perfidy

Later that same day, as we continued through the exhibitor tent, we encountered the 101st Airborne’s booth. There we met a very nice young sergeant, who offered to paint John’s face. Not in the sissy manner of most children’s activities, but with camo paint. Here you see the sergeant, and the result:

Murdoc:

Having gotten our fill of things military, the next item on the agenda was a protest on capital hill. When my wife was pregnant with John, she (being the kind of person she is) conducted a thorough, not to say obsessive research project on all things related to child birth and child rearing. Whilst examining the topic of breastfeeding, she got on some breastfeeding email list and they had informed her that they were mounting a PR event next to the Cannon House office building.

It seems that a representative was sponsoring a bill to modify the civil rights law to include protection for breastfeeding mothers in the workplace. Aside from, (I assume) a normal distribution of gender in the fifty or so children there with their mothers, my presence accounted for half of all male participants. Also present were a goodly amount of comfortable shoes, caftans and high tech child mobility devices. While I couldn’t hear anything the representative or any of the speakers said thanks to a substandard sound system, it was my understanding that the aim of the gathering was to amend the law to prevent breastfeeding mothers from being fired for using mechanical breastpumps in the workplace, and to provide tax breaks for companies that provide special rooms for that purpose. I suggested that they be called lactatoriums, but no one was impressed with my creativity.

I was very disappointed in my wife, however, when she removed the camouflage war paint from John’s face. She felt that it might offend some of the more granola-munchy of the participants. My view, based on personal experience, is that loving breasts and loving your country are hardly incompatible, but again my input was not well received. I got strike three when I was not interviewed by the attractive ABC reporter, and was hence unable to use my line, “While I have not had any personal experience with breast feeding in over three decades, I stand four square behind the woman’s right to breastfeed.” Breastfeeders may have won a great victory, but the experience was a bit of a letdown for me. 

A little while back, my wife and her band were on a local morning talk show. Since their slot on the show was at 8:30, and I was still unemployed at the time, we decided to make a day of it in downtown DC. As we wandered toward the Mall, we (I) immediately noticed that there were military vehicles parked in the area between Air and Space and the National Gallery. Eager to look at the instruments of death lovingly crafted by our great nation’s scientists and engineers, the three of us headed toward the scene.

The soldiers were very friendly and informative, and let my son sit in the driver’s seat of a MRLS, and even press the firing button. Sadly, the missiles were not live and we were unable to destroy the Department of Education, located only a couple blocks downrange. Here’s a pic of young John looking warlike:

But the interesting part was when we went through the big tent. The various services, agencies, departments, bureaus and whatnot gathered for Public Service Appreciation day all had booths in which they could tout their contributions to the nation’s security, safety and (in the case of the Marines and Airborne) general stance of extreme lethality and kickassitude. The Marines had a display of the various weapons that they use in persecuting our enemies. There were mortars, squad automatic weapons and at the end of the line, two corporals in charge of explaining and exhibiting an M-16 and its baby brother the M-4.

Being the kind of guy that I am, I asked the two what they thought of the new XM-8, proposed as a replacement for the M-16. Corporal #1 exhibited the extreme conservatism for which military establishments are famed:

“We fear change.”

He went on to opine that the new gun looks like his son’s super-soaker, and no right thinking Marine would want to carry one, though the pansies in the Army can do whatever they want. (I’m paraphrasing, but that was pretty much the thrust of his comments.)

Corporal #2 was more eloquent, but also more favorably disposed to the new weapon. He said that he had actually fired the weapon in Ashkanistan (his word) and was very impressed by the weapon’s recoil system.

“You can squeeze off three rounds on full auto before the barrel even starts to rise. Close groups, easy to handle. The only problem is, three rounds of five-five-six won’t put a jihadi down. Maybe if we could use hollow points or a soft nose bullet, the stopping power would be better.”

I asked about the 6.8mm round that was also being considered.

“That might be an improvement. But small caliber rounds don't work against fanatics.”

A hundred years ago, Marines had a problem with another fanatical insurgency, the Huks in the newly acquired Philippines. We invented an entirely new and larger type of handgun, the M1911 .45 semi-automatic, just because we needed something that would drop a crazed fanatic when the small caliber handgun just wasn’t hacking it. Perhaps it’s time to do that again. Shoot-to-wound strategies might encumber a reasonable army, where the enemy will spend time and effort to care for wounded comrades. Against frankly suicidal Moslem fundamentalists, reverting to a less nuanced shoot-to-kill policy might be a good idea.

And right thinking Americans aren't the only ones on this bandwagon. Via McQ, we find this Telegraph article:

Language, history, cooking and support for rival football teams still divide Europe. But when everything else fails, one glue binds the continent together: hatred of the French. Typically, the French refuse to accept what arrogant, overbearing monsters they are. But now after the publication of a survey of their neighbours' opinions of them at least they no longer have any excuse for not knowing how unpopular they are.

Well, that doesn't exactly beat around the bush, does it? But here are some of the meaty details:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Britons described them as "chauvinists, stubborn, nannied and humourless". However, the French may be more shocked by the views of other nations.

For the Germans, the French are "pretentious, offhand and frivolous". The Dutch describe them as "agitated, talkative and shallow." The Spanish see them as "cold, distant, vain and impolite" and the Portuguese as "preaching". In Italy they comes across as "snobs, arrogant, flesh-loving, righteous and self-obsessed" and the Greeks find them "not very with it, egocentric bons vivants".

Interestingly, the Swedes consider them "disobedient, immoral, disorganised, neo-colonialist and dirty".

I join McQ in puzzling over why "rude" failed to make the list. And smelly somehow missed as well.

It is a reassuring thing for the newly re-employed to perform some (to him) absolutely simple, nearly automatic rote task and receive gushing, heartfelt praise for the sterling quality, integrity (nay, authenticity) and aesthetic verve of a 30-page security checklist composed almost solely of repeating table entries with check boxes for yes, no and N/A.

If I can keep this up, my long term employment prospect is looking rosy. Maybe tomorrow I can sweep them off their feet with a nifty template that saves them the trouble of formatting each document from scratch.

