It will perhaps come as no surprise to you if I acknowledge the fact that I am, by nature, somewhat morose and pessimistic. My general mental state is one that tends to sorrow and self-pity. The simple joys that seem so easily found for others are constantly just outside my grasp. Even rare moments of success are entwined with a sense of foreboding and the awful knowledge that however cheering the current moment may be, it is essentially transitory. I have been this way since I was a child, and after a while one learns to, if not make peace with it, generally accept that this is how things are. The last few weeks or so, though, have been incalculably worse. I have been suffering through an almost crippling depression, one in which the pains of existence and the futility of my every action have weighed so heavily that I have found myself almost incapable of performing basic human functions. I have had several conversations among a group of my acquaintances, however, and have found that I am not alone right now. (This is oddly gratifying, which makes me feel even more guilty because of that very gratification.) The common thread of despair, as best I can figure, is related to the weather. It is grim out there. The rare glimpses of the sun are not enough to take off the burden of melancholy that seems to stalk us through our days. But I have good news for you: Eventually you will die and all your suffering shall be ended. Also, tomorrow is supposed to not be that terrible. Not that that’s going to make any difference.

Photo by Tony the Misfit, from Flickr.

Because I am feeling too lazy to make up a bit about Superman renouncing his American citizenship after angry birthers claimed his allegiance to Krypton made him undeserving of its privileges, I will instead simply pass this one along. It is apparently some kind of sperm retrieval machine. Have your way with it. God, Thursdays.

“For many, it might not seem like an error. But a misprint in a tourist pamphlet aimed at visitors to the Eurovision Song Contest, which will be held in Düsseldorf in just over a week’s time, has left organizers a tad embarrassed. In a guide booklet to accompany the event, a ‘Gay’s Day of Action’ has been listed instead of the actual ‘School Event Day,’ a single letter error that conflates the German words schwul, for gay, and Schule, for school.”

Writer Harper Lee turns 85 today. Just yesterday, Ms. Lee issued a statement denying any involvement in a forthcoming biography which claims to have been “written with direct access to Harper and Alice Lee and their friends and family.” As the Times notes, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird “has not given a public interview in 45 years.” She did, however, use this space to explain her longstanding reasons for silence just last year. Happy birthday, Ms. Lee!

“Scientists surveyed 82 species of passerine birds, including sparrows, pigeons and anything that perches, in and around 12 cities in central Europe. They classified the birds as those that breed in the heart of the city or those that avoid the hustle and bustle. And then they compared the bird brains. The results? Birds that prosper on the city streets have larger brains than their pastoral relations. So it seems that novel environments, including urban landscapes, may select for street smarts — at least for birds that flock toward the city lights.”
 — Huh. Well. This could reinforce some unfortunate stereotypes, I guess. It seems, according to Science, that birds who live in cities are actually smarter than ones who lives in the country. Or, at least, they have larger brains. City birds talk faster than country birds, too. Which makes sense. Still, smart and successful as they may be, and as awesome at ping pong as they are, I hate pigeons.

“A new study suggests some unexpected benefits of blushing: It found that people who turn red after making a mistake or social blunder were considered more trustworthy and judged more positively than those who did not.” The lesson here: Learn how to fake a blush and you can get away with anything.

The other night I attended the premiere of a video game. It was an odd little duck — the premiere, that is. The video game is L.A. Noire, an interactive thriller from Rockstar Games (coming out in May), and it was not odd at all. But the premiere was a bit of a puzzle.

In many aspects, it was more traditional roll-out than premiere — a demonstration of the product, followed by prepared remarks from the company and then a Q&A; for the fans. But this was not Comic Con or E3 Expo, where we’d expect a whole weekend’s worth of such events; this was at the Tribeca Film Festival. And to answer the question of why L.A. Noire was occupying a slot at the Festival was Geoff Gilmore, the host for the event and also the festival’s chief creative officer (and former longtime director of the Sundance Film Festival). Gilmore has no small amount of cinema street cred in the bank, and he was visibly excited to present this premiere of what he described as “a whole new sphere of storytelling: narrative gaming.”

