7/28/03

One of the less-pleasant aspects of that all-American passtime, self-employment, is the tendancy of channeling your playtime into gainful occupation to render it less attractive than it was when you started. Some Wise Old Fart once entoned, "Find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life." In my case, I've taken most of the recreational value of my computer and music activities and subsumed it in the pursuit of the unholy dollar. The end result of this devil's bargain is that sometimes I actually pay the mortgage, but in the main my play has become work instead. I tend to think of this as the Spoiler Principle: work trumps Fun.

It's intuitively obvious why this should be the case. In his classic study of Tom Sawyer and the whitewashed fence, Mark Twain examined the differences between work and play and the subtle ways in which they can trade places. Such a transubstantiation is inevitable in the case of earning a living with activities normally associated with recreation. Just ask any hooker -- or bar musician. Up until now, though, rigorous proof of this theorem has been lacking.

One year at Country Fair, we ran into our pal Tom Noddy (aka the Bubble Guy), a vaudevillean of international renown possessed of a subtle, gently ascerbic wit. We asked him how his Fair was going. "Pretty good," he replied. "So far it's been more fun than work." It was a fateful exchange. From it, I conceived the first notion of what would become that great leap forward in Fun Theory, that awesome perameter of Fun evaluation, the Noddy Quotient.

Defined as Fun divided by Work, the NQ provides a metric to a universal Fun Scale, a means to compare different experiences and determine their relative Fun values. But more than this, it is a key to understanding the inevitablity of the Spoiler Principle, as follows:

[The following exposition, an abridgement of the paper the author will read at the Symposium L'Intriege Internationale in Senegal later this year, is of necessity of a highly technical nature, and interested laymen would be advised to consult First Principles of Fun by Dogman and Balderdask for further information.]

If we think of the relationship of work and fun in a given situation as a percentage of return of gratification on investment of time and energy, we may then define the Noddy Quotient, Q_n as

Q_n = F/W (1)

where F is the total fun derived from the work W performed. By inspection, larger values of Q_n are more desirable, with 1.0 as a suitable minimum acceptable amount.

However, for Q_n to have the most universality, it is important for it to be dimensionless, not burdened with an arbeitrary unit of measure. Hence, the work and fun quantities pertinant to any given Q_n must be stated in equivalent metric units. This can lead to severe confusion, eg, smooth talk, flowers and expensive dining can hardly be expressed in units relating to coital satisfaction.

In the absense of such universal metrics, it is necessary to rewrite (1) with a equivalence function E_f in which the fun F derived from the work W is cast in terms of W:

F = E_f(W) (2)

and

Q_n = E_f(W)/W (3)

Thus, the very quantization of Q_n requires a formulation of fun in terms of work -- the essence of the Spoiler Effect.

Furthermore, a more minute examination of the moment to moment relationship of F to W points to the need for the inclusion of time. This leads to the notion of a Noddy Series for any given Q_n, in which

Q_n = F_t(1)/W_t(1) + F_t(2)/W_t(2) ... + F_t(n)/W_t(n) (4)

Substituting (3) into (4) and solving for the total value of Q_n by integrating, we get

(5)

As a relational function, E_f(W) will vary indeterminantly above and below the value of W. However, over time it is bound to diminish. It is thus clear that as t tends to infinity, Q_n tends to 0. Therefore, (5) can be evaluated as some finite amount, F_total, and the term at which further work does not produce further fun defined as

(Q_n)_null = F_t(null)/W_t(null)

A reliable method of identifying t(null) for any given Q_n has yet to be determined, but recent research by Zwog and Zworkins (2000) suggests that certain gifted individuals are capable of perceiving it intuitively.

7/21/03

There's also the tendency of the mature to have a ma-and-paternal or even doting mien towards the sprittens that come into their sphere of influence, be they three or thirty three. While we've always maintained a distance from the act of procreation (as opposed to its physiological precursors), neither S nor I are immune to the Mind-Destroying Rayz (as described in1975 by R Chumleigh) emanating from Little Baby Whatnots, be they humans, kittens or sand scorpions. One Folklife not too long ago I was guided by piteous squeaks to rescue a forlorn kitten that had managed to get caught behind a giant vase in a side courtyard at Seattle Center. We were on our way to the Saturday night participants' party and outside the door to the festivities we paused to fob the little cutie off on some unsuspecting bystander. It took about five minutes for El Furballito to sink its diminutive claws into an attractive teen's sweater and make itself at home. "I'm sure I'll find someone to take her," she crooned, eyes glazing over. We slipped away into the night, grateful to be rid of the burden. Fifteen more minutes and we might have taken the fleabag home ourselves.

