My Thoughts Exactly

Howard the Duck, KISS, Sudd the original scrubbing bubble, and me

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Harold’s been wonkifying up Wetmachine lately, almost to the point of upsetting the delicate bullshit/wonkosity ratio that I, as Wetmachine circusmaster, have so studiously sought to maintain down the cascade of years. Time for some drastic action to keep our ph right.

Over on another group blog (which shall remain nameless) on which I hang out from time time time, a recent confessional thread has prompted people to fess up to embarrassing things from their adolescence, such as the fact that the first album they ever purchased was Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” or the Bee Gee’s “Saturday Night Fever”. That discussion inspired me to relate the tale of a post-adolescent piccadillo of my own which appears below the fold. To borrow a sentiment, if not the precise line, from Charles Dickens’ alter ego David Copperfield, whether this tale will make me an Internet hero worthy of your esteem and cross-linking, or whether it will make me more deserving of your open scorn or silent pity, these paragraphs must show.

One night, nearly thirty years ago, while drunk, I wrote a letter to the writers of Howard the Duck, a quasi-popular, quasi-cult Marvel comic book about a cynical, wise-cracking, cigar-smoking guy from a universe where everybody is a duck, who was stranded here in our universe one day when “the cosmic axis shifted”. The writers’ response, two months later, has immortalized me in bathrooms all over North America (and for all I know, all over the world).

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Jabberwocking the Fundies

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Here at Wetmachine we have a tradition of posting what the New Critics called “close readings” of arcane texts. Usually these close readings are done by Harold Feld in Tales of the Sausage Factory or by Greg Rose in Econoklastic, and most often the closely-read documents are obscure legal decrees, rulings, opinions, pronouncements, etc, originating from the Oracle at Federal Communications Commission, or they’re drafts of some lobbyist-written telecommunications bill lurking in the shadows of some state legislature or congressional committee, hoping to become law while nobody’s looking –although occasionally Harold treats us to a scholarly exegesis of a biblical or Talmudic text.

Over at Enter the Jabberwock, my erstwhile OpenLaszlo colleague Josh Crowley has a long-running series of close readings of illustrated tracts by the crackpot so-called “Christian” fundamentalist Jack Chick. Crowley calls these analyses “Chick Dissections”. In them he mercilessly skewers the artwork, logic and theology of individual Chick tracts. He does this in a direct, unironic voice, taking each frame of the comic book under review at face value. In other words, he does not come at them with a knowing, jaded air of sophistication and superiority. He engages them on their own terms.

When I first saw these Chick Dissections I wondered what the point was, since the comics themselves are so ineptly drawn and poorly reasoned that they basically are self-refuting; they are their own parody.

But, you know, Jack Chick is not some lone nut promulgating his paranoid ravings in photocopied pamphlets on a streetcorner to an indifferent audience of dozens. He’s a lone nut promulgating his paranoid ravings to an audience of millions, some of them quite credulous, through his website and publishing empire. The fundamentalist meme, in Christian, Islamic, Hindu, or whatever form, is a present danger to civilization. Therefore Jabberwock/Crowley is right to resist it. The Chick Dissections are not to everybody’s taste, but Jabberwock is providing a valuable service. And he’s often quite funny.

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“Prosperity Church” or “Criminal Enterprise”? Senator Grassley wants to know

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By way of the great “religion watch” blog Wittenburg Door I come upon this story about Senator Chuck Grassley’s investigation into megachurches :

Senator Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican whose middle name is “Mr. Accountability,” concluded a two-year investigation of big “prosperity church” ministries with a few suspicions about whether the spirit of the tax code might be in peril. So he sent out letters requesting full voluntary financial disclosure to six of those organizations–three big ones and three not so big.

The story begins with a lede that is, dare I say it, nearly Feldian?

Yes, that was the sound of 148 televangelists all trying to get through to their lawyers at the same time yesterday morning as the faxes from the Senate Finance Committee sputtered into their headquarters.

