It's all my fault

Because my wife is gone on business, various friends of ours have been kicked into "Check in on Skob" mode, randomly e-mailing me to take me out and keep me occupied...keeping me out of trouble or some such noble deed. So far, I have an invitation to see friends on nearby Bainbridge Island, which is always tempting but I'll wait for my beloved to return home first. No real reason, except I think the invite was actually for next Saturday and I don't want to make some horrible visitation faux-pas by going out there on this Saturday.

You can see why my wife keeps our social calendar.

Anyway, I do know this weekend I'm being taken to the new Xmen movie that's opening Friday. Yep, I'm going with the rest of the elephantine masses, paying my bucks and helping to push the film to the top of the box office, thereby causing film snobs everywhere to grimace and say that mature, thoughtful cinema in America has been defeated yet again by juvenile costumed action flicks with little plot or substance.

And I say yes, but Nightcrawler is going to be in the new film, and Nightcrawler was my favorite mutant in the comic book on which the films are based.

And he's being played by Alan Cumming, of all people. A legit Scottish actor, who was spellbinding as the slimy villain in Julie Taymor's "Titus."

Can't wait.

Happy Birthday to You

Mosaic was released in April 1993 by the school's National Center for Supercomputing Applications as free software. It became the foundation for today's Web browsers, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape Communications' Communicator. Mosaic's lead developer, Marc Andreessen, became one of Netscape's founders and took some of his UI colleagues with him.

"It was an accelerator for the whole Internet," said Larry Smarr, the former director of the computing center. "It sort of took the Internet to the next level of capability."

Before Mosaic, access to the Internet and the World Wide Web was limited to text. The new software brought a way to integrate images and sound with words.


I remember Mosaic, seeing it out of the corner of my eye in 1993 in some small office in a small college in Indiana.

At first, I was staring at this putty-gray slate on the monitor, a bland slab that wasted screen space. Suddenly, text appeared and then a kaleidoscope of a picture, the pixels in COPS-style fuzz out, barely gaining resolution until the image turned from stained glass to something stuck between lifelike and crude iconography. A college logo, a cartoony rendering of the weather outside? I can't remember. Color, text, shape all the gray slab...long before anyone could sculpt with HTML, so the image was at the top of the page and the text ran like water...down the page, in mini rivers left to right.

No one said, "This is a web page" or "This is the Internet." This moment of communications history was lost on us, Trojan Horsed as yet another booting-up application. In fact, I was blase about the whole affair, and I still was a year later when I was in graduate school and I got a hold of a text-based Web tool, Kermit. As a variant on the text-only Lynx, Kermit was a step backwards, but this was in 1994, when schools and a few other outlets were connected to the Web. Getting online was the domain of the cybersavvy...its main star, the leather and chrome clad hacker, who could negotiation the tricky netherworld of BBS. The Internet, complete with foreign magic portals like "telnet," "gopher" and "FTP," was a jungle for us newcomers. Yet, the whiz-bang of Gibson's cyberspace looked flat boring with no pictures or a larger heterogeneous playground to interact with. Few got addicted to it (including me, with the idea of getting e-mail and chatting with random folks across the world), but really, why send e-mail to a classmate when he was a couple floors down, ready for a beer and pizza?

In the early 90s, the Web was primordial soul of text, images and little sound. DejaNews archived virtually everything on Usenet, the Grand Central Station for the Web back then. No one knew what the Web was for. No one rushed to pour money into it. It was just a way to toss words on an invisible wall, and see what happened when they were read. Using Kermit, the cyberworld looked like a giant Infocom game. Before the web got hot, it was Brigadoon, and I kind of wish it never got found and turned into a mall/casino/adult book store/Speaker's Corner.

Mosaic helped people "see" the Web, attracting more people to it and eventually the hullabaloo that gassed and crashed the New Economy. Now, the Web is background noise. Google has more than three trillion pages indexed. E-mail is a godsend we never realized we needed. Every night, I sit in front of a high-tech lingerie of a Macintosh, complete with scandalous see-through curves, writing for my personal Weblog stage-show. It's a far cry from the stegosaurus of Mac I ogled back then, watching the basic cave etchings of Web communication appear in front of me.

If you want to "see" what the Web world looked like through Mosaic's eyes, go here and contain your laughter, like when you see home movies of your folks at the beach before they had you, and you're sitting there embarrassed with how alien they looked in worn-out Kennedy-era go-go fashions and obsolete slicked-back/puffed-up coiffure. Remember, the Web was trying really hard to look good, but no one gave it a mirror (or an idea of what to look like) before it walked out the door 10 years ago.

Blessed be the coffee makers

Pope John Paul II beatifies 'father of cappuccino'

Marco d'Aviano, a wandering preacher for the Capuchin monastic order, is credited with rallying Catholics and Protestants on the eve of the Battle of Vienna in 1683, which was crucial to halting the advance of Turkish soldiers into Europe.

He is also remembered by some as the man who, by legend, inspired the fashionable cappuccino coffee now drunk by millions across the globe.

The monk, who was born in the city of his name in northern Italy in 1631, was sent by the pope of the day to unite Christians in the face of a huge Ottoman army.

Legend has it that, following the victory, the Viennese reportedly found sacks of coffee abandoned by the enemy and, finding it too strong for their taste, diluted it with cream and honey.

The drink being of a brown colour like that of the Capuchins' robes, the Viennese named it cappuccino in honour of Marco D'Aviano's order.

Remember that next time you're in line at Starbucks.

Flip side

Cheap coffee 'threatens wildlife'

Demand for coffee in the West is threatening to destroy already endangered wildlife, according to new research.

Conservation experts say overproduction of cheap robusta coffee beans - commonly used in instant coffee - may be contributing to the loss of tigers, elephants, orangutans and rhinos in Sumatra.

A study by the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society says that large areas of Indonesian lowland forest are being cut down to make way for coffee plantations.

Again, remember that next time you're in line at Starbucks.

Third side of the coin

See what Patrick Farley's pen has to say about wildlife, spirituality and Yuppie-icon office fuel.

Health update

Wife and I markedly better. Tomorrow, we are going out to eat. Mexican. One last meal together until she has to go out of town on business.

Police yourself

Books to avoid in the time of SARS.

"Blindness," by Jose Saramago.

"The Hot Zone," by Richard Preston.

"The Plague," by Albert Camus.

