I can’t resist a good blog-a-thon, and South Dakota Dark’s X-Files blog-a-thon, anticipating tomorrow’s release of the new X-Files movie, seemed as good as any. For the past couple of weeks I watched the date of the blog-a-thon approach and waited for a good idea to strike. By the time it began on Sunday, none had yet. And I don’t appear to be the only one — sad to say, the X-Files blog-a-thon appears to be even more sparsely attended than my “I Can Do It Better” blog-a-thon of a few months ago.

What can account for this? The X-Files was a major pop-culture phenomenon in its time. Was its time too recent? It takes a while to ferment a classic after all. Those who were fans while the show was on the air have long since moved on, finding no shortage of well-written, well-acted conspiracy/mystery/thriller/science-fiction shows. (I’m thinking particularly of Lost, whose jaw-dropping third season I just finished on DVD last night.) And it takes more than a scant decade for a new nostalgia-minded fan base to build.

As for myself, every time I tried to think of what to write about The X-Files, my mind kept drifting instead to The West Wing. Why was that happening? I think I know, and if I’m right, it doesn’t augur well for tomorrow’s premiere.

During the late 90’s, Andrea and I used to love sitting down and watching The West Wing each week. It took place in a progressive paradise where, even though the moneyed interests sometimes won — it was about presidential politics, after all, and dealt believably with moral and political dilemmas — at least the public interest was usually uppermost in the minds of the fictional senior officials.

Star Trek had nothing on The West Wing when it came to enticing visions of an enlightened possible future.

That all came to an abrupt end during a few wrenching weeks in late 2000. The real-life presidential election results were up in the air, hinging on voting irregularities in Florida. The bad guys gamed the system and bent the rules to get the count to go their way. The good guys, being too principled, didn’t put up enough of a fight. During those weeks there were reversals of fortune and counter-reversals and counter-counter-reversals. I was a wreck. I followed every development as closely as I could and each scrap of news flayed my nerves raw. Democracy itself was under attack, and everyone involved in the battle had a stake in the outcome — meaning there was no disinterested authority to help settle the matter reasonably, not even, in the end, the Supreme Court. That authority vacuum felt like a taste of anarchy; the election battle, a gang fight in a bad neighborhood where the cops never patrol. The bad guys won, democracy lost — and at once The West Wing went from uplifting, optimistic, educational entertainment to simple-minded, far-fetched wish-fulfillment fantasy. The very thought of watching another episode was almost too painful to bear. We did try a few times, but we weren’t entertained and we weren’t optimistic for the future. The show’s only remaining power was to remind us of the brutality perpetrated on our ideals and the ease and speed with which it had been done, and was continuing to be done.

I think something similar may have happened to X-Files fandom. After seven and a half years of George Bush, who could be entertained by the idea of a shadowy government conspiracy? Who would even find such a story remarkable? Our real-life news is a constant barrage of conspiracies and corruption taking place in broad daylight. Cigarette-Smoking Man, with his furtive ways, would be laughed out of the Bush administration! The Lone Gunmen wouldn’t be three weirdos in a basement shining light on official misdeeds, they’d be DailyKos! As for Mulder and Scully, if they wanted to keep their jobs at the FBI they’d have to accept assignments trumping up new terrorism fears, busting consumers sharing mixtapes, or cracking down on porn. (Hmm, that’s one Mulder might actually like.)

Well, there’s one thing that George Bush hasn’t managed to ruin, and that’s a good working relationship between two intelligent people with a lot of integrity and courage and a little sexual tension. If the producers were smart and made the movie be about that, then tomorrow’s premiere stands a decent chance.

At this point it looks like there’s only one choice: get money out of politics somehow or other. Meaningful campaign finance reform and other similar measures have the virtue that they address the very root of the problem, and the drawback that they will never, ever happen. (In part because of entrenched interests, but also in part for the legitimate reason that campaign spending has been equated with free speech, which must not be curtailed, especially in a political campaign.) Not to mention that any mere legislation, depending as it does on enforcement and judicial interpretation, is weak medicine in the current environment.

