Bob Dylan is my favorite singer/songwriter.  Original, I know, and I’ll spare you the diatribe about his greatness as his

Album: Slow Train Coming (1979)
Link:  Lyrics/Audio

I’m not sure if “Man Gave Names to All the Animals” is the worst song Dylan has ever recorded, but it’s certainly close.  Coming of the earlier portion of his descent into Christian-themed music and through twelve verses of banal, unironic descriptions of — for the most part — farm animals, Dylan alludes to the story of Adam bestowing names upon all God’s creatures:

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl in the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.  And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.

Genesis 2:19-20, King James Version

Dylan, however, tends to phrase Adam’s exploits in this regard with considerably less poetry than the indelible King James Version of the Bible.  Take, for instance, my favorite verse of the lot:

He saw an animal up on a hill
Chewing up so much grass until she was filled
He saw milk comin’ out but he didn’t know how
“Ah, think I’ll call it a cow”

He couples his childish lyrics — and really, this song’s only legitimate home is within the disease-ridden confines of a Kindergarten classroom — with a hefty serving of backing Gospel singers as would be his wont for some time.  (There will be other entries that deal with more egregious uses of the Gospel tradition, which I do like, by and large.  It can, however, be abused and mutated to horrendous effect.)

To end off what amounts to a musical version of a See ‘n’ Say, Dylan concludes the song with an ellipsis as if challenging you to name the animal he is describing in the last verse.  Go ahead.  See if you can guess, but you have to actually listen to the roughly 4:20 that precedes this point in the song because I did, and it’s very lonely out here.

This article is cross-posted at Foolish Human.

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Forgive the bad pun in the headline.  I couldn’t resist.

I don’t know if anyone out there still actually believes in the notorious “Face on Mars” located in the Red Planet’s Cydonia region, but just in case, those of you with any lingering trepidation may put your fears to rest.  PhysOrg.com has just published an article outlining a new photograph of the area at a much higher resolution that confirms (again) the face is nothing more than your common, garden variety Martian mesa and reaffirms those who’ve been shouting the Face was simply a byproduct of optical illusion and pareidolia.  (Go figure that the originating citation from the PhysOrg.com article emanates from FOXNews.com, which has surprised me for the second time in a week with a well-reasoned article.  Murdoch must be losing his sensationalist touch, but take a quick skim through the comment boards, and you’ll see there are still a handful of clingers-on that chalk this newest photo up as further spin from NASA, released to embolden the space agency’s vast conspiracy aimed at keeping us in the dark about alien life on Mars.)

Imagine my surprise — disclosure: glee — that the Wikipedia article about pareidolia to which I linked actually uses the Face as its primary visual example.  Other examples of the phenomenon include, of course, Jesus Christs on burnt toast, figures we see in cloud formations, and this eggplant that looks like Richard Nixon.  Pareidolia also applies to perceived patterns related to senses other than sight.

An eggplant.  What will Tricky Dick think of next?

Other Resources:

“Extreme Close-Up of the Face on Mars” – Universe Today
This article gives the most in-depth analysis of the progression from the original Viking Orbiter photo to the current one.  You’ll see a brief timeline of photos taken, each one clearer than the next, and it should have been abundantly clear even after the 2001 photograph that there wasn’t anything even particularly odd about the mesa, at least insofar as it resembles a face because, of course, it doesn’t.  There are a few anomaly hunters in the comment boards on this article too.  This article is also cited in the PhysOrg.com release.

This article was originally posted at The: Foolish Human.

Courtesy of goodrob13's photostream. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/goodrob13/3928208574/)

So the Obama administration is presently hemorrhaging classified information courtesy of WikiLeaks, the Bush administration is doing so posthumously, the earth’s crust is hemorrhaging oil, and Tom Vilsack is simply battling an embarrassing case of hemorrhoids after/during the stress of the Shirley Sherrod debacle.  Those are the big stories at the moment, but in true form for a real live Twenty-First Century Narcissist, I’m not really thinking about all that right now.

Something terrible happened on Sunday at Dave & Buster’s… I lost.

In and of itself, losing is not a rarity in my life though I am, in general, more accustomed to winning.  But on Sunday evening, I lost in a big way.  I lost at everything.  Even now, my ego hasn’t restored itself, nor will the chasm be sated or filled by gobbling up Scrabble wins and cheap, trivial victories.  The merciless drubbings I received left me pithed like a dissected frog against a lab mat, immobile and dumb, twitching violently, wanting for an elusive victory at something, anything.

