Abandon Text!

My biggest accomplishment this summer -- which certainly wasn't writing, as you can tell by the big gap in the blog -- was to move my mother-in-law from Winston-Salem to a retirement home near to us in the Chapel Hill area. We just finished that process this weekend. Phew.

We sold my mother-in-law's house ourselves, without using a real estate agent. I had a number of motivations:

1. I wanted to save money, and selling a house yourself is worth a lot of money, considering that it's really not that hard.
2. I wanted to sell the house quickly, and selling it ourselves would give us more control over the process.
3. I hate real estate agents. As a consultant who serves primarily sales organizations, I'm normally well-disposed to salesmen of all kinds. I understand how a salesman's knowledge and experience can add value to a transaction. Unfortunately, the real estate business is dominated by a price-controlled racket which grossly overcharges people for things they could do themselves, and which systematically motivates agents to not serve their client's best interests. I have had such consistently bad experience with real estate agents that I consider it karmically necessary to do everything I can to help people avoid them.

So here's a small gift to the world: my short synopsis of what it takes to sell your own house.

1. It's all about the price. It used to be that real estate professionals (realtors, agents, brokers, and appraisers) were the only ones who had really good information on homes. They could charge a premium for that information and the network of relationships that provided it. Those days are now gone, destroyed by the internet. Now a host of online resources make that information available to everyone: online MLS listings, Google searches of web pages, online tax information, instantaneous property appraisals, etc. With so much information available for free, it's unlikely that you're going to score a big premium price on your home; absolutely everyone knows what it's really worth. So, the biggest, most important lesson for selling your house:
1. Know what your house is worth. Get an independent professional appraisal. (You can find an appraiser in the phone book.) Do NOT have a real estate broker do it, even if they offer to do it for free -- they're just trying to get your business, and their interests might taint their appraisal.
2. Accept what you house is worth. I don't care how much money you spent renovating it. I don't care how much it "should" have appreciated in the last ten years. Your house is worth absolutely no more than what it appraised for. Almost universally, that's less money than you hoped it would be worth. Deal with it.
3. Price your house below what it is worth. If you want to sell quickly and efficiently, price it below what it's really worth. You might be tempted to price it higher than it's really worth so you'll have room to make concessions in bargaining. Unfortunately, no one will even bother to look at the house if the price is too high. You will sell much faster and still get the price you want if you price slightly lower than the appraised value.

2. List your house with a discount broker. Most real estate listing agents or brokers will charge a 3% commission to sell your house. That's a lot of money: 3% of a $300,000 house is nine grand. That might seem reasonable, except for the fact that the listing agent does close to nothing at all to earn that money. They put it on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), stick a sign on your front lawn, give you some advice for cleaning up the house, and that's about it. You are the one who has to do the hard work of cleaning up the house, fixing anything that needs fixing, etc. Instead of paying a fat commission to a listing agent, go with a discount broker that will give you an MLS listing for a flat fee of $300 or so. You cand find plenty of them online; we used Bloomkey. You can use some of money you save to price the house a little lower, which will attract interest.
3. Work with buyer's agents. Home buyers do not have to work with a buyer's agent, but most folks still do, and it's hard to buck the system. Some for-sale-by-owner sellers try to shun buyer's agents, hoping to keep all the commission money for themselves. That might work, but I think you can expect to wait a lot longer to sell your home -- the number of buyers who will be a good match for your home, who also don't want to use a buyer's agent, will be quite small. Not only that, anyone who is smart enough to buy a house without a buyer's agent is also smart enough to know they should get to keep that commission money, so the likelihood of saving money is even more remote for the seller. Instead, I recommend welcoming buyer's agents with open arms. In fact, you might offer a slightly higher-than-normal commission to them, say 3.1% instead of 3.0%; that will give them a strong incentive to steer their clients to your house instead of many others. Best of all, the buyer's agents do most of the work when it comes to showing your home; they will do the tours, you just get out of their way.
4. Make your house as perfect as possible (without spending a lot of money.)  Mostly this means:
1. Declutter. Get rid of most of the extra furniture and other stuff -- make the house feel as spacious as possible without feeling empty. Leave enough furniture in place to suggest the way the room could be used, but no more. Empty the closets and storage areas. Think of it as getting a head-start on packing up for moving to your new home. Rent a storage locker or a POD to keep all your extra stuff in.
2. Fix obvious problems.  Make sure all the light switches work, all the doors open smoothly, every sink doesn't drip.
3. Spend reasonably on improvements. Some improvements are relatively inexpensive but make a big difference to how the house shows. Interior and exterior painting is probably the most common. Do NOT spend vast amounts on top-of-the-line carpet or floors. If the carpet is truly hideous, ok, fine, replace it. Remember that your buyer might rip out whatever you put in.
4. Clean, clean, clean. Make the house so spotless it looks like no one actually lives there.  This is the hardest part, especially if you have kids.
5. Leave a few problems. When the house inspector comes to inspect the house for the buyers, he's going to have to find something wrong in order to demonstrate he's doing his job. If you leave a few minor but inconspicuous issues, he'll call out those items on his report. If you fix absolutely everything, he's just going to find more things that aren't real issues for you to fix ("Gee, this wallpaper looks like it's starting to peel…")

