The Sop of Originality

Quick, which band is the originator of grunge music?

I bet most of you—something on the order of 97 to 99% of you, in fact—replied “Nirvana.”  Which is a lovely answer: their radio anthem “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is what introduced grunge music to the world.  I can remember the first time I heard it: it was Industrial Night at the Roxy, in downtown DC, in 1991.  I won’t go so far as to say it changed my life—I was already very much into alternative music, otherwise why would I have been attending Industrial Night?—but it certainly jolted my system.  I had no idea it was about to take the airwaves (and, shortly thereafter, the nation) by storm, but I knew this was something ... special.  Something profound.  It’s 22 years later now and I’m still listening to new songs from the Foo Fighters coming on the radio: that’s a decent run for any modern band and its descendants.  It doesn’t rival the Beatles or the Stones, but it’s a damn fine run, and it ain’t over yet.

But of course Nirvana didn’t invent grunge music.  The first incarnation of Nirvana came together in 1985 or ‘86.  Soundgarden had already been around for at least a year, as had Green River, who begat Mother Love Bone, who begat Perl Jam.  Green River’s roots, in fact, go back as far as 1980, and the roots of the Melvins go back to 1983, at least, and they together spawned Mudhoney, who is certainly the best Seattle grunge band you’ve never heard of, hands down.

And Seattle is the birthplace of grunge, right?  Here’s what Kurt Cobain said about writing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to Rolling Stone:

I was trying to write the ultimate pop song.  I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies.  I have to admit it.  When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily that I should have been in that band—or at least a Pixies cover band.  We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard.

And the Pixies, you see, were from Boston, whose grunge scene is underrated nearly to the point of being unknown, even though it included great (but little-known) bands like the Pixies, Buffalo Tom, and of course Dinosaur Jr., who formed in 1983 and not only wrote what is arguably the best grunge quatrain ever:

I know I don’t thrill you
Sometimes I think I’ll kill you
Just don’t let me fuck up, will you
‘Cause when I need a friend it’s still you

but also what is surely the greatest remake ever.

But what is the point here?  (Other than to re-educate you on the finer points of grunge music, naturally.)  I think the point is that some Nirvana fans may be offended by my pointing out they didn’t invent grunge, they merely popularized it. As if that somehow takes away from their genius.  Am I saying that Nirvana is just a rip-off of the Pixies?  No, Kurt Cobain said that.  I think I’m saying that originality is overrated.  It’s held up as some sort of sacred cow, and, if a thing isn’t original, it’s therefore inferior.  But Nirvana is not inferior to the Pixies ... I’m not saying they’re better, merely that they’re not any worse.  Coming in second or third or fifth or tenth in the chronological list of grunge bands doesn’t make them any less insanely good than they truly are.  Everyone had done what they did before, but no one ever did it like they did, before or after.  Why do we care if they were first or not?

We can move into the wider world of music.  Can there be a Lady Gaga without Madonna?  No, not really.  Does that make Lady Gaga a “Madonna rip-off”?  Certainly not in the pejoritive way that the phrase is generally used.

We’ll expand to movies.  Can Dark City exist without Metropolis?  No, certainly not.  Hell, I’m not sure Dark City could exist without The City of Lost Children, but that doesn’t make Dark City any less brilliant.  Hell, I’ve heard it argued that The Matrix doesn’t exist without Dark City (although their releases are close enough together that it’s more likely a pair than a rip-off), but that doesn’t take anything away from The Matrix either.

Comic books: I’ve always loved Moon Knight.  Moon Knight is a rich guy who fights at night with a mysterious, scary costume and uses a lot of gadgets ... sound familiar?  Yeah, Moon Knight is pretty much a Batman rip-off.  So what?  How does that make him any less cool?

Literature: I’ve already talked about how I feel about the Wheel of Time series being accused of being a Lord of the Rings rip-off.  I’ve also heard it accused of being a Song of Ice and Fire (a.k.a. Game of Thrones) rip-off, which is amusing, since the first book of Wheel of Time was published before George R. R. Martin even started writing the first book of Song of Ice and Fire.  But let’s say you’re willing to flip it around and accuse Martin of ripping off Jordan instead: I still say, so what?  If it were true that Martin deliberately and consciously sat down and said “I’m going to rewrite Wheel of Time, only better” (and I truly don’t believe he did), who cares?  What Martin produced is still awesome.  You could argue whether it’s better than Jordan or not, but, in the end, it’s different, and they’re both very good.  They could have been ripping each other constantly throughout the respective series (which, although it’s true that Jordan started first, were being published simultaneously), and I would only be grateful for the cross-pollination.  It’s not like whoever got there first gets more points or something.

In my discussion about the Wheel of Time question, I made another analogy: Harry Potter being described as a rip-off of James and the Giant Peach.  I chose it for a number of deliberate reasons.  The most obvious being that James and the Giant Peach was published 4 years before J. K. Rowling was even born, so it completely eliminates any question of whose idea came first.  Also because I don’t think it’s a criticism that’s ever actually been made; rather it seems to be the case that any series which is even remotely like Harry Potter is proclaimed to be a rip-off of it: A Series of Unfortuante Events, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Artemis Fowl, the Bartimaeus trilogy, the Septimus Heap series, Children of the Red King, The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, The Wednesday Tales, etc etc ad infinitum.  But of course the one that concerns me is the one that I’m currently engaged in writing (assuming I ever get back to it), Johnny Hellebore.

So this question of originality hits home for me, and I must admit I have an ulterior motive.  It only occurred to me after Johnny Hellebore was completely fleshed out as a character that he shares a lot of similarites to Harry Potter, especially physically.  He’s a white, English-speaking, male, teenaged boy, thin, with black hair and eyes that are some shade of green.  The differences, particularly at this level are so slight as to be laughable: American instead of British, a bit older, eyes more blue-green than Harry’s piercing green.  They’re both parentless, although Johnny isn’t an orphan, and one might even go so far as to make a comparison between Larissa and Hermione (although I feel that’s unflattering to Hermione, really).  The farther along you go, of course, the more you have to struggle for the similarites against the profound differences instead of the other way around, but by that point you’ve established your foundation, and your audience is more likely to grant you the benefit of the doubt.  And, while I’m telling you that all of this only occurred to me after the fact, you only have my word for that, no?

For that matter, while I can assure you that I was not consciously trying to “rip off” Harry Potter, how can I make any definitive statements about what my subconscious may or may not have been up to?  I certainly had read the Harry Potter books—several times—as well as listened to the audiobooks and watched all the movies.  And I respect the hell of out J. K. Rowling: she’s a dead brilliant author with an envy-inpsiring talent for both characterization and plotting that I certainly could do worse than to emulate.  So was Harry kicking around in the back of my brain, casting an influence on this idea?  I’m sure he must have been.

Still, Johnny Hellebore is an entirely different story than Harry Potter.  One is aimed at younger readers, though it’s good enough that older readers will appreciate it as well; the other is aimed at older readers, and, though younger readers may certainly appreciate it, it requires a much higher maturity level.  One focuses on a sense of wonder and a fierce joy that only slowly becomes eclipsed by the darker themes of the series; the other is dark from the very first page, and it’s the joy and wonder that serve as the counterpoint.  One is a story of a boy growing into a man; the other is a story of a boy who is in many ways a man already, but who exists in a state of being “stuck”—not necessarily stuck in childhood, but just in a deep a rut in his life, which is a state that all of us experience, at many different points in our lives.  One was very likely influenced by Roald Dahl; the other is more likely influenced by Stephen King.

Still, the comparisons will inevitably be made, and, on one level, I find it flattering.  As I say, Rowling is a brilliant author and even to be mentioned in the same sentence as her is quite nice.  Still, one doesn’t want to be thought of as a rip-off, right?  But then that got me wondering ... why not?

It seems to me that we’ve somehow elevated originality into some Holy Grail.  Everything has to be original.  Except ... nothing is original.  At this point in human history, everything can be said to be derived from, descended from, influenced by, or in the vein of, something else that we’ve seen or heard or read before.  There’s just so much out there ... how could you not sound familiar, even if only by accident?

So, I say, let’s set aside originality.  Can we not rather ask—should we not rather ask—it is good?  Who cares whether it’s original or not, as long as it’s valuable, inspirational, emotionally involving, socially relevant, philosophically touching, mentally engaging ... does it speak to you?  If it does, then doesn’t it deserve to be evaluated on its own merits?  I think it does.  I’ll take my Nevermind and my Doolittle, thank you very much.  They’re both pretty damn rockin’.

