Back in the sixth grade, at the end of a school day, I tried to get a cheap laugh from the rest of the class by pulling away a friend’s chair while he tried to sit down. I wasn’t trying to be mean, but yeah, it was really mean, and dumb. It’s not like I’d cleared it with him before I did it. And is it ever possible to look cool after you’ve just fallen on your butt? I feel a serious twinge of guilt every time I remember that event.

There! That wasn’t difficult, was it? And I should point out that the preceding paragraph was a DIY job written by someone without the benefit of highly-paid staff. Why, then, is the Romney campaign having so much trouble dealing with an ancient story about high school bullying?

I find the process of a national campaign fascinating. Most candidates keep plugging away until they find themselves (though circumstance or careful management) with a specific opportunity to break away from the pack and make America stop thinking of him or her only as a candidate for a party nomination. If you want to win, at some point you have to do something to make people think of you as someone who could be a President. Obama had That Moment when a ranty video surfaced of his pastor giving a screechy and angry sermon. Out of context, the video played to some people like a call for racial violence.

The video went viral and it became a major distraction. The campaign could have ignored it or parried it off. Instead, they recognized it as opportunity for Obama to stand behind a podium, say some important basic things about who he is and what he believes, and in doing so, demonstrate the world that he was fully qualified and prepared to occupy the Oval Office.

If you haven’t the time to watch the speech, then download it to your phone or read/Instapaper the transcript. It’s gripping stuff; I listened to it several times over the course of that week. In 45 minutes, he convinced America that he was one of those rare people who are intellectually and emotionally capable of leading the world’s dominant nation.

I want every credible candidate from any party to have That Moment. I want to feel as though no matter what happens, my next President isn’t going to be the political equivalent of an “American Idol” winner. I want to know that this is a serious person who’s committed to a life of public service, and that they’re seeking this office because they have an earnest plan to improve the condition of all Americans. I won’t waste my time and attention on a candidate who seems to be in the race because they saw someone on TV in a spotlight surrounded by fireworks and confetti cannons and madly-cheering people and thought “That could be ME up there!”

This week, as the result of either Circumstance or “Careful Management” on the part of Romney’s opponents, the campaign is dealing with its own distraction: stories of the cruel bullying or dumb pranks (pick one) that he instigated when he was in high school. And yeah, the fact that people are dredging up something from his teen years and claiming it has relevance on how a President will fight our wars and fix our economy is pretty damned silly. What I’m actually paying attention to is how Romney reacts. For now, Romney seems to be content to parry it all off with an “acknowledgment apology” (ie, “I acknowledge that some people feel as though an apology is called for, and therefore, to those people who do feel that way, I apologize”) accompanied by the sort of chuckle that seems to represent nostalgic reverie as much as any actual regret for the stupid actions of one’s youth.

I imagine that a national political campaign is disorienting for anyone who’s spent his or her entire adult life as a successful CEO. It can be the first time in decades that he or she is actually being held personally accountable for their actions. An oil-industry CEO directs and enacts a plan to cut costs wherever possible or impossible, reasonable or unreasonable. The capos under his command are told to ignore a law if costs of compliance are greater than the cost of fines and litigation. The CEO funnels gargantuan amounts of lobbying money towards the elimination of any governmental oversight at all.

And then, after 4.9 billion gallons of oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico, who gets the blame? The tip of the spear. Never the hand that threw it.

After decades in such a low-gravity world, is it any wonder that a guy like Mitt has trouble finding his footing? Under the circumstances, I’m not terribly surprised that he doesn’t clearly remember this incident and doesn’t see the need to show personal accountability. I’m not even surprised that he doesn’t see this bullying brouhaha as an opportunity to define himself as a candidate.

What surprises me is the fact that with national election just six months away, the presumptive nominee of the opposition party is still getting such awful advice from his campaign managers. I mean, at some point, a campaign acquires enough momentum, support, and money that there’s someone there at the candidate’s elbow to tell him or her “When we get to the county fair, do not, do not, do not allow yourself to be photographed eating a corn dog, or indeed inserting any sort of shaftlike object into your eager, wide-open mouth.”

When a candidate passes that simple test, it fills me with some small bit of extra confidence about his or her abilities. “Thanks, but no. Oh, boy, my spouse will never let me hear the end of it if I get mustard all over my one clean jacket” isn’t up there with Obama’s 45-minute speech on race in America, but isn’t it an impressive display of common sense and mental agility? It indicates that this person can connect an immediate choice with a future undesirable outcome. Or, in the absence of the candidate’s own common sense, doesn’t it indicate that he acknowledges his own failings and is at least smart enough to hire smart advisors?

Yes, I’m thinking specifically of “That Photo” of Michele Bachmann:

I never thought she was clever enough to be President (for the record: neither am I). And after seeing that photo, I wasn’t even sure that she was clever enough to operate one of those restroom sinks that turns the water on when you wave your hands near a sensor (for the record: I usually get it on the first or second try).

So this is how Romney responds to allegations that he bullied a long-haired kid in high school. He says he doesn’t remember the incident, even though it definitely happened. He’s not talking about it, and that absence of data from a candidate leaves a big void that a voter backfills with Worry. I worry that maybe he’s lying about his recollection. Why lie about something that he did more than 40 years ago, when “I did a lot of stupid things when I was a kid that I’ll regret for the rest of my life” is one of those common touchstones that all humans can relate to, and would readily forgive? I worry that maybe he genuinely categorizes that incident as just Jolly Hijinks. Something that merits a laugh over a gin-and-tonic during a high school reunion. Even though it seems like it was a terrifying incident that might have haunted the victim for the rest of his life.

And I worry that maybe he genuinely doesn’t care about how the incident and his reactions to it appear to the rest of the country. I worry that he knows that his supporters are his supporters, that the other members of the party will support him as soon as he officially wins the nomination, and that once he’s elected, the opinions of the people who didn’t vote for him don’t matter at all. This was a massive opportunity for Romney to show the country that he connects to people, that he has a sense of empathy, and that he believes that our country is beset by social problems that at times appear to be just as troubling as our economic ones. But the campaign let that pitch buzz right past him.

When Obama gave his “More Perfect Union” speech, it became important to me that he become the next President. There’s another kind of Moment in a candidacy. When John McCain nominated Sarah Palin as his running mate, and it became clear how unprepared she was for the campaign, let alone the office of the President, I stopped thinking of him as the guy I wasn’t going to vote for and I started thinking him as the guy I wanted to vote against. I honestly think that McCain, plucked from the right phase of his political career, could have been quite a successful President. And while I’m no fan of Sarah Palin, I will eagerly defend her against those idiots who refuse to acknowledge her as a human being worthy of a certain non-negotiable amount of dignity and respect.

That said: if we had elected the McCain/Palin ticket, the British would have declared us a society in a state of chaos, incapable of self-rule. Parliament would have annexed us back into the Empire and appointed a colonial governor. “Thank God. And God save the Queen!” I would have cheered, as I watched the Royal Marines curtly re-raising the Union Jack over the Old State House after their little 237-year setback.

I feel as though I’m experiencing that same sort of transition regarding my perception of Mitt Romney. I might vote for someone despite the fact that he or she was kind of a **** in high school. I might vote against someone who doesn’t care how much of a **** he was, or who doesn’t care about the people he hurt.

And Marty, if you’re reading this: I’m sorry about the thing with the chair. Let me buy you a drink sometime.

[Updated to note: Be civil in the comments, please. I don't have the time to police the comment thread and if things turn ugly, I'm just going to delete all comments and disable the dialogue forever. Agree with me, disagree with me, agree with what other people say, disagree with what other people say. It's all good...until "I don't have time to police the comment thread" becomes "I'm ashamed by the tone of the comments."]

Usually it’s, you know…Cow Things. But it can’t hurt to look, provided it’s just a second and I don’t veer into oncoming traffic.

Today, most of the herd was on the other side of the road.

This is unprecedented in my experience.

The concept continued to distract me long afterward. Did the farmer move the herd over there to graze on virgin grass? Traffic is infrequent, so that’s certainly within the realm of possibility. But how do you move a herd across a road? Do you have a little Crossing Guard sign and white gloves, like the ladies in front of the middle schools?

Or did the alpha cow address the herd and say “Ladies and gentlemen — you too, Goat — we are most definitely in a Rut. Every day it’s ‘the grass near the pond’ and then ‘the other pasture on the other side of the dairy building’ and back again. And where does it get us, I ask you? Yes: back to the grass near the pond again. Well, let me be the very first cow who says ‘Neighh’.”

(I imagine that he’s been preparing this little speech for days. He thought he needed a joke in there somewhere.)

“So I’m going for that long, cool, lush grass on the other side of the road. Who’s with me?”

The fact that some of the herd remained behind suggests a philosophical schism among the herd. Like Martin Luther before him, Alpha Cow nailed his own 95 Theses to the crossbeam of the gate to the pasture, and led a major Reformation of the status quo.