5. Get competing offers. If you price the house correctly and list on MLS, you should get several showings in the first week. For both houses we sold ourselves, we got half a dozen showings and two to three offers within three to five days. When you have competing offers, the price of the house can be bid up to the true market value. It also forces the buyers to make up their minds quickly and give you an offer right away, rather than spending weeks shopping around for better deals.
6. Don't be afraid of legal papers. People in the real estate business will try to make the legal paperwork sound intimidating. It's really not that hard:
1. When you list your house, you will need to sign some disclosure forms that say you don't know of anything wrong with your house. The listing service will provide you the forms. Just fill them out and provide them when a buyer asks for them.
2. If you have a mortgage on your house that you need to pay off when you sell your house, just call up your bank and tell them you're selling your home. They will tell you what paperwork, if any, you need to fill out to complete the sale of your home.
3. When you get a offer to buy your house, the buyer's agent will bring you an "Offer to Purchase and Contract." This is the contract that spells out the buyer's promise to buy your house, and your promise to sell it to them. It's almost always a template form filled out by the buyer's agent; it's not terribly complicated and is readable by a non-lawyer. Read it and understand it. If you don't understand anything in it, you can ask your real estate lawyer (see below).
4. Once you've signed a contract, you're done with the hardest part of the paperwork. Hire a real estate lawyer for the rest of it --  you can find one in the phone book or get recommendations from friends. You'll pay the lawyer a few hundred dollars to prepare the deed -- the legal papers that give ownership of the house to the buyers. The lawyer will also review the settlement statement (also called a HUD-1) that spells out all the money that changes hands with the transaction.  The deed and the settlement statement are the only papers you'll need to sign at the closing, unless the buyers' or sellers' banks have other things they want you to sign.
5. Don't forget to keep your MLS listing service in the loop! The rules for MLS listing agents requires them to know what's going on with the sale of your house, to insure the quality of information on the MLS system. That means you need to fax to them the paperwork as it happens -- disclosures, signed purchase agreements, settlement statements, etc. The contract with the listing agent will spell out exactly what you need to send them, and when. You will be hit with nasty penalties if you don't send it in on time.

7. Get help when you need it. There are lots of free or cheap resources available to help you sell your home. Most of the advice you need can be Googled easily. There are books available that spell out everything I've described in more detail. Local "for-sale-by-owner" advertisers will often host evening seminars to teach you what you need to know.

Selling your house will take some time and energy, but it's worth it!

Sad little reminder of our litigious society: this is free advice from a non-lawyer and non-real-estate professional. No warranties are expressed or implied. Don't sue me if this advice doesn't work out for you. If you want to be feel absolutely safe in selling your house and not have to think about it all, hire a real estate agent, you wuss.

We just spent the last five days at Wrightsville Beach. We had a series of small victories:

• Five days on the beach with four adults and five kids, and nobody got severely sunburned. (Well, Aidan got some raccoon-rings under his eyes where he rubbed away the sunscreen, but that had already faded before we even got home.)
  
• Janet scheduled a free day to pack before we left, so she didn't drive herself crazy trying to get everything ready to go.
  
• Both Janet and her sister-in-law Heather are plan-for-everything packers, so between the two of them we lacked for nothing.
  
• The hotel did not have internet access, which was probably a good thing. I had not planned on an unwired vacation, but it wound up being that way. Instead of whiling away my evening hours with my usual techno-geekdom, I read. By the end of the vacation I decided I wasn't reading nearly enough in my ordinary life. Marsha Norman and J.D. Salinger were right: reading is the raw material for writing.
  
• We didn't lose anything. No frantic dashes back to the hotel to find a missing teddy bear or wallet or camera. The only casualty for the trip were my clip-on sunshades, which are now sleeping with the fishes. I needed new glasses anyway.
  
• I planned for a couple free days after we returned, so I could properly recover and do the around-the-house things that needed doing.
  
• I didn't think about work, nor was there any work that needed thinking about. Gosh, what a difference a lack of dread makes.
  
• I normally suffer from vacation anxiety – a free-floating sense of purposelessness and vague discontent that plagues me when I'm removed from my normal environment for no discernable reason. But for some reason, I felt no desire to accomplish anything, nor any sense of "time wasted." I'm told that's what vacations are for: to settle into oneself, to find repose apart from all our patterns. So I got that goin' for me.
  

Today's Wall Street Journal reported that the fugitive Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, the architect of "ethnic cleansing" in the Bosnian War, was finally captured. The fact that he had evaded capture until there was a political power shift in Belgrade should not be surprising – even genocides can cut deals to stay alive. What was truly shocking, though, was where and how he was living: right in the middle of the capitol city of Belgrade, practicing alternative psychiatric medicine in a private clinic. With white hair, a full face-covering beard and thick glasses, he looked more like Santa Claus than a brutal killer of hundreds of thousands. In his identity as "Dr. Dabic," he styled himself as a "Spiritual Explorer," and even gave public lectures on Orthodox meditation and "Human Quantum Energy."

This story is a shoo-in for Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me, the humorous NPR news quiz. I can already hear Peter Siegel: "Now, panelists: what will Radovan Karadzic's next disguise be?" Adam Felber will go on a riff: "I wonder what kind of advice he gave his patients? 'Kill two Croats and call me in the morning.' (One second pause for laughter.) 'No, really, a murderous hatred of Muslims is perfectly normal.'"

