ttyl.ca

I just saw Jesus Christ Superstar at the Port Theatre in Nanaimo.  This is the third time I’ve seen it, and I love this rock opera so much, I probably would not normally post my views on it, but wow, they really did a bad job, so here’s my revenge… 

1) Geriatric Jebus: FAIL. Time for Ted Neely to hang up the tunic and sandals.   He couldn’t sing to save his life — er, so to speak.  He did manage to screech a little — which made people clap — but luckily a few well-placed bright lights and thunder booms, and ridiculous acting, covered it all up (mostly).

2) Director: FAIL. He completely missed any and all irony (not to mention the real tragedy) in the original production. He produced it straight — with Christ as the hero — and made Judas into “evil Shylock” (short, with a pointy Jew beard and devil-red pants).

For example, right after the 39 lashes, when the score cuts to the Jesus Christ Superstar music, the center piece is Jesus struggling back to his feet (I half-expected Elton John’s I’m Still Standing to start playing).  Anyone who knows this piece knows that the point is Judas’s words and not Jesus’s defiance.  Judas sings…

Every time I look at you, I don’t understand
Why you let the things you did get so out of hand
You’d have managed better if you’d had it planned
Now why’d you choose such a backward time and such a strange land?
If you’d come today you could have reached the whole nation
Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication

…

Tell me what you think about your friends at the top
Now who d’you think besides yourself was the pick of the crop?
Buddah was he where it’s at? Is he where you are?
Could Muhammmed move a mountain or was that just PR?
Did you mean to die like that? Was that a mistake or
Did you know your messy death would be a record breaker?

This is possibly the grooviest song in the score.  It’s supported by an iconic chorus, not to mention the radical notion of Judas’s voice from the grave.  And what does our director want us to see?  Geriatric Jebus bathed in glowing white light struggling to overcome the extreme unfairness of it all…  Come on!

This to me is the biggest failure of the production.  Judas as villain wouldn’t have worked 30 years ago.  It certainly doesn’t work today.  But then again, maybe not.  I might be wrong about that.  Maybe it *does* work today, and that’s a very sad statement about today.

3. Judas: also fail.  But somewhat reluctantly and so lowercase.  This performance was damaged far more by the director than the singing.  But seriously, it’s Judas.  Your cries need to be blood chilling dude.  Maybe it was just a casting error.  But then again, between needing to diminish the power of Judas’s lines, and running out of thunder boomers and blazing lights to cover up for Neely’s voice, maybe he was just told to aim for mediocrity.  (Win?)

4. Pilate:  FAIL.  Back to uppercase.  I actually wanted to plug my ears during his final climactic lines.  He was just shouting.  I’m all for making the part your own (who could ever reproduce the irrepressible Barry Dennen?), but again, this is another one of those important (non-deity) characters, and whoever this guy was…  <yawn>.

5. Mary: win.  It’s not all bad news.  Mary’s voice was beautiful, and one of the highlights of the show for me.

6. Herod: WIN! It’s not risky to do Herod as Rice/Webber intended him, and so here our director does not let us down. Way to go!

7. Choreogrpahy: WIN!  Arlene Phillips and Louanne Madorma-Williams saved the day in my opinion.  Considering what they were given to work with in terms of interpretation, they pulled off some great numbers.  In particular, the blob-like mass of bodies pressuring Jesus to cure them was brilliant!  (Although Neely turning his face quizically skyward in mock conversation with dear old dad mouthing “His purse?” in response to one of the lines actually made me laugh out loud.)

Poor Ted Neely.  Poor Jebus.  Poor Christians.

In the end, that’s what this production is all about.  That oh so annoying “oppressed majority” and its oh so easy-to-hurt feelings.  I suppose one good thing about this production is that it shows just how ridiculous it is to believe that there can even *be* such a thing as a villain in a plan you laid out in the first place to accomplish!

One thing that I always liked about JCS (whether as a believer or an atheist — I’ve enjoyed it as both) was that I could identify with both Judas and Jesus.  I Only Want to Say is Jesus’s great moment of questioning the difficulty he faces.  At that point, he’s just like you or me, struggling to do the right thing.  It’s about overcoming fear with courage.  And that’s Rice/Webber’s genius.  It works because both sides are human.  As soon as you turn Judas (and the mob, and Pilate) into the obvious villain and Christ into the poor victim (not helped by the white hair and wrinkles Ted!) it all just becomes sanctimonious and righteous.

