FTFF: an up button for the Finder

I've been looking around at what the FTFF (Fix The Fucking Finder) blogs have been griping about, to see what they have to say about the 10.5 preview. My biggest complaint with the 10.4 Finder is the fact that search folders are second-class citizens, and the "integrated search" that Apple (and Microsoft and Be) have promised us never materialized. It looks like they fixed that in 10.5. We'll see.

But that's not what everyone else seems to care about. In fact, the top three complaints are:

1. no "spacial Finder"/settings memory,
2. beachballs for unpreviewable files/lost network connections, and
3. no "up" button on the toolbar.
   

I don't have a solution for the first two (and #2 bothers me), but #3 is easy.

Personally, I don't have much problem hitting cmd+up arrow, or holding cmd and clicking on the window title to move upward. However, apparently plenty of people do. So, here's the answer:

Fire up Script Editor (in Applications/AppleScript) and paste the following:
tell app "Finder" to set target of front window to parent of target of front window

Now save it to your home directory as an application without splash screen called, say, Finder Up. Go back to the Finder and drag "Finder Up" into the toolbar. You may have to hold it still for a second, but then it'll appear as a toolbar button, and you can drop it. Now, whenever you want to go up to the parent folder, click that button. Tada!

You may notice that the icon in your toolbar is the generic AppleScript application icon, which isn't too helpful. If you want to fix this, find a .icsn file that you like (maybe the Sort Ascending.icns buried somewhere in System--Spotlight'll find it for you), preview it, copy it, get info on Finder Up, click the icon, paste, and now you have a new icon. (You can also copy a .png, .tiff, or other image file, as long as it has transparency.)

Finally, you may notice that it takes a fraction of a second for the up arrow to do its thing, and you get the slightly annoying effects of an app launching and quitting whenever you click it. You can solve this by saving the script as a stay-open application and rewriting it as follows:
on run
tell application "Finder"
set target of front window to parent of target of front window
activate
end tell
end run

on reopen
run
end reopen

While you're at it, you can save it as an application bundle instead of an application, click the "Bundle Contents" button, and replace the applet.icns with the .icns file you found somewhere else.

Yeah, it's a bit more complicated, but it works.

It still doesn't grey out when you're already at the parent directory and can't go up any farther, and so on. It wouldn't be too hard to write a real application that does all of this right, but this ought to be good enough.

Music I've Made

I just realized that I have pages all over the internet, with nothing to link them together. To make things better, some of them are years out of date. So, here's my musical history, with links to mp3s and websites where I have them.

Painted Invisible (2003-present)

A solo project that's somewhere between electroclash and futurepop (both terms I hate, by the way), as well as the name of a bouncy synthpop duo that never happened and an earlier trance/pop solo project.

An mp3 collection for Painted Invisible and Pneumat IX (below).

A web page about Painted Invisible and my musical history.

Pneumat IX (2005-2005)

Slower and moodier synthpoppish stuff. Pneumat IX was a duo with my former flatmate Francis until he flipped out and took off (with a bunch of my CDs and equipment) for LA.

The band's myspace page. Just about nothing on this page is true. For example, you may notice that the music that Francis claims as his deeply personal solo music is bit-for-bit the same mp3s that are on the other pages above and below. Oh well, it's still good music.

My personal myspace page, from the Pneumat IX era. I haven't updated it in almost a year, and I'm not even sure which email address it was attached to. There's some music-related stuff there, and some more blogs if you're bored.

The original Pneumat IX page, which we never finished.

The mp3 repository for the above site.

DJ Payn (1989-present)

My usual club DJ name. I've released a few mash recordings, but I haven't looked for them online.

Ice IV.V (1999-2002)

Electronic parody covers. My first post-Ice IX solo project. Most famous for "Del Taco Man," And One's "Techno Man" rewritten about various people in the LA industrial scene hanging out at a Del Taco. Other targets included Idiot Stare via Falco ("Rock Me Chadley Bishop"), NIN ("Closer to Lunch"), and... I can't remember. I no longer have any of this music. If you have any, please let me know.

LAGoth.net writeup, thanks to archive.org. Also see a later version, with the logo.

I have no idea how I ended up on last.fm. But someone must have this song--two different versions, in fact.

HacK (1999-2003)

Psytrance/ebm solo project. I never finished anything, mainly because I spent all my time making new sounds in Reaktor instead of writing music. Reaktor is dangerous. Also the name of three different clubs I promoted. No websites appear to exist.

Mulder's Files (1996-2000)

Synthpop all about the X-Files, basically a S.P.O.C.K ripoff. No finished recordings exist, and I can't find any evidence online that I existed.

Ice IX (1994-1999)

Synthpop/hiphop/ebm/techno. Ice IX was originally an SF band called RU486, but after founder Zeke moved to LA, it ended up turning into Ice IX, which I joined shortly thereafter. Over the years, we morphed from generic Laeatherstrip-style ebm to something unique and cool--partly because I got more involved, but mainly because Zeke's tastes evolved. Our album never came out, but we had a bunch of compilation appearances (not one of which I now have a copy of--again, contact me if you do). Not to be confused with Ice Nine (Levi from TKK's band) or Ice 9 (Chris Randall from Sister Machine Gun's band), from around the same time and in roughly the same musical space.

Official web site on Hallucinet, thanks to archive.org.

An interview in an online 'zine.

The discogs page, proof that someone actually paid me for a recording at least once. Although I think I made more off mp3.com (before they started screwing over their artists) than the whole band made from all the comps combined.

An everything2 node.

Internet Covers Database results, notably including not a single one of the covers we recorded on comps (I think Human League, Gary Numan, Run DMC, Kraftwerk?), and including some that we never even played live.

Krypton Angels (1992-1995)

Bad ebm. I wish someone had told me that the world didn't need another FLA ripoff. One demo recording lost years ago, and that's OK. No references online.

23 Naked Jesi (1991-1996)

Annoying old-school industrial noise. All demos lost, and I don't care. No references online.

Beat Traitor (1988-1992)

New beat/ebm/industrial collaboration with a guy named Topher back in college. One demo recording lost years ago, but I'd love to hear it again. No references online.

Battery Club (1987-1989)

"College rock" (which means somewhere between indie and alternative, before those terms existed) band that went through numerous incarnations before me and the other guitar player (Topher) decided we liked playing keyboards better and started Beat Traitor. No demos, don't care, no refs.

Why I Love Python

Plenty of people, including die-hard lisp-heads and big names in the open source field, have already written about why they love Python. Google does most of their new development in Python, and it's cut their development cycles radically. And Python is the language behind BitTorrent, without which I wouldn't have been able to download replacements for all the CDs that have been stolen or broken over the years (not that I would ever do such an illegal thing). Any company that uses Java or C++ or .NET without thinking about Python first is giving a sure sign that they don't know what they're doing. (Of course I still end up working for them. Well, if they're going to throw money away, I'll take some of it.)

But forget about the technical merits of high-level languages, the beauty of indentation as structure, the interactive environment, etc. You can find all of that in other languages, but none of them are Python. Here are some of the less-commonly given reasons why Python rocks.

First, there's the name. It started off as a Monty Python reference, which is a great way to declare uber-geekiness while (to distinguish it from C++) at the same time not taking yourself too seriously. The only way to top that would be to name the language after a Hitchhikers or Discworld reference, like Slartibartfast or Rincewind. And using spam and eggs instead of foo and bar makes it impossible for any Python user to deny being a geek.

The fact that Python is also the name of a snake (not to mention the Israeli update to the Sidewinder missile) made it way too easy for O'Reilly to come up with the cover for their "Programming Python" book (unlike, say, caml, which is named for animal already in use by Programming Perl). However, now that Python is big news, the community has to worry about offending ophidophobes and Christians--so all of the old logos involving snakes and/or 16-ton weights (especially the MacPython logo, with a realistic snake wrapped around an apple) had to go.

This led to one of the most entertaining discussions I've ever seen, as hardcore geeks tried to figure out how to be politically correct. And the resulting logo is pretty cool, too.

In fact, the Python development lists are often entertaining to read, which I can't say about any other language.

Then there's the fact that Python's Beneficial Dictator For Life has the same name as Risky Business's Killer Pimp (played by Joe Pantoliano in what I think was his first major role). Yes, his name is Guido--and he's not even Italian; he's Dutch. How cool is that?

Python is also the only programming language with its own font (designed by Guido's brother Just).

Pythonistas (and isn't that much cooler than "C++ experts" in itself?) talk about the Zen of Python, and really mean it. Try typing "import this" into a Python interactive session.

Meanwhile, while C++'s big future plans are for a "200x" version, and Perl is looking ahead to a version 6 that may come out any decade now, Python is looking ahead to the year 3000. When we're all disembodied software agents, we will reprogram ourselves in Python.

Then again, what do I know; I used to code in Forth.

Python Macros

OK, I should post this on comp.lang.python, but I wanted to think it through first by posting it somewhere nobody's going to read. Also, I wanted something techy on my blog.

For the last 300 years or so, Python fans with lisp envy have been arguing that Python needs macros, while Python fans with lispophobia have been arguing that Python should avoid macros like the plague.

The problem is simple: How do we make macros usable (as opposed to the C preprocessor) and implementable, while still being Pythonic?

The only answer anyone ever comes up with is "sort of lisp-like" or "sort of scheme-like" or "anything but the C preprocessor," or at best, "sort of lisp-like but with Python doc strings." Without a good proposal, Guido tells everyone to shut up, and Python stays macro-free.

I think the answer has to come from Dylan. Dylan has a macro system is both hygenic (like Scheme) and powerful (unlike Scheme). But Dylan isn't a syntaxless Lisp derivative; it's a language with a quasi-Algol syntax (like Python). And the macros preserve the syntax. Pretty cool. The classic article is D-Expressions: Lisp Power, Dylan Style (Jonathan Bacharach and Keith Playford, 1999).* (Watch out, that's a PDF.) You can also read The Dylan Reference Manual.**

I'm not going to explain Dylan macros in detail. There are three secrets.

