Fatwa #26 Pro Umpire

A friend of mine was complaining again about the lack of replay and challenges in baseball.
He thinks the fact that people can now clearly see on television what the umpire can't see on the field is unfair and that it will drive people away from baseball.
I think that adding a replay or a challenge to an already leisurely paced/glacially paced game would kill it dead.
I also think that if baseball is to serve a useful social function then we must retain the tradition of the umpire making the call, even if it is patently obvious to others with technological hindsight that the umpire was wrong.
Why?
Because this is how we learn about the nature of the judiciary in a democracy.
A baseball heading toward the plate isn't ever objectively a strike or a ball. It is only a strike or a ball after the umpire declares it to be one or the other.
You may be able to see it better, but it is the umpire who creates the reality of the situation even if it seems to the whole world to be unfair.
You can already see the comparison to jury trials. Juries are not measures of objective reality. They make a decision, one which the whole rest of the world unfettered by blinkers and rules of evidence, can possibly see as patently wrong. But that's not how the system works.
And where do we teach our kids about this? Not in football where every play now comes with a flag, a coach's challenge and a battery of lawyers threatening to sue the other side and who drop the case in return for a settlement of 5 yards and a loss of down.
Not in basketball or soccer where as far as I can tell penalties are awarded for acting ability alone.
No, we teach our kids about the judiciary in baseball. It is in baseball that we learn that laws are not perfect, that they are administered not by omniscient, omnipotent beings, but by men, sometimes flawed, often short sighted, sometimes blind as a bat. Human beings. That is what baseball teaches us. That the administration of law is never perfect, that we are ultimately limited by our inability to see and know all and that the res publica, the common wealth, the good of the public, is ultimately served by our acknowledgment that nothing is ever perfect, that sometimes the best we can do is to watch a replay later that night, admit that the ump couldn't see it that way from the perspective of the ground, and try again some other day.
Why is this a good thing?
Because the opposite of that, the belief that there is such a thing as perfect human judgment is dangerously arrogant. The belief that mankind, with the help of technology can render perfect judgment on something as arbitrary as baseball is dangerous, because ultimately the very notion of a ball or a strike is not a divine revelation, but something that is always up for interpretation by an umpire. And the belief that you can measure that with a robot in the sky...well, at that point why bother playing the game at all? Why not just let robots play against each other with robots officiating? That way everything can be just perfect.
And you can take that perfect world, wrap it up in spandex put it on a bicycle and let it take up a lane of traffic on I-10 on a Wednesday afternoon at 5 o'clock in the afternoon.

Fatwa #25 Recreational Bicycling

It's a work day and it's around 10am or 4pm and if you're in full spandex and bicycle helmet regalia going for a recreational bit of exercise and I can only wonder WHY YOU AREN'T AT WORK, YOU GOOD FOR NOTHING LEECH ON SOCIETY! That's right, it would be one thing if I thought you were getting on that bike to go get some groceries or were headed to work on that thing. But you're clearly not going to a place so much as enjoying yourself on a bicycle and TAKING UP A LANE OF AUTO TRAFFIC IN THE PROCESS, and before you get environmentalist on my ass let me remind you that you and your bike are getting in the way of people who are coming and going to and from real jobs that don't come with time off to go riding around you and your friends in a pack like it's the TOUR DE TEJAS. You know where you can stick that bicycle. And because this is the hill country I'm going to apportion some of the blame for you and your "recreation" to that ONE-BALLED CHEATING JACKHOLE Lance Armstrong, though the real blame goes to you for wanting to be as cool as the ONE-BALLED CHEATING JACKHOLE who gave Sheryl Crow cancer. (While it hasn't been proven that he gave Sheryl Crow cancer it also hasn't been definitively ruled out.)

So, here's the thing, recreational biker. How about you put a basket on that bike and use it for a real purpose instead of using your $300,000 SUV to haul your bike around to cool places where you want to bike DURING THE WORK WEEK? Why don't you put away the spandex and get off the INTERSTATE HIGHWAY SYSTEM so those of us who need to drive to get to work don't have to dodge you and your whole pack of friends?

You know where you can stick that bicycle and that helmet if you don't get off the rural routes and the highways and the access roads. Recreational equestrian riders, you are officially given a pass, because you are taking care of a fine and noble creature and if you want to clop along I-10 on a Tuesday morning you are more than welcome to do it. Bicyclists, you are not welcome. Either get enough money to get a horse, or put away the spandex and get to work.

