I’m divided on this whole thing. This woman is clearly not interested in nerdy pursuits, but the actual substance of her piece isn’t really about hating nerds, it’s more about the sort of information that gets put in dating profiles. Now, in her particular case, the information she wished was there was about a nerdy pursuit. And it could be argued that the sort of deep passion for any subject that is required to become a World Champion of it can be considered nerdy — car nerds, fitness nerds, politics nerds, et. al. — but you don’t need to unless you are intent on casting this woman as a hater of passionate interests.

Common interests build relationships, and discordant interests contribute to strife, that’s true whether it’s you not liking their interests or vice versa. There are countless shortcuts in the modern world of dating, all of them mildly distasteful when discussed openly and plainly, and if the worst one this woman is guilty of is too hastily deciding that she has nothing in common with this man, then she is hardly outside the norm.

Now, that doesn’t mean she isn’t at least a little deserving of the scorn she’s received today, just not really for the supposed nerd bashing. She published this piece. She “outed” this person, when it would’ve been fairly simple to alter some details and leave certain points vague enough that his particular identity didn’t matter, simply that she felt she had nothing in common with him and felt he should have made his level of involvement with Magic clear in his profile; it would have been a dubious point, and fairly demeaning to “nerdy” pursuits, but it would have been presented with a degree of tact. She chose not to do that, and she should bear the consequences of the very public way in which she disclosed and presented this story, but let’s not turn this into a war on nerds.

It’s perfectly fine not liking someone because you don’t think you have anything in common; it’s marginally acceptable to write a piece about it on an incredibly popular blog; it’s decidedly not OK to include the sort of specific details that she includes. That’s just being a bitch.

Footnotes

1. You can google it if you like, but I don’t see the need to contribute to its search rank by linking to it.

Film is a collaborative art form. When someone is nominated for Best Director, they are receiving praise for the costumes, for the lighting, for the lenses used, for the performances, for the script, for the way it was shot, for the way it was edited, and yes for the way they championed all those things to make a final product. I’m not saying that Directors don’t offer up tremendously valuable work or that they shouldn’t be considered for awards because they rely on others to make a final product.

Serkis is one of the few actors who has figured out motion capture as an art form. He acts through totally fictional characters, but if you were to compare his work to any of the wholly CG characters you see in other films that don’t have an actor providing a base performance, it would be laughable to claim that he contributed nothing to the film.

Should we create a new category called Best Baseline Performance for CG Character? I guess we could, but I don’t see the point. What Serkis does is acting. He acts without little balls tapped to a spandex suit just as frequently as with. However they altered his performance in post production is a part of post production and should be examined as a separate act.

In truth, the two big shows he seems to have a problem with are The Killing and Game of Thrones. The Killing is definitely too serious for its own good, and if it doesn’t improve I’m going to find it hard to return for a second season, but Game of Thrones, while telling a very dark story, still manages moments of levity, at least as many as Rubicon, a show he offers lenience to for its attempts.

But the odd thing is that he’s taking criticism with a specific set of shows and attributing it to the whole of television. What seems to be happening here is that television writers are being afforded the opportunity to tell stories that the old guard of television wouldn’t have allowed. Funny dramas aren’t being replaced, at least not entirely, but there is greater variety now, both in content and tone. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Drew McWeeny wrote an excellent piece today, after a long increasingly aggressive twitter argument with Harry Knowles, head of Ain’t It Cool News, describing why we can’t simply throw all the blame on the studios for the increasingly derivative and lazy film marketplace we find ourselves in. One of the problems, he notes, is that targeting a nerd audience doesn’t seem to work.

There is a fine line between serving an audience and shamelessly pandering to them, and when the studios decide to go whole-hog and pander without hesitation, and the result is box-office failure after box-office failure, the message seems clear: chasing the fanboys isn’t working. They are unreliable, they are ungrateful, and they aren’t turning out for the “sure things” that have been greenlit specifically for them.

This is one of the reasons I find myself unable to visit Ain’t It Cool News anymore. As much as I like nerd-focused films, it seems like they’re never good enough for the online bastions of nerdery. The problem of course being that there is no such thing as ‘nerd-focused films’ because every nerd has their own idiosyncratic and extreme stance on what should happen to their film. Nerds, like too much of society today, are too self-centred to realize or appreciate the amazing things that happen on their behalf².

When a Captain America movie comes out, they trash it because his helmet doesn’t have wings, or when a Thor movie comes out they trash it because one of the characters is played by a Black man. They ignore the quality of the film, the writing, the directing, the performances, in order to feed their pointless minutiae-driven rants.

There’s no real solution to this. There’s a chance we’ll hit some critical mass and nerds will grow up a little bit and the world of film and television will be able to get back to creating good television regardless of nerd-based fan-service, works that can broaden the minds of all viewers not just satisfy the narrow expectations of the “fans.”

Footnotes

1. Another perspective here is that it’s amazing how bad some things are.
2. That doesn’t mean that things can’t improve; they undoubtedly can in almost every aspect of life, but that doesn’t mean things are bad.

People argue that dropping H.264 is going to lead to an increase of Flash. News Flash: Flash is already active on every browser that matters. Flash will stay there until there is a convenient usable alternative for its biggest use cases: specifically video and graphical rendering. HTML5 handles those through the <video> and <canvas> tags. The problem is that having a video tag doesn’t mean people can use it, because not all browsers support the same codecs and nobody wants to go around encoding their videos in half a dozen different formats for each browser permutation.

H.264 costs money for distributors and producers. In a world where we’re all slowly becoming producers this is troubling. It also has a deep patent pool backed by dozens of large companies waiting to sue someone.

WebM is open, unencumbered by patents, and royalty free. Hardware acceleration is being built into the next generation of CPUs. It has quality comparable to H.264 and has fewer caveats.

The truly baffling thing about defending H.264 is that it is equivalent to arguing for the death of Firefox. I mean this. H.264, as a closed source patented video format, cannot legally be included in Firefox because of its licensing model. If you want everyone to standardize around H.264, you don’t want Firefox to be a player in the web browser game any longer.

Some people argue that they’re not “backing” H.264, they’re simply against Flash. I don’t really know what to say about that; Flash is all-pervasive right now. H.264 didn’t make it magically disappear, precisely because it wasn’t allowed in one of the more popular browsers. For Flash to disappear, it needs viable alternatives that are as simple. When you put the burden on the user to make sure they have the right codecs installed and they’re using the right browser for the right website, that’s not as easy as Flash.

Here’s something maybe people don’t know: Google, Opera, Mozilla, and Microsoft have all promised WebM support in their browsers. The odd man out here is H.264 proponent (and patent-holder) Apple. Apple has made no comment on WebM, but they will soon have to; IE9, Firefox 4, Opera 11, and Google Chrome will all have WebM support this year.

Of course, the mobile landscape is different — Apple is dominating there at the moment — and tied relatively tightly to hardware cycles, but chips are already being prepared for hardware accelerated WebM video, so if Apple really cared about making HTML5 the Next Big Thing, it would start looking into integrating WebM for their next generation of chips. Then we can finally start the work of obsolescing Flash for good.

In 1975, Pepsi unleashed “the Pepsi Challenge,” a blind taste test where subjects threw back an ounce of each beverage and reported back on their favorite. Their favorite was Pepsi.

You already know what happened next: Coca-Cola developed a more Pepsi-like product called “New Coke.” America rejected New Coke. Coke came back with “Coca-Cola Classic.” America celebrated the restoration of the country’s carbonated identity, and Coca-Cola’s disastrous decision ended up entrenching its original product.

Behind all this was a problem with the Pepsi Challenge. People liked Pepsi more in small increments. They liked Coca-Cola more when they had to drink a can of the stuff. And this, I think, is going to prove a problem for Chris Christie.

Arguing that Pepsi had a “flashier” taste that doesn’t stand the test of time sounds like a Coke fan going on the defensive over the obvious results of a blind taste test¹. But seeing as I prefer Pepsi, it would be useless to quibble over that point. Taste is totally personal. However, his post ignores a well-known fact about New Coke: people did prefer it².

In all the taste tests, New Coke beat Pepsi as well as Coke Classic. Unfortunately, brand identity was such a huge factor in Coca-Cola’s dominance, consumers took the rebranding and reformulation as an affront to their national history.

It may be that Chris Christie is best taken in small doses, but that has nothing to do with the Pepsi Challenge or why New Coke failed.

Footnotes

1. A taste test that convinced America. Before the Pepsi Challenge, Pepsi was struggling, now it’s a formidable opponent to Coke.
2. Ezra could still argue that winning taste tests has no relevance to real world drinking, except that Diet Coke is quite popular, for both its flavour and its calorie cutting, and its formula is based on New Coke.

A guest-blogger over at Alyssa Rosenberg’s blog wrote about Rubicon echoing the common complaint, that the show is too slow. My issues lie not with her distaste for the pace, but with a tack-on statement that feels very wrong to me:

Rubicon needs some adjustments if it’s going to attract and keep viewers.

I think it’s true that Rubicon will likely draw a meager audience — though the inherent sexiness of conspiracy theories will probably entice a few people who would not otherwise watch a show of its caliber — but I think a better question is, “Is it any good?”

