Chrismukkah

Continuing the current trend of large-scale mergers and acquisitions, it was announced today at a press conference that Christmas and Hanukkah will merge. An industry source said that the deal had been in the works for about 1300 years.

While details were not available at press time, it is believed that the overhead cost of having twelve days of Christmas and eight days of Hanukkah was becoming prohibitive for both sides. By combining forces, we're told, the world will be able to enjoy consistently high-quality service during the Fifteen Days of Chrismukkah, as the new holiday is being called.

Massive layoffs are expected, with lords a-leaping and maids a-milking being the hardest hit. As part of the conditions of the agreement, the letters on the dreydl, currently in Hebrew, will be replaced by Latin, thus becoming unintelligible to a wider audience.

Also, instead of translating to "A great miracle happened there," the message on the dreydl will be the more generic "Miraculous stuff happens." In exchange, it is believed that Jews will be allowed to use Santa Claus and his vast merchandising resources for buying and delivering their gifts.

One of the sticking points holding up the agreement for at least three hundred years was the question of whether Jewish children could leave milk and cookies for Santa even after having eaten meat for dinner. A breakthrough came last year, when Oreos were finally declared to be Kosher. All sides appeared happy about this.

A spokesman for Christmas, Inc., declined to say whether a takeover of Kwanzaa might not be in the works as well. He merely pointed out that, were it not for the independent existence of Kwanzaa, the merger between Christmas and Hanukkah might indeed be seen as an unfair cornering of the holiday market. Fortunately for all concerned, he said, Kwanzaa will help to maintain the competitive balance. He then closed the press conference by leading all present in a rousing rendition of "Oy Vey, All Ye Faithful."

Silence

Last night I was up late reading this beautiful piece of fiction in which the protagonist was called Silence, and eventually ended up pondering silence itself - about how scared we are of it, about how deafening it can be if we don't know how to recognize its true value.

We are so used to noise that silence has started to mean that you don't have anything valuable to say. People feel the need to fill the gap, and if someone becomes quiet while talking to us we become nervous and start filling the blanks with jargon. I've noticed, especially in a group, that if everyone suddenly becomes silent someone will always begin talking, even if it has nothing to do with the conversation. In fact, in our hurry to fill the silence we start thinking of topics beforehand in our head so that we'll have a fallback plan if the situation comes to that.

We feel that until we call attention to ourselves through our words, we won't have a chance to be noticed or a chance to contribute. This happens the most in interpersonal relationships, with your boyfriend or friend or family member. If they unburden themselves to you and tell you of some problem they might be having, you immediately start thinking of the solution you need to offer and imparting your advice - when maybe sometimes all they really want you to do is listen. To be able to have something 'insightful' to say, sometimes we forget to even listen.

This extends to inner silence as well; we are afraid that if we let our mind achieve stillness, we'll be forced to look into issues that we don't want to deal with. So we fill our head with a million thoughts that continually chase each other resulting in a cacophony of sound... but we forget that a symphony needs rest, patches of silence to accentuate the notes in between to elevate them, to let them shine.

The simple fact is that silence troubles us and we simply don't know how to deal with it (me being one such person).

Strangely enough, it is actually the testament to the strongest of relationships. If you can share silence with someone, it means you are so close that you don't need words to bridge the distance.

A Vote for Change

Video Game Violence

At a certain time in the development of any new entertainment industry, Puritanical reactionaries can be counted on to come out of the woodwork and wag the finger of blame, transforming the next evolution in performing art into the latest pre-packaged excuse for the decline of Western Civilization. In Shakespeare's time, actors were barely tolerated, and before that were considered no better than prostitutes. When Elvis Presley began to appear on late night television, "concerned" citizens assumed that wantonness and debauchery would follow thanks to The King's reckless pelvic thrusting. Among the first initiatives of the Nazis, as they began to seize power in 1920s Germany, was to stamp out a thriving and energetic stage culture, ostensibly because of its bizarre jazz sounds.

Now that rock music and movies have become acceptable mainstays of popular culture, the self-appointed guardians of morality step into the breach once again to take aim at the latest easy answer for all society's ills: video games. Figures such as Florida lawyer Jack Thompson, who has led several widely unsuccessful anti-video game campaigns, are the screeching, spitting, fist-pounding demagogues who demand that society compensate them for their lack of modern understanding by indulging them in their petty contests against video games and the creative, talented individuals who produce and play them.

Thompson and his irrational posse conflate video games and violence with the same shallow ignorance that once caused people to connect masturbation and blindness. Any art historian will tell you that the images created by any society are a reflection of that society's values and norms, and do not come into being in a vacuum. Clearly, unexamined social forces are in play; the nature of video games is merely a reflection, not a causal agent.

