TinkerX

Something is “Happening.”

Massive spoilers below about the newest M. Night film. But, if you don’t feel like having the movie spoiled, know at least this… it’s really, really pointless.

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So I downloaded the free trial of “Spore: Creature Creator.” I’ve been drooling in anticipation of the full game of “Spore” now for… I don’t know, Will… how long? 3 years? 5? Something like that.

Anyway… played this little mini-preview game-y thing where you create creatures using one of the engines that will be in the final game. It’s fun. And my son really enjoyed it. I registered the trial online so that I could see other folks’ creations, get updates, etc. Registration, as per normal, requires an email address (cue ominous music… why would he point out an obvious bit o’ stuff like that? hmmmmm….)

The free trial of “Creature Creator” only gives you access to like 1/8th of all the pieces-parts. And my boy liked it enough that I decided to upgrade to the full version (never mind that I think this is essentially a marketing tease for the full game, now slated to come out in September, and that, IMHO, the “full version” of this little mini game should be free).

Clicking the “upgrade” button from within the game takes you to the purchase site for EA. OK…. Not exactly what I expected, as I’d already downloaded the large install file. Will they make me go through that again? I’d assumed I’d just pay and get an unlock code. A trick that 3rd-rate shareware peddlers have had perfected for years. We’ll see…

So I add the full version of the program to my cart, fill in all my info for checking out…

And get an error.

“That email address is already in use.”

Bwa? BWAAAA? The email address I gave EA as part of the registration process for a piece of trial software is already in use… Well, DUH! It’s in use by me, who registered earlier today. And now I want to upgrade… but you won’t let me, because my email address is already in use by you.

Mad stupid. Mad-5 stupid. I expected more from EA and Spore and Will and Maxis. This does not bode well…

Abe Books has posted a neat article about stuff that used booksellers have found in books. Money, baseball cards, airline tickets and lots of personal notes.

Would make a cool scene for a story or novel, or a neat moment in a poem.

One of the things I grew up doing while waiting for movies — once the multi-plex took over from the single-screen cinemas — was to play “mix up the movie titles.” Nothing better to do while hanging out in the lobby on a freezing cold February day in Boston, eh?

So, I saw three movies over the last week, and the mixed-up title would have been the subject of this blog.

Other possible mixed-up movie titles based on what was playing at my local AMC theater:

• What Happens in Narnia…
• Iron Stranger
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Sex
• Made of Panda
• Sex and the Panda
• Iron Panda
• Panda Racer

The word “Panda” in a movie title is simply irresistible. So…

Kung Fu Panda: A- Quite a lot of fun with my 8-year-old son. Jack Black’s voicing of the main character is excellent, and they allowed his personality to mold the character animation quite a bit; how could you not? Lots of laugh-out-loud moments, and really great, somewhat unusual (which is nice) art. Best bit — when Po, the titular panda, performs the super-killer-hyper move involving the minor twitch of his pinkie, he says, “Ska-doosh.” Very Jack Black. Very funny. Half-grade off for pulling out almost every trope in the kung fu sack.

You Don’t Mess with the Zohan: B Solid “B” movie. Ha ha. If you go to this movie expecting Adam Sandler and Co. to engage in an enormous amount of over-the-top pseudo-hasidic silliness, making fun of Jews, Arabs, gays, straights, rednecks, etc… you won’t be disappointed. Sandler is consistently goofy and never misses a chance to refer to sex as, “making the sticky.” If that line revolts you, please avoid the movie. My favorite dialogue (note: Zohan is attempting to escape his Israeli super-star anti-terrorist status in the states, and so is pretending to be…)

Zohan: I’m from Australia [with a glottal, “hutzpah” “h,” somehow, at the beginning of “Australia.”]
Friend’s Mom: Oh, it must be so much nicer there since they got rid of appartheid.
Zohan: Oh, yes. Much cooler.

That’s about the size of it. Nice cameos from Henry Winkler (if you ever dreamed of watching the Fonz puke out of a limo, this film’s for you), Dave Matthews as the violent, anti-everything red neck, Chris Rock as a taxi driver from Cameroon, Mariah Carey as herself (the low point of the film, frankly… she’s just not funny), George Takei, Kevin Nealon (why?), Rob Scheider (of course) and John McEnroe. Full point off for not having English sub-titles for all the Yiddish or semi-Israeli slang or whatever it was. That woulda been cool.

Indiana Jones and the yadda yadda yadda: C+ It’s an OK movie. What sucks about it is that it’s just an OK movie. No really funny lines or memorable bits. No really amazing action sequence… They go down a couple waterfalls in a car/boat/thing? Really? That’s all you got for me, Indy? Oh… and riding a motorcycle through the college library? Seriously? That counts as action these days? Yeesh. No really good interaction between Indy and his… uh… young friend. No really villainous villain. It all felt very phoned-in to me. I’d place it 3rd in the pantheon, behind (duh) the original and “Last Crusade.” Major points off for [minor spoiler alert] the big “Ohhhh….” near the end being, “The city of gold doesn’t literally mean gold… it means treasure… and knowledge was their treasure.” Yeah. Right.

Todays journey of metaphoric bliss: Alzheimer, buses, jewelry, YouTube.

Patients with Alzheimer’s and other cognitive troubles who wander out of their nursing homes are a danger to themselves, of course. And with short-term memory issues, folks can go as little as a block away and then forget how to get back or why they’re out. To help with this, some German nursing homes have put “phantom” bus stops outside their facilities. Patients remember the distinctive look of the bus stops and associate it with “going home.” So they stop, rest, and the workers from the home come and get them (link).

Paco Underhill did absolutely groundbreaking work in the science of retail shopping behaviors. The New York Times called him, “the anthropologist of the dressing room.” He wrote “Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping,” (Google, WorldCat) and has consulted all over the place. In a 1996 NewYorker article (by Malcom Gladwell, no less), titled “The Science of Shopping,” the concept of the “butt brush” theory is discussed. Full article here.

The quote that I’m most interested in today, though, is, “…the likelihood of a woman being converted from a shopper to a buyer is inversely proportional to the likelihood of her being brushed on her behind while she’s examining merchandise.” Which is the explanation for giant, wide aisles around the jewelry, perfume and watch displays in stores like Lord and Taylor, Macy’s, etc. When pondering a pretty purchase, we get into a kind of dreamy, fugue state. Being bumped on the behind takes us out of that state and puts us back into the reality of, “Holy crap… that watch costs as much as three car payments.”

