The Real Constitution: Article I, Section III (Structure of the Senate)

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.


Immediately after they shall be assembled in Consequence of the first Election, they shall be divided as equally as may be into three Classes. The Seats of the Senators of the first Class shall be vacated at the Expiration of the second Year, of the second Class at the Expiration of the fourth Year, and of the third Class at the Expiration of the sixth Year, so that one third may be chosen every second Year; and if Vacancies happen by Resignation, or otherwise, during the Recess of the Legislature of any State, the Executive thereof may make temporary Appointments until the next Meeting of the Legislature, which shall then fill such Vacancies.


No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.


The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.


The Senate shall chuse their other Officers, and also a President pro tempore, in the Absence of the Vice President, or when he shall exercise the Office of President of the United States.


The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.


Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

Recall that even those members of the Convention that supported direct election of Representatives (as opposed to election by state legislatures) were comfortable with the idea of "successive filtration" for the Senate and Executive. Under Edmund Randolph's original Virginia Plan, Senators would be elected by the House of Representatives from nomination by state legislatures. Richard Spaight of North Carolina, concerned about the withdrawal of power from the states, was the first to propose that the state legislatures elect Senators directly; but since the convention was at the time thought to be likely to pass a system of assigning representatives according to state populations, and Randolph believed that the Senate should be "so small as to be exempt from the passionate proceedings to which numberous assemblies are liable", and Rufus King pointed out that under proportional representation "there must be 80 or 100 members to entitle Delaware to the choice of one of them", the motion was laid aside for the time being.

James Wilson, who had defended direct election of Representatives, believed the Senate should be independent of both the House and the state legislators and called for direct election of Senators, perhaps by uniting several different districts, which Madison opposed on the grounds that if a large and small state voted as a group, all its senators would be chosen from the large state even if someone from the small state was more qualified. Even at this early point, Roger Sherman proposed electing one member from each state legislature. Ultimately Randolph's scheme was effectively rejected, with only Massachusetts, Virginia, and South Carolina being happy with it.

The Real Constitution: Article I, Section II (Structure of the House)

The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.


No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.


Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New-York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three.


When vacancies happen in the Representation from any State, the Executive Authority thereof shall issue Writs of Election to fill such Vacancies.


The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.

Under the Articles of Confederation, members of Congress were picked by state legislatures. When Edmund Randolph moved, as part of his original Virginia Plan, "that the members of the first branch of the National Legislature ought to be elected by the people of the several States", it touched off a firestorm among the more aristocratic members of the room. All words are Madison's: Roger Sherman: "The people...immediately should have as little to do as may be about the Government. They want information and are constantly liable to be misled." Elbridge Gerry: "The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots. In Massts. it had been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men, and which no one on the spot can refute." (It was in Massachusetts that Shays' Rebellion took place.)

George Mason provided the first coherent defense of the direct election of Representatives:

It was to be the grand depository of the democratic principle of the Govtt. It was, so to speak, to be our House of Commons-It ought to know & sympathise with every part of the community; and ought therefore to be taken not only from different parts of the whole republic, but also from different districts of the larger members of it, which had in several instances particularly in Virga., different interests and views arising from difference of produce, of habits &c &c. He admitted that we had been too democratic but was afraid we sd. incautiously run into the opposite extreme. We ought to attend to the rights of every class of the people.

"He had often wondered at the indifference of the superior classes of society to this dictate of humanity & policy," Madison continued, considering that in a few generations, given the economy of the day, some of their descendents would almost certainly join the lower classes, so "every selfish motive...every family attachment, ought to recommend such a system of policy as would provide no less carefully for the rights and happiness of the lowest than of the highest orders of Citizens." Mason was no poor man; he was a slaveowner born on a Virginia plantation, and arguably was far less of a self-made man than Sherman, whose "education did not extend beyond his father's library and grammar school and his early career was spent as a shoe designer" according to Wikipedia. But Sherman and Gerry were New Englanders intimately familiar with Shays' Rebellion, and the others that defended popular election of representatives were not.

Pennsylvania's James Wilson concurred that "no government could long subsist without the confidence of the people" (echoing the Declaration of Independence's "consent of the governed" clause) and "in a republican Government this confidence was peculiarly essential.

He also thought it wrong to increase the weight of the State Legislatures by making them the electors of the national Legislature. All interference between the general and local Governmts. should be obviated as much as possible. On examination it would be found that the opposition of States to federal measures had proceded much more from the officers of the States, than from the people at large.

