A Place for My Stuff

Sunk Cost and Mobile Game Addiction

The Story

After 5 or 6 years of playing, I've made the decision to give up my Game of War: Age of Fire account.

Those of you who are well familiar with the game may read that and think, "Gee, Bill, I didn't think anybody was still even playing that game.  You may as well tell the world that you've stopped using A.O.L. for the Internet!" Those of you not so familiar with this the game may wonder why this personal event is worthy of a blog entry.

 

The Problem

Before I go any further, let me be clear about one thing: I'm not saying video games are all inherently life-draining and evil.  We do a lot of things that may seem to have no immediate real-world benefit to our survival: playing a game, watching movies, watching sports, gardening, stamp collecting, whatever.  There's nothing wrong with having something you like to do in your spare time.  Life would be pretty dull and pointless if we weren't allowed to have some fun now and then. As with any pleasurable things in life, it comes down to responsibility and one's true net enjoyment.  And even within the realm of games, there may be benefits:

• Maybe playing Monopoly with your family proves to be a interactive bonding experience. 
• Maybe playing chess helps keep your analytical mind sharp. 
• Maybe you learn new words by playing Scrabble. 
• Maybe you learn something about listening and teamwork by playing an RPG or co-op game. 

HOWEVER, if you find yourself...

• ... spending so much time and money on a game such that it significantly cuts in on other things you'd like to (or need to) do with your life?
• ... having lost most of the initial appeal you had in the game, and are now just playing out of habit? 
• ... driving loved ones up the wall because you're paying more attention to your smart phone than to them?
• ... playing mainly because you'd feel guilty about quitting? And it's a game with no definitive ending? 
• ... ultimately just looking at advertisements on your phone for hours at a time, interrupted by opportunities to play some spin-off of "Bejeweled" or "Minecraft"?
• ... using your game scoring as a substitute for real-life accomplishments?  

Then yeah, maybe it's time to stop and reevaluate whether you're still really "playing" this game, or if the game makers are playing you.

 

Sunk Cost

In reading Scott Adams' 2019 book Loserthink, I was introduced to a concept known as the "sunk cost" fallacy.  As I understand it, it's basically the human tendency think, "Right now I have options 'A' and 'B'. I've already invested a lot into 'A', therefore that's the option that makes the most sense to continue with."  The reason this is fallacious thinking is because how much you've invented in something doesn't necessarily determine whether it's the right decision. Whatever time or money you've invested into option A is now "sunk", and doesn't change the fact that option B might be better for you or more desirable in the long run.

For example, "This $1800 suit I bought no longer fits me well, and I'd actually look better in and feel more comfortable at the job interview tomorrow if I wore one of my cheaper suits.  But hey, I paid $1800 for this, so I should wear it."  Or to cite an example from my own career: "This device we use is hard to maintain and breaks down all of the time. We could hire somebody to just spend two months creating a replacement that would work ten times better.  But the company already paid some contractors in India a ton of money to create what we use now.  Therefore we need to keep using it."

So it goes with some video games.  What was it that was really driving me to log in and play "Game of War"?  Was the gameplay still really fun? Was it the game's aesthetics? Was it the social interaction with other players, especially those on the same team as me? There was a tiny bit of truth in all of those ideas.  But what mostly drove me to tap on that icon and launch the game, was this subconscious need to keep it afloat.  To justify my investment.  To justify my progress in the game.  And of course, the longer you play and the more you invest, the harder it is to quit, because the more that would feel like throwing it all away.  It was a spinning plate on the end of a pole that I had to keep spinning because, well, I just had to. And whatever tiny reward of fun or escape, or the hope for more fun, was also just enough fuel to continue too.

 

"Just one more level! One more fix!"

What makes these games so addictive in the first place?  For me, it's a couple of different things.  There's always a need in life for occasional fantasy and escape.  So there's incredible appeal in being able to procrastinate from stuff in the real world, and instead be a sword-swinging, dragon-fighting, gold-plundering hero of your own empire.  Granted, a good fantasy book or action movie can have that same sort of effect.  But what video games additionally provide is the illusion of accomplishment. 

See, unlike most other skills or challenges in life, video games provide you with a numerical measure of progress, and typically a clear path from one path to the next.  "If I just get enough gold pieces, I can buy this piece of armor.  Then I can kill the boss at the end of this level and advance to the next level!"  What's the next level after 33?  34, of course.  How close are you to getting there?  Just look at the progress bar.  "Hmm, I've been stuck on this part for a while and it's tedious.  But if I pay $4.99, I can get a boost that will get all of my buildings up to the next level, and the game will be more fun then.  Well, the game is otherwise free and I've gotten a ton of hours of play out of it for nothing, so I suppose dropping five bucks won't hurt."

Now imagine somebody who is typically a procrastinator, has not only an impulsive behavior but an OCD such that he (and it's more often a "he" than a "she") can't stand to leave things unfinished and asymmetric, perhaps lacks some certainty in their own career or other life endeavors, doesn't otherwise get to command much in life, finds most humans unrelatable, and has such an imaginative mind that they can easily tune the world out and hyperfocus on something appealing.  Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of a mobile game company's income comes from exploiting the top 2% of its players who are, as people often nicely try to put it, "on the autism spectrum".

(On a related note, there's a common feeling that giving into an activity that serves no real purpose is just stupidity, and smug self-described "rational" people won't allow themselves to do such irrational things. But IQ has little to do with this. In fact, smart people with addictions are usually better at misusing their intellect to rationalize what they're doing. But that's a whole other topic.)

Fortunately, I've had enough sense of self-control and purpose not to go nearly as deep down that hole as I've seen others go.  One attitude that I've long maintained, even before I owned my first cell phone, was this: I want to look back at whatever I've done in the past month, and have some kind of real accomplishment to show.  By "real", I mean something besides "I got my Diablo game character up to level 99" or "I watched all 8 seasons of this TV show."  Rather, something I can be proud of.  Something that I felt was worth the investment.  Writing an article, solving a complicated math proof, learning something on a particular musical instrument, publishing a website, whatever.  Again, that doesn't mean avoiding video games or TV shows at all costs; it just means not letting those sorts of things being the only things I "accomplished" that month.  I think was really drove me to having this attitude was hanging out with some of my friends who'd just finished college, and seeing how some of them had gotten into the disillusioned zombie routine of coming home from work, watching TV for the next several hours, going to bed, repeat.  I promised myself that I wouldn't fall into that trap.

Denial

Alas, getting back to the question of why I quit playing Game of War: Age of Fire, it wasn't just a strong sense of resourcefulness that made me quit.  Frankly, the game had really come to suck.  Just when you thought you were getting a hold of things, they'd introduce some new feature that wasn't very clear at all.  There were lots of old features of the game that grew to become useless, and you weren't always sure whether you just weren't investing enough in some particular thing, or whether you should be working on some other part of the game. And this isn't just some sour grapes rationalization on my part; you can read the game reviews.