First, I absorbed two straight losses at what was essentially a free throw competition — something I don’t believe I’d ever lost until two nights ago — and then a demoralizing defeat at the Super Shot basketball game.  I was put away handily on the air hockey table by a score of 7-2, at the trivia board three straight times in a row, and I managed to die before my partner in two co-op campaigns on Terminator: Salvation and House of the Dead 4.  I am still surprised I avoided making a hellish scene and tearing some poor child’s arms off in a rabid, ego-fueled frenzy.  There is nothing that incites a petulant rage quite like the perturbation of the competitive spirit, and in my twenty-six years of competing at various events, I have never taken the prospect lightly, which has cost me more than one enjoyable evening playing Taboo or Risk with friends.  (The two remaining teams in a game of risk cannot enter into an alliance with the intention of ending the game in a truce when other armies have been exhausted.  The game must be played to the death.  The incident that spawned this aside happened nearly two years ago and serves as a cautionary tale to all Risk players that treaty restrictions must be stipulated before the game, and in the interest of competition, alliances should generally be disallowed.)  I did manage to win the Daytona racing game, but there isn’t much satisfaction in placing first when the difficulty is set to Easy, the transmission to Automatic, and the game itself is a subpar racer made by SEGA in 1994.

Whether this rage is the justifiable product of primate evolution or a pathetic shard of the male ego still buried in my amygdala (probably both), I almost never see the point in playing “for fun”.  Playing for fun is playing to win, and the fun comes as a by-product of real competition, not half-assed lollygagging through a novel activity.  I don’t want any mealy-mouthed “the fun is in the journey” platitudes either.  The journey isn’t fun unless you care about the destination, and if you don’t care about the destination, why take the journey?  This isn’t to say that I’m always an unreasonable loser, but most people who know will probably tell you that I’m certainly not a tranquil one.  I’d be loathe to disagree with them publicly and at the risk of self-delusion.

But that’s just one asshole’s opinion, a maligned philosophy that emanates from a severely wounded ego, and if you must know, while I’d been planning to post on the site for a few days now, the only reason I got around to it this afternoon is because Master Gorman needled me this morning and pointed out that he was beating me easily in the post ratio.

Trust me, I’m bordering on illiterate right now as I’ve been staring dumbly at this computer screen for going on six hours with very little to do but ponder the slow waste of the world, the burden of being a vile loser, and the long-term implications of muscle atrophy.  I am in no condition to be blogging, and if you were looking for, you know, information, you’ve caught me on the wrong day.  If you catch me on the right day, you might get to read some better dressed gibberish, more eloquent bullshit.  You might not be subjected to such public conceit. (Neil, there will be actual content next time.  I promise.)

So for now, it’s time to suck down my private devastation and try to see the bigger picture.  Stare into the Hubble Deep Field image I’ve now made my desktop wallpaper and contemplate smallness for awhile.  Make this nightmare seem mercifully silly.

This article is cross-posted at Foolish Human.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/migrainechick/ / CC BY 2.0

So this article on the NewScientist website really chapped my ass.

It cites the publication of a new study that outlines successful use of acupuncture to treat spinal injuries induced in rats.  Now, I’m not a doctor, and I’m unable to access the full-text of the study in question.  My suspicions are that some qualified party will cite methodological issues, or more likely, the study will remain a footnote  in light of the overwhelming weight of evidence in favor of the interpretation that acupuncture possesses no therapeutic benefit beyond that of placebo. (Maybe not.  We’ll see, but I doubt it.)

From the article:

Acupuncture’s scientific credentials are growing. Trials show that it improves sensory and motor functions in people with spinal cord injuries.

Well, not really.  For a great review of the current literature regarding acupuncture and an even greater deal of irate bitching about a fishy article written by The YOU Docs, Drs. Mehmet Oz and Mike Roizen, I highly suggest reading an article on the subject written by Dr. Mark Crislip over at Science-Based Medicine.  In it he outlines the results of numerous systematic reviews of the medical literature as well as dubious claims made about the mechanisms by which acupuncture works its supposed magic.  It appears that Drs. Oz and Roizen are attracted to the mysticism surrounding traditional Chinese medicine.

(Harriet Hall has also written a very thorough overview of acupuncture.)

Furthermore, the scientific paper to which the NewScientist links in the blockquote (different than the paper the article is discussing) does not deal directly with traditional acupuncture but with electroacupuncture in which an electrical impulse is introduced to the nerve.  This is an actual intervention that will induce some type of physiological response and cannot be considered acupuncture as Dr. Crislip asserts in his piece.  It seems dishonest to equate the two since there is a big difference between simply placing a needle into someone’s skin and running an electrical current into their body.