Madison himself sided with Mason and Wilson, seeing popular election of Representatives as "essential to every plan of free Government". Some states, he noted, did not even have popular election of their upper houses; if the lower house were to be elected by state legislatures, the upper by the lower, the executive by the two together, and other offices by the executive, "the people would be lost sight of altogether; and the necessary sympathy between them and their rulers and officers, too little felt." Madison was okay with imposing "successive filtrations" as long as they didn't apply to the lower house, and felt that "the great fabric to be raised would be more stable and durable, if it should rest on the solid foundation of the people themselves, than if it should stand merely on the pillars of the Legislatures."

Gerry rebutted that the comparison with the House of Commons was fallacious and "that the State legislatures drawn immediately from the people did not always possess their confidence." He would be okay with direct election of representatives "if it were so qualified that men of honor & character might not be unwilling to be joined in the appointments." Madison thought Gerry supported a system where the people would only nominate some candidates for the legislatures to elect - a primary without a general election. When the general motion came to a vote, only New Jersey and South Carolina outright dissented.


In considering the "small state-big state" debate that broke out regarding representation in the new Congress, understand that before the Convention, the United States was much more like the European Union than it is today. To understand the change being considered, imagine if the UN voted by majority vote instead of consensus, and decided tomorrow that instead of giving each nation one vote, each nation would have a number of votes proportional to their population. A state like, say, New York really was a state, in the traditional sense as the government of a nation, rather than what it's become today, what most countries would call a "province". There might never be a conflict explicitly between the interests of "large states" as a group and "small states" as a group, but the individual small states certainly didn't want to see their power reduced more than their larger brethren, as one might reasonably expect them to.

Randolph proposed replacing the "one state one vote" principle of the Articles of Confederation with a system of proportional voting power to either the free population or the "Quotas of contribution" (tax revenue). Madison wanted to reject the "number of free inhabitants" approach out of hand, not because it was a bad idea per se, but because it "might occasion debates which would divert the Committee from the general question whether the principle of representation should be changed". Rufus King pointed out that the government might collect taxes in such a way that determining which state contributed how much might be impossible, Madison agreed, and the question was postponed on that first day of debating Randolph's scheme. The room wasn't yet ready to open the slavery debate.

Since one approach wasn't going to work and the other was going to touch off a firestorm in the specifics, Madison moved "that the equality of suffrage established by the articles of Confederation ought not to prevail in the national Legislature, and that an equitable ratio of representation ought to be substituted." Madison observed that, being "generally relished, [the motion] would have been agreed to" before Delaware, whose deputies had been forbidden from changing the equality of representation between the states in Congress, threatened to leave the Convention.

Madison pointed out "that whatever reason might have existed for the equality of suffrage when the Union was a federal one among sovereign States, it must cease when a national Govermt. should be put into the place." The state legislatures were most important under the Confederation; it made sense that they be treated as equals. With a new, supreme, national government in the works, it made more sense for the population of the entire nation to be represented more or less equitably. Still, the matter remained postponed after that first day, and Madison believed the room was confident that "the proposed change of representation would certainly be agreed to, no objection or difficulty being started from any other quarter than from Delaware."

The Real Constitution: Article I, Section I (Creation of Congress)

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

The very first order of business of the Constitutional Convention, after procedural matters such as electing George Washington its president and passing rules to govern the proceedings, was a speech by Edmund Randolph in which he proposed what came to be known as the Virginia Plan.

The Articles of Confederation had allocated one vote to each state in a single house of Congress. The Virginia Plan created a two-house legislature, the lower house to be elected by the people and the upper house to be elected by the lower house from a pool of people nominated by state legislatures. The two-house Congress would have power to "legislate in all cases to which the separate States are incompetent, or in which the harmony of the United States may be interrupted by the exercise of individual Legislation", veto laws passed by individual states they deemed to contradict the Constitution (referred to as the "articles of Union"), and use force against any state they deemed to be "failing to fulfill its duty under the [Constitution]". An executive would be chosen by the legislature, who - besides normal executive duties - would, along with "a convenient number" of the "National Judiciary... compose a Council of revision" that would review every national law and every vetoed state law, with their own veto power that could be overridden. So powerful was this plan that the following day, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina asked whether Randolph wanted to completely abolish the state governments.

The two-branch structure of Congress would be agreed to without a peep except from Pennsylvania, which Madison attributed to Benjamin Franklin "who was understood to be partial to a single House of Legislation."

Bracket Watch: A new approach to bracketology

One of the most common arguments against a playoff in college football is that it would turn college football into college basketball, where - allegedly - the regular season is completely meaningless.