The movie business and the video game business (or the “interactive” business, as it’s known) have been flirting for some time. Blockbusters get licensed to interactive producers for video games (even E.T.!), and sometimes games get developed into movies (i.e., the Resident Evil series). Each of course is vying for a sometimes-overlapping audience, but as technologies advance and delivery platforms begin to resemble each other, this flirtation is becoming a bit more serious, though still awkward. And the tone of the event, from the perspective of Gilmore and the TFF, was an invite to the interactive industry to go back to cinema’s room later that night. Interactive, from the tone of Rockstar, is playing hard to get. The company’s reps, Rob Nelson and Simon Ramsey, while seeming pleased to be there, were clearly more focused on promoting the game than celebrating any potential union between the sectors. When asked to identify the game’s ideal audience, Ramsey answered that Rockstar was not just looking to Rockstar fans (who comprised the majority of the audience), but also to fans of film noir. And what better venue to reach these fans than a high-profile film festival? And if the initial outreach to cineastes is in the guise of a serious discussion of the arts, then so much the better.

The game itself is a bright shiny thing. Immaculately art-directed, it takes place in the Los Angeles of 1947, and the protagonist (“you”) is a WWII hero recently promoted to detective, trying to solve a series of grisly (and graphic) murders. The animation of the characters’ faces was mapped using a new process that approximates photographic-level graphics, and it’s impressive, as is the richness of the period LA scenery. It was written and directed by Brendan McNamara, and features a cast of 400 and a “script” of 2,300 pages. As progress in the game is ultimately determined by engaging in a series of interrogations of potential suspects in which you, the player, must determine the truthfulness of statement — literally by choosing between Truth/Doubt/Lie after each interogatee response — both the script and the facial animation are much more important than they would be in, say, a first-person shooter.

As pretty as the game is, the product demo of the game was an interesting experience, in the full sense of that word. It was novel, if not newsworthy, to get a peek at the next big Rockstar game (considering their track record), and at the same time it was squirmy. The demo was a live projection of one of the Rockstar team playing an early chapter, and watching a stranger play a videogame is as stultifying as it sounds. The cut scenes which lay out the arc of the story are fun, but when the game proceeds into actual play there are small gaps and pauses that the gamer takes in stride when playing but are less than riveting for those looking over his shoulder. All of the dull parts of game play — driving the car from scene to scene, climbing the stairs — were live and in real time. And to watch and not be distracted by mashing your thumbs, your attention is freed to wander and notice the little things, good and bad — the richness of the sound design, and the incongruity between near-human facial gestures and weirdly mapped fabric (which is notoriously hard to depict via CGI). A live demonstration was not as evocative as perhaps the organizers had hoped.

That point where video games are so immersive as to become watchable by third parties is not that far away, though, and L.A. Noire is a clear effort to approach that point. It’s very pretty and very well realized, but at the same time, the fact that the mechanics are based on interrogations, on an immense but still finite logic tree, can be reminiscent of reading a souped-up “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. Above all this, the decision of the TFF to “premiere” L.A. Noire, is a component of the engaging gospel of Geoff Gilmore: finding the places where cinema overlaps similar media, and to even find a Unified Field Theory of Narrative. And while L.A. Noire may not be the apotheosis of that, the event was a window on the ways the two industries will step on each other’s toes while they consider the prospect of finally getting it on.

Brent Cox is all over the Internet.

