Todd Stadler's blog

The bloom is off the rose. Hurray!

Well hello, fall!

According to some data I downloaded from Weather Underground, it really wasn't just me — autumn came on rather suddenly and definitively this year. Here's a graph:

Fig. A: Yeah, that's right — I have mad graphing skills that move
beyond mere color into the realm of highly meaningful clip art!

I really want to write some faux mathematical (mathemetacal?) equation that conveys the general idea of this sudden autumnal offset, one involving a step function — like T_Jul–Oct(t)=80-10H(t-t_equinox)+N(t), where H(t) is the Heaviside step function and N(t) the rather convenient random noise function I just made up — but then I realized that I had no real idea about that kind of math anymore, and even if I did, almost no one who reads this would (a) get it or (b) care. So yeah.

Anyhow, we've now officially entered the rainy season, starting Thursday night with the sounds of wind and raindrops that are the hallmark of so many fall and winter nights in Portland. I love the sound of our house being buffeted by inhospitable elements. It makes sitting on the couch with a computer seem less like uninspired laziness and more like a very wise choice.

Now, don't tell anyone in Portland that I really love this time of year. Because it would ruin their fun when they start whining about the rain. (A note for all the non-Portlanders: it's really not that rainy here. The "downpour" we had on Friday, which was the rainiest day so far of 2007, was only 1.1 inches. And it was more rain than we had in all of June, or in July and August combined.)

While I do love the dry summer months here, fall is just more my style. You get to pick clothes based on how they look, and not just how little you'll sweat in them. Snuggling up to your loved one becomes much more enjoyable. And hanging out in the cozy bed seems like a much more legitimate activity. In short, fall doesn't seem so pushy as summer. Fall kindly suggests that you take it easy.

Plus, coffee, tea, and beer all seem to find their place best when the weather becomes crisper. There's just something defiant about sitting inside on a nice, gray day, staring out the window over the wisps of steam* coming off your coffee, as if to say, "I am warm and content — so there!"

*The nerd in me is compelled to note that it's not actually "steam", but rather a mixing or vapor cloud, that one sees coming off hot liquids.

Anyhow, fall. Yay!

Don't jump my shark, bro!

I think CafePress and its ilk have jumped the shark.

Oh, sure, I realize that using the phrase "jump the shark" jumped the shark a while back. It has become such a cliche that Googling for the phrase "'jump the shark' jumped the shark" produced 824 results as of this writing. Yes, it's all so clever and helical, an ironic snake eating its own tail ... while water-skiing over a shark, which is also eating its own tail. Yes, even though snakes can't water ski — such is the power of irony, it can even make it rain on your wedding day.

Ahem. But enough of that — this is about CafePress.

Remember the first time you heard about blogging and how you thought it would revolutionize the world, truly putting publishing into the hands of the Everyman and ushering in a new era of people-powered media? No? Well, do you at least remember someone saying that in the first article you read about blogging in a magazine or newspaper?

And then, like, six months later, there were 83 quadrillion blogs, half of which were about what their author had for breakfast that morning, and the other half of which hadn't been updated in over eight months?

Remember how disappointed you were in humanity for ruining the opportunity they had been given?

Okay, never mind what you remember. My point is that I feel the same way about CafePress.

Don't get me wrong — the theory behind the site is nice enough. People can create their own designs and have them printed, on demand, on t-shirts, mugs, mouse pads, and so on. That way, they don't have to invest in large runs of materials up front. Hooray for the common man!

Of course, the downside is that you get middling production levels at high prices. Ah, but you get middling production levels on products related to cutting-edge news and memes, and therein lies the advantage of CafePress.

It's also what makes it — or any of its ilk — really, really annoying.

This all came to a head when I saw the "Don't tase me, bro!" video. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then there's no need for me to provide a link for you, since you wouldn't know how to click on it anyhow, much less how to operate the video at the subsequent page.