(Thesis 1: “There’s lots of tasty grasses over there.” Thesis 2: “We should definitely go over there and eat some.” Thesis 3: “The farmer’s dog thinks he’s ‘keeping us in line’ with all of his running and barking, but we all know he’s just being a colossal prick.” Then it kind of trails off into a list of his favorite TV shows.)

Another theory: this is a test case to see how the farmer reacts. If there’s no reprisals, then the herd continues the pretense of “grazing the next meadow over” day after day until they finally make it to the airport. And then: Cabo!

Greetings from the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Thanks to the 5624-foot altitude, EVERY night is two-for-one drinks night to anybody visiting from sea level, at least in terms of the effects of the alcohol.

I don’t know for sure how many years I’ve been speaking here. I think my first was in 1997, and I’ve missed only one of them since. That’s 14 years. Which is absolutely absurd, so I dismiss this as just another agenda-driven fiction of the Liberal-controlled basic math.

Actually, the scary thing is my realization that (oh, for the love of God) I’m now part of the Old Guard here. During my first years as a speaker, I was impressed by those people who seemed like they’d been coming here forever. They’d show up at the first party of the week and they’d continue conversations that have been going on for ten years, picking them up right from where they’d left off at the previous Conference, it seemed. There I was on Monday evening, sitting on the steps of a patio with a plate of buffet food on my lap, talking with the same group of friends I’d been chatting with at the same party in the same place last year.

It’s great to feel so at ease, don’t get me wrong. The situation just makes it very difficult to maintain my self-image as The Dangerous Young Upstart Whose Radical Ideas Will Ensure His Early Ouster. It was hard enough when I was still in my Twenties.

(Jeez, I am old. I find myself walking through the U of C campus and thinking “in MY day, we didn’t need longboards. We rode skateboards, like normal people!” Please note that I road a board for exactly one year of my life and I would have traded my twitchy thirdhand deck for a longboard in a heartbeat.)

Speakers at the Conference on World Affairs contribute to seven to ten panels that cover a wide range of topics. Tuesday was fairly typical for me. In the morning, I talked about alternative definitions of journalism and in the afternoon I was on a panel about interstellar space travel. I write about space and I’m keenly interested in those subjects. But I know I’m just a dabbler. Two others on the panel were an astronomer and a physicist. After my ten minute contribution (which leaned heavily on my knowledge of history) I was smart enough to just be quiet and let those guys handle the audience Q&A.

During my solo ten minutes, I stumbled on the term “manned exploration.”

I asked my pal Seth Shostak (fab astronomer and educator) “Is there a gender-nonspecific way to express the concept of sending people, as opposed to probes, into space?”

“Crewed space exploration,” he replied.

“Crude? Who are we sending up there? Ricky Gervais and Seth Macfarlane?”

This got a laugh from the crowd. Which made me happy.

When a session ends, people often come up to the stage to start up conversations with the speakers while we’re packing up our pens, papers, and iPads. A group massed around Seth and the other Guy With Credentials, asking questions about dark energy and solar sails and space elevators and the imperatives of human exploration. A woman skipped past them and made a beeline for me.

“Every time I try to email my friend,” she said, thrusting an iPad forward, “It tries to FaceTime her instead. What’s wrong?”

I happily fixed her iPad. We’re all just here to serve.

I had a new responsibility this year. The organizers gave me a plenary session…one of only a handful of slots in which a speaker has the stage all to him or herself for the whole time. Panels are casual by design; the conference explicitly tells speakers that we’re meant to speak as extemporaneously as possible. Usually, all I do is prepare a rough, five-item outline of the major points I want to cover.

But this was a different thing. The audience was going to be stuck with me and only me for the whole 50 minutes. So I went ahead and wrote a whole new show for the event. I prepared for this just as I do when someone pays me to fly out and give a keynote.

The title of the plenary was “Steve Jobs and Apple.” I built the talk over a course of about a month. First I just kept jotting down thoughts and topics that seemed relevant. Then, I shaped those notes into a rough outline with some sort of beginning, middle and end trimming out anything that seemed irrelevant. Finally, I turned the outline into slides and started thinking about the best way to communicate all of this stuff.

I spent a lot of time reflecting on Steve’s philosophies. Item after item in my OmniOutliner file contained quotes about his design ideals. Each of them said “Simplify, simply, simplify.” One item was my observation the iMac’s power button is hidden away on the back, so that nothing superfluous can mar the face of the screen. I had Apple’s PR photo of the original iPod: it’s a stark whiteout.

I created another new slide, and pasted in a good quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that I wanted to use:

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away.”

This was the first presentation in which I’d used so many direct quotes. I changed my custom template and created a new master slide, basing “Quotation” on an existing master that I call “Statement.”

I looked at the new slide.

The font for the quote was Comicrazy, which is probably my single favorite Comicraft font. It was yellow. The attribution was in the same font, in white. At some point in life I’d come across a list of presentation design tips that suggested putting your identity on every slide, to encourage people to connect with you later. So my name and my Twitter handle were at the bottom of the slide, in a different font, on top of a dark box.

I re-read the “nothing left to take away” line.

Then I flipped back and forth, clicking through all of Steve’s quotes about the importance of saying “no” and simplifying things. I clicked through the slide which represented my cue to talk about Steve’s single-window design for iDVD’s user interface. My presentation contained image after image of Apple products, each with their clean, serene lines.

Well, goddamn it. Steve had shamed me from beyond the grave.

So in the days before my plenary, I built a whole new presenation template. It uses only one font (Futura) and there’s only ever one color on the screen, red. And I only use it for hairlines, to call the audience’s attention to a note). If there’s ever more than one thing on a slide, there has to be a very good reason. I try to use Magic Movies to redirect the audience’s attention instead of just slapping up a thick pile of stuff and hoping that I can steer through it.

I like the new template a lot. My next talk after Boulder is in Dublin, Ireland for Úll and I bet I’ll tweak this a little more. I’ll probably switch Futura for something just a little more interesting.

But, yes. From now on, every time I build a presentation I’ll look at each slide and ask myself “Does this screen look clean enough to contain a quote from Steve Jobs about his design ideas, or a photo of an Apple product, without making me look like a clueless idiot?”

Even when a slide contains neither of those things, it’s a good question to ask.

Hi! I’m Andy! I’m a professional writer! Many people trust me for advice on how to make technical things work!

OK. So here’s what I was getting at.

We all get frustrated about our writing projects. Don’t let it set you back.

Frustration is the villain with a thousand faces. I’m bored. Or I lose focus. Or I lose faith in this idea; I think there’s something else I ought to be doing with my time. I remember a workday when the writing felt like I was just reaching down into a wishing well and pulling up fistful after fistful of quarters and today is nothing like that.

I usually get myself out of this sort of mood by reminding myself that the words aren’t supposed to flow easily every time I sit down at the keyboard. This stuff is work. Why is this specific writing problem any different from the time a switch broke on my washing machine, and I couldn’t immediately figure out how to put it back together so that the thingy would stay engaged with the whatchamacallit? A problem can only be solved if you keep working on a solution, as the Tide-fresh Alien Skin Software tee shirt I’m wearing today attests.

Also oh-so-correct: this question that Neil Gaiman recently answered on his Tumblr:

“You being lazy and unmotivated and not writing allows another writer, who does sit down and write, to get published in your place. Magazines and publishers only have so many pages, so many annual publishing spots. You’re letting someone else who wants to do the work get published. Surely that’s a good thing…?”

Similar: that scene from “Tootsie” in which Dustin Hoffman is Teri Garr’s acting coach. She’s struggling with an audition piece. “I’m no good with confrontational characters,” she lamely apologizes. “Well, that’s too bad,” Hoffman snaps back. “Because you’re competing with hundreds of actresses who have no problem with confrontational characters. And that’s why one of them is going to get this part instead of you!”

(The takeaway from the scene and the Tumblr: it’s hard for everybody. Some people will work through it and some won’t.)

To these motivational tools I now add the tale of the hardworking screenwriter of “Death Bed: The Bed That Eats.” Via Patton Oswalt’s “Werewolves and Lollipops” (NSFW language):

Oswalt is absolutely right. George Barry (the filmmaker) can definitely call himself a writer. The English professor who’s had an incomplete novel moldering in his or her desk forever can’t. The novel is bold and original and ambitious. The professor believes it’ll inspire the peoples of the world to coalesce into a single, higher being. “Death Bed” is schlocky drive-in tripe. George Barry only believed that a sufficiently lurid low-budget horror movie couldn’t fail to make money.

Aha! But George Barry finished his screenplay.

Becoming a writer isn’t like becoming a doctor or a civil engineer, or a luncheonette that serves “the best coffee in town.” You don’t have to go through a seven-year accreditation process. If you want to call yourself a writer, all you need to do is finish writing something.

