BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: June 2007
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Harry Potter History
Nice article on AP news about the history of the Harry Potter phenomena.
True phenomena are never planned. Not "Star Trek," a series canceled after three seasons by NBC; or "Star Wars," rejected throughout Hollywood before taken on by 20th Century Fox, which didn't bother pushing for merchandising or sequel rights. The public knew better — the young people who screamed for the Beatles or watched "Star Wars" dozens of times or carried on for years about "Star Trek" after its cancellation.
In the beginning, "Harry Potter" simply needed a home. Several British publishers turned down Rowling, believing her manuscript too long and/or too slow, before the Bloomsbury Press signed her up in 1996, for $4,000 and a warning not to expect to get rich from writing children's books. An American publisher had bigger ideas: Scholastic editor Arthur A. Levine acquired U.S. rights for $105,000.
"I can vividly remember reading the manuscript and thinking, `This reminds me of Roald Dahl,' an author of such skill, an author with a unique ability to be funny and cutting and exciting at the same time," Levine says. "But I could not possibly have had the expectation we would be printing 12 million copies for one book (`Deathly Hallows'). That's beyond anyone's experience. I would have had to be literally insane."
They go through Rowling's history, how she was unemployed and writing in coffee shops, how the early books were considered great successes when they were selling tens of thousands of copies, how publishers congratulated her but warned her not to expect to get rich writing children's books, etc. I wonder what percent of aspiring (and already published, for that matter) writers around the world read this article and get a gleam of dream in their eye. I certainly do, even though I realize that anyone aspiring to be the "next Harry Potter" is insane, since it's quite probable that we will never again see a publishing phenomena of this magnitude.
Still, it's fun to pretend. The funny part is that a new author could literally be 1/1000th as popular as Rowling, and still be a great success. Perhaps even 1/10000th as popular? Quick math: 350,000,000 Harry Potters books in print. Knock off 4 zeros and that's 35,000 books in print. Okay, not a great success, but if you jump up to 1/1000th, 350,000 books, that's huge bestseller status. You can quite happily live on that, in a world where most authors dream of selling even 50,000 copies of anything.
It's certainly an argument for fantasy series, too. Everyone laments fantasy series that go on too long and get soggy in the middle, and spin in the sand like the Wheel of Time, but imagine if Rowling had written a one-off Harry Potter book? Or even just a trilogy, with each book rushing through 2 or 3 years of his school time? It would probably still have been popular, but nothing like it has been, with time for the story to develop, time for the audience to grow, time for the movies to become successful, etc.
I've frequently belabored my disinterest/disgust in the crappy quality of Playboy magazine and their "pictorials." All busty blondes, all airbrushed, all bleh. This one sets a new standard though, even non-blonde and non-nude.
As you may notice, there's a certain, frequently-ringed depression missing from this woman's lower abdomen. And you thought they just fixed up their faces and shrunk their thighs!
As the page says, this apparently went out in an issue of Brazilian Playboy without the copy editors noticing, and has provoked some amusement. I don't think there's as much airbrushing on Eve XY here as they use to turn the 5s into 8s in their regular "Girls Next Door" features, but at least they don't entirely erase their noses, or mouths.
I've not been posting much on politics of late, mostly since I'm lazy/far too busy with other stuff. I do spend about an hour a day reading political news and blogs and such, but I haven't really had much to say/add, and I figure if you care you're reading those sorts of sites on your own. I did think this video of President Bush at a news conference today was worth remarking on, though.
Yes, I know. You don't want to watch him, you can't stand him, etc, etc. Just give it 10 seconds; that's long enough to be amazed at how worn and defeated the man looks. Count the deep sighs and moments of dazed confusion? I almost felt sorry for him, since as the video title says, he's just out of steam. He looks exhausted and dazed, and not just in his usual "excessive cocaine and beer consumption burned out my prefrontal lobe in 1981" sort of way. It would be alarming to see the PotUS so broken, if not for the fact that he did done such consistently awful things when he was fresh and vital. Better he's tired; less he can screw up then. Cheney's still fresh and agitating for WWIII behind the scenes, though.
If you do make it through a bit more of the video, it's fun to laugh at the keywords Bush staggers towards once he's finished lamenting his failed immigration bill (which less than 25% of the Republican senators voted for, despite Bush's heavy lobbying for it). He's clearly running on fumes and just hits the various buzzwords he's had drilled into him by poll-checking advisers. "mumble mumble... comprehensive energy policy... affordable health care without government running it... work together to balance federal budget... not overspend or raise taxes..." Of course he's had 6 years to accomplish all of those, did nothing to accomplish them when he had a 90% approval rating and Republican-controlled House and Senate, and his Iraqi misadventure is the reason the budget needs balancing, since Clinton left him a surplus he's squandered by the trillion.
Just to get the taste of that out of your mouth, enjoy some Dramatic Gopher! If this is not the best 5 second video in the history of the Internet, I have no idea what is.
