Speed Screed: Barack Star

Other than the fact that a presidential election is a de facto popularity contest, pretty much by definition, the appeal of Barack Obama has been staggering – so much so that people are apparently already attempting to scalp non-existent tickets for his inaugural address – the interest is so staggering that as many as 4 million people have already expressed a desire to attend this event live. This number is huge. Clearly, that many people can’t attend, but you can imagine the battle for attendance this might entail.

Of course, the GOP was essentially lambasting Obama for being popular, and his election has naturally intensified this feeling. The media has crowned him with “rock star” status. By “the media,” though, I am referring to political obsessives like Rachel Maddow and not necessarily the mainstream media. While I definitely think it’s undeniably a good thing that people are excited about are new president, and am relieved that we can look to our Commander-and-Chief as a role model rather than a national embarrassment, I do think it’s somewhat irresponsible of the supposedly disinterested media to jump on the frenzied bandwagon here.

We all love Barack and we wish him well. We hope he will be able to be accomplish much – he certainly has the intelligence and temperament to handle this job. But I do hope that the media will not once again hand over a free pass to any President (like they did with Bush on the Iraq War) on principle. I sincerely believe that close media scrutiny must be restored – not because I don’t trust Obama, but because it is an absolutely critical component of any functioning democracy. The media need to sharpen their teeth again. What better time them with a President who has promised transparency and honesty? They need to get their groove back so when a stonewaller takes office they won’t be cowed into submission.

So when the media starts hitching a ride on the zeitgeist, I always get a little bit worried. As I said, we all deserve to celebrate and feel joy and renewed zeal at this historic time. Even the media may not be able to hold back its excitement for a little while. But what I don’t want to see is Barack’s popularity interfere with the media from doing its vital work, because the press needs to redeem itself for eight years of jingoism and underreporting.

Sometimes I wonder if we need a new generation of journalists. This old one hasn’t done much to help my faith in the media along.

Speed Screed: Pop Stagnation

Music doesn’t seem to have evolved much in the last ten years. Although I hardly started listening to popular music of any kind before 8th grade (I can’t even remember what I used to listen to), once I actually got into the music of the 90’s I realized there were actually many quality bands around. Beck, Rage Against the Machine, Sublime (to an extent), Nine Inch Nails; there were dozens of bands that didn’t suck. They weren’t derivative. They had some talent. In short, they were good.

I now know that death metal was really taking off during those years too, though I only learned that later. And hip-hop? Four words. A Tribe Called Quest. The 90’s were a serious decade as far as popular music went. The end of the millennium brought all the creative people out of the woodwork.

What the hell happened?

Music these days is unbelievably derivative. Other than a sneaking of country influences into the mainstream via cute Southern women singers who can also play acoustic guitar, I have yet to see anything new, or anything old enough to be re-branded as novel. A perfect example are these “Jonas Brothers.” Now there’s a shtick if ever I saw one. Their music is what I kindly term “post-alternative drek,” an amalgam of punk, emo and whining that was exemplified by Blink 182, though any band that uses that formula (including the Jonas Brothers) are still better than they were.

What sells them is that they’re three brothers, with their outfits coordinated. This is marketing designed to shoot right into the hormone-soaked early teenage girl market. They are not without talent or ability, but their music is absolutely nothing new, and it already sounds corporate. And if they’re the “hottest new band” as magazines and TV shows have publicly announced ad nauseum then I think we can draw a pretty good bead on what passes for music in the popular mind these days. The 00’s here are just castoff leftovers from the sound that wasn’t better produced in the 90’s. I mean, new wave was irritating, but at least it was a sound! People were trying! And at least the 60’s and 70’s saw the introduction of rock and even hints of progressive rock.

No wonder I listen to metal.

