Maybe Graham Annable’s best one yet:

I had to watch the repeat of the Vice-Presidential debate tonight, which means I got to see all the people a-twittering about it first. Based on what I was reading, I expected something very different from what I saw.

But then, I’m about as politically ignorant as you can get. (Without using the word “repug” or spitting out complaints about “liberals” like it were a dirty word, of course). My vote in the 2008 election was already decided back in 2000, so the only reason I’ve been following the election at all is to make sure neither Obama or Biden is exposed as a baby cannibal (and even then, I’d want to get more details on the baby and its tastiness before I rush to judgement). I’m ignorant partly out of laziness; partly out of a misplaced optimism about the “representative” part of “representative democracy;” and partly because whenever I watch unprocessed “news” I get the urge to punch, kick, and stab things, and it doesn’t go away until I change the channel to cartoons.

So I was surprised to see anything other than the images the headlines and pundits have been creating for me over the past month: Palin didn’t trip over herself or start babbling completely incoherently or pull out a gun and shoot a moose, skin it, and make a rape kit out of it. And Biden didn’t plagiarize someone else’s speech (I’ve still got residual punditry from the last few campaigns running around in my brain), yell at her for being an idiot, or pull out his gun and threaten to shoot Obama if he tried to take it away. Instead what we got were two reasonably well-spoken adults going on television in front of millions of people and delivering their parties’ talking points.

That’s not to say that it was “close.” There was only one person in the debate who proved himself qualified to be Vice President, much less President. If I were Biden, I’d have been insulted at even the implication it was a contest — my estimation of the man went up 100 times, if only because he never stopped and said, “Seriously? I’m supposed to be responding to that?” But he wisely chose to take the situation for what it was: simply another opportunity to campaign for Obama. The only ones who could consider it “close” are those who’ve become so cynical and numb to the political process that they’re simply analyzing the analysis with their responsometers, abandoning any pretense of actual government and simply paying attention to marketability and watchability, like the crassest of TV executives.
Read the rest of this entry »

Since I’ve been confronted with my age (thirty-seven) a lot lately, I’ve been wondering:

1) If you’re around my age (thirty-seven), can you recite the Preamble to the US Constitution? If so, can you do it without singing it?

2) If you’re significantly below my age, can you recite the Preamble to the US Constitution? And were you guys subjected to Schoolhouse Rock as much as we were?

3) Did they ever make a Schoolhouse Rock song about the role of the Vice President and how we can work together to give that position more power?

Microsoft’s ads with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld generated a lot of “controversy” and media attention, for some reason; I thought they were over-long and unfocused, but ultimately harmless. They managed to make a subtle, self-deprecating acknowledgement that Microsoft is perceived as being out of touch, and spun that into a positive: hey look, Windows helps people stay connected and get back in touch!

So they were nothing spectacular (especially considering how much they must’ve cost), but they were a damn sight better than the campaign that ended up taking focus. If you haven’t seen it — and I have no idea how you could’ve avoided seeing it, since I don’t even watch that much TV anymore, and I’ve seen it over a dozen times — it’s the one that starts with a John Hodgman look-alike complaining that PCs have been reduced to a stereotype, and then cycles through dozens of people all around the world saying stupid things like “I have a beard!” Here it is on YouTube.

This campaign fails on every conceivable level, and it makes me angry thinking how much money was spent on it. Here’s just a small sample of the failure:

• It puts Microsoft on the defensive. It’s purely a counter-ad, which would be fine if it didn’t so blatantly say, “You know those ads that everybody loves? We can do those too!”
• As if it weren’t enough to steal the successful Apple campaign’s spokesperson and tag-line, it even rips off Apple’s music gimmick, with its little synthesized jingle screaming “God DAMN we’re quirky!” Does Microsoft really want to dredge up another look-and-feel complaint?
• It’s indistinguishable from hundreds of other ads. They have to keep the Windows logo on-screen the whole time, so you can tell they’re not trying to sell you shoes or body spray or an American Express card.
• It misses the whole point of the campaign it rips off. The people in that ad aren’t PCs, they’re people who (have to) use PCs. In the Apple ads, Hodgman and the Dodgeball guy are really supposed to be a PC and a Mac, not PC and Mac users. That is exactly why those ads are clever.
• That line from Deepak Chopra where he says, “not a human doing, not a human thinking, a human being.” That fails on two sub-levels:
  • It’s bullshit that is supposed to sound like it’s saying something deep.
  • I don’t think it’s wise to emphasize “not doing or thinking” when you’re talking about a computer operating system. Those are pretty much exactly the things that an OS is supposed to help with. Nobody needs to boot up Windows before they can “be.”
• It doesn’t say anything about Windows other than “a lot of people use Windows.” A lot of people get root canals, too; that doesn’t mean they enjoy it. When Coca-Cola runs ad campaigns that are just brand-retention “Hey, Coke still exists,” at least they usually mention that it tastes good, or at least that it can be chilled.

And as terrible as that ad campaign is, they’ve done worse. They’re also touting “The Mojave Experiment”, a “blind taste test” type gimmick whose message is “We have to trick people into liking Windows Vista.”

After you’ve installed Microsoft’s crappy doomed-to-failure Flash rip-off (or better yet, just skipped the whole thing and forgotten it ever happened), there’s a suite of crappy videos where you can watch two anti-charismatic Microsoft PR guys try their damnedest to emulate the creepy black-T-shirt-wearing Apple demodroids. The videos are full of little jump-cuts and “oh are we recording now?” gimmicks that make you want to start punching whoever made them and just never stop.

The premise is that they took a few people, showed them a new version of Windows in development, recorded their squeals of delight at how fast and pretty it is, and then oh my God would you look at that pulled the rug out from under them and told them they’d been using Windows Vista all along!

So apparently, Microsoft is aware that Vista is a miserable failure, and it has terrible word of mouth. Good for them. It’d be nicer if they were actually paying attention though, because they would’ve known that no one has complained about the first impression of Vista. It is pretty. All the little window effects are neat. You can believe for the first few minutes that Microsoft made something as slick-looking and enjoyable to use as OS X, and that even better, you can actually play games on it.

But it takes five minutes or less to run into your first “security” confirmation pop-up. And the eight different pop-ups warning you that some users have been the victims of phishing scams by using their keyboards, and are you sure you meant to type that letter? You’d better hope you don’t have to change a setting, because the Control Panel now has more icons than Ramses’s tomb, half of which are named “DreamFlight” or “SilverShade” or “ActionCenter” or some other boneheaded PR-driven non-name that has nothing to do with “I just want to copy a damn file over the network.”

And you definitely better hope you don’t have to turn the damn thing off, because re-booting it will take up 10-15 minutes of your life, especially since it’s constantly downloading updates every 5 minutes and then failing to install them. But at least you can run it in a virtual machine while you’re actually being productive in a different OS except oh no wait, you can’t, unless you blow $300 on the “Ultimate” edition of Vista.

But at least it’s incompatible with a ton of videogames, since playing games is the only reason left to have Windows installed on a machine. I’m a PC, and I log into an account with Administrator privileges and still have to explicitly say “Run as Administrator” and click away two or three confirmation dialogs whenever I want to launch a game!

They copied so much of Vista from Leopard, and got it wrong. Now they’re copying the ads from Apple, and getting those wrong. As a Mac user, I paid to have that smug sense of superiority over Windows. I need that. But I can’t enjoy it if Windows just keeps failing so badly.

(And the really baffling thing is that Xbox Live is so well done. How can these two products be from the same company?)

via James Urbaniak’s livejournal:

A few years ago, my friend Alex recommended I read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I filed away the suggestion but never acted on it, for any one of a dozen stupid reasons. I wouldn’t have the attention span to read a 1000-page book I liked, much less one without spaceships. I wasn’t that interested in tennis or drug addicts. And most of all, I immediately dismissed it as yet another of the pop culture-influenced “great novels” of the 90s (most of which I haven’t read either, but still feel entitled to judge): an over-educated and under-experienced man vacillating between too earnest and too self-consciously ironic in pre-emptive defense against seeming too earnest.

