TinkerX

[Alternate sub-titles for this post were: "Social Betworking," "Stoopidity 2.0," "The Venality of Crowds," and "Nothing for Money and Your Clicks for Fee."]

In line at the cafeteria this last Wednesday, I heard a couple guys I don’t know talking about the online auction site Swoopo. It seemed, from the little bit I overheard, like eBay with a slight gambling twist. Not for me, as I am an inveterate non-gambler, but to each their own. Then I saw a post about it on BoingBoing, and read more. All I can say, like many of the commentors at BoingBoing, is that PT Barnum was right. There’s a sucker born every minute, and two to take him.

The site bills itself as “entertainment shopping.” Note: this should be the first clue to anyone who wants to hang on to their money and/or get a decent bargain and/or actually buy something. “Entertainment” is a service. “Shopping” is (generally) for products. When you pay for a service, at the end, you have intangible assets: memories, new skills, an environmental change of some kind. From a pure-poetry standpoint, the phrase “entertainment shopping” is wonderful. The signal-to-noise ratio is incredibly high. I could spend an entire post just unpacking that phrase. Maybe later…

The Cake Scraps blog has a decent anyalysis of the site’s mechanics. But the basic idea is that you pay $1 for the chance to raise the price of an auction by 15-cents and be the high bidder. The winner (in most cases; there are several types of auctions) then has to pay the final price, on top of $1 for each of however many bids they made.

So… let’s say there’s an item that’s worth (retail value) $150.00 that finally goes for $75. If you placed the final bid, you would get yerself a nice deal; slightly less than 50% off ($75 price + $1 for the bid). But the total cost of bids to all players (the community?) would have been $500.

It’s like eBay, but where the “house” also gets $1 for every 15-cents spent.

It’s a variation on a scheme called a dollar auction. And Swoopo actually does auction off money, too. Bid on a $100 chunk of cash. As long as you (personally) bid fewer than 100 times (and win), you come out on top. And, of course, as long as there are enough bids to cover the dollar amount in bid charges, Swoopo wins.

It’s brilliant psychology. There isn’t even any trickery (unless, as several comments point out, a Swoopo shill or two is doing some bidding). It’s perfectly transparent.

The value statement becomes, I believe, very simple: How much are you willing to bet that you’re less of a sucker than everyone else who’s playing?

It’s been a long time. But I just don’t have anything to say. Which is about the least interesting way to start a blog post I can think of.

I mean… I have things I *could* say, certainly…

1) I’m currently more than annoyed with people who read/write text messages during movies. Noise is bad, yes… so we turn off our phone ringers and don’t take calls during the show. Right? Right. We’ve had that down since about 1998. Now people are doing the IM or email or texting thing during movies, and the bluish-white glow of their iPhones and Pocket PCs is just as friggin’ annoying as hearing a phone ring. If you have to haul out your dang device during the film, hold it in your lap so that the rest of the theater can’t see it. And if you get a message that you must respond to… leave. It’s only about an hour-and-a-half. Give us a breat and get out of your own ego-space long enough to enjoy the film.  I mean, geez. I saw a teenage girl read and reply six times during one show last month. And every time, she held the phone up at eye level, so that everyone behind her could be distracted. I finally asked her to stop, as it was totally pissing me off. She didn’t, and so I beat her to death with my shoe.

2) I think that Time Warner, our cable company, must be training their field repair folks in commiseration skills. We’ve had our DVR break twice in the last month, both times requiring a guy to come out. And both times, when we complained about various elements of the service, the techs joined right in. “Yeah… the new software isn’t as good as the old stuff. We hear that all the time. I use the service, and it makes me crazy, too.” And… “No, these boxes aren’t great. They’re going to upgrade to new hardware sometime next year, and I can’t wait. We get so many problems with these.” Etc. One of the first things they teach you in customer care training is the power of the words, “I understand.” Upset customers, before anything else, want you to admit that they are not crazy, and that there might be a reason why you feel the way you do. They do *not* want to be questioned, harangued or taught a lesson. So, “I understand [fill in the blank]” is a great way to move things forward. These guys have taken this technique to a new level, though. They’ve gone beyond understanding, to joining in. It’s as if they’ve aligned themselves with us — all us folks being put out — against the Big Bad Company. The one that they work for. They aren’t representatives of Time Warner any more, but some kind of moles. They are our spies in the Big House. I got to say… it works. They were nice guys, did what they could, and I felt like they were on “our side.” Weird.

