Category: Personal

I was shoved by mobs of French, German, and Japanese tourists; directed to stand in four different lines half a mile apart from each other; accosted by pushy tour guides offering tours of the Colosseum in two different languages; and nearly run over by a police car chasing a pickpocket.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t funny. Guess you had to be there.

I’d said that I was surrounded by hordes of tourists everywhere I went in Italy, but the Colosseum is where they all seemed to converge. Now, I’d decided up front that I was going to be in full-on tourist mode for this trip: not only was I going mainly to check off the sights I’d been wanting to see ever since I was a kid, but when you’re in a foreign country, sticking to the tourist areas is usually the least hassle.

Every tour guide or travel book scoffs at tourist traps, gives tips on how to avoid touristy areas and how (supposedly) to “live like a local.” That used to be my thing when I was younger, but I just don’t get that attitude anymore. If I want to live like a local, I’m not going to get that in a few days or even a couple of weeks. Besides, I’m on vacation; I can live like a local back home. When I go to Rome, I want to gawk at the Colosseum or the Forum and take pictures of crumbling buildings and statues without really understanding their significance and I want to eat a lot of overpriced ice cream.

It’s overwhelmingly evident that I’m not the first person to discover this enormous building of antiquity, so why would I want to pretend that I were? If I were delusional enough to believe that I was the first guy to stumble onto the Pantheon, then I wouldn’t need to go on vacation at all. I could just sit in my living room and pretend I was in Pompeii or, for that matter, Yavin 4. (Come on, admit it: you’ve wanted to go there ever since that first shot of the temple). So hooray for tourists!

Except for the crowds. Buying a ticket to wander around a ruined building doesn’t break the illusion of travel adventure all that badly; waiting in line to buy a ticket definitely does. And in the case of the Colosseum, it just shatters any sense of history or even of place. It’s now the architectural and archeological equivalent of the Mona Lisa: it’s no longer appealing on its own merits; it’s become nothing more than a thing you go to see.

The museum at the top does a remarkable job of trying to put everything into context: it focuses on Vespasian’s life and his rule, shows a bit of the history of Rome up to the Colosseum’s construction and its use, offers reconstructions of how the building looked while it was in use, and presents archeological findings (like the remains of animals killed during exhibitions). It’s a noble attempt, but in the end, it’s all overwhelmed by its status as a tourist attraction.

The Forum and Palatine Hill have kind of the opposite problem: it’s a wealth of stuff without any real context. Especially if you visit it second (and you’re tired of walking), you’re left to just trudge through with a vague understanding that you’re somewhere Very Ancient and Important, but without enough information to get your bearings. In my case, this was the point where my feet had finally decided they’d had enough and kept threatening to just stop working altogether. So I was left to just stumble over cobblestones and ruins and snap pictures of every column, arch, and statue I saw with the hopes that I could piece together their significance afterwards. The end result is like looking at pictures in a textbook or travel guide: neat, but does it mean anything?

On the other hand, The Capitoline Museum, on the Campidoglio above the Roman Forum, is something I hadn’t even known existed before this trip. For me, it was one of the highlights of Rome. It’s a large but not overwhelming museum (only one side was open; the other was closed for renovation), and it was my first exposure to the kind of ostentatiousness you get when you combine Europe, time, and lots and lots of money. Most of the rooms were less like walking through a museum than wandering through a palace: enormous paintings on the walls, chandeliers and ceilings with elaborate detail work, and the ability to see priceless sculptures up close, just standing in the center of the room as if they were incidental decoration.

There’s a more modern section of the museum as well, the highlight being a beautifully-designed space added to house the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius that used to stand outside in the plaza.

At the time I was there, there was a temporary exhibition of medieval religious art, including some amazing illuminated texts and hymnals. Photographs weren’t allowed, but imagine a bunch of pictures of Mary and lots of gold leaf, and you get the idea.

Unrelated, but while I’m thinking of it: another highlight of Rome was an exhibition of woodcuts by Hiroshige at the Museo del Corso. It was an exhaustive collection that was really well done; I got the impression it’s a traveling exhibition, so if it comes your way (or if you’re in Rome) I’d highly recommend it.