Wallace’s death shocked me into reading some of his stuff, especially after seeing one reviewer after another mention exactly that play between media influence, irony, self-awareness, sincerity, and cynicism as a recurring theme in his work. I’ve started with A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and I had to stop after 80 pages to process it. One of the essays in that book, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” is one of the most insightful things I’ve ever read.

In that one essay, Wallace manages to touch on everything I’ve been trying to figure out for decades about the media, pop culture, and How We Got To This Point. I don’t even like to suggest that they’re ideas that I’ve had; they’re ideas that I’ve been trying to have, but my brain just couldn’t form them. My own attempts at it seem banging-the-rocks-together facile: “Why no people say what them mean? How come reading The Onion A.V. Club make Chuck so sad inside?” And it’s jarring to be reading a series of observations so relevant, and come across a mention of “St. Elsewhere” or “Moonlighting” or “Growing Pains,” reminders that this was written 18 years ago.

Read the rest of this entry »

One thing that almost all the Coen Brothers’ movies have in common is stupid people. I’m not exactly breaking new ground in cinema studies here: whether they’re stupid but good-hearted (Raising Arizona), stupid and vain (Intolerable Cruelty), stupid people gone cynical (No Country for Old Men), or just plain stupid (Blood Simple), not since the Bush/Cheney administration have two men accomplished so much by artfully manipulating the ignorant.

Burn After Reading doesn’t do anything to break that trend; like Blood Simple, its whole plot is driven by stupid people in way over their heads. Like Fargo and The Big Lebowski, it shows a horrible string of events escalating from one stupid decision. Like The Man Who Wasn’t There and The Hudsucker Proxy, it’s a pitch-perfect parody of another genre of movie (in this case, the spy thriller). Like O Brother, Where Art Thou?, it gets near-genius performances out of every single person in the cast — in this one, Brad Pitt and George Clooney are the stand-outs, and that’s only because Frances McDormand is so great you never notice how great she is.

You can’t avoid comparing it to other Coen Brothers movies, because it’s like a Coen Brothers sampler. Great soundtrack, brilliant dialogue (they can make a guy saying nothing but “fuck” sound like poetry), familiar plot threads mixed up in surprising ways, and masterful editing; you’ve got to think it’s impossible for these guys to make a bad movie. They’ve even included their “Greek chorus” characters like in Hudsucker Proxy, O Brother, and Big Lebowski, the guys who remind you it’s all just a movie and tell the audience what’s going on (although in this case, they admit they don’t know what’s going on).

And it’s hilarious, with just the right combination of lowbrow and highbrow so you’re never sure where the next joke is coming from. You want subtle? There’s a sequence following a guy walking through the corridors of C.I.A. headquarters, and each hallway has its own unique oppressive rushing-of-air ambient noise. Not-so-subtle? The reveal of the invention George Clooney’s character’s been building in the basement had the entire audience laughing out of shock.

Still, it’s a hard movie to love. I’ve read reviews that call it “slight,” or “a trifle.” One particularly misguided review of the movie comes from Ty Burr of the Boston Globe: he criticizes the movie for having no meaning or art, and just being a smug laugh at the audience’s expense. But my problem with the movie isn’t that it doesn’t say anything. There’s nothing wrong with the Coens’ deciding just to goof off for one movie, especially when they’re so good at doing it. The movie would work fine as a simple parody of spy thrillers, deflating their self importance: the global satellite cameras, discs with sensitive info, shady deals in foreign embassies, and pervasive paranoia.

My problem with it is what it does say. To make yet another comparison: it’s ultimately got the same sense of defeatist cynicism as No Country for Old Men. What makes Burr’s criticism so wrong — and he’s far from being the only person who’s made the same misinterpretation — is that the Coen Brothers’ movies are all about rejecting the smug, elitist mentality he accuses them of.

The Coens love showing us stupid people, but they almost always encourage us to root for them. (Except for Blood Simple, which is based on the characters’ being idiots you can’t feel any sympathy for, but that was more a movie about moviemaking than about characters.) Pretty much all of the movies are resoundingly populist and optimistic. That was the core message of Fargo: there’s plenty of hopelessness, and desperation, and sadness, and just plain evil in the world, but people are basically good. (Or at least they want to be). And most importantly, that there’s nothing naive or foolish about acknowledging that.

