After all this time, a treat

Since the tragic demise of David Foster Wallace, I’ve had it on my to-do list to type out one of my favorite sections of Infinite Jest where he walks through the enthusiastic adoption of videophones and the eventual abandonment of the same.

Besides being funny as hell, and probably true (if they ever do try to foist videophones on us), it’s a nice little examination of all the eddies and collateral damage caused by the adoption of new technology. (Think original IRC chat, message boards, and now Twitter. Or even blogs, ahem. Or, watch the vid in the post below.)

Without further ado:

WHY -- THOUGH IN THE EARLY DAYS OF INTERLACE'S INTERNETTED TELEPUTERS THAT OPERATED OFF LARGELY THE SAME FIBER-DIGITAL GRID AS THE PHONE COMPANIES, THE ADVENT OF VIDEO-TELEPHONING (A.K.A. 'VIDEOPHONY') ENJOYED AN INTERVAL OF HUGE CONSUMER POPULARITY -- CALLERS THRILLED AT THE IDEA OF PHONE-INTERFACING BOTH AURALLY AND FACIALLY (THE LITTLE FIRSTGENERATION PHONE-VIDEO CAMERAS BEING TOO CRUDE AND NARROW-APERTURED FOR ANYTHING MUCH MORE THAN FACIAL CLOSE-UPS) ON FIRST-GENERATION TELEPUTERS THAT AT THAT TIME WERE LITTLE MORE THAN HIGH-TECH TV SETS, THOUGH OF COURSE THEY HAD THAT LITTLE 'INTELLIGENT-AGENT' HOMUNCULAR ICON THAT WOULD APPEAR AT THE LOWER-RIGHT OF A BROADCAST/CABLE PROGRAM AND TELL YOU THE TIME AND TEMPERATURE OUTSIDE OR REMIND YOU TO TAKE YOUR BLOOD-PRESSURE MEDICATION OR ALERT YOU TO A PARTICULARLY COMPELLING ENTERTAINMENT-OPTION NOW COMING UP ON CHANNEL LIKE 491 OR SOMETHING, OR OF COURSE NOW ALERTING YOU TO AN INCOMING VIDEO-PHONE CALL AND THEN TAP-DANCING WITH A LITTLE ICONIC STRAW BOATER AND CANE JUST UNDER A MENU OF POSSIBLE OPTIONS FOR RESPONSE, AND CALLERS DID LOVE THEIR LITTLE HOMUNCULAR ICONS -- BUT WHY, WITHIN LIKE 16 MONTHS OR 5 SALES QUARTERS, THE TUMESCENT DEMAND CURVE FOR 'VIDEOPHONY' SUDDENLY COLLAPSED LIKE A KICKED TENT, SO THAT, BY THE YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT, FEWER THAN 10% OF ALL PRIVATE TELEPHONE COMMUNICATIONS UTILIZED ANY VIDEO-IMAGE-FIBER DATA-TRANSFERS OR COINCIDENT PRODUCTS AND SERVICES, THE AVERAGE U.S. PHONE-USER DECIDING THAT S/HE ACTUALLY PREFERRED THE RETROGRADE OLD LOWTECH BELL-ERA VOICE-ONLY TELEPHONIC INTERFACE AFTER ALL, A PREFERENTIAL ABOUT-FACE THAT COST A GOOD MANY PRECIPITANT VIDEO-TELEPHONY-RELATED ENTREPRENEURS THEIR SHIRTS, PLUS DESTABILIZING TWO HIGHLY RESPECTED MUTUAL FUNDS THAT HAD GROUNDFLOORED HEAVILY IN VIDEO-PHONE TECHNOLOGY, AND VERY NEARLY WIPING OUT THE MARYLAND STATE EMPLOYEES' RETIREMENT SYSTEM'S FREDDIE-MAC FUND, A FUND WHOSE ADMINISTRATOR'S MISTRESS'S BROTHER HAD BEEN AN ALMOST MANICALLY PRECIPITANT VIDEO-PHONETECHNOLOGY ENTREPRENEUR ... AND BUT SO WHY THE ABRUPT CONSUMER RETREAT BACK TO GOOD OLD VOICEONLY TELEPHONING?

The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, (3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech.

