Gandalf, Jack Sparrow, and a Muffled Candidate

It's only a couple of years since Attack of the Clones pushed digital film projection into the mainstream, but I don't think it'll be too much longer before it starts to take over, and it can't come too fast for me. A. and I have been used recently to seeing films at The Arclight in Hollywood, where, as well as regular 21+ screenings, which allow the audience to take drinkies into the show - and also allow them to know they'll be free from noisy kids, even at stuff like Spider-Man 2 - digital screenings are common. I try to choose them as often as I can, and I think I've been spoiled. It's worth a lot to have a stable picture, a clean soundtrack, and none of those reel change markers that loom hugely once you know what they are.

Because, well, because it's The Chinese, we went to see The Manchurian Candidate at Grauman's Chinese last night, and they dropped the ball. About 20 minutes from the end, the sound became muffled. It happened at first in the middle of a scene where that might have been intended - a kind of druggy sense of dislocation - but it soon was obvious that it wasn't. Essential dialogue was inaudible. It got worse, and then literally at the climax of the film the sound cut out completely for about 30 seconds. The inevitable wails of despair and frustration followed - the management was fortunate that it wasn't a very full house, otherwise they might have had a riot on their hands. We ended up getting four free tickets to compensate, but, well, Grrrrr. Just Grrrrr.

As for the film, I'm reluctant to think too much about it, given how screwed up the projection was. I've not seen the original, but was aware of the basic premise, and despite perfectly good performances there didn't seem to be much there. Demme gives away the heart of the film quite early - as he probably had to, given the fame of the original - but doesn't have a great deal left in reserve.

As for Hollywood, it remains forever Hollywood. An imposing Gandalf walked past us - staff swinging purposefully and wide-brimmed hat at just the right jaunty angle - as we came up past the Kodak Theatre, and while we waited for the film to start, scoffing Red Vines and BonBons, an off-duty Jack Sparrow wandered in and sat close to the front. I don't think it was Johnny Depp, but then this is Hollywood, USA (as it used to say at the end of Tom & Jerry cartoons), so who knows.

The Beauty of 36 Degrees

Don't tell me that science can't be moving, and beautiful. Don't tell me that truly understanding something is any less inspiring than marvelling ignorantly at its prettiness, never mind any less than the wishful myths that humans use as security blankets against the darkness of not knowing.

Francis Crick died two days ago, not so very far from here. Thanks to BoingBoing, here's the first paper Crick and Watson wrote, describing the structure of DNA. It's a thing of great science, and also of great beauty, and those two things are entirely consistent. Go on, go read it. It won't take you long.

The first thing that's truly shocking about the paper is how short it is. But then, this was a time in which science was racing to DNA as technology would rush to space a decade later. It was expedient to get the word out quickly, and to the loudest amplifier, which then was Nature. There was considerable prestige to be had from being first. But it's also short because it doesn't have to be long to do its job. The complicated ramifications of this seed of knowledge are still being worked out, but the seed itself is beautifully simple, in the manner that scientists and technologists and logicians are fond of calling elegant. It's also true.

The clarity and lack of self-absorbtion of Crick and Watson's text is a model of how to present scientific discovery. Here's the first short paragraph:

We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.

In retrospect, that sounds like ironic understatement, but I'm sure that wasn't intended. It's just a clear statement first of all of purpose, and then of potential import. A word too about the small diagram in the paper, which is also a model of clarity and beauty.

If DNA was a puzzle-box, then this diagram was the key - along with the angles and pair-bonding specifications. The structure itself is given dramatic presence in Mick Jackson's film of Crick and Watson's discovery, Life Story. The model they create in the lab is endowed with a Spielbergian sense of wonder. It's as lovingly photographed as the Mothership in Close Encounters. Except this time it's real.

No apologies, but this unassuming line from the paper strikes me as deeply, deeply affecting:

It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.

In other words: we think we've found the mechanism for heredity, and therefore life itself. It's ingenious - in the way that nature constantly is - but it's not miraculous. Miraculous implies satisfaction with not knowing, and no-one should be satisfied with that.

I fuck up, you make a mistake, he misspeaks

One day in French class at school, I was given a sentence to translate that entirely baffled me. Unlike one of my Latin teachers, who would choose translators pseudo-randomly, which allowed him the freedom to give me the thorniest sentence in the piece (which he typically did, the bastard), the French teacher would simply run along the rows from front to back, one sentence each. Counting off the number of kids before me, I worked out which sentence would be mine and set to work. And it shouldn't have been a bitch, but it was. There was a particular phrase that defied any logical explanation. It went something like:

"Rapellez-vous moi à [someone]."

