MemeMachineGo!

Great article on Michael Moorcock :

“We were all attracted to science fiction,” he recalls. “We all saw it as describing our experience in a way that modernist fiction didn’t. It can be crude stuff, but we weren’t in any way slumming, as science-fiction allowed us to write about intellectual ideas in a populist way that modernist fiction didn’t permit.”

[…] “I still see my main audience as a smart populist audience, not a middle-class literary audience,” he says. “I think (literary fiction) writers are as guilty of pleasing their audience as any writer of a popular fiction. Experimental fiction always has its roots in popular fiction anyway. Tough detective stories were around long before Hemingway.”

(Via Neil Gaiman’s Journal )

Tom Robbins’ Bumbershoot’s Golden Umbrella Award Acceptance Speech :

In Seattle, I soon found that my radical ideas and aesthetic explorations—ideas and explorations that in Richmond, Virginia, might have gotten me stoned to death with hush puppies—were not only accepted but occasionally applauded. In retrospect, that shouldn’t be so astonishing, for the most fleeting overview of neurogeography reveals that for four or five thousand years, there has been a pattern of migratory movement of consciousness from east to west. The smartest people, the strongest, bravest, most adventurous, creative, open-minded, and advanced have pressed ever westward: starting from India and China, moving to Alexandria, Constantinople, and the Middle East; on to Athens, Rome, Paris, London; crossing the Atlantic, the New England of Thoreau and the Transcendentalists, New York of course; then Chicago, which earlier in this century was a hot box of intellectual and artistic ferment; and, now, the West Coast, where LA, San Francisco, and Seattle represent the end of terrestrial migration.

There are lots of more interesting bits, but they all rely on internal context. Read the whole thing.

And his new book, Villa Incognito is scheduled to be on sale at the end of April.

A fair and unbiased account of the extrovert menace :

The worst of it is that extroverts have no idea of the torment they put us through. Sometimes, as we gasp for air amid the fog of their 98-percent-content-free talk, we wonder if extroverts even bother to listen to themselves. Still, we endure stoically, because the etiquette books—written, no doubt, by extroverts—regard declining to banter as rude and gaps in conversation as awkward. We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts’ Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say “I’m an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush.”

Already widely linked to — for some reason it struck a chord with the blogosphere.

Updated 7/22/2005: Here’s a current link

Big news — the New World Disorder Online Magazine is finally here, with features like this interview with Peter Carroll :

I have this thing about originality, I much prefer to have my own religion, my own theory of magic, my own ideas about physics, my own self-made jewellery and sculpture, my own handmade weapons, games I have designed and built myself and so on. I do not drive cars for example, because I do not have the time to design and customize or build one. I have however compromised with clothing and usually buy readymade items. I prefer my own cooking to anyone else’s even if it does not taste as good. Some people think I take originality to extremes, but I wish to respond to mass consumer culture in this way as a matter of principle.

Don’t be shy about visiting the tip jar .

Meryl Yourish has declared March 15 to be International Eat an Animal for PETA Day . Herman Thrust comments at Vegan Porn :

As the originator of this master plan is an omnivore already, this reserves every other day of the year for International Eat an Animal for Me Me Me I Love the Taste of Meat and I Don’t Care Where It Comes From or How It’s Made or What It’s Doing to The Planet Day.

I’ve been lax in announcing our next show, just two nights hence. 8 PM, Cafe Eclectica , free!

All singing (some singing), all dancing (probably not much dancing), all improvised (that one’s absolutely true) fun! Without a script, without a net, without a clue.

And, for the first time, I’ll be doing a scene solo. Very dangerous.

$1700 remote control — for that price, I’d better be able to fast forward at the movies.

(Via IncuBLOGula )

Terry Jones rips Bush one :

A recent UN report reckons that if and when the US starts bombing as many as 100,000 Iraqis will die. I can’t really believe that the President of the United States gets his rocks off by having people killed. That’s more like Saddam Hussein. And yet it worries me that Mr. Bush says that one of the reasons he wants to kill a lot of Iraqis is because Saddam Hussein has also been killing them. Is there some sort of rivalry here? Back in 1988 Saddam killed several thousand at once, in the town of Halabjah. Since then he’s been carrying on the good work, but on a piecemeal basis. In fact, for all I know, since his 1988 spree, he may not have killed any more of his own citizens than George W. Bush did as Governor of Texas. When Mr. Bush became Governor in 1995, the average number of executions per year was 7.6. Mr. Bush succeeded in quadrupling this to a magnificent 31.6 per year. He must have had the terrible chore of personally signing over 150 death warrants while he was Governor. I suppose the advantage of killing Iraqis is that you don’t have to sign a piece of paper for every one of them. Just one quick scribble and - bingo! You can kill a hundred thousand and no questions asked! What’s more, nobody is going to quibble about some of them being mentally retarded or juveniles, which is what happened to George W. Bush when he was Governor of Texas.

(Via Electrolite)

Funny, snarky condemnation of NPR

National Over-privileged Caucasian Radio, formerly National Plutocrat Radio, is member-supported — just like a country club. […] For a donation of just $250 you’ll a gift basket from Archer-Daniels Midland, the multinational concern that mutates America’s Breadbasket. Archer-Daniels Midland —the innovative folks who have found a way to make vegetarian food bad for you!

(Via Robot Wisdom )

Psychological Warfare Between Therapists and Scientists :

Our society runs on the advice of mental-health professionals, who are often called upon in legal settings to determine whether a child has been molested, a prisoner up for parole is still dangerous, a defendant is lying or insane, a mother is fit to have custody of her children, and on and on. Yet while the public assumes, vaguely, that therapists must be “scientists” of some sort, many of the widely accepted claims promulgated by therapists are based on subjective clinical opinions and have been resoundingly disproved by empirical research conducted by psychological scientists.

(Via wood s lot , if I read more of which, I’d be smarter)

I’ve been reading Skimble lately.

Laura Bush had scheduled a symposium on “Poetry and the American Voice” at the White House. She cancelled it when one of the invitees, Sam Hamill, took exception to the idea of associating with the Bush White House and instead began organizing a war protest anthology. One invitee, Roger Kimball, got all huffy about Hamill’s spoiling his invite to the White House. Skimble writes :

The United States is a country, not a country club. But Roger Kimball is just a caddie on the manicured fairway of Laura Bush’s stunted cultural imagination.

