships with aspies, or at least folks in the foothills of Asperger's. There's a witty little aside about fonts which I really like.

He sees the world as a system which, given enough time and effort, is completely knowable. This is a fragile illusion that your nerd has adopted, but it’s a pleasant one that gets your nerd through the day. When the illusion is broken, you are going to discover that…

Your nerd has control issues. Your nerd lives in a monospaced typeface world. Whereas everyone else is traipsing around picking dazzling fonts to describe their world, your nerd has carefully selected a monospace typeface, which he avidly uses to manipulate the world deftly via a command line interface while the rest fumble around with a mouse.

The reason for this typeface selection is, of course, practicality. Monospace typefaces have a knowable width. Ten letters on one line are same width as ten other letters, which puts the world into a pleasant grid construction where X and Y mean something.

For the uninitiated:

This is an example of a monospaced font in 
action. Notice the way the letters line up; 
this is what most typewriters produced, back 
in the day. Monospaced fonts are useful for 
making ASCII art like this:

 ___________________          _-_
 \==============_=_/ ____.---'---`---.____
             \_ \    \----._________.----/
               \ \   /  /    `-_-'
           __,--`.`-'..'-_
          /____          ||
               `--.____,-'

... but being significantly less readable than the proportional fonts that post-Mac computers have made us accustomed to seeing, they're not good for much else. Unless you have a certain frame of mind which requires a certain kind of order.

For the record, I held onto monospaced fonts for my email for a little while — how else could I be sure I was seeing a .sig as intended? — but I'm not geeky enough to use them any more.

)O+

Mercury goes direct on Wednesday. Not soon enough for my taste.

You can guess the word

Noting along the way that I agree with Hilzoy that we should keep our rhetorical hands off of Sarah Palin's family, I have to say that Samantha Bee is my secret feminist girlfriend.

Holiday

It seems that today is World Mental Health Day.

Uh, okay.

No greater honour

From last year's long New Yorker article about The Wire, the best television show ever made.

Once, a man pressed a package of heroin into the hands of Andre Royo, the actor who plays the sympathetic junkie and police informant Bubbles, saying, “Man, you need a fix more than I do.” Royo refers to that moment as his “street Oscar.”

Swing voters

George Packer at The New Yorker pays a visit to Ohio. His article is full of heartbreaking stories of working class struggle that remind me how thankful I am for the life I have.

But it's mostly about politics ...

Every morning at seven, Cotter and Morris had coffee at Bonnie’s Home Cooking, on Main Street across from the gas station. The menu was scrawled in Magic Marker across a whiteboard, and almost nothing cost more than five dollars. On the morning I visited, a dozen men and women came in for their coffee and eggs. One of them, a retired union coal miner, was identified to me as if he were a rare species of bird. Three people, including Morris, expressed reluctant support for Obama. The nine or ten others were roughly split between voting McCain or sitting it out.

Dave Herbert was a stocky, talkative building contractor in an Ohio State athletic jersey. At thirty-eight, he considerably lowered the average age in Bonnie’s. “I’m self-employed,” he said. “I can’t afford to be a Democrat.” Herbert was a devoted viewer of Fox News and talked in fluent sound bites about McCain’s post-Convention “bounce” and Sarah Palin’s “executive experience.” At one point, he had doubted that Obama stood a chance in Glouster. “From Bob and Pete’s generation there are a lot of racists—not out-and-out, but I thought there was so much racism here that Obama’d never win.” Then he heard a man who freely used the “ ‘n’ word” declare his support for Obama: “That blew my theory out of the water.”

A maintenance man at the nearby high school, who declined to give his name, said that he had been undecided until McCain selected Palin to be his running mate, which swung his support to Obama.

“So you’re a sexist more than a racist,” Herbert joked.

“I just think the guy Obama picked would do better if he got assassinated than McCain’s if he died of frickin’ old age in office,” the maintenance man said.

Four women of retirement age were sitting at the next table. All of them spoke warmly of Palin. “She’d fit right in with us,” Greta Jennice said. “We should invite her over.” None had a good word to say about Obama. “I think he’s a radical,” a white-haired woman who wouldn’t give her name said. “The church he went to, the people he associated with. You don’t see the media digging into that.”