The production ends with Neely twitching his way to a slow (almost) death on the cross.  At the last instant, he stops twitching and is raised into the heavens (with a goofy grin on his face).  It was all Janice and I could do not to laugh out loud.  It was simultaneously hideous, comical and sad.  Keep in mind this is all happening just a few hundred seconds after Judas has belted out the great title song.

And then?  Ta da!  The show is punctuated by a huge Shroud of Turin dropping in front of the entire stage.

The best part of the whole night for me was in that instant of silence right before the applause, and before my filter had time to kick in, when I let slip, “CON!!!” and even heard a few giggles in response. 

Every month I get three emails from Bell, one from Customer Service and 2 from mobility.confirmation.

The one from Customer Service has the subject “Your e-bill is ready” starts out (in plain text) “Hello, Your Bell Mobility e-bill is ready.  To see your bill on our secure Web site, complete the following steps.” and it carries on to describe how to log in to my account.

The next one, from mobility.confirmation has the subject “Bell Mobility eBill Notification”.  This is an HTML message with a two-column layout, links to log in to my account, the total due this month, and my phone number.  The main heading is “Your eBill is ready.”

And if that weren’t enough, I get a third one (second from mobility.confirmation) inviting me to sign up for eCare.  Subject “eCare registration information”, again an HTML 2-column message this time inviting me to “Register to eCare” and giving me the steps to do so.

My billing date is the 16th (I think) and I get these messages in the order I described them.  This month I got them on the 18th, the 20th and the 21st.

Now, that has been naggingly annoying for some six months or so.  Please make it stop!!

I have been ignoring it actually, but the background annoyance has always been there.  Well, I called about it today because not only did I get the third (confusing) email today, but also a text message informing me that my bill is ready.  That was new!  But I started to wonder if my last payment had not gone through.  Was I behind?  Why all the effort on Bell’s part?  So, I called to find out.

Poor agents…  they mean well, but they have no clue.  I bit my tongue when she sent me off with “what you have to do is..” rather than “here’s how I can help you..”.  What “I had to do” was go to bell.ca/contactus and use their fancy form to tell the people who handle the website (and the email, and the texts) about the issue.  Okay, fine, whatever.

So, I write a quick message, include my customer info, click submit, and get an error message.  “The following information is missing or incorrect. Check your entry and try again.  Account Number.”  But of course…. :)  The Account Number, as far as I could tell, looked just fine!

I phoned back, this time asking for just a plain old email address of “the people who handle the website (and the email, and the texts)” so I could send them my original problem and a screen shot of this error message and Account Number field filled in.  I got another agent, explained what was happening, and got put me on hold (nothing good like Dido or anything playing).  She came back and, wouldn’t you know it, she started explaining to me the process of “what I had to do” was go to bell.ca/contactus and use their fancy form to tell the people who handle the website (and the email, and the texts) about the issue!

Um, what is the appropriate resonse here?  I am SURE that I have no idea!  Well, I was nice (enough).  I think.

Poor agents.  They mean well, I know they do.

So, she put me on hold again.  I was escalated to another dude.  Nice guy.  He listened patiently.  I think he absorbed most of it, but I can’t be sure.  He put me on hold too.  I waited for a while, smiling sardonically, as I drafted this post in my head.  I snapped out of it when I heard the line click, and I was again, ready to be civil.  And then I hear, “Thank you for calling Bell.  My name is Roger.  How may I be of assistance today?”

I laughed hard for about 30 seconds, and then filled the guy in.

He laughed too.

So, anyway, here I am writing this.  Oh, and while doing that, I actually went and tinkered with the Account Number.  I would have liked to see the look of horror on my face when I clicked in the field and and saw that there was a trailing blank space.  I shuddered, hit backspace, and then submit…  Of course, it worked.

Do I feel stupid?  (no)  Honestly?  (yes)  Should I?  (absolutely not)  Here’s a tip for the “engineers” at bell.ca…. trimming whitespace has been around for a while.  You might consider it as a valuable input validation aid.  It might just save you, your tech “support” team, and your customers some undue pain and suffering.

Incidentally, I still need the three message per month thing solved too.