[Note: I share this story with all my marketing and advertising students, male and female. It’s a good trick, and not just for guys with wives and girlfriends. Men go into this same state, I believe, when shopping for power tools, HDTVs, boats, video games, etc. My non-scientific assumption, though, is that men are more likely to break out of Shopper’s Fugue if you bump them in the testicles.]

What’s the connection to degenerative brain disorders and shopping for jewelry? Well… let’s move on to YouTube.

Douglas Galbi, over at the ever-intelligent and interesting “purple motes” blog, has an excellent recent post titled, “Stories largely missing in online video.” His conclusion, after going over some good stats, is that online video is not successful in telling stories. While I agree with him that the “short form” video — with YouTube as its major example — isn’t doing much storytelling, I’m going to point out some details that, I think, are important with regards to online viewing habits.

First, Doug is 100% right that the majority of YouTube videos are short, and a large percentage are repurposed  music videos that, in the past, would have run on MTV or VH1 or a similar network. A research study I was involved with at my day job provided much the same insight (”The YouTube Phenomenon,” page 2-16 of “Our Social Spaces,” from “Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World.”) Our survey indicated that 49% of the top 100 YouTube videos were music videos. Also, 63% of the top 100 videos were “professional,” in nature. This segment of the material is clearly not “user created content,” but maybe best described as “user uploaded.”

Doug also points out that online video viewing time only amounts to 3% of traditional TV viewing time. When considering this, lets remember that TV is, and has been for 50 years, the dominant communication medium in our country. It’s only over the past few years that even a decent minority of the U.S. population (23.3% as of December 2007, according to the OECD) has access to broadband Internet service, which is pretty much a requirement for watching online video.

My two points, and they relate back to comfort — which relates to bus stops and butt touching –  are simply as follows.

First, we currently regard TV as, largely, a “comfort medium.” We sit down to watch, don’t interact much, and enjoy it largely as entertainment. There are good stories on TV, yes. Because stories are a big part of how we like to be entertained, especially in “comfort” mode. I would remind my several readers, however, that lots and lots of TV is also “short form” entertainment, lacking in real storytelling elements. We have talk shows, sports, game shows, reality TV, news, weather and informational shows that don’t have traditional narrative. And many of these have parallel elements in Web video. I just watched, for example, Clinton’s “campaign suspension” speech on the NYT site. It was very, very nice to have the transcript and a TOC right next to the video. I think that as more online video becomes nested within other activities, it will gain more usage. I also think that as broadband becomes more the norm, non-narrative video will seem much more natural online, both in aggregate and compared to TV viewing.

As to when we’ll get more narrative, storytelling content on the Web… well, it’s starting. Hulu provides free (ad supported) access to narrative TV and movies. I missed an episode of Battlestar Gallactica a few weeks ago and watched the hour-long show on the SciFi channel’s site to make up for my DVR behaving badly. I now have a desk chair in my home office for working on the computer… and a comfy chair nearby for relaxing and watching DVDs and long Web-videos. But, even when I choose to watch long-form video on my computer, there are issues. My spam-blocker, anti-virus software pops up in front of the movie screen and tells me it’s finished updating and update. Super. My IM pings, unless I’ve remembered to turn it off. My screen saver kicks in sometimes. Geez. I’m trying to watch TV on my computer and it keeps behaving like a computer.

The boundaries are melting. Slowly, yes. I agree with Doug that, at the moment, there’s not a lot of storytelling going on specifically within online video. I do think, though, that it’s beginning. And, also, that many online “stories” have video as one element, with other media embedding video as part of the story.

We like our comfort zones, and TV is a *HUGE* comfort zone for Americans. We head to the bus stop of our La-Z-Boy lounger because it means, “Here there be relaxation.” Major changes in how we watch long-form video will take time, and will require computers to become something other than “working machines,” and to stop touching us on our collective butts when we’re trying to enjoy a story.

[Note note: the draft of this post was written months ago. I’m not sick anymore, thanks for asking.]

Note: I am sick as heck. Bad cold. This is Day 4 of what, at work, is being called affectionately, “The Pox.” I read an interesting post on Lifehacker about “Presenteeism,” the opposite of absenteeism. The idea that going to work, regardless of consequences, is necessary. We’re all the stars in our own life drama. So the idea that I’d put my own work requirements above the health and welfare of my coworkers isn’t completely unreasonable; especially when we take into account the fact that we don’t know what facts to take into account in terms of where/how we get sick. All this being apropos of nothing, except that I did stay home from work Thursday and worked from home on Friday, and now consider those acts to be somewhat selfless and communal. Whereas before, I would have considered myself lazy and weak. New wine, old skins. Yea.

Meanwhile… having been sick, I’ve been waking up early and watching The Daily Show on the DVR. One of the episodes from last week featured an interview with Lee Siegel, author of “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.” I did not read the book, and don’t plan on it. This is a review of a couple things Lee said on the the show.

First, he made the claim that relationships mediated by electronics — the Web, that is — aren’t really as real as those in real life and (?) those conducted over the phone. Hmmm… Odd that he wouldn’t consider the phone part of the machine of the electronic mob. When it debuted, critics believed that the phone would end civilized discourse, as it allowed for communication without physical presence and, therefore, without possible physical repercussions. That is true (I suppose), as you can call somebody a dillweed on the phone and not worry about him/her cracking you on the mellon.

Lee went on to say that because of the lack of real presence on the other end of the digital line, we tend to imbue “the other” with our own characteristics, thus making the relationship both shallow and somewhat fictional. That’s not a bad point. It is easier, certainly, to create a web (ha ha) of assumption when there is more left to the imagination. He then started talking about bad behavior on blogs and bulletin boards, what with the ranting and raving and flaming and invective and… and… and…

And he lost me. Even as an interesting antagonist to my own view… he lost me. Because you can’t have it both ways, Lee. If the machine is bad because it is a concave lens that diminishes our perception of “other,” that’s one thing; if it is a convex lens that exaggerates the bad behavior of others… hold on. Can it be both?

Well, here’s the thing: it can, if you’re being a dillweed.

