Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: Helping People Steal Concrete

In the latest episode of their revelatory podcast, Ken and Robin talk F20 entheogens, Rahm’s run-off, status quo first acts, and Goetia.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: Eat My Orange Slices, Peons!

In the latest episode of our ENnie-winning podcast, Ken and I talk creativity rewards, sanity and atrocity, lightning round, and a worse WWI.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: It's Like Football Camp

In the latest episode of our ENnie-nominated podcast, Ken and I talk memory hunter scenarios, recommendations, post-rehab Rob Ford and saving the bodhi tree.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: The Werepig Demographic

In the latest episode of our rumor-busting podcast, Ken and I talk info asynchrony, fearmongering as tradecraft, Jeff Richard and voodoo.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: The Envy Must Flow Through Me

In the latest episode of our herb-scented podcast, Ken and I talk Chimeriades, plausible alternate histories, Mount Shasta Lemurians and Rob Ford in rehab.

FordWatch: Doug Ford Lashes Out at Police Chief

In a move so brazen I’m having a harder than usual time maintaining my satirical detachment, Toronto councilor Doug Ford, brother and enabler-in-chief to drain-circling Mayor Rob Ford, has now called on Police Chief Bill Blair to resign. His offenses? Having described the Ford crack video to the press, and having quasi-rescinded Ford’s invite to the annual police gala. Ford smears Blair as unaccountable because he went on a fishing trip with a Ford-approved police board appointee.

In a statement that in no way encourages us to recall his well-documented former occupation as a mid-tier Etobicoke hash dealer, Doug Ford said, to a media scrum, “Am I supposed to be intimidated by the police chief? The police chief doesn’t intimidate me.”

In the team of Tweedleford and Tweedleforder, Doug is supposed to be the voice of reason. To fully comprehend the throes of this meltdown, hear the above and below quotes in Pacino’s Scarface voice.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: A Faith Demand Moment

In the latest episode of our mayor-hounding podcast, Ken and I talk transhuman PCs, journalist burn, more Rob Ford, and the 1928 Baltimore space program.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: Love, Gerald Ford

In the latest episode of our conquest-hungry podcast, Ken and I talk orcs, Chicago gangland, iconic characters, and unpardoning Nixon.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: The League of Extraordinary Skeletons

In the latest edition of our humble podcast, Ken and I talk game design ideology, Richard III, elements of RPG prose style, and Black Herman.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: Passing the Legislation to See What’s In It

In the latest episode of our ancient and mysterious podcast, Ken and I talk kludges, Stonehenge, White Wolf edition wars, and sacking the Old Summer Palace.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: Her Agile, Ventriloquistic Foot

In the latest episode of our eponymous podcast, Kenneth Hite and I talk mappers and callers, guns and America, Bond despond, and Margaret Fox.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: A Thin Sludge Along the Sidewalks

Ken and I return from holiday hiatus to talk proactive play, dice fudging, Rob Ford and Jack the Ripper.

An Incomplete List of Congressional Metonyms

As profound students of Restoration comedy one and all, you surely know what a metonym is—a given name for a fictional character that telegraphs his or her personality or role in the story. This may be direct, or simply through euphony. Examples: Charles Surface, Sir Benjamin Backbite, Mr. Gradgrind, Mistress Quickly, Severus Snape.

Sometimes real people have metonymic names. This can come in handy sometimes.

For example, certain members of US Congress have names that an editor might reject as too metonymic if we tried to use them in fiction. I hereby nominate my top ten.

1. Henry Waxman

2. Louise Slaughter

3. Bob Goodlatte

4. Bobby Rush

5. Mac Thornberry

6. Sam Graves

7. Emanuel Cleaver

8. Marcia Fudge

9. Leonard Lance

10. Raul Labrador

Though perhaps not strictly a metonym, an honorable mention must surely go to Dutch Ruppersberger.

How apt these names I leave as a matter for other scholars. Just how creamy and delicious is the legislation of Marcia Fudge?

