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Dec202010

Glad I’m Not the Only One

One of the hardest things about being “not of The Body” when it comes to the Christmas season is feeling like you constantly have to explain why you’re not as hap-hap-happy as everybody else is this time of year. It doesn’t matter that you — by which I mean I, of course — have already explained it; you (I) still feel misunderstood and somehow obligated to keep on trying to explain until you (I) get through to your (my) Christmas-loving loved ones. Okay, sure, you (I) have explained your (my) lingering childhood traumas, and everybody gets that and has expressed sympathy and such, but maybe there’s still the matter of your (my) performance anxiety (for lack of a better expression) when it comes to gifts, or the myriad ways in which traditional holiday activities fail to generate that warm glow in the dessicated hearts of we sad, emotionally dead grinchy types.

Thankfully, there are articulate people out there who share my feelings, and from whom I can borrow for illustration purposes. Case in point: Monica Bielanko, a.k.a. The Girl Who, a fellow Salt Laker who writes sharp, funny, profane, often painfully honest blog entries about, well, everything. And I do mean everything. Her blog is not for the faint-hearted, as when she’s discussing the physical discomforts that accompany pregnancy, for example. I have trouble relating to those entries, obviously (although I still enjoy reading them), but today’s post really could have been written by myself, we’re so simpatico on this Christmas stuff:

…for me, Christmas feels like I’ve accepted a part-time job that begins right after Thanksgiving and ends on New Year’s Day. Buying, wrapping, shipping, keeping up with expectations. God forbid some well-meaning acquaintance gifts you with a little something you weren’t expecting. MUST RECIPROCATE! Not only do I feel pressure to make each Christmas The Best Christmas Ever! but the whole spending money thing just makes me sick.
And it isn’t just buying the gifts that weighs heavy. I hate being asked what I want for Christmas. I know people want to get me something I like but even that feels like a job. Like, if I don’t list items then I’m not helping you out? Who feels comfortable listing off items they want/need? I feel like I’m adding to someone else’s Christmas stress. And is that what Christmas has come to? Your loved ones call and you tell them what you want and that’s it? This exchange of Christmas commodities?

Keeping up with expectations. God, that one turn of phrase is so poignant for me. I think maybe that’s the key to my holiday pathology, more than childhood damage, more than any philosophical high-mindedness about consumerism or personal weirdness about the retail industry blurring the seasons by pushing Christmas buying earlier and earlier into the year. What it really comes down to for me is the fear of disappointing somebody I love, either because I get them the wrong thing (or I don’t get them anything at all) or because I don’t unequivocally love something they’ve gotten me (I have an incredibly difficult time taking things back, no matter that I already have twelve of them or whatever). Expectations lead to fear of disappointment, fear of disappointment leads to anxiety, anxiety leads to unhappiness… powerful with the Dark Side is the Christmas season. At least for me.

This year has been a little better than the last several, though. That’s really due to my lovely Girlfriend making an admirable effort to understand my feelings and keep the scheduling under control, and I really, sincerely thank her for that. But even when we’re not overbooking our social calendar, nothing ever seems to make a dent in the damn anxiety…
Anyhow, go read the rest of Monica’s take on all this. As I said, she really tells it like it is, while acknowledging that how it is, isn’t necessarily how we scrooges want it to be.

ED. NOTE: Incidentally, that “not of The Body” thing is a Star Trek reference, just in case it went over your head. Specifically, it’s a reference to the classic episode “Return of the Archons,” which was the first of many in which Captain Kirk destroys a computer that has ruled over a stable but stagnant society for centuries. Dang computers, anyhow.

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Dec202010

It’s Like We’re Living in the Future!

On the original Star Trek, Captain Kirk seduced the alien babes with the help of his trusty Universal Translator. The Colonial warriors of the Battlestar Galactica (1978 vintage, of course) carried a gadget called the Languatron while on patrol, just in case they ran into non-English-speaking creatures. And in an inspired bit of silliness, Douglas Adams came up with the miraculous — and unexpectedly deicidal — Babel fish for the heroes of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Well, the new iPhone app Word Lens won’t exactly turn your phone into a Languatron or a Babel fish — it works with text only, not spoken language — but it’s pretty damn incredible nonetheless. Check it out:

This is not a hoax. It’s available at the iTunes app store and I’ve found reviews for it in a number of places. And even though the reviews appear to be mixed — the app’s literal approach leads to a good percentage of Engrish-style misunderstandings, apparently — the thing does work, if not quite optimally. One reviewer says, “Word Lens will work well enough if you need to read a street sign or specials in a restaurant.” And I can attest from my own experiences as a monoglot wandering alone through Germany that understanding street signs and menus is often all you need to get by.

