Dark Souls vs. Skyrim is an interesting contrast, but I wish Kuo went further than chalking it up to cultural differences. Dark Souls is ultimately tyrannical, it is incredibly carefully executed – it can’t glitch the way Skyrim glitches because any glitch would make its tyranny cruel rather than inviting.

The games illustrate different ways of achieving success, of progressing. Dark Souls never, ever lets up. It teaches you that unless you are patient, and careful, you cannot move forward. If you even once think you can take some easy route, or breeze through some fight without paying attention, without observing the rules of combat and following them meticulously, it will fucking kill you and rob you and send you back.

Skyrim asks patience only in that it takes time for you to become powerful. If you dedicate time to the game your character will become something that can win any fight. You must observe the mechanical rules for progressing your character, rather than yourself, through the game.

Dark Souls is a continuation of the original video game, it is a direct line from Mega Man or Mario, that challenged you to learn controls and reactions and levels. Skyrim is a new thing (well, it’s a continuation of Morrowind, but, you know…) in that the primary challenge it offers is the challenge of exploration. It doesn’t ask if you can master its controls and tasks – those are easy – it asks if you can discover all it has to offer. In essence, though, both styles are about the player unlocking more of the game.

I think that’s why he picks out Passage. There’s nothing more to unlock. You live, you meet someone, you die. It’s miniscule, and it asks you only to read its message. Yes, it’s simple, but it undermines that very basic premise of games.

Trying to understand a piece of art is like playing Dark Souls. This is where Passage falls short, because it still places challenge not in understanding it’s message, but in completing it. You know you’re partner is going to die if you keep moving, you know you are going to die, but there’s nowhere else to go. You’re challenged to walk into death.

Now what would be interesting is a game that challenges you the way Dark Souls does when it comes to understanding, but lets you in the way Skyrim does when it comes to progression.

There’s a moment that comes close in Metal Gear Solid 4. At one point you find yourself in Solid Snake’s memory, and his memory is a moment from a PlayStation game. The graphics become archaic polygons, the control scheme reverts to one created for play on an entirely different controller. The level itself is simple and relatively easy to complete, but you have to recall or intuit an entirely different way of interacting with the game in order to do so. It’s both a new interface and an old interface at the same time.

I also don’t think I’ve entirely parsed all the implications of this moment; what it has to say about games, about memory, about history. It’s an incredibly rich experience that demands patience and care in seeking understanding. Let your mind get lazy, and you’ve got to start back at the beginning of your thought – as with any art.

I think Kuo’s comparison to the Rennaisance is apt.  Games are learning to be art, and I think they’re primed for a real explosion.  Right now they’re in a sort of Don Quixote phase, where they have to deal with their own legacy and meaning before they can expand into the broader world.  Once games understand themselves the way Don Quixote understood the novel, they’re going to explode.  I can’t wait.

The lovely ass holes (go to their websites and send them anonymous hate-mail while you still can) responsible for this bill are calling it, “The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011.”  They claim that they just want to keep our children safe from those nasty internet kiddie-pornographers.  Which is a fat, steaming load of bullshit.

The assholes:

First off, the people you need to keep your children safe from are not faraway strangers on the internet who want to wank to pictures of little boys.  You need to keep your children safe from your creepy cousin with the creepy, forced smile who your kids call “Uncle” and who used to try and get you to play doctor (or, “touch the electoral body”) when the two of you were kids.  He’s the one taking the pictures and hurting your kids.

Second, this bill is a little like saying, “In order to prevent suicide bombers, we’re going to implant a GPS chip in anyone who enters a store that sells vests.”  Only a tiny fraction of the people who enter said store will be shopping for vests, everybody else will be perfectly innocent and totally violated.  On top of that, the one person who does buy a vest to affix with explosives will still be able to hurt people, the GPS chip will just make it easier to bust them after they have exploded.  Which is useless.

Okay, that metaphor got a little tortured there, but you get what I mean.  The child has already been hurt before the pictures/video hit the internet.

