the 941

Cover: Living in harmony

Using innovative systems that have zero environmental impact, a Myakka City Earthship will integrate itself into the surrounding ecosystem.

UrbEx: Phos-fate

As a mining mogul makes headway into the Peace River ecosystem, a coalition of environmental groups is fighting back.

The City: Political espionage

Brian Ries gives a lesson in public records: finding out who supports what candidate.

Townie: Big E

Eric Hamilton tells how losing his job in the Enron fallout led him to open up Big E’s Sweets and Gourmet Coffee.

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If there’s anything that pouting girlfriends, hollering family members and freaked-out strangers have taught me, it’s that Scrabble is a divisive force. Let’s just look at what happened in the little Internet city that Amanda Schurr likes to call the Book of Face.

First, Hasbro sued Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla, the makers of a Facebook application called Scrabulous, and the game was disabled. Then Hasbro put up its own Facebook application, since it had licensed online Scrabble to Electronic Arts.

However, Facebook Scrabble is unplayable. It was victim to a malicious attack! We don’t know for sure whether the attackers were Scrabulous fans, but I think it’s pretty obvious. Anyone who’s ever been challenged and lost, but only because the dictionary was stupid, knows that that game makes you mean.

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I don’t object to violence in video games. It’s fun and cathartic. The human destruction drive is not going to go away any time soon, and maybe digitized bazookas are a good way to exorcise it.

But why, so often, is the character you control in a video game a U.S. soldier, or a supersoldier, or a mecha-destroyer module for the American federation? I’m talking about games like Call of Duty, Splinter Cell, Halo and Crysis. That’s not to mention America’s Army and Future Force Commander — addictive, realistic first-person shooters developed as recruitment tools for the armed forces. The Pentagon spent millions on these games, and it distributes them for free on the Army’s Web site.

Command and Conquer at least allows you to direct the communist army if you so choose, but otherwise, I mean, why do the video game companies kowtow to the military-industrial complex? It seems to me that gaming ought to be an individualized, subversive experience because it empowers the player beyond his marginalization by the ruling class.

Where are the video games about rebellion, anarchy and revolution? A nod to Half-Life, but how about a game where you subvert the CIA instead of some aliens?

Check out this interview with Nina Huntemann, who wrote Game Over: Gender, Race & Violence in Video Games. She compares militaristic video games to the propaganda film Why We Fight, which was commissioned by the U.S. government before WWII in efforts to sway public opinion. Excerpts after the jump. (more…)

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A giant statue of a penis, a naked man suspended from a harness. The St. Petersburg police have arrested those responsible, protecting ordinary citizens from the grotesque and freakish sight of male genitalia.

The owner of Erotic Lounge art gallery has closed his business (thank the gods!), but will instead focus his efforts on suing the St. Penisburg — sorry, Petersburg — police. I hope the department is not distracted from this lawsuit by any violent crimes.

The offending sculpture is available on eBay. It’s made of wood, so we recommend that anyone with a few hundred extra dollars purchase it quickly and douse it with kerosene.

Let’s face it: People look like mutants with their clothes off. Ropy, uncontrollable appendages, wounds that never heal. God created us in his own image, but the devil stole in while our bodies were cooling and gave us the mutilations of demons. Lest that madness take over, we must never expose our viler parts except in darkness or in the holy light of an X-ray machine.

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Arts writer Amanda Schurr and I were discussing the new JC Penney commercial that riffs off The Breakfast Club. These are the days when advertisers, filmmakers, radio programmers, basically all producers of media, are trying to cash in on Gen X nostalgia.

At 32, Amanda is a tweenie, an XY-er if you will (She does have a strong handshake, come to think of it. Jk, Amanda, don’t beat me.). But born in 1985, I landed soundly in Generation Y, or the Millienial Generation. “I wonder,” I said to Amanda, “where people will mine for nostalgia when my generation is the consumer class.”

