On her first night in town, Chris was trapped at a meeting, so Katie met Lara at a coffeeshop in Davis Square. They went back to my place, and then I met the ladies at Christopher’s in Porter Square (editor’s note: the review is spot-on). I had a chimichanga and one beer, but this picture makes me look like I had 3 beers.

So, the thing about Lara’s camera is that it is about the size of a Bic lighter and takes video and all that. It’s what you would call “super sweet.” The best part is that it is metallic orange. The worst part, is that the red-eye reducing flash blinds you and then takes your picture. Katie can take it, but I can’t handle it…

Wow. Words cannot describe the retinal damage I was acting like I could have received (editor’s note: ?????).

Anyway the next day, Lara had the big interview in Sturbridge, and I had a big midterm that night. Needless to say, we were both pretty tired and brain dead, so it was definitely time to drink more beer and eat more food. We met Mark and Anitha at Grendel’s in Harvard Square. They have a food “happy hour” after 9:00 pm (editor’s note: half-price bizzatch), which is pretty cool. I had two Guinness’ and some linguini with shellfish.

Anitha is on the left, Mark is in the middle, and “two-beer” Melmack is on the right. Here’s the deal with Mark: his eyes are never open when you take a picture of him. I don’t know if he’s trying to protect his soul or what. The other thing is that he hasn’t updated his website since before that whole Y2K thing.

They were playing Soul Coughing’s Ruby Vroom in the bar, which was cool because I hadn’t heard it in a while. For this picture, Lara got in the mix, but Anitha’s unsteady hand made things look pretty blurry. I bet if we had a tripod, you would see that Mark’s eyes are, in fact, not open.

BTW: Still don’t know how I did on that test, and Lara starts her new job on May 1st.

One of the biggest gripes I have is against web designers who do not understand that the web should be a free resource of information. The greatest purpose the web can have is to share information equally, giving anyone the power to educate and inform themselves. With that goal in mind, making the web as accessible as possible, obviously within reason comparing things like cost-effectiveness and demographics of your audience, should be one of the highest goals of any web designer.

I thought I’d take this opportunity to say this, as going to that NBA quotes page reminded me of it. Hard-coding the size of your font for bodies of text is one of the most common mistakes a malinformed web designer can make. Most do it as a way to ensure proper layout of a page, and under certain circumstances, like for menu items, it is understandable, but for a common news-type template where it is applied to the actual main article, it’s inexcusable. Go to that site which Ben linked to and look at it.

Now look at what I had to do to read it the way I wanted to:

“We designed it that way because we want to control how people look at our content” is probably the biggest reason you will find. “Would you like how I take your content out of context and read it that way?” is my answer.

Most of the time it doesn’t bother me this much, but I just felt like sitting back and relaxing today rather than sitting up attentively as I normally do…

This is what happens when you ask NBA players a bunch of questions. Sports interviews are so banal. But the quotes are funny. My favorite quote has to be when someone asked Yao Ming at one of his tri-weekly press conferences what his favorite English words were…and he answered “Last question”. Hhahaha… but a close second is this gem by Charles Oakley that I just found:

Charles Oakley, F, Washington Wizards:

Hello all, So i am following Ben’s advice and giving a low down on my life right now: Since my departure from Colombo ( and consequently leaving behind a good life, car and LOTS of BOOZE!) and my arrival here in Savannah ( which has to be the most boring city ever), my life has taken a very monotonous turn… Savannah was not what i expected. It is a beautiful city with some old historic buildings and lovely parks and other scenic views. Unfortunately this is offset by the lack of a social life and a high crime rate. Just the other day a bunch of students got held up at gun point and two others were stabbed in broad daylight. So that way i try not to be walking out at night and thats sort of general stuff. The other thing that really bothers me is that lack of a place to ball… they hjave a court and training facility but that is reserved for the athlethes.. since this is a real Div III school, it has a bunch of really good athlethes. The basketball team here fro example is better than any i have seen at our time at Reed… and that includes the teams that we never played..!! Graudate school is good for the most part, i am enjoying the work and all, sometimes get frustrated my some of the undergraduate students, they dont seem to give a shit. Perhaps Reed had more commited students but here most people seem to be about how they look, partying and fast cars…in class they are about as intelligent as hamsters…. The only other newsworthy thing is that i have started interning at a design house called Lead Dog Productions. I am a graphic designer there…. hopefully the experience there will lead to bigger and better things aight, thats about all i can think of for now… talk to ya all later

I had the pleasure of dinner with Mark and Robin over the weekend. A great time as always. Mark has a badass monitor for his machine, I feel that mine is suddenly inadequate…