I think anybody who dismisses the Coens’ movies as being smug or elitist is doing more than a little bit of projection: the viewer might be looking down on these characters, but the movies aren’t. For the most part, they’re good people doing bad things. And part of the reason the morality of the Coens’ movies works so well is that they acknowledge that real evil exists (more often than not in the form of John Goodman), but they don’t dismiss everyone just for being flawed. When Frances McDormand’s character at the end of Fargo says “I just don’t understand,” she’s not being stupid, she’s being sincere: she doesn’t understand why someone would choose to throw away a world that has such simple beauty.

There’s a little bit of that in Burn After Reading — the only real villains of the movie are John Malkovich and Tilda Swinton’s characters. They’re not just flawed; they’re broken. And Malkovich’s character commits the worst possible crime in a Coen movie: it’s not murder, but being a pompous, self-important asshole. When he delivers his speech about the “league of morons” he’s been forced to deal with, that’s not the Coens talking; it’s the audience’s signal that he’s passed the point of being a flawed but ultimately sympathetic character, and he’s become irredeemable.

But ultimately, that ends up feeling like a holdover, a vestigial characterization tic left over from back when the Coens made positive movies. There’s a real sense of hopelessness and emptiness in Burn After Reading, and a sense that they’re even mocking the concept of optimism. When characters reach their breaking point, they yell at each other for being “negative,” and the naivete of it gets a laugh. Everyone is selfish and deceptive, and the whole descent into murder is caused by our protagonist’s being lonely and sad and looking in the wrong place for self-improvement. The capper is as well-written as anything the Coens have ever done, but it also just confirms that nobody really knows what happened, or how to keep it from happening again. For such a funny movie, it’s pretty bleak.

I’m hoping that the whole shift in tone is just detritus from the cynicism of No Country for Old Men. Even at their worst, the Coens are still geniuses at screenwriting and editing, and at the very least you’re going to see something visually interesting. But when they hit that sweet spot between cynical and naive, arch and sincere, clever and populist, it’s transcendent. I’m hoping they can get it all out of their system and just get back to their happy place. I don’t know. Maybe it’s Utah.

Earlier I mentioned being a big fan of the Japanese game show “Nounai Este IQ Supplement” (that link is to a Japanese-language website). Above is my favorite puzzle from the show, because it’s the only one I’ve been able to figure out before hearing or seeing the answer. (Since they insist on talking in Japanese on that show, I still consider it an accomplishment when I can solve a puzzle after seeing the answer.)

As far as I could tell, the question was: “How can you make this an accurate statement by adding only one line?” I put the solution at the end of this post. If you want a hint: you do have to know a little bit of beginner’s Japanese to understand it. And a bigger hint: it’s not a math problem, but a language problem, a visual pun.

The reason I’m putting it on here is because I absolutely love this kind of thing, and it’s exactly the reason why I want to learn Japanese. When I first started, I had this vague notion of being able to read manga or watch anime, or play imported videogames. As it turns out, I’m really not all that into manga and anime, and these days, the good stuff is quickly translated anyway. And I barely have enough time to check out the games available in English, much less go to the trouble of importing more. Plus, I’ve already been to Japan twice, and I’ve seen how easy it is to navigate knowing next to nothing about the language.

So now, the appeal is as simple as just being able to understand something I didn’t understand before. I don’t realistically expect I’ll ever become “fluent,” just because I don’t have any opportunity to use the language. (I also have some weird kind of dyslexia where Japanese is concerned; I’m constantly getting the syllables in the wrong order or using the wrong one, for words I should be familiar with). For me, it’s not about fluency as much as having a big puzzle to solve, discovering new pieces and then finding out how they fit together.

And that’s what’s frustrating me about the way the language seems to be taught. Nothing really presents the language in a way that makes sense. And from what I’ve seen, it’s hard, but it all does make sense. But it only makes sense after the fact — while I’m learning, it’s all arbitrary memorization.

