Favorite Movies of the Past Nine Years - #5

"Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it."
- voice of Galadriel (Cate Blanchett)

#5 - Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Why I liked it

What's not to like?

OK, let me be more precise.

I did try, when I was in high school, to read through JRR Tolkien's trilogy -- it seemed something of a geek rite of passage, and it was mentioned as an inspiration to those who put together Dungeons & Dragons, a game to which I was devoted in those days even when I had no one to play it with.

When I tried to get through the first book in the trilogy, though, I found it very slow going. So slow that I gave up about a third of the way through. Sure, I recognized elves and halflings, things I'd first encountered through D&D, not Tolkien directly, but those things weren't breathtaking. And yeah, there was ancient Elvish history and such, but everybody who's ever tried to write a campaign world has ancient Elvish history, and I didn't see that Tolkien's (at least as far as I'd read) was markedly better than any number of his professional and even amateur imitators in world-building that I'd encountered in my travels through D&D campaign settings.

The thing that should have tipped me off, oddly, was "The Princess Bride".

By the time the film version of "The Princess Bride" came out in 1987, I'd learned to avoid things that my fantasy-obsessed friends thought as wonderful, based largely on my experience with Fellowship. I skipped seeing Princess Bride in a movie theater, waiting until it came out on VCR tape (we didn't yet have DVDs in those days).

Once I'd seen the movie once, I realized what a mistake I'd made in dismissing it. It's become one of my favorite movies of all time, and I never pass up an opportunity to see it if I have any ability to do so.

But if anything, the book was even better than the movie.

The great conceit of the book was that William Goldman, who wrote the screenplay for Princess Bride, was only transcribing the words of a Florinese writer named S. Morgenstern, who'd penned a story that Goldman's father, an immigrant and poor English speaker, read to him during a long stretch of illness. Interspersed with sections of Morgenstern's story were snippets, outtakes if you will, of bits of Goldman's own memories of his childhood, his attempts to turn on his son to the book as he was originally turned on by his father (though not, significantly, by reading the book to him).

It's that last point that turned out to be the most significant. Turns out that what Goldman's father was reading wasn't the book, per se, but a variant of his that Goldman, in his own book, called the 'good parts' version -- a version focusing on the main plot of the princess bride and her perils, and avoiding the side trips into political discussions and dissertations on historical fashion, etcetera.

It didn't hit me at all, until this movie came out, that Goldman's comment was a satirical dig, not at the fictional S. Morgenstern, but at Tolkien.

Seeing the movie, a movie that captivated me for over two hours, compelled me to go out and get the book again, just to be sure my adolescent memories of boredom weren't some kind of youthful hallucination. They weren't -- but what Goldman (and Jackson, et al) had taught me was that, if I found something that didn't seem to relate specifically to the plot at hand, I could probably skip it, then come back later if it seemed relevant to understanding some plot point. I very rarely backtracked, and realized only later that some entire sections that looked like plot (such as the whole section featuring Tom Bombadil) could have been skipped without harm.

With all that said, though, the main reason that Fellowship appeals to me is in its hero.

Those of my D&D-playing friends who weren't much into Tolkien growing up tended more toward fantasy that featured uber-competent heroes: Conan the Barbarian, Doc Savage, etcetera. A story might begin with its hero in a fairly weak and impotent state, but that would only be until the hero understood the power he was growing into; one day, he'd be the most powerful being in his world, as was his right.

Turns out that most fantasies following this sort of trope bored the undistilled piss out of me. (One of the very few exceptions was the Riftwar Saga by Raymond Feist.) Turns out the fantasy that I like best is that where your normal, run-of-the-mill person (with perhaps one or two not-quite run-of-the-mill attributes) ends up saving the world, at least in part because they aren't the uber-competent super-warrior that can do anything or win any fight. While Fellowship featured a few of those kinds of characters (specifically the hyper-competent Aragorn and the fanboy-fetish-object Legolas), the odd thing about Fellowship, and the rest of the series (which I greedily devoured before the second movie was even released), was that, while these characters had their own adventures and successes, none of them could have accomplished what Frodo accompished, and without that latter accomplishment, everything else done by the hyper-competent heroes would have been for naught.

Now that's the kind of story that gets my engine running.

With all that said, though, one thing I didn't get at the time the movie first came out (and one reason I think so many critics have since backtracked on the nice things they said about it at the start of the decade) is the supposed echoes/parallels with September 11: men of the west duelling with an ancient and implacable evil from the east, intent on overthrowing the world and leading everyone to a time of utter darkness. I've never seen the alleged War on Terror as being of that sort of Manichean scale (perhaps that comes from being on a bus heading to a plasma center on 9/11, trying to fend off starvation for another week), and now that it's obvious that the al-Qaeda terrorists who attacked the U.S. on 9/11 weren't real-life analogues for the once-human Nazgul, servants of ultimate evil, but were more accurately just guys who got lucky while attempting something of tremendous audacity, everybody who once thought that the story of Frodo and Gandalf was somehow a reminder of What We Faced in this New Era of Terror now realized that what they said was, if not hilariously misaligned, at least hyperbolically overblown. It's no wonder so many critics have performed a volte-face with respect to this film.

As for me, who never thought Fellowship was anything but a marvelous adventure well-told, I can go on thinking that it's one of the best movies I've seen in the past nine years, and even of all time.

Favorite Movies of the Past Nine Years - #6

#6 - Hot Fuzz (2007)

I don't remember a time when I didn't want to be a police officer... apart from the summer of 1979 when I wanted to be Kermit the Frog.
- Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg)

This is likely to be the most 'controversial' entry on this list, assuming anybody cares.

Of the ten films on this list, six are on the IMDB top 250. (If you want a partial spoiler of the films to come, the seven on the IMDB list are, ranked in order of the films released from 2001-2009: #2, #4, #5, #7, #13, and #25). The four not on this list are this one, and three films already covered: The King of Kong at #7 (a documentary), Sky High at #8 (a Disney film), and Presto at #10 (an animated short). So in that sense the pick is at least in part defensible.

Those who feel inclined to argue, however, will wonder why this Simon Pegg movie is the one that makes my list. After all, 'Star Trek' has Pegg, is also on the IMDB 250, and is a sci-fi movie that, based on my preferences thus far, you'd think I'd have liked. (I did, not just enough to get it into the top ten.) Or, if not that one, Pegg's best-known film, the George-S-Romero-homage 'Shaun of the Dead', is also in the IMDB 250 and considered by many critics to be one of the best genre-bending films ever, not just of the decade.

The latter is the reason why I rank 'Hot Fuzz' higher. 'Shaun' was a very funny, yet very faithful Horatian satire of 'Dawn of the Dead'. 'Hot Fuzz', meanwhile, was also very funny, but a much more Juvenalian satire of not just one but two genres: the murder mystery, and the 'buddy cop' film. (One could argue that Pegg and his co-writer Edgar Wright are also satirizing the 'hard boiled detective' genre of literature and film, but I consider the 'buddy cop' movie to be an heir to many of the Chandlerian traditions of the earlier 'hard boiled' genre.) Regardless, the film is far more ambitious than 'Shaun', and thus deserves praise for that.

But this isn't a list of my 'most admired' films of the past nine years; I very much enjoyed the degree of skewering of the traditional tropes of both the murder mystery and the buddy cop film, particularly the reveal of the mastermind(s) and the reasons for their murderous activities. If you found this reveal disappointing, all I can say is that you must have been expecting the movie to play it straight -- and why would you think that given everything that went before?

If this 'review' seems deliberately vague, well, it is -- 'Hot Fuzz' is available for instant viewing via Netflix and is probably sitting in the bargain bin at your local video store, and I'd hate to ruin someone's appreciation for the degree to which this film tickled exactly the ideosyncratic and contrarian bits of my personality. Go, see it, then come back and explain why you did or didn't like it.

Favorite Movies of the Past Nine Years - #7

7. The King of Kong (2007)

I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to be the center of attention. I wanted the glory, I wanted the fame. I wanted the pretty girls to come up and say, "Hi, I see that you're good at Centipede."
- Walter Day, "The King of Kong"

Begin with the obvious. It's a movie, in large part, about video games. Specifically about Donkey Kong, the ur-classic arcade video game of most Gen-Xers' childhoods. For a self-professed gamer, that's one point in its favor.

Next up, there's a decent amount of history here. You might even consider it 'secret history', not because it's been hidden away, per se, but because most folks probably don't care much about it. But you can find out a lot about the pastime of competitive video gaming, as well as the founding organization that brought it into public view, at least for a moment in 1982: Twin Galaxies.

(I can also see in Walter Day, the founder of Twin Galaxies, an older version of a friend of mine who had a similar combination of organizational drive and desire to make a permanent mark on the world. Verisimilitude, then, racks up another point.)

Now, throw in a whole crap-ton of controversy:

• The film itself presents Billy Mitchell, the man whom Twin Galaxies recognized as the world-champion Donkey Kong player in 1982, as the major villain, and Steve Wiebe, a former Boeing engineer and Redmond, Washington area school teacher whose quest to dethrone Mitchell makes up the dramatic heft of the film, as the main hero. The director, Seth Gordon, claims that he actually lightened up Mitchell in the film, using only those moments that would be applicable to the story he was telling, and that using more of Mitchell's actual personality would have resulted in a far darker film.
• Walter Day, the founder of Twin Galaxies, has posted on the Twin Galaxies internet forum that he believes the film is dishonest with a number of facts regarding the Donkey Kong record, including the presence of a third player, Tim Sczerby, in the race for the title who does not appear at all in the film.
• Blogger and pundit Jason Scott (who himself created a documentary about the early days of computer bulletin-board systems, takes the charge of dishonesty up another notch with a post on his blog, ASCII, claiming, among other things, that Gordon played so fast-and-loose with the facts that the reaction from sources for his own potential video-game-history documentary decided not to cooperate, fearing that Scott would manipulate their stories as much as Gordon is alleged to have done. (Scott doesn't claim the movie is bad, just dishonest and damaging to the genre of capturing the true history of early computing, including video games.)

So you can watch the movie on the level that the director intended, reveling in the 'sad sack mokes good despite conspiracy to defeat him' storyline presented there. You can look deeper and see more complex patterns not just among the principals, but between the filmmaker and those he's interacting with.

And of course, along the way, you can learn a crap-ton about a subject geekier than most of us will ever really want to know about; assuming, of course, that you end up trusting the movie after finding out about the online controversy.

What's not to love?

Favorite Movies of the Past Nine Years - #8

If life were to suddenly become fair, I doubt it would happen in high school.

Warning: Spoileriffic blog post ahead!

If you asked a typical geek what he'd consider the prototypical superhero movie, not even just of the last ten years, but of all time, chances are good that he'd pick Sam Raimi's Spiderman (2002). The film was clearly a labor of love for Raimi, and Tobey Maguire was spot-on as the nebbish Peter Parker. As with any film, Spiderman wasn't perfect, and people who wanted to could find things to quibble about. Some I dismissed, such as criticism of Kirsten Dunst's portrayal of Mary Jane Watson; I thought it was a pretty solid success to take the Mary Jane character, seldom more than a fantasy girlfriend in the comics, and try to make a believable character out of her. Some I rejected, such as the update of the spider from 'radioactive' to 'genetically modified'; radiation in the 1960's was the genetic modification of today, a poorly-understood field of science from which all sorts of dangerous monsters were hypothesized to be waiting to escape. Some criticism, though, I took to heart, such as the oddly jarring decision to have Spidey's webs come organically from his wrists rather than from mechanical web-shooters of his own design, though this was less troublesome in this movie than in the first sequel, where the filmmakers had to introduce a mysterious (and seemingly otherwise pointless) cold in order to justify the iconic 'Spidey runs out of web fluid' moment seen so often in the comic books. I enjoyed Spiderman, and thought it was a good film, but it doesn't make my top ten of the 'decade'.