More pictures are up on my Flickr site: The Capitoline Museum, and The Colosseum and Forum. To get the full effect, use your preferred method of making yourself salty and moist all over, stick your feet into hives of angry hornets, and have foreigners shove you at random intervals.

The highlight of Rome for me was seeing the Pantheon. I’d seen pictures and video, and I’d read about it in travel guides and the like, but never saw what the big deal was. More than anything else I’ve seen, it’s something you have to see in person to appreciate.

Even after seeing it in person, I couldn’t tell you what the attraction is. Sure, it’s the best-preserved ancient building in Rome. And the dome is impressive in the abstract, as an engineering concept: we’re told that by the time of the Renaissance, people had lost the technology to build a dome like the Pantheon’s. But that’s the kind of info that impresses historians and people who write travel guides (and, I’m presuming, Renaissance engineers). It doesn’t explain why you can walk into the building as a tourist in 2009 — one who’d been to Disney World, even — and still be struck dumb by it.

I can only conclude that there are still ancient spirits inside.

At the other end of the reverence scale is the Trevi Fountain, a bombastic display of excess and aqueducts that is perpetually overwhelmed with mobs of tourists. And yeah, it is kind of a garish tourist trap — the part of Rome that feels most like Disney-fied Las Vegas — but I still dug it. Gelato-sucking crowds and all.

When I was in Paris, I was turned off by all the monuments, arches, fountains, and statuary: it felt ostentatious (which was the whole point), but cold and unnecessarily off-putting for anybody in the 21st century. Paris — like Venice, in my opinion — doesn’t feel like a real place, but a theme park. Almost everything in Rome felt like people actually live and work there, coexisting with sights and monuments from the past 2500 years and, most likely the next 2500.

Apart from the Vatican and the Colosseum/Vittorio Emanuele area, there aren’t any huge stretches of land set aside just for show. You can be standing in front of any of the tourist traps in the city, turn your head 90 degrees and realize, “hey, somebody probably lives right there.”

More vacation pictures are up on Flickr, this set including the Pantheon, Trevi Fountain, and the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.

Also: while I was at the Pantheon, I kept trying to come up with a dirty joke about the HBO series Rome, but it never quite materialized. It involved graffiti and a picture of Octavia that said “Marcus Agrippa did this.”

Hey, I got back from Italy last week! I realize the internet has come to a standstill waiting in breathless anticipation for me to report back.

Before I left, I imagined I’d be keeping an online travel journal, blogging about the trip as I went. I pictured myself sitting at a cafe, sharing illuminating photos and tapping my profound insights and observations into my laptop as locals strolled past, fascinated by the exotic American. (I also imagined that La Vie en Rose would be playing on an accordion, because my understanding of European culture is still pretty amorphous). That didn’t happen, for a few reasons:

1. Internet access was intermittent and unpredictable. I could barely tweet. The hotels all promised “high-speed internet,” which is apparently defined differently outside the SF Bay Area; the places where I could get online at all still didn’t cooperate with Macs.
2. Sightseeing in Italy requires a lot of walking. At the end of the day, I didn’t want to get online; I just wanted to lie on the hotel bed and watch my feet and their red, cartoon-like throbbing. (There were even little stink lines coming off them, I swear to Jupiter).
3. For some reason, I never appreciated just how big a tourist attraction Italy is. Not only was I surrounded by hordes of American, French, German, Australian, Spanish, and Italian tourists the entire time I was there, but I got tons of recommendations before, during, and after the trip. There’s not really much I could add to the mountain of stuff that’s been written about the places, or to what people have already seen.
4. Not much interesting happened. This is not a bad thing. In fact, the total lack of adventure was exactly what I was hoping for.

Still, after two weeks traveling alone in a country where you don’t speak the language, you build up a pretty sizable transcript of internal monologue. Here’s the kind of stuff I would’ve commented on, in handy list format:

• Pretty much all of the major tourist attractions in Rome — except for the Vatican — are crammed into a surprisingly compact area. I’d be walking to find a bus stop, turn a corner, and Bam! there’s the Pantheon. Or the Roman Forum. Or the Trevi Fountain. The maps and the sightseeing bus make everything seem farther apart than it really is.
• Just because you can walk between sights, doesn’t mean you should. I imagine for the rest of my life, every time I see a column I’m going to get psychosomatic searing foot pain.
• Any benefit to all the walking I did was offset by my mistaken belief that you had to order two courses at every meal. I’m not sure which travel guide put the idea into my head, but I was convinced that waiters would have me ejected from the restaurant if I didn’t. So I spent the bulk of the trip bloated from unwanted veal.
• I’m not sure if it’s because my expectations had been set impossibly high, or if I just have terrible luck with restaurants, but I wasn’t impressed with the food. It ranged from “pretty good” to “meh” — nothing inedible, but nothing exceptional, either. I didn’t go anywhere too fancy (because I didn’t want to bother), but I stayed away from the tourist-heavy areas most of the time, and I took recommendations from travel books and from tour guides. Still, the best Italian food I’ve ever had has been in San Rafael and San Francisco.
• While I didn’t go anywhere that served absolutely awful food, I did get some absolutely awful service. A place in Venice (that was recommended by a travel book) was the worst: I’d thought that the service industry in San Francisco had made great strides in surliness and unfriendliness, but they’re strictly amateur class when compared to some of these Italian waiters. (And of course, several of the places had exceptionally friendly service, so it wasn’t everyone).
• I’m a total whore for those open-air sightseeing buses; I can’t get enough of them. I bought a two-day ticket for one line and rode the entire circuit at least three times. And then I paid for a different line for a third day. They’re slow and crowded, and the voiceover narration is never worth anything, but still: drop me in any city, and I’ll make a bee-line right for the open-air bus. I’ve even considered riding the ones in San Francisco, and the only reason I haven’t is because it’s too cold.
• The people everywhere I went had a better understanding of English than I do of Italian. So we’re making progress in our goal of bending the rest of the world to our culture! Now that we’ve got most of western Europe speaking English, we just need to work on getting them to form queues and respect personal space.
• I’ve had nightmares that were, quite literally, a direct replay of the taxi ride from my hotel in Rome to the airport. A few years ago, when I was in Paris, I watched the cars careening around the roundabouts and had my chuckling American “heh, how do those crazy Europeans manage?” moment. Watching — and being in — traffic in Rome was neither amusing nor fascinating; I don’t want to know how they do it, I just want to be promised that I never ever have to get in a car in Rome again.

That plus my pictures from around the city are all I’ve got to say about Rome for now. I’ve got more photos on the way of the Colosseum, Forum, Pantheon, and Vatican Museum, and the other cities I went to on the trip. (The best pictures came out of Florence and Siena). I’ll put them up when I can get everything organized and remember what happened when and where. Stay tuned!

It’s still a week away, but I’m already trying to get myself in the right mindset for my upcoming vacation. It’s a somewhat spontaneous trip to Rome, Florence, and Venice, prompted mostly by watching the last season of the HBO series in a two-week burst and then getting an e-mail reminding me my frequent flier miles were about to expire.

I say “somewhat spontaneous” because I made the reservations well over a month ago. But that’s spontaneous for me, because I’ve got the kind of overwhelming inertia that makes me have to fill out a list of pros and cons before I’ll leave the house even for groceries. I get… nervous when I’m separated from my computer and refrigerator for too long. The movie Into the Wild, about a guy who abandons all his possessions and hitchhikes through Alaska, is incorrectly labeled as “Adventure” and “Biography”. I call it “horror.”

But that’s negative thinking! This is going to be an adventure-filled trip to the birthplace of civilization. It’ll be great to get away from San Francisco, and visit a place with fascinating history, great food, interesting architecture, and a beautiful rolling countryside filled with vineyards.

That’s the other problem: it’s kind of hard to get all that excited about sightseeing when you start every day by driving over the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County. There are plenty of things not to like about San Francisco, but “lack of scenery” isn’t one of them.

I’ve tried to get myself in the mood by watching La Dolce Vita and Roman Holiday and of course, Gomorra, but as soon as the camera stops showing the Coliseum or the Forum or gondolas or dudes wrestling in togas, my attention starts to drift elsewhere. I’m not even a little bit Italian, and I don’t drink wine or coffee, so there’s little pulling me there.

Of course, I’m not at all Japanese, and I’m not crazy about seafood, so there’s little pulling me to Japan either. The difference there: the place really does feel like you’re about to see a samurai or a giant robot (or both!) at any moment. The part of me that would rather stay in bed keeps telling me that Italy is just foreign enough to be inconvenient, but not foreign enough to feel like an adventure.