I understand that ratings are what keep shows alive, but I don’t think it’s too much to expect criticism of a show to be based on the merits of the show. Any related punditry about the politics of television renewal is similarly valuable — TV by the Numbers is one of my favourite television blogs — but they are two wholly separate endeavours.

There are certain shows and types of shows that will simply never be a huge success¹. Rubicon is not a common denominator show, and probably wouldn’t get big ratings even if it were the best conspiracy theory show ever made. Critics should be judging it from within that rubric, not aiming to nudge it into another. Movie critics don’t argue that slow cerebral thrillers should have more action sequences, why should television critics?

If you don’t like a certain genre or style or aesthetic, that’s fine. Make that preference clear. If you think a show is moving slowly, say so. Explain how your suggestions would improve the show’s quality. But don’t argue it needs to change in order to increase its ratings.

Footnotes

1. Exceptions like Lost and The Big Bang Theory, both shows that seem targeted at niches small enough that they have no right to be so successful, are obviously exceptions to the rule.

As Lost was winding toward its conclusion and it became more and more apparent that not all of the series’ big questions were going to be answered, it touched off a bit of fan discussion about just how much needs to be tied up to make a satisfying ending. I realize that my position on these things is a bit unlike most other people who watch this sort of stuff for fun or a living, but, officially, I don’t care. If the story just keeps getting bigger and bigger and more nebulous, fine. Pile mysteries on top of mysteries until the groaning weight of the artifice topples in on itself. So long as the character stuff and the plotting are generally tight on an episode-by-episode level, I kind of LIKE it when things get so big that they seem to encompass all of human existence.

Exactly.

Footnotes

1. New job, new projects, blah blah blah, I need to stop being lazy.
2. Well, as I’ve said before, I think Lost gave us a lot more answers than most of the fans give it credit for, but the sentiment of this quote is dead on.

The very first episode I saw — I ignored the show at first because ABC’s early marketing made it look really really stupid — was “…In Translation” and I watched it totally unaware of what show it was or any past relations for the character. The episode focused on Sun and Jin, and when it ended I thought it was one of the best hours of television I’d seen in a long time. Following that I went back and watched Lost from the beginning, quickly becoming a die-hard acolyte.

During those early years, I was one of those guys that theorized all the time, I’d discuss with friends my thoughts about what The Dharma Initiative was all about, why there were Egyptian hieroglyphs, and why it was that you couldn’t find the Island.

I don’t know when it happened, though, but somewhere along the way I realized that I could answer most of those questions myself, and it was probably more fun to not get definitive answers. What I really ended up caring about was the characters. I actually don’t really remember caring about characters all that much before Lost; I’m sure I had some understanding of it before Lost, but it was certainly during the time Lost was airing that I grew more and more interested in how characters grow, and how a show can service them rather than the other way around. It’s entirely possible that Lost was the thing that made me realize that television was about more than filling a half-hour with jokes or constructing a clever murder mystery to be unraveled.

And so, Lost ended tonight. And it’s final moments were about — what else? — the characters.

I think it’s easy to criticize Lost for not giving enough answers to its mythology, but it’s also pointless. Those sorts of answers will always be, in some very important ways, arbitrary. We’ve seen this throughout Lost’s run when big questions are answered, two from this season in particular are the explanations for The Rules and The Numbers. This is absolutely intentional on the writers part.

What could possibly be a rational answer for the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 constantly showing up in the characters lives? There is none, it’s just something to signify that these people are connected in important ways.

So much of the mythology of Lost is ultimately unimportant; all that matters is that these people were brought to the Island for a reason — to protect it — and the Island is a very special place. Anything else is merely an extension of those two fundamental principles.

It’s less important what these people do than why they do it. Watching Lost, you learn who these people are, and you come to see each of them as a flawed person seeking resolution, seeking redemption, seeking some meaning. Basically, they’re real people.

I think that almost every action a character has performed during the run of this remarkable series had come from them, not from some need from the writer¹, and the show has been much stronger for that reason.

Trying to talk about the finale that just aired is essentially impossible. People who haven’t watched the show before will be baffled, and the people who have watched it for years are mostly trapped between two positions: the finale didn’t answer anything, and the finale gave us all the answers we need. These two positions are surprisingly not actually mutually exclusive, they’re just the expression of two different types of fans. Some people are here for the mythology and others are here for the characters.

People are absolutely right that the finale didn’t answer anything. Nobody was sat down and told the history of the Island, nor where the mechanics or the Donkey Wheel explained or the power of The Source. There were no long drawn-out scenes explaining why the Island needs protecting, who created it, why it was special, where it came from or anything even approaching that.

But a lot of us really didn’t care about that. We were much more interested in knowing if Kate will ever declare her love for one of her two lovers², or what will Jack do now that he’s the new Jacob, or if all the pain and suffering the survivors have gone through really had meaning.

To that second group, we were inundated by answers. Kate finally fessed up to loving Jack, just as they part ways for the rest of their lives. Jack risked the Island in order to finally kill the Man in Black and then heroically sacrificed himself to save the Island, and by implication the world. And yes, all the hardship and pain these people went through, it was worth it; completely ignoring the flashes sideways, which I’ll discuss in a few moments, those people grew from the shallow self-serving people they started as into fully realized people who were part of a community. They all came to be part of a larger whole, and that community is what ultimately gave Jack the strength to sacrifice himself for them, for their memory, and for the world they all left behind when they crashed on that Island.

Aside from that long-term schism, the finale has opened a new idea for fans to be divided on: the flashes sideways³. I’m not entirely sure what people were looking for out of the flashes sideways, I’m not sure what I was looking for. My basic metric was that I wanted them to mean something, I wanted them to matter in some way. I think that the flashes sideways being an ethereal staging ground for the survivors to find each other so they could go off to some sort of afterlife together probably works. Going over the season with that knowledge at hand is probably necessary to really see if everything that happened needed to be there.

For the moment, I’m gobsmacked. I wept through the closing scenes where all the castaways reunited across time and space to essentially die together. I don’t know if it will really work in the long term, but right now I’m more than satisfied. I can’t wait to watch it all again.

Footnotes

1. Obviously, the layer above that is that these characters were given these traits and character arcs precisely because the writer’s needed those characteristics for future plot points, but that doesn’t negate that their actions, in and of themselves, were internally consistent.
2. I know a lot of Lost fans hate Kate fervently, but I like her character a lot and I think her open declaration of Love in tonight’s episode was one of her bravest moments in the series.
3. I pluralize that shit like a classy motherfucker.

What you can’t do is whine like a petulant child when something you don’t like happens.

Tonight’s episode was absolutely amazing. The story raced along, the characters were all playing in their wheelhouse and their emotions felt true. Nobody behaved out of character². What happened tonight is what had to happen, even if it’s not what you think should have happened or what you would’ve liked to happen.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go cry for a while.

Footnotes

1. I didn’t say your criticisms were correct.
2. I want to talk more about why the particular actions that occurred make sense for the characters, but I won’t do that tonight; this post is mostly about venting over the vitriolic hatred some Lost fans are spewing about this episode.

A recent addition to this group of series is Doctor Who. Two of the last three companions have had romantic feelings toward The Doctor¹ and the most recent companion, Amy Pond, has continued the trend with gusto. Which is where the angry fans get involved.

Many² fans are angry that every companion since Russell T Davies rebooted the show has been a potential paramour; I think it’s probably less than ideal if every companion is like this, but at the same time I’m much more interested in how it works for each individual case and I think the way they’ve handled Amy Pond’s infatuation with The Doctor has so far been pitch perfect.

But going a step farther, I think the new dynamic that has been established since the show returned is a more realistic one. A brilliant, intelligent man brings you around through time on fantastic adventures; do you expect anyone to not fall in love with the guy?

Footnotes

1. Some people claim that even Donna Noble had romantic tension with The Doctor; maybe I just hate Donna Noble too much to see that.
2. I know that’s a weasel word, and I’m not linking to any specific critiques, but I don’t feel like looking them up; they’re out there.

A recent post on his blog, Daring Fireball, asserts that what Gizmodo did was theft because the person who found the lost prototype didn’t contact the bar, where the Apple engineer who lost the phone inquired a few times as to its whereabouts, but that seems like a pretty arbitrary standard to follow. The person who found the phone — and in turn Gizmodo, who purchased the phone from them, because of the laws in California — is only guilty of theft if they don’t try to return the lost item to its owner, and the wording of the law seems intentionally vague, stating that the efforts undertaken to return it should be deemed “reasonable.” Were the phone calls with Apple employees informing them that he had a prototype phone — phone calls which were completely ignored by Apple, at least in part because Apple’s overly tight-lipped procedures left no-one aware a phone had been lost or that a new iPhone existed in any form at all — not reasonable? They seem quite reasonable to me.

Granted, maybe he should have contacted the bar, but not contacting the bar is not an inherently malicious act, it’s not the subtle machinations of someone hoping to feign ‘reasonableness’ when asked later while still scoring a payday from their discovery. It’s human error. Hindsight is 20/20.

Footnotes

1. I personally don’t consider him a fanboy for Apple, but rather an apologist, a distinction worth making and perhaps worth clarifying in a later post.

It’s easy to say that magnets emit a magnetic field, but when you get down to it, that statement that needs more explanation. What is a magnetic field, and more importantly why does it cause that repulsion and attraction. The strange truth about most things we take as a given is that there are scads of underlying assumptions we ignore because at some point it’s easier to just take it as a given.