Third, the assholes don’t understand how the internet works.  They have not heard of proxy servers.  Nor of public libraries with internet access.  Nor of internet cafes.  Of course, those last two will only work until we all get internet IDs…though, considering how easy it is to fake a real ID…

All the assholes are doing is chipping away at what remains of our privacy and bastardizing enumeration.  The name of this bill, as I’ve partially illustrated above, is complete crap.  It does not protect children, not at all.  Yet who would be willing to vote against this bill?  Can you imagine?

“My opponent voted AGAINST The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011!  He obviously wants to hand your children over to nasty perverts to be fondled!”

You need to let your representative know that you are not fooled by the name, and that you do not want your ISP keeping a record of the things you do on the internet.  Not because you’re doing anything wrong, but because you shouldn’t want this any more than you should want a floating security camera following you around all day and watching you crap.

Go here, to the EFF, and fill out the form.  Send the pre-written letter.  Do it.  If you don’t, I don’t want you to come whining to me when the floating security cameras start making fun of your grotesque genitals.

But why do we even care?

We all know the deal with piracy and DRM, have heard the arguments both pro and con, and we all have our own rabid opinions on the matter.  I’m not going to debate the need for DRM, I’m going to debate the need for Diablo III.

Eleven years ago Diablo II was a revelation for a certain type of obsessive compulsive gamer.  All the looting and clicking on things and leveling up and clicking on more things…what a joy.  The people wanted more.  Finally, in 2008, eight years after the release of Diablo II, a new sequel was announced, the aptly named Diablo III.

But then, in 2009, Torchlight was released.  It had all of the leveling and looting and clicking action, with the added bonus of being newer than Diablo II.  So people bought it.  People, in fact, have bought more than a million of it, and that’s an impressive number of units for most products this side of rice.

Now the aptly named Torchlight II is slated to come out “some time in 2011″ with a host of improvements, including multiplayer and outdoor areas with weather cycles.  Meanwhile, Diablo III has been pushed back to “maybe January 2012,” which probably means summer.  To put the whole thing in perspective: the crew at Runic Games (a small, independent developer) has done all of the same work in creating new content for a sequel as Blizzard (which, according to Wolfram Alpha, has 7,600 employees, or roughly three-and-a-half RMS Titanics worth of people), while also creating day and night, sun and rain.  And they’ve done all that in a mere fraction of the time its taken the mighty Blizzard to get to the point where it can delay the release of its game again.

Let me rephrase this one more time, because it blows my mind.  Runic games was founded in 2008, the same year Diablo III was officially announced, and they’re going to release the sequel to their first game before Blizzard releases a game that it has ostensibly had eleven years to work on.

Yes, Diablo III has more impressive graphical assets.  It better, considering Blizzard rakes in $4.5 billion a year.  But, honestly, I don’t think the better graphics matter.  They’re clearly meant to be realistic, which so far means that they’re all sorts of muddy shades of mud.  Here, take a look:

Torchlight II, while not quite as intensive, seems like a bright, colorful place:

And, frankly, it still looks pretty damn good.  It looks, in fact, like a world I’d actually want to spend some time in, which is more than I can say for Mudablo.

So what we’ve got is two games that will have almost exactly the same clicky-looty-levely gameplay, but one will be largely “realistic brown” and have ridiculous DRM.  I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of both those things.  In fact, in the last few years I haven’t played a single game I wished was more realistic.  Usually, I wish games were less realistic so they wouldn’t be either a) creepy, or b) BROWN.

I often, however, wish games were more fun.  And I know Torchlight is just as much fun as Diablo, so why should I suffer for realism?

Sorry, Blizzard, but you’re a decade late and a dollar short.

That effect is rare in real life – the human eye seldom perceives spokes in natural light (sunlight) as moving backwards. It is, rather, a side effect of frame rate. A video camera captures so many frames a second, yada yada yada, wheels on film appear to be rotating backwards.

