Another Question, No Answers, About Spygate...

There's been a lot of hand-wringing about the possibility that the Patriots might have derived some advantage over the Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI by taping the Rams' practice the day before the game. What I don't understand is why nobody mentions that the Buccaneers gained a clear advantage over the Raiders in Super Bowl XXXVII because Jon Gruden, the head coach of the Buccaneers and head coach of the Raiders the previous year, told his defense everything he knew about the Raiders' offensive schemes. Is Gruden a cheater, or were the Raiders at fault for not changing their offense? Is Belichick a cheater, or were the Rams at fault for not having better security at their practice?

Yes, there is a difference in the situations, but it's odd that what similarities do exist have gone completely unremarked.

The Scar (Mieville, China)

Is that Mieville or Melville? With the same neck-wrenching plotting used in Perdido Street Station, China Mieville takes us on a fishing trip/pirate ship/spy story/exile's tale full of similarly wild imaginations in all-new settings. The Scar is less of an editor's nightmare than Perido Street Station must have been, and Mieville refrains from the worst of his tendencies to write long, semicomprehensible passages in an alien life-form's first person view. In the end, the novel is an exercise in non-too-subtle metaphors for the title, but surprisingly, it works. And it's effective.

Thread spool art

This past Saturday, we went to "Craft Attack", a family craft activity at the Fleming Museum. While there, we took Connor and Finn through the regular collection, where Connor liked the mummy best and Finn liked the more brightly colored paintings. We also passed through the Material Pursuits collection and made a great discovery: Devorah Sperber's After Van Eyck. I love the use of the commonplace thread spools to represent a pixelized digital image.

Jesus saves through the internet these days

Way behind on the blogging.

Reps from the LDS dropped by today; Sarah had seen them while out walking earlier, so I was ready when they walked up the drive. Unfortunately, dinner was waiting so I didn't have time to talk to them (and didn't want to encourage them by saying that I'd be available another time), so I simply thanked them for dropping by. They handed me a card with a picture of the heap-big Mormon temple on one side and a URL with associated text on the other; I handed it back, saying "I think I can remember www.mormon.org." They then told me that my family would be blessed simply by visiting the website. Maybe it was for the best that dinner was ready.

Guns of the South (Turtledove, Harry)

I'm trying to imagine the marketing possibilities: "Andries Rhoodie here. I just wanted to say that the discriminating time traveling white supremacist always chooses Apple for his 1868 computing needs. I'm not really entirely sure what we did with those Macintoshes, but a single video iPod holds enough kinky blinking porn to last the next 150 years. Thank you, Steve Jobs!"

Okay, I'm happy that after having to endure endless tripe about how the Southern states were "oppressed" by the Northern ones and that the Confederacy was built on "high ideals" (ignoring the slavery) that deserved to win out, that finally on page 411 (of the paperback) we get at a little bit of the truth: Jefferson Davis, worried about the voting split along state lines between Bedford Forrest and Robert Lee (who is a closet abolitionist) states, "Sectionalism appears to remain alive and well among us. That is dangerous; if we cannot cure it, it will cause us grief down the road: the United States, after all, tore asunder from a surfeit of sectionalism." Albert Brown (Lee's running mate) replies, "The Constitution of the Confederate States does not provide for secession." "Neither did the Constitution of the United States," Davis replied. "But if the western states have the gall to seek to abandon our confederacy as a result of this election, we shall--" He stopped; for once his facade cracked, leaving him quite humanly confused. EXACTLY!

All in all, it's a worthy read, if very slow to start out as we wade through Turtledove's excellent and exhaustive Civil War research.