Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in amoshias' LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
1:32 pm	Warning! I am going to use the word "Awesome" a lot here. I can say honestly and without exaggeration that Queen is not only the best band ever, they are the best anything in the entire history of Earth. It's all downhill from here, folks. I just saw a commercial for a new series on Sci-Fi: Flash Gordon. Now, Flash Gordon is not good. It is not a particularly interesting or engaging story concept. It was not good when it was a newsreel series, it was never good as a comic book, it was not good on TV in the 50s, 70s, or 80s, and the Sci-Fi series looks to be racing for the bottom. But you know what? That 80s movie was kinda awesome. Not for the script, or the acting, both of which were awful... Okay, my hand just reached up and tried to strangle me. Max von Sydow as Ming the Merciless was one of the most relentlessly awesome things ever. Big actors in campy villain roles just tend to ham it up (Jeremy Irons in D&D being the purest example, and Magneto being the big exception) but every once in a while, it just turns out for the awesome. Also, Richard O'Brien played a minor part. Anyway, what is amazing about that movie is the way the soundtrack saves it - takes what would otherwise be a steaming sackful of tripe and turns it into a steaming sackful of pure awesome. Queen is to geeks what Wagner was to Nazis; it activates something deep and primitive in my soul. If I ever had to lead a charge to take a hill, or smell napalm in the morning, I would want it to be to the theme song from Flash rather than Ride of the Valkyries; it's more my style. While I was slaughtering and gutting my foes, I would know that it is because I'm the hero and they're the villain. Also, I would be singing along. The only problem would be that I'd be fighting in time to the music, which is definitely a tactical issue which could be exploited by a clever enemy. I LOVE that movie, even though intellectually I recognize how terrible it is. I am not speaking ironically; I'm not making fun here. I don't love it because I'm better than it; I don't look down on it. I love it because the soundtrack makes it one of the most awesome movies in human history. It's like Field of Dreams. Guys, you know what I'm talking about. Women, you can't understand, don't sweat it. So this commercial comes on, and it's so bad that I'm making gagging noises. Not for anyone's amusement; it actually looked so bad I was choking on my own vomit. But then that hammering piano starts up, and that shout of FLASH! AH-AH! All of a sudden, the reptile part of my brain, the part that evolved from really nerdy dinosaurs, wakes up - and entirely independently the thought "This looks kind of good. Maybe I should watch it." wanders through. The rest of my brain stares in horror at the thought, but it's too late; I've thought it, and it can't be unthought. I still won't watch it... but it's a tribute to Queen that such a thought was even able to come into being. Portney, of course, will watch it faithfully and bug me for the next few years to share his misery. (Eric also got me into the new Battlestar Galactica... just in time to watch an awesome science fiction series turn into one of the biggest TV train wrecks I've ever seen. The beginning of season three? Some of the best TV I've ever seen. By the end of the season... well, let me put it this way. I almost got kicked out of someone's house based on the ten seconds she heard of the courtroom scene in the last episode.) Anyway... FLASH! AH-AH! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 7th, 2007
10:39 pm	quick poll Which of the following is more attractive to you? 1. Being able to write as a day-to-day job. IE, you get a decent salary to write every day, and that is all you will ever get paid. 2. Writing with little possibility of ever getting recognized, but with the possibility of making an extremely large amount of money if you are. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 2nd, 2007
1:59 pm	The night is cold, and I am sick at heart. I’ve written before about how the opening few lines of Hamlet are among my favorites in all theatre. As always, Shakespeare does a magnificent job of setting the tone of the play. He manages to convey so much with so few words. We see two soldiers. They’re not at war; they’re on the battlements, doing routine patrols. They might be clowns; this might be a comedy. After all, the play is called ‘Hamlet, Prince of Denmark’ (if we ignore the leading “The Tragedy of”) but we’re not getting kings or witches or battle; we’re getting two bored guys talking to each other as they change watch on top of the castle. “The night is cold, and I am sick at heart.” And all of a sudden we know everything about this play. It isn’t going to be nice, it isn’t going to end well, and we’re not going to have many laughs. “The night is cold, and I am sick at heart.” Whatever is going on in Denmark – whatever tragedy will befall or has befell prince Hamlet –is so weighty that even these guards, these tiny men doing a tiny job, can feel it pressing down on them. One line – the second of the play – and we know how long and ugly the road ahead will be. If you remember, I went to see Hamlet over at Oxford Castle two Saturdays ago, but was rained out. Last Wednesday I finally got to finish watching it, and from the very beginning the play was in my bad graces; it didn’t start out with that line. Everything I said about Macbeth and the preservation of famous speeches goes octuple for Hamlet. (Macbeth and the Preservation of Famous Speeches is one of my favorite fantasy novels.) People come into the play with enormous expectations. Every time I read or watch the play, I pick out another common English phrase that has its origins in this play. If Macbeth needs to practice “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” until he can recite it perfectly in his sleep, Hamlet needs to know practically the entire play that well, and even a minor role like Ophelia has lines that are at least famous enough to have books take their titles from. And even a little line like “The night is cold, and I am sick at heart” is going to be missed. (I think the world leader in “titles taken from” has got to be The Second Coming, by Yates. I’ve seen books or short stories titled: The Widening Gyre Things Fall Apart The Centre Cannot Hold Mere Anarchy The Blood-Dimm’d Tide The Ceremony of Innocence The Second Coming (Okay… that one may not count) Slouching Towards Bethlehem This is perhaps a 24-line poem. A pretty awesome one, though.) Actually, this wasn’t strike one, although it was a symptom of which strike one is the cause. My first worry about the play came when Irfan, one of my classmates, asked when it would be over. We were told that the play lasted two hours twenty, with twenty minutes of that being intermission. Now, Kenneth Branaugh’s Hamlet was a bit topheavy at four hours, but that doesn’t mean that I really think you can do the play full justice in half that. When that early line was skipped, it told me that my fears were realized; this was going to be an excised version of the play, and done badly at that. I gritted my teeth and got ready to get good‘n’angry™. And then the full cast came on stage. Claudius was dressed to the nines for his brother’s funeral, Armani all the way, black on black. Gertrude was showing a bit more cleavage than her son would perhaps approve of, but was wearing a mourning veil. Polonius walked behind the new king, clearly Claudius’ man, in a white vest and hat; he looked the Danish Secretary of State. As he walked into clear view, my ready rage was sublimated into pure love. This is something I’ve never seen in Hamlet before, but it’s a reference so obvious it’s brilliant: Polonius was wearing white flannel trousers. Their bottoms were not rolled, but who cares? I’m a simple man, and once you get me thinking of Prufrock you’ve won me. His son, Laertes, followed him; sadder and tireder than his father, just off the boat from France and still in his traveling clothes. Ophelia was a ways behind them, a teenage goth in blonde dreads and a black lace skirt, shutting the world out with headphones. Her bag has a sketchbook sticking out, and she’s got a camera in one hand, a single orchid on the other. She’s the saddest by far, as she walks up to the spot on the stage that’s obviously the grave; she drops her flower on it, then goes to hide in a corner. Finally, the man himself walks up, and this is a Hamlet I can relate to. He’s dressed in black, but a little frou-frou; it’s not quite modern dress, as Claudius and Polonius are wearing, and it’s not as costume-y as Ophelia. It’s a hodge-podge, with pants that could pass as tights or could pass as punk, depending on whether he was in CBGB’s or the 16th century. He’s got a satchel, and a black frockish coat, and he is clearly destroyed. He’s clawing back sobs as he walks up to the grave and takes a battered picture of his dad out of his back pocket. The whole time, there’s music in the background; something soppy and emo, not my favorite but it works. Claudius is the first to speak; he’s got a few lines of exposition here, which generally feel a little bit out of place. But here, he’s not saying them to the audience; someone hands him a mike, and with Gertrude on his arm he addresses the cheering Danes, telling them that the royal line would continue, that he was marrying the queen and would continue his brother’s reign as king. It worked really well; I started clapping and cheering, spurred on by the ‘crowd’ being projected over the sound system. There’s then a scene between Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius, followed a soliloquy by Hamlet. But before Hamlet could start, a low, thrumming heartbeat of a rhythm came over the speakers, and the rest of the cast started walking off the stage to its time. There’s a moment when the audience just has no idea at all what’s going on, but then Hamlet stalks through his family at a normal speed, hand to forehead, crying “Oh, that this too solid flesh would melt!” and it becomes obvious; the rest of them are moving in slow motion. This is the stage equivalent of bullet time, the rest of the world slowing down so we can see into Hamlet’s head; so that we can see him staring at his mother, screaming at her “Frailty, thy name is Woman!” It’s an absolutely brilliant moment; for fifty years, Shakespeare on film was too often just one step above a camera pointed at a stage. The director here has come full circle, and is injecting the sensibilities of film into the play. It gets gimmicky sometimes; the soundtrack gets to be a bit too much, and there are moments where the play was trying its hardest to show us a montage. Montages are like voiceovers and the passive voice; they’re almost always terrible, so don’t ever use them. If it was just a Hamlet with filmic qualities, though, it would have kept my attention but wouldn’t have overcome the initial displeasure I felt. And that displeasure was ongoing; I don’t mind cutting scenes, but I come to Shakespeare to revel in the language. When Hamlet tells Polonius he knows him “Excellent well – you are a fishmonger!” he’s calling him a pimp, accusing him of prostituting his daughter for the King’s purposes. But when you cut the language, modernize it the way that was done here, all of a sudden it’s just crazy Hamlet sayin’ crazy shit, which was clearly the way the scene was played. There were moments where true art was used by the writer; where the slicing of a few strategic words makes a phrase ring clearly to modern ears. But too often that scalpel became a hatchet; I don’t give a shit if nobody in the audience knows what a fardel is, or where a proud man keeps his contumely. “To be or not to be” is the most famous speech in the English language, and removing a single word of it means you’re not giving me Hamlet. Every word of “What a piece of work is man” is pure gold. A million years from now, when bee archaeologists sift through the ruins of Google’s Human Age computer systems, 1.352.462-02674-124 will dance to his comrades “man, this is some good shit… the author, LOVEBILLYBOY1976, was truly the greatest writer on his species’ so-called ‘web’.” 