"The Stand," by Stephen King.

"The Coming Plague," by Laurie Garrett.

Ironically, they're all decent reads (well, maybe not King, but his stuff is ideal airplane literature).

Health update

I'm better. My stomach is playing nice with me. Wife worse. She's graduated to a sore throat.

Writing update

Came up with some new ideas for Patrick and Rayelle, the two main characters. Going back through the notes and found out I kept switching back between Rayelle and Raylene as the name.

SARS is giving me fuel for other ideas in the novel. On the surface, it feels very wrong to use a public health crisis as inspiration, but then I got dreadfully honest with myself. If it wasn't SARS, it'd be the 1918-19 pandemic, the Black Plague or some Ebola outbreak in the 1990s. With SARS, I can see the still-living in their cotton masks, roaming Asian streets and eyeing each other with paranoid suspicion. The panic is too palpable, too fresh, and moving on it for literary purposes seems opportunistic. Yet, I watch from my porthole, scanning Cursor and BBC News for updates or better links.

Every so often, I'm a vulture. It's an ugly condition that's part of writing with the whole process is a little more kinetic than watching TV. Doing what I do, I watch something and reflexively use the images and words doled out to me to imagine a next step, a character, a setting...and then I go write it up as ideas or plot points. Sometimes I feel like the cameraman who takes pictures of the starving African children for news magazines, but does nothing on the spot to feed them. Thanks for the inspiration, fellas, and hope you get better or something.

I also feel the same way about seeing homeless people begging on corners as I drive home to my nice, cozy condo. Deep down, I feel culpable for the situation, and if I don't have anything to do with it, like SARS, I get a guilty vibration in the percussion section of my soul when I see people in bio suits close off schools, movie theaters and other icons of socialization in Beijing. I know in me an idea is generating, and I'll get up to jot a few phrases that are burning in my head, right behind my optic nerves. Guilt comes after the sensation fades.

Good to see the tenacious vines of Catholicism still holding on tightly.

Incidentally, the novel is going to be called "Babylon by Twilight." It's going to be set in Seattle.

Liquid state of emergency

The stomach ailment that my wife was coping with has hit me. Stayed home from work today and got little done, except some elements of my weekly work schedule (which I brought home the day before, not knowing I would be so ill) and a couple dungeons in the re-mixed "Ocarina of Time Master Quest" on Gamecube. Add in some Massive Attack and comfy clothes and I'm feeling just a wee bit guilty. Could have I actually made it into work today?

Then again, it's hard to get anything done when your lower intestine becomes a water balloon, urgently requesting emptying at sudden and alarming random intervals (like when you are going to the grocery store to pick up some nice, bland food).

My darling wife camped out on the couch, reading and watching "Unsolved Mysteries" while I marched on, the brave little solider that I am, trying to make sure I don't get behind at work. Found out the home office is dropping one of our group, and his work is getting piled on to another co-worker. Plus, we don't have a reliable replacement if me or my co-worker is home sick for a prolonged period, so...I upset my boss by taking work home with me (I'm not supposed to, union rules and all), but just what am I going to do?

Enough bitching. At least I don't have SARS. Speaking of SARS, Dr. Big Brother is watching you in Singapore if you happen to catch this year's media darling (Iraq was good for a few photo-ops, darling, but disease and panic is so...Biblical. Think of the audience! Think of the ratings!).

Speaking of feeling not-so-right

I'm not going to comment about Sen. Santorum's remarks about gays, bestiality, incest and so on. You can read about it anywhere these days (here's a link to get you started).

But this little moment of Zen in the transcript of the senator's remarks did catch my eye.

AP: I'm sorry, I didn't think I was going to talk about "man on dog" with a United States senator, it's sort of freaking me out.

Being a former newspaper reporter and editor, I've never ever known The Associated Press to get freaked out over anything. This is news itself! Talk about burying the lead.

Psychosomatic thought for the day

Can evil be transmitted like a virus?

New meaning for illuminated manuscripts

The question came up today: What's the difference between a blog and a book?

Both are the end destinations for prose and poetry. Both require the same skill. Both can be furiously fussed over, with words polished until they scream for mercy. Both can reach large audiences, if you're lucky.

So, what's the difference?

First, length. That's a gimme. Although some of us in the blogsphere have been putting phrase to pixel for months or years, it can't reach the same level and duration as a book.

Second, content arrangement. A blog is more like a diary. People post entries, bite-sized syntheses of their lives in progress. While diaries or rolling meditations can make their way into a book binding, it's the redheaded stepchild in storytelling forms when it comes to traditional long-form novel. When you read a book using the diary template for its prose, there are two options on how the story ends: the author finds some kind of happy ending (since the author lived long enough to write the source material), a la "Bridget Jones' Diary" or it ends abruptly, a life silenced when the pen falls, a la "The Diary of Anne Frank."

Unless the content is lined up in a linear fashion, complete with some kind of running storyline, it's a rambling avalanche of events, loose of context and devoid of dramatic push or pull. Most blogs I've read have their authors make a running stab at addressing and re-addressing events in their lives (breaking up with boyfriend, trip to Europe, new puppy in the family), but you'll mostly his short bursts of alpha-release thoughts wrapped up in small text packages...no set order, no reason to be except to recollect what was.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you. Books are more deliberate in planning and constructions, though...far more than blogs. Books are skyscrapers. Blogs are sand castles.

Speaking of dimension, let's talk physical parameters. A blog, in case you've been living in rural China or (until recently) under the thumb of a certain Iraqi dictator, is a computer-based outlet for writing and reading online text through a template-based publishing system. Blogs exist on a Web browser slate, which you can expand or shrink at will. You can move the slate around the screen, tile it with other applications to make it look like you're doing actual work at the office, or click the little 'x' at the top of the screen to kill the blog all together. You can read a blog with the machine you use to play Minesweeper, check stock quotes, scan pornography or order flowers for Mother's Day. Blogs are ephemeral, a ghost of real, nearly liquid in its transformative abilities in a browser window. It's a wall of content in an HTML frame... and the words change, vanishing with the next URL entered or when the author feels like a new entry is in order.

