Boob Toob 2009

Television has changed since I was a kid. I remember when I was around ten my family often referred to me when they wanted to know what was on. The reason was because each week when the TV Guide arrived on our doorstep via postal mail or from the supermarket or from the Sunday paper, I'd be the first to grab it and I'd practically memorize the whole thing. Certainly the prime time schedule and the cartoons on Saturday morning. I was a walking encyclopedia of useless television information. I knew Farrah Fawcett was the oldest Angel (30). I knew Kristy MacNichol and Leif Garrett had a thing for each other (but it ended in tears). I knew the names of all the Smurfs. You get the idea.

Today it's different. My television is in a corner of my room gathering dust. Its darkened unblinking eye reflects the distant light from my computer monitor as I type these words. I used to look at it but now it's looking at me, perhaps wondering what it did wrong. I used to enjoy passive entertainment. Now I still do, but I like a more interactive element to my entertainment. Or rather, I like the illusion of interactivity. I like making notes about shows I watch and I do enjoy comments and replies from others about these shows, but sometimes I wonder if I didn't get any feedback or input, would I be doing this anyway? I like to criticize the shows I watch, but I don't know if I'd like to do anything about it. Would I want to improve it? Could I if I were given an option? Most likely not. I used to believe I could make a living with ideas in my head. So far that hasn't materialized. I only make a living by blindly following the whims of other people's ideas, which is perhaps more than anything why I refuse to discuss 'work' in my blog. Well, that and office politics and nondisclosure agreements and things I don't understand. I go here to get away from all that stuff. 'Nuff said.

So today when I say "television" I'm not actually referring to a television. I watch pretty much all my TV online, so it's no longer really TV. It's Hulu or DVDs or YouTube or whatever I can find. I stopped paying for cable television when the SciFi Channel canceled Mystery Science Theater 3000. I had wanted to quit cable for a long time because I couldn't rationalize paying for all these channels that were subjecting me to commercials over and above my subscription fee. I thought the whole purpose behind Pay TV was to make commercials obsolete? Further, when MST3K was removed from the airwaves, it occurred to me that whoever the people behind cable television were making cable television for? It wasn't for me. They were keeping stuff I didn't like on the air and removing stuff I did like. So I left cable over a decade ago now and I have no desire of going back.

Hulu has been talking about going to some kind of pay model. If that happens, I fear I'll have to look elsewhere. If I were made of money it wouldn't matter, but already I pay to get on the Internet. Then there's ads all over the place. I'm not going to pay to access every website on top of that, and a pox on you if you give in to that. That would be like going to a club in Deep Ellum, having to pay to drive there (gas), then having to pay to park, then having to pay to get in the door (cover charge) then having to pay for everything I drink or eat at outrageously jacked up prices, then having to tip the bartenders and waitresses, and then having to pay the band for playing for every song. Yeah, I stopped clubbing about a decade or so ago too.

The cost of living is just too expensive to enjoy. So instead I like to spend my free time on the Web. The last bastion of serenity in a life where I'm pretty much waiting stupidly for something interesting to happen to me because I'm too cheap and lazy and unproductive to just go out there and make something happen to me.

Back in 2003 I boycotted FOX because they canceled Firefly, Tru Calling, and a host of other programs I enjoy. I was livid and felt helpless. I didn't quit on FOX because I thought it'd make a difference to them. I knew they wouldn't notice. I just no longer wanted to even passively support a network that refused to cater to my interests. This eventually expanded to most other networks too but to lesser degrees.

I have since gone back and looked for what I missed on the FOX network. The only show that comes to mind that I wish I'd seen as it was broadcast was HouseMD and recently I've 'caught up' on that one. DVDs are wonderful things. I still don't watch the Simpsons anymore, and pretty much everything else on FOX between 2003 and now has been kinda... well, Lie To Me is cool, but that's a relatively new show. I dropped my boycot when Whedon and Dushku got with FOX to bring Dollhouse to TV. I thought I'd give the network a second chance.

Today, I understand that FOX has canceled Dollhouse, but it doesn't really mean anything to me now. It has no relevance, because FOX and ABC and NBC and and Scyfy and BBC and CBC and Discovery Channel and Comedy Central are to me really all Hulu. HBO is a pain in the ass because it doesn't put jack shit on Hulu. So I don't watch Bill Maher as often as I'd like. When I do it's in pieces over at YouTube. I've only started watching Monk because it's now available on Hulu, but unfortunately I started liking it just in time to watch it end. CBS also hasn't entered the 21st century yet so I have to find Big Bang Theory by 'other means.' These networks, both the ones getting with the program and the ones holding out, are in fear of obsolescence. They want to still matter. They still want you to know that LOST is on ABC or HEROES is on NBC. I know this, but it's about as pointless to me now as memorizing the special guest stars appearing on Happy Days back in the 1970s. It might be a novel thing to know, but it's trivial, because it has no practical usefulness to me any longer. The networks can fret all they want, but they're already obsolete.

They can either speed this process along and embrace their own extinction, or they can fight it, but the latter won't even slow it down, and the former won't be a more noble way to go out. Just as the dinosaurs couldn't stop the meteor from slamming into Earth, television has no way to stave off its own execution. It has served its purpose for almost a century, but now it's going the way of the dodo. One could argue that it's because people like me no longer wish to pay for it, but I think that's more of a symptom than a cause. It's an after effect.

Recently I saw a news report claiming that nearsightedness is on the rise in America, just as obesity is. The question then became is that because more Americans are embracing entertainment via smartphones and laptops as opposed to trying to make a three pointer shot in the basketball court of a community YMCA? Or is it that we human beings tend to prefer entertainment that is less taxing, and lends to our strengths? I'm near sighted but I've been nearsighted since I was a kid. Granted, I was practically born and raised on television, but I think this is a kinda 'chicken and the egg' deal. In my youth I liked TV cuz it's easier than trying to entertain myself by going outside to play. Today, I prefer the web because it's cheaper and when it tries to tell me what to spend what little money I have, I can usually squelch the noise. I don't have that option with television, and with billboards getting bigger and becoming more and more prominent on my daily commute, real life is becoming more and more annoying.

The Internet allows me to create my own network. ZachTV. My programs are broadcast when I want to see them, not when some guy in a suit decides its most ideal for some demographic. My programming never conflicts. If CASTLE and HEROES are on the air at the same time for the rest of the world, I just wait a day and watch them at my leisure, in whichever order I prefer. I can include in my virtual network programming that regular networks would never touch. My programs don't have to be thirty minutes or an hour long. They can be five minutes long, or three hours long. Whatever length is necessary to accomodate the needs of the program itself. I get my news from Jon Stewart, Marta Costello, Uncle Jay and The Onion Network. My programs don't get pre-empted by the President's speech. In fact if it weren't for Jon Stewart telling me on The Daily Show that the president recently had a speech, I wouldn't know about it at all, and that's just the way I like it.

Aside form network shows like Dollhouse, Castle, Monk, Big Bang Theory, Heroes, Fringe, House MD, Sanctuary, Lie To Me, Lost, and The Daily Show w/Jon Stewart, I also regularly watch Mister Deity, Felicia Day's The Guild, Mediocre Films, 2 Hot Girls In The Shower, Rooster Teeth, Kilplixism, The Art Of The Drink, The Onion, Val's Art Diary, Gnooze & Uncle Jay Explains The News. In conventional network television, these shows don't belong together. As far as I'm concerned, this is the best that today's entertainers have to offer me, so for me they're all one big happy family.

I was watching Kevin Pollak's Chat Show until recently. Even though the show actually still exists on the web for anyone else to see, KPCS is currently on hiatus in my virtual network with a demographic of one. I'm debating whether or not I want to renew it for a second season. There are some things about it that I like and other things about it that I don't. I guess that's like how Fox Network executives feel about Joss Whedon's Dollhouse. It's a good show, but for some reason just doesn't accomplish what it needs to in order to keep the audience at an acceptable level of interest.

I used to blame networks for that. Now, I have no one to blame but myself if I watch something I don't like anymore.

Doer of Wonder

I'm no great seminary student or learned scholar of biblical texts. However, I have had my humble share of teaching in this area. From practically birth to my mid teens I regularly attended Baptist Churches every Sunday morning, most Sunday nights, and depending on the church in question there'd usually also be social opportunities on Wednesday nights as well. I didn't do this because I wanted to or needed to. I went to church because my family were church goers and therefore so was I. I had no reason to rebel beyond the fact that most of the time, it was usually incredibly boring.

I recall once in my junior high years we had an active Youth Director who was Filled With The Spirit and had taken it upon himself to educate us youngsters on the Power of Christ. I think he had recently attended some seminars where he'd purchased cool looking educational materials and he felt if we were armed with Knowledge, we'd be able to Witness to Nonbelievers and our own Salvation would be intact with our Belief. ..or words to that effect.

I should reiterate here that I didn't go to church because I wanted to. Thinking back I can't even say I went because I did believe, although I must have. I think. I went to church because my parents asked me to and I didn't want to displease them. I went to church because that's what you do when you live in a family that goes to church. I don't even think I'd thought that much about the whole thing before this point. I got more out of comic books that illustrated bible stories than I did out of the bible itself but to me it was all the same. If adults told me there was a god, there was a god. Just like any answer to "why is the sky blue" was acceptable so long as it was some kind of answer. I couldn't have been more than 15 at this point and the idea I'd one day be 40 was fantastical. Most of the universe was fantastical to me. I didn't take much of anything seriously. Even when I did take something seriously, it'd be in that melodramatic way where kids strung out on hormones take serious things. Whatever bad thing happened it'd be the end of the world and I would experience my life as if it were an episode of a TV series named after myself. I should also point out here that I did attend these meetings at least partially cuz there was a gorgeous blonde chick whose name escapes me at the moment but that I had completely failed to ever impress.

