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People who know me claim (erroneously), that I’m prone to hyperbole, which is ridiculous.  However, I do want to make this one, modest claim:

Arrested Development is the funniest show in the history of all television.

I kid you not.  It’s redefined comedy for me.  I want to take this moment to apologize for not watching it when it was on.  I’ve made a huge mistake.

I just finished watching the entire series on Hulu.  I started three months or so ago, and worked through every one of the 53 episodes, finishing up tonight.  I’m so sad that it’s over, but so happy I finished it.

Here’s what made it so utterly brilliant.

• The intricacy of the plotting within episodes.  Episodes would begin with a bunch of random gags, only to have them all come together 20 minutes later in some massive orgasm of comedy.
• The intricacy of the plotting between episodes.  Characters and situations would come back again and again.  Gags would sometimes be set-up many, many episodes before they were finally delivered.  The bits about Annyong and Ann towards the end of the series were just brilliant.
• The in-jokes.  The chicken dance (”Has anyone in this family ever actually seen a chicken?”), “I’ve made a huge mistake,” Gob’s use of “The Final Countdown,” etc.  There’s a good list here.
• “Intertextuality and reflexivity” as Wikipedia calls it.  I couldn’t put my finger on this, and I can’t really explain it, so go read their description.  It’s kind of a subtle, indirect breaking of the fourth wall in a holistic sense.
• The guest stars.  What other series could bring Carl Weathers in for a couple episodes and make it funny as hell?  Mixing Judge Reinhold with William Hung?  Richard Belzer as both himself and Detective Munch on different episodes?  Zach Braff, Charlize Theron, Amy Poehler, Henry Winkler, Scott Baio — it became obvious that guesting on the show was the “in” thing to do.
• Ron Howard’s narration.  He was especially funny when acted self-aware about the series and his role in it.
• The acting — it was pitch perfect.  There was no weak spot in the entire cast.

Do yourself a favor — go over to Hulu and just start watching.  Without commercials and the end credits, episodes are only about 20 minutes, so it’s not a huge time commitment.

The very first episode will hook you just as soon as Lindsey sees some guy on the gay protest boat wearing a blouse like hers and you find out how it got there.  Trust me on this.

This is one of the more amazing things I’ve ever seen.  Just keep zooming out.

It’s Tristan da Cunha, a dependency of St. Helena (which is a territory of the United Kingdom). It’s commonly understood to be the most remote, inhabited place on Earth.  Population 270-ish, all of whom share just seven last names.

It’s an archipelago.  One of the islands in the group is officially called “Inaccessible Island,” if that tells you anything.

Living there might be scary:

Health care is free, but, with just one resident doctor from South Africa and five nurses, the delivery and surgery are limited and serious injury can mean necessitating sending signals to passing fishing vessels, so that the injured person can be transferred to Cape Town.

Found via this Reddit post, which has some interesting commentary, including this gem:

wtf, no street view?

USA Today reports on a Gallup poll which confirms what I already knew: religion is really dying off.  Consider:

• 67% of respondents think that religious influence is declining in the U.S.
• This number was higher among people who regularly attend church: 74%
• Only 53% of respondents hold that religion “can answer all or most of today’s problems”
• 28% say that religion is “largely old-fashioned and out of date.”

The Internet has given rise to a huge atheistic revival.  Atheists used to kind of hide out on the fringe, but now they’re “out and proud” and trying to recruit.  They used to just be content with quietly thinking religious people were fools, but now they’re actively trying to convince and convert.  Religion, they hold, is no longer harmless — it is contributing to the decline of civilization and must be eradicated.

There’s a term for it — “evangelical atheism.”  Soon, I wonder if we’ll have atheist missionaries traveling to remote parts of the world trying to get indigenous people to drop their religious beliefs in favor of, well, no belief at all.

And, it’s worth mentioning, that this is their right.  It’s an opposing viewpoint, and they have just as much right to promote their cause, recruit for it, and defend it as anyone else.

What I find interesting in the Christian reaction to atheism is the fear of non-belief.  As Christians, we’re fine with Muslims and Hindus and such because we’ve seen this before.  But someone who believes in nothing?  That throws a lot of Christians for a loop.  We’re prepared for people who believe in something different, but where do we even start with something who rejects all belief?  We’re often quite threatened by it.  The existence of an atheist doesn’t just call into question our beliefs — it indicts the very concept of belief.

There’s a longer post in me about why I am a Christian.  Suffice it to say that I’ve been through a crucible of sorts with atheism.  It’s a logically seductive proposition, for sure.  However, I have just as many questions with it and see just as many flaws in it as an atheist does with Christianity.  I came out of this crisis of faith as a stronger Christian than when I went in.

But that’s a post for another day.