Worst of all was that you spend a lot of time and even real money building up your kingdom, then somebody who had just spent more money and was thus at a higher level could come by and completely wipe out the army you'd been building up.  Or once you got to a certain level of riches or equipment quality, they'd introduce some new tier of more things to get, which meant you'd have to start getting that if you wanted to have any kind of edge in the game.  More and more people ended up leaving the game.  So I'd log in, and it would be a ghost town.  Not that there still weren't a handful of players who'd search around for anybody vulnerable to destroy, of course.  

So once I decided this game was more trouble than it was worth, the next decision was to just delete the app, right?  Unfortunately, it wasn't that simple.  Again, I was haunted by the nagging feeling of, "You dumped all of this time and money into the game.  You can't just DELETE it!"  Then, "I know.  You could SELL it!"  Yes, there is a market out there for selling and buying game accounts where the player has reached a high level.  There are sites where you can buy and sell high-scored accounts for particular games.  Unfortunately, that selling price would be nowhere near the amount of money you may have dumped into the game.  As time went on, it seemed that you'd be lucky to get anything in exchange for your game, as interest in Game of War rapidly waned.   And you can't in fact delete your empire from the game outright; you can only transfer ownership.  Frankly, I didn't want to leave a game that the high-paying bullies could rape when I was gone.  At the same time, I also thought, "Maybe there's somebody would would actually appreciate this account of mine, and use it."

Acceptance

I did finally come to accept the fact that the sunk cost was sunk, and waiting to make any money back from a sell wasn't worth the time if I could give it away sooner.  So I went to a Facebook forum that some of the local kingdom players had created some years ago, stated my account level and said, "If anybody wants it, message me and it's yours."  There were a few jeering idiots, as well as a couple of other idiots who didn't realize that "message me" doesn't mean "post a reply on this thread".  Regardless, one guy did message me.  And now my old account is his.  And I have a burden gone from my phone. The end.

Movies Critics Hated, But Audiences Loved

TL;DR: With the help of data from IMDB, I compiled a list of movies with the biggest "audience likes it" to "critics like it" ratio.

I was thinking of a good place to publish this information. Then I realized, "Oh wait, I have a blog, don't I?"

When Critics Hate It, But I Love It

Movie websites such as RottenTomatoes.com often give at least two different ratings for a given movie: what critics rated it, and what audiences rated it.  Sometimes a movie will seemingly please both audiences and critics.  Sometimes, both audiences and critics will overwhelmingly dislike a film. But then there are the other times where the critics overwhelmingly hate a movie, but the audiences love it, or vice-versa. 

In recent years, I've noticed that the movies I end up loving a lot are typically the ones that critics hate and audiences love.  Sometime in 2019 I started using this as a rule of thumb for deciding whether to see a new movie, and it proved to be pretty reliable.  In fact, the bigger that ratio of audience rating to critics' rating, the more I liked the movie.  I guess this isn't too surprising for me, because there are likewise many books and music albums I absolutely love which critics have always trashed.

I was curious to see what other movies there may be that had very low ratings from critics and very high ratings from general viewers.  So I decided to do some coding and hacking to grab online information from lots of movies, and crunch the numbers.

Getting the Data

Without getting too geeky about the coding details: I read that RottenTomatoes.com had its own API that developers could use for the precise purpose of getting their movie data and doing analysis on it.  Long story short, that's not so easily obtainable these days. 

I found that the good ol' Internet Movie Database site (IMDB.com) had the information that I need. Movies on IMDB have a "user ratings" score. Users can create an IMDB account, log in, and give a particular movie a rating from 0 to 10.  Most movies on IMDB also have a critics rating in the form of a "Metascore".  This is a number provided by Metacritic.com where they give "a weighted average of reviews from top critics and publications for a given movie". IMDB has a list of the top 250 rated movies.  These are the movies which got the overall highest viewer ratings.  With a little more searching though, you can find a list of the top 1000!  So I wrote a script to go through this list, grab the respective viewer and critic ratings for each title, and then see which ones has the biggest audience to critic rating ratio.

Before I tell you the results, there are some disclaimers you should know about the top 1000 list:

• The list only includes full-length feature films. Shorts, TV movies, and documentaries are not included.
• IMDB ranks the movies not just by the ratings themselves, but "a formula which includes the number of ratings each movie received from users, and value of ratings received from regular users".  I guess this is to help prevent some movie maker from making hundreds of fake accounts in order to rate their own movie 10 stars.
• IMDB also says, "To be included on the list, a movie must receive ratings from at least 25000 users".  This is understandable, because otherwise I'm sure there are obscure movies which few people have heard of, but they got a "10 star" rating because there were only one or two people who rated it, and gave it 10 stars because they're the sort of people who liked the movie enough in the first place to want to look it up and rate it. Or likewise, movies that have really low ratings due to only getting a handful of reviewers.
• About 160 of the top 1000 movies didn't have any critic reviews. These included a lot of old movies (Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), etc.  I guess this makes sense, because modern critics don't often go back to review and rate old movies, just new ones as they come.  So I just omitted these ones. 
• One inherent problem with ratings in general is that people tend to only rate things they feel strongly about.  Most people who rate things, whether it's movies or something else, want to give it either zero stars, or 10 out of 10.  But we'll just see what the list gives us anyway.

Results

Here are the top results I found:

1. I Am Sam (2001).  With an average user rating of 77% (7.7 stars out of 10), and an average critic rating of 28% (Metacritic rating of 28 out of 100), this film easily had the biggest ratio of viewer appeal to critic appeal. 
2. The Butterfly Effect (2004). Users 76% vs. critics 30%.  This is one I actually saw.  I guess not surprisingly, I enjoyed it.
3. Elite Squad (2007). 81% vs. critics 33%.  In fact, if we go by absolute difference (subtraction) instead of ratio (division), this one would be #2.
4. Seven Pounds (2008). 76% vs. critics 36%.  I don't think I ever heard of this film, to be honest.
5. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998).  76% vs. critics 41%. I had no idea this cult film was hated by critics.  But from this point on, the ratio goes under 2.0.
6. The Boondock Saints (1999). 78% vs. critics 44%. 
7. Predator (1987). 78% vs. critics 45%. Critics tend to hate action movies, for some reason.
8. Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982).  81% vs. critics 47%. Yes, critics also tend to hate band films like this too.
9. Flipped (I) (2010). 77% vs. critics 45%.
10. Blood In, Blood Out (1993). Users 80% vs. critics 47%.
11. Love Me If You Dare (2003). Users 76% vs. critics 45%.
12. Saw (2004). Users 76% vs. critics 46%.  I'm not surprised.  And I do love this franchise.
13. Man on Fire (2004). Users 77% vs. critics 47%.
14. Primal Fear (1996). Users 77% vs. critics 47%.
15. Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). Users 80% vs. critics 49%.  I had feared the opposite would happen with this movie.
16. Remember the Titans (2000). Users 78% vs. critics 48%.
17. My Name Is Khan (2010). Users 80% vs. critics 50%.
18. The Best Offer (2013). Users 78% vs. critics 49%.
19. Tombstone (1993). Users 78% vs. critics 50%.
20. Sleepers (1996). Users 76% vs. critics 49%.
21. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989). Users 76% vs. critics 49%.
22. The Gentlemen (2019). Users 79% vs. critics 51%.
23. Taken (I) (2008). Users 78% vs. critics 51%.
24. Adam's Apples (2005). Users 78% vs. critics 51%.
25. Kelly's Heroes (1970). Users 76% vs. critics 50%.

