Kevin at BlogHouston picks up the Houston Chronicle story about financial collapse of Infernal Bridegroom Productions.
I have some personal knowledge of what it takes financially to survive in the local stage world. A girl I know wrote a play several years back and entered it into a new playwright talent competition that was judged by a panel of professional theater folks. Her play won first prize and was later put on in an abridged form on a few occasions by several local theater troupes at some small theater houses here in town. She crafted a few others before stopping her work to concentrate on furthering her formal education.
To cut to the chase, there were problems with venues, the terms which theater house owners would put on allowing her play to be staged, and so on. Moreover this girl had some ambition. She wanted to do some rewrites to her play and then put on a full length run (3-4 weeks) at a larger theater house. It turned out that she located 2 venues that were interested at the time, but they wanted (if I remember correctly) a minimum of $500 per night to put on her play. That would have meant that a 4 day per week run for 3 weeks would have had a starting price tag of $6,000 to stage and that did not include such small things like props, lighting, advertising, and so forth. However those items would have been donated for free by sympathetic travelers and allies. As for the cast and crew receiving payment for their efforts, well I made it clear to these youthful idealistic souls that he who had the gold was the one who made the rules - right? They soon got the message that they were not the ones in the drivers' seat when it came down to talking about money.
I told this girl that I was willing to put up the money for staging her play on the terms that I would have gotten 100 percent of all ticket sales up to my initial investment and would have split anything beyond that 50 / 50 with her and her troupe. I would have also been given Executive Producer credit for my investment risk. It later turned out that there were scheduling issues and several troupe members who worked with her went off to do other things, ergo the enterprise eventually drifted apart.
Still, the experience gave me a new appreciation for what many entertainers do on the Houston theater and arts scene. Starving artists had their own self help groups back in Ancient Rome. Two millennia later I found that little had changed and their spiritual descendants here in H-Town still suffer for their art and willingly at that. As Kevin sort of alluded to, many times established theaters or troupes will put on well known plays just to pay the bills and upstarts have to fight tooth and nail just to get started. I would venture to guess that IBP's following might have been growing older and moving on with their lives. However, not having ever seen any of their work I would not be certain of the validity of my belief.
The exercise really does go to show how hard cultural types have to work in order to make it in the free market for entertainment where they compete for your discretionary spending dollars with television, movie theaters, home videos, hobby past times, music venues and nightclubs, and so on. Many talk the talk about Houston being a great place for culture, but little do they know how hard it is to put your money where your mouth is and walk the walk. Maybe I should revisit the idea of becoming an arts entrepreneur and make another run at bankrolling some hopeful artists. Stay tuned.
Wizard.
This entry is actually a redirect from a web page which I wrote in February 2004. I copy it into my blog in its entirety.
My website gets, on average, probably 10 visits per month from people who are searching for Dungeons and Dragons adventure ideas. As a retired player of role playing games (though I am considering starting to work as a game master again), I haven't been to a game tournament in over 10 years. I now play chess, but I can sympathize with intelligent fellow travelers who happen to be wracking their brains out trying to come up with new ideas to keep their campaigns and milleus interesting for jaded players. Thus, after noticing the number of visits I was getting to this page, I decided to write some advice for people who happen to be looking for new ideas for role playing games (RPG's).
And what is that advice, pray tell? I would suggest that Game Masters start reading history and political science. No gentle readers, not Tolkien's, or Harry Potter, or Elric, or John De Chance, C.J. Cherryh, or any imaginary history written by any other fantasy or science fiction author to flesh out their own worlds. I'm talking about the history of Egypt, ancient Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, Chinese history, or of the Indian subcontinent.
If you can afford to cough up the money, start reading Edward Gibbon's unabridged version of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Read the works of Livy, of Dion (if you can find Dion), of Herodotus, the Veneable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English people, Alfred the Great, or the Chinese classic The Dream of the Red Chamber (aka Hong Luo Mong in Mandarin or The Story of the Stone). Find a book on the history of the Roman Catholic Church (which has a incredibly fascinating 2000 year history!) for ideas regarding politics surround your Cleric playing characters. For that matter, why not read British religious author Karen Armstrong'sA History of God, Camille Paglia's Sexual Personnae, or revisit the Bible for ideas? As of this reposting, I am reading The Mammoth Book of Pirates by Jon E. Lewis.
Do you want a true adventure story? Why not try reading Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative. Equiano was an West African, who in the 18th century was taken into the slave trade, but eventually won his freedom and became a loyal British subject. Equiano's true life story will blow your mind. If you have slavery (or realms where slavery is part of the social fabric) in some of your campaigns (which you will find was quite common in the ancient world), this story will breathe some terrifying reality for what that sorry institution was like for those who suffered from it.
Once you get on a kick for reading history and political science, you'll find more titles that are to your taste. You can find these books at most major book store chains, as they are published by Penguin Classics (for that matter, you might want to visit Penguin's website and look for them there).
So why would I suggest you start reading real human history instead of imaginary works by sci - fi or fantasy authors? Well for one, most authors themselves have read quite a bit of history and political science and plunder the past for ideas to write about. Tolkien did (and Rowling does) this, so why not you? More to the point, if you find yourself wracking your brains out looking for names that don't sound phony for your characters, for twisted mind bending situations for your hungry players to solve, and for broad historical / political situations as to why things are the way they are in your world, then why not read history and political works. All of these things are found in unending abundance in the works of history and political science.
Moreover, once you have absorbed a big idea from the past, with some imagination (isn't that why you play role playing games to begin with?), you can easily flesh out the ideas you have read about and work them into your campaigns. I would be willing to bet big money that you will never run out of ideas for characters, adventures, and situations to embroil your characters with.