I would laugh, but actually it fills me with a murderous rage to see how easily evil can clothe itself with the trappings of spirituality. "Spiritual exploration" is a catch-phrase that I and the Self Knowledge Symposium had used frequently. I would not be surprised if dozens, if not hundreds of people listened to "the good doctor" (as he was sarcastically known during the war) and thought his spiritual pronouncements to be full of wisdom and virtue. What do those people think of his lectures now, once his identify has been revealed?

This kind of story only reaffirms a few principles the SKS has long championed:

1. Talk is cheap. The Devil himself (and Karadzic is as close as you'll get to the Devil himself on this planet) can tell you beautiful lies about spirituality. You can't possibly judge people's virtue or wisdom by what they say. Only by watching how they act can you ascertain their genuine nature. As Augie Turak puts it: "Spirituality today has been slowly drained of its moral dimension. Everybody's paying attention to what they think, how they feel, what they believe, when the only thing that really matters is what they do. The thoughts and feelings and beliefs will all sort themselves out if you pay close attention to how you live."
   
2. Skepticism is mandatory. As Jefferson said, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." If you want to do your own free-wheeling exploration of spirituality, then you need to be on guard against the hucksters who will sell you all kinds of untruths that flatter your ego or soothe your conscience. Now it has been established as fact: that guru or shrink you've been listening to might be a mass murderer in disguise.

The problem with most punditry is that commentators are rarely held accountable to their predictions. By the time events pan out, everyone's lost interest and moved on to new predictions. So, when I make predictions, I try to keep accurate score. (Warning: spoilers follow).

With Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, I correctly predicted that Dr. Horrible would win a compromised victory, one that left him in pain. That one was pretty easy – as I said before, Joss' whole philosophy of story-telling is that pain is the basis for sympathy and human connection. If the main character isn't in pain, we lose interest pretty quickly.

Where I went totally off the rails was in predicting a greater role for Penny in the unfolding of events. I thought she would have some kind of agency in the way things turn out . . . but nope, she was just cannon-fodder. In my defense, a lot of other people had exactly the same critique of Act III: couldn't we have the girl do a little more than just be the passive motivator for the macho-men? But I will let that go . . . for writing seven years of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss deserves an automatic bye on any feminist critiques. Once in a while, a guy deserves to be allowed to write a passive female role.

What also surprised me, but I didn't articulate very clearly in my predictions, was how much Hope got overshadowed by Pain in the conclusion. The structure of the songs and the story suggested a dynamic tension between Penny's world-view (do-gooding is good, what matters is human connection) and Billy's (do-gooding is for saps, what matters is who has the power). The third act doesn't do much to contradict Billy's position; Penny's reward for her do-gooding is to be publically humiliated shortly before she gets killed. I had expected at least one more song from Penny to stake out Hope's position: "All your Power and Domination is bereft of meaning, so who's the sap?" Rather than just falling in love with Penny the object-of-desire, Dr. Horrible could have fallen in love with Penny's virtue, and wished from afar that he could be that way. That would have made the tragedy of Billy's fall more complete, and also perhaps have indicated a path for his eventual redemption in a sequel. Instead, everything about Penny's behavior, right up to her dying words ("Captain Hammer will save us!") confirm that she really is a deluded sap. I think Joss' absurdist philosophy got the better of him, here.

^    ^    ^

At the risk of appearing like a raving fanboy with no life, there's a few more random items I wanted to point out, simply because the begged for someone to notice them:

• In the newscast in Act III, the anchor says, "Next up: who's gay?" This is almost certainly an in-joke referencing Neil Patrick Harris, the actor portraying Dr. Horrible. In 2006, a report circulated in the media that Harris was gay. Harris' response was, essentially: "Yeah . . . so?" He was widely lauded, not so much for coming out (he had been openly gay for years among friends and co-workers) as for refusing to act like it was a big deal. I guess Joss & company thought it deserved to be cataloged among the sins of a media world obsessed with celebrity non-stories.
  
• In the background of Dr. Horrible's lab, there's a model of Serenity, the spaceship from Joss Whedon's earlier TV series Firefly. I'm sure if spent more time watching I would find lots of other in-jokes . . . I'm told there are lots of cameos by friends-of-Joss. Not that I would ever do such a geeky thing, myself . . . I'm just sayin' . . .
  

(Warning: spoilers for Act III of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog follow.)

Man.

I . . . man.

I seriously underestimated Joss' guts when it comes to story-telling. I saw the darkness looming in the story, but I didn't think he could go all the way into Wagnerian tragedy with a premise as silly as "Dr. Horrible." And yet he did . . . and convincingly, too.

I should have known there would be blood. Bad Horse had called for blood repeatedly. It couldn't have been otherwise. And death was really too good for Captain Hammer – he needed to be utterly humiliated for the story arc to complete itself. So the blood had to be Penny's. And Billy's descent into full-bore villainy is seen for the human tragedy it is. Billy's decency never left him – in spite of his rage, he hesitated to pull the trigger on Captain Hammer, even while calling for "no mercy." Horrible's "victory" was achieved, ironically, by his own incompetence at evil – had the freeze ray held a minute longer, or the death ray not blown up in Hammer's hands, things would have turned out very differently. And equally telling that it's Hammer's arrogance (and genuine lack of remorse) that ultimately defeats himself and does in Penny, too. So Horrible stumbles across the threshold into full-bore villainy, more the victim of a corrupt society than a willing agent . . . and we feel, with him, the hollowness of his victory, and ultimately, the complete loss of any feeling at all.