After this, the critics' ratings tend to be over 50%, and thus the general notion of "Critics hated it but audiences loved it" gets less intense.  But for the sake of completion, here are the rest up to 100. I've boldfaced a few that stick out to me personally, either because "Yeah, I figured this would be here" or "Damn, I didn't realize critics disliked this one".

26. Snatch (2000). Users 83% vs. critics 55%.
27. The Intouchables (2011). Users 85% vs. critics 57%.
28. Kal ho naa ho (2003). Users 80% vs. critics 54%.
29. Detachment (2011). Users 77% vs. critics 52%.
30. The Fifth Element (1997). Users 77% vs. critics 52%.
31. The Notebook (2004). Users 78% vs. critics 53%.
32. Dead Man's Shoes (2004). Users 76% vs. critics 52%.
33. 300 (2006). Users 76% vs. critics 52%.
34. Blow (2001). Users 76% vs. critics 52%.
35. Lost Highway (1997). Users 76% vs. critics 52%.
36. Life Is Beautiful (1997). Users 86% vs. critics 59%.
37. Lucky Number Slevin (2006). Users 77% vs. critics 53%.
38. Joker (2019). Users 85% vs. critics 59%.
39. The Blind Side (2009). Users 76% vs. critics 53%.
40. Enemy at the Gates (2001). Users 76% vs. critics 53%.
41. Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983). Users 83% vs. critics 58%.
42. The Name of the Rose (1986). Users 77% vs. critics 54%.
43. The Thing (1982). Users 81% vs. critics 57%.
44. About Time (I) (2013). Users 78% vs. critics 55%.
45. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008). Users 78% vs. critics 55%.
46. The Sandlot (1993). Users 78% vs. critics 55%.
47. The Chorus (2004). Users 79% vs. critics 56%.
48. The Green Mile (1999). Users 86% vs. critics 61%.
49. The Last Samurai (2003). Users 77% vs. critics 55%.
50. La leggenda del pianista sull'oceano (1998). Users 81% vs. critics 58%.
51. Love Actually (2003). Users 76% vs. critics 55%.
52. Big Fish (2003). Users 80% vs. critics 58%.
53. Papillon (1973). Users 80% vs. critics 58%.
54. American History X (1998). Users 85% vs. critics 62%.
55. Back to the Future Part II (1989). Users 78% vs. critics 57%.
56. Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). Users 82% vs. critics 60%.
57. Jojo Rabbit (2019). Users 79% vs. critics 58%.
58. Watchmen (2009). Users 76% vs. critics 56%.
59. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002). Users 76% vs. critics 56%.
60. Falling Down (1993). Users 76% vs. critics 56%.
61. Ip Man (2008). Users 80% vs. critics 59%.
62. Scent of a Woman (1992). Users 80% vs. critics 59%.
63. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012). Users 78% vs. critics 58%.
64. Joint Security Area (2000). Users 78% vs. critics 58%.
65. True Romance (1993). Users 79% vs. critics 59%.
66. Fight Club (1999). Users 88% vs. critics 66%.
67. Dogville (2003). Users 80% vs. critics 60%.
68. Sherlock Holmes (2009). Users 76% vs. critics 57%.
69. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). Users 76% vs. critics 57%.
70. Robin Hood (1973). Users 76% vs. critics 57%.
71. Léon: The Professional (1994). Users 85% vs. critics 64%.
72. Se7en (1995). Users 86% vs. critics 65%.
73. V for Vendetta (2005). Users 82% vs. critics 62%.
74. The Blues Brothers (1980). Users 79% vs. critics 60%.
75. Dancer in the Dark (2000). Users 80% vs. critics 61%.
76. Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995). Users 76% vs. critics 58%.
77. The Hunt for Red October (1990). Users 76% vs. critics 58%.
78. The Help (2011). Users 81% vs. critics 62%.
79. Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001). Users 79% vs. critics 61%.
80. Midnight Express (1978). Users 76% vs. critics 59%.
81. The Prestige (2006). Users 85% vs. critics 66%.
82. Shutter Island (2010). Users 81% vs. critics 63%.
83. Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014). Users 77% vs. critics 60%.
84. The Experiment (2001). Users 77% vs. critics 60%.
85. Evil (2003). Users 78% vs. critics 61%.
86. The Count of Monte Cristo (2002). Users 78% vs. critics 61%.
87. The Game (1997). Users 78% vs. critics 61%.
88. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986). Users 78% vs. critics 61%.
89. Scarface (1983). Users 83% vs. critics 65%.
90. Harold and Maude (1971). Users 79% vs. critics 62%.
91. The Shining (1980). Users 84% vs. critics 66%.
92. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003). Users 80% vs. critics 63%.
93. The Sound of Music (1965). Users 80% vs. critics 63%.
94. Gladiator (2000). Users 85% vs. critics 67%.
95. Gifted (2017). Users 76% vs. critics 60%.
96. The Godfather: Part III (1990). Users 76% vs. critics 60%.
97. Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War (2004). Users 81% vs. critics 64%.
98. The Sixth Sense (1999). Users 81% vs. critics 64%.
99. The Machinist (2004). Users 77% vs. critics 61%.
100. First Blood (1982). Users 77% vs. critics 61%.