1.352.462-11537-124 will reply “Aaagh! Web? Where!?!” while 3.471.1125-12774-124 wiggles “Man, these humans were really, really full of themselves.” Oh, 1.352.462-11537-124, you’re such a dork. Bees. What the hell was I talking about? Watergate, or something? Oh right. Hamlet. Right. So it’s simple; I don’t care how pressed you are for time; MAKE TIME for these speeches. When you cut most of the “Alas, poor Yorick” speech right after Gravedigger 2 gets a full minute to play ‘Voodoo Child’ on his spade… well, then, I hate you. Forever. That’s all there is to it. But it’s the magic of the theatre that despite my true hatred for whoever did the script treatment – despite feeling cheated out of some of the best writing humans have thus far managed – despite… You know that awful feeling when you’re about to sneeze, but you don’t? I get the same unfulfilled feeling when I close my eyes to listen to Hamlet talk about why he’s afraid to kill himself and he never mentions that people might like to their quietus make with bodkins, bare or otherwise. But despite… Despite all that, I loved the show. I loved it from the moment I saw the actors walking in slow motion to make sense of Hamlet’s soliloquy. I loved Goth Ophelia, who, when her character was off scene, was constantly lurking in the corners, spying on people, taking pictures with her camera, listening to music. I loved the stage, a black riser surrounded by seats on all sides, in an open courtyard at Oxford Castle; a perfect place for Shakespeare, and Hamlet especially. (As opposed to all those Shakespeare plays not set in castles.) And I loved the play for one scene they did better than I’ve ever seen, on stages, in film, or even in my head. It’s funny; I love the language so much that I sometimes miss the forest for the trees. I’ve read the play easily twenty times, seen different productions a dozen times, and never given a second thought to why Laertes was in the play. And I’ve never thought… I’ve never thought about what Hamlet is actually upset about. But here, in this show, Hamlet isn’t somber at the start of the play. His dad has just died. He’s angry. He’s upset. He’s broken-hearted. We spend our entire lives trying to live up to our fathers, and no matter what we do, no matter how great we become, somehow we never manage to meet that goal. Every word of that was written across Hamlet’s face as he walked up to that grave. When Laertes comes back from France, a storm of rage and pain, he has become Hamlet, or the Hamlet that could have been. Again, I’ve read the scene a thousand times where Claudius poison’s Laertes’ sword, and I’ve always thought that Laertes was just a dupe, a tool for the king to kill Hamlet. But Hamlet just killed Laertes’ dad. Laertes has the same right to want revenge against Hamlet that Hamlet has against the king; but unlike Hamlet, Laertes’ conscience has not made a coward of him. I’ve never seen this before in the play; it’s a tribute to the director and the actors that they brought it to the forefront. They made Laertes and Polonius people; Polonius especially was a wonderful actor. He was played as stodgy, kind of a bore, certainly, but as eminently likeable. He did much more than “swell a progress, start a scene or two;” he stole most of the scenes he was in, because half of the guys in the audience were able to look at the character, and think “Dad!” It all came together at the end of Act 1 – as I said, a scene here an order of magnitude better than I’ve seen before. Polonius has given his son permission, the funeral and wedding being over, to return to France. Laertes takes some time to talk to Ophelia, who is snide and aloof as he tells her to watch out for Hamlet. She’s openly mocking him (and his libertine French lifestyle) for trying tell her she could be chaste when everybody knows he’s tomcatting around Europe. Things are getting heated, but she gets through to him. He walks a few steps away from her – they’re both poised to fight – and he reveals a daisy in his hand, which he offers to her with an apologetic smile. She sees it, and suddenly she’s not a surly teenager, just a baby sister whose big brother is going away. She looks like she’s about to cry and throws her arms around him; he picks her up and spins her around, as their dad walks in. He sees his children, and asks Laertes for a moment. He’s got some fatherly advice to give him. His kids turn to each other, smile and sigh, in the same way siblings have done when getting ‘advice’ from their parents since Thag said to Thag Jr. “Son, remember, try to attack the saber-toothed tiger from the furry end, not the pointy end.” And then their eyes widen with horror as Polonius triumphantly pulls from the leather binder he’s carrying around a laminated sheet (with “Elsinore” on the letterhead, a nice touch) with about a dozen bulleted points. Laertes shakes his head, and braces himself; Ophelia retreats to the corner to hide her giggles from her dad. Polonius is so deeply immersed in being fatherly that he is insensetate to his children’s mocking. Ophelia starts moving her head back and forth, mouthing the words as her father says them. The two of them wind up huddled together in a corner, gasping for air, as they both recite along with their dad ”Neither a borrower nor a lender be!” The recital now finished, they wipe their tears away, arms around each shoulder, and prepare to walk away. But Polonius, laminated sheet of advice now put away, speaks again. There’s a different, stranger tone in his voice; gone is the singsong recital, the rote repetition. He’s speaking from his heart, unsure of himself all of a sudden, unsure how to do what he’s trying to do; a father used to edict and distance, not emotion, in his dealings with his son and daughter. “This above all…” Both of the kids turn around, amazed. They’ve never heard this one before; maybe they’ve never heard this tone before. Polonius walks over to his son, lays hands on his shoulders, and looks into his eyes. “This above all. To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!” It’s a father-son moment as powerful as Hamlet’s rage and loss during the funeral. Polonius is saying to his son, “I’m proud of you, proud of the man you are. Be true to that man, and continue to make me proud.” I could see Laertes’ eyes fill with tears; Polonius goes to shake his son’s hand, but Laertes moves in and hugs him as tightly as he was hugging his sister. The old man is clearly shocked by the sudden contact, but recovers, looks down, and softens. You can see the proud “this is my son” written across his face as he smiles, and hugs Laertes back just as tightly. There is nothing in the world a son wants to hear more than “I’m proud of you.” I doubt there was a single guy in the audience whose eyes stayed dry; I got more than a touch misty myself. It makes Hamlet’s pain more real to us, as well; he’ll never have that feeling, now. I’ve never cared about Polonius before; never cared about Laertes, and never seen Ophelia as anything except Hamlet’s girlfriend. They made me see these characters differently. The play failed in many ways. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two characters I have a huge soft spot for, were leering, shrieking clowns, with no real point in the play. Ophelia was a nice girl the whole play, until the once scene where she for no apparent reason went crazy and died. Hamlet was kind of overshadowed by Claudius and Polonius, who were just much better actors. But I can criticize anything. In this case, I lay the flaws in the play squarely at the feet of the person who wrote the adaptation, and leave them there. I can criticize anything, but it’s relatively rare that I can look past obvious flaws and love something anyway. The same company is putting on Taming of the Shrew next week; it’s not one of my favorites, but there’s no chance I won’t go and see it. Okay, England. There’s finally something you do that I can appreciate. Keep feeding me Shakespeare, and I’ll do my best to be polite. PS – The swordfight between Laertes and Hamlet at the end of the play was one of the best-choreographed stagefights I’ve ever seen. It was fast, and it wasn’t stagey; they weren’t just clashing their swords, they were actually doing something that, were one of them to not block, would really hurt. I was impressed. PPS – They’re also doing a passion play right now. I’ve never seen one and I’d like to, but I get the feeling that I’d be clapping at all the wrong moments and thereby offending people. PPPS – it says more about me than I really should be sharing that I actually revised the bee archaeologists’ names five times until I got a designation system that seemed to carry all of the information I expect Future Bees to want to communicate to each other. I’ve also revised this statement once – while I was writing this, I looked at those numbers, which originally included some eights and nines, and realized that Future Bees obviously count in octal. Future Bees rule. (Comment on this)
Monday, July 30th, 2007
4:46 pm	About last night… (This was mostly written on 7/18. I've got a few older entries that never got finished I'm trying to polish off over the next few days.) In the final minutes of the last Justice League episode, Lex Luthor shows up for the climatic battle, smiles, and straightens his cufflinks. “Sorry I’m late… I needed to get my power suit.” It’s a joke. (I guess.) (Well, I found it funny.) During the 80s, the writers of the comic books decided Lex needed to be able to actually, physically mix it up with Superman, so they gave him a green and purple monstrosity, a la Iron Man, complete with Kryptonite beam, force fields, and the works. It showed up a few times in the cartoon, but the vast majority of the time, the writers realized that Lex Luthor is a far, far lamer villain if he’s going mano a mano with Superman. Supes gets in dust-ups with all of his bad guys, and anyone can put on an armored suit. But rather than write something not nearly as good, I’ll quote Seanbaby in re: what makes Lex Luthor an awesome villain: “He has a bald head and some gadgets. There are people on TV at four in the morning selling us juicers and fruit dryers that are as qualified as that to be super villains. But then I realized how brave someone has to have to put their bald head up against Superman. Just the fact that he tried makes him the fucking embodiment of Eye of the Tiger. Do you think Lex's clothes are so tight because he's putting on weight? No, they're just being sucked inward by the gravity caused by his huge balls.” Nobody gets excited when a guy in an armored suit fights Superman. Happens all the time. But when a guy in an Armani suit does the same? Well, that tells us that this person is someone special. I accept, intellectually, that my hair looks fine. It’s not exactly what I imagined, but I don’t think that would really have been possible. I forgot what my hair is like, how much body it has. It basically grows straight up, so over the last week or so I’ve seen my head get progressively taller. This is not really a good thing, and I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do about it. That’s not the real problem, though. If I choose to care about it, I’ll eventually figure out what to do with it. The real problem is that I’m still looking into mirrors and seeing a stranger staring back at me. Well, not a stranger; in fact, a bit worse than that. It’s an impostor. That’s clearly my face, but I know what I look like, and that ain’t it. I would never do anything like that, because that’s not what I want to look like. I look normal, and I absolutely hate it. The girls in my program tell me it looks good – my father said how great it looked – and all I could think of was, “Your approval fills me with shame.” It’s not that the girls in the program are bad people – most of them are quite nice, and the compliment was honestly meant. But they’re not my people; they’re drones, or clones… whatever you call normal people. And my dad? Well, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that when I’m doing something that meets with his disapproval, usually I’m on the right track… (I don’t actually remember if my dad said that my hair looked good. What I do remember him saying is that I looked like Djerzinski. I told him I didn’t have the slightest clue who that