The stupidity of our enemies

"We are truly fortunate in the stupidity of our enemies."

Thus said a friend of mine as we discussed a breaking news story. After looking over the story myself, I can only agree.

A terrorist group which claims to be the same ones who killed Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni has taken two French journalists hostage, and is threatening to make them shorter by the head if France doesn't rescind its ban on the wearing of headscarves in public schools.

My friend called particular attention to this quote from the above-linked story...

The crisis stunned France, which campaigned against the 2003 invasion of Iraq and so had considered itself relatively safe from militant attack. France also opposed the 1990-2003 economic sanctions on Iraq.

Imagine that! The French thought they were safe because they opposed the United States—perhaps trusting in the terrorists to honor the old Arabic proverb, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." But then they went and discriminated against Muslims (and, to be fair, Christians and Jews) in schools, and voila...funny how that works.

You might be wondering, even so, how the terrorists could be so stupid as to attack the closest thing to a friend they had in the Western world—one of the only Western countries that consistently stuck up for Iraq, even if they might have been doing it more for the sake of opposing us than helping Iraq. This was the nation that campaigned so heavily against the USA, that got on so many American nerves that it led to restaurants renaming French Fries to "Freedom Fries." (We certainly didn't change food names for any of the other countries that opposed us. German chocolate didn't become "freedom chocolate"—we didn't even go back to calling sauerkraut "liberty cabbage" like we did in World War I.) You'd think the terrorists would be smart enough to leave them alone as an example of a their philosophy of, "You scratch our back, we don't shoot you in yours."

The fundamental problem is explained in this article that looks at the email files on the hard drives of captured al-Queda computers. Despite what people may think, there isn't any one monolithic terrorist faction over there in Iraq, but a loose coalition made up of a lot of niggling little groups, each of which has differences in philosophy, goals, tactics, and so forth from all the others. As the article points out, the real reason for the 9/11 attacks was not so much to give us a black eye as it was to provide a rallying point to draw all the terrorist groups closer together, to get them to present a united front.

But now that we've been playing havoc with the communication network of terrorist groups over there, apparently Osama doesn't have as tight a hold on the reins as he needs—and this in turn leads to terrorist groups going around chopping the heads off of American journalists, Italian journalists, and apparently now French journalists, right when it might be better all around for the terrorists to lay low for a while and let the outside world's memories grow hazy. It only takes one bad apple to spoil the whole bunch, and it only takes one group of stupid terrorists to ruin things for all the reasonably intelligent ones.

The problem this particular terrorist group seems to have is that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. They're so accustomed to solving their problems with terror and executions that, when a country does something that offends them, their only tool for forcing change is, yes, more terror and executions. Even if that country had stuck up for them in the past.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I certainly hope, for the sake of those journalists and their families, that France and the terrorists can come to some sort of accomodation. But even if they do, that just means the terrorists will be emboldened to take even more action against France in the future. Either way, I suspect the French (and those who joined them in their opposition) may be starting to take a slightly less rosy view of the Middle East now...

I guess we truly are fortunate in the stupidity of our enemies.

Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro — The Commentary Track

Roger Ebert is one of my favorite movie critics. He's thoughtful and insightful most times, he's a fan of Miyazaki just as I am, and he goes beyond the status of mere reviewer into being an authority on movies. When Alex Proyas made Dark City, it was Ebert to whom he turned for a commentary track comparing it to Metropolis. Also, I have an inordinate amount of respect and sympathy for someone who has to sit through every bad movie Hollywood makes without even Joel and the bots to keep him company. But another neat thing about Ebert is, he also has some pretty good original ideas from time to time.

A couple of years ago, my interest was piqued by a Slashdot story which featured a link to a column by Ebert that talked about the idea of do-it-yourself DVD audio commentary tracks. The idea was that broadband and digital audio technology gave anyone the power to sit down with a microphone and a DVD and roll his own mp3 audio track—be it for critical purposes, MST3K loonery, or what-have-you. It would even qualify as fair use—it's just a review like any other, except instead of reading it in print, you let it unroll as the movie happens.

Ebert wrote,

This idea intrigues me because I know there are critics and fans on the Web who have a special relationship to movies that even a film's makers can't duplicate. I'm curious, for example, about the depth of the fanaticism for the martial arts and anime genres. I can understand why Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Princess Mononoke are great, but it might be enlightening to listen to a running commentary about Revenge of the Drunken Master or the Sailor Moon series. I would also like to hear a psychologist analyzing Memento, a Vietnam combat veteran talking about Platoon, or Harry Knowles taking us one shot at a time through The Giant Gila Monster, one of the neglected classics he has resurrected for his annual birthday Butt-Numb-a-Thon.

The idea intrigued quite a few other people, too—and so DVDTracks.com was born. Alas, the site became defunct sometime in early 2005. However, archive.org still has a snapshot. And the idea lives on; you can now find alternate commentaries hosted and aggregated at Commentary Central, and another list as well as a Windows DVD player specially designed for playing them at Sharecrow. These sites serve as directories for downloadable mp3 commentary tracks recorded by fans for particular movies, as well as providing a how-to guide for folks interested in trying it themselves. Aside from the Slashdot story, DVDTracks received coverage in Salon Magazine, Pioneer Press, and Lawmeme.

Now, as it happened, there was a movie—one of my all-time favorites—that had recently been released on DVD without any commentary at all, and I thought that just wasn't right. And due to a confluence of factors, I had become sort of a mini-expert into this movie's background and history—so here was a chance to set things right. And so my commentary track to Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro was born. (Since the mp3 link on that page won't work, you can download the audio track for it here or here. Right-click the link and choose "save as," otherwise your browser may try to play it instead of downloading it.)

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Note: I revise the commentary track from time to time, whenever I make a new discovery or find out that I was wrong about something, and list the date of revision in the Comments field of the id3 tag. The most recent revision was made on 08/24/06. If your file is older than that, please download the current version.

Update (7/16/2006): In the last few months, after I learned a few more things about Castle of Cagliostro, or received corrections and alterations to my review, I went back into it and fixed some segments and rerecorded others, adding substantially more information and observations. There are still a few things I probably need to add or fix, so the commentary will probably never be entirely finished—but that's just how life is sometime.

Update (8/28/2006): In honor of the two-year anniversary of this essay, I decided to do something special to help folks get the most out of this track. If you are interested in using the Sharecrow Windows DVD player to experience the commentary track, and take some of the gruntwork out of keeping it synchronized, I've made the following .crow files for use with it. Right-click the link and choose "save as," download the .crow file into the same directory as the audio commentary track, then open it from the Sharecrow program's "Profile" screen menu. For watching with…

• the original Manga Video R1 DVD (with climbing Lupin on the cover): use the .crow found here or here
• the Manga Video R1 Special Edition DVD (with Lupin carrying Clarice on the cover): use the .crow found here or here

Because the Special Edition's menus are authored slightly differently, its crow will result in losing the first 13.3 seconds of the commentary track to ensure the rest is properly synchronized. Annoying, but it can't be helped; and it's just me introducing myself anyway. If you like, you can play that part separately before you start the movie.

For either version, Sharecrow will also cut off the last minute or so where I kept on talking after the movie ended, but you can play that separately too. Besides, I probably talk too much anyway.

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Directed by Hayao Miyazaki, Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro was the second cinematic outing (but the first really popular one) for Japanese author Monkey Punch's "Lupin III" manga and anime character. Lupin III was supposedly the grandson of an early-20th-century French character named Arsene Lupin, written by French novelist Maurice Leblanc; of all Lupin III's outings, Cagliostro was probably the closest in spirit to, and most directly inspired by, these earlier works. As it happened, I already knew a great deal about both the Lupin III character and the original Arsene Lupin character, from diligent research and from seeking out and reading electronic and physical copies of the old public domain Lupin novels. In fact, I even sent a couple of the books I had found—Arsene Lupin and The Hollow Needle—to be scanned and added to Project Gutenberg; I'm very proud of the fact that thanks to me, now anyone who wants to do so can read those glorious old books. (I suggest starting with the first Lupin book, The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar, though.)

But to do a good job on the commentary track, I needed more. I needed to avail myself of every resource available on the Internet, to become a super-expert. I searched and read voraciously, coming up with sites like Cool French Comics's Lupin page, Anna Exter's regrettably defunct Nighthood site, the Lupin III Encyclopedia, The Mystica's article on the original Count Cagliostro—and, of course, Nausicaa.net and the Miyazaki Mailing List, of which I was already a member.

And oh, the things I found out! I started learning facts and making connections that I had never realized before. I had known that there was some Cagliostro person in some of the original Lupin novels, but I had never known that Castle of Cagliostro actually borrowed elements (whether intentionally or coincidentally) from several of the Leblanc books—and I had never known that there really was a notorious figure named Cagliostro who figured prominently into French history. I also learned some interesting things regarding idioms used in the anime from comments on the Miyazaki mailing list by a fan who was working on his own translation of the movie for a personal fansub. (I wish I could link to the mailing list posts in question, but the list administrators made the archives private in an effort to make trolling the mailing list less attractive.) I could go on and on about what I found out—but then you wouldn't have any reason to listen to the commentary track, would you?

Once the research phase was over, I commenced taking notes. I took a pad of index cards and marked each one with a three-minute segment, then I watched through the movie so as to write down a brief summary of what happened in each segment. This would be my guide in coming up with things to say about the film over the course of its hundred-minute running length. After that, I jotted some notes down, watched the movie again, and jotted more notes down. Some cards barely had a couple of lines, such as, "Zippo lighters?" and "Miyazaki's changes to Lupin. This Lupin most like original." Other cards were very full, even written on the back.

Here's the complete text of one of the busier cards, written front and back:

12:00-15:00 — Burned-out castle, groundskeeper, Lupin uses columns as stepping stones, looks at ring.

BIG BEARDS The "real" Count Cagliostro born 1743 Palermo, Giuseppe Balsamo Dabbled in alchemy as a way to con rich people out of money Travelled world investigating occult & alchemy, invested in Egyptian Freemasonry Founded Masonic Lodges across Europe Was popular in France until 1785, involved in events leading to French Revolution, banished Sentenced to death for heresy by Inquisition Commuted to life imprisonment Died in Castle of San Leo near Montefeltro in 1795 [Reminder: look at columns, water gate. HANDS ON CLOCK!] Castle part of small city-state called San Marino—not unlike Vatican Landscape seen in chase scenes identical Castle not.

Once I was finished taking notes, the next phase began. This was where I set myself up with my microphone, my CoolEdit audio recording program, my DVD player, and a pair of earphones (so the DVD audio wouldn't pollute the commentary track). I started watching, reading, and talking. I actually recorded it in several segments, so I wouldn't get too tired or bored or throatsore from talking for too long. Then I went back, listened to it while watching the movie yet again (by the time I was finished, I was definitely ready not to watch Cagliostro for a while), and subsequently recorded over a few places where I'd made mistakes, been unclear, or left omissions.