Loved by Critics, Hated By Audiences

To find the opposite, namely movies that had a high critic rating but a low audience rating, I switched over to the bottom 1000 list.  At first I tried looking for the highest ratio of critic ratings to audience ratings, but this wasn't too helpful, since for example a movie where the audience gave it a 1 out of 10 but critics gave it a 2 out of 10 would technically mean the critics liked it twice as much, but more accurately it means both groups hated it.  So I just took a look at movies from the bottom-1000 list that still got a critic rating of 65% or higher:

• Spy Kids (2001). Users: 55%, critics: 71%.
• Universal Soldier: Regeneration (2009). Users: 52%, critics: 70%.
• Cult of Chucky (2017). Users: 52%, critics: 69%.
• The Monster (2016). Users: 54%, critics: 69%.
• I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016). Users: 45%, critics: 68%.  This movie has the biggest whole difference of any in the list.
• Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams (2002). Users: 51%, critics: 66%.
• Earth Girls Are Easy (1988). Users: 54%, critics: 66%.
• The Girlfriend Experience (2009). Users: 55%, critics: 66%.
• Stuart Little 2 (2002). Users: 55%, critics: 66%.
• The Bling Ring (2013). Users: 56%, critics: 66%.

Oddly enough, I also spotted a number of movies elsewhere in the bottom 1000 list which I personally liked.  Not too surprisingly, they tended to get low ratings from critics.  Also, much like the top 1000 list, keep in mind that the bottom 1000 list only considers movies that have gotten a lot of ratings.  I'm sure you can find plenty of obscure B-movies which are even worse that anything in the bottom 1000 list, but for those ones it would be rare to find many ratings one way or another.

Equally liked by Audiences and Critics

Finally, I decided to go back to the top 1000 list and look for movies whose audience and critic ratings were equal.  Here were the only matches:

• The Godfather: Part II (1974) - 90%
• The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) - 87%
• The Departed (2006) - 85%
• The Pianist (2002) - 85%
• The Sting (1973) - 83%
• Downfall (2004) - 82%
• Ford v Ferrari (2019) - 81%
• The Martian (2015) - 80%
• Dallas Buyers Club (2013) - 80%
• Casino Royale (2006) - 80%
• Central Station (1998) - 80%
• Young Frankenstein (1974) - 80%
• Sing Street (2016) - 79%
• Life of Pi (2012) - 79%
• Iron Man (2008) - 79%
• The Untouchables (1987) - 79%
• Drive (I) (2011) - 78%
• Glory (1989) - 78%
• The Color Purple (1985) - 78%
• The Verdict (1982) - 77%
• Zulu (1964) - 77%
• Superbad (2007) - 76%
• Inside Man (2006) - 76%
• A Very Long Engagement (2004) - 76%
• The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) - 76%
• When Harry Met Sally... (1989) 76%
• The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988) - 76%
• The Secret of NIMH (1982) - 76%
• Escape from Alcatraz (1979) - 76%

Conclusion

Do critics tend to think in a certain collective way?  Do they use certain judging criteria which most general viewers don't?  Do some movies get made purely to appeal to critics?  I'm sure you can find other articles out there exploring these sorts of questions. I still wonder why the critics' fear of Joker led to having policeman standing around at every screening, including the one I myself went to.  Regardless, the first list gives me some titles I'm now curious to see.

Update. And March 16, 1989.

I think it’s been about 10 years since I started this blog. Most of its visitors seem to be people who search the web for a particular topic, and come to one of my pages. People who had followed it in the past may have concluded that my clutter problem was something I solved, and I lived happily ever after. Not quite. You can fix a car that’s been heavily damaged, but that doesn’t mean you never have to give it regular maintenance again. Likewise, an uncluttered home will inevitably need to be looked at again when things reach a point of getting out of control again.

I’ve reached a point where things have gotten pretty out of control again. But it was from that first major clean-up I took up and used this blog to document, that I learned so much about myself, my old habits, and decluttering. And that’s been helping me take on this new round. So lately I’ve been taking before & after photos along the way. You may see many new “Why the hell do I still have this?!?” photos in the upcoming weeks.

In the meantime, I have an anecdote I’d like to post here. It doesn’t have to do with clutter, but it does have to do with the 30^th anniversary of an event that recently passed. Here it is.

 

March 16, 1989 was one of those eventful days I have a good memory of. I remember four events in particular:

1) It happened to me my friend Danny’s birthday. Though by that time he was in a different school, so I didn’t see him on this day.

2) My homeroom teacher, who was a complete cunt, was actually out that day. That was rare. My wife had ended up having the same teacher some years after I had, and would probably use the same words to describe her.

3) I got into a fight after gym class. I started it. Though I think it would be more accurate to say I finished it. The boy who truly started it had started it with me 2 years before that, when he started to make relentlessly picking on me as a hobby. Did I win the fight? Rumor had it that I did. But in reality the fight was broken up by a teacher before it was finished. But the boy never bothered me again after that day.

4) I saw Metallica that night. It was my first time seeing them, and to this date the only time. Queensryche opened. What a show. I visualized a lot of vengeance and death to that boy from memory #3 as “Creeping Death” played. I managed to talk my mother into letting me stay home from school the next day on account of having been up late. Of course another part of that was not wanting to immediately go back to school the next day after memory #3. My brother, who was at the same concert, ended up going to school that day, much to his dismay.

Those were the big events on that day 30 years ago. I can still remember many little details about #3 and #4 too, for better or worse. It’s one of the curses of having a good long-term memory.

Cleaning up Sheet Music (Alice Cooper, "Pain")

Intro

This is a blog post where I babble a lot about sheet music, and eventually show the details of my attempt at making a semi professional-looking copy of the transcription to Alice Cooper's song "Pain" (1980).  Skip or skim as you like.

 

I still like the album version of this song the most, but he's also performed it in the move Roadie (see below), had an official music video, and even played it at some of his 2017 shows.

 

 

About My Sheet Music Hunting

In recent years I've been collecting a lot of sheet music.  The reason for this has been two-fold.  The less obvious reason is that sheet music can be very aesthetically pleasing to me, whether it's the artwork or just the phenomenon of seeing sound laid out in this visual way that humans have invented.  The more obvious reason of course is the practical one: I like learning and playing songs as a musician, and sometimes getting an officially transcribed source is the way to go. Earlier this year I researched, uncovered, learned, and performed a long lost 19th century song in honor of the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein:

 

Granted, you can search on-line and sometimes find "free" transcriptions of chord charts or guitar tablature for many songs.  But you may not find one for the song you want.  And even when you find it, the transcription can be pretty poorly done or just plain wrong.  

The Library of Congress website has been a fun source of music that's old enough to be in the public domain, which means their copyrights have expired.  I've found many fun songs from the era of World War One that I've learned and performed.  And there are music stores, of course.  But anyway, let's get to the topic in the headline here.

Amassing the other Alice Cooper Songbooks

In recent years I set out to obtain the various 1970s song books from Alice Cooper. Years ago my father gave me a pristine copy he had saved of a sheet music book of various artists who played the ABC "In Concert" series in the 1970s, including Alice Cooper along with other acts like Billy Preston.  Some years later I stumbled across a copy of the sheet music to Alice's Lace and Whiskey album in a store.  So what else was there?