Dude can turn a phrase (said with awareness that I don’t recall anything establishing his or her sex.)

Elsewhere, Skimble quotes Goering

“Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” Goering shrugged. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”

“There is one difference,” I [Gustave Gilbert, a German-speaking intelligence officer and psychologist] pointed out. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.”

“Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

And to measure the underreporting of theft, Skimble invented the smoke and mirrors index :

The Smoke & Mirrors Index is Skimble’s measure of ill-gotten money divided by Google hits. If I stole $1,000 and got 10 Google hits, my Smoke & Mirrors Index would be 100, equal to $100 per Google hit. If you stole $100 and got 20 Google hits, your Smoke & Mirrors Index would be 5, or $5 per Google hit. I stole more money than you but fewer people are talking about it, so the smoke and mirrors are in my favor — distracting the world from my self-enriching crime. Bad guys score high; (relatively) good guys score low. In other words, the higher someone’s Smoke & Mirrors Index, the more they are getting away with. The less scrutiny there is about great financial crimes, the higher the S&M Index. The more scrutiny there is about smaller crimes, the lower the S&M index.

Read it.

Sumana had some nice things to say about Saturday’s improv show (thanks!) :

Zed gamely put up with an overzealous audience in the “No You Didn’t” game. (The performer tells a story but is interrupted by the audience saying “No, you didn’t,” and has to immediately change that bit of the story.) Such audience behavior makes me think that improv would be better without the audience, or at least substituting computer-randomized suggestions for audience suggestions.

Trade secret: “No You Didn’t” works only because of the audience’s zealotry. The need to change the story every few moments makes it look incredibly difficult, so much so that just gamely putting up with it, rolling with it unphased and in good cheer, wins so much audience sympathy, I can do no wrong. If there were fewer interruptions and I had an “easier” time of it, it would become much harder. The audience would automatically start holding me to the higher standard of a monologist — I’d have to actually make sense!

The equivalent holds for the rest of improv — the same scenes that would seem disappointing from a sketch comedy group can seem brilliant from improvisers because the audience’s sympathies and expectations are so different.

Improv is a place that makes especially evident that “90% of life is just showing up” (Woody Allen says he really said 80% — fact-checking: your clue to quality blogging.)

And, yes, Cafe Eclectica is closing . But the show must go on and it will, somewhere. We’ll be back with a brand new name. Platypus Jones is the troupe formerly known as SF Improv (nothing at the new website yet, alas.)

And here’s a picture from last month’s show (this marks the first time in a year of blogging I’ve linked to a picture) — I’m the rightmost guy seated on the couch, the only one with a beard.

An Electrolite entry has spawned a hot discussion, chiefly concerned with whether Nader voters are irresponsible idiots who are to blame for everything that’s gone wrong in the past two and a quarter years, or just unconscionably misguided fools who are to blame for everything that’s gone wrong in the past two and a quarter years.

I continue to be astonished by the arrogance of this position, that because I’m no fan of the Republicans, the Democrats own my vote. That it wasn’t Gore’s job to get himself elected, it was Nader’s. Bush voters, people who didn’t vote, Gore and his milquetoast platform — they played no role in the election. It was all Nader and his voters. (I alluded to this in MMG’s early days.) Despite that it’s very unclear Gore would have won without Nader’s candidacy, even the coming war is all Nader’s fault .

They’re fond of patronizing us with the facts of the matter — that we have a two-party system, that we’re obliged to vote for the lesser of two evils regardless of how we feel (convenient how claiming the high ground of “realism” automatically marginalizes dissent.)

Well, here’s my patronizing lecture: if you want my vote, earn it by running a candidate I can vote for in good conscience. I voted for Clinton in ‘92 to vote out Bush Sr. Having done so made me ill thereafter as he stuck to everything I didn’t like about his platform, and caved on everything I liked. I voted Green in ‘96 and 2000, and I do not apologize for it.

Yes, Gore is not Bush. He could have done a lot more to demonstrate that before the election. I couldn’t make out much advantage in having someone who understood the environmental issues but planned to ignore them over someone who just didn’t care and planned to ignore them (to comment on just one issue.) And so I chose to cast a vote that said “being not registered as a Republican isn’t good enough.”

All that said, I know of no more pressing issue for this nation’s future than ousting Bush. So much so that I figure I’ll register as a Democrat for the first time, to participate in the primary and maybe help to select a candidate I can live with. So far Kucinich looks pretty good to me, but I haven’t looked at all the candidates in detail yet.

Columbia Journalism Review ‘s review of What Liberal Media? offers an interesting history of the origins of the idea of the media’s liberal bias .

[At the 1968 Democratic National Convention,] perhaps a tenth of the protesters in their designated sites far from that hall were beaten by the rampaging Chicago police. That is well remembered. What is less well remembered is that one in five of the reporters and cameramen covering the event were sent to the hospital. At the convention site, Mike Wallace was socked in the jaw. There came a moment of extraordinary professional solidarity from the sachems of journalism in response. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Katharine Graham, Otis Chandler, executives from all three networks, and the editor in chief of Time jointly dispatched an unprecedented telegram to Mayor Richard J. Daley, accusing him of streetside censorship of a story “the American public as a whole has a right to know about.”

Their response seemed to them merely common sense, a rallying point: they, after all, not Mr. Daley, were the trained, trusted experts on public opinion in this country. The police riot was clearly a travesty. “These,” Tom Wicker wrote, “were our children in the streets, and the Chicago police beat them up.” Who could disagree?

The guardians of public opinion were mistaken in their every assumption. For America did not see Chicago as Tom Wicker did; it saw it as Mayor Daley did. The bumper stickers showed it even before the polls: “We Support Mayor Daley and His Police.”

Huge majorities blamed the protesters for their own fate, though many also blamed the media — CBS received thousands of calls accusing them of hiring cops to beat up the kids. Newsies suddenly awoke to find themselves hated the way bosses were hated. And the media’s inward, anguished, bending over backward to not appear liberal, which Alterman describes so effectively in the present day, was born. Not untypical was The Washington Post’s retrospectively exonerating the police, allowing that, “of course” policemen should be agitated by (no kidding) men in beards. Richard Nixon rode resentment of the media all the way to the White House that year; and, in 1972, to the greatest landslide in American electoral history.