Although DVDTracks and Ebert suggest splitting the recording up into mp3s to match the chapter stops, that was a bit too fiddly for me, and I didn't quite have the level of expertise with CoolEdit to do anything that fancy. After I'd gotten the wav file as good as I felt I could get it, I compressed it down and ended up with an 18 megabyte mp3 file, which I put on my website and linked into DVDTracks.

After that, there wasn't much to do but wait. People downloaded the track, and I guess they listened to it, but I've never received very much feedback—in spite of the track reaching number six on DVDTracks's "most active tracks" tally with 1190 hits as of the writing of this article. The only quality-rating I've ever received was the one I entered myself, and nobody's left any notes on the commentary track page. I even emailed the link to Ebert himself, since he'd inspired it, and got back a terse "Thanks" with no indication of whether or not he had listened to the commentary or intended to. Still, almost 1200 downloads isn't bad. And in spite of not receiving much feedback, I was contacted by a representative of a company that was going to be making a live-action Lupin III movie to ask if I would like to consult for them. (I've never heard back from them since, though.)

In making the track, would I have done anything differently? Well, a few things. It would be nice to fix a few places in the track where I start to talk about something, then switch to something else and don't go back to what I was originally saying. I'd really like to be able to do something about the background noise on the recording. I wanted some way to filter it all out, to tell the program "any time where the noise level is below X decibels, drop it to zero," but in all my tinkering, I never could manage to make CoolEdit do that. I manually muted a few long stretches of silence (which had the effect of causing some people to think that something had gone wrong with their mp3 player) but I couldn't go through and manually mute every bit of silence. I would also have liked to work out how to alter the speed of the recording for people in countries with PAL players where movies are about 5% faster.

But all things considered, I feel really good about having this recording out there, where I get to play the expert and introduce people who might already enjoy Lupin III to the bigger world surrounding his history and influences. The occasional feedback I get makes me feel good about it, too. Hopefully, it will result in a few more people reading these classic novels, which really are extraordinarily good.

I had hoped that the Cagliostro commentary track might cause more people in the anime community to start putting out commentaries of their own. I would love to be able to listen to a track by some of the Miyazaki Mailing List experts on other Miyazaki movies, like Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away—people who are super-experts in Japanese culture as well as Miyazaki, and would be able to point out little moments of significance that would go right over my head. Unfortunately, it hasn't, and that's a real pity. There really should be commentaries for these movies, because they're movies of such great social significance...but I just don't feel qualified to make them.

Ad-itude Adjustment

Those of you not using RSS may have noticed a Google text ad appear on this page in the last few hours; if you scroll down a couple of screens from where you are at the moment and look to the right, you'll see it right there. No, this page isn't exactly in danger of vanishing from bandwidth costs (alas). In fact, I don't really expect to make much money at all from it. A friend using the same ad system got 15,000 unique views of his page yesterday—and toted up about $4 in ad revenue. So far, I've earned approximately enough to buy a single stick of gum. Given that Google doesn't cut a check until you make the $100 mark, I think I've got a ways to go yet.

So, really, it's not that important to me if you skip clicking on the ads. If I were dependent on advertising revenue to run the site, I wouldn't be running the site at all. No, part of the reason I put the ads up is that I have a huge amount of respect for the unobtrusive, unannoying way in which Google does advertising, and I want to reward that behavior by inviting them into my site. But the larger part is due to the way Google does its ads: they try to pick ads appropriate to the content of the particular page.

When you look at the ads on my journal's main page, you see Google's thoughts about the "average" of everything that's been posted to the visible part of my journal. If you click on one of the article links in the right-hand column, you get to see what Google thinks for that one individual article. Thus, not only do I get to advertise, but I get to "read Google's mind" and see what they think might interest the people who read my articles and other pages.

The results have been mixed, but amusingly so. My Minerva shrine and my Jordan Greywolf art gallery both get topically appropriate ads (for Transformers or toys and Furry stuff or other art stuff, respectively) at the bottom of their particular pages. Likewise, my iPod/Flatscreen conga line gets ads for iPods and flatscreens—in some cases, ads directly from the freeipod.com or freeflatscreen.com people themselves (although for some reason a couple of ads from the Netherlands pop up there, too). What has struck me is the remarkably large number of cases where my journal and the ads next to the journal are humorously at odds.

Click on my screed about how Hollywood's screwed up Catwoman, and you see ads for Catwoman costumes. Click on my first, second, or third article about annoying things President Bush has done, and you'll find mostly ads for Conservative causes. (You'll also often find them on Liberal political journals, such as John P. Hoke's Asylum in the sidebar. I'll bet they find that annoying.) Click on my rant about how Coke has been turning schools and the Olympics into its own marketing indoctrination camps, and there's a big panel of nothing but ads for Coke collectibles. (Oy.) My story about a flight attendant costing an airline $700,000 by panicking over a barf bag marked "Bob" and my article on Senator Kennedy's trying time with airport security often (but not always) get ads for publications proclaiming The Dangers of Terrorism in tones of barely suppressed panic—when the whole point of the articles is that we're overreacting.

I think my favorite, though, would have to be my rant about the illegality of peer-to-peer the way most people are using it. This gets advertisements for various peer-to-peer services, about half of which proclaim themselves to be "completely legal." Snort. Yeah right.

Some people would probably be terribly upset that the ads are proclaiming the exact opposite of what they're saying in the articles. They would be afraid of sending mixed messages, and would probably spend half the day typing advertising URLs into Google's "don't want ads from this source" box. I find it more amusing than anything else, though; for one thing, I think people are savvy enough to know that I can't choose what ads show up on my pages. For another, I think the ads can sometimes serve as an illustration of what the article is talking about in the first place, or else provide an "opposing viewpoint" or "counterprogramming" that makes it seem more like "real journalism." Or, if nothing else, they can at least make people laugh at the juxtapositions the way I have.

Thus far, there's only one site whose ads I've permanently banned from appearing on my page, and that's the Noam Chomsky meetup.com gathering—I have a moral aversion to having anything to do with the man after his behavior in the wake of 9/11. It's going to take someone or something I find totally repulsive like that to get me to put an actual block in.

All things considered, I don't really care if you don't click on the ads. I put them up mainly because they're unobtrusive and interesting, and occasionally provide a good laugh.

Webcomics publisher finds "Keen Spot" in South Dakota

Back in late 1999 to early 2000, the webcomic movement was just beginning to pick up steam. Webcomics had actually been around in one form or another since 1993, when the graphical web browser first hit the scene, but most of them hadn't gotten much publicity; about the only strips the average person knew about at this point were Kevin & Kell, Sluggy Freelance, and User Friendly.

Many would-be webcartoonists had a problem: webhosting was still expensive, and the cost of having one's own domain was a high barrier to entry. Enter web strip syndication site Keenspot, founded in part by cartoonist Chris Crosby of Superosity, and his mother Teri. Its goal: to help promote this burgeoning new form of comic art, which for the first time ever offered cartoonists a chance at widespread exposure without being subject to the editorial whims and publishing bottlenecks of a print strip syndicate.

"Most of our comics are too edgy to be in a 'family newspaper' and would have to be watered down for syndication," said Keenspot Co-CEO/"Superosity" cartoonist Chris Crosby, 23. Co-CEO/"Nukees" cartoonist Darren Bleuel, 29, added: "Once a comic strip has taken hold in the newspaper, it's there forever, no matter how bad it gets. Newer, younger cartoonists cannot get onto the comics page without ousting one of these 'tenured' comics. As a result, the typical newspaper syndicate signs up only one or two new cartoonists per year out of thousands of applicants." [1]

In addition to selecting what it considers the best webcomics to aggregate on the Keenspot.com front page, Keenspot provides free hosting service and revenue sharing for hundreds of web cartoonists [2], enabling them to host their strips without having to worry about where the bandwidth money is going to come from. Though it's had some problems along the way, it's done this for nearly five years—even through the dot-com bust—which is approximately a geological era in Internet time.

Thanks to Keenspot's support of web cartoonists, there are many more comic strips on the web now than there would have been without; even those strips that don't host with Keenspot have been helped by its promotion of the webcomic as an art form. Along the way, Keenspot has made the jump from web-only to publishing print comic books, as well as spinning off other tie-in merchandise.

I haven't been paying much attention to the world of webcomics lately, which is why I was startled to see a news item halfway down the front page of Scott Kurtz's PvP webcomic today. Kurtz writes with some astonishment that Keenspot's physical operation is moving out of California...and into a defunct schoolhouse in Cresbard, a tiny South Dakota town in a very rural area. [3]

Looking at Cresbard's homepage, I see that the biggest recent event of which this town of population 143 can boast is the "6th Annual Corn Fest". Chris Crosby relates in a Comixpedia discussion of the story that the purchase price of the entire school was just $36,000, "which [Cresbard's government is] apparently using to pave the roads." Now this tiny hamlet is about to have the publisher of hundreds of Internet comic strips, including many quite popular titles, take up residence.

Having grown up in a small town myself, I can see that the location has certain benefits for Keenspot. In particular, the cost of living and doing business in small rural towns in the heartland tends to be a lot lower than in coastal urban settings. It won't affect their overall business; since their servers are located elsewhere, it doesn't matter where their office is as long as they can receive and ship postal mail easily. And if they enjoy living in the country in general, then I suppose they'll enjoy living in the country in South Dakota specificly.

Chris Crosby notes in Comixpedia that, despite the tone of the news articles, he and his mother have tried to downplay the possibility that Keenspot's relocation is somehow going to "save the town or become an economic boom." This is a sensible position for them to take; even with the printing and silk-screening operations, most of Keenspot's business is virtual, and the datacenters will be staying in California. I would be surprised if Keenspot ended up employing many more than half a dozen people in Cresbard, at least unless they further expand.

The Crosbys do intend to give back to the community in other ways, however, such as by turning part of the school building into a library. "[A]t the very least it looks like we'll have a positive effect on the place," Chris writes. "And it's having a positive effect on us, too."

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[1] Astor, D. (2001, February 26). Keenspot is major comics spot on web. Editor & Publisher, 134(9), 27. [Found via the EBSCOhost magazine index.]

[2]Keenspot was actually not the first site to try this approach; merely the first long-term successful one. It followed in the footsteps of an earlier hosting operation called Big Panda, which formerly hosted Superosity and Nukees among others, but ultimately imploded amid clouds of acrimony.

[3] To what Kurtz says, I should add the correction (courtesy of Crosby's post in the Comixpedia discussion) that Keenspot didn't actually buy the school, the Crosby family (who co-own Keenspot) did, and will be using it for the work that they do for Keenspot. It's a distinction that was apparently too fine to be caught by any of the journalists covering the story.