Books, on the other hand, are weighty objects you can carry around with you, mostly to impress someone in the cafe with if you have the right tome in hand. Literary mating rituals at your local Starbucks aside, books carry permanence, an attribute that give it still an arrogant swagger among the majority. A book means something, something accomplished, leisurely and relaxing. Computers? You use those at work, or at school. Computers are fancy TVs, and we'll all try to say out loud that we're more well read than those mindless TV addicts. One is noble, the other slovenly. If I haven't read a book in a while, I feel myself going soft in a cerebral sort of way. Blogs, with a few exceptions, are mainly empty calories of political trash-talking or frightening examples of "little-man syndrome," with the blog owner mouthing off vile things he could never say in the offline real.

Computers are also lousy at confining the eye. Too many distractions on the desktop. An mp3 player going in the background, another corner relegated to instant messenger software. The eye skips over the open windows: one idea runs up against a spreadsheet, which runs into your e-mail folder, which is overlapped by your customized mp3 playlist that's flowing out of your speakers. Where does it end, where does it begin?

Books are built to trap the eye. Consider the use of polar elements on the pages, with black text and white pages as absolute contrast. Reading from left to right, you start at one end, reaching the white space boundary at the other, only to ricochet back and down one line to the left rail of vertical white space. And you begin reading again. Repeat until you fall asleep, the phone rings, or you finish.

Fourth and final, books are highly technical works, often taking many hands to write, edit, rewrite, galley proof, produce, ship and publicize. While blogs may have some invisible hands working behind the scenes, it's just one person writing, hitting "publish" and watching the editor churnchurnchurn until, bing, out comes your entry into blogspace. Besides the cost of your Internet connection, any advance blog package you may have bought and your time, blogging is pretty cheap and low on the labor-intensive meter. In fact, if you read this at work or at the library, one could argue it's practically free.

That's not to say you can't find something compelling to read on a blog. There’s a difference, that's all.

Minor puzzle

A question to ponder: Can art created in part out of revenge be a liberating thing for the artist?

Low tide

My wife is ill, lying on the couch nursing a sore throat and a fever. I'm not well either, but it's different for me. I'll go into more detail another day (It's worth another entry, but I can't get it going right now), but I'm in a funk over writing, struggling with the valley part in the peak-valley sine wave that's common when you are trying to be creative. I'm in the low part, not happy with anything I'm doing. Nothing's good enough and I feel as if I'm standing in everyone else's shadow.

For now, I'm going to avoid it and go back to something I wrote a few days ago (April 18), about Madonna and her act of online bitchslapping aimed at the bit pirates out there trying to download copies of her new stuff before it hits the streets.

A few days ago, I heard Radiohead is coming out with a new album in June, and later read that the album had been leaked and the clever ones with dodgy ethics and a cable modem snatched up the files for a sneak preview. Scrolling through the message boards of music pirate sites, I found favorable reviews of the songs yet-to-be released, even probably the bizarro high praise of "I'm gonna buy this when it comes out in stores." You have the album on your hard drive…why drop $20 at your local soulless mega music chain in a month?

Well, simple. The stuff downloaded were rough mixes, which lead to the rampant speculation (on the Web, is there any other kind?) that one of the band members unleashed the working versions on the Web in some aurally tantalizing way to get fans all hot and bothered for the real thing. It's a clever mutation of marketing, bypassing the record label to offer a treat for the fans. If you're lucky, you can even have the pirates start generating a positive buzz. (P.S. If you think it only applies to music, think again. I'm sure it's not "the" script, but I can imagine it was a early draft that was released to hint at what's to come. )

And it makes my head spin that someone as crafty as Madonna didn't think of this earlier, instead of circling the wagons and spiking mp3 files with obscenities. I mean, what can it hurt to seek a bit more publicity by dropping a working version of a song into the vast swimming pool of the P2P playground, maybe laying down a challenge to see if some beat surgeon out there could engineer a remix in, say, 72 hours. The winner gets some cash, a sliver of fame, and the track included in a CD single when the song gets formally introduced to the street. Just like in the software world, I'm sure you could get people to pay for the privilege of working on the beta version of a product.

P.S...Madonna, here's a good tip for the future: Never piss off kids who are better than you at tech stuff, otherwise this happens.

P.P.S. There's a bit of a Jodie Foster vibe to the hack with regard to Ms. Webb, dontcha think?


And the day before that...


...I was talking about trying to track down (April 17) a cinematic rumor that in the original "Star Wars" trilogy Vader would come out alive in order to face a war crimes tribunal in the planned "next' trilogy (episodes 7-9, for you fanboys out there)

Well, I did my best kung fu on Google and came up with incomplete, but interesting, results. I found this from ReelInsider.com.


Intending the search for Han Solo to be the main plot point of Return of the Jedi, the Emperor wasn't originally going to appear until episode 9, Luke and Leia weren't going to be brother and sister and there was no second Death Star. Solo was going to die in the film's final battle, Luke was going to continue his Jedi training and Leia was going to resume her position as Queen of her people, separating the major characters in a downbeat ending similar to Episode 5. Kurtz strongly objected to Lucas's changes and insisted they should stick with their original plans. Lucas, however, just as strongly disagreed and the two parted company for good after successfully breathing life into two Best Picture-nominated films, American Graffiti and Star Wars.

Frankly, I was shocked. I always thought Lucas wasn't that daring when it came to his characters, and here he is, about to kill of Han Solo and end the first trilogy on a big downer. Make me wonder where the Ewoks came from. (On edit: I wonder if the writer meant Kurtz had the "downbeat" ideas, not Lucas. Hmm.)

Of course, I tripped all over some fan fiction, and this one was the best I found dealing with a "Vader lives/war crimes tribunal" theme. It's written by several people in a collaborative effort, yet it felt unified in voice. Interesting turns, but I was puzzled at the underplaying of the war crimes aspect. I'll have to go back and re-read it in case I missed anything.

Last but not least is this item, which asks something I never thought of: How did the Empire get those big, wildly impractical walking machines down to the ice planet in "Empire Strikes Back"? I mean, geez, there were huge so the support ship had to be enormous, right? They were dropped a distance away, so does that mean they were, say, dropped in pieces and then assembled, saying to any first-strike Rebel team coming to catch them unready, "Hey, no fair, we're not done yet. Give us an hour"?