Why has this filmic convention been imposed on Red Dead Redemption?  Certainly, there are a number of tropes borrowed from westerns in the game…in fact that pretty much IS the game, but there’s no lens flare, no grit or film-grain on the screen.  There’s nothing else to indicate a movie camera presence.  Yes, blood gets on the “lens” when you skin an animal, but that’s not quite the same.

We’re aware that there’s a lens through which we view the world.  This isn’t a first person game, there’s no conceit about us looking through Marsden’s eyes, so giving substance to that imaginary lens doesn’t seem all that alien.  After all, it has presence – just press L1 (or the Left Bumper, depending on your system) and the weapon selection overlay pops up, a two dimensional presence that exists on, or just in front of, the lens.

But the frame-rate issue that creates the impression of spokes rotating backwards has nothing to do with the video game lens.  Video games (for the most part) don’t run at a fixed frame-rate, the frame-rate is determined by code, processing power, number of objects on-screen, etc., and it changes constantly.

It seems like the majority of developers and players, when talking about what makes games special or how games are growing into a legitimate artistic medium, value the ways games a different from movies.  Personally, I think games should be looking to literature to inspire their growth and development, rather than movies (read Don Quixote, that book prefigures the exact struggle video games are undergoing in their infancy), but that’s a post for another day.

So why are the spokes on the wagon wheels spinning backwards?  Why is cinema allowed to invade this world?  Because people expect spokes to move backwards on screen?  Video games can be so much more than movies, and it’s time to start changing expectations.  Let the wagon wheels spin how they’re rendered.

Why?  Not because I’m snobby or anything.  Though I am snobby, but that’s besides the point here.  I like Rowling’s books.  I’ve read them several times.  They’re fun, and I happen to think that fun books are fun to read.  As a bonus, they’ve got some depth, and some really engaging characters.

I even like some of the movies, and the Sorcerer’s Stone captured a sense of childlike wonder at being introduced to a world with magic quite nicely, and and the Prisoner of Azkaban actually managed to tell a story pretty well…plus, Gary Oldman.

But and the Goblet of Fire and and the Half Blood Prince illustrated the problem with turning Rowling’s ever longer and more complex books into movies.  First off, they can’t cram all the material in, so they skip over big chunks and trust that the audience has read the books.  This means that they’re just reminding us of an involving story we once read, rather than involving us in the story they’re telling.  Second, they need to keep up the action.  That sense of wonder in simple magic from the first movie has worn off, and the sequels needs to provide bigger and bigger thrills.  Also, we might notice that the movies aren’t actually telling involving stories if we aren’t disoriented by the occasional action sequence.

Remember the scene where Harry has to steal the golden egg from the dragon in Goblet?  In the book, Harry pulls off the summoning charm (hooray, all that practice paid off!) and then pulls off the Wronski Feint (hooray, he’s such a talented flyer!).  This takes all of, what, three pages?  Remember the scene in the movie?  Remember watching a solid fifteen minutes of Harry running from the dragon, way out of sight of the crowds, trashing the school?

That was a solid fifteen minutes of NOTHING HAPPENING.  It was a car chase, and if I want a car chase I’ll rent Bullit.

A major point of the last two HP books is that victory lies in understanding.  This is why the climactic battle between Harry and Voldemort is mostly a conversation, followed by each man casting a single spell.  Oh, spoiler alert (but why haven’t you read the book yet?  Don’t want to spoil the movie?  Don’t like to enjoy reading?  Bugger off).  Harry can’t hope to beat Voldemort in a straightforward or prolonged magical duel, in the end it’s Harry’s understanding that lets him win.  He understands Voldemort, he understands all the plans and schemes, and he understands a few things about magic that seemed too trivial to Voldemort to bother with.

That’s all well and good…in a book.  How do you think a five minute conversation would go over in the climactic battle in a movie?  From what I’ve seen of the previews, the conversation is replaced with gems like, “Come on, Tom, let’s finish this the way we started it…together!” to make room for a protracted fight between the hero and the villain.  Now that sounds like some silver screen magic!

Skip to 1:50 for the money shot!