"Feeling" is the real theme of the entire story. Both Billy and Penny show their humanity in their capacity to feel pain, which opens to them the capacity for empathy and connection to other people. Captain Hammer evidently never felt a moment's pain in his whole life . . . making him an arrogant self-serving tool. When Hammer does finally feel pain, his capacity to oppress is completely undone. And only when Billy's capacity to feel is extinguished, numb with grief and horror, can he become truly Horrible.

"Pretending" could contend as the central theme, too. Joss mercilessly pounds on the shallowness and banality of society in the final episode, demonstrating how it hides from inconvenient truths with pasteboard heroes, thin veneers of caring over the power of the status quo. I thought it was a sweet to see Penny sitting in the Coin Wash, obviously waiting for Billy, extra frozen yogurt at the ready, and she asks herself, "Should I stop pretending?" Even at that point she knew she was playing along with something less than genuine, denying her real feelings for Billy in favor of the security of being with the established power of Captain Hammer. She alone had the sense to be mortified by Captain Hammer's speech at the dedication . . . but too late. All that pretending – Hammer pretending to be compassionate, Penny pretending to love him, Billy pretending to be the villain he really wasn't – was what ultimately creates the tragedy.

I love the last cut of the film. We see Dr. Horrible fully realized, his white coat and gloves traded for red and black, walking into his place in the Evil League of Evil . . . but at the very last we cut back to Billy's blog. Billy: still human, still small and alone, calling out to the world from his blog, still a human being. This is "Horrible"'s greatest achievement: to humanize evil, to see the person behind the mask.

The final episode of "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" airs today. My young kids are TV-free, so I won't be able to watch it until late this evening. So . . . how will Act III conclude?

• Were Dr. Horrible an aspiring super-hero, we might anticipate a classic hero conclusion: guy defeats nemesis, guy gets recognition and respect, guy gets girl. But Dr. Horrible isn't a super-hero; he's an aspiring super-villain, and even though he's a sweet guy who is only putatively evil, story-telling conventions can't hand him an unadulterated victory. Besides, that's not Joss' way . . . even in victory, the winner has to be in some pain, or the audience stops caring about them.
  
• On the other hand, I don't think Dr. Horrible can outright lose, either, because as stark as Joss' philosophy is, he still believes in goodness and doesn't want to disappoint his fans. So I think we're looking at a compromised victory for Dr. Horrible.
  
• What kind of victory? Hmmm . . . well, here are some possibilities:
  
  • Dr. Horrible is redeemed. Billy attempts to zorch Captain Hammer during his big date with Penny, but fails, as usual. Captain Hammer reveals himself to be a total tool by the way he humiliates Dr. Horrible, and Penny's sympathies shift to Billy. Bad Horse suddenly shows up, ready to rub out Dr. Horrible for his failures. Dr. Horrible somehow defeats Bad Horse, winning his girl's love but crushing his ambition to be super-villain. This is the way Hollywood would do it, which is why I don't think Joss will do it. Joss will want to keep the premise of Dr. Horrible alive – "nice guy wants to be bad" – and turning him into a superhero just kills the fun.
    
  • Dr. Horrible wins, but Billy gets the girl. Dr. Horrible succeeds in being the villain he always wanted to be, defeating Captain Hammer. But in the process he terrifies Penny. Through a series of quick costume changes Billy manages to "save" Penny from Dr. Horrible. Billy wins the affection of Penny, but she doesn't know he is Dr. Horrible. Now Billy is in a real bind – Bad Horse is on his case to do evil, but he must hide his evil-doing from his love. This seems like a better, more Jossy outcome – the show's premise is preserved, even magnified, letting the main character win and lose all at the same time.
    
  • Penny wins. Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer duke it out to a draw, revealing their true natures to Penny. Penny is both sympathetic and disgusted with both of them, and says as much. Penny is endangered by Bad Horse, and Captain Hammer and Dr. Horrible compete with each other to save her (or, alternatively, they reluctantly join forces to save her, still sniping each other in the margins). In the end Penny is saved, both Hammer and Horrible remain even more themselves, but no one gets the girl. This also has potential, because ever since making Buffy the Vampire Slayer Joss is expected to write empowered women, and he won't want Penny to be anyone's prize to be won.
    

It's always easier to write about pop culture than philosophy . . . so I guess I'll indulge in random analysis of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (as of Acts I and II – caution, spoilers follow.)

