Wii are the world, Wii are the children

Nintendo unveiled the official name of its next-generation console yesterday. Long known by its code name, the Revolution, it will now be called the Wii. Pronounced “we.” Or, if you prefer, “wheeeeee!” As in, “Wii think this sounds dumb.” The idea is that the “we” sound represents the spirit of social, interactive gaming. Also, it’s supposed to be distinctive. I don’t know how a homonym of a pronoun is supposed to be distinctive, but maybe that’s why I don’t work for Nintendo. It would seem that Nintendo executives are amazed that when you take a common word and respell it, it still sounds the same, but is spelled differently. Mind-blowing. This is what happens when you let businesspeople make creative decisions.

I’ve given myself a day to let it sink in. I’ve written it down and typed it out over and over. I have stared at those three letters masquerading as a word, but I cannot get it to not look ridiculous. I understand what they’re going for: something quirky that differentiates itself enough form its competitors that it seems to create its own niche or genre, so much so that it is devoid of competitors. Nintendo wants you to think of the Wii as not just another gaming console, but as an entirely different type of electronic device altogether. The problem is that you will think of it as a dumb, childish, possibly vulgar type of electronic device. Best case scenario: you think of it as trying to sidle up to Apple’s trendy gadgetry market, and much less subtly than it thinks.

When you spend so much time and money developing new technology, and, in the case of the Wii (bleh!), innovative technology that you’re trying to sell people on, you want the name to be a non-story. You want a name so effortless that it seems to not exist at all. Look at cars. Most cars have dumb names, but they’re dumb names that seem instantly to be car names, so no one notices, no one cares, and no one holds it against the car. What’s a Prius? Nobody knows; it’s not the point. It gets great gas mileage: that’s the point. But now, before Nintendo can even begin to convince you to buy its console over Sony’s or Microsoft’s because of its new control interface, it must first convince you to come to terms with the name “Wii.” They will have to convince you to take their name seriously and stop making sophomoric puns out of it.

The simple argument is that names of things don’t matter, but that’s inaccurate. Names of things shouldn’t matter; they only matter when they are so awkward and cumbersome that they force themselves to matter. A name cannot add any value or function to a videogame system. The only thing it can accomplish – and this is its only task – is to not make the product sounds stupid. And at this task, Wii has failed. Or is it: Wii have failed? See what I mean?

Bush wants to what...?

For years environmentalists have advocated increasing fuel efficiency standards in cars, and for years Republicans have blocked it. But lately President Bush has been on a brainstorm kick, discovering that the best way to improve life in America is to run countercurrent to Republican policy. Hey, it's what I've been saying all along!

The Internet goes the way of... Everything Else.

Congress took another step today towards a pay-to-play Internet that could relegate some of us to the slow lane while the big players get preferred access to networks. The Internet has always been praised for its democratizing powers, but like democracy itself, it will work a little more smoothly for the rich.

Health Care for Some!

More exciting news today in the world of health care: as health care costs continue to rise, more people are predictably going without. Twenty-eight percent of Americans, according to a new study. I’m not a statistician, but that seems like a lot of people. I have a feeling that if it were the richest 28% or the prettiest 28%, maybe we’d be talking a little more earnestly about national health care. Every time the subject is broached, though, horror stories abound of Canadians flocking to America to get treatments they’d otherwise have to wait months or years to get (for free) in Canada. Well, I’m sure this happens to some people; and I don’t know how many Canadians are crossing the border in need of medical treatment, but I’m going to assume it’s a lot less than 46 million. Forty-six million seems like a lot of people. That’s like Texas, New York and Oregon all without health insurance, give or take South Dakota. In America we may have lower life expectancies, higher infant mortality rates and higher per-capita health care costs than most industrialized nations, and tens of millions of uninsured people, but at least we’re not Communists! The Reds are on the march, but we’re going to win this thing!

Why do we assume that, if we had a national health care program, we would have the same problems that Canada supposedly faces? Why would we not be able to do health care better than Canada? Don’t we do pretty much everything else better than Canada? Our dollar is stronger, our bacon is better, and we’ve even taken most of their hockey teams.

