“I’m sure that all of this data will be useful down the line….” NOT!

Devin Parker has posted about getting fed up with GURPS Vehicles in his recent attempt to design a space ship for his GURPS Firefly campaign.  He struggles on with it because he’s “sure that all of this data will be useful down the line,” but I just can’t see it.  Ship combat in science fiction falls into just a handful of archetypes– and most of the ship combat systems don’t come close to addressing them.  As far as your actual campaign is concerned, once you’ve got your deck plan, you’re done.  Everything else is driven by the demands of the narrative.

Think about it.  The dramatic action is always focused on a few key heroes.  If the characters are hopelessly outgunned, straight up tactical ship combat will not be the solution: everything will hinge on a clever trick or deus ex machina.  Characters will feverishly work to buy time as crewmen die and systems explode.  The really tough opponents will require the heroic sacrifice of the “fan favorite”– or at least a new non player-character that was introduced for the purpose.

Ship Combat, like any other in-game crisis, will be tailored to the assets and abilities of the heroes.  Rarely will they face a threat that does not require them to all work together.  Individual failure should be possible, but it should also be possible for the team to compensate in some cases.  In the case of a major failure, there might be still one last opportunity to save the innocent, but the players will pay a heavy price and the campaign will necessitate a new tone and direction.  Survivors should be shown the consequences of their decisions in later adventures and should be given an opportunity to set things right only if they weren’t flagrantly reckless or foolhardy.  Players that achieve a reputation for being complete morons should be forced to choose between a life outside of the primary society or perhaps a spot on a suicide squad instead.

But referees will never simply eliminate a group of players just because of a single lucky roll in a tactical ship combat system.  That’s crazy.  Narratives simply do not work that way.  Oh and the repairs and revenues are the same: The players are always going to be struggling from one job to the next– and even if they make it big, they’ll soon have to use their gains to overcome the next obstacle.  If the players are all big-time agents, then they won’t have to track expenses at all.  Do you think money was ever an issue for James Bond??

Players’ abilities will be the focus in any action.  The ship is generally hardwired into the setting and just determines the tone and style of the events.  The players’ choices and sacrifices will have to matter… and at the same time, the plot will have to be adaptable to a great many outcomes.  This is an art, not a science, and hence these techniques are not amenable to hard and fast tactical rule systems.  This makes the stats and figures in your ship designs largely irrelevant to a real game.

Newspapers are dead! Long live the… uh… internet stalkers?!

You know its got to be bad if Scoble stops blogging….  When the little feed that occasionally pops up through out the day on my system tray began to be noticeably light on tech news, I had to wonder if maybe a nuclear bomb had gone off that I hadn’t heard about.  This was only a short while after he’d pronounced newspapers dead; maybe the media cabal had conspired to silence him….

It turns out that he’s stopped blogging for a week as an act of solidarity with a fellow a-list tech blogger that’s received several disturbing threats on her blog and elsewhere on the web.  (They’re pretty disturbing; don’t look unless you want to be grossed out.)  That’s shouldn’t be that surprising– but what really makes it scary is that the wacked out stuff is coming from, apparently, other well known tech bloggers….  Perhaps what’s most surprising about all of this is that it is in fact… uh…  surprising.  If we’d just paid attention to Clay Shirky, though, we’d have known all along that A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.

(It amazes me that Shirky had written this as far back as 2003.  His speech is the only thing that makes sense out of the 25 years of technological development that I’ve witnessed first hand.  This is definitely one of those cases where reality is stranger than science fiction.)

Folding this in with my Traveller gaming, I’m going to play blogging in the far future as being one of those forbidden technologies that are outlawed and restricted the same way that robotics and psi research are.  It’s not that nanotech and blogging can’t exist… it’s just that any culture that goes too far with this stuff just mysteriously annihilates itself.  Whether the technologies are that inherently volatile or whether there are mysterious forces that want to guide civilisation along certain predetermined “tech trees,” it is not known.  But the information technology of the Third Imperium is strictly organized along the Encyclopedia Galactica approach.

