Chrononautic Log

February 21, 2004

Those fine gentlemen, the Rat Bastards, have just let me know that my “Five Irrational Histories” will be among the pieces in the next Rabid Transit. Get your shots now, before the rush.

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February 19, 2004

This should be the last one, but I’m a soft touch and I’m sure something will slide in over, under, or around the wire: 177 submissions, 1,043,000 words.

One million, forty-three thousand words.

At least nine hundred sixty thousand of which we’ll have to reject.

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I fear you have mistaken voting for pornography. This is a mistake. A vote is not a private satisfaction, chosen solely for the exactness of its match with your own personal tastes. A vote is a social act or it is nothing. It has larger consequences in the larger context, and those consequences go on propagating until another set cancels them out.

Voting the perfection of your own conscience is a great luxury. We didn't have it. We’re getting billed for it now. The cost is terrible.

—— Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Comments (3)

From Eschaton:

I get a reasonable amount of political junk mail. Frankly, most of it goes into the trash unread these days. But, to the extent that I do read it I have the impression that it reads something like this:

REPUBLICANS ARE GOING TO EAT YOUR BABIES UNLESS YOU GIVE US $25

There’s a kind of “we’re pathetic and can't do anything unless you send us a couple of bucks” vibe. Now, that may in fact be true — that they’re at a financial disadvantage. But, look — nobody likes a loser.

I'd prefer direct mail which went something like:

Last week we took Tom DeLay out back and kicked the crap out of him. This week, we plan to do it again. Help support this ass-kicking! For only $25, your name can be on a bootprint on DeLay's mottled ass!

Democrats are tired of being on the defensive. We’ve been on the defensive since the Failed Clinton Presidency began being reported 2 hours after election day ‘92. It’s time for those days to be over.

Comments (1)

February 18, 2004

So much for all the hoo-rah about the Henson family buying back The Jim Henson Co. last year:

The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS) and The Jim Henson Company today announced that they have entered into an agreement under which Disney will acquire the beloved “Muppets” and “Bear in the Big Blue House” properties from Henson.

The transaction includes all Muppet assets, including the Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo and Animal characters, the Muppet film and television library, and all associated copyrights and trademarks, as well as all the “Bear in the Big Blue House” characters, television library, copyrights and trademarks. The parties have signed a binding purchase agreement and expect the transaction to close within two months, subject to receiving the necessary regulatory clearances. The transaction does not include the “Sesame Street” characters, such as Big Bird and Elmo, which are separately owned by Sesame Workshop..

Christ, they could have had Elmo. Elmo and Michael Eisner deserve each other.

But I guess Eisner and Brian Henson do, too.

Comments (6)

The rulers of the Soviet Union, that empire of untermenschen facing extermination or enslavement, knew what was coming. They knew that, in a decade or less, an army from the future would fill their horizon with a storm of steel. There was no way of avoiding it. There was no way of preparing for it without the most horrendous efforts, the most drastic expedients, to drive and dragoon their empire into the twentieth century. As I’ve said elsewhere, they had to beat their ploughboys into swordsmen. And if they chose that, there would be those who would flinch, those who would panic, those who would revolt and those who would betray. There was no way of knowing in advance who these might be. There was no benefit of the doubt to be given doubters. One slip could be fatal. There was not an inch to be given. The costs would be horrific. The price was madness. The reward was infamy. But it was that — or death.

—— Ken Macleod

There’s much that he says elsewhere in that post that I can’t make myself agree with; but this is a piece of the True Knowledge.

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Twin Cobra Fist, Drunken Temple Boxing, Hidden Monkey Hands — Rummy’s got it all.

Figure 1. Donald Rumsfeld demonstrates his Grimace Palm technique.

How did Carter ever defeat Ford with Rummy by his side?

(Via Electrolite Sidelights.)

Comments (2)

February 17, 2004

. . . and boy, am I glad I checked the mailbox again today: 146 submissions, 824,000 words. (Yes, you read that right, nearly a third of our submissions have come in just the last three postal days. I had to ask the girls at the UPS Store for a box.) I’m no longer wondering if we’ll get enough good stories. Now I’m just wondering if I’m insane.

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As of some time early in the morning, Friday, February 13: 101 submissions, 566,000 words.

