MUSIC- Old Man's War (Toy Matinee)

Got together with an old friend from high school, that I hadn't seen for 30 years in-between, for the second time a couple of weeks ago. The uncanny thing the first time we re-met was that we were able to pick right up where we left off. The weird thing this time was that in the interviening years we had developed so many similar tastes. Perhaps it's no so strange. After all, we'd been together through our formative years. Why wouldn't we follow paraelle paths in the years later? But the thing is- we've had different carreers, different love lives, different interests. I traveled all over the world, he stayed close to home. I was prone to small groups of close friends, he was more outgoing and social. I developed odd ideas about the world that sometimes it seems only I subscribe to, he is funny, charming, and relatable. Even my girlfriend thought he was more immediately accessable than I am (she was privy to most of our last get-together) and she's every bit as odd as I am. (In fact, I often think of her as the female version of me since we are so much alike. And realize that when she annoys me it's just Karma paying me back for how much I must have annoyed everyone around me for all these years.)
But the thing we seem to have paraelled more than anything else was our taste in music. Perhaps that isn't surprising. We were both musicians in high school. We loved going to concerts (rock, classical, big band, marching band, whatever...). But I was surprised to hear that he didn't like Steely Dan so much in high school but came to appreciate their music in later years (just as I had). So I turned him onto a song from another band that I love who makes music just as pop and yet as complex as Steely Dan did.

Toy Matinee

Toy Matinee made only one album. Like Steely Dan it was the brainchild of a pair of musical geniuses: Kevin Gilbert and Patrick Leonard. Unfortunately, Gilbert died before a second album could be made. Their music was a combination of pop, progressive, jazz, and fusion, that dealt with political and intellectual subjects (the first album contains songs such as Remember My Name about Vaclav Havel and Turn It On Salvadore about Salvadore Dali) while being filled with great gituar and keyboard riffs, lush productions, lyrical complexity, and catchy pop melodies. I found them when a radio station started playing this tune while I was in college.

Enamored with the Steely Dan combination of great musicianship, provocative lyrics, layered production, and catchy pop hooks, I sought out the album and in the interviening 20 years it has become the most played album in my life. It simply never seems to get old as I find new newance in the melody/countermelody, rythmic changes, key changes, and catchy tunes. Other standouts from the album include:
Turn It On Salvadore


wow, just...wow. The first lyric references everything from UN CHIEN ANDALOU (drag the bound priest across the floor) to "death and a Gala Premere". Gala was, by the way, the love of Salvador Dali's life and the muse for most of his great works of art. It has nothing to do with a gala premere with the "a" having a long a sound.
This is just scratching the surface of why these guys made ART while most pop bands make SHIT.
Let's go back to the definition of ART: (well, at least my definition of ART, but I have yet to find a better one. If you know one, please clue me in.) Art is that which is complexly satisfying. Art is something that touches the brain and the heart. Art is something that makes you want to learn something while it makes you FEEL something. If you feel something visceral (if you get a chill, it sturs your loins, it frightens you, it moves you) while it makes you want to know something (it stirs your curiosity) then you have found a work of art.
Toy Matinee does that for me.

But, like so many artists, they didn't stick around on this world too long. Next time I'll talk about their successor: Third Matinee

In the meantime, go buy their album...

PERSONAL- The Social Network Part 2

This is another personal post and I apologize. Looking back, I've posted more personal stuff this year than in the entire history of the blog until now. I've also posted less than any other year. It's just been that kind of year.

So anyway (ahem) after seeing THE SOCIAL NETWORK I decided to open a Facebook page. Sunday morning, 3AM. Put out feelers for two old friends from high school who I hadn't seen since.

And boom.

After 30 years of carefully hiding my tracks on the Net, now it's like the walls of my house have turned transparent. And, no, that's not a typo- 30 years. I tell some of the younger people that I was on the net before the web existed, and they laugh. But it's true. I first went online in... well... a long time ago. Back in the antediluvian days of text only. I was old when Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet by pushing the button on the first webserver (a neXT if you remember that computer brand) in 1990. I was old when Apple introduced the first Macintosh. I was old when the first IBM PC was introduced.

Hell, I'm just old.

And now, for two weeks, I've been on Facebook. A newbie again for the first time in a long time, coming late to a technology that everybody else is already using. It's unnerving for me.

So I did what I imagine everybody does. I started looking up people from high school.
And what the heck- I found some!

Hell, I even met up with one the other day and got caught up.

But I'm still not sure what it's all about.

So I asked a friend who is much younger but far more experienced than I in these matters (a self professed Facebook Whore- a term I immediately fell in love with) because I figured that since she's hella smart she could give me the key. And she gave me the key.

Or what I think is the key.

It's for gossip.

Which means that I'm probably the last person Facebook is aimed at. I never know the gossip going around. I'm completely out of the loop. In fact, my neighbors could be sacrificing small animals to Chthlu next door and, unless they made too much noise,
I wouldn't have a clue. And this is a social space where I don't know the rules. Do you friend a 19 year old girl who you work with, or is it as creepy as it feels? Do you just friend everybody you know, like a fisherman with a net (bad joke, bad) and see what you catch? If you die with the most friends on Facebook, do you win?

I just don't know. And I HATE not knowing things.

But, what the hell. I'm going to give it a try. And perhaps that means that the blog can return to it's usual content of lame jokes, indecipherable movie reviews, weird links, obscure science articles, and general crap that nobody reads anyway.

Or maybe I'll just become a Facebook Whore.

Music- Lessons

Ever since I was a small child I've wondered if everything in a world is just a projection to see how I would react to it. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. The only subjective reality is what you perceive and everything else is just your interpretation of it. It's Plato's metaphor of the cave.

On of the things that has kept me from dismissing this viewpoint is the wild coincidence that music I like sometimes comes back to slap me in the face with what it's saying years after I've forgotten about it. I couldn't have known it was going to teach me something when I fell in love with it but there it is, years later, reminding me that it said something I would need to hear years before I needed to hear it.

Let me tell you a little story. When I was in college I fell in love with a woman. Our relationship progressed and eventually I was ready to move in with her. At that point she suddenly became distant and I learned it was because she (without being honest enough to just tell me outright) had gotten back together with an old boyfriend.

I was heart-broken. I had never been jilted by a lover, let alone cuckolded! Yet, after much crying and soul-searching, I picked myself up and continued with my life. She disappeared and I finished school. One of my last clinical projects was to spend two weeks at a state mental hospital in McClenny, Fl. When I returned home and returned to work my charge nurse (who was also my roomate) took me outside during a break and told me that she had called while I was gone. Over the next few weeks she called several times.

But I began to piece together some things that didn't make sense. She said that she wasn't with the man she had left me for, yet she was living in his mother's house. She only called me from work and wouldn't give me her home phone number. She was vague about what she was doing and what was going on in her life. Eventually I came right out and asked her. "Are you still living with -----?" Yes, she was. I told her that I wasn't interested in playing the same role in her relationship with him that he had in ours and she was welcome never to call me again.

I thought that was the end of it.

Until three months later when she showed up on my doorstep.

Sure, I should have known better. God knows all my friends told me she was nothing but trouble (more unanimity than I had ever known them to show before). But, what can I say. I was young. I was a romantic. I thought that what we had was true love.

In short, I was stupid.

I was in love.

So, a year later, we got married.