It was in direct speech, and in context I worked out that it must mean something like 'give my best to [someone]', or 'say hi to [someone] for me'. But there didn't seem to be a neat English phrase that captured the concept. The nearest I could come up with was the seemingly bizarre:

"Remember me to [someone]."

Obviously it wasn't that. There was no such construction. Eventually my turn came, and I was none the wiser. I umm-ed and err-ed, but eventually just gave up. Whereupon the teacher asked for hands (probably one of the two particularly Hermione Grainger-esque girls in my class), and was happily told that the sentence translated as "Remember me to [someone]."

I was deeply puzzled. Had I somehow missed this apparently-obvious construction for the whole of my life thus far? Had it just been invented by some scary-haired linguist and launched, gleaming with newness, into the language? Those of you who pay attention to these things will not be surprised to learn that within the next week or so I heard "remember me to" used in anger several more times - as if I just hadn't been paying attention before. Life is like that.

Which brings me to 'misspeak', which is also a new concept apparently freshly launched into my idiolect. I first came across it during the famous encounter between Bill O'Reilly and Al Franken at the 2003 LA Book Expo, at which Franken took O'Reilly to task for his claims/bullshitting about having won two Peabody awards, and O'Reilly retreated into an admission that he 'misspoke' about that. 'Misspeaking' seems to be a common occurrence for O'Reilly.

So what does this new (for me) word actually mean? What's the concept that it captures? An efficient compression of 'mistakenly speak'? Webster's gives 'misspeak' as:

1 : to speak (as a word) incorrectly

2 : to express (oneself) imperfectly or incorrectly

Prior to discovering this word, I'd just have said 'I made a mistake', or 'I got it wrong'.

But hang on a minute, because there's an additional nuance to this concept which neither of those statements captures. The nuance might be said to have something to do with the good faith of the mistake. O'Reilly, for instance, launches himself time and time again on some fact-free diatribe, blithely throwing out claims which (charitably) he cannot know to be true, or (cynically) knows to be false. There are honest mistakes, and then there are either negligent or wilful mistakes - though enough negligence becomes de facto wilfulness anyhow, so the border is blurry. When finally called on such disregard for the truth, having 'misspoken' becomes the FOXhole into which the embattled O'Reilly climbs.

Where else do we see this concept? Quite a lot of places recently, actually. Try Rumsfeld misspoke, and Bush misspoke, and Cheney misspoke.

The most recent is via Al Franken's Air America web-log, which doesn't have permalinks, so I'll quote the whole thing here:

Today on radio row, we had a surprise visit from Sean Hannity, Playgirl’s sexiest newscaster! Fireworks were in the air, friends! Among the highlights: when Hannity denied claiming that Howard Dean said the president knew about 9/11 ahead of time, we played a bit from his show:

HANNITY: ". . . and Howard Dean saying the president knew about 9/11 ahead of time."

Our guest said he "misspoke." Which must be his excuse for saying the same thing on other occasions too. For a thorough debunking Hannity's favorite non-truths, look here.

In a spirit of new-found linguistic laissez-faire, I say define a word according to how it's used. Here's my current draft:

misspeak: To get caught either wilfully, or negligently, disregarding the truth, especially when pontificating self-importantly (cf. O'Reilly), or knowingly denying the existence of a previous statement.

In lieu of examples in context, here's Donald Rumsfeld doing his thang, and one of The Daily Show's finest moments, courtesy of Lisa Rein's fabulous archive.

Share and enjoy.

Bukkake and the Famous Philosopher Friend

To Beverly Hills, early yesterday morning, in my informal capacity of IT-guy to my Famous Philosopher Friend. He'd called me a couple of days before to say that he was having problems with a new printer he'd just got, and now neither printer nor computer (an Apple G4 Cube) was working properly. It's not long since I'd had to get the Cube a new logic board, after it had shorted out due to a couple of seriously knackered USB ports. And slightly longer since I'd souped up his whole system with Mac OS X, and then sat quietly beside him as he downloaded mountains of e-mail. He was fascinated by the Babylonian nature of the spam, sounding out the hard consonants in 'Bukkake', and wondering aloud what it might be. ('Shall I explain, or would it be easier to just show you?' thinks me.)

It turned out that neither printer nor computer was a problem. He has a way of shutting the computer down when he merely wants it to go to sleep, and the printer just needed the ink cartridges fitted. All was fine. No sooner had I got things working, however, than he was putting on jacket and grabbing walking stick, and we were heading out shopping.

My relationship with Famous Philosopher Friend is an odd one. We met originally when he was the Faculty Fellow at the student dorm (it's called a 'College', in slightly unconvincing echo of those leafy Oxbridge quads) where A. was Resident Coordinator. I remarked at the time that I'd have been much more impressed upon meeting him had I heard of him, which is flippant as all hell, but true, and indicative of my ignorance, not his lack of renown.