As my Loyal Readers have probably figured out by now, I’m not a real cutting-edge guy, and I resist hopping on most bandwagons just on principle… but this app is almost enough to make me want an iPhone. Almost. Maybe when my five-year-old Nokia flip-job finally gives up the ghost and I have a practical incentive for buying a new phone…

(Via Andrew Sullivan, a political blogger who is often at his most interesting when he’s not writing about politics…)

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Dec182010

No More Commenting for the Time Being

Kids, I really hate to do this, since interacting with readers is one of the primary pleasures of having a blog, but I’m at my wit’s end. After several months of constant and steadily increasing comment-spam, I have decided to just shut the damn commenting feature off. You win, you grubby little spam-bot bastards.

Earlier this year, the spam seemed to be on the decline, causing me to naively think maybe it was finally going out of fashion, but it then it came back with a vengeance, with more of it flooding in than ever before. And just to make a bad thing even worse, the programming code that generates this crap has gotten more clever, using commenter names that look like something human beings might actually call themselves, and tailoring the body copy of the comments to my actual blog entries so they almost look like the real thing. This, of course, demands more of my attention when I’m sifting through them looking for the small handful of legitimate comments I still get, which equates to even more of my precious discretionary time being wasted. (Notice I didn’t say “free time,” since such a thing no longer seems to exist for me except as an abstract concept.)

The final straw was the several hours — no shit, hours — I’ve spent today eliminating 4,114 new spams. Let me repeat that for emphasis: four thousand and fourteen spam comments, received after only about 48 hours of not monitoring this blog. I just can’t keep up with that kind of volume anymore, not if I’m going to do anything else with my life. And that includes writing blog entries.

For those helpful souls who would ask why I don’t just set up more robust security, I’ve tried. The Movable Type software that runs Simple Tricks and Nonsense supposedly has an authentication feature to help deal with this nonsense, but my skills have proven insufficient to actually make the thing work. So, until I can chat with my webmaster Jack and figure what to do, I’m afraid I have no choice but to just close the spigot.

I’m sorry, Loyal Readers. I’m going to miss our conversations. Although, to tell the truth, the conversation has tapered off so much in the last year that I’ve been wondering lately if anybody is still reading my little ramblings, at least on any kind of regular basis. Jaquandor said something similar recently, about how his traffic is down and how discouraging it can be to spend a lot of time working on the perfect blog entry, only to receive a deafening silence in return. I guess Facebook is eating up a lot of the casual conversation that used to occur on blogs, as sad as that is.

Which reminds me, if you really want to chat with me while the comments are disabled, I am active on Facebook, and you can also email me at jason-at-jasonbennion.com (substituting “@” for “-at-“, of course). I’m hoping the commenting hiatus will be short-lived, but Jack’s a busy guy, too, so this problem may well take a back seat for a while. In the meantime, though, I’ll keep hammering out the content, so I hope you’ll all keep reading…

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Dec182010

Just When You Think They Won’t Do the Right Thing Ever Again

Congress has just voted to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Good.

It was a stupid and short-sighted policy from the start. Honestly, it really doesn’t matter what you think about gay marriage or gay people generally. If someone is willing to wear the uniform and carry a weapon, and they’re physically and emotionally capable of doing so, what does it matter who they choose to love or what they do with their genitalia?

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Dec132010

Dirk Gently’s Electric Monk

A couple days ago, I mentioned that the novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams contains a wisecrack about my hometown of Salt Lake City. (Actually, I guess SLC is better described as the urban core of my home region, as opposed to my actual hometown, which is a little burg called Riverton several miles to the south of SLC proper. But I digress. As usual.) I was pretty sure I remembered the generalities of the joke well, but because I’m essentially an insecure and obsessive-compulsive wreck, I had to spend part of my day off today rummaging in the basement for my copy of the book in order to prove a point to myself. I am delighted to report that my memory had not failed me, even though it’s been years — not since high school, now that I think about it — since I read Dirk Gently. Here’s the exact quote:

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

 

Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they’d have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City. It had never heard of Salt Lake City, of course. Nor had it ever heard of a quingigillion, which was roughly the number of miles between this valley and the Great Salt Lake of Utah.