Some of those who didn't choose Spiderman would probably instead go for Brad Bird's The Incredibles (2004), an ersatz Fantastic Four in a world that turned its back on superheroes. I thought the film was fun, but not really great, and said so at the time:

This is a world that has learned to fear and mistrust superheroes, to the point where no good deed seems to go unpunished in the first two-thirds of the movie, and yet a single giant robot attack suddenly makes everything all right again. This is a world where being repeatedly told to stay out of the way gives a shy girl enough self confidence to be able to out-cool the cool guy in school at the end of the film.

While there were a few individual moments that worked for me, the film as a whole left me oddly underwhelmed, and it's not one that I go out of my way to watch.

Lastly, any geek who didn't name one of the prior two would probably pick Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008). This is a film in the top ten of the Internet Movie Database's most popular films of all time. Frankly, I feel that if any movie made in the past ten years deserves a critical backlash, it's this one - yes, the late Heath Ledger gave an impressive performance as the Joker, but it wasn't his 'last movie' -- that would be Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus -- and while I'm a Maggie Gyllenhaal fan, I don't think she was used nearly enough in the film, seemingly out of fear that it would draw attention to the fact that the filmmakers couldn't get Katie Holmes back to reprise her role from Batman Begins. Finally -- and my biggest beef with the film -- is that it's a Batman movie that's got almost nothing for Batman to do. The whole 'normal citizens dressing up as Batman' subplot seemed tacked on, an excuse to justify why Batman seems to eager to take Harvey Dent's sins onto himself at the end of the movie, and the romantic subplot suffers, again because the filmmakers don't want to call attention to Gyllenhaal replacing Holmes. Without more depth in those two subplots, the movie is about Batman chasing the Joker and Two-Face around Gotham City, ineffectually at first, and then finally catching one and then the other.

Now I don't want to give you the impression that I thought any of these movies were bad -- quite the contrary. If someone wanted to put one (or all of them) on her own 'top 10' list, I'd understand the decision. Heck, you could probably put together a reasonable list of just superhero movies from the past ten years, adding in Iron Man (2008), Spiderman 2 (2004), and others to taste.

Only one of those 'others' makes my list at all, though:

8. Sky High (2005)

Since 2004 had seen the release of The Incredibles and Spiderman 2, this Disney offering didn't draw a whole lot of water when it came out in the summer of 2005. It wasn't a terribly 'marquee' movie: its director was probably best known for piloting Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo and the writers were virtually unknown -- one was a freelancer known to Disney for his work on various projects like Kim Possible and the straight-to-video Aladdin movie sequels. The best known actor in the marquee was probably Kurt Russell, a Disney veteran himself (back from his Dexter Riley days). There wasn't much reason to think this was anything other than a cute little Disney movie about superheroes, trying to cash in on the success of the previous year's releases.

But oh, how wrong you'd be if you thought that.

First off, this movie is filled with 'hey, it's that guy' moments, which suggests that enough people liked the premise and pitch of the film to hop on board just for kicks. Among the lesser-billed performers include:

• Lynda Carter as the school principal
• Bruce Campbell as the school gym teacher
• Dave Foley as 'Mr. Boy', the teacher for 'Hero Support' (aka "the loser track")
• Cloris Leachman as the school nurse
• Kevin McDonald as the big-brained science teacher
• and, though you'd have to be a real fan to recognize it, Patrick Warburton as the voice of the villain following her 'big reveal'

So that's fun all by itself.

Plus the filmmakers weren't afraid to give these recognizable actors some call outs. (Example: near the end of the film, when Lynda Carter as the principal is leaving the detention room, she mutters "I'm not Wonder Woman, you know.")

But if all the movie was was a geek-fest for older viewers, it wouldn't be half as good as it is. Unlike Spiderman, which is a power fantasy masquerading as a coming-of-age tale (Peter supposedly learns 'with great power comes great responsibility, but in reality he already knew that and just needed to be reminded; the rest of the movie is how kick-ass it is to have super-powers, except for the personal life aspects), Sky High actually manages to pull off a coming-of-age tale, with a nebbish, powerless yet highly regarded child of two famous heroes discovering his own powers, letting them go to his head, and figuring out what he needs to do to be a hero just in time to save the day -- with the help of his sidekick friends.

And the truth is that the younger performers really do carry the water in this movie. Michael Angarano is perfect as the goofy, likable Will Stronghold. Danielle Panabaker nails the 'best friend who will take any amount of self-inflicted pain to make sure she doesn't lose her friendship with the guy she's secretly in love with' (and the look she gives Will after he's 'come out' to his father as a powerless sidekick made me wish I was back in high school). Steven Strait is the 'Draco in leather pants' that Harry Potter fanfic writers dream about as Warren Peace, a troubled teen forced to grow up too fast because of his father's supervillainy.

You get all this -- you can see these things in the characters. But the filmmakers never pound these things over your head to make a point about 'here is the bitter but misunderstood villain who just needs some understanding to become a better man'. It's a fun ride, with some serious backstory for anyone paying attention.

The best thing about it is that the filmmakers chose to eschew CGI for much of the film, using more traditional wire effects for much of the fight scenes in the film. And you really can tell the difference between a computer-generated Spiderman fighting CGI bad guys, and the real Warren Peace crashing through a wall and buckling a support pillar after being smacked by Will Stronghold.

There's just a lot to like about this movie, which is why I rate it my favorite superhero movie of the decade, and my #8 overall since 2001.

Favorite Movies of the Past Nine Years - #9

Welcome to the next installment of my ten favorite movies of the 'decade' thus far, since I can't see 2000 as the start of a decade any more than I was able to see it as the start of a millenium.

9. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)

You might not have noticed unless you're a cineaste, read a lot of movie reviews, or caught Salon's film writers a few weeks ago, but a critical backlash has developed against Peter Jackson's 'good parts' adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkein's epic 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy.

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, who wrote the main story linked above, points out that, from his perspective, the folks who are dissing on the LotR series pretty much can't agree on exactly why they seem to dislike it so, and some of the comments make absolutely no sense. For instance, the following:

I don't really think it has to do with their length, but more with the fact that the films do not speak to a wider truth. For example, "The Godfather" is not really about the Mafia; it's an examination of the nature of capitalism and revenge. There is something very universal about the Corleone saga, and every time I've seen that movie and the sequel, I notice something different and have a different reaction. The LOTR movies are just about hobbits, wizards, elves and the rest. That's it. They do not offer us any insight into human nature or our culture.

H...wha?

'The Godfather' isn't just a bunch of Mafiosi shooting each other up while declaring undying loyalty to their 'families', but 'LotR' is just about elves and hobbits?

Let's move on to the section where I debunk this.

Why I liked it

There were a number of overarching themes in the LotR films, most of which began to come into sharper focus in this movie than they did in the first one:

- The durability and power of true friendship: Despite the breaking of the Fellowship at Boromir's betrayal and redemption, the three groups of friends go on to achieve truly mighty things -- Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas press themselves almost beyond mortal limits in attempting to save Merry and Pippin, only to be redirected by a resurrected Gandalf toward Rohan, where they serve as part of the balance that tips the scales in the favor of the human kingdom's survival at Helm's Deep. Merry and Pippin achieve by trickery what they can't achieve by force of persuasion with Treebeard of the Ents.

- The seductive lure of evil: Despite some critics assertions otherwise, Jackson actually changed very little of Tolkien's overall plot, though one of the biggest occurs here. In the books, Faramir, originally tempted by the power of the Ring, relents and allows the hobbits and their guide to go along their way after capturing them in the wilds south of Mordor. In the film, Faramir remains in the Ring's thrall until he and the tiny trio return to Osgiliath, in the hopes of using the Ring to break the orcish siege of the city, only to realize that the Ring will not deliver them, but destroy them. We also begin to see Frodo's recognition that, despite his fighting against the influence of the Ring, the Ring is slowly corrupting him, and thus he reacts by reaching out in the hopes of finding Smeagol redeemable, knowing full well that he, too, will need to be redeemed once this trial is ended. And of course, it appears that Smeagol can be redeemed, as he exorcises his own demon, Gollum, early in the film, only to have Gollum and his lust for the Ring return with a vengeance at the hands of Faramir's troops, in a sequence that, for Frodo was all about saving Smeagol's life, but to Smeagol was a betrayal.

This film also introduces us to my favorite character in the entire trilogy, and I need to point out that this was not, in fact, my favorite character in the books. Critics may try to say that Jackson's (more accurately Phillipa Boyen's and Fran Walsh's) screenplay reduced 'epic' characters to more identifiable stereotypes, but for my money, Bernard Hill's portrayal of King Theoden of Rohan is anything but stereotypical.

We first meet Theoden as he sits on his throne, ensorcelled by Wormtongue and Saruman. Gandalf releases Theoden from their control, yet thanks must remain brief, as Theoden must bury his last son and then mobilize his people for war with Saruman's uruk-hai. There are moments on the road where you imagine Theoden is barely holding himself upright for the sake of his people, having lost nearly everything he personally has to live for, yet being unwilling to abandon his responsibility to those who serve him. In the end, he accompanies Aragorn on a seemingly suicidal ride into the uruk-hai horde, only to have defeat turned into victory by the rising of the sun and the arrival of Gandalf and the Riders of Rohan.

And if you thought he was cool in this movie, wait till you see what I say about him in the third one.

My Favorite Movies of the...what?

Well, when Eric Burns gets back to updating his blog regularly, I know it's time for me to get off the stick, so here goes:

Remember Veruca Salt?

No, not the band, though if I was more of a music aficionado, there might be an interesting post there, too.

No, I'm talking about the character from Roald Dahl's book, truly immortalized by Julie Dawn Cole's portrayal of her in the 1971 film adaptation of Dahl's book. The bratty, spoiled kid who meets a fitting end at the climax of the show-stopping song "I Want It All" by being identified as a 'bad egg' and sent into the factory's incinerator.

I was reminded of Miss Salt's character just over ten years ago, when the Year 2000 was approaching, and the air was filled with excitement about the imminent arrival of the 'new millennium'. I could understand that most folks probably didn't realize that Arthur Clarke had named his own famous S.F. book "2001: A Space Odyssey" specifically because 2001 would be the start of the third millennium, at least according to the Gregorian calendar. I could even get that most folks, blinded by the sight of so many zeroes in the upcoming year, wouldn't stop to consider that, since there was no Year Zero, the first millennium (had the Gregorian calendar existed then) would have started in Year One.

What I couldn't quite stomach was the insistence with which these people wanted to insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the Year 2000 would still be the start of the new millennium. It seemed petulant to me, as if people were saying, "I don't want to wait another whole year to celebrate the start of the millennium. I want my new millennium NOW!" Eventually I learned to just scowl at those folks, because after all, how many new millennia have I had the chance to experience for myself? It was a big enough deal that arguing seemed somehow to lessen the moment.

