perfidy

In regards to GeekLethal's post, a necessary precursor to worrying about what to do once you've received a singing telegram from ET is worrying whether you have a telegraph machine to receive telegrams with.

I think that worrying about ET's message is pointless. It is clear that hyper-advanced aliens, wise with the knowledge of the eons, will completely endorse my worldview. Therefore, to prepare for their arrival, attend to my words and all will be well.

The fact that reasonably thorough searches of the sky have completely failed to reveal the existence of radio broadcasting, Dan Rather in the sky aliens leads us to several potential scenarios, all of which rather undercut SETI as it currently exists.

1) The cool aliens don't use radio. If we are going to be accepted by our social betters, we must move beyond attempting to speak with a hick accent on the radio waves. Quantum entanglement, even with our current, limited understanding of the laws of nature, holds open a possibility of FTL communication. Other quantum high wierdness may also be infinitely more efficient than radio. Some heretics even believe that relativity may be incomplete, and that gravity may propagate significantly faster than light. We have only recently become even marginally technologically competent. By galactic standards, we were born yesterday, and slept in late today for good measure. Are we to imagine that radio is the ne plus ultra of communication techniques forever?

2) There are no aliens, cool or otherwise. This would certainly explain why we haven't gotten any dancing ape telegrams on the white house lawn. It would be reassuring in some regards to know that we have the galaxy to ourselves. Given the rate at which we have lately been discovering planets, its feels unlikely to me that there is no one else out there, anywhere.

3) There is some compelling reason that the aliens are not communicating at all. Long time readers will know about the novel Killing Star, which set outs the Central Park analogy for life in the galaxy:

Imagine you're alone and unarmed in Central Park at night. From where you are, weapons are concealed and intentions hard to discern. The very last thing you do is wander around shouting, "I'm here! That could attract the attention of decidedly unsavory types. What do you do? You hunker down, keep quiet; and wait for a policeman to come round or for daylight and walk out of the park. However, there are several unfortunate differences between the universe and Central Park:

1. There's no policeman
2. You can't leave the park
3. Night never ends

If this scenario even remotely approximates reality, sending signals into space is just about the stupidest thing we could imagine doing. It's painting a bullseye on your chest, and screaming, "Shoot me!"

I don't think that SETI is at all likely to detect any signals. The energy cost to send a radio broadcast that would be coherent at distances greater than a few lightyears is absolutely enormous. And if aliens are sending narrowcast sigals, we would only pick them up by the thinnest of chances. The only remotely plausible radio broadcast would be the nearby deathshout of a species that had been wacked a la Killing Star, and no longer had anything to lose. At that stage, stealth is no longer a priority and having some memory of your existence better than no existence at all.

Life on this planet is scary enough. I don't think that life throughout the galaxy is going to be the big rock candy mountain, either. As we develop the technology to start moving around outside the cradle, we will have to be more than a little cautious.

Sky and Telescope covers a recent conference at Hahvahd regarding the SETI program.

For the non-dorks among you...if there are any...SETI is the nifty-sounding acronym for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a decades-long research program devoted to finding evidence of an alien civilization. In a nutshell, the plan is to search the skies with ridiculously oversized dishes listening for signals of certain type and strength to conclude they originated from an alien world. Conversely, an extraterrestrial society may one day be conducting similar experiments, and hear, say, Double Live Gonzo through the ether, and conclude that not only is there "alien" life out there, but it's gonna kick your ass.

So this conference was held to discuss where the project is, what they've found (not much), what they've not found (everything else), how they'll improve the search process, and the like. One interesting twist was the faction that asks whether alien civilizations have been trying to reach us for centuries, but we are too ignorant to understand the means of communication. I'm not talking crop circles here- kinda hard to believe that a civilization that can build interstellar conveyances would choose to express itself in corn- but subtle consistent signals that exist in frequencies or energies we're only beginning to comprehend.

What none of these people ask though, and which I find extremely unsettling, is what the holy hell we're supposed to do the morning after we get a telegram from ET. How about some conferences discussing the repercussions on our country, indeed our world, in that event? What happens to our livelihoods, our foreign policy, our belief systems, our self perception, the day after Kang and Kodos get a listing in the phonebook?