Of further interest is another post by Dr. Steven Novella regarding the placebo effect, one of the more misunderstood health-related phenomenons due to the complexities of interpreting study results.  The standard perception goes like this:  you walk into the doctor complaining of pain, the doctor gives you a sugar pill that you think is a pain reliever, and because you believe you’ve received treatment, your brain responds in kind and ramps up the production of natural healers, presumably the immune system.  Viola!  You’re better, and you didn’t have to ingest any dangerous drugs.

As you’ll see when reading Dr. Novella’s article and the mostly excellent discussion on the comment board that follows, the placebo effect doesn’t really work that way.  Most of it can be chalked up to study artifacts, bad study design, and reporting biases on the part of both doctors and patients.  Without an objective way of measuring pain or nausea or other types of discomfort, many of these studies are hindered by the need for patients to fill out a pain evaluation, the results of which can vary greatly from study to study.

You’ll notice all of my links are from Science-Based Medicine.  So sue me.  They devote their time and energy to evaluating dubious claims and pseudoscience, and they are an absolutely fantastic resource for anyone interested in the complicated study of medicine.  At the very least, reading many of these posts should help elucidate why all-or-nothing claims made by various pseudoscientific outfits are silly and don’t incorporate a nuanced approach to the business of getting things as right as possible.

This article is cross-posted at Foolish Human.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I used to watch Bill Nye the Science Guy when I was a kid, and his show stands as probably the earliest discernible science-related influence I can remember.

Imagine my disappointment when I happened across Brian Dunning’s post over at Skepticblog that discusses Nye’s recent promotion of a cleaning product called Ionator from the company Activeion.  Essentially, the company has recruited Nye to endorse a line of water ionizers the cheapest of which is priced at $169 and the science behind which is unproven and dubious.

I’m not going to get into the debate over the science of their claims.  You can scroll through the comments on Skepticblog, which do a decent enough job of hashing out the quandaries, and you can read an article by Dr. Stephen Lower, a retired chemist from the Department of Chemistry at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, that Dunning links to and which discusses the general quackery of ionized water claimants and provides an interesting remedial chemistry lesson about the subject.

My overall impression is that at best, Activeion’s product is a ripoff that does what they say it does despite the fact that its effects could be achieved for a few dollars and without the aid of the ionizer, and at worst, it’s a pseudo-scientific scam.  (If you’re interested in specifics, I highly recommend reading the discussion.)

I don’t agree with Dunning’s reasoning that we should withhold judgment if Nye took up the job because of money woes.  If Bill Nye knowingly promoted snake oil, he has done so at the peril of his credibility within the skeptical community as a science advocate.  If he was duped, at least he wasn’t a witting scammer, but even so, it’s fair enough to say he should have vetted Activeion’s claims and checked with one of his many contacts that would have had access to pertinent knowledge.

Either way, my opinion of Nye is diminished.

This article is a cross-posted at Foolish Human.

Image Courtesy of DevilCrayon (http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035676122@N01) under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

(That title sounds like something I never hoped I’d write. The first part is admittedly stolen from the Round Table via this Monty Python sketch.)

If you’re an office worker like me, you probably spend quite a bit of time clicking a mouse and pounding on a keyboard.  The time you spend doing this also might lead to some manner of repetitive stress injury.  In my case, my right index finger is nearly perpetually swollen, stiff, and in pain because I learn my lessons slowly and rail in the face of common sense when it comes to my own well-being.

There are a number of ways to combat your office-wrought deterioration.  You could drop money on ergonomic products like gel pads to support your wrist or braces designed to prevent the common motions that bring on Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and while there is some debate as to how efficacious many of these interventions are, they’ll probably bring you some physical respite.   Your other option would be to take the less expensive route and attempt to reduce the number of mouse clicks and keystrokes you perform each day.   Here are two ways you could do that.

AutoHotkey

AutoHotkey is a tool known — I would imagine — to most computer nerds, and while my brother, a Computer Science major, recommended I learn to use it, I took quite awhile to start digging into it.  Before I go any further, let me stress that I am a computer/coding/technology enthusiast.  I learn what I can and pick up things here or there, and for personal purposes, I’m relatively proficient, but as a handful of my friends and my aforementioned brother are either professionally or scholastically involved in the computer fields, I should extend the caveat that you take my tech advice as gospel at your own peril.  Indeed, I have a pronounced case of cybernetic penis envy.  Read that as you will.

