Lunch Money, the brutal cardgame of playground combat, and without question the most disturbing game on my bookshelf o’ games, now has “an expansion”:http://www.atlas-games.com/product_tables/AG1102.html. Scary. Delightful. Mine’s on order.

I wrote two weeks ago about the possibility, reported in the South African press, that the mercenaries currently imprisoned in Zimbabwe and Equatorial Guinea were actually planning to capture Charles Taylor, not overthrow the EG government. There hasn’t been a peep along those lines since, and that, coupled with the fact that major media elsewhere never picked up the story, leads me to conclude—tentatively—that there wasn’t anything to it. There’s always room for doubt in situations like this, but I’m not holding my breath.

So how is ol’ C.T. doing these days? Not so well, it turns out:

Taylor arrived with a large entourage. Dozens of family members and close aides accompanied him to Abuja and onwards the same night to Calabar, on Nigeria’s southeast coast, his agreed place of exile.

Days beforehand a series of special flights from the Liberian capital Monrovia had brought in a couple of luxury cars, household goods and hundreds of hangers-on who fled with the disgraced president as rebels besieged the capital Monrovia.

However, barely six months later, life has taken a lonely, perhaps bleak turn for Taylor.

Close aides said most of his entourage had deserted him, heading back to Liberia or dispersing within Nigeria in search of better fortunes.

“More than 70 percent of the people who came to Nigeria with Taylor have since left him and gone back to Liberia,” said Vaani Paasawe, who was Taylor’s official spokesman in Liberia.

Paasawe, who fled with Taylor to Calabar, told IRIN “Out of 23 personal security details Taylor brought with him, 15 have left because he’s not been able to pay them”.

Good riddance. The best part of this is that a poor and abandoned Taylor will have a harder time meddling in Liberian politics from afar.

“Ed has beat me”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org/archives/002316.html to the latest Liberia news. Go to his site for all the details.

This month, with an extra helping of metablogging!

Time to subdivide. The blogroll is now broken into ‘friends’ and ‘strangers,’ depending on whether I know those in question mainly as people or as bloggers. This is _not_ to say that the ‘friends’ are not fine bloggers in their own right, or that all ‘strangers’ are unknown to me personally. The Top Five will remain and will draw from both groups.

On to the changes:

* Hearty congratulations to Kevin Drum for scoring a paid blogging gig at The Washington Monthly. His new blog “Political Animal”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/, is front and center at the magazine’s site and promptly takes the place of “Calpundit”:http://www.calpundit.com/ in the Top Five.

So, should we expect something different from Kevin now that he’s actually getting paid? In his case, no, since someone _should_ have been paying him for his excellent punditry before now. Kevin’s one of the rare bloggers whose output is both voluminous and substantive; I can’t fathom the time and energy he happily donated to us all while writing Calpundit. For me — and for most bloggers, I suspect — there’s a limit to the time and effort we’ll spend on something that isn’t a paying gig. There’s been plenty of times I’ve stopped working on an entry and just posted the dang thing, though I certainly would have kept toiling had I been on the clock. In general, then, I think we certainly ought to expect more from paid bloggers than unpaid ones. I thought of this first when reading “Josh Marshall’s”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/ coverage of the Democratic primary in New Hampshire. He collected donations from readers in order to cover the event specifically for the blog, which struck me as a cool idea. But ultimately that coverage was pretty lackluster — had I made a donation, I would have been disappointed. (On balance, though, Josh is every bit as pay-worthy as Kevin is.)

* Congratulations are also in order for “John and Belle”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/, who have become regular contributors to “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org. I’m happy for them, but insofar as this means a reduction of material on J&BHAB, I’m also disappointed. A big part of their charm is having them on their own site, with two distinct voices and the occasional interplay between their entries. Call me persnickety, but reading their stuff mixed in with the rest of the CT crew just won’t be the same.

* “Wonkette”:http://www.wonkette.com/ has been promoted to the Top Five. I find myself laughing out loud almost every time I read it. And while I have no idea if the drawing on the masthead resembles the real Ana Marie Cox, I have a crush on . . . the drawing, I guess. Man, that’s weird.

* There are two newcomers this time around. “A Coqui in Winterfell”:http://winterfell.blogs.com/anacoqui/ belongs to Ana Canino-Fluit, who’s giving this blogging thing a try by trying to post something new every day for the first month. “little more than a placeholder”:http://james.anthropiccollective.org/ is also going in the friends section, though it’s something of a borderline case. I’ve only met James once, and briefly at that, so most of what I know about him I know from his blog. But he’s engaged to “Kari”:http://kari.anthropiccollective.org/, which is how I met him in the first place. Either way, he’s a great source for British news and perspective, and has been on a roll the past couple weeks, with entries full of meaty goodness showing up every day.

* Rather than try to keep up with “Ed’s”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org ever-changing titles for his blog, I’m just listing his name in the ‘roll from now own. But I have to say that his current title is my favorite so far.

(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.