The Megahunks & Superbabes fiasco

About a year ago, I prepared a talk on the use of analogies to understand complex systems to give as a part of the Un-Distinguished Lecture Series (better known as UDLS). It’s a topic I find interesting, but I worried that it would be boring to a bunch of grad students dropping in on Friday before going out to drink.

In order to spice it up a bit and, yes, try to secure a larger audience, I announced a talk on a different topic: sexy men and women. Before giving the presentation on analogies and complexity, I would give a joke presentation full of garish slides, inane talk, and unfortunate typos. It would lighten the mood, I thought. The audience and I would laugh at the amateur quality and vapidity of it all. I put together a few slides, and mailed out the following abstract:

there are lots of people that are super hot for men and for women but do we know which is hotter the man or the woman? im going to show a lot of pictures of sexy people and we can decide which are the most sexy or the two. SAFE FOR KIDS!!! (your sick for thinking i’d make a pornshow) ;P c u there

The trick worked: somewhere between twenty and thirty people showed up in time for the talk (as punctual as CS students are when there’s no free food), a good turnout. I did my best to live up to my stupid slides, speaking with the judgemental attitude of TMZ in the style of JEFF K. The three slides in my joke presentation on megahunks and superbabes follow.

The audience laughed and called out jokes. A few pointed out the incorrect use of “whose,” that I had stretched some of the images, and tried to guess who was with Jeff Goldblum in that photo.

I followed these slides with a blank one, over which I said something along the lines of “seriously though, here’s what I’m here to talk about” and then got into the real presentation: Thoughts on the Use of Analogies in Understanding and Solving Complex Problems.

That was when I lost the audience. Talking though the first few slides, I noticed that they’d become much quieter. Emt, interrupting my explanation of how colour is to spectrum as tone is to scale, asked “Analogies? Are you serious?”

“Uh,” I hesitated. “Yeah.” I had hoped to pull the rug out from under them, but I had sucker punched them instead.

I got through it, but I’ve not lived down my mistake. Since, other UDLS lecturers have joked about it by showing slides on unrelated topics with long titles in the middle of their presentations, threatening to “pull a Lucas.”

I’ve thought about that bungled joke a while. My joke presentation flopped, but why? I’ve tried to diagnose what went wrong, and find ways to avoid making the same mistakes. What follows are a few of the things I’ve come up with.

They’re not hard and fast rules, nor are they applicable in every case. Some should be obvious. Nonetheless, I do think they can be useful, and not only to fake out your audience with cheesecake.

Get your rewards right

I went from ogling Megan Fox to a remarkably un-sexy brain teaser from the GRE test prep. I feigned a fun, juicy presentation but delivered a dry, thoughtful one that had nothing to do with hot bods. It was a mistake to do so. It is better to risk scaring the audience away at the beginning, then rewarding them for their patience, than to tease them and not deliver.

Perhaps I should have started with a dull presentation, later switching to something more engaging. I could have made drab and heavy slides, full of complicated diagrams of the geometry of beauty, then moved on to more colourful things, like the photos of hurricanes and crowds in the slides on complexity.

Take advantage of their good will

Thing is, it’s okay to start juicy and then dry up—a little. The slides could have hooked them, softened them up for some meaningful content. As it was, the fake presentation grabbed everyone’s interest, and then the second one did nothing with it. There was no connection to be made from sexy people to complexity. It is important to take advantage of the good will of the audience.

I could have realized hunks and babes would be more exciting than analogies and complex systems, and kept those slides, used them to draw the attention of the audience before dropping science on beauty and sexual attraction. After I had everyone’s eyes and ears, I would ask “Why do we find this supermodel so attractive?”¹

Be clear before being clever

I thought the goofy, poorly made slides would tell them that the presentation was a joke. I mean, the images are warped, the spelling off, and it’s in Comic Sans, fer chrissake! They were meant to make the audience sceptical of the presentation.

They weren’t clear. Not everyone takes typos as cues to become critical and wary, as I do. Instead, the mistakes and imperfections signalled to the audience that they could kid and relax. The real joke—that the whole presentation was fake—was hidden. It is better to err on the side of readability rather than of subtlety.