Politics Redux

Two updates in a single day. Aren't you lucky?

Once again, I find myself looking at the Presidential race and just shaking my head sadly. I still haven't made up my mind how I'm going to vote. Maybe in the long run it doesn't matter, as I'm just one small voice among the millions of people in my home state, but it matters to me. I want to be able to look back on my vote as something to be proud of, something with meaning. I'm not going to write some cartoon character's name in the write-in box as some of my friends do (though it's definitely tempting to write in Bill Pullman—he made such a great fictitious President that he could hardly do worse than any of the unappealing choices on the ticket this election). But more and more, I just find myself being turned off of Bush.

If I'm going to vote for a President, what matters to me more than politics or party lines is personal integrity, or at least the appearance thereof. (All right, so I'm looking for personal integrity in a politician. If you need to stop laughing before you can start reading again, it's okay, I'll wait.) I'd vote for McCain in a heartbeat; I only wish I had that choice.

Kerry, like McCain, is a Vietnam vet. As President Clinton noted in his Democratic National Convention speech, Kerry could have avoided the war, could have shirked his duties and stayed stateside. Instead, he went, he served, and he won three Purple Hearts for being wounded in the line of duty. Even granting his detractors the benefit of the doubt on the one that's in dispute, that still leaves two instances of one of the highest military honors this nation can bestow. And if he came back to the states and spoke out against the war after that, well, I'd be the last to gainsay his right to do that. Unlike most of the anti-war crowd, he was actually there.

Bush, on the other hand, avoided serving (like so many of his generation, including President Clinton), and his conduct over the course of the campaign has not been very becoming. There's a lot of evidence suggesting that Bush has very strong secret (and, where they involve his campaign, illegal) ties to the 527 group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group whose members' present statements in commercials attacking Kerry's Vietnam record often conflict with the records or with their own prior statements. A Bush campaign lawyer also advised the Swift Boat group (and has subsequently resigned). Bush campaign worker Ken Cordier appeared in Swift Boat ads (and also subsequently resigned). And Bush has continually refused to condemn the Swift Boat ads—the closest he's come is condemning all 527 ads in general, including the ones run by liberal 527s like MoveOn.org.

When asked directly if that included the Swift Boat ads, Bush gave a weaselly evasive response, followed by an even more weaselly "clarification" from a press spokesman:

One reporter cited the swift boat ads and asked, "When you say that you want to stop all—" "All of them," Bush responded. "That means that ad, every other ad. Absolutely. I don't think we ought to have 527s."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters Bush's use of the words "that ad" did not indicate a repositioning on the issue. He said Bush was repeating his previous calls for an end to 527 ads.

So he doesn't even want it to look like mentioning the ad nonspecifically as an example of the inclusive class of all 527 ads suggests any condemnation. What I don't understand is, why all the pussy-footing around? Would it really hurt Bush so badly to come out and say, "I don't condone what those ads said"? Even if he didn't really mean it? Bush's disavowal of the ads rings just a bit false without a condemnation to back it up, and it's making him look bad.

After the Kerry campaign filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, the Swift Boat Veterans dropped the offending commercials and started on another line of attack...but now that the Swift Boat vets' usefulness is apparently played out, Salon Magazine editor Scott Rosenberg notes, Bush is calling for an end to all 527 ads—again, including those of the 527s in Kerry's camp. Gee, I wonder why? Could it be that now that your side has gotten its licks in, Mr. Bush, you don't want anyone else to have a shot?

The thing that gets me the most about this is the way it insults my intelligence. Does he really think the American public dumb enough not to see why he's doing this? Does he think I'm that dumb?

I wish we could put politicians under the same curse as Jim Carrey in Liar Liar. It would be so entertaining to ask them questions and see what the real answers were.

At any rate, that's more of why I'm going to have a hard time picking a candidate this November. (You can also see my earlier post on the subject.)

Peering at Peer-to-Peer

All right, so the RIAA is suing still more file-sharers. Sad, but there you go. In related news, the FBI has infiltrated the Direct Connect file-trading network and seized 200 petabytes ("I just have to pet a byte, it's sooooo cute!") of illegal material—apparently marking the first time the Justice Department has acted against a peer-to-peer network instead of leaving it to civil cases.

I'm not going to get into all the typical Slashdot hoopla about "an industry that sues its customers" or "file-trading should be okay because it actually makes the traded stuff sell better." Those particular arguments have been done to death. Instead, I'm just going to point you at Lawrence Lessig's book, Free Culture. You can buy it, check it out of a library, or download it free (with Lessig's and his publisher's blessing) in umpteen zillion e-book formats. Unlike the typical Slashdot zealotry surrounding this issue, Lessig actually tries to present a balanced look at copyright, its origins, its intents, its uses, and its misuses, while still agitating for a freer position on intellectual property rights; when the content industry is in the right, he says so without hesitation—but also when it's in the wrong. Go read it—I'll wait.

This may not make me very popular among certain people, but I have to say it: Although I used to be fairly active in sharing on peer-to-peer networks myself, I have a hard time feeling much more than a vague, abstract sympathy for the people getting sued now. Why? Well, the RIAA has been suing file-traders by the hundreds for quite some time, now—and even back before they started to sue, the RIAA gave months worth of warning that they were intending to do it. They even said what criteria they were going to use: they weren't going to sue downloaders, but rather, sharers—people with hard drives full of music and video files that they were making available for other people to download.

I removed all my directories from my Kazaa shares months before the RIAA even started suing. Any of the smart people would have done the same. Any even marginally-intelligent people would have done it after the first couple of thousand file-traders got sued. Anyone with a brain capacity surpassing that of a slime mold would have done it after the next several hundred people got sued. To still be sharing files by now...

Yes, yes, I know, it gives you an ego-boost to think that you're sharing all this marvelous Good Stuff with the rest of the community. I've been there, I used to do it myself. But you have to ask yourself, is the risk worth the reward? (Or, as Clint Eastwood might have put it, "Do you feel lucky, punk?") There is a seriously non-trivial chance that if you're sharing any large amounts of files at all, you're going to get sued. The chance increases the more stuff you share.

Compare it to a lottery. For the reward of a chance at earning a small fortune (well, half a small fortune after Uncle Sam gets done with it anyway), you risk a dollar or two. And that's fine. (Well, fine if you're bad at probability math, anyway.) But with this file-sharing, for the reward of warm fuzzies you're risking...your life's savings. And the chance you're going to get sued is a lot higher than the chance you picked the winning numbers.

Yes, yes, I know, the RIAA is Evil and they just want to shut down the file-trading networks and We Can't Let Them Win and all that other Slashdot b—-s—-. Well, I've got news for you. Trading in copyrighted files without permission is against the law. We can argue whether or not it should be against the law until we're all blue in our collective faces, but that doesn't change the fact that it is. The RIAA is within its rights to shut down people who are sharing even one copyrighted-and-unpermitted file. We can argue whether they should be shutting file-sharers down until we're all blue in our collective faces, but that doesn't change the fact that they are within their rights to do so if they want to. If you want to keep trading files out of some misguided notion of "civil disobedience," well, I guess that's your right—but you'd better be just as prepared to be punished for it as were all those who've engaged in civil disobedience in the past. And since that's what you wanted, I won't feel sorry for you then either.

The time is long past to stop kidding ourselves that we can continue to get away with illegal activity. If you continue to share large quantities of illicit music or other files on P2P networks, best be prepared to pay the piper. Literally.

This Song is Your Song, this Song is My Song

This song is your song, this song is my song
No matter what you do with it, you can't be held wrong
To renew the copyright, Ludlow waited too long
This song is made for you and me!

This mp3 contains a recording I made to prove a point. The point is—hey...wait, what are you doing? Stop downloading that! I just made it to prove a point, you're not supposed to listen to it! No...wait...stop...or else I'll come to your house and—sigh, oh, all right, but don't blame me if playing it damages your computer, your hearing, or your sanity. Suzanne Vega, I'm not.

Anyway, the point is that Ludlow Music—the people who own the copyright to the music of Woody Guthrie—have just pulled a really boneheaded move, and it's come around to get them in an uncomfortable spot.They bit the hand that fed them, they killed the goose that laid the golden egg, and now they're hoist by their own petard. Oh, they are so hoist by their own petard, it's like they took their petard and used it to run themselves up the flagpole atop the Empire State Building to see who salutes (but no one ever does).

Back in 1940, Woody Guthrie wrote a beautiful folk song, called "This Land is Your Land," combining an easily singable melody and his unique talent for words with a hefty dose of patriotism to produce one of the most famous and most popular folk songs ever. The song endured through the ages; I even remember singing it out of a songbook in my elementary/middle school music classes. I liked it a lot, it was fun to sing, even if I didn't entirely understand it at that age (I kept wondering what a "skyway" was). I also remember seeing the copyright notice at the bottom of the page, saying something like "©1956 Ludlow Music," and wondering why the copyright notice was there instead of at the front of the book like most "normal" books. Over the years, the song has become a well-known and easily-recognizable patriotic anthem, right up there with "America the Beautiful" and "My Country, Tis of Thee."

Which makes it only natural that, when the parodists at JibJab.com were looking for a song to which to set a flash-animated parody of George Bush/John Kerry mutual mudslinging, the duality of your and my inherent in "This Land is Your Land," not to mention the patriotic overtones the song evokes, should bring it to mind. Quite to their surprise, the parody became a smash hit, being downloaded an estimated forty million times. (Not that it's such a surprise to me. Even though it's "not PC or even PG," it contains a wicked sense of humor and, like the best political satire, pokes fun at both sides equally.)

You might wonder how JibJab thought they could get away with making use of the song in this way, given that the song was still under copyright. The answer is that parodies enjoy a special form of protection in copyright law, right alongside other forms of review and criticism. Parody, as long as it is a "valid parody," is considered to be a form of fair use, which means that it is fair under the law for them to make use of others' intellectual property. Parodist Weird Al Yankovic always obtains permission from artists before he parodies their songs just to be courteous, but under the law, he doesn't really have to; when Coolio was upset over Al's parody "Amish Paradise" (which Al recorded thinking he had permission due to a misunderstanding), being upset was about all he could do because the parody was legally protected.

Unfortunately, there is a gap between the theory of law and the actual practice of law. In Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture, Lessig tells the story of a documentary filmmaker who needed to get permission to use a 4.5-second clip of The Simpsons that coincidentally appeared on a TV in the background of one scene. Fox wanted $10,000 to license it—a budget-breaking amount for the small filmmaker—even though it would arguably qualify as fair use. The filmmaker relates,

I did, in fact, speak with one of [Lessig's] colleagues at Stanford Law School . . . who confirmed that it was fair use. He also confirmed that Fox would "depose and litigate you to within an inch of your life," regardless of the merits of my claim. He made clear that it would boil down to who had the bigger legal department and the deeper pockets, me or them.