Matt Barton covers Autoduel in his History of CRPGs

Matt Barton has written up a comprehensive account of the development of Computer Role Playing Games.  Autoduel stands firmly in the Golden Age and is noted there for being one of the first “open ended” games.  The only other game like that at the time would have been Firebird’s Elite, which was a sort of computerized Traveller.  (Thanks to The Vintage Gamer for bringing parts I and II of the series to my attention.)

I saw a demo of Ultima I while in elementary school and was blown away.  I played pirated copies of Ultima II and III until the disks wore out.  When I finally could spend money on these things I was sorely disappointed.  A copy of Amber Star refused to run on my Atari ST… and my version of Temple of Apshai Trilogy would crash randomly.  I got completely stuck very early on in a later “martian” themed Ultima game written for the IBM.  I played a free text game on the ST called Hack compulsively and thought a graphical over the counter version would be even better… but the one I payed money for just plain stunk.

The idea of CRPG’s has always fascinated me, but I’ve honestly never really had that good of an experience with them.

Avenger’s Flexos Guide: After Action Report

I ran a Traveller game last night set in District 268 in the year 1111.  This gritty no-man’s-land is the perfect locale for pulse pounding pulpy adventure, so I knew I wouldn’t have any trouble getting the players into sticky situations.

We had one new player and one that had played some during the early eighties.  The old timer brought his character with him: an old army guy with lots of combat skills and a useless title.  (He also had original copies of the hardback Traveller Book and some classic Supplements.  Cool!) 

The new guy was forced to roll up a new one from scratch with no idea of the other guy’s skills, which was vaguely amusing: he couldn’t attempt to cover contrasting abilities in order to round out the team!  In rolling up attributes, he rolled a 2 for endurance.  This is one of those cases where getting killed in character generation is a good thing.  He went into the Scout Service and after his second term rolled another 2 for reenlistment.  Heh heh.  No death for you!

I noticed that the original classic Traveller skills are all either combat, vehicle, management, or shipboard-professional.  These do not cover thief/spy/investigation type skills in much resolution.  In practice, and especially given the narrativistic approach I was using, I ended up calling for a lot of “attribute checks” during the game based on off-the-cuff characterizations of a character’s career and background.  Skills only became relevant in a couple of instances– and if I thought a plan was particularly good, or if it was role played well, then I wouldn’t ask for a roll at all.  One technique I noticed emerging was skill rolls being called for even when a task was mostly certain in order to give one character or another the chance to make a decision.  I didn’t have anyone hogging the game or anything, but it seemed to me to effectively break things up and keep things moving.

I opened the game in the Bowman system at a grungy spacer-bar.  Much grungier than the one on your keyboard….  (Sorry.)  We actually had to spend about ten or fifteen minutes covering the core premises of the Traveller setting: jump drive, the Imperium, multiple human races, surrounding alien empires, the 5th Frontier War, outlawed psi, restricted robotics, no weird tech, no near-c rocks….  There was ample opportunity to geek out here.  After that we spent another ten minutes or so doing armchair theorizations about what the Bowman system was really like based on its Universal World Profile.

The guy that had played Traveller before actually got really into this, throwing lots of facts around.  I was worried at first that I’d have trouble with a player that knows more than me, but in most cases I could work everything he said into my plans with only minimal corrections/nudges.  We’re all grown up enough to separate characters’ opinions from facts, so I really don’t see this as a problem: in fact, I want to encourage my players to help create background and setting specific “color” as much as possible.

The opening vignette was a simple TV-show style opener.  The characters meet a Darrian merchant and try to convince him to hire them to help crew his ship.  He brushes them off… and one of the PC’s notice some goons trailing him as he leaves.  The players follow and intervene in an awkward scene being played out in a back ally.  They rescue the Darrian, dispatch the thugs, and quickly find themselves on the ship heading out system.  Not quite as elegant as Joss Whedon, buy hey– might as well start with a bang.

As the characters traveled to Flexos, we engaged in another round of setting description.  As we picked apart the UWP, I was surprised at just how much the players wanted to know.  Just about everything: climate, flora, fauna, politics, and even history.  The information from the Flexos System Guide was essential, but I also found myself throwing out bits of things I’d remembered from Alien Races II and III.  I did feel a bit compelled as an armchair sci-fi story teller to “show it not tell it.”  But on the other hand, the players did not seem to see a fifteen minute discussion of all of this background as being ‘just’ for setting things up.  The questions and answers and theories all seemed to be as much a part of playing the game as rolling dice in combat or role playing an exchange.

