My boss walked into my office today, saying, “I have a surprise for you!” “Are you being facetious?” I asked. “Maybe.”

He handed me this:

I think my reaction surprised him. “Oh, wow! This was my favorite mouse ever!” “Really?” I was not being facetious.

This, friends, is the Apple Desktop Bus Mouse II. According to Mactracker—an awesome, comprehensive app that gives info on every Apple product ever made—this mouse was included on all Macs from 1993 to 1998. It was only the third mouse design since the Mac’s introduction in 1984. My boss found this one locked in a cabinet in some conference room. It cleaned up really nice, and I plan to keep it.

I began using Macs when they showed up in my junior high school, though it took a long time for me to have one of my very own. Macs were too expensive, so my folks bought a IIe while I was in high school. (I first used a IIe and learned Apple Basic when I was in 4th grade.) I used my Apple IIe to write all my papers in college, but I loved every moment using the Macs at school to create flyers or newsletters or graphics.

I got my very own Mac, an LC III, in 1993. It had the new Apple Mouse II. When I started doing scientific illustration and page layout for books at Birkhäuser, the LC III was quickly replaced with a faster mac, a Quadra 610, that could better handle Illustrator and Aldus PageMaker. (Here’s one of the books I typeset. For some reason, I thought I had put my name on the copyright page. I usually did. Anyway, I want to go on record saying that nowadays, I would never stretch a font like I did in those black boxes!)

I did not upgrade my Mac until 1999, when I got a blue and white G3. I had already been living in L.A. and working for Disney for five years. I got the G3 literally weeks before the brand new G4 towers came out. It was my first introduction to immediate obsolescence.

I got my G3 less than a year after Apple had introduced the bondi blue iMac, the machine that began the rebirth of Apple and the Mac. Perhaps the most maligned thing about the new iMac was the mouse: it was round, which meant you could never tell, by feel alone, if you were holding it upright or not. My G3 came with one of these horrible mice, but I did not mind, because the machine still had an ADB port, which meant I could use my old Apple Mouse II. (I think this was the last Mac to have an ADB port. It was the first pro-level Mac to have USB.)

When I got my 12″ PowerBook in 2003, I could no longer use my Apple Mouse II. I still have not found a mouse I love as much.

The Apple Mouse II was perfect. That seems like a silly thing to say, because it had only one button, used a physical roller ball, and had no scroll wheel or scroll ball. But I consider it perfect anyway.

The mouse was low profile, which meant it sat in the curve of my hand without me having to bend my wrist backward to accommodate its bulk. The button end of the mouse was very shallow, down close to the desk surface, so I never had to strain my fingers up to rest on the button. My hand could relax comfortably. Most mice, especially today, have unnecessary bulk. They force the hand to arch up to unnatural heights, and the buttons are far off the desk, which pushes the fingers higher than is normal. The Apple Mouse II was shaped so that you could plonk your hand down, relaxed, on the desk, and the mouse would just happen to be there, in the cavity, ready to go.

The button had perfect tactility, which meant you could rest your finger(s) on the button comfortably without the button accidentally clicking. It also clicked at just the right pressure, so I never had to strain my fingers to press down. If a button clicks too easily, finger muscles get strained as you hold them aloft, trying not to click. When a button mechanism is too strong, the muscles have to strain harder to click.

The single button that covered the entire front of the mouse meant I could relax my hand in a natural position, even to the very right edge of the mouse, and still move and click with ease. A two-button mouse where the left button is the default button forces your wrist to rotate farther left and your index finger to angle more than is natural, then hold the pose the entire time you use the mouse. Most mice are designed with the buttons inset from the sides of the mouse, so even if you can rest your hand at the very edge, you have to move your finger to click. On the Apple II Mouse, you could just click any part of the front, and you were okay.

All these tiny little alterations, muscle movements, and position-holdings add up over the hours, and, in my experience, at the end of a long mousing day, they hurt. My right hand is sore every day using “better” mice. For sure, hands of different sizes and shapes may require different shapes of mice. A large hand still rests its fingers at the surface of a desk, so the low mouse button works well there. Perhaps stronger fingers would need stronger button clicking, and a wider hand a wider mouse to more comfortably grip, but overall, I posit that the Apple Mouse II was a perfect, average shape.

