The Mallet of Loving Correction Part 20

23.

2010.

I don't get apps. Not as in how they work, but why, in fact, they're called "apps." Because you know what? They're programs. They are compendiums of code, compiled in a manner that when you execute them in a computing environment, they perform a specific task. Like a program. Exactly like a program. Because they are programs. So why not call them programs?

Is it because programs is an ungroovy kind of word? Is it for the same reason station wagons are now called "crossover vehicles"? Will the hip young things using Foursquare on their iPhone to let the world know their apartments are unoccupied and ripe for looting be filled with horror if their cute little larceny abettor were called a program? Does the word conjure up intolerable images of a chunky, misshaven nerd, hovering asthmatically over a Commodore 64, waiting the 20 minutes until Omega Race downloads off the ca.s.sette by strapping on a feedbag of Cheetos and Mallomars and settling down with the latest copy of Byte? Is the word really that bad?

I certainly admit that "app" is a nice phoneme of a word, and that "program" doesn't lend itself to such shortening; "There's a prog for that" doesn't quite have the same ring. And I don't really have a problem calling programs "apps" as long as I can tell my brain it's short for "application," which is a specific genus of program, rather than a wholesale replacement of the word. But I don't think that's how people generally use the word, and it just makes me want to shake my cane and get the kids off my lawn. Recently I read a piece about what it will mean when we switch over to app-based operating systems, and I was all, what? So the new hotness is a screen on which icons are used to access the programs they represent? Just like the Macintosh in 1984? Somebody get me a chair, the future is blowing my G.o.dd.a.m.ned mind.

I like apps. I like the little computers we use to run apps, which fit in my hand and have the same processing and visualizing power a forty pound hulking desktop and a fifty pound CRT screen had a decade ago. I'm not entirely sure why we need a new word to describe these little programs. And while I'm at it, I'm also not sure why you're still on my lawn.

Todd Akin Aug

21.

2012.

Representative Todd Akin has decided to stay in the Missouri senatorial race, bucking the national GOP, which desperately wants him tossed under the bus for the spectacularly stupid "legitimate rape" thing, and you know what? Good for him. Leaving aside my own love of political schadenfreude here, the dude did win the Republican primary fair and square, did he not? He is the plurality choice of Missouri's Republican voters, isn't he? He didn't strangle kittens, set them on fire, and insert them into an unmentionable part of some adorable puppy's anatomy, did he?

No; all he really did was say out loud something that an apparently non-trivial number of conservatives seem to believe, i.e., that some rapes are rapier than others, and (probably less common, at least I hope) that at the rapiest level of rape, you probably aren't gonna get knocked up. It's appallingly stupid and wrong, of course. But that doesn't mean he (up until Sunday, anyway) didn't believe it, or that saying something appallingly stupid and wrong but entirely within the penumbra of conservative thought should disqualify him from partic.i.p.ating in a race he earned the right to be in, through a democratic process. "You stupidly said out loud what many of us actually believe," shouldn't by any rational standard be a reason for his forfeit.

Yes, he's embarra.s.sing the GOP presidential candidate by staying in a race after Romney said he should drop out, and yes, the Democrats will use Akin's comment and his extraordinarily restrictive anti-choice views (reflected, incidentally, in the official GOP platform) like a cudgel on the Republicans every single day that Akin stays in the race. But why is that Akin's problem? By all indications, he was not the favored candidate of the national GOP anyway, so no skin off his nose. The national GOP says they're not going to send him money, but if they want to take the Senate, they're not likely to do it without him, so I imagine sooner or later they're going to slip some cash his way regardless. So again, what impetus does Akin have to do anything other than run? For the rest of the GOP, it's about control of the Senate; for Akin, it's whether or not he has a job come next January. He sure as h.e.l.l doesn't have any reason to quit, and winning, should he win, will be sweet indeed.

And yeah, Democrats binging on schadenfreude, he could win. Even after the "forcible rape" flub, he was still up a point in the polls against Claire McCaskill. He might sink-as I understand it, making an a.s.s of yourself on live TV takes a few days to sink in with the polls-but then again he might not. He apologized for his stupidity, and pitched it in a way that will resonate with evangelicals, for many of whom he is the ideal candidate. Don't kid yourself that he's lost the race already. And of course, that's just one more reason for him to stay in.