So once again we’ll be getting a car chase instead of substance.  Fine, I can enjoy a special effects romp…sometimes.

But I don’t think I’ll enjoy this one.  And the Deathly Hallows: Part I was trying so hard to be gritty and grown up that it was almost completely joyless.  It was, in fact, a little painful.  Remember that bit where they run through the woods shooting spells at death eaters, and the camera’s just whipping around, never quite focusing on anything, and the only sounds are of running and the loud, sharp pops of curses?  That just gave me a headache.  And it wasn’t suspenseful or exciting at all, because I already knew how it had to end.

They needed an action sequence, so once again they drew out a fight (that wasn’t even a fight in the book) into a few minutes of unenjoyable car-chase-ism.

The other big component of the final book is tragedy; people dying, lot’s of important people dying.  Oh, but they’re not important people in the movies because their parts we’re cut to make room for more action.  So the movie has to either try to build the characters up in about thirty seconds each, rely on us to remember from the books how important these people are, or go for such over the top tragic moments that we just have to be sad.  I figure it’ll be the least involving combination of the three that Warner Brothers can manage.

So I’m expecting about two hours of car-chasing; loud, dark, gritty, joyless car-chasing, mixed in with about forty minutes of overwrought tragedy.  I’m sorry, I just can’t get too excited about that.

We’ll see how I feel after I see the movie…probably the day after it comes out.

I avoided Pandorum when it came out because the advertising made it look like just another schlocky survival horror film dressed up with science fiction bits.  In actuality, Pandorum is a potentially great science fiction movie dragged down by some tacked-on survival horror bits.

True, there’s nothing really original in the “good” part of the story.  Mankind’s last survivors riding an arc into the unknown; madness caused by extended time in deep space; the subsequent power-hungry madman who decides to free himself from morality; I’ve read or watched these stories before.  But if we really valued complete originality, we wouldn’t read Shakespeare.  I’m prepared to accept that new ideas are hard to come by.

Pandorum takes these old ideas and breathes a little life into them with a solid cast and some really fantastic set-design.  I’ll get to the actors in a second, but I really want to stress how great the set-design is.  After the craptacular crap-filled crap fest that was Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, I began to give up hope that I would ever see another REAL set.  CG is cheaper.  Shittier, but cheaper.  The sets of  Pandorum hearken back to The Fifth Element and Blade Runner.  Sure, not quite at the same level, but it’s clear that a lot of love and attention went in these sets.

The film itself seems aware that the sets were the real stars, as the closing credits are projected over close-up shots of the different sets.  I watched every second of the credits, and it wasn’t to see who played who.  Think about that for a second: how many movies in the last decade have had sets that are worth looking at closely…let alone sets that would even stand up to a close inspection?

A close second to the sets in making this movie worth watching are the actors.  Ben Foster teeters convincingly between heroic and broken, Cam Gigandet is delightfully creepy and dangerous feeling, and Dennis Quaid gets to show a little range.  Cung Le is sort of random as the Asian-dude-with-a-low-level-job-who-happens-to-be-a-martial-arts-expert, but I appreciated the fact that the Vietnamese actor was allowed to be a Vietnamese badass instead of, say, Chinese or Japanese (the usual suspects for Random Eastern Badasses – cough, cough, Predators, cough).  Antje Traue is competent as the female lead, but this movie is such a boy’s club that she never really gets a chance to shine.

The biggest problems with the performances wasn’t any fault of the actors, but rather the big elephant-in-the-room Problem (yes, that’s a capital P) with the movie.

I can’t help but think that if this movie had been made thirty years ago, it wouldn’t have had the Problem.  Thirty years ago a movie about the final survivors of mankind trying to rescue their dying ship while struggling with memory loss, madness, and an insane leader would have been enough.  But Pandorum came out at the tail end of a long cinematic resurgence of interest in zombies.  So Pandorum has inarticulate mutants that like to eat people.  Inarticulate mutants who suck up a good deal of screen time forcing the cast to run and hide and watch people get eaten in, really, the most banal and uninspiring ways possible.

