Urban Challenge comes to Boston this weekend. I regret to say that I am not participating in this update of the scavenger hunt, but a co-worker is. Her husband got to go to Las Vegas last year for the Finals as part of a support team, and he convinced her that this year she should play too.

What is Urban Challenge? A bunch of weirdos (nice people, those weirdos...) in teams of two run around a city taking pictures to prove that they've spent the day running around the city. Or, by the official word:

" The object of Urban Challenge is to visit twelve checkpoints in correct order and return to event headquarters. The first team back wins. The only allowed methods of travel are by foot or local public transportation — city bus, ferry, train, or trolley. [...] Urban Challenge is about using your mind, body, and spirit to complete the course as quickly as possible. "

There are riddles and clues, puzzles and teasers, profit and loss. The teams of two do a lot of running, but they can have support in the form of someone sitting by an internet connection and an encyclopedia to help them through the brain work. It gets wicked serious for the folks trying to get to New Orleans (site of this years' Finals). My co-worker, however, is simply looking forward to running around Boston for an afternoon. I would have thought she got enough of that during the Marathon, but then I guess that was proof enough that she's a weirdo.

Electrolite and friends take off from a "well-rounded" education into the wide, starry skies of geekdom (absolutely read the comments).

And I was reminded of one of the keys to the universe, a key that will unlock both the first door and the thousandth. In the words of blessing whispered to me one dark winter night by my parents - and repeated again at all the seasons of my life: " The more you do, the more you can do. "

Or, to be more accurate, let's call it "Dinner With Redwood Dragon".

Mrs Martial and I kept Dave, Deborah, and Rose up way too late last night. First, they joined us for a sail on the Charles River and then deigned to dine with us after.

The day was perfect for sailing, with a light, curiously constant breeze to carry us up and down the river and a startlingly bright sun, clearly brought by the Dragon from California. The humidity was supplied by the hosts. Nothing but the best for our guests!

After a fairly lengthy sail, we found a little local bistro which served seafood. Several hours later, we closed down the restaurant, staggering out into the humid night after denuding several harbors in Maine of their lobsters, several rivers in Alaska of their of salmon, and I fear Georges Bank will never be the same. Well, once upon a time I could eat like that, but no longer. We had a very nice, mostly sober dinner, with bon mots and anecdotes and conversation practiced as an art.

You know the feeling of leaving someone's presence and you realize just how intelligent and witty you are and, further, you realize that it was the company that raised you to that level? It was wonderful, I count myself three friends richer, and I'm looking forward to making them reciprocate out on the Left Coast.

It was civilized. And I can bestow no higher compliment than that.

While not quite one of the founders of the discipline of the History of Science, I. Bernard Cohen was one of the key figures in elevating it to the ranks of scholarship.

I was privileged to have taken a course with Bernard on "scientific revolutions" at the Harvard Extension School, taught some years after his formal retirement. Bernard as a teacher drew upon a incredible wealth of knowledge, able always to find an interesting and salient anecdote from the lives he was discussing in order to offer his students something less dry than a date or a place upon which to hang the elements of the argument being constructed. Newton in particular seemed like a close friend of Bernard's, like someone who had just nipped off to the grocery and would be back in a minute, but let me tell you this amusing story of the time we . . .

I was even more privileged to have known Bernard as I was growing up. I have heard many stories of his aloofness and his aristocratic eccentricity, but the man I knew never once took a six, nine, or fourteen year-old with anything less than the utmost seriousness. I strive to emulate him in this characteristic and I strive to pass on the generosity he never failed to show me.

Normally I dismiss all talk of an American Empire, modelled somehow on Roman experience, as seriously ahistorical analogizing. Not only are contemporary circumstances vastly different in the political and social spheres, the pace of technological development - driven in part by our economic structure (another huge difference) - changes us from generation to generation in ways that are unprecedented in human history.