That’s not to say there aren’t people out there who truly understand magnetism, but chances are you’re not one of them.

Feynman’s ‘explanation’ of magnetism via a chain of questions running down into more and more general and fundamental truths reminds me of this great bit by Louis CK:

Footnotes

1. Miracle in this instance meaning things science has explained quite well, but are still ‘magical’ in the poetic sense.

But despite their horrible music, and bizarre stances, they got it right that nature is pretty great. Law of averages, I guess.

Footnotes

1. And the over-the-top title was little more than a lame reference to an awesome show.
2. Really, I think the line is supposed to invoke some Creationist anger against the scientifically valid theory of Evolution, but if you didn’t know the members of Insane Clown Posse were devout Christians — and who could blame you for not knowing that based on their profuse profanity and bizarre clown make-up — it’s easy to just imagine them hearing a scientist describe the way magnets work and getting super pissed because they the explanation was lame and/or confusing.

His early point that Conan is being treated like a working-class folk hero is questionable at best — Conan’s audience has always skewed young, and I doubt that’s changed during the recent surge of support — but his discussion of the origins of his supporters is interesting.

I think the deeper reason people are so inflamed by this petty war is that Conan in his own way has come to represent the aggrieved, the injured, the wrongly terminated. I think there is a sense in this country that giant corporations are ruining everything, even late night talk shows. Something so insignificant takes on greater importance because I think on some level, “The Tonight Show” actually has become a very flawed stand-in for all the jobs lost to corporate greed, arrogance, and stupidity. We see Conan as a victim because we feel as though, like us, he wasn’t given a fair shot. If a guy like that, a guy who has everything, can be downsized and demoted, what hope do the rest of us have?

One way of thinking about it is through the corporate world but, to my eyes, the return of Leno’s Tonight Show has much more relevance when analogized to the current political climate.

The world is shitty right now. Especially for the young, presumably liberal, audience of Conan O’Brien. We elected a vibrant young politician to the presidency a little over a year ago with the idea that he would fight for the progressive liberal goals he said he would. Instead he’s fallen prey to the idiotic desire to crawl to the political centre despite a strong electoral mandate to push the things he said he would push. What’s worse, each time his opposition fumbles he creates new compromises, weakens his position, claims that he needs to be more accommodating to the immovable objects he’s tasked with moving.

And here comes Conan. He’s a young vibrant comedian who’s given a chance to run The Tonight Show, to remake it in his image. And he did that. When he first started, he appeared semi-neutered but as he grew more comfortable with the show, he loosened and began to adjust his new surroundings to who he was and not the other way around.

What’s more, when the news came that he was being cast aside, he didn’t compromise, he became more like himself. And, yes, people loved him for it. Because that’s why they were excited about him being there in the first place.

I don’t know about any of you, but Conan going down swinging felt like a win to me. Maybe it’s a shallow one, but it doesn’t seem like we’re going to get any real ones any time soon.

I like flow fast, and full of bravado.  But most of all, I need my flow to be smooth.  You can’t hear the breath pauses in Diam’s voice.  She’s going fairly fast.  The phrases aren’t chopped up.  Just gorgeous.  I realize this is a prejudice, born out of debate (and yeah, it’s called flowing there too) where the ratings you got for your speeches declined the choppier and breathier you sounded (content counted too, of course).

I don’t enjoy commenting on rap or hip-hop because I barely listen to it, and there are people out there who know so much more about it than me, but this statement bothered me. Ignoring the obvious problems with her love of Diam’s raps given the language barrier — content counts too — I think having this view of flow in rap is a little limiting. And yes, I know that she’s only making a statement about her preferred form of flow, but even with that caveat this seems too restrictive.

That amazing BET Cypher I posted a few months back exemplified what I’m talking about here and that’s that flow is flow, smooth or rough. Mos Def kicks it off with a silky smooth free-style, just totally relaxed with the words practically melting off his tongue. I love it, but after that Black Thought comes in a goes to a whole other level, with the staccato roughness of the rhythm. You can hear the gasps in between words, he’s fighting to get the words out, his mind’s racing faster than his muscles can work. There’s an intensity to it that just elevates the already amazing words. It’s a different sort but it still flows, more than the others to my ears.

I surely have my own prejudices that lead me to enjoy the struggled staccato a little bit more than the effortless silky delivery, but I think bowing down before either style, regardless of the content and the message, is a mistake. I think you have to know where the words are coming from to understand and appreciate the flow; the breathiness, the choppiness, and everything else all contributes something to the content of the song; whether its endorsing, subverting, or otherwise affecting the content, it’s there for a reason.

The first is that Obama is a super-genius 11-dimensional chess master who has been setting up all the pieces to knock them down precisely to accomplish health care reform without these two progressive policies in place.

The second is that Obama can swoop into the Senate, jiggle a few carrots, whack a few sticks, and everyone would fall in line and health care reform would pass with the exact requirements of Obama and his White House without further complications.

Anyone who ascribes to either of these positions is a fool, or really digs the DC universe.

I personally think Obama should have done more to pressure moderate Democrats to toe the line on this issue; I don’t think it would have done any good, but at least Obama would have demonstrated some position. As nice as it is to have a White House administration more interesting in passing legislation than jockeying for power, it doesn’t hurt to bluster on occasion.

But I’m not going to sit here and argue what others have: that Obama is essentially talking a good game in public but sneaking wry grins in private as his plan to limit health care reform unfold. These sorts of extremes do nothing but persist the idea that the executive branch not only does but should have a choke hold on the rest of the government. Quite frankly, even if Obama did have the power and clout to wrangle the Senate into line, which I don’t think he does, shouldn’t we be glad he isn’t doing that? I thought Bush was hated for his abuse of the office, not because he abused it to get things we didn’t like.

Many different progressives have been reminding Glenn that the President isn’t all powerful and that expending his political capital trying to push obstinate senators toward a more progressive bill would almost certainly result in nothing, or worse a deeper obstinacy from senators feeling bullied.

He cites the example of the White House pressuring freshman Democrats with what is essentially ostracism if they don’t vote for a war funding bill as proof that Obama can play hardball with the legislative branch when he really wants something done. But I think this ignores some depressing realities within Congress.

Obama can pressure freshman congressman to support a war bill because they are likely on the left, and people on the left need the support of the DNC and the Obama Administration. But on health care, Obama would have to push people from the Right towards the Left, something for which he can offer no incentives.

Nelson won Nebraska despite Obama losing, not because of it. There’s no pressure he can apply in that situation. And Lieberman is a petulant child who wants only to punish progressive policies. Maybe Obama could have tried the hardball tactics here, and maybe it would have worked, but these two scenarios are not comparable except in the most superficial way.

I’m 25 now, and still have accomplished shockingly little with my life, so I sympathize with this view. Watching Jim Halpert settle into a life that we’ve all been silently (or not) rooting for him to escape is a little sad, wistful perhaps. But depressing? No. Because Jim isn’t settling, he’s settling down.

I don’t know why people don’t see this. From the first moment Jim Halpert graced our televisions, his life’s purpose has been little more than sharing said life with Pam Beasley. Jim didn’t want to change the world, he wanted to be Pam’s world. Mission accomplished. Time to hunker down and start a family. It might be a little banal, but that’s what he wants out of life.

Similarly, Pam wanted to be an artist, but more than that she wanted to not be a receptionist for the rest of her life. Now she’s a saleswoman. Mission accomplished.

They probably could leave the office and become more successful somewhere else, and maybe when the show ends, the finale will be them moving on with their lives, I don’t know. But the last couple seasons haven’t been leading us down that road. The Office seems to be about what a family is.

Last year, when Jim and Pam almost eloped they stopped because their coworkers – their friends – were having a goofy dance party and they realized that they wanted the odd little community they’ve joined to be there, to take part in the celebration.

I think it was the second season when Jim invited the office over to his apartment to have a little shindig of sorts. He had a roommate and there have been references to non-work friends in the past, so to claim that Jim has no friends outside of work is disingenuous. Maybe he’s not friends with most of those people anymore, but to me that’s more an after-effect of growing closer to his office mates.

Work relationships, romantic or not, are very very common in the real world. Settling down and starting a family is very common in the real world. The Office is about the real world. There’s a bitter taste to that, because not many people have the desire for a simple uneventful life shared calmly with a lifelong best friend. But, quite frankly, if that ending is depressing to you, well that’s just depressing.

Still though, I feel a little cheap writing about how ‘white’ I am when just last night I wrote a critique of Andrew Sullivan for talking about how ‘black’ America is. I also didn’t really do this completely by accident. I think that talking about how we talk about race is sort of a big deal. When Sullivan spoke about the blackness of America, what he seemed to be writing about was the culture of the South. Most of his readers who wrote in spoke about being white and Southern. It’s apt that I woke this morning to Ta-Nehisi Coates doing what he does best:

There are many reasons why it’s wrong to presume that your particular, specific, individual narrative of blackness is The Only Narrative Of Blackness Ever In All History.

Blackness is a lot of things, and I think conflating it with ‘Southern’ is probably not a great idea. It’s not wrong, but it’s not all right.

