Our friend Dowingba has been after me for some time to do this. So here's a present for him.

Below is the map of a beautiful country named Canada. I'd like you to take particular note of one of its many fine provinces: Alberta. It's in dark green, with the famed Castle wilderness preserve marked with a star:

Now. Let's ignore Alberta for a little bit and let me point some things out to you about crowded living conditions among humans.

The City of Chicago--a beautiful city full of rivers, ponds, lakefront property, huge parks, zoos, sporting arenas, universities--houses 2,886,251 residents, at least according to 2002 figures. This is not counting the hundreds of thousands of people who commute in and out of the city every day. Let's round it off and say that on any given day, as many as 3 million people may be in that fine, beautiful city. The city encompasses 234 square miles. (All figures cited from Wikipedia.)

Doing a little simple math (3 million divided by 234) and you can determine for yourself that Chicago boasts a population density of about 12,821 people per square mile. This in an area which, as I've said, includes parks, rivers, ponds, sporting arenas, shipyards, museums, libraries, tree-lined neighborhoods, and world-class universities. Also stock yards, train depots, factories, airports, amusement parks, hotels, and shopping centers. There's even a working farm within the city limits, at an agricultural college.

Mind you, it's not America's most crowded city, let alone the world's. Far from it. As far as major cities around the world go, it's only average in terms of crowding.

The City of Tokyo, one of the world's most populace cities, has a population of 12.275 million people, and takes up only 0.6% (barely 1 half of one percent) of Japan's total land space. This enormous city covers about 844 square miles. That gives it a population density of 14,544 people per square mile. All jammed in to barely one half of one percent of Japan's total land space--and also including parks, ponds, zoos, universities, museums, sporting arenas, and so on.

The city of New York, New York has a population of 8 million, spread out over 320 square miles. Giving it a population density of about 25,000 people per square mile, distributed among its many parks, museums, sports arenas, universities, and so on.

The city of Paris, France, universally hailed as one of the most beautiful cities on the planet, encompasses a shockingly tiny 41 square miles (105 square kilometers). It houses over two million people in that area, giving it a population density of (dig this) 48,780 people per square mile, marking it as quite possibly the most crowded city on the planet.

Here's a quick look at some other world cities:

London: 11,475 people per square mile

Rio de Janeiro: 16,495 people per square mile.

Moscow: 29,016 people per square mile.

Seoul: 42,194 people per square mile.

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to look up what other beautiful, highly livable cities like Vancouver, Seattle, Mexico City, and so on look like.

Now, the United States encompasses about 3,717,142 square miles. The world population is currently estimated at well over 6 billion and is projected to reach 7 billion in 2010. Depending on whose estimates you believe, the population will either peak around 2050 and then begin to decline or, according to more aggressive estimates, may go as high as 11 billion some time after the year 2100. This is depending on whether you believe people around the world will continue to grow wealthier and more prosperous, which they have been throughout most of the world (except in totalitarian regimes) for the last 100 years, because a documented fact is that the more prosperous and healthy people become, the fewer children they tend to have.

Okay, so current estimates have the world population hitting 7 billion in about 6 years. Let's go with that figure. And like I just said above, the current land space in the United States is 3,717,142 square miles (a bit over 9,600,000 square kilometers). This means that if you took the entire world population in 2010 and forcibly relocated every man, woman and child to the United States, we would have a population density in this country of (drum roll, please):

1,883 people per square mile.

This would be about twice the population density of Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin (813 people per square mile), or about two thirds of the population density of New Albin, Iowa (2,635 people per square mile).

In other words, it would be about average for a small rural farming community.

Now, remember where we started this little journey? Oh yes: Alberta. The Canadian province of Alberta, that great nation's 4th largest province, encompasses approximately 260,000 square miles.

Which means that if you took the entire world population in 2010 and forcibly relocated every single one of them to Alberta (we plan to make everyone Canadian, eh!), Alberta would have a population density of 26,923 people per square mile.

In other words, roughly the population density of New York City or Moscow, and considerably less crowded than cities like Paris, the famed City of Lights.

Which means that we could fairly comfortably squeeze the entire world population in 2010 into this massive red area:

The rest is for whatever else we want: growing food, wilderness conservation, and so on.

As an exercise for the reader, I invite you to calculate what it would look like if we jammed everybody into Ontario or Quebec instead.

Here's the truth: Penn & Teller like to say "everybody got a gris-gris," by which they mean, almost everybody has something they are absolutely positive must be true even though it simply is not. This is one that practically everyone has: fear of overcrowding.

Well we can leave aside the debate over how we can feed and provide decent quality of life for the entire population for another time. We had a pretty good debate on the overpopulation question a few months ago that you might want to read. But overcrowded? Not this country, and not any time soon.

As part of the Spirit of America fundraiser, our friend Patterico commissioned me to write an essay recommending good jazz recordings for classical music fans. He mostly likes classical and romance period music, but also likes some modern rock groups, especially stuff like Pink Floyd. That being the case, coming up with a few recommendations for him should be fairly easy. Believe it or not, though, it'd be easier for me the other way around, since I know more about classical than jazz. However, let's see what we can do, eh?

First off, the most important thing to understand about jazz, real jazz music the way it originally started, is that it is improvisational music. Classical music fans will be familiar with the concept of "variations on a theme," especially since Bach and many other composers frequently wrote them. Jazz works along similar principles, except that the musician is generally expected to make up improvizations spontaneously, as he plays. (Believe it or not this used to be quite common among classical musicians as well, but that's another subject.) Some jazz performances will feature a little improvization, some will be almost entirely improvizational.

A big part of the "hook" for the serious jazz fan is in understanding that every time you hear a piece played, it's going to be different. Maybe a little different, or maybe a lot. And any particular recording you hear will be unique, recorded a certain way only once. Once you listen to enough jazz, you start to really appreciate this, because every performance becomes an adventure. You're not just listening to the notes, but you're also appreciating how the musician's mind works, how his creativity works, because if he's any good he's going to surprise you. That's part of the thrill.

Even the vocal performances are improvizational. Again, some more than others, but they're all improvization-based.

The pitfall to all this is that some of the most ingenious improvisers often wind up producing work that's not very accessible to those who aren't deeply immersed in jazz music. I have some jazz recordings in my library that are practically unlistenable to anyone who isn't a jazz musician or a very serious affcianado.

Another frequent complaint about jazz is that it sounds sterile. Many jazz musicians, particularly starting in the 1970s, seem to embrace an austerity and an almost strictly mathematical approach to their music. Often the music is very cerebral and what many people would consider sterile: passion and blue notes and, for want of a better word, "soul," tends to take a back seat to the excitement of the hunt for beauty and complexity of construction.

These things are, of course, subjective. But I suspect most jazz fans know what I'm talking about, even if they wouldn't always agree with my particular picks.

Thus classical fans might actually be surprised to hear it, but they actually probably need to start with jazz that can be classified by that dread word: "accessible." That doesn't mean "for dummies." It means steeped enough of standard chord and melodic structures, and with enough simple hooks, to let the uninitiated get a grasp on what's going on. After you start your adventure in (relatively) safe territory, you can begin exploring and branching out from there, and either keep playing fairly close to home where there's lots of wonderful music, or range as deep into uncharted waters as you want.

With that in mind, here are a half-dozen personal recommendations of jazz music that I think the average classical music fan would appreciate that will also give you an insight into what makes jazz a unique, interesting, and very enjoyable art form:

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Billie Holliday: Lady In Satin

Serious jazz fans are of two minds about this immortal recording, because strictly speaking the only "jazz" going on here is Billie Holiday's singing. The musical arrangements are very traditional, old-school, Hollywoodish scoring, very lush and simple and lacking any improvization. Offhand this would sound like it would not be much of a jazz recording, then.

However, Holiday herself sings pure jazz throughout, weaving and improvizing around the very simple, straightforward arrangements. You thus get a deep appreciation for her performance, for everything interesting or profound in this recording comes from Holiday's voice. Everything else is just a simple backdrop for that.

And what a voice it is. This recording needs to be listened to in a quiet room. Yes, you can put it on as background music and probably not offend anyone, but to truly appreciate it you must listen to it like you listen to great classical music, with earphones or in a quiet room, with a glass of wine perhaps, while you relax.

Holliday was very near the end of her life when she made this recording, and frankly her voice was nearly gone. She'd had a hard, difficult life, and at first you think she's not even singing very well. She's hoarse, her voice cracks now and then, and rasps throughout. But by the time you're halfway through it, if you're really listening, likely your heart will be breaking---because hers so obviously was.

It's simply an amazing recording.