Sickthings, an AC fan site, has a compiled list which was really handy.  So using that guide and starting from the beginning: 

• "Alice Cooper Complete". Well it wasn't really complete, but it sure had a lot of stuff from the original Alice Cooper band.  I found this on eBay, sold together with a set of other 1970s rock songbooks.  There are two versions under this title, but I bought the one with more songs.  Still absolutely nothing from the first two albums, and nothing but the title track from the beloved School's Out album, but a lot of songs none the less.  But for the rest of the 1970s, there was a songbook for each entire album.  Beginning with...
• "Welcome To My Nightmare".  This was my absolute favorite album in high school, and is still one of my "desert island" albums.  I was happy to get this in the same lot as the "Alice Cooper Complete".
• "Alice Cooper Goes to Hell".  This took me a while to hunt down on eBay and Amazon stores until I got lucky.  And it wasn't cheap.   But so worth it.
• "Lace and Whiskey".  As mentioned, I lucked out and found this in a store earlier.
• "From the Inside".  Purchased earlier this month, thanks to eBay.  This was another one that I found no listings for, but after checking and checking I finally got it.

Unfortunately, there's not much beyond that.  You can find some "best of" books for guitar with songs taken from these albums, one more song book (1989's Trash album), and a few individual song sheets not included in any of the above, but not a lot else.


Cleaning up Pain

In my search for more Alice sheet music, I decided to look at the album that came out after From the Inside, which was the 1980 album Flush the Fashion.  The first time I ever even learned of this album's existence was sometime around 1990, when I stumbled across the vinyl in a new & used record store.  I bought it, transferred it to cassette tape for convenient listening, and years later bought the CD import.

Apparently there was sheet music printed for the big single from this album, "Clones (We're All)".  Copies of this show up on eBay now and then.

However, after doing some more searching, I found an old, expired auction for a hand-written copy of his 1980 song "Pain":

 

 Here's what I noticed about this:

• The "handwriting" at first looked like some sort of digital font, not real writing.  But comparing some of the letters, I've since concluded that no, somebody seemingly wrote this by hand.  And very neatly, too.
• I suspect that the person who did the writing wasn't anybody special, like Alice Cooper himself or one of the other collaborators.  My guess is somebody just transcribed the song and was trying to make money by passing it off as an artifact.  But who knows.  Maybe it really was used in the studio.  I have no idea.
• All three pages of the song were scanned in full like this, and available on the site!  Not the best resolution, but certainly readable.  (PRO TIP: Don't do this with items you're trying to sell.  It gives the goods away. :) )
• Unfortunately, as you can see, there was a lot of bleed-through from the other side of the page.  I guess either the paper was really thin, or the ink was think, or it was pretty bad photocopying or scanning job. 

And now, here's what I did to make my own cleaned-up copy.

First, there was the task of cleaning up the original sheets:

• I opened up my trusty, free image editor of choice, Gimp.
• I didn't like that styling of the song title at the top.  So with all of that space available, I looked though my fonts to find a fun, obnoxiously 1980s-looking font to replace it with.
• The biggest challenge of course was removing that bleed over from the back pages.  I had to use a combination of contrast settings, brightness settings, level/threshold stuff, making a separate masked layer of just the music, redrawing some of the staff lines to correct for the lightening, and so on.  But I managed to get something I was pleased with.
• The original scans had pages 2 and 3 together in the same image, so I had to do some cropping to separate those.  They needed some different cleaning up anyway.

Also, I wanted to have a front cover for the music:

• Originally, I tried looking for a font that was close to the one shown on the album title.  Eventually though I gave up and just got a scan of the album cover, grabbed the original letters, and cleaned them up.
• Taking the scratched word "FASHION" from the front cover, I took the "F" along with the "A", "I", and "N", squashed them together, used some cloning (Ha! Song reference!) to alter the "F" into a "P". and voila: "PAIN".
• I remembered how the album came with two photos of Alice, from the same photo session.  One was on the back cover, one was inside the record sleeve.  I used the latter.  I cleaned up the photo a little too, giving it a slight sepia tint.

You can see the resulting cover at the top of this blog post.

Finally, I wanted to put it all together into a nice PDF.  Most individual songs you see printed are a single large sheet folded into a booklet to make four "pages": a cover on the front, two pages of sheet music inside, and finally the third page of the music printed on the back cover.

A wonderful free site I've used for this sort of thing before is https://png2pdf.com.   So that's what I did.  It was just a matter of uploading the PNG images, and pressing a button to create a single PDF out of them.  Click on the link below for the final PDF:

Download ac-pain.pdf

 

Happy 30th Anniversary to "Hysteria"

On August 3rd, 1987, I walked into my local Strawberries record store. I walked over to the "D" artist section of the cassette tapes. There I saw a male clerk putting copies of a brand new cassette tape into the vertical shelves. I realized the album he was putting in was the same new album I precisely walked into the store for. So I asked him for a copy. That album was Def Leppard's "Hysteria". (And for anybody who still thinks "album" necessarily means "vinyl", you're wrong. "Album" is the general term for an official music release, no matter which medium it takes.)

 

I really have to put the personal importance of this album into perspective. Def Leppard was the first band I could really call a favorite. On my 8th birthday I got "Pyromania" on vinyl from my best friend Robbie, and on cassette from somebody else. I ended up joining the fan club. I bought t-shirts and posters. I sought out and bought their first two albums. I was obsessed.

But tragedy struck in 1984 when it was announced drummer Rick Allen lost his arm in a car accident. It took four long years for the band to recover and rebuild itself. The status quo lost interest in Def Leppard. But as a fan, I kept my loyalty. I stayed in the fan club, reading the news updates over those 4 years. I certainly got into many other bands over those years, particularly other heavy metal banda of the day, but Def Leppard was never forgotten.

 I ended up losing that tape to an irresponsible friend named Craig, a.k.a. "Blinky" due to the way he'd firmly blink his eyes, who borrowed it and never gave it back. He insisted the case had shattered. Even though I had given him back his tape of "Diary of a Madman" I had borrowed. What an ignorant jackoff.

 But by the summer of 1988, the album went huge, and "Pour Some Sugar On Me" was arguably the biggest hit of that season. My father did business with somebody who worked for the local 108FM station, and that station sometimes traded tickets with the local rock station WBCN. So after pulling some strings he managed to get 2 tickets to see them in concert.

