I love Angry Birds. While not exactly proof, it’s worth noting that I had a live-action Angry Birds dream in which sparrows rained down from the sky and littered the ground, their lifeless eyes squeezed shut. This before the announcement about the movie rights.

Anyway AB recently unlocked another board, seemingly its penultimate update, and I am pumped. I’m also starting to worry about how the game is going to end. For the first time I can sympathize with Sopranos fans who fretted about the series finale. To paraphrase Marlowe, I am concerned as to the way it will go out.

Because quietly, underneath the more or less mindless gameplay, there is a plot here. It started simply enough: pigs stole eggs, pigs are bad, kill pigs, get eggs.

But it’s gotten more nuanced. After the level 3 cinematic, the birds recovered the eggs. There had been losses on both sides, but the birds clearly were superior and had taken the battle to the pigs’ homeland. Not only the soldier pigs but tiny defenseless pigs, presumably children, had been lost in the battle.

Why then, is there a level 4? Why does the bloodshed continue, and why is the reciprocity harsher than ever? The way this super bird destroys everything in its path makes the game feel like a massacre.

At this point a diplomatic resolution seems hopeless. But I hope that when the carnage ends and those angry birds get their eggs back, they look at their bloody wings and stretch their bloody talons and ask themselves, “What have we done? 1,000 dead pigs for 3 eggs? God, what have we done?” Then, hopefully, the cinematic does one of those top-down zoom outs on one bird’s sky-gazing, grief-stricken face and keeps zooming out to take in the whole gory landscape, city ruins and pig guts everywhere.

After all this killing, Angry Birds has a responsibility to remind us that war is not merely an addictive time-killer — it is also hell.

What does your mom send you in the mail?

Care packages? Clothes for the new season?

How about a newspaper clipping, aggressively circled and arrowed, using the word “dubious” in a way that, during an otherwise pleasant family vacation, had been the subject of some debate?

(via text)

Scientist 1: Let’s clone our fav soccer player!

Scientist 2: I duno, could get 2 messi.

Mom: I wonder if there’ll be mimes here.

Dad: Mimes? Why would you say that?

Mom: I don’t know, just seems like a possible mime opp.

The perfect checklist would have a box for “Get your visa photos!”

It would already be checked with a big blue check, because this is a booklet for your visa photos.

You would then feel more encouraged to finish off the rest of the items on the list, because you’ve made great progress so far.

To make room for it, an item that only speaks to a tiny minority of people (eg., proof of rabies vaccination for dogs traveling with you) would be excised from the list.

I’m smirking in my photo because in about 40 days I will be taking a three week vacation to visit Seoul, Shanghai, Goa (for a wedding) and Tokyo.

Meteor showers aren’t like fireworks at all. A meteor shower proceeds according to its own cosmic timing; it has no interest in impressive beginnings or grand finales.

Really all that meteor showers have in common with fireworks is that they usually feature large groups of people gazing upward at darkness sporadically made interesting by visual stimuli.

This also roughly describes the conditions of Muzafer Sherif’s study that established “informational social influence” — the notion that groups of people will arrive at observational conclusions that map neither to reality nor to any individual’s subjective experience.

So it wasn’t too surprising that last night’s meteor shower, which I watched at Charles Lee Tilden Park along with a few dozen other people, felt a bit like a fireworks display after all, full of dramatic Ooohs and Aaahs in reaction to distant moving objects that in reality were perhaps Not That Cool.

And when the unspoken boredom settled in we decided it was over, waiting for a particularly impressive meteor we could call a finale before climbing back into our cars and driving home. Meanwhile the shower carried on, undisturbed, behind us.

it doesn’t take much

her again

Good morning midnight, good night day.