National Heroscape Day 2013

Well, it’s October, and you know what that means: another National Heroscape Day tournament.  If you need to refresh, Heroscape is one of my favorite games, and last year was the first year my middle child (a.k.a. the Smaller Animal, from when he was the younger of two) was old enough to attend.  He decided not to go this year, as he wasn’t feeling well, but my eldest (currently 15) decided to invite his current Band of Merry Men, so yesterday we took a road trip to Van Nuys for the annual get-together.

Last year we had our record low for attendance: only 8, 3 of which I brought with me.  This year was better—we were up to 10 total participants—but I provided 5 of them.  So I’m happy that attendance is on the rise, but I’d prefer it if more of it could come in from other quarters.

One bright note for this year: we’ve finally allowed Valhalla Customs units, which you may recall are the community-developed continuation of our beloved (but discontinued) Heroscape.  I think this is the future of the game, and, inasmuch as its the only future we’re likely to get, I’m glad to see my fellow ‘Scapers embracing it.  We should be happy there’s a future at all, really.

With so few attendants, we only needed 3 rounds to settle the standings.  Up to now, I had come in dead center of the pack 4 times, and next-to-last once.  This year I came in dead last, so I suppose I’m now at 4 and 2, in terms of acceptable performance.  I’ve never been super-competitive with the game: I’m in it for the fun.  So I’m happy enough with finishing up in the middle.  Being at the end is a bit of a bummer.  But I drew another newbie for the first round (he’d never played anyone other than his son before), so I spent a fair amount of time helping him out, and my last game was against one of my son’s friends, who was even newbie-er than that, so I wanted to help her do well as well.  So I don’t really mind those losses, both of which were close games (one of them down to 20 points, out of a possible 520).  The middle game was the big bummer though: I got the bad luck to go up against my son, and he’d been practicing against my exact army all week.  He ended up completely crushing me, handing me my only total defeat of the day.  Ah, well: he was happy enough, and beating me helped him finish up right in the middle of the pack (5th place, getting the very last of the prizes we had).  So I can’t really complain.

The newbie who I played against in the first round brought his 8-year-old son with him (which makes him, as you may recall, just a year older than the Smaller Animal).  He wasn’t going to enter the tourney itself, but we would have had only 9 without him, so he did.  And that went really well, despite the fact that he seemed to have the exact same focus issues that my son has (although I think he took losing much better than mine would have).  I hope to get these two boys together soon, either for Heroscape or just for hanging out; I think they’ll hit it off famously.

As we usually do, after the tournament we stuck around and played more games.  The four teenagers played a two-vs-two game of Heroscape, while the other father, his son, our host, and I played Fluxx.  Fluxx is one of those games that can either go fast or take forever, and this one went on for quite a while.  The teens finished up their Heroscape game and started up a massive round of Munchkin.  Father and son had to leave, so our host and I worked on tearing down the Heroscape maps while the kids finished up Munchkin.  Then we ordered some pizza and played two medium-length games of Fluxx with the 6 of us left.  This is the Monty Python version, and we went through the entire deck at least 3 times, so we got to play nearly every card at least once, including the Fake Accent card (which got played about 3 times) and the I Want to Sing! card, which unhappily was cancelled before it got around to me, or else I would have been pulling 2 extra cards every turn, potentially for the remainder of the game.  “I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay, I work all night and I sleep all day!”  Ah, well, I guess they didn’t appreciate my singing.  Not as much as they did the outrageous accents of our host, which ranged from something I can only describe as Scottish-brogue-with-throat-cancer to actually barking (which I promptly dubbed his “Labrador” accent).  As for the teens, they eventually decided that the most outrageous accent they could think of was Valley Girl, and spent at least 15 minutes trying to out-ohmahgod! each other.

So another excellent year was had, despite all of us ending up in the bottom 60%, and we hope to have just as much fun next year.

Salad Days

                  My salad days,
When I was green in judgement,

— William Shakespeare

When I was in college (for the second time), I was invited by a friend of mine to a picnic with some folks he worked with.  We were typical college students (by which I mean that the word “picnic” typically implied several twelve-packs and maybe a few bags of chips, if you were lucky), but this was to be an adult picnic.  I’m still not sure why he brought me.  Probably just for moral support.

You may remember that I talked before about how I don’t socialize well with strangers (even though I’m quite gregarious with people I know).  So in this particular setting, I mostly just watched and listened.  I, who’d never really been an “adult” in the conventional sense—and still haven’t been, I suppose—was essentially a visiting anthropologist observing a strange tribal culture.  And, while I was dutifully cataloguing greeting rituals and parental models for acceptable public behavior, I heard this phrase:

“I simply must have that recipe!”

Now, you must understand that, at that age, I had no clue that real people actually said that.  Out loud.  In front of other people.  Sure, you see it on televsion, but television people aren’t real people, after all.  I thought it was a phrase found in old movies from the 50s, and possibly in ironic treatises on the illusions of domestic bliss, but never spoken by real people.  Out loud.  In front of other people.  It was like I had been transported into some alternate universe.

Well, now I’m older.  Now I understand ... that real people still don’t actually use those words, but the sentiment, at least, is occasionally genuine.  So, somewhat oddly, I’m going to give you a recipe.  Which you simply must have.

Once upon a time, I rarely ate salad.  Not that I disliked it—salad was just one of those foods that I had a strong neutrality towards.  I was happy enough to eat it—in fact, I very occasionally craved it, which always seemed to stun my friends, no matter how many times they saw it—but there were just lots of other foods that I liked more.  So why not eat them instead?

These days, I make a giant bowl of salad twice a week.  The Mother helps me eat it, mostly, but the baby will leap into my lap when I have some, and even the eldest will partake occasionally.  (The middle child is still in that picky eater phase.)  This change is due to two very important factors.

The first is that I moved.  I never really liked fruits and vegetables until I moved to California.  Of course, I’m older now, and we do begin to appreciate such things a bit more as we get older.  But mainly I believe that the food is just plain better here.  I used to live on the East Coast, remember, and I’m guessing that a lot of the fruits and vegetables I was eating were coming from California anyway—just after a very, very long trip, which doesn’t do much for the taste.  And (at least when I lived there) you could get organic food, but you couldn’t actually afford it.  Now that I’m here on the West Coast, I’m closer to where a lot of the food is actually grown, and the organic choices are not that much more expensive than the regular ones.  Organic celery, for instance, is less than 50¢ more than regular celery where I shop.  Will I pay a couple of quarters more per week to get celery that is better tasting and most probably better for me?  Of course I will.  Even across all my items, I can buy 100% organic fruits and vegetables for well under $20 more than if I didn’t, per week.  A few yuppie food coupons per month to eat healthier—yes, yes, some people will dispute that, but even more importantly, in my book: to enjoy it more.  If there happen to be health benefits, I consider that gravy on the cake.  Sure, the quality is inconsistent.  Sometimes you get something that’s less than stellar.  But the awesomeness you get the rest of the time more than makes up for it.  Trust me on this: even if you can’t, where you live, afford to eat organic all the time, do it occasionally, just to treat yourself.  You’re worth it, right?

The second factor, though, is due to the discovery of the right accoutrements.  A salad is composed of three basic ingredients: vegetables, dressing, and ... other.  The extra bits that make different salads different.  It can be meat, like a chef’s salad or oriental chicken salad.  It might be fruit, or nuts, as in the case of a Waldorf, or cheese, as in a Cobb or a Caesar.  If you’re just stuck with veggies and dressing, you’re missing out.  At the very least slap some croutons or bacon bits on there.

But, for me, the ultimate salad accompaniments were a gift from our Sister Family.  The Mother was having a salad one day, and I saw her putting pistachios and feta cheese on it.  This struck me as terribly odd, so I asked about it.  This was the favorite salad of her best friend (matriarch of the Sister Family, in case you didn’t follow that link), she explained, so she was giving it a try.  Now, I was pretty sure that I didn’t like pistachios, but I couldn’t really remember why.  (Later I decided it was probably because I don’t like pistachio ice cream, which is a pretty stupid reason, if you think about it.)  And I’m certainly always encouraging my children to retry things they decided they didn’t like a long time ago, because your tastes change over time.  So I tried it.  And it was good.  Seriously good.  Better than seriously good: like into the “fucking fantastic” range.

So now I’m going to tell you how to make your own salad that you will enjoy just as much as I enjoy mine.  Unless, of course, you are a totally different person than I am with totally different tastes.  In which case I refer you yet again to the name of the blog (q.v.).

Vegetables  The base of any good salad is its veggies.  Now, different people like different vegetables.  For instance, some people like radishes, while I think radishes taste like dirt.  So, while I’m going to tell you the veggies that I like, the exact types aren’t that important.  Use whatever you like.  Mainly I want to give you some general tips.

