A Broken Heart For Every Light Pulled Down In Boston
Thursday, February 01, 2007 • 12:52:23 PM EST
This post is for Doug, a composite character who, in my mind, represents everybody who's posting about the Aqua Teen Hunger Force kerfuffle:
Doug. You're talking crap. Stop it.
Doug, I know you're really proud of your big "What a damned shame it is, truly, that our once-proud nation has now given itself over to post-9/11 hysteria so completely that something as innocent as an illuminated cartoon character can paralyze a major American city." You've worked real hard on it and every time you hear police sirens outside your window, you give it another polish and prepare to slug in the details of the latest time that the police were called upon to behave like…well, like the police.
I praise this part of your ongoing crusade, Doug. As a seasoned professional, I concur that the process of writing is never completed, only abandoned.
Plus, believe me, Doug, I'm no stranger to post-9/11 idiocy. The previous tenant of my PO box was a bankruptcy attorney who (ironically enough) told the postmaster that he had no intention whatsoever of paying the six months' rent he owed on it. It's four or five years later, and I still occasionally get his mail…official-looking letters from bankuptcy courts and individuals. I can't just toss 'em. Over the years, at the urging of the clerks there at the post office, I graduated from patiently waiting in line to hand them back, to just strolling straight to the head of the counter and saying "Another one!" to simply sliding them under the door, wih "FX" scribbled on them ("Forwarding Expired").
One day, though, the door was flung open and a janitor read me the riot act. I'm not entirely certain why he was so enraged but the phrase "There are terrorists targeting post offices, you know!" came into play and before I could (quite reasonably, I thought) counter with "Says who?" the door slammed shut again.
So I'm not denying that a certain amount of hysteria — trace elements, at this point, but still — remains.
But Doug, first of all, you're letting bloggers and The National Media control your perception of reality again. I can attest that here in the Land of the Cod, life proceeded on a more or less even and steady keel. Unless you tried to cross a certain bridge or pass by a certain landmark during a specific two-hour period yesterday, in which case the City In The Grips Of Fear angle was solely articulated by a concern that you wouldn't get back to your office before your boss realized that today, your OfficeMax run included two hours at the Loews Boston Common seeing "Happy Feet" for the fourth time since you started with the company.
What I'm telling you, Doug, is that when people learned that the police had found some Suspicious Devices, it's not like they started making final, desperate love with each other right there on sidewalks.
Onward to the devices themselves. Now, Doug. I know you're a huge fan of Aqua Teen Hunger Force; your wonderful daily check-ins at the show's Wikipedia page, defending its scholarly integrity from newbies who have reached entirely the wrong conclusions about Meatwad's size and relative mass, are a testament to your commitment to Truth and Accuracy and a legend amongst the Cartoon Network fancommunity.
Have you considered, however, that the Mooninites (and it pains me to write this) haven't really gained any real traction in the public consciousness? Aqua Teen Hunger Force is laser-marketed precisely to your Dougographic; well done, Turner Networks. Can the rest of the country be expected to be just as hip as you?
All I mean to tell you is that I watch a lot of Cartoon Network myself (Go, Team Venture!). I think I've seen one or two episodes of ATHF, but ultimately I reached for the "This Show's Humor Is Apparently Way Too Clever For Me" stamp and forwarded its paperwork back to the mailroom.
And yet, if you showed me a picture of a Mooninite I wouldn't have been able to identify it. And the LED images were pretty hard to make out, too. In fact, when a picture of one of the devices popped up on the news I thought it looked like Cheese of Milk And Cheese (Dairy Products Gone Bad) Evan Dorkin's delightfully homicidal cartoon duo.
So there's that. And then there are the devices themselves, which don't exactly sport iPod-level industrial design and craftsmanship. It's a circuit board and a bundle of exposed wires and something bulky wrapped in tape underneath it, and folks were zooming past it at thirty miles an hour.
