By any means necessary.

For weeks (months?) after I mentioned Seinfeld in a post, the helpful sponsored links on myspace have been trying to sell me Seinfeld ringtones.

Finally we've moved on.

Change is possible.

Based on my Orson Scott Card post, the sponsored link is now trying to get me to vote yes on Proposition 8.

If for no other reason, I look forward to Wednesday just to see what myspace will try to sell me next.

hmm. The NYT explains it a little bit better.

1. medical ethicists[...] say more research is needed to determine whether doctors must deceive patients in order for placebos to work.
2. the survey found [...]  5 percent described the treatment to patients as "a placebo."
3. "In the clinical setting, the use of a placebo without the patient's knowledge may undermine trust" according to the AMA.
4. [According to one expert] "Doctors should resist using placebos, because they reinforce the deleterious notion that 'when something is the matter with you, you will not get better unless you swallow pills.' "

So a doctor might hand you a sugar pill and says, "This is a placebo. It might make you feel better, because—as I'm sure you know—sometimes placebos make you feel better."

Number 3 above even suggests that a known-to-be-effective treatment might not work, in a sort of "reverse placebo" way, if patients suspect that they've been given a placebo. I think. That'd be, um, neato.

Number 4 is so exactly what I wanted to hear that I can't help but feel I'm being fed a line of shit. Only when I'm being placated and manipulated does something sound so true. Thanks, NYT, for that spoon full of sugar.

From the Associated Press:

About half of American doctors in a new study regularly give their patients placebo pills without telling them.

or

About half of American doctors in a new survey say they regularly give patients placebo treatments — usually drugs or vitamins that won't really help their condition. And many of these doctors are not honest with their patients about what they are doing, the survey found.

Call me silly, but if the patient were to be told that she'd been given a placebo, wouldn't it as-if-by-magic cease to be a placebo?

While R's been out of town, I've had a chance to scrape the bottom of the Netflix barrel. Somehow another Alien movie, Alien vs Predator: Requiem, was released last year without me knowing it. I'm not sure how. One of my softer soft spots is for the Alien franchise.

First the bad news. Either the writers didn't actually know what requiem means, and just thought it sounded cool—please please please be true—or the film is meant to be a requiem for the series itself. That'd be a shame. I think the world is full of smart, grokful people who might have interesting things to say through the medium of the Alien mythos.

The good news is, even if it was merely instinctual or accidental, a tiny bit of the script did touch on maternal connections. Without that, the continuity of the series would be broken beyond repair.

Odd. My spellchecker isn't calling me out on "grokful" while the Google turns up only six hits for it.

Anyhows, 14 percent on the Tomato Meter and worth every penny.

It's worth reading this article through to the end. It might make you uncomfortable. That's okay. You'll live.

Synopsis: Popular Science-Fiction writer concludes: [gay marriage]=[bad] and [bad marriage]=[bad] and [gay]=[poor choice] and [California Supreme Court]=[gay gay gay]

I haven't read anything by Orson Scott Card in maybe fifteen years, but I remember his writing as thoughtful and curious. Hmm. Not so much here. He seems to be making some pretty rookie moves. That's okay too. It happens. I suspect that Card doesn't have any gay friends, or if he does then I suspect that he's never talked to them.

So. Who wants to play the finding-common-ground game?

First, I'd like to give Card some credit. In some ways his argument is fair and consistent. For one thing, he's clearly uncomfortable acknowledging that homosexual couples love each other, judging by the awkward work-around phrases he chooses, and I felt kinda bad for him, but then I went back and found that he doesn't use the word "love" at all in the article. So, I dunno, in a sense that's even-handed, right? For another, his choice to frame the debate as one of tough-love semanticians vs. newspeak provocateurs is, well, at least a starting point. It beats good vs. evil, anyway.

There is no natural method by which two males or two females can create offspring in which both partners contribute genetically.

Hmm. As long as he gets to define "natural", this statement is airtight. See? That wasn't so hard. I'm not sure why he thinks that "natural" is particularly good. Maybe some day he'll explain that part a little bit better.

only heterosexual mating can result in families where a father and a mother collaborate in rearing children that share a genetic contribution from both parents.

Well, you could argue that this is not strictly true, but the goal here is not to descend into minor quibbles. I would like to know though how this statement could ever be more than trivially true. That is, it's true by definition, but otherwise meaningless. Am I missing something? Still, for our purposes I'm willing to call it common ground.

