Unpatriotic

An open letter to various wingnuts I have been hearing from lately.

I am so sick of people telling me that because I don't support the war in Iraq, I am unpatriotic. What this really tells me is that the people who want a war in Iraq are incapable of defending it on its merits, i.e. they can't build a good rational case for why we need to be there. I am ready, willing, and able to partake in a real debate, but the supporters of the war, knowing they can't win a fair debate, resort to calling me Unpatriotic.

I love our country enough to not want our blood and treasure squandered in useless wars which don't enhance our security.

I love our freedom and security enough that I want our leaders to be accountable to us and to deal with real security threats. How about North Korea? How about Saudi Arabia?

I support our troops enough that I don't want their lives wasted solely for the political benefit of one man and his party.

I respect our servicemen and -women, who sacrifice to go where they're told and do the job they're ordered to do. That doesn't mean I have to believe that they weren't sent there on the basis of lies and deception.

Our founding fathers weren't just soldiers, they were citizens, and they believed in fair, free, honest, and open debate. They believed that real
debate was the cornerstone of democracy. I'm ready to pick up that mantle. Are you? Or do you just want to call me unpatriotic?

A Happy Customer is Our Best Advertisement

I got this email a couple of days ago, from a man who played a role in a full production of my play First Person Shooter:

Hi. I played the lawyer in FPS two years ago... I just wanted to say that I loved the play, having been kicked out of highschool my junior year less than a month after the columbine shootings. I was a habitual trench coat wearer who hung out with my antisocial friends and made fun of all the jocks. Performing your work was cathartic, because I think the satirical tone you took with it showed the audience just how insane all the paranoia that started after columbine really is. It's a powerfull message wrapped up in dark sarcasm. Thank you very much for putting this out there...

P.S: Thought you could appreciate the humor of my signature, which follows.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Trench Coat - $100
Military Combat Boots - $75
AK-47 - $500
The Look on Their Faces - Priceless
For Everything Else, There's Mastercard
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Wow. All I can say is wow. I did write the play with guys like John in mind, and it pleases me immensely to imagine that it made a difference for someone. Of course it pisses me off more than I can ever convey that our institutions, e.g. high school, are so mind-bogglingly dumb and irrational, and given the choice, I'd rather live in a world where such institutions work and don't invite satire.

Unlike John, I didn't get kicked out of high school, but I had a very poor high school experience. Who knows, though? Maybe if I had been in high school at the time of Columbine, I just might have gotten kicked out. Not because I am or ever was likely to go on a shooting spree; but because the teachers and administrators in my school were stupid and incompetent.

To this day I am baffled by some of the things the teachers and administrators in my high school did and said. (This was Penney High School, now known as East Hartford High School) I'm not going to generalize here, but the majority of my teachers and every single administrator I encountered in the East Hartford school system was arrogant, ignorant, and completely uncaring. Dick Taser and Miss Millstone were drawn directly out of high school teachers I have known. I didn't have to make up a lot.

Upcoming Plays

My short play dog_eat_dog.com will be played on Wednesday and Friday, August 13 & 15, at the Pregnant Chad Theatre Festival, at the American Theatre of Actors, 314 W. 54th Street, New York, at 8 pm. dog_eat_dog.com is a comedy about what people will do to hang on their piece of the crumbling dot-com pie. If you are in town and you're looking for something to do, please consider checking it out! I know you will enjoy it!

More on the Madness of George Dubya

In my last post, I documented what seemed to be an open and shut case of plagiarism. Since then, I've spoken to the production's press relations person, who doesn't know if they have the rights to the Strangelove script, but has passed the question along to the producer and the playwright. However, she did mention that the Kubrick family "has given their blessing to the production".

Does this mean that there's nothing wrong with the production of The Madness of George Dubya? No! As I explained in my previous post, the playwrights' responsibility does not end at securing a legal permission. Copyright infringement is not the same as plagiarism; one may commit infringement without plagiarism, and one may, incredibly enough, commit plagiarism without infringement. I wouldn't have thought that possible, but it seems to be what's happened here: Butcher most likely is not guilty of infringement, but he is definitely guilty of plagiarism.

