Shoemaker-Levy 9 Made Me Feel A Bit Better About The Whole Thing

Last night, for those of you who happened to miss it, the moon was stolen away and replaced with what I shall call "The Blood Sphere" from this point onward last night.

Which is me trying to be dramatic about a Lunar Eclipse, which is cool enough that it doesn't need me for dramatization. I'll agree with the Chicago Tribune article that the view of the eclipsing moon was fantastic on a clear night in Chicago and that it was interesting to check out (especially considering that we're not having another one for some time), but I'll disagree that the cold didn't deter people. At least, I'll disagree with them if I presume they're writing about me, and why shouldn't they be. Unfortunately, I was sort of still trying to get some work done in the lab, and so could only afford a few brief ventures outside to look at it, but I was glad I got to see what little of the eclipse I got to see. I always seem to miss things like this, or lack the proper equipment to view things like this. There's a photo depicting the entire eclipse taken in three minute intervals by someone just south of Chicago here, which you should check out if you missed it. Or if there were clouds. Or, I guess, if you have no idea what a lunar eclipse looks like. They're not as rare as solar eclipses but damn it, they're still fun. And they demonstrate that the moon is indeed illuminated by the Sun, which you already knew if you're not out burning Bill Nye in effigy.

That actually made me think about when I was just getting interested in science. I owe my interest to a book on astronomy that I checked out of my elementary school library over and over again, and while I've only recently started reading up on it again, I've always held a place in my heart for astronomy. For a while there, it took the form of reading Carl Sagan's books, watching Cosmos and hearing a goofy electronic rendition of Arabesque No. 1 whenever I thought of Venus. But when I was young, reading much more about it and trying to figure out how to find things in the sky, there was always a bit of a dark secret which I have never really shared with many people.

But now I've got a blog with a self-imposed midnight deadline for a post, so I'll come out with it.

I've always been kind of freaked out by Jupiter. It's always kind of scared me.


The stuff of nightmares, ladies and gentlemen.

I don't know why. I think it's because I have never been able to wrap my head around how truly vast the universe is and, by corrolary, how incredibly small we are, and given that Jupiter is the biggest thing around that's not the Sun, I sort of projected my inability to deal with immensity onto the largest planet. The Great Red Spot still makes me a bit nervous, and when I walk outside somewhere on a clear night when I'm miles away from civilization, there's a bit of me that still harbors that ten year old's fear that I'm going to look up and Jupiter's going to be right there ready to screw up my day. It's weird, because I don't have the same thing with any other celestial object. I'm totally fine with the idea that there are some parts of the universe that are so distant that their light will never reach us, but damned if I still don't trust Jupiter.

It doesn't impede my wonder, but yes. It's odd.

If you've got something which makes you nervous but you're not sure why or if you recognize that you channel a greater nervousness into a specific thing, leave it in the comments. Or anything in the comments, really.

I Can't Believe It's Not Torture!

While taking out my garbage last night, I noticed that one of the cars in the parking lot had a bumper sticker which I'm going to presume is anti-torture. I'm not going to get into the concept that you'd have to say that you were against torture via bumper-sticker because the default is "pro-torture", and I'm sure it's some response to the situation in Guantanamo Bay as a whole, or perhaps the Military Commissions Act of 2006 in specific, though if that's the case, I'd hope it was a bumper sticker that had the words "habeas corpus" on it, just because I like Latin phrases to pop up on my commute. I'm not going to get into any of those issues in this post.

Part of the reason I noticed it was due to the fact that about half of the sticker was gone, which probably tends to happen when you're driving around in a Chicago winter. It was the bottom half that had been torn away, so that the car just said, in big letters

TORTURE

Which raises the question, what's on the lower half of that? Am I wrong in presuming it's anti-torture? Could it be torture fandom?

In order to explore that possibility, I ran "Torture" through Sloganizer to see what the possibilities for a fun, friendly pro-torture message could have been.

Torture-It's What's for Dinner
Torture-The Real Thing
Torture-The Original
Torture-Just Do It
Torture-Your Specialist

Or maybe it's a new leather bar around town.

I'd be fine with any of those things being true.

Stockboy

On Sunday, when I was writing that Diary of the Dead review, I decided that I needed to be out of the house, so I packed up my laptop and headed to the Panera Bread in Evanston. After buying some soup*, I sat down, yanked my headphones out of my iPod and put them in the headphone jack on the laptop before opening it up. I do this regularly in case I've left the sound on and something playing (not very likely, but it's happened) in order to spare those around me whatever music I'd been listening to before having it hibernate. On this occasion, nothing was playing and the sound was muted anyway, so it turned out not to be necessary. Simply because it was easier, I didn't remove my headphones and just left them on, without bothering to put on music, while I typed and ate my dinner.

To my right was a teenage girl and who I presume was her mother. They were having the "damn it, you need to get a job" talk, and, because I didn't have my music on, was impressed by how loud they were talking about it. I'm not one to eavesdrop, and so was trying to focus on writing, but kept hearing things like "If I worked there, I'd kill everyone and myself" and "I'm not working at the supermarket. I'm better than that" which I couldn't help but find amusing, because, frankly, an unemployed teenager just isn't better than working at a supermarket. At that point, because it was practically shouted, I looked up at the mother and wished that psi weren't fiction, because I'd have liked to have told her to tell her daughter to shut the hell up, stop holding out for a dream job (which is apparently folding clothes, because there's music there) and take the job at the supermarket, but alas, my thoughts were not transmitted. She asked her daughter to keep it down, because they were in a public place, at which point the daughter turned around and said "He can't hear us. He's got headphones on."

Which is a logical conclusion, but that doesn't make her inaudible to the other twenty people that are sitting just as close as I am with no headphones on.

It struck me as funny that I wanted the mother to force her to take the supermarket job (if for no other reason than "I'm better than it" being laughable), because my time working as a stockboy in a supermarket, which also happened to be my first job, was easily the worst job I held in my time as a teenager, and therefore the worst job I've ever had. To the point that I can still, almost a decade later, remember the last thing I did on the last day I worked there because I was so damn happy to be getting out of there. Easily. As in "cleaning behind the dumpster on New Years Day, trying to scrape frozen, discarded chicken breast off of the pavement and somehow getting stung by a bee, then trying to figure out how in the hell the bee was alive and hanging out in January.

*Incidentally, to any Panera managers reading this, there's no real reason to give me a buzzer. At all. Especially not if I'm buying soup. I'm capable of standing there and waiting for my number or name to be called, and if I'm buying soup, the guy behind the counter is just going to ladle it into a bowl and immediately cause the buzzer to start a-buzzin', so it's more an exercise to get me to move the buzzer across the counter for you than any kind of convenience to alert me to when my food is ready.

Floor Hockey, The Final Week

I'm still recovering from the marathon that was that last post (looking back on it, I probably should have split it up, and that would have taken away the necessity for me to write a post right now) but am also about to collapse from exhaustion in the wake of our final regular season floor hockey game. Still, my commitment shall not wane and you shall get your recap.

Week Five of the Floor Hockey season, and with byes on weeks one and four, this was the third game for Team Rich Ahn. And, as luck would have it a rematch against the team that humiliated us 6-1 in the first week.

But we've grown since then. Gotten stronger. Better. We've learned how to play and have been practicing. We're ready. Surely, this will be a rematch of the ages.


"Deep Blue" would have been a much better team name than "Team Rich Ahn". Just saying.

First period started pretty smoothly, and we seemed to be much more evenly matched than during our first matchup. Unfortunately, they're actually better at moving around than we are, and put up a goal about halfway through the first. Sad times. It looked to be on the way to another blowout.

And then, from downtown, Ben comes up huge to tie it. We survive the rest of the first.

More or less as soon as the second period started, though, we gave up two straight to put us down 3-1, then another where it sure seemed as though their forward knocked it out of the goalie's glove, or at the very least, entered the crease to put them up 4-1.


Just replace Hasek with Erin and Hull with "Some Guy I Don't Know".

We'd end the period 4-1 after Stephen's attempt to tie things up got denied on a play that will remain forever shrouded in controversy, as the puck seemed to cross the goal-line, but then was suddenly ejected in a smooth, sweeping motion that also knocked the goal out of position, forcing a faceoff.


You won't believe this, but there's apparently no co-ed intramural War Room. What a joke.

Starting down by three goals is no way to go into a third period. Sadly, that was followed by a garbage goal from their forward who's been giving us grief all day. 5-1.


For some reason, it hadn't occured to me that the first few images of a GIS of "garbage" would be Shirley Manson.

Shortly thereafter, Ben gets a bit tired and calls for me to sub in.