"But wait," you cry! I don't like reading history. We read it in high school and all there is to history is reading what the three causes of the French and Indian War were and writing them down on an exam. Not only that, history is dry and boring! Who wants to know about the past, when what happened long ago has nothing to do with anything? Moreover, these are works of heavyweights! They are way out of my depth! Don't laugh at this last statement. Once per month, I attend a Tolkien gathering group, and more than a few people I meet get intimidated when a bring a history book with me to the gathering.
Well, well, well, gentle readers, if you start reading Edward Gibbon, you will be in for a very rude shock. You will find yourself reading the words of a man who makes the pages turn effortlessly. Many of these men are very easy to read, you just have to pick up the book and start reading them! Don't get intimidated by the idea that these "weighty" works are only for professors of the classics. They can be enjoyed by everyone, not just college students and their professors!
Also, if you happen to have some real money, try taking an actual vacation to Thailand, India, anywhere in Europe, Mexico, or some other far away place. Open your mind and it will feed your imagination!
As for the issue that history can be dry and boring, that is probably because the history you read in a public high school is in fact dry and sanitized history because public tax dollars are at stake and plenty of interest groups don't want you to read too deeply about the past. Moreover one of my own thoughts about public schools is that they are really there to keep you off the streets during the day and not necessarily to teach you anything interesting.
So take my advice to heart. Put down those Star Trek and Ursula Le Guinn books and dig into the real thing. Not only will your campaigns probably become more interesting, people might start looking at YOU as a more interesting person.
Regards... oh, and as for the Greatest Dungeons and Dragons adventure in history? Well gentle readers, read on!
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Today's writing regards the greatest Dungeons and Dragons adventure ever told. This is no idle boast either! I was one of the original crowd of Dungeons and Dragons players. It is well known that the game was first conceived and invented circa 1974 by Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax. I was first introduced to the game in 1977, the same year Star Wars first came out. There were two brothers with whom I grew up with down the street and the older of the two came home around the time the school year ended with the game.
When David, the younger of the two told me of this new game, he had a bit of a hard time explaining what Dungeons and Dragons was and how to play the game. I distinctly remember him telling me that this game was unlike any other game in existence and that I would simply have to play the game in order to experience what it was like. A week or two later, Steve, the older of the two guided me through creating my first character - a magic user named Gandalf (how original!). Like so many others, we all immediately got hooked by the incredible imagination involved in the game. I still have my first books and some of my stuff from way back then.
I played in 6 or 7 "campaigns" (a series adventues in an imaginary world involving a group of characters created by a group of players for those of you who have no idea of what I am talking about) over the years when I was an active D&D player. All of these campaigns lasted somewhere between 3 - 18 months. As time went on, I specialized in "running" (creating and role playing) Magic User type characters. Magic Users are weak in using weapons and could not wear armor to protect themselves, but as time went on, the spells which came within their grasp became very potent and much feared. I fell in love with Magic Users and specialized in their play. I knew their spells up and down and could often put such powers to interesting and unexpected uses.
I've long since forgotten most of the adventures we had, but I do have one memory that I will remain with me as long as I live. I was playing at Nancon, which was sponsored annually by Nan's Toys and Games in Houston. It was 1983 and I had made it to the last round of the tournament playing a magic user. This adventure would tax my powers of imagination at problem solving to their very limits. It was my greatest moment in D&D play. Unexpectedly, I was to find many years later that my game play at this tournament was to become the stuff that legends are made of.
When we received our characters that we were to play in the 3rd and final round of play in the tournament, I was stunned. I was given a 17th level magic user! I couldn't believe it! I had never played any character remotely that powerful before and it took me about 45 minutes just to write down the spells my character had at his disposal for the tournament round! In a similar vein, all of my fellow players (there were six of us in the party), had characters ranging from 14 - 17 levels in ability! We were also loaded with very powerful magical items and weaponry. We soon found out why.
We were told at the outset of the game round that we (the six of us) served as the sole armed forces for a small "Switzerland" type City State far up in the mountains of our fictitious world. Our kingdom was normally safe from invaders, but there was little in the way of agriculture to support ourselves, so our little city - state relied largely on trade with the outside world to support itself. However, there was only one road that led to our fair city from the plains and fields that surrounded the mountains in which we were situated. This road normally served as our access and trade route to the outside world. There was, however, a problem....
The world had turned dark you see. We could see the skies turn cloudy and full of omens. We heard rumors that 3 evil and chaotic gods had come to invade and conquer our world. We had heard rumor that the world was frothing with horrible plagues and pestilences, but nothing of these potents had yet visited our little realm - not yet...
One morning, the denizens of our fair City all arose to find that there were100,000,000 (yes that's 100,000,000!) little Orc like demons were lined up blocking the road to our little paradise! They stood, crowding the entire width and breadth road for 75 miles! They were three feet tall and had only 4 hit points each. They did not move, they just stood there. They were armed with swords and spears, but they did not brandish them or threaten us with them. All they were doing was waiting for the citizens of our fair City state to roll over and die of starvation. With a sense of awe and horror, we knew we were in TROUBLE...
Our first thought was that "we are the most powerful characters in the world! We can just hurl tons of spells and attack then with wild and hideous abandon!" They can't possibly do anything to us! However, the game master laughed hideously and quickly squashed such idiotic ideas! He started telling us stories such as if our fighting men attacked with all of their might while our spell casting characters fired off all of our magic spells like fireballs and lightning bolts, it would take 27 years to clear the road. We would have to do better than that...
It began to dawn on us how many of these creatures there really were...
My fellow players went into a group think. We tried to think of other ideas that would be able to deal with such a vast horde of monsters. It began to dawn on us that the framework of the game Dungeons and Dragons was set up such that even the most powerful characters in the game would find it impossible to deal with the destruction of such an awe inspiring horde of creatures. We could defeat hundreds, even thousands, of creatures. Millions however, were absolutely out of the question.
