Work Avoidance

Guest Artists

2008-11-17T21:39:19Z

Okay for this year's (post) anniversary guest art series, a bunch of the great folks over at The Webcomic List agreed to work from scripts I'd provided them. The scripts continue the parallel stories of Penny's birth and the birth of her baby.

Today's art was done by he bizarrely talented Owen Gilbride (Lord Pandar) of A Large Panda.

Last week's Comic

2008-11-07T20:56:52Z

...is up. Working on today's as we speak. Also a review. Maybe.

C-Ya

2008-10-25T11:12:36Z

I'm going on vacation into the wilds of West Texas. Next week's comic will go up when I get back, probably over the weekend. I'll start back up with the reviews, then, too.

New Comic

2008-10-24T22:01:26Z

Told you that comics would be restarting on October 24th. Nyah!

The end of the big hiatus is coming (and other stuff)

2008-09-03T01:16:18Z

First off, I can't tell you how much it amuses me that LiveJournal now has me behind an age wall because I drop a few F-Bombs. What would they do if I was posting Harry Potter/Dr. Horrible fan slash, nuke my house?

Anyway, on to the end of the hiatus. I have not been entirely idle during the down time. I have been practicing a few things, taking care of a few others, and making more than a few very hard decisions. First and foremost, the comic will be continuing in its present form at least until Scot and Penny's baby is born. After that, there may be some minor changes in focus.

I expect to redesign the site. Currently, it's a mass of nested html spaghetti code, so I'll be rebuilding some things deleting some others, and (hopefully) converting archive links to php calls. My web-god and host, Joe, recently migrated the whole server to a new service with faster rates but smaller storage. I wasn't even approaching my old storage allocation, but I want to check with him (and get his inestimable advice) to see what we can and should economize.

With any luck, the whole schmeer will be done by the comic's 4th anniversary on the 24th of October. In any case, the comic will relaunch by then if not sooner.

Comic's up

2008-05-04T23:58:14Z

Really!

Coming soon

2008-04-27T23:42:42Z

Beenh spelunking archives all weekend. Reviews up when I've scraped my brains off the wall and scooped them back into my skull.

Crawling Out of the Cave

2008-04-22T20:24:13Z

Yeah...sorta been out of it for a while. Comic returns on May 5th. I'm just going to pick it up from, where it left off with no back-dating or anything as if the last three months didn't happen.

Also, there's a new review up.

Cardboard Cutouts Part Three

2008-02-26T16:14:18Z

Achieving a Real Mandate
Imagine living in a place where more than sixty per cent of the registered voters voted against the winning candidate. If you live in Texas, you don't need to imagine it, you're living it. Like I am. In 2006, incumbent Rick Perry won the election with only 39 per cent of the ballot. This was, in large part, dues to the so-caled "spoiler effect" of the two major independent candidates in the election. Well that, and the fact that Texas statewide elections employ a plurality system.

A plurality system is one where candidates are elected and issues decided by a single vote, and whoever gets the most votes win. This differs from majority elections where candidates and issues are required to receive at least half (simple majority) or some set minimum (preset majority—alway a larger fraction than one-half).

The "spoiler effect" only exists in places where the plurality system holds sway: A strong independent candidate, rather than expressing a reasonable chance of winning the election, tends to draw votes away from the party to which he is most closely aligned. The upshot of this is that power is concentrated in established corridors, with little likelihood of new ideas being introduced into the system.

Mind you, I don't think that the plurality system was instituted as an intentional and cynical method of maintaining power. originally, I'm sure they were instituted as a matter of expedience. The United States is a big place, and with notable exceptions on the East Coast, the states themselves are pretty big, and for a long time, it just wasn't feasible to elect candidates to office by even simple majority. For one thing the vast communications network necessary for determining runoff positions and notifying voters of a runoff election quickly and efficiently didn't exist until around 1925 or so. The other major obstacle was counting procedures; the technology for mechanically or electronically counting ballots didn't really exist until the last half of the 20th Century. These difficulties in coutning and communications are the reason that for most of the life of our country, the Presidential Inauguration took place on March 20 (this was changed in 1932, with the ratification of the 20th Amendment). It's odd that our leaders recognized the changing trends of communications as they regarded the ratification and exploitation of election results, but not the effect on the process itself.