If vegetables are the base of the salad, lettuce is the base vegetable.  Most salads are concocted of a whole lotta lettuce and a few other veggies.  This is presumably because lettuce is cheap.  However, you’re not looking to make a cheap salad; you’re looking to make a delicious salad, so don’t overdo the lettuce.  Let it be a supporting player: it’s not strong enough to pull off a leading role anyway.

For years I was a staunch supporter of iceberg lettuce.  It’s simple, and it tastes good.  Other people would say it’s boring.  I don’t care: I don’t want exciting; I want yummy.  When you hand me a big ol’ plate of arugula, or micro-greens, it certainly looks exciting.  But it tastes like eating grass.  I am not a cow.  Don’t serve me grass.

Romaine is fine.  It’s not my favorite, but at least it doesn’t taste like grass.  The Mother prefers it, and disdains my beloved iceberg.  So it was always a bone of contention when creating salads.  Lately, however, we’ve reached a compromise: butter lettuce.  Butter lettuce is as crisp and dependable (and tasty) as iceberg, but not as boring, so it makes a good choice.  I typically buy it by the bag and I use about a bag and a half for the base of my salad.  If there’s any leaves which are even the least bit brown or wilted, I just toss them to the side and feed them later to the guinea pig (lizards or turtles are also good for this purpose).  You may ask, why a bag?  Mainly because that’s how my store sells it.

For the rest of the vegetables, there are just a few tips.  First, get what you like.  Don’t try to fool yourself into eating veggies you wouldn’t eat separately by sticking them into a salad and hoping you won’t notice.  You will.  Buy them as fresh as you can, because there’s no way you’re going to go to the store every time you want a salad (especially since you’re going to want this one a lot).  Sure, fresher is better, but let’s be realistic too.  I buy enough to make two big salads every week.

Lastly, buy organic.  Seriously.

Here’s what I use:

• 1 large bell pepper (green’ll do, but red or orange is nicer, for color)
• 1 large cucumber (American or English)
• 3-4 small cucumbers (Persian)
• 4-6 ribs of celery
• 4-5 green onions or scallions (which in some places are the same thing, but even if different should be interchangeable)

Buy whatever you like that you can reliably find.  Outside of not being able to find American cucumbers for part of the year, everything on my list is available year-round where I am.  (And, when I can’t get American, I just substitute English instead.)

Then chop all that shit up and throw it in a big salad bowl.  I peel my cucumbers first, but you don’t have to.  Chopping is a big pain in the ass, but once you taste this salad, you won’t mind it so much, because the end will justify the means.  But that’s why I always make much more than I can eat: so I don’t have to chop so often.

For storage of leftovers, a gallon Ziploc bag will do fine.  Maybe add just the tiniest splash of water to keep it moist.  It won’t sit in the fridge long enough to go bad, trust me.

Extras  Like I said above: pistachios and feta cheese.  I suppose you could experiment a bit here—slivered almonds, maybe? goat cheese, perhaps?—but don’t, at least not until you’ve tried the original.  It’s pretty awesome.

For pistachios, I buy dry roasted, unsalted, shelled halves and pieces.  Raw wouldn’t be as good, in my opinion.  You can also get them organic, but honestly the taste difference for nuts is not nearly what it is for veggies.  But you certainly don’t want to have to shell them yourself, and you don’t need the extra salt.

I buy pre-crumbled feta with “Mediterranean herbs.”  I have no idea what that means, exactly, but it tastes good, so I go with it.  You can also buy it in blocks and crumble it yourself—it’s a little bit cheaper, but not enough to be worth it, if you ask me.  Plus then you don’t get the “Mediterranean herbs” ... whatever those are.

Add your extras to the individual servings.  Your pistachios and feta will get soggy if stored with the leftover salad.

Dressing  I like lots of different kinds of dressing.  My absolute favorite is bleu cheese.  But that’s not what I use for this salad, because this salad really shines with Thousand Island dressing, and that’s what you should use too.  You can use your favorite brand of Thousand Island if you like, but what’s really awesome is to make it yourself.

I taught myself how to make Thousand Island dressing because I didn’t want all the sugar and MSG and other various crap in the store-bought brands, and my local Trader Joe’s doesn’t carry a healthy version.  But, as it turns out, it’s easy to make, and I get to buy mostly organic ingredients, which is nice.

Now, I don’t measure things when I cook, for the most part.  I mean, think about it: whose is the best cooking you’ve ever had?  Your grandmother, right?  Now, did your grandmother ever measure anything?  No, of course not.  Grandmothers have better things to do with their time than fiddle with measuring spoons and whatnot.  So, when I say “tablespoon” below, I don’t mean an actual measured tablespoon; I mean just take the big spoon out of your silverware drawer.  Likewise, “teaspoon” means the little spoon—I actually use a baby spoon, since I have a baby around, but I also heap it pretty high, so it’s probably the same as a normal teaspoon if you fill it closer to level.  And “3 count” means you pour at a reasonable rate for a count of three (like mixing a drink).

• Mayonnaise: 5 tablespoons (not heaping)
• Ketchup: 9 good squirts
• Yellow mustard: 1 good squirt
• Dijon mustard: 1 little squirt
• Sweet pickle relish: 9 teaspoons
• Vinegar: 3 count (I use balsamic white vinegar)
• Sugar: 2 heavy pinches
• Salt: 1 heavy pinch
• Pepper: 12 grinds

Throw that all in a big bowl and just stir it up.  Now grab one of those 12 oz squeeze bottles they sell at the store (or get ’em on Amazon) and a funnel, pour your dressing into the bottle, and you’re pretty much set.  The only other bit you need to do is to cut the top of the nozzle pretty low, or else the pickle relish will get stuck in the tip.  I also cut it at a bit of an angle, as that seems to give me a wider opening.  The amount above is pretty much exactly enough to fill the bottle (sometimes I’m a bit over, but I just dollop that on my current salad).  When you run out, just make more.  Easy peasy.


Hopefully you’ll give this a try and come to love salad as much as I do.  I used to eat a little bowl of salad before getting a bit plate of spaghetti, or burritos, or whatever.  Nowadays I eat a big bowl of salad and then check to see if I even have any room left over for the “main” meal.  That’s gotta be more healthy in the long run, right?

Perl blog post #19

This week I saw a cool Perl blog post that I just had to respond to, so I did, over on the Other Blog.  If you’re into Perl, hop on over and check it out.  If not, go amuse yourself for another week and check back in then.

A Cento for a Sunday

When I was in college, I took a Shakespeare class where we had to do a group project.  For our group’s project, one of my fellow students suggested that we put on a short skit, talking about the plays, but using the Bard’s own words.  We carefully culled bits and pieces of dialogue from the plays, put it in the mouths of our characters, and, by putting exisitng things into new context, we created new meaning.  I was fascinated by this process and have occasionally found myself doing it for other occasions.  One of my best friends asked me to do a reading at his wedding, of anything I liked, and I cobbled together several different quotes on love and fashioned a complete speech out of it.  It was generally well-received.

I’ve also tried my hand at creating poems like this.  It turns out that poetry created thus actually has a name: it’s a cento.  I’ve done a few over the years (despite the fact that poetry isn’t truly my forté), but none of them were particularly good.  Today, I give you a new cento that I “composed,” which I think is better than my previous efforts, although perhaps still not great.  The lines (or in some cases half-lines) here are mostly quotes from other poems, books, songs, or movies, although some are old things other people have recycled before me.  Most are quotes that appealed to me and ended up in my quote file, but a few I had to hunt down specifically to fit parts of the “narrative.”  All I personally added were a few connecting words here and there, and the first half of the title, which doesn’t necessarily mean anything (contrast with the second half, which is rather deliberately chosen not only to offset the first half euphoniously, but for its meaning in its own source).

I thought of listing all the sources here, but I’ve decided against it, mostly because it’s more fun to let you discover them on your own.  I’m pretty sure that judicious Googling will turn them all up, so I don’t worry that the original authors will fail to be attributed.

Consider this a first draft and be kind to it.  It’s new, and doesn’t much know what it’s saying yet.

Cobblestone Fray, Cottleston Pie

Once upon a time, when we all lived in the woods,
on a dark and stormy night,
all of the animals are capably murderous—
still, you may get there by candle-light.

You got devils living in that head,
watching the whites of your eyes turn red
by the pricking of my thumbs.
Where’er we tread ‘tis haunted holy ground,
like someone trying not to make a sound.
At sunrise, there is the sound of drums ...

It’s all sex and death as far as I can tell,
drinking the blood-red wine.
Fear is the mind-killer; blood is compulsory.
And I’ve made an enemy of time.

No less liquid than their shadows, speaking with the speech of men,
Satan must be our cousin, and does his crossword with a pen.
What noisy cats are we,
with the perils of being in 3-D,
and why the sea is boiling hot?  He’s won a lot of friends ...

