Another scene that will never go anywhere.

“So there’s a theater downtown that’s running the Steve Jobs interview tonight. Wanna go?”

 “A— sorry? An interview at a theater?”

 “Yeah, some guy found a videotape of an old PBS documentary or something, they were interviewing Jobs in the ‘90s, and now it’s going to released to theaters. Wanna go?”

 “To see a PBS interview with a dead guy? You want me to pay to see this?”

 “Dude, the guy changed the world! Why wouldn’t you pay to see it?”

 “That’s your criterion for buying a ticket? ‘Dude changed the world’? Really?”

 “…says the guy who’s ignoring me to type something on his iPhone. Come on, it’s only ten bucks.”

 “That’s ten bucks to watch a videotape — videotape! — of a guy who’s just been kicked out of his own company by some suit from Pepsi. We’re talking career low here, and you want me to pay to see it.”

 “You’re just being difficult.”

 “You know what wouldn’t be completely moronic? A series of `Dudes Who Changed The World… ON VIDEOTAPE!’ screenings. A Steve Jobs/Osama bin Laden double bill! ‘Hi, we’re both dead, come and see our musings on fuzzy, decaying tape!’ I could probably see my way clear to spending ten bucks on that.”

 “I’m pretty sure you can go to prison for making suggestions like that these days.”

 “You’re probably right.”

 

Brain! Exploding! Sexual! Assault!

It was really nice to believe, even for a short while, that SlutWalk would be a once-a-year exercise in gritting my teeth and thinking “Great cause, utterly wrong-headed reason” and that would be that. But now, gosh-darnit, the world’s all Krista Ford! Alice Moran! Nobody reading straight! CTV throwing gas on a fire! THE RAGE IT BURNS MAKE IT STOP!

‘Cause SlutWalk… wow. Sexual assault is one of those things — like corpse desecration — that you really can’t make a case for. When it comes to saying it’s wrong and it should be prosecuted and the perpetrators need to be slapped down but hard, I’m 100% with the people out there tromping around and waving signs. When there’s an outcry over people trying to give advice where no advice will really help, though… IT BURNS MAKE IT STOP!

Seriously, I pity the poor bastard whose comments to a group of students at York got him pilloried and prompted the First Great Tromping. That particular spate of assaults started, what, four months earlier? (I’m pretty sure that this is the campus police bulletin about it, but 2010 saw more than just a few attacks happening at York.) An arrest was announced mid-November, and that’s great, but come January 2011, Sanguinetti gave his crime-prevention talk to somewhere under a dozen people and great vengeance and furious anger rained down. I’d love to know if his “I’m not supposed to say this, but…” comment was in response to a question (“So, Mike… how can we avoid being victimized?”) or if it was just an off-the-cuff pronouncement that he’ll probably regret forever. (Same deal with Krista Ford, actually… now that her fateful tweet is gone and Stephanie Gawur’s account is private, I don’t see any way of knowing if she was just trying to be helpful or if someone actually asked for her thoughts.) Why do I pity him? Because there’s no right answer to that hypothetical question.

It’s been a while since I’ve been a university student, but even back in the days when the Internet was a supremely nerdy thing that often involved telling your housemates “Get off the phone; I want to check my e-mail”, campuses were littered with “Rape bad! Safewalk good! Don’t drug your classmates!” posters and seminars, and I really doubt that that’s gone away in the intervening years. Factor in four or five assaults at York over the space of a couple of months prior to Sanguinetti’s talk, and can you imagine what the reaction would have been if his answer had been “Don’t go out alone at night! Tell your friend’s where you’ll be at all times!”? I’m thinking something along the lines of “Do you think we’re completely retarded?”, followed by angry trumpeting at MongoloidWalk shortly thereafter.

So what should he have said? That some people are just plain awful and that, if they’re going to attack you, there really ain’t a damned thing you can do about it (other than fighting back, possibly with illegal weapons, per Ms. Ford’s advice)? That you should just talk an attacker out of what they’re doing, ’cause logic is the ultimate deterrent? I’d love to know — Genuinely! Break with global tradition and leave a comment if you’ve got any better answers at all! — what he could have said other than, basically, “try to avoid being noticed by scumbags in the first place”. It doesn’t guarantee safety, but it certainly can’t make it less likely.

One of the organizers of Toronto’s SlutWalk quite reasonably points out that the whole “stranger in the alley” thing doesn’t even come close to addressing every single rape that might happen, and that the responsibility for rape lies entirely with the rapist. She’s right. If there’s anything that you could possibly say, though, that might keep someone safe from a potential attack at some point, is it anything but irresponsible not to say it? Does anybody seriously think that Krista Ford was looking back on recent attacks and saying “Well, gee, they clearly didn’t follow my safety tips — sigh — which I’ll now outline again because they just weren’t paying attention the first time. Oh, and Alice…? You, in particular, are a whore”?