Oh, and: writing about writing almost doesn’t count as writing. I suppose I should get back to work. Just remember that as a writer, you’re not a passive receptacle for some mysterious Muse. You’re a worker. The good news is that when you’ve finished something, you’ve earned something.

Today, opera has pretentious undertones that scare people away. Okay, yes, it’s probably the undertones and all of the foreign speakey-talk. I myself didn’t really get into opera until I learned that reading the libretto beforehand wasn’t considered cheating.

Anyway, it’s a shame that so many people don’t give opera a try. Opera was never meant to be inaccessible. There was a time when it was simply the popular entertainment of the day, just like movies are now. Opera stories go all over the map. You have your intense dramas, your light comedies, your action and fantasy productions.

“Tales of Hoffman” has elements of many genres. It’s an anthology piece. Hoffman the poet is killing time in a tavern until his latest crush, an opera star, gets off stage. He’s entertaining the house with stories of unrequited love from his past. The first tale is about Olympia, a lifelike windup automaton whom Hoffman thought was a real woman because he’d been tricked into putting on magic eyeglasses.

(See? Opera doesn’t seem so highfalutin’ when you read the librettos. Michael Bay would have used a plot like that without thinking twice.)

And there’s another similarity between opera and movies: mainstream audiences wanted to be thrilled and excited. Witness “The Doll’s Song,” which is the coloratura equivalent of a scene in which giant robots throw each other into skyscrapers. It’s designed to push a performer almost to the limits of what the human voice can do. When this aria comes up, even modern audiences lean forward in their seats a little; they know they’re going to see something spectacular.

In this first video, Olympia is sung with vim, precision, charm, and humor by principal performer Kathleen Kim.

Why is it that you often see Craigslist cattle calls for TV singing competitions, but you never see one for a coloratura soprano role? Here’s the answer. The number of people who can perform at this level is miniscule. For proof, search YouTube for other performances of this aria. Even when they’re sung extremely well, if a performer is the least bit intimidated by the piece or if they only have 99% of the technique necessary to meet its high demands, that’s crystal-clear in thirty seconds.

Kim, an elite professional, accelerates through every curve. She seems to have no limitations; every note she sings is a conscious choice and she’s in full control of her instrument throughout. And keep in mind that as impressive as this performance was, it was all in a day’s work for her. She would do it again and again and again throughout the show’s run.

So. One night, Kim got sick and Rachele Gilmore was forced to make her Met stage debut on just three hours’ notice.

This second video is an example of what happens when a highly technical role is performed by a talented, hardworking person who knows that:

(1) This next performance is a huge moment in any singer’s career;

(2) This is an aria in which the singer is actually supposed to showboat during the reprise;

and maybe most importantly

(3) She doesn’t necessarily need to protect her voice for the next two weeks of performances.

Do watch the whole thing — it’s so worth it — but skip ahead to 3:35 if you only have time for the fireworks:

When she gets to the reprise, smoley hokes! Yes, you are hearing the audience gasping at what Gilmore is doing. The popular consensus is that her A-flat above high C was the highest note ever sung in a Metropolitan Opera production.

Whether it was or it wasn’t, just look at that response! The audience simply refused to allow the production to move forward until they’d worn out their arms and their hands applauding. Yeah, she probably did pretty good, there.

Live performance means real people immediately responding to the work of real people. Each performance is unique and some are devastatingly exceptional. That night, the audience saw something being done as well as any human being ever will, even under sub-optimal conditions. And because it was live opera, they had a chance to make their reaction immediately and fully known to the performer instead of just Tweeting about it during intermission.

The applause went from a visceral reaction to an emotional one, too. Once the initial thrill dissipated, the audience realized that this young performer had made her debut on one of the world’s premier stages on three hours’ notice and she’d absolutely killed. It just made them cheer longer.

It reminded me of another thing I love about live theater. How does the company deal with the unexpected? “The Doll’s Song” was written as a showstopper. Even so, the performers and musicians have no idea how long the applause will last after any given performance of the aria. That night it went on more or less forever. It continued for so long, in fact, that the people onstage needed to do things to keep the show moving even though it had stopped moving forward. I love how the man playing Spalanzani (the inventor) eventually chose to mill about behind Gilmore, accepting the handshakes and congratulations of the partygoers, as though the 17-minute ovation were for his character’s engineering virtuosity instead of for Gilmore’s vocal virtuosity. He did it without taking the spotlight off of her, either.

The way the Met staged “The Doll’s Aria” was interesting. In that part of the story, Olympia is supposed to be performing to crowd of partygoers, so it’s perfectly in character for Gilmore to react to the Met audience’s applause by bowing. The other performers onstage are supposed to be muchly impressed and entertained by the demonstration of this amazing windup automaton, so it’s perfectly in character for them to react to Gilmore as though they were muchly impressed and entertained. Of course. That’s how they rehearsed the scene.

I’ve been watching the onstage audience. I don’t think they were completely acting. They couldn’t have been entirely surprised by Gilmore’s performance but I still think they were almost as thrilled and delighted as those people out in the real audience. They had much better seats and they got paid!

Added: Paul Henkiel was so impressed that he ran the audio through a spectrum analyzer and posted the video on YouTube. Check out the precision of those stair-step escalating notes.

Added: I’m getting lots of nice comments from people who’ve never really dipped into opera before. If you enjoyed this aria, you should definitely sample two albums by my favorite coloratura soprano, Diana Damrau.

“Coloraturas” contains track after track of what I think is technically-termed “Goddamned gorgeous singing.” This nice little behind-the-scenes video of the recording of the album includes (at 2:10) a full performance of the explosive first track, “Je veux vivre” from “Romeo and Juliet.”

“Arie Di Bravura” contains both of the Queen of the Night’s arias from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” This is the role that established Damrau as an international star, beginning with an incredible performance in a 2003 Royal Opera House production.

The more famous of the two arias is “Der Hölle Rache.” It’s so intense, in fact, that it defines the soprano vocal range. Mozart wrote this part specifically for the skills of his supremely talented sister-in-law and afterward, the International Committee Of People Who Decide Such Things said “Look, we’ll let you have this one. But moving forward, let’s all agree that if you expect a woman to sing notes higher than this top F6, you’re kind of being a d***.”

“Der Hölle Rache” is considered the coloratura aria. When I tell you that the title line means “Hell’s vengeance burns inside my heart” you get the idea that it’s going to get fairly Intense. The Queen of the Night feels as though she’s been betrayed by her daughter, Pamina. She hands her a dagger and orders Pamina to murder Sarastro, the Queen’s enemy. And if she fails, the Queen promises to bring the full furies of vengeance upon her head.

Many productions portray the Queen as a harpyish villain. Damrau plays her as a strong, independent woman who, after her husband’s death, has been dismissed and marginalized by male-dominated society. It’s almost literally sung in the story: “Silly, emotional, stupid woman. We strong, wise, and rational men are taking your daughter and your objects of power away from you because, honestly, a role of esteem and responsibility would only make you all confused and emotional.” Can you blame her for getting rather cross?

But her first aria is my favorite. It’s both emotional and subtle. The Queen is imploring Tamino, the Handsome Young Prince™, to infiltrate Sarastro’s temple and rescue her kidnapped daughter. She sings of her sorrow; she could hear her daughter’s cries for help as she was being abducted, but she could do nothing. She promises Tamino her daughter’s hand in marriage.

I must have seen this video a hundred times but I still can’t decide if the Queen is manipulating Tamino or if she’s being wholly sincere and requires his help in Pamina’s rescue so urgently that she’s not above playing on his emotions a little.

That’s what makes Damrau’s performance so gripping. It’s impressive enough to simply stand in the middle of the stage and sing this aria well. But her singing and her acting are ten out of ten. It seems superhuman to be able to sing something so technically difficult and have it read to the audience as a real, three-dimensional character. It’s like performing the role of Hamlet entirely while riding a ten-foot unicycle around the stage, and integrating this stunt so tightly into the role that a theater critic forgets to mention that detail in his review.

“The Magic Flute” is, incidentally, a great “first opera.” The Royal Opera House production is gorgeous. It’s true to the original spirit of the piece while still feeling thoroughly modern. It’s on DVD and Blu ray.

This was the year I wasn’t interested enough to even post a list of predictions.

This! My friends! Was the year when, after I realized that the Oscars were on ABC and not CBS, I gave it a little bit of thought and then decided to just DVR the show and watch plain-old Episode Two of “The Amazing Race” instead.

Yes. I am saying things to you that are quite true.

I was sort of on the fence this afternoon. You know what finally pushed me over? The fact that the producers claimed they didn’t have enough time to allow for performances of the Best Song categories…but hey, they had plenty of time to have Cirque du (goddamn) Soleil perform.