Today’s Rave: The Simpsons Movie

I finally saw the Simpsons movie the other day. It was good – better than I expected, really. But what I found compelling about it was not the humor – it was pretty funny throughout, though not hilarious – but the way they basically upgraded everything about the Simpsons to movie-quality. Better animation and clearer sound(and music scored for a movie, of course) are a given, though I will say there is more nuance to be picked up from the voice-acting here than in the show, and I also think the voice actors were either told to ham it up more, or realized the necessary gravity and did it themselves.

There are subtler important things woven into the way the movie is wirtten. I’m not convinced that the Simpsons have a true “canon,” nor am I sure that even if there is one that the movie would be in it, but much of the movie involves collapsing some of their most typical plot points from the show into a bigger dramatic arc. Everything is much more intense from a character interaction standpoint. For example, Bart’s tenuous relationship with Homer is an obvious plot used for many different episodes, but rather than a short reconciliation after twenty minutes of mental, emotional and physical tussling, Bart wholly abandons Homer to be with Flanders as he comes to realize what a father can be – and this gets worse for virtually the entire movie, ’till the very end where Homer wins him back by letting him hold the bomb as they race off to rescue the town. Essentially, I see their relationship as a “you can’t spell dysfunctional without functional” kind of thing, and that’s basically what they use to reconcile the two. Flanders also ends up looking pretty good, ultimately happy to see the two back together.

Speaking of bombs, they also made the conflict situation more serious than it would normally be – i.e. the government sealing off and possibly murdering the residents of Springfield. To be honest, the drama of this plot actually detracts somewhat from the humor – it’s hard to laugh when all of your favorite characters might be wiped off the face of the earth. I mean, you know they won’t, but I actually found this emotional tweak to the plot to be interesting because it let the writers and actors stretch a bit, which I always enjoy.

And perhaps the most particularly overused plot point, as far as the series is concerned, is of course Homer and Marge’s outrageously improbable and inexplicably continuing marriage. Of course, as this is a movie, when she finally inevitably decides to break it off, it is particularly dramatic (in fact, Julie Kavner adds a very skillful, heart-wrenching degree of hopelessness to her goodbye video monologue) , and of course when they get back together it is much more touchingly romantic than it is in the series, where it is almost trite at this point.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that the movie was not simply a longer episode of The Simpsons – the writers, actors, and composer(s?) all rose to the task and took one of America’s (and probably the world’s) most beloved TV families and actually made a real movie out of them. I have only one thing to say.

Bravo.

Today’s Rave: Smart-Guy Advantage

During Bush’s reign of error I would recall reading many informative and useful pieces by various staff of the New York Times. Not all the columnists necessarily make political recommendations in their articles, but a couple that do (most often Krugman, Friendman, and Kristof) struck me as being particularly useful. There are ideas being thrown around that are worth simply knowing about and considering.

Then I would recall that the chances of Bush reading it to be absolutely zero, or at least abysmally low, and even were he to read it, the chance he would use or absorb any of the contents were zero.

Of course, I’m not claiming that the New York Times columnists are particularly adepts at instituting policy recommendations. Their strongest ability is simply to promote awareness of an issue. But most of all they quite authoritatively use the lens of common sense (with the exception of Kristol and some Brooks).

I read a good article regarding moving hard and fast in regards to another stimulus package by Krugman. And suddenly it occurred to me that Obama probably read the same article, or if he didn’t, one of his people might bring it to his attention. Additionally, Obama may consider Krugman’s word carefully, since Obama would be likely to take things like education and Nobel Laureate status into consideration.

Refreshing, isn’t it? That’s the power of logical thinking. Oh, how I’ve missed it.

So whenever I read a good idea from any even remotely public source, I can be sure that it’s probably gotten to Obama’s ear one way or another.

Obama seemed to be dead-center in terms of political ideals, but if you think about the policies he wants to implement (universal healthcare, green energy) he would seem to actually be leaning quite a bit to the left. Unless, of course, he’s seeing those two things simply as what they are: two good ideas that are necessary to move this country forward, and they have no inherent political affiliation. That’s what we’d all like to hope, I’m sure. I imagine the real reasons like somewhere in between.

