SAT 04 MAY 2002

OK, That Explains It...

The secret of Dubya's rise to power revealed...
(Thanks to the ShanMonster!)

Why Johnny (and Janie) Can't Learn
Last week, female students attending a prom at a California high school were required to prove they were not wearing "inappropriate" underwear by... lifting their skirts to show their underwear. Excuse me, but if schools think that this is a good way to teach our young people the virtues of modesty and decorum, it's really no wonder students aren't learning much of anything else there, either. Using this mindset, we might teach students that weapons can be dangerous by taking them out behind the gymnasium and having them shot. But I hesitate to suggest this, since some brain-dead school administrator somewhere might actually implement the idea, at least until parents started to complain.

If the underwear-inspecting incident were merely an isolated case of administrative insanity, it might not be so worrisome. But crap like this happens all the time now. An 11-year-old girl in Pennsylvania was recently suspended for "terrorist" doodling, and in March, an honor student in Texas was initially expelled for a year after a non-serrated silverware knife was found in the bed of his pickup truck (he has since been reinstated).

Some people have tried to tie such absurdities in school policy decisons to "political correctness", but I've always associated the overzealous enforcement of "rules" with the right, not the left. In any case, I don't think most of these incidents reflect either end of the political spectrum -- they simply reflect stupidity, and stupidity knows no party lines. It is widespread and ubiquitous. Unfortunately, it also appears to have taken up permanent residence in our schools, which are certainly the last place we need any more stupidity.

Technical Difficulties
Technical difficulties prevented the uploading of this week's issue at its regularly scheduled time. The Saturday dating has been retained, even though it's no longer Saturday, because that's when it's from.

Thought for the Week
"Every creative act involves ... a new innocence of perception, liberated from the cataract of accepted belief."
-- Arthur Koestler

Study Reveals Differences in Male/Female Shopping Habits

News Briefs
The U.S. State Department has issued a global travel advisory urging all American citizens to "just stay home" this year. "The world is a dangerous place," explained Secretary of State Colin Powell, "full of terrorists, foreigners, and confusing cultural differences. We believe that it is in the best interest of the American people that they confine their travel plans to the borders of this great country."
Powell added that tourists who prefer to travel abroad should consider visiting Disney World instead.

In other news, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms is undergoing an operation to replace a defective pig valve in his heart. When asked why a human valve was not used, doctors replied that for some reason, replacements of porcine origin were more compatible with Helms' bodily systems. Surgeons now face the problem of locating the organ in which to install the valve, noting that among other irregularities, Helms' heart appears to be "two sizes too small."

Springtime Humor
Two friends, a blonde and a redhead, are walking down the street and pass a florist's shop where the redhead happens to see her boyfriend buying flowers. She sighs and says, "Oh, crap, my boyfriend's buying me flowers again."
The blonde looks quizzically at her and asks, "You don't like getting flowers?"
The redhead replies, "Oh, I love getting flowers, but he always has expectations afterwards, and I just don't feel like spending the next three days on my back with my legs in the air."
The blonde says, "Don't you have a vase?"

Thought for the Day
"Don't dream it -- be it!"
-- Dr. Frank N. Furter

Time Marches On...

	It's hard to believe it's been almost thirty years since my younger brother and his friends were terrorizing our quiet suburban neighborhood, back in the mid-1970s. The photo to the left is from November 1974; below we see the same usual suspects at the sci-fi film cast reunion last weekend. Both photos, left to right: Jim West, Lee Porterfield, Steven Ballenger.

Weird Wild Web
With Barbie and Ken exploring S&M and evil clowns everywhere, is it any wonder our children are turning from the true faith of the Time Cube? If Catholic pornography and Presidential incompetence are making you long for the good old days of pet pennies and full gospel, just relax with a cool toxic popsicle and consider adopting a demon of your very own. Where's Jesus?

Ice Fishing
A drunk decides to go ice fishing, so he gathers his gear and goes walking around until he finds a big patch of ice. He heads into the center of the ice and begins to saw a hole. All of sudden, a loud booming voice comes out of the sky.

"You will find no fish under that ice."