Married people are doing something that is very, very hard --

I think most of us can agree on that one, and I respect Card's reverence for marriage. I wish he could trust other people a bit, though. But that's my job right now. It's my job to trust him. I trust that Card is arguing in good faith. I trust that he has everybody's best interest in mind. I trust that his position doesn't rest on a foundation of "because the Bible tells me so." I trust that he isn't "full of hate" or anything like that, and that at worst he finds the idea of gay sex icky. That's okay. Lots of people think that some kind of sex is icky. Agreeing on which is the icky kind doesn't seem like a deal-breaker right now.

We heterosexuals have put marriage in such a state that it's a wonder homosexuals would even aspire to call their unions by that name.

Unassailable!

State job is not to redefine marriage

I'd go farther. The State should get out of the marriage business altogether. Let people marry in the church of their choosing. Let the State limit it's involvement to the legal issues of civil union. The State's job is not to tell us how to find meaning.

"Left and right, all Americans know that freedom is better than slavery, that love is better than hate, kindness better than cruelty, tolerance better than bigotry. We don't always know how we know these things, and yet mysteriously we know them nonetheless."

Is that true? Did I miss another meeting, where the rest of you all agreed to agree? Crap.

This is and isn't the story of the show I never saw.

  I've had this notion of "time porn" knocking around in my head for ten years or more, since Mr. Danks first told me about an article he'd read. That conversation may or may not have taken place while we sat on his parents' roof in the Berkeley hills, looking at the Bay Area on the night that a cable outage interrupted the last episode of Seinfeld. Wait, were we really on the roof? And wasn't it a power outage? See? My memory is useless. But I remember what I wasn't doing. I wasn't watching Seinfeld.

  So, back to that article. It claimed that the true appeal of shows like Seinfeld was that they let us, the over-booked, over-anxious, enjoy (Perky-Pat-like) a world in which people had plenty of time to sit around with friends doing nothing. It's a fun idea, and I've played with it over the years seeing if I could make anything useful out of it. Nothing satisfying ever came of it. The first problem, which I'm sure you've already spotted, is that watching Seinfeld is sitting around doing nothing. How overbooked could anybody really have been?

Then there's the question of whether we were really any busier at all. As a dissenting voice from that '94 article puts it, "Americans have not lost leisure time. They just feel that way." Maybe we were like the Red Queen, running as fast as we could just to stay at the center of what we didn't yet call the dot-com-bubble, a half-imaginary place which was--quite problematically--everywhere and nowhere. That'd make for a long long way to run. Unless it wouldn't.

Neither of those glitches was enough to make me stop thinking about the idea of time porn. After all, truth is hardly a prerequisite for pornography. Meanwhile, I guess Clay Shirky has been thinking about it from the other direction.

In "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus", Shirky casts sitcoms as a coping mechanism for all of our free time, something that helped us get by until technology could catch up, until we were given more meaningful ways--supposedly even this blog entry is one--of using our time. His is my favorite brand of optimism, where "sitting in a basement pretending to be an elf," is at least doing something.  I want to live on the earth into which those basements were dug, where even sitcoms were about something after all, since they (singlehandedly?) kept the sound of a million idle hands not-clapping from becoming unbearable.

Which is it? Too much time or too little? I choose not to choose. It seems more fun to believe both at once.

I'd like to go back a bit, to one of the Republican primary debates, [when|where] the question was put to each hopeful candidate, "Do you believe in the Bible?" I'm still trying to work through this answer.

Huckabee: Sure. I believe the Bible is exactly what it is. It's the word of revelation to us from God himself.

(Applause)

And the fact is that when people ask do we believe all of it, you either believe it or you don't believe it. But in the greater sense, I think what the question tried to make us feel like was that, well, if you believe the part that says "Go and pluck out your eye," well, none of us believe that we ought to go pluck out our eye. That obviously is allegorical.

But the Bible has some messages that nobody really can confuse and really not left up to interpretation. "Love your neighbor as yourself."

Knowing that it "is what it is" is comforting, what with the Grape Nuts® ads I've been seeing on the billboards lately. If only somebody could cut through the hype for me. But then, "Obviously allegorical"? "Not left up to interpretation"? I didn't realize that it was that easy. Is everybody else in agreement as to what the Bible means and you all just decided not to tell me?

So I went looking for help on the matter of eye-plucking and hand-cutting-off and here's what I found.

            "The language employed by Christ in this context does employ a figure of speech that is common to all languages. It is called hyperbole."       