 

It remains one of my most memorable concert experiences. Great laser show. Joe Elliot donned a Sex Pistols shirt. A lady tried to storm the stage when Steve Clark was soloing. Another lady charged the stage when Phil Collen was soloing. Yet another woman stormed the stage and made out with Rick Savage as he played the keyboard. A muscular guy in front of me showed his friend the sugar cube he was holding, motioning how he's chuck it to the stage (as others would do that day eith sugar packets). It was a way to request their big hit. Our seats were in the center, about 20 rows back. And on the way to the venue, my father bought me a replacement copy of "Hysteria". I bought the book "Animal Instinct" that day. My baby boomer father strangely ended up loving Europe, the opening band.

Fast forward to August 3rd *1997*. I went back to the same store to buy "Hysteria" on CD. I told the clerk the story. He was indifferent. What an alternative-loving asshole.  The store eventually closed and changed into a flower shop anyway.

 Like the die-hard fans of certain other genres of music, metal fans sometimes get into the delusion that they "own" their favorite bands. Then when a band they love gets immensely popular, they feel cheated. "Hey! We can't have all of these NORMAL people listening to that band! That's MY band! Our fan club is exclusive, and our own! Damnit, my favorite band sold out!" Lots of people took that attitude with Def Leppard's "Hysteria", but I never have. I even worked a couple of tracks into my solo act. It will always be a memorable album for me of great songs, and the time when my favorite band made a huge comeback when the world still was against them.

Low balances on too many Vanilla Visa cards? Here's one solution.

One of the biggest magnets for clutter, at least for me, is the open space around my desktop computer. Recently I had to clear this out because my ISP was giving me a new modem.  In cleaning the area, I stumbled across a couple of Vanilla Visa cards.  I had two more I was keeping in my wallet.

For those who aren't familiar with the Vanilla Visa card, it's essentially a prepaid credit card.  A lot of drug stores and supermarkets sell them.  Some companies will give them out as gifts too.  You purchase the card for a flat fee and load it with a set amount of money, either paying for it with cash or from another credit card.  Then you can use it just like a credit card.  There are no additional fees; you already paid that up-front when you bought the card.  Some versions of the card are re-loadable, and some aren't.  I was using these for a while to help keep myself in budget, namely by loading a Vanilla Visa card with a set budgeted amount from my credit card, and then using only that loaded card to make purchases for the month.

One problem with these cards is that you can end up collecting a stack of them with low balances.  You may have one card with a balance of $1.29, another with a balance of $4.90, and a third with $11.50.  Unfortunately, you can't transfer all of those little balances together to one card.  So if you want to buy something that's $15, you're out of luck.  In theory, you could use the $11.50 first, then pay the remainder with one of the other cards, but most places won't let you split payments like that.

I searched on-line for some solutions.  Some suggested using them at the gas station.  It seems like a bit of a hassle to the clerk though to say you want to pay for 21 cents on pump #3, then come back and say you want to add 59 cents using this other card, and so on.  Besides, I think that like many places, some gas stations have a minimal amount that can be charged for a card.

Here's one solution that worked for me: transferring the amounts to Amazon!

Some pages suggested buying separate Amazon gift certificates for each of the separate cards you have, and them redeeming them.  But I found that you can just add them directly to your current Amazon gift card balance.  Here's how I did:

1. Find out the exact balance on each of your card(s).
   • I found out that there's a slight difference between the "Vanilla Gift" and "One Vanilla" cards.  In any case, if you look at the teeny-tiny print on the back of the card, you should see a website you can go to.  Usually it's "VanillaVisa.com".  You might be redirected to a different site from there.
   • In any case, you'll be able to enter in the card's number, expiration date, and CVV (three-digit code found on the back) to check the balance.
   • If it's not accepting the info, double check that you have cookies enabled for the site you're on, that it matches the type of card you had (I found that my "OneVanilla" card uses a different site than my "Vanilla Gift" card) and of course that you've entered everything correctly.
2. Log in to Amazon.com with your Amazon account.
   • I'm talking about the desktop website here, not the mobile app nor the mobile version of the website.  I'm sure you could accomplish it on those too, but I'm writing the directions here for what I'm seeing on the desktop site.
3. Click "Gift Cards & Registry" and "Reload your balance"
4. In the "Amount" box, type in the exact amount you found for one of the cards.
5. In the list of credit cards, click "Add a card".  Enter in the info for you Vanilla card.  
   • You're required to enter a name. I just used my own name and didn't have a problem.  I don't know if the name is actually checked anyway for gift cards.
6. You should now be able to follow the other buttons to transfer the amount on the card to your Amazon.com gift card balance.
7. Repeat this with any other Vanilla cards.

There's one catch to all of this: Amazon won't take any amounts that are less than 50 cents. I checked the balances of my four cards.  I had $0, $1.35, $6.21, and $0.21. The $0 card was useless, so that was simple enough to disregard.  The $1.46 and $6.21 cards were transferred.  This left one card with 21 cents.  The old me would have rationalized, "Let me hold on to this. Maybe I can find some way to transfer this too."  But I decided to just throw it away rather than have the burden of trying to find a way to spend 21 cents.

#VanillaVisa

John Wetton, RIP

Here's something I had posted to my Facebook page at the end of January when the news broke.

JOHN WETTON 1949-2017

There have been plenty of famous musician deaths in this past year following Lemmy, but this one really hurts.

I knew it was coming. I followed along on all of those updates from Twitter on elsewhere of Wetton's chemo treatments. I tried being hopeful. But I'd see those photos of him with his belt tightened to its tightest setting around his waist, and the photos where he looked less and less human. He fought a long battle. And I got the news mere hours after talking about him with a co-worker.

I had always known about Asia, but I don't think the Asia bug really bit me until the early 2000s. Sometime around then I was also introduced to Wetton's work with King Crimson. Being both a singer and a bass player myself, Wetton became a new source of inspiration. It wasn't long before Asia became one of my favorite bands.

The original line-up reunited sometime around 2006, and I made the effort to see them every time they came to town. I got a chance to meet John only once, at a VIP meet-n-greet in Connecticut. I made a point in telling him how incredible the (then) new album was.

In my solo act at the coffee house, I perform a number of Asia songs. I never went for the obvious "Heat of the Moment", though. "Face On The Bridge" was the first one I ever did. I've also done others I loved: "The Smile Has Left Your Eyes", "Don't Cry", "Judas", "Extraordinary Life", "Finger on the Trigger".

Well, my set list for my show tonight is pretty clear.

----

After writing this, with some time in the morning free before work, I banged out a few of these songs in the living room:

Brawndoism: When Stupid People Misunderstand the Smart as Stupid

When I got to middle school, I had to pick a foreign language class.  While most students were taking Spanish or French, I wanted to do something different, so I chose German.  I ended up taking German in middle school, high school, and college.  It's come in handy professionally for me too, with a few companies I've worked for.