The drunk looks around, but sees no one. He starts sawing again. Once more, the voice speaks.

"As I said before, there are no fish under the ice."

The drunk looks all around, high and low, but can't see a single soul. He picks up the saw and tries one more time to finish. Before he can even start cutting, the huge voice interrupts.

"I have warned you three times now. There are no fish!"

The drunk is now flustered and somewhat scared, so he asks the voice, "How do you know there are no fish? Are you God trying to warn me?"

"No", the voice replies. "I am the manager of this hockey rink."

Weekly Words to the Wise
"I don't know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace is an interlude during war."
-- Georges Clemenceau

Special Midweek Update: Reunion and Reviews
The reunion of old neighborhood pals I mentioned in the last entry took place Saturday evening near Graham, NC, and it was a real blast. It's very strange seeing people after two decades or more, with all your memories of how they look dating from the Carter administration or thereabouts. Some people I recognized instantly; others had changed so much I would never have known who they were. But the great thing was that our friendships were very much alive, and we spent a most enjoyable evening laughing and talking and reminiscing (and drinking a bit), just as though hardly any time had gone by at all. I hope to have some photos ready by Saturday. In the meantime, you can read about my first programming experiences, including reviews of the beginning of my text adventure game, TimeTrap.

I Can't Believe It's A Law Firm!

TimeTrap Update Announcement
This afternoon I'm heading to a reunion of childhood friends who appeared in an 8mm film I made as a high-school teenager back in the mid-1970s. The story involved these scientists who contruct a time machine and end up stranded in a semi-primitive post-nuclear-disaster world of the sort-of-distant future, a fashionable sci-fi locale of the period. Late last year, my younger brother and one of his old friends (who had both figured prominently in the film) dug that old home movie out of the attic of the past and proceeded to transfer it to DVD, adding a synchronized soundtrack reconstructed from an ancient cassette tape. This was right around the time that I was discovering how to program interactive fiction, and I decided to use that old plotline for practice in coding my own games. These practice sessions soon took on a life of their own, however, and I started implementing the game in more serious detail. I was just polishing up the introductory section when I heard about an online competition especially for the beginnings of IF games, and on impulse I entered it at the last minute.

I'll post an update soon with an account of the reunion, which I'm greatly looking forward to, and the results of the online competition (which I most decidedly did not win, just so the suspense won't kill you), along with some reviews of my entry, both hostile and benign. In the meantime, I'll be getting together with some old friends who were in that amateur film that we made over a quarter-century ago, which much later became the basis for my first IF game. Watching the DVD restoration of that film, alongside many of the original cast (some of whom I haven't seen for more than 20 years), is sure to be something of a time-travel experience in itself.

Bimbo of Evil
Despite what the liberal media may have led you to believe, that young temptress hawking carbonated sugar-water on your TV is actually a tool of Satan. Just ask the squirrels.

In an astonishing medical breakthrough sure to give new hope to overweight Americans who would like to do something about their obesity problem without sacrificing their sedentary, self-indulgent lifestyles, scientists this week announced a new "fitness" pill that will purportedly give the user the same benefits as a good diet and regular exercise, without all that annoying time and effort. Somehow, we're skeptical. Just ain't natural, as great-grandpappy used to say. Somewhere down the road, people who take this stuff are going to end up growing a third arm, or dissolving into jellylike blobs, or possibly mutating into a new form of matter entirely.

You're Either On the Bus or Off the Bus
A busload of politicians were driving down a country road when, all of a sudden, the bus ran off the road and crashed into a tree in an old farmer's field. The old farmer, after seeing what happened, went over to investigate. He then proceeded to dig a hole and bury the politicians.

A few days later, the local sheriff came out, saw the crashed bus, and asked the old farmer where all the politicians had gone.

The old farmer said he buried them.

The sheriff asked the old farmer, "Were they all dead?"

The old farmer replied, "Well, some of them said they weren't, but you know how them politicians lie."

Weekly Words to the Wise
"If we do not learn from history, we shall be compelled to relive it. True. But if we do not change the future, we shall be compelled to endure it. And that could be worse."
-- Alvin Toffler

Bush & Cheney Revealed To Be Pinky & Brain

Insert shows clever disguises used by Pinky and the Brain, above, to gain power.