When a playwright is not the sole author of a play, he is under a moral and artistic obligation to point that fact out, whether he has the rights to the material or not. As it is, Butcher is explicitly claiming to have written every word, when this is manifestly not the case. Why should I need to call the play's PR rep in order to get some sort of grudging acknowledgement that Kubrick et al. had something to do with the dialogue?

Butcher doesn't reference Doctor Strangelove in the play. Butcher doesn't quote a paragraph or two. Butcher lifts entire scenes from the movie, all without the slightest hint of attribution!

It would be much more appropriate, and honest, for the writing credit to read, for example: "written by Justin Butcher, Stanley Kubrick, and Terry Southern; based on the movie Doctor Strangelove and the book Red Alert by Peter George III." In that case, I would have had nothing to complain about, except, as I noted, that the material is actually pretty dull once you take Strangelove out.

The point I'm trying to make is just this: if Justin Butcher wants people to regard him as a brilliant playwright, then he should write his own brilliant play.

Update: Their PR person never did get back to me.

Plagiarism in the West End

My wife and I went to the Arts Theatre last night to see The Madness of George Dubya. We had heard and read so much about the play, and we were very excited to see a satire on our current Buffoon-in-Chief, not to mention his lapdog Tony Blair; a satire which is desperately need in the States but which, apparently, can only be done in London. The theatre was packed and the excitement was palpable as we waited for the play to open. We were very pleased to see so many people who shared our excitement -- and a lot of them seemed to be Yanks as well.

Let me just say before I go any further that The Madness of George Dubya, alas, is not a very good play. In fact, it seems to me that it's not a play so much as a publicity stunt. The actors, who wade through this material with professionalism and aplomb, are not to be blamed for this plane wreck, either. The fault lies entirely with the playwright. But I can't even get to the point of posting a review of this play, because as it wore on, I realized (to my astonishment) that The Madness of George Dubya is a plagiarism of Doctor Strangelove !

The play's website says: "playwright Justin Butcher has decided – like a mad fool – to fling together an anti-war play in a matter of days, rehearse it in a week and bung it on in London. " That sounds like an awful lot of work in an incredibly short period of time. Actually, these days it's easy. All you have to do is find a script that already exists, like, say, this one, and cut and paste your way to a West End premiere!

"Butcher's basic narrative is borrowed," says The Guardian. The flyer I have for the play indicates that it's "based on" Doctor Strangelove. This play, unfortunately, isn't "based on" Doctor Strangelove, nor is the material "borrowed". It's stolen. In very large measure it is a word-for-word ripoff of Doctor Strangelove, with only the most inconspicuous mention -- not even a proper credit -- given to Stanley Kubrick, no credit whatsoever given to Terry Southern, who co-wrote the script with Kubrick, and no credit whatsoever to Peter George III, who wrote the original novel Red Alert, upon which Strangelove itself was based. (Kubrick, unlike Butcher, believed in giving credit where credit was due.) There is nothing on the marquee or the program to indicate any other writer, or any other source, other than Butcher. If you didn't know the movie, or you didn't know it well, you'd think that Butcher had written the entire thing himself, and I believe that was the intent. To add insult to injury, the program (which costs an additional £1.50) actually includes the following sentence: "Respectfully dedicated to the memory of the great Stanley Kubrick."

Perhaps by now it should go without saying that I know Doctor Strangelove really well. Well enough, in fact, that I was whispering the next line of dialogue into the ear of my incredulous wife in order to persuade her that the dialogue was, by and large, purloined.

Incredibly, not a single review I have read has mentioned that the play contains entire paragraphs of dialogue lifted verbatim from the movie. Only the names have been slightly modified: General Ripper, for example, becomes General Kipper. Group Captain Mandrake becomes Windbreak. Other name changes are similarly clever on the part of the playwright. Instead of the President in the War Room, we have the Prime Minister. And so on.

The overall plot is exactly the same: General Ripper, er, Kipper, orders his bombers to attack the enemy, using a coded order to which only he has the key ("OPE" in the movie, "PBF" in the play). Exactly as in the movie, the general is obsessed with the purity of our bodily fluids. Exactly as in the movie, the chain of command tries desperately to recall the bombers before their attack is successful, which would precipitate a worldwide nuclear war.

Oh, wait -- he changed the ending. In the play, they succeed at stopping the holocaust.