We tried many ideas. We tried thinking of having our clerics cast Blade Barrier spells which would destroy monsters that would dare to pass the gate. However, the monsters weren't moving. We tried to change the weather in the hope that such an event would chase these monsters away. No such luck. We tried to summon various monsters and undead with the hope of scaring them away. Nope.
Finally at one point, we decided to send our Thief character on a voyage / adventure (we all possessed magic flying carpets as part of our incredible, but seeming useless arsenal of items we had at our disposal) in the hope that there was some artifact or powerful talisman that could destroy the awesome horde of passive beasts that sat there, waiting for our starvation. The rest of us would remain as guards in case the fell bite - sized demons decided to invade our Fair City State. They never did, but our Thief came back empty handed.
All seemed lost...
The Game Master spoke of a few issues and then went through the process of describing how the Thief was coming back to our Fair City State. We took pains to make it clear that our Thief was flying high over the mountains, out of range of bow and arrow shot of the demons which lined the road. The Game Master said he understood and our Thief was soon safe and back at home with us. Still, we were no nearer to solving our horrible dilemma.
In the meantime, I had drifted off into a dream. In my mind's eye, I imagined our Thief flying high in the air, out of bow shot of our little enemies. I saw the thief flying along the road and following it back to find his way back to our Fair City State.
And then... I had a Vision!
I had an Angle...
And it just might work...
Suddenly, my mind raced like lightning! My powers of imagination were blazing with excitement! Inside I was jumping up and down with the possibility that I had glimpsed a way out of this impossible situation! Inside, I shook with the amazement that I was on to something that bordered on the verge of greatness!
Quickly, I took out my First Edition Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook. I looked up the Magic User spell, Wall of Fire. It was a 4th level spell, so it was easily with the power of my character to cast and wield such a spell. I read feverishly through the spell's description. I was looking for a prayer...
The description of the Wall of Fire spell read as follows:
Wall of Fire (Evocation)
...
...
This spell different from the fifth level Druid spell , Wall of Fire, ... (the difference between the spells was minimal).
So, I turned to the description of the Fifth level Druid Wall of Fire spell. It read as follows:
......
Only the side of the wall away from the spell caster will inflict damage. The opaque wall of fire lasts for as long as the character concentrates on it (or for a limited time if they do not - TMW). The spell could create an actual wall in front of the spell caster, or a ring of fire that surrounded the spell caster and moved with the spell caster if the spell caster decided to move somewhere.
I had my answer...
Quickly, I told my fellow players and Game Master of my idea. First, we would get all of my fellow players to get on to their magic flying carpets. Second, I would cast a "ring type" Wall of Fire spell on each of them so that the firewall would move along with them. Then, we would open the gates of Our Fair City and fly out of them on our flying carpets with the idea that we would mow these little Orc like demons down (like a Lawn Mower in Fact!) by flying right through them with our Wall's of Fire blazing a hellish and fiery trail in front of us.
It was impossible. My fellow players went wild! They absolutely could not believe that I had thought up such an idea. Seeing that nobody else had any other ideas, everyone agreed immediately to trying my plan.
At that point, the Game Master punched the clock that kept time as to how much time had passed during tournament play. We had 2 hours and 30 minutes of game time to complete the adventure, assuming that we would be able to get anywhere to begin with. We had already spent about 90 minutes trying to come up with an idea to destroy the 100,000,000 demons in front of us.
As we waited for the Game Master to return, we talked excitedly about what was to come just in case our plan worked. We didn't know what to expect next.
The Game Master came back. He said that he had conferred with the Tournament Director and that they had concluded that my use of these spells were in fact within the scope of the game rules. We immediately went into a celebratory frenzy - yelling, slapping each other's backs and giving each other "High Fives"! And so it was that we returned back to our Fair City having won the adoration of the populace and ruling classes.
The rest of the adventure was also memorable, but sadly we didn't complete the entire scenario. We ended up fighting one of the gods whom was visiting pestilence on our world, but time ran out while we were in the midst of combat. We never found out what else was to follow.
That tournament was the end of innocence for me. I went on to my adult life and gaming grew to be of less and less importance. I did go back to play 2 or 3 more tournaments in my adulthood, but they didn't have the excitement they had of my youth.
Ten more years passed before I went to my last game tournament. I was 27 years old and had just quit working for the much hated Oil Seismic Data Company. I had quit with no job lined up, but I had to save my sanity. I went to a game tournament with the hope of taking my mind off of my real life woes.
During the second round of the tournament, I found myself playing (yes!) a Magic User. We were six adventurers who were out trying to watch the son of a ruling monarch of a seafaring based empire. The City we were in was, naturally, a sea port and we were told to follow "Junior" while he went out on a night on the town. It was a good adventure and as usual, I came up with some timely solutions to some awful situations.
We were playing this round of the tournament at a very late hour, perhaps 11:30pm - 12:00am on a Saturday night. At one point during play, the Game Master, along with a long time Houston area gamer / Tournament Director whom I remembered from years gone by, had decided to order some pizza from a nearby restaurant. We all decided to join him. So we stopped the game when the food arrived.
As we sat eating our late night repast, several of my fellow game players had noticed my abilities at playing a Magic User character. At that point, I decided to tell them the story about my classic defeat of the 100,000,000 demons from 10 long years before. My fellow players were spell bound as they heard my now legendary story from years gone by...
And I was to discover that my story had indeed become a legend! While I told my story, both the Game Master whom was handling our game and the Tournament Director (who was lying down on a couch in the hotel room we were playing our game in) immediately broke in. They were buzzing with excitement and started laughing when I spoke! "Oh, my gosh, the Wall of Fire story!" yelled the Tournament Director as he laughed aloud. Clearly, they knew the story, but they said that they never had met anyone who had played the game! Some players had actually told them that they heard that the story was nothing but a myth and a legend! Both men said it was an honor to have met me and the game master actually shook my hand!