My players went crazy when they saw the map, though.  (It really is beautifully done.)  They asked about locations of things I’d mentioned in passing and made plan for exploring an area as I gradually introduced an adventure seed taken from the Flexos book.  It surprised me.  I had no location maps or skill check data or anything, but just one little specific fact pulled from the System Guide could give the players 5 minutes or more of time spent discussing, planning, and worrying.  All of the facts that I needed were very concise and easily transferred to a game situation.  My role as a referee was simply to synthesize the facts as I knew them with the actions of the players.  Of course, I did have to improvise a lot of details– and the players would obsess over these things the most!– but it was easy to do so with the setting and background so clearly laid out.

There is easily enough material in the Flexos book to keep my players busy for several game sessions.  I can keep them there for an entire campaign or introduce something new every time they pass through.  For years I’ve stressed out about the daunting task of taking up the reigns of a Traveller campaign, but material such as that in the Avenger System Guides and Cluster Books really make it easy.  Most importantly, I think these materials demonstrate a best practice for fleshing out an area in Traveller– that way as I begin working on my own material I have a very practical model to work by. 

Jeffro’s Night Out: Robyn Hitchcock live with Peter Buck

Coming home from work on Friday I serendipitously turned to the local college radio station where they were mentioning that Robyn Hitchcock would be performing nearby.  I had to go.  He was easily my favorite artist back when I was in high school.  He combined a raw intensity with his bizarre sense of humor to define “alternative rock” well before it had crystallized into a tightly scoped marketing term.  And unlike They Might Be Giants, he would always retain his coolness because I never ended up having to be tortured hearing “regular people” annoy me by reciting his lyrics in public places.

Seattle’s Johanna Kunin opened up for him.  Her songs were permeated with an old-school organ sound: generally some sort of arpeggiation in one hand with a one note harmony played with the other.  (Think “No Quarter” from Houses of the Holy and you’re pretty close.)  She’d sing about fireflies and blueberries in a borderline nigh-yodel while her cohort would play guitar, percussion, or a child’s xylophone.  For some songs she’d switch between mikes to make a home-made echo effect, and often her tunes would simply end abruptly: apparently full cadences are considered too traditional out West anymore. 

I’m highly banter conscious.  It’s funny, just the right little prefaces and introductions can completely win me over or turn me against an artist.  Somehow, I didn’t quite feel that she connected with us when she could have broken down the invisible east-west barrier and given us all some sort of mystical license to cool.  Instead she remained a slightly nervous outsider glad we had given up the basketball mania to come to the show.  (We’re Robyn Hitchcock fans… how many of us have ever really cared about sports?  Really.)  After singing a song about a ghost, she took a much needed drink of water and sighed, “nothing like bottled water to chase the spirits away.”  (?!)

I stalked the scene walking up to random people trying to find other Hitchcock fanatics and discovered my banter was pretty off as well.  One guy said he was there to see R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, and others were simply drug there by their dates.  The die hard fans were generally women that must have been ten years older than me, though I did meet a couple of guys in their forties that were following the tour around.  They said that one night Robyn played with Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones and that one time he’d simply played the entire White Album for a concert.

Robyn came out alone and treated us to a solo acoustic piece.  Then the drummer came out and they did Queen Elivis together.  He could have stopped right there and I would have felt like I got my money’s worth.  I think Buck came out next, and then the bass player.  They stayed acoustic for a few songs until Buck switched to his signature “clanky” electric sound and they played a mix of older and newer material.  I was really afraid that it was going to be all new stuff, but they actually did Balloon Man, the “There’s a House Burning Down” song, and Brenda’s Iron Sledge.

I was really hoping for some serious guitar action, but it never came to pass.  Hitchcock and Buck stuck pretty much to straight-up rhythm and there was little in the way of out-of-control/improvisational rocking out.  The banter was really weird though.  Robyn wistfully spoke of the days before remote control when all we had was ectoplasm.  Later he would manage to use the word solispsic to introduce a song… and he described politics in the eighties as being a sort of a conservative glacial period.  I was disappointed when he made a couple of digs at Catholics and Karl Rove, though: I can hear that sort of thing from people with much lower IQ’s than Robyn’s on just about any talk radio station, so it seemed a bit pointless.  No one talks about ectoplasm, though, so I’d rather have heard more about that.