However, we now have a cabal among our rulers that actually seems to have studied their ancient history - and are looking forward to it.¹

Anticipating the Empire, our clever historians realize that the British model will not be palatable to Americans. Ideologically, Americans will vigorously resist assuming the "White Man's Burden". Our national arrogance runs in different channels, less noblesse oblige, rougher and more "practical" and, of course, the necessary overt racism is not palatable any longer. A "British" empire also requires far too large an expenditure of blood and treasure for far too little visible gain. Finally, the British model remains a democracy at home, where policy is still subject to electoral result.²

No, the visionaries who see the glorious future of America shrouded in purple do not imagine that an Empire founded upon the British experience has any chance. Their only hope toward an American imperial agenda is to return to Rome.

Rome, city of spectacle and stoicism, deeply conservative and rudely decadent, hated for its hegemony and its homogeneity and attracting all the other nations of the world in their immigrant hordes. Beautiful, violent, mad, and glorious, Rome subjected half the world to the will of its Senate and People and shaped the rest after its image. Brazen eagles marched across the globe, promising a thousand years of peace, constantly warring in order to keep that promise: Rome's borders, patrolled by ever fewer of her distracted citizens and ever more of her greedy allies, were never secure. And her frightened people, held on the knife's edge by this decade's threat (Gauls, Carthaginians, Germans, Persians, Egyptians, Christians...), eagerly gorged themselves on the sight of blood spilled not by their own hands but most definitely in their name, telling themselves that an unsqueamish eye was what kept the sedentary strong, made the coddled brave, and uplifted the rabble beside the powerful.

Our visionaries expect that difficult times will encourage stern measures and strong leaders. Whether or not the new American Empire is also ruled imperially does not matter so much (though a ruling family, influenced by their new intellectual Praetorians, might serve to hold at bay one or two potentially troubling aspects of democracy). It is enough to foster the ambitious and to fuel their lust with offers from the mountaintop. The rest of the population can be dealt with through adroit class warfare: bind the rich with chains of anxious loyalty through tax-cuts and the threat of the angry mob; use every slanderous wedge to split the workers off from and set them against their allies among the intellectuals; drive the poor to true desperation; actively induce civil seizures similar to those of first century BCE Rome.

An economy in ruins, unemployment rampant, and the well-primed mob eager for blood are all in the works. As the economy crumbles and more and more people are forced out of work, forced to the margins of society where the options are few, we will see the hand of the state reach out magnanimously. All other functions of government starved and crippled, the one arm of the state that remains strong will be the military, a military in constant and desperate need for manpower to police the far flung lands where our legions struggle and die - and win the Empire's true gold: glory.

This is one fractured vision of a future America. But before this, there is still a Rubicon to be crossed . . .

. . .

¹ Edward Luttwak, influence on the neocon movement's obsession with strategy, authored what seems to me an increasingly important book for understanding today's shaping world: The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. I seem to pick on Luttwak, but I actually find him to be the most thought provoking - and therefore most entertaining - of the current crop of government employed conservative thinkers. He's also a bit of a trickster with a biting sense of humor.

² Unsurprisingly, British commentary is rather partial to their own experience. Niall Ferguson accurately describes exactly why America is unsuited to British Imperialism. He thinks this is a bad thing, that America must ape the British. He seems to miss entirely that (a) America would fail if it tried the British model, and (b) that is exactly why the Roman model is preferred. Ferguson even points out that the British model was influenced by an explicit rejection of the Roman model.

Andrew Natsios, Administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), is a man I have always respected. He has done good work and he has done it well wherever he has been. Until now.

Speaking at the 2003 InterAction Forum, Mr Natsios made very little sense.

" Natsios insisted that aid agencies and for-profit contractors in the field should identify themselves as recipients of U.S. funding to show a stronger link to American foreign policy. If this does not happen more often, Natsios threatened to personally tear up their contracts and find new partners. NGOs and contractors 'are an arm of the U.S. government,' Natsios said. "

I'm struck nearly speechless.

Victor Davis Hanson, farmer and classicist, practical and intellectual, fighter and lover, beauty and truth, Bush and Cheney, admires Paul Johnson's recent polemic about Napoleon for much the same reasons I do.

