(Snippets of this entry have been hanging around for a while, waiting for some thought or insight to come to mind to help hold it all together. But in this case the coherent, rather than the perfect, is the enemy of the done, and I’m posting it anyway.)

Standing in the Family Christian store in Landmark Mall in Alexandria, looking at all the merchandise tie-ins for The Passion of the Christ, I had to do a double take. In particular I was looking at the necklaces they were selling, adorned with a single, small nail. Setting aside for a moment the issue of whether aggressive merchandising is appropriate for a film with such serious intent and disturbing subject matter, those nail necklaces just seemed morbid.

But then I remembered that, as symbols go, it’s hard to get more morbid than the good old-fashioned cross. So while there are plenty of things to find distasteful and inappropriate about the marketing blitz for Passion, it doesn’t really make sense to object to the nail necklaces on grounds of morbidity. (I don’t mean to belittle the power of the cross itself—it is an immensely powerful symbol precisely because of the horror and hope it simultaneously represents.)

But then, why the need for the necklace? Unlike the t-shirts and bookmarks, as something worn as a pendant it’s deliberately reminiscent of a cross necklace—so what does wearing one signify that wearing a cross does not? Something like this, it seems to me: “I am not only a Christian, but one who embraces this movie.” That embrace includes more than just appreciating the film aesthetically. (Many people whom I respect found Passion powerful and moving, and while my own response was rather ambivalent, I don’t have a problem with theirs.) It also includes wanting the film to succeed, not financially (it’s already there), but evangelically.

While I’ve yet to see someone on the street wearing one of those nails, that sort of support for the movie has been in the news, was readily apparent at the store in the mall, and is all over the websites ancillary to the official one. Sites like sharethepassionofthechrist.com and passionmaterials.com are linked to directly from the official site, and even share the same design style. None of that should be surprising to anyone who’s tracked the development of the film or listened to Mel Gibson talking about it, though Gibson was slightly disingenuous in the interview I cited in my review when he expressed amazement at the film’s reception in the evangelical community. He has very deliberately sought out that reception. Poking around at the message boards on studentshavepassion.com, I found messages posted pre-release in which students expressed delight that a recording of Mel had left messages on their answering machines encouraging them to promote the movie. He’s mentioned in the acknowledgements and forewords of all the Passion-related books, always in near-beatific terms. There was a kerfluffle in some segments of the blogosphere when the president of the Catholic League referred to Gibson as “Saint Mel.”

Three things about all this make me uncomfortable. The first, when it comes to the merchandising, is the simple issue of distastefulness that I alluded to before; that doesn’t really need any elaboration. The second is that the pedestal Mel is standing on in the eyes of some is not something that grew out of the grassroots, but a carefully and masterfully crafted bit of image marketing. Third, this is a bad movie for changing people’s minds. Rather, it may be very good at that, but in the wrong ways: aesthetically it’s a mixed bag, and its honest moments run alongside the crassest sort of emotional bludgeoning.

At the store in the mall, I asked the lady behind the counter if she had seen the movie, and what she thought of it.

“I loved it. Have you seen it?”

“Yes,” I said. “My reaction to it was mixed. I have a problem with the way it focused on the physical suffering.”

“Well,” she said, in a conversation-ending tone, “The movie shows how the Bible says it is.”

“There’s a lot in the movie that isn’t in the Bible, and a lot in the Bible that isn’t in the movie,” I said. (Actually, what I said took considerably longer and lacked the rhetorical balance, but that was the gist.)

“Well,” she said again, “This is how Mel decided to make it.”

Very true, for better or worse. I just wish that was the first thing she had thought.

UPDATE: In the comments, reader Jeff Brower points out that nail necklaces have been around for a while. Oops. This does leave open the question, though, of why the Passion promoters chose to merchandise that, as opposed to a cross or some other symbol. Which has got me thinking about nails and crosses and fishes and flags—more on that to come.

