Gygax Statue

It has been two months since a non-bacon article and I break our silence to announce that Gary Gygax's widow is planning on erecting a monument to his greatness in Lake Geneva, WI. The article is sparse on details, but I assure you that if the opportunity presents itself we will place whatever fund raising widget they create on this website as well. I have not been to Gen-Con since WOTC took it from Milwaukee and created several clones, but I may just have to go to the 2010 event if there is going to be hoopla about the Gygax statue.

Of Silent Passings

From The Fringe Element

I have previously mentioned how the origins of D&D are intertwined with southern Wisconsin. I have been chided, probably in response to the articles I have written regarding Gary Gygax. I have been chided for not recognizing the passing of Dave Arneson. Arneson is pictured above as the bearded guy on the left. The bearded guy in the center being accused of being the murderer is Gary Gygax.

Dave Arneson was instrumental in the creation of D&D back in the ancient days before anyone had thought of a role playing game or a character sheet, or a Dungeon Master. These words are so significant in my life that these men seem to be earth shattering geniuses. I find myself hard pressed to separate out how their original ideas have changed the face of gaming or created whole new dimensions of the paper, miniatures, board game, and video game industries.

Sadly, I never paid much attention to the names on my books which would have given me some inkling of the great men to whom I owe the many hours of nerdy squealing joy. Equally sad is the fact that often we never hear of significant people until after they have died. Arneson Died last week on Tuesday. He was only in his early 60's.

UPDATE: According to our commentator(commenter?) the man I identified above as Dave Arneson is actually Mike Carr. From my perspective this is conflicting information coming from third parties. If Wikipedia has taught me anything it is the value of verification on the internet. So, if anyone can positively identify those in the above image I will go off of that in the future. My goal was to post an image related to this article and not just swiped from Wikipedia, and thereby enrich the imagescape of the internet. However I would warn against using the images I post as a reference since it is abundantly clear I do not know who these people are.

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.

Do Not Take the Red Pill!

What do Wisconsin and Ohio have in common? Emerald Ash Borer? The homes of the primary writers of the illustrious Fringe Element blog?

All of the above, but most recently, they are both the sites of dirty tricks by the McCain campaign.

In Wisconsin , the McCain campaign conduct a massive mailing to encourage absentee voting, presumably so that voters who would otherwise be unable to do so, such as the elderly and veterans, would vote for their candidate. However, all of the applications that were mailed also included the wrong addresses for the appropriate county clerk's office or addresses for the wrong county clerk's office. Both of which would render the application completely invalid as the applicant would be filing in the wrong district, and would possibly lose their right to vote in the election on November 4th.

In Ohio , the campaign similarly distributed potentially fraudulent ballots. In this case, the campaign distributed ballots that were invalid as they contained one too many boxes. This "Are you a qualified voter?" box, if left unchecked would invalidate the application, and again, disqualify the voter for the November 4th election.

The statement that the campaign made a mistake because of faulty lists is an egregious insult to voters everywhere. With direct mailing costs so high, and campaign funds so limited, these types of mistake would have been too costly to allow. So, let's evaluate the two choices of fraud and mistake. If this were a deliberate campaign of fraud, and two instances of similar fraud begin to remove the necessary layer of reasonable doubt, the question becomes whether individual state investigations are called for, or if the federal government should become involved. With the Justice Department having become a tool for Republican electoral tricks through partisan hiring practices, especially in the Civil Rights Division, and miscellaneous shenanigans, this seems very unlikely to happen, even if it were called for, and with states' budgets, particularly Wisconsin's and Ohio's in a state of distress from the ongoing economic crisis, any relief from that quarter seems equally unlikely. However, if this had been a case of a mistake made in the processing of the direct mailing, then the McCain campaign is incompetent on multiple levels. Any random sampling would have revealed the problems of the mailing list, and brought into question whether the effort was needed at all. In the case of Ohio, this is a much more sinister form of incompetence. Someone in their staff took the extra time to design another box that probably doesn't appear on other absentee ballot applications, and their supervisor, who is assumedly similarly inexperienced in Ohio elections, approved it. If these campaign managers are allowed to stay in their office after wasting money on such a large scale, the plot will thick and further peel away the thin, fatty layer of reasonable doubt. Stay tuned.

The Global Food Crisis: Too Much Water

Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, And Illinois have all been hit by massive flooding over the last week. Some heroic boyscouts have garnered all the press from this storm but there is another story with wider reaching implications. The flooding has caused damage to farmland across the nation's breadbasket, ruining thousands of acres of fields prior to harvest. These fields are primarily corn and as detailed in a prior posting, corn is the backbone of the U.S. comodoties market. Further, such a huge loss in corn will cause the prices of all foods to rise even more than the international food crisis has caused. The bottom line for you, expect to pay more for all kinds of meat, cerial, grains, milk, and of course, gasoline.

This all brings up the concept of inflation. The general rise in the price of goods as measured by the United States excludes the cost of comodities like food and energy(oil). The standard reason given for this is that even when the economy is stable the costs of oil and food fluctuate wildly and are thusly not directly pinned to the general economy. That reason turnes into a mere excuse to ignore bad news in times like these where inflation is being driven by world crisis level food prise increases and devistating growth in cost of oil. Yet economists will continue to use the old measure and more tellingly the old media will continue to parrot what they are told in their role of controling the public.

