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.

Modern warfare: drones attack public connection to battlefields far away

According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, insurgent forces in Iraq are using a $26 software program to compromise U.S. Predator unmanned flying drones.

The insurgents are using programs like SkyGrabber, which captures live feeds from the drone’s cameras, allowing them to see what is getting beamed back to U.S. forces. U.S. officials are saying that there isn’t any evidence that insurgents were able to take control of the drones, but the intercepted imagery could give an advantage “by removing the element of surprise” from certain missions.

U.S. military forces have thousands of these drones in service, some of which are capable of carrying out missile strikes. Robotic technology has advanced greatly since the first primitive unmanned recon vehicles (basically glorified remote-controlled airplanes with cameras) used during the first Gulf War. Now, Predator drones can linger silently over a target for hours or days at a time, controlled by U.S. Air Force handlers half a world away.

The abilities these drones possess create new ethical issues. Jane Mayer, author of a New Yorker Magazine article called “The Predator War,” raised a good point during an NPR interview this fall.

“If we can’t feel the impact of the people that we’re killing and we can’t see them, and none of our own people (are) at risk, does this somehow make it easier to just be in a perpetual state of war because there’s no seeming cost to us? ... My sense is that (with) this kind of technology, there’s going to be no turning back.”

P.W. Singer, author of “Wired for War,” put it another way.

“This is leading some of the first generation of soldiers working with robots to worry that war waged by remote control will come to seem too easy, too tempting. More than a century ago, Gen. Robert E. Lee famously observed: ‘It is good that we find war so horrible, or else we would become fond of it.’ He didn’t contemplate a time when a pilot could ‘go to war’ by commuting to work each morning in his Toyota to a cubicle where he could shoot missiles at an enemy thousands of miles away and then make it home in time for his kid’s soccer practice.”

If the American populace knows that U.S. troops will be sent in harm’s way, they ask troubling questions – like ‘why are we doing this?’ With robots, there are no such questions, because robots aren’t people. They aren’t citizen soldiers whose parents and spouses raise holy hell when a loved one doesn’t come back from the battlefield. The impact of a loss of a drone doesn’t dent approval ratings or political capital.

I was watching an interesting documentary the other night called “Why We Fight.” It states the opinion that real opposition to the Vietnam War at home started in earnest when the lottery system made it so that middle and upper class children faced the real risk of being drafted. The armed forces responded, in the wake of Vietnam, with an “all-volunteer force.”. While this may, as some have argued, created a better military, it also had the effect of removing the commonality of military service from American life.

In the decades since, it seems that the military has become more and more of a detached entity from the lives of the average American, who may know few people in the service. Removing this connection has, in my opinion, removed some of the human cost from recent military decisions. Dead soldiers still come home at Dover Air Force Base, sure – but public outcry over their deaths is muted.

Robots will only carry this detachment to another level. Removing the human element from a military operation will negate questions regarding said operations. After all, who cares if we lose a drone? It’s just a robot. Now, if that same mission were being carried out by a human pilot, and that pilot were shot down and taken prisoner, the resulting firestorm of criticism would be damaging. Removing the human removes this risk – and gives those in power a freer hand for performing consequence-free operations.

Remember this, though – those robots perform missions against human beings. They may be our enemies, but their deaths are very real. Sept. 11 may have come as a shock to Americans, but not to those in other countries who’d seen our cruise missiles destroy targets in Iraq or Sudan during the 1990s. We’ve been at war for a long time – and will continue to be ignorant of this war so long as the costs are hidden from us.

In the wake of 9/11, many of us asked, “Why do they hate us?” It seemed a logical question, but only in the insulated bubble that most Americans had been living in. Our leaders take great pains to assure us that each new operation will be bloodless, that we will indeed “be greeted as liberators.”

Robots taking more and more of the work load, combined with the public’s increasing apathy towards years-long operations so long as the body counts are low, will likely only result in us re-asking the same question when another tragedy happens.

I've become one of "those guys" at McDonalds

As my daughter tottered through the dimly lit maze of plastic tunnels and absorbent floor material that made up the McDonald’s PlayPlace, I realized that I’d become “that guy.”

