The best image I’ve seen from the 2012 Olympic Games:

happy birthday, kid.

Introducing Arya:

It’s been about a year since we lost Calypso, and things have gotten such that we thought it was time to add someone new to the family. We picked her up from the local animal shelter on Wednesday, and she’s settled in pretty well since. She’s wonderfully personable, and has at least begun making friends with the other feline occupants of the house (although the biggest of them seem somewhat afraid of her). She’s 12 weeks old, and as of the vet visit on Saturday, two point seven pounds of curiosity. So far, she’s been an exemplary little companion, acting in ways befitting of the more pleasant aspects of her literary namesake.

I am quite taken with her, as are we all.

She also doesn’t seem to like being photographed (or at least likes to present herself as a gray-cream blob of fur by looking away from the camera) – this was taken Saturday afternoon, shortly after a vet visit, where the poor kitten was poked, prodded, and vaccinated, and thus, a little less energetic than usual. It’s the best we have so far.

Given that I spent a little while this weekend listening to someone make some remarks about “The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all”, and that at least a few of those remarks related to gun violence, I was particularly attuned to, and dismayed by the fact that on my morning commute this morning, the top local, national, and international headlines on the radio news all contained the words “gunman” and “shooting”:

• In my general geographic neighborhood, one person was killed and three more were wounded in a shooting incident in West Petersburg, VA.
• Near Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a man a man shot up a Sikh temple during services Sunday morning, killing seven people, in what’s been described an act of “domestic terrorism”.
• On the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, a NATO supply truck driver was shot and killed this morning as his truck crossed near the Torkham border crossing.

And we can’t forget that all of this follows the Aurora, Colorado movie theater incident a few weeks ago, and many other gun-related incidents around the world, those that make headlines and the many others that don’t.

I really don’t know what the root of the problem is, at least when we’re talking about gun violence inside the United States (to be fair, the international example falls a little farther outside the discussion, but it’s still a symptom of some of the same issues). I could write a polemic here about the pervasiveness and weirdness of American gun culture, the rampant “othering” of any person or group that doesn’t resemble the subjects in your average Norman Rockwell painting, the stress people feel due to the struggling economy, and the fact that a lot of people with serious problems can’t get the help they need within the healthcare and criminal justice systems in this country as they exist, but beyond this really long sentence, I won’t. Feel free to do some reading on those things, though – it’s those very topics that lead to our inability to foster the kind of peace, freedom, and justice for all I think we all would, on at least some level, hope we as a people and species should strive for.

No, this post is pretty much just my public lamentation that on a day where there are so many great things to talk about, like the inspirational stories of peaceful competition at the Olympic Games, and the fact that last night, NASA landed a mobile science platform on the surface of Mars; stories and events that celebrate all the best that humanity is capable of both physically and intellectually, all the lead stories at the top of the hour were about somebody putting bullets into someone else.

I understand that there’s truth in the adage about how if it bleeds, it leads, and I understand the economic realities of why the media runs with these kind of stories. Maybe, though, it would be better if we didn’t have so many of these sorts of stories to report.

Not feeling particularly profound today, but I thought since I was getting back into the routine everywhere else, I might as well do it here by posting something.

The routine was disrupted last week, as I was off for a week. I needed some time, and some things needed done. Didn’t get quite as much as I’d like done, which is pretty much always the case, but we’re in the midst of a physical transition in the house (replacing some furniture, moving some rooms, reducing some clutter), and the process needed to move along.

It wasn’t all work, of course. I spent a nice-ish day at Busch Gardens (the “-ish” stands for HOT), and on Thursday, @fairiemom and I spent the evening at Maymont Park in Richmond relaxing in the shade of a big tree and enjoying an outdoor show by The Indigo Girls, who I* hadn’t seen live since our honeymoon fourteen years ago, and given that this show fell right around anniversary time, it was nice full-circle sort of thing. We first saw the ‘Girls early in our dating phase, when a bunch of us caught a show in ’93 or so at our crosstown rival college – they’ve been kind of a constant in the soundtrack of our relationship.

Like a lot of things that have been a going concern since the mid-eighties, the band took a little while to find the groove, but things started sounding really great a few songs in, and went on for the rest of the evening. The band’s supporting a new record, which is quite good, but much of the show was a “greatest hits” sort of package, and enjoyable all around. All the big tunes, plus a couple of interesting side trips into the semi-obscure (they did a great version of “Kid Fears”, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen live with the 3rd harmony part). But then, I’ve only seen them thrice, rather than 75 times like the nice woman we met in line.

