Filling up that top row was kinda difficult.

The quest for the 2012 Republican nomination features heroes of every alignment. I am their dungeon master. What fate befalls the party?

Mitt Romney — who, if I’m really extending this Dungeons & Dragons metaphor for a whole post, is like a druid or something — serves as the nominal leader of this band of adventurers. But his stats are weak, evidenced in his narrow recent victory over Santorum in Iowa. Romney only beat Santorum by eight votes? My high school debate club treasurer should be able to beat Santorum more convincingly than that. My big black ass should be able to beat this homeschooled twerp by a larger margin than that. I’m serious, I’ll stage a write-in campaign.

Now, it’s written that in a conflict between a large power and a small power, the large power can lose simply by not winning convincingly enough. And the small power can win simply by surviving. It’s like the Vietnam War. But enough real political science: a frothy slime is surging in this dungeon, a monster born of some corrupted part of Santorum after the hex of a wicked mage!

No well run D&D game would have two guys named Rick, but the other one is packing up his cards by now anyway. King Perry the Merciful was applauded early in the race for executing 234 people under his reign. But he appeared weak after it was revealed that he’d approved a health program for at-risk girls.

Noting the success of President Bush, Perry played up his arrogant, proudly ignorant Texan aspect. Ultimately he overdid it, promising to purge some agencies and then failing repeatedly to remember which agencies those were. Which is like not being able to roll above a 2. Or something? Ok, I’m going to admit I don’t really know very much about D&D. Doing that chart and knowing Romney would play a druid was really the extent of my ability. Onward!

John the Huntsman is falling far behind, having run a pathetically sane campaign. He refuses to endorse teaching creationism in science class or declaring a ruinous trade war with China. He even criticized Donald Trump! I like to think that these same stances might make him look good to an electorate outside the serfdoms of the state of Iowa. Then again, maybe the dim light of low media scrutiny has a flattering effect on Huntsman — as it did for Perry, Cain, Bachmann and Gingrich.

Gingrich the Goblin King meets some incredibly low bar for intellectualism in this field. I guess this is because he actually writes his own books, unlike every other major politician. There is one other guy in this election who has written his own stuff, though, and he’s managed to do a little better than being Amazon’s 78th place in Civil War history. Everybody re-roll your characters.

With the camera charged, it was time to start trespassing. On a quiet street in Ryan’s neighborhood one night, she and I had passed a four-story brick building, gutted and undergoing renovation. She was trying to play with a dirty white street cat at the time, but my own strange idea of fun was to roam an off-limits place of ruin. So on a Sunday afternoon after leaving Ryan’s, I found the place again and climbed in a window.

The window was just a rectangular gap in the course brick, and the surface I dropped down to was just a dirt floor. The ground floor was a dusty expanse dotted by wheelbarrows and piles of lumber, with only a few rows of studs suggesting walls. I wanted to shoot some wildness in this scene, either of being someplace restricted, or someplace seemingly being reclaimed by nature, or both.

A month later, I had no problem getting the Canon in to a D.C. Roller Girls bout, unless you count the security woman at the metal detectors smacking its case around carelessly during a search. The security is because Roller Girls games are held at the D.C. Armory, or perhaps because they don’t want things getting out of hand at a scene that already combines vicious women and contact sport.

The first bout was Scare Force One versus the Cherry Blossom Bombshells, featuring Kelly, AKA Kitty O’Slay. The general formula for a derby name apparently is something feminine plus something violent, with optional local reference. Witness Stabigail Adams and Nasty Pelosi (the uniqueness of derby names is enforced by an online database). Unfortunately, I’m no sports photographer and the Canon 60D with 18-135mm f/5.6 attached is no sports camera. In the dingy light of the shuttered gymnasium, focusing on and capturing the scrambling players was difficult, and all my Cherry Blossom Bombshells photos came out blurry. With the film speed boosted, I managed a few shots from the second match, between the DC Demoncats and newcomers the Majority Whips.

These outings with the Canon were fun, but as with any marriage, the small moments count most. For the first few weeks, I’d often compulsively unpack the camera at odd times and just shoot anything. I must have shot 50 photos of a water bottle sitting on the coffee table one afternoon, idly testing settings and judging sharpness as I lay on the couch. All this manual control gives the Canon the flexibility and creativity I wanted, but recently I’m worried about just how much time I spend fiddling when I should be composing.

I looked back at the construction site photos. Mostly flat angles, nothing crazy going on with composition; I had been thinking about exposure settings, white balance, noise and other details instead. When I’m so used to shooting with a DSLR that it becomes like a compact I might be free to focus, but for the time being, I suspect that upgrading to the Canon 60D has made me a worse photographer.

Bristling with functions, the Canon 60D with standard zoom is immediately impressive. Despite its build of polycarbonate “don’t-call-it-plastic” resin and glass fibre, the frame, grip and overall heft are commanding. At the business end rests a deep pool of glass that winks at you with a iridescent gleam of dreamy greens, blues and purples.