Madness is incremental, and it's so very hard (isn't it?) to know when you've crossed the line from healthy paranoia into deranged ranting. Loyal reader #0017, EDog, is edging away while nodding politely at this skeptic, who believes that gmail, combined with Carnivore/Total Information Whatever They Call It Today*, will be the ruination of us all. He's right... gmail is too creepy!

(As an added sop to insanity, why not give your obsessive tendencies a soothing backscratch with this fun game? Thanks again to Edog.)

[wik] *I have it on good authority that the "Total Information Awareness" program now appears in Congressional budget packages as "070220- Misc Funds 0688a: Puppies (cute)."

In a stunning display of unmitigated fuckwittery, the FCC has fined VIACOM more than half a million smackeroos for the Great Janet Nipple Event of 2004.

That's right. In a superbowl that featured dozens of nearly naked cheerleaders filmed at close range, countless swimsuits in commercials, and an astonishingly unfunny ad whose punchline was a farting horse, the possibly accidental and entirely unprurient exposure of one nipple is WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!, so wrong in fact that the network in question has to pay a gigantic fine. Worse yet, two members of the FCC's Star Chamber thought the fine was far too lenient considering the millions of tots now hellbound.

Where's the fine for the farting horse? That's the shit I don't want my kids seeing.

[wik] In fact, I didn't even know it was possible to make a farting horse unfunny. That takes a notorious lack of talent.

If your name is this:

Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens)

and you say this:

"No right thinking follower of Islam could possibly condone [the September 11 attacks]: The Quran equates the murder of one innocent person with the murder of the whole of humanity."

expect this:

Homeland Security officials said Yusuf Islam — formerly known as singer Cat Stevens — will be deported Wednesday after being denied entry to the U.S. Stevens had recently been placed on a government "no-fly" list after U.S. authorities received information indicating associations with potential terrorists, a government official said.

Laying aside the puzzling and unnerving proposition that the governmental"no-fly" list is still a going concern after repeated assurances by that very same gubmint to the contrary, I have yet to hear exactly what Mr. Islam (I love that name!!!) did to deserve deportation. He is an orthodox Muslim. Whoopee doo. Moreover, he's an orthodox Muslim who has consistently spoken out against terrorism, especially of the Islamic variety, something that prominent Muslims may be excused for not doing very often what with the short lifespan it seems to lead to. He isn't guilty of a crime. He hasn't even been charged with anything. But since his name is on a list somewhere-- a list we're not allowed to know anything about-- he's a persona non grata. Heck, if it's names that's the problem, my good friend Tommy Axemurder really better watch his ass.

I have alot of trouble being in the right place at the right time.

It usually has nothing to do with me, or my efforts to do well. It's simply the Unfathomable Forces that Govern Our Universe (UFGOU) paying undo attention to fucking with me: I was a soldier during wartime (right time), but served in the only heavy division in Europe not to fight (wrong place); I spent a long weekend in Berlin (right place), but couldn't get there until two years after the wall fell (wrong time); I'm writing this here (wrong place) and now (wrong time), and not drinking in a Munich beer tent during Oktoberfest (right everything).

But for the first time in a long time, the UFGOU smiled upon me as loyal wife Lady Lethal and I spent 10 days with family in Germany.
The primary mission was to serve as the godparents to our niece, now about 15 months old. Lady Lethal's brother and wife were getting irritated over the baby's lack of christened status, and we finally got it together and got ourselves over there.

If you've never flown to Europe, it's a long flight. If it's been a while since you last flew to Europe, it's longer than you remember. Alot of Frankfurt airport is new and shiny, alot is old and smelly, most of the rest of it flows between the two, and about none of it is open at 5 a.m, when we got in. The only people around seemed to be an inordinate number of bathroom attendants. What was odd was that the number of bathroom attendants in no way reflected the actual cleanliness of the bathrooms. We took a pic of ourselves looking quite haggard that we find funny but will nonetheless not share.

The German border police were nominally dour but well within predicted norms. Absent were the security teams I remembered, with one man with an MP5 and a sidearm, and a kamerad with a sidearm and a German shepherd. Instead were uniformed kids with pistols who managed to both be highly visible yet not actually move around much. They must train for that. Anyway, the unamused chap who stamped my passport gave me the first exposure to sustained spoken German I've had in years, so it was a good intro for the next few days.