Ben Franklin Report: Where Did My House Go?

As anecdotal evidence of the ongoing financial crisis, the foreclosure rate in Wisconsin jumped in the past month to a new record high! As with other states, the urban areas are being hit the hardest, with Milwaukee County leading the state in the number of newly empty properties.

As for hard statistical evidence, I present the Rental Vacancy Rates, as compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau. There's a lot to be said for this table, but one of the most important notes regards the rent of a 1-unit structure, which actually decreased if one uses the value of a 2007 Dollar. One potential lesson from this is that the dollar didn't actually increase in purchasing power during 2007, in fact it lost such power. When prices increase in this fashion, it is almost certain to be indicative of inflationary growth, as in the growth derived not from any improvement in quality of product or innovative economic organization, but rather from aggregate forces which are reducing the power of the greenback. I believe this phenomenon might be called stagflation. The changes in vacancy rates do not appear to be statistically significant, other than perhaps a slight trending in shorter vacancy times. Which can only be taken as good news, despite the problems that foreclosure causes renters.

Amazingly, the search volume for 'foreclosure' has jumped by double in the past year, and the Internet, in an example of supply meeting demand, has come through with a plethora of sites designed to provide consumers information on foreclosure actions.

On the reverse side, most homeowners are not fully aware of their options when faced with foreclosure, according to Freddie Mac. Thus, many fall easy prey to scams like this one.

Quit Tasing Me, Bro!

So aparently the appropriate police responce to a call about a weapon with a vague discription of the suspect is to tase the first person they see that fits the description. It just so happens to have been this guy more than once. If I were him I would also be filing suit.

Here is the description given police; a black guy with light blue hat, black coat and light blue T-shirt on with a silver gun under his coat. Notice there is no mention that the man is acting violent or threatining or suspicious in any way. He has just been "seen" exercising his constitutional right to bear arms.

Here is a list of reasonable questions to ask before resorting to violence:
1. Is this tip legitimate?
The vague nature of the call should suggest that the call might be a hoax or prank or a spitefull attempt to provoke harassment of this man by the police. Further probing of the caller may have revealed any of the above.
2. How old is the suspect?
3. What does his hair look like?
4. Does he have any facial hair?
5. Does he have any piercings or tatoos?
6. What does the coat look like? Is it puffy? Does it have any writing on it?
7. Is his hat a ball cap or a knit cap? Does it have any writhing on it?
8. What do you mean by "light blue"? Is he wearing North Carolina gear?
9. Describe the gun. Was it entirely "silver"? Is it automatic, or a revolver?
10. How do you know the "silver" object you saw was, in fact, a gun?

All of these questions inhabit the grey area between doing nothing and jumping and then tasering an innocent man in the mall who was just waiting to get his McFucking sandwich. But unfortunately the police chief of Madison Wisconsin cannot see this grey area and it can be inferred from his comments that the officers training reflects that ignorance.

link

Allow me to expand on a point I made in an earlier post. The police have to deal with the worst element of society all day and are compensated precious little for putting themselves in harms way. (thats really two points but I will expand on the first one) However, the police frequently display an inability to tell the difference between the people they deal with that present a clear and imminent threat, and those persons who are not dangerous.

For example, my brother-in-law once witnessed two police officers approching an 80 year old woman with a walker, with their guns drawn. If that kind of behavior can be considered appropriate by police standards, it is time to rethink the standards of behavior we allow the police to set for themselves.

Tazer News Today

First, from the blog's hometown Madison, comes the revelation that it doesn't pay to be some random guy in the mall the day after Christmas. I'm not sure if this is a case of prank calling gone to one of its most extreme and sadistic extremes, or a case of someone who was overly paranoid. I'm not sure how I would react if the police, seemingly for no reason, showed up in force and tried to get me to go out to the parking lot. He's being charged with resisting police, but it would seem that he should get a medal for resisting the worst form of senseless police brutality.

Second, here is a transcript of Amy Goodwin from Democracy Now interviewing people involved in the fracas in New Orleans. In this case, it would seem that there are two narratives surrounding the police's use of force in this case. If, as some believe, the police were keeping more members of the opposition from getting into City Council's chamber, the use of force represents a gross violation of the principles of a free, democratic society. If, on the other hand, the police were justified after keeping protesters from tearing down the gates around City Hall, then, you're also violating the principles of democracy, at least in a purely philosophical way, in that the force keeps citizens from entering what should be common municipal space. In any event, it would be interesting to see how many times Tasers were deployed during the course of that protest. See the video goodness below for some background and color the way only CNN can provide. "How do you know you were tazed?" That's some great reporting, Rick Sanchez.

"We Tased him to maintain compliance," [Ogden Police Lt. Scott] Conley said.

Sure, the guy who breaks into a school in the middle of the night because he's really drunk and still got a bottle of vodka to burn through probably needs to go to jail to sleep it off if nothing else. But, it takes a special kind of bravery to sic dogs on a drunk guy who you have out numbered, and then tase him when he doesn't immediately jump to your beck and call.