I went to get keys made again yesterday, because I’m always running out of keys. As usual in the keymaking process, I tried to go to Home Depot first but they don’t do Medeco keys, so I’m always disappointed. Eventually I got to the Ace, where the nice wacky young girl works in the back. Her name is sort of like Candi, so I’ll call her that. I decided I was going to get a bunch of keys, three of each. Candi does keys but she doesn’t do Medeco keys, but a guy there knows how, even without the stupid card you’re supposed to have. “Meehhhdecooo,” Candi sighed into the intercom, and he came in from mopping out back to do it. The mop handle had just hit him in the head and he had a red mark. They resumed a conversation from earlier about the business of recycling pallets. They got the idea because there’s a guy who comes around every week in his pickup truck, and he takes their pallets to the pallet recycling place, and he’s getting paid three bucks a pallet. Actually they’re paying a little less now, something like under three bucks. The price just went down.

Candi looked up the nearest pallet recycling place on her work computer. It wasn’t too far, and she and the other guy started working out the math.

Candi has a pickup truck (it’s her dad’s pickup truck) and they’d also seen other people driving around with their trucks piled up with pallets too, so they figured they could get 20 or maybe even 25 pallets in the truck. 20 times three is… $60. So Candi thought: what if she rented a U-Haul truck for the day? Those are $19.99, basically, or just under seven pallets, at least at the original pallet price. So after your first seven pallets, and maybe three or four pallets worth of gas, every pallet after that was profit.

Candi figured she could get two across and maybe six deep, for a pallet base in the truck. So that was 12. “And they’re about this high,” she said, slightly underestimating, I thought, with her hands. So we figured we could get them at least ten high in the truck. So that was… I used the calculator on my iPhone. 120 pallets. Times three. That is $360. “That’s way more than I make in a week,” she said.

Candi’s mind was a little blown and, as one will, she immediately started to work out the five days a week, 52 weeks a year plan. “And it’s all tax-free!” she said. “I know,” I said. We downgraded a little, trying to get in just 100 pallets a day. “Once you go to all the Aces and the supermarkets and the Home Depots, that’s a lot of pallets,” she said. The guy pointed out that it was probably really competitive, and everyone had a pallet routine and showed up early to get the pallets, but we weren’t that worried about that. $300 a day. $1500 a week. We’re not quite sure how we did the math — probably we threw in holidays or something, or subtracted for gas and truck rental — but we came up with an annual number.

“That is $64,000 a year,” she said. Her mouth was open. It was like she’d never heard of such a large amount of money in her life. I vividly remember her saying the number, in part because of the old game show, “The $64,000 Question,” but mostly because of her awe.

My keys were done finally and, because the Medeco keys were $11 each, all told my keys cost about 14 pallets. “Then you can expand into stripping copper,” I told her, “or become a big recycling business,” which I added on because I realized suggesting she become a copper stripper sounded kind of mean, or maybe tacky, and I didn’t intend that at all. Candi thought maybe she’d go into business with her dad, because he owned the truck after all, and they could collect pallets together. I said that was a good idea. I don’t think she’ll probably do it in the end, but I’m glad she’s taking these kinds of opportunities seriously.

“They weren’t thinking about fusion per se. They were thinking about New York and approaching terroir, a French concept usually applied to the climate and natural harvest of a given area, in a new way. What ethnic foods had come to co-exist in, and define, the terroir of this city? The answer: Almost every kind. Their take on chicken fra diavolo gets some of its heat from sriracha, an Asian pepper blend. It sits on a slick of un-Italian yogurt.”
 — Frank Bruni’s article about Torrisi Italian Specialties in this weekend’s Times Magazine starts out seeming like a profiley thing about a hit restaurant, but gets into a more interesting discussion of fusion cooking and the essential differences between Italian and French cuisines. I’ve never been able to go to Torrisi’s for dinner, because they don’t take reservations and people are lining up outside two hours ahead of time. (I’m hoping the wait might be alleviated when they expand, come September, but it probably won’t be.) I do go there for lunch sometimes, though, and while the picture of Billy Joel on the wall is best not to look while eating, their turkey sandwich is the no. 1 best turkey sandwich I’ve ever had in my life. They put this tomato/pepper sauce on it that mixes with the mayonnaise to make heroin.

Here is a brief history of birtherism. It is sadly incomplete, because you know those crazy sonsofbitches are never gonna let this thing die.