One strange thing I learned about the German language is that it has quite a number of nouns for which there's no equivalent in English.  The German word Schadenfreude for example refers to a type of pleasure derived from seeing other people's misfortunes.  We can describe the concept in English as I just did, and many of us have felt it when we've laughed at a "Fail Blog" video clip.  But there's no single English word to describe it.  You can break the word down into a literal translation (Schaden + freude = "damage" "pleasure") but that doesn't tell us much.  Then there are wonderfully longer German words like Lieblingsfreizeitbeschäftigung.  I'll leave it to the reader to look up the meaning of that one.

In some cases we've taken foreign words and outright made them part of English use. We've done this with French words like déjà vu or gourmet, but we've done it with German too, when we talk about a culture's zeitgeist, referring to somebody really skilled or knowledgeable on a particular topic as that topic's meister, or a person having a doppelganger.

But enough of my introductory spiel.  Let's get to the headline topic.

Take a look at this scene from the 1987 horror movie House II.  Jesse (left) and Charlie (right) are on a dangerous mission to explore a room in Jesse's house.  Charlie arrives to the scene with a machine gun.  The following dialogue ensues:




This scene sticks out in my mind as one of the first examples I saw of the following phenomenon:

• Somebody says something rather brainy, witty, or sarcastic
• The listener is simply too unknowledgeable or dimwitted to pick up on it
• In fact the listener is so dumb, he or she ironically concludes that the speaker is stupid

Even if you've never seen this movie yourself, I'm sure you've seen other examples of what I described above.

So is there a word for this phenomenon?  Where something smart goes over the heads of stupid people, to the point where it's ironically perceived as being stupid?  I don't know of one in English.  I figured the Germans might have a word, but I haven't seen one.  If there's a word for this in some other language, then I'd love to know about. So far, I haven't heard one.

I ranted about this on Facebook before.  A friend of mine, Drew a.k.a. artist Mister 47 of Abaddon Arts, LLC, proposed the following word for it: Brawndoism.

The name is derived from "Brawndo", the fictitious brand name of a sports drink in the movie Idiocracy (2006). For those who aren't familiar with the film, it's about a man named Joe who is put into hibernation as part of a government experiment, only to wake up 500 years later to a world where everybody has an IQ of around 70 or below.  This now leaves Joe, who has an IQ of 100, as the world's smartest man.  He's asked to solve nation's food crisis and dust bowl problem, and learns that people have been watering crops with a green sports drink called Brawndo.  His suggestion is to use water instead.  But as you can imagine, he has a difficult time convincing the cabinet members at the White House:

And again, even if you haven't seen either of these movies, chances are you've seen Brawndoism.  For example:

• Maybe you've seen a friend make a sarcastic joke -- brilliant and even well-executed -- that just went over the heads of people who misread the friend as an idiot.
• Then there's the more specific phenomenon known as of Poe's Law, which states that you simply can't do a parody of extremism without SOMEBODY stupidly mistaking it as the real thing, no matter how thick you lay on the sarcasm nor how much you exaggerate.  A good example are the people who stumble across satirical Facebook pages such as "Christians for Michelle Bachman" or "Marijuana Makes You Violent", and, despite the over-the-top, blatant sarcasm, still invariably attract one or two people who think the page is serious.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that Poe's Law is always Brawndoism, though.  Stupidly mistaking a satirist as the real deal is not the same as mistaking a satirist for being stupid.
• I've also all too often seen alarmists and conspiracy theorist crackpots who, being too clueless about the topics they're passionate about, try to debate actual experts of the field and call the experts stupid.  For example, a layman who concludes that astronomers don't know anything because they "couldn't decide if Pluto was a planet".
• Similarly, somebody who calls a mathematician stupid for stating that 1+1 is equal to "10" in binary, because "everybody knows 1+1=2".  Speaking as somebody who got his degrees in mathematics, I've run into more than a few incidents like this.
• I remember one email correspondence where I used the word "anecdote", and the woman I was writing to called me stupid for having so badly misspelled "antidote".

I'm hoping that "Brawndoism" or a similar term catches on.  There's a power in having a word to describe something.  Maybe if we have a word for this phenomenon, it will be easier to point it out when it happens.  Unfortunately, by the very nature of Brawndoism, people on the "stupid" side probably won't acknowledge it when it happens.

At The Circus

Introduction

I was reading the news about the Ringling Brothers circus closing.  It made me think of my very first time I went to the circus. I’ve always had a pretty good long-term memory.  One of my many childhood memories is going to the circus with my father when I was about 3 years old.  Here's my attempt at remembering every detail I can about that day, almost 40 years ago.

The Skill Of Not Neglecting Neglection

First, to put this event in perspective, it's worth mentioning that I was the first child in my family.  When you’re the first child, you’re the center of attention.  This doesn’t mean your parents necessarily love you more than your siblings, but it does mean you marked the transition of your parents from “childless couple” to “parents”. My brother was born when I was about 2 and half years old.  When that happened, I was suddenly no longer the only child in the house.  I was no longer the center of attention. The new baby was.

My parents didn’t neglect me, though.  Somehow in the middle of work, raising a second child, going to night school for a master’s degree, and playing in a band, my father found time to take me to the circus.  So here's as much as I can remember about what was one of my first "father & son" trips.

My Circus Story: The Hall

We arrived in a winding hallway.  My father pointed to a humanless, automated organ, playing a song as the white and black keys mechanically went up and down.  At the time, I took it as a gag to imply there was an invisible man playing.  I guess the line between circuses and Halloween wasn’t so fine for me in this new experience.  Speaking of which…

We continued walking down the hall, and a clown appeared, looming over me, just a few feet from my face.  He smiled and said hi, continuing to stare at me from above, arms out stretched.  I just stood there in silence.  I was not scared.  But it was a lot to take in at once.  “Billy, you say ‘hello’?” my dad requested.  I just continued to take it in.  I looked at the chosen patterns of the clown’s greasepaint.  He was certainly a man underneath all of that.  I could make out the normal adult that was shielded by the painted mask.  He was none the less some stranger I’d never met.  Both the clown and my father quickly gave up on trying to make me say hello.  Realizing that the situation was uncomfortable (for them, not me), they went their separate ways.

The Beasts

I followed my father into another room, lit by a few naked light bulbs.  Through the huge crowd of people chatting and shuffling forward in their overcoats, I could make out the bars of a few cages.  “Hey Billy!” said my dad, pointing over to one of the cages.  “Look out for the bulllll!”, he jokingly sang.  The phrase was a jingle from a 1970s TV commercial, and one of many, many catchphrases he’d end up use around the house.  I looked over toward the other end of the room to see a behemoth of a bison. It stood still, but with anchored authority.  I gasped.  It was my first time seeing an animal that large before.

