Scenic Wonder

Multnomah Falls - this is one of the only times that the picture is actually useful to get an idea of what the blog is about.

Oregon is a place of remarkable natural scenic wonders and a near record number of strip clubs. However, as multiple family members read this blog, I’ll be devoting the bulk of this update to the natural scenic wonders and only employing strip-club anecdotes when I think things are getting boring.*

*In Salem, where I grew up, there were plenty of strip bars, but only one actual strip club, which would admit anyone over the age of 18 as opposed to anyone over the age of 21. This club was called Cheetahs, and it was located along Lancaster Boulevard on the outskirts of town, which has all the charm of East Los Angeles with shittier weather. It was a ritual of sorts among the sweatier boys at my high school to make a pilgrimage out to Cheetahs every time somebody turned 18. Throughout my senior year, as many of my friends turned 18, I heard a lot of stories which implied that Cheetahs did not necessarily attract the highest quality of stripper, and most of the people showing up at school the day after a Cheetahs outing had the emotionally hollow stare of Vietnam veterans and rescued POWs. Point is, Oregon may have a lot of strip clubs, but they are by no means good. The more you know.

In spite of all this scenic natural wonder, the biggest tourist attraction in the state is the Woodburn Outlet Mall, a sprawling complex surrounded by muddy fields roughly halfway between Portland and Salem. The main attraction is at the Woodburn Outlet Mall is that while the stores there will still take your money and give you overpriced name brand clothing, they won’t take quite as much of your money because there are reasonable discounts on everything. The second largest tourist attraction is Spirit Mountain Casino, where they will take as much of your money as you want in return for some buffet potato salad and the feeling that you’re atoning for the sins of your ancestors who swindled and murdered these poor Native Americans off of their land. The third most popular attraction is Crater Lake, where the National Park Service will take your money and in return you get to look at a really big lake. But, in the lake’s defense, it’s way big. Also, blue.

In the interests of appreciating our state’s beauty while capitalizing on the last few days of spring break and also saving some money, The Girlfriend and I went with two friends to Multnomah Falls, a place in the Columbia Gorge where a river jumps off of a 620 foot high cliff, with highly photogenic results. Our intent was to hike the trails around the falls in pursuit of a merit badge or experience points or something useful like that.

As you all know, the most exercise I get during spring break is walking downstairs to the refrigerator for hummus, and I’ve even gone so far as to draw up blueprints for a flying refrigerator so I won’t even have to do that much. However, when we reached the falls and I tilted my head all the way back to see the entirety of the massive waterfall, I spotted a tiny viewing platform right at the top of the falls, and all at once I became dead set on going up there. I went into this outing expecting that what few exercise oriented skills I’d developed during my three months of kindergarten soccer had been lying dormant for the past 15 years and as soon as my feet hit the trail I’d be making the great outdoors my bitch.

But would my blog be funny at all if anything I wanted to happen ever did? Hiking Multnomah Falls seemed like a great idea right up until the second of 83 very steep switchbacks on an uncomfortably narrow trail leading all the way up the mountain. It didn’t help that The Girlfriend and one of her friends had done track in high school, while the other friend was a former tennis player. I spent the entire way up the mountain lagging behind everyone else, gasping for breath, and praying that there was a casino or strip club at the end of the trail. At every turn, the views were definitely breathtaking, but I’d wager that was mostly because I didn’t have a whole lot of breath for most of the trip.

The excursion up the mountain was made no easier by the fact that there were throngs of other tourists there. This surprised me, as I had expected these people to be the sort who would be wandering the outlet mall or playing the slots. But no, intrepid and somewhat overweight throngs of people were working their way up and down the mountain with us – however, many of them were toting along young children and large, excitable dogs on the narrow paths with no guardrails, so I can only assume they either had thought they were going to a pet-and-child-friendly casino and were instead duped into visiting a waterfall. Or, they were idiots. Both are valid options. Regardless of why they were there, the extra people on the mountain made things significantly more exciting. More than once my companions and I had to hop out of the way as a pudgy, middle aged man came barreling down the dead center of the path in the opposite direction, leading a big golden lab that looked like it just really wanted to jump up and put its paws on anyone’s chest, even if it meant that person falling to certain death on jagged rocks below.

Upon reaching the top of the mountain, the trail wound down a little on the other side before finally reaching the lookout point; nature’s own way of going “psych!” The lookout was a small platform that hung sickeningly far out over the edge of the waterfall and mountain, offering some spectacular views of both the Columbia Gorge and the poor bastards down at the bottom of the trail who were only starting their trip. Sweaty, legs burning, gasping for breath, I looked out over a few miles worth of what some people consider to be creation and realized that maybe, just maybe, the 45 minute trek up the mountainside had been worth it.

Of course, at the outlet mall, there’s an elevator.

Truman Capps wonders if Multnomah Falls is wheelchair accessable.

65 Days

"For my next trick, I'll be turning Dow Jones Industrial Average into delicious pudding!"

I’m thinking that this is going to be one of those updates where I get political. I usually avoid doing this, not because I don’t want to offend people but because I really hate putting any more thought or effort into my blog than is absolutely necessary, and good political writing usually takes a little more thought or research than simply yelling the name of the guy you like louder than anyone else (all AM radio personalities, please take note). But if there’s one thing that’ll galvanize me into doing work, it’s spite, and I’ve been feeling pretty spiteful about goings on in the political arena recently. In the past, I’ve tried to keep these things out of my blog, once again not out of fear of offending, but out of fear of not being funny – as this is primarily a comedy blog, I try hard to adhere to truth in advertising; nothing is worse than sitting down in front of the TV, all ready to laugh your ass off, only to find that it’s a “very special” episode of Home Improvement. However, I feel as though I ought to say a few things in order to clarify why everybody needs to calm the fuck down, regardless of whether these things are funny or not. Fasten your seatbelts, stow your carry on luggage, and prepare to be teabagged by the sweaty testicles of political blogging.