So are we screwed? Are we doomed to suffer the worst that tyranny and endemic corruption can ultimately produce?

I thought so, until I thought of two movies (because that’s how I think, in movies): The Untouchables and Schindler’s List.

You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!

Why are we (the good guys) denying ourselves the use of the most powerful weapon in the other side’s arsenal? I’m talking about bribery. To borrow a page from the NRA (“Guns don’t kill people…”), bribery itself is not the problem; the problem is what people are being bribed to do. There aren’t thousands of evil people in the Establishment. There are just a few; the rest are all whores. The thing is, when only evil people employ whores, the whores only do evil. But the nice thing about whores is that they’ll do whatever you ask as long as the money’s green.

Oskar Schindler understood this. He became one of the greatest heroes of the 20th century by using bribery for good for a change. At the cost of his personal fortune, he bought, via bribery, the lives of hundreds of Jews who were otherwise doomed. To him, it was nobler to befriend and enrich Hitler’s murderous sociopaths and actually accomplish something, dammit than it would have been to disdain those methods and let the “Schindler Jews” perish in the name of not lowering himself to the Nazis’ level.

That was just one man’s wealth. Imagine how much good we can bribe Establishment whores into doing if we pooled our resources! We could bribe Brian Williams into reporting the real news. We could bribe Nancy Pelosi into putting impeachment back “on the table.” We could bribe any number of high-ranking officials to ease their troubled conscience and spill everything they know about Bush administration misdeeds. (As if there were any shortage of evidence.) I thought of this, rushed to the nearest domain registrar and discovered that bribe4good.com was available, and started thinking about how to design a website where citizens could contribute money and dicuss how best to use it to fight bribes with bribes.

Of course, even though there is presently a raging epidemic of illicit bribery, and even though law enforcement agencies routinely look the other way, you better believe that if the good guys started using bribery, the law would crack down faster than you can say, “I’m shocked, shocked!” And forget about keeping secret a slush fund that consists of contributions from millions of individuals (hey, why not dream big), all of them with a say in how the bribes are to be allocated.

But perhaps a modified version of this idea could still work. Instead of setting up a slush fund and proactively bribing those in a position to fix our country, set it up as a reward fund instead, meting it out to those who contribute to achieving specific goals. “Presidential signing statements declared unconstitutional” — $100,000. “War crimes trials for torturers” — $250,000. “Expose attempted bribes between corporate officers and government officials” — twice the amount of the bribe.

I call it Healthy Lucre and have an embryonic demonstration website up and running. Watch this space for further developments.

His Department of Health and Human Services is now defining the use of birth control as “abortion.” (They must have read my blog and drawn the wrong conclusion.)

Subscribers to Comcast basic cable TV in Pittsburgh can no longer get the news on MSNBC (whose show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, is occasionally critical of President Bush), but they can still watch the Republican propaganda channel Fox News.

It’s been revealed that the Bush administration gave $43 million to the Taliban just four months before 9/11.

And this is just what’s been reported in the past day. My prediction for tomorrow: schools abolished; election coverage placed under state control.

Remember the legend of Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects? That when bad men held his family at gunpoint, Söze shot his wife and children himself rather than allow the bad guys to threaten him that way?

That’s what we’ve done to the America we once loved. The Constitution — BAM! The middle class — BAM! Clean air and water, reliable infrastructure, basic services — BAM! BAM! BAM!

That’ll show the terrorists.

Oh Gorby, where are you when we need you?

GORBACHOV: THE MUSIC VIDEO - BIGGER AND RUSSIANER from Tom Stern on Vimeo.

To goose my weight-loss regime, which appears to have stalled once again — though I am holding my own against the “Google 15” — I am adding a daily exercise regimen for the first time, inspired by hundredpushups.com: each day I will do one more push-up than the day before, starting with one today and culminating with a hundred push-ups by my birthday.