Artie Shaw: Begin the Beguine

A contemporary to such big band swing greats as Bennie Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw managed to do something unique. While the other big band musicians mostly wrote pop music with strong jazz influence, Shaw's music tended to be jazz music with a pop accessibility. It was improvizational, original, cutting edge, and yet still kids in their 20s could listen to it and jump, jive and swing to it.

While he wasn't the most popular of the big band leaders, he was peerless in terms of musical ability.

Unfortunately, the best Shaw recordings are all from the 1930s and 1940s, which means they're monaural and limited in fidelity. Nevertheless Shaw's music is so powerful, interesting, and dynamic, it shines right through even the quality limitations of the era.

Buena Vista Social Club

Afro-Cuban Jazz played by masters of an almost forgotten subset of popular jazz. Accessible, dancable, rich, and subtly complex. It sounds laid back when you first listen to it, but the more you listen to it, the more intensity and richness you find. I can think of nothing bad to say about this recording.

Al DiMeola, John McLaughlin, & Paco DeLucia: Friday Night in San Francisco

Three simply phenomenal guitarists explore and virtually make love to the amplified acoustic guitar. While the musical forms are basically jazz with a strong flamenco influence, the music otherwise defies categorization. But I don't see how any fan of any form of guitar music can fail to be both impressed and awed by this amazing live recording.

I think even Andres Segovia would have respected what these musicians could do together.

Mahavishnu Orchestra: Between Nothingness and Eternity.

Having not mentioned any real electric jazz yet, I picked my personal favorite. This 1973 live recording in Central Park could have better recording quality, but the sound is quite acceptable and the music exceptional. Spacey, cerebral, intense, at times mind-blowing. This is probably the quintessential electric Jazz/Fusion recording from the 1970s. It's right on the edge of what I'd call "accessible," since it's not something you'll exactly tap your toes or swing dance to. But if you like electric guitars and synthesizers, and also like complex and interesting music, this is an exceptional and surprising recording.

Duke Ellington and John Coltrane

Ellington and Coltrane represent two different generations and two different mindsets on jazz, and in this recording is in some ways like a baton-passing by Ellington and a tribute to the older generation by Coltrane. It's mostly Ellington's music, but Ellington lays back and lets Coltrane do his thing.

Reportedly, there were no charts or formal arrangements used at any time during the making of this recording. Ellington and Coltrane would sit down at a piano, talk, come to some agreements, then get up and tell the other musicians what they wanted--and then just play. To really appreciate this recording, you want to appreciate that aspect too: these musicians weren't sure just exactly what was going to come out of their instruments at any given moment. They basically knew where they were going, but making it up as they went along anyway. When you feel the excitement of that in your soul, you'll start to get what's so cool about jazz. At least, really good jazz.

Grateful Dead: One From The Vault

Bonus recommendation: A lot of people will hoot at this one, but they can go stuff themselves. The Grateful Dead were seminal pioneers and, at their best, unsurpassable masters of an under-appreciated genre known as "Hippie Jazz," also known these days as the "Jam Band" sub-genre. More or less rock based, hippy jazz is best understood as an eclectic mix of musical styles with a moderate pop sensibility, not too different from what artists like Count Basie and Artie Shaw were all about: accessible, but with no small amount of creative improvization in the mix.

The Grateful Dead were a live band meant to be heard live and, most importantly, they always played every song differently. The set lists changed from night to night, the tempos changed, and while the basic chord structures stayed the same the improvisations often got so wild it often felt impossible for these magicians to find their way back together--but they always did.

The Dead were so improvisational, and their lead guitarist Jerry Garcia sometimes so undisciplined, they sometimes delivered a lousy show. Indeed, it wasn't uncommon for people at some shows to say, "what's the big deal, why do people like this band?"

On a good night, you understood: when they were on, they were on. You had no idea where they were going or what they were going to do but when they were clicking it was mind-blowing.

As you listen to this mid-70s live recording, which features killer sound, note that what may sound like carefully structured songs are, in fact, largely improvisations around themes. Pay particular attention to the solos, and to the breaks as they move between songs, which was where the band liked to improvise the most. At every good Dead show, there were always moments for the real fans when they'd be listening, and enjoying, and all of a sudden they'd hear something and look at each other and go, "wow, where did that come from?" Hear tell it, that happened to the musicians on stage a lot too.

The music is accessible, pleasant, creative, and intense, and I think even serious jazz fans who've never experienced the best of what the good jam bands have to offer will find this a pleasing recording.

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So there you have it: the Dean Esmay pick of jazz music that classical music lovers might well enjoy. I believe you'll find these picks all interesting, with enough depth to show the subtlety, power, and variety that can be found within the jazz art form, and to see its potential.

Now, I'm quite certain that many people will disagree vehemently with some of my recommendations, and maybe all of them. If so, well, that's what the comments are for. So tell me, readers: what do you think of my choices, and what recommendations might you make?

If you ever want to see an egregious example of press spin, not to mention shallow science reporting, just read the New York Times and glance through the headlines on any given day. The latest example is a headline reading "Study Finds That Teenage Virginity Pledges Are Rarely Kept."

Although I have a bone to pick with cultural conservatives, I'll get to them later. Now I'm going to pick on the left-leaning bias of the press, and slipshod reporting when it comes to matters of science.

There's More...

An Irishman recently asked me an interesting question:

I'm writing as an Irishman (hardly the most democratic of countries) and I have to say that I find the American system of election to be very odd and a slight bit undemocratic. Perhaps someone can explain to me what is the reason for the Electoral College System.

My answer is as follows:

The Electoral College is not complicated. Nor is it a bad thing. One must merely understand its construction. As an Irishman, a subject of the nascent European Union, you should find this not particularly difficult to understand at all.

The first thing to understand is that America started as 13 different nations. Each of them with their own legislatures, their own governments. Not at all unlike Europe today: France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, and so on. But for the U.S., it was Virginia, Rhode Island, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, New Hampshire, and so on. Thirteen nations, each of them smaller than any European country today, but each of them a nation unto itself. Its own armies, its own currency, its own system of government, its own traditions.

These little nations decided to band together. Each with their own sovereignty, but surrendering some of that sovereignty to the other nations.

A great debate amongst them occurred. "If we are to band together democratically, but keep our own individual nature, how shall we do it?" This debate went on for several years. Eventually, they established a compromise:

There shall be two forms of legislature. One shall be the House of Representatives, in which each State shall have a minimum of one member, but which shall otherwise be determined by population. So each small nation shall have at least one Represenatative, and yet, the Nations with larger populations shall have a greater amount of representation.

But to guide against the excesses of populism, and to assure that each nation shall have its own unique identity, there shall also be a Senate of wise, learned men. Each State shall have two such Statemen to represent them, no matter how large or small. Thus, a giant nation such as Virginia should have two, and a tiny nation such as Rhode Island should also have two.

The Representatives shall be the Voice of the People. They shall be subject to election every two years. The Senators, however, shall to be subject to loss of office only every six years, so that they may stand aside from everyday politics and be able to vote their consciences.

This is the basic nature of the American governing body.

Yet a great debate continued to rage. "If we should have two Parliaments, two legislatures, who shall preside over them, so that someone should be sure to get things done while debate ensues? Should we be ruled ultimately by a populist? Or should we have a King? And if we are to have a King, how should he be crowned?" Much debate ensued, until a compromise was again reached:

Each nation should have a minimum of one Representative, and two Senators. And so, to elect our head of state, we shall grant each state a minimum of three votes (one Representative, and two Senators), plus a greater number of votes atop this for based upon population.

Ultimately, it is the difference between pure populism, and making sure that each Nation within the Federation is represented.

And so it is today: Each State within the American union has a bare minimum of two Senators, and one Representative. But if a particular Nation is larger than others it shall have more than one Representative, based upon its population.

Thus, a tiny Nation of very few people (such as Minnesota) and a great Nation (such as California) shall have two Senators, but Representatives based upon population.

For our Head of State? He shall be elected based upon the popular vote of a majority of Nations. Each Nation shall have a minimum of three votes (one for each Senator, plus one for each Representative). He who wins the majority of votes from each Nation shall be President, and shall have certain (limited) powers granted to the Head of State.

Which we call our Electoral College: persons from each Nation, from Rhode Island to California, Alaska to New York. The people from each state, based partially upon population, and partially upon the fact that each represents a member of the Union, shall have its vote.

America is one nation. And yet, within that nation, there exists today 50 different small nations. Our Head of State presides over them all.