Fatwa #24 for the Priceline Negotiatah!

while your hardworking muftis have oodles more to say about patents and copyright, i want to put these issues aside for the short term whilst we cogitate a bit. and i think it's fitting that we end (for now) with an affirmative fatwa.

in an earlier fatwa, i mentioned an ongoing segment about truly awesome ideas that couldn't get made in today's intellectual property environment, called

Great Ideas You'll Never Get to See, or, Thanks, Sonny Bono!
imagine that a mysterious bomb malfunctions, causing every character William Shatner has ever played to enter our reality in pursuit of the real William Shatner. imagine that they are joined by a lunatic quasi-religious sect of Bruce Campbell fans, called Campbellians, who cut off their own right hands in devotion, and hope to kill Shatner for their own nefarious ends. imagine that during the story, Shatner gets punched in the face by t.j. hooker, and that the cartoon kirk from the animated star trek series makes an appearance during which his companions discover that he is literally two-dimensional and can't be seen from the side.

but wait!
destiny, she is kind to this one.
this story exists!
"Shatnerquake," self-published by Jeff Burk,
can be purchased here:
http://www.amazon.com/Shatnerquake-Jeff-Burk/dp/1933929820

note that before and after the story, the author thanks his muse (Denny Crane!) and begs that his muse not sue him. which is a charming, if lamentable, approach to the current lay of the land.
i call it the Radiohead approach: like Amp Live, you do an end run around the faceless megacorp opposing your use of material, by appealing directly to the authors of said material.

i urge you to buy and consume this delicious fruit of a possible future in which intellectual property laws make some kind of sense.
we can make that future happen!
Big Deal, tell 'em how.

Fatwa #23 Happy Birthday to Me

In pursuing this line of judgments about intellectual property I am going to make a ruling about the "Birthday song."

Nobody should have to pay anyone for singing that song any more under any circumstances.
No matter the venue. Even if it is for profit. I don't see how anyone could profit from it, but I think if they do, then nobody should have the right to demand a cut from that profit anymore.

Once upon a time this argument was presented as a matter of a couple of greedy old ladies who held the copyright on the song. This was a useful outdated myth and it even made its way into an episode of Sports Night where a sports anchor cost his network thousands of dollars by singing Happy Birthday to him on the air.

But the old greedy bats have been dead for a while now. A long time. I doubt whether any more money will give them the leisure (now that they're dead) to come up with another song or contribution to our culture. Because they're dead. Their estate doesn't contribute anything to our culture. And it doesn't even matter, because the copyright for the birthday tune is now held by Warner. That's right. A huge corporation is cashing in on the the "artistic contribution" of a pair of old bats who may not have had much of a right to slap down the copyright they way they did to begin with.

What does this mean?
The Warner corporation subsidiary which holds these rights should immediately relinquish them to the public domain. The Birthday song is no longer a part of a living creative system, it is an excuse for intellectual property intimidation and robbery. It is an excuse for a racket, for legal bullying by legal pirates, who have letters of marque issued to them by their corporate intellectual property holders.
The Birthday song should be in the public domain. The argument that taking it away from the copyright holder would force artists and creators into starvation is fatuous. It is plainly false. This song is better off in the public domain where it can live in peace alongside Camptown Races and My Old Kentucky Home.

Fatwa #22 Trademark This! (Insert Public Domain Rude Gesture Here.)

Today Kim Kardashian sued Old Navy for using someone in their ads who looks like Kim Kardashian.
I don't really care about this case in particular, but it is symptomatic of the larger problem of trademark law gone too far. Cases like this are the intellectual property equivalent of Somali pirates boarding ships demanding ransoms. They are the sort of thing that beg for genuine tort overhaul, but that is a fatwa for another day.

For today, let's concentrate on this: Trademark controls have to be trimmed back, pruned back or just plain cut to the bone so the holders of trademarks will no longer find it in their interests to run around the intellectual property neighborhood demanding protection money. If someone in a film is holding a can of Coca-Cola, they shouldn't have to ask for permission from Coke to use that image. If the corporation didn't want its logo to be seen publicly wihout their permission why did they put it on the side of a common item available for sale. It's not like it's a secret that it's a can of Coke. Blurring the image isn't going to make me think it's not a can of Coke. Taping it up on the side or putting a fake label on it (Cake Cola anyone?) is sometimes funny until you realize that the reason for the subterfuge is that a corporate owner is holding the world hostage. This trademark enforcement piracy has also been extended to documentaries and at this rate we will eventually find ourselves being sued for making home movies without blurring out advertisements and logos we recorded without permission.