It’s a great video, and it did make me smile, but I have to wonder if it’s not ‘The Fun Theory’ as much as it is ‘The Novel Theory.’ We all enjoy novel experiences, but thanks to habituation we tend to become less enthralled by them as we adjust. They become less fun. So the piano staircase sounds fun for the first day, but eventually people will get used to the shifting tones as they climb the stairs or, even worse, they will become increasingly annoyed and repelled by them. Either way, it seems to me that the escalator will return to dominance over time.

So what we’d need is something that continually adjusts to human interaction. The more we interact with it, the more it adjusts and changes. We’d need an anti-habituation staircase. Now that’d be real fun.

Getting rid of his limp a few seasons ago only to have it return because he can’t be a good doctor without it was one of the stupidest decisions the show ever made. The limp, House’s acerbic misanthropic personality, the dangerous risks he takes on a regular basis, all of these things are crutches. It was an interesting set-up for the show, but to play the audience with the appearance of growth for House but failing to follow through and soften his character over time is basically the writers being afraid to mess with their formula. I understand that to a degree, but that doesn’t mean I accept it. The writers should be able to do better. They should be able to keep the show interesting and compelling without keeping their characters essentially stagnant.

An excellent counterexample to House is Numb3rs, a show that seems to me to be consistently underrated. It’s your basic procedural on the surface, but the characters are always growing and changing. Sometimes, a character goes away, other times they’ll return, relationships will be born, the aftermaths of their orders are reflected on, and they’re not afraid to tell a story where the FBI is the bad guy, or the villain we knew wasn’t the villain at all. It’s all around a great show, and for the geek in me it’s much more interesting than House because each week mathematics is used in some way to analyse the crime and help solve the case.

The point I’m trying to make here, something I didn’t in my previous attack on House, is that despite my dislike of House’s faux-serialized format, there are procedural shows I enjoy and Numb3rs is one of them.

That said, I think sometimes people take offense too easily on the subject. Case in point, Feministing’s lambasting of ABC’s new — and already basically cancelled — sci-fi drama Defying Gravity. Defying Gravity is set in a near future where abortions are illegal and one of the main characters, in the flashbacks to five years earlier, gets pregnant accidentally and has to decide whether or not to get an underground abortion.

They attacked the show viciously and then Defying Gravity’s show-runner, James Parriott, responded to the critics directly discussing the themes of the show and even spoiling some future plot points to explain to his audience that the show is about bigger questions than abortion.

I personally think they didn’t handle the abortion stuff very well, but not because the woman who had the abortion hesitated and debated with her close friend over the issue. I support choice, but that doesn’t mean I think abortion should be handled glibly. One commenter disagrees:

I really appreciate Mr. Parriott taking the time to respond. However, I really hate the fact that even pro-choicers seem to have conceded that abortion is necessarily an awful, tragic, agonizing experience. Sure, for some women it is a gut-wrenching decision, but for many women it is not a particularly difficult or traumatic decision.

I guess that’s my problem with Parriott’s description here. Why shouldn’t women ever be shown making an “glib, easy, and insensitive” decision to have an abortion? Why do women always have to be portrayed as damaged and guilt-ridden over their abortion? Certainly that is some women’s experience and it is a valid one, but when it is the only way we see abortion played out it just reinforces the idea that abortion is a horrible, awful thing, which I strongly disagree with.

I don’t think Defying Gravity dealt with abortion in that way at all. The abortion story plays out in flashbacks from five years earlier than the main storyline. The character was an astronaut-in-training five years ago who would’ve not been in the program if she’d kept the kid. But in the main storyline she’s in the program. She either had an abortion or a miscarriage. Ultimately, she has the abortion because she wants to go to space. She puts her career ahead of her uterus. She’s not emotionally damaged because of the abortion, but she also didn’t commit to it with the ease of a colonic which, quite frankly, seems like a rational response; a fetus might not be a child, but it has a hell of a better chance of being one that a tumescent appendix.

In fact, the original post discussed a very similar situation (to my eyes) that they approved of:

The only TV show I can recall watching that even had a character obtain an abortion was Third Watch, in which a cop who has a recovering alcoholic husband, two kids and financial woes decides to terminate her pregnancy. I remember liking it because it was matter-of-fact, and the character makes a decision she knows is best for her family, and isn’t punished after the fact for it.

I personally think anyone who watched the early episodes of Defying Gravity and sees a show fighting against abortion doesn’t understand what science fiction is. Or really even basic fiction. Establishing a world where abortion is illegal and then having a character struggle with the decision to have one is not endorsing the anti-abortion stance, it’s storytelling 101.

What is the point of a television show having a women have an abortion as though it were a non-event? What’s the dramatic point to it? Conflict is at the heart of all stories, and having a women get an abortion with no real discussion about not doing it and no real emotional consequences is quite possibly the stupidest “plot development” a show could ever do.

“What is it with abortion and television?” the initial Feministing post asks. Abortion remains one of the few watchwords television tends to avoid. Why? Ultimately, it seems like anything you do with abortions on television will be attacked by one of the sides of the issue. You can’t have it be a glib non-event in the woman’s life both for dramatic reasons and because the pro-lifers would attack the show for “endorsing” abortion. You can’t make it a dramatic traumatic psychologically damaging event, because the pro-choice people criticise it, even if it’s the woman’s choice to ultimately abort. You can’t make it a simple act emotionally with severe physical ramifications because it will be seen as demonizing abortion.

Both sides of the argument are unsatisifed with any middle ground, leaving most writers with no ground on which to stand. So they avoid the story entirely, to avoid undue criticism. It’s a terrible state of affairs, that probably won’t change anytime soon. But nothing I, or anybody along the spectrum of opinions on this subject, will really have an effect; we’re all just screaming into a void hoping to hear an echo.

At a fundamental level, what is Grey’s Anatomy? It’s a character drama set primarily in a workplace. Is it overwrought at times? From what I’ve seen of it, absolutely. But I don’t think anybody that’s watched all of Battlestar Galactica could say they never crossed the line into soapy goodness.

But even ignoring that, this show is not Grey’s Anatomy in Space. Even if being a simple character drama set in space made it nothing more than Grey’s Anatomy in Space, it’s not a simple character drama. Already, the show’s established an ongoing arc and a greater power watching over the mission.

And for those not enamoured with weirdo rooms with God complexes, there’s the characters and their lives onboard a long-term space journey. They’re not just going through the motions here. They’ve got the men left behind learning to cope with their less stellar lives, people on board dealing with the problems of space travel and navigating their histories together while functioning as a crew.

This show isn’t the Best Thing Ever. Virtuality would have been a better show, I think. But that doesn’t invalidate what this show is doing. And so far, it’s been mostly interesting.

I may be slightly biased because the two ostensible leads (the Meredith and Derek, as it were), Ron Livingston and Laura Harris, are among my favourite actors and I’d watch almost anything they’re in. But I genuinely think this show isn’t some trifle; it might become one as the show develops, but everything I’ve seen so far has been a pretty decent melding of romantic character drama and science fiction drama. Watch before you judge.

There are a few reasons I wouldn’t be able to counter this argument: I have little experience with the law and so don’t feel a comfortable extrapolating in that field; the argument has never been convincing enough for me to sit down and think about why it’s flawed; and finally, maybe I’m just not smart enough to explain why I thought the argument didn’t work. Well, none of that matters because publius, who I think has stepped up his game since Hilzoy retired from blogging, has written what I consider to be the definitive defense of hate crime legislation. You really should read the whole thing, but here’s a snippet that sums up the argument fairly well:

In one sense, all crimes criminalize “thought.” The American criminal justice system requires showing not merely an act, but an intent. If I fall down accidentally and kill you, I can’t be prosecuted. Yes, I committed an act of homicide, but I didn’t intend to do that act.

QED Bitches.

Vampires were, I suppose, a horror tale in the beginning, and then when Bram Stoker created Dracula they became a symbol for seduction and sex. But they were still scary.

But, so the critics say, beginning with Buffy the Vampire Slayer² we’ve had a slow pussification of vampires. They are no longer ravenous beasts who view humans as nothing more than a slow moving meal, who use their overwhelming sexual charisma as a mere tool to entice humans into their arms (and fangs).

I understand that to a degree, especially in light of Twilight³, but I respectfully disagree. Vampires were made to evolve along this path.

Zombies, werewolves, and vampires are the holy trinity of supernatural horror. Zombies are mindless horror, and any expansion of zombies beyond that is likely to be seen by connoisseurs as no longer being zombies. Werewolves are generally seen as a Jekyll/Hyde scenario with the werewolf half being uncontrollable so any shift away from that changes the definition of werewolf. But vampires are at their basest level undead creatures of the night who drink blood for sustenance. You can make a harrowing tale based around the premise of that creature, or you can tell a story of addiction, or a story of human empathy, or a story about the power of free will over base desires.

Basically, there’s much more wiggle room for what’s acceptable for a vampire story by virtue of their base properties. There’s nothing inherently primal and horrifying about vampires, it just so happens that those were the tales told most frequently until recent history.

So, when people make fun of Bill Compton of True Blood for being a “wet blanket” or some similar term because he desires to live as human a life as is possible as a vampire they’re missing the point. Vampires are homogeneous but not in the way everyone thinks. They’re not universally unfeeling unsympathetic sociopaths. Even looking at their source material can show you that.