What can I say, lucky bounce, and an open shot. 5-2.

Everything's looking up. Unfortunately, that same forward finds another shot that bounces off the post. 6-2.

Things are grim. Stephen, who's been rocketing it down the court all day, sort of gives one of the better players on their team a bloody nose by lifting the puck into his face. Words are exchanged. Their defensemen start calling foul, and that we shouldn't be hitting the puck at them that hard.

Here's a tip. Don't want to have a puck hit at you with all of Stephen's might? Don't play hockey.



Intramural Badminton starts in a few weeks. Maybe that's more your speed.

No sweat. Stephen gets down the court, behind the goal and flips it to center. I'm going to brag about this one, because it looked like we practiced it. I notch my second goal of the game. If there were spectators, they'd be cheering.

Time's winding down, and with one last chance on a breakaway, Stephen scores again. The refs disallow it, saying that time had expired. Bill Belichick has no comment.

Final Score: 6-3. Better than 6-1, considering that they disallowed two of Stephen's goals, and we did it with fewer subs, more court time per player and without the support of George F. Will.


We're not conservative politics or baseball, and so this guy couldn't care less.

I'm happy with how we played, and I think we've got a good shot at not being immediately eliminated in the next round. The team we played this week was seriously just in much better shape than we were, and without making excuses and all joking aside, they're solid kids. Check back in here for all your Team Rich Ahn Floor Hockey coverage.

Diary of the Dead

I was pretty sure this was going to happen, where I'd have trouble putting down my thoughts about Diary of the Dead. I wanted to do it right and almost bought a pen and a memo pad on the way to the theater, but decided against it. I should note first that it's incredibly bizarre to me that a movie made by the guy who essentially invented the socially conscious zombie movie is only playing in one theater in Chicago, and that this theater is somewhat inconveniently located, especially when the CTA has decided that for what seems like the fiftieth straight week, no trains are running northbound through the subways and it took an hour to get home. Again. Because the management focuses more on finding new places to renovate slowly and poorly while contemplating shiny new cars and ignoring the fact that they're talking about spending insane amounts of money while claiming that they're nearly bankrupt instead of, you know, making the trains run on time.

But this isn't about the trains.

This is about zombies, which are much more interesting and reliable. And occasionally on fire.

Oh, and I've got no training in film theory, so I'm just going to go along with probably missing a bunch of technical things and mostly talk out of my ass. You'll get over it.

First, a short review of what actually happens. I'm going to presume that if you're reading this, you will be doing so with the understanding that there may be spoilers. I'll try to keep it minimal, but if you are really excited about seeing this and don't want any plot points revealed, stop reading. There's one very near the end, but my complaint with the bit I'm analyzing is that it's so obvious from the outset of the film, so you can make up your mind as to whether or not you think that's enough of a spoiler for you not to read this. So yes. Diary of the Dead is presented almost entirely as "The Death of Death", a documentation of the events surrounding the beginning of a zombie outbreak made by a film student at the University of Pittsburgh (which answers my previous question as to whether this would have any ties to the city). He and a group of students that are filming a socially-conscious mummy movie in the woods near Pittsburgh (a not-at-all subtle nod towards Night of the Living Dead) decide to capture what's happening on film after hearing a radio broadcast that claims that the dead are rising and attacking the living. Most of the rest of the movie involves an incredibly long road-trip from Pittsburgh to Scranton by way of Winnebago which one of the students just happened to have in Oakland, apparently and how they deal with the problem that surrounds them. I'll get more into their specific actions later, but that's essentially all you need to understand what's going on here.

I said the other day that I was glad Romero was returning to the roots of the zombie outbreak and showing what happens at the beginning. I later realized that that's really the only place he really could have gone as far as pursuing a new direction in the chronology of the whole zombie outbreak scenario. He's already explored what happens in the middle of the outbreak (after the initial chaos, but before an actual response is formulated) in Dawn of the Dead, the military response to such an outbreak in Day of the Dead and the "zombies as the dominant species" in Land of the Dead. There isn’t anywhere really to go beyond that that doesn’t involve continually showing how the survivors are dealing with a prolonged zombie plague, and so it makes sense to “reboot” even if every other movie franchise there is has done the same thing recently. That said, I thought his depiction of the first few days was pretty solid. He addresses the issues uncertainty surrounding whether the people the protagonists kill are actually dead and the skepticism of a few of the group's members as to whether this is all actually happening, the stress this imparts upon the group, the film-within-a-film-maker's decision to try to make a documentary out of the situation and how this goes over with most of the people who just want to stay alive and the idea that they'll all have to adjust to living in a world where the undead are a constant threat. This, to my mind, is the most interesting part of the sequence of things that happen in most zombie movies, as the more it's clear that living humans are a besieged minority, the more it turns into a straight-up war movie.

What distinguished Romero's zombie films from the standard zombie horror has always been his ability at weaving bits of social satire throughout the plot. It's been more subtle at times (particularly in Night, which seems to me to be the purest horror movie of the series) and less so at others (addressing commercialism by sticking the movie in a shopping mall, for example). What I mean to say is that subtlety is not a sticking point for me. Sure, Dawn of the Dead is pretty explicit about what it's satirizing, but that's part of the reason I enjoyed it. With Diary, a lot of the social commentary is delivered through the voice-over of the girlfriend of the student who makes the film, often combined with a series of images that are intended to enhance the concept that an over-powerful government is spinning the reports of a zombie apocalypse (for unspecified reasons, presumably to decrease panic? I guess?) and that only through blogs and YouTube can the truth be disseminated. It comes across as something which has been tacked on and stated explicitly, rather than expressed through the narrative of the movie. Even in Dawn of the Dead, the parallels between the zombies and consumer culture and organized religions were expressed by isolating the protagonists for long stretches in a scenario where they had no material wants and then throwing Hari Krishna and nun zombies at them. There wasn't a voiceover telling you that the survivors got restless and realized that satisfying their needs by looting a JC Penney's wasn't enough. Unfortunately, that's the case for much of the voice-over for Diary. I'm not sure if there's a better way to do that if you want to make a point about media portrayal of disaster and the way the media and government work in general, but I'd have been more satisfied if it didn't feel tacked on at the end.

The reviewer for Slate criticized the movie for being "almost Luddite in its skepticism about the now-ubiquitous technology of information" which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing, though the constant references to YouTube and MySpace do get a bit tiresome and gave me the same feeling that I got from Live Free or Die Hard, that the person making the film is only vaguely familiar with what he's talking about and is trying too hard to relate to the younger viewer. (I should note that in saying that, I am in no way implying that Diary is as technologically ludicrous as Live Free or Die Hard. It's not. Everything that happens is actually pretty plausible. Except for the whole zombie apocalypse thing.) She further notes the inclusion of Samuel, a deaf Amish man as a hero as further commentary on the constant barrage of information and technology on the modern world, but this is exactly the kind of humor and satire that made me love Dawn. The scenes with Samuel, by the way, are easily the funniest of the movie and, while a bit confusing, rates as probably the best. The "corruption of those with power" scenes, such as the National Guard members stealing the supplies of the group at gunpoint also manage to make a salient point without having a voiceover, and I really wish that could have been more consistently what was going on throughout the movie.

As a zombie movie, you could do much worse. Many have done much worse. Romero sticks with his characteristic style of zombie, in that anyone who dies in a way that doesn't cause severe brain trauma reanimates (not just those who are bitten), that a zombie bite is fatal even if the bite itself, if received from another creature, would not have led to death, and zombies are slow, shambling creatures. He actually explicity states his preference for the slow undead by having the in-film director make reference to it, though he gives an explanation that differs from Romero's original rationale behind slow zombies. It's now "they'd snap their ankle off" rather than a misunderstanding of the phenomenon of rigor mortis, which is actually a worse explanation for me because it implies that the zombie is consciously choosing to move slowly. I've always been a fan of Romero's zombie more than the virus-ridden quick zombie of Boyle's 28 Days/Weeks Later because I think it ups the danger factor (by having anyone who dies reanimate, so that even seclusion in a group does not protect against the monster) and because a slow, lumbering mob that you know you should be able to get away from if it weren't for their sheer numbers scares me more as a thought experiment than ultra-fast zombies. Slow zombies, for me, carry with them a sort of brute-force determination that overwhelms because of their sheer numbers and the psychological terror of seeing someone related to the protagonist who has died and reanimated, but is more subtly a danger because they're not running at you screaming, but lumbering toward you looking for all the world like they person they were before becoming a zombie, which makes it much more difficult for the protagonist to go through with the whole killing thing. With a group of really fast zombies coming at you, it's really no different than if they were anything else that was fast and wanted to attack you. They could just as easily be angry tigers. There's no reason for them to be the reanimated dead, except that you'd become one if they got you, but that really isn't that terrifying to me, or any more terrifying than death. Romero's always been great at portraying the slow zombie as a terrifying creature, and Diary of the Dead is no different. He makes good use of the fact that the group is for some reason always wandering through the woods or stumbling through a darkened warehouse, though I wish he'd spent more time showing the claustrophobic nature of the Panic Room at Ridley's house near the end of the movie where those who have survived decide to "wait things out" or explain just how the hell the survivors edited the footage together and distributed it.