Over the next twenty years I supported her and her three children. Paid for her to go to college (she flunked out). Set her up in her own Real Estate Business (she never sold a house). Begged her not to ruin her children through a combination of enablement and bad parenting (her daughter was arrested for the first time at 10 years old for shoplifting and spent the majority of her teen aged years in reform school). Bought her the first new car she had ever owned. Bought her the first house she ever owned. Tried to be the best husband and father to her children I could be.

And the whole while begged her to stop being emotionally unavailable and stop belittling me at all times.

Then one day while I was at work I got a phone call. "I just wanted to know that you were alright." "Yeah, sure. See you tonight."

Except when I got home that night what I found was that she had taken everything she wanted from the house, emptied out our bank accounts (including the profits from a house we had just sold in Colorado), and told me that she was leaving with a message on my voice mail.

Still, I let her go. Two months later I called my step-son and told him that I was filing for divorce, he ought to tell his mother. I hadn't heard from her. I didn't know where she was. I just didn't think it was right to divorce her without at least letting her know.

A week later she was naked on my living room rug.

Yeah. I know. I'm usually a very logical person. My only excuse is that I was deeply, passionately, head-over-heels in love with this woman the whole twenty years I was with her. In spite of being used and abused, cheated on, lied to, and stolen from, none of it changed the way I felt about her.

Over the next three years I tried to reconsile with her. Even when I found out that she was cheating on me again. Even when she lied to me about it. The bottom line was that I wasn't ready to quit making excuses for the way she acted.

Eventually she did one thing too many and I had to admit that I was just being stubborn. She wasn't ever worth what I invested in her and I had to finally admit that she was just what she was- not what I wanted her to be.

Since then things had gotten a lot better. I've fallen in love with a woman who is everything any man would want. She's beautiful, tall, willowy, caring, financially secure, and 16 years my junior. She's put up with a lot of shit that she doesn't deserve from the damage done by my last relationship and yet she seems to love me for who I am and not be afraid to show it.

But about music teaching you things you don't know you need to learn yet. Here's a song I liked long before I met my ex-wife that perfectly taught me a lesson I didn't know I needed to learn for a long time.

(BTW, the last nasty thing she did to me was just last week when I realized that my mortgage company had stopped sending me statements for the last few months. When I called them about it they informed me that she had changed the address on the account to her P.O. Box! I called her and asked why she would do such a thing and, in typical form, she told me the bald-faced lie that she had never done any such thing. Yeah. That's it. Now my bank is lying on her to make her look bad! It's completely conincidence that she used to work for that bank and knows their services inside out.

They say that one possible definition of a sociopath is that they don't see anything wrong with lying to you and can't figure out why you would see anything wrong with them lying to you either.)

VIDEO- Free Hugs

I was genuinely and deeply moved by this silly little video. What a wonderful idea!

A life is a little soap bubble. It might sometimes bump up against the other little soap bubbles and even stick for a while. But the advantage that soap bubbles have over lives is that no matter how close your life comes to another persons, the bubbles never merge.

PERSONAL COMEDY- Just Dessert

I have no plans to talk about my ongoing divorce. It's not that I feel it's private or that I'm embarrassed, it's just that I don't really have anything to say. But a friend sent me this and it's funny enough to share. (FWIW, the line about not being a "licensed therapist" is especially funny in light of the fact that she's been lying on her resume for as long as I've known her about having a BA in business when she never finished high school and flunked out of community college because she couldn't pass remedial algebra.)

BIG QUESTIONS- The Meaning of Life (part 1 in a series)

I think I’m in love.



Oh yes, definitely I have fallen in love. She’s funny, smart, uncompromising, and very nice to look at. I admit, she’s picking the low hanging fruit. But even the staunchest Christian has to admit that there’s nothing more tempting than an attractive woman picking fruit. And I have always had a soft spot for smart asses.

As I’ve said previously, I frequent the HairyFishNuts blog, mostly because the writer is often knee slapping funny. But over the years I’ve watched him fight a tireless battle against religion. I admire his stamina, but watching the non-believers who wander into the site from time to time and often following them home to their blogs I’ve come to believe that he is, as the bible would say, kicking against the pricks. (works on so many levels;-) Of course, he isn’t alone. The Internet is full of people like him- K-rina in the Youtube.com video above, endless Fark.com flame wars, it seems that every time religion is mentioned the same types show up to offer the same arguments that Voltaire and Thomas Aquinas voiced centuries ago and said far better.

I also reflect on my own personal discussions concerning things like science and evolution with believers. And my conclusion is that the problems isn’t so much that members of the two sides have been convinced by differing information and might change their minds if they came to understand the other side of the argument, it’s that the people on the two sides of the divide have fundamentally different ways of looking at reality and are completely intransigent. I think that a lot of these debates are held for the benefit of the people who are debating- to sure up their own thinking- and the only people who might be swayed are the spectators who haven’t made up their minds yet.

When I look back on my life I’ve got to admit that I’ve always been of a scientific mindset. Not only in the case of being fascinated by science and learning all I can about the world, but also as a matter of intrinsic philosophy. I can’t remember a time when, even as a little child, I didn’t question things and discard ideas when convinced that they were erroneous. Long before I had been taught the scientific method in school I was already a devout practitioner. I question everything, especially my own conclusions. And I'm a firm believer that Voltaire was right when he said that you can tell more about a man from his questions than his answers.

But, having said that, I also can’t remember a time, even as a small child, when I wasn’t fascinated by religion. I was a born seeker, looking for answers, and religion claimed to have them. I’ve explored a great number of religions. And practiced a number of them to ‘try them on’ as it were. I feel that I can see both sides of the debate. But I can’t help being logical and questioning. I understand the need to feel like part of something grander than yourself, and I deeply feel that connecting with other people is part of being human. As far as we can tell, humanity is the only creature on the planet that can feel empathy. And that's the basis of religion- feeling for others. Jesus called it loving your brother as you love yourself.

So for the next few posts I’m going to retrace the steps that I’ve taken to come to my (tenitive) conclusions. Perhaps an even handed exploration by someone who isn’t antagonistic to either side is a good idea. There seems to be far too much acrimony in the debate. Both sides show their worst sides as they contend with each other. It's time for a dispassionate look at the question from the middle.

PERSONAL- Divorce

A quick personal note before launching into a longer, more Halloween-appropriate article.

Sometimes the only way you can know where you’ve been is to get to the end of a journey and turn around. Relationships are often like that. And relationships, like everything else in the universe, are of finite duration. There’s a song I particularly like that was written by Cardew Robinson and Roger Whittaker called The First Hello, The Last Goodbye. The lyrics go:

They say when you gain a lover
You begin to lose a friend
That the end of the beginning’s
The beginning of the end
They say the moment that you’re born
Is when you start to die
And the first time that we said hello
Began our last goodbye

We know each summer’s coming
Means the winter’s waiting there
And gold would not be precious
If we all had gold to spare
You only know how low is low
The first time that you fly
And the first time that we said hello
Began our last goodbye

If I could live forever
It is certain I would never know
Another single second so sublime
At the moment of our meeting
When our hands first touched in greeting
How I wanted to hold back the hands of time

When they begin the overture
They start to end the show
When you said: I’ll never leave you
Then I knew that you would go
The sound of all our laughter
Is now echoed in a sigh
And the first time that we said hello
Began our last goodbye

Yesterday I had to tell the woman who is and forever will be the love of my life that I was divorcing her. It isn’t because I don’t love her. I’m as crazy in love with her as I’ve ever been. But there comes a time when you have to give up. I truly believe that the opposite of love isn’t hate. Love and hate sit too close together. No, the opposite of love is fear. Love is brave enough to be vulnerable, giving for the sheer joy of pleasing, intoxicating as any narcotic, consuming like a fire. Fear is protective, greedy, sober. Love is expansive while fear turns inward. Love throws caution to the wind. Fear is caution when none is needed. Love can be the most painful thing in life. Fear avoids pain at all cost.

