Nathaniel Edwards

Testing the "Peaceful Transfer of Power" Myth

2013-02-22T18:33:00.000-08:00

For my whole life, I've heard teary-eyed talks about how America was really unique for "the peaceful transfer of power." Especially at election time or Scout Jamborees or, I dunno, DAR meetings, that sort of nebulous phrase is professed and repeated and written on blackboards as though it were the mathematical proof for American Exceptionalism. As a kid I always thought it was stupid, so today I'm going to define the concept as best I can then test it.

The "peaceful transfer of power" thing was and is phrased a lot of different ways. I remember my 70 year-old Scoutmaster once saying that America is the only country in the world that peacefully transfers power (from president to president every four or eight years, in our case). He very generally and very wrongly talked about other countries always having to fight wars or kill somebody before a new head of state is allowed to take the reins. Well, no; that would be unusual in the fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire but not in the modern world or the vast majority of world history. Succession is not that difficult.

But that's the most extreme version of the "peaceful transfer" myth I've heard. My Scoutmaster was terrific but sort of insane. He fought in the Korean War, but I would never ask him to lecture on Korea or the Cold War or anything that requires a working knowledge of history and geopolitics. Speaking of, here's a version of the myth I remember from my 8th grade history textbook: "The 1800 US election in which Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams was the first time in history that power peacefully transferred from one group [sometimes they say "party" instead of "group"] to another without bloodshed." You know this is in textbooks because you can find a bunch of kids asking this question on various quick answers websites to do their homework for them.

This claim is also significantly overreaching the facts. Dynasties should count as the same "group" remaining in power, but there are plenty of times in history that one dynasty was peacefully replaced by a new one. To use some easy, high-school history book-level examples, Elizabeth the Great was the last Tudor monarch in England, and when she died she was replaced by James VI of Scotland, the first king of a new dynasty called the Stuarts, and he brought basically his entire Scottish government down to London with him. A century later in England you get the Glorious Revolution, which was famously bloodless. I'm not going to pretend it was the norm, but bloodless transfers of power from one group to another are not tremendously unusual.

But what if we want to talk about the first peaceful transfer of power between "parties" rather than simply "groups"? Well first of all that wouldn't be tremendously impressive given that we don't really call anything anywhere a "political party" before the late eighteenth century. You have families as in Florence or Venice or you have factions as in ancient Greece but we don't call them "parties," not for any real difference so much as it just not being the applied word at the time. Then second, in 1762 a Tory replaced a Whig as Prime Minister of Great Britain. I doubt they thought of Whigs and Tories as political parties for another few decades, but that's what they were, and power transferred between them several times between then and our 1800 American election. Doubtless some people would argue that the king was still holding the real power in Great Britain rather than the Prime Minister, but they'd find themselves defending a poor example because George III was famously insane and not given an awful lot of actual power.

Jefferson replacing Adams was a fairly unique and notable occurrence, but more because of America's rather new and somewhat experimental form of government than anything claimed about the peaceful transfer of power. It is slightly rare in history to find peaceful transfer of power between groups while the former ruler was still alive (if I add any more qualifiers this sentence is going to cave in). It does the 1800 election a disservice by attempting to make up fake facts about this special event.

But there's yet another version of the myth, the one someone writes glowingly about every inauguration: America has the longest streak of consecutive peaceful transfers of power in the world, going back to either 1789 or 1797 depending on your definition. Dylan Matthews covered this in sort of a misleading way last month at Wonkblog. He includes a graph ranking current streaks based on the number of peaceful power transitions, which is going to favor parliamentary systems like Italy's which switch primi a thousand times like my picky nonna Eugenia (boom!). Most people want a streak of years rather than transfers, which would reflect a bit better on the United States except for another thing Matthews didn't cover: The US had a Civil War over an election!

South Carolina seceded from the union in direct response to Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860, leading to a giant war that's still the bloodiest conflict in American history. How can you possibly call that a peaceful transfer of power? Because in the end Lincoln prevailed (only to be shot and killed anyway)? If the American Civil War counts as a peaceful transfer of power, then it's not a phrase worth glorifying.

Okay, so let's say we're up to 147 years of peaceful transfers of power now. Is that special? Yes, that's a remarkably long time, but still not the longest nor the longest active streak. Great Britain/The United Kingdom still has us beat because their last contested transfer of power was the Glorious Revolution in 1688 (bloodless, but it involved an army I suppose so I wouldn't necessarily call it peaceful). They also have the US beat in only having one assassination of a Prime Minister against four US Presidents.

Without having done any actual research of any of that stuff, I'm going to guess that the Republic of Venice had the longest historical streak of peaceful transfers of power. The Venetian Republic lasted from the 700s AD to the time of Napoleon, a thousand years of bizarre and complicated elections. A failed coup by Marino Faliero in 1354 is the most obvious spot on their record, and that still leaves them with 400+ years of peaceful elections on either end.

Basketball Writing at The Northwestern Chronicle

2012-12-30T20:54:00.002-08:00

I'm writing about Northwestern University Men's Basketball for The Chronicle this season. A quick synopsis of my columns so far:

Wildcats Edge Some Guy Named Usher:

I describe the chaos of last year's Big Ten Tournament and some inside details of my dating life, leading into this season when NU slips by Mississippi Valley State, and I make a series of videos that explain how to pronounce our players' names (incorrectly).

Like Life, November Basketball is Meaningless Yet Better Than Nothing:

A series of meaningless non-conference games leave me wondering what's the meaning of it all.

Terps Rout 'Cats, Season Basically Over, You Guys:

Northwestern suffers a disappointing loss to Maryland, and I express my feelings by producing a fake highlights video.

My Thesis: Wildcats Terrible, Great, Mediocre:

Three very different games have very different results, and I produce the most pointlessly erudite and impenetrably academic piece of sportswriting since George Will's heyday.

Things Fall Apart; The Center Cannot Hold:

The Wildcats lose their two best players, leaving freshman center Alex Olah as arguably the team's most important player.

Accent Attractiveness

2012-09-01T08:08:00.000-07:00

Accents in Order of Attractiveness to Women

Irish

Italian

French

German

Italian-American

African-American (US)

United States of American

Southern United States

Native American

Minnesotan

Japanese

Chinese

Korean

Indian

Accents in Order of Attractiveness to Men

Northern Italian (Lombardy, not Piedmont)

Okay now this time I mean Piedmont

Indeterminate Western European

Spanish (lisp, non troppo)

Bible Belt Honey BBQ

Girl Only Whispers

Parisian ‘Dame

Prussian Dom

Faux Russian

Foix French

Upper crust

Plain Jane

Lower crust

Clueless (‘95)

Chicaaaaaahgo

A Northeast Shore

White Suburban Male

Desi Girl Goes Hollywood

Unbelievably Gorgeous Snowy Owl
Jewish Mother With Cleft Lip And Palate

The Beachy Review: Big Screen Reviews From The Big Leagues

2012-08-28T15:38:00.001-07:00

The Actual Website

Hey everyone... It's me, Brandon Beachy, the undrafted ace with the untendoned elbow. In my life, there has perhaps been othing I have been loving so much as movies... That's right, its the good stuff... I'll watch anything, irregardless of era, color, race, zombies fast or slow...So log as the pictures are moving!

So thats why I am casting my critical eye and this big red pen of mine (well, keyboard...) to grade the movies I watch while I'm sitting out the season. I'm bored, folks! So lets get started..

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

What an awesome film. Saw it at the theater with my then-girlfriend in 'Frisco while the team earned a hard-earned split, earning a good shot at a wild card spot this October. She loved it probably more than me, going "awwww" at like evey other scene! The shot composition was very cool

5/5 "Beach" balls

Faces of Death (1978)

Yikes!

4/5 Beach Balls

Muholland Drive (2001)

Very stong use of metaphor..And holyy cow, Laura Harring!

5/5 Beach Balls

East Bound and Down (2009-????)

Not a movie, per se... But man, funny as hell. I wasn't in the bigs when John Rocker was around, but Chip and Tom tell me the show guy's supossed just like him..Haha

5/5 Beach Balls

Bicycle Thiefs (1948)

Rossy recomended this one to me, haha weird. Pretty cool, just the right length

3/5 Beach Balls

Antichrist (2009)

Me and my girl loaded this up on Netflix Stream, looking for horror and got a bit more than we bargained for..! She didn't make it all the way through but I finished it the next day, extyreme as heck. stuff. Nice to see the uncomprimesed vision of a powerful director, so give it a watch, folks.