Humans are not all the same. And vampires are made from humans. Some, when given eternal life and superhuman power, will forget their humanity and become a darker creature something akin to what we imagine as the prototypical vampire; others may shrink at the very thought of being a creature they previously imagined as an affront to God and may very well consider suicide; and many more will see their new powers not as an excuse to behave inhumanely but as a curse they must reject to retain their humanity.

The other supernatural beasts we’re familiar with don’t have this breadth. Zombies become mindless seekers of brains⁴, and werewolves become a creature who is a regular human most of the time but transforms to an uncontrollable monster during a full moon. Vampires don’t follow either of these paths and so they have a much broader palette from which their personalities can be painted.

So Bill Compton being a self-hating vampire isn’t a failing of True Blood, but rather it’s a sign that people are willing to be more complex with vampires in stories. Much like the wise stoic Native American, and the Magic Negro faded away with time replaced by more natural characters, the monstrous vampire stereotype has found itself a mere permutation in a panoply of perspectives⁵. And this isn’t a bad thing.

But with this in mind, we have to accept that a global shift from one persona to another in vampires would be a weakening of the whole. If everyone began to write all vampires as effeminate waifs afraid of human contact, that would be a terrible fate for vampire lore. But if those original sexual seductive monsters are not supplanted but supported by these new unexplored aspects of vampirism, I can hardly see that as a bad thing, for vampires or for storytelling.

Footnotes

1. I should probably be less lazy and find links to the numerous “Vampires are being made lame” articles and blog posts and essays I’ve read over the last few months, but seeing as you’re reading this endnote that clearly didn’t happen
2. Again, maybe there were pussy vampires before then, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire comes to mind though I don’t know enough of the details of that novel to include it as a canonical example pussy vampires
3. which has vampires that twinkle rather than smolder when doused with sunlight
4. Well, not really. The brains thing is sort of a stereotype that everyone knows but for which there’s remarkably little backing in pop culture instances of zombies.
5. Sometimes, I think I like alliteration too much

As it’s developed, I’ve read many intelligent arguments on both sides. But the truth is most of the religious side of the debate presumes a level of deference to religion. Atheists, it seems, are not allowed to compare religion to belief in Santa Claus or similar fanciful beliefs. At first it was attacked for being glib, but that does little to alter the fundamental similarities in the belief in Santa Claus and the belief in God.

Subsequently, the argument was made that people spend a great deal of time developing their religious stance, whether it’s through thorough readings of the philosophies of theologians across the ages or merely an internal conflict, and so the comparison is unfair. Admittedly, there are people who examine their beliefs thoroughly, break down all the preconditions of life that their parents instilled in them to arrive at a self-determined philosophy, one which includes God, but those people are a far and away minority. For many people, religion is a part of their life because they’ve never thought about it¹.

Similarly, following an atheist argument that religion can undermine the “development of logical thinking” in children, a religious reader responded with:

I have an 18 year-old and a 15 year-old which my wife and I have raised in the church. They are both at the stage where they are questioning and challenging everything. The idea that I could possibly “brainwash” them into believing anything is specious.

Which isn’t wrong so much as it is unsophistcated. The fact is that the reader almost certainly could “brainwash” their children if they wanted to. We always read of the children who escape from a cult they were born into, but we ignore the fact that many children remain in the cult, contented and certain that their way of life is the true path to salvation.

I use cults as an example, but parents with enough religious zeal can just as easily cause many problems for their children. Home schooling children that the Earth is the centre of the universe and that it’s only 6000 years old and evolution is a lie — all things that Christian parents do² — absolutely affect the child for years to come. No one is claiming that the damage is irreparable — after all, there are atheists out there — but to ignore it because it lacks 100% efficacy is exceedingly naive³.

The problem with having a religious debate is that when atheists argue with fundamentalists nothing is accomplished, but when they argue with reasonable, temperate theists like those reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog, we get nice nuanced arguments which describe God in a manner very different than the norm. The theists seems to forget that atheists are mostly arguing against the edge cases.

I’m staunchly atheist, and confident that there is no God. But when I attack religion, I don’t attack the muted and temperate version that intellectuals believe in, the kind where God is a passive observer, or where he sets the pieces up and has spent the past 12 billion or so years watching them all fall around him like a massive set of dominoes. I attack the religion that forces genital mutilation, stonings, oppression of women, ignorance of science, and all the stuff that the brainy version of religion has eschewed in its development.

Often, atheists (and theists) are accused of ignoring the moderates of the debate, instead focusing on the fringes of their debate, but one thing I’ve noticed as time goes on is that even the extreme atheists, so far as I know, do not argue for the abolition of religion. What they argue is that religion is irrational and that the world would be a better place without religion. The first half of that argument is absolutely true. Religion is the belief in something for which there is absolutely no evidence, an inherently irrational stance. The second half is much more contentious and an argument that I personally don’t accept. That said, the “atheist fringe” is much less extreme than the religious fundamentalists, so to act as though they are equal criticisms seems disingenuous to me.

The edge cases matter⁴. So don’t call upon the “civility” of atheists to sit down and shut up when it comes to the pernicious ills of religion.

Footnotes

1. I speak from experience; many members of my family have no actual philosophy with respect to their religion, they merely accept it as what they’ve always “believed.”
2. Obviously not all Christian parents, but these extremes do exist
3. I’m not advocating the abolition of religion here, nor would anyone suggest state-enforced atheism, but ignoring the problems of religion accomplishes nothing.
4. On both sides of the discussion

So the recent study that watching TV relieves loneliness was not a surprise to me. In my previous post, I actually predicted it:

Of course, one telling aspect of this study (what you didn’t think I’d turned this post into an opportunity to whine about personal problems did you?) is that it covers 30 years of television and television has only recently become something more than mere escapism. What was once a rare occurrence on television — serialized storytelling and complex relationships — is now a mainstay. Television, in the intervening years, has grown up. It is more than a time filler now. It can and does explore life with equal or greater depth and insight as other more respected media. And in another 30 years, after a generation of people who have grown up with intelligent and thought-provoking television, the data will tell a different tale.

It didn’t quite take 30 years for TV to shift the data, but my point remains. One of the reasons I enjoy television more than I do movies is that the longer form of storytelling allows stronger connections to the characters. This goes beyond a need for social connectedness, though this study shows that this is clearly a factor, and into the ability of television to ask deeper and more fundamental questions than film.

Movies often seem grander in some respects, but I think that most of that view comes from film’s greater opportunity, not greater ability, to ask these sorts of questions. In two hours, a lot of ideas can be examined but they cannot be explored to any real depth. In addition, in two hours characters can be examined, but they will most likely not change in any appreciable amount. But television dramas have characters that change drastically. A movie could attempt such changes, but it would be seen as absurd by critics; in two hours, for those sorts of changes to occur would break the audiences willing suspension of disbelief.

In addition, movies require a real dramatic thrust and driving action, and so the framing of the characters always relies on that structure, unless you’re doing a very indie film with no expectation of heavy distribution. Television, on the other hand, can explore multiple characters by virtue of their long-term status. In a movie that tells the same high level story as Lost or Kyle XY or other character dramas, you might get some amount of time devoted to side characters, but nowhere near the attention to detail that television offers; with television, you can truly get immersed in a world.

It’s that immersive quality that makes television more capable of not only examining a world and its inhabitants but also touching you with the answers it uncovers.

One of the “rules” of Strunk and White the author of this article, Geoffrey K Pullum, notes chidingly is “write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs,” except it’s not a rule; it’s what the book calls an approach.

The book is separated to five segments: Elementary Rules of Usage, Elementary Principles of Composition, A Few Matters of Form, Words and Expressions Commonly Misused, and An Approach to Style. That last section has some questionable advice, some which I consider outdated and therefore ignore, or rather I put less weight on them when I make my decisions.

On the other hand, I, to this day, agree with all the Rules of Usage and following them does indeed generate more pleasing sentences. In the rare cases when those rules can be broken, they should be broken knowingly and by someone well versed in their proper usage. For example, splitting up a sentence into briefer, less grammatically correct, sentences can affect the reading of a line of a novel, giving greater urgency to the words. Overall, those elementary rules are truly elemental to good writing. Pullum criticises little of this section, and I’ll save my response to that for later in the post.

Following the Rules of Usage, there are the Elementary Principles of Composition. The one rule in this section Pullum derides in particular is “use the active voice.”

We are told that the active clause “I will always remember my first trip to Boston” sounds much better than the corresponding passive “My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me.” It sure does. But that’s because a passive is always a stylistic train wreck when the subject refers to something newer and less established in the discourse than the agent (the noun phrase that follows “by”).

For me to report that I paid my bill by saying “The bill was paid by me,” with no stress on “me,” would sound inane. (I’m the utterer, and the utterer always counts as familiar and well established in the discourse.) But that is no argument against passives generally. “The bill was paid by an anonymous benefactor” sounds perfectly natural. Strunk and White are denigrating the passive by presenting an invented example of it deliberately designed to sound inept.

Pullum failed to notice the subsequent paragraph which discusses that very point:

If the writer tries to make it more concise by omitting “by me,”

My first visit will always be remembered,

it becomes indefinite: is it the writer or some undisclosed person or the world at large that will always remember this visit?

