Category: No Politics Friday

I've never been a big video game / computer game guy. As a kid I played what I think is a fairly normal amount of Nintendo for the average American teenager of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The last video gaming system I owned was a Super Nintendo, to let you know how much I stay on top of console technology. In fact, with the exception of a $5 copy of Counter-Strike I put on my PC five years after the game ceased to be popular, I am essentially game-less.

OK, OK. Also the Call of Duty series. Lately I don't even have time for that, though.

Still waiting to get Black Ops. Despite this damning exception, hopefully the point holds: I've never been a Gamer. So I don't really get what compels people to be Gamers.

Not dabblers or dilettantes, mind you, but the obsessive "I play WoW 19 hours per day" kind. The games people play these days, especially the "role playing" kind, are a little too…intense for me.

My sense that this is not a world I have the time or inclination to enter was reinforced when I saw this story about how Chinese prisoners are being forced to "gold farm" en masse in World of Warcraft and other popular MMORPGs. For those of us not in the know, players can perform mindlessly repetitive tasks to amass in-game currency ('gold') that can be used to purchase items of value to one's character. And apparently players looking to save time are willing to pay money – real life money – for these in-game currencies. So Liu and his fellow prisoners play WoW until they amass 100 gold doubloons or whatever, and then some gamer kid pays $50 in real money for them via PayPal, credit card, etc. Man, I remember when good ol' prepaid credit cards were good enough for transnational money laundering.

Since this is not my subculture, this story shocked me.

I have a vague sense of how "into" these role playing games some people get, but it's surprising to learn that enough people people are willing to shell out money for goblin armor and wizard spells or whatever to sustain a multi-billion dollar black market. I mean, when Chinese prisons are forming work details to turn out vast amounts of a given item, it's safe to say that global demand is high.

I suppose the following is true of any hobby – we know how expensive hobbies get, right? – but it blows my mind that people get enough of a psychological benefit out of a video game to make a second life out of it (and don't get me started on Second Life).

The idea of getting far enough into virtual / alternate universes to start shelling out money to buy fake objects from Chinese prison sweatshops is…as I said earlier, a little intense. All these years I thought games were supposed to be, you know, fun. This just seems like work. Work mixed with escapism. In a way, the fact that someone managed to combine those two is pretty impressive.

I'll stick with Tecmo Bowl.

Sometimes I worry that I am turning into Andy Rooney as I get older, and twenty years from now ginandtacos.com is going to be beaming (directly into your brain stem, I assume) rants about how every time I open a bag of potato chips it's already half empty. What is the deal with that? Did I not pay for a whole bag, Lay's? AOL-Chrysler Lay's, a division of Citibank Grumman?

When I witness behaviors in public and social settings and conclude that society is going to hell on a greased shutter, my Andy Rooney fear seems well placed. Imagine an old man going on a rant about how kids are wearing baggy pants and don't say "sir" or "ma'am" anymore and the whole country's going to hell. When I feel myself drifting into that territory, I try not to share those feelings with the world.

Today we're going full Rooney.

Like many people it bothers me quite a bit when I am interacting with another person – face to face, not electronically – and they are glued to a spacephone. Texting, twittering, checking email, staring aimlessly at the internet, etc. It's not unreasonable to expect that when someone is trying to talk with you, you will, like, listen to them and maybe make some eye contact and respond and stuff. Don't ask me to lunch with you or to meet you at the bar tonight if all you plan on doing is staring at the internet. I can sit around alone at home and I don't need to go out and spend money for the privilege.

I think that's fair. I'm not being unnecessarily uptight on that point; if a person is speaking to you in a social setting, do not ignore them to start staring at Facebook. That isn't asking much.

Of course, the younger generation has no problem doing this, mostly because they are physically and emotionally incapable of NOT staring at the internet or texting, etc. for more than a few minutes at a time. And over time we see more and more people comfortable engaging in this kind of behavior. I'm picking on The Kids, but older people do it too (especially Very Important Business Types). We can agree that it's irritating but it's hardly worth blowing out of proportion, right?

Two incidents.

First, I was dining in a swank restaurant in February. A woman was on her cellphone and couldn't possibly hang up long enough to interact with a waiter (not to mention her dining companion). Yet she needed the waiter's services. Her solution was to loudly snap her fingers at him, not unlike one would do to a dog, and point at her plate to indicate that she wanted pepper on her salad.

Second, I had to spend that pointless day at the DMV getting a license and plates last fall. There was a large sign over the service counter stating that people would not be served unless they stopped talking on their cellphone when the reached the front of the line. I asked the kindly bureaucrat who served me if this sign was preemptive or if people actually expected to be served while yapping away on the phone. She assured me that people do exactly that all the time.

Look. We already have the regrettable tendency to treat other people like they are of no value whatsoever to us, especially strangers and/or people in the service industry. I'm not exactly a stickler for etiquette and I'm not going to complain that America's Goin' To Hell because we violate some rule from Emily Post about using the proper salad fork. But I think it's fair to be alarmed at our willingness to expect people to interact with us while we ignore them. I worry about that. I worry about what it says about our society and how little we care about anyone other than ourselves. I worry that our already waning interest in the people around us has entered some sort of death spiral.