If I keep exactly to that plan, the total number of push-ups I’ll do is 5,050 — one today, two tomorrow, three on Wednesday, four on Thursday, and so on. The sum of the first N numbers from 1 through N is, in general,

(N+1) × N/2

an elegant intuitive proof of which is as follows. List the first N numbers, let’s say 6 for this example:

1 2 3 4 5 6

The sum of the two “outer” numbers is 7:

1 2 3 4 5 6

Removing those, the sum of the next two “outer” numbers is also 7:

2 3 4 5

Removing those, the sum of the final pair is also 7:

3 4

That sum — N+1 — is repeated N/2 times, giving rise to the formula

(N+1) × N/2

“Wait a minute,” I hear you say. “What about when N is odd? Then there’s one extra innermost number with no partner.” That’s true. In that case, the number of pairs that add up to N+1 isn’t N/2, it’s only (N-1)/2:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Here N is 7, and there are 3 pairs that add up to 8 — 1 and 7, 2 and 6, 3 and 5 — and 4 is all alone in middle. So the sum is:

(N+1) × (N-1)/2 + the middle number

But the middle number is always (N+1)/2, so this becomes:

(N+1) × (N-1)/2 + (N+1)/2

which is the same as

(N+1)/2 × (N-1) + (N+1)/2

which can be read as adding one more (N+1)/2 to a collection of N-1 of them, for a total of N (N+1)/2’s:

(N+1)/2 × N

which is the same as

(N+1) × N/2

which is the same as the original formula above whether N is odd or even. QED.

OK, let’s get this regimen started. Rrrrrnnnnngghh — one. Whew.

Inevitably Andrea raised the question, “Did that guy ever do anything else?” referring to Paul Freeman, the actor who turned in a memorable performance as Belloq, Indy’s Nazi-collaborating rival.

Opening a mental filing cabinet I said, “I only remember seeing him one other time, in a British TV series on PBS of all things, a year or two after Raiders. I think it had something to do with solving mysteries with science. It might have been called Q.E.D. Come to think of it, Sam Waterston might have been in it!”

When I went online to confirm this, I found that my recollection was faulty in one way: I had seen Paul Freeman two other times, including in the very funny Sherlock Holmes parody, Without a Clue, in which he played Professor Moriarty. But I was exactly right about Q.E.D. — it was a British TV series about solving mysteries with science, its few episodes aired on PBS between one and two years after Raiders, the star was Sam Waterston, and Paul Freeman was indeed in one episode. I remember being disappointed that he was nowhere near as suave as he’d been in Raiders. (But that was OK, because Sam Waterston was the main attraction. In my house growing up, we were all big fans of Waterston thanks to his droll performance in the movie Hopscotch.)

Incidentally, despite my having seen Freeman in a total of only three roles, his filmography lists nearly a hundred film and TV appearances I managed to have missed.

Now here’s a Lucky Strike extra: co-starring with Freeman in Q.E.D. was Julian Glover, who a few years later would play Indy’s other Nazi-collaborating rival, Walter Donovan, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

President Bush has been pushing and pushing to get Congress to pass a bill granting him expanded warrantless surveillance powers, even though the existing FISA court already served as a rubber stamp to approve almost any wiretapping the Executive Branch wanted. Why then would he need such powers? Obviously it’s to conduct surveillance that even the FISA court wouldn’t approve — i.e., surveillance not essential to national security.

Cheney and Rumsfeld
The White House, 1975

What was it that the Nixon administration was busted for? (You know, the administration in which Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld served?) Oh yeah: spying on its political rivals.

Bush has also insisted that any such bill include retroactive immunity for the telecom companies that complied with his illegal orders by conducting electronic eavesdropping on Americans without duly obtained warrants. So they can never be sued for those illegal acts. So the facts never have to come out in court. Bush has shown so little concern for the law to date — undermining Federal agencies, approving torture, striking out bits of legislation he doesn’t like, defying Congressional subpoenas — and has suffered so little in the way of consequences, why would he need to make sure the facts of past warrantless wiretaps never came to light? Obviously because those facts are so heinous that for once, Bush and his friends would be in serious trouble if exposed.

