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So Annie and I went and saw David Copperfield tonight at the Washington Pavilion.  It was a good show.  I honestly couldn’t figure out a lot of the tricks.

As with many magicians, a lot of the show revolves around random people in the audience. He had some neat methods to pick these people.  You always worry that he’s going to pick a confederate, but he had a couple methods that were pretty foolproof to be random.

At one point, he needed three random people, so he tossed a foam Frisbee out into the audience.  He used the person who caught it, then had them throw it somewhere else, and used the next person that caught it, and then had them do the same thing again.  I can’t see how he could manipulate that process.  These people were not precision Frisbee throwers or anything, and a lot people lunged to catch it.

At the end of the show, he needed 13 volunteers for the finale.  So he threw 13 beach balls out in the audience, and started playing music.  If you were holding a ball when the music ended, you were one of the 13.

As luck would have it, I was one of the 13.  I assure you I was a purely random participant – no one talked to me beforehand, coached me, or anything else.

When I walked to the front, a production assistant asked me a series of quick questions:

• Do you speak English?
• Do you have unattended children in the audience?
• Are you a magician?
• Are you a member of the press?

There were a couple other questions I don’t remember, but all of them took less than 10 seconds, and there was no other communication prior to the illusion.

We went up on stage and sat in a cage-type thing.  The core of the trick involved this thing rising up in the air, then the curtain dropped, and we were gone.  We re-appeared on the balcony behind the audience a few seconds later.

I was sworn to secrecy about what actually happened, so I won’t ruin anything here.  But, interestingly, having a first-hand perspective of how he did it makes me even more impressed with it.  I’m looking back on what happened, understanding the nuances of what he did, and I’m really impressed with the skill and showmanship of it.  It was deceptively intricate…or intricately deceptive, depending on how you look at it.

In fact, in the end, I obviously know how it worked…but I really don’t.  I can clearly remember what happened, and it makes logical sense in my head.  However, not seeing it from the audience perspective, I have no idea how a couple aspects of it actually played out.  I think I would have to see it multiple times from in the audience to actually understand it fully.

In a lot of ways, I’m just as in the dark about it as the audience is, just from the opposite side.  They don’t know how it worked from my perspective, but I don’t know how it worked from their perspective.  He essentially compartmentalized us from the audience, and fooled us just as effectively.

I’m amazed by this.  It’s like…well, magic.

I’ll admit that – before tonight – I thought Copperfield was pretty cheesy.  But as I sit here and write this, I’ve come to understand that he’s an enormously gifted entertainer who is phenomenally skilled at what he does.

Call me a fan.

Ask the card-carrying socialists: Is Obama one of them?: I thought this was quite inventive of CNN.  While lots of people call Obama a “socialist,” CNN when and found an actual socialist and asked him what he thought.

Billy Wharton should be happy.

"Socialized health care" is on its way. The "socialist agenda" is taking over America. And best of all, Barack Obama, a "committed socialist ideologue," is in the Oval Office.

But Wharton, co-chair of the Socialist Party USA, sees no reason to celebrate. He’s seen people with bumper stickers and placards that call Obama a socialist, and he has a message for them: Obama isn’t a socialist. He’s not even a liberal.

The ending is interesting:

Llewellyn, the national director of the Democratic Socialists of America, says he was struck by one player in the 2008 presidential elections who displayed more socialistic leanings than Obama.

This candidate raised taxes on the big oil companies, and sent the revenue to the people.

If you want to learn something about spreading the wealth, Llewellyn says, don’t look to Obama.

"To be honest, the most socialist candidate in the 2008 election was Sarah Palin."

I drive a 1997 Jeep Grand Cherokee.  It’s a weird story about how I came to be driving this vehicle, but suffice it to say that I love it.  I’d like to drive it until the wheels fall off.

The only drawback? Gas mileage.  It gets about 13 mpg.  I thought perhaps something was wrong with it, but I went asking around on some forums, and that’s about right.  It’s got a 5.2L V-8, full-time 4WD, and body-on-frame construction, which leads it to be pretty heavy.

This gas mileage thing bothers me.  I’m not an tree-hugger, by any stretch, but all things considered, I’d rather save the environment than damage it, so I feel pretty bad about driving around a gas guzzler.  But, I’ve been thinking about this, and I want to toss out a justification that might be just be a lame attempt to make myself feel better.  Here goes –

This Jeep exists.  There’s nothing we can do about that.  It was manufactured 13 years ago, it gets crappy mileage, and that’s that.

