KT and I encountered this guy in the middle of "Cowpies," one of the many stunnning trails among the spectacular red rocks of Sedona, Arizona. We're in the middle of a two-week jaunt through the west, with stops in Las Vegas, Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon, Sedona, Phoenix and Tuscon. I've put up many more travel photos on Flickr.

Sedona's an amazing place, where the desert meets the mountains. In one hike, you can walk from lizards and cacti to alpine forests - all under the shadows of those luminous red rocks.

There's definitely a special kind of energy in Sedona. Our hotel was nestled among the rocks, and on the last morning I woke up at 6:30 so brimming with vitality I ended up taking a two-hour pre-breakfast hike through the canyon. Those of you who know me know how out of character it is for me to even get out of bed before noon.

Sedonans have concluded that the place is full of what they call "vortexes" - sites where the earth's energy is especially concentrated. The purported precise locations of the vortexes were first mapped out by a local psychic in 1980. Surprisingly, they're all conveniently located within short walks of trailhead parking lots - which may say more about her lack of interest in hiking than in the dynamics of local energy flows.

We had a fantastic tour gide in Sednoa, Dennis Andres, also known in town as "Mr. Sedona." In his invaluable, BS-free guide, What Is a Vortex?, Dennis concludes it may make more sense to consider the entire city one giant vortex, rather than splitting hairs over which spots count as vortex sites. A globetrotting hiker, he compares the energy in Sedona to Peru's Macchu Picchu, California's Mount Shasta, and Mount Everest.

Not surprisingly, Sedona's become a New Age magnet in recent years, leading to traffic, inflation, and a truly boggling number of crystal stores. Land is being gobbled up by rich vacationers, yuppie dropouts, and speculators, As Dennis explains, the top four professions in Sedona today are psychic, jeep tour driver, realtor, and psychic jeep-tour-driving realtor. Out of a population of 10,000, there are 400 reiki healers.

Not to knock Sednoa reiki healers - I had a session the night I got into town that blew my mind. That Sedona energy is powerful stuff, however fuzzy the rhetoric and kitschy the marketing. After three days, I was ready to take a vacation from my vacation, and bring my chi back to more familiar levels. But I'll be back.

Posted 01:18 AM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2006

Container Garden, 2006 version, Day 0

Posted 01:19 PM | Comments (0)

May 19, 2006

Summer Movie Pool

Every summer since 2001, I've participated with a few dozen film academics and fellow travelers in a summer movie pool. We all predict the top ten summer box office grossers, and whoever's list comes closest wins. (The specific rules are way too detailed to list here, or for me to even remember - these are academics, after all.)

I came in third my first year, but it's been downhill ever since. This year's a real tricky one to predict - I'm very confident in Superman Returns at #1, but after that, it's a real crapshoot.

The ballots were due on May 15, but movies released before then still count. So, we were all able to take into account the disappointing openings of MI:III and Poseidon. I've concluded audiences this year are unmotivated to rush to the theaters for bigger, louder sequels and remakes, figuring they can eventually catch them on DVD. But everybody needs a summer movie fix eventually, so I'm betting on Superman Returns as the movie that brings the nation together, Da Vinci Code as the must-see object of controversy, and Cars as the kids' movie adults enjoy too. (I guess Superman Returns is kind of a remake/sequel, but the previews suggest Brian Singer's produced a fresh take on the material - an idealistic antidote to our ugly era.)

On the other hand, I almost always underestimate the power of the mediocre sequel - junk like Rush Hour 2 and Austin Powers 3 have been my undoing, year after year. But some years, the audience does rebel. So far, this is looking like one of those years.

Not that my entry is full of European art flicks. Here's my complete list:

1. Superman Returns
2. The Da Vinci Code
3. Cars
4. Pirates of the Caribbean II
5. X-Men III
6. Mission Impossible III
7. Click
8. The Break-Up
9. The Lake House
10. Nacho Libre

We also get to pick three "dark horses":
Talladega Nights
Little Miss Sunshine
A Scanner Darkly

And we each pick a catchphrase every year. This year, mine comes from blockbuster savant George Lucas. According to Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, it's the only direction he ever gave them on the set: "Faster, more intense."

All the summer movie pool results since 2002 are online here. You'll just have to take my word for it that I finished in the money in 2001.

UPDATE: I take it back. Complete top finishers since the pool's start back in 1994, including corroboration of my 2001 finish, are available on this Hall of Fame page.

