Brought to me by Macy's

*sigh* I'm so lame that I only "discover" "new" music through TV commercials, occasionally CW shows, and *double-sigh* shopping at Macy's. (Don't worry, I didn't end up buying anything.)

Speaking of which, I recently bought my first smartphone, and having a music search engine (e.g. Google Sound Search, Pandora, Shazam) on me at all times has proven a wondrous addition to my daily life. Remember how, back in the day, any time you heard a hot new track while out and about, you would have to just listen really hard and savor it while it lasted, knowing that you might never hear it again? Indeed, I am sure you must have had that perfectly normal experience many times, as I did. After the Internet debuted and people could actually look things up, life got better. You could commit yourself to memorizing a key lyric in whatever song you were hearing, then later use that information to try to track the song down online. Ah, how strange it is to think that, not so very long ago, that was simply how we lived . . . if indeed you could call that living! But, now, how convenient it is to just fire up Sound Search and have the song ID'd for me in seconds, the info also saved in my history for future reference! Oh, what an age we live in!

Sack

"Is that the Jack Sack you got there? Nice!"

Not recognizing the reference, I could only suppose that he had made a witticism, and I inquired to determine that it had not been at my expense. As it turned out, he was complimenting me on my Rothco military-style messenger bag--the "Jack Sack," as he called it, after Jack Bauer, the enhanced interrogator protagonist of the FOX hit series 24, who notably carried a very similar--if not, in fact, identical--shoulder bag throughout season 5 of the show.

I should point out that I was never personally a fan of 24, and it had not been my intention to cosplay Jack Bauer. I had no idea whatsoever, when I purchased my bag, that it was any kind of "Jack Sack." Indeed, it was rather a blow to my ego to learn that I was not only unoriginal but had even unwittingly aligned myself with the fandom for a show that I really didn't care for. I had been out in public with the bag several times already, and, although none had voiced the observation before now, I shuddered at the thought of how many more people might have recognized it as the "Jack Sack" and privately thought to themselves, "Watch out guys, we're dealing with a badass over here."

In case I didn't quite believe (or want to believe) that it was so, I was forthwith directed to an entire blog that was inspired by and named after the "Jack Sack." Sure enough, there was a picture of Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) wearing an olive drab canvas bag that looked nigh indistinguishable from that I had so proudly obtained some three months ago and was even at that moment (now rather less proudly) still carrying. And, compounding my dismay, this blog extolling the virtues of the Jack Sack seemed written in an ironic tone! It referred to it as "the original manpurse," when I had specifically chosen this messenger bag, yes, because it was both practical and affordable, but also because, with its rugged military styling, it was the most masculine and un-purse-like that I could find.

Researching the business further on my own, however, I discovered that, although indeed the bag had been quite the coveted item once, made so by 24, and that Jack Bauer's carrying it had prominently played a part in making "man purses" slightly more socially acceptable, this was all years ago. Querying the Internet on "Jack Bauer bag," I found that nearly all relevant discussion dated back to 2006, around when season 5 of 24 was airing for the first time. Some more recent results discussed different sacks and packs that the character carried in later seasons, and, by the time the show ended its run, nobody was asking anymore where to buy any of Jack Bauer's bags. Meanwhile, if you read the customer reviews for the Rothco bag on Amazon, you'll find many positive appraisals, none of them describing or acknowledging it as "the bag from 24." It's a popular item still, but probably now again for the same reasons that people used to buy it back before Jack Bauer ever started carrying it--not because it's the "Jack Sack" but because it's practical, affordable, and fairly un-purse-like.

The occasional 24 geek notwithstanding, I now feel reassured that I can resume carrying my bag out into public without fear of any sane person misidentifying me as a Jack Bauer wannabe. Alas, there remains the fear, now greater than ever, that my messenger bag is yet not un-purse-like enough.

"Well, as long as you're going to carry a man purse, you might as well make it the manliest purse."

