The Origin of Species - Darwin/Kirk Cameron

As some of you may be aware, November 24th 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. This truly monumental work is deservedly being celebrated around the world in a manner similar to the celebration that took place in 2005 for the 100th anniversary of Einstein's mind-boggling achievements in 1905 (the year he published papers on Special Relativity, Brownian Motion [his least famous but most cited work] and the Photoelectric Effect). Also as some of you know, Kirk Cameron has taken this time of celebration to be a complete dick.

Walking through campus last week around lunchtime, as I am prone to do, I noticed hordes of students carrying what seemed to be a copy of On the Origin of Species. At first I thought they must have all just been from the same class, but as I saw more and more of these copies I excitedly figured that someone on campus must be handing them out for free in celebration of the anniversary. On my way back from the student center, I spotted some people handing out these books and snagged one. However I got a weird vibe from the man who handed me one and asked 'is this a trick?' to which the man just replied 'no, the whole book is there'. I instantly know that yes, this was indeed a trick.

Because Georgia Tech is a state school, anyone can come and distribute free information on the campus. However what this really results in is religious fanatics handing out pamphlets, showing pictures of aborted children, or yelling about fire and brimstone through a megaphone as students rush off to class. It's taken much of my self-control not to confront or thwart these people in the past.

What I realized after picking up my copy of The Origin of Species (yes I left out the 'On', see below) is that this was no different than the above cases. Yes it does have the entirety of Darwin's text, but the front 50 pages of the book is creationist propaganda. After getting back to my computer and chatting up some informed friends, I discovered this was a well known ploy spearheaded by infamous nutjob (thanks for the word, Pat) Kirk Cameron.

He calls his this is 'Origin into Schools' project, which intends to 'inform' students about the 'truth' involving evolution. Because public schools like Georgia Tech are public domain, he intends to freely distribute roughly 100,000 copies of this monstrosity on campuses around the country, hoping to change the minds of countless 'lost souls'.

Now I don't really want to sit here and point out all the fallacies found in the introduction to the book (and boy are there many) but it's the whole idea behind this stunt that I find despicable. First let me point out that they got the title wrong of Darwin's book (having left out the 'On'). Yes something as simple as the freaking title Cameron, Ray Comfort and their cronies were unable to get right. Secondly it is true that they seem to have included the entire text from On the Origin of Species, they have however made it completely unreadable. Using a text at least 4 points smaller than the intro, they have also eliminated any line breaks and formatting whatsoever, leaving it as a large impenetrable block of text. They obviously never intended anyone to read the majority of this book, which makes their motives loud and clear.

What I have a big problem with, is the 'Trojan Horse' method used here. I can't imagine anyone picking up this copy intending to read Darwin, and being convinced by the shoddy and infantile introduction. As much criticism as atheists often take for 'using hostile methods to force their beliefs on others' I don't think anything Richard Dawkins or others have done anything as disrespectful as this. The only proportionate response would be for Dawkins to publish his own edition of the bible including footnotes whenever the text says something factually incorrect or impossible. And before anyone claims that this is an illegitimate comparison, yes I do believe that On The Origin of Species is equivalent to the bible for evolutionists (just as I also believe that going into space is as close as someone like myself has to reaching heaven).

I don't think this attempt by Kirk Cameron and introduction author Ray Comfort will really have any impact on this intellectual war whatsoever. It is generally agreed that they are pretty crazy and very few (although more than you would like to think) people listen to them. My only hope is that for anyone on the fence with respect to this issue sees through the vile tactics used here to realize how crazy these people really are. I leave you with Darwin's final words, found even in this copy.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

(Interesting side note: as Dawkins points out in The Greatest Show on Earth after the first edition the line 'having been originally breathed' was modified by ending with 'by the creator' due to pressure from religious forces. The fact that this line does not occur in Cameron's edition shows that really, they have put hardly any thought into this section of the book and have no idea what they're talking about.)

Mad Men v. Friday Night Lights

While watching the first season of Friday Night Lights I was struck by how similar it was to Mad Men and felt the need to do a comparison piece between them. For those who are unaware, Friday Night Lights is a show based on a movie which is based on a book which is turn based on a fictional high school football team in west Texas. The show focuses on the everyday lives of those closely associated with the team, which turns out to be pretty much everyone in the small football crazed town.