This is complete bullshit. If you're going to use the "meaningless regular season" line, college basketball is not the place to use it. (That would be the NBA and NHL, which push more than half their teams into the postseason.)

There are about 347 teams in Division I college basketball. Only 65 get to play in the NCAA Tournament, or 18.7%. By contrast, major league baseball puts 26 2/3% of its teams in its postseason - even counting the NIT, college basketball is nearly as selective, putting 27.95% of its teams in the postseason. But college basketball's regular season is far more meaningful than baseball's because its teams only play 30 or so games. We can get a rough estimate of how meaningful the regular season is by taking the reciprocal of the selectiveness percentage and dividing it by the number of games. By that measure, college basketball's regular season is more meaningful than that of the NFL.

(Incidentially, college football, if it adopted a 11/5 playoff, would still only put 13 1/3% of its teams in the playoffs and have a far more meaningful regular season than any other major sport. Right now, its meaningfullness index number is 5, which means it's too meaningful because its number is over 1.)

So why does this perception of the meaningless college basketball regular season persist? Undoubtedly, a lot of it has to do with the subjectivity of the process, and its cousin, the unbalanced schedules played by college basketball conferences. In the pros, you know exactly the impact a given game will have on a given team's chances to make the playoffs. You can't know that for certain in college basketball. What's at stake for North Carolina entering today's game? Are they already locked into a #1 seed? Are they in trouble of sinking to a #2 or #3? Are they going to get an ideally situated region, or can they? We don't know.

The fast-growing field of "bracketology" (a neologism invented out of whole cloth by ESPN) could help answer these questions and help us know exactly what to expect out of a given game. Unfortunately, most bracketologists post little more than their reckoning of where the field stands right now, not how close all the teams are to each other. So we know that North Carolina is (for example, since I'm writing this during last year's March Madness!) the second #1 seed. Could they rise up to the overall #1? Could they fall? How far could they fall, and how soon? We don't know. The closest most bracketologists come, if you're lucky, is a "bubble watch" feature tracking only whether teams are in or out of the field, not how high they are if they're in. Often, even that only contains vague descriptions. Say what you will about Joe Lunardi and his tendency to get way more play than his accuracy would indicate, but if you're willing to pay for ESPN Insider, he'll give you percentage chances for every possibility you could care about. That's way more than most bracketologists.

If. You're willing to pay for ESPN Insider. (And the subscription to ESPN the Magazine Insider requires.)

Over the next two months, leading up to Selection Sunday, I'm thinking I'm going to run my own bracketology project, showing the information college basketball fans really want to know: what's at stake. I'll tell you exactly who has a shot at the overall #1 seed, the range of seeds a team could get, whether a team's in or could still be out or if they're on the bubble or if they're out but could still be in, using color-coded bars and all the information you could ever need.

I'm going to make an effort to use the same information the selection committee uses, but the NCAA seems to be more tight-lipped about what info the selection committee uses than I recall them being in the past. (Is the committee really using game scores now?) So I'm going to use the same information I use for my Golden Bowl selection process: record, RPI, strength of schedule, out-of-conference record, road/neutral record, record in the last 12 games, record against other teams in consideration, quality of wins and losses. (I'm okay with using injury info and the like.) However, this is not an effort to attempt to predict what the selection committee will do, because the purpose is to demonstrate the format. Rather, this is a record of what I would do if I were on (or rather, were) the selection committee.

I'm spending today going through each team's resume and forming an initial ranking. I hope to have a first, rough sketch of where I see the field by the end of the day. And we'll see where we go from there.

The most important day in the history of the Morgan Wick Online Universe since the launch of Da Blog, and a day never to be matched in importance again.

The day has arrived that I knew would come ever since I launched the web site.

I have moved the web site from morganwick.freehostia.com to morganwick.com.

Morganwick.com will be the new home for all aspects of the Morgan Wick Online Universe, from the seemingly-stalled comic strip Sandsday to the 100 Greatest Movies Project to the street sign gallery to my sports projects. That includes Da Blog. Effective immediately, all blog posts will be hosted at morganwick.com, and the Blogspot account will stop updating. (Some dummy posts may start appearing next year.) Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds to point to morganwick.com.

I've made my frustration with Blogger and Freehostia clear over the past several months. Blogger was clunky and prone to problems. Freehostia had a clunky file manager in IE, a frustrating FTP, and only one MySQL database on the free plan. Both of them, however, should be commended for getting me a head start in building the content that will now make the move to Morganwick.com. In fact, the problems with Freehostia have been sufficiently mitigated that I might be tempted to continue housing the new web site on Freehostia, especially since my ads pay for my domain but not my hosting.