was; the response was that he was the first chief of the KGB. I am just as confused by whether or not that was a compliment as I was a week ago. In any case, having looked him up, I just don’t see it.) So KGB leaders aside, I’m looking in mirrors pretty obsessively these days. Someday, one of them is going to show me ME again. But something changed yesterday. I was in my suit, walking to the Monday night lecture. Now, I like this suit, quite a bit; it’s the nicest I’ve ever owned, although I hope to own nicer. I try to wear it every chance I get; I need to be able to be me in it. So I’m walking down the street, enjoying the click-click-click of my heels as I straighten my tiepin, fix my cuffs. And I catch myself in the mirror. The cuffs are buttons – I don’t have the money to wear shirts with cufflinks yet – but I remind myself of that scene with Lex Luthor, and think to myself, “This is my power suit.” And then I look at my hair, and think of the Kurgan; I whisper to myself, “I’m in disguise.” (For some reason, I managed to actually scare Becki when I said things in a Kurgan-voice. I attributed this to Becki being easily affrighted rather than any amazing mimicry skills on my part; still, I have since loved saying things in that breathy growl.) And maybe that’s my answer. Lex knew that he was more powerful in the business suit than he ever was in the armor. Me? Whenever I put on a suit, I think how out of place I am, how silly I look because of it. I know myself really, really well, and a suit isn’t what I wear; it’s not the way I act, not what makes me happy. But yesterday, walking down that street, looking at myself in the windows, those two lines running through my head, yesterday, I realized something. I like this suit, I think I look good in it, but it still doesn’t feel like me, because I don’t wear suits. I feel unnatural in them. I can put on antlers and furs, paint myself black, and feel totally natural. I like disguises and costumes. I don’t like suits; they’re just something you wear. But I’ve put on suits for LARPs, I’ve put on a suit for a play; why not put one on to play me? Why not make this my new disguise? So I’ve been walking around, the last few weeks, and worked on changing what looking in the mirror makes me think. I see that reflection in store windows, and I think, “I’m in disguise.” And then I look around for nuns to stick my tongue out at. It seems to be working so far… we’ll see if I’ve convinced myself by the time I get back. You know what? I always forget – Lex Luthor and the Kurgan were played by the same guy, Clancy Brown. What a strange coincidence… (Comment on this)
2:00 pm	7-30 Benson begin again Howell, the Canadian who’s the head of the program, just said the following to me, in response to my request to shift classes around (we’ve got two days this week with six hours of classes, and an afternoon trip to Parliament; next week, we’ve only got two hours of class a day.) “No, we can’t do that, I can’t change the times. Anyway, you don’t really want to do that, because you’re going to want that time next week for exam prep. It’s just the nature of students to complain about whatever is going on.” I have rarely been this angry at a professor; my jaw dropped as he walked out of the room, and (with his colleague in the room) turned to my classmates, who were also kind of amazed, and said something along the lines of “Thanks, fuck you as well.” He’s the one teaching the afternoon classes; nobody else uses this room. If he wanted to change it, he could. But that’s okay; I didn’t expect anything to change, for any of a hundred reasons. But don’t – don’t fucking EVER – tell me that I don’t want it done. And don’t call me a whiner because I propose a perfectly rational change. Six hours of lecture – especially Howell’s monotone– is a fucking LOT for one day. (To head off a defense – his tone made it clear he wasn’t using ‘you’ to refer to the class. He meant me, personally.) God, I am so happy I go to law school in America. The Brits and the Canadians give us two solid hours of boring, droning, lecture. Everyone in the room adored Smith, my first year Property teacher – you know why? Because he’s engaging. He makes the law come alive, by making sure we see the real people being affected, and by asking US to interpret the court’s decision. On the other hand, Aplin, the British professor lecturing right now, just proposed a question to the class – “Should ISPs get the extensive protections the law gives them?” Except she wasn’t proposing a question for class discussion. She was telling us how smart she was, that she had thought of this question. There was no exploration, no real examination, and CERTAINLY no participation by mere students. What could we possibly have to contribute to such an erudite, philosophical topic anyway? Thank god… now we’re back with an American prof, actually talking about this stuff – intellectually analyzing whether or not the benefits of a patent system outweigh the costs. I can’t wait to get back to school, and away from these lecturers. It’s nice that they deign to share their wisdom, but “I piss knowledge, feel free to drink it” is never an attitude that’s going to win my respect. WOW, that pissed me off. Better get my head back into class… but it really helps my focus to be nice and angry, so that’s good, at least. (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 26th, 2007
2:13 pm	The Reasonable Nerd So a concept that's important in law is that of "the reasonable man." The reasonable man is a special kind of animal; he's not an average man, necessarily. He doesn't speed, for instance; speeding is unreasonable, even though everyone does it. We often ask if something was objectively reasonable; would the reasonable man have done the same thing, in your shoes? But there are plenty of confusing questions inherent in this. Who is this reasonable man? Is he white or black - and does what is 'reasonable' change dependent on that? Is he a man at all, and is the reasonable man different from the reasonable woman? What about kids? Do we really expect a five year old to act 'reasonably' in the same way we expect a fifteen year old to, or a fifty year old to? We had a great discussion about the Bernie Goetz case; one of our profs showed us the videotape of his confession, and it made a good case that there might be such a thing as a 'reasonable racist'; even though the guy was a kook and a murderer, at what point is that a reasonable response to external circumstances? We're still talking about patents, and the prof, a dry British fellow with a sharp with, just told us a story where two judges hearing a patent case were discussing the meaning of 'obviousness'. You can't patent something that is obvious, but that leads to a further question - obvious to who? Obvious to the general populace? The reasonable man may not help us here, he probably doesn't know much about technical subjects, and it seems unfair to say anything an untrained person wouldn't see as obvious is patentable. One judge puts the question to the other, and gets the answer that the standard should be a person highly trained, a specialist in the field, who understands related technology issues. The judge responds, "So, a nerd." I love the idea of a reasonable nerd standard, and I actually think it's a really good place to start for patents. If the local geek looks at your invention and says "Duh!", it's not patentable. If he starts looking at it and tries to take it apart to figure out how it works, it's non-obvious and therefore a patent can be granted. I also love the idea of finding a bunch of reasonable nerds, and hiring them to work in the patent office like lab rats... "Test subjects alpha and beta found the item 'neat', and gamma called it 'awesome'; however, delta found it 'lamezor'. We're sending that to the courts for interpretation." The funny thing is, even though this sounds like an insane way to, for instance, run a legal system... it's still better than the one we currently have. An amusing fact - in the US, out of 774 federal judges in the United States, only one has a technical background. He was a patent examiner before becoming a judge. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 24th, 2007
3:41 pm	Something funny my Patent teacher said today... "The American patent system's statement is that anything under the sun is patentable, as long as it's made by man. So, the legal test for a patent seems to be: 1. Is it a thing? 2. Is it man-made? 3. Is it sub-solar?" (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 23rd, 2007
10:47 pm	Our speaker tonight... Was the 605th richest man on Earth. The top 1% are very, very rich people. The top 1% of that are monstrously rich. He's in the top 10% of THAT - the top 10% of the top 1% of the top 1%. I'll admit, the numbers impress me. The speech was nothing special; he's speaking at Oxford, he doesn't have a college education, he made a big deal of it; but not in a bitter way, and it was easy to appreciate what he was saying. Typical stuff: the four cornerstones of success are persistence, networking, self-confidence - and the fourth I liked - lateral thinking. "Typical thinking leads to a typical life." The thing I really found interesting, though, was the different reactions he got from the different groups, specifically our group vs. the international business program that's running here at the same time. There was much more awe from their side of the fence... but more importantly, far fewer questions, and a very very different way of looking at things. One of the stories he told was about when the business he started with a single store finally bought out the 160 year old unquestioned leader in the business. He talked about how it made his company nearly unopposed in the field, and how it felt to be signing those papers at 4:15 in the morning. The business folks, of course, were rapt, dreaming of their own world-shattering victories. We, to a person, were considering the monopolistic concerns with a deal like that. Those of us who have already done firm work were actually feeling sorry for the lawyers involved - because while the business folks were kicking back with cigars and scotch, the lawyers for both sides were probably in a conference room, hammering out those final details, knowing that while the other guys got to take comp days, they were due back at the office in four hours. It's interesting how people can hear the same story, and carry away totally different things from it. By the way - I think you should read about Gabe entering a Pokemon tournament. Whether or not you're a PA fan, I think it's just a great expression of what being a gamer is about, and what we are too often in danger of making it into. Off to get a job. Wish me luck. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 21st, 2007
1:32 pm	I have to admit, part of me didn't believe Professor Nowak Our Con Law professor, when he talked about one possible final outcome of the executive privilege clash between Congress and the Administration... or, at least, I assumed that it was the kind of thing nobody but a constitutional scholar would ever have the slightest clue about. But this is from the Times today... "Congress has another route to enforce its will, an inherent power of contempt. But that has not been used since early in the 20th century. It has long been deemed unwieldy in the modern era as it entails Congress stopping all work to hold its own trial and imprisoning any offenders in the basement of the Capitol." Yup. Congress has its own bailiffs, which it can use to arrest people, and lock them in the basement. Nowak was actually pretty awesome, as a human being. It's cool to see something like this at least vaguely come up in real life. Shower, then Hamlet. So have you read it yet?!? I want to talk about it with someone! (4 Comments |Comment on this)
11:58 am	worth waiting two years for. That was amazing. I figured out one of the secrets at the end of the last book; but the ending was better than I hoped. I can't wait till other people read it so I can talk about it. Neville was actually my favorite character in this book. Shower, lunch, and then I'm gonna see Hamlet at Oxford Castle. It's been exam week, and I haven't been posting; I've got a few just about ready to go, though, so I'll probably be posting a bunch over the next two days. (Comment on this)
