the daily snivel

Now that the worst impulses of the wanton conservative heart have been satisfied by the Senate's orgiastic passage of the draft legislation to authorize a military regime that enables the detention and torture of "enemy combatants" in US-run gulags, where the constitutional rights to habeas corpus or the production of disclosure evidence will not exist, I can honestly say that I am heartbroken. I am bitterly disappointed in the willful abandonment of all the values that make the United States of America a country worth living in or fighting for. I do not believe it can claim to have any moral authority in the "war on terror" any longer.

In Canada, we need only look to the cruelty that was inflicted upon Maher Arar without any regard for human rights, the rule of law, or government accountability, to see that these powers can and will be abused. No one will be made more safe by this perversion. To the contrary, it will increase international anger and radicalism against the US, it will endanger the safety of US troops when they are taken prisoner, and strip the US government of any moral high ground when they object to future abuses perpetrated against them. This will be long remembered as a dark hour of that nation's history, made the worse by the many people, doubtlessly good intentioned, who supported it or said nothing in opposition.

Many more have said it much more eloquently than I, so I won't add more than that right now.

Instead of crying into my beer coffee tea water (it's the only liquid within my budget), I thought I would spread around a little of the goodness that can make these moments temporarily step aside due to the fact that you're having a good laugh. It's the 700 Hoboes Project.

I don't know why hoboes are funny -- I deal with a lot of homeless clients, and clients with mental disorders, and their problems are most assuredly not funny -- but the idea of the rambling, wandering, boxcar-hopping tramp of the Depression era can (think of the song "Big Rock Candy Mountain"), in the right light, genuinely tickle the black humour in my heart.

The idea behind the 700 Hoboes project is to get artists from across the internet to contribute illustrations of 700 fictitious hoboes whose names appeared in a spoken word excerpt of the "wonderful and wholly inaccurate almanac" entitled The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman. All of the names are clever, and while some of the illustrations strike me as cop-outs (e.g. pasting in some pre-existing drawing or photo) or poor fits, others are completely bang on and ingenious, and are guaranteed leave you in stitches. Hodgman has given the site his blessing and links to it from his own site. Here are some of my favourites:

Guesstimate Jones
Ol' Barb Stab-You-Quick
Mr. Wilson Fancypants
Apparently Mitch Dixon
Prostate Davey
Boxcar Jones, the Boxcar Benjamin Disraeli

You can also just browse the Flickr gallery here.

Hat tip: Thanks to Mel for showing me this site.

UPDATE:

Just wanted to mention that Mr. Hodgman, who wrote the 700 Hobo names, has appeared on the Daily Show as both a guest (promoting his book) and a "Resident Expert" on several different subjects. He also plays the role of the nerdy PC in the "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" commercials. So nifty. 

I wanted to touch base as time went on and update interested readers in my efforts to help my iBook cheat death after installing the shim discussed in my Happy Mac post earlier this month. While I can't say I specifically recommend it to those who are at all uneasy about the idea of cracking open their pristine, shiny, lickable iBook case (you will scratch it along its sides as you progress, I guarantee this) and mucking about with the interior, I'm happy with the results.

I will say that my iBook is behaving a bit like an old mule in the sense that does need a good poke in the rear to make it go. I've had to go in again since my last post to thicken the shim so as to put more pressure on the GPU, in order to ensure that it stays in proper contact with the logic board. I found that the 1.5 millimetre shim I had employed earlier was not sufficient, and I would still encounter periodic kernel panics and even startup failures. I would say that I roughly doubled the thickness to about 3 millimetres, which makes reassembly a bit of a challenge (part of the case definitely does not want to seal up nicely with that big foreign object sitting there), but keeps the pressure on the GPU to the point where I have not had any more problems.

