Suspicion

One of the great things about being from southern Wisconsin (other than access to quality dairy and cheap liquor) is that the six degrees of separation don't leave much of a gap between a southern Wisconsin resident and Gary Gygax. My in-laws were involved with the early days of TSR. My father in law even claims to have developed a new printing technique to allow the production of the map included with the original Dungeons and Dragons box. This connection has also led to a number of games finding rest in the closets of my in-laws, games that never found their niche like D&D did.

This Christmas, these facts led to my having the fortune and displeasure of playing an old TSR game called "Suspicion." That's Gary Gygax on the cover in center frame being accused of the murder. My father in law took that picture.



The game is a murder mystery where one of the players is the murderer and everyone else is trying to figure out who the murderer is. It adds a note of complexity by giving points to innocent players for being wrongly accused of being the murderer.



Its not hard to see why the game never caught on. It has a 13 step set up process that took over an hour and requires all the players to be present. This process also involves lots of sorting and stuffing cards into envelopes. So it combines all the excitement of sending Christmas cards with all the excitement of setting up a board game. In comparison, the game itself is very short. It probably only lasted an hour at most. The rules have many suggestions about strategy to determine who the murderer is but the added complexity of false clues doesn't add any length to the game. Adding extra players doesn't seem to add length either because with the full six players the game could end in one round and really shouldn't take more than four. The players actions are relatively quick and each roll of the dice just pushes the game toward its inevitable conclusion. The game even boils the clues down to numbered cards so that very simple logic can determine the murderer. Repeat plays reduce set up time but there is still the issue of having to sort all 160 clue cards and stuff them into envelopes. Its basically a more labor intensive version of Clue.



Still I am glad to have played it because of the tenuous connection it represents between me and a great man I never got the chance to meet.

The Friday Bacon

The Friday Bacon

Cleveland Ohio: Terrible American City or the Worst American City?

It has been such a long time since a Cleveland article that the city must have thought it had to do better. Yesterday a 42 inch, 111 year old, water main ruptured in an industrial neighborhood of downtown Cleveland cutting off water to half the city. Schools and commercial buildings were closed due to unsanitary conditions and the risk of fire. This being Cleveland the Federal building promptly caught fire. Today there was a boil water alert because of the microbes and toxic industrial chemicals that contaminated the cities water supply as a result of the breach. This happened on a day where the low temperature was 23F in a City that gets as cold as -10F yearly. Tonight there is a massive ice storm bearing down on the Mistake by the Lake and attempts to flee the flaming wreckage of the city by air have been eliminated as the barely operational airports in the region cancel flights. Sure there is a lot about Cleveland to cause a resident to complain, but apparently Clevelanders even do a good job of exporting reasons for people in other regions of the country to take note of Cleveland when they leave the city. What a wondrous place.

Cleveland Ohio: Terrible American City or the Worst American City?

A dead body was discovered in the Cleveland impound lot on Monday. This was two days after the car was impounded. A little background; there was an ice storm last Friday night in the area causing a large multi-car accident. One of the cars towed away from the scene contained the person who was not discovered. The question I have not heard any local media raise is whether the person was already dead at the time the car was towed. And if not, whether it was the negligence of the police in leaving him in the car for two days that caused his death

The Friday Bacon

Don't You All Fell Better Now That Racism Is Over?

I don't know if my own experience over the past month has been unique but I have noticed an increase in little incidents of racism and they seem to be connected to Obama being elected. Here is what I mean, I will be with a group of people and the topic will turn to the recent election and while the subject of the first black president is in the air someone will then tell a joke so racist that you would think Carlos Mencia had just walked in the room. It's like some kind of weird cognitive dissonance is trying to work itself out of the population. In many cases, the people I hear doing this are not what I would call racist but I don't know how else to quantify what I am experiencing. Its somewhere on the racism scale between being uncomfortable with interracial dating and using the word "colored" when drunk.

Spying On The Innocent

This article details some of the absurdity of the Maryland terrorism list wherein peaceful people who never committed any crime and never planed to do so were labeled as terrorists. Remember, people still claim that the president has the power to indefinitely detain a U.S. citizen living in the United States after merely labeling them an enemy combatant. A term the government was unable to define even at the Supreme Court. Also remember that the people detained as enemy combatants are tortured prior to determination of guilt or complicity in any criminal act.

We don't have any examples yet of someone being detained and tortured merely for exercising their First Amendment rights by expressing a liberal opinion and hopefully we will never see any. This is still the danger we have to be aware of when a government takes these kinds of powers for itself. The above article details how intelligence that repeatedly says these people were not dangerous leads to them being labeled as terrorists and in many cases misidentifies what these people were involved with and where they were. If these cops really thought these people were terrorists and a danger to the country I would hope that they would be more careful with the information they gather so as to actually know where someone was on a certain day rather then place them on the opposite side of the continent. Here we are seven years after 9/11 and we still haven't learned the lessons about putting quality people between us and the enemy and not wasting time and taxpayer dollars on witch hunts.

Extinction Delayed

Some good news on the primate conservation front. Scientists have discovered a previously unrecorded group of Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys. This is a bit like the previous story where scientists were able to access a previously inaccessible part of jungle and discovered more Gorillas than previously estimated. It's not like these things weren't there before, we just didn't know about them. Still it means that from our perspective the species is slightly better off even if it is still tetering on the brink of extinction. I guess thats good news.