Today my son is two years old. After playing in the sandbox his grandmother gave him for his birthday, here he sits, just before holding forth on the tensile and shear strength of support elements in all sand construction. Later, in a similar pose, he lectured the family on the history of the sand castle, its persistence as an image of transience and instability, and its connection to the 'building on sand' metaphors in the theology of the Early Church Fathers.

The Universe is a demanding place. It was not enough that I spent most of a year groveling before HR drones, dutifully following up on every lead, no matter how tenuous, sending emails and trolling through the nether recesses of internet job postings. I had to demonstrate that I really, really wanted to work.

Last week, I started applying for McJobs. While I have been getting the occasional short term techwriting gig – a week here, a week there – the work was not dependable enough to provide any kind of financial security. So I figured a yob at Kinkos would provide a steady, if not large, amount of income to even out the feast and famine of intermittent contracting. Among the fine institutions that I petitioned for work was the local video store.

Last Wednesday, I accepted their kind offer of employment and free movie rentals. The Universe, now convinced that I was serious about the whole work thingy, turned the work spigot to ’11.’ Thursday, I had an interview with Northrop Grumman. Whilst I was interviewing, I got two calls offering short term contracts. Friday morning, Northrop offered me a job at significantly more than I was making last year. Today, I fully expect my last two interviews to call back and offer me work; and just to rub it in, I bet someone I talked to half a year ago will call back and say that the position I interviewed for is now open, and can I start yesterday.

Not that I’m complaining. After very nearly a year of blissful unemployment, I am ready to get back to the daily hassles of interminable commuting, smelly coworkers, cramped cubicles and (this is the important bit) the bimonthly ego validation of shekels in my checking account. The long drought is over, and now I need to google for whomever is the patron saint of unemployed and desperate white collar IT wage slaves.

He gets a candle and a beer.

The people have spoken. By a vote of eight to three, Johno was voted winner of the game, match and tournament. Johno is the Lord High King of the Dorks, and all should avert their eyes from his painful awkwardness.

Johno should be given special credit, as he defeated two fresh opponents in his path to victory. (Frankly, he deserves this victory, as if I had had to go up against Ross, I would have had nothing - nothing - to use against Johno.) I would also like to extend a personal, huge, thank you to Johno for making me feel so much better about myself. I never spent $500 on magic cards while on an exciting European adventure.

Thanks also to everyone who shared our pain and voted in our pathetic little contest. Except for those of you who shared your own dork stories, you get anti-dork points for laughing at the dorks.

While this has been fun in an odd and vaguely cathartic way, I don't think we'll ever do this again.

Dave at Garfield Ridge links to an internet classic that I had somehow missed: the Evil Overlord To-Do-List.

My personal favorites:

4. Shooting is not too good for my enemies.
12. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.
29. I will dress in bright and cheery colors, and so throw my enemies into confusion.
53. If the beautiful princess that I capture says "I'll never marry you! Never, do you hear me, NEVER!!!", I will say "Oh well" and kill her.

As a technical writer by trade, I cannot help but appreciate this one:

57. Before employing any captured artifacts or machinery, I will carefully read the owner's manual.

While we're on the subject of internet classics, one of the best is the 213 things Skippy is no longer allowed to do in the US Army. There are also some other submissions by skippy's fans here. A sample of Skippy's list:

7. Not allowed to add “In accordance with the prophesy” to the end of answers I give to a question an officer asks me.
35. Not allowed to sing “High Speed Dirt” by Megadeth during airborne operations. (“See the earth below/Soon to make a crater/Blue sky, black death, I'm off to meet my maker”)
54. “Napalm sticks to kids” is *not* a motivational phrase.
58. The following words and phrases may not be used in a cadence- Budding sexuality, necrophilia, I hate everyone in this formation and wish they were dead, sexual lubrication, black earth mother, all Marines are latent homosexuals, Tantric yoga, Gotterdammerung, Korean hooker, Eskimo Nell, we've all got jackboots now, slut puppy, or any references to squid.
60. “The Giant Space Ants” are not at the top of my chain of command.
66. There is no “Anti-Mime” campaign in Bosnia.
83. Must not start any SITREP (Situation Report) with "I recently had an experience I just had to write you about...."
84. Must not use military vehicles to “Squish” things.
137. Should not show up at the front gate wearing part of a Russian uniform, messily drunk.
138. Even if my commander did it.
167. Not allowed to operate a business out of the barracks.
168. Especially not a pornographic movie studio.
169. Not even if they *are* “especially patriotic films”
177. I am not to refer to a formation as “the boxy rectangle thingie”.
181. Pokémon® trainer is not an MOS.
191. Our Humvees cannot be assembled into a giant battle-robot.
202. Despite the confusing similarity in the names, the "Safety Dance" and the "Safety Briefing" are never to be combined.

And so it comes to an end. Weeks of bloody and humiliating combat culminating in this, the final round. Much like actual war, this has been a painful and harrowing experience, fought for dubious purposes and to uncertain ends. Unlike actual war, no one gets killed and bystanders are rarely bombed. But like war, it is not without moments surreal and grim humor.

The true dork nature has many aspects. Ineptness, lack of social graces, monomania, unjustified arrogance, obsessive pursuit of minutia, vainglory, well-timed bad luck, and fear are the names we give them. No dorkish pursuit affords so many opportunities to indulge in so many of these facets of the dork nature as role playing games. And so I return to the rpg for the final round with two soul-searing tales of role playing madness.

[See the earlier rounds here and here. ]

Blackballed by God

Those who have been following this competition closely will remember my nemesis the fundamentalist Bill. This is the story of why he was my nemesis.

In the dark days at the end of the Carter administration, I was a young boy of eleven years. I had finished with cub scouts and webelos, and had moved on to the big leagues, the Boy Scouts. I went on camp outs, learned to make fire by rubbing matches together, and observed some of the older scouts playing a mysterious game late at night. That game was Dungeons and Dragons. My dork mind was afire with the concept. You could be a wizard, or knight, or elf! How fricken’ cool is that? Of course, I was as low on the dork feeding chain as you can be and still live. I didn’t know how to play the game, had no one to play it with, and didn’t even have the rule books. I burned to play. I found out that my best friend in the whole world, Jeff, (now a rocket scientist at NASA) had a rule book. And was playing with some other kids – some I knew, some I didn’t.