4/5 beach balls

Translated Names: Baseball Edition

2012-08-24T18:57:00.005-07:00

Let's make it three baseball posts in a row.

Some players already have clearly evocative English-language names: Prince Fielder, Urban Shocker, Mike Trout, or even Babe Ruth. Ignoring for now that not all of those examples are actual birth names, I thought I'd translate some other famous players' names.

Here's an easy one, Miguel Cabrera is Spanish for Michael Goat-Herder. (Michael is apparently Hebrew for the rhetorical question "Who is like God?" but if it translates to a standard English name without a funny meaning, I'm just gonna stop at the English name.)

The hell if I know what Melky means (maybe it comes from Malachi?) so feel free to call that particular Cabrera Goat Melk, if you think that's interesting. It's not really that funny, to be honest.

Carlos Beltran enters English as the medieval-sounding Charles Bertrand, Bertrand being old Germanic for "bright rim" as in the rim of a shield, which could just not be any more German.

Staying on the Cardinals, Yadier Molina means Friend Mill, and that's adorable.

Verlander means "pasture dweller."

Ryan and Jordan Zimmerman can be literally read as Ryan and Jordan Carpenter, of no relation to the dozen or so actual "Carpenters" in Major League history.

Ryan Braun's last name already has an English meaning, but it actually comes from the slightly-more-archaic word "brand," in the sense of branding a cow, more or less, you know, using a firebrand. It's that practice that led to the more common modern sense of "brand" as in "brand name" or "company brand."

Both Roy Halladay and Matt Holliday's last names mean "Holy Day," or, you know "holiday," traditionally a name given to those born on, yup, holidays.

Bryce Harper's last name doesn't technically need a translation, but it's not immediately clear that it means "professional harp player."

Brian McCann has flat-out sucked this year, but his last name will always mean "son of Cano," (not Canó) with Cano meaning "wolf cub." "Son of the Wolf Cub." Patronyms don't often work well in literal translation.

The Baseball Nations

2012-08-10T10:23:00.001-07:00

For a friend, here's a list of countries that play baseball.

Countries with at least two professional baseball leagues:

-United States of America/Canada
-Japan
-South Korea
-Italy
-Netherlands
-Spain
-Venezuela
-Mexico
-Australia

Countries with only one professional baseball league:

-China
-Taiwan
-Dominican Republic
-Puerto Rico
-Nicaragua
-Colombia

Countries without a fully professional baseball league who compete in international baseball competitions:

-Cuba
-Czech Republic
-Germany
-France
-Greece
-Ireland
-Sweden
-Finland
-Switzerland
-United Kingdom
-South Africa
-Guam
-Palau
-Saipan
-New Zealand
-Israel
-Philippines
-Thailand
-Brazil

And how strong are all these other countries? Cuba and Japan have so far won most international tournaments with the US coming just behind them. Canada, Korea, Italy, the Netherlands, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela would probably make up the second tier of talent, at least according to international results in the past. There is strong competition in baseball, but in softball, not so much. Softball is US-dominated to the point of being embarrassing (though Japan won one of the four gold medals ever awarded), which is probably why the IOC even thought to toss the sports out in the first place.

Baseball was a "men-only" sport for one Olympics, but there is not an international talent level reason to expel it from the games, it's all about the softball problem and MLB's unwillingness to let professionals join the games.

Baseball Poem: Braves at Marlins, 7/25/2012

2012-07-25T18:22:00.002-07:00

It’s the first since Bob Feller, I think you should know
The distinction is dubious but worth saying, so:
It’s seven plus walks and then kays and ess bees,
topped off with a win earned with relative ease.
He’s a part of the problem but got time to grow,
yet I like Hanson better in Sony’s The Show.

The Beach Boys Cartoon and Video Games - Camp California

2012-05-23T18:30:00.001-07:00

"Official Mascots of The Beach Boys: Camp California." Really, 'cause I've never heard of 'em, you're no doubt saying. Well don't feel bad, because there's almost nothing on the internet about this early '90s multimedia Beach Boys property.

I'd be tempted to call Camp California an abortive attempt at a kids' Beach Boys IP, but there's only one sense in which it's really "abortive": there was never a TV cartoon. Instead, this short-lived little franchise consisted of an oddly disembodied kiddie cover song CD (pictured above) and two video games for the Turbografx-16, a late '80s, early '90s console that beat the SEGA Genesis in Japanese sales but only had about one or two games that the US market seemed interested in playing (remember the "Bonk" series?).

I first stumbled onto the 1991 video game in this, uh, I guess you could call it a series, called "Yo, Bro." There's a gameplay video up on YouTube here. The start screen immediately hits you with "I Get Around" by the Beach Boys, followed by "Fun, Fun, Fun," "Help Me, Rhonda," and "California Girls" if you let it sit there long enough. I thought it was some kind of rip-off at first, but the chiptunes are really well-done. Nothing else in the game seems to really allude to The Beach Boys, but if you look at the box (pictured on the right) you'll see that some "Official Mascots of the Beach Boys" logo on the ursine, skateboarding main character's shirt.

In the game, you must save various California cities from Professor Liverhosen, who is attacking area children with bees, zombies, airboarding dogs, and Audrey II-esque plant monsters. You skate around much like other 8 and 16-bit era skateboarding games, but with an assortment of weapons to awkwardly fire at your opponents, mostly different kinds of slingshot with the less G-rated option of grenades thrown in there as well.

Today, I found there was another video game in 1993, titled "Camp California." This one utilized the Turbografx CD system, allowing for true audio and entirely new gameplay. This one I haven't been able to play yet, so all I've got to go on is this Turbografx promo video and a video of the game's intro. One copy of the game is on eBay for over a hundred dollars, but I'll keep digging before I resort to that.

The significantly cheaper key to this Beach Boys ephemera mystery was the music CD I mentioned earlier, which arrived in my mail at the cost of four entire dollars this afternoon. Let me tell you, it's odd to hear scripted cartoon character dialogue featuring easily recognizable 90s voice actors prefacing well-produced if empty-spirited Beach Boys covers and original songs, all presumably for a cartoon that never came to exist.

This CD, "Camp California: Where the Music Never Ends" features the voice acting work of Nancy Cartwright (Bart Simpson), Jess Harnell (Wakko from "Animaniacs"), Hal Rayle (Raphael from "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles"), and Kath Soucie (Linka from "Captain Planet"). The music's arranged by Gordon & Lisa Goodwin, who did music for things like "Animaniacs" and "Ferngully," so again, right in that fairly high-rent '90s cartoon talent wheelhouse. The characters were created by Edward Garner and David Fontana, presumably the same David Fontana who directed the animation for Rugrats. As much as I'd like to play 6 Degrees all day, you get the point that a lot of typical cartoon guys all worked on this weird cover CD that didn't actually have a cartoon to go along with it.

You can probably imagine how the music sounds, it's the kids' music genre. The all-important backing vocals and instrument layering of Beach Boys music is chintzy but not bad. The Beach Boys tracks (and "Little Old Lady From Pasadena," "Surfin' Bird," and "Wipe Out," the three other beach craze standards got shoved in here, too) aren't ruined by the arrangements so much as by the voice actors, who ham it up and screech and ad lib whatever their characterizations are supposed to be before, during, and after each song. Two original songs, "Camp California (Where the Music Never Ends)" and "Kelly's Song," are just sort of tolerable additions that wouldn't sound out of place on an '80s Mike Love record, for whatever that distinction's worth. Besides the voice actor-only moments before a few songs, and some punishing female lead vocals, it doesn't curl your hair like an early Kidz Bop CD, but, you know, it is what it is.

Why is all this sorta-decent '90s kids stuff so completely unheard of? Where's the cartoon? How involved were the Wilson-less cash-in '90s Beach Boys in approving this "official mascot" business? Did they really think that the Turbografx-16 would be a good platform to launch a new multimedia IP? I am infinitely curious about this mediocre crap, and I want answers. We'll see what I can find out.