Which is absolutely correct. And completely unaccounted for by Pullum. He then criticises the book for three of its four example passive sentences in its “Passive vs Active” sentence pairs not actually being passive sentences. At least not grammatically speaking. Of course, that’s not really what that section is about. What is specifically stated at the start of the section is “the active voice is usually much more direct and vigorous than the passive.” While some loose grammatical terminology is discussed, the crux of the argument centred on the passivity of the sentence. And no one can deny that “there were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground” is considerably more passive than “dead leaves covered the ground.” It was the indirect way in which these sentences got their point across that chafed Strunk and White. Perhaps they could’ve done better in their description of the difference between their examples, but the advice is no less valid; nitpicking the difference between grammatical passivity and semantic passivity seems childish.

Immediately following this minutiae-obsessed drone about passive voice comes an attack of another rule of composition: put statements in the positive form. The critique of this is once again a case of nitpicking. Because Strunk and White wrote the sentence “the adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place,” which includes a dreaded negation, Pullum calls them out as hypocrites and purveyors of inaccurate advice. Naturally, while doing so, he completely ignores the actual content of the section.

Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, noncommittal language. Use the word not as a means of denial or in antithesis, not as a means of evasion.

So, because Strunk and White wrote a sentence which definitively asserted that adjectives cannot replace well chosen nouns — that is, as a means of denial — they are hypocrites.

And when Pullum isn’t misrepresenting Strunk and White’s advice, he cherry-picks from the collected vocabulary of English to refute their supposed arguments.

For example, Chapter IV, in an unnecessary piece of bossiness, says that the split infinitive “should be avoided unless the writer wishes to place unusual stress on the adverb.” The bossiness is unnecessary because the split infinitive has always been grammatical and does not need to be avoided. (The authors actually knew that. Strunk’s original version never even mentioned split infinitives. White added both the above remark and the further reference, in Chapter V, admitting that “some infinitives seem to improve on being split.”) But what interests me here is the descriptive claim about stress on the adverb. It is completely wrong.

Tucking the adverb in before the verb actually de-emphasizes the adverb, so a sentence like “The dean’s statements tend to completely polarize the faculty” places the stress on polarizing the faculty. The way to stress the completeness of the polarization would be to write, “The dean’s statements tend to polarize the faculty completely.”

I am an avid supporter of the split infinitive, primarily because the arguments against it are rooted in the limitations of English’s progenitors. And “to polarize completely” does place more emphasis on the completeness of the polarization than “to completely polarize.” But the example which Strunk and White use — “to diligently inquire” versus “to inquire diligently” — is the exact opposite. (And really, is it placing more emphasis on the boldness of it to say “to go boldy” than “to boldly go?”) Strunk and White note the difficulty of split infinitives later on when they write that “some infinitives seem to improve on being split,” and describe the decision the author must take as “a matter of ear.”

Beyond these childish criticisms, none of which carry any real persuasive power, though, is the deeper problem: Pullum is a linguist, and an idiotic one. Following these “scathing” criticisms, he moves on to a different tact: the appeal to popularity.

An entirely separate kind of grammatical inaccuracy in Elements is the mismatch with readily available evidence. Simple experiments (which students could perform for themselves using downloaded classic texts from sources like http://gutenberg.org) show that Strunk and White preferred to base their grammar claims on intuition and prejudice rather than established literary usage.

Consider the explicit instruction: “With none, use the singular verb when the word means ‘no one’ or ‘not one.’” Is this a rule to be trusted? Let’s investigate.

• Try searching the script of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) for “none of us.” There is one example of it as a subject: “None of us are perfect” (spoken by the learned Dr. Chasuble). It has plural agreement.
• Download and search Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). It contains no cases of “none of us” with singular-inflected verbs, but one that takes the plural (“I think that none of us were surprised when we were asked to see Mrs. Harker a little before the time of sunset”).
• Examine the text of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s popular novel Anne of Avonlea (1909). There are no singular examples, but one with the plural (“None of us ever do”).

It seems to me that the stipulation in Elements is totally at variance not just with modern conversational English but also with literary usage back when Strunk was teaching and White was a boy.

The naïvete here is a little baffling, to be honest. How a linguist can claim a style guide published in 1959 should not only mirror the style of how text was written fifty years hence but also remain completely valid fifty years later is beyond me. Language is constantly changing. Maybe it was considered archaic to write in the manner of Oscar Wilde or Bram Stoker in the wake of the scores of literature-changing novels that emerged in the intervening fifty years. We don’t suggest using the term “help meet” to refer to women anymore, either.

Despite this utter lack of understanding of how languages change — from a linguist, no less — Strunk and White once again have preempted this false criticism:

A plural verb is commonly used when none suggests more than one person or thing.

None are so fallible as those who are sure they’re right.

And yes, the appeal to popularity should carry some weight when writing a book like The Elements of Style, but I’m sure that there are just as many examples of “none of you is perfect” that Pullum either ignored because they weren’t written by authors as famous as Stoker and Wilde or simply to prove his point.

But, for the moment, let’s ignore the appeals to popularity, and the straw men arguments he attempts to construct, and the cherry-picked sentences; there’s one sentence that, in my opinion, discredits any analysis Pullum may proffer.

There are many other cases of Strunk and White’s being in conflict with readily verifiable facts about English.

The Elements of Style is not a formal description of the language and its syntax. It is not there to describe what is possible in English. It describes one way to write well, not what can be written.

Many sentences can be written which meet the grammar of English and make no sense at all. Even further, only a limited subset of the infinite permutations of possible sentences that can be written will read well.

To talk of the “facts about English” in this way, when the subject matter is explicitly discussing the style of English, is absurd. It borders on dishonesty. It’s true that some of Strunk and White’s advice isn’t universal, but to claim that they considered it such is farcical. Strunk and White offer up intelligent guidelines while admitting that “the shape of our language is not rigid; in questions of usage we have no lawgiver whose word is final.” Pullum seems content to throw the baby out with the bathwater, choosing to ignore all of Strunk and White’s inestimable advice because of a few outliers in our complex and beautiful language.

If you don’t watch How I Met Your Mother, I feel sorry for you. It’s one of the few shows out there that manages to leverage the classic multi-camera sitcom format, while keeping an ongoing storyline and having characters with real emotional weight. It’s one of those genuine shows that can make you laugh and make you really feel for the characters at the same time.

This year, the two main actresses on the show, Alyson Hannigan and Cobie Smulders, both got pregnant mid-season, which was a tough logistical challenge for the show’s writers. Smulders isn’t showing too much thus far, but Hannigan had ballooned out and the last few weeks have barely managed to contain her baby belly. Some of the early attempts to explain Hannigan’s baby bump were very clever. Aside from the usual hiding of the stomach with a large purse, or a kitchen island, there was an episode where it was revealed that Lily, her character, was a former hotdog eating champion, which resulted in a few scenes of her, baby bump on display, scarfing down hotdogs. It’s funny to the audience, who is clearly aware of her real-life situation, but also serves a valid purpose. Tonight’s was even better.

In the opening scene, sitting in a bench at the gang’s favourite bar, she is told a joke that is referred to as “boy-funny.” The joke is quoted above, along with the punchline which the show refused to even utter. Upon hearing the punchline, Lily was so offended that she left. And as the narrator said “she didn’t talk to us for four weeks.” I’m guess there are four episode left in the season. In either case: Awesome.

Glenn Greenwald has been following, and closely scrutinizing, the DOJ’s positions in the hopes that Obama’s campaign rhetoric would lead to real change in the department most disturbed and malformed as a result of Bush’s corrupt administration. There have been advances, none miraculous. But what’s more troubling is the movement towards some of Bush’s positions rather than away. Obama’s Department of Justice continues to strengthen the abuses of power put in place by the Bush administration.

I was sympathetic at first. So early into his term, we shouldn’t be so demanding. Indeed, many of the problems the DOJ is faced would inflict wide-spread collateral damage. But the DOJ is doing more than asking for more time to consider the proper solution, they are fighting to ensure the unjust status quo remains. Get with it, Obama. Fix this shit now.

It’s only been a few weeks for me as a regular recapper of television shows, and in that brief amount of time both of the shows I cared about enough to discuss on a weekly basis have been cancelled. Not officially cancelled, of course; Dollhouse’s 13th episode, originally planned as the finale for the season, will not be aired, and Kings has been moved to Saturdays. But they’ve been cancelled nonetheless. So I’m done with all that. The more I write about shows, the sooner they seem to be cancelled. Besides, I could continue writing about each new episode — detailing the many ways I love each scene, each characterization, each twist — but everything would end with “if only the show wasn’t cancelled.” I don’t think I want to subject myself to that. So I’m finished. For now, anyways.

UPDATE: Supposedly, the non-airing of the 13th episode was expected. So the show isn’t necessarily cancelled. That said, I’m not buying it. I’ve given up hope. It’s over. Even if the non-airing of this final episode was done in good faith, the damage is done. To the dedicated fans, the ones who were willing to go back to Fox, despite the abuse they suffered with Firefly and Arrested Development, because they were assured that things would be different, this was what we knew was inevitable but silently ignored as the evidence mounted around us. The show is dead. At least this time, people won’t be able to blame shifting schedules on the show’s failure. The sad truth is, the vocal fans of Joss Whedon do little but talk. Because none of them came to watch.