(1) Pattern-matching rewrite rules are sufficiently powerful for almost all purposes. Full-scale code-generating procedures break syntax, but fortunately, they're unnecessary. While there are a few annoying limitations to Dylan macros, they have to do with the implementation, not the concept.

(2) Algol-like languages have useful Skeleton Syntax Trees (SSTs), just like Lisp. Macros based on raw or tokenized text either break syntax, or are too restricted (like cpp). Macros based on ASTs are useless unless you can modify the AST parser on the fly. With macros based on SSTs, a single one-time change to the parser is needed to allow macros, but then you're done.

(3) Hygenic macros need an escape clause. One reason that Lisp and C macros are dangerous is that they accidentally inject names into the scope of the calling code, possibly overriding the caller's names. One reason that Scheme macros suck is that there is no way to inject names into the calling scope. Dylan solves this by making new names hygenic by default, but providing the "?=" form to circumvent this.

Here's an example of a Dylan macro:

 define macro with-open-file
   { with-open-file (?stream:name, ?options:*) ?:body end }
   =>
   { let ?stream = #f;
     block()
       ?stream := make(, ?options);
       ?body
     cleanup
       ?stream & close(?stream)
     end block }
 end macro

 with-open-file(stream, locator: "phonenumbers")
   process-phone-numbers(stream);
 end with-open-file;

Here's what the same thing could look like in Python:

 defmacro withfile:
   """withfile(stream, °options, **kw) -> Open a file for use without the enclosing scope"""
   withfile(?stream:name, ?options:*, ?kw:**):
     ?:body
   =>
   ?stream = file(*?options, **?kw)
   if (?stream):
     try:
       ?body
     finally:
       ?stream.close()

 withfile(stream, name="phonenumbers"):
   processPhoneNumbers(stream)

Of course this is a pretty bad example for Python--but it's short.

Anyway, there are a few obvious differences. In Python, indentation is part of the SST. There are docstrings. The list of matchable forms is somewhat different--in particular, "*" matches an argument list, rather than arbitrary syntax. (We might need a form to match arbitrary syntax, the "*" and "**" forms should obviously match the usual Python meaning. Maybe "***"?)

Why do macros need names? Not just for debugging, but so you can undefine them with "del withfile" the same way you can with functions.

I haven't written an implementation. The obvious first step is to build a preprocessor that converts Python source with macros into macro-expanded standard Python source. But I'm not sure that's sufficient to show off the idea, because it doesn't show how macros will integrate with the parser, or how macros can be used in interactive code.

* Look, an actual blog-style link in my blog!
** And another one!

Maps

I was just playing with the built-in map feature in Flock, which uses the new Yahoo! Maps.* Their maps aren't much different from Google's, or Microsoft's. How many ways can you Ajax up a map GUI. And, after all, it's all the same data, isn't it?

The funny thing is, it's not all the same data.**

According to Google, that train track that runs two blocks down the hill from me is called CalTrain, and the stop is called 22nd St. CalTrain Station. It carries trains all the way down to the Google Shuttle Transfer Station (which most of the world calls the Mountain View CalTrain Station) and beyond.

According to Yahoo!, that train track is called Southern Pacific, and there is no stop to be given a name. For a forward-looking company like Yahoo!, that's charmingly old-fashioned.

Yahoo! also thinks that Chavez is still called Army between Mission and Bayshore--just as old-fashioned, if not quite as charming.

On the other hand, according to Google,*** 22nd St. runs all the way from Potrero to Missouri. This would be a really handy street if it existed.

In fact, the day after I moved to Potrero Hill, armed with a Google Maps printout, I got off a bus at 22nd & Potrero to walk home across 22nd. I immediately discovered that this was wrong unless I wanted to jump over the freeway. But after detouring, everything looked fine. Until 22nd St. became a dirt path, a stone stairway, someone's driveway, a back yard, an unmarked and unlit path, and, finally, a cliff overlooking a fenced-in construction zone. (If you make it down the cliff and past the fence, it becomes a real street again for two car lengths or so.)

From that cliff, I think I could have jumped on top of the first house on the block, run downhill along the rooftops, and then rapelled into my flat. But I didn't have my climbing gear, or my action-movie theme music, so I had to detour two blocks out of the way.

At least I didn't try to drive across 22nd.

To Google's credit, there are actually signs saying 22nd St. every step of the way. Even at Connecticutt, where it's a path into someone's backyard to the west and a cliff to the east, it's clearly marked as 22nd St.

Yahoo! has 22nd St. running from Kansas to the point where it turns into a staircase. That not quite right, but it's the part that's theoretically drivable as long as you don't mind driving your SUV on narrow dirt paths that clearly don't go anywhere other than a staircase.

Looking up one of my old neighborhoods, I discovered to my surprise that Stanley Ave. connects up to Nichols Canyon and Curson. To get to Curson would require driving through someone's front door, out their back door, around their pool, through a hedge, and then up a 45-degree incline. To get to Nichols Canyon would require using their neighbor's garage door as a ramp to jump over the garage and the cliff behind it. I think you get an Insane Stunt Bonus for that one.

* Do I really have to type the exclamation point whenever I write Yahoo!? If I end an exclamation with their name, do I need two, as in "Damn that Yahoo!!"? I had a phone interview with Yahoo!, and the guy on the phone actually said, "The point of this interview is to find out if you're a Yahoo!" I could hear the exclamation point. At that moment, I began to wonder if maybe I was a Google. I didn't feel like one, but I called. They took so long to set up a phone interview that I already had four offers. So I guess I'm not going to work for a company that makes AJAX maps. Oh well.

** There's also search data, in addition to map data, and Google clearly beats Yahoo! here. If I leave off the Ave or the N on N. Stanley Ave, Google asks whether I mean Stanley Ave or Stanley Dr, or N or S. Yahoo just puts me three miles away from either of the two streets.

*** A big chunk of this was written shortly after I moved, whenever that was. Since then, Google appears to have fixed their data, and now has exactly the same 22nd St. as Yahoo! Maybe someone heard me complaining? Meanwhile, there's a dirt trail down from Connecticut and around the construction, at a manageable slope, not far from where 22nd should be. And some of the sillier signs are gone.

Why I'm Not an Engineer

My official job title at most of my jobs has been "Senior Software Engineer." And I hate it.

I won't belabor the fact that "Senior" makes it sound like I've been at the company for 15 years, when actually I've been there 6 months and the company was only around for 3 months before that.

The real problem is with the word "Engineer."

Engineering is about physics and mathematics. Engineering is about designing to exacting specifications. Engineering is about being able to prove that a solution will work before implementing it. Engineering is about discovering all relevant factors and taking them into account. Engineering is about repeatable successes. Most of all, engineering is about using proven processes to guarantee reliability.

Anyone can design a bridge, or a skyscraper, or a fuel pump. But we don't let just anyone do it. And there's a reason. If you design a bridge, a "crash" is not acceptable. People die, there's a major scandal, your company gets sued for negligence, and you get fired, if you're lucky.

But when you're building a mail server, or a web browser, or a real-time strategy game, it's perfectly normal for a sizeable percentage of your customers to have regular crashes. What happens? Your company charges them for support, and gives you a bonus for releasing on time.

Worse, when something goes wrong in a software project, it's usually so difficult to pinpoint the problem that nobody even tries. Remember the Challenger O-ring hearings? Imagine something like that applied to Microsoft Windows. In fact, you don't have to. The Navy tried to hold similar hearings to determine why a Windows crash left one of their ships dead in the water. Ask them how that went.

From the other side, what we do--when we do it well--feel something like magic, even to us. That's simply not true for engineers. That's not to denigrate engineers. They get the satisfaction of solving a difficult problem (just like us), or doing a job and knowing they've done it right (unlike us), but if they pull something off and can't believe that it works, they consider that a red flag, not a reason to celebrate.

So, if what we do isn't engineering, what is it?

Computer Science. Adobe calls all of their code-writing employees Computer Scientists. After all, that's what most of us studied in college, right?

This is completely bogus. Someone who studies algorithmic complexity, or programming language semantics, or type theory: that's a computer scientist. Calling someone who writes software a computer scientist is like calling an auto mechanic a physicist.

Software Craftsmanship. Some people (most famously Pete McBreen) argue that what we do is more like craftsmanship than engineering. There's something to that. Despite all the college degrees, the knowledge that we pass down is more like guild wisdom and rules of thumb than rigorous training in known methodologies.

The problem is that craftsmanship, even more than engineering, is about repeatability. A craftsman builds similar products over and over, and gets very good at doing so. But software is supposed to be not just better, but radically different, than its predecessors. A marble table that's every bit as good as one from the Victorian era is a triumph. A program that's just as good as last year's is a failure. Forget our products; even our methodologies are supposed to be radically different than those from a decade ago.

Software Development. "Developer" doesn't sound bad at first glance. But that's only because it doesn't seem to mean anything.

As a consequence of that vagueness, most fields use it for those people who are neither actual workers nor creatives. Within the software industry, we're the workers and the creatives--or at least what passes for them. Look at development executives in television, or the career development team at a performing artists' agency, or the business development team at your own company. That's about as far from what we do as anything I can imagine.

Tinkering. Others have likened us to tinkerers. There are no rules to what we do, but there are lots of tricks that we figure out, and these tricks look like magic to the outside world even when we try to explain them, even though they're really pretty simple.

But that doesn't really work, for much the same reason. Tinkerers make minor improvements to existing products, Whether or not we succeed, we're always trying to build new things.