Chris, I agree fully with your last statement, that it’s a function of grabbing ratings as opposed to worthwhile reporting. Your friends are technically correct in that they are showing life and death situations. The problem though is what’s already been addressed; they don’t show the consequences of the action. They had an almost 30 minute segment on the other day from a firefight outside Baghdad; guys running and shooting, a wounded guy popping off rounds from a stretcher, ammo supply vehicles blowing up. But again, they fail to show you what would separate it from watching a movie. There was a video from a checkpoint where they opened up on a car that failed to stop, and the first thing through my mind was that it was straight out the movie Heat. Then you add the commentary, as you mentioned, where they claim the absurd or mumble about the inane, such as that the guy in the stretcher actually hit anything with his two rounds. They not only edit the video it so that it’s visibly disassociated from the real violence of the activity, they supplement it with voice over crap that asserts things that you do ONLY find in movie.

What’s absolutely fucking absurd is that it looks like Saving Private Ryan might be more effective in persuading people that war is not something to be desired than real footage from current events. But is the solution to show what happens to people when they are shot or blown apart, or to turn off the camera completely and send dispatches at the end of activity?

As for the bit about our dead, you’re absolutely on point. We’re a microwave society and need our fix in 30 seconds or less, even if means it’s going to be a rubbery fucking mess.

One last gem; if you’re lucky, you can catch the weather reports for the Gulf on MSNBC. That way you at home can more acurately determine how far your 4th Armored Cav piece can move on that turn, er, day…

The other reality of the day is that I need to go full time at something. I have way too much time for this blog thing eh?

You guys dropped some science after I vented about MLB. But now, I’m going to vent some more: today is opening day in Boston, and it took my bus 45 minutes to travel about 8 blocks. That sucks a duck. It’s drizzling outside, but the Fenway faithful are on their way out to challenge pneumonia together, or even better, find a nice big place to exchange SARS….

Brandon, I fully agree with you about the media coverage. In fact, you put it better than I could have when I challenged half my volleyball team to convince me that the war coverage was actually beneficial. I found the first day or two of coverage embarassing:

“Wolf, I’m hearing sirens outside my hotel room again… I heard these sirens earlier today, and I can’t say exactly what they are for…. WAIT! The sirens seem to have stopped, Wolf…. I can’t tell you why they have stopped, but it is silent in Qatar right now. No, the sirens are starting up again….. and they seem to have stopped, again. Wolf, I think the sirens were just turned on for a moment there, I can’t tell you why. These seem to be the same sirens I heard earlier today. I’m going to turn around and look off my balcony here….. I hear another siren, and it seems to be coming from a police car or ambulance, but I can’t see it. I can’t tell you what this could mean, Wolf. What’s that? Ummm, I can put my gas mask on in about 30 seconds.”

After that, it didn’t get much better with the minute-by-minute accounts from several “embedded” journalists. This added very little to me. My friends were trying to convince me that it was “so real” or “you’re watching life and death when you watch their coverage.” Really? I felt like I was watching a movie or some journalist try to catch a bullet to make a name for himself. The sheer number and amount of front-line reports made it impossible to stop for a minute and talk about WHY we were at war. After 9 days of reading “Troops approach Baghdad,” I felt like the media was trying to distract me from something.

I hadn’t even heard a thing about the “United Nations” until today. Did they go on recess during the war? What did the European governments have to say? What about the extent of war protests? The “phantom ship” that left Iraq just before we invaded? Nope, too busy hearing about friendly fire, or the guy that shot himself in his sleep, or making a mockery of the Iraqi information officer. My friends are laughing at this guy, and it sounds ridiculous, but how do you KNOW what’s really happening there? By looking at the pictures Geraldo draws in the sand? Geraldo could have done that from Palm Beach, and we’d never know…

And so much for privacy and respect for the dead. The camera crews are at the family’s home within an hour of publicizing their names. Who wants to watch these people try to reconcile their loss with some asshole reporter trying to get some tears on tape.

It’s not life and death that they are showing us. It’s bonus sweeps week in a special ratings battle. (Which, by the way I hear NBC is winning. Who needs Seinfeld, right?)

OK. End rant. I need to do some work.

I not only looked forwad to Grand Theft Auto Vice City, but promptly bought it. Running random people over got boring, couldn’t hold my attention. I feel a nervous laugh comming on…

That link to the news about India and Pakistan is kinda frightening, in an “i told you so” sort of way….chickens coming home to roost, anyone?