I’m not going to go into the specifics of my relationship. But looking back at it as I am now from the end, I do have a graphic representation that pretty much explains why I have to finally give up in spite of all the love I have for her.


No matter how much Charlie Brown loves the idea that Lucy is eventually going to do the right thing, sooner or later he’s going to give up. You can only be lied to so many times.

PERSONAL- The Nail That Sticks Up

I’ve just finished reading John Scalzi’s articles for AMC back to the beginning of the year and I highly recommend them to anyone who is interested in fantastic films or the ramblings of a great Sci-fi author. As usual I was “late to the boom” in becoming aware of Scalzi, but that’s OK because it allowed me to pick up his first three books all at once. Since I read far faster then most people write (and who doesn’t?) this gave me almost a week of Scalzigasm as an introduction, and I’ve been a fan ever since. His novel Old Man’s War is as good as it gets in Sci-fi, an interesting premise, memorable characters, scattered insight into both military culture and life itself, and a plausible universe if you can believe the incredible luck of the protagonist. The follow-up novels weren’t quite as good, but it’s a rare work that is. Nevertheless, finding a new author who writes in classical SF style so well is always a treat and Scalzi was that.

Just like his blog (one of the older and most read on the net), his column for AMC bounces around a lot, but no matter what the subject he’s entertaining and thoughtful. A few of the better columns deal with things like what makes a Sci-fi movie Sci fi, why 3-D movies don’t work, some of the EPIC FAIL in the design of the STAR WARS and STAR TREK universes, and even a Father’s Day scorecard of SF fathers (titled Who’s Your Daddy? and including an evaluation of Darth Vader’s parenting skills).

But while the AMC column is fun and lighthearted, it’s a particular entry on his blog that is the kind of thing that endears him to me. “Being Poor” is a blog entry that everyone, simply EVERYONE, should read.

Read it now, I’ll wait.

No really, READ IT!

I know all about being poor. When I was nine years old my mother finally left my alcoholic, abusive father; bundling up my seven year old brother and me and taking us to a different state in the middle of the night. It isn’t exaggerating to say that everything in my life changed. I went from living in a big city to living in a small town. I went from a predominantly black neighborhood to a place where black people were almost nonexistent. I went from being a child prodigy who had been tagged to be in the first group of students to go to an experimental school for advanced children to being placed in a class for developmentally challenged children when the officials at my new school misunderstood my mother’s explanation of the “special” school I was supposed to go to. But the biggest change was that I went from being a middle class kid to being poor.

When you are a kid for the most part such things don’t mean that much. The world is what it is and you don’t make fine distinctions. But even given that, it’s hard not to notice when you go from being a little bit better off financially than most of the kids you go to school with to barely having enough to eat and sometimes not having that. And, no doubt, the change was exacerbated by the southern small-town culture that I found myself in. In a small town everybody knows everybody and in the south everybody knows where they fit in the social hierarchy. Being poor and without a father in the home back then got me labeled as “white trash” immediately. I noticed it right away the first time I walked into the local 5 &10 cent store. The wizened crones that served as clerks only had two questions for me. “What fer ya, boy?” and “Who’s yer daddy?”. This was the same store that had been the highlight of my summer vacations every year when we visited my mother’s family. You see, this dime store had a table full of comic books with the covers half torn off that they sold for 5 cents each, and every year my father would take me there and let me pick out all the comics I wanted, which would then be hidden away in my parent’s closet until Christmas. But after my parents split up the store was different. Now I wasn’t buying a dollar or two worth of comics with my father watching. Now I was a poor kid who would pour through the pile trying to find which of books was worth the investment of my lone nickel or dime, watched over the whole time as if at any point I might suddenly scoop up an armload of the precious (presumed destroyed) books and bolt from the store, thus plunging it into financial ruin.

But the biggest change in my life wasn’t my new caloric intake or even my presumption of guilt whenever I walked across the threshold of a local merchant. The biggest change in my life was at school.

Even after the mistake of putting me with the “slow” children was rectified (a mistake that, looking back on it, was probably abetted by my mother also having to register my brother, who was profoundly mentally retarded, at the same time) (and, yah, we called it “retarded” back then) I was still never looked at the same way again. Luckily the people teaching the “special” class were a married couple of graduate students working on their PhD’s in education who caught on in a couple of days. It took me a week to confront one of them and ask what was going on (I’d been raised to respect my elders but by that time I knew that either some kind of mistake had been made or all the stereotypes I’d heard about inbred southern morons were horribly true). They administered a series of tests and soon my mother was faced with the idea that they wanted me to skip to the 10th grade. Rightly or wrongly, mom figured that I was dealing with enough culture shocks without suddenly finding myself with kids five years older than I was, so she vetoed this plan and I was moved to a regular fifth grade class. But being poor still was what most of my teachers saw.

PERSONAL- The Vampyre Lifestyle

Working nights is the perfect schedule for someone who doesn’t mind sleeping all day, being up all night, and spending a lot of time entertaining themselves. Commonly referred to as people “with no life”, these independent souls tend toward careers in writing, art, the convenience store industry, and corporate security. My father was a night shift worker in the Colonial Bread bakery in Indianapolis when I was a kid. But he worked every night and was up every evening by the time I got home from school so it wasn’t so different than having a dad who worked in the daylight and slept at night. Except when I would wake up in the middle of the night and hear the voices of him and a couple of his friends in the kitchen- drinking and talking. On nights when he didn’t have friends over I have no idea how he entertained himself. Back then there was no Internet, no cable, and the three local TV networks signed off around midnight after playing the national anthem. (In fact, for years when I was a kid I thought that there was some kind of law that required playing the national anthem after every late night horror movie, since I only got to stay up that late on Saturday night to watch the weekly creature feature.) When I look back on it I suspect that most of dad’s time was spent drinking. But I don’t think he spent that many sleepless nights. Mostly because the drinking he did in the evenings on the days he didn’t work usually found him passed out by bedtime.

Anyway, if you don’t drink and you work nights then the Internet is a Godsend. Even nowadays television in the wee hours is a wasteland even by the typical wasteland standards of television. 300+ channels on DirecTV and by 2:00 AM most of them are showing infomercials for naked girl vids, miracle cures, exercise plans, or pee-pee lengthening pills. It makes me long for the days of slow fades from flags to jet planes to war memorials with the Star Spangled Banner playing in the background followed by a screen of calm, blessed static. But the Internet changes the game. It’s a true 24-hour business. Anything you can do online in the middle of the afternoon you can do 12 hours later with little or no difference. The Internet has no circadian rhythm, just like night shift workers! Finally an end to the disenfranchisement of the chronic insomniac!

So what have I been doing online for the last few weeks while working nights?

Watching television ONLINE!