The joke might have been clearer had I used something more esoteric, less appealing, and been more forceful and bizarre. I could have made the topic ridiculous, presenting close-up images of insect larvae and asking the audience which they thought was most attractive. “Which of these slimy young things would you like to kiss?”

Be sure they’re in on it

The audience did not know it was a parody, and I did not do enough to help them see it as one. I had failed to get the audience on my side. They had fun with “Megahunks & Superbabes” itself, not at its expense.

I assumed they would come in expecting to see a serious presentation, but sent out a silly abstract and started with funny slides. I failed to see that the audience did not, and could not, know that I intended to talk about analogy. I’m the only one that can read my mind. Presentations should be considered from the perspective of the audience, divorced from the experience of the presenter.²

I’m certainly not the only one that’s failed to get his audience in on the joke. Ghandi made the same mistake. He describes it in his autobiography:

When my turn for speaking came, I stood up to make a speech. I had with great care though out one which would consist of a very few sentences. But I could not proceed beyond the first sentence. I had read that of Addison that he began his maiden speech in the House of Commons, repeating “I conceive” three times, and when he could proceed no further, a wag stood up and said, “The gentleman conceived thrice but brought forth nothing.” I had thought of making a humourous speech taking this anecdote as the text. I therefore began with it and stuck there. My memory entirely failed me and in attempting a humourous speech I made myself ridiculous. “I thank you, gentlemen, for having kindly responded to my invitation,” I said abruptly, and sat down.

Ghandi and I should have known better. Not only could we have communicated our intent more clearly (Ghandi by impersonating Addison), but we could have taken a moment to think about the audience. Would they know about Addison’s stumble? Would it be funny to them?

Be confident

All things considered, I would have been better off without “Megahunks & Superbabes”. I was told later by a by a few audience members that the presentation about analogies and complex problems was pretty good, despite starting off on the wrong foot. Instead of resorting to cheesy humour and sex appeal, I should have been confident enough in my presentation to go out and give it as it was.

The pressure to read canonical or acclaimed books is something I believe many of us feel, those of us educated enough to feel poorly educated. It pushes us to pursue books that may be dull and difficult to get through. We have been convinced that these books are worth the effort, if not for the ideas or experiences they give us, then for the illuminated company we’ll be in once we finish the book.

It is hard to admit to yourself (more so to others) that this is bullshit. Slogging through the Aeneid or The Wealth of Nations will not make you a better or more authentic person. You’re likely to get as much out of the Cliff’s Notes. Your patience, schedule, and personal habits won’t allow you to become as ridiculously erudite and well read as you’d like to be. If you don’t enjoy it, don’t read it (unless it’s for a course or some such).

I’m working at this myself, trying to accept the limits of my own attention, to be realistic, to pursue books that I am interested in—and capable of finishing. So long Complete Stories of Franz Kafka. Hello Neal Stephenson.

If only it were so simple. I’ve just finished reading Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and feel a little disappointed. It’s well written, but not exciting: I had heard and agreed with much of what he writes about well before I read it. This is something I’ve felt after reading many of the books I’ve chosen for myself lately. The characters, phrases, and ideas are already reasonably well known to me; drained of novelty, I only really enjoy the small refinements and differences that haven’t managed to escape their original source. I finish these books, but slowly and for the satisfaction of knowing—later, bragging—that, yes, I’ve read that book.

It’s this reading-to-have-read-it that I was trying to move away from in the first place. I’m still a victim of my own self-conscious book selections, though now not because of a self-hating drive to become well read, but because my selections are too familiar. To some extent, I already know much of what I’m reading, and this takes a lot of the fun out of reading it. Sure, Here Comes Everybody and Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions had some neat ideas, but they were only refinements of ideas I’d already seen or gleaned from other essays and books. I got even less from The Prestige (I’d seen the movie several times) and re-reading Ender’s Game.