In a startling revelation that shocked the country earlier this week, U.S. President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were revealed to be, in fact, two laboratory mice who had donned elaborate disguises and infiltrated the Republican Party as part of an unlikely scheme to achieve global domination. While many GOP faithful expressed confusion and disbelief at the news, both U.S. Democrats and European leaders admitted that the discovery confirmed certain long-held suspicions and helped to explain a number of otherwise unfathomable actions undertaken by the Bush White House.

"None of it made any sense before," commented one Senator, speaking on condition of anonymity, "except in the context of some vast right-wing conspiracy. This administration's rapcious energy plan, its incoherent foreign policy, its obsession with polling data, the rumors about suspending the 2004 elections -- let's face it, if any actual human beings were behind all this, they'd be considered totally insane, and rightly so. But now that we know these policies were contrived by a pair of genetically altered rodents trying to take over the world, everything falls into place."

Although their identities have now been publicly exposed, White House Minister of Propaganda Ari Fleischer warned reporters that "severe reprimands" would be imposed against anyone in the press referring to America's top leaders as "Bushy and the Chane."

Spring Forward, Lose Sleep
Well, it's that time of year again -- the trees are budding, the flowers are blooming, the squirrels are engaging in wild, drunken orgies, and most of us here in the U.S. get to experience the seasonal joy of turning our clocks back an hour, thus disrupting our normal sleeping patterns on a mass scale. (Other countries are urged not to startle the U.S. with any unexpected crises on Monday morning, as it is likely to be cranky and irritable, and there's no telling what it might do.) We call this biannual experience in self-imposed jet lag "Daylight Saving Time", and its ostensible purpose is to save energy, presumably by making workers so groggy and disoriented on Monday that they spend the first hour or two staring off into space. A potential solution has been proposed to this problem, but has yet to gain wide acceptance. Better to just take a nap.

Bogus Rebate
We'd heard rumors going around this tax season that if you'd gotten one of Dubya's much-touted "tax rebate" checks last year (about $300 each for most of us peons), you'd owe at least that much in taxes this year, essentially having to give it all back. We're still not sure if that rumor is universally true, but when we finally got around to doing our taxes a few minutes ago, we discovered that sure enough, we owed a little over $300 for each wage-earning member of the household. Thanks, George! We're sure the government will spend our former rebate with its usual degree of wisdom and efficiency.

Weekly Words to the Wise
"If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream."
-- René Magritte

Be Prepared

Furling the Flag
Starting today, you'll see some new changes to this website. First of all, we're weekly now, with updates scheduled for each Saturday. Also, we've gotten rid of the flag in the upper left. Flags seem to be everywhere now, especially the ragged tattered ones that some people have apparently been flying since last September, and they're getting a little tiresome at this point. What are people going to do on the Fourth of July this year -- put out two flags?

Goodnight, Uncle Miltie
I always thought Milton Berle was kind of silly, even when I was a kid in the '60s. Back then, he was still making appearances on what were known as "variety shows". His type of humor isn't what a lot of people would consider uproariously funny these days, and in fact it was already becoming dated thirty-five years ago. It was mostly slapstick sight gags -- calling for make-up and getting hit in the face with a bag of flour, for instance, or simply appearing on stage in drag -- that had almost a vaudeville flavor to them. But in the infancy of television, in the late 1940s, Milton Berle was King. Perhaps the appeal was simply in being able to actually see silly sight gags that you couldn't see on radio, a result of the novelty of the medium. But whatever it was, Berle was staggeringly popular at the time. His show, sponsored by Texaco, was broadcast on Tuesdays from 8:00 to 9:00 pm. During that hour, restaurants would empty out, movie houses and theaters would experience a marked drop in attendence, and neighbors would gather around tiny black-and-white screens to watch "Mr. Television". The city of Chicago reported sudden citywide drops in water pressure on Tuesdays at nine, the result of viewers waiting to use the bathroom until after the program ended. People actually bought TVs just so they could watch Berle's show. But as programming and audiences grew more sophisticated, Berle's popularity waned, and the cultural changes of the following decades changed his jokes from knee-slapping belly-busters to quaint artifacts of another era. He died on Wednesday at the age of 93.