So we bring you the beginnings of a collaborative list: movies, music and TV shows that molded the impressionable adolescent minds of my generation. Our lower bound for release dates is the year 2000, when I and others born in the Year of the Ox were learning to drive. In homage to High Fidelity, we deliver our lists in chunks of five. Note that these aren’t necessarily the best releases, just culture shapers. A qualifying candidate either affected American behavior on a large scale or altered the course of its medium. First are my lists, with Amanda’s to follow: (more…)

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Here he is on Heath Ledger’s character:

His clown’s makeup more sloppy than before, his cackle betraying deep wounds, he seeks revenge, he claims, for the horrible punishment his father exacted on him when he was a child.

No, Rog, he doesn’t. The whole refreshingly nihilistic point was that this Joker defies simple psychoanalysis. He tells that (somewhat pat) story about his father in an early scene, and then later on, he gives another (dense and compelling) explanation for his scars. In a climactic scene, before he’s interrupted, he prepares to tell Batman what will probably be a third story to explain the same result. He’s not motivated by some childhood trauma, he’s not really motivated by anything. He’s just fucking around.

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Clean Water Action, a political action committee that has its origins in Ralph Nader’s late ’60s activism, gave its endorsement to local Democratic Congressional candidate Christine Jennings yesterday.

In its endorsement letter, the group said that Jennings was committed to protecting “our lakes, rivers, streams and drinking water sources.”

Jennings’ campaign, in announcing the endorsement, accused her incumbent Republican opponent Vern Buchanan of “greenwashing” his platform through taxpayer-funded mailouts. The campaign reproached Buchanan for snubbing environmental bills like the Safe Climate Act and the Renewable Energy Bill.

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I repeat, spoilers everywhere.

Like our theater critic Lance Goldberg, who gave the film a rave review, I loved the latest Batman installment. And one of the remarkable things about the film was the way its messages spilled out into the theater to address our own relationship with its hero.

Take the chaos vs. order theme, which unfolded throughout the first half of the movie before being laid out explicitly by The Joker at Two-Face’s bedside. This is of course the theme of any crime-fighting story, but I’ve never seen it dredged to the surface the way it was in The Dark Knight.

Suddenly we’re able to see through what we’re doing when we watch a Batman movie, and we see that it’s like watching a sporting event. Most moviegoers are fans of order, but some of them don’t care. The most important thing is that both sides put up a good fight.

We don’t want The Joker to lose because the game would be over. But the funny thing is that in this movie, neither does Batman, apparently. Remember the note from Rachael Dawes, about how he’ll never be ready to retire the mask and cape? And then there’s the climactic scene when Batman saves The Joker with his grappling hook as he’s falling down the side of the building.

Sure, Batman has his moral code and everything, but what a world of good it would do to just let The Joker die. And even when the clown is caught at one point, it’s Commissioner Gordon who actually collars him. Batman just gives him a good fight.

It beats watching the Superbowl, if you ask me.

A friend at the St. Pete Times, cops reporter Stephanie Garry, pointed out another way that The Dark Knight interrogates its audience. At the end of the movie (huge spoiler) when Harvey Dent goes bad and ultimately dies, Batman takes the fall for all of Dent’s wrongdoings. The people of Gotham need to believe in a perfect fiction, he says, so they can have faith that order may someday win out. Meanwhile Batman is the real hero, the only character uncorrupted by chaos.

For the Batman audience, said Stephanie, the perfect fiction is The Dark Knight himself. He is our Harvey Dent.

But there’s a flaw in this analogy. Real-world moviegoers, unless they follow an Abrahamic religion, have no true hero defending them from behind the fiction. Maybe that’s why we’re so drawn to The Joker, whose life is nothing more than a game with no rules.

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This BBC comedy series has aired 20 episodes since 2004. Somehow we’ve missed it until now.

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Charlie Crist, once thought to be the good guardian of Florida’s swampy kingdom, now says he’s prepared to fight a legal battle to open our shores to oil companies.

If you asked us, Charlie, we’d say we’d rather ride our bikes to the beach than drive out to the west-Florida slime shelf. Like many Americans, we’re driving less. And our poor struggling government is consequently losing money on the federal gas tax, causing a big deficit in funds for highway projects.

Why don’t they just borrow more money from China? We already owe them at least half a trillion, and it looks like “American” companies are cheerleading for the Red Giant anyway. Just direct evidence that any corporation, once it gets big enough, ignores national borders.

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