I have on order the "Star Wars - Infinities" graphic novels of the first two films. Both editions take a wildly different approach to the canon, and I'm eager to see where it goes for the final part. When I don't have anything better to do, I picture an alternative history to "Return of the Jedi" with the Rebels staging a cinematically breathtaking D-Day-type invasion of the Death Star (after the "torpedo in the tail pipe" method failed in the first "Infinities" edition), complete with a wave of Rebel fighters fending off enemy ships as surface teams audaciously try to drill, blast or erode their way in. Meanwhile, the Imperial Destroyers are at a loss: Do we fire on the Death Star or let the Rebels continue their burrowing?

And then I remember that the ticking-clock premise of rebels in the upcoming Matrix films is something kind of similar. Argh. Self-imposed comparison overload! Batten down the hatches! Secure the gunpowder! Here we go again.

You got viral

Gee-whiz. All my cell phone has is voice mail and that "Breakout" game.

HONG KONG -- In this city where the SARS virus ranks highest on most worry lists, a cell phone company has created a text-messaging service that lets customers know if they're near a building where victims lived or worked.

The fee-based service, offered by Sunday Communications, represents a novel use of an up-and-coming technology called location awareness.

The wireless carrier relies on data that the government issues daily on buildings where hospitalized SARS patients had stayed in the previous 10 days and tailors the information for its subscribers.

With a few button punches on their handset keypads, subscribers can request a text message that lists all the SARS-affected buildings within a kilometer (0.62 mile) of the calling location.

Electric Wow

Just a note to say thanks for the nice responses over my Easter entry. Bouncing around the Web, I'm reading from my blog list written by my Usual Suspects and my eyes catch firm on something achingly familiar. My blog entry title for Easter is living and breathing as the title on someone else's blog.

Seeing my blog's entry header appear as large as life on his blog shocked me for a second, caught in a moment of recognition of something familiar, but seeing it in a whole new landscape.

I don't know what to say. I'm flattered, flustered, embarrassed in a "surprise party" kind of way. Someone recognizes me in the flotsam and jetsam of the blogsphere and replicates my words on his blog as a tribute. He's redirecting his readers to me. Word of mouth, the Internet way with invisible highways being built to my little truck stop. Tracking back through the Blogger traffic-watcher feature, I see I got eyeballs from his site. People come see me, read me and get on with their lives. And for a second, I was part of their lives. Me, a stranger.

Earlier this evening, my wife was cleaning up the living room, including putting away the book she had been reading, "The Woman in White" by Wilkie Collins. At one point, she held up the book and said, "This book is getting really...really good." Just like that, all frantic as you can imagine in her random but fevered testimonial. She reads an avalanche of books on a monthly basis, often times making me feel like an illiterate sloth for not keeping up. For her to say something that positive and passionate is a real seal of approval.

So, when she said it, a little green-colored spark of envy and desire came alight. Maybe, hopefully, one day some avid reader will be saying that about some novel I wrote.

Until then, it's great to get a "rah-rah" from someone you never met.

Jesus, chocolate bunnies and you

It's early Easter morning in Seattle and the sky is fluffy-gray with ridges and crests of ivory or cream painted within for highlight. The sun is beginning to break through, and soon patches of blue will melt the clouds into puffy islands roaming the atmosphere. On street level, the daffodils are blooming and the trees in the back yard are sprouting leaves. The foliage is expanding, covering up the patches of bare space that reveal the golf course on the other side of the ravine and treeline that make up our back yard. Soon, the yard will again be a formidable lush wall of green: a playground for squirrels, bugs, birds and the occasional mountain beaver.

Easter's also "the big day" for a lot of churches. As the story goes, Jesus, having been nailed to the cross, rose from the dead today. Well, not today as in April 20, but three days after being killed. The date itself is irrelevant, a point on the calendar derived from a formula more arcane than the college football playoffs and the KFC secret recipe combined. Parishioners far and wide will come dressed in their Sunday best to celebrate the big day, a kind of "yay for the home team" rally with Jesus filling his end of the bargain of life everlasting for all who believe.

Every once in a while, my mom or grandma would ask me if I was going to church (To her credit, my grandma is more subtle, just wondering if my wife and I have found a church yet). With Easter coming down the pipe, mom has been a bit more vocal on the topic. I always hem and haw, trying to deflect the conversation but it's always awkward. I don't want to just pick a church, and I don't want my mom to thinking she raised me wrong with her errant son skipping Sunday service. I try to explain but it doesn't work out. Voices get strained, humor fails and bitterness lingers on the phone line. So before I lose my diplomatic tai-chi and say just get over the church issue, I thought I'd take today to explain why I don't go to church in a format I'm far more eloquent in. I give good text, or as my friend Cori puts it about herself, "I don’t give good phone."

It's hard to write this without sounding like I'm on the defensive, pleading my case that it's perfectly normal to not go to church and I'm not a socially evil freak. I'm not going to quote the Bible, twisting verses like torturing a prisoner to my will in a bid to prove my own superiority. I don't go to church because I pretty much heard it all in my 20 years of regularly attending Catholic mass. Spend a couple years going to mass and you'll see what I mean. You'll hear the same passages read for Easter, for the Ascension, for Mary, for Good Friday, for the angel telling Mary she's pregnant by God, and for every other point on the Catholic celebratory timeline.

And it's not just the Catholic Church, but nearly every other denominational service I witnessed followed some sort of entrance-song-verse-song-donation-homily-prayer-song-exit routine. When there's little to inspire you, you start to notice the mundane. You fidget, your soul gets bored. You begin to look at church as an obligation, that place you have to get to for an hour after breakfast and before football. You have to wear itchy clothes and listen to some guy drone on and on, all a one-way street. You're supposed to be a supplicant, a silent patron and (what really got to me after a while, especially in the Catholic sphere) a unworthy vessel who always, always had to give voice to the mindless, bloodthirsty crowd who wanted Jesus dead during the Good Friday-Easter read-along of the Passion. Jesus may have died for my sins, but I didn't send him to the cross.

And then there's the rules. While the idea of order and hierarchy may be appealing to those looking to "put God in the driver's seat," I've seen it cut the other way to the point of exclusion. The Byzantine rules of the Catholic Church made my mom sit down during Holy Communion, since her divorce from my derelict father made her unworthy in the eyes of the church to take this token of the redeeming body of Christ. Getting up to take the wafer as my mom was forced to sit there was a disturbing image for me. Oh, my mom's not worthy? She's given years of faith and devotion to your order, and because of one asshole you won't let her take part in a ritual of spiritual unification? How can you love a church that forces your mom to be a lesser member?

