Our daughter Leah brought back from Prague this very cool, hand-made, three-person chess board.

I haven’t tried playing it because, as a result of an ancestral genetic mutation, I am unable to visualize spatially-arrayed objects even when I am looking at them, much less three moves ahead. But it might be fun for you Normals.

As far as I can tell, it doesn’t violate either of these two patents: 1 2. Of course, I also can’t figure out what the hell these patents are describing. [Tags: chess prague games]

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In 2008, Cliff Richard’s first hit, “Move It!,” will come out of copyright because the British government just refused to extend the term of copyright for sound recordings from 50 years to 70 years after the artist dies.

Richard’s is up in arms about this. Instead, lets help Cliff Richard celebrate the ultimate success of his work: Fifty years later, it’s touched enough people that it matters that it’s moving into the public domain.

Congratulations, Cliff! You should be very proud that you have the opportunity to see something you made become something all culture now can rely on! [Tags: copyright copyleft cliff_richard ]

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Sicko is brilliant. And hilarious.

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Last night we saw Shakespeare & Co.’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in Lenox. Over the course of the twenty years we’ve been going, this was one of the best productions of this play, and one of the flat out most enjoyable productions of them all. It’s hilarious.

Jeez, that guy could write! [Tags: shakespeare ]

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As I write this, it is my mother in law’s 80th birthday. I love her, I like her, and I enjoy being with her.

As far as arbitrary markers go, an 80th is a big deal. We’ve marked it by gathering the entire family, as well as the four couples known collectively as The Wine Group who have known her since high school. They are only slightly reduced by age: One couple is now a single, they are all shorter than they used to be, one of the men runs down conversational paths a little too long. Still and all, when I was a lad, eighty year olds were by and large dead, and for the survivors we had words like “dotage” and, if they were lucky, “spry.” I don’t know if being 56 enables me to see past the wrinkles and pates or whether we’re just aging remarkably better than our grandparents did — if we are lucky enough to get to old age, a contingency that, as ever, comes without merit or mercy.

So, this morning I went for a run. Of course, if you saw me, you wouldn’t say, “Oh, there’s a man running!” You would have said, “Oh my god, should we get that staggering man some help?” Nevertheless, to me it feels like running. It was the first time I’ve run wearing my new iPod, which came basically free with my new MacBook. Yes, I am now Apple Man, right down to my iSkivvies. So, here’s a Note to Self: Do not exercise while listening to John Lennon songs because it’s hard to keep up one’s breath while weeping.

By December 8, 1980, nothing had gone wrong in my life. My parents were middle middle class, although growing up I thought we were wealthy. None of my desires were frustrated (well, except for prom night, but that’s a different story). An aunt and an uncle had died young, but I’d managed to make that feel like someone else’s loss. I had convinced my draft board to make me a conscientious objector — a first for them, I was told — and even then, my lottery number didn’t come up so I didn’t even have to spend two years doing alternative service. I’d gone through philosophy graduate school having been warned for six years that there were very few teaching jobs available, yet in 1980 I was an assistant professor in a philosophy department. I’d married well and truly.

We were sitting in our little apartment in Portland, Oregon, when the radio announced that John Lennon had been killed.

The Beatles’ story was my story, our story. It wasn’t just music, although I’m ever more impressed by their talent and daring. It’s hard to explain my — our — sense of identification with the Beatles. I didn’t think I could have been a Beatle if only I had been in the right spot. I didn’t identify with their rise from humble origins. I didn’t envy their lifestyle of concerts and groupies. They were more important to my self-understanding than that. They exposed my — our — possibilities. Everything was up for reinvention, or so we thought, never dreaming that when our generation took over it’d be in the form of Bill Clinton and George Bush. The Beatles in their music, but also in their way with celebrity, said we could take the old, bust it up, make fun of it and delight in it, and build something new. Love and youth could refashion the world.

Until they shoot you.

Had any of the other Beatles been killed, it would have been sad and horrible, but it wouldn’t have marked the end of my own youth. John was special.