This video's been around for a couple of weeks, and I want to scorn it for being too silly, but I can not. In fact, it gets funnier every time I see it. I want a behind the scenes feature. Who filmed it? How did they know to zoom in right then? Who thought to add the music? It reminds me of LOLcats in a way, especially the "invisible" genre, though Monsieur Gopher's video is a subtler form of anthropomorphizing.
Here's a cute tool I saw a link to via Pharyngula. It's billing itself as a blog rating device, into which you paste an URL and get a rating based on the US's G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17 movie rating system (which in itself is largely arbitrary, but that's another issue). It's not a real sophisticated analysis; the bot seems to simply scan the text and tips on sensitive words, which it summarizes below the URL box. It doesn't know from context and it doesn't have any ability to rate photos, so I'm sure you could find a porn site it would return as wholesome and a medical website that would be NC-17, but it's fun to kill five minutes plugging URLs into it just for laughs.
The current rating, though it's highly subject to change, as older, more offensive posts are pushed down and newer, more family-friendly ones replace them. "Doggy. Montana. Pillow. Big floppy donkey d..."
Writing advice for teens and other aspiring fools...
I've recently been reading a blog by John Scalzi, a writer I'd never previously heard of. He writes Sci-Fi and lots of articles and other non-fiction, and is apparently pretty successful. He's a good blogger too, and while I ended up reading him thanks to his posts about the new Creationism Museum and his offer to visit it if enough readers donated money to a separation of church and state charity, (they did and he will), I've found his various posts on writing the most interesting.
One on his main page is entitled, "On Teens, and the Fact Their Writing Sucks" and you know I had to read that one. It's a follow up to a post he made last year, "10 Things Teenage Writers Should Know About Writing," and as you may have guessed from the title of his follow up post, one of the major thrusts of Scalzi's first blog post was that the writing produced by teenagers sucks. Equally predictable is the fact that many readers didn't really get any further than that in his first post, and addressed complaints to him based on their own incomplete reading of his advice.
I'm linking to them both, and recommending that you read them both in whatever order seems more appropriate, but I did want to quote one thing from Scalzi's first "advice" post, since I thought he really summed up an issue I've given though to since... I was a teenaged writer. (Who sucked, in retrospect.)
1. The Bad News: Right Now, Your Writing Sucks.
...There are reasons for this.
a) You're really young. Being young is good for many things, like being flexible, staying up for days with no ill effects, not having saggy bits, and having hair. For writing deathless, original prose, not so much. Most teenagers lack the experiential vocabulary and grammar for writing well; you lack a certain amount of perspective and wisdom, which is gained through time. In short: You haven't yet developed your true writing voice.
Now, if you're really good, you can fake perspective and wisdom, and with it a voice, which is almost as good as having the real thing. But usually, sooner or later, it'll catch up to you and your lack of experience will show in your writing. This will particularly be the case when you have a compelling, emotional story, which would require the sort of control and delivery of your writing that you only get through time. You may simply not have the wherewithal to express your very important story well. Yes, having a great story you're not equipped to tell pretty much bites. Normally, this is when teens look for help from the writers they admire, which brings us to the next reason your writing sucks:
The first paragraph of this is exactly what several adult readers tried to tell me about my writing when I was that age, and of course I didn't comprehend a word they said. What I wrote was the most interesting writing to me, and I assumed it would be what other people wanted to read too. I concentrated on the cool stuff; sex and violence, and didn't waste much time with character development and the other tedious aspects of a story. I remember an agent I worked (briefly) with telling me that I didn't need to try so hard to reinvent the wheel, and that I needed to just experience more of life to gain more depth and content with which to build my characters. Not advice I was partial to at the time, though I did, at least, mature quickly enough to realize that what I'd written a year or two earlier was crap (which caused me to not work with that agent for long, since he wanted to try and publish a novella I'd since disowned.)
Unfortunately, it's not essential that a writer do that to become published and/or successful; plenty of crappy genre fiction writers don't do it and most of them are decades past their last acne outbreak. Lots of writers never get any better, but what Scalzi says is very true for writers who want to. Something else he mentions in the same post is even more important.
Work on your empathy -- try to understand why people are the way they are. This will achieve two things. One, it's a good exercise for you to help you one day create characters in your writing who are not merely slightly warped versions of you. Two, it'll make you realize there's more to life than wry mockery.
Emphasis by me, since that's really a key. I could write a lot of characters when I was 17 or 19 or 20 or 22, but in retrospect... all of the main chars were pretty much slightly warped versions of me. Not biographically; I wrote female chars and old people and monsters and aliens and such, but they were sometimes believable, but they all tended to have something very close to my cynical, observing, non-emotional personality. That's something most writers do forever, and I'm still trying to avoid it; the main female char in my fantasy novel is too much like me in some ways, and one of the things I'm fixing in my current rewrite is her personality. I'm making her mentally younger, and more spontaneous, emotional, etc.
