Enjoy the cookout!

Why do we get sleepy after eating a big meal?

The popular medical opinion is that your body rushes blood to your stomach because it's busy digesting such large quantities, but personally I don't buy that.

I think it's your brain saying, "Ok, clearly you have no idea what you're doing. You don't have any idea how much food is appropriate, or what kind of food you should be eating. Now go to sleep, try again tomorrow."*

This mental mechanism is the same one that gives you an aversion to something you got food poisoning from and makes you throw up when you've had too much to drink. Wired into your mind is a patient parent desperately trying to save you from your own dumb ass.

As you may imagine, I have used this concept to make some very passionate defenses for avoiding spinach, seaweed, turnips, and green beans. My longstanding hatred of each one, I reason, is not a childish dislike for vegetables, but rather my own mind insisting that these things are poison to this particular body.

Especially seaweed.

*So then the minds of most men are trying to save them from watching baseball?

Picking up where I left off last week

If you are a crazy person, this must be a very exciting time to be alive.

There are so many contextual avenues for the modern delusional to work his magic. Big business and government are their old standbys, but every new technological or scientific advance flares the psyche of these individuals!

It makes you wonder how people in the past managed to have paranoid delusions and conspiracy theories, living in era without cameras, satellites, or large-scale corporate structures.

I wonder how they did it?

"You know the king? He's got a secret intelligence division. Whole bunch of guys with tiny easels and canvases that paint pictures of what we're doing. They could be painting us while we sleep!"

"Oh sure the OFFICIAL story is that Charles X died of cholera, but that's just what they want you to believe . . . there was a second illness given to him by the bourgeois!"

"That apple cart?* The one you always see right after you think about apples? It's controlled by a powerful fruit conglomerate that plans to take over the world!"

Yet today's crazy people have it hard. Science has mostly dispelled the public belief in "magic" (And here I'm speaking of magic proper. Please don't trot out that tired idiom about how 'new technology is essentially magic.' You know there's a difference, don't pretend otherwise.) It's harder to convince the un-superstitious.

But it's for the best. Just like any kind of story telling, using a reasonable mechanism to explain yourself is always more compelling than not.

Take "Death of a Salesman" for instance. Would that story be as good if it cut away for "flashback" sequences? No. The hook of that play is how Willy's failing mind draws us in and out of the past. We appreciate the story because it creates a reasonable excuse for what is otherwise a clunky technique.

And that's why we have things like the "X-Files" and "Men in Black," the hard work of the paranoid has found resonance in popular culture.

*Thank you, MarioKart, for keeping me from spelling this word correctly on the first try.

Siren Song

I'm really impressed by the location of that QuickTrip on 316, as should be anyone who makes the drive from Atlanta to Athens on a regular basis.

I mean you can resist the Kangaroo, right? Because it's so close to home. You think about stopping, but then you realize "I'm practically there anyway, I can survive twenty more miles. It would be silly to stop now."

But that QT . . . JUST far enough away. You're close, but you're not TOO close.

I'm particularly aware of this "sweet spot," because anytime I drive for more than thirty minutes at a time, my body begins demanding Dr. Pepper. Not soda in general, mind you, Dr. Pepper specifically. Mr. Pibb will not substitute, because as Mitch Hedberg so aptly put it, "Dude didn't even get his degree."

Now I stopped drinking soda on a regular basis several years ago, when I discovered that doing so ended the near-chronic heartburn I had at the time. And in the past six months or so, I've cut back heavily on the amount of sugar I take in. So this weird Pavlovian Pepper thing is really an inconvenience.

My willpower is strong enough to resist these cravings, for the most part. But that QT . . . it gets me every time. Just when I'm really worn out from driving, anxious to be back and bored with listening to music, there's the QuickTrip.

They have to know. You don't get a spot so precisely tuned to people's carbonation fatigue patters by accident. Thought went into that establishment. Crafty questionnaire-writing individuals held meetings about it. Charts were employed.

It's really a strange thing too. In the past, people ascribed superstitious meanings to these little coincidences in their lives. If you really wanted an apple, then came across man selling apples, you'd think the gods were smiling on you. Or maybe you'd start wondering if you were having premonitions.