Anyhow, AutoHotkey essentially allows you to write scripts, macros, shortcuts, etc. once you’ve downloaded the program.  The nice advantage to AutoHotkey is its simplicity.  Even a dullard like me can manage to streamline a few processes and cut down the daily digital (think fingers) mileage.  For instance, I’ve assigned shortcuts that open up the programs I use most often.  In the following example, “#” represents the WIN key, and “w” represents, well, the letter “w”:

#w::
Run WINWORD.EXE
return

This bleeding simple code launches Microsoft Word when you press WIN+w.  Let’s say you’re running a program like Firefox that doesn’t have such an obvious Windows call:

#f::
Run C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe
return

So if you pres WIN+f, Firefox will launch without your having to go to your Desktop and find the icon or even start the program from your Quick Launch bar.  The problem with the way I’ve written the Firefox shortcut is that I haven’t made it incredibly portable.  In other words, if I wanted to convert the AHK (AutoHotkey format) file into an EXE and run it on another computer, it might not work depending on the local configuration or Windows version running on that machine.  There are ways to make it more portable like using the built-in variable %A_ProgramFiles% in place of C:\Program Files (this is paraphrased from the Quick-start Tutorial on the website), but I have no imminent plans to do so.  You’ll have to check AutoHotkey’s documentation.

Other than that, I have to copy and paste a number of form letters for a variety of reasons and send them to people via email.  I’ve gotten pretty quick at navigating from file to file, but every time I go on a rampage, my right hand begins complaining and cramping up something fierce.  Why not write a script to type everything out for me?  That way I simply create a new email and press the shortcut.  In the following example, “^” stands for Ctrl, “!” stands for Alt, and {Enter} sends a Return/Enter keystroke:

^!h::
Send Dear Widgets Inc.,{Enter}{Enter}I am extremely displeased with the quality of your widgets. I demand a full refund for the widgets I have purchased in bulk, and I plan to take my business to Customized Widget Solutions.{Enter}{Enter}Sincerely,{Enter}{Enter}Lord Knickerswitch
return

There is probably an easier way to do this, and please, if anyone who actually knows what they’re doing wants to posit a few suggestions, I’d love to hear them. If you’ve downloaded AutoHotkey already, write this into a Notepad file, save as an AHK file, and run it. Then open a new Notepad file, place your cursor in the body and hit Ctrl+Alt+h. See what happens.  If you performed all actions correctly, you should have seen this letter typed out before your very eyes after pressing just three keys.  Your joints will thank you.

I stress again, these are very elementary examples of two things I’ve done with a base and exceedingly simple knowledge.  The AutoHotkey documentation provides a very complete reference of the variables and other functions available.  They are numerous, and hopefully, I’ll have some more layman updates for which my brother and tech-pro friends can chastise me.

NiftyWindows

The second bit is more of an endorsement and less of an example.  Download the NiftyWindows EXE from Enovatic-Solutions.

This program also uses AutoHotkey, so to use NiftyWindows, you’ll need to download the former.  Reading through the features, you’ll notice that NiftyWindows provides a set of mouse and keyboard shortcuts that help in dealing with the dearth of simultaneous windows you’re liable to open throughout a full working day.  These shortcuts allow the user to quickly resize or make windows transparent, stick windows on top so that they stay in view as you click through others, minimize, close, and roll up all the annoying work and non-work related windows littering your monitor.

In the twenty minutes or so it takes to program the NiftyWindows shortcuts into your muscle memory and grow comfortable with using the various interactions, you’ll have saved yourself future time, hassle, keystrokes, and mouseclicks.  As far as the website notes, this program works with Windows XP and previous versions.  I haven’t tested it on Windows Vista or  Windows 7, so I cannot vouch for it in those environments.  However, I do run Windows 7 at home, and I wouldn’t be surprised if NiftyWindows’ benefits are much less pronounced when used with 7, which is a much better and more convenient operating system than XP, as it should be after all this time.

NiftyWindows is also an open-source project under the GNU General Public License, so you’re free to modify it to suit your needs if you’re able and willing.

To get any real benefit from either of these solutions, you’ll need to dig through the documentation yourself, and if there are AutoHotkey junkies or efficiency gurus out there with suggestions that are easy to implement for idiots like me, please post comments.  I’d also like to hear about anything that helps refine or correct the information above.

Image Courtesy of Ian Britton and FreeFoto.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license.

As best I can remember, I originally posted this blog post some time during 2005 or 2006 on the now-defunct WritingUp.com, and because I’ve been too busy (or something) to maintain a semblance of a working blog these past few months, I hereby provide this tasty archival morsel.  It is my sincerest hope that posting these foul words precludes some increased production on my part in the near future.