Look, if you don't believe me, just try this: Go see the play, then rent the movie. Or see the movie first, then go see the play. You'll be astonished. You might be a little disgusted.

One review after another which I found on-line has approvingly quoted the assessment of one general on the number of deaths to be expected in the impending war: "I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed." That came straight from the movie -- and it was even delivered better. By George C. Scott.

There is some original material in this play (including some moderately clever songs, one of which is by Tom Lehrer, who is credited). By and large, the original material falls flat on its face, especially an overlong lecture about the history of the Middle East's oppression by the West. This lecture was mind-numbingly boring and redolent of the dullest kind of amateur theater (I've written enough boring theater to know). But this is only a minor sin, especially since Butcher commits it with the best of intentions. It's the plagiarism that really burns me about this production.

If you took out all of Kubrick's words, all of Southern's words, and all of George's words, and all you had left were Butcher's words, you'd probably be left with about one-third of the play intact.

I don't yet know whether the producers of this play actually secured the proper permissions to use Doctor Strangelove. I doubt that they have -- otherwise there would be a conspicuous credit -- but it's actually beside the point. If The Madness of George Dubya had truly been based on, or inspired by Doctor Strangelove, it could have used the same ideas, a similar plotline, and similar characters, all without violating the original text. It could have treated the original material with the respect that it deserves. Inspiration is not the same as Duplication. Even getting the formal permission to use someone else's words is very different from writing them down verbatim and claiming them as one's own. You'd think a man who read Classics at Oxford would know that. You'd think.

Isn't this a Great War?

I'll be honest with you, I was against this war in March. I thought Bush War II was part of W's agenda from the very beginning. I thought the war had nothing to do with Iraq and everything to do with getting little George Jr. re-elected, on an imagined swell of patriotism after an easy military victory. I thought our Fratboy-in-Chief figured the U.S. could sashay into Baghdad, topple Saddam, and leave by fall. I figured, on the other hand, that the U.S. would have an easy victory followed by a hard occupation. But I was so wrong! And I am so sorry. I just want to take this opportunity right now to personally apologize for being a traitor! That's right, I must hate America! I hate it! And I'm sorry. When I saw little George in his little flight suit, I was filled with pride for America and I was ashamed that I loved Saddam so much. See, when I didn't believe George about the immiment threat that Iraq posed to America, it was because I was blinded by my liberal hatred of everything America stands for, and I was blinded by my love for Saddam. So what if Bush lies? So what if the WMD's are never found? So what if Saddam is never found? Oh, and where's OSAMA? It's all just liberal ranting anyway. I must support the President 100% because anything less is TREASON. I know that now, and I'm sorry. I didn't really think that the United States was about to get bogged down in a ten-year occupation which is going to end up costing us about two thousand American service members' lives, God only knows how many Iraqis, and half a trillion dollars of our tax money. That was just liberal bullshit that I was willing to swallow because deep down, I was a filthy traitor, a dirty hater of America, and I can add, and believe me, I'm really, really, really sorry for it. Thank God that Ann Coulter has the courage to set me straight. Now I see the error of my ways. I'll watch Fox News from now on; they'll tell me what to think, and then I'll be a happy Patriotic American again. Because we all know that the meaning of "Patriotism" is to shut the hell up and do what we're told! So... Yeah. This is a great war after all.

More Links!

Serious Stuff
Pito Salas's musings about software economics. Good reading for anyone who makes a living in this business, since we're talking about the long-term viabibility of the industry.
Did Bush Cut Your Taxes? Lucky me: somebody else's children will be giving me an extra $3000 next year. Actually, I'm going to consider this a high-interest loan which I will eventually have to pay on demand.

Now for some fun:
Weight Watchers Cards From 1974.They weren't kidding. The commentary is worth the visit.