However, that's only possible in the short term, and it's not really possible. I'm only allowed one MySQL database on Freehostia and it pretty much has to be used by my blogging platform; while the blogging platform is robust enough to handle a lot, I kinda need to at least have the freedom to create a second database for certain purposes. And as long as I'm moving to my own domain and moving up to paying for the hosting, I should get the best domain, hosting, and blogging services there are out there, and get the most bang for the buck for them.

For me, and for those particular fields, that means moving to Namecheap, Hostmonster, and Wordpress.

For most people, GoDaddy is the only domain registrar they've ever heard of. I decided very early on in the process of finding a domain registrar that I would not use GoDaddy. By all accounts, they're all T&A (literally), no substance (or customer service), and possibly the worst domain registrar on the Internet, used only by amateurs who watch TV to find an Internet domain registrar and don't really know what they're doing. Namecheap was one of the most commonly cited and praised names that came up in a search for good domain registrars. I found Hostmonster the same way I found Freehostia - by looking at sites that would compare hosting services side-by-side for me based on other people's reviews. Hostmonster came out on top on multiple such comparison sites despite some tight competition, especially since Wordpress didn't include a link to Hostmonster that I could use to support Wordpress, but did contain a link to Hostmonster's sister service Bluehost.

That might be the last time I mention either service. You don't need to know who I paid for the domain or who's hosting the site. It's my very own domain now. I mention them in case I ever have problems with either service, or in case I ever move from either and have to shut down the site while the move processes. If there's a quibble with Hostmonster, it's that they've been known to shut down sites without warning for violations of Terms of Service, which basically comes down to backing up the site and not getting the domain and hosting from the same place lest you become unable to leave.

Chances are if you've ever heard of any of the three services, you've heard of Wordpress. Even in the unlikely scenario you haven't heard of it, you've seen it. Adherents to Movable Type would proclaim its superiority, but by many accounts Wordpress is the best blogging platform on the Internet, and certainly the best free one. It's fitting that there are three major blogging platforms and they all appeal to different people. Blogger is the quickest, dirtiest way to start a blog if you don't want to pay any money and don't know anything about the Internet, especially if you want to start building something big. (Both Wordpress and Movable Type have hosting services using their infrastructure but Wordpress' functionality is extremely limited - ads aren't even allowed. Typepad is a pay service, which makes me wonder why anyone who could afford it wouldn't just start their own Movable Type site.)

Wordpress is the best service if you have your own hosting and don't want to pay, and Movable Type is best if you believe "you get what you pay for" and can afford to pay the price to get better than a volunteer effort - though depending on your philosophy on the Internet and your exact needs, Wordpress may still be best. (No less than the government of Great Britain uses Wordpress to host its site.) It may be ideal to take the path I took - build an audience on Blogger and take it to a self-hosted Wordpress site when it gets big enough.

Honestly, not only did I grow frustrated with Blogger over the years, I've started to distrust it a little; use of Blogger has started to throw up a red flag of amateurism for me, especially the use of variants of the default Minima template, which is used by some of my favorite blogs. The effect is mitigated with the use of templates that at least look original, and when people have their own domain it reminds me less that it's a Blogspot blog, but there's still that niggling feeling in the back of my mind that I can't shake while reading something like Awful Announcing: why aren't they at least using Wordpress?

I saw why Wordpress is so beloved shortly after starting experimenting with it. It was loaded with so many features that I could use. It wasn't so clunky as to eat the code I tried to feed into it (see: my first attempt at Da Countdown). Some of the problems surrounding draft posts, such as the matter of finding them if I stopped working on them and wanted to come back to them later (something that led me to start scheduling unfinished posts), as well as some of the patches Blogger tried to put on, such as the inaccurate post time for all unscheduled posts that led Blogger to tweak the posting settings, as well as some of the quirks of scheduled posts, aren't an issue with Wordpress, which has a "last saved draft" field allowing you to schedule a post without making it leave draft mode. And Wordpress' "pages" allows me to create my own, custom, "about me" page.

More important to you, Wordpress doesn't make it complicated to post a comment - you won't be tempted to post as "Anonymous" anymore when you wouldn't normally do so. Just fill out your name, e-mail, and if you have a web site a link to it, and you're all set. And because of the Akismet spam protection system you don't have to fill out a CAPTCHA anymore either, which is really more trouble than it's worth since it only protects against automated, not human, spam, and automated systems can easily crack it. (If your comment doesn't show up, don't panic; wait 24 hours to see if it shows up. After that, contact me with a copy of your comment; there is some anecdotal evidence of Akismet eating comments without the capability of accessing them, but if so it's so rare that on the thread I looked at, WordPress couldn't even reproduce it.) Tomorrow I'll launch the new MorganWick.com forums to complement the site and the comments, which I'll have more detail on then.