Famous Philosopher Friend has lived a long and full life, which my small contact with him can only hint at. He began as a mathematician and physicist, but quickly moved into philosophy. He worked at a junior level on Radar in England during the war - which work brought him into occasional contact with Churchill. Though I'm told - and am reminded of his demolition of the Cube's USB ports - that he was mostly given jobs which would keep him away from anything mechanical. He's that sort of philosopher.

The man sitting beside me in the car as I drive to Williams-Sonoma studied under Wittgenstein. He tells anecdotes about E.M. Forster. He knew Alan Turing. I wonder if, were Turing still alive, he'd need some kid to come around and fit ink cartridges into his printer - which would presumably be connected to a real Turing Machine.

At the shop, he knows exactly what he wants. Picardy glasses. He asks two assistants, both of whom do the same thing. 'Oh,' they say. 'PiCARdy glasses.' Never mind that his pronunciation is the more accurate. He's a long way from France. He's a somewhat difficult customer: insistant and impatient, a tiny bit demanding. I stand somewhat at a distance and watch. The second assistant sighs a little dramatically when he asks her to take him to where they are. I'm not sure she's seen that I'm with him, so she might not be trying to hide her slight exasperation from me - only from him. Perhaps she sees that I'm watching, or perhaps she catches her grouchy moment, but she then switches into a gentler, more helpful mode.

The glasses, it turns out, are for A. and me, as a late housewarming present. It's very sweet of him. He'd basically assumed that I'd be okay with taking him shopping, without needing to ask, but the occasion of shopping was to buy us some really nice glasses. That's very him.

Then to Gelson's supermarket, where he zips around gathering supplies, me barely able to keep up. He's in his early 80s. Sometimes every year shows - his memory is an instrument that still hits wonderful notes, but takes longer to warm up and isn't quite as reliable as it was. And sometimes he's as spry and purposeful as a naughty little boy. Soon we're heading back to the hills. As we cross Santa Monica Boulevard he says, 'Ah, West Hollywood', with a happy sigh. Outwardly every inch the emeritus British academic and intellectual, he's found a place here in the California sun where he really feels at home. He's endlessly amused by the fact that on one corner there's a bar called 'Rage', and on the opposite corner a shop called 'Don't Panic!'. There are still moments of sweet naivety. He tells me that when he first came to LA and saw signs for 'Star Maps', he assumed they were for amateur astronomers.

I look at Famous Philosopher Friend's online biographies and daunting publications, and I know that all I'm really seeing is the tip of the tip of the iceberg. It's humbling that he considers me to be - well, whatever he considers me to be: informal IT-guy and occasional guide on shopping expeditions. I'd love to get to dig a little deeper into his work, but it feels like travelling in a foreign country with only a few phrases of the language. One is instinctively reluctant to give the impression of knowing more, for fear of the barrage of genuine language which would return. I have a reasonable brain, but Famous Philosopher Friend has a great brain.

Or perhaps had a great brain, and that's a fear. I hope I didn't get to know him too late to even try to scale some of those heights, but feel sad that it might be so. And yet this might still be exactly the same man who was shooed away from the Radar engineering for fear of what he might do to it. What I perceive as the beginnings of decline might just be eccentricity and absent-mindedness. I hope so.

I carry his groceries up the kitchen and empty the bags. His two dogs lie quietly nearby. He'd switched the television to a channel playing light classical before we left, so we've arrived back to a gentle symphony. He seems very pleased to have completed the little shopping adventure. I think he takes particular pleasure in self-sufficiency - even with my small help - now that he doesn't drive any more, and will greet his wife's return home with some treat that he's put together from the food he efficiently gathered.

He shakes my hand heartily. I leave him to the light classical, the dogs, and some peace.

More Names from the Spam Can

Jumpsuit G. Oversells's hero is the great Richard Simmons - he'd at least love to be as butch as Richard - but for the moment his domain is middle-of-the-night infomercials, in which he impresses the Botox off of his co-host, Cindy Ex-Actress, while working up a sweat to KC and the Sunshine Band. He's a real professional, though, and has the key phrases 'quick and easy', and 'but the best part is', committed to memory. He'll get there one day, and then he'll be able to make Richard his bitch.

Ninetieth J. Riboflavin has done all of the talk shows, and is currently finishing what his publisher assures him will be a smash bestseller, in the spirit of The South Beach Diet. He's planning to call it: 'Live to 100 by Eating Nothing Except Corn Flakes'.

