First, this study by some Princeton IT folk on the ease of tampering with electronic voting machines is pretty depressing. If the US media had any shred of hope of still being the protectorate of the public interest, this would be discussed widely. Especially since here in Minnesota (and in many other states) the entire voting process is going entirely to electronic voting.

Which is why it is important to bury your head in the sand and live in a virtual world (mostly kidding on that one, I have been trying to raise this issue with local media members, but it is important to have distraction in your life when the basic framework of your so-called democracy is slowly dissolving…). And on that note, two things come to mind from the previous post: Oblivion and the online poker handle theory.

First, I think Oblivion is one of the most wonderful and simultaneously evil games that has ever been created. Never mind not going to work to play it. If I found a drug where I would never have to sleep again AND somebody paid me during the day to play this game, I think I could attempt to accomplish all the tasks etc. in the game in 20 years. I mean any game where you can step into a stocked library with all different books AND read them all(?!) is a little over-the-top in terms of level of detail. But I support any and all attempts to find a system of pay for playing this game. Please hire me when you find it Aakaash.

Which brings me to a game that does (occasionally) pay when you play it. Online poker. In addition to all the standard poker advice that you can find out there — play your position, be willing to fold a big hand, make others make tough decisions, be patient etc. I have devised a new poker theory system that only works online, the poker handle theory.

The handle theory is really pretty simple, and should be combined with solid play, but can help out in tough decision moments. First, some categorization…I would break online poker handles down into six major cateogories: 1) the brash and annoying reference to male anatomy, i.e. MyCoksHuge, Ihavthenuts etc.; 2) the pop culture reference, i.e. ArtVandelay, ChiefWiggim etc.; 3) the nonsensical, i.e. ltm568, g-flon58; 4) the self-referential, i.e. LarrySmith, MarieS; 5) the poker reference, i.e. acesfull, AKplayer, bluffnwin; and finally, 6) the animal reference, i.e. Crocteeth, viperman.

Within those categories, I would say I notice these kinds of trends:

1. Male anatomy handles are brash and aggressive. As their name so obviously suggests, they are trying to compensate for something. This is the easiest group to call with marginal hands because they are uber-aggressive, and just try to buy pots. Remember their handle suggests something is missing, so it’s likely not in the cards either….

2. Pop-culture or humorous handles are tight players. They are there to have fun, as their name suggests, and would rather not have to quit playing. Aggressive bets against them will often get them to fold superior hands.

3. The nonsensical handles: fear these players. This is someone who gave no thought to their handle, they just wanted to play poker. And they are probably pretty serious about it and probably play a lot. If they have a chip lead over you and you start getting into a raising war, it may be time to consider exiting the hand unless you know you can win.

4. The self-referential handle in my experience is often a beginning player. After all, who would use their first and last name as their handle? This is someone who saw an ad in a magazine or watched poker on TV once and thought it would be fun to play online and then signed up with their name. When they make a large bet, you should consider calling, not because they are bluffing, but because they actually think they have a good hand with a king-3.

5. The poker reference is a mixed bag, and the hardest to classify in terms of style of play. Some are quite good and some quite horrific, which is why they should be watched closely and evaluated. Don’t get into major early standoffs with them — see where they go with other players, identify the strong and weak ones and play accordingly.

6. The animal or animate reference, often with violent suggestions, is interestingly, in my experience the tightest of players. Their handle suggests someone who will lash out at any moment, and it is clever that way. They want you think that so that when they raise, you will call them. This type of player won’t bluff very often, so when they raise, you better have something pretty good or get out of the way.   

Hope that helps you video game and poker players out there distract yourself to ignore the fact that democracy as you know it is crumbling around you and no one seems to care…

Today, September 19, is Talk Like a Pirate Day! This will make some people very happy. Arrr. If you go with it, this could bring you pleasant distraction for at least 3 minutes. To help you facilitate that, try the Pirate Translator. I just plugged in that last sentence and got “Aye, t’ help you facilitate that, try the Pirate Translator. Gar.” but I’m disappointed because pirates don’t say “facilitate.” Oh well. See what results you get.

Ahoy and walk the plank.

Hey, not that I really mind sitting atop somebody’s home page for days on end, but can someone post something a little more interesting than my dopey M & Ms sidetrack? It’s embarrassing me that it’s still lingering on top of 12apostrophes. Where is everybody?