It is no longer unfeasible to hold a runoff for every election. Because of this, the plurality system is a dinosaur in desperate need of revision. Now, I've heard of ideas of holdin "instant runoffs". These would be complex ballots, much like the judging ballot for beauty pagents, where candidates are scored on a sliding scale, and mathematical wizardry is used to determine fromt hat who would win. With all due respect to those who champion such systems, that's crap. In any election very few people know who they're "for" beyond their main candidate of choice, and asking people to fiull out a score card in the few minutes most people have in the ballot booth is just unreasonable. In a runoff situation it always comes down to who the supporters of the minor candidates hate least, and an "instant runoff" will not make that happen.

I am more in favor of traditional runoffs, in all election. Election results are generally fully tallied within 48 hours, and, even in the worst case possible, there are 79 days between the general election and the date of inauguration. Even factoring in weekends and a week off for Christmas, that provides plenty of time for a runoff announcement and an abbreviated runoff campaign. That's all it takes. Take the top two candidates by plurality from the general election, place them on a ballot for an election to be held before (say) December 1, hold the election with those candidates only (no write-ins), and bingo! You have an actual mandate from the people. Assign electors in the manner I described last time, and I guarantee, our Presidential elections wil quickly stop being the divisive, frustrating circuses we've grown so used to. Candidates, freed from the expedience of appeasing some amorphous majority, will stop being cardboard cutouts spewing platitudes, and maybe become actual people talking about actual issues.

A Very Annoying Year

2008-02-26T16:09:46Z

I suppose you folks have noticed that there haven't been any updates in the past couple of weeks. Well, my computer started acting all wonky some time ago, and round about the last rant it started getting seriously unstable. So, in order to not have to deal with the mayhem involved in having the system fail entirely, I bought a new computer while I still had something that vaguely resembled a computer to work from, and have been transferring files, email addresses and necessary programs since. Yippee!

Free Association

2008-02-18T11:47:05Z

It's five-thirty in the morning and I've already been up for over an hour. A dream awakened me. I've always had extremely vivid dreams, and they're often diturbing to me (not Ted Bundy disturbing, more sadness and regret disturbing, as if my conscience likes to trot out all of myold failures and sins and parade them in front of me to browbeat me into submission). A lot of the time I wake up from the at a particularly intense point. Normally, I can get back to sleep, but sometimes, the dream returns, or a dofferent dream follows the same theme, and at the point of fullest intensity, I awaken.

I did, however, get an idea for a reality show. Basically, you get people whos marriage is in trouble and you give them a week or a month—some fairly long time period—at a resort of some kind. You tell them that there will be cameras everywhere (but not specifically where), and give them counselling and group activities, but here's the thing...you also give them plenty of free time to do stuff on their own either together or alone (ar at least thinking they're alone...the cameras will always be with them). Essentially, you give folks the opportunity to work on themselves but you also give them enough rope to hang themselves, and then you watch to see which they do. I see it as sort of a combination of Dr. Phil and Cheaters.

A friend of mine mentioned last night that fashion shows and films often use foam latex nipple prosthetics to get nippleage on demand. I can't help but wonder why, and how? As in how do you start doing that? Are there nipple specialist firms that make prosthetic nipple in a variety of shapes and sizes, or can you just get them from a theatrical make-up company. Do youhave to order then exactly by size or do they come in a variety pack? Donna mentioned that given the shape of most runway models, nipple prosthetics are probably the closest they'll ever get to filling out a bra (thereby proving that they are not, in fact, just very pretty boys).

Okay, done.

Cardboard Cutouts Part Two

2008-02-16T02:36:55Z

200 years in college and still no degree

Before I get into this too deeply, let me first point out that I am not one of those guys who thinks that the Electoral College should be completely dissolved. I don't think anyone with a small amount of reason believes that direct election of the President would be a good thing, and, if they did, all it would take to convince them otherwise would be a short trip to Walmart or Target on the day before a major gift-giving holiday. I am also not in favor of any sweeping Federal mandate on the subject. If anything, I'd like to see fewer Federal mandates on a lot fewer subjects. I've always been of the opinion that one of the main causes of the failure of the Soviet Union was the attempt to centralize the daily government of a huge land area, undermining local authority and responsibility to the point that bureaucratic apathy and corruption became commonplace.

If you haven't guessed, the next item in my little hit parade of difficulties that need to be addressed in order to fix our electoral system is the electoral college. The electoral college was invented by the drafters of the Constitution to prevent Americans from knowing how their government works. The simple mention of the name has put most of you into a sleepy torpor, I can tell. Right now, you're trying to remember what the girl who always wore sweaters even when it wasn't really cold looked like, and imagining what she might've looked like with the sweater off (women readers are doing this, too; the sweater-girl was ahead of her time in that she was an equal opportunity ogling target). Well, High School is over, so wake up! We'll never fix the country if you waste all day reminiscing about a girl you were too lazy or shy to talk to. (For the record, I married her, and her breasts are even better than you imagined!)