Anyhow, not only was the blogging world suddenly full of the tase/bro video and discussion of it, but everywhere I went, someone was flogging some poorly conceived t-shirt on HastilyDesignedMemesploitation.com. Er, that is, CafePress.com.

Depending on how you spell "tase" (derived from the trademark Taser, but often misspelled "taze" by bleeding-heart gun-control pinkos or mouth-breathing paramilitary gun nuts), there are at least 352 designs on CafePress right now related to Taser-related imperatives. Hilarity.

Furthermore, a Google search on "'don't tase me bro' shirts" turns up 172,000 knee-slapping results. (Again, more hilarity can be found with alternate spellings.)

I guess what irritates me is just the sheer crapulence of most of these shirts. They're terrible. They're not meant to ever see the light of day — following their ill-conception, they will be forced to gestate forever in the CafePress womb's, um, lame-niotic fluid (?).

They are, in short, a sort of blog for those people who think they're clever but don't really have much to say except the occasional, "Hey, remember that funny thing?"

And I'm angry because that's my shtick.

Except it takes me thousands of words to say what their one hastily uploaded picture says. And I probably get fewer hits than their CafePress stores. Which is so not fair.

Or maybe I'm grumpy because no one has bought any of the clever t-shirt designs from my own line of CafePress products.

Fig. A: Do you like dinosaurs? Do you like shirts?

Oh sure, it could have something to do with the fact that I've never actually linked to that URL before now, in part because I just remembered it existed. Or that I never intended the products to be created for and purchased by anyone besides me*.

But enough about me. The point is that I'm so full of ironic rage that I'm considering buying a "don't tase me, bro" t-shirt, just to bring me that much closer to a quadruple ironic apoplexy. That's right, I will call your memesploitation bluff!

Also, CafePress has "jump the shark" designs available.

*They were made for Julia's birthday last year, designed by me, but ironically based almost completely on dinosaur doodles drawn by Julia herself. I loved their (intentional) naive simplicity. Julia loves that they're about dinos. She seems to particularly enjoy the "Oh no! Metric system!" raptor design, for reasons I can only guess at, since I don't know what it means myself. Is it a koan on the nature of change? A timely meditation on the waning of the customary unit system? Or is it cheap surrealism with a cute dinosaur? Who can say? If the designer can't, then it's probably the one about cheap surrealism.

Update: I added pictures of the t-shirt designs. Because I need more pictures on my blog.

Who is the loneliest monk?

My workplace is next door to the Portland Jazz Festival's office downtown. They have a poster on their door for a Sonny Rollins concert, which features a quote proclaiming him "the last jazz immortal."

I'm not here to question Rollins' reputation — heck, I'm much more familiar with the work of his brother, Henry, than I am with Sonny's music.

But it does bring to mind several questions. Why is he the last jazz immortal? What happened to the other jazz immortals?

Did Mr. Rollins, tiring of undying improvisation, marry a pop mortal so that at least his offspring might not be forced to endure the unbearable burden of eternal riffing, constantly yearning to take an ordered phrase and repeat it for a century or so?

Were the other jazz "immortals" really immortal in the first place, or did it just feel that way after their solos passed the seven-minute mark?

Or did Mr. Rollins behead the other jazz immortals in order to gain what is known as the "allegroning"?

Wow. Did I really just attempt a joke involving The Highlander and Italian musical terms? I've never even seen The Highlander — in any form. I'm clearly hard up for ideas.

(The title of this article comes from the possibly apocryphal story in which MTV reporter Tabitha Soren, responding to Bill Clinton's saying he'd always wanted to play saxophone with Thelonious Monk, asked, "And who was the loneliest monk?" It seemed relevant when I started this article. But then, this article seemed clever when I started this article. Ah well.)

A frank discussion of online encyclopedias

So in the middle of writing the previous screed, I naturally went to Wikipedia to look up what the name Carl's Jr. actually means.

