ThomStratton.com

Visitors to a public chat recently had a chance to participate in a live-action video game. An experiment by British production company Realm Pictures, it mimicked a first-person shooter, but with the players giving a live actor verbal instructions. The result is the video below.

Perhaps just as interesting is the “behind-the-scenes” look at how they were able to do this live. As someone who has been behind the scenes on many productions, this looks like it’d be tons of fun to pull off.

I wonder how much it would cost for one of their Nerf-gun mods.

Mars rover Curiosity has been sending back some incredible pictures. Here’s a high-definition look at he Martian landscape I find inexplicably compelling. This is cool stuff!

Here’s another view.

As I mentioned recently, Sofie, our sweetheart rottweiler-hound mix, had to be put down several weeks ago. Well, we knew we couldn’t do without a dog in our home for long, and so many are in need of one. From Terhi’s experience at the Idaho Humane Society shelter in Boise we knew that three categories of dogs have the hardest time getting adopted: old dogs, black dogs, and handicapped dogs.

So Terhi went looking, and we found the un-adoptable dog trifecta: Sam.

It might be a little hard to tell from this picture, but Sam has only one eye. He lost the other to glaucoma when he was a puppy. He’s eight years old, and as you can see, he’s black. And big. Like 90 pounds big. He’s a black Labrador mix (we think the other part might be Newfoundland), surrendered when his family had to move to an apartment.

Let’s just say that when John O’Hurley states repeatedly each year during coverage of the National Dog Show on Thanksgiving that you should do your homework and make sure you understand the characteristics of the breed before you select a dog, he is not kidding!

One reason we chose an older dog is because they are calmer. That may be true, but Labradors are high-energy dogs. They love to play, and there is a reason they are called “retrievers.” So for the first couple of days we were caught off guard by the hurricane of energy called Sam–okay, we were overwhelmed.

But then my dear, sweet wife went to work, researching everything she could find on Labs and dog training, especially for old dogs. And we realized that we did pretty much everything wrong for poor Sam at first. Fortunately, things can be undone, and we’ve been working on it for a couple weeks now. And things are getting better.

But new dogs, young or otherwise, will require changes. We’ve had to change up our routine for both Sam’s and our sanity. He sleeps quite well at night, but when he wakes up his batteries are fully charged. We need to find ways to burn off that energy, and a walk just doesn’t cut it. Our morning routine is a bit chaotic at the moment, but we’re learning, and so is he. He also gets another big burst of energy in the late afternoon, but the kids are coming home from school then, and they’ve promised to take him outside and play with him when they get home. One more walk before bedtime seems to burn off his energy enough to sleep at night.

We’re pretty sure Sam was an outdoor dog. At first he required some work to make sure he did his business outside, but after a couple of days he seems to have it down now, and we’ve learned his signals that he needs to be let out. But we suspect he didn’t get as much attention as he would have liked before, and he is a real attention hound. It most often manifests whenever the whole family gathers in one place, such as dinner, family prayer, or watching TV. Suddenly he wants to play. If we don’t play with him he goes and finds our shoes. If that doesn’t work he finds the biggest, most destructive toy he has and starts to play with it in the most dangerous, destructive manner he can devise. Ever been whacked with a knotted 1-inch rope propelled by a 90-pound dog?

But he’s learning. We’re all making progress. The cats, currently barricaded safely upstairs behind a child gate, are slowly getting used to him. We’re discovering the power of Kongs, including the MOADT (mother of all dog-toys), the Kong with peanut butter inserts, frozen overnight. He’s learning our routine, and developing a little more patience. And he’s learning commands, which he mostly follows. (By the way, the covering on that dog toy at right was stripped off by Sam within the first few days.)

I don’t mean to imply that Sam is Marley incarnate. He certainly has his good traits. He’s very friendly, and gets along just fine with other dogs. We arranged a “play date” with one of our neighbors’ two-year-old husky the other day, and they got along great! He loves people, hardly ever barks, and will take all the petting and hugging you want to give him. He doesn’t have “doggy breath.”

And even though he’s full of energy, he’s still an older dog. He’ll play until his body hurts, and then insist on playing some more if we don’t stop him. He’s not as young as he used to be, but he remains in denial on that point.