(There were only two Best Song nominees. two.)

I have nothing against circuses, French-Canadians, or even the basic concept of pretentious twerps jumping around dressed as some sort of shrub/stewardess hybrids. I just remember a time in this millennium when the Oscars were actually exciting and interesting and they seemed to have more value than they do today.

I look around for something to blame for this downward trend. If the producers themselves were bouncing around on bungee cords and miming some sort of rot about how this fitness ball they’re juggling with their feet is Their Heart And Hope, I suppose I’d be singling them out but alas, the only people on stage will be Cirque du ****ing Soleil.

All in all, I was just more excited by The Amazing Race.

And then — oh, dear — I flipped over to something else. I couldn’t get interested.

So instead, I saved it on the DVR for this morning and after watching all three hours and nine minutes, I know I made the right call. This was another Lithium-stabilized telecast, with no real highs or lows. The producers put fresh batteries in, switched it on, set it on the ground, and then it rolled in a straight line at walking speed until it ran out of juice and stopped.

Yes, it’s the Thrill of the Movies, ladies and gentlemen!

I can’t dislike the Oscars, however. Without the Academy Awards telecast, the Turner Classic Movies channel wouldn’t have run thirty days of programming in which every single movie is an Oscar nominee. The airing of the telecast signals the end of that series and, finally, the end of the temptation to stay in bed and watch movies all day long.

I’m a little sad to see the telecast sink so low in my esteem. For much of my adult life I’ve been setting aside time in my work schedule every February to write lots and lots of stuff about the Oscars. I’ve learned, however, that it’s important to do things that you’re legitimately enthusiastic about instead of numbly doing things out of morose routine.

So I’m letting go of the Oscars. Instead, maybe I’ll just spend February writing about actual movies. If the Oscars telecast refuses to celebrate filmmaking — seriously: just two nominees. You could have made time for those just out of the loose time in your pockets, producers! — then there’s nothing stopping us film fans from picking up that banner and running with it.

And now, the live-to-tape-blog:

Morgan Freeman kicks things off. Which, as a regular movie-watcher, I can only associate with an extended flashback.

Cool! I’m not sure that George Clooney would have rearranged his schedule and kissed last year’s host on the mouth.

Couldn’t get Jonah Hill to reprise his “Moneyball” role…he’s way too skinny now!

Okay, a Tom Cruise cameo is a pretty cool deal. I think it shows he’s a great sport.

TinTin…missed opportunity fr a Martin Short Ed Grimley appearance.

Billy Crystal does look nice in a tux.

Tuxedo Watch. This is a controversial part of my annual Oscarcast. My audience is split down the middle on whether I should spend any time nitpicking over men’s formalwear: I’m for it and the audience is against it. But I know I’m doing God’s work here.

(Strikes heroic pose, lit by golden sunset as eagle perches on shoulder.)

Two point on Billy’s tails. First, white tie is, I think, supposed to be worn with an open collar. And secondly…hmm…he doesn’t appear to be wearing an undershirt. The pink of his skin is showing through the front of his shirt.

But he is wearing proper white microphone.

Running down all of the Best Picture nominees in his medley points out how silly the new nominations process has become. Nine nominees? Ugh. Honestly, it’s like March Madness. If everyone is in the finals, then what’s the point?

Scorsese either brought one of his grandkids kids (that’s his daughter? Well, awright, Marty!) with him to the show as his Plus One, or else he’s paying a silent tribute to the late career of Woody Allen.

Tony Bennett! Dig that!

Tom Hanks takes the stage, in proper black tie.

Waste of time with a seat-filler gag that Hanks clearly doesn’t believe in and has to (in an affable Tom Hanks way) disavow.

Best Cinematography. This is one of my favorite categories; the point is to look at the movie as an artfully-composed photo. “Hugo” was the obvious choice; a team of that level of skill working with a canvas where they can control every element? They had complete freedom and it showed.

Winner is wearing a proper tux except for the white cravat. Black tie = bowtie.

Makes a slight dig against the producers for putting the Cinematography category first. “It can only go up from here!” Hmm. But normally, it gets buried in the show’s “dead zone,” where the audience is just zapping through and waiting for the Best Actor and Best Picture final runs. By putting Cinematography in the first act, more people than ever will see it. That’s why traditionally they’ve done Best Supporting Actor awards in that slot.

(Also: the show has yet to start to run short on time…so you can almost take as long as you want to say your thank yous. The finger on the “PLAY HIM OFF. NOW” switch is by no means itchy.)

But the next award is “Best Art Direction.” Mmmaybe there’s something to this idea that the producers have decided that “boring categories that are only about highly skilled and experienced behind-the professionals working behind the camera at the top of their art”

Art Direction goes to “Hugo” — another clearly-deserved win.

Co-winner is standing off to the side. See, this I mean: if Art Direction had been presented later in the show, there is no way that the director wouldn’t have played him off at full volume and cut away before she got to step up to the microphone and give her short and very sweet thank you to Scorsese and to Italy (which are kind of the same thing, right?)

The guy is wearing a proper tux.

Show wastes (to my eye) time with a tease for Meryl Streep’s nomination, and an extended skycam shot of the drummers in the house orchestra. This is why the producers couldn’t find any time to perform the two — two Best Song nominees.

Montage of clips from the lat 40 years of movies. I don’t get why they do this. It has no focus, no real point…it’s channel-surfing.

Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Lopez (whom used to do movies before the industry stopped allowing her to do so).

Best Costume Design. OK, I’m with the Cinematographer: this feels like “Let’s get all of these behind-the-camera nominees on and off the stage early. Honestly, next year let’s just give them a dinner or something, okay?”

Winner is “The Artist.” Note that the award-winning costume designer is wearing a proper tuxedo: black jacket and pants, white shirt with black onyx studs, black bowtie. Nice.

Best Makeup: J.Lo and Can-Di come back from a respectful presentation package posing with their butts to the camera. Yeah, real respectful, ladies. Oh, and J.Lo: we can totally see your nipples.

“Iron Lady” wins. Nice win. It’s amazing how effectively they achieved that Margaret Thatcher effect with such little apparent makeup. Streep has a 40-year relationship with one of those makeup artists.

First major male formalwear fail: he’s wearing a black shirt and a black cravat.

Adam Sandler sharing his favorite movie memories: also more important than presenting the Best Song nominees.

Sandra Bullock, looking very sharp. Doing a funny bit about the international audience. Few people on the Oscar stage can handle deadpan humor well. Yes, I’m looking at you, Ben Stiller.

Presenting of course Best Foreign Language Film. Yay! The film from Iran won!

(No, I didn’t see it.)

I actually prefer most of these “non-celebrity” categories. You’re seeing people who seem more genuinely pleased and proud than the over-composed and over-rehearsed celebs.

Winner reads a very nice speech about warfare.

Also: he’s wearing a black cravat instead of a proper bowtie. If you wear a black jacket and pants and a white shirt and a black cravat, you are wearing a Blues Brothers costume. You are not wearing proper formal attire.

Christian Bale. Black cravat and black shirt. If this makes it into the “Oscar moments” clip package in twenty years, he’s going to look as classy as the guys in the crushed-brown-velvet tuxedoes from the Seventies Oscarcasts.

Presenting Best Supporting Actress. Supporting categories are fun because they’re wide-open. Voters are just as likely to give the award to a someone’s first major role, or to someone in a comedic role. Otherwise, they don’t consider comedic roles to be “acting.”

Octavia Spencer wins for “The Help.” Another nice thing about giving an Oscar to someone early in his or her career: they really appreciate it. They get up there and they start thinking about how their families are out there watching this happen and boom, there go the waterworks.

(An Oscar is a big deal! It’s wonderful to see nominees who aren’t too cool to show they think it’s a Big Deal, too.)

I must say it: the Oscars set looks like an iPad app. Which is to say that it’s more akin to what would have been designed for the Oscarcast before HD and cable TV…gotta make everything BIG and obvious, so that it’ll “read” on those screens.

Cool, the Christopher Guest Repertory Company doing a bit about the focus group for “Wizard Of Oz.”

If you’re going to stop the Oscars for something that isn’t related to the awards…you gotta shoot for the moon. Funny bit but it probably went on a bit too long.

Bradley Cooper and Tina Fey. Bradley is wearing a proper tuxedo. Tina Fey demonstrates that classy dresses work great, too. J.Lo? J…? Yeah, you’re already in your Escalade, aren’t you.

Best Film Editing. Another category that I love. I’m fascinated by the process of assembling a film from elements. The director shoots, shoots, shoots, the actors act, act, act…but we see the story that the editor chooses to tell.

“Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.” Won by Jake and Elwood Blues. Hit us with a few bars of “Rawhide,” will you, boys?

They could also make a decent living as Matt Damon and Ben Stiller impersonators.

Best Sound Editing goes to “Hugo.” The favorite here would probably have been “Drive” for its more obvious applications for sound effects.