I wouldn't vote for Akin; I don't know why anyone would want to vote for someone so heinously ignorant of human biology, which I suspect is indicative of other vasty swaths of ignorance in his mental makeup. I wouldn't encourage anyone in Missouri to vote for him either, as we already have enough appallingly ignorant people in the Senate without adding him to their number. But do I think he should be the GOP senatorial candidate for the state? Absolutely. If Mitt Romney, the national GOP or anyone else has a problem with it, they should bring it up with Missouri's Republican voters. He was their pick for the gig. I think you have to respect that, even if you shake your head that they could choose so poorly.

Tom Becker Apr

2.

2010.

Let me tell you about Tom Becker. In 1991, I got my first full-time professional writing gig, as a movie critic for the Fres...o...b..e newspaper. Tom was the a.s.sistant Features Editor there, which is to say he was my boss.

There are many things that are important for a young writer, but the one I want to focus on at the moment is this one: That it helps to have the right editor at the right time. When I started at the Bee, I was 22, young enough that I got carded at the first "R"-rated movie I was sent to review, and madly, truly, deeply full of myself, because, hey, I was 22 years old and I spent my time watching movies and interviewing movie stars, so obviously I was doing something right, you know? Basically, I was a bit of an a.s.s. Had I been matched with the wrong editor, bad things would have happened.

Tom was, very simply, the right editor for me. I think Tom very quickly sized me up for what I was-a young guy who had the potential to let his ego get in the way of his development as a writer-and also quickly figured out what it was I needed from him, and then set to providing it to me. Tom's method was to be calm and sensible, to give me enough of a lead to try things and then reel me in during the editing process and show me where things needed to be fixed and why. I can't say I always agreed with him-I was a bit of an a.s.s, remember-but how he worked with me did the job just as much as what he did when he edited. It's a long way of saying that he did his job in a way that didn't set off my ego and insecurities. Over the time I worked with him, I did indeed become a better writer.

That being said, I truly learned to appreciate what Tom did for me not when I was at the Bee, but when I left it and took a job at America Online. One of my tasks was to be an editor, and I spent not-inconsiderable time with writers, finding ways to make their writing better, and also finding ways to do it in a way that didn't collapse those writers into tight little b.a.l.l.s of neurosis. Once I did my stint as an editor, I went back to look at some of my raw writing from my Bee years and was horrified at how unfinished it was, and how much it really had needed an editor-how much, in point of fact, it needed Tom Becker.

Shortly thereafter I had reason to visit Fresno again, and on a visit to the Bee I went over to Tom's desk, to thank him for the help he'd given me, and to apologize to him for being, as previously mentioned, a bit of an a.s.s while I worked with him. Tom was amused, and very gracious, and also, I think, happy to know that his work and patience had been recognized and valued, even if that recognition had been a bit late in coming.

I do recognize it and I do value it. What Tom Becker did for me and for my writing helped make it possible for me to go on to do everything else I have been able to do. He's also responsible for me recognizing that as famously solitary as writers are alleged to be, we really don't work alone. Our words-and our skills as writers-very often do need help, which we get from editors, copy editors, proofers and all the other people between the writer and the audience for our words. Writers are fortunate to have people who strengthen our skills and our work, and it doesn't hurt for us to recognize that fact. I may or may not still be a bit of an a.s.s, but I know how much more of an a.s.s I would look like without the help I get from editors and others. I owe that sense of realism, and humility, to Tom.

Tom pa.s.sed away on Wednesday, at peace and with family and friends by his side, in his home. Tom had known for some time that this was coming and from what friends tell me handled it in the gentle and orderly manner I remember him having. I was fortunate to have been able to say goodbye to him before he left us, and to thank him again for everything he'd done for me. He wrote something to me then which I don't think he would mind me sharing with you: It makes me happy to know the influence I had on you. I was never sure at the time. You always seemed like a wild horse running free on the plains. All I tried to do was get you to look in the right direction every now and then. Sounds like I did just that. Thanks so much for remembering and absorbing my teachings and editing. I consider my life as a journalist and editor successful and full with the positive influence I had on you and others. And that makes me happy. I always was trying to teach as I went along. I think I did with you. Now you are spreading the word to others, so maybe there will be fewer hurt feelings and more working together between writers and editors in the world thanks to your stories about me. I am honored.