After yet another trouncing by entirely inferior television, it’s being move to the less high-profile Saturday night 8pm time slot. The worst part of this is its being replaced by longer episodes of Dateline. I’ve never understood this response from networks. The show is complete and ready to air in its entirety. There is nothing better to put in that time slot. And yet the networks invariably opt to air repeats or unnecessarily long versions of slightly more popular shows. I understand that ratings are important, but at the same time, giving a show a chance to build a connection with the audience, even if that happens to take a while, seems advantageous to me.

It’s obvious to anybody now that Kings is going to get cancelled. It’s a sad day. Not an outrageous day, and that makes it all the more sadder.

I can do little but agree with this. It is the mark of a great man¹ that he says what people don’t wish to hear, that he pushes for the things the silent majority wishes to remain silent. And by this metric Obama is, for the most part, not a great man. He is an inspiring man. He is an articulate man. He is an intelligent man. But he is also a pragmatic man. And pragmatic men do what they think they can get done. Obama knows that to push for the legalization of marijuana, even timidly, would create a backlash that would distract from the work he has to get done.

Is his stance cowardly? In its own way, it most certainly is. And Webb is a braver man for the fight he brings to the Capitol. But that is, I think, something for which Obama has been previously praised. His pragmatism is what allowed a first term African-American Senator, with the middle name Hussein, and a Muslim father to get where he is. He wouldn’t accomplish much at all if he was pushing for the wild-eyed quixotries of others. Unfortunately, his visual and cultural radicalisms limit his ability to be truly radical politically.

But this is not to say that he follows this actively. He simply is a political moderate man. The liberal arguments that he is secretly for the legalization of marijuana don’t hold any weight for me, any more than the conservative arguments that he is secretly a Muslim. He may not be someone fervently for the prosecution of casual users, as evidenced by his recent mandate that the DEA no longer raid state-run marijuana farms and his support of medical marijuana, but I don’t think that equates to legalization, or even decriminalization. His past usage is not compelling in this respect to me either; hypocrisy at this level among politicians is hardly new.

It’s disappointing to me that President Obama is unwilling to address the unpopularity of the marijuana and hemp laws, but it’s not entirely surprising. That’s not to say I support this position. I do not support it, nor do I respect Obama’s reasons, but I do understand it is a part of his politics.

Footnotes

1. A great woman as well, but let’s not get into neutral pronouns today, m’kay?

Fuck off, Heroes.

We psychologically stay home, even when we’re gone. I’m doing it at this moment, typing on my laptop while Paris awakens outside. My friend Dan moved to New York to produce a TV show, and says never really saw the city: he had thirteen nights free in four months. He was either on set or on the phone with Los Angeles the rest of the time, and came to see the JFK-LAX flight as a commute.

I see it happening with with this generation of college students. When I left Boulder to go to Drake, and when I left Drake to move to Los Angeles, I left people behind. Through phone calls, letters and visits home, I maintained relationships with a few close friends. But ninety percent of the people I knew vanished in the rearview mirror. That doesn’t happen as much anymore. Through Facebook and email, it’s trivial to keep up with dozens of classmates more or less daily.

But is it really a good idea?

Your twenties are a crucial time, and I’d argue that it’s harder to discover yourself — or reinvent yourself — when surrounded by a vast network of people who already have a fixed opinion of who you are. I went to college and grad school not knowing a single person, and while it was a little terrifying, it was also liberating. Decoupled from my previous opinions and embarrassments, I was able to become the 2.0 and 3.0 versions of myself. I could only do that by going somewhere new. By changing place.

There is a level of permanence to your persona that wasn’t there forty years ago. Becoming a new man, à la Don Draper, is hardly feasible in this world where your blog’s archive sits there for all to read, where your twitter updates lay in neat chronological order, where the photos on your facebook page sit waiting to be found and reported on. I don’t know if it’s a good idea. But it’s certainly where we’d headed.

It’s called preference. I don’t want to kiss guys and I think it would be gross. Just because you accept other people’s homosexuality doesn’t mean you have no problem performing homosexual acts.

In some ways it’s right, but at the same time going back to that thread now I see myself as woefully ignorant. Actors are paid to perform roles. And most of the actors who get interviewed about kissing against sexual preference (truthfully, no-one ever asks NPH how weird it is to kiss hot chicks all the time) are famous enough that if they didn’t want to kiss a guy, they wouldn’t have to. And really, even if you’re a struggling actor desperate for a role and you’ve got an audition for a gay character who goes through an intense and intimate sexual awakening (not that I’m working on a screenplay or anything) why wouldn’t you do it? A kiss is only as intimate as you make it. A kiss is only as sexual as you make it. And all of that happens in your mind. It has nothing to do with how deep your tongue goes down their throat or how hard you push your face onto theirs.

Beyond all of that, I’ve grown up a fair bit since then. I’m not wet in the pants to make it with a dude, but it’s not something that disgusts me any longer. And there’s always a chance the dude’s a good kisser.

Is the scientist (or anyone else) who refuses a cigarette based on that evidence making a moral judgment?  Yes!  The scientific data say nothing about whether cancer or death are BAD and things to be avoided, only that they are likely to happen.

Refusing a cigarette is not necessarily a moral decision. Not wanting to die is not a moral position. In fact, generally speaking self-preservation is seen as a biological imperative and selfish act. This statement is really taking the false dichotomy logical fallacy to new depths.

This study talks about how TV is escapism — which is true of any entertainment media, even though the same study says that happier people read more books — but in many ways, good television holds a mirror up to you and examines the various aspects of humanity. A few years ago, I was at a (cliche alert) crossroads in my life. I was around half way through a university degree which was promising but didn’t hold the appeal it did when I first applied. Beyond that, my faith was dwindling. For years, I had a constantly evolving understanding of God and religion. When I first had my religious re-awakening in high school, a lot of people thought it was because I had a crush on one of the girls that went to my church, but the fact is that I simply wanted to understand God better. I was experiencing teenage angst and wanted to figure what “all this” is about.

My faith grew over those years but ultimately I found myself having an understanding of God that differed and contradicted the one that both the Bible taught and that my church taught. Because of my growing skepticism of psychics, ESP, and other paranormal phenomenon and my growing understanding of how science explained the universe, I no longer thought that Jesus was actually the son of God. I still believed that he was a wise man likely sent by God to teach people a newer better way to live and worship, but I could no longer consider myself a Christian.

So, I was confused about life, the meaning of it all, and a few other things. Around that time, I started rewatching Babylon 5, a show that I hadn’t watched in quite some time, and I think it’s safe to say that it changed my life. I went from a mass of self-doubt and uncertainty about pretty much everything to having a very solid understanding of myself and the way I wanted to live in this world. I still consider Babylon 5 one of the best shows ever made, and almost certainly the best sci-fi show ever made.

There are a lot of times throughout my life that TV has helped me. Not because it let me forget about my sadness for a few minutes, but because I discovered new things. The long, drawn out character development that happens in television allows you to connect more intimately with their lives and in turn make discoveries about yourself.

Of course, one telling aspect of this study (what you didn’t think I’d turned this post into an opportunity to whine about personal problems did you?) is that it covers 30 years of television and television has only recently become something more than mere escapism. What was once a rare occurrence on television — serialized storytelling and complex relationships — is now a mainstay. Television, in the intervening years, has grown up. It is more than a time filler now. It can and does explore life with equal or greater depth and insight as other more respected media. And in another 30 years, after a generation of people who have grown up with intelligent and thought-provoking television, the data will tell a different tale.

Is a recent interview with Joss Whedon, Joss claimed that he had heard no complaints about Buffy’s foray into homosexuality, or perhaps simply bisexuality, or perhaps even simplest sexual experimentation.

Really Joss?

I’ve got a few complaints. First of all, it didn’t flow naturally. I’m working off of old memories now, but I don’t remember that cut to Buffy sprawled out covered in sheets next to a fellow slayer making a heck of a lot of sense. It works in that we all know that Buffy gets horny when she slays. But if that were the case, then why did her experimentation not happen when slaying with Faith years ago?

Another argument I’ve had with myself is that Buffy, in that universe, was still basically the age of a college student and that’s a time ripe with experimentation. But it’s not that age that induces experimentation, but the maturity and independence of that time. And Buffy has had to be incredibly mature for years. Her times for experimentation are over. One of my biggest complaints with Season 7 of Buffy was that Buffy still acted like a petulant child a lot of the time. She should have been more mature, because she was more mature. The same applies here.

Overall, I just don’t think the situation was handled very well. I’m sure they could have done a lesbian storyline with Buffy smartly, but to me there were simply too many things that didn’t add up or make sense in the greater scheme. I’m not alone either. There were quite a few people who didn’t like the direction the story took on forums, some of them being quite hyperbolic about the whole thing, but most citing their issues with the story in reasonable terms. It didn’t ruin Buffy for me, it didn’t ruin the comic for me, it didn’t even ruin the storyline for me, but to say there were no complaints is a little presumptuous.

It doesn’t look great, but I’m cautiously optimistic about the prospects for both of these shows, primarily because of this: their ratings aren’t stellar, but MRC is an independent producer and its requirements when it comes to ratings might not be as grand as networks. And it seems to me that MRC is working towards establishing itself as a producer of quality television programming. They might not succeed, but the very fact that they have that goal means to me that they’ll give their material more of a chance than an established network.