“I don’t know anyone who’s for Obama,” said Jennice, a Democrat who supported Hillary Clinton and who won’t vote in November.

“If they are, they don’t say it, because it would be unpopular,” an elderly former teacher named Marcella said. That had not been true of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, or John Kerry, she added.

“I think the party-line Democrats are having a hard time with Obama,” Bobbie Dunham, a retired fourth-grade teacher, told me. When I asked if Obama’s health-care plan wouldn’t be a good thing for people in Glouster, she said, “I’ll believe it when I see it. If it’s actually happening, I’d say that’s good.” But she and the others had far more complaints about locals freeloading off public assistance than about the health-insurance industry and corporations. Dunham declared her intention to write in a vote for either Snoopy or T. Boone Pickens. “I’m not going to vote for a Republican—they’ve had their chance for the last eight years and they’ve screwed it up,” she said. “But I really just don’t trust Obama. He only says half-truths. He calls himself a Christian, but he only became one to run for office. He calls himself a black, but he’s two-thirds Arab.”

Remind me why I claim to believe in democracy?

I should say, though, that Eric Martin at Obsidian Wings reads the same article and finds hope for the better angels of our nature.

of particular concern to Obama supporters is the potential for a “Bradley Effect” on election day — or lower than expected turnout driven by racial animus
....
However, there are also indications that there might be an opposite Bradley reaction (Bradley 3.0) that could, even if not fully, at least somewhat counteract the effects of Bradley 1.0 and 2.0. The newest version, an anti-Bradley really, is based on the theory that in some regions, supporting a black candidate is so unpopular that residents and, at times poll respondents, conceal their prefernce for the black candidate.

He finds this in Mr Packer's article; the emphasis is Mr Martin's:

“I don’t know anyone who’s for Obama,” said Jennice, a Democrat who supported Hillary Clinton and who won’t vote in November.

“If they are, they don’t say it, because it would be unpopular,” an elderly former teacher named Marcella said. That had not been true of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, or John Kerry, she added. [...]

As the guests drank sodas and ate pigs in a blanket in Babe Walker’s living room, Gwinn asked for volunteers to make phone calls and go door to door. There were not many takers. “Local validators are very important,” she said, with urgency. “A lot of people are secretly for Barack, but they’re afraid to go public. You know everyone in this town. So if there’s anybody out there with misinformation, you have to find them and say, ‘It’s not true. He’s not a Muslim.’ ” Seeing an Obama sign in a neighbor’s yard could make a huge difference in a place like Glouster, she said.

Mr Martin has more to support the claim. Which really tells us that there's no saying what will really happen on election day. Cross your fingers.

Eating the seed grain

Alex Steffen at World Changing frames our problem well.

One way to wrap our brains around the implications of that many people sharing a small planet is to do some math, divide up the usable part of the globe by the number of folks who want to use it. This would give us a sense of what a fair share would be for each of us.

To be really fair, though, we should probably not use up everything right away. Our kids and grandkids may want to eat, drink and breathe, too. So, we should probably only take as much as we can while allowing nature to renew itself.

It's like when people plan for retirement. You save money — build up a investment portfolio, say — and then try to live on the revenue those investments create. In this case, our natural “capital” is a gift we've inherited simply by having the good luck to evolve on such a bountiful planet. And in using that capital, we should leave enough nature undestroyed that future generations can draw upon it as well. We should leave the capital alone and live off the interest.

So, really, we don't have an entire planet to use, if we're being fair about it. We don't even have a quarter of the planet to use. What we have, if we're being fair, is that portion of the planet that we can use without trashing nature so badly that our grandkids are reduced to grubbing for withered tubers in a world of cockroaches and weeds — divided by the number of people who want to use it.

How much nature is that per person? Well, luckily, some ecogeeks have worked that out for us. They've found a way to measure the impacts of our lives on the planet, what they call our “ecological footprints.” In a fair and sustainable world, these ecological footprints would work out — in Matthis Wackernegel's equations, which really smart people seem to think are pretty accurate, if not perhaps a bit optimistic — to about 1.9 hectares per person (that's 4.7 acres). In other words, if you divided the usable part of the world up by the number of people who want to use it, we'd each have find a way to meet our needs sustainably from the bounty of a little under 2 hectares.

