Who Belongs in the Brat Pack?
I don't spend enough time tackling the big questions on Workbench, so I'd like to rectify that today by addressing a subject of great import among those of us who came of age in the '80s: Are James Spader and Robert Downey Jr. part of the Brat Pack?
The term Brat Pack was coined by journalist David Blum in the June 10, 1985, issue of New York magazine. His cover story Hollywood's Brat Pack describes a world, now lost, in which attractive young women fought for the right to engage in consequence-free heterosexual coitus with Judd Nelson.
If Rob Lowe seemed to be inviting all too much attention from the girls, Judd Nelson acted as though he wanted nothing to do with it. His fame, too, helped attract them -- they recognized his tough-guy looks from his role as the wrong-way kid in The Breakfast Club and sought his attention. But as Alice sat down in an empty chair next to him, Judd Nelson announced to anyone within earshot, including Alice, "There is a line. When someone crosses the line, I get angry. And when someone sits down at the table, they have crossed the line. You can let them get close" -- he looked around at Alice and the swarm of girls -- "but you can't let them sit down." ...
Everyone in Hollywood differs over who belongs to the Brat Pack. That is because they are basing their decision on such trivial matters as whose movie is the biggest hit, whose star is rising and whose is falling, whose face is on the cover of Rolling Stone and whose isn't. And occasionally, some poor, misguided fool bases his judgment on whose talent is the greatest.
Only a fool would attempt to judge Brat Pack members on the basis of acting talent. The editors of the Pack's Wikipedia entry have spent a great deal of time defining eligibility for membership:
Appearance in one, or both, of the ensemble casts of John Hughes' The Breakfast Club and Joel Schumacher's St. Elmo's Fire is often cited as a prerequisite for being a core Brat Pack member.[10][11][12] With this criterion, the most commonly cited members include Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy.[5][6][13][14][15][16] Conspicuously absent from most lists is Mare Winningham, the only principal member of either cast who never starred in any other films with any other cast mates.
When there are nine citations in just three sentences, you know that a major bloodbath has taken place behind the scenes at Wikipedia. The victorious editors, clambering over the corpses of their opponents with their cold, dead hands still clutching keyboards, have taken a conservative position on membership that relegates Spader and Downey to "close contributor" status. Jamie Currie, the web's preeminent Brat Pack scholar, also uses Wikipedia's eight members and consigns Downey and John Cusack to "Possibly Pack" status.
This is a crime against the '80s. I recently caught the tail end of Less Than Zero, a 1987 film I've seen in random order over the years while channel surfing and reassembled in my brain. That movie has everything we've come to associate with the great works of the Brat Pack: a lily white cast, self-absorbed young protagonists who yearn for more interesting personal problems, big haired women in shoulder pads and absolutely no awards for acting.
I take the liberal view of Brat Pack membership. If you've starred in at least two films with a lead actor from Breakfast Club or St. Elmo's Fire and you were younger than 30 at the time -- the Harry Dean Stanton exclusion -- you ran with the Pack.
James Spader starred with McCarthy and Ringwald in Pretty in Pink, McCarthy in Less Than Zero and Mannequin and Lowe in Bad Influence. Robert Downey Jr. starred with Hall in Weird Science and Johnny Be Good, Hall and Nelson in Hail Caesar and Ringwald in The Pick-Up Artist. He also starred with Spader in Tuff Turf and Less Than Zero, which counts once we've admitted Spader into the group.
The decision to admit these actors has far-reaching consequences that become clear when you spend too much time on IMDB's People Working Together search page.
The appearance of three or more Brat Pack members in a film grants it first-order status alongside Breakfast Club and St. Elmo's Fire, so Less Than Zero, Pretty in Pink and Hail Caesar also can bestow membership upon their stars.
Jami Gertz starred with Downey, McCarthy and Spader in Less Than Zero, Hall and Ringwald in Sixteen Candles and Spader in Endless Love. Count her in.
