Less is More: The Truly Great Superheroes.

Everyone knows Batman, Superman, Spiderman, the X-men. The great superheroes--those with their names in the papers, their powers on display. The merest 5-year-old can tell you what Superman can do, and what his weakness is.

This isn't so good. Part of the requirement of herodom is secrecy. You appear to have no identity outside of your costume--you are a terrifying mystery, outside the bounds of normal society and therefore a threat to those who try to break the rules of normal society to their advantage.

I want to argue that these well-known superheroes fail, no matter how spectacular they are, simply because we know them. And that we are overlooking the major superheroes completely. Heroes who play the game successfully, never let us know they have secret identities, or powers, or weaknesses.

I'll prove it. The other thing that heroes have is a look. A costume that only changes with serious plot enhancement.

Now there are also people in the comics who have a look. Jonah Jameson. Commissioner Gordon. These people are normal, right?

Right?

There you go. Jim Gordon is the best superhero ever. We don't even know he has powers.

Strange Friends

Got an email today. Was a little odd. Came from a friend of mine named putput@centurytel.net. The ever-mysterious putput said:

Hi there
Hey where have you been recently ? I could not get any news from you for a long time. Anyway, I found a decent pharmacy store from google last week. I decided to give a shot because it was Canada Licensed Drugstore. Well the prices were % 65 cheaper than the local pharmacies in my region. So I took a chance. I took my medicines in my hand 3 days after i ordered and they were packed very well as they claimed that they provide full anonymity. Needless to say medicines are legit and they give me what i want :) If you need any medicine without any prescription, give it a try until the discount ends.
Take care of yourself. I included the url below. See you later.

My friends are strange. They email out of the blue after months without contact just to tell me about a 'decent pharmacy store from google'. This is the generosity of my friends.

Moreover, I am a good friend, because I am not going to correct my friend's English. Nor even point out his or maybe her mistakes.

Lemon graph, very pretty

Correlation may not imply causation, but it's sure fun to pretend.

Differences

The thing about cultural differences, at least between France and the US, is that they are often rather subtle. Things like how formally you dress for work, how late you eat dinner, what you do with the bread that you have with dinner. Or, for instance, how you converse or argue. One that I discovered recently has to do with toilet etiquette.

See, I was taught throughout my childhood that it's polite to knock on the (closed) door of a bathroom or stall before you enter, in case someone is inside. Sure, occupants should lock the door, but sometimes people forget, so you knock. And, to my best knowledge, I think that's the general rule in the US. There are occasional times when it doesn't happen, but usually...

Anyway, totally not the case here. After noticing a certain pattern at work, and hearing about one of a colleague's several reasons for not using the teachers' bathroom much anymore, I asked Virginia about it. Seems that the logic in France is that the door to the bathroom should be closed and locked if you're in it, so there's no need for anyone to knock. They just yank on the door.

I'm sitting on the toilet at work and I hear someone enter the room. I listen to the person's footsteps approach the small room with the toilet. I expect a polite rap on the door. Instead, there is a boom as the door is nearly yanked off it's hinges (or so it seems to me) in the process of being tested, and then the retreating footsteps of the culprit, followed by silence as I wonder why no one bothers to ask. I'm nice. I'd respond, honest.

A Question of Geekiness

Look at this.

It’s a link to a short list of eight things that “happen when geeks have children.” However, only half of the photos, to my mind, actually qualify as examples of geekiness applied to (inflicted upon?) children--and in some cases they qualify only barely. Shall we run through them?

1. The D&D baby. Giving your child character stats for the granddaddy of all roleplaying games, which are still the hallmark of geeks and nerds everywhere. Sheer geekiness. Our winner.


2. iPood. Baby-based parody of a popular mainstream electronic device. No geekery at all.


3. Cthulhu baby. Dressing your child up as one of the chief alien gods from a series of cult horror stories penned by an obscure (nowadays semi-obscure) New England writer at the turn of the 20th century. Definite geekiness.


4. Robot child. WTF? Making a robot costume for your child out of boxes and foil? Robots aren’t geeky. My halloween costume at that age—a walking personal computer, complete with 5.25” floppy disk and disk drive, was geeky. A Robby the Robot costume would have been geeky. But a mere generic robot? Cute, sure. But not geeky.


5. Mario and Luigi. Cute, admittedly. And the detail is pretty neat. But the Mario Bros. have been popular video game icons since the late 1980s, starring in millions of sequels and spinoffs. Putting your kids in costume as them hardly squeaks off the ground. But we’ll give points for effort. Inching toward geekiness.


6. Ninja baby. I know ninjas are all the rage now, and the ninja vs. pirate meme that got passed around among certain crowds several years ago was definitely geeky—but ninjas and other eastern martial artists have held our collective fascination since before Bruce Lee—through movies, TV shows, stories, etc. Dressing your child up as a ninja for halloween is as mundane as serving cereal for breakfast (in American culture). Just ask my parents about taking me to a martial arts supply store when I was in 1st grade to buy a genuine ninjitsu outfit for the end of October. Not geeky.