That was actually one of the few things that bothered me about the movie that I think would have been ok if I weren't from western Pennsylvania. Some of the errors confused me, as Romero, though born in NYC, has spent a large part of his life in the Pittsburgh area. So when it's taking two days to get to Scranton from downtown Pittsburgh (even through back roads, that's maybe an eight hour trip), somehow forgetting to drop the character that's going to Harrisburg off on the way (which is stated as the plan), claiming that a member's family should have beaten them back to Scranton (despite the fact that they were somewhere in West Virginia, which is a larger distance no matter how you slice it than Pittsburgh to Scranton) and that West Virginia is claimed to be "one hundred miles" away from northeast PA (it's more like four hundred). I just don't really understand the nature of those screw ups.

And it still bugs me that they had a Winnebago in Oakland somewhere. I've just... where do you park that?

Overall, I enjoyed it, but as I thought would be the case before I went, it can’t hold a candle to his first two. It’s an interesting movie, if a bit blunt with its points at times, and I’ll always prefer a Romero zombie movie to a lot of horror movies. I’d have liked the voiceover to have a bit less of an “added on” feel, though I suppose that makes sense with the movie’s premise and think that there were a few parts where it could have been a bit less predictable (Spoiler: If the voiceover is done entirely by the girlfriend of the person making the film rather than the person making the film, chances are he’s going to bite it at some point, probably near then end). It successfully mixes horror with the occasional comic relief (“Hello, I’m Samuel” and “I’m stealing shit.” spring to mind), while eliciting laughs in some places where they’re not intended (running over zombies on the way out of Pittsburgh, before it’s been established to the group’s satisfaction that they’re actually the living dead is intended to show the level of stress this causes, particularly between the driver of the Winnebago and the strongest skeptic of the group, but comes across as somewhat goofy as the zombies get knocked over like they’re pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto). I’d recommend going to see it, but try not to hold it to the unreachable standard of Romero’s earliest zombie films. I have a feeling for most of you, that shouldn’t really be an issue, so go to the theater if there’s one in the state that’s playing it and enjoy the carnage.

Oh, one more thing. There was one zombie in the scene where they're leaving the Amish barn that just didn't look like he was committed to the whole shambling thing. That annoyed me, and that actor should get no more work as an extra in zombie movies.

I think that’s easily the longest thing I’ve ever written for Murphspot.

I'll get you back for this, Steve Jobs

Yesterday, for some reason, while I was getting ready to leave work, my mp3 player of choice decided that everything that was on it was suddenly unplayable. No problem, I just had to delete everything and reload it, except that that meant I lost a bunch of podcasts that I've since removed from my computer. Still, cleaning that thing out isn't a bad thing, probably, and it brightens my day to be forcibly reminded of punk rock bands from the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania is something I'm not opposed to in principle.

And sure, iTunes somehow forgot where a lot of my music was, but that's ok because I relish the opportunity to tell software "No. Screamin' Jay is here. It hasn't moved since I told you where it was last time. No."

This is what happens when I make a commitment to post everyday, but haven't had any revelations since yesterday and am running out the door to go to the one theater in Chicago which is playing Diary of the Dead, which is actually pretty conveniently located near where I used to live. I've got some stuff on the mixture of politics and science and will have up a review of that movie at some point, but those will have to wait for when I'm not actually trying to convince the CTA to take me somewhere.

Nationstates

Once in a while, I'll remember this thing exists (usually by Kriss) and take five minutes to plunge my great nation further into depravity and lawlessness. NationStates is an online "nation simulation" game based on author Max Barry's novel Jennifer Government which is evidently a dystopian view of a government with too little power. I haven't read it, don't have any real inclination to read it and was surprised to learn what the novel itself is about, considering that I have been trying to see what happens if I ramp up civil liberties while having basically no economic restrictions in my little nation of Murphspot.

The gameplay is simple. You register a nation and its performance and well-being are determined by the government's (your) action on issues that are automatically generated. The solution to these issues is usually to pick one of a few very extreme positions, which makes the decision sometimes difficult, but it is good to see that both positives and negatives are acknowledged for every choice you make. To take an example from an issue I had recently:

Recent studies showing that the sources of Murphspot's most common street crimes (vandalism, muggings, joyriding, and witchcraft) are children under the age of criminal responsibility has prompted a national outcry for government action.

My options were to treat juveniles as adults and sentence them to long prison sentences (an option which did not define any age limits) which would stop a lot of the crime but would lead to a rise in taxes and could affect those who are caught up in petty crime and would not be likely to become dangerous if not incarcerated with violent criminals, to write it off as "childish mischief" which might be accurate and avoids a tax increase, but does nothing to solve the problem and to prosecute the parents of the offending children, which addresses the problem in an indirect way and might be unlikely to yield results.

As a result of trying to see what happens if I go with full on civil and economic libertarianism (a philosophy which, as the novel critiques a situation where the government is powerless), my nation is officially listed as an "Anarchy" with a street crime problem, but "superb" civil rights, a "strong" economy and "superb" political freedoms and is led by a "large, liberal, pro-business government" and peopled by citizens who pay a flat 16% income tax rate.

It's an interesting distraction. There's also a lot of activity on the associated forums and a very strong RPG aspect to participation, but I tend to stay away from that (partly because I'm not really all that good at role-playing) and stick with seeing how allowing me to pick a Supreme Court Justice would lead to the downfall of society.

If you'd like to see exactly how that's leading to the breakdown of everything, go to there and do a search for "Murphspot" and enjoy the ocelots, biker gangs and large private sector.

How Did I Forget About This?

I've just gotten done preparing samples that I'm going to analyze, and I don't know if I'll be done before midnight, so I thought I'd put this up now.

I'm not one who claims to be exactly linked in to popular culture at large. I don't have cable (as I'm down with either watching things online at a network's website or waiting for Netflix to bring me television and it's way cheaper that way) so I tend to miss a lot of things, but I also try to keep up with news sources, radio and the intertubes. Having said that, I've let something slip so drastically that I fear that I might have to stop claiming to be an enthusiast of the genre. I am speaking, of course, of tomorrow's release of Diary of the Dead.


IMDB.com claims one of the other taglines is "Shoot the Dead" which I like for its "Hey Guys! Zombies!" straightforwardness, but I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a reference to something which is more conventionally done with the dead

For some reason, it was stuck in my mind that this was coming out in May. Apparently, that was completely wrong, and now I'll have to fit seeing (and then reviewing) Diary of the Dead into the weekend, which sadly shouldn't be too hard. I could write for a very long time on the subject of zombies in horror fiction, of my preference for slow zombies in the eternal slow (Romero) zombies versus Fast (28 Days Later) zombies which does not hinge upon the pedantic argument that Boyle's zombies aren't true zombies because they're not dead. I grant Boyle's zombies "zombie status" but still find the slower counterparts more interesting. And while I was disappointed with Land of the Dead, I'm not holding up high expectations for Diary. It's not going to be in the same league as Night or Dawn because those were simply astonishing blends of horror and social commentary (a bit more on the latter in Dawn) that it's unfair to expect Romero to match it, though I do maintain that largely avoiding the overt social commentary is what made me not like the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead all that much. The premise sounds a bit too much like Blair Witch Project with Zombies but I think if executed well, it should be an interesting twist on the origin-bit of the whole zombie tale and could provide an interesting device to follow the survivors who are, after all, what the story's really all about (a prime example of a story which executes this very well, in my opinion are the Walking Dead series).

I'll be interested to see, because I can't find much information online (in the time I'm giving myself to look for it) whether Romero continued to set his movies in Pittsburgh. That's always added a little bit to the appeal of his movies for me, if I'm able to recognize that sometimes, cemeteries in Evans City get screen time, that if there's a zombie outbreak, George Romero envisions the residents of Johnstown having a blast with the whole affair and that I can remember going to the Monroeville Mall on days when it was, thankfully, cleared of the undead. Even when he either set Day explicitly elsewhere, it was nice to know that it was filmed in Beaver Falls of all places, and Land let me know what downtown would look like from Mt. Washington if there were suddenly a giant citadel in the middle of it.