It seems complicated. But it's not really complicated at all, once you understand it. In America, there are today 50 separate States. Each exerts its own influence, based partially upon its population, but based partially upon its own unique identity.

America is not a collection of counties and provinces. It is a federation of 50 small nations, banded together for their collective good.

The following essay is longish, and will mostly only interest people who do creative work.

In Understanding Comics (which, as I've said before, you should read if you do almost any kind of creative work--web design, application programming, scriptwriting, video production, journalism, short or long fiction, biographical non-fiction, etc. Yes, even if you don't like comics. Yes, it's that good. You should buy it), Scott McCloud unlocked many secrets of the storytelling process for me. But one of the things I've been musing on lately is the difference between Japanese and American storytelling styles.

There was a time when I found many Japanese movies, as well as many of their cartoons and comic books, confusing. I knew there was a difference in their style, but it seemed cryptic and weird, almost like there must be something fundamentally different about the Japanese mind. Incomprehensible, sometimes confusing, although I usually dug it even when I didn't get it.

For example, an archetypal scene in a Japanese movie (or cartoon or comic book) might run something like this: the protagonist is unexpectedly struck down by a goon. He goes flying. Then everything slows to a crawl, and you see the character in a falling-backward position, frozen. Maybe his hair is waving a bit is all. Then the camera cuts, and you see the clock on the wall next to the protagonist, and hear it ticking. You see some birds flying silhouetted against the moon in the window behind him. Then you see and hear some children laughing just outside the building. Suddenly (he's still falling, remember), the hero starts remembering some events from his distant past, some conversations he had, and muses upon them. Then the slow-motion suddenly stops, the hero finishes falling, grunts, turns, and pulls a gun on the goon who just hit him.

"What the hell was all that?" was what I thought any time I saw something like that in Japanese cinema or comics. I was utterly mystified. I thought there must be something deeply, fundamentally different about the Japanese, something almost alien. I sometimes hated it ("gaaah, I'm so confused, what the hell is going on?") but I often dug the style. "The Japanese brain must just be wired differently," I sometimes thought.

Indeed, I know people who refuse to read or look at Japanese comics or cartoons precisely because the see things like this and find them so confusing. Which is too bad, because it's not all that complicated or confusing once you understand a couple of things. Once you do unlock those simple secrets, Japanese art seems cooler than ever, and not at all confusing. They're not all that different from us at all, as it turns out, they just have a slightly different frame of reference.

To understand it, you first have to understand something about the American style of storytelling (which is also the style of most Western cultures): It is very action-oriented. And by "action," I do not mean sword and gun fights, either. A kiss, a bedroom scene, a quiet conversation between mother and son. We still tend to tell these in action-oriented fashion.

Let me see if I can't explain further: What's the #1 reason most Americans give for sitting through a movie even when when they're bored by it? "I want to see what happens next." What is the reason that people who hate Howard Stern still listen to his radio show? "I want to hear what he'll say next."

This attitude suffuses most of our cultural storytelling. By "storytelling," I do not mean just fiction. Read the sports page. Read newspaper stories about events overseas. Pick up almost any biography, especially those simple, popular ones like Monica Lewinsky's autobiography, or George Stephanopoulous' memoir of the years he spent working with the Clintons. The default mode of storytelling is usually the same: Event happens. Someone says or does something about it. Then this happens, and then that, and someone does this, and someone says that, and another thing happens and another thing happens and another thing happens, and we end by pondering what has happened, or possible future events. The end.

Almost all stories we Americans tell involve actions, consequences, and reactions. It is not just Americans, either, nor is it something we invented. Hell, Shakespeare worked in this fashion, at least in all of his plays that I've ever seen or read. There is nothing primitive or childish about this, it is just an observation about style.

Now, to be clear, it is also a generalization, not an ironclad rule. To digress, I want to rant about a pet peeve of mine: Every time I generalize about something, someone almost inevitably feels the need to lecture me about why my generalization must not be true because it does not apply to them, or because they can rattle off a list of exceptions. Why do people do this?!?. Of course there are exceptions! Exceptions make life interesting. Exceptional people are usually my favorite people. They add spice to life, and are all kinds of fun. But exceptions do not disprove generalizations. Exceptions disprove stereotypes.

What's the difference between a generalization and a sterotype?

A generalization is a statement of how things generally work, what holds true a very great deal of the time. A stereotype is an attempt to apply a generalization in an inappropriate or inflexible way.

Just look at the following statements: The Irish are temperamental. The Scots are tight-fisted. Jews go in for accounting, law, medicine, artistry, and academia for their careers. Young guys get horny more often than young girls. Lesbians like softball. Minnesotans like lutefisk.

Every single one of these is a completely valid generalization. They become stereotypes when you try to apply them to every situation and person, when you make stupid assumptions about individuals based solely on those generalizations. If you look at a black guy you barely know, smile slyly, and say, "want some grape soda?" you're being an ass. A great big horse's ass, and I would be embarassed for you. But, if you run a convenience store in a black neighborhood, at least in Detroit, you'd be an idiot if you don't keep a lot of Faygo Grape in stock, because black people buy a lot of that stuff. (By the way, if you're black and you're not chuckling at the above, you need to loosen up. You know it's true.)

Generalizations don't need to be angrily challenged and struck down. What we should do is simply acknowledge them, with a little humor and humility--and bearing in mind that no generalization is ever true in all places and times. If we can get past that, then we can have all kinds of great discussions on why the generalization holds true, why there are exceptions, why the exceptions are interesting, why the generalization might change in different places and times. But the dismissive, "well this isn't true of me, therefore it is not true" attitude destroys a good conversation. Generalizations are not stereotypes, okay? They're rules of thumb, cultural markers, not God's Law About How Everything Always Is Or Should Be.

Generalizations are also lots of fun. So long as we keep them in perspective. Hey, I'm from Texas, and I gotta tell ya: don't mess with Texas. I'll hurt ya. (Hee!)

My, this is turning into a rather Den Bestian essay, isn't it? Well, digression over. Back to storytelling styles:

Americans tend to tell stories in an action-oriented fashion. Even our soap operas, our gentle romantic comedies, and our news reports are written this way. We set a scene, and then describe events and reactions.

This is not a primitive or crude or inferior or childish way of telling tales, by the way. Not at all. Like I said, almost all of Shakespeare's work was written in exactly the same fashion. Furthermore, most of the greatest movies in American cinema, all-time classics like Casablanca, It's A Wonderful Life, The Ten Commandments, Star Wars, The Dirty Dozen, or even Sleepless In Seattle were written just like this. It's just how we tend to see things, how we tend to think of the world.

If it was good enough for Shakespeare, it should be good enough for us, right?

But the Japanese (and other southeast Asian cultures--I just concentrate on Japan because I've seen a lot of Japanese cinema, read a lot of Japanese fiction) have a slightly different frame of reference. It is not alien, nor is it either superior or inferior. It is just different, in an interesting, thought-provoking way. Nor is it difficult to understand. Once you get it, you can appreciate their artistic works more. Furthermore, if you're a creative type, you can draw a good deal of inspiration from it.

So what is the difference? Japanese art tends to put more emphasis on being there rather than getting there. Being somewhere, rather than doing something. There's often a great deal more emphasis on setting a scene, and looking at the scene from different angles.

Especially in their more sophisticated, mature works.

Go watch Akira Kurasawa's all-time classic movie, The Seven Samurai. This is a great movie. In fact, it was so good, some Hollywood producers decided to buy it and turn it into another classic American movie, The Magnificent Seven. (Indeed, as a masculist, I think that Robert Blake has a sililoquy in there on what it is to be a man that I will one day write a long essay about. Men have gotten a horrible bum rap in this country for a very long time, and I'm tired of it. In that one short sililoquy he says more than I'll be able to in a thousand words. Powerful stuff. But, it's a subject for a different essay.)

Anyway, Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai is a great movie. From start to finish. But parts of it seem weird and a little hard to watch, to most Western eyes. There are scenes where we tend to just look and say, "what's going on?" Two Samurai are crouching toward each other, katana drawn. They're frozen, just staring at each other. At some point, they are going to charge, and one or both of them will likely be dead within seconds. But they just stare at each other. The camera flashes to one, then the other. Then to the faces of individual spectators. Then to the background, the skies, the fields. Nothing is happening. We're just being shown flashes of images surrounding the scene.

"What does the field have to do with anything? What do the blank expressions on these random people watching have to do with anything? What does the sky have to do with anything? Why is he showing us this stuff?"

The answer: Kurosawa is emphasizing being there over doing things. The experience of that moment. The scene itself is the important thing, and not what is happening. In fact, other than the psychological tension, nothing is happening. Kurosawa just wants you to feel what it was like to be in that moment.