Of course, S and I have had a fair share of volunteer nieces and nephews, borrowing them from our friends and acquaintances as the occasion dictated. We've herded unruly mobs of rugrats for overstressed parental units, donated instruments to likely budding musicians and given computer lessons to eager little would-be surfers. Our performances have always been family-friendly, no matter how extended that family might be, and we've never suffered from a lack of dancing babies at our shows, right along with the smiling older folks and husky lezzies in piercings and tattoos and biker (byker?) tackle sweetly foxtrotting cheek to cheek.

My own particular weakness isn't Junior Americans vying for hypothetical recording contracts by shrieking "Proud Mary" on national TV or babies smeared with jelly wrecking the kitchen, uh uh. It's young rebels. From S's lip-ringed baby-dyke caregiver to the young lion with the orange hair who comes in to record deathbreath screaming protest postmetal with a drum machine and an absurdly huge old Peavy amp, Bohemians TNG are cute as a bug's rear to me.

Upon inspection, this has to be viewed as a biological aberration -- humans are hard-wired to kill the stranger, or else mate with them. But in the case of my agegroup, it appears to be an artifact of nurture rather than nature. Baby Boomers (bleh, the original Awful Eponym) grew up in the throes of a constant dinnertime struggle with buzzcut elders of the Gratingest Generation offering mandatory noncredit open-enrollment lectures on The Best Way To Do Everything Or Else Be Wrong Wrong Wrong, with a subtext of And Clean Up Your Room. Perhaps the armed services instilled a love of authority into these well-meaning but hopelessly clueless fossils, or maybe they were just regurgitating the treatment their overbearing immigrant forebearers gave them, happy to be on the dishing-out end for a change.

While some BB'ers might be just as happy to pass the dirty dollar right down the line, a significant portion of breeders in our population bulge were inspired by the partisanism of their childhoods to attempt a more ecumenical approach when their turn came to play the big stick card with their own offspring. Masters of agitprop that we were, we're far more attuned to the messages sent by inappropriate fashion fads or creative potty-mouthery. Instead of seeing swearing, bepierced, rainbow-haired teens as unruly pervos or worse, we perceive the brave, furious individuation and independence developing behind the Halloween costumes. And our own experience with Get-A-Hair- Cut-Young-Man intolerance leaves us more flexible and understanding towards the experiments of the underaged and overhormoned.

It's a reward of virtue that this method also drives potential juvenile delinquents to near distraction at their inability to get a rise out of their ancestral overlords. Worse yet, we're still wild and crazy enough ourselves to occasionally give callow youth a run for their fun, inspiring a reverse-psychology conservatism. While this hopefully doesn't mean that we're raising a crop of Young Republicans, at the very least it may induce them to use protection. And that's a good thing.

But there's another trend here as well, a far more sinister one that's been at work since our own days of whine and acne. The 20th century was termed the Advertising Age by one industry organ, and the horror of it is that they were right. Anything of social value was coopted by marketing forces, a process which started slow but gained enormous momentum as it progressed. The vast maw of cultural commercialization cut its teeth on the 50's, was perfected in the 60's, and by the 70's had attained an efficiency which even the square-peg broken-glass indigestibility of punk rock was powerless to resist. By the 80's, the route was in full progress and cutting-edge artists like Madonna made no effort to avoid the grinding jaws of Da System, choosing instead to ironically swim with the polluted tide. Local produce grunge was barely a tidbit, and modern rawk sells more cars and soft drinks than celebrities do.

In a world where the personal is commercial instead of political, what's an honest conformity-fearing runamuck to do? It may be the most intensely oppressive social force in history, this commandeering of adolescent protest. Without the recalcitrant of adults or the approbation of society to push against, the act of rebellion erodes to meaningless gestures, empty shouting and bad haircuts. That'll bring em back in line, yeah, baby.

So all you moms and pops out there, go home and yell at your kids. Our future depends on it.

7/14/03

Yeah, that's exactly what I said. But once I'd gotten over the shock of finding a literate essay in a tits-and-monsters inker, I was quite taken with the specific notion put forward, that our present-day inability to cope with moral complexity has its roots in our culturally endemic notions of GAWD and DE DEBBIL dividing the universe, to borrow Heinlein's pithy phrase, "like two cats splitting a gopher." Said notions being distinctly un-Christian (though you'd never know it to listen to them) -- a monotheistic religion can't have its god and bifurcate it too -- but quite in keeping with the perpetual soap opera struggles of Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman, two Persian superbeings who need only cool costumes and smartass sidekicks to fit right into a comic book of their own.