The Game Master then told me a very interesting fact about what had happened to Dungeons and Dragons after that tournament. During the years, the Game had gone through one of its changes and new rule books had been published. One of the rule changes in the new Game Players Handbook was that the Wall of Fire spell had been changed so that a magically created Wall could be avoided by adversaries. The Game Master told me that after that tounament I had played in 10 years before, word went out everywhere like wild fire about my classic solution to the impossible situation of destroying 100,000,000 monsters with this spell. Therefore, everyone who ever heard the story (and both the Game Master and the Tournament Director told me that the story had in fact been told far and wide) started using the spell in this way - if they were powerful enough to actually use the spell. This eventually resulted in a rewriting of the game rules regarding the powers of this spell.
I was dumbfounded. Nearly everyone who played Dungeons and Dragons claimed at one time or another that they had done something or another that resulted in a change in the game rules, but never offered any proof. I cannot be certain that my case was the reason the rules were changed regarding this spell, but it cannot be doubted that such an act made an incredible impression on my fellow players.
This is the first of what will probably be a slew of ideas involving role playing games. I've been inspired to write these because of the frenzy accompanying the release of the last Harry Potter book.
I've noted elsewhere that I get visits from hapless game masters looking for Dungeons and Dragons adventure ideas. I was watching the History Channel the other day and came up with the following ideas just by watching a one hour program:
1) Why not have your characters go on a state or government sponsored expedition to locate the source of a great river? Perhaps the city or town where they happen to be lives and dies by what happens to the river and it would be of interest to the inhabitants of the town or city to know all they can.
2) Who knows? Maybe there is gold mine at the river's source? In effect your players would become prospectors. If there was an undiscovered gold mine, then surely that would attract the attention of rival political powers, powerful non player characters, nasty monsters and so on. Think of what happened in Tolkien's The Hobbit after Smaug the Dragon was killed. A fierce scramble ensued to battle over the slain dragon's hoard. Players might find themselves fighting to hold on to their new treasures or having to use their diplomatic skills to do the same.
3) One issue that was pointed out in the History Channel program is that adventurers and explorers of human history often didn't find what it was that they were looking for. For example, Ponce De Leon did not find the Fountain of Youth, nor did Christopher Columbus find a passage to India.
4) Remote islands in our own world are often used as prisons. Devil's Island off of Guyana was used by the French for generations and housed many of France's most famous convicts. Adventurers could be asked to free some prisoners off of such an island.
5) Game Masters should really think twice before they use the old "there's a nearby dungeon which used to belong to an old wizard" adventure. Why? If there really was an old dungeon nearby, then chances are that if there was treasure in the dungeon, then other more powerful non player characters would have already gone on an expedition to plunder those riches.
And speaking of information and law, I will be writing more about these matters in RPG's soon.
So last Friday July 13, 2007 (did that make for an unlucky day for anyone?), HPRA welcomed David Mincberg as the guest speaker. It made for a curious luncheon, but a civil one considering that I had to warn Mr. Mincberg that he was walking into a den of tigers. Forewarned, Mincberg went about his talk and went away to his next appointment that afternoon relatively unscathed.
Mincberg reminds me quite a bit of current Houston Mayor, Bill White. Both men are in their 50's and well off. They are genteel and come across as fairly harmless older fellows. Such personnas help considerably when it comes to dealing with people on a personal level, which is always a plus when you find yourself in the viper pits of political life. Still, his personality has not always won over would be friends within the Democratic Party, many of whom think that Mincberg is all about - well - David Mincberg.
But none of that was talked about at this luncheon. I had wired up the podium microphone so that I could capture a podcast of the day's meeting, but Mincberg started off his talk by nimbly stepping away from the podium so that in his own words he "could speak more clearly to the audience". Very clever of you, Mr. Mincberg...
Mincberg first recounted that he was born in 1950 and that his parents were Holocaust survivors who had come to Houston in 1949 without any money, no friends, and no English language skills. Despite all of these handicaps, they did well for themselves and raised their family in the Fondren / southwest part of Houston. Mincberg is in the apartment construction business, having built some 30,000 - 35,000 apartment units in the City. He knew a fellow in the audience named Jerry Seltzer who owns a plumbing company. He knows the Mayor through their contacts in the Democratic Party and when White became Mayor, he asked Mincberg to become a special assistant with a portfolio for multi-family housing, though he also deals with single family housing issues and the homeless. Mincberg happens to be one of those high powered $1 per year salary types whom the Mayor seems to be able to get to work for him in droves. Mincberg also told of a story where the Mayor invited Mincberg on a trip to New York City to look at what was being done with various housing matters, but was then told that he had to pay his own way.
Mincberg told the audience that the City of Houston has three agencies which deal with housing. The first is the Housing and Community Development, which dispurses about $70 million in federal grants. The second is the Housing Authority of the City of Houston which people apply to get on waiting lists for housing vouchers. Mincberg told the audience that about 20,000 people are waiting to get on the list. The third agency is an agency which offers low interest loans for aspiring home buyers. The Mayor asked Mincberg to look into ways in which the agencies could be co-ordinated.
Mincberg then went on to the main part of his descriptive talk in which he said early in his tenure to the Mayor that he was not a big fan of government building apartments for low income residents. When the Mayor asked him why, Mincberg gave the reason that were the government to go out and build some nice new residences, that would in return cause the best residents in current complexes to move out of them and into the newer ones - I suppose one might say that the filtering effect is kicking in here.