Similarly, Barry Manilow's lawyers will not allow parodist Mark Jonathan Davis to sell his song "Star Wars Cantina," a parody of Manilow's "Copacabana," despite the song (which can be downloaded freely) getting wide airplay on the Dr. Demento show (and on radio stations everywhere around the time of The Phantom Menace's theatrical release). As Lawrence Lessig has said, "Fair use is the right to hire a lawyer."

With this in mind, it should not be surprising that, when JibJab's parody came to the attention of Ludlow Music, they were about the only ones in the country who were not amused; feeling that its use in a political parody could do damage to the song's reputation, they sent JibJab a cease-and-desist letter.

The irony is that the one person who would have had the most moral right to be concerned over one of Woody Guthrie's songs' reputation—that is, Woody Guthrie himself—was known to have used a remarkably permissive copyright notice on songs he wrote:

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

And Arlo Guthrie, Woody's folk-singer son, has been quoted by NPR as saying that he found the JibJab parody to be hilarious and thought Woody probably would have as well.

Well, I really can't speak for [my father]. I can just tell you that when I saw it a few weeks ago I thought it was one of the funniest commentaries if not one of the most directly inspired... I called my sister, I called my friends, I sent everybody a link to the site so that they could go see it. And we've all been laughing about it since then. I think my dad would have absolutely loved the humor in it.

What's more, the melody of "This Land is Your Land" wasn't even Guthrie's to begin with—he apparently borrowed it from an earlier song by the Carter Family. Not that there's anything wrong with that—melody-borrowing happens a great deal in folk music. You might even say our nation is built on it, since our national anthem "The Star-Spangled Banner" was set to the tune of a popular drinking song of the day. (Not to mention that "My Country, Tis of Thee" is just the British anthem "God Save the King" in disguise.)

The traditional English folk song "Greensleeves" shares its melody with the Christmas carol "What Child is This?". The Elvis Presley songs "That's All Right Mama" and "My Baby Left Me" share a melody. I could go on and on, but the point here is that the melody of "This Land is Your Land"—which was the only part of the song that JibJab actually used verbatim—wasn't even written by Guthrie to begin with and would probably already be in the public domain due to its use by the Carter Family.

Feeling that they were in the right due to the principles of fair use, JibJab and the Electronic Frontier Foundation vowed to fight Ludlow in court, and asked a judge to decide pre-emptively that the parody qualified as a fair use.

But as it happens, the matter never got that far. When the EFF was searching for evidence in the Library of Congress's archives, they turned up evidence that the song had actually not been first published in 1956 as Ludlow claimed—but rather in a pamphlet published in 1945. The 28-year copyright term that was in place during that period started at the time of the song's first publication. Unaware of the earlier publication, Ludlow filed for copyright renewal in 1984—eleven years too late. Once a work enters the public domain, even if by accident, it can never be re-copyrighted. "This Land is Your Land" entered the public domain in 1973—the same year I was born. (Ludlow has subsequently and rather hastily settled with JibJab without the matter reaching court.)

So, "This Land is Your Land" has actually been in the public domain for as long as I've been in the world. All those years ago when I was singing the song in elementary school and wondering at the copyright notice in the songbook—that copyright notice was actually invalid and nobody knew it!

Since it's in the public domain, I can take that song and do whatever I want with it. I could use it in a parody, like JibJab (or like User Friendly), but that's just the beginning. I could record my own "straight" performance of it (as I did, thanks to Eric A. Burns of Websnark for posting the lyrics so I had them close to hand), and not have to pay Ludlow the compulsory licensing fee. I could write another verse to it (as I did) and sing that, too (as I did). I could write a verse extolling the virtues of each of the fifty states, plus one each for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. I could write "This Land is Your Land" fanfic, in which Woody Guthrie goes a-chasin' his shadow ("Hey, come back here, you...") out across that roadmap ("How are you supposed to fold a map this big, anyway?") and encounters waving wheat fields ("Hey, it's good to see you, too!") and dancing corn fields ("The Charleston? Who'd have figured?"). I could even sing it at the top of my lungs while walking naked backward down main street at high noon, and I'd only get in trouble for the naked part—they couldn't touch me for a public performance of the song, since it's now in the public domain. This song really is "made for you and me."

Filmmakers can make "This Land is Your Land" movies (like Kenny Rogers did for his own song, "The Gambler"). Ad agencies can use "This Land is Your Land" in TV commercials. School songbook publishers can use "This Land is Your Land" without paying licensing fees. In short, anyone who wants to do anything with the song can. And what's more, their uses of the song would create new derivative works that would be copyrighted to them for as long as copyright is nowadays (which is apparently going to be forever and a day if the Mouse has anything to say about it, but that's a subject for another rant).

And the beauty of it all, the icing on the top of the thirty-story layer cake, is that, if only Ludlow Music had kept their big mouth shut, if only they'd said, "We don't like that parody, but we realize they have the legal right to make it by fair use," rather than throwing their legal weight around and hoping the little guy would chicken out instead of ponying up legal costs, nobody would ever have known that "This Land is Your Land" entered the public domain more than thirty years ago. They could have gone on collecting license fees and royalties on what must surely have been the most popular song of any in their collection (it has no fewer than 31 different cover versions for sale on the iTunes Music Store alone) and nobody would have been the wiser. But they tickled the sleeping dragon, and thus slaughtered their own cash cow. (Okay, okay, I'll stop mixing metaphors now. Don't hit me.) They may even have to pay back all the royalties and license fees they've received over the last thirty-one years (though I'm not a lawyer so I can't say for certain—and the I.P. lawyer friend of mine I've emailed to ask hasn't yet gotten back to me; I'll update when and if he does).

So, sometimes the good guys do win. And that's cause for celebration.

Incidentally, as to the verse at the top of this post which is my own derivative work from Guthrie's, it's ©2004 by Christopher E. Meadows...and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do.

[Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, don't take anything in this entry as legal advice, it's just my educated opinion.]

It's Virtually Economic

In one of those odd coincidences that come along every so often, two unrelated stories have just come out about similar subject matter—the intersection of real money and virtual worlds.

Economics was one of my favorite subjects in college—I found it fascinating to learn about all the little factors that somehow worked together to produce the state of valuation of goods and services we call an economy. I've forgotten most of what I learned there, of course, but I still remember enough to appreciate the peculiar situation that was called into being when the first MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) went live. It started slowly, of course—the first time an Ultima Online character was placed onto eBay (and sold for hundreds or thousands of dollars) made headlines all over the place—and it was the crack in the dike that subsequently unleashed a flood of such auctions as astonished players saw just how much real money could be made by selling virtual possessions. For perhaps the first time in the history of economics, a virtual nation had been created, with its own system of economics. When you have two economies in close proximity to each other, they will naturally start to interact—that's an economic principle. And in this case, the other "nation" is only as far away from us as our keyboard and screen.

Naturally, this got a lot of economists interested in the games. Economics professor Edward Castronova wrote a ground-breaking economic analysis of these worlds, which has been downloaded thousands upon thousands of times. For a while, there was even a virtual currency exchange in operation, the Gaming Open Market, to convert money from one MMORPG system to another. (It stopped trading in all game systems but one, however, after being defrauded out of $3,000 in June of this year.)

Gaming companies and most players aren't happy about this new economy, though. Many players feel that it cheapens the time and effort they put into the game for some random schmuck to be able to buy his way into higher levels of power. Gaming companies are concerned about issues of game balance, and about keeping their players satisfied enough to continue playing.

It's interesting to compare this MMORPG situation to the RIAA and MPAA's problems with file-trading. The media industry's problem is that people don't want to pay real money for intellectual property—virtual goods that have no physical existence outside of numbers in a computer and can be traded easily on-line. On the other hand, the MMORPG industry's problem is that people do want to pay real money for virtual goods—intellectual property that has no physical existence outside of numbers in a computer and can be traded easily on-line. I just keep having this mental image of a game exec and a recording industry exec looking at each other and saying in unison, "I wish I had your problem."

Anyway, the first new article that prompted this entry is a wired.com piece on MMORPG sweatshops—the gaming businesses that are set up in third-world countries to pay cheap native labor to harvest virtual currency and sell it for real-world money. This is hardly anything new, of course, despite Wired's attempts to paint it as such—it's just that Wired has only just noticed it. These operations have been in place for a long time, and are even mentioned in the economic paper I link to above. The Wired article calls this "outsourcing," in a slightly lame attempt to draw parallels between MMORPG money-harvesting and the migration of computer jobs overseas. I say slightly lame because like it or not, the parallel is there, if you look at it in terms of the cash-harvesting being a service. On the other hand, if you look at it as a factory for creating virtual goods, it's more akin to Nike's Chinese shoe factories. Still, it's hard to be as judgmental here as with Nike; according to the article, the amounts of money the workers get paid are apparently very good payment rates for those parts of the world—and we're not exactly talking about the most strenuous and demanding physical labor.

The second article comes from BoingBoing, and is totally unrelated to MMORPGs—except in the matter of paying real money for virtual goods. And in this case, you aren't even the one who gets to use the goods. A Hong Kong firm has developed a "virtual girlfriend" game for cellphones. You pay a subscription fee to have this girl show up on your phone's screen—and then you can pay more real money to buy her gifts. If you neglect your virtual girlfriend, she gets upset and doesn't talk to you. In other words, it turns your phone into a Tamagotchi with a coin slot.

Maybe that will play well in Asia, where the Tamagotchi was invented, but I don't know how successful it would be in America. People are willing to pay real money for virtual goods that they can use in a virtual environment. I don't think it necessarily follows that they'd be willing to pay real money for a virtual girlfriend.

Although, when I think about it, I do think that the first MMORPG company that manages to tie its computer-MMORPG in with a cellphone/wireless PDA-based minigame interface might just have something. Let people keep track of their character, perhaps perform simple tasks (such as trading, crafting, communicating with in-game friends via text message, etc.), anything to continue the immersion in the game world even when they can't be back at their desktop computer. But that's getting away from the point.

Today's computer technology allows us to create some pretty amazing things—not the least of which are entire new economies. The question of how those economies should interact with real-world economies is a thorny problem that is still under examination—and, since virtual worlds aren't going away any time soon, it will be with us for some time to come.

Free iPods: Worth the Cost?

Some time ago, I read a science fiction story—I can't remember the exact title or author—predicated on the "perfect" multi-level marketing scheme. The exact nature of the scheme was never revealed, but apparently the plan was so perfect that it was totally irresistable, both to join and to market—but to reap the benefits, you had to get more members to join. The narrator of the story remarked that the way things were going, they would have a world government before long—for a few minutes, until such time as the whole thing fell apart due to there being no new prospects to sell on the plan. I always wondered what would happen if aliens landed and made first contact right at that point...