Mechanics. Sometimes people in "traditional engineering" fields like to disparage us by calling us mechanics or technicians. But mechanics only exist in fields where there are already engineers. Without automotive engineers to build cars, there'd be no auto mechanics to fix them. We're the top guys in our field, sad as that may sound.

Besides, this suffers from the same problem as the last two categories, only more so. A mechanic who ripped out your working engine and replaced it with an untested new model because he had a cool idea would not be in business long.

Software Writing. Why not run with the "creative" thing. We write programs, so we're writers. Maybe it's not exactly writing novels, but then neither is punching up dialogue in screenplays, producing tech manuals, or doing biographical research--and yet people who do those jobs are called writers. And if our hours and work conditions aren't as weird as writers', they're not exactly normal.

That all sounds appealing, but I think it misses something crucial: We're creating products. Actual things that do work for people--at least when they work. Writers don't do that.

Plus, nobody wants to read what we write. I know, the linux kernel is available online, and thousands of people download it and read it. But every one of them is doing so in order to improve it, or get ideas for a different kernel, or write linux drivers, or debug linux applications. Not a single person reads the linux kernel just to read it.

Programming. What about programmer? We make programs, so we're programmers.

If it sounds a bit dull and old-fashioned and unglamorous, so what?

That's really the crux of the matter. Most people in our field want an impressive title. "Engineer" has some kind of cachet that many of us covet.

But why? Who are we trying to impress?

Girls aren't impressed because you call yourself an engineer. If they're impressed by your job, it's because you're so overpaid that you can afford to buy ridiculously stupid toys. Or maybe because you can get away with dressing like a teenager and showing up to work at 11:00.

Banks and lenders aren't impressed because you call yourself an engineer. They're impressed because you make enough to pay interest. And because even if your company tanks or you get fired, there's so much turnover in your industry that you'll have another job in a month anyway.

Your grandmother may be impressed, but she doesn't know the difference between you and a computer repair technician or an AOL tech support drone. Besides, your grandmother would be a lot more impressed if you just called more often, or married someone nice.

Do you really want to be a guy who wears a buttoned-up white shirt, black socks even with sneakers, and a slide rule in a pocket protector? Not me.

The best title I ever had, I was in charge of a team that, as far as our founder could tell, just randomly banged away at keyboards until eventually an approximation of working code came out. Like Hamlet, but he didn't need an infinite number of us.

So I was Big Chief Codemonkey.

Unfortunately, we soon had to start dealing with H1B visas and partnership deals and next thing you know, I was Lead Software Engineer.

Sigh....

1 You Scan Through Monster...

In the piece that follows, all names have been changed. Not to protect the innocent, but because I'm trying to forget most of them.

I've already written about plagues, but here's one I missed.

Until recently, it had been a long time since I actively looked for a job, so I'd forgotten what it was like. If you've forgotten too, let me refresh your memory about recruiters.

<div voice="Andy Rooney">Have you ever noticed that recruiters these days don't know how to use email?</div>

Every email I get from John Smith has the subject "John Smith: Recruiter." Every email from Joe Blow has the subject "Joe Blow: Contact Info." Every email from Sue Brown has the subject "Sue Brown: Hipressure Headhunting Agency."

So of course they all get filtered right into my Bulk folder. This means that instead of checking my Bulk folder once a week to make sure there's nothing useful there, I have to check multiple times per day.

Then there's Mary Marks, who ends every call with "I'll send you the details by email" and then sends a messaging saying, "It's all set."

At least she's better than Jesse Jones, who replies to each and every email I send by clicking "Reply" and then "Send" without typing any text whatsoever.

I think the founders of Zimbra are right that email is broken--but I can't imagine how it could be fixed well enough to help these guys.

<div voice="Jerry Seinfeld">Have you ever noticed the way recruiters just love to offer you jobs that even a monkey could tell aren't a match? Who are the wizards that came up with that? I mean, they'd offer Superman a job in the Kryptonite mines! What's the deal with that?</div>

I'm a C++ developer. I mostly work on network software. So I love when I get a call like this:

"I've got the perfect position for you. They need a Visual Basic developer with 15 years' experience working on in-house farm management applications."

I especially love when they ask you in detail what you're looking for:

"So, what in particular do you want?"

"Well, I've spent too much of the past three years dealing with Microsoft technology, so mostly I want to get back to cross-platform work."

"Wonderful! Do I have the position for you! We need someone to build Microsoft Management Console GUIs for a Microsoft Active Directory plugin on Microsoft Windows!"

Even if you've never seen a computer, you should be able to tell what's wrong here.

<div voice="Dennis Miller">Recruiters know geography like Zahir-ud-din Mohammad Babur knows how to keep the Uzbeks happy, Chachi.</div>

I live in San Francisco. I don't mind taking the train to work. (Hell, I used to take the subway to work in LA. Yeah, that was me, the one guy they built the subway for, and I don't even live there anymore.) What I don't like is driving down 101 through rush-hour traffic.

So, when recruiters ask how far I'm willing to commute, I always say something like this: "I live right next to CalTrain, so I'm willing to go as far as Mountain View if they're by a station. But I absolutely hate driving down 101, so even San Mateo is too far if they're not by a station."

And the answer is invariably something like this: "Right, of course, of course! I mean, you left LA for a reason, right? Hahaha! Yeah. So, I have this position in Sunnyvale, well, I think maybe it's Milpitas, that you'll just love, they're right between the freeway and the bay, perfect!"

For those who don't know the area: This is about 5 miles past Mountain View. It's also about 4 miles from the train. Getting there generally means transferring from the CalTrain to a VTA train to a bus, and then walking sixteen blocks along a road with no sidewalk under the watchful eye of Lockheed/Martin guards on loan from the US Navy. Total commute time between 80 and 150 minutes, depending on how you time the transfers.

Or, of course, you can drive down 101.

<div voice="Slick Rick">Now sit down, and I'll tell you a story.</div>

I'm nearing the end of the job-search process. Companies A.com and B.net want to make me offers, but I still want to talk to C.biz. I have a second interview with C.biz for tomorrow at 11:00. I very clearly explain the situation to everyone involved.

I tell A.com's CTO that I'll call him at 2:00. I tell B.net's hiring manager that I'll call him at 2:30. I tell the recruiters who set me up with A.com and B.net that I'll call them later in the afternoon, after I've called their companies. Everything's good.

Tomorrow, at 11:00, right as I'm shaking hands with C.biz's team lead, my phone rings. I check to see if it's anyone important. It's Josh Stone, the recruiter who hooked me up with B.net. I hit ignore. Ten minutes later, he calls again. Two minutes after that, he calls again. Then my phone begins ringing continuously. I can't even navigate through the menus to switch to silent mode, because a new call comes in and cancels navigation before I can get there. I settle for turning the volume all the way down, which puts it in vibrate mode, and stuffing it in the couch cushions.

Now it's 2:00. I'm done with the interview, and ready to talk to A.com's CTO.

But I can't, because my phone is dead. All that vibrating has killed the battery. I have to go all the way home first.

By the time I get in touch with B.net, their CTO is on a phone interview with someone else. The receptionist tells me that he assumed (quite reasonably) that I was going to turn down the offer based on the fact that I didn't even call him back after my interview, and that neither my home voicemail nor my cell voicemail will take a message from him. (Did I mention that both are completely full of empty messages from Josh Stone, so they won't take messages from anyone?)

<div voice="Sam Kinison">Oh! Oh! Ohhhhhhhh!</div>

What would possess someone to act like this? I've had crazy ex-girlfriends call me 20 times in 15 minutes, but they were (a) crazy, (b) girlfriends, and most importantly (c) ex-, and therefore had nothing to lose by pissing me off. When someone who's trying to put together a business deal with me acts this way, what am I supposed to think?

It goes without saying that this was a dumb way to achieve his goal of getting me hired by B.net. But I'll say it anyway.

I came very close to summarily turning down B.net because I was so annoyed. And even if I had been sure I wanted to go with them, they might have found a better candidate (through a different recruiter) in those phone interviews before I got back to them. Or they might have just decided I wasn't reliable enough to hire because I don't call when I say I'm going to and don't answer my phone.

Either way, he's out a big chunk of money. (That's where recruiters' money comes from: If B.net hires me, they pay his company something equal to a percentage of my first year's salary, and his company pays him a commission on that deal.) And what does this do for his repeat business with B.net, or with me or any of my friends?

How do these people stay in business, not to mention get good accounts like B.net?

It's almost as if the only competition factor among recruiters is luck. (I'm not an expert on economics, but I believe that's the only situation where you end up with drooling morons and highly-trained professionals succeeding at the same level.)

<div voice="Yevgeny Petrosyan">That's all time for laugh today!</div>

To be honest, looking for a job as a computer programmer in the Bay Area in 2006 is great, recruiters notwithstanding. In the end, I got four good offers (including A.com, B.net, and C.biz) so quickly that Google didn't even get a phone interview set up.

I'm sure to people in other industries, or other times and locations (I remember LA during the Crash), being buffetted with calls from people trying to offer your high-paying jobs doesn't sound all that bad.

I remember looking for a job as a computer programmer in LA in 2001. That wasn't so great. I'm sure if you're a 60-year-old aerospace engineer, or a 19-year-old single mother, or an immigrant from Chechniya whose work visa is on hold because someone saw you go into the same mosque as a guy who looks kind of like Osama, it downright sucks.

And there are a few really good recruiters among the batch. I even have some good-recruiter stories; they're just not as interesting.

And once upon a time, I thought Bruce Sterling was going to be right about the future, and a headhunter would be someone who kidnapped you on the way to work and brainwashed you until you thought you'd actually been working for the rival zaibatsu your whole career. Compared to that, 25 phone calls in 10 minutes doesn't seem so bad.