I'm good at writing characters who are scheming or manipulative or superior or Vulcan-like in their emotional detachment and superiority. Whole novels of that don't work real well though, and one of the hard things in crafting believable, varied characters is making some of them people you (the author) disapprove of, are disappointed by, or even dislike. I can easily dislike the actions of chars, bad guys or whatever, but writing them to think and act in ways that are foreign to me, and that I actively strive to not be like in real life, is more difficult. Not only couldn't I do that when I was a teenaged writer, but it didn't really occur to me that there was any reason I'd want to. I hated chars who acted stupid for stupid reasons in novels, and wanted to fix them. Sure, they were necessary to the story, and they had to be like they were to contrast to the other chars, to advance plot events, to give variety, etc, but they just annoyed me so much. I realized at the time that my reaction to them was far from universal, but it took years longer until I understood in an analytical, logical way, why and how they were essential to the story.
One example: Sansa in Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. I hated her so much through books 1-4 that I might have had to stop reading her chapters when I was 18, or 20, or 22, just because she would have annoyed me so badly. How could she be so stupid? Reading those books now though, I still hate her, but I can simultaneously appreciate her purpose and Martin's genius in crafting her. I root for her to die on every page, but I realize that my passion is a sign of how brilliant a character she is, and how well she works in the story, and how subtly Martin uses her to advance events and contrast her personality to other personalities around her. One of his greatest strengths as a writer is his ability to craft a wide variety of believable, complicated characters. As the series progresses and Sansa grows up we're seeing changes in her personality, changes that have an impact because she's been so realistically depicted over the course of the series.
No, that's not the name of the upcoming fourth Matrix film. I watched Matrix 1 a few days ago, and then needing further mental break/relaxation Friday night and Saturday evening, I watched Matrix 2 and 3 on DVD. I'd not seen all of The Matrix in years; just bits and pieces on cable, and the same went double for Matrix 2. I hadn't seen any of Matrix 3 since seeing it in theaters opening day, despite having the DVD lying around here for like 2 years. Malaya and me picked it up as the fifth-wheel third disk in one of those "3 used DVDs for $25" sales Blockbuster has, and never got around to watching it. She's out of town now and has still never seen it again, and probably never will, since she disliked it a lot more than I did back in 2004 when it was released.
Going into this viewing session, I had no expectations. I've long held that those are the primary determining factor in movie enjoyment, and in fact I talked about it quite a bit in the intro to my original Matrix 3 review, ironically enough. Going into Matrix 2 back in 2004, I and most everyone else had enormous expectations, since most of us were (justifiably) huge fans of the first film. Matrix 2 wasn't anywhere near as good a movie, but it did enough interesting things and had enough faux-philosophy that most voters were unimpressed, but kind of undecided. Which put all the pressure on Matrix 3 to salvage the whole trilogy, or sink it. It sunk, earning the least money of the three films and garnering by far the worst reviews. Looking back 2.5 years later though... how was it? Not that bad.
Then again, I didn't think it was that bad when I first saw it either, though that fact came as something of a surprise to me. In my memory I was very disappointed that the plot went nowhere and that the action sequences were all completely irrelevant to the plot. In reality, I gave Matrix 2 a 6 and Matrix 3 a 6.5, then spent most of the review and about six subsequent blog posts nitpicking it like a chicken eating corn on the cob.
I'm wandering here, so let me refocus.
Matrix 1: excellent film. I hadn't seen the whole thing in sequence in years, and watching it a few days ago I was impressed. It's a very tightly-plotted, well-formed film. It's fairly lengthy, and entirely chronological and episodic, but it moves along quickly since there aren't any wasted scenes. As is often the case with movies or books, the first one is the best since much of the dramatic load is handled by simply telling the story and introducing the world. The audience learns about the Matrix and the machines and Agents and Zion and the prophecy and all the rest along with Neo. The action scenes are very well integrated too, and they advance the plot. Neo and Morpheus don't spar just for fun, they do it to prove that Neo has actually learned from the programs, and to demonstrate the rules of the virtual reality. The later gun battles and helicopter flying and subway fight are much the same, in that they are cool action sequences that are essential to the plot. They don't go on for too long or do anything totally silly either.
This is not the case in Matrix 2, which has a bunch of technologically better action scenes, most of which are entirely devoid of imagination or plot importance. They're filler, basically. Unnecessary, or if necessary, much longer than they need to be. Neo spars with Seraph to no purpose. Neo fights 100 Agent Smiths for 10 minutes of rubbery CGI to demonstrate nothing at all, since we already knew Agent Smith could clone himself. Neo takes forever to kill six guys in a room with antique weapons when he should have ended them in 30 seconds or just flown down the hallway since he knew dangerous. The freeway chase is good... for about 10 minutes. The last 10 is just more of the same thing. Etc. Action porn aside, I did enjoy Matrix 2 this time, for the most part. The paradoxes and mind-bending philosophy stuff from the Oracle and the Architect was still interesting, and while almost everything that happened in Zion, especially Morpheus' big speech and the rave, was crap, I could see why it was there. It mostly served to advance the plot, at least, and since I just criticized the action for not doing that, I've got to give some credit.