That's straight Andy Rooney. I recognize it. But what the hell, people. When you can't be bothered to hang up or stop texting long enough to nod, smile, or perhaps speak to another human being, we have a problem. When you leave your house you accept an implicit social contract that requires you to respond to the presence of other people. You have to brake when they are in crosswalks, step around them on sidewalks, and speak to them when you need or want to interact with them. It's tough, I know, but nobody said life would be easy.

The end of the semester entails many tedious tasks – grading, listening to endless student "But I need a higher grade" speeches, manually entering hundreds of grades into the university's system (with an interface fresh out of 1996), etc. – but I always get a kick out of going through the class rosters and enjoying the ridiculous names. People name their kids some seriously stupid crap, moreso here in Georgia than at my previous school. Misspelled "regular" names are popular (i.e., Nichoal, Abigale, Morgyn…no, I'm not making these up) as are made-up names that saddle kids with a burden they will never be able to shed. Incidentally, though, some of the most hilarious ones are bad first-last name pairings. "Crystal" would be a fairly normal name for a girl, but when one's last name is Waters it turns into a porn name. And of course if the family name is something like Sackrider or Raper the first name is irrelevant.

It would be inappropriate at best (and illegal at worst) to actually post hilarious student names here. Instead, I'll use the disproportionately large number of genital-themed names in this semester's crop of students as inspiration for a list of my own favorite real names from the world of penis humor and related disciplines. It's Friday, I'm finally done with a year that dragged on forever, and we could all probably use a giggle. And if you're as mature as me this will probably do the trick on a Friday. Note: Be sure to check out two older posts: the Most Ridiculous College Football Names and All-Time Ridiculous Baseball Names. Man, those were fun.

1. Dick Assman. David Letterman devoted most of a summer to Mr. Dick Assman…from Regina, Saskatchewan. The city is pronounced like the genitals, as if a beneficent God would allow Dick Assman to be from any other city.

2. Dick Pole. Covered this one with the Baseball Names All Stars.

3. Dick Pound. The former International Olympic Committee official provided history with one of the greatest headlines of all time: "The Righteous Fury of Dick Pound."

4. Dick Wolf. Every Law & Order fan giggles at the end of the opening credits, just as the awesome music fades out, when producer Dick Wolf is credited for his fine work.

5. Dick Trickle. Olbermann may recall that in the mid to late 1990s, every episode of ESPN Sportscenter hosted by Keith prominently featured the starting and finishing position of an obscure, not-very-good NASCAR driver Dick Trickle. He now sponsors a race in his native Wisconsin called, I shit you not, the "Dick Trickle 99", which sounds like either an extremely questionable trick football play or an unfortunate memory of a careless summer.

6. Dick Blazer. Anyone who has driven through Kokomo, IN has enjoyed billboards for Blazer Farms, a proud family run operation under the direction of Mr. Dick Blazer.

7. Dick Hammer. The 1970s TV series Emergency! (a largely forgotten forerunner of today's popular hospital/emergency dramas) featured a fire captain named Dick Hammer. Not only was the actor a real fire captain, but he was actually named Dick Hammer.

8. Dick Hyman. A world-renowned pianist. That's right: Dick Hyman, the pianist.

9. Dick Butkus. Pronounced Dick Butt-Kiss. Yep.

10. Congressman Norm Dicks (D-WA). Too bad Dick Armey is no longer in the House. The possibilities for hilariously co-sponsored legislation are endless.

11. Peter Bonerz. Prolific producer and sometimes director of forty years of popular TV series such as ALF (imagine how hard this image made me laugh when I was eight), The Bob Newhart Show, Wings, and many more.

12. Tobin Buttram. You haven't heard the name but if you play video games you've probably heard his music. Most recently he scored the hit game Left 4 Dead.

13. Chubby Cox. This needs an asterisk, as his given name was actually John.

14. Sally Mangina. A college tennis coach in Illinois. Let's hear it for the ladies, at long last!

15. English football (soccer) stars Dean Windass and Nicky Butt. If only they played on the same team. The Butt-Windass duo would be…I don't even have the words.

Do you feel ashamed of how hard you laughed at this? Lighten up. Embrace it. Use the comments to add your own.

Special Bonus: A legend and pioneer in the field of geology, Prof. Reinhardt Adolfo Fuck.

Thanks to an appearance on Boing Boing, this odd piece from an 1870 London Daily News report has been making the rounds on the interwebs. It appears that the British journalist Henry Labouchere was in Paris during the siege that eventually brought the Franco-Prussian War to conclusion. Fortunately this war resolved tensions between France and Germany once and for all.