Multi-level marketing schemes, like Amway, are the more-handsome fraternal twin of the "pyramid scheme" con. You know how pyramid schemes work; back in the early days of Internet spam, those would often be found in your mailbox. Before that, you would occasionally find them in your snail mailbox. "Send $5, put your name at the bottom of the list, and send it on to ten more people; you'll be rich before you know it!" (Nowadays, their niche in the ecology of spam seems to have been co-opted by Nigerian scam-spammers; I can't remember the last time I saw a "send $5" pyramid scheme mail in my inbox.)

Pyramid schemes are, of course, a con, and illegal for that reason. The only winners are the people at the top or middle of the pyramid; the losers are the ones at or near the bottom, who send their money and then discover there's nobody else left to pay money to them. Multi-level marketing schemes like Amway are not much better; they manage to stay within the law by actually selling products instead of just demanding money, but still the only ones who really get rich are the ones at the top of the heap.

But now along comes a brand new form of pyramid scheme: multi-level advertising, in the form of FreeiPods.com and FreeFlatscreens.com. These sites are run by a marketing firm called Gratis Internet as a method of customer acquisition for companies such as AoL or BMG Records. The idea is simple: if you complete a free-or-cheap trial offer, and get a number of your friends (or acquaintances or complete strangers) to do the same, they send you a gift (but not your friends, until they get enough of their own friends to do the same thing). They are able to afford this expense by using the new-customer-acquisition bounty that the businesses putting forward the trial offer pay them for each new customer who commits to the trial.

The idea is elegant, subtle, and one might even say insidious, on so many levels (pun not—oh, heck, who am I fooling, pun fully intended). First of all, it bypasses the reluctance of the average consumer to deal with advertisements. The same consumer who blocks pop-up ads and spam-protects his mailboxes, who TiVos past or tunes out TV commercials, will sign up for a trial offer in a heartbeat if by doing so he can get a $300 or $400 freebie.

Next, it co-opts the consumer, turning him into his own personal marketer for the site in order to get those vital referrals. All of a sudden, people start telling their friends about this neat new promotion they're taking part in, advertisements start appearing in .signature files on email and message boards, and people find clever ways to get other people to register referrals for them. For example, last night I happened to see that a fellow had bought a Google Ad-Words ad relating to freeflatscreens.com, and was offering to paypal $5 to anyone who would sign up for a flatscreen TV referral for him. Paying at most $40 for eight $5 referrals (plus the cost of the Google advertisement) for a $400 TV set doesn't seem like a bad deal at all, does it? Blog entries, webpages, and "conga lines" (lists of referral links) are popping up all over the place as people explain that this is "not a scam" and try to get referrals for themselves and for the people they referred.

This is a classic example of the viral marketing methods that Seth Godin proposed in Unleashing the Ideavirus—create a product (or an advertising method) in which an individual markets to his friends and neighbors as part and parcel of participating, and the world will beat a path to your door. It's marketing as an infection that spreads by powers of five (or eight for the TV).

But even with advertiser bounties, how is Gratis able to make a profit by doing this? The advertiser bounties can't be all that large, after all, and they still have to buy an iPod for everyone who manages to get five referrals—and as rapidly as word is spreading, they'll be needing to send out more and more iPods as more and more people get referrals in. The answer is simple enough: not everyone who signs up for a free iPod will be able to get five referrals—thus, Gratis gets to pocket the money for the bounties those people do get. Likewise, some people will get many more than five referrals, just from advertising in a high-volume area; that's more extra money Gratis gets to pocket. And finally, it's likely that they sell your information to other marketers—which means you may receive more junk snailmail (easy enough to deal with) and email (which is why you should use a disposable address such as the ones offered by SpamGourmet).

Even though FreeiPods is not a con game like the iPod matrix scams that infest eBay, it has the same central shortfall: the exponential nature of the referral expansion. The Skeptic's Dictionary illustrates this in its section on pyramid scams with a pyramid of numbers showing that, by the 10th level of a 10-referral pyramid, substantially more people than comprise the total population of the Earth would be needed to kick in. Though FreeiPods requires only 5 referrals and FreeFlatscreen requires only 8, that just means it would take longer to reach its limit but the central point remains valid: there are only so many people out there who are available to be sucked into this thing. Sooner or later, everyone who was eligible for and cared to sign up for a free iPod will have one, and the people at the bottom of the pyramid will have no way to get more referrals. Unlike with financial pyramid scams, they won't be out actual money—just the time and inconvenience it took them to go through with the trial offer—but they will still be frustrated. And Gratis will get to rake in the dough from that final level—the largest level, the flat base of the pyramid—without having to pay a cent for iPods to send.

Of course, that isn't necessarily an argument against participating in the program, if you acknowledge and accept going in that you may not be able to get enough referrals. Ever a sucker for free stuff, and still mourning the collapse of the tzotzke-laden dot-com era, I went ahead and took the plunge. I signed up for the iPod, using a disposable email address to prevent more spam accumulating in my main box, and within a day (thanks to a fortuitously early post on an appropriate Slashdot story) had gotten enough would-be referrals that even if only some of them actually complete the trial offer, it will be enough. (I'm still going to have to wait about a week to find out, though, as most of the offers seem to take that long to show completion.) I have also signed up for a free flatscreen TV, but don't anticipate as much success with that one (at least until the next appropriate Slashdot story comes along). And I've set up a "conga line" of my own to try to snag some referrals for the folks who helped me.

As pyramid schemes go, this seems like a relatively benign one; the only risk to the participant if he fails to reach his referral goal is being signed up for an online service or program which can be easily cancelled, and the reward seems to justify the risk. It is hard to see a downside, except possibly in the case of someone geting in too late—but then, I'm not exactly the most impartial observer, am I?

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As a postscript, aside from FreeiPods and FreeFlatscreens, Gratis Internet runs a network of other "free stuff" sites, using a non-pyramidal "complete multiple trial programs to earn points toward free stuff" scheme. (You can also refer friends, but each referral only earns a measly 10 points.) It amuses me how the domain names of these sites show how well they have the desires of the younger generation pegged: aside from freegiftplanet.com, they have freecds.com, freedvds.com, freevideogames.com...and freecondoms.com.

I've Got a Little List...

If someday it may happen that a victim must be found
I've got a little list, I've got a little list
Of society's offenders who may well be underground
And who never would be missed, they never would be missed.

—"I've Got a Little List", from The Mikado

Slashdot, BoingBoing, and fellow web-journalist Matt Lavine report that Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy recently found himself on the Transportation Security Administration's "no-fly" terrorism-prevention list. According to the articles, this led to the esteemed Senator being stopped and questioned no fewer than five times at the airport—and it took him three weeks to get his name off that list.

While I'm sure that my staunchly Republican father (who greatly dislikes Senator Kennedy) is getting a great big guffaw out of this, it's frankly quite worrying to me—and I'd say the same thing if it were some prominent Republican politician who had hit the list. If one of the most powerful Senators in Washington (not to mention most easily recognizable due to his oft-caricatured accent and face) can get on that list by mistake, be stopped five times at airports because of it—and it takes him, with all his power and connections, three whole weeks to get removed—then what chance does an ordinary, powerless citizen have if he shows up on it by mistake?

A Kennedy spokesman said that the error "had not been politically motivated," and I believe him. Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence, after all. I don't envy the airport officials who had to enforce the list, as they would have been in a bit of a catch-22—either enforce the list against a Senator, or else open themselves to accusations of partiality. After all, the list has to apply to everyone, and we wouldn't want terrorists to think they could slip by simply by disguising themselves as Ted Kennedy, would we?

Elsewhere, an anonymous source said the block had happened because a suspected terrorist had been travelling under the pseudonym "T. Kennedy." Undoubtedly snickering to himself all the while. I wonder if he is, even now, chortling at hearing about the mix-up he caused. And I wonder if it is uncharitable of me to suggest that would-be terrorists should perhaps start travelling under the names of "G. Bush," "D. Cheney," "T. Ridge," "C. Rice," etc. now?

In related news, paranoid reporter Annie Jacobsen (whom I previously mentioned in my "What About Bob?" entry) continues her delusional tirades against harmless Middle Eastern air travellers. Apparently she's up to the fifth installment by now. Likewise, Salon's pseudonymous pilot columnist Patrick Smith has written three more installments calmly debunking her claims (find them here, here, and here). You'll have to view a 30-second advertisement (or be a Salon subscriber) before you can read them, but it's well worth it.

I'm afraid I've just about given up on air travel. I doubt I'd refuse a free ticket if someone offered it to me and I needed it, but I'm certainly not going to go out of my way to take a plane anywhere any time soon—and perhaps I'd go out of my way not to have to. Unlike Ms. Jacobsen, however, it's not out of fear of terrorists—it's out of fear of fear of terrorists. Theoretically, as an innocent person I shouldn't have anything to worry about—but tell that to Ted Kennedy.

Update: According to another Slashdot story, 9-term Democratic Representative John Lewis has had similar difficulties.

Teen/Adult Animated Movies a Go-Go

Everything old is new again! I set out to review a couple of new movies I saw lately, and then I realized that I should dive back into my old Themestream files and re-post a review I did there, here, as background material against which to set those new reviews.

So now, I give you reviews of four different movies at once. The first two reviews have been edited only slightly from how they originally appeared on pay-writing site Themestream.

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THEN...

Heavy Metal (1981)
Heavy Metal 2000 (2000)

A shadow shall fall over the universe, and evil will grow in its path. And death will come from the skies.

I remember the first time I saw Heavy Metal, at a midnight movie showing over ten years ago, during my first college go-round. I had almost no idea what to expect; all I knew was that it was animated, science-fictiony, rated R, and had a cult following. So I went in to watch it, and I was utterly blown away. I wish I could remember now my exact feelings, my exact memories, so I could relive the thrill of that first time seeing this movie.

Try to imagine my perspective. Here I was, a barely-post-teenaged fan of animation, who thought the only mature stuff worth watching came from Japan. Suddenly, as I was seated in that theater late at night, that stentorian narration came through the speakers, a space shuttle hove into view, and an astronaut rode a classic Corvette down to earth from it. From that moment on, I was entranced.

Here was a definitely-adult animated film that combined comedy, drama, science-fiction, fantasy, and horror into one somewhat-cohesive whole. At times like watching an animated Boris Vallejo painting, at times something just this side of MAD Magazine, it had remarkably good animation for the time in which it was made, and gripping stories that resonated well enough with audiences that elements from them have shown up again and again in our popular culture. Co-produced by Hollywood comedy maven Ivan Reitman, it featured high-caliber voice-acting by professional actors and comedians, such as John Candy, Harold Ramis, Eugene Levy, Joe Flaherty, John Vernon. It had a kick-butt rock-and-roll soundtrack by some major-name musicians of the late '70s and early '80s, including Sammy Hagar, Stevie Nicks, Journey, Grand Funk Railroad, Blue Oyster Cult, Devo, and Cheap Trick, backed with a very Wagnerian symphonic score by Elmer Bernstein.