See, the other thing that working nights does is leave most people chronically fatigued. Regular night shift workers either acclimate or get a day job. (Or die, I read somewhere that working nights takes 7 years off your life.) I could be writing, or playing videogames, or painting, or exercising, or even going down to the Wal-Mart (the only place open 24 hours in my small town) to watch the virtual circus side show of customers who wander in there in the middle of the night. But all those take a surprising amount of energy when you can’t sleep but have been up for 36 hours straight. Instead I find that mostly I read, listen to music, and watch television- basically anything that requires a minimal amount of concentration and a near non-existent amount of movement. Usually I’ve been too tired to even write reviews of the movies I’ve seen lately. When I do have a couple of days off I jump into the car and get the hell out of the house, snapping up as much sunshine, activity, and regular human contact as possible.

Anyway, spending a lot of time web-surfing isn’t all bad. As I hope to demonstrate by sharing some of the videos I’ve found online.

So lets start with one of JoCo's latest masterpieces, which is so appropriate that I've been playing it a lot. Go to his website to listen to (and buy) the fully arranged version which is better and has some wonderfully recorded bird sounds too.

PERSONAL- Roads Not (yet) Taken

Within the first few weeks after I moved to Colorado there was a story on the news of four people in a Jeep Cherokee going off a mountain road and falling 1500 feet. That's right. 1500 FEET! Nevertheless, our own Wrangler was destined to log thousands of miles off-road over the next several years. And although there were times I wasn't sure we had enough traction or even room for the wheels (once we followed a four-wheeler trail for over ten miles before we found out that it wasn't a road) there were only a few times when I was in actual fear for my life.

Can't wait to vacation in La Paz so I can travel this road.

This I Know

I thought I’d start the year with an infodump. Here are some of the aphorisms I’ve picked up or written over the years that have helped me to understand the world. Hopefully you will find something helpful for the New Year.

God is far too fond of irony.

Spirituality is inversely proportional to self-righteousness.

Over the long haul, correctness is proportional to doubt.

Quae nocent docent: Things that injure- teach.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained as stupidity.

Common sense is not so common.

Never assume that everybody else is like you.

Argue with a fool and there are two fools arguing.

One of the primary purposes of religion is to separate people into us and them. One of the primary purposes of enlightenment is to break down barriers between us and them.

All too often, Christianity isn’t the religion of Jesus; it’s a religion about Jesus.

The opposite of love is fear.

You quit learning the minute you stop thinking that you might not be wrong.

Expecting gratitude when you help someone is ridiculous.

The more you love, the less you care.

The Democratic fallacy is that everybody’s opinion has equal worth.

Everything in the world conspires to keep you from actually being in charge of your own life. Including you.

Lotto is a tax on the mathematically challenged.

The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.

The only thing in the world you can be sure that you can change is your reaction to it.

We are stone-age brains dealing with twenty-first century technology.

The police work for the status quo. They are not employed to protect or serve the citizens.

Human society is an outgrowth of human nature.

One of the earliest things children learn is possessiveness. Lying is another.

Being sure is not the same as being right.

Psychology derives from biology, sociology derives from psychology, thus sociology derives from biology.

You are never in control as much as you think you are.

If you don't believe in luck, flip a coin and prove it.

It is never a bad idea to look for more evidence.

All governments eventually become malignant.

Gender roles were not imposed on either sex. They were inherited from biology.

No matter how wrong an idea is, there will be smart people who believe it, conversely there is no idea so right that it doesn’t have some idiot involved. (The popular expression of the second part of this is “even a broken clock is right twice a day”.

No person can be more than 50% of a relationship. A 50% correct relationship still gets a failing grade.

It may not have been your fault, but thinking that teaches you nothing.

One of the best courses in psychology you’ll ever have is driving in traffic.

Mentally retarded people rarely get angry. Stupid people get angry a lot. Smart people get angry less and control it better.

Democracy isn’t a system for making the best decisions, it’s a system for correcting the worst ones.

By the time they reach adulthood most people have figured out if they aren’t beautiful, athletic, or rich. However, they will go on thinking they are smarter than other people for the rest of their lives.

Insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting different results.

Class warfare has been being fought since the invention of money but it’s only called that when the poor fight back.

Life is a school. If you don’t learn the right answer to a problem you will keep seeing that problem repeatedly until you do get it right. This is why your cable keeps being turned off.

If you worry more about being respected than you do about respecting others, you’re doing it wrong.

Usually, not always but usually, when people are about to do something they shouldn’t do, they know it.

The golden rule isn’t “do unto others” it’s “love one another”.

We tend to dislike things in other people that we don’t want to admit about ourselves.

Spirituality is about making yourself better, making other people better is their job (not to mention impossible for you to do).

Unwanted help is always “unwanted” first and “help” second.

In college they taught me:
A class in statistics
And that generalizations were bad
These things are mutually exclusive.

Growng Up in the 21st Century

Tomorrow is New Year’s Day and today I’m woolgathering and taking stock. I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions. Why wait until some arbitrary day on the calendar to do something that needs doing or change something that needs changing? But I understand that it’s human nature to procrastinate all that doing and changing and the start of the new year does serve to remind one that time is passing, if you need to be reminded of that sort of thing. Personally I’d be in serious contention for the title of world’s worst procrastinator of I let myself, so I’ve always made a conscious decision to try to get done as quickly as possible things I might otherwise put off. This leaves me free on New Year’s to take stock and plan what I want to accomplish in the future. And to ruminate on what has happened in the last year and try to understand it. I find this works better for me than trying to change everything at once, failing miserably, and then giving up for the rest of the year- which is what resolutions seem to wind up causing for a lot of folks.

The year has been rather uneventful for me on a personal level. Sure there have been the sort of things that crop up in any given year of your life- I bought a new car, sold my old one (both transactions on Ebay, that was a first), and had a bout of illness (practically the first time I’ve ever been seriously ill, so that was enlightening) but most of my time was taken up with the things that comprise day to day life- work, play, taking out the garbage. My life goes on at a pretty even keel. One of the advantages of getting a little older is that you’ve had a chance to work a lot of things out, to figure out what works and what doesn’t. And one of the advantages of my job is that it helps me keep things in perspective. It’s hard to sweat the small stuff when you deal with people who are dealing with real crises every day.

OTOH, the year seems to have been pretty traumatic on a national and world level. I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I think we’re on the cusp of big changes. One of the constants in the universe seems to be that things have a specific plan to their existence. Everything from plants and animals, to people, to stars, to galaxies, and presumably even the universe, has a series of stages they go through from birth to death. For instance, a star and it’s attendant solar system starts out as a ball of gas. The gas congeals into the sun and planets. The sun ignites when it gets dense and hot enough for hydrogen to fuse. There’s a period of furious activity where billions of orbiting particles get whittled down to a few hundred thousand and the planets cool. Then the sun settles into a long period of stable activity. Eventually the sun grows old and uses up the available hydrogen. It cools, expands, and eventually dies. Sort of like people. There’s birth, childhood with all its associated traumas, adulthood with it’s attendant stability, and eventually old age. One of my favorite psychological theorists, a fellow named Eric Erikson, postulated that human beings go through eight developmental stages from birth to death and that each stage had a central challenge that had to be overcome to advance to the next. I think intelligent species are like that too. Human beings have gone through a sort of childhood, where we developed society and technology, and an adolescence, where we covered the planet and learned some rudimentary control over the forces of nature. Now we seem to be entering a period of adulthood. We can no longer afford the excesses of youth. But like any adolescent, if we don’t learn to control our impulses to be wasteful, greedy, thoughtless, and self absorbed, we aren’t going to be able to enjoy a long fruitful period of adulthood. My entire life I’ve lived in a world where human beings had the capacity to destroy themselves and the planet. And somehow, so far we haven’t. But the problems are becoming more complex. Now we don’t have to worry just about doing something mind-bogglingly stupid and starting a nuclear holocaust. We have to start thinking about how we are going to manage the planet so we have a long prosperous life as a species. I hope we’re up to it. If we aren’t it’s entirely possible that, like many adolescents who don’t grow up, we’ll ruin our future or perhaps even kill ourselves as a race. I think we’re at that point now. We have the capability to do almost anything if we’re smart. But if we don’t quit acting like children we aren’t going to last long. It seems the time has come for us to start acting like adults.