" Paul Johnson has written a gripping biographic essay, whose ultimate message is a much needed moral reminder: 'We have to learn again the central lesson of history: that all forms of greatness, military and administrative, nation and empire building, are as nothing—indeed are perilous in the extreme—without a humble and a contrite heart.' "

Given this conclusion - and the title of Mr Hanson's essay (The Little Tyrant) - I defy you to read the review without laughter. Over and over, I am amazed and inspired that the eternal verities array themselves so neatly - with armor gleaming and banners snapping in the wind - against Mr Hanson's enemies.

Go on, pull the mote from my eye . . .

" So what accounts for those who professed beauty but worshipped evil? It was not merely the romantic naïveté of artists and men of letters; ... some intellectuals, cut off as they are from the practical life, are impatient with the clumsiness of republican government. They yearn for the enlightened autocrat, the philosopher-king who can by fiat do le peuple 'good.' As Napoleon put it, 'The people must not be judge of its own rights.' "

William Julius Wilson in the New York Times today:

" The lesson for those committed to fighting inequality, especially those involved in multiracial coalition politics, is to pay more scrutiny to fiscal, monetary and trade policies that may have long-term consequences for the national and regional economies, as seen in future earnings, jobs and concentrated poverty. We must remember that high-poverty neighborhoods reflect America, all of America. "

Fancy that: consequences.

The Story of My Life, Helen Keller's first autobiography, is one-hundred years old. Cynthia Ozick offers a wonderful reminder in the New Yorker of why this work - and Keller's life - remain important:

" Yet the story of her life is not the good she did, the panegyrics she inspired, or the disputes (genuine or counterfeit? victim or victimizer?) that stormed around her. The most persuasive story of Helen Keller’s life is what she said it was: 'I observe, I feel, I think, I imagine.' She was an artist. She imagined.

" 'Blindness has no limiting effect upon mental vision,' she argued again and again. 'My intellectual horizon is infinitely wide. The universe it encircles is immeasurable.' And, like any writer making imagination’s mysterious claims before the material-minded, she had cause to cry out, 'Oh, the supercilious doubters!'

Nevertheless, she was a warrior in a vaster and more vexing conflict. Do we know only what we see, or do we see what we somehow already know? Are we more than the sum of our senses? Does a picture—whatever strikes the retina—engender thought, or does thought create the picture? Can there be subjectivity without an object to glance off? Theorists have their differing notions, to which the ungraspable organism that is Helen Keller is a retort. She is not an advocate for one side or the other in the ancient debate concerning the nature of the real. She is not a philosophical or neurological or therapeutic topic. She stands for enigma; there lurks in her still the angry child who demanded to be understood yet could not be deciphered. She refutes those who cannot perceive, or do not care to value, what is hidden from sensation: collective memory, heritage, literature.

" Helen Keller’s lot, it turns out, was not unique. 'We work in the dark,' Henry James affirmed, on behalf of his own art; and so did she. It was the same dark. She knew her Wordsworth: 'Visionary power / Attends the motions of the viewless winds, / Embodied in the mystery of words: / There, darkness makes abode.' She vivified Keats’s phantom theme of negative capability, the poet’s oarless casting about for the hallucinatory shadows of desire. She fought the debunkers who, for the sake of a spurious honesty, would denude her of landscape and return her to the marble cell. She fought the literalists who took imagination for mendacity, who meant to disinherit her, and everyone, of poetry. Her legacy, after all, is an epistemological marker of sorts: proof of the real existence of the mind’s eye. "

The whole piece is worth both the time and the stirring of your soul.

Of further autobiographical interest, I went to the same preparatory school that Helen did. The Cambridge School has changed somewhat over the years, becoming coeducational and moving out to Weston, Ma, but the spirit that encouraged the unique gifts of Helen Keller continues. My best friend, severely dyslexic and functionally illiterate at age fourteen, has read a book a week since eighteen. For that alone, the school has my undying love.

Of further historical interest, the founder of the Cambridge School, and its principal while Helen Keller was in attendance, was Arthur Gilman, who had been involved in the founding of Radcliffe College, and began the school as a preparatory for Radcliffe (this Gilman is not the same as the notable architect - designer of Boston's Back Bay - of the same name who was contemporary). Our Mr Gilman, educator of Helen Keller (one of the few people who ever bothered to learn Ms Keller's sign system), was the author of several books, including Shakespeare's Morals: Suggestive Selections, with Brief Collateral Readings and Scriptural References, wherein he concludes that the high-minded and noble instruction of the Bard's drama, the eternal and beautiful lesson to be drawn forth from the sublime poetry of our language's greatest master, is simply "know your place and do not be ambitious".