Doug, I'm just asking that you take a moment to imagine a world in which somebody might have looked at this and not immediately thought "An electronic advertisement for Aqua Teen Hunger Force; specifically, an image of 'Ignignokt,' one of its misguided Mooninite characters. How artfully sardonic!"
An alternative reaction might have been — and I'm not insisting that this is the only credible one, mind you, merely tabling it as a possibility — "A weird, handmade device crudely fastened to a bridge support; should I maybe phone somebody about this?"
And once "weird handmade device crudely fastened to a bridge support" makes it to a police switchboard, there's a predictable chain of events.
I see that you summarized the police's overall reaction to the device as "o noes!" I suspect that this particular netmeme has long-since gone the way of "All Your Base Are Belong To Us," Doug, but that's a side issue. Instead, I suppose it's germane to point out that I have friends in law enforcement and I know that when they respond to a burglar alarm (for example) they know full well that it's probably just a homeowner who forgot his disarm code. They've been in this business for quite a while, you see. I've no doubts that even as they were slapping velcro hooks onto velcro loops together on their body armor, they were certain that it'd turn out to be nothing.
But when a patrolman at the scene eyeballs the thing and he can't radio back "oh, it's just a broken cellphone" or somesuch…well, look, Doug, they have a job to do. When confronted by "we have no idea what this is," their default position can't be "Let's not bother."
At this point I can't help but think of the Worcester Cold Storage Building fire that killed five firefighters in central Massachusetts a few years ago. Fire broke out at an old, abandoned warehouse, and firefighters knew that there probably weren't any homeless people trapped in there…but not going in there and looking wasn't an option. This is why some of us are police officers, firefighters, and soldiers, and others write about technology for a living. Plus — and this is something that never occurred to me before a cop explained it — their general attitude is that every time they mobilize and respond to something that turns out to be nothing, it makes them just a little bit better-prepared to deal with something that turns out to be something. It's hard for you and I to appreciate that driving a bomb squad truck out to a site is just a routine day at work, but for folks on the Bomb Squad…well, yeah, it's exactly that.
We should talk more about this, Doug, because I haven't talked about the true problem that this whole incident illustrates. Believe me, it's far, far more important than How Sad It Is That The Post-9/11 America Has Become So (etc.).
But I've already gone on for a thousand words on this already, and I should probably get back to paying work. It's noon, and the Terror Threat Alert Panic took up all of four minutes on the midday local newscast, most of that spent talking about Turner Networks' (and now Time/Warner's) attempts at damage control. The twentysomethings who built and placed the devices spent some time in court this morning, and were released on a fairly nominal bail ($2500).
It's sad that one of them is apparently an immigrant awaiting a green card. What a dumb, dumb way to get your ass bounced out of the country. The Mayor was careful to say that these two were just trying to make a few bucks and that the true responsibility for the devices and their placement lies with the folks who hired them and furnished them with precise instructions. I hope that their failure to engage in a bit of abstract thinking doesn't have a life-changing impact.
Rest assured, Doug, that I'll get back to this soon. Because it seems that you've never learned about The Law Of The Bigger A****le before. It's truly the bane of our existence, Doug, and I think it'll shift the targets of your disgust regarding this incident rather dramatically.
Because it's WRONG to wish for a house fire or a car wreck
Friday, February 02, 2007 • 02:19:42 PM EST
I wasn't lucky enough to be watching when a passing truck snagged an overhead wire a few days ago. But repair crews in two bucket trucks have been working their way up and down the street all morning, like a couple of brontosauri grazing in a territory with no natural predators. And that's just as good.
It's no good for my productivity, mind you, but regardless: this is working out to be an awesome Friday.
Yes, yes: it's "Apatosaurus," not "Brontosaurus." And a tomato is a berry, not a vegetable, and a spider is an arachnid, not an insect. We're all so very bloody impressed. The only reason why we're throwing lit balls of Kleenex at you is because we know you're clever enough to appreciate the irony.