My current favorite mouse is the Wireless Mighty Mouse. Yes, also by Apple. I have used a number of other brands of mice, and none of them works as well (though the Logitech MX 300, now impossible to find, was pretty decent). With the Mighty Mouse, I get back the low profile and the low, borderless button. I swap my left and right clicking, so the right side of the mouse is my “left” click. This way, I only have to strain my hand or fingers occasionally to execute a “right” click. My hand can rest as it did using an Apple Mouse II. (I tried swapping button mapping on other mice, but for some reason, it didn’t work so well, mostly because the unclickable side border made it pointless.)

The down side of the Mighty Mouse is that I have to be very careful, and therefore strain my hand, to do a “click and pick up the mouse to move it before you unclick” maneuver. This is easy on most mice, but because the whole top of the Mighty Mouse is mostly one piece, the only place to grab and hold is the side-click buttons. I have to move my thumb up to the left side click button (because it does not naturally rest there), then sort of do a squeeze–hold while I click the main button, then do a cumbersome lift… Do you know how many times I accidentally squeeze too hard and bring up Exposé? And then suddenly I’m stuck, hand aloft, mid-click, with all my windows shrunken, and everything has to come to a halt while I repair the mess.

Another issue is the touch-sensitive button. I love the idea in theory, but you have to lift your fingers off the “left” click “button” to make the “right” click “button” work properly. If the mouse senses a touch on both sides, it does not execute a “right” click. This strain does get to my hand by the end of the day.

I could get into my issues with tracking sensitivity, but I won’t. Suffice it to say that the Apple mice have the best tracking algorithmicity thingy I’ve used. Other mice are too sensitive and don’t get the acceleration right.

One could say that I simply like the Apple Mouse II because that’s what I got used to using. It seems a fair argument, but it doesn’t work here because I can just lay my hand down on my desk, let it relax, and see how it comes to rest. The Apple Mouse II fit right into that relaxed posture. I do not imagine other people’s hands lie in completely different ways than mine, all twisted to the left with fingers naturally hovering in the air and wrists bent backwards. Maybe I’m ignorant, or a fool. Or maybe it’s approaching 8:00 on a Friday night, and I’m here in my office writing a blog post about mice.

I have spent a lot of time at work testing mice, trying to find decent ones that haven’t been bastardized by forced progress and redesigned for redesign’s sake. It’s a constant battle. So seeing an old friend walk in the door was a great surprise and, perhaps pathetically, a happy one.

No, that is not me making fun of Japanese. On the contrary! It’s… well, not on the contrary. I’m not even sure why I used that phrase. I just know I’m not making fun of the Japanese language or people. I wear a Chococat bracelet, for God’s sake!

All I want to say is that there’s a lot of talk going on about the fonts Obama and Clinton and McCain are using in their political campaigns. I don’t have the energy to post all the links here (see previous post regarding not getting things done), mostly because there are so very many. But here’s the one that got me started on this post in the first place (via Daring Fireball, of course).

What I thought might be both fun and helpful was posting snapshots of the three main candidates’ websites here for easy comparison. So I did. This is what their homepages look like today. Click on any of the images to see them full-size. (They are large PNGs, so they may load slowly.)

Let’s start with McCain.

Boy, that’s a fun site! All the wonderful colors! The cheer! The optimism! The Optima! (And the Gill Sans and the Myriad and the Futura and the Trajan and… ACK!) If John McCain were an investment firm, this would be a great website design. Or, perhaps, a great start to a website design.

How does Hillary’s look?

Hmm. How… cute. Is she running for district council? And I hear she just recently put a new font on her site. Is that… Gotham? Copycat! Charlatan! Lemming! Oh, wait, it’s Avenir? Well, then, she’s definitely not copying what’s-his-face. The guy with the funny name. What is it again?