Here are a couple of grainy, blurry cell phone pictures:

The real surprise of the evening was The Shadowboxers, a band from Atlanta who played a great opening set, then stuck around and sat in as the Indigo Girls backing band the rest of the evening, providing a full sound (and the Michael Stipe part on the aforementioned “Kid Fears”). These guys are infectious performers, and won the crowd over handily. They’re currently in the process of putting together their first full-length record, which is going to be really great, if their performance and the demo EP they were selling are any indication. If I were to classify them, they’re equal parts folk, country, soul, white boy R&B, and rock and roll; it’s a nice combination. Lots of great instrumental skill, a great rhythm section, and three lead vocalists creating some really nice harmonies. They’re also kind of pretty in a boy-band sort of way – kind of like if Timberlake decided he wanted to join up with Robbie Robertson, or if Rascall Flats had more talent and dialed down the corn-pone twang.

In any case, I really enjoyed them, the show, and the company.

Those are really the highlights; I’m not going to go into the work stress and such that nobody wants to really hear about.

I do have a couple of other things that might be worth sharing, though, so take a look at the following random links and observations!

♦- If you like good independent music at a reasonable price that supports charity and the artists who created the music, I suppose I should point you at The Humble Music Bundle, which you can get for the next not-quite ten days for the price you set (five records, six if you pay more than the current average price, which as I type this is $8.26). Tunes from excellent artists like Jonathan Coulton and They Might Be Giants! Go forth, and download them!

♦- The other evening I watched the recent remake of the film Fright Night. Among other fun actors, it stars David Tennant as Peter Vincent, stage magician and vampire expert. The film worked well, and is a lot of fun. I thought it worked equally well, and was more fun if I simply assumed that Peter Vincent was actually the Doctor incognito sometime between series 4 and the specials year. The character went on a bit of a bender off-screen there; I could totally see him spending a few years as a tattooed and eyelinered stage magician drinking hard and swearing up a storm, with the TARDIS masquerading as the panic room in his apartment.

♦- Tangentially related, actress Mary Tamm passed away over the weekend. She was the first and best Time Lady Romana(dvoratrelundar), and lots of fun during the “Key to Time” season with Tom Baker. Want 90 minutes of fun? Go spin up The Pirate Planet on Netflix Instant and see what the world is now, sadly, missing.

♦- Fred Clark at slacktivist put up a great post about the Evangelical response to liberal boycotting of Chick-Fil-A; which gets to the heart of the matter about how certain there really are two types of people in the world who fundamentally don’t understand each other. Insightful analysis as always.

♦- …finally, over the weekend, a fellow named Joe Peacock posted a poorly thought out piece on CNN about how geek culture is being overrun by pretty girl cosplayers who aren’t really geeks, and how this is a bad thing. Both John Scalzi and Amanda Marcotte weigh in from the geek and feminist perspectives, respectively, each offering a glorious takedown of the whole manufactured question of “who gets to be a geek?” The answer, of course, is “anybody who wants to be.”

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*She saw them as recently as three years ago when we bought tickets to a show that got postponed, and our babysitting arrangements for the rescheduled date fell through. She went with the eldest, I stayed at home with the youngsters..

I know I’m a little late to the party in talking about this particular topic, but I hadn’t quite managed to wrap my head around my thoughts on the subject until recently. The topic, of course, is the Sandusky abuse scandal and subsequent fallout at Penn State. I’ve been following the news reports on it, certainly, and given my geographic origins, I’ve been rather inundated with information and opinion via social networking sites. I found more than a few of these opinion posts troubling, for various reasons. As I’ve done some thinking and discussing, I think I’m starting to get a handle on why.

I grew up in Central Pennsylvania, within an hour or two of Penn State University’s main campus. I was well with the sphere of influence of Penn State football and the cult of personality surrounding Joe Paterno. I knew many a dog named JoPa and many a cat named Nittany, nearly all of which amused their owner’s guests by drinking cheap beer from a bowl (yes, even the cats). I lived in a place where the Sky was blue and white because God was a Penn State fan, and everybody’s two favorite teams were Penn State and whoever was playing Pitt that weekend.

I don’t think I ever met the coach as a kid, but it rather feels like I did, because people in that part of the world look at Joe Paterno like family, like the uncle that made good – Paterno’s triumphs on the field were, for whatever reason, personal victories for people all over the eastern half of the Commonwealth. I’ve often made the observation that people from Central PA don’t exactly ascribe divinity to Joe Paterno, but if Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father in Heaven, then Joe, when he was alive, sat just to the right of Jesus, except on Saturday afternoons in the fall.