Woodenness T. Corpuscle's days of fame are over, and he knows that, but he can still dream nostalgically of those months on the set of Fantastic Voyage, and wonder wistfully whether anything would have come of his passion for Raquel Welsh if he'd not been stuck in the white blood cell costume all day long. He cherishes the signed photograph from Donald Pleasence, 'To My Favourite Erythrocyte. Love, Donald.'

And Shady P. Nonrefundable is, of course, nothing but a piece of shit spammer.

Humanity, somewhere in the distance

Added a couple more photographs to my album of the Western US, which were taken on Venice Beach a while ago. They're not great, but they're very distinctively my photographs, in ways that slightly give me pause. Signs of humanity in photographs I take are so indistinct or indirect. I'm drawn to photographs of large artificial structures - which are human constructs, but static, and historical. If people appear in my photographs, they're typically distanced, dwarfed by the environment. Often I'll take pictures of traces where humans (or other living things) were, but aren't any more: footprints, for example. Again, there's a distancing, only this way in time rather than space. I don't mind the psychological implications too much, but it might be nice if they weren't quite so obvious.

The Sun on Mrs Slocombe's Pussy

Via Gloria Brame, who gives good blog, this bit of silliness from (of all things) The Sun, reheated by Ananova. It's probably nonsense, but it has a small whiff of plausibility about it. Are You Being Served isn't remembered all that fondly in Britain - it was dated long before it ended, and operated on a level of sophistication one small step above Christmas pantomime. And yet the whole Mrs Slocombe's pussy riff was amazingly daring, in a way that I think resonates entirely differently in the US and Britain. As the PBS guy says, British comedy thrives on double entendre, and always has done, at least from music hall onwards. Max Miller; Frankie Howerd; the Carry Ons; and then the post-modern spin given by The Fast Show. But however lewd the other entendre - and they don't actually get much lewder than Mrs Slocombe's pussy - there's always been a comfort, whether misplaced or not, that the audience will get whichever entendre is appropriate for them. Or, at least, that they'll fail to understand any entendres that aren't appropriate for them. It follows that you don't need to censor, because the level of linguistic sophistication needed to get both entendres acts as a kind of child-friendly filter, allowing Mother and Father to get the joke, while Little Johnny doesn't, but doesn't entirely realise that he's missed anything. I'm not sure that assumption is made in the US, where double entendres aren't quite such a refined art.

Anyway, enjoy this collection of the juiciest bits of Mrs Slocombe's pussy.

Omission Accomplished

I've been having fun watching the videos from the 2004 ACLU Membership Conference, which are available here. The Gala Dinner, 'America at a Crossroads', in particular has some great stuff. After Sandra Tsing Loh [Sweet Chariot] and John Sayles, Seymour Hersh wanders on and, in his low-key, self-effacing way, drops some huge bombshells. Needless to say, what he said has been entirely ignored by the popular media in the US, though more widely reported outside the US and in the blogsphere. But then, when the word 'fuck' is unsayable, however would they deal with 'sodomized'? But it sounds as if Hersh is waiting until the story is ready to launch complete and whole. The words 'shit' and 'fan' spring to mind.

The Death Star Model of Essay Structure

There's a short scene towards the end of Star Wars which, despite being shot carelessly, as if it were just tedious but necessary exposition, is hugely important to the film. Luke, Han, Leia and the droids have just escaped from the Death Star with its plans, and have done the hyperspace thing back to the Rebel Base. Cue some handwringing about Han's intentions to leave with his reward, and then cut to the scene in question. It's the briefing for the Rebel pilots who'll be attacking the approaching Death Star in their apparently-inadequate X-Wing fighters. We don't know the character giving the briefing - it's his only moment in the story. We don't know most of the pilots. There's scarcely any character information or interaction at all in the scene. It's entirely about the exposition ostensibly given to the pilots - but in reality (and crucially) given to the audience - about the Death Star's fatal flaw, why it's the flaw, and how they're going to attack it. It turns out to be an 'exhaust port'. If a missile is launched into the port, it will inevitably find its way into the heart of the otherwise indestructable space station, and blow it to quarks.

Structurally, the scene introduces everything that's going to follow, and enables us to understand it. In the chaos of the space battle, we know what the pilots are trying to do, we know how to assess their success and failure, and we know what the Empire's pilots must stop them from doing. Because we know all of this, the battle never for a moment lacks clarity, and we feel every turn of the suspense screw.

There's a functionally similar scene in Titanic, though in this case it's towards the beginning of the film. The crew ostensibly show Old Kate Winslet - but in reality the audience - a computer graphic of the ship's collision with the iceberg, its breaking up and sinking. The rest of the film is wonderfully prefigured. As Old Kate implies, it was just like that, but not like that at all. We know the magnitude of what we're going to see, and can ratchet up our anticipation of its power, but at the same time we know that around that simple, tragic event will happen other events that we don't know at all.

