Quitting swearing: blankety-blank-blank

As I heard the stomping footsteps hit the floor above me, I realized that my foul-mouthed tirade had been overheard.

It was late. My wife had gone to bed and I was downstairs on my ancient eMac (hey, it was free) trying to accomplish something of moderate importance. As the computer did its best to keep up with me, I let off a foul-mouthed verbal tirade that would have made Denis Leary blush. I was confident that no one could hear me – that it was just unemotional circuitry and overemotional me.

“Cut it out!” my wife shouted down the stairs. I blushed. I knew I’d been caught.

With our child growing smarter by the day, I’ve known for a while that I would have to give up swearing. My wife and I started a swear jar as a New Year’s resolution, and so far, I’ve racked up a tremendous debt while contributing nothing. I’ve quit smoking, and quitting smoking is easy compared to quitting swearing. It’s one thing to go through withdrawal for a week. It’s another to quit what has been a lifetime habit.

My first experience with the power of vulgarity came when I was 5 years old, and started swearing at uncooperative Legos. My mother asked me where I’d learned those words. I told her. I’d learned them from my father. Four warnings later, she washed my mouth out with soap, which she still feels bad about. I remember grinning as I looked into the mirror and saw the foam around my lips and on my chin. I resembled a rabid dog from a cartoon. Besides, it was hotel soap, and didn’t taste that bad.

I was fascinated with the power these words had. A few years later, I decided that I wanted to swear on a regular basis. I got off the school bus and ran upstairs without dropping my book bag. Staring into a sun hanging low in the afternoon sky, I smiled, and, with all of the dramatic emphasis I could muster from my eight-year-old body, cultivated and unleashed my first deliberate post-soap obscenity.

It felt good. It felt powerful. I liked swearing. I decided to do it more often.

I managed to keep my habit a suppressed secret into the teenaged years, when swearing was as common as the cans of Mountain Dew we had permanently glued to our hands. We had some good times, swearing and I – reciting the dirty bits from Adam Sandler comedy albums, and quoting Dr. Dre on the way home from the video store. There was something about it that made me feel edgy and alive.

Alas, all good things must come to an end. I face the prospect of letting this part of myself fade into the past. I like swearing. I don’t like obscenity, per say, but I find a properly applied swear word to be artful at times, as a more earthy and earnest way to express one’s frustrations.

Still, my wife is right. I can’t keep doing it – not in front of ears and eyes that hear and see my every move and seek to mimic it. I don’t want my daughter’s idea of “Daddy” to be synonymous with a cantankerous, foul-mouthed ogre. It may be hard in the short term, but in the long run, the best thing to do is to set a good example – even if it means using “fiddlesticks!” as a much-less-than-satisfying substitute for it’s unprintable swear word counterpart.

I’m going to be prepared. I’m keeping a small stock of hotel soap, just in case. It’s not for my daughter, you see – it’s for me. If I know anything about myself, I quit things the hard way. I quit smoking by eating cigarettes. Now, I have to eat words, and it makes me want to choke.

James Cameron's "Avatar" - the face of things to come?

Apparently, all of the hype has turned out to be true. “Avatar,” rushing past the $1.4 billion revenue mark this past weekend, truly is a game changer.

While the storyline, with elements lifted from familiar movies like “Dances With Wolves” and “Aliens” isn’t anything remarkable in itself, director James Cameron’s true triumph is in creating a world that seems so real that an online topic thread called “"Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible” has more than 100 members on the “Avatar” website. Like he did with the “Terminator” movies and “Titanic,” Cameron has once again changed what is possible with movies.

After years of hype (how Cameron invented much of the technology to make it, how he spent 12 years doing it, etc.) my hopes were pretty high. When the first trailer previews came out, the movie looked, well, awful. It looked like another computer-generated adventure in a world that looked like a video game. There was a reason for that – the 3D effects, the movie’s true coup, weren’t there.

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, “Avatar” uses 3D in a way that makes you forget it is even there. It’s not like an old 1950s-era movie, where 3D was a gimmick. No, this time, you lose track of the concept minutes in to the movie. I immersed myself in places that seem so real that I questioned whether or not they had always been in my memory. When I left the theatre, my brain was humming. I felt like I’d lived it – like I’d been to these places before, and had some sort of ancestral tie to them.

The story line of “Avatar” revolves around a greedy corporation that is trying to save a dying Earth by mining a mineral (called “Unobtainium”) on a planet called Pandora, which is populated by a race of 7-foot-tall aliens called the Na’vi. The Na’vi’s main village is on a huge deposit of Unobtainium, so the corporation develops simulations of the creatures, called “Avatars,” that are remote-operated by humans. One of the humans, sent to infiltrate the Na’vi, instead falls in love with the culture, and becomes one of its greatest heroes when times runs out and the company starts the military assault to clear the area.

James Cameron has several elements from “Aliens” in this movie – the greedy corporation putting profits before people (apparently, in space, all corporations like to hear you scream), powered robot suits, aircraft making atmospheric entry from space ships, hypersleep, Sigourney Weaver, etc. Cameron isn’t the only one to reference his own past work in “Avatar.” Soundtrack composer James Horner’s score uses motifs from other scores he has written. In fact, one of the main themes for the Na’vi rips off the first part of the main motif from “Glory,” another Horner score. Some of the action cues are also reminiscent of fragments of “Aliens,” “Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan,” and “Titanic.”