It also had (and my apologies to any women reading this article) more female nudity than any other animated film I've ever seen, before or since—in fact, more nudity than even most R-rated live-action films. It had least one full-frontal nudity shot for almost every one of its usually-quite-busty female characters, and plenty of sex to match. My eyes were so glued to that screen . . .

Now, Heavy Metal was by no means a thought-provoking film like Princess Mononoke, or even great mass-market cinema in the way that Titanic or even Gladiator were. Some of its segments were better than others, and some ran a little too long as the animators got so bound up in showing pretty pictures that they forgot to focus on story. The connecting story, about the Loc-Nar, a mysterious artifact that is the sum of all evil in the universe, is a bit weak—in some segments, the Loc-Nar plays a very, very minor role, and in one it never even appears at all.

But nonetheless, Heavy Metal remains a very powerful experience, and even twenty years later is still a terrific example of how to construct a truly entertaining film. It strikes a perfect balance between lighter and darker elements, sandwiching dark horror between comedic pieces so that the audience can have some laughter to help them recover from the shock of seeing people's bodies dissolve into goo. It integrates its music into the scenes, using long segments of the songs to set the tone for what is to follow. And the clever writing manages to interject engaging moments of surreality into even the most serious scenes. It is no wonder that elements of these stories have been recycled into movies (The Fifth Element), TV shows (Aeon Flux), and games (arguably Parasite Eve).

After nearly 20 years of unavailability due to rights issues with the music, Heavy Metal finally came to VHS a few years ago, and DVD more recently. Though I only rented the DVD, and did not have time to check out all of its cornucopia of features, it definitely rates as one of the most featureful DVDs I have ever seen of an animated film, and I will undoubtedly buy it before long. Even on a small screen, the movie still lived up to my memories.

Rating: 8 out of 10.

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However, at the same time, I also rented Heavy Metal 2000, also known as Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K. 2, and I have a much less optimistic review of it.

Heavy Metal 2000, hereafter referred to as HM2K, was conceived by Kevin Eastman, of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fame, who had realized every young comic-book-fan's dream by purchasing Heavy Metal Magazine, the adult-comic magazine on which the original Heavy Metal movie was based. He had also recognized every young adolescent male's dream of marrying 6'1" ("and worth the climb") supermodel/B-movie-queen Julie Strain. Out of these two dreams was forged a new dream: an animated science-fiction movie, based on both Heavy Metal and Julie Strain.

The result is a slick-looking piece of definitely-adult science-fiction animation, with some similarities to "Taarna," the final segment of the original Heavy Metal. But that is where the resemblance ends. None of the original movie's staff had any part in making this one (with the possible exception of Carl Macek as a "special consultant"), and it shows.

Heavy Metal 2000 has plenty of violence, some nudity (though I can't remember many full-frontal shots, which is probably not too surprising considering how sensibilities have changed over the years. Were the original Heavy Metal released now, it would probably be NC17), oddly very little sex, and a single, not terribly coherent storyline that involves a character named "Julie" taking revenge for the decimation of her planet, with the dubious help of a comedy sidekick who was left behind by the original raiders. It also has no connection to the original movie in any real sense whatsoever, other than sharing a name.

By itself, as an example of an adult animated film where the characters are not inclined to burst into song every five minutes, HM2K is not a bad movie. The animation is very good; the voice acting ranges from competent—such as Julie Strain, who as a voice actress makes a better live-action star—to great—especially Michael Ironside, who always plays a wonderful animated villain, and Billy Idol, whose growly, Brit-accented voice was just made for voice-acting.

However, neither is HM2K a particularly great movie, and by naming itself after one of the recognized greats of American animation, it invites an inevitable comparison by which it can only suffer. For a film whose name is also that of a musical genre, it uses its music very badly, sticking in a short snatch here or there of some blaring heavy metal song that is forgotten as soon as it ends. The musical acts lack any of the name recognition value that the original movie's artists had, as well—except for Billy Idol, I had not heard of a single one of them. Whereas all the music from the original Heavy Metal was distinctive and memorable, any one of the songs in HM2K could be switched for any other song and I would never have noticed the difference. None of the characters is terribly sympathetic, either, save perhaps for Julie's younger sister (who gets relatively little screen time).

By having a serious plot, Heavy Metal 2000 throws away the comedy part of the formula that made the original Heavy Metal such a treat. Instead, it becomes a continuous melodrama that continues on and on, long past the point where it should have ended. It does try for the little moments of surrealism that made the original so pleasing, but they usually come off as—no pun intended—strained. It is obvious they were tacked on, where in the original Heavy Metal, they were so naturally a part of the scenes they were in, it was as if they happened without anyone even thinking about them.

Heavy Metal 2000 still manages to be moderately enjoyable, especially in the scenes where it homages the original, but it is nowhere near as good as the first one. Though its DVD also has a remarkable number of special features, it is definitely on my "rent, do not buy" list.

Rating: 6 out of 10.

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NOW...

I've seen a couple of animated movies recently—one of which I rented and watched for the first time, the other I bought and watched for the second time. As they're both animated features and both targeted at an audience older than the traditional Disney/Pixar kiddievid, it seemed appropriate that I review them both together. However, they're both very different films, so I'm not going to try to compare them to each other.

I'll go ahead and review them in the order in which I'd watch them. I learned long ago when doing a movie double-feature (as I'd occasionally do at the buck-to-two-buck second-run cinemas), you should always watch the worse one first, so the second movie gains rather than suffers by the comparison. (The movie pair that provided this great cinematic insight, by the way, was watching Under Siege before Passenger 57. I should have watched them the other way around.) So, we'll start with...

Titan A.E. (2000)

I found this DVD in the $5.50 bin at Walmart this weekend. Actually, that's not entirely true; I've been seeing it in the $5.50 bin for months but never bothered to pick it up. I'd watched it before, borrowing it from a friend, and I wasn't sure it was worth another $5.50 to me to own it. I finally went ahead, if for no other reason than to see how much it improved on watching it with 5.1 speakers instead of two.

American teens and young adults are exactly the target market for much of the animation that comes out of Japan these days, but they're a target that American animators have a really hard time hitting. And the Disney/Pixar films don't count, because all of them—yes, even Atlantis—were aimed primarily at a juvenile audience (with some jokes for older folks snuck in under kiddie radar). They've also tended to be comedies with a little drama thrown in, as opposed to dramas sprinkled with comedic elements such as one-liners. There's nothing wrong with that at all, but it's a fundamentally different type of filmmaking than aiming directly at an older audience.

In fact, there have only been either two or three mass-market attempts at a more mature, serious animated film by American studios in the last few years (depending on whether you class Final Fantasy by the American or the Japanese half of Square Studios), and they have all been dismal box office flops. This is at least partly because, while even though they have been animated, and usually animated quite well, they just haven't been what American teens want to see.

Final Fantasy, while a technical masterpiece, suffered from a variety of little problems (slight spookiness/plasticity of its characters, slow pacing, non-Hollywood ending) that conspired to bring it down. Heavy Metal 2000...well, Heavy Metal 2000 was just baaaaad. It tried hard, and had a stand-out performance by Billy Idol (who really should be given more voice-acting work), but suffered from the idea that all that is needed to make a film "mature" is naked body parts. (Yes, I know, in the above review I'm kinder to it. That was then, this is now.) Of the three, Titan A.E. came the closest to hitting the mark. In fact, to extend the analogy, it's the only one of the movies that even managed to hit the paper target. That wasn't enough to save it, though—or to save the studio.

Titan A.E.was the last gasp of 20th Century Fox's traditional animation studio division. The movie flopped theatrically, spelling the end of cel animation at Fox. It's a pity, really—not so much that I have any particular attachment to Fox's animation studio, but because it adds to the growing perception of cel-based animation as being outdated and "superseded" by CGI. (Even Disney is buying into this idea: if Lilo and Stitch had flopped, it would have been the end for Disney's own cel-animation division. Thankfully, it didn't.)

As far as reviewing the DVD itself, I'm going to "cheat" a little and point you at the DigitalBits review of the disc. They say pretty much everything I would, and this saves me some time and effort which I can use in talking about the movie itself instead.

To summarize, Titan A.E. has good to great CGI and cel animation, excellent 5.1 digital sound in both Dolby and DTS flavors, and decent music. The film's lesser flaw is that sometimes the CGI animation and cel animation clash stylistically, jarring the viewer out of his suspension of disbelief. But then, this has been a problem to some extent for at least as long as animators have been trying to combine CGI and cel. (See the Lensman anime movie for an early example.)

Even with the clash, Titan is a truly impressive film visually and aurally. The use of CGI enables some fancy cinemagraphic techniques and tracking shots of the sort that give cel animation trouble. The 5.1 soundtrack is filled with loud explosions, crunching noises, energy blasts, and music. The voice acting is excellent, with standout performances from Nathan Lane, Bill Pullman, and a host of others. If you're looking for a home theater demonstrator disc with lots of eye and ear candy, you could do a lot worse than Titan A.E. (In fact, Fox put a scene from Titan in the "hear how impressive DVD audio can be" section of its own DVD demo for just that reason.) The greatest area where Titan falls short is in the plot.

Without giving too much away, Titan A.E. opens 15 years after the earth has been blown up. It centers around a young man named Cale (voice of Matt Damon), whose father built a giant starship whose existence caused an alien race called the Drej to blow up the planet. Now, a roguish human starship captain named Korso (voice of Bill Pullman) has tracked Cale down, because a ring on Cale's finger holds a map to the location of that starship, and he wants to find it (and help create a New Future for Humanity) before the Drej can destroy it.

There's nothing particularly science-fictiony about this plot; replace Cale's ring with a treasure map, the Titan with treasure, the starships with sailing ships, the planets with islands and the aliens with native tribes and you could tell almost exactly the same story. There is only one single nod to hard science anywhere within the movie that I could find (one character telling another to "exhale" before a brief excursion through hard vacuum); the special ability of the mysterious Titan starship is nothing short of a magical deus ex machina. (In fact, in terms of what happens in the story, it's a deus ex machina in two separate and distinct ways!) In short, the story is pure Star Warsian science-fantasy space opera.

And there's nothing wrong with that. (Hey, it worked for Star Wars after all.) There's not even necessarily anything wrong with the story being one long cliche from start to finish. Cliches only become cliches because they're used a lot, and they're only used a lot because they almost always work. Every one of Shakespeare's plots can be considered a cliche by now, but that doesn't make them any less classic.

There's nothing wrong with the pacing, either: at 94 quick minutes, the movie never seems to drag. The pendulum swings from action sequence to dialogue scene and back at a decent pace, and some of the sequences are quite spectacular. In particular, the game of "hide and seek" in a field of ice-asteroids is almost worth the cost of admission all by itself.