So what, if anything is to be done with regards to housing? Mincberg stated that there were areas of town which have become rundown and that these areas had a tendency to become criminal hot spots. He outlined three aspects of what the Mayor White administration has decided to do:
1) The Administration pushed through a crime ordinance against apartment complexes. Complexes would be looked at from a crimes per capita aspect and the worst 5-6 percent would be paid a visit by the Houston Police Department where they would be required to upgrade facilities (such as lighting) that would mitigate criminal activity. He noted that certain areas of town like Westbury, parts of Sharpstown, Gulfton, 45 & 1960, and Airport &59 had become hot spots. I asked Mincberg if this was to be done on the public dime or not and he said no, it was up to the property owners to pay for mandated security improvements out of their own pockets.
2) Mincberg described a so - called "Habitability Ordinance" on apartments. There is now to be a minimum standard threshold for apartment maintenance. Holes in roofs, backed up sewers, vermin running loose, or continually opened gates would all be grounds of citing.
3) A program called "Neighborhoods to Standards" where public monies would be available for neighborhoods. The Broadway and Fondren areas were being targeted as pilot areas.
Some of the comments made by the lurking tigers in the audience included:
- One fellow, who had been a victim of a mugging many months ago, asked about the dispersal of Hurricane Katrina evacuees throughout the city and in particular out of the 77042 zip code area. He asked why the City forced aparment owners to take in evacuees and then not allow them to perform background checks on the new residents. Mincberg replied that the City did not force anyone to take in evacuees. As far as performing background checks, the big problem is that the Hurricane had destroyed most of the government buildings on the New Orleans area, which made background checking extremely problematic.
- Another attendee wondered if Katrina evacuees were still living on the dole. Mincberg told the audience that FEMA had whittled down the funding for evacuees and that the waiting lists for rental assistance had been closed. This was challenged by another member of the audience.
- One attendee asked what has made America different where we have to hand out money for housing? After all, Mincberg's parents didn't get money for housing and neither did his parents who had come to Houston as poor people. Mincberg said he wasn't sure of an answer to such a broad and complex question.
- Another person asked what Mincberg thought about the appraisal system. Mincberg mentioned that the City files dozens of lawsuits against HCAD on appraisals every year. I suppose one could draw one's own conclusions based upon hearing this.
- Someone asked how many apartments are owned by the City of Houston. The answer was that the Housing Authority owns 2,500 - 3,000 units out of the 500,000 or so aparment units in the Houston area. The Housing Authority contracts out management to private parties.
There were other questions and replies, but I couldn't write fast enough to catch what was said. Mincberg did have another speaking engagement at 2:00pm, ergo he had to leave. It was an informative day and we did play a bit of softball considering this guy is a likely candidate for some powerful local post in the near future. Still, we had to remind ourselves that Mincberg was not speaking as a political candidate but as the Mayor's housing czar.
HPRA President Barry Klein was absent from the day's luncheon as Barry has been diagnosed with cancer of the tonsils. He was going in for some dental work before going in for treatment as doctors felt they needed to do this to treat Mr. Klein's ailment more effectively. We all wish Barry well in his upcoming therapy.
So I am up right now during the small hours doing some opening line studies because I am thinking about entering the Houston Open next weekend. VH1 is on and I've just seen the video for Rehab by Amy Winehouse for the second time in about 90 minutes.
I have to admit something here. I am one of the few Americans so far who have had the privilege of seeing Amy Winehouse perform in person. I went to see her play to a jam packed gig at the Camden Crawl while I was in London in April. What caught my attention was hearing Rehab playing while I was in a Boots store buying my chocolate fix for the day at VLICA. Amazing how it is with certain songs that you will always remember where it was when you first heard a song. Well, it does seem bizarre and rather out of place that I would have first encountered Amy's work in a pharmacy store of all places. Still, Rehab was good enough for me to head on over to a record shop that night, nab a copy of Back to Black and listen to it about 42 times in a row. I then proceeded to drive my colleagues at VLICA nuts the next day by playing the album over and over again on my laptop.
Amy's stuff was all over the airwaves when I was in the Sceptered Isles. It strange, but I went to the UK for the first time in May 2002 on holiday. While watching the BBC one night, I watched a music show and was star struck by a then unknown woman named Norah Jones. She played a slow sounding wistful ballad called Don't Know Why. Norah had everyone in that audience in the palm of her hand that night and that included the show's host and the other artists. I couldn't believe that Norah wasn't a monster back home, but that trivial matter was settled by that summer.
The Brits have a way of digging up and giving an airing to really great stuff that often doesn't make it over here. I didn't know about The Jam until I was in my mid 20's, even though I came of age in the early 1980's and would have died and gone to heaven had I known of them.
But I digress. When I saw Amy play at the Crawl, I witnessed a small girl with a big whiskey soaked voice (and a nice rack and big bouffant hair do to match) get the entire crowd going with sing along songs. I fell in love with Amy on sight. Once again Britain came through for me on the cultural front.
Her website shows that Amy is supposed to play a series of shows here on our side of the pond. Too bad she isn't scheduled to show up in Houston (though she does have a habit of canceling shows) because I would love to see her again.
To me, Winehouse is what Scarlett Johansson would have been had she been a singer instead of an actress. She is one of those young women artists whom you get so scared about. You just don't know whether Amy will hang it up, crack under the pressure, burn out artistically, or careen off the rails on drink. All you can do is sit back, soak in the emotions from her songs, and hope she finds out what makes her happy. What a Star!
I am percolating over what to say over the newly published H-GAC 2035 Regional Transportation Plan. I have written about 5 pages in my response so far, but I will not have enough time to write a full response to all of the topics covered in the program. Ergo, I will write about the topics which I consider to be of greatest interest. I hope to have a reply done by this weekend and get it in before the deadline. I do know that:
1) If the population projections are true (a big if), then we will probably have another 2 million or so vehicles on our roads by 2035 barring a catastrophic economic depression. Ergo, we will need more roads.
2) I will look at the decision making process by which members of a society make their mobility decisions.
3) The percentage of money which is devoted to transportation within the political economy of America is small and frequently ill focused, while needs are growing. At the same time, use of market mechanisms have seen some success but political mishaps have thrown wrenches into employment of the free market to help solve transportation puzzles.