• At first it seemed like a totally unique genre-bender: a super-villain story instead of a super-hero story. But in retrospect it seems only natural. The revival of the whole Dark Knight tradition in comics and films shows that the difference between heroes and villains is exceedingly fine. In fact, every superhero franchise in recent memory – Batman, Spider-Man, X-men, Hulk, Dare-Devil, Hellboy, Buffy, Angel – all feel obliged to explore the dark side of their heroes and the moral ambiguity under which they operate. So it seems only a small step to cross the line and start with a "bad guy" with a good nature, instead of a good guy with dark side.
• Even though the tone of "Dr. Horrible" is blessedly silly, I see places where Joss' darker philosophy creeps out. His writing not only manages to make Billy sympathetic, it even makes his philosophy of villainy sympathetic. In the Dr. Horrible universe, the only difference between the "good guys" and the "bad guys" is which ones happen to be in power. In that realm, the super-villain represents the powerless and dispossessed rising up to reclaim their just due, and cast down the smug and corrupt. Neither Captain Hammer nor Dr. Horrible are particularly admirable – both claim to be serving the larger world order, but are ultimately motivated by a desire for personal power and recognition. Only Penny's heartfelt empathy for the world's suffering seems genuinely good . . . but even that is in for a gentle drubbing. When Billy sneers at Penny's quest for petition signatures, I couldn't help but think that Joss was sneering with him. "Bless her heart, she means well . . . but that's not the way the world works." As, indeed, it doesn't – it takes Captain Hammer's political pull to win the building, not Penny's petition drive. Her innocence and goodness, as good as it is, is rooted in her naiveté.
• Neil Patrick Harris plays the introverted geek well . . . almost too well. When Penny approaches him to a get a petition signature, I was expecting the usual "guy makes fawning idiot of himself" routine . . . but what we get is something slightly different. He's interested in pleasing her, but not nearly as interested as he is in not appearing desperate. His attention wanders to his geeky exploit at hand. Even the facial tics . . . boy, he's got weird loner down pat. The effect is interesting . . . we sympathize with him, but we also witness with agonizing frustration how he's missing the human connection. And what ultimately redeems him for us is when his humanity pops out naturally and unbidden, totally outside of his consciousness. He doesn't even know how decent a human being he is.
• The only reason the Big Bad of the show is "Bad Horse" is to give Joss an excuse to make a silly song in a Western style. Showoff.
• I gotta hand it to Joss for his pioneering use of contemporary language. Anyone who can use the word "dork" in a heartfelt song is on the cutting edge.

   

I keep vacillating between two positions:

1. Busy is good. Having lots to do is a blessing -- it means you have lots of opportunity to make a difference, and lots of people wanting you to do it. Nothing like the urgency of time constraints to focus the mind and get things done. All the people I admire, including the creative geniuses, work like dogs. Protestant work ethic rules.
2. Busy is bad. The constant sense of not having enough time (something I share with practically everyone else I know) is symptomatic of a life that is out of balance. If you feel like you never have the time to do what's most important, your priorities may not be in order. Or, perhaps your desires and aspirations are out of step with reality -- you might want what can't be had, and you need to scale back what you think can be accomplished. You can't really enjoy life unless you have the freedom to engage it on your own terms.

^     ^     ^

Most of the parenting literature I've studied has spoken highly of "unstructured free play" -- kids just kicking around, playing with what comes to hand in a free-wheeling make-believe, without any schedules or rules or leagues or facilitators or teachers. Such play is critical to developing "executive function," especially self-regulation. It's how kids learn to control themselves and their impulses. It seems to consistently result in creativity; I'm amazed at the things the boys create when left to themselves.

Which leads me to wonder . . . Is "free play" just for the kids, or could it have some benefit for adults as well? Rather than dwelling in the constant teleological crunch of having to accomplish the next task, might it help to have some time to just, like, do whatever you fee like doing? If left completely to my own devices, with no schedules or deadlines, to read or write or think or ride my bike or whatever . . . What would I do? Would I connect with a creative drive and achieve something undreamt of? Or would I sit on my butt and lose all desire to do anything?

Some interesting precedents for the "play time for grownups" can be found. Google requires their employees to spend 20% of their time working on whatever pet project they feel like working on. Google hopes that the extra freedom will pay off in innovations that nobody in the executive suite could have planned for.

What would grown-up play look like?

We interrupt our regularly scheduled tedious rant about philosophy to bring you this special announcement:

Joss Whedon is up to something. Something evil and nefarious and, and, well, Jossy.

Namely: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. It's a mini-musical about a second-rate super-villain. Evidently Joss has been thoroughly bitten by the musical bug after composing "Once More with Feeling," the musical Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode for which he should have won an Emmy, had the Academy not "accidently" left his name off the ballot. So, during their downtime in the writer's strike, Joss and his friends did a little internet project on the cheap.

This is one-time streaming event that is only happening this week, so check it out soon. Act I one was released yesterday, and Acts II comes out tomorrow. Also don't miss Joss' letter explaining the Master Plan.

Look for some familiar friends-of-Joss, including Nathan Filian (as swashbuckling and self-absorbed as always) and Felicia Day (a.k.a. "Vi", one of the potential slayers from the seventh season of Buffy). And Neil Patrick Harris, whose musical stage experience and goofy sense of humor make him a great fit for the title role . . . not to mention a vague resemblance to Joss Whedon himself.

Last week Sir John Templeton, the founder of the Templeton Prize for Progress towards Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities, died at the age of 95. Templeton also happened to be a superstar investor, but I felt obliged to mention his spiritual work first, since nearly every other obituary recognizes his material success before acknowledging what he considered his real work: bringing a scientific mindset into spiritual inquiry.