Unfortunately, we're already using an average 2.3 hectares per person, planetwide. To make matters worse, our sustainable share of the planet is shrinking. Part of this is a natural result of population growth: divide the planet by more people and you get a smaller piece of land.

But the planet is shrinking for another reason: we're using it up. We each get 1.9 hectares, and we're already using 2.3. Where's the extra half a hectare coming from? It's coming from nature's capital. Every year, we cut more forests, graze more cows, drive more miles, dump more trash — gobble up more stuff, and spit out more waste. And since we're already gobbling and spitting more than the planet can sustainably take, the result is that every year nature has less to offer us. To make matters worse, this spiral seems to be accelerating and the gap between sustainability and reality widening.

Here too, really geeky guys with supercomputers have gone to work, and one thing they've found is pretty shocking: as they'd put it, we're already using between 40 and 50% of the world's “net primary productivity.” What that means, for those of us whom math makes sleepy, is that humans are using about half of all the life on earth — that about half of all the plants, insects, microbes and mammals alive on the earth are being sucked into the systems that go to feed our needs.

The mighty dead

 
 
 

I lost a friend yesterday. We knew it was coming, but still ...

I can't think of anything to say in this space.

Protocol

Emily Post, Etiquette, 1922.

The “Cut Direct”

For one person to look directly at another and not acknowledge the other’s bow is such a breach of civility that only an unforgivable misdemeanor can warrant the rebuke. Nor without the gravest cause may a lady “cut” a gentleman. But there are no circumstances under which a gentleman may “cut” any woman who, even by courtesy, can be called a lady.

On the other hand, one must not confuse absent-mindedness, or a forgetful memory with an intentional “cut.” Anyone who is preoccupied is apt to pass others without being aware of them, and without the least want of friendly regard. Others who have bad memories forget even those by whom they were much attracted. This does not excuse the bad memory, but it explains the seeming rudeness.

A “cut” is very different. It is a direct stare of blank refusal, and is not only insulting to its victim but embarrassing to every witness. Happily it is practically unknown in polite society.

---

Update: It turns out they did shake hands.

Test

Robert Heinlein's juvenile novel Space Cadet has this terrific passage where teenagers wanting to join the Space Patrol are subjected to a series of tests: getting spun in centrifuges, operating faux spaceship controls while being shaken around, and so forth. This test has always stuck out in my mind:

Late in the day he was ushered into a cubbyhole containing a chair, a gadget mounted on a desk, pencil and paper, and framed directions.

“If any score from a previous test,” Matt read, “appears in the window marked SCORE, return the starting lever to the position marked NEUTRAL to clear the board for your test.”

Matt found the window labeled “SCORE”; it had a score showing in it—“37.” Well, he thought, that gives me a mark to shoot at. He decided not to clear the board until he had read the instructions.

“After the test starts,” he read, “a score of ‘1’ will result each time you press the lefthand button except as otherwise provided here below. Press the lefthand button whenever the red light appears provided the green light is not lighted as well except that no button should be pressed when the righthand gate is open unless all lights are out. If the righthand gate is open and the lefthand gate is closed, no score will result from pressing any button, but the lefthand button must nevertheless be pressed under these circumstances if all other conditions permit a button to be pressed before any score may be made in in succeeding phases of the test. To put out the green light, press the righthand button. If the lefthand gate is not closed, no button may be pressed. If the lefthand gate is closed while the right light is lighted, do not press the lefthand button if the green light is out unless the righthand gate is open. To start the test move the starting lever from neutral all the way to the right. The test runs for two minutes from the time you move the starting lever to the right. Study these instructions, then select your own time for commencing the test. You are not permitted to ask questions of the examiner, so be sure that you understand the instructions. Make as high a score as possible.”

“Whew!” said Matt.

Still, the test looked simple—one lever, two pushbuttons, two colored lights, two little gates. Once he mastered the instructions, it would be as easy as flying a kite, and a durn sight simpler than flying a copter!—Matt had had his copter license since he was twelve. He got to work.

First, he told himself, there seems to be just two ways to make a score, one with the red light on and one with both lights out and one gate open.

Now for the other instructions— Let's see, if the lefthand gate is not closed—no, if the lefthand gate is closed—he stopped and read them again.

