Rogue Dictionary

i love this image

courtesy Thobias Fäldt, by way of Matt Fraction

yes. we did.

more information, including the full text, here

powell's endorsement of obama

As Larry Lessig put it, "the most important, most profound, more powerfully argued 7 minutes of this campaign."

the anti-literary internet

David Foster Wallace committed suicide about a week ago. This is sad, if not entirely unprecedented. He was a towering talent, and, in memoriam, lots of his writings have begun springing up online. They're worth digging up—the man could dance with the English language.

One article in particular got me thinking: Federer as Religious Experience, published August 20, 2006 in the New York times. Obviously it's full of great, Wallacian sentences like these:

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

And these:

He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. Like Ali, Jordan, Maradona, and Gretzky, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces. Particularly in the all-white that Wimbledon enjoys getting away with still requiring, he looks like what he may well (I think) be: a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light.

And even (my favorite) these:

Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform — and even just to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way) reconciled.

Sitting in my chair, reading these words on my computer screen, I realized that I was enjoying a fundamentally different experience from all the other reading I've done in this position.

Think about it this way. The internet is still a fundamentally text-based medium. I worked it out once, and I consume between fifty and a hundred pages of printed text per day off the internet every day, factoring in news, blogs, RSS feeds, and everything else. And that's exactly what it is: consumption. The words come in, the ideas come out, and I move on. Almost none of it really sticks.

But reading this article, written by a real honest-to-God gifted-to-the-sky writer, I realized that I've been doing the equivalent of consuming a thousand calories per day of Powerbars. Sure, it'll keep you alive, and even give you most of the energy/information/whatever that you need, but it's a fundamentally joyless experience. It's more about the end product, what you learned, what you can do with it, rather than the reading itself.

The internet makes it very easy to passively acquire information, to let it pass through us like so much water. And it is crucial to note that this is fine. Water is necessary for life, and, let's be honest, it would be exhausting to wade through an article like this one every time we wanted to find out what's going on in the world. But the English language is capable of so much more than this. In the hands of a master like Wallace, it can be made to turn backflips. The water can become a tidal wave and sweep us off to some wild and new island full of wonders we could never imagine on our own. It can requires our whole brain to parse it, grab us by the eyes and show us something new. And I'm concerned that, in the word-flood of the modern internet, the occurrence of such works is becoming rarer and rarer. After all, it's much easier to bang out a blog post (irony duly noted) or, heaven forfend, a Twitter than it is to put the blood and effort into really writing something.

So I find myself reconsidering all of those daily RSS feeds and newsposts and things. If I trim some of those out, I'll have more time to read things like this. And while I may know less, in some quantitative sense, I'll have acquired something less tangible, but ultimately more real (at least in terms of sticking in my memory).

And I am left wondering: These days, has our increased ability to know somehow come at the cost of our ability to be?

why doesn't superman drink beer?

Action Comics #869 came out this week, and it's a pretty rollicking good tale of Superman meeting Brainiac for the first time. But I'm not going to talk about the story. No, it's the cover that's got me interested.

Here's the original cover (click to enlarge):

And here's the production version (again, click to enlarge):

See the difference? Other than variations in color saturation, the production cover also has generic, slightly-distorted "Soda Pop" labels plastered over the bottles from which Clark and Pa are drinking. It's hard to tell, but the original seems to have them drinking Crow brand root beer, though Clark's bottle is turned such that only the word "beer" is really visible.

The reason for the change seems obvious. DC Comics doesn't want to influence kids by having their paragon of virtue drinking the evil devil-liquor, even if it only looks like that's what he's drinking.

But that raises an interesting question. Assume arguendo (as we say in law school) that Clark is drinking a beer. What's so bad about that? He's supposed to be about 33 years old, so there's nothing illegal about it. It's not like the concept of adults drinking beer is an alien one to most comic book readers, regardless of their age. And moreover, he's supposed to stand for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. What's more American than sharing a beer with your dad while you tell him stories about your life?

Let's put it another way. Clark can't get drunk. Alcohol doesn't affect him at all. He drinks because he likes the taste, not for any of the "bad reasons." Shouldn't an adult, let alone an adult with the powers of an Earth-raised Kryptonian, be able to exercise a measure of self-determinacy?