(1) It turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn't been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they'd been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony. They'd never noticed it before, the delusion -- it's like it was so emotionally complex that it could be countenanced only in the context of its loss. Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation -- utilizing a hand-held phone whose earpiece contained only 6 little pinholes but whose mouthpiece (rather significantly, it later seemed) contained (6²) or 36 little pinholes -- let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carryon a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet -- and this was the retrospectively marvelous part -- even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end's attention might be similarly divided. During a traditional call, e.g., as you let's say performed a close tactile blemish-scan of your chi n, you were in no way oppressed by the thought that your phonemate was perhaps also devoting a good percentage of her attention to a close tactile blemish-scan. It was an illusion and the illusion was aural and aurally supported: the phone-line's other end's voice was dense, tightly compressed, and vectored right into your ear, enabling you to imagine that the voice's owner's attention was similarly compressed and focused ... even though your own attention was not, was the thing. This bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infantilely gratifying from an emotional standpoint: you got to believe you were receiving somebody's complete attention without having to return it. Regarded with the objectivity of hindsight, the illusion appears arational, almost literally fantastic: it would be like being able both to lie and to trust other people at the same time.

Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable. Callers now found they had to compose the same sort of earnest, slightly overintense listener's expression they had to compose for in-person exchanges. Those callers who out of unconscious habit succumbed to fuguelike doodling or pants-crease-adjustment now came off looking rude, absentminded, or childishly self-absorbed. Callers who even more unconsciously blemish-scanned or nostril-explored looked up to find horrified expressions on the video-faces at the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress.

Even worse, of course, was the traumatic expulsion-from-Eden feeling of looking up from tracing your thumb's outline on the Reminder Pad or adjusting the old Unit's angle of repose in your shorts and actually seeing your videophonic interfacee idly strip a shoelace of its gumlet as she talked to you, and suddenly realizing your whole infantile fantasy of commanding your partner's attention while you yourself got to fugue-doodle and make little genital-adjustments was deluded and insupportable and that you were actually commanding not one bit more attention than you were paying, here. The whole attention business was monstrously stressful, video callers found.

(2) And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside who doesn't. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattled your saber. But for the image-conscious, there was of course no such answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes and attach prostheses and do hair-checks in the foyer mirror before answering the door.

But the real coffin-nail for videophony involved the way callers' faces looked on their T P screen, during calls. Not their callers' faces, but their own, when they saw them on video. It was a three-button affair, after all, to use the TP's cartridge-card's Video-Record option to record both pulses in a two-way visual call and play the call back and see how your face had actually looked to the other person during the call. This sort of appearance check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn't just 'Anchorman's Bloat,' that well known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with high-end TPs' high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable. In an early and ominous InterLace/G.T.E. focus-group survey that was all but ignored in a storm of entrepreneurial sci-fi-tech enthusiasm, almost 60% of respondents who received visual access to their own faces during videophonic calls specifically used the terms untrustworthy, unlikable, or hard to like in describing their own visage's appearance, with a phenomenally ominous 71% of senior-citizen respondents specifically comparing their video-faces to that of Richard Nixon during the Nixon-Kennedy debates of B.S. 1960.

The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry's psychological consultants termed Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria (or VPD) was, of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking; and in fact it was those entrepreneurs who gravitated toward the production of high-definition videophonic imaging and then outright masks who got in and out of the short-lived videophonic era with their shirts plus solid additional nets.

Mask-wise, the initial option of High-Definition Photographic Imaging -- i.e. taking the most flattering elements of a variety of flattering multi-angle photos of a given phone-consumer and -- thanks to existing image-configuration equipment already pioneered by the cosmetics and law enforcement industries -- combining them into a wildly attractive high-def broadcastable composite of a face wearing an earnest, slightly overintense expression of complete attention -- was quickly supplanted by the more inexpensive and byte-economical option of (using the exact same cosmetic-and-FBI software) actually casting the enhanced facial image in a form-fitting polybutylene-resin mask, and consumers soon found that the high up-front cost of a permanent wearable mask was more than worth it, considering the stress- and VPD-reduction benefits, and the convenient Velcro straps for the back of the mask and caller's head cost peanuts; and for a couple fiscal quarters phone/cable companies were able to rally VPD-afflicted consumers' confidence by working out a horizontally integrated deal where free composite-and-masking services came with a videophone hookup. The high-def masks, when not in use, simply hung on a small hook on the side of a TP's phone-console, admittedly looking maybe a bit surreal and discomfiting when detached and hanging there empty and wrinkled, and sometimes there were potentially awkward mistaken-identity snafus involving multi-user family or company phones and the hurried selection and attachment of the wrong mask taken from some long row of empty hanging masks -- but all in all the masks seemed initially like a viable industry response to the vanity,-stress,-and-Nixonian-facial-image problem.