Actually, the electoral college is pretty simple. Like the primaries, where you vote for delegates to the party conventions, when you vote for President, you really vote for a slate of Electors who, in turn, get one shot at coming up with a President. What I mean by this is they get together in Washington, and they vote once, and the candidate receiving a majority of electoral votes becomes President. If they can't come up with a majority candidate, then the question is left up to the House of Representatives. This has happened more than a couple of times in our past. It has been suggested that it was intended that there would never be a clear Presidential winner in the Electoral College, and the House would always determine who the President would be. This is the same House that was going to clean up Washington, bring the boys back home, and shut down Big Brother, but only managed to hold a couple of hearings and run for Senate vacancies created by Presidential campaigns.

Now in and of itself, the Electoral College isn't a bad thing. In most cases, the offset representation actually increases the power of individual voters. What needs to be changed is the way Electors are selected. Right now, the vast majority (by which I mean all, but I'm not sure, and I don't feel like looking it up) of states nominate their Electors under a winner-take-all plan. This means that if you win Texas you get 34 representatives in the Electoral College. More to the point, this means that if you win Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas, you will very probably get 34 representatives in the Electoral College, and if you win New York City or Los Angeles, you will definitely get New York's 31 Electors or California's 55.
Winner-take-all selection concentrates all power within our major urban areas and the states that contain them. It would be possible to win a Presidential election by winning only 12 states. Admittedly, those twelve key states together represent 58 per cent of the national population, but that's an even greater reason to move away from WTA selection. It's unlikely that any Presidential candidate would walk away with all of the electors of any of the key states under any system other than winner take all.

But the problem is that the Electoral selection process is determined by the individual states. I believe this is the right and proper way to do it, for the reasons cited above, but I also think that we Americans should start to lobby our state legislatures to fix them, and it's got to start in the key states. The non-key states can't afford to switch to a mores reasonable plan because that would water down what little influence they have now, but key states have influence whether they go winner-take-all or not. The only difference a reassessment would make in Texas is that the news organizations would no longer be able to report a winner as soon as Harris, Fort Bend, Tarrant, Fort Worth, and Bexar counties had reported.

Anyway, here's my plan for fixing the College, and remember, this has to be done on the state level, starting with the key states. The number of electors allotted to a given state is equal to the number of congressmen and senators that state has added together. My idea is that we should take that allotment literally. Each state should have two at-large electors, and a slate of electors elected from the state's various Congressional Districts. That would mean that if I, and the rest of the 9th US Congressional District of Texas, voted for the ragged remains of Ron Paul's candidacy (not that I would), then he would have one elector, plus a number of votes for the two at large electors. I think this sort of redistribution would open the field more and ensure a better race.

Of course the race itself needs to be fixed. At least the way we count a winner. But that's for next time.

Updates a-comin'

2008-02-15T14:07:06Z

Yeah, I know. I haven't updated in a while, even after saying I was going to try to catch up. That's a fair criticism, and in my defense, let me just say, shut the hell up.

As some folks know, my old Toshiba tv finally died at the beginning of January. This was expected. It hadn't been particularly reliable since Tropical Storm Allison, and Donna and I had been laying back money for an eventual replacement. So, while Donna did the legwork involved in pricing and comparing various models, I decided to start building a tv table to provide a home for the new monster. If you didn't know, the makers of tvs aren't even pretending to make console models any more, and all tv's have to sit on some sort of platform. The cheapest of these (that didn't look like it belonged in a prison day room) ran about $150, so we decided that it would be better to just go ahead and build one. Sadly, I cheaped out on the wood, and it didn't come out as hoped. If you ever plan to do any major joining, I would advise that you remember that designs that depend on complex and interdependent joints demand a reasonable minimum quality of wood. "White wood" (actually, untreated white pine), while technically a furniture grade wood, does not meet that minimum standard. Trust me on this, folks.

The other major thing that has prevented me updating, and I hesitate to say this, because it is more than a little embarrassing, is that I have become addicted to my Wii. Yes, at over 40 years old, I have beome addicted to a video game, despite not being a big fan of most console games. I'll just say that if you had a Wii, you'd understand. So far, it's the only promise made regarding the new millennium that has even come close to being fulfilled.

