Mike’s Guide to Life’s Blindingly Obvious, Part Whatever:

What we call charisma is really just the ability to pretend to be happy to see a total stranger.

That doesn’t mean pretend you’re friends with a total stranger, or pretend you know them, because that’s creepy. You don’t even have to like them. It’s simply acting happy to see someone you don’t know, and wondering, how is that person’s day? Do they have anything to say about the thought I was just thinking? Can they brighten my day?

There’s nothing more to it. That’s charisma.

Corollary: The above is one of exactly two skills required for a successful political career. (The other is being able to filter your words before they leave your mouth.)

I really wish I wasn’t right as often as I am. I wrote on Jan. 2:

Iraq has been less chaotic recently thanks to the six-month ceasefire declared by al Sadr’s militia, but if it doesn’t look like the US will withdraw its troops soon, expect the violence to return around March or so.

What’s happening in Iraq these days? And, oh, look at the calendar…

It’s far more complicated than that, of course, and the funny thing is, I should have been completely wrong. Al Sadr surprised me by extending his cease-fire in February, but then events on the ground spiraled beyond even his control. I just wanted to note the eerie, accidental prescience of what I wrote, and nothing more.

The truth is, anyone who says they know exactly what’s going on in Iraq or what we’re doing is working is lying or deluded. We need to get out. Still.

I spent my Monday and Tuesday nights with Sky’s latest Pratchett adaptation, and I have to say this: if Jeremy Irons is going to play Lord Vetinari in future Discworld movies, I hope he drops the dog and the Pythonesque speech impediment. I kept expecting him to say, “We must wewease Wodewick!”

Of course, even that couldn’t quash the giddiness over the fact that I was watching Jeremy Irons as Lord Vetinari. He’s in, what, at least 15 of the books, all of which I’ve read? And now he’s on screen for the first time. Sweet.

Cohen the Barbarian was incoherent enough that I only caught two of every three lines, which was absolutely perfect, and I loved the Conan reference that introduced him. The Butch Cassidy riff that followed was somewhat less successful. And the Librarian was… a guy in a monkey suit. Ah well. What can you do on a Sky One budget?

The two-part miniseries turned out to be an adaptation of the first two books, The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, which was a necessary choice if you think about it for a second. It had the same flaws as Hogfather, really — I can’t imagine a non-fan enjoying it much, and most of Pratchett’s narrative/footnote humor is lost in translation. And yet, I nerded out and enjoyed it anyway.

It’s not actually true that everyone in the world does a webcomic, even if it seems like that sometimes. However, Bitstrips might make it so.

After spending some time experimenting with its staggeringly deep character creation tool, it literally took me all of ten minutes to whip up this three-panel gag using nothing but the stock characters and props. (And a copy button. And Google.)

As far as I can tell in my small time working with Bitstrips, it has no tool for creating backdrops, props or clothing, which limits your storytelling options. It’s hard to do, say, Order of the Stick without castles or swords or wizardly robes. But it’s still only in beta, so who knows what’s coming next.

Any day that brings me four bits of awesomeness can’t be a bad one.

• Obama’s speech today was honest, nuanced, and totally reasonable. Which means it probably won’t help him in the slightest, but hope springs eternal. Video of the speech is here, and if you don’t have 40 minutes to spare, the text is available, too.
• Jon Stewart picks up on the Bear Stearns story and that Jim Cramer clip. Video starts here and continues here.
• This piece by Paul Waldman so perfectly reflects my view of anti-war protests that I might as well have written it myself.
• And finally something totally apolitical: Joss Whedon is currently filming a three-episode Internet series called Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-Long Blog. Joss says, “It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.” It stars Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible and Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer. Oh, and it’s a musical.

I forgot to add this to the Colour of Magic post. As I’ve blogged before, Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Recently, he made a half-million pound donation to Alzheimer’s research — and what does he have to lose at this point, really? — and now his fans are attempting to match him.

I just made a small donation via their Paypal tip jar.

Bear Stearns sells out to JPMorgan at a fire-sale price of $2/share to avoid total collapse, with the Fed putting up the risk money. Bernanke hits the panic button for more rate cuts (again… as if they’ve helped at all so far). And all of this happens on a Sunday.

Looks an awful lot like the Epic American Financial Collapse has finally begun. Rumor has it Lehman Brothers is next, possibly followed by Citigroup.