Got our connecting flight to Amsterdam, which from Frankfurt is akin to getting the shuttle from JFK to Hartford. Lady Lethal, me, and two dozen working stiffs in suits. Nice suits, but shabby shoes. To a man. I'll have to explore that more later.

Schiphol airport in Amsterdam is cleaner, brighter, far less smelly, and an all around better space than Frankfurt's. Thumbs up. Minor quibble though for the powers that be: do please reconsider the recording that implores in a caring, sing-song, female voice to "mind your step". I heard it about every 6 seconds when I was within 100 feet of every conveyor-belt sidewalk. After the 6 or 700th time, I got it. Thanks for looking out for a brother though.

My wife's brother and father picked us up and we made our way to the house, which is just over the border into Germany. Not that there's a border anymore. It's not even delineated in any obvious way, beyond a smallish sign. Little different from the "Connecticut Welcomes You" signs hereabouts, and that's kind of frustrating in its entirely anticlimactic, pedestrian manner. Go all the way there looking for good pics and mild adventure and it looks like rural Connecticut- even the signs. Only thing missing was a Home Depot and a Wal Mart.

The village where we stayed is outside Kleve , in the northwest corner of the country. Saw plenty of Kleve and environs. It and the surrounding towns lie on what the regional tourism marketeers promote as the Via Romana, an old Roman road that is still in use. The road connects all these towns and suburbs, and has done so since those towns were Roman garrisons. There's a fair amount of museum displays, signage, and and ancient burial mounds to make it quite an interesting region.

And that Roman heritage is not limited to the east side of the Rhine. Nearby Nijmegen and Arnhem in the Netherlands also promote their Latin history. The Museum Het Valkhof in Nijmegen devotes a significant amount of its space to ancient art and artefacts. And let me add that America by no means has a monopoly on unruly children. The Het Valkhof was inundated with some sort of field trip from a local school, and unsupervised guttersnipes abounded. But we managed to enjoy ourselves despite the unceasing hand-under-the-armpit farting noises and relentless giggling.

Arnhem too had its share of ancient museums and curios, but we opted instead for the touristy, expensive, pungent yet thoroughly enjoyable Openlucht Museum. We didn't get tired of seeing all the nifty windmills of all sizes and function, working shops and trades, and the extra-yummy yummies from the bakery. For more recent events of historical import, we located the Airborne Museum as well as the Frost Bridge, better known as "the bridge too far".

And of course no trip to Europe would be complete without an obligatory visit to the local castle. Castle Moyland is an old fortification that is now an art gallery, but in its checkered past has served as vacation spot for Voltaire and headquarters for the British 3d Infantry Division.

We finally did get around to having a christening- remember that? The reason we were there? The local church was fairly unremarkable as such things go, and only about 130 years old. It had been spared major damage in WW2, which is remarkable because we saw a photo of Kleve proper the morning after a serious bombardment. From the view of an RAF recon plane, the city looked like 10,000 blackened toothpicks scattered and piled around a few scorched bits of masonry: beams from homes and buildings clinging to a few standing stone walls and chimneys. Doubly creepy was that town landmarks are readily visible- kind of like having a picture of Hiroshima the day after with an arrow pointing to a pile of rubble saying "you are here".

As it happened, the baby was christened on September 11th. The significance of the date completely escaped me until the priest's sermon (is that the right word?) before the actual ritual. My German is fair on my best day, but from what I could understand at the moment and from what I can recall today, his piece was rather stirring. He described the September 11 attacks in some detail, and tied them into the atrocities in Beslan. The running theme of course was children, and how important it is for Christians to continue bringing their children to Jesus, and involving them in the religious community, and that because our civilization values our children as we do, will ultimately prevail over terrorists. He had alot more on this theme, but when he said it it wasn't at all cheesy- believe me at that moment, in that place, it was moving.

The ensuing festivities back at the house saw my father in law and I enjoying some Cohibas (note to eavesdropping government agency: I absolutely did not bring any contraband back with me), lovingly sipped with Tucher hefe weizens and later, a smooth Erdinger pilsner thanks to good neighbor Tobias. Tons of food, tons of drink, music, dancing, and general frolic. These are primarily Poles, remember, who do not celebrate with one drinking hand tied behind their backs. One new experience was a thoroughly disagreeable Bulgarian spirit papa brought from Poland. Not sure what in the Bulgar character compelled them to create not simply a potent brew, but a spiteful one, but the lesson is clear. Safety tip for loyal readers: if it originated in Bulgaria, keep it out of your mouth- that counts double for liquor.