There’s no such thing as the real world, but
there’s a hell of a good universe next door.
Little things are infinitely the most important.
Respite and nepenthe: to die, to sleep no more.

We’re all alive for a reason.
People need good lies.
Thou wast not born for death, but
when you stop dreaming, it’s time to die.

I recommend pleasant, but we’re all mad here.
I am the king of the cats!
Dance like nobody’s watching,
cry, ain’t no shame in it,
and that is the end of that.

Media Trip

There are many of you out there who have never had a hallucinogenic drug, and never intend to.

Which is fine: it’s not every person’s cup of tea.  It probably involves dealing with unsavory characters, and who wants that?  It definitely involves lack of control—if you’re the sort of person who can’t stand being a passenger in a car, you must never drop a tab of acid.  It involves a certain amount of risk as well ... probably not as much risk as you take when you get into your car every day to drive to work, but different people evaluate risk differently, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

On the other hand, if you’ve ever wanted to feel like you were have a drug-fueled hallucination without all the bother of having to consume potentially dangerous chemicals, that too can be arranged.  There are many things you could watch and get the exact same feelings of disorientation, paranoia, and a conviction that the world is not what it seems.  I would start with Naked Lunch—really, just about anything in the Cronenberg ouevre will do: eXistenZ is good, and Videodrome or even Dead Ringers will do in a pinch.

In fact, certain directors just have a flair for this.  Peter Greenaway is good (I would go with Drowing by Numbers or 8½ Women, even though The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is more famous), as is Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man probably most of all, but Mystery Train and Broken Flowers have leanings as well), or even the Coen Brothers—Barton Fink is a full-on trip, and The Hudsucker Proxy a lesser one, whereas Raising Arizona or The Big Lebowski are just a minor marijuana high.  And dare we forget David Lynch?  Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart are twisted journeys, and Lost Highway is just a bad trip.  Honorable mention to Spike Jonze (for Being John Malkovich) and Tarsem Singh (for The Fall).

What really disturbs me though (even more so than the insectile typewriter in Naked Lunch) is that many of these experiences can be gotten from watching television with your children.  If there is an adult anywhere in the world who has ever watched their first episode of Teletubbies and not said to themselves “dude, whoever came up with this idea was tripping balls!”, I can only assume that they simply don’t know the meaning of the phrase.  And don’t even get me started on Yo Gabba Gabba!, where even the name of the show must have required a serious LSD hangover.

I was sitting around watching television with my middle child (current age: 7) and my youngest (current age: 1) and we were searching for something colorful and distracting to keep the smaller one from destroying the house.  (And if any of you fellow parents out there are looking down on my use of television as a babysitter, I can only assume you have nothing breakable in your house.)  I was hoping for something educational, like Sesame Street, but I was willing to settle.  Cruising through the cable listings, what to my wondering eyes should appear but H.R. Pufnstuf, which I remembered very fondly from my own childhood.  I quickly switched over to it.  The baby didn’t seem to care much for it, but the middle child was fascinated.  Then my oldest (current age: 14) came in, stared at the screen for a few minutes, and then looked at me with wide eyes.  “What the hell are you watching?” he asked.  I couldn’t really explain.  Seen through adult eyes, it was just as insane as any Yo Gabba Gabba episode, even down to the bizarre outbursts of singing, although H.R. didn’t seem to have as many morals prepared as DJ Lance Rock typically does.

(After Pufnstuf was over, whatever channel we had stumbled onto immediately launched into The Land of the Lost.  It was like the Sid & Marty Kroft all-the-time channel or something.  I fully expected to see Sigmund and the Sea Monsters next.  Unfortunately we had chores to get to, so I never found out.)

I wonder how many more of my treasured childhood memories of televsion shows would play like bad acid trips to my adult brain?  Man, I’d love to find some old Electric Company reruns: Morgan Freeman as Easy Reader and Rita Moreno yelling “Hey You Guys!” at Bill Cosby.  You can’t get more trippy than that, right?  Or Captain Kangaroo ... dropping thousands of ping-pong balls on somebody’s head because a talking moose tricked you into saying the magic words is not something you come up with without some sort of chemical stimulation.  And those Hanna Barbera guys were certianly on something ... Hair Bears? a talking air-breathing mystery-solving drummer shark? Captain Caveman? really?  And as much as I loved shows like Blackstar or Thundarr, I’m not sure they make any more rational sense than my little brother’s He-Man or the slightly-before-my-time Herculoids.

So, today, I’m watching Ruby Gloom.  For some insane reason, my middle child really loves this show, which he discovered through the magic combination of Netflix and Roku.  Ruby Gloom has been described as a goth version of Strawberry Shortcake, which I suppose is not too far off (although I have to say that, for me, mainly what it triggered was vague memories of the Groovy Ghoulies).  So I have no idea why he likes it, being neither a fan of Strawberry Shortcake nor goth, as near as I can tell.  But he’s really into it.  I think he’s watched every episode at least once and is on his second tour through.  In Ruby Gloom, there is a character called “Scaredy Bat” (get it? oh ho ho!), who is a talking bat with an Indian accent.  Why does he have an Indian accent?  I mean, I know why Baljeet on Phineas and Ferb has an Indian accent: he’s actually from India.  And I sort of get why Raj on Camp Lazlo has an Indian accent, being an elephant and all.  But the talking bat?  That I don’t get.

Drugs.  I’m telling you: we have drugs to thank for all this.  Yes, like Bill Hicks, I’m positing that chemically-induced hallucinatory experiences may have had some positive impacts on our lives.  I just don’t see any other way to explain something like Aqua Teen Hunger Force or Squidbillies.  In fact, I think the very existence of Adult Swim owes quite a lot to narcotics of questionable medical value.  And then there’s the Japanese, who apparently are getting high off all the squid ink and crab brains they consume (I’m going by Iron Chef on this point).  There’s Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, which has a character who uses the martial arts style “True Fart Fist,” and then there’s Fighting Foodons, with its Pokemon-like food, including an anthropomorphic plate of fried rice.

Right now, in fact, my children are watching Cartoon Planet, as hosted by Brak and Zorak—whose journey from cartoon supervillains to talk show co-hosts to surrealist children’s show presenters is a strange trip itself—with numerous commercials thrown in for Thomas the Tank Engine, who carries “hallucinatory” well into the territory of “creepy,” heading hard into “terrifying.”  It’s all around us.  There are screens everywhere these days: the gas station, the doctor’s office, the breakroom at work, restaurants, bars, hospitals, gyms, family rooms, bedrooms, our children’s rooms ... everywhere we turn.  And, on many of those screens, we’re caught up in somebody else’s freaky acid dreams.

It’s something to ponder, anyhow.

Perl blog post #18

Had an interesting conversation at $new_work that I parlayed into a new tech blog post.  If you dig Perl (especially modern Perl), hop on over and check it out.  If not, then you can try back next week, if you’re so inclined to be that persistent.

Birthday Time Again

Well, it’s birthday season at our house again, starting with The Mother‘s birthday last weekend, the Larger Animal’s birthday today, and continuing on through the raft of Scorpio birthdays next month, including myself and several of my best friends.

Today in particular we spent the day at Universal Studios with both Smaller Animals and four teenagers.  As I’m sure you can imagine, I’m exhausted.  So no blog post this week.

I’ll come up with something exciting next week.  Unless I don’t.

Here's My Beard; Ain't It Weird?

It’s almost time to shave again.

I grew my beard at age 19, to make myself look older—or at least that’s what I told everyone.  My family hated it: mother, father, both grandmothers, aunts and great-aunts and nearly everyone who bothered to notice at all.  I sort of liked it, but I always claimed I was willing to shave it off if I didn’t need it any more.  You know, to look older.

When I turned 21, I reasoned that now I was older: old enough to buy beer, anyway, and what other reason is there to look older?  So I shaved off the beard.  I left the moustache though: I was afraid I’d look a little too young without some sort of facial hair.  That only lasted a few months.

I look like a complete goober without a beard.  My original conclusion was that I just had too much of a babyface.  This was overly optimistic.  What I came to realize, eventually, was that I have no chin.  Not just a weak chin, but practically none at all.  I get it from my mother.  Turns out it’s not so awful on a woman, but for a man to have no chin is pretty bad.  And it gets worse the older you get.

A lot of people have told me that, when they try to grow a beard, it itches too much and they eventually give up.  My beard has never itched when it’s coming in.  In fact, it hardly ever itches at all, except for one sort of curious cycle: about every 5 years or so, it starts to itch something fierce.  So, every 5 years or so, I have to shave my chin completely ... just to air it out, so to speak.  Twice I’ve gone for the General Burnside, which let me tell you will get you some strange looks.  Once I did a sort of droopy moustache and soul patch combo, like Ben Stiller in Dodgeball.  I can’t recall what I did for the other one.  It probably won’t be long until the next cycle rolls around, although that’s not the sort of shave I was talking about.