Templeton was the premier advocate for open-mined spiritual exploration. He called it "the humble approach":

"The main focus in my life now is to open people's minds so no one will be so conceited that they think they have the total truth. They should be eager to learn, to listen, to research and not to confine, to hurt, to kill, those who disagree with them."

Many people have championed religious tolerance and mutual respect, but Templeton was unique in his call for religious progress. He believed that we could do more than just quietly put up with each others' religious views – he saw spirituality as a field that could be studied, critiqued, analyzed, and tested, as much as any other endeavor of knowledge, and that new understanding could emerge from an open-minded inquiry. And he put his money behind it . . . a lot of money.

Of course, Templeton ruffled lots of feathers among both scientists and religious scholars, groups he was supposedly trying to bring together. Many religious leaders didn't like the implication that their knowledge was antiquated, nor did many scientists care for someone trying to tie them back to traditions of thought they had been running from for several hundred years. But in his own way, I think Templeton gave voice to the general opinion of most of the secular civilized world:

1. There is a spiritual dimension to our experience of the world.
2. Nobody seems to have all the answers about it.
3. I wish I knew more about it.

It was that basic recognition of spiritual ignorance, and a personal desire to know more, that led me to working with Augie Turak to form The Self Knowledge Symposium. And when Augie Turak was awarded the grand prize in Templeton's "Power of Purpose" writing contest, I felt a profound sense of vindication for the work we had been doing. Now, as then, I'm grateful to John Templeton for supporting new evolutions in spiritual thought.

I know this may seem like a small thing. It's a kid's book. It's been around forever. People like it. Why should I even bother? But it bugs me. It continues to bug me every single time I sit down with it. I can't take it anymore. I have to tell the truth and shame the devil.

Busy, Busy Town, supposedly one of Richard Scarry's classics, is a fake.

Ok, maybe that's a rash thing to say. Someone will sue me for libel. But the evidence is so overwhelming that something weird is going on.

When toilet-training our two boys, we encouraged them to sit on the potty by reading to them while they did their business. The favored bathroom reading was (you guessed it) Richard Scarry. As much as I love Richard Scarry and regard What Do People Do All Day? as a timeless classic, I am conditioned to literally yawn every time I open the books up, as a result of our endless potty sessions. "No, I'm not done yet, Dad. Keep reading."

After such close study over two kids' worth of reading, I couldn't help but notice . . .

• The overall quality of Busy, Busy Town is nowhere near as high as What Do People Do All Day, or Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. The text is boring, disjointed, flat. The pictures are not as appealing. I found myself wanting to read the other ones. That was the first clue.
• Everything about the visual style of Busy, Busy Town was different than the other books. Now, that in itself would not be a surprise -- Richard Scarry drew in several different styles over his career. The style in Best Mother Goose Ever and The Animals' Merry Christmas is much different than the other books – more painterly, more subtle shading, and very different conventions for representing animals. But Busy, Busy Town is just . . . bad. It looks like someone with no imagination and low talent trying to imitate Scarry's style.
• In fact . . . most of the themes in Busy, Busy Town are exact repeats of themes in the other books, only with one-tenth the level of detail. Trains, airports, supermarkets, policemen . . . it's the same stories, but drained of all vitality. The Scarry I love would have two-page spreads with lavish detail. Busy, Busy Town has isolated images floating in white space, with almost no interlocking context.
• In fact . . . even some exact images are copied from the other books into Busy, Busy Town, but without the same context. For instance, in Cars and Trucks and Things that Go, there's a street sweeper that has a broken nozzle that sprays to the side instead of straight down, and it sprays water into the Pig family's car. That exact same street sweeper shows up in Busy, Busy Town, right down to the broken nozzle . . . but totally out of context. It's like someone copied the image without even bothering to understand what it was about.

   

  Here's the original image in Cars and Trucks and Things that Go:

   

  And here's the totally ripped-off image in Busy, Busy Town:

   

• The copyright date for Busy, Busy Town is 1994 . . . the year of Richard Scarrey's death. Hmmm. The most extensive online biography of Richard Scarry notes that he died of cancer of the esophagus, and that his eyesight began to fade in the 1980's due to macular degeneration. The same biography says his last book was The Biggest Word Book Ever . . . published in 1985.

How can one explain this inexplicably poor book at the very end of Richard Scarry's career? A few theories:

• Theory #1: Scarry's capacities were diminishing late in life, due to bad eyesight and bad health. He tried to make one more book, and could only create a shadow of his former greatness.
• Theory #2: After his death, Scarry's heirs (or his publishers at Random House, or both) were eager to keep as much of Scarry's extremely profitable franchise productive. They cobbled together the best imitation they could manage of Scarry's work, slapped his name on it, and sent it out. At this point it's hard to identify whether Scarry is the author, or just a brand name to be commandeered and marketed at will – Busy, Busy Town does not explicitly say "by Richard Scarry" anywhere, but merely bears the title "Richard Scarry's Busy Busy Town." I suppose his son, also named Richard Scarry, could have produced the book and put his name on it, capitalizing on the ambiguity of names. Other children's franchises have freely cloned their creator's style, but at least they had the decency to acknowledge it; the more recent installations of the Curious George series clearly say "illustrated in the style of H.A.Rey by Martha Weston."

