I am playing in a football tournament tomorrow in Morgan Hill. We have three 60 minute games. In the middle of the day. In the middle of the desert.

Hope it’s not hot! Forecast says “partly cloudy” so it should be fine.

If we do well tomorrow we get to play two more games on Saturday.

Scott Adams is a metaphor

At some point, probably about 32 seconds into my commute, it dawned on me that I had inadvertently become a metaphor for life in general. Life is half delicious yogurt, half crap, and your job is to keep the plastic spoon in the yogurt.

I attended the PARC Open Forum today and heard Nick Yee share some fascinating insights about MMORPGS. Nick gave the presentation that I expected Raph Koster to give - also at PARC - a couple of months ago and he seemed to be really enjoying himself throughout. I know I was.

The talk covered enough topics to keep me blogging for weeks - and his own web site has heaps of good stuff - but there was one thing I wanted to ask before it slipped my mind.

Nick gave a fly-by overview of behavioral conditioning (The Skinner Box and all that) and made a comparison between the kill-the-monster-gain-a-level reward structure of most recent MMOs and the pass-a-test-get-a-certificate education system.

He suggested that the entire education system is centered around this behaviorist model of reward and punishment and that the Real World is not like that. For a lot of people, life after school is unsatisfying because they have been trained to expect continuous feedback and constant rewards for effort but they don’t exist in the 9-5 of shelf-stacking (or lawyering or doctoring). For these people, MMOs are comforting because they provide exactly that kind of feedback. (He also made it clear that people play MMOs for LOTS of different reasons).

My question to Nick is - was the education system designed for a population that thrives on continuous feedback and rewards or do we expect such feedback and rewards because the education system conditioned us to do so?

Just asking.

Ron Jeffries, on the agile-testing mailing list said

The last couple of times I read it, I took a somewhat different lesson from /Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance/, having to do with one’s own level of caring, and the key role that plays in happiness, at least to a certain kind of person. I include myself in that “kind”. There are lessons to be learned about outsiders’ view of quality as well. I like my work to be appreciated — though sometimes I wonder whether that is perhaps a personality flaw. I also like it to be valued economically, which may be a flaw as well, but leads to a certain kind of convenience.

I like to consider myself “that kind of person too”.

There is a vicious cycle that repeats over and over and over.

A brilliant movie is about to be made/beer is about to be brewed/tv show is about to filmed/newspaper is about to be published and the money men get together to discuss how to maximize success - and, of course, success is measured in dollars.

“It might be a little difficult/complex/cultural for our target market”

says one.

Let’s remove the [parts that make it satisfying] to make it more accessible

responds the other.

Repeat this for long enough and large sections of the audience become unable to catch cultural references/stand any trace of hops/follow any story that is not about Peoria/understand english accents/watch a movie that doesn’t have a happy ending.

American Culture at is finest is still magnificent, but large swathes of America thinks that Budweiser is beer and USA Today is a newspaper and Ben Stiller is funny. Me, I can no longer tell the difference between Entertainment Tonight and Eye Witness News.

Expose a population to this kind of pap for long enough and they lose the ability to digest a richer diet. Only pap will sell. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. We reap what we sow.

My pet peeve for today is when they take a cultural icon from a different culture - The Magic Roundabout - and remove as many of the cultural references as possible. Americans are not familiar with the British actors in the original. No-one knows who Joanna Lumley is because Absolutely Fabulous was remade in america (and bombed) because no-one knows who Joanna Lumley is because …

It’s no use making cultural references because no-one is familiar with the culture because …

Can’t use actors with English accents because no-one understands English accents because …

Where will it end?

Why does every great French/Spanish/Japanese/even English movie have to be remade for the American market? Why couldn’t they at least tip their hat to Rudyard Kipling in the credits of The Road to El Dorado? Are they afraid that someone will go watch The Man Who Would be King and never watch an American movie ever again? I watched the entire “Making of the Lion King” just to see if anyone would mention the Prince of Denmark (they didn’t).

On the bright side, microbrews are really taking off. A lot of people still watch Jim Lehrer and, in sophisticated circles, everyone knows that Cheddar is “The Single Most Popular Cheese In The World”. A few niche markets - like anime - are making inroads. Maybe Harry, Ron and Hermione are the camel’s noses?

I am not hopeful.

If they ever plan to make a movie from a book/cartoon/comic/video game that you love you need to think carefully before going to see it. If that, let’s say, cartoon was made 40 years ago and you have ever so fond memories from your childhood about it, you need to think very, very carefully. If the original was made in stop-frame animation by french people then dubbed into English with all-new, surrealist plots and dry, witty dialogue and the remake was going to use the latest computer-generated, 3D animation with a hollywood screenplay and american voice actors … well, you shouldn’t even risk finding out that the cynical, world-weary, middle aged, main character was to be played by one of those cheery, hopeful, annoying child actors that only grow in California. But Dylan wanted to see it so we got it on pay-per-view.