(In the future, our children will ask us, "How did you resolve disputes before Wikipedia?" And I will tell them that we used to beat each other senseless. Usually with heavy volumes of the Encyclopædia Brittanica — our rage being fueled in part by that pompous "ae" ligature, of course, but mostly by the fact that we could not edit said encyclopedia. Of course, I occasionally tried to edit my parents' copy of the 'pædia, but when my dad found out, he got angry. He also questioned my sourcing on the entry on "Stadler, Todd" that he found inserted in the "Sla–Stu" volume. "I don't remember your coronation," he said. Whatever.)

It turns out, according to Wikipedia, that the truth about Carl's Jr.'s name — other than that it makes phrases like the foregoing one burdensome to the grammatically conscious — is that the restaurants were "so named because they were a smaller version of [Carl Karcher's] drive-in restaurant."

This is, you will agree, really boring.

Moreover, it is quite likely wrong, reflective more of Wikipedia's liberal, anti-American bias than of the truth. So naturally, I turned to Conservapedia to learn the true facts on Carl's Jr.

For those of you too busy hugging trees to be familiar with Conservapedia, it is, according to its main page, "A Conservative encyclopedia you can trust. The truth shall set you free." (The latter sentence, taken from the eighth chapter of the Gospel of John, is included because there is nothing more conservative than conflating Jesus' exhortation to follow his teaching — and thereby be freed from sin — with the desire to enforce a particular political worldview on the facts as you state them.)

So, according to Conservapedia, what did "Carl's Jr." really mean, in a way unbiased by liberal ivory-tower fat-cat-trial-lawyer academicians and the criminals for whose hearts they bleed?

It turns out that conservatives don't have a lot to say on the matter. Sometimes a restaurant's awkward name is just an awkward name. And yes, I'm looking at you, Ruth's Chris.

But while refusing to free me from the lack of truth surrounding Carl's Jr., Conservapedia did helpfully ask if perhaps I was looking for information on Joseph McCarthy, who "became the most visible public figure to stand up to Communist infiltration of the United States government."

Freed by this truth, I then hopped over to the Conservapedia article on Hitler to see if it mentioned how he "became the most visible public figure to stand up to Jewish infiltration of Europe". No such luck. But, you know, Conservapedia is publicly editable, so only time will tell.

Look, here's my point: Conservapedia is actually less an encyclopedia than a collection of articles of import to conservatives, with the remaining content reading like articles written by teenagers for their geography projects.

(No, really — according to the Toronto Star, "The site was born with the help of a large group of home-schooled teenagers Schlafly assembles near his home in northern New Jersey to teach such topics as world history and economics." Also, see this bit of Conservapedia "homework".)

As an example, consider the Conservapedia entry for Whitewater (in case it changes, this is the version I'm referring to). It contains 525 words, of which 519 (98.9%, but who's counting?) are direct quotes from articles found at the History Channel's Web site. That's some good sleuthing.

But then, Whitewater isn't a topic of concern to many conservatives. "Oh, those were the bygone Clinton years! Let's move on and not dwell on the 90s, right?" Ahem.

No, to really get a sense of how the truth will set you free, you need to look up a true cultural touchstone like Los Angeles.

Now, Wikipedia's article on Los Angeles goes on for over 9,000 words, sprinkled liberally (aha!) with facts, such as the city's official name, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula, or The Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels of the Pork Uncola. Er, more or less.

Allow me to digress for a moment to once again complain about Spain's American place-namer. He really didn't bring his A game — I mean, how embarrassed do you think he is at having put the word "Village" in the name of what is now the United States' second-largest city? And do you know why it belongs to the United States now? Because we have the efficiency to refer to it as "L.A." — a savings of 97% over the Spanish name, identifying in two letters what it took him to express a definite article. To say nothing of his once again using another town's name in his town-naming. And where is Porcupinola? About 4 kilometers from Assisi. What was this man's obsession with Assisi?

Okay, I feel better now.