Posted 11:24 AM | Comments (1)

May 08, 2006

Democratic Political Consultants: Not Just Incompetent, But Greedy, Too

If you feel like you aren't quite cynical enough yet about American electoral politics, check out Walter Shapiro's horrifying piece in Salon on the slimy world of political consultants. Did you know that both Republican and Democratic consultants pocket commissions of 10-15% of every TV ad buy? That Bob Shrum's company made $6 million (plus reimbursement for production costs) to bungle the 2004 Kerry campaign? That consultants often get "victory bonuses" not only for wins in the general election, but even for wins in barely contested primaries?

Hey - why don't the Dems take a page from the playbook of their trial lawyer benefactors, and make it all or nothing for consultants? 33% if they win, zilch if they lose. Maybe then you'd see them go for the jugular more often.

This morass of sleaze and complacency shows why the netroots needs to do more than just raise money for Democratic candidates. All the money Howard Dean raised in 2004 didn't mean much once he hired the same old hacks to make his ads. And why do incompetents like Bob Shrum still have jobs?

We need to be thinking about ways to shake up every aspect of Democratic business as usual. We need to encourage creativity and fresh blood by funding innovative consulting startups. We need to bring the online world's innovation to the hidebound world of political TV advertising. And we need to do it now, or God knows how bad things will get by 2008.

Posted 10:49 PM | Comments (0)

May 03, 2006

Save the Internet!

A. J. Liebling warned, "Freedom of press is guaranteed only to those who own one." The internet has spawned millions of printing presses, leading to an explosion of democratic discourse perhaps unmatched in human history. Anybody with access to a computer and a web connection can join the fray.

But don't think it can't be taken away.

Right now, there's a debate in congress over "net neutrality." It's hard to get worked up over something that sounds so technical, but the stakes couldn't be higher.

The end of net neutrality would mean the end of the internet as we know it today in America. The giant corporations which provide internet access to most Americans would be free to sell preferential access to the highest bidder - and to squeeze the bandwidth of the websites that don't pay their protection money.

The internet didn't get the way it is today by accident, or simply because of the "free market." The system was coded - by regulators and technologists - in ways that enforce fair, equal treatment to all speakers. But code can be altered, and don't think big media wouldn't love to see all us uppity bloggers put back in our place, and the net turned from a global public square to just another mass medium.

If you think I'm exaggerating here, check out this shockingly spiteful and incoherent rant from Mike McCurry, onetime Clinton hand, now lapdog for the telcos. (To get some context on McCurry's bewhilderingly aggreived tone, check out Joshua Micah Marshall here, and Adam Green here.)

For more on how net neutrality works, check out this video distributed by MoveOn:

To get involved in this struggle over the future of democratic discourse in the United States, go to savetheinternet.com.

UPDATE: From the New Yorker, here's James Surowiecki on net neutrality. Surowiecki's an extraordinary business writer, and he does a great job of laying out the economics of the conflict, but I think he understates the dangers to democracy posed by the loss of net neutrality. Right now, the internet is America's public square. The end of net neutrality could turn it into a mall.

Posted 10:06 AM | Comments (0)

May 02, 2006

Our Constitutional Crisis

Bush challenges hundreds of laws - The Boston Globe

Posted 01:55 AM | Comments (0)

April 26, 2006

My Comics Subscriptions

As longtime readers of this blog know, I'm a big comic book fan.

Although I loved superheroes as a little kid, I actually wasn't a comic book geek in high school. (I was a sports stathead instead, which may be even geekier.) And I got back into comics the wrong way around - in college, rather than moving from the mainstream to the indies, I started with R. Crumb and Los Bros Hernandez, got into Neil Gaiman, and gradually worked my way back to the guys in tights. Today, I find the indie scene disappointingly thin (beyond Carla Speed McNeil's amazing, overlooked Finder), but there's lots of superhero genre stuff I love - especially the work of the astonishingly prolific Brian Michael Bendis, who combines the dialogue skills of David Mamet with the mythographic imagination of Alan Moore. There's a superhero comics renaissance going on, as great writers like Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Kurt Busiek, Warren Ellis, Alan Heinberg, Paul Jenkins, Robert Kirkman, David Lapham, Brian Melzer, Mark Millar, Greg Rucka, Kevin Smith, Brian K. Vaughan and Bill Willingham reinvigorate a genre many gave up for dead years - if not decades - ago. Call me old-fashioned, but I still love seeing the classic archetypes put through their paces - and I'm still thrilled when a visionary like Bendis rings some new changes on the old tunes.