As I said, I could go on about that for a very, very long time, but I won't. I'll save that for the review, and for when I have more free time.

So yes. Expect a post on that soonish.

Music and Associations

I've changed my music listening habits. I don't listen to as much music as I used to, but when I do listen, I tend to prefer whole albums to either compilations or "Greatest Hits" albums. There are a few exceptions, which I'll talk about, but for the most part, I tend to get accustomed to a sequence of songs and it throws off my ability to enjoy the music if I'm being shifted around a lot. I tend to prefer albums over Greatest Hits compilations partially for that reason (I get confused if "Getting Better" is not followed by "Fixing a Hole") and would prefer to listen to a more accurate representation of where a band was at musically at any given time than just listen to their most popular works as selected by someone who isn't me. Plus the fact that everyone who's released more than one album (and some who haven't) has a Greatest Hits record.

What I've noticed, however, is that certain albums are very, very strongly tied to vivid memories in my mind. When I was getting ready to go in to work today, I threw on Buck-O-Nine's Twenty-Eight Teeth, an album that's not superb and that I haven't listened to in years but that was around during the third-wave ska surge of the late nineties, and so, to my shock, other people had it.


Chances are you only listened to My Town

I noticed, about halfway through "Jennifer's Cold" that I desperately wanted to be playing GoldenEye 007. Somehow, Buck-O-Nine and their fairly standard pop-ska-punk have become inexorably linked to me running around a dam in Arkhangelsk trying to figure out what to do with the little uplink bugger and then looking for something to bungee jump off of.

Off the top of my head, and this is somewhat unsurprising, I can think of two other albums that come to mind if I think about a video game. One of them I'm a tinge embarassed to admit . One I'm not. Guess which one's which for a prize.

Music: "Moonshot! A Moon Ska Records Compilation"


Game: The Legend of Zelda-Ocarina of Time

I know. I said I don't listen to many compilations. This is one exception. It was one of the first CD's I'd ever purchased with my own money (and may or may not have been the second album I ever bought) and I've listened to it so many times that it bothers me when "Nex Finga" by Skinnerbox isn't immediately followed by "Regular Guy" by Easy Big Fella. It's stuck in my memory there because my friend and I resolved to learn the lyrics to "Nex Finga" which are sung quickly and in an accent while beating the Water and Shadow Temples.

Yes, I still remember them.

Music: Tubthumper by Chumbawamba


Game: Legend of Zelda- A Link to the Past

I know. I know. Stop yelling at me, I know. Although, really, if you skip "Tubthumping" and the insanely excessive airplay it got when the record came out and listen to the rest of it as an album like any other, it's really not that bad. Anyway, I remember having it in a CD player and not bothering to take it out while I was playing this. I distinctly associate "Drip, Drip, Drip" with one of those "here's some water-striders" dungeons and "Mary Mary" with knocking armored knights into an abyss rather than the movie on whose soundtrack it appears. Possibly embarassing? Sure. But honest.

And yes, there are albums that remind me of things which aren't games in the Legend of Zelda series. Two examples.

Music: The Mouse and the Mask by DangerDoom



I hadn't really heard of MF DOOM when I decided to buy this album and had only heard of Danger Mouse as the guy who came up with The Grey Album, a mashup of the Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album and knew that it was somehow tied in to Adult Swim. I ended up really enjoying the album (and buying more MF DOOM) and really strongly associate it with biking into work first year, because it was one of the few albums I had placed on a tiny mp3 player I owned at the time and listened to it pretty much every day. I associate "Benzie Box" and "Old School" specifically with the stretch of Sheridan between Estes and Tuohy. Probably because I would get to that stretch of road on the way home in about the time it took to get to "Benzie Box."

Music: Jinx by Quarashi


Associated with: the intersection of Peebles Road and McKnight Road in Ross Township, PA


This is, I think pretty obviously, copyright Google, but for some reason when I cropped the picture to include it, I cropped out the mark. Please don't sue me, Google. Afterall, Murphspot will eventually quadruple the number of people that use Blogger. Eventually.

I wish I had an explanation for that one. Oddly, I associate that corner with the first track, "Stick 'em up" and the stretch of road about a mile before that intersection with the second track, "Mr. Jinx". That confuses me further.

And there we are. Done with today's post one minute before midnight. Hopefully, I'll be able to get this up in time, but I'm typing this at a Burger King and the internet connection is really shoddy. We'll see. Oh, and editing may take place after midnight. Deal with it.

Let's say for the sake of argument that people actually ever read this. And that those people who do listen to music. Am I the only one who strongly associates music with very specific actions, or is there an album you listen to that you can remember listening to at a specific time and place?

I'm Concerned about my Viewing Habits

Maybe it's just because I'm reading this intermittently on the train when I'm not trying to learn about anti-matter or the housing market or how to look for a hotel room in Aachen, but should it worry me that while watching Batman Begins the other day, the visual of Christian Bale in a business suit made me think he was going to abandon his plans to save Gotham in favor of hacking Paul Owen apart with an axe?

Languages

I'd be totally useless in another country. Well, moreso.

The idea of being able to speak more than one language has always appealed to me, but it's never been my strong suit. Mostly, it took me a very long time to understand the difference between speaking another language and translating everything from English. For some reason, I never really wanted to try in my Spanish classes in high school (and as a result speak no Spanish) but minored in German and took one French course (in preparation for being in Paris later that semester, which worked until I got to a door and realized I hadn't learned the words for "push" or "pull." So I only really ever knew the barest minimum French and my German has become lousy because I stopped reading it and don't have anyone to speak with. My plan had been to listen to Deutsche Welle, but it's difficult to jump back into a language when you've forgotten most of the grammar. I've got enough grammar and vocabulary books for German that I should probably try to get back to understanding it enough to be able to get something out of German radio broadcasts.

I don't have enough time or money to take another class, but I think I'm going to try something to supplement that. I've already mentioned, really recently, that I'm a big podcast listener, and I'm not sure this is the right mode of action for precisely that reason (because I tend to get behind in listening) but I'm going to give it a shot. Deutsche Welle has a series of language instruction podcasts Warum nicht? which I'm giving a shot (I'm not sure what I should think of the "invisible ex" thing in the introduction paragraph there, but I'm just going to ignore it for now.

I'm also going to try a beginners podcast in a language I don't know at all to see if I pick anything up. I've been intending to give Russian a crack for a while, have a few grammar books and while I'm sure this is probably the least effective way to go about learning it, I'm going to give Spoonful of Russian a listen. I'm glad some of the entries are videos, because one of the reasons I picked Russian as a language I'd like to learn is that every language I've attempted thus far uses the Latin alphabet and Cyrillic seems similar enough that I'd not run away screaming, but different enough to be a challenge.

As I said, I'll probably not succeed in either of these endeavors, but I don't really see any harm in giving it a shot. If you have any ideas how I should go about brushing up on my German or trying to learn a new language, leave me some advice in the comments. If you have advice that's not going to cost me any money, even better.

Update: "Invisible ex" refers to an invisible elf who accompanies the protagonist of the series and is named "Ex". Whatever. It reminded me how to form pronouns in the dative, and therefore is awesome.

Walking as an Energy Source

The push to get away from fossil fuels is something I'm sure all of the readers of this blog are familiar with. Two quick things along those lines while I get ready to head out of Evanston for the night.

First, this paper in Science which I'd like to claim that I found while perusing scientific journals at 7am with a big cup of coffee, but in reality I found on Ben's desk, which shows a prototype for a device which takes advantage of a normal human walking motion to generate electricity and their attempts at overcoming the burden of having to wear a big knee brace while you're walking. They employ a one-way clutch to gather energy only when the knee is straightening (not when it's flexing) so that power is generated when you step forward. I know nothing of the engineering here, but it seems like an interesting if unwieldy idea. They do a fair job of pointing out some applications for the technology, primarily power-generation in places on the earth that are not connected to a power supply and the use as a power-generating source for motorized prosthetic limbs, such that you'd use your healthy limb to help you move the prosthetic, which is kind of cool.

Second, an interesting discussion on the feasibility of biofuels on Talk of the Nation last week. I'm more familiar with cost-effectiveness arguments for and against the use of biofuels (it's not feasible to use corn as a source of ethanol in the US because of the way we grow and harvest corn and its poor return on investment, while Brazil derives a bunch of ethanol from sugar cane as a waste product, and so it's relatively cheap and easy for them to implement biofuels.) Their argument is more focused on carbon-release, and without getting into the whole global warming discussion, it's an interesting phenomenon to note that if we're going to grow crops like switchgrass (which is much more energy efficient than corn) to use as a fuel source, we'll end up either leveling forest to free up land to do so or using land which would otherwise be used for food, which forces the food-farmers to go and level forest, and so the end result is the same. I recommend listening to the bits on the use of algae and bacteria to produce fuel, but mostly because I've got a friend who's a synthetic chemist and has been, as far as I can recall, playing around with bacteria to get them to make things for him.