Add to this the "extreme sport" quality of preaching coming from the types of satellite preachers like John Hagee, Jerry Falwell or Jack Van Impe, using the television to tell you all the marvelous ways you were going to hell. Sheesh, you committed sins you didn't even know about, and without total paranoid devotion to a mysterious hotheaded God, you're doomed. Repent your sins by buying my videotape and getting on our mailing list, because the devil is everywhere, you know...egging on people to listen to rock music, study godless art and science, to vote Democratic or to be lesbians. Sorry, but your talking about nearly everyone in my address book here. Good to know that hell will be filled with my friends. At least I won't be lonely.

So, a few years ago, after this charismatic and wonderfully humane priest left the parish where my wife and I lived, I stopped going to church. After his departure, there was little left to connect me to the assembly line Catholic mass, and in the vacuum that followed I figured out that it didn't matter if I was in church. What was more important is how you acted, how you treated your fellow humans. Planting your fat ass in some ornate building with crosses and candles meant nothing if you didn't take the lessons being handed out and made something with them. It was time to stop looking for wisdom in the rituals and incantations that I heard so much I know in my sleep.

I stopped listening to the TV preachers (which, okay, I should have done long ago) and began experience the world not through the "ever faithful or else" mindset, but seeing people as people, screwing up and doing good in no set order. I watched as non-Christians outshined their Christ-loving counterparts in kindness and love. I discovered the beauty and peace of nature, the wondrous moment of "now" where you feel more connected to God's mysterious plan than I ever did in the dusty pews of St. Mary's Church in my hometown. I learned that, deep down, people are mostly good, only turning rotten when they get any semblance of power or control…from your company’s CEO to the local parish priest who's been popped for decades of child molestation.

I don't believe God keeps score on the little things, ready to cast you into hell for skipping church when it isn't doing anything to inspire you to begin with. I don't believe it's a rigid path you have to stay on. I don't believe the End Times are upon us, and the world ends everyday only to have a new one begin in the morning. Faith is a garden that you tend on your own. Get your comfort on whatever divine patch you plant your seeds in. Act kind and wise and I get the feeling it'll all work out for you. It's a big world out there, and I believe the powers-that-be are gonna allow you to explore it so you grow into a bigger, better person more connection to the mystery of faith.

Today, my wife and I are going to have Easter dinner with her aunt and other relatives, a small gathering of family to celebrate the resurrection...or the return of spring...or chocolate bunnies. Whatever. What matters is the time you have together, what you share and learn. It's no big secret...just a spin on what Jesus mentioned once. Love each other as you want to be loved. How hard is that?

And somewhere, I bet Jesus is having a good laugh. At churches today, little children are rummaging on the grass looking for candy or plastic eggs while the message for the grownups is about the triumph over death and eternal life.

"Talk about marketing," Jesus would chuckle. "Something for everyone."

NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!


Hollywood couple J.Lo and Ben Affleck have secured a deal to remake the classic movie Casablanca, according to reports.

The pair are said to be delighted with the multi-million pound deal and are now in talks wirth American producers.

The original film was a hit in 1942 starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

Affleck will take the romantic lead as Rick, the Daily Star reports.

Lopez will play the former lover who had jilted him but comes back into his later life - married to a French resistance leader.

Story here

I'm beyond words for right now. God help us if it's true.

For now, this is all we have with which to defend ourselves.

It'll have to do until we set up some cinematic version of a war crimes tribunal.

Don't say I never gave you anything

Here's a ready-made story idea for you authors out there looking to write a topical novel complete with exotic locales and avenues for social commentary.

Interpol launched a worldwide hunt on Friday for priceless Iraqi antiquities looted during the chaos of the U.S.-led invasion and warned collectors not to buy art treasures they suspected had been stolen.

The international police authority said it had set up a team to track down the looters and missing treasures. Agents will fly to Iraq as soon as possible to check on what was stolen in the mayhem surrounding the end of Saddam Hussein's rule.

Make your main character an Interpol agent troubled that s/he gets more access to a shattered country that is teetering on the break of economic and cultural collapse than aid agencies, mix in gung-ho farm boys from Iowa with Hummers and rifles, slowly fold in the struggle over the pursuit of things over the welfare of people, and a dash of anarchy, tribal warfare, mistrust and 7,000 years of human history and serve.

Material girl channels Metallica

Sharing must not be part of Madonna's Kabala faith because she is clamping down something fierce on online peer-to-peer piracy of her new album, "American Life," (due April 22).

Her people are flooding file-sharing networks with decoy sound files, and those who download tracks from such services as KaZaA are greeted by the voice of Madonna asking, "What the f ---- do you think you're doing?"

A couple thoughts here. As an artist, Madonna can do whatever she wants to protect or distribute her music, but as the culture vulture that she is, endlessly reinventing herself in all sorts of spotlight-hogging guises and life paths to dodge the bullet of pop culture irrelevance, I'm shocked that Madonna's such a control freak who never got the memo that you can't stop peer-to-peer file sharing. If anything, Mrs. Ritchie, you've now made the whole pursuit of your oncoming album a kind of game...who's got the purest download, who's got the raw deal.

Honestly, I'm surprised she never embraced the whole Web music culture, releasing a couple songs exclusively online for her fans, perhaps making the whole endeavor an exclusive, catch-me-if-you-can hacker game involving sexy images, computer servers and hidden files that vanish after some internal clock counts down to zero, akin to William Gibson's now-you-read-it, now-you-don't poem "Agrippa," originally published on a self-erasing diskette. I'm more surprised she never tried to seriously colonize the Web as her own personal accessory, like having children, embracing Jewish mysticism or acting. I mean, it was just sitting there, and she has a few bucks to spend. Why not go Microsoft, giving away some of her content and access for free in the beginning, draw in the online fans, and then charge whatever she wants when she shuts the door and has the only master key.

I'm guessing somewhere in Madonna's clever and money-hungry mind that this is all going to some ingenious plan. Make the content so exclusive that they can't have it and people will be clamoring for it. I imagine she already has some sound engineers slaving over a mixing board, trying to add her little online screed into a dance re-mix of her album, cannibalizing herself yet again as she readies to morph into some other highly marketable, drive-by, button-pushing image.

Frankly, I never cared for Madonna. As I see it, you could put the first Portishead album against the entire Madonna library, and the seminal trip-hop album will come out aces every time.