Matrix 3 was not bad either, if I went very small picture. Ignore the massive plot holes (detailed at length in my original review) and general stupidity or futility of every human action in the entire film, and there were a lot of pretty things happening, some of them even kind of original or clever. Most of the movie was like the action in Matrix 2 though: filler. The endless and pointlessly futile battle to defend Zion from invading robots, the endless and pointlessly futile race to get back there with one ship, the endless and pointlessly futile Neo vs. Agent Smith fight scene at the end, etc. A complete plot outline of Matrix 3 would require what, 50, 75 words? Nothing happens. You learn a lot about why nothing is happening, and stuff blows up real good, but so what? The movie ends almost exactly where Matrix 1 ended, and that is, I think, the source of the general discontent with the film.
One could pretty easily argue that Matrix 1 was a great idea, and that the writers had no idea where to go next and signed a bunch of deals for books and comix and games, all of which were set in the world in that state. They also had a 2nd and 3rd movie to cash cow with, so they had to make it seem like stuff was happening, while introducing a ton of new characters and adding character types to the canon so they could be plumbed by the companion works. So we got Matrix 2 and 3 with the plot transcribing a huge and pointless circle, but along the way we added robot cities, rogue programs of all types in the Matrix, Zion's political structure, lots more vague philosophy, battling robot factions, a complicating world history, sentient programs outside the Matrix trying to enter it, merciful squiddies, and more. None of which really mattered, but it certainly gave the guys drawing the comix and writing the novels and creating the MMORPG a lot more ammunition.
I am willing to give the W brothers some credit for not having a happily ever after ending. It was a happier ending than it had any right to be, what with the robots sparring humanity in Zion, promises made to release all the one percenters who won't accept the Matrix program, etc, but it wasn't a defeat of the sentient robots, or an end to the Matrix, or anything world-changing. On the other hand, wouldn't that actually be a far less happy movie? Imagine the robots shutting down the Matrix and waking up all the billions of people plugged into it? What then?
Zion's somehow producing enough food (though no means of food production was ever shown in any of the films) to feed 250,000 people... that seems extremely unlikely, but we'll just play along. What are they going to do with 100 or 1000 or 10,000 times that many? Imagine the entire world's population suddenly sitting up in those tubs of pink goo, with hoses attached to every part of their bodies and no muscle tone, ability to walk, etc? How would the multiethnic hippies in Zion do about that? How many could they rescue or try to feed? Five percent? A Matrix 4 with several hundred million naked, hairless, insane, starving, physically-helpless humans flopping around on endless fields of broken machine parts would actually be a pretty interesting film. In a Nazi war crimes sort of way.
On the whole, the films weren't bad. Matrix 1 kind of spoiled us by being so good and smart and tightly-plotted, and our expectations sabotaged Matrix 2 and 3, but looking back the sequels aren't so bad. They're certainly better than most of the other comic book movies we've seen in recent years. It's just that they had the opportunity to be so much more...
I'm nowhere near the cutting edge on this one, as it's already got damn near 3m views on YouTube, but I thought it worth sharing.
It's kind of hypnotic, the way it goes 3d on the morphs. I'm left to wonder if it's better via YouTube's pixelly view, or worse? Obviously the art would be much improved as a HQ quicktime file, but would the morphing frames look like crap in comparison to the full quality stills?
This is the first thing about the never-ending Paris Hilton goes-to-jail-for-far-too-short-a-time idiocy I've thought it worth commenting on. Well, pointing to, since I don't really have anything to say about it, and the pictures are worth a good 2000 words. Here's the source.
One of the most iconic photos in human history, this was taken June 8, 1972, by a Vietnamese photographer whose name is usually English-ized as Nick Ut. It shows Vietnamese children running from their destroyed village, most notably the nine year old Phan Thi Kim Phuc, who was covered in 3rd degree burns thanks to the napalm that had burned the clothing right off her body. She almost certainly would have died that day if not for Nick Ut's assistance in getting her and the surviving members of her family to the hospital. Kim eventually underwent seventeen surgeries to repair the burn damage, survived them all, and eventually married, had two children, and defected to Canada where she lives today.
Thirty-five years later, to the day, this photo was taken by the same Nick Ut, now living in Los Angeles and working for the AP. It shows Paris Hilton displaying the strength of character we've come to expect of modern day celebrities. Paris was on her way back to jail to continue serving the ridiculous slap on the wrist three week jail term she'd been sentenced to for repeatedly violating her probation and driving drunk and otherwise impaired on a suspended license.
I've never previously felt any emotion towards Paris. I've blogged about her occasionally, but just from my bemused-by-the-idiocy of modern day celebrities attitude. I actually kind of admired her, for the fact that she'd achieved her ambition. Thousands of children are born to wealthy and powerful families, and a depressing number of them wish to become famous celebrities. Very few are able to do so, despite all the advantages of wealth, power, and the best plastic surgery money can buy. And yet here's Paris, possessor of no discernible skill or talent, and she's made herself into a major celebrity simply by performing a famously-inept blow job on a grainy home movie, attending every celebrity event held in or near downtown Los Angeles, regularly falling out of her clothing, and possessing nothing even faintly resembling shame or dignity. I've often thought her life was a disgusting waste and a tragedy, but even though I didn't agree with her goals, I had to admit that she'd worked hard to achieve them.