(As an aside, Reddit has a large community of atheists.  They’re extremely smart, active, and informed — I’ve seen a number of people try to engage them in debate, only to get smacked silly.  Eleven months ago, I became a member of Reddit just to post this comment. The 187 points I got for it was pretty gratifying.)

(And if you’re an atheist tempted to comment here, please read the post carefully before starting a fire.  I really doubt I’ve written anything here that you’d disagree with.)

(Note: This post was originally made in October 2004 to an earlier incarnation of this site.  It was good enough to recover from the Internet Archive and re-post.)

What is the inherent value of downtown? Is there one, or are downtown areas just antiquated leftovers of yesteryear?

I come to this question through a strange route. Bear with me –

I love downtowns.  Joe and I were in Chicago a couple of months ago for a workshop, and I just couldn’t get enough of downtown. Michigan Avenue, Lakeshore Drive, the Sears Tower – I could just walk around downtown Chicago forever.

It’s the same way with New York. My wife is from the East Coast, so I’ve been to Manhattan twice. I love everything about it – all the sounds, all the buildings, all the people. Burned into my mind is the view down Central Park West with a solid wall of apartment buildings on the right, and Central Park on the left. There’s an energy to it that I can’t describe.

I love the downtown area in my beloved Sioux Falls as well. It’s not as big, but it’s beautiful, safe, nice to walk around, etc. My office is on the north side, and sometimes I’ll walk across downtown to a grocery store on the other side to get some trail mix in the middle of the day. I love how…busy it is. We have a small financial district on the corner of 9th and Phillips, and our own little “Miracle Mile” in the 200 block of South Phillips. It’s not New York, but it’s ours and I like it.

However, downtown Sioux Falls has what I think is an inherent limitation: no highway access. To get to downtown Sioux Falls you have to fight your way down your choice of surface streets: Minnesota, Cliff, 10th, 6th, etc.

This is in contrast to other Midwestern cities. I-35W dead-ends in downtown Minneapolis. I-90 goes right through downtown Chicago. And it’s not just big cities. Downtown Omaha is bi-sected by 680. I-29 runs just to the west of Downtown Sioux City – pick your off-ramp, and you’re right there.

Is this a fatal limitation? I don’t know, but I think it has an effect. Could you retrofit interstate access to Sioux Falls downtown? Probably not. It’s as far removed from any of the interstates as possible. (For those not from here – Sioux Falls is bordered on the north by I-90, the west by I-29, and the south and east by the I-229 spur. Downtown is smack in the middle.)

So, this got me thinking: could you move downtown? Not move what’s there now, but could you designate an undeveloped area of the city as the “New Downtown” and institue zoning ordinances to encourage the grow of another urban area?

For Sioux Falls, I was thinking that the area just west of I-29 out by the Russell Ave. hotels would work fine. Across the interstate from the Ramkota Inn, just north of Southeast Technical Institute. It’s relatively undeveloped, it’s right on a nice curve in I-29, and it’s just one or two miles south of I-90. I have pleasant visions of a downtown area springing up there, with tall buildings bordering I-29 – a perfect northern gateway to Sioux Falls.

But – and here’s my main point – why would you want to do this? Can anyone state, in clear terms, the reasons for wanting to encourage the growth of another downtown area? Put another way, what inherent benefits does downtown provide?

Like I said, I love downtown, but I’m, at a loss to figure out why you’d want to build another one. There are drawbacks: no parking, limited space to build, traffic congestion, etc. To offset these, are there advantages?

I can think of one: limited sprawl. I get tired of driving further and further into the country and still not getting away from unspeakably boring strip malls and their gaping, optimistic parking lots. They have no character, no soul. Downtown areas have at least somewhat interesting architecture and they’re more respectful of space.

But that one advantage has a mountain of drawbacks to scale before I can say that we should create a new downtown for reasons other than urban sentiment.

We have downtown areas today because they’ve been around for years. They were created back in the Industrial Revolution because communication and transportation were limited, so the businesses of a city needed to be close together. But with communication today, we don’t need to be in the same country to work together, much less the same city block.

In searching for the value of downtown, I stumbled across a paper called (wait for it) “The Value of Downtown (pdf).” It was written by Todd Litman from the Victoria Transport Policy Institute in British Columbia. While it’s not an in-depth study, he summarizes some good points:

Many activities are most efficiently performed in downtowns because so many important resources are available within convenient walking distance. You can run several errands within a few blocks that would otherwise require several vehicle trips. Downtowns usually contain more commercial space and greater diversity of activities than other commercial centers in the region.

Downtowns typically contain major financial and legal services, such as banks and law offices, and government offices such as city halls, courts and municipal departments.