Unbelievable ActionScript

I write Flash code for Applied Messaging Corporation, where I've had an excellent opportunity to observe firsthand some of the silliness of Flash. For example, I have the following code buried somewhere in the thousands of lines which I've written:

gServer.handler.onNotificationCancel = funtion(notificationId)
{
shTrace("in gServer.handler.onNotificationCancel");
gAlertList.removeAlertID(notificationId);
}

It compiles fine; Flash gives me no errors and there is no indication whatsoever that anything has gone amiss. However, when I run the application and look at the copious logs we generate (we've learned you need to do this when you write in Flash), I notice that the function never gets called from the place where it's supposed to be called. This is odd... so I turn to another tool, a custom in-house Flash debugger which I built. I check here and I notice that when I evaluate the function, it's undefined! Hmmm. What could be wrong? Then I notice (after about 15 minutes of staring at the code): I spelled "function" wrong!!! The code is supposed to look like this:

gServer.handler.onNotificationCancel = function(notificationId)
{
shTrace("in gServer.handler.onNotificationCancel");
gAlertList.removeAlertID(notificationId);
}

Silly me, I expected the compiler to detect that!

You know, it's 2003. There's no excuse for a compiler to allow syntax errors to go by unnoticed. This may just be a bug, but I doubt it. This is a fundamental design flaw in the Flash compiler. Flash didn't even issue a warning about this code! I don't think it should be necessary for a programmer to be a perfect speller, and I don't think it should be necessary for a programmer to slavishly inspect his code to make sure the syntax is correct. Damn it, that's what computers are for! This single incident has nearly deadened my enthusiasm for developing in Flash.

Advice To New Playwrights: The Gentle Art of Accepting Criticism

In the course of learning a thing or two about writing a play, I have been to a number of informal readings and staged readings of new plays. (Sometimes my own!) The usual format of such events is that after the reading, the audience critiques the play, asks questions, and gives feedback to the playwright. This is a critically important part of the process by which plays are crafted. Now, in these situations, I've sometimes seen the playwright react in ways which struck me as not useful or not helpful. On the other hand, I've sometimes seen the playwright act in ways which I thought were exactly right, ways which advanced the process and helped improve the play. So let me share with you my take on The Gentle Art of Accepting Criticism:

Don't come simply expecting praise. A reading isn't a performance, and the Q&A afterward is supposed to be more than the audience taking turns telling you how wonderful the play is. If it is perfectly wonderful, then you don't need the feedback anymore; it's time to get it produced. Seriously! If that's what you came for, you're wasting your time and you're wasting your audience's time. Conversely, if you can't stand to hear people telling you how they think the play isn't working, then if you only want to hear about where it is working, then you're not ready to have it read.

Do listen carefully. Listening to a new play is not necessarily easy, and it's not usually entertaining. Your audience listened to your play, and now they have something to tell you -- something which may be valuable to you. Give them the courtesy they gave your play.

Do recognize the unique opportunity that a reading affords you. You've got a chance, possibly for the first time, to hear real people speaking the lines you wrote. Now's your chance to know whether it sounds as good in real life as it did in your head, as you think it does on the page. You're doing this in front of a small and mostly sympathetic audience. Now is the time to find the rough patches in the script, the parts that don't work, the stuff that doesn't make sense. Far better to do it here than to wait and try to do it in front of a larger and rougher audience. A reading is your chance to get potentially valuable contributions from a diverse bunch of other people (usually other playwrights). It's like they're your collaborators, only you don't have to credit them! Make the most of their time, and yours.

Do ask questions. It's important to come prepared to your reading. You should know where you think the holes in the script are, and you should be prepared to ask pointed questions of the audience, designed to elicit whether they saw the same holes. Be specific. Find out if they understand what you wanted them to understand, when you wanted them to understand it.

Don't dismiss your audience. They know, or should have known, what they were in for when the reading began. Now they are giving you the benefit of hearing what they're really thinking in the moments after the lights come back up. Don't let that opportunity get away by allowing yourself to discount the opinions you're going to hear.

Do screen out the obviously wrong criticisms. You know what? Some people just aren't going to get it. No matter how good it is, no matter how well it works, someone is going to have a problem with it. Maybe a particular audience member just likes to hear himself talk. Who knows? You have to have writer's integrity at this point, to recognize this when it happens, and to let it slide. Ah, but how do you know the difference between simple, stubborn pride and writer's integrity? That leads to the next point:

Do maintain your vision of the play. You wrote your play for a reason. Your audience may well (usually does) contain someone who will make suggestions about plot, characters, or even theme. Some of these might go well with your vision of the play, but some will change it radically; and even if a good and interesting suggestion is made which violates your initial vision, you should resist it. That initial animating vision, which you brought to the play, is what gives it integrity, and violating it risks killing the play. So: listen to suggestions, take them (mostly) seriously, but guard your vision.