Although the weather soured on us and we didn't make it to Amsterdam, we weren't that disappointed. Everything else came together in a pleasant, memorable, and refreshingly uncomplicated manner. We balanced family stuff with nerdy tourist stuff pretty well. And somewhere in there I turned 33.

Right place, right time.

We will plan to go a little later next time though- we flew back 2 days before the first keg was tapped for Oktoberfest.

Howard Wolfson, a representative of the DNC, was just interviewed on Fox News. He was attempting to explain how a Kerry-run Iraq war would ease the burden on the United States. Fox News' Linda Vester asked for details. How, exactly would Kerry do this? I kid you not, the man said, "We can bring in our allies." Vester: "Like who?" Wolfson: "Like France."

You could hear the entire audience doubling over in laughter.

Autumn comes as a real downer to where I live. The rest of New England is blessed with dying leaves in fiery colors, gorgeous sunsets, and crisp weather that promises warm hearths and snacks from Martha Stewart’s wet dreams. Not so for me. Where I live on the coast in Salem, Massachusetts, the weather turns cold and then it rains. The leaves go from green to dead in a matter of days only to get turned into stinking muck by the feet of thousands of mouth-breathing tourists come to town to gawk at “witches.” The grass on the common turns brown and the town hunkers down for another busy Halloween season and a long, cold winter.

Oddly, I like it this way. If I want scenic panoramas and hearthwarmed idylls, I just need to drive an hour north. At home in Salem, the gross weather and the ersatz festival mood suit my listening habits. I tend to key my music to the seasons. Spring is funktime, summer tends to mean power-pop and loud rock, and in the autumn I pull out my downer records—Tom Waits, Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds, Neil Young’s heartsick ‘70s work, the Black Heart Procession, and German operas about men and women doomed to horrible fates they cannot escape. It’s not that I court depression. That’s a louche pursuit for tortured teenagers in black eyeliner who carve their initials in painful places. But autumn in New England seems the right time for high weirdness straight out of some fetid basement in Peyton Place.

David Thomas, formerly of high punk priests Pere Ubu and punk prototypes Rocket from the Tombs, has been making music of surpassing high weirdness for thirty years now, and age treats him well. These days he records as David Thomas and Two Pale Boys, the two pale boys in question being Andy Diagram (trumpets & electronics) and Keith Moliné (guitars, violin & electronics). The stripped-down instrumentation that these three not-boys bring to their third release, 18 Monkeys on a Dead Man’s Chest (in stores October 19), allows Thomas’ chameleonic voice and bizarre lyrics to shine through a bed of heavily processed trumpet and guitar, sometimes softened by the lilting wheeze of Thomas’ melodeon.

The hardest thing about writing about music is avoiding X-meets-X clichés. I could finish this review right now if I just hooked Tom Waits’ “Swordfishtrombones” up to early Nick Cave and ran them both through the horrorshow country of Johnny Dowd’s “Temporary Shelter.” But that depends on your knowing who those people are, and most of you just thought to yourselves, “Johnny Dowd… who the heck…?” Even if that were not the lazy man’s escape, such associations do the album, Mr. Thomas, and his Two Pale Boys a major disservice.

The music on 18 Monkeys on a Dead Man’s Chest defies fair description, featuring layers of sound, lurching rhythms, and Thomas’ own elliptical lyrics. The opening track, “New Orleans Fuzz,” clumps along heavily under a lurching beat while disconnected impressions float by: “There are monsters in the rain,” “The river’s in the air, there’s nothing else to breathe,” “Live free or die, live free or die.” Even without drums of any kind, the following track, “Numbers Man” manages to swing like a lost Ventures recording, albeit a lost Ventures recording bent on murdering your family. And so the tension builds, until smack in the middle of all the ugliness sits “Brunswick Parking Lot,” one of the most luminously beautiful songs I have heard in a long while. With just his melodeon as accompaniment, Thomas croons (in his own broken way) a long and heartfelt apology to a girl named Deborah. The second half of the album is more atmospheric and leans more heavily on Andy Diagram’s tape loops and trumpet. “Nebraska Alcohol Abuse” barely moves, covering Thomas’ downcast murmur in gentle noises like falling snow, making the subtle groove of “Golden Surf” seem positively energetic by comparison. A few lyrical hints point to some of the songs being linked into a story, but if that is true I have yet to figure out the plot.