For more on the book, see Alterman’s article adapted from it and whatliberalmedia.com

(CJR link via Atrios)

People respond better to trust than mistrust (duh):

People playing an investing game with real money rapidly abandoned their altruistic behaviour if they felt the punishment given for selfish acts was unwarranted. […] “If people feel the punishment is fair, they respond by cooperating,” says Herbert Gintis, an economist and expert in human altruism at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, but they react very badly to an unfair punishment.

Any resemblance to the situation between employers and employees at most companies, or, more generally, between the haves and have-nots is purely obvious.

Meanwhile, while women find altruism attractive in a man, men find it unattractive in a woman :

When Barclay asked men and women to rate lonely hearts ads containing identical photographs but different text, women duly rated the men whose spare time was filled with altruistic pursuits as more attractive. But male raters found altruistic women less attractive, and less desirable as a prospective date. […] Male raters said they would prefer to go into business with and lend money to the altruistic women. “The only difference was in sexual attractiveness and willingness to date,” says Barclay.

Which leads me to this Salon interview with the author of Mismatch:

You are feminizing a man by wanting him to listen or participate in intimate conversation. Honestly, you’re more likely to get what you’re looking for from your girlfriends than from a man. You might even get it from a gay guy who is very adept at listening to women. But most men don’t listen to women, even in the 2003 [sic]. I did a little experiment once. I got a group of men — young guys with girlfriends — and a group of girls who had boyfriends, and paid them 20 dollars to sit in a room for an hour or two. I had the guys write down everything they knew about their girlfriends, and the girls write down everything they knew about their boyfriends. The girls sat there for two hours, filling up whole exam books. The guys? After 20 minutes they had nothing more to say. They could barely fill up a page.

He generally affirms single straight women’s stereotypical relationship insecurities — men all suck, and if they don’t, they’re gay, and if they’re not, they’re taken.

Gotta love a blog called Pedantry . Its author gloats :

You see, I’m in debt. […] What’s important in this is that I’m in hock to US banks, in US dollars and our incomes are in Euros. Every day that the dollar goes down is a day that I’m less in debt without having to pay a dime. My banks have to absorb the loss, not me, and those banks pass those losses onto their other customers - those residing in the US - in the form of higher interest rates. In short, the unemployed, mortgaged, up to their noses in credit card debt American middle class is paying for my three month trek through Asia to practice Chinese and my year of unemployment in graduate school, and I am not even paying American taxes to help them.

[…] But, the next time you run into a Bush supporter, thank them for me for subsidising my life. Remind them that, thanks to Dubya and his damn-foolishness, every time they make a mortgage payment or send money to their credit card, there is a liberal, non-American computer programmer who’s getting to see the world on their money.

Hey, it’s nice that someone can enjoy our economy.

(Via wood s lot )

The Pentagon spends $200,000 on a set in Qatar where generals will give updates on the war, even as they threaten to blow up independent journalists in Iraq , even as Fox sends Oliver North to Iraq as a war correspondent (whose felony convictions included obstructing a Congressional investigation before an appeals court overturned them on the grounds that he had been granted immunity for his lies, er, testimony.)

As for the ‘embedded journalists’ :

All reporters “embedded” with U.S. troops must sign a contract agreeing to the Pentagon’s rules governing coverage. Included in the document is a clause dictating what kinds of information reporters can and cannot detail. Journalists can be precluded from reporting certain “sensitive” information according to the military commander’s discretion. What’s more, “all conversations [with the troops] must be on the record,” Schanberg said. That’s a big problem: In the Vietnam era, much of the most damning information came from military sources who would talk to reporters if their names were not used. The Pentagon can revoke a reporter’s credentials at any time, for any reason.

OK, raise your hand if you think you’ll hear one damn thing about the war from the mainstream media that the government doesn’t want you to hear.

(First three links via New World Disorder , American Samizdat , Skimble , respectively)

Paul Coelho, author of the excellent book The Alchemist, offers his thanks to Bush:

Thank you for showing us clearly the enormous abyss which exists between the decisions taken by leaders of nations and the true desires of their people. Thank you for helping us see with painful clarity that whether it is José Aznar of Spain or Tony Blair of the UK, that our so called elected leaders don’t have the slightest regard or respect for the fact that over 90% of their population are against war. Thank you for allowing us to witness the ease with which Tony Blair was able to blithely ignore the largest public protest held in England in the last 30 years.

Thank you, because your insistence on war forced Blair to go to Parliament with a plagiarized dossier which consisted of notes written ten years ago by an arab graduate student. As a result we were able to witness the unbelievable farce of Blair insisting that these notes represented “proof” gathered by the British secret service.

[...] Thank you, because your position on war resulted in the French Foreign Minister, Mr. Dominique de Villepin, in his speech against war on Iraq, being honored by a standing ovation. This is an honor which, if I am correct, has only happened once before in the history of the U.N., and that was during a presentation by Nelson Mandela.

Thank you, because due to your strenuous push for war, for the first time the Arab nations of the Gulf, usually so divided, have found a reason to unite and have recently issued a joint resolution in Cairo condemning your proposed invasion. You have brought about a unity of opinion amongst the arab nations, that they had not achieved on their own.

One Jordanian Loves Microsoft, Hates America:

He explained to me in careful detail why he wants to be a shaheed, a suicide bomber against the United States, quoting at length from the Koran. But when he’s not talking about blowing himself up and killing American troops, Fadi talks about his other great dream. ”I want to be a programmer at Microsoft,” he says. ”Not just a programmer. I want to be well known, famous.”

[…he shows] a few boxes of audiotapes that he listens to every day. ”This is NLP,” he explains. ”It’s very good. Neuro-Linguistic Programming.” NLP, which originated at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is a sort of modern ”The Power of Positive Thinking,” and Fadi says it has helped him overcome the barriers to his dreams. ”Six months ago, I was much more negative,” he says. ”I would get frustrated.” For example, Fadi says he finds it frustrating that it is so difficult to get a visa to the United States, so he can’t train for a job at Microsoft. But the tapes teach him to remain positive about reaching his dreams.

Fadi doesn’t see anything strange about using American self-help tapes to get a job at an American company, while at the same time harboring hatred of the American government to the point of self-annihilation. Self-help, computer programming, the Koran and jihad are all aspects of the same thing, he says: a search for a way for a good Muslim to live in the modern world.