The first season starts out with one of the best pilots that I have ever seen, it has a pretty spoilerific incident at it's conclusion that I won't ruin, but really it's not necessarily that plot line that makes it fantastic. The pacing and energy of the pilot really capture the excitement leading up to the first game of an especially promising season for the Dillon Panthers, and the camerawork (as it is throughout the whole show) is especially beautiful. The show is shot in the familiar cinema verite (the shaky hand held camera technique used in Blair Witch, The Office and Battlestar Galactica) and although I guess it's true of any film or show that use this technique, it really ads a sense of voyeurism making it feel like you're watching real people experience real events.

As I pointed out in a previous post, it is often told that Mad Men is really just a well written period soap opera. I'm not the first person to come up with this description, pretty much every casual viewer and critic has pointed this out. However when I described Mad Men as such at the time I was unaware that this would become somewhat of a criticism of the show. People who have not watched it and are skeptical of its greatness just end up quoting what they've heard by asking 'isn't it just like a soap opera?' Fairly or not, because 'soap operas' are often portrayed as trashy low brow entertainment, this ends up turning some people off to Mad Men who may otherwise find the show completely engrossing.

I much prefer the way Mad Men is described by Chuck Klosterman in his new book Eating the Dinosaur.

As a piece of entertainment, Mad Men has done everything right. It's perfectly cast and brilliantly paced, and it uses symmetrical symbolism in a way rarely attempted on television-every plot point is mirrored by a minor, less overt story line in the same allegorical vein. No Character is drawn without flaws.By Placing it in the 'secret' 1960s that everyone now accepts as normative (i.e. the subversive and damaged masquerading as suburban bliss), its white-collar characters are able to get away with living archaic, un-PC lives that (a) feel completely authentic but (b) would be impossible to depict in the present.

Here he points out all the things that are great about Mad Men without having to resort to talking about their sex lives. But this begs the question, what is wrong exactly with having plot lines driven by characters' personal lives? Almost every serial requires this sort of plotting, and what is special about Mad Men that makes people describe it in this way? Really what makes this show anymore of a soap opera than Battlestar Galactica? I don't think it is (actually I think BSG is much 'worse' in this way), and just because Mad Men smartly focuses its slow moving stories around peoples jobs and important incidents in their realistic lives rather than focusing on explosions and robots, doesn't make it any more melodramatic.

The reason I thought of Mad Men while watching FNL is that the later is pretty much the best nighttime soap opera that I have ever watched. Whereas Mad Men parcels out its events and well thought out plot lines, FNL tries to introduce as many different threads as possible. Put it this way: the writers of Mad Men could have used the plot lines from 2 FNL episodes to fill an entire season, and there were 22 episodes in the first season of FNL. This is great whenever the show introduced a lame plot (did Tyra having a one night stand with the oil speculator from LA do anything for anyone?) seeing that the audience was pretty sure that it would go away as fast as it came. However this also results in plot lines that have enough promise to be strung out over the majority of the season getting dropped just as quickly as they came (the introduction of Voodoo Taylor or Smash's steroid problems). FNL isn't as good as it could be because of this (the subsequent seasons are only 12 episodes so it's possible that they fix this problem) but boy is it watchable and entertaining.

Besides both being 'nighttime soap operas' both Mad Men and FNL rely on a strong sense of 'place' to ground the show. Now when I was doing literary analysis for novels in high school, I was one to kind of ignore issues such as place or setting and focus more on character analysis. Although I think sometimes the importance of 'place' is a little overstated, it is wildly essential to both Mad Men and FNL. Whereas Mad Men tries to place its characters in the context of the changing 60s, FNL attempts to chronicle the inter workings of the aforementioned football obsessed town. Although most people are familiar with the important events of the 60s, I have a suspicion that most people who might watch FNL know very little about these type of towns, or really even Texas in general. FNL attempts to show why those who grow up in towns like Dillon are so obsessed with high school football, and to show that they are not all just 'dumb jocks'. I think people who are still bitter from being picked on by the football players in high school might have some problems with this show (the AV Club message board tells me so) but the portrayal of the athletes is especially important and even handed, and might make some people rethink the 'jerky dumb jock' stereotype.

