Does anyone reading this still play any of the Sid Maier Civilization games, or even just have them on their computer?

I posted earlier today about my science & technology course. The first lecture back in January, I'm going to be talking about the industrial revolution and the Needham Question. Crudely put, the Needham Question asks "why didn't the industrial revolution happen in China?" Slightly less crudely put, the Needham Question asks, "why did an industrial revolution happen in England?" Less crudely put than that, the question involves me yammering on about coal deposits and opium and counterfactuals for three hours or so. (There is a twenty minute break.)

So I thought I'd use Civilization as a way of getting in to the question. Not just because you can play out alternate histories where the Sioux get the bomb and the Mongols discover the secret of cheeseburgers, but because I figure I can use the Civ tech tree as a metaphor for technological development, contingency, and determinism. What I'd like to have is a couple of screen shots from Civilization that I can use for slides. I especially want one of the discovery screens that says "Chinese Wise Men Discover the Secret of Industrialization" or however it's worded. But I could also use a handful of images of, say, ironclads putting the hurt on phalanxes, or really anything from the game. I've Googled around and found various screen shot collections but none of the discovery screen for some reason. (Did they drop it from the later versions? I thought I remembered it from Civ 3 but maybe my memory is playing tricks on me.)

If you're wondering why I don't just dig up a copy, reinstall the damn thing, and get the screen shots myself--well, that's a little like asking a former junkie to throw together a heroin kit for old times sake. Anyway, I can certainly get by without the screen shots, or with ones I pull together from the web. But if you were looking for an excuse to kill 36 hours over the holidays...

I am not getting enough sleep.

Just taught my last class of the year. It was about THE FUTURE!

Time to kick back and take it easy! grade this stack of papers! have and raise a child!

I'd better talk about 1998, because I'm three years into my memories of grad school, and I've managed to say nothing about school itself. ( Here goes. )

Don't forget: Doyle's, 3484 Washington Street in JP, tomorrow night at 7.

This is supposed to be a memory from 1996, but it needs a memory from 1994 for context. Or maybe I just want to brag/confess. ( Read more... )

...

Now here's a random 2005 moment for you, no extra charge. In fact, this took place just today, though it does have a bit of an early 90s feel to it. I got an ice cream this afternoon at J.P. Licks. When I got to the counter, a middle-aged woman was shouting at the cashier that one of their flavor names was offensive. "We are a multi-racial family, and we find that completely inappropriate!" But I didn't catch which flavor it was, and I'm dying to know. They all seem so innocuous. Lumpy Primate? Black and White Malted? Cow Tracks? Rum and Raisin?

Another mysterious but very J.P. moment, come to think of it: I walked by a cop today giving a driver a ticket. The woman getting the ticket was screaming at the (male) cop, "I'M A LESBIAN! A LESBIAN! A DYKE!"

Ok, one more. This was a few weeks ago, and it actually took place in Allston rather than J.P. But it stuck in my head, and the theme of angry women continues. Woman on cell phone, yelling well above the din of a coffee shop: "LET ME TALK TO HER! LET ME TALK TO HER! CHRIST, WILL YOU LET ME TALK TO HER?" She then hangs up the phone and says calmly to the woman behind her in line, "I wish I'd never made contact with my biological family."

Edit: I got it! The new wasabi-flavored ice cream, Turning Japanese. Seems pretty harmless to me, but that's gotta be it. You can take J.P. Licks out of Jamaica Plain, but you can't take the Jamaica Plain out of J.P. Licks.

Oy, my aching head. I went to Minneapolis this weekend for a business history conference, the aptly-named Business History Conference, actually. I had one very good day there sandwiched by two disappointments. I was giving two talks on Friday: the first as part of a panel on the history of the Bell System, and the second as one of four nominees for the association's big dissertation prize. The first disappointment was that my flight Thursday night was delayed so much that I missed the last connection to Minneapolis and thus my own talk on Friday morning. The good day came after I gave my other talk. It was a plenary session, so basically everyone attending the conference was there, and my talk was probably the very best short summary of my work and its significance that I've done to date. I rocked it. All that night and all the next day, people were coming up to me to rave about how great my project was—and to whisper that it was, they thought, the best of the talks, and that the prize was mine to lose. Which is exactly what I did, so that was the second disappointment.

Ah well. My profile was nicely raised for a few hours at least, and I saw some excellent talks. Plus I got to catch up with some people I rarely see, meet some very smart new people, and have several awkward little moments with folks who've turned me down for jobs in the last two years. I didn't see a lot of Minneapolis, but what I saw was friendly and green. (And it was about twenty degrees warmer than Boston, omg wtf.) There was a Canadian-themed restaurant across the street from the hotel—mounties, moose head, canoes and float planes—which I enjoyed on all seventeen levels of irony and sincerity. And the big reception took place in a gorgeous old flour mill converted into one of those zinc-y museums of industry, complete with multimedia show and breathless tour guide spiels about the awesome destructive power of, well, flour. "And so it was, on that fateful night in 1882, a single blast reduced the flour milling capacity of the entire city of Minneapolis by one-third!"