4) The self correcting mechanisms to traffic congestion which arise because some move closer to work or because work moves closer to them do operate, but they have their limits. Hence the need for more road building.
A general idea would be to try to match the number of new lane miles to increases in vehicle miles traveled (VMT). In a tie in to point #3, part of the reason why we have seen increases in congestion is that we have seen improvements in gasoline mileage which has put both lowered the cost per mile of vehicle ownership and has lowered the amount of gasoline tax monies collected for transportation purposes.
5) Freight in Houston is set to become a big issue. The Bayport facility and expanded use of the Port of Houston have put these issues on the front burner.
6) Heavy investment in mass transit via light rail or BRT have and will result in social dead weight losses. Having put picked off the lowest hanging fruit via installing rail in the corridor with the heaviest patronage, we are set to spend several billion dollars of government transportation monies available to install BRT or light rail into corridors with much lower levels of utility.
I will also denote how rail shares aspects in common with transportation via car and roads that many people don't realize.
7) Some quick thoughts on mixed use real estate development.
8) Would it be of interest to create a regional board for pollution issues?
9) Finally, I will get really brave and take a stab at future transportation energy supplies and how we might adapt.
Wizard.
In the Monday July 9, 2007 edition of the Houston Chronicle, the front page story was entitled Dual - Language Classes in Texas Spark Debate.
Yes, that doesn't surprise The Wizard very much. That is what you get when you put education into the political economy of your society.
A quote from Chris Moyles, a British D.J., speaking to the crowd at Wembley Stadium in London during a Live Earth show, an event aimed at raising awareness about global warming.
Answer: Maybe. But I really don't know if the world needs saving just yet. So far the summer in Houston has been quite rainy, but it also has been quite cool. Temperatures have been several degrees cooler than average for some weeks now. On Friday July 6, 2007, the high temperature was a mere 84 degrees fahrenheit. The normal temperature for this time of year is 93 degrees.
Bjorn Lomborg hopes that everyone enjoys the shows, but he doesn't think climate change is the most pressing matter facing mankind.
So yesterday I managed to catch an HPRA meeting featuring Jeffrey Friedman, editor of the journal Critical Review, as the guest speaker. Critical Review is one of the few journals out there which is genuinely worth reading. The Economist is still a good read, as are various online newspapers throughout the world. On rare occasions I still pick through Foreign Affairs or some other journal. Good history books are always fun to read. These days though, much of my spare time for reading has been swallowed up by reading on IT issues, though I still can draw upon a vast background of reading which I have done over the decades.
There is plenty of economics or political blather out there for people to read no matter what your views are on these matters. Materials have become even more available with the advent of the Internet. However little of what is out there is really interesting. I can usually tell within the first 2-3 pages of reading an online academic paper or a print journal article whether the treatise is worth reading or whether it was probably written to keep tenure. I stay away from anything written by English professors, as well as most Sociology. If I exert serious effort, I can tell whether an Economics paper simply rehashes an old idea with newer and more complicated math.
What drew me to Critical Review was an incident that happened about 9 years ago. I was in a bookstore which used to be on South Shepherd, across the street from my auto mechanic. While getting my car worked on one day, I went across the street and perused through their offerings. That is when I saw a now classic issue of CR where they debated the issue of Public Ignorance and what such matters might mean for republics and democracies. I picked up the issue and probably learned more about how decision making goes on in the political arena than I had learned in years of reading anything else. I was hooked. I have read the journal on and off ever since. Most recently, Friedman has republished Philip Converse's 1964 classic paper on public ignorance, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics", along with an issue of scholarly debates surrounding the subject.
Friedman started off his talk by saying that he started CR in 1987. He talked about how the modern world really is too complicated for anyone to understand, and that this really has immense implications for those who would desire to craft public policies to shape the future in certain directions amenable to them. He then went on to describe the Converse paper and said that the great man's research is just there and is known in the political science community, though not widely known outside of it. Nobody has challenged or successfully rebuked what Converse wrote. It just sits there seeming to be something of a curiosity.
But there is far more to it than that. Friedman went on to say something that is not well known about some political polls, namely that many people do not know an answer or do not have answers to questions that might be asked of them in polls. What happens in such situations is that pollsters will push such sample members in their polls to take a position on poll questions when they say they don't know what to say. I found that to be very interesting.
Friedman mentioned that 90+ percent of the public knows little about politics, while the other 1-10 percent do know quite a bit. The more you know, the more dogmatic you tend to become. That does not surprise me one bit.
For my two cents worth, I have long felt after reading my original issue of CR that a big reason for public ignorance is economics. Time is scarce and there is little monetary gain to be had from spending endless hours reading about or becoming knowledgeable about politics, unless you happen to be a politician, a lawyer, a political scientist or other university professor, a bureaucrat, military officer, or a professional such as an engineer or doctor, or perhaps a single issue activist. Otherwise you would be better off simply concentrating on improving your job skills so that you would get better paid.
Friedman went on to talk about what he called "The Hobson's Choice (or Rule) of Democracy". We can basically have rule either by the largely ignorant masses or the dogmatic elites. Ignorance of politics is a worldwide phenomena, not something peculiar to the United States. So if you think that the French are all sitting at Left Bank cafes, sipping coffee at tables and holding forth on deep discussions about philosophical and public affairs, then think again.
Friedman says that dogmatism largely comes from the huge number of decisions and complications arising in our modern world in an array of issues. This results in huge amounts of data which need to be collected and analyzed. What dogmatism does is simplify understanding of complex issues and helps people screen most of the complications out. Friedman went on to say that one idea or theory is all it takes to change or see the world in a different way. You need an idea as a peg to hang your hat on.