12:31 am	Guess who... Has the new Harry Potter book 5-6 hours ahead of any of you jive suckas? Spoiler alert - Voldemort is actually Harry's father. I can't believe that was the best I could come up with. Oh well. Talk to you when I'm done. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007
1:53 pm	This is clearly the most awesome thing that has ever happened to me. So I woke up this morning, and remembered that I had drunkenly posted last night. (Aah, sweet sweet mercy - getting actually drunk is really rare for me, it's a good time up to a point) It didn't seem like a bad idea at the time, but I was afraid that upon sober reflection I would change my opinion. Instead, I found this in my mailbox. My friends are SO AWESOME. (Comment on this)
12:35 am	Hey ladies... get funky. I would like to talk a bit about the lecture today (medieval English music, complete with performance) but I am, blessedly, inebriated enough to be barely able to type. I heard a girl saying "Gamargaba" outside a bar today, which is Georgian for hello, and introduced myself. She was as amazed as I was, but disappointed that I didn't speak Georgian. Anyway, the reason I'm writing; Ladies. If you are out at a bar. Sending signals to more than one man is definitely NOT COOL. it is in fact a shitty thing to do. I was not one of the men, but both of the guys involved I like a lot, and I could feel the tension. I'm ashamed that the lady in question was from my school. NOT COOL. It's taken me ten minutes to type this. Probably time to go to sleep. NOT COOL. (Comment on this)
Friday, July 13th, 2007
5:04 pm	What I really want to do is direct The Swan was definitely one of the coolest theatres I’ve ever been in. It’s a modern reproduction of the original Globe, but roofed in. The groundlings have definitely moved up in the world since Shakespeare’s time – they’re no longer stuck in the standing and chomping sausages, (long story, don’t ask) the floor’s got about a hundred seats. Above them, two levels of balcony, with about a hundred seats each. It’s a theater designed to get the audience as close to the action as possible; the stage projects into the seats, so there’s audience on three sides of the actors. The balcony seats are only two rows deep, with the second row on a riser, and both rows eschew legroom in order to be as close to the railing as possible. I really like stages set up like this; one of the limitations of theater is that you’re playing to an audience, and if they can’t see what you’re doing, there’s a problem. So the action in plays is blocked out so that everything is facing the seats as much as possible, which can sometimes feel really unnatural. When you’ve got audience on three sides, you’re often going to have your back to someone, and since that’s unavoidable the motion tends to be much more natural. Actors didn’t just enter from backstage; there were two walkways leading through the audience to the front corners of the stage, so people could walk on directly into the action. There were also numerous ladders and stairways which the actors made great use of; the whole theatre became the castle for interior scenes. The first time it happened, one of the actors had moved up right next to our group, and all of a sudden she started shouting down to the stage – we jumped out of our seats, wondered what the hell was going on, and only then looked over and realized. The whole setup of the theater draws the audience in, makes us feel like there is no stage, or if there is, we’re on it. We’re part of it. The play was… meh. It was hot and cold; there were some things which were phenomenal, but a few things that really dragged the production down. The play opened interestingly; Macbeth and Banquo are on the battlefield, and the fight carries them into (I suppose) a little village; when the two characters kill the soldiers, they go on to kill the women and children. It’s a pretty brutal slaughter, too. The last woman tries to buy her life with her body, running up to Macbeth and kissing him. You don’t know what’s happening for a second, as he slides his hands slowly up her body, putting them on either side of her head… they kiss, they’re grinding, it’s starting to get hot… and then he twists his hands, her neck snaps, and she slumps to the ground. It’s hard to pull the same fake-out twice, but when he then walked over to her cradle and rocked her baby, I wasn’t sure if he was going to keep it. As the wails crescendoed over the speaker system, and Macbeth’s arms got tighter and tighter, it became clear what was going on. As I said, it was absolutely brutal. The audience was murmuring and shifting in its seats as the two characters (whose identities we didn’t know at that point) stalked off the stage, leaving blood and bodies. The anxiety rose as no new actors came on the stage, and we were left staring at the bodies of three women, two babies, and a young boy. And then the three women got up. One at a time, slowly, still bloody, clearly in pain, they get up. Each walks over to her child, slowly, shuffling – nearly sleepwalking. Each sees what has happened… wails… and wakes up. The three look one to another, and without a word, come to an agreement. They wipe the blood off the ground. They get a cart, and load up the bodies of their husbands, their children. There’s none of the tenderness they showed earlier as they stack the corpses. These are women in the vein of Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax; women of iron, women who calmly help children come into the world and just as calmly usher them out. You’ve probably figured it out by now, but I didn’t realize it until the one dragging the cart stopped, and called out to the other three “When shall we three meet again?” Hot and cold; here are the three witches, recast as vengeful spirits. During the “Double, double, toil and trouble” scene, they’ve each got a suitcase, and before they throw the ingredients of their charm into the pot, they take out their children’s clothing, item by item, and drop it in. So when they meet Macbeth, and tell him his fate, they’re not just literary devices or agents of fate; they’re active agents, speaking a prophecy they know will lead to the destruction of the man who destroyed them. The addition of a three minute scene turned three ciphers into three real characters, and changed every scene they appeared in. But… But… But they didn’t use it! They were moderately manic, cackling and dancing, but after that opening, I wanted every word to drip with malevolence and scorn, for them to drink in Macbeth’s fall like it was nectar. Or, alternately, for them to feel nothing, and go back to being stony spirits – raised from the dead to be unfeeling instruments of vengeance. But it wasn’t there. The writer had it – there were nods like the cauldron scene, and half of the servants, nameless soldiers, and other random deliverers-of-bad-news were played by the witches. But the actors and director never used it. They were played like it never happened. And when a witch was mopping up and Lady Macbeth greeted her as though she were one of the servants, I just got confused; there was nothing in the acting to indicate that this wasn’t just one actor playing multiple roles. I wanted to see their glee in watching their handiwork; I wanted to hear the hate in their voices as they guided Macbeth step by step to his doom. They set up a great twist on the play, and I wanted to see them use it, not just go back to playing it like every other production. “Omnia mutantur, nihil interit.” “Everything changes, nothing is truly lost.” This is not true, of course; my body may die and be absorbed into the Earth, each piece becoming part of something else. But the words I speak today are gone forever. When my heart stops beating, the meat that I live in may remain, but everything that I am will fade, like… like…“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire, off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All these moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain. Time to die.” -Roy Batty, Blade Runner Ten minutes of newsreel footage, some still photos and production notes, and a bunch of awed reviews are all that remains to us of Orson Welles’s 1930 production of Macbeth. If you go into the IMDB, you’ll see that he filmed a movie of the Scottish Play; it’s brilliant, like everything Welles put on film. But twenty years before that, under a Depression-era grant from the WPA, Welles took an all-black cast and set Macbeth in the Caribbean. It became known as ‘Voodoo Macbeth’, and gave Welles, still at that time an up-and-coming actor, renown as a visionary director, as well. And it’s lost to us forever. (I think Welles, by the way, is the greatest genius in the history of film, and understood Shakespeare better than any other director in his century. He was a prodigy – wrote a paper on Hamlet at the age of 6 – in every sense of the word, and spent his life getting relentlessly beat down by Hollywood, which tends to have little patience for true genius.) So hopefully three paragraphs of setup makes it clear that when the Royal Shakespeare Company gives half the characters in Macbeth Scottish accents and half Caribbean accents, I’m not impressed. The cast was slightly more than half black; I don’t want to get into race theory (which I know nothing about) talking about the play, but I found it at least a bit striking that Macbeth, Duncan, and Macduff were white. Banquo and most of the other generic characters were black (including Fleance, Duncan’s son, strangely enough.) A few of the black actors had Scottish accents, but most of them spoke in a Jamaican patois (including Fleance, Duncan’s son, strangely enough.) All of the white actors had Scottish accents. I would say “Maybe the actors are just Jamaican, and the director ran with it”, but there were enough accent slips during the course of the play that couldn’t have been universally true. (One of the early scenes had Generic Soldier #1 speaking in a BritScottMaican accent that was moderately mind-boggling.) There was a later scene where one of the witches (two black, one white), the one who kissed Macbeth, and the one with the thickest Jamaican accent, wound up frantically – animalistically – humping him. It seemed in bad taste, but beyond that, my point is that there seems to have been some kind of race issue with the play. I’m talking about a lot of negative things I saw, because that’s the way I am. So when I go to talk about the acting itself, I’m going to skim over Macduff, who was phenomenal – I’ve never really paid attention to the character before, but he was really brought to life. I’m going to ignore Lady Macbeth, who did a great job of being a short, bitter, ball-busting harridan. What I am going to do is focus on the title character – because in a play called Macbeth, which is about Macbeth… Macbeth had better be good. There is so much bad Shakespeare out there. There are a lot of factors involved in that, but in a professional troupe or a movie, I have absolutely no patience for “Romeo, oh Romeo – wherefore ART thou, Romeo?” Buy an annotated version, and figure out what the words mean before you say them. I have even less patience for crappy actors who affect terrible British accents and declaim their lines in what they feel is the Grand Shakespearean Tradition; mostly Americans, who think it’s not Shakespeare if it’s not in an accent. “To BE… or NOT to be. THAT… is the question.” I love Claire Danes’ performance in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet. When she gives her balcony speech, you know what she sounds like? She sounds like a teenager, who is upset because she’s having problems with her parents and the boy she likes. No long pauses, and she’s not falling into iambic singsong; she’s just talking. Like a real person. Macbeth, in this production, was an American. And he had the Grand Shakespearean Tradition down pat. Important lines got pauses, so the audience knew they were important; famous lines got even more. He literally waited an entire minute before his best speech. And Shakespeare’s plots are melodramatic, so this must BE a melodrama; why simply jump when something startles you when you can flail and fall down? If you’re