Comments (3)

February 13, 2004

Deep time, that is — courtesy of PaleoIndustrial: The Lost Worlds of Deep Time.

Half a billion years before the first humans walked the earth, and hundreds of millions of years prior to the reign of the mighty dinosaurs, the Paleozoic seas teemed with bizarre and beautiful life forms. PaleoIndustrial strives to bring these long-extinct creatures back to life in still images, short animations, and interactive 3-D reconstructions.

And do they ever. You want to give yourself nightmares, imagine going snorkeling and running into Anomalocaris canadensis.* (Yeah, it’s only three feet long, but on the other hand, you know — Jesus! It’s three feet long!)

* Anomalocaris: Latin for freaky shrimp. Which is what they thought the mouth-parts were when they’d just found those, and not the rest of the body.

Comments (2)

Artists are always disappointed by their audience’s attention-spans. . . . As artists, it would be a hell of a lot easier if our audiences were more tolerant of our penchant for boring them. We’d get to explore a lot more ideas without worrying about tarting them up with easy-to-swallow chocolate coatings of entertainment. We like to think of shortened attention spans as a product of the information age, but check this out:

To be sure one thing necessary above all: if one is to practice reading as an art in this way, something needs to be un-learned most thoroughly in these days.

In other words, if my book is too boring, it’s because you're not paying enough attention. Writers say this stuff all the time, but this quote isn't from this century or the last. It’s from the preface to Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of Morals,” published in 1887.

Yeah, our attention-spans are different today, but they aren't necessarily shorter.

—— Cory Doctorow, “Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books”

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February 11, 2004

If you pay your ratcatchers by the number of rats they catch, you shouldn’t be surprised to find them breeding rats in the basement. Breeding terrorists is harder, but on the other hand, since terrorists don’t look that different from normal people . . . Well, have a look at what local law enforcement — not to mention the FBI — are getting up to:

In an interview with the [Oakland] Tribune, Mike Van Winkle, spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, issued a remarkably broad definition of terrorism. “You can make an easy kind of link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest,” he said. “You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act.”

What do you say to something like that? Don’t they teach civics in school any more?

“This is a good way for police officers to get terrorism points,” says Timothy Edgar, legislative counsel for the ACLU. “They have to justify the dollars they’re receiving from the federal government for homeland security. We’ve seen a massive inflation of terrorism statistics on the federal level. Every Arab who has a phony drivers license is now called a terrorist by the Justice Department, so they can say, ‘We've arrested thousands of terrorists.’

And if the fact that all those Arabs and hippy longhairs are getting beat up and arrested doesn’t bother you, this should: while the cops are wasting their time making lists of Democrats, shooting beanbags at kids, and arresting people for talking to National Guardsmen, the real terrorists are laughing their asses off.

“This is the perfect example of not learning the lessons of 9/11,” he continues. “The FBI was not sufficiently focused on the possibility that a group like al-Qaida would commit a serious terrorist attack. One real failure since 9/11 is that, when they call everything a ‘terrorist,’ they're still not sufficiently focused on actual terrorists. There’s an overbroad definition of domestic terrorism in the PATRIOT Act, and it’s had a spillover effect into state and local governments who want to justify their antiterrorism funding and mission.”

Details on Salon.

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Hey, I don’t actually have a “Technology” category. How cool is that? So I’ll file this one under “Economics”:

World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else

All we need to do is pay attention to what the Internet really is. It’s not hard. The Net isn’t rocket science. It isn’t even 6th grade science fair, when you get right down to it. We can end the tragedy of Repetitive Mistake Syndrome in our lifetimes — and save a few trillion dollars’ worth of dumb decisions — if we can just remember one simple fact: the Net is a world of ends. You’re at one end, and everybody and everything else are at the other ends.

Sure, that’s a feel-good statement about everyone having value on the Net, etc. But it’s also the basic rock-solid fact about the Net’s technical architecture. And the Internet’s value is founded in its technical architecture.

Fortunately, the true nature of the Internet isn’t hard to understand. In fact, just a fistful of statements stands between Repetitive Mistake Syndrome and Enlightenment . . .