If I have a sudden bout of guilt, and sell the Jeep over the mileage issue, what have I accomplished?  The Jeep still exists, whether I’m driving it or someone else is.  It’s just now getting crappy mileage for someone else.  The bottom line is that someone is going to get 13 mpg in this thing, whether it’s me or the kid down the street.

The inescapable point here is that selling this Jeep does nothing for the environment.  The only way to end its reign of terror over Mother Earth is to put it down.  Destroy it, so no one drives it again.

So, let’s go all “Cash for Clunkers” on it, destroy the engine, and buy a more fuel efficient car.  A gas guzzler is off the road, and I’m all planet-friendly now.

Or am I?

If I destroy this Jeep, I now have to go buy a new car.  That car might get better mileage, but it has to be manufactured, transported, and sold, and the environmental costs of that are huge.

This is the dirty little secret of Cash for Clunkers – the resources necessary to build a car are fairly astonishing.  Yes, Obama got 665,000 gas guzzlers off the road, but what no one talks about is that he created a market for 665,000 new cars, with all the environmental costs associated with that.  By throwing away 665,000 functioning cars and replacing them with new ones, we essentially re-manufactured 665,000 cars.  We built each one of them all over again.

(Yes, I realize there were other reasons behind Cash for Clunkers.  But I’m just talking about the environment, for the moment.)

(And – while this may be a little off-topic – some of those cars were very awesome and still had perhaps decades of productive use left in them. Perfect example: my buddy Dave posted about this sweet BMW 7-series, destined for the scrap heap.  If you love the Earth, I defy you to tell me how throwing this car away is a net positive, all costs considered.)

“So buy a used car!,” you say.  “That way the manufacturing cost is already incurred!”  It doesn’t matter.  If I buy a used car, that means someone else doesn’t have that used car, which means they have to buy another car.  And so on.  Eventually, this trickles up to someone, somewhere standing in a automotive showroom shelling out money for 3,000 pounds of gleaming steel, rubber, and glass.  It may be multiple levels removed, but a used car purchase almost always creates a need for a new car purchase.

So, is the environmental drawback of my 13 mpg Jeep offset by the fact that it keeps the world from having to manufacture yet another car?  To destroy it only creates the need for another car, and the automotive industry is only too excited to fill that need. And do we really need another car in the world?

The rootless world of the super-rich: Interesting article about how the really rich live these days.

Once upon a time, the rich were rooted. They had big estates in the country. They were chairmen of local charities; they hosted the summer fête. Today, they are rootless – international nomads forever in search of fertile ground in which to sow the seeds of another bumper financial harvest.

[…] "That’s one of the problems we have," says Trevor Abrahmsohn, head of Glentree International, a firm of estate agents that specialises in upscale houses in the area. "For a lot of people, this is their third or fourth home and sometimes they lose interest. They can’t be bothered to live here and they can’t be bothered to sell."

A commenter in the Reddit thread made a really interesting point:

The article is about how wealth used to be land-based — and, basically, hereditary — and is now pretty much free of geographical basis.

It’s an interesting concept – wealth is no longer tied to land.  Land no longer confers status, and is no longer the preferred investment to tie capital up in.

Africa’s Forever Wars: Why the Continent’s Conflicts Never End: This article paints a sad, sad picture of Africa’s descent into bloody conflicts that have no purpose and no winners, typified by brutal leaders who seem bent on nothing but destruction.

[Former rebel and current Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s] words seem downright noble compared with the best-known rebel leader from his country today, Joseph Kony, who just gives orders to burn.

Even if you could coax these men out of their jungle lairs and get them to the negotiating table, there is very little to offer them. They don’t want ministries or tracts of land to govern. Their armies are often traumatized children, with experience and skills (if you can call them that) totally unsuited for civilian life. All they want is cash, guns, and a license to rampage. And they’ve already got all three. How do you negotiate with that?

The short answer is you don’t. The only way to stop today’s rebels for real is to capture or kill their leaders. […]

The author argues that these people aren’t fighting for anything.  They don’t want to rebuild a country or improve the lives of their people.  They simply want brutal power over whatever they can get their hands on.

I’ve become awfully smitten with the TNT series Leverage.  It’s a dramedy about a team of five con artists who play Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and powerful and returning money to those they’ve wronged (“we provide…leverage,” Timothy Hutton says in the title sequence).