[…] Oddly, the place Fadi feels the most free to express his anti-American views is a pizza restaurant near his house that is modeled after one in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. It’s small: only room for two round tables, the pizza oven and a counter. It has red and white tiles like any American pizza place. It is run by two brothers, friends of Fadi’s who both lived in the United States for a long time. Y., the younger brother, is chubby and short. He was the first Arab barber in Brooklyn, he says, pulling out a contact sheet of photos of his customers, all with variants of a stylized buzz cut. ”Bay Ridge is beautiful,” he says. The older brother, O., says his pizzas are as good as any in New York. ”It’s very good,” Fadi says and orders the special: a large pie with mushrooms, olives, sausage and tomatoes. Fadi comes here about once a week and sits with Y. and O. to discuss jihad and America.

[…] America, Fadi says, is just too powerfully present in the lives of his generation of Arabs. America decides what young people will wear and what music they’ll listen to. America decides whether there will be war or peace. It’s so hard for a young man to feel proud of being an Arab, he says, when it is America that determines his chances for happiness and success.

Every now and then as we talk, a woman or a group of women walk by looking completely Western: no hijab, heavy makeup, a T-shirt, sometimes with several earrings or sexy boots.

”Do you look at the pretty girls here, or just ignore them?” I ask.

”Of course I look,” he says. ”I’m a human being.”

”Do you prefer the girls with hijabs or the Western-looking girls?”

”I prefer the hijab, of course.”

”You think the girls with hijabs are prettier?”

”Let’s be realistic,” he says, laughing. ”Maybe they’re not prettier. Maybe I prefer the Western-looking girls. But I wish they would wear the hijab.”

A bit of advice, gleaned from my long experience in the programming field: just one suicide bombing can really fuck up your career.

(Thanks, Dominic!)

Neil Gaiman explains how to dis the French like an Englishman:

[The English] have a special relationship with the French: we are in awe of their sophistication, their cuisine and their wines, we think their women are beautiful, we like them as individuals, we badly want to go and live in their country when we retire, while at the same time we are deeply suspicious of them. It’s like having people living next door to you who may be snappier dressers and better cooks, but who, after all, borrowed the lawn mower sometime in the thirteenth century and never gave it back. Anyway, the English dislike the French. We’re really good at it. We’ve been doing it ever since we got up one day and realised that the Norman Conquerors were now, like it or not, Us, and weren’t conquering French people any more. We feel, frankly, that if anyone’s going to dislike the French, it’s going to be us. On the whole we manifest our dislike for them by drinking their wines, buying up their cigarettes, and, despite the fact that all English people can naturally roll their Rs and speak perfect French, declining to do so, and when forced by circumstances to speak French the English do it with an English accent on purpose.

These are tactics we’ve worked out over the course of hundreds of years, and if carried on long enough, they will bring France to its knees. I’m English. I know these things.

Y’know, about the best part of this job is finding good blogs ‘cause they found me first. From Badgerbag :

I spent all morning trying to write a serious academic paper on heterodiagetic vs. homodiagetic narratives and “Green Eggs and Ham”. Managed to confuse myself greatly, but wrote a few pages of rambling stuff.

I can’t manage to leave myself out of it with proper academic formality; instead having fascinating long thoughts about how cool it would be to have various comic book artists re-illustrate the story in gritty film noir style, so that when Sam-I-am finally persuades the other creature to taste the G.E.&H., it is because he is holding a gun to his head. I leave the fox, the box, the dark, and the goat to your imagination.

Then instead of getting serious I took jim’s idea about Levi-Strauss and the raw and the cooked, and just ran with it. The eggs are sunny-side up; ham is not actually cooked but smoked; the green-ness is partly vegetal, partly raw; Sam-I-am and the other guy are not human, not any recognizable animal. Smack in the middle between nature and culture!

After hours and pages of rambling crap about narrators, focalization, and implied authors, I had this happy feeling of a lightning flash of genius, realizing that in G.E.&H., the reader IS the narrator. “The Reader IS the Narrator!!!!!” I write excitedly in my notebook. About 2 seconds later the genius part of it eluded me. Paper still unwritten. Still not king.

(That last bit’s a reference to The Very Secret Diary of Aragorn )

Paul Krugman writes of George W. Queeg :

Aboard the U.S.S. Caine, it was the business with the strawberries that finally convinced the doubters that something was amiss with the captain. Is foreign policy George W. Bush’s quart of strawberries?

[…] Mr. Bush’s inner circle seems amazed that the tactics that work so well on journalists and Democrats don’t work on the rest of the world. They’ve made promises, oblivious to the fact that most countries don’t trust their word. They’ve made threats. They’ve done the aura-of-inevitability thing — how many times now have administration officials claimed to have lined up the necessary votes in the Security Council? They’ve warned other countries that if they oppose America’s will they are objectively pro-terrorist. Yet still the world balks.

And Howard Fineman waits for war .

I’m waiting for war to break out—not in Iraq, but in the Bush administration. I’m wondering what’s going through Colin Powell’s mind. The secretary of State is looking pretty grim these days, like a man going through the motions. Might he bail out after a not-too-distant decent interval? Friends say no, he’s a team player. “But he’s not a happy camper,” one admits.

I just don’t feel like posting anything serious, so here’s one of the goofiest programs I’ve ever seen: Zen Garden for the Palm .

I was having email issues for most of the past 24 hours. If you sent me something, (including via the contact form) please re-send it.

On the bright side, it was nice getting no spam.

Tom Lehrer is alive and well and just recently retired from teaching at UC Santa Cruz. In this interview he speaks of the limits of satire and many other things:

Sadly, though, Lehrer is of the opinion that while satire may attract attention to an issue, it doesn’t achieve a lot else.

“The audience usually has to be with you, I’m afraid. I always regarded myself as not even preaching to the converted, I was titillating the converted.

“The audiences like to think that satire is doing something. But, in fact, it is mostly to leave themselves satisfied. Satisfied rather than angry, which is what they should be.”

His favourite quote on the subject is from British comedian Peter Cook, who, in founding the Establishment Club in 1961, said it was to be a satirical venue modelled on “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War”.

Life During Wartime Coping Mechanisms

Say, did you know that the classic PC text-mode action game Snipes is still available?

And there was recently a new release of Nethack .

And I’ve been spending lots of time checking out new software for my Palm. You know, so I can be more productive. Ooh. icons , color themes , a caculator desk accessory . There’s no stopping me now.