Oh. Yeah. No. Right. I  totally get that. It all sounds very simple, very reasonable.

            But maybe sometimes I still need a little bit of help sorting out what's what. The NFPA's Pocket Electrical Reference, for instance, helpfully lists common jobsite medical emergencies, how to spot them, and so on. I decided to buy it when I saw on the list Alchohol Intoxication ("What to look for: confusion") and Drug Overdose ("What to do: if victim becomes violent, leave the area and call 9-1-1"). Still, I didn't know what a serendipitous find this little book really was until reading the entry on Amputation.

Amputation

What to look for:

• Loss of body part

What to do

1. Call 9-1-1
2. Control Bleeding
3. Care for shock
4. Recover amputated part(s) and wrap in sterile or clean dressing.
5. Place wrapped part(s) in a plastic bag or waterproof container.
6. Keep part(s) cool.

Sometimes I don't want hyperbole.

love your neighbors, keep your parts cool,
Alex

I don't generally go in for this sort of thing, and there are plenty of zombie quizzes already to be found in the wild. But Corvus's take on it lets me talk about a few things that were on my mind anyway.

You are in a mall when the zombies attack. You have:

1. one weapon
2. one song blasting on the speakers
3. one famous person to fight alongside you

1. The Halligan

Corvus is right. A BFG isn't the right tool for the job. I'd considered forgoing a weapon altogether if I could, instead, have my lock picks with me. If, I reasoned, I get a bug up my butt later and want to fight zombies, okay, but for now I'm more interested in simply putting a few locked doors between us and them.

It turns out I can have it both ways. I've found my dream tool. As toolmonger.com puts it, there are times "when you absolutely positively need to be inside a building two minutes ago."  What they should have mentioned is that the Halligan bar is to urban zombie warfare as the machete is to searching for lost cities long overgrown by jungle.

As for my lock picks, well, I can always make a new set during the building-fortification-and-weapon-fashioning-to-a-vaguely-A-team-drum-beat montage. That should be coming up in the second half of the film.

2. The Desert Island

There'll be that scene where we, the survivors, will find temporary safety and can catch our collective breath. We'll end up arguing about plans and pecking orders and all of that. My first brash, unilateral decision will be to take my very cool Halligan, pop open every utility room, every office, until I find and eviscerate the mall's sound system.

I have no Desert Island LP. In fact, the last thing I'd want if we were stuck on a Desert Island is to be slowly driven mad by what was once my favorite music. So keep your last-song-on-side-one-of-Led-Zeppelin-IV. Bring your iPod if you really must. Since Western Civilization just collapsed, I can stop complaining about Apple culture.

Did I say "if we were stuck on a desert island"? Silly me.

What I think would happen though, is I'd get something like The Girl From Ipanema stuck in my head anyway. That's the thing about zombie scenarios. Eventually, you are your own undoing. The outcome is inecapable.

3. Famous?

I think Corvus was on the right track when he picked Professor Hawking, but I'm not sure that this is the right time for a specialist. I want somebody who is going to know how to bump-start Western civilization. I want somebody to show me how to use an ox-drawn plow and a harquebus. I want, of course, James Burke.

This is a drag. Up 'til now, I've been told again and again, it's been all about who you know. I've waited my whole life to be on the winning end of this truism and now, finally, I know just the right person. He's a big, martial-artsing, SCAing, blacksmithing, carpentering juggernaut. He'd make as good a zombie-killing sidekick as anyone could ask for, but the big dope isn't the least bit famous and so he's disqualified.

Still, I'm quite happy with my choice of James Burke. You may love him, or you may love to hate him, but admit it: he'll be useful. He's like the Baroque Cycle without the annoying intrusion of chase scenes. Go fill up your netflix queue with Connections if you haven't already.

I said that I’d learn to knit so that I could make myself a certain hat. Well. I say a lot of things. No, I haven’t (yet*) learned to knit.

After about a year of my idle scheming, my very cool neighbors took matter into their own hands, and made me one.

Generally strangers don’t notice me. Or didn’t, I should say. When I wear my new hat I’m greeted with the sorts of  smiles usually reserved for dogs, very small children and very old cars. The effect is amplified when I borrow my other neighbor’s truck. And it’s amplified further when I put an orange dog in the passenger seat.

* I still have a knitting project in mind, so I still have an incentive to learn, and if it doesn’t go with my new hat then I don’t know what would.