Depression Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery
Friday, February 02, 2007 • 06:21:26 PM EST
Folks often send me things they've written, and they ask me "Andy, do I have what it takes to be a professional writer?"
Reading your work is completely unnecessary. It's not important that I think you could be a professional writer. The only people who need to believe that are you yourself, and the person who's in a position to buy your work. Which is why I selflessly forward these pieces on to my editors, claiming that they're my own stuff so that he or she won't be unfairly prejudiced against an unknown author.
Fortunately, an unerring litmus test of your professional potential has finally arrived, in the form of a recent "For Better Or For Worse" strip.
The backstory: Michael Patterson, son of…of…er…well, his parents, obviously, finished the first draft of his first novel on Christmas Eve, some five weeks ago. Moments after completing the final chapter, fire broke out in his apartment building. He escaped with his wife, his two kids, and his laptop, but lost everything else. They've all been living with…with…again, his parents. I know they have names. I'll be damned if I can think of 'em. Something-Patterson, I know that.
The key points: first novel, first draft. It's been just five weeks since he sent it to a potential publisher, and that's assuming Mike dropped it in the mail on the day after Christmas.
What is your reaction to this strip? Is it:
(a) "How wonderful that even in the shadow of tragedy, triumph can emerge!"
(b) "It looks like…Mrs. Patterson's…Ellie? Is her name Ellie? What's-her-face's life has taken yet another wacky, unexpected turn!"
(c) "Screw you, Michael Patterson. Screw yourself with a broken banjo. And then pull it out sideways and play Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah on it over and over and over again until your god-damned fingers fall right off."
If your answer is (c) then congratulations: you have the makings of a professional writer.
And…join the club. There's been a certain amount of discussion of this strip on various writerly blogs. The fact that we, as a community, can get so worked up about a fictional character who's doing better with his novel than we are with ours says a lot about both the complexity of the artistic spirit and the insane injustice of failing to find a publisher for a (totally) genius pirate-spaceman-medieval-fantasy-scifi-locked door parlor murder mystery.
Bastards.
I'm still sore over the last rejection (did hey even get to the chapter where it turns out that Adam and Eve were actually ancient spacemen who crash-landed on Earth? Honestly! That's pure Tabasco!) so I'll mean-spiritedly excerpt something from "Michael"'s blog, in which "he" talks about the fire:
It was 2 am. I had just finished my book and I felt like celebrating. Not that I know anything of the physical pain of giving birth, but I was comparing this feat to something equally agonizing - and, now it was done. I sauntered down the stairs into the living room and my eyes began to burn. The smell of melting plastic and a blue haze of smoke was beginning to curl into the apartment. The alarm on the hall ceiling went off, a high-pitched whine that pumped the adrenaline like a syringe. I woke Deanna and told her to get up. Fast. It helps if you imagine this as a book-on-tape, read by John O'Hurley…you know, the guy who played Elaine's boss on "Seinfeld." Re-read the above excerpt, and then follow it with "…I thanked my lucky stars that I had the wit and the opportunity to pull on my Yalta Herding Clogs before fleeing into the cold night air. Available in Buff, Chocolate, and Nancy; Mens' sizes 8-14."
And the best part of my novel is that it has no fewer than thirteen protagonists. How many does Michael's novel have? Two? Just one?!? Well, look: writing is a rewarding gig but it's an endlessly frustrating one. If you want to try to thwart a loved one from the path of professional writing, send them to Sandra Scoppettone's blog.
This is precisely why I don't usually subscribe to blogs that talk about the writing process. It's like an avid skydiver subscribing to a LiveJournal entitled "Notes From An Avid Skydiver Whose Chute Didn't Open, And Who Is Now Free-Falling Above What Appears To Be Some Sort Of Factory Where They Manufacture Those Iron Fences Topped With Long Spikes." Nobody in any profession should be as hard on themselves as Sandra is.
Who searches for Lost Thomas?