Oops. My bad. Apparently, unbeknownst to me — but knownst to others — MRC was having cash flow and managerial issues which likely led to the cancellations. And sure, the atrocious ratings probably didn’t help, but in the end, it comes down to a lack of faith in your product. And me, I’ve got too much faith. Everyone I know considers me a pessimist of the highest order, but I’m in fact an incredibly optimistic, almost naïvely so, guy.

Which is why, when MRC shut down production to “work on scripts” I didn’t really see it as the company saving some cash while they decide the faith of the show. I saw it as a company willing to work to improve a product. For the most part, I genuinely believe that television networks want to do more than just sell advertising.

Yes, sometimes networks are too quick with their trigger finger, cancelling shows before they’ve had a chance to build a base, but overall they try to let shows develop if there is promise. Unfortunately, a brilliant show with ever-decreasing ratings doesn’t show promise to most network executives, much to the detriment of good taste. So there is a level of practised cynicism I should have by now, but I generally don’t. No matter how many times I get burned, I keep going back to the networks to see what new brilliance they have that no one seems to be watching. Not that Valentine or Easy Money were brilliant, far from it, but their deaths are a symptom of a greater problem that television is enduring right now. A problem I on occasion rail against, but most of the time am ignorant of simply because I have too much faith.

Oh well, two fewer shows to watch every week.

I don’t know much of Howard’s other work, but I do know that his portrayal of Jim Rhodes in Iron Man was one of the weaker aspects of the film. It wasn’t a bad portrayal by any count, but it wasn’t great and it certainly wasn’t the best interpretation of the character. So as much as I want to yell at the studio and Favreau for holding out on cash or some other reason, I have to believe that they had similar misgivings about his performance and decided to go in a different direction.

One particularly moronic guy on the Ain’t it Cool News talkback said “Empire would have been great with a replacement Han, eh?” Let’s replace 1) Empire with Dark Knight 2) would have with was 3) Han with Rachel Dawes. And then replace that question mark with a fucking period. It depends on the fucking situation moron! And I think that in this instance it might have been worth it. Obviously we’ll see, it’s always a gamble, but I’ve seen a decent amount of Cheadle’s work so I’m pretty hopeful about the whole situation.

But what this post is really about is stupid language. Over on slashdot, they had a post discussing the acquisition of Jerry Seinfeld by Microsoft and they quoted somebody saying “Mac users might be quite amused, considering that (like many other TV shows) the set of Seinfeld always had a Macintosh prominently displayed in the background.”

Nothing is prominently displayed in the background. Now, I don’t consider this an oxymoron, because dictionaries tend to describe oxymora as phrases which are seemingly self-contradicting. There’s nothing seeming about this. It is impossible for something to be prominently displayed in the background. Something can be prominent in the background, but “prominently displayed” implies that it’s the visual target of a given landscape and things in the background are never that.

The real problem here is that the context was ignored. “Prominently displayed” is a common phrase but connecting it to “background” belies its original intention. Context is everything when it comes to language. That’s why the spell checker in Office 2007 is so much better than any previous one: it verifies the words in the sentence in relation to each other to see if the words make sense in that order and in that context. It’s something people should try more often.

Recently, JM Straczynski, (or JMS as he is known to awesome people) creator and primary writer for Babylon 5 — a show that I consider one of the best Sci-fi shows ever made, and arguably one of the best shows ever made — posted to his newsgroup a message that all Babylon 5 fans are reading with some pain in their heart:

So I’ve let everyone up here know that I’m not interested in doing any more low-budget DVDs. I’m not interested in doing any low-budget cable things or small computer games. The only thing I would be interested in doing regarding Babylon 5 from this point on is a full-featured, big-budget feature film.

I Love Babylon 5. I Love it with a capital letter and while this is a bit disappointing, I absolutely understand it, and I’m even more impressed by JMS because of it. He could have pumped out low-budget movie after low-budget movie straight to DVD for another decade and every fan would’ve bought it, but he saw that the low-budget was affecting the quality and he wasn’t willing to further sully the B5 universe with that kind of stuff. I never watched the Legend of the Rangers, but I did watch and own The Lost Tales; it was mildly entertaining but it was nowhere near as good as the show was. And the fact that JMS knows and is willing to admit that just makes me respect him more.

Here’s a post, with some editing and spelling liberties taken on my part, asking for some arguments on moral relativism, which are especially targeted at an atheist reader.

Today I will play the role of an atheist who subscribes to humanism and the relative nature of morality. Shall we begin?

THESE ARE MY TWO CORE BELIEFS:

1. I believe that certain nonproductive members of society – i.e. the terminally and painfully sick, unemployed and alcohol-addicted street vagrants, serial criminals, and those too old to contribute anything meaningful - should be euthanized for the greater of good of society and mankind.

Resources that they consume can find much better use in advancing civilization and the happiness of other (and more) people. The good and survival of the human species takes precedence over selfish and petty individual needs.

2. I believe that bestiality as a sexual choice should be given the same legal rights and social respect as heterosexual and homosexual human-human relationships.

I am a practicing zoophile who regularly engages in group sex with my fully-mature rottweilers (both male and female) who willingly and often actively reciprocate the intimate eroticity.

We all enjoy it immensely, so what’s wrong with it? For some reason, most people – even the supposedly enlightened individuals at PFLAG – think my sexual choice is disgusting, morally repugnant and unnatural. To me it’s incomprehensible and inexplicable why.

Now please tell me why my stance is MORALLY WRONG from a atheistic, humanist point of view.

Quotes from the Bible or other holy scriptures will not be accepted. Arguments that some god or another forbids it will similarly be ignored. As a atheist, I WILL NOT ACCEPT ANY RELIGION OR PHILOSOPHY BASED ARGUMENTS.

I welcome and eagerly await comments which attempt to persuade me that somehow, my beliefs and practices are fundamentally wrong from a relativistic, humanist, liberal and pluralistic point of view.

Convince me.

Usually, when I read stuff like this on the Internet I just sigh and move along, but this time I couldn’t resist responding. What follows is a comment I posted on that blog in its entirety. Normally, I also don’t repost comments I write on other blogs on this site, but this one is fairly well written and much longer than I originally anticipated. Plus I haven’t posted in a while so I needed to put something up.

First of all, you say that you reject any philosophy based reasoning which is possibly the stupidest thing anyone has ever said. Philosophy strives to create logically valid reasoning. If the premises of that logic are true, then the reasoning is also true so to say you reject philosophy (but accept “atheistic” arguments which wouldn’t exist without philosophy) is really dumb.

As for your first point, there’s a difference between euthanasia and what you propose. Euthanasia is about ending the suffering of people who wish death. You’re talking about killing people against their will because they are no longer useful to society. That’s an egregious attack on the freedoms of people. Not only that but you then need to define usefulness to society. What if someone is intelligent, went through university and even went through medical school and graduated at the top of their class. But once that was all done they decided to make crappy clay sculptures that everyone agrees are not only a terrible waste of their talents but also just in general terrible. He is no longer useful to society and was even a burden on society by going through an unused education process so your proposal would be to kill him, but hopefully you can see that that is no more than cold blooded murder.

Secondly, regarding bestiality. I have a very specific opinion about sex: you don’t do it without consent. Until animals can be proven to be sentient and are capable of communicating with humans their thoughts and opinions, you cannot have sex with one without it being rape. If you want to stick your ass up in the air and wait for a dog to figure out that you want it to fuck you, well that’s fine by me, but you can’t do anything to the dog or any animal because you can’t reliably convince me that it’s consensual.

One final note. Your basic argument seems to be that without God all morality is completely relative. That may be true, but it’s a problem philosophers have discussed for millennia without making any real headway, so you shouldn’t assume your stance to be true. For one thing, morality may be a genetic trait, or a part of the structure of our brain. If those, or something similar, are true then there very well may be an absolute moral code built into us, or at least some moral absolutes from which we can extrapolate the rest. Regardless, a godless world is not necessarily a morally relative world. Furthermore, a morally relative world is not necessarily a world where you can do anything. Morality is a societal construct because morality defines the behaviour between members of a society. Which means the members of society need to agree on the basic terms. Agreeing on the basic terms of a morality, relative or not, will lead to certain limitations. Always.

(Before anyone starts accusing me of teaching Parrots to say “fuck me good” and then going wild, I should say that I personally would never fuck an animal other than a human; I’m just that kind of guy. But I also don’t think that I have the right to tell people who have those bizarre desires, along with animals intelligent enough to have and communicate those desires, that they shouldn’t do that funky business.)

So there’s my thoughts on those particularly grimy and unpalatable. I hope that I’ve both made some sense and also not completely grossed the fuck out everybody reading this.

P.S.: After having looked at a few other posts on the blog, it seems pretty clear that this guy is either bipolar and has two distinctly opposite personalities or he’s a racist neocon who likes to argue that atheism leads to rampant dog fucking and murdering by playing the part of a crazy atheist who thrives on dog fucking and murdering. C’est la vie, but maybe my arguments manage to convince him that supporting someone’s right to do fucked up shit is not the same as wanting to do fucked up shit.