But who needs national health care when you can instead use a Byzantine amalgam of interwoven private companies and government programs to lower health care costs? And this system is doing a great job. You know, sometimes. Sure, our health care policies might be causing some people to skip treatments, go without care, and sometimes die, but that’s what you get for being poor. Serves them right.

Oil

President Bush is calling for a probe into oil industry price-gouging, and looking to rescind some of the huge tax breaks he gave them in last year’s energy bill. According to the President, the tax breaks are no longer necessary, what with the oil industry’s record profits. Which begs the question, when were the tax breaks necessary? Oil companies experienced record $100 billion profits in 2004, and then Bush turned around and signed an energy bill giving them billions in tax breaks, subsidies and incentives, as well as exemptions from various environmental laws.

The energy bill also repealed the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, which had blocked mergers and acquisitions in the energy industry. This was all done in the name of increased competition, because nothing says “competition” like energy companies buying one another until we’re left with one huge, unregulated, taxpayer-subsidized, massively-profitable energy company. With energy prices soaring and the Bush Administration’s backwards, feed-the-rich solutions failing, it’s hard to find anything but discouragement in today’s Christian Science Monitor report that – surprise of surprises! – energy prices in deregulated states rise faster than in regulated states. But, of course, deregulation is a little trickier to backpedal than tax policy when your approval rating starts to dip.

So maybe it turns out that giving massive energy conglomerates huge subsidies and legal exemptions doesn’t compel them to spontaneously lower their prices. Who would have guessed? But at least President Bush has found a sensible solution to our nation’s problems: namely, to get a head start on our next president’s task of undoing everything that Bush has done.

The Smashing Pumpkins return

The Smashing Pumpkins’ website has been updated, making official the band’s all-but-official reunion. No word yet on who exactly is going to be in this latest iteration of the Pumpkins, but Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin are on board, and that’s all that matters. It could be D’Arcy and James Iha rounding out the group – unlikely though that may be – or it could be me and you; it wouldn’t make much difference. Other than this brief announcement, and a mailing list sign-up, the website offers absolutely no other information, and is basically telling us what we’ve already known for a few months. Still, I’m excited to see the old SP heart logo up on the screen. It feels more real now. Just knowing that somewhere someone is working on the next Pumpkins record is exciting. Here’s hoping they take it easy on the Pro-Tools…

Friends with Money

I saw Friends with Money last night and was pleasantly surprised. The film serves as a snapshot of a group of (mostly rich) friends in Los Angeles, the non-rich exception being the Jennifer Aniston’s also non-married Olivia. Olivia works as a maid because in her former job, as a teacher, she felt condescended to by her students. How she avoids this same fate as a maid is left unexplained, but it doesn’t really matter. There is plenty of preposterousness to this movie’s setup: for example, the typical questions about how someone who looks like Jennifer Aniston can end up as a penny-pinching, lonely, hopeless maid. But this is the movies, so let’s just accept it and move on. We go to the movies to entertain the possibility that there might exist some Jennifer Aniston-caliber diamond in the rough because, one, we don’t want to watch movies about, you know, ugly people, and two, we want to believe that we might one day meet someone like Jennifer Aniston who has somehow flown under the radar for the first thirty-odd years of her life and whose hotness has gone, inexplicably, unnoticed.

As for the story, not a whole lot happens in this movie. The married couples have their various married couple crises, and Olivia flits around trying to find a man and some sort of direction in her life, but she just can’t. There’s a minor subplot about some guy she used to date, whom she calls and hangs up on repeatedly, which doesn’t seem to make much sense or add anything to the movie, but it at least gives us a glimpse into her emotional state and potential screw looseness.

What makes the movie enjoyable is simply the quality of the writing and acting. The characters are all richly drawn and superbly acted, as one would expect from this cast. They all have flaws, and obstacles in their lives, and watching them manage these is quite entertaining. Their problems existed before the movie begins, and not much is necessarily resolved at the end. You get the impression that the movie could have started at any random point in their lives, run for two hours, and been equally entertaining. Despite their various flaws, it’s not hard to get invested in these characters, the end result being a movie that plays less like a movie and more like an extended episode of a good TV show. This could be seen as a flaw, I suppose, but if you want to spend 88 minutes with some engrossing characters, Friends with Money is a fine choice.