Ah, yes, that’s right. Obama. Well, now, this is a site! Look at the airiness! The beauty! The hope! The change! The fonts! Gotham! And I can not for the life of me find the name of the serif and script fonts, but they are fantastic. Look how well the script and Gotham work together! Now if only HTML 5 were in effect, we wouldn’t have to put up with Helvetica and Georgia in the text boxes.

Most pundits have agreed that Obama’s branding team knows what it’s doing. I have to agree. That is one professional, good-looking, and effective site. It’s yummy. I’ll take a double scoop in a waffle cone, please.

I have before bemoaned the change, currently in progress, from the original highway font to the new Clearview font. Seeing the new font in action in Austin during my last two trips there, I have to say… I do not like it any better. Yes, it’s very legible, but it’s still dull, dull, dull. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s “ugly,” but I’m very close. Some lobbying money from Friends for Fabulous Fonts could steer me to that conclusion.

The New York Times published a long article on Clearview and its creation. Perhaps it’s because this article was published in the Times Magazine section, or perhaps it’s because journalism is pretty much dead, but interesting as the article is, it suffers from many maladies of poor writing. Take, for instance, this:

Looking at a sign in Clearview after reading one in Highway Gothic is like putting on a new pair of reading glasses: there’s a sudden lightness, a noticeable crispness to the letters.

True, the Clearview’s letters are crisper, but so-called Highway Gothic is not illegible. It is not muddy. It is incredibly clear and wonderfully designed. Since all our highway signs in L.A. started being replaced a few years ago, I’ve been seeing if I ever find them hard to read. Almost never. I do have good eyesight—meaning good contact lenses—so perhaps I’m not a target demographic for clearer sign fontage. Which is not my overall point. My point is that looking from Highway Gothic to Clearview is nothing like putting on a new pair of reading glasses.

What started as a project to organize information for tourist routes in Oregon would soon turn into an all-consuming quest, and one that marked the first time in the nation’s history that anyone attempted to apply systematically the principles of graphic design to the American highway.

Anyone who’s paid attention to the signs on our highways knows that they were, in fact, carefully designed. Their colors, shapes, and placement are very specific. The statement above is mere popsicle writing.

The text that did appear on these early signs was largely hand-painted and all in uppercase, simply because no one could effectively draw lowercase letter forms by hand.

Preposterous. Assumptive writing at its best. “No one could effectively draw lowercase letterforms by hand”? Who made that up? Heck, I can make up stuff, too. For instance, did you know that the quality, tone, and content of most news articles are sloppy and sensationalistic simply because no one has the means to effectively research and confirm details and sources? It’s true!

Now how about mismatched points? Toward the beginning, the article mentions how the understanding of type has turned from an “esoteric pursuit” into one that marketing has made more front-and-center. “Fonts are image, and image is modern America,” an argument for how badly the font on our highway signs needs to be changed. However, later on, Highway Gothic is said to be exactly that kind of font to many people.

The quirky appeal of imperfection does give Highway Gothic its fans, who share highway lore and trade vintage road signs on the Internet. To highway enthusiasts like Richard Moeur, who runs a Web site devoted to traffic signs, the existing highway typeface has become evocative of the wonder of the open road.

So yes, we need to spend all this time and money on a new font in this era of marketing, a font that can improve legibility but also create a new, cohesive image for America’s highways! Forget that FWHA Series E is already that, and that Highway Gothic is being used by marketing campaigns willy-nilly these days. Why make reporting accurate when it can be fun? Oh, and re-read the first part of that quote: “The quirky appeal of imperfection.” How perfectly symbolic of this story’s propagandistic slant and “by golly, it’s swell” uselessness.

I completely agree that the proper use of fonts more important than ever today, thanks to the computer. Computers have made fonts more accessible for everyone, and so the general public is more aware of what fonts are. At the same time, I’d argue, fonts have never been more misused. Back in the days when FWHA Series E was created, there were people creating typefaces such as these who knew what they were doing. It was difficult work. Highway Gothic is not a product of haphazard creation or accidental need. Fonts were made and used by people who knew how to make and use them. Now, fonts are made and used by everyone. I need not explain the consequences.