John Cusack starred with Gertz, Hall and Ringwald in Sixteen Candles, Lowe and McCarthy in Class, Spader in True Colors and Bob Roberts and Moore in One Crazy Summer. He's way, way in.
Gertz and Cusack bring Sixteen Candles and Class to first-order status.
Charlie Sheen starred with Cusack, Gertz, Hall and Ringwald in Sixteen Candles, Estevez and Nelson in Never on Tuesday, Estevez and Moore in Wisdom, Estevez in Young Guns and Men at Work, Cusack in Eight Men Out and Being Jon Malkovich and Spader in Wall Street. He's the mayor of in.
Because Sheen and Estevez are brothers who often work together, sometimes on films that no one outside their immediate family went to see, there's potential for chaos here. The first-order clause must be modified to exclude movies in which two of the three Brat Pack stars are siblings. (My apologies, John and Joan Cusack.)
So if you starred in at least two films with a lead actor from Breakfast Club, St. Elmo's Fire, Less Than Zero, Pretty in Pink, Hail Caesar, Sixteen Candles or Class, and you were younger than 30 at the time, and the film did not star two siblings with less than two otherwise eligible members, you belong to an imaginary group of middle-aged actors whose association will circumscribe your career until your dying day.
Oddly, I have yet to find a way to admit Kevin Bacon.
Coming soon on Workbench: Who's the better Darrin Stevens?
Judd Nelson forever!
Fixing a 'Recompile with -fPIC' Error in MySQL
I run my web servers by compiling the most important components from source code, which makes it possible for me to add security fixes more quickly and fine-tune my installations of Apache, MySQL and PHP. While compiling the new release PHP 5.2.8 this weekend, the make process failed with this error:
/usr/bin/ld: /usr/mysql/lib/mysql/libz.a(compress.o): relocation R_X86_64_32 against 'a local symbol' can not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC
/usr/mysql/lib/mysql/libz.a: could not read symbols: Bad value
Naturally, I had absolutely no idea what this meant.
The file libz.a is part of the Zlib compression library, which apparently is included in MySQL 5.0. A Google search for the error message uncovered a bunch of people suffering the same problem I encountered when compiling programs on Linux. The best explanation I found was a Gentoo Linux page on how to fix -fPIC errors. Unfortunately, none of Gentoo's tips worked for me.
Through trial and error (and error and error), I finally solved the problem by compiling a new copy of Zlib and specifying that it create a Unix shared library using the option:
Next, I added the option when running configure to prepare PHP for installation. This didn't work until I figured out one last obstacle -- the Zlib option must be placed before the option. Otherwise, PHP tries to use the copy of Zlib included with MySQL.
Everything now compiles and runs successfully. So until the next time I try to install something, I can return my ego to its upright position. My new Linux technique is unstoppable.
New Word: Cupertino
There's a new meaning for the word cupertino that has nothing to do with the city in California, according to the etymology site World Wide Words. A cupertino is any word that's produced when a lazy editor accepts spellcheck suggestions without reviewing them, as in this press release:
In August, nGenera announced version 8.1 of its Talisma Knowledgebase, saying the release added enchantments to its search functionality through an OEM agreement with enterprise search vendor Autonomy.
The name comes from Microsoft Word 97's suggestion that Cupertino is the proper spelling of co-operation. "European writers who omitted the hyphen from co-operation (the standard form in British English) found that their automated checkers were turning it into Cupertino," Michael Quinlan writes.
In July, the Christian media site OneNewsNow turned the sprinter Tyson Gay into a human cupertino. In an attempt to reclaim the word "gay," for purposes as yet unknown, the site was automatically replacing it with "homosexual" in news stories. This resulted in several articles about the accomplishments of Tyson Homosexual, one of the fastest men alive. "He was ahead of American Tyson Homosexual from the get-go and beat Homosexual easily," one story states.