Winter is Enjoyable

I was trying to think of what I should write here today (and might write a better post after I do some more cleaning), but was having a lot of trouble. What could the reason be? The fact that I got up late today and spent the day doing laundry, cleaning dishes and buying groceries while watching Batman Begins? Possible. I'm going to go with "was more concerned with the fact that I couldn't feel my extremities."

I knew it was going to be cold when I moved to Chicago. It has a sort of reputation for that, which I think is generally overblown. This weekend, though, has been absurd. It's been downright tropical over the last week (mid-thirties!) but suddenly we're back to a -25F wind chill and me looking like this while typing.


That light isn't from my lamp. I've strategically set a few fires for warmth. Perhaps I should talk to someone about the heat.

I'll have something of substance to post tomorrow, but for now, I'm going to keep cleaning because it allows me to be near hot water.

I'm Why I Can't Have Nice Things

So, in addition to being incredibly tiring (which is likely also a side effect of the fact that I can't bike in when there's ice everywhere, and so I'm not exercising as much as I was during the summer and fall, which probably isn't good), floor hockey has been doing something that causes me to wake up the next day with a really sore back. I think it's probably because I'd been playing for the past few weeks with a junior stick, so I had to bend down pretty awkwardly to have even the tiny ability to control the puck I had. As a result of the fact that I'd rather not spend Tuesdays unable to stand up straight, I've gone out and spent the fourteen dollars that buys you the cheapest wooden stick at Sports Authority that's actually a proper size. There is that unfortunate "A. Ovechkin" on the shaft, but I'm sure I can put some tape over that.

I'm not going to use it much as we don't have very many games left this season, most likely, and then I won't have another game to use it in until next winter, but I've also discovered that when I'm waiting for chemistry to occur (that is, once I've set everything up and it just needs to sit and stir for a while), it's incredibly good stress relief to go to the stairway that no one uses and knock a puck around. Mostly after people have gone home but I'm still in the lab because of my terrible sleep schedule. So maybe it'll get some use between now and next year.

However, I've not taken it in to work yet, and so I've spent the last half hour learning why I shouldn't have a stick and a puck at home. There are scuff marks on my kitchen tile and a bunch of things have been knocked off my bookcase. I'll have to spend a little while cleaning, but every time I get up to put the papers I knocked down back, my mind short circuits, realizes there's still a puck in the room, and forces me to head back to the kitchen to play with it again.

I think this cycle's only going to cease when I figure out a way to lose the puck in my apartment until Monday.

I'm A Terrible Musician

Once upon a time, not long ago, when people wore pajamas and lived life slow, I played the bass guitar. Not very well, mind you, but I still played it, dammit. I'd played mostly the lines to songs I knew which tended to be incredibly easy. I improved slightly when I joined the jazz band in college and discovered that "Hey! I can't read music." That worked sort of well for a while. I still wasn't terribly good, but learned enough to play the accompaniment to alto sax in the intro of 'Round Midnight in a dining room in Erie, so I considered it a success. I haven't been playing much recently. Part of it is that I don't plan my time out very well and end up playing NHL06 instead, but a larger part is that I don't have anyone to play with recently, and playing bass unaccompanied by any other instrumens is fine if you're Vic Wooten, but not so much if you're mortal.

I have thought in the past that the solution to this would be to either find someone that plays another instrument (a difficult prospect for a graduate student) or learn how to play guitar. That's been kind of on hold for a while because, in addition to not actually having a guitar yet, the whole "playing more than one note at once" thing kind of eludes me. That's where this comes in. I'm not exactly sure how "Guitar Hero for an actual guitar" would work, as the easier settings on Guitar Hero are made easier by skipping long passages, which doesn't really work if you actually want to play a song. Still, it's an idea that intrigues me. I'm a big fan of the Guitar Hero franchise, don't buy into the whole "stop playing this and start playing a real guitar" thing in general because the point of a video game is not to delude the user into thinking they're actually acquiring a skill other than "playing the game", and because people who whine about that somehow don't say the same thing of, say, people who play Madden but don't actually play professional football.

So yes. Perhaps this level of "slow down there, cowboy, and we'll show you how to play a guitar" tutorial will motivate me to actually pick one up and learn. Or maybe I'll take up basketweaving.

One of those two.

Political Surveys and their Ramifications

I've never been more interested in the Mass. 5th congressional district GOP primary for a special election following the resignation of a guy named "Marty".

Unfortunately, political science studies I'm involved in don't involve some kind of crazy reënactment of the Scopes Trial performed by schoolchildren or an assesment of our feelings toward a movie depicting bears in overalls running out of a burning building.

Rather, it was a relatively tame survey of our political opinions, our political knowledge and our reactions to a twenty minute debate leading up to the GOP primary to determine the Republican nominee in a special election for the congressman for the Massachusetts 5th district after Marty Meehan decided he was going to be the Chancellor at University of Massachusetts-Lowell. So stunningly interesting.


Jim Ogonowski (left) and Thomas Tierney, two of the most strongly accented individuals ever to compete for a Congressional seat. Tierney describes his plan for reducing the deficit as "wicked." Or he would. If he was ever more than ten minutes from taking a nap.

Nothing too difficult in the survey. It appeared to be attempting to determine if we'd been awake during the debate and had us assess who we thought won and where the participants stood on the issues. But, they came through with $20 for my participation and gave me lunch, so I'm happy with them.

To think, there will eventually be a time, if everything goes well, that I won't be a graduate student. And I might be able to not get excited over $20 for participating in a survey. Those times are, as far as I can tell, far away, so I'll happily capitalize on my ability to rank things on a scale of one to seven in the interim.

Oh, and Ogonowski crushed Tierney in the primary (which isn't surprising, as Tierney's positions seemed more similar to those of the current incarnation of the Democratic Party and he admitted that for him, political parties are more about finding the easiest way to get on the ballot rather than ideology), then lost to Niki Tsongas (Paul Tsongas' wife) in the general election. In case you were interested.

Murphy, Study Participant

I'd somehow envisioned a brighter start to my New Adventures, involving a wide variety of flora and fauna not native to wherever I happened to be. Turns out, not so much. I'll have to settle for being part of someone's undergraduate thesis.

I'm planning on participating in a political science study tomorrow that I found out about yesterday. I'm going to pretend that I'm doing this because I think that undergraduates are our future and they need all the help they can get in forming their theses, and because I think that the concept of furthering knowledge for the benefit of mankind by sacrificing some of my time that we may better understand society is a noble endeavor. Mostly it's the free pizza and the $20 compensation. But I also think it'll be a good time.

I've always wanted to be part of polls, or somehow contribute to "popular opinion" though I'm sure that desire would go away as soon as I actually started to be asked to participate on a regular occasion. I've only been polled once, last year, on the rare occasion that my landline phone was actually charged and I was home during the evening. It was mostly about the presidential election and which issues I was most concerned about, but also, oddly, how excited I was for the 2007 MLB season.

But for tomorrow, I am left with the charge of getting enough sleep to be coherent for the study and with the weighty decision of whether I should answer honestly or just give the most batshit insane responses I can come up with. And whether those are two different things. I'll try to post about how it goes, unless I'm forced to sign some contract that says I won't because the undergraduate is going to try to publish or some such. If that's the case, I'll come up with an absurdly complex and unwieldy coding system and relate my experiences that way.

My Metacarpal, A Retrospective

It just occured to me that in addition to it being Super Tuesday and Fat Tuesday and Half-Price-on-Meatball-Subs-At-Subway Tuesday, it's been exactly one year since my fifth metacarpal was cleft in twain by a cruel combination of an uneven sidewalk at Noyes and Sheridan and a sandwich from Rollin' to Go too delicious to sacrifice for the cause of saving my hand from being broken. Which means that about ten and a half months ago, my hand was incredibly weak (well, somehow weaker than it usually is), that all the skin was doing some kind of weird "falling off all at once after being liberated from the hell-cast" thing and I was watching 300 on an IMAX screen.

I was reminded of that because I remember breaking my hand on my sister's birthday. So, Happy Birthday, Melissa. I'm sorry such a joyous occasion is associated in my mind with blinding pain. Well, moreso.*

Those were incredibly painful, then incredibly itchy, then incredibly ab-laden times. Then, some incredibly sad times that I've never posted about (and won't) and then qual-times, which resulted in me keeping my job, which is a bonus.