Every Photo of Rick Steves is Amazing

2012-05-14T21:53:00.000-07:00

Rick with the ladies

Rick Steves [sic] hosts a travel show I like to watch late at night on WINDOW TO THE WORLD CHANNEL 3, which I guess is a PBS alternate or something. When I'm in the right frame of mind (which I usually am at 2 AM when I'm watching) this show is the Funniest Thing on Earth. I don't exactly understand why, but this post is for all my favorite photos of Rick Steves on his many travels.

iran_rick_girls.jpg

Rick with the ladies

Rick with the runners-up at the local Iranian beauty contest

Rick's action is too fast for the camera exposure

Rick listening to some sick tunes or 'casts or whatever in Venice

Rick likes to look just off-center in his photos, a decision I support

Rick Steves and the Last Crusade (1989)

Rick takes photos like a 16 year-old girl at The Cheesecake Factory

There's an app for Rick

Rick with the lady

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Rick's a supporter of legalizing marijuana, no, really

MEN WANNA BE HIM

...and we'll close with Rick doing his teenager on Facebook photo thing with the Revolutionary Guard. Way to go, man.

Bobby Valentine, Big in Japan

2012-05-10T17:34:00.002-07:00

In Japan, you are a winner.

In Japan, you are an icon.

In Japan, you are a rock star. (Skip to 3:00 if you don't already hate Bobby V.)

Go back, Bobby. Your country needs you.

How to Defend Korea in Civilization V

2012-05-08T18:15:00.000-07:00

How to Defend Korea in that one Civilization V Scenario: A slightly less-than-serious tips video.

Vlog Every Day in April - The Worst Idea

2012-04-06T12:26:00.000-07:00

Watch this video. You'll have a gnawing, physical, real need to close the tab and start doing something else after about ten seconds, but overcome your deep animal instincts against wasting your life and sit through all two minutes of this thing.

No, nothing happens in the video. There's nothing going on at all. This is a symptom of a site-wide movement to dilute the content of YouTube called VEDA -- Vlog Every Day in April.

So a vlog is a video blog, not in the current sense of blogs (a website content delivery system that can include anything) but rather the original meaning of blog (a public diary). Ideally, a video would add in much-needed humanity and intimacy to blogs, allowing you to more easily see and identify with someone else's life. However, the technical requirements of making a video almost always lead to an even more empty and pointless weblog than one in pure text for several reasons:

The vast majority of vlog videos include discussion of the technical failings of the creator's previous or currently-in-progress vlog video. "Sorry my last vid was so dark/windy/bright/compressed/poorly framed/shaky/quiet/long/short!" Making a single setup two-minute film of myself talking is hard!
Most people aren't natural performers, and most people can't edit, either. Poor writing on a regular blog at least comes off as honest and natural at times, but someone stammering in front of a camera for three minutes without saying anything is unnatural and really hard to watch.
You can't live and film at the same time, so the video isn't really adding anything, a vlogger is just talking about their day in audio rather than text.

And now, VEDA is a fad that encourages people to upload a new vlog video every day. So the already impossibly low quality of vlog videos is further harmed by an influx of new vloggers who are pressured to upload something every 24 hours, even though they have nothing to show or tell. The video at the top of this post is actually remarkably content-rich for a VEDA video, because we get to see some food in boxes, rather than just someone talking about failing to make videos for VEDA.

Go to YouTube, search for VEDA, then sort by upload date, and get prepared for the saddest time of your life as you enjoy "slice of life" videos from an infinite series of people who have nothing to talk about besides that they have nothing better to do than talk about how they have nothing better to do.

The Republic of Venice, as Illustrated by deviantART

2012-03-30T20:05:00.000-07:00

I'm in preparation for the longest writing project of my life, a senior thesis on the Republic of Venice. I've got a lot more reading and research to do, but while I've got a moment of free time, I like to search for goofy drawings on deviantART, which is basically a site for amateur manga art, which means it has a ton of weird stuff. It never disappoints me no matter what I search for, so here's some weird fan illustrations and stuff related to the Republic of Venice, a mercantile European power that managed to cling to life from the very beginnings of the medieval period until the age of Napoleon. Enjoy.

An Italian "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" fan took the Venetian flag and replaced the Lion of St. Mark with Princess Celestia from the show. The top comment on the deviantART page reads (translated from Italian): "Aha! But let's just hope there's no lockout in the Venetian Great Council over this!" Nah, I'm sure they wouldn't have minded changing the patron saint to Saint Lauren Faust, dude.

Somebody made a flag for a hypothetical Most Serene Republic of Venice-Genoa. The two republics were worst enemies, so this is kind of like making a logo for a hypothetical New York-Boston Yankee Sox baseball team, but otherwise, it's sort of an okay flag, I guess. "Pax tibi Marce Evanglista meus" means "Peace to you, Mark, my evangelist," referring to the patron saint of Venice, and the right half of the crest basically resembles the standard Genoese crest, the cross of St. George. The flag of England looks exactly the same because it is also simply St. George's Cross.

Some sort of role-playing character introduction, I dunno, but it's basically if La Serenissima was a manga character. Neat?

An early sketch of the same thing, by the same person. "You got the money?" won me over.
In the Renaissance comedy theatre form, Commedia dell'Arte, Venetians was represented by an old retired merchant character named Pantalone (the origin of the word "pants," it's a long story), but I guess a little girl works, too?

A different person's personal character drawing based on the Republic of Venice. Again, this picture sports the hilarious combination of kind-of obscure history research and juvenile 13 year-old girl comments 'n' stuff. It's got the right patron saints, the right hat style, and, well, a gondola, so pretty accurate for a weird drawing thing! So why are people drawing characters based on Renaissance states, again?

It's not incredibly clear, but this is the same character as the illustration above. It's a remake of this actual painting, with Neptune (left) and Venice (right) made younger. Johnny Depptune is pretty hilarious-looking.

And here's another one? Oh, now I see. Hetalia: Axis Powers is a manga/anime series in which various countries that fought in World War II are all represented by a character. Fascist Italy is the lovable loser, of course. So I guess fans like to add their own characters for every other historical entity ever. Anyway, what's cool about this particular fan art is that it actually gets the traditional birth date of the Republic of Venice right, March 25th! What the hell kids, don't do that much research just to make one drawing!

This one isn't for some weird role-play thing, the artist insists on the deviantART page for this illustration. It's for his AP European History notes. Hard for me to tell what the bell-bottoms and spiky hair on Venice represent here, but I hope it helped the artist remember stuff.

...so here's another Republic of Venice original character! Again, they actually got the birthday right. What exactly is going on here, internet?

This isn't as interesting a picture as the other ones, but I needed to include it to illustrate that there are even more different people who have developed their own character to embody the spirit of the Republic of Venice. This one's called Serena, playing off of "Serenissima."

Vivaldi fan art, 'cause why not? Looks like a color-by-numbers with finger-painted hair.

This is barely related, but it's a map of fallout shelters in 2205 AD Italy set within the "Fallout" video game universe. This is just like something I would've wanted to make when I was younger. Also the artist put a mustache on the Fallout guy and darkened his hair to make him Italian, hilarious.

Burn Down High School English and Start Over

2012-03-26T19:53:00.001-07:00

Why don't kids love this stuff?

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

I couldn't sleep last night because I was thinking about my old high school English classes and feeling angry. I'm at Northwestern now, and it's become increasingly clear that writing is what I want to do. I loved writing back in high school as well, so one would think I'd have loved English class, but it was the most worrisome school subject for me. I read the assigned novels (except Huckleberry Finn, which was apparently one assignment too many for me at the time, so sorry Mrs. Hicks or whatever your name was!) and I wrote all the essays, but I may as well have handed them in to an especially vindictive and snarky Sumatran tiger, because they came back to me with ink clawed all over every page.

This may sound entitled, but it is a bad sign when the top student in the senior class is enthusiastic about your topic, tries his hardest on every assignment, and gets a 5 on the AP test, but he can't manage an A in your class. At some level, something in the system's not functioning correctly.