(‘toon via This Modern World )

Some days I wish I’d gone with the free-form short entry style…

Best SF Gateway — an index of the best sf available free on-line (via Sore Eyes )

Gotta love Dan Savage

Sexually active young people need to be treated like campsites—i.e., they should be left in better shape than they were found.

On being a cop in Kensington (a small town in the hills north of Berkeley):

Kensington residents and merchants, it seems, are crazy about their cops. At Christmas, the department’s lobby is piled with candy, cakes, pies, and gifts from appreciative locals. “In Oakland, if a pie was delivered, we’d probably have the bomb squad called out,” Balousek says. […] School kids actually wave. “They wave with all five fingers,” Khan says. “Sometimes it’s almost embarrassing how nice people are.”

I-Hate-the-French Vanilla — at last, Star-Spangled Ice Cream offers a conservative alternative to Ben & Jerry’s. Other flavors are Smaller Governmint, Iraqi Road and Nutty Environmentalist. And 10% of the profits go to charities that support the U.S. Armed Forces! (This was my first Metafilter post )

The Bill of Rights discovered after 138 years missing — please, someone get it to John Ashcroft immediately. (OK, that’s such an obvious crack that good editorial cartoonists are no doubt specifically refraining from it.) (via MeFi )

Get the French out of our language ! (via Follow Me Here )

Why stop with Evian, Total gasoline, and the Concorde (just only the Air France flights)? Let’s get to the heart of the matter thing: A huge big percentage of the words in modern today’s English are of — gasp! — French origin beginnings. What if, as a result of the current diplomatic dispute today’s falling out between lands, the French demand ask for their words back? We could all be linguistic hostages captives.

Even Global Hegemons have to set priorities.

And monkeys might fly out of my butt (via Eclectica )

Johns said Cusack denied having anything hidden on his body but was ordered to undress. “When Mr. Cusack removed his pants (inspectors) found two pygmy lorises in the crotch area of his underwear, much to the shock and amazement of the inspectors,” Johns said.

Today at 1700 PST is the exact moment of the vernal equinox. Spring is here, spring is here. Happy Ostara. It’s the Great American Meatout. And, an event rather sure to be overshadowed by world events, but still of note to me, it’s the first anniversary of MemeMachineGo!

I’d like to say some thank yous to Boing Boing and LinkMachineGo for links early on that brought me most of my initial readership (I frankly did a lousy job of advertising it to friends and family.) To Mena and Ben for Movable Type — I mightn’t be blogging without the efficiency, convenience, and control it offers (and all for an optional $20 registration I gladly paid.) To everyone else who’s linked here, who’s posted comments or suggested links, and, especially, to everyone who reads it. My interests are so eclectic — I so completely violate the conventional wisdom that a blog must focus to succeed — that sometimes I’m amazed I have any repeat visitors at all.

To express my appreciation, I pledge the following: original content every day for the next calendar month, through April 19. And I’ll be giving away two copies of Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine — one simply raffled off — drop me mail via the contact form to enter, the other to be awarded to the poster of the best comment between now and then (as determined subjectively and arbitrarily by me.) You’ll have to submit an email address with your comment, but you can obscure it from public view by including also a URL, any URL will do. Winners will be announced April 20 (well, unless they prefer their name not be mentioned — this ain’t the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.)

Take good care of yourselves, and let’s hope for brighter days.

For reasons related to my email problems — Apricot Systematic ‘s Perl was updated to 5.8 and numerous Perl modules were updated as well, such that some of the code I’ve set up suffered fatal bit rot — the contact form I encouraged you to use was broken. It’s working now — thanks to Mris for pointing it out to me.

Which brings me to what was an unconscionable omission in my list of thanks for MemeMachineGo! Thanks to Apricot Systematic for all of the system resources involved in providing MMG.

I met Pocahontas online. After our initial cafe date, we met for dinner. “There’s something I have to tell you,” she said then. “I did a Google search on you. And you’re all over the place!”

She didn’t want to have an unfair advantage, you see. Now, I just assume that any given person might find any given thing I say in public on the Net, and have written my blog with that in mind. So I was favorably impressed by her initiative and geekiness, but didn’t think much about it thereafter.

We hit it off. A few weeks ago, she said “You know, when I said I’d done a Google search on you, you never asked what I found.”

“I thought you’d read my blog.”

“Well, I did, some. But you know what was the thing that really got me, that made me think: I like this guy.”

“What?”

“It was this funny thing you wrote on footnotes.”

“What?” This was ringing no bells.

“It was about footnotes, and it was told using footnotes — it was really funny. It had things like footnotes can be bred in captivity and are shy and easily startled — oh I don’t remember it all.”

“Uh, I don’t think I wrote that.”

“And you got to see the footnote text by rolling the mouse over the footnote.”

“Wait, you needed to do a rollover to get the footnote text?”

“Yeah.”

I’ve harbored an anti-javascript bias for years, one I’m only recently getting over. So I knew then I hadn’t written this. Yet the piece was sounding vaguely familiar. So next I was in front of the computer, I googled myself . A couple of pages into the results is Notes on Footnotes . By my friend Jed . Who had quoted me in one of those footnotes, hence the page showing up in a search for me; Jed’s name isn’t present.

I called Pocahontas over and showed it to her and explained.

She looked at it.

She looked at me.

She shouted “You’re getting someone else’s sex!”

Thanks, Jed. I owe you one. I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t pay you back in kind.

Dr. Faustus :

Sometimes I think I should try to stop being so insecure and petty.

Then I see somebody I’m jealous of fail in a completely insignificant way and think, no, it’s too much fun to give up.

(Via Cheese Dip )

I doubt I’ll talk about the war much. See American Samizdat , Electrolite , or, for obsessively detailed coverage, The Agonist . I am compelled to comment on China’s condemnation though:

China demanded Thursday that military action against Iraq stop immediately and said the initial attack was “violating the norms of international behavior.” […] Chinese State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan told U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell that China “strongly urged an end to military actions against Iraq so as to avoid hurting innocent people,” the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Tang also told Powell that China is “deeply worried about humanitarian disasters, regional turbulence” and other ramifications of the war, the report said.

I heard that and snorted. “That’s rich, coming from the butchers of Tibet.”