Here’s some news briefs to get you going:

• The Health Minister of South Africa—the country where 1 in 10 people has the HIV virus—has been publicly advocating vegetables and garlic as the best way to manage the disease. She went to an international AIDS conference in Toronto last month and displayed a table of vegetables. Depressing. Needless to say, the international scientific and health communities are up in arms.
• Australians having apparently started “revenge killings” of stingrays, in honor of Steve Irwin, the animal lover and conservationist. Go figure.
• In good news, ABC’s factually incorrect right-wing smear effort of a “docudrama” about 9/11 did somewhat of a flop in the ratings Sunday. Hey, there’s a reason to love football afterall. I was going to link you to the ThinkProgress article about it but their site is down.

This reminds me that yesterday, while taping a football game for duodecad or however you spell that, I saw an NFL 9/11 tribute that actually made me teary-eyed. But the thing that made me cry wasn’t the memory of the tragedy (which obviously merits mourning), but rather the memory of what could have been. The memory of how much people cared and came together then, all over the world, and how MUCH the Bush administration fucked that up. There was a brief, worldwide outpouring of sympathy and unity, and the Bush administration did everything imaginable to destroy it.

For some reason the image of crying giant athletes (don’t laugh) was a powerful reminder that goodwill en masse doesn’t come around very often, and collective emotional resonance even less. We could have done so much with that. If someone in power had really wanted to, they might even have used it to make the world a slightly better place. But maybe I’m dreaming.

You make a boy smile as large as Pluto. Yes, I’m obsessed. But it raises another (controversial?) idea: Big Ten college towns. Why are they so much better than other college towns around the country? If I had to choose a college town to live in, I would choose almost every Big Ten town before any other part of the country (not that I’ve been everywhere). But Ann Arbor, Bloomington, Iowa City, Madison — in my experience, they seem so much more culturally interesting, playful, civic-minded, quirky etc. than say Gainesville, Chapel Hill, Syracuse, Tallahassee etc. The only other two college towns that come to mind in that category are Eugene, Ore.  and maybe Boulder, Co. Though I’m probably just clouded by midwestern goggles.

As an illustration: a typical Saturday night in Gainesville and Madison (both towns I’ve spent some time in). Madison,all along State street, has street performers (good ones), local pubs, good and cheap dining, theater, lots of live music, and a strip of 18+ dance clubs with underdressed college students. A Saturday in downtown Gainesville, on the other hand, has a strip of 18+ dance clubs with underdressed college students and one VERY overcrowded bar for everyone else in town.

So that’s the brief observation of the day. I’m working on several projects and interviews right now for work. More later with thoughts about the nature of interviews, oral histories, and life “retold”.

Left Pedal, the blog, has risen Phoenix-like out of the ashes.

Warning: semi work-safe bird-flipping images may occur.

Yes, it’s true. Pluto has been stripped of planetary status.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/08/24/pluto.ap/index.html

Time to ramp up the Charon isn’t a moon campaign — or maybe dust off the the moon isn’t a moon, instead an Earth Orbiting Object…

 Who’s with me?

It looks as if Pluto will be ‘unclassified’ a planet and ‘reclassified’ a Kuiper Belt object. Now, I’m all for greater knowledge and understanding, but isn’t this a bit of a waste of time?

I kind of feel like this would be the same thing as some group of alphabetologists informing everyone that the alphabet isn’t really ordered as well as possible and that all the vowels should be at the beginning for greater understanding. Possibly it would be a better system and more technically correct, but it brings up a tough question, is it worthwhile to re-categorize something that won’t be recognized by most people?

Certainly this has been done to great benefit and harm. There are numerous examples of new cultural identifications that have done away with years of latent bigotry. At the same time organizations have changed readily-understood concepts like ‘bomb’ into ‘payload delivery devices’ or firing a bunch of people to ‘right-sizing’.

Orwell was always talking about language like ‘right-sizing’ — the obfuscating of reality through language. But I wonder if there is another form of Orwellian language, that is some form of overanalyzing? 

Maybe I’m just rationalizing because I want to call a tomato a vegetable, a spider an insect and Pluto a planet. But is that so wrong? 

No one cares how I came to be in possession of a fortune cookie today, especially since the important part was the message inside:

Pure pleasure is found in

my own imagination running wild about what the rest of that fortune was meant to have said?

Conjectures welcome. Happy Friday.

I’ve been reading a lot about the ‘people powered’ election of Ned Lamont in Connecticut – how for once an election wasn’t decided by the special interested, well-moneyed, over-lobbied joecumbent, but instead a grassroots, collective, power-of-the-people, wisdom of crowds type effort by the voters in Connecticut. 