I don’t mean to imply that Clearview has been made by morons. It has obviously been carefully designed, with much thought put into its every curve. I admire the goal to create a font that will be legible in any condition, night or day, wet or dry, in slow or fast passing. It’s not surprising, though, that one of Clearview’s creators says that he wanted to take the “goofiness” out of the Highway Gothic design. Clearview is the dull result; it is too dull to be something that will become romanticized as the new American Spirit of the Open Road.

“Highway Gothic conjures the awe of Interstate travel and the promise of midcentury futurism; Clearview’s aesthetic is decidedly more subdued.” That’s exactly the problem with Clearview, but not something the article realizes might be an issue. It’s so strange to have a propaganda piece written for a highway font! I wonder if someone paid someone off. Friends for Fabulous Fonts could pay me off to write an anti-Clearview article. Or they can just send me a check for this post. Hello? You guys out there?

Yes, that is the best headline I could come up with. That’s Friday for you!

So have you seen the trailer for this Beowulf movie? Without knowing what I was about to see, something looked very, very wrong from the get-go. I was watching live action that had been… faked? Overly processed? What was it? Then I realized that Beowulf is another of Robert Zemeckis’ horrifying amalgam movies, combining live-action motion-capture with CG. The effect still gives me a deep-seated shiver any time I see clips or trailers of scenes from The Polar Express.

Now the technology has advanced to a more shiverific state. Beowulf stars some great actors. But just watch them in the trailer. They have been digitized, removing any subtlety from their performances. Anthony Hopkins looks like Anthony Hopkins, and Angelina Jolie looks like Angelina Jolie… but those looks have been waxinated. Faked. Changed. Deadened. Look at Beowulf’s CG-perfect body. Creepy. Look at the unnatural CG physical movements of the characters. Creepy! Look at the Polarized deadness in everyone’s eyes. CREEPY! That last one is the worst of all.

I suppose I can go read about the technology involved in the making of this movie, but that’s okay. I will say, having not read such, that while you can motion-capture every movement of an actor’s performance, and while you can make a 3D scan of every tiny crevice of an actor’s face, you can not capture the subtlety of acting. The dead eyes are a huge indication of what’s wrong with this kind of filmmaking. CG turns good actors into bad CG characters.

Of course, CG in the right hands can create brilliant “acting.” Ratatouille is the latest and, maybe, the best example of that from a company that knows what the hell they’re doing with CG. Pixar does not use motion capture, a fact they happily call out in Ratatouille’s credits.

Motion capture has its place. But why take very talented and expensive actors, shoot them via motion capture, digitize their faces, then scrub out any nuance though CG? It makes no sense. You’re throwing away the subtlety for which you hired those actors in the first place. Oh, unless you hired them just for their names. But no one would do that, now, would they?

Some day someone will get this technique right. But then the question can still be asked, why do it this way? Why not shoot your actors as you normally would, then use their actual faces and reactions and emotions and paint the world around them? 300 did that, and though it was a mediocre movie, at least the actors looked like people.

Pushing the envelope in this direction is a wonderful evolution of science and technology, but not of storytelling. When technology impedes or erases part of the moviemaking magic, it should not to be used.

There has been much talk that the iPhone does not have Flash on its browser. Hooray.

There are some very good, nearly-noble reasons for why Apple wants to leave Flash off the iPhone… and, for that matter, get it off the Web entirely. Before reading about this, I was simply wanting Flash off the Web for reasons having to do with usability, speed, and aesthetics.

Smashing Magazine has an interesting post today about start pages, the first page someone sees when they go to a site. The examples they use are heavy with Flash and cumbersome, difficult-to-use navigation. Admittedly, some of these sites are very cool and have a very fun aspect to them, but forget ever really finding anything useful. Forget, too, sending someone to a particular part of the site via URL… they will have to follow your instructions to find a particular item.