Over-broad as it might have been, I don’t see how Ford’s tweet was anything other than generalized advice that, even though you’ve heard it or something like it a million times, could possibly prevent a very specific sort of assault under pretty specific circumstances. It wasn’t a cure-all, and it certainly wasn’t an attempt to call anyone out or call them names… correlation, causation, fallacy, etc. Why does CTV’s talking head not get that? Or Alice Moran, for that matter, who otherwise seems to have no trouble keeping things civil and nuanced? I don’t know the specifics of her case, nor do I know what the four women who were attacked back in September 2010 were wearing, but if a common-sense reminder has the potential to help even one person, who is helped when we shout it down?

What the hell, brain?

Just once, I’d like to remember a dream that isn’t narratively coherent yet still complete nonsense. Every now and again, my brain decides that it’s going to take me on a trip somewhere profoundly strange at about 4:30 in the morning, and when I wake up, I’ve got fairly vivid memories of the whole thing. Not that it’s a good idea, but if you ask me to, I can talk at reasonable length about the ducks who stole the world’s soda crackers and carried them off to a volcanic island, and how I was chosen to lead a team of armed commandos to get them back. (Most of my guys died in the lava.) There was also one about a pretty spectacular game of laser tag in the Mississauga central library, and just how far into the bowels of that particular building you can get with a single code for their Simplex door locks. (That last part is true, by the way, though the code isn’t the default “2 and 4 together, then 3″.)

This morning, My Cephalic Buddy™ concocted an elaborate tale of a band trip to somewhere in the United States. I’m not sure exactly where we went, but it wasn’t Decatur, IL. (More on that later.) Wherever it was, though, we stopped for lunch, filed off of the bus and I somehow decided that I had to go to the public library and get myself a coin locker. Having done this, I browsed through the stacks for a while, read up on Aubrey Beardsley, and then went back to the locker, where a bill for thirty-four dollars was affixed to the door.

“Uh… what’s this all about?”, I asked the middle-aged woman at the check-out desk. Gesturing that she wanted to see the bill — standard thermal-printer roll stock — she did the squinty thing that suggests bifocals might be a good call, pecked at a keyboard for a second, and informed me that I had been charged with disseminating information to coloured people, the fine for which was thirty-four dollars.

“What year is this again?”, I asked. (I don’t actually remember the words involved here, but I was devastatingly eloquent in my outrage.) The Squinter shrugged and admitted that the law was outdated and more than just a tad bit fucktarded, but it was on the books and what are you going to do? What I did, apparently, was go outside and bellow the words “FUCKING DECATUR!” at the top of my lungs, though it felt like a bit of a non sequitur, so I’m assuming that I wasn’t actually in Illinois or Georgia. (Are there more than two Decaturs?) It was at that point that I noticed I had also missed the bus out of town, resulting in a panicky feeling when I woke up and found that I had slept through my alarm.

Seriously, brain, I’d like to dream something less idiotic than that the next time you’re going to let me remember it, okay?

Jeopardy! blather, Sherlock Holmes, etc.

“Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last.”
– that Conan Doyle guy, who I think wrote some stories or something

Jeopardy! might not be cool all of a sudden, but it’s sure getting an awful lot more press than usual this week because of its affectless bot contestant. It’s pretty incredible, too, to watch two of the best players the game has ever seen get so thoroughly spanked — almost 3.5 to 1 in the first match — by a machine that can hesitantly place Toronto on the bad side of the border.

What I don’t get, though, is some of the shock and awe surrounding its performance. “It stores all of that information itself!”, gasps one suitably-impressed blog that probably won’t be linked from WordPress’ front page if/when you read this… which would be awesome if an uncompressed dump of the contents of Wikipedia didn’t take up all of 27 gigabytes. No, I’m not suggesting that it’s working with nothing better than an index of an easily-vandalized web site, but if that much raw data occupies less than 3% of the space available on a hundred-dollar hard drive, well, “all of that information” isn’t exactly mind-bending.

“Snork-snork-snork! It called milk a non-dairy creamer!” seems to be the gist of the other comments, and yeah, machines can make some pretty hilarious guesses if you let them. (The computer store where I work on weekends fed a good-sized pile of pictures to iPhoto’s facial-recognition feature when iLife ’09 came out and it promptly asked if the wheel of a jeep was our service manager.) That’s just a matter of refining code, though; what’s actually missing from Watson’s ability to genuinely play the game right now is speech recognition — a whole other nest of programming woes — and the ability to sort out who’s saying what and when. Right now, it plays in a vacuum, but being able to identify that one of the other players had just given its own top answer, and then been told that it was incorrect, would go a long way toward making IBM’s amazing toy worthy of all of those Terminator references I keep hearing. If that ever happens, and if it suddenly announces an interest in beekeeping… that’s when you can start stocking the bomb shelter.

Fun facts about moderation.