Let's go back to my example above of the Japanese cartoon, where the hero is struck, and falls. What is the director trying to do with this weird sequence where the hero suddenly freezes in mid-fall, and we see the clock, the birds, the children, these conversations and events from our hero's past? What's happening here is something that has happened to all of us at one time or another: something startling and traumatic happens to you, and all of a sudden time seems to slow down, and the world closes in around you. You suddenly become hyper-aware of your surroundings, details like the clock ticking and the song playing on the radio, and, you start remembering things from your past that relate to this. It all happens in a flash. In just seconds you're flooded with all these impressions.

Well, it's happened to me anyway, and I'm pretty sure it must have happened to most of you at one time or another.

The Western style of storytelling has a hard time showing those moments. We want things to happen, and are confused when things aren't happening.

But the Japanese style has an easy time with this, for they like to put emphasis on the experience of being there in the moment.

The Japanese also like to show things from the perspective of the protagonist looking outward, rather than the experience of the audience watching the protagonist.

Once you get this, an awful lot of their artistic works crystallize for you, and it doesn't seem that odd at all. You just have to wrap your head around it.

So tell me, does that make sense? Do those of you who've watched anime, read manga, or seen some Japanese live action films, see what I'm talking about? Because I find it quite instructive and useful from a storytelling perspective, and I do draw inspiration from it.

Jerry recently sent me these two interesting links on political book-buying habits. The data they present are interesting; the conclusions the author draws are, however, incautious at best.

To understand what I mean, you'll need to have a look of course, so here are the links:

Divided We Stand???

Political Patterns on the Web: Didvided We Stand.... Still.

The basic methodology seems to be that whenever two political books are purchased together, examine which two they were. Now, if someone else, a separate customer, buys one of those two books, look at another book he bought in the same purchase. Then do that with a third, fourth, and fifth customer, and so on, and see what your chart looks like.

Go look at the charts. It'll make sense when you see them.

The chart breakdown is fascinating, but Valdis Krebs, the author, draws several sweeping conclusions that deserve rigorous examination. These include statements such as this:

"All though academics and political pundits may read books from both clusters, the common reader obviously does not."

This is hardly obvious.

What Krebs misses here are the many other kinds of readers that might buy books in these clusters he has identified. My suggestion would be that there are at least eight different types of people who would contribute to the patterns that Krebs has observed:

1) The open-minded person whose political views are well-grounded, well-informed, and firm, but who occasionally decides to pick up a couple of the more popular books on the other side just to see what all the fuss is about. Such a person need not feel the need to buy "one from each side" so he can "balance" it. He knows perfectly well what he believes and why he believes it, having read a good deal on the subject in the past.

2) The "refugee reader," the recently-alienated person who has become disillusioned by his old political views and feels as if he's insulated himself from ideas he should have taken more seriously in the past. So he thirstily seizes on several books that map to ideas he had never bothered to explore before so he can learn more about them. He may wind up "converted," or he may not.

3) The "guerilla reader," who wishes to understand his enemies' arguments in order to better poke holes in them.

4) The "boomerang partisan," one who is very staunch and quite narrow-minded, but who likes to think he is open-minded. Thus, he occasionally samples books on the far fringes of the other side just so he can assure himself that they are full of stupid and evil people. (Example: a hard-core, unwavering Democrat who picks up an Ann Coulter and a Michael Savage book just so he can say, "See! those Republicans are all jerkoffs and bigots!")

5) The "rage-addict reader," who reads authors whose views he despises because he gets a perverse pleasure in the anger it gives him. (There are any number of Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage listeners who hate them but listen to them regularly, for example.)

6) The "bumblebee reader," who enjoys a wide variety of political views, but tends to read in clusters, like bees to one cluster or the other of flowers. "Oh, let's see what the lefties are up to this month." "Okay, it's been a while, time to dip back into the righty pool and see where they're at these days.

7) The "daredevil reader," who agrees to read one or two books that a friend has challenged him to read.

8) The "gimme that old time religion" reader, who only buys books that agree with his views, so he can yell "preach it! preach it!" and "see! we're right! we're right!"

I certainly know type 8s, the type Krebs assumes he has uncovered in his charts. But none of types 1-7 have to be "academics," none of them necessarily inhabit ideological echo chabers, and Krebs misses all of them.

I also note that within Krebs' many listed books, some are far more shrill, rant-oriented, and one-sided than others. But even there, I know people who love Ann Coulter's books because they find her to be screamingly funny, even though they admit that she's full of it at least half the time.

But a Victor Davis Hanson, who is near the center of the same cluster as Coulter, is infinitely more subtle, nuanced, and balanced, and much, much less partisan. Hanson is someone that many on the left might find a good deal of common ground with.

Thus, when Krebs says, "It appears that echo chambers have emerged that repeat a consistent message within each cluster," I must say that I simply see no evidence that this is the case.

Krebs says, "See someone reading Sleeping with the Devil? That is someone you can talk to about your candidate. If they are reading Bushwacked or Dereliction of Duty -- the most central books in each cluster -- then either give them a high-five or a sneer, you won't change their views."

In response I say, "pish tosh, Mr. Krebs. You should have more respect for the decency and common sense of the average reader, and the average voter."

As always, the point with statistical data is not that statistics lie--statistics rarely lie, in fact--but in understanding the data and assumptions underlying those statistics.

* Update * Bryan identifies a 9th type of political reader, who I will dub "The Stingy Hoarder." He goes out of his way to listen to read lots of op-ed pieces, in newspapes and magazines and web sites, by people he knows he disagrees strongly with. He will also check books out of the library by people he strongly disagrees with, to read what they have to say. But the only books he'll buy are from respected authors close to his own world view, to both support them with his wallet and treasure copies of their work.

By the way, am I the only one out there who has a copy of The Way Things Ought To Be sitting on his bookshelf right next to Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot? I guess I'm not #9, but I can understand the urge!

(Note: I didn't buy those two books on the same shopping trip!)

Joshua Ellis has a very interesting discussion of the concept of 'taste tribes' which you will find quite worth reading. The short of it is that people tend to like and associate with those who share some of the same tastes, and that the online world is starting to increase the ability of large taste tribes to form.

I think he goes off the rails near the end, however, with a screed about how valueless Britney Spears' music is, and suggesting that the only reason she's successful is the millions of marketing dollars pumped into promoting her. While I have no real use for her music, he's making a fundamental error: believing that marketing money makes people buy things they wouldn't particularly like under normal circumstances.

This view is widespread, and it's false.

Look at last summer's two biggest box-office phenomena: The Hulk and The Cat In The Hat.

What do these two movies have most in common? 1) The studios spent literally tens of millions of dollars promoting them, and 2) they stunk so bad that people who saw them ran screaming from the theaters, warning everyone else off. Almost no one saw these movies as a result.

Some years ago, a group of economists did an in-depth analysis of the most financially successful and popular movies of the previous ten years (running from about 1987 to 1997, if I recall correctly). They concluded that there was absolutely no correlation between how much money was spent on marketing and the success or failure of any movie. Some of the least expensive, least-marketed movies were monster hits, whereas some of the biggest bombs of all time had spent some of the most marketing money.

We see the same phenomenon in politics. For most of the last year everyone has been talking about the Howard Dean phenomenon. He's raised far more money than anyone else. He's spending more money than anyone else. And he just got himself an embarassing ass-whupping in Iowa and looks to be down for the count in New Hampshire. This is because money does not, and never has, won elections. Countless politicians have learned this lesson the hard way--in the last decade, politicians named Steve Forbes, Michael Huffington, Ross Perot, and even George H.W. Bush have all learned this lesson, and Howard Dean looks well onto his way to having his hat handed to him as well.

For decades, Republicans routinely outspent Democrats in political campaigns, and routinely held a minority position in state legislatures, governorships, and both houses of Congress. Democrats didn't complain. Now that Democrats are in the minority position, they're inclined to blame all that Republican money, because they appear incapable (for the moment) of concluding that it's their ideas that aren't selling anymore, and that money's only a minor part of that equation. Indeed, conservatives used to be inclined to grunt about how stupid voters were--even when their candidates outspent Dems, they usually lost anyway! Now that Dems are often on the losing side, they're starting to grumble about how stupid and ignorant the American people are. Do you spot the pattern?

You cannot make people like you, agree with you, or enjoy something, with marketing money. You just cannot. What you need is a product people like (whether it's a politician, a food, a sound recording, a movie, or anything else), and then at least enough money to market that product sufficiently to raise awareness and establish credibility.