Shout out to Thelma Schoonmaker and Marty Scorsese. One winner in proper tuxedo, the other gets a solid 9/10 for wearing a black bowtie with an open collar.

Best Sound Mixing, also goes to “Hugo.” If memory serves, “Mixing” means the overall sound picture and “Editing” means the “special effects,” as it were.

I’m liking the “behind the camera” Oscars coming first. They have my full attention and nobody’s impatient. You get the sweetest speeches.

One proper tux. One black cravat, but he’s wearing a waistcoat so the Jake Blues effect is mitigated, at least…9/10. Also because of his extremely kind-hearted acceptance speech.

Annnd we’re back from commercial, with The Muppets!

In an opera box? Yes, to hide the puppeteers but isn’t that Statler and Waldorf’s gig?

Doesn’t sound like Frank Oz voicing Miss Piggy…?

ANother little presentation on “what it’s like to go to the movies.” Oh, it’s the “Cirque du Soleil” crap.

Which the producers thought was way more important than performing the “Best Song” nominees.

And we see a couple of men in the same suits as Cary Grant in “North By Northwest” bouncing around on tethers.

Now we see a dozen guys in suits doing the same boring Cirque crap that they haul out all the time.

No relevance whatsoever to movies at all. This is just a free ad for Cirque.

Yeah, see, for me, Cirque absolutely doesn’t work out of its original context. If it’s meant to be saying something or enhancing something else, it completely fails. It’s just acrobats tumbling. Yes, they’re at the top of that art, but why not just get the top three pitchers and the top three batters in Major League Baseball up on stage and have them throw and hit batting practice?

That’s also an art, also at the top of their game, and has just as much relevance to the proceedings at hand.

Annnd the Cirque du Soleil crap is swept off the stage.

“We’ve got puppets, acrobats…we’re a pony away from being a Bar Mitzvah” says Billy Crystal. Spot-on.

He hasn’t had much to say by the way of on-the-cuff jokes yet.

Talking about the age of the nominees. “Next year, this will be called the Flomax Theater.” Another spot-on joke. But it’s fab to see Christopher Plummer doing such great work at any age.

Robert Downey Jr. Wearing a black tux shirt and a silvery bowtie that I imagine is a nod to “Iron Man.” Doing an extended comedy riff where he’s filming a documentary about being an awards presenter. Mmm. Didn’t really land.

Also risky as an intro to Best Documentary. The show literally cuts straight from The Wacky to a clip from the story of a soldier severely wounded in combat returning to family, rehabilitation, and civilian life.

“Undefeated” wins. Correct tux, correct tux, Blues Brothers, Blues Brothers, Blues Brothers, correct tux with silver bowtie (9/10).

I field-promote one of the Blues Brothers to 10/10 for cursing during his acceptance speech. Can’t really make out what it was but there was a minor gasp.

They keep thanking people until the director mutes the mic.

Best Animated Feature, presented by Chris Rock in a proper tux, leading off with a good joke about how black actors wind up voicing donkeys and zebras.

Lesson to Oscarcast producers: actors with standup experience will, more often than not, kill it as presenters.

Becomes a very interesting category when Pixar doesn’t walk away with it. I kind of wish all of the categories could see this same variety of films. I’m hoping for “Rango.”

And it wins! Great. Beautiful lighting and movement in this one, and a very, very funny movie. The first pass at the voice track was done “live,” so to speak: they got the actors on a stage and they played their parts like they were in the little stage at a high school. I’m keen to see more animated movies recorded this way. I have no complaints about “Toy Story 3,” for example, but there’s definitely a different energy when the actors are actually moving and actually playing off of each other, instead of reading each line twenty times.

(Director is wearing proper black tie.)

Clips from upcoming nominees. From the right angles, Glenn Close as “Mr. Dobbs” looks like Billy Crystal.

HD trailer for Pixar’s “Brave” forces me to cancel the fast-forward and rewind. It…it seems unlikely that any other animated movie will have any kind of chance at the Oscar next year.

Back from commercial. Billy Crystal finally changes into a proper tux. Starting off with a bit of lame comedy that mostly shows off how bad Billy’s hair dye (and hair replacement system) look on him.

(He’s a great looking guy…but he’s this guy in his sixties who looks like he’s in his eighties because he’s trying to look like he’s in his twenties.)

Ben Stiller and…can’t place her…follow up the lame schtick with some more lame schtick. I think Stiller is 2 for 2 in presenting absolutely interminably long presenter comedy that doesn’t at all work.

(And he’s in a Blues Brothers costume.)

I’m just going to take a moment here to point out that this schtick was more important to the producers than performances of the Best Song nominees.

I’m also getting annoyed by how these behind-the-scenes awards are being presented. Will they precede “Best Director” with five minutes of schtick? Oh, hell, no.

But at least each movie/nominee gets a good twenty seconds of talk about the thinking behind the effects.

It has to go to “Hugo,” right?

Annnd it does!

(1 proper tux, two Blues Brothers take the stage to accept their statuettes.)

Oh, dear: closeup reveals that one of the Blues Brothers is wearing a checked cravat. Jeeves would most assuredly not approve. At the end of the story, Bertie would be instructing Jeeves to get rid of that tie and would be told that he had given it away to a hotel porter that morning.

Best Supporting Actor. Well what do you know: introduced with a short, classy tribute to this field of endeavor.

I’m so happy that Jonah Hill got nominated. He’s been working, working, working for years and doing exceptional work in roles that don’t conventionally attract awards attention.

It tends to attract nominees at both ends of their careers. Christopher Plummer and Max Von Sydow could win as a functional “cap off a brilliant career” award.

And it’s Plummer. Receives a standing ovation in addition to the Oscar. “Beginners” is almost a “Best Actor” role; looks like the studio lobbied tactically for a less-competitive category.

(Moneyball, indeed: millions of dollars are spent on a Best Actor campaign.)

Plummer is wearing a proper tux. It…might…be black velvet but I’ll give him a pass. I’m not sure if I should nitpick about fabrics. So long as it isn’t an Isaac Hayes fake bearskin sort of thing.

Back from commercial with another comedy bit. Billy putting words in the mouths of the nominees in the front rows. Not…bad…but it feels more like a “Crap, one of the Cirque du Soleil guys has fallen to his death backstage. Billy, can you stretch for a few minutes while we toss him in a bag and get him out of the theater?”

Owen Wilson-Blues and Penelope Cruz (in best gown of the night so far) present Best Original Score, after a bizarre bit where the whole show stops and everyone focuses on the stage while a large screen in the shape of a movie score rises up.

(Ironically, the producers think this is more important than presenting the two Best Original Song nominees.)

Award goes to “The Artist.” Very classy: Ludovic Bource (in proper black tie) stops to shake John Williams’ hand and say a word or two on his way to the stage.

Pro Tip: if you’re respectful and speak adorable, halting English, the Oscarcast director will probably let you keep talking.

Will Ferrell and Zak Galifanakis. Presenting “Best Song.” Now I think the producers are truly ****ing with this catgory. Or, maybe one of the nominees was ****ig with the producer’s wife and this is all just payback.

“Man Or Muppet” wins. Composer gets off some good jokes and then thanks the right people (including Jim Henson). Cutaways to Jason Segel, who looks immensely proud (justly so). And he’s wearing a proper tux.

Time to spend half a minute broadcasting costumed ladies handing out popcorn to the audience. Which was more important than actually playing the Best Original Song nominees.

Angelina Jolie presenting a writing award. Apparently she’s signed on as a spokesperson for the Right Leg Marketing Board, as she’s making sure the product is out of her dress and facing the camera at all times.

Best Adapted Screenplay. I think it’s got to be Hugo; it’s a magnet movie. Gotta say that I love the arty fake movie posters (silkscreen-style) that they commissioned for the playback of the nominees montage. A great designer can reduce a 2 hour movie to a simple graphical element.

Winner is “The Descendents.” Three men in proper tuxedoes.

Quite the sausage fest, innit?

Pro Tip for all nominees: if a previous winner brought his Mom to the Oscars and dedicates his award to her, please re-think your “wacky” acceptance speech. You’ll look extra-extra-dopey.

Best Original Screenplay. Goes to Woody Allen! Interesting! Shows how much he’s respected; if you establish that solid and consistent a track record — and you don’t break any actual laws — it doesn’t even matter that you never show up to collect your awards.

Another interview montage. Again, we get to hear Adam Sandler (unshaven, in his tennis gear) talk about himself. Instead of hearing the Best Original Song nominees.

I’m not annoyed by the mere fact that they’re using these clips packages. I’m annoyed that they’re doing it so poorly. What do we get from people speaking for five or ten seconds?

Time for a recap of the Technical Awards. Very pleased that the presenter introduced it with complete respect and dignity. Shameful, how they’ve treated these awards in the past (“And now, the moment everybody’s been waiting for…ha ha!”).