Not that Usenet was ever the place that lofty conversation called home, but is anyone else finding the message boards that have taken its place a bit suffocating? Facelike and its accursed “Book” buttons have done a pretty good job of reducing threads to context-free lists of stuff your neighbours have consumed, with maybe some smiley faces to play Rating System with if they’re feeling ambitious, and about half of the boards that I use are “staffed” by people who seemingly lock threads to distract themselves from the discomfort caused by the starter logs they’ve got wedged Up There.

“Sorry,” they’ll write. “This thread about movies is starting to veer off into philosophical territory, and we’ve got another sub-forum for that. Kindly keep that shit over there until the sophists herd you back this way, at which point we’ll debate it on a closed mods-only forum for three weeks and you’ll hopefully lose interest in the topic altogether. Plus, c’mon, you haven’t told us what you Like™ in at least an hour. Thanks.” Or they’ll merge your thread with something from this time last year that used seven of the same words in its initial post, and how did you not see that before clicking “Submit”?

There’s a precedent for this. Someone else is bound to remember GEnie, if only for its regular ads in the back pages of Compute! magazine when Quattro Pro was slugging it out with Lotus 1-2-3 and tribes of hunters roamed the plains, hoping to gore buffalo with flint-tipped spears. (It’s funny to think that people once paid $20-30 an hour just to connect to an online service, never mind if they did anything with it at that point; it kind of puts the Canadian uproar over usage-based ISP bills into perspective.) GE actually paid people a salary to patrol the waters of their roundtables then, making sure that the folks who took advantage of the $6-an-hour overnight rates weren’t doing anything that would drive the daytime corporate customers away, but at the same time encouraging them to drum up as much traffic as possible to maximize the amount of cash being generated by chatter.

It was at that point that things started getting weird. When GEnie sysops were paid according to the amount of traffic in their given domains, a lot of them got really territorial about where everything was posted. Sharing a brownie recipe on the sci-fi board would bring the Cooking Stasi down on the heads of the Star Trek Gestapo, who would similarly frown on astronomy fans talking about their favourite Outer Limits episode. Granted, it’s backwards in relation to today’s “NO POSTING THAT STUFF HERE!” moderation, but I love knowing that the latest flavour of blinkered nerd taxonomy has its roots in some guy jealously guarding his paycheque at 1200 bits per second… and that nobody’s getting paid for it any more.

Oh, and I ate a whole box of Pop-Tarts today.

Premise for a radio play that will never happen.

It was a partly-cloudy Thursday morning when Grady Brandt’s eyes were first opened to the reality of an infinite number of parallel universes by the voices in his toaster oven. Nothing about the morning hinted even vaguely at what was to come: there was no black bird cawing on the windowsill as he woke, no distant rumble of thunder as he rubbed his eyes and fumbled with the alarm clock, no shooting pain in his groin as he rolled out of bed. He took a perfectly ordinary shower before breakfast and no eldritch glyphs danced tantalizingly out of view in the fogged-up mirror as he washed his hair. He didn’t even crack his shin on the door of the refrigerator as he opened it up to root around in the mess of condiments and slightly over-ripe chicken for the carton of yogurt he knew was in there somewhere.

No, contrary to the laws of radio drama, even opening the door of his haunted small appliance failed to produce the kind of orchestral stab that usually features prominently in stories this ridiculous. A turn of the wrist later, the old Sunbeam was ticking away the seconds to Grady’s forever-altered sense of what was or could be, but our hero was none the wiser and there were no juddering cellos to wring suspense out of a hypothetical audience, so he turned back to the fridge and wondered if there might still be any of that good apricot jam left, too.

Had he been a more intuitive sort, he might finally have noticed the portentous edge to the ding that signalled both the arrival of the infernal chorus and the readiness of his toast. The fridge door all but filtered that edge out, however, and the search for the apricot jam distracted him from whatever might have remained, so he was still entirely unprepared for the fabric of reality to bend, twist and reshape itself around him as he popped the toaster oven open once more and reached inside.

“GRADY!”, intoned the voices of the damned.
 ”GAH!”, yelped their chosen agent as he jerked his hand back suddenly and singed his wrist on the upper edge of the door’s metal frame.
 ”GRADY BRANDT, WE ARE THE SOULS OF THE DAMNED, AND WE HAVE AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR YOU!”
 Grady cradled his wrist in the other hand and goggled at the toaster in disbelief.
 ”GRADY BRANDT, YOUR REALITY HAS BEEN FOUND WANTING AND IT NOW FACES CANCELLATION. YOU MUST RIGHT THE WRONGS OF YOUR STREAM AND FINISH THE WORK THAT WE CANNOT, OR YOUR VOICE WILL SURELY COME TO AUGMENT OUR RANKS.”
 Aching, endless seconds burned by while Grady struggled with the implications of the chorus’ words. An entire plane of existence in peril! A host of voices from beyond the veil communicating with him, guiding his hand to avert disaster! Unknown forces that could conceivably snuff out billions of lives and stars on a whim! How to even begin to respond to this torrent of possibilities?
 ”You’re a toaster,” he sputtered.

The chorus sighed.

Picture Trio #1