Where is it that Bush recently made a huge purchase of land? Oh yeah, Paraguay — that haven for state-level criminals fleeing justice, where the notorious Josef Mengele and other Nazi officials ended up after the fall of the Third Reich (which was funded in large part by Bush’s grandfather, by the way).

Fortunately, the Democratic Congress beat this legislation back a few times, albeit with difficulty. They were responding to outrage from the public about the bill’s frontal assaults on the Constitution: the vast new powers being handed to the Executive branch, the near-elimination of protections against unwarranted search and seizure, the institution of precisely the kind of tyrannical authority that moved the Founders to rebel in the first place. There was no corresponding outcry in favor of the law, except from telecom lobbyists.

As recently as May it seemed like this issue was finally dead until the next Congress — and the next Presidential administration. Crisis averted, right? Not so fast: all of a sudden, the bill was back in Congress, and before you could say “Bush and Pelosi sittin’ in a tree,” it had been rammed through the House of Representatives. There was an interlude during which a vast coalition of citizens, rights groups, legal experts, whistleblowers, and editorial boards raised an almighty uproar (and a lot of cash) in opposition to the bill — and then yesterday the Senate passed it anyway, at the behest of a president whose approval rating is the lowest in the history of presidential approval ratings. Wasting no time, a gleeful Bush signed it today. It is now the law of the land.

(That is, it’s the law of the land only if you believe that when Congress passes a bill and the President signs it, that makes it the law of the land. The only thing saying it’s supposed to work that way [besides Schoolhouse Rock] is the Constitution — that document that we just keep ignoring anyway, and about which Bush is on record as having said, “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper.”)

What can account for this abrupt reversal, this unaccountable betrayal, this act of seeming political suicide? Why did Congress — the Democratic Congress — stir itself to such swift action for the benefit of George Bush, a terrible, evil, and unpopular president, their sworn enemy, the man whom we elected them to bottle up before he could do any more damage to our beloved nation?

Some might say that the administration has to do nothing more than publicly utter “national security” and the spineless Dems wet their pants with visions of Republicans calling them “soft on terror” at re-election time. A year or two ago that might have been all it took, but I think most Americans can tell that the Bushies have gone to that well a few times too often. I don’t think it is the source of electoral fright for Congresspeople that it once was.

Cynics would say that the telecoms and/or the administration simply bribed the hell out of our lawmakers. I’m sure that played a part, but there’s clearly something more at work here than run-of-the-mill payola.

After seven and a half years of George Bush I think I know his administration well enough to say with confidence that they would never use just a carrot when a carrot and a stick would work so much better. It seems likeliest to me that an element of blackmail was involved. Has the Bush regime been collecting damaging intel on legislators? Has it done such a thorough job of spying on its political rivals that it can now use some secret dossiers to compel them to legalize spying on political rivals? Is this how it’s been getting them inexplicably to roll over on issue after issue despite the public humiliation and the clear will of the electorate?

If I were a lawless cabal intent on a scorched-earth looting of America, that’s certainly how I’d operate.

So obviously Bush and his gang have some pretty good dirt to hold over the heads of our elected officials. To be blackmailed into commission of a gross dereliction of duty — directly contravening their oaths to uphold the Constitution — some of our Congresspeople must have some major skeletons in their closets. The kinds of secrets that would cost them their fortunes or land them in jail.

Well Congress, you may have just cut off the public’s avenue for investigating Bush’s abuses, but we will need justice sooner or later, and if those skeletons really are there to be found… well, Rambo said it best when he was hung out to dry by a weaselly bureaucrat:

Citizens, here is what to do in the meantime:

Culture Snob has asked for blog posts about movies that elicited very personal reactions, a subject on which I’ve written at great length here at gee bobg. I don’t have anything new to write on that subject right now (except to publicly recite my mantra for upcoming movies that look cool: “Dark Knight, please don’t suck, please don’t suck, please don’t suck”), so instead here’s a short retrospective of things I’ve said about how movies have affected my life.

To begin with, there’s Star Wars, which enveloped me in a miasma of intense fandom from age 10 to about age 20, at which point the mist began to clear and I finally started being able to think critically about it.