If forced to choose which show I liked more, I think I would still be pressed to find a show currently airing better than Mad Men. I loved watching the first season of FNL, and the first couple of episodes were some of the most emotionally affecting hours of television I have ever seen (really, me and Lindsay were almost to the point of tears for each of the first 6 or so episodes).The show also portrays sports in the way you wish they were, every game coming down to the final play and almost always in the favor of your rooting interest. However because of the way the show constantly brings up and drops new plot lines the show gets a little shaggy towards the end of the first season. Through thee seasons Mad Men has been absolutely superlative. The way the show is rooted in its well developed characters makes viewers more invested the more they watch it. The seasons are not distinct as they are in a show like The Wire, but I think there is something to be said for being consistently spectacular.

The Book of Basketball - Bill Simmons

Bill Simmons tends to be one of those writers that elicits pretty strong opinions by those who encounter his writing. As you may or may not be aware, Simmons is famous for writing on ESPN's Page 2 and more recently for starring in one of the most popular sports podcasts. His schtick is that rather than writing from the perspective of a sports journalist he writes from the perspective of an everyday fan. This results in him being able to take strong, and often biased opinions and he hardly ever tries to be politically correct. Unlike pretty much every ESPN personality he rarely appears on the network, and even actively tries to separate himself from the company. This 'fan friendly' approach is often the source of the bad parts in his writing, but I think it's also what really separates himself from his contemporaries.

In Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs Chuck Klosterman points out that it appears that all sports reporters and writers actually hate sports. This is, he claims, because they get so close to the athletes and day to day operation of sports that they can't help to be disillusioned with what they see. Many athletes are indeed terrible people (as are people in any occupation) and becoming too close to those same people you need to idolize in their reporting eventually breaks down pretty much every sports journalist. Simmons avoids this by staying at arms length from the athletes, owners and coaches involved in professional sports. Although this creates some pretty strong biases in his writing (he's a HUGE Boston fan, which has become insufferable due to all their winning this decade) it actually leaves him less biased than most writers or talking heads when it comes to sports as a whole. He's allowed to call athletes out when they act like knuckleheads, and he's allowed to attack the owners when they act like rich, cheap assholes. By being able to voice his real opinions he fills a much needed gap in sports reporting which too often degenerates into a huge circlejerk between the writers, athletes and everyone else involved.

Although this is technically not his first book (he published one a few years ago about the Red Sox winning the World Series), this is Simmons' first book of almost completely new material. In The Book of Basketball he sets out to redesign the basketball hall of fame (which he finds inadequate) with a tier system and by ranking every player to make it into the hall of fame. His reasoning for doing this is something along the lines of 'why should Micheal Jordon (the best player ever) and Vince Carter (a malcontent and infamous ball hog) both be recognized to the same level'? It's a valid question, and one that should be considered for other sports as well. If the hall of fame is to recognize not only the accomplishments of those who contributed to a particular sport, but also to act as a history museum, shouldn't the levels of those accomplishments be acknowledged?

The Book of Basketball also attempts to answer many questions which Simmons thinks are important to the sport as a whole. There is a whole section dedicated to 'what-ifs' that considers how the league might be different if small (and sometimes huge) things happened differently. But really at the core of this book is something that Simmons calls The Secret. He wants to find out what really is the trick to winning basketball games and championships and what is the 'it' that some players seem to have while others are completely clueless. As he is first told by Isiah Thomas, The Secret is that 'basketball is not really about basketball'.

What Isiah, and pretty much every other great player, understands is that winning basketball games to some degree is not just about who has better players. More than baseball, and possibly rivaling football, basketball is a team sport. It doesn't matter who has the better players as much as you might think, what really matters is having a team that plays well together and having players that can fit certain roles. While this may seem obvious to some people, just watch any NBA game of the past 10 years and you'll see that hardly any players gets The Secret (which I guess is where the name comes from).

Simmons frames the focal point of this argument as whether or not you think Bill Russel or Wilt Chamberlain was the better basketball in the NBA's early years. Do you go with the defensive team minded Russell or the unstoppable scoring machine Wilt (who famously scored 100 points in one game)? As Simmons points out, this is a ridiculous argument seeing that Russel won 11 championships in 13 years, often beating Wilt's teams, while Wilt only won 2 championships his entire career. Why was it that Russell routinely beat Wilt even though Wilt arguably had more skills? According to Simmons, this argument is at the heart of understanding basketball as a whole, and where individual players rank against each other.

Other than these topics, Simmons also attempts to lay out a brief history of the league and the important events that shaped the NBA as we know it today. If this seems like a lot to go over for one book it is. There is a reason the book is 700 pages besides the fact that Simmons feels bad making his readers pay for his writing.