I meant to make a list of things which I'll try to do this year around New Years, though the resolution thing kind of turns me off. One of those things was "finding a way not to break my bones" this year. The other was to have more incredible adventures. These may work to counter-act each other, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it (and by get to it, I mean jump over it on a dirt bike.)

That'll probably be good for this, as well. Writing about the mundane doesn't interest me. Writing about getting into fake fights in front of a pizza parlor, then having my fake adversary get mad at one of the cheering onlookers because he was wearing a Red Sox cap, then running down the street to a diner seems more fun.

But first, before my adventures can start, I've got to fix this goddamn sleep schedule.

*No, seriously. Happy birthday, kid. It also just occurred to me that this is your 21st. Please with the being responsible.

**I've also just learned from Wikipedia that the fifth metacarpal is the most common broken bone if you're breaking your bones throwing a punch. This bodes well for the story I've been telling about it, which involves at least three tigers and five heavyweight champions.

Super Tuesday and Ventilation

Another update on the results of playing floor hockey. Sure, it's awesome, especially when we're good, but my back is killing me. Damn it.

I thought about doing a big Super Tuesday post, but I'm just not really feeling it. I'm pulling for a McCain/Obama matchup, because I think I'd be least sad with the winner of that advancing to the Presidency. I've got huge issues with Clinton, and I could go into those if you'd like, but not in this post. It's a long list and includes her position on censorship, her healthcare plan and its economic viability and long screeds on her support of an incredibly strong executive branch, along with her willingness to play identity politics, her insistence that she's not the establishment candidate when it's clear that she is and I need to lie down now. And positions on a ton of other issues. And Romney strikes me as completely incapable of doing the job as I have no idea what he thinks about any given issue. Plus that whole thing where I'm trying to match up socially and personally liberal with slightly economically conservative. Romney seems to me to represent the socially/personally conservative thing that I'm not down with.

For that same reason, I'm crazy opposed to Huckabee, but he's not going to get the nomination anyway.

But yeah. I'd rather not get into that too much. Unfortunately, now that I'm looking for a blog topic on the news outlets I go to for my news, they're all going on and on about the Primaries.

So I shall merely complain about my back, and the fact that the ventilation has apparently been screwed up in Pancoe, which I think isn't going to kill me (as most of the stuff I'm working with at current is aqueous solutions of metal salts) but it does make it completely impossible to open the doors. Well, not completely impossible. Just imagine trying to open a door when there's oh, say a gale wind pushing on it. It's like that. The ventilation is supposedly a result of the storm that's a-comin', though I haven't noticed any of the six to twelve inches of snow we're supposed to get tonight.

I'm apparently never riding my bike again.

The Game

You probably thought I was going to have a lapse in my daily posting. And that, I submit, is just a horrible underestimation of my dedication to this thing.

By which I mean you'd have been right. I'm exhausted now and would really like to lie down and sleep, but this is way too early in this experiment to fall behind.

The appetizer situation was solved by a brilliant purchase of bagel chips and spinach dip at the Morse Market.


Saved the night about as much as David Tyree

I'd do a recap of the game, but everyone saw it, those of us who are rational and were cheering for the Giants rejoiced while those of us who have souls blacker than a starless night wept. A team of researchers is trying to determine how the hell Eli avoided that sack. And, this year at least, I was happy to see the Giants pull it off, and I was glad to see them pull it off in such a solid game, where the officials stayed out of it for the most part and didn't make any enormous mistakes. I was going to make reference to some joker who tried to explain that the Patriots actually won if you screw around with how the clock was kept and presume that the Giants wouldn't have changed their strategy if there was no time left, but he's removed it from YouTube, presumably because Fark picked up the link. He seems to be a minority, though. I haven't read too many Pats fans who are doing anything but giving the Giants credit. Incidentally, if you want some entertainment, go read one of the Fark threads on the Super Bowl.

It what is undoubtedly a bigger game, however, Team Rich Ahn (because our captain didn't get the team name to him on time, so they used his name) had a matchup against "Kaibigan". If you'll recall from the video, our last attempt at floor hockey resulted in a 6-1 loss, three broken legs and our head coach's resignation. Tonight, however, things were different, except that I stuck with #19.

Why the hell not.

We were much more coordinated on offense along with absolutely stellar defense (our third period goalie, Meera, had two saves on two shots on goal, as did the goalie for the first two periods Erin.) Their goalie was solid, blocked me four times and had a terrific stop against Steven, but could not sustain the awesome throughout. One goal by Preeti, a goal by Erin (on which I'm claiming an assist) and a sick backhanded goal by Steven tied up a 3-0 shutout.

Because this is the Northwestern Intramural system, there's only one game left in the regular season. Then the playoffs arrive.

This is going to be intense. Come to Murphspot for all your intramural hockey needs. For all your actual hockey needs, you'll want The Pensblog. OT losses that move us into a 3-way tie for first are not kosher by Murphspot, but I'll leave the recapping on that to the people that do it best.

Giants/Patriots/Digestion

I'm about to head over to a friend's house for the Super Bowl, and thought I should get today's post in before that. He's a Giants fan, so I'll be cheering for the Giants in addition to the fact that there was that annoying little stint where the Patriots seemed to knock off the Steelers constantly.

My intention was to make some appetizers, but I don't have a normal sleep schedule, and so it's going to have to be whatever I can find that has the potential for deliciousness at Dominick's. I could, if I decided I hated everyone that's going to be there, swing by White Castle for a 30-count case (which the marquee was advertising, urging the passerby to "stop in for a 30-burger Crave Case today!" I'm not one who whines about how everyone's overweight because I'm not in shape myself, but it seems strange to me that someone would be walking by and think "Oh. You know what I need? Thirty burgers."), which is in my mind because I went for a walk last night. There's one about a mile south of here, and I'm usually struck by the fact that White Castle is only good theoretically, before you eat it. While you're eating it and certainly after, it's sad times.

We'll see how it goes, I guess. Hopefully, I find something to serve as an appetizer that won't give everyone some kind of terrible disease, the Giants will win and the resulting euphoria will help the half of the party that's on that floor hockey team be awesome and win tomorrow's game.

I'll post a recap of that when it happens. And yes. I considered trying to liveblog a game I'll be playing in (which might actually be possible if I rely on my Post-It pad, but that seems really lame).

Radio Lab

I listen to too many podcasts. In fact, I'm going to throw a podcast-roll on the side there to keep track of it. Well, no. I can keep track of it just fine with iTunes. I'll throw a podcast-roll on the side there because I feel like it.

Anyway, yes. I come across these things long after everyone else has found out they're awesome and worthwhile and terrific. Which happened this last week, when I finally added Radio Lab to the things I listen to. Thankfully, there are only about five full episodes a year, so I'll be able to catch up with it. Anyway, yes. Fantastically produced show which deals with science topics in a very accessible way. I'd first heard of it a while ago when an episode of This American Life excerpted their bit on a thought experiment which attempts to analyze the roots of morality in humans and their episodes on how we as a species experience things are fantastically interesting. They seem to have Brian Greene from Columbia on speed-dial, their "Space" show included some interesting clips from Ann Druyan on the Voyager probe and Neil deGrasse Tyson and their episodes on Time are very interesting. I think part of that is that I, as someone who doesn't study it and rather blogs about podcasts that mention it, don't understand a lot of the concepts that go along with how time works.

So I suggest you listen to it. It's fun. And, specifically, even if you're not really into science and things that explain other things, at least give their "Beyond Time" show a listen. You'll learn some things about time dilation later in the show, sure, but it's more worth it to hear the raving goddamn lunatic who lives in the past and rides his 19th century bicycle to the bank because he refuses to use the internet and is really proud of that and goes on and on about old shirts he has. He starts the piece of by stating "Most people do not need to live in the present." which becomes more emphatic as he declares "Everybody doesn't need to live in the Present!" He seems to be taking the whole "there was a Golden Age" argument that I'm not fond of as far as it can. He throws away toothpaste caps because they're plastic (isn't the tube as well?) and appears utterly convinced that everything he's saying is absolutely common sense and gets weirdly argumentative sometimes. They tie in his segment to the rest of the show because he talks about the concept that moments don't fade into the past or come into existence in the future, but just exist. Which Professor Greene agrees with, that moments don't pop into being or fade away, but just exist. Eventually, they tie it in with a quote from Einstein given at the eulogy of a friend which has some interesting implications for dealing with time and how to comprehend it.