In fact, it is I who am honored, to have worked with Tom and to have been taught by him. And I am honored to be able to tell all of you this little bit about him and about how he was important to me.

If you are a writer, in Tom's honor I would ask you to think about the editors and others who have helped to you to become the writers you wanted to become. Everyone else, think on your teachers and mentors who with patience and humor and possibly even a bit of love looked past your unformed nature, saw what you could be, and helped you be just that.

Your appreciation of their work would be a fine memorial to my friend, teacher and editor Tom Becker. You might not have known him, but I bet you know someone like him. Let that person know that you know what they did for you. You won't regret it.

Twitter Apr

3.

2009.

Ben rather crankily wants to know my thoughts on: Twitter: A revolution in information consumption & dissemination OR I don't give a f.u.c.k what you want for breakfast.

What Twitter is, frankly, is a public exhibition of what used to be a private activity. It's phone texting-its character limit is right in line with the character limit on SMS texts-but rather than to just one person it goes out to dozens, or hundreds, or thousands, depending on who you are and how many followers you have. That Twitter has become ma.s.sively popular is unsurprising because texting is ma.s.sively popular; indeed, I have a suspicion that if you told most people under the age of 35 that they had to choose between texting or making voice calls, voice communication would drop to next to nothing. For a generation that grew up texting, Twitter isn't a revolution, it's simply an expansion of how they were communicating anyway. And in point of fact, it's even better than blogging for quite a lot of people, because when you're limited to 140 characters, you don't have to feel bad about not having all that much to say.

That most Twitter communication is aggressively ba.n.a.l should also not come as a huge surprise. First, news flash: people are ba.n.a.l. Yes, all of us, even you (and especially even me). Even the great minds of the world do not spend all their time locked in the contemplation of the mysteries of the universe; about 90% of their thoughts boil down to "I'm hungry," "I'm sleepy," "I need to poo," "Check out the [insert secondary s.e.xual characteristics] on that [insert s.e.x of preference], I'd really like to boink them," "I wonder what Jennifer Aniston is doing right now, John Mayer can no longer tell me on his Twitter feed," and, of course, "Look! Kitty!" That the vast majority of Twitter posts encompa.s.s pedestrian thoughts about common subjects like food, music, tech, jobs and cats is entirely unsurprising, because this is what people think about. h.e.l.l, even Stephen Fry, patron saint of Twitter, tweets about what fruit he's having and what's going on with his iPhone. And he's more clever than any six of the rest of us will ever be. When Stephen Fry tweets about his G.o.dd.a.m.n snack, you can be forgiven about tweeting that, say, your cat has fur (which, in fact, I have just now done).

Second, phone texting, Twitter's technological and philosophical predecessor, was not known as a place for weighty, meaty thoughts-it was known for "Where R U?" and "IM N claz N IM SO BORED" and other such messages of limited scope and mental appeal. But that's pretty much what texting is for: Short thoughts about not much. That Twitter, shackled as it is to 140 characters per post, is not the Agora Reborn should not come as a huge shock.

However, this is a feature, not a bug. Twitter, along with text messages, IMs and to some extent blog posts (although not this particular blog post) and social networking pages belong what I think is a relatively new category of communication which I call "Intermediary Communication"-which is to say communication that exists between the casual, spontaneous and intimate nature of oral communication (talking to a group of friends, as an example) and the more planned, persistent and broadcasting nature of written communication. Intermediary communication feels spontaneous and intimate, but it exhibits the persistent and broadcast nature of written communication, and this is what often gets people in trouble-the famous "oh c.r.a.p I talked s.h.i.+t about my job on my blog and my boss read it and now I'M FIRED" thing, exemplified by Heather Armstong.