Some minutes later he had sixteen possible positions of gates and conditions of lights listed. He checked them against the instructions, seeking scoring combinations. When he was through he stared at the result, then checked everything over again.

After rechecking he stared at the paper, whistled tunelessly, and scratched his head. Then he picked up the paper, left the booth, and went to the examiner.

That official looked up. “No questions, please.”

“I don't have a question,” Matt said. “I want to report something. There's something wrong with that test. Maybe the wrong instructions sheet was put in there. In any case, there is no possible way to make a score under the instructions that are in there.”

“Oh, come, now!” the examiner answered. “Are you sure of that?”

Matt hesitated, then answered firmly, “I'm sure of it. Want to see my proof?”

“No. Your name is Dodson?” The examiner glanced at a timer, then wrote on a chart. “That's all.”

“But— Don't I get a chance to make a score?”

“No questions, please! I've recorded your score. Get along—it's dinner time.”

Tricky!

McCain

Looking for a full-throated critique of how John McCain is not the man who has been sold to us? Tim Dickinson's article Make-Believe Maverick in this week's Rolling Stone delivers the goods.

This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

Seriously. Did you know that McCain has cost the US five airplanes? You've heard about the one that was shot down, I'm sure ... but then there are four that he crashed. Taking out five planes makes you an ace, right?

Approximations

The post Assume a Spherical Physicist at The First Excited State brings back happy memories of when I was in school. I never mastered thermogoddamics, but I was a whiz at rapid approximations.

• It’s on the order of…

This is the jargon that physicists use when we are doing really rough estimates. Often, you don’t care what the actual numerical value of something is, you just want to know whether it’s about a meter, a nanometer, or a kilometer. This gives us free license to be sloppy. Pi is equal to 3, or 1 if we really feel like it. We don’t have to remember whether the equation has a factor of 2 in it, or the exact values of constants, and we can feel free to make any of the other approximations as we see fit. These calculations are sometimes called “back of the envelope calculations,” since we might work them out on any scrap of paper lying around, as the answer will not be quite worth saving. This is not to say that the answer is unimportant, however, as the calculation can give us a conceptual understanding of how the system in question behaves.

The new blog Shores of the Dirac Sea has a nice list of how such approximations are called in the jargon of technical papers:

• “Toy model”: hopefully this model has something to do with the original problem that I couldn’t do.
• “This is a very rough approximation”: We are calling a spherical cow a spherical cow. If you are lucky the order of magnitude is right.
• “An approximation”: One can probably do better, but this is all I can do now.
• “To zero-th order”: This suggests that there is a systematic way to improve the calculation: these are called first order, second order, etc.
• “An uncontrolled approximation”: Something that seems to work even if I don’t know why.

One of my profs used to say, “The most important thing is physics is to make an even number of sign errors, so that you are right about whether the result is positive or negative.”

Spoooooky

Since I know I have readers who dig that sort of thing (including myself, for later reference) I offer this handsome set of alchemical symbols.

Exactly what I saw

On dKos, via Veleda.

White Dahlia

Ganked entire from Warren Ellis:

Lucius Shepherd's Larisa Miusov

A peculiar, manic-depressive little story about Hollywood, the way men think about women, and being Russian. In three parts. 1 2 3. Shepard remains a gloomy, drunken wizard with language.

If you liked that, I strongly recommend his novel A Handbook of American Prayer.

Education

William Deresiewicz writing at The American Scholar reflects on what elite universities produce.

There is something wrong with the smugness and self-congratulation that elite schools connive at from the moment the fat envelopes come in the mail. From orientation to graduation, the message is implicit in every tone of voice and tilt of the head, every old-school tradition, every article in the student paper, every speech from the dean. The message is: You have arrived. Welcome to the club. And the corollary is equally clear: You deserve everything your presence here is going to enable you to get. When people say that students at elite schools have a strong sense of entitlement, they mean that those students think they deserve more than other people because their sat scores are higher.
....
An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead once you get there. I didn’t understand this until I began comparing my experience, and even more, my students’ experience, with the experience of a friend of mine who went to Cleveland State. There are due dates and attendance requirements at places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late.