I figured out why I like it so much: it’s the re-incarnation of The A-Team.

• The team consists of five people with interesting inter-relationships.  Some like each other, some don’t.  The banter between them is highly entertaining.
• They gallivant around the country helping people who have been wronged, operating outside the law.
• Every episode is self-contained.  We’re introduced to the person who needs help, and we spend the episode resolving their problems.  The ending is always neatly-tied up.   I like how there’s never any explanation of how the troubled soul found the team, they just did.
• It’s light as a feather.  No one dies.  There’s no moral ambiguity.  Guns are rarely fired. If they are, no one actually gets shot.
• The way they solve problems is completely ridiculous and stretches the bounds of believability past the breaking point, but it’s done in such an entertaining way, you just don’t care.
• There are usually two or three plot holes in every episode big enough to drive a truck through.

The team is well-balanced:

• Nate Ford, Mastermind.  He used to be an investigator for an insurance company, until that company denied treatment for his dying son.  His son died, his marriage fell apart, and he developed a drinking problem.  He’s the de-facto leader of the group. 
• Sophie Devereaux, Grifter.  An aspiring actress who is inexplicably horrible on-stage, but can assume any identity with any accent and mannerism.  She and Nate have an unspoken…thing.
• Parker, Theif.  An abused child who apparently blew up her own home, she’s a master thief who can get in or out of any security system, pick any lock, and lift any item you’re carrying practically just by looking at you.  She’s socially awkward in the extreme, and constantly says the wrong thing.
• Alec Hardison, Hacker.  He’s black, which is interesting for a hacker.  He’s also an epic wiseass, but he can get into any network, hack any gadget with zero prep time, and usually create a technological solution for any problem.  He has a major crush on Parker.
• Elliot Spencer, Hitter.  A martial arts and military expert and the show’s resident hearthrob.  He can kick anyone’s ass, decisively.  The fight sequences are extremely well done.

What makes me laugh in every episode is the bickering among the members of the team.  Elliot and Hardison are very funny together, with Elliot playing exasperated straight-man to Hardison’s never-ending stream of complaints.  Nate tries to manage everyone, Sophie plays mother hen, and Parker will chime in every once in a while with something so off the wall it stops everyone dead in their tracks.

The cons they run are sometime ridiculous, sometimes extraordinary.  Some episodes will be fairly realistic, while others border on slapstick and are just a framework on which to hang witty dialogue and funny situations.  At times, the show seems to be almost poking fun at itself, blatantly daring you to call BS on it.  At any given time, you’re not quite sure exactly how the con works, but you find out in the end, often by way of flashbacks to events they didn’t show you earlier.

Leverage is comfort food.  I know that I can watch the episodes out of order without missing anything, and the single episode I watch will be entertaining all by itself.  There are some continuing plotlines and story arcs, but nothing you can’t pick up.

Give it a try sometime.  You don’t have to watch the series from scratch – just pick any episode and go.  Netflix has every episode available for streaming, and TNT has a bunch available at their site as well.

And if you’re ambitious, head out to Portland for the official convention.

I don’t want to get too political, but here’s my feeling on the process Congress is going through right now to get this health care bill passed.

This is a huge bill, both in raw dollars and in the way it will change the relationship of the citizen to the state.  It’s probably one of the most far-reaching bills in the history of American legislation.  It’s epic.  This isn’t a small regulatory issue.  They’re not re-naming an airport, or deciding to make a new national park.  No matter what side of this issue you’re on, we can all admit that this is the biggest thing Congress will have done in decades, save perhaps the decision to go to war with Iraq (and even that’s debatable).

You don’t pass something like this by the skin of its teeth. This is not something you kick and scratch to get 51% of votes on.  If you do get 51%, remember that there’s still 49% of legislators that hate it.  And for something this massive, 49% is a lot.

When a church wants to hire a new pastor, they have a vote of the members.  Our church requires a two-thirds majority to move forward, but if the vote comes back less than 90%-ish (especially for a senior pastor), we’ll usually voluntarily pass and keep looking.  The pastor is that important to a church, that we just can’t afford to have one-third of the congregation upset with the choice, even if we technically got the two-thirds vote we need.

Same thing with this health-care bill.  To say nothing of the public opposition , Congress is completely changing the nature of the government by moving forward on the slimmest of margins.  This is too big of a bill, and too important of an issue, to disregard the 49% of legislators who hate it.