To show how completely George Lucas misunderstands the importance of the Death Star briefing scene in Star Wars, consider the structural mess that's The Phantom Menace. The final land and space battles are won by accident, as cute Anakin flies a fighter haphazardly into the docking bay of the bad guys' space-ship, which happens to also be controlling the droid army that's kicking the crap out of Jar-Jar and friends. Shooting wildly at enemy droids in the docking bay, Anakin accidentally blows up some crucial doodad inside the ship, which promptly explodes, disabling the droids on the surface of the planet below. The fact that Anakin wins the battle single-handedly without knowing what he's doing is structurally weak, but it's not the fundamental problem of the scene. Far more important is that we, the audience, have no idea what he's doing, or even what he's done, until it's shown to us. We have no idea what the space-ship's strengths and weaknesses are. We have no idea what it might take to blow one up. We can only watch the good guys fly around it aimlessly, unable to assess their success and failure. Because we can't anticipate the outcomes of their actions, we can't feel any suspense. The victory, when it comes, is cheap and meaningless - not because it was accidental, but because we didn't know what the rules were in advance.

Which brings me to the purpose of this little ramble - the Death Star that I'm trying to explode, if you like. It's my Death Star Model of Essay Structure, and it's presented in public for the first time here, entirely free of charge.

The Death Star Model of Essay Structure

1. No matter how big and scary an essay seems, it's not impregnable. Imagine your essay as the Death Star: enormous, monolithic. Then remember the briefing scene in Star Wars. Nothing's so big that it doesn't have a weak-spot.
2. Forget about breaking down an essay into sections, subsections and such. If your essay is the Death Star, then you must find its exhaust port. It has one. The essay's exhaust port is the place to begin.
3. The Death Star's exhaust port, if hit directly, not only led directly to the Death Star's core, but led inevitably directly to the core. Likewise, if you find your essay's exhaust port and start there, the essay will, step by step, paragraph by paragraph, lead inevitably to the heart of the argument.
4. Once you've blown up your essay, you can stop.

The scary thing is that I actually think this way when I'm planning to write something. I find it works for other narratives, too - even sometimes for fiction. The exhaust port for this little piece is the Death Star briefing scene in Star Wars. It goes something like this:

There's a short scene towards the end of Star Wars which . . .

Thelma and Louise do a PhD

I found lots of good crunchy fibre in this piece by Tom Coates, What you should know before starting a doctorate. Having given up a PhD myself too, I empathised with a lot of the feelings of conflict, depression, failure, burning-out. I can't speak too much for the argument that doctoral students consider their path into academia too exclusively, because I don't think I ever thought of a PhD as a step up that particular ladder. Partly it was the chance to do something of my very own for a few years. Partly I felt I needed to prove something to myself about my intellectual abilities - and, ironically, ended up proving mostly what I'd intended to disprove.

Something that Tom doesn't talk about much is the terrible battering that one's self-esteem can take in the situation of giving up something into which one has invested not just significant amounts of time and money (and career potential), but also intellectual credibility. I suspect it's unusual for someone to reach the point where they abandon a PhD without having spent quite some time before that point in faking it, whether to themselves, their friends, families and academic supervisors, or some combination of all of those. It's a slow chipping away at one's trust in one's own abilities. In one's trustworthiness, too. No matter what explanations and rationalisations might be provided afterwards for the giving up, and no matter that they be entirely sound ones, the sense of isolation and failure can be overwhelming.

There are plenty of books out there aimed at prospective PhD candidates, most chock full of good advice, and just the right sort of warnings and reality-checks. There's not a great deal aimed at the student who shoots off the end of his PhD like Thelma and Louise off that cliff, though, and that's a shame. If Tom's figure of 50% PhD non-completion is even close to being accurate, that's a lot of Thelmas and a lot of Louises.

The Hunt for Shepherd's Pie

Lunch today at the (Ye Olde) King's Head in Santa Monica, which treads a careful line between authentic British pub and cheesy parody, sometimes falling off the line completely. Among the photos and artwork cramming the walls like a particularly low-rent Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is one piece of kitsch that Jeff Koons might be pleased with. It's a fake period portrait. Of Sean Connery. In costume. Playing Russian submarine captain Ramius in the film adaptation of The Hunt for Red October. Take a moment to consider the full glory of that concept. There's something of genius about it.