talking about the world, the only way people will know that is if you swing your arms around, encompassing the whole world. Don’t inflect your words like you’re having a conversation with the people around you; this is Important Writing, and Poetic to boot, so stick to iambic pentameter. I’m sure that’s the way they read it in Shakespeare’s time. If you’re acting in a Shakespeare play, you’re going to get judged by your big speeches. I don’t really remember if Lady Macbeth was convincing as she greeted Duncan at the castle gates (actually, I do, she was) but if “Come, you spirits who tend on mortal thoughts…” is great, I’m going to remember her performance as great. I would probably put almost as much time into practicing that speech as the rest of my lines combined. Compared to her husband, Lady Macbeth has it easy; her big speech is early on, and if she does a good job, she’s got the audience for the rest of the play. As it was, she knocked it out of the park, and we were hers, but if she had struck out, she would have still had plenty of time to recover. Macbeth, on the other hand, has a heavier burden. He gets what might be Shakespeare’s best speech; it’s top five at the outside, so people are going to know it. And it comes at the very end of the play, which means that he could be awesome the entire play and have the audience walk out of the theatre disappointed in him. Even beyond that, they’re going to be looking forward to it the entire play, so no matter how good you are, you’re not building up credit with the audience; they’re reserving judgment for that one moment. Luckily for him, he wasn’t really in a position where that was affecting him negatively. I wasn’t reserving judgment on whether or not he was good until that speech; it was pretty obvious that he was a total ham from the beginning. That’s the situation where this might really help him; I knew he had a chance to save himself, and if he busted out with a brilliant “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…”, all his sins would have been forgiven. But, like Macbeth himself, the weight of his sin just urged him to further sin. He clearly had practiced the speech, over and over; every single flaw, every terrible foible in his acting was polished until it gleamed and shone. Someone with a tin ear for Shakespeare couldn’t help but think “Man, he’s pausing a whole lot during this speech.” One of the girls from the group I had hitched with, who was Malaysian and spoke English as a third language, whispered “Did his accent just come back for that one speech?” I would have enjoyed him much more if I had realized that he was irrevocably terrible early on; as it was, I simply gritted my teeth and hoped. But that speech having come and gone, I was finally freed from expectation, which was good, because it allowed me to enjoy the one moment in the play he touched greatness. I wrote once about nearly dying on my motorcycle once. I ran over low barrier I hadn’t seen at about seventy miles an hour, late at night on Route 80. The only reason I survived was that I immediately accepted that I was dead; my fear of it dissolved, and all of a sudden, I was powerful. Knowing that I was going to die meant that when part of my brain would normally have panicked and argued “That’s really dangerous – you can’t DO that on a motorcycle!” instead, I stayed calm, and did it. I made an impossibly sharp turn to avoid hitting the median; I hit the gas, which stabilized the bike, when everything in me should have been shrieking to brake. Being able to do the suicidal thing saved me; doing the intelligent thing would have led to me falling over and sliding a few miles down the highway. It’s amazing how deeply every second of that incident is burned into my brain; objectively I know it probably lasted less than five seconds, start to finish, but there are entire years I have fewer direct memories from. (The end of the story - I recovered, pulled over, and just sat there and shook for about ten minutes.) Right before he dies in his fight with Macduff, Macbeth has another fight, who with I don’t remember. Macbeth thinks he’s immortal, and in that fight, that one moment, the actor plays it perfectly. There’s no hesitation, because there’s no debate in his head, no self-doubt. Nothing is too dangerous; there are simply no consequences. He’s manic, and he plays; his opponent swings, he steps inside the arc of the sword, grabs the guy’s wrist, and simply takes the sword. It’s insane – not the type of thing you could ever do, because half a second too fast or two slow and you’re taking two feet of steel in the gut. But it works; it doesn’t look like choreography, it looks like madness. Again, without thought, without hesitation, Macbeth tosses the sword back. They engage again; not even considering that there might be a threat, Macbeth whacks the sword out of his opponent’s hand, tosses his enemy his own sword, and dances away to pick up the fallen one. And then, with just as little thought, just as little concern, Macbeth kills him. And after the apex, we fall. The final fight scene is weak to start with; nobody really buys “from my mother’s womb untimely ripped”. Add to that bad acting (at least from Macbeth) and one of the most awfully choreographed swordfights I’ve ever seen, and GOD, was I thrilled when Macbeth finally bit it. If the play is called Macbeth, make sure the guy playing Macbeth knows what he’s doing. Seeing this play definitely stirred something within me, though. Someday, I’d like to direct that play. I’m not nearly as good a writer as I am a reader. I take things in from ideas to individual sentences and phrases. I chew them thoroughly, and when I’ve extracted all the nutrition I need from them… well, you know what comes next. (Appealing, huh?) If you had read all the same things I have, you could look at my writing and pick out pieces of things I’ve been inspired by, sticking out as brightly as undigested corn. There was a moment… Macbeth and his wife are on stage together for the first time; he has just come home from the war a hero and Thane, with the prophecy of the witches promising him a crown. His wife has determined to push her weak-willed husband to take fate into his own hands and kill the king. They rushed towards one another, kissed… and then backed off and went on with the scene. You’re Macbeth. You’ve got this wife who’s always busting your balls, saying you lack ambition, even though you’re already a Thane, with a nice castle and everything. You married her, you put up with her, and eventually you’re going to let her stroke your ambition until you kill your friends, burn your soul and turn your whole country against you. Why do you do these things? Because despite being a soldier who single-handedly turned the tide of the civil war against King Duncan you’re actually a total wuss? No, of course not. You do it because of sex. Whatever it might be, Lady Macbeth gives him what he needs; he needs her so badly that he destroys himself for her; needs her so badly that he tears his heart out of his chest and destroys his entire world, on her say-so. It’s not the only reading, but it’s the one that made the most sense, seeing the two kiss each other. The play works better, I think, if the audience gets why Macbeth is willing to do all this stuff. Sex is the reason guys do 87% of the things they do, so it can hardly be a bad motivation to base a character on. (Just to answer the next question – 9% hunger, 3% “it’s cool when things explode/get set on fire”, 1% other) So again, now you’re Macbeth. All of your friends think you’re the greatest fighter since Hercules; the king has honored you with both title and friendship. You think it’s possible that you’re going to become king soon. And honors are great, but you’re still a soldier, just finished with a long, bloody war. You’ve just come home, after god knows how long, where your hot wife (who is usually stand-offish at best) rushes up to you and kisses you. What do you do? I tell you what – it ain’t “plotting”. I’m not saying that I wanted to see him fuck her on stage. But I did, very much, want to see him grab her, push her back up against the wall, and at least TRY to fuck her. Let her be the buzzkill; let her start talking about killing the king, and let him back off. But don’t just hint that there might be passion; show it to me. When we had the Shakespeare scholar speaking last week at the college, he said something that really resonated with me. He said, “We don’t owe Shakespeare anything.” We can take what we need from his works, and shouldn’t feel like we are obliged to do things any particular way. So if you’re doing Macbeth, and you really think that these two are hot for each other, don’t restrain yourself from doing more than hinting because they are Shakespearean Characters. They’re not holy. If you want me to care about them, let them be real people. (Heading you off at the pass – the show didn’t shy away from depicting sex any more than it did violence; Macduff’s wife was more or less held down and raped on stage. It was slightly tasteless.) Beyond that, there were just some things that I thought the director or the actors didn’t seem to get about the play. Macbeth may get crazier and crazier as time goes on… but one of the central themes of the play is how, as with Dr. Jekyll’s, Macbeth’s evil side takes him over once he gives it voice. Duncan’s murder destroys his wife, who thought she was strong-willed; but as she slowly breaks into pieces, he gets stronger and stronger. At the end of the play, Macbeth should be Darth Vader; in this production, he turned into Gollum instead. I keep wanting to elaborate on that last line… but I think most anyone reading this understands what I’m saying better than I can explain. So I’d love to take a crack at it. I have no idea how to direct a play, but I bet I can learn; at least, I bet I could learn the craft of directing more easily than someone who doesn’t understand Macbeth can learn to love the play. Maybe I’m just being arrogant, but I don’t think so; my Batman movie probably wouldn’t look nearly as pretty as the crapfest directed by Tim Burton, but it would be ten times more fun to watch, and a thousand times more awesome. Welles himself knew nothing about film when he directed Citizen Kane. Kane uses literally every special effect available at the time, because Welles had a technician from RKO on-set as his teacher; he request was simply “show me everything that you are capable of doing.” I’m no Welles, but I bet I could direct a pretty decent Macbeth. If nothing else, I’d direct the Macbeth that I’d like to see – and that sounds like it would at least be interesting, right? If nothing else, you could be sure that the “Tomorrow” speech would be perfect. PS - Fearless, with Jeff Bridges, is about a man who survives a plane crash and gets stuck in that ‘I’m already dead, so I have nothing to fear’ state. It’s pretty good. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 11th, 2007