Which, I suppose makes the recent news that for years, Paterno, the humble blue-collar coach, mentor, and humanitarian, covered up, or at least looked the other way, while one of his assistant coaches abused over a dozen young boys a bit hard for people to take. While Joe didn’t do the actual diddling, he certainly didn’t do anything constructive to stop it once he found out it was going on. That’s a big failing, and it’s causing a hell of a lot of cognitive dissonance.

A lot of people don’t like to see the objects of love and worship proved not worthy of it. And when such a thing happens, for many people, there’s less mental stress in doubling down on denial than there is in adopting the new facts into their frame of reference.

That’s what a lot of the reaction I saw to the whole package (the allegations, their proving out in the legal system, and the subsequent penalties imposed by various authoritative bodies) looked like to me. There was lots of denial, misdirection, and oddly constructed justifications thrown about, all designed to somehow prove that Sandusky was a “lone gunmen” and that the decades-long pattern of avoidance and cover-up throughout the Penn State football program (including Coach Paterno) on up through the university administration didn’t actually happen, despite all those “facts”.

All these people, with their posts on social networking sites and message boards (and those students who were looking for an excuse to semi-peaceably assemble on campus in support of the coach) were totally invested in their chosen reality, and no manner of smoking gun would convince them that their sky was blue and white for some reason other than the fact that God has granted his special blessing on the Penn State football program, which could not possibly have engaged in such despicable activities.

This divine imagery isn’t accidental on my part – Penn State is rather like a religion in certain parts of the world with certain people; more importantly, it’s a tribal marker (and if you ask Fred at slacktivist, that’s the modern purpose of religion for an increasing number of people). The most vociferous defenders of the infallibility of Penn State have no ties to the university*; they’ve never walked any of the campuses, never sat in a lecture hall, never met Coach Paterno or any of his staff, though through their profession of devotion to Penn State football, they’re marking themselves as part of the “in group”, for so many people, being part of the club is the highest (if often unacknowledged) goal in life.

My discomfort with it comes from the fact that despite being surrounded by that sort of thing, I just don’t understand it, and trying to get myself in that headspace is difficult. I’ve never been one of those people that defines themselves by their affiliations. It’s something I’ll never grok, because I’m just not wired that way. Being witness to that sort of on-the-fly cognitive dissonance live, in real time, is an interesting thing to watch, but it’s alien to who I am and my way of looking at things.

And I guess I’ve always been that way, to some extent. When I was a kid, the fanatical devotion people had to Penn State football was a little weird. As an adult who feels driven to think about these things, it’s gotten even weirder to me.

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*Actual alumni I talked to seem to have a more nuanced view. Understandably, most feel betrayed by the university administration (and the football program – even in their minds, Penn State can’t help but equal football at least in part). One friend took the position that the Penn State “concept” for him isn’t the public face of the university, but rather the four years of memories, experiences and friendships he made there, and he’ll have those regardless of how many conference titles or football wins the NCAA strikes from the record. That’s an interpretation I can get behind.

So, somewhere in the last couple of days, my Windows 7 install decided to go ahead and eat the GRUB sector on my dual boot Win7/Ubuntu desktop. My lovely wife tried fixing it, and despite her normally amazing competence at fixing that sort of thing when linux is involved, she couldn’t make things work.

So, today’s been a day of wiping and rebuilding. It’s not something I’ve done a lot of recently; as I said, I’m mostly a linux user, and that’s one of the nice things about running Ubuntu; it doesn’t seem to go to pot so often. However, the desktop tends to get used for mostly Windows-based things anyway (it’s pretty much the games and itunes box), I decided I’m going to skip the complexity of dual booting, and go pure Microsoft this time around.

Yes, I’m aware of how this makes me a traitor to the open source cause, a corporate toady, and all that. Believe me, I feel guilty as hell about it.

But I wanna play Mass Effect (and all those other games on Steam), and level up Baern the Dwarf Druid for Encounters on Wednesday. I’m going to have to live with the guilt. Right now, Linux won’t let me do that.

I’m not a total tool. I’m still running just linux on three different laptops, and some of the first things I’m installing on this Windows box are Firefox, LibreOffice, and an open-source bittorrent client. So there.

excuse me if this gets a little personal…

It was fourteen years ago today that we had one epic house party celebrating the fact that earlier that day, we got up in front of a bunch of people and said that we’d continue down the path of life together from now on. I mean, we’d been doing that a while already in practice, but that day, we made it official in the eyes of whoever keeps track of those things on the cosmic ledger. It was a pretty good party, if I recall, and people still talk about it. I’m glad we did it. Both things, that is.