3) Waiting for Spore. Been waiting for four years. They say it’s gone gold, and will truly be in stores by 9/8/08. We’ll see…

4) Not thrilled with the animated “Clone Wars” movie. It was OK for an animated sci-fi movie… but I expect more from Star Wars. Not sure why. Episode One made me doubt the existence of a benevolent God.

5) Have an idea for a YA fantasy series. Don’t want to talk about it here. Oops. Just did. My bad. If you want to help me get it out of my head and on paper, let me know. I find that I need at least one person to talk about this stuff with or I just let it stew for… well… forever (see: three previous attempts at novel writing, all stuck between 70 and 130 pages).

6) Overheard three “nice old ladies” talking politics at Bob Evans last night while eating with the boy. At one point, one of them said that they wouldn’t vote for Obama because he was going to “take away everyone’s guns.” A friend of hers had told her that part of Obama’s presidential platform involved the revocation of fifth ammendment (I assume she meant second). The current president already having played loose and free with the fifth, I can see why she might be worried about the second. I can’t find anything on line, even on the crazy-right sites, indicating that Obama has any dread plans for our right to bear arms. On conversations such as this, in states like Ohio, hangs the fate of nations.

7) Got a new chair for the home office. Nice.

That’s it. Like I said…

Years and years ago, I read the excellent “Chaos: making a new science,” by James Gleick. I recommend it; very interesting stuff. But the point I remember most vividly is that there is a big difference between stuff that’s random — completely without order — and the functional, scientific definition of chaos.

It’s a great book. Brings together stuff from many fields; meteorology, biology, traffic, math… fun stuff. But, again, my main take away is that there are systems that exhibit meaningful behavior, chaotic systems, that aren’t particularly Euclidian in their proceedings.

That is what popped into my head after having viewed “No Country for Old Men” (on DVD) and “The Strangers” (at our local dollar-flick). “No “Country…” is about the utter impersonal nature of fate, about the uncaring of large systems, about how we change in our relationship to those systems as we age, about the penalty for underestimating the power of huge fates to grind us down. It’s got a lot going on. And it’s very well done. It is a great film, and a great poem. Death, in the movie, is an agent of chaos. I won’t go into the plot at all, because it would require me describing the entire movie to make all my points, and I’m tired and I don’t like to spoil really good movies. Trust me, though — the chaos inherent in death. Big theme.

Now… let’s compare and contrast to “The Strangers.” A horror flick based, supposedly, on real events. I don’t mind giving away the plot elements, because if you’ve seen the trailers or read the intro, you know what will happen. In fact, if you’ve ever seen another “weird people in clown masks are hunting/terrorizing a nice, pretty couple” movie… you know what will happen.

Nice couple in cabin. Minor background story. People in clown masks terrorize them. Running, screaming, stabbing, bleeding. Blah, blah, blah. But, at one point, the guy asks them, “Why are you doing this to us?” And the reply from Scary Girl Clown #2 is, “Because you were home.”

Not withstanding the fact that this was actually a punch line in “Stir Crazy,” it’s just not good, scary storytelling. And it’s because of the difference between “chaos” and “randomness,” or “random-mess,” in the case of “The Strangers.”

Chaos is a dance whose steps you don’t quite understand. Randomness is a spasm; a fit. Chaos is the wind blowing leaves in one direction one minute, and another the next. Randomness is a drunk 16-year-old with a leaf blower. There is some beauty, some meaning in chaos. Randomness is just, well… pointless.

Maybe the sheer randomness of some kinds of horror and death can be scary. But it makes for a much less interesting movie.

“No Country for Old Men:” A-

“The Strangers:” C-

I was on vacation last week. The beach in SC. Lovely, thank you, but very windy the last couple days. Good for surfers, bad for families with kids.