Will we be able to? I honestly don’t know. There is such a strong spark of the divine in us. We can be so good and caring and smart. OTOH, like any child on the brink of adulthood, we have such great hesitance and fear when we think we are going to have to start being responsible for ourselves and start making good decisions. The current financial crisis is like the hangover that follows a wild college frat party. The party’s over, it’s Monday morning and time for class. If you don’t make yourself get up and go in spite of the fact that your head is pounding and the next little while is really going to suck, then you’re never going to graduate. Maybe in the long run this financial crisis will be a good thing. Those bleary eyed Monday mornings teach you that spending the weekend getting loaded is a pretty stupid idea. And people often are at their best when challenged. I’ve noticed that when times are good and things are easy, people often get complacent and lazy. A kick in the pants sometimes smartens us up considerably. I’m just not looking forward to the hangover. But if we wind up with a better world when we come out the other side then it was worth it.

abbreviated post this morning because I’m in away from home.

Cool tech thingie- an ink-jet printer for concrete buildings.

An article at the NEW YORK TIMES website where Peter Leeson (in their Freakanomics column, and if you haven’t read the book go to Amazon or your local library and do so right now) realizes that UFO sightings and Bigfoot sightings statistically occur in the same states. (bonus surprise, none of them is below the Mason-Dixon line). This either means that (a) UFOs are actually looking for bigfoot, (b) wookies are piloting UFOs, or (c) this should be a three dimensional (or three-dementia-onal) graph where the third axis is alcohol consumption.

In a UFO thread on FARK I was the only person to get a song lyric challenge.

And yet more astronauts are saying that the government has been covering up UFO contact. (And shame on Discovery.com for not having a dateline on the story.)

PERSONAL- Back to the Blog

Well, two entries for the month of June. Not my fault this time. I finally got sick of paying Charter Cable for malfunctioning equipment, bad service, high prices, and a complete inability to fix any of the above despite dozens of phone calls and attempts.

I’ve loved technology and been an “early adopter” starting back when audio was called Hi-Fi and stereo was a new technology. When the IBM PC was introduced I had already owned a few computers. My first videogame was PONG and my first VCR was a JVC 6800 Vidstar. (Their first 4-head design- with a wired remote control!) I owned a few Laserdisc players, a couple of Betamax machines, a first gen CD player (with two whole disks to play on it), and at least one of virtually every new technology since. I’m no stranger to technologies that require a lot of savvy from the user and sometimes don’t work anyway.

I even had cable as soon as it was available in my area. But for the last several years I had DirecTV. I found them to be reliable, easy to deal with, and decent value for money. But the grass is always greener and I decided to try Cable again for the sake of price, faster internet service, and because I was frustrated with the slow roll-out of HD.

My local cable company is Charter Communications. They SUCK. I originally ordered two HD DVRs. I never got the second even after a year. When first installed my premium movie channels were not enabled and my cable modem didn’t work. Fixing this took three phone calls. Charter cares so much for their customers that they don’t even list their local phone number in the phone book. Once I spoke to someone in the Philippines, another time someone in Nova Scotia. When my first bill came I had been charged for the Internet connection and movie channels even though it had taken two weeks to get them running. Another call to customer service and I was given a new balance to pay. When the next bill came it showed that I hadn’t paid the balance in full and still owed for the first two weeks of Internet and HBO even though I thought that I had straightened that out. This prompted yet another call. That’s when I found out that when you call Charter they don’t seem to write down what the conversation was about. They had no record of my adjustment in the first bill even though I could tell them whom I had spoken to and when the conversation had taken place. I eventually wound up paying for something I didn’t get because it was obvious that they weren’t going to budge.

The first DVR I got didn’t work. That one got changed to one that worked intermittently. Finally a firmware update was supposed to fix the problem and enable the USB connection for the addition of an outboard hard drive. This was welcome news since the I had been used to the Phillips TIVO for DirecTV, which had about 30 hours of HD space. The Charter DVR only had about 10. So I immediately bought a 500 GB drive and hooked it up. The result was that not only did the new drive not work but the machine started to refuse to record intermittently. Disconnecting the HD didn’t help but did allow me to learn that the DVR had reformatted the drive so that it was now useless. That unit was replaced with yet another HD DVR (my third in 6 months).

After that the DVR worked, but only after a fashion. The software was full of bugs. For instance, if you had four things scheduled for the same time it wouldn’t allow you to select which ones you actually wanted to record. Once it had assigned a program to a particular tuner, it was an either-or proposition. And if you wanted to cancel all 4 recordings it would enable at least one anyway. (Low storage space and the inability to cancel recordings- there’s a winning combination for you.) In short, while my HD TIVO had been reliable, intuitive, programmable, and had adequate storage and simply the best interface I’ve used in a new technology, the Charter DVR was none of those things. What it was instead was, in a word, frustrating.

And yet, calling on the patience I had cultivated as an “early adopter” I hung with them. Numerous calls to customer service during this period resulted in a new DVR (which worked- mostly), a 500GB doorstop, and a tentative truce with the company. Then two things happened that would be the last two straws.

First my bill went up 50% after my introductory period ended. I had expected this and wasn’t bothered by it. Or rather I should say that I wouldn’t have been bothered by it. But then my Internet service started being troublesome. After getting the thing turned on, my Internet connection had been cable’s saving grace. It was fast (nowhere near as fast as advertised, but Internet connections never are) and relatively reliable. But suddenly I started to be unable to access the Domain Name Server. I did what I could do. I rebooted the modem. This worked sometimes but sometimes it didn’t. So I called Customer Service. They told me to reboot the modem. Another call prompted a service call. In the meantime the service went up and down intermittantly. When the tech came by the service was working so he told me that they had been “having problems in this area” and did nothing. Then the service went out again.

That sound you hear is the fracture of dromedary vertebrae.

Let’s wrap this up. I called them to get a final balance and have my service cut off. I couldn’t explain to the rep that cable is paid in advance so I only owed for half the current month (she got snippy but still missed the point). I took my equipment apart and took it to the local office where I was told that my service was still working in spite of my request for cut-off by the person I spoke with (she got snippy but missed the point). I walked out of there and drove directly to a local DirecTV dealer and then to the local phone company.

So I’ve been without television (you can’t pick up a terrestrial broadcast in my area without a considerable antenna) and internet access for the last 20 days or so. For those of you considering a Luddite lifestyle all I have to say is that, for a voracious reader such as myself, loss of TV is no big deal but loss of internet access is a problem. I used to keep an extensive library of reference books and almanacs. Nowadays I use the net for reference. Being without a fingertip reference library was the thing I hated the most.