But while this intermediary communication has its pitfalls, it also has its advantages. Fact is, the reason Twitter is so popular is that people like all those ba.n.a.l little messages that skitter across the service. For the people you know-friends, family and co-workers-those "I'm eating fruit now" messages take the place of the little, not-especially-notable interactions you have on a daily basis that add up to a familiar and comfortable sense of the world and your place in it. When in fact you can't see those friends, family, etc on a daily basis, these ba.n.a.l tweets still group them into your daily, unremarkable life, and in doing so make them seem closer and therefore more of a part of your world. Twenty years ago you'd maybe make time to call distant members of your tribe once a week, and that sort of punctuated, telegraphed communication would have to do. Twitter (and other intermediary communication like it) puts them quite literally back into the stream of your life. This is not a bad thing.

For the people you don't know-the celebrities whose feeds one follows-the ba.n.a.lity of Twitter makes you feel closer to them, too. Hey! Stephen Fry eats fruit! I eat fruit! He's just like me! And then you send Stephen Fry a reponse tweet about the fruit you had, and bask in your fruit-enjoying fraternity. Does this benefit Stephen Fry somehow? I suspect not; a shared liking for juicy, vitamin-C-bearing foods is probably not a bond that directly translates to Mr. Fry's agent landing him quality roles; likewise, I'm not sure John Mayer's hyperactive tweetery making him look like geek America's spastic younger brother is going to translate into music sales. But I don't think marketing is why Fry or Mayer fiddle about with Twitter; I think they do it for the same reason everyone else does. And in both cases it's probably nice for them to have a halfway "normal" communication channel.

(There are celebs who look at Twitter as just another marketing avenue, mind you. You will know them by the fact their feeds, in addition to being ba.n.a.l, are also boring.) All of which is to say that the ba.n.a.lity and silliness and unremarkable pedestrian nature of Twitter is what the service actually has going for it-it's baked into the service's DNA. It's why it's successful and why it (or something very much like it) will continue to be successful going forward.

(This entry: 6,091 characters. Not suitable for Twitter. Which is, you know. Why I keep the blog.) The Venereal Disease Channel Imaginatizes Greatastically Mar

17.

2009.

People have been asking me to weigh in on the whole "SciFi Channel changing its name to Syfy" thing, so here's me weighing in: Meh. It seems like pointless fiddling for the sake of pointless fiddling to me, but if it makes them happy, then, you know. Have fun with it, guys. I like a fair amount of the programming, so I'll watch it whatever they call it.

That said, I think they might have picked a better name. Apparently one of the motivating factors to change the name from "scifi" to a phase-changing-vowel-filled h.o.m.onym was to have a name that was trademarkable and extensible, and it seems no one else in the world actually uses the word "syfy" for anything. Well, except Poland, where the word is used to identify crusty, scabby s.e.xually transmitted diseases, and no, this is not a joke. No one there is going to use the word to a.s.sociate with their product, any more than someone here might try to market, say, Chlamydia brand adhesive bandages.

Note to SciFi Channel: when your new brand ident.i.ty means "venereal disease" in any language, it's the sort of thing that-excuse the term-gets around.

You would think NBC Universal's brand people might have caught this (heh) ahead of time. They do have people for this. And maybe they did catch it, but figured, heck, who knows Polish? Aside from 40 million Poles? Problem is, this is one of those things that Those Perverse Internets, and the equally-perverse people involved in them (not coincidentally SciFi Channel's primary viewing demographic) will find out almost immediately and then proceed to have a big ol' jolly field day with. As they did, and are doing.

Look: When your core audience looks at your new branding and exclaims "Hey! It's the Venereal Disease Channel!" from the day you announce it until the day, a few years later, when you finally slink away from it and try to pretend it never happened, you may have chosen your brand ident.i.ty poorly. Yes, "Syfy" is brand extensible. But then, the Polish "syfy" is extensible too, in its way, although not in a way most people would want. So, yes, this is a problem. Glad it's not my problem.

To be honest, however, the incipient "Syfy" branding doesn't bother me nearly as much as the new brand's tagline: "Imagine Greater." I mean: really? "Imagine Greater"? What, were complete sentences too dear down at the marketing shop? I know there's a recession on, but maybe they could have checked in the couch cus.h.i.+ons for loose change. Or if they were simply intending to break grammar into pieces, for jazzy, kicky effect, why not go all the way? "Imagine Greater" is settling for the bronze when "Imaginate Greatably" is within one's grasp. And, hey, it's brand extendable.