These businesses attract support services, such as office supply and computer stores, and the concentration of employees in turn attracts coffee shops, restaurants and retail shops. Many centers are also entertainment and arts districts, and increasingly residential developments are located in or adjacent to downtown.

But still, what we’re looking at here are “legacy” tenants – business who are downtown because they’ve always been there: banks and law firms, mainly. Do they seek downtown space for practical benefits? Or because it’s just…traditional? Is there even a cachet value in being downtown?

And if we take away the “anchor” tenants of a downtown, all the support services go with them. When the banks and law firms leave, so do the restaurants and the dry cleaners. They’re parasitic businesses in the sense that they follow the big fish around, so they didn’t really choose to go downtown just like an ant doesn’t choose to come to your picnic – he just has to go where the food is.

What I’m seeing is a lot of sentiment for downtowns, but not a lot of practical benefits that lead me to believe that we’d do things that same way again if we had the choice.

Consider this: if downtown Chicago was leveled tomorrow – completely wiped out; gone – would it be rebuilt? Or would the former tenants move out to the suburbs where there’s more room for parking and the office is closer to the employees’ homes. Would their downtown locations become just a fond memory of a more traditional, but inefficient, time?

So, again, I wonder: are downtowns still valuable? Or are they around just because they’ve been with us for years? Are they the 1960s-era IBM mainframes of urban planning?

If we had the chance to do it again, would we?

(The title of this post is a line from Petula Clark’s 1964 hit: “Downtown“. The images at the top and bottom of the post — of Chicago and New York respectively — are taken from Wikipedia.  The new York image is courtesy of David Iliff.)

(Note: this post was original made in November 2007 to a collaborative blog run by a friend.  That blog appears to have gone offline, thus the repost here.)

There needs to be a certification process for eco-friendly families. Al Gore tells me the planet is dying, so he needs to follow that up with an objective standard of when I’m doing enough to save it.

The Barker clan is a family of five. I think we’re reasonably eco-friendly.

• We recycle everything
• All the bulbs in our house are CFLs
• Both our vehicles get 22+ m.p.g.
• We don’t over-consume — my wife lives by Oprah’s motto of “Wear it out, or do without.”

But how do we know if this is enough? How can I step back and say with confidence, “I am part of the solution, rather than part of the problem”? Frankly, I don’t know if what I’m doing is enough. I think we’re better than most of our peers, but would Al look at our household and approve? Would he say, “If only everyone did at least this…”

To this end, I want a certification process. I want a clear, objective standard with which I can compare my family and work toward if we don’t measure up.

I need all the tree-hugging groups to come together and work out a scale for a “Green Household”. Give me multiple levels. “Green Household, Level 1,” for example, might have the following requirements.

• All bulbs in your house are replaced with CFLs
• All vehicles in your house get more than 20 m.p.g. (which effectively rules out full-size SUVs)
• You have a programmable thermostat
• You have replaced your furnace filter in the last 12 months
• You have wrapped your water heaters in insulating material
• You recycle all disposable plastic
• Your water heaters are set a maximum of X degrees

Consider if 80% of households in America became a Green Household at Level 1. The improvement would be massive.

The levels could scale up from there. For example, Level 5 might include things like:

• You consume no meat (cows fart methane, it turns out)
• You refrain from using your car three days out of the week
• Your car gets 40+ m.p.g.
• You have planted at least five trees in the last 12 months

This wouldn’t be for everyone, but I know some people who would find the prospect of measuring their sacrifice against that standard downright seductive.

This would have to be voluntary. There can be no independent authority that comes to your house and checks everything out. But when I feel like I’ve acheived Level 1, I go to some Web site, register and pay a $5 fee to cover expenses, then I get a couple bumper stickers and another sticker for the window of my house.

This has two benefits:

1. It gives us something to work towards. I still think there’s a lot of confusion about exactly what we need to be doing to save the planet. Paper or plastic? I still don’t know, to be honest. Everyone has a different plan of action. Who’s right?
2. It gives someone an easy way to show that they care enough about the planet to work towards something. If I’m sportin’ my “Green Level 1″ bumper sticker, it says that I cared enough to find the standard, evaluate my behavior against that standard, and perhaps make a few changes to achieve that standard.Sadly, in a lot of social circles, worrying about the planet is considered a very “Democratic” or “Clintonian” thing to do. I’d like a nice, subtle way to show that my politics and caring about the planet are not mutually exclusive.

I could see this getting pushed in the school system a lot. If his teacher got my son all excited about earning this achievement, it would be a motivator for me to make the changes necessary to do it. Call it a merit badge for the entire house.

I’m not an eco-warrior. I’m a suburban dad who’s a little confused about what he should be doing and concerned enough about it to want to know that he’s doing enough.