Parisians, like many peoples subjected to wartime siege tactics, discovered that food runs out alarmingly quickly. During the Civil War residents of Vicksburg were reduced to eating wallpaper paste by the Union siege. In Paris they may not have been eating mucilage but by no means were they eating the usual delicacies of French cooking. The menu shifted from pork, veal, fish, and fowl to…more exotic fare. Labouchere offered a culinary review of the bill of fare:

* Horse: “eaten in the place of beef … a little sweeter … but in other respects much like it”
* Cat: “something between rabbit and squirrel, with a flavor all its own”
* Donkey: “delicious — in color like mutton, firm and savory”
* Kittens: “either smothered in onions or in a ragout they are excellent”
* Rat: “excellent — something between frog and rabbit”
* Spaniel: “something like lamb, but I felt like a cannibal”

I can see why this gained traction around the internet as a news-of-the-weird item, but let's up the ante a bit. I am reminded of another journalist, William Seabrook, who had traveled extensively among the less developed areas of the world in the early 20th Century. Along the way he encountered many indigenous peoples who practiced cannibalism and he developed something of a morbid (*rimshot*) curiosity. He asked a friend at a medical school in Paris (side note: What the fuck, Paris?) to provide him with a piece of a recently deceased man who died in an accident (side side note: If you are a medical student and someone asks this of you, do not say yes). After consuming the meat in a variety of preparations, he reported:

It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable.

So, yeah. Keep that in mind the next time the Channel 58 Local News does an exposé on designer shampoos.

I am not often fascinated by the subject of language or semiotics, but if you throw in a few hundred barrels of high level radioactive waste there is a good chance I'll pay attention.

In southern New Mexico the Department of Energy has been running an experimental facility called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). Planning began in 1974 and the storage of radioactive waste began in 1999. It isn't the first time anyone thought of Deep Geological Repository as a means of dealing with the thousands of tons of radioactive waste generated by the Atomic Age, but it might have the greatest chance of success due to the geology of the area. It is 3,000 feet below the surface in a salt bed that has been tectonically stable for over 250,000,000 years. So scientists are confident that the site will remain undisturbed for the 10,000 years it will take for transuranic waste to cease being dangerously radioactive.
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This creates an additional problem, though. What are the odds that the United States will be around in 10,000 years? What if there's an ice age for a few thousand years that takes humanity back to the primitive, pre-language hunter-gatherer stage? In other words, how can the people behind the project today make it clear to someone who may or may not speak English or comprehend radioactivity that the site is dangerous and should not be disturbed?
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The WIPP has forced the government, which usually does not traffic in long-long-term thinking, to address the kind of question better suited to hypothetical work among academics. DoE assembled a team of a wide range of specialties – linguists, anthropologists, science fiction writers, doctors, hard scientists – to come up with a practical answer.
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The final report (all of the interesting parts are excerpted here) proved very interesting to anyone interested in language, symbols, communication, and cultural significance. Without being able to rely on written language and the three-pronged "radioactive" symbol, how would you explain that something is dangerous?

Well, that's one way.

The discussion is equal parts amusing – lots of talk about crude cartoon warnings and "menacing earthworks" that say "this is a place of danger" – and fascinating, as it describes the different levels on which symbols can communicate information.
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The goal here is to communicate danger and fear at the most basic level, and once I contemplated that task it became clear that it's much more difficult than it initially seems.

If these subjects interest you at all, I could think of much worse ways to kill a slow Friday afternoon than checking out the report.

Frontline is still killing it this season, most recently with "Post Mortem", an episode about the lack of standardization and reliability in post mortem medical examinations. Shows like CSI make the public assume that a team of crack investigators is on the case whenever someone dies, but in reality death certificates are signed by doctors on what amounts to an honor system, autopsies are rarely performed, and those that are performed are not often done well. Part of the problem is that most jurisdictions either elect coroners (who don't even need to have a high school diploma let alone any relevant training) or outsource post mortem investigation to private contractors staffed mostly with otherwise unemployable doctors.

For some reason this was the most interesting aspect of the episode for me.
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Lots of people get medical degrees.
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So what happens to the ones who, despite that fact, are completely incompetent? Alcoholics? Ex-felons? Previously I was under the impression that doctors who fell into this category all ended up working in prisons, which makes perfect sense. After all, who's going to care if the prisoners complain and who else would take such an awful job? But thanks to Frontline we now know that jackholes with medical degrees have other options. Like taking a circular saw to the cadaver of a car accident victim for eight hours per day.

This got me thinking more about analogies to other professions. What happens to shitty lawyers?

Do they end up in a basement somewhere thumbing through manila folders for the rest of their lives, or is there some lawyering equivalent to "alcoholic autopsy specialist"? Where do engineers who lack the ability to engineer a birdhouse end up practicing their trade? Do teachers who get busted running meth labs out of their basements or appear on registered sex offender lists end up teaching calculus on an oil rig or something?

Is there some hidden underbelly of the airline industry filled with pilots who couldn't even hang on to a job at a regional airline?

Tell me, where do the burnouts, losers, and felons in your particular field end up? Thirty years ago I'd say that for PhD-holding academics the "reject pile" meant adjuncting at terrible colleges, but the way the industry is today I think that's what about 75% of us are going to end up doing. We'll have to think of something more degrading for the true incompetents.