And then I realized that for generations to come that’ll be the rest of the world’s reaction to any criticism by the U.S. of other nations’ military adventurism.

Several months ago, before I met Pocahontas, I posted this as a personal ad on Craigslist.

A is for Anarch, not ruling or ruled
B is for Books and the thinking they've fueled
C's for Create, coming back to ourselves
D is for Dreams and the depths the mind delves
E's for Envir'nment — don't shit where you eat
F is for Frank — I'm not very effete
G is for Groupthink, thing at which I suck
H is for Happy, more choice than it's luck
I is for Improv, performing in shows
J's for Jujitsu: strikes, joint locks and throws
K is for Kiss, to receive and to give
L is for Learning, as long as I live
M is for Music, songs straight from the heart
N is for Nature, of which we're a part
O's Opportunity, don't let it pass
P is for Play, risk, laugh, fall on your ass
Q's for Quixotic — keep up the good fight
R is for Rhythm, yo, ain't my verse tight?
S is for Science, technique that I like
T is for Transport, my fav'rite is bike
U's for Unique, only one of its kind
V is for Veg, it's good eatin', I find
W's for Writing, the joy story brings
X: Xenophilia — love of new things
Y is for You, fun, smart, passionate — wow!
Z is for Zen, mindful life in the now

It received all of one response, from someone I ultimately never met.

In hindsight, perhaps "Abecedarium" wasn't the catchiest of subject lines.

I had misgivings about posting this as I didn't like the appearance of cruising on my blog. But as I am now Not Looking, here it is.

In a tragic blow to local booksellers, I’ve been using the public library more often. Placing a hold on a book used to cost $.50, but is now free. The online catalog lets one place holds on books.

Once a popular book is out, it’s common for there to be dozens of holds on it; it would take months for one’s number to come up. For instance, there are still 12 holds on Stupid White Men, 15 on Fast Food Nation. 42 on Pattern Recognition.

But one can place a hold as soon as the library orders the book, before the library copy is available, often before its publication. And, so, when I know of a forthcoming book I want to read, I’ve taken to stalking the library’s online catalog. Checking the book’s status over and over. Until I pounce.

I scored Pattern Recognition that way. What Should I Do With My Life? The library’s now processing Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About and I’ll have it in my hot little hands soon. This weekend, I put holds on Villa Incognito, McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, Set This House in Order.

I am a happy bookaholic.

Dawkins on Bush (via The Null Device ):

Osama bin Laden, in his wildest dreams, could hardly have hoped for this. A mere 18 months after he boosted the US to a peak of worldwide sympathy unprecedented since Pearl Harbor, that international goodwill has been squandered to near zero. Bin Laden must be beside himself with glee. And the infidels are now walking right into the Iraq trap.

American Empire — excellent article on just how deep a hole we’ve dug. (via Electrolite )

Watching the tumult around the world, it’s evident that what is happening goes well beyond this particular crisis. Many people, both abroad and in America, fear that we are at some kind of turning point, where well-established mainstays of the global order—the Western Alliance, European unity, the United Nations—seem to be cracking under stress. These strains go well beyond the matter of Iraq, which is not vital enough to wreak such damage. In fact, the debate is not about Saddam anymore. It is about America and its role in the new world. To understand the present crisis, we must first grasp how the rest of the world now perceives American power.

Something which continues to be under-reported: Bush’s cronies planned the invasion of Iraq prior to Bush’s election .

Shock and Awe: the Divine Presence of God (via Post-Atomic )

Only indirectly related to the war, but one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time: Endless Love (via This Modern World )

The U.S./Iraqi Empathy Schedule

And, of course, Get Your War On

I hate to participate in all the French-bashing that’s the rage among idiots today, but I do have one big issue with them.

After a bicyclist on a recumbent bike, Francois Faure, broke the bike speed record in 1933, the Union Cycliste Internationale, the body that governs bike racing in France, forbade recumbent bikes from racing. Their stated rationale was to maintain bike racing as an athletic rather than an engineering competition.

Which makes some sense, of course, but had a chilling effect on innovation. They specified the diamond-frame bike (dating to 1884) as the standard, and bicycle manufacturers followed suit, such that even today almost all bikes are that shape. Only in recent years, largely driven by mountain biking, has there been much innovation.

The diamond-frame bike, by design, puts about 40% of your weight on your hands. Operating it involves maintaining tension in much of your body. If you want to look up and enjoy the view, you have to crane your neck into an uncomfortable position (generally — some styles allow one to sit more upright.) This means that anyone with upper-body joint problems — wrist, back, neck — is essentially barred from bicycling.

And I gnash my teeth every time I see a recommendation for a split-seat or other ‘comfortable’ bike seat for an upright bicycle to alleviate the well-documented discomfort, and even nerve damage, and, in men, erectile dysfunction and sterility that upright bicycling can cause. No matter how much you pay for the seat, you’re still jamming something up your crotch. It’s solving the wrong problem.

Now on a recumbent, you’re comfortably reclined, your head upright, positioned to comfortably look all around. With above-seat steering, there’s a little weight or your hands — basically, the weight of your forearms, with under-seat steering, there’s none. If your hips and legs work, and you can see and balance, you can ride a recumbent, even if upper-body injuries prevent your riding an upright.

I always thought recumbents looked neat, but probably would never have taken the leap until my repetitive stress injury meant that a single bike ride caused days of pain — a pretty big drawback for a transportation cyclist.

If the UCI hadn’t banned recumbents, they obviously would have become the standard for racing, because uprights couldn’t compete. If they’d been the standard for racing, manufacturers would have been mass-producing them for most of this century, and we wouldn’t even refer to recumbent bikes — they’d be what “bike” meant.

And if that’s what bike meant, then more people could ride them — the elderly, those with joint injuries — and maybe the idea of someone biking for transportation wouldn’t be quite so peculiar.

OK, I‘m lapsing into bicyclist fantasy there. Recumbent bikes wouldn’t have trumped car culture in this country. But it could have (and could still) mean more comfort, more options, and a better quality of life for some. And that’s more than enough to be worth it.

Walking to lunch from work, I often see people in their parked cars. Eating, or napping, or just hanging out, listening to the stereo.

I think this reflects a largely unconsidered aspect of car culture, one which we need to understand and address if we’re ever to have any chance of moving away from the one car per person (and if you don’t have one, you should just stay home) transportation infrastructure.