So, I feel a bit guilty for whining. Until I check my voicemail and have to clear out 20 more messages from recruiters who already know I accepted an offer but still want to tell me about this great job just north of Port Sonoma for a MS SQL database administrator who speaks Serbian.

And then I think, maybe Shakespeare was wrong: Second, we kill all the lawyers.

The Hobbit

No, I have no rumors about what Peter Jackson's up to. I just watched The Hobbit for the first time in a couple decades. In some ways, it was better than I remember; in other ways, worse. But this isn't a review.

I'm here to talk about the voices.

Take a listen. That's gotta be Orson Bean as Bilbo, Snidely Whiplash as Thorin, old-time comedian Brother Theodore as Gollum, Captain Hook as Elrond, someone doing a bizarre parody of Otto Preminger as the king of the wood elves, Leonard Nimoy as Gandalf, and Harry "Captain Murphy" Goz as Bard, King of Lakeland. So, as soon as Leonard Nimoy finished telling Orson Bean about his adventures to come, I rushed off to IMDB to look them up.

Yeah, that's Orson Bean, and Hans "Snidely" Conried, and Brother Theodore, and Cyril Ritchard (who really is Captain Hook, even in real life). And who's doing the Otto Preminger impression? Oh, Otto himself. Well, he did it for Stalag 17. "Vith Christmas coming on I haf a special treat for you. I'll haf you all deloused und haf a little tree for every barrack, and then ve vill kill the dwarfs und take zere gold."

But it's not Leonard Nimoy. In fact, of all people, it's director John Huston. To think, if he hadn't been wasting all that time on that Bible movie (you know, the one that had the balls to call itself The Bible--and was good enough to get away with it), he could have been wearing the pointy ears, telling Kirk how illogical everything is, and getting a Swedish synthpop band named after him. And why didn't he give that overly-emotional Mary Astor a nerve pinch on the Maltese Falcon set?

OK, so I was wrong about Nimoy, but surely Bard is The Goz, right?

I mean, who else could deliver a line like "Hooray for the King under the mountain!" with that panache? (And without giggling!)

Who else could say, "Our town has been ruined, many of our people have been killed, and I'm still not an Adrienne Barbeaubot, damnit!" (I may be slightly misremembering that one, but it was something like that.)

But lo and behold, it's not Harry Goz. Harry was apparently too busy playing his first supporting role in the long-forgotten Looking Up, so they had to go with some guy named John Stephenson.

Who the hell is John Stephenson? He has a decades-spanning career with dozens of credits, but nearly all of them are as "Additional Voices" in lame Hanna-Barbera cartoons. He must have had at least one major role in the 70s, right?

There it is. Star of the original Sealab 2020, Captain Murphy.

If you haven't watched The Hobbit in a long time, it's worth it. The scene where Smaug chases Bard around the corridors in the Murphmobile until Stormy accidentally blows up the whole station rocks.

Curses to Smaug, and to Pod Six!

So now I have to go find Return of the King. I vaguely remember three hobbits that sound like Orson Bean, Roddy MacDowall, Casey Casem, and a guy who sounds like Casey Casem doing an impression of a bad Mexican actor doing a British accent, renacting the first two books in five minutes flat. Is that right?

My Name: Andrew / Laurence Payn Barnert

People sometimes ask about my name. Here's the story.

Start with my birth name: Andrew Laurence Barnert. My initials match my father's (Anthony Lewis Barnert). There's a long family history of giving your firstborn your initials and your later kids a different first initial but the same middle initial. Yes, my family have been geeks for generations.

Payn started as a pseudonym. Once upon a time, I was doing publicity for record labels, and also doing music journalism. It doesn't look very good when an article or interview in a magazine is written by a guy who works for the band's label. Someone with more integrity would have avoided writing about bands he worked for, but someone who knows that the music business is the last place to waste your integrity would have come up with a pseudonym. Which is what I did. Because of a long story, I had the email address payn@usc.edu, so I chose Payn. And then one of the labels I worked for started writing me checks under that name, because someone is an idiot. So I had to get it added to my legal name so I could deposit the checks.

It turns out that in California, anyone can change their name just by using it officially for a period of time without any intention of fraud. This is pretty cool in theory. The problem is, it's very hard to use your name officially until it's been changed. In old-fashioned states, you have to go before a judge, and he approves the change; in California, because of our enlightened common-law name change rules, it's very hard to get a judge to see you without a good cause, so you're stuck in a catch 22. Eventually, though, I got a bank to accept my new name.

Anyway, there is no "e" at the end of Payn. Trust me; I made it up, I should know.

The / comes from the same time. I'm a huge fan of the 80s TV show Square Pegs, and it was the nickname of Merritt Buttrick's character, who was a hero ("totally different head... totally"). I decided that since I was changing my name anyway, I should add a / to it. That turned out to be hard to do, as most computer systems beep at you when you enter a non-alphabetic character as part of a name.

So, back to my birth name.

Andrew apparently came from a girl named Andrea. Both versions just mean "man" (in the sense of "male," rather than "homo sapiens"),* so it's a pretty dull name for a boy, and a cruel name for a girl.

I usually go by Andy, or sometimes Andi. This isn't really a matter of choice; I had a friend in college who, as a sort of experiment, tried to get everyone to call me Andrew instead of Andy, and then Drew, but neither caught on with anyone else. Even people who were originally introduced to me as Drew and never heard me called anything else started spontaneously calling me Andy anyway. The same friend later tried spelling my name with an 'i', and that did catch on. I'm not sure what any of that means about me, but there you have it.

I'm not sure where Laurence came from,** but my father was adamant that it's spelled with a 'u' rather than a 'w' to match Laurence Olivier rather than Lawrence Welk. Which is pretty cool.

Barnert is apparently of Plattdeutsch (far northwest German) ancestry, even though it comes from Jews living in eastern Pommerania. I'm sure Hansa traders are somehow involved in that. The "barn" could mean barn, or child, or maybe bear--or something completely different.*** The "-ert" is like English "-er." My guess is that some ancestor brought bear furs from Novgorod or Finland down into Germany, but maybe he was a barn-builder or an early obstetrician. Anyway, it's a pretty uncommon name, so if you recognize it, you probably from a relative of mine (or live near Paterson, NJ).

So now you know.

* "Andrew" is of course also a Biblical name--one of the first disciples, the apostle crucified by illiterate Romans (they made his cross in an X shape instead of a T), and the patron saint of Scotland and Russia. You'd think religious Christians would love him, but it seems less popular among them (except the Scottish) than among the masses. (In fact, it was the most popular name for Jewish boys one year in the early 90s.) So I guess everyone in America has forgotten him.

** The name itself comes from Laurentius, a title for a victor crowned with a laurel wreath; I mean I don't know why I was given it.

*** By the time a Plattdeutsch name goes through eastern Germany and then Ellis Island, who knows what might have happened to it....

The Good Old Days

Everyone knows that conservatives are just misguided by longing for the "good old days" of their youth--which weren't actually all that good. (Ah, the 50s. If you were white and male and Protestant and rich and didn't know any leftists and didn't have teenage sons to get into rumbles with knives and chains and/or get sent to Korea....)

But romantic liberals who long for the good old days of mankind's* youth are even more misguided.

Surely the ancient peoples were more peaceful, honorable, spiritual, and in touch with the earth than modern Christian/scientific/materialist/whatever society, right?

• The Celts liked to decorate in human skulls.
• The Norse idea of heaven was a place where they could hack each others' limbs off all day, drink all night, and wake up ready to do it all over again? (Didn't Dante give the wrathful a circle of Hell that was pretty much the same thing?)
• The Egyptians worked thousands of slaves to death to build the pyramids.
• The Caucasus mountains are full of peoples who finally accepted civilization only after the Russians showed them that modern weapons are even more neato than rolling boulders down the hill at strangers (although some of them still required Peter to wrestle lions first).

Oh, but those are all part of Western culture, if you stretch "Western" to include part of Asia. What about the wise and mystical east?

I could point out that, long before western culture invented 8 buns to 12 hot dogs, the Chinese invented 16 pounds of mu-shu pork to 4 mu-shu pancakes. How wise and mystical is that? But let's stick to ancient times.

• I'm guessing you've heard of Genghis Khan, and maybe Tamerlane and Beber? A "Horde" is generally not a friendly gathering.
  
• Then there's the Japanese, who, centuries before making salted cuttlefish snacks labeled "For great taste of healthy Fun!" used to intentionally starve most of their people just to make sure they couldn't revolt. Not to mention slaughtering the Ainu for sport.
  
• The Polynesians practiced cannibalism until the 19th century.
  
• Chinese warlords put entire populations to the sword to make sure there was nobody to breed with their women while they were out plundering.

Ah, but those peaceful Native Americans, they knew and loved Mother Earth.

• The Lakota drove entire herds of buffalo over cliffs so they could skim a few off the top.
  
• The Aztecs--this one's just too easy. Yeah, just about every culture on earth had some kind of human sacrifice, often involving babies, but nobody took it to quite the level of these guys.
  
• There are Amazon tribes still alive today who won't let you get laid or take drugs until you can prove you've killed someone--which goes back to the ancient human tradition that the best way to get laid is to kill someone and then rape his wives.
  
• The Apaches, they were nice guys too....

Maybe we're not going back far enough? Maybe it's agriculture or civilization itself that spelled the beginning of the end? Well, whoever the first modern humans in Europe were, they drove the mammoth and so many other species into extinction so quickly that they had to abandon northern Europe thousands of years before the glaciers forced them to. I think that says it all.

If not, look through the early human bones we've found and count up what percentage show clear signs of being attacked--and often butchered after death--with stone axes.

The fact is, through most of human history, the strongest and most bloodthirsty ruled. There were no Ghandis or MLKs until the 20th century. Pining for the peaceful state of nature in edenic prehistory is just stupid.