I try to read one non-fiction book while on vacation (along with several pieces of brain candy). This year, it was “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky. I don’t always agree with Clay, but even when I think he’s wrong, he’s wrong with intelligence and style.

In the case of this book, he ain’t wrong. It’s his best work yet, I think, and a must read for anybody who’s serious about thinking seriously about the ways in which the Internet (and associated technologies) are intersecting with society. I may do a longer review post at some point, but for the time being, just go read it. Lots of good, telling examples. Lots of well thought out questions, without necessarily giving any answers. Which is a good thing. Asking the questions well is important. Pretending you know the answers is less so.

Clay talks a bit about the “publish then edit” mode that the Internet enables. In traditional media, you “edit then publish.” That is, producers and directors and publishers sift through (edit) a mountain of content, and then present what they think is best. On the Web, everybody publishes everything, and then we, the public, use a number of functions — links from friends, search engines, blog posts, etc. — to edit down the already published stuff.

In another part of the book, Clay talks about how folks all over the world are using this functionality to impact political situations. He gives examples of how smart mobs, email campaigns and even Twitter are used to turn the usual “Big Brother” thing on its ear. This started me thinking… Publish, edit, politics, government. Role reversals.

And then I started reading William Gibson’s new novel, “Spook Country”. Not done with it yet, but 1/3 of the way in… it’s great. There’s a scene where one character is talking to another who may be doing some sneaky “anti-terrorist” stuff. He says (I’m approximating, as the book’s downstairs and I don’t feel like getting it), “A nation is defined by its laws more than it’s circumstances at any particular time. A person whose morals change with circumstance is not moral. And a nation whose laws change based on circumstance is not true to those ideals that brought it into being.”

Bong. Gong goes off in my head.

Are laws, when taken as content, the result of publishing or editing? I would argue that laws themselves are a kind of editing; they keep us from doing certain things; they proscribe. Is the tendency of the current administration to do whatever the frick it wants, and then justify it later, a kind of “publish then edit” rather than the other way around? We’re supposed to come up with laws based on (among other documents), the Constitution, which (as my Republican friends point out all the time) does more to limit the power of government than describe it.

OK. If government is meant to be limited (edited), and laws are meant to be editorial tools… then doing things first, then coming up with wild-ass justifications for them, is a case of going “public then edit.” Action as public publishing of events; editing as the spin, rewrites, cover ups, justification, etc. after the fact.

I’m still not sure if this makes any sense. But all these thoughts are tangled up in my head in this way, and sometimes they need to live somewhere where I can come back and look at them later.

Publish then edit gives power to the creative masses. Editing, not publishing, is the proper function of government and laws.

Are the current hijinx in the White House a kind of reaction to the new balance of power imposed, to some degree, by the Web and the Flat World? Are politicians “doing more things” outside the lines of editorial (read: Constitutional) correctness because the Great Unwashed now has access to so much more creative power.

I have no idea. But it’s ringing in my head.

I saw Disney/Pixtar’s “WALL-E” yesterday with my son. Fun movie, excellent animation, some good laughs. A bit heavy-handed on the overarching messages about society side… but that’s Disney for ya. B+

Based on the film, I was going to write a quick post about how, apparently, in the film, singularity is achieved through waste management. Go read the Wikipedia article on “technological singularity” so I don’t have to do a crappy job summarizing here. [pause] Thanks.

Machine intelligence is a wonderful topic for when you’re hanging out waiting for a movie to start, or sitting around drinking wine coolers on the deck on a nice, early summer evening. It’s fun to discuss the differences between creativity, computation, cognition, recognition, etc. and go on about how men and machines may differ — both now and in the future — in terms of thinking-type activities.

My point, from watching WALL-E, was going to be that we equate (especially as children) emotional goals very specifically with self-awareness. You can have an animal (or a plant, a teapot, a statue, a car, etc.) in a movie be, essentially, a prop, and have no “feelings.” Or they may be rudimentary feelings that reflect back from the main characters. But for a creature to be “alive,” it needs to do thinky things that have more to do with its own well-being (usually emotional) than with sheer computing power. Thus, though WALL-E may be able to do many computational things, what makes him “thinking,” what has pushed him beyond the singularity, is his ability to formulate his own goals.