Don't argue. It's very easy, when someone is raising an issue with your play, to take it personally, and it's natural to want to argue with the idiot and tell him why he's wrong. But what if he's right? Once that wall of defensiveness goes up, it's very unlikely that any useful information will get through it. Just remember that nobody is telling you that you're a bad person -- or even a bad playwright. Most people won't say anything at all if they think your play's irredeemably bad, so you don't need to argue with them. If someone's talking to you, it's probable that they're trying to help you.

Don't explain. If you have to explain the actions of your characters after the play, that means that they aren't being explained during the play. Once you know that some actions are confusing your audience because they don't understand why they're occuring, you know enough to note the problem and move on to the next issue. Don't explain the play that you meant to write; talk about the play that you did write, then go home and get it a step closer to what you wanted.

Don't lecture. The feedback session after a reading is your golden opportunity to be a world-class bore. Don't take it. Let the audience go home talking about your play rather than about you. My feeling is, if you've got something boring to say, say it in your blog.

Don't pontificate. They heard your play. You had your soapbox. If your play didn't say it, nobody wants to hear you say it. On the other hand, if your play did say it, nobody wants to hear you say it again.

Don't cave. It's possible, even likely, that someone will have a very strong opinion about something you need to change in your play. This person may push this opinion on you very vigorously, even to the point where you may waver in your own conviction about why this or that should remain unchanged in your own play. Don't go there. After all, the guy with a strong opinion won't even remember it next week -- he's really got no stake in it -- but you've got to live with your own play forever. So just thank whoever for his opinion, write it down if you can, and reconsider it calmly once you're back at your writing desk. The person may be right or wrong, but the force with which the opinion is pressed gives you no clue to that.

Don't be disappointed.

One final note, in case you think I'm being smug. You bet I'm smug! No, sorry. What I meant to say was this: I have violated every one of these in the course of time, and I probably will violate at least some of them again. I'll try not to, but feel free to call me on it when I do. Then perhaps someday, I'll have learned enough about writing plays that I can actually tell other people how to do it.

Switching Over to My Main Page

I've gotten enough confidence in blogger now to stop using an auxiliary page as my blog. I've decided to make the blog my main web page.

Upcoming Plays

My monologue Old Flame will be performed by Michele Markarian at the 2003 Hovey Summer Shorts Festival in Waltham, MA. Old Flame is a short comedy piece of mine about cigarettes and failed love. I'm so pleased to be a part of the Summer Shorts. This year's will be the best yet and everybody ought to see it. It's more than a festival of short plays -- this year's festival includes original songs and even a few mini-musicals! Old Flame will be performed on the 19th and the 24th.

EcoSphere

My wife gave me a very nice birthday present today: it's an EcoSphere. This is a completely sealed mini-aquarium. It's a (very nearly) completely closed ecosystem that only requires a little bit of light and a comfortable temperature range to stay alive for an average of 2 years. The system consists of salt water, air, algae, bacteria, and brine shrimp. The shrimp are pretty active, and they look to me like tiny lobsters. They eat the algae, exhale CO₂, and produce waste. The bacteria eat the waste, exhale CO₂, and produce their own waste. The algae consume the bacteria's waste and the CO₂, and produce oxygen. et voila, a closed cycle! What's most amazing about the EcoSphere is the fact that the system requires absolutely no other inputs except light and heat, and it can keep running! According to the manufacturer, the shrimp can live for up to five years, and the entire system can live beyond ten years!

The EcoSphere is beautiful and relaxing to watch. It's also educational. Naturally, my wife understood that my interest would most easily be piqued by a tie-in to outer space, and the EcoSphere is a spinoff of NASA research into closed-cycle life support systems for deep space travel. The life support methods that work in near earth orbit, or even for lunar voyages, won't work very well for interplanetary travel. The EcoSphere provides a glimpse into the kind of system that will be needed for long-duration space flight.

Yet More Random Web Sites

I'm dumping a bunch of web sites onto my blog from all the various places I have stashed web addresses, in the hope that someday, you know, that great someday when I'll finally get organized, I'll just assemble everything into a nice little compendium. I just know that by that time all my links will be stale. But hey, that's life on Internet time.