My point is that the Conservapedia entry for "Los Angeles" has notably fewer than 9,000 words. Specifically, 8,729 fewer. And for those arguing for "quality over quantity", may I submit as my counterpoint the penultimate paragraph from said article (exactly as it was presented):

Many people from all over the world live in LA, and as a result there are restaurants from well over 300 nations there. The weather is excellent all year around, which is why the movie business moved there - the light is excellent for 'shooting' for over 300 days a year. The Mayor of LA is Antonio Villaraigosa.

Okay then. But maybe — just maybe — it's not the whole of L.A. that conservatives truly despise, just Hollywood. As such, the Conservapedia entry for "Hollywood" should be the one stuffed to the gills with right-leaning (that is to say, unbiased) facts. Right? Well, here's their Hollywood article, in its entirety:

Hollywood is a neighborhood located in the city of Los Angeles, California. As a lexical entry, it refers to the movie studios once located in the district, and more generally, to the motion picture business. It is a synonym encompassing all the definitions of 'glamour', 'beauty', 'fame', 'sex', and 'power' in a shallow way.

See also: Three Stooges, Salma Hayek, Marilyn Monroe

I. Rest. My. Case!

... Er, whatever my case was.

Why I hate the internet

Dagnabbit!

There I was, earlier this week, when it came to me: if I ever open a specialty supermarket that focuses on U.K. imports, I could call it The British Aisles!

Heh, I laughed to myself. That's good. The Brits eat up puns like so many meat-and-pastry products.

But then I checked to see if anyone else had come up with the same idea. Yeah, only 1,620 people (or at least Google results, as of this writing).

Back before the internet, I would have been secure in the knowledge that I was one of the most clever supermarket-namers around. But no, the harsh reality of the internet tells me it just ain't so.

Man, the internet is such a downer.

On Carl's Jr. and other thoughts

We went to Carl's Jr. for lunch today, and even though the food was okay, it bugged me for many reasons.

Of course, there are many problems with the name alone. Shouldn't it be "Carl's, Jr."? At least it should be if Carl's had a son.

And I hate how the period in "Jr." appears to prematurely terminate any sentence with the place's name in it, simultaneously appearing to create an incorrectly capitalized (and possibly fragmentary) second sentence. Every time I write something like, "This summer, I ate at Carl's Jr. and it was really, really good," people write back complaining about my poor grammar. And my uninteresting subject matter. (Fine! I didn't want to be your paper's stupid restaurant reviewer anyhow!)

Frankly, these typographical issues alone are why I don't write more blog entries on Carl's Jr.

(See how I threw its name at the end of the sentence to avoid all those problems? But I can't do that for every sentence involving Carl's Jr.! See, like that? You can't end a sentence with ".!"! Man, this is out of control.)

And what does "Carl's Jr." even mean? Is it a restaurant opened up by Carl's son? Wouldn't that be "Carl Jr.'s"? Or would it be "Jr's."? Maybe that's why the apostrophe migrated over to Carl.

In twenty years, will we all be eating at Carl's III? And aren't such post-nominal letters better suited to the monarchical Burger King, anyhow?

Or does the name refer to the fact that Carl treated the restaurant like his true son, sadly never acknowledging the several biological children he fathered, referring to them, however infrequently, as his "nieces and nephews"? (Just kidding, dear Carl Karcher Enterprises lawyers!)

Anyhow, I decided to get a particular burger for my meal. I'm not going to say its name, because it's goofy. I have issues with Carl Karcher Enterprise's nomenclature, alright?

But I could tell from the picture menu that the burger came with some sort of nasty condiment on the bun. I ordered mine with "no mayo".

The guy behind the counter said, "There's no mayo. That comes with [mumble mumble] sauce." I stared at the guy for two seconds while my brain did some processing and came to the conclusion that he must have said "Santa Fe sauce".

It's just that the guy was Hispanic, and he (logically) pronounced it with a Spanish accent as "sahn-tah fey", rather than the more common (for me, at least) "sant-uh" (rhymes with "ant-uh").