I’m “that guy” who chews his food like cud and keeps an eye on the child whose motion seems less guided as it is compelled by forces she doesn’t understand. I’m “that guy” who utters slowly progressing warnings when his daughter is grabbing on to another child: “Evvvveeeeeyyy? Evvvvey?? No. Let that kid goooo. I meaaaannn it.” I’m “that guy” whose Friday night wardrobe has devolved into a sweatshirt and “comfy jeans” – you know, the “relaxed fit” ones your previous self would have never admitted to owning?

While I always knew I would be a father someday, I never knew what this actually meant. I never thought that I would ever have to fight for time to iron a shirt. I never thought that my ears could train themselves to recognize the particular frequency of my child’s cry and be able to pick it out of a crowd. I never EVER gave any thought to the idea that I’d ever be one of the anonymous balding fathers whose benevolence contributes to make the carefree experience of childhood possible.

It struck me there that my own happy childhood was no accident. It was created and nurtured not only through my parents, but also through the other adults involved in my young life. Now 30 years old, I have moved from taking advantage of this protective cocoon to doing my best to create one for my own offspring. It’s a powerful feeling – and one I am just beginning to understand.

That was my Friday night. I’ve determined that life is divided into distinct modes of operation. In this case, it’s “pursuit” and “maintenance.” Friday nights used to be spent in pursuit of a significant other. Now, those nights are spent maintaining and developing what that significant other and I have created, be it a massive pile of laundry or giving my daughter a trip through a Play Place.

I used to work at this same McDonald’s location when I was 16, sweeping floors and mopping up accidents of the last decade’s children. At the time, I cursed the parents who let their kids made ketchup messes, let them run around with sticky hands, and just seemed so detached from the experience, like they were so stone on Valium that they could care less. Now, I realize that these parents were probably exhausted and, like me many days now, craving a minute or two of what passes for tranquility.

I also realize now the awesome marketing firepower that McDonald’s aims at children and parents. For children, it promises a cheap toy, the luxury of fast food, and a trip to a wonderful place to play. For adults, it offers a trip to relive those same times, all while being able to eat a meal in relative peace as their children run through a plastic maze of diminished responsibility. For every minute my daughter spends in a plastic tube, that’s one more minute that I can eat my French fries and stare blankly into space.

Laws and Those They Don't Apply To

I know sports players are treated differently from regular folks, but this is ridiculous.
In the past two weeks, two Minnesota Vikings (Adrian Peterson and Bernard Berrian) were both pulled over after being clocked at speeds well over 100 mph (Peterson: 109 mph in a 55-mph zone; Berrian: 104 mph in a 60-mph zone). Both were let go with tickets – but if my reading of Minnesota state law is correct, they should have gotten far worse.
According to Section 171.17 "REVOCATION" of Minnesota statute, "The department shall immediately revoke the license of a driver upon receiving a record of the driver's conviction of ... violation of an applicable speed limit by a person driving in excess of 100 miles per hour. The person's license must be revoked for six months for a violation of this clause, or for a longer minimum period of time applicable under section 169A.53, 169A.54, or 171.174." In other words, having exceeded this speed limit, both of these men should have lost their licenses. If it had been you or me, that's probably what would have happened, and I would be writing you from my new home in the garage.
But that didn't happen. If anything, Berrian and Peterson got off with tickets, which don't add to much given the fact that Peterson has a salary of $2.8 million and Berrian has a $13.7 million salary. I'm sure the speeding tickets, which would have seriously dinged yours-truly's budget for the month, will probably end up being a drop in the bucket of a never ending sport-cash waterfall.
Had I gotten pulled over, I would have lost my license and likely been thrown into the back of a squad car. I wouldn't, as Berrian and Peterson did, have gotten a ticket. And I sure as hell wouldn't have one of the troopers, as he hands me said ticket, wish me luck against Chicago. No, I wouldn't have gotten any of this. Why? Because I am no one. I don't throw a ball, I don't get paid millions for it, and I'm certainly not connected to the image of the state. No. I'm jail fodder for sure.
What bothers me so much about both of these instances is that these men acted like they were above the law, which, seeing as how they've been let off easy, seems exactly correct. It's a great message to send to people: I can drive 60 miles over the speed limit on the same public roads you and your children travel on because I am famous. And if I were to hit you? Well, I'll probably get out of that somehow, too.
These sorry incidents are symptomatic of the sports-worship that I think misplaces our priorities as a culture.
To use an old argument, the people who teach our kids get paid squat, but thoroughbred athletes like Peterson and Berrian are paid millions to play a childhood game that's been inflated and distorted beyond any sort of playground fantasy. This is nothing new – the Romans had well-paid gladiators who were no doubt spoiled by success – but I would like to think that the vast gulf between the salaries of those who contribute to society and those who suit up on Sundays would close someday. I guess it won't.
The world can really be divided into two categories: those who can get away with driving 109 mph and those who can't. Where do you fall into this scheme of things?