Are we really concerned that kids, in an effort to be like Superman, will start pounding down the Pabst Blue Ribbon? Isn't it more likely that they'd tie a towel around their shoulders and jump off a roof? And didn't we get past that once the Comics Code fell into disuse?

lying, politics, and the west wing

Perhaps against my better judgment, I've been watching my way through the second season of The West Wing (in my opinion the best season of television ever). What's so good about the show? It gleefully flees from reality. Everyone is supernaturally smart, committed, and just plain good in a way that is downright impossible in the real world. It's inspiring and depressing at the same time.

Teller, of Penn and Teller, once said that the practice of magic is lying in a way that people desperately want to believe is true. And what's television, what's POLITICS but an elaborate magic trick? At the end of the day, though, magic won't feed you, or give you health care, or stop a war.

All that said, two links.

First, one of my favorite general-purpose bloggers writes a scene in which characters from the West Wing discuss the modern political climate of lying to the world until people actually believe it's true.

And second, a neuroscientist's take on why facts don't matter in politics.

Put 'em together, and you begin to understand the yawning chasm between things as they should be and things as they are. We may say we want real change and real progress, but most people (and in a democracy, that's all that matters) just want their own ideologies confirmed.

But there's always hope, right?

last day in california

So today's my last (full) day in California. Summer Associateship ended Friday. Some things are shipped, some things are packed. Rental bike is returned. Still to do: laundry, pack, clean.

And now I sit on a bench on Stanford campus, tapping out a blog post because it's too damned pretty to go inside.

It was a great summer. Interesting work, lovely weather, those were almost givens. But the people really made the experience for me. So, a few highlights, in no particular order:

• Go-karting at 30 mph wearing truly ridiculous firesuits.
• Discovering a lighthouse.
• Pandora wars.
• Kiteboarder beach.
• Writing what was effectively a law review article in three days.
• Biking through wine country.
• Blackberry Mojitos.
• EFF Cyberlaw Trivia Night, and coming in FIRST (among teams without a law professor on them).
• Hunter S. Thompson Memorial Movie Night.
• Scaling a lamp post in downtown Palo Alto.
• The Dark Knight.
• Castle Rock.
• Visiting a Tesla Dealership.
• And too much else to count.

Goodbye, California. You were good to me. I'll see you soon.

two things that made me happy today...

First, book five of Scott Pilgrim was announced: Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe. It comes out February 4, 2009. I am counting the days.

Second, Xeni Jardin is livetwittering and photoblogging the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo press conference. That is one hell of a sexy spaceship.

being a meat puppet

Yes, I'll be there at 8 A.M. to pick up a phone before work. It's a strange feeling, knowing that I am being thoroughly manipulated by Apple's marketing strategy and willfully (gleefully) going along with it. Oh well.

Nice work, Apple. You have succeeded in overriding my free will. Maybe I'll take a camera to my local Apple store so I can at least justify it to myself as a kind of street-level sociology experiment. Yeah. There we go. Self respect restored.

On the bright side, I finally get to escape from by-god Sprint. And it is a well-documented fact that my current phone is not only in its death throes, but actively and spitefully scheming against me. How dare I have the audacity to make a 20-minute phone call and expect more than three hours of standby time? How dare I jostle the phone in my pocket and expect it to remain powered on? How dare I cup it between my cheek and shoulder and expect it to maintain a connection to the network?

Seriously, good riddance. Now all I need is a clever, thematically appropriate (that is to say, mythological) name for my new toy. Currently debating between Aegis (since my laptop is named Athena—goddess of technology and heroic endeavor) and Mjolnir (because Thor is freaking awesome, and I am apparently a Viking Jew).

4 o' j weekend

Went down to Santa Cruz with a friend from the Firm for the long weekend to hang out at a fancy, lovely beach house. I've said it before, I'll say it again -- California is heartbreakingly, unfairly beautiful sometimes.

It was a grand old time. Met some folks who are internet famous, spent some time with a lot of very smart people, and even got invited to write an article for Slate.com. Also? I learned how to fly a stunt kite, played (and mostly lost) countless games of pool and chess, and watched Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior at four AM. Other highlights included watching a sunset, observing the operation of a truly disturbing *redacted*, marveling at the amount of *redacted* consumed, sleeping too little, eating too much delicious food, and more nerdery than the civilian mind can stand without snapping like a Thanksgiving wishbone.

To close, a few quotations from the weekend:

"That's mathematical onanism, and that's kind of a terrible idea."

"Whoa. It's nerd dueling banjos."

"I only date girls who say they hate girls."