And perhaps most of all, Wordpress has a robust system of "categories", including the ability to make subcategories. Wordpress also has "tags" and my initial instinct was to make all of my labels tags, since that was what they seemed to resemble, and only make those labels that bore the most resemblance to subsites into categories, so I was a bit frustrated when Wordpress wanted to convert them all to categories by default without giving me a choice. But after reading up on the distinction between the two (it seeems tags are mostly a search engine helper) I decided that the way I use labels, it made the most sense to convert all labels into categories.

Because of my various interests, I always intended to create various subsites once I moved to morganwick.com to house my various projects in various fields. Because of that, because of the presence of subcategories, because of the decision to make Da Blog the front page of morganwick.com, and because of the intricities of the move itself, I have made several changes to the category structure, with virtually all categories affected:

• All categories are now properly capitalized.
• The "100 Greatest Movies Project" label is now a subcategory of "movies".
• "About Me" remains as-is but may, in the future, be split into multiple categories.
• "Advertising" is now a subcategory of "Web Site News". As I've said before, most important information about ads will now come via Twitter.
• "Astronomy" is now a subcategory of "Science".
• "Blog News" is now a subcategory of "Web Site News". The exact role of both "Blog News" and "Web Site News" given the merger of the two, the further splitting of the blog into subsites, and the role of Twitter, is undetermined at this point.
• Because not all formatting was preserved when importing all the old posts from Da Blog, and because comments will not be associated with any other comments you make going forward, the "Classic Da Blog" category will be extended to include all posts before last week, and will no longer be just a quick way to get Technorati to update correctly. (By the way, 5vjhdtuzmg.)
• "College Football Lineal Title", "College Football Schedule", and "College Football Rankings" are all now subcategories of "College Football".
• The just-launched new category "Constitution" is now a subcategory of "Politics", as are both the Democratic and Republican Platform Reviews.
• "Election 2008" is also now a subcategory of "Politics", and "Election 2008 Live Blog" is in turn a subcategory of "Election 2008".
• "Education Policy", "Foreign Affairs", and "Health Care", all categories used solely in the platform reviews, are now subcategories of "Politics".
• "General TV Business" is now just "TV Business". See below.
• "Human Nature" is now a subcategory of "Philosophy", two categories neither of which with very many posts.
• There is a new "Random Internet Discovery" subcategory of "Internet Adventures".
• "IRL" and "NASCAR" are now subcategories of "Auto racing".
• "Microsoft" is now a subcategory of "Computer geekery", two categories that may never be used again.
• "MLS" is now a subcategory of "Soccer".
• "News You Can Use" is now a subcategory of "My Comments on the News"; both its posts were members of that category already.
• "NFL Lineal Title" is now a subcategory of "NFL". "NFL Superpower Rankings" has been deleted, and all the posts it contained moved to "Superpower Rankings" which has been made a subcategory of "NFL".
• "Non-UFC MMA" has been renamed "MMA" and "UFC" has been made a subcategory of it.
• "Fantasy Football" is now a subcategory of "NFL".
• "Simulated CFB Playoff" is now "Golden Bowl Simulated CFB Playoff" and a subcategory of "College Football".
• "SNF Flex Scheduling Watch" is now a subcategory of "NFL".
• "Sports in general" is now simply "Sports" and all sports categories have been made subcategories of it, as have "Sports TV Business", "Sports TV Graphics" and "Sports Watcher". "NFL" and "College football" are now subcategories of a new "Football" category, and "NBA", "College basketball" and "WNBA" are now subcategories of a new "Basketball" category. All my sports posts are available at sports.morganwick.com, as are the old Morgan Wick Sports features.
• "TV Upfronts" is now a subcategory of "TV Business".
• "Webcomic news" is now "Sandsday", a subcategory of itself, and a subcategory of "Web site news". (To clarify: "Web site news" now contains a subcategory "Webcomic news", which contains a subcategory "Sandsday", which contains all the old "Webcomic news" posts.)
• "Webcomics" is now hosted at webcomics.morganwick.com and is loaded with new features, including an index to reviews, tags for each webcomic mentioned in a post, new categories for full-fledged reviews and reviews of webcomics blogs, a new "Webcomics' Identity Crisis" category for both the series itself and the ongoing blog thereof, and an index to said series, with potentially more features to come.

