You Know You're a Local If...

One of SFist's standard interview questions asks locals to finish the sentence, "You know someone's a local if..." When I did my interview, my response was, "...their biggest problem with the Folsom Street Fair is that it causes traffic problems." But some junk email I got the other day suggested another answer: "...spam offering a $400,000 loan for a house prompts the thought 'Is that all?'"

Sudoku

Sudoku puzzles have become a craze in mainstream (non puzzle-loving) America. Slate ran a story about it, and the Chronicle is running a puzzle every day next to the big crossword in Datebook.

I'm surprised by the genre's sudden ascendance, but I'm glad to see people excited by it. Unlike crossword puzzles and their kin, sudoku, or Number Place, puzzles can be solved with logic alone. Most Americans don't get exposure to such puzzles, though any of you who play The Minish Cap will notice some clever Lunar Lockout-esque puzzles in the Water Temple.

The best sudoku puzzles share something with Miyamoto's video games. You do a bunch of things quickly until you get stuck. One crucial breakthrough allows you to sail through another few steps until you get stuck again. Ideally, you're just about to give up for a time when you make your breakthrough, and you get a sudden burst of energy. If you're doing a difficult sudoko, this means you stay awake for another half-hour. If you're playing a Miyamoto game, it means you stay awake until the next morning.

Even the hardest of these puzzles can be solved given a reasonable effort. Though these puzzles appear in the World Puzzle Champsionship, those versions are hard primarily because competitors have such tiny slots of time to complete them (which they still do, in a breathtaking flurry of pencil movements). Though it doesn't take long to develop the strategies you need, you can get a head start on the process by reading the Wikipedia page about these puzzles. I recommend playing with some: You may find yourself as hooked as everyone else. They're a nice intro to the modern world of logic puzzles.

Princess Nine

Melissa and I just finished watching Princess Nine, the anime series about an all-girl baseball team competing within an all-boy league, "not in a league of their own" as the description on the back cover cleverly asserts. When we saw the trailer on the Nadia discs, we were sucked in by the ultra-cute opening to the title sequence.

The series is unabashedly in the shojo genre, with its focus on schoolgirls becoming young women as the baseball season forces them to look past the typical teenage world. The animation isn't anything special, and you could argue that each member of the team simply embodies a particular personality, whether it's the "bad girl" or the starlet in the making.

But none of that matters once you get into the compelling story. The series focuses on Ryou Hayakama, whose late father was a famous pitcher. Ryou, the virtuous innocent, has inherited his pitching ability, and she gets recruited by Katagiri Girls' School to head up and recruit for the new team.

To my mind, the most complex character is Izumi Hirumo, the star tennis player who eventually joins the baseball team as their best hitter. She's maniacally driven; she hits Ryou's high-speed pitches only after spending all night practicing and getting bruises and cuts all over her hands. That obsessiveness translates into a cold-hearted mean streak, but that ferocity often disguises a caring heart that Izumi clearly isn't comfortable with. Her seemingly mean directives often help her teammates over a psychological hurdle. She considers Ryou a rival: for the school's attention, for Izumi's mother's time, but most importantly for the heart of Hiroki Takasugi, the champion hitter for the Katagiri Boys' School. Most of the time you'll hate Izumi, but Melissa and I whooped out loud when she transformed one team's dirty-trick pitch into a totally unorthodox hit that only she could pull off. And her rivalry with Ryou makes their final scene even more touching.

The series builds to an obvious showdown between the girls' school and the boys' school, with the final climactic moment resolving the love triangle between Ryou, Izumi, and Hiroki. Along the way, we learn a lot about each character's past, and the other members of the team find their strengths and come together in a way none of them imagined. We cried, we yelled in triumph, we laughed. And we were sad when the last ninth inning ended the show.

Planarity

My friend Phil sent me a link to this Planarity puzzle. It is a tool of the devil! Simply unwind the graph so that no line crosses another. As Phil points out, it doesn't save state, so if you close your browser and come back, you'll have to start over. Conversely, if you leave it open, you can continue to play it even if you're not connected to the Internet.