Have you ever written long post, or comment, or email, on some topic, and then lost it?  You spend all this time crafting your piece, making this point and that, and then the power goes out, or you’ve timed out, or Windows crashes.  Sooo frustrating!  The first time this happened to me, I actually felt sick.  (I had spent about twenty minutes trying to be eloquent — or was I ranting? — in some forum or other.  When I clicked submit, my session had expired, and I was taken to the “your session has expired; please login again” page.  No amount of clicking Back or reload helped.  It was like a mini death in the family when I realized I wasn’t going to get my purple prose back.I sat there stunned for a little while, and then finally got up the courage to try to remember the more important points I had made, and rewrite the thing.  Eventually I pushed something out, but it didn’t have anywhere near the satisfying feeling to it that the first draft did.

Anyhow, the other day I heard a good tip, which I thought I’d pass on.  It was made in the context of communicating more efficiently, and therefore more effectively.  I forget where I heard it, but it might have been Tim Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Workweek.  The tip was to always draft email messages as though I had already typed a long version and lost it, and I am just reiterating the most important points.  Basically, get concise stupid!  And stop treating other people’s time like my own little freewriting playground.  Not only will other people appreciate their time being respected (if I do it right, maybe they don’t even notice!), but I appreciate the brain exercise and the resulting clearer thinking.

For a happy life, write like you’re summarizing yourself.

I just happened across an old episode of Mythbuster Adam Savage on Penn Jillette’s radio show.  A very interesting exchange on what cold readers are really up to, and what it says about human communication in general.

One way to read this is to be horrified.  Another is to marvel at the counter intuitiveness of how we regularly communicate.  But no mater what, for me, this underscores precisely WHY I want to rob people of their credulity in all respects, whether towards woo or religion.

Rick Warren of Saddleback Church was invited to give the Indoctrinational Address at Barack Obama’s inauguration last month, despite strong opposition from the gay community.  Apprently, his appearance has had a slightly embarrassing — if not counterproductive — result for the evangelical community.

Listening to the preachers at the National Prayer Service this morning, I can’t help thinking that they would be better off listening to Obama than the other way around.  What a letdown.

I was mildly interested to see the first woman preach at the service, but unfortunately that historic moment was marred by, well, by preaching!  …and her cadence was about as good as Elizabeth Alexander’s (Obama’s inaugural poet).

Another preacher suggested that he couldn’t think of a better way to start Obama’s journey as president than by praying.  The audience’s response was priceless.  Laughter!

I’m sure many people were as ecstatic as I was to hear mention of nonbelievers in the inaugural address.  But then the question remains whether it is just lip service, or a sign of real change?  He is after all sitting in church on his first day.

Check out the first item on the Additional Issues page in the Agenda section of the new whitehouse.gov site (complete with RSS feeds for the first time!).  It mentions Obama’s “doubts” and “the need for a deeper, more substantive discussion about the role of faith in American life.”

I just don’t think you make this the first (additional) item — ahead of Child Advocacy, Science and Transportation — unless you’ve got some humanist-friendly goals in mind.

The reality is that you can’t yet win in American politics by eschewing belief in imaginary friends (or “childish things”), and Obama is exactly what we need to bridge the gap between that reality and some new one where it no longer matters.  I can’t wait!

We all know Kiva is goodness wrapped in chocolate.

Even better, the AASFSHNR group — Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists, and the Non Religious — is goodness wrapped in chocolate wrapped in bacon! (Sorry to the vegans on board, just substitute “tofu” for bacon or some similar thing…)

I think the discussion on this group has been superb. Of course, as a regular contributor, I may be biased. But it seems to me that caring a lot about other people, and doing so from a particular point of view which is relatively unpopular politically, and talking about it enthusiastically, is a pretty awesome use of the Internet.

I recently pointed out that FriendFeed is also a big bowl of awesome with many groovy applications.

Inspired by my friends at Kiva AASFSHNR, I just created a new group on FriendFeed with the same name (it’s pronounced ass / fuh / shu / ner by the way). I’m hoping it will become a place for rational discussion of issues to do with atheism/agnosticism/religion/politics from a skeptical and secular point of view.

So, here’s an invitation to all people who value critical thinking, who approach life from a skeptical and scientific point of view, and who care about the political health of secular humanism. Join AASFSHNR!

It’s a place to share content you come across in your online travels, and to encourage lively discussion.

By the way, in the group description, I point out how hard it can be to label this kind of a group. It has been noted previously that there are many names we might use, and has even resulted in a campaign to adopt a new name. I may be way off here, but I’m actually kind of hoping that AASFSHNR will take off as a new meme. I don’t get any credit for the neologism if it does. That goes to the founder of the Kiva Group: Peter Kroll.