In addition, all web site features have new addresses, and may not be immediately accessible:

• morganwick.freehostia.com/greatestmovies (the Greatest Movies Project) is now at greatestmovies.morganwick.com.
• morganwick.freehostia.com/sports (Morgan Wick Sports) is now at sports.morganwick.com. It may be a while before this section of the site returns to full functionality, and when it does everything will be at a new URL. Watch the Twitter feed to find out when everything is restored, and where to find it.
• morganwick.freehostia.com/streetsigns (the Street Sign Gallery) is now at www.morganwick.com/streetsigns.
• morganwick.freehostia.com/webcomic (Sandsday) is now at sandsday.morganwick.com. I'm still trying to translate the PHP from PHP 4 to PHP 5, so it won't be linked to there until then.

For the time being, the Premier ad is being shut down, as it doesn't translate easily to the new site. morganwick.blogspot.com and morganwick.freehostia.com will remain up, but not maintained; in a year my Freehostia account will lapse and that site will no longer work.

It's a new day on MorganWick.com. Let's go boldly forward into the future.

OOTS 672: Not a montage, but the next best thing.

(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized metaplanets. Despite the title, this is part of the "monthly" OOTS post series.)

Important note: Comments are turned off for this post until the site reboot goes through. You'll have plenty of time to leave your comments after that.

I already had only a vague idea where OOTS would go entering the next book.

The one thing that seemed certain was that the OOTS was headed for its next showdown with Team Evil at Girard's Gate, and the OOTS is certainly headed there. Team Evil is busy at the moment tracking down Xykon's phylactery, and opinions are divided as to whether it's to hasten their departure (as suggested by Xykon's "as soon as we find it we're leaving!" rhetoric), or delay it (as suggested by the fact that from Team Evil's perspective, the phylactery could be "who the hell knows where!"). I'm in the "hasten" camp (though I don't have that many allies on the forums), especially since the OOTS is already ahead of Team Evil on the road to Girard's Gate by a good margin, and would only get further ahead by any delays to Team Evil. For Team Evil to need to be delayed, we'd need the OOTS to be delayed as well.

If anything delays the OOTS it's dramatic considerations: it makes the most sense for the showdown for Girard's Gate to be the big climactic showdown at the end of the book. That means any other adventures the OOTS might have on the Western continent - presumably, ones performed en route to Girard's Gate - must in any case occur before reaching the gate (unless getting off the Western continent in the book after next is an issue... more on that later). Clearly something is likely to happen to delay the OOTS, and even if they spend some siesta time in Sandsedge (and Books 2 and 3 have both opened with slow periods in towns, and Book 4 opened with a slow period in Heaven) that's not likely to actually be very long in in-comic time. That means one of two things: something happens to them in the desert that delays them, probably substantially, like more bandits, or something happens to sidetrack them entirely, something that at least seems more important than outracing Team Evil to Girard's Gate.

What would be more important than making it to Girard's Gate as fast as possible? A visit to the Western continent means a potential trek through Elven lands, so Vaarsuvius might want to catch back up with his people, but there is no evidence that V wants to return there, that she'd be accepted there, or that the plot would have any reason for her to return there. (Unless Pompey is waiting there...) If anything of that sort happens, it might be during the march off the continent in the next book.

More likely would be Haley's quest to free her father, floating in the background of her character since we first learned of his capture (134?) This book has seen confirmation of the fact that Ian Starshine's captor is indeed on the Western continent, and while the greedy side of Haley's character had already been weakened by her Resistance experience, Celia's "deal" with the Thieves Guild would completely ruin any hope she might normally have of collecting enough money to free her father. What's more, Haley just told Elan the whole story. Plots for one book are usually well-laid-down in the background of the previous book; even in Book 3, which mostly tied up most of the plots from all the previous books, there was still plenty of foreshadowing of the Kubota subplot, if not for its larger irrelevance. Haley terminated Celia's deal on her way out of the Thieves Guild HQ, but as it had paid off absolutely zilch at that point, if you don't think it's coming back to haunt her later you haven't been reading stories very long (or at least you don't visit TV Tropes). A likely scenario would involve the Thieves Guild tracking down Haley in the desert and battling the OOTS, which could leave Haley with a problem only she and Elan can solve.