UPDATE: Ana also has some good points in the comments. Generally speaking, read the comments. 🙂

Some of these are a few days old, but all are worth reading:

* Gary Farber of “Amygdala”:http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/ has been blogging the transcripts of the 9/11 Commission. Great stuff. I’m hoping Ella has a long nap early next week so I can get a chance to finish reading it all. “Start here”:http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/2004_03_28_amygdalagf_archive.html#108093941546785519 and work your way up.
* As Slacktivist noted, he took a couple of days before he posted anything about Fallujah, and as a result what he has to say is “balanced and enlightening”:http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2004/04/fallujah.html, particularly on the role of the victims as security contractors:

USAT’s Johnson, following the logic of the term civilian, describes the killing of the four contractors as “Wednesday’s murders.” This too is inaccurate. The killing of these four men was wrong, brutal, cowardly and execrable. And the mob’s behavior after the killings was, as Bremer said, “bestial.” But they were soldiers who died in a war; they were not murdered.

The United States’ increasing reliance on such private military forces muddies the water for those who want to maintain the essential moral significance of the distinction between soldier and civilian, between combatant and noncombatant. (Thousands of U.S. Marines were stationed just outside Fallujah while the bodies of these four contractors were dragged through the streets of the city for hours Wednesday. I wonder if these soldiers would have allowed this to continue unchecked if the four men had been uniformed Marines.)

* Everyone’s talking about PMCs now; I “said my piece”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000312.html a while ago, and don’t really have anything to add just yet. Via “Making Light”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/, “Kathryn Cramer”:http://www.kathryncramer.com/wblog/ has been tracking the Pentagon’s use of PMCs in Iraq for a long time now in considerable detail. (“This entry”:http://www.kathryncramer.com/wblog/archives/000485.html in particular is very good.) Like Gary’s stuff, I hope to get time to read it all, because I have a feeling I’ll have some comments and disagreements. Ella’s going to need a _few_ long naps, I guess . . .
* Glen Engel-Cox has been having “trouble with his heart”:http://www.engel-cox.org/iArchives/001451.html#001451, literally, and writes about it with the scary sort of medical detail that makes me squeamish even as I crave more. Glad to hear the outlook is good, Glen!
* Michael Hall’s “media rant”:http://www.puddingbowl.org/archives/media/002287.php is simply glorious. He starts by laying into CNN and keeps going from there. Preach it, mph.

Crossfire and every Sunday morning show where matched teams of ideologues scrum are a toxic result of analysis culture. They turn political issues that will have an effect on millions into a chummy game of one-upsmanship and backslapping bonhomie between members of the analyst class who want to make it very clear that at the end of the day the whole thing is a collegial debating society for the tragically witty.

* Finally, after all the April 1 fun, Jim has some “musings on the ethics of the April Fool’s Joke”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2004_03_28.html#005211.

I consider myself a pretty sharp guy when it comes to computer games, but but these days it’s starting to feel like old age has kicked me back into the amateur league. Unreal Tournament 2004 is only the most recent and most concrete example. For those who don’t know, UT2004 is the latest iteration of a popular multiplayer first-person shooter. It occupies the “lots of cool stuff” end of the spectrum, with scads of weapons, power-ups, special moves, and a highly configurable physics engine. (The other end of the spectrum, gritty-relastic FPS, is currently dominated by Battlefield 1942.) Recent first-person shooters have rewarded tactics and teamwork a lot more than in the past, and that holds true for UT2004 as well. Nevertheless, reflexes are still king. And I swear, the reflexes required to play this game require some sort of mutant affinity or cybernetic attachment. Everybody’s moving around so quickly that by the time I manage to swing around and aim at a target, I’m either dead or he’s somewhere else. Half the time there’s so many explosions and lights and sounds on the screen that I have no idea what’s even going on.

Being something of a completist when it comes to these things, I started the single player campaign first thing instead of diving into multiplayer mayhem online. UT2004 has surprisingly good single-player functionality—you’re still playing the same levels you would on multiplayer, with a bunch of computer opponents and teammates, but layered over it all is a detailed tournament tree and a system for playing side matches, managing your team, and recruiting new members. (Some or all of this may also have been the case for UT2003, but I never played it.) Anyway, seeing that the default starting difficulty (out of a range of eight) was Experienced, I kicked it up a notch to Skilled, figuring that a cool cat like myself would find the default level too easy.