There was nothing I hated more* over the last eight years than people who would defend George W. “Skippy McDumbass” Bush with the reasoning, “It’s a really hard job.” I would understand that if President Bush were in some sort of Jack Bauer situation where he was forced to become president lest his daughter be killed by terrorists or something, but I remind you that wasn’t the case – to become president, you really fucking have to want to be president. If somebody is willing to blow hundreds of millions of dollars on an extensive ad campaign, I’m willing to assume that they know exactly what they’re getting into and ought to be qualified to do the job well if they wind up getting it. This is a job which can essentially determine the very fate of the world – the guy doing that job is the last fucking person to whom we should cut slack. That guy needs to be under more intense scrutiny than anyone in the world. If I fuck up at my job, you get a small milkshake instead of a medium one. If he fucks up, nuclear war.

*Except Sarah Palin. Fuck Sarah Palin.

So it would be unfair of me to ask everyone to just chill the Christ out for a couple minutes and cut President Obama some slack because it’s a hard job – I won’t do that. Let me point out, though, that his job is significantly harder at the outset than Bush’s, thanks to an economic crisis and war that Bush started. But hey, you know what? Barack Obama is vastly more intelligent and capable than W., so I feel like he’s up to the increased challenge.

I see a lot of people – Senate Republicans, Senate Democrats, conservatives on Facebook – talking about what a terrible job Obama has been doing over the past 65 days, due largely to the fact that the financial crisis is still going on and everyone in America has yet to receive free donuts. Republicans on the hill have called his proposed multibillion dollar investments in education, healthcare, and public infrastructure the most irresponsible legislation they’ve ever seen. Some people even accuse Obama of scaremongering because of all the speeches he’s made in which he talks about how bad things are now, and how they’re going to get worse before they get better.

Here’s the thing about the financial crisis – about 12 years’ worth of economic development pretty much just disappeared. It’s like on Arrested Development, when Gob turns $100 into 100 pennies, only here he starts with a lot more than $100 and in the end there’s nothing but broken dreams and snakeskin boots. Also, it’s not funny. This thing that happened took a long time to get into place – shout out, by the way, to all the business majors who thought real estate speculation was a great idea – and you can’t just hit the back button. There’s a lot of work to be done, and nobody is quite sure what will work; it’s a trial and error sort of thing. It took years for this to happen, and it’s going to take even longer to rebuild. Deal with it. Nobody - nobody - could fix this in 65 days, not even MacGyver.

And forgive me, but who the fuck do you think you are, Republicans? How the hell can you sit there talking about irresponsible spending after you all rallied behind a war to find weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there – a war which, might I add, sent our military into an absolute shitstorm without sufficient supplies, and which has seen mentally and psychologically wounded vets coming back to a VA system that can’t adequately care for them amidst a few million “Support Our Troops” magnets? We’ve all heard about how much our deficit could or will increase with Obama’s programs, but frankly, if our deficit is going to increase, wouldn’t you rather see your tax dollars getting flushed away on schools, healthcare, and roads in this fucking country? Let me tell you, I’d be thrilled to face a hefty tax increase if I knew that money was helping people instead of funding Dick Cheney’s jingoistic oilhunt, and that is indisputably what the War in Iraq was.

And what’s this shit about scaremongering? Obama isn’t scaremongering when he says that the economy is a disaster, he’s telling the fucking truth, arguably for the first time in recent White House history. I don’t know if you’ve looked around at all, but the world really blows at the moment, and a lot of it is our fault. Would you rather he keep on lying and tell you that everything’s fine, like the last guy did? Would you rather he continue to disrespect you? Because if that’s what you want, I’m more than happy to disrespect you. For starters, you’re an idiot. Go sit in the corner.

But here’s the thing: I am not a blind Obama worshipper. Admittedly, I greatly admire Barack Obama – I feel that he’s a very intelligent man of high moral fiber, and, unlike our last president or Sarah fucking Palin, he knows how to speak English. But like I’ve said before, our worst enemy is fundamentalism. By no means should we blindly accept everything any of our leaders tell us.

I disagreed with just about everything George W. Bush said or did – this is because I feel that he was a somewhat intelligent man of exceptionally low moral fiber who took advantage of our political system for his and his friends’ personal gain. By the time I became actively involved and interested in politics, he’d already made several high profile fuckups, and at the time was talking big about starting a war in Iraq. See, by the time I started hating our last president, he’d already proven his incompetence.

So I’m going to ask you this: Just give Obama time to screw up. Don’t like him, don’t idolize him, and certainly don’t stop scrutinizing him, but quit all this fatalistic, end-is-nigh shit until he’s actually done something. We could’ve just elected Han Solo and I guarantee you the economy would still not have improved – that’s not reflective of Han Solo, that’s reflective of the nature of the economy.

Jesus Christ, people, it’s been 65 days.

Truman Capps has suspended his disbelief in the economy for this update.

Real Genius

"Aw, Kramer, what have you done this time?"

The word “genius” gets tossed around a lot these days, to the extent that I feel like the meaning is beginning to change. I consider a genius to be someone who has contributed something groundbreaking and amazing to the world – Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, any given member of Styx. However, these days the title is getting handed to just about anybody, regardless of how many vaccines they’ve invented or power ballads they’ve composed.

