A Pilgrim’s Digression

For at least a year now, a friend has been advising that I give something called Second Life a try. At first glance, it seems like another MMORPG, “The Sims” made into a multiplayer online roleplaying game. My friend assures me it is not a game, however.

I registered a character name one night last week, and I installed the client (again, I am at a loss what to call it, since I can’t refer to it as a game). That first night, I didn’t play much, however. Set down naked on the orientation island, I couldn’t even move. I later determined my immobility, and even my nakedness, was due to lag, even though I signed into World of Warcraft soon after quitting Second Life and was able to play just fine.

Yesterday, I was home for the day and, the WoW servers being down, I tried Second Life again. My connection was much stronger at home than in my place in D.C., and it turned out that my character was fully clothed after all. But I still noticed a very slow load time at the start, and some lag later on that made it nearly impossible to enjoy whatever it is I am supposed to enjoy about Second Life.

At one point as I was passing through the Communication part of the orientation, my character completely disappeared. I was spamming the movement keys, trying to get some response from the “game,” and then all of a sudden my character reappeared in the water off the coast of the island, where I had apparently walked or flown while invisible.

My first impressions of Second Life are not positive. The “orientation” is non-intuitive and does not really give any clue as to what I am supposed to “do” once I am off the island and neck-deep in this “virtual world.” I stopped at one of the “Exit to Second Life” signposts after growing tired of the orientation that wasn’t really telling me anything, and I chose to teleport to a survey where I could supposedly make some Linden dollars by taking a survey. The survey “room” was full, though, so I stayed on the orientation island.

Then I chose another Exit and was teleported to a place where I could supposedly watch streaming video and listen to audio. Upon teleporting, I was greeted by a cacophony of people chatting, overlaid by what sounded like promotional clips for Second Life itself. Whether because there were so many people just wandering aimlessly around, or because of the stress of streaming audio of dozens of conversations simultaneously, the application lagged out. My character was moving one frame at a time.

Finally, the first time I heard someone say, “Kiss my ass, motherfucker!” (Not to me specifically, I don’t know who he was talking to), I decided I’d had enough. It wasn’t the cursing necessarily that made me call it quits, it was the general sense of pointlessness of it all. All those voices talking over one another…it gave me a headache trying to make sense of what was going on. I am often confused and bemused by my First Life; why do I need a Second Life that is far and away more confusing?

Anyway, I exited the application…and the audio continued on long after the application had seemingly closed. I had to Force Quit the application to get the audio to go away.

The graphics are bad, far worse than the website indicates in its pictures of character models and landscapes. The client is laggy and seems to bog down even on a strong broadband connection. The Inventory system works like a Windows Explorer file browser, which is to say it really sucks to burrow through a dozen directory levels just to put a shirt on my character! And again, I was just left with this sense of pointlessness. “Ok, I’m here. What do i do?”

I know, I am coming to Second Life from World of Warcraft, a highly polished, commercial game from a game maker with millions of dollars in the bank to spend on development. Maybe some people who come to World of Warcraft for the first time experience the same kind of confusion. I only remember feeling awed the first time I logged into WoW. Trust me, I had no such feeling upon logging in to Second Life.

I would not even evaluate Second Life’s graphics on Blizzard’s level, if it were fun. A fun game can cancel out bad graphics; thus many people still like to play Mike Tyson’s Punch Out after all these years. Second Life is not fun.  Now I’ve given it a second chance; I don’t know if there will be a third chance.

One of the most inane characterizations of Barack Obama this campaign season has been the accusation that he is a “latte-drinking liberal.” Republicans love throwing that around. The appearance of elitism is like the curse of death (supposedly) to a politician.

With that in mind, I found the following picture rather ironic on a number of levels.

The caption for the picture, courtesy of the AP, is “John McCain gives a thumbs up to the coffee at Café Versailles in Miami on Tuesday.” Clearly, as any of us elitist liberals can tell you, that is not just a coffee he is drinking, but an espresso.

And what the heck is a red-blooded American like John McCain doing drinking espresso at a place called, of all things, Café Versailles? If I am not mistaken, that’s French; Royal French, since Versailles was the palace of the Sun King and his descendants, until they lost their heads in the Revolution.