I tend to expect the best of people, regardless of circumstance. I assume that they, like me, want to get along, be friendly, be smart, do the right thing, etc. That holds true online as well as in RL. I’ve had very cool, long, intelligent disagreements with people in both places. Where it stops (again, regardless of media), is when someone clearly just wants to rant on their own, and has no interest in discourse; no interest in the voice of “the other.”

Does that happen on the Web more than in RL? Perhaps. Comments on blogs are often not set up as discussion points, but more as stand-alone statements. And it is certainly possible to read a such a comment as if it were aimed right at you, thus making it seem like a churlish response, rather than a simple statement.

And so we’re back to the Web, as Lee said, distorting relationships because of our tendency to put ourselves in the center of the whole thing. We either assume closeness that isn’t there (because we want to see it), or assume animosity that isn’t there (because we read everything as personal).

At least we do when we’re being dillweeds. I’ve done it, for sure. A disagreeable statement that, in RL, might have been mitigated with a shrug and eyebrow-raise, comes across as totally hot-headed and unreasonable. And I’ve flamed back, too. But… but but but (this is the big but, and I like big buts, and I can not lie)… because of this tendency, signs and appeals to reason come across even more strongly, too. I’ve made some very good friends over the Web — some of whom I’ve never met in person. And in almost every case, it is because their online voice is one that I want to hear more of.

Which is the same as in RL. We seek out those people whose presence is pleasant. And that’s the case online, too.

Yes, there are more cranky, shallow statements on the Web. But there are also more chances for rare and beautiful flowers to spring up, in stark contrast with the dillweeds.

Where there’s smoke

The thunder came back for a third time last night.
Explosive light spattered behind and beyond,
too far up the county to preview the drums
with a white, sharpened, spark bone
jammed into your eyes.

Sitting, not sleeping (for how could we sleep?),
as the fists of the clouds beat down on the tent
that night stretches over our streets and our eyes
now pointless as shelter
from violent light.

Each rumble is different, a fingerprint boom.
One feels like a train rolling over our graves.
While the next is a branch cracking under your foot
in a forest of black fingered
dry-as-dust wood.

The first wakes us up and the next pulls us out
of our beds with a fist of sound gripping the sheets.
By the third… we’ve relaxed, and got milk for the wait
while mountains of air
converse with the heat.

They talk to us, too, of course. Querulous bombs.
The volume is such that it’s hard to make out
what the words are. But listening, closely, we hear:
“Don’t fear us — we’re only
the gentlest of signs.”

* * * * *

[with thanks to Shannon whose comment improved this]

Bad Pun

he defines “untied”
as “tied to nothing”

no hope of hope
no jump into a lake of cool
sweet summer peace
no rope swing leap
from earth to air to water

boys fly free

men tire
mourn
hang rubber
on a dying tree

First of all, let me explain the use of the word “perils” in the post title. It’s an arcane word, and clearly out of conventional usage. We’ll most often see it in modern language used in an slightly ironic way, often with alliteration: “The perils of puppies,” “Perambulator Perils,” etc.

I use it here very specifically, rather than its near synonym, “danger.” Why? Because “The danger of self-knowledge,” implies future harm. If something is dangerous; you can avoid it or not. “Peril” is more about the activity itself, already undertaken.

And self-knowledge is like that. You can go into almost any situation and come back with self-knowledge. But by then, it’s too damned late. You can’t say, for example, “There’s a danger of increased self=knowledge at this year’s Thanksgiving dinner with my wife’s family… I’ll stay away.” You go, no thought of peril, and you learn that your tolerance for various kinds of bad behavior has lessened since you all got together 10 years ago. You come away with new self knowledge. [Note: this is an erroneous, facile example — I get along just swimmingly with my wife’s family. Not that they read this blog, but if they do, they’ll recognize the fiction; we never have Thanksgiving with them. So, ha.]

You just can’t tell when a trip will turn into an adventure in discernment.

But sometimes you should.

About 12 years ago, my then-boss had our whole team take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). It was so we could learn about ourselves and each other and work together better. Those of you who have read my stuff before know that I have a low tolerance for corporate hoo-hah. Being told, “You’re going to learn about yourself,” makes me feel like a small child being led by the hand. I already understand myself very well, thank you. And if you don’t think so, then clearly *you* don’t know me very well.

So… The MBTI. I’m an ENTP, if you care. Which, in general, made sense to me at the time. Read the linked description, if you know me, and (I think) it’s not too far off.

But… when you take the test, you get a score from”0″ (meaning dead center between two of the paired functions) to “100″ (meaning extremely one way). I was very near zero for the first three classifications. Which, when it came to splitting the difference between Sensing v. iNtuition and Thinking v. Feeling, I was fine. I like balance on those things, and would have been surprised to find a test that scored me much higher in either of those pairs.

But an “Extrovert” score of only 4? That’s mad! I’m the f’in life of the party! I love public speaking and teaching. I have no fear of strangers and of approaching people I don’t know for help, advice, directions, bottled water, sunscreen, etc. I like working on a team. All kinds of extroverty stuff. What’s with the “4?” That’s nearly balanced!

Well, come to find out, I’m a closet introvert. What the trainer we had (she was quite good) explained, is that for the MBTI, the categories are less about activity than attitude. From the Wikipedia definition:

People with a preference for Extraversion draw energy from action: they tend to act, then reflect, then act further. If they are inactive, their level of energy and motivation tends to decline. Conversely, those whose preference is Introversion become less energized as they act: they prefer to reflect, then act, then reflect again. People with Introversion preferences need time out to reflect in order to rebuild energy. The Introvert’s flow is directed inward toward concepts and ideas and the Extravert’s is directed outward towards people and objects.

Gulp. New self-knowledge came flowing in as the trainer explained this. I am introverted, in that sense, at many times. I like to reflect before acting. Sometimes several times. Sometimes to the point where it seems like procrastination, even to me. And that one line — need time out to reflect in order to rebuild energy. Yikes! Totally me, totally on the spot.

So. Hmmm…. Yes. I went in skeptical, and came out having learned something about myself that has, ever since, been helpful to some degree, yet painful, too. Because self-knowledge doesn’t necessarily imply actively working on anything based on that knowledge. Now, when I get funky and low after having spent too much time in “extrovert mode,” I understand that it’s my introverted need to reflect and recharge. I know, now, that I’m not an extrovert with periods of waning energy; I’m an introvert with occasional bursts of energy.