Unfortunately, the article’s probably still too technical for a lot of the people it needs to reach, and the ones it’s not too technical for will probably answer: “Like I care about maximizing the ‘value of the Internet’? What the Internet is, is interfering with my business model. That’s what the Internet is.” But it’s a start.

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February 10, 2004

From an interview with William Gibson:

Q: You say you spend maybe 12 hours a year watching television. Does maintaining a certain distance from mass culture give you an advantage in writing about it?

A: Absolutely, because when I am exposed to it, I react to it to some extent as though I were a stranger. If I were swimming in it constantly, it would just be the water in the aquarium. It is anyway, but I get a little bit of insulation from it. Anytime I turn on the television, it’s one moment after the other of, “That is so weird!” That alone is worth restricting one's media diet.

It’s true. Try it some time.

Another nice bit:

Q: In academic circles, you’re a poster boy for “postmodern science fiction.” Do you consider yourself a postmodernist?

A: There are academics out there who have written extensively about how I’m somehow a pillar of that sort of stuff, but I don’t think it actually has very much to do with what I’m doing. It’s strange to me. I mean, I think we are somewhere else — we’re not in Kansas anymore — but I don’t think that discourse necessarily describes it. It’s based on the assumption that language is fundamentally inadequate for the description of reality, so that ordinary folks who haven’t been indoctrinated by this philosophy don't have a hope in hell of figuring out what's going on. And I’m just way too much of a populist to buy that. To go way out on a limb, I think in 30 or 40 years, it’s going to be looked back on as something akin to Stalinism.

Or, as Alan Sokal put it: “I confess that I’m an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class.”

Comments (8)

February 9, 2004

Guys, I know Watchmen was set in the 80s, but that doesn’t mean you have to film it in Retro-Vision. (Link courtesy of Jon Hansen.)

Given that this is the industry that produced LXG, it’s probably an accurate assessment of what Hollywood would do with it. (I mean, at least use the original music, for God’s sake!) But I think we can all do better. For instance:

Anyone else want to have a go?

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Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s post on slush (noted last week) has spawned considerable discussion, much of it interesting, some of it depressing. What’s depressing is the apparent imperviousness of a certain mindset to the Clue Stick. No matter how well or how often you say it, some people just seem to be incapable of understanding that getting published is not a game of chance.

But for the rest of us, here’s Teresa again:

The higher truth is that you can’t create a good book just by avoiding the errors of bad ones. . . . I think of novels as medium-size mammals. They’re complex creations: skeleton, specialized internal organs, muscle tissue, surface integumentation. It’s quite an achievement to build one at all. When you’re talking about a book I’d put in category 11, “Someone could publish this book, but we don’t see why it should be us,” what the author can see is that this time he got the eyes in the right place, and remembered to give it a rectal opening, and that the overlapping attachments of the muscles to the bones are really quite artful: a nice piece of work. What we can see is that it neither moves nor breathes nor opens its eyes. Or maybe it manages that much; even gets up and wanders around. And yet, it fails to inspire affection.

(This crystallizes, by the way, my worst fear — and no insult to our many fine contributors is intended; I haven’t read your stories yet, so this isn’t about you, it’s about me — with regard to All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories: I no longer worry that too few stories will have mouths and ears and pelts and limbs, but I do still worry that too few stories will inspire affection, and that the resulting book will be an example not of the animal trainer’s art but of the taxidermist’s.)

(The first time I typed that last sentence, I substituted inspire rejection for inspire affection. Subconscious, there’s a call for you on Line Two . . . )

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On the Asimov’s message board, Locus reviewer Rich Horton has posted the TOC for a virtual Year’s Best, and Gardner Dozois has noted (just below) some of the stories he would have included in his non-virtual Year’s Best if only it was open to fantasy. I’m pleased to see “Theo’s Girl” on both lists. (Thanks to Scott Reilly for the heads-up.)

(But it’s starting to make me nervous. What have I done for y’all lately?)

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February 8, 2004

Help! This café is full of Teds!