The plot boils down to simplification: all corporations are bad, all native cultures are good. I doubt our troops in Iraq will be seeing this movie. There are several unsubtle references to some of the perhaps less-diplomatic aspects of America’s foreign policy this decade, including use of the phrase “shock and awe” in conjunction with the final assault.

The idea that people on Earth would pay a corporation using armed forces to forcibly remove other cultures on other planets and steal their resources also sounds like something that would actually happen. It appears that making any sort of sacrifice in lifestyle isn’t any more popular in the future than it is now. Out of sight, out of mind – just as long as it isn’t in my back yard.

It’s easy to draw parallels between this plotline and others taken through human history. The parallel between the story and what happened to Native American tribes in the United States is so obvious that it practically smashed the viewers’ glasses with a baseball bat. There are other references in “Avatar” to the native peoples’ gods failing to protect them.

I am reminded of how the Inca saw this happen in real life where, in November 1532, 168 Spanish conquistadors arrived in the holy city of Cajamarca. They faced 80,000 troops and the Incan emperor, yet within 24 hours they had killed more than 7,000 and had the emperor in chains. Within hours, an empire was destroyed. Eventually, more than 95 percent of the entire native populations are wiped out. The “savages” in “Avatar” face the same fate.

In the end of the story, though, it is the god of technology that fails, as well-equipped and powerful military forces are crushed (sometimes literally) by the powers of nature. It’s perhaps an unintended reminder to another technologically proud culture (us) that no gods are truly infallible.

“Avatar” is just a story – albeit one which draws on history and current events and presents these in such a way that it wipes the movie-making slate clean. If “Avatar” is any indication of what we can expect for the future of cinema, it could be more amazing than we could imagine. This new technology could elevate cinema to the place it once held in the pantheon of entertainment as the place where you go to see things you can’t see anywhere else. All it took was a $238 million gamble from James Cameron – a gamble that appears to have succeeded.

Sticks, stones and cyberspace: online behavior has real-life consequences

While many saw the possibilities and potential of the Internet as it gathered momentum in the early 1990s, I doubt that many people could have foreseen how ingrained it would become in people’s everyday lives.

While many aspects of these developments are positive, there is a downside to this blend of real and online living: it's easier than ever for people to be verbally abusive, saying things online that they might not say in a face-to-face conversation. Go to any online comment board for a story featuring the word “Obama,” Pelosi,” or “Palin,” and you’ll see what I mean. Within a few posts, the name calling starts, and 400 posts later, the message stream ends with "No, YOU’RE an idiot."

The problem doesn’t stop there. Online bullying has driven people to suicide – people like 13-year-old Megan Meier, who hanged herself after being told off by a neighbor pretending to be a boy who liked her on MySpace. When a 19-year-old Florida man who committed suicide in front of a live audience in 2008 relayed his intentions in an online forum hours before he committed the act, he was greeted with responses like, “You want to kill yourself? Do it, do the world a favor and stop wasting our time with your mindless self-pity.” He swallowed a fatal dose of pills as hundreds of people watched online.

Hundreds. Did any of them call the police? Did any of them think that this was something worth a second thought about?

Hours later, as police broke down the door to Abraham Biggs’ apartment, nearly 1,500 people were watching a video stream of the long-dead man's body. Biggs isn’t the first or the only person to have killed himself in front of Internet viewers and he won't be the last – but would people who wrote messages like the one above responded the same way if they’d seen Biggs about to jump off a bridge? I think not. So why write such statements? Has the line between fantasy and reality blurred to the point where we cheer people online to their deaths? And if so, why?

We can do and say things we might not get away with in real life because there aren't any apparent consequences on the Internet. The very nature of the technology fosters this disconnection between strangers, and makes such behavior possible. It illustrates one of the secondary findings from a series of experiments conducted in the 1960s by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram.

Milgram’s experiment focused on the willingness of subjects to obey authority figures who instructed them to administer electric shocks to a “learner,” who was in fact an actor who would plead with the test subject to stop and later pretended to die if the shocks continued.

It was easier for Milgram’s test subjects to shock the learned to “death” when that subject was hidden from their view – when all it took was the push of a button. In fact, the closer the learner was to the test subject, the more the test subjects resisted the command to carry out the shocks. Milgram's experiment didn't set out to prove it, but it illustrates that it is easier to hurt people when they the farther away from you – like on a computer screen.

The new world we have entered continues to amaze me. We have the ability to be in constant contact with the ones we love, to hear about things moments after they happen, and to enrich our lives with the goods and only a truly worldwide market can provide.

I'm not against the opportunities this technological revolution can provide – but it has made it easier to say and encourage previously unspeakable things. It's akin to being in a dark theatre watching something on stage. It's easy to should insults and heckle when you are in the dark. In the Internet's case, it's done behind a handle like "Wampa12" that reveals little, if anything, about the user, and thus guarantees this anonymity.

While technology has changed the way we interact, it hasn't changed who we are as humans or the realism of the emotions we feel. It is important, now more than ever, to remember that there is a human being on the receiving end of any message, despite how many digital walls stand between sending and recipient.

I'm tired of seeing the callousness, the hatred, and the gross insensitivity to anything close to civility. The old saying about sticks and stones was incorrect then, and it is incorrect now: words can hurt, and do. Use them wisely.