After seeing these photos side by side, I finally feel an emotion for Paris other than disgust. I hate her.
My biggest surprise about Game One of the NBA finals was that San Antonio didn't more easily defeat Cleveland. In light of that it was no real surprise to turn on the TV tonight and see SA heading into halftime with the second biggest lead in the history of NBA finals. Well, I was surprised that it was almost halftime, but I hadn't exactly set an alarm for 6pm, or whenever the game was due to start, so bleh.
At any rate, game one was only close because SA couldn't shoot straight. They seem to have gotten over that tonight, and while SA's suffocating defense again held Cleveland to around 30 points for the half, SA's offense returned, and they put up almost 60. And that's that. The real danger here is that this might threaten my half-assed prediction that not only will Cleveland lose every game, but that they'll lose every half. If SA were up by 10 or even 15 they'd come out fierce and build the lead. But 25? Isn't some degree of relaxation and let down from SA inevitable at this point? I'd think that a corresponding prideful awakening of "We're getting humiliated on ABC." would stir in the shriveled hearts of the Cavaliers, but that obviously has no effect on the people starring in the upcoming ABC programs, and I'm not counting on seeing it from Cleveland either. Desire only goes so far against vastly superior talent, strategy, and coaching, after all.
On the bright side, I'm hungry and planning on making a wokful of shrimp fried rice, and now I can get right to that, without any worries about missing the second half of the third to last NBA game of the season.
TV Promos and the End of Civilization as We Know It
I watched most of Game One of what's likely to be the four-game NBA finals tonight, and it pretty much went as expected. My main surprise was the San Antonio didn't win by 20, and they would have if not for their shooting. I've seen a lot of San Antonio games in recent years, and I've never seen them miss so many wide open 14-18 footers. Cleveland was giving those up all night as they sagged into the paint on defense, but SA kept clanging them. In the second half SA stopped settling for those shots and started driving and making layups, and with LeBron laying a fat egg for the game it was a routine, unexciting ten point win. Going into the series I figured SA would sweep, and I saw nothing to change my mind in game one. Unless SA gets bored and lets up some intensity on the road, or LeBron throws up a few 35/12/9 type games, Cleveland will be lucky to win a half, much less a whole game. They're just not very good.
I wouldn't blog about the game though, since it was, as I said, both boring and predictable. I only made it through with the sound off and a bunch of pages to edit in the HGL wiki on the computer. The thing I found most remarkable about the telecast was the tsunami-like avalanche of a landslide of crappy commercials for new ABC programs. I guess this is summer replacement season, when the popular series end their run for the year and filler crap comes on. I have no idea if ABC's offerings are especially bad, since this was about the first network TV I'd watched since the Super Bowl, but they were certainly awful. Not just bad, but actively insulting and outright embarrassing to American culture. ABC's entire summer lineup seems to be a cavalcade of laughing, jumping, overly-excited, corpulent white people. Remember dignity? Shame?
The crown jewel looks to be some kind of bingo-themed game show, with a huge, hamster ball-like bingo machine as the centerpiece. I'm guessing the target audience for a TV show where the attraction is a chance to watch complete strangers engage in a form of zero-skill gambling isn't exactly Mensa-esque, but Christ the promos are dreadful. Overflowing with hyperactive idiots, content free, and basically on a level I'd think 3 or 4 year olds would enjoy. Lots of bright colors and motion, and not a second of thought required.
The official ABC page is here, and on it you can watch their main promo movie, as well as a spine-tingling 90 second demonstration of how the game of bingo is played. The main promo is bad, but the ones that were really awful were the 15 second bumpers (which I do not see online) they played coming out of seemingly every commercial break during the basketball game. Those were short features showing individual lunatic contestants leaping around as though electrocuted, and it had a very "first weeks of American Idol" feel to it, with the parade of ugly, delusional, talentless losers humiliating themselves for our amusement. Needless to say, those are the only episodes of American Idol I've ever watched, since Malaya enjoyed them and got me into it once or twice. Once they whittle out the pretenders and get to the actual "talent" portion of the show, I'm long, long gone.
As for the bingo show, ugh. And worst of all, it looked like about the most entertaining show ABC had coming up this summer. The rest were even worse, with wacky lunatic inventors trying to show why their automated shoe folding system was the best, or C-list celebs learning to drive NASCAR, or new flavors of reality shows where the goal is to make the biggest spectacle of yourself, thereby guaranteeing additional camera time. If you took 10 minutes of ABC summer show promos, burned them to CDs, and dropped over the Middle East as Al Queda recruiting videos, I'd lay even money on the Statue of Liberty and Empire State building being engulfed in flames by August 1st.