7. iPod baby. Okay, the baby’s expression is cutely disturbing. And actually clothing your baby as an iPod is a little bit on the geeky side. But it’s still a popular mainstream electronic device, and I would bet that this baby jumper can be bought easily and by many online—and was tailored for exactly that. So: borderline geeky.


8. Princess Leia. Fine, fine, you win on this one. Star Wars fanatics (old-school ones, especially, and not young kids these days) rank as high as Trekkies on the geekometer. So this one counts. But every time Lucas clones a sequel (excuse me, prequel) or a spinoff, it gets less geeky.

To Be or Not To Be: Determining the Fate of a Final Work

I'm a little late to the literary news table with this one, but that's okay.

Dmitri Nabokov, son of the late Vladimir Nabokov (author of Lolita, Pale Fire, and many others), is facing a dilemma: respect his father's wishes and destroy the literary genius's unpublished final manuscript, or fulfill the desires of the international literary community and publish it.

Honestly, I don't know what I'd do in such a situation myself. A part of me hankers to see this last work (and knows, too, that other greats made similar requests that went unheeded, much to our literary benefit), and another part of me understands the need to honor our dead loved ones and follow their final requests. Yet a third part of me has little idea why one would make such a request in the first place--unless maybe one felt that the unpublished work was crap. On the other hand, if I knew I wasn't long for this world and I still had unfinished works, would it really matter to me if people saw them after I shuffled off?

Please Tip Your Servers

Wait staff aren't really anybody, are they? Within their jobs, they exist only to ferry desires from customer to kitchen and fulfillment from kitchen to customers. Same holds true for other serving staff: we tend to ignore them.

I was thinking about this as I walked home from a caf&eactue; this evening: the language we use when seeking service in retail and service environments is really telling. We rarely ask about the server him or herself, and when we do, it's often a surprise to the person behind the counter.

But even so, when asking for things, we typically say "I'd like" or "May I have" or "One [x]", and even if we're polite (please, thank you, etc.), there's a fundamental deprivation of subjectivity that happens in our language in these situations. "I'd like" is a simple statement of our personal desire. It ignores any agency on the part of the person who might help us obtain our desire. "May I have" adds some personhood to the server by symbolically asking the server for something--but it's largely rhetorical now, and it isn't much. And simply stating the object(s) of desire is like pushing a button on a vending machine: we don't give even the courtesy of complete sentences and the interpersonal interaction hinted at by introducing ourselves as a subject. It's interesting to me that with all the variations available to us, we never ask "Would you give me", which would open up an even interaction, human to human.

Land of Opportunity

America is reportedly the Land of Opportunity, Land of Freedom. But many of the best and most interesting jobs require at least college education these days. Getting a college degree in the United States costs a lot of money. To wit,

According to the College Board's Trends in College Pricing, the 2006-2007 average total costs (including tuition and fees, room and board, books and supplies, transportation and other expenses as specified in Table 2) were $12,294 for students attending two-year public colleges, $16,357 for students attending four-year public colleges and universities, and $33,301 for students at four-year private colleges and universities. Out of state students attending public colleges and universities pay an average total cost of $26,304 [from FinAid.org]

Chiefly, one pays for this with loans, savings, jobs, a lot of work in finding and earning scholarships and grants, or if one is lucky, one's family has the money for it.

In many of the European countries, university education is free, or practically so. Students only need find a way to pay rent and buy food and pay bills while being a student. France and England both seem to work this way (so say my chief source of information on European culture).

Medical aid is also friggin' expensive here, at least without insurance, and often insurance doesn't reduce costs much. To get good health insurance (and any eye or tooth plan), one generally needs a pretty good job. If one is self-employed, one pays for such insurance out of one's pocket. If one is poor and doesn't have enough work to give insurance then one is screwed. (Many companies don't offer health benefits unless an employee works more than a certain amount a week, often 20 hours or more, and some try to save costs by hiring many workers to work shorter shifts.) In Canada, the UK, France, and many other nations, health care is paid for by the state, largely. Citizens pay higher taxes to cover this and other services, but the result is that everyone has reasonably priced health care. Compare that to the reported 40,000,000 uninsured Americans, people who have to pay the full amount of their medical costs, which could range from a $50 check-up to thousands of dollars for surgery or costly medicines. (Virginia was given a shot of painkiller last October that cost over $700. I doubt that's the most expensive medication out there.

Now, I may be a little fuzzy on the details here, and I realize there is much I have not taken into account yet, but it seems to me that if one needs a certain education level to achieve certain degrees of wealth, comfort, influence, and health, and that education costs an average of $12,294 at best, there's a certain limiting factor to this so-called opportunity available in America.