Click for larger version.

Taking the day off, I wandered Ryan’s neighborhood framing things up, adopting awkward camera stances, and generally being a tourist of my own city. Among my trite first photographs: a brick wall; some ducks in a fountain; the fountain with the water’s motion exaggerated by long exposure and frozen with short shutter speeds; and Ben’s Chili Bowl. Oh, and the metro! Shameless, yes, but I’m honeymooning here.

When you stop hanging it around your neck and gawking at things, the camera can give you a learned aspect. Especially when one-handing the chunky DSLR for a shot of an antique Alfa Romeo, pausing to dial in some settings and review on your variangle screen, passersby may look on admiringly. The sunken-eyed stare I normally give the world is suddenly discerning and keen to everyone else. I feel a bit outgoing — I could have even said hello to a few people. Of course I didn’t.

The camera is not without issues. Indoor lighting ends up orangey whether white balance is set to auto or ‘tungsten.’ It could be that Japanese engineers simply can’t believe we’re still using incandescent bulbs here in the West.  Manually dialing all the way down to 2500 was necessary in the environs of my basement apartment, and I’ve made a mental note of how I’ll adjust. But this should be considered a problem area for users who don’t want to guess the color temperature of their lighting in Kelvins.

The Canon 60D also features Live Mode, but this, too, is problematic. Live Mode makes your DSLR a little more approachable by making the back screen your viewfinder. Together with the swiveling display, it can be fun to judge your shot on a screen — except when it comes to focusing. I have asked a girl to the prom with greater speed and assurance than this thing can auto focus in Live Mode. Even my Canon compact, which Live Mode is emulating, seems to focus faster, oddly.

None of these questions are terribly distracting, however. If anything, they give me an excuse to boot up Photoshop and congratulate myself on knowing levels, curves and other adjustments. More troubling is the competition from Nikon. Buyers of the Canon 60D have to live with their purchase knowing that for just a little extra money, the D7000 does everything just a little bit better. Still, for the gadget gratification the 60D inspires, you’ll think Steve Jobs had a hand in it.

Trite photos

Clichés from my first few days of shooting (these have seen some work in Photoshop, by the way).

Click for larger image.

Click for larger image.

Click for larger image.

Click for larger image.

But why the hell would I do that? Here in D.C. residents shouted, whooped, and cried their reactions all around, converging on the White House. Ryan and I got there around 2 am.

We passed flag-draped, drunk GW students staggering away from 15th street, hoarse and weary of celebration. Arriving at Lafayette Park, we found a carnival of happy car honking, gaudy police strobes and hundreds of revelers. So many people cheered out the windows of their cars that they were high-fiving other cheering car-fulls passing by.

Along the palisades at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., leery guards were deployed to stare down possible jumpers. The White House glowed behind them with a fluorescent greenish cast. Watching the crowd, I realized that D.C. seems to do the same stuff for every big event: pack into a public space, bring tongue-in-cheek signs, and climb the park trees — plus somebody brings the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag.

There was plenty of chest puffing and careless bravado on display, and not a little bit of actual chest-baring. Someone showed up around 3 am with a boom box and cranked out some Bon Jovi. While I’m certainly glad we stopped bin Laden, it began to seem ghastly to celebrate someone’s violent demise like this. It’s the terrorists who revere death.

Ryan and I struck off, passing near the Washington Monument on the way to the car. You couldn’t be anywhere downtown without knowing what had happened. It reminded me of the 2008 election night, when I was returning late to the District from a fairly menial assignment for the AP and didn’t know that the election had been called until I saw the outpouring in the streets. I knew right away it meant an Obama victory. It occurred to me then that bin Laden’s last day on Earth would go down as an Obama victory as well, and on the way out I silently congratulated Obama on the 2012 election, already all but won. But that, too, is crass.

Wasn't kidding about that Gadsen flag. Click for the full-sized version.

...Or the shirtlessness. Click for full-sized version.

...Or the signs. Click for full-sized version.

That was almost too brilliant. It was like being at one of Lacan's seminars in Paris.

MR. GREGORY: Up next, we have some silly ideological posturing and a sneak peek at next week’s talking points. If it’s Sunday, it’s Meet the Press.

For fun we also came up with some of the least likely words.  Brian’s list:  masturbatory, race-traitor, funkadelic, ewok, chrysanthemum, scatological.

My additions:  octoroon, nubile, Dethklok.

But the worst drinking word, the very least likely word of all, is marijuana.  And that’s very strange.

In the ’80s and ’90s, talk of drugs and crime dominated politics and the media.  The crack epidemic struck, prison populations bloomed and Nancy Reagan implored us to just say no.  Freshman Congressmen of both parties made damn sure they somehow voted “tough on crime” in their first year.

Yet we rarely hear about the War on Drugs anymore.  Presumably there is still a war on; people are still dying and taken prisoner, certainly.