The AP needs to investigate this further, or at least change their caption to actually reflect McCain’s beverage of choice.

While I am on the subject of McCain, one more thing to note. In reports about the recent dust-ups between McCain and Obama, I have detected a strain of arrogant condescension in McCain’s criticisms. Here’s a quote from a campaign rally yesterday.

“I admire and respect Senator Obama. For a young man with very little experience, he’s done very well. For his very, very great lack of experience and knowledge of the issues, he’s been very successful.”

That was clearly meant to elicit a laugh from his supporters. However, McCain had much sharper words for Obama over McCain’s refusal to vote for an extension of the G.I. Bill.

“I take a backseat to no one in my affection, respect and devotion to veterans. And I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my regard for those who did,” McCain said.

The above quote fairly drips with anger and contempt. The remark about Obama “not [feeling] it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform” is right out of the liberal playbook, considering how many times the same charge has been leveled against Cheney and Limbaugh and their ilk. It’s rather startling to hear such a specious and childish argument coming out of the mouth of John McCain.

If McCain is angry, he has no right to be. He did not even show up to vote on the G.I. Bill, but he made it clear that he opposed it because he believes it would hurt retention rates, since veterans would serve only one four year term of service before cashing out and going to college (so he says). Nonetheless, the bill is supported by almost every Veteran’s organization in America.

If this is a preview of how McCain is going to go after Obama in the Fall, Republicans should prepare for defeat. Attacking Obama’s inexperience did not work for Hillary Clinton. In fact it failed miserably. And anger and contempt for Obama because of his youth and inexperience will only serve to alienate a whole lot of people who don’t like it when an old geezer talks down to a younger person.

I don’t want to give McCain any advice, though. If he wants to run his campaign from the Clinton playbook, let him. Doing so, he looks more and more like Bob Dole every day: a proud veteran who served his country with distinction, who has become an angry old man barking at the youngsters to get off his lawn.

And also like Dole, come November McCain is going to be left incredulous at how millions of Americans rejected him and his much-vaunted military record for the young man “who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform.”

Ordinarily, this would not be worthy of note, but last Thursday as I was driving home on I-395 S out of Washington, I saw a brand new Toyota Sequoia. It still had the paper tags, the bright sheen, and the dark, shiny black tires of a car that had just been driven off the lot.

The Sequoia is one of the largest SVUs on the market, second maybe to the Hummer H2. And just as an aside, let me ask you, when was the last time you saw a Hummer on the road? I can’t recall, personally, which only highlights the unusualness of seeing a brand new SVU on the highway, stalled in traffic on a major urban roadway.

So I am sitting there in my car, looking across at this vehicle, and I start thinking, “Who in their right mind buys an enormous SVU these days, with gas prices what they are?”

I really don’t know how to answer that question. The person driving the Sequoia was a young man, probably in his mid-twenties. I try to imagine his conversation with the car salesman.

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For my exercise this morning, I climbed seven flights of stairs. Once up, once down. Seven flights.

I don’t know if stairs are harder on the lungs or legs. I was pretty oxygen-deprived when I reached the top, but then after climbing back down, my legs felt like a couple of Twizzlers. Ironically, I always thought of myself as being in pretty good shape from all the walking I do, but I am finding out that is not the case. Yes, I walk from Capitol Hill to Union Station once a day, about a fifteen minute walk, plus all the walking I do in between–from the house to the bus stop, from the Metro station to work.

Obviously walking is not the intense cardio workout people think it is. Maybe lazy people like me invented the myth that walking is good exercise to rationalize our lack of physical activity.

“Look, I walk from my chair to the refrigerator several times a day. That’s got to count for something!”

It sorta reminds me of these reports one hears occasionally about sex being good exercise. Who knows, sex may well provide a good workout, depending on the variety of Yoga-like positions implemented, and as long as the man lasts long enough. To make a sports comparison, for some people sex is like playing a full nine innings of baseball and scoring a triple homer in the last stretch; for others, it’s like a game of Little League ball where the batter always swings early.

Personally, I’d like to see scientists investigate the health benefits that accrue to women who perform intense fellatio several times a week, but that’s just a sign of how concerned I am about my wife’s health. I have only my wife’s best interests at heart.