Cast of “The Bridesmaids” takes the stage. Introducing Short Films with a bunch of dick jokes. Well done, ladies!

Best Documentary Short. Jesus. They do a Drinking Game joke in which they pull snorters out of their bras and chug. Christ almighty. It’s as if the producers are completely unaware that in twenty seconds, they’re going to cut to footage of people being machine-gunned in Iraq, images of Pakistani women who had been set on fire by religious maniacs, and a village being wiped off the face of the planet by a tsunami.

What a complete lack of taste and class. Idiots! (Here I’m specifically talking about the producers, but the presenters should also have been canny enough to bail out.

Best Animated Short. Good to see a castmember of “Reno: 911″ on the Oscars. (No sarcasm there.)

“Fantastic Flying Books” wins. Both wearing proper tuxes. One of them was wise to wear a bowtie instead of a Blues Brothers cravat, given that he’s got thick-rimmed black glasses and is wearing a porkpie hat.

Another exceptionally sweet and sincere acceptance speech.

Michael Douglas presenting Best Director. Gosh, are we that far into the list?

(I forgot: now there are 38 Best Picture nominees. Probably still another three hours left to go.)

Wearing a very classy tuxedo.

Oscar goes to Michel Hazanavicus for “The Artist.” (In a proper tux). Adorable halting English, and it’s a top-tier category. He can talk all the way through the start time for “Good Morning America” if he wants.

Meryl Streep. Billy Crystal mentions her 17 nominations and 2 wins. Gads, I hope she doesn’t become the Susan Lucci of the Oscars. Funny, isn’t it, how a decades-spanning career of consistently fine performances can so easily and gently turn into something to poke fun at.

The Governors’ Awards presented as a clips package. I’m not sure the producers know what they’re doing. Who wouldn’t want to see James Earl Jones or Oprah or even Dick Smith on stage, with a live microphone for thirty seconds?

Buuuut no. We got to see Cirque du Soleil Jumping Around Randomly Crap that looks no different from any other Cirque performance.

They did something similar recently, where they had Pilobolus (I think) do a running series of shadow-performances, in which a Cirque-like Gang Of People In Leotards tumbled and then formed a shadow that approximated something from a Best Picture nominee.

Failure Point 1: It was moderately interesting the first time, it was ok the second time, but as the evening dragged on and the screen descended before a commercial, the only rational reaction from an viewer was “Ugh, more of this.”

Also: lame as the concept was, how doubly-lame was it that they would use little cardboard cutouts to incorporate details (like the heel of a shoe) that they couldn’t do with body parts? Bad idea, lamely executed. At best it made the show longer for no benefit and at worst, it took time away from real winners.

Memorial montage. Never any complaints about this one. I like that they use live music to back this with.

Yes, Whitney Houston got a card.

And Steve Jobs! Complete with the “Stay hungry, stay foolish” line from his commencement speech. Good pick. Hard to think about where Pixar would have wound up without his support, hard to think about where the industry would be without Apple computers and software.

Liz Taylor gets the honored final spot. Seems obvious. Was she the last of the old-style Big Hollywood Superstars? We should probably define that as the sort of stars who made it big and finished their careers before it was possible to get every detail of their lives through social media and news sites.

Best Actor. Another facet that makes me think the producers need to be removed by the National Guard. Presentation of the nominees is better this year than in years past, when a stage full of celebrities would take turns praising each of the nominees individually. Super-awkward and interminable. “How nice that this man who gets $10,000,000 a picture and regularly described as ‘The Sexiest Man Alive’ is getting an ego boost,” we think.

It’s still the ego boost testimonial, but at least they’re all being done by the presenter.

Still! Why not just present clips from the performances and let the work speak for itself?

George Clooney, incidentally, is indeed looking eminently wonderful in a lovely tuxedo. Brad Pitt: perfect tux. Gary Oldman: perfect tux.

In fact, the Oscar goes to the one actor not wearing a proper tuxedo: Jean Dujardin. 9/10 for wearing a black tie with an open collar.

But it’s a lovely, charmind speech that ends with a tapdance…that’s about the best way to go out.

And! He keeps pacing the stage in excitement instead of leaving! Formidable!

Best Actress. Colin Firth sings “Happy Birthday” to each of the nominees, so to speak. That’s almost the most awkward situation you can put someone in: make ‘em sit in full view while you lob a very long series of compliments at them. You want to look grateful, but not like you’re lapping all of this up; reserved, but not like you’re impatient for this person to hurry up…nightmare!

The best was his accolade to his “Mamma Mia!” castmate, Meryl Streep.

And it goes to Meryl Streep! Lovely. She’s honored so frequently with nominations that one might guess that the Academy doesn’t think it’s so important to give her the Oscar.

(The statuette marches her gown exactly.)

Points in favor, for this wager: it’s a flashy performance and the whole movie is this character. It’s a historical drama. Against: “The Iron Lady” really didn’t make much money or attract much attention.

But it’s great to see someone with her class and dignity getting the big hardware. I’ve no doubt that there are consultants who get five figures to coach a nominee on how to prepare an Oscars speech. If they’re worth half the money, they’ll burn that speech onto a DVD and make their clients watch it over and over again. Lovely speech about her family and her industry.

Her affection for her hairstylist is no joke. She was on “Fresh Air” a few weeks ago and spoke at length about their working relationship.

Best Picture. All 82 nominees get clips. It runs through about three commercial breaks but no, this doesn’t cheapen things at all and how dare you suggest otherwise.

I don’t like it, no. The significance of nominating a movie like “The Artist” or “Moneyball” is diminished when there’s room for so many on the list. When there were only five, the announcement of the nominees was exciting in and of itself: why did the quirky comedy get nominated for Best Picture, but not the intense, highly-regarded drama that made lots of money?

Producers say, I think, that it broadens the appeal of the show. If that’s the point, it’s not working: ratings are still flat. It just cheapens the whole thing and makes it far more ordinary.

Winner is “The Artist.” Director thanks Billy Wilder three times. Highly apropos!

The latest Oatmeal cartoon has been making the rounds of Twitter (largely thanks to John Gruber’s link). It makes two points about the problems of piracy exceptionally well.

The intentional point is that the content distributors often make it crazy-stupid hard for us to give them our money. Most of these industries have been frustratingly slow to adopt to the patterns of the modern consumer. News flash: we’re not heading to Blockbuster Video any more. Well, actually, yes, we are. But only because the Blockbuster went out of business and a Panera Bread is now leasing that space. We’ll probably get a Bacon Turkey Bravo for lunch and then watch some Netflix via the restaurant’s free WiFi while we eat.

Consumers couldn’t make their desires any more clear. We’ve got money to spend on TV and movies, but now we’re looking for it on iTunes and Netflix and through all other kinds of network-connected devices. If a distributor shows up in any of those places with a product we want, we’ll buy it.

[Added to clarify: and if they don't show up in those places, they're making torrenting that much more attractive. They're just feeding the monster they're trying to fight. That's crystal-clear.

Remember the mistakes that the comic book industry made. Digital distribution made no sense to Marvel and DC, so they never really committed to it. Fine, but reading a comic book on a phone or a laptop made perfect sense to their audience, and they're the people with the money. In the absence of a legal means of digital comics distribution, an illegal infrastructure of file standards, consumption tools, and distribution systems developed and flourished.]

The Oatmeal made an unintentional point that was just as important as the first, however:

The single least-attractive attribute of many of the people who download content illegally is their smug sense of entitlement.

Here’s my conversation with a hypothetical person who wants to check out “Game Of Thrones.” Not with Matthew Inman, author of The Oatmeal, I hasten to say. Just a conglomeration of the species of torrenters as a whole.

You want to see what the hubbub around “Game Of Thrones” is about? Cool. The show is produced by HBO and it’s available exclusively on that channel. It’s a premium channel and any cable provider can sell you a monthly subscription.

HBO’s awesome. They have a streaming app that will allow you to watch pretty much any original series or movie that they still have the rights to (including “Thrones”) and it works with almost everything that can play streaming video. HBO doesn’t even charge for the app or for the extra access.

You say you don’t want to subscribe to HBO, or even cable?

Ah. Well, no worries. The show will be released on DVD and Blu-ray later in the year.

You’re not into physical media? I’m with you. It’ll be on iTunes soon. See? The store page lists the release date. March 6. You can circle it on the calendar and everything.

You’re still frowning. What’s wrong, Scrumpkin?

Oh. You want it right now.

But — umm — the release date is only, like, two or three weeks away. Just hang on a bit. You’ll be fine.

Yes, I heard you (please, sir, there’s really no need to shout). I understand that you want it (and I hope I’m not misquoting you) right the ****ity-**** NOWWWWWWWW. But you can’t have it now. You can have it on March 6. It isn’t even as far away as you think. Remember? February is the super-short month?

