Things That Terribly Disappoint Joe: Sudoku

The year was 2006. The world was gripped by Sudoku Mania (not to be confused with the Rubiks Cube Ague of 1983). I, being of this world and highly attuned to all its whims and fads, was soon spending every spare waking moment filling empty squares with numbers, such that each number from 1-9 would appear nine times, but once and only once in every row, column, and 3x3 grid.

Man, was I hooked. I started on the easy ones, developed a few strategies, and methodically planned to move up the Sudoku difficulty ladder from easy, to medium, to hard, and finally (Lord willing) fiendish! Each level found me getting stymied, as my early strategies were found to be inadequate to handle the tougher puzzles. But each time, a new strategy appeared before me, beckoning like a great big beckoning thing, showing me the way forward. Thrilled beyond hope, I crept along steadily, amazed in the ability of the human mind to construct ever more refined logical tools to solve problems, until, one day, I finally discovered something that would change my life forever....

You can't solve every Sudoku with plain old logic. There are some puzzles (millions, in fact), where you have to guess - there's no other choice. You pick a square that has two possible numbers, pick one, and try to solve the rest of the squares, hoping that your 50/50 chance works out. If you reach a dead end, you backtrack to that same square, erasing everything you've done along the way, go with the other number, and voilá - a completed puzzle.

I think that's stupid. The whole point of Sudoku is that it's a universal logic game. It's not like the hybrid logic/verbal game of a crossword puzzle. You don't have to know any historical or pop figures; you don't have to know twelve synonyms for "paltry"; you don't have to be clever enough to figure out any themes or cutesy clues (Clue: "Head start?" Answer: "Doodoo"; ha ha ha); you don't need to know anything at all beyond the numbers 1-9 - it's pure logic. Wow! what an incredible challenge, thought I. The greatest human advancement since staging the moon landing at Universal Studios in 1969.

Well, that's baloney. It's not pure logic. If you're guaranteed to reach a point where logic stops working, then it's not pure logic. That's pure frustration. And a waste of my valuable time the entire way. If I'd known that guessing was eventually going to be not only a strategy for the weak, but a requirement for success, I would've found something more worthwhile to do - like twiddling my thumbs, or listening to Kenny G (best jazz artist ever imho).

By the way, I understand that, strictly speaking, guessing (or trial and error, or Ariadne's thread, or whatever you call it) is still logic. When you're walking around a labyrinth, keeping track of where you've been and so forth is actually a very logical way to proceed. In fact, it's the most logical way to proceed. But if you're not in a labyrinth, guessing is stupid.

Point is, Sudoku betrayed my trust. It's not what it purports to be. And I think it's sad that Will Shortz has jumped on the bandwagon by putting his name on so many Sudoku books - for all the dumb puns and obscure 1920s actresses that find their way into the New York Times crossword puzzles, at least you know what you're in for. Suduko, though, the siren of puzzle games, sang her song of mental stimulation, lured me too close to the shores of false logic and dashed my brain ship on the rocks of stupidness. Very messy.

Terrorists Won't Become Like Pirates

I was going to make this a comment to Ed's last post. But as I was writing it, it seemed like there was enough content to make a new post out of it. We'll see, won't we?

Terrorists won't become like pirates. They don't fit into the established Western tradition of rebel worship. This tradition goes back a long ways; certainly nearly a thousand years. Consider figures like Robin Hood, Jesse James, and Andre Agassi. We love them all! And why not? They kill people in authority, flout current standards of morality, and answer to no one. (Well, maybe that doesn't go for Agassi - I don't recall him murdering anyone. But I could be wrong. In any event, he's still a rebel.)

But bloodlust is not why we love them. Rather, it's that they represent freedom. Emily was right when she noted that most modern depictions of pirates focus on searching for buried treasure, exploration, and just general carousing. There's a part of us that wants to be able to do those things - pick up and leave whenever we want, do as we choose, do things no one has ever done before. Sail off into the sunset; ride a lone horse into the sunset; follow a jungle trail...into the sunset. (Sunsets are the key to freedom, apparently.)

But we can't. We have to raise crops, raise families, and follow most of the rules most of the time. It's called society, and it's worked for thousands of years. When society works, it's a wonderful thing. It lets us eat and live comfortably. And it allows us to do things that the cavemen never could. Science and literature, arts and industry - all the advances of mankind are because we buy into society.

There's little pieces of us that still feel like cavemen, though. And fortunately, those bits of us are largely satisfied by allowing a very few people to live that life outside the law. We secretly root for them, and we celebrate them because they let the rest of us live productive lives. If everyone were an outlaw, nothing would ever get done. But if Jesse James robs a couple dozen banks over the course of a couple decades, we can lean on our desks and say, "Man! Did you hear about that last job the James Gang pulled? Phew! Always staying one step ahead of the law, too. Alright - now what were you saying about the third quarter actuarial adjustments?"

It's a fine line, however, between outlaws and fanatics. We like the idea of a little rebelliousness out there; we don't like fanaticism. Why not? Because fanatics aren't any more free than the rest of us - they're slaves to their ideology, and that's not very romantic. This is why terrorists won't be like pirates. They're both on the fringes of society, but we're scared of the parts of us that are fanatical, whereas we are wistful about the parts of us that want freedom.