Namely that if you’re one of a huge number of people, then your car is the only place you really control your environment. A place that’s solely your domain.

Most people don’t have the privilege of living alone. (And many of those who do have to answer to a landlord.) Relatively few people have private offices or work spaces.

So you deal with others’ noise, others’ smells. Their posters and pictures and furniture. Making accommodations to their schedules. Sometimes simply literally taking orders from others. Bound into roles, shaped by those relationships, all the time you’re there

But your car’s an isolated bubble — wholly autonomous. It provides shelter, entertainment, a comfy chair. And you’re in control. There’s no one to tell you what you can play on the stereo, or how loud. No one to make you pick up your trash. You can smoke cigars, stay up late, sing out of key, pick your nose, or scratch your butt without anyone’s judgement or criticism. It’s an embassy of the self within the foreign land of society. Driving’s the only time a lot of people have to be alone, or to be in charge, or both.

For someone working in a cubicle maze and going home to a family of five, or working in retail and going home to an apartment shared with two other people, or working in a busy kitchen and going home to a tiny room in a building with shared bathrooms and walls so thin everyone can hear everyone else, it’s easy to see how this could be important. Easy to understand why they might resist the idea of replacing their driving time with riding mass transit, even beyond the convenience and expense arguments.

I write this from an acknowledged position of privilege. I have a private office, with doors I can close. I live alone in a place that’s tiny, but is a stand-alone house in a small yard. I do rent, but I’m not much interested in doing anything that’d violate the lease. I have plenty of autonomy and control over my space at work and home — a car wouldn’t meaningfully add any, for me.

If we want to advance mass transit, another of the problems we need to solve is how to provide a lot more people rooms of their own.

A Washington Post reporter is questioned by the police for being inquisitive while black . Canadian band Godspeed You Black Emperor were reportedly surrounded by cops and FBI agents with guns drawn in Oklahoma because the attendant thought nine white guys in two vans and a white panel truck were suspicious.

The “Don’t suspect a friend — report him!” poster from Brazil comes to mind. We’re living in a time when the most tenuous of excuses, an anonymous tip from Mrs. Grundy reporting “suspicous behavior,” can bring the authorities down on someone, when failing to conform to others’ expectations is growing dangerous. Yes, the individuals in these stories were unharmed, perhaps frightened in the latter case, but not tremendously inconvenienced otherwise. Yet still, I sympathize with Gregory Dicum, who wonders how do you know when it’s time to flee an encroaching police state?

It’s something I’ve been wondering myself.

Brooke and Eliot ask where are the conscientious objectors?

August asks why are we asking whether women should be in combat instead of why should humans be in combat? (my paraphrase)

A while ago I posted a quote from Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About :

An especially frequent argument argument, however, is the result of Margret NOT STICKING TO THE DAMN ARGUMENT, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE. Margret jack-knifes from argument to argument, jigs direction randomly and erratically like a shoal of Argument Fish being followed by a Truth Shark. It’s fearsomely difficult to land a blow because by the time you’ve let fly with the logic she’s not there anymore. A row about vacuuming gets shifted to the cost of a computer upgrade, from there to who got up early with the kids most this week and then to the greater interest rates of German banks via the noisome sexual keenness of some former girlfriend, those-are-hair-scissors-don’t-use- them-for-paper and ‘When was the last time you bought me flowers?’ all in the space of about seven exchanges. “Arrrrrrgggh! What are we arguing about? Can you just decide what it is and stick to it?”

The war seems to be bringing out that style of argument in everyone. A Cheese Dip entry linking to a photo of a maimed Iraqi girl inspires a comment condemning spring breakers for having wet t-shirt contests during wartime. A Boing Boing entry on GM’s ad campaign smearing mass transit and insulting its riders led to a rant about someone else somewhere else on the site Boing Boing had linked to having said something grotesque in support of fragging your lieutenant. And the discussion on Boing Boing’s linking to Paul Krugman’s editorial on how a major corporation with close ties to the Bush administration organized a rally to celebrate the destruction of the works of artists who’d dared criticize Bush really made my head spin. The real issue, you see, is a liberal media outlet typically attacking a corporation for engaging in its constitutionally protected right to free speech. Or something.

I have been remiss in making this announcement. Platypus Jones, the comedy improv troupe formerly known as SF Improv , will be returning to Cafe Eclectica for the second Saturdays of at least the next two months, April and May.

The next show is Saturday, April 12, 8 PM. Be there. Yours truly is directing (which means little in the kind of improv we’re doing — I’ll be the one choosing who’s in what games, then stepping back and letting it all happen.)

We’re not getting the use of the space for free any more, so we’ll be soliciting donations (which means just that — we’re not going to browbeat people for a “suggested minimum donation” i.e. an admission fee by another name.)

Best laugh I had all day — British newscasters’ gaffes

A female news anchor who, the day after it was supposed to have snowed and didn’t, turned to the weatherman and asked, “So Bob, where’s that eight inches you promised me last night?” Not only did HE have to leave the set, but half the crew did too, because they were laughing so hard!

(Pretty much stole the whole damn entry from Sore Eyes )

=v= This is an urgent appeal to all activists who start singing John Lennon’s "Give Peace A Chance" at anti-war rallies:

"Give Peace A Chance" is much like an old-school rap song, heavy on beats and the spoken word. "All we are sayyyinggg …" is an occasional chorus. Alas, when we sing it at rallies we often get out of synch because we’re not using percussion.

Bring a bongo, conga, or even a DIY-style overturned bucket. Anything to put some rhythm back into the song. Thank you. Peace out.

P.S.: Please forward this urgent appeal far and wide.

The bulk of my past few screenwriting classes has consisted of in-class critiques of scenes from the students’ screenplays. My turn was last night. I’m no stranger to being critiqued, but it was a new medium and a new environment and I was a little nervous.

Screenwriters are at least as concerned with economy as short story writers. Everything on the page has to be there for a reason, preferably four or five reasons simultaneously. Generally, scenes are only a page or two in length. Dialogue is just a few exchanges, and each utterance is short: in screenplay format, dialogue is centered with two and a half-inch margins, leaving only three and a half inches, thirty-five characters, for the text. And normally, one uses only one or two lines at a time. More than four is considered a speech.