Amusingly enough, the story was written by one John Bloom, better known to some as Joe Bob Briggs. Bloom is a fascinating guy, and if you can track down the profile of him by Calvin Trillen that appeared in the New Yorker in 1986 (summarized here), you should do so. I have always cherished one line attributed to Bloom in that article: “Never start a fight with an anarchist. He do not care. He flat out do not care.” Bloom writes for Wittenburg Door under both names– commentary as Joe Bob, reporting as John. And clearly he do care, in this case.

John of Wetmachine says check it out.

Salon loves them some Sundman!

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Or rather, they used to. For some reason I just checked out Salon.com’s “Best of Salon2003” list. It includes 32 articles, four of them by me. I remembered that the Loebner article made the list, but had forgotten that the Human Genome one did too-also. Holy crap. I musta been a contender.

This discovery, I think, calls for a repeat-performance link to this little Wetmachine chestnut about the time I got snubbed by Salon editor Joan Walsh. (See, there are some perks to getting laid off. It gives you endless hours to spend polishing your peerless prose, for which you might even get a party invite, not to mention a few hundred bucks, or whatever it was they paid me. If I ever get laid off again (God forbid!) and have time on my hands, maybe I’ll ring up Joan and pitch a few idears.)

OK, lunch break over. Here endeth my little diversionary walk down literary lane.

When the writer strikes!

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I’ve been keeping a desultory eye on the gathering strike by the Writer’s Guild of America, which is the screenwriters’ union — where “screen” means movie screen and television screen.

One of the points at issue is whether computer screens and iPhone screens also count as “screens”, that is, the writers want compensation for works of theirs that are distributed on the net, and, as I understand things, the other party doesn’t want to give it to them.

As a person who has made his living as a writer, kinda-sorta, since April, 1980, I find the notion of a writer’s union intriguing and somewhat baffling. It’s hard to imagine a technical writer’s union negotiating terms with Sun, Microsoft, or IBM. But why is that, exactly? Screenwriting is a much more solitary endeavor than technical writing, so on the face of it, one would expect screenwriters to be even less likely to unionize than technical writers. But then again, the stakes are higher in Hollywood, where the difference between an OK screenplay and a good screenplay is measured in millions of dollars at the so-called bottom line. So writers have more clout, is what I’m trying to say.

Recently my friend the Hollywood actor/producer/script-doctor has been making some noises about pimping the movie rights to my novel Acts of the Apostles. (It would make a great movie, by the way!) I have no understanding of the craft of screenwriting; nor do I have any free time not taken up by the day job & so-called life. So I’m not a very strong candidate to try my hand at writing a screenplay of my book. On the other hand, I’m not in the Guild, and, given that it is a guild— meaning that it’s hard to even gain admission to it— I’m unlikely to be in it anytime soon. So maybe I should go for it.

Act one, Scene one: Exterior. A dark and stormy night. . .

On the open-sourcing of OpenLaszlo

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My friend and colleague Sarah Allen has a nice little essay on her blog Ultrasaurus about what it was like to be part of a project that took a closed-source platform (“Laszlo Presentation Server”) and made it open (OpenLaszlo).

Like Sarah, I found that changing to the “open” way of doing software development took a little getting used to. One of the most profound, and yet most mundane differences is how you use email. Before we went open, if I had a technical question for, say, Tucker, I would send him an email; perhaps I would copy a few other interested parties.

Now, however, if I have technical question for Tucker, I send it to him and copy the OpenLaszlo Developer’s list or the OpenLaszlo User’s list. Which means that hundreds of people, at least, may be reading my messages. Similarly, all development work (including my baliwick, the documentation) is driven by tasks and bugs listed in the OpenLaszlo JIRA database. All of our code, communication, and planning, is in the open.

Sometimes this does make one feel a little awkward– like when you have to ask a question that you think you should know the answer to, and are embarrassed. But the “upside” is tremendous, as you often get helpful answers from people you’ve never heard of, in far off places, who are part of the OpenLaszlo community.