Workbench

Review: 'The Spy Who Came for Christmas' by David Morrell

Rogers Cadenhead — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:41:24 -0500

I don't read many thrillers, but I asked to review David Morrell's The Spy Who Came for Christmas after it was advertised recently on the Drudge Retort. I'm a sucker for holidaymas-themed books and films, and the title got my attention with its evocation of John le Carre's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

Morrell, a prolific thriller author who created Rambo in 1972's First Blood, centers his new book on Kagan, an American spy who has committed an escalating serious of heinous acts while working undercover with Russian mobsters in the U.S. When he's tasked with kidnapping the newborn son of an inspirational Palestinean leader to derail Middle East peace, he flees with the child into the crowd of celebrants on Santa Fe's Canyon Road during the annual art walk on Christmas Eve, ending up in the home of a woman who's packing her bags after being punched by her alcoholic husband. Together, the spy, the woman, her 12-year-old son and the infant "child of peace" -- as he's grandiosely described -- hunker down and prepare for a siege as three mobsters and the husband lurk outside.

The plot's tense and engaging, but the novel's told through so much dialogue it feels like it would rather be a screenplay (six of Morrell's books have been made into films). While waiting for the mobsters he betrayed to storm the house and take back the infant, Kagan entertains the family with his theory that the three Wise Men, the Magi, were actually Persian spies trying to destabilize King Herod's government in Israel with false tales of a savior:

"The Magi were so convincing that Herod didn't realize who his true enemies were. They became what intelligent experts call double agents: spies pretending to work for one side when they're actually working for the other. ... But something remarkable happened in Bethlehem, something that changed everything. ... They began to believe that the disinformation they'd given Herod was in fact the truth."

Though Kagan's Christmas story is rationalized as an effort to keep the family from freaking out, by the end of the book it's clear he's an incorrigible blabbermouth, an amusing trait to find in a battle-scarred intelligence operative.

Morrell's back-of-book bio makes him sound like a figure out of his own novels:

[H]e is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School for wilderness survival as well as the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security. ... He has been trained in firearms, hostage negotiation, assuming identities, executive protection and offensive/defensive driving, among numerous other action skills ...

The best part about The Spy Who Came for Christmas is Morrell's choice of setting, which makes a holiday vacation to Santa Fe sound like a pretty good idea, once all the spies and terrorists have cleared out.

Credit: The photo of Santa Fe's Canyon Road was taken by CelebrateGreatness and is available under a Creative Commons license.

'Let Us View Candy Land as a Mathematical Entity'

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:21:50 -0500

Game designer Greg Costikyan has written a detailed analysis of why Candy Land succeeds as a game in spite of the fact that winning the game is completely random and requires no strategy of any kind:

There are those who criticize Candy Land as being jejune and ultimately futile, since the nature of its rules construct and the (non-existent) emergent complexity it supports is utterly unsusceptible to any sort of rational analysis, or indeed, choice of player strategy.
... let us view Candy Land as a mathematical entity. It is very nearly a Markov chain, a stochastic process in which, given the current state, future states are independent of past states. (It would be a pure Markov chain if the deck were shuffled after each play; instead, it is a crippled Markov chain coupled to a push-pop stack.) As such, it is a metaphorical representation of the fundamental ideology of the United States; the past is no constraint on the future, and each individual should strive resolutely for personal advance despite whatever the past may hold.

Banking CEOs Deserve a Christmas Malus

Rogers Cadenhead — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 08:55:52 -0500

I was scrounging through old bookmarks recently when I rediscovered World Wide Words, Michael Quinlan's online newsletter of unusual words. His current edition features "malus," a word that ought to be more common in American business given the disastrous mismanagement of many companies:

Though malus isn't in any general dictionary that I've consulted, it's also a fairly common term in the world of banking, insurance and contracts. A malus is the opposite of a bonus -- you might call it a forfeit or a clawback instead. It's receiving more attention as finance houses seek to rein in excessive payments to senior staff (it was in the news last week because the Swiss bank UBS has introduced malus provisions for its executives). It turns up in particular in the form bonus-malus system, for a contract that rewards success but penalises failure.

World's Oldest Person Dies (Again)

Rogers Cadenhead — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 15:30:40 -0500

One of the best jobs I ever had was working weekends on the state desk at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram during the late '80s. I took calls from correspondents across North Texas, wrote spot-news stories and spent the other 98 percent of my time reading everything on the news wire. That job had a lot in common with publishing the Drudge Retort today, with the notable exception that you once needed a journalism job to gorge on an all-you-can-eat buffet of wire stories.