So my current plan is just to chill the hell out. I’m not going to think of it as a once-in-a-lifetime expedition to a land rich in history, but a vacation. I’m not going to make a list of 100 things I have to see in each location, but wander around and take pictures. If I feel like heading back to the hotel room and watching TV or just lying down, so what? I’m not getting graded on this trip, and if I miss anything important, that’s what the Travel Channel is for. I’ll just take advantage of two weeks of not doing anything of consequence, and more important: not feeling like I should be doing anything of consequence.

And testing my theory about how much prosciutto a human being can eat before his heart explodes. And chasing it with tiramisu.

Pretty much every review I’ve read of Amazon’s new version of the Kindle has been mostly positive. (Not counting those of the Author’s Guild (as explained by my hero (although I disagree)) or the anti-DRM set, of course). They already got as close as they’re going to get to a “sweet spot” with the business model, like it or not, and now the second iteration of the device itself has fixed most of the inconveniences with the first version. Personally, I’ve got absolutely no need for an e-book reader — I read a total of nine books last year, and that was pushing myself. Even still, the new machine is so well designed, even I had a moment of gadget temptation.

Now, Amazon’s released the Kindle App for the iPhone (warning: link opens iTunes store). It’s alarming how quickly I went from skeptical to converted: I went from “just downloading a sample to try it out” to buying my first book in under 15 minutes. (It was The Book of Vice by Peter Sagal, which was very funny and I’d recommend to anyone over 18). I quickly finished that one and picked up a Terry Pratchett book that’s been on my wish list for months, as well as a couple of travel guides for an upcoming trip, so I can carry them around in my pocket.

The Stanza (another iTunes link) reader is still more solid and full-featured. The difference, apart from Stanza’s lack of support for graphics, is of course, Amazon. With the Kindle app, you get the size of Amazon’s collection and the convenience of having everything go through one account. Stanza’s made it as easy as it’s ever going to get to find what you’re looking for across a wide range of free and paid sites — but it’s always going to be a wide range of sites, instead of just one place, with one click. I feel as if I’m betraying some loyalty I’m supposed to have to independent bookstores and smaller websites, but it’s just a fact: I’ll take the path of least resistance wherever it’s available.

I still wouldn’t recommend the Kindle app without reservation, though, and reading on a phone is never going to replace paperback books. Reading a 270-page book by someone as easy to read as Peter Sagal is one thing, having to slog through something longer and/or more “serious” on a tiny screen isn’t anything I’d look forward to.

But the Kindle 2 looks so close to being an e-book reader I’d actually use; so close that the concessions they made in the design are maddening. The problem, from my perspective, is the target audience. Or to be more exact, the fact that I’m not in the target audience. They had to target People Who Read, the kind of folks who are skeptical about “electronic books”, who read enough to consider spending 350 bucks on something to carry all their books, who insist that they love the feel of paper and the smell of old bookstores.

I’m in the crowd of People Who Don’t Have the Attention Span For Reading, the folks who are skeptical of anything that doesn’t have an LCD screen, who wouldn’t hesitate to blow money we don’t have on devices as long as we can rationalize they have multiple purposes, and who insist that we love the feel of chrome and plastic and the smell of Best Buys. I’d be perfectly willing to sacrifice the readability of the Kindle’s e-Ink in favor of color, the battery life in favor of its being multipurpose, and the “Whispernet” cell connection in favor of simple wifi that lets me sync with a desktop client.

In short, I want a cross between a tablet PC and the mini PCs or personal media players that for whatever reason, still haven’t quite caught on while everybody else chases after “netbooks.” A tablet PC from Apple seems like such a natural, I’m convinced the only reason they haven’t announced one yet is to spite me personally. (Is it because I compared Steve Jobs to a serial killer? That was a joke!) Here are the specs for my ideal machine:

• 9-10″ color screen. Any bigger than that, and it’s getting into tablet PC territory. I had a 12″ laptop for a while, and it was just a little too big to use comfortably on a plane, and a little too small to do anything productive. Something Moleskine-sized.
• About the form factor of the Kindle 2. A little thicker would be necessary, sure, but it wouldn’t have to be a full-sized Tablet PC.
• Backlit screen. Amazon touts the Kindle’s lack of backlight as a plus for readability; I say that I do most of my reading in bed or on planes, and it’s nice not to need an additional light.
• Pressure-sensitive touch screen. I’d want to use it for drawing and sketching, as well as note-taking. So it should support a stylus as well as touch. Handwriting recognition is still built into OS X (and Windows).
• Runs Mac OS X. The desktop version, ideally, although a modified version of the iPhone OS could be made to work.
• Wireless-N connectivity. The Kindle targets people who hate synching with a desktop machine; I can’t imagine myself ever buying a book while at a beach, or even at an airport, so looking for a plain old wireless hotspot is fine by me.
• Open development. It needn’t be open-source, but at a minimum something like the Apple AppStore instead of having to run proprietary apps only. You’d need note-taking, drawing, and naturally, e-book reading software at least.
• Skip the keyboard. A big chunk of the Kindle’s space is taken up by a keyboard that’s not as usable as a real keyboard. If my dream machine had a USB slot or a Bluetooth receiver, then I could use any one of the hundreds of full-sized keyboards already out there. Apple makes 2 now that are so thin, it’d be reasonable to carry them around with the device.
• Removable storage. Apple’s already proven that this isn’t a deal-breaker, as many of us saps have been perfectly willing to spend big money on devices that have hard and fast memory sizes. Still, a compact flash or even memory stick slot would be nice.
• Headphone jack, speakers, stylus slot, etc. I’d assume these would be included as a matter of course, but just in case any engineers are out there feverishly scribbling down design notes from my blog.

So: something in between an iPhone and a Tablet PC. Nothing in that list is in the realm of the impossible, I don’t think — it’s basically a Wacom Cintiq plus a MacBook Air. Of course, those are two of the highest-priced pieces of “luxury” electronics available, so the machine I’m describing would probably cost 1500 bucks at a minimum. And have a battery life of about two hours.

But there’s got to be a market for that, right? There are all kinds of devices out there that are almost the same thing, but with exceptions — sub-$300 mini PCs without the touch screen, iPod touches that have to stay pocket-sized, tablets that have to contain a full-featured PC, personal media players that are trying to stay iPod-sized. Am I the only person who’d love to have a notebook PC that acts like a genuine notebook?

Another WonderCon down. Either I’ve gone to too many of these things, or there wasn’t a lot to this show, because it all seemed pretty routine. Nerds, costumes, crowded panels, sensory overload, awkwardness, repeat. A few photos are available for the curious.

I already mentioned that I was most impressed by the Watchmen panel, enough to make me anxious to see the movie on opening weekend. Other highlights from the show:

At a panel with Michael Chabon and Matt Fraction, they talked about the generational shift that’s happening in literature and pop culture in general, and how creators no longer need to be embarrassed to work in “genre fiction.” Chabon claimed that fandom first became a thing with his generation, and both he and Fraction gave accounts of “coming out” as fans of the nerdy. They said that the divisions between high art and low art, or “literature” and “genre work,” were getting blurred by phenomena like the popularity of Cormac McCarthy’s westerns (and literary circles’ refusal to call them “westerns”), and by Chabon’s own Kavalier and Klay. Overall, it was a nice survey of what’s going on in “real culture,” and a pep rally to empower the WonderCon crowd to embrace Nerd Pride.

Except — as I’ve said before and will keep saying every time I go to one of these things — a little bit of healthy shame is a good thing. When a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist is saying it’s okay to be a geek, that’s one thing. But then somebody steps up to the mike for the Q&A and starts stammering or effusing and it makes everyone else in the room reflexively cringe and try to pull himself into a fetal position to escape the sheer awkwardness of it all, that’s a sign that We Have Much Road Left to Travel. (Note that nobody at the Chabon/Fraction panel was particularly awkward; there’s just a sense of general awkwardness that pervades everything at these conventions).

I also waited in line at the Dark Horse booth to stammer and effuse at Chris Onstad, the creator of Achewood. He was signing copies of The Great Outdoor Fight, but I’d left mine at home, so I ended up having to reject his offer to buy another copy and just say “you’re awesome,” Chris Farley-style. He did say that the success of Great Outdoor Fight has meant another hard-bound compilation of the early Achewood strips, called Worst Song, Played on Ugliest Guitar. If it’s half as well-done as the last volume, it’s a must-have: the books are so well put-together that they’re a perfect example of value-added publishing. You get all the comics that you can get online for free, plus a ton of supplemental material. Onstad said that the new edition will have back-stories for all the characters, explaining how they got to Achewood before the first strip.

