Lately I’ve been watching the BBC adaptations of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” and “Smiley’s People” and noting again the difference between the American notion of the spy — act first, shoot from the hip, ask questions later — and the version presented in John le Carre’s books and these adaptations — quiet, investigative and inexorable. It also calls to mind the difference between the Bush administration attitude of torture (yes, torture, not “enhanced interrogations”) as a useful tool in the War on Terror versus what I understand is the more valued method in the intelligence community of tracking down a suitable candidate with information and breaking them through a battle of wits between interrogator and the interrogated.

In particular, I’ve been thinking about this in the context of “24,” and in the context of interesting television. Just to be clear, I haven’t watched the more recent seasons of “24″; I stopped around the beginning of Season 6 partially because of all the torture but mainly because it was getting too ridiculous. A quick scan of Wikipedia shows Jack continuing his torturing ways, at least through Season 7, but to be fair, let’s address this as a criticism of Seasons 1-5.

So imagine this, if you will. Rather than Jack Bauer grabbing a suspect and torturing them (or, say, cutting off someone’s head as an offering to a potential contact), he and his team use the multiple sets of snitches and double agents and embedded agents and what have you that they’ve developed through the years to find a useful contact, bring them in, and then grill them over the course of one or two episodes. After back and forth, sweating the subject, maybe having people in the field or Chloe with her mad computer skilz find a new datum to use in cracking their resolve, you get the vital piece of information you’re looking for and then you return to the action for the big finale against the Big Bad.

Maybe it wouldn’t work generally season-by-season for an action show designed around a 24 hour crisis. But in the context of one season I think that dedicating that much time to basic tradecraft, building the tension, creating a feeling of “Will this work, will we break him in time?” would be quite dramatic. Heck, maybe you could even throw in a torture scene earlier in the season to satisfy the bloodthirsty and get a red herring out of it just to ratchet things up further.

Extended interrogation scenes can be done well on television. “Homicide” and “The Closer” center around them. “Castle” also heavily features interrogations, though not as well done as the previously mentioned series. Babylon 5 and Star Trek have had entire episodes that center around the interrogation of a central character, and these were some of the more gripping episodes in whole series. So I think it could work.

But could Fox have done it with “24″? Maybe, maybe not. From a writing perspective it’s certainly much easier to just torture a guy, get what you need in 15 minutes and then move on with the action. But I think someone should tackle this in a series someday. I would watch it.

I recently took a social media holiday, ostensibly for Lent despite me no longer being a practicing Catholic. Part of the intent of this was to start doing more in-depth blogging and less micro-blogging, i.e. to produce items of substance rather than throwaways. This did not happen –  not at all.  So Lent being over, I’m trying something new.

In order for me to continue using Twitter and Facebook for a given week, I have to post to one of my blogs that week. My plan was to do a great thoughtful essay on Art and Games and the meaning of it all… but I’m too tired from working all weekend. So instead I’ll present a project I’ve been working on for a while: a bookshelf for my daughter. She has too many books and her current bookshelf is overflowing. While there’s certainly some purging to be done, she really needs a bigger bookshelf.

(The color isn’t too good here because I didn’t set my camera to incandescent, but it’s supposed to be green, light blue and purple. Color correction doesn’t seem to be doing much for me.)

This is the result of a few weekends of work. It came about because I was looking at buying a bookshelf, but all I could find were either supercheap and flimsy composite shelves, or what to my mind were overly expensive composite shelves, or superexpensive wooden shelves.  So instead I measured a set of composite shelves we already had, went to the hardware store, got some reasonably priced pine boards, and went to work.

It took a weekend to build the shelves themselves (cutting the dadoes by hand was the worst part), and this past weekend Princess Scientist and I painted it (she picked out the colors). She has a grand plan to paint a bookworm in the area behind the books. “As you wish, Princess Scientist,” is all I can say.

The combination of sewer problems, cleaning up the resulting mess in the bathroom, then preparing the bathroom for fix-up, planning and postponement of a vacation and finally a 35th birthday party ate up July. So it goes.

But all of that has made me rather thoughtful about time management. In particular, I’ve been trying to compare my time management now with that of myself 20 years ago. Or to put it another way: how on earth did I do so much stuff when I was in college?
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So this little beastie, plus another two feet of the same, was filling up our sewer line:

When the plumber told us we had a rootball, I was thinking something like what you might find wrapped in burlap, at the end of a sapling at a tree nursery. Apparently when you’re dealing with plumbing, “ball” is a relative term.