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: As Kenya is to Running

In this week’s episode of our Golden Geek-winning podcast, Ken and I talk time and pacing in RPGs, wrap up the election, propound my theory of the one okay game store, and open up the Spycraft Hut for a Petraeus-inspired survey of sexy security scandals.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: Riesling and Dirigibles

The latest episode of the Golden Geek-nominated podcast that's sweeping the gamer nation, Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, now wings its way toward your earbuds. Join us as we fling open the inaugural doors of the Cartography Hut to contemplate maps we have known and loved.

In a frenzy of construction, we then throw caution to the wind and cut the ribbon on Politics Hut, in which we look at the current US Presidential election from the Republican and Canadian points of view.

Ask Ken and Robin prompts us to consider: can comedy and Lovecraft coexist? (Thanks for the question, Monica Valentinelli.)

Finally, Ken faces his most daunting Ken’s Time Machine yet as Time Incorporated asks him to prevent Prohibition.

Who Killed SOPA?

SOPA died last night.

If you’re a member of the MPAA team tasked with shepherding this bill into Congress and getting it passed into law, you started the week hoping the bill would move quietly through the system as an uncontroversial piece of commercial regulation.*

Uncontroversial bills have to be bipartisan. So you appointed as your legislative spearhead a Texas Republican, and worked to get congressmen and senators from both sides of the aisle to support the bill.

Depending on which conservative interest he favors, a Republican lawmaker might align for or against balls-to-the-wall intellectual property enforcement. It advantages** a lucrative industry, one in which America enjoys a worldwide upper hand. On the other hand, that industry is Hollywood, whose content social conservatives love to hate.

Unfortunately for you, MPAA lobbyist, there's a primary on. The primary system may be a crazy way to pick a president, but it’s a fabulous way to figure out which stances work with voters. And last night all four primary contenders intuited that slamming Hollywood played better for them than supporting its industrial interests. In one brief round of answers they cemented the anti-SOPA position as the Republican default.

This doesn’t mean that Democrats will line up in favor of SOPA. They too can pick either side of the fight and remain within their interests or ideology.

But even if you keep the Democrats on board, you second-person MPAA representative, you, the issue won’t go back to being bipartisan again. Worst case, you lose both parties. Best case, you get a partisan battle, which will be protracted, heavily publicized, and, with the system’s profusion of veto points, is unlikely to resolve in your favor.

The Internet generation may have whittled down SOPA’s hit points with blackout day, but it was the Romney-Gingrich-Santorum-Paul adventuring party that scores the kill-steal.

*To nurture this hope, you would have to forget that the sector you want to regulate, information tech, is as big if not bigger than the entertainment industry, and better positioned to mobilize public opinion. But let’s leave that aside for the moment.

**If it works as claimed. But let’s leave that aside for the moment.

Bring Back the Old-Timey Political Nickname

I've started in on The Game of Thrones of political biography, Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson. The first volume, The Path to Power, begins by establishing the Texas political scene prior to LBJ's birth and during his childhood as the son of a Populist state representative.

As a savorer of political lore, I have to say that the modern era has lost one great element from the early part of the last century—the old-timey nickname. Honest Buck. Old Oxcart. Cactus Jack. Heck, I would settle for Pinky.

The trick is that the nicknames have to be favorable, bestowed by admirers. In the modern media environment unironic affection for political leaders is harder to find. Reagan had “the Gipper”, but he got it on loan from Hollywood. Margaret Thatcher's “the Iron Lady” cut both ways.

I'm too much the satirist to come up with straight-faced, old-timey-ish nicknames for current figures. Hillary “Pant Suit” Clinton? Michelle “Crazy Eye” Bachmann? Rick “Santorum” Santorum?

The best I can do is Barack “Long Game” Obama. Fans of the Steve's Dad candidate might go for Ron “Gold Standard” Paul.

What moniker would you bestow on the politician you admire?

A Contrary Life

A motif emerges in friends’ reminiscences of the alternately brilliant and maddening Christopher Hitchens. At some point they all have to note that they didn’t agree with Hitchens on everything. In fact his barbed-wire views were so various, so untethered from standard ideological allegiances, that it is mathematically impossible to agree with all of them.