11:20 pm	Golden strange That was extremely odd… if you’ve got a phenomenally overactive imagination. I’m sitting in the library at St. Peter’s, doing my homework. This isn’t Oxford’s main library, just my school’s library, but it’s a geek dream, and the first thing about Oxford I totally and unreservedly adore. It’s a tiny, tiny little place, at least by library standards; any Borders’ dwarfs it for size and number of books. But it’s the books themselves, of course, that matter, not how many there are. It’s carpeted, with odd curio cabinets, and books on every surface; most of the tables are covered, leaving just barely enough room for people to actually READ here. It’s old, and musty with the deep wise scent of books left to their own devices for just long enough that they’ve become dangerous… It’s such a mishmash, with the books barely organized, and labeled according to some archaic system I can’t make heads or tails of. I’m in the climatology section, and the books have markings like “Gy2/18p”. Dewey, why hast thou forsaken me? The reference section was sparse, with a few different versions of the OED and a copy of Burke’s Peerage, a book I’ve heard of all my life but never actually seen before. It gives the appearance of either having scared off any other books from its section, or simply having eaten the rest of them. It is easily the largest book I’ve ever seen, in terms of sheer thickness; when I went to take it off the shelf, I couldn’t get my hand around the spine. If I remember correctly, my hands span about an octave and a half on a piano, if you need a reference. It’s the kind of library, in short, which I would feel quite uneasy hanging out in were I a hero. The odds of being caught up in some sort of adventure is dangerously high, and I’ve got law to study tonight, and class tomorrow. So when I saw, nestled between “Encyclopedia of Global Change” and “Geomorphological Techniques”, Frazer’s The Golden Bough, I have to admit that I felt a chill. Some background. This is another book that I’ve known about for a long time, even read excerpts from, but have never seen. It’s a seminal examination of magic, written around the turn of the last century and informing modern mysticism throughout the last hundred years. More secret societies have been founded because some charismatic jackass read this book than any other in human history. In short… in short, it doesn’t belong on the same shelf as “The Winters of the World.” And it’s a goddamn weird coincidence that I happened to sit here, right where I could see it. Again, if I were a hero, I would know something was up. I’m not, so I was willing, though nervous, to take it off the shelf. My pretense was re-filing it; I saw a mythology section downstairs, which is probably where it should be. But there’s no cart here to put books when you’re done, and none of the other students knew where one might be. Well, that kind of explains why the library is such a mess. I was rapidly running out of options, and at the same time, well aware that I was being silly. I flipped through, just in case; shook the book, without looking too closely, so if a note DID fall out, written in an ancient and shaky hand, stating something like “To He who Finds my Book, Hidden in Plain Sight in This, my College and Demense…”, I could simply kick it under the table, put the book back, and walk home. Of course, there was nothing. Overactive imagination. I smiled at myself, and put the book down on the table, flipped to the table of contents. Circled in heavy black ink: Chapter XXIV * The Killing of the Divine King. I. The Mortality of the Gods. Okay… that was a bit of a knock, but at least it’s obvious what happened here – the hero has already BEEN here, taken the note in the book, learned what he needed from it and gone on to save the day. Thank god. I was actually worried there for a moment. Still, I though…what kind of hero writes in books? That guy must have been a total douche. I guess it’s true, that when you fight monsters, you must take care to not become one yourself. In any case… frikkin’ awesome library. (Comment on this)
12:14 am	Now is the summer of my discontent… Made glorious winter by a trip to Stratford. I like things that require effort to be enjoyable. It’s one of the reasons I love Guinness – a poorly-poured Guinness tastes vile. A proper pint requires time to prepare, and time to enjoy. When I make chili, it takes half a day – two hours of chopping and preparing, four to six hours of cooking, and it’s not until about five minutes before it’s done that the mix in the pot actually tastes like chili. There’s definitely a pride, and a joy, in that. The language may be part of what makes Shakespeare difficult to understand, but the language is easy, compared to the style. He takes his audience’s expectations and turns them upside down. It’s so normal to sit back and expect an author to front-load the meaning for us. “Now is the winter of our discontent.” What’s Richard saying? That everything is bad? That’s what most people think. It’s natural to listen to that and stop there. But now that I've set that up, we know that Richard can't be saying that everything is bad, can he? “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York.” Oh, okay; now I get it. You’re York’s kid. Things used to be bad, but now they’re good, because of something you did. It’s not negative; it’s a positive opening to the play, right? Of course not. Because then Richard goes on to tell us that everyone else is thrilled to have the war over, to be able to turn from fighting to games, and love; but he’s crippled and deformed, and that world would hold nothing but misery for him. So he’s going to take this peace that he was responsible for, and turn it on its ear, because he’s a total bastard. Or the Merchant of Venice – Shylock’s famous speech. “Doth not a Jew bleed?” The world’s most famous plea for tolerance, a last-ditch effort to say ‘we’re all alike, treat me decently because I’m just like you.’ No, of course not. Nothing of the sort. Don’t take it at face value; hear on. “And if you harm me, will I not revenge? In this, at least, Christian has taught Jew; and it will go hard, but I will better the instruction.” (The quote is inexact; sorry, my memory is Teflon) I’ve never known what to make of Shylock, or what Shakespeare really thought of Jews. Shylock is such a relentlessly negative and hateful character. But that one line is such an incredible indictment of the Elizabethan attitude towards Jews. “You made us like this – I’m just returning the hate and scorn you’ve shown me. And even in that, I’m better than you.” It’s so utterly subversive, and Shakespeare makes it so easy to overlook; I wouldn’t be surprised if theatergoers back in the day didn’t hear what he was saying any more than people today tend to. All this is apropos of nothing. But last night, after the Monday night lecture (The Waterways of Oxford) and another Harry Potter dinner (lamb shank with mint sauce and glazed carrots, braised cod in tartar sauce over a potato pancake for starters) one of the heads of the other programs mentioned that if a few people from the Wednesday Stratford trip wanted to switch to Tuesday, they had an extra ticket or two. This time, “that’s England for yeh” worked in my favor; I kept trying to figure out what I needed to do, if I needed to pay, etc. When I finally got to the guy I needed to talk to, they were already doing a headcount of the group – I was 18. Steve, another guy from my program who wanted to join, was 19. And that was it; we were part of the group, and on the trip. Dr. Addison had the extra tickets and extra space and didn’t really give a toss as to who used them. So I got out of class, had lunch, and it’s on the bus to the Bard’s town. And now, here I am, sitting on a tiny open-air stage in the middle of a park, writing a hundred yards from where Shakespeare lived. I’ve got homework to do; Steve and I are meeting up in about ten minutes to head to a well-lit pub, and get to work. But I’m here, it’s gorgeous, and I’ve got a ticket for a 7:30 showing of Macbeth in my pocket. I’m off to do some law; I’ll pick this up in a bit. There are memorial plaques everywhere; I just walked through a park, full of lone trees with plaques beneath each one. “Nothing that truly is, is ever lost.” “Resting forever in near the theater he loved.” For reasons I don’t really understand, the simplest of them absolutely tore me in two: “Hello forever.” Now I’m in a public garden, near the house that Shakespeare died in (or, at least, the site of the house he died in, and a reproduction thereof.) It’s a gorgeous garden, with gorgeous soft grass, flower beds exploding with color, and these amazing statutes… they’re abstracts, each with a famous speech from one of the plays on the back side. But despite being abstract, they each convey SOMETHING about the play that’s instantly recognizable. It’s like a series of Shakespeare puzzles, out in the garden. The benches here continue the memorial theme. The next one over is simple, “He loved this garden.” The one I’m sitting on, though, is, heartrending: “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun.” Life am good. Finished my beer, read one of my assignments. Chuckled when the jukebox started playing “Englishman in New York.” Started on the second one, but when (7th circuit court of appeals judge) Richard Posner, who is a total douche, wrote “A consumer who is curious about the properties of the broom can feel the bristles through the wrapper; she [emphasis mine] would have no occasion to ask the salesman to remove the wrapper.” This decision was written in 1995, not 1955. Time to take a break. I adore those statues. On the way out of the garden, Steve and I stopped at the last one, and puzzled at it; it seemed to be totally random, single bird wings and a stormy sea… but at the very bottom, a wrecked boat on a shore. Tempest. Stratford is such a beautiful, peaceful little town. It’s busy; there’s plenty of tourism here, and enough fudge and antique shops to mark it as a tourist trap in the grand style. But there’s not nearly as much chintzy Shakespeare-related stuff as I’d expect; very few places called Falstaff’s Keg or Juliet’s Lingerie or anything like that. What there is, is tasteful; a lot of street theater, kids (supposedly mostly hopefuls who want to get jobs performing) doing scenes for coins out on the corners. There was one bit of Shakespeare chintz I absolutely adored. The Avon River (a redundant term, apparently; Avon is Welsh for river, so it’s like pita bread or ATM machine) runs through town, right beyond the theater. (We’re seeing the play in the Swan, a smaller theater attached to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s main theater, which is being refurbished.) I wandered by a dock which rented rowboats by the hour. Each of them was named after a Shakespearean love interest; the Juliet, the Rosalind, the Desdemona. I just thought it was really cute and romantic. For some reason, when I found out that the sites in town related to Shakespeare’s life – his birthplace, the house he lived in, etc. – are all reproductions, I lost all interest. I guess I’ve seen enough stuff like this that I have a good idea what an Elizabethan house looks like; it’s the personal connection to Shakespeare that I was interested in, and without it, there just doesn’t seem like much of a point. Interesting fact of the day: So last week, we had a talk by a Shakespeare expert, and this was from him. Most of you probably know that there is a superstition among theater people about Macbeth – they don’t say its name, but call it “The Scottish Play.” A line from the play may be read before your play opens, as a sacrifice of sorts. Well, what he told us is that it’s not that there’s some kind of curse associated with Macbeth that creates that superstitious fear. It’s every actor’s greatest and most real fear - fear of being out of a job! Macbeth is such a popular play, and such an old standard, that English theater-owners would have no trouble finding a company to play it, and people interested in filling the seats. So if your play bombed, and the owner was forced to replace you in a hurry, more often than not Macbeth was the play that would be put on. So if you’re in a theatre, and someone’s talking about Macbeth, you’re going to be back to waiting tables relatively soon. Half hour to finish my homework before I need to head over for the play. I’m so glad to be here, so glad I decided to do this over the summer. So glad I’m the type of person who is willing to ask “Hey, I know I’m not in one of the programs scheduled to go on this trip, but if you’ve got extra seats, mind if I go?” Life am good. Talk to you later. (Comment on this)
Monday, July 9th, 2007
3:49 pm	And finally... webcomics. Good webcomics day... hooray for sharing! http://www.shortpacked.com/d/20070709.html - I just haven't been able to stop laughing at this. http://xkcd.com/c287.html - If you don't read XKCD, I don't know why we're friends. Actually, we're probably not. Don't worry if you have no idea what he's talking about some days, just do a wiki search. Edutainment! http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001021.html - this is not today's Dinosaur Comics. It's really just chosen to support my contention that I and T-Rex are two bodies which share the same soul. And because it's possible that I haven't forced you to read Dinosaur Comics yet. What's wrong with you? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