He gets along just fine without his right eye. He does have his limitations, but he can play fetch just fine, often snagging the ball out of the air. He’s still getting used to where everything is in the house, though, and sometimes he’ll turn to his right and whack his head on something he couldn’t see. I don’t know if this results in a higher focus on movement, but that’s certainly the way for the cats to get his attention. The faster they move the more he wants to chase them. If they move slowly they can go right by him and he couldn’t care less.

Taking in a new dog is never something to be approached lightly. We knew that, or thought we did. We know now our previous two dogs spoiled us a little. That, and we’d forgotten how much adjustment they required at first. Six months to a year from now we’ll probably have forgotten those first trying few days before we figured things out. But we owed it to Sam to give him a chance, and we’re glad we did. We still have a way to go, but he’s already fitting in with our family and becoming part of our lives. We’re glad he’s got a home with us, and we think he is, too.

What if the poem you’ve been told all your life is a tribute to individualism, to charting your own course, wasn’t about that at all? There are few people in America who haven’t heard the Robert Frost poem “The Road Not Taken.” But what if it doesn’t mean what we think it means? Inconceivable, you say? David Orr, in his new book, “The Road Not Taken” offers some food for doubt:

“This is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us, or allotted to us by chance),” Orr writes.

“The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism,” he continues. “It’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.”

Wrongly referred to by many as “The Road Less Traveled,” the poem’s true title, “The Road Not Taken,” references regret rather than pride. That’s by design. Frost wrote it as somewhat of a joke to a friend, English poet Edward Thomas.

Orr posits that the poem grew out of Frost’s visit with British poet Edward Thomas who, on their many walks in the woods, always seemed to feel that the other path they might have taken would have been better.

In 1912, Frost was nearly 40 and frustrated by his lack of success in the United States. After Thomas praised his work in London, the two became friends, and Frost visited him in Gloucestershire. They often took walks in the woods, and Frost was amused that Thomas always said another path might have been better. “Frost equated [it] with the romantic predisposition for ‘crying over what might have been,’ ” Orr writes, quoting Frost biographer Lawrance Thompson.

The poem was supposedly meant as gentle teasing, but Thompson suggests that Thomas didn’t take it as such, but rather mocking his indecisiveness over joining the military in World War I. Thomas joined, and was killed two years later.

So could it be true that the poem we thought we understood was simply meant to pull someone’s leg–and hence has been pulling our legs for over a century? Could be. I’ve been accepting the commonly-accepted interpretation, even though my own internal language critic has always been bothered by the ambiguity of the last line, “And that has made all the difference.” It never says whether that difference is good or bad. One could say “And I, I smacked myself over the head repeatedly with a frying pan until I developed seizures, And that has made all the difference” just as easily as “And I, I went against the grain, made a boat-load of money, and now sneer at all the dorks who used to mock me, And that has made all the difference.”

We know Frost was not above teasing with his poetry, as the poem “Departmental” proves. So who knows, perhaps Orr is right. We all love to attribute to Frost a certain rustic, quiet, even cryptic wisdom. Certainly there is as much or more wisdom to saying, “there’s no point fretting over what might have been” as “don’t follow the crowd.” So I suppose it doesn’t really matter which interpretation is correct.

But I’m grateful to Orr for pointing out that alternative interpretation. He certainly takes the road less traveled by. And it’s still an awesome poem, regardless. Here’s the whole thing, courtesy of Bartleby.com:

Before Jean Shepherd became the man behind “A Christmas Story”, he was the man behind one of the biggest literary hoaxes in history. He and his late night talk radio show followers successfully got a book title “I, Libertine” on the New York Times bestsellers list, even though the book didn’t even exist. Eventually, in an opportunity too great to pass up, Shepherd met a publisher who convinced him and friend Theodore Sturgeon to actually write the book the world was clamoring for, and made the New York Times bestsellers list for real, though Shepherd gave all his proceeds to charity.

This was well before the age of the Internet.

You could call Shepherd the father of the Internet Viral Hoax.

Read the whole story here.

I hear many people lamenting the lack of willingness to seek compromise, especially in the political realm. I’m one of them. But like most things, I suspect these people, myself included, haven’t completely thought things through. Is a compromise even desirable, let alone possible? As usual the answer is: it depends.