Our Youth Director planned to have us meet together every Wednesday night all summer and he'd relay to us the Wonder of Jesus from an historical perspective. I recall one particular night where he came in armed with all kinds of charts and booklets and a whiteboard upon which he'd jotted bible verses and he was going to prove to us once and for all that Jesus lived, and that the Bible was a valid historical tome as well as living proof to the Word of God. The room had us surrounded with authentic looking evidence, but that I could tell didn't really tell me anything more than we already knew.

Jesus was born in Bethlehem because his parents had to go there for the purposes of the Roman Census. Joseph followed Mary even though they both believed that the unborn Jesus wasn't his. That alone always troubled me but that night I didn't bother to mention it. We know very little about what happened to Jesus between his birth and his adulthood. There's one scene when he was about a decade old where he rebelled from his parents by spending all day in a synagogue arguing with pharisees. When Joseph demanded he return to their house, Jesus said he was already at his Father's house. I always found this a very rebellious sentiment, kinda like when I'd diss my Dad over worthless trifles. It amused me that Jesus was as petty and self-centered as I am. There's entire years unaccounted for. Jesus goes from birth to puberty in the space of a couple paragraphs, and then graduates to a beard and sandals by the turn of a page. This is a rather cryptic historical record for a guy that's supposedly the centerpiece of an entire religion. George W. Bush prized his privacy throughout his reign as Leader of the Free World, but we know where he attended college. We know he drank a lot of alcohol in his youth and probably did cocaine. We don't know Jack about Jesus.

The Youth Director went on and on but my mind was drifing, and I found myself more concerned about the fact my eyes kept involuntarily flitting back to the gorgeous blonde chick and her sandy blonde hair and crystal blue eyes and soft white skin. I honestly wanted to concentrate on what the Youth Director was saying, but I found myself combating sinful thoughts instead. They didn't seem all that sinful really. I wasn't thinking of nudity in that moment in fact I kinda preferred her wearing clothes. In fact it woulda been fun if the both of us were fondling one another fully clothed, inside a big sleeping back, near a cozy campfire underneath a moonlit sky...

I had issues. No doubt about that. However, they didn't seem to be particularly hellfire and brimstoney. I was really just mostly thinking how could I get her to be mildly pleased about the fact we shared the same air.

I blinked back to reality and the Youth Director was talking now about the authenticity of the Bible itself. How it WAS the Word of God, and he'd prove it. Then he spent the next half hour or so explaining how the Bible actually got written.

Thousands of years ago we didn't have printing presses or magazines or anything like that. They had paprus. The Egyptians invented paper and it was rolled up in the form of scrolls because they kept better that way, but paper is very delicate and moisture or insects or any number of other things could damage them over time. Before paper was invented, the only way stories could be captured was if they were chiseled in stone, or more commonly if they were passed down from one generation to the next.

Tribes of people would live together like a community, and the wise people of the village would regularly tell stories of great wonder to the others in the community, and the older generations would challenge the younger generations to memorize these stories so they'd be able to tell them to their children. And this is how most of the Old Testament was chronicled. These stories passed down for scores of generations were eventually transcribed onto papaya by people the Youth Director called Scribes. These Scribes would then keep collections of scrolls hidden away for safekeeping from extreme weather, hungry bugs, marrauders, etc.

"Password," I mumbled I thought to myself.

The Youth Director turned to me, "I don't understand."

"Yeah, I don't either." I glanced about the room. The cute blonde wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the Youth Director. Everyone else though was looking at me. I found it uncomfortable and yet the attention whore in me perked up - always preferred an audience even if I were the butt of the joke. "We were playing the game Password in this very room just a few months ago," I looked at everyone else in the room to see if anyone else remembered this. They either didn't, or didn't care, as it made no difference to them. "One person started with one phrase and after twenty people whispered it to each other we came up with something entirely diffferent!"

"You're right!"

"So if we can't keep a simple phrase accurate in the same room over the course of a minute, how could entire tribes of people keep bible length stories straight for over twenty generations?"

The Youth Director responded to this as if he were expecting the answer, and launched into a very detailed account of how younger generations were required by elders to learn not only the exact wording of these stories but identical inflections and mannerisms and what not. I asked him how he knew this was so and he said some historians whose books he'd read had researched this.

"How could they research it?"

"They're historians. They looked it up."

"But we're talking about pre-history. We're talking about a time before writing and paper. What are they looking up? Other historians?"

The rest of the summer went kinda downhill. Every Wednesday night for weeks the Youth Director came in armed with more answers and I came armed with more questions. By the time we got to the King James Version of the Bible and canonization practices of the Roman Catholic Church, I walked away from the whole thing more confused than ever. I think the Youth Director thought he won the argument, but by then I'd realized that pretty much everyone else in that class shunned me, because I was a squeaky wheel, and that cute blonde chick was never going to know I'm alive, so I didn't really care about the class at all anymore. I'd just stopped arguing. And then I stopped going.

None of them were there to learn more about God. Like me, they were there because when you're a white anglo saxon protestant in suburban America in the 1980s, you go to Youth Group on Wednesdays because that's what you do. You go to public school during the week because you go. You do what your parents tell you cuz you do what your parents tell you until you get rebellious and learn when and where and how you can break that particular commandment, and suddenly some of the other commandments (like lying and coveting for example) get easier.

You believe in God because you believe in God. You don't question it.

I kinda repeated this to a lesser extent in college. I attended a Methodist university which required some theology classes. I took the New Testament course because I figured it'd be an easy A. I'd already read enough of the textbook to pass. I came out of that class with an even firmer understanding of how weak The Holy Bible passes as an historical document, that outside the Bible itself there is zero documentation that Jesus ever existed, and I also molded a detailed opinion of Saint Paul of Tarsus that left me thinking when I got to heaven the first thing I wanted to do was walk up to the guy and punch him in the mouth.

"Give unto Caesar that which was Caesar's." What a coward. He'd tell the followers in entire cities what he thought of them while sitting comfortably in someone else's city, judging even though he wasn't the one who should be judging, a believer in his own press who became arrogant and drunk from power, and he wasn't even one of the original twelve! There were twelve people who hung out with Jesus - why is over 80% of the New Testament from a guy who was Caesar's lap dog? He rebelled a bit and got thrown in jail and wrote even more letters to cities telling them how to live their lives as if he were some authority. And his statements against gay people are harmful and cruel. Even though I was then and still am now a recovering homophobe (sorry gay people you creep me out but that's my trip not yours don't sweat it), Paul is downright prejudiced to the point of disgust. THIS was the guy who founded Roman Catholicism? Paul's the ass upon which all contemporary Christianity is based? No wonder the religion makes no sense.

Yet despite all this, despite the fact that the more I investigated about the religion the less credence I could give it, I still considered myself a Christian all the way up until March of this year. Even when I embraced The SubGenius Church in 1985 and found ways to laugh at my own beliefs, I still thought of myself a SubGenius Christian and honestly thought I could balance the two.

Sure MANKIND had fucked up chronicling and accurately citing proof to the existence of God, that didn't mean God didn't exist. It meant we humans failed to prove His existence but that's just because we are inferior.

I look at a leaf or a baby or the stars in the sky and think surely this was all made with a purpose. It's too majestic and wondrous and amazing to just be there with no logic behind it. There must be a Presence. An Instigator. An Artist of Universal Proportions. Something. Surely something so breathtakingly wondrous as the Universe didn't just happen by sheer chance. There must be a method behind the madness. That method must have been orchestrated by something akin to human, or at least humanoid, or at least something or someone who is on our side. Otherwise, if there is no god, a random 'planet killer' asteroid could at any second be discovered on a collision path with Earth, and there wouldn't be a god to coincidentally place Jupiter in its path so that we'd be saved.

I still let myself believe in god and just stopped believing in Man. I stopped believing in religion many years ago, because that was a construct of Man. I stopped believing in god less than a year ago, because it finally dawned on me that if religion is a construct of Man, then so are gods. Even and especially The One True God. It's all a lie. I hope it doesn't take you forty years to see it. Whoever you are.

Temporal Ethics In Lost

Ethics? Really? Time doesn't need ethics any more than the Voyager 1 spacecraft needs a burrito.

There are no ethics of time travel, beyond what sentient beings choose to place upon it. I imagine that if any individual ever got close to discovering time travel prematurely, people from the future would approach them in the past and place their own self-centered rules and restrictions. Far more likely though, time travelers from the future would seek to protect their own historical records, for fear that deviations of their past may erase their own future, placing someone else in power for example, or wiping out their race. If that guy was meant to figure out time travel, messing with his present could destroy their past, so it would be in the best interests of anyone not to travel into their own past for fear that it might upset their own present. If there is only time time line, that is a valid concern.

I happen to accept currently the Many Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics, until I see sufficient evidence otherwise. However, the writers of LOST don't seem to be falling on that overused hack answer for time travel in fiction which is to their credit. The story becomes much more interesting if there's only one time line.

In the movie Back To The Future 2, Biff goes back in time and (among other things) kills Marty's father, thus building an empire for himself that ruins Marty's future. However, when old Biff went back to young Biff and gave him the sports statistics so he could bet on the winners, he didn't erase the previous timeline. He also didn't invent a new timeline. He committed actions that were always meant to happen that were always meant to fulfill that timeline. This sounds like predetermination I know but it's not. Because Old Biff was the kinda guy who would do such a thing, there's a probable chance that he would. There's also a probable chance he wouldn't. So BOTH of those realities exist, as well as an infinite number of others. We just didn't see those other realities cuz they're not the ones to which the DeLorean took 'our' Marty McFly. Notice that in Rich Biff's time period there was another Marty McFly who was in another country. This is a fun storyline, but it's chock full of paradoxes and impossibilities, if followed to its natural conclusions.