That may be an extreme example, but it is unthinkable at an elite school. Just as unthinkably, she had no one to appeal to. Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down. They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent bureaucracy; it’s not handed to them in individually wrapped packages by smiling clerks. There are few, if any, opportunities for the kind of contacts I saw my students get routinely—classes with visiting power brokers, dinners with foreign dignitaries.
....
In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.”
....
For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the year-end bonus, the dividend. If Al Gore and John Kerry represent one of the characteristic products of an elite education, George W. Bush represents another. It’s no coincidence that our current president, the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale. Entitled mediocrity is indeed the operating principle of his administration, but as Enron and WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated, it’s also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-. Anyone who remembers the injured sanctimony with which Kenneth Lay greeted the notion that he should be held accountable for his actions will understand the mentality in question—the belief that once you’re in the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club. But you don’t need to remember Ken Lay, because the whole dynamic played out again last year in the case of Scooter Libby, another Yale man.

He also points out something I realized when I was a high school kid. People were surprised that I, a pretty sharp cookie, was not motivated to want to pursue admission to a famous Ivy. I had already caught on that the college admissions process is not only a test of intellect, it's a test of temperament.

There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty.
....
Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there. Long before they got to college, they turned themselves into world-class hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers, getting A’s in every class no matter how boring they found the teacher or how pointless the subject, racking up eight or 10 extracurricular activities no matter what else they wanted to do with their time. Paradoxically, the situation may be better at second-tier schools and, in particular, again, at liberal arts colleges than at the most prestigious universities. Some students end up at second-tier schools because they’re exactly like students at Harvard or Yale, only less gifted or driven. But others end up there because they have a more independent spirit. They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t be bothered to give everything in every class. They concentrated on the ones that meant the most to them or on a single strong extracurricular passion or on projects that had nothing to do with school or even with looking good on a college application. Maybe they just sat in their room, reading a lot and writing in their journal. These are the kinds of kids who are likely, once they get to college, to be more interested in the human spirit than in school spirit, and to think about leaving college bearing questions, not resumés.

Search

MyWiseBunny.com is a tool for browsing CraigsList pictures.

Today's quote

Alaska politician Andrew Halcro, describing what it's like to debate Sarah Palin, quotes her saying this:

Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies, and I'm amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, “Does any of this really matter?”

That's contemporary American politics in a nutshell, ain't it?

Magnitude

Many times I've been with people out on a cool, dark night and they say that looking at the stars makes them feel small. But when I look out at the night sky, I think to myself how amazing it is that I can see so far.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has more on that subject.

L'shana tovah

Let's make this a good one, eh?

The Evil League of Evil is watching, so beware!

Ooh, very exciting news from the Evil League of Evil. Now if only I could think of a supervillain name as cool as “Fake Thomas Jefferson.”

The rumblings you've been hearing in the criminal underground since July indeed are true: At long last, we are seeking new applicants to the League.

Aspirants to new heights of Evil should submit a video application ...

Their most recent member being, of course, Dr Horrible, who has a Ph.D. in horribleness.

Craven

Ganked entire from DeLong:

John McCain: Dishonest and Dishonorable

Hoisted from Comments: The best comment on John McCain's campaign suspension that I have seen:

Neal: It's a tough job being a windsock in a tornado.

Secretary Paulson, the leaders of both houses, the chairs and ranking members of the relevant committess--all were on the same page and working toward a financial deal that Paulson and Bernanke, solid Republicans, say is needed now.

John McCain announces he is suspending his campaign, cancels on David Letterman, gets made-up for and does an interview with Katie Couric, goes and talks to the Clinton Global Initiatiive the following day, persuades Bush to call a meeting at the White House, gets to Washington DC in the afternoon, goes and talks to the House Republicans, goes to the meeting, sits in the back of the meeting and is evasive, and when the meeting breaks up, three things are clear:

• John McCain won't say what financial rescue packages he supports or opposes.
• George W. Bush won't say that support for Paulson is a test of Republican loyalty.
• The House Republican caucus doesn't support their leaders.
• The House Republican caucus doesn't have an alternative plan.