But, alas, when has Congress done the right thing?  The Republicans won’t let the Democrats have any victory on anything until November, and the Democrats know this, so they’re going to push this thing through with the justification that this is their only shot to get it in.

I just read that the Democratic Party have announced they have the 216 votes they need.  It literally came down to a single vote.  Why don’t I feel good about this?

So, I saw Avatar the other night.  I was finally prompted to go because it’s coming out on DVD in about a month, so I figured this was my last chance to catch it in the theater.  Alec came with me, though he had already seen it. I was mildly disappointed that I couldn’t see it in 3D – that version had already left the theater.

I enjoyed it, though it wasn’t as Earth-shattering as many made it seem.  The plot was about as clichéd as they come – there wasn’t one bit of original plotting in the entire film.  As my friend Joe pointed out, about 30 minutes in, you knew exactly how the rest of the film was going to go.

Plot criticisms aside, however, the CGI was astonishingly good, the action was thrilling, and the little details of the film were extremely creative.  I loved Steven Lang as the fantastically evil Colonel Quaritch – I hope I can look that good at 57-years-old.

There have been criticisms of Avatar on both political and religious grounds.  I was interested in seeing if any of them hold water, but I come away convinced that the film is just not that big of a deal.

Many have said it’s anti-business or anti-capitalist.  I don’t see it.  It’s anti-evil business, but so am I.  Aren’t we all?  The company portrayed in the movie is irredeemably horrible, and I believe that there are real-life companies that have done things on a similar scale.  In particular, the actions of the some of the oil and chemical companies in Africa have been pretty evil.  But this doesn’t indict all companies.  I own a company, and I’m confident in saying we’re not evil.  Furthermore, I believe that 99% of the companies on Earth are run by good people with the best of intentions.  But I also believe there are some pretty greedy people out there that will do anything for a buck.  Those folks are the ones stereo-typed by Avatar, and rightfully so.

Did the film portray primitivism as more appealing that the technology-dominated society we live in now?  Yeah, it probably did.  But that’s a fantasy.  I’m sure some people watching the movie were suddenly disgusted by their decadent lifestyle and were smitten with the idea that they could live in the wild, in harmony with nature.  I’m also sure these same people checked their Blackberry for messages as soon as they left the theater, and went home to their 55-inch plasma TVs.  If Avatar drives you to give up everything to live in the wild, fantastic – more power to you, I guess.

The religious community (Christian fundamentalists, mainly) has complained about the portrayal of the the spiritualism practiced by the native people of Pandora.  Again, I just don’t see this as a valid issue.  I’m a Christian myself, but I realize that other religions exist, and have been portrayed in film since the medium was born.  This was just another portrayal of another type of religion.  I don’t think anyone is more likely to go worship a tree after seeing Avatar, so how is this any different from portraying any other religion on film?

So, there you have it.  I enjoyed the film, but it was nothing but a grand cinematic fantasy.  I really don’t feel it had any larger point or message worth debating.  It was a sci-fi action movie, nothing more.

Is Enron Overpriced?: This was the 2001 Fortune article that started the Enron downfall.  Bethany McLean simply asked why Enron was trading so high.  This was the beginning of the end for the company, and it led to her book and documentary entitled “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.”

This excerpt is telling:

Start with a pretty straightforward question: How exactly does Enron make its money? Details are hard to come by because Enron keeps many of the specifics confidential for what it terms "competitive reasons." And the numbers that Enron does present are often extremely complicated. Even quantitatively minded Wall Streeters who scrutinize the company for a living think so. "If you figure it out, let me know," laughs credit analyst Todd Shipman at S&P. "Do you have a year?" asks Ralph Pellecchia, Fitch’s credit analyst, in response to the same question.

I know from watching the movie, that virtually no one – not even employees – really understood just exactly what the company was doing or was supposed to be doing.  That’s never a good sign.

Rielle Hunter on Edwards: ‘I Know He Loves Me’: The understatement of the year.  John Edwards wanted Rielle Hunter to get an abortion, because of the timing…

"He … always said that he would support whatever decision I made," Hunter told GQ. "But I believe on some level he was hoping that I would get an abortion. Because he didn’t — he wasn’t happy about the timing. Which is understandable. He was married and running for president."

Yeah, I gotta think that knocking someone up while you’re (1) married, and (2) running for president, might present a small problem in timing.