Anyone paying attention to the fundamentals has seen this coming for over a year. Sadly, modern economic theory, at least among the professionals on Wall Street, apparently relies more on spin and blind faith than fundamentals. The latest Bear Stearns drama began one day after S&P assured the public that the worst of the banking crisis was over. And then, as if we needed more reason to despise Jim Cramer, he aired this earlier this month:

You might dismiss Cramer as a single screaming idiot in a sea of otherwise calm, rational brokers, but as far as I can tell, he represents the common wisdom on the Street.

I so wish the grownups were in charge right now. I think they all bought gold and Euros and departed for Zurich.

This one snuck up on me: Britain’s Sky One airs its second live-action Discworld adaptation, The Colour of Magic, starring David Jason, Sean Astin, and Tim Curry, a week from today on Easter. Hopefully I’ll have a copy by the following day.

I wish I could recommend visiting Sky’s official site, but every time I go there, my laptop’s CPU hits 100% and my entire PC drags to a halt. Way to go, Internet team. Nobody can use your Flash-ridden site, but man, it sure is sparkly. Instead, go to Sky’s YouTube page and check out the trailers and such.

Not that I’m complaining about a new Pratchett movie — and I really am looking forward to this one, even if the ads look less than promising — but why do they keep filming the subpar books and skipping the great ones? The Colour of Magic is the first book, true, and introduces Rincewind. But where are my live-action Wyrd Sisters or Guards Guards or Small Gods?

If you’ve followed my posts marked research, you’ve noticed many of them are news about how American society might change and harvest energy in a post-oil world. Ever since I read James Kunstler’s The Long Emergency in 2005, I’ve thought that world would make a fascinating yet realistic setting for a book or comic or screenplay. So I’ve been slowly accumulating bits of news that might make it into my eventual story.

That is, until last month, when a couple of weeks ago, when James Kunstler had a novel published called World Made By Hand, about American society in a post-oil world.

And you know, fair enough. It’s his sandbox anyway, so it’s only right that he plays in it first. It reminds me of the time I had this great idea to record MST3K-style podcasts to be played along with the original movie on DVD… and then Mike Nelson debuted Rifftrax two months later. In both cases, I wanted to fill a genre niche I would personally pay money to experience, only to find it had been filled by the originator of the niche. So naturally, I raced out to Borders and purchased Kunstler’s novel.

And my god, it is… so… not very good.

Let’s get the praise out of the way first: the best part of the novel is, as expected, the setting. Kunstler’s strength lies in his dystopian futurist speculation, and here he imagines, for example, exactly how suburban homes would be stripped of useful materials in ways I might not have imagined. And his writing style, as always, is smooth and readable.

But his plot is wooden, his dialogue clunky, and his ending is eighteen layers of awful. Plot threads are introduced, then never pursued. On top of that, Kunstler’s own prejudices come through too strongly. His protagonist is a thinly-veined version of himself: about the same age, lives in the same area, has the same distaste for cars and suburbia. Naturally, the town names him Mayor because he’s such a great guy, and three different hot women throw themselves at him during the course of the book.

The entire country has become a terrifying wasteland — except for upstate New York, where the novel is set, and where Kunstler happens to live. I would say this is a case of writing what the author knows, except for two things: LA and DC have been nuked by Muslim terrorists and every other major city is unlivable due to race wars. The Long Emergency included a passage about how Mexicans were illegally crossing the border in order to take the southwestern US back for Mexico, a belief held by people such as Pat Buchanan and rebutted well by Jon Stewart. Basically, if American society collapsed due to a lack of gasoline and electricity, Kunstler believes the first thing brown and black people would do is conspire to Kill Whitey, and only racially unified areas will be livable. Um… okay.

Kunstler also hews a little too closely to The Long Emergency, which is not unexpected. If he didn’t think everything in that book would happen, he wouldn’t have included them in the first place. Still, even Kunstler admits that the world will never entirely run out of oil, it will just become too scarce to run an economy, so it might have been nice for some oil to show up in World Made By Hand. I also would have liked some ingenuity in repurposing those cars and suburban homes, re-opening lines of communication, etc. We live in a world with cheap, handcranked laptops, yet Kunstler believes that when confronted with an apocalyptic lack of electricity, America will immediately give up and either go feral or go Amish?

Meh. Maybe he does believe it, or maybe he just finds that a more interesting story to tell. Either way, perhaps there is room for a post-oil America story of my own… if I ever get back to my writing.

My parents are in town for the first time ever, so I’m pretty much booked up until they leave on Friday.

I’ve taken a couple of days off from work. Today was a Rockies spring training game, which the home team gave away in the ninth. Tomorrow will be Old Tucson Studios and the Sonora Desert Museum — two big touristy hot spots. They want to go to Tombstone, too, but that will be without me, sadly. (I’ve never been.)