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February 7, 2004

So a couple of weeks ago I filled out an absentee ballot — school board bond issue, reauthorization of property tax, something like that — and was mildly curious about the fact that it didn't include anything about the presidential elections. But I'd heard that the courts had thrown out Washington's open primary system a while back, so I didn't give it much thought. I figured there'd been some party registration drive that I'd missed, or that the state Democratic machine was planning to settle things in some smoke-filled room in Olympia, or something like that. Oh well. Till I moved here I was always registered to vote in California, so I'm used to the idea that presidential candidates are chosen by a few spoiled people in Iowa and New Hampshire, rather than, like, by any process I might have any input into. So no change there.

Turns out I was only half right — earlier this week I found out that Washington was having Iowa-style caucuses, not primaries. Then I found out the caucuses were on a Saturday. Then, poking around on the web, I found out that my local caucus was going to be held literally a block from my apartment. Then I found out Saturday kendo practice was canceled.

Okay; running out of excuses not to do my civic duty here.

About five minutes after ten, and there's a definite increase in the neighborhood's pedestrian population. Two, five, seven, a dozen — lots of people in sweaters and waterproof REI jackets, some of them with dogs and/or children, all converging on the B. F. Day School. Some of them calling out to each other as they cross the soccer field. Obviously many of my neighbors take this whole 'neighbor' business a lot more seriously than I do. About 95 percent white — even whiter than the general makeup of the neighborhood. (I would have expected to see more Asians. There are a few, but not many. Maybe the older ones I see around are Republicans and the younger ones are foreign students.) Gray-haired, ponytailed couple in front of me — probably Kucinich voters. Nope, Dean. Darrel Schweitzer lookalike with a feather in his trilby — probably a Kucinich voter. (Nope, Dean.) Arty-looking Eurasian girl in a powder-blue parka — probably a Dean voter. (Nope, Kerry.) Rock-climbing engineer type and girlfriend — probably — okay, no more of that.

Line looks long, but it moves pretty quickly. Posters — Dean, Kerry, Kucinich, Clark, white on blue, all pretty much identical from a distance — all over the place; obviously none of the rules about campaigning within x-hundred yards of a polling place apply to this business. Guy with the feather gets the local Dean activist's last button. (The Dean activist looks like a certain sort of SF congoer: jeans, white T-shirt over pot belly, fanny pack worn in front.) (I may have imagined the fanny pack.) Herded down into the school's basement and told to divide ourselves by precinct, if we know what our precinct number is; good thing I brought my voter registration card. Cafeteria full — like, King’s Arms at the end of exam week full — with people closest to the tables holding up small pieces of paper with precinct numbers on them. No way I can get to the precinct sign-in sheet; just have to hope it all works out in the end somehow.

Oh, God, did I just hear someone mention Robert's Rules of Order? Let's hope nobody else heard him.

Call for volunteers to move (by precinct) out of the overcrowded cafeteria. 43-1352 enthusiastically rises to the occasion, our first collective act. Great, now I can drop my bag on the tray return shelf and take off my jacket. The bag's heavy and it's hot in here.

The sign-in sheet becomes accessible. By the time I get to it (actually, by the time the tenth or twentieth person in front of me gets to it) the neatly printed blue and white forms have gone away and we're down to yellow notepaper. From things like this — and the put-upon tone of the meta-precinct chairman, or whatever he is, who's going around from precinct group to precinct group shouting instructions and seems to think that we all failed to do our required reading before coming to class — I get the feeling that the local party machine didn't expect anything like the turnout they've got. Probably thought it would just be them and their political junkie friends and relations.

Wow, all these people live around here? Probably some of them are even from my building. I'd be sure that the fact that I don't know any of them was a sign of the collapse of civil society, only lots of them seem to know each other, so obviously it's just me. (Hey, she's cute — ah, she's talking about some guy; sounds like a boyfriend.)

Chorus

We're supposed to have a precinct chairman. Do we have a precinct chairman?

Anyone?

Okay, we don't have a precinct chairman, but we've got an officious type who's willing to open the Official Envelope and read the Official Instructions. Good for him; glad I don't have to do it. Looks like 43-1352 gets to nominate four delegates and four alternates, who go on to the next round of caucuses in May.

Put-Upon Guy is shouting (from the cafeteria) that we should all be voting now. Whatever, Put-Upon Guy; there are still half a dozen people signing in. As that starts to get done I suggest to the people nearest me that maybe it would be easier if instead of trying to count hands we all sorted ourselves into groups by candidate. The meme spreads; candidate posters are torn from the walls and held up.