Interestingly, the “bad guy” in the movie [very minor spoiler] seems alive, too… but has received his goals as part of a program; ie, they are not his own goals, per se, but are direct instructions from a human.

That was about it for my original post idea… the thought that we base our idea (at least in a shallow, entertaining sense) on what is “real person thinking” on the ability not to solve problems, but to come up with them. To decide, “This situation isn’t ideal for me… I can envision another possibility.” Person-hood based not on survival (which requires all kinds of problem solving, and which animals do all the time), but on idealism.

That was the extent of it. But then I read a new post at Kevin Kelly’s The Technium about “The Google way of science.” The basic idea being that a new kind of cognition (or at least, though-work) is being done through super-fast evaluations of super-huge data sets. The example I like is the one about how Google provides on-the-fly Web site translation. They don’t have an translation algorithm, they just compare enormous sets of currently translated documents.

This is, as Kelly and other point out, a fantastic way to solve problems. You don’t worry about a model, you don’t worry about a theory or an equation. You just put trillions of cycles of computing power to work examining billions of data points, and then you figure out where new data points would line up.

Fascinating, important stuff, yes. But Kelly goes on to suggest that this kind of computation disproves Searle’s riddle of the Chinese room,  whereas I think it actualy *proves* Searle’s point in that thought experiment. If I had access to all the (let’s say) Chinese-to-English-and-back documents that Google does, I, too, could translate between the languages without understanding both. Maybe even neither. If you’ve ever tried Google’s spot-translation facilities and seen what it does to metaphor, you know that quite a bit of understanding is lost (ahem) in translation.

Kelly goes on to quote George Dyson in a response he (Dyson) made to an article Chris Andersen wrote in Wired on this subject:

For a long time we were stuck on the idea that the brain somehow contained a “model” of reality, and that AI would be achieved by constructing similar “models.” What’s a model? There are 2 requirements: 1) Something that works, and 2) Something we understand. Our large, distributed, petabyte-scale creations, whether GenBank or Google, are starting to grasp reality in ways that work just fine but that we don’t necessarily understand. Just as we will eventually take the brain apart, neuron by neuron, and never find the model, we will discover that true AI came into existence without ever needing a coherent model or a theory of intelligence. Reality does the job just fine.

By any reasonable definition, the “Overmind” (or Kevin’s OneComputer, or whatever) is beginning to think, though this does not mean thinking the way we do, or on any scale that we can comprehend. What Chris Anderson is hinting at is that Science (and some very successful business) will increasingly be done by people who are not only reading nature directly, but are figuring out ways to read the Overmind.

Now… I love science fiction. But I really don’t buy that dipping into enormous pools of data to look for correlations counts as any kind of “thinking” that we would recognize as being of an order even close to that of animals, to say nothing of the cute (yet not cuddly) WALL-E. Dyson himself says, “… though this does not mean thinking the way we do, or on any scale that we can comprehend.” Well… why call it “thinking” if it’s something completely different than what we call “thinking,” and on a totally different scale… Mama always said, “Life is like a box of semantics.” If I can call what the weather does “thinking” because it moves enormous numbers of things around and exacts changes and is involved in activities based on ultra-complex rules, then OK. What Google etc. does could be called “thinking,” too. If we open it up that far, though, we’ve lost the original intention of what we mean when we use the term to apply to us man-apes.

When you challenge a child who has done something stupid or dangerous and ask, “What were you thinking?” you’re not looking for an answer in terms of their problem solving abilities. If the boy-child has emptied 25 cans of shaving cream into the kiddie pool and is making “summer-time snow angels,” you may love the creative spirit, hate the waste of money (and how he smells afterward), but your chat with him afterward will be about making choices, not about air pressure and aroma. You want to know what led him to the choice to do the unwise thing, so that you can teach him not to lead himself there. You want to help him create better problems for himself, not, in many cases, solve them.

I can’t tell time anywhere near as accurately as a watch. But that doesn’t mean that a watch is thinking. Or, if want to say it is, it is only ever thinking about what time it is.