It is the soul of sense, when your principles have been confounded by your experience, to change your mind for the betterment of the world (or your own small part of it).

Last night, sitting up on our roof with some friends, sipping some wine and noshing, I heard an alarm. One of our friends, punching buttons on watch (the alarm went silent), turned his head and looked out to the northwest where a bright star was climbing swiftly up the ladder of sunset.

"That's the space station."

Professional athletics is a field where - if you want to play - you have got to have game! No one at this level is mediocre. No one. And when, after the long slog of the season, we finally get to the championship - the Finals, World Series, Super Bowl - the players and their level of play can cannot be improved. These guys are good.

Then why does the music played at halftime suck?

The acts who perform around the games are seldom very good. They are made even shabbier through comparison with the athletes. Yet we are asked to greet the spectacle of the popstar and "the show" with enthusiasm. These interludes are even advertised and promoted as reasons to watch the game!

Get musicians who play at the same level as the athletes and then I'll pay attention.

. . .

The occasion for this minor rant was the inexplicable presence of Lisa Marie Presley voguing during halftime of the first game of the NBA Finals on Wednesday night. This woman walks this earth blessed with a whole lotta the genes of the King. How is it possible that she has absolutely no rebop? Worse, though, was the simple fact that - from a purely aesthetic perspective - she's not fit to be on the same court with the ball players.

" Mr. Bush added that he was pleased with his performance during his past two days in the Middle East. 'I'm the master of low expectations' and 'we accomplished what I hoped we'd accomplish.' " - from the NYT

After all, as Woody should have said, eighty percent of life is just showing up.

Dave Trowbridge, the Redwood Dragon, is a great-souled man of romance and courage. And you can tell him I said so.

It's over. Thank god. But the only reason for my heartfelt shout of "finally" is that I loved Buffy. Oh, how I loved it! but when a show you can't live without stumbles then, well, I fell. And it hurt. The past two seasons hurt in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways. At it's best, Buffy broke my heart. At it's worst, it broke my spirit.

I've wanted to write something about Buffy, something about heroes and metaphors and getting through the next day, but what exactly I mean by those has been jumbled up with the love and the disgust. Fortunately, there have been a few other people saying some smart, interesting things.

Will Shetterly nails down the metaphors, why they worked, and what happened when the show let them down.

Jonathan Last offers his ten best episodes.

And then there's Jaime J. Weinman, telling us ' Why Spike ruined "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" '.

" To make this clear, the monsters on the show were often portrayed as the twisted embodiment of high school coolness. ... Spike, when introduced in Season 2, was exactly the kind of smartass punk who makes high school a miserable place for geeks: Arrogant, cocky and contemptuous of anyone who wasn't equally cool, he was a superficial, self-confident Fonzie type who deserved to get smacked down by our awkward heroes.

With the transformation of Spike into a lovable antihero, 'Buffy' has stopped celebrating the uncool outcasts; instead, it celebrates the cool punk, the guy who would push the first-season Willow or Xander out of the way in the school halls. ... And Andrew [...] is constantly mocked for his geekiness, because a show that was once on the side of geeks now portrays them as buffoons or villains. "

The elevation of Spike is a repudiation of what Buffy stood for when it was young and capturing my heart. More than anything else, that is what hurt. Jon Katz was one of the first media critics to pick up on what made Buffy important to its fans. In 1998 he declared Buffy to be the best show on tv. But even before that, in 1997, he realized:

" [T]he personal lives of Buffy and her friends are bleak. They wish they were popular; they long for love. But they know too much about how the world works to be happy (Buffy's parents are divorced, for example), and they are cynical - allergic to the posturing, moralizing, and false piety that comes from adults and popular culture. ... Buffy's friends are the ungainly, the brainy, and the socially disconnected. "

And they set out to save the world anyway. Heroes. Just like me and you.