If I were more clever, I’d find a way to make a crass-but-endearing joke about avoiding the seven year itch twice over, but to tell you the truth, that societal concept has never really been an issue, because it’s really always been you. Sure, there are some bumps and distractions and such – we’ve been classified as a unit for nearly two decades, you have to realistically expect some of that- but when it comes down to it, I can’t imagine you not being there…scratch that, I *can* imagine it (I have a good imagination), and it scares the crap out of me. I guess that’s part of what love is, huh?

So, let’s keep adventuring together, okay? It’s more fun and less scary when you’re with me.

Happy Anniversary.

I’ve recently had some people tell me they enjoy what I’ve been writing here lately, and (in what I take as a great compliment) that it makes them think.

Hearing this stuff makes me happy; I like that my particular flavor of “old man shouting at clouds” is capable of connecting with someone occasionally; despite all evidence to the contrary, I am not a complete unfeeling robot; despite my retiring ways, I do enjoy occasional, meaningful human contact, even if it often comes from behind the comforting buffer of asynchronous communication on the internet.

So, thanks, dear tens of readers, for your attention and praise.

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By the way, I hope you’ll take the time to read the last couple of posts, which are reviews of some great indie comics I picked up at the VA Comicon a couple of weekends back. Between them, over 200 pages of great art and storytelling.

I don’t say this enough, but I think it’s a great thing to support your local independent artist, who often has some really interesting and unique things to say, and almost always provide a welcome break from the cookie-cutter pop culture so much of the mainstream keeps feeding you. Seek them out and buy their stuff, and share it with others. Keep the cycle of creativity going!

Another review: A Dog’s Life: No Shenanigans!!!, by Chris Otto

There’s an adage that you often hear from others (often from others who aren’t particularly creative themselves, in my experience) when you’re engaging in a creative project: “Write what you know”. Even though it’s possibly an empty cliche, it’s also often pretty decent advice. I’m sure this dictum was on the mind of creator Chris Otto when he set out to create his oft-entertaining webcomic A Dog’s Life, the first year of which (almost) is collected in this print collection.

A Dog’s Life chronicles the adventures of a chocolate labrador named Hunter S. Thompson (which makes perfect sense, trust me), his rescue sibling Gillian, and their humans. Running with the “write what you know” thing, Otto and his wife happen to have a couple of dogs: a labrador named Hunter S. Thompson and a rescue dog named Gillian. Many of the situations and stories are inspired by true-to-life events. The experience of sharing space with pets is one most of us can relate to and find humor in, making the comic exceedingly accessible to readers, even those who aren’t really “comics people”.

The strip is laid out in the traditional strip style; a couple of panels leading to a (usually) clever punchline. There are plenty of arcs running the course of several (or more) strips, including things like Hunter’s “origin” story, the process of the family’s adopting Gillian, and the two dogs’ adventures outside after escaping the yard that wasn’t quite fenced in on time.

This isn’t to say that the comic is just slice of life stuff, although that aspect is certainly a strength. The comic is primarily from the dogs’ point of view, and often veers into satisfyingly absurd territory, involving evil twin parallel universes, foster home fight clubs, and conspiracy nut squirrels. These little flights of fancy are tons of fun, really, and elevate the material above your typical decades-old syndicate newspaper strips with a decidedly modern sensibility.

Otto would be the first to tell you that he’s not the world’s greatest cartoonist (this is a common theme of his copious commentary throughout the volume); some of the early strips are pretty rough in the art department, though as the strip progresses the art gets more ambitious and confident, and develops a consistent cartoony style that works well with the material.

The writing across the volume is always at least enjoyable and often pretty clever. He’s got some great ideas throughout the strip; a favorite of mine is the clever use of the generally understood idea that dogs have absolutely no sense of time. It’s not all necessarily jokes, though. Across the larger arcs, there’s often some pretty touching stuff, particularly the way the story of Gillian’s adoption plays out. I was personally a fan of the “local color” as well. Otto, like me, resides in the Richmond metropolitan area, and plays with some local instututions, like Nutzy, the mascot of the local minor league ball team, The Flying Squirrels, who is lots of fun, but just a little bit creepy. Like my four year old daughter, Hunter and Gillian are a little wary when he makes an appearance in their back yard.

Otto’s story of simply jumping into the webcomic business with little to no art or publishing experience is actually pretty admirable: he had an idea, and he just went and did it. It’s actually one of the better examples out there of Wil Wheaton’s get excited and make things mantra. I wish more people with interesting ideas would just decide to take a chance and get them out there. I happily recommend supporting independent art like this on principle, though in this case, I can honestly say you’ll have some fun keeping up with Hunter and Gillian’s continuing adventures.