For years, I stopped by my local comics shop every Wednesday to pick up new releases. But it closed down a few months ago, leaving the nearest store a little too distant for a regular haul. So, I've started mail-ordering my purchases from an online subscription service, Sci-Fi Genre. It's not the best way to buy comics - I miss the weekly ritual, the browsing, and the overheard debates over whether Picard could take Kirk in a fight - but it's better than waiting a year to get the trade paperbacks on Amazon.

So, here's my current subscription list. It may look like a lot of comics - alright, I admit, it is a lot of comics - but it boils down to about 5-10 issues a week. Since each issue takes about 15-20 minutes to read - more for the talky ones, less for the ones with lots of fights and explosions - that's roughly 2-3 hours of new comic book reading a week, less than the time it takes to watch one baseball or football game. The only problem comes when responsibilities intercede and I start falling behind. Then, catching up can start to seem like work rather than fun, and I end up feeling like Steve Buscemi in Ghost World when he tells Thora Birch, "I hate my interests!"

I'd probably read fewer comics if there were more good SF on TV, or if SF literature weren't currently dominated by the "hard SF" genre, which so often boils down to blowhard scientists with guns. But I'll take my pleasures where I find them.

Ted's Comics Subscription List
  
Albion
All Star Batman and Robin
American Virgin
Apocalypse Nerd
Astonishing X-Men
Astro City
Battle Pope
Books of Doom
Captain America
Checkmate
Civil War
Colonia
Conan
Daredevil
Dork Tower
Dr. Blink: Superhero Shrink
Eightball
Eternals
Expatriate
Fables
Finder
Girls
Hate Annual
Hawaiian Dick
Invincible
Justice
Love & Rockets
Luba's Comics and Stories
Marvel Team-Up
Nat Turner
New Avengers
Palookaville
Polly and the Pirates
Powers
PvP
Queen & Country
Runaways
Shadowpact
Stray Bullets
Superpatriot
True Story, Swear to God
Ultimate Extinction
Ultimate Fantastic Four
Ultimate Spider-Man
Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk
Ultimate X-Men
Ultimates
Usagi Yojimbo
Walking Dead
Wonder Woman
Y: The Last Man
Young Avengers

Posted 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

April 25, 2006

"The Future Is Already Here, It's Just Unevenly Distributed"

The above quote comes from William Gibson, and I've been thinking about it a lot lately, since it's turned up in the last two books my grad seminar in new media has read: first Peter Morville's wonderful Ambient Findability, then Joel Garreau's fascinating, overblown Radical Evolution.

Gibson's line is one of those sexy aphorisms that crystalizes a whole theory of the relationship between technology and society, like Stewart Brand's famous dictum, "Information wants to be free." But as with Brand's pontification, it conceals as much as it reveals.

What makes Gibson's phrase so appealing is the idea that we can get a grip on what is to come if we just examine today's cutting edge. To understand the future of mobile technologies, study how the hippest teens in Tokyo use IM. To see what ubiquitous broadband produces, go to Seoul. And to see the future of the human species, check out the research at DARPA's hottest labs (as Garreau did).

But there's something suspiciously self-flattering about a theory of history that so easily boils down to, "We technorati are already living in the future; now it's just up to the rest of the world to catch up."

Granted, this smug, monolithic vision of progress isn't an inevitable corollary of Gibson's aphorism. After all, the phrase doesn't specify who's living in the present, and who's living in the future. Perhaps it's Brazil's present that's the future of the USA: increasing stratification of haves and have-nots. Or maybe in a hundred years everybody will decide it's the Amish who really live the good life. We could simply interpret the line to mean, "To understand the possible shapes the future might take, study the range of ways people live today."

But when I actually see Gibson's phrase invoked, it's almost always being used to justify an author's predictions of inevitable social change to be produced by the inexorable forward march of technology. It implies you can't argue with the author's predictions of the future - after all, it's already here. And that's just a new way to justify old-fashioned technological determinism. Garreau's book claims to offer a range of "scenarios" for how the future might look. But what all of them take for granted, despite his protestations, is that the engine of history is technological change, and that such change is continuously accellerating (thanks to Moore's Law, which predicts that the speed of processing power will continue to double every two years for the foreseeable future). Even Garreau's less deterministic predictions start from the premise that humans will have to take strong action to avoid being pulled along by the tidal force of technology.