(2 and maybe also 3) But combine the natural entrepreneurial instinct to satisfy all sufficiently high consumer demand, on the one hand, with what appears to be an almost equally natural distortion in the way persons tend to see themselves, and it becomes possible to account historically for the speed with which the whole high-def-videophonic-rnask thing spiralled totally out of control. Not only is it weirdly hard to evaluate what you yourself look like, like whether you're good-looking or not -- e.g. try looking in the mirror and determining where you stand in the attractiveness-hierarchy with anything like the objective ease you can determine whether just about anyone else you know is good-looking or not -- but it turned out that consumers' instinctively skewed self-perception, plus vanity-related stress, meant that they began preferring and then outright demanding videophone masks that were really quite a lot better-looking than they themselves were in person. High-def mask-entrepreneurs ready and willing to supply not just verisimilitude but aesthetic enhancement -- stronger chins, smaller eyebags, air-brushed scars and wrinkles -- soon pushed the original mimetic-mask-entrepreneurs right out of the market. In a gradually unsubtlizing progression, within a couple more sales-quarters most consumers were now using masks so undeniably better-looking on videophones than their real faces were in person, transmitting to one another such horrendously skewed and enhanced masked images of themselves, that enormous psychosocial stress began to result, large numbers of phone-users suddenly reluctant to leave home and interface personally with people who, they feared, were now habituated to seeing their far-better-looking masked selves on the phone and would on seeing them in person suffer (so went the callers' phobia) the same illusion-shattering aesthetic disappointment that, e.g., certain women who always wear makeup give people the first time they ever see them without makeup.

The social anxieties surrounding the phenomenon psych-consultants termed Optimistically Misrepresentational Masking (or OMM) intensified steadily as the tiny crude first-generation videophone cameras' technology improved to where the aperture wasn't as narrow, and now the higher-end tiny cameras could countenance and transmit more or less full-body images. Certain psychologically unscrupulous entrepreneurs began marketing full-body polybutylene and -urethane 2-D cutouts --sort of like the headless muscleman and bathing-beauty cutouts you could stand behind and position your chin on the cardboard neck-stump of for cheap photos at the beach, only these full-body videophone-masks were vastly more high-tech and convincing-looking. Once you added variable 2-D wardrobe, hair-and eye-color options, various aesthetic enlargements and reductions, etc., costs started to press the envelope of mass-market affordability, even though there was at the same time horrific social pressure to be able to afford the very best possible masked 2-D body-image, to keep from feeling comparatively hideous-looking on the phone. How long, then, could one expect it to have been before the relentless entrepreneurial drive toward an ever-better mousetrap conceived of the Transmittable Tableau (a.k.a. TT), which in retrospect was probably the really sharp business-end of the videophonic coffin-nail. With TTs, facial and bodily masking could now be dispensed with altogether and replaced with the video-transmitted image of what was essentially a heavily doctored still-photograph, one of an incredibly fit and attractive and well-turned-out human being, someone who actually resembled you the caller only in such limited respects as like race and limb-number, the photo's face focused attentively in the direction of the videophonic camera from amid the sumptuous but not ostentatious appointments of the sort of room that best reflected the image of yourself you wanted to transmit, etc.

The Tableaux were simply high-quality transmission-ready photographs, scaled down to diorama-like proportions and fitted with a plastic holder over the videophone camera, not unlike a lens-cap. Extremely good-looking but not terrifically successful entertainment-celebrities -- the same sort who in decades past would have swelled the cast-lists of infomercials -- found themselves in demand as models for various high-end videophone Tableaux.

Because they involved simple transmission-ready photography instead of computer imaging and enhancement, the Tableaux could be mass-produced and commensurately priced, and for a brief time they helped ease the tension between the high cost of enhanced body-masking and the monstrous aesthetic pressures videophony exerted on callers, not to mention also providing employment for set-designers, photographers, airbrushers, and infomercial-level celebrities hard-pressed by the declining fortunes of broadcast television advertising.