Finding Updated Feeds with Simple Update Protocol
FriendFeed is working on Simple Update Protocol (SUP), a means of discovering when RSS and Atom feeds on a particular service have been updated without checking all of the individual feeds. Feeds indicate that their updates can be tracked with SUP by adding a new link tag, as in this example from an Atom feed:
<link rel="http://api.friendfeed.com/2008/03#sup" href="http://friendfeed.com/api/sup.json#53924729" type="application/json" />
The rel attribute identifies an ID for the feed, which is called its SUP-ID. The href attribute contains a URL that uses JSON to identify updated feeds by their SUP-IDs. There's also a type attribute that contains "application/json" to indicate the content type at the linked resource.
Developer Paul Bucheit makes the case for the protocol on FriendFeed's blog. "[O]ur servers now download millions of feeds from over 43 services every hour," he writes. "One of the limitations of this approach is that it is difficult to get updates from services quickly without FriendFeed's crawler overloading other sites' servers with update checks."
My first take on the idea is that defining a relationship with a URI is too different than standard link relationships in HTML, which employ simple words like "previous", "next", and "alternate". When new relationships have been introduced, they follow this convention, as Google did when it proposed nofollow.
Also, neither RSS 1.0 nor RSS 2.0 allow more than one link tag in a feed, so the SUP tag only would be valid in Atom feeds.
Both of these concerns could be addressed by identifying the SUP provider with a new namespace, as in this hypothetical example:
<rss xmlns:sup="http://friendfeed.com/api/sup/">
<channel>
<sup:provider href="http://friendfeed.com/api/sup.json#53924729" type="application/json" />
...
Six Apart has offered an alternate solution that seems more likely to work for large hosting sites and constant feed-checking services like FriendFeed. The company produces an update stream of Atom data indicating an update on any of the thousands of TypePad or Vox blogs.
Another potential solution would be to borrow the technique used by Radio UserLand blogs to identify a list of recently updated sites: Add a category tag to the feed with the value "rssUpdates" and a domain attribute with the URI of XML data containing the list:
<category domain="http://rpc.weblogs.com/shortChanges.xml">rssUpdates>/category>
The XML data is in the weblog changes format used by Weblogs.Com.
Streamline Your Consolidated Resources
I love the thick coat of BS that Wizards of the Coast President Greg Leeds laid down to justify the layoffs this week of around 20 employees, including longtime Dungeons & Dragons game designers Jonathan Tweet and Dave Noonan:
Consolidating internal resources coupled with improved outsourcing allows us to gain efficiencies in executing against our major digital initiatives Magic Online and D&D Insider. Wizards of the Coast is well positioned to maximize future opportunities, including further brand development on digital platforms. The result of this consolidation is a more streamlined approach to driving core brands.
If your player character has mastered the Comprehend Language ritual, which requires a successful Arcana check, he can understand corporate executive gibberish for 24 hours, according to page 302 of the Player's Handbook. On a check of 35 or higher, he can even speak it.
Web Hosting Provider Alpha Red Files for Bankruptcy
While looking through some records in a bankruptcy database, I found an item that hasn't hit the news yet: The web hosting provider Alpha Red Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Wednesday in the Southern District of Texas, claiming more than $10 million in liabilities.
Alpha Red, a hosting provider with two datacenters in Houston that hosts numerous adult-content sites and other high-bandwidth customers, has been in legal trouble in recent months. On Sept. 23, Alpha Red chief executive officer James Reed McCreary IV and the company were sued by Washington state Attorney General Robert McKenna, who accused McCreary of selling "scareware," software that made Windows XP users falsely believe that their registry had become "damaged and corrupted." The suit claims that through another company he controlled, Branch Software Inc., McCreary sold Registry Cleaner XP software for $39.95 that was marketed by exploiting the Windows Messenger Service with Internet-transmitted messages that made misleading "Critical Error Message!" dialog boxes appear on user computers.
"Contrary to the representation implied by Defendants' message, the user's computer has not already been tested or examined to determine the presence of errors, damage or corruption," the suit states. "Through alarmist language seemingly delivered by a trusted source, Defendants misrepresent the extent to which installing the software is necessary for repair of the computer for proper operation."