No, I meant just the regular sort of shave.  My pattern, you see, is to let the thing grow for several months: basically until it’s so long that it gets annoying.  The beard will, if left untended, start curling under my chin, creating a sort of shelf under there.  I can understand why people put beads and shit in their beards—I’m sure it’s just to get the stupid thing to grow straight down.  I can’t imagine how much effort it takes to grow a ZZ Top or somesuch.  But that’s mostly irrelevant to me, because long before I have to worry about that, my moustache will get so long that it starts getting in my mouth.  When I’m trying to eat, certainly, but even when I’m just trying to talk, or stick my tongue out so I can concentrate, or sometimes for no good reason at all.  Once that starts happening, it’s time to shave.

I had a friend (my boss on my first professional programming gig, as it happens) who grew a beard for a while, but he eventually shaved it off.  When I asked him why he gave up on it, he said it was too much trouble.  I was perplexed by this answer.  What do you mean, too much trouble, I asked.  Well, you have to trim it, and shampoo it, and condition it ... he went on and on about all the beard grooming he was putting in.  I had no idea how to respond to this, other than to say: you’re doing it wrong.

I mean, if we’re going to be honest here, most of the reason I grew the damn thing in the first place was sheer laziness.  The whole “it makes me look older” thing was mostly a convenience.  And, if you’re growing a beard because you don’t like shaving, then you better not be shaving very often, or else what’s the point?  I shave once every two or three months.  Something like that.  I don’t keep track; as I mentioned, I just wait for it to get annoying, then I shave.

But I don’t shave it all—did I mention that I have no chin?  Basically, I start at about the top of my ears and go all the way down until I have just a smallish goatee.  Then I thin out the beard a bit, square off the moustache so it’s not in my mouth any more, and that’s it for another few months.  Now, if I’m doing this for a special occasion (funeral, job interview, that sort of thing), I may follow that up with some shaving cream and a safety razor, but typically it’s just clippers.

The clippers I use to trim my beard are the same sort people use for shaving their heads—which is handy if you have friends who are skinheads, or Neo-Nazis, or Sinead O’Connor fans, or just guys who are going bald but still need to look tough, like bouncers in dive bars or Bruce Willis.  I’ve tried special beard trimmers and that sort of thing as well, but a nice simple pair of clippers is moderately cheap, does a great job, and they’ll last forever.  Well, they will if you oil them regularly.  My first pair of clippers I didn’t oil them.  The clippers come with a tiny little bottle of oil, and a recommendation to oil them after every use, and to use only the special oil with the manufacturer’s name on it, and if you’d like to order some more, it’s only $30 a bottle.  This sounds like a rip-off—which it is, but not because the clippers don’t need the oil.  I found out right quick that the clippers will rust on you in a heartbeat if you don’t oil them.  The rip-off part is needing to use the special oil.  Just get yourself some sewing machine oil: it’s the exact same stuff, except cheaper.  The Mother‘s mom is the one who taught me that trick: she bought me a 3 or 4 dollar bottle of oil some ten years ago or so, and I’m still on the same bottle.  I don’t know if you need to oil the clippers after every time you use it, but, since I only use mine once every few months, I do.

For me, shaving is a whole big ritual.  I only do it before I shower (otherwise you wander around with little stray beard hairs down your shirt all day).  I only do it over the toilet—I only had to clog up my sink 3 or 4 times before I learned that one.  So I always start by cleaning the toilet first.  Not necessarily the toilet bowl, I mean, but the outside of the toilet and the seat and all that.  Then I get my mirror and prop it up on the seat.  Then I double over my ponytail and tie it up out of the way ... one wouldn’t want to shave off one’s ponytail by accident, now would one?  Then I do the shaving, which is fairly simple.  Then I use one of those barber’s brushes to sweep all the stray hairs into the toilet.  (Maybe those things are easier to come by these days, but it took me about 15 years to manage to get one when I first started looking.)  Then I have to brush the stray hairs off me.  Then I have to brush the stray hairs off the clippers.  Then I oil the clippers.  It takes quite a while, really, for the whole procedure.  But then again I’m only doing it every few months, as I say.  So it’s not that bad.  And, you know: you get it down after a while.  Becomes sort of second nature.

So I start with the goatee, and it gradually fills out to a full beard.  By the time it gets shaggy, my moustache is in my mouth again and it’s back to the goatee.  It never really itches (except for the every 5 - 7 years thing), and it’s not particularly stiff, so I never bother conditioning it as my former boss did.  Oh, I shampoo it when I shampoo my hair, but conditioning?  That’s way above and beyond.  I’ve also never had any problems growing it.  I don’t have nearly as much hair on my head as I used to—my once-cool widow’s peak is now more of a Phil Collins sort of look—but the beard has always grown in nice and thick.

When I was younger, it was brown, with reddish highlights.  It got darker as I got older, nearly black ... and then it started to go gray.  First a salt-and-pepper look, then almost all white except for a black stripe down the center of my chin.  Yes, for a couple of years I was rocking the reverse-skunk look.  Now you can barely see any black at all.  No gray in my hair, but my beard is almost completely white now.  Hopefully it looks distinguished.

Our title today is from George Carlin’s famous poem about his hair.  (And where is the hair on a pear?  Nowhere, mon frère!)  Mr. Carlin always had a flair for language that I envied.  I’ll lean on him a bit to offer my final thoughts on the topic of beards.

Don’t be skeered,
It’s just a beard.

Perl blog post #17

Well, it’s been about 2 months since I’ve done a technical post, so I decided to put one together for my Perl homies.  This one is on strong vs weak typing, so pop on over if that sounds like something that might excite you.  If it doesn’t, just take the week off.  Perhaps next week will thrill you more.

Grokking the Wheel of Time

I’ve talked before about my affection for Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series—even mentioning that I named one of my children after one of its characters.  There are 15 books in the series, which I’ve always felt break up into a quadralogy of trilogies (despite the fact that the math on that really doesn’t work, but we’ll get to that in a second).  So it’s a very long series, both in page count (nearly 12,000 pages), and in terms of years of waiting for the series to be completed (nearly 23 years).  I personally have been reading it (off and on, obviously) for about 40% of my life, rereading the older books when the newer ones come out, poring through the online encyclopedia, listening to the audiobooks on long commutes, even fashioning a role-playing campaign around it once.

So it’s been a pretty big part of my life.  And the series is finally finished: the final volume came out at the beginning of this year.  The Wheel of Time outlives Jordan himself, but thankfully his extensive notes were passed on for completion to a new author, Brandon Sanderson, who was hand-picked by Jordan’s widow.  For some reason, after Jordan’s death, I took a break, and I haven’t read any of the Sanderson books (i.e. the final three in the series).  But, now that they’re all complete and I can finally see how it all comes out, I’m anxious to get through them.  After some consideration, I decided to start at the beginning and read straight through until the end.  But not with the paperbacks, although I own nearly all of them.  Nope, I decided to go audiobook for all the Jordan books (they’d all be rereads anyway, and in many cases several-times-over-rereads), then switch to e-book for the Sanderson volumes (so I can pay closer attention to the ones I’ve not read before).  As of writing this sentence, I’m about 3 hours away from finishing Knife of Dreams, the last Jordan book.  I’ll be starting on the first Sanderson book, The Gathering Storm, within the week.

It should go without saying at this point that I’m a fan.  Although that’s not to say that I recommend the books unconditionally: they do have flaws, and I’m keenly aware of them.  I’ve already talked about Jodran’s tendency to stifle his characters.  Also, Jordan never met a subplot he didn’t like: when he started off book #10 (that is, page 7,382 of the series, not even considering the prequel) by introducing a new character perspective, someone we’d heard of before but never seen in the flesh, in a country which none of the characters which could possibly be considered main characters had likely ever even visited ... well, that’s when I knew he had a problem.  No, Mr. Jordan^* was not a perfect author ... but then who is?

There are also criticisms of Jordan that I disagree with.  One such persistent claim is that the series (or at the very least the first book, The Eye of the World) is a cheap imitation of The Lord of the Rings.  The typical defense of this is to bring up Jordan’s own words on the topic:

In the first chapters of The Eye of the World, I tried for a Tolkienesque feel without trying to copy Tolkien’s style, but that was by way of saying to the reader, okay, this is familiar, this is something you recognize, now let’s go where you haven’t been before. I like taking a familiar theme, something people think they know and know where it must be heading, then standing it on its ear or giving it a twist that subverts what you thought you knew.^**

See? (say Jordan’s defenders) he wasn’t deliberately trying to steal LotR’s plot; he was, rather, making a conscious choice to borrow elements from it in order to make the reader feel more comfortable.  Totally different.