But I’m back. I’ve got a backlog of blog articles but rather then dump them online I’m going to dole them out as I can format them. Hopefully that will allow me to supply a constant stream of useless information to add to the ocean of useless info of which the Internet is mostly comprised.

Sorry I’ve been gone. Glad to be back. Don’t buy Cable.

PERSONAL- A Return to the Blog

Sorry for the long absence. My internet connection has been (hopefully not “still is”) out of commission and anyway, I’ve been reading, working extra, and enjoying the summer.

On the reading front: I had been on a non-fiction kick most of the winter and spring. Brushing up on chemistry, physics, history, and some biology. This was a pendulum swing from a early winter graphic novel binge. Having indulged my strange affectation for science I was ready for something lighter and at just about that time I happened upon the SMART POP books published by BenBella press. This is a series that dedicates a book to a particular pop icon and collects a dozen or two essays exploring various aspects of that pop icon. Topics include Superman, Batman, Farscape, Star Trek, Star Wars, Alias (the TV show), House (ditto), etc. This is a kind of geek heaven. Smart people writing seriously about not very serious subjects. It's why I read the COMICS JOURNAL during the '70s and '80s. I have a soft spot for serious literary criticism devoted to not-so-serious literature. So far I’ve read a half dozen in the last couple weeks and branched out into similar books such as Danny Fingeroth’s SUPERMAN ON THE COUCH and the excellent SUPERMAN VS. HOLLYWOOD by Jake Rossen (neither published by BenBella). I have some things to say about the books and whether you should read them.

On the working front: I haven’t got much to say about that. The interesting thing about my job is that it forces me to keep up with what’s happening in medical science. OTOH, the day to day performance of my job is full of human drama and occasional insights into the human condition but that’s not what this blog is about.

Well, perhaps some stories later.

On the enjoying the summer front: I took a trip out of town last weekend and it was as good a holiday trip as I have ever taken. I plan to break the rule of blogging about personal stuff so I’m going to leave that for a later entry. It will include science, sex, cars, and good food. What more is there than that?

I’ve also seen a few more movies, watched some GREAT television (yes, that’s right, great television. Not an oxymoron just something as rare as a blue moon), listened to some new music, bought a new car, built a new garage, and done some other stuff that defies description. Sorry to have been gone but one of the ironies (God is far to fond of irony) of life is that the more time you spend living it, the less time you have to write about it.

(Have you seen Valerie Bertinelli on the new Jenny Craig commercials? For a woman on the leeward side of forty she looks GREAT!)

But now on to smart people writing about silly subjects.

PERSONAL- My Best Friend

I have a best friend. He’s not a usual type of person but I guess that’s only understandable since I’m not either. His father was a professional man who was killed in a robbery attempt when he was 10 years old. The event changed his life in ways that even he is probably unable to understand. His childhood world was visited with perhaps the most feared event at that stage in someone’s life. The death of a parent. There is a period from about 6 years old to about 11, that the death of a parent is a particularly traumatic event in the life of a person. Walt Disney made a movie about it. It was called BAMBI and, when it was first released, parents took their children to see if their children would cry when Bambi’s mother is killed. My friend had this tragedy visited on him. But as Nietzsche said, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger”.

(I use the old comcs icon since it was based on him)

He is perhaps the most moral person I’ve ever known. I have never known him to lie. The idea of him stealing is unthinkable to me. I’ve never known him to be malicious to anyone. That isn’t the same as saying that I’ve never known him to kick some ass. He kicks a lot of ass, a lot, actually.

He lives in this great house but rarely has visitors. And even those rare guests seldom know about the downstairs area. It’s the real heart of his living space- far more representative of his true psyche than the above ground areas. Those few invited into the above ground space- the public area as little as the word public means- admire his taste, avariciously desire his wealth, but come away thinking they have discovered something about him when they only have seen what he wants them to see.

He has had a few close relationships with women, and dates quite a bit, but he disdains any close attachments. He’s too much of a loner. He’s too much of an iconoclast. Women are drawn to him but find him incomprehensible. The more they actually get to know him the more he unnerves them.

His parents are dead but he does have a sister though. Like most people, I don’t think she really understands him. He’s a little too smart, too disciplined, too aloof, and too sure of himself for most people to really “get” him. Not to say that he isn’t gregarious, he’s hard not to like but almost impossible to really get to know. His public face is very charming but he keeps a tight hold on who he really is.

He’s the best best friend a person could ever want. I have no doubt that if I were in trouble he would be right there for me. In fact, he’s proved it time and again. There was a time just a few short months ago when I thought I was going to die and asked him to take over for me. It went against his own personal dictates but he was willing to do it anyway. I’m sure we would see more of each other but we live in different cities and the busyness of our lives prevents us from socializing very often. Still, there is seldom a week in which we don’t talk at length. He is truly the one person on the planet that I go to for council when I am faced with a dilemma. I cannot express how much I trust him.

Part of this trust is because, just as I may know him better than any other person, he knows me better than anyone else. I have no secrets from him. He knows both the best and worst of me. My history is similar to his but different. I too have known the loss of a parent. But while he had someone to take care of him, I was a mystery to both the parents I grew up with. I was also different, though I was different from the start. Not through any real effort on my part. I was born different. I grew up being bigger, stronger, smarter than any of the other children around me, or even than most of the adults. At an early age I became enamored of space and spaceflight, which led me to a lifelong affair with science. But because so many things came so easy to me I never developed the discipline that my friend has. OTOH, I’m not nearly as guarded as he is. I too have a hyperactive moral compass but I think mine is more a product of my genetic heritage. As long as I’ve been self aware I had strong convictions about right and wrong. Part of why I admire his honesty so much is that I have no choice but to be honest to a fault. It isn’t that I’m morally superior, it’s just that I don’t lie worth a damn. I can’t lie well, so I don’t. He could, but doesn’t. I have a strong streak of the messianic in me. He is more rooted in the mundane day-to-day activities of the people around him. I sometimes put people off because I am alien to them. He puts people at ease so as to attain his goals. I find that often I don’t understand what other people do. He seems to have a far better understanding of what motivates others.

I too have a secret place where I go when I want to be left alone. But most of the time I’m on public display. My regular job causes me to interact with people on a more regular and intimate level. In some ways this allows me to have a different knowledge of what people really are. But it is the clinical viewpoint of someone who is always an outsider. I help them. I save their lives frequently (that doesn’t seem to be something that motivates my friend). They see me as everything from a servant to a savior. Him they see differently. It’s a strange dichotomy. A friendship borne on similarities as well as differences. In spite of his pragmatism, I find that he shies away from ultimate sanctions. I am more practical in this way. There are some things that I find so reprehensible that they should be countered with ultimate force. I try to use this force sparingly, but knowing that it’s there, ready whenever I need it, I am not averse to leveling the ultimate sanction. I consider it a necessary evil and to be used only for ultimate evil but there are individuals who are so dangerous that they require it. My friend thinks that use of ultimate force is unthinkable. I once talked to him just prior to leveling it. He talked me out of it in that instance and, as I have come to expect, he was proved right that time.

I wish everyone had a best friend like the one I have. A couple of times I’ve thought that my romantic interest could be a best friend. They were, but there is a gap of understanding that is doubled by being of a different gender. There are, of course, far greater advantages to having a member of the opposite sex as a “best friend”. I put the term in quotes because have come to learn that there is a definite difference in the term when applied to relationships involving sex that those which don’t. Not that I’m not equipped to have profitable sexual relations with either sex. It’s more that I’m only sexually attracted to one particular sexual situation. I’ve been devoted to my romances. But none of them, even that one that is more special than any other could ever be, is like the bond I have with him.