Al Gore bums me out. He keeps telling me the planet is dying, and next time he does, I want to be able to relax and know that I’m doing enough to save it. To that end, give me a clear bar that I can jump over.

In the end, I just want absolution. Give me a way to achieve that.

(Note: this post was original made in March 2008 to a collaborative blog run by a friend.  That blog appears to have gone offline, thus the repost here.)

I have to get something off my chest: I am so tired of people blaming their deliberate bad acts on “poor judgment.”  Today, John Edwards admitted to having an extramarital affair.  In a statement, he said;

In 2006, I made a serious error in judgment and conducted myself in a way that was disloyal to my family and to my core beliefs.

No, no, no — you did not make a “serious error in judgment.”  You did something deliberately unethical in the hopes you wouldn’t get caught.

“Poor judgment” implies that, at the time, you thought what you were doing was acceptable.  It implies that you exercised some judgment, deemed that your actions were okay, but later realized this was not so.  In these cases, you can say you exercised “poor judgment.”

But, at no time did John Edwards ever think what he was doing with Rielle Hunter was okay.  He can’t look back on this and legitimately say, “Yeah, I just judged that one wrong.”  That’s akin to trying to blow this off as a misunderstanding, or trying to imply that his perceptions were different back then, and he shouldn’t be judged in the current light.

No — John Edwards f*cked around on his wife.  He did it willfully, and he knew damn well at the time that what he was doing was wrong.  His only “judgment” was whether or not he thought he was going to get caught.

Rant over.

I’ve always liked Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame.  What started as a simple hosting gig for him turned into a mission, really.  He’s said many times that he feels a real kinship with the people who do the dirty jobs, and that people who don’t take them for granted way too much.

His latest project is mikeroweWORKS.com.  Click through and watch the mission statement.  It’s 9 minutes, 44 seconds out of your life, but it’s totally worth it.  It’s Mike Rowe without a hint of sarcasm, but every bit as interesting and compelling as when he’s on TV.

His basic premise is that “working the trades” has been villified.  Everyone wants to go to college, because working as a plumber or a carpenter or an ironworker is beneath them.  He’s creating this site as a community and an advocate for people considering going to trade school to learn a skill.  He’s promoting the idea of work — not “9-to-5 in an office” work, but “get your hands dirty and actually build something” work.

I read an article some time ago — I absolutely forget where — that said we, as parents, should not encourage our children to go to college above all else.  There apparently is a type of person for whom college is not the solution.  There are people who should go to trade school and learn a manual skill.

The problem is that this idea has been downplayed for years.  You “settle” for trade school.  You “aspire” to college.

Mike Rowe makes a heck of a case that we need to change our attitude in this regard. This country needs more plumbers.  It needs more concrete workers.  It needs more electricians.  It needs more people to do the work that cannot be offshored to India.

Sadly for me, the last thing this country needs is more Web developers.  Hell, there’s probably a guy in Mumbai doing my job right now.

Aaron Mentele forwarded a meme.  The rules, copied from his post:

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged

The topic is “7 things you wish you didn’t know about me.”  Here goes.

1. I love Justin Timberlake.  Seriously.  I think he’s an amazing artist and gets too much crap from haters.
2. When my grandfather was 19-years-old, he was translating Bibles in Kenya.  He and my grandmother had three children deep in Africa, did a lot of good there, and lived to tell about it.  Knowing this fact and comparing it against what I was doing when I was 19 really, really depresses me.
3. I am a born-again Christian, which I find harder and harder to talk about every day I spend on the Internet.  There’s a tide of atheism rolling in that’s getting tougher and tougher to hold your head above these days.  I have a lot of guilt over this.
4. At one time, I was a Webmaster of “the biggest James Bond site on the Internet” — Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (no link, ’cause it’s no longer around…).  It was really big — we interviewed directors of the films, we hob-nobbed with the writer of the novels, we got invited to the film premiers, United Artists linked to our site from jamesbond.com, etc.  While I love that this happened, it feels really juvenile to talk about.
5. I have very little life outside my job.  Every day, I find it harder and harder to relate to anything that doesn’t have something to do with the business.
6. I find Guitar Hero incredibly repetitive and boring beyond about five minutes.
7. I hate dogs.  Absolutely loathe them.  When a dog licks me, I have to restrain myself from breaking its damn neck.

I send this to:

• Carla White
• Tim Schoffelman
• Chris Lukenbill
• Ben Bertrand

I’ll try to think of three more.  It’s Christmas Eve.  Lighten up.

I’m back to blogging again for some reason. Not sure why, with Gadgetopia, Twitter, and Facebook, but I keep finding myself wanting to say things that just don’t fit anywhere else.

So, anyway.  I’m back.  Whoop-dee friggin’ do.