Anyway, expect something in Casual Notes in about an hour or so, and expect comics to resume by the end of the day. Unless I get distracted again.

Oh, look, a bird...

What I've learned in my wood shop

2008-01-25T19:01:07Z

Some woods are pliant and take a shape easily, but they wreak and warp more readily, and details are often wasted on them. Others, while rigid and hard to work will hold their shape for years with stunning detail.

The fastest tools leave the deepest scars. Some scars can never be sanded out.

Measure twice, cut once. It's easier to align properly with wet glue than to sand down a ridge. Thin coats, multiple layers.

With the right stain, anything can be mahogany.

Some things will always be beyond our abilities. This is why we have friends and spouses.

Comic's Up

2008-01-20T21:09:50Z

A new comic up. Supersized, even. Shooting for daily until I catch up, plus working on rants and maybe even reviews.

Cardboard Cutouts

2008-01-12T16:05:26Z

Part One Subsidizing Tammany Hall
I seem to have allowed things to get away from me again. I've missed Iowa and New Hampshire. I meant to write this before any primaries occurred because this is the only real political rant I expect to write this year. Oh, sure. I'll still write about Washington's ongoing war against the people they're supposed to be serving and protecting, but, I've already stated and restated my standing on the main issues enough times to paper the walls of my house in words. And I find myself unable to form any real opinions on the candidates in the election.

Seriously, look at these people dispassionately for a moment. Giuliani and Clinton seem to be the same person (with the exception that Giuliani is much less likely to fly off the handle if things don't go his way). Obama and Thompson are nice guys, but neither has any experience in leading...well anything. Edwards and McCain are the kind of slick, huckstering salesmen that beg to be transformed into squirrels. And Huckabee is, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, completely insane.

And yet, on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of this coming November, we will be asked to choose between two of these six people the man (or woman, or squirrel) who will lead the United States for the next four years. The person who will, presumably, lead us out of Iraq and...err...well I'm not entirely sure what else they plan to do. They're all more or less agreed that we will bring our troops home during the next administration, but beyond that...? Sure Hillary's still waving around the ragged remains of the old National Health thingie she worked out back in the 90's, and Giuliani would like to continue the war on terror (whatever that means), and Edwards and McCain would both like to make all of the illegal and unethical things they've done even more illegal and unethical so they don't look quite so bad, but there's not a whole lot else on anyone's plate, is there?

Of course, this early in the game (early? haven't they all been campaigning since last May?) nothing is set in stone. They're all just simmering the minor issues in a pot, waiting to see what rises to the top as the defining issue of 2008 (in 2000 and 2004, the primary issues were, respectively, whether the nation wanted someone smart and boring or dumb and funny in the Office, and who was padding the 20-year-old entries in their resume, and whether anyone actually cared (no)). And, anyway, I don't want to discuss any issues at the moment.
I want to talk about our electoral system and why it's broken. Most specifically, how we're destroying our way of life by undermining our own Constitution in the very election of those individuals meant to "protect and defend" it against "al;l enemies foreign or domestic." I'll focus on three major problems which, if corrected, will open up the electorate and repair a badly broken system.

And the first, silliest part of that is the Primary System. I don't know when, but at some point we, as a nation decided it was okay to subsidize political machines. That's what the National Parties are: machines to enable lobbying and control political power. With the possible exception of Massachusetts, the only difference between the National Parties and Tammany Hall is the noticeable lack of drunken Irish enforcers at the party headquarters.
Don't get me wrong, here. I'm not suggesting that all National Party leaders should be indicted on corruption charges. For one thing, unlike Tammany Hall, the Republican and Democratic Parties have both been good at condensing widely disparate public opinions into more easily grasped platforms that have little or nothing to do with lining the pockets of Boss Tweed.

But should we be giving them a free ride? It only takes an endorsement of some kind to get on a state primary ballot for the Big Two, and, if you win the primary, you get to run for office. Everyone else has to go out and collect a number of signatures on a petition (numbers vary, depending on the state), even those who had a strong enough showing in their party's primary to represent a popular surge (if not a full mandate) must go through this process if they want to continue their candidacy. Primary winners, on the other hand, do not., which gives them a huge advantage coming out of the gate. By the time of the conventions, the persons who get the nod from the major parties have received millions of dollars in free press, a slot on the ballot in every state in the Union, and the endorsement, money and clout of a pair of political machines so entrenched in the US landscape that we cannot think of American politics without thinking in terms of these two parties.

