…or Andy Serkis, rather.

The Hobbit was the first “big book” I ever read.¹ And Gollum made a huge impression on me. I’ve had an image of Gollum in my head ever since, for more years than I care to recount. The Hobbit cartoon? No. That other cartoon? Nope. But now, in 2002, boom, there he is on screen.

Well one thing’s for sure — there will be no precious Oscar for poor Smeagol. Andy Serkis might have done the voice, he might have done the body movements and modeled the facial expressions… but the fat hobbitses in the Academy aren’t likely to award a computer-generated character a real-person’s award any time soon, thank you very much. Not to mention the everyday bias against SF and fantasy in the ordinary media. In the last few days, I’ve listened to no less than two radio interviews with writers talking about the writing process. The first was a twentysomething kid, an up-and-coming writer who mentioned offhandedly, “I used to read fantasy and stuff like that when I was a kid, but…” He now writes “literary”² short stories about a fictional town in Maine. The second was Carolyn See, a professor who writes and teaches creative writing at UCLA. “My students have to write about real things, real relationships.” she said. “What if one of your students wants to write about — I dunno, Mars?” “They can’t write about Mars,” she chuckled. I was waiting for her to follow up with something like, “unless they write about real people on Mars,” something like that. But she wouldn’t even throw me that bone. They just moved merrily on. Feh.

Anyway, I’m spending my evening drinking wine, listening to This American Life archives, and sewing. Yes, sewing. The washing machine in our complex is pretty rough, and it’s torn apart the seams on the corners of my comforter. I really don’t know how to sew, and all I have is a button repair kit that Mom gave me for Chanukah during my last year in high school. “What’s this?” I asked. “So you can sew on buttons when you go to college!” she said. “Oh,” I said.

But now after all these years, the kit has finally proved useful. It just has a couple of needles and some short lengths of a variety of colors of thread, but that’s enough. Unfortunately the threads don’t really match the comforter so well, and I’ve used up the thread for three colors already. Which begs the question, what happens if I actually lose a button? I might be missing the right color. I guess I’ll just have to go back to Mom… which was what she was trying to avoid by giving me the kit in the first place. That’s OK, I’m not sure I actually know how to sew on a button anyway. I do a mean whipstitch, though.

Just another crazy Saturday night.

1. The first book I ever “read” was You Will Go To The Moon when I was about two. Actually, it turned out I wasn’t so much reading it as reciting the text from memory — it was my favorite book, and my parents must have read it to me about fifty times. I have continued this proud tradition of reading-without-comprehending ever since.

2. As for the whole silly literary-vs.-genre debate, only one thing is clear: as soon as you allow someone to label their favorite group of books as “literary” and your favorite group of books as something else, you’ve lost the battle.

From the introduction to a recent review of the movie Solaris:

There’s not a single blasted laser battle to be found in “Solaris.”

Despite being produced by James Cameron, who directed the sci-fi classic “Aliens,” the interstellar drama doesn’t feature any slimy creatures or thrilling action, either.

Apart from George Clooney in a space suit, “Solaris” is science-fiction in name only.

Thank goodness the reviewer warns us all about this, so that we’re not fooled in to thinking that Solaris is a science fiction story. With no laser battles, slimy aliens, or thrilling action, how could it be? What is Steven Soderbergh trying to pull? On the other hand, it is my understanding that there is at least one naked space babe in the film, so maybe the movie qualifies as science fiction after all.

Gaaahhhh.

So I caught Jonathan Franzen on the radio the other day, plugging his new collection of essays. I wasn’t too impressed with him a year ago, but I figured I’d listen to the entire interview anyway.¹ The show began with Franzen expertly dodging the “Oprah question” by affecting a bored, world-weary air and explaining that he had been misquoted. He then spent the next 57 minutes of the interview being generally morose and opining that Lowbrow Consumer Culture Is A Bad Thing, or if not a Bad Thing, then at the very least Incomprehensible to Jonathan Franzen.

Anyway, I had almost forgotten the interview², when I ran across a review of Franzen’s essays in The New Republic. The following passage is typical:

In “Books in Bed,” a roundup of sexual how-to guides that elicits the coy admission “I have no objection to a nice bra, still less to being invited to remove one” (down, tiger), Franzen again fidgets to set himself slightly apart. “The last thing I want is to be reminded of the vaguely icky fact that across the country millions of other people are having sex,” he writes, horrified by all that humping going on down along the railroad shacks.