I’d say there’s a lot of geniuses at work at Apple. Steve Jobs, in spite of his Darth Vaderesque personality and (current) appearance, is probably a genius. The guy who thought of the iPod? Genius. The guy who looked at the iPod and decided that it needed not only a phone but also an Internet connection, making it possible to discreetly watch porn on the bus? Genius, possible pervert. Those guys are deserving of some sort of professional accolade, besides, y’know, their impressive salaries and stock options and all. But the only people working at Apple who actually get the genius title are not, by their nature, geniuses.

When your washing machine breaks, you call a repairman. When your car breaks, you take it to a mechanic. When your MacBook breaks, you take it to the Apple Genius Bar. Now, to me, Genius Bar sounds more like a sort of singles club where MENSA members hang out once they’ve finished driving buses and pumping gas for the day. In fact, this is a room full of Apple enthusiasts who are very eager to help you fix your computer and possibly discuss the next season of Battlestar Galactica.* Their job title is “Genius.” That’s what they put on their taxes – Professional Genius.

*Coming from me, that’s a good thing.

Even for Apple, with its rich and vibrant history of egotism and unfiltered douchyness, this is a fairly presumptuous move. Apple is, after all, the company that creates aesthetically pleasing computers that run very well with artistic programs like Photoshop and come with rudimentary music mixing software. Die-hard Apple patrons generally turn their noses up at spreadsheets and listen to Celtic music overdubbed with whale calls. They don’t vote out of protest for the Electoral College and fully 80% of them live in Seattle, the bastards. Apple has now given them something to aspire to, a Jedi order if you will – become enough of an expert with Apple products, and you too can become a Genius™.

I feel as though a true genius is somebody who does something original that the world never saw coming, like Styx’s groundbreaking 1977 single “Come Sail Away.” An Apple Genius does not create anything new; he or she really just fixes something groundbreaking that somebody else created. Today, a Genius replaced the plastic casing on my girlfriend’s MacBook. To his credit, the new casing looks great, and it isn’t damaged like the old casing, but as far as the work of a genius goes I really don’t feel like this compares to The Origin of Species or anything. On the other hand, this guy had a braided beard, and I don’t think Darwin could really pull that look off.

That being said, something being groundbreaking doesn’t necessarily make its creator a genius, although I’m sure the managers of DinnerInTheSky.com would beg to differ. Dinner In The Sky is a company with a remarkably specific product – for a vast sum, they will use a giant crane to hoist a modified dinner table 50 meters above a given location so that up to 22 people can have a dinner that is in the sky. This will supposedly enrich everyone’s lives greatly and ensure business success for the creative and engaging executive who opts to have his next high-powered business lunch 50 meters above downtown Saginaw.

I feel like this company came to be because its creators needed a business plan for their Future Business Leaders of America tournament and decided to try and replicate something they’d thought of while smoking pot and watching infomercials. I can’t think of any reason why it would be desirable to pay an astronomical amount of money to eat what is probably sub par food in an open environment that is completely at the mercy of the elements and whatever ballsy seagulls happen to be in the area. Also, it’s at least 50 meters away from the nearest bathroom, which is a bad idea no matter how you slice it when you’re suspending people in midair and pouring them wine. I imagine that Dinner in the Sky would only be a great venue for a Lehman Brothers stockholders conference, as participants wouldn’t have to look too hard for a good way to commit suicide once they find out about their life savings.

Yes, the idea is innovative, and nobody has ever done anything like it before, but in some cases things have never been done before because they’re really just not a good idea. Nobody’s ever tried to fill the Grand Canyon with whip cream, but that doesn’t mean it’s something we ought to try. Of course, that would make it possible for me to go swimming in whip cream, which has always sort of been a personal goal of mine… Still, no, not a good idea – if we’re going to start filling things with whip cream, we should start smaller and work our way up. If we just start filling things with whip cream willy-nilly, that could quickly get out of hand.

Right, anyway.

We need to reign in the terminology that we use. Apple employees are not geniuses, they are people who are good at fixing computers. The creators of Dinner in the Sky are not geniuses, they’re just two guys with a crane and a table. Dr. Phil is not actually a doctor, he’s just a prick. Save these terms for when they’re really necessary; otherwise, the real geniuses won’t get as much credit as they deserve.

And God help you if you deprive Styx of credit.

Dinner in the Sky may actually be a great idea, but Truman Capps has hella vertigo.

Loathing at the Comic Book Shop

"Most offensive. Update. Ever."

Listen:

You all may sit in your ivory tower of not having played Dungeons and Dragons or not knowing the difference between a corps style and a pageantry style marching band and label all us nerds alike, but that is simply not true. There are layers of nerddom, dear readers, just as there are layers in a 7 Layer Burrito at Taco Bell. My level of nerddom is, while seemingly high to all of you, not that bad – probably only at about the cheese level in this particular analogy. However, my attempts to pursue my interests are frequently hampered by nerds at the deepest layer of nerddom, to the tune of the rice or beans, even.

I’m not a huge reader of comic books (sorry, graphic novels) but I have a passing, albeit shameful, interest in them in the same way that Republican Senator Larry Craig has a passing interest in anonymous airport dudes.* One graphic novel in particular that interests me is called The Walking Dead, which, according to Wikipedia, is an epic account of several people trying to survive a zombie apocalypse, which happens to be one of my primary interests. Hoping to find this book, I went to a local comic book shop near my apartment.

*Yes, it’s still funny, and it always will be.

As much as I try to be open minded, I’ll make no bones about the fact that I absolutely hate anime with every fiber of my being. No, I’m not just saying this because of anime’s propensity for schoolgirl tentacle rape porn – I understand that this trend is not wholly representative of the medium as it only affects some 95% of all anime. Also, I’m not saying this because of some sort of bias against animation in general - King of the Hill is one of my favorite shows in spite of their propensity for the words “narrow urethra.” Simply put, I hate every single element of anime equally. I hate the overblown emotions, I hate the huge eyes, I hate the rapid speech, I hate the gigantic drops of sweat, I hate the cute shrieks of glee or displeasure that the characters make – I hate every single aspect of the medium, and yes, I have sat down and watched a few episodes of anime shows that my friends tell me are “the best.” Basically, my hatred for anime is roughly equal to my hatred of Southern California, El Paso, Sarah Palin, Sex and the City, and the “University” of Washington.