That doesn't make his obsession with old shirts less weird. He appears near the end of the clip to acknowledge and want to live in an imaginary world, but yeah. Interesting dude. Maybe he's right and I'm just a square because I am not obsessed with throwing out my toothpaste caps. Listen to it.

Maybe he just seems weird because he's from Tralfamadore.

New Mexico, the Sierra Club, and Duke Nukem.

I was starting to get worried. It looked like there wasn't going to be very much interesting to write about today, and you'd all be forced to read uninteresting autobiographical things using some kind of Ludovico Technique setup. I'd considered the case of a MySpace group for atheists and agnostics that was shut down a month after someone vandalized it (and after it had been deleted by MySpace once before following a "protest", whatever that means in terms of MySpace), but that's kind of boring and involves MySpace and therefore it's hard for me to write something coherent on it before my loathing for MySpace takes over and destroys the village.

I was going to write a post on the nominees for President, but I think that's probably either going to be very long or I'll just keep postponing it until after February 5 and then it'll be possibly irrelevant.

I'd also considered whining about the train, but you've had enough of that.

But then New Mexico stepped up to the plate. Or, more specifically, the Rio Grande chapter of the Sierra Club.

Groups Push for Taxing TVs, Video Games as Part of 'No Child Left Inside' Initiative

The Rio Grande chapter of the Sierra Club would like the state of New Mexico to institute a one-percent tax on TVs, video games and video game equipment in order to fund outdoor education initiatives to show kids that the outdoors exist and it's occasionally fun to actually play a sport, rather than watching a little avatar play it on a screen.

I agree with them that kids should play outdoors, that it's not so good if everyone's obese and that it's fun to actually play a sport rather than playing MVP 2005 exclusively. But this seems, to me anyway, to be the wrong way to go about it. Some points in no particular order.

First, if you accept for the time being that attempting social engineering by levying taxes on things that are deemed vices is ok for the sake of argument, I don't know that that can apply to video games. Sure, Jack Thompson thinks that anyone who plays a video game is a sociopath who will inevitably destroy the world*, but in general, video games, in moderation, are just like any other hobby. There seems to be, in popular culture, a sort of bias against someone who would put the idea of beating some immensely difficult video game on the same plane as building a ship in a bottle, but I'm not really able to see what separates the two. Millions of well-adjusted, productive people play video games and they seem, to me anyway, to be not intrinsically bad for you. Sure, there are studies which say that video games (violent ones, anyway) make you more aggressive, but they also improve coordination, reflex times, act as a social tool either over the internet in MMORPGs or as a way to connect with friends playing Halo when there's a foot of snow outside.

The problem, as is the problem with alcohol and drug abuse, gambling addiction and other things which have negative impacts upon the person engaging in the behavior and those around them is not the presence of the vice. You can enjoy alcohol and gambling without being a raging alcoholic or giving your house and all your possessions to Vegas. Rather, the problem is that the person who has a problem with them is not enjoying them responsibly. It seems to me to be an overly wide approach to go after everyone to punish a few who have a problem. Offer them support, give them help, sure. But punishing people who can enjoy a hobby responsibly because some can't? I don't know. That is, I don't know that I agree with attempting to socially engineer things by levying taxes on everyone, especially as they're not only targeting video games, which most people enjoy responsibly, but televisions, which a much larger population uses and which is, by most people, used without incident. Is it possible that people spend too much time inside watching television instead of interacting with other people? Sure. But I don't know how much this will do to stop that.

Second, I don't know how effective this would be in actually influencing anything. If you're buying your kid the newest game system when it comes out and constantly buying them games, you're likely either spending really irresponsibly in which case you're not going to notice the effect of the tax because you're not acting rationally, or you're spending a bunch on video games and televisions because you have a lot of money to spend, and you're not going to be affected by a paltry 1% tax. Who this will affect are those who aren't making that much money, either lower-class families or young people who don't make much money yet, and there's something that irks me about trying to influence the behavior of only those people who can't afford to ignore your tactics.

Third, I'm not sure how effective it will be because those of us who don't have that much money to spend on video games might not buy our video games new. Those of us who don't spend more than $100 aren't going to be affected enough to not buy the games, and we're able to avoid the affect of it by buying things cheap and used. I can't remember the last time I paid full price for a video game.

Lastly, it seems like if the Sierra Club really wants to start an outdoor education program to convince kids not to be fat losers who sit inside and play video games, that's a fantastic idea. There are two problems I see with it. The first problem is that the enormous increases on taxes on things like cigarettes and alcohol are supposed to be doing precisely that and if that money's not going there, I don't think the idea is to tax more, it's to find out why that money's not going there. The second is that you might be able to do it either with sponsorships or private donations from, oh, the members of the Sierra Club. I'd personally be much more willing to donate more than you'd ever get from me from the tax to fund this kind of thing (which isn't hard as I think you'd have gotten $2 from me over the past three years). Run it as a private enterprise and see if that doesn't work, I think, before you start demanding social engineering taxes on a hobby. Give positive incentives (upon stumbling upon two people playing catch outside when I was in undergrad, while twelve people watched two other people play MVP2005, it seemed like "Hey, let's all go outside" worked pretty well), rather than positive incentives associated with negative ones.

Ok. There we go. An incredibly long post on a day on which I already had one. I guess I could change the timestamp later, or fall back on the "I said one post per day and as long as I average that, it's cool," but we'll see how it goes. My posts probably won't be as political as this, but why not kick off this shindig with something that's actually in current events and not me complaining about my pathetic social life, I thought.

The February Project

I was gazing lovingly at my own blog when I posted that last video, as I do on many occasions, and looked to the right at that part where it says how much I've posted in any given period of time. As it's now the first day in February, you'll see that I had four posts in January (only one of which was text) and that over the entirety of 2007, I had 22 posts.

That's just sad.

I always say that I want to post more often, and really believe that it might help my readership as I know I'm more apt to read a blog that I know updates constantly like Phil Plait's than I am to read a blog that updates never, like mine, because I give up on checking back for new things and if it's something that I don't usually check on Google Reader, it doesn't get read.

So I'm going to try something. A while ago, Rory (of roriness.com and bleacherblogger.com fame) who is actually funny and interesting to read tried an experiment in which he posted at least one entry every day for one hundred days. The original experiment, which he credits to someone he knows named Keacher, sets a 100 word limit on posts, but I'm really verbose and tend to write boring, interminable passages, so I'm just going to ignore that. I'm sure there's something satisfyingly artistic about condensing your thoughts into short posts, but I'm ignoring it anyway.

This comes mostly as a result of another blogging friend, Kriss, who writes bellablvd.com mentioning that she's going to try to do a 30-posts in 30-days blog-a-thon thing. Which I thought was pretty cool, reminded me of when Rory tried it, and I decided that I'll give it a go.

The really challenging thing with writing a post a day is that it, I think, is probably going to become difficult to keep it interesting, which is what I fear from things like NaNoWriMo. I'd like to get back to commenting on society, politics, cereals and the such, and so I'll try to force all of these to be at least somewhat more substantial than filler, but we'll see how it goes. Some will be text, but I think I'll try to do a video at least once a week, because I enjoy them. I'll try to make some of them funny. That will fail.

So yeah. We'll see how that goes. Hopefully, at the end of it, I'll have a thing on the right that says "February, 29" (what with it being a leap year and all), and I'll have a reinvigorated sense of blog-joy and will actually get around to doing this as regularly as I keep claiming I want to.

(I've also changed the template to make this more readable. Now that I'm using that DarkRoom application to write these, it struck me that the text was very... wide. So I've moved to this. I could make my own, of course, but I've got things to do. I don't. But let's pretend I have things to do.)

Murphspot 3: Floor Hockey, Bang, and Why I Fail At Costumes.

Getting Things Done

I used to be pretty good at getting things done. Sort of. At the very least, I was getting done what I needed to get done. I don't actually recall doing homework in high school (outside of trying to get my girlfriend at the time to teach me how to comprehend calculus). That whole "not doing work" thing, as a lot of people realize freshman year in what I call "undergrad" now but called "college" then, went right the hell out the window when I failed the first exam I ever had (again, in calculus, as instructed by Professor Barry). So I figured out how to do things. That's worked for me pretty well to this point, but lately, I've been noticing that I'm just sort of grooving along in this nice little rut I have. I think part of it is that my schedule is not what it probably should be, but I get the sense that I should also bulk up my organizational issues, which have always been terrible. As a result, I'm going to be trying a series of things, and while this might not make a very interesting blog post, it's something and it's not video.

So. Here's what I'll be going at.