But today, things like that aren't superstition.* That apple cart is there because the statistical analysis said you'd be wanting an apple right about now.

*Except for Mint Oreos, which were invented by the Devil, specifically to destroy me personally.

Contrarian Medicine

Now, as I remember it, sugar is bad for you. Or, at least, it's not very good for you. I'm not sure anymore, though, because recently I watched someone choose a soda BECAUSE it was made with sugar.

So I guess sugar is still bad for you, but high fructose corn syrup is worse, which makes sugar ok by comparison. Continuing this logic, you can have a big bowl of Cool Whip for lunch because at least it's not searing-hot volcanic ash.

People tell me that HFCS is bad because it doesn't trigger the chemical signal that tells your brain that you're full. And since your brain doesn't know that you're full, you keep eating. This is, of course, why people who drink sodas with lunch continue to sit there eating meal after meal, charging hundreds of dollars to their credit cards until they pass out from exhaustion. Unfortunately the human mind has absolutely no sort of redundancy for protecting itself, and we're basically just robots to every chemical suggestion.

The best part of the HFCS controversy is how, when I was young, people told me that sugar was bad because it suppressed your appetite. Now HFCS is going the other way, pushing me to finish my broccoli, and people are making a fuss.

But perhaps there is something to it, I mean we weren't designed to consume HFCS, it isn't natural. Natural things are much better for you, except all the ones that will make you sick or kill you if you eat them or maybe just touch them, because you could get a bad rash.

I think the real motivator behind the whole thing is our need to have someone to blame. It's a lot easier to think that bad health is the fault of a single source than to believe that it's a complex issue with a number of factors at work*. That, and hippies who sell healing crystals know when they've found a good hook.

*And by that, I mean that it's our CELL PHONES!

The Latest Addiction

Oh Lord.

This, my friends. This could be worse than "Settler's of Catan." Much worse, considering the online version of it is free.

Oh the time I will spend coming up with new and brilliant strategies for constructing railroad lines at peak efficiency. If ever someone wanted to "Nerd Snipe" me, a board game with lots of strategic options would be the way to go.

Wow, that's some real Smaug info I just gave you there. If you could just forget all about it, that would be awesome.

But as much as I enjoyed "Ticket to Ride," it brought up an unsettling point.

See, at their best, competitive games serve as a sort of personality test. The point of a game is not to win, but to find out what happens when you try to win. By pitting yourself against other people, you draw out elements of yourself that you wouldn't otherwise see. Anyone who has found an extra reserve of strength in the final moments of a football game will know what I'm talking about, but that's not the extent of it.

Do you go after the high-production spots on the Catan board, or do you build away from them in fear of being cramped by your opponent's roads?

Are you the kind of person who builds a big-point city in Carcassonne? Or do you make a bunch of tiny cities on a field that contains one of your farmers?

In "Ticket to Ride," do you find that you are at your best while saving up cards to cross the continent, out-building the competition . . . or are you like me?

Are you kind of a bastard?

I don't know what it is, but I just can't win through non-combative tactics. My best bet in "Ticket to Ride," just like in Carcassonne, is to secure a few points for myself and then spend the rest of the game getting in everyone else's way. I play for the block, it's how I roll.*

But while competitive games offer us one view of ourselves, the oft-missed co-operative game experience show the other half of that coin. How you react in competition with other humans is one thing, but how do you react when you have to work alongside them?

A few months back, I realized that I've always been one of two things in co-op video games: a healer or an archer. They're not that different really. Both are ranged jobs, away from the main fight. Both are support roles: the healer keeps everyone going, the archer keeps an eye on the whole fight and deals with problems (read: dark wizards).

And when I think about that, it reminds me of how startled I was that I liked teaching, and that I was good at it.

And maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised.

*See? Roll? Like dice? Eh? Eh! Oh. Hmm.

My Thought Process: A Beginner's Guide

1. Oh hey, that's a good idea for a blog post.*

2. You know, I should really write that idea on my Ideas list, so I don't forget it. I'm always thinking of these things, but I don't write them down and they're long gone by the time I sit down to write.

3. Ok, so Firefox. Click "More," then "Documents." Alright, in my Google Documents. "All Items," and scroll down . . . "Ideas:", there we go.