So what do we have as alternatives, if any? Friedman went on to say that one Nobel prize winner stated that there are two forms of participation in life. One is what was called "Exit" and the other is "Voice".
What Exit denotes is the process of the personal and economic life of an individual. Life is a process of experimentation whereby someone feels their way forward towards the things that make them happy. Friedman gave as an example how someone might experiment with smoking cigarettes. If the would be smoker didn't like the taste of a cigarette, that is all that mattered. That person would not smoke that cigarette again. There was no need for the smoker to understand the cause of why that cigarette was disagreeable to her, whether the manufacturing was bad or the tobacco was bad or any other reason. All that mattered was that the product was disagreeable. Our female smoker will never try that cigarette again, ergo the "Exiting" or quitting of the action. The world then becomes a better place for it.
What "Voice" is denotes the world of politics. What politicians or political activists do is that they try to actively look for and identify "problems". They then try to dissect the cause of these "problems" and offer some "solution" using the coercive powers of the state. Using the above example, those in the political sphere might start investigating the tobacco company, complain about the product, the health care costs on the public dime, the habit forming aspects of smoking (note I didn't say its addictiveness), and so forth.
Wisdom is the accumulation of knowledge. The big problem here for people is that political outcomes or solutions are so hard to interpret that we end up arguing the same issues over and over and over again, going round and round in circles in the process. Rarely do the best ideas get into the arena because powerful organized groups who might get threatened by them will see to it that they get stomped out.
A question was raised where Friedman was asked to differentiate between a public ignorance critique of politics verses public choice. Friedman mentioned that two big problems of public choice are that public choice often allows its subscribers to go about demonizing politics and that public choice is arguably part, but not the whole picture. A fuller picture of politics is that the arena has both selfish interests who are out to gain something for themselves at public expense, but that there are idealists (often misguided ones) who need to be dealt with too. In a memorable turn of phrase, Friedman characterized public choice a kind of "right wing Marxism".
Friedman addressed the issue on how do voters make decisions. Citing Converse, voters often fall back on two big things. First is the "Nature of the times", meaning that if a war is going well or if the economy is going well, then voters often stick with incumbents. The second is nationalism or voting along ethnic / religious lines.
Another topic of discussion came up and that was whether free market economics is common sensical? Arguably, Friedman says no it is not. He pointed out that good economics often has unseen aspects to it (Amen brother!) and that you often have to think abstractly in order to grasp its implications. Meanwhile our brains which evolved during hunter gatherer times did not weed through the gene pool for men and women who were good economists, but they did weed out for beauty, brains, strength, and being able to hunt deer. The field of economics itself was invented in Britain in the 18th century and the complexity of the modern world has complicated its study even further.
Other topics Friedman spoke about had to do with the "Myths of Democracy". Does everyone's vote count? The answer is - No! Another myth of democracy is that voters should have had time to be fully informed going into the voting booth. That is true, but they rarely have much information digested, nor does it help that the vast majority of journalists who are supposed to be responsible for disseminating information to the public rarely have had any formal study of economics. Instead they rely on heuristics instead of detailed knowledge of issues and candidates in order to guide them.
Friedman stated that the goal of his journal and his seminars was to try to reach young people and educate the future judges, bureaucrats, and politicians of tomorrow so that they would at least have some grounding in freedom and free market arguments since they are often so bitterly attacked. They need defending, whereas as one member of the audience pointed out, wherever you look in the political economy of modern day America, everything is an absolute mess. That includes Social Security transfer payments, Medicare, Medicaid and health care, transportation, farm subsidies, education, policing and law enforcement, the list is endless. Even if the whole of the political economy is a mess, every program has plenty of defenders and well monied interests who have every incentive to make sure that things stay that way or get even worse.
In all, Dr. Friedman gave a fascinating talk and one I will always remember. I never thought I would get to meet the professor. I brought my copy of the latest issue of CR and had him sign it. He said he was thrilled to meet long time readers and was happy to hear that there are people out there really valued what he was doing since he didn't hear enough of that.
Bye for now...
This year is turning out to be a very interesting one in the world of clusters, grids, and supercomputing. Advances in computing tend to move forward in fits and starts, whereby developments in one area of computing often rush ahead of development in others. Then those areas which might have fallen behind then experience breakthroughs which may allow them to catch up.
In the past decade, the plummeting costs of processing power, local disk storage, and the development of ethernet drivers by people like Donald Becker has allowed for the construction of low cost clusters of computers which can work together to solve problems. That sounds great, but that in of itself doesn't solve all problems in supercomputing, indeed it creates others. Another major issue in supercomputing is that you often want to have areas of centralized storage, along with the files and filesystems that reside on that storage, which all of the computers in your cluster can read from and write to. Effectively, the computers that are part of your clusters will become clients to those pools of storage. There are two general types of such storage, NAS or SAN's. And, lastly for this epistle, a new issue has cropped up with the construction of large clusters of compute "nodes", namely that such clusters are so cheap that they can be scaled to the point where they strain the electrical capacity of modern day data centers. Just last year we had to retrofit our data center to add 900 amps of electrical power to our data center at VLICA.
The electrical power problem has spurred renewed research into an old hoary idea in computing, namely using graphical cards in computers to help do more general purpose computational work and not just good ol' fashioned things like rendering. In line with what I wrote above about innovations in computing often developing at different rates, graphical cards have improved their capabilities at far faster rates than general purpose CPU's. This has spawned the two giants in the graphics card industry, ATI (which was actually acquired by AMD) and NVidia, to develop solutions to meet this emerging market. Our developers at VLICA have tried several ideas. At this time it looks like NVidia's CUDA suite is the current front runner, but the computing industry is nothing but competitive and it can't be said that the game is over. Not by a long shot.