Sunday, February 04, 2007 • 10:15:52 PM EST
Lots of you are (like me) longtime fans of Evan Dorkin…if response to my Mooninite post is any indication. Well, then, you definitely need to visit Evan's blog. Lately, he's been cataloguing monsters.
I sure hope he does something with these characters. There isn't a single dud in the bunch. Every time a new sketch appears, I find myself thinking "I wonder what this one's deal is?" It's just flat-out great design. And it was Day Three or Four before I stopped instinctively looking for some sort of "Add To Shopping Cart" button.
(Evan: I'm thinking Tiny Madison, with background, printed at about 6"x8" on a black Hanes Beefy-T, Size XL, no text or anything. But hey…no pressure.)
Pull Of The Astronomer Monday!
Tuesday, February 06, 2007 • 09:33:24 PM EST
"Phil!" I laughed. "You rockstar!"
This was said to my car's largely-empty crew compartment while I navigated from the post office to OfficeMax, but I said it with great glee nonetheless. I was getting caught up on my Penn Jillette Show podcasts and within five minutes of the start of Monday's program, I heard the voice of my good pal, Phil Plait, aka the Bad Astronomy guy. Jillette had brought him into the studio to explain to Joe Rogan (the "Fear Factor" guy) precisely why all of his ideas about the faking of the Apollo moon landings are complete and utter bollocks.
(Yes, I said "bollocks." I realize that I'm not British and I promise you that I'm not one of those people who hangs around the food court at the mall trying to sound like John Constantine or something. But sometimes, the perfect word is the perfect word.)
Once again, I've had an unnanounced visit from an Invisible Friend. These come as a startling and welcome little surprise in an otherwise boring day, and they happen to me a lot more frequently than what I imagine would be statistically likely. For instance, there was the time when I was up late working, with the TV squawking in the corner of the office.
"My name is Seth Shostak," I heard someone say. My head snapped up towards the screen. But it was clearly not my friend Seth.
"…and I'm looking for aliens."
It was a modern revival of the old "To Tell The Truth" show. It had been awarded the highly-competitive 2:30-3 AM time slot, the one so coveted by advertisers. After all, Howard Hughes was known for watching TV all night long…and who had more discretionary income than Howard Hughes?
The statement was repeated twice more by two other men…one of whom most certainly was Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute. I was thrilled. It was really cool that he was on "To Tell The Truth," even if it wasn't the classic version with Kitty ("This product that you invented…would I be more likely to use it than, say, my husband?") Carlisle.
And lest you conclude that only astronomers have the ability to hijack their way into my day, I once had a double-header involving magazine columnists. I was cloistered in a Chicago hotel room all morning, before delivering a keynote address. I was still trying to finish up my iPod book and was plugging away at it when I heard a familiar voice from the TV in the bedroom. Hey, cool: it was my pal Ellen McGirt, talking about personal finance on "Good Morning, America." And just an hour later, Bill Nack was reminiscing about the life and accomplishments of Secretariat over on ESPN Classic. Clearly, the hotel had subscribed to the Close Personal Friends Of Andy Ihnatko Cable Network; how thoughtful of the conference to have checked before booking me into the place.
It's like having one of those tragic and famous mental disorders that culminates in being arrested a block away from a TV studio, while carrying a roll of duct tape and a photo that I insist is the child I had with (name) out of wedlock, even though it was clearly torn out of an old issue of "Redbook." Only in my case, I really do know the people in the TV box.
I must now email Phil and send him what I'm sure will be a very welcome "I acknowledge that you were indeed on the radio recently" email. Part of the fun of being quoted in a question on "Wait, Wait…Don't Tell Me" was getting emails from lots of friends I hadn't heard from in months.
We were gonna try to get together last month when I was in San Francisco. But I was running arond at Macworld Expo all week and Phil was away at a conference of his own until the weekend. By the time Friday rolled around, we were both way too exhausted to figure out how to exploit the few hours of free time I had that weren't already spoken for by other pals. But I'm glad we managed to have a (one-sided) conversation all the same. I will indeed tell him how brutally jealous I am that he was a guest on the program. The Penn Jillette Show is one of the few podcasts that I keep up with week after week, making sure that I catch up on any shows I might have missed.