"Syfy" tells me the branding people involved here don't know how to read Polish, and you know what, that's fine. But "Imagine Greater" suggests they don't know how to read English, either, and that's not. Seriously, SciFi Channel: you paid someone for "Imagine Greater"? h.e.l.l. I wouldn't have given that to you for free. Clearly I need either to get into marketing, or run away from it as fast as I possibly can.

What Happens in the Acela Quiet Car Stays in the Acela Quiet Car, Unless Twitter is Involved Jun

7.

2012.

Yesterday I traveled from New York City to Philadelphia on the train, specifically Amtrak's Acela high-speed train. The compartment I ended up sitting in was the "Quiet Car," i.e., the one in which you don't use your cell phone to make calls and otherwise keep things down to a murmur. Naturally, I went on Twitter to joke about it: On the Acela to Philadelphia. In the "quiet car." My airhorn is soon to be a delightful surprise!

But then something strange began to happen: People are beginning to hum in the quiet car of the Acela. I think that may be against the rules.

And then, my friends, it got nuts: OH MY G.o.d THE QUIET CAR OF THE ACELA HAS ERUPTED INTO A FULL BLOWN PRODUCTION OF STEPHEN SONDHEIM'S "MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG"

HOLY c.r.a.p NOW THE QUIET CAR ON THE ACELA HAS THE MOST RIGHTEOUS GUITAR SOLO BATTLE SINCE RALPH MACCHIO AND STEVE VAI IN "CROSSROADS"

GEEZ LOUISE NOW EACH OF US IN THE ACELA QUIET CAR HAS BEEN GIVEN A TEN FOOT j.a.pANESE DRUM AND TOLD TO BEAT IT FOR OUR VERY LIVES.

JUMPIN' JIMNEY THEY HAVE BROUGHT OUT THE VUVUZELAS AND DEMANDED A JAZZ FREE FORM VERSION OF "NOVEMBER RAIN"

DEAR LORD IAN MCKELLEN AND PATRICK STEWART HAVE ARRIVED IN THE ACELA QUIET CAR AND ARE NOW PERFORMING A DECLAIM-OFF.

Now arriving in Philly. THIS HAS BEEN THE MOST UNSATISFACTORY QUIET CAR EVER AND I WILL COMPLAIN TO AMTRAK.

Seriously.

What I Think About Atlas Shrugged Oct

1.

2010.

In the wake of a side-swipe comment about the delusional nature of some Ayn Rand fans, I was asked by a friend of mine to share my thoughts on Atlas Shrugged with the general public. I suspect this friend then went off to make herself some popcorn in preparation for the presumed inevitable mind-losing that will occur in the comments. That's what I am to you people: cheap entertainment. Well, fine.

I've mentioned it in pa.s.sing before, but I'll go a little more in detail about it now. I enjoy Atlas Shrugged quite a bit, and will re-read it every couple of years when I feel in the mood. It has a propulsively potboilery pace so long as Ayn Rand's not having one of her characters gout forth screeds in a sock-puppety fas.h.i.+on. Even when she does, after the first reading of the book, you can go, "oh, yeah, screed," and then just sort of skim forward and get to the parts with the train rides and motor boats and the rough s.e.x and the collapse of civilization as Ayn Rand imagines it, which is all good clean fun. Her characters are cardboard but they're consistent-the good guys are really good in the way Rand defines "good," and everyone else save Eddie Willers and the picturesquely doomed Cherryl Brooks are obnoxious s.h.i.+theels, so you don't really have to worry about ambiguity getting in the way of your zooming through the pages.

Rand is an efficient storyteller that way: You know early on what the rules of her world are, she sticks with those rules, and you as the reader are on a rail all the way through the story. It's not storytelling that works for everyone, and it doesn't work for me with every book I read. But if you're in the mood not to work too much, it's fine to have an author who points dramatically at the things she wants you to look at, and keeps the lights off the things she doesn't. Basically, I find her storytelling restful, which I suppose isn't a word used much to describe her technique, but which fits for how it works for me.