Jeff was a peculiar kid – and kept his friends strictly sorted by venue. There were church friends, school friends, camp friends and as far as he was concerned, there was no need for friends in one set to even know of the existence of the others. As we moved toward junior high, this segregation began to break down. I met Rance in art class in the seventh grade, and we were shocked to discover that we had both known Jeff since we were three – but had never heard of each other since we went to different elementary schools. Similarly, I met my future nemesis for the first time in Boy Scouts. Future Fundamentalist Asshole Bill was a long time friend of Jeff (FoJ) from church – and the troop I had joined was sponsored by Bill and Jeff’s Methodist church. (I was there because it met on my mom’s night off.)

Despite the fact that our group of friends was growing tighter as we all met in the great melting pot of Medina Junior High, and despite the fact that we were all interested in this magical game, somehow I remained on the outside. I never found out about when they were playing until afterwards. My inquiries received vague and increasingly strained excuses and evasions.

So, I convinced my mom to buy me the rule books. I studied them. Well, damn near memorized them. I made characters. Designed worlds. But I was excluded from the only game I new of. I would occasionally catch them talking about their campaign, and there’d be an embarrassed silence when they noticed me.

What I didn’t know, and wouldn’t know until my Junior year, was that Bill was plotting against me in secret. Whenever someone brought up the subject of my joining the game, Bill would blackball me. He’d say that I wasn’t right for the game, that I’d mess it up, or any number of excuses. And the rest would went along, since Bill seemed so committed to the idea of keeping me out.

Meanwhile, to my face, Bill was he soul of amity and comradeship. While I trusted him, asked him to speak for me so that I could gain entry to the forbidden garden, he jealously kept me out because he believed I was a dire threat to his friendship with Jeff. For two years while we went on campouts, school activities and even when he invited me over to his house, he kept me out of the game.

In my dorkish lack of insight into interpersonal relationships, I was blind to what was happening right in front of my nose. I was rejected even by my friends from the one thing in the world that I most wanted.

Ten-Second Ted

Years later, I had eventually worn down the resistance of the others, and was admitted to the game. We gathered in Jeff’s basement and geeked out on Mountain Dew, Cheetos and D&D. There was one other group of D&D players at our school, people we knew and liked. Some of them were even in our boy scout troop, but somehow we never played D&D together. One member of the other group decided that time had come for a D&D tournament, to decide who was the best of the best.

This tournament was simple in outline. Every player would receive a large amount of gold pieces and experience points with which to create and equip their entry. Let your imagination run wild, subject only to the basic rules of character creation. Also, every player would get several random magical items – and if you received something that was completely unusable by your character due to your choice of character class, you could roll again for a different magical item. Everyone was to contribute ten dollars for the winner-take-all prize.

I labored for almost a month preparing for the tournament. I considered and discarded hundreds of different ways of spending those experience points. Fighter/Mage? Assassin/Illusionist? Straight-up Paladin? Druid? Elf, Dwarf or Hobbit? I ignored sleep, schoolwork and meals as I pored over the manuals looking for the perfect combination, and for loopholes to exploit. I pondered what equipment to take. I added and crossed off items from my panoply, honing and perfecting the list. Can’t take too much, or you’ll be too slow. Do I get a pack horse? Hirelings? What kind of armor, what weapons to take? Will I need rations?

Finally, I settled on a stealth approach. A human illusionist-assassin. A couple levels of Illusionist for some useful concealing spells, and all the rest on assassin – because a simple dice roll can kill even the most powerful character, and if I botched it, my stealthiness would allow me to beat a quick retreat. Sneakiness was to be the order of the day.

Once everyone had created their entry, and tossed ten dollars into the pot, we were ready to go. Everyone materialized in a giant hall. I had my plan of action set – immediately run for the nearest exit and begin my hunt. We rolled for initiative, and I would be going third! Excellent! Maybe I could even get in a hit before I split.

The Steve N. went first. He disappeared. Ah! somebody thinking like me – I’ll have to be wary of him. Then Thad was up. A donkey over toward the side of the hall sprouted a five foot long rod on its back. From the rod’s tip shot immense balls of magical fire. Lots of them, right into the center of the rest of us. The DM, Brian, called out, “everyone save vs. magic.” I missed my roll. I was hit by three different fireballs. I took seventy points of damage. I was crispy before I could even move.

Ten seconds into the tournament and months of labor was wasted, along with my ten bucks. An Illusionist/Assassin has about the lowest average hit points (ability to take damage) of any possible character class except for a pure mage. And I hadn’t rolled well. The only ones who survived that initial holocaust were a couple fighters and one cleric. Who were all killed the next round by the invisible mage behind the donkey. Who was eventually killed by the Assassin who disappeared. The final battle apparently took seven hours, but I was long gone by then, having left with my tail between my legs shortly after having been carbonized.

[wik]

Buckethead has spoken; Johno must now rebut. The war of ages careens toward its grim end. This is our Pelennor Fields, our forest moon of Endor. Our Aigincourt, our Yorktown, our Flanders, our Carthage, our Waterloo.

Two dorks dug into their metaphorical trenches. Two dorks, exhausted, dirty, and suffering from encroaching swamp-ass. Enervated, disheartened, and completely out of ammo they hunker in the rain, scrabbling in the mud for sharp rocks to hurl at the enemy in lieu of the lethal measures that so far failed to strike true. Everyone else went home for supper long since; they remain, though whether out of dedication, petulance, or sheer bloody-mindedness it is hard to tell. Two dorks, hands red and chapped from slap-fighting and bleeding from innumerable paper cuts (those rule books, you know!), panting toward the finish.

Hopefully I will finish my final tale of dorkdom sometime early tomorrow morning for you to enjoy. In the meantime, I will repeat here what I told Buckethead at the end of last round: "Bring that weak shit again and I will beat you so hard you'll be crapping twenty-sided dice for a week."