Tool, "Vicarious"

I’ve been listening to this song a lot lately, in anticipation of 10,000 Days’ May 2^nd release, and it is really growing on me. It opens with, essentially, the middle section from “Schism,” throws out a sufficiently hard-hitting 5/4 guitar riff, and culminates in the drum ending from “The Grudge.” It also, in its seven minutes, perfectly encapsulates the paradox that is Tool.

It’s easy to break down Tool songs and discover that they’re all assembled from the same basic components; a little time on a guitar tab website is all you need. To write your own Tool song, just tune your guitar to drop D, hammer away on the first few frets in some strange rhythm, and there you have it – a Tool riff! Then teach it to your friend, the bass player, and while he plays the riff, you can scribble some high, piercing, distorted guitar notes over the top of it; then come in with the riff yourself, along with the bass, kick on some extra distortion, and you’re well on your way to having your very own Tool song. Once you figure out a nice breakdown and hire a ridiculous drummer, you’ll be almost all the way there. But, the only problem is, your Tool song will suck. It will sound like some no-talent, junior high metal band who may as well be jumping up and down on their guitars instead of playing them. It will sound like you wrote a song by simply following the instructions I just laid out, and everyone will know it.

So one would understandably assume, then, that actual Tool songs suck as well; but they don’t. To the contrary, they are awesome. They are the sort of awesome that makes you run and grab a friend and proclaim, “Dude, check out how awesome this is!” And that is the paradox that is Tool. No band I can think of has done so much with so little. It helps that the singing and drumming is always amazing. (Although, Danny Carey has come a long way since Undertow.) But it’s hard to sit there, learning these riffs, and not imagine that your band could just as easily be Tool.

That Tool rarely deviates from their formula would seem to indicate some lack of talent, but I think instead that it indicates a wealth of talent. What other bands could get away with this? Not many. When U2 released How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, the consensus reaction was: “Hey, look, U2 rewrote All That You Can’t Leave Behind, but took out all the likeability.” When Tool releases a new album, though, we peel our faces off the concrete and ask, “What was that locomotive and how can I get onboard?”

Essentially, this is the spirit of rock and roll music. Much if it is imitative, almost none of it is very complicated, and yet it all seems fresh and new. When an album review mentions how so-and-so’s new single pinches its riff from this old song or that, it always makes me laugh. That new Weezer song doesn’t mimic a Cheap Trick song; it mimics thousands upon thousands of rock songs that have come before it. And it will itself be mimicked someday. Probably by Weezer. Probably on the very same album. The talent in rock and roll does not lie in writing original, complex music (although that is always nice), but in breathing life into the same old I-IV-V riff that Chuck Berry didn’t even invent.

And few bands do this as well as Tool. (And they don’t even use a lot of I-IV-V riffs; mostly it’s just I-II.)

So when 10,000 Days finally comes out, you will hear criticism that Tool songs all sound the same and that they just play the same riffs over and over. The source of this criticism, though, is not likely dissatisfaction with Tool’s music; rather, it is the feeling of being duped. I think a lot of Tool critics are just disappointed to analyze and deconstruct the songs and discover that the root elements are so basic and so recurring. Like pulling back the curtain to reveal that the wizard is really some fumbling old boob, it’s bound to cause a little disappointment. But, the trick is: the songs are great. If you at all like heavy rock music, it’s hard to listen to a Tool song and not a.) be impressed; b.) get pumped; and c.) want another. Tool does a very lot with a very little. And the key is the “lot.” That is what makes Tool so good. That is what makes their songs so great. And that is what makes the Tool song you just wrote so bad.

On illegal immigration.

So there's a lot of talk about illegal immigration in the news, and that can only mean one thing: elections is coming, and white peoples votes! Apparently, some American explorers recently crossed the Rio Grande and discovered a new country which we are temporarily calling "Mexico," as an homage to the great American state, New Mexico. Final naming rights for this newly-discovered country will eventually be sold to a corporate entity; Verizon Wireless and DHL are currently favored by industry analysts. This new country is characterized by a warm, arid climate, spicy food, and rampant poverty.