Simultaneously:

Me

Dean people over here!

Woman next to me

Kerry people over here!

Woman on other side of crowd

Dean people over here!

Kucinich guy (already in the right place)

(Says nothing; just looks smug.)

Dean people from here go over there. Officious Guy is trying to count written candidate preferences on the sign-in sheet. Put-Upon Guy is shouting (still from the cafeteria) that we should sort ourselves into groups by candidate — way ahead of you, buddy — and then we get ten minutes to figure out which candidates are below the 15% minimum threshold and/or re-sort ourselves, either to reapportion voters for those candidates or to push those candidates over the minimum. Since we've only got four delegates, I'm not sure how much the 15% is going to matter.

Doesn't look like it's going to matter much; as we sort ourselves out it seems pretty clear-cut. Looking good for Dean.

Me

I can hold that sign, if your arm's getting tired.

Not looking good for Edwards or Clark or Sharpton — not only are they below the 15% threshold, they don't seem to have any voters here at all. Must have just been one enthusiastic Clark supporter with a stack of posters. Fair-sized groups for Kerry and Kucinich. (Not only does she have a boyfriend, she's a Kerry voter. Oh, well.) A couple of undecideds, apparently. Can't really tell any of them apart — no wonder my guesses were all wrong.

Put-Upon Guy (coming over to 43-1352)

Now that you've selected your delegates —

Me

Don't look at me — just 'cause I'm holding this sign, doesn't mean I'm in charge.

Chorus (to Put-Upon Guy)

You're ahead of us!

Put-Upon Guy

I'm not ahead of you, you've had ten minutes, no one will be allowed to vote after 11:00, I'm not going to repeat this, you should have read the instructions, don't ask questions.

Screw you, too, Put-Upon Guy. I thought this was supposed to be a democracy. But, regardless of Put-Upon Guy, we've got four delegate slots and three candidates, so we'd better count heads. Thirty-one for Dean. I don't know how many Kucinich and Kerry have got, but apparently it's not that many, because according to those closer to the border (and according to Officious Guy), Dean wins. So Dean gets two delegates and Kerry and Kucinich get one each. Probably there's some complicated mathematical explanation in the rules, but this seems obvious to everybody, so never mind. Anyway, right, now we thirty-one need to elect two Dean delegates.

Okay, forget elect. Have we got two volunteers?

One hand up. Right, I had that one pegged as the student activist type from the start. Have we got any others . . . ? All right, what the hell.

Me (Raises hand)

Me, sure, okay.

I guess we've got two delegates.

Selection of alternates follows; then paperwork. One of the Kucinich guys (I think), who's standing near Organized Guy, the sign-up sheet, and the Official Envelope, volunteers to be elected precinct chair, so we have a precinct chair to sign (the rules say "notarize"; how quaint) our delegate selection cards. We fill out said cards and some sort of official sign-up list that includes addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. Hopefully the party machine will (A) remember to call us to tell us what to do about the county and/or legislative district caucuses, and (B) not use that list for fund-raising.

While we're filling out the paperwork, someone remembers that we're also supposed to vote on resolutions, to be forwarded for consideration as part of the state party platform, or something like that. The other Dean delegate, the one I had pegged as an activist, has brought one of her own — apparently she is with some advocacy group — and also has a couple that she's found lying around on tables. The one she's brought is about universal health care, and passes 28-3. The others are about working hours (mandatory minimum paid vacation, caps on overtime, that sort of thing) about the war on Iraq, and about the environment. I miss the details of the last couple since I'm busy with the paperwork. They all pass with a minimum of discussion, though a couple people object to the one on working hours on the grounds that it doesn't have a small-business exception.

Oh, yeah, we should probably give the Kerry and Kucinich people a chance to vote on these, too, since it's supposed to be by precinct. (Completely forgot about those guys. Amazing how quick these little sub-tribes form, isn't it?) Someone takes the resolutions over to the other groups, and our numbers on them over to Organized Guy and the precinct chairman.

I exchange names and phone numbers and email addresses with the other Dean delegate and the two alternates. We'll make sure we all get to the district convention, even if the party machine forgets about us.

I'm not sure this has been more democratic than primaries, but it's sure been more entertaining.