(3) But there's some sort of revealing lesson here in the beyond-short-term viability-curve of advances in consumer technology. The career of videophony conforms neatly to this curve's classically annular shape: First there's some sort of terrific, sci-fi-like advance in consumer tech -- like from aural to videophoning -- which advance always, however, has certain unforeseen disadvantages for the consumer; and then but the market-niches created by those disadvantages -- like people's stressfully vain repulsion at their own videophonic appearance -- are ingeniously filled via sheer entrepreneurial verve; and yet the very advantages of these ingenious disadvantage-compensations seem all too often to undercut the original high-tech advance, resulting in consumer-recidivism and curve-closure and massive shirt-loss for precipitant investors. In the present case, the stress-and-vanity-compensations' own evolution saw video-callers rejecting first their own faces and then even their own heavily masked and enhanced physical likenesses and finally covering the video-cameras altogether and transmitting attractively stylized static Tableaux to one another's TPs. And, behind these lens-cap dioramas and transmitted Tableaux, callers of course found that they were once again stresslessly invisible, unvainly makeup- and toupeeless and baggy-eyed behind their celebrity-dioramas, once again free -- since once again unseen -- to doodle, blemish-scan, manicure, crease-check -- while on their screen, the attractive, intensely attentive face of the well-appointed celebrity on the other end's Tableau reassured them that they were the objects of a concentrated attention they themselves didn't have to exert.

And of course but these advantages were nothing other than the once-lost and now-appreciated advantages of good old Bell-era blind aural-only telephoning, with its 6 and (6²) pinholes. The only difference was that now these expensive silly unreal stylized Tableaux were being transmitted between TPs on high-priced video-fiber lines. How much time, after this realization sank in and spread among consumers (mostly via phone, interestingly), would any micro-econometrist expect to need to pass before high-tech visual videophony was mostly abandoned, then, a return to good old telephoning not only dictated by common consumer sense but actually after a while culturally approved as a kind of chic integrity, not Ludditism but a kind of retrograde transcendence of sci-fi-ish high-tech for its own sake, a transcendence of the vanity and the slavery to high-techfashion that people view as so unattractive in one another. In other words a return to aural-only telephony became, at the closed curve's end, a kind of status symbol of anti-vanity, such that only callers utterly lacking in self-awareness continued to use videophony and Tableaux, to say nothing of masks, and these tacky facsimile-using people became ironic cultural symbols of tacky vain slavery to corporate PR and high-tech novelty, became the Subsidized Era's tacky equivalents of people with leisure suits, black velvet paintings, sweater-vests for their poodles, electric zirconium jewelry, NoCoat LinguaScrapers, and c. Most communications consumers put their Tableaux-dioramas at the back of a knick-knack shelf and covered their cameras with standard black lens-caps and now used their phone consoles' little maskhooks to hang these new little plasticene address-and-phone diaries specially made with a little receptacle at the top of the binding for convenient hanging from former mask-hooks. Even then, of course, the bulk of U.S. consumers remained verifiably reluctant to leave home and teleputer and to interface personally, though this phenomenon's endurance can't be attributed to the videophony-fad per se, and anyway the new panagoraphobia served to open huge new entrepreneurial teleputerized markets for home-shopping and -delivery, and didn't cause much industry concern.

- from Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

roflmao

NSFW but definitely fire this up at home:

Watch We Didnt Start the Flame War on CollegeHumor

Being There

So, you're starting to hit the big time, you're invited to all the big parties, and you discover you are human.

I love this blog post from Elizabeth Banks where she cops to doing the two thumbs up in spite of her better judgement.

Not that I'm anything close to a Hollywood starlet, but I did the double thumbs up recently, and as they were hoisting from my fists, I was already thinking, "what in the hell am I doing?"

Oh well.

Media Insiders Say Internet Hurts Journalism (says "The Atlantic")

There's been a lot of news about the news lately - newspapers going under, what journalism in America should mean, blaming the internet, etc. (And who the hell are these "media insiders" and why weren't they identified?)

My opinion on it is pretty straightforward: the news media fell on its ever-loving ass during the Bush years (though they began the fall during the Clinton years).

Journalism hurt journalism.