The point of all this being that I just took another one of these kinds of assessments at work. And I went in with a bit of the same attitude: “Yeah, it might be fun and/or interesting. Yeah, I’m sure it’ll tell me some stuff I already know. But it’ll be no big deal.”

Indiana Jones would’ve known: there’s always snakes in that cave.

I’m still processing what I learned. It took a couple of years after the MBTI for me to get comfy with the results. We’ll see about this latest batch of understanding and maybe, later, I’ll share the results.

But maybe I won’t. As they say about ENTPs, “…less interested in generating and following through with detailed plans than in generating ideas and possibilities.”

“The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” by Michael Chabon: Another great one from Chabon. Not quite as rich and chunky as “Cavalier and Clay,” for which he won the Pulitzer… but truly great. Chabon is an author you have to read slowly, as his prose is dense with wonderful description, idiom and thoughtful insights. Like C&C, though, I did feel that the ending was a bit… short. It just kinda stops. Yeah, I know… that happens a lot in crime thrillers, and “literary” works. But I was still hoping for at least a teaspoonful of denouement. Still… a fantastic read. A must for any alternative history fan. Grade: A-

Boom Blox game for the Wii. It’s virtual Jenga with angry devil monkeys and explosives. If you need more of a description or review than that, this game is not for you. If, however, that description makes you think, “Hell, yeah! That’s what Jenga has always needed! Devil monkeys and bombs! Awesome!”… than you should go out, right now, and buy this game. It is, in fact, awesome. Single player adventure, party fun, and build-your-own modes all are great. Taking off 1/2 grade because in the built it mode you are limited in the number of blocks you can place, and because you can only rotate blocks by 90-degrees, making real domino chains kinda a pain. Also, the music can’t be turned off and gets repetitive. Minor quibbles. A-

Speed Racer. Hot tranny mess. Racing can’t be exciting when the laws of physics are entirely ignored. Doing the seemingly impossible isn’t astounding when everything that’s being done is impossible. It’s not racing… it’s neon vegas pinball acid fireworks slap happy zoom spazz. Which, if you’re my 8-year-old son, ends up being, “OK.” More Christina Ricci, please, and less Rain. John Goodman and Susan Sarandon are wasted on this. Or the script is wasted on them. Or something. C-

Mario Kart Wii. Way more fun that Speed Racer. Good, funky, chirpy karting fun. Good characters, good graphics, a decent set of tracks, varied music. Can be frustrating because you can go from 1st to 12th place in an instant if it’s a close race and you get hit by one of the disruptive pick-ups that racers can, well, pick up. Half-grade bonus for including cycles as well as karts. The wheel thingy is lots of fun, too. B+

Iron Man. Pimp my hide. Fun, fast, shallow. It’s a comic book movie… whaddya want? Solid B.

I had an interesting epiphany a day or two ago, based on a couple notions:

1. I blog more when I get comments. Which makes perfect sense, and the writing might either be in reference to a comment, or just make me feel good that somebody is reading my stuff.
2. Content aggregators like BoingBoing.net (which I love, btw), live by directing attention to the postings of others’ blogs/sites.
3. Almost every BoingBoing post I’ve read has waaaaay more comments on it about a piece than there are on the originating site

Epiphany: content aggregators should encourage people to post some of their comments on the originating sites.

I mean… take this post from BoingBoing on a creepy slacks ad from 1970. It has (at this moment) 58 comments.  The original post has four. That seems, to me, to be about the norm; 10/15X the comments at BB as at the originating post. In some cases, you’ll have a post where the BB readers start a full-on discussion, and the original post has no comments.

It’s entirely fair for BoingBoing to bring content together from an incredible array of sources, and to serve it up to a whole horde of us Websters. It’s not just fair, it’s helpful and cool and fun.  And BoingBoing makes money off’n their ads. Again; cool. And getting a post BoingBoinged is huge a traffic boost for the originator. Sometimes so much so that small blogs end up crashing from the number of hits. A friend of mine once called that BBDOS — BoingBoing Denial of Service.

But if readers want to respond to a post, shouldn’t they do it on the original writer’s blog/site? At least some of the time? 54 comments is more than I generally get in a year. I’d love to have that many readers having a discussion over something I wrote. And I guess I’d be glad to see that discussion happen at BoingBoing… but it would be cooler, still, if they’d come on ta my house and yap around the table that served the bloggy goodness.

Not a big deal. It just happened inside my head and I wanted to share the thought.

I love Richard Bartle.

Not in the way that a man loves a woman, or another, less-hairy man. Or a really, really good steak. But he’s very well spoken, writes very well, is a major figure in the gaming universe, and is just an all around interesting guy. He writes great posts and leaves great comments on TerraNova, and responds amiably and intelligently there… as long as you provide some measure of amiability and intelligence back.

We don’t always agree. He doesn’t believe in God, and I think spelling “color” with a “u” is just batty. But other than those minor quibbles, he’s one of my favorite people in the infogamingmediasphere.

And he just went off on  the “smug, out-of-touch, proud-to-be-innumerate fossils” who are perennially down on video/computer games. My favorite bit?

Gamers vote. Gamers buy newspapers. They won’t vote for you, or buy your newspapers, if you trash their entertainment with your ignorant ravings. Call them social inadequates if you like, but when they have more friends in World of Warcraft than you have in your entire sad little booze-oriented culture of a real life, the most you’ll get from them is pity.

Like I said: love.

Thank you, Dr. Bartle. I’ve been playing video games since I was about eight in 1974. I play them, now (and have for years), with my 8-year-old son. More and more people are playing. Both kids and people my age… and older. And we haven’t seen a major up tick in violence during the Rise of the Game. The most violent parts of the world, methinks — Israel/Palestine, Afghanistan, Darfur, Chechnya, Washington D.C. — have many fewer gamers.

We are voters. We do buy newspapers. And we are tired as fuck of people (who don’t play) telling us how bad it is for us. So let me add my 2-cents to the Bartle rant. I won’t get quoted in the Guardian… and that’s OK. But I am glad to be in such good company.

* * * * *

What Richard said. And…

I’m so flippin’ tired of people who don’t play games coming at us as if we’re cellar-dwelling, no-life, dweebs. Or is if there’s something really wrong with that. Watch “Triumph of the Nerds.” The richest man in the world? Dweeb. Suck on that.