In case my words are misunderstood in these strange and uncertain times, let it be known in no uncertain terms that I do not promote or condone violence against anyone for their race, religion, creed, or sexual orientation.

Indeed. Remember the Sabbath, and keep it holy. This is perhaps the most important Commandment ever carved into a stone tablet, and it is one you would all do well to heed if you wish to avoid finding yourself in the Sea of Souls at the mercy of your best friend. He will gnaw upon your head like it is beef jerky for all eternity. Dante seemed to think absolute zero epitomizes ultimate suffering, but I would much rather spend my Afterlife in excruciating frigidity than splashing about with billions of other lost souls. This is your future, though, if you fail to worship every Sunday.

But this thing isn’t about Dante or Inferno. Certainly not. For the first time in a few years, I picked up a New World Translation (NWT) Holy Bible and got farther than I ever have before. I got all the way to Chapter Five of the Book of Matthew, in fact, with a .38 Special from about sixty paces away. It took me three shots to do it, but that third hollow-point bullet made the thing dance a jig for one split second. I was lucky to have hit it at all from such a distance seeing as how twilight was falling upon the land, and aiming the pistol proved more difficult in the dark than it had earlier in the afternoon. After savoring the feat for a few brief moments, though, I reloaded the pistol and fired five more shots point blank through the Bible. I could hear them screaming – Noah, Bathsheba, Abram, Jonah, and all the rest. I got every one of those miserable fuckers. They’ve been asking for it for a long time. They should consider themselves lucky, though. If I hadn’t have been immersed in a game of Pistol Baseball, I would have fired twelve more rounds into the thing.

Before I get any further, I must stress that I would never terrorize a King James Bible in this manner if only because the King James Version exhibits more grace and style in Genesis 1:1 than the NWT manages to all the way through Revelation. A King James Bible is truly a thing of beauty not be sullied by bullets, fire, or half-assed updates meant to sedate modern day human beings by appealing to them on their level. Whoever thought putting the NWT into widespread circulation was a good idea should be castrated for crimes against quality and literary eloquence. The NWT is nothing more than a dogmatic abortion that foretells of darker days to come. It is a harbinger that we mustn’t ignore, for if we do, one day we will be seeing biblical translations in text-speak and backwoods West Virginian slang. The Bible will swell with inaccuracy. It shall be overrun by anachronism, and we shall all be worse people for it because, as it stands, the King James Bible could very well be one of the greatest works of literature every composed. However, my money for the top spot is on Gilgamesh.

Nonetheless, this outburst against the Good News and its preliminary component was not just an attack against literary inadequacy but an exorcism of sorts of lingering demons from fifth grade when I was made to memorize the Lord’s Prayer, the Nicene Creed, and the Lutheran Pledge of Allegiance (I shit you not) and recite them all in front of my class. Word travels fast in parochial schools, and it was a well-known fact that I was an unbaptized heathen running amok among good, upstanding young Christians. The bastards made an example of me, and they might as well have marched me down the hallway while letting the entire student body take bites out of my legs. I am not normally a patient man, and I have been looking for revenge for a long time without ever saying a word.

But this is all the distant past, as everything is becoming the distant past more quickly than we recognize. Sometimes the only thing to do is shoot a bullet straight through those old memories, wake the fuck up, and realize when you’ve been hoodwinked.

“God hath delivered me to the ungodly, and turned me over into the hands of the wicked. I was at ease, but he hath broken me asunder: he hath also taken me by my neck, and shaken me to pieces, and set me up for his mark. His archers compass me round about, he cleaveth my reins asunder, and doth not spare; he poureth out my gall upon the ground. He breaketh me with breach upon breach, he runneth upon me like a giant.” Job 16:11-14, King James Translation

“God hands me over to young boys
And into the hands of wicked ones he throws me headlong. I had come to be at ease, but he proceeded to shake me up; And he grabbed me by the back of the neck and proceeded to smash me, And he sets me up as a target for himself. His archers encircle me; He splits open my kidneys and feels no compassion; He pours out my gallbladder to the very earth. He keeps breaking through me with breach after breach; He runs at me like a mighty one.” Job 16:11-14, New World Translation

Simon Read. War of Words: A Tale of Newsprint and Murder. Union Square Press, 2009. 320 pages. ISBN-10: 1402756127

“Journalism [is]… a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world of misfits and drunkards and failures.” — Hunter S. Thompson

Simon Read begins War of Words: A Tale of Newsprint and Murder with two quotations, the first an excerpt from the Daily Dramatic Chronicle (later the San Francisco Chronicle) comparing the marksmanship of American journalists to that of their French counterparts and the second a fitting quote from Thompson’s indelible The Great Shark Hunt, a landmark collection of essays and articles that chronicle Thompson’s slog through the mid- to late-1960s and 1970s.