By coincidence, in the radio interview Franzen read the very passage that includes these quotes. I can’t transcribe the whole thing, but one thing’s for sure: the reviewer has taken Franzen’s phrase “I have no objection to a nice bra…” totally out of context. As I read the review more carefully, I realized that the entire purpose of the article was to take little snippets from Franzen and follow each one with a snide and irrelevant remark (“down, tiger”). How does the reviewer take Franzen’s “vaguely icky” comment and turn it into “horrified by all that humping”?³ It was one of the laziest pieces of writing I’ve ever seen in TNR’s pages.

Then again, the writing couldn’t have been that lazy. After all, it accomplished the near-impossible: I now have sincere sympathy for Jonathan Franzen. I didn’t believe him earlier, because after all when you say something outrageous, the standard method for spinning your way out of trouble is to say that you were misquoted or taken out of context. But now I’m thinking, hmmm, maybe Franzen was misquoted, maybe he was, in fact, taken out of context. I mean, he’s not someone who I would invite over for Thanksgiving dinner, but still.

1. Well, I do have a good deal of free time these days.

2. It must be the assault of Lowbrow Consumer Culture on my mind, degrading my long-term memory.

3. From the tone, one must assume that this particular TNR literary critic is some kind of railroad-shack-humping veteran.

Lawrence Lessig has given his arguments before the Supreme Court for Eldred v. Ashcroft. Lessig’s mostly been getting kudos from all over the web… although those pranksters at the Ayn Rand Institute seem to think that Lessig and his “gang” are Marxists of some sort (along with his Communist friends, Milton Friedman and Phyllis Schlafly, I suppose). Anyway, Lessig hardly seems fazed by this, and the Ayn Rand Institute’s position appears to be a distinct minority opinion in the libertarian community, judging from the various eye-rolling reactions from Declan McCullagh and his compadres on Politechbot. M’ris also gives assurances that the Rand Institute’s “orthodox Objectivist rant” was not in the mainstream. So, whew. I mean, take Declan McCullagh — I don’t agree with everything he says, but at least he is almost always thoughtful and worthy of respect. In contrast, that Objectivist paper was just plain loony.

Anyway, Lessig has some thoughts on how the arguments went:

The Court clearly got it. Though the other side had written literally 300 pages trying to show all the good CTEA did… the Court hadn’t bought any of it. Congress was not acting to promote progress, it was acting to reward “court favorites.” The only question the Court was struggling with is whether it has the power to do anything about it.

Now pause for a second to think about how important and good this struggle is. First: It is a rare but valuable exercise for any branch of government to worry about the scope of its own power. And the greatest virtue the Court exercises is the virtue of self-restraint. This is a reason to respect the Court, not criticize it (though how they exercise their restraint, or where, can be criticized, as I suggest below). But the general idea that it will restrain itself, despite believing a law is stupid, is a feature, not a bug in our constitutional tradition.

Teenage wunderkind¹ and F.O.L. (Friend Of Lessig) Aaron Swartz also attended court that day:

I thought Larry had done an awful job until Solicitor General Olson (the man who argued for Bush in Bush v. Gore) came up. The Justices had a field day with him. Rehnquist got him to admit that a perpetual copyright would violate the Constitution. Kennedy got him to admit that a functionally perpetual (900 year) copyright would also be a violation. “Isn’t that what petitioners argue?” asked another Justice. “That if you keep extending the term of copyright it’s the functional equivalent?”

It’s hard to say how well Lessig did, particularly from the perspective of a non-lawyer. As one of Swartz’s colleagues admitted, “it was a dance for which I don’t know the steps.” That said, the fact that Lessig might have looked weak is pretty much par for the course — as far as I can tell, everyone looks bad in front of the Court. Every Supreme Court snippet I’ve ever heard consists of Scalia or one of the other justices just tearing the poor lawyer on the stand to shreds. This is why Nina Totenburg has the best gig on NPR.

1. I don’t know if Swartz really is a wunderkind — honestly, I just like getting to use the word. Wunderkind! Eet ees wunderbar!