Stay tuned to see if my threat of dodecahedral excrementia comes to pass.

Pass. Get it? "Pass?"

[alsø wik] Having used all my good gaming ammo on prior rounds, I am left with nothing in that genre except dull and pathetic little vignettes which would gain me nothing to tell here. Buckethead has agreed that I don't have to parry with gaming stories, and to be perfectly honest I have already shared my best dork-in-groups stories (viz. Penguin Patrol and Space Camp, and I suppose my Magical Mystery Tour of England would qualify). The Space Camp story was my nuclear option; I needed it just to stay alive to get this far, having also used up a lot of ammo putting GeekLethal down. So, in a final attempt to "win" this competetion, I need to fechez le vache, load up the catapult with whatever will fit, and fling it in the direction of my elderberrically paternoscented opponent.

Buckethead wrote,

The true dork nature has many aspects. Ineptness, lack of social graces, monomania, unjustified arrogance, obsessive pursuit of minutia, vainglory, well-timed bad luck, and fear are the names we give them.

In this, he is dead right. However, he is wrong that role playing games in and of themselves are where dorkiness achieves its apex. I would argue that truly dorky behavior - ur-dorkiness - is carried out in public, outside of the circle of your dork friends, as a result of striving for greatness and failing thanks to the staggering limitations you didn't even know you had. With that counter-argument in mind, I offer the following.

If You Want To See Me Pull It Out, Just Wear Your Cub Scout Suit With The Butt Cut Out (with apologies to Mr. Chuck E. Weiss)

I wasn't always the snazzy dresser I am now. Today, for example, I'm sporting charcoal grey Italian wool slacks with a richly colored red shirt and a dark tie with red and grey stripes (and blue and bronze and black and brown) that is juuust this side of ugly. My hoofs sport Italian leather monkstraps. It might sound fey and overdone on the page, but people, I gotta tell you... I look good today. Not GQ good (too broke for that!), but good. I've come far.

For years - in fact until I was well into my twenties, I dressed like a colorblind retard. This in itself is not so remarkable, and many potential voters will already be scrolling to the end to cast their votes for Buckethead. Not so fast. What makes this saga dork-tragic is the inordinate pride I took in trying very hard to dress in a clever, cool, and generally awesome way for much longer than common sense and abundant evidence to the contrary would suggest - all the way through college, in fact.

In a previous round, I alluded to some of the various wardrobian missteps that mar my personal past. In and of themselves, they are not so bad. Plenty of people have agonized over what to wear only to make bad decisions. But I remind you of these incidents here to set the table for a rich tale or two about managing to publicly, even enthusiastically make a big dork of myself thanks to what I was wearing, once over a period of years.

Scene The First: Crass Times At Ridgemont High

The year: 1988. George Bush was challenging Michael Dukakis for the Presidency. Me, I was in the ninth grade and my nascent political views were shaped entirely by Time Magazine and Bloom County, both of which I read religiously. God, I loved Bloom County. I used to read Bloom County compilation books in the lunchroom and laugh out loud at the timely antics of Portnoy, Milo, Steve Dallas and that crazy, lovable lug Opus. Sometimes people would ask me what my problem was, at which time I shut up. Other times, they would ask me what was so funny, at which time I showed them a couple strips and then they shut up and went away.

At some point during Reagan's second term, I had obtained a t-shirt with a picture of the Bloom County character Bill The Cat, an American flag, and a slogan that read, "Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Bill The Cat!" I treasured this shirt dearly. By the time the '88 elections rolled around, it had seen better days. It was now a size or three too small, the fabric had worn thin (did my nipples show?), the graphic was starting to wear off, and since it was white my 30-year-old mind is sure that there must have been visible pit and food stains. Nevertheless, with this clever garment I was determined to make my wit and savvy known to all when Election Day rolled around.

On the appointed November day, I crammed my pudge into the prized shirt and set out for school. All day, I made a point of walking around with my chest out, saying to teachers and students, "Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Bill The Cat!," assuming that since most of the teachers and Seniors would be voting, this would go over as a trenchant yet wacky commentary on the ludicrousness of our modern American political system. To my great consternation, nobody seemed to think this was half as funny as I did, and I in fact got a lot of perplexed and irritated responses. Never one to let a good joke die young, I persisted. Toward the end of the day, I did the whole routine for my friend Kevin and, trying to stay cool about my incredible sense of topical humor, let it drop that, yeah, I'm wearing this shirt because it's election day and I think it's a riot. Don't blame me!I voted for Bill The Cat! Kevin gave me a... look... and changed the subject.

Later that afternoon I got home from school eager to spring my jollies on the easiest of audiences, my parents. I set it up by 'casually' asking my dad who he'd voted for. He paused, cocked his head, and said "John, the election's next week."

Scene The Second: "False Consciousness, Punk Mock, and the Semiotics of Green Tape: Johno's College Years, 1992-1996."

Lest you think the Bill The Cat incident was my nadir as fashion plate I hasten to assure you that my aggressive wrongheadedness continued on into college. Toward the end of high school I grew my hair into a mullet and shellacked the top down good with generous squirts of "The Dry Look" hairspray. It was only halfway through my freshman year at college that I came to understand that this hairstyle, which was de rigeur where I grew up, was considered in college an act of tonsorial gaucherie. Clearly, if I was to become a Kool Kollege Kat I was going to have to make some big changes.

I first compensated by clipping the back and growing all my hair out into a sort of helmet-mushroom-shag shape that became greasy about an hour after washing and which absorbed ambient static electricy at a furious clip.

I then made some changes in the way I dressed. Grunge was big then, and indie/skate punk was making a big resurgence on college campuses. Out went my treasured university sweatshirts, acid-washed jeans and white K-Swiss. In came very baggy jeans, gigantic t-shirts, several red plaid flannel shirts, a leather biker jacket, a pair of black 10-eyelet Doc Martens, and a baseball cap from the Alien Workshop skate company. The plastic size tab thingy at the back of the cap quickly broke: I repaired it with a few turns of green electrical tape. I insisted on always wearing the hat backwards in the theory that wearing caps the right way around brought the hick-ness latent in my facial structure right to the surface, so the whimsical accent of green tape was ever-present in the middle of my forehead.

