THE GAME, PART II

Not too long ago, I finally upgraded my computer to make it capable of running Medieval II - Total War, the computer game I blogged about sometime near the Christmas holiday. It was a dangerous thing for a recovering vidiot to do, yet I was certain that I had a hold on my inner nerd and so saw little risk of damaging my life for the sake of computer-generated battle, conquest and intrigue.

Well, after a month or two of playing the game, I can say that its spectacle and intensity have combined to ensure that I might never again know the touch of a woman. Instead of posting lies on Internet dating sites or preying on young women with daddy issues, I spend many of my waking hours mastering the deployment of Byzantine cavalry and Holy Roman Empire spearmen. I have learned that it is a good thing to put a cow carcass in a trebuchet and hurl it at an opposing army, which might be helpful to know if I ever find Seljuks Turks arrayed for battle on my front yard but would bring date conversation to certain doom. I am becoming geekier by the day, and I have no idea how to stop it.

Sadly, I can't say that I have undergone a compensating enlargement of command skills. My record in single-player practice battles is a dismal 5-23, making me the ideal opponent for a hostile realm's homecoming weekend. And my victories have usually been either over armies that would have been cowed by a particularly nasty morning on The View or over the just-north-of-the-Stone-Age Aztecs. (They have no cavalry or artillery, and I was not in the slightest uneasy about subduing an indigenous people. As a matter of fact, I even won a battle commanding the Aztecs, but I was mighty ticked off that I was unable to round up prisoners for human sacrifice, as the real Aztecs did.)

A typical practice battle begins with a general's pep talk in heavily accented English, depending on the realm. (For instance, let's say the general speaks a Romance language. He wants to order his units to advance. He winds up barking a command to something called a "joo-nit." I began to wonder whether Desi Arnaz and his drums would be at the head of my army.) The general usually says such things as "We will make neckties of their entrails!" which makes one cringe thinking about Father's Day. (The Venetian general, however, does not say such a thing. Too much fashion sense.) After that, the battle commences, and in pretty short order my troops are doing what they do best: running headlong for the safety of home. It would not surprise me in the least if I were to zoom in on the routed units and find them stripping off their gear and donning the dress of prep school first-graders. Nor would it surprise me if they were to burst forth from the computer screen and begin hiding themselves among the clutter of my desk.

Of course, much of this failure is because of my pathetic leadership. In my first battle, my forces were tasked with taking a castle. But instead of breaching the walls, my units promenaded back and forth in front of the ramparts as though they hoped to conquer by making their foe envy their uniforms. I was having a little trouble handling the view tools, you see. My favorite gaffe came in a subsequent battle when I sent peasants forward with a battering ram to fell the enemy gates. The ram was doing its thing when for some reason the gates just swung open. My hapless but eager peasants then stormed into the castle ... and the gate just closed behind them. I didn't take a look inside to see what was their fate, but it wasn't hard to imagine. the peasants were probably about as welcome as an ACTUP delegation at a Klan rally. Eventually, when my troops finally did storm the gates I saw the inert forms of the peasants all clustered around the gate. Some had even managed to fall in positions that spelled out U SUK.

But heaven knows I try. I pay strict attention to the advice I get from Sir Robert, my battlefield tutor. He pops up on the screen at the start of battles and then glares at me the way my father did when I would mention that I had gotten a totally unfair speeding ticket during my teenage years. He sometimes takes a patronizing tone with me that is a little annoying, or he just butts in during the height of the conflict. His advice is often woefully at odds with our democratic impulses, which leads me to wonder just how much time he spends at country clubs instead of honing his military knowledge. But at least he is expected to be a little callous; Lady Gwendolyn (the campaign tutor) is more jarring because she seems to take such relish in advising me to send in the assassins whenever possible ("Good show, my liege. Your assassin cut that peacenik diplomat gizzard to gullet. Now the carnage and ruin of war with Denmark are sure to follow. Besides, Copenhagen always has been such a dreary town.")

Yet none of this has stirred military genius within me. So I go into battle certain that at some point I will hear that heavily accented voice saying, "Our foolish general (that would be me) has fallen to the swords of our enemies!" And I take it that calling me foolish means there will be no statue of me built to mark a heroic defeat, just a lot of insults in the history books. But, hey, it could be worse. I could have gotten hooked on a computer game that is based on heart surgery. Just think about the overflowing morgues and angry, distraught family members who would trying to claw through the screen to get to me, the most incompetent heart surgeon in computer game history.

At least in such a case I would know how to retreat.

I've been wearing my co-workers out wondering what the exact nature of Paris Hilton's incarceration is going to be like. My assumption is that it's probably going to be a pretty dull affair, but because the setting is Los Angeles I can't help thinking that there might be a cinematic influence of some sort. I like to think that Cool Hand Paris might be eating 50 hard-boiled eggs on a bet or hearing these words a lot: "What we got here, is ... failure to communicate."