For starters, most of us, when it comes to compromise, aren’t really serious about it. What we really want is for the other side to compromise. And by “compromise” we really mean “surrender.” That’s the current environment regarding Planned Parenthood and the recent undercover videos that have part of the population up in arms and the other part manning the walls. What would true compromise look like here, and would either side be satisfied with it? Would the Pro-Planned Parenthood faction be willing to accept only partial defunding, or for that funding to be reallocated to improve female health coverage under Obamacare? Would the Anti-Planned Parenthood faction be willing to accept a promise that no aborted fetuses will be sold or given to any party, but destroyed within a certain brief period?

We’ll never know, because ultimately neither side seems remotely interesting in anything resembling true compromise. We simply want the other side to fold. This stems from an ongoing insistence that this particular issue is just too important to accept anything short of complete victory. They feel it’s like asking Israel to compromise and let ISIS kill only half their population.

Another problem with compromise is that we can be extremely myopic about issues. If it’s not important to us it doesn’t exist or isn’t legitimate. And if it’s an illegitimate concern, what reason is there for compromise? Who freakin’ cares if Hillary Clinton broke the rules and used her own off-site mail server to send official Secretary of State emails, many including classified information? There are more important issues at stake here, like whether we can get her elected President of the United States? What is there to compromise on?

Or why do we need to worry about police overreach? If you don’t want to get abused by the police don’t commit crimes, or don’t talk back and get aggressive with them when they’re just doing their job. Clearly they’ve got a tough job, and if you’d just give them the respect they deserve there’d be no problem. Right? What’s there to compromise on?

We all get pretty good at ignoring that another side to the issue even exists, let alone acknowledge an opportunity to compromise. Tempest in a teapot, and all that.

What’s more, we seem to completely forget that before compromise can even occur, two sides actually have to come together and negotiate in good faith. How often is that going to happen in today’s poisonous environment? How can you expect someone to negotiate in good faith with you if you were just broadcasting to everyone that you feel their faction is comprised of moronic baboons who have no heart, no soul, no merit, and no legitimacy? You don’t sound very approachable. Demonizing, denigrating, dehumanizing or devaluing your opponents does not lay groundwork for compromise. It just confirms in the minds of your opposition that everything they thought about you is true and there’s no point in trying to reach out. Victory or death.

Compromise is a moderate position, requiring a moderate approach. Our political climate is increasingly becoming “Miyagi-land”: Walk left side of road, okay. Walk right side of road, okay. Walk middle of the road? Squish. Like grape. We don’t like moderates. They’re the annoying “Yeah, but…” people. They’re not the cool kids. They’re not the edgey, hip “take no prisoners” types like the rest of us. Best to ignore them and hope they go away. Or better yet, marginalize them, call them “out of touch”, sell-outs, traitors, “Uncle Toms”, or anything else we can think of to justify our not taking them seriously.

If we really, truly want compromise then we have to be the ones to push for it. How often do we contact our Congressperson and voice our support for compromise? Or do we just (re)post on Facebook in support of our side only, giving no credence to the other side, and making no mention of the need for compromise? How often do we make moderate statements that would give support and hope to moderates leaning the other way that we’re open to compromise and might be sensible enough to make it worth reaching out to us? How often do we seek out and support moderate candidates, even if they only exist on the other side in that particular race?

My experience has been that we slap down moderates, and hard, lest their crazy lack of clarity infect the rest of us. Any candidate that runs as a moderate we immediately distrust. They might cave on the issues that really matter most and sell the farm out from under us. The latin saying “the translator is a traitor” is alive and well today. Anyone who would claim to understand both sides well enough to represent the one to the other, and vice versa, is someone not to be trusted. You can’t count on them to do the right thing.

Compromise might be a great thing–might even be essential to our survival as a nation–but if we really wanted it as badly as we claim, we probably wouldn’t be in the position we’re in. We want to cling (not unjustifiably in some cases) to our side of the issue and hope the other side will step up and compromise. We’ll take a little now so that we can get the rest from them later. That’s our idea of compromise: make the other side surrender their position, be it slowly or all at once–it’s all good, so long as we get our way.

If we do what we’ve always done, we’ll get what we’ve always got. It’s time for something different. Moderates of the world, time to work in roughly the same direction for a somewhat common cause!

