Cable Snooze

It's worth pointing out to the cable fables crowd that political campaigns don't actually register with normal people until some time after Labor Day. There's a long, quiet summer. Nobody but the pros are thinking campaign in July or August.

As far as polling goes, you might as well be asking hibernating bears. So, for example, when the phrase "poll of likely voters" comes up in an August poll, append the words "who didn't hang up on us in something like unhinged fury."

The question is not whether Barack Obama has broken 50% yet. That will come. The question is why John McCain is still becalmed in the horse latitudes — and who gets tossed overboard next?

Paris Pwns McJerk

It's funny I didn't notice the gold stilettoes. BBC.com picked right up on that.

Nobody believes Paris Hilton wrote this stuff, of course — there hasn't been a Presidential candidate since Pat Buchanan who could write his own softsoap. Maybe Obama can. Does. Writing takes a lot of time (time it sometime, with a stopwatch, 1000 words).

Perfect delivery, though... :)

My first reaction was that the Paris spoof was at least as good as the "three purple hearts" hatchet job JibJab did on John Kerry (by setting him up for the Swift Boaters.) But it's not a Daisy ad, which was my second thought.

Daisy, if you recall, detonated during the Goldwater convention of 1964. Or so close that nobody ever found the daylight between those two events. Johnson only ran it once. And the Republicans squealed like a stuck pig, but Goldwater's "no vice, no virtue" speech made it easy to believe he was a raving loon.

Nope. Actually, nobody has to take down McCain, either. He'll do it to himself, by himself, in a clearly lucid moment of amphetamine-induced rage, on camera. About one week before the election.

[Update 2008-08-07] Funny thing, this is now being called "McCain's Paris Hilton ad" on MSNBC. That means, whenever anyone says that phrase, "McCain's Paris Hilton ad," the producers pull out this video (Paris Hilton's video!) and not McCain's. Gee, that's incompetent.

Finders Keepers

Waking up... The paint on the inside of my skull is old, damp and peeling. Aside from that... How's your day?

On the bright side, my replacement copy of John F. Adams' Beekeeping: The Gentle Craft (Doubleday, 1972) arrived this afternoon. Good. I don't understand how I ever let this one get out of my hands, but it surprises me not in the least.

I'm an idiot about books. For example, I wrote a fan letter to J. R. R. Tolkien ages and ages ago, just as he was getting famous, and he wrote back! I had a handwritten letter from J. R. R. Tolkien, an autograph, signed by him, plus the hand-addressed envelope it came in, and I put that letter in my boxed set of paperbacks (the Ballantine "courtesy to living authors" edition), blithely sold it several months later to the Little Read Book Shop in Ames, Iowa and did not realize what I had done for years. Someone has a nice gift, with my name on it ;-)

Hmmm...

The Old Farmer's Almanac has never exactly been Mother Jones, it simply is what it is.

Which reminds me that the AARP these days seems mainly to be an insurance lobby, not the senior citizens political action committee it used to be.

I'm not sure that's an improvement. What if Smokey the Bear took over Joe Camel's old job?

Still a fan

Michelle Wie finds a little support out there now and then. Just a reminder that though the 18-year-old missed the cut at (ahem?) "Legends" in Reno-Tahoe this week, so did a ton of older guys. Can you even name who won^† that tournament?

It's a cruel game. But then, the whole point of golf is that normal people can't play this game. It's a natural for that better-than-thou country club cachet. Michelle Wie can play. She's a natural. She's good now, and she'll be phenomenal tomorrow, and a lot of foolish people who wish she'd just go away will vanish in the silence of their private lives.

†_{Parker McLachlin.}

Samus has the I.Q. of a brick

I got as far in this stupid game as the first two Baby Sheegoths (whatever those are) guarding the Wave Beam (whatever that is), after spending hours developing the skills needed just to jump onto the floating ice chunks to get over to the Ice Temple. Every time you fall off, you have to recapitulate a long run through various rooms and hazards just to get back to the same point where you jump off onto the first floater, and fall off trying to make your second jump. The game format is absolutely unforgiving — you're forced to polish your mistakes.

I got bored, frankly. Metroid Prime is tedious, repetitive and overrated. The various battles usually reduce to discovering what trick works this time against that not remotely familiar beastie (the War Wasps seem like old Old Home Week compared to most of 'em), the story line is a simple accomplishment plot: Get the Missle Launcher. Get the Morph Ball. Get the Morph Ball Boost. Get the Space Jump Boots. Get the next thing on the list, and repeat. Sound like fun? You need a life.

I understand there's a larger story involved, which is "gradually revealed" as you explore the dungeons and discover item updates. It reduces to finding the boss of the Space Pirates and taking him out. Find the hidden evil thingy ("Metroid Prime," get it?) the Space Pirates covet and destroy that, too. Samus, our hero, is a girl, so we don't even get the age-old narrative hook of Saving the Princess. Saving the Chozo, a tired race of hasbeens who can't even manage to transcend this underdramatized corporeal sphere gracefully, comes in a dim and distant hundredth in my list of immediate priorities.