Now, if we were to take a glance at video game history, you'd notice a distinct lack of major protests against video gaming's influence before the production of Mortal Kombat (1992) or The House of the Dead (1996). No one ever led a crusade to prevent Super Mario from jumping on turtles, or Link from slaying a dragon. It's wrong to assert that before this time, video games did not depict violence between human characters: this has been going on since at least the mid-1980s, with titles like Bad Street Brawler or Urban Champion, (both released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1986).

Knowing these two things, we can reduce the major assumptions of video gaming's foes to two possibilities: Either a) video games do not reflect the norms of society and are unreasonably violent, gruesome, and so on or b) semi-realistic visual depictions of totally unrealistic acts cause people to completely lose their ability to tell fantasy from reality.

It is intellectually untenable for anyone to state that the video games of today do not reflect western cultural norms. Foundational literature shows countless depictions of gratuitous violence against humans across every gradiation of the moral spectrum: Beowulf. The Odyssey. The Bible. Even today, war is a continuous social fact that claims thousands of lives every year.

Despite this, organized violence is still accepted by the majority as both heroic and necessary; at the very least inevitable. War is considered an essential method of problem solving.The U.S. Army has recently released a computer video game aimed at recruiting youth into the military, and not the providence of any feature of gaming itself. Anyone who claims that you can learn to fire a rifle by pressing a button has obviously done neither.

So this means that the average game player can't be trusted to distinguish reality from falsehood, right? Absolutely not. We trust people at 18 - my own age, perhaps the age of your children - to fight in wars, to consume poisonous substances at will, to operate dangerous equipment and vehicles. The assumption, therefore, is generally made that their psyche is in good enough shape to not be irreparably damaged by an encounter with fiction, no matter what form it may take. Clearly, these aren't the people for whom most of those who would see video games abolished cry so loudly... though I suspect some of them would take video games (among other things) out of the hands of grown adults if they could.

This leaves children as the benefactors of Jack Thompson's righteous outrage, and to that idea I direct a simple question: who is buying games for these children? Who's letting them spend time in front of a TV when they should be developing skills to cope with life as a human being? Only mature, involved, caring adults can impress essential facts of co-existence upon the young mind, and among the first is this: what goes on in your head is not the same as what goes on in the world around you. In times of regular anger or distress, there should be no question of violence. In cases where young minds are disturbed, it is the responsibility of elders to notice the signs.

Video games are rated for content in a manner very similar to movies, allowing parents to take a proactive role. To claim that a well-adjusted, well-rounded and well-balanced young person can be incited to violence by a video game is utterly incredible. Such a superficial argument is tempting only because it shifts the blame away from countless complex social and psychological factors. These produce changes in a person's behavior any reasonably involved parent should be expected to notice. Even in the worst case scenario, when violence does occur, blaming a video game is not any more sensible than blaming a book, a fortune cookie, or the victim. The core skills of understanding what fiction is and what our relationship to it should be are the responsibility of the parent to provide, not that of teachers or any government agency.

The idea that video games cause violence is as hollow and dogmatic as a fire and brimstone sermon, couched in illogical beliefs and promoted as the centerpiece of a retrogressive agenda. Those who decry video games as the next great evil should focus their feverish energies on addressing the attitudes and afflictions that contribute to violence of every kind, especially among the young: the aggrandizement of the physically strong and attractive, issues of inequality based on race, wealth, and social class, and much, much more. Mature, responsible people do not recourse to violence in the real world, and when violence occurs, placing the blame on an inanimate object is an injustice to all concerned. Don't let the Jack Thompsons of the world convince you otherwise.

Strange Satellite Movies

Ever bother to press the 'info' button on your remote to check out the program descriptions? We did at my friend Rachel's last night... and the experience was somewhere in between kind of funny and slightly creepy.

Here's a sample of what I'm talking about:


An enraged one-legged Scottish janitor shoots his wealthy employer in the leg and kidnaps his grandmother at gunpoint.

A samurai who can turn into a shape-shifting creature enters a town that holds a strange and deadly secret.


A gay waterfowl and his longtime companion split up due to an unexpected love interest. Animated.


A teenager undergoes a personality change while trying to free himself of the need to suck his thumb.


Valley girls cruise Southern California with Mac, Wiploc and Zebo from the planet Jhazzala.


Gangsters, dissatisfied customers and the FBI pursue two Los Angeles punks selling cellular phones from their van.