I had already developed the odd habit of recording, memorizing, and reciting the dialogue of miscellaneous TV shows when Star Wars came along and spurred me to perfect that strange hobby. Thanks to that (and to obsessive audio-recording of movies on HBO) I became something of an expert in verbatim, memorable movie dialogue, which contributed to the initial courting of my wife — I presented her with a transcript of The Princess Bride, written from memory, which amazed and delighted her (and which she still keeps handy) — and led me to a unique and lucrative entrepreneurial adventure.

(It was not my first movie-based entrepreneurial effort.)

Then there’s Koyaanisqatsi, the movie that was the first one I ever watched with my later-to-be-wife, and the strange way that came full circle when the aforementioned lucre ultimately got us invited to the gala premiere of the final film of the “Qatsi” trilogy.

More recently I’ve been better able to appreciate the message that some films have for parents and those facing middle age. Which is not to say I don’t sometimes return to those few films that transport me back to childhood by evoking New York the way I remember it.

As you know, e-mail is a long-established standard, but there’s one piece missing from it, and that’s a standard way to be notified when new mail arrives. E-mail clients are required to “poll” e-mail servers for new mail periodically. Most polls reveal no new mail to download, and so are a waste of bandwidth and computing time. It’s a negligible waste to a single user, but if you’re an ISP with millions of polls happening every minute, it really adds up. [...]

Something similar is true for RSS feeds, which are getting more and more popular. You subscribe to someone’s blog posts, or to a news-clipping service, or whatever, and your feed reader shows you the new articles as they become available. But there again, the feed reader is required to poll all the sites to which you subscribe; there is no standard way for those sites to notify you of when there are new messages available. [...]

The arrival of new mail or the appearance of new blog posts are called “asynchronous events,” meaning that they happen without regard to whatever you may be doing at the moment. Most of the time, our computing infrastructure is obliged to use synchronous methods (like polling) to check for whether any asynchronous events have occurred lately. But that doesn’t have to be true. You could arrange for an asynchronous “listener” to be notified of asynchronous events and then take appropriate action. [...]

I went on to describe an idea for an Internet-based service that delivers asynchronous events. I started working on a prototype. But that was around the same time that I left my job at Danger and was busy looking for a new one. There was also a birthday party to plan, and a family trip to New York, and another birthday party, plus a consulting gig and the beginning of a new job at Google. My asynchronous-event-delivery service went near the bottom of my priority list.

Then just a few days ago I learned about Gnip, a brand-new venture-funded startup that is the exact same idea, right down to hosting it on Amazon’s cloud-computing infrastructure for scalability. To add insult to injury, their clever name — “ping” spelled backwards (to “ping” a computer on the network is akin to polling it) — could not have been more perfectly chosen if their aim was to highlight my slowness off the mark.

This is not the first time I’ve been beaten to the punch with a clever online business idea. It’s maddening.

There are endless numbers of movies in which New York City is the star: New York as we’ve always imagined it; New York as we wish it really was; New York as we fear it actually is or might become. This is not about any of those movies.

I grew up in New York City, and by the time I left it to go to college I had an ample collection of authentic New York experiences under my belt. I explored every nook and cranny of the subway system. I told a cab driver to “step on it” and then hung on for dear life. I ate at Horn & Hardart’s. I outwitted muggers. I hung out at Greenwich Village coffee shops past midnight. I rode my bicycle hell-for-leather through midday traffic. I took my prom date on a horse-and-buggy ride up Sixth Avenue and through Central Park. In the middle of a discussion with my friends of the parallels between The Warriors (a New-York-as-we-fear-it-actually-is movie) and Homer’s Odyssey, a complete stranger joined in and explained that the more apt classical comparison was with a work called Xenophon’s Anabasis.

So when I got to college in Pittsburgh I felt smugly cosmopolitan. Pittsburgh was a podunk backwater by comparison, and the people I met there — the first people I ever knew who weren’t from New York — were country bumpkins sorely in need of being edified by me about the marvels they’d been missing by lacking a big-city upbringing. Honestly, it’s a wonder I made as many friends there as I did. For a time I was insufferably superior about having come from New York.