It is hard to imagine anything (journalistically, at least) that rivals the depravity Thompson encountered and, in some cases, perpetuated during the Hippie movement, the 1972 presidential campaign, and Richard Nixon with the notable exception of the Vietnam Conflict.  Enter War of Words, Read’s account of an unimaginable and, by turns, almost comic rivalry between the founding editors of the San Francisco Chronicle Michael and Charles De Young and Reverend Isaac S. Kalloch, mayor of San Francisco from 1879-81.  While not an account of drug-fueled rampages like those of the often prescient Thompson, it is somehow fitting the events Read recounts are prefaced with a quote from a writer who spurned the journalistic establishment as cowardly and hypocritically beholden to calling itself objective.  While Michael and Charles de Young couldn’t be considered cowards nor — as Read illustrates — objective, their actions and involvement with Mayor Kalloch were something of an antecedent to the activities that spurred Hunter S. Thompson to write those words and were coincidentally driven by the founding editors of a paper for which Thompson himself would one day write.

At its heart, War of Words is a quintessential American story, a tale of two ambitious, young men who built one of the largest and most influential newspapers of the day almost from scratch and the eventual corruptive influence of the power they eventually gained. Michael and Charles de Young literally began their endeavor with a $20 loan from a friend in order to start a theatre review that they would hand deliver throughout San Francisco.

Read doesn’t necessarily comment or appear to push a morality tale upon us, though it is telling that he makes sure to note that the de Youngs’ transition from entertainment editors to political opinion-makers came under the auspices of providing San Francisco with a newspaper willing to expose graft and corruption among city and state politicians in an attempt to restore dignity to the government.  It was to be a paper for the people, but as circulation grew, the de Youngs (more notably Charles) began to take personal stake in the outcomes of elections.  The San Francisco political scene in the 1870s was tumultuous and marked by immigration disputes over how to deal with a swelling Chinese workforce and the doldrums of a gold rush that had waned over the past twenty years.  This new xenophobia in many ways led to the creation and galvanization of the Workingmen’s Party, a political entity that Rev. Isaac Kalloch, the de Youngs’ eventual nemesis, would eventually come to lead.

Ultimately, Kalloch proves to be the lynchpin and powering force behind Read’s narrative in War of Words.  In his review of War of Words for the Chronicle, Joshua Spivak notes that Kalloch is the richest of any of the characters, and I tend to agree on this account.

Kalloch started as a minister in New England whose riveting, boisterous speeches gained him a considerable celebrity among his parishioners.  An inspiring orator, he found his public life considerably altered by allegations that he’d had an affair with another woman, an old friend of his from university, at a nearby hotel.  It is during Read’s descriptions of the trial that War of Words truly hits its stride and becomes a brisk account of mostly salacious details.  There is no insignificant amount of comedy for the modern reader as Read notes that descriptions of sexual acts such as those given under oath by the hotel manager were certainly not commonplace and likely shocking to attendees of the trial.  One can easily imagine the fodder such a trial would provide for trash magazines and tabloids were it to happen today.

Though he was eventually acquitted, Kalloch eventually moved away from New England, and after a foray into the Plains states where he remained beset by further rumors of lechery and financial misdeed, he moved west to San Francisco in 1875.

I am obviously skipping over important bits here and there, and I should mention that what makes Kalloch so interesting is his willingness, for a time, to stand up for some progressive views of the time.  An abolitionist since childhood and later a supporter of Asian and black rights, the reader’s introduction to Kalloch (aside from the adultery) is largely favorable until the man once known as “the Golden Voice” becomes the helmsmen and mayoral candidate for the Workingmen’s Party, an upstart movement responsible for rioting and violence as well as fervent opponents of immigrants, especially Asians, in California.  In the end, Read paints Kalloch as an opportunist who, by the time he comes to San Francisco, becomes more enamored with the acquisition of power than with the sincerity of his beliefs and who abuses the charge of his status as preacher for the Baptist church to further his political ambitions.

The book comes to its boil when the de Young brothers and Kalloch butt heads, initially over perceived slights, and then Kalloch reading publicly an old smear article published by a rival of the Chronicle’s depicting the founding editors’ mother as a whore in crude, shocking language.  The article itself had been a point of violence for the de Youngs upon its original publication, and the consequences proved similar the second time around eventually resulting in the gruesome assassination of Charles de Young.