It caved. It failed to report important story after important story. All of news became some pale version of Fox news. No one fact-checked except Al Franken. And, no one had the guts to openly mock Fox for even claiming Fox is a legitimate news outlet.

The far right has won the noise war for years, but they've never gotten past being blatantly biased as hell and playing to the choir rather than to anyone interested in the facts.

When Rupert Murdock took over "The Wall Street Journal" and immediately ignored the prohibitions he agreed to regarding the purchase, everyone should've immediately walked away and canceled their subscriptions.

The fact that Sun Myung Moon has had deep access to, and support for, the Republican party should be a weekly article in most papers. I mean, c'mon: a dangerous cult leader who's cult brought about deprogramming from brainwashing who also claims to be Jesus having that kind of access? How does the "Washington Times" even have subscribers and readers? Like Nancy Grace does with her missing kids, every serious journalism shop should have the daily announcement or scroll across the bottom of the page saying "Sun Myung Moon still in America, still attending Republican events" until the bastard is arrested or deported.

A local newscast report this week on the Obama's getting their dog finally, and the report said it wasn't a shelter dog as Obama "promised" it would be, thus yet one more campaign promise has fallen by the wayside.

Excuse me?

WTF?

The guy didn't even blink or smirk to let us know that bit of "reporting" was a joke.


So, when the newspapers and TV reporters get back some guts and actually report facts and the news, things will begin to improve, but if they insist on coming off like Bill O'Reilly, they might as well take their fucking loofahs and go home.

Whither Sulu?

Saw Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlst, which was not something I had on my waitlist, but since it was on the shelf, I snagged it in case time presented itself. And it did. I have this lovely flu that's like a greatest hits of other viruses: combo cold, body hangover, and digestive tract craziness (that hasn't included yacking, thank God).

The movie is as tedious as most reviews label it. It's watchable when you don't feel like getting up and putting in American Graffiti or Dazed and Confused. But there's no real conflict, and I wondered how in the hell Michael Cera ("Nick") keeps getting parts with his nearly complete lack of looks and charm, though I hope to see way more of Kat Dennings ("Nora") who has plenty of both.

Outside of watching Kat do her stuff, I was pleasantly surprised when it looked like they would have a major Asian character (outside of sci-fi). Maybe because I don't watch swat-fu flicks, I notice it when an Asian appears in a lead, because they almost never do. It's like having a dad on a sitcom who's not a major buffoon.

However, my second thought was, "ah, but they'll make him gay, probably" and sure enough, Nick is in a band where all the other guys are gay. Imagine that little walk through hell if this were even remotely realistic. You go through the pain of learning how to play an instrument to be in a band to meet chicks (the largest common denominator for most guy musicians) but there you are in gay bar after gay bar, fending of guy pass after guy pass.

But I digress…

What the hell is it with the nearly complete dearth of normal Asian main characters? Is this a holdover from the prejudices of WWII, maybe?

Now, I'm not a quota person, but after someone mentioned way back in the day that there were no black actors in commercials until the Cosby show (when he demanded it), and the complaint that there were no black acts on MTV until they swapped over to nothing but black acts, I ended up with a low-key mental filter that when I watched a drama or comedy (again, fantasy and sci-fi are somehow exempt), I would eventually notice if the cast didn't have the mix of people types I encountered day to day.

This also does not count the overabundance of pretty people in entertainment; no one wants to look at average people all the time. My "is this realistic?" filter actually kicks in when there are too many plain people, because it IS abnormal for entertainment.

And for those of you who are thinking I'm a hypocrite by asking, "Where are the Asians?" while at the same time complaining (somewhat) about (what I've come to think of as) "the obligatory gay character," it goes back to the daily mix I encounter in reality. I see way more gay characters in fiction anymore than I do in real life, and typically they are uber-heroic in ways that would be laughable in reality. I've known some very wonderful gay people, but I've also known my share of petty, hateful, bitchy and mean gays, too. Imagine a bad gay character in a major or indy film these days.

I exempted sci-fi because that's about the one place where you do see Asian leads who are actually the hero, except for Garrett Wang / Harry Kim from ST Voyager who was such a pussy that all the female characters had more balls than he did.

But that leaves the question as to why sci-fi doesn't have the same unbalance that dramas and comedies do.

I have no theory. Do you?