Well, it looks like the Twins have knocked off the A’s. This year’s baseball playoff schedule, I think, constitutes ironclad proof that God does not give a rat’s ass about baseball. A kind and merciful deity would not have permitted a schedule that forced the two worthiest teams in baseball to eliminate one of the other so early.¹ Well, I’ll be rooting for the Twins, then, assuming that the Giants get rolled by the Braves as is customary at this time of year. (The Giants are beating the Braves 7-1 at the moment, so they’ve still got a shot, at least.)

In Other News: via the brilliant and learned Garrett Moritz,² I learned about a wonderful MIT parody of the Fellowship of the Ring prologue. It’s a big download, but well worth it. Deleriously geeky. My only concern is that the current generation of MIT students apparently thinks that Maxwell’s equations in integral form are a representation of pure evil. Are the students just saying that they prefer Maxwell’s equations in their somewhat-more-aesthetically-pleasing differential form… or is this a larger statement about physics itself?

1. Then again — the Angels smote the hell-spawned Yankees pretty early this year. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

2. I agree with Moritz that the latest Two Towers trailer looks fantastic. And no, I don’t know why Legolas is being made up to be such a stupendous bad-ass. I mean, I’m all for defeating the pernicious stereotype that Elves are nothing more than limp-wristed fops, but this is getting ridiculous.

Last fall, Michael Walzer of the leftist journal Dissent wrote an article (which is no longer online) called, “Can There Be a Decent Left?” A year ago, I wouldn’t even have understood Walzer’s question. We’re the left! We’re decent! Case closed.

Then again, when you read about stuff like this, you really start to wonder.

Well. This too we shall overcome. And let me assure you, despite the best efforts of the Right to portray things otherwise, reports of the death of the ‘Decent Left’ have been greatly exaggerated. See, over the last year, it’s become pretty clear how the “Left” breaks down:

• Category A: Those who believe that we as a nation are irredeemably evil, and that nothing we have ever done has any moral justification.
• Category B: Those that don’t.

One can disagree vehemently about the policies of our government — in fact, contra Ashcroft and Fleischer, that is the defining characteristic of good citizenship. But there’s a difference between healthy dissent and curling up into a fetal ball of hate, anti-Semitism, and victimhood. Those who fall into Category A are simply not leftists… nor are they even thinkers. They’re… well, I don’t know what they are, but they’re something else. In any case, the most charitable thing that you can say for them is that they force real lefties to waste energy fending off strawman attacks that are (presumably) targetted at the Fakers. Well, I’m tired of it. To the Fakers, I say: Get out. Piss off. Quit wasting our time. Oh, and another thing: go find yourselves another goddamn label.
We
had
it
first.

With that off my chest, here are three examples of real lefties fighting the good fight.

Michael Walzer himself, in a reprint of an article he wrote last fall for The American Prospect, “Excusing Terror: The Politics of Ideological Apology“:

It is not so easy to reach the last resort. To get there, one must indeed try everything (which is a lot of things)–and not just once, as if a political party or movement might organize a single demonstration, fail to win immediate victory, and claim that it is now justified in moving on to murder. Politics is an art of repetition. Activists learn by doing the same thing over and over again. It is by no means clear when they run out of options. The same argument applies to state officials who claim that they have tried everything and are now compelled to kill hostages or bomb peasant villages. What exactly did they try when they were trying everything?

Could anyone come up with a plausible list? “Last resort” has only a notional finality. The resort to terror is not last in an actual series of actions; it is last only for the sake of the excuse. Actually, most terrorists recommend terror as a first resort; they are for it from the beginning.

David Remnick and Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker, “A Year After“:

This week, we remember the dead. It will be an overwhelming commemoration. Some of refined sensibility have complained in advance that the media will exploit this anniversary, that television commentators will wax fatuous, that people are tired of it all — tired of the anthems and the flags, tired of the invocations of “9/11,” tired of a certain kitsch, civic and commercial, that has attached itself to the event. Fair enough. But to spend one’s energies this week calibrating levels of rhetorical sophistication in public and private grief seems like time, and refinement, ill spent.