I found myself shuffling over with my dad to tall stacks of cardboard trays, each containing dozens of tiny 4 oz. Dixie cups filled with dry animal food.  I held my cup.  I fed an animal or two.  I held my little cup under the mouth of one goat.  It didn’t look at me nor the cup.  But after its mouth started to eat a few morsels, it then nonchalantly proceeded to pull the entire cup out of my hand.  I heard the Dixie cup crush under its teeth as I watched the cup fold into a triangle.  “Nooo!”  I screamed.  I turned around and started walking away, hands in the air.  "Ahhh!"  It was admittedly a bit of a mock-horror act on my part, as I played along with this strange experience of shock and humor.  “Billy, Billy!” my father called behind me.  “I got it back!  I got it back!” I turned back around. He presented my little food cup back to me, which he had managed to salvage from the goat's mouth. while I had my back turned.




The Ring

I really can’t remember if the petting zoo came before or after the main big top show that day.  But I do remember sitting in the dark stands with my father as we watched the main ring far below. I don't remember too many details of the show itself, but I'm sure it was standard circus fare. The only specific parts of the main show itself I really remember were ones where my father leaned over to me and commented.  “Ah-HA!”, yelled a magician.  “He just said, 'Ah-HA!'", my father commented.

At some point there was a clown with a rubber chicken hanging off of his back.  The gag was that he didn't know it was there, but the audience knew.  We were instructed to yell, "THERE'S A CHICKEN ON YOUR BACK!"  He looked back and forth but pretended he didn't see it.  We were instructed to yell it again.  "THERE'S A CHICKEN ON YOUR BACK!"  He still didn't see it. Seeing that the clown remained oblivious, without any cue, I started to yell the phrase again.  My father quickly hushed me, as this wasn't the time to keep yelling. [NOTE: After I wrote this part, I realized there's a slight chance I could be conflating two different childhood memories on this one. I'm pretty sure the chicken-on-your-back thing happened here, not at some clown or magician at a kids party or something, but as with any kind of memory recall like this there's always a chance I'm wrong.]

The lights flickered off and a man in the ring was seen shaking and running around with his arms in the air, painted like a skeleton. “Ooh, a skeleton.” my dad said with a mix of mild surprise, commentary, and intrigue.





At various parts of the performance, the stage lights would turn off as a new act moved to the stage.  It was during those brief seconds of darkness that we, the audience, did our part for the show: flashing lights and noise makers.  My instrument for this was a little yellow plastic gun. It was shaped like a fat hair dryer with a silver metal squeeze handle, and the circus’s logo in raised lettering on the side.  During that time, I was told to fire the gun.  Pulling the handle turned some mechanism inside, producing sparks as some internal gear spun and ground itself inside in a whirring rattle noise.  They glowed red through the red plastic windows on the side of the gun.  Other people in the audience similarly flashed their spark guns or special flashlights during these lights-out moments, effectively becoming part of the show.  There was one time when I decided to fire my gun as we were sitting during the lights-on part.  My father quickly told me to hold off.  I did.  [Note: Wondering if my vivid memory of this was still reliable, I searched eBay for '1970s barnum circus sparks gun'.  The photo here confirms what I remembered!]

I ended up keeping that little sparking gun for a few years.  But of course the sparks only had a so much of a shelf life.  At some point, squeezing the trigger would no longer produce any sparks. Years later at different circus trip with the whole family, my brother would have one himself, while I held a blue flashlight with a spinning mirror.  And some years after that, I remember seeing them both guns in the toy box, one clearly older and more worn out than the other.  No doubt the guns wound up with Toys for Tots as the years went on and more toys came in.  Regardless, history repeated itself that time all four of us went, as my parents shushed my little brother when he tried to fire his own aforementioned yellow spark gun once during the lights-on part.  



Closing

My family ended up doing countless things all together in the years that followed: car races, zoos, theme parks, beach trips, board games, ball games, rock concerts, and so on. But the four of us also did plenty of things one on one.  We still understand the value of all getting together, but we also all instinctively know the bonding value of just two family members doing something alone together too.  That was something I got from the circus.

Happy Pi (and S&BJ) Day

"I am repelled by wholesomeness."
    - George Carlin, 'Brain Droppings' (New York: Hyperion, 1997.  Print.)

"Steaks and orgasms: how empty life would be without them."
    - The Residents, 'Insincere' (2006)

I love mathematics, so I'd love to talk about "Pi Day" (3/14).  However, there are already plenty of sites for that.  So instead, I'd like to talk about another holiday that also falls on 3/14, namely because it's one month after Valentine's Day.  That day is known as "Steak and Blow Job Day".  Here's a site claiming to be the "official" one for it.  Hopefully the site doesn't crash like it tends to do every year on this day: http://www.steakandbj.org

So where does this idea come from, anyway? Well as I understand it, some radio station years ago decided to promote it as a low-brow humorous reaction to Valentine's Day. More specifically, it's a reaction to the way that Valentine's Day is largely celebrated: a sickeningly-wholesome, commercial, guilt-inducing Hallmark card holiday, centered around pleasing female partners with stereotypically "woman" stuff: flowers, chocolates, overpriced dinners, poetry, and so on. So the idea is that since these sorts of women have hijacked the holiday, then a month later there should be a day to equally celebrate the equally stereotypical man stuff. Personally, I think it's brilliant.

Now every year that I mention this, there are always people who say "But, but, but, it's not just for women!" or "But I buy my husband stuff too for Valentine's Day!" or "Well I'm not one of those shallow women, and in fact I abhor that sort of approach to Valentine's Day as much as you do." That's great! But you're all missing the point. The fact remains that the Valentine's Day phenomenon I described is a very real thing, regardless of whether you yourself participate. So you'd have to be incredibly myopic to not understand why a reactionary, satirical holiday like S&BJ day would come about in the first place.

Likewise, I've seen some men reject the idea by saying "Hey, if you have a woman who loves you and/or have a healthy relationship, then EVERY day is S&BJ day!", or simply "Every day should *BE *S&BJ Day!" Again, these people are missing the point. In fact, let's just take it back to the original premise: you could equally argue that if you have a good relationship in the first place, then you don't need a special day like Valentine's Day for love, since every day should be Valentine's Day. But in that case, then you reject the original B.S. I mentioned which the industry attaches to Valentine's Day, as it doesn't apply to you (again: that's great!), and thus you're really on the side of the people supporting S&BJ Day.

So for the men in relationships, and women who don't try to turn Valentine's Day into a second birthday party for themselves: Happy S&BJ Day!

 

Bill M.
3/14/16