What do we want? Compromise! When do we want it? When’s good for you?

Peter Hollens teams up with Bored Shorts to present “Peter Hollens Voice Lessons!”

I think this is mostly amusing because we don’t usually hear such sounds coming out of his mouth. And in case you don’t know what he usually sounds like, there’s this:

And on a totally different note, via Mr. Hollens I found this cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car”. Not a happy song, but one I’ve always appreciated for its simplicity and ability to transport me into someone else’s life for a moment, even if–or maybe because–that life is so different from mine and yet…not. (And for the record, while this cover is nice, I’ve still not heard anyone capture the raw intensity of the original.)

It’s practically a cliche these days: Rising sports star with multi-million dollar contract winds up broke in a few years. But if Ryan Broyles of the Detroit Lions has his way, that won’t be his story. Though he’s made over $3 million in his career so far, he’s living on $60,000 a year and investing the rest.

Although many NFL players have gone bankrupt after making tens of millions of dollars, Broyles told ESPN that he, his wife and their child live on about $60,000 a year. After that, he puts the rest of his money into investments and retirement accounts aimed at ensuring he can live the rest of his life on his football earnings. Broyles said he has educated himself about long-term investing and is confident that he’ll never run out of money.

That approach has made his life easier, he believes:

“When I come to work, I don’t think about the money, man,” Broyles said. “I can tell you that, without a doubt. There might be some guys that do but I put myself in a position where I come out here and have fun. I don’t have that pressure, you know what I mean. My wife has no worries. My child has no worries. For the most part, I can help my family, you know.”

Though I can’t help but feel a little envious, I certainly can’t fault the guy. He’s nearing the end of his contract, and has been struggling with injuries. There’s no guarantee he’ll still be playing ball next year. If he’s been able to take his four-year contract and curry it into financial independence for life…well, awesome for him! It’s probably good that he will never have to work again, because one wrong move on the field and he not be able to work again.

But if nothing else, perhaps he has a future as a financial advisor to other up-and-coming sports stars.

Mytheos Holt has an interesting take on the Trump phenomenon in his latest article:

Trump’s candidacy should also serve as a cautionary tale about just what happens when you try to brand even the smallest indiscretions as evidence that someone is of the Devil’s party. To illustrate this, ask yourself this question: what label can the Left (or the Right, for that matter) apply to Trump that hasn’t already been so devalued by overuse?

That he’s a racist? So is anyone who criticizes President Obama’s golf swing these days.

That he’s a sexist? So is anyone who defends due-process rights.

That he’s a phony? What politician isn’t?

That he’s a fascist? So were the last two presidents, depending on which books you read.

That he’s a crypto-Nazi? Yeah, because Lyndon Larouche hasn’t beaten that one to death at all.

See the problem? Even if all of these labels were true of Trump, they’ve all been used to cry “wolf” so many times that now no one thinks they mean anything anymore. Short of openly waving a Nazi flag, eating black babies, or sexually assaulting someone on live television, there’s little Trump could do to actually give these labels the power to scare people. So instead of dismissing him with labels, people actually have to engage with his arguments, such as they are, and even if he’s proven to be gloriously, hilariously wrong, the fact of having to engage with him still lends him some degree of legitimacy.

I know plenty of people for whom each of the above accusations still trumps everything, and oddly enough, I think that only further bolsters the argument. Not only do those accusations, through overuse, no longer scare us, but we’ve seen far too many people for whom one–and only one–of those accusations is simply more important than any of the rest, perhaps even all the rest put together. Be a fascist if you must, but don’t you dare be a racist! Or be a mass-murderer in the name of your religion, just don’t be an American Christian! Such myopia is also getting old.

Perhaps Trump is the answer to outrage-ism. Be a big, dorky-looking, bombastic, rude jerk. Just don’t try to pretend you’re not one. And if that’s not Trump to a “T”, what is? He is completely unrepentent. He’s the Honeybadger of politics. Donaldtrump don’t care!

That’s still no reason to vote for the guy, and I don’t intend to. But it’s easy to see why so many others are currently excited about him. And it’s about time that the usual suspects on both sides woke up and realized that they produced the environment in which Trump actually seems like a good idea.