Louis Menand, critiquing the critics in “Faith, Hope, and Clarity: September 11th and the American soul“:

[Baudrillard’s argument] is as fantastic, in its way, as Alice Walker’s colored threads. It supposes a universe that (like Walker’s) operates by an internal equilibrating mechanism that just happens to be in perfect synchrony with the writer’s own prejudices. Globalization is evil because it destroys “singularity” by imposing a system of “generalized exchange.” O.K. “Singularity” being a good thing and “generalized exchange” a bad one, the universe will automatically correct the insult to itself by having the extinct “singularities” exact “revenge” on the very agents of “generalized exchange” — the folks who work in the World Trade Center — by means of a “terrorist” act (or let us call it a “terrorist situational transfer”) perpetrated by a fanatical Saudi millionaire sitting in a cave in Afghanistan. Like all superstitions, it makes perfect sense. “For it is the world, the globe itself, which resists globalization,” as Baudrillard proclaims. “Terrorism is immoral. The World Trade Center event, that symbolic challenge, is immoral, and it is a response to a globalization which is itself immoral.” If this is too metaphysical for you, stick with the threads.

As for me, I’ve certainly changed my reading habits. For one thing, I’m cutting way back on my media consumption. First things first: I’m dropping Andrew Sullivan. Yes, again. He’s an ideologue, of course… but worse, he bores me. Ditto for the cacophony of the “warbloggers”. No more Salon or Slate either. And I’m definitely not dumpster-diving in The Nation or The National Review anymore. I used to have a sort of car-wreck fascination with their nonsense, but when you get right down to it, they’re the equivalent of watching reality TV. That goes for the tech rags and the tech blowhards as well.

So now my daily and weekly reads are down to a reasonably trim list:

• Good Morning Silicon Valley for tech news.
• The O’Reilly Network for tech goodies. Plus I dig their books.
• TAPPED for political commentary.
• The New Republic for more political commentary. (My only regret is that Michelle Cottle is married.)
• Carolyn Hax for her advice and her husband’s cartoons. (Tough luck about her being married too.)
• The Onion for humor, along with every other college-educated twentysomething in the Western Hemisphere.
• Spinsanity, because they do the dumpster-diving better than I ever could.
• Prof. Jeff Cooper for cogent legal analysis, wine recommendations, baseball, and links to other interesting lawyers and law students.
• Last but certainly not least, M’ris. To paraphrase Jeff Cooper, thou shalt honor thy blogmother!

And that’s it. Looks like it’s time to edit the ol’ Links page yet again…

As it turns out, I was extremely foolish to taunt Germany about the 2002 World Cup Match in my last entry. (And I should know better than to taunt Germans, being of Polish extraction and all.) Oh well — we still did better than anyone could have expected. What hurts is that the German team has been so lackluster. With a little more luck, I think we could have beat them. Coulda woulda shoulda. Ah, well.

The really nice thing about following the World Cup in the European press is that we Americans are such underdogs, and as such we are not as resented as we usually are. I think that the BBC football pages are the only place you’ll find us referred to as “valiant”, “courageous”, and “glorious” instead of “fat”, “greasy”, “lazy”, “imperialistic”, and so on.

Just for chuckles, when I was poking around the BBC site, I found that they had helpfully offered a detailed definition of “soccer”, presumably as a gentle introduction for newbie USA football fans:

soccer n. colloq. (esp. US) A ball game involving two teams of 11 players – only two of whom can regularly handle the ball, while the remainder must use their feet, heads, knees or chests to advance play…

PROPERLY KNOWN AS: Association Football, since kicking the ball with the foot part of your leg is where the real trick of “soccer” lies.

NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH: American Football, a debased version of rugby popular in the United States (and Canada) involving pads, helmets and hulking players in spandex – but precious little kicking…

Thanks, BBC! By the way, be sure to check out their other definitions, including “ideas hamster“, “pashmina politics“, and “airy-fairy libertarians“:

…CITATION: “We could live in a world which is airy fairy, libertarian, where everybody does precisely what they like and we believe the best of everybody and then they destroy us.” Blunkett, Nov 2001.

EXPOUNDED: by Labour MP Kevin Hughes: “Don’t you find it bizarre, like I do, that the yoghurt-eating, muesli-eating, Guardian-reading fraternity are only too happy to want to protect the human rights of people who engage in terrorist acts?” …

Yeah! Take that you yoghurt-eaters! Hmmmm. One must admit that while the level of British debate is perhaps even more debased and farcical than ours, their command of the English language remains as strong as ever.