I did manage to pick up another one for the “things that make me feel stupid file.”  Waiting in line for the autographs, I discovered that Buck was a pretty nice guy.  The bass player, Scott MacCaughey, was extremely personable and talked enthusiastically about which songs from “Eye” they were thinking of playing.  But when I got to Robyn, he asks me “Who’s it for?” as I approached him with my CD’s.  “Uh… me,”  I said, not understanding the question and feeling vaguely selfish for not getting the signature dedicated to some other Robyn Hitchcock fan instead.  There it was… my moment with a childhood hero and I don’t even have the sense to tell him my name so that he could give me a proper autograph.  This is of course going on while I’m frantically trying to rip off the stickers on the CD case that are impossible to remove without specialized tools.

I felt very silly and not very clever and on the drive home I tried to think of something obliquely appropriate for a Robyn Hitchcock fan to do after a show like that, but never really came up with anything.

****

Update 3/28/07: Pictures from the concert are available here.  I think I even saw the guy taking the pictures.  I know I saw his wife walking by with the playlist… lucky girl.  Too quick for me!

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Update 3/29/07: You, too, can hear the sounds of Johanna Kunin!  This recording of “Blueberry” really isn’t that bad.  It has a fresh sound that’s fairly unique and is actually kind of fun.

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Update 3/29/07: I just feel it to be my civic duty to confirm that Peter Buck did indeed look like somebody had just told him his cat had been sucked into an irony vortex.

****

Update 4/10/2007: You can hear a live studio recording of Robyn Hitchcock playing his new song “Adventure Rocket Ship” along with a pretty good interview here from WNYC.  It’s neat hearing Robyn explain how he ended up touring with most of R.E.M. and also why he wrote the songs on his latest album the way that he did.

Jim Van Verth Interviews Designer of Paranoia and Toon

The recent podcast on The Vintage Gamer includes a very healthy interview with Greg Costikyan, the Maverick Award winning designer of such notable games as Paranoia and Toon.  While the discussion ranges from topics on the 70’s wargame market to modern indie computer games, the podcast still contains a healthy dose of material of interest to folks that are obsessed with classic eighties era games.

Aspiring game designers will want to hear this– Costikyan says that most professional game designers burn out within five years.  If you’re going to college, don’t major in some goofy program geared totally towards games, but go ahead and do Computer Science or Graphic Arts instead so that you can use your industry experience to get your foot in the door for what will likely become your real career.

CAR WARS fans will note the cameo appearance of podcaster Jimmy Anderson, but don’t forget to check out the links section: Van Verth includes a reference to this Costikyan article that describes how TSR almost single handedly put an end to the wargaming hobby.  The article includes a concise history of War Games and of Strategy & Tactics magazine in particular.  And according to SPI’s feedback, 90+% of all wargamers played alone.  Just based on the number of CAR WARS and Traveller players that appear not to have a gaming group, this shouldn’t have shocked me like it did… but I’m surprised.  I’ve long despised “game designs” that target, not people that play games, but people that play with games… but evidently that has pretty much been where the market was all along.

Costikyan also comments in the article on the fact that computer games do not “match paper games for sophistication, depth, and accuracy.”  Hopefully his new Manifesto Games company can do something to address that.

One thing I could quite parse from the podcast was Costikyan’s opinion of the atrocious looking Paranoia XP.  I think Jim Van Verth was expecting him to slam it, but it might be that he actually was pleased with it: the author was from a preapproved list of people he had complete confidence in.  But there was one edition that he completely hated… I think it might have been the one before XP, though.  Not being a Paranoia expert, I may have completely botched this exchange, so if anyone can clear this up, please let me know.

At any rate, it sounds like the definitive version of Paranoia to pick up is the second edition.  According to the podcast, the first was probably overly complex and still “finding its voice.”

The Vintage Gamer continues to be a good resource for solid material on game design history and analysis.  It can really open your eyes to classics you might have missed.

Munchkin Joins CAR WARS and Illuminati on Wheaton’s ‘Will Always Play’ List

Are you a Munchkin afficionado?