In any case, having a President who actually reads the newspaper (of course, he probably has a bunch of press staffers combing the news at all times, but that’s more for publicity control) is a real relief. I can be sure that Obama won’t exclude anyone simply because they don’t fit into his own political conception of what the world ought to be like.

I don’t know when pragmatism became so rare, but I’m oh so glad it’s back where it belongs: in government.

Speed Screed: Scads of Hardware

As the complexity of computers increases, so too does the number of things that can go wrong. Additionally, as more and more peripherals flood the market from competing companies, the possible hardware configurations of computers are increasing exponentially. This presents a real problem for game developers.
In the old days, there were maybe a dozen basic outfits that a computer could have, with a couple variations. Beta testing on virtually all available machines was practically possible. When a game was released, there was no chance of hardware or software compatibility – the games were pretty much designed on the same computers they were ultimately going to be run on.

These days, testing is becoming the longest part of game development. Any company that wants to take a stable release seriously has to put the game through its paces for an absurdly long time. This is because there are something like ten thousand possible rigs that meet the minimum requirements, and you never know what innocuous-seeming software is going to gum up the works. Any game that is released these days has a small contingent of people who get unexplained crashes to the desktop, horrible and archaic errors like total system freezes, or the extremely dreaded monitor completely deactivating until the computer is reset.

These poor souls love to bitch about what a horrible and buggy release it was, and how badly the developers screwed up. But it often has just as much to do with a publisher. The publisher is in it to make money, and they want the game out as fast as possible because they want to make their money back as fast as possible. The developers may tell them that they need six months of alpha and three months of beta and the publishers may only agree to half that amount, instead offering a longer contract for creating game patches and the like. Many publishers don’t seem to understand the fallout generated by a game that barely runs after someone dropped fifty bucks for it at the store. Some do, though.

Blizzard (although they merged with Activision) are notorious for taking godawful amounts of time to make games. This is because they understand the requirements for making a game these days, both in terms of innovation and also product testing. Blizzard’s famous attitude of “it’ll be done when we say it is” is really the only way to ensure a top-quality release that will require minimum patching and also that it will run on a huge number of systems.

The upshot of this is that it may be easier in the future to play games on consoles, since developers only have to make sure it runs flawlessly on ONE system. Considering I can get an Xbox 360 for much less money than a state-of-the-art video card (let alone a computer), this argument is persuasive indeed.

Speed Screed: Litigation Nation

No, I don’t need help out with my single two-pound grocery bag. Thanks for the offer though.

Not that I’m offended, despite my strapping young man status. But I am annoyed. I shop at Vons all the time and apparently it has become company policy to ask everyone, regardless of gender, age, or general fitness if they need help with their groceries. It could be a pack of gum, or a fifty-pound sack of potatoes. The customer could be a little old lady or a two-time world kickboxing champion. The same question must always be asked. Never mind the fact that grocery carts exist for the purpose of piling on the purchases and still being able to easily wheel them around.

Of course, there is logic to this. You don’t want people to feel excluded. Why only ask women? Why not ask men? Well, first of all virtually every non-disabled man is not going to ask for help with practically any amount of ordinary groceries. He’s even less likely to accept help from a female attendant. If you made it company policy not to ask men if they need help, I don’t think it’s going to matter.

But I somehow suspect the real reason was some lawsuit in the recent past. Some poor fool threw his or her back out trying to lift some groceries, sued them for selling groceries that were too heavy, won, and now Vons has instituted Operation Overkill: ask everyone if they need help. Or maybe even more likely, some woman behind the counter freaked out when the old lady in front of her was offered help but she wasn’t, and decided that it was discrimination other than, um, common sense. And now to cover their ass legally, they have to ask everyone the same damn question.