The good old days were pretty horrible, and as bad as W is, any randomly-chosen leader of Assyria would make him look like a saint.

Now, that's not to say that today's status quo is good. But instead of looking to a mystical past that never existed, look to the future. Figure out what's wrong with the world and find a better way to live that nobody's ever tried. It could be a lot better than today--and it can't be a lot worse than a few millenia ago in the "good old days."

Footnotes:

* If you want to call me a sexist for not saying "humankind," go ahead. But men pretty much ruled the early days of the species, so women don't deserve as much of the blame.

What is This Crap?

A blog is supposed to be a weblog--commentary on links to other things on the web. That seems to be less true today, but a blog isn't supposed to be "here's all these files I found while recovering a dead hard drive."

But that's what this was. Some of these were written years ago, others more recently. Some were meant to be posted somewhere; others I just wrote as notes to myself. I'm sick, and I didn't feel like sorting them, so here you go.

Don't expect a dozen posts/day from me in the future....

Plagues

Remember the plagues of Egypt? A river of blood. That was supposed to spook old Pharoah into letting Moses's people go.

At first thought, it sounds pretty creepy. But compare it to what we live with every day today. Rivers of motor oil, syringes, and used condoms. Which is worse?

OK, sure, Egypt's entire agriculture system was based around the Nile, while ours is based around managing software projects coded in India or producing movies made in Canada, so it probably affected them more than it would us.

But personally I'd rather be drinking blood than motor oil, syringes, and used condoms. And that's despite the fact that some annoying wannabe-vampire twits would think I was cool for drinking blood.

Of course someone will point out that, unlike the Egyptians, we can drink bottled water. Is that any better? More than half of California's tap water comes from the same lake system as Arrowhead. And it's not $2 a bottle.

Also, something like 30 million of the various brands of bottled water are actually owned by Coke or Pepsi. Read the fine print. (Oddly, in the developing word they put their gigantic logos on the water, and people drink it because they trust Coke more than some company they've never heard of....) And then there's the imported French water that's not legal for sale in France.

Even when the bottled water isn't just your municipal tap water or the runoff from the Coke plant, studies show that it's no cleaner. And, while most brands win in taste tests against most cities' tap water, that's just because of the chlorine.

If you really want healthy water, get distilled water. A gallon costs less than a pint of whatever post-Evian brand you're into. And it has no nasty bacteria or chemical runoff. And no weird taste.

Unfortunately, distilled water also has no electrolytes--and dying of a water overdose sounds pretty sad, especially if you're not even on ecstasy. Plus, some people apparently like the taste of dirt in their beverage. I don't get it, but it's true.

But you can fix both problems by adding a sprinkling of salty dirt.

Come to think of it, maybe someone should sell special blends of salty dirt as "mineral packets," to add your favorite flavor or "health boost" to distilled water. (Personally, I prefer a blend of table salt, potassium salt, MSG, iron, manganese, selenium, and LSD.) It'd be cheaper for both the manufacturers and for the consumers.

Plus, we'd be living that old joke about "dehydrated water--just add water."

Anyway, I've gotten way off the topic of the Egyptians' plagues. The Egyptians had locusts, rivers of blood, hail-and-ice-and-fire storms, death of cattle--we have killer bees, rivers of oil, the last three Novembers (at least in the Bay Area), and Mad Cow Disease.

Frankly, I'm not sure how we're still alive, but I'm in favor of figuring out who God has chosen this time and letting them go wherever the hell they want.

But maybe that's just because I'm a first-born son.

Waitresses and Sonic Youth

Here's a pair of bands you rarely see compared. Why?

Both bands were formed in the early 80s when quasi-stars of the post-prog-rock/pre-no-wave New York art-music scene found a skinny chick who couldn't exactly sing but could talk really cool. Both bands had alternative hits in 1992 with brilliantly quirky pop songs. Both bands have influenced far more musicians than their mainstream fame would imply.

Plus, both bands are somehow magical. Maybe not the same kind of magic--one is the everyday magic that's responsible for you coming up with the perfect sarcastic response without even thinking about it, while the other is more the kind of magic that you have to say "klaatu verata nikto" before picking up if you don't want to wake the deadites. But still.

OK, that's really about as far as the similarities go, so now for the "contrast" part of my "compare-and-contrast" assignment.

The Waitresses made brilliantly quirky pop music from day one. Starting with "I Know What Boys Like," and ending five years later with "I Know What Boys Like." It was a good time to do quirky pop, what with new sub-KROQ-clones springing up across the country (the spawn of a former KROQ program director who'd sold his soul to Satan).

The strange thing was, they had at least 5 good songs on the album, plus one brilliant non-album track. (Remember "It's my car, and I'm gonna do the drivin', drivin'"? Didn't think so... but you should.) And of course the theme song to the most quintessentially 80s period piece, "Square Pegs." And yet, all you ever heard was "I Know What Boys Like." Or, as the band called it, in their politer moments, "That Fucking Song."

The Waitresses were, to most people, a one-hit wonder, but they did have a mini-legion of devoted fans, mostly boys who imagined having an ambiguous relationship with Patty O'Donoghue. You know, the kind that mostly consists of sneering at the world together and staggering around under the influence of something, although it might have involved some drunken sex a few times but neither of you can remember.

All Waitresses fans are now playing keyboard in post-britpop bands.

Sonic Youth started off making the most off-putting music they could make. Discordant guitars, played with screwdrivers, feeding back on each other fed through distortion, with a gravelly-voiced cry for help. Technically brilliant, but the only people who'd had enough music education to figure that out either couldn't sit through an album or were in the band.

If you've never heard it, that description isn't going to give you an idea. So, have you ever had one of those days where you can't score your fix of smack so you try a couple hits of LSD hoping you won't notice the withdrawal symptoms and then realize what a bad idea that was? The sound you heard 20 degrees off to the right of Hell: early Sonic Youth is like that. But louder.

So most of their fans had to get into them as an acquired taste. It started off as a sort of macho test, like a punk rock version of a habanero burger, but after a while it grew on you, and you found yourself trying to convince your parents that there were real melodies in there and your friends that there was raw anger in there and secretly dreading that one of them might actually get it.

All Sonic Youth fans are now playing guitar in post-grunge bands. Except the ones who are dead or in psych hospitals.

So, what the hell happened in 1992?

Well, Nirvana got famous (much to their dismay). Suddenly the alternative stations were #1, except that when they ran out of grunge bands they pretty much changed "alternative" to mean "bad wannabe-70s crap" so they could stay #1. The few real grunge bands who found themselves caught in the frenzy spent every minute telling the press how cool Sonic Youth was.

Sonic Youth responded by suddenly making quirky pop music. Sure, "Goo" made a little less sense than "I Know What Boys Like," but you have to factor in the extra decade of learning to distinguish between different varieties of feedback noise while under the influence of heavy drugs. Anyway, a few years later, you'd still hear "Goo" every once in a while (usually when some hardcore Sonic Youth fan made a request for "Schizophrenia").

Meanwhile, now that they were #1 in every major radio market, the alternative stations had to come up with morning DJs and special features like seasonal countdowns. And you can only play the Ramones' one Christmas song so many times in a row. So the music directors started looking through the requests, and they noticed one called "Christmas (W)rapping" by the Waitresses, and suddenly they were in regular rotation again. And not "That Fucking Song," either. From November to December every year, this song is all over the airwaves. On the 26th, some DJ who's glad Christmas is finally over will play "I Know What Boys Like" one time before the record goes back in the closet, but that's about it.

So, in 1992, Sonic Youth and the Waitresses both found themselves as lasting alternative quirky pop one-hit-wonders.

A few years ago, there was suddenly a major reunion circuit for 80s pop acts. Some bands are back with their original lineups--which is sometimes not such a good idea. Others are the one or two core members filled out with younger guys who used to be huge fans in the 80s and really like the idea of second choice on the 35-year-old groupies. But neither of these bands are there.

Patty O. died a few years back, and the Waitresses guys have enough class that they haven't tried to fob off a replacement singer. Sonic Youth--well, they didn't actually have a pop hit until too late to cash in, and I don't think they'd sell out if it meant having to tour with all those bands they used to hate.

Anyway, I won't ask you to listen to Sonic Youth's "Confusion Is Sex." If you're going to like it, the name probably already called up nostalgia and/or flashbacks, and you're listening to it right now.

But go buy (or at least pirate) one of the Waitresses' multiple best-of albums (pretty impressive for a two-hit-wonder with a decade between hits even though they were on the same album...).

And if you can find the Barcelona song "Haunted by the Ghost of Patty," bonus points.

Gower Gulch

As special as Sport Shots were, the place I bought them was more special still.

When I lived in Hollywood, there was this little shopping center called Gower Gulch, which looked like a leftover set for a C-grade western. This shopping center contained everything you'd expect--a locksmith, an Indonesian sushi/karaoke bar, a Japanese Mexican seafood restaurant, a Denny's, an optometrist's office that never opened, and a Baskin Robbins/Starbucks/Togo's.

But the whole thing was anchored by Gower Gulch Liquor, the greatest store in the history of the liquor/convenience/drugstore/deli genre.

Gower Gulch Liquor made great sandwiches. They stocked the largest selection of impossible-to-find sodas in the world, from the only Triple Cola west of New York City to the last 300 bottles or RC Draft in existence. They had weird candy from Australia (ever had a Jaffa?) and imitation Japanese junk food from Malaysia. They had 4 more flavors of Spam than normally exist outside of Guam. They even claimed they could get me a can of Pocari Sweat, but that never panned out. (I finally had some this year in Singapore--it's basically Gatorade with a silly name. Oh well.)

Of course, being a liquor store, the variety of alcohol was really the central point. From $60-a-bottle Canadian rye that was worth every penny to all flavors of Cisco in existence. But the crowning achievement was Sport Shots, which I never saw anywhere else.