Wil Wheaton is.  While Ogre didn’t make his off the cuff list of “will always play” games, he has mentioned it before in an interview.  (Oh, and his fans did make the photoshopped cigar magazine covers that he asked for, too.  Heh heh.)

I just can’t get the hang of the game– probably because I end up playing it just with two players.  The fun of Munchkin comes from the mind games that emerge in the group dynamic– who will merit the smiting of the “whoop cards?”  With two players, that dynamic is gone because there’s only one place for the hurt to fall.

The thing I can’t stand about it is how everyone has, just as in Chez Geek, all of these randomly powered cards in front of them.  Not only do they interact in weird ways, but unless you’ve memorized the abilities, it’s very difficult to “read” the current situation.  This makes it a pain to plan any coherent tactics….

Anyways, its pretty cool to see that CAR WARS is still high up on Wheaton’s list.  I knew he played it way back, but I didn’t know it was something that he’d still play.

Fighting a Battle with the last Game’s Tactics…

In Ogre, you put your Heavy Tanks out front and your Missile Tanks and Infantry form the second line of defense.  But if you’re playing the 1983 Challenger: Ultra Modern miniatures rules double blind, this is not a good idea.  In this game you should have a line of infanty on the first line in order to alert you to the enemy’s approach.  You should concentrate your mobile units in a second line– preferably somewhere that your opponent is unlikely to shoot with artillery fire.  Finally, you should have a reserve just in case your opponent if feinting.

Here’s my infantry and APC’s whooping it up after taking out some Ruskie scout cars:

My boys quit laughing right about the time the rest of the party showed up.  The APC’s were quickly destroyed and the infantry remained dug into their fox holes.  I annoyed the Ruskies with artillery fire and accidently hit some of my men once, too:

I had to do something about my men!  I sent my tanks to respond and split them up a bit in order to avoid having them disabled all together by enemy artillery.  I moved at full speed to get there ASAP, but couldn’t fire as a result of that.  (I was still learning the rules!)  Then… because of the lack of a full first-line infantry screen… we unexpectedly ran into the main Russian element!  The smoking hulks in the picture below are all that remained of my platoon of tanks:

Now the Ruskies were free to roll on through and cover Bergkohn with as much fire as they liked.  The rest of my forced were ill-placed to respond… and heavily outnumbered. 

 

A fog of war can have a huge impact on tactics….  Panic is bad news– and playing a game with another game’s tactics is, obviously, not a winning strategy.

T4 QSDS 1.5 Sheds Light on Cryptic 1.0 Draft

A secret cache of files over on the BITS site has granted me much enlightenment in regards to T4 ship design and combat.  (Thanks to Hans Rancke-Madsen for pointing these out to me.)  Not all of my questions are answered, but there is a glimmer of hope that I can succeed in making this thing work!

It looks like the sandcaster you buy in T4 is a single sandcaster in a small turret with a “rating” of one.  It appears that each one requires its own gunner.  (It’s still not clear whether or not a single gunner can fire several of these at a single laser or missile swarm without penalties.)  The power plants in the core T4 rulebook did not seem to vary much, but the QSDS 1.5 PDF from BITS addressess this problem.  On the other hand, the new hull definition for the 400 dton needle style airframe has a Maximum G of 3– which forces me to cut the maneuver drive back on my patrol cruiser design.  I also don’t have an official design for the small craft, so I just use the Classic Traveller designs for now.

The MayDay 4.1 PDF from BITS contains valuable rules for converting the abstract system to a hex based approach.  It also includes a new version of the sensor rules, but appears to require the T4 edition of Fuel Fire Fusion & Steel.  Oh well… we’ll take what we can get at this point.  It looks like we’re more or less at the everything but sensor rules and missile munitions now.

For my Patrol Cruiser design, I added in an additional small laser battery for point defense.  I also added several extra MFD’s to allow the gunners to control two full waves of missiles.  I couldn’t stand to just shoot 8 missiles… wait for a hit… then shoot another 8 4 turns later.  This way, the cruiser can get 20 missiles on the map at once.  Viva la barbette!  There’s not a lot of cargo space after that, so things are pretty tight on this ship, but it should be a pretty fun ship to play in a fight.