Even if I’m wrong about there being a lawsuit in this particular case, it’s the story of this country: legal action can be pursued even when it is you, the “victim,” that is clearly in the wrong. Many companies, like Mickey D’s, find it much easier to throw money at the problem until it goes away than actually defend itself from frivolous lawsuits. Make no mistake: McDonald’s can afford some extremely good lawyers, but the publicity from squelching these people’s pointless lawsuits would probably be worse financially than offering someone a few hundred grand to quietly go away. It’s a beautiful system, in its way.

Of course, for most of these register people, it’s become a mantra: they don’t actually think about the words that are passing out of their lips, they just say them because they have to. I suspect that if I actually said “yes” they would probably reel in disbelief. I have no desire to do that, though, because these people’s jobs are irritating enough without me wasting their valuable time to prove a point for a self-indulgent blog.

Bye.

Speed Screed: Meaningless Advertising

In some ads, there seems to be this idea that attitude sells more than, say, actual words. Some of these phrases that get tossed around are actually completely meaningless, even though they seem reasonable. A favorite I saw on television recently was a Kia commercial. They refer to their cars as “stylishly affordable.” It sounds good, but actually it’s complete gibberish.

Consider that the adverb, stylishly, describes the word “affordable.” Generally, affordable is not a word that takes much description, other than that of degrees, i.e. “somewhat affordable, very affordable,” etc. However, not only are Kias apparently affordable, but stylishly so. That is to say that you can afford them in style. They are priced stylishly.

I know I’m rambling on about pointless crap more than usual, but advertisements in general annoy me greatly. Many of them suck, and I swear they suck more so than in the past. Many commercials these days are what I refer to as “pseudo-clever,” where they try to do something witty and it ends up simply being kitsch because they don’t have any idea of timing, tension, or how to deliver a punch line. I know I could write better commercials than 90% of the hacks at these ad agencies. I don’t because I think my ability to write could be better put to use, such as complaining about things rather than trying to fix them.

See? A joke. Ahem.

Personally, I long for the old commercials from the 50’s, where they simply tell you to buy it. The old “Enjoy Coke” ads in 50’s-style diners really cut to the chase. At least with an ad like that, I don’t have to wait through a poorly constructed quasi-narrative arc or an unfunny joke to find out what it is that I don’t want to buy.

Truly, DVR and TiVo have made watching TV so much less of a waste of time than in the past. Part of the reason I don’t watch TV is I don’t like watching ads, and that’s also why I download 90% of the stuff I want to watch. Consider also that the best shows are actually all of 20 minutes long since stations make the vast majority of their advertising money during a two-hour block known as “prime-time.” Simpsons episodes these days are actually about 21 minutes. They’ve been getting shorter, which I believe is part of the reason they got worse for a season or two; the writers couldn’t usually get a decent B plot going in the face of five or so missing minutes. For the more recent seasons, the episodes have been up to snuff but have been sort of like “Simpsons Lite” because there still is a weaker B plot.

Enough of my chattering. See you tomorrow.

Today’s Rant: One Step At A Time…I Guess

I think I have “straight white guy” guilt.

As many newscasters have pointed out, the country did take a step backward in a few places during the election, astonishingly including my beloved California. It would seem that many of the minorities who voted for Obama also voted in favor of banning gay marriage just a few months after it had been fully recognized as legal by the state.

Now I know little about gay culture, and that which I do know involves white people, who generally are somewhat culturally blank. I know nothing about the interaction between latino culture and gay culture, for example. So I make no claims to say anything factual here; I’ll just be putting out a few ideas for consideration.

Consider the gung-ho masculinity of mainstream black culture (i.e. hip hop). You can be damn sure you’re never going to see a gay black guy in a hip-hop music video riding around in a limo with a bunch of gigolos with him, or whatever. I would guess that there would be a definite homophobia attached to hip-hop culture.

Also, though I’m too lazy to look up statistics, it’s probably a safe bet to assume that a higher proportion of these “minorities” (latinos are hardly a minority in California anymore) are Christian than whites hereabouts. Obviously a few sects of Christianity are fine with gay marriage (or at least the existence of homosexuality), but not the big obnoxious ones. And Catholicism? Fuggedaboutit.