Diana might understand. Maybe. But I could never ask her. She always thought he was a rival and not something different. Anyway…

I’m just not good at this. I’m trying to explain something profound in simple terms. My business is explaining things. I write for a living. But I am a writer that can’t put their most innermost feelings down on paper. Every other writer either bares his soul of the souls of others. I am an objective observer of the souls of everyone around me, but I can’t tell them what I see because I know they can’t understand my perspective. A purely alien perspective. Alien but not unique. Your species has known the truth, many humans have told you before I landed on this world. But you don’t listen. You didn’t listen to them and I have no reason to think you will listen to me.

That’s why I need him. He lets me know the truth about the best and worst of your species. Because he is both and all. The most in control and the most I’ve ever met completely without control. The master of the minute while being the slave of the life. He has to be the way he is. It was a decision he made a long time ago, so long ago that the point where he was still able to affect it, was still able to be different, is long past him. Still, it’s hard to fault a man for deciding to be the best and all when he was a child and then doing it. In spite of everything that he’s dealt with since then. All the sorrow. All the pain.

Pain he would, of course, never admit.

Just like I don’t admit my pain. A lot of being bulletproof is not to let them know that even if they don’t kill you, they may be hurting you. One thing life teaches everyone is that you either stick out your chest out and take it, or you cover your head and run away because it hurts. At least I learned that lesson. He learned it too. One of his call signs on the net (of which he has many, do you think someone so alone would not gravitate to an anonymous medium?) it that it’s better to let go of your pains as quickly as possible because dwelling on them isn’t helpful. He’s right. Lamenting over lost parents is a dead end as much as lamenting over a lost world.

Shame that everyone is a product of their losses as much as their victories. Maybe that’s the gift I give him. He can’t afford to admit his failures and I’ve learned that you have to do that. You have to admit that people die and there's nothing you can do about it. But you have to greet the dawn every day, not the fall of night. I have known the night, far more than his brief experience with it.

He thinks he is alone. But, except for him, I am the one that is truly alone.

PERSONAL- Christmas in May- Hairy Fish Nuts

Several years ago, when the web was smaller and the world was still a little larger, I found a humor site dedicated to exposing the hypocrisy in religion in all its forms. It’s written by a self-educated Canadian high school dropout who now runs his own design company specializing in web design and is an aspiring stand-up comic. But for years he has taken it upon himself to rail against the religious, political, and societal forces that eschew reason for rhetoric, discussion for dogma, and the need to stare into the sun for the kind of blind faith that is, well, blinding. It has been said that he was born with his brain backwards and his genitals upside-down. Some say that he is the latest incarnation of the wandering Jew. But all know him as Salvage, proprietor of HairyFishNuts.com.

The title is, of course, a reference to the Bloom County comic strip by Berkeley Breathed. The story goes that Opus, the character that would eventually become the centerpiece of the strip, was originally intended to be temporary. In one of his final few appearances he meets a woman asking for money for “prayer temples for Hare Krishnas”. Opus is completely unable/unwilling to understand what she is talking about. “Pear pimples for Hairy Fishnuts?” he asks. (Breathed would later say that the response to this strip was so overwhelming that he decided to keep Opus.) Likewise Salvage seems completely unable/unwilling to understand what draws people to ideologies based on things other than logic and reason.

PERSONAL- Christmas in May- iwatchstuff

Today’s gift is a funny web site that keeps me abreast (you’ll get the joke later) of the latest in film. Not the kind of film where there are subtitles or where low budget independents do things that draw attention to parts of a film that perhaps should best be felt and not seen. This site glories in the mainstream with a geek twist. Comic movies, Action-adventure, comedy, drama, the movies that will be playing some weekend in the near or distant future at your local multiplex. But it’s not the kind of fan site that gushes over every Hollywood schlockfest. They are irreverent and often bitingly cynical about much of what comes out of Tinseltown. They are a clearing house of the kind of COMING SOON stuff that happens all over the web with their own share of exclusives. And they are so up to date that you have to visit the site every day if you want to see everything, since often their hottest scoops are taken down only hours after being posted because the studios have found them out. If you want to see the newest trailers, posters, info, and behind the scenes pics don’t waste your time with Aint’ It Cool News (they sold their soul for inside access years ago and Harry Knowles can’t tell shit from shinola on a movie screen), don’t go to Empire (they are in England and get everything late anyway), don’t go to IMDB (an excellent research site but their info on new movies is all advertising). Go to IWATCHSTUFF.COM. That’s where the good stuff with untarnished commentary winds up.

Iwatchstuff.com has several sister sites and they are worth a look too, but they all cross pollinate so you’ll see the best of all of them with a single stop. In addition to movie news you’ll get a smattering of celebrity news, photos of beautiful women caught by paparazzi (mostly while they enjoy themselves on the beach for some reason), and the occasional tech snippet.

IWATCHSTUFF.COM because you do.

PERSONAL- Christmas in May- What do you say after you say hello?

May 3, 2008

Continuing our 30 days of Christmas in spring, today I’m going to offer you a gift of self-awareness. You will probably have to invest a little money in this one, but, as the feller said, nothing ventured-nothing gained.

I’ve always considered myself an explorer of the human condition. As Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” This was my mantra long before I knew that someone who had lived more than a couple thousand years before me had also figured it out. By the time I started high school I had also figured out that most people, myself included, made bad choices for no apparent reason. This puzzled me. Why would people do things that were obviously to their detriment? Why did I do things that on further examination seemed stupid?

Somehow I came on a book by a psychiatrist named Eric Berne. I had read a lot of psychology books by thr time I found this one and like many people I considered a lot of what they had to say silly. Some of it might apply to some people and some it might apply to me but unlike other sciences they didn’t seem to offer a framework for understanding the basis for human interactions. Berne’s book, WHAT DO YOU SAY AFTER YOU SAY HELLO?, did just that. Thomas Harris had written one of the first self-help books in the 1960s from a part of Berne’s work called I’M OK, YOU’RE OK and later John Bradshaw would build a self-help dynasty on just the child ego state paradigm which he called the “inner child” but the only real influence these men had was to belittle the precepts in Berne’s book as “pop” psychology. Instead of these abbreviated versions of the theory, Berne’s magnum opus presents a realistic and workable theory of human behavior was laid out from cradle to grave and in the years since I’ve read it I’ve seen it verified again and again. I don’t think it explains everything for everyone but it is a fascinating viewpoint on human behavior.

I also risk belittling Berne’s theory by condensing it, but I wish to give you enough of a taste to whet your appetite. Simply put, the book posits a trio of mainsprings of human action- transactional analysis, script analysis, and games.

Transactional analysis is the study of human interaction. Berne supposes a trio of ego states: the child, the adult, and the parent. These are roughly analogous to Freud’s id, superego, and ego but go much deeper in explaining the voices everyone hears in their heads.

The Child is the spontaneous, intimate, fun-loving part of a person. It is free of inhibitions but somewhat naïve. It has the domain of creativity and open love. It is engaging and free. It can also be petulant and afraid. It fears a lack of control in it’s life and can act out accordingly.