The rest will be up to the people.

What the online world's expansion of "taste tribes" has done has made it possible for people to start bypassing the traditional one-to-many marketing methods of record companies, movie studios, foods, politicians, and so on. This is fantastic. That certainly does not guarantee long-term success for any movie, music, politician, food, car or whatever, but it has made it possible for some products to gain widespread notoriety without so much marketing money.

Britney Spears' music is certainly not to my tastes, but it certainly does not suck. I'm just not her target audience. Her target is young teen and pre-teen girls, and some boys of that age. She doesn't have to be a good singer or songwriter; she's got producers and songwriters who help her craft simple, catchy tunes, with lyrics that appeal to what's typically in the hearts and souls of young girls. On top of that she's pretty and perky and, well, for want of a better word, "sassy," at least so far as "sassy" is defined by your average 12 year old.

That being the goal, Britney's music is exceptionally good. It's going straight to a "taste tribe" that neither Joshua Ellis nor I belong to, nor ever will belong to. That doesn't mean she sucks, it means we think she sucks. But our opinion has not been sought in the matter, and is not needed. Catchy, perky, simple music appeals to some people, especially very young people.

I fully expect that in years to come, there will be successful musicians self-distributing their music through the internet who are making music and creating images for themselves that are in no way fundamentally different from the formula Britney Spears uses, or that other popular girl singers like Cyndi Lauper, Tiffany, the Go-Go's, Melanie, Lulu, and so on have used through the decades. They'll just have more ways to reach their audience now. I also suspect that Britney will disappear like all of them did, unless she manages to do what Madonna did: grow and change with her audience as they age, thereby keeping their interest.

All that said, I think Ellis' point about taste tribes, and the way the internet is expanding what's possible for distribution, is right on the money. In fact, the very fact that this phenomenon of online taste tribes forming, and creating commercial successes, is still more proof of the validity of much that can be found in the Clue Train Manifesto.

The world of marketing products is indeed changing. Mostly in very positive ways.

(Via Gerund.)

Kate recently made a posting about weight, and for some reason chose to link me in it while she wondered why American white people seem to be obsessed with overweight.

Throughout most of human history, most people didn't get enough to eat. Being somewhat-slender was the normal state of human affairs, because most people were at least a little hungry most of the time.

I invite you to read much classic literature, going all the way back to the writings of the likes of Homer. Obsession with great feasts where people ate enormous amounts of sumptuous foods was quite normal for the literature of the day. If you read this ancient literature with the notion that most people were usually at least a little hungry, this isn't in the least bit surprising. Reading a description of sumptuous feasts was rather like reading porn is for us today: titillating and evocative.

In such times, either a man or a woman who was significantly overweight was an odd thing to see. Because most people simply couldn't eat enough to get fat.

Fast-forward to the modern West: we are so wealthy that even the majority of our poor people are overweight. In fact, in today's wealthy American society, it's a sign of poverty that you're fat, because you eat a lot of hot dogs, macaroni & cheese, cheap white bread, potato chips, and other things likely to make you fat, and you have neither the leisure time nor the spare income to afford low-cal foods and a gym membership.

Thus, go back 200 years ago: if you were fat, you were likely powerful, well-respected, and wealthy, and an ideal mate. Whether you were female or male, carrying extra weight was a sign of prosperity, and power.

Indeed, in such calorie-deprived cultures, anyone, male or female, who had a metabolism that was slower than others (and thus tended to retain weight better) tended to look like someone better able to survive harsh times.

Today's modern world is the only time in human history where being obese is a sign of poverty. All that mac & cheese, cheap hamburger, and so on, that would be a veritable feast of unbelievable wealth in Homer's time, is what our "poor" people here in early 21st Century America take for granted.

Long and short of it: 200 years ago, if you were fat, you were prosperous and powerful, or at least better able to survive harsh winters. Whereas today, being fat is a sign that you are simply slovenly or poor, and not particularly desirable. Lots of Twinkies and Big Macs and Coca Cola and so on. In fact, it's a little ironic that such sumptuous fests are now the everyday meal of poor people.

The curse of modern poverty: more calories than you know what to do with.

If you want me to get even more crude, for the male, 200 years ago, a voluptuous female indicated a woman who could probably bear and nurse many children even through harsh times. Today, at a time where we know that most children and mothers survive childbirth, and that 99% of our children will survive to adulthood, such a trait no longer seems quite so desirable.

Thus a slender female indicates a desirable sexual playmate who'll bear you the 2-3 children you instinctively know you need to spread your progeny--as opposed to the 6-9 you needed in centuries past to assure that your genetic line would be passed on. In earlier times, a male who was slightly overweight was no big deal, just a sign of power and prosperity. Today, a little extra weight on a man is no big deal, but if he's extremely fat, then you know he's likely got diseases (diabetes, heart disease, slovenliness) that make him less desirable as the father of your children. So a few extra pounds on a man is no big deal, but a lot of extra pounds makes him less desirable.

Because sex is, in the end, all about how to produce the most survivable offspring. Even for people who intellectually think they don't want children, the primal urge still predominates.

Thus, in modern society, men will always seek females who are not particularly overweight, while women will care somewhat less about such things, although too much overweight will still repulse them.

And none of it, really, has anything to do with cultural values. Because instinct still predominates.

Such is my opinion, as a late 30-something male who has lost 80 pounds in the last year, and still needs to lose more. People with upbringings in poor cultures tend to still value overweight as a sign of power and prosperity, whereas people raised in wealthy cultures (and, really, "middle class white American" is obscenely wealthy by most historical standards) have an instinctive bias toward thinness as being a desirable sign of wealth and power.

Thus spaketh the Dean. ;-)

In El Paso, Texas, in the summer of 1966, a girl named Mary gave birth to her second son.

Her first son had been born in 1964, and given up for adoption. She had absolutely refused to have the abortion her grandmother wanted her to have, and her family was in no condition to take care of the new child. That first son's father had been the owner of a night club for teenagers there in El Paso, and was also an up-and-coming rock star. Today he is best known for the big national hit "I Fought The Law (& The Law Won)," although he also had several regional hits in places like Texas and California, and everyone expected him to make it very big very soon. The scandal of having a bastard child would have ruined him, though, especially because he was in his 20s and the girl was so young. She was madly in love with him and wanted to marry him, but was too young legally to do so. So all concerned among the families decided the child must be given up for adoption--although they didn't bother much with asking the young mother what she wanted to do.

Eventually, the rock star died an untimely and mysterious death in California, under obscure circumstances no one quite understands. It was officially ruled a suicide, although the family to this day still doesn't believe it. In any case, you can still find excellent collections of this man's music, which feature shockingly good recording quality, almost digital quality, even though almost all his hits were recorded in his home studio in El Paso in the mid-60s. Bobby Fuller was quite gifted both musically and as a recording engineer. Although his taste for young girls seems rather deplorable in retrospect, it seems he was rather shocked to learn just how young she was. Like many teenaged girls she looked and acted a good bit older than she was, and very much enjoyed the company of men. Especially musicians. Especially him.

Interestingly, in the 1980s, Mary managed to make contact with her long-lost first biological son. She also became deeply involved in a national movement to help birth parents and adoptees to find each other, and had significant influence in getting legislation passed to make it easier for both children and birth parents to find each other (if they wanted to). During those years, Mary was also deeply involved in and committed to the Pro-Life movement. But all that was many years away, and in those early days, young Mary did her best not to think too much about her first son, and almost never talked about him to anyone.

So, having been born herself in 1950, young Mary was only 16 years old at the time her second son was born. After becoming pregnant, she had married that boy's father, a fellow teenager named Richard. The name "Dean' being something of a family tradition for the Esmays (going back to an ancestor who married a woman named Laura Dean), they named the boy Dean. Four years later, his sister Kristine was born.

They weren't really very good days for the young couple, although they made a brave go of it at first. Neither one of them'd had what you could call a healthy upbringing as children, mental illness and alcoholism having plagued parts of both of their families. Mary's young husband's upbringing was particularly rough; his parents having been such severe alcoholics that their children often had to fend for themselves for days at a time and sometimes didn't eat. Young Richard's mother eventually killed herself when he was just a child. Many, many years later, he told his (adult) son that when that happened, he'd felt nothing.

Young Mary's family tried to be supportive of the young couple, but her parents had divorced, and her mother and grandmother left the country to work in the Civil Service in Okinawa. This left only Mary's father, her paternal grandmother, and her older brother (all of 20 years old himself) for support, and, being poor, none of them could do much more than offer their presence and guidance. Richard's father was friendly enough when he was sober, but never offered much in the way of moral or emotional support.