So I would guess that a confluence of factors probably makes these minority groups more prone to vote against gays than they otherwise would. Keep in mind I’m not trying to make any assumptions here, I’m simply trying to reason out the numbers.

But it’s important not to confuse the issue and lump all equal rights as part of the agenda of a “progressive” voter. While all movement towards equal rights is progress in the literal sense, there is no reason to assume that someone who’d vote for a black man must therefore be committed to civil rights and therefore could not in good conscience vote to ban gay marriage. There are plenty of people who broke out in tears of joy that a black man finally got elected and then pulled out their “God Hates Fags” signs and got back to humiliating and generally making life hell for people who have no more control over their sexual preference than their shoe size. Well, hopefully not plenty. But I can posit there are enough of them out there.

Ultimately, all issues of equality are godawfully complicated. For example, we broke the color barrier, and to a somewhat lesser extent the gender barrier with this election. We can all generally accept the fact that a woman or a minority could be President at this point. But what about an atheist? Other than the fact than I’d personally want my politicians to be avowed atheists, everyone has to pander to McCarthy-era leftovers and be a Christian of some sort, or else kiss your prospects goodbye.

And how about a gay president? Even as I revel in our moving forward in terms of electing Obama, I feel like the opposition to a homosexual president at the moment would be so much more violent and horrible than it would be for a black person or a woman. I mentioned before that I think racism is going out of style, but sometimes I feel like the haters have simply picked up the banner of anti-gay rights. Denying gay couples identical rights under the law is public discrimination, and laws of that sort are inevitably struck down by any supreme court judge that has even mild respect for the Constitution. I think that eventually all states will have to come around, but it might not be soon.

The gay community probably sees the election as slightly tarnished by these Stone Age propositions. California will come around. Apparently the Mormon church donated some twenty million dollars (tax-exempt my ass) to make gay marriage illegal in California. When this news got out, people really started to get peeved (people generally do when the Mormon Church gets involved). Protesters are going nuts. As well they should.

Later.

Speed Screed: Soft Drinks and the Restaurant Industry

It just occurred to me, today, that soft drinks must have revolutionized the restaurant industry. Before Coke, Pepsi, and their ilk were around there were basically three things you could drink in your average restuarant besides booze: milk, coffee, or water. Water was free, and milk was basically a concession to kids. Kids would probably just be drinking water anyway.

But along comes soft drinks, and now there’s something special that kids can drink as a treat while their parents kick back a beer or two. Not only does that mean that there’s a whole host of drinks to be targeted to the spending money of minors, but it also means that restaurants can buy cheap and sell dear on a drink that really only costs them a couple of cents a glass. After all, if all the other drinks on the menu are already a couple bucks, you can easily inflate the true costs of a glass of soda into a tidy little profit for yourself.

I mean, any beverage that comes with free refills nine times out of ten is obviously so cheap that one person can’t even drink enough to lose money on the deal. I’ll bet you that this “buoying up” of the ability of restaurants to operate at a profit sparked a boom in the restaurant industry. I couldn’t readily find any statistics to support this assertion, but that’s alright because I enjoy being wrong, if it turns out I am. Still, it’s a pretty compelling product from a marketing point of view. People often drink several cans a day. And the profit margin is absurd. I often wonder if soda is one of the most “marked-up from cost” products, though bottled water is still, I think, the winner in that category. As Penn Jillette said on an episode of Bullshit!, selling bottled water is like minting your own money.

The profit margin on alcohol, by comparison, can obviously also be pretty good, particularly for cocktails and wine. But only adults can drink booze. The fact that you target the kids too is what makes soda so particularly effective as a method of getting more money from your average customer.

And lets not forget that soda companies has actually forged a minor cultural bond. In the old days you’d take your date to get a soda at the drugstore – like going out to a bar, but much more lame. There you have the iconic picture of the two teenagers on a date drinking the same soda that is resurrected by Coca-Cola every couple of years. Of course, back then that was as close as you could get to kissing in public. But I digress.