What's worse, high school English killed my taste for fiction. In eighth and ninth grade, I read a ton of Thomas Pynchon, partially because I wanted to feel better than everybody, but also because his style is so incredibly fluid and pervasive, that I didn't need to understand every reference or even follow the plot particularly well. Even when he's talking about a man stuck head-first into a toilet while Malcolm X lubes up his asshole and rapes him, the style is just beautiful beyond words, so to speak. By twelfth grade, I was done with fiction (besides writing it occasionally, which is difficult when you don't read much) and onto reading nothing but history books, when I was reading anything at all.

The Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic to the right articulates the problem pretty well. To test how "well" you read a novel in English class, teachers either ask about the text or the subtext. Either option is horrible.

If you ask questions about the text, you're on a tightrope between two vast chasms of awfulness, because easy questions make the test and class seem meaningless (What's the main character's name? Congrats on your A!) and hard questions make the test and class seem meaningless and vicious (What does Wernher von Braun say about ennui in Chapter 8 and what does it mean for the story as a whole? Shame on you for your F!).

Some of that part of Gravity's Rainbow I'm talkin' 'bout

If you ask questions about the subtext, then your class still faces the same accusations of meaninglessness. First of all, hunting for symbols in a piece of entertainment is a horribly pretentious and labor-intensive process for high school students. Then consider that even two literature professors are incredibly unlikely to come up with the same subtextual meaning over the course of an entire novel. Any art that can only be interpreted and understood in one way is vapid. So students have to be told what to think about a novel's meaning, and that's just not how art works. If a high school teacher told you exactly what the Mona Lisa means, you'd feel either insulted or confused, and that's basically the two options you have as a reasonably intelligent high school English student.

Asking questions about subtext also assumes that there's a correct answer. Yet every author faces subtext in a different way, and many of them claim to never think about subtext at all. This terrific Paris Review article details one high school student's survey of popular living authors' attitudes on subtext and symbolism. This sort of justified skepticism when it comes to authorial intent destroys the basis for "symbol hunting" in English lit classes, the premise of objectivity shattered in front of a whole class of frustrated students.

For what it's worth, it seems like the AP test graders for English literature face the problem fairly well. You're given two very brief passages and told to analyze some aspect of it. Flash fiction and poetry is much simpler to analyze, limiting the realm of possible answers down to a manageable size. Then the third question on the AP exam lets you pick from a giant list of novels, talking about one particular common thing to analyze like a certain character's sense of justice. Here, the field is so open and non-specific that students are allowed to come to their own conclusions and build them without worrying so much about being "right." Presumably, the AP graders give a passing grade to writing that's competent and well-reasoned, rather than, again, trying to make novels into a puzzle with one solution handed down from God.

Meaning and analysis of literature is a tricky area, and clearly not every English teacher can handle it competently. Students should be taught some techniques of analysis, and that art can have subtextual meaning, but making it the entire topic of a whole cornerstone of education is preposterous. English literature classes need to teach an appreciation for beautiful language, because that's really what literature is about. Write something beautiful. Not a "towering riddle of symbology."

Microsoft Flight - Release Week Review

2012-03-02T08:00:00.001-08:00

Microsoft Flight is exactly what simulator fans guessed it would be when the title was announced. The message is clear: Less simulation, more game, on a free-to-play-but-you-should-pay model. It's a move to make the series much more accessible, and more fun for people who aren't like me.

By default, you control the airplane with your freaking mouse, after all. What the hell?

A game system of achievements, missions, and "Pilotwings"-esque challenges have been laid on top of what is still largely the same flight simulator engine. Basically, this game is trying to appeal to very casual new players and the old flight simulator geeks at the same time, so I'm going to split this review into two, based on two entirely different sets of expectations.

The Review for Non-Simulator Fans:

The first thing anyone will notice is naturally, the installer program. Usually, a review doesn't have to mention the installer, but in this case, it's unfortunately very relevant.

The installer is broken.

That's right, the game may be free, and trust me, it runs pretty well on even a crappy computer, but if you aren't running the exact specs they developed the game on (hell, maybe even if you are) then the installer will crash a few times. This is primarily due to Microsoft Flight getting lumped in with the terrible Games for Windows Live service, which ruined "Fable III" last year. GFWL is supposed to be like an Xbox Dashboard for your PC games, which would be fine if it just worked unintrusively. But nope, the installer for GFWL crashes over and over, and then the installer for Flight crashes because of GFWL, then Flight crashes on load-up because of GFWL, and basically GFWL ruins everything. To play a Microsoft game, you must don this albatross called GFWL and wear it with pride throughout.

But evading that glaring issue for the moment, what is the game like? Well, it's a simple, pretty flight game that lets you fly around Hawaii, doing missions and challenges if you want. The challenges are an awful lot like the "Pilotwings" games, in which you fly a plane through various kinds of hoops. There's Gold Rush, a mode in which you have to fly through 25 hoops in a concentrated dangerous area in a short time limit. There are capital-C Challenges, which have you fly through a linear course of hoops in an interesting area while doing aerobatic maneuvers like loops and barrel rolls. Then there are Aerocaches, hidden hoops you spend a long time finding based on clues the game gives you, so you can fly through those hoops.

Missions are usually as simple as "fly from this airport to that airport" but give you a passenger who says things from time to time and likes to pee her pants. Seriously, every passenger has the bowel and bladder control of a zoo elephant on Flomax, and they like to talk about it. There must be a button to tell them to use the bathroom before a flight, but I haven't found it yet.

The initial game is free-to-play, but you can spend $20 on opening the game world up from the island of Hawaii to the entire island chain of Hawaii. You start off with only an Icon A5 (an airplane/seaplane that looks like a car and flies about as easily), a Boeing Stearman (a biplane), and a Van's Kitplane (one that real people order the parts for then build at home, but no one in the game will shut up about how fast and powerful it is). You can then purchase a Maule bush plane (the coolest little plane from Flight Simulator X) and a P-51 Mustang (WWII fighter). The Maule and P-51 cost approximately ten times too much at around $15 and $5, respectively. They add to the game, and are both neat planes, but Jesus Christ, $15 for one stupid plane with only two paint configurations? And the Mustang doesn't even have a cockpit for some reason, so you can only fly while viewing it from outside, which ruins whatever cool factor it had as DLC.

There's no story or career mode or anything, but you do need to complete missions to unlock the next ones, and you level up and earn experience points based on how well you do in each mission. So it takes some effort to reach the Aerobatic competition mission or missions in which you deliver secret clandestine cargo for some reason.

There's not honestly a ton to do in Flight just yet, but it's an attractive game that's well-optimized and runs pretty well, and it's certainly worth the initial admission price of "free." But if I didn't care about planes that much, the DLC is too costly to justify sticking around any longer. When the game adds new free content, it'll be worth loading up again, but besides that, the experience is done after about a week.

For Simulator Fans:

You might not wanna get out your whole simulator rig right off the bat. The game doesn't support TrackIR, first of all, so no need to put that on. The game doesn't support axis controls for about a million things that should have axis controls, like brakes and trim, so have fun mapping everything to buttons, instead. And if you set all the realism settings up as high as they can go (which isn't very high) then you might be missing out on the action-y challenges, which are clearly made for people who don't have to worry about yaw dynamics. This game is not made for you. The simulator engine is still there, but good luck finding and programming in your ILS approaches (which I think is still possible, if you can find out the real world frequencies), because this game doesn't even mention the radio at all.

I used to like a little FSX add-on called FSEconomy, which populated the world with little transport jobs to do. The missions in Flight are like that, except with only five planes, no job variety, no cash to worry about, and it's not very fun. I don't fully understand why this isn't fun and that third-party add-on was. Maybe it was because I was able to worry about ILS approaches and optimal routes and stuff in FSEconomy. Maybe it was because I could fly anywhere in the world, and not just Hawaii. Maybe it was because I could fly jets and turboprops. Or maybe the cash to buy new planes was the motivator. In any of these cases, FSX with the add-on was the more fun and complete experience, and Flight's got a lot of work to do in order to catch up.

The weather effects in Flight are nice-looking, but limited, and completely static. And if you happen to look in the wrong direction from any height, the clouds all sit in a very noticeable repeated pattern.

The terrain is legitimately very well done, very detailed and satisfying to fly by. However, it's just Hawaii, even if you spend $20. The amount of detail in these islands is almost worrisome, because I can't imagine how much more work they'll have to do to expand the world out a little more. Flight Simulator games have included the entire world for years and years, so Hawaii feels awfully claustrophobic.