In the beginning, however, when their first son together was born, young Richard worked hard at his job with the phone company, and tried to be a good provider for Mary and their child. He was very proud to do it. Unfortunately, at the age of 17, the stresses of work and fatherhood were too much for the young man, and he had difficulty coping. He also had no emotional support structure to fall on except his young wife and his infant child. He began drinking heavily, badly out of control much of the time, and, while he was usually a very gentle, friendly, funny person, when he drank his inner demons would often come out. He occasionally became violent and abusive while drunk. Sometimes, to a frightening and dangerous degree. There was many a time when young Mary had to flee the house with her children because he'd been drinking and was on a tear again. Other times her young son hid in the tree in their back yard, or under his bed, while the fighting was going on.

The divorce was, in the end, an inevitability.

It was easy for Mary's young son to hate his father for all that sometimes. It was also easy for him to hate his mother for rushing into having a child at such an age and under such circumstances. She'd wanted that baby back, and forcing a young man into a shotgun wedding before either of them was ready just so she could have another one was hardly the most responsible choice. But now that her son is 37 years old, he sees the situation for what it was: troubled teenagers desperately trying to cope in a frightening and difficult and painful world, still nursing their own internal wounds. It was all a long, long time ago, and all those involved are very different people today.

Nevertheless, soon after the birth of Mary's daughter Kristine, the divorce came. It was the appropriate thing to do, but divorce was considered rather scandalous in those days, and it was something she was rather ashamed of. But Mary was still young, and quite pretty, and determined to make it in the world. At 21 years old, even with two kids in tow, it still didn't take her long to find another husband.

He was a recently-returned, decorated veteran (bronze star and two purple hearts, amongst others) of the Vietnam war named Gary. He was a Border Patrol agent at that time. He was at the start of a very long and successful career with the Immigration & Naturalization Service, first as Border Patrol, then as Special Agent, and eventually retiring as assistant director for investigations in the state of Texas.

He was a very good man in many ways, although sometimes emotionally cold, and like so many stepfathers who'd never had kids of his own, was less understanding with children than he at times should have been. He could be alternately affectionate and harsh, and occasionally just plain mean. It was hard to predict which side of him you might see in those days. On the other hand, it would be easy to make Mary out as a saint, and she was not one; at times she was rather manipulative, and she tended to try to make herself the center of attention. She was constantly caught up in her own personal dramas, and sometimes played out her own issues through her children.

Still, Gary and Mary were mostly happy together, in the beginning, and the kids were doing okay. A few years into the marriage, though, Mary gave birth to Gary's first son, Michael Harlan, who unfortunately had severe birth defects. He died within days. Both Mary and Gary took that very hard, and it seems that their marriage began to crumble around that time. They did have another son together before the end, who they named Gary, after his father. Recently, young Gary followed in his father's footsteps, first joining the Border Patrol, and now recently having been promoted to special agent within the newly-formed Department of Homeland Security.

Not long after Michael Harlan's death, however, it started to become apparent that Mary had some profound problems. Her own mother had suffered from mental problems, so much so that in the 1950s she'd been institutionalized for a while, and underwent shock therapy. Mary began exhibiting the same symptoms as her mother had, and began spiralling into the depths of that horrible disease, that hellhole known as profound mental depression. Having a second child with Gary did not help pull her through it.

There in the late 1970s, mental health problems still carried a fairly severe stigma. Whether diagnosed or undiagnosed, severe depression was looked down on with contempt and misunderstanding. Although today we understand that these things are medical problems that can usually be treated, in those days that was less widely understood and far less accepted.

Eventually, Mary and Gary divorced, and she wound up alone again, this time with three children: Dean, Kristine, and young Gary. Child support payments and occasional reliance on the welfare system kept them afloat, but Mary's ability to cope eventually collapsed. The children over the next few years were alternately separated and brought back together, in constantly varying arrangements that never worked out to anyone's real satisfaction.

By the time her son Dean hit 15, he was an angry, rebellious, resentful, and cynical young man who did not particularly like anyone in his own family. He left home slightly before his 16th birthday, and never came back. He would go several years at a time having no contact with Mary, his father, his siblings, or any of his other relatives, as he generally wanted little or nothing to do with any of them.

It was not until he was in his late 20s that Mary's son Dean started learning how to forgive, how to place the lives and actions of those young people and the demons that sometimes drove them into some kind of perspective. By the time he reached the age of 30, he'd all but lost the ball of anger that had for so many years seemed permanently lodged in his chest.

Indeed, it was in trying to get his upbringing into perspective, to understand who those young people he called his parents were, that he finally realized that he cared about them after all.

But now let me tell you a few more things about Mary. She gave her son Dean certain gifts when he was a child that he has carried with him throughout his entire lifetime since, and I'd like to tell you about a few of those.

Her greatest gift to him was, of course, life itself.

Her second greatest gift was that she instilled a love of the written word into him. His earliest and happiest memories as a child involve sitting in his mother's lap while she read to him, encouraging him to learn the letters and the words. It was their favorite activity together, and by the time he reached school age he was already reading and writing well in advance of his peers.

She gave him her at-times goofball, at times subtle wit.

She gave him a sense of introspection and, although he's sometimes overused that particular gift, he knows it is a blessing in the end.

She gave him the gift of empathy, the ability to really care about other people's feelings, and to realize that hurting someone's feelings isn't particularly admirable.

She helped him to learn to forgive others for their sins--and to forgive himself for his own.

She helped him to understand just how desperately important fathers are in their children's lives, and how having children is a deep and abiding responsibility--yet that parents are human, and can never be perfect.

But most of all, she gave him the gifts of life and love.

Now I'd like to tell you a few more brief things about Mary, and then I'll be done.

She reads this weblog every day.

She is a big fan of her son's writing.

She turns 54 today.

Happy birthday, Mom. I love you.

Growing up in the '80s, I was often taught that women and men are not fundamentally different in anything other than anatomy "There's no real difference in the sexes except the shape of your underewar," I used to say. I took that notion to heart, and it wound up complicating my relations with women in many different ways. Because it's nonsense.

The funny thing is, I've always been a philogynist (look it up). Most of my favorite friends are female, and still are. Not for silly reasons, like "they're more nurturing" or "they're more in touch with their feelings," either. In fact, as a rule, my experience is that women are not more nurturing than men, except perhaps to their own children. Furthermore, I tend to think that women are less "in touch" with their feelings than men are. They tend to feel things more deeply, but are less conscious of the fact that they do. In fact, I find that they tend to believe that whatever emotions they are feeling at the moment are entirely rational and sensible, even when they're obviously not being rational.

Indeed, I have one recommendation for every male on the planet, one that I think each and every male needs to learn: When a woman is upset about something, and she is telling you why she is upset, do not make any suggestions about what she could do to fix her situation.

I mean it. Don't do it. If she's describing to you why she's upset, about almost anything, never, never, never, never, never, never, NEVER give so much as the hint of a suggestion as to what she could do about it. Just listen, and nod, and tell her how that you can relate to how and why she's upset.

You're not being patronizing if you do this. You're just getting your head into the female psyche. Because if you make so much as one suggestion about what she could do to fix the situation, she will think you are an asshole.

Write it down, my man. This is how females work. Take it to the bank. It ought to be in the Bible: "Thou shalt not tell her how to fix it."

Whole marriages have been lost over men's inability to understand this, and respect it. The truth is that if you tell them how to fix whatever's bothering them, most of the time they'll hate you.

Indeed, the comedian Tim Allen made a big part of his early career out of men's clueless inability to understand this. If you ever watched the show Home Improvement, almost every show was about Husband Tim's supposed "insensitivity" to his wife's needs. When what was really happening wasn't that he wasn't listening, but rather, that he didn't understand her. (Unfortunately, the show usually made him the bad guy in such encounters, which is why I got sick of it and stopped watching.)

Test me on this. This is just how the female of the species works. They want you to relate to their problems, not fix them. Recognizing that fact isn't patronizing, it's just acknowledging reality.

Mind you, it wouldn't hurt much if you women would realize that when you come to a man with a problem, his urge is to figure out how to fix it. Be that as it may, men need to learn that that's not what women are generally looking for when they're upset about something.

I make no secret of the fact that I think that the gender-feminists are generally full of shit. The biggest area in which I think they're full of it is in their notion of the female as a creature who was oppressed by men throughout history until brave "feminists" liberated their minds. This is, and always has been, utter nonsense. Women have always, as a rule, been self-assured and self-directed, and far more powerful than (mostly male) historians have been willing to acknowledge.