A good way for me to describe how I relate to Atlas Shrugged is to note that one time when I was in college in Chicago, the only way for me to get back home to California for the Christmas holidays was to take a Greyhound bus. This meant a 53-hour-long bus ride in the company of felons (no joke; the bus stopped at Joliet and some rather skeevy-looking parolees from the prison got on. One of them decided to sit by me and I was treated to delightful stories of prison rape all the way through Iowa). The way I handled the trip was to take Atlas Shrugged along for the ride, and when I was bored, to crack open the book and start reading. The book would put me in a fugue state and when I looked up again from the pages, an entire state would have gone by. It's no exaggeration when I say that Atlas Shrugged probably saved my sanity on that bus trip. So well done, Ms. Rand, and thanks.

That said, it's a totally ridiculous book which can be summed up as Sociopathic idealized nerds collapse society because they don't get enough hugs. (This is, incidentally, where you can start your popcorn munching.) Indeed, the enduring popularity of Atlas Shrugged lies in the fact that it is nerd revenge p.o.r.n-if you're a nerd of an engineering-ish stripe who remembers all too well being slammed into your locker by a bunch of football d.i.c.kheads, then the idea that people like you could make all those d.i.c.kheads suffer by "going Galt" has a direct line to the pleasure centers of your brain. I'll show you! the nerds imagine themselves crying. I'll show you all! And then they disappear into a creva.s.se that Google Maps will not show because the Google people are our kind of people, and a year later they come out and everyone who was ever mean to them will have starved. Then these nerds can begin again, presumably with the help of robots, because any child in the post-Atlas Shrugged world who can't figure out how to run a smelter within ten minutes of being pushed through the birth ca.n.a.l will be left out for the coyotes. Which if nothing else solves the problem of day care.

All of this is fine, if one recognizes that the idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt. This is most obviously revealed by the fact that in Ayn Rand's world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal p.r.i.c.k, which is what he'd be anywhere else. Yes, he's a genocidal p.r.i.c.k with excellent engineering skills. Good for him. He's still a genocidal p.r.i.c.k. Indeed, if John Galt were portrayed as an intelligent cup of yogurt rather than poured into human form, this would be obvious. Oh my G.o.d, that cup of yogurt wants to kill most of humanity to make a philosophical point! Somebody eat him quick! And that would be that.

The fact that apparently a very large number of people don't recognize Galt as the genocidal p.r.i.c.k he is suggests a) Rand's skill at stacking the story-telling deck is not to be discounted, and b) as with any audience with a large number of nerds in it, a non-trivial number of Atlas Shrugged readers are possibly far enough along the poorly-socialized spectrum that they don't recognize humanity does not in fact easily suss out into Randian capitalist superheroes on one side and craven socialist losers on the other, or that Rand's neatly-stacked deck doesn't mirror the world as it is, or (if one gives it any sort of genuine reflection) model it as it should be.

To be fair to Rand, she's certainly not the only science fiction/fantasy author who has lashed together a universe out of twine and novel but shallow philosophical meanderings (Objectivism: the spongy white bread at the Great Buffet of Human Ideas), and then populated it with characters tuned to exist in that universe and that universe only. She's not even the only author to have enthusiastic nerds confuse that Potemkin universe with a possible one, who then go about annoying the rest of us, who have no desire to be characters in that sort of universe, thank you kindly. But on the other hand, Rand did spend a lot of time getting high on her own supply, which most pushers are smart enough not to do, and at the moment, her claque of enthusiastic nerds certainly seems to be the most energetic, which doesn't really please me. I wish they could be more like Heinlein nerds, who keep to their own freeholds.

So that's how it susses out for me. As a pulpy, fun read about an unrealistic world that could never happen, I give Atlas Shrugged a thumbs up. As a foundational doc.u.ment for a philosophy for living in reality with other actual live human beings, I rank it below Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Secret, both of which also have the added value of being shorter.

What It's Like to Have Me For a Dad Jul

26.

2011.

My daughter is at ranch camp this week-which is not a camp where everything has been covered in delicious ranch dressing but rather a camp where the campers take care of their own horse for a week-and while the camp does not allow the campers to bring electronic equipment with them, it does allow parents to send e-mails, which they will then print out and deliver to the campers. Here is the e-mail I just sent my child.

h.e.l.lo, sweetheart! I thought I would drop you a note to let you know we love you and are thinking about you and hope you are having fun out there with your horses and new friends and everything.