Some Flash sites also love to re-size browser windows, which just happened as I was writing this. Go here, the first site mentioned by Smashing, then use the back arrow to return to this post. See what happened? Now you have to go a re-size your browser window to where you want it. Annoying.

Flash has also been notoriously slow on Mac browsers. This is not a function of the Mac, but a function of Flash. Some of these Smashing sites seem to be working quite well, however. There was a time when Flash in Safari would be so painfully slow that the site was unusable.

What should trump what on a site dedicated to showcasing design? The answer would seem to be, duh, design! Design does not only encompass the visual, however. The layout and function of a website is also design. A designer who wants to show off their goods on the interactive Web, then they need to be sure the site they present is also very well designed, easy to navigate, quick to load, and tolerant of the user’s own browser settings. A snazzy, animated site may seem cool and wow us with visuals and graphic shenanigans, but if it ends up frustrating me as well, forget it. I’ll move on.

Oh, and might I point out that Smashing itself is using another excruciating website junker-upper, the sponsored inline link. Horrifying. To watch the text on Smashing become diseased by ugly green double underlines that themselves then bring up invasive Live Search or ad pop-up windows is infuriating. Flash + commerce = butt ugly.

I recently mentioned a blog I read on the Wired site called 27 B Stroke 6.

Well, sadly, they are changing their name to something less clever and creative: “Threat Level.” How… interesting. How… thought-provoking. Pshaw!

I have been a subscriber to Wired for many years. The reason I never read it much when it first came out is because it was so over-designed as to be difficult to read. Magazines are… what? Anybody? Yes, read. A difficult-to-read magazine is useless.

Thankfully, Wired’s loony design got toned down and I started subscribing once I realized what a great magazine it actually was.

Well, actually, that’s kind of a lie. I subscribed once I noticed they were offering the mag for $12 a year. Wow! A bargain!

During my readership, Wired has undergone three major redesigns. I think I can safely say only the first one was a success. The last two are horrible.

The first mistake, this being from the second redesign (I think), was making stories continue in the back of the magazine. For years, Wired stories were printed in a continuous flow, ending before the next article began. But that was changed, and now you have to flip way back into the magazine to finish reading an article. This sucks. I hate magazines that do this. It is inconvenient to read and bookmark.

The second mistake was the fonts. Oh, the FONTS! The second redesign brought the text of the magazine back to the nearly unreadable zone. I can suffer very small text, but when it’s small and thin, forget it. This style lasted a couple years.

The last redesign, which happened sometime last year, was yucky. The first change that brought the magazine from “cool” to “pedestrian” was the size. Wired went from being a wide-format magazine, which is nice to hold and imparted a bit of specialness, to being a normal size, which is… normal. Dull.

The last redesign also brought a bunch of “new” fonts, designed specifically for the magazine. Oh, the FONTS! They suck. Often, the font meant for body text is blown up huge for headlines and such, and the font is butt-ass-ugly at larger sizes. And the multiple fonts used do not harmonize well together, nor have I really been able to determine when a certain font is used for what, meaning they are all just tossed in whenever and make the magazine look junky.

Maybe to offset this now-ugly monthly experience, I recently subscribed to Print magazine. (Yes, that Print.) It is a model of beauty. The typesetting is pristine and high-class. The fonts are readable. The layout is thoughtful and pleasing. It makes the people designing Wired look like junior high students just learning InDesign.

What does all this have to do with 27B Stroke 6? Only this: Wired’s changes, both online and off, have smacked of Corporateness. Wired used to have this rebellious spirit about it, but that’s definitely changed. The magazine is now almost dull. Any hipness it tries to impart seems forced, like Cargo or something. I still enjoy the info I get from it, but it’s no longer my destination magazine.

The name change for 27B Stroke 6 is another sign of this. The old name was amusing and clever. If not everyone got what it meant, so the hell what? For God’s sake let some people be in the dark about something. Let there be something to discover about something. But corporate marketings desire the exact opposite of this. It’s a shame.

At least the new Wired.com redesign is an actual improvement. The site has sucked for quite a long time now, design- and coding-wise. At least now it’s cleaner and easier to use.