I think men and women are different. I think they have different strengths and weaknesses that come along with their sex. I also think it's a spectrum, so that some men are stronger on the feminine virtues than some women, and vice-versa. It isn't a set-in-stone thing, it's just a human reality. A delightful reality, in most cases.

So here's the thing: If you can't acknowledge that the male animal has greater upper-body strength, and a more athletic cardio-vascular system, then you're just silly. That's what our big chests and shoulders give us. We're able to breath in more oxygen when stressed, able to sprint a bit faster, lift a bit more, throw a bit further, unscrew bottles a bit better. You're just being silly if you don't acknowledge that.

Yes, there are women who can run faster than me, who might even be able to beat me at arm-wrestling, but really, let's just get real: men are generally better at that stuff.

So what are women generally better at?

I eschew the trite notion that they're better at "emotional stuff." Bullshit. They are better at some emotional stuff, but, as I said above, sometimes they're actually less good at it than men are.

No, actually, I think there are three very physical areas where women excel men. They may surprise you.

There's More...

Lunch time. Hungry. Look in lunch bag.

Sigh. Two frozen burritos. Uninspiring.

Oh well. Walk to microwave. Contemplate dull lunch while waiting.

Eye spies condiment tray. Packets. Ketchup, mayonaise, mustard.

Mustard?

Burritos out of microwave, steaming beans and beef bursting slightly out of folds.

Mustard?

Tear open with teeth, apply liberally onto beef and beans.

Surprise. Yum!

I have been saying for something like a year that the candidate I most desperately hope for Democrats to nominate is Senator Joe Lieberman. While he is consistently dismissed by most observers, I note that he is consistently in the top 3-4 candidates in the polls, and is steadfastly refusing to fade away. He is a moderate long-shot, but far from dead, and if I could afford it right now, I'd throw his campaign some cash.

Howard Dean is toxic. Not just to the country as a whole (although he is that), but to one of our most important, indeed vital, institutions: the Democratic Party.

It remains an utterly poisonous untruth to claim that George W. Bush "stole" the 2000 election, or that there was anything illegitimate about his narrow victory. He is not even the first President in living memory to win the Presidency while losing the popular vote; we are now pretty sure that John F. Kennedy also lost the popular vote to Richard Nixon in 1960. And Kennedy wasn't the first, either, because both Presidents Hayes and Harrison did it before him. We don't elect Presidents by popular vote, and never have. We do it based on semi-proportional representation of state elections (i.e. the electoral college), an enduring and functional way of electing Presidents that's as old as the Constitution, and has many valuable features that make it unlikely to ever change (among them, that it forces the candidates to pay attention to state issues).

Furthermore, it is completely without merit to continuously claim that Bush cheated to pull off his win in Florida, or that he was "appointed" by a right-wing Supreme Court. (Yes, I said it's false, and see this article if you aren't aware that it's false. It is simply not a matter of opinion, and not particularly subject to debate by rational persons. See this article too). Continuing to cling to this myth about stolen and illegitimate elections isn't just delusional, it's damaging to the country as a whole. Fortunately, only about 18% of the country believes in this delusion, but they appear to be almost all of Howard Dean's supporters--at least, he's the candidate who's most effectively exploited their rage, anyway.

And by the way, I'm going to repeat something I've said before in response to people who've told me how nice and sincere and optimistic and patriotic Howard Dean's supporters often are. The fact is that if you believe in, and put forth, vile falsehoods, I don't particularly care how cool you are to hang out with at parties, or what a terrific time you have hanging out with your fellow Dean supporters. If falsehoods about the 2000 election, which have been debunked time and again, drive your support, and if you believe vile things about America going to war just for oil or because we are bully imperialists or just want to make our President's business cronies rich, then you believe hateful things and are, at core, a hateful person. I don't care how many ear piercings you have, what kind of cool laid back attitude you have, how interesting your taste in music is, or what kind of terrific parties you throw. You believe vile, hateful, and deeply hurtful things about your own country, not to mention a President that tens of millions of decent, not particularly stupid people voted for and still support. (By the way, a Howard Dean supporter gave me that link--no surprise, just read the campaign web site that those people spend so much time bragging about as "innovative" and "daring" and so forth).

Howard Dean's shameless way of playing to that kind of irrationality--not just now and then in little jokes, but as a backbone undercurrent of his entire campagin--is toxic for the country as well as his party. Worse, he compounds this with very shallow, often irresponsible stances on national security that throw the Democratic Party back to its bad-old pre-Clinton days. Whatever else may be said of his other policy proposals (some of which I agree with, some of which I don't), the man is not who we need leading the world's oldest and (arguably) greatest political party.

Wesley Clark, on the other hand, is interesting. While he keeps saying stupid things in off-the-cuff remarks, he appears to be trying manfully to pull the party toward a Clintonian centrism, and deserves encouragement in that regard. Like almost all the Dems, he's exploiting rage, but it's not the backbone of his campaign. I could find a way to live with this guy, maybe.

The New Republic, however, recently gave a ringing endorsement to Joe Lieberman, one that I almost entirely agree with. I take issue with some of their characterizations of history (they dodge just how much Reaganism was embeded in the core of many of Clinton's policies, and their characterizations of the 2002 elections are shallow), but I can hardly dispute their arguments about why Joe is such a good choice. The money quote is in the conclusion:

The deep irony of Lieberman's campaign is that many Democrats view him as timid. But how much courage does it take for Dean to throw red meat to the party faithful? The Democratic Party is racing back to the '80s, with interest groups enforcing litmus tests on everything from partial-birth abortion to steel tariffs, and party activists dangerously out of touch with a country that feels threatened by terrorism, not Donald Rumsfeld. Dean has helped create this mood of self-righteous delusion, and his competitors have, to varying degrees, accommodated themselves to it. Only Lieberman--the supposed candidate of appeasement--is challenging his party, enduring boos at event after event, to articulate a different, better vision of what it means to be a Democrat. Three years ago, that vision seemed ascendant. Today, it is once again at the margins. It may take years, or even decades, for Democrats to relearn the lessons we thought, naïvely, they had learned for good under Clinton. But one day, Joe Lieberman's warnings in this campaign will look prophetic. And the principles he has espoused will once again guide the Democratic Party. It will be the work of this magazine, to whatever small degree possible, to hasten that day.

Read the whole thing, as the Professor would say.

"But you voted for Bush!" some of you will say. Yes I did. And I sure as hell won't hesitate for a second to vote for him again if Democrats don't nominate someone sane. But I do not hate Democrats, and I do not hate the Democratic Party, as much as it's done to alienate me over the last 10-15 years. I'd like to think I'm something other than a voice crying in the wilderness here, and I don't think I am. Are those of us saying these things simply wrong? Or do Democrats need to wake up and start listening?

Because this really matters, you know, and more than just the next election is at stake.

PS: You know, I really, really, really miss Pat Moynihan these days. A lot. Bob Kerrey too. And Sam Nunn. Even Dan-freakin'-Rostenkowski. I'm going to miss Dick Gephardt. Hillary's starting to give me some signs of hope, and Joe Biden's still out there and usually a class act. But they've gone from a party I frequently disagree with but will listen to, will try to give a chance, to one that's starting to scare the crap out of me. Does it matter? Do people who see it like me make a difference? I guess time will tell.

Rose and I met through the internet. Personal ads, no less. I even wrote a very popular FAQ about it, although it's a little outdated now. Several online dating services wound up adapting it for their own needs and reprinting it on their sites, and it's still regularly re-posted to a group of personal ad news groups. I even had extensive contacts with the Match.com people when their service first went live.

People joke about online dating, but you know what? It's a fabulous way to meet people, as long as you have the right attitude: you will meet people you don't click with at all, and you might wind up with a few funny stories about weird dates and weird people. But you also just might meet the person you've always been looking for. It's very hard in this modern world to meet people, especially if you don't date people you work with, and this sort of thing is a perfectly sensible solution. It's not "desperate," it's sensible as hell. My brother met his wife that way. My brother-in-law met his wife that way, and they just had their first baby. Another buddy of mine recently proposed to a woman he met through eHarmony. Not a single one of these people is or was stupid, desperate, or psychotic.

Online dating has one wonderful feature that normal dating doesn't usually have, by the way: you both know, up front, what you're looking for. You bypass that entire embarassing and uncomfortable dance: "Are you marriage-minded, do you want kids, are you just looking for a good time, are you just looking for a friend, will I look desperate if I reveal my true desires?" POP, you're right past all that bullcrap, and can concentrate on feeling out whether you've found the person you're looking for or not.