This is a racket, nothing more, nothing less. Our aspirational culture keeps it going because all of us dream of the day we can sue someone for looking like us in the hope that the poor schmucks will be willing to settle to get us off their backs. That is the same as boarding an oil tanker in the Red Sea in the hope of getting a payout for not scuttling their ship.

Isn't there a need for some trademark protection? Sure. Nobody should have the right to sell a can of dog poop with the logo for Coca-Cola without the express permission of the Coca-Cola corporation. Nobody should be able to massacre the inhabitants of a small town and leave a Pizza Hut flag flying to implicate Pizza Hut in the killings. But if some poor schlemiel in Toledo wants to open up a place called Pizza Hat, then Pizza Hut should have to suck it up and take it like a man. (After all, if corporations claim to be just like individual people for the sake of arguments, then they should man-up and stop suing people like rat pansies.)
And if you want to sell a delicious soft drink in a red can called Caca Ole, then you should have that right. And nobody should have the legal right to demand protection money from you for coming close to their trademark.

For those of you about to quibble about the law.
I don't care what the law currently says or how it has been interpreted to this date.
They are wrong. This fatwa is a declaration of just how wrong those interpretations have been and an exhortation to those who have it in their power to make a difference that trademark law must be changed or reinterpreted in line with this fatwa. No more trademark enforcers running around threatening to break the legs of free speech (insert less ridiculous analogy here).
Viva Pizza Hat and Caca Ole and Tennessee Fried Chicken and Boing Rubber Aircraft and Ex-On Oil.

Fatwa #21: For Intellectual Property Eminent Domain

we're gonna be talking about this one more than a little, and Mujtahid WMR and i have been chewing on this subject for years, so this fatwa will have some elisions and shorthand. to make it clearer, i will say that the subject is the Happy Birthday Problem: how even humming this tune on film, radio, or tv, or even a sufficiently public space, means i'm supposed to send a check to fucking warner brothers. and it's not like they give a cut to the two women who wrote happy birthday; they've been dead a long time.
if you'd like more background on this, i can recommend two great films: Steal This Film, about the founding and growth of the infamous site thepiratebay.org, and Rip: a Remix Manifesto, a movie about (in part) why Girl Talk would have to pay over $4 million an album to "legitimately" use all the samples he uses....and why plants, animals, and sometimes even your cells can be patented and owned by a company whose basic business model could be most accurately described as intellectual property squatting.

anyway, Mujtahid WMR had an idea, years ago, that i at first scoffed at as mere sarcasm, but that, like the idea virus it is, grew and grew until it found it's vector: me talking to you about it. sorry for that, but at least this one is free. here it is: if these companies are going to demand money for 75 years after the death of an author (even if that author has long since been cut out of the process), if their sole intention is to sit on their "properties" until you stumble across the wrong mental domain and have to pay a toll, then the inevitable effect is going to be an intellectual climate increasingly strewn with untouchable wreckage. too expensive to refurbish, too broken-down to be worth the trouble.

and the only way around it, as well as the only way to sell any reform to the idiots who think the words "idea economy" make any sense, is eminent domain. it works the same way it does for actual real estate. you're boppin' along, and you notice a property that is blighted: it hasn't been maintained or used for anything productive, and its' poor state has a deleterious effect on neighboring properties. so you petition for, and are given, eminent domain: the right to take that property and use it for something useful, in exchange for "fair market value." and not the fair market value that says five seconds of christina aguilera is worth $100K, but the fair market value "conservatives" in texas spend on a house they grab for 1/3 of what you could actually get on the market.

conservatives could be led here, for the same reason whores like rick perry have thrown their arms around physical eminent domain: because at some level they realize their politics amounts to abstract philosophy without a toolkit, and they're willing to accept tools that are at odds with that philosophy as long as they can use them to maintain power. and liberals, whatever and whoever they are now, love an idea that sticks it to the man...provided we can pry their hands out of what Mujtahid JB called the "soiled lacy white panties" that are hollywood.

but here's another issue: this idea is kind of smartass, in that it shouldn't really be necessary at all. because ideas aren't really like real estate after all. that is a bad analogy. land does not have to enter my brain to become valuable to anyone, for one thing. the whole concept is absurd. but if we cannot change that fundamental, and fundamentally wrong, approach to intellectual property, then IP eminent domain is a reasonable temporary work-around.