As sad as it was when Sport Shots disappeared, it was even sadder a few months later when Gower Gulch Liquor disappeared. It was replaced by another Starbucks, two doors from the original one, but not saddled with a Baskin Robbins and a Togo's.

You'd think this would be the death of the hybrid Starbucks, but years later, both were still going strong. (Just like the Starbucks a mile down the road that failed to kill off the Burger King/Starbucks and the laundromat/Starbucks in the same 3-storefront building.)

Neither one, of course, had Sport Shots.

Sport Shots

I never got those guys who were waking up to get their morning exercise just as I was staggering home from a club to plan my hangover, but when I watched them lift those nifty bottles and squeeze water or Gatorade or their own urine or whatever it is they drink into their mouth, I always felt a twinge of jealously. It just looked so convenient.

Somewhere in the mid-90s, I discovered Sport Shots. Jealousy no more!

Sport Shots were vaugely-Schnappsish-flavored alcoholic beverages that came prepackaged in transparent squirt bottles just like the ones those sanctimonious bikers carried along with their safety reflectors and smug "Hey, I'm not puking in the gutter" looks.

Plus, while they were labeled with alcohol content and a few other words of text, the letters rubbed off as soon as you looked at them, so they were perfect for walking down the street drinking in flagrant violation of California's open container law. (Come to think of it, you never opened them, just squirted the alcohol through the little nozzle--but I don't think the LAPD would have gone for that excuse.)

Finally, there was the name. Sport Shots. In case you ever need to get really hammered before quarterbacking the big football game, I guess.

There were four flavors which, like much of 1995, I for some reason can't remember, but the red one tasted just like cinammon Scope mouthwash. Ah, memories.

I would have spent my childhood slurping Sports Bottle Candy in prepration, but they didn't invent it until I was 16, so I had to come into Sport Shots unprepared. But I took to it with gusto. Until 6 months later, it was gone, as quickly as it had come.

I suppose I could have gotten a bicycle and started drinking Evian or whatever, but when forced to choose between convenient health and inconvenient drunkenness, the choice was easy.

Salsa

I love salsa. Yeah, as George Castanza says, it's partly because it's fun to say.

Especially specific different salsas and hot sauces. I don't mean the trendy boutique salsas like "Jump Up And Kiss Me Hot Sauce," I mean the simple things, like habanero.

For a semi-Spanish-speaking Caucasian, this word gives you the delightful challenge of making it clear that you understand how much different the word sounds in Spanish without sounding like a TV anchor saying "Channel 4 reporter <brief pause to switch language modules> Rrrrrramon Marrrtinez <pause> is on the scene with more."

But my favorite is Pico de Gallo. Because it means, of course, a trillionth of a rooster. Sort of like homeopathic salsa, in case you need to be cured of roosterosis or something.

Plus, there's the fact that people from all Spanish-speaking countries, even the ones where "ll" isn't normally pronounced like a hard "y," have to say "Pico de Guy-yo," because it just sounds wrong any other way. Even the dumb gringos get this one pretty close.

Anyway, any tacqueria without a decent salsa bar is not worth eating at. They don't have to have 20 flavors of salsa--in fact, if you find southwestern mango chutney paste, leave before someone tries to charge you $10 for a "wrap"--but they should have at least two, one of which should be very hot and one of which should be an odd shade of green.

But the real key to the salsa bar is the pickled spicy carrots. There is no proper English term for these things, because it's really not proper to speak English in their presence. Many people cannot handle them, and Taco Bell exists for those people, but that just means more for me.

Speaking of Taco Bell, when I was young, they had two salsas: Mild and Hot. At some point they added Fire. Fire is not really much hotter than Hot, it's just redder. Both have no flavor whatsoever, but can be used to give spice to Mild, which actually has an interesting taste once you get over the fact that it tastes like nothing else in the world that has ever been called "salsa." Somehow, it makes Taco Bell chicken almost edible. But for the boil-in-the-bag beef, you really need Hot. Or maybe Fire, whose thicker color hides the meat from view. Maybe that's what it's for.

Anyway, carrots.

POP Snacks and Nazi Rice

I know, you expected this to be a paean to Pop Rocks, Magic Gum, and other hypercarbonated snacks of the 80s. But this is even better.

Someone I know recently got back from Korea, and brought a bunch of snacks, including something called 'POP' Snack. With the quotes and everything. Basically just rice cakes, except for the packaging.

Now, usually I don't go crazy over East Asians and their bizarre English. (It's certainly better than Americans and their bizarre Chinese, Japanese, and Korean--"bonsai" and "banzai" are not the same word, damnit!) But in this case....

Written on the package was the sentence: "Let's establish heatlh society by abolishing inferior food."

This is creepy.

At first it sounds sort of bad-spelling-hippie (which is better than the usual bad-smelling-hippie).

Then suddenly the Nazi overtones hit you.

Finally, you realize with relief that it's actually talking about the cleansing of inferior food, not people. Some Hitler of the rice fields is attempting to establish a master race of pure white rice.

Not so scary, but still sort of disturbing. I was just about to become amazed at the Koreans' lack of sensitivity to racist fascism after their treatment by their neighbors during WWII, not the mention the previous millenia, when I remembered Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netenyahu and it all makes sense.

Anyway, I'm not sure how much lebensraum a grain of rice needs--I'm sure any farmers out there can help me. But if I were the soy in the next field over, I'd watch out. Or at least make sure that I didn't form all my defenses into a big line that reaches almost all the way across the field.

Hillary and Tipper and Hadassah, Oh My

I never understood why the Republicans hated Clinton so much. Sure, he occasionally talked left, but this is a guy who balanced the budget, destroyed welfare, ended affirmative action, screwed over gays again and again, attempted to censor the Internet, prevented technology from being exported, expanded wiretapping, and gave us the DMCA. And not just as President, under duress from the Gingrich revolutionaries; back when he was governor of Arkansas, he was the only governor who allowed Reagan's people to use one of his state's national guard bases for illegal Contra-funding missions.

This is the kind of stuff conservatives love.

The real problem, I think, is that Republicans aren't conservatives anymore. Look at W: He's destroyed the balanced budget. How? By spending more than anyone in history, mostly on a massive nation-building exercise that would have made Goldwater or Reagan blow smoke out of their ears (and, if it weren't both misguided and misapplied, would have made the hippies proud).

Unfortunately, the Democrats now are conservatives, since the Democratic Leadership Council's successful takeover. If you've never heard of the DLC or their agenda, read Nader's viewpoint, or the same thing in their own words. Then come back here.

But forget about their Reaganomic policy for a moment; the worse thing is that they've turned the Democrats into the anti-fun party. There's something horribly wrong when the people who went to Woodstock (or wish they did) finally take over the Democratic Party and immediately use it to try to prevent the MTV generation from hearing bad words (remember the PMRC?) and follow up by trying to prevent the PSX generation from seeing badly-animated simulated sex without nudity. Yes, these are the wives of Clinton, Gore, and Lieberman in action.

The sad thing is that you can imagine W having a good time at a concert, while Gore stands outside giving out leaflets against the band. The question isn't, "How can Democrats like that win," but "Who in their right minds would want Democrats like that to win?"

Grand Theft Auto: The Sex

Of course the real hoopla with GTA:SA wasn't the violence, it was the sex. It all started with the "Hot Coffee" patch. Not that the right-wing lunatics of the Democratic Leadership Conference wouldn't have found some reason to shout about GTA, but this was their way in.

After Hot Coffee surfaced, GTA:SA was pulled from the shelves, and eventually rerated AO for Adults Only. How exactly is this different from M for Mature?

For an M, if you're not an adult, you have to convince your parents to buy it for you even though you probably shouldn't be playing it.

For an AO, if you're not an adult, you have to convince your parents to pretend to buy it for themselves and then give it to you even though you probably shouldn't be playing it.

(If you're Dad's too much of a pussy to look the salesman in the eye and say, "Yes, I want to play Grand Theft Auto," he can just tell them it's for his 18-year-old son in college.)

The difference is supposed to be the sexual content. Never mind the whole argument about hidden content that you have to download a mod to access (and RockStar shouldn't have tried it). Among dozens of minigames is a cheesy sex game with no nudity, and this is somehow less acceptable for tender young children of 17 than Grand Theft Auto.

Well, I suppose it might be dangerous for kids to think they could have sex without taking their pants off. They'll be bragging to their friends that they "went all the way" when all they got was a dry-hump--and they won't even know they're lying. A whole generation could grow up pathetic.

But somehow, I don't think this is what Hillary, Tipper, and Hadassah are all pissed off about.

Grand Theft Auto: The Violence

Does Grand Theft Auto really affect kids? Are today's kids going to be jacking cars to do drivebys for corrupt cops tomorrow? Of course not; that's so 90's (before the games even came out).

Besides, in my day, the biggest game was Pacman. Did my whole generation end up eating pills and running around a dark room to a repetitive beat?

Hmmm... Bad argument. Let's try a different tack.

First, kids aren't supposed to be playing these games.

Pacman was pretty much for everyone, except the small number of people who were over 25 when it came out and therefore never got it. But there were games clearly intended for different markets by the time I was a teenager.

You wouldn't want a 6-year-old to face the trauma of real combat in the form of wireframe tanks approaching over a 2D landscape. And it takes a certain amount of maturity to face up to the awesome responsibility of losing at Defender and failing the last of the humanoids. And the demonic talking space station Sinistar would scare the crap out of any young kid other than maybe Damien the Omen.

On the other hand, the Strawberry Shortcake game was torture to anyone in double-digit ages.

And then there was Master Blaster, a game for the Apple ][ that simulated masturbation, which was obviously too mature for anyone under 18 and far too immature for anyone old enough to masturbate for real.