Standing in line, I was in front of the Street Fighters, and I kept getting pushed aside for strangers to have photo opportunities. Chun-Li kept hitting me with her bracelets, and she did apologize for it, even though it was my own fault for not properly doing a dash-cancel on my focus charge while she was readying her secondary attack. In general, there was a lot more presence from the videogame world than I remember from previous WonderCons; I wonder if that’s an artifact of the Bay Area or if it’s happening to every place where nerds are celebrated. I noticed that the San Diego Comic-Con was beginning to look disturbingly like E3 last year, but the Hollywood influence was so huge that it was keeping the games in check. I’m not nearly as interested in comics as I used to be, but I’d hate for the comic book aspect of these conventions to become an afterthought. (Especially since the conventions will never be as cool for pure videogame fandom as PAX is).

Make your own! Some good ones available via twitter search.

I was going to make some kind of comment to the effect that the reason the Colonials on “Battlestar Galactica” need Cylon technology so much is to enable all their faster-than-light jumps over sharks. But I thought better of it, partly because “jumping the shark” is such a tired expression now, but also because “twirling the jacket” is a much stronger image for me, at least where BSG is concerned.

I’ve pretty much narrowed it down to that moment where the show lost me for good. Because Apollo jumping on a table and twirling his jacket in the air was such a corny moment (not to mention being Tom Cruise-style creepy), and it was so prolonged that I knew exactly what was going to happen next. I guess other potential phrases could be “putting Baltar on the Base Star,” “blowing up Starbuck,” “shooting the leg off Gaeta,” or “bringing back the President’s cancer.” (It’s just coincidental that all these phrases are also excellent euphemisms for wanking).

Whatever the exact moment, I can tell I’ve left the flock because this week’s episode (“The Oath”) would’ve been an excellent episode, taken out of context. There was a strong through-line and strong motivation for the characters. Plenty of action without losing individual interactions. All the major characters brought together, each one given a chance to say what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. Tie-ins to previous episodes to put all in context.

Okay, maybe the last bit is the problem. Because I kept getting annoyed at what should’ve been a cool episode, and it’s because so much of it doesn’t make sense if you’ve been watching the show for four years (or two and a half for those of us who came in late).

One of the strengths of the series has always been that stuff happens: they prided themselves on making big changes to characters and their relationships, instead of having everything reset at the end of every episode. That’s fine for drama, but lousy for continuity. And I don’t mean nerdrage continuity issues like “Seelix claims she was rejected by Anders but we clearly saw in episode 314 that she was hitting on Apollo.” I mean motivations that come out of nowhere for the sake of convenience.

A character speaks for the audience in this episode when he tells Starbuck “nobody even knows what you are anymore.” Ostensibly, that’s a comment about how she came back from the dead, but it could just as well be a comment about how her personality changes completely from week to week. The episode is full of unintentional (I’m hoping) meta-commentary like that.

Hey Apollo, remember that trial? Hey Helo, remember the Pegasus, and that time you betrayed the entire fleet and nothing happened? Remember how we had a big moral quandary about planting a virus in the Cylons’ hub, but had no problem destroying the Resurrection Ship? The series is ending, so they’ve got to tie it in together, but that kind of falls apart when the only thing holding the show together is that without a wiki, people tend to forget what happens from one episode to the next. It doesn’t feel like they’re commenting on the characters’ decisions, but on the writers’.

And I don’t know; maybe it’s the intention of the writers that Apollo is supposed to be the most insufferably annoying character on the show, but having him stop in the middle of a desperate firefight and tell Tigh, “You know, maybe the revolutionaries have a point, what with you being a Cylon and all” was ludicrous almost to coat-twirling levels. Meanwhile, everyone is conveniently ignoring the fact that the Cylons are indistinguishable from humans and that they found a planet thought only to be a myth and they found 2000-year-old bones of Cylons on the planet. These would be interesting things to pursue.