The flood of new content on the Internet is definitely exciting. We are pulling our media in smaller bits (and on demand) rather than having it pushed out to us by scheduled broadcasts.

But have you noticed that the more you do online, the harder it is to talk about with your friends? Remember when we used to all watch Seinfeld on Thursday nights, and then go to work on Friday to talk about the new episode around the water cooler?

At the water cooler, someone would say, “hey, did you see…?” And we would talk about it. We would add interesting personal anecdotes, and segue freely to other things we were interested in. Every time we brought up a new item in the conversation, we were producing (or better said, re-producing) content. We were offering up something for our listeners to consume, and giving them the chance to participate (by adding their experience, disagreeing, or high fiving, whatever..). But we did so from our shared experience of scheduled broadcasts.

As the flood of new online/on-demand media continues, it can feel impossible to recapture the water cooler experience. Whether we find content on YouTube, our favourite blog, a forum discussion, a news item, a photo, or simply some web page, how do we do the water cooler thing? If we try to talk about it at work (like we did Seinfeld), we have to repeat or summarize the content for context. Over and over again! We can’t assume that our listeners (consumers) have seen what we want to talk about. What about family and friends we don’t work with? What if we telecommute? What about new online communities?

And, just in case it’s not clear, it was the water cooler that made Seinfeld successful at all. In the same way, all this groovy new exciting Internet content gets practically all its value from us: our mentioning it, and our discussing it meaningfully. So how do we do that now?

Sharing platforms to the rescue.

You’re probably very familiar with one platform already: Facebook. It’s pretty good. …and pretty bad. It actually can be more than just a rolodex + a silly waste of time. (Personally, I have tried to use it primarily as a platform to update friends about what I’m doing online.) But, it has a drawback. It is very much USER-focused, rather than CONTENT-focused. It’s all about my profile. Me. Pictures of me. My favourite TV shows. And my favourite quotes.

FriendFeed, on the other hand, is all about content, and discussion. (It is only about the user inasmuch as you trust someone enough to follow the content they produce.) It has been around for about a year, slowly building a committed user base. It is being built by the people who brought us GMail, Google Maps and other popular Google apps. It is both simple to use, and very powerful. Like most powerful apps, it can be a little overwhelming (so take your time not to throw the baby out with the bath water).

So, how do you use it? There are 2 ways:

1. You produce content:
   

   You create an account, and then “hook it up” to your other social accounts (such as Facebook, Twitter, your blog, your YouTube account, your Flickr, your last.fm, and many many many many more), and then you go about your social way — twittering, blogging, fav’ing on YouTube, etc.. Basically, you create content for people to consume at the water cooler.

2. You consume content:
   

   You follow people who are doing the same thing as producers. You comment on their shares. You can “like” stuff (ie, “vote up”). You can divide streams into various lists (to avoid overload perhaps), or aggregate it into rooms.

And, if you just want to just consume, that’s okay too. It’s kind of like showing up at the water cooler and never saying a thing. For some people, that’s their comfort zone. Whenever they want to participate (beyond listening), it’s easy to do.

The thing that I find the coolest about FriendFeed is that it doesn’t require me to give up any of my previous social networks. If you use Facebook, you continue to do so. Twitter, same thing. FriendFeed is complementary to all these services. In this way, it’s a very sustainable transition. Remember how long it took you to get good at Facebook? Well, you don’t have to risk any of that investment by slowly experimenting with FriendFeed. (I have never used Twitter before now, but am getting a taste for it, slowly, as I get good at FriendFeed.) It’s all very interoperable, and open, and squishy good!

The Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious group (or AASFSHNR as we like to refer to it) accomplished a longtime goal on Kiva.org. It became the #1 group in all categories (number of members, total amount of money loaned, and total number of loans).. It was that last category that had eluded them until recently.

The loan-a-thon over New Year’s finally pushed them past Team Obama. (Earlier in the year, AASFSHNR held off a challenge by the Kiva Christians as well.)

The Obamanians have a loan-a-thon of their own planned for Inauguration Day to reply. It remains to be seen if they can take first place back.

Meanwhile, the historical moment has been immortalized by AASFSHNR member JOsara.

Way to represent people! Who says the godless don’t care about their human beings?

I can’t decide…