So anyway, my day took a real turn for the worse when I walked into the comic book shop to see massive anime posters adorning the walls and a video of some anime show poisoning a perfectly good television perched on top of one of the bookcases. Out of the entire inventory in this shop, I’d say about 50% of it was anime. This was a jarring start to my search, but, unwilling to have walked two blocks in vain, I pressed on.

I entered the shop as one would enter a public restroom near Larry Craig’s office – carefully. I tried to keep my eyes off of the anime, but there was no clear divide in the store between the anime shelves and the shelves that stocked things that don’t make me grind my teeth. No matter where I looked there was at least one cheery-faced, sword-wielding vixen whose eyes were only dwarfed by her breasts. This was problematic for me because I feared that at any point someone could snap a picture of me looking in the general direction of anime and then label it “Truman looking at anime,” which would be a PR disaster of Larry Craig proportions.

Eventually, I figured out that the honest-to-goodness graphic novels were stored on a shelf that, much to my chagrin, was pretty much directly under the TV displaying the anime show. I would have loved to have walked over and examined the entire shelf, but I couldn’t as an overweight male individual had pulled up a chair right to the edge of the shelf and was sitting there reading one of the graphic novels, page by page, his considerable girth completely blocking access to the shelf for all other customers. No, it wasn’t enough that this guy refused to dip into his Pocky fund to actually buy the book he seemed so interested in, he made a point of freeloading in such a way that nobody else could freeload either. I feel like that level of disregard for one’s surroundings ought to be punished by sterilization or something, but then again, from the look of the guy I got the idea that we wouldn’t have to worry about his continued presence in the gene pool anyway.

The two other customers in the store weren’t doing much better – one of them, standing in front of a rack of comic books, was softly singing the theme song to some TV show and was quick to mutter “Hello” to me every time I walked past him. The other, another overweight fellow in an overcoat and bowler hat, was engaging the guy behind the counter in a long and, forgive my pun, ‘animated’ discussion about manga comics that rendered him unable to answer my question about the location of the graphic novel that I’d shown up for in the first place.

At this point, I may have alienated a good deal of my readership (many of whom have a distinctive history of marching band and science fiction enthusiasm) and would like to pull back and remind everyone that I’ve spent many a Sunday afternoon in my best friend’s living room in the company of character sheets and dice, and that I own a T-shirt identifying me as a member of a fictitious rebel science fiction army. I’m not trying to judge the other people in the store based on the fact that they weigh more than I do or even because they have a somewhat more enthusiastic opinion toward anime.

What I am trying to say is that if we nerds ever want to shed our stereotype as socially awkward and unhygienic, well, maybe it would do if some of us started getting a little less socially awkward and unhygienic. I doubt that Christians feel embarrassed when they go to Christian bookstores, nor do NRA members feel embarrassed when they visit gun shops. So why is it that when I go to a comic book shop, which sells some products I have a passing interest in, that I feel like I have to look over my shoulder all the time in case somebody cool sees me hanging out with TV Theme Singer or Captain Mooching Obstruction? I mean, I feel more self-conscious than Larry Craig when he goes to adult shops to buy gay porn.

In the end, afraid that prolonged exposure to the comic book shop would drive me to grab a chair of my own or start singing TV themes, I left and went to the bookstore next door, in search of a more socially acceptable form of literature to spend money on.

It was there that I spent a very pleasant afternoon among the countless thousands of paperback science fiction novels they had on sale.

While Truman Capps’ stance against anime is similar to Larry Craig’s stance against gay people, Truman would like to assure you that he doesn’t solicit anime in public restrooms.

Info Hell: An Epilogue

"Hurry! We've got to find another Academic Source!"

The completion of Info Hell has become something of a rite of passage among journalism students, and the professors have recently gotten involved as well. For years now, the official paper turn in date has consisted of the professor reading the name of every student in the class, who, when their names are read, stand up, go to the front of the classroom, and deposit their project into the turn-in box belonging to the graduate student who had been in charge of their discussion section. Having turned in the project, each student then shakes hands with the professor and is presented with a small button, which reads “I SURVIVED INFO HELL!” It is generally accepted that that button and talent will make you a very talented journalist.

In many ways, the ceremony is a lot like high school graduation – the highly boring conclusion of a horrific experience I’d much rather forget – although I doubt there are quite as many girls sobbing and hugging throughout the whole affair.

As someone who is not necessarily a fan of boring ceremonies, you could say I was lucky that I opted to turn in my paper early so I could go to the Pac-10 basketball championship in Los Angeles. I met my professor during her office hours at 9:30, handed her my paper, shook her hand, collected my button, exchanged pleasantries, and went on my way. That was the end – I leave it entirely in their hands.

I’ve talked to a lot of people about Info Hell over the past term, and it’s my opinion that just about everybody who comes to the University of Oregon starts out as a journalism major.* This is because every time I mentioned Info Hell, somebody nearby would, without fail, say “Oh, yeah, that class is why I quit being a journalism major.” In fact, I believe I wrote a column about roughly this subject some time ago. Point is, it makes me feel like sort of a badass for being able to put up with more crap than the literally hundreds of other ex-journalism majors at this school. I’m not saying it makes me better than they are or anything (I’m better than literally hundreds of people for plenty of other reasons) but it does make me feel like somebody who climbed a mountain or something. Maybe not the world’s tallest mountain, but a mountain nonetheless. Not everyone has tasted the air at the top of Mount Journalism, but I have – and it tastes just as fetid and disgusting as the air down at the bottom, with the added depression of knowing I have to climb down the other side now. Really, the only good thing about the top of Mount Journalism is that I can piss on the people on top of Mount Business (it is considerably smaller) and tell them it’s raining.