That's quite an accomplishment. It is hard to read it any other way than as John McCain rallying the House Republicans to blow up the bipartisan agreement that was being negotiated. The House Republicans don't want to do anything to hold CEOs accountable, to protect taxpayers, protect homeowners, or provide oversight. The Treasury rejected the not-quite-ideas they put forward at the White House meeting last week.

John McCain and the House Republicans blew up the deal because he doesn't want to debate Barack Obama tonight, and thinks that this is a way he can get out of having to do so.

We'll see if it can be put back together.

Emphasis mine.

Newspeak

Ezra Klein observes that Sarah Palin has become a doubleplus ungood duckspeaker.

These aren't lies she's telling. It's not misdirection, or deception. It's just nonsense. It exists in a realm beyond where truth is a relevant concept, more akin to the utterances of sleeptalkers than to the prevarications of politicians. I always figured that Palin's trouble on the trail would come when she was exposed to the obscure questions of governance: Queries on drug policy and Afghani tribes and Medicare reimbursement. But instead, she's collapsing on the big questions, the issues that she should be able to dispatch with a memorized soundbite. What's going on?

From the appendix to Orwell's 1984, “The Principles of Newspeak:”

The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument ....

Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning “to quack like a duck”. Like various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when the Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment.

Spam

Via Content Love Knowles

From: Minister of the Treasury Paulson
Subject: REQUEST FOR URGENT CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully
Minister of Treasury Paulson

Arrr!

It be International Talk Like a Pirate Day today, me hearties!

Arrr!

Note

David Foster Wallace
1962-2008
Author¹

It seems that he hanged himself.

He wrote with brio and heart, and if his stylistic pyrotechnics were occasionally a bit much² he never indulged in them at the expense of actual content and meaning. Laura Miller at Salon offers a touching remembrance.

He wrote about the maddening impossibility of scrutinizing yourself without also scrutinizing yourself scrutinizing yourself and so on, ad infinitum, a vertiginous spiral of narcissism — because not even the most merciless self-examination can ignore the probability that you are simultaneously congratulating yourself for your soul-searching, that you are posing. He tried so hard to be sincere and to attend to the world around him because he was excruciatingly aware of how often we are merely “sincere” and “attentive” and all too willing to leave it at that.

I, for one, will miss his work.

---

1. Though he is perhaps more properly remembered as a novelist and occasional writer of short stories, my own love for his work was instead for his essays^a, which obviously consumed so much of his attention that I wonder if the fiction was not, in fact, to some extent an attempt to bolster the literary respectability of his non-fiction writing.
2. Most famously in his vigorous and whimsical overuse of footnotes.

1. The first work of his I read, a very long essay in Vanity Fair about the politics within the world of professional tennis which almost frightened me by being so fascinating in spite of being so very far outside my usual sphere of interest.

9/11

Each year I try to find something that reminds me how I felt at the time.

For your reflection, I offer archives from The Onion: their masterful first issue after 9/11, which managed to make the Onion voice relevant to the times. Funny, incisive, and even moving.

My personal favourite article: God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don't Kill’ Rule.

“I tried to put it in the simplest possible terms for you people, so you'd get it straight, because I thought it was pretty important,” said God, called Yahweh and Allah respectively in the Judaic and Muslim traditions. “I guess I figured I'd left no real room for confusion after putting it in a four-word sentence with one-syllable words, on the tablets I gave to Moses. How much more clear can I get?”

“But somehow, it all gets twisted around and, next thing you know, somebody's spouting off some nonsense about, ‘God says I have to kill this guy, God wants me to kill that guy, it's God's will,’ ” God continued. “It's not God's will, all right? News flash: ‘God's will’ equals ‘Don't murder people.’ ”

Potlatch

My new apartment being quite small, I'm purging some stuff. Two things I'd rather give to friends than Craigslist strangers:

• A big old solid wood desk. Rather battered, but still handsome, and the drawers move smoothly. Comes with a wood swivel chair which is surprisingly comfortable, and even more surprisingly heavy.
• A full set of trade paperbacks for Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon's comic book series Preacher. It's about love, sex, violence, scatological humor, the great state of Texas, and the search for God — but if you want it, you probably know all about that.

Status report

Burning Man was grand. My stuff is now in my new apartment. I am in total disarray as I settle in, but I do have internet and toilet paper. More when I can find the box containing my socks.