Other highlights: Dinner with the telephone history mafia. I do feel for all the other people at that restaurant, though, whose romantic evenings were drowned out by three hours of alternating toasts to AT&T and its demise, interspersed with insanely animated and arcane debate over telecom rate structures and long distance-local separations. And then the cool kids' invitation-only party after the awards banquet, where it is possible we took the names of certain leading business historians in vain. As the fun of that wore off and the night rolled on towards dawn, someone came up with the scheme of watching Sideways as a drinking game, complete with all the appropriate wines for every scene. Hence the headache. But that was Saturday night, or at least Sunday morning. Should my skull still be hurting like this?

I usually turn to Cliopatria to keep up to date on campus speech controversies. So I’m surprised that I beat my colleagues there to the following scoop: This past Tuesday, the College Republicans at the University of Connecticut invited Jim Hellwig, better known as face-painted pro wrestler “The Ultimate Warrior” to speak at their school. But students in attendance were shocked, shocked when, instead of comporting himself like a proper professional wrestler, the Ultimate Warrior launched into an angry, incoherent tirade.

Students started heckling Hellwig when his remarks turned (allegedly) racist and homophobic. The Ultimate Warrior (who, you may recall, bested Ravishing Rick Rude in a steel cage match at Summer Slam ’89) only got angrier, and eventually campus security had to shut the event down.

The UConn College Republicans have apologized for the incident, but Warrior (my Chicago Manual tells me it is correct to drop “the Ultimate” after second reference) appears unrepentant. In a memo “from the desk of Warrior,” he dubs the UConn Republicans “spineless,” and calls his critics the “World Class Crew of Crybabies.” (Which is ironic, because I’m pretty sure the WC3 took on the Hart Foundation in Wrestlemania 4.)

(Crossposted to Cliopatria.)

(Edit: David Noon’s Axis of Evel Knievel has the story in more chair-throwing, turnbuckle-smashing, pile-driving detail.)

Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.

My dear, dear friends:

I have been offered and am probably going to accept (pending negotiation of salary details, etc., which is the reason this post is still Friends-only) have now accepted! a tenure track job at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario.

This is wonderful news: it’s a great job at a great school, it’s tenure track, it’s a respected research university, I get to teach grad students, I get to develop one of the first programs in United States Studies in Canada, it means being in the same city as my sister and her family, and far closer to the rest of my family, and all my Toronto friends, than I’ve been in years.

This is terrible news: it means moving away from Boston, and so many of you!

More to come, no doubt, in person and on this LJ, about the decision and what it means, and what you all mean, to me. But, yeah. Big news.

Edit: One of the first U.S. Studies programs—turns out University of Toronto has one too. Grumble, grumble, Torontonians think they're so great... :)

So, as I might possibly have mentioned in this journal already, I graduated! (See icon for robe and funny hat.) Thanks to everybody who traveled from far and wide to mark the occasion (my parents, L's parents, Kofi Annan, princeofcairo, Ali G...) and to everybody who came to my party last week, which raged from about eight pm to midnight and then instantly turned into a pumpkin. Which is actually pretty much how I like it. It was so great to have Mom & Dad here—their only visit to Boston this millenium (they did make it to Amherst for the wedding). My Mom apologized for getting weepy. We're such WASPs. Weepiness is good! It reminds me that this graduation thing might actually have been kind of a big deal. Thanks for everything, everyone.

Another great success was djwilhelm's salon, where a random sample of our generation's greatest minds gathered to discuss the weighty issues of the day. It was a lot of fun, and some of those present may have said something intelligent at one point or another, though alas, nobody was writing anything down, so our genius will be lost to history. The one moment I will remember is when narcissime suggested I do an LJ post about five alternate Harvards, and I said something like, "Five goofball variations on some ridiculous premise seems to have become my thing." And Ken Hite said, quite rightly, "Your thing? [Krusty the Klown voice:] If this is anybody but Avram Davidson, you're stealing my bit!"

Which I shall treasure for a couple of reasons:

1. Because it's actually validating to have someone as cool as Ken Hite acknowledge that I am blatantly ripping him off, occasionally artfully.

2. Because while the geek conversational habit of just tossing out obscure references without stopping to explain them can be deeply irritating if you don't know, for example, who Avram Davidson is (he's a science-fiction author and fabulist whose influence can definitely be seen in Ken's magnificent Suppressed Transmissions), or you don't immediately recognize a line from The Simpsons (Krusty the Klown gets a prank phone call from rival TV host Gabbo. After realizing he's been punk'd, he says, "If this is anybody but Steve Allen, you're stealing my bit!"), it is both pleasing and flattering when you do.

3. Because Ken had no way of knowing that that line from The Simpsons is an old favorite of mine. See, in my Golden Words days (GW = the weekly humor publication at Queen's University), I became keenly aware of the long chain of homage, inspiration, and outright plagiarism that lay beneath each attempt at "original" "humor." I started out a somewhat slavish imitator of the senior writers and cartoonists on the paper, but stayed long enough to be imitated myself. By the time I reached the lofty heights of editor-in-chief, I often responded to cartoon and article submissions with some variation of Krusty's klassic line. "If this is anybody but Joey DeVilla, you're stealing my bit!"

Literature is full of such coincidences, which some love to believe plagiarisms. There are thoughts always abroad in the air, which it takes more wit to avoid than to hit upon.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

We're all part of the great circle of rip-offs, remixes, and pastiches. It's like that Elton John song with the dancing warthogs. Hakuna Matata, baby. You're stealing my bit.

Say, who's that pictured in your LJ icon, robotnik? Why, it's Doctor Robotnik!

DOCTOR

Robotnik.

Get it?