But who pays for this decision-making process? Sure, the candidates themselves have to pay for campaign ads for each primary they've entered, but who pays for the process by which they are selected? Who pays for the voting booths and the rent on facilities, who buys the cards or pays the light bill, who operates the massive tabulating computers and the results collection process? Is it the private organizations that use this process to select their favorites? No, it is the states, the cities, the towns. The entire process from the first ballot in Iowa and New Hampshire to the last hanging chad in.—I don't know where, by the time the last state votes, we pretty much know who won—the whole process is paid for by you and I. Even if you're independent. Even if you've never actually voted in an election, you still get to pay for the primary system.

It's extremely funny because the Major Parties have no official standing in our political system. Parties are not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, or any foundation documents. Not only that, but the Founding Fathers, with very few exceptions, hated the two-party system. They had already seen its effect on the English Parliament where it polarized the nation and made way for counter-productive compromises. And yet, we willingly, gladly subsidize this system that is the exact opposite of the system that gave us the strength to survive for two hundred years.

It's amazingly funny in that, when you vote in a primary, you're not voting for a candidate, you're voting for a slate of delegates to the National Convention, and what they do, far beyond picking the candidate, is set the Party's platform for the next four years. They decide if subsidizing foreign industry under the moniker of "Free Trade" is a good idea, they decide that the Patriot Act is a horrible crime against American Liberties, but not so much so that it should be repealed or modified, they decide which way the wind blows. Because that's how machine politics works: a few power brokers determine among themselves where the power is going to go.

Mind you, I'm not entirely against political parties. Look at the mayhem that occurs in nations where there is no power collection and brokerage system. I'm just questioning whether the political and social desires of private organizations should be subsidized by the public.

New comic

2008-01-05T05:57:41Z

Here. Also there's a new essay in the history by J. Dalton.

New comic

2008-01-01T21:36:05Z

Yesterday's comic is up. I am caught up (except for that 2 month gap between October and December).

New comic

2008-01-01T00:50:37Z

Friday's comic has been up since this morning. Today's will be up tomorrow.

New comic

2007-12-30T19:43:50Z

Last Monday's comic is up. Friday's is drawn but won't be up until tomorrow. Tomorrow's comic will be up tomorrow or Tuesday.

Clearance Sale

2007-12-28T20:01:04Z

Just a few dribs and drabs left over to get rid of before starting the new year. None of these thoughts are rants, really. Just meaningless bits that have been floating around in my head with no place to go.

I should probably start by apologizing to the pizza guy from last week. Look, I'm sorry if I seemed disinterested in your health difficulties. It's not that I don't care about your ongoing struggles with gout, it's just that there's a time and a place for things. And, honestly, I think most people will agree with me that standing in my yard while the chill December wind whips around my rapidly cooling, over-an-hour-late pizza is probably not the time nor place to give me a detailed accounting of your medical history and allergy medication. "How're ya doin'!" was merely a courtesy, and was intended to prevent me from shouting, "What the hell? It took you almost two hours to get a pizza made and carry it five blocks in a car?" The only proper response to that was, "I'm sorry...I'm physically incapable of reading the clearly-printed numbers on the lighted sign at the very front of your front yard." So, I'm sorry if my polite-but-curt responses caused you any distress. I wanted to get my pizza inside and at least partially eaten before the cheese congealed into a solid mass. It's not that I didn't care about your discomfort, it's...no, wait, I didn't care, and I still don't.

On a similar, but less irritating note, I have a quick lesson for all you young kids out there cutting your teeth in the employment world: When a customer says, "Thank you," your response should be a return, "Thank you." You're not doing the customer a favor by selling him your product. You and the customer are exchanging goods and services, and courtesy demands that you provide mutual thanks one to another. "Thank you for my burger." "Thank you for your money." See?

I ran into Renata Santoro last month. Renata is a ridiculously talented actress and dancer that I've known since she was twelve. Technically, I knew her when she was twelve and just ran into her again last month. That's always weird. It's odd when you run into someone you used to think you knew after not seeing them in a while. There are always a few uncomfortable moments when you just sort of avoid each other and the awful gap of time that has passed between your last meeting. Then someone says something and you realize just how much they've changed, or how much you never really knew about them to begin with. Sometimes you find you can bridge the gap and be buds again, or at least acquaintances. But a lot of times, and this was one of them, you realize that no...something was lost. And you wonder if maybe it was you who changed, or that maybe there was no friendship at all. In any case you can do nothing but move on.