How wrong I was. I wasn’t even able to qualify for the tournament at Skilled, so I kicked it back down and made a little more headway. But now, maybe a third of the way into the tournament ladder, these dang computer players have brought me up short. Not only am I not able to beat the opponent teams, but my computer teammates always do way better than I do in the matches. Obviously the computer ‘bots can be as tough as they want, but they’d only be this tough if the programmers figured it was a good-but-not-insurmountable challenge for the largest number of their core demographic buyers.

So who are these people? I’m good at computer games, dang it! I have decent reflexes, and hand-eye coordination honed by years and years of gameplay. And yet I am clearly not up to what the designers considered an “average” skill level. I’m not only inferring this from the single-player campaign—I’ve ventured online a few times too, and each time have had my hat handed to me in short order. I’m tempted to blame the hordes of eighth-graders out there, who must have some sort of generational advantage, but it’s more likely that the others playing UT are my age than theirs. I would be delighted if I could chalk it up to hardware deficiencies, because then I could upgrade—but I have an above-average rig for gaming. Connection speed isn’t a problem. It must just be skill, or lack thereof. Maybe—and here’s what I’m hoping—the UT subculture is reserved for really hard-core gamers. I do pretty well in BF1942 and in Halo for the Xbox, after all. Yeah, yeah, that’s it: I’m still a good gamer, but those UT guys are a bunch of freaks.

Now I feel better.

On an unrelated note, Unreal Tournament 2004 wouldn’t play on my computer out of the box. It installed fine, but when I ran the program, the splash screen came up briefly, and then it just fizzled. After an unfruitful trip to the support site, I found the answer on a message board. Hordes of people were having the exact problem I was, and the culprit was Securom, the software that Atari put on the CD in order to copy-protect it. As is often the case with such software, it has a nasty habit of making the disc difficult to run on older CD and DVD drives. The only solution was to use a no-CD crack that someone—probably one of those aforementioned eighth-graders—had whipped up and made available online.

Of course, Atari’s support site mentions nothing whatsoever about Securom, and sends frustrated users on a wild goose chase of updating drivers and tweaking settings. There’s no mention of the limitations of Securom in the Play Requirements label on the box, either. All this, thanks to an anti-piracy effort that also prevents legitimate owners from doing what any sensible person would: make a backup copy of their game. Phooey on Atari, I say. I’d boycott them, but it’s not like the other game publishers are any different. To be fair I’d have to boycott them all, and stop playing computer games altogether. And we can’t have that, can we?

* *hellboy pamcakes* — I’m proud that 21 people searching for this found their way here, but I have no idea how. I’ve never mentioned pamcakes before. Mmmmm. Pamcakes . . .
* *sean astin and elijah wood undertones return of king movie* — I don’t understand this search string. What sort of undertones were they . . . oh.
* *peter jackson comic store guy* — Hey, we were all _thinking_ it, but show some respect!
* *the rhythmic flashing in his head was gradually altering into the familiar alarm call he opened one eye unsure of the motive behind this irritating noise which requested his attention. through a hazy window he located the source of his subconscious intrusion there it stood in defiance its small hands pointing akimbo. a flash of recollection eliminated his frontal lobe as he focused on the small symbols scattered on the round face eight o’clock!* — I’m having flashbacks to reading the creative writing of college freshmen.
* *is there luck in chess* — No, that’s called backgammon . . .
* *convince husband baby* — This has to be the most poignant search string I’ve ever seen. Somewhere out there there’s a woman who wants to have a baby, but her husband is resistant to the idea. She’s not sure who to talk to, and so what does she do? She goes to Google. I can’t decide whether to laugh or to cry.
* *do you have a small rey mysterio costume for sale off the internet?* — I don’t personally; talk to Michael Thomas. His blog will be up soon.
* *poker collectible card game -software -program -computer* — Yeah, because a computer version of a poker CCG would suck, but a tabletop version would _rock_.