When you read news for too long, you develop weird obsessions. Back then, I became the world's foremost expert on Paul Tsongas and Japanese sumo wrestling. Today, I've become fixated on how the AP reports the death of the world's oldest person.

The world's oldest person has a high mortality rate (tough job), and every time AP covers the story using the same formula: who kicked the bucket, how old was she down to the day, what was her secret for longevity, and who's now the oldest person. (I'm using the feminine pronoun because it's always a woman.)

On Thursday, Edna Parker gave up the ghost at 115 years and 220 days old. Born April 20, 1893, she was a mother and schoolteacher who never tried alcohol or tobacco, spent 69 years as a widow and offered "more education" as her best advice for living. The newest oldest person becomes Maria de Jesus of Portugal, also 115.

When the oldest person expires, it moves the living memory of the world past a certain number of historic events, a concept I've dubbed the Line of Oblivion. Although it's a grim notion, I check Wikipedia to see what crosses the line each time the oldest person croaks.

When Parker bought the farm and the line moved forward to de Jesus' birth on Sept. 10, 1893, we lost the last person who could have remembered the stock market crash of 1893 (May 5), Gandhi's first act of civil disobedience (June 7) and the Sea Islands Hurricane (Aug. 27).

We also lost anybody who could have been on the friend list of the German philosopher Jakob Froschammer (died June 14, 1893), Stanford University founder Leland Stanford (June 21) and the actress Georgiana Drew Barrymore (July 2), the mother of Lionel, Ethel and John.

If this line of thought is too macabre, I blame a childhood spent reading the cartoons of Gahan Wilson.

Customizing Apache Directory Listings with .htaccess

Rogers Cadenhead — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:30:05 -0500

I was clearing off my desk today when I found an article I've been meaning to scan and send to somebody -- the story of how my friends almost elected a dalmatian and squirrel to the homecoming court of the University of North Texas in 1989. The alumni magazine wrote a feature on Hector the Eagle Dog and Agnes the Squirrel's campaign, which attracted national media and made a few of the human homecoming candidates very angry.

I can never tell when a file's too big to send in email without aggravating the recipient, so I upload files to my server and email the links instead. I decided to make this process easier by creating a clippings directory where uploaded files show up automatically.

The Apache web server can publish a listing of all files in a directory, as the official Apache site does in its images subdirectory. I wanted to make my clippings page look more like the rest of my weblog, so I found a tutorial on customizing directory listing pages.

First, I created an .htaccess file in the directory and turned directory indexing on with this command:

Options +Indexes

This command only works on servers that are configured to allow users to change options. For security reasons, I turn directory listings off by default, so they only appear when I specifically configure a directory to reveal its contents.

Next, I created header and footer web pages that contain the HTML markup to display above and below the directory listing. These files are identified by two more commands in .htaccess:

HeaderName header.html
ReadmeName footer.html

These web pages are located in the clippings directory. For the final step, I added a description of PDF documents and made sure that the header and footer files are not included in the listing:

AddDescription "PDF Document" .pdf
IndexIgnore header.html footer.html

There's a lot more that can be customized in an Apache directory listing, as the tutorial demonstrates, but for my project it seemed like overkill.

Update: Alternatively, I could've checked to see if the story was already online. Auugh.

Sharing Bookmarks and Feed Lists with XML

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:42:31 -0500

I'm working on a programming project that requires an XML format to represent bookmarks and other collections of URIs, but before I reinvent the wheel I'd like to see if there's an existing format that meets my goals. The format should be able to hold all of the following information:

Bookmarks in web browsers
Links in web directories like the Open Directory Project
Feeds in an OPML subscription list
Social bookmarks in Delicious

There are several potential formats that could be put to use: XBEL, the outline formats OPML and XOXO and the syndication formats RSS and Atom. Each has drawbacks, as I'll go over in upcoming posts here on Workbench.

I'm starting with XBEL, because that's the best-supported format specifically designed to hold bookmarks. XBEL was created in 1998 by members of the Python community led by Fred L. Drake Jr. XBEL 1.0 continues to be the only release, though there's occasional talk on the XBEL-Specs mailing list about developing a new version.

XBEL was designed to represent browser bookmarks and has become the native format for storing them in the Konqueror and Galeon browsers. There are add-ons that extend XBEL support to more popular browsers -- one example is SyncPlaces, a Firefox add-on that can manually import and export XBEL bookmarks.