The straw that breaks the camel's back is that the story flies along a bit too fast and doesn't explain enough. We never really learn who the Drej are, except that they're composed of "pure energy" (thank you, Mr. Spock) and they hated and feared (and destroyed) the Earth because of what the Titan project was supposed to be able to do. (It is never even clarified, once we do find out what the Titan actually does, why the Drej are so scared of that to begin with. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, unless it's some kind of a "humans are evolving faster than we did, so we must kill them before they overtake us!" thing.) How did the Drej even find out about the Titan project to begin with? How do they and Korso both manage to find Cale at exactly the same time after almost 15 years? And that's not all—in some cases, characters exhibit peculiar abilities that are never adequately explained. At one point, Cale is able to operate Drej technology (much as Flynn operates a Recognizer in Tron) even though it is made out of glowing blue energy with no controls evident anywhere. It would have been nice to find out why.

Motivations of particular characters such as Korso or Tek (the Alf-like alien who raises Cale after his father goes away, voiced by Tone-Loc) are never explored beyond surface level. The movie falls into the Disneyesque trap of making its characters familiar stereotypes as a substitute for spending time characterizing them individually. Because of all these gaps, the film has "plot holes big enough to fly a starship through" that might not have been there if things had simply been better explained.

As I was watching Titan A.E., I was often reminded of an earlier teencentric animated movie, 1981's Heavy Metal. The original Heavy Metal wasn't a great film. It may not even have been a particularly good one. Yet it had a sort of infectious spirit that drew its viewers in, and that is probably what caused it to become a cult classic. In its best moments, Titan A.E. sometimes manages to capture that same spirit—which brings it closer to being a worthy successor than Heavy Metal 2000, which never does. For this reason, if no other, I say it's well worth that $5.50 Walmart bin expenditure.

Rating: 8 out of 10.

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The Triplets of Belleville (2003)

The other animated movie I saw recently was aimed at a primarily adult audience (in the sense of maturity, not nudity) but was as different from Titan A.E. as chalk from cheese. The Triplets of Belleville was a French animated art film that was twice nominated for the 2004 Oscars (Best Animated Feature and Best Song ("Belleville Rendezvous")). I rented it not having any idea what to expect, as I had intentionally made every effort to avoid being spoiled by the movie beforehand.

This led to a few moments of surprise when the movie first started and my parents and I were treated to the opening moments of a Fleischman-like cartoon in which enormous women and itty-bitty men attended an event played by the musical group the Triplets of Belleville (as well as caricatures of musician Django Reinhardt and dancers Josephine Baker and Fred Astaire). However, after the cartoon, we met the movie's actual main characters, who are done in a somewhat more realistic style.

I say somewhat because this is a very stylized movie. In fact, it's so stylized it is difficult to find anything to compare it to. All the characters are exaggerated caricatures of stereotypes—usually exaggerated to the point of grotesqueness. People are either extremely short or outrageously tall, beanpole-thin or mountainously obese. This goes for buildings, vehicles, animals, and just about every other object in the movie

Without giving away more than the blurb on the video cover, the story centers around an old lady named Madame Souza; her grandson, Champion; and their dog, Bruno. Sometime in the late 1940s, a very young Champion has apparently just come to live with Mme. Souza after the death of his parents. Trying her best to make him happy, Mme. Souza becomes his trainer over the years that follow so that he can, in 1963, enter the Tour de France and follow in the footsteps (or tire tracks) of those he idolizes. But Champion is mysteriously kidnapped, and Mme. Souza follows his abductors across the ocean to the very peculiar metropolis of Belleville. Here, she must enlist the aid of some most unlikely allies to rescue him.

There are many things I could say about this movie...but almost all of them would spoil it in some way. I had several belly-laughs over the course of the film just from incidents that were entirely unexpected and yet so much in character that they still made perfect sense. To say anything at all about what they are, or why they're so funny, would take away from the wonder you would get from seeing them for the first time.

Knowing nothing about the movie when I rented it, I experienced moments of trepidation as I started the DVD. First of all, the audio selections were English and Spanish only. No French. As one used to subtitled foreign films (particularly anime), and aware of American importers who leave off the original language tracks of foreign films and just dub them into English (particularly Jackie Chan movies), this immediately made me nervous. Then, when I started the movie, I saw the warning "This movie has been formatted to fit your screen" usually reserved for pan-and-scan butcheries of widescreen movies, and that made me really nervous.

But as it turned out, I needn't have worried on either count. First of all, since there are only about three important spoken lines of dialogue in the entire movie, the fact that those lines were dubbed into English was rather unimportant. All the rest of the dialogue in the movie, including French announcers heard speaking over the radio and Charles DeGaulle seen speaking on TV, is left alone. Second, Triplets of Belleville is one of those odd movies that is actually made in a narrower (1.66:1, or 15:9) aspect ratio than anamorphic (1.78:1, or 16:9). In order to keep from having to "windowbox" the film and show black bars to the left and right when they put it into the anamorphic format, they shaved a few pixels off the top and bottom, so the movie ended up losing perhaps 7% of its overall picture—a regrettable but acceptable loss, all things considered. Thus, Triplets joins The Substitute 2 in the unusual subclass of movies that were altered for DVD from their original version but formatted to fit a wide screen.

I find that I particularly enjoy movies such as this, which are told with almost no dialogue whatsoever. It's a challenge to a storyteller to present a tale like that, and sometimes a challenge to the viewer to puzzle out how to interpret things he is shown. And if nothing else, a dialogueless film is not ever going to suffer from an excess of exposition.

Dialogue or no, Triplets is presented in 5.1 digital sound, and though I've only had the chance to watch a little of it on a 5.1 system (as opposed to my parents' stereo set), it seems to have a decent digital mix with good directionality. The musical numbers and soundtrack to the film come through quite well. The DVD's picture is crisp and clear, and the disc itself also includes a number of extras which I have not yet had a chance to peruse.

Much like Titan A.E., Triplets is a mixture of computer animation and traditional cel animation (though Triplets also has a sprinkling of black-and-white live-action photography). Unlike Titan, however, Triplets blends the two almost flawlessly; some reviewers don't even notice the CGI and laud the film as a triumph of "traditional" cel animation. It's hard to blame them. The only way to tell that a particular shot is CGI is that it moves in a way cel animation couldn't, or allows a pan or tracking shot that cel animation would not—but there are many, many shots throughout the course of the film that are inobviously CGI, as I only found out when I watched the making-of documentary on the DVD—and that's exactly as it should be. This marriage of cel and CGI allows for some very creative shots and camera effects, especially in dream sequences.

Grotesqueness of character and architectural design aside, Triplets is a very well-animated and detail-oriented movie. The vistas are cluttered with interesting little signs and handbills and miscellaneous objects and random clutter. It reminds me of some of the illustrations of Mercer Mayer, which also include a lot of trifling little details. There's way too much to take in with just one viewing—I've started watching it a second time, and though I'm only about twenty minutes into it, I'm already seeing dozens of things I missed the first time around. This is a disc that will certainly reward repeat viewing.

The Triplets of Belleville is not a movie for children—but unlike the other movies I've reviewed in this entry, it isn't due to sex or violence. Save for some brief nudity near the beginning (the parody of Josephine Baker, a 1920s dancer who often danced half-nude), there's very little objectionable material in the entire film. Triplets isn't a children's movie because it simply doesn't have much to keep them interested. The pacing is slow and leisurely, the humor is often subdued, and most children would probably get bored after the first few minutes.

If you're interested in art films or good animation and have a fairly long attention span, check this one out.

Rating: 10 out of 10.

Accidentally Famous, at Internet Speed

Every so often, something happens that just makes you think about the world we live in today—this brave new net-connected world, a billion keyboards and screens tied together with filaments of light. It's such a remarkable system for putting people in touch with other people, or disseminating the news moments after it happens. And the dissemination isn't just one-way, either; we have search-engines and news aggregators to let us reach out and find what we want on our own. There's just so much information out there, and it travels so fast.

But this rapidity can have unexpected consequences, as a friend of mine found out the other day when he posted about a bad experience he'd had on his way to work that morning to his LiveJournal. He was basically just letting off some frustration to his friends (that's what most personal LiveJournals (including my own) are used for, after all—posting events in your life for your friends and family to see, sort of your own personal me-newsletter) and chronicling the ways in which he found his home being changed by new political realities. He didn't expect anyone outside his circle of friends to be interested in his bad day that morning, and he certainly didn't expect what followed. Someone passed the URL of his journal entry on to a widely-read journal, some of its members passed the link on to other places, and before he knew it he was the lead story on BoingBoing and spattered across Metafilter and a variety of other journals and blogs (including this one). Startled and chagrinned by this unexpected (and unwanted) fame, my friend elected not to make any more public LJ posts for a while.

My friend had been completely unaware of this when he posted the tale, but his story struck several major "geek chords"—that is, it hit some particular hot-buttons readers of those sites share—and it was the sort of thing that those people would see and immediately want to spread the word. And since it was a public post, well...they did. (I'm only surprised he didn't hit Slashdot...but then, given how long Slashdot's article-approval process tends to take, maybe he did and it just hasn't shown up yet.) And this is the unexpected consequence of our speed-of-light 'net: it is possible to have a bad experience in the morning, and be a minor Internet celebrity for it by the evening of the same day.

But the Internet is all about this kind of spread of ideas. Not usually on such a startling scale, but we interact with it in a million small ways every day. Read very many LiveJournal entries and you'll invariably come across somebody putting a web quiz into their journal. What character in a particular book or movie are you most like, what kind of personality do you have, what is the placement of your LJ friends on a graphical chart, and so on. (And I'm as guilty as the rest in this respect.) Often called "memes" after evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins's writings, these are little ideas that get passed on because people just think they're neat and want to take part in them, and then other people see them and pass them on.

Seth Godin, in his book Unleashing the Ideavirus, calls this sort of thing—a story or idea that people want to spread—an "ideavirus." The book is all about how to use them in marketing, from a marketroid's perspective, but it's still quite fascinating; Godin was among the first to recognize and write an organized book about the spread of ideas in the Internet era. "Ideaviruses" have always been around, but the Internet gave them the first really effective means to spread rapidly—which caused them to catch the eye of marketroids. (After all, if there's anyone who has a professional stake in studying and explicating how ideas spread, it's the marketroids.)

The first "ideavirus" marketing gimmicks were things like Internet greeting cards, referral links on websites, and and beamable apps on PDAs, but recent years have seen them expand into complicated projects like the recent AI and Halo 2 webgames that form entire communities around investigating and learning stories that are in some way related to the product being advertised.