In the LOST universe, we've been given every indication that there is only one time line. Whatever Happened Happened. Dead Is Dead. The producers and writers of LOST are not playing with paradoxes. They're saying there is no paradox, or rather if there is, it's only one, and it's a biggie, and it's what will get resolved at the end of season six for better or for worse. What I'm hoping though is that the use of time as a plot device is behind them, and as we start season six they'll make it very clear that Whatever Happened Happened, and they'll move forward. I understand many fans speculate that what we've seen are actually multiple time lines. However, the writers have gone out of their way to keep everything on as linear a line as is possible in episodic storytelling that involves seemingly sporadic and arbitrary temporal hopping. This goes against my own personal "beliefs" (for lack of a better word) about how time would work, but I'm not writing LOST.

Time is like a river. Metaphorically, time starts at the top of a mountain as a raincloud. It falls down the mountain first as a trickle then a stream and then a river. At times it collects in pockets like ponds or lakes. At other intervals it may fall quickly like down a waterfall or surging through river rapids. Sometimes it'll be in the form of a small creek and at other times the creeks merge together into larger streams or rivers, and sometimes those rivers branch off into smaller tributaries and this can go on and on until finally it reaches the ocean. Of course that is sort of where the metaphor breaks down, because water in the ocean can then be collected up into the atmosphere once again as rain clouds and the whole process repeats itself. Many fans of LOST think that is exactly what's going on: that these characters are caught in a loop and while UnLocke finds this a futile endeavor, Jacob feels that repeating their little game will eventually lead to progress - a different result. Any psychiatrist will tell you: repeating the same actions over and over, anticipating a different result, is a sign of madness. I'm not convinced Jacob is the good guy here.

Unlocke (aka Blackie or Nemesis) & Jacob have been doing dance of theirs this since at least the ancient Egyptians. Perhaps even before that but the producers haven't shown us anything older than that four toed statue. If we are to accept the conversation between Unlocke & Jacob at the start of S5's finale at face value, every time they've repeated their little game, Unlocke's prediction has come true. So Jacob has "lost" to Unlocke thru ancient Egypt, the time of The Black Rock (which I believe to be Richard's time) and on and on up until our present day.

So Unlocke & Jacob have stuck themselves in a loop, but linear time continues to keep on slippin slippin slippin into the future. Unlocke is trying to stop Jacob from changing what he believes to be the acceptable result. Jacob wants something to change. It appears that it's humanity's faults and short-sighted selfishness that is the hinge of this change. Unlocke believes their pawns are lemmings that will continue to make the same kinds of mistakes. Jacob is either aspiring for something better, or more likely he's going for something worse, because based on the lowly 3D restricted humans chosen to be their pawns, Jacob's not trying to cultivate piety and perfection and excellence. He's tilling the soil of humanity hoping to grow some weeds.

They each seem to have some control over life & death, time & space. However, they each can only cause one effect as they traverse through, and can't go back to undo what they've done or undo what the other has already committed. These are their rules of the game.

We don't know why Jacob visited Kate, Sawyer, Jack, Hurley, and perhaps even others in our Losties' pasts, and we may assume he did this by traveling back in time from some point near current present (say Sept 2004 after the crash). We may also assume he met them in his linear travel through time, either by happenstance or because he knew their fates were sealed, or a third possibility that he was altering their fates so that they would better assist his future.

We still don't know to what end, and that may not be made fully clear until the very last hour of the very last show. I don't question the ethics of time travel when it comes to Blackie & Jacob because I'm not yet convinced they're able to do so at the drop of a hat. The temporal distortions we witnessed in season five did not appear to be as a direct result of either Jacob or Blackie's actions. They knew about them. They're not surprised. Jacob could sense their impending return from the past as he lay 'dying'.

No matter how many tributaries meander about the surface of the planet Earth, all water eventually finds its way out to sea. Man can build a dam, but that only holds back the inevitable. Years, decades, centuries from a dam being built, it will fall, or the river will simply reroute itself making the dam irrelevant.

As Mrs. Hawking is fond of saying: Time has a way of course correcting.

Horribly Torn

Before I start, I haven't updated my smoking part of this journal in some time. I still ain't smoking. I still want to. People are always smoking at bus stops and train stations and I love the smell this time of year, cuz it's cold and chilly weather's always the best time to smoke cigarettes. Probably not from a medical standpoint but from aesthetics it's awesome, but I don't. That could change any day cuz the urge is growing. It's the perfect time of year to start up again. However, I get winded walking from my house to the bus stop, so I've probably done enough damage to my lungs during the twenty years of my life I was a smoker. Anyway, haven't smoked a cig since the last time I mentioned this in my blog. Feel free to go look up when that is cuz I'm too lazy to link back to it myself. Okay. Enough of that.

Also, before I begin let me say for the record that I enjoyed Horrible Turn immensely and I think you will too if you haven't already. If you are a fan of Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog, you are only cheating yourself out of a fun time if you don't also see Horrible Turn.

Why?
1) it's fun.
2) it's silly.
3) it's silly fun.

If you are not a fan of Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible and have never seen it before, I urge you to watch Horrible Turn before reading past this paragraph. Then, after you have seen Horrible Turn, please come back here and leave a comment. Tell me whether or not it actually is objectively good, because I can't tell. Then you can watch Joss Whedon's work upon which Horrible Turn is loosely connected, and maybe it'll make more sense to you. I of course saw Dr. Horrible before seeing Horrible Turn, which may why I'm having so much trouble figuring out whether or not I really objectively enjoyed.. well either of them at this point. You wouldn't be so conflicted. So go watch them both in the wrong order and come back and help me figure this out. Now please stop reading because the rest of this is only for people who have seen both.

...go on. Scoot. Go watch this, and come back and tell me what you think, then watch this, (pay for it if you can afford to so Joss can one day afford to make the sequel) and tell yourself how wonderful life is and that Joss Whedon's pretty fucking cool. And so are those crazy kids from Houston. And so is Australia. ...Okay I'm gonna assume from here on out that if you're reading these words you've seen both. Please don't make a liar out of me.

...

I'm horribly torn by Horrible Turn.

There. I said it. Why? Well. It's complicated. Perhaps if Joss Whedon himself would only come forward publicly and say that it's okay for me to like it, then I wouldn't be so torn. Perhaps he doesn't do that because he knows that if nothing we do matters than the only thing that matters is what we do and therefore he doesn't want to do anything that might adversely jeopardize a fan of his work from appreciating the work of others inspired by him. Or maybe I'm reading too much into his silence. He could also have a gag order by lawyers or something. I dunno. Maybe he's just too busy saying goodbye to Dollhouse to have noticed Horrible Turn. He's a busy guy.


I had been looking forward to seeing it for weeks. Ever since I found out it existed, which was a couple few weeks or maybe a month before it was made publicly available online. I was looking forward to it cuz I was expecting it to suck and I look forward to nitpicking shit like this. It's a form of masochistic entertainment that I allow myself. Sometimes I prefer to see soemthing that sucks cuz it's fun to rip it a new asshole. It's like pulling the wings off frogs or something.

So I must admit when I started watching Horrible Turn, I set the bar very very low. I expected the music to be off key, or make my ears bleed, or not exist at all. I expected the humor to be juvenile and pedantic (I just used that word cuz it felt good typing it). I fully expected it to be another Mary Sue fanfic wank like the many I've seen over the years (and I'm guilty of writing a couple few myself). I expected to watch a handful of fans attempt to recreate the ambiance of their favorite work of Whedon's, without having anything relevant themselves to say. I expected Horrible Turn to be empty and devoid of meaning for anyone beyond those who made it. YouTube has tons of that kinda stuff for every show from Star Trek to Lost. Some I enjoyed despite it being crap. Some I enjoyed because it was crap. On rare occasion one finds a gem in the rough, but those are few and far between. Even then, when I see something that's well performed or well written, I still wince cuz the creativity was too much for their pocketbook and the construction of the work fails to capture the essence of whatever it was imitating. A green screen and a single cheap camera from Best Buy can only do so much. It does help if it's done in Lego, but not by much.

Horrible Turn raises the bar. Parts of it were literally filmed inside someone's garage. You can tell that if you pay attention, but it doesn't matter, cuz parts of Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog were either literally or practically filmed inside someone's garage -- probably Joss's.

On a technical level, while Horrible Turn doesn't quite match Whedon's original work, it far surpasses most other similar fan-based projects, and proves why TV is currently running scared. The very idea that something as good as this can be made outside Television City has Television City very worried. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if it'll soon fall and can't get up, with screaming sirens and a crash cart in its near future.

So Horrible Turn doesn't qualify for my Piece Of Crap treatment. It actually was worth watching for its own merit, as well as being a respectable tribute to Whedon's gang of misfit toys. It made me laugh. It gave me goosebumps. It entertained. I was so disappointed. I was all dressed up to lampoon it and had nowhere to go.

So how do I compare it to stuff I actually like? That's where it gets even more complicated. I can't literally dissect it with the same proverbial toolkit I pull out for network television. Shows like Dollhouse and Castle and LOST can withstand my throwing spaghetti at them cuz it actually sticks. Shows like Flash Forward and Defying Gravity fail under my wrath, but it's so fun to watch them BURN.

While Horrible Turn is better than I expected, it's not network television. Millions of dollars per episode weren't riding on it. We're talking a budget akin to that used to make The Blair Witch Project (which I also loved passionately by the way). In many places the editing of Horrible Turn is downright cringeworthy. It's much longer than it should have been. The pacing is not addressed. There's points where as an audience member I wish they'd linger longer, and there's other moments where I'm like okay I get the point lets move on.

Although it wants to aspire to Whedonness, it pales. The humor is not rapid fire and occasionally just the bombs don't go off at all. Many jokes are more intellectually curious than laughter illiciting. In some moments the acting is inspiring and in others it feels like the millionth take (whether it actually was or not) or they didn't have time for millions of takes and had to suffer with the one they actually had w/the fewest errors. Then there's the writing. The plot, while fun, is telegraphed way ahead making the climax of the piece falling action. This is partly The Curse of the Prequel.