Here's what a bookmark looks like in XBEL data produced by SyncPlaces:

<bookmark id="row123" added="2008-11-25T17:30:22.352" modified="2008-11-25T17:30:22.522" href="http://workbench.cadenhead.org/">
  <title>Workbench</title>
  <info>
    <metadata owner="Mozilla" dateadded="1227634222352963" lastmodified="1227634222522963"/>
  </info>
  <desc>Rogers Cadenhead's personal weblog</desc>
</bookmark>

Bookmarks in XBEL can be grouped into folders, which themselves can contain more folders to create a hierarchy. The format's well-designed and can be extended by namespaces or the metadata element, which in the preceding example carries Firefox-specific information.

There are several drawbacks to using XBEL. The format predates social bookmarking and lacks support for tagging bookmarks or assigning them to categories like the ones employed by the Open Directory Project.

XBEL also predates the popularity of syndication, so there's no way to identify that bookmarks are RSS or Atom feeds. You also can't establish a relationship between a web site's home page and its feed. A few years ago on XBEL-Specs I floated the idea of adding type and rel attributes to bookmarks that function like they do in Atom, which would be all that's required to publish blogrolls and feed subscription lists with the format.

XBEL can't be used for web directories, feed lists or social bookmarks without extending the format. I think all three are strong enough use cases to be part of a bookmark format's core set of elements. If I choose XBEL, most of my project's functionality won't be supported by today's XBEL tools or client libraries, which is the primary reason to adopt an existing format.

Jeff Bridges Visits the Dentist

Rogers Cadenhead — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:28:22 -0500

The actor Jeff Bridges passes along a fish tale I hadn't heard before, concerning a fisherman in Wichita, Kan., who saw a basketball behaving oddly in a lake:

It turned out to be a flathead catfish who had obviously tried to swallow a basketball which became stuck in its mouth!!

The fish was totally exhausted from trying to dive, but unable to because the ball would always bring him back up to the surface.

Bill tried numerous times to get the ball out, but was unsuccessful. He finally had his wife, Pam, cut the ball in order to deflate it and release the hungry catfish.

The story appears to be legit, according to About.Com's Urban Legends site.

The tale led me to Bridges' blog, which he publishes entirely in the form of doodles. His October update includes this drawing from his most recent dental cleaning, where his hygienist offered him a headlines and "pretty images + music or a dose of terror." He chose terror.

Bridges' doodles make particularly inspired use of hyperlinks, such as the one that promotes his upcoming-in-2010 film Men Who Stare at Goats. "Click goat droppings for information," he urges.

Most Expensive Magazine Subscription Ever

Rogers Cadenhead — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:03:57 -0500

I subscribe to Pyramid, a roleplaying game magazine published for the past 15 years by Steve Jackson Games. The company keeps track of past orders so you can redownload issues in PDF format. I found a surprise when I checked my subscription today.

That's probably a bit more than I should have spent, but the deduction will make it a lot easier to pay my 2008 taxes.

NBC Cancels 'My Own Worst Enemy'

Rogers Cadenhead — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 10:06:08 -0500

NBC has cancelled the new Christian Slater spy drama My Own Worst Enemy and the returning series Lipstick Jungle, according to Live Feed:

NBC's expectation for the return of Lipstick was modest, but Enemy was considered an important show. A spy thriller with a grown-up budget inspired by the Bourne movies, Enemy received NBC's coveted post-Heroes time period. That valuable Monday hour of scheduling real estate has become less worthwhile in recent weeks, however, as Heroes shed viewers -- weakening the lead-in for Enemy and hastening its decline.

I tried My Own Worst Enemy a few times and thought it was fun to see Slater argue with himself in video voicemail, but the series made some odd decisions, like casting pudgy comic Mike O'Malley as an international superspy. Television's Jonathan Bourne convinced me to put it on my TV Death Pool, where I ranked it the ninth-most likely cancellation.

I tried most of the new shows this TV season, giving up on everything but Fringe and Life on Mars. The latter series is a surreal cop show in which Jason O'Mara plays Sam Tyler, a modern New York police detective thrown back into the '70s, where he works cases old school with Harvey Keitel, Michael Imperioli and Gretchen Mol. (It appears that Tyler's in either a coma or purgatory -- there are occasional discontinuities, like when he spots a clubgoer wearing a Nirvana T-shirt at a time when Kurt Cobain would've been six years old.) The cast is unbelievably good, and the series keep finding great music in a decade where I thought none could be found.