But Garreau too quickly takes the grand predictions of technologists - both the optimists like Ray Kurzweil and pessimists like Bill Joy - at face value. The past fifty years have seen many, many pronouncements of the inevitability of certain technological developments - from machine sentience to space tourism to the extension of the human life span. Each has been derailed by the irreducible complexity of the real world - by the mystery of consciousness, by the expense of space travel, by the relentlessness of mortality. Instead, the greatest breakthroughs have been in the development of a parallel universe designed precisely to escape the constraints of the material world: cyberspace. Given that track record, I'm skeptical that the next fifty years will see us finally get back to those flying cars and cancer cures we were promised fify years ago.

Moore's Law creates the illusion that technology is speeding forward at a breakneck, ever-accellerating pace. But a few minutes with Windows XP should be enough to shatter that fantasy. Processor power may double every two years, but that doesn't mean software improves at the same rate - or at all. Bloatware can make a Pentium 4 run more sluggishly than my old 386. That's supposed to be a sign of the progress that's going to transform the human species?

I'm being flip, I know. I'm sure we're in for profound changes over the next few decades, many influenced by the emergence of powerful new technologies. And certainly some awesome technologies - nuclear bombs, for one - have the power to radically and quickly transform our globe. But whenever I hear technologists make grand predictions about the future, I always consider how they may be projecting their own fantasies and fears. This is the process I describe in Electric Dreams as the dialectic of technological determinism: using the rhetoric of inevitability as a cover to authorize utopian (and dystopian) speculation. That's fine - by all means, let's talk about what kinds of futures we want to live in. But let's remember that the choice is always up to us. After all, our machines are just extensions of our selves.

The future may well already be here. But nobody can say for sure where it is, or how we'll know it when we see it.

Posted 01:31 AM | Comments (0)

April 24, 2006

The Definition of a Fetish . . .

My cat Moby usually has plenty of dry food in her bowl. But she'll bang at the bedroom door when I'm asleep because she wants me to get up and pour in some more food. I don't think the issue is that the old food is stale; sometimes, when we're out of fresh food, I'll just pour some of The Dude's old food out of his bowl and into Moby's bowl, and that satisfies Moby just as much as food fresh out of the bag. The important thing is the ritual, and specifically the sound of the dry food hitting the bowl.

It makes me wonder: once Pavlov's dogs were trained to salivate at the sound of the bell, did he find they wouldn't eat without the bell?

Posted 02:06 AM | Comments (0)

April 22, 2006

Goodbye, Scott McClellan. Hello, War in Iraq?

Press critic Jay Rosen argues in this astute piece that the painfully inarticulate stonewalling of outgoing Bush press secretary Scott McClellan wasn't just clumsy spin. It was a new kind of presidential press strategy. McClellan wasn't trying to "manage" the press as previous secretaries in the TV age have tried to do. Instead, his job was to delegitimize the press, and indeed the whole idea of the public's right to know. McClellan didn't try to persuade. He just repeated the same points over and over, running out the clock without even bothing with the illusion of engaging reporters' questions.

News organizations could and should have responded by refusing to play McClellan's game, and abandoning the pretense that what McClellan said every day was in any meaningful sense "information," let alone "news." Instead, they played into his hands by continuing to send their reporters out there day after day, legitimizing the administration's delegitimization strategy.

Will Tony Snow or anybody else who comes in to replace McClellan change this approach? Certainly, the administration will want to try to do something to shore up those tanking poll numbers. But they probably won't risk actually attempting to explain and defend their policies, simply because at this late stage, they've become patently inexplicable and indefensible.

More and more, I'm fearing that Karl Rove's grand plan to save congress for the Republicans will involve bombing Iran at the most politically opportune moment - maybe so close to election day that the blowback doesn't even have a chance to start until after the polls close. As Joshua Micah Marshall has been pointing out over at Talking Points Memo, one hallmark of the Bush administration is that every major policy initiative has peaked in popularity on the day of its announcement, then slowly and steadily declined. The important thing for Democrats - or anybody concerned with the security of our nation and the world - to do is to preempt this potential October (or even early November) surprise now, while there's still time. Lay the groundwork so that the idea of bombing Iraq right before the election is widely seen as intolerably craven and reckless, so that polls clearly show that doing so would end up backfiring. That might not be enough to sway the regime-change-aholics in Cheney's office. But it should be good enough for Rove, who may end up the only person on the planet capable of pulling Bush back from the brink.