And what strikes me about it is that I resonate so strongly with that idea. Politics is so disturbing lately because it feels so out of touch from everyday life (even if it always has been, it feels decidedly more out of touch in the past decade). And it feels so combative, without any sense of doing what’s best for the most amount of people. And so we rejoice at the victory of the ‘people-powered’ candidate in the nutmeg state.

Now, I’m just giddy that Joe Lieberman was defeated. And I’m saddened that an 18-year senator can’t leave the stage with some grace, and instead has chosen a path that seems to me delusional, quixotic, pathetic and infuriating: independence.  

What’s strange about this reaction to Lieberman for me is that for years I have longed for more choices in elections, that the choice between the lesser-of-two-evils isn’t really a choice at all, that we need more independents running on issues to bring more dialogue to elections and more connections with voters.

I suppose you could say the difference is in viewing that voice of ‘independence’ as not ‘independent’ enough, and rather a tired, establishment voice that doesn’t know when to quit.

But as I’m just shooting the breeze here, I’ll contend that it goes a little bit deeper than that to a contradiction in my own mind, and, dare I say, in the American psyche — or perhaps more accurately measured, the Midwestern American psyche (not that this is an exclusive condition to that locale).

But a contradiction in valuing deference to authority, community standards, and the power of cooperation, compromise and conflict resolution, while at the same time valuing critical thought, unconventional thinking and behavior, and the power of competition, creativity and confidence.

In thinking about this though, I think it is a perfectly healthy contradiction. Three things come to mind (mostly because they are on my mind for other reasons).

Take a new forum on Minnesota Public Radio called Public Insight Journalism. Part of me values the fact the establishment media is searching beyond its cadre of spoon-fed experts to dig up new sources of information, sources with just as much expertise in a given area as the Executive Director of this and that Institute. And part of me questions the value in this, that sometimes I do just want to be spoon-fed the expert opinion and I’ll come to my own conclusions based on that. And even more, though I’d hate to admit it, that sometimes I don’t really want to hear the opinions of everyday people, when, for instance, 50 percent of ‘everyday’ people can’t place Canada on a map of North America. Elitist? Yes. But do factoids like that give me much faith in something called a ‘people-powered’ movement? I’m still amazed that Lamont won, but factoids like that waver my enthusiasm just a little. Is this just a fluke? Will it still take place when the entire state votes in much greater numbers? Is there something wrong with Lamont too? etc. 

On the other side of the coin, take poker – yours truly won $1200 yesterday which is why it is on the mind. I love the game. But if this game isn’t quintessentially counter to what I most often think I believe in, I don’t know what is. Pool a bunch of resources, have a competition, and have the winner walk away with most of those resources, while most people (around 90%) are just out of luck. It is skill, it is luck, it is ruthless. And I love it.

Which brings me back, in a roundabout way, to Ned Lamont and the F5 key. I’ve started working one day a week in a new office. At that office, you have to hit the F5 key to refresh your email. At my other office, you don’t need to do that, your email just comes to you.

I guess all this is a very convoluted way of saying that whether I am a libertarian, independent individualist or a socialistic, common-good, deferentialist, all comes down to a given context. And please pardon the horrible analogy, but sometimes you just have to let the world refresh around you, and sometimes you have to do it yourself.

So would I like more independent voices in politics? Yes. Do I believe in the ‘people-powered’ movement? Sometimes. Do I want joementum to drop out? Without a doubt. As I said, context, and in this context, the one where Lieberman has repeatedly backstabbed party members and given the opposition increasingly damaging sound bites (“the anti-security party”), I’m leaning more towards the Hold ‘Em, pragmatist, forget-your-ideals-of-multi-party-politics, in-it-for-all-money mentality. I’ve got pocket rockets and some 18-year joeplayer just moved all-in after a ‘bad beat.’ You call that every time. Then hit the F5 key, and refresh.

This is more of a test I suppose for the first blog post, but also something of a contest. It comes in two parts:

1. Why 12 apostrophes? Does a favorite passage of yours have 12? Or is there something about 12? Maybe after reading that, I’d like my moniker to be duodecad?

2. This is the more contesty part of the contest. Here is a passage I just had to edit:

In conclusion, organizational cultural competency presents a dynamic interaction between an agency/program’s developmental continuum and a multi-component revolving cultural competency of individuals working within that system. The individual’s cultural competency is an actice, on-going interaction between its key components and its outcome depends on agency system’s cultural competency.

Now the contest — can you simplify this into five words or less?