All these efforts, plus a summer spent wrangling 300-lb railroad ties, combined with the midnight pizzas of the mythic "freshman fifteen," transformed my appearance from "pudgy high school dork" to "hulking punk rock fashion plate." My metamorphosis was complete! Goodbye small town, hello college cool! Dork no more! I was most pleased.

The cap became my especial friend after I tried to change my haircut again. A girl in my dorm had cut my hair at the end of my freshman year into a sort of skater-boy shag that made me look even younger than I was but was, it was generally agreed, pretty darned cute. That summer, I mentioned to a (former) friend of mine that my hair wanted cutting, and she volunteered to do it, assuring me that she had cut plenty of hair. Did I mention that this person was later revealed to be an actual for-real pathological liar? My first sign that things would not go well was when she made her first cut and said "oops." My sign that I should have heeded the first sign came when I felt the cold steel of scissors against my skin as she cut a line all the way across the back of my head down to the bare scalp. My stylist/liar paused, took a deep breath, and in a more definitive tone said again, "Oops."

Rather than do the smart thing and go to a professional to salvage what remained of my crop of hair, I chose to wear my Alien Workshop cap backwards every single day for one year. I didn't cut my hair once in the entire time. Meanwhile, I wore my updated cool wardrobe religiously, joined a punk band, wrote the music column for the school paper, and generally considered myself quite the Big Man On Campus In A Punk Rock And Certainly Cool As Hell Way. I was in my element! I was awesome! Look at this jacket! These boots! This hat! Punk Fucking Rock, Baby!

It was in my senior year that a new term was introduced into my vocabulary: "The Uniform." "The Uniform" came up one day when most of my clothes were dirty and I was late for class. I picked out some random items from the back of the closet, threw them on, put a hat over my dirty hair, and went out the door. Later, at lunch, someone commented to me that today was the first time in a while that they'd seen me wear the uniform. The what? "The Uniform. Jeans, red flannel, giant t-shirt, Docs, and that gross hat with the green tape on it. What you're wearing. Everyone always called that 'The Johno Uniform.' Why'd you used to do that, anyway?"

Johno's tale of Space Camp dorkery won the second fight of round two of the Perfidy Dorkorama. That forces the two of us to dig yet deeper for sufficiently ugly tales of woe for the final and deciding round. Stay tuned for the last, exciting installment of dorkish combat.

[wik] See the earlier rounds here and here.

New World Man imagines what we would have been reading had blogs existed when men first landed on the moon. My favorite:

Little Green Footballs

Religion of Peace Update

Syrian television is saying the moon landing is a hoax and is blaming Israel.

[eight-paragraph excerpt omitted]

(hat tip: Libkiller)

How about Pearl Harbor, or the Kennedy assassination?

[wik] hat tip: our beloved blogmistress, Kathy K.

The Washington Post reports on a study that finds that the vast majority of college professors are liberal. While this should come as no surprise to anyone who ever went to college, the degree to which the professoriat is liberal is worrying.

Among the findings:

Among all universities, professors are:
72% liberal and 15% conservative
50% identify themselves as Democrats, and 11% as Republicans

At elite universities (the top 1/3), the gap is wider still:
87% of faculty are liberal and only 13% conservative

"In contrast with the finding that nearly three-quarters of college faculty are liberal, a Harris Poll of the general public last year found that 33 percent describe themselves as conservative and 18 percent as liberal.

The liberal label that a majority of the faculty members attached to themselves is reflected on a variety of issues. The professors and instructors surveyed are, strongly or somewhat, in favor of abortion rights (84 percent); believe homosexuality is acceptable (67 percent); and want more environmental protection "even if it raises prices or costs jobs" (88 percent). What's more, the study found, 65 percent want the government to ensure full employment, a stance to the left of the Democratic Party."

"The most liberal faculties are those devoted to the humanities (81 percent) and social sciences (75 percent), according to the study. But liberals outnumbered conservatives even among engineering faculty (51 percent to 19 percent) and business faculty (49 percent to 39 percent).

The most left-leaning departments are English literature, philosophy, political science and religious studies, where at least 80 percent of the faculty say they are liberal and no more than 5 percent call themselves conservative, the study says."

Liberal professors tend to hire more liberal professors. Anecdotal evidence of discrimination against conservatives in academia abounds, although this study says that evidence of discrimination is "preliminary." For all their talk of diversity, universities seem to be almost entirely lacking in the one sort of diversity that actually matters - diversity of ideas.

[wik]Johno comments that

Yeah, okay. But what happens when a bunch of adults start hectoring students about right-thinking this and socialist that?

That’s right- the smart and attentive ones do what endless generations of kids have done: grow up, drift the opposite way, and end up as professors with center-right to conservative opinions.

Seriously… if the problem were as bad as for example David Horowitz would have us believe, the Yoots of Today would be hoisting the star and sickle and marching to the “Internationale” on their way to cut their penises off in recompense for man’s injustice to (wo)ma(or y!)n. And yet, heavens! that ain’t happening.

But that ain’t happening, and this will fix “itself” in a few years.

(Trust me on this. The one entrenched big-school liberal arts faculty I know well is changing its face with each new hire, abandoning the orthodox insurgent marxism of the 60s and 70s for a softer kind of wimpy leftism (as described above) with no backbone to it whatsoever. The Marxists staged a “revolution” in the 70s in the academy, and they are now moribund at best and laughingstocks at worst. In twenty years, all the Assistants and Associates will be trending right, I promise.)

Johno gets the Calvin Coolidge award for recommending effective non-action. My original intent when I read the article was not to write a “sky is falling” post. Things generally swing back and forth, but this swing has been bigger than others, and - this is the important thing - accompanied by constant claims that the swing never happened, and that all those Chairman Mao quoting postmodernists were really just middle of the road moderates. That someone had to commission a no-doubt costly study to demonstrate what any booze-drenched college freshman could blearily see in seconds is the real story. Which is what I was thinking when I saw the article, but lost track of as I wrote the post.