A primary issue with GPGPU solutions still outstanding is that, depending upon your applications, they can outperform general purpose CPU solutions by several orders of magnitude. However the cost of the cards, along the cost of the hardware (often you have to have 3U sized servers to house the cards) often means that the price per server is also several times that of a cheap Dell or HP server. In other words, as of the current time the increased cost per server cancels out the increased performance of the GPU's, but that is changing. Also, multicore processors are coming on strong, giving GPGPU's a new competitor. The main issue here is the programmers would need to start writing code that allows for multiple threads to execute simultaneously and coding is hard enough.
The other item of interest is that in the world of Unix and Linux, a 20+ year staple solution of filesystem sharing over networks is getting an overdue. That system is of course NFS. NFS was written for a world where you had one server serving up files on so called "mount points" defined on the server, and a fairly small number of clients. Originally the mount points were defined in static files, however over the years the number of mount points and clients grew larger and larger. Eventually someone came up with the mechanism of doing mounts automatically via a product called autofs so that systems administrators would not have to go through the trouble of adding and maintaining and endless number of new mount points on static files on an endlessly increasing numbers of clients. The actual mounting (and umounting) of filesystems is done via the Autofs mechanism so that users and administrators do not have to issue endless streams of commands to make filesystems available (and release them when they are through with them) to clients.
This is all a fine and dandy solution, but running NFS this way creates serious problems. Namely, all the I/O has to go to and from the server which can overload the server's networking capability. The number of mounts being served up can quickly reach into the thousands on a large cluster. Also, NFS has never guaranteed that multiple clients which might be accessing a file (or filesystem) would see the same data on a particular file if multiple clients were attempting reads and writes to the file simultaneously. File locking was always an issue, as was recovery in the event that a server or client failed. There are also security issues which I won't get into.
Several vendors have offered solutions for firms which have large SAN or NAS environments with lots of clients accessing data simultaneously. At VLICA, we have used Polyserve as our solution. What Polyserve offers is their own filesystem which allows for concurrent reads and writes to filesystems in a SAN or NAS from many NFS servers, all of which can act in concert. You install and define Polyserve on NFS servers, which all are aware of each other. They form a "matrix" which is composed of all of the NFS servers are defined at installation, as well as all of the NFS filesystems which are meant to be a part of this matrix. You then install a load balancing system between the many clients and the servers in the Polyserve matrix. This distributes I/O amongst the multiple NFS fileservers which have Polyserve installed on them and from there the servers read and write to the SAN or NAS. Such a solution is known as a clustered filesystem.
However there are limits to what vendor solutions can do to address the many clients writing to a pool of storage. The single biggest problem is that the performance is not linearly scalable. What I mean by that statement is this: If you have 4 servers which between them can achieve 1GB per second of I/O between the SAN and clients, then 8 servers will have less than 2GB per second of I/O performance. Vendors will claim that their solutions are linearly scalable, but their claims don't stand up under real world conditions. Also, you have the problem of having to install ever greater number of servers into your NFS server pool. A classic summary of problems involving the use of NFS can be read about in the paper entitled "Why NFS sucks" which was written by Olaf Kirch, noted NFS developer, for the 2006 Linux Symposium.
A more elegant solution to the problem of NFS scalability would be for clients to be able to write directly to the storage pool and in parallel, effectively cutting out the "middle man" of the NFS server. This is exactly what a minor revision of the NFS version 4 (NFSv4), called pNFS is designed to do. A highly simplified way of describing how pNFS works is that the server essentially serves up only metadata to clients telling them how and where to locate the files or filesystems in the storage pool. The I/O itself is not driven through the servers. The clients themselves have have a so called "layout driver" in the Linux kernel which takes the metadata served up by the server and I/O operations then run between the client and the storage pool. My supervisor is currently running tests using pNFS on a simple setup and so far we are getting nearly linearly scalable increases in I/O performance in some instances. This stuff does show promise. pNFS will also most certainly help adaption of NFSv4 since many IT managers have not seen many good reasons, outside of improved security, for adapting NFSv4 into their shops.
Enough for now. This has been a long entry and it is getting late. Another day of problems and black art sorcery await tomorrow at VLICA.
And so it is that the newspapers are full of stories describing what the world is like in Hong Kong 10 years after the British handed over their old colony to the Chinese Communists in Beijing. The general consensus is that the Beijing government has not made a basketcase of Hong Kong, much to the relief of many. It seems that what we have is a case of plus ca change, plus c'est la meme.
I stayed for six days in Hong Kong during my last break while I was in China. I actually went down to Guangzhou with a girl I knew after I left Zhouxian for good. We stayed there for several days before going to Shenzhen. I later went to Zhuhai and Macau on day trip while I stayed in Hong Kong.
I found Hong Kong to be a fast paced city which glittered with light and intensity. It would have been difficult for me to really make myself feel at home there though. It would have taken a long time to lay down roots and make my way in the world. I had few job skills at that time that would have been in demand which could not have been filled by locals. Housing, then as now, was also expensive.
Since that was 1992, the handover to Beijing was still five years into the future. Nevertheless, there was plenty of talk of Hong Kong denizens trying to secure visas to Canada, Britian, Australia, and the U.S. People just didn't know what was going to happen and many were effectively hedging their bets that Beijing was going to shut everything down - the media, speaking English, general rule of law in favor of cronyism and rule by the most politically connected, a reasonably efficient civil service, and so forth. Fortunately little of that has happened. There is a strong argument to be made that China has become more like Hong Kong rather than the other way around. Shanghai will surpass Hong Kong as China's busiest port this year and other coastal cities now look like Hong Kong.
I suppose the question to ask for the future is whether China will successfully reform itself from within before it wears Hong Kong down whether by accident or purpose. So far the Beijing government has played its cards well and has gotten everything is has wanted out of Hong Kong and there is no reason why from Beijing's standpoint why the status quo cannot continue. Look for Democracy or elections to be a long time coming.
Wizard