Hey, I'm a delegate. Isn't Mom going to be proud?

Several hours later

State-wide, the papers are reporting Kerry 49%, Dean 30%, Kucinich 8%. Apparently 43-1352 isn't very representative. If Dean concedes before the May caucuses, it's going to get interesting.

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82 contributors, 460,000 words.

Comments (1)

February 6, 2004

About a decade ago, I invented a game with a colleague of mine who, like me, had once worked for Irving Kristol. We called it neoconservative bingo. The idea was that the clichés of neoconservative discourse would be arranged in various combinations on bingo cards: “The World's Only Superpower"; “The New Class”; “The China Threat”; “Decadent Europe”; “Against the UN”; “The Adversary Culture”; “The Global Democratic Revolution”; “Down With the Appeasers!”; “Be Firm Like Churchill.” The free space in the center of the bingo card would be “The Palestinian People Do Not Exist” (nowadays it would be “No Palestinian State” or “All Palestinians Are Terrorists”). As you read an essay or a book by a neoconservative, you would check off each slogan on the card in the order in which it appeared.

—— Michael Lind, “A Tragedy of Errors”, The Nation, Feb. 2004

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February 5, 2004

Man, I so know where Wil Wheaton is at with this:

I sit here and drink my coffee, which is getting cold and bitter (how appropriate). A Starbucks guy runs a sweeper across the floor around me, and beneath my feet.

“Are you a writer?” he asks.

“I hope so,” I tell him. He sort of recoils from me, and I feel bad. It’s not his fault that I haven’t written anything in over a week. It’s not his fault my sweet and kind 12 year-old stepson has been replaced with a surly, disrespectful podperson. It’s not his fault that this couple’s wonderful, supernova passion for each other is what I want and lack more than anything else on earth. Maybe it’s the grey sky, the cold February day, or Stinky stinking up my chair . . . but I can’t feel passion for anything these days. I am a man in his thirties, snapping at a boy in his twenties, because I used to be him.

“I mean . . . I’m trying. I’ve done some good stuff in the past, but right now I’m in a bit of a rut.” I say.

“Oh, well, I hope you find your way out,” he says, kindly. No harm, no foul.

Also, I was Tweed Jacket. Only it was somewhere else. And It would have been a notebook, not a crossworld puzzle.

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February 4, 2004

ovnílogo, -a: ufologist.

Comments (2)

February 2, 2004

This is not to say that the Leninists and the imperialists are without moral feelings. Individually they are for the most part perfectly normal. Their compassion for their enemies’ victims is absolutely genuine. So is their outrage at their enemies’ moral failings and blind spots. . . .

Morality has very little to do with choosing sides. It can tell us that a given act is dreadful, but it can’t tell us whether to say, ‘This is dreadful, therefore . . .’ or ‘This is dreadful, but . . .’ We still often believe that we oppose our enemies because of their crimes, and support our allies despite their crimes.

—— Ken MacLeod

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Teresa Nielsen Hayden on slush reading, rejection letters, and associated subjects:

If you’re an author, the arrival of a rejection letter is a major event. If you’re an editor (or an associate editor, assistant editor, editorial assistant, or intern), 90% of all rejections are something you do on a quiet afternoon when you don’t have something more urgent breathing down your neck. O Yawn, you say, O Stretch, there’s that catalogue copy finished. I’ve got — hmmm, about two and a half hours left in the day. Nothing else urgent? Okay, it’s time to blight some hopes and crush some dreams. . . .

Most days, the slush will divide up into books you reject immediately, and books you feel guilty about rejecting immediately, so you read further in them, and perhaps assign them to an intern to read, and then you reject them. . . . What RejectionCollection.com sees as someone getting bent out of shape . . . or snootiness . . . is the bored irritation of someone who’s processing a very large stack of rejections, and is having to deal with a submission that has ignored one of the most basic requirements in the guidelines.

Like most of Teresa’s writing, there’s much more good stuff than I feel like I can adequately quote, so go read the whole thing.

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February 1, 2004

Maybe the reason this story’s giving you so much trouble is that you shouldn’t have dragged in the enigmatic and intriguing protagonist of that other story as a secondary character with nothing to do, you knucklehead.

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