The End of All Things

Walking westwards down Wilshire from our new apartment towards the commercial centre of Santa Monica, a funny but almost magical thing happens. The street that pumps like a main artery through the centre of LA seems to vanish into a blue haze in the distance. It's the Pacific Ocean, of course, but it comes as a shock. The transition from urban cityscape to tranquil blueness is so sudden, so final, as if the land ends because some deistic development scheme just ran unexpectedly out of cash one day. How much more sudden must it have seemed for those travelling westwards not along Wilshire, but across the entire continent, thousands of miles which must have appeared infinite, unboundable. But with another infinite, unboundable space beyond. It feels like the end of all things.

It's a strange yet obvious place to find a sense of genuine community that's missing from so much of LA. Strange because it's so close to the rest of greater LA. The loaded LA term would be 'freeway close' - loaded because Santa Monica works as a community partly because even if one might travel to and from it by freeway, one travels within it by foot, bicycle, skateboard. Human-scale transport. If you need a freeway, then you're not close, no matter how long it might take you to navigate. Obvious because communities tend to form on edges and in extreme conditions, and Santa Monica in its own way has both of those. Hemmed in by the LA sprawl on one side and the expanse of Pacific on the other, people are squished together enough to overcome the repelling forces of distance and car-pod insularity, and let the attracting forces of community take hold. Find somewhere where geography constrains expansion - Manhattan Island, central San Francisco - and you'll find society.

And where you find genuine society, you'll find left-of-centre politics. It's almost dizzyingly refreshing to feel part of a community whose politics are informed, slightly radical, perhaps - whisper it - even slightly socialistic. Even the sad demise of Midnight Special, a fantastic Santa Monica bookshop with a left-wing flavour, can't dent the feeling too much. It's hard not to feel a twinge of hopelessly naive optimism.

And hard not to see, in the faces of the Santa Monica homeless, a measure - perhaps only a measure, but even so - of peace. There are showers on the beach for them to use. The sun shines most of the time. If they can't have a roof, then at least they can expect not to be cold too often. The authorities are largely tolerant of their presence. Indeed, one might almost claim that the homeless in Santa Monica are integrated into the community. The lined, weathered faces and occasional random utterances from the older homeless speak of hard and damaged lives, but there are far worse places they might be than here. Here, at the end of all things, they can at least live out their days with some small comforts.

Names from the spam can

If it has to be endured, the least one should expect from spam is that it be entertaining. I'm kinda tickled by the recent rush of spam appearing to come from people with names apparently dragged from some random generator, yet which capture something. It's probably just me seeing pattern where there is none, but:

Imprison K. Pinup is a vampish platinum blonde actress, no better than she ought to be. She killed her lover with a pistol one day in a fit of jealousy, and is currently waiting for her turn in the chair.

Oahu I. Worldwide is probably a Hawaiian surfer-dude whose fame has spread. He's a regular in gossip magazines. Picture him as Zaphod Beeblebrox but with only the one head.

Beeves U. Raspberry is obviously a huge ruddy-cheeked man, given to bear-hugs and loud practical jokes. He'd be played by Brian Blessed, obviously.

No idea what algorithm the spammers are using here, but I like it.

On clean dishes, and being positive

About our new dishwasher . . .

A couple of years ago I taught a course called 'Introduction to Artificial Intelligence Programming' - largely because I was available when no-one else was. It turned out to be great fun, and not least because I'd been through the same course one year as a student, and another as a Teaching Assistant, and could finally teach it the way I wanted to.

The course had been moving towards trendy-but-hardly-AI stuff like Java, so I was happy to yank it back to the delights of Prolog, and basic AI techniques like state-space search.

Prolog is a fantastic way to approach programming, for various reasons. You can't help but learn about logic too - you're basically programming with a subset of first-order predicate logic. You absolutely can't hack it, the way that you can with most procedural languages. If you're not exactly sure what a piece of code you've written means, it'll bite back, hard. It's a perverse joy to see students go through the Three Stages of Prolog. The First Stage is: 'Bah. This is just a toy. It couldn't possibly be actually useful for anything.' The Second Stage is: 'SHIT. This suddenly got hard and I don't understand it any more.' (The Second Stage only really exists because of the First Stage, which gives them a lethally false sense of security.) The Third Stage, which most (but not all) reach, is: 'Oh, I get it.' That light-bulb moment is wonderful to see, when it happens. It'll never be unclear to them again.

Prolog is to AI programming as Latin is to natural language. You don't just learn the language - indeed, in some ways that's the least thing that you learn. Latin teaches you about language itself. Prolog teaches you about AI: formal logics, knowledge representation and inference, search strategies.

Anyway, about our new dishwasher . . .

One of the small-but-important rules of thumb that I tried to teach the students on the course was not to define some predicate in terms of the conditions under which it isn't true. A Prolog clause might look like this:

mortal(X) :- man(X).

which says that some property, 'mortal', is true of some thing, 'X', if some other property, 'man', is also true of that thing. 'Every man is mortal', in other words. And that's fine. On the other hand:

not_immortal(X) :- man(X).