4. What was that idea again?

5. Hmmmmm . . .

6. Crap.

7. What what was I doing just now? Did something inspire it?

8. Gotta think. Ok, turn off the Penny Arcade podcast. Put the Animal Crackers away. No distractions.

9. Ummm . . .

10. Crap.

11. Maybe it was something on one of the web pages I have open. Joystiq? No. Fark? No. Garfield minus Garfield? Can't be, even though that one's hilarious. Ring of Fates item list?

12. What? How would the Ring of Fates item list inspire a blog post? My new Wolf's Bow isn't exactly a latter day muse. Wow, now I'm just desperate.

13. Urrrgh! What could I possibly have been thinking about? It was like two minutes ago!

14. Wait a minute! Now I remember! That IS a good idea. Sweet, just enter that in the "Ideas:" list, save it. Good to go.

15. Get the animal crackers, turn my podcast back on.

16. Oh right, I got the idea from something they said in the podcast.

*But not as good as this one!

Ok, so Indy 4

Under no circumstances should you see "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." Sweet merciful crap it's bad. I mean ugh.

I take that back. If you just picked up the kids from soccer in your SUV, and you want to go to the movies anyway just so you can see one of the Fandango commercials that you always laugh at because those paper bag puppets are just "so cute," then by all means plop down your whatever-you-last-paid-for-a-move-plus-75-cents and go see it.

Make no mistake, it's not Harrison Ford who's showing his age in this movie, it's George Lucas. I honestly don't know if the man remembers how to tell stories anymore, or at least which ones are worth telling.

For the core of the problem, I point you to "Wikipedia:"The film's long gestation coincided with Harrison Ford growing older, and this meant the filmmakers had to give a new approach and setting. Instead of tributing Republic Pictures's 1930s serials, the film needed to be more like a 1950's B-Movie."

WHAT.

The 1930 serials had charm, George, charm that came through brilliantly when real actors and directors were applied to it. There's not a lot of charm in "The Crawling Eye" or it's contemporaries, and I know because I've seen plenty. Now please stand up an admit to the class that you just wanted an excuse to make another movie set in the 1950's, because you and Spielberg are part of that generation that remembers the era as a sort of Eden. Also, apparently your Eden is a time when women were largely subjugated and black people weren't allowed to vote.

Lucas' chronological obsession is why Indy 4 goes out of it's way to beat us over the head with 1950's clichés. When Indy was in the diner and told his greaser sidekick to punch "Joe College" so they could escape the Communists, and a classic 1950's hit started playing at just that moment, I knew it was all over.

Three final thoughts on the matter:

1. The sad part is that "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" keeps alluding to Indy's career with the OSS during WWII, which sounds far cooler than the chapter of his life we got. "Indiana Jones and the Quest to Kill Hitler" is infinitely more promising than Harrison Ford running around like Bugs Bunny on a nuclear testing facility. Hey, maybe Lucas could farm that "OSS" stuff out to Genndy Tartakovsky like he did with "Star Wars:Clone Wars!"

2. Every time I try to think about Indy 4, I find myself drifting off to "Uncharted: Drake's Fortune." That game was really a lot of fun, and a better model of this kind of story.

3. They waited ten years to find this script. To find THIS SCRIPT! THIS ONE!*

*TEN YEARS!

Ok, so superhero movies, Part 2

But the fact is that human beings think differently. And I don't mean that they have differences of opinion, I'm saying that they process the same information in different ways.

Imagine three factories standing alongside one another. The first one makes toys, the second makes shovels, the third one makes bombs. All three factories get a daily delivery of steel.

It's the same way with entertainment. People approach it wanting different things, they handle it in different ways, and what they take away from it is all their own.

Which is why reviewing a creative work with a score is such a fantastically stupid idea. It's like saying that steel can be given a numeric grade, like "7.2," and that number summarizes all the toys, shovels, and bombs in the world. You can't measure a movie because there's nothing to measure it against. You and the guy next to you had very separate experiences.

And maybe that's why a lot of the creative things that endure have a knack for hitting the audience on multiple levels. Take Shakespeare. He wrote with elegance, grace, and respect for his characters . . . characters who routinely murdered, went insane, hung out with witches, ran from bears, and settled it all with a good sword fight. He was a good writer. He didn't need to avoid the exciting hooks just to get his work respected. He wrote for the queen and he wrote for the peanut gallery, all in the same stoke.