That problem, though, could really stress-test their relationship (and not just their joint one with the OOTS). It's almost taken as given on the OOTS forums that "Lord Tyrinar", the man holding Haley's father captive, is in fact himself the tyrannical father of Elan and Nale (watch that crest!). What sorts of hilarity might ensue from the complex interplay between Haley, Ian, Tyrinar, Elan, and Nale? One suggestion comes in this comic, which seems to imply that Elan did not exactly tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about Therkla to Haley. We do know Haley knows that there was a "ninja chick who had a crush on him, then died", but it's clear that Elan didn't entirely hold to his commitment to honesty he gives in flashback in the same strip. Did Haley not quite succeed in making sure Elan didn't "hate" her for her secret backstory (parts of which are, it's clear to me, being hidden from us for a reason), or had Elan already decided to go ahead and set up future "entertaining dramatic conflict", only in a sneaky way? (These two are perfect for each other!)

(It's only on later re-reading that I realize Elan could have just as easily been referring to Crystal, not Therkla. That could STILL lead to dramatic tension later, though, as it's not clear exactly how relevant Haley found the personal aspect of her rivalry with Crystal, meaning it could be Elan's turn to learn an incomplete version for dramatic purposes.)

Team Evil is more likely to be delayed by Hinjo's elven allies than by Xykon's phylactery. Xykon and Redcloak are under attack seemingly on all fronts: there's the unified Resistance Haley left behind, there's the elves that are meeting with them, and there's the prisoners O-Chul inspired. Between that and Xykon's demand to leave the instant his phylactery is recovered, Redcloak's planned goblin state is teetering on the edge of the abyss. And yet there's also plenty of potential for conflict between these various groups and with the Sapphire Guard once they make their return. In the absence of Team Evil there may only be a power vacuum and civil war in Azure City. And what if Xykon, kept in town by the phylactery, is forced to leave prematurely by the forces allied against him, meaning the elves made the situation worse instead of better?

Which brings us to what will happen at the gate itself. Roy is doing a lot of on-panel plotting here of exactly how the battle is going to go, and anyone with an understanding of dramatic conventions must realize those plans are almost bound to get thrown out the window the instant the battle begins. Xykon will already be at the gate, or something else will happen to muck up the waterworks in a way that renders Roy's planning almost null and void. Not that we won't see his disrupting attack he learned from his grandfather, but we probably won't even see much of an opportunity for pre-battle preparations, and Belkar's much-prophesied demise will happen in a much different way than Roy envisions.

The most likely candidate for that to happen would come from the IFCC, and their various designs on the gate. Although it's intentionally vague, the IFCC seem to be setting the Linear Guild in position ahead of everyone else at the gate itself, beating both the OOTS and Team Evil there in the process. That seems to jive with Nale's original plan, but that would mean Nale would miss out on the whole Tyrinar business, implying maybe there's not a familial relation involved there after all. Unless the Tyrinar business comes after the battle for Girard's Gate, in the sixth book before the OOTS leaves the Western continent... But the IFCC also want "conflict. Destructive unnecessary conflict", and they could decide that "moving their pawns into position" means creating conflict that prevents the OOTS from reaching Girard's Gate too soon, and that could mean an alliance with Nale's father. Besides, the IFCC's real focal point for their plotting as far as the gate is concerned, it's fairly heavily implied, centers on V, and the 45 minutes of V's soul they have.

Which brings us to the absolute bombshell towards the end of this strip that pretty much completely destroys any ideas the people on the forum had regarding the future course of the entire rest of the strip. It turns out that no one - not Redcloak, not Xykon, not the IFCC, not the Linear Guild, not the OOTS, not the Sapphire Guard - may have any idea what the gates are really protecting, that there are some things that the gods may have held back even from the Order of the Scribble (or, alternately, that they held back), things that, at this point, only Vaarsuvius knows. Once again, I preface this by saying I haven't read the prequel books and whatever implications they may have on all this, but it's possible that, if the whole notion of the Snarl is so completely different from what we have been led to believe, Redcloak's plan is horribly flawed at its core (and it's entirely possible for it to be a complete success as far as what he and the Dark One need to do, and still totally backfire) and virtually the entirety of the main plot of OOTS is, as the IFCC would put it, "destructive unnecessary conflict", this time semi-unintentionally engineered by the gods. And what is this planet within the planet, anyway? Please don't spring a Planet of the Apes ending on us and tell us "it's our earth!"

(It's doubtful the Order of the Scribble didn't know this, incidentally, because they would have had at least as much contact with the rifts as Blackwing did, and at the very least, if they never did know it leaves open the question of what exactly happened to Mijung. In fact this could be fodder for another entire OOTS post in itself, reinterpreting the Crayons of Time series and pretty much everything I wrote in my post on the non-interference clause, which may have been adopted for very different reasons than we'd been led to believe. And suddenly the "MitD is an aspect of the Snarl" theory becomes a lot more plausible... because it doesn't become incompatible with any other theories. Also note that I've only offered one theory; others include the notion that the Snarl has somehow "de-snarled", that the Snarl didn't destroy everything it touched as suggested but instead incorporated it into this new world, that the gates actually changed the Snarl's nature, and even that the world Blackwing saw was the OOTS world itself. Considering the popularity of these, not even V may fully grasp the implications, but what will it mean when the IFCC cashes in?)