Quite a nifty little application here. It uses a reactive graph to chart the relative popularity of male and female baby names in the US over time, and is full-configurable. You can type in names and it will show you all of them that start with as many letters as you input. Play around with it on just male or female, and try out popular names. It's good for reinforcing your own preconceptions. I've noted in that past that like every other guy within ten years of my age is named Mike or John, and sure enough, Michael was the #1 boys' name during the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, while John was in the top ten during the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
The girl's chart does a good job explaining today's situation too, when half the women alive seem to be named Jen, Jenny, Jennifer, Jess, or Jessica. Jennifer was #1 in the 70s and #2 in the 80s, and Jessica was #1 in the 80s and 90s. And those don't even count the not-inconsiderable numbers of Jenas, Jennas, Jenifers, Jessies, and other variations on the theme.
It's interesting to note the overall decline in all the name popularities. For the seeming glut of Jessicas and Jennifers and Michaels and Johns today, parents are far more imaginative in names than their grandparents were. Looking at the early decades of the 1900s, it seems like literally a quarter of male babies were named John, Michael, or William, or Robert. If you add up the top 4 most popular names today, you're still way under 10% of the total. That's probably got more to do with expanding minority populations and their attendant name variety than it is white people getting a great deal more imagination, though.
No baseball player has hit for the "triple crown" (leading the league in batting average, RBIs, and home runs) in decades, and it's quite likely that no one ever will again. In fact it's not entirely desirable that one does, since as baseball analysis has evolved the understanding of slugging percentage as far more important than batting average has grown with it. Most teams (and sluggers) prefer to boost their power numbers over their batting average, and hitting the ball far requires a harder swing with a bigger risk of failure (and reward). Hence we get regular double crown winners since RBIs and HRs have a lot of natural overlap, while the batting average title usually goes to speedy guys with great bat control who can punch a lot of singles without striking much, ALA Tony Gwynn or Ichiro.
On a related topic, while there's no actual racism triple crown award in baseball, and if there were it would probably have to be a quadruple crown with the growing numbers of Japanese players in MLB, I'd like to single out Gary Sheffield's recent effort. In an interview with GQ magazine, he offered his thoughts on the declining percentage of black players in MLB, and managed to insult Whites, Blacks, and Latinos all at once.
"I called it years ago. What I called is that you're going to see more black faces, but there ain't no English going to be coming out. … [It's about] being able to tell [Latin players] what to do -- being able to control them," he told the magazine.
"Where I'm from, you can't control us. You might get a guy to do it that way for a while because he wants to benefit, but in the end, he is going to go back to being who he is. And that's a person that you're going to talk to with respect, you're going to talk to like a man.
"These are the things my race demands. So, if you're equally good as this Latin player, guess who's going to get sent home? I know a lot of players that are home now can outplay a lot of these guys."
Nifty, eh? In just a couple of quotes he called Latinos house boys who do what they're told, said that Blacks can't follow rules or behave themselves in a professional work environment, and implied that Whites are the evil, controlling puppet masters who manipulate the darker races for their own benefit.
Sheffield's being roundly-castigated for these remarks, but does he deserve it? And in an not necessarily related question, is he correct? Given that the owners of professional sports teams in the US is probably around 98% white, it's kind of hard to argue his third point. His second one is hard to argue too, and since it's kind of a backhanded compliment to his fellow blacks (or at least a soothe to the non-conformist soul) it's not going to get him into too much trouble. What he says about Latinos can't really be construed as anything but an insult, so long as you value "being yourself" over following a few rules in order to earn millions of dollars for hitting a white ball around a grass field. I think the most easy and obvious attack on Gary's logic here is a favorite line of mine. "That's why they call it 'work.'" As every living human with a job can likely attest, you often have to do things you don't want to, and you're often treated poorly. That kind of goes with people giving you money to do a task for them. I'm sure in his real life Gary's entirely understanding if the car wash attendant, or waiter, or bellhop whose services he engages doesn't want to do things as he's told and wants to "go back to being who he is" and refuses to follow the rules or requirements of his job.
To put Gary's remarks in context, here's some recent demographic info on major league baseball players, from the same article:
According to a 2005 report by the University of Central Florida Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, only 8.5 percent of major leaguers were African-American -- the lowest percentage since the report was initiated in the mid-1980s. By contrast, whites comprised 59.5 percent of the majors' player pool, Latinos 28.7 percent and Asians 2.5.
I was surprised to see this, especially given that the NFL is at least 50% black, and the NBA is more like 80%. So is baseball really that different, in terms of the skill set required? Do baseball players have to put up with that much more bullshit and control from management, and is that sport somehow uniquely driving off the blacks who seem to have no problem adjusting to life as a professional basketball or football player?
It's long been news that baseball isn't as popular among American youth as other sports, and that it's especially under-represented in poor areas. I can see the logic there for basketball, since you don't need much/any equipment to play basketball. There are hoops up on courts everywhere, and any number of players, down to one, can spend hours playing and improving their skills with no more equipment than a bouncing ball and some sneakers. But football requires far more equipment and players and a bigger playing area than baseball, and it and baseball seem to both be supported by just about every high school in America. So why are black kids so prevalent in football and basketball, but not in baseball?