Walking is overrated as exercise, though. I can walk from Capitol Hill to the White House at a brisk, city-dweller’s pace, and not break a sweat. I can’t run a hundred yards without nearly losing a lung.

For what it’s worth, I went jogging yesterday for the first time in my life. I don’t even know whether to mention it, because I am not sure I can make running into a habit.

I hate exercise for its own sake. Exercise has to be one of the silliest ideas mankind has ever come up with as a means of occupying his time. Think about this for a moment: would a Neanderthal man purposefully run five miles a day, simply for the sake of running? No, he’s too busy worrying about where his next meal is coming from and defending himself and his family against predators. True, he took his exercise from those necessary activities, and his diet was meager so he probably did not ever have a weight problem. It is also true that a Neanderthal had no concept of cardiovascular health; but my point is that exercise is a concept that could not exist in a culture or society other than one in which the (literally) bread and butter problem of famine does not exist.

Only wealthy, well-fed, content societies have time or resources for exercise.

But one doesn’t even have to go back as far as the stone age to find a time in which the idea of exercise for its own sake would have been regarded as ridiculous. Byron may have swum the Hellespont, but he did not do so for the exercise. Indeed from what I’ve read, by the time he died at age 36, he was actually rather portly, though no less attractive to women of the day. From medieval times, fat was regarded as a sign of wealth and good health, and thus was a rather attractive quality in a potential mate.

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I was browsing the video aisle in Wal-Mart today, and the following DVD cover caught my eye.

The title indicates that this DVD must be a movie about Jesus. “King of Kings,” it says, and the subtitle reinforces that idea: “There is only one.” So why does Jesus look like he is ready to rip someone’s head off? And what’s with the Nazi Iron Cross around his neck?

Strange, I thought. So I look closer, and then I see at the top of the DVD box, “World Wrestling Entertainment.”

I almost laughed out loud, right there in the store. You have to admit there is some irony, here. Wal-Mart–the “Christian” department store that won’t stock Maxim magazine because it contains suggestive photos of women, apparently will stock a blasphemous DVD that depicts a steroid-injected wrestler as Jesus Christ.

If you want to see Christ in action, sweaty and oiled, headlocking his opponent until they scream for mercy, here is the official WWE page for the DVD.

Yesterday’s post was pretty heavy, so to lighten up the mood a bit, here is a “kid’s say the darndest things” anecdote.

Awhile back, we were going somewhere in the car–which seems to always be where these kinds of conversations occur, I don’t know why–and out of the nowhere, Brendan
said, “Tabetha and I are getting married.”

Tabetha is a girl he has been playing with on the playground at school.

“Oh really,” Lynn said. “When are you getting married?”

“When we’re like fifteen or sixteen,” he answered promptly.

“It’s good that at least you’re waiting,” Lynn said.

“Yeah,” he said, “but Mom, I need a baby doll so I can practice.”

“Practice what?”

“Practice being a father.”

Silence for a bit, then Brendan said, “Tabby already has a doll she can use. It’s a real baby that you feed water and it pees and cries. But I need one of my own.”

More silence. Lynn and I both were at a bit of a loss for how to respond. I was just amused, not saying anything at this point.

Brendan kept things going, however.

“Oh, and Mom, you’re going to be the flower girl.”

“Oh, you’ve already decided on your wedding party?” Lynn said.

“Yeah. Josh is going to be the best man.”

I looked at Lynn and whispered, “I had no clue he even knew about best men and flower girls.”

“Maybe Tabby taught him about that,” Lynn said.

To Brendan I said, “What about me? Do I have a place in your wedding?”

“You can be the preacher, Dad,” Brendan said, not missing a beat.

Needless to say, Lynn and I couldn’t contain ourselves anymore after that. We both started laughing. Brendan was very serious about it, though. This is the girl he’s going to marry, and since I’m the minister, I guess that makes him the sweet-talking son of a preacher man.

When I was a kid growing up in West Virginia, on Sunday mornings I’d get up early to watch the Three Stooges and Little Rascals on one of the network stations. I’d get up so early that the only thing on the channel would be a test signal. Yes, we had cable, but the old guard stations weren’t 24/7 yet.