To a large extent I tend towards the decidedly more modern idea of morality as a slippery slope of Better and Worse rather than twin peaks of Good and Evil. I find such a viewpoint decidedly more useful in a multicolored world, just as I get more out of my 24 bit monitor than Mac Plus black and white. As such, I struggle to be patient with people who try to turn everything in human life into a competitive sporting event in monochrome jerseys. My little motto is, "I don't believe in the devil, but I believe in people who believe in the devil."

I'm in good company here: the majority of respectable philosophical and humanistic traditions grade on a sliding scale, not pass-fail. The hard sciences, though -- they're a horse of a different wheelbase. Measurement and accuracy and formulas and exact theoretical specifications are the gods there, and Truth and Falsehood the guys with the tights and the bulging muscles.

It should be less of a surprise than it is, then, to find one of the few credible physical manifestations of virtually binary-pure evil in the world comes, not from spiritual inquiry gone terribly wrong (nice try, Mister Hitler, but you did get Germany back on its feet before you wrecked it completely), nor from intellectual sophistry (Communism won WWII in spite of Stalin), but from those priests of Absolutism, of Verifiable Fact, the scientists.

I'm referring here to the single greatest operation of black magick of the 20th century, or maybe ever: the atomic bomb.

Just how ee-ville is Da Bomb? Well, to start with, what good is it? Alfred Nobel's guilty pleasure dynamite has value for mining and such, even if Al felt constrained to give away his fortune in the face of its most common use as a means of blowing up people. Atomic weapons have no such utility, not in any sane engineering scheme at least. Some scifi types claim that A-bombs would make a dandy propulsion system -- that is, if your space ship was big enough not to mind parts being blown off in the process. High flying notions aside, people have tried and they have tried, but nobody has ever come up with a nonlethal use for explosive fission devices. Even <War! Huh! What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothin! Sayitagain!> is more useful than that.

Sure, worthlessness doesn't in and of itself equate to wickedness. It's easy to conflate disfunctionality with moral turpitude. But while they may not be good for anything positive, for what nukes are designed to do -- obliterate human life and real estate -- they're plenty effective. It could be argued that sometimes offing bad people to save good people is a justifiable action. Nukes, though, are the dictionary definition of "overkill," and run a strong race for "collateral damage" as well. They're simply too powerful, too absolute, to be anything but messengers of sheer terror. And if the myriad religions and myths of the world agree on anything, they all identify terror as a harbinger of the Big E.

But if it's mythology you're after, hows about this: {creepy whisper} The Manhattan Project, shrouded in secrecy, a dark conspiracy of amoral investigators into the mysteries of space and time, bent on revenge and driven by fear of the enemy, casting intricate equations and devious engineering spells to unleash a power older than the Sun. The esoteric device built of plutonium, a metal long vanished from the Earth, resurrected like a vampire risen from its coffin, named for the Greek lord of the Underworld -- Devil's Metal! And its premier, in a barren valley known to the Spanish as the Dead Man's Journey. {/creepy whisper} Okay campers, bedtime!

In the end the very mechanism of atomic weapons, the process of fission, gives them away. They unleash their horrific power in the act of disintegration of the material, by methodically and deliberately destroying matter, breaking it down into lesser components and releasing as raw chaotic energy the subatomic "glue" that held it together. At their heart, they're about obliteration, negation, destruction literally for the sake of destruction. Remind you of anything?

Perhaps we may leave it to the principle scientific architect of the Bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant physicist and student of languages who taught himself Sanscrit and schooled under Warner Heisenberg and Ernest Rutherford, to supply the last word on the subject. When the ghastly light of the first nuclear sunrise burst forth at the Trinity site on July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer was moved to quote from the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." He then added "In a very real sense, science has now known sin."

Amen. And holy shit.

7/7/03

I've been locked in relentless, unrequited struggle with an Epson inkjet printer for several days, never quite managing to clear a stubbornly persistent plugged print head -- with a job I've already been paid for held up by the process yet. The beast has jammed up before and always came back with the offering of a new color cartridge. Not this time, boy. I'm going through expendables like they're expendable, and even at the cutrate prices I pay I'm burning good money in sacrifice to bad. The whole CMYK-stained episode has me seriously examining an obsolete wax-jet color printer at the local surplus computer stuff store, the one with the all-too-relevant Computer Museum in the back. I'm still hopeful of bringing the benighted critter back on line, but I'm also pricing color laser printers in the Tiger Direct catalog, which may well be As Low As You Can Go.