None of which would have prompted me to write this navel-gazing blog entry, except that I happen to speak a bit of Spanish. And hearing a man who probably also spoke Spanish refer to this condiment as "Santa Fe sauce" struck me as odd.

Because that would mean "holy faith sauce".

Oh, I know that it's named after the city in New Mexico, presumably based on the idea that everyone down there slathers foul, spicy soybean-based mayo on pretty much everything — a concept I have not personally found evidence for in my travels there. (But then, maybe I was confused because everyone in Santa Fe was just calling it "sauce"?)

Anyhow, as is so often true, it's ultimately the fault of the Spaniards. They're the ones who gave odd, and often annoyingly long, names to their cities. Wikipedia tells me that Santa Fe's real (that is, completely ignored) name is La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís, or The Royal City of the Holy Faith of St. Francis of Assisi.

Rule number one for naming your city: don't include the name of other cities in the name. "What, you're from Assisi?" "No, I'm from The Royal City of the Holy Faith of St. Francis of Assisi!" "Can you diagram that for me? There's, like, twenty prepositional phrases there!"

I'm almost certain that long names like that ultimately led to Spain's loss of influence in that part of the world. See, when the non-Spaniards ride up to attack your town, you stand on the ramparts in your gleaming armored helmet and, after a trumpet fanfare, declare, "Attention would-be invaders! I speak for all inhabitants of The Royal City of the Holy Faith of St. Francis of ... Aah!" That last bit being where the invaders got tired of your pompously long geographic name and decided to invade before you'd finished reciting all of it.

And the first resolution of the new conquerors? "From now on, we just call it 'Holy Faith', okay?"

All of which is a fine name for a city in your theoretically religiously homogeneous country.

But it's an awfully odd name for a condiment.

Religion in the newspapers

Last Saturday's Oregonian had an article about a local pastor waging a "spiritual war against sexual addiction." As these things go, it was a pretty normal article.

But one thing caught my eye, and it was from a question-and-answer set the Oregonian had with the pastor:

Q: Why tackle this problem now?
A: We need a true revival in the church, but a real in-depth relationship to God is not possible right now if we don't deal with this sin.

Although I understand the desire to combat such problems in our society, and I agree that sin is the root problem, the pastor's statement is wrong, as I read it. It's just backwards, and it makes me sad to think that people whose main exposure to Christianity may come from the Oregonian's Saturday religion stories might think that this is what the faith is all about.

Let me be clear about Christianity: it is not about people themselves overcoming their sins in order to have a relationship with God.

No, like I said, the pastor got it all backwards: it is not possible to deal with sin if you don't have a relationship with God.

But hey, don't take my word for it! Take God's, as found in Paul's letter to the Romans: "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."

What's my point? We don't approach God and initiate a relationship with him once we've rid our lives of sin. No, he approached us first, and he did so "while we were still sinners." Then, "since we have been justified [that is, declared not guilty] through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ."

It's only after God tells us that he established a relationship with us, declaring us free of sin and guilt, that Paul tells us what our response should be to our sinful desires: "What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace [that is, forgiveness] may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?"

This may seem like so much religious fooferaw to some of you.

But, whether he meant to sound that way or not, the pastor quoted above has managed to summarize what so many people seem to think Christianity is about: working really hard to rid ourselves of sin, in the hopes of earning God's favor. And I can't think of a more horrible thing to believe.

No, God himself took away our sin while we were still sinners and hostile to God. The proper response to such mercy is to willingly turn away from sin in our lives.

Twinkies fame: still going

I got a call last week while I was at work.

In itself, this is unusual, since no one calls me on my work phone, except the occasional poorly informed cold-call from some software sales-schmoe (sample conversation: "Hi, are you responsible for making software purchase decisions for your company?" "Um, not really. Who is this?" "Can you transfer me to that person?" "Um, not really." Click).

I mean, I'm the internet guy at work. If anyone needs to talk to me, they either walk the several dozen feet to my desk, or they e-mail me. So I'm suspicious whenever the phone, nearly hidden behind a stack of papers and old design magazines, rings.