Here's a sample episode's soundtrack, as described by Drake Lelane, who writes a regular music on TV feature for Film.Com:

"Wild in the Streets," Garland Jeffreys
"Ice Ice Baby," Vanilla Ice
"I'm Gonna Keep on Loving You," Cool Blues
"Come on and Gettit," Marion Black
"He Keeps You," Boscoe
"Anywhere in Glory," The Mighty Indiana Travelers
"Everybody is a Star," Sly & the Family Stone
"Black and White," Three Dog Night

"Ice Ice Baby" snuck into the episode when Det. Tyler used it to impress gun-toting black nationalists who kidnapped him. As Lelane observes, "only in 1973 would laying down the rhymes of Vanilla Ice's 'Ice Ice Baby' be considered cool."

Mike Masnick: Newspapers Have Become Souvenirs

Rogers Cadenhead — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:52:27 -0500

The morning after Election Day, I had to make four stops before I found a store that still had a copy of the New York Times, beating a spry older woman by seconds. She was not happy, but her plaintive "I was going to buy that" fell on deaf ears. The unifying spirit of the moment did not mean I was handing over the last copy of the paper of record. Hit the bricks, grandma!

Like some newspaper editors I saw quoted in the media, I took heart in the mad dash for papers taking place all over the nation. I thought it was a sign that even in these disintermediating times, people still need the paper. Mike Masnick of Techdirt posted a crushing takedown of this premise:

... it sounds as though many newspaper publishers got exactly the wrong lesson from this. Some publishers celebrated the rush to buy newspapers as evidence that newspapers were still relevant and that in "big events" people still turned to print papers. Except, that's not true. Publishers who believe that are deluding themselves. People got the actual news from the internet and TV. The newspapers just represent a souvenir of the event -- not the place to turn to for news about it.

The copy of the Times I bought Wednesday morning still sits on my desk unread. I got the news online.

Sarah Palin's Long Road to the White House

Rogers Cadenhead — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 10:24:57 -0500

One night, Schmidt and Salter went to her hotel room to brief her. After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat with her laconic husband, Todd. "I'll be just a minute," she said. Salter tried to strike up a conversation. He knew that Todd was half native Alaskan and a championship snow-machine racer.
"So what's the difference between a snowmobile and a snow machine, anyway?" Salter asked. "They're the same thing," Todd replied. "Right, so why not call it a snowmobile?" Salter joshed. "Because it's a snow machine," came the reply.
Later, Schmidt and Salter went outside so that Salter could have a cigarette. "So how about the Eskimo? Is he on the level?" Schmidt asked. Salter just shrugged and took another drag.
-- Newsweek, "Secrets of the 2008 Campaign"

There's a ferocious campaign being undertaken on right-wing blogs to blacklist campaign aides for John McCain who are trashing the reputation of Sarah Palin in media interviews. Erick Erickson, the founder of RedState.Com, calls this campaign Operation Leper:

We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you'll see us go to war against those candidates. ...
We are rooting for Sarah Palin. Don't make us add you to our list. Do you really want to be next to Kathleen Parker in the leper colony?

If this effort is motivated by a desire to see Palin in the White House in four or eight years, I think her supporters have a much larger task ahead of them than they realize. Even if she softens her reputation as a sharp-elbowed social conservative and establishes her credibility as a presidential aspirant, Palin finds herself in a country that has been brutal on politicians who lose a presidential race as the second banana.

In the history of the U.S., only one unsuccessful vice presidential candidate has gone on to become president. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, lost the 1920 election as the running mate of Democratic presidential candidate James Cox. Republican Warren Harding won the race in a Republican landslide. Twelve years later, Roosevelt was elected president.

In the intervening 12 years, Roosevelt practiced law and remained active in Democratic Party politics, giving nominating speeches for fellow New Yorker Alfred E. Smith at the 1924 and 1928 national conventions. He was elected New York's governor in 1928 and re-elected in 1930 before running for president. Palin and Roosevelt share a gubernatorial job from which to launch a presidential run, but New York was the largest state in the nation when he led the state. Alaska's smaller than 46 states and Puerto Rico.