3:30 pm	Live Free or Die Hard Another reason I do this is because it quiets the voices in my head. Don’t take that the wrong way. But my brain is a beehive, a thousand different ideas at a time buzzing for attention, trying to get themselves expressed in some permanent way before they are forgotten and die. I write because it terrifies me to step out of the shower and not remember what I was thinking about a minute before, when I was washing my hair. I am, quite literally, haunted by the ghosts of my own thoughts. But when an idea gets written down, it goes to its grave happy, and doesn’t stay around to trouble my thoughts. I’m writing this from a perfectly lovely playground on the north side of Oxford. After lunch, I went out looking for a park; it’s a gorgeous day, I wanted to write, or at very least do my homework in the sun. But England is no Israel; you can’t walk a block in Tel Aviv without seeing at least a little park, a place for kids to play and the elderly to sit in the sun. Now, considering that Oxford got seven days of rain last week – generally, three or four fifteen minute long downpours a day – I can understand why not as much space is dedicated to outdoor recreation. Still, it was and is one of the best things about Israel, and for some reason, when I headed out of the building after lunch – “North” being the only real idea in my head – I expected finding a park to be a trivial task. Mostly, on the way over here I thought about two things – how classes are going, and how much I hate England. Let’s go with the second, to start with. As I hinted at before, I’ve got a lot to say on the subject; when I get around to disliking something, it tends to be epic. I’m still going to save it for a separate rant, I just wanted to bring up the two trivial things that my walk highlighted. Across the street is the main reception of the Oxford University Press. This seems like as good a mecca as any for word geeks, and I decided that seeing where the OED is born is a requirement before I return stateside. The guard on the other side told me to come to this side, so I happily walked in. I figured asking if this is where the OED lived was not likely to get me a warm welcome from a security guard (I honestly had an image, or at least a hope, that the receptionist would actually be a librarian) so I went with something more conventional. “Do you offer tours to the public?” “No.” Okay, well, that’s a direct answer, but it goes against what the other guard told me, and there’s clearly information this one hasn’t given me yet. So I look crestfallen, and stand around. It is one of the most useful techniques I have ever learned for dealing with recalcitrant people. Humans don’t LIKE to stand around together in silence. Keep your mouth shut, and people will say things they don’t intend, just to make the encounter less uncomfortable. “Well, not today.” Aha. Now I’m getting somewhere. He gave a little, but then clammed up again. Rather than continuing the game, though, it only seems fair that it’s my turn. “Okay, well then, when DO you have tours?” He gives me a look like I’m trying to pry a state secret out of him. When it’s clear that I’m not going to turn around and walk away, he finally pipes up again. “Tuesdays and Thursdays. But tomorrow –“ and I get a glare that tells me very clearly that I am The Enemy, and that he has His Eye On Me, and that No Funny Business Will Be Tolerated. “Tomorrow, we have fourteen tours going, so you won’t get anything then!” Interesting, and emblematic of what will, eventually, be my point. He’s clammed up again. Well, any good interrogator knows when it’s time to really put the thumbscrews to your subject. I let him have it. “Well, then, what about Thursday?” Check and mate, my friend, check and MATE. He visibly deflates. I’ve stymied him at every turn; he has used every trick they taught him and yet I’m still here. Broken, defeated, he silently turns to his computer, and starts writing something down. But with that proud British spirit, he manages one tiny last act of defiance to his oppressor. He turns and hands me a post-it with a name, a title – “Archivist” – and a phone number. A phone number? Really? You mean that despite the fact that there are 14 tours tomorrow, the archivist arranged each of them personally, by phone? In 2007, the archivist of this huge company, which sells millions of books a year, doesn’t have an email address? Every single one of those tourists had little notecards, filled out by hand, from the front desk? There’s no printed information, or even a business card? That’s England for you. That’s what I’ve been told, with a kindly laugh, every time I point out how stupidly and inefficiently this supposed first-world country is run. That’s England for you – there are twenty different ways of doing things that would be easier for me, for the guard, and for Dr. Martin Maw. But instead of making a system that runs well, that makes everyone involved happier, the guard does his best to drive me away. I’m sure I’ll get Dr. Maw’s answering machine, and never hear back from him, and call back over and over out of sheer spite. In the end, all of us spend ten times the amount of time we need to, and don’t enjoy a minute of it. That’s England for you. It’s hard to believe this idiot country used to be the greatest empire the world’s ever seen. Still – the OED lives in that building across the street! How cool is that? The other thing that struck me on the way over her was that the new Die Hard movie is titled Die Hard 4.0 here. I’ll spare the obligatory geek rant on using a versioning number system for something that will never have a different version; will they release a slightly better movie in a few months, maybe with some of the plot holes patched up, and call it Die Hard 4.1? Right. On the other hand, I haven’t seen it – is it a movie that has a specific reason to want to be associated with computer programming? If it is, please retract the criticism. No, what really got me going was the American title, Live Free or Die Hard. Now, I understand that the phrase the title derives from doesn’t really have any cultural cachet here, but honestly, does it have any these days in the US? I doubt one person out of a hundred could identify its origin; I’m not even sure what state it’s from. New Hampshire? Anyone want to correct me? But whatever resonance little the title has in the US is lost here. Not because the phrase is unknown; whether or not that’s true, it’s simply not expressing anything ingrained in the British psyche. Americans may have forgotten the phrase, but it’s still buried within us, and I really think that if it came down to it, we would still be willing to fight to the death for our freedom. The British, (from my week and a half here, he said, laughing at himself) wouldn’t do that. Not just because they wouldn’t be willing to make that ultimate choice, but because living free isn’t something they want to do in the first place. It may have been a huge empire, but today it’s a tiny little country, which hangs on to its tiny little rules like they’re its only life preserver in the Atlantic. Today, a guard prefers to tell me when I CAN’T take a tour, rather than when I can. And that’s the whole society; it’s better to say an insignificant no, than to give the people the idea that they CAN do stuff. People follow their little rules, and do what they are told. The porter in charge of our building told us that they’d been having problems with the keypunch lock which lets us into the building for weeks, but that was the only way in. A day later, one of the Americans tried their room key, which opened the door with less time and less hassle. The people that need to deal with that busted electronic lock every day never thought to do anything but punch the code in over and over. There are cameras EVERYWHERE here. You cannot walk down the street without being recorded by the government. It can’t possibly stop crime – and it doesn’t. It can’t possibly stop terrorism – and it doesn’t. It doesn’t do anything except erode the rights of the Brits, which it does. How can you live with that? I walk down the streets and feel the eyes on me – and it’s MORE creepy, not less, because I know the cameras are unmanned. There are just too many of them. To watch them all they’d need to have half of England monitoring the other. It’s an empty system; maybe it’s recording everything, but so what? They can find a time and a place, but nobody’s ever going to see me giving the finger to every camera as I pass by, because they’ll never look for it. If I become famous some day, there will never be a Giving the Finger to the CCTV scandal, because there’s just no way anyone will search that data. Or maybe that’s not the scary thing. I somehow doubt that a country that doesn’t seem to understand email can manage digital video, but what if this isn’t getting recorded on disposable VHS? What if it’s all going on hard drives, and five years from now, ten years, whatever short amount of time is required for until we’ve got computers powerful enough to really be ABLE to sift through ninety exabytes of video data, looking for one face, looking for every single moment in one person’s life? What if ten years from now, a picture of me will be all that’s required to show every time I kissed someone in public, every time I stumbled drunkenly out of a pub… like I said, I understand Orwell better than I did a month ago. Americans fear Big Brother. He’s been in charge of England for years. It’s not a country that would Live Free or Die, because it’s not a country which would be willing to live free in the first place. Hundreds of years ago, they shipped everyone in the country interested in giving their lives for freedom to the US. We started by winning a guerilla war, fought half by irregulars, against what was then one of the best armies in the world. We built our country up until we have eclipsed everything about England. When you ship off the free spirits – the people willing to explore, willing to make changes – the people with BALLS – you wind up with a society which just stagnates. Remember that Star Trek episode, where Kirk has a transporter accident, and is split into two sides of his personality? Active Kirk was an asshole, but passive Kirk would have eventually just lay down and died. That’s what this country is, to my eyes; passive. No balls, no will, no fire. Tennyson said it best: “How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life!” As though to breathe were life. Ulysses knew what he was talking about. Just because you’re sucking down air doesn’t mean you’re alive. Since time immemorial, the first thing Man does when he wants to build something – when he wants to change something – is to make a fire. There’s no fire here. England may have been great once, but to my eyes, this country’s just wasting sweet oxygen these days. All that from Die Hard 4.0, huh? I think I need to take a pill. Still, it tells you something when I decide NOT to rant about England, and still take up four pages… Coda - Titles generally suggest themselves to me, but this one, for some reason, was incredibly difficult; I finally went back to the original one, which I don't think quite fits. But while looking, I reread William Blake's Jerusalem. AND did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England's mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen? And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic mills? Bring me my bow of burning gold: Bring me my arrows of desire: Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire. I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land. God... talk about ups and downs. An hour ago I was flying high on how much I enjoy writing. After hours of wandering, and thinking, and making sure I had just the right word, I come back here to find that two hundred years ago some total bastard said EXACTLY what I just said, twenty times as well and in a tenth of the space. Read the poem again; everything I've just said does nothing but echo Blake's poem. But it doesn't make me want to weep when I read my rant about Die Hard. He talked to God, and God talked back. How is that fair? How am I supposed to have any respect for my own writing, in the face of that? Fucker. I wonder where he's buried, and if his balls still exist for kicking purposes. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