By the time the album winds down with the seven-minute long minimalist tour de force “Prepare for the End,” all the building unpleasantness of the previous forty minutes dissolves into a pale sunrise tinged with, if not exactly hope, than at least resignation that things might be okay. David Thomas and Two Pale Boys have created a beautiful album of downcast music that finds solace in desolation and redemption after despair.

Recommended for fans of: Tom Waits, Pere Ubu, Johnny Dowd, Nick Cave, Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht, Black Heart Procession, that depressing high-school crap we all loved back in the 80s.

Dave Thomas and Two Pale Boys record for Smog Veil Records.

See them on tour in (fittingly) October:

Thu 10/14/04 San Diego, CA- Casbah
Fri 10/15/04 Los Angeles, CA- Spaceland
Sat 10/16/04 San Francisco, CA- Bottom of the Hill
Mon 10/18/04 Portland, OR- Lola's- Crystal Ballroom
Tue 10/19/04 Seattle, WA- Tractor Tavern
Fri 10/22/04 Minneapolis, MN- 7th Street Entry
Sat 10/23/04 Chicago, IL- Empty Bottle
Sun 10/24/04 Pittsburgh, PA- Brew House: Space 101
Mon 10/25/04 Cleveland, OH- Beachland Ballroom
Wed 10/27/04 Cambridge, MA- Middle East Upstairs (*I am so there*)
Thu 10/28/04 New York, NY- Knitting Factory
Fri 10/29/04 Baltimore, MD- Talking Head
Sat 10/30/04 Chapel Hill, NC- Local 506
Sun 10/31/04 Atlanta, GA- The Earl

Also posted to blogcritics.org.

Watched the CBS evening news for the second time in ten years today. The first time was last week. I think that Rather's performance can be summed up thusly:

I accept full responsibility, but not the blame.

The good faith bit at the end seems really out of place considering the complete lack of thoroughness or even common sense CBS displayed. Even cutting them maximum slack, you have to assume that they thought this story was so sexy for its potential to damage Bush that they ignored all the warts, VD, and surplus-to-requirements facial hair. Call it the partisan journalistic analog of beergoggles. They ran with it in spite of all their friends telling them, "hey, that chick's really fat!" And now, the inexorable logic of beer goggling leads them to the coyote ugly moment. But Rather is still trying to pass it off, "No dude, she is hot."

While I was watching, I snorted my Diet Dr. Pepper when I heard the Dan say that they went to Burkett. Oh really? Then the big question is of course, if you went to Burkett, who told you to go there? Who is the unimpeachable source that you are protecting? Why are you protecting anyone? Not that any sort of journalistic ethics (even the rather thin and underfed ethics CBS has exhibited so far) would prevent you from turning on a source that rolled you.

The fact that two high level Kerry aides have now admitted to speaking with Burkett before the 60 minutes piece suggests some stinky going on. A lot of evidence is pointing in the direction that at least some in the Kerry campaign knew of the material that ended up in the 60 minutes report before CBS did. The timing of the "Fortunate Son" campaign that even used footage from 60 minutes suggests foreknowledge. If memogate gets connected to the Kerry campaign, he's really, really toast.

Just as soon as I promised that I may soon return to optimal posting density (or "OPD, yeah you know me!"), I remember that tomorrow is the release day for The System of the World.

.

I called today and had a copy held for me at my local bookstore. It's cheaper than Amazon, and I get to walk right out onto Massachusetts Avenue carrying that gold covered bricklike tome in all its prominent eggheadedness, as if to say to the world around me "that's right. Geek right here."

For those of you who have read and enjoyed the previous two instalments of Stephenson's trilogy, I highly recommend Davis Liss' The Coffee Trader, set in the same eighteenth-century Amsterdam that Stephenson reconstructed for Eliza, Countess de la Zeur.