(Sigh)

You’re already torrenting it, aren’t you?

Annnnd now you’re also calling me a d*** because I expected you to wait two weeks, and you’re claiming that you’re “forced” to torrent it because the video industry is bunch of turds. How charming.

Here’s the terms of use for commercial content: you have to pay for this stuff. This means either you need to wait for it to become commercially available, or if you torrent it today you need to buy it when it gets released. So long as you buy it as soon as it’s possible to do so, I can confidently reach for my “No Harm Done” rubber stamp. Some content is commercially unavailable because the publisher or distributor has no desire to ever release it. I’ll even go so far as to say that downloading it illegally is a positive thing; you’re helping to keep this creative work alive.

If you avoid purchasing the media in some form, however…you’re just one of those people who prefer to steal things if they think they can get away with it. Simple as that. Get off your high horse.

I’m reminded of a Louis CK joke. I’m going to clean up a little because I’m not Louis CK and this isn’t a live comedy stage. It really wouldn’t come across the same way otherwise.

“I’m totally opposed to stealing an Xbox. Unless Microsoft sets a price for them that I don’t want to pay, or there’s a new model in a warehouse somewhere and it won’t ship to stores for another few weeks. Because what else am I going to do? Not have that Xbox? That’s no solution!”

The world does not OWE you Season 1 of “Game Of Thrones” in the form you want it at the moment you want it at the price you want to pay for it. If it’s not available under 100% your terms, you have the free-and-clear option of not having it.

I sometimes wonder if this simple, grown-up fact gets ignored during all of these discussions about digital distribution.

It was still a funny strip, though.

It seems like there’s only one universally-acceptable answer to “How should the ‘Ringer/Silence’ switch work?” question:

“The switch should behave flawlessly for the specific way that I want it to work.”

When others complain that Your Way totally fails for their personal use of the feature, the proper response is

“Yours is an edge case scenario.”

And when a solution is suggested, the response is

“That makes the feature way, way more complicated than it needs to be.”

(…in the sense that from the perspective of this user, the switch doesn’t need to be any more complicated than “Behaves exactly as I, personally, expect it to when I slide it to the ‘Silence’ position.”)

Mind you, I’m not saying “The people who agree with me are right, and everybody else is just a wrong stupid mister stupid-head wrongy-man.” I’m saying that I and the people who agree with me are no different from anybody else: we expect this switch to work the way that we, personally need it to.

For instance, one of the strongest arguments for the switch’s current operation is “I use my iPhone to wake me up in the morning. If the switch worked the way you want it to work, I’d be woken up by phone calls all during the night.”

To which my insensitive, knee-jerk response would be:

“I understand that Alarm Clock technology has matured to the point where an alarm clock that once would have been housed in the bell tower of a cathedral can now easily fit in a footprint no larger than that of a small bedside table.”

Plus, if someone tries to call me at 4 AM, it’s got to be a complete disaster of some kind and the very last thing I’d want my phone to do is allow me to miss the call. So why would you want to leave your phone on Mute while you sleep? “It’s an edge case!” the knee-jerk responder is therefore tempted to say. “Why must a basic feature be ruined just to address an issue that so few people need to deal with?”

These are all Perfectly Sensible arguments…but only from my personal perspective, which is worthless to anybody but me. For many other people, alarm-clockage is far more relevant to their lives than silencing a device in a public social situation.

“If you need your phone to be completely silent,” the Perfectly Sensible Argument goes, “Just switch it off. Or, take a moment to glance at the screen and see if there are any alarms pending before putting it back in your pocket.”

From that perspective, yes: perfectly sensible. But it’s worthless for users like me. My retort would be “Great: you’ve taken a clear, simple, two-position switch and turned it into a multi-step process. Also, I don’t want a dead phone in my pocket; I just want this device to be both useful and silent.”

Overall, the lesson is that silencing a phone is far too idiosyncratic a feature for any “one answer fits all” implementation. As I said in the blog post, no locked-in definition of “Mute” is going to work for everybody. Worse, any definition will fail for every user at some point, either in the form of a missed alarm or a humiliating disturbance of public silence.

Which is why the only solution is to allow the user to adjust those settings. The iPad has its own little sliding switch. The user can define its function as either “Mute” or “Lock screen rotation.” If the default function of the switch works fine for you, then this “added complexity” is invisible. If you wonder why on God’s green earth any rational human being would prefer an iPad that rotates willy-nilly as you recline on your sofa with a good ebook, you can fix it in about fifteen seconds. And then you never have to touch that Settings panel ever again.

There’s no good reason not to add that sort of customization to the iPhone’s Mute switch. The Mute switch will continue to screw up royally at least once for every user. But when that happens, his faith in Apple will cause them to think “I bet there’s a way to fix that.” After spending a second or five hunting through Settings, they’ll find it: a bank of toggle switches for the four or five different ways that an iPhone can make noise. On-Off-Off-On and presto: the Mute switch works exactly the way it should.

For you, it might be On-On-On-Off.

Possibly Off-Off-Off-On.

Or maybe Off-Off-Off-Off is more to your liking.

Why, I could go on forever. Actually, no, I could only go on for twelve more times but I think you already get the idea.

I still think the default for the Mute switch should be “No noise of any kind under any circumstances.” My argument comes down to this:

• Ask an average person “Your phone has a switch which is described in the documentation as ‘Ringer/Silent’. You’ve set it to ‘Silent.’ Under what circumstances would you expect it to still make noise?” and the most common answer will be “None. None circumstances.” Not everyone will give that absolute response. But I suspect that there will be three or maybe four different answers, and only a single-digit percentage will correctly describe the current behavior of that switch.
• In general, if it’s impossible to identify a canonically-correct default behavior then the default should be the one that’s easiest to understand. “Silence means complete silence” is easier to grok than “…except when it doesn’t. Here, let me explain the thinking behind this switch…” This general theory of UI wouldn’t apply if there were one obvious “right” default. There isn’t one here.
• The “Ringer/Silence” switch is unique among iPhone UI. It’s a mechanical toggle switch. Toggle switches have only two positions: ON and OFF. Not “Mostly On” and “Sort of Off.” This is how the Humans have been taught to think about two-position switches and it’s far more natural for them to translate that same all-or-nothing nature to the feature itself.

But the right answer isn’t “This switch mutes everything.” The absolutely right answer is “If the user doesn’t like the default behavior, the user can go into Settings and tailor this feature to his or her personal needs.” The only canonically wrong answer is to lock the user into one mode.

A Settings panel wouldn’t change the operation of the Mute switch in any way. Slide the switch and the iPhone Mutes. The only difference would be that it’d work properly, as defined by the user’s individual preferences.

The only bits of this discussion that have left me completely confused are those from people who insist that such a Settings panel would overly-complicate the feature. A few people on Twitter actually categorized that as “An Android-like implementation,” and I’m 99.44% sure they didn’t mean it as a compliment for Google.

They could have. There’s only one thing I envy about Android: its underlying instinct to give the user more control of his or her device.

The upside of Apple’s approach is that the iPhone is coherent and consistent and it represents a considered point of view. Apple puts a monumental amount of thought into almost every human-surface detail of every device they make. They make great choices. But the downside is that institutionally, the thought “How can we give the user more freedom?” is lower on the list of priorities than it should be. Apple sometimes defaults to “No, if we let the user do that, it’ll just make things more complicated” even when that’s not the case.

I believe that a different company would have made this switch customizable long before iOS 5.0.

What did I tell you? Tech questions are dull and dispensable. It’s these philosophical questions that make for interesting discussions. Now, about that drink…

Oh, and for the record, when I went out to a comedy club last night…I turned my iPhone all the way off.

Boring. Next?

Why does the iPhone’s “Mute” switch silence some alerts but not all of them? Is that wrong?

Well, gee, I don’t know. I suppose it depends on what you believe the natural mindset of the user is. And, how a device can best support its user. Should it do what the user asks, or what the user would ask it to do, if he or she knew such a thing were possible? Because…

Ahhhhh. That’s much better! Wait here in the living room…I’ll be back with a bottle of claret and a few glasses. In the meantime, switch off the Xbox so we won’t have any distractions during what I’m certain is going to be an awesome discussion. Wait, I’ll even silence my iPhone so that we won’t get interrupted…

Oh, right.

So that’s why I’m moved to post my own thoughts about this Daring Fireball piece. I think Brother Gruber is wrong when he says that Brother Jim is wrong. John’s point is that the iPhone handles the Mute switch in a friendly and sophisticated way. The iPhone doesn’t treat it like a modal function (speaker is on, speaker is off). The iPhone does a contextual mute. It’ll mute any alert that you didn’t specifically tell it to make. You weren’t expecting a phone call to come in at 8:31 PM. It mutes the ringer. You told it to sound an alarm at 7 AM the next morning. The iPhone wakes you up as scheduled.