You start out learning the hiragana and katakana, which makes sense because it’s kind of a bridge between western languages and Japanese. Each symbol corresponds to a sound, so there’s an order to it, but you’re not just trying to transliterate between the roman alphabet and a language that has nothing to do with that alphabet. And you’re learning something that’s actually used — it’s just plain neat to be able to read something that wasn’t translated or altered for my benefit, even if I can only pronounce it and don’t yet know what it actually says.

At the same time, you’re learning vocabulary: the days of the week, the days of the month, how to tell time, etc. That all has context, but it’s rote memorization. “Sunday” is nichiyoubi, “Monday” is getsuyoubi, and the number one is ichi unless you’re talking about the first day of the month, in which case it’s tsuitachi. It all seems arbitrary and needlessly complex, until you start to make the connections: in English, we don’t say the “oneth day,” but the “first.” That’s the kind of thing I can understand.

And through it all, kanji looms in the distance as this ridiculously complex thing you shouldn’t even bother looking at until you’ve mastered the basics. You start to wonder why they bother with kanji at all, since you can write everything in hiragana or katakana. (The explanation I read when I was first starting out was that it’s “faster,” which is astoundingly simplistic and off-base). It’s only after you struggle with the basics that you’re exposed to your first few kanji, and then you start to understand why it’s used.

The kanji for “sun” is sometimes read nichi, and the kanji for “weekday” is youbi. So nichiyoubi really does mean “Sunday.” Same thing for getsu (moon) youbi (weekday), “Moon-day” or “Monday.” And the rest of the days of the week are named after the elements — fire, water, wood, etc. — something that any fan of role-playing games should be able to get into. So how come I was never shown the kanji for these until after I’d already learned them the hard way? Why take something with such a direct analog to what I already know, and turn it into arbitrary memorization?

Especially since the language just builds from there: the names of the months are the kanji for a number plus the kanji for “moon.” The word Nihon for Japan literally does mean “sun source,” or “the land of the rising sun.” The kanji for “fire” in kayoubi (Tuesday) is also used in “fireworks,” which is written hanabi or literally, “fire flower.” I can’t be the only one who thinks that the concepts of “fire flowers” and “source of the sun” and “moon day” is much more interesting and evocative than trying to memorize long lists of unfamiliar words.

Plus, if you’re nerdy at all (and I hate to break it to you, but if you’ve read this far, then you are), then there’s all this built-in potential for etymologies and odd connections between words. The symbols are so packed with meaning and multiple readings, that they’re interesting both on a conceptual and a linguistic level. I mentioned that my favorite aspect of the Yokai Attack! book was that included the kanji for the monsters as well as notes as to which monsters derived from idioms or folk expressions. It was the first time I’d seen the characters for “woman” and “child” and “demon” pop up consistently, and realized that the names aren’t just arbitrary collections of syllables, but logical combinations of concepts: “Onibaba” really does mean “devil woman.” And some names come from the fact that the kanji used to write them can be read in different ways, which results in puns and homonyms.

With my current job, there’s no way I’ll have time to start taking classes again, so it’s back to the books. And all the books I’ve found so far fail in one of two ways: some start with an exhaustive break-down of all the radicals and kana and kanji that make up other kanji, and present them in long lists to memorize. This makes everything systematic and shows all the cool connections between the characters, but removes all of the context and meaning, making it dry and arbitrary.

The other books present mnemonics and build off those: this one looks like a dude boxing a giant spider, while this one looks like a leaky faucet on top of a slice of bread! These have the problem of having interest but not much system, and a context that’s just plain goofy. Sorry, but that does not look like a faucet on top of a slice of bread. And now that you’ve shown me the picture, that’s all I can think about, even though the symbol I’m supposed to be learning has nothing to do with either faucets, sandwiches, or giant spiders.

So, I guess I’m just going to start exploring on my own and see if I make any progress. One website for kanji instruction that seems pretty good so far is called Kanjiroushi, and it even has an interface that works well with Mobile Safari on the iPhone. And the answer to that puzzle up top is after the jump:
Read the rest of this entry »