We know Anakin becomes Darth Vader. We already saw eps 4-6 so when we watch eps 1-3 it's anticlimactic before the opening fanfare music. The fact it takes three movies for Lucas to dip Anakin in a volcano and encase him in the suit is just downright excrutiating. We finally get there, and the story's already over! So the twenty years of Darth Vader actually being neato evil and pissing off entire solar systems? It all happens between eps 3 & 4 with a dramatic gravitas that equals the messenger telling Hamlet that Rosencrantz & Gildenstern are dead.

With Horrible Turn, we know Billy goes from sweet innocent youth to super-villain wannabe. That's the intrinsic DNA of the piece. Like James Bond not dying, the question is not IF but HOW. Sticking around after the HOW is explained, becomes an exercise in patience for the audience.

We figure it out when we learn that young Billy has named the potion "Love Potion Number Ten." You might as well have dubbed it "McGuffin Potion." We know it's not gonna work cuz we know Billy. We know who's gonna ruin it cuz we know Hammer. Watching it all unfold after the writer has inadvertently told us how it will unfold is fun in much the same way Jay & Silent Bob swinging from the rafters at the end of Mallrats was fun, but Silent Bob's the freaking DIRECTOR! He's not gonna kill himself off in his own film by having his character fall from that great height meaninglessly. The suspense is not only gone - it never shows up.

I can continue to dissect Horrible Turn thusly, but it's no fun. It's totally unfair of me to use the same measuring system on Horrible Turn that I'd use to explain why the last three seasons of Heroes are not worth dog poop (except for some of the acting - I mostly hate the writing and the cheap special effects tricks since they can't actually afford to be a show about super heroes). Horrible Turn is not trying to be better than its predecessor. It's a labor of love by those making it. It was a training ground for people studying the art of filmmaking. It's a college level project. So expecting the Sistine Chapel from people just learning how to paint would be foolhardy. Horrible Turn doesn't have millions riding on it. It may have thousands riding on it, but so far as I know there's no legal way to market it, so whoever invested in it either didn't want that money back or they don't understand copyright law. Either way, that's a dead issue, and I don't understand copyright law either so I could be completely wrong. Something that takes millions to make should hold up under critical review and if it doesn't, it deserves to get wrung up and hung out to dry. Horrible Turn doesn't deserve such heartless treatment, because it really comes from the heart. Still, if I just stopped there I'd lose my reputation as a heartless bastard. Okay. So I don't have any reputation at all, but I'm working on being a heartless bastard. I'm trying here.

While it's not trying to surpass its predecessor, it IS trying to hold a candle to it, and perhaps that's where I'm having trouble. Does it? Really? Is it Whedony enough? Is that how I should measure it? Is that even what the makers of Horrible Turn were going for? I guess any great critic should measure a movie or tv show or web-based viral whatchamacallit not by how it compares to other works but by what it was trying to accomplish and whether or not it truly succeeded.

When I first saw the actors in Horrible Turn playing "Muppet Babies" equivalents of characters in Dr. Horrible, it took me a moment to adjust. I think I was originally expecting them to just mimic and impersonate the actors that portrayed the characters originally. What impressed me was that they didn't. Or IF they did, they did such a bad job at impersonating that it doesn't look like impersonating which is serendipitous.

If you hired Tom Hanks to reprise the role that Jimmy Stewart made famous in Rear Window, you wouldn't get Tom Hanks impersonating Jimmy Stewart playing Jeff Jeffries. You'd get Tom Hanks' take on Jeff Jeffries, and he'd go out of his way to make you forget Jimmy Stewart ever existed.

Rather than try to be Nathan Fillion or Neil Patrick Harris, the leading actors of Horrible Turn inhabited the characters themselves as themselves. Not having Fillion or Harris' years of experience and natural talents, these young gents brought their own toolkits to bare on the roles. They focused on their own strengths and approached the role as best they could. In some areas they seem to be influenced heavily by their predecessors, but only in as much as Moore or Brosnan were influenced by Connery.

This kinda haunts the entire project. Those behind Horrible Turn wanted to tell this story that's touched on in the original work and some of the accompanying canonical side works like the comics. However, they knew they couldn't actually outdo Whedon so rather than try to be something they're not they just did the best they could with what they had. And what they had was some kind of awesome in its own right.

This is a good thing! However, it's also a bad thing.

Is Horrible Turn trying to be a prequel to Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog? Yes.

Is Horrible Turn trying to be Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog itself? No.

Is Horrible Turn trying to BE Whedonishy? I hope not, cuz if that's what it was trying to do, it's an epic fail. The dialogue alone is so not Whedonishy at all, or maybe it's like a good guitarist trying to match Van Halen's guitar solos on a poorly strung stratocaster knockoff.

I guess seeing these talented guys and gals from Houston put so much effort into emulating one of my favorite writer/directors of all time just leaves me frustrated. I'm left not wanting more of them singing Whedon's tune. I'm left wanting to hear what they'd sound like if they sang their own tune. Invented their own characters in their own world and ran rampant over wherever that took them, hopefully far away from Whedon's voice until they really understood that they had their own voice this whole time.

Of course, this is my bane and my curse. I feel like this about local cover bands too. I'll take a pretty lady singer/songwriter alone over a four piece Beatles Tribute band any day. However, guess which one gets more gigs. People already know The Beatles. They don't know if they are gonna like the genius of the lady songwriter.

Same problem here. The talent behind Horrible Turn wouldn't have turned any heads if they announced to the world that they had made their own sing along blog about Turnip Moustache and Eunich Squalid from Porter Junction. I doubt they woulda turned my head. Still, after riding Whedon's coat tails a short distance, maybe in the fantasy world of tomorrow they might..?

Guess we'll just have to tune in Tomorrow and find out.

God Game Rigged

This is in response to THIS but TwitLonger was giving me error messages, so I had to put it here instead. It's just as well. Though TwitLonger allows more than 140 characters, it still feels more stifling than Blogger.

Well @j_lavalley even Moses only got a burning bush.

If a god won't introduce itself personally, why do we want so badly to worship it? If a god won't bother because we are so insignificant, why should we care? Ants don't care about me. They wouldn't start praying to me after I pour buckets of scalding water on them.

The myth presumes if a man were to meet a god, the mere sight of said deity would destroy the man. That's rather convenient isn't it? You say that my requisite for irrefutable proof would rig the game. I say the game is already rigged by charlatans.

If I ever met @FeliciaDay I would get her autograph if possible so I could prove I met her. Whoever first came up with divinity either actually had irrefutable proof and kept it to himself, or NEVER had proof. Why did the first guy to come up with divinity NOT get irrefutable proof? I submit it's because he never had it. He was lying to trick others for purposes of manipulation and power.

So those who have power already hold the cards. I use to accept anecdotal evidence as proof of a god & I got suckered in. The only way to limit being fooled is to challenge the evidence, and use deductive reasoning to insure validity. Science may be just another theology, but it holds up under scrutiny.

Gods do not. PAY ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN. Whether it's The Pope, or Pat Robertson, or a Sunday preacher down the street, he's selling empty cans and calling them hope.

The Egyptian Pharaohs used manipulation and control tactics to trick their followers into believing them gods, but scientific examinations of their remains mummified in tombs prove they were just as human as the next guy. They also used very cheap beer and various torture methods to control the masses, but you get the idea.

It has been like this since the first cave man threw a rock at the moon. The other cave men noticed that cave man didn't get struck by lightning, so they turned to him for guidance, since he was smart enough to challenge the moon god.

How do I know this?

A god told me.

Don't believe me?

Prove he didn't.

...

See how it works?

Griffin and Pacific

"You wanna sell me some Vicadin?"

"Excuse me?"

I turn around and see a middle aged guy at the curb. I had seen him in my periphery walking towards me as the light changed but I was heading towards the donut shop and really didn't wanna be bothered by complete strangers. Like, ever. Even when I need to know the time, I don't wanna start a conversation I just wanna know the time. I especially don't wanna be bothered by anyone wanting me to sell them drugs. I'm now about four limping steps off the curb aka in the middle of one of the busiest streets of downtown Dallas. Fortunately, this ain't rush hour. It's about nine pm in the evening on a Saturday night.

"You use a cane. That tells me you got Vicadin."

I glanced down and back up, "sorry to disappoint but I just use OTCs. I'm not Dr. House." I continue walking with a nervous laugh. The light of the white walking stick figure just turned into the blinking red hand gesture saying people without canes should start running and people with canes should prepare to be run over by a bus.

I don't really need the cane anymore, but it helps on the longer walks when I'm out of breath to help me keep going. Like an extra leg. Both my ankles are still tender from the beating I've been giving them the past several months. I sprained my right ankle and pulled a muscle or two on the lower left leg. Been nursing them back to health the past several weeks. Also, the cane scares off would be attacking dogs in my neighborhood. I don't really need the cane, but it's become a thing of comfort. I kinda like having it around.

"Of course you ain't Dr. House he's a fictional fucking character." His response sounds like it was intended to be good natured, but there's also a frustration in his voice. Methinks he might have just run out of Vicadin himself, tho he has no cane.

I'm trying to be good natured about this too, but the guy's now following me down the crosswalk, in much the same way I recall myself in my youth following the occasional beautiful woman who just tried nicely to reject me, and is about to meanly tell me to bug off.

At my regular limping pace I continue making my way to the other side of the street. I see him in my periphery on my left. He's half following me, but obviously he's heading towards the liquor store while I'm still aiming for the donut shop. My beer is already in my backpack. I bought it at the last bus stop so I wouldn't have to visit both the beer store and the donut shop here while waiting for the next bus. In hindsight this was a good thing because I do not think I woulda wanted to continue the small talk that follows with this stranger as we both shared a liquor store.

"Besides, " I add for no apparent reason other than small talk as the two of us begin to gravitate away from one another like celestial bodies on different orbital trajectories, "my problem's just my ankles. House is missing a thigh muscle."