Now they have the a small “stake in America” angle that so many domestic beer companies capitalize on; not to the same extent, but Coca-Cola is at least responsible for Santa Claus in his current red-suited incarnation. And of course they run the commercials with the young people tricking out their bicycles and jousting with them and then all sitting around and drinking Coke and laughing. Not too subtle. But I also sadly realized that these kids are all sitting around and drinking coke and laughing because they aren’t allowed to drink beer. Otherwise they’d probably be getting trashed and then running their bikes into each other. I mean, wouldn’t we all?

Today’s Rave: Yes, We Can. Yes, We Will.

Man, what a great moment in history. The entire Republican hate machine couldn’t stop this tide.

Truth be told, the historical significance of this moment was a little lost on me at first, because I saw nothing particularly novel about an African-American being elected myself. My generation is much less likely to be racist because racism has to be taught, and racism is rapidly going out of style. But this morning it just occurred to me just what a huge step in the right direction this has been. We used to have an entire group of people who were denied practically all their fundamental rights in this country, and who were subject to centuries of discrimination,  but the “hold these truths to be self-evident” clause just got a little more accurate last night, as America took a major step in closing the book on slavery and racism and elected a black man to be President. It’s got great narrative sweep. I can never even hope to understand what this must represent to the black community as a whole, but I do know that internationally we just got HUGE bonus points. Except from Russia, who has been cranky recently. You know, I really hate these has-been empires throwing their weight around. Which is, I imagine, why much of the world hates us for Iraq. America was generally subtly imperial (that is, after we took an entire subcontinent and wiped out most of the native population) but still was creating banana republics and shifting “friendly” dictators into power in other countries. You know, like Saddam Hussein (we didn’t put him there, but we helped keep him there).

Part of the reason I despise politics so much is that the Bush administration and their mindless Republican cronies have been doing it wrong for almost a third of my life (and for another one-third of it, I wouldn’t have understood or cared much anyway). But Obama gives me reason to think that maybe we can not completely betray the founding principles of this country after all, and maybe we can actually work towards the stated goal of “a more perfect Union.” It will never get there, but that’s the point. Improvements can and must come. A huge one came last night.

The stunning electoral smashing McCain received may have had much to do with Obama’s huge amount of resources and modern style of campaigning, but what galvanized people into giving the money and volunteering is the positive message. If trying to run a campaign positively in a time where hope is rapidly being lost is pandering, then a) pander away and b) you’re too cynical for me. Obama brought and represents a unity that is sorely needed if we are going to undo the damage of nearly a decade of inept and corrupt administration.

I was, I must admit, very impressed with McCain’s concession speech. Who I heard was the old McCain: the honorable, good-humored, self-deprecating and patriotic veteran who loves his country first and has genuine respect for his opponents. If the Republican sleaze machine had tried to make use of these natural qualities of McCain instead of trying to fit him into their usual scumbag tactics, maybe they would have had a shot. It is dead obvious that McCain is relieved that he can stop being an asshole (his discomfort with this entire campaign has been apparent from the first debate and earlier) and go back to doing what he does best: sticking to his guns in the Senate, rather than sticking to somebody else’s guns on the campaign trail. McCain’s speech did much to repair my negative image of him that has built up. Especially when he made it clear that people’s mindless booing of the new president set an inappropriate tone. Perhaps there’s hope for him yet. Let’s all keep an eye on the Senate.

Obama’s victory speech was so great. I liked it better than his acceptance speech even though it had even less informational content. He skillfully put the moment in historical perspective, and generally just did a hell of a job making us think positively about the future, even as he noted that there will be no easy solutions and no quick fixes.

No easy solutions? No quick fixes? Thank God. Eight years of that attitude has done enough damage already.

Congratulations, President Obama.

Congratulations, America.

But be ready. There is much work to be done.