The Problem is that these survival-horror bits steal time from the movie.  As long as they’re running, the actors don’t really get to act, and the story doesn’t really get to progress.  To get all of the story out to the audience, two blatant expository scenes are shoehorned in with all the grace and smoothness of an inarticulate mutant reciting Shakespeare with a mouthful of human flesh.  There are plenty of moments where all the material covered in these info-dumps could have been artfully unfolded in the action of the film, but that would have taken more time, and thanks to the mutant not-zombies there was no more time.

The advertising for Pandorum made it seem like a horror flick.  In truth, Pandorum could have been a great science fiction flick if it hadn’t been burdened with the need to try and include some overt horror elements.  In fact, there’s more and better horror going on inside the characters’ minds than there is in all of the grayish skin and pointy teeth of a million man-eating mutants.  It’s a crying shame the latter had to overshadow the former.

The NC Miata, introduced in ’06, has a beautiful body. The swelling wheel arches filled with just-big-enough wheels, the gently sloped hood with it’s small, neat power bulge up near the driver – these are delightful. I actually think that the “improvements” made by Mazda to the car since ’06 have made it worse. Yes, the angular headlights on the newer version are an improvement over the little ovals on the older model, but the silly, grinning air intake (which, when you slap on a license plate, turns into a stupid, buck-toothed grin) and the pointy, plastic fog-light enclosures that come off like dimples just ruin the front end for me. In ten years the showier new design will look dated, while the original NC will be another classic, small sports car – and that’s all a Miata should be.

Around back the dual exhaust pipes are aggressive without being overstated or pointless. The slightly lifted haunches make the car look like it’s about to pounce – which it is – and the rear lights actually manage to look modern. That’s quite a feat in a world where most automakers still seem to be slapping rectangular leftovers from the Eighties onto the rumps of their blah-boxes.

The ’02 Boxster is not so attractive, and, in the case of this car, Porsche’s visual tweaks over the last decade have greatly improved the overall look. But I can’t afford a better looking, modern Porsche, and I can’t afford to run a better looking, older Porsche, so let’s just stick with the entry level, ’02 rag-top.

The front end is very Porsche, which may or may not be a good thing. Those awkward eyes, that bonnet that droops towards the middle, the rounded nose; it’s not the kind of face you love, it’s the kind of face you’re proud of because it could only be a Porsche and you like knowing that your Porsche looks like a Porsche. Once you get past the car’s halfway point things start to fall apart.

The tiny side air intakes are not aggressive or sporty looking. In fact, they lack almost any sense of having been designed. They’re simply there, being useful (a trait that was fixed in ’05).

Around the back is…more of the front, and if you like the front you’ll like the back. The big, awkward eyes are here even more problematic because they’re awful shades of red and orange (something else Porsche eventually fixed). While this is a pleasant way to tell other drivers at night whether the car is coming or going, it looks bad with every color the car can be painted. Well, at least it’s a Porsche.

Oh, and the standard alloys look stupid, especially in chrome.

Get inside these cars and the Miata wins again. Yes, it’s smaller, less well-equipped, has less comfortable seats, worse sight-lines, less head room, has possibly the cheapest and lightest feeling parking break lever ever installed in a car, and is, in the burgundy Grand Touring I drove, an awful, thoughtless mixture of black and brown. It’s still better.

The inside of the Boxster has nearly as much plastic as the inside of the Miata, but in order to make it seem more expensive all the switchgear and buttons have been made bulgy, bubbly, and curvy, and they just look like they’re trying too hard. The Miata on the other hand is just what it is, a small sports-car. Yes the plastics are hard and cheap, but they’re unobtrusive, they don’t call attention to themselves, and they let you focus on driving. And when you’re driving, all you’ll care about are the wheel and the shifter, and the leather wrapped around these two gems is on par with the materials in the Boxster.

When you drive the Miata you know you’re not paying for a badge or a show; you’re paying to drive.