Maybe you like to golf, which requires that you take up inordinate amounts of space in order to whack around a small little ball. You can even do it by yourself, eh? And even when you play with others, it’s not really playing *with* them. You’re scoring against the course. OK. That’s fine. But how is that any less dweeby than playing computer games? Go buy $1,000 worth of sticks and plaid pants and a weird, visor-y hat. That’s cool. Drink beer while you’re doing it, if you like. Also cool.

Just shut up about *our* games.

Maybe you like to watch sports. Maybe you memorize facts about players and games and leagues. Maybe you get so personally, psychologically involved in “your” team(s) that it gives you pain when they lose. That’s cool. Buy the sweat-shirts and the caps and the big, foam fingers and spend four hours waiting in traffic and three hours in the rain waiting to sit on your ass for another four hours to watch 60 minutes of actual action. It’s all good.

Just shut up about *our* games.

Maybe you like to shoot guns. Maybe you think they’ll help you protect yourself, of just that it’s fun to shoot at targets. Good. Cool.

Just shut up about *our* games.

My whole dang life I’ve put up with smug, superior glances when I tell people (yes, I admit it, and always have) that I play video and computer games. I’ve put up with people who’ve never played these games equating them to childish, whimsical pastimes.  Well, there’s nothing really wrong with childish whimsy, but there’s actually nothing childish nor whimsical about Sid Meier’s Civilization or Assassin’s Creed.

Some games are whimsical, easy and simply fun. Some are incredibly complex and downright diabolical. Some are art.

If you don’t want to play, that’s fine. But until you understand what you’re talking about… just shut up. That’s what I do when people spend hours discussing golf, sports and guns. I don’t know much about them. So I shut up.

For the half of you out there playing games, though… I’d love to hear from you 

I used to really like the Encyclopedia Britannica. By “used to,” I mean of course, “before Wikipedia.” It’s a fine reference work, and I never had anything against it until they, and others, started getting smarmissimus about how Wikipedia sucks because it’s written by people who aren’t on the staff of an encyclopedia. And how kids shouldn’t be citing it as a resource. Etc. etc.

Now… I don’t want to get into a fight about Wikipedia. I don’t care if you like it or not or have issues with it. This is not an opinion piece. The fact of the matter is, Wikipedia gets waaaay more hits than Britannica. Maybe it’s because Wikipedia is free. Maybe it’s because it has lots more articles. Maybe it’s because people like to think that anybody (themselves included) is smart enough to help somebody else out with a reference question.

Maybe it’s all about elves and pixies. Repeat: I don’t care. From a marketing and sales perspective, yelping about how your customers are dumb because they choose a competitor is, well… dumb.  Britannica could hop about, get red in the face, and produce volumes of statistics about how it’s better. If users don’t have a compelling reason to go there, they’ll go somewhere else.

What Britannica *should* have been doing is figuring out a way to get more people into their space. Which they now have, with a very clever little program called Britannica WebShare. Basically, if you write a blog or publish on the Web in any way, you can apply for a free year of access to the entire online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and link to the full articles there.

That’s clever. Very clever. My readers now have an ancillary benefit from my blogging relationship with EB. If you’re a regular ol’ person with no subscription to EB (it costs $70/year normally), and you look up “Wikipedia,” you get this:

Wikipedia:  free, Internet-based encyclopaedia operating under an open-source management style. It is overseen by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia uses a collaborative software known as wiki that facilitates the creation and development of articles. The English-language version of Wikipedia began in 2001. It had more than one million articles by March 2006 and more…

Wikipedia… (75 of 754 words)

But if you go to that same article from a link on my blog, even if you don’t have a subscription, you can see the whole thing.

Yep. All 754 words. You’re welcome.

Very, very smart. They have turned chunks of their content into advertising for the whole, and enlisted the help of people who build the Web to engage in that advertising. They get links and good marketing, I (and my readers) get full text articles.

This is a good thing to think about in a general way — how can other content owners release some subset of what they create/own in ways that promote an economic model that makes sense for them?

PS: If you’re interested in the full text of any particular Britannica article, let me know and I’ll work it into a blog post  

At work, I get to do some research about the information industry and related technology because, well, libraries are deeply involved in the mediasphere. So that’s cool. And last week I was reading up on teens (god, I hate the terms “tweens” and “screenagers”) and tech. And there’s a neat, very recent report from Pew on teens and writing, and another, older study from Fox about “Never Ending Friending” and a NYT article that asks, “Can Cellphones End Global Poverty,” another good report from Pew on the demographics of mobile data use, and on and on. Stuff about social networking, teens, mobile phones, games and media literacy. So that’s all in my head.

Then, this morning, I read Clay Shirky’s blog post, “Gin, Television and Social Surplus.” It’s good. Go read it and come back.

Clay is talking about what we do, as a society, to deal with radical shifts in culture. He gives the example of people going on a generation-long gin bender when the industrial age brought millions of people into cities. In order to deal, they got plastered.

Years ago, I read a similar theory about the pyramids. You had this ancient, Egyptian agrarian population that, like most of such, spent almost all their collective time farming and starving. Then some clever dudes figure out some basic math, engineering and astronomy, and put the knowledge to use to create an irrigation system that is N% more productive and reliable than the old methods. Whatever that “N” is, it provided a bunch of time that nobody new what to do with. So they built the pyramids. Partly as a program of public works… but mostly because they had a bunch of people with time on their hands and no idea how to spend it. They already knew how to build stuff… so why not build really big stuff!
Clay makes the point that TV has been sucking up brjillions of hours of our free time, and that we now have more choices about what to do with that time, many of which are creative, and that people like being creative, and so they are choosing things that are at least interactive as opposed to truly passive. Best quote of the post, imo:

However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

That’s just so true it makes my teeth hurt [note, I actually enjoy both of the above, but the comparison is valid as hell].

OK. So we’ve got new media literacy. We’ve got participatory media and massive social applications. We’ve got mobile phones that are increasingly used as tools for digital participation, and are less expensive (than desktop PC’s with Web access) and thus more readily available to folks in lower economic strata, and that includes kids. That’s all in my head. Don’t worry… it’s a really big head.