Just a quick reminder to scroll down and see the latest entry in the perfidy dorkorama. Or just click here and see my rejoinder to Johno's impressively dorky Space Camp tale of woe. Vote for your favorite...

Celebrity defense attorney Johnnie Cochran has gone up to that big trial court in the sky. Think OJ will pay for the funeral?

Surfing around the web at lunch today, I ran across this gem on Ace of Spades:

Since we were kids, we always enjoyed the humorous and sometimes poetic group-names given to different animals. It was interesting to us that one said a school of fish but a pack of wolves; it was delightful that one said a parliament of owls and an exultation of larks. A shrewdness of apes, a crash of rhinoceroses, an ostentation of peacocks-- just grand poetry.

And of course it was just flat-out cool that one said a murder of crows.

But this practice was also extended to naming groups of people. One could say a skulk of thieves (cool!), a rascal of boys (cute!), and, if one could keep a straight face, a neverthriving of jugglers (goofy!). More of these are found here; we don't know if we'll ever actually say a superfluidity of nuns, but it's nice to know that we could, if we wanted to...

... from the Home Office in Pocatello, Idaho...

Top Ten Lesser-Known Collective Nouns for Different Groups of People

10. A gesticulation of Italians

9. A corruption of Congressmen

8. A moustache of policemen

7. A tumescence of pornstars

6. A shriek of liberals

5. A waddle of Rosie O'Donnells

4. An armpit of feminists

3. An insignificance of Canadians

2. A malodor of Frenchmen (also acceptable: a quavering of Frenchmen; a surrender of Frenchmen)

...and the Number One Lesser-Known Collective Noun for a Group of People...

1. A crimewave of Kennedys

Honorable Mentions:

A doddering of seniors

A twaddle of Democrats

A condescension of reporters

A kegger of collegians

A genocide of Germans

A trust-fund of "peace" marchers

A hypervapidity of Maureen Dowd

We might add a grumble of conservatives, and a bickering of libertarians.

Via ACE, we find this protest sign.

Feel free to comment.

[wik] This one is funny, too.

Patton over at Opinion8 has actually managed to draw a conclusion out of the morass that is the Terry Schialvo Cluster@#!?%. For that, I salute him. But in the end, his conclusion is that there really isn't much we can say for certain, though he pads this thought with some interesting bits about the media and other things as well. Go read it. But his piece actually pulled into slightly clearer focus my own mixed bag of thoughts on the matter.

Throughout this whole media ordeal, I have found myself wondering, "Why is it so necessary to pull the plug?" Sure, the husband has the legal right (proven at great length and, likely, cost) to make that decision for his wife. And that is the way it should be. In most cases where we talk about pulling the plug, having do not recussitate orders and the like, it is when the patient is going through, or is expected to suffer, extreme physical pain. My grandfather had pancreatic cancer, and we used hospice. They mitigated the (ungodly) pain that he went through, and when the chemo failed to control the cancer, they made his passing as peaceful as could possibly be imagined. Had heroic measures been used to keep my grandfather alive, at most he would have gained a few weeks or months of hellish suffering.

But the cases are not really similar. By all accounts, it did not seem that Terry was in any way suffering - just seemingly out of it mentally, and for the long haul. It did not require extensive medical technology, just a feeding tube and the kind of nursing care that any bedridden senior in a nursing home needs to remain amongst the living. The parents are willing to bear all the cost and effort of caring for Terry, why is he so intent on pulling the plug?

And those thoughts led to wondering about his motivation. He's still married to Terry, though he has a girlfriend, and children with her. Why didn't he get a divorce, or the marriage annulled or something? What does he have to gain by her death that he wouldn't get by leaving her behind with her parents and moving on with his life? I've seen reports that he would stand to gain from insurance or malpractice suits - which he would not if he were no longer married to her. And apparently, the dispute with the parents dated from the first settlement.

I don't know for sure that this is his motivation - though it seems plausible. But one thing is sure - that whatever his motivation - he gave a lot of assholes reason to piss in the swimming pool that is our political commons.

Voting is now closed in this round of the Ministry of Minor Perfidy's Biggest Dork competition. Round 2 between Johno and Buckethead is now open for reading and mockery here.

GeekLethal has been bested in the first round of our no-holds-barred, slap and flail, triple cage dork match. Under normal circumstances, one would expect that the next round would involve a duel to the geeky end between Ross and myself. We would bare our nerdy souls to the harsh judgment of our gentle readers, and the winner (loser) would advance to final combat with Johno to determine who amongst the perfidious ministers can wear the crown of infamy, dorkmaster, lord high king of the geeks.

But Ross is unavailable to participate in our little tournament. Due to a perverse confluence of debilitating gastrointestinal disorders, an unfortunate encounter with a less than hygienic dinner date, and his own monomaniacal work ethic Ross is flatulent, itchy, exhausted and on the verge of a complete mental, moral, and spiritual breakdown. Forcing him to participate our dorkfest would certainly push him over the edge and leave him wondering which is worse: moving back to Canada or base jumping off the Washington Monument with an hanky for a parachute.

So, we move directly to final combat. Buckethead v. Johno for alpha geek of the Ministry pack.

Front Toward Enemy

While a perusal of my posts to this blog over the last couple years should convince anyone of my dork credentials, this fight requires more meaty stuff than just writing a twenty page essay on space warfare, or repeated ravings about giant space robots.

When I was in high school, like many other geeks I played RPGs. We played Paranoia, Traveller, Twilight 2000, Cthulhu, but Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, 2nd edition was out meat and potatoes. Pretty much every Friday, we would gather together in the basement of future rocket scientist Jeff’s house and begin the dark rituals of high dorkdom. Armed with fifty-pound bags of reference materials, notebooks filled with deranged scribblings, bags of varicolored dice and laboriously yet ineptly painted lead miniatures we trooped into the dankness and imagined ourselves as grumpy dwarves, pure hearted paladins, crafty rangers and in one case, a sanctimonious fundamentalist cleric. (That last one was from the heart, not really acting.)