*Whenever I make a broad generalization such as this one, in which I hypothesize that all 20,000 people at my school are majoring in the same thing, I always get a deluge of comments from people calling shenanigans and self-righteously pointing out that they never started out as journalism majors or rubbed their roommate’s camera on their crotches or whatever I was talking about in that week’s generalization. Newsflash: I know. That’s the thing about comedy; it’s not always 100% factual. Telling me my impossible generalizations are incorrect is like telling a clown that it would probably be easier for him and his 30 friends to get around if they bought a bigger car.

As it turns out, though, the hardest part of the entire process wasn’t the research or the writing or the fact that at any given time I had so many Word windows and PDF files open that my processor basically ground to a halt – it was the logistics of printing my entire 104 page assignment. This is sort of embarrassing for me, because the process of printing is basically clicking and waiting as opposed to generating 104 pages of original content, suggesting some sort of motor skill deficiency on my part.

I was fortunate not to encounter any of the serious disasters that my friends did, such as Cameron “The Hammer” Shultz, whose USB flashdrive successfully deleted 13 of his annotations about a day before the project was due, throwing him into a tailspin of work, profanity, and non-bathing until he refinished his project about an hour before the due date.* My project was finished and ready to print a full 48 hours before the appointed turn-in hour, but the printing process could well have been a class in and of itself. There are about a thousand tiny elements to keep track of as you pull together 10 weeks’ worth of data to print and bind, and in a few cases, if you don’t have some of those elements you get an automatic zero on your paper.

*To continue an idea Cameron began in his blog post about the whole affair, I’ve got to say that USB flashdrives are the college equivalent of that giant alien sand pit in Return of the Jedi that Jabba wants to throw Luke into – if you never want to see your information again, by all means put it on a flashdrive. Just chuck it off of your floating hoverbarge and wave goodbye as it gets slowly devoured over the course of several thousand years, just like Boba Fett.

With the help of my intrepid roommate Josh I organized all 104 pages into a single PDF file (and by “with the help of,” I mean “Josh did everything while I gave him vague, highly critical directions”), which was a lot harder than it sounds because this process required a flashdrive to transfer files en masse from my computer to his, which is about as safe as delivering Christmas presents through a black hole, and because the Adobe program he was using refused to put the pages in the proper order unless it had been asked three times and offered a sexual favor. Fortunately, I have no shame when it comes to offering sexual favors, so the job did get done eventually, although we all felt a little less innocent once it was finished.

So I went to the J-school that night, finagled my way in through the good graces of a janitor, and printed my project on one of the free black and white printers in a photo lab. In the interests of protecting my stack of papers, I put my project into my laptop’s protective carrying case and carried my $1200 laptop under my arm. As I walked home in the light drizzle at 1:30 AM, I knew that at that point if anybody tried to mug me they were more than welcome to my laptop.

If they went for the project, though, motherfuckers were gonna die.

Truman Capps is going to major in pottery if he didn’t pass this fucking class.

Delay

Due to unforeseen circumstances, I'm going to have to update later on today, most likely sometime in the early to mid afternoon.

Preaching Tolerance

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald - 3 days since our last strike!

It was a Saturday morning and I was fast asleep, as usual. Having gone to bed at roughly 3 AM, I wasn’t planning on waking up much before the mid afternoon – that is, until there was a quick, businesslike, “shave and a haircut – two bits” style knock on my door. Jerked out of the darkest depths of my REM cycle, I stumbled out of bed wearing only my boxer shorts and groggily flung the door open, evidently expecting whoever had dared wake me up so early on a Saturday to be comfortable with what they were about to see.

Standing on my doorstep were two of the cutest, most innocent looking young women I had ever seen, wearing matching black wool coats. Their smiles abated slightly when they realized they were looking at a man who was about 80% naked. I promptly came to my senses, swore loudly, shut the door, threw on some clothes, and opened it again. In spite of their better judgment, the girls were still there, and one of them began to speak when she saw that I had covered as much of my shame as was possible.

“Hi there!” She said through a quaint Minnesota accent. “We’re from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints…”

Once she’d come to the end of her introduction, I politely told them both that I wasn’t going to be buying what they were selling and bade them adieu. They seemed eager enough to leave. I have to say, I felt sorry for them – being plucked out of Minnesota to do a mission trip in Oregon in the winter is bad enough, but I had perhaps made their experience even worse.

I am an atheist. This means that I don’t believe in any god, instead placing my faith in science to explain the world’s mysteries (interestingly enough, I barely scraped through high school chemistry with a B-, so maybe I’ve been having a crisis of non-faith). My parents and grandparents are also atheists, so altogether we have a combined total of nearly 250 years of being told we’re going to hell. To world religion’s credit, there have also been many attempts to save us – from Jehovah’s Witnesses to Mormons to Christians to Catholics and even some Orthodox Jews once in New York. Throughout my life, my parents have instilled in me the importance of always being polite to the people who attempt to convert me.

At first, I couldn’t understand why. I found it supremely offensive – and, to some extent, still do – that complete strangers would have the audacity to think that their way of life is so much better than mine that they’d be doing me a favor to try and impress it upon me. Now, however, I am an opinion columnist, and my job is more or less to impress my opinions on everyone unlucky enough to read my column, so that’s given me a fair amount of perspective. But more importantly, I see the futility of this misdirected anger.