As I said the other day, I thought this was incredibly funny when I was a teenager. Seeing it again, I think much of its impact derived from it being the first time I ever saw Salt Lake mentioned in a book published for a wide (i.e., non-Utah-specific) audience, amplified by the fact that the novelist was from the UK. That a British man had even heard of Salt Lake — a British man I already idolized for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — was mind-blowing. That he correctly identified one of the most distinguishing characteristics of your average Utahn — our sweet gullibility — and so blithely poked fun at it… well, I’ve remembered this joke for over 20 years, haven’t I? Simply incredible.

Yeah. Dirk Gently. I probably ought to re-read that one of these days…

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Dec102010

Imagine There’s No Heaven

I wasn’t planning on writing anything on the anniversary of John Lennon’s death. I figured there would be plenty of other voices on the InterWebs this week paying tribute and remembering, and anyway I honestly didn’t think I had much to say about the subject because, as crappy as this is going to sound, John Lennon just doesn’t mean that much to me.

Please don’t start sharpening your pitchforks and lighting up the torches. I really don’t mean to be offensive or insensitive. John’s murder was a horrific act that hurt thousands, if not millions, of people, and there’s no question that he was a talented man who wrote some genuinely great and immensely popular songs. But when it comes right down to it, I respect the music of John Lennon and The Beatles far more than I actually enjoy it. It’s been overexposed to such a huge degree that the only emotion I experience when I hear most of it is weariness. I don’t really dislike The Beatles. I’m just tired of hearing them every time I turn on the radio, not to mention hearing about how damn great they were.

However, at some point while I was reading all those other blog posts about what happened 30 years ago, I had a sort of epiphany. I remembered something related to John Lennon that does mean a great deal to me, something he did not create directly but which depends on his best-known solo recording, “Imagine,” to achieve its impact. I’m talking about — and this may sound a little strange — one of my favorite episodes of the old TV series WKRP in Cincinnati.

Continue Reading…

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Dec092010

A Dirk Gently TV Series? Really?

I think most of my Loyal Readers are probably familiar with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — that sublimely silly sci-fi spoof by Douglas Adams — in one or another of its many varied forms. (It has been a radio show, a low-budget BBC television series, a big-budget Hollywood feature film, and, of course, a bestselling novel.) But I’d be very surprised if many of you know Adams’ other major literary works, a novel called Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and its sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. I’ll be honest… I don’t remember them all that well myself. In fact, I’m not certain I ever got around to reading Tea-Time, and the only thing that has stayed with me about the first one is a joke at the expense of my hometown… something about an electric monk who has recently started malfunctioning and is therefore believing in things they’d have a hard time accepting in Salt Lake City.

Well, I thought that was terribly witty when I was in my teens.

Anyhow, somebody remembers the Dirk Gently books, because I’ve just learned via Boing Boing that the BBC has done a TV adaptation of them. Here’s a brief and not-terribly-informative trailer for it:

Might be something worth seeking out. If you like this sort of thing. Which I do. No word on when or if it’s coming to American TV, though…

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Dec092010

Another Step Toward the Future

Big news from the Final Frontier: SpaceX, the spaceflight company started by Paypal and Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk, has become the first to successfully launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft that was designed, built, and operated entirely by a commercial entity, rather than a government agency. You can read the details here, but in brief, SpaceX’s capsule-style Dragon spacecraft was launched yesterday morning aboard one of the company’s own Falcon 9 boosters (which you may recall were successfully tested earlier this year); the Dragon circled the earth twice at an altitude of 186 miles, then returned beneath three big parachutes for a soft splashdown in the Pacific, just like the old Apollo moon ships. The flight was flawless, and the Dragon even came down within a mile of the waiting recovery ship.