Now we have this rating system, brought to you by the Clinton/Gore/Lieberman families (you know, the ones who were going to save us from the Bush family fascism). I'm not sure I like the rating system, but it's the same people who pushed for it who are now attacking game companies that follow it.

RockStar claimed that GTA:SA was Mature, and it is. It has lots of violence, tons of antisocial content, light sexual content, and the kind of social satire that nobody really enjoys until they're in college (and not for long after).

The M rating, for Mature, means that if you're not an adult, you have to get your parents to buy it for you. Sort of like R for movies, but with much more detail. There's no way your parents could buy you GTA:SA without knowing what it was about. Besides, the name ought to have been a clue.

Second, if any of these governmental wives had played any of the GTA3 series, they might have liked the messages. Bad guys screw each other over and always lose in the end. Drugs kill. When you spray a room with a Tec-9 it's really easy to accidentally kill your friends. The good cops hate the bad ones. Chuck D is insane. You can make more money putting out fires than setting them (although you do have to steal a firetruck first).

The violence in the GTA3 series is less extreme, less graphic, and at the same time less realistic than you find in movies--and the guys who make those movies get to be governor of Minnesota or California, while the game developers are threatened with bodily harm by Congressmen.

And when is the Predator himself going to get to be governor instead of letting the minor characters get all the glory?

Hints for Austrians

Austrians clearly don't get the American psyche. They don't understand why Kurt Waldheim couldn't be in charge of the UN because of his Nazi past but Schwarzenegger can be in charge of California.

That's OK, Americans can't tell Austria from Australia.

But given that America likes to invade countries for reasons not far different from "You gave us an immigrant who looked like the savior of the Republican Party but who actually turned out to suck," Austrians might need to understand America. So here goes:

While Kurt was recording messages of peace for the aliens to be carried in space probes, Arnie was acting as a homicidal robot and blowing shit up. Penance doesn't work nearly as well as blowing shit up. Look at Clinton and Yugoslavia.

(Not to pick on Democrats. The only reason the Republicans don't try this is that excessive blowing-shit-up is usually the very thing they have to make penance for, as opposed to Democrats, who have to make penance for getting shitty blowjobs. Rimshot.)

One-Hit Wonders

The thing about one-hit wonders is that they usually aren't.

Oh, sure, there's the occasional Baltimora or The Vapors, who produce an album or three but only one song gets any airplay.

There are also plenty of Gary Numans and Human Leagues who have a dozen hits in the UK but only one of them ever made it big in America.

But the most puzzling of all are the legion of artists who everyone agrees are one-hit wonders, but nobody can agree which one is the hit. No, I don't mean Soft Cell, where the club kids think it's "Sex Dwarf" but everyone else thinks it's "Tainted Love." I mean bands where any two random people are likely to come up with different answers.

Let's go through a few examples.

• Falco: "Der Komissar" or "Rock Me Amadeus"?
• The Waitresses: "I Know What Boys Like" or "Christmas (W)rapping"?
• The Smiths: "How Soon is Now" or "Panic"? (If it weren't so much fun pissing off Morrissey fans, I wouldn't include them on the list--but it is.)
• Suzanne Vega: "Luka" or "Tom's Diner"?
• Beethoven: "5th Symphony" or "9th Symphony"?
• Nena: "99 Luftballons" or "99 Red Balloons"?
• Men Without Hats: "Pop Goes the World" or "Safety Dance"?
• Twisted Sister: "We're Not Gonna Take It" or "I Wanna Rock"?
• Kylie Minogue: "Locomotion" or "I Should Be So Lucky"?
• Frank Stallone: "Far From Over" or "What, as in Sly's brother? He had a hit single? No way!"

As with many of the undisputable one-hit wonders, most of these artists (with the obvious exception of Frank Stallone) have multiple albums full of equally good songs, and legions of devoted fans.

For example, the entire nation of Austria is up in arms that Falco is considered a one-hit wonder in America (although the rest of Europe is just baffled that "Jeannie" isn't the one hit). Falco's three big hits (in America) are spread between his first and third albums, but he continued to release great music up until his untimely death--as artists ranging from Chemical Bros. to the Bloodhound Gang recognized, not to mention most of Europe, but few non-musicians in America even noticed.

It's sad, but the nice thing is, all those great Falco and Human League and Suzanne Vega albums are out there, ready to be downloaded via mininova^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H purchased from Amazon, hits or not.

Money Smarts

My last thoughts about money, I promise.

I don't get why we still have exact-change slots. Anywhere.

When the bus was 25 cents, this made sense. When I hop on the KX and have to deposit exactly $3.50, though, it's a bit silly. Why can't I get change, or just slide my debit card through the machine, like on the CalTrain?

And parking meters are even more ridiculous. When I'm planning my commute to work, it's not that hard to set aside 6 dollars and four quarters. When I'm running off for a quick drive to the store, having to scrounge in the sofa cushions for dimes is ridiculous. But when the alternative is playing beat the clock with the DPT, hoping I can dash in and get change for a dollar so I can feed the meter so I can run back in and do my actual shopping, what choice do I have?

Everyone in Europe is switching to smartcash. You go to the ATM, slide your card through, and instead of getting a 20-Euro bill that can't be used as exact change anywhere, you get a different card, that's worth exactly 20 Euros. And you spend it by waving this smartcard at other machines (including parking meters) which deduct the appropriate amount, until eventually the card is worth nothing.

I've been told that in some countries, you can't spend the last euro, because they want you to recycle the card. Money with a cash-back deposit is an interesting idea, to say the least.

Maybe Americans are afraid of their cash being smarter than them, but I don't see it's any better if we're dumber than everyone else's money just because we're still smarter than ours.

Mo' Money

Why do we even still have a $1 bill? Even before the Euro, coins usually covered everything up to about $2. If you pulled out a bill, it was 5 marks or 10 francs or 20 billion lire or something of similar value.

People always say the same thing: "Americans just can't get used to a $1 coin." More conservative-minded folks will claim it's because the $1 coin always has someone forgettable (code word for "female") like Susan B. Anthony or Sakajewia.

Bullshit. Americans can't get used to a $1 coin because we still have a $1 bill. Get rid of it, and people will use the coins. Nobody's going to magnanimously say "keep the change" and wave away $4.25 because they don't want to carry coins. Or, if they do, it'll be a major change in American consciousness that's probably for the better.

Speaking of coins, some of them are cool. I've always liked the sub-penny-sized dime. (This is a holdover from the days when they contained measurable quantities of copper and silver. As every D&D player knows, 1 gold = 10 silver = 100 copper. And something called electrum comes in there somewhere.)

But other countries have cool coins. Most of the Scandinavian countries--you know, the ones that are 20 years ahead of us in cellphone technology--have at least one coin with a hole in it. Round coins with square holes, triangular coins with round holes, maybe even sawblade coins with intricate holes that can be used as a stencil to spraypaint the prime minister's face on a wall, although I haven't actually seen that one.

If you go far enough north into Scandinavia, the Sami used to have half-ton coins made of stone, probably because of their inherent value as something you could roll down the hill to kill reindeer. OK, I don't want to try to put these in the bus exact-change slot, but I suspect it makes money seem more real.

Money

The Talking Heads said it: American money is the ugliest money in the world; that's why it's worth so much.

Maybe there's something to this. But forget how ugly it is; that's a matter of taste. What's indisputable is how incredibly boring it is, despite the fact that we spend so much more (ugly, boring) money designing our (ugly, boring) money than just about anyone else.

Let's start with the paper. In most countries, bills come in different colors, so even without looking carefully (or soberly) you can immediately tell 20 rupees, which is worth about a gumball, from 1000 rupees, which will get you cabfare all the way across India. They also come in different sizes, so you can reach in your pocket and pull out that Hong Kong $2 as a tip without pulling out and rummaging through that big wad which may have a $1000 on top in front of the local Triad boys.

Our bills--including the fancy new "uncounterfeitable" bills (like "uncrackable" software copy protection)--are all identically-sized, identically-green, identically-dull slips of paper. Although it is cool that you can wash our bills in your pants pockets and they come out good as new (if considerably lower in cocaine content), there's not much else going for them.

Vegetarians

I have little respect for vegetarians. But I have even less respect for carnivores who are grossed out by the knowledge that animals are dying for their food.*

I've never stalked an elephant with a crude hand-ax and 20 cohorts in hopes of carting off enough raw meat before the hyenas arrived to feed my tribe for a week. But I have killed a turkey.

Once upon a time, for Thanksgiving, a group of us who lived too far from college and/or were too poor to fly home decided that we'd spend the long weekend and our friend's dad's farm in southern Jersey. We arrived around 3am Wednesday night** and were awakened at 6am Thanksgiving morning by the dogs barking at the roosters to shut the hell up.

Pops*** came into the room and asked who wanted to kill the turkey. My other city-boy friends freaked out (my city-girl friends were spared by Pops' gentle sexism), but once I realized that I'd lived 19 years as a meat-eater without ever taking responsibility for it, I volunteered.

At first, I wasn't sure I could do it.

That's because I'd never met a turkey before.

I assumed that, when you walk out into a field of free-range turkeys, the first thing you notice is the sound. Or maybe the smell. But really, the main thing you notice is the fact that dozens of turkeys are pecking at your legs hard enough to draw blood, as if they think there are seeds hidden somewhere in your veins. You shoo them away, and then walk around in circles for a couple minutes and come back to bury a beak in your flesh.

These are hideous, foul-natured fowl. It's hard to call anything so stupid evil (W's saving grace), but it's hard to find anything nice to say about them. By the time Pops handed me the axe and explained how to do the deed, the only hard part was lifting 25 pounds of vicious attack-bird up onto the stump.

Still, I didn't enjoy killing it.

But I did enjoy eating it.