I keep hearing the phrase, "In a post-911 world." I often wonder if, during World War two, Americans justified stupidity by saying, "In a post-Pearl-Harbor world you can't be too careful." Gotta impound those Japanese. You say some of them are of Chinese descent? No matter...in a post 12-7 world anyone with almond eyes and sallow skin is a potential saboteur. I find myself wondering if we'll ever get the chance to regret the excesses of the past few years the way our parents and grandparents regretted the immediate response to the Pearl Harbor attack.

I know we need to be aware of the danger of attacks by terrorists, but do we need to turn our airports into prisons? I took my daughter to catch her plane back to Minnesota, and I swear there were more TSA agents visible than actual flyers. I wonder if the Germans watched their rights and liberties slip away in the thirties likes this. Justifying it to themselves because of the burning of the Reichstag. Last year, the new Democratic Congress promised widespread changes, but the only thing they did, despite a majority in both houses and a number of sympathetic Republicans, was whine constantly. I don't have such high hopes for this year. In an election year nothing gets done, anyway. No one wants to rock the boat and upset potential voters. Maybe all this non-boat-rocking is why there are fewer and fewer voters each year.

History—A Note on Technology and Historical Eras

2007-12-27T15:26:12Z

For convenience sake, the history is broken down into the various eras defined by Western history, but a history of Western Civilization is not—no matter what the Victorians thought—a history of the world. The section breaks here only exist to provide an easy means for westerners to see the timescape. The so-called Dark Ages were only Dark in Europe, where the collapse of the Roman Empire left a huge power vacuum and internecine warfare destroyed much accumulated knowledge. In the Middle East, particularly in Asia Minor where the Seljuk Turks held sway and the Byzantine Empire remained for several hundred years, much of the knowledge and literature of the Classical Period were retained and flowered into a Golden Age. China, too, was also experience one of its rare periods of expansion and exploration.

This is an important note for two reasons: first, one should not assume that just because a period has a certain name, that that's the way it was, everywhere. As stated before, I'm using Western conventions because I'm an American writing in English, and I assume the readership to have similar cultural references for comprehension. Second, and most importantly, it's important to understand that not all technologies are developed by all cultures and civilizations simultaneously. In the Americas, no civilization ever made lasting use of the fixed-axle wheel. This should not be taken as an indication that the American Cultures were any less intelligent or developed than their Old World counterparts. Most American civilizations occurred on or very near to mountainous regions that made early versions of wheeled transport counterproductive. By the same token, those same civilizations developed advanced farming methods that weren't put into much use by Old World cultures (and here, I'm including the US as an Old World culture, being—as we are—and extension and refinement of the British Empire) until the last century.

Different influences drive technology, and drive cultures to make use of technology in different ways. It never occurred to the Chinese to use gunpowder as a propellent for missiles, just as it never occurred to some cultures to augment the release power of bows by inserting a opposing curve at the end of the staff. Iron-hardening processes, and ultimately steel, resulted from interruptions in the Mediterranean tin trade. Certain Pacific Northwest cultures used copper as a decorative and utility metal, but never developed copper weapons or tools.

I hope to get someone better qualified to write a more complete essay on the influence of one society on another and the variances of divergent and convergent technology, but my main point is this: having a gun doesn't make you more advanced than the guy with a stone axe, it just makes you more dangerous, and, even then, only if the gun is loaded. History is a long and winding road, but it doesn't necessarily lead anywhere, and there are lots of stops and byways, anyway. Not everyone you meet will have enjoyed—or even read—Dickens, but that doesn't make that person ignorant or impaired; he merely has a different set of references. It's best to try to learn from variant references, and neither discount them as "savage" nor romanticize them as somehow better than our own. Human history is a smorgasbord of triumph and failure, and I want this particular buffet to be slanted toward allowing people to sample as many dishes as they can without pretending to empirical judgement on one or the other.

History—Stone to Copper to Bronze

2007-12-24T17:49:14Z

At some point, between 500,000 and 50,000 years ago, all those protohumans either died out or became something vaguely resembling what we are, now. Or God set up a medieval villa with fruit trees and carefully monitored pets and then created some gardeners to care for the whole thing. Your pick. I don't really care; it was a long time ago, and it has very little influence on the discussion as is.