The interest that motivated me to obtain and start these books faded quickly, and somewhere between the front and back cover, reading them began to feel like a chore. I did not enjoy them as I thought I would due to spoilers or redundancy. This isn’t because I’m all-knowing, but because I’ve over-applied my new standard.

(I wonder if Brottman covers this in The Solitary Vice. Her insights on reading are quite keen.)

I sound whiny and pompous, don’t I? I do. This frustration is not as bad as I make it out to be; I think that choosing for myself is still better than following some literary consensus against my own patience and curiosity. The Selfish Gene was not nearly as arduous as was my World War I-like struggle to complete The Brothers Karamazov. There were many ideas of interest in Dawkins’ book, though they seemed to have been packed in at the end. (I should have read The Extended Phenotype instead.)

I need some non-Lucas noise to throw-off my book selection methods just enough to keep me interested. Perhaps I should try reading books recommended to me by others, a compromise of my own tastes, as they perceive them, and theirs (a received opinion, a should read).

He slid back. How did it get there? How long had it been there? He hadn’t made the bed in days, had been sleeping in it for days. A paring knife hidden under his pillow.

(Does this in any way relate to the ignorance and confidence I sense when reading things written a long time ago? Did the medieval and modern pre-Freudian worlds feel just as capable and cheated when came the Renaissance and the theory of the unconscious?)

I was not conscious of my “inability to grasp… any very large portion of human knowledge.” This I admitted to myself only when I became a teenager. That until I was fifteen I felt excluded from the adult world—of driving and long division—rather than feeling simply unready or uninterested seems, in retrospect, a little odd. At what point should I feel cheated of my childhood naïveté, my lack of responsibility and bills?

Being an adult child (as a child—whatever) was a confusing thing.

So it was reassuring to find the following quote in a (somewhat misinformed) article in the New York Times:

“My original concept,” he said, “was almost operatic: the cadences, the deliberate pacing. I mean that in the sense of the best comic strips, the ones that adults read, which are very operatic. Batman—you can’t get more operatic than that.”

Batman? Yes. Fuck yes.
I’m all over those new DVDs.

Some friends and I were returning home from a party at a friend’s place (where the toilet had “R. Mutt” scrawled on the side of the bowl). She lived way up by York University, a long subway ride away from home. We were travelling on a Sunday: the trains were few and far between and the cars were pretty full.

I was spinning. We had all had quite a bit to drink; I had all of the night’s good times souring inside me. Before stepping into the train, I was trying to reassure myself that I did not need to vomit. When at that point, of trying to soothe your stomach with words first imagined and then silently mouthed to yourself, vomiting is inevitable.

My friends weren’t any help. They’re the kind of people who, when made aware of your need to barf, will taunt you, jab you in the stomach, impede your frantic scramble for the washroom. You’ll be throwing up in the bathroom, long past the point of swearing you’ll never drink again, and reach one of those moments of respite where your body is deciding whether or not to retch some more. My friends? They’ll be right outside the bathroom waiting for that very moment to begin to make loud retching sounds, provoking another spell of vomiting. They’ll keep on doing it too, until you’re exhausted, at the brink of consciousness, just as hoarse from the bile as from cursing their names.

When I answered a curious “Are you alright?” with a bleary-eyed nod and a stifled burp, they knew exactly what state I was in. From Finch to Lawrence station, I tried to keep my eyes on the advertisements and the tunnels rushing past the window, away from my friends’ sly grins and fake half-retches. It was awful.

At Lawrence, a group of cheerful young girls came onto the train and sat across from me and my friends. They were sunny, happy, chatting loudly, and perfumed. Their pungent, vanilla-like reek made my stomach churn. I swung against the doors and closed my eyes. I had a wet mouth. It was going to happen.

The doors opened, I rushed out into Eglinton station and met the nearest garbage bin with a big fist of puke. I held onto the garbage and emptied myself. At first it came with strong pumps, but soon became painful and drawn-out, like squeezing all you can from a tube of toothpaste. It was loud. It was gross. It was in full view of everyone in the subway car.