* * * * *

PS: Irony of the week. The last line of dialogue in WALL-E was clipped slightly at my showing by the “pop” you get during a slightly crappy jump from one reel to another. A movie created using advanced, computerized digital effects about an advanced, computerized digital creature… partly f’d up by an analog zit. I was amused.

Something is “Happening.”

Massive spoilers below about the newest M. Night film. But, if you don’t feel like having the movie spoiled, know at least this… it’s really, really pointless.

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So I downloaded the free trial of “Spore: Creature Creator.” I’ve been drooling in anticipation of the full game of “Spore” now for… I don’t know, Will… how long? 3 years? 5? Something like that.

Anyway… played this little mini-preview game-y thing where you create creatures using one of the engines that will be in the final game. It’s fun. And my son really enjoyed it. I registered the trial online so that I could see other folks’ creations, get updates, etc. Registration, as per normal, requires an email address (cue ominous music… why would he point out an obvious bit o’ stuff like that? hmmmmm….)

The free trial of “Creature Creator” only gives you access to like 1/8th of all the pieces-parts. And my boy liked it enough that I decided to upgrade to the full version (never mind that I think this is essentially a marketing tease for the full game, now slated to come out in September, and that, IMHO, the “full version” of this little mini game should be free).

Clicking the “upgrade” button from within the game takes you to the purchase site for EA. OK…. Not exactly what I expected, as I’d already downloaded the large install file. Will they make me go through that again? I’d assumed I’d just pay and get an unlock code. A trick that 3rd-rate shareware peddlers have had perfected for years. We’ll see…

So I add the full version of the program to my cart, fill in all my info for checking out…

And get an error.

“That email address is already in use.”

Bwa? BWAAAA? The email address I gave EA as part of the registration process for a piece of trial software is already in use… Well, DUH! It’s in use by me, who registered earlier today. And now I want to upgrade… but you won’t let me, because my email address is already in use by you.

Mad stupid. Mad-5 stupid. I expected more from EA and Spore and Will and Maxis. This does not bode well…

One of the things I grew up doing while waiting for movies — once the multi-plex took over from the single-screen cinemas — was to play “mix up the movie titles.” Nothing better to do while hanging out in the lobby on a freezing cold February day in Boston, eh?

So, I saw three movies over the last week, and the mixed-up title would have been the subject of this blog.

Other possible mixed-up movie titles based on what was playing at my local AMC theater:

• What Happens in Narnia…
• Iron Stranger
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Sex
• Made of Panda
• Sex and the Panda
• Iron Panda
• Panda Racer

The word “Panda” in a movie title is simply irresistible. So…

Kung Fu Panda: A- Quite a lot of fun with my 8-year-old son. Jack Black’s voicing of the main character is excellent, and they allowed his personality to mold the character animation quite a bit; how could you not? Lots of laugh-out-loud moments, and really great, somewhat unusual (which is nice) art. Best bit — when Po, the titular panda, performs the super-killer-hyper move involving the minor twitch of his pinkie, he says, “Ska-doosh.” Very Jack Black. Very funny. Half-grade off for pulling out almost every trope in the kung fu sack.

You Don’t Mess with the Zohan: B Solid “B” movie. Ha ha. If you go to this movie expecting Adam Sandler and Co. to engage in an enormous amount of over-the-top pseudo-hasidic silliness, making fun of Jews, Arabs, gays, straights, rednecks, etc… you won’t be disappointed. Sandler is consistently goofy and never misses a chance to refer to sex as, “making the sticky.” If that line revolts you, please avoid the movie. My favorite dialogue (note: Zohan is attempting to escape his Israeli super-star anti-terrorist status in the states, and so is pretending to be…)

Zohan: I’m from Australia [with a glottal, "hutzpah" "h," somehow, at the beginning of "Australia."]
Friend’s Mom: Oh, it must be so much nicer there since they got rid of appartheid.
Zohan: Oh, yes. Much cooler.