"I remember literally breaking out into a sweat"

I've written about this before, but now I can actually show you Butch Vig's reaction to hearing Nirvana play "Smells Like Team Spirit" for the first time.



The reason this intrigues me is it's about the genesis of probably one of the best songs evar, a pivotal moment in music history.

I've always wondered what it would be like to be there when a seminal work is being born. I have a friend who spent years in the arts scene, going to performance after crappy performance of local bands, cruising all the art openings, hitting every event he could merely to experience being there when something huge was born and took off.

I don't think he ever had the pleasure.

Anyway, here's one story of being there when it did happen. I would've probably broken out into a sweat, too.

What's Wrong with This Picture?



I burst out laughing - loudly - at the library, which is still a no-no.

Now if the word "metro" had appeared in the title, maybe the soft, foofy sweater and the doe-eyed gaze - with the hand held so dandily to the side of the head - wouldn't have been so damn funny.

But "Mantalk"?

Uh, no.

He Should Be Pissed. Sorta.

The recent Rolling Stone has a nice little bio on Kris Kristofferson by Ethan Hawke (the actor, who's apparently branching out). It starts with a little vignette backstage at Willie Nelson's 70th birthday concert (excerpted from the Yahoo story, as Rolling Stone hasn't put it online yet):

Hawke said the argument began with the "Star" [Toby Keith] telling Kristofferson: "None of that lefty (expletive) out there tonight, Kris."

Hawke said Kristofferson then angrily confronted and asked him if he had ever served in the military.
"Have you ever killed another man? Huh? Have you ever taken another man's life and then cashed the check your country gave you for doing it? No, you have not, so shut the (expletive) up," Hawke recounted Kristofferson as saying. "You don't know what the hell you are talking about."

After the shit Keith pulled on the Dixie Chicks, it's nice to see him get a little jab in the nuts. Which he handles well:

"He didn't even call me by my name. ... He called Norah Jones, Ray Charles, everybody else by name. Willie (Nelson), Kris (Kristofferson). Why didn't he call my name? Why didn't he say Toby Keith walked through and said this (expletive)? Right? You know why. You know why. You know as good as anybody why. He didn't want to (expletive) deal with the aftermath."

Oh, wah. Guess what goes around comes around. I can't wait for the Dixie Chicks song about it.

_________
Update:
Almost forgot to include a pretty funny story from the article, which I'll have to paraphrase as I don't have the mag with me.

At the funeral of June Carter Cash, as Kristofferson was sitting next to Johnny Cash in the receiving line, a guy walks up and after he offers his condolences to Cash, he tells Kristofferson that he loved his singing. After the guy walked away, Cash leaned over and whispered, "Well, there's one.

And Speaking of Rolling Stone...

They had a great (maddening and saddening) article on some of the corruption under the Bush administration:

During the Bush era, the scandals over America's wilderness areas were centered at the Mineral Management Service, the Denver office that serves as Interior's collection agency. The government auctions off the right to drill on public lands, and taxpayers are supposed to receive a cut of any profits that energy firms make on the oil and gas they extract. Last year, MMS collected more than $23 billion in royalties from drilling — second in revenues only to the IRS. "The oil companies were basically running MMS during the Bush years," says Bobby Maxwell, a top auditor for the service who was forced out of his job in 2005, despite having recovered more than $500 million in unpaid royalties during his career.

Maxwell and other auditors sensed the change in direction as soon as Bush took office: Collections of unpaid royalties from oil and gas companies plunged from $300 million a year to less than $50 million. "The focus changed," says Maxwell. "It was 'Quit doing detailed audits. Stop getting records from oil companies.' " The push was no longer to collect money owed to taxpayers for drilling on public land — it was to provide what the Bush administration euphemistically called "royalty relief" to big energy firms.

MMS not only slashed audits by 22 percent, it even prohibited auditors from recouping money in cases involving clear evidence of fraud. In what would become the costliest scandal, it also looked the other way when it learned that, because of a massive bureaucratic fuck-up, it had failed to collect billions in royalties for deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Instead, the Bush administration fought to let oil companies keep the money, and a judge appointed by Bush recently overturned royalty collections on 75 percent of all oil produced in the Gulf. Should the ruling stand, taxpayers will forfeit as much as $53 billion owed by Big Oil.