And what a drive! The Miata is responsive and planted, and it feels quick. Put your foot down and the two liter, four cylinder engine buzzes it’s way up to 7,000 rpm like it’s an eager puppy and there’s bacon at the red-line. The noise can be a little harsh and a lot loud with the top up, but put the top down and everything is right with the world. Power delivery is smooth, if a little weak down low. Some cars can feel twitchy when they’re in the power band, but the Miata just feels ready.

The Boxster does not feel ready. Porsche has upped the power output in the Boxster’s engine umpteen times since releasing the car, and driving a ten year old version with the 2.7 liter engine makes the reason clear: the engine simply does not feel powerful enough. Yes, the noise of the straight-six rumbling away right behind your back is delightful, and it does produce almost 50 more horsepower than the Miata, but the Boxster also weighs upwards of seven hundred pounds more than the Miata. That means that the power-to-weight ration of the two cars is very, very close, and that translates into very similar straight-line performance.

I know that people swap monstrous V8s into Miatas, and I know the chassis can handle the power, but even with the standard motor the Miata just feels alive. The Boxster, on the other hand, has a chassis that seems to be constantly telling you that it could handle more power just fine. It tells you that it was built to handle more power. It’s just a shame, this chassis says, that you didn’t have the money to afford the extra power.

Turn into a corner in the Boxster and once again the car just screams at you that it could handle more. It’s got a very “on-rails” feel to the handling – but on-rails handling is the sort of thing that front wheel drive cars aim for. It almost doesn’t matter that the Boxster is mid-engined, or that it has a racing pedigree, because down here at the entry-level it just feels like…a car. You know what else just feels like a car? All the other cars.

The Miata, on the other hand, feels like a sports car. It’s limber and planted, but it also has a limit to its handling. It wants you to know that even though you’ve only got 170 measly little horses, they’ve still got enough gallop to put the tail out. I’m not saying the car feels unstable, not at all. Turn in at speed and the body rolls ever so slightly, but the wheels keep going where you’ve pointed them. Even when you’re driving fast the Miata’s as planted and balanced as the Boxster, but the chassis and the engine fit together so well, and each makes the other feel more alive. The Miata is a car that can be driven in a way that feels very fast, where the Boxster feels like it could only go very fast if you’d had the good sense to buy a Boxster S instead.

So in a straight line these two cars are nearly identical, and in the corners the Miata’s more fun. Add to that the fact that the Miata gets right up near 30 mpg while the Boxster maxes out at 25, and what you’ve got, I think, is a rout.

Oh, and I’m not even going to bother comparing the shifters, because they’re both magnificent works of art that make you feel like Mario Andretti for the half-second it takes to downshift.

Since I’m comparing these two particular cars because I am a human being who has things like budgets, and not a playboy with a Black Card, it’s also worth mentioning that even though the Miata is newer it’s cheaper to insure, cheaper to maintain and repair, cheaper to fuel, and will devalue less than the Porsche.

And if I’m talking about mundane things like money, I suppose I should also address practicality, although if you’re buying a small convertible you’re probably not overly concerned about practicality. Because small convertibles aren’t practical. But surprisingly, practicality is the one place the Boxster wins…sort of. Being a front-engined car the Miata can only have one trunk, and while this trunk is a perfectly reasonable size for a beer run or for two duffel bags for a weekend trip, it’s not all that big. I’m told golf clubs will fit, but the trunk lid is quite a bit smaller than the trunk, so unless you can fold your clubs they’re not going to be able to reach the space in which they would fit.

The Boxster has more cargo volume. Being mid-engined it can have a trunk at the front as well as the back. Of course, being mid-engined and a convertible, the trunk at the back is not particularly deep. The trunk at the front is deep…like a well. It’s like a narrow, deep, carpet-lined funnel with a spare tire stuffed into it. Sure, there’s a good amount of volume up there, but nobody owns anything that is a shape which would fit naturally into the front trunk of a Boxster. So while it does have more room for cargo, I’m not sure what cargo.