Although he has obviously done his research for the book (and likes to remind you of this fact over and over) the best parts of The Book of Basketball are anecdotes either from Simmons personally or from those he reads/interviews. The beginning sections of the book where Simmons describes going to Celtics games during Larry Bird's prime are absolute gold. You really get a feel of what it felt like to attend those historic games, and makes you yearn for the days before jumbotrons and around the clock sports coverage. Even if the Celtic love can get a little old at times, it's hard not to see how growing up watching that particular team would create an NBA fanatic.

Being only moderately knowledgeable about basketball I found The Book of Basketball to be at the perfect level of depth. However, if you know hardly anything about basketball, or more specifically basketball greats of the past, you might glaze over when Simmons starts his countdown to the greatest players ever. Especially in the lower numbers (he lists the 96 greatest players ever leaving room for current players that don't yet make the cut) I too often found myself in sections of 5 or so players who I had never heard of before. Simmons tries to break this up with humor and funny anecdotes, but many of the older less known players blended together. This is not to say this is his fault, I'm sure someone with more knowledge of basketball history would be much more interested in these sections than I was.

The thing that really keeps this book going is Simmons' patented humor and stories. He fills this book with footnotes (almost 2 a page) and while this makes this book a 'long' 700 pages, they are mostly used to break up the basketball talk. I know it might make me somewhat of a 'dude', but I often find Simmons really, really funny. However it's in this 'dude' quality that I think that the book's weakest moments lie. Seeing that normally he has to listen to ESPNs censors, he really lets himself go with lots of dick and sex jokes. He occasionally makes comments that could be deemed sexist, and while I appreciate him trying to challenge the overly politically correctness of out times, it did occasionally make me cringe. Also a little over the top are his pop culture jokes. He likes to think he's a king of pop culture references, but it's really just Karate Kid, Teen Wolf, and Boogie Nights jokes over and over. I also think he'll regret making references and comparisons to things like The Bachelor, seeing that I don't think these references will age particularly well.

As much as I wish Simmons held back at times, what really makes The Book of Basketball great is his ability to point out which players and teams mattered, and which people had worthwhile personal stories to tell. Simmons turned me own to players who I knew about but never fully appreciated, Bill Walton and Julius Erving to name a few (seriously, who was cooler than Dr. J? See below), and made me realize how much of a team sport basketball really is. I also liked the sections where he would trash players (i.e. Patrick Ewing, Vince Carter, Pete Maravich, all for different reasons) who are often (mistakenly) thought of as all-time greats, especially given that his talents for humor lend themselves to negative criticism. Reading this book has already made me appreciate understand basketball when I watch it much more than I previously have.






















On the personal stories front, his discussions on race relations in the early days of the NBA are particularly great, especially given that this too often gets ignored when discussing sports history. His treatment of lives of Elgin Baylor and Oscar Robinson gave me chills, and I'm not the kind of person who throws that term around. If anyone ever wonders why sports matter, I would encourage them to read about the lives of these and other players.

If you're a fan of Simmons, basketball, or sports in general I would say this is a solid 'must read'. He structures it such that if you get bored with a certain section, you can easily skip around and still enjoy the book. Only want to read about players or teams you know? Go ahead, he encourages it. The 'R-rated' humor will cause a few eye rolls, as well as some audible guffaws, but you will finish the book having a much better feeling about why basketball is a great sport, and which players were truly transcendent.

Eating the Dinosaur - Chuck Klosterman

On the back cover of Chuck Klosterman's newest book there is a fake question and answer with the writer. Besides containing some of the typical smartassness found in Klosterman's writing there is the following section discussing the book's theme:

Q: Is there a larger theme?

A: Oh, something about reality. "What is reality," maybe? No, that's not it. Not exactly. I get the sense that most of the core questions dwell on the way media perception constructs a fake reality that ends up becoming more meaningful that whatever actually happened.

Although Klosterman often hides though humor or snarkiness, this is some of the best self analysis that he's written, and it perfectly explains what Eating the Dinosaur is about.