OK, before I get any more comments, emails, or calls from people, let me hasten to say that the entry Unsettling News was an April Fool’s Joke. Not real. In the slightest.

I was deeply touched and ashamed throughout the day, because of the calls and emails of support from friends who were ready to help in any number of ways. One offered to track the caller’s phone number down for me; another offered to help set up a rotating watch on the front door of our building in case the guy came by again. (You know who you are, guys.)

I honestly thought it was more transparent than that, otherwise I never would have brought Ella into it. I figured the notion that a company would pay attention to what was said on a weblog was implausible enough that readers would do a double-take, even if they were snookered for a moment. (And that was the case for a lot of people who responded.) Since more people found it credible than I thought would, though, the entry was creating a lot of unwarranted (but welcome!) concern that I didn’t expect. Hence, I’m calling off the joke now and not waiting until tomorrow. My apologies to everyone I caused undue worry and distress.

Jim also had an April Fool’s Joke today that proved way more credible than he dreamed it’d be. The funny thing is, Jim fooled me for his first few paragraphs, and I was reading his blog literally minutes after I had posted my own fake entry. I suspect there’s an object lesson here about how strong our impulse is to believe what we read—even when our guard is up, or we think it is.

Anyway, the April’s Fool’s Joke is something you can only do on a blog once. I hereby promise that Polytropos will be falsehood-free from now into perpetuity.

I hope David Randolph wasn’t one of the four contractors killed in Fallujah yesterday, but their stories are no doubt similar to his own. “This article”:http://www.greene.xtn.net/index.php?table=news&template=news.view.subscriber&newsid=109880 from the Greenville Sun provides an excellent profile of Randolph, how he came to work for Blackwater Security, and his experiences escorting convoys in Fallujah. The article was published the day before the horrific attacks.

UPDATE: This entry is an April Fool’s Joke. More notes on it here.

OK, I think it’s safe to say I’m seriously freaked out.

It started yesterday afternoon with a phone call that, at the time, I only found amusing. Here it is, roughly, from memory:

“Hello?”

“Is this Nat?” The guy had a rough voice and a hard-to-place accent.

“Um, Nate, not Nat.”

“Nate. You have this web site called Polytropos?” (He pronounced it incorrectly.)

“Um, yeah . . .” I was wondering how he got from there to my phone number. Not hard to do, but he would have had to go through a lot of bother when he could have just emailed me.

“I would like you to stop writing about my company.”

“What’s your company?”

“I think you know. You have been mentioning us quite a bit recently, in a not-so-flattering light. We do not need or want that kind of publicity.”

“Who is this really?” I said. Then he hung up.

I didn’t think much of it, and assumed it was just a practical joke, and I’d find out which of my friends did it in a day or two. But earlier this morning, as I was leaving the building with Ella, I saw a big guy hanging around out front. He turned to face me as I came out, enough that I stopped because I thought he was going to say something. When he didn’t I just nodded and kept on going toward teh car. As I was hooking Ella into her car seat I saw that he was coming up behind me.

“You are Nate?” he said. His voice sounded kind of like the guy on the phone but I can’t be sure.

“What do you want?” I said. My heart was pumping. I was thinking to myself, irrationally, “If this guy takes me down who’s going to know that Ella’s alone here in the car?”

“I am just here to say that I was serious when I spoke to you on the phone. Have a good day with your daughter.” Then he turned and walked away.

I just called the police (had a grand old time trying to explain the concept of a “weblog” to them), but it’s obviously one of those “nothing we can do now; call us if he tries to contact you again” things. As which which company he’s talking about, I can only assume it’s Northbridge, but who the heck knows? And why should they care about me? I guess if you do a search for their name you’ll come across the blog on the second page of searches, but everybody knows that blogs have inflated status on Google. Or maybe they don’t know, and so think that it’s a bigger deal than it is. I don’t know. Maybe it’s still just a practical joke, although at this point I’ve ceased to find it funny.