Away: In lead-shielded nuclear fallout shelter
Thursday, February 08, 2007 • 06:12:20 PM EST
I'm busy. Busy, busy, busy. During the first half of the week, I'm usually "working on columns" busy, but for the second half, I'm "working on books" busy, which is far, far worse. It's one thing to be walking a mile in shoes filled with broken glass. During the second half of the week it also feels like my Odor Eaters have been soaked in lemon juice.
There are different levels of Busy, though. I thought there were only two, but events of this afternoon have proven that there's a new high bar, viz:
Busy: I'm not wasting time checking out websites. Even if I've left the TV on, I'm concentrating on my work and not paying any attention to it. The left-hand column of my Bloglines window is a solid smear of boldface, with each newsfeed growing ever-more-swollen with unread articles. I'm so focused that I've pretty much completely shut my environment out.
Busier: During my forays to the Web to research things, I don't even click into Fark.com for a moment just to see what's going on. It's an odd interface to the outside world. I don't want to even tell you how many heart-wrenching stories of immediate national and world concern first came to my attention as an orange-on-black newsflash listed below a story about a burglar who got his testicles caught inside an ATM.
Busiest: Something happens and I don't find out about it until the news is reflected in the Status lines of my iChat buddy list.
And so, thanks to a Level Three busy day (and the fact that I have some very, very peculiar friends), my need to ask someone a technical question has resulted in my learning of the death of Anna Nicole Smith. I mean, seriously: three times.
On this terrible day, when we're all desperately reaching out for a reason to maintain one's faith in a kind, thoughtful and loving God, I can only offer you these drops of Chicken Soup For The Soul: know that somewhere in America, the stalker astronaut diaper lady is thinking "finally, I catch a break."
ANS's casino death won't be enough to get everybody to stop talking about the incident altogether. But if I appeal to your more compassionate natures, I'm certain that you'll agree that this poor, troubled woman deserves a week's vacation from the front pages, at least.
And a doorknob that doubles as a Purell dispenser
Monday, February 12, 2007 • 01:22:08 PM EST
Just like the desk-sized machine in Dayton, Ohio that keeps the rain from coming down all purple like it used to in the days before steam power, Genius is something that should be left running 24/7. Take this to heart and you'll reap a lifetime of rewards.
For instance, there is now a Post-It on my monitor with the following words written on it:
COKEHEAD ON A MOPED
And it just sort of came to me this morning, when I wasn't planning on doing anything brilliant at all! Gosh!
I don't know what I'm going to use it for yet. Maybe as the title of a new Adult Swim cartoon, with the lead character voiced by one of the lesser Balwin, Belushi, or Farley brothers. Or it'd make a great name for an incredibly inexpensive and wildly unreliable courier service. It's way too good to waste…I know that.
Full Feeds for Yellowtext?
Monday, February 12, 2007 • 04:29:46 PM EST
I got an email today from a Concerned Reader who pointedly asked why I don't put the full text of my posts in Yellowtext's RSS feed. He's not the first, he surely won't be the last, and I'm talking about it here on the blog because it's something that I've been seriously mulling over recently.
There's a simple answer: because Yellowtext runs off of my own blog software, and the idiot who wrote the RSS features decided to just pop the first paragraph out and use it as a summary. The app appends a word count to clue you in that when I write "I have a thermonuclear device and I hate the way the little tag on the back of my sweatshirt itches," it's just a lead-in to a much larger subject and there's no reason to get the Feds involved, honestly. And that's as far as it goes.
But recently I've been rethinking this approach. I read most blogs via Bloglines and although I don't think it's much of a hassle to click a link to read Emma Kennedy's or Kevin Smith's latest posts in their entirety, I confess that I get an additional 3 grams of undeserved joy from Mark Evanier's blog and the Planet Karen strip, simply by virtue of the fact that when I click on their boldfaced names I'm reading the whole thing a moment later.