Most losing vice presidential candidates couldn't even get their own party's nomination for president later. John Edwards and Joe Lieberman tried and failed, and I suspect that would be the outcome of a future Palin presidential run, no matter how well she masters the continents.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Rogers Cadenhead — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 01:31:38 -0500

At 11 p.m. Eastern time on Nov. 4, 2008, a simple three-word news story moved on the Associated Press wire:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Obama wins presidency.

As much as I wanted this to happen, I refused to believe it actually could happen until the moment Barack Obama reached 270 electoral votes. I find myself wondering what else can happen, now that the impossible has become possible. For the first time in my adult life I live in a blue state. The 21st century has begun and the old rules no longer apply. Do we finally get hovercars and jet packs? Will college football adopt a playoff?

Florida Poll Worker Challenges My Right to Vote

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 09:23:35 -0500

When I voted at 7:10 a.m. this morning in St. Johns County, Florida, my right to vote was challenged because a poll worker decided my signature did not match my driver's license signature. I was given an "Affadavit of Elector When Signature is Different" form to sign and was going to be given a provisional ballot, but I objected to that decision, telling the worker that I've been voting at the same precinct with the same address for a decade and they were "abrogating my right to vote." (When negotiating a government bureaucracy, the most obscure verb wins.)

In Florida, provisional ballots aren't counted unless they are approved by a canvassing board. My wife has observed the work of these boards as a newspaper reporter, and it's an arbitrary and capricious process. I decided at that point I wasn't going to leave the polling place until I was able to cast a legitimate ballot or I was ordered to leave. I don't want to look back on this election, years later, as the one in which I might or might not have voted for Barack Obama.

I always bring my sons to vote, so my fourth grader was at my side, telling the worker that my signature was acceptable. My mother was visiting from Texas, and she also walked up and affirmed who I was, which demonstrates how thorough I am at providing proper forms of ID.

A supervisor at the precinct discussed the decision to make me vote provisionally with a poll observer, who I'm guessing is an attorney because he wore glasses on a chain perched on the end of his nose, like someone who might be called upon to inspect a hanging chad. He told her, "The issue here isn't whether the signature matches; it's whether he is the person he says he is." He then told me not to move, because he was going to go outside and make a call.

He didn't have to go outside. The decision was made that I could fill out a form that reflected my updated signature, and I was given a regular ballot.

Though my signature has grown progressively worse over time -- millions of mouse clicks have been hell on my mad cursive skills -- it's clear to me that poll workers in this county are being told to apply strong scrutiny to signatures. This seems excessive to me when the state requires a driver's license to vote, and I had my license and voter's registration card with me. Eight years ago a worker also challenged my signature, but another worker told him he was wrong. Individual votes in Florida were a pretty big deal that time around.

When I was leaving the building, a poll worker who was not a witness to the challenge told me unexpectedly that I should "put this on your blog." Apparently, he overheard my wife talking about the situation and mentioning that I'm one of those people.

As a general rule, I resist the temptation in commercial or governmental conflicts to play the blogger card, because I don't want to be the douchebag who doesn't get the banana peppers he ordered on his pizza, so he threatens Domino's with the dire consequences of a strongly worded blog entry on a site with Google page rank 6.

But this was so going on my blog.

CBS Takes 'Ex List' Off Schedule

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 10:55:56 -0400

CBS has pulled The Ex List off its schedule, which is good news for my TV Death Pool:

Eye has yanked the drama off the sked, effective this Friday. A repeat of NCIS will air in its place.
Decision comes after The Ex List averaged 5.3 million viewers and a 1.5 rating/5 share in its final airing, last Friday. The Ex List repped CBS' weak link on Friday nights, where Ghost Whisperer and Numbers both won their hours.

The Ex List had an idea that was better in concept than application. A single woman (Elizabeth Reaser) is told by a psychic that she has one year to find her true love or end up alone, and the guy's somebody she already dated.

Reaser's an appealing actress as the unlucky-in-love woman, but every week she chased after -- and usually bedded -- some old boyfriend who had become a stranger to her. So there was a new male guest star every week, like on Love Boat, but he wasn't just climbing aboard a boat.

Cyber-Cowboy Post-Apocalyptic Kung Fu

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:44:11 -0400

I found a great "cyber-cowboy post-apocalyptic fu" music video on another blog this morning. Watch for the appearance of Col. Wilma Deering, the Planet of the Apes Statue of Liberty and the film crew in a mirror:

This video for Muse's "Knights of Cydonia" is the work of Joseph Kahn, a prolific music video director whose next project is a film based on William Gibson's Neuromancer. (Via Stan!.)