John was doing to himself what the Beatles did to music and culture. He became a father and househusband, and started writing songs as naked as his photo on the “Two Virgins” album. I didn’t like many of the songs. Some were embarrassing. And that often was the point. In fact, many of his most personal were sung at the highest reaches of his voice, as if to say, “I love you so much that I’m willing to sing badly for you.” (Not that Lennon ever sang badly. I will have none of that!)

So, I was running this morning, listening to “Instant Karma,” the 2-disk collection of Lennon songs sung by others, with profits going to Darfur via Amnesty International. There are performancs, particularly on the second disk, I like a lot. Green Day’s “Working Class Hero,” Jack Johnson’s “Imagine,” Ben Harper’s “Beautiful Boy,” Jaguares’ (or Jakob Dylan’s?) “Gimme Some Truth,” The Postal Service’s “Grow Old with Me.” I’m sorry to say that I didn’t like the under-represented women’s tracks as much: Avril Lavigne’s “Imagine” and Christina Aguilera’s “Mother” both sing songs that came more directly from Lennon’s voice.

The compilation makes it clear that Lennon was inconsistent. In “Imagine,” he singles out religion a couple of times as a force that stands in our way. Later, he thanks God for Yoko. So he likes God but not organized religion. But then he bashes God. Oh my! What a great blogger he would have been, so eager to be imperfect in public.

I admired the perfection of Beverly Sills’ singing, but I could never get past wondering how she did that with her voice, which is also my reaction to ventriloquists. I know her singing touched many, but it wasn’t for me. The imperfection of Lennon’s voice, his insistence on being human right in the midst of our insistence that he be John Lennon, is what got to me. Gets to me.

Mark David Chapman thought he was protecting John Lennon by killing the evil Lennon-impersonating robot outside the Dakota that December evening. Bang. Lennon isn’t given the chance to be patient with his children, to tell them how beautiful they are, to grow old in their eyes.

So, here I am at 56. Our children are 25, 22, and 16. I’ve made it past the point where they’d be too young to remember me clearly if I died tomorrow. I find comfort in that, although I’m enough of a rationalist to find it also silly.

But, like many heading into old age, I don’t feel old. I still dress as if I’m going to summer camp. Yet I remind myself — biting down on a painful tooth — that I’ll be sixty soon. Fifty you can pretend is the new forty, but sixty is just freaking old. I’ve always avoided mirrors, but now I find myself examining my baldness to try to fix in my mind how old I look to others. Likewise, when talking with young people (a symptom of my denial about my age: It feels weird to call them “young people”), I force myself to dredge up an external image of this old man talking with the kids.

This isn’t a pity thing. I think I know more than thirty years ago, and, thanks to the Net, I’m part of many networks, each of which is smarter than I am. I have more love in my life than when I could take three of flights of stairs, skipping every other step, while whistling. (“Octopus’ Garden” for many years was my stairs-climbing song, even though I never liked it very much.)

But something has gone wrong. I know what the path to old age is supposed to be: You’re young, you marry, you work, you retire, you become small, cute, and certain, and you die. But, here I am hanging out with 80 year olds who don’t feel all that old to me. And here I am, hanging out on the Internet where no one knows you’re an old dog, and where the pace on the treadmill has been turned up from cane-assisted to massively multiplayer intellectual marathon. The simple journey we’re supposed to take, one of ascent and descent, has been disrupted. Only the end remains fixed.

The truth is that I don’t feel myself on a path. The truth is that I don’t know how old I am.

[Tags: john_lennon instant_karma beatles aging death ]

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We saw Shakespeare & Co.s production of Tom Stoppards Rough Crossing last night. We always enjoy their productions. This one too. But it is slight. It’s 100% froth. Of course, it being Stoppard, it has its moments of self-reflective cleverness, including a hilarious exposition toward the beginning. But I was surprised that it didn’t do more with its genre, a drawing room comedy at sea in which the men are Cowards and the dame is Russian blonde who pronounces “Naples” as “nipples.” It is all very silly, exuberantly performed, and very funny, but just a little disappointing – the play within the play doesn’t really get reflected back into the play – given Stoppard’s usual standards of meta-cleverness

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[HUGE SPOILERS AHEAD]………

There are two possibilities, and both worked for me.