I doubt I'm the only one who noticed. Someone posted to Flickr a catalog of changes between the 1961 and 1993 releases of The Best Word Book Ever, so I know people notice these things. But perhaps I'm the only one who cares who actually drew and wrote a book. One of the sad things about Scarry's career was that he sold so many books that literary institutions refused to give the slightest acknowledgement or critical acclaim. By that reckoning, who cares who wrote it, if it's making money?

Yesterday I went to my mother-in-law's house in Winston-Salem to take pictures for selling the house. It was overcast for most of the day, and I busied myself pulling weeds and clipping hedges while praying for the sun to come out and give me the light I needed to make the house look good. I guess hunters must feel like this – preparing and planning and waiting, but still mostly dependent on blind chance and forces of nature outside their control to bring them success.

I have no particular skill as a photographer, and certainly no training, other than a few bits of common advice on composition I picked up from old desktop publishing magazines. I spent enough time creating posters and marketing pieces to acquire some vocabulary and concepts for evaluating images: what was too busy, or too boring, too dense or too sparse. What struck me then, as now, is how much the process is one of just looking at something and judging how it makes you feel. Evaluating images is an introspective process; you look at the image, and at the same time you watch yourself watching the image, and seeing how you react to it. Out of nowhere, thoughts occur: "That corner is dark, I can't tell what's back there, and that makes me feel uneasy." "I keep looking at this tree in the foreground instead of the house." "I like that flower, I wish there were more of them." From these random thoughts you devise experiments: change the light, change the angle, pull that damn frog statue out of the frame. And then you compare and conclude: "Yup, that's definitely better." "Nope, didn't make much difference." Eventually you start to recognize patterns and devise simple rules: "Don't include the light source in the frame." "Get as much light as possible into the room." "Windows are interesting. Walls are boring."

I know I'm only rediscovering what people probably learn in the first twenty minutes of an introductory photography class. But what's more interesting is what it says about how we think:

• As Dan Ariely pointed out in Predictably Irrational, we think largely in terms of comparisons. Judging whether a picture is "good" or "bad" is complicated, but judging whether this photo is better than that photo can be instantly recognized by most anyone. In fact, the only way we devise broad principles at all is through lots and lots of comparisons.
  
• There is a discrete difference between knowing how we react to something and knowing why we react that way. As Malcolm Gladwell repeatedly demonstrated in Blink, we formulate impressions and opinions long before we are consciously aware of them. And sometimes we never figure out why we react the way we react: "I dunno, for some reason I like this one more than that one."
  
• We like to believe that our decisions are following rational, logical, consistent principles . . . but the logic and the rationale come later, after the fact. Most of the time, we are responding in the moment to gut reactions – warmer, colder, warmer, red hot – which only later we understand.

For the last week The Onion has been running their "Green Issue" with stories about the environment. In tiny print above the title banner are the words, "The Obligatory . . ." Which sums up the state of environmentalism in our culture, these days: even if you don't care that much about the environment (and I don't think the majority of people do), you are at least obliged to pretend that you do. "It's the new patriotism," said Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, in a recent Wall Street Journal article described the lengths the Democrats are going to make their national convention green . . . or, at least, look green. The rules seem as focused on how things appear – such as mandating bright colors for catered food – than on the real substance of the matter. Many of their "greening" strategies are of questionable value (do biodegradable coffee sleeves make sense, if you have to ship them all the way from China?) but certainly look environmentally sensitive. In fact, so many of the unavoidable requirements of a convention (jet travel, balloons) were incompatible with the green goal that they had to revise their target to be the most "sustainable" convention ever. "Sustainable", it turns out, means doing some questionable math to account for your environmental impact, and then paying someone else to actually do something to offset the damage. I don't have a problem with cap-and-trade schemes in principle – you've got to do something to make conservation economically viable – but it only underscores the whole problem: our culture is fundamentally at odds with environmentalism. It will always be easier to look green than to actually be green, and as the rhetoric heats up the hypocrisy will only get worse.

I suppose it has to be this way . . . it takes an awful lot of noise and cultural pressure to make people change their ways. I am old enough to remember a time before recycling. In fact, I vividly recall being in grade school, and seeing an article in a children's publication about this new-fangled idea of "re-cycling" trash. Even then, at the tender age of eight, I thought: "There's no way you'll get every person in the country to voluntarily sort through their trash." But lo, thirty years later, recycling is commonplace. I still wonder at the overall impact – even after recycling all plastic and paper and metal, the volume of my trash is still twice as much as my recycled items – but I suppose every bit helps.

Some young friends of mine recently returned from a year-long stint in China, teaching English and working in hospitals. They were headed back for another year-long hitch, but were starting to make plans for settling in the U.S. The most significant factor in their plans: "After seeing China . . . we really don't want to own a car." Now used to doing everything by bike or bus, and having breathed the ubiquitous China smog, they were ready to live life without an automobile. I don't think they saw it as a particularly big sacrifice, either, some monumental offering on the green altar . . . it was just a sensible choice for them, that's all. I, myself, am not ready to live without a car, nor can I foresee I time when I or the rest of my generation will give up driving. Younger people are every bit as steeped in consumerism as the rest of us, if not more so . . . but I see, in the younger generation, the possibility that the culture might shift. Which is a good thing, too, since I, like the organizers of the Denver convention, am hoping that someone else will be willing to make the choices I'm unwilling to make.