PETA's Kill Shelter

Interesting. It would seem that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, if you don't know) runs a kill shelter in Virginia. See petakillsanimals.com to get the scoop. I'm sure there's another side to the story—there always is—but the petakillsanimals site offers some pretty compelling evidence. It seems like something PETA should address.

I've defended animal rights organizations in the past in foie gras debates, but I always qualify that defense with particular organisations: both Viva! USA and the Animal Welfare Institue seem to work from good information and intentions, though the people at those organizations and I don't always agree. As far as I know, though, neither one advocates animal rights while running a kill shelter.

SF Main

I've fallen out of the habit of using the library. Either I buy books at a bookstore, or I look up the information on the Internet. But at the moment I'm researching a topic for which information is hard to find, so I decided to head off to the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library. I can walk there in twenty minutes from my work.

As I pored over the one book the helpful staff could dig up for me, I had to ask myself: "Why am I not taking advantage of this more?" I love doing research-heavy features, and the library has tons of books and a knowledgeable staff. Plus, SF Main has free wireless. And most days they're open until 8:00pm so I could go there after work, away from the distractions of home.

I know it's a little silly to extol the virtues of a library. As one of my co-workers put it, "Hey, wow! There's this place called a library, and they have books. That you can just borrow! For free!" But when was the last time you visited your local branch? Libraries are an endangered species. The town of Salinas recently decided to close their libraries, and funding cuts for other instances of Benjamin Franklin's innovation are commonplace around the nation. To keep abreast of developments in library land, and to find out just how much these institutions are being gutted, keep an eye on librarian.net. Libraries are a great resource, enriching communities with an egalitarian access to books and computer research. Don't let yours go away!

For those who have been in the Bay Area a while, I know SF Main has its critics. Nicholson Baker—whose name, despite appearances, does not come up in conversation all that often around here—wrote a piece revealing that the renovated main branch now holds fewer books than it used to. Baker, of course, frequently tries to raise public awareness about how libraries jettison information in the face of public apathy. I don't know if librarians hate him or worship him, because he places the blame at their feet but concedes that budget cuts force their hand. One of the essays collected in The Size of Thoughts bemoans the loss of the card catalog in the New York Public Library, and his book Double Fold reveals how libraries have been discarding precious copies of old newspapers, replacing them with the vastly inferior microfilm. Both are worth reading for anyone who cares about information and how we're allowing it to go away.

Fantastic Fanboys

Wired is carrying an interesting article about trying to generate buzz for Fantastic Four. Marvel is hoping to utilize the fervent F4 fanboy base to generate a grassroots marketing campaign. I find this interesting: Ten years ago this would have been a marginal market, but now these same fanboys have blogs and participate on general-interest message boards. They've become a powerful tool for marketing departments. The role of fanboys is a favorite topic for journalists: look at these crazy kids, snort, aren't they fascinating? But you can see marketers starting to worry about the larger influence enjoyed by this marginalized group, with a disproportionate presence online. Of course, that doesn't mean the studios will actually start making good movies, but they clearly figure there's no such thing as bad press (which is very true; by mentioning the movie I'm contributing to the buzz and keeping the movie's name in your mind)

A fair number of p.r. people have approached me about promoting their products, and I find it fascinating to watch marketers try to leverage blogs. We must look like a dream come true: writers unfettered by corporate guidelines and sporting a large, persistent audience that trusts our opinions. Since most of us aren't paid for our efforts, marketers hold out freebies in exchange for our support. But marketers haven't quite figured us out yet, and their current attempts are often clumsy. You can't blame them: Each blogger is a different person, with quirks and foibles, and business can't afford to build a portfolio for each of us, even though it would make their marketing efforts much more successful.

Something to consider: Many believe that in 2007, money spent on online advertising will outstrip money spent in print media. That raises a lot of eyebrows, and it's certainly going to cause interesting changes.