NBC, ABC, CBS still had a sign off time, usually following the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and usually including the playing of the Star Spangled Banner to a fire works presentation and followed by hours of white noise (if you’ve ever seen the film Poltergeist, you know what I”m talking about; after seeing that movie as a kid, I was always afraid to watch white noise, or snow as we called it, on TV).

Well, on those Sunday mornings when the station would finally come on the air, it always began with a slide show of typical West Virginia scenes, set to the tune of John Denver’s song about West Virginia, “Country Roads.” Covered bridges, small towns, mountain vistas, the New River Gorge bridge…

Only thing is, I couldn’t understand a lot of the words. I was still at that early stage where I had trouble understanding the lyrics to music. “Mountain mama,” became, in my mind, something between “Mountain Humus” and “Mountain Hummer.”

I didn’t know what humus or a hummer was–we didn’t have either in West Virginia, at least in polite, rural society. But that’s what it sounded like. Also, there is the fact that I didn’t realize that the song was actually about my state. I thought it was about a woman, maybe John Denver’s grandma, because he kept talking about “her.”

“All my memories / Gather round her…”

And not to mention he hears her voice in the morning, as she calls him. That has to be his mother or grandmother. Who else wakes you up in the morning to get you ready for school?

Anyway, I’ve got West Virginia, and another Mountain Mama, Hillary Clinton, on my mind today.

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I have to say, I am a little disappointed with how the economic stimulus money is being distributed. Let me tell you a few of the things my wife has found out, in researching when we would get our money.

1. The money is disbursed according to the last two digits of your social security number. And if you’re married, that means the husband’s social security number, because traditionally the man is the first person on the tax return. The higher the number, the longer you will have to wait. Even if your wife has a low number, if she is not first on the tax return, it will be disbursed according to the husband’s social security number.
2. So you’ve got a low number. You’ll receive your money almost immediately, right? Not necessarily. If you did not have your April tax refund direct deposited into your bank account, the IRS will not disburse your money until early July, and you will get a paper check.
3. “Well,” you say, “I had my money direct deposited by H and R Block, the third party company that I used to file my taxes.” I am sorry to report that if you used a third party tax preparation service, and you allowed them to take their fee from your refund, no matter whether your tax refund was direct deposited, you will receive a paper check in early July.

Lynn and I are in the latter category. We used H and R Block online, and I allowed them to take their fee from our refund. What that means is that the bank account the IRS has on file for direct deposit is H and R Block. H and R Block received our refund first, and they disbursed it into our account after taking their fee.

We won’t get our stimulus payment until early July.

Really, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me why the disbursement must be on a rolling schedule anyway. We aren’t talking about the 19th century here, where the IRS employs hundreds of employees to sit at a desk sealing checks in envelopes and manually depositing each and every stimulus payment into citizens’ bank accounts. We live in an electronic age where, conceivably, all payments, by check or direct deposit, could be disbursed in a matter of a few days.
My opinion is the government wants the use of our tax dollars for as long as possible, so by stretching out the payments it minimizes its own loss.

Still, it’s aggravating. Our neighbors received their payment yesterday. We will have to wait until July. The only upside is that we will probably go on vacation about the time the stimulus arrives, so it will be a nice extra chunk of change to spend in New England this year.

I am not complaining really. If the government wants to give me back some of my tax dollars, kind of like an extra refund, then by all means I will take it. If Obama is successful in getting another stimulus package passed by the fall, I’ll take that one, too. I just don’t understand how this money stimulates the economy when there are so many restrictions on how and when people will receive it. It becomes a trickle of money going back into the economy, not a flood.

There have been quite a few colorful comparisons used to describe Hillary Clinton over the course of her presidential bid. Curiously, it always seems like the women pundits who come up with the most spiteful comparisons. Maureen Dowd once compared her to the axe murderer in the horror films who keeps coming back, even when you think he has been dispatched.

I’ll offer a comparison of my own. She’s like the woman on the dead cart in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

“I’m not dead,” says The Body that Claims it Isn’t.

“Well you will be soon,” says The Dead Collector.

“I’m getting better,” says The Body that Claims it Isn’t.

“No you aren’t, you’ll be stone dead in a moment,” says The Dead Collector.

“I feel happy; I feel happy!” says The Body that Claims it Isn’t.