More than I can chew

As I embark a novel-writing journey of a thousand steps (or eating a elephant with a KFC spork...see yesterday's comments section for more details), I get smacked upside my right brain by one hell of an embryonic idea.

And it's an idea I need some help with.

A year ago, I heard a yummy rumor about the original Star Wars trilogy. Apparently, one of the early drafts of "Return of the Jedi" had an ending where Vader lives, taken by Luke from the exploding Death Star. Rumor had it that Lucas was going to aim the next trilogy to take place after "ROTJ" with Vader alive, Han Solo dead and Leia trying to piece together a fractured galaxy. I did my best to Google the rumor to life, but met with failure.

I did unearth this, though. It's an "alternate universe" approach to the classic trilogy (you know, the good one), starting with Luke botching the destruction of the first Death Star and things going drastically downhill for the Rebellion right after that.

I have mixed feeling about "alternate universe" projects. I enjoy the imagination involved in embracing a popular icon and putting a refreshing spin on it (not to mention how risky it is to tamper with a pop culture canon). And sometimes it works smashingly. Look at the results of Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns" project or Harry Turtledove's line of fiction that recasts world history through major timetwists.

But before you bite that juicy, tempting apple, be sure you are doing it for the right reason. I'm sure everyone at one time reading a comic book or seeing a movie wrinkled a brow and smugly said they could do so much better with the material, or this is where the story derailed (and how I alone, the great undiscovered scribe, would make it all right). I have to balance why I think I want to tinker around with someone else's vision. Is it some kind of artistic showboating or what exactly? Carrying on the tradition of generational oral storytelling using established mythological characters, maybe?

Plus, how would I feel if I create a set of characters that make their way into the public sphere, only to see some author in the shadows create scenarios and dialogue that I would never dream of making, seeing my creations go out to play in different fields and left with as little control as parent watching their kids grow up and go off in the world? Maybe they'll call once in a while. Maybe they’ll come home for Christmas.

But I suppose, short of a flagrant disregard for copyright laws or some intense intellectual property lawsuits, there's little one can really do to protect fictional characters once they arrive for public consumption. Look at the proliferation of "slash" stories and other variant strains of fan fiction based on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," soap opera stars or even the stoic Master Chief from the videogame "Halo." The only major hurdle appears when you try to make some cash with your vulture work, catapulting yourself into fame on the unauthorized back of someone else's work. Remember, it's always fun until the lawyers show up.

Anyway, if anyone can find the "Vader lives" rumor on the Web, please forward it to me.

Back at work

Today was my first day back at work and, pleasantly, I was missed greatly and my temporary replacements never want me to leave again. It's good to know that I'll have my job for as long as I want, even though it drives me mad on occasion.

I never have been away from work for more than a week. When I came into the office today, I felt a subtle shift in the soap-operatic fault lines that's my work...the day-to-day dramaquakes you just absorb, but coming back in three weeks and it's the exchanges, the curious vacancies, the new alliances that throw you. Be aware...here lie little feuds you missed out on and now a new, mysterious wake must be navigated.

All this and subsidized parking, too.

Cities fall

It appears that the some of the looters stripping Iraq bare of its history weren't your average thugs looking for a pretty bauble to hang in the family den. When I watched footage of the Iraq looting on Scottish and French TV, part of me hoped that some in the crowd were amateur historians, trying to stage a pre-emptive smash and grab to tuck the artifacts away in some secure U-Stor-It or basement bunker somewhere, bringing the items out only when the coast is clear and some kind of law and order emerged.

Part of me finds it ghastly that I'm so worried about the snatching of culture, the theft of items from a display case. Maybe it's because it's the only news about the outcome I'm getting. Maybe if the parade of images were switched from things to people, I'd feel more concern about the human toll if we ever get a straight answer of the civilians killed. I'm not holding my breath though, so one outrage at a time. I'm more inclined not to hold my breath after recently walking through the British Museum, packed to the rafters with ill-gotten historical gains from all over the world. After passing the zillionth Egyptian or Greek artifact, I turned to my wife and asked why don't Greece or Egypt ask for them back. I mean, both of them are stable countries perfectly capable to look after their heritages.

"They do," she dryly replied, "You just don't hear much about it."

And so, there's history for you. Finders keepers, and it looks like Iraq is going to be no exception. Just to prove the point, I found a longer article about the looting, and a hint that collectors are going to get a huge boost to their collections from the trafficking of artifacts that's in play. Also, in that article is a noteworthy piece from the Washington Post about how historians are saying the Pentagon made some allusion that troops would be in place to prevent looting.

Deeper though, I worry when order gets put back in place. If Iraq doesn’t have their anchor of history to hold a nation together, it'll have a vacuum of harder to fill than leadership, one of identity. Iraq right now is tempest of ethnicities, loyalties, crimes and confusion. Waking up to find your country robbed of its culture (the only thing for sure that survived Saddam) while the occupying army does little to protect your heritage has to be heartbreaking. Not only is your future in doubt, but someone just freely wheeled away a bit of your past in a shopping cart. It doesn't suggest stability. It suggests everything about you is disposable, and your heritage is going to the highest bidder.

Meanwhile, as America's attention is captivated by the crumbling of one nation, it's missing a slow-motion self-destruction at home of a city-state. Place your bets when the Whitney gets ransacked.

State of the SKOB update

I'm nearly over my head cold. I have a slight fogginess in my left ear, but I'm fine for the most part. I was able to sleep through to 3:30 a.m. last night, beating my previous 1 a.m. of the night before last. I hope to get to 6 a.m. tomorrow morning, a full night's sleep to charge me up for my first day back to work since my vacation. Let's hear it for the two-day workweek. Yee-hah.

Tonight, I may have pasta for dinner. Then, Mrs. Skob and I go over our vacation photos. I'll try to nab something off the discs for posting here. Maybe a picture-of-the-day/“what I did on my vacation” feature. Who knows?

Revelations/Resolutions

The extended vacation offered me an ideal chance to distant myself from my ongoing ruts, exposing what I do on a daily basis in a new light. When one has hours to kill on a layover or while driving to another cozy, cutesy village (or when your plane gets hit by lightning), one gets to thinking about all the little things done to fill up a day.

Revelation #1: It’s official: I hate my job. I'm in it for a paycheck. I'm in it as part of a Faustian bargain to keep food on the table as I carve out time to write.