1:02 pm	Why We Write This is just an addendum to my earlier statement of purpose, brought on by an email Michelle sent me the other day. In retrospect, I’m appalled that I didn’t call the original entry Why We Write to start with, so I’m fixing that problem now. So another reason I love doing this – and a reason I was really eager to pick it up again when I got here – is that, self-indulgence aside, I want to be a good writer. I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was six years old. In first grade, my gifted and talented program at school helped us ‘write’ a book. We took a simple story provided, re-wrote it in our own words, drew pictures to go along, and the school had it bound together. On the last page is a Polaroid of Lil’ Aaron, age six, with seventies clothes and a patch over my left eye, under the thick glasses I started wearing the year before. (My right eye was even weaker back then, and the patch basically forced the muscles to work out harder.) And there was a typed “About the author” blurb across the page from my beaming face; in it, I said that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. Now, I was only six… so it seems perfectly natural that in a book, I’d say I wanted to be a writer; if I was in space, I’d probably have said I wanted to be an astronaut; if I was on a dig for dinosaur bones, I’d probably have said I wanted to be a dinosaur rider. Hmm. I guess these are all terrible examples… because I still want to be an astronaut today. Last year, when I started law school, I gave up my remaining hopes of that dream actually coming true– I’m getting too old, and I’d need to go back for a Physics doctorate, as well as getting in better shape than I’ve ever been in. That doesn’t mean it’s not something I still desperately want; I’ve pretty much relegated myself to becoming rich enough to afford space tourism. And I still hope I’ll find a baby triceratops, raise him, and that we’ll achieve worldwide fame as Aaron And His Amazing Triceratops Who Is Also His Best Friend. Still, I realize that the older I get the less likely that is; I’ve pretty much relegated myself to becoming rich enough to afford to have a motorcycle custom-made to look like a triceratops. And rich enough to pay out all the lawsuits a motorcycle with three huge spikes on the front would generate. And writing is just as bad an example. It wasn’t just a passing six year old fancy; I still want to be a writer, and I always have. I’ve spent half my life reading; one of my great goals in life is to give something back, as it were. Something that makes some other person feel the way J.D. Salinger, or Peter S. Beagle, or T.S. Eliot, has made me feel. All this is a big way of saying thank you to Michelle for her email, and trying to express just how good getting complimented on my writing makes me feel. It’s one of the few areas where I actually trust compliments. I dismiss compliments on how I look immediately; I’m just not capable of believing them. I’m always wary of compliments about my cooking; I like getting them but I never can quite bring myself to trust them. For some reason, compliments on my public speaking just embarrass me, even though this is an area I feel that objectively I am quite good at. Compliments about my writing, though, cut through all that. I trust them, I believe them, and they make me feel absolutely great about myself. So I write because I love it, and I write because doing it makes me better at it. I write because I want people to read it and see something new; to see something, however small, through my eyes for a moment. I write because it makes me feel good to do, and it makes me feel great to realize that I’ve accomplished what I set out to do, and did it well. I hope, of course, that this isn’t seen as trolling for compliments on my writing; quite the opposite, in that it would be hard for me to trust a compliment sent after this particular entry. But so many of the people who read this blog last year and the year before told me how much they enjoyed it; I hope this gives you an idea of just how much that means to me. Thanks. (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 7th, 2007
6:36 pm	Where the demons dwell I am haunted by the specter of King Haggard. I wonder often at how “childlike wonder” and “cantankerous bastard” can co-exist in the same personality, and I fear that the answer is that they can’t. That I’m going to get to the point, someday, when I no longer remember how to take joy in things. I don’t think it will happen, but I fear it will happen. Today we’re visiting Stonehenge and Bath. I’ve just seen one of England’s greatest man-made treasures, and my opinion is a giant ‘meh’. It’s not that I couldn’t have enjoyed it, under the right circumstances. The right circumstances would have been pretty hard to come by, however. Partly, of course, the experience was ruined by postmodernism. This is a thing, the reality of which isn’t as important as the idea of it. I’ve seen Stonehenge a hundred times in movies and pictures; I’ve read detailed descriptions of it, seen models of it… seeing it in person is cool, but it’s not new; it’s not really different from what I see in my head. There’s an old sign outside of the visitor center, “Touch the bluestones, see how much warmer they are than the sarasen stones.” I would have loved to do that – in fact, I was desperate to. It’s probably not that surprising that I love to touch things. I love textures; I connect so much better with things when there’s an actual, physical connection. I love walking through libraries and bookstores an running my hand along the spines of the books, or touching the bark of different trees in a forest. But today, the guide ropes keep you fifty feet away from the stones at all times, after some moron tried to damage it somehow two years ago. So we couldn’t touch; we couldn’t even get close, to see the details that we can’t see in movies. It’s hard to wonder at something from fifty feet away, when you want to be in the middle of the circle looking out instead. And then there’s the people. Not just the hordes of tourists. Or the people doing Yoga. Or even the weirdo with the divining rod. (Actually, it was something similar but even stranger… a length of metal wire in an L-shape in each hand that he was holding by the short end and letting swing around freely.) It was the friggin’ British. It was the country which decided, when they chose not to allow people to walk up to the megaliths, decided that people couldn’t even come vaguely close to them. You know what? I’m not going to do this now. I’ve got a file called “why I hate Britain” on my hard drive. It’s a lot of writing. I’ll post it someday. Suffice it to say that I understand George Orwell and Alan Moore’s writings far better than I did a month ago. Let me give you an example of what drives me batty about this country. The audio tour starts with an intro which explains how to use the tour device. It’s a bit basic, but I suppose there are people who don’t know the basic symbols for fplay, pause, stop, etc. But after explaining that in a three-minute intro, each segment itself says “Now type sixty-six – that’s six then six – on the player, then hit the green Play button when you get to the next marker.” Even the accent doesn’t save it; it’s just so disrespectful. Maybe it seems like I’m overreacting, but the whole society here is like that. The English treat everyone around them, not excepting the other English, like they were retarded children. Americans may be loud, rude assholes… but at least we’re not a society of sheep. Even that’s not what really got my goat, though. (Poor goat. He keeps being gotten.) You know what word I don’t want to see on an informational plaque by the British Historical Society? “Mystical”. Look, I understand that there’s a grand tradition of morons who believe Stonehenge is a worldwide center for leylines, or that giants built it, or it was the alien version of the Statue of Liberty, given to the Druids out of gratitude for protecting the universe against the mighty forces of the Egyptians. You know what is really mysterious about Stonehenge? That we don’t know what it was used for, and that it seems like an awful lot of effort to go through to make a calendar that you can’t even write on without a chisel. You know what is NOT mysterious? How it was built. We may not know exactly what methods they used, but it was perfectly within mankind’s technical ability five thousand years ago to move friggin’ rocks around. It was such a wonderful affirmation of how much some people deserve to be hated… the audio tour was going on about the mysteries of the way it was built, and I’m fuming. They probably moved them on log rollers, lifted them using main force, levers, and pullies when they got really sauce. Maybe they built scaffolding, like the Egyptians did, to put the lintels (the top stones) in place. But in the end, with thousands of slaves (as with Jesus), all things are possible. Well, the tour thing got to the end, where it finally reluctantly admitted that some people hypothesized that a combination of basic tools (such as wedges and levers) and brute force put them in place. The Easter Island megaliths – the great stone faces – were similarly ‘mysterious’, and all the idiotic, condescending British anthropologists said it was impossible for such a primitive people to move such gigantic stones, let alone stand them upright. Finally, some American scientist got fed up with arguing that it wasn’t just possible but not particularly hard, took twenty locals, and without using any tools more complicated than a hammer, they quarried, shaped, moved, and raised a new one inside of a week. Then, as per the Roshambeau Convention of 1873 (to which both American and England are signatories) he kicked all of the other guys in the balls. I made the British/American part of that story up for dramatic purposes, but the rest of it is true, although the ending is apocryphal. You know what? I find it MORE amazing that people five thousand years ago figured out how to use a combination of basic tools to accomplish what takes us incredibly complex machinery today. I also find it amazing that today we have that machinery, and putting those stones into precise place is the work of a half hour for a team of three or four men. Merlin is not required. There’s a rock – one of the Sarsens, the big upright stones – called the Slaughter Stone, fallen on its side about twenty feet from the main site. It’s called this because when it gets wet, it looks like it’s covered in blood. Chemical analysis shows that the rock – and all the Sarsens – have a huge amount of iron oxide, ie rust, in their composition. When there’s water pooled up on the rock, it refracts through, giving the water a bloody, metallic red sheen. It would happen with any of the big rocks, it’s just that the water can’t really pool up anywhere except the top… and it’s not really going to freak anyone out if they can’t see it, because it’s eighteen feet up. The smaller, inside stones are called the Bluestones – they’re made of a separate type of stone, which are warmer to the touch. The entire thing really IS a giant calendar – the sun shines through a different one of the arches every month. I honestly don’t know if there’s anything more to it than you’d find from a sundial, but what do I know? These are the kinds of mysteries which interest ME. Did the builders choose the types of stone as special effects? IE, did they decide to use a stone which looked bloody in the rain because they new it would freak people out? The one – ONE – useful piece of info the tour had was that, despite the popular conception that Stonehenge was a Druidic creation, it predates the Druids by thousands of years. Nuts to you, Druids! So all in all, Stonehenge was cool, but I really wish I could have walked up to the megaliths. In the end what was really important was that the meadow all around Stonehenge was filled with sheep, which were adorable and calmed me down. Then I decided that if a field full of sheep could cheer me up I’m probably not losing anything in the “childlike wonder” department. So THAT’S all right. PS-Maybe I’ll get a crew together and make my own Stonehenge. I really want to kick those guys in the balls. It’s the law! (2 Comments |Comment on this)