God help us, we've reached the point where Turd Blossom could be the closest thing to a moderating influence left in the White House . . .

Posted 02:21 AM | Comments (0)

April 20, 2006

Baseball Ennui

For some reason, I just can't get myself to care about baseball at all this season. Part of the problem is time - I've been swamped with administrative work all semester, and haven't even had time yet to launch the fantasy league I organized over the winter. But I think the deeper issue must be the steroid scandals.

I've been surprised by how much this steroid stuff has bummed me out. No baseball fan awake during the home run boom of the last decade can be too surprised that it was largely powered by illicit substances. And thinking historically, this is hardly the first time the game has been widely influenced by cheaters - think of all the spitballers like Gaylord Perry who, at least in retrospect, seem more rakish than vile.

I guess it's the combination of corporate hypocrisy (it seems pretty clear now that the Yankees knew just what they were getting when they signed Giambi), institutional intertia (both MLB and the players' union sat on their hands as long as they possibly could on all this, until Giambi's cancer and the Bonds bust forced them to at least look like they were doing something), and the trashing of cherished records (Bonds chasing Ruth and Aaron).

The latter, in particular, is such a bummer that I feel like not watching any baseball highlights until Bonds retires. I'd been excited over the last few years to have the chance to see the career home run record broken in my lifetime, and now the prospect just fills me with dread.

Again, it's not really that I'm disappointed with Bonds personally - from all I'd read about his failings as a human being, juicing up never seemed out of character. And maybe in 50 years we'll remember him as another cantankerous competitor like Ty Cobb - part of the vast range of characters who makes the game's lore so rich.

But I sure wish somebody had called a halt to all this nonsense before something as central to the game as the career home run record was threatened. Maybe the worst part is how this all seems to cheapen, retrospectively, the accomplishments of Ruth and especially Hank Aaron, who handled racist harassment and even death threats with incredible poise on his way to breaking Ruth's record. Now the record may well end up just another number attached to a juiced-up cheater. Or think of the McGwire/Sosa home run race, so thrilling at the time, which now looks more like corrupt stunt than a historic rivalry.

What burns me the most, I think, is that if baseball really wanted a power explosion in the '90s, they didn't even have to go this route, one with unknowable long-term health consequences for all those scrawny middle infielders who poured god knows what into their bodies and suddenly starting pounding out 30-plus homers a year. The owners could have simply brought in the fences in more parks. Or openly juiced the ball, the way they did in the 1920s when the dead ball era gave way to the modern power game. Or allowed aluminum bats. Or whatever. Instead, major league baseball looked the other way, and in many ways encouraged, a chemical arms race that led to so many players to conclude that they needed to juice up just to stay competitive.

Hell, if MLB and the MLPA had any integrity, they could have begun research years ago on the health implications of long-term steroid use, and developed safe and legal alternatives. If so, fine - that would be just another development in the history of sports training, like the rise of nutritionists, weight trainers, and sports psychologists. But by sliding the whole mess under the table, the owners and the players union conspired to create an unfair system which penalized the players who played by the rules, while endangering the lives of players who made the perfectly rational decision to risk their health in return for the chance of a $100 million payday.

I'll probably get over all this eventually. I'd hate to give up on a pastime which has given me so much pleasure over the last 28 years. (I started following the Yankees at age 9, in 1978 - what a season!) But in the meantime, I'm stoking my thirst for competitive entertainment with reality TV, and gearing up for the basketball playoffs.

Posted 03:02 AM | Comments (0)

Finally, A New Kind of First-Person Shooter

This game is just too cool. It's a first-person shooter with no graphics at all - just a blank screen. Instead of visual information, you navigate levels entirely through 3D sound cues. It's like playing Doom as Daredevil.

The game is designed for visual impaired players, but I think everybody ought to give it a try. It's a breath of fresh air in a computer game market full of me-too retreads more interested in polygon counts than in innovative gameplay.

Posted 02:07 AM | Comments (0)

April 04, 2006

(Perhaps) The World's Largest Video Game Collction

More photos and an interview here.

Posted 11:08 PM | Comments (0)