Resolution #1: Start writing in the morning, before you go to work. Screw work. Just go your job like the rock star you are and go home to the important parts of your life. I'm not going to get promoted anytime soon and no matter how hard I jockey to be a copy editor, it's just not going to happen in the slow-motion sphere of office politics; and I’m tired of the Rashomon effect of other people judging my abilities, guessing when I’m “ready.”

Revelation #2: I screw around way too much surfing political chat rooms, inevitably bending my mind around a political sphere, as if I have anything important to add. As I wrote here before, I'm not a political pundit. I'm just a guy with what I can only label as a macabre "roadside accident" curiosity to the dysfunctional state of American politics. I swerve into writing about politics because it’s easy to say "Bush is an corrupt, simple-minded idiot." But really, who cares what I think?

Resolution #2: Ditch the chat rooms like Salon's Table Talk and Democratic Underground. Let's face it: We're entering a bizarro world...anarchy is peace and the war's cause may not be that important anyway. No WMD in Iraq? So what, let's hit Syria. If no weapons of mass destruction are found in Iraq, and Team Bush doesn't get roasted for its phony war, then don't bother to vote in 2004. The public doesn't clearly care and it isn't bright enough to pay attention. So, why should I be a pundit if no one really cares?

Incidentally, Patrick Farley at E-Sheep has put together a collection of cut-and-paste meditations on bizarro America, including wondering just where the anti-war crowd goes from here. Check it out.

Revelation #3: I'm too nervous about writing, thinking everything has been done or I suck.

Resolution #3: This is an oldie, but a goodie. It's bullshit. I'm at a point of no return with the novel. I either have to start it now or ditch it all together. During my trip, I swore I'd take some mental time off…get some distance between my nagging insecurities and myself. Ironically, I was flooded with ideas all through the trip, and I have a small black travel journal to prove it. In my time away, I felt more pieces come together and watched as the characters developed in a more natural way in a matter of days than compared to the weeks prior to the trip I spent feeling out the characters and scenes. Coming home, I never felt more ready to begin.

Apropos of hopefully nothing, I've read of dominatrices being employed to by people not for some sex play, but to get them going on their life goals, literally cracking the whip to get them hustling to make the first million by the time they are 30 or some such target. I don't know about you, but the sinister image-recipe of a leather corset, knee-high boots and a cat-o-nine tails would get me pounding out a chapter a day.

Marquis de Sade "life coaches." Yikes.

There and back again

I first would like to apologize to the British Museum for the whole "pedestal incident.”

It seemed like a great idea at the time. An empty, big space to stand on, right between a pair of ancient Egyptian artifacts…a space that’s too terribly tempting for a jet-lagged tourist who giddily thinks "What a great photo" and imagines striking some Pharaoh-like pose as his wife rolls her eyes and aims the digital camera. "The faster I take the photo, the faster he'll stop being a fool."

I didn't mean to be a problem and I appreciate the thoroughness of the British Museum's security to explain to me, in detail, about how foolish I was and how dangerous the situation was for me to stand on a plywood base not meant to hold up dense North American specimens. Well, okay, they didn't say it like that. I mean, they are British, after all, polite and all that.

It's all a blur, the whole European whirlwind. 5 days in London. A few in Bath. One in York. I black out at this point, waking up days later on the tarmac of Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris, racing to comprehend this alien tongue being shoved at me. Oh, I miss London, and the ungodly simple and efficient Underground. I miss the British Library, with one pane of glass separating me from a gold-leafed Koran or the original lyrics to "Help." Paris? Argh. Don't make me think about translating, about conducting conversations. The one thing my French teacher never taught me about the French...they speak their language really, really quickly.

And they all know English.

Damn it.

Why did I bust my ass trying to understand this twisted garble of syntax and modified pronouns when once I do try to speak it, my accent gives it away and they drop into "English" mode, like some preset burned into their motherboard? Oh well, at least I tried. At least I made it to the Louvre. I walked the halls of the Museum D'Orsay. I smelled the terminal scent of decomposing paper at the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore. On my birthday in Paris, I felt snow on my face as I climbed Notre Dame Cathedral, touching gargoyles on their stony backs. I climbed the Arc de Triumph and watched the sun set from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

I remember one morning waking up in our London hotel and me, struggling to find my feet and glasses thinking, "Oh my God, I'm in London." It's that kind of adrenaline that counteracts jet lag. Before exploring the City of Light, I viewed all of London the peak of the London Eye, only to wander on the ruins of Hadrian's Wall a week later, a supreme juxtaposition of design, empire and engineering achievement.

It's all a jumble, a whir of cathedrals and cozy towns, of worn-out feet and unlaundered clothes, of exploring castles, including a ruined Scottish one and, to get to it, wandering through a landscape resembling Tolkien's Dead Marshes. I remember eerie rural silences, dormant orchards, Gothic spires, and London, always London, in its jambalaya of cultures and languages and history...a futuristic steel and glass space-egg of a building nestled next to the stubble of a Roman wall, sectioned off for future generations.

I apologize for going back and forth in time. I started getting sick the day before we came home, and felt myself melting away on the various legs of our Paris to Seattle trip (with Indiana Jones-style, connect-the-dots travel stops in Amsterdam and Detroit). I'm getting over the fever and jet lag now, but I’m still looping in and out of time like the main character in "Donnie Darko," jumping around the time stream with the help of the chronological-liquid umbilicus.

I can't compress the whole event, the whole 15 days, into an easy order of words. They just won't march for me right now. I will post some photos, but for now I want to give you my recommendations.

-Go to London. If you can't have fun in London, there's something wrong with you.

-The London Underground rocks. I said it before, but it's amazing. You can take it anywhere in the city. It's safe, easy to understand and mostly clean.

-The McDonalds at the Amsterdam airport takes American dollars. This is great to know when you get off an airplane and it’s the next morning, but your body is still operating under orders that it’s still last night. Meanwhile, you could each drywall you’re so hungry.

-Paris is great, but do not try Paris as the final leg of a whirlwind European tour. Paris should be its own trip.

-Paris is dirtier than London, but you still have to watch out for pollution in London. Blow your nose and observe the black flecks on the tissue.

-Bath is amazing. It’s low-key and full of Roman architecture and cheap food. Watched my first-ever European football game there (Turkey vs. England...England won, 2-0) and finally understood the fanaticism the sport injects in the public. More than 90 Britons arrested for causing trouble, and the team won. Yikes.