It's not the only way to meet people. But it's a damned good one, so long as you keep your head screwed on straight. I dated seven women I met that way (and several I met more traditional ways) over a period of almost a year. A few weeks after meeting Rosemary, on a beautiful summer night in July, I got steaming drunk with my friend Steve. A very old neighbor lady of his accidentally locked herself out of her house, and I put my left fist through her window to break in and get her back into her house. My knuckles bleeding, I then walked back into Steve's house, called up Rosemary--this was around 3 AM I think--woke her up, and said, "So, are you going to marry me or what?" She said maybe. "I think it's pretty much inevitable, you know," I said. She said okay.

The next morning I woke up with a hangover, stinging knuckles on my left hand, and a chill in my gut. Had I actually done that? Yes, I had. We agreed to back off a bit, but a few weeks later I proposed again. We married that December 15, one of the happiest days of my life.

The heart knows what it knows, even when the head doesn't. Indeed, it helped us to create this.

Having looked at just about all the online dating services out there at one point, I really think eHarmony.com is the very best. Their approach is stronger and more sensible than any I've ever seen. They're much better than Match.com, for example. I signed up for it just to check it out (no, I'm not looking for a new relationship, I just wanted to see how it worked) and it's absolutely rock-solid. I'm convinced that it's worth every penny, and that the 30-day free trial makes it worth giving a whirl. If I were single again (which I hope to God I never am) they're the first service I'd choose.

So here's my free piece of advice for you: if you're single, and don't particularly want to stay that way, get off your duff and do something about it. At worst, you'll gain some funny stories, and at best, you just might find the rest of your life just sitting there waiting for you.

* Update * For the curious, here's the personal ad that got me a wife. The funny part is, she wasn't even looking, she just stumbled on it by accident. Man, just re-reading it brings back great memories. Jesus, it was nine years ago. I was such an ass at that age. Now I'm an even bigger ass, but I'm a happier one!

During the years 1958 and 1959, China experienced what was hailed by Marxists as the "Great Leap Forward." During this time, Mao's regime was directly responsible for between 30 and 40 million deaths.

Please re-read that last sentence, and contemplate it for a moment.

How many people live in your state?

As it happens, I now live in Michigan, whose total population is about 10 million. The cities of Detroit, Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor, Lansing, plus all the other communities, total about 10 million.

And so I repeat: During "The Great Leap Forward," which happened within living memory, the Communists killed between 30 and 40 million people, in a two year period.

Starting in 1966 (the year of my own birth), a lesser pogrom known as the "Cultural Revolution" began, with a new wave of terror and torture that killed mostly-uncounted numbers of people.

Mao Tse Tung was, quite simply, the greatest mass-murderer in human history. Funny how most people don't know that, isn't it?

Want to know more?

"In the summer of 1966, in Beijing alone more than 1,700 people were beaten to death openly by the Red Guards. On the surface, the persecution of 1968 was not as severe as that of 1966. Some people were still beaten in public but usually were beaten to death only behind locked doors. "

"...They hacked Liu's hair, put dirt into her mouth, and beat her. [She] was forced to crawl on the playground and repeatedly say: 'I am Liu Meide. I am a poisonous snake.' ...After a journalist of the Beijing Daily took a photograph, the student kicked Liu from the table to the ground. Liu was pregnant at that time. Her baby died from prenatal injuries soon after the birth."

"At the Shanghai Foreign Languages School, after the Red Guards from Beijing came and beat teachers...during the next day students of this school followed the example of Beijing students and beat their teachers. After some teachers were wounded and bled, they forced the teachers to lick the blood on the ground."

---

Youqin Wang, who teaches at the University of Chicago, has created the Chinese Holocaust Memorial. All that I've written about and more can be found on her terribly important web site.

She is also attempting to construct an online memorial for the victims of the Cultural Revolution. Like the famed American Vietnam War memorial, she is simply listing the names of every person beaten to death or otherwise executed during Mao's second and third waves of terror in the 1960s. The horror is, no one knows all their names. She has made it part of her life's work to find out as many names as she can. She has "only" several thousand so far. But viewing it is still a powerful and heartbreaking experience.

Youqin Wang is a true champion of human rights, and one of my heroes. Here's her site again: Chinese Holocaust Memorial.

Make a point of visiting it. It's important.

By the way, not long ago, someone said to me, "Communism is not Marxism." Even more bitingly amusingly, to me, someone actually recently called me an "anti-Communist bigot."

To the latter point I merely say: Guilty.

Guilty as charged.

You Commie prick.

As the holidays approach, I find myself thinking of my brother Gladimir. I've never met him, but I'd like to tell you a few things about him anyway.

It's an odd name: "Gladimir." It sounds sort of like a cross between "gladiator" and "Vladimir." Funny, huh?

So what can I tell you about him?

His parents were Baby Boomers. They remembered Ed Sullivan, Don Cornelius, Otis Redding, Little Richard, and Elvis Presley so well it practically coursed through their veins. Aretha Franklin was a source of immense pride for them. As their son, he absorbed those names with his mother's milk.

Growing up, he had a vague awareness of who Richard Nixon was. Nothing definitive, nothing specific, but he kind of remembered the resignation speech. He also vaguely--very vaguely--remembered when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. He knew what the Vietnam War was, in a visceral way. Although he couldn't tell you when it started, or exactly why America got involved in it, he knew some older men who served there, and who had very little good to say about it.

The first Presidents he clearly remembered were the aging Jimmy Carter and the exuberant Ronald Reagan. The most formative memory of national tragedy in his life, prior to 9/11, was the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Even though he may not have liked President Reagan, he vividly remembered Reagan's speech about how those seven astronauts slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of God.

He also had a pretty clear memory of the same President saying, "Mr. Gorbechev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbechev, tear down this wall!" Even though he didn't know quite what it all meant, even though he and his family may not have liked that President, it still struck a chord in him, made him shiver and nod in assent.

He saw the emergence of rap music as a mainstream art form. He could tell you who KRS-1 and Run-DMC were, and he could tell you why the first was more important than the second. Whether he was a fan or not, he also saw the emergence of punk rock, including such artists as The Clash, U2, and Blondie. He may have snickered, but if you asked him about Frankie Goes to Hollywood or A Flock Of Seagulls, he'd tell you who they were. He could also tell you who Eddie Van Halen was, and the names of the lace-clad strumpets who sang Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Like A Virgin, and Cruel Summer.

He saw a balding TV star named Bruce Willis turn into a major box office smash. He saw a low-budget Sci-Fi movie called The Terminator transform an awkward Austrian bodybuilder into a major movie star. He saw a charismatic young black man named Will Smith go from obscure rap artist to one of Hollywood's most sought-after stars. He saw black men named Ving Rhames and Samuel L. Jackson turn an oddball flick named Pulp Fiction into an all-time classic.

He didn't know quite what to make of it when President Clinton was impeached, but he was vaguely relieved when Clinton wasn't thrown out of office.

He tried to be blase, tried to believe that race issues were irrelevent, but he cried a little when he saw Halle Berry win her Academy Award. He tried not to let anyone see those tears, though.

I didn't know my brother Gladimir. I never met him. When I tell the tale of his life, I admit that I'm mostly guessing. Yet there are a few things about his life that I am absolutely certain of, know for a fact to be true:

Gladimir Phillppe was born in New Jersey in 1966, the same year I was born. He chose a careeer in military service. And on June 25th, 2003, Gladimir Phillipe was killed in action by enemy fire in Iraq.

In supporting this war, I helped to send him to his death.

I think of my brother Gladimir regularly. He was a better man than I.

Armed Liberal has recently complained that he finds increasingly that, as he reads left-leaning publications, weblogs, and other media, which he spends a lot of time doing, he finds pockets where he has difficulting quite understanding what they're saying. The words he can make out, and there's nothing particularly complex there, but the train of logic is so alien he has trouble wrapping his mind around it.

I've had the same experience. It's been going on longer for me than him I think, but the upshot is the same: you look at a string of statements someone has put together, and practically every sentence is based on an assumption you would like to challenge. Furthermore, you have no desire to challenge it because you want to be argumentative, but simply because it's based on assumptions you no longer share. Or assumptions that you never shared, but that used to seem unimportant, but now seem very important.

I get this a lot when I look at the left side of the blogosphere these days. I also see "humor" that isn't funny. Not that I don't "get" them. But it's like watching a rerun of Good Times and seeing Jimmy Walker clap his hands and say, "Dy-no-mite!" We get that we're supposed to laugh. We even get why we're supposed to laugh. But we don't, because it's not particularly clever or funny.

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