I hope you like little General Aviation planes. There is clear evidence that we will get more powerful planes at some point (there's an achievement for hitting Mach 3 when you have to cheat the lack of plane-ripping-apart-at-high-speed physics to even break the regular sound barrier with any of these planes) and that's generally how this game feels. It could be okay, but there needs to be more content. This is a decent start, but it feels like a Beta.

The game looks good, but I want to post this video from another flight simulation work in progress, just to show that people are doing much, much better without any sweet Microsoft money.

Basically, Microsoft Flight is okay, but it's such a step down in terms of content from Flight Simulator X that it's disappointing. You can't even argue that the game is free, because if you want all the content available (five planes and an island chain) you're already up to spending about $40. That's bordering on the real price of FSX. Hell, you can buy FSX right now for $20. It won't look quite as good, and it won't run as well on your system, but you'll get the entire earth with a few dozen planes (including, you know, jets) and about as many missions as Flight offers, including the good old Rod Machado learn-to-fly missions.
In fact, that's one major problem I have with Flight. The game's missions are almost entirely divorced from anything a General Aviation pilot might do. You learn to fly by making a water landing outside a cruise ship, then head straight into aerobatics competitions. There's nowhere to grow! The game doesn't ever teach you anything about flying! When I was younger, I played FS2004 and flew strict traffic patterns so I could earn virtual pilot's licenses like the dork I was. If you are new to aviation and you load up Flight, don't become curious about all the crazy dials in front of you, because nothing in the game will let you know what they are. You can fly at night in Flight, but without the instrument-reading tools to actually be successful without seeing where you're going. Basically, Flight is fun at times but frustrating as hell, which is exactly what we expected and exactly what we got.

Modern Pretenders to the Italian Throne - Where Are They Now?

2012-02-23T18:33:00.001-08:00

A bunch of countries used to have monarchies, got rid of them, but naturally didn't kill every last one of the last king's descendants. As you'll soon find out, leaving these unlanded but entitled successors live may have been a mistake! This is WHERE ARE THEY NOW, ITALY EDITION.

There were only ever four Kings of Italy: Vittorio Emanuele II, Umberto I, Vittorio Emanuele III, and Umberto II. Due in part to Fascist connections and in part to being generally dumb and worthless, Umberto II only lasted for a little over a month in 1946 before Italy declared itself a Republic, hence his nickname, the King of May. But unfortunately, there are still two claimants to this throne, and for some reason they continue to make a show out of declaring themselves King and Duke and so on. Meanwhile, the Italian Republic is perfectly with dignified heads of state like Silvio Berlusconi.

Vittorio Emanuele IV in front of his disappointed father

The first claimant is Vittorio Emanuele IV, or as God calls him, Alberto Carlo Teodoro Umberto Bonifacio Amedeo Damiano Bernardino Gennaro Maria, the Duke of Savoy and Prince of Naples. A good name if you'd like to practice the language. He declared himself king in 1969 and decided to call his fiancee a duchess.

In 1978, Vittorio saw that someone had tied his yacht's dinghy to another yacht so he went around carrying an M1 Garand to see what was up and he accidentally shot and killed a 19 year-old kid. Basically the Italian Dick Cheney, with a few yachts thrown in to make me even more angry while reading about this. After more than a decade of legal proceedings, he served a six month suspended prison sentence. For unauthorized possession of an M1 Garand. Not for, you know, killing a guy.

Vittorio was originally banned from entering Italy along with his dad in 1946, but after decades of hearing his whining, Italy let him return in 2002, on the condition that he completely renounce his claim to the throne. Bear in mind that he KILLED A GUY but whatever, sure, go ahead and AMEND THE CONSTITUTION so he can come home anyway. After his return, he went through the typical old white guy stuff like raging anti-semitism, casino prostitution scandal, and a literal public fistfight with his fellow claimant to the throne, Amedeo (see below). Oh, and what's more, he recently asked Italy to pay him for all the moral damage they did on removing his family from the throne. Nice.

Amedeo, or Paul Krugman in twenty years

The last reigning Italian monarch, Umberto II, had a cousin named Emanuele Filiberto who was Duke of Aosta. That Duke had a son named Aimone. Then that guy had a son named Amedeo, the other claimant to the Italian throne. He's also just a spectacular human being. While in his second marriage, he father an illegitimate child with Kyara van Ellinkhuizen (I only mention her name because it rules). The child has Down Syndrome. Amedeo said he would legitimize her and pay for her welfare, but instead of doing that, he did nothing to help the child until a judge forced him to.

But hey, he didn't kill a guy and hate Jews and run a prostitution ring, so AMEDEO IS THE BEST OF THE PRETENDERS to the Italian throne. I hope he dies in an only slightly gruesome fashion.

Amedeo and the wife he cheated on, and their totally royal-lookin' tats

Do Your Worst - FIFA vs. Nintendo World Cup

2012-02-13T06:39:00.000-08:00

What happens if you don't press any buttons while playing FIFA 12? And what happens if you do the same on the easiest match in Nintendo World Cup? Find out how AI has improved over 20 years of game development in my latest video.

Eli's Big Day: A Super Bowl Retrospective Salad

2012-02-07T22:35:00.000-08:00

"Shucks," he said, as he lifted the Lombard Lump of Lanthanum. As everybody really knew would happen, the Patriots had failed to Strike Back in Episode XLVI. The eyes of the country upon him, and Eli still couldn't get that annoying Tinie Tempah song out of his head. The crease of his lips just slightly upturned, Eli decided to shake the trophy slightly once more. Yeah. Yeah, that felt pretty good.

On an unrelated note, Did you know? The film "Moneyball" is based on a true story. Brad Pitt is also divorced in real life.

Elsewhere, the people of Boston were scheming how to destroy their most successful sports organization ever. Any other town would pick at Tom Brady's superior attitude, his supermodel girlfriend, his excessive ability to appear a good loser. But Boston has no pretensions about their pretension; a superior attitude is preferred. This would be a tough task, much more difficult than kicking the nerds off the Sox.

Eli's offseason thoughts 2012, a complete list:

"Hehheh"
"Shucks"
"DAYum, she shore got me good withat one!"
"Balls are pretty cool I guess"
"Satan's gon' hear the reaper, you're 'a win, you're the sun 'n' the rain! This song rules but what'n'the hell's it sayin'?"
"Pizza rules, man"
"Dammit, Abby, I'm tryin' to watch some Meerkat Manor, alright?"

The most popular ad of the Super Bowl according to a consumer poll was the Dorito's Sling Baby advertisement. As you and Punxsutawney Phil both know, this means six more years of terrible ads. Thanks, America. And while we're on the subject, fuck Boston.

Did you know? No professional football player has ever lasted the entire Super Bowl without pissing. See, they aren't so different from us, after all.

Eli Manning is not just a happy accident of genetics, no. It took generations of conditioning and preparation to produce the perfect specimen you see today. God alone could not be the source of a face that hilariously goofy.

Boston sports fans! Hello, It's Me! You may realize by now that I hate all of you, but Can We Still Be Friends? Don't get too angry at Welkah or Brady, because, and I know this is an old Cliché, but that game's just Dust In The Wind now. You've got to face the Cold Morning Light in Foxborough and think to yourself there's always One More Day. Time Heals. Maybe next year you'll get to Piss Aaron Rodgers off in Super Bowl XLVII.

Couldn't I Just Tell You that Gronkowski might have won the game for you without that injury. And I know he was up and Dancing Barefoot* later that night, but you know it's not easy for a guy like Gronk to score post-Super Bowl. You've got to Believe In Me when I say It Takes Two to Tango. Now This is For the Girls: You're not a Slut just because Gronk in the club made you Breathless. Now of course, Gronk says he doesn't need surgery, but the offseason's so long that It Wouldn't Have Made Any Difference. He keeps it in perspective though, like he always says, "Some Folks is Even Whiter Than Me."