Congratulations, Rich Burlew. You've done what, when it came to your strip, might have seemed impossible. You've rendered us totally clueless. We may need this three-week break between books as much as you do. And given how many other groups are in different situations at the end of this book, it's either telling of how tight-lipped you're getting about future plot turns, or just surprising, that you didn't end this book with a full-scale montage like the others.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week and a prelude to a series of posts a year away

See, now, this was the sort of thing I had in mind when StumbleUpon allowed me to bring more specific criteria to the RID! I may have to refer back to this when it comes time to run a related series next year. And that series is hinted at in the new label.

Important notice: Any comments left between now and the launch of the new site will not survive the launch of the new site. We are that close to launching the new site.

How LeBron salvaged Kobe's reputation

I was originally saving this post for the big relaunch of the site, when I would have a week of exciting, interesting posts. Various factors have been continually pushing that back much further than I ever intended. But the relaunch should go through next weekend, sometime between the 15th and 17th, as I'm very close to taking care of both those factors and the last few tweaks needed before relaunching the site.

In the interim, in our 24/7, hypermedia world, we've already forgotten and moved on from the LeBron dunk story. The word came out that Nike suppressed the tape of LeBron being dunked on by a college journeyman, we all laid shame on Nike and LeBron, crappy, Zapruder-like tape came out and we all ridiculed Nike and LeBron some more, saying we would have seen the footage and forgotten about it if LeBron had just let the tape go... and then we forgot about it.

But I think that, in the big picture, LeBron James, in the space of a few months, has done more to salvage the reputation of Kobe Bryant than anything Bryant himself could have ever done.

LeBron was supposed to be the good guy. He was supposed to be the guy who helped his teammates, didn't get into legal trouble, came from Akron and helped the local small-market team to an NBA title. He was supposed to be everything big-market, me-me-me Kobe wasn't. Kobe was a petulant individualist who was accused of sexual assault in Colorado and was poison to team chemistry, ultimately driving out Shaq and demanding to have the Lakers to himself, to carry a team on his own shoulders. The hopes of NBA purists rested on LeBron to give Kobe what for.

But three things have happened to completely reverse the roles. In reverse order: One, the LeBron dunk controversy. Two, Kobe DID carry a championship team by himself. And three, LeBron's reaction to losing the Eastern Conference Finals, refusing to shake hands or address the media.

Bracketing Kobe's title win were two events that create a new narrative of LeBron James. The dunk controversy in particular makes LeBron come off as a carefully crafted persona, too perfect, a fake, a creation of Nike. (After a shorter career with fewer titles, LeBron is more visible in Nike ad campaigns than Kobe.) Getting dunked on may have seemed harmless, but it didn't fit the Nike storyline of perfection, so Nike tried to erase it from the narrative and in the process exposed the true LeBron. Kobe Bryant, by contrast, is human, and (unlike LeBron) lets his human foibles come through. Kobe is one of us, what we would be like if we had Kobe's talent. According to this narrative, LeBron couldn't handle losing the Eastern Conference Finals because it didn't fit into The Plan as laid out by Nike, which says that LeBron must always find success.

We may end up seeing Kobe's career from 2004 to 2008 very differently than we did at the time. We may see it as the struggles of a tortured man to find his individuality and find fulfillment, struggling to balance the demands of NBA stardom with his own needs and desires. Finally he managed to find the magical combination that could lead him to the title he could claim as his own. As for LeBron, probably the only way he can even hope to kill the narrative, the only way he can go back to being Michael Jordan instead of Tim Tebow, is to stay in Cleveland, or at least move to another mid-sized market. If he moves to New York, the Clippers, or even Portland (capital of the Nike empire), all moves that would be driven by Nike's marketability needs more than anything else, I'm going to start calling him LeNike or LeSwoosh.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

Now this is why I was optimistic about the changes in StumbleUpon getting me better RIDs! I think this is the second time in RID history I've been delivered to something I was already familiar with. This version is more current, but if only the poses weren't so generic...

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

Okay, this is a little creepy. Are you absolutely desperate to talk to a real person, you absolutely can't stand going through automated menus, even if it means having to talk in Spanish? This list is for you! If there are people so desperate that this list is useful to them, it makes me wonder why ANYone would have an automated menu...