THE VERDICT

You know those people who say they’d rather drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow? Well, the Miata is for them – it’s not a race car, but boy, can it go. The Boxster I drove was a fast car with the fast taken out…the epitome of fast car slow.

If what you’re looking for is a composed cruiser with badge appeal and a six-cylinder engine, go ahead and buy the Porsche. If you’re over six feet tall, go ahead and buy the Porsche. You won’t fit in the Miata anyway. If you’re one of those people who can only think of Miatas as being driven by women or men like Corky Romano, go ahead and buy the Porsche.

But if you want a small, fun, affordable sports-car…

So what did I buy? Well, I bought a Mini, but that’s a whole other story.

And they are guilty of trying to keep him out of school kitchens.  They are guilty of trying to pinch pennies and continue feeding children horrible food.  But they’ve got a damn good reason.

The Los Angeles Unified School District had almost 700,000 students to teach in the 2007-2008, a number which is not shrinking, and those students are performing at a below-average academic level.

The budget for the district has been cut, due to California’s poor economy, year after year.  Teachers have to contend with growing class sizes, furlough days, layoffs, and a complete lack of resources.  The district’s budget is in shambles.  Without extra funding, says the Deputy Superintendent, “we are going to irreparably harm education for students.”

And Jamie Oliver knows this.  He was set the challenge “to meet the food requirements and within [the LAUSD] budget, then his folks said they couldn’t do it.”

Yet he’s persisting in publicly shaming the LAUSD, in making them look like the bad-guys on national television.  I’m not saying they’re the good guys.  I’m not.  But their first responsibility is to ensure proper education for nearly a million young people – a task that’s already a massive struggle.  Jamie Oliver has created a PR disaster for the district, one they will be forced to address.  Addressing the issue of school food will cost them money.  And where, exactly, does Mr. Oliver think that money will come from?  At what cost will he ensure healthier school lunches?

Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution will come at the cost of education.

And if so many parents are really so concerned with their children’s food, what’s wrong with packing a lunch at home?

I hate this guy.

I hate this guy and I hate his stupid bid for attention and money. Most of all I hate that now I have to listen to people talk about him and his potential Presidential bid. He can’t win; he’s a Mormon and no matter what he says that’s not the same as Kennedy being a Catholic.

Instead I want to talk about how humanity took its first steps into space fifty years ago today. I want to talk about how people are rising up against dictators around the world. I want to talk about anything at all that’s important and relevant, and try and ignore the fact that I’ll be seeing Mitt’s smug, punchable face in YouTube clips and television ads for a solid eighteen months.

He did have a public face, though, this Leon Kaufman.  He shied away from it as much as possible, but his accomplishments were not small.

He ran the team which created the first MRI machine for medical use.  Here’s a 43 minute documentary about it.  I grew up a guinea pig for this project, spending countless staying very still inside large, loud, metal tubes.

He had multiple degrees, a small truckload of patents, and a lifetime of experience with diagnostic imaging technologies.  So when he had something to say about, for instance, X-Rays, people listened.

The morning of his funeral, my father’s final article from the Journal of Transportation Security hit Gizmodo, Boing Boing, Slashdot, and probably any number of other sites.  In the following days and weeks it had been mentioned in just about every major newspaper in the country.  The article detailed experiments that illustrated how the shape of an explosive charge, or its position on the body, could make it invisible to TSA body scanners.  He’d previously questioned the potential side-effects of x-ray body scanners, and now he’d illustrated the basic uselessness of the technology.

He saw the U.S. government using the threat of terrorism to inflate spending, invade people’s privacy, and possibly endanger their health.   And he stopped trusting the country he had called his home for more than forty years.  It’s easy to understand his fears; his parents fled to Argentina from Poland just before the Nazi’s took over, and my dad lived through some of the worst years of Argentine politics before coming to the U.S. in the early sixties to attend U.C. Berkeley.  He knew how easily a government could slip over the line from “protective” to “dangerous.”

This was his last public effort, to use his professional skills and knowledge to try and do some good in the world.  I hope it works, I can think of no better way for him to exist just a little bit longer in our world.