I have a completely different response to this argument: I just reject it.  How are they similar again?  In both cases, a mysterious magical figure comes to a sleepy backwater village and tells some simple country folk that they are now caught up in the ultimate fight against the personification of evil in their world.  Well, when you describe the plot from 50,000 feet, sure, they do sound a bit similar.  But that’s sort of like saying that Harry Potter is a rip-off of James and the Giant Peach because they both involve orphans raised by unpleasant family members who discover a strange, magical world living in the grim, dreary cracks of the real one.  Does The Eye of the World share broad themes with The Fellowship of the Ring?  Well of course.  All modern fantasy shares broad themes with Tolkien.  He invented modern fantasy.  It’s sort of like wondering if some modern detective in crime fiction bears any resemblance to C. Auguste Dupin—how could they not?

So I never bought the Tolkien-rip-off theory.  It’s crap.  Anyone who has the patience to get through the first book knows that this ain’t your daddy’s Tolkien.  And anyone who doesn’t isn’t particuarly qualified to comment: they’ve read less than 7% of the total story (again, not even counting the prequel).  Even Jordan’s quote above doesn’t much phase me.  I much prefer this one:

Question: I have noticed some similarities to The Lord of the Rings. Was Tolkien an inspiration for for you?
Jordan: I suppose to the degree that he inspires any fantasy writer in the English language, certainly.^***

The other thing that Jordan is often criticized for is his pacing.  Yes, it’s true that he describes every little thing: the plants, the dresses, the architecture, the history, the shades of meaning of things translated from the Old Tongue, where the armies are getting their supplies from, how this servant used to serve that one’s mother many years ago, how much this character like his or her horse, etc etc ad infinitum.  Nothing wrong with that, per se.  Description immerses us more fully in the world.  It’s not Jordan’s fault if our minds being to wander while he’s painting us a perfect mental picture.  He built an entire world here, and he’s justifiably proud of it.  Besides, Tolkien was very fond of that too, as are many writers in the fantasy genre—not to mention sci-fi (e.g. Frank Herbert) and horror (e.g. Peter Straub).  He’s also accused of being verbose, which, again, is not a crime in and of itself: certainly Stephen King has been accused of that more than any other literary sin, and I’ve already mentioned that he’s my top literary idol.

No, all of these are just roundabout ways of saying that his pacing is too slow.  It takes forever for anything to happen in a Robert Jordan book.  Now, first of all, I don’t even consider that to be particularly problematic.  After all, Jordan’s pacing isn’t any worse than that of Ann Rice (who is fond of having the first ten and the last twenty-five pages happen in the present, while the thousand pages in between are one giant flashback, or the reading of someone’s diary, or somesuch).  And Ann Rice’s works are genius too (remember: another one of my children is named after one of her characers).  But, above and beyond that, I think the problem is just understandig the structure of the series.

Most fantasy series are trilogies, this being the pattern set by Tolkien.  Book 1: establish the characters and set up the action.  Book 2: create obstacles for the characters; allow the villains some victories, and end with the characters seemingly on the brink of defeat.  Book 3: the characters make a mighty comeback, mostly through sheer force of will, and the villains are defeated for once and for all.  This is a tried and true structure for trilogies—not only does the Lord of the Rings follow it, but so do many other fantasy series (e.g. His Dark Materials, the Riddle-Master trilogy, Drizzt Do’Urden, Bartimaeus, etc etc) as well as things as far flung as the first 3 Dune books, the original Star Wars movies, and the Millenium series.  Typically, if a series is longer than that, it’s either from adding prequels and side stories, or it’s from stretching out the various bits of the trilogy into multiple books.  For instance, if you tilt your head and squint just right, you could see Harry Potter as a triology: books 1 and 2 are Book 1, books 3 - 6 are Book 2, and book 7 is Book 3.

But there are series with more complex rhythms, and I’ve always felt that Wheel of Time was one such.  I think that you need to view WoT as a quadralogy of trilogies, with the addition of a prequel, and the fact that the final book in the final trilogy was so huge that it had to be split into 3 books (which gives you the total of 15).  The overall structure goes something like this:  Trilogy 1: introduction and establishment, and the characters begin to lose their innocence.  Trilogy 2: the characters make some strides, despite heavy opposition.  Trilogy 3: the villains get a lot more organized and dangerous, and the heroes start to discover their limitations.  Trilogy 4: well, I’m hopeful that this is where Good pulls it out in the end, but I haven’t actually finished reading yet, so I can’t say for sure.  But I’m pretty confident.

But within each trilogy, the structure is pretty much the same as a traditional trilogy: establish a situation, ratchet up the tension, and then an explosive finish.  However, what this means in the overall context of the series is that books 3, 6, and 9 (and presumbly the final book) are amazingly exciting, with each one being even more amazingly exciting than the previous one.  But that means that book 4 is a bit of a let-down.  And book 7 is a big let-down.  And book 10 is nearly unbearable.  But you have to pace yourself.  You have to remind yourself that Jordan couldn’t keep that level of excitement up for however many more books you have left to go: your head would just explode.  You need to come back down a bit, and then work at getting back up to those dizzying peaks slowly.  Book 3 makes you happy; book 4 makes you want to sigh.  Book 6 makes you want to laugh; book 7 makes you want to grumble.  Book 9 makes you want to cheer ... and book 10 makes you want to gnash your teeth and start tearing out your hair.  Yes, yes, all that info is important, and I’m sure I’ll need to know it as background for the future action, but, as Monty Python would say: GET ON WITH IT!

But my attitude is: forewarned is forearmed, and now that you understand how the rhythm and flow of the series is going to work, you can be prepared for it.  If you read this series, and you stick with it, you will be rewarded, I promise you.  The world is rich, and full of interesting cultures.  The politics is subtle, and intriguing, and full of factions (and sub-factions).  The magic is different, in both broad and fine ways.  The allusions (not just to Tolkien, but to Arthurian legend, Norse mythology, Samurai culture, and so forth) are rich and subtle.  The characters—even those you want to strangle for not waking up and seeing their own mistakes—are genuinely affecting, and you will come to care about them.  And, there are so many of them that, if there happen to be a few who rub you the wrong way, you won’t have to put up with them for very long before someone else’s point of view comes along.  The story is intricate, with seemingly throwaway minor characters popping back up, sometimes so subtly that you don’t even notice they’re the same person until you reread for the second or third time.  It’s the work of a master crafstman, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

And I’m really really excited to see how it all turns out.

* Yes, I know that’s not actually his real name.  But I shan’t refer to Mark Twain as Mr. Clemens, and I shan’t refer to Lews Carroll as Mr. Dodgson, and likewise I shan’t refer to Robert Jordan as Mr. Rigney.

** from a June 2002 interview, preserved at Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

*** from an online chat on October 21, 1994, preserved at Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

Yet another week off

Well, this has been a weird two weeks: a fantastic first couple weeks on a new job, coupled with The Mother‘s car being totalled by a drunk driver—while sitting empty on the street, happily.  (Not sure Facebook will let you see, but in case it does work: here‘s what the poor car looked like afterwards.)  So this week I’ve mostly been consumed with work, and shopping for a new car.  Granted, The Mother did most of the work on the latter, it being her vehicle that needs to be replaced.  But still, it hasn’t left a lot of time for contemplation of things such as blog post topics.  Still, I took a stab at it, but I only got a few hundred words in before other stuff distracted me.  So you’ll have to wait until next week to see that.  Try to contain your disappointment.

Cynical Romanticism

Many of my friends seem to think I’m a pessimist.  They’re then quite surprised when I seem to display some trait of stunning (and often naive) optimism.  The truth is that I’m not a pessimist; nor do I have moments where I transition to being an optimist.  I am, in fact, a cynic.  But I’m also a romantic.

I’ve mentioned this dichotomy of mine before (more than once, even).  What does it really mean though?  To understand, it’s useful to examine the roots of both terms.

Cynicism is actually an ancient Greek philosophy.  You remember the story of Diogenes, don’t you?  (Of course you don’t—I shouldn’t either, really, but my mother had an odd idea of what constituted a well-rounded education.)  Anyway, Diogenes was the guy who lived in a bathtub on the streets of Athens.  He carried around a lamp in the daytime, waiting for someone to ask him why.  When they did, he would reply that he was looking for an honest man.  The Cynics were sort of proto-hippies, living “in accord with Nature” and eschewing things like wealth and fame as non-natural.  It wasn’t enough to reject these things, though: a Cynic was required to practice shamelessness (sometimes translated as “impudence”), by which they meant that they should deface laws and social conventions.  So they were sort of in-your-face hippies.