First, their life and stories continue, too organic to wrap up, but the series ends. We sit in silence, feeling the series’ absence.

Second, as others have pointed out, last week the series replayed a clip of Bobby telling Tony that you never hear the one that gets you. That’s what we “heard” at the end.

At first I thought it was ending #1. Actually, like everyone else, at first I thought it was broadcast problem. Now I think it’s ending #2.

I might add that the more specific my predictions were, the more they were off. And if #2 is the meaning of the ending, then I was way off.

There are a bunch of comments about tonight’s episode attached to a 2004 posting I did about that season’s finaled…”

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Here’s a distributed journalism project for Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net: How many headline writers tomorrow are going to give away the ending of The Sopranos by giving articles titles such as “Carmella’s Revenge: A Sad Farewell to Tony,” “Tony Soprano Sings for His Supper,” “King Tony – Justice Foiled, Fans Delighted,” or possibly, “Tony Saved by Aquaman? Who’d a Thunk it?!” ?

So much for Tivo-ing it… :( [Tags: sopranos]

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[NO SPOILERS AHEAD. Just bad guesses. Although I do give away some general stuff about the old series Oz. And I do presume you’ve seen all but the last episode of The Sopranos.]

I hope The Sopranos isn’t going the way of Oz, which spent its final episodes relentlessly killing off its characters. The writers may have thought they were playing with the form in a postmodern way, but I thought it was just cheezy writing.

The Sopranos has never been cheezy. But I worry that the kiss-off by Dr. Melfi and the death of Bobby, the innocent, were meant to signal that the reality principle is about to kick in, where the proof of realism is that you kill your characters. That would be a betrayal, since the great joy of the series has been its recognition that realism is conveyed dramatically through the complexity of life, not the simple fact of death.

But I have hope. If I had to predict — and I certainly don’t have to — I’d say that the show will end tonight as the comedy that it’s always essentially been. No comeuppance! So, here’s what I think will happen…but, since the writers of The Sopranos are just a tad better at writing The Sopranos than I am, I’m likely to be way off:

– Tony’s family survives. Killing any of them would turn this into tragedy, which would be a tragedy. Besides, this season hasn’t focused on the family, except for AJ. Either AJ is being built up for a tragic and ironic offing, or (as I hope and suspect), they wrapped up his story arc last week. (One of the disappointments of this season has been the small role Carmella has played. She was all set up to confront her own bad faith, but the show left that undeveloped. Of all the characters, she’s the one I’m left most curious about.)

– Tony’s resolution is complex. We’ll be left thinking there is a story beyond the ending. That means he doesn’t get killed and he doesn’t go to jail. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the FBI guys come through the door and pull Tony out. So, it’s either the federal witness protection relocation program for him, or he relocates himself. (Another possible deus ex machina: The son of the former head of Phil’s family — what’s-his-name, the guy from Miami — might turn on Phil.)

– New head of the Sopranos gang: Paulie Walnuts. Comedy reigns!

– Last scene of the series: Carmella has just received her real estate broker license wherever they’ve settled. Tony settles into his LazyBoy, turns on his down-scale TV to a documentary about WWII, and bites into some cold cuts.

Now let the showing of me wrong begin! Please! [Tags: sopranos heroes tv]

Is The Sopranos the greatest TV series ever? Of course it’s a silly question, but I’d still argue in favor. And because the series exists within its own crazy, stipulated rules, within which the characters and their behavior are real, it’s also likely to survive the decades.

Over at Everything Is Miscellaneous, I’ve posted about why I’m catching up with Heroes via torrents instead of using NBC’s video player.

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Start with Cat with Bow Golf. Then notice the other games to its right. [Tags: games]

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