in the longer term, some alternatives might be (stay with me here, these are fuzzy, hippyesque terms, but useful) the "copyleft" movement, creative commons licenses, modified open-source agreements with permissible profit avenues spelled out explicitly...really, the suggestions already out there are numerous, inventive, and invigorating. check 'em out.

in the meantime, in response to those asinine psa-style ads during movie previews (the ones where cameramen and key grips are pimped as proxy for the huge companies that profit from owning nearly everything in your head, wringing their calloused hands about how they'll afford dental care and mortgages), we might also discuss another brilliant idea from M. WMR:


Great Ideas You'll Never Get to See, or, Thanks, Sonny Bono! 
you could have cameramen and costumers talking about all the work they'll never get, the projects they'll never get to hone chops on, because of bullshit copyright laws.
i'll start us off with an example, again from M. WMR: All-Star Miami Crime, a show that mixes together every crime show ever set in Miami into one story. miami vice, burn notice, all of it. we get to see how the guy in csi: miami is an incompetent boob who never even noticed Dexter running around in his own back yard. or maybe he's just overworked, what with all the forensic work he has to do every time michael weston and Sam Axe get done blowing shit up.

does that sound like a cool idea to you?
well too bad. it'll never fucking happen.
can you imagine how thrilled all the actors on those shows would be at the prospect of all those additional fans, syndication fees, what have you? how thrilled Bruce Campbell would be?
well too fucking bad for them, too.

please, let's discuss. just because i'm an asshole don't mean it won't be both fun and interesting, to talk about.

Emotional Hangover Fatwa #20 For My Friends

....lord knows how i still have any at all, much less two. stay with me a little longer; i can be better.
meantime, hey: i'm an asshole, but i'm your asshole.

and let's face it: maybe blogging is a consumption of mental real estate, but so is all the shit already discussed here. what right does dorito's or "extreme antiquing" have to consume actual physical space in my neurons? you are right to be irked by all of this, because the answer is obviously, none whatsoever. in fact, i'll reiterate what i've said for years: every time an ad jingle or sitcom teaser or catchphrase enters your head without your permission, using up real storage space and vital neurotransmitters (some of the body's most expensive chemicals to manufacture), they owe you rent. i'll say it again: GEICO OWES YOU RENT.

this is getting into another topic, but it's still relevant to my apology because it is, in short, part of why i was wrong, why talking about this stuff is not totally useless. first step, diagnosis: our mental environment is now almost entirely owned. maybe this was always true to some extent, but quantitative differences can become qualitative, and we now live in an economy built on the idea that, like public school students watching "channel 1," we should sit in our seats and consume what's on the screen, be sent to the principal's office if we try to remix the pizza hut ads or turn off the tv.

but i digress: bless my friends, that i have any at all. you are magnificent, noble sunsabitches. let's face it: you've kinda had to be, all these years.

and regarding the mental real estate issue, on to #21.

Fatwa #19 Against This Blog

"but i hate blogs! i never read them! it's like carefully reading everything in the bathroom stall: it only makes sense if you've got a lot of shit to unload, and even then you certainly shouldn't be asking other people to join you."
(yeah, sorry about that. thanks for joining!)
"no but i really think we should start one called dueling fatwas."
"yeah, alright, fuggit."

i mean, lookit this shit: oh no, a substandard actor has been cast in big roles and made a bad movie! oh no, my dorito's bag has something affected and silly written on it! (any more behind the curve on that one and you have to start saying "what's the deal with that?" at the end of your sentences. you saw harold & kumar, right?) oh my goodness, sitcoms in the 60s were kind of sexist! fucking shocker. [gasp!] the daily show is sorta bland; that's sticking it to the man.

blogging in general and this blog especially are a modern device whereby you are encouraged to fritter away precious time and mind space that might otherwise be used productively; the end result is an intellectual eunuch who has actively participated in his own castration. all this shit-churning saecular nonsense; fuck it! and fuck you fucking fuckers for reading it. go tweet about your favorite facefuck game or something.

shame on you.

Fatwa #18 Extreme

Enough with the "extreme" business. Extreme Couponing should be an indicator that this word has gone too far. How about Extreme Cancellation of Shows That Use the Word Extreme.
Extreme Sports? They're not really extreme unless people actually die. Extreme Couponing? Same thing. If you don't understand what the word extreme means, then maybe you need to watch Extreme Vocabulary on the Extreme Language Arts Channel.