Then we reached the end of 2009, and I started noticing a flurry of retrospectives intended to recap the past decade at the start of a new one. Wha? Every argument that applied to 2000 not being the start of a new millennium applies to 2010 not being the start of a new decade. In addition, it's not as though people are missing out on new decades -- even short-lived adults get to see two or three before passing into the great void.

There's another point to be made about decades, though -- a Millennium has a certain connotation, just as a Century does. But a decade is, in some sense, just a period of ten years. So I thought I might wait a few years, then post a retrospective of the past decade: 2004-2013. It'd be just as valid as any other decade-wide retrospective, and would even make a snarky point about how people seem to feel about the turn of this decade.

In this case, though, there's another justification that can be used; in 2000, most people didn't have blogs that demanded regular content updates. So in that spirit, and because I need any excuse I can take to update my own long-neglected blog, I'll present my 10 favorite movies of the past decade...to this point, going from 2001 through today.

Ground rules: I'm only posting movies I've actually seen, thus can count among my favorites. I'm also going to avoid movies released in 2000, but I'll have an Honorable Mention at the end for one that would make the list if I was going with the seemingly-common interpretation of 'decade' as it's being used in the retrospectives I'm rebelling against.

10. Presto (2008)

You might not remember this one by name, or if you do, you might think it's a bit of a cop-out. "Presto" was the Pixar short film that played before "WALL-E" (about which, see more below).

Why I liked it

Two reasons, mainly:

1. The filmmakers gave an associate producer's credit to the late Jay Ward, creator of some of my favorite childhood cartoons (which, in retrospect, were a bit too subversive to be really targeted at children).

2. The film is itself a primer in the art of fantasy and SF storytelling, perhaps one of the best out there, despite not having a single word of actual dialogue.

Point two is going to require a bit of additional explanation, I can tell.

A lot is made of the idea that the fundamental ingredient of story is conflict, and a lot should be made. If your story has no conflict, it's not really a story -- it might be a well-crafted fictional essay, but if nothing happens in the sense of someone accomplishes something despite the resistance of some force or person trying to prevent that thing from happening, then all you have is an essay on utopia.

"Presto" presents a rabbit, whom we see at the beginning of the story trying to reach a carrot just out of his reach. He's hungry. Basic, understandable human need, and that the character is an anthropomorphized rabbit doesn't change our ability to empathize with his plight. The magician enters the room (in a nice touch, the magician has clearly just finished eating, as he wipes his mouth and licks his fingers as he enters), then suddenly realizes how late it's gotten and begins preparing for his performance by checking on the magical hat that makes him the 'amazing' magician that we saw written on the wall at the opening, while listening to the grunts of the poor rabbit trying to reach his own dinner. The magician tests his 'rabbit out of a hat' trick, then is just about to feed the rabbit when a knock on the door tells him that the performance is starting. Racing out to the stage without feeding the rabbit, the fundamental conflict in the story is thus established:

The magician wants to get through his act, and the rabbit wants dinner. Everything that happens from here on out is an escalation of this basic conflict to an energetic climax, with the occasional quick aside to make a joke about the situation.

Where does the SF/fantasy angle come in? Because of a premise in SF storytelling that the reader will give you one freebie in compositing your world. In "Presto", this is the MacGuffin of the magical hat, without which the action wouldn't be possible. Tricky stuff happens with the hat, but everything else follows from that basic 'gimme' premise.

(Those who might be inclined to argue that the anthropomorphic rabbit counts as another thing the audience must be willing to accept aren't necessarily wrong, but this is actually covered by the film being animated: one of the expected tropes of animation is that things like animals, plants, and even mechanical objects can have sentience and act like a character. Had the filmmakers tried to use a live rabbit and have it act the way the animated 'Alec' does, the story wouldn't have worked.)

Next time you're stuck trying to figure out where your story needs to go, ask yourself: which character is Alec and which is Presto, and whose turn is it to escalate the conflict? And if you can't answer that question, consider re-working your story until you can.

Next time: number nine!

The Longest Night

There is one alone, and there is not a second; yea, he hath neither child nor brother: yet there is no end of all his labor; neither is his eye satisfied with riches; neither saith he, For whom do I labor, and bereave my soul of good? This is also vanity, yea, it is a sore travail.

- Ecclesiastes 4:8, Skeptic's Annotated Bible

Today is Christmas Day. Normally, I'd have likely gone to the midnight mass held at the Richfield United Methodist Church, where a close friend and her family are members, but this year they are all overseas visiting the eldest daughter, who is herself spending the year studying abroad. Partly for this reason, and partly from curiosity, I decided that my Christmas service this year would be the Longest Night service at Aldersgate United Methodist, a church where I'd participated in a couple of shows for their Theater of the Spirit outreach ministry.

The first I'd heard of so-called 'Blue Christmas' programs was some years ago in the local alt-weekly the City Pages, which did a story on a concert specifically focusing on sad and contemplative music during the holiday season. Those organizing the concert acknowledged that some might find their efforts perverse -- why be sad during what for many is the happiest season of the year? -- yet they understood that the 'for many' in that phrase just passed means that there are some who don't find themselves feeling excited at the prospect of the Christmas and New Year's season. I thought the idea was both thoughtful and curious; after all, to some degree artists depend on the financial patronage of their audience, and while I could attest that there were definitely those who didn't find the thought of the holiday season exciting, I wondered if that audience could sustain such a program.

Years passed, and the underlying ethic of the 'Blue Christmas' concert began to spread within certain denominations: the Methodists and certain Lutheran denominations primarily. (Note: I don't think it's a coincidence that these denominations tend to be more liberal in their politics -- there is a connection, though not necessarily an absolute one, between liberalism and thoughtfulness of the troubles of others.)

The service at Aldersgate was the first such service they'd tried to host; talking with Pastor Aastuen after the service, I learned that she had heard of such services being held in other churches, and decided to host one at Aldersgate, at least in part, because of a surprising number of deaths among the aging parishoners in the previous year, thinking that a service targeted toward those in grief or despair might not just be well-received, but even be spiritually necessary for some of the remaining congregation.

From a pure attendence standpoint, the service might be judged disappointing if not a failure: when I arrived, the audience to that point consisted of me, four other Methodist pastors, and one pastor's husband. By the time the service began, there were twelve of us in the chapel, and the non-ordained outnumbered the ordained, thankfully.

Though I can't say I enjoyed the service (like a Requiem Mass or funeral service, a Longest Night service isn't intended to be enjoyable or entertaining, but cathartic), I did appreciate it, though I appreciated it more for the symbolism and mood than for the specific message. The mood was somber and restrained, as you'd expect of a service targeted at those who are not celebrating the season, and some of the symbolism was fairly profound; for example, in contract to most Christmas services I've attended, where a packed church raises their voices triumphantly, fulling the chapel with the strains of "Joy To The World" or "O, Come All Ye Faithful", our service sang "In the Bleak Midwinter" and "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel", and though a few of us were not unaccomplished as singers, the simple fact that there were just twelve of us meant that we couldn't fill the space, and our mood was such that we didn't have the energy to do so. Instead, our voices were thin and trembling, perfectly fitting the thought of us being wounded or suffering and searching for, if not healing, then at least solace from our pain.

The one part of the service I didn't ultimately appreciate was the focus of the selected Scripture: the service used the traditional Gospel verses regarding the story of the birth of Christ, focusing on the humble surroundings and simply failing to mention the glorification of those surroundings later by the arrival of angels and Wise Men and such (since, of course, glorification would have been out of place for the mood of the service). It also mentioned Isaiah 40, which some might interpret as being fitting for the service (it begins, "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.") but which, on reflection, I found to still be too optimistic. For instance, compare the following:

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain; (Isaiah 40:4)

with a verse in an earlier book:

I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. That which is crooked cannot be made straight; and that which is wanting cannot be numbered. (Ecclesiastes 1:14-15)

I suppose it's too much to ask even of a thoughtful church, but my hope was that the service wouldn't just focus on those who were sad for a reason, or mourning a specific loss, but also serve those who, like the Preacher, find life itself to be vanity, filled with frustration and toil with no obvious reward or even point.

That is, after all, part of what Longest Night is for some people: not just a reflection of the solstice, where sunlight is at a minimum and Seasonal Affective Disorder runs rampant, but a spiritual night, where hope cannot be found and the world is, at best, cloaked in shadow if not drenched in impenetrable darkness.

Perhaps it's too much to ask that a church, whose primary myth at this time of year is a story of glad tidings of great joy, find a way to reach out to those who can't see that light; to treat those people not as though they have some sort of temporary flaw or failure which time and faith will repair, but rather as people in need of actual comfort, companionship, and friendship, not just the promise of same in some ill-defined afterlife.

Perhaps we as humanity will one day find a way to love the unlovable, rather than mindlessly expect that God will take care of the problem once it no longer matters.

Blessed with Suck

1. Every form of strength covers one weakness and creates another, and therefore every form of strength is also a form of weakness and every weakness a strength.
- Bill James, from the 1983 Baseball Abstract, related in Moneyball by Michael Lewis

Generally, this is a blessing to a character that seems to cause nothing but trouble:
- "Blessed with Suck", TVTropes.org

By any rational analysis, this past weekend was a really good weekend. On Friday, I ran a session of 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons for a group of friends who, at one point, seemed utterly uninterested in trying out 4th edition D&D. On Saturday, I won a reasonable amount of money playing in a nickel-ante poker game. On Sunday, I attended a Minnesota Vikings game where the home club won a comfortable 35-9 victory.

Then the sun goes down on Sunday evening, and the weekend's events replay themselves in my mind, and I'm reminded not just of Bill James's comments at the start of this essay, but the aphorism about success containing the seeds of failure in order to keep us humble. There are enough seeds for quite a harvest just in this one weekend:

- Friday night involved me creating a series of pre-generated characters. My intention was to put together an interesting, integrated group that would demonstrate the degree of teamwork that 4th edition D&D calls for in successful party composition and execution. Sadly, my own tendency toward procrastination meant that, by Friday morning, I'd only completed one of the five pre-gens, and barely worked out the roughest details of the three-encounter delve that would be the focus of the evening's entertainment. I thought we'd start by 8pm and be done by 10-10:30pm; instead, we started at 8:30pm and weren't done until well after midnight. The session went reasonably well, but by the time the evening was over, the main topic of conversation was how badly most of the pre-gen characters had been designed, which doesn't bode well for future game sessions.

- Saturday night was the most entertaining of all; I don't consider myself a card sharp by any means, and the game was more social than serious. Still, it's fun to win money -- the old adage about money won being twice as sweet as money earned seems just about right from where I'm sitting. Unfortunately, I offended at least one of my friends at the table with my insistence on an odd dealer's-choice game.

(If you're wondering how you can offend someone simply with a game of cards, let me explain with an example, which is not the specific example I encountered on Saturday: say you have a game where the value of wild cards changes frequently -- on one betting round 4s and 7s may be wild, but then the next round may see 3s and Js wild, and the final round before the lay-down may change yet again so that only 8s are wild, and that these changes are essentially unpredictable, save that they'll happen. Someone who prefers to understand how good their own hand is before betting and the likelihood that their own hand may win (or improve enough to win) before deciding to stay in is going to find this kind of game frustrating unless they're also the kind of person who likes juggling multiple sets of probabilities in their head at the same time -- what cards are likeliest to become wild, what are the odd my hand will improve by that change, etc. Someone who just wants to play cards and not feel stupid for betting a ton of money on a hand that becomes worthless just before the lay-down isn't going to appreciate your tour-de-force of rapidly shifting wild cards.)