I think the sport itself offers some answers. Basketball and football are more about all around athletic ability. In a nutshell, you don't need to be an athlete to play baseball successfully. You don't need to be fast, or strong, or quick, or agile, etc. Those things can help, and some of them are mandatory for different defensive positions, but if you are brilliant and hitting or pitching the ball, you've got very good odds of making it in the major leagues, regardless of your other physical abilities. As John Kruk once said, "I'm not an athlete; I'm a baseball player." Kruk was fat, slow, and not very strong, but he had the ability to hit the ball, and for that he earned millions of dollars a year for more than a decade, before moving into a cushy position on ESPN's baseball tonight, from which he can dispense entirely irrelevant conventional wisdom into the ears of the perpetually-shrinking number of adult American men who still give a shit about "the national pastime."
Hitting a baseball is a very difficult thing, but you don't have to outrun anyone to hit it, or leap over anything, or dodge tacklers to get to home plate. You just stand there in the little box and wait for the pitcher to throw it, knowing he has to throw it at a certain height right over the plate. Pitching requires even less athletic ability, in that you merely need to throw the ball in some tricky way so that most of the hitters can't hit it. Pitchers don't need to run or catch, most of them aren't very good at fielding their position, and in half of the league they don't even need to hit. They have one job skill, and it's one that virtually any clumsy oaf, the kind of physical specimen who couldn't last 30 seconds on a football field or basketball court (unless the oaf had tremendous physical size, which pretty much rules out Latinos) can fulfill admirably.
My point here is not to rebuff or agree with anything Sheffield said, but to point out that the pool of potential baseball players is enormously larger than football or basketball, simply because those sports are self-limiting by requiring that their players be... athletes. (There are exceptions, of course. Quarterbacks and kickers are often akin to baseball pitchers in possessing one key skill, and behemoth size can make up for a lot of missing athletic talent.) Lots of baseball players are great athletes, but quite a few are not, and the sport is more about a painstakingly-acquired skill set that's largely dependent upon early immersion into the game and constant practice at the key ability -- hitting a pitch with a bat.
Temperament, the issue Sheffield was nibbling at, might well come into play in that, but it would require even more pop psychology than I'm willing to delve into. Does becoming a successful baseball player require a higher tolerance for correction and constant coaching than other sports? Do you have to listen to a hitting coach and learn from what he tells you and do things as they want you to do them, to a greater amount than aspiring basketball or football players? Is there a racial aspect to an individual's willingness to put in the time and concentration and effort required? Answering that seems to require far more generalization than insight into an individual's psyche, but if anyone wants to give it a try, I'll be happy to listen.
So yes, as evidenced by the previous post, I have returned from my vacation with the folks down in San Diego. It went pretty good, lots of relaxation involving fine dining, wine tasting, tennis, swimming, and the best part of visiting the parents... not paying for any of it. The only real surprise on the vacation was how quickly it went. I got there the 25th and returned the evening of the 30th, and it felt like I'd been there for about a day and a half, come dinner on Wednesday night.
Sadly, that's about it for my summertime fun. I'm scheduling about 12 hours a day of work for myself with the fantasy novel to finish editing, agents to query and woo, the HGL site to ramp up towards the impending Beta test, and a couple of RL work/projects I need to spend at least a couple of hours a day on, but can't talk about on the blog just yet. I'm busy enough that I'm trying to block out my time, like a real person. X hours for this, X+2 hours for that, etc. I didn't get off to a very good start yesterday, my first day back, but today (Friday) was more productive. Unfortunately it was productivity in just one area, as I caught up on a bunch of Hellgate: London stuff -- I posted like 10 news items, lots of new screenshots, Alpha test news someone mailed in out of the blue, and worked on updating the wiki with all the new info that's come out lately. I've barely scratched the surface of the necessary wiki updates, but it's got to be done as I try to position the site to be the news & info resource come beta time and the 100x increase in HGL interest that'll bring.
Thankfully, I'll be awake for another 8 or 10 hours today and can spend a few more of those on hellgatewiki.com, before transitioning to novel work. The work on the HGL site (and the approaching Beta/release date) is starting to pay off in increased traffic, but with increasing popularity comes a drawback -- decreased visitor intelligence.
To this point most of the readers/posters on my HGL site have been pretty smart and savvy about things, but as the site gets more popular more random people show up, and some of them are, inevitably, dumb as a box of rocks. I don't blame anyone for not knowing about the game; everyone has to learn at some point and I want them to learn on my site. That's why I spent hours on the content, after all. The people who pain me are the (usually) young ones, who are AOLese-fluent dolts. For example, here's a PM (private message) I received to my forum account from a new user just a few days ago.
hey flux were are all the HG:L conventions and little places were they show up if u know message me back k thnx :)
I didn't reply since well...what do you say? "Yes, I know about lots of upcoming conventions and "little places" where HGL developers will show up, but I post absolutely everything about HGL but this because I'm insane. I will happily take the time to personally tell you all about it, however, since you never know -- Bill Roper might magically appear close enough to your home town that you can pester your mom into driving you there."