Naturally, there is talk of building a fence that spans the length of the Mexican-American border. (Not to be confused with an American of Mexican descent who is renting a room in your house: a Mexican-American Boarder.) As if the barren desert, Border Patrol, and vigilante Minutemen weren't deterrent enough. I've read about Mexicans who have been smuggled across the border inside the gas tanks of cars, so it's hard to imagine what effect a fence is going to have on people who are that determined to get into the country. If the entire Atlantic Ocean didn't keep the first wave of immigrants out - to say nothing of the crippling fear that they might fall off the edge of the earth - then I don't see a fence as doing much more than make the Real Americans feel like their soon-to-be-re-elected leaders are on their side. Which is, obviously, the point.

It seems typical of a country that blames the entire Abu Ghraib scandal on Lyndie England to look at economic inequities in America and blame them on the guy who crosses the border looking for a better job. But addressing systemic problems in our economy, and the global economy, isn't sexy, and illegal immigrants can't vote. And if there's one group of people politicians like to dump on in order to get votes, it's people who can't vote. (See: Defecits) So, speeches will be made and some kind of fence might be built; and if we're lucky, it will keep greedy Mexicans from sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night to steal our jobs from under our beds. Instead, they can patiently wait for NAFTA to kick in on their side of the fence, in good old Verizon Wireless. I mean, Mexico.

This is barely worth reading.

This is the first post of a blog of utter inconsequence. It may also be the last post. It may not even be a post at all, should I succumb to any of the enticements that surround me before finishing this meager paragraph. A (very) little about myself: I am an aspiring writer, which is to say that I am the exclusive reader of my own work. But one doesn't become a writer without writing; ergo, this blog.

I will write about music, movies, books, and politics - about which I am passionate - and television - from whose grip I cannot escape. And sports, I suppose. And perhaps videogames. Or video games, as it were. And food. You get the idea; this blog will be as unfocused and disorganized as is to be expected of someone who watched Teletubbies well into college, and not even while high. I may also one day post, or link to, some of the short stories I've written; should the prospect of any sort of remuneration for a particular piece of writing finally expire, then it will be made available to you, the blog reader. What is the Internet, after all, if not a clearing-house for all the thoughts in the world that arern't cumulatively worth a penny?

I have chosen the name Credible Threat for myself because this is the Internet and that is what people do. Anonymity is awesome! Genuine human interaction is for suckers! The name is, I suppose, ironic, since I am remarkably non-threatening (weighing in under 130 lbs.; this is the Internet, after all), and am wholly without credibility (lacking any sort of reputation, body of work, or even a first and last name).

Anyway, as I write this, I'm listening to the latest Ben Harper album, Both Sides of the Gun, for the first time. It's pretty good so far. It's a double album, one half all acoustic and mellow, the other less so. The artwork is split between a black half and a white half. The dilemma I face is that the white disc corresponds to the black lyric book, and vice versa. So, do I put the white disc and black book in the white half or black half of the packaging? Do I put all the white pieces in the white half and the black pieces in the black half? Do I put the first disc and book on the left? These are the sorts of things that trouble me; I'm sure this says something about me, and I doubt that it's positive. I wouldn't have these kinds of problems if I had an iPod, I suppose.

Hey, maybe that would be a good idea for a post: why I don't have an iPod. I'm sure many (read: not any) people would love to read that, right? This is where, in normal conversation, you would say to me, resoundingly, "No." But this is the Internet. There is no interaction and, therefore, no dampening of spirits. Every utterance presumptively overestimates its own worth. So maybe I will one day write about why I don't have an iPod. It will be unintersting; no one will read it; and I will bask in the self-satisfaction of having written for such a large hypothetical audience.

Okay, I think those are enough words for now. I'm really only writing this post so that the blog will actually exist and I can look at it and hate that it exists. (Side note: The number of times I have typed the word "blog" in writing this is alarming. This has to be one of my least favorite neologisms, right up there with "podcast" and "WMD.") Thank you for having read this far; and for each subsequent visit that you will make to this unremarkable corner of the Internet; and for telling your friends; and, if you hold a position of some authority in a transnational media conglomerate, for extending a lucrative job offer to me. I am mulling it over. I am weighing my options. I'll get back to you soon.