Month: October 2010

We can’t just let them secede.

It would be nice, it would be easy, it would be a great relief to drop about 15 states of dead weight and go back to being a hard-charging up-and-coming country with a dynamic future, unencumbered by the sclerosis of the Hookworm Belt.

But we can’t do it.

If you want to know why, look at the recent publicity for suicides among gay teens. Dan Savage is out promoting his “It Gets Better” campaign, which is fine as it goes, and a pretty good message for almost any teen – but what if it doesn’t? What if a kid’s stuck in a rural town, with average grades, and going off to college is only going to put him a hundred miles from home and among the same sorts of people? And what if it’s not just a question of being gay? What if it’s being some other color, or having the wrong accent, or just plain being different?

We assume people could just get away if they wanted to – probably because most of us reading this (certainly those of us writing it) are well off, healthy, “free white and twenty-one” as the saying used to go. And with all those advantages, it still took me until graduate school to break out of the metro area – and another three years to break out of the South. How, then, are we to identify and rescue every single prisoner of the cult of conformity – especially once we’ve allowed said cult to form its own country? Especially if they’re ready, willing, and able to decide that who you are as a person is against the law?

No retreat. No surrender. No punting. No throwing out hands in the air and letting them go. We stay, and we fight, and we win. And you can paint that right on the bottom of the flag: “not for ourselves alone.”

I guess I was ten months old the first time I went to Disneyland. I don’t remember too much about it – for me, the Disney experience meant Orlando. I went as a preschooler, I went six months after EPCOT opened, I went (briefly) in 1988 – and then the big trips. I went to Walt Disney World three times – 1989, 1995 and 1997 – and each trip had an impact on my life that was totally unforeseeable at the time. They all involved multiple days, staying in the resort, the whole experience.

So my first adult trip to Disneyland in 2001 was a bit of a head-turner. Here it was, the Magic Kingdom, just as it had been – but not really, and not quite. There was this huge mountain in the middle, for one thing, and the castle was smaller, and what the hell is New Orleans Square–? It was new, and interesting, and just different enough to make for a contrast with the Disney World redux trip in 2003, which was itself fraught with peril of only the sort that two weeks at home with the family can create.

And then last October, we went down to Anaheim again, the first of what would become three trips in twelve months. And not only did we have Disneyland, we had Disney California Adventure, which is now officially my favorite Disney park.

California Adventure might strike you as an odd theme for a park. But it works. You have the big boardwalk area, which provides some of the buzz of the Disney Boardwalk in Orlando while calling to mind the Santa Cruz and Santa Monica boardwalks or even the long-lost Playland-by-the-Sea in San Francisco (original home of the It’s-It). You have the replica whitewater ride next to the replica Yosemite lodge. You have the Hollywood area, which captures a lot of what you’d get in Disney-MGM (or whatever it’s called now) in Orlando. You have “A Bug’s Land” which really is the vanguard of incorporating new Disney product that doesn’t really fit the traditional “Magic Kingdom” layout. There’s even a replica wine country trattoria (complete with AMAZING tenderloin) and a faux-winery building that does a great job showing off the early design concepts behind what’s going to be in the park next.

There’s California Screamin’, which is handy if you’ve ever wanted to be shot out of a railgun. As coasters go, this is the best thing – you board the cars, they roll down into position, and no foreplay, no windup – BANG, shot out of a linear induction motor at 55 miles an hour straight up a hill, and the devil take the hindmost. There’s the Animation building, featuring Turtle Talk with Crush, perhaps the greatest interactive movie tie-in of all time – this animated turtle on a huge screen is computer-rendered IN REAL TIME and carries on a conversation with your little kids in full surfer dialect. (‘tcha!!) And there’s Soarin’ Over California, which will absolutely put a lump in your throat and make you proud to reside in the Golden State.

There’s World of Color, which is an amazing feat of engineering that draws on decades of Disney content, and there’s a reason you’re better off buying a dinner package that includes a pass to the VIP area. And in a couple of years, there’s Cars Land, yup, Radiator Springs come to life. Hell, down one alley there’s even a few Victorian homes and a replica Palace of Fine Arts.

Basically, what California Adventure is to me is a completely new Disney experience, new to me in the last year, unfreighted by baggage of years gone by but still alive with that Disney sense of unreality. It’s as exciting as being given a new Star Wars or Indiana Jones movie unexpectedly – only it turns out to be really, really good.

Now I just need that high-speed rail line built…

I love Barry Bonds. Not as a person, or as a player, but for what he did in the end.

Baseball looked the other way on steroids for more than a decade. Then everyone woke up and realized what had happened, and through the hangover realized that baseball had completely lost its way. And they decided that Barry Bonds was the symbol of everything that was wrong. Old white sportswriters bawled like somebody’d shut down the buffet. Bud Selig suddenly decided he had better things to do than honor the impending accomplishment. Everyone wanted Barry Bonds to pay for the sins of baseball. And Barry refused to play along with it.

Everyone went apeshit for Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in 1998. Bonds took that record in 2001. Then, in 2007, he took the most hallowed record in baseball away from Hank Aaron. Every one of the aforementioned sports fossils wanted to apply an asterisk to the records – well, the asterisk is there, all right, and it’s on an entire decade of the sport. It’s on Bud Selig, it’s on the players union, it’s on the owners who looked the other way because the balls were flying out of the yard and the cash registers were ringing. Barry Bonds is God’s judgement on baseball – you think this guy’s an asshole, and you want to pin it all on him? He’s going to take your crown jewels and quite literally smash them with a ball bat.