You can vaguely draw the connection from this attitude of telling everyone that they were fools for letting things like greed and conformity take them further and further away from the natural state of living and the ultimate meaning that cynicism has today: the belief that people as a whole are vain, gullible, avaricious, and generally not that bright.  Steve Jobs once said:

I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart.  I have a very optimistic view of individuals.  As individuals, people are inherently good.  I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups.

Although I’ve always preffered the version from Men in Black:

J: People are smart.  They can handle it.
K: A person is smart.  People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.

J has no answer to this, of course: he is a New York City policeman.  He does know it.

When I was young, I did the required stint in fast food.  My particular greasepit was Burger King.  I worked there when chicken tenders were introduced, and I lived through the “Where’s Herb?” campaign.  Part of this campaign was to get a particular burger for a dollar by mentioning the fictional Herb’s name.  During this period, I saw innumerable people in Burger King ordering a “Herb burger.”  Yes, that’s right: they had absolutely no idea what they were ordering—just that it was cheap.  I am fond of telling people that we could have served them a shit sandwich and they’d have been happy as long as they thought they were getting a bargain.  I’m also fond of telling people that Burger King is where I first began to lose my faith in humanity.  Looking back, I’m not sure that’s entirely true, but I can’t deny that ol’ Herb played a large role in pushing me down that road.  Certainly it’s the place where I learned to appreciate H. L. Mencken’s observation that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the common man,^* and surely Mencken is a big a cynic as Twain or Voltaire, two of my most cherished quotemeisters.

So do I have, as Wikipedia puts it, a “general lack of faith or hope in the human race”?  Yeah, pretty much.  My experience with politics, business, financial institutions, organized religion, and even smaller coteries of humanity such as neighborhood homeowner’s associations or Internet forum denizens tells me that, if you expect the worst from people, you’ll rarely be disappointed, and occasionally you get a pleasant surprise.  Which is much better than the inverse: expecting the best yields constant disappointment and the occasional situation where your expectations are merely met.  Thus, I’m entirely comfortable with being considered a cynic, even though I don’t think that’s the same as being a pessimist.  I’m happy enough to consider the glass half-full ... I just remain convinced that there’s every likelihood that someone else will come along and drain the glass before I get any.

Romanticism is also tied to nature: it was in some ways a revolt against the rationality of the Enlightenment, a way of stressing that one should go out into untamed Nature and stop trying to analyze it and categorize and just feel it.  Romanticism was a validation of strong emotion—be it wonder, awe, passion, or even horror.  Especially for Art.  As one early Romantic German painter put it, “the artist’s feeling is his law.”  This was a movement of rejecting rules, particularly rules about Art, and it led to the Gothic horror tale and luminaries such as Edgar Allen Poe ... it’s certainly no wonder that I would experience a feeling of kinship towards it.

“Romantic” as a term implying love came later.  Even before Romanticism, “romance” was a term that referred to knights and heroic quests: Shakespeare’s The Tempest was considered a romance.  From knights to chivalry, and rescuing damsels in distress, plus Romanticism’s emphasis on strong emotions (such as passion), we eventually came to think of “romance” as primarily a love story, which today leaves us with Harlequin and Titanic.  Sort of a step down from Romanticism, if you think about it.  Not that there’s anything wrong with romantic love, of course: just that love is only one small part of Romanticism.

As a would-be-writer who idolizes Steven King (among others), how could I not be attracted to the movement that gave us Poe?  Certainly there is no King (nor Straub, Koontz, Barker or Gaiman) without Poe.  This is a movement that also (albeit more indirectly) gave us Robert Browning, who I quoted in my deconstruction of one of my all-time favorite quotes, and who also inspired King’s Dark Tower series.  Like Cynicism, Romanticism was a rejection of rules, and especially the “rules” of conforming to a polite society.  Throw off the chains of conformity, they both proclaim.  Be an individual.

And that’s the heart of my outlook.  Note how both Jobs and Tommy Lee Jones laud the individual person.  And we don’t have to look far to hear more famous people doing so.  Margaret Mead once said:

Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world.  For indeed that’s all who ever have.

How can you not take inspiration from that?  Pearl S. Buck said:

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible—and achieve it, generation after generation.

So I believe that, despite the fact that humanity in general is close to useless, every individual human has a potential for greatness.  I believe that the universe works hard to put me in good places, and succeeds a surprising percentage of the time, even when the formless churning rat race of mankind is working hard to push in the opposite direction.  I won’t say I’m an optimist—the glass may indeed be half-empty.  But somewhere out there is a person who’s willing to refill it for me.  If I’m fortunate, and if I really need it, I’ll meet them.

This is not a philosophy so much as an outlook.  If you ask me about my philosophy, I’ll go back balance and paradox.  But that theory is how I attempt to make sense of the world when it doesn’t seem to want to make sense on its own.  That’s different from how I approach the world, and what I expect out of it.  When it comes to that, I don’t expect much out of people, but I will never give up my idealism.  The world doesn’t owe me anything, and I wouldn’t expect to receive payment if it did.  But I continue to believe that the universe is a decent enough place, and that there will always enough light to balance the dark, and that what you give out will surely come back to you.  In the end, Good will always triumph over Evil, even if Evil usually gets more votes (and always has better financial backing).

So I suppose it’s a bit like Mel Brooks says in The Twelve Chairs:

Hope for the best.  Expect the worst.
Life is a play.  We’re unrehearsed.

Although I would favor the formulation of Benjamin Disraeli:

I am prepared for the worst, but hope for the best.

Because I’m not a Romantic Cynic, after all: I’m a Cynical Romantic.  I may start with dread, but I always try to end on a note of hope.

__________

* Technically, what he said was: “No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

Technical Debt Strategies

For a new role I’m starting at work, I’ve been thinking about the concept that we in the software development business refer to as “techincal debt.”

In software development, there is always a tension between two opposing forces: the desire to do it fast, and the desire to do it right.  I could probably write an entire blog post on just that topic, but for now I’ll settle for the short version.  If you do it right, then, later, when you want to extend it, or modify it, or use it as a jumping off point for branching out in a whole new direction (and you will always want to do these things eventually, if your software lives long enough), you can do so easily, with a solid foundation as a base.  The downside is that it will take longer.  If you do it fast, you get results faster, which means you can serve a customer’s needs before they change, fill a window of opportunity before it closes, or perhaps even beat your competitors to the market with your offering.  But when you have to modify it later (which you will), it will end up taking even more time to clean things up than if you’d just done it right in the first place.

You can see why we often call this “technical debt.”  You’re saving time now, but you’ll have to “pay it back” later, and the amount of extra time it takes is like the interest.  Primarily, we software people invented this analogy because it makes good sense to business people.  When you’re running a business, sometimes you need a piece of equipment.  You have two choices: you can borrow some money and buy it now, or you can save up and purchase it outright, later.  Buying it now allows you use it now, thus saving you costs somewhere else or giving you new capabilities you can capitalize on.  But you’re going to have to pay for it eventually, and you’ll have to pay the interest too.  Buying it later saves money in the long run, but denies you the advantages of the equipment for however long it takes to save up enough money.

This analogy really works because, despite what some people tend to believe, neither choice is always right or always wrong.  Sometimes it makes sense to borrow the money and buy it now; sometimes it makes sense to wait.  Likewise with software, sometimes it makes sense to just get the damn thing programmed as quickly as possible, and sometimes it makes sense to take the time and do it right the first time.  And business people have to make that call, and expressing the choice in financial terms makes it easy for them to understand the trade-offs.

For instance, when a company is first starting up, “do it fast” is nearly always the right answer.  (David Golden has a great post which explores this in greater detail.)  Basically, there’s no point in worrying about how hard it will be to change your software tomorrow when you’re not even sure there’s going to be a tomorrow.  Once a company leaves the startup phase, though, it’s time to think about paying down some of that technical debt.  If it doesn’t, the lack of agility means it may not be able to respond to customer demands quickly enough to thrive in the marketplace.

Now, technical debt is in many ways unique to every individual company, and there’s no one technique or approach that will work for everyone.  But everyone faces the same basic problem: I need my development team to keep making new features while they’re also paying off this debt; how can I have them accomplish even more than they were doing before without burning out, or creating new problems as fast as they fix the existing ones?  Hiring more people helps, of course, but it isn’t the complete solution.  But there are some general strategies that will work, and can be used by nearly every company that finds itself in the position of having a fair amount of technical debt to pay off.  These five areas nearly always need some attention, and they’re excellent things to think about when looking for ways to make your programmers more efficient, which not only gives them time to work on refactoring messy areas of your codebase, but also gives them more time and confidence to avoid creating technical debt in the first place.