I got a real, honest-to-goodness, paying voice-over job yesterday. It was awesome. I was in and out of the joint in ten minutes. It was, without a doubt, the easiest money I’ve ever made. I like this voice-over thing!

The V/O was for HIT Entertainment’s DVD Auto-Play feature, which begins playing the DVD automatically after a short interval (and after my short announcement). I had to record two versions of the announcement, both of which ended with a single-word sentence: “Enjoy.”

I think I did a good job, and was very professional. But I had trouble on that last word. Mentally. A tiny flag went off in my head each time I came to that word. But I read it anyway, and in the most tranquil tone possible. Yes, folkarinos, it seems I’ve become part of a recent trend that has been growing in obnoxiousness in recent years. It’s the Enjoy Entreaty.

Just take a listen as you go about your life. Purchasing a yummy chicken sandwich at Wendy’s? Listen for the cashier to say “Enjoy” as she gives you your food. Acquiring a small souvenir for yourself at a little gift shop in the lobby of some touristy hotel in a vacation paradise? Notice how the smiling lady in the trifocals and the flower print shirt tells you to “Enjoy.” Buying a tiny plastic jar of chemical glop to apply to your hair for the perfect coif? Witness the purveyor urging you to “Enjoy” your new hair goop.

It seems that no matter what you go to do these days, someone is inviting you to Enjoy. They are doling out the Enjoy Entreaty. But why? How did this come to be so prevalent? Is corporate marketing to blame? Did it start with some new mandatory guideline at some mass market chain somewhere that required salespeople to say “Enjoy” to each and every customer? Or is it some kind of personal choice, where each individual salesclerk and serviceperson has decided that “Enjoy” is rather pleasant and wants to pass the delight on to others?

There’s nothing wrong with being told to Enjoy something. On the surface, and used sparingly, the word Enjoy is infused with positive vibes. It’s a comfy, cozy word. The key, though, is that “sparingly” part. When I am being hit with Enjoy at nearly every purchase, the word moves from the kingdom of Pleasantry to the dictatorship of Annoyance.

Perhaps the issue is that Enjoy is being used improperly. Really, when I purchase a movie ticket, should I be told to Enjoy? “Enjoy the movie,” yes, but just simply “Enjoy”? When I’m being handed my bag full of brand new cargo shorts, is it truly the correct suggestion? “Enjoy?” When I listen to the podcast of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! every week, should I be urged to “Enjoy” at the end of every cut-and-paste intro?

Here’s when Enjoy should be used. It should be used for food. Treats, preferably. Enjoying food is an accepted part of our lexicon. Boy, I Enjoyed that steak. Boy, did I Enjoy that marshmallow sundae. Did you Enjoy that homemade, oven-hot chocolate chip cookie? Boy, I sure did!

Beyond food, Enjoy needs qualifiers. Certainly, one can Enjoy a vacation. But the ticket lady at the garishly lit airline check-in counter should invoke the word in a phrase such as “Enjoy your flight!” or “Enjoy your trip!” She should never just say, “Enjoy.” Enjoy what? The trip? The ticket sleeve? The soon to be tedious immersion into ineffective security protocol? You may find the fit and comfort of your new clogs to be Enjoyable, but the clerk at Shoe Boot Shoe Shoe Boot Shoe should not say, nakedly, “Enjoy.” He should say, “Enjoy your new clogs!” The policewoman who so kindly pulled you over for speeding, thus sparing society an assuredly damaging and expensive accident, must take it upon herself to say, “Enjoy this financial deterrent to future misbehavior,” because a simple suggestion to “Enjoy” would exude a hint of smugness and righteousness.

My life is being made less Enjoyable by being constantly reminded to Enjoy the things I have myself sought out to Enjoy. “Enjoy” is so innocuous, so benign, so friendly, that to have it consistently misused and unwarrantedly thrust upon us is akin to a small child who, though adorable for a few minutes, becomes a nuisance when he simply will not turn around in his seat and stop staring at you while you Enjoy your Fatburger.