"Yeah but House doesn't make his own prescriptions for Vicadin."

"He did in season three."

He glances away and shrugs. I laugh to myself. As I enter the donut shop I find myself marveling at what a weird exchange that was with a complete stranger. Even if I could get Vicadin I wouldn't sell it on the streets of Dallas. The place is crawling with cops. It was rather silly of that guy to go up to complete strangers and try to buy a fix. Guess he was desperate.

I'm kind of torn with the new direction my life seems to have taken as of late. I can't remember being without a car after college. It had become something I just took for granted was always there. I've always heard the phrase "driving is a privilege and not a right" but only this year have I been forced with the sobering reality of what that phrase means. I'm forced to agree Thomas Jefferson didn't include "car" in the definition of "pursuit of happiness." However, I swear if he were alive today a ride in a Lamborghini would make him add an amendment to the Constitution. Finances and other pressing matters have made me still having a car an impossibility, so now I function at the whimsy of public transportation, and Dallas Area RAPID Transit is poorly labeled.

Still, I am forced to interact with complete strangers that for the past twenty years or so I've been able to instead just drive past and never acknowledge. I'm sure this is good for my psyche or something. I no longer believe in souls, so I know it's not any good for that. Maybe someday I'll meet enough people and have "real life experiences" that I can then write about and turn into a book and make millions of dollars. Until then, it's sixty-five dollars for a monthly bus pass. I'm still waiting for the December card to show up in my mail.

After I was done in the donut shop (apple fritters and chocolate milk rule) I'm heading towards the bus stop and another complete stranger turns to me with pamphlets in his hand. I glance down and see the word "HELL" in big red letters and that's all I need to know.

"Would you like one?" He asks with a toothy grin and big doll-like eyes that make me think Stepford Wives all the sudden.

I muster up the most compassionate and pitiful face I can muster which probably came off more as just tired. I also fought the urge to roll my eyes at him. "There is no god," I said as simply and matter of factly as I could.

"Of course there is!"

"I'm sorry. I checked. He ain't there."

"Prove to me there's no god," he says with this false bravado I hear echoed in the back of my mind as memories of me twenty years ago, which chills me to the bone. Or was that the November wind that gusted up from between skyscrapers? I'll blame the wind.

"See that's the thing," I said with less false but more pompous bravado, "I don't have to prove a thing. I no longer believe." I pointed at him with the hand holding my bag of donuts, since the other hand was holding my cane, which was holding up the rest of me. "It is incumbent on the believer to prove there is a god."

"I can give you five reasons-" Oh this one's been coached. He can count the reasons he knows off the top of his head.

I decided to cut him off at the pass. "Anecdotal evidence doesn't count," I said flatly.

He went to say something but it got stuck in his Adam's apple. I turned away and continued down my path having left him silent and frozen on his own.

Several minutes later I'm sitting at the bus stop and that same dude who wanted Vicadin walks up to the bus stop and announces loudly to the handful of us that are all busy trying to ignore each other, "ROSA PARKS everybody! Let's give a hand to Rosa Parks! Let's give it up for Rosa Parks everybody." He's clapping his hands loudly and a couple others join in. I just look at the back of his head and he continues walking past us and against the light. No traffic this late so there's little danger of him getting run over, but I chuckle to myself as I see a policeman carefully following the guy about twenty paces behind him. They both saunter on into the night. I'm sure that guy's story is much more interesting than mine, but this ain't his blog, so you're stuck with me.

I'm a maniacal cane-wielding ex-Christian with a bag of donuts, a backpack of beer, and a monthly bus pass. I take off my hat when I pass Rosa Parks in honor of what she represents to me, but I don't applaud her cuz she's a fucking statue. I lord over the intersection of Griffin and Pacific and all the West End. You may never see me, but that doesn't mean I'm not there. I'll take away your gods and make you pray for Vicadin. Don't cross me.

Left 4 Dead In The Details

My new addiction of the nanosecond is the video game Left 4 Dead and its sequel/expansion/whatever the hell it is Left 4 Dead 2. If you haven't played it yet, and care about spoilage, read no further. If you have played it already, or don't plan to ever play it or don't care, keep reading. No I ain't playing it. I can't afford to buy games on my paycheck. I watch videos of others playing it at places like YouTube and I read about it at places like Wikia and I have searches running via TweetDeck so if anyone happens to mention L4D or L4D2 I can eavesdrop on their conversations. Like I said, it's an addiction of the nanosecond. By the time I'm done writing this I will have probably already lost interest. In a nutshell this is the story behind Left 4 Dead.

About a month ago someone came down with an unknown contagion that caused them to lose any shred of humanity and lash out at anyone. It's believed this Patient Zero was taken to Mercy Hospital, but that's speculation. Well hell, a lot of what I'm about to say is speculation based off observations in the game. After this first case, others began to exhibit similar symptoms. It appears the medical community, and the military in the form of an organization called The CEDA, first began to treat this disease as some sort of cross between the common flu and rabies, but when that didn't work and incidents escalated, the government turned towards evacuating the uninfected, and leaving the infected behind. Because the infected react violently to anyone not infected, deadly force was required, and the hasty process of building SafeHouses created a sort of underground railroad giving people occasional respite as each time attempts to fortify failed the survivors were forced to retreat. That was a month ago. At the beginning of the game, you are one of four of the last survivors still in a highly contaminated area, surrounded by humanoids who were not long ago just mild mannered normal people and are now rampaging insane lunatics frothing at the mouth and attacking anything that makes too much noise or knows the difference between a TV remote and a fire hydrant. So you got no choice but to shoot them back before they kill you, as you make your way across urban and suburban environments hoping to find safety just beyond the horizon, cuz there ain't nowhere safe where you are now.

But what is it that I find interesting about this game? Usually shootemups like this bore me to tears. I haven't bought a shootemup since Quake 3. I haven't bought a first or third person adventure game since the second or third Tomb Raider. The last MMORPG I invested in was City of Heroes. I completely avoided World of Warcraft and didn't see the appeal of ElfQuest. Halo I prefer to watch than play too. I especially like Machinima comedy like Red vs Blue, where helmets bobbing up and down passes for talking dialog.

One of the things that intrigues me about Left 4 Dead is the cooperative gameplay. It's difficult to grief fellow players in L4D, and even when you do, the results are more immediate that you're just shooting yourself in the foot. I imagine there are still griefers out there. The same bastards who go to online multiplayer games where the object is to draw words so others can guess and they just write out the word instead of drawing it. Griefing that doesn't help you and it doesn't help anyone else. It's just griefing for griefing sake, but I imagine in a game environment like Left 4 Dead that sort of thing would police itself. What works in L4D that I haven't seen much elsewhere is that if you really want to progress and do well you gotta work as a team. Friendly fire is pretty much unavoidable given what I've seen, but except for extreme cases that's usually quickly forgiven and focus is on getting the foursome from point A to point B with a lot of chaos and carnage in between.

Something that is more interesting to me than the gameplay itself though is the story behind it, and how it's presented to the audience. Rather than long boring cut scenes where the players must remain passive, there's clues embedded throughout the game that cause the player to become more involved in the present events as well as the preceding events leading up to the here and now. Even more anticipatory is where they're going - is any place safe? Will they be safe when they get there?

There's clues throughout the games in the form of dialog said between characters, graffitti on walls in SafeHouses, and visual cues throughout the environments themselves that if utilized with deductive reasoning can lead one to surmise what is making these zombies and how it's spreading, or more precisely how it's NOT spreading. Cuz the Valve Boys behind the game are keen to give a lot of false clues and then knock the more obvious guesses down.

The people themselves are the first clue. In Left 4 Dead 1 we have a Vietnam vet named Bill who must be pushing seventy if he was twenty while serving in the military. We also have a biker named Francis, a cubicle rat named Louis, and the token tomboyish female named Zoe. In Left 4 Dead 2 we have a school teacher named Coach, a con man named Nick, a redneck named Ellis, and another token tomboy named Rochelle who this time appears to have a vocation of reporter, but little is made of that. Based on how they behave with one another, we are led to assume that they knew little to nothing of one another prior to the contagion taking effect. They were not friends prior to the "Green Flu" infecting over half the populous, and causing those infected to attack the rest. The Valve Boys take great care to convey to its audience that these eight people each come from dramatically different walks of life. One might think the reason for that would be to increase the odds a player might find something in one of these four people that'd make them feel more comfortable in that particular skin, but if that were the case they'd have put more effort in allowing players to personalize their avatar more. When picking a character in Left 4 Dead it's more like choosing a player marker in the game Monopoly. Some people prefer the horse, others the boot, and still others the thimble. Psychologists may waft eloquent on what this means about your psyche but ultimately you pick one because a friend took the one you really wanted and you didn't want the other choices more.

I surmise that these characters were invented and chosen for reasons that help advance the story The Valve Boys wish to convey. Four people who have never knowingly met before today suddenly have one thing in common: they're not infected. What brings them together in the chaos is the fact that they're the only ones in eye shot of each other not drooling and growling like mad dogs. In any other way they are remarkably different from one another and had they ever been in the same public place together prior to this day, it would have been a marvelous coincidence. This means that the reason why these four have somehow been singled out as the only survivors in a post apocalyptic America can't be because they hung out with the same people or frequented the same place or ate the same foods or anything environmental.

