a thaumaturgical compendium

“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

Our seven-year-old guest was literally on the edge of his seat, watching The Princess Bride for the first time, and seeing Inigo Montoya fulfill his lifelong pursuit to avenge the death of his father at the hyperdactyl hand of Count Rugen.

“This is an excellent scene,” our young guest said precociously.

When we considered movies we had on hand that were PG-rated—his requirement—we came up with two, this one and Flushed Away. Afterward, he said both were good, but he much preferred Princess Bride; why? “Obviously, more chaos.” Was a bit puzzled by this, but his mom let us know that “obviously” and “chaos” were two of his favorite words lately.

Watching Princess Bride with a kid makes you recognize that it has some messages that were common in films of the period that were intended for younger audiences, but not so common today. While the arch villain is left by the hero to live with his own infamy, Montoya seems in many ways to be more heroic in his quest and in its completion. The theme—call it Count of Monte Cristo light—seems largely absent from youth literature today, and perhaps even to my own surprise, I find that unfortunate.

There is something in Montoya’s righteous indignation, his passion for justice, his sense of honor, that is comforting and wholesome. The idea that vengeance is always wrong, an idea that runs through much of modern Christianity, seems misplaced to me, just as misplaced as assuming that revenge is always just. French moralist Joseph Joubert wrote, “Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.” (He also wrote “Children have more need of models than of critics.”) The standard escape these days—played so often as to be a cliché—is that the hero captures the villain and allows him to live, only dispatching him when the villain makes a last effort to kill the hero when his back is turned. This is present somewhat in Princess Bride I suppose; If Montoya was not seemingly mortally wounded early in the scene, I’m not sure it would play as just.

I realize that there is something in my core personality that sympathizes with Montoya, and I suspect this was installed in me at about my guest’s age. Seven is traditionally referred to as the “age of reason” among Catholics, when people start becoming responsible for the morality of their actions. Seven is also a pivotal age for many developmental psychologists; Piaget marks this as the onset of “concrete operational thinking” and the close of egocentric thought.

It seems somehow retrograde and old-testament, these ideas of vengeance and honor. But I’ve always liked those imperfect characters who nonetheless were honorable in their own way. I’ll take Montoya over Wesley, Solo over Skywalker, Batman over Superman. I am pleased, therefore, that a pervading sense of the avenger is present in the first book I am reading to my unborn son, Cory Doctorow’s new Little Brother. We are going through it slowly, a few chapters a week, and of course I like the way it introduces a hackerish ethics to issues of surveillance, but I also like its revival of the vow of retribution. No spoilers please—I hope Doctorow does not cave to more recent sensibilities, and dampen the release (or noble tragedy) of retribution.

7:30am in the Halavais household, light seeps in through the soupy July morning air.

Jamie: Good morning, Darling Husband!

Alex: Grumble… mrf. Why are we up?

Jamie: What day is it?

Alex: Monday?

Jamie: Yes, but what Monday?

Alex: Too-early-in-the-morning Monday?

Jamie: Today’s the 21st, your birthday!

Alex: It is? Cool! What am I getting this year?

Jamie: [Dramatically indicates her own personage.]

Alex: Um. didn’t I get that last year?

Jamie: Notice anything… different.

Alex: Well, I’ve been meaning to say, you’ve been really packing on the pounds lately…

Jamie: How old are you again?

[A subtly cruel question, since she knows he hasn’t been able to keep track for about a decade.]

Alex: I’m gonna be 40.

[A graceful allusion to pop culture that nonetheless dates him.]

Jamie: Well, we’re off to the hospital for pictures.

Alex: What, have you been listening to the Vapors?

[A less graceful, overly obscure, yet still out-of-date pop culture reference.]

Jamie: I’m sure you’ll figure everything out eventually…

Our first child is due on December 8 of this year. I’m furiously reading various parenting books and trying to figure out who I’ll need to knock off to get him into a decent pre-school on the Upper West Side.

Don’t worry, this blog will remain unfocused, intermittent, and boring. But soon, with more baby!

(The sonograms are in order: April 22, May 6, May 22, July 21, and many more are over at flickr.)

This is awesome: redeeming not only (as Boing Gadgets notes) Feist from repetitive iPod commercials, but Sesame Street from small red monsters that start with the letter E.

This sort of post has now become a staple, but here are some things I’m doing instead of blogging. I’ll try to post a little bit about these projects as they progress.

• Finishing up my new book, Search Engine Society. I’m putting the finishing touches on the index. All of it was desperately out of date the moment I wrote it, but that was inevitable. Luckily, Polity has been very good about turn-around timing on this. It’s due out in October, if the gods of printing allow. Indexing is more annoying than I thought. Can’t we just Google it?

• Research for a paper about Digg, and ratings. I had originally planned on writing this up in the form of a Dr. Suess book, but I think I’m headed for something a bit more traditional at this point. This actually follows a line of research from my dissertation, lo, so many years ago.

• Research for a paper about the use of hyperlinking in the rhetoric of extremism (and particularly racism) on the web. Again, this is a project that I’ve been thinking about for about a decade, but I’m only now getting things together for it.

• Early stages of planning to take the initial ideas I presented in a paper at NCA last year, about collaborative filtering, netroots, and the public agenda, and apply them to the presidential election. I want to finish this up sometime in, say, November.

• Organizing materials for my next book. Will be working on it over the next year or so. There are a three separate ideas I’ve been working on, but I think I’m going to look at the nexus of networked communication, learning, creativity, and government.

• I’m revising my “Intro Interactive” course. No, really. This will be the first time I have revised a course rather than starting pretty much from a clean slate. Very exciting. Hoping to outsource some of it, and interview some friends and former students to get a look at the interactive industry.

• I’m rewriting “Communication, Media, and Society” from scratch, trying to provide the means for doing my “students design the class” thing and still having it work for an online version.

• Early stages of planning for my spring courses: “Web Programming” and “Something Else.” There are several possibilities for my special topics, including: Search Engine Society (duh!), Surveillance, Virtual Worlds,

• I’ve been doing some prep on a major project, which will be my top priority when it launches later this year. Laying the foundation and doing some planning over the next few months. I’ll announce it formally on my birthday later this month.

But I haven’t been blogging. I’ll try to do better. Oh, and if I owe you something (refereeing, emails, invoices, money, the head of your sworn enemy), I’ll get to it. Just a bit bogged down right now.

So, I was watching a BBC show on the “Secrets of the Sexes” (below), and realized that I hadn’t done a self-indulgent online quiz in a while. So, I went over to the site and took a battery of quizzes. What were the results? Apparently, I have a lesbian brain trapped in a man’s body. The equal length of my ring and index fingers indicate woman hands, and suggest that I had too little testosterone in the womb; which, in turn, means that I won’t be winning any footraces soon.

So, has this brought on any deep introspection? Well, for a moment I was reminded of an old Steve Martin number, the I’m me song, during which he stops and says “But wait. What if I’m a girl?” I just don’t happen to fit well on their scales. I’ve got very manly spatio-visual awareness, but also, apparently, a colossal corpus callosum, which may or may not, be more prevalent among the ladies.

At any rate, I’m not going to take much stock in it. My hairline suggests that whatever testosterone I may have missed in the womb was more than made up for later on.