Which brings me, naturally, to "The Incredibles." It's my favorite kind of movie: the one that's so much better than it had to be. Pixar's reputation and talent plus a superhero theme equals cash money money, dolla dolla bill ya'll. It doesn't have to be any good to make back every cent that goes into it.

But it is good. It succeeds as an action movie. It's entertaining to kids and gives them characters they can identify with. But it also has a lot to say about aging and feeling trapped, about strength and weakness and how they coexist, and about family.

It's really . . . remarkable.*

*Thought I was going to say "incredible," didn't you?

Ok, so superhero movies, Part 1

This week, someone told me that "Iron Man" was, and I'm quoting here, "stupid."

As you might guess, I'm inclined to disagree, but then I did just see it for the second time, so maybe I'm partial at the moment.*

"Reviewing" creative works has always been a nebulous process. People approach their entertainment in an expanse of ways, and the great value of criticism comes in understanding just how deep and complex that expanse can be.

Take "Superman Returns" for instance:

I thought it was terrible. See, I feel that one thing you usually need in a story, and especially a story about good versus evil, is conflict. Maybe I'm crazy, but conflict seems like a pretty important element. "Superman Returns" doesn't really have conflict, because Lex Luthor doesn't have any sort of plan. Oh sure, he's got his little crystal that he's going to throw into the ocean, so he can create an island and flood the world. But does he have a way to defend said island? Missiles? Rockets? A BB gun, anything? No. So why is Superman even bothering with it, when a single army helicopter could handle the whole thing during lunch? Do we send Superman to deal with a gas station robbery? No, we call the local police. Lex's "plot" is so poorly thought out that he might as well have knocked over a Texaco. When Superman showed up, and the henchmen were LITERALLY playing cards, because the script had written them into a corner with nothing else to do, I laughed.

Which is why I was so confused when a friend told me how much he loved the movie. And the weird part is that I agreed with most of his reasoning: The acting and direction were, after all, pretty solid. But to me those elements are a means to a end: telling a good story. If the story isn't good to begin with, then the rest is null and void.

I had never occurred to me that someone might see a movie JUST to see good acting, or good direction, not caring what the story was about.

*So awesome.

Moments of Wii-kness

I have a policy about first-generation electronics (that is, the first run of a product with a new technology).

This policy reads: "How about NO?"

Among geeks, early-adoption carries a fair amount of "cred," but it comes with a price . . . and I mean that literally, it comes with a direct monetary consequence. Plus there's a risk of the hardware defects and software bugs that are common with new products. You're generally better off waiting for the next iteration, which will cost less, have more features, and be more reliable.

Funny how the promise of a government rebate can overwhelm my own good advice. Sweet Lord I want a Kindle.

It's an electronic paper device, which also puts it into a substrate of technology that I try to avoid anyway, separate from the "first-gen" issue.

This substrate is labeled: "Solutions to the problems that no one has."

The Segway is a fine example of this kind of technology. Its very existence asserts that cars, bicycles, and even feet were always missing something, and that this something is best resolved with a several-thousand-dollar piece of equipment that has to be recharged. Unless you need an alternative to a wheelchair, I can't think of a good reason to have one.

And electronic paper is the same way, despite some of its unique properties.

Because, you know, in general . . . regular paper seems to work just fine. The book has been around a long time, and there's a reason. It's a really good design.

But eReaders make use of technology's intoxicating little "hook," they unfold (no pun intended). The most desirable machines always have a "reveal" quality, they open up or unfurl. This is why the XMB won an Emmy. It's the reason cell phones are always finding new ways to flip open. It's why Transformers resonated so strongly with my generation.* There's just something about watching the text of one page vanish into a whole new page that makes your better judgment all woozy.

It's like bananas, really. Bananas are a perfect metaphor of superfluous technologies. In most ways they're completely impractical. They bruise easily, aren't very durable, and you've only got about a two day window between when they're no longer green and when they're black and gooey. But there's just something neat about how they peel. They even have a handle!

*It's also why I'm sitting here thinking about new electronics right after seeing "Iron Man."