To borrow a line from Battlestar Galactica, the day comes when you can’t hide from the things you’ve done. Baseball got exactly what it deserved. Nobody likes the Angel of Death, but the judgement has to come from somewhere. And that’s why I like #25 – because he was given the role of Angel of Death, and he didn’t shirk from it. He didn’t apologize for it, he didn’t beg forgiveness, he didn’t knuckle under and accept the scorn and abuse from a thousand other guilty consciences. He went out, punched the clock, told the world to go fuck itself, and swung the bat. And I can’t help but respect that.

We live in a world of trolls. Message boards, AM radio, Westboro Baptist – you name it, the trolls are everywhere. At some point, a certain segment of people decided that it would be fun to go around looking to cause trouble. And it has become impossible to deal with them – you seem to have a choice between ignoring them and letting them go unchallenged, or engaging with them…which never seems to end well.

The problem becomes what I call the “smoking-on-the-platform effect” – it’s against the rules to smoke on the train platform, but somebody lights up anyway, and as soon as you call them on it, you are equally the asshole. I don’t know how this happened, but could make a couple of guesses – mostly stemming from white people who learned exactly the wrong lesson from civil disobedience and from a culture that privileges both sides equally no matter how far out on the seesaw one may be relative to the other.

The point is, the guy blows his smoke all over the platform, and you can tell him off or point out the rules, but he will continue to blow his smoke – usually with his middle finger up, which is generally the intent anyway – until he runs out of cigarettes or until he is forcibly stopped from smoking. Which makes people quail a bit – do you really want to call the police because a guy’s smoking? Now, what if there are no police and it’s on you to make it stand up? Or rather, what if despite the signs there’s actually no black-letter law that says you can’t smoke?

Take a turn through your typical metropolitan newspaper’s comment section and you’ll figure out what I’m talking about pretty quick. Hell, there’s a Greasemonkey extension for Firefox just to block all comments at al.com, which is proverbial for the craptastic quality of its conversation. The only thing that ever seems to have made a dent in all the nonsense is Slashdot’s famous system of community moderation and meta-moderation, where reading at +3 and up will filter most of the horseshit.

But it all boils down to the same thing. Turn it off. Walk away. Let it go. Block it out. The trick is, can you do that? And more importantly, what happens while you’re looking the other way? Long story short: what are you prepared to do?

I’m not worried about Mitt Romney in 2012. You know why? Because he’s not going to be the GOP nominee. Why not? Follow the bouncing ball.

1) It is impossible to win the GOP nomination without the South.

2) The South is populated heavily by Southern Baptists.

3) It is the official position of the Southern Baptists that Mormons “don’t really know the God of the Bible.” Not to put to fine a point on it, the Mormons are considered a cult.

4) People who believe that an American-born Christian is actually secretly a foreign-born Muslim are statistically likely to believe that a self-professed Mormon is a follower of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

5) See 3, above.

6) Therefore, viz. the South: Mormons = cult, Mitt = Mormon, Mitt = self-professed cult follower and unfit for higher office. QED.

Don’t believe me? Why else would the GOP nominee for governor of Alabama turn down a Romney endorsement?

October 1, 2004 was cool and overcast. The executive decision was taken that we should go down to main campus for breakfast and then take it easy the rest of the day. We all knew what was coming – the huge rush of shows and orders that was already being referred to as Black October, something we had hoped to avoid until the lab was up and running and we had everything sorted out. As it was, we were only somewhat operational, but it was good enough that we truly thought we’d earned a day to slow-roll things.

There were even leaves turning on some of the trees. It really felt autumnal, and after the chaos of summer and moving halfway across the country, it felt like I was starting to get back into a groove, to get some of my powers back – almost two months at the new job and I was finally finding my comfort zone. And as I wandered back to see some interesting things I can’t discuss to this day, I thought, “this is going to be good.”

That’s when everything went black.

Power outage. Big one. Entire town. We rushed back to the lab to find no power there either. With a little scuffling, we got a generator and emergency power together sufficient to image some machines, but external communications were out, which meant no FedEx machine. Which meant that the tremendous order would have to be sent not with the easy stick-on labels that would have taken five minutes to produce, but with handwritten airbills. Which was a fiasco.

In the end, we wound up commandeering a friend’s Jeep and loading it down with cases strapped on all sides like some sort of third-world bus. Our manager was trying to bribe the guys at the airport to hold the plane five minutes so we could get away okay. Meanwhile, the other contractor helped me park the forklift, and we sat on the curb and smoked and watched the sun set, wondering if our badges would work the next day.

They did. But over the next six weeks plus, our manager would be summarily dismissed and our director would run the show personally, with the daily 8 AM meeting to hand out paper lists of orders already prioritized, and “get as far down the list as you can.” I spent plenty of days holed up at a bench, with our primitive imaging system that only kinda sorta scaled, barricaded behind a seven-foot wall of boxes and shipping cases, trying to piece together a dozen laptops for shipping using whatever scraps of foam and accessories I could assemble. In retrospect, it’s flabbergasting we weren’t all lined up and shot.

But it was during that time that I discovered Virgin Radio, and set to streaming with Martin Collins and his “Mellow Madness” or Suggs doing Party Classics on Friday, with an endless array of commercials for things I’d never heard of. It was very nearly the same sort of five-months-on whiplash I’d “enjoyed” in 1997 – here I am, new town, new job, new life that I would never have expected as the old one wound down. Which was actually pretty impressive – for the second time in a decade, I had fallen ass-backward into a new home and a new job far from the old one, this time in the company of a six foot blonde.

The first time that happened, I realized I was an incredibly lucky person. Nothing since has given me any reason to deviate from this diagnosis.