How can you tell which side of the line someone falls? I think it can all be boiled down to something I call the plush doll test. If you can imagine a historical figure or archetype as a plush doll, it's a rebel or an outlaw. If you can't, then it's a fanatic. For example: Robin Hood - plush doll. Torquemada - not a plush doll. Pirate - plush doll. Ku Klux Klansman - not a plush doll.

And here's where I disagree with Amy. I don't think that Nazis are like pirates, either. We don't celebrate Nazis as a general rule. We tend either to demonize or ridicule them. And we do this, again, because we're afraid of the dark corners of humanity that they represent. They fail the plush doll test.

Like I said, it can be a fine line. But I'm convinced that terrorists will never be like pirates.

Little Blue Pills

I like Ed's game of advertising pandering; I especially like that the key to getting an ad (so far, I've seen ads for Fast & Furious, Joss Whedon dating, and elderly singles) is to just totally trash/ridicule/demean the target ad subject. So now I've decided to take my power as co-person on this thing and use it to try to draw an ad for one of my favorite cartoons growing up: the smurfs.

In order to get the ad, though, as we know, I'll have to tear those little blue pills apart first. So here goes:

I hate smurfs. And I'll tell you why. Smurfs are racist. Smurfs are sexist. And smurfs are communists. (I hope that sentence doesn't attract any ads for communist dating websites - eCollectiveHarmony, perhaps.) Not to mention their lackadaisical treatment of the English language. To wit:

The Smurfs, as far as I can tell, is the most racist cartoon ever shown on American tv. Smurfs live in a supposed utopia where only blue-skinned beings are allowed. If you don't have blue skin, you're evil. Look at Gargamel and Azrael - white and furry, respectively. And of course there was that infamous episode where the smurfs start turning purple by biting each other. The purple smurfs are totally insane and evil, and threaten to destroy the idyllic life of the all-blue smurfs. (I looked at this online, by the way, and in the original Belgian version of that story, the evil smurfs were actually black! Hanna-Barbera changed them to purple to make it seem less overtly racist. Clearly they wanted to convey more subtle racist imagery.) The other thing the smurfs did was to listen to a lot of music by Richard Strauss and Wagner. Nazi music. Can't get racist-er than those Nazis, my friends.

Smurfs were also totally sexist. They profoundly, purposefully perpetuated the patriarchal paradigm. How many female smurfs were there? Exactly one, for most of the show's run. One girl smurf? Now there's some misogynism for you. Especially when you consider that she was created by Gargamel (evil white guy) expressly to bring about the downfall of the smurfs. Sure, she eventually was turned into a "good" smurf, but what were the outward effects of her inner change? Her hair turned from spiky and black to long and blonde. Her dress grew longer and got frillier. And she got high heels, for goodness sake! She lived in a forest!! All the male smurfs lusted after her - their previously perfect all-male village was riven with division. Strife caused by The Female. And as if the patriarchal stuff was too subtle for people, who was their leader? Papa Smurf. Now, later on, they did get a couple more girl smurfs (although the little one was also made by Gargamel, I think), but that was right about when the show jumped the smurf (or should that be smurfed the shark? (or even smurfed the smurf? See the grammar gripe, later.))

Smurfs were commies. The show was blatant communist propaganda. Smurf Village was essentially an agrarian collective, where everyone wore identical Mao-like outfits, sang ego-crushing work songs (We all work together! Together we all work!), and were led by an apparently grandfather-type figure - Papa Stalin, er, Papa Smurf - who in reality enforced a code of conformity. Intellectuals were persecuted and ridiculed (Brainy Smurf). Old smurfs, outside of Papa Smurf, are nowhere to be found (presumably banished or left to die once their useful working days were over). Gargamel, representing capitalism - he was obsessed with gold - was an evil, lurking figure, that had to be kept far away from the smurfs' unsullied commune. Azrael, representing organized religion (Azrael is an evil angel in Islam), was a tool of capitalism, used by the wealthy to subjugate the weak-minded, and, while outwardly soft and furry, always kept his claws in view as a reminder of what he would do if you let him get close enough.

Finally, the smurfs had the laziest dialect of English. Ever. The word "smurf" is essentially contentless. You can substitute "smurf" for nearly any action verb, noun, of adjective in any given sentence. "Hey! Anyone want to go smurf that smurfy smurf over by the smurf? It'll smurf a smurf!" That's nonsense. Anyone knows you can't just smurf that kind of smurf without using a smurf first. And if you think I'm just being silly, consider this: since the smurfs were on tv in the 80's, we've seen other contentless words invade the language - like (as a placefiller) and dude are classic examples - and more are on their way, abetted by the casual format of the internet. Pretty soon, no one will be able to communicate with each other. When scholars look back on the self-destruction of English, they'll see that it began with a bunch of racist, sexist, Maoist creatures called smurfs.

Alright! That was fun! Let's see how long it takes to get an ad for a smurf-collector dating site.