I've actually been fiddling around with an experimental full feed. Here's the problem: no matter what I do…it looks like crap. Not the crap that integrates with the soil and helps living things to grow and thrive, either. I mean a completely shiftless form of crap that contributes nothing to Society and isn't welcome at your next family or church function, for reasons it's fully aware of.
Essentially, releasing a full feed drops Yellowtext all the way back down to HTML 1.2. I can embolden and I can em-italics-en. I am (grudgingly) allowed to have images. But style sheets would be completely out, as far as can tell, which means that I could no longer do things like Asides, Citations, (hang on…let me drop down my Yellowtext formatting menu) iTunes links, images (the way I want them to work)…it's a big, big step.
Of course, I understand that the whole point of a full feed is to allow the reader to format the text whichever way is most appropriate, whether it's being displayed in a pane in Firefox or the teensy screen of a smartphone. But the whole point of having my own blogging app is that it gives me the maximum level of control over the presentation. It's hard to let go.
I'm mulling over various solutions.
One idea is to simply have the blogging app "burn" two different versions of the post. Folks who subscribe to the summarized feed and read this stuff in a proper browser would see pretty formatting like this whever there's an aside… (Aside)
…And folks who read it through Bloglines or some other newsreader without its own built-in browser would see an aside formatted like this.
(End of aside.)
As for things like an iTunes post, well, there's really no solution. I'd just have to include the CSS-formatted HTML as-is…and may God have mercy on all of our souls.
I'm not saying this by way of announcing that Yellowtext will never ever have a full feed. I'm just asking, once again, for your pity. Pity's always good; as much as you think you have, you can always use more. It's much like Scotch tape in that regard, although pity is no good for making scary monster faces with.
A third solution is to simply keep things as-is. But I think a full-feed has to happen to this blog eventually. You mull through all of the philosophical reasons why you're not doing it and all of the technical reasons why you're not doing it, but in the end, the only questions that truly matter are "Is this something that current readers want?" and "Is it something that will encourage new readers to jump in the pool?" Full feeds seem to offer a firm yes to both.
So it looks like I've got some more reading and research to do. My experimental Atom feed looks prettier than the RSS feed (and frankly, there's something more satisfying about wrapping 1300 words within two "CONTENT" XML tags than two "SUMMARY" ones). I'm using Bloglines as the primary test bed. Alas, I don't know yet if the style limitations I'm encountering are hard limits imposed by syndication feeds, or just limitations to my own understanding. You can't use CSS styles? Really?
Then there's the larger and itchier question. I love having my own blogging app — sometimes there's great satisfaction in eating your own dogfood — but this is another case where the source of my problem is the fact that CWOBber has exactly one annoyingly-demanding user and one seriously-overstressed developer. Whereas I were using MovableType, I could simply click a checkbox and be done with it.
Oh, yes: and I could also click another checkbox and allow you folks to leave comments. And Technorati and other search tools would allow people to find me on the 'Net a lot more easily; it still amazes me that outside links to my blogposts turn up more readily than the post itself. And it'd be a piece of cake for you to link to my posts from your own blogs. Et cetera. All of these are good things, given that that I write with the intention of actually being read by people. A few months ago, I had an idea for how I could finally post to YellowText straight from my phone. It's something I dearly would like to do, but I'd have to keep a client app running on my always-on home server and change the philosophy of the app so that it "lives" on my webserver, not on Lilith. Lots of work. Again, if I were using somebody else's blogging app, it'd be no more complicated than wanting to do it and then spending fifteen minutes configuring things.
(…And José has a curse on his glove and nobody seems to know what to get Millie and Jimmy for their wedding. We're dealing with a lot of ****, here.)
The Management Welcomes Your Input. Just leave a comment to this pos…oh, right. Well, send me an email or something if you have a strong opinion about any of this.
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