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Month: April 2003

North Korean records

April 8, 2003
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Idle note of no particular relevance except that North Korea has this urgent need to be noticed right now and I want to do my part:

The biggest audience ever for a professional wrestling match was in Pyongyang, North Korea in 1995. The venue was May Day Stadium, and the wrestlers were Antonio Inoki and Ric Flair. Attendance is variously estimated at between 150,000 and 190,000 people.

Whooooooo!

Also, because I stumbled across it while researching this entry, I want to share the unofficial Pyongyang Metro web site. Enjoy.

Fame and fortune

April 7, 2003
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The 2003 Basketball Hall of Fame inductees were announced today. Unsurprisingly, Robert Parish was elected in his first year of eligibility. James Worthy also made it in, as well he should have. So did Chick Hearn. I can’t quibble with his inclusion but they really ought to at least nominate Johnny Most next year; if you’re going to include broadcasters who were identified with great teams, you need to include Most for his association with the Celtics.

Mo Cheeks probably should have gotten in. He’s a multiple all star, he is second in steals all time, and he is sixth in assists all time. His Philly team won a title, too. DJ should also have made it — he was maybe the best defensive guard of the 1980s, plus he won titles with two teams and was the scoring star of the Sonics the year he won a title with them. DJ may never get in cause he’s a prickly guy; Cheeks might get in someday. Le sigh.

Evidentiary

April 7, 2003
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I watched a couple of episodes of CSI over the weekend. Wow. Now, that’s what I call a cop show for the new millenium.

It’s really one of the most overinflated things I’ve ever seen on television. Every single image is saturated with color, usually blues; the cast is shot so as to be both gritty and polished at the same time. It is, in fact, a pretty good embodiment of Vegas. The show doesn’t take place on the strip, but the design ethos is still very Vegasesque.

The dialogue, likewise, is as stylized as it comes. “There is no room for subjectivity in this department.” “We’re just a bunch of kids that are getting paid to work on puzzles. Sometimes there’s a piece that’s missing; sometimes, we solve it in one night.” “People leave us clues, Nick. They speak to us clues in thousands of different ways. It’s our job to make sure we’ve heard everything they’ve said.” All utterly deadpan. These guys talk in Capital Letters, cause they do a Very Important Job.

The terrifying thing is, I kind of liked it. Kind of. I mean, it’s a total Bruckheimer production in all ways, but if you just pretend that it takes place in a hyperreal Morrisonian world it’s pretty entertaining. The science is OK, even though no police department in the country has as much gear as these guys, and the mysteries are generally cute.

Come to think of it, it’s almost the television equivalent of those old Gardener Fox Flash stories. The ones with the science facts in every issue. Not altogether surprising, since Barry Allen was after all a police scientist. Going with the Morrison theme, one might well remember that those Flash facts were one of the things Morrison loved about Flash, and were in fact one of the reasons he did a 12 issue run on the book. So there you have it: Flash, the very first CSI.

Daily weirdness

April 7, 2003
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NPR reports that chemical weapon loaded missiles have been found in Iraq. The NPR story attributes the news to an officer in the 101st Airborne Division, but a Yahoo story says NPR attributed it to an officer in the 1st Marine Division. The latter attribution matches my memory of what I heard on NPR while driving into work this morning.

That division’s commander, Joe Dowdy, was relieved of his post on Saturday. There’s been no explanation of why yet, which is not necessarily alarming, but man. Part of me wonders whether the two stories could be linked. Part of me says “That’s silly; if he was relieved of duty for refusing to report fake WMD evidence, the truth would come out pretty quickly.” The second part wins after a short battle, but the story bears watching.

Update: Reuters says the missiles were found by Marines travelling with the 101st, which clears that up a little. This is not the same find as the barrels of possible sarin found at an agricultural facility. Busy day.

WISH 42: the morning after

April 7, 2003
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Isn’t the morning after sort of the definition of incoherency? Anyhow. WISH 41 asks:

How coherent do you expect a game world to be? Is a game world merely a stage for the characters, or does it have a life of its own? How deep does it need to be to satisfy you? How do you contribute as a player or GM to making the game world more coherent, if you do?

This is kind of a hard question to answer, given that my primary GM for the last five or so years is the kind of guy who has every NPC in his cities statted out. So I think I don’t care so much about coherency, but perhaps I am spoiled and I would hate it if the world wasn’t coherent.

However, I think that what I really want is not so much coherency but depth. I like being able to go in any direction and find something there. Maybe the GM is ad libbing it, or maybe s/he’s just thorough. I don’t much care as long as I can’t tell the difference.

The classic GM trick, of course, is to simply listen to the players theorizing and choose one of the theories to be accurate. That works OK for me.

Depth is different than coherence. Let’s say one NPC says he used to work with another NPC; I’m not gonna think much about whether or not they were actually in the same place at the same time in the game world. I’m big on suspension of disbelief, and am happy to paper over small cracks in the world.

Housekeeping and plagarism

April 7, 2003
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I pulled the Agonist from my war blogroll and added Stratfor; this won’t do anyone without a subscription much good, alas. Sorry about that. I’m pretty sure I had good reason, though.

When Sean-Paul Kelley admitted he was pulling stuff from Stratfor without attribution cause of “time constraints” I chalked it up to newbie enthusiasm. It’s one reason I decided to get the Stratfor account — I’d been reading their reports for free over on the Agonist, which made me feel a touch guilty. However, it now seems that he misattributed several Stratfor bits in order to gain credibility. In other words, he wanted people to think he had insider connections so he copied some Stratfor pieces and claimed they came from secret sources.

Thanks for doing the image of the Internet all kinds of good, Sean-Paul.

Panopticon continues

April 5, 2003
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CBS has a live Baghdad webcam running. I’m sure everyone else in the world but me knows this. So surreal. Stratfor pointed out recently that all this embedded exposure is a great way to pull attention from units without embedded reporting, which is utterly true.

Right now, on CBS’ webcam, someone’s talking in Arabic from off-screen. I can see a tripod to the right of the picture, and that might be the talker just barely visible next to it. I hear the other Baghdad webcams are also set up on top of this building, whatever it is.

Strange times.

Reasons and whyfores

April 5, 2003
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Condoleezza Rice says the coalition gets the leading role in rebuilding Iraq:

“It would only be natural to expect that … having given life and blood to liberate Iraq, the coalition would have the leading role. I don’t think anybody is surprised by that,” President Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told reporters.

Well, sure, if we were doing for the reward. I was under the impression we were doing it a) to protect the West from terrorism and b) to give the Iraqis a better government. Rice makes it sound like we should get to rebuild Iraq… as a reward. Shouldn’t we be selecting the rebuilders with an eye towards who will best help reach those two goals?

I mean, hell. Let’s say (it’s a hypothetical, breathe easy) that France is the country which can do the best job of keeping Iraq from turning into a haven for terrorists. Wouldn’t it in fact be utterly wrong of Bush to do anything other than hand it to France? I think he’s obliged to continue planning with our established and public reasons for invading Iraq at the forefront of his selection criteria. Reward should be at best a distant third.

Machiavelli had this great trick for conquering nations. You put a harsh ruler in to really piss everyone off; then you bring in a nice guy and they’re so grateful they forget they were conquered. Through no real fault of our own other than being there, we’re doing a solid job of pissing people off. It’s unavoidable in a war. I’m thinking we should give the Arab world something they can perceive as a victory by reluctantly handing over the post-war reconstruction to the UN.