Logically, this is completely equivalent, since (one assumes):

not_immortal(X) :- mortal(X).

But clarity, which is every bit as important as logical soundness, goes flying out of the window. Consider how we might define 'immortal' using our original definition of 'mortal':

immortal(X) :- \+ mortal(X).

The \+ symbol is the typical Prolog symbol to represent a logical 'not', so this reads: 'Something is immortal if it isn't mortal' (assuming a closed world), and that's clear enough. Consider now how we'd define 'immortal' using our second definition of mortality:

immortal(X) :- \+ not_immortal(X).

That's: 'Something is immortal if it isn't not immortal', and it's entirely boneheaded. We've defined mortality in terms of the absence of immortality. Start sprinkling such double-negatives in Prolog - as in any representational system - and you're very quickly lost. The mistake is right at the beginning, where we defined 'not_immortal'. It has no place in logic programming.

Anyway, about our new dishwasher . . .

Apart from the program settings on our new portable dishwasher, there are two 'options' settings. The first, when selected, causes the dishwasher to increase the water temperature to 140 degrees before it begins to clean. It's labelled: 'Water Heat'. The second option is labelled:

No Heat Dry

Can you guess what it does? That's right. When selected, it disables the application of heat at the end of the cycle to dry the dishes. I could easily talk about confusing defaults, but today I'm yakking on about logic, and I'm sure you can see how I got here. One option setting is defined in terms of the conditions under which it's true:

water_heat :- button_1_depressed.

But the second is defined in terms of the conditions under which it's not true:

no_heat_dry :- button_2_depressed.

There's even a third option button labelled 'Reset Options', at which point things start to get mind-bending. What does it reset to? 'No Heat Dry'? Or 'No No Heat Dry'? (I'm guessing that the designer isn't a Prolog programmer.) The result is a throughly confusing user interface, and a long and tedious blog entry. Blame Kenmore, not me.

Did everyone except me know about this?

Sitting in a deli the other day, having lunch, I was battling with the thixotropic brattiness of a new bottle of Heinz ketchup. I'd shaken it vigorously, and was whacking the bottom, to little effect. A girl from a couple of tables away leaned across and gave some advice. Tap on the '57' with the side of my hand, she advised sagely. 'Que?', I said, falling into Manuel for a moment. Tap on the '57' with the side of my hand, she gently insisted. So I tipped the bottle almost directly downwards, held it steady, and then jogged my hand against the label by the neck of the bottle, right where it says '57'. Sure enough, a steady stream of ketchup emerged, neither too fast nor too slow.

Now, obviously, no matter how runny the stuff is in the bottle, it has to be replaced by air as it comes out, otherwise it's not going to move. So perhaps where brute-force whacking of the bottom fails to allow a channel for air to move into the bottle, nudging the ketchup to one side of the neck makes such a channel? I notice that the problem has also taxed readers of New Scientist.

Fuckity fuck fuck

This timely, pertinent, and wholly depressing little piece from LA Weekly about Dick Cheney's outburst. Hooray for the Guardian, and not for the first time. This Victorian veil that's drawn over certain good solid words in popular media drives me slightly nuts. It's even more baffling in this case, since what Cheney said was the whole point of the story. What do newspaper editors think would happen if 'F---' (which everyone knows is 'Fuck' anyway) were replaced with the actual word?

Kelsey Grammer on Conan O'Brien a while ago, the occasion being the end of Frasier. Talking about his tendency towards road rage, Grammer wanted to show the audience how he often reacts to other drivers. And he did something very strange. He looked across to the TV monitors so that he could make sure that he knew where his hands were relative to the picture, and then he did the middle-finger thing with both hands, keeping them below the bottom of the TV picture. He knew - and said as much - that it would be unacceptable to make the gesture on camera, so conspired to make it anyway, but out of the camera's view. That's so fucked up I can hardly describe how fucked up it is. Everyone knew what he was doing, but the world would come to an end if people at home actually saw it. Oh, and this was at about 1.15am.

Sigh. Come back Bill Grundy.

This blog was great, but isn't any more

In another life, I'm running a short story contest, and keep being reminded of a linguistic wrinkle that's most naturally associated with naive arts reviews. The simplest form would go something like this:

'This was a great story. I really enjoyed it.'

On the surface, there seems to be nothing untoward or inconsistent in those sentences, but underneath is what seems to me to be a fundamental mistake - or perhaps a fundamental difference in how people think of certain forms of art.