So I wonder... which of today's comedians will still be funny 50 years from now, and who will be seen as silly, old-fashioned, outdated and out of touch? Dennis Miller? Robin Williams? Chris Rock? George Carlin? Any of a number of others? Your guess is as good as mine.

News and Commentary
So what's up with Florida? Apparently not content with being home to the infamous "Miami relatives" and the site of the stolen 2000 Presidential election, the Sunshine State has in recent weeks been tottering on the brink of religious lunacy. The mayor of one town banned Satan from the city limits, and a motorist was denied a custom license plate reading "ATHEIST" on the grounds that it was "obscene". The anti-Satan law was challenged by the ACLU, but apparently the town avoided a lawsuit by either claiming that the mayor was acting as an individual rather than a town official, or by designating approved Satan areas. Whatever. At least state highway officials decided to reverse their decision about the license plate -- hey, religious philosophy isn't obscene after all! You know, a state that relies as heavily on tourism as Florida really should do a better job of making people actually want to go there. I wonder if this site is based in Florida as well?

In other news, we have the toilet paper that dares speak its name, some very bizarre movie reviews, a super-high-tech kitty door, and yet another footnote to the Nixon legacy. Debate rages over whether or not we'd be better off if we'd actually gotten creamed by that recent asteroid.

Weekly Words to the Wise
"Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian."
-- Herman Melville, in Moby Dick

Know Your Clientele

New Update Schedule
Beginning this week, Creative Dynamix will switch from a (supposedly) daily update schedule to a weekly one, rather than continue with the highly irregular and sporadic updates that have come to be the rule over the past few months. With other obligations significantly eating into the time available to maintain this site, we felt that a somewhat reduced but more regular update schedule would allow us to better provide the quality material that our patrons have come to expect.

The next update to Creative Dynamix will appear on Saturday, March 30, and weekly on each Saturday following. Stay tuned.

St. Peter's Ducks
Three guys died in an auto accident and went to heaven.

Upon arrival, they found Paradise to be the most beautiful place they had ever seen. St. Peter welcomed them and told them to make themselves at home, but he cautioned them with one rule: "Don't step on the ducks."

The men had blank expressions on their faces, and finally one of them asked, "The ducks?"

"Yes," St. Peter said. "There are millions of ducks walking around Heaven, and when one of them gets stepped on, he quacks, and then the one next to him quacks, and pretty soon they're all quacking and raising hell. It really breaks the tranquility. So if you step on the ducks, you'll be punished."

The guys did their best to be careful, but within 15 minutes, one of them stepped on a duck. The duck quacked, the duck next to it quacked, and soon there was a deafening roar of quacking ducks.

St. Peter appeared with an extremely homely woman and asked, "Okay, who stepped on a duck?"

"I did," admitted one of the men. St. Peter immediately pulled out a pair of handcuffs and cuffed the man to the homely woman. "I told you not to step on the ducks," he said. "Now you'll be handcuffed together for eternity."

The two other men were very cautious not to step on any ducks, but a couple of weeks later, one of them accidentally did. The quacks were as deafening as before, and within minutes, St. Peter walked up with a woman who was even uglier than the other one. He determined who stepped on the duck by seeing the fear in the man's face, and he cuffed him to the woman. "I told you not to step on the ducks," St. Peter said. "Now you'll be handcuffed together for eternity."

The third man was extremely careful. Some days he wouldn't even move for fear of nudging a duck. After an entire year of this, he still hadn't stepped on a duck. One day, St. Peter walked up to the man with the most beautiful woman the man had ever seen. St. Peter smiled and, without a word, handcuffed him to the beautiful woman and walked off.

The man, knowing that he would be handcuffed to this woman for eternity, let out a sigh and said, "What have I done to deserve this?"

The woman replied, "Well, I don't know about you, but I stepped on a duck."

Thought for the Day
"Art" is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers. What we call art is a game."
-- Octavio Paz