I don't think I've necessarily lost a friendship through my poker choices on Saturday, but money, even for low stakes (Henry Kissinger would say especially for low stakes), can be a real stickler when it comes to feelings between people. I've apologized, but I'm not sure that'll be enough.

- On Sunday, just the process of getting someone to use the second ticket I'd purchased was like pulling teeth. At first, I thought it'd be a great chance to spend time with an attractive woman, and even had more than one in mind to ask (in order, of course) - none were interested. I then asked other friends who I knew had an interest in football; each one either was uninterested in the game or had some other event going on that they decided should take precedence. I did eventually find someone to take the ticket, but the experience of having so many people, for their own reasons, say that they weren't interested in attending a football game with me started me off on the wrong foot to begin with.

Next, though I'm firmly a bandwagon fan these days, I still have little patience discussing games with people who aren't willing to take even a little time to think about what they're saying. Case in point: third down, five yards to go, coach calls for a running play. Person next to me complains that it's stupid to call a run on third and five.

Well, person, when you have one of the top running backs in the league, who in a good season averages about five yards a carry, that's not so stupid right on its face. Then add in the idea that, if you give the opponent the information that you'll always pass on third and five, that changes the kinds of defenses you'll see, so that passing will become significantly more difficult. You run, even in those situations where you might not make it, to keep the defense honest -- because running now keeps your options open for later. (And 'later' even means games against other opponents, since every NFL game is extensively taped and reviewed by upcoming opponents -- if you establish a pattern of always passing on third and five, every team in the league gets the benefit of that information for when they play you.)

So start with, what for a normal person would be a great weekend, salt in my own personal quirks, and you end up with a string of disappointed and/or offended people, including in an odd way, myself. And the really screwed up part of this whole thing? Even I can see that this reaction to the weekend, skewed and potentially unhealthy as it is, is more interesting and even possibly valuable than simply recounting, "Hey, I ran a game on Friday, won at poker on Saturday, and saw the Vikes kick ass on Sunday. Awesome!"

If you disagree, may I respectfully direct you to the title of this blog?

The March of Progress

Been taking some time this evening to burn some episodes from the "Star Trek Alternate Realities Collective" to disk so that I can carry them around in my iPhone. (Thanks, Andy, for the advice in iPhone Fully Loaded!)

It's a depressing sign of progress that I can generally identify the episodes in Handbrake even though the order of the episodes on the disk doesn't actually match the order listed on the DVDs or on the cover art, and Handbrake doesn't actually give an episode name, just a track number and file length in minutes and seconds.

If the episode is in excess of 50 minutes in running time, it's an original series episode (ST:TOS).

If the episode is just over 45 minutes in running time, it's a Next Generation episode (ST:TNG).

If the episode is just under 44 minutes in running time, it's either a Deep Space Nine (ST:DS9) or Voyager episode (ST:VOY).

If the episode is under 43 minutes in running time, it's an Enterprise episode (ST:ENT).

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, anything that isn't running time is advertising time, at least during the original broadcast of the episodes in question. Sadly, it's not just a broadcast TV problem: episodes of my favorite series at the moment, Leverage, run about 43 minutes (for a one-hour broadcast time slot) or 57 minutes (for a two-hour broadcast time slot).

One more among the many good reasons to skip the broadcast and just go straight for the DVD. If the networks can only stay in business by shrinking the content we actually want to watch, then they should go away and be replaced by something that meets viewers' needs better.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Habitually...What?

Anger helped make Larry Johnson into a breathtakingly good NFL running back. Anger helped make him famous and successful and rich. Anger helped him fulfill the dreams he had been having since he was a child.

The trouble is, at some point, all those other things faded away. He’s not a breathtakingly good running back now. He’s not especially famous, not particularly successful, and being rich — assuming he has been smart with his money — isn’t enough. This is the the sad thing about Larry Johnson. All he’s left with is the anger.

- Joe Posnanski, in this blog post



[W]e are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit...

- Will Durant, "The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers"

You may recall the second of the quotes above being attributed to Aristotle; I know I thought he wrote it, but it turns out that's not true. There's probably an essay in that observation alone, but that's not what I came out here to talk about.

Durant is basically summarizing Aristotle's position on how people acquire virtue, so in a sense the idea is still Aristotle's even if the quote isn't. Still, there's reason to believe that Aristotle, on this topic, was just writing what he thought was obvious, and as a result just blowing smoke out his ass.

On the other hand, Aristotle might actually have something here, but it's sportswriters who are blowing smoke. (Posnanski is a sportswriter, though one of my favorites -- another note to self: update the Five Favorites essay from over three years ago.) The idea that Larry Johnson might believe that his anger is part of what makes him an outstanding athlete, despite not having shown himself to be an outstanding athlete in his chosen field for a few years now, doesn't mean that anger is actually what make Johnson good at football. Being young, being hungry to prove something to the world, having outstanding teammates helping you: all of these things pretty clearly also have something to do with Johnson's success, even if these things are far less under Johnson's direct control.

And that, I think, is where we hit the fundamental fallacy of Aristotle's sentiment (and Durant's words): the illusion of control.

We want to believe that we are responsible for our successes; that we succeed because we are good people doing good things. Though many of us will accept that chance and other factors outside of their personal control may have influenced a given successful outcome, most of us will still assert that, even in the absence of those factors, we would still have succeeded 'in the end', just that the additional factors meant that we had to spend less time and effort on the attempt.

In a case where the thing we personally had control over wasn't really all that significant, then we choose to develop habits that aren't helpful, and in fact can become harmful. When the habit we learned no longer appears useful, frustration develops. Just look at Larry Johnson -- injuries have stolen away some of his athletic ability, and ownership decisions and age have taken his most talented teammates away and not replaced them with equally talented counterparts -- yet Johnson, who appears to believe that his anger was an integral part of his success as a runner (and why wouldn't he believe that, when he was repeatedly told by sportswriters that they believe it themselves?) now has nothing but his anger to fend off a growing sense of frustration.

It behooves each of us, if we are considered successful, to look very closely at the factors that went into that success and not assume that the factor we have control over was the main determinant of that success. Doing so will leave us, years later, with a habit -- but not a habit of excellence, just a habit of self-delusion.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Things That Are Not Rights

- You do not have a right not to be upset or disturbed by troubling news.

- You do not have a right to not be inconvenienced.

- You do not have a right to be trusted or presumed honest.

- You do not have a right to be believed at face value.

- You do not have a right to question someone else's beliefs when you've never questioned your own.

- Unless you invented the game, you do not have the right to make up your own rules.

- You do not have the right to never be presented with information or situations that challenge your beliefs or intellect.

- You do not have the right to act as though an untested belief was true.

- You do not have the right to tell someone how to pronounce his name, nor how to spell her child's name.

- You do not have the right to tell an adult not to do something because 'your parents won't like it'.

- You do not have the right to tell a child that isn't related to you that either doing or not doing something is 'bad' or makes them a 'bad person'. (And even if the child is related, unless it's yours, you should consider still following this advice.)

- You do not have the right to give advice to people whose advice you do not consider.

- You do not have the right to a full explanation of why someone doesn't like you.

- You do not have the right to be automatically treated as though you know what the fuck you're talking about.

- Unless you made the rules, you do not have the right to interpret them. (Depending on the situation, however, you may have the privilege of interpreting them, but don't mistake this for being presumed correct in your interpretation.)

- If you do something in public, you do not have the right to avoid criticism for it.

- No matter how many nice things you've done in your life, you do not have the right to be assumed to be a nice person.

- You do not have the right to treat someone with scorn or anger when the same request can be made politely.

- You do not have the right to blow off requests and expect that people will still treat you politely.

- You do not have the right to assert someone's belief is wrong without proof of your assertion.

- You do not have the right to present an easily falsifiable belief as true, no matter how good it makes you feel.

- You do not have the right to compliment someone if you are aware that person does not wish a compliment.

- You do not have the right to speak one way about someone when she is present, another way when she is absent, and expect to be thought morally or ethically consistent.

- Unless you are the person who paid for the entire pizza, you do not have a right to the last slice.

- You do not have a right to say offensive things and still be thought wise.

- You do not have the right to see anyone's tattoo unless you also have the right to forbid that person from getting a tattoo. The same is true of toenail polish, undergarments, and sexual partners.

- You do not have the right to make decisions you know nothing about.

- You do not have the right to reduce your portion of the bill because you think someone else's tip is too large.

- You do not have the right to get something for nothing.

- You do not have the right to avoid the consequences of your actions.

The Nobel Hall of Fame

Since U.S. President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, political organizations all over the United States, and to a lesser degree the world, have been abuzz with the news. Much of the conversation in the U.S. has revolved around the question of whether or not Obama 'deserved' to win the award.

It turns out that this is one of those times in life where being a sports fan actually helps you with a non-sports-related life situation: having listened to arguments, rants, and out-and-out denunciations of various sports award winners over the years, I can say with confidence that the people discussing whether or not Obama deserves the Peace Prize are missing the point: being deserving has very little to do with receiving an award.

Consider a less significant award, such as baseball's Cy Young award or college football's Heisman Trophy. One of a number of different scenarios may apply:

- There may be one candidate who achieves general acceptance that he should win the award. In almost every case, this candidate does end up winning the award without controversy. If for some reason this candidate does not win the award, controversy inevitably results.

- There may be two or more candidates seen as equally qualified to win the award. One of these candidates will generally win the award, but if there are only two such candidates, and their support breaks nearly down the center of the population doing the evaluation for the award, the award may be awarded to 'co-winners' for that given period, usually to avoid controversy, which otherwise almost always occurs.

- There may be no candidates seen as obviously qualified to win the award, yet the award must still be given out. Someone will be chosen, for reasons which either may be revealed or may be left to the imagination, and there will inevitably be controversy over which candidate was chosen and why.

Even in the first scenario above, where there's a single candidate that nearly everyone agrees should win the award, it's not a question of that candidate 'deserving' to win (though supporters will often use the word when describing the candidate and the award). To borrow a concept from Bill James (discussing the baseball Hall of Fame), awards exist to honor the individuals thus awarded. To say that someone deserves a specific honor is a very difficult thing, especially given that most awards are pretty vague as to what it is they are honoring. (For example, nearly every annual sports award is given to the 'best' practitioner of a given sport in that year, usually without defining what 'best' is supposed to mean. How can you say someone 'deserves' to be honored as the best player of a given sport when you can't really even say what is meant to say that a given player is the best?)

Given this, I find that getting all worked up over whether or not Obama 'deserves' the Nobel Peace Prize is about as sensible as getting worked up over whether or not Joe Mauer 'deserves' the American League MVP award; whether or not someone wins an award doesn't change what they've done or what their goals are. Johan Santana was no less admired as a starting pitcher for not being awarded the 2005 American League Cy Young award, nor did winning the Peace Prize in 2002 mean that Jimmy Carter's diplomatic work in Haiti was considered more significant than the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt.