Yeah, I know, just another way of putting the old joke, "Meat is murder... and murder tastes damn good with A-1 sauce." Still, having never actually killed a soy plant, I'm not entirely sure I can eat tofu in good conscience--but I have enough understanding of where my meat comes from before it's injected with water and covered in plastic wrap that I can make the choice. I wouldn't want to kill a cow, but if I were starving in a field of cattle, I could.

Anyone who can't say the same, maybe they should stick to fungus. And if you can't bring yourself to kill a mushroom, you deserve to starve.

Footnotes follow. I like blogs with footnotes; it's such a silly idea. So here:

* Of course I don't have much respect for hunters, or people who work in slaughterhouses--or animals. And definitely not plants. I guess I don't have much respect in general.

** I know, officially Thursday starts at midnight, but if 6am is good enough for TV Guide, it's good enough for me.

*** Pops was not his actual name, and his sons weren't named Speed and Rex, but it sounds like a good farmer-dad name.

Masks and Sports

So apparently a famous Mexican wrestler died a while ago. I had no idea. Everyone says it the same way: "You know, the Mexican wrestler."

Now, in my head, I'm thinking of Mexican Wrestlers. You know, with the masks and capes and the extreme overacting that made them so much fun. One of them died? That's a tragedy! But no, this is just some guy who happens to be both Mexican and a wrestler of the American variety. No mask. No cape. No bizarre combination of Catholic, Satanic, and Precolombian mythology. Hohum.

At first, I feel bad for not caring more--I mean, a human being died. But you know, a few million others did, too. So lay off your guilt trip.

My next thought is, would I care more about athletes in other sports if they wore capes and masks?

And then it hit me. This is the first time I realized that no other sports have capes and masks. Even in Mexico.

Outside of wrestling, what sports even have masks? Not many. OK, baseball catchers and hockey goalies, but somehow Johnny Bench never had the same kind of charm as El Santo.

Maybe he needed a cape.

The real scientific test is to find some good opposed pairs. So, who's cooler: Mario Andretti, or Racer X? Dale Earnhardt, or Racer X? Speed Racer, or Racer X? Rex Racer, or Racer X?

Yes, I'm a bit short on examples. And yes, the last two are the same guy--but Racer X is still cooler. The conclusion is obvious.

Everyone's whining about how crappy sports are today. We pay them $100 million and they won't even work their asses off like the old guys used to. Frankly, that doesn't bother me too much--if we're stupid enough to pay them $100 million without any kind of performance review process, they'd be stupid not to take advantage. Obviously they're getting something out of those college scholarships.

But at least we can tell them they have to wear masks. And capes. I suspect some of the basketball guys would enjoy it. As a side benefit, the white-kid-wannabe-ghetto types would all start wearing capes.

That's mildly cool because the upper-middle-class kids once wore capes to look like the rich, and now they'll be wearing them to look like the poor. But it's really cool because this is the perfect time for the real poor to open fire in a glorious Tarantino-ripping-off-Lam-ripping-off-Peckinpah moment. Just imagine the sight.

Well, I've gone a bit astray. My central point is this: If you want to take sports fandom back from stats-crunching nerds and flaming homosexuals with endless puns about tight ends, add capes and masks. Trust me.

Peace, Love, and Matriarchy

The Greeks didn't have our penchant for associating femininity with compassionate rejection of patriarchal violence. Hera, the Queen of the Gods, was the ultimate psychobitch from hell, and the most important human women in their mythology were the Bacchanites, who got roaring drunk and ripped people limb from limb in their celebrations.

Today, Gaia is the hippie symbol of all that's good and peaceful. After all, she's the earth goddess, the all-mother.

In particular, she's the mother of her own husband. And of another boy who she raised so she could give him a sickle to castrate her husband/son. And a bunch of weird-looking monsters, too. Not the kind of stuff hippies are usually into, unless you lace their pot with a mixture of speed, PCP, and blue nine.

Say what you will about Margaret Thatchter, I think she'd fit right in on Olympus.

This whole longing for an ancient pagan matriarchy that was destroyed by the Christian patriarchy is just silly. Anyone who's read the slightest history realizes that the Athenians, the Persians, the Chinese, and the other important pagan nations were ever bit as patriarchal as Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire.

It wasn't Julia Caesar, after all.

There were a few women like Boedicaea, who ran things for a while when some tribe ran out of men after one too many bloody battles. But you can say the same thing for the Christian era--look at Queen Elizabeth, or the 20 or so Queen Christinas that plagued northern Europe for most of the middle ages.

Then there were the behind-the-scenes women, from just about every king's mother or wife in Byzantium having her nephew's nose cut off up to Princess Sophie of Hanover, who arranged enough royal marriages to guarantee the survival of hemophilia into the modern era.

P.S., to those neo-hippies who think matriarchy is as bad as patriarchy and poly is the real way to go, remember that before the Jews started putting limits on things, "poly" meant that the King had a harem of hundreds of wives guarded by eunuchs. Polygyny is common all over world history, but polyandry only exists (outside of San Francisco) in tribes on the edge of survival, and then only in special circumstances. (For example, some Inuit tribes make the groom's younger brother into a "junior husband" in years when there's not enough whale fat to feed the usual number of nursing women and babies. Not exactly the free-wheeling love fest the Ren Faire/Burning Man crossover crowd imagines.) If you can make it work, good for you--but don't try to tell me it's "natural" or "pagan."

Filet O'Fish

Nowadays it's called "Filet-O-Fish," like "Bass-o-matic," but when I was a kid it was "Filet O'Fish." Not "Filet o' Fish" like "Barrel o' Monkeys," but "Filet O'Fish," like "Feeney O'Flannery."

Considering that back then, nobody but the Irish ate these things,* did Ronald McDonald read Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal," get the sarcasm, but still think it was a cool idea?

Before you scoff, remember, this is the same Ronald McDonald (as Scottish Presbyterian as a man could be without being named Robert**) who dressed up in whiteface and a red frightwig and a red nose to signify drunkenness as a hideous parody of the Irish for the delight of the normal beef-eating children.

Of course they're still made today despite the Irish being able to eat hamburgers,*** but they spend their allotted hours under the heat lamp in vain hope that a Scotsman will wander in, lost on his way to H. Salt or Long John Silvers or Canada, and order a fish sandwich.****

Footnotes follow:

* For those who don't get what the Irish have to do with fried cod: Until the 60's, Catholics weren't allowed to eat meat on Fridays, so they ate fish. Even after they dropped that rule, there were a number of kids--for some reason mostly Irish--with alcoholic fathers and dead grandfathers who ended up being taken care of by crotchety old grandmothers who refused to listen to that blasted new Pope. Fortunately, the last 6 escaped into legal adulthood, the hobo underground, or the sweet embrace of death somewhere around 1986, and modern Irish kids eat double quarter-pounders and supersize fries and are, as a consequence, just as fat as the rest of us Americans.

** ... or Bruce, or Mel Gibson

*** You read * above, right?

**** Scotsmen are required to eat fried cod, of any quality, whenever offered, or the English will stop letting them call themselves British. It's sort of a hazing ritual for being the new crown in Great Britain. Lucky for Northern Ireland there's no adjective "United Kingdomish."

The Internet Will Turn Us All Into 13-Year-Old Girls

Once people expected that the net would turn us all into geeks. Well, it makes sense. If the instant access to all of the world's information didn't geekify you, surely learning how to fight Internet Explorer and the bizarre interfaces of many early web apps would....

But the most popular use for the net--after porn--seems to be LiveJournal. And the most popular use for LiveJournal seems to be reading journals of people you'd never talk to in real life and gossiping about them behind their back.

This all reminds me of my sister in 6th grade. "Ohmigod, did you see what Pam wrote on her notebook?"

Except instead of 13-year-old girls who will grow out of it faster then fluorescent sweats and leg warmers, it's everyone. Geeks, artists, parents, people who should have something better to do with their life all want to ask me--via email, from across the room, even out at clubs--"Ohmigod, did you see what Pam wrote at http://livejournal.com/pamsnotebook?"

No, I didn't see. And I don't care. I don't know Pam, I don't want to know Pam, and I'd rather read a good book or the news or even some hideous Microsoft sample code than read up on what Pam's saying about her friends--or, as seems to more often be the case, what she ate for breakfast today. If her life is not interesting to me in person or over email, why would it be interesting when written up in tedious, rambling detail?

There's a theory floating around in linguistics that humans developed language specifically for gossip. For a good example, see Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language by Robin Dunbar.

But even if that's true, we're only designed to handle gossip about the 50-100 people in our local tribe. TV added dozens of soap opera characters and hundreds of celebrities to our repertoire. Now LiveJournal adds thousands of random strangers. Is there a point where enough gossip is enough?

I'll bet the answer is no. After all, look at porn. (Well, you probably already do....)

Until about 30,000 years ago, if you saw a naked woman, that meant a real woman was naked right in front of you: a living chance to outcompete your neighbors in the Darwinian sweepstakes. But then someone invented art.

You draw a stick figure with a couple of circles to represent tits, and suddenly you've found a way to fool your brain: all the pleasure of looking at a naked woman without having to fight the other guys for her, bring home food for her, or clean up your dirty loincloths.

Of course a stick figure only works for unsophisticated cavemen or 13-year-old boys, but the cave paintings and pocket sculptures got better, and eventually we reached the point where you can download thousands of high-quality videos of beautiful girls spreading themselves for the camera.

If that's not enough porn, LiveJournal probably isn't enough gossip. Hence MySpace, and dozens of imitators of LJ and MS, and Blogspot, and....

Yeah, I know, there were also cave paintings of deer and bison, and there are also blogs about politics and music and software, but just as nothing comes close to porn for total bandwidth usage, I have a feeling nothing comes can beat blog-gossip for total eyeball-seconds.

Well, at least the kids are reading....