Many other people in my apartment complex were not as polite to the Mormons as I was – sure, I wasn’t aware of anyone else inadvertently giving them a free show at the door, but I did see many other tenants slamming doors in their faces or angrily debating them about the existence of God or the veracity of their beliefs. This sort of thing is just damn impolite, if I do say so myself.

I’m lucky, as a career atheist, to live in Oregon and to be going to a school like the University of Oregon, where a significant portion of the student body is very open minded about my lack of faith. However, in many cases I’ve also seen a lot of close-mindedness exercised toward people who do have faith, based on the sometimes (or often) detrimental effects of religion both in the past and the present. I’ve seen students debating with theists of most every sort on campus, but what I find perhaps most offensive is when I see people arguing with Jesus Guy, who stands by the EMU with his “Trust Jesus Now” sign.

Jesus Guy has never done anything to hurt anyone – he just stands there, rain or shine, holding a sign that preaches a message of love. Even though I don’t think Jesus was the son of God, I agree with a lot of what he said, and I really respect the Jesus Guy both for focusing on the more peaceful aspects of Christianity, and also for his dedication to his message. Yet I see people debating him on the notion of belief from time to time, calling up facts and figures about all the strife in the world caused by religion as a means to bring him down, as well as what he believes in.

It certainly would appear that religion is to blame for the majority of the world’s ills – terrorism, Gaza, imperialism, the Left Behind movies – but in fact, it is not. The real culprit is fundamentalism. If every member of every religion in the world were able to swallow their pride and accept that other people live differently, religion would be no problem at all – it would all be love, harmony, and charity, tenets that I believe most major religions were founded on.

This is why I, as an atheist, do my best not to take umbrage when theists show up at my door trying to preach their own way of life. Religious tolerance is a two way street; if you want it, you’ve got to show it (in fact, I think there’s something in the Bible about that). We can’t blame individual members of a religion for any past or current prejudices and violence on the part of that religion either here or abroad ¬– that sort of thinking is where prejudice begins.

If there’sone opinion I can impress, though, it’s that you should always put on your clothes before you answer the door.

Watching Watchmen

"Okay, see, basically none of the people in this picture are in the movie, but they're all really important to the alternate history of the storyline because... Hey, where are you going?"

How big of a geek am I? Well, the newspaper I work for (so, geeky thing #1 right there) went on strike this week, garnering national news coverage and missing publication for the first time in over a century, and in my blog I’m opting to talk about a movie I saw which features the world’s most awkward sex scene and a lifetime supply of glowing blue dick (and trust me, that’s a lot of glowing blue dick).

If you aren’t familiar with the Watchmen graphic novel, probably the only thing more perplexing to you than the trailers (which featured a guy with an inkblot test for a face, a flying glass machine on Mars, and people making out in front of a nuclear explosion) was the reactions of the people in the audience who were familiar with the graphic novel (sweating, grabbing inhalers, more sweating). I can’t blame you; people have tried to ask me what Watchmen is about, and despite an all-encompassing love of basically every element of the story, I really can’t explain it. I feel like the first major stumbling block is when I say “alternate history,” because a lot of people don’t get what that is, and those who do get it tend to roll their eyes when they hear it (take it from me, the one writing an alternate-history novel). Because of this, I had always felt that even if a Watchmen movie were to be made in a manner that did not suck, it would be a huge financial flop because most people in the country haven’t read the graphic novel, and would thus assume that it was some sort of softcore porn movie about Blue Man Group or something.

However, if there was anyone who could take one of the most densely layered and complex stories in the past 25 years and turn it into a feature length film, it would be Watchmen’s director, Zack Snyder. Zack Snyder has only made three movies counting this one, but thanks to his directorial prowess every one of his films has been literally overflowing with raw, unrefined kickass. Furthermore, each film is defined by a crowning moment of pure insanity. In Dawn of the Dead it’s a zombie woman giving birth to a zombie baby, in 300 it’s King Leonidus and his men building a wall of dead Persians and then tipping that wall of Persians over so that it crushes a bunch of other Persians, and in Watchmen it’s Lee Iacocca getting shot in the fucking face. For those of you not up to date on your famous entrepreneurs of the 1980s, Lee Iacocca was the CEO of Chrysler from 1978 to 1992, and is credited with saving what had once been a fledgling auto company from bankruptcy. Furthermore, Lee Iacocca is nowhere to be found in the original graphic novel. What this means is that Zack Snyder looked at the script for Watchmen and said, “Yeah, that’s good – but I think we should blow Iacocca’s brains out.” And by golly, he did. Iacocca, apparently, is not amused.

It’s these little departures from the source content – and I’m referring here to spontaneously murdering a captain of industry – that really made Watchmen shine for me. I was surprised at how closely the film stuck to the graphic novel, right on down to dialogue and order of events. However, as great as it is to see all the stuff I’d read more times than probably is healthy on the big screen, it was even better to see the places where Snyder had decided that his vision was cooler than that of the original author’s. In the graphic novel, there is not a scene wherein two spandex clad heroes beat the crap out of about 30 rioting prisoners with their bare hands; however, in the movie it is both perfect and totally awesome.* Also, fifth-term President Nixon and his cabinet gather to discuss mutually assured destruction in a war room that looks exactly like the one from Dr. Strangelove, which actually made me yelp with pseudo-orgasmic, cult film and cult graphic novel synthesis glee.

*This could also be because I’ve wasted entire days of my life this term doing research on the best rehabilitative methods for prisoners as part of my Info Hell project, and it was nice to just see some of those bastards get the beat down for wasting so much of my time.