That’s about the size of it. Nice cameos from Henry Winkler (if you ever dreamed of watching the Fonz puke out of a limo, this film’s for you), Dave Matthews as the violent, anti-everything red neck, Chris Rock as a taxi driver from Cameroon, Mariah Carey as herself (the low point of the film, frankly… she’s just not funny), George Takei, Kevin Nealon (why?), Rob Scheider (of course) and John McEnroe. Full point off for not having English sub-titles for all the Yiddish or semi-Israeli slang or whatever it was. That woulda been cool.

Indiana Jones and the yadda yadda yadda: C+ It’s an OK movie. What sucks about it is that it’s just an OK movie. No really funny lines or memorable bits. No really amazing action sequence… They go down a couple waterfalls in a car/boat/thing? Really? That’s all you got for me, Indy? Oh… and riding a motorcycle through the college library? Seriously? That counts as action these days? Yeesh. No really good interaction between Indy and his… uh… young friend. No really villainous villain. It all felt very phoned-in to me. I’d place it 3rd in the pantheon, behind (duh) the original and “Last Crusade.” Major points off for [minor spoiler alert] the big “Ohhhh….” near the end being, “The city of gold doesn’t literally mean gold… it means treasure… and knowledge was their treasure.” Yeah. Right.

“The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” by Michael Chabon: Another great one from Chabon. Not quite as rich and chunky as “Cavalier and Clay,” for which he won the Pulitzer… but truly great. Chabon is an author you have to read slowly, as his prose is dense with wonderful description, idiom and thoughtful insights. Like C&C, though, I did feel that the ending was a bit… short. It just kinda stops. Yeah, I know… that happens a lot in crime thrillers, and “literary” works. But I was still hoping for at least a teaspoonful of denouement. Still… a fantastic read. A must for any alternative history fan. Grade: A-

Boom Blox game for the Wii. It’s virtual Jenga with angry devil monkeys and explosives. If you need more of a description or review than that, this game is not for you. If, however, that description makes you think, “Hell, yeah! That’s what Jenga has always needed! Devil monkeys and bombs! Awesome!”… than you should go out, right now, and buy this game. It is, in fact, awesome. Single player adventure, party fun, and build-your-own modes all are great. Taking off 1/2 grade because in the built it mode you are limited in the number of blocks you can place, and because you can only rotate blocks by 90-degrees, making real domino chains kinda a pain. Also, the music can’t be turned off and gets repetitive. Minor quibbles. A-

Speed Racer. Hot tranny mess. Racing can’t be exciting when the laws of physics are entirely ignored. Doing the seemingly impossible isn’t astounding when everything that’s being done is impossible. It’s not racing… it’s neon vegas pinball acid fireworks slap happy zoom spazz. Which, if you’re my 8-year-old son, ends up being, “OK.” More Christina Ricci, please, and less Rain. John Goodman and Susan Sarandon are wasted on this. Or the script is wasted on them. Or something. C-

Mario Kart Wii. Way more fun that Speed Racer. Good, funky, chirpy karting fun. Good characters, good graphics, a decent set of tracks, varied music. Can be frustrating because you can go from 1st to 12th place in an instant if it’s a close race and you get hit by one of the disruptive pick-ups that racers can, well, pick up. Half-grade bonus for including cycles as well as karts. The wheel thingy is lots of fun, too. B+

Iron Man. Pimp my hide. Fun, fast, shallow. It’s a comic book movie… whaddya want? Solid B.

I never watched the TV show “24″ when it was on. I’d heard the name “Jack Bauer” of course. Upon looking him up in the Wikipedia just now I was a bit surprised at the length of the entry (around 6,400 words)… The entry on George Washington has around 6,200 words, for the sake of comparative irony.

My brother, John, usually has similar taste to mine in media, and so, last year, when he highly recommended watching “24,” I thought I’d give it a go. Being that we were in the “Put something on your Christmas list or else!” timeframe, I added the DVD of the first season to my Amazon.com wish list. My lovely wife got me the first two seasons for under the tree.

After a couple weeks, we were both referring to my “24″-watching experiences as, “Andy’s TV crack.” The show is addictive, bad for you and messes with your head.

Today, I just finished watching the last episode of season 6, the last season shot/available. That means (math alert!) that I’ve watch around 115 hours (144 episodes x 80%) of  one show in about 4 months. Roughly one episode a day.