However, I do feel I should make a minor digression here to talk about time. As individuals and as a species, our relationship with time is one that is simultaneously immediate and associative. It's easy to remember what you did an hour ago. Last night may be more difficult, but—assuming you're in college or single—it might come back with the help of still-available artifacts: twelve empty beer cans and a mostly-eaten pizza, for instance (oh, right, I got plastered with whatsername...did we..? I think so...did I..? hmm...) Last week, may be a little more difficult unless you're a bit of a slob. Last year...well, if you keep a journal, it's covered, but otherwise it comes down to "Did mom buy me that candle or did I get it during the strange weekend in Portstown?" And on and on until you get to a point where you're relying on someone else's memory.

At that point, it all starts to run together. It becomes less an accounting of our lives and more a bunch of interesting stories. The past loses its intrinsic emotional attachment and starts to accept whatever new emotions we choose to apply to it. baby Boomers started calling authoritarian figures Nazis not because we were the first ones to think of the word, but because we were the first generation without a deep emotional connection to the actual term. To us, the Nazis were just these wacky people from our parents' lives who pushed everyone around (much like we perceived our parents as doing). Eventually, you run out of people who remember the occurrence and start relying on things. Everything we know about anything before...say World War One is based on recorded accounts.

But the farther back you go, the fewer of these things remain. Wood, paper, and cloth rot, metals and stones are recycled, words and stories are altered or given new meanings. We become less and less sure of exactly what happened at any given time the farther back we look. As a result, we deal with larger and larger blocks of time, so we can be more or less reasonably sure that these events and standards were in place.

Which brings us to the Stone Age. The Stone Age spans nearly half a million years, not because humans made no advances in that period, to the contrary, it can reasonably be stated that every advancement that mattered was made during the Stone Age, but because so little of it has survived the millennia to give us a picture of the events. We know that at some point humans stopped living on their bellies and began collecting food and keeping it for later. Then they started collecting food animals and keeping them close. Then they made the connection between seeds and edible plants, and started farming.

We also know that they made the jump from poking anthills with sticks to poking animals with sharpened sticks to hardening points with fire to simple stone and bone tools. At some point, flint, alabaster, and obsidian were discovered. This was a leap forward. The flake method of producing blade edges and points from these stones made for harder, longer-lasting spears, arrows, and knives. They held a sharper and more durable edge than bone, and they were more predictable in the shaping than random rocks. Near the end of the Stone Age, humans made a quantum leap in technology with the discovery of copper and gold.

Gold's charms are obvious: it doesn't oxidize, it shines a warm yellow, and it can be easily worked even without heat. Copper, on the other hand, has less obvious, but more important attributes, especially to developing cultures. Copper is reasonably common, and—at least in the Old World—can be found in several near-surface veins, making it easy to mine. But there's more. Copper can be cold-hammered like gold and blades made of copper can be sharpened to an edge, which it will keep for at least a little while. Unlike flint and other stone edges, however, a copper tool can be resharpened. Copper led quickly to bronze, because copper and tin have one thing in common besides being relatively soft metals: they have relatively low melting points. A funny thing happens when you blend them together in a smelting pot, however, they form a new metal, an alloy of its parents, which is harder than wrought iron but still workable in many of the ways that copper is.

Expanding technology led to language, or maybe language enabled expanding technology. Enh, they probably grew up together. You see, the thing is, certain methods, like the flake method of creating points and tools, cannot be taught by simple observation; the ability to express abstractions is necessary for proper teaching. At the same time, language is merely a means of description, and with nothing to describe, language is meaningless. It led to other things as well, particularly trade. As better weapons and tools made surpluses more likely, different cultures and societies found themselves trading their extras for things that they lacked: flint for northern firs, copper for arboreal fruits. Cultures appeared that existed primarily as a means of trade between other cultures.

It's important not to think of these people as primitives. Stone Age cultures were and are very human, and their bodies and brains were as developed and specialized as our own. They were a little hardier than most modern humans, especially in the West, but that had more to do with a generous daily exercise regimen. There was a general division of labor, largely along gender lines, and even a few non-functional specialists. At least on some level, they understood the need for genetic diversity: every tribal culture recorded has some means of intermarriage with other tribes and cultures.

And they were capable of great destruction. By the time the first recognized civilizations appeared, Stone Age cultures had driven the American and Asian mastodons and mammoths, the smilodon, the American horse and camel, and several species of antelope and deer to extinction. It has been hypothesized that our immediate ancestor, homo sapiens Cro-Magnon drove Neanderthal man (homo sapiens neanderthalensis—a sort of uncle subspecies to modern man) to extinction as well.