Unit Tests  Few companies have no unit tests, but few have enough either.  I’ve heard people worry about creating too many unit tests, but honestly this is like your average American worrying about eating too many vegetables: I suppose it’s technically possible, but it’s unlikely to be a problem you’ll ever face.  It is possible for your unit tests to be too messy, though.  Remember: your unit tests are supposed to give you confidence.  The confidence you need to get in there and clean up some of that technical debt without being afraid you’re going to break something.  But your tests can’t give you confidence unless you’re confident in your tests.

Now, many people will tell you that you should put as much time and effort into your tests as you do your code (this is often—but not always—what people mean when they say “tests are code”).  I don’t necessarily agree with this.  I think that all the effort you put into your unit tests should go towards making your unit tests effortless.  I think your code should be elegant and concise: you don’t want it too simple, because it’s a short hop from “simple” to “simplistic.”  Imagine the Dr. Suess version of War and Peace and how hard that would be to get through—that’s what I’m talking about.  You need to use appropriate levels of abstraction, and using too few can be as bad as using too many.  You have to strike a balance.

On the other hand, your tests should be simple.  Very simple.  The simpler they are, the more likely your developers are to write them, and that’s crucial.  Whether you’re using TDD or not (but especially if you’re not), devs don’t particularly like writing tests, and anything that gives them an excuse not to is undesireable.  You want your tests to read like baby code, because that way not only will people not have to expend any brainpower to write new tests, but reading them (and therefore maintaining them) becomes trivial.  This doesn’t work as well for your code because of the crucial difference between code and tests:  Code often needs to be refactored, modified, and extended.  Tests rarely do—you just add new ones.  The only times you modify tests is when they start failing because of a feature change (as opposed to because you created a bug), and in many cases you’re just going to eliminate that test.  And the only times you should be refactoring them is when you’re working on making them even simpler than they already are.

So, in addition to trying to extend your test coverage to the point where refactoring becomes feasible, you should probably work on creating underlying structures to make writing new tests simple, and to make reading existing tests even easier.

Code Reviews  There are still plenty of companies out there not doing this one at all, so, if you fall in that category, you know where to start.  But even if you’re already doing them, you could probably be doing them more efficiently.  Code reviews are tough to implement well, and it has as much to do with the process you implement as with the software you choose to utilize.  Of course, it has a lot to do with the software you choose to utilize.  Code reviews, like unit tests, need to be simple to do, or people will find excuses not to do them.  Good software can really help with that.

Hopefully, like unit testing, code reviews are something that you don’t really need to be convinced that you should be doing.  But more people are resistant to code reviews than any other practice mentioned here.  They absolutely do require an investment of time and effort, and they absolutely do mean that you will deliver some features more slowly than you could without them.  Of course, if that extra time and effort catches a crucial customer-facing bug, you won’t be complaining.

But, honestly, catching bugs is not the primary benefit of code reviews ... that’s just the icing on the cake.  Code reviews just produce better software.  They’re the time and place where one developer on your team says to another: “hey, you know you could have used our new library here, right?”  (To which the response is inevitably: “we have a new libary?”)  They’re fantastic for cross-training too: don’t think code has to be reviewed by someone who already knows that code.  Have it reviewed by someone who’s never seen the code before and they’ll learn something.  Have your junior people reviewed by your senior people, and have your senior people reviewed by your junior people: they’ll all learn something.  It makes your codebase more consistent and builds a team dynamic.  It diffuses business knowledge and discourages silo effects.  If it happens to catch a bug now and then ... that’s just gravy.

Once you have code reviews in place, though, you’ll probably still want to tweak the process to fit your particular organization.  If you require reviews to be complete before code can be deployed, then code reviews are a blocking process, which comes with its own hassles.  Then again, if you allow deployment with reviews still outstanding, then you risk making the review process completely ineffectual.  So there’s always work to be done here.

Code Deployment  I suppose there are still software folks out there for whom “deploy” means “create a new shrink-wrap package,” but more and more it means “push to the website.”  At one company I worked at, deployment was a two-hour affair, which had to be babysat the entire time in case some step failed, and, if a critical bug was discovered post-launch, rolling back was even more difficult.  From talking with developers at other companies, I don’t believe this was an exception.

If your organization is big enough to have a person whose entire job is dedicated to deployment (typically called a “release manager”), then you don’t have to worry about this as much.  If that two hours is being spent at the end of a long day of preparation by one of your top developers, you’ve got some room for improvement.  But even if you have a seprate release manager, think how much you have to gain as your deployment gets shorter and simpler and more automated.  You can release more often, first of all, and that’s always a good thing.  And there are simple strategies for making rolling back a release almost trivial, and that’s absolutely a good thing.

Now, I’ve never been a fan of “continuous deployment” (by which I mean deployment happening automatically, triggered by checking in code or merging it).  But I do believe that you should strive for being able to deploy at any time, even mere minutes after you just finished deploying.  Part of achieving this goal is reaching continuous integration, which I am a fan of.  Having those unit tests you worked on so hard being run automatically, all the time, is a fantastic thing, which can free your developers from the tedious chore of doing it manually.  Plus, continuous integration, unlike code reviews, really does catch bugs on a regular basis.

Configuration Management  Similar to deployment, and for the same reasons.  If building a new production server is a heinous chore, you’re not going to want to do it often, and that’s bad.  Horizontal scaling is the simplest way to respond to spikes in traffic, and you should be able to bring a new server online practically at the drop of a hat.  It should be completely automated, involve minimal work from your sysadmins, and zero work from your developers.  There are all kinds of tools out there to help with this—Puppet, Chef, etc—and you should be using one.  Using virts goes a long way towards achieving this goal too.

For that matter, it should be trivial to bring up a new development server, or a new QA server.  Once that ceases to be a big deal, you’ll find all sorts of new avenues opening up.  Your developers and/or your QA engineers will start thinking of all sorts of new testing (particularly performance or scalability testing) that they’d never even considered before.  Figuring out how to handle database environments for arbitrary new servers can be a challenge for some shops, but it’s a challenge worth solving.

For Perl in particular, you also need to be able to reproduce environments.  You can’t spin up a new production web server alongside your existing ones if it’s going to be different than the rest.  If your server build process involves cloning a master virt, you don’t have to worry about this.  If you’re rebuilding a server by reinstalling Perl modules, you must expect that CPAN will have changed since you last built production servers, because CPAN is always changing.  For this reason, a tool like Pinto (or Carton, or CPAN::Mini, or something) is essential.

Version Control  In this day and age, I doubt seriously I need to convince anyone that they should start using version control ... although one does hear horror stories.  More likely though, you should be thinking about what VCS you’re using.  If you’re using CVS, you should probably be using Subversion, and, if you’re using Subversion, you should probably be using Git.  But along with thinking about which software to use and how to switch to a better one (preferably without losing all that great history you’ve built up), you also need to be thinking about how you’re using your VCS.

Are you using branches?  Should you be?  If you’re not, is it only because of the particular VCS you’re using?  If you’re using CVS or Subversion and telling me branching is a terrible idea, I can understand your point of view, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be using branches—it just means you should probably be using Git.  Now, granted, branches aren’t always the right answer.  But they’re often the right answer, and they allow experimentation by developers in a way that fosters innovation and efficiency.  But it takes work.  You have to come up with a way to use branches effectively, and not just your core developers should agree.  If you have separate front-end developers, for instance, they’re going to be impacted.  If you have a separate QA department, they’re definitely going to be impacted—in fact, they can often benefit the most from a good branching strategy.  Your sysadmins, or your ops team (or both), may also be affected.  If you’ve tried branches before and they didn’t work, maybe it wasn’t branching in general that’s to blame, and maybe it wasn’t even the particular VCS ... maybe it was the strategy you chose.  Feature branches, ticket branches, developer branches—again, there’s no one right answer.  Different strategies will work for different organizations.


So these are some of the things you need to be considering as you look to reduce your technical debt.  None of these things address the debt directly, of course.  But, in my experience, they all play a part in streamlining a development team by increasing efficiency and cohesiveness.  And that’s what you really need in order to start paying down that debt.

Restoration of balance: anticipated

Once again I’m going to forego my usual blog post, this time because I don’t really have anything to say I haven’t said before.  About a year and a half ago, I posted a rather long, rambling musing on the topic of fate.  This week I’m reminded of that posting, in a very positive way.  I continue to believe that everything happens for a reason, and even things that seem to be bad at the time can often lead to a better outcome than expected (or hoped).  Not always, of course.  But the universe has a way of tempering the bad with the good in such a way that makes it difficult not to believe that there is an ordered plan.  My current plan is still ongoing, so I can’t guarantee it’ll end up where I think it will.  But, so far, my faith in the universe is back on track, and aiming at a destination that I’m currently pretty excited about.

Until next week.