"Dad, do you think Disneyland would be fun?" asked Aidan.

"Hmmm . . . You know what I remember most about the amusement parks I went to, when I was your age? Standing in line."

I have vivid memories of the wooden railings at Great Adventure outside the Log Flume ride. Constellations of gum stuck to the walls. I remember the slant of the sun, the sunburned feeling on my neck, the sound an artificial decorative stream bubbling near the entrance. The disgustingly sweet smell of cotton candy. The hollow thunk of empty flume boats drifting past towards the loading area, still slightly too far away to be seen.

Yes, I remember the waiting.

Of the ride itself, I have absolutely no memory. Well, not quite true. I remember the flume boat hitting the bottom of the final drop, and what my soaking-wet shoes felt like when I was getting out of the boat. Being soaking wet, I recall, was not nearly as much fun as advertised.

^     ^     ^

Lying in bed one night, my wife and I try to recall the first time we met. It was at an SKS meeting at UNC-Chapel Hill, in the early summertime. I have one image of her from that encounter still intact in my memory. I remember thinking that she was attractive, but that she didn't talk enough that night for me to know whether I liked her or not. She says she remembers me talking a lot that night, and thinking that I was really smart . . . But neither of us remembers what I said at all. It frustrates me that I can't remember the exact room we were in. Even with the two of us talking together, reminding each other of details, we have a hard time piecing together the chronology of our early relationship -- when exactly, did we go out on our first date? And the first time we broke up?

When, exactly, did the most tumultuous, passionate episode in my life start to become fuzzy and confused in my mind?

^     ^     ^

I try to summon memories of the early childhood of my first son . . . I find it disturbingly difficult to summon specific memories unaided. Some routines were, through sheer repetition, burned in permanently. I remember every contour and detail of the wooden changing table beside the bed in the bedroom, but I can't recall what his face looked like then. I remember the streets and sidewalks and trees where I walked with him at night in a sling, trying to get him to sleep. I remember the pattern of the sling, but not what he wore. I remember the shape of his hands, the bump of his legs against my side, the weight of him in the sling. I cannot, for the life of me, remember his face.

^     ^     ^

I started reading The Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman a couple years ago. I just got Volume Three of the bound collections. The Sandman is Morpheus, the incarnation of dreaming. As an eternal being who has been around for millennia, he's constantly running into other long-lived gods and demons and recalling old times: "We drank wine in Babyon together . . . " I find it slightly annoying that all these immortal beings have such crystal-clear recollections of events centuries ago, when I can only hang on to a few shreds of memory from a mere five or ten years ago. It seems more likely they would say things like, "You're my brother? Ohhhhh, yeaaaaaah, I kinda remember that . . . " Or "What the heck did we do with ourselves in Babylon? Was that Ashurbanipal's place we stayed at?"

It makes me wonder about God himself . . . All of humanity's drama may rise and fall away, and all God might ever remember is the theme song of "Gilligan's Island."

For some reason, theological questions always seem to come up at bath-time. Aidan, standing naked in the shower, said, for no particularly visible reason:

"You know, Dad, Jesus sounds like a story."

"Mmmm . . . what do you mean?"

"Well, magical things like that don't happen very often, except in stories."

What could I say? "Well, that's a very astute observation," I said. He said no more on the matter, and neither did I.

*    *    *

When I was in my teens, questions of religious truth were dichotomous: either you believed in Jesus, or you didn't, and anything in-between was either dishonest or lazy. I was aggravated with people who said squishy things like, "Well, no, I don't think it's literally true, but I think it's a beautiful story, a metaphor for an eternal truth." I was not much interested in metaphors, back then. I wanted the truth, by God, and if all you got out of religion was a pretty story, I could hardly see how it would be worth all the bother and inconvenience. I suspected that the non-literalists were quietly trying to defang their religion, removing any claim it had on ruling their lives while still nursing some small bit of consolation and order from it. It smelled like a scam.

On the other hand, literal interpretation of scripture challenges even the most willing of minds. Even if you completely accepted the events of the Bible as literal fact, the reasoning behind them still makes no sense. Why, exactly, is Jesus' death necessary for my salvation? Why should belief be the determining factor in the afterlife, when action is the determining factor in everything else in life? Even when I was perfectly willing to accept it all, the basis of its reasoning felt foreign, and primitive, and weird, and wrong.

There is a whole school of theological thought that regards religion as fabulation – as story-telling. Story-telling has its own logic and rules, which are not the rules of science. A story can be true – that is, true to life -- without being literally true. That was always the reason I loved great literature: the feelings it prompted in me were identical to the feelings of religion. Rapture. Awe. Longing. Resonance.

There is no such thing as "just" a story. Stories hold a more powerful influence over our thinking than abstract theories. All the things that make life possible and worthwhile – love, honor, duty, commitment, trust, peace, justice – bear a stronger resemblance to story than scientific fact.

I cannot really claim to be teaching my kids anything about religion. I tell them the stories . . . lots of stories. At some point, I expect them to be able to see stories for what they are: the language of the psyche, and pointers to the truth. Until then, the stories will work on their imaginations and hearts.