No matter what happens in the next few years, you'll always have the Sweeter Memories of Super Bowls past. For now, forget those who bet on Black, Maria Menounos for instance. I know it's A Long Time, A Long Way To Go, but I Hope I'm Around for your next big sports moment, ready to console/insult your fanbase. Honestly, Sometimes I Don't Know What To Feel. I'm afraid that with Just One Victory your town would get all that entitlement right back. I don't mean to Bang On The Drum All Day about this, but maybe your city lacks Compassion. You know what it is, I think We've Gotta Get You A Woman. Maybe you should see new people, give you Something To Fall Back On outside of sports, you know? The world of sports is all Black and White, so sometimes you can lose that Spark of Life and just keep thinking about the Celtics Sons of 1984 all day. Don't be that kind of sport fan who's on Facebook all day posting nothing but Useless Begging for a new championship. I Think You Know where that kind of fandom gets you.

Blue Orpheus.

4 American Perspectives on Liverpool-Tottenham

2012-02-07T07:02:00.000-08:00

Luis Suarez, contemplating Special Relativity

Frank Jaeger, 29 years old and currently unemployed, says: Zero to zero draw. And both teams stay in the same spot in their league table. I just spent two hours or whatever watching two teams do jackSHIT. My time's worth more than that, you know? I'm not gonna stay home and watch like a whole movie or whatever if everything's just back the way it started at the end of the thing. Enough of this dumb sport on MY ESPN2.

Mei Ling, 27, a prominent rocket scientist, says: OH MY GOOOOODDDD THAT CAT WAS SO DAMN CUTE! IT RAN ACROSS THE FIELD OR PITCH OR WHATEVER AND THEN THE CAMERAS TURNED ON IT AND IT JUST LOOKED BACK AND IT WAS SOOOOO SCARED OH MY GOD. Thankfully, the nice and beautiful people of Anfield just picked it up gently and sent it on its way. Then they even gave it its own Twitter account! Listen to all these great jokes: "Hopefully going to Paw-tugal this summer." THAT IS BRILLIANT.

Hal Emmerich, 21, recently back from studying abroad in London: I am down with this sport, you know? I don't mind if it was a draw or if Tottenham Hotspur's manager wasn't there because his flight was cancelled on the way back from contesting tax evasion charges and the other team's player Luis Suarez is just back from being really racist or whatever! Better those things than steroids! Oh by the way, check out my sweet London accent, it's pretty legit. Here we go.... *ahem* Oi mate, a chav done nicked me trousers, innit?

Robby, the baseball analysis computer, age 3: DATA_WIN_ERR, DATA_LOSS_ERR, DATA_IMPORTANTPLAYS_ERR, It was an emotional night for SUAREZLUIS who played on Monday against former beloved AJAX teammate VANDERVAARTRAFAEL in DATA_YEARSTOGETHER_ERR. DATA_TOUCHINGPLAYERANECDOTE_ERR.

The New Microsoft Flight

2012-01-04T07:21:00.000-08:00

After months of speculation on "Microsoft Flight," finally we are told what's so different about this flight simulator, the product of an all-new team desperate for modern relevance and profitability. From their press release:

After downloading Microsoft Flight for free, players can jump into hours of exciting gameplay on the Big Island of Hawaii.

In addition, players who sign in to their Games for Windows – LIVE account automatically receive additional free content, including the legendary Boeing Stearman plane, supplementary missions, and access to Achievements and an Online Pilot Profile. Those looking to deepen their experience can purchase and download additional content that adds new aircraft, regions and customization options. The frequently released new content for Microsoft Flight includes daily aerocache challenges and updates that make every flight unique and fun.

This confirms expectations that the lack of the word "Simulator" in the title is meaningful. The developers are assuming that simulation fans will either stay with the Microsoft series no matter what it does or they will give their money to X-Plane instead. I'm not sure if anyone guessed that this would mean a free-to-play, pay-to-get-out-of-Hawaii model, but that's not really surprising. It's the pay model with buzz behind it right now, and whether or not it is profitable, it is popular, as demonstrated by Team Fortress 2 and all the DOTA clones that have come out over the past year or so.

I'm perfectly fine with paying extra for airplanes I want. I paid for extra planes from third-party developers with FSX multiple times, even though they were pretty clearly overpriced. I'm not so happy about paying for new regions, however. Part of the appeal of Flight Simulator for me was the ability to go anywhere in the world, and see what all these varying landscapes looked like from the air. The trailer that accompanied the press release shows clear shots of mainland America and China and various other landmarks, but that still implies that the world will be broken up into small chunks. Are international jet flights completely out of this game? The trailer is full of smaller, general aviation aircrafts. I prefer general aviation flight, but that's almost certainly untrue of the simulator geek community at large.

The promise of achievements and daily "aerocache" challenges are to bring in gaming fans as opposed to simulator fans. I'm a fan of both things, so I guess I welcome this change, so long as it doesn't actually intrude upon the simulation, as it well might if each region is too small for legitimate cross-country flights.

The biggest problem with the achievements, however, is the Games for Windows Live login necessary. Games for Windows Live is restrictive, buggy, and annoying, just like every other attempt at a central game server besides Steam. I have an account, but I would really rather not have to deal with GWL every time I wanted to play Flight.

Lastly, the graphics in the trailer linked above look an awful lot like Flight Simulator X, which it's easy to forget came out almost six years ago. Games look better than this now, as evidenced by X-Plane 10. I realize Microsoft Flight will be free-to-play, but it doesn't have to be this low-budget. It's as if no work was done on the graphics outside of individual aircraft since the ACES Studio was fired.

I wouldn't exactly call it disappointing news, as has every commenter on YouTube, but it's sort of predictably mediocre news. Maybe the achievements and daily updates and so on will be very well-done, but the tethering to GWL makes it easy to get pessimistic about the new title. Regardless, it won't be long before we find out, as Microsoft Flight arrives, taxis in, parks, and ties down this Spring.

United States Upsets Martinique 5-0

2011-12-30T17:09:00.000-08:00

I love Football Manager and all, but man, something must be wrong with their team evaluation. But sure, Michael Bradley totally might have claimed that a 5-0 win over Martinique was one of America's greatest soccer achievements.

Do Not Read Every Word

2011-12-30T00:41:00.000-08:00

As I finished reading "The Postmortal," Drew Magary's oddly serious and mostly terrible novel, I just kind of sat there for a moment and regretted what I had done. Why did I spend any amount of time reading this? I like Drew Magary as a silly internet columnist, so I bought his book and gave it a shot. I read the synopsis and ad copy which described the book as basically a speculative fiction thought masturbation on the end of death, but I never expected it to be serious! Magary is a king of poop jokes, dick jokes, and explaining why LeBron James is a cocksucker. That's his thing. Sports and low-brow comedy. This book mentions the Buffalo Bills once and does not tell a single joke. Writers can write what they want, but the author has so colored the experience of the reader in this case that the top review on Amazon.com is titled "Dystopian humor." I will repeat: the book does not contain any attempts at humor.

Here is my own sneering, flippant, spoilery synopsis of "The Postmortal": Authorial self-insert John Farrell gets injected with the cure for death, which stops aging but still allows for non-natural death to occur. The world essentially collapses for several uninteresting reasons: The overpopulation caused by The Cure kills the environment, oil runs out, Russia and China start invading and nuking other countries and their own overpopulated areas, and so on. The basic things that we have assumed for decades will destroy us all. The Cure doesn't even add that much to the story in this respect. These are all already issues we assume we will face even without a cure for death creating a massive population of 25-year-olds around the world. Where's the speculation in this speculative fiction? But anyway, self-insert John goes around falling in eternal love over and over again as old eternal lovers leave or die in various fashions. As the world falls apart, he adapts from a divorce lawyer into Rambo. Then America is nuked over and over and the world ends. HILARIOUS!

The novel is certainly dystopian, as the world we know slowly fills up more and more with violent gangs and global problems that eventually end the freaking world. (Oh, by the way, the most deadly gang is a pro-death, anti-Cure group that likes to paint their heads green. They're called "Greenies." This dark, realistic, dystopian future Magary is trying to paint basically has cast the Green Goblin as its main antagonist. Maybe I'm the only one who finds this funny.) The novel does not do a good job of building a believable world at any point past the present day. The most advanced technology portrayed in the book in the year 2079 is a sort of advanced iPhone called a WEPS and electric cars. Russia and China are the big evil empires, both basically reverting back to their politics of the late '60s. Peak oil dooms our economy and overpopulation dooms our environment. This is speculative fiction, right? Come up with something new! The whole genre exists so people can imagine what might happen in a fictional scenario, like, I don't know, if a cure for death were possible. Basically, Magary comes to the conclusion that a cure for death would sort of help all our normal, well-understood doomsday scenarios happen a little bit faster. Wow, well, that's so interesting.