Found Magazine : It's just stuff that's found. Notes, letters, notebooks, photos. Tiny glimpses into somebody else's life. Fascinating and poignant.
Engrish.com
Rapture Letters It's really serious.
Book Finder

Astronautix
JPL Solar System Simulator Check out the comparisons between the predicted views and actual space flight imagery.

Today's Links

Space Fun
HobbySpace, home of the big collection of Space Hobbyist Links

Games : Space Games
Mistaril, home of Space Station Manager
MAD, a game of Global Thermonuclear Warfare

Today's Links

Astronomy : Asteroids and NEOs
IAU: Minor Planet Center
Small-Body Orbital Elements

Adventures in ActionScript

I've been a professional programmer all of my adult life. In the past, I have used a succession of FORTRAN/Algol-derived procedural languages (BASIC,Pascal,C,C++) to accomplish my work, with occasional forays into Assembly and more exotic territory, e.g. Prolog, LISP, and FORTH. Most of what I have written could be characterized as filters, that is, programs or modules which accept a single well-defined input and create a single well-defined output. This lead me to the point where I wrote the ActionScript code generator for Adobe LiveMotion 2.0. A compiler (of which the code generator is a critical component) is definitely "the mother of all filters". I definitely enjoyed the work, but once LiveMotion 2.0 shipped, Adobe decided to lay off the team, and as it turns out, that was the last time I did traditional programming work.

Now I am working for a startup called Applied Messaging Corporation, where I was hired primarily on the basis of the ActionScript knowledge I acquired by writing the code generator at Adobe. Applied Messaging is building a networked enterprise-level application using a very wide set of technologies, and Flash MX is one of them. I am now part of a team which is building a rich client interface for the product in Flash and ActionScript. I've spent about eight months there now, and it's given me a unique perspective on using ActionScript on a daily basis to build a real application.

Macromedia has been positioning Flash MX as a development platform for some time now, and their story gets better with each new release. However, they're not really there yet.

To a Designer, trained in art, photography, or video production, Flash is a fantastic if tempermental tool, and ActionScript is a revelation. In its traditional application sphere of interactive animations, Flash and ActionScript do a wonderful job, especially among its target audience. I've seen people do fantastic things with Flash. Take Eric Dolecki, for example. He's one of my coworkers, he's a wizard with Flash, and he's a great example of Flash's target audience.

ActionScript was designed (like JavaScript, its source) to be a scripting language. When you want to do something simple, with a minimum of fussy overhead, it's a great tool. ActionScript is easy to learn and easy to use in projects without a lot of complexity. The language is essentially untyped and the scoping rules are liberal, meaning it isn't terribly picky about how you declare or use your variables. The runtime is garbage collected, so the programmer doesn't have to worry too much about the details of allocating and cleaning up objects. It's robust in the face of missing objects or null references; most of the time Flash will just fail silently. The point of the language is to stay out of your way and let you code something up quickly and effectively, and it succeeds brilliantly at doing what it was designed to do. Its simplicity and ease of use have another virtue: the language doesn't intimidate or frustrate designers, many of whom have never written any programs, in any language, before they were exposed to ActionScript. This is all for the good, and I'm all for it.

The trouble, of course, is that with success comes new demands. Now that Flash has achieved ubiquity, it has become very attractive as a platform to build and deploy applications in. And once you've built and deployed simple applications, you start to want to build and deploy more complex applications. And that's where the trouble with ActionScript begins.

[next post: ActionScript applications are slow, and brittle wrt design or requirements changes.]

New Template

Naturally, the first thing I did once I set up my Blogger account was to look for some templates for my page. I didn't much care for any of the default templates. I found the template for this site here. I like it because it's clean, it's easy to read, and it emphasizes the text, sort of like me.

Blogger

So now I'm a blogger. Can you feel the excitement pulsing through the universe?

Hi, my name is Patrick, and this is my blog. No longer content to let the fashion parade pass me by, hopeful nay confident that this is the wave of the future, I'm jumping on the bandwagon at the last possible moment.

Try this link to Playwrights' Platform, where I am the webmaster and only about five years behind the curve.