Many of the tributes mull the question of whether Hitchens was, in the end, a man of the left or right. If you go by the degree of discomfort eulogists of both factions display toward him, he winds up on the left. His liberal friends may have a tough time accepting his unrepentant touting of the Iraq conflict, but that pales compared to conservative distaste for his atheism and general loathing for hierarchy. Lots of young Trotskyites wound up as neoconservatives. Hitchens didn't so much discard one for the other as fuse the impulses together, with ferocity of judgment the bonding agent.

Admiring individual contrarians, as opposed to contrarianism itself, can be a fraught business. When summoning a pithy Mencken quote one has to keep in mind his pro-German sentiments in the lead-up to WWII. In late career, the contrarian may reveal himself not as an all-around puncturer of fuzzy thinking, but a much less interesting creature, the hedonistic Tory.

Still, one can look to figures like Hitchens and Mencken for the aspiration to question assumed truths, and to pursue logical propositions to their pitiless conclusions. To defend itself, even a culture of empathy needs the ability to construct an argument. Relying on cant or empty pieties leaves you only able to sputter when challenged. What does not kill your argument makes it stronger.

No matter how intense a detractor one might be of one Hitchens stance or another, the techniques he uses are transferable to the support of any position based on facts and reason.

If you look at him as a practitioner of the vanishing art of debate, his weak arguments become as informative as his strong ones. There you see the dodges you might skewer when deployed against you. In neocon mode, Hitchens cheats wildly, engaging his opponents’ worst arguments or resorting to untestable counterfactual assertions. This is where you see his twin passions, his hatred of tyranny and religion, combining to overwhelm the skepticism that anchors his best polemical writing.

I certainly envy the legendary Hitchens recall—virtually everything he read went straight to the memory bank and stayed there. As someone who makes his living as a writer, I can only gasp at his mammoth output, mysteriously squeezed into days given over to the voracious pursuit of Johnny Walker-fueled conversation. One account clocks him at a hard-to-credit 10,000 words per day—all the more staggering when you consider time spent on reading and other research.

With his prodigious intake of Scotch and cigarette smoke, Christopher Hitchens embodied the romantic image of the hard-drinking, hard-typing man of letters. I’m happy to identify with that so long as I don’t have to do it. His early death from esophageal cancer illustrates the real-life hazards of that image. As any contrarian knows, being a romantic figure is a dangerous business.

Lowering Cain

I enjoy observing politics—that is, the politics of nearby other countries whose results I suffer only indirectly —as a venue for real-life drama, of clashing personalities and personal flaws heightened by stakes and pressure.

When it comes to men of power, no flaw is more classical than hubris. It takes that and chutzpah, too, to know that you’ve been carrying on a long-term affair and had a series of sexual harassment claims filed against you, and to think that you can run for President without either of these things coming to light. You might think that the solipsistic miscalculation of a Herman Cain is somehow off the charts. And it is, insofar as it got him hoisted from nominal front-runner to footnote.

According to this podcast interview, of controversial Republican campaign manager Ed Rollins, conducted by Alec Baldwin, hubris might almost be a prerequisite of the mindset required to run. [Engage paraphrase engines!] Rollins says that the first thing a would-be campaign manager asks a prospective candidate is if they have any skeletons in their closet. And they all lie.

(The seasoned campaign manager, Rollins continues, knows this and hires a private investigator to dig up the truth on his own client, as it will otherwise come out from an unfriendly source, timed at the worst possible moment.)

True tragic heroes must not only be afflicted with the flaw that brings about their downfall—they must also embody greatness, lending piteous significance to the final plummeting. In an age of political cable and radio, a candidate can get close to the sun free of that pesky quality. Instead he can shape himself into a hot button cartoon character, vivid enough for TV but without the dimension for drama, and rise at least to the level of primary contender. At first blush, this seems to add entertainment value to the proceedings. But as Aristotle might tell us, it’s not as profound when the players come pre-satirized.

Link Round-Up: Ashen Availability, Fringe History, Sun Surrender, Ferry Wine

If you’ve been waiting for Ashen Stars to show up for sale at RPGNow or Flames Rising, wait no longer.

Nick Mamatas examines the historical provenance of Fringe’s Walter Bishop(s.) (Link good for one week only.)

The Toronto Sun is just phoning it in now.

If I learned that Bryan Ferry could drink wines with ugly labels, my faith in humanity would have been shattered.