The car driver had left the doors open, perhaps because of a shift-change, perhaps out of kindness (not wanting me to miss the train and have to wait for another). When I had finished, I turned around to see the occupants of the car watching me. They were silent, embarrassed, disgusted. The chirpy early-teen girls were wide-eyed and still. I boarded the train less aware of my acid breath than of the way I was being judged. This was not what the other passengers had wanted to see on Sunday morning. Except my friends. They seemed okay with it.

Lynn, your book idea is great. Think of it: sections dedicated to hasty cover-ups and last-minute dashes, cautionary tales of survival, and leather covers that’ll be easy to wipe. It’ll be a bestseller.

My brother and I were waiting for our mother outside some store in Old Strathcona. The call had come from just a few metres to our left: a man standing on a folding chair in the shade of a tree. He held out a loonie to passing pedestrians, asking them for an answer, assuring them it was easy. There were a few cautious guesses called out by people walking by, none of them right.

Eric looked at me and asked “The Beetle?”
“Don’t tell me. He’s the one with the dollar.”
“The Beetle!” We turned to see a man walking up to collect his dollar. Eric turned back to me and raised his eyebrows.

The man on the chair asked another question while digging in his pocket for the second dollar. The first winner stood with his back against the window of a store, watching, calling out answers every now and then. To me, it was obvious the two were working together, probably to drum up business for a nearby bar. “Come to Trivia Night,” or something like that.

The sidewalks were reasonably busy, it being the middle of Edmonton’s Fringe Festival; traffic from the Farmer’s Market and Whyte passed their spot. Slowly, people stopped to hazard a guess or to watch the man on the chair and his growing audience.

At first, my brother would tell me what he thought the answers were, but as others began to win with the same answers, he gathered enough courage to shout his answers out. After winning one he became even more eager. We went to stand a little closer. Our mother joined us, and the three of us listened in the shade.

“What restaurant food do Americans choke on most?”

It took much longer for someone to answer that one than it had for any of the others. The man on the chair became nervous, insisting that the answer was worth money, that we all knew what it was. Small, round, not soft. “For a dollar, c’mon.”

“Hard-boiled eggs?” The man who guessed didn’t sound at all certain.
“Yes!”
I could see by some of the faces in the audience that I wasn’t the only one wondering where that bit of trivia had come from.

The man on the chair seemed a little more relaxed. He tucked his folder under his arm and brought out of his pocket, not a loonie, but his wallet. He announced that his next question would be worth five dollars, and that he would need a volunteer. He pointed to a few people in the crowd with the blue bill, asking them whether they wanted to win five dollars.

He hesitated for a half-second when my brother went up. He searched the crowd a moment before asking my brother his name, again after Eric answered. It wasn’t what he had wanted, an eager kid, but he went on anyway.

“Eric, we’re going to find out if you’re a good person.”
Something inside me dropped.
“Do you know the Ten Commandments? Thou shalt not lie? Eric, have you ever told a lie?”
Eric looked back at me, at mom, then at the man in the chair. “Yeah.”
“What do you call someone who lies?”
(“Human,” called someone behind me.)
“A liar,” said Eric.
“You’re a liar, Eric, and that’s not good.”

He kept talking as his audience left, taking my brother down for stealing, for being envious, for being angry at others, concluding each strike by telling Eric he was “not a very good person.” Eric was silent.

I wanted to pull the bastard down off and ask him how he dared to condemn my brother. I wanted to feed him those five dollars. I didn’t. I wanted to lead Eric away, to leave the man without a victim. I didn’t—Eric wouldn’t have received his five dollars. I went and stood next to Eric, between him and the self-righteous jerk on the chair. I tried to absorb my brother’s humiliation. I tried to contain my anger. I whispered into my brother’s ear, “Don’t listen to him. You’re a good person. He’s an idiot, bullshitting.” Eric watched the ground, wounded. The man went into his sermon, saying all men are sinful and guilty, and only through the love of Jesus Christ can one be redeemed.

When he finished, Eric took the five dollars. The man snapped his chair shut and walked off to set his trap somewhere else.