My Secret Identity

"Henry, do you have two email addresses?" she asked apprehensively.

"Of course not," I answered. "I have six."

Here was the breakdown:

1) Personal email. This is given out only directly to the very small number of people I know, trust, and correspond with regularly.

2) Professional email. Given to employers, prospective employers, and the government.

3) Business email. Used for my bank account, bills, online shopping, anything involving money.

4) Fake personal email. When I meet someone and they ask for my email but I don't really want to give them my personal email, I give them my fake personal email. I also use this for mailing lists and newsletters.

5) To save myself having to regularly log into so many separate email accounts, I have 2-4 above set up to forward everything into a single Outlook/Hotmail account, which I keep private.

6) Then, because I have issues with Outlook's functionality, I have my Outlook email set up to forward everything into a Gmail account. The username for this account is random gibberish, and I have never shared it except with my own Outlook email for the aforementioned forwarding purposes.

"That's . . . " And I waited for her to say "brilliant," or at least "sensible." Instead, she gave me "That's crazy. Like, maybe sociopathic."

I'll admit I was a tad taken aback at this reaction.

She continued: "Having a 'fake personal email' is creepy, but everything you said after that is insane. Like, literally insane. Double-forwards? Spies don't even do that!"

Memo to self: Instead of referring to it as my "fake personal email," from now on call it my "newsletter subscription email." Setting that aside, I tried to explain the prudence of my system. This way, even if a hacker gets into any one of the first four accounts, they get access to only one slice of my identity. And the more sensitive the information an account concerns, the lower the visibility of that email, therefore the lower the probability that it will be hacked.

But she only looked at me as though I had suddenly become a stranger to her.

Well, I guess I'm glad I told her I only kept six email addresses.

Angie

Although it was not among the Rolling Stones tracks selected for discussion in honor of their 50th anniversary by any of the band members on NPR's All Things Considered, nor one of the 14 Rolling Stones songs to make Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time", I consider "Angie" to be my personal favorite Rolling Stones song. In fact, it possibly even ranks among my top four favorite songs of all time.

Mick Jagger's face is incredibly creepy and distracting in this official music video, though, so perhaps just avert your eyes as you listen:

They also filmed an alternate video, but he's 100 times worse in that one. Before these high-quality videos were uploaded to the band's official YouTube channel just a few months ago, the preferred "Angie" video on YouTube was this from user EagleMDare, featuring nothing but the album version of the song playing over the unrelated still image of a random gorgeous woman. And the image periodically dissolves to a mirrored version of itself. Ah, YouTube. But I digress.

The one thing that always used to bug me about "Angie" was that I felt the song should have ended on the penultimate lyric "Angie, Angie, ain't it good to be alive?" Or perhaps the line should have switched places at the end of the song with the actual final lyric "Angie, Angie, they can't say we never tried." It's a melancholy song either way, but I felt that "ain't it good to be alive?" would have ended it on a more consoling note, with a perspective toward the future and possibility, whereas I felt "they can't say we never tried," echoing a line from earlier in the song, brought the perspective back again toward the past and regret.

Just the other day, however, as I was in my car listening to the Pink song "Try," I thought of "Angie," and I had a change of heart over that last lyric. And, yes, I realize it's probably sacrilege to be interpreting the Stones through Pink, but I'm only saying that the one song happened to make me think of the other, as happens all the time. Anyway, as I thought over "Angie," I concluded that, after all, this has never been a feel-good song. It has neither aspiration nor obligation to provide hopefulness or a happy ending, and perhaps ending on "they can't say we never tried" is more artistically honest. Hard to say, though, since Mick Jagger, who sings it with such passion--and I can't imagine anyone else ever pulling this song off--isn't traditionally believed to have written the damn thing!

What is a man?

I know almost nothing about this game, except that I probably won't be playing it any time soon. I didn't play the first one, and I probably won't for a while, especially now that this teaser has seemingly spoiled what I assume was the big twist. But they say the thing, so I feel almost obligated to post it.