That’s a reflection of a valid specific philosophy. I just think it’s wrong in this specific feature. The key question to ask is “When the user slides the switch to ‘Mute’, what does he or she think is going to happen?” They’re most likely to think that their iPhone will be completely silent until they flip that switch back.

I also try to think about how the user will react when things go wrong.

Case “A”: he Mutes his phone before a movie. He forgets to reset it afterward. His morning wakeup alarm vibrates instead of making air horn noises, so he oversleeps. He’s late for work, and misses an important meeting.

Case “B”: he Unmutes his phone after the movie and gets to the meeting on time. His boss tells the 20 people present that she needs everyone’s full attention and she asks everybody to mute their phones and please close their laptops. Our man duly flips the switch. At 10:30 AM, just as his boss’ boss is about to make an important point, his iPhone starts quacking to remind him about an eBay auction that ends in 15 minutes. He had totally forgotten that alarm…he set it almost a week ago.

In both scenarios, his iPhone has royally tripped him up. In both scenarios, he’s going to walk back to his office — hopefully not carrying an empty cardboard box and accompanied by someone from HR — and he’s going to immediately have a frank discussion with his iPhone.

“What the hell, man?” he says, as soon as the door’s closed. “I thought you were supposed to be on my side!” he says.

In Case “A”, the iPhone replies “Dude. You told me to be quiet and to stay quiet. If you wanted me to stop being quiet, you had every means and opportunity to do so. You just had to slide the exact same damned switch! You wouldn’t even have had to wake me from sleep! The switch is even marked in orange!!! Nothing else on any Apple product is marked in orange!!! So, gee, Einstein…you think maybe the day-glow orange was warning you that you’d enabled a mode that could have had unexpected, but easily-predictable consequences?”

In case “B”, the iPhone says “Oh. I thought you meant ‘Just be mute in some situations but not others’. No, I didn’t bother telling you what situations those would be. I do that sometimes. I’m a very people-oriented bit of engineering. I were a dumb device, I’d just observe the state of the switch and do exactly as I was told and never use my own discretion at all. Oh, and: not that you bothered to thank me for waking you up on time this morning despite the fact that you’d left me on ‘Mute’, but you’re welcome.”

(Of course the iPhone wouldn’t actually say these things. The user would be so angry that the phone would still be on “Mute.” But the iPhone would definitely be thinking them.)

My philosophy is “It’s much better to be upset with yourself for having done something stupid than to be upset with a device that made the wrong decision on its own initiative.” Every time I screw up and take responsibility for my own stupidity, it’s another Pavlovian stimulus that encourages smarter future behavior. If I forgot to unmute my phone after a movie, I’m a dumbass. But if my iPhone makes noise during the movie despite the fact that I’d deliberately chosen to silence it, I can only conclude that the dumbasses in this equation reside about 3,000 miles west of here.

I can’t give Apple a free pass on this. I was just as upset with an Android phone I once tested. I was getting a demo photo inside Bates Hall, the gorgeous, cathedral-like reading room at the Boston Public Library. I put the phone on “Mute”, I walked quietly to my desired position in the middle of the room, I tapped the shutter button…and then a maximum-volume CLICKKKK!!!!! resounded and reverberated through the cavern walls.

I felt like a total hayseed. “Stupid piece of crap,” I muttered, as I tried my best to adopt an apologetic facial expression and slinked away. Yes: this phone, at that moment, was a stupid piece of crap and I felt, correctly, that none of the responsibility for this screwup was mine.

Great technology locates a sweet spot between anticipating your intentions and only doing exactly what you tell it to do. Apple’s very good at this but like any company, they succeed and they fail. Apple’s most notable successes and failures usually spring from the same basic company mindset: “We know what the customer wants better than the customer does. After all, the customer doesn’t spend every working hour of the day thinking about how to make a great phone.”

The Mute behavior of the iPhone is just wrong; it’s an important function and its behavior isn’t transparent. The correct answer is so clear to me. Whether the switch silences everything or just some things, the behavior is going to trip people up sometimes. It’s unavoidable. Apple can only choose how users get tripped up. The right answer to most feature design problems the one that puts more control in the hands of the user. If screwups are inevitable, then the iPhone should choose to screw up in a way where the user feels like he understands what went wrong, takes responsibility for that mistake, and knows how to avoid repeating it. I shouldn’t be forced to consult a little laminated wallet card every time I slide a two-state “Mute” switch, to remind myself of all of the iPhone’s independent exceptions to the concept of “silence.” I can’t review all pending alerts and notifications to anticipate future problems.

No. I should slide the switch to “Mute,” and then the phone goes SILENT. If I miss an appointment because I did that, it’s completely on me. If my phone disrupts a performance despite the fact that I took clear and deliberate action to prevent that from happening…that’s the result of sloppy design. Or arrogant design, which is harder to forgive.

“Why not switch the phone off when you need complete silence?” comes the counter-argument. That’ll certainly work. But if you’re claiming that the Mute switch’s current behavior is correct, shouldn’t you argue that the iPhone should refuse to shut down if there are alarms and reminders scheduled?

You see where this line of thought leads? Straight to that scene in “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide” where a hundred passengers on a commercial spaceflight are kept in suspended animation for centuries. The computer that operates the flight is awaiting a shipment of moist towelettes for the courtesy and comfort of the passengers. It’s the ultimate example of a computer preferring to do what it thinks its users want, instead of just doing what the user asked it to do.

No, I’m fine with Mute meaning M-U-T-E. Particularly if the phone defaults to “vibrate” when muted. But the right answer seems clear. The iPhone must never let a user down the way it let down that man at the philharmonic.

During those endless moments when the conductor and members of a 40 piece orchestra and the 600 people in the audience were fixing him with icy glares of utter hatred, and he frantically clicked and re-clicked the “Mute” switch on his quacking iPhone to no effect, and he was desperately trying to convey that goddamnit, he put this thing on Mute before he even sat down…yes, the iPhone was a stupid piece of crap.

I almost never say that about my iPhone or iPad. This problem is so easy to fix. Even something as simple as a Settings option (“Mute switch silences all alerts”) would do the trick. You don’t have to ask me what the default setting should be.

The memory that sticks with me, in fact, is that I was temporarily dumbstruck by the sheer feel of the device. I was testing it while sitting with a couple of Apple executives as well as an Apple PR handler. The idea was that I could try out the device while also asking them questions. As I used the iPhone, I found it very difficult to speak questions or even listen to the answers. The iPhone was so unlike anything I’d ever handled.

The iPhone: Five years later… | Macworld.

I had to link to my pal Jason Snell’s reminiscence about his first hands-on experience with the iPhone. It was so very familiar. I probably had my own briefing on the same day. I was a room with a VP, a senior executive, and a PR person. I had about a half an hour or maybe 45 minutes, tops, to ask as many questions as I could about a device that I knew nothing about until that morning. So what was the first thing I said after they handed me the iPhone?

Well, I said “Go help yourself to a cookie,” nodding towards the catering table. “I wanna play with this for a while.”

Yes. I don’t regret it, either. I had been blown away by Steve Jobs’ demo. I didn’t want to be led or coached. I wanted to see if I could make it do absolutely everything I wanted it to just by poking around with it.

It lived up to every expectation. Nothing — nothing — about the iPhone or the way it worked was in any way similar to anything else I’d ever used. Every tap and swipe and pinch and zoom was accompanied by the exhilaration of discovery and of new experiences. And the only time I couldn’t get something to work was when I launched the Notes app. None of its buttons responded. I finally asked for help…and was told that what I had been trying to use was just an image file taking the place of an app that wasn’t on the device yet.

I’ll never, ever get bored with my job. Every now and again, a device like the iPhone comes along. Great, groundbreaking technology provokes a physiological response: a tingling at the base of my neck. When a thing sets off my Spidey-Sense like that it means This is effing brilliant. I’ve never seen anything like it, but I’m certain that this marks a real moment of history.

Devices like the iPhone come along rarely. In between, I look at hundreds of phones and laptops and social networks and generic apps and gadgets which are each about 80% interchangeable with anything else in their product category. I have to check all of these things out. It’s part of the job. I keep right on looking and it’s for the same reason why movie critics keep coming to the screening room day after day even they know damned well that the first film of the day is going to be the second sequel to a movie based on an 80′s TV show: we love what we do and when we find something special, we feel like that love’s being returned.

Oh, and Jason was 100% right on another point. Man, oh, man…as someone who had actually had substantial hands-on time with a working iPhone, there were a few months in 2007 when paying for your own meals and drinks was purely optional. Everybody wanted to hear the story, everybody wanted to ask questions and hear more.

It was just like that scene from “Bull Durham,” only more so.

“Yeah, I used an iPhone once. It was the best 37 minutes of my life…”