Some people have said that participatory media is a move back to a time when people made their own fun and entertainment. Up until the printing press, if you wanted a story, you pretty much had to *hear* a story. News and history were participatory media. Until radio, there were no mass, single-source, culture-wide stations. Then TV came along. And we had tens of millions of people watching “Leave it to Beaver” and “Dallas” and and and and. I grew up in the middle of that. I joke that I had three parents: Mommy, Daddy and Teevy.

It was, and is, a cross between beauty and horror. I love, for example, that there are now hundreds of channels of TV. We watch all kinds of history, science, engineering, etc. programs with my 8-year-old son (Hooray for Myth Busters!). But he also watches Sponge Bob and  Avatar and other stuff (so do I, btw). Big budget media can produce some neat stuff.

Soon he’ll start typing in earnest. And then, I assume, will enter the mediasphere as a participant; commenter, responder, linker, writer, poster, photographer, videographer, blogger, cartoonist, podcaster, IMer… something. Many things. Some interesting, some meaningful, some trivial. Just like life.

And that, I think, is the major difference between the old, top-down media (TV being god there) and what we’re getting into now — it’s more like life.

I’ve taken to saying that my motto for the new, participatory mediasphere is “verbs over nouns.” Whenever you want to bet on a new trend or idea or technology, ask yourself… is it improving (or growing) something “noun-y” (stuff), or something “verb-y” (activities). The line that many of my (older) friends use about much of the new content on the Web (YouTube and journal-style blogs seem to be the favorite targets), is that, “It’s a bunch of crap.”

Well, yeah. But for the people who created it, it’s their own personal crap as opposed to a small piece of a giant load of crap dropped on them from 30,000 feet up that also hits a couple million other people.

It’s also useful to keep in mind that the pyramids, when looked at a certain way, are crap, too. Engineering marvels? Sure. Wonders of the world? Of course. But what have they ever done for you? Would your life be any different if the pyramids were suddenly not there? Or if they’d never been? The Colossus of  Rhodes went away in 226 BC. Do you miss it? I mean, sure… it would be cool to see. But I’ve never, once, in my life, said, “Thank God for the pyramids!” (as opposed to penicillin, steam power, the printing press, blues, chocolate, etc.)

How will we spend what Clay calls our “social surplus?” Will we make more friends in more places? Spread knowledge? Create great works?

I don’t know. I feel that it’s inherently better to do things that are creative and connected. That time spent creating even the “least of these” in terms of blogs and YouTube movies is better than time spent watching a rerun of (shudder) “Welcome Back Kotter.” But I also wonder if partly all we’re doing is creating many, smaller pyramids.

The nice thing, with the new media, is that we get to decide what’s important. It doesn’t have to be a centralized project like the pyramids or TV. And, just like with the printing press, I bet (as does Clay) that many smaller voices will add up to something more important than one, big voice.

I never watched the TV show “24″ when it was on. I’d heard the name “Jack Bauer” of course. Upon looking him up in the Wikipedia just now I was a bit surprised at the length of the entry (around 6,400 words)… The entry on George Washington has around 6,200 words, for the sake of comparative irony.

My brother, John, usually has similar taste to mine in media, and so, last year, when he highly recommended watching “24,” I thought I’d give it a go. Being that we were in the “Put something on your Christmas list or else!” timeframe, I added the DVD of the first season to my Amazon.com wish list. My lovely wife got me the first two seasons for under the tree.

After a couple weeks, we were both referring to my “24″-watching experiences as, “Andy’s TV crack.” The show is addictive, bad for you and messes with your head.

Today, I just finished watching the last episode of season 6, the last season shot/available. That means (math alert!) that I’ve watch around 115 hours (144 episodes x 80%) of  one show in about 4 months. Roughly one episode a day.

Now, of course, I didn’t watch one episode a day. Some days (like today) I watched four. I think the most I ever watched in one 24 hour period (ha ha) was six. I had oral surgery back in January, and it was very nice to just crash on pain meds and do nothing but eat mooshy food and watch Jack Bauer save the universe for large blocks of time.

I have mixed feelings about the show:

• I really like watching Kiefer. I have for years. I thought he was great in “The Lost Boys” back in the 80’s. I’ve always liked his dad, and some of that bleeds over, I suppose. He’s easy to watch. I find his style/look to be a kind of “corn fed danger boy” thing. The kid next door who owns guns. Lots of guns. My only problem with him in “24″ is that most of the lines are delivered in an anxious, urgent whisper. That gets old. He got a bit more pink-noise in the vocals in season six, which was nice to see (er… hear). I think he was a good choice for the role of Jack Bauer. If you’ve watched the show, try to imagine Charlie Sheen, for example, in the lead. Giggling ensues.”
• I am well aware of the whole torture issue. Jack’s character embodies the current administration’s idea that, under some circumstances, it’s OK to torture people because, well, you really, really need to stop the nuke from going off. To be fair, it runs both ways in “24,” as Jack and other good guys get tortured both by the bad guys, and by earnest good guys who think that Jack and/or others might be hiding info. To be more fair, torturing works sometimes and not others. Sometimes all Jack has to do is shoot a guy in the leg, and he gives over. Sometimes they do the whole pharma-torture thing, and get nothing. After awhile, I became used to torture as a minor plot development action that simply moved the plot one way or another. And (again, after awhile), I got used to Jack cutting people’s fingers off, electrocuting them and threatening to put out their eyeballs. I’m not comfortable with that situation — that I got used to seeing it — but there it is. After something becomes almost as much of a trope as the “there’s a mole on the inside” thing (see below), it just doesn’t have the same power to horrify.
• Apparently, there’s always a mole. Every season features some kind of situation where an American is aiding the bad guys. And, frankly, I can tell you why — the people who run CTU (the Counter Terrorist Unit where Jack works… kind) are idiots when it comes to their own security. There are all kinds of scenes where a person they bring in as a witness or friend or family member is allowed to wander around the facility. People who work there slip away to make phone calls in a little stone corridor off to one side. Sometimes these calls are overheard. Mostly not. But you think they’d learn to bug that little hallway. I don’t mind “Big Stupid” stuff like the whole idea of an international conspiracy to start a Middle East war and drive up the price of oil. That’s fine. But a counter terrorism department shouldn’t let people have their own, private cell phones in the office, and should be more careful about civilians wandering around. I’m just sayin’.
• The stakes are too f’ing high. You can have a fantastic, scary, tense movie where the whole thing that’s “at stake” is one person’s life, or even their career or morality. You don’t need to threaten the West Coast with bio-plague or nukes every damned time. Now, I understand, this is Tom Clancy-esque anti-terrorist stuff. But, seriously, there were seasons where Jack rescuing a friend was better drama than Jack saving 6-10 U.S. cities from imminent destruction. The other problem with “high stakes” is that the math ends up being really bad. [Spoiler alert] In season six, one of the briefcase nukes that Jack is chasing goes off in an L.A. suburb killing around 12,000 people + whoever dies later from radiation poisoning. And while further Jacksonian efforts to avert WW3 are in line with that scale, the rescue of one or two people just seems… trite… when you put it on the table with 12k dead. Jack saved the day for these two nice people? That’s swell. What about the whole town of Valencia that just when ker-poof?
• The cinematography and direction are really nice. Multiple shots at one time, the whole “real time” schtick… Nice work, team. In many ways, the direction and pacing are what makes the show so addictive. The acting is OK, and some of the writing isn’t bad… but it’s not very deep or, really, very different from season to season. Like candy, sex, cigarettes, crack, booze and Abba, it’s not really about the quality, but the intrinsic fun.