Back when USENET was the primary medium of discussion on the Internet, it was harder for ideaviruses to spread. Messages on a USENET group were ephemeral and hard to find amid all the other messages, and the process of accessing USENET was somewhat arcane to the uninitiated. Websites required more expertise than the average person had, so while they could be a source of ideas, they didn't usually participate in the spread of them so much. However, with the dawn of the blog (and now even Seth Godin has one) and blog search engines and trackback and so on, even the average person could have his own printing press...and millions do. And most of those presses seem to be largely devoted to echoing what other presses have already said. Thanks to the weblog, a viral idea can be more contagious than ever before.

Dawkins's original definition of a "meme" was that it was a building block of ideas in much the same way a gene is a building block of life. With that in mind, it would not be stretching a point too far to suggest that whenever we sit down and write, stringing ideas together into a coherent thesis, we are engaging in "memetic engineering." What my friend found out is that, just as an act of genetic engineering might accidentally create a virus, an act of memetic engineering can accidentally create an ideavirus.

There is a "bright side," however (at least for my publicity-shunning friend): just as an ideavirus can spread at Internet speeds, it can also die out the same way if no action is taken to keep it alive. As stories age off the sites that once posted them at the top, readers move on to other, newer stories (that themselves spread at Internet speed) and forget the old. If we all used to have our "15 minutes of fame," now it's closer to 15 seconds.

Collectively, we are voracious consumers of information; it's just in our natures. We try to find out more about the things that interest us, and then knowing more, we want to tell others what we know, and they want to find out just as much as we want to tell them. And then we move on to other interests. The Internet didn't invent this process, but it sure did speed it up.

Have a Coke and a Smile...Or Else

Found via, yes, BoingBoing writeup (that's where I seem to get all these stories I comment on, but that's just because it's one of my favorite web journals, right up there with Slashdot), it seems that the Olympics Committee has laid down some rather draconian rules concerning bringing outside food, drink, or items with the wrong brand logos on them into the games. This is ostensibly to prevent "ambush marketing," but it's also a form of protectionism akin to DVD and video game console region-locking. Sponsors such as McDonald, Coke, and Adidas have bought monopoly rights in the game. I swear, we're getting closer to the corporatist world depicted in the cyberpunk genre every single day.

This isn't new, of course; it's been going on for quite some time, just on a smaller scale. The most publicized incident in recent years was the time a student chose to "ambush protest" with a Pepsi T-shirt on a day when Coke executives would be at his school. Do a little research, and in only about thirty seconds spent on Google you will start to see that schools are becoming a major branding battleground these days, with some schools even prohibiting wrongly-branded beverages to be brought onto the grounds. (I wish I could dig up the article I read a while back about that—among other things, it indicated that a Gatorade cooler used by a school's football team had to have the logo hastily covered up until Coke could supply them with Powerade coolers instead.) Sure is different from when I was at school in the eighties. Back then, we had a couple of Coke machines (and a Dr. Pepper machine) by the cafeteria, and that was it. Nobody made a really big deal out of it (except my Mom who didn't want me drinking that sugary stuff as it would rot my teeth...but that was on a strictly individual basis).

Now all of a sudden we have big business funnelling money into the schools to try to hook customers early and turn them brand-loyal for life—and this is something whose prediction far, far predates the cyberpunk revolution. Look at Pohl & Kornbluth's The Space Merchants sometime to see what I mean; the ad execs in that book were talking about doing things like packaging icky school lunches in the colors of a hated rival of their client, to cause the kids to grow up assigning negative connotations to those colors (and hence that product)—and back then it was considered a satire, things that ad agencies might do taken to extremes that nobody really expected we'd ever reach. Well, guess what...we've reached those extremes.

So is it really any surprise that, having started with schools, the big business is now moving on to the Olympics? Given the International Olympic Committee's track record of corruption, it's perhaps even less of a surprise than "clean venues" in schools. Perhaps it was inevitable.

Between this sort of thing, politics, losses of freedoms, terrorism...I sure hope they hurry up and send a mission to Mars soon, because I think I want to move there.

A Game Attempt at Confiscation

I've just had the URL to this nasty little tale mentioned in a chatserver where some friends and I hang out...then thirty seconds later, I see the same story mentioned on BoingBoing. The protagonist of the tale, a friend of friends of mine, had someone at the New Jersey/New York ferry authority attempt to confiscate a copy of a role-playing game book, Exalted: The Abyssals, that he had been carrying in his knapsack because the would-be confiscator felt it was "inappropriate" for other ferry-goers to be exposed to it. (What's more, this wasn't even the first incident where having a RPG book got this particular gamer hassled.)

Of course, this is hardly the first time that roleplaying games have been considered "inappropriate"; religious and other attacks on RPGs have quite a long history, in fact, including a condemnation by a fellow who's been in the news a good deal recently for certain other condemnations, Dr. James Dobson. (Dobson's "Adventures in Odyssey" radio show depicting D&D as satanic has such a skewed vision of reality that it is almost as funny as the Dead Alewives' famous "D&D skit" which depicts gamers as they really are.) But for the most part, D&D-bashing was a religious fad of the eighties that has by and large faded since the founder of BADD died. (Its "ecological niche" has since been largely filled by Harry Potter-bashing, but that's a subject for another rant.)

This is, however, the first time that I have heard of something like this happening, where some authority in the real world (other than a school teacher or principal, where the rules are very different) has tried to confiscate a gaming book for "inappropriateness." It's a bit of a scary thing to have happen, for sure. Still, I doubt it's indicative of any larger trend on the part of that ferry authority. More than likely it was just one or two guards on a power-trip, looking for things to confiscate to boost his ego...and since they probably didn't expect to be able to get away with taking someone's dirty magazine, picked on the somewhat spooky-looking RPG book instead.

In the end, the joke will be on him, though; I gather that the story has been hitting a lot of livejournals and other web logs since being posted to mephron's LJ, so the incident is getting a lot of attention. One can only hope it will result in some sort of corrective action.

Update: As mentioned in an update to the BoingBoing story, game author/web journalist Greg Costikyan wrote to the company that runs the ferry about this incident. He received a response that they were very interested in contacting mephron to find out exactly where and when this had occurred, since such an incident would have been in violation of both corporate policy and maritime law. If and when any outcome will be revealed is uncertain, however; shaken by the abruptness of this unwanted fame, mephron won't be posting anything publicly for a while. Can't say that I blame him, either.

Final Update: mephron has made an LJ post including the text of his letter to the ferry company and a few closing words.

What About Bob?

Found via BoingBoing: Cryptology/security maven Bruce Schneier writes about a recent incident in Australia wherein an airline attendant found an airsickness bag in a lavatory with the letters "BOB" written on it. She immediately concluded that this stood for "Bomb On Board" and had the captain return the plane to the ground. And we're not talking about just a simple landing, we're talking about emergency procedures, emergency crews standing by, 150,000 litres of fuel being dumped, US$140,000 to US$700,000 in expense incurred, the whole shebang.

I can only shake my head in sadness at the whole thing. It's only the latest indicator that we've worked ourselves into such a state of hysteria that we jump at shadows. Someone writes his name on his barf bag and drops it in the toilet, and it's suddenly a credible indicator of a terrorist threat. Why??? What terrorist, if he had planted a bomb on an airplane, would choose such a roundabout method of making it known—a method that depends on a flight attendant jumping to conclusions, I might add? Even if the flight attendant didn't know better, I would think the captain should have.

I say only the latest indicator, as there's another one that's been making the rounds recently. Women's Wall Street reporter Annie Jacobsen was on a flight with a group of Syrians who turned out to be members of a band, and was terrified during the flight by what she felt was suspicious behavior on their part...and subsequently wrote an over-dramatic article about the experience, and a few days later, a follow-up. The story was a three day wonder in the media, who were sucked right in by its scaremongering sensationalism; even BoingBoing picked it up about a week after the fact without even bothering to do any fact-checking on it. But the fact is, there wasn't anything to it. The men were what they claimed to be...members of a band en route to perform at a Las Vegas casino. They went there, they performed, and presumably they flew back again. The US Air Marshals on the flight were rather ticked with Ms. Jacobsen over it. And yet, she still stands up there on her podium, preaching distrust and fear. Patrick Smith, the pseuonymous airline pilot who writes the "Ask the Pilot" column for Salon.com, wrote a pair of rebutting articles pointing out the fallacies better than I can.

Of course, we've always been a bit panicky about airline travel, at least in recent decades. 9/11/01 and attendant security restrictions only served to magnify that fear, not create it from nothing. That airline travel is, mile for mile, safer than driving has been repeated so often that it's become a cliché, but we still feel this irrational fear. Gregory Benford wrote a great article on risk assessment which touched upon fear of flying, back in the September 2000 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. (The article is available here, but you need to have logged into EBSCOhost (see if your local public or school library subscribes) to access it.) I think it's more true now, in the post-9/11 era, than it was even then.

Benford wrote, in part:

We instinctively dislike stories that lower our estimate of what human lives mean. Audiences prefer dramas about rich, beautiful, powerful people, rather than barflies and beggars -- these people matter. Similarly, we deplore disasters that seem to rob us of our self worth.

In ancient times, weather and the gods made disasters. Now we make them, for we are lords of the biosphere.

I propose that the myriad small deaths from disease, tornadoes, falls, or even from train wrecks, all seem to us "natural." Dying of something nature makes, whether it's a microbe or a meteor, has about it a strange sense of harmony. This at least carries a freight of consoling meaning: And eventually we assign old, familiar technology to the category of "natural."

Death from new technology that we do not understand carries a taint of being self-inflicted, almost of unintentional suicide. This is especially true if we cannot control the new technology personally, relying on unseen experts -- that pilot up ahead in the cockpit, say.

Techno-accident demeans all life by making it appear trivially spent.

Another aspect: It may well be that the most important feature of modern times is not technology, but the fact that we dwell in the first era in which atheist ideas are commonly (though not universally) accepted.

Disaster means something if it comes from God or, failing that, at least from nature. Techno-disasters can't be rationalized this way, because we have only ourselves to blame.

So, deploring the public's irrational views of risk, as some number-crunching experts do, can miss a vital point. People seek to invest event with meaning -- they want more from risk assessment than body counts.

And if they die in their cars, while in full control -- well, that's life, isn't it?

To use another hoary old cliché, the first step to solving a problem is admitting that we have one. So, we should just admit it: we're irrationally afraid of flying. We're scared of being out of control, putting ourselves at the mercy of people we don't even know, utilizing a technology we (as passengers) don't fully understand. We're even more scared when we see the bogeyman of the Evil Middle-Eastern Terrorist lurking in every other seat. We need to recognize we have that problem, and then we need to get over it.

As long as we allow ourselves to be spooked by barf bags (or, as in Ms. Jacobsen's article, McDonald's bags), then, to use one final cliché (last one, I promise), the terrorists have already won.