Clinton is trying to put get up and walk to prove she’s alive, taking an unscheduled stop today in West Virginia for a rally, but the media has pronounced her dead despite her protestations.

My how quickly things change. It’s even hard to understand why. She was projected to lose North Carolina by double digits–and she lost by 14 points. She was projected to win Indiana–and she won.

Yet the morning’s headlines all proclaimed her, in the one word backhand slap of the New York Post, “Toast.”

Don’t get me wrong, I think she is toast. But nothing really changed between last night and today, really. It makes you wonder if the media didn’t artificially pump up Clinton’s chances to win the nomination, merely to see the fight drag on awhile longer.

Watching Tim Russert pompously proclaim Obama the nominee, as if he were Walter Cronkite declaring that the Vietnam War was lost, was amusing, but also a bit disconcerting.

I mean, who is in charge of choosing our nominee, anyway? The media?

The mind boggles at how quickly the media shifts gears. I hate to say it, but I feel some sympathy for Clinton today. I’ve felt some growing sympathy for her in recent weeks anyway, but today I really felt bad for her. She must feel like the media pulled the wool over her eyes, too, giving her such positive press this past week.

I found this line from a Clinton spokesperson funny and tragic at the same time.

“It’s another beautiful day in downtown Arlington,” began Howard Wolfson, a spokesman for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, on the morning after political pundits declared her presidential bid all but dead.

One can almost hear Clinton from the dead cart, croaking, “But I’m not dead.”

She’s like some piece of foul rubbish Tim Russert just dumped on his compost heap. Now he’s off to score another interview with Golden Boy Obama.

I’m exaggerating the extent of my sympathy for her, but not by much. I think it’s good to reflect on the good she has done in this campaign. yes, I am feeling optimistic today, as opposed to my usual pessimistic self.

I think Clinton’s run for the White House has helped Obama in the following ways:

1. She has toughened him, like a mother who throws her naive son into the deep end to teach him how to swim. Feminists won’t appreciate the motherly metaphor–must strong women always be relegated to either mother or whore status?
2. Her bid for the White House has focused media attention almost exclusively on the Democratic campaign for five months now. Who is John McCain? Many voters are going to be finding themselves asking that question. My seven year-old thinks Clinton and Obama are the only nominees. When I told him John McCain was also running, he had no clue.
3. She has contributed to the airing of some of Obama’s dirty laundry, such as the Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers flaps.

Limbaugh believes that the extended Democratic primary has “bloodied” Obama for the fall, but I think what it has done is exhausted the public on his scandals.  I said it once before, Limbaugh and Hannity blew their wad early on the Rev. Wright thing. Call it a case of “premature immolation.” The mainstream media isn’t going to raise the issue again between now and the election, and although conservatives can harp on it until they are blue in the face, people who aren’t already opposed to Obama are going to be sick of it.

It will be like the Clinton’s and Whitewater, or the Clinton’s and adultery. Republicans were frustrated in the nineties because they couldn’t get any scandals to “stick.” Well, it’s because they drive every scandal into the ground. After awhile, moral indignation wears as thin as the seat of Rush Limbaugh’s “Big and Tall” men’s store pants.

I suspect they are going to face the same issue with Obama. You conservatives think the media fawned all over the Clintons in the nineties, covering up their deceit and crimes? You ain’t seen nothing yet. The hagiography of Barack Obama has yet to begin. Just wait for the Kennedy-esque Vanity Fair piece about the Obama family’s home life…or the endless comparisons to the Kennedy’s generally…the admiration of women anchors for Michelle’s taste in clothing…the cuteness of the Obama kids…Obama’s strength, faith, coolness under fire…oh, just you wait.

I honestly feel really good about Obama’s chances in November. Matched up against an old white guy, who gets older by the day, Obama is going to look like the next incarnation of Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., combined.

You don’t believe me? Vanity Fair is already on the case. just take a look at this article, “It’s the adultery, Stupid,” which makes the case that one reason for Obama’s success is that one can actually imagine his wife and him getting it on in the bedroom. He probably doesn’t have to sneak around for furtive sex with lobbyists, the way John McCain was recently accused of doing.

It’s going to be the most historic election year of my life so far, I suspect. And I can’t wait for it to really begin.