I’m glad it’s over, frankly. For me. For now. Maybe I can finally start blogging regularly again or read some more books or… wait… there’s a new season of Battlestar Gallactica.   Mmmmm….

Fascinating post titled, “Is the Tipping Point Toast?” at Fast Company. In it, author Clive Thompson focuses on work done by Duncan Watts (a Columbia U. network-theory scientist on sabbatical to do work for Yahoo!) that shows how trends move through society. Contrary to the work of Malcom Gladwell, who wrote “The Tipping Point,” and who posits the importance of “Influentials” in establishing trends, Thompson’s research suggests that anybody can be the “spark” that ignites a conflagration of popularity. In fact, one of his research projects points to the almost random nature of hits:

Watts wanted to find out whether the success of a hot trend was reproducible. For example, we know that Madonna became a breakout star in 1983. But if you rewound the world back to 1982, would Madonna break out again? To find out, Watts built a world populated with real live music fans picking real music, then hit rewind, over and over again. Working with two colleagues, Watts designed an online music-downloading service. They filled it with 48 songs by new, unknown, and unsigned bands. Then they recruited roughly 14,000 people to log in. Some were asked to rank the songs based on their own personal preference, without regard to what other people thought. They were picking songs purely on each song’s merit. But the other participants were put into eight groups that had “social influence”: Each could see how other members of the group were ranking the songs.

Watts predicted that word of mouth would take over. And sure enough, that’s what happened. In the merit group, the songs were ranked mostly equitably, with a small handful of songs drifting slightly lower or higher in popularity. But in the social worlds, as participants reacted to one another’s opinions, huge waves took shape. A small, elite bunch of songs became enormously popular, rising above the pack, while another cluster fell into relative obscurity.

But here’s the thing: In each of the eight social worlds, the top songs–and the bottom ones–were completely different. For example, the song “Lockdown,” by 52metro, was the No. 1 song in one world, yet finished 40 out of 48 in another. Nor did there seem to be any compelling correlation between merit and success. In fact, Watts explains, only about half of a song’s success seemed to be due to merit. “In general, the ‘best’ songs never do very badly, and the ‘worst’ songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible,” he says. Why? Because the first band to snag a few thumbs-ups in the social world tended overwhelmingly to get many more. Yet who received those crucial first votes seemed to be mostly a matter of luck.

Yikes. The reaction of older music industry executives, in Watt’s words, was, “They were all like, ‘I think it’s bullshit. I’m still going to go with my gut,’” he recalls. “And I’m like, Okay, good luck to you. You’re going to need it.”

This reminds me, a bit, of the reaction of old-school baseball scouts in Michael Lewis’, “Moneyball: the art of winning an unfair game.” From the New Yorker editorial review:

The Oakland Athletics have reached the post-season playoffs three years in a row, even though they spend just one dollar for every three that the New York Yankees spend. Their secret, as Lewis’s lively account demonstrates, is not on the field but in the front office, in the shape of the general manager, Billy Beane. Unable to afford the star hires of his big-spending rivals, Beane disdains the received wisdom about what makes a player valuable, and has a passion for neglected statistics that reveal how runs are really scored.

Lewis wrote about how old-school scouts woud go out and pick players based on some basic, observed phenomenon — batting skills, running ability, etc. — and then go with, essentially, a hunch based on which ones looked “the best.” This is, to my mind, akin to looking for these Influencers that Gladwell and others insist are important to the hit making (ha ha) process. What Billy Beane found, though, was that all kinds of other stats were a better indicator of how well a player would perform as part of a team and contribute to scoring and, thus, wins.

I’m in a funny place, here. Because, on the one hand, I believe in the power of powerful ideas, influences and influencers. We’ve seen how trends can catch on based on support from a powerful patron like Oprah. But…

I’m also an old-school ad man. When I read about WoMM and how important it is to generate buzz… I can agree that, yes… it *seems* sensible. Let’s try to get people who have influence to be excited about your product. But I also know, from having managed hundreds of marketing campaigns, that when you do the same, smart, old, right stuff… it just works. All other things being equal, for example, I’ve found that frequency beats size in print advertising. If you have the choice of placing 20 half-page ads vs. 10 full-page ads… take the 20 smaller ones. Why? The stopping power of an ad isn’t important if nobody sees it, and people have to see your ad multiple times in order to even register the dang thing. Breakthrough creative is great… but you can’t budget for it. Make your ad solid, get the basics right, and flog it like mad.

There’s another post in here somewhere too… something about how the Wisdom of Crowds is more like the Random Influence of Crowds.

My title for this post reflects the possibility that while the Long Tail is great for finding interesting, niche stuff… the head of that curve is governed less by quality and influence than by… chance. If that’s the case, then chance favors the prepared, I believe. And being prepared seems to have more to do, if Watt’s is right, with playing to the bleachers as opposed to the box seats.

God, I love mixing metaphors.

Books and articles by Duncan Watts:

Watts, Duncan J. “A Twenty-First Century Science.” Nature. 445. 7127 (2007): 489.