Mark, that whole debate about the links between video games and violence is an interesting one to me. I mean, it’s almost a visceral response for me to immediately laugh at the idea and say that if a video game is enough to make someone devalue human life to the point where it ends in tragedy (as is always the case when the proponents of this argument rear their ugly heads), then there’s something much deeper and more troubling involved. At the same time, I run into all too many people (and I am sure Brandon is with me here, probably the rest of you) who I give almost no credit to in terms of their ability to reason or understand real-life issues. So then I have to make the decision: do I have faith in humanity (meaning that video games should’nt be able to negatively affect people so profoundly) or do I not (be honest, on the highway, you hate everyone and wish they would die)?

I mean, in some sense, we all know that a slight majority of Americans support the war. Now, to be a smug liberal and assume that I am right and they are wrong, we have one of three choices: 1) Americans understand the issues and are capable of intelligently making a decision on the matter, and hence they just believe it is the moral thing to do, and that getting rid of / disarming Saddam really is worth all the potential problems. 2) Americans understand the issues and are capable of intelligently making a decision, but the way the war is presented by the government and media skews the issue so that Americans are on the wrong team. Or, 3) Americans are presented the issue in a balanced manner but are unable to adequately understand the situation and therefore arrive at the wrong conclusion.

So, from that point of view, I am forced to choose between our citizens being immoral (or at least morally so different from myself that they seem alien), duped, or stupid. I guess I’d have to lean towards a combination of (2) and (3)…but it’s hard to tell. I guess if I chose immoral, that would suggest that video games aren’t responsible for violence, it’s just an inborn American trait. Whereas if I chose (3), video games could be responsible for making people violent. But I just don’t believe it…so it’s kind of a quandry.

As for not enjoying yourself running over civvies…I have to say that’s a totally understandable and probably healthy reaction. From my personal point of view, I never had the chance or much yearning to play grand theft auto, but if I did, I’d probably enjoy running over the civilians a great deal. Why? I guess it’s like Q-Tip says: “I really can’t tell/I guess I laugh to keep from cryin/so much goin’ on,/people killin, people dyin'”

Chris, fully agree with the baseball thing. Tim Robbins was at Brown last week speaking about the war; people said he was pretty good. I would have to say that the fact that the whole thing went down like that lends credence to hypothesis (3) above…

Well put Mark. I agree that the ends/means debate is worth mentioning, and I fear the many have already found the answer. I had a much longer post in mind at that time, but opted to go the short route of the instigator as I was, and am still, not sure of how to bring up my thoughts.

As for the laughing at people being killed; that’s also do to the voyeristic and desensitizing nature of modern media coverage of war. They are happy to show you things blowing up where people are hardly visible, but they shield the american populace from the devastation to bodies. I would wonder if the same people that laugh at those images of destruction were incredibly indignant at the sight of our dead on TV? I wouldn’t be surprised. There’s a book called ‘On Killing’ that addresses the issue of the perception of violence here in the US. I can bring that too if my brain works properly. Interesting read. Actaully talks more about military programs to overcome the unwillingness to kill that most of us have (almost said ‘suffer from,’ heh). Ultimately, there is a suggestion that the practices and effects have spilled over, like the widespread adoption of euphamisms for killing. A fuel air bomb kills at close range with an intense heat and pressure wave. Those unfortunate enough to be farther away get to be lit on fire or otherwise severly burned, and hit with high speed debris. But the best effect is the rupturing or otherwise turning inside out of your organs by the negative pressure of the vaccum that must be filled after the fireball. They don’t talk about that. The MOAB is just cool eh? I love explosions as much as the next man, and as I mentioned before, I identify with my team, but I’m not a cheerleader of pointless killing.

My opposition to the war is multifold; obviously that the rest of the world doesn’t agree is of concern, as is the lack of Iraqi threats to the US, as the lying to the american populace, as is the ominous precedent… But yet another thing that I find dubious is the supossed humanitarian angle. I am aware that thousands of people in Iraq have been living what must be an unimaginably shitty life, but therin lies the key. I, and I’d have to say that most of the US, actually don’t care about he plight the average Iraqi and hence we haven’t spent time trying to be informed enough imagine it. Practically speaking, since nobody here really knew jack shit about what was going on over there, why the hell are we going to kill and be killed for something that isn’t even worthwhile enough for people to have been informed about 3 years ago? Humanitarian sympathies? Come on. So now, we have these people extolling the virtues of liberating the Iraqi people, but if we all jump on the ‘feel good’ bandwagon, we’re going to be invading a good portion of the world, if we take the time to read about any of it.

Would I support the ‘liberation’ of the Iraqi people if a quality of life was an assured outcome? No. Would you? Kinda a random jumble of half thoughts, but anyway…

As for the weekend. I can do something later on Sunday, that would be best. I’ll call you tomorrow late afternoon/ evening when I get down there.