Beyond that, I'd have to say that frankly the art and ambience are second-rate. By comparison, the original Tomb Raider was, for all the clunkiness of its character engine, absolutely first rate. It almost never hit a wrong note, and almost always left the player gazing around in rapt appreciation.

Metroid Prime fails to achieve simple interest most of the time. Stuff gets on Samus' visor — "realistic-looking" water droplets and splattered bug guts, mainly. The scenes and settings are no more than simple arenas, and one long hall with Yet Another Bug Eyed Monster in the way is much like any other. Like Gotham City, the atmosphere is claustrophobic without suspense. Tallon IV is not an interesting place to visit, and you wouldn't want to live there.

And Samus has the I.Q. of a brick. She has limitations, and she doesn't help the hapless fool who tries to work her controls. She doesn't get better, as the player gets better^†. She's like the passive aggressive date who, all shields up, bats your conversational overtures back like tennis balls, never revealing personality, interest, humor, accomplishment, response or charm, until you wonder whether the pizza will be cold and the movie as stolidly unsatisfactory as present reality.

One and a half stars for Misty Visor.

^†_{It's hard to strike the proper comparison, but "advanced" controls in the Tomb Raider and Zelda franchises, any of the Star Oceans (but especially the second and third), and most Final Fantasy (especially XII) are way more seamless and dynamic. MP weapons levelups seem additive, whereas most good games give you an exponential sense of synergy and emergence. Maybe it is that First Person Shooter perspective, which is really off-putting if you're used to the good Role Playing Games.}

Li'l ol' Barack Obama, a celeb-rity?

You mean like... like... Ahnold "Dutch" Schwarzenegger? Or Ronnie Rayguns? I think McCain must be blowing out his last working synapse. Celebrities achieve political status all the time. Obama may be the first politician since Jack Kennedy to be popular before he was elected Governor of California.

Got the Varia Suit. Hmmmm...

Triclops Pit is fun. About what Michelle Wie is going through right now, I imagine. Critics, critics, critics...

Bee stroll

Took a slow stroll through the white clover at Noelridge Park this afternoon, counting bees.

I lost count, actually, but the totals were something like a dozen honeybees, seven or nine bumblebees, three or four hoverbees (one of them about 1/8"), a few yellow sulfurs and a little black-and-orange skipper, plus half a dozen accidental Japanese beetles (they weren't there for the clover, and they're everywhere this year).

This in a swath about thirty feet wide and two tenths of a mile long. More bees than I've seen this year, so far, yes. But nothing like when I was a kid. That kind of path on a warm sunny day like today would have been chock-a-block with buzz in the old days. The little blue butterflies the size of a dime are gone, too.

Kind of fun. I haven't a wasted a good slow, quiet hour like this in ages (no "walking for exercise," no agenda except counting bees.)

The trick to seeing which is to keep a weather eye on your feet because you're probably about to step on a bumblebee! If your clumsy feet are where they should be, look for wiggling clover blossoms about ten or fifteen feet off in a big circle. It's a bit comical sometimes. A bumblebee can bend a clover stem clear to ground, but she's usually on the other side of the blossom.

Futility At Large

Yesterday, I unblocked VH-1. I finally realized, in the welcome refuge of that Young Marrieds demographic, they don't even bother trying to advertise Viagra.

Dr. Who: "The bees have gone missing."

In Part one of the Dr. Who season finale this Friday, the only "odd thing that's happened lately," so far as one character can recall, is that all the bees have gone missing. Dr. Who seizes on the information and the Earth (and 27 other planets?) is (or might be) soon saved. I haven't been following the series, so I don't know what this is about — but the reference to honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder and the allusion to Douglas Adams' So Long and Thanks for All the Fish was kind of noteworthy.

Flaahgra... Hard to put down, harder to spell!

(Thank you, PinkKittyRose!)

Hello, Sailor!

Working bumblebees spread diseases to the native bumblebee population? Science News is reporting that commercial bees brought in to pollinate greenhouse crops like tomatoes have been escaping from "porous" greenhouses and sharing their parasite loads with native bees.

This story is so wrong on so many levels... Who's the worst offender? The sick bees, the migratory beekeepers who haul sick bumblebee hives from leaky greenhouse to leaky greenhouse, the sloppy greenhouse operators whose low-margin cornercutting lets fed-up bees slip the surly bonds of glass, or the buzzy fat drones who mooch around the local pollenwhackers and strum "Noboddy nose de trubbles I seed" on their tiny banjos?

Matango?

"Deep in the radioactive bowels of the smashed Chernobyl reactor, a strange new lifeform is blooming."

Gee, that's surprising

What's the "Legends Reno-Tahoe Open"? It's the PGA, but no idea who'll be there. Except for Michelle Wie — good for you, kiddo. No more Crazy 88's.

The French Have A Word For It