Whether or not someone 'deserves' an award is irrelevant. If you agree, celebrate. If you disagree, congratulate the winner and then bitch to your friends. Preferably in private.

Do It Yourself Reification

I spent some time a few years back talking about my postmodernist worldview, and within that discussion talked a bit about reification: the creation of human items (physical, psychological, philosophical) and then the subsequent 'forgetting' that those items were made by humans. It's a weird game, but it's played almost constantly in our culture, though it's hard sometimes to tell whether or not the people doing the reification are actually forgetting the human-derived nature of their sacred cows, or they're simply ignoring it in the hopes that their ideas will seem more powerful if they're thought to be eternal verities handed down by the ages.

One interesting thing to note, though: people on the American political right wing tend to be either really bad (or really good, depending on how you define it) at reifying their belief systems.

Case in point: small-government conservatives and the 'intent of the Founders'. It's a little bit of a stretch to put folks as relatively disparate as Ron Paul, Grover Norquist, and Bill O'Reilly into a bucket as 'small government conservatives', though they do seem to share that general belief. They also seem to share a belief that such an opinion is not only Constitutional (Paul in particular is very keen on arguing that many government programs of the 20th and 21st centuries are unconstitutional, based on little more than his understanding of the Founding Fathers), but opposed to the very spirit of the men who banded together to craft that founding document. The Constitution, to their minds, is a small-government manifesto.

Except that, if you actually look at early American history following the Revolutionary War, you find that this isn't strictly true. Yes, the men who gathered in Philadelphia for the so-called Constitutional Convention were leery of unbridled executive power, having just fought a war to free themselves from the perceived oppression of the British crown, but the former colonies at the time were operating under an organizing document called the Articles of Confederation, in which ultimate power was vested in the governments of the various colonies-turned-states, and the whole reason the gathering was taking place was because of the realization that a confederation of states simply wasn't working as a system of interstate governance.

Granted, not everyone at the Convention was as gung-ho about federalism as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, the two men who were the primary authors of the Federalist Papers that both helped define and promote the Constitution during its ratification period, but the people who showed up in Philadelphia recognized that the Articles of Confederation weren't working, became convinced that something else was needed to balance powers between the states, and realized that the best tool to balance states against one another was a plenary federal power.

Those who disagreed? They stayed away. The state of Rhode Island, afraid that the Constitutional Convention would abrogate their powers, boycotted both the convention and refused to ratify the subsequent Constiution. One could make a joke about the size and stature of Rhode Island as an independent state, but...

One notable absentee was Patrick Henry, he of the famous 'if this be treason, make the most of it' line (though ironically, at the time that comment was made, Henry apologized for it). Henry was one of the most well-known anti-federalists (only fellow Virginian anti-federalist Thomas Jefferson would likely be considered more famous at the time); he both agitated against the ratification of the Constitution and then, once it became obvious that the Constitution would pass, lobbied to add the Bill of Rights as the original Constitutional amendments. However, by the end of the 18th century, Henry's anti-federalist opinions had changed (it is said primarily due to the excesses of the French Revolution), and he even spoke out against Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions which specifically sought to limit the scope of federal Congressional power as defined by the Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson is likely the most famous anti-federalist in the early American political landscape, writing both the Declaration of Independence from England and the aforementioned Kentucky Resolutions. His absence from the Constitutional Convention, though, was not so much a philosophical difference with the aims of the convention (he was good friends with Madison, who would keep Jefferson updated of the proceedings by post) as because he was actually in France serving as American ambassador. While Jefferson continued to write and argue against what he considered to be liberties taken on behalf of federal power (even going so far as to repeal federal taxes once elected President in 1801), he also exercised significant federal power himself, working with Congress to purchase the Louisiana Territory from France and passing the Embargo Act of 1807 in the hopes of convincing Britain to respect American naval power. From this, one could argue that all anti-federalists are actually federalists when the chips are down.

In short, very few men involved in the drafting of the Constitution were interested in creating a crippled federal government, and the few who fought against the expanded federal role at the time either recanted or made use of those powers when convenient. Hardly the shining example of small government heroics I'd have expected given the right's reification of the Founders in general, and Jefferson in particular.

Another somewhat bizarre example of the right's seeming need to invent things and forget that they invented them can be seen at the somewhat awkwardly named wiki site Conservapedia: The Conservative Bible Project. Everything you really need to know about the project can be summed up in its first sentence:

Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations.

To which I reply: huh?

The project seems to be deriving its impetus as an alternate translation to the King James Version of the Bible, one of the most oft-printed texts in human history. Their ideas on what needs to be changed, though, seem a bit off.

Let's begin with their first beef with the 'liberal translations' of the Bible (by which I infer that they're talking about texts like the New American Standard edition and the New International Version; to avoid these problems, I'll use the online Skeptic's Annotated Bible where I don't have access to someone's direct translation): that 'liberals' have added words to or mistranslated words in the Bible to support their political agenda. The specific example they give is Luke 23:34, where Jesus says, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do," as the soldiers crucifying him throw dice to determine who got to keep his discarded clothing. Conservapedia suggests that the 'liberal' modification of this line to 'they don't know what they are doing' is a corruption of the original. Oddly, in his book "Misquoting Jesus", Bart D. Ehrman, graduate of the Moody Bible College and Wheaton College (the latter being the alma mater of Billy Graham) and head of the department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, translates the original text of the Gospel of Luke exactly in this way: "Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing." (p.143) Perhaps the chair of religious studies at Chapel Hill is too liberal even for Conservapedia?

Ironically, Conservapedia glosses over some much more historically and litergically significant differences in Luke. One of them is in Luke 24:12, where after Mary Magdalene and other women have gone to Jesus's tomb to pay their respects and have been frightened by the presence of an angel, it is Peter who discovers that Jesus is no longer physically in the grave: "But Peter, rising up, ran to the tomb, and stooping down he saw the linen cloths alone, and he returned home marvelling at what had happened." Ehrman notes that this text is stylistically different from the rest of Luke's Gospel, and thus there is reason to believe that the verse is not Luke's but that of an orthodox scribe added to Luke's Gospel in order to do two things:

1. To emphasize that Jesus had a physical body (necessary in order to fight the early Marcionite heresy that said that Jesus did not suffer, because he was not made of physical flesh), and
2. To put the glory of the discovery of Jesus's resurrection into a man's (Peter's) rather than a woman's (Mary Magdalene's) hand.

Of course, the Conservative Bible Project has no doctrinal or political issue with either of these motives, so the truly suspect verse in Luke may be allowed to remain, while a perfectly valid translation of a different verse is recommended to be modified to support a specific political viewpoint. It's going to get truly interesting when the volunteer Conservapedia translators get to places where the Gospels actually contradict one another: the Passion according to Mark is very different from the Passion according to John, for example, particularly in their willingness to show Jesus as human (Mark has numerous examples of Jesus angry or frightened, where John's Gospel has Jesus as an almost cosmically detached emotional figure, becoming anguished only at the very end).

I could go on, but anyone reading this who hadn't already made up his mind to support these two conservative examples of making shit up and then pretending that they totally didn't make that shit up has probably already gotten the point by now. Further bulletins as events warrant.

The FARKLE Guide to Life

Recently, I've discovered a new Facebook time-waster: FARKLE. It's a dice game where you try to throw as high a score as possible in ten sets of 'tosses'*. Playing it pretty seriously over the past few days has given me an odd insight into peoples' approaches to life in general.

* - There's a 'classic mode' where you play against an opponent and the object is to get the highest total score in ten sets of opposed rolls, but I haven't played that version yet, because you have to earn 'chips' to unlock that game mode, and I'm not even halfway to earning enough chips.

First, the basics. FARKLE is a game where you start with six dice and throw them all at the same time. You score points based on the combinations of numbers that come up; for instance, a '1' scores 100 points, a '5' scores 50 points, and three of a kind scores 100 times the number on the triplet (unless it's trip '1's, in which case it scores 1000 points). There are a few other scoring combinations, but the most common way to score is to throw a '1' or a '5'. This is important, because you set aside the dice that score** and continue to roll the dice that didn't score until one of two things happens:

1. You make a roll that doesn't score any points; this is a FARKLE and ends your set of rolls without allowing you to score any points you previously may have rolled.

2. You choose to 'bank' the current number of points you've rolled, which ends your set of rolls and allows you to score the number of points you've rolled thus far and then begin a new set of rolls with the full set of six dice. You can only do this, however, if your current number of points rolled is 300 or more; otherwise you are required to roll again.

** - You technically don't have to set aside a die that would count as a scoring die, but you also don't get the score on that die if you don't set it aside. I haven't yet figured out a situation where you'd deliberately choose not to set aside a scoring die.

Here's an example, in case that explanation doesn't make sense:

You roll the six dice and get a result of '1', '2', '2', '3', '5', and '6'. The '1' scores 100 points, so it's set aside, while the '5' scores 50 points and it is also set aside. Since you have only 150 points, you don't have enough to bank yet, so you pick up the other four dice and re-roll them. Your second roll comes up '1', '4', '4', and '6'. You score another 100 points for the next '1', set it aside, and are again forced to re-roll, since you now have just 250 points. Your next roll is '2', '3', and '6'. Since this doesn't score, you've just FARKLEd and all 250 points you've rolled this turn are thrown out. You then begin again with a new set of rolls (set 2, in this case) starting with all six dice again.

One other wrinkle; if you score on the dice often enough so that all six dice are set aside before you bank or FARKLE, you then get to start over with all six dice again, only this time you keep your previous points. So if your first roll is '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', and '6' (a special called a 'straight', worth 1500 points), you get to keep the points and start with six dice again.

Another wrinkle, this time strictly for the Facebook version of the game: the game tracks the scores of everyone on your friends list who's also played, and can display the top ten ranked scores of both you and your friends over the past week, the past month, and over the lifetime of the game, giving special emphasis to the top three scores in each grouping. If you're competitive, your goal is to get the top score, or at least get into the top 3.

The interesting thing about this game to me is the way that, well...let me explain with another example. Let's call this player Eric.***

*** - Though I have two friends whose names sound like 'Eric', neither actually spells his name like that; this means that either the people involved won't think they are being used as the example (because I didn't spell his name correctly), or, if one does ask if this example was supposed to represent him, allows me to claim that I was using the other as the example. Win-win!

Eric is what might be called 'risk-averse'. Each time he reaches 300 or more points, he banks his result. It's extremely unlikely to roll a FARKLE off the initial six dice (though it does happen occasionally), and although it sometimes happens that a FARKLE occurs before he's reached his 300 point minimum, it doesn't happen often enough to prevent Eric from consistently scoring more than 2000 points in a game. However, likewise, the 'great' rolls, while they do sometimes happen off the initial roll, don't happen consistently enough off of early rolls to ensure really high scores, thus Eric seldom scores higher than 4000 points.

Now, consistently scoring 2000-4000 points might be a great way to consistently win games in FARKLE Classic, where you're going up against a live opponent. But in the 'shoot for the high score' version of FARKLE, it's a good way to stay stuck at the bottom of the top 10 list, if indeed you even manage to get on.