The adherence to the source content is also one of Watchmen’s biggest flaws, for two reasons. The first is that some scenes do not need to be replicated in the same, shot-for-frame detail as in the graphic novel. To be honest, Zack Snyder really only made about half of a movie – for the rest of it he just referred to the graphic novel for all of his framing and dialogue, moved his actors around accordingly, and turned on the camera. While it’s admirable to try and please the fanboys, Zack Snyder was sticking so close to the source that I feel like he thought they were going to burn down his house if he left too many of his own fingerprints on the material.

The second reason is that Snyder clearly shot several hours of footage, perhaps intending to release all of it on the DVD, but the movie is only (yes, only) two hours and 45 minutes long. A whole lot of footage had to be cut, and in a few places the choppiness is evident. Where, for example, did Silk Spectre II get the gun she uses at the end of the movie? Who are the reporters who receive the journal? I feel certain that the answers to these questions are on film somewhere, but most audiences won’t see them until they buy the extended edition DVD in a few months. Had Snyder taken one or two liberties with the original story, he could’ve made a more cohesive movie that was capable of standing on its own two feet, rather than creating a pseudo-fantasy world in which women can produce guns out of thin air and overweight men spill ketchup on their shirts.*

*This probably doesn’t make any sense at all if you haven’t seen the movie, but then again, I don’t suppose this post does either.

Overall, though, I was pleased with Watchmen. It did the story justice and serves as an awesome experience for readers of the graphic novel – everyone else, however, would do well to read a copy before buying a ticket. There isn’t much in the movie that I’d change, save for an overly long and remarkably graphic superhero sex scene, the awkwardness of which doubles if you see it with your girlfriend. And doubles again if she hasn’t read the graphic novel.

And doubles again if she’s been listening to you rave about how great the naked blue guy superhero porn movie is for the past six weeks.

Truman Capps also applauds the use of 99 Luftballoons in a big budget superhero blockbuster – if there was anything that could’ve saved Spider Man 3, it would’ve been that.

Open Source Publishing

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald, which is currently on strike until further notice.

Knight Library is a truly invaluable information resource, thanks largely to the various online scholarly databases to which it subscribes. Databases like EBSCO and LexisNexis provide access to hundreds of thousands of documents that simply cannot be found elsewhere on the Internet. Sure, Google is a great information database when you’re looking for UFO conspiracy theories and pornography, but unless you’re lucky enough to be writing your doctoral thesis on either of those topics you’re probably going to need to search for information somewhere more reputable.

Unfortunately, Knight Library is planning to cut several scholarly journals and nearly 30 databases, limiting the research options available. Officials have given various reasons for the cutbacks in service – subscription prices are growing while the library budget does not, for-profit publishers who maintain some of these services make a lot of money while the authors themselves make none, and a desire to proceed toward new forms of research that is mutually beneficial to both authors and the school – but the fact remains that once these journals and databases are gone, there will be fewer avenues of research open to students completing their scholarly projects. Some of the smaller databases on the chopping block, like Nucleic Acids Abstracts, may not be vital to a large percentage of the student body (although I will sorely miss this opportunity to know about the thousands of kinds of nucleic acids in the world, or even to find out what a nucleic acid is), but others, such as the LexisNexis Government Periodicals Index, could have a greater affect on student research.

The proposed alternative to these databases and journals is open source publishing; a form of Internet distribution wherein scholars publish their studies online and everyone has free and unrestricted access. Sites like www.archive.org are host to hundreds of thousands of articles, videos, images, books, and archived web pages, all available for free download. Eager to see if this Wikipedia-style approach to research was all it was cracked up to be, I swung by archive.org and took a look around.

The website describes itself as a digital equivalent to the ancient Library of Alexandria, which was said to include a copy of every book in the world at that time before it burned down (one would think that with all that accumulated knowledge in one place they would have at least figured out how to install a sprinkler system). When I visited, Archive.org’s front page indicated their intent to archive just about anything by displaying their most recent acquisitions, which included a recording of a Grateful Dead concert, a novel published in 1892, and a documentary about the Los Angeles Fire Department from the early 1950s (exactly the sort of thing the Library of Alexandria needed). All in all, archive.org is a fascinating place, and I’d definitely recommend that you go there on the off chance that anything that’s happened in the past 100 years interests you, because they’ve probably archived something about it.

However, when I entered my Info Hell topic, “Prison Reform,” into the search bar, I was presented with 71 results. Several of them were historical documents, a few digitized books, a B-movie from 1943 called Prison Mutiny, and two audio clips from a right wing talk radio show whose topics frequently include 9/11 conspiracy theories and the illegal immigrant “invasion” of our country. I didn’t find any contemporary academic sources; however, to archive.org’s credit, there were a few Congressional documents dating back to the late 1800s. Of course, I could have been looking on the wrong site; there could be another open source publishing website that I’ve missed entirely which features a wealth of information about prisons and nucleic acids. The problem is that I spent an hour searching for open source sites on the Internet, and archive.org was the best result I found – if we’re switching to a new source for research, I’d want it to be more assessable than that.

I’m not trying to say that open source publishing is bad, because I feel like the concept of freely available information is very sound – this is one of the reasons I can spend hours fiddling around on Wikipedia. Also, I’m definitely in favor of the University making the shift to open source publishing of this sort. What I am trying to say is that to make that shift now by canceling our subscriptions to more traditional services is not a good idea.

Open source publishing is only as good as the people participating, and at the moment the trend is only gathering steam. The open source database I looked at was home to exercise videos and a 45-page stageplay about ants, but no scholarly articles on corrections, which is a commonly picked topic by students in Information Gathering. To cancel our subscriptions to traditional databases and journals before open source websites develop a broader range of useful scholarly information will leave a lot of students in the lurch as far as research is concerned.