War Patrol Cruiser (QSDS 1.5)
Tons: 400
Volume: 376.2 m^3 ?
Cost: 364.48 MCr
Crew: 32
Cargo: 8
Std Controls: Std Mil (Bridge) 
TL: 12
3 Jump Drive (6 Std/Pc Fuel)
3 Maneuver (Thrust Plate, 22 Mw)
8 Size
680 Power Plant (3x 200Mw, 4x 20Mw)
A10 P4 J10 Sensors

2x Laser Battery(2) 4/3-2-0-0           
1x Laser Battery (1) 4/2-0-0-0 
2 Battery Missile Barb 5 (4)
3 Sandcasters (30×3 Cans)
Ext. Grapple (30 dton Ship’s Boat)     
10 Armor, 12 Structure

Crew Detail: 2 Engineers, 1 Electronics, 2 Maneuver, 11 Gunners, 3 Screens,
2 AuxCraft Crew, 8 Troops/Marines, 4 Command, 1 Steward, 1 Medical

Software: Predict 2 (x3), Gunner (x11), Evade-4, Anti-Hijack, Library (+33.4 MCr)

(Cost includes an additional MCr 16 for Ship’s Boat.)

***

Some remaining minor questions:

“Missile launchers do not have to be crewed when operating as part of a missile battery under the control of a Master Fire Director, but if assigned, a crewmember may launch missiles under local control from the weapon mount.”

Question: If a crewmember is launching missiles from the battery, how many can he control?

Guess: None.  Only unguided missiles can be launched without the benefits of a Master Fire Director.

***

“USD Bonus – The USD bonus for missile batteries using this equipment.”

Question: The QSDS 1.5 rules on bits introduce a “USD Bonus” in regards to Master Fire Directors.  Is this the same thing as the number of missiles that it can control or is it some new bonus for to-hit rolls?

Guess: Uh… just use it as the number of missiles it can control.

***

Question: Does carrying a small craft on an external grapple increase the amount of fuel it takes to make a jump?

Guess: Uh… no?

***

Question: Does Predict software improve to-hit rolls using Missiles or Sand?

Guess: Uh… no.  (According to robject.)

***

[Note: I'm not sure at this point why I continue to fiddle with such an outdated system riddled with errors and ommissions that Traveller players have long since abandoned, but here we go anyway.  I guess I partly want to be able to judge the rumored T5 edition from the standpoint of what Marc was trying to accomplish with the T4 ruleset.  Also, there are some neat features in it for those of us that haven't gotten around to buying every single edition of the game.]

Update:  Here’s the spreadsheet detailing my Patrol Cruiser design.

Attention-Challenged Scout Discovered Near Campsite

News has just started coming in about the Boy Scout that got lost this past weekend.  The facts, as I’ve heard them on the radio, are that the boy did not go on a hike with the other scouts, but stayed behind with a scout master.  He turned up missing only after all had returned and had lunch.  The troop searched for a few hours before calling in help.  No conflicts between the scout, his troop, his scout masters, or his parents were known.  He was on medication for ADD, but had not taken it since the day before he went missing.

Its stuff like this that makes me real concerned about the future of
America.  Sheesh.  I mean… why would this guy’s parents send him to the boy scouts?  So he could not go hiking?  You know, maybe if this guy got a little exercise… maybe he wouldn’t need so much medication for his “condition.”

And what’s up with the one scout master staying behind with him?  After all of this stink we’ve had about gays in scouting and teachers and other role models… uh… abusing teenage boys… you’d think this guy would kinda not want to be seen hanging around alone with the kid.

This is the stupidest thing I’ve heard in a long while….  I mean, when I was a scout, we’d at least have the sense to get lost, say, during a hike.  I don’t recall anyone ever turning up missing after everyone got together for lunch.

This is crazy.  And now… they’ve discovered the guy near the campsite.  Oh please!

Fifty years from now people are going to look back on this and say that this was the turning point in the War On Terror.  I tell ya, this will do more to embolden the enemy than the most cutting rhetoric or even the most embarrassing anti-war media campaign.  When the Grain Blight finally hits, this nation of wimps is going to be dead meat.

There has to be more to this than what the media is telling us.  This is just too weird.