So the end result is that we got a completely new sewer line. And a big cut out of our driveway. And a big hole in our yard. Bonus!

So last night we went to the Bulls game and got in our fireworks there. And that was for the best, really, because the actual Fourth hasn’t been much to speak about. It started when Mur did some laundry, and the drain water started coming up through the toilet. Well, we shut off the washing machine, got out the plunger and the Liquid Plumber and got to work. After an hour of this, it was draining slowly. We had to run some errands, so we let it sit until we got back (it’s a good thing we didn’t try to run the washing machine then!).

Once we got back, Mur really wanted to start the laundry again, so I reluctantly said okay, assuming that someone would be around to keep an eye on it. I then proceeded to wander away and forget about it. A few minutes later I come downstairs to find water flowing over the top of the toilet and onto the bathroom floor. I quickly shut off the washing machine and headed to the basement, to find Niagara Falls from the water flowing between the floorboards. Fortunately we have an old carpet down there, so all I needed to do is get everything out of the direct path of water and let the carpet soak up the rest. Then Mur called the plumber.

End result: the plumber found a blockage somewhere in our sewer line — where, he’s not sure. Apparently the “kid” has the camera. But it’s looking like a bad one. Hopefully it’s not under our driveway, but it’s not looking good. Until then, our “grey water” (and “night soil”) is flowing out of the cleanout onto our lawn, so at least we can get our business done. But it’s not looking like a fun weekend.

And now here’s a Friday picture of a cat, to take your mind off of all of that:

It’s been a busy week and a half.  Mur and I and the Pink Tornado were up in Buffalo visiting my family, and then from there we went to Columbus, OH, to attend the Origins Game Fair and Expo.

One stop we made while in Buffalo was at the Butterfly Conservatory near Queenston, Ontario, where we met this little guy:

Origins was fun, as usual.  We gave ourselves an extra day there this year, which was good because we were pretty beat that first day.  However, we managed to get in a game of Arkham Horror, a game of Pandemic, and got to try out China Rails (not recommended when you’re introducing people to crayon rails games — better to choose geography they know).

And the Pink Tornado won the costume contest again. All in all, a good time, but it’s good to be home again.

The narration in this strip from the online comic Ozy and Millie sums up my attitude right now — and the feeling I’m trying to capture with this blog.

I feel that in the last twenty I have lost a good part of my purer self, and so I’ve drifted a bit off of course.  My goal now is to figure out who that self is, and to start living up to the potential I had in the first twenty.

Or maybe it’s just to be “totally unsupervised.”  Whichever is more fun.

It figures that during the first big heat wave of the year, our A/C poops out.  In the grand scheme of things, it’s not that surprising: the first big heat wave is the first time the system gets a serious stress test.  I went out and checked it last night after it cooled down a bit — looks like it’s pumping air from the house but the fan in the outdoor unit isn’t running.  I managed to find a technician that will show up before Thursday so hopefully we can get it fixed today.  Until then, we have a (loud!) window unit in the kitchen, the relative coolness of the basement, and the whole house fan to blow the hot air out at night.  Well, and the community swimming pool.

Mm, good on a hot day

Originally uploaded by jvsquare
This little guy (gal?) showed up outside NVIDIA one day last year. For next few Fridays I’ll be sharing pictures. Given how hot it is, this one seemed appropriate.

Today I caught a fly with my bare hands.  It was just flying by and I reached up and grabbed it.  I’m not sure whether this has anything to do with my recent push to get in better health, but it was pretty cool.  As far as the “better health” regimen goes, I rode 6 miles today, as part of building up my strength to ride to work everyday.  Too bad I’ll have to give that up when the PT heads to summer camp, but for now it feels good to get out there.

In the creative-type news, the hops are coming in pretty well, but something seems to be nipping at them.  It might be rabbits, but I thought I plugged up the hole under the fence.  Maybe birds?  I also saw a cool spider in a hole, with little baby spiders riding on its back.  Maybe it’ll get big enough to eat whatever is eating the hops.

And the sauerkraut is doing its thing in the basement.  Now to make some corned beef…