President Obama this week has once again offered to field questions culled from YouTube to supplement the State of the Union.  Once again, drug questions, especially marijuana questions, are sweeping the unmoderated system on YouTube.  It’s not just the most popular question — it’s the topic of the 50 most popular questions.  As I write, the drug discourse on YouTube is frenzied, like it was in the mainstream media in the ’80s and ’90s.

Certainly one could say a smattering of drug war opponents just swamped YouTube.  But since so many issue groups obsess over social media and astroturfing, I have a hard time believing the pro-marijuana crowd turned out to be the most motivated.  More likely, some people think that the War on Drugs still has something to do with personal liberty, class and race.

But President Obama will put these questions of equity, equality, expense and detention in the same bin as the UFO questions.  He, like the president before him, did his experimentation with pot and coke in the privileged environs of Ivy League universities, and must think these discussions terribly embarrassing.  Besides, the parties have nothing to gain from the issue anymore, and TV journalism considers its job done once a strategist from each party has said something.  So while ignoring the most popular question may seem elitist, if you were one of our country’s ruling elites, you’d realize talking about drugs is just not done.

I’m not writing in support of Assange.  Unlike seemingly every person quoted in political news, I’m not being ideological at all.  It’s just simply a fact that terror involves “violence or threats of violence used for intimidation or coercion” and WikiLeaks is not violent in any way.

How can the biggest names in the political establishment — party leaders, pundits and journalists — get together in a room as they did on Meet the Press and all be so recklessly incorrect?  How can Sarah Palin and others accuse of treason someone who isn’t even an American citizen?  Even in the use of legal terms and other unambiguous language, there isn’t a shred of rigor in our political discourse.

I’m ashamed to have majored in political science.  American politics is an intellectual wasteland, with demagoguery and double-speak so prevalent it feels obtuse to call it Orwellian.  Sarah Palin is as much of a political scientist as the creator of the median voter theorem, and no one is wrong, even when they’re wrong.  I should have majored in making mud pies.

It had been with the other gear — the glass-encased dueling pistols, the knife-concealing belt buckle — in the master bedroom, where bullets mingle in the change tray and magazines sit by the bathroom sink.  Brandishing it in the living room, Dad’s hair was still mushed and damp from deer tracking earlier that morning.  He never betrayed a hint of pride, just amusement, as he handed me the medieval weapon.

“Pretty neat, huh?  I’d always wanted one of these.”

As you’d expect, he’s not a man with much use for a computer.  But Mom and Dad do check stocks and car auctions, respectively, now and then on an underpowered Dell.  Dad complained recently about the laptop getting slow.  Cars may lose a horsepower a year, but computers don’t just ‘get slow,’ so I took a look.  This was a job for the indoorsman.

Turns out those cock-bites at McAfee were to blame.  For some reason the virus scanner would periodically use up to 170 megabytes of RAM.  The laptop only has about 500 to begin with, so running McAfee, Windows, and a web browser was enough to overtax the memory and force it to use hard drive space as RAM, which is massively inefficient, especially on that laptop.  I installed avast!, a virus scanner that doesn’t have to bribe Dell to get on people’s computers.

While tooling around on it, I noticed that a single-core, Celeron-type processor isn’t enough to render my game smoothly.  With so many things onscreen and a target framerate of 60, I should have known better.  I’m gonna have to forgo Flash’s vector engine for bitmaps and matrices.  I’ll share the beta version of the game soon.  It’s not as cool as a crossbow, but it’s a hobby.

Mom and a corn husk doll at grandma's nursing home

And that’s the Kinect.  Basically a set of cameras connected to the Xbox 360, the device bathes your living room in infrared beams to detect your movements.  So, you can make your onscreen character jump just by jumping yourself.  Apparently the most popular game has you dancing around in front of the Kinect.

The problem is that I don’t play video games to exert myself.  After a long day of saving the children, I’d like to play a game without having to do a humiliating pantomime in front of the television.  Buttons were invented precisely so that I would not have to move my butt — look it up, that’s where the word comes from.  Others will argue that I’m missing the point.

It’s also far too casual for my tastes.  Everyone with friends and family already bought a Wii, Microsoft, so please focus on your core demographic of angry male shut-ins by making more elaborate murder simulators.  People buy an Xbox to curbstomp aliens and maybe drive a Mustang with the C-word painted on it, not dance.

Kyle brought up the possibility, reported this week, that the Kinect camera could spy on you.  A Microsoft guy apparently suggested that the Kinect could collect visual information from the camera to better “target advertising.”  The Kinect simply communicates data back to Microsoft:

“Tasteful home decor not found. Martha Stewart Home Living has been alerted.”

What a great opportunity to let one of the world’s largest corporations into your living room.

Kyle suggests a creepy hybrid Kinect-HAL 5000 to spy on your living room, saying something like, "Why don't you take your shirt off, Dave?"