Compared to the other books of his that I have read (Killing Yourself to Live and Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs) Eating the Dinosaur has a much stronger central theme and seems to have had more thought put into it. Although Killing Yourself to Live has a 'strong theme' in theory, it too often gets dragged down by his various musings and distractions. In Dinosaur he stays much more on topic, and almost never gets distracted from his central idea (he barely brings up his personal life, which is a welcome change from his previous efforts). Although I haven't read all of Klosterman's other work, I think it's safe to say that Eating the Dinosaur is is best work to date.

As stated above, Dinosaur has a central theme of "reality versus perceived reality as it is affected by culture". Although like Cocoa Puffs it is a collection of essays on various subjects, unlike Cocoa Puffs all these essays seem to be connected on a deeper level. Whether it's talking about the failure of Chris Gaines, the fall and perception of Ralph Sampson, laughtracks, the sincerity of Rivers Cuomo, Ralph Nader and Warner Herzog or the things the Unabomber got right (more on this in a bit) Dinosaur attempts to analyze ways in which our world experience is mediated and affected through the culture in which we live.

One of my favorite essays was Klosterman explaining why he loves football (which can be read here on ESPN, to which Klosterman is an occasional contributor), and why it's such a fantastic sport. He ends the chapter with his best thoughts about the subject:

Football allows the intellectual part of my brain to evolve, but it allows the emotional part to remain unchanged. It has a liberal cerebellum and a reactionary heart. And this is all I want from everything, all the time, always.

Klosterman is here discussing how when it comes to the way football develops tactically, coaches are willing to try anything, constantly challenging the intellect. There is no 'right' way to play (unlike in other sports, say Baseball) and teams are constantly coming up with unique formations and plays to challenge what we thought was possible. However in a way football does support 'old school values' and this results in Klosterman calling it a kind of reverse libertarian. This section explains many of the reasons I myself love football, and I would point to it for anyone who doesn't understand America's fascination with this sport.

As much as I liked the chapter on football, objectively Klosterman's best section is the one in which he tackles the Unabomber. He begins the section with the usual caveats when discussing a possibly sensitive subject, and compares discussing the Unabombers manifesto to discussing O.J. Simpson as a football player. Regardless of the 'appropriateness' of the discussion, he makes some good points. Klosterman writes:

Like so many modern people, my relationship with technology makes no sense whatsoever: It's the most important aspect of my life that I hate. The more central it becomes to how I live, the worse it seems for the world at large. I believe all technology has a positive short-term effect and a negative long-term impact, and-on balance-the exponential of upsurge of technology's social import has been detrimental to the human experience.

Being a little young when the Unabomber was fully active, I was somewhat unaware of what he was all about. I knew he was a crazy guy who lived in the woods of Montana and who sent bombs in the mail to random people in order to have his manifesto published. After reading this section I went online to read though parts of the manifesto, and it ended up making me really depressed. Really, I was upset that I shared to many of the same ideas about society and technology that the Unabomber posits (and Klosterman agrees with here) that it was hard for me to reconcile how I could not come to the same conclusions as Ted Kaczynski.

Kaczynski's main thesis is that as we have become more reliant on technology, and thus don't have to work to fulfill our basic needs as an organism, we have become unhappy and depressed as a species. Almost every activity we associate with 'being human' from art to science to even charity, he ascribes as a 'surrogate activity' that is really taking the place of living and surviving. I don't necessarily agree with him here, but it's hard not to follow his logic to some of these conclusions. After thinking about this a while I came to the conclusion that yes our species seems to be having some issues with the acceleration of society and technology, but I don't think we can go back at this point. Not everyone in the world can live in a cabin in Montana, and many of the people that I love would not be alive if it were not for advanced technology. It's true that human's weren't 'made' to sit and look at screens all day, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices.

It's in this last section that many of the ideas that Klosterman has batted around for a while in various books and articles come together. The modern human is fully immersed in his society, and many of our ideas or thoughts that we would think originate from ourselves are actually a manifestation of the society we inhabit. Is our own reality different than the reality we experience through media such as television, movies or the internet? How much of our own mind is distinct to us and not shared with the rest of our society? These are some serious questions that Klosterman hints at in Dinosaur while discussing his usual assortment of 'irrelevant' topics. Like his other books Eating the Dinosaur is entertaining and a fast read, but I think it does dig a little deeper. Instead of finding myself rereading sections from confused by what Klosterman is saying because of his complicated wordplay, while reading Dinosaur I found myself rereading sections in order to understand what sophisticated philosophical idea he was trying to connect to ABB, or whatever other piece of irrelevant pop culture he choses to disect.