But my guess here is that her time might be something like Reform School Girls, a classic 1986 movie that featured Wendy O. Williams. The movie is set at a sinister reform school for girls who robbed lingerie stores (I say that because that was all the girls for practically the entire movie.) Reform School Girls tells the story of Jenny (or Jodi or Jessie or whatever the hell her name was) who falls into the penal system because instead of breaking up with her loser boyfriend, she drives his getaway car. Once in reform school, Jenny runs afoul of Charlie the bully and her gang. Though supposedly a teenager, Charlie is played by the clearly in middle age Wendy O., whose wardrobe consists of unflattering g-strings and boots. I guess the director was hoping that we would believe that Charlie just keeps flunking reform school and so has been held back for, oh, about 20 years. Anyway, after Jenny finds out that innocence is always crushed by brutality and that just because a guy has sex with you in the back of a laundry truck does not mean he will smuggle you out of jail, there is the inevitable prison riot. In a whirl of gunfire and Frederick's of Hollywood apparel, Wendy O. takes two barrels of buckshot to the chest. But a shotgun blast that would have felled a herd of deer is no match for our girl. She then somehow finds the strength to sprint -- not jog, not stagger, not crawl -- sprint to a nearby school bus, start it up and then point it toward the tower where Edna, the sadistic head guard who would deserve the death penalty if she were to ever put on something lacy and skimpy, is squeezing off rounds at the rioting inmates. Wendy O. then speeds the bus toward the tower, clambers on top of it and raises her fist defiantly as the bus strikes the tower. She then succumbs to her wounds. At this point nobody cares about Jenny Whatever anymore.

So the only real question is, which character would Paris be?

CLASS ACTION

Go to most college sports message boards and you'll see something that would have been unfathomable before the Age of the Internet: Miss Manners is kicking Vince Lombardi's ass seven ways from Sunday.

Few coaches have reached the iconic place that Lombardi holds in American sports history. Tough, gritty and demanding, he knew the high price of victory. "Winning isn't everything," he said. "It's the only thing." And Lombardi won by dedicating himself and his players to that brutally reductive maxim.

But now victory has company in the triumphal chariot. Sports fans are insisting that teams --more specifically, victorious opponents -- win with class.

This doesn't mean that State U. should hire Christopher Plummer to be the head football coach and insist he wear a tux on game day, nor does it mean that Maggie Smith should represent the team at the post-game news conference. It apparently means that games should be played with the emotion of a Soviet chess tournament.

It's not easy being a college sports fan. We often wed ourselves to teams at young ages, before we really know who we are. And before we know it, it's 15 years, four blown title games and two recruiting scandals later, yet we just can't seem to break away. We've given so much money to booster organizations that we can afford to send only one of the kids to college (which one depends on who wins the family kickboxing tournament). We give and we give and we give and all we ask in return is a 200-game winning streak and 15 national championships. Oh, and the head of the coach of our top rival placed on a spike at the stadium.

Instead, more often that not, what we get is a free throw that inexplicably bounces out of the rim and a pass that is just beyond the outstretch fingers of a diving receiver. We get a series of body blows that we don't deserve, but that those bastards who cheer for other teams definitely do.

So, in a way, being a sports fan is to drink deep from the cup of powerlessness. Aside from taking out a second mortgage on the house so you can bribe recruits or putting your 5-year-old son on a steroid drip so he will become a stud middle linebacker, there's not much you can do to help your team.

But that doesn't mean you have to sit there and just take it when a rival team is pounding yours. Oh, no; you can deny the legitimacy of the rival's victory, if not by saying "we wuz robbed" then by wailing on a message board that the rival players were unworthy of their triumph. They won, but they did so rudely. And any display of youthful joy, any hint of enthusiasm, anything that shows that playing sports might be fun and winning feels good is a sign of deep and discrediting "classlessness."

(OK, this does not mean that I condone taunting or anything else that is deliberately aimed at humiliating an opposing player or team that is getting its ass kicked. But I don't see the harm in a player punctuating a dunk with a feral howl or a similar display.)

Simply put, this is etiquette run amok. Celebrating a big play or a game-winning shot is natural and good. It reminds us of the payoff that can come from shared sacrifice and collective effort.

And excessive deference is perhaps not good for society. Where would Genghis Khan have been and what would he have accomplished had this been his philosophy:

“The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather into your bosom his wives and daughters. And to do so in a way that represents the courteous and gentlemanly qualities of our tribal forefathers.”

But if you insist on demanding this sort of class, that's up to you. And so I give you your true enemy, a team that won big, but did not do it with "class" as defined on college message boards.



