Abigail Blakeway Edelman, born October 31st at 8:02 am, 6 pounds 5 ounces.

Benjamin Blakeway Edelman, born October 31st at 8:04 am, 6 pounds 2 ounces.

Mom and babies are healthy, Dad’s a little frazzled but ecstatically happy.

Before I had even left for the con, the panel schedule was already messed up. The Balticon folks had mistakenly given me Scott Edelman‘s reading slot and emailed me panel assignments that were at variance with the pocket schedule on the website. Things further devolved from there when it was discovered that my picture appeared next to Scott’s bio in the program book; my buddy Tom Doyle had been given two reading slots; and the schedule for at least one entire room seemed to have come unstuck in time, leaving plenty of people with double bookings, missing panels, or both.

Late Sunday afternoon, I discovered that my panel on “The Future of Cities” — which had been listed at 3 pm in the email I received from programming — and which the pocket program listed at 5 pm 6 pm — was actually going to be held at 6 pm 7 pm. Plus it was going to be short a moderator, considering that he was double booked. At that point, I just decided I’d had enough and bagged the whole thing. I was sick anyways.

Some cons are just like that.

But hey, just because Balticon was chaotic and organizationally challenged in places doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun. I go to cons for very specific reasons: (1) to catch up with friends that I generally wouldn’t otherwise see; (2) to soak up SFnal ideas and pour a few into the mix myself; and (3) to promote myself and my books. But most of the people wandering the hallways at Balticon seemed to have a different agenda. They were more interested in filking or dressing up like slutty Jedi knights or playing obscure board games until four in the morning. Which is fine. Personally, I’d prefer to listen to panelists discuss the ways in which Maud’Dib deviates from the Joseph Campbell mythical hero track, but that’s just me.

Add to this the fact that the Baltimore Marriott Hunt Valley Inn is a terribly nice place, perfect for cons with its abundance of labyrinthine hallways and nooks for display tables. The dealer’s room was enticing and not too crowded, the bar was inviting, and the conference rooms got a little too hot (but then again, when have you been to a con where that wasn’t the case?).

Will I go back? Maybe not every year, but… sure, I’ll go back.

Some of the highlights of my Balticon experience:

• A very nice dinner with fellow authors Jeri Smith-Ready, Maria Snyder, and David J. Williams, among others, during which we discussed our favorite topics (publishing and book promotion).
• A hyperkinetic reading by David J. Williams for his just-published debut novel The Mirrored Heavens. Let’s just say that watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was kind of a letdown in comparison. Indy may have had a nuclear bomb blast, giant killer ants, motorcycle chases, and a swordfight atop Jeeps cruising at 80 mph, but David’s excerpt had some SERIOUS FRICKIN’ ACTION. David mentions on his blog that one of the audience members fell asleep and began snoring during the reading — which is true — but hey, I’m sure there was some deranged sap who slept through the bombing of Pearl Harbor too.
• A joint signing with comic book artist and fabulously friendly guy Mark Wheatley, during which much discussion was had about Marvel Comics film properties (Iron Man, of course, plus the upcoming Captain America, Thor, and Avengers flicks) and Hollywood in general. That’s the cover of Mark’s Frankenstein Mobster on the right.
• A long discussion with Nathan Lilly and Diane Weinstein about William Hope Hodgson’s classic 1912 science fiction/horror novel The Night Land, which then segued into a discussion about H.P. Lovecraft, which then segued into a long complaint by me about how nobody’s done the kind of authoritative chronological trade paperback treatment for Lovecraft like Del Rey has done for Robert E. Howard.
• Reading chapters 1, 9, and part of 10 from my upcoming novel MultiReal and hand-selling a number of copies of Infoquake in the hallways. Supposedly the readings will be available on the Balticon podcast at some point, at which point I’ll link there.
• A very stimulating panel on “How Long Will It Still Be Called the Internet?” The panel’s supposed moderator (whose name I never caught) walked in two minutes after the hour, informed me and fellow panelist Angela Render that he was double-booked, and promptly hightailed it out of there. Since neither Angela nor I had prepared any questions, the panel soon turned into a lively free-for-all with the audience about net neutrality, government censorship, the changing nature of web client technology, and the sad state of email. The discussion quickly went over my head, but in a good way.
• Counting the aforementioned Internet panel, writer and web programmer Angela Render moderated no less than three of my Webbish panels this weekend. I think she deserves a metal of some sort. (No, not a medal. I think we should name an atomic element after her.) No offense, Angela, you did a good job, but I’m sick of you.
• Sampling the wonders of шљивовица with my official fangirl Danita Fries and my future wife Suzanne Rosin. (No, she’s not really my future wife. Not in this dimension, at least.) (What, you don’t read Cyrillic? That’s “Slivovitz.” Otherwise known as “fermented plum juice,” “paint thinner mixed with battery acid,” or “good shit” to you and me.)