The Adult is the rational mind. It is the inner computer that, like Freud’s Superego, mediates between the other two ego states. It acquires data and rationally makes decisions. But it is not always in control.

The Parent is the programmed mind. It’s the part of you that tells you to wash your hands before you eat, or wear a seatbelt, or to always be on time. It is what humans have in place of instincts. Early instruction that your parents gave you to get you through life, good or bad, resides here.

Transactions are either complimentary or crossed. An example of a complementary transaction might be lovers in their Child ego states exploring each others bodies, or a group of people playing a game together where each is open to their own feelings and mindless of the score. OTOH, a crossed transaction might be when one person is in their Adult ego state and another is in their Child or Parent ego state. An example of both of these kinds of transactions would be a typical exchange between two people on the subject of dinner:

“When will dinner be ready?”
“In about 10 minutes.”
Both people are in their adult ego state. One is asking for information and the other is supplying data.

“When will dinner be ready?”
“Leave me alone, don’t you see that I’m going as fast as I can?”
Here the first person is simply asking for data (adult) while the second is responding from their child ego state to the first person’s parent ego state. This results in a crossed transaction and both people are frustrated.

The second part of Berne’s theory is called Script Analysis. It deals with the life plan that people make for themselves while still very young. This is often based on a combination of what they see the grown ups around them do (most especially their parents) and the stories they are familiar with while they are making these determinations. This explains a lot of what the bible calls the sins of the fathers being perpetuated on the heads of the children. Berne refers to children as Martians. They are strangers in a strange land trying to make sense of it. As a result, they tend to interpret what they see and hear literally.

An example might be:
Daddy drinks. The young child interprets this as drinking is good since daddy is good. He asks his daddy for a drink of what he’s having. Daddy says, “You’re too young to drink.” Daddy thinks he has told his child not to drink. What he has actually told his child is that he should drink when he gets older. And the child follows this instruction. We wonder why the children of alcoholics are so prone to be alcoholics. We say that it’s a genetic pre-disposition. But that doesn’t explain why a child that grew up in the living hell that constitutes being a child in a alcoholic home would ever take the first drink. Berne gives us a framework to explain that.

Life Scripts easily fall into the plots of familiar fairy tales and myths. (Perhaps that’s why we continue to tell them.) Cinderella finds love in spite of a horrible home life. Little Red Riding Hood is consistently fooled by men pretending to be something they are not, even though the signs are all there. Humpty Dumpty has an event in his life that allows him to give up. Sisyphus takes on impossible tasks. Scripts can result in winners or losers and are difficult to give up even when they are discovered. As the son of a woman who had four long term relationships in her life, all with alcoholics, this made a lot of sense to me.

The third part of this framework for human behavior is game analysis. Games are, simply put, a substitute for real intimacy. (The theory also goes into “pastimes” but to deal with them, just as to do justice to the other two parts of the triad, I’d be taking on a load that would expand this article to the length of the book). These games aren’t the games you might be familiar with but they are interactions that everyone will find familiar on some level. A psychological game has a number of indispensable parts- a come on, a response, and a switch. Games fall into easily categorical types and are numerous. If you have someone in your life that frustrates you, chances are they are addicted to one or more games.

Popular games include:

IGYN, YSOB- I’ve got you now you son of a bitch. Where a person expects the worst of you and always finds it.

NOKTIS- Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen- Where the point isn’t the trouble but the fact that nobody knows. Compelling the person to constantly regale anyone who will listen with their latest catastrophe.

Yes, But- This one goes like this: “Little Bobby is acting out at school.” “Have you tried Ritalin?” "Yes, but he’s allergic.” “Have you tried a time out?” “Yes, but he never stays in his room so it doesn’t work.” “Have you tried taking him to a therapist?” “Yes, but its too expensive.” And so on.

Berne gives a framework for finding what you are doing that is sabotaging your life, your interactions, and your ability to be intimate with another person. There are many more subtleties to his theory. What he calls the tee-shirts people wear (a popular one might say “I’m proud I’m an alcoholic” on the front and “remember, it’s a disease” on the back) is one such insight. The whole “I’m OK, You’re OK” subject of Harris’ book is another. (Bullies have an intrinsic “I’m OK, You’re not OK” mindset, as do criminals. Co-dependants have an “I’m not OK, You’re OK” worldview.)

I’ve read a lot of psychology both before and since. I’ve been trained in psychology, sociology, and psychiatric illness in college. But I’ve never found anyone who could explain why people do what they do as completely and dependably as Eric Berne. Read his book if you want to really know why people do what they do and tell me if you don’t find insight in it, because I’ll be anxious to hear.

(The links supplied to Amazon.com are strictly for convenience and are not sponsored. Berne's books should be available to you from the library as well)

PERSONAL- Christmas in May

In honor of the coming of spring and in the spirit of renaissance I’m going to have Christmas in May this month. Every day I’m going to give you a little gift of something I find dear in this world. All will be either accessible on the net or through the net. Some will cost a little money but they were wrong when they said that money can’t buy happiness. (It can, but only for about 20 minutes. Then whatever you’ve bought is just another possession and becomes, at best, a part of the environment or, at worst, kipple. This explains the Christmas Afternoon Refractory Period, the letdown you feel after the presents are opened.)

Yesterday my gift was Jonathan Coulton and his wonderful song FIRST OF MAY. Today I give you another treat that is free on the Internet.

I got turned on to ESCAPE POD quite by accident several months ago while doing a search on iTunes for science fiction content. I expected to find a few dozen (hundred, thousand, million) podcasts about science fiction or a few (dozens, hundred, thousand, million) authors self-publishing. I didn’t expect to find a science fiction magazine with the kind of editorial standards you would expect from Astounding or Asimov’s.

ESCAPE POD is the brainchild of Steve Eley, a science fiction author himself who lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Every week it publishes a short science fiction story, usually read by a group of regulars, with introduction and closing comments by Eley himself. Eley is also pseudo-famous for a post to alt.atheism many years ago about invisible pink unicorns:

"Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of great spiritual power. We know this because they are capable of being invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them."

I’ve been reading SF for just about as long as I’ve been reading anything and I have to say that the genre is like a pile of garbage with diamonds in it. The last bastion of pulp fiction publishing, monthly SF magazines have published piles of mediocre stories over the years. The last monthly I subscribed to was Science Fiction Age over a dozen years ago. It was a magazine sized text publication with pictures and I was lucky if one story per issue caught my fancy. Eley has managed to cull truly interesting stories from the slush pile for the most part and, after hearing over 130 of the 156 stories as of today, I have to say that the clunkers are so far between that I don’t even feel that my time is wasted on them. In addition to his regular fare, he presents most of the HUGO nominees for BEST SHORT STORY every year- a service I have waited a lifetime for. He also has the distinction of making truly interesting comments for the introductions (his metaphor for Windows Vista is astounding, as are his comments on online gaming and the joys and fears of being a new parent). To add to all of that, the stories are read wonderfully. I have long been an aficionado of the spoken word and was always astounded that so many books on tape (or CD or .mp3) are read so badly. Somehow Steve had surrounded himself with a number of readers who are actually able to read aloud without it sounding like they are reading.

Check out ESCAPE POD, and its sister podcasts PSEUDOPOD (horror) and PODCASTLE (fantasy). And send some money to EscapeArtists. They pay their authors and publish under the Creative Commons license so you can share what you’ve found freely as long as you don’t charge money for it or alter it in any way.