Overall, I am thrilled to bits that my computer works so well again (and without costing me the $300 or so to have a shop fix it for me). I can get on-line, read and answer my e-mail, manage my music collection with the amazing new features in iTunes 7, and even waste some time with mindless retro video games. I will keep you posted as to how this "hack" actually works out in practice, given that I suspect someday someone else with the same problem will stumble across these posts and wonder if it is actually worth the time and bother to go on in and fix it up like this. 

The other day I was sitting in my kitchen with the incomparably lovely trio of Natalie, Celeste, and Mélanie, and I was mentioning the mindlessly fun nostalgia of playing video games on my newly resurrected iBook using Stella, an Atari 2600 emulator. I actually own a bunch of old Atari games, making my owning of a number of ROMs (the software images of ROM chips from the actual cartridges that the emulator uses to run the game) more or less legal from a copyright perspective, though there are a few games I'm proud to say I do not own.

These are the games created by Mystique Softare, a now-defunct software company that created absurdly low-quality pornographic (for a lack of a better term) video games for the Atari 2600. It really is amazing that, from the very dawn of the home computer age, smut made a home for itself right away, despite the inability of computers to render anything but the crudest suggestion of sexuality.

This line of thought gelled kind of well with our discussion of how simple things can be misconstrued or misinterpreted as sexual items by our overly active brains (which are of course wired to be sensitive to reproductive acts through 100 million years of sex and mayhem down the evolutionary trail). I think the exact tangent had to do with the recent to-do over an IKEA catalogue's apparent inclusion of a doggie erection in one of its posed photographs which on much closer inspection is simply a leg, as well as recollections of Leisure Suit Larry's own rough and heavily impressionistic PG-13 nudity intersecting with so many adolescent awakenings.

And that got me to thinking how in 1982, it seemed sufficient to have a pixelated diagonal line really stand in for a penis. And I had to bring up these awful games.

Caution: unsettling images below:

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First, there's "Bachelor Party." It's kind of a smutty version of Pong or Breakout, whereby you have a paddle (the vaguely phallic looking icon on the left) and have to bounce the eager bachelor into the wall of crudely rendered naked ladies. Each time the naked man bounces into a woman's body, he rebounds back to the paddle and she vanishes. Note the diagonal line erection.

Even worse is "Beat 'Em and Eat 'Em" which really is as horrible as it sounds.

Yes, that vague depiction of a man and a weenie really is up there. And he really is masturbating. And it really is the point of the game to manoever the two crudely depicted naked women so that they catch the falling drops of computerized semen in their mouths or on their faces.


If you do well enough, the characters stop to lick their pixelated chops.

"Custer's Revenge," not pictured here, can be found at Wikipedia. I just couldn't say more about it than has already been written there. It really does deserve its ranking as the worst video game ever.

It's hard to even begin to decipher everything that's wrong with these games, but I don't think they should be forgotten just because the graphics are crude and don't incorporate the elaborate breast physics that are inserted into more modern efforts at depicting women (or men) as, essentially, just recepticles. While I personally think there might be a market for blown up representations of the happy little naked people from "Bachelor Party" on t-shirts, in general it's impressive that most of what you can find on the internet these days doesn't quite manage to offend as much as what was barely cutting edge 25 years ago.

UPDATED TO ADD:

See the excellent comments below this post for more discussion of the issues these pictures raise.

I wanted to add that while there's nothing inherently wrong with erotica or sexuality, even in video games, there's nothing sexy or cute or even daring about the kinds of raunch portrayed here. It's just a gross objectification of female sexuality, and although the company involved responded by creating versions of these games where the women are the dominant sexual actors (including "Bachelorette Party," and the equivalent to "Beat 'Em and Eat 'Em" where a woman lactates into the waiting mouths of men below), this doesn't change the disturbing portrayal of sexuality that leaves these games ranked amongst the very worst in history.

If I had children, and I had to choose between my kids being exposed to more violence in mass culture or more sexuality, I would gladly choose more sexuality. I am amazed at the fiendish things we watch and accept on television and the outrage and even revulsion we exhibit at the thought of a woman shown breasteeding, or nudity being depicted as natural. "Schizoid" doesn't being to describe it. But depictions of sexuality cannot be self-serving or violent in themselves; rather, they should be part of accepting the fact that sexuality and intimacy is natural and desirable and takes many forms.