Like the beetle who's larva burrow into the human brain, Bush's political appointees are burrowing into their respective departments. As the president's term comes to an end, people who occupy positions that are appointed by the executive take up new jobs within their departments, preserving their high status within influential government agency's and moving beyond the reach of the incoming president of the opposing party. It is something that always accompanys a change in the guard but with the Bush administration's appointees it takes on a more sinister effect. We have recounted many times here that President Bush's picks for department heads have not been based on quality of the individual but on their loyalty to his narrow ideology and the individual of the president. One need only look to the energy department the EPA or to the Justice department to see scandals arising from industry insiders acting as regulators or "holy hires" who were picked because of the ultra right wing religious fundamentalist colleges they attended. The damage done to policy and the public interest done by this administration will take decades to undo.

Another example of cementing of Bush policy long into an Obama presidency is the midnight passage of executive orders. Like the burrowing of political hacks, these last minute orders cement extremest right wing policy and weaken government oversite and cannot be easily overturned by a new administration partly because of the time consuming process of determining all the changes and waiting through the public commentary period but also because of a lack of political will. Somehow there is the perception in Washington that turning back all these executive orders will cause some kind of liberal shock to the populace at large resulting in a backlash against the president. As if setting things back to the way they were is somehow more shocking than a lame duck president without a mandate of the people sneakily instituting his personal preference for policy at the last minute.

The LHC And the United States Committment to Science Education

The Large Hadron Collider is the biggest and most powerful super collider in the world and humanity hopes to discover new fundamental truths about reality through its use. It was built in France and Belgum but there was once the possibility that an even bigger, more powerful collider would have been built in the U.S. except congress lost the nerve to fund the project after already dumping millions into partial construction. This was not just a loss to the local community and the University system of Texas but to U.S. education. Now the best and brightest minds in physics will be compelled to go to France instead of being drawn to America. New discoverys will be made that will lead to marketable technologies that could have been discovered within U.S. jurisdiction. The loss of talent and potential discovery and the immesurable loss to the U.S. economy is particularly irksome in the current economic crisis. This shortsitedness reflects a general U.S. failure to focus on quality of science education in order to maintain our technological and intellictual superiority in the world.

Property Rights = Civil Rights

Some months ago I discovered that my wife keeps a large supply of cash in a secret location. She does this to be prepared for emergency's. One of those emergency's is the possibility of leaving me and having to leave immediately. I was not particularly threatened by this revelation and jokingly acted hurt that she might abandon me in some tragedy or that she thought I would transform into some raging monster after we have been together for almost 10 years. I also was not threatened because it is a sensible plan and I wholly endorse this for all women. Not that I need to, because as I look around and ask women I know and my female relatives they all have an escape fund. It seems like most modern western women have the good sense to be financially independent from their men or to preserve the ability to sever the financial connection on short notice.

It seems related to some of the conclusions reached by the UN Commission on the Status of Women. I paraphrase; they found that due to the vast imbalance in earning power and property ownership of women relative to their percentage of the world population and the percentage of the worlds labor performed by women that efforts should be taken to improve the equality of women's property rights worldwide as that inequality tends to multiply the terrible consequences of tragedy's like war and natural disaster, leading to increase in HIV infection among other things.

To spell out what that means, after a mudslide or tornado or flood damages a village some of the women might be left without their husbands due to deaths in the tragedy. Because they cannot earn as much from their labor or perhaps because they cannot claim ownership of their dead husband's property they are forced into prostitution in order to make enough money to survive or to keep their children alive. This would be bad enough if it didn't also obviously increase the spread of STDs and increase violence against these women, amplifying the personal tragedy set in motion by a natural disaster.

If the personal tragedy of each individual were not enough there is the social cost. With property rights or equal earning potential, these women could continue to be productive members of society, producing value through their labor through farming, or producing other tangible goods. Instead they end their lives destitute, in medical care funded by charity, government spending, and privately subsidized medicine. This cost is shifted to some degree on to western persons through government aid and pharmaceutical companies selling novelty lifestyle drugs for erections and sleep aids at overinflated prices to recoup the costs of the discount AIDS medication they sell to African countries and charities.

In this way, the very real costs of human tragedies on the other side of the world financially impact the life of every American such that even the most cynical and selfish should care for real equality. Even if just out of concern for the cost of their next 4 hour erection.

Depression Era Tactics

We have really hit the shit now people. Labor is dusting off tactics that they haven't used since the bad old days of company towns and anarchists. Laid off workers have occupied a factory in Chicago. They were given short notice of the closing of the plant and are attempting to get the severance and vacation pay due to them. This is actually connected to the $700,000,000,000.00 bailout because one of the banks that got assistance from the Treasury is the bank that finances this company that employees these workers and said bank refuses to loan the company the money it needs to keep up with its payroll, forcing it to close its factory doors. Which is exactly why there needed to be better controls put on this massive act of corporate welfare so that Paulson wasn't left with the sole option of begging the banks to not horde the cash but deploy it. Because if they won't spend the money then the bailout can't serve the purpose it was authorized for.

The Friday Bacon

Pizza with Bacon, peperoni, ham, sausage, and banana peppers. Served frequently at my work.