My own strategy has evolved over the past few days so that I occasionally make plays that Eric, if he were looking over my shoulder, would shake his head about and wonder why I was being so foolhardy. A great example is rolling the sixth and final die when it's the only die remaining to be rolled with a score of 350-500 points sitting in the bucket waiting to be banked. Since the only way to score a single die is to roll a '1' or '5', this means that two-thirds of the time, I'll end up FARKLing and scoring nothing instead of getting the 350-500 points I could have banked. If the point of the game is to score points, Eric would wonder, why am I trusting to luck and ending up throwing away these sure-fire points?

There are two possible answers to this question: the FARKLE-specific reason, and the more general philosophical reason.

The FARKLE-specific reason is that, if I want to try to score 8000 or more points in a single game, I'm not going to manage to pull it off without luck -- if I FARKLE out at 350, I wasn't likely to break 8000 that game anyway, but if I get lucky and roll a '5', bumping my score to 400 and allowing me a new set of throws, I might get an additional score before banking that gets me a lot closer to my goal. (There's been at least one occasion where I threw a lucky '5', then tossed a straight with my very next roll, resulting in a net boost of over 1500 points on that turn.) Yes, I'll fail more often than I succeed, and sometimes even if I do succeed, the additional points aren't big enough to get me to my goal anyway, but the point is that I already know that 350 points by themselves aren't going to be enough to get me where I want to go, so I throw the dice and hope for the best (knowing as well that I can always start a new game).

The more philosophic reason is that, while you can easily total up the points you lost by taking a chance and losing, you can't easily, if at all, total up the points you passed up on by playing it safe and banking what you currently have. In that sense, it's always going to look 'smarter' to play it safe rather than take a risk. But is it really? Sure, you can do the math showing that, in the long run, you'll give up at least as many points if not more by risking low-probability throws than by playing it save, but on the other hand all I need is one really lucky game to post my score as the #1 lifetime score among all my FARKLE friends, and that score doesn't go away. Sometimes, you only need to succeed once to make all the losses irrelevant, and likewise playing it safe 'for the long term' doesn't really help because the scale on which you're being judged doesn't care what your overall score was, just your best score.

Take a chance and let yourself be vulnerable to someone; maybe you'll end up hurt and miserable, but one success may be all it takes to make you happy for the rest of your life. Spend a dollar or two on lottery tickets when the prize gets high enough to notice; odds are you'll never see anything like the amount of money you spend over the years you play, but one lucky ticket and none of that matters anymore. Now I'll be the first to admit that it's easier to hold faith in luck when it works in the latter rather than the former fashion; spending two extra dollars in a week almost never deprives you of something you need, while having your heart shattered (yet again) feels like something you simply can't do over and over without losing your mind. The principle is the same in either case, though; just because you can't see or feel the prize doesn't mean that it's impossible for you ever to reach it. Yes, you may never actually get there, so be ready for that, but if you use that as an excuse to stop trying, then you're guaranteed never to get there.

I'll also be the first to admit that I haven't always lived up to this philosophy; as I noted, it's sometimes pretty hard to hold to faith when you feel broken by fate. I'd like to think, though, that it's a lesson that I stay as open to as possible, and occasionally even re-discover after a long, dull routine of playing it safe.

After all, there are only two ways to tell when you're done rolling the dice: either the dice themselves tell you to stop, or you put them aside and stop yourself.

FOLLOWUP:

Shortly after posting this, I rolled my best-ever score in FARKLE: 10,600 points. It's a bit behind the highest I've ever seen (among my FARKLE-friends, that score ranks sixth all-time, with the second-highest at 11,850 and highest at 13,100), but it's pretty good.

To quantify what I mean about 'it's harder to realize how many points you may have given up by stopping', I thought I'd track one game here to demonstrate:

1. Roll to 250, then FARKLE out. No choice here. (Net +0)
2. Roll to 700 with one die remaining. Take the chance and get a '1'. Then roll trip '1's on the next roll. Bank. (Net +1100)
3. Roll to 350 with one die left. FARKLE out. (Net +750)
4. Roll to 550 with three dice left. FARKLE out. (Net +200)
5. Roll trip '5's on the first roll. Add two '1's on the second. FARKLE out. (Net -1200, since the game imposes a 500 point penalty for three consecutive FARKLES.)
6. Roll to 600, then FARKLE out. (Net -1800)
7. Roll three pairs on first roll, then on second roll, up to 850. Roll up to 950. Bank. (Net -1700)
8. Roll straight on first roll, then start second roll with a pair of '1's and a pair of '5's for a total of 1800. Bank. (Net -1700)
9. Roll trip '6's and a '1' for 700. FARKLE out. (Net -2400)
10. Roll trip '4's and a pair of '5's for 500. FARKLE out. (Net -2900)

Final score = 4,050

On one hand, this looks like a good reason not to push too hard -- had I banked at every logical opportunity, I'd have had a final score of 6,950 instead of 4,050. On the other hand, 6,950 is the lowest score among my FARKLE friends who've played this week, and wouldn't even crack the top 10 all-time. You've got to have a game that's capable of being pushed to win a high score; even pushing for good luck won't help you if there's no luck to be had in that game. If there is luck, though, and you don't push for it, you won't get it, either.

One thing I'll add to my method, though -- for FARKLE, be less aggressive about pushing luck where there's a chance for a third FARKLE, since the penalty helps negate whatever luck you've already had. Not sure how that translates to a general life lesson, though.

Note To Future Self #6

The next time someone goes on a rant about the usage of 'ironic' in Alanis Morrissette's song "Ironic", complain about how pop culture also claims that every person in Muskogee, Oklahoma is an upstanding citizen who regularly attends church and has never used illicit drugs or had sex outside of marriage.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Is It Opposite Day Yet?

In the midst of 'new book mania', and enjoying an autobiography/tell-some (but not all) book about the fashion industry by plus-size model Crystal Renn. The book, entitled "Hungry", is an interesting study in contrasts; so much so that it would be borderline irresponsible of me to try to summarize it in some kind of 'review' format right now, before I've had a chance to really digest (pardon the pun) the contents.

Part of my interest in this book comes from the contrast between the way Renn describes both her childhood and her life in the industry with something of an odd yet honorable double-standard: She'll assiduously find good things to say about others, or if she must say something bad, she'll go out of her way either to avoid personally identifying the person she has to bad mouth, finding compensatory values that present that person as more than just a black-hatted 'bad guy', or both (even her biological mother, who gets the worst of this treatment, comes off as sympathetic by the time Renn and her grandmother go to New York to kick off her modeling career). But when it comes to herself, there's little she won't cop to -- she describes her mild OCD as a child which blossoms into full-fledged anorexia when 'discovered' by a modeling scout and told she has to lose dozens of pounds before he'll take a chance on her, she all but paints herself as an exercise-obsessed zombie for the first few years of her modeling life in New York City, and she admits, even after her awakening and acceptance of her body type, being drawn to the odd and the borderline deviant, to the point where I'm expecting that any turn of the page might reveal that Renn has decided to become the 21st century's Bettie Page. She comes across as fiercely honest, at least about her own struggles and flaws, and because of this it's hard not to root for her now that her life seems to have taken a turn for the better and she's getting both positive publicity and personal satisfaction out of her new life choices.

The most amazing part of the book, to me, wasn't the personal revelations or the happily-ever-after ending which sees Renn as, apparently, the first plus-size 'editorial' model (a model who makes art, as opposed to a 'commercial' model who only takes pictures to sell things); it was a lengthy section just before the halfway mark of the book, almost an aside from her narrative about starving herself into shape for her modeling career, where she takes on the concept of 'fat' being equal to 'unhealthy', doing so with a diligence toward relating evidence and following the implications of that evidence to seemingly logical if iconoclastic conclusions that I wondered if Renn hadn't somehow stumbled across Bill James at some point in her bookish youth. When I do decide to discuss the book in greater detail (assuming I get around to it), this section is going to get the lion's share of my attention.

Meanwhile, I thought it might be interesting to point out another double-standard; one that's probably ridiculously obvious, but one I couldn't get out of my head after reading how finally accepting her body's 'natural size' helped bring her entire life into clearer focus.

Renn explains that she's five-feet nine-inches in height, and fluctuates between one-hundred-sixty and one-hundred-seventy-five pounds in weight, depending on mood and other circumstances. This makes her 'plus size' in the modeling world, and while she says that she's neither the largest nor the smallest plus-size model working today, she's significantly larger than the 'straight size' models against whom she now competes for editorial work. In the world of editorial modeling, she's a giant, arguably in both senses. So I thought it would be interesting to compare her with a couple of other 'giants' of roughly similar size from different walks of life:

- Doug Flutie (5' 9", 180 lbs)

Crystal Renn is the same height and about five to twenty pounds lighter than Doug Flutie was during much of the latter's football career. Like Renn, Flutie found success in his chosen profession, though, also like Renn, he didn't find it on what most would assume to be the largest stage of that profession.

As a quarterback at Boston College, Flutie threw arguably the most famous touchdown pass in the history of college football, a pass that won a game against the defending national champions. Flutie also was the first NCAA quarterback to break 10,000 yards passing in his collegiate career, and won the Heisman Trophy as the top college player in 1984.

However, when Flutie graduated, he had extreme difficulty landing and holding a full-time job as an NFL quarterback, largely due to concerns over his size. Flutie, you see, was too small to play quarterback in the NFL.

Flutie was originally taken by the USFL's New Jersey Generals, but after the rival league folded, Flutie finally got a chance to play in the NFL, starting one game for the Chicago Bears in 1986, then one game for the New England Patriots in 1987. (It's hard to know how much Flutie's decision to cross the NFLPA's picket line during the 1987 player's strike to serve as a 'replacement player' harmed Flutie's reputation in the NFL.) After a couple of more seasons with the Patriots, during which time it became clear that the Pats had no interest in declaring Flutie the starter, Flutie decided to leave the NFL and went north to play in the Canadian Football League.

As a CFL quarterback, Flutie came into his own, winning three Grey Cup championships and being lauded as one of the greatest quarterbacks ever to play in the Canadian league. His success enabled him to return to the NFL nearly a decade after he left, even earning a starting job with the Buffalo Bills, for whom he won 17 of 25 starts before finally being demoted. Throughout Flutie's two stints in the NFL, commentators would frequently ascribe his mistakes to being too small to see over his linemen.

Doug Flutie, too small to play quarterback.

- Bill Mazeroski (5' 11', 183 lbs)

Renn tells the tale in her memoir of becoming a cheerleader in Clinton, Mississippi, and being utterly unable to do gymnastic handsprings. It would be easy, given the subject of her book, to imagine that Renn was simply 'too big' to be acrobatic (though Renn also describes taking and excelling in martial arts training as a younger child in Florida, which you'd think would be good prep work for a gymnastic career). Any doubt over whether someone of Renn's size can be acrobatic, however, should be settled by this comparison.

Bill Mazeroski is generally, almost universally considered the greatest defensive second-baseman the game of major-league baseball has ever seen. He was not a tremendous hitter; in fact, there were a number of years where Mazeroski hit just barely enough to keep his job. Still, his defense was amazing, and the cornerstone of his defensive skills was his ability to turn the 'pivot' on the double play. This involves fielding a throw from either the shortstop or third baseman, tagging the bag with a runner advancing from first base to force the first out, then 'pivoting' to get a strong throw to first base to force the batter for a second out, completing the double play. In Maz's day, runners from first were routinely taught to try to 'take out' the second baseman on his pivot, especially given that, having to face toward the infielder making the initial throw, the second baseman would not always be in an ideal position to protect himself from a hard-charging baserunner intent on 'breaking up' the double play. (Conversely, when a shortstop would take a throw from second, he was already facing in the same direction as the first baseman, and could thus see the approaching baserunner and position himself appropriately to get out of his way.)