-British tabloids are the only newspapers you can read 20 feet away and still get the gist of the story.

-Going hungry in Paris is akin to being illiterate in London. It's impossible. There's a cafe every 100 yards or less in Paris (it's like a zoning law or something) and even the homeless in the Underground have books to read.

-There's a saleswoman in Harrod's who should be canonized for her ability in getting me the most comfortable hiking socks in the world.

-The British pub and the Parisian cafe are curious and amazing institutions that acts as a "third place" over there the way a Starbucks does in America, except a pub is stocked with alcohol and the cafe is like temporary real estate (you can sit there as long as you want; the table is yours until you pay the bill or the cafe closes for the night, whichever comes first). The pub, though, is the one that still stands out in my mind. Pubs are almost second-homes, frequent hangouts for citygoers looking to decompress after the day ends. Yet there's an air of respectability compared to an American bar, where hanging out there all night makes you look like a lush.

-Scotland had little effect on me. Scotland was, to me, just another chunk of rural England. Edinburgh was a pale imitation of London, or Seattle for that matter. Gray, dreary, sun-lacked faces in a modern city. I don't care for bagpipes or kilts. The whole tartan clan/Robert Burns/William Wallace thing is wasted on me. Plus, my coat got nearly destroyed at Edinburgh Castle. Not that I'm bitter or anything. I could have spent the time in Scotland back in London and not missed anything. (Well, I would have missed one thing. At breakfast in Scotland one morning, our B&B owner brought us a plate of red and brown meat-looking mush. He said one patron ordered a haggis breakfast and then changed his mind when the food appeared...would we like it? Wow, gee when you sell it like that, why not? We sent the plate back again, and I have visions of the cursed entree comes back every morning, like a ghost on the moors, trying to find rest by the hand of one daring guest, only to find its salvation put on hold by a return trip to the kitchen.)

-A note to hotel guests: Some people have to wake up really early to catch a flight out, so please be quiet when you come stumbling in drunk at midnight. Otherwise, the airport-bound guests will return the favor at 4 a.m.

-Our Detroit-Seattle plane got hit by lightning. If I wasn’t blanketed by a DayQuil haze and the exhaustion of a long day of flying, I think I would have seriously gone nanners.

-Another true food story: At the very start of our trip, we flew in to Amsterdam from Seattle and it’s 8 a.m. local time. I’m craving teriyaki chicken something fierce only to find that nowhere at the Amsterdam airport, or in London, or in Paris has a quick and cheap teriyaki joint. Between all my travels to historic sites, I keep an eye out for some street-stand, some hole-in-the-wall with bad neon and heady salty smells of overcooked chicken meat and teriyaki sauce. Nothing.

And then, on our last night in Paris, the last night of our trip in fact, I’m eating dinner at a café on Rue Cler. I order some chicken and risotto dish and find that – surprise – it’s skewered chicken breast pieces marinated in soy sauce with a dollop of white rice. It even smells the same as a cheap teriyaki dish. I giggle evilly as I mash up the chicken bits into the rice, lubricating the whole affair with the soy sauce. I finally got my teriyaki, or something close enough to make me happy…two weeks later, in a Paris café.

-Finally, there's a pub across from the British Library that serves the best damn fish and chips on earth. Period. Ironically, I can’t find the name right now. Still, when you go to the British Library, look for a big pub in the center of the block across the street. Go there.

End of a world

So, I'm reading from one of the free newspapers the European airline I'm on passes out. I'm slipping back into the news stream after keeping away from it for the most part, a self-imposed exile to enjoy my vacation. Yet, I’d break my vow once in a while, watching BBC morning news in England and Scotland or trying to decipher the French channels. On the flight to Paris, I'm reading the Guardian, catching up on the cultural lobotomy going on in Iraq as its citizens celebrate freedom by raiding museums, destroying or making off with their heritage. I try to wrap my mind around it: Is this really what you want to call “freedom,” treating your country to a street-level Year Zero?

Call it the law of unintended consequences at work, this destruction of history. Coming from fresh experiences at museums in London, it breaks my heart to see items from 7,000 years of Iraqi history ripped apart not by a brutal dictator but by people who are on a freedom high.

All about me

I come home, plug my computer back in and find out that "The Weblog Review" did a write up on my blog. I've been dreading this, getting some kind of evaluation from a type of authority figure. When I started this blog, it was just to be an outlet. But, in time, you end up wanting to be the shining star in the ever-growing blog constellation. So, one day, in a fit of Diet Pepsi-madness and being bored at work, I submitted this blog to be examined and picked apart. Months went by, and nothing. Then I learned that there's something worse than being seen and made fun of...it's not being seen at all.

But the day after my birthday, a reviewer named Strixy posted a write-up, giving me (actually, the blog, but we're one in the same, so what the heck) a 3.5 out of 5 as a score. Not bad for having a basic blog template and a whole lot of words. Other blogs I have seen netting a 3.5 have home-brewed templates, layers of code, interactive features and webcams. Me? Maybe four colors and text.

The prose is mostly positive to the point of being flattering, but being the masochist I am, I want to highlight this negative bit here.

As clean and as crisp a design as this site has it only further proves that presentation is a mode of content. The content is as crisp and clean as the layout, both notably lacking that one thing any truly great work of word play may possess – ethos. A writers ability to convey upon their readership a perspective of suffering and passion within the characters presented is what drives the exhibitionistic tendencies online journal readers thrive on. I would simply ask for more commentary on the condition of being SKOB rather then a precisely written highlight reel of what SKOB did and/or does. What little self dialogue that is included is always well observed and tastefully written. I am asking for more because it makes the experience of reading a journal that much more personal.


The fact is, my life is really kinda boring. Or at least I think it's boring. I have no problem posting up what I did today, but it's not that interesting. The commentary on the condition of being SKOB can be summed up in a few words on any given day: I fought through traffic, I hate my job, I'm working on my novel, I love my wife and cats. Generally, I don’t carry any tumultuous baggage or experience dramatic events, so due to the lack of juicy personal material I resort to commenting on the world around me. Plus, I consider everything I post here a reflection about what I'm thinking about...ergo, it is personal. There you go.

If it makes anyone feel better, I’ve going to start making running updates on my novel-in-progress. If anyone else wants to know something about my life, drop me a line in the comment box.