And so I take it upon myself to give you this apology. The voice-over that you may soon begin hearing before your new Barney, Bob the Builder, or Angelina Ballerina DVD bursts into spontaneous playing will invite you to “Enjoy.” It’s unfortunate and wrong. Am I telling you to Enjoy the video? To Enjoy the bonus features? To Enjoy the actual auto-play feature itself, movie be damned? What the hell does Enjoy mean at the end of the auto-play announcement? Nothing. It means nothing. So I’m sorry for being a part of the problem. I’m sorry I have been a party to the Enjoy Entreaty.

Well, I certainly am glad I got that off my chest. Thank you for listening, and have a nice day.

What a busy day for posts. And though this will once again preempt the hilarious OK Go treadmill video, I have to say something.

I’ve taken Bruce Tinsley to task before regarding his inability to be funny. For a comic strip writer, that’s what I would call a huge liability. And though he’s extremely conservative, and extreme conservatives simply don’t have it in them to be humorous (so goes my theory), he’s not alone in his poor humor on the funny pages. Hell, that stupid La Cucaracha comic is atrocious—head-banging-on-the-table atrocious—and it’s very liberal.

But I digress.

Here, look at the Mallard Fillmore from this Monday:

Yes, as you can see, not funny. But it’s also a bit infuriating, because that’s what happens when conservatives get a hold of anything complicated: They take a simplistic detail and use it as their talking point.

Of course Hezbollah, a terrorist, guerrilla operation, hides among the civilians of Lebanon. That’s how rats live. When you are fighting a huge power, like Israel or the U.S., and those huge powers have absolutely nothing in their hearts for you but, at the very best, dismissiveness, you really have no choice. If the U.S. got somehow taken over by, oh, I don’t know, an evil oligarchical government run by large companies and their friends, and that evil government began to, oh, I don’t know, chip away at the freedoms of its citizens until that government became, in the end, no better than the dictators and kings it still purported to loathe, and such events led to, oh, I don’t know, more subversive or violent oppression of the people… well, I imagine all patriotic countrymen who wanted to fight for the freedom that they were being denied would become, in effect, a terrorist, guerrilla operation. The oligarchy itself would waste no breath without calling the freedom fighters terrorists.

What’s so ignorant and ridiculous about the cartoon is that, were muggers to pull such a stunt with babies and other innocent people, the cops would not shoot at him. Or, rather, they should not shoot at him. Sure, that means the mugger has, for now, outsmarted the cops. But taking hostages is not anything new. It’s not like no mugger has ever hidden behind an innocent before.

Without being able to simply shoot the mugger, which is an extreme solution to begin with, the cops would have to rely on other means. Negotiation, perhaps. Or, as the movies like to show us, negotiation to buy time until another solution could be found. Suppose negotiation or another more covert way of apprehending the mugger were to fail and the mugger killed the baby before either killing himself or then being caught or shot by the cops… Who’s at fault for killing the baby? The mugger. If, while the mugger holds the child, the cops go in regardless, guns blazing, with the excuse that it is the only way to get this rat, then it is more likely the baby will die at their hands. In that scenario, who’s the one at fault? Law enforcement wold be at fault.

Those who choose to attack the mugger with the baby at risk and those who support people who make such violent decisions would claim it was the fault of the mugger for putting the baby in harm’s way in the first place. That kind of reasoning is slow-witted at best, calculatingly cruel at the worst. That sort of propaganda is no better than the mugger claiming that the police shooting at him were targeting the child.

In the Lebanon–Israel conflict, which still seems to be on hold, thank God, Israel was making the simplistic, inhumane, inelegant, cruel, and foolhardy choice in dealing with the rockets Hezbollah was firing into their country. They invaded a sovereign nation (the same thing we did in Iraq) to get at a military group that was, as anyone could have told them, not able to be destroyed with military might. If Israel really wants to destroy Hezbollah, they have to make measured, thoughtful, political choices. Hezbollah did not mainly arise out of brute force. It arose out of political and social circumstance. The only way to come close to destroying them militarily would be to nuke the entire region, and even then the annihilation of Hezbollah would not be assured.