As another favor to oil and gas companies, MMS also set up an office called "Royalty in Kind," allowing drilling interests to pay the government not in cash but in petroleum products. The RIK office would then sell those products on the open market, bringing in some $4 billion a year. But since the office owned no pipelines or refineries, it was forced to extend lucrative contracts to the oil companies to transport and process the oil — taking another costly bite out of the revenue owed to taxpayers.

Instead of negotiating tough deals with the oil companies, officials in the royalties office indulged in what an internal investigation later termed "a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity." A third of RIK staff members, the investigation found, accepted illicit gifts from the industry. Others "used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relations with oil and gas company representatives." One pair of government-employees-gone-wild, celebrated among oilmen as the "MMS Chicks," partied hard during corporate snowboarding trips — one got so drunk at a ski resort that Shell had to put her up for the night in its "Dutchman Haus" chalet — and repeatedly had sex with representatives for Chevron and Shell. The "Chicks" did not recuse themselves from negotiations with the companies. Worse, they allowed Chevron and other firms to revise the terms of 118 contracts that had already been finalized — favors to the industry that cost taxpayers $4.4 million.

"They were literally and figuratively in bed with the oil industry," says Maxwell. The director of the Royalty in Kind office, Greg Smith, was apparently too busy worrying about where his next line of coke was coming from to rein in his underlings. According to Interior's inspector general, Smith regularly bought cocaine from a subordinate, offering her a $250 "performance award" as a reward for provisioning him with quality "office supplies." When Smith wasn't high — or pressuring women on his staff for blow jobs, as the inspector general found he did repeatedly — he was busy accepting payments from an oil–services consulting firm in return for insider information about the RIK program.

When the inspector general sent his findings to the Justice Department, however, the Bush administration suddenly went soft on drugs, declining to prosecute Smith. It also failed to charge Lucy Dennet, a former associate director of MMS, whom the inspector general said "manipulated the contracting process" to steer $1.1 million in government business to a company run by two outgoing MMS agents, both of whom have pleaded guilty to felony violations of conflict of interest. Many Interior insiders believe that both Dennet and Smith are prime candidates for prosecution under Salazar. Speaking to Rolling Stone, the secretary refused to speculate about which former officials are now in legal jeopardy, but says that his investigation extends beyond the corruption at MMS to the entire department. "I am being cautious as a former prosecutor," he says. "I can't tell you everything I know."

Even by Washington standards, the level of corruption at MMS was mind-boggling — far worse than the notorious bribe-for-drilling scandal that defined the administration of Warren G. Harding. "The previous low point for the Interior Department was the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s," says Jeff Ruch, executive director of a federal watchdog group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. "Right now we've got Teapot Dome cubed."

Read the whole thing here.

In which my baby finds a children's book that's NSFW

A family ritual of ours is a weekly (at least) visit to the library where we let the girls pull anything and everything off the shelf they'd like to read, watch, or listen to. Our only limitation is the sheer amount of stuff that we can carry to the van in one trip.

As the four-year-old plucks things from the shelves, we do a quick preview because a huge portion of children's books are just weird. For instance, there's a huge genre I'd label "victimhood" which contains books about being a particular race, or religion, or having a handicap or something. We eschew all these books with an agenda other than telling a good story.

Well, even with our filtering, sometimes we miss a stinker.

What slipped through security this week was Mommy Laid an Egg: Or, Where Do Babies Come from?

From the cover, it looks like it will be whimsical.


But, after a page where it's explained that the cartoon penis fits into the cartoon vagina - an arrow even helps us make the connection (and it's cartoonish enough that it's almost innocuous) - we suddenly hap upon two pages that show many positions in which mom and dad can do it in.

Check it out for yourself, and believe it or not, this is NSFW!!! And it's a freakin' kids book!

Did they really need the Kama Sutra angle? Oh, and I especially love the pair who's role-playing with the clown noses and stuff. As if clowns weren't scary enough to kids.

What in the hell were these people thinking?

I half expected to find John and Yoko's conception video as a bonus DVD in the back.
(In case you've never heard this one, they filmed themselves screwing when they were trying for Sean, so they could give him the videos - along with his birthing vids - when he was old enough. How scarred would you be if you saw the video of your parents boinking in order to bring you into the world? Even if one of them was a Beatle?)