All the speculation is left to the characters instead, but they don't really do anything interesting, either. Here are the things that a cure for death changes, according to the novel:

Even more marriages end in divorce, and a new sort of 20-year marriage contract is devised. LOL!
Prostitutes are given The Cure at terribly early ages, leading to odd eternally-young but withered-looking people. That's pretty funny!
The government really does start setting up death panels to kill old people. Haha, Obummer!
People now have to basically work forever, because they can never afford to retire. Psssh!
Farming is a bit easier because stud animals can be guaranteed against ever dying, until a weird virus develops called sheep flu that kills hundreds of millions of people. I am literally rolling on the floor, oh my.

So, how does the book qualify as humor? It doesn't! And to be fair, the book cover and ad copy never promise humor. But the writer is so identified with dick jokes that everyone expects it to be funny, and apparently certain reviewers as on Amazon.com just decide to imagine that there must have been jokes, and that he was actually laughing out loud the whole time! The reviewer does mention that the third act becomes terribly serious and oddly unfunny, and it certainly does. But there was no humor before that. There is not a single joke in this book.

So basically what I'm trying to say is that I've wasted my time reading the whole book just to make sure I didn't miss something. Freaking Penguin Books published it, so clearly it must be good enough to enter the mainstream. But I don't understand why. An internet comedy writer decided to write an unfunny speculative novel that doesn't actually say anything new or interesting, but instead paints a picture of the world ending in exactly the way that everyone has thought it will for twenty years.

To conclude the book review portion of this post, I'd just like to include one excerpt I enjoyed from "The Postmortal." The worst metaphor I have ever read appears in the novel on page 297. This is in a passage describing the genesis of sheep flu.

"...nature has an unlimited power to adapt to its environs to suit its needs--to sustain itself. It's not unlike a group of robbers trying to get into a bank vault. They may fail the first dozen times they attempt to break in. But they're constantly scheming, constantly trying to find a way in. As long as they go unnoticed, it's only a matter of time before they succeed."

To be fair, this passage is supposed to be quoting a fake biochemist, and biochemists probably aren't great with metaphors in real life. But Magary came up with this metaphor that is just wrong in every way. That's not how bank vaults work, Drew. You don't just take a crack at it over and over until eventually it opens. That is the last thing a bank vault would ever do. At least according to my popular culture idea of a bank robbery, you pretty much either get a guy who works at the bank to unlock it for you, or you know the combination, or if it's a really weak vault, you just blow the damn thing open. It's really not an iterative process. And bank robbers don't go unnoticed. They run in and stick everybody up, then get out before the cops arrive.

Okay, I'll stop picking on this poor guy's novel. It was competent, and I'm jealous I can't have my own shitty novel on the shelves right now. My book review really isn't the point anyway.

The point is, I have to read entire novels. I can't stop halfway, and it annoys me, because I just end up wasting more valuable time (it's not like I'm gonna live forever, hyuk hyuk). Maybe the ending will absolve the sins of the first and second acts, I think (this hasn't happened yet). I can hardly say I have read a novel without having read the whole thing, but non-fiction I treat differently. So many history books, for instance, are padded out with repetition and pointless extra detail, that I can safely skip entire sections and still feel like I've read the book. You just have to know what to skip and what to read.

I read "Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory" a year or two ago, and it's sort of an extreme example of padding a thesis out to make a book. There's about 100 pages of meat in that book, followed by an impenetrable day-by-day account of every member of the Dutch royal family, none of whom did anything interesting. The meat explains the book's thesis, basically stating that the famed Glorious Revolution of 1688 was actually less an English internal dynastic change and more a bloodless and incredibly successful Dutch invasion of England. That's good, that's interesting, and I think that's accurate. I was convinced. Then the next two thirds of the book are unhelpful fat, telling me everything that happened for the entire century before and after the events central to the book's thesis. So, I stopped reading. Yet I still learned something and felt like I had a positive experience with the book.

In a work of non-fiction, a successful thesis should be placed at the beginning, so people can safely read the important part, then stop. But art seems to demand spreading out its meaning in the least efficient way possible, and that's creeping more and more into non-fiction. Starting a book or article with an example before the thesis the example is meant to prove is just prolonging the experience to the torture of the reader, especially if the writing isn't actually entertaining. Therefore, your novel better by damn entertaining before it tries to be thought-provoking, because if I give a shit about the latter need, I'll read non-fiction instead, which gets the point across better, most of the time.

We don't need so many words to understand these things. There's no need for more examples or print space or even electronic inches full of words. What's the point? Say what you mean, then prove to someone that it's valid, then they can go away.

Don't write a 400-page history book, is what I'm saying, and don't write a novel if you want to say something serious and you aren't an entertaining writer.

By this point, hopefully, you have stopped reading. Not to go all "puppetmaster" on you, but this work is self-parody. I'm criticizing masturbatory endless writing with an article that never ends. It just has more and more typed words going further and further down the page into infinity. I'm saying legitimate things for now, but eventually I will only be copying and pasting, so it becomes more and more clear that this is not meant to be taken totally seriously. Come on man, read the title.

But seriously, "The Postmortal" sucks.

You have full license to hate me and stop reading now. That's what I'm trying to say. This sucks. What I'm typing RIGHT NOW. It's terrible, and it should stop. There's only one way to stop it at this point, I'm afraid to say. And that's to stop reading. Click anywhere else. It's the internet, after all. Pretty entertaining stuff, overall. It's, like, everything there is in the entire world. Besides cool landscapes and stuff. You can only get photos of those. And really, the Grand Canyon is way, way better in person. Why don't you go? It rules, seriously. You have no idea. If you haven't been there.

If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid. If you are reading this part, you are stupid.

By the way, Drew Magary literally apologized for his book in the acknowledgments in the back. Or rather, he said sorry for the lack of poop jokes. Which is the same thing.

The Santa Slammers: New NBA Jam: On Fire Edition Team

2011-12-09T18:57:00.001-08:00

There's another new team in NBA Jam: On Fire Edition today for yet another holiday. The Santa Slammers automatically entered my team select screen today, no need for you to spend your Jam Bucks this time.

The team consists of Santa, a good all-around player, and two elves, named Boom and Shaka. Boom is a strong dunker and blocker (but he's short, so not actually very useful at blocking in-game) and Shaka is good with speed and stealing and he's got a 10 rating in 3-point shots. Pretty good team besides a height disadvantage with the two elf players, honestly.

Flight as Propaganda in Fascist Italy - Reprint from World At War Magazine

2011-11-29T15:03:00.001-08:00

The following is a history piece I did for World at War Magazine at the end of last year. It's not online anywhere, so I thought I'd keep it for prosperity here.

The Fascist Italian state in the 20’s and 30’s wanted to be seen as a modern, industrial power with prestige rivaling any other nation on Earth. One way in which Mussolini and his officers attempted to create that image is through the use of airplanes, a relatively new invention that was just beginning to see use in everyday life. By making and flying airplanes that set new standards for the industry, Italy could appear modern without having to spend too much money or occupy too much of their industry, and with the help of Italo Balbo, that is just what Mussolini did. Through large formation cruises across great distances, record-setting flights by prototype airplanes, and simply the swagger and personality of Balbo himself, Italy enhanced its image through propagandistic aviation.

Italy has a strong history for aviation, despite its lack of industrial power. The Italo-Turkish War of 1911 saw the first ever use of airplanes in war as Italy was conquering Libya. (Segre 150) Mussolini had a keen interest in aviation, and he specifically wanted Fascism and flight to be as linked in the minds of the world as possible. (Segre 148) This effort was helped by the Italian Futurists, artists devoted to the romance of industrial progress and machines. The Futurist Marinetti penned a “Manifesto of Aeropoesia” in 1931 that codified the goals of poetry devoted to airplanes and flight, going along with the existing Futurist aerial music and painting. (Bohn 207) In the theater, Giannina Censi performed Aerodanze, or aerial dances, in the 1930’s which chronicled aeronautic experiences through dance. (Klock 397) Italian designs won the Schneider Trophy, a highly publicized international seaplane race, three of the eleven times it was ever held. Famous air power theorist Giulio Douhet also hailed from Italy, cementing the country’s reputation as a country obsessed with flight and developing its myriad uses in civil and military matters.