As always, it's the combination of ignorance, AOLese, and undeserved entitlement that annoys me. And while this is the first bad enough to motivate a blog entry and a new tag, it most definitely won't be the last. Years and years of Painful D2 Emails (only a very small fraction of which I blogged about here) taught me that much. I'll try to console myself with the thought that even the worst emailers generate ad loads as they blunder their way cluelessly through the site, but since I've been working on the HGL site since early 2006 and my efforts have thus far yielded several no-expense paid trips to E3 in LA and downtown SF, and a few free t-shirts and comic books I'm saving for prizes in future site contests that will cost me postage to send out, that's not exactly the most powerful motivation imaginable.
It was posted on Tuesday, but since I just read it this evening I thought I'd share. "It" in this case is a blog entry by Andrew Sullivan in which he exactingly compares the "enhanced interrogation" techniques practiced by the US military under the Bush Administration, and similar-to-identical tactics practiced by the Gestapo under Adolph Hitler. It would appear to be an instant violation of Godwin's Law... but not if it's true? A short excerpt:
The phrase "Verschärfte Vernehmung" is German for "enhanced interrogation". Other translations include "intensified interrogation" or "sharpened interrogation". It's a phrase that appears to have been concocted in 1937, to describe a form of torture that would leave no marks, and hence save the embarrassment pre-war Nazi officials were experiencing as their wounded torture victims ended up in court. The methods, as you can see above, are indistinguishable from those described as "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the president. As you can see from the Gestapo memo, moreover, the Nazis were adamant that their "enhanced interrogation techniques" would be carefully restricted and controlled, monitored by an elite professional staff, of the kind recommended by Charles Krauthammer, and strictly reserved for certain categories of prisoner. At least, that was the original plan.
Also: the use of hypothermia, authorized by Bush and Rumsfeld, was initially forbidden. 'Waterboarding" was forbidden too, unlike that authorized by Bush. As time went on, historians have found that all the bureaucratic restrictions were eventually broken or abridged. Once you start torturing, it has a life of its own.
Sullivan is obviously doing some cherry-picking with his quotes and is framing his argument to fit the event, but hey, that's what blogging or making an argument is all about. In any event, it's pretty striking that the methods and justifications of "torture" by the current US Administration are virtually identical to the methods and justifications of torture practiced by the Nazis, especially given that Nazi guards who did these things and the superiors who gave them their orders were eventually sentenced to death by various war crimes tribunals.
I found Sullivan's argument fairly devastating, (assuming you're the type of person who is horrified, rather than encouraged, by parallels between current US policies and those of Nazi Germany) and after reading it I skimmed the trackbacks, wondering how the other pro-Bush/torture bloggers would attempt to criticize or minimize it. Nit picking seems to be the method of choice, or else the old chestnut, "Yeah, but terrorists are even worse than we are." That one seems to resonate amongst the wingnuts, which confuses me. Isn't the whole point that we (Americans) are supposed to be better, morally and politically, than the evildoers we're busily engaged in an epic struggle against?
I didn't follow that many of the trackbacks, but I did check out this one, which was amusing enough to motivate this blog entry. It's by the Confederate Yankee, a blogger I've never before heard of/read, and I'll just quote his opening line.
Saint Andie isn't calling the Bush Administration Hitler...
...because the phrase War Criminals and Nazis is much more fitting.
Let's begin at the end of Andie "Patron Saint of the Man Pooter" Sullivan's article.
If you're confused by that, let me explain. Sullivan is an openly gay male, and besides that unpardonable sin, he has further alienated the right wing by being a conservative who strongly supported Bush's Iraq Attack in the beginning, before growing disillusioned and turning against it after seeing the light a couple of years ago. So obviously wingnuts like the ConYank here are predisposed to disagree with anything Sullivan says (now), and to practice character assassination, but seriously... "patron saint of the man pooter?" I'll admit that I would have found that relatively amusing when I was like, fourteen, but to see that now, on a political blog intended for adult consumption, is just embarrassing. I guess all of ConYank's regular readers are as homophobic as he is and take this sort of thing in stride, but can he possibly imagine any newcomer to his blog seeing that sort of adolescent stupidity and not disregarding anything else in his post?
If you're going to slip in ad hominem homophobia, is it too much to ask that you do it with some intelligence? Maybe that would be way over the head of ConYank's audience, but a decent writer would feel obligated to do it anyway. Quote one of Sullivan's opinions and say something like, "But given Sullivan's preference for the wrong end of the male digestive tract..." Or work it in with some subtlety; ConYank's opening line almost does it by accident, "...let's begin at the end of Sullivan's article." he says. All he had to do was add, "since we all know that's where Andy likes it best!" and bang, he's made a joke, reminded his readers that Sullivan is a sodomite, and worked his readership's base prejudices all in one quick line.
What do we have to do to get some quality insinuation and innuendo from the lunatic war-mongering fringe? Yank out their fingernails?