Now, of course, I didn’t watch one episode a day. Some days (like today) I watched four. I think the most I ever watched in one 24 hour period (ha ha) was six. I had oral surgery back in January, and it was very nice to just crash on pain meds and do nothing but eat mooshy food and watch Jack Bauer save the universe for large blocks of time.

I have mixed feelings about the show:

• I really like watching Kiefer. I have for years. I thought he was great in “The Lost Boys” back in the 80’s. I’ve always liked his dad, and some of that bleeds over, I suppose. He’s easy to watch. I find his style/look to be a kind of “corn fed danger boy” thing. The kid next door who owns guns. Lots of guns. My only problem with him in “24″ is that most of the lines are delivered in an anxious, urgent whisper. That gets old. He got a bit more pink-noise in the vocals in season six, which was nice to see (er… hear). I think he was a good choice for the role of Jack Bauer. If you’ve watched the show, try to imagine Charlie Sheen, for example, in the lead. Giggling ensues.”
• I am well aware of the whole torture issue. Jack’s character embodies the current administration’s idea that, under some circumstances, it’s OK to torture people because, well, you really, really need to stop the nuke from going off. To be fair, it runs both ways in “24,” as Jack and other good guys get tortured both by the bad guys, and by earnest good guys who think that Jack and/or others might be hiding info. To be more fair, torturing works sometimes and not others. Sometimes all Jack has to do is shoot a guy in the leg, and he gives over. Sometimes they do the whole pharma-torture thing, and get nothing. After awhile, I became used to torture as a minor plot development action that simply moved the plot one way or another. And (again, after awhile), I got used to Jack cutting people’s fingers off, electrocuting them and threatening to put out their eyeballs. I’m not comfortable with that situation — that I got used to seeing it — but there it is. After something becomes almost as much of a trope as the “there’s a mole on the inside” thing (see below), it just doesn’t have the same power to horrify.
• Apparently, there’s always a mole. Every season features some kind of situation where an American is aiding the bad guys. And, frankly, I can tell you why — the people who run CTU (the Counter Terrorist Unit where Jack works… kind) are idiots when it comes to their own security. There are all kinds of scenes where a person they bring in as a witness or friend or family member is allowed to wander around the facility. People who work there slip away to make phone calls in a little stone corridor off to one side. Sometimes these calls are overheard. Mostly not. But you think they’d learn to bug that little hallway. I don’t mind “Big Stupid” stuff like the whole idea of an international conspiracy to start a Middle East war and drive up the price of oil. That’s fine. But a counter terrorism department shouldn’t let people have their own, private cell phones in the office, and should be more careful about civilians wandering around. I’m just sayin’.
• The stakes are too f’ing high. You can have a fantastic, scary, tense movie where the whole thing that’s “at stake” is one person’s life, or even their career or morality. You don’t need to threaten the West Coast with bio-plague or nukes every damned time. Now, I understand, this is Tom Clancy-esque anti-terrorist stuff. But, seriously, there were seasons where Jack rescuing a friend was better drama than Jack saving 6-10 U.S. cities from imminent destruction. The other problem with “high stakes” is that the math ends up being really bad. [Spoiler alert] In season six, one of the briefcase nukes that Jack is chasing goes off in an L.A. suburb killing around 12,000 people + whoever dies later from radiation poisoning. And while further Jacksonian efforts to avert WW3 are in line with that scale, the rescue of one or two people just seems… trite… when you put it on the table with 12k dead. Jack saved the day for these two nice people? That’s swell. What about the whole town of Valencia that just when ker-poof?
• The cinematography and direction are really nice. Multiple shots at one time, the whole “real time” schtick… Nice work, team. In many ways, the direction and pacing are what makes the show so addictive. The acting is OK, and some of the writing isn’t bad… but it’s not very deep or, really, very different from season to season. Like candy, sex, cigarettes, crack, booze and Abba, it’s not really about the quality, but the intrinsic fun.

I’m glad it’s over, frankly. For me. For now. Maybe I can finally start blogging regularly again or read some more books or… wait… there’s a new season of Battlestar Gallactica.   Mmmmm….