***

Related News Updates for displaced Carolinians:

Charges against the members on Greensboro’s Guilford College football team have been dropped.  Earlier this year, the team members allegedly ganged up on three Palestinian students on the grounds of the historic college that’s more well known as a stop on the underground railroad.  Much breast beating over the alleged “hate crime” ensued, and columnists across the country waxed eloquently upon the irony of such deeds occurring on a peace-loving Quaker campus.  The story had the potential of exploding into a scandal bordering on the scale of the Duke Lacrosse Team fiasco, but has since dropped off the radar of major media outlets.  The truth of what happened and why may now never come to light.

“Just because the legal issue has been resolved from the perspective of the legal system doesn’t mean the issues we’re dealing with [on the] campus are resolved,” stated a Women’s Studies professor at the college.  I guess this translates roughly as “just because we unfairly smeared white and black football players as guilty of racist hate crimes before the facts were in, it doesn’t mean that we weren’t right in principle.”  Evidently some people think that there has as yet been insufficient self-flagellation over the incident.

If we can’t have a return to the days of “innocent until proven guilty”, then I for one would at least like to know how many of the football team are being medicated for ADD….

***

“Now, if it had been a NASCAR showdown, he would have been over in the ditch somewhere.” 

When folks wanted to build a race track near Seattle, the “tolerant” fancy-coffee-drinking-types were quick to point out that it would draw undesirable elements to the area.  You know… trashy redneck NASCAR fans and so forth.  Working-class people, even.   “The crime rate always goes up when those people come to town”, and all that.  The house speaker up yonder even went so far as to tag Richard Petty as being “the guy who got picked up for DUI.”

Right.  Richard Petty… that terrible guy that runs that camp for chronically ill children.  Okay… fine.  We’re a little different down here.  Say what y’all want to say about us, but lay off of Richard Petty, okay?  Not that he can’t take care of himself….

***

Hillary Calls for Flag to Come Down

Us rednecks down here are still trying to figure this out.  Apparently, the basis for Hillary’s objection to The Flag is that she believes “that we should have one flag that we all pay honor to” during a time of war.  This makes no sense!  We’ve had one flag to pay honor to down here ever since the fighting began back in 1861.  What is she talking about? 

***

UPDATE 3/21/07: Okay, it turns out the kid didn’t want to go at all.  His dad offered to do pay him five bucks if he went.  The kid left the camp site to go try to hitchhike home– supposedly because he was homesick.  Way to go, dad.  Your son is now the biggest loser since the Star Wars Kid.

Dad says he’s going to give his son a good stern talking to about the dangers of hitchhiking.  If that’s all he’s got to say about this whole depressingly pathetic affair, then I have to wonder if maybe the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. 

I just wish we lived in a world where scoutmasters could send kids like this back to their clueless parental units.  “My troop is made up of winners.  We don’t have time for losers that don’t want to participate.  Camping and hiking is what we do.  Maybe you should look at signing your son up for a Lego Mindstorms activity at the local Science Center instead.  I will not sacrifice the good of the troop just to babysit your son.”  Why can’t teachers and scout leaders ever be allowed to require anything of the young people they’re responsible for?  What kind of country is this anymore?!

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UPDATE 3/23/07: Here’s something that’s not completely clear just based on the news coverage.  They found the kid in the middle of the park next to a stream, right?  If you look at maps of the area, if he’d gone uphill from there for a mile, he’d have got to the Blue Ridge Parkway.  If he’d gone downhill, or followed the stream in either direction, then he would have also hit roads pretty quickly as well.  It looks like a pretty major accomplishment to be able to get lost on that campground: this was not an isolated and rugged area like some of the parks out West.  This kid was never far from civilization at all!

We continue to see the dad quoted as saying he needs to have another talk about hitchhiking….  What about that talk that goes like, “if you ever go anywhere with me or another adult and try to slink off without telling anyone, I will give you the biggest whoopin’ you’ve ever had, I don’t care if you are 12 years old!!”

This is pathetic on so many levels.  The dad has no concept of discipline.  The scout master was just plain stupid for staying behind alone with him when he should have sent him back to his parents to begin with.  And the kid couldn’t find his way out of a paper bag!  Argh!