I sweated bullets to cram my scene into 4 pages — it’s the most pivotal scene of Act I, when my hero and heroine meet, obviously a big deal in a romantic comedy, so I didn’t feel bad about it being a long scene. I squeezed every line until it screamed.

The first thing someone had to say: “It’s too wordy.”

And he was right.

I’m learning a lot about writing and storytelling — I’d recommend studying screenwriting to any writer in any medium. (I’m also experiencing ever diminishing sympathy for complaints that movies over-emphasize explosions, car chases, and gasp, other things that are visually interesting and in motion, but that is a topic for another time, perhaps.)

Oh, and by and large my scene was well-received. People laughed at the right parts. In discussion afterwards, I got a lot of good feedback and have realized one character needed to be much more sympthetic, and the relationships and thus the plot had to change fairly drastically from what I’d envisioned, or Act II won’t sustain itself. All to the better — it’ll be more complex and more interesting this way.

And hard to pull off.

At Electrolite, PNH links to this CNN POW profile of Sgt. Mark Riley which says:

Riley […] taught himself the guitar and is a science fiction buff who is making a chain mail shirt for himself.

PNH adds “God. He’s one of our tribe.”

I don’t have a tv. I’ve been reading a lot of online news and weblogs about the war, and so I’ve seen still images of the wounded, the dead, the captured. But not any of the video, of the POWs, or anyone or anything else.

So I knew there are people dying, killing, suffering. And I was outraged at all the stupidity that led to the situation. But ultimately I remained detached.

Until knowing that some poor bastard fellow sf geek is out there, in the hands of people whose country we’re invading. That the best-case scenario features his spending every day worrying about being tortured or killed. Worse-case scenarios feature one of those worries being realized.

And it suddenly felt personal.

Probably Sgt. Riley and I have read some of the same books, but that might be it. Our reading tastes could be wildly different, as could our values. I have no idea whether I’d like him personally, or he’s someone I’d choose to spend time with, or vice versa. There are lots of people I meet at cons with whom that’s not true.

But none of that matters. He’s one of the tribe, and he’s in terrible danger.

Part of me was tempted to feel guilty that I’m feeling this so much more personally for having found commonality with one POW, when I ‘should’ have been feeling that all along for all the suffering of fellow human beings. But that’s unrealistic and counter-productive. We’re tribal. That’s not a bad thing, it’s a human thing. It has a shadow-side that should and must be fought against when found in ourselves or our society, in which anyone who is Other than the Tribe is dehumanized (leading to rhetoric like “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.”)

Times like this, I sort of wish I prayed, ‘cause, well, what the hell else are we going to do?

I hope you make it back home safe, Sgt. Riley. You and everyone else.

Whenever I stop to think about it, I’m amazed that the dominant religion in the U.S. is Christianity. It’s the default, expected religion for the rich and powerful, de rigeur for politicians to identify as. Bush, most of the Hawks, and most rich guys in suits would identify Jesus Christ as the most important spiritual teacher to have ever walked the planet.

Jesus Christ. A pacificist socialist anti-authoritarian most popularly depicted (in our culture) as a long-haired bearded hippie freak wearing a dress.

Maybe the only lesson they really got from him is that if you’re nice to people, you’ll get crucified.

This morning I was showing off my extensive first aid supplies to Pocahontas. This afternoon, she was applying them to me.

Some weeks ago, a suggestion by Pocahontas prompted me to do something I’d meant to do for ages: I replaced the wheels and bearings on my Rollerblades (not abusing a trademark; mine happen actually to be Rollerblade™ brand inline skates.) I can more or less skate, if gracelessly — I more or less go into it expecting to fall down. So I wear knee pads, elbow pads, wrist pads, my bike helmet, and just accept looking like a dork.

Today we went to Point Isabel, where there’s a nice smooth paved path. And I got to be humbled by the plain truth that I can’t keep up with Pocahontas inline skating. I probably have the fitness level to do so, but not the technique — when I tried to go that fast, I fell down. The first time, I landed nice and neatly and gently on my wrist and elbow guards and was right back up and going. The second time, I fell on my hip.

Maybe I should find some nice transvestite shop in San Francisco and get foam rubber hip pads.

My father posed me a conundrum. He has a calendar with an ordinal enumeration of the days of the year, and noted that Ash Wednesday was Day 64 and Easter Sunday was Day 110. But Lent is supposed to be the 40 days before Easter starting with Ash Wednesday, so where’d the extra six days come from?

I looked into it and found that, first, the definition of when Easter occurs is stranger than I knew. The first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, what I thought it was, was strange enough. Here’s the scoop from the U.S. Naval Observatory , Dick Cheney’s home away from undisclosed location:

The ecclesiastical rules are: Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after the day of the vernal equinox; this particular ecclesiastical full moon is the 14th day of a tabular lunation (new moon); and the vernal equinox is fixed as March 21, resulting in that Easter can never occur before March 22 or later than April 25. The Gregorian dates for the ecclesiastical full moon come from the Gregorian tables. Therefore, the civil date of Easter depends upon which tables — Gregorian or pre-Gregorian — are used. […] The times of the ecclesiastical full moons are not necessarily identical to the times of astronomical Full Moons. The ecclesiastical tables did not account for the full complexity of the lunar motion.

That page even has an equation to compute it:

This is an integer calculation. All variables are integers and all remainders from division are dropped. The algorithm uses the year, y, to give the month, m, and day, d, of Easter.

c = y / 100
n = y - 19 * ( y / 19 )
k = ( c - 17 ) / 25
i = c - c / 4 - ( c - k ) / 3 + 19 * n + 15
i = i - 30 * ( i / 30 )
i = i - ( i / 28 ) * ( 1 - ( i / 28 ) * ( 29 / ( i + 1 ) ) * ( ( 21 - n ) / 11 ) )
j = y + y / 4 + i + 2 - c + c / 4
j = j - 7 * ( j / 7 )
l = i - j
m = 3 + ( l + 40 ) / 44
d = l + 28 - 31 * ( m / 4 )

None of which addresses the extra 6 days. Here’s the scoop :

The Lenten period is calculated to extend from Resurrection Sunday back for forty days, not including Sundays [emphasis added]. Sundays are not included because they commemorate Christ’s glorious resurrection on “the day after the Sabbath,” “the first day of the week,” “the Lord’s day.”

So basically, the whole 40 days thing is false advertising. They’re squeezing 6 extra days of deprivation out of everyone.