It wasn’t bad. Once I got used to the fact that Dougal had shed his nihilistic pessimism and become Doogal the ever-smiling puppy, I was able to enjoy the show even though Zebedee never once said “Boing!” and Jon Stewart made a very sorry villian.

It was a shame that Florence had only a cameo role - I spent the first 7 years of school being called Florence and Florence was Best Supporting Actress in the original, the perfect optimistic foil to Dougal’s misery - and disappointing that Dylan was a pale imitation of a hippy - being called “a bit of Dylan” was the worst insult that you could hurl at a fellow seven-year-old and was the reason that no boy children in England were named Dylan between 1970 and 1995. Was Nigel Planer not available?

Still, I enjoyed it heartily. The children laughed and laughed (I did too) and we appreciated the Monty Python references having just watched The Holy Grail. Chevy Chase as the train was great and Ian McLellan was the perfect Zebedee. But…

…by what logic did they think it OK to end a remake of The Magic Roundabout and not have Zebedee say “Time for bed” ??? It’s criminal too that they could find a way to squeeze in the original theme music.

TRIVIA

I told Dylan it was called ‘The Magic Roundabout’ in England and he asked why they kept calling it a ‘carousel’. I told him it was because ‘carousel’ is what americans call it. “No, it’s not”, he corrected me. “We call it a merry-go-round”. You learn something every day.

STOP PRESS

I just noticed from Wikipedia that the movie was made in England and then dubbed into American for over-here. Now I am very sad

When I lived in Manhattan, I remember this one time when we were going to head out to Long Island with Georgina’s cousins and I was really, really thirsty. I had never been so thirsty in all my life. I drank a full pint of water straight down. Then another. And another. I drank six full pints of water then we got in the car and drove out to Long Island.

About 45 minutes into the journey, I really wanted to pee. I kept quiet about it until, eventually, I whispered to Tony that it was imperative that he find a place to stop the car and let me out to relieve myself.

That was the best pee of my entire life. It was like liquid ecstacy. It was like all the sunsets that I had ever witnessed pouring out of my todger. It was the closest I had ever been to a state of pure happiness.

Until tonight.

I should have gone before the lecture - I really needed to. Definitely after the lecture…before we went to the pub and drank all those beers. To get in the car after three beers and think I could then drive 25 miles in heavy traffic without having a pee first was just plain irresponsible. I had my trousers undone and the seat belt loosened to make the situation less urgent. I even took the lid off of my coffee cup in case things became more urgent.

I made it though.

That last red light at Almaden and Trinidad was almost more than I could bear, but bear it I did. I made sure I hit the garage opener at exactly at the right moment - because if you hit it too early you have that frustrating thing where you hit it again twice and it goes up a bit then stops and starts coming down again and you have to wait until things settled down which wastes time and I didn’t have time to waste - I got it just right. I put the car in Park while it was still rolling and ran for the door. Jazz came to greet me and when I dodged right to get by her she dodged the same way but I still made it.

It was the best pee ever. It was like the twin peaks of Bora Bora peeking up over the horizon - after an 18 hour ferry ride - just at the moment that the sun chose to rise between them while handsome polynesians strummed softly on their guitars. It was like that. Made into the purest liquid happiness. Pouring out of my todger.

Hooray pee!

Ah! So that’s ok then,

Well, objectively (and it’s Orwell’s original usage), I am pro-Kim Jong-Il,

There is something vaguely ironic about quoting Orwell to justify the creative redefinition of a commonly used word like “pro”.

Andrew Sullivan said

As for my later comments about opponents of the Iraq war being “objectively pro-Saddam,” that seems to me to be indisputable.

Sullivan wants us to believe that the conservatives who have lately been criticising the war in Iraq - like George Will - are making principled, reasoned arguments but that anyone who spoke up three and a half years ago was a closet Saddam supporter.
Does that make all the people who prefer a diplomatic solution to the problems in Iran - like Bush and Sullivan himself - pro-Ahmadinejad ?

He and I got off on the wrong foot with his involvement in the Clinton impeachment but Linsey Graham has been nothing but marvellous since he joined the senate. Definitely my favourite senator.

What I’m trying to do with my time in the Senate during this whole debate we’re having is to remind the Senate that the rules we set up speak more about us than it does the enemy. The enemy has no rules. They don’t give people trials, they summarily execute them and they’re brutal, inhuman creatures. But when we capture one of them, what we do is about us, not about them. Do they deserve, the bad ones, all the rights that are afforded? No. But are we required to do it because of what we believe? Yes,

Barbara Boxer is way up there too but many are likely to disagree for narrow partisan reasons.