With the future of NASA’s Ares booster and Orion space capsule uncertain and the final flights of the Space Shuttle Program fast approaching, the Falcon/Dragon system now looks to be our nation’s best bet at maintaining our spaceflight independence, rather than having to bum rides off the Russians. The next step will be bringing the Dragon to within sight of the International Space Station, followed by a third test flight in which it will actually dock with the ISS. SpaceX, feeling its oats a bit, has proposed combining those two flights and just going straight to the station, but hasn’t yet received permission to do that. And then, assuming all these tests go as well as yesterday’s, SpaceX will win a $1.6 billion contract for 12 flights to the ISS. The Dragon will be carrying only supplies on these missions, no humans — passengers are going Russian once the Shuttle retires — but the craft was designed to be configurable for passengers, so maybe once it’s proved itself… well, we’ll see.

I’d like to believe that Americans will remain at the forefront of manned spaceflight, or at least involved in it, but there doesn’t seem to be much public interest in it anymore, and with the politicians now obsessing over the national debt (while stubbornly turning a blind eye to the single largest item in the budget, our insanely huge military budget), I can’t help but feel pessimistic. Maybe outsourcing the logistics of spaceflight to private companies will help. Maybe it won’t. As I said, we’ll see.

As long as I’m blathering about space stuff, and on a somewhat happier note to wrap up the entry, NPR blogger Robert Krulwich was pondering the subject of scale the other day, and he used for example the fact that the Apollo astronauts really explored very, very little of the moon’s surface, in spite of the perceived significance of their missions. He used some interesting maps to illustrate his point, showing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s tracks superimposed over a football field and a baseball diamond. Interesting stuff… but things got really interesting when he received a message from none other than Armstrong himself, explaining why he and Buzz didn’t venture very far from the Eagle… and suggesting he, Armstrong, would’ve liked to go much farther. Armstrong, if you don’t know, is the most reclusive of all the Apollo astronauts. He rarely makes public appearances, and unlike so many of his colleagues, he hasn’t written a book about his experiences, so having him send an email response to a blog entry is a pretty big deal. Go check it out!

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Dec062010

The Triumph of Intellect and Romance over Brute Force and Cynicism

Starting off the week with a dim, gray, and rainy Monday. I think we need a happy video to liven things up, don’t you?

Today’s selection will probably not make a lot of sense to some of my Loyal Readers, but for all you folks who are about to be baffled, trust me: this is very cool and funny. This is what’s known in the TV business as a “cold open,” a brief segment of a show that precedes the opening credits. This is actually a pretty common device, especially among hour-long dramas and talk shows. CSI, for example, always does a cold open consisting of the discovery of the dead body of the week, followed by the bad pun of the week, and then a smash cut to The Who singing the theme song.

In this case, we’re looking at a cold open from a recent episode of The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson — the best late-night talk show currently running, in my humble opinion; Leno, Letterman, and Conan, meh — for which a friend of mine was lucky enough to be in the live studio audience. Which means I heard about this opening a couple weeks in advance. For some reason, though, the bit was cut when the show actually aired. (I’m guessing some network suit thought it was too obscure and viewers wouldn’t get it, but I don’t actually know.) But the 21st Century being what it is, the clip naturally leaked onto the InterWebs last week, and now here it is for everyone’s pleasure and edification:

Ferguson is riffing on Doctor Who, of course, the classic British science-fiction series that ran from 1963 to 1989 and was recently revived (in a somewhat more grown-up version) to much acclaim. While it’s all presented in a very silly fashion, Ferguson pretty handily summarizes all the major ideas of the show here. And in case you’re wondering, the nervous-looking young man who shows up right at the end of the routine is Matt Smith, the latest (and youngest) actor to play the iconic character.

Speaking of Matt Smith, I’ve been meaning to mention that he and the rest of the Who cast have recently been right here in my humble little home state of Utah, filming an episode of the show in Monument Valley, that starkly beautiful landscape made famous in countless Westerns and TV commercials. This marks the first time Doctor Who has filmed in the United States, and even though I’m more of a casual fan than truly rabid about this show, I am absolutely delighted that they came here, to my own backyard, in order to mark the occasion. I have no idea if Monument Valley will be standing in for some alien planet — remember, Pixar’s Princess of Mars project has been shooting in the same general area — or if it will be properly identified for what it is. Considering the Doctor is a time-traveler, I have a hunch it’ll probably be an Old West setting in the classic Hollywood style (paging John Ford!). But nevertheless, it’ll be fun to see a piece of home on a show that is so uniquely British.

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