I also had to strike a compromise with myself over the analysis and treatment of a dead speedometer in Blue, the Voyager we picked up last summer in a fit of hope. After months of on-again off-again speed and distance indication, the unit finally saw fit to go stone cold belly-up about a month back. Since then I'd been assailing everything from the internet to dealer parts counters in search of a shop manual that contained a circuit diagram and diagnosis tree. Alas, hen's teeth are a drug on the market in comparison. Finally I quit squirming and called up an actual official repair shop for a diagnostic appointment. Oh the mortification!

On the other hand, I had a lot more success with a $5 yardsale espresso maker that sat and eyed us sullenly when we first plugged it in. I burrowed into its guts and discovered a broken switch, which I thaddeused in best eponymous fashion, whereupon it obediently spit hot black speed and bid me drink. The reward (or is that peril?) of caffeine generator repair is that the only way to test is to make some. When do I go to bed again? S is delighted, both because her five smackers weren't flushed down a javacrucian rathole and because the new machine goes from zero to coffee in about thirty seconds and does steamed milk at the push of a button as well. Its logo certifies it to be a Baby Gaggia, but it was immediately christened Baby Gaga.

But the real loss of the week, and the source of all this reflection to begin with, was the immolation of my stalwart companion White Lotus, a 1986 Mazda 626 I inherited in 2000 for all of $500 from a dear friend and loyal fan who was moving to darkest California and couldn't drive two cars at once.

She came along while I was going through a dark passage of my own, wife in ICU, car breaking down, left arm virtually unusable from a pinched nerve, uncertain new job, like that. I put out an SOS on the old tg list for a usable transpo car and she volunteered. Her headroom was limited -- I had to take off my hat to drive -- her power windows opened and closed funkily and she balked shifting into 2nd gear. But the price and the gas mileage were both right and I jumped right in.

Lotus proved to be one of the most dependable and versatile cars I've ever owned, right up there with the Volkswagen bug I lived in for two years in my turbulent youth and our Mercury Bobcat baby wagon that didn't croak until I broadsided a Honda with it. She lived on minimum maintenance and revealed a secret identity as a pickup truck, hauling tools and building materials to various handyman jobs. She also doubled as a cabulance, springing S out of the nursing home once we figured out how to fold up her power chair.

Some cars are sullen, overpriced prima donnas. Others are lowlife scumbags that nickel and dime you to death. Lotus possessed that spirit most praiseworthy in vehicles, willingness. Through any and all abuse, misuse, and malfeasance she soldiered on. As her odometer climbed into the 200k range, she started showing more signs of age -- a blown out muffler here, a spot of shimmy in the front end there. But even her most troubling symptom, a tendency to overheat in the summer, was mild and easily ignored.

It is written in the Great Book Of Automobility that one truth of a cheap, marginal vehicle is that you have to pay attention or suffer the consequences. Blue began taking more and more of our time as S became healthier and our music work picked up. And in truth, I wasn't using the Mazda as much. My handyman work seems to come in bursts, and the burst was mostly a bust. Several times I'd taken Lotus out and noticed that her temperature seemed a little high. But after fixing a leaky radiator hose the problem seemed less severe.

Then I started out one bright and sunny morning to a gig in Olympia, and five miles out of town the Mighty Clouds Of Joy began blasting from under my hood. I made it to a gas station and attempted CPR, then called my fellow bandmates, who came and rescued me after I rolled down the hill and around the corner to street parking. We still got to the job on time.

The next day I rode the bus out to pick up my busted flush. To my astonishment, Lotus started and drove, albeit steamily, and managed to limp home under her own power, as opposed to a hundred dollar towtruck's. One last dollop of thriftiness -- from what I can tell, her head gasket is thoroughly, even clinically blown.

I could probably fix her -- the procedure looks remarkably unmessy on paper, certainly less severe than the double head jobs I routinely performed on a succession of Dodge vans in my roadnik days. But I'm an older dog than I once was, and perhaps just barely busier enough that the profit margin in doing my own carwork is mitigated by potential for lost income. And it may be time to let go of my ugly old work vehicle, my mercy car, and let myself move up some.

A nice little pickup, now -- that's a pleasant thought...