Robert Carlyle does his best, but, alas, a pale shadow of the original.

What I've Been Playing #5: Batman: Arkham Asylum

I just started Batman: Arkham Asylum and, so far, have been enjoying it quite a bit. The game manages to capture most of the various facets of the Batman character that collectively make him such a geek fantasy to roleplay.

Physically, he's a beast and, on the normal difficulty, easily capable of taking apart a whole gang of muscled (unarmed) goons with a variety of punches, kicks, and a near-uncanny ability to sense and counter oncoming attacks. And this decimation is always highlighted in spectacular fashion with a cinematic slow-mo zoom-in on the finishing blow. Very satisfying.

It's a different story when the baddies are packing heat. Batman can't withstand bullets, alas, but Arkham Asylum conveniently transforms into a stealth game in these situations, encouraging you to take foes out from the shadows. So far, these segments remind me of the first Metal Gear Solid more than anything else; they're essentially puzzle rooms, where you observe and then exploit simple enemy patterns. What distinguishes Arkham Asylum is, not so much the mechanics, but the minor narrative details that make you feel like you really are the Dark Knight. As you silently pick off enemies one at a time, you get to watch their remaining comrades progressively lose their heads in panic. Seeing how terrified they are of you is perhaps even more empowering than when you get to pummel them with Batman's martial arts.

Less empowering, however, is Batman's telling silence whenever some friendly NPC remarks that the Joker and other rogues should simply be "fried." This comes up with alarming regularity, which is perhaps understandable, since you're usually running into these NPCs only after some buddies of theirs have just been murdered by one of Batman's lunatic foes. Also, why would they stop making this point, considering Batman never has a response?

The no-kill policy maintained by Batman and most other comics superheroes has long fascinated me. As a kid, I was quite often frustrated by heroes refusing to end the lives of villains who were clearly irredeemable and almost certain to strike again in subsequent stories. I wondered at times if that made me a bad person, but I know I wasn't alone in my feelings. Indeed, Hollywood, unlike comics and cartoons, seemed to consistently agree with me that bad guys should be ended with extreme prejudice. And it's nothing so simple an issue as superhero comics merely aspiring to higher moral standards than Hollywood. After decades of stories of the Joker somehow breaking out of Arkham repeatedly to commit many murders, Batman becomes hard to take seriously as a moral paragon, as his refusal to do what must be done starts to sound more like just a selfish or even neurotic impulse to preserve some kind of personal purity above serving the greater good.

Mind you, I'm not even taking the "if this were real life" tack; I'm saying that, internal to the comics world, Batman's no-kill philosophy must be challenged. If it be evil to take the one life of the Joker, nevertheless it must surely be the greater evil to let him live and inevitably take dozens more lives. That is, unless Batman and the Gotham authorities sincerely believe, every time they apprehend the Joker, that it really will be the last time they have to deal with him. But, in that case, I better see Batman looking truly shocked and disappointed every time the Joker breaks out. But I don't see that.

Clearly, many of the comics writers too have recognized the mounting absurdity of Batman's high horse moralizing (although, in fairness, what doesn't become absurd when a story spans 70+ years with the same cast of ageless heroes and villains?). Otherwise, these NPCs wouldn't be saying these things. Yet how I wish Batman would respond! Because I don't even know that he's wrong; I just know that it's a challenging topic. And when these guys make these challenging statements against everything Batman stands for, and he just stands there silent, I can't help thinking, Batman, you're taking a beating here! These are the moments that demand a response! Where is the "lecture, philosophize, or browbeat" button prompt? Instead, he passively allows these random NPCs to make him look foolish.

Well, it's early yet. Maybe Batman is seriously meditating upon their words, and this is all building toward a climactic quick time event, when the player will have to take all arguments presented into consideration before deciding whether or not Batman will end the Joker. Now that would be empowering.

"If it didn't happen in the movies, it's not real."