Their lives were so remarkably different than ours that its hard to think of them simply as people who lived in a different time and neither romanticize them nor vilify them as savages. But everything we are and have has its origins in that period. They were human beings, and their human brains made some remarkable leaps in thinking and achievement while still being capable of some amazing brutality and destruction.

By about six to seven thousand years ago, the various human cultures stood on a brink, and at about that time, in four different places across the globe, cultures stepped across that brink and became civilizations. There is a permanence to the word "civilization", and a complexity. It's notable that here are varying standards as to what differentiates a civilization from a mere culture, and that's a debate that can span lifetimes. For our purposes, we can call civilization a place of permanent cities bearing multiple specializations and at least some class distinctions. The main thing you need for a civilization is the means for long term storage and distribution of food, because you have to stay in one place for a long time to develop a tribal village into a specialize city, and to do that, you have to be able to save food in case of emergencies.

This is why the big four, the first recognized civilizations, all occur at alluvial plains in otherwise arid areas. Without refrigeration, only vegetable foods, particularly grains and tubers, can be stored for a long time, and to do that, you need a dry place to do it. Wet grains and tubers rot or try to sprout, and become useless as food, either for humans or animals. That is why the earliest civilizations, and the beginnings of real history, can be found at the Nile Delta, the Indus Valley, the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates, and the Norte Chico region of Peru.

The development of civilization is important, not because they were more advanced than their contemporaries, but because now time gets smaller. Civilizations wrote things down and built them up. They left things behind, like unmarked photographs in your grandmother's attic. History from that point on could be measured in centuries and millennia, rather than tens of millennia (maybe).

The Casual History Project -- An Explanation

2007-12-23T14:48:33Z

Whenever I first pitch the idea of the Casual History Project to people, the first thing they always ask is, "Why?" I normally at a loss to answer. I certainly have no standing in the academic history community, and there are probably tons of resources out there that can cover aeons of history more fully and with more authority than I can. So what gives me the arrogance to think that I can outline and edit a complete history of the world?

Well, to begin, I'm pretty arrogant, anyway. But beyond that, there has always been something missing in the way history is reported. For the last several hundred years, history has been written by authority, but history doesn't happen under authority. Indeed, the most dynamic events occur because someone had the courage and the will to challenge authority. History is the result of multiple compromises and interactions, but to read most authoritative histories, you would never truly realize that the Age of Discovery, the Italian Renaissance, the Tudor Period, the Little Ice Age, the Reformation, and the collapse of the Nordic Empires were all more or less concurrent periods and events.

Each of those factors listed above and hundred of others all influenced each other in that period to create what we see as an inevitable (because that's the way it happened) history. history happens everywhere there are humans, and because humans are garrulous and mobile, history rarely happens in a vacuum. The West African slave trade didn't start when Portuguese sailors accepted captured blacks in exchange for trade goods any more than the war between the Iroquois League and the Hurons started with the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Yet we are limited in our knowledge, and in the things we are willing to learn. We look behind us and see one, maybe two or three, of the roads that led us here, but there were thousands.

Because,as I said before, history doesn't happen in a vacuum. Refugees from wars and natural disasters migrate to new places and share their histories with the new people they meet, conquerors overwhelm client states and overlay their own history (embellished to justify the conquest) over the subjugated, and, always, merchants and traders bring history and technology and philosophy from one place to another. China didn't just appear on the map with Marco Polo's journals; Europeans had been trading with China and hearing tales of Chinese dynasties for thousands of years (albeit slightly buffered by the various Fertile Crescent empires that stood between). The Polynesians reached Easter Island long before Columbus reached Cuba; given artistic similarities can anyone really say that the preColumbian cultures, especially those in the northern parts of South America and in Central America, were entirely based on independent development by the descendents of wandering Paleolithic tribesmen?

And that is Why. As I see it, the Casual History Project is less an authority, and more a doorway to discussion. To move beyond linear retellings of inevitable events and discuss wildly divergent influences and outcomes. Because history only fascinates me because it is made up of the intersecting and conflicting interests and views of People. And the telling of it should be the same way.

Comic's Up

2007-12-23T03:10:09Z

Here. Art sucks...it's better, and my scaling is consistent, but there are a bunch of flubs. Yes, Petal Oak's neck is supposed to be that long. No that hump on her back in the last panel isn't supposed to be there.

More stuff later tonight or early tomorrow.