Well, speaking of libertarians (of the non-muesli-eating, Guardian-avoiding variety), I’ve been managing to amuse M’ris by forwarding her a few links from some message boards about the Wizards of the Coast campaign setting proposal search. I think that if I’m reduced to amusing my friends by sending them message board threads to pick on, this is a very bad sign. Picking on message board people is shooting fish in a barrel. It means I’m tapped out on the humor front. I got nothin’. I got no game. I might as well be riding my little bicycle in a circle while honking a horn and spraying the crowd with seltzer water.

But I can’t help it. I mean, if you encountered an unpublished writer who states quite seriously that “I know 95% of what there is to know about writing…” but just not the “5%” involved in publishing their work, well… wouldn’t you pass it on? Call me mean-spirited, call me condescending, but I couldn’t help sending it on to someone who would get a cheap laugh out of it. Can you blame me? No? Allrighty then.

“So,” said Miles gently, “after we shot up the police station and set the habitat on fire, what did we do for an encore?” — Miles Vorkosigan, getting to the bottom of a sticky situation in Diplomatic Immunity

So I bought Diplomatic Immunity for my Dad for Father’s Day, only to find out that he had already checked it out from the library. He said I could take the book home and finish it, then hand it back to him. What bad luck for me, eh? Anyway, the book’s a winner, as far as I’m concerned. My one complaint is that Ekaterin didn’t have much to do in this book, especially compared to A Civil Campaign. In this one she just leans down and kisses Miles at various intervals — that’s about it.

I am also listening to the Moby album Play over and over. Weird. Am I becoming some sort of electronica fan? Hmmm… well, I am getting paler these days, but I’m certainly not getting thinner and mopier. So maybe it’s some kind of delusional behavior. I only buy about five CDs a year, so perhaps I need to fool myself into thinking that this was money well spent. Well, whatever. I’m digging it.

Page wanted me to make a correction to my previous account of our Burn Rate game from last week. Basically he felt that he and Justin got short shrift. Page, Page. Don’t you get it? This journal is about me, me, meeeee! Ahem. Anyway, this week everything was reversed. Jay and I cratered our startups very early. Justin and I tangled several times, to my eventual detriment. I finally managed to hire financial whiz kid Ben Zhao, but then courtesy of Justin he had a “difference of opinion” with my other, less competent VPs, and headed back to the labor pool. I couldn’t scrape together enough funding, and I went belly-up. Meanwhile, Page stuck to his tried-and-true “big government” strategy of building a giant organization with plenty of redundancy. Justin couldn’t really attack Page with any “Bad Idea” cards, because Page’s massive, idle engineering department had enough staff to handle pretty much anything out there. Eventually Justin slipped away, leaving Page as the victor. The take-home lesson: bloated, inefficient bureaucracy wins over all! Huzzah!

Finally, I’m trying to decide whether I like The American Prospect. Let me switch into Tevye-mode for a second:

• On the one hand, I really like their blog, Tapped. Tapped happens to be a committee, but for some reason I’m really fond of their habit of referring to themselves in third person present tense, as in “Maybe we should be hardened to this by now, but Tapped is always stunned around this time of year when the financial disclosure information comes rolling out…”

• On the other hand, they print hysterical drug articles such as this one that again repeats the tired old charge that the United States gave $40 million dollars to the Taliban for opium crop suppression. Hellooo? Did Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanity not thoroughly debunk this crap almost exactly a year ago?

• But on the other hand… they also give us articles like this one by William F. Gates Sr., cogently arguing that yes, we do need the estate tax.

• But on the other hand, we get this rather strange article by Garance Franke-Ruta about career women and fertility. Regardless of what one thinks of the article’s target, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the fact is that Hewlett does have a point — older women have a harder time conceiving children. Franke-Ruta’s solution for this problem is to have older women marry younger men, because the age of the man also affects the odds of conception:

  Though your average 36-year-old female executive might not find it socially acceptable to date a 29-year-old man (or vice versa), she could still very happily work things out with, say, some nice, stable 34 year old.

  What a quaint assertion. Practically-thirty males are not allowed to date mid-thirty females? Sez who? And jeez, if your goal is to have kids, what do you care what other people think? I mean really.