But after spending several person-years using our minds to imagine ourselves in fantastical and vaguely ridiculous situations palled, and we felt an irresistible desire to put ourselves actually, physically in farcical and most definitively ridiculous situations. Each of us repaired to our individual lairs. We prevailed upon parents who had long since lost any hope of having normal children to make trips to the hardware store and invest hard earned money to outfitt us as medieval warriors. We all had different ideas on how best to kit out as a warrior. The constraints were poor materials and a total lack of woodworking, metalcrafting, or in fact any other skill. In a couple weeks, we had all equipped ourselves with a stunning variety of poorly made and inelegant weapons and armor. We met at Cory’s house, because Cory’s parents had five acres of land. This wooded lot would be our tournament field, our Agincourt, our Waterloo.

I had chosen for my armament a long sword and Norman kite shield. The shield was a crudely shaped flat piece of plywood, painted green and with an expertly painted heraldic logo of, uh a shield green on a field, uh green. The sword was a four foot dowel. The ‘blade’ was wrapped in duct tape and the hand guard was a shorter piece of dowel lashed, with duct tape, to the sword. For armor, I had a thick sweatshirt and a woolen watch cap. Thus accoutered, I was ready for battle; my portly figure rendered manly by the weapons I bore. Or so I thought. My friends mostly had chosen swords. A couple had axes, and one had a bo staff. Only I had made a shield. But with the common sense native to all geeky teenagers, we were convinced that no harm would come to us. We knew about these weapons, we had read about them.

Amazingly, the first three sessions went without incident. Aside from a few minor bruises, and shame at our ineptitude, we were unscathed. Over the course of these battles, we had of course (as our dork natures required) developed extensive rules to govern our activity. We had rule systems to determine how battles should be scored, and how even to integrate the use of magic spells. (The latter mostly involved water balloons.) We also set up a complicated triple elimination tournament based on individual and team scores. Teams ranged from two to four per battle, and we’d have at least three battles per weekend. Team scores were dependent on both individual duels and reaching victory conditions in the overall scenario.

So, on the fourth weekend, battle was joined once again. I was on the verge of being eliminated from the tournament, though happily I would not be the first if I didn’t make the cut. My primary objective was to survive longer than Bill. Bill was the fundamentalist cleric I mentioned earlier, and at this point was about a year away from being shunned for degenerating into a complete asshole. Though he remained part of the group, tensions between Bill and I had been on the increase. I had to beat him.

The battle started off well. My team located the enemy flag, and eliminated one of their fighters in the process. The enemy lacked reliable intelligence on the location of our flag, and were outnumbered four to three. For me however, the situation was grim as Bill was the one who got credit for the kill. (Even though the weasel had backstabbed someone Jafo had already engaged.) He was one step closer to moving on in the tournament.

Thus motivated by desperation, I decided to act decisively. The enemy had taken up defensive positions on a small ridge. Heavy undergrowth protected their flanks, and any effort on our part to swing around to take their flag from the rear would give them plenty of time to redeploy, or even to move their flag. I turned to Jeff, and told him to cast a paralysis spell on the enemy. Then, I said, we would rush them. The plan meeting their approval, my teammates and I went into action. Jeff threw two water balloons at the enemy. One missed, and the other splashed Cory. Now Cory could not move until he counted to thirty as fast as he could. But we had engaged too soon. Cory was already at twenty five by the time we scrambled up the ridge.

Like a retarded and clumsy shadow of the Viking berserkers of old, I rushed up the ridge. I blocked a blow from Tim’s short sword with my shield. This is going to work! My mind completely free of any thought that I was fighting my functionally unarmored friends, I swung my sword in a massive overhand blow. Future eye surgeon Bob raised his sword to parry. My sword hit his hand, and I heard something very like a wet crack. Instantly, my berserker rage was replaced by geekly self doubt and confusion. I managed to get out an, “oh shit!” before losing my balance, falling down the incline, in the process stabbing Jafo with my sword. Simultaneously Jeff was hors de combat according to our rules and knocked out of breath. Skidding down on my back, I knocked over our wizard, future rocket scientist Jeff. Cory, having reached his count of thirty, nimbly sprang down and administered the coup de grace to Jeff and me. In one spastic maneuver, I had removed myself and two of my teammates from the fight, reducing our combat capable fighting strength by exactly 75%.

And of course, there was the matter of Bob’s hand. His fingers had already swollen up like Polish sausages. So, we had to troop back to the house, and explain to Cory’s parents what had happened. Cory’s mom was a teacher at the high school, and was at least somewhat prepared for teenage idiocy. Cory’s dad was a bit grumpy even on good days. He threatened to feed me to his dogs. If I’d hit Cory, he probably would have. But he never really liked Bob anyway, so I escaped that indignity. But then I had to personally apologize to Bob’s mom, who was herself a doctor. She had heavily invested emotionally in Bob’s future as a surgeon, and only a clean x-ray saved me from her undying wrath.

In less than a minute, I had: nearly ended a friend’s career before it had even begun to begin, humiliated myself, brought the tournament and any future combat to a ignominious end, humiliated myself, embarrassed two of my teammates, humiliated myself, and gave Bill fuel to feed his supercilious arrogance for most of the next year. Oh, and I humiliated myself.

[wik] A fresh and well rested Buckethead enters the fray attacking my strong point: gaming dorkery. I should have expected as much, knowing as I do a few cherce tidbits about his past. Before I continue, I have to ask one question of my esteemed colleague: dude, just how old were you when this sad display happened? AD&D 2nd Edition came out in 1989, at which time I was turning 15. That would have made you… eligible to vote?

I’m afraid that I simply can’t compete with Minister Buckethead on the gaming front, having spent the most potent of that ammo on Geeklethal in prior rounds. My remaining gaming stories are fairly run-of-the-mill stuff, slap-fights over whether Paladins can stab someone in the back, whether characters really have to buy clothing for underneath full plate mail (yes, dammit!), and other such incidents that are not so much dorky as just small and pathetic. Indeed, I may be a poor judge of what is actually dorky in the first place. Voters in the last round deemed my Concert of the Squirts not dorky (I strenuously beg to differ), yet deemed a story I thought more an amusing throwaway than actually dorky - my Mexican AD&D Adventure - supremely dorky.