Italo Balbo, above any other individual, promoted the use of Italian aviation for propagandistic cruises and record-setting flights. As Minister of Aviation from 1929 to 1933, Balbo led two transatlantic flights of flying boats, using his talent for showmanship for the glory of Mussolini’s government. These cruises created incredible excitement everywhere Balbo’s flights landed. When he landed in Chicago after a transatlantic flight, a column was dedicated in his honor, and even today one can come cross Balbo Avenue in the city. The flight also earned him America’s Distinguished Flying Cross from President Roosevelt himself, and the Sioux Indians made him an honorary Chief, naming him “Flying Eagle.” The word “Balbo” came to mean a large formation of airplanes in English, and the Marx Brothers even parodied him in their film “A Night at the Opera.” (Segre 146)

The Regia Aeronautica (or Royal Italian Air Force) was one of the first independent air branches in the world, and it became dominant among great powers in the 20’s and early 30’s, at least on paper. Italy could claim to hold the second-largest air force in the world, behind France, over that period. (Segre 150) Italian-designed planes could also reach top speeds that could easily compete with any top fighter of World War II, if they could only put them into mass production. Industrial issues and bureaucratic failures would cost them that advantage later on.

Even after Balbo moved on from his aviation post to become Governor of Libya, the Aeronautica continued to make pioneering technological advancements. Balbo’s seaplane flights set a number of long-distance speed records which stood for decades. (Segre 161) In fact, between 1927 and 1939 Italian planes would set 110 aviation records, though few of them were held for a significant period of time. (Segre 162) Most interestingly, Italy claimed in 1940 to have flown the first jet aircraft, the Caproni Campini N.1. Though the aircraft was generally underpowered and did not use a true jet engine, the achievement was publicized at the time as yet another Italian first in the aviation world. (Pavelec 5) It would later become known that Germany had flown a jet aircraft a year prior to Italy without making the event public. Italy was so focused on propagandistic achievements as opposed to actual military development that they created an underpowered and generally impractical “jet” aircraft simply to be first, making their progress public while the other great powers secretly developed on their own.

Despite all this quantifiable success, the Italian air force would still find itself outclassed in actual warfare when it eventually came in 1940. The Aeronautica had made so many technological leaps under his tenure, yet they still sent out squadrons full of regressive biplanes during the failed invasion of Greece. Perhaps more disastrously, Italy had completely failed to develop their own torpedo planes, carrier-based aircraft (or carriers for that matter, the RM Aquila remaining unfinished at war’s end), or dive-bombers. (Sadkovich 130) Their air force was also woefully short of strategic bombers, yet another important piece of other modern air forces.

Many historians would give blame for the Aeronautica’s wartime failure to the use of aviation as propaganda, and even contemporaries of Balbo shared this view. The Aeronautica’s Chief of Staff Francesco De Pinedo went straight to Mussolini with his condemnation of Balbo’s spending. (Segre 161) Even Luigi Federzoni, a Fascist politician and friend of Italo Balbo, said the Aeronautica had become too superficial and too focused on technical development without actually making developments feasible. (Segre 146) Balbo himself criticized the air force before he took over, saying “Our Aeronautica was nothing more than an office for propaganda… now it is necessary to begin building military aviation and its weaponry has not even been studied.” (Segre 152) Although he certainly made the Aeronautica more war-ready than it had been in 1925, his legacy was still undoubtedly one more aligned with propaganda than true military engineering or development.

Italy’s industrial capacity may have been unable to sustain a modern air force regardless of how it was led, however. Although Giulio Douhet once proposed that air power was a cheap alternative to other military solutions and therefore one his native country could support, by World War II this was no longer the case. (Segre 153) Italy’s dominance in the air would not last as other nations mobilized. Between 1940 and 1943, Italy produced 10,000 aircraft in total while in the same period the United Kingdom produced twice as many Spitfires alone. (Sadkovich 130) Though Italy had brilliant aircraft designers, the country’s raw material base could not support serious production levels, and the country’s domestic market was not large enough to support the industry alone. Italian researchers attempted to make the country’s industry self-sufficient by attempting to use tar as a source for airplane fuel, but the experiment was unsuccessful. Raw materials were simply unavailable, and Fascist laws against buying raw materials abroad further starved Italy’s industry. (Segre 168)

Engine design plagued Italy for this entire period, as the same Italian companies that designed record-setting engines for individual planes and prototypes completely failed to develop a mass-produced engine for Italy’s fighters and bombers. (Segre 166) Thus, Italian warplanes were forced to either use seriously underpowered Italian designs or German imported engines.

A number of minor errors and inefficiencies further plagued the air force’s production numbers. A contract to provide armaments for Italian planes went unfulfilled for two entire years in the late 20’s because the manufacturing plant had simply not yet been built. (Segre 151) In 1938, the Regia Aeronautica held a competition to find the design for their next primary fighter. The Reggiane 2000 was deemed best, yet the next production order only mandated that twelve of them be produced, compared to 200 biplanes and a significant number of monoplanes with demonstrated critical design issues. (Sadkovich 133) The Aeronautica thus neglected to actually implement the new design, instead relying on a number of ones they already knew were inferior.

Italo Balbo himself had no faith that Italy would win any upcoming war, and he particularly disagreed with Mussolini’s decision to join Germany. (Segre 147) He did not consider the air force or any other branch of Italy’s military to be ready for modern combat, and he would remark in a letter to Mussolini’s mistress and biographer that he could write an article for her called “How we are getting ready to lose the future war.” (Segre 157) The Aeronautica’s budget was limited, and as other nations geared up for war, Italy was stuck at the same maximum production levels, falling further behind the allied powers. Italy quickly slipped from second to fourth among great powers’ air force strength as war approached, falling behind more and more every year. (Segre 159)

The characteristically Italian use of aviation for propaganda was thus likely not the major cause of their weak air force showing in World War II. Like most other parts of the country’s war machine, industry was the primary weakness holding Italy back, along with a number of inefficient low-level command decisions. The propaganda, whether or not it was truly useful in popularizing Fascism throughout the world, at least left a lasting legacy that is only somewhat tainted by the totalitarianism behind it. Italo Balbo and the Regia Aeronautica can claim to be reasonably important pioneers during aviation’s golden age, helping to popularize flight at a time when its future everyday use was not a certainty.

Claudio G. Segre, Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 143-289.

James J. Sadkovich, “The Development of the Italian Air Force Prior to World War II,” Military Affairs Vol. 51, No. 3 (Jul., 1987) pp. 128-136.

Anja Klock, “Of Cyborg Technologies and Fascistized Mermaids: Giannina Censi's "Aerodanze" in 1930s Italy,” Theatre Journal Vol. 51, No. 4 (Dec., 1999), pp. 395-415.

Willard Bohn, “The Poetics of Flight: Futurist Aeropoesia,” MLN Vol. 121, No. 1 (2006), pp. 207-224.

Sterling Michael Pavelec, The Jet Race and the Second World War (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007), 1-10.

The Gobblers - Turkey Team in NBA Jam: On Fire Edition

2011-11-16T18:38:00.001-08:00

Since I can't find news about this anywhere else on the internet, I'd just like to mention that NBA Jam: On Fire Edition seems to have stealthily added a new unlockable team for Thanksgiving, The Gobblers.

You get a selection of three different turkeys, one without a hat, one with a pilgrim buckle hat, and one with an Indian headdress.

With the two hatted turkeys, you can make a pretty good dunking team, but otherwise they are difficult to play as because their tail feathers are gigantic and make it very difficult to see where the ball is at times.

This is the second seasonal secret team for NBA Jam, the first being the Halloween-themed Skeleton Crew. I'm really enjoying the slow addition of new teams, and I hope they keep it up! We need a Columbus Day team! Amerigo Vespucci, Christopher Columbus, and Vasco da Gama would kill in this game.