War of Words is an interesting story, one of those historical anecdotes normally served to the public by little else than local historical societies and out-of-the-way websites.  Read specializes in rustling up these old stories (SEE: On the House: The Bizarre Killing of Michael Malloy, The Killing Skies) and dusting them off, their prior neglect sometimes due to nothing more than a selective mainstream taste for history. In the case of the events surrounding the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1870s, the murder of Charles de Young was a well-publicized event not only in San Francisco but around the country.  Sometimes we tend to lose even seemingly major events to the ravages of time.

Read has found a way to bridge the gap, though, and his excitement for his subject matter is apparent.  War of Words reads much more like a novel than a historical account and its narrator possesses a notable lack of impartiality.  That’s not to say Read takes sides, but the book pitches and swells along with pointed, often bilious excerpts from the Chronicle and its contemporaries as well as accounts from witnesses and those involved with the various rifts presented throughout in such a way that the reader is swept up in the fray.  The amount of research Read has invested in his tome is quite staggering.  He has plumbed the depths of many newspapers and other publications of the time and has resurfaced with scores of fascinating excerpts for the history junkie.  More importantly, he knows when to allow the historical literature to do his talking for him.

There are times when some of his descriptions such as those of a physical twitch or rolling of the eyes seem unverifiable, and it is the one potential downfall of novelizing, so to speak, the narrative, but the citation list ought to quell at least some of those fears.  All in all, Read appears to bet the pot on immersion rather than didacticism while drawing from a sound base of material, which he describes richly and with great enthusiasm.

This review originally appeared in the Sloth Jockey Books section.

Image Attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paladin27/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

I am forced to sit here and suffer through another long afternoon of pretending to work largely because I have become more efficient as a worker.  I wouldn’t even go as far as to say that I’ve automated everything because, in truth, I haven’t automated anything.  I’ve simply succeeded in cutting down the number of steps it takes to complete certain tasks, eliminated needless components of the job, and don’t have to amass a library of printed pages to do one simple thing on the computer.  Combined with a relatively high level of aptitude for quickly executing brain-wasting computer work, my total output exceeds that of a normal worker  by High Noon.

Mind you, I’m running my own internal statistics, and it is a rare occasion indeed that such numbers should be trusted or taken at face value, but I assure you, any discrepancy between my findings and reality are not due to any nefarious deed on my part.  I’m fairly confident that any independent and unbiased panel of experts would come to similar conclusions, perhaps pushing my time-efficiency estimate back by a maximum of two hours.

The difference is largely generational.  Walk in the front door of my office, and you will find a large wall of file cabinets.  What they contain, I do not know.  I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that some of the documents contained therein are kept necessarily in print form.  There are legal entanglements I don’t anticipate experiencing that might loom over those with a different job description, but regardless of this fact, I’d bet a quick combing of the archives would effectively reduce the lot by at least half.  There was a day when that sort of pack rat mentality probably served the office worker well.  A reliable filing system was tantamount to maintaining the stability of an office’s everyday operations, and in many ways, it still is.  But the filing of today does not require paper.  There is virtually nothing that can’t be done without the aid of a printer or even a fax machine (why we still have one of those, I can’t imagine) because all paper does, except in very rare instances, is slow you down.

This is all obvious stuff, chapter headings in the Child’s Office Primer, and non-adherence to a paperless office can more often than not be attributed to a lack of desire or effort to train the brain to utilize the tools available to it.  It’s adherence to the Old School, the paper trail, which is no more than a crutch these days.

I don’t mean to engage in a Young vs. Old argument here, though the lines do tend to fall slightly along those lines.  Hell, one of my high school English teachers was a coder and programmer at seventy-six, an age at which one surely has plenty of excuses to resist adopting new ways of doing things.  If he would have spurned everything post-dating the electric typewriter, he could have been forgiven for beholding the swelling tides with the scowl of a seasoned curmudgeon.  To this date (he, sadly, passed away a few years ago), his final knowledge of computing probably still exceeds mine, so what I’m on about here is not complicated.

Administrative tasks have been simplified to the extent that it’s almost silly to rent office space anymore.  There is nothing in my job description that I couldn’t do from the comfort of my own home without ever stopping to pull up my pants.  Same goes for everyone else, and since I am in a vindictive mood today, I’ll just go ahead and shift the blame for my having to dance through this intricate pantomime of artificial busyness to everyone else.

If we all work together, goddammit, we’d spend less time at our jobs, get more done both professionally and personally, and save a few trees while we’re at it.

Who’s with me?