What a bunch of punks! Can't they act like they've done it before. The Russians would have been more "classy," no?

TRAINING

Eleven and a half years on The Telegraph's news desk has made me an assiduous collector of grievances, both real and imagined. That might not be an attractive quality, but I get a special warmth from the indignation that comes from holding minor injustices close.

I also get an impulse to gorge myself whenever I get a chance to stick my snout in the company trough, and I gave free rein to that impulse last week when I was sent to Raleigh for online training. I saw this as an entitlement: "Have I not toiled for years in a thankless, low-paying, socially crippling job?! Yes, I have! Waiter! Bring me a month's worth of steak dinners, boxed for easy refrigeration! And charge it to the company! Better yet, charge it to the CEO!"

Actually, I was a little surprised the company agreed to send me someplace on its dollar, considering two prior events. In 1998, I was flown into Biloxi, Miss., on the Knight Ridder jet as part of a group of journalists that was sent in to help a sister paper after Hurricane Georges struck. The jet was a sweet ride, but its appearance was a little sullied after I spray-painted "Big John was here" in the cabin. In 2000, I was sent to Baltimore for a conference. My boss gave me her company card with one caveat: no porn charges. But apparently I rode that card hard enough without the hard-core thrills, and future excursions from The Telegraph's news desk were pretty frugal affairs.

Seven years and the knowledge that my co-workers had paid for my excesses had not improved me in the least. When I agreed to go to the training, I began negotiating like a two-bit shyster. I'm going to have to drive to Raleigh? Fine, I want to drive a car with a little flava, a Chevy Impala with 22-inch spinners, ground-effect neon and hydraulics. (I wound up getting a Chevy Cobalt. Black.) And if the company sees a $3,000 charge from Southern Charm Escort Agency, I want it covered -- no questions asked. (The company didn't even offer to spring for an inflatable doll.) So in the end, I wound up driving an economy car that had manual locks and windows ... but did have a CD player. It might have just been AM radio or a used CB radio had I not asked for so much more.

The hotel was a different matter entirely. It was one of those business traveler hotels that has mini-apartments instead of single rooms. It seemed to be styled on a Belle Epoch English hunting lodge and so was strewn with robust images of outdoor sport (fox hunting, duck hunting; hey, it takes a healthy dose of blood sport to create an empire) with faux Old Money touches. Some of the guests, however, were not of the stiff-upper-lip breed. "It's too cold in here! And the Internet is too slow!" howled a note left in the hotel's Executive Center (a room with two PCs with Internet access). Its plaintive tone sounded like a last note scrawled out by a doomed pioneer: "It's too cold in here, and the Internet is too slow. And so I die."

The shortcomings of the Executive Center were easily compensated by other amenities, namely the complementary beer and wine that were offered with food between 5 and 7 p.m. most nights. Frankly, this offering trumped any imaginable flaws. The hotel owners could have based its decor on a single-wide trailer park and still not had to worry about occupancy as long as the taps kept flowing. And there was no nagging about drinking responsibly; it was enabling of the purest sort.

Of course, I was not there to enter a co-dependent relationship with a hotel. I was there to be trained on the software The Telegraph uses to post its Web site. And in a stunning life-imitates-art twist, I wound up in Initech, the computer company in Office Space. Really. I was as though I had been pulled through the screen and immersed firsthand in the travails of Peter Gibbons. There were rows and rows of cubicles in which people were writing lines and lines of code. I thought of eavesdropping to see whether I could recognize any familiar banter and see whether such a species of office worker actually existed. That way I would be sure (as I suspected) that Office Space was more documentary than fiction. (For a second, I wondered whether I could lure these folks out of there cubicles by dangling a red stapler on a string, sort of like fishing, y'know.)

The training, however, left little time for pith-helmet anthropology. I had more productive things to do ... like sitting in a room for about eight hours and having little idea what the hell people were talking about. I mean, really, I was mystified. The last time I had seriously worked on the Web had been eight years ago, which makes me about as useful as an abacus in today's Web environment. But the instructors tried gamely to bring me up to speed with the others in the class (most of whom seemed to have no trouble grasping what was being taught). But I sat there a lot like this:

A dull, uncomprehending being. I liked the free food they kept bringing us, but I think the paper had higher hopes for me than just proving to other McLatchy papers that a Telegraph employee can spend hours in a digestive trance.

A free lunch cannot last forever, and so my training ended and I came back to Macon. I now have to show my bosses exactly what I learned and how I have improved my value to the company. Sadly, I think that will end with my head falling back and my tongue lolling out the side of my drooling mouth a la Homer Simpson and me saying, "Aaahhh, free beer."

kitty: The Mitten
photo and caption by: Melissa
I found it on ICANHASCHEEZBURGER.com