Anyway. I’ll be sure to keep you posted on any future developments, if any.

Overheard at the coffee shop:

“I am SO worried that everything in my life is going to work out . . . I don’t think I _want_ it to.”

Spoken by a teenager — not that there was any doubt.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are addicted to the glory of “Cheez-Its”:http://www.cheez-it.com/, and those who, tragically, are unable to perceive that glory. Among Cheez-It lovers I am somewhat cavalier in that I tolerate and even approve of the recent glut of new flavors. Cheddar Jack, White Cheddar, and Hot ‘n’ Spicy are all very good, though Parmesan & Garlic definitely crosses some sort of line.

Now, all new, we have “Cheez-It Twisterz”:http://twisterz.cheez-it.com/, which abandon the cracker paradigm altogether. They consist of two elongated parts of differing flavors twisted together. But that’s just the gimmick — more importantly, they have a little bit more substance than your average Cheez-It, and a more generous dose of finger-staining flavory goodness, too. The varieties available so far are “Cheddar & More Cheddar” and “Hot Wings and Cheesy Blue.”

What twisted mind came up with HW&CB? In what sort of depraved environment would it occur to anyone to capture the taste of buffalo wings in a _snack cracker_? Please note, too, that it’s not “Hot Wings and Blue Cheese” — a description that would no doubt violate any number of truth-in-labelling FDA regulations. No, here we have “Cheesy Blue,” a description that makes no concrete claim as to the snack’s cheese content, only its _blueness_. Terrifying.

I don’t know who came up with it, but give that man a prize. I bought a box — to try them just once, you understand, in the spirit of inquiry — and lordy, are they tasty. It will take a fair bit of self-control to see to it that they last until gaming night tomorrow, which is the occasion I told myself I was buying them for.

Mind you, I’d take actual buffalo wings over HW&CB C-I Ts any day. What makes them so delightful is in part the unlikeliness of it: we might call it the Scariness-to-Taste Factor, or STF. Also in this category are chips & cheese when the label on the cheese dip doesn’t say “cheese” at all but “processed cheese food.” Somehow the guilt and fear that must be overcome in order to ingest them make them taste way better than they should. Pork rinds have an astronomically high Scariness level but nevertheless a low STF because, for me anyway, they’re not tasty. In retrospect, Pop Rocks had a very high STF, especially if you were a kid and believed “the stories”:http://www.snopes.com/horrors/freakish/poprocks.htm about them.

READER: No posts on the blog for five days, and you finally come to light again talking about _Cheez-Its_?!
NATE: (breaks for the exit)

Blame “Ed”:http://www.puddingbowl.org/ed/. I got the idea from him. Here’s the deal: do a search for your first name on a “Google image search”:http://images.google.com, and pick one of the photos you see there to, y’know, blog about.

I honestly wasn’t planning on joining this particular bandwagon, but I naturally had to peek at what was there for my name. And I noticed that ‘nate’ turned up this picture in the number five slot:

!http://www.calvin.edu/news/events/debate/images/1800/big/nate.jpg 320×228!

See, the thing is, I know that guy. No, not the one on the right — the other one. The Nate. I forget his last name, but I see him every year or so at “Rick Treur’s”:http://www.rivercityimprov.com/ annual Christmas party in Grand Rapids. The picture is from 2000, when one of the GOP primary debates took place at Calvin College, my (and the other Nate’s) alma mater.

The first thing I thought was: why the heck is he being so friendly with George Bush? Then I remembered that West Michigan is pretty conservative, all things considered. No reason Nate wouldn’t be. (And heck, it was 2000 — even conservatives didn’t know better yet.)

I’m going to take this stupid little Google game a step further, and do my small part to hinder Bush’s reelection chances to boot. I’m going to try to get another Nate picture — yes, a picture of me — up _above_ the Bush one in the Google rankings. Given my “surprising luck”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000266.html with Google image rankings thus far, this shouldn’t be too hard. So, here’s the pic:

!http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/misc/nate.jpg 240×320!

I figure the cute baby factor will pick up a few extra clickthroughs.