Despite this, Maz turned more double plays than any other second baseman of his era. Not only this, but on a per-game basis, Maz turned more double plays than any other second baseman for which there are reliable box scores, which is to say at least since World War II and possibly since before World War I. His overall outstanding defense, and particularly his agility and quickness on the double play, eventually got him recognized by the Veterans' Committee and Maz was inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001.

Bill Mazeroski, the smoothest, slickest fielder second base has ever known, despite being two inches taller and one-to-two dozen pounds heavier than Crystal Renn.

I could go on -- fans of the Minnesota Vikings will remember Leo Lewis, a wide receiver and punt returner during the 1980s who stood 5'9' and weighed 170 lbs and was known as 'little Leo Lewis' for much of his ten-year career -- but I think this makes the point. In the right context, Renn's size would either be a non-issue or a worrying deficiency, but as a model she's 'plus-sized' and supposed to settle for a life of selling clothes to overweight women.

Clearly she didn't think that was good enough, and I appreciate the results of her rebellion. We could use more like it, in all walks of life.

Why I Am Leery of Enjoying FAILblog Too Much

Alan Wiggins was one of the key success stories for the San Diego Padres in 1984. Making the very difficult move from the outfield to second base, he had gotten along well defensively and contributed steadily on offense, enabling the Padres to get an extra bat in the lineup. In spring training of 1985 Wiggins confessed that he had developed a dependence on drugs, and needed to fight his way clear of it. The Padres were understanding of this, up to a point, but in the second week of the season Wiggins had a relapse, and had to seek further treatment.

It was late June when he was ready to return to the team, but by this time the Padres were playing real well, and they had reached the conclusion that they didn't really need Alan Wiggins -- not only that they didn't need him, but that he did not deserve to walk among them anymore; yessir, they took a vote on it, and they decided that they just didn't want any of his kind around. The owner of the team took the same position, and took it with such determination that it was clear she would, if need be, fight in court for the right to throw Alan Wiggins away like a lump of rotten cheese.

Now that was, to tell the truth, a right arrogant, self-righteous attitude, and as I think I mentioned earlier in the book, it has been my experience that the Lord rarely wastes much time in punishing this particular failing in us. I mean, I've found that a lot of times it is just damned difficult to figure out what the Old Bugger is up to; I don't know too much about it, but I was raised to believe in God, and there are a number of areas which I was led to believe were his assignment to which it seems to me he don't pay as much attention as he might. He is, however, quite alert to punishing arrogance and re-instructing us in humility; in fact, I think this is the only one among his deific duties that he really enjoys, and I've found that he can be tremendously creative in accomplishing this task swiftly."

- Bill James, originally from the San Diego Padres comment in the 1986 Baseball Abstract, reprinted in This Time Let's Not Eat The Bones

Blast From The Past: The Canonical D&D 3.5 Alignments, As Chosen By Me

Before I started my first Contrarian Bias blog, I used to write a little-known and unremembered gaming blog called Simulation 16 on the TypePad service. Unfortunately, when I left TypePad, I didn't think to take my writing with me.

Enter the Internet Wayback Machine.

It's not perfect, but it's enabled me to find some of the writing I did back when I didn't know how to write for the web. One of my favorite pieces is the following, a list of the nine D&D alignments as they existed prior to the new 4th edition, and the iconic characters I decided to associate with each of those alignments.

(Note: Many of the links from the original post are now, sadly, defunct, but I've left in a few that I could confirm still function, years after the original essay was posted.)

* * *

Wizards of the Coast seems to have introduced the concept of the 'iconic character' to D&D - there are a number of characters in the Player's Handbook intended mainly to give players an idea of the 'look and feel' of the various classes in the game. The same is true of the various prestige classes listed in different WotC-published D&D supplements (to the point where, even before D&D 3.5 came out, Ed Stark noted that there are more iconic characters than character classes).

Interestingly, there have never really been characters created to illustrate the game's alignment rules. One could argue that you could 'retrofit' the existing iconic class-characters to illustrate the alignment grid - for instance, the iconic paladin would also be the iconic lawful good character - but there are a couple of limitations to this approach. First, because none of the 'core iconics' are actually evil - you have to go into the DMG to find even a couple of evil iconics (the assassin and blackguard). More importantly, the rulebooks don't really take time to explore the attitudes and behavior of the iconic characters, which is really where alignment can be most readily seen. And if you turn to the various works of D&D fiction containing the iconic characters, then you run right back into the first problem - the main characters are usually good, occasionally neutral, never evil.

So I'm going to attempt to fill this void, somewhat, by naming a collection of what I think are the nine iconic characters corresponding to the D&D alignments. Rather than drawing them from the D&D universe, though, I'll draw them from the larger sphere of popular culture. With any luck, this will give the chance to show not only that the D&D alignment system is much more broadly applicable and useful that some of its detractors claim, but also to dispel a few misconceptions about the D&D alignment system.

Lawful Good: Victor Lazlo

I know a good deal more about you than you suspect. I know, for instance, that you're in love with a woman. It is perhaps a strange circumstance that we both should be in love with the same woman. The first evening I came to this café, I knew there was something between you and Ilsa. Since no one is to blame, I - I demand no explanation. I ask only one thing. You won't give me the letters of transit: all right, but I want my wife to be safe. I ask you as a favor, to use the letters to take her away from Casablanca.

At first, I toyed with the idea of doing the entire 'alignment wheel' just out of characters from the classic 1942 film Casablanca, but ultimately decided against it because it would have required a few stretches to fill some of the alignment roles. But there's no doubt in my mind that Lazlo is a paragon of lawful good, perhaps the best example of a secular paladin in popular culture.

If you've seen Casablanca, then you know what I mean. If you haven't, here's a quick rundown:

• A Romanian, Lazlo lived in Warsaw prior to the outbreak of World War II, publishing a newspaper calling out against the Nazi regime in Germany (the highest ranking German officer in the film refers to "lies and propaganda", as you might expect) until the very day the Germans invaded Poland.
• Lazlo becomes a member, and then a leader, of the underground resistance fighting the Nazi occupation of Europe.
• At some point, Lazlo is captured by the Nazis, placed in a concentration camp, and tortured. (I assume this occured after Lazlo became identified as a leader of the resistance.)
• Lazlo escapes, beginning a chase across Europe that involves acts of organized partisanship, more "propaganda", and various heroic deeds. They're not spelled out in the film, but are impressive enough so that the cynical Rick Blaine congratulates Lazlo on his "work" the first time they meet. Lazlo modestly responds, "I try," to which Rick replies, "We all try. You succeed."
• While in Casablanca, Lazlo stands up to the German officer assigned to bring him back to Europe, attends a meeting of the local underground despite the danger of being followed by German agents, leads the patrons of Rick's Cafe in a stirring rendition of Les Marsellaise that drowns out a German attempt to use the same melody as a drinking song, and utters the quotation above when it becomes obvious that Rick has the letters of transit that will allow Lazlo to escape to the relative safety of America.

Belonging to a higher calling, concern for others over and above anything that might happen to oneself, unflinching courage and competence in trying circumstances. I'm not saying that every paladin should look and act like Lazlo, but if more of them did, there would likely be many fewer 'when paladins attack' moments.

Neutral Good: Blossom

Being a Powerpuff Girl isn't about getting your way, or having the best stuff, or being popular or powerful. It's about using your own unique abilities to help people, and the world we all live in. And you, little girl, have done nothing worthy of the name Powerpuff.

Gamers would know of Aaron Williams's Nodwick and the duct-tape-wielding cleric Piffany. And in many ways, Piffany is a great example of Neutral Good behavior. She's even quoted in one story as having entered an ecumenical organization so that she can uphold Good across the board. Yet Piffany's naivete, while endearing to her own character, isn't something that I identify as classically Neutral Good, or even Good. Instead, I turn to the leader of the Powerpuff Girls to serve as my iconic Neutral Good character.

The episode "Stuck Up, Up, and Away" (Episode 14, for those Comic Book Guy wanna-bes) from which the quote above comes from is an excellent example of why Blossom makes an outstanding representative of Neutral Good. When Princess's snooty behavior endangers Twiggy the hamster, it's Blossom that gives the orders that allow the Powerpuffs to rescue the poor creature (and creates the dramatic urge that drives the rest of the episode when Princess decides she wants to be a Powerpuff Girl). Blossom even defends Princess at first - noting that she's new and probably isn't good at making friends, so they should give her another chance. When Princess, in her first super-outfit, turns a routine bank robbery into an embrassing spectacle, Blossom again spares Princess the ire of her sister and tries to be understanding, only to see Power-Armor Princess stop by the very next day and threaten to destroy the Powerpuff Girls. In fact, Princess does defeat both Buttercup and Bubbles, then engages in the classic villain taunt to try to humble Blossom - who isn't having any of it. In a classic execution of judo-strategy, Blossom gets Princess to overcommit, then not only puts her off balance, but gets her sisters to chime in, in true leader-fashion, to finally defeat her.

Now, Blossom isn't perfect - when Bubbles, thinking that she's actually Mojo Jojo, clocks Blossom in a later episode, she originally wants to retaliate before Buttercup reminds her that it's not really a sisterly thing to do. And Blossom even commits a crime - swiping a set of uber-golf-clubs that Professor Utonium reeeeeealy wants because she can't afford to pay for them, then framing Mojo Jojo for the deed. But when Blossom does do wrong, she realizes it and corrects her action. In the first example, Blossom eventually has to restrain Buttercup from kicking Bubbles/Mojo's tush after a well-aimed barb hits home, while she ends the latter episode in jail for her crime, serving her debt to society as required. She does the right thing - which is the essense of Neutral Good, after all.

Chaotic Good: Cyrano de Bergerac

To sing, to laugh, to dream,
To walk in my own way and be alone,
Free, with an eye to see things as they are,
A voice that means manhood -- to cock my hat
Where I choose -- At a word, a Yes, a No,
To fight -- or write.

It is a delicious irony in these days of 'freedom fries' to note that the man who embodies what most American men would see as their national ideal is, in fact, a Frenchman. But Cyrano, as he points out in his own epitaph, is "not like other men."

For starters, while he embarasses the pompous Montfleury for daring to make a pass as his beloved Roxane, he willingly enters into a bargain with Christian to provide words to bolster the latter's good looks so as not to disappoint his beloved. After Christian dismisses Cyrano as no longer useful to him (a dismissal which proves hasty on Christian's part), Cyrano not only forgives the young fool without another thought, but wins the lad a kiss (and ultimately, a marriage). Then, instead of fighting his arch-rival DeGuiche (as he defeated DeGuiche's catspaw in the first act), he delays his rival with a whimsical story of a trip to the moon. Promising that Christian should write every day while away at war, Cyrano runs a nightly siege blockade to deliver those promised letters. And, at the moment when it seems Cyrano might finally have his happiness after all, he instead allows himself to honor his dying friend Christian by keeping his secret faithfully until the day of his own death.