The "Critical Error" messages were sent repeatedly to users. McKenna cites one user who allegedly received 214 such dialogs in a 24-hour period. Five causes of action were filed alleging violations of the Computer Spyware Act and unfair and deceptive trade practices.
"We won't tolerate the use of alarmist warnings or deceptive 'free scans' to trick consumers into buying software to fix a problem that doesn't even exist," McKenna said in a press release.
The top 20 debtors in the bankruptcy are owed more than $4.57 million, including $826,000 to the IRS. McCreary owns 82 percent of Alpha Red's common stock, according to the bankruptcy filing.
A Texas state court removed McCreary from management on Oct. 23 and appointed a receiver to run the company, responding to a court action by MegaUpload Ltd., a file-upload site based in Hong Kong that was an Alpha Red customer.
Although a Chapter 11 bankruptcy is designed for companies to reorganize and settle debts to continue operations, the filing includes this statement by receiver Douglas Brickley: "[T]he Receiver deems it to be in the best interests of the Company to file a bankruptcy petition ... for the purposes of winding up the Company's business affairs, liquidating the Company's assets and distributing payment to creditors."
Some Alpha Red customers have been discussing their difficulties with the company for several months on the Web Hosting Talk forum. Customers who sent servers to Alpha Red facilities in Houston posted that they have been unable to get them back. "The place is locked down and no one answering the phone/mails etc.," one customer complained in October. "Got 10 servers stucked inside and cant do anything."
Review: 'The Spy Who Came for Christmas' by David Morrell
I don't read many thrillers, but I asked to review David Morrell's The Spy Who Came for Christmas after it was advertised recently on the Drudge Retort. I'm a sucker for holidaymas-themed books and films, and the title got my attention with its evocation of John le Carre's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
Morrell, a prolific thriller author who created Rambo in 1972's First Blood, centers his new book on Kagan, an American spy who has committed an escalating serious of heinous acts while working undercover with Russian mobsters in the U.S. When he's tasked with kidnapping the newborn son of an inspirational Palestinean leader to derail Middle East peace, he flees with the child into the crowd of celebrants on Santa Fe's Canyon Road during the annual art walk on Christmas Eve, ending up in the home of a woman who's packing her bags after being punched by her alcoholic husband. Together, the spy, the woman, her 12-year-old son and the infant "child of peace" -- as he's grandiosely described -- hunker down and prepare for a siege as three mobsters and the husband lurk outside.
The plot's tense and engaging, but the novel's told through so much dialogue it feels like it would rather be a screenplay (six of Morrell's books have been made into films). While waiting for the mobsters he betrayed to storm the house and take back the infant, Kagan entertains the family with his theory that the three Wise Men, the Magi, were actually Persian spies trying to destabilize King Herod's government in Israel with false tales of a savior:
"The Magi were so convincing that Herod didn't realize who his true enemies were. They became what intelligent experts call double agents: spies pretending to work for one side when they're actually working for the other. ... But something remarkable happened in Bethlehem, something that changed everything. ... They began to believe that the disinformation they'd given Herod was in fact the truth."
Though Kagan's Christmas story is rationalized as an effort to keep the family from freaking out, by the end of the book it's clear he's an incorrigible blabbermouth, an amusing trait to find in a battle-scarred intelligence operative.
Morrell's back-of-book bio makes him sound like a figure out of his own novels:
[H]e is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School for wilderness survival as well as the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security. ... He has been trained in firearms, hostage negotiation, assuming identities, executive protection and offensive/defensive driving, among numerous other action skills ...
The best part about The Spy Who Came for Christmas is Morrell's choice of setting, which makes a holiday vacation to Santa Fe sound like a pretty good idea, once all the spies and terrorists have cleared out.
Credit: The photo of Santa Fe's Canyon Road was taken by CelebrateGreatness and is available under a Creative Commons license.
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