But of course, money is tight. Even with the $20 million the library gained through Campaign Oregon, the rising cost of these subscription services will eventually exceed our budget. That said, giving students a few more years with ready access to reliable information allows sites like archive.org some time to develop their range of scholarly articles. While sitting and waiting for open source publishing to really take off may not seem like a wise idea at first, the University could hasten the process along by setting aside some funds for the development of the open source model. By offering incentives to professors who post their studies online rather than submitting them to journals or helping to spread the word in the academic community about these digital alternatives, we could work to increase the number of scholarly documents available online in order to make the transition smoother when the time comes to change our methods of research.

Sure, the idea of spending money on what is supposed to be a more cost effective strategy seems counterintuitive, but if we really want to embrace a publication model that is free for everyone, we’ve got to make an investment in our future.

Hate Mail, Part Deux

Now here's somebody who knows what he's talking about.

As you may recall from a previous, not terribly funny update, I wrote about my frustrations with working at the Oregon Daily Emerald. Getting into the job, I apparently hadn’t understood that I’d have to be coming up with an opinion on a weekly basis, and after a term and a half of throwing out mostly half baked, soft pitch opinions, I was wondering how much longer I’d be able to keep up the façade of myself as a “serious” “journalist.” The time had come, I suppose, to decide between going big and going home, and for what is perhaps the first time in my life, I opted to go big. Some of you have mentioned that in the past few weeks, my Daily Emerald articles have started getting better. The combination of bourbon, rage, and not giving a shit has evidently paid off.

I may have mentioned before that I was afraid to toss out an actual, controversial opinion. Don’t take this to mean that I’m not an opinionated person; that I most certainly am. It’s just that up until this point I was under the impression that in addition to being an opinionated person, I was also an idiot whose ideas had best be kept out of print lest he incite an accidental race war or something.

I think this first became an issue for me when I was on the speech and debate team at my high school. Now, for those of you popular enough to not know the ins and outs of competitive public speaking, that gloriously dorky world is divided into two camps: Speeches, which tend to be individual orations judged on their quality, and Debate, in which two people (or two pairs of four) argue the pros and cons of an issue while wearing suits and generally refraining from hand gestures, crotch grabbing, or the phrase “jump up my butt.”

My various speech coaches always thought that I’d be great at debating with the same misguided fervor that people assume I would make a good leader or a great Jehovah’s Witness. On a few occasions, they paired me up in practice debates against other people from my team, and in almost every situation I’d end up getting verbally massacred by my opponents, who had the remarkable ability to disprove every word I said, including prepositions and most forms of punctuation. These repeated defeats quickly taught me that stating an opinion in the presence of dissenters was a great way to get mentally gang raped by people better informed than I. Thus, I opted not to do debate and instead settled on a Speech event called After Dinner Speaking, which centers on making stupid jokes for a few minutes before saying something mildly insightful. I was so good at this that I kept doing it after high school, twice a week, on the Internet – like a drunk man pissing non sequiturs and metaphors into a storm drain full of porn and lolcats.

Once again, this brings us to the question of why I became an opinion columnist in the first place, seeing as I already had a well-established fear of inciting the rage of a better-informed contemporary with a different opinion than my own. It’s especially bad given the fact that the name of the job was the thing I was so reluctant to do – Opinion Columnist. I mean, I wouldn’t feel any sympathy for somebody with a fear of alligators who became a professional alligator wrestler, or a guy with a fear of genitalia who became a gynecologist. I guess I was just sort of hoping that the Emerald’s readers would be so tired of opinions halfway through the week that they’d really appreciate a collection of non sequiturs and metaphors that ambled toward a point. Think of it as a kinder, gentler Opinion page, a vacation for the brain, if you will.

It was a few weeks ago when I finally realized that my opinions, which almost all fall into the “Don’t be an idiot, quit whining, meatloaf is delicious” vein, weren’t really all that scandalous to begin with – as far as I was concerned (in my opinion, you could say), they were common sense. My main fear, then, was broadcasting these opinions to the thousands of people who read (or do the Sudoku in) the paper, at which point I applied the “quit whining” portion of my personal philosophy and started writing down the stuff that made sense to me.

So far, it’s been going pretty well. I’ve received a couple of congratulatory emails from faculty who enjoyed my work, ensuring that I will forever be a teacher’s pet, but I’ve also received some pieces of hate mail. Fortunately, though, so far a fucking idiot has written every message. Take, for example, this response to my piece on helicopter parents:

Megan

It's kind of hilarious to hear someone whose mommy and daddy pay for everything try to preach about "independence" and the "real world." Practicing all those important life skills is easy enough when you have that big golden buffer between you and reality. Let's talk when you're juggling two part-time jobs, a full-time school load and are $15,000 in debt. If (heaven forbid!) my parents offered to drive up here and buy my books then I would have to accept that help because honestly I can't afford not to.

I'm sure you're a nice enough guy, Truman, but I think it would be in your best interest to find something to write about that doesn't make you sound like a first rate douchebag. Maybe a story about some third world country whose Poor Starving Children you helped or your struggle to choose the perfect double major combination or that backpacking trip through Europe when you lost cell phone reception for 20 minutes.

Hey, Megan – I couldn’t say this in an email, but I’ll say it here: You can jump up my butt.

I’ve changed my opinion on opinions, or at least the ones I’m writing for the paper. Whereas before I tried to examine things from every possible angle and see all the sides, I’ve realized now that that sort of behavior doesn’t meet deadlines. In order to put out good articles, like the ones you’ve been reading, I need to stand behind what I think and not look back. Therefore, I’ve been following this mantra every time I sit down to crank out another column:

Opinions are like assholes – everyone’s got one, and mine is the best.

Truman Capps actually is a nice enough guy.