Correction (10/21/2009): Due to a silly grammatical oversight, the title originally read “Children of the Office, I Implore Thee”.  Thanks to commenter vet’s bringing the error to my attention “thee” has been changed to “you.”

Image from Wikimedia Commons

It happened very suddenly. A large pair of artificial breasts shrouded in a loose-fitting shirt of the Renaissance Period slid into view at eye level as I was standing in a circle of my friends. I tilted my head upward to meet the large middle-aged man’s gaze. Thin lines of lavender set his lips apart from the rest of a ruddy, sweaty face, and the curly, black nylon wig he wore hung below his shoulders in little cascades. However, neither of these observations tempered the suffocating closeness of his breasts to my face.

“Oh, you don’t want to go there,” he said waving a loose finger at our map.

I was visibly flustered. “Where do we want to go?”

“You want to go where the fun’s at.”

“Where’s the fun at?”

“The fun’s where you are.” He stood there expectantly for a moment and looked around at us before becoming perturbed at our silence. “It’s a riddle!” he screamed angrily and stomped off with his two friends in what must have been eight or nine-inch high heels.

It was gay pride weekend at the Bristol Renaissance Faire in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a place with an almost mystical sanctity to me since I had not visited the fair since the age of seven when I sat at the feet of an almost portly woman in a green robe who told us stories from the old Arthurian legends. Somewhere in one of my pack-rat cardboard boxes, I still have the storyteller’s stone she gave me all those years ago, a distant relic revived in a memory bereft of the weirdness I experienced upon my return to Bristol. At such a young age, I had perceived the experience as authentic in my ignorance. The visual aid provided by costume must have been enough back then, but in the year 2009 at twenty-five years old, it would, understandably, take a bit more to conjure similar sentiments.

To be fair, I had no expectations of a repeat experience, and any diminished wonder on my part comes simply from cynicism and knowledge of what it means to pass a hat around for money. As a child, I viewed the act of throwing a dollar bill into a sack as a novelty, whereas this time I tended to bounce back and forth from cynically declaring each sideshow a scam to feeling a deep sense of compassion for the performers who clearly were taking every chance to practice their craft for the sake of exposure.

I can only imaging how many out-of-work actors have ended their careers after a summer-long run at Bristol or any other fair (SEE: Feast of the Hunter’s Moon). They are lost in a vast feeding frenzy for artisans of anachronistic arts, and, hell, I would have fed it provided the financial backing. The war horn my friend purchased remained the only material indulgence of the day.

Some people apparently thought that a renaissance fair would be a good place to get kinky as evidenced by men in black spandex sporting fairy wings, goth angels, and no shortage of large riddling transvestites. My offenses in this regard have absolutely nothing to do with the sexuality of these patrons as anyone remotely familiar with my writing or soapbox barroom ranting knows well enough that I am a fervent supporter of gay marriage and equal rights. What I oppose here is the injection of gothic fantasy motifs into an event that should probably attempt to approach authenticity, if only in garb alone. It’s a simple enough request for the most renowned renaissance fair in the region, and a good number of the costumed attendees appeared as if they had learned everything they knew about renaissance fashion from the front of a Trapper Keeper. Obviously, there is no dress code for these things, nor should there be, and who am I to talk? Last I checked, the English Renaissance was marked by the non-existence of Levi jeans.

What really troubled me were the fashion transgressions promoted by some of the exhibitors. A friend recently cautioned me of a disturbing trend in renaissance fair. They are being infiltrated by pirate enthusiasts. I’m not talking about people dressed as seafaring merchants, which would be appropriate, but people proliferating the image of the Tortuga-bound, syphilis-ridden pirate while at renaissance faires. Both Christopher Moody and Edward Teach‘s flags hung proudly at the event, which is transgression enough (both pirated between 60-100 years after the English Renaissance), but when I walked into the pirate boutiques, I saw one set of Captain Jack dreadlocks — a reference to Jack Sparrow played by Johnny Depp in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies — as well as a Pirates banner hung up in a corner.

I love pirates as much as the next scabby wart. Believe me, I do. I even have Moody’s flag hanging in my hallway above the stairs, but that doesn’t mean I’d show up with a parrot on my shoulder at a Revolutionary War reenactment or a Trekkie orgy.

These are nitpicks, though. Who really expects to uphold the wonderment of childhood? Disneyland and renaissance fairs and trips to Six Flags don’t hold that same innocent swell of emotion that they used to, and that’s fine. I loved going back to the Renaissance Faire, and if I’m lucky, I’ll go again next year toting my replica claymore remembering that I’m where the fun is at, and so are you.