But I think the “kicker” is this article about the peculiar hatred of American conservatives for soccer, which somehow magically combines one of my loves (the latter) with one of my, well, dislikes (the former). Here Sasha Polakow-Suransky explains how the the likes of the National Review have managed to score an own goal on the soccer “issue”:

Perhaps the first evidence of conservatives’ aversion to soccer appeared during the last World Cup in 1998, when denunciations of bourgeois, liberal, Clinton-supporting soccer moms graced the pages of National Review. Tirades against the inevitable hooliganism of the game were entertained in the right-wing press as well. Taken together, these seemingly divergent criticisms from soccer-bashers gave rise to the peculiar and ironic phenomenon of assigning a political label to what is perhaps the only sport known to have united fascists and communists, bosses and workers, and millionaires and slum-dwellers behind their respective national teams.

Excellent stuff. So I guess I’ll have to keep TAP on my reading list. (And while I’m at it — GO USA! And be afraid, Germany. Be very afraid.)

• But on the other hand… no… No! There is no other hand!

Napster officially declared bankruptcy today. I’ll be weeping softly into my pillow tonight, to be sure.

Actually, I fully agree with David Coursey, who writes that the lingering, painful death of Napster provides “proof of a loving higher power that eventually smites evildoers“:

I was about to write something about feeling sorry for the people who worked at Napster and lost their livelihoods while the investors and executives doubtless looked after themselves quite nicely. But I won’t, because I wonder how a truly honest person could have gone to work there in the first place.

Of course, one could say the same about certain other companies. And look! One has. (Although Coursey is wrong about the smiting evildoers bit — otherwise Avanti would be out of business. But that’s another story.)

I suppose that Napster simply demonstrates how far people are willing to go to rationalize their bad behavior:

• “But CDs are way too expensive.”
• “But the record companies are really, really, bad.”
• “But Napster actually increases sales to artists — it’s a form of marketing.”
• “But in the future, we’ll have a glorious P2P distribution system where everyone will make money — you copyright-happy fuddy-duddies just wait!”
• “But the record companies are trying to take away our fair use rights.”

All of which are true to one degree or another, and none of which has anything to do with Napster per se.

Honestly, what are we to think of a company that poses as a Champion of the People while building its business plan on the backs of others? How cynical do you have to be? The whole thing reminds me of Rage Against the Machine. In college I truly thought that Zack de la Rocha & co. were real, hardcore, angry revolutionaries. Fighting the System. Speaking Truth to Power. (Please stifle your snickers.) Not that I was really for fighting the system… but I could certainly respect fighting the system (and as a matter of fact, I still do).

Then one fine summer day, the most crassly commercial movie of 1998 rolled into theaters, and guess who wrote the title track? I learned a valuable lesson that day about who is into rebellion these days, and why. (Interesting aside: the imdb.com page on Godzilla says, “If you liked this movie, we also recommend Armageddon.” They could not have picked a better match.)

One final point: I find Rage Against the Machine’s pro-Napster histrionics particularly amusing. After all, their record label is a subsidiary of Sony, which is actively trying to destroy all semblance of fair-use rights. (Sony’s recent forays into copy-protected media have been less than successful, but they shouldn’t worry… someone has come up with a brand-new piracy-proof format already. Hooray!)

Last night Laura and I went to go see the play Art, which is running at the San Jose Rep through June 16. If you haven’t seen it: go. Go now. I’m talking to you in particular, M’ris. (By an unfortunate coincidence, M’ris and I are having an email discussion about the nature of art. Please believe me, M’ris, my exhortation to go see Art has absolutely nothing to do with our discussion. I just think you and Mark will really enjoy the play. No ulterior motives here whatsoever.)

This is the second play that I’ve seen first in London, then in the US. The last one was The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Abridged, which was screamingly funny in England but only somewhat humorous in San Jose. I had been worried that Art would suffer the same fate, but fortunately, it was quite good. At least as good as the London production, maybe better.

Since we’re on the subject of art, the AVArtFest is running at the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara this weekend. There are several dozen booths with local artists — mostly painters, although there are a few potters and sculptors. A lot of the paintings were quite good in my uneducated opinion, although they were mostly out of my price range. (As in, “Oh, that’s nice! Mmm, $1100.00.) Still, I ran into my ex-boss’s wife, and we had a nice conversation. I also talked with an artist who was almost exactly my age — we had an interesting discussion on how his paintings were like and not-like Giger. So I basically had a good time.