Watts, Duncan J. Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness. Princeton studies in complexity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Adamic, L. “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, Duncan J Watts.” NATURE -LONDON-. 6929 (2003): 265.

Watts, Duncan J. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. New York: Norton, 2003.

Watts, Duncan J. “Networks, Dynamics, and the Small-World Phenomenon.” The American Journal of Sociology. 105. 2 (1999): 493.

Kossinets, Gueorgi, and Duncan J Watts. “Empirical Analysis of an Evolving Social Network.” Science. 311. 5757 (2006): 88.

Citation HTML generated by WorldCat Lists. 

Revelations 8:11 (KJV) — And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.

I’m not a scholar of Revelations. But I’m pretty sure this (link may be NSFW depending on WYW) counts as evidence of the end times*. Quotes from the review:

The play mechanics are simple. Prepare yourself by strapping on the included belt harness and jacking in your Wiimote. A series of toilets are presented on screen and the challenge is to tilt your body to control a never-ending stream of pee. Get as much pee in the toilets as you can while spilling as little on the floor as possible. Sounds easy eh? Well the toilets open and close whack-a-mole style and occasionally the stray cat or other cute critter pops up. Spray a cat for extra points…

According to the Japanese text on the box “Super Pii Pii Brothers promotes good bathroom skills and allows women to experience for the first time the pleasure of urinating while standing.” What we say is that virtual peeing is damn fun!

Up to two players can compete with dueling pee streams.

Wow. Just… wow.

*Note to readers with no sense of humor nor of irony: I don’t actually think this.

For the record, I think Kevin Kelly is a genius and often am extremely gratified to find him exploring weird, wild areas of technology and the mind. Even when I disagree with him, it’s usually on small points or on wording.

In his latest post on The Technium, though… I just think he’s wrong and oddly so, to boot. Read the post, so I don’t have to paraphrase it too much, here. It’s short. I’ll wait…

So, where is he wrong? Well, let’s start with the idea that computer scientists are more comfortable with technological change because, “They grok that many of the tasks they used to do can be done much better by computers.” Really? There are computers designing computers and writing code? There are robots building robots? I haven’t seen much of that.

What I’ve seen is that computer scientists use computers in their daily business, and that computers do more tasks than they used to. But not tasks that used to be done by CS folks. The scientists are doing the same tasks, just with more complex, robust and cheaper tools.

I also haven’t ever seen good art created by a computer or good poetry or fiction (or non-fiction, for that matter) written by a computer. But many artists, designers and writers absolutely embrace technology because the tools are just so flippin’ helpful. The writers I know love word processors, for example, and the spell-checking, note-taking, formatting functions now available. I don’t in any way begrudge my computer the ability to look up spelling much quicker than I did with a dictionary back in college. Yet there isn’t a computer out there that could, as of yet, write this blog post.

Same with designers. Those of you out there with a graphic arts background, especially those who have come-of-age in the last 15 years or so, will understand why “Photoshop is God” is a popular phrase. Does the computer do a better job at some mundane (and elegant) tasks associated with design? Hell, yes. Doing layout with InDesign or Quark Xpress is hundreds of times faster, easier and better than using the old paper layout methods. But a computer has yet to design a great piece of packaging or ad or children’s book illustration.

In some cases, I think this is the opposite of what Kelly is saying. As a writer (and sometimes designer), I have absolutely no fear of adopting new technology, because I think it’s impossible (or at least waaay down the road) for a computer to “do” what is at the heart of what I do: create. I’d put many musicians and film makers in this bucket, too. Again… I don’t see any films being made by computers, but the movie industry is moving the tech ahead in many cases.

And about doctors… I’m not sure what docs Kelly is working with, but most of the ones I know are huge tech nuts; they love they new toys. The digital distribution of records and labs is something they *rave* about when I talk to them. Scans of X-rays go on the hospital computer system and show up on the computer screen in the patient’s room, maybe even across town, in minutes rather than hours. MRI and CAT scan tech relies incredibly on computer power, obviously. Genetic engineering of drugs is almost impossible without computers. Maybe there are some good ol’ GPs who don’t want to computerize their bills… but I think this is a micro-example of a pain-in-the-ass system that nobody even likes the old way, so they don’t want to spend time on it.

In short… I think this is just a weird argument. When computer technology disrupts your job to the point that you are totally disintermediated –  take, for example, the guys at the print shop who used to cut film — you aren’t, I think, going to be thrilled about it… but, to be successful, you may have to get on board. But there’s a pretty decent chance you’ll go the other direction and be pissed off. On the other hand, if computers make your job easier, you’ll probably be OK with them in other instances, sure.

Oh… and I know some UNIX grey-beards who absolutely resent new computer technology. They liked being part of a small, elite band of brothers who understood computers when they were big and important and separate. Now that there’s a computer in my cell phone, and kids can mash-up aps on the Web, they feel a bit massintermediated.

Turing proposed a computer that was indistinguishable from a person in a conversation. In Kelly’s examples, he seems to be talking about our tech (computers in this case) besting us on particular tasks. Well, that’s been happening  since spear-throwers came along. John Henry died trying to beat the steam drill. I’d die trying to beat a spell checker. Just because I respect a tool’s ability to multiply my value doesn’t mean I think it’s likely to replace my value.

16 Gary Gygax Jokes we better not catch you making

1. “Quick! Someone cast Raise Dead!”
2. “Don’t worry – he’s just playtesting the Astral Plane for the next edition.”
3. “He’s gone the way of Star Frontiers.”
4. “Analysts warn of a free-fall in Mountain Dew futures.”
5. “In the next town, you meet a stranger named Barry Bygax.”
6. “Now who will lead our young people to Satan?”
7. “With his last breath, he cursed the name of Marlon Wayans.”
8. “I wonder how they’ll divide up his XP.”
9. “Pallbearers, make a Bend Bars/Lift Gates roll.”
10. “At least he didn’t live to see Disney’s Greyhawk On Ice.”
11. “Lorraine Williams is behind this somehow, I just know it.”
12. “The worlds of adventure gaming, fantasy fandom, and van painting will never be the same.”
13. “When I heard, I cried 2d10 tears.”
14. “Is there anything in the will about electrum?”
15. “Heart condition? Wow, I always thought it’d be owlbears that got him.”
16. “Suddenly, nobody in Heaven wants to hang out with Marilyn Monroe on Friday night.”