So, a few years back, me and the boys were discussing Star Wars, and some nut commented how sad it was that Chewbacca was dead. And I was like, What is this nut talking about? Is he some kind of nut? He explained that it all went down in some novel, which was "canon" and "a huge story" in the fan community. Well, I considered myself "the fan community," and I held that no Expanded Universe content could ever be considered "canon," "a huge story," or at all worth discussing in my presence. This nut huffed at me as though I were the one being ridiculous. "Sorry," he said, "but if you haven't been reading the books, then you've been missing out on some really important Star Wars stories." On the contrary, I rather felt that any nut who would bring up "Chewbecca's death" should have been the one prohibited from participating in any serious discussion of Star Wars. At the time, my hardline position was basically "If it didn't happen in the movies, it's not real."

Things got complicated, however, with the arrival of the Clone Wars cartoons. It had been easy to dismiss the books, because I hadn't read any of them, I wasn't interested in reading them, and everything I'd heard about them suggested to me that they were not worth my reading them. But I did watch the Genndy cartoons, which I initially approached more as promos for Revenge of the Sith than as fiction unto themselves, canon or otherwise. I was apathetic toward the first season, which I thought really added nothing to the story. The more intriguing elements of Season 2 were Anakin's trials and especially the debut of the General Grievous character. After that cliffhanger finale, I could not wait to see Grievous in Revenge of the Sith. Little did I suspect that that cliffhanger was really hype, not for Revenge of the Sith, but for a third season of Clone Wars, wherein Grievous grew progressively less impressive with each appearance, until finally, by the time we got to the actual movie, he was totally lame, in almost every sense of the word. Mind you, I still considered him the coolest character in the prequel trilogy, but his best moments weren't actually in the movies. And thus, because of Clone Wars, suddenly I had become the guy who would bring up non-movie elements during discussions of Star Wars.

When the Clone Wars movie came out in 2008, that was when I really had to reexamine my position on the canon. After much soul-searching on the matter, I did not so much change my stance as clarify its original meaning. My clarified position on canon: "Unless Lucas himself wrote it, it's not real." Thus, Episodes I-VI were real, and everything else was not, though the Clone Wars stuff was at least occasionally interesting. In the course of amending that conditional, however, I had to confront a reality I had never seriously considered before, namely, the inevitability that there were going to be feature films called "Star Wars" that would have no place in Lucas's story. It seemed obvious once I considered the simple economics of it; the property was far too profitable to ever end simply with the story that one man had to tell. In fact, for years already, hundreds of other people had already been writing their own Star Wars stories, which Lucas approved because they made him money. I just didn't really notice because I didn't pay attention to all those books. But why had it never occurred to me that the Expanded Universe could encompass more than just books? Movies were where the big money was, and there were surely at least as many people out there wanting to make Star Wars movies as there were to write novels. I considered that it might not happen until after Lucas died, but eventually there were going to have to be blockbuster movies that would be part of what I considered the "not real" Expanded Universe. The potential for moneys simply demanded it.

Now, it seems we won't even have to wait for Lucas to die first. Frankly, I'm rather stunned by Disney's forthrightness in stating its intention to release a new movie every 2-3 years (and that's following the completion of their sequel trilogy). That's surely a press release note for investors; does any fan seriously interpret anything other than crass commercialism out of that promise?

That said, I do like Star Wars, and I like summer blockbuster season. Even without knowing anything about what Episode VII will be, I'm already more excited at the prospect of getting to see a Star Wars summer blockbuster in 2015 than I was about the Avengers sequel. But will it be canon? Well, since they're daring to call it "Episode VII," and since Lucas has already said that he had story treatments for the sequels, I'm hoping it won't go too far afield of what I currently consider canon. If Chewbacca dies in "Episode IX" on movie screens across the world, then that may be when I finally withdraw altogether from serious discussions of Star Wars canon, lest I come across as the nut denying that this thing everybody saw ever actually happened.