Look at the tenses in each of the sentences. They're the same, but they refer to very different things, and that's where the wrinkle is. The subject of the first sentence is the story; the sentence describes the writer's feelings about the story's greatness. The subject of the second sentence is the writer himself; the sentence describes his feelings on reading the story.

A simple past tense fits the second sentence, since it's the reading of the story that's being described, and that's in the past. But a simple past tense doesn't fit the first sentence. It's not just a matter of an opinion being stated - the 'greatness' of the story is obviously a matter of opinion. It wouldn't be problematical to say:

'Caligula was a great Roman emperor.'

It wouldn't be problematical, because Caligula isn't a Roman emperor any more. The past tense refers not to the location in time of the writer's opinion, but the location in time of the matter that's the subject of the opinion.

But art typically persists. If I say:

'This was a great story.'

and the story still exists, then what do I mean? That it used to be great (in my opinion), but isn't any more? What happened to it? If the story continues to exist, and I continue to believe that it's great, then this is surely a linguistic mistake.

Things might be complicated in certain situations. Graham Sutherland's infamous (and, in my opinion, great) portrait of Winston Churchill doesn't exist anymore. It was burned by Churchill's wife. Yet the photographic image still exists. Should I say that it 'is' (in my opinion) a great portrait, or that it 'was' (in my opinion) a great portrait?

That's by the by, since the stories that I'm using as my subject here unquestionably still exist. So why would a reader say that a story 'was' great? I have two speculations.

The first is that the reader somehow fails to see the story in the abstract, and therefore cannot separate the story from his reading of it. If he liked it when he read it, some time in the past, then it 'was' a great story. It was great because he thought so at the time of reading, and that's past.

The second, which I suspect is more likely, is that the reader seems sure that he won't read the story again. Perhaps reading isn't something that he associates with multiple occasions. It would seem very odd - obviously very odd - in contrast, to say that a piece of recorded music (as opposed to a performance of a piece of music) 'was' great. We're used to hearing music - especially music that we're fond of - on multiple occasions, and expect to hear it again. It seems less obviously odd to say that a piece of recorded text 'was' great, but the music and text are functionally equivalent. Films too. To say that a film 'was' great would be to make the same mistake - unless the film has somehow lost its greatness over time, or unless the statement is an elided form of:

'I used to believe that it was great, but have since changed my mind.'

Either of these speculations represents a diminishment of a piece of art. It denies it a continued existence, and a continued ability to be 'great'. It connects the art too closely to its consumption by a reader or audience.

Eggs and Sports and Legos

Okay, so today's the day for dangerously-obsessional language-issue blogging. Get those safety helmets firmly on, tighten the chinstraps, and we'll proceed.

Sitting in The Pantry yesterday, as a bit of a breather from the last day of our Big Move to Santa Monica, I was having their yummy sausage, fried potatoes, sourdough toast, and scrambled egg.

Except, rewind that last bit. I wasn't having scrambled 'egg' - as I would have done in Britain. I was having scrambled 'eggs'. It's not 'bacon and egg'; it's 'bacon and eggs'. It's not 'sausage and egg'; it's 'sausage and eggs'. Granted, I was having more than one egg, but they'd been, well, they'd been scrambled, so what was left was, um, well, it was egg.

I'm probably extrapolating wildly here, but here's a question: Is there a tendency in US English to prefer count nouns over mass nouns? At least in situations of ambiguity?

There's a more obvious example. More than one sport makes, of course, 'sports', pretty much everywhere. But the field of endeavour that encompasses all sports splits British and American English neatly down the middle. In British English, the field of endeavour is 'sport'. In American English the field of endeavour (ahem, endeavor) is 'sports'. Hence Dickie Davies presenting a cheesy '70s Saturday afternoon programme in Britain called 'World of Sport'. Might seem to an American to involve only the one sport. (Though British viewers of a certain age would be excused for remembering that it did seem to only show one 'sport' - and here the quotes do double duty since the sport in question was wrestling.) Whereas Howard Cosell's US gig was 'Wide World of Sports'.

And here's another. The stuff that the Lego company makes, seems to be commonly referred to in American English as 'Legos'. In Britain - you're ahead of me now - it's just 'Lego'. If the stuff is 'Legos', what would one Lego be? One of the bricks, I suppose. In Britain a Lego brick is just a Lego brick.

See? Egg. Eggs. Sport. Sports. Lego. Legos. What's going on here? How did this come about?

If there is genuinely a preference for count nouns in US English, it might go somewhere towards explaining the bizarre reverse engineering of the singular word 'kudo', from 'kudos'. 'Kudos' certainly superficially looks like it's a plural, even though it isn't. Legos, kudos. And if it's a plural, then there must be a singular, right? Many kudos. One kudo.