The rules of this contest stipulate that a response must address the themes of the first story. Well, I never joined the ranks of the Duct Tape Warriors, so I will shift axes slightly to give you a tale of being dorky in groups, sometimes outside, as I recount how I out-dorked the other dorks of the Boy Scouts of America

Idiot-arod

The Boy Scouts got me young. First I was a Cub Scout, and we held Den Meetings in my mom’s basement. Then I graduated to Webelos (short for “We’ll Be Loyal Scouts (in Baden-Powell’s Secret Army)),” and made candlesticks in Mr. Souther’s garage. Along with puberty I advanced into the tan uniform and gaily colored neckerchief of the big leagues. For a couple of years, I was one of the official flag raisers at our high school football games (this was when I was in about 6th or 7th grade), and got to raise the flag while the band played the national anthem, finally saluting the sight of Old Glory waving in the Ohio night with my best and most military three-fingered Scout Salute.

I imbibed everything. I found and read old camping manuals in which the women stayed around camp in their dungarees and jaunty scarves and minded the fire while the lads went off swimming and fishing. I read the entire Scout Manual and all the related publications, and made sure after every shower to give myself “a brisk rubdown until the skin tingles” just like one of them recommended. Every summer I went to summer camp, and every autumn I built a little car for the Pinewood Derby. I was into the Boy Scouts big time.

One winter, the regional Scout-council-whatever held a Scout Iditarod, a sort of Very Special Winter Olympics for all the troops in the region to take place at a local Scout campground. Each troop would construct its own dogsled and pull their dogsled around the campground in a circuit race, performing stupid tasks at each station (snowball target practice, light a fire in the snow with two matches, tie a series of knots). My buddy Seth and I got right on everything important (coming up with a logo, banner and name) and helped conceive the sled. Some dads built.

Seth and I spent a few afternoons working on our team concept, and after due consideration we felt we’d really cooked up a cool winter-themed name. We helped his mom sew us up a neat pennant with a mascot and had the sled painted bright red with our troop number and the name we’d chosen blazoned boldly in black. This was one of the first times in my life I’d taken charge of something, and both Seth and I were proud of the job we’d done. We counted down the days until the Iditarod, waiting with anticipation to unveil our creation to the rest of the teams, who would doubtless be thunderstruck with amazement at our creativity and talent.

Our troop arrived at the Iditarod and surveyed the field. There were a good couple dozen troops, probably about 30 or so, present from around Northeastern Ohio, so there was a fairly good cross-section of other Scouts against whom to measure our merits. Other troops had taken names for their team like the Timber Wolves, Huskies, Polar Bears, and Ice Pirates (there was that movie) with flags featuring slavering mascots with talons, fangs, teeth and knives. There were color schemes and airbrushing, and sleds with actual skis for runners. Suddenly our red sled with the plywood runners seemed diminished, and the name we had chosen became far less cool as we realized that we may have erred somewhat in dubbing our team “Penguin Patrol.”

Needless to say, with plywood runners and my sack of jello ass helping to pull the monstrosity through the snow as the other Scout troops jeered – the older, bigger boys of our own troop having lost their taste for this competition at the first sign of my fine handiwork – Penguin Patrol came in somewhere south of dead last, having managed thanks to me to out-dork every Scouting dork for fifty miles around.

I don't have the link for the article, but I ran across someone's list of the top ten coolest movie characters.

1. Rick Blaine - Casablanca - Humphrey Bogart
2. James Bond - Goldfinger - Gert Frobe
3. Luke - Cool Hand Luke - Paul Newman
4. Rhett Butler - Gone With the Wind - Clark Gable
5. John Robie - To Catch A Thief - Cary Grant
6. Jules Winnfield - Pulp Fiction - Samuel L. Jackson
7. Rocky Sullivan - Angels With Dirty Faces - James Cagney
8. Capt. Virgil - The Great Escape - Steve McQueen
9. Johnny Strabler - The Wild One - Marlon Brando
10. Morpheus - The Matrix - Lawrence Fishburne

The article included some honorable mentions. In no particular order: Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, James Coburn in The Magnificent Seven, Sam Shepard in The Right Stuff, Kevin Spacey in L.A. Confidential, Al Pacino in The Godfather, Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, Clint Eastwood in The Good, Bad and the Ugly, Kevin Costner in Bull Durham, Denzel Washington in Training Day, Mel Gibson in Road Warrior.

I can't really argue with the names on the list - though I might quibble with the order. Some other roles that I might add would include:

• Darth Vader - Star Wars - James Earl Jones
• Gen. 'Buck' Turgidson - Dr. Strangelove - George C. Scott
• 'Il Duce' - Boondock Saints - Billy Connolly
• Ferris Buehler - Ferris Buehler's Day Off - Matthew Broderick
• Bluto - Animal House - John Belushi
• Tyler Durden - Fight Club - Bradd Pitt
• Doc Holiday - Tombstone - Val Kilmer

Some of these actors have more than one potential role. I'd actually nominate Mel Gibson for his role as Porter in Payback before Road Warrior. Arguably, Buck Turgidson isn't a 'cool' character, but I love him for being so over the top. I would definitely put Doc Holiday, Darth Vader and Indiana Jones in the top ten, and drop at least Rocky Sullivan and Johnny Strabler - and maybe Rhett Butler.

hat tip: mom.

This is a picture of Martyr's Square in downtown Beirut. The caption says that there are 800,000 people there demanding freedom and the immediate departure of the Syrians.

Reading that caption, it made me wonder how many people are actually in Lebanon. According to the CIA Factbook for Lebanon, the total population is only 3,777,218 (July 2004 est.) That means that 21%, or more than one out of five Lebanese are in that square demanding their freedom. And that, friends, is really goddamn amazing.

[wik] More news, and more pictures.