An entire retail world at my fingertips - but is it worth the cost?

As I walked through a Best Buy this weekend, I was amazed to see how many artists were still represented in their CD department.

Remember those? The five-inch shiny disks we used to buy music on before people under 30 (and some over) started going to the digital convenience of iTunes? Yeah, I thought they were gone, too, but they aren’t. I can remember the last CD I purchased (a Nine Inch Nails album in 2007) like it was yesterday. It was unlike buying something on iTunes, which is convenience itself. I had to drive to the store, walk through said store, use my eyes to find the disc, walk it up to the register, and purchase it. Once I was in the car, I had to unwrap it and manually insert it in the disc player. How exhausting!

While I love the fact that iTunes offers rare and strange things that I would never, ever see on a Best Buy shelf, I wonder if the shift between online and offline retailing is something that truly benefits us. I’m no economist, but it would seem that offline retailing would be more beneficial in the long term, because it requires employees, people to maintain the physical infrastructure, contracts with the people who make the merchandise, people who ship the merchandise – a long chain of economic ties. Online retail, however, requires far less of these – no employees to speak of (or at least not nearly as many as an actual store) fewer shipping needs (as items are likely shipped from a warehouse directly to the customer) no physical infrastructure to build or maintain, greatly-reduced local tax base and so on.

It’s become apparent that technology has changed how we live our lives in ways that unimaginable even several years ago. Who would have thought, for example, that digital camera technology would become so dominant as to render all of the Pro-Ex and Ritz locations an endangered species (taking with them all of the film manufacturing jobs)? Who would have thought that we’d see shrinking CD selections at stores like Best Buy? Who would have thought we'd see formerly-vital video rental locations like Blockbuster Video shuttering stores because it can't compete with RedBox and Netflix? Who would have thought that the U.S. Postal Service, an organization that was formerly seen as a lifetime job, would be posting billions of dollars in losses and shuttering facilities because people don't write letters anymore? Who would have thought that’d we’d see entire large chains like Circuit City fall under the combined weight of Best Buy’s market dominance and the Internet?

If it seems like the so-called economic recovery isn’t apparent, I think part of it has to do with entire industries as we knew them not even a decade ago no longer existing in a meaningful form. Circuit City alone took more than 30,000 jobs with it when is collapsed earlier this year. And if you take away those jobs, there are going to be people spending less money, right? How does this benefit us?

While the Internet has all but turned the retail world on its head, I don’t think it’s something that benefits us long term, much in the way that I don’t think that shipping off many of our entry level manufacturing jobs overseas has done us any favors. No one can stop the inexorable march of technology, but I can’t help but think that there’s a price to be paid in terms of human employment, be it here or elsewhere in the country. Remember, behind every shuttered Ritz Camera and Circuit City facade lingers memories of employees with families to feed that contributed to the local tax base. Can we really say that Amazon or eBay (both of which I happen to love, full disclosure) have that same benefit?

Here’s a glimpse of things to come. When my dad was looking at a dual VCR/DVD player at Best Buy, he asked me to run to Target to price compare. When I came back with the answers, he asked me an interesting question. “Where else could we go to look for these?” We sat there in silence. No easy answer came to mind - at least anything in the physical world that we could drive to. Perhaps this is the future of commerce – sending money to people unseen in places unknown, and then wondering why local retail seems to be withering on the vine.

There is a cost to have this convenience we’ve all come to expect, and whether or not we realize it, it’s something we’re all paying, be it as a customer with few local options or someone who worked in an industry that no longer exists.