---

I've downloaded DarkRoom (which I'm using to type this post) and which is one of the so called "zenware" applications that are detailed by Slate's Jeffrey MacIntyre in an article examining the concept of returning to a clean desktop and the possible effects on organization. The upshot is the same as if you adjusted the margins on a Word document, made it full screen with a black background and green courier text, which I did to write my comp in undergrad, but all packed nicely into a shortcut. Oh, and there aren't big grey margins. So there's that.

Just a side thought, I think it's weird that "MacIntyre" is a name that doesn't seem hard to spell. It's, subjectively at least, a kind of strange word. I don't mean any disrespect to any MacIntyres out there. Just seems like an odd thing to be ingrained enough for a sort of unthinking spelling. Send any theories on this to either my email (on the right there) or your local congressman. And while you're at it, try to do something about these damned potholes.

---

I think I'm going to try to develop a deep love of and dependence on Post-It notes. In sort of the same vein as making a list and checking things off, but in a format that I can stick to things I'll be taking with me when I enter screw-around mode. If the book I'm reading is reminding me that I've got to look up a paper or every time I look up from a dryly written .pdf on the rheological properties of cheese*, I see something telling me to stop with the looking up, I might actually get something done. I had a friend in undergrad who did this and seemed to be ok about it, though they tended to accumulate in his planner and he never slept. Ever.

So we'll see.

It's also probably influenced by the fact that since Netflix has removed the hour restriction on Instant Viewing (source), I've been watching a few TV shows, including Dead Like Me, which is good times. Unfortunately, not all of the episodes are on Netflix, so I may need to make the ice-laden trek to somewhere that sells the box set for a reasonable price. Actually, now that I think of it, there was a weird side story about the pathetic manager of the office that George Lass worked in having a website ("Getting Things Done with Dolores") for which she set up a bunch of webcams and people paid to, ostensibly, watch her accomplish menial tasks in her studio apartment.

This post is completely different and not like that at all.

This is a one-bedroom.

---

I know everyone and their mother has already done it, but the idea of 43things intrigues me. I don't know if I'll set up an account, but the idea of not only setting goals but making them public appeals to me on a "you'll start doing this or suffer the shame of humiliation" way.

A lot of the things I do operate on a way to avoid humiliation, so that actually works out really well for me. Not so well in the arena of being terribly outgoing, but pretty well.

There are actually two corollaries to this that gathered my interest in the past week. The first was this segment on Talk of the Nation, in which a man convinces himself to lose fifteen pounds by wagering on it. I should probably look into losing fifteen pounds myself, but the idea of setting negative incentives (financial or, since I'm a broke-ass grad student, pride-based) sounds like a way to force myself into getting things done. Maybe I'll set something up where I make some donation to a cause that I hate any time I go a week without posting something here on murphspot.

The other thing, which was pointed out to me in an email, runs on exactly those lines with another problem I have: waking up on time. Thinkgeek (which sells a lot of things that you, the reader, should buy me) has this as a new product. A Wi-Fi alarm clock that deducts money from your bank account and sends it to a charity or group of your choosing if you hit the snooze button. The idea being that you pick causes and charities you despise so that you force yourself out of bed in order to stop, say, Hippies with Unicycles United from getting any of your money.

I don't think this would work for me. Sure, the incentive's there, but I'd do something like forget to turn it off when I leave town for a few days and end up giving a bunch of money to some society for the prevention of Ryan-Fun, or something.

And it'd be sad times.

Good thing I kept this short and didn't ramble at all.

*I did my REU (Research Experience for Undergrads) at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, studying the rheological properties of certain hydrogels. A bunch of the literature I looked at that was trying to provide reasons for that particular branch of physical chemistry to exist seemed to mention the importance of determining the properties of cheeses.

Another Entry into the Videoblogging Experiment

Yeah, I'll eventually stop doing this and just write a post. But for now, I am tired and so we'll run with it.

A New, Lame Addition to Murphspot

Well, here's this then. I'll let this do most of the explaining and apologizing and weeping.

Oh, also, I clearly know you don't read video. Ignore the part where I say that you are reading it.

Yes.

The Mitchell Report: Murphspot Nation Barely Reacts

I've long ago abandoned the pretense that I will occasionally be blogging about the Pirates. For one, blogs that are actually devoted to the cause of trying to figure out what on earth my team is doing are much, much better at that (I read WHYGAVS and Bucs Dugout regularly, but there are like twenty others that are also awesome). More than that, it's just really hard to come up with something original and funny to say when you're constantly being stabbed in the face by bad decisions, poor management and lack of talent. Again, I commend those who can hang in there and write about it anyway.

And yet, here we are. A baseball post.

Yesterday, George Mitchell's report on use of performance enhancing drugs came out. Most of you have probably heard this by now. Some eighty-nine players are named, from Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte to Chuck Knoblauch and Nook Logan. There's been some controversy over how much evidence exists for each of these allegations and whether or not the report is exhaustive (it's emphatically not). It's what George Mitchell could find without being able to pressure most players into talking to him and relying, largely, on the evidence brought forth by former Mets clubhouse guy Kirk Radomski (who had cancelled checks from players who had him get them steroids and human growth hormone) and former Yankees trainer Brian McNamee (who claims to have injected Clemens and Pettitte.) I'm going to leave for right now the question of who the hell buys drugs illegally with a goddamn check. My reaction to the report's release was, of course, to check for Pirates on the list. The Post Gazette proudly proclaims that no current Pirates were on the list, though of course the list is not exhaustive (so there may indeed be current Pirates cheating) and, perhaps more importantly, if any current Pirates are on performance enhancing drugs, they're doing it wrong. Then again, the indominable Slaw-o tested positive, so it's possible to cheat and suck.

All of this to say that I'm not sure what to make of it. It's not exhaustive, as much as Bud Selig, the Players Association and MLB want to pretend it is and does not mark the "start of the post-steroid era." I'm not sure how to feel about the fact that there's no way to defend against the allegations except to sue for libel. What I am sure of, however, is that the Slate staff does a pretty good job of kicking it around for a while. Or, at least, they're coming at it from a position that's somewhat outside the typical sports-commentary/blogging perspective.

Give it a read, mostly because it occasionally contains gems like this:

(Josh) Levin: I guarantee that Batboy: The Rise and Fall of Kirk Radomski (or maybe The Unnatural) will be a major motion picture in the next two years. It's like Blow meets Almost Famous meets Major League.

Astronomy Cast

Ah. A geek post. How refreshing.

As you know if you read the header at the top of the page, I attempt to do science for a living. Chemistry. Mixing little bits of things with other little bits of things, then swirling it and drying it and putting it in water and heating it and trying to figure out what the hell is going on. It's fun. It wasn't what got me into the sciences, though.

The reason I'm interested in science and am trying to make a career out of it goes back to being in the fourth grade and checking a book about the solar system out of the library of my tiny Catholic school. Specifically, I remember it including instructions on how to grasp the scale of the solar system by using strings and a basketball and some pebbles. Or something. The point is that while what I do today involves things on a somewhat small scale and attempts to manipulate molecules and the structures they form into doing what I want them to do, what first got me interested in studying how everything works was astronomy. Recently, I've started to get back into paying attention to it, if only to have something pretty to look at in between banging my head against the wall trying to get my science to work.

Which is why you may, if you read this blog regularly and pay attention to it, have noticed the addition of the Bad Astronomy blog to my links on the side there. Actually, if you read this blog regularly and pay attention to it, I'd really like to have a talk with you, as your visits either indicate that you have nothing better to do, and so are clearly experiencing levels of boredom previously thought impossible by leading psychologists and should find your nearest university so that we can study how you've gotten this bored, or you're my mother. In which case, hello.

Phil Plait runs a terrific blog and has a book out and another coming up soon and keeps showing up on the skeptical podcasts I listen to, but the reason I thought to write this post is not to promote him. It's to promote Astronomy Cast. Astronomy-focused podcast run by Dr. Pamela Gay of Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville and Fraser Cain, the publisher of Universe Today and noted Canadian. It's worth a listen and, if somehow you're reading this and employed as a high-school teacher, are running a program through NASA in which you let them know you exist, they send you equipment to record your student's questions, then answer them for you. Which is pretty cool. Overall, very good at taking incomprehensible things and making so that I can at least start to understand them.

It makes me a little bit sad that I'm not able to actually see very much in the night sky anymore, but I suppose that's one of the trade-offs you make when you choose to live in the third largest city in the nation, but do so on a salary that doesn't permit a car, so that you can get the hell out of here or an awesome telescope. I have yet to work up a decent rig that would allow me to carry a very sensitive piece of equipment on my back while biking, and given my tendency to either be hit by cars or have old women jump in front of me, I don't think that's something that's going to happen for quite some time.