So what could it be? Well off the top of my head maybe they all have the same rare blood type. It's NOT, but that's the first logical guess. Let's explore this for a moment. In the U.S. at least, over half the population has a positive type blood. In fact close to 75% is either O+ or A+. Less than 15% have negative type blood, the most rare being AB-. B+ is at just under 10%. I know that cuz that's my blood type. I memorized that cuz when I found out I'd had a rough day, and I remember laughing cuz I thought it was a backhanded joke God was making at my expense: telling me to "be positive." So just for sake of argument, let's pretend that the survivors of Left 4 Dead all have B+ blood. It's somehow fitting, in a sardonic dark humor way that the game seems to enjoy. Less than ten percent of the population of America may be immune to this disease due to blood type. Anyone of any other blood type succumbs to this infection some in the game culture are calling "Green Flu" or "Zombie Cancer." This would mean at least nine infected for every one 'immune' person. That still wouldn't explain how we get whittled down to four, but the number isn't four. It's more like a few hundred. Others before our foursome have run the gauntlet and made it out safely. They've even left behind a trail for our guys to follow to safety, or presumed safety, in the form of SafeHouses. It's never quite clear just how safe the rest of the world actually is, or will be by the time one gets there.

I should point out here that in Left 4 Dead 2 we see infected people wearing HAZMAT suits that show no sign of having been compromised, so either ALL the ppl wearing these protective suits (that are flame proof and presumably germ proof) were dormantly infected prior to putting their suits on, or you don't contract this disease via blood, saliva, semen, or any other bodily fluids. It's also probably not airborne. What's that leave? What indeed. That's just what I'm trying to figure out.

Our foursome in the game are late to the party. For reasons not particularly made clear in each case, evacuation has already happened and as we first meet these characters, they're trailing behind hundreds (maybe thousands) of others who have not only escaped successfully, but they managed to build crude but effective safe houses and they've left behind a near infinite arsenal of weaponry and ammunition. Our special foursome are not trailblazers. They're in last place for the race of their lives.

Looking at the SafeHouses a moment, it's fun to note that as our foursome continue forward, they purposefully barricade the SafeHouse doors in order to keep the Infected they left behind from following them. This however also sabotages any chances of anyone behind them from escaping. So again, either they have very good reason to assume they're the only living people left, or these four are thoughtless, hateful human beings. Had the people before them been so uncaring of their plight and barricaded the SafeHouse doors...

Why have the eight characters surrounding this game each put off leaving the infection zones for now? We don't know. If this were a TV series like LOST, there'd be elaborate back stories revealed in flashbacks that would tell us just how well they knew one another prior to the zombie apocalypse, if at all. It'd also explain why they're still where they are when all indicators pointing to RUN already existed. However, this ain't LOST. We don't have the luxury of flashbacks. Cut scenes take away from playability, and get real boring on repeats.

Perhaps even the writers of this game don't know why these are the last ones to escape. Someone has to be last, right? And it's a good thing they're last because as a player you are literally shooting anything that moves, at least if you're a newbie. No one's stopping to check for pulses or brain activity in these humanoid targets. Everyone from Bill (who appears the most knowledgable and collected of the eight when it comes to being at war) to Ellis (who is more of an immature joyrider not taking the experience remotely serious) is shooting first and asking questions much much later. They have reason to believe they're all that's left of humanity that hasn't made it to Disneyland. Presumably there have recently been people escaping alongside them, but none of them are in earshot or eyeshot now that haven't either escaped themselves, succumbed to the infection, or become cannonfodder.

I might note here that aside from rare instances where piles of cattle indicate failed scientific examinations trying to uncover where the disease came from, we see little to no animal activity anywhere. We see no infected birds or domestic animals. We never encounter any zoos. We also see literally not a single infected or dead child. The reasons for this are more likely external to the game storyline. There are censoring organizations that make it difficult for a game company to market a game that shows excessive animal mutilation, and abuse of children is pretty much not only censorable, but unmarketable. No ingame explanation is made, however, a presumption that ALL children were evacuated without their parents is both unfeasible and unrealistic. However, I'm not able to utilize this information one way or the other. Either the game designers did this on purpose and will explain later on as to why, or they had no choice but to make all infected grown adults in appearance, and the absence of children is not a clue just a necessity of having to cater to today's immature, short-sighted, ignorant censormongers in our global community.

There's some countries that required a less violent version of the game, that is so censored it actually adversely affects gameplay. Some of the violent visuals are necessary to tell if an enemy has been properly incapacitated or needs another hit. Imagine playing PacMan but not being able to tell whether or not the ghosts in the game are edible. That's how much censorship has threatened to castrate these games. Have I mentioned I hate censorship? Even when I agree with it, as in the case of children missing from Left 4 Dead? I wouldn't want to see children getting shot to pieces, but their absence from the game without any explanation is almost as unsettling. Were they abducted? Did CEDA force parents to abandon their children to the care of the state?

In the first game there are four campaigns and at the end of each campaign, our foursome is rescued (provided you as a player make it to the end). At the end of No Mercy, a helicopter pilot picks them up at the top of a hospital roof, but at the start of Crash Course we find out that something strange happened on the chopper. Zoe was forced to shoot their pilot dead because he changed before her eyes in midflight. He turned into a zombie.

I should probably add here that these things aren't really zombies in the strictest sense of the word. They're infected. In fact they may actually be alive when you're killing them, and if there's some kind of cure of this infection.. well, perhaps thinking of them as zombies makes it a little easier to deal with but they're not undead. They just stop behaving as if they have any humanity. The game refers to them often as zombies, and it's more convenient occasionally for me to do so as well, but I'd rather reserve the actual argument of what a zombie is for some other diatribe.

Anyway, so a guy was normal before picking up our survivors, and begins to change after meeting them. Now, to be fair, we are given indications during the finale that perhaps the chopper pilot has been 'bitten.' He hints to that in some of his dialogue. However, our foursome are attacked by these creatures regularly and it's rarely if ever indicated that the zombies are biting anybody. In fact it doesn't seem like any of them have any appetite whatsoever. If you watch their behavior, infected sometimes exhibit signs of starvation, including irritability, lethargy, atrophy, and even vomiting or 'dry heaves.'

Later on in Death Toll our foursome come across "the Church Guy." In one of the more effective 'crescendo' moments of the first game, they find a guy who has locked himself inside a SafeHouse and won't let our stalwart friends in. He thinks they might be infected. Turns out he'd been 'bitten' a little over an hour ago and has gone a little crazy, thinking he might be running out of time. However, he's fine until our foursome walk up and bug him. I mean, he was obviously crazy before they arrived (later investigation of his SafeHouse reveals he got a little happy with the black magic marker and wrote "better safe than sorry" on the walls a couple hundred thousand times), but he didn't turn into "one of them." After he rings the church bell bringing all the infected within earshot barreling down on everyone, he then exits the SafeHouse having turned into a special zombie (either a Boomer, Hunter, or Smoker depending on random factors) his own self. Needless to say, nowhere in this game do you ever actually get to save a fifth human being from the infected. They always seem to turn.

A possible exception to this is at the end of Death Toll. There's two people in a boat that come to rescue our survivors: John and Amanda Slater. However, we never learn of their fate because there's currently no direct story narrative between the end of Death Toll and the start of the next campaign called Dead Air. That could change in the future. Crash Course was "Downloadable Content" or DLC that the game designers added after the fact as an expansion update for their player base. Death Toll opens inside a greenhouse, and gives no explanation why these four people would find themselves holed up in one of those. None of these guys look like they have a green thumb. Some player speculate there is no correlation between Dead Air & Death Toll. That these are completely different scenarios perhaps in alternate realities or that the game has no linear narrative at all. Others speculate that it's very plausible secret plans are in the works to connect Death Toll & Dead Air and also reveal the fate of the Slaters. My guess is Zoe had to take them out too.

At the end of Dead Air, our survivors are saved by an airplane pilot. At the start of the next campaign called Blood Harvest, our survivors appear to have spent at least the past night or so sleeping in a forest. There's three sleeping bags, indicating that one person always stayed awake to keep an eye out for zombies. Again there's no indicator this is in direct correlation to Dead Air, but it's possible a future expansion will come out that reveals the fate of the airplane and why our foursome find themselves in the middle of the woods. Blood Harvest ends at a Farmhouse with the survivors hitching a ride on a massive looking All Terrain Vehicle from the military. Surely they're safe now, right? Well a later expansion to the game is known as The Lighthouse, which game designers have said, "is what might happen to our survivors if they took a wrong turn.." It's only for Versus and Survival modes. Rescue never comes for the foursome at the Lighthouse. It's where they go to die.

Left 4 Dead 2 has a similar breakdown, but better correlations between the different campaigns. Dead Center ends with this new foursome escaping in a race car. At the start of Dark Carnival the race car is unable to take them further because the highway is literally jammed with abandoned cars. Dark Carnival ends with the heroes in an helicopter escaping a concert stadium. Like in No Mercy, it's later revealed in Swamp Fever the helicopter pilot was also infected. Nick had to take him out in midflight, just like Zoe. Ellis argues with Nick on this point occasionally through the course of Swamp Fever. However, Swamp Fever starts in a box car, so again we don't see the direct story narrative between the end of Dark Carnival and the start of Swamp Fever, leaving ample room for future expansions that might shed more light. Swamp Fever ends at a plantation near coastline, where our survivors meet Virgil. He's a boat captain that essentially becomes the taxi service for the Left 4 Dead 2 survivors from Swamp Fever onward. Like the survivors, he appears to be immune, but apparently his wife wasn't so lucky. In Hard Rain, Virgil drops off the survivors to get him some diesel fuel so he can take them the rest of the way to New Orleans which they hope is safety. The opening of The Parish reveals that's not the case, and the final climax of Left 4 Dead 2 occurs on a Lift Bridge as once again the military arrives to take our survivors to presumed safety.

Something curious is revealed through Left 4 Dead 2 that is not as apparent in Left 4 Dead 1. Grafitti on walls and evidence of NON-infected human beings being killed indicate that there was a growing belief among some survivors that some who appeared to be immune to the infection were actually carriers and the only good carrier is a dead one. At the start of The Lift Bridge scenario, we hear the military guy on the radio refer to our survivors as "immune" but then we overhear him talk to the copter pilot on the other side of the bridge and when he talks about the survivors, the words "immune" and "carrier" are treated as synonyms.