Anyhow, this time the call was actually for me. The guy on the other end of the phone said that he worked for some media company or other, and asked if I'd do a quick interview about my involvement in the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project.

Oh. Whenever I get these calls, two thoughts immediately go through my mind. First, how funny is it that some Web page I made twelve (!) years ago (with my co-Twinkies-scientist, Chris Gouge) is still resulting in media exposure?

Second, as much as I love the (now mostly warmed-over) fame and storytelling opportunities that result from such phone calls, I really have nothing interesting to say anymore. I wish I did, sure. I'd love to be hilarious for every (infrequent) interview I do. But I have nothing further to say, it seems. I don't find it a humorous discussion topic anymore.

It's like someone asking you what was your favorite part from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. "Oh, yeah," you'd say, "Huh. That was a good movie. Hadn't thought about it in a bit. Yeah, I dunno." And he then proceeds to act out all of his favorite scenes: "Blue! ... No, yellow!" And you just sit there and hmm and laugh politely, more at the memories of the movie than anything said in your actual conversation.

Not that the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project is remotely comparable to that movie, mind.

Anyhow, once I told him with some misgivings that I'd do an interview, the guy told me he'd call back quickly.

These misgivings transformed into a more proper dread when the phone rang again. See, you can always tell you're talking to a radio personality because, well, it occurs to you that you're not talking to a normal person. "What's wrong with this guy's voice," you might wonder, "Why is he over-enunciating and giving dramatic inflection to the most mundane phrases?"

What's strange is that this bizarre style of talking doesn't seem so odd when it's on the radio. But out of context — like, say, on the phone — it can be deeply disturbing, every bit as creepy as if your life suddenly gained a laugh track.

Let me be clear: radio people are freaks who have done something to their voices every bit as unnatural as that guy on the street with the tattoos all over his face. And chatting with a radio "personality" is a bit like being asked to sing a duet with an operatic soprano. You can't help think about how ... different ... you sound.

It turns out that the reason for this interview was that Interstate Bakeries Corp. (IBC) recently announced that it would be closing down its bakeries in Southern California. You know, IBC, makers of Wonder Bread? And Roman Meal bread? Oh yes, and Twinkies.

I don't know if this (ahem) journalist has my name filed in his Rolodex under "Food, Twinkies: go-to guy", or if he just plugged "Twinkies" into Google and found the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project and used his (ahem) journalism skills to find my work phone number. Oh, and my parents' phone number as well. (Thanks Mom, for taking that message.)

So there we were, talking about Twinkies and what I did to them twelve years ago. As much as I've already said about this event, I have little to say about the actual interview.

He told me it was being recorded to be played on the air, and I told him they'd have to edit it massively to make it sound interesting. He laughed a polite radio personality laugh that said, "If we have to create new words and sentences from your recording using a team of professional editors, we will!" (radio people learn to express themselves efficiently in radio school), and then babbled on about how he was sure I'd be a great interview. After all, I was a funny guy, right? That Web page I made was funny!

Which, ultimately, is the problem. Writing isn't speaking. In writing, you can edit your ideas repeatedly, and wait around for a particularly funny phrase to come to you. Not that I consider myself to have mastered writing — for instance, perhaps you haven't noticed, but I'm not terribly succinct — but I have spent more time writing and editing this story than I would in telling it.

Anyhow, the interview was terrible. On at least two of the questions, I just trailed off in the middle of answering, realizing that I was boring even myself.

To get an idea of what I was feeling, here's an exercise. Write something sort of funny. And then wait a decade or so. And then hand out a sheet to five people that you don't know, but who enunciate well, containing the following talking points:

• So, tell me about [what you wrote].
• I liked what you wrote when you said, "[read a passage from what you wrote]"
• What was your favorite part of [what you wrote]?

I mean, I know I sound really whiny right now, but I promise you that in ten years, you'll understand where I'm coming from. Until then, please don't rag on me in the comments. Thanks.