One day, I made a remark along these lines to my friend Mike, something about how he, being only from Rochester, NY, should take my word about something or other since I was from New York, NY. It wasn’t the first such remark I’d made, but it finally crossed the line for Mike, and he called me out. I wish I had a transcript of exactly what he said. I remember it both as very perfunctorily putting me in my place and also as encompassing all of the following points:

• Though New York City may contain many things to see and do, they are still only a small fraction of all the things there are in the world to see and do;
• Though growing up in New York City may provide a broader perspective on the world than growing up elsewhere, it is still only a single perspective;
• Though very many people live and work in New York City, it is still only a small fraction of all the people in the world; and
• Most of the other people in the world don’t go around saying that they know better than everyone else just because of where they’re from.

I don’t know if this was the first time my arrogant attitude was directly challenged, or just the first time that it got through to me. Either way, it had the desired effect, and then some. I recognized the validity of Mike’s criticism and took it to heart. No one ever heard that sort of elitism from me again — an improvement in my personality for which I will be forever grateful to Mike. Moreover, I began to open up to the charms of Pittsburgh. Before long I felt completely at home there, where previously I had only ever measured it against my memories of New York and found it wanting.

All of which is just preamble to the point I want to make about New York. When Mike gave me that much-needed dressing down he made me feel distinctly provincial, which at first struck me as an odd way for someone from The Big Apple to feel. The City That Never Sleeps! Gotham! But I had to admit that my worldview, and that of most of the other New Yorkers I’d left behind, was as insular, as parochial, as uncultured in its way as that from any one-horse hick town.

And that’s when my idea of New York began to change. It wasn’t really the teeming, glitzy metropolis that everyone always claimed, any more than Norma Jean was really Marilyn Monroe. At heart New York City was actually the world’s biggest small town — or rather, the biggest collection of small towns, jammed close together.

It’s hard to nail down just what I mean by that, but that’s where movies come in. Offhand I can think of a few films that capture the Norma Jean face of New York City, so you can see what I mean without my having to strain my writing muscles.

A movie like Woody Allen’s Manhattan does not capture it, because it makes the city bigger than the people in the story. It’s a New-York-as-we’ve-always-imagined-it movie. A movie like the little-seen Rich Kids, on the other hand, does. It can be set in no place other than New York, but not because New York makes the characters be who they are — the characters make New York what it is.

Neil Simon was good at this kind of New York story, and ironically the main characters in his best one, The Goodbye Girl, aren’t even New Yorkers! Marsha Mason’s character is from Cincinatti; Richard Dreyfus’s is from Chicago. But their banter is a big part of what makes New York the city it is. Quinn Cummings, even more so.

Martin Scorsese’s movies almost qualify for inclusion but rely too heavily on the violent (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver) and the bizarre (Taxi Driver, After Hours) to really capture my New York — the real, personal, cozy New York of my youth, the New York made primarily of neighborhood people and not of melodrama. On the other hand, Eyewitness and Dog Day Afternoon do qualify. Even though each contains some melodramatic crime and violence elements, they are both populated by actual New Yorkers: outspoken, ethnic, irritable, big-hearted in spite of everything; people who thoroughly inhabit their own small communities that form the patchwork quilt of the city.

It’s strange: Hero At Large captures my idea of small-town New York, but Turk 182! does not. Both are lighthearted comedies about anonymous heroes whose exploits capture the imagination of the entire city, but it’s instructive to see how Timothy Hutton and Robert Urich, the brothers in Turk 182!, fail to embody the things about New York that I’ve been talking about despite their obvious efforts at characterization, while John Ritter and Anne Archer, whose acting skills are blander, nevertheless succeed in Hero At Large on pure heart.

I’m sure I’ve failed to convey my point very well, but if you watch some of the movies I’ve named, maybe you’ll understand what I mean. Or maybe it’s only possible to understand that feeling about New York if you grew up there in the 1970’s, when giant retail chains did not yet dominate the landscape and perhaps it really was more of a small town than it is today.