It’s disappointing, because for a while, BSG was the most successful and accessible example of “world-building” I’d ever seen on TV. There was a real mythology and history to these characters. It was a little too self-satisfied with its “edginess,” but more than made up for it by delivering mature stories without devolving into “Star Trek”‘s schmaltz or overly-obvious analogies. Now, it just seems like a bunch of people in a writer’s room trying desperately to tie up as many loose ends as they can, spending more time trying to make 45 minutes of drama than something you have to put genuine thought into. I can see a future of half-Cylon babies and madmen with guns screaming, “Can’t you see? She’s half-black, and I’m half-white!!!”

Hey, speaking of old video and VCR effects, here’s one of my favorite things they’ve ever done on “Saturday Night Live,” “Body Fuzion:”

The best part (apart from the music) is how Drew Barrymore looks like she can’t deliver a line without cracking up. Also: “Penthels!”

Georgia’s changed so much in the 13 or so years since I moved away, that there’s not much left there that I miss. One thing I do miss is the accent, or at least my own version of it.

I never listen to myself talking (because, you know, I’m kind of boring), so I have to trust other people. And opinion seems to be mixed. I’ve heard “you don’t have an accent at all” as well as “you’re not from around here, are you?” and the plain old “huh?” I’m told that it comes and goes based on how much I’ve been drinking, who I’ve been talking to, and my proximity to Atlanta.

Which makes sense, because I tried so hard to get rid of it while I was growing up. Plus I watched an obscene amount of television, letting it leech away any trace of my origin just as effectively as it did my attention span. And now, as penance, I’m living in the one part of the country that has the blandest, most generic, straight-out-of-the-box made-for-TV accent possible. I’ve been listening for years, and the only distinctive thing I can hear in the SF Bay Area is the tendency to pronounce “both” like “bowlth,” and they’re not even consistent with that.

But a real Georgian accent, when it’s done right — although, as my mother claims, “I don’t know what business anybody has writing about the south if he’s been living in Massachusetts for decades.” — but a real Georgian accent done right is about as cool as you can get, at least in the United States. It’s mostly “Hey, how y’all doin’?” but with an undercurrent of “well truth be told I don’t particularly care ’cause I got plenty on my mind as it is, I tell you what.” The midwest is too much of the former; the northeast is all about the latter.

And it’s not like Texas (too much of the “yee-haw”), or the Carolinas (too much of an attempt to sound refined; the South Carolina accent always struck me as sounding fake). It isn’t like Arkansas or Oklahoma, either, since they took a good thing and stretched and beat it out to a painful-sounding extreme. And it sure as hell isn’t like what you hear on TV.

Except if you’re in Georgia, and you’re watching TV, and you’re seeing the Senate campaign attack ads between Saxby Chambliss and Jim Martin every five minutes. Those struck me as bizarre just for their black-is-white, up-is-down quality (the Democratic candidate is accusing the Republican candidate of being unpatriotic for not supporting the troops, and socialist for voting in favor of the Wall Street bailout). But they also struck me as bizarre because it’s the first time in a long time I’ve heard people speaking with southern accents on television, and they weren’t doing an impression, and they weren’t talking about country home cookin’ (Paula Deen’s been dead to me ever since I saw her put mayonnaise on a BBQ sandwich), and they weren’t the President, and they weren’t one of the Duke boys. But a well-educated, well-off person speaking with a southern accent that wasn’t faked.

I hate to sound too much like the SNL version of Zell Miller, but I think I’d cross party lines to vote for a man named Saxby Chambliss. (One of his ads has him asking God to bless Bush and Obama, and ends with his grandkids saying “Vote for my Big Daddy!”) I think we’ve done the Liberal White Southern Male Guilt thing long enough. It’s time for people like me to feel guilty for fleeing the south, forcing ourselves to say “can’t” instead of “cain’t,” and trying so hard to blend in that we let plain vanilla “American-ness” wash out everything distinctive about our upbringing.

Edit: I suppose I should clarify, this being the internet and all, since that sounded like I was actually endorsing the candidate with the cooler name. First, I haven’t been a resident of Georgia in over a decade, so I don’t keep up to date with the politics there. Second, voting for (or against) somebody based on his name is about as stupid as it gets. Third, based solely on the smear ads, I can’t even tell the two candidates apart. All I’m saying is that I feel dumb now for spending so many years trying to get rid of my accent.