Yes, Cyrano kicks a lot of ass. But no one's ass is kicked who doesn't deserve it, and in some cases, the lesson is taught without an ass-kicking, but rather with more humilating weapons - wit, charm, and fiery honesty. It's also interesting to note that there are only three characters other than Cyrano himself that appear in all five acts of Rostand's play - Roxane, Cyrano's love; DeGuiche, Cyrano's arch-rival; and Ragueneau, the pastry cook and poet who is one of Cyrano's dearest friends. Cyrano does not lack the 'looking out for the little guy' aspect of the classic Chaotic Good - indeed, his closing line in the first act of the play might well be the call-sign for all well-played Chaotic Good heroes: "Did you not ask why against this one singer they send a hundred swords? Because they know this one man for a friend of mine!"

Lawful Neutral: Sir Te

In matters of the heart, even great heroes can be idiots.

This might be another choice that pushes the envelope of 'popular culture', since Sihung Lung's character probably isn't the first you'll remember from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and if you do remember him, you probably remember him as a father-figure to two of the main characters, Li Mu Bai and Shu Lien. Yet Sir Te is also a highly placed and effective bureaucrat in the government of medieval China, an age that prized law not just for it's own sake, but for its essence as expressed in diplomacy, manners, hospitality, and etiquette. Indeed, the scene where Sir Te meets with the newly-arrived General Yu, shows him the Green Destiny sword that Li Mu Bai has entrusted to him, and exhorts him to cultivate contacts in the Giang Hu underworld, despite Yu being the minister of security with the job of ostensibly opposing such criminals, marks him as being a true student of law and efficiency, regardless of whether or not the common understanding would take the means as 'good' or 'evil'.

'True' Neutral: Cool Animal Strong Bad

"(gurgling sound)"

Part of the problem with identifying a canonical Neutral character is that there are two generally accepted 'flavors' of neutrality. There is what I call apathetic-neutral, where the person simply doesn't care about morality or ethics and simply blows in the prevailing winds. Then there is what I call activist-neutral, which is more concerned with maintaining a 'balance' in the world between competing moral and ethical principles. (There is technically a third sort of neutrality, where the actor simply doesn't have the intelligence required to make moral or ethical choices, which is why all animals, constructs, and most other mindless or low-intelligence creatures default to neutrality in current D&D - animated undead being the significant exception these days.)

That's why I'm going with Cool Animal Strong Bad as my neutral iconic character. He has all the cool animal accessories: tentacles, claws, horns, mandibles, multi-faceted eyes, and a proboscis (as well as other traits you'll have to discover by watching the Strong Bad e-mail Flash cartoon called 'Animal'), but pretty much all he does is sit in one place, looking funky and cool, and gurgling when you ask him any question. On one hand, this may seem like I'm being unfair to those who prefer the concept of activist-neutrality, typically portrayed by druid characters. On the other hand, there's a Book of Exalted Deeds for good alignments, and a Book of Vile Darkness for evil characters, but can you name the equivalent book for neutrals without looking it up in the DMG? I can't.

(gurgling sounds fade out)

Chaotic Neutral: Calvin

Calvin: "Boy, did I get in trouble at school today. Wow."
Hobbes: "What happened?"
Calvin: "I don't even want to talk about it."
Hobbes: "Did it have anything to do with all those sirens about noon?"
Calvin: "I SAID I don't want to talk about it."

One of the great disservices done to the D&D alignment system was when TSR began to forcefully equate the Chaotic Neutral alignment with insanity and mental illness. It's one of the reasons I dismiss the Planescape setting to this day. Unlike fans of the setting who seem to have seen it as morally complex and ambiguous, I see the setting as morally two-faced: unlike the typical setting where reductive players use detect evil and similar divinations to distinguish between characters to interact with and those to simply be destroyed, Planescape allows reductive players to distinguish between characters who express personality traits or emotions atypical for their alignment 'type' (the ones to interact with) and characters slavishly devoted to their alignment 'type' (the ones to destroy). In the former case, you get murderous celestials who rationalize their crimes as necessary for 'the greater good' interacting with infernal characters capable of feeling and even understanding 'higher' emotions like love and sympathy (but who, because they're evil, still get to dress in funky leather or mailed costumes with - at least in the female NPC cases - an awful lot of exposed skin). In the latter case, you get the modrons, largely mindless minions of utter law whose very form follows a rigid Euclidian heirarchy, and the slaadi, masters of madness whose primary ability is to force their opponents to act based on random die rolls (the still-clunky-even-in-3.5 confusion mechanic).

It took Bill Watterston to point out that true chaos isn't found in non-Euclidian spaces or amphibian terrors cribbed from H.P. Lovecraft, but in the mind of a young boy with a hyperactive imagination.

Calvin sometimes does good. He seldom does anything blatantly evil, though 'naughty' is a word that applies to nearly all of Calvin's pranks. And while he has the wisdom of his imaginary pal/stuffed tiger Hobbes available to him, he's remarkably resistant to any sort of 'corrective influence' Hobbes might be. (Indeed, Hobbes is frequently a co-conspirator in Calvin's less sociopathic schemes, particularly the invention of bizarre clubs with their attendant rituals.)

The best example of pure chaos coming from Calvin's brain, however, is something that's even entered the game theory lexicon: Calvinball, a game where the rules are literally made up as one goes along. And part of the fun of watching Calvinball is realizing that Hobbes is often better at the game than Calvin himself is, which perhaps says something profound about what wisdom is capable of.

Or not. After all, this is Calvin we're talking about.

Lawful Evil: Darth Vader

Apology accepted, Captain Needa.

For an entire generation, those young enough to revel in Star Wars when it first came out but old enough to appreciate the subtler, more adult shadings of The Empire Strikes Back (from which the quote is drawn), Darth Vader was not just the embodiment of evil, but the embodiment of cool evil. He had a cool black armored costume, a spooky sound effect that announced his presence even when you couldn't see him, a tricked-out space fighter, and acres of unflappability. Despite those of us who ran around pretending to be Vader in kid-like play or later RPGs, Vader himself wasn't wanton or capricious in his choice of targets - he focused on those who challenged him, either his authority or his traditions, and made it known that failure always carried a terrible price where he was concerned. And in the second film, we even got to see some measure of his devotion to his even more evil master, the Emporer, which covers the lawful part both ways. And, because Vader is evil, not neutral, we also got to see that Vader was, all the time, plotting the overthrow of his master with the help of his son rather than being content to serve as the galaxy's number-two bad guy.

As an aside, part of the problem I have with the recent/'earlier' Star Wars films isn't necessarily that Lucas is trying to retrofit a galaxy that wasn't anywhere near as detailed when he made the first film than it is now. It's that, instead of a tale of the heroic journey of Luke, these 'earlier' films recast the entire story as a chronicle of the fall and redemption of Anakin/Vader. And while I'm willing to suspend my disbelief a little more to see what Lucas might come up with in the soon-to-be-released Revenge of the Sith, I'm finding that I can't quite reconcile the scheming, lawful Vader of the 'later' movies with the impetuous, frankly chaotic Anakin of the 'earlier' films. It's not impossible for a character's alignment to change* - even under AD&D rules, where the penalties were probably most severe - but convincing me of this one is going to take a trick of storyteller legerdemain that I'm not sure Lucas can pull off.

(And while I don't mean to turn this entry into yet another internet screed against George Lucas, who is about five hundred million times more successful than I am, it's pleasingly ironic that our canonically opposed alignment character once states, in the midst of one of his own rants, "Shall I labor night and day, to build a reputation on one song, and never write another?" Though I admit the quote isn't quite fair to the guy who also directed American Graffiti.)

* - Speaking of alignment change, one of the reasons I'm drawn to the Ravenloft setting is the rule that incorporates madness, not with a specific alignment (see Chaotic Neutral above), but with involuntary alignment change. Not only does it allow for the dramatically interesting portrayal of a character whose ethical and moral outlooks suddenly shift, resulting in a fracturing of that characters 'reality', but it also doesn't restrict the madness mechanic to merely shifting to an evil alignment (though admittedly there are many more ways to shift to evil in Ravenloft than there are to shift to good) - an apathetic neutral who suddenly finds herself with the moral attitude of a paladin might just as easily slide into madness (which is why, in my own Ravenloft campaign, if you decide you want to go after Elena Faith-Hold, you're in for a rude shock).

Neutral Evil: Hank Scorpio

But Homer, on your way out if you want to kill somebody, it would help me a lot.

At first glance, it might be hard to think of the charismatic CEO of the Globex Corporation as evil. After all, he gives Homer Simpson an influential, high-paying management job, one that comes with a tricked-out high-tech house in a managed community. He refuses to apply traditional labels to himself and his activities, like "boss" and "work". He even listens to and helps implement Homer's odd-sounding scheme for morale-building. He's a great guy.

Except for the blackmail of the U.N. And the blowing up of the 59th Street Bridge to demonstrate his willingness to back up his threats. And the attempted slow torture of an agent sent to defeat his evil plot. And the manaical glee he shows when brandishing a flamethrower against the assault team sent to try to thwart his plan at the last possible moment. Oh, and the plot involves doing something nasty to France, but he'd be the first to point out that it's not entirely his fault.

Let's face it; evil doesn't have to be slavering, clumsy, and obvious. Sure, it's easier to identify evil when it's massacring women and children, but that's not the real danger of evil. To borrow an observation from another film, the Antichrist isn't likely to be a hundred feet tall with tentacles and dark flames erupting from every pore and orifice; he's more likely to be a nice-looking, nice-sounding guy who simply convinces us to lower our standards, bit by little bit, until we're willing to do or believe anything. The most dangerous evil is cool evil, in my mind at least.

Scorpio best exemplifies the 'anything for evil's sake' methodology of the classic Neutral Evil, but with a twist - not everyone is a potential carcass or speed-bump on the road to world domination. He can be nice, outgoing, even magnanimous to those who will take that magnanimity and use it to work himself and his underlings that much more efficiently on the nuclear device or weather control machine. If you set yourself against him, you're going down, but until that point, he can be your best friend.

Chaotic Evil: Richard III

Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls;
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devis’d at first to keep the strong in awe:
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.
March on, join bravely, let us to ’t pell-mell;
If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.

As the quote should make clear, I'm referring to Shakespeare's Richard III, not necessarily the historical man. (There is in fact some controversy over whether Richard really was all that bad a person or a king.)

Skakespeare's Duke of Gloucester is a swaggering, self-described villain. He manipulates his brother the king into imprisoning his other brother, the Duke of Clarence, then has Clarence killed in order to implicate the king. He pretends to piety to rally public support behind his own attempt at the throne. He has two little kids killed off because they might one day choose to challenge the legitimacy of his reign as king. He kills another of his rivals, then seduces the rival's wife at the funeral. These acts show the sort of brass cojones that guys like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity can only fantasize about.

In the play, Richard is defeated by the return from exile of Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond - portrayed by Shakespeare as less a man than a force of divine retribution heralding the end of the War of the Roses. (It should be noted that Elizabeth, Shakespeare's patron, was also a Tudor.) But, in classic Chaotic Evil style, by the time Richard finally does go down, there are few significant rivals or even allies who haven't gone down before him. If a man's gotta go, after all, then the true Chaotic Evil takes as many folks nearby with him to the Abyss before he punches his own ticket.