I mean, I like boobies. I hope to see more of them someday (it's been a loooong time for me, sadly). And I like sex and think sexuality is a wonderful and normal gift that makes being alive extra nice. But rape and facials and two-dimensional sex roles are a whole different beast -- yet they are still prominent themes in depictions of sexuality in today, even though these video games in particular have been relegated to history's dust bin. 

From the Department of I Cannot Fucking Believe That Worked:

As you may recall, my beloved if elderly iBook (G3 600 mHz, 16 MB VRAM, 128 MB RAM, 20 GB HDD) recently fell prey to the dreaded iBook Logic Board Kablooie, in which iBooks of a certain vintage suffer from corrosion of the soldering between the logic board and the graphics processing unit, resulting in a loosening of the connection between the two that results in display issues (frequently lots of coloured lines or other erratic behaviour being displayed) and kernel panics, such that the computer is no longer usable for more than a few minutes before locking up. Apple was good enough to provide an extensive free repair program for those iBooks affected, but lamentably it expired in May 2005 -- at a time when my computer was functioning perfectly.

When I first encountered problems with my computer a month or so ago, I immediately turned to the Apple Support discussion site, as most of the common issues that arise are discussed on these groups, and most often when you encounter a problem you'll reach someone who has heard of it before and can offer some advice. Aside from calling Apple's Customer Representatives (NOT Customer Support) and pleading your case for an extension of the repair program (which I confess I have not yet tried), the following helpful advice was provided by John Sawyer to those suffering from logic board-itis:

[Y]ou can often fix this yourself by removing the iBook's bottom housing, and placing a shim of any sort, about 1mm to 1.5mm thick, onto the raised square on the bottom shield. I use a Scotch mounting square--you can get them in hardware stores and many grocery stores. When you reinstall the bottom case, it will press against this shim, which will press against the graphics chip, and may allow the chip to come into better contact with the logic board.

John Sawyer
CJS Macintosh Repair

Another helpful soul, Ronda Wilson, also links to instructions for removing the iBook's lower case:

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/50.5.0.html

I also found detailed instructions on Josh Oakhurst's website, where he describes the process behind the "Best Ghetto Apple Hack Ever: iBook Logic Board Fix," including helpful photographs to illustrate bringing the theory to reality.

Now that I am unemployed, and have lots of spare time and little money (though this situation may change shortly -- see below), I was desperate enough to try this solution myself. Tonight I hauled out the ol' toolbox and pulled out the various tiny screwdrivers and other delicate implements needed to open up my lower case. As has been observed by many others going thither, this is a somewhat harrowing process. But eventually, I managed to gently remove the lower case from my iBook, revealing the metal housing for the iBook's logic board and other internal components. As directed, I applied a shim created out of materials that were handy (in my case, I had 7 business cards left from my days at the Legal Clinic, which I taped together) and affixed them to the bottom of the housing, on the raised area directly underneath the GPU.

Then came the edgy work of fitting everything back together and wishing I was religious enough to say a few Hail Marys.

Then I turned the iBook on.

And wouldn't you know it, the bastard works. It's been running without issues for the past hour and a half. I honestly am amazed that this hack would work. But it does. It may not be an indefinite solution, and it may not be without deleterious side effects, but none of my research has dredged up reports of subsequent failures or, say, fires, so here's hoping. I'll definitely be gentle with my computer just in case.

The upshot is: Yay! I have a computer that works perfectly again! Internet boobies, here I come!

Oh, and I just might have a job at a criminal law firm here in Ottawa. I had an interview on Friday and received an offer today. I'm going in later this week to sort out the details (like can they afford to pay me and can I afford to work for them).

Could this be the start of a spate of good luck for Rob? Keep your fingers crossed.