Sunlight comes in through the window (a window that opens: rejoice) with complete disregard to my retarded sleep cycle—contempt, almost. My navy blinds are made a joke. Walls, furniture, retinas, all are blasted a fierce and relentless white until the late afternoon when the sun, gorged with the satisfaction of having made my adversely positioned monitor unusable for the majority of the day, lowers itself behind the houses across the way. My new room is beige only in the evening.

You’re using the space well, they’ve said. It was smart of you to remove the closet door. It must have saved, what, like, six inches along that wall. You’ve managed to fit quite a lot in here.

What they can’t appreciate is how new and fragile this economy is. How long do I expect to maintain the Scandinavian show-room tidiness that has freed so much space? This undramatic tautness is days old and already showing signs of atrophy, soon to give all at once. What they don’t see is the lack of purposeless surfaces. There’s no leeway. I sense the sagging shelves, can feel the failure of this room in the startling dreams I suffer in it, waking to sounds from the open window (a mixed blessing), to white walls.

I’m a stone fruit here. Not only in this room, but here in these twin cities. And on the television I’m being sold the tragedy of mismanagement.

Since, the tangle of wires has been thinned some, thanks in part to a working wireless card; the most urgent bills, the ones buried deepest under the desk-toys and scribbled notes, have been paid; and the dishes spotted with cheese made their way to the sink soon after I found them under a pile of shirts I was to put away.

It is the books—four of which can be seen in the photo—that give me the most trouble. I have too many of them, and a bad habit of buying more before I’ve finished the ones I’ve already begun. (I am convinced that, it being summertime, I have ample time to make my way through all the titles I’ve jotted down over the past months, and so, shortly after my paycheck hits, I find myself waiting in line for a cashier at a bookstore. It’s only when I get back home, when I see the small piles on my dresser and on the floor, that I realize how quickly I’ve been accruing books—and lament how short the summer is.) My shelves are already packed. The papers can be shredded and recycled, the dishes washed, the clothes folded, but where do I put the books?

Earlier this afternoon, my mother phones in a solution. It’s from Ikea, you see. It’s on sale.

Perhaps I was growing out of it, or perhaps I was put-off by the later Batman movies, but my enthusiasm for things Batman dwindled in the mid-nineties. It resurfaced only recently, when a friend shared a few of his comics with me. I didn’t find the Hush series of Batman particularly good, but it did make me curious to read some other comics that are: Gotham By Gaslight, Batman: Year One and Two, Arkham Asylum, and, of course, The Dark Knight Returns. With the help of Les Daniel’s Batman: The Complete History (which I read cover-to-cover in a single afternoon) and the web, I was able to quickly immerse myself in Batman again.

I’ve come to realize that Batman is many things to many people (master detective, allegorical vampire, caped crusader, gay icon, money-making franchise undeserving of respect) but, as stated in Jay Pinkerton’s latest article, his appeal comes most strongly from one thing.

Batman isn’t a great character because of the camp value.
Batman isn’t a great character because he’s dark and gritty.
Batman is a great character because he’s batshit-bat-fucking-crazy.

Jay’s not the first to notice this: it’s been a theme in the ongoing Batman comics since the end of the Silver Age. Certainly, the gritty noir of Dark Knight and Tim Burton’s Batman is cool, but it’s incomplete without Bruce Wayne’s creepiness and tortured history. Batman’s mental instability, as well as that of his enemies, is what makes the myth so interesting. Superman, the Flash, and the Green Arrow (despite having a run of twenty-or-so well written books a few years ago) are all shallow do-gooders. They’ve all the appeal and moral flexibility of dedicated boy scouts. Batman, on the other hand, is nebulous and troubled, sometimes as twisted as the villains he fights. He’s a control freak who deals with his childhood trauma by beating the crap out of people at night. He’s a great character to watch, not so much because you want to be him, but because he’s so screwed-up.

I can’t be sure of just how much of my interest has been warped by time, introspection, and talk of the upcoming Batman Begins. Whatever worries I have about the purity of my interest disappear when I watch Batman Returns, and I can’t deny that I’m eager to see Begins. Here’s hoping that it can live up to both my fan-boy expectations and childhood memories.