This and everything I've said thus far has led me to the following hypothesis. I believe in future expansion packs and perhaps a Left 4 Dead 3 (already rumored to be in the works), it will be more fully detailed that this pathogen is not airborne and it's not contracted by blood or saliva or any other conventional method. It is perhaps not even a disease. Carriers who appear to be immune to the condition actually spread it by close proximity to the non-infected. Just being around an immune carrier for an indeterminate amount of time can cause one to be stripped of their humanity and behave like a rabid dog. How can this be? Certainly not by any known conventional scientific method. If I were writing this, I'd be leaning towards either magical curses or alien technology. Probably a meteorite was uncovered by the government containing alien mystic energy was incorporated into a series of military experiments intended on creating The Ultimate Super Soldier, but inadvertently led to making people who can't die, but are cursed to kill everything around them. This would also explain why it's so difficult for the zombies to kill our survivors; because their immunity makes them difficult to kill, and curiously capable at any kind of weaponry they touch regardless of how much life experience they have shooting and fighting and throwing Molotov cocktails.

Why? Cuz this is a zombie movie. Zombie movies always end up having crazy explanations as to why all this is happening. The crazier, the more fun! So by trying to escape, Bill, Francis, Louis, Zoe, Rochelle, Coach, Nick and Ellis are inadvertently spreading the disease! Put THAT in your pipe bomb and smoke it!

A Little Late

So I'm reading the Dallas Observer, which is a free publication available offline at every other street corner or eating establishment in downtown. Online, you can go to DallasObserver.com for five seconds, shrug and say I'm right, then surf on. So anyway, I'm reading Jim Schutze's latest article, "The Power of the Table" which is yet another tired attempt by Schutze to be as cool about demonizing local politics as Laura Miller was fifteen years ago. She used to be in the D.O. as often as he is now, and she used to shake her fists at City Hall and tell the people of Dallas why we should be outraged this week. Then she became a member of City Council and later Mayor herself and completely failed to exorcise the demons out of the Dallas City Council. Some might argue that she became a demon herself, but I digress. What I just did there may appear mildly ironic to you later on. I think I'm using that word right.

Whatever. Laura Miller used to write for the Dallas Observer, then she put her money where her mouth is and ran for Mayor, she came and went and according to Jim Schutze, City Hall is still just as evil as it ever was. I guess this is why they give the Dallas Observer away. I wouldn't pay to be told this. I already know. In fact, I find it amusing that I'm currently criticizing the D.O. in much the same way the D.O. criticizes City Hall, Belo Corp, DART, state government, and pretty much everything in Texas that's not hot & spicy or fried. Frankly, the D.O. food critics are not critical enough in my not so humble opinion, but this is why they get paid the big bucks and I can't even give my words away. Who would pay to be told this?

Anyway, so I'm reading Jim Schutze's article as I said before, and he's plodding along eloquently about how some guy I don't know who is named Don Hill has the power to postpone deals between land developers and "buzzing people" who are "friends" of Hill. I'm reading along for the ride, wondering when Schutze is going to get to the point of why I should give a shit about any of this, and for the record I don't. I quit voting some time after Nine Eleven and before Sarah Palin. My voice is less effective than Laura Miller was at fighting City Hall. Schutze makes a good case but at this point I'm reading to pass the time and not be enlightened. It's either this or flip to the back of the Dallas Observer and read the classifieds where lonely desperate people try to shack up with each other. That's always good for a laugh. In his plodding eloquency, Schutze begins illustrating why whatever he's talking about matters by tellling me a story about something that happened five years ago. Newspapers usually stick to things that happened within the past week or so, but the Dallas Observer is, well, let's say "special."

Schutze introduces a character in this true-life narrative drama as "The Late Lynn Flint Shaw." That's curious of him. So okay, not only did this story he's weaving happen before 'teabag' stopped being a euphemism for lewdness & turned into a nomenclature for nonsense, but one of the key players in his drama is already dead. I hate it when stories do this. You already know how it's going to end. In death. How tragic.

Am I suddenly intrigued? Well, yes, but not for the reasons Schutze has been trying to manipulate me into caring about, because he continues on talking about Don Hill and some other guy completely named John Tatum. A couple paragraphs later, Schutze happens to mention while continuing to detail something about John Tatum trying to turn DART property into a museum, that The Late Lynn Flint Shaw "died in March of last year in an apparent murder-suicide with her husband."

Erk! SLAM ON THE BRAKES! Schutze keeps right on going but I feel like I just hit a speed bump the size of a DART bus. I get whiplash looking back at that previous statement as Schutze continues pressing onward about This Other Thing. Something I don't care about. At all. Even though I ride DART every day, the property that was supposed to be a museum by now is on Corinth Street. I've lived in Dallas since before Mississippi ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, but I don't know where Corinth Street is.

This dead lady interests me though. A dead lady who 'apparently' died by killing herself and her husband, or maybe her husband killed her and then himself - I DON'T KNOW - why don't I know? CUZ JIM SCHUTZE JUST SKIPS THAT as unimportant to the point he's trying to make and continues putting Dallas to sleep w/politicians who use their power to put off developers until they cave to whims of special interests.

That's politics as usual. How is this news? That's NOT news. That's dog bites man. The Late Lynn Flint Shaw isn't quite man bites dog because as I find out later it's also old news, but it's slightly more interesting than Schutze moaning about how the Don Hills of the world generate red tape to wrap up the John Tatums of the world because they won't hire friends of The Late Lynn Flint Shaws of the world. Anyone, and I MEAN anyone, who tries to be a politician does so with alterior motives. I KNOW this to be true. This is why I stopped voting.

You may have looked at John McCain and Barack Obama and seen two dramatically different choices. I saw Coke & Pepsi. You may look at Rick Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchison who are both currently running for governor of Texas and see two dramatically different choices. I see The New Coke & Coke Classic, only both have been left out in the sun opened and have gone warm and flat. I don't wanna drink any of that. Most recently I've turned to V-8 even tho it's too salty, cuz I'm too lazy to ride a bus to the Farmer's Market every day and get something that might actually be good for me. ...weren't we talking about politics? Well, the metaphor still works so I went with it.

Why did I stop voting? ALL politicians are corrupt. Even and especially the ones who claim not to be. Even and especially the ones who put themselves into a position where they have friends buzzing around developers who want to get something from the gov't. If we really wanted uncorrupt people in office who would get things done, gov't positions would be a random draft, like jury duty. People who didn't want the job would be dragged to an appointed office, given crap to get done, and they'd get it done as fast as possible so they could say they did their duty and go back home to watch Oprah. We don't do that. We like our politicians dirty and corrupt and greedy little bastards. Otherwise, we'd do something about it. Or, like me, we'd give up because the only way to stop this corruption at this point is through a major revolution, and I'm allergic to bullets, so I ain't gonna start one.

But this, right here, is why the media has a problem with its audience. Jim Schutze wants to talk about political corruption. Again. And he thinks he's taken this tired and worn out topic and dressed it up with a new paint job and some decals and he's gonna try to sell it to his audience again. What pops off the page for my eyes? A lady offing herself and her hubby for no immediately forseeable reason whatsoever. That's a mystery to me. That's actually almost interesting. Not political corruption, which I've heard before. How many times can you see the same old card trick over and over? But if Penn & Teller threaten to shoot each other with bullets that are written on by people in the audience, hell that just never gets old does it?

This is why conventional media (unlike unconventional media like the D.O. which as I said before is "special") puts death and destruction front and center in news reports. They tally the dead in headlines where people can see them, and throw out the boring details that make us change the channel. Jim Schutze does what I believe Kevin Pollak might refer to as "burying the lead." He focuses on what he finds interesting, and hides what his audience might actually find interesting.

I went ahead and read the rest of the article. Yes of course this is a terrible thing for a politician to do. People in power positions have friends who want things from the businesses that want politicians to just do their damn jobs without all this wheel greasing and project tabling. It's disgusting and unethical and amoral and horrendous and I'm sure they'll all be smited by their respective deities and burn in whatever hell they deem to believe exists. More importantly this all leads to expensive litigation that the taxpayer will no doubt end up footing the bill for, and is the real reason why everything from potholes to skyscrapers take forever to get done, unless some troll who is blocking the proverbial bridge gets paid to step aside.

The Late Lynn Flint Shaw is only mentioned once more, to remind us that she was one of the trolls. Shaw wanted John Tatum to 'hire' one of her people as a 'consultant' on his project. Tatum didn't do that, so Shaw, then chairman of DART, stopped him cold.

Then, for some reason Schutze fails to explain, Shaw and her husband killed each other a couple years after this happened. Apparently the two events are completely unrelated, which is why Schutze didn't bother spending precious copy inches explaining to me why. Besides, it happened so long ago. Why even mention it?

I've thought about Googling The Late Lynn Flint Shaw and putting the pieces of her sordid drama together for my own edification, but I wrote this instead and now that I'm almost done, I really don't think I care about some complete stranger offing herself and her husband. I mean, why does it matter to me? Why should it? Why do I want to get my facts straight when it serves me no personal satisfaction at all, and won't put food on my table or help me brave the bus line to work tomorrow. Sure, she was the chairman of DART before I started using it, but maybe I should find out how insane and corrupt the current DART chairman is. Maybe that would be slightly more useful to my current situation, given that I'm at DART's mercy when it comes to getting around in this city. Frankly, I don't even know the names of my favorite bus drivers. So why would I bother to figure out who's running the gig?

Fox News keeps their audiences glued to the boob toob with constant reports of dirty dealings and carnage and mayhem. Anything that might make their audiences feel superior to complete strangers of questionable morals and character. Anything that will keep their audiences glued to that screen through the next set of commercials. This isn't news. This is catering to the lowest common denominator. This is giving the people what they want and not what they need. This is unethical and wrong and all kinds of shit. Know what I do to combat that? I don't watch Fox News. Not much more I could do than that. Vote? Rebel? I might as well start praying again, like that ever did any good.

I watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. That's how I like my news. Maybe Jim Schutze should try to be more like Jon Stewart and less like Laura Miller.

Surrounded

Yeah I know. I really should stick to blogging about unimportant stuff like my opinions regarding television shows and movies. I might get back to that. However, this is weighing heavy on me and this is where I leave bits of brain so I can find them later, if I ever want them again. This piece of brain is getting pretty big. It's probably a metaphorical tumor. Paging Dr. House.

Again I state for the record, and I simply cannot emphasize this enough, I am an atheist now not by choice but by default. I have been born again again. Or maybe I'm dead again. I'm not sure how that metaphor worked the first time around. Anyway, I saw the light and it turned out to be a trick of the light, and was never there.

Not long ago a (now fellow I suppose) atheist said he was surprised to learn I was taking this so badly. When he found out there was no god it was like a weight had been lifted, and he was very happy about it. I'm reacting to it the same way I reacted when I learned there was no Santa Claus. I was pretty pissed off back then too. My own parents deceived me. Hell, THE WHOLE WORLD IS IN ON THAT LIE. There's a Father Christmas of some sort in practically every country on the planet. We still lie to children about that even today. If you're reading this and you have kids, you probably help perpetuate that lie, and you don't think there's any harm in it. You're probably right, but even if it's a little white lie - IT'S A LITTLE WHITE LIE THAT THE WHOLE OF HUMANITY HELPS TO PERPETUATE. which is a pretty big little white lie.

And now I learn there's no god. Never was. It's a lie. A lie that the vast majority of humanity still accepts as a given, like assuming magicians can pull rabbits out of hats or take quarters out of ears, or assuming a rain dancer can make it rain.

If I could choose to go back and take the blue pill, like Cipher in the Matrix thought he could do, I would. I really don't want to care if I'm in the Matrix. I liked it before. But I can't go back. I can't. The genie won't go back in the bottle. Once the kid realizes Santa Claus can't work in every shopping mall on the planet simultaneously, there's no going back.

There's simply no proof that there is a god. Up until now I've assumed the burden of proof is on the nonbeliever but it's not. If someone tells the police that their house was robbed, the cops are gonna wanna check the house for stolen goods, forced entry, fingerprints, etc. They're not just gonna assume the guy's telling the truth. They could, because why would someone bother to lie about having been robbed?

...see what I just did there?

We can take for granted that the guy wouldn't steal from his own home, but there are reasons why someone would make that up. Insurance for example. Or even if he didn't steal from his own house, he doesn't know who did, so the cops have to investigate and gain knowledge into the crime so they can suss out who did. Detectives don't solve crimes by taking presumptions for granted. If they did, they'd be called Presumptionists. They're detectives. They DETECT.

All 'evidence' that there is, was, or might be someday a deity is simply anecdotal or inconclusive. Deductive reasoning demands such inconclusive evidence be corroborated with solid facts. Knowledge IS power, and religion feeds on ignorance.

Now that I see this truth for what it is, I'm frankly stymied that religion still holds such a firm grip on humanity. I mean, I'm really not that bright, and if I can figure it out, why hasn't the rest of the planet? But they haven't. Humanity has been on this kick about believing in things that aren't there for millenia, with no end in sight. Why? Cuz if you look at history, every few hundred years or so the people who do believe band together with weapons and KILL ANYONE WHO DISAGREES WITH THEM. And sometimes they kill each other over discrepancies in each other's figments. And let's face it, they're overdue for a genocide. Haven't had one on a Spanish Inquisition kind of scale in awhile.

When I was taking The Christian God for granted and assuming he was there cuz everyone and my mom said he was, it didn't look remotely scary, cuz when the next Crusade was gonna go down, I felt relatively safe that they wouldn't be pointing pointy sticks in my direction. Now, I'm not so sure about that. I'm a heretic. I'm a blasphemer. I'm a nonbeliever. And as any diehard zealot will tell you, if you're not with God, you must be working for The Other Guy.

Of course the irony of this is if I can't believe in God anymore, it means there's no Satan either, and never was. John Lennon once asked me to imagine there's no heaven, and assured me it was easy if I just tried. I scoffed at that back when I was a kid. Now I wish he'd take it back, because it IS easy if you try. Too damned easy, if you ask me. It also means there's no hell below us as John was quick to point out, and above us is only sky. I made the tactical error that no believer should ever make if they want to continue believing: I looked up.


So if there's no God, Devil, Heaven or Hell, then there's no sin either. There's choices people make and every action has consequences. So do inactions for that matter. In fact, every exhalaton of breath affects the world around you, even if in ways you can't easily measure with just your senses. The bacteria crawling around on your skin are more real than a grey haired old coot in robes on a throne of clouds, but you can't see them any more than you can see him. So how do we know they're there? Science. Get me a microscope and I can prove to you there's animals crawling on your skin. Thus far, science hasn't found a microscope that susses out gods.

And there's a lot of scientists who are also still believers, so believe me there's still a lot of people out there actively trying to figure out a way to prove that there is a god. It's just that we haven't found anything yet, and the more we look the less places we have to check. Maybe he's on one of those planets out there. I'm no longer holding my breath on that one.

But the point is there ARE scientists out there, people far smarter than me, who still believe. Beyond all common sense or reason, they still think there's a god. They still go to church. They still pray. They still tithe. They still read the Good Book. And I'm not necessarily knocking the book, I mean it's full of holes and contradictions but what great work of fictitious literature doesn't? So very smart people still assume God exists. Now, either all of them are wrong, or I am. That's kinda creepy.

Cuz it's not just scientists. It's politicians, and sanitation workers, and bus drivers and coworkers and friends and family members and grocery clerks and waitresses and doctors and lawyers and firemen and dog walkers and complete strangers at bus stops - literally billions of people on this planet, despite the overwhelming evidence that there is not a god AND the overwhelming lack of evidence that there is, still insist there's a god. These billions of people disagree with one another over just who what where when why and how god is, but they do all agree on a monotheistic deity that likes them personally and roots for their respective favorite sports teams.

Except of course for those who don't. The polytheistic believers for example, or the many variant forms of nonbelievers such as myself, but comparatively speaking we're outnumbered worldwide by the Catholics alone. So let's focus on the real threat.

Let's say you and I are standing in front of an object, and we both utilize all our senses to determine what it is. I look at it. I touch it. I listen for sound and hear nothing. I may even put the tip of my tongue to it or take a whiff inches away from it. I come to the conclusion that it is a fire hydrant. You do the same. Utilizing your masterful talent at conquering your own senses, you observe the object before us and come to a similar conclusion. It is a fire hydrant. On that, we both agree.

Now we compare notes about what kind of fire hydrant. I observe that it is painted grey. You observe that it is painted red. We argue over this briefly and each come to the rational determination that the other person must be crazy. It doesn't occur to me that perhaps I am suddenly color blind. It doesn't occur to you that perhaps you are wearing rose colored glasses. I simply see a grey fire hydrant and you see a red one. We eventually realize we must agree to disagree.

Now it also doesn't occur to either of us to check to see if this object that appears to be a fire hydrant actually has the capacity to put out a fire. Neither of us are firemen. We don't have the necessary tools to open her up and let her rip. For all we know, this fire hydrant has no water inside it, but we both just take for granted that if a fire ever erupted on this spot, firemen would come along open her up and let her rip. We call it a fire hydrant because that's what it looks like, and when I say fire hydrant and when you say fire hydrant, we both assume the other person knows what that phrase means.

What if it can't put out a fire? What if for some reason it doesn't work? Maybe the plumbing in this area is damaged. Maybe the object was made to look like a fire hydrant but is really just there for decoration, or as a prank to piss off firemen. We have no way of knowing. We're taking a lot of stuff for granted here, predominantly cuz it's just a silly fire hydrant and I don't know why we even care about it still.

This is how I'm seeing this whole god thing. No one is bothering to check to see if there's a god, except for people like me who do and find out he doesn't exist. Then we go back and tell other people and they look at us like we're mad. Well did you look everywhere? Maybe you missed a spot. Well okay you go check with me, or find out for yourself then report back. Oh I don't need to do that. I already know there is a god. I don't have to go looking for him. Well actually, you do. It's kinda stupid not to. You're assuming there's a god without any proof.

What is faith? It's the belief in something without proof. It's accepting as a given something that isn't true, because you don't know if it is true and you don't know if it isn't, and you decide to assume it is true just to be on the safe side, cuz what if you think it's not true and it is? Then you'd be in a pickle wouldn't you?

Every now and then at a bus stop downtown there's this sweet lady who walks around with big signs hanging off her shoulders and her back. They don't say The End Is Near. Worse. They say something to the effect that God wants to free people from sin and let Jesus save them. She walks around with a big smile on her face handing out little booklets, and people who already agree with her take these little booklets from her hand and with big smiles on their faces go on about their day with this silly booklet in their hand telling them what they already know about what they already believe. I never actually see any of them read this booklet. They just thank her and take it and walk away and go on about their lives with this really big smile on their faces. It's eerie.

If someone believes in fairies, or monsters, or zombies, or thinks he's Napoleon, we lock them away. Yet billions of people on this planet are under a delusion that there's a man in the sky who knows all and sees all and has a personal plan just for you but he's not letting you in on it and if you do any number of things wrong he's laid out your life like a mine field and will blow you up if you do wrong, but he loves you.

All around me are delusional people, and if I were to point out their delusion, they'd look at me like I was the one that's crazy. BILLIONS of people. ALL OVER the planet. Making decisions that sometimes affect me, with this illusion that they got a little cherub w/wings floating over their shoulder pointing the way for them.

This time last year I may still have been one of the deluded. Now, all the sudden, I feel like I'm Ben in Night of the Living Dead. I'm surrounded, there's no escape, and I think they're coming for me, Barbra.