The news is riddled now with stories of Hezbollah providing large cash payouts to people who suffered losses in the Israel attack. Harry Shearer, on Le Show, made an aside about how curious it was that Hezbollah was helping to repair the damage of the war while, in the U.S., our government isn’t doing anything tangible for the victims of hurricane Katrina. The point is that Hezbollah wins the hearts and minds of the people with a mix of propaganda and truly helpful financial and infrastructure contributions.

Israel gained nothing by destroying southern Lebanon for a month, and in fact will suffer political fallout from their foolishness. Just as the U.S. has gained nothing and lost much by having destroyed Iraq. Imagine how much more potent a non-military solution would have been in both Lebanon and Iraq. Were the U.S. to have worked for Saddam’s ouster through various well-placed and useful outlays of money and humanitarian aid, just think how much stronger our image would be. Such “soft power” solutions would not completely eradicate terrorism or resistance to the U.S., but it would lessen it and its attractiveness.

The trouble with such plans is that they take many, many years or even decades to bear fruit. Hawks don’t have any patience. Not until a war has begun, the justification for their existence is finally playing out, and all the friends of the government are raking in the cash from the building and selling of arms, are the hawks patient. Why should we accept that the military “war on terror” is going to be a long and hard one when it is unlikely to produce any good result? Why is it not more desirable to wage that long war with the morals and intelligence that are supposed to be the hallmarks of an advanced democratic civilization?

In the end, though Israel can claim they were not targeting innocent children, they certainly were. They knew that they would be killing many a civilian to get at the few rats that were hiding in their midst. Hezbollah can claim that Israel was purposefully targeting innocent children, even though they knew that, by being a target, they were in fact taking those innocent children hostage.

Who should have killed the children? Israel? Hezbollah? Should Israel have killed an exponentially larger number of civilians in a month than Hezbollah killed by launching the occasional, random rocket into Israel? Hezbollah’s rockets before the conflict were designed to kill civilians, but this is no excuse for Israel to retaliate in the same manner. In war, a baby killer is still a baby killer, no matter what the excuse.

To boil this all down to a mugger with a baby strapped to his front does nothing to enlighten, inform, or engage. It is not a sad truth or factoid, it is not a clever way to prove how evil Hezbollah is. It’s merely stupid. And it’s not even funny.

Therefore, I can only conclude what the headline here states: The Bruce Tinsley is an idiot.

Thank you, and good night!

So I think I’m way late in coming to this party, but I just got shuffled over to Tiny Vices, a website that showcases pictures taken by people. Just people. I recall hearing of the site before, but have never visited.

I got to the site from a link featuring a pic by someone called Dash Snow. Click here to see his pics at Tiny Vices. Dash’s medium is the good ol’ Polaroid. But just to warn you, these are not glamorous pictures. The world of Mr. Snow is a dark, dirty, depressingly gritty, sadly happy one. The pictorial blend of violence, blood, vomit, drug use, skanky sex, and crime is punctuated with hazy beautiful moments. A pic of a guy shooting up, a pic of a woman holding a cat, a pic of thugs kicking in a glass door, a pic of a woman and her daughter wearing bunny ears. It’s both a disquieting and serene set of pictures. Kinetics and action are there, but the still moment snapped in most of the pics evoke an odd, languid emotion.

This guy lives a lifestyle whose existence most of us tend to ignore. Though I do not know him or his life, it seems he is part of a crowd that lives solely for the tactile feel of doing things that are destructive. The kinds of things that at once destroy you and make you feel alive. The fluid-strewn alleyways and harmful powdered bliss of Dash’s universe are dirty, cluttered, mysterious.

This kind of world is as far from my reality as can be. I’m not even enticed by it. My visceral reaction is repugnance, and I so often wish the world were free of drugs and violence and the kind of ugliness unkempt lives create for everyone. But there is an attraction, through the lens of pictures such as these, to the underworld I never see. Human beings have created that layer of life. Why? F