Here are the only things you can communicate in a car that I can think of offhand:

So what’s so fascinating about these gestures? First off, nobody ever really teaches them to you. I can’t remember anybody ever showing me the gesture to get someone to roll down their window; I simply learned it in context.

Even more interesting is the fact that the official hand gestures that the government does teach you — left hand extended to turn left, left hand up to turn right — are hardly ever used. The few times a year I see somebody stick their hand out the window to make an official hand turn signal, it takes me a few seconds to actually remember which gesture translates to which direction.

But there’s a problem in that certain necessary communications just aren’t a part of the common lexicon of driving. We don’t need to communicate angst at the state of the Dow Jones to other drivers on the highway, but there are certain basic concepts it would be helpful to be able to communicate. How do you indicate to someone that you want to go straight and not turn, for instance? You can’t. (Not easily, at least.) And here are some more simple gestures that I think should be a part of our driving vocabulary:

• Follow me.
• Please move over a lane and let me pass you.
• Stop tailgating me, I’m going to move over and let you pass as soon as I pass this group of cars.
• You seem to be having a mechanical problem with your car.
• You’ve got your brights on and you’re right behind me.
• You’ve been driving with your blinker on for the past 3 miles.

But the most crucial omission from this lexicon is that there’s no way to say you’re sorry. Sometimes you can use the friendly one-handed wave, but unless you do it just right, this gesture can be mistaken for arrogance. I remember once a number of years back I was driving along a highway paying too much attention to the radio, and I almost sideswiped a church van with a dozen people on it that had crept into my blind spot. We both swerved and caused half a dozen cars around us to swerve too. Luckily everything came out okay and nobody was hurt. But in that two-second interval before we moved off to different lanes and parted forever, I couldn’t think of any way to indicate to the occupants of the van that I had made a mistake. They had plenty of ways to communicate their anger with me — honking, shaking fists, yelling — but how could I say I was sorry? I couldn’t. These people reached their destination angry and scared, I’m sure, and there was nothing I could do about it.

They say you can tell a lot about a culture by studying their language. The Eskimos have a gazillion words for snow. There’s a hunter/gatherer tribe in Brazil that only has three words for counting: “one,” “two,” and “many.” So what does it say about driving culture that we have no way of saying we’re sorry? It’s a cycle that only leads in one direction: we have no way of expressing calm and measured politeness on the road, therefore people interpret this as hostility, and therefore people are angrier and more reckless on the road.

(Of course, now that I look up on Wikipedia about the Eskimo words for snow, I see that this idea is really just an urban legend. Lots of fascinating reading on Wikipedia about this topic in the article on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, if you’re interested.)

I read an article recently about the debacle in Iraq that demonstrated just how deadly the communication barrier can be. (Wish I could remember where it was — The New Republic, maybe?) Apparently the common gesture that we Americans use for “stop” — holding your hand up high, fingers open, palm out — doesn’t mean that to Iraqis. That means “hello” or “come here.” You can imagine where this leads. A confused and frightened eighteen-year-old soldier standing at a checkpoint with an intimidating M-16 raises his hand and yells at an Iraqi to stop where he is. The confused and frightened Iraqi doesn’t understand English and misinterprets the hand gesture, thinking the soldier is demanding that he come here right now. Iraqi runs towards the checkpoint as quickly as he can, soldier thinks he’s a suicide bomber and sprays him with bullets. This isn’t just a hypothetical; soldiers say it happens all the time.

Update 8/29/07 12:30 PM: Found the article in The Nation (“The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness”). It’s really sobering reading. Here’s the passage in particular I was remembering:

A few veterans said checkpoint shootings resulted from basic miscommunication, incorrectly interpreted signals or cultural ignorance.

“As an American, you just put your hand up with your palm towards somebody and your fingers pointing to the sky,” said Sergeant Jefferies, who was responsible for supplying fixed checkpoints in Diyala twice a day. “That means stop to most Americans, and that’s a military hand signal that soldiers are taught that means stop. Closed fist, please freeze, but an open hand means stop. That’s a sign you make at a checkpoint. To an Iraqi person, that means, Hello, come here. So you can see the problem that develops real quick. So you get on a checkpoint, and the soldiers think they’re saying stop, stop, and the Iraqis think they’re saying come here, come here. And the soldiers start hollering, so they try to come there faster. So soldiers holler more, and pretty soon you’re shooting pregnant women.”

***

Here’s something else I think about before I judge other drivers on the road. A few times a year, I’ll purposefully skirt traffic laws because of legitimate emergencies. When my dog’s been attacked and he’s bleeding to death in my passenger seat, I’m going to drive on the shoulder and zoom around people if I need to. If my wife’s about to have a baby, I’m going to veer in front of other cars and make illegal U-turns in the middle of the street if it’s the quickest way to the hospital. I’m not saying this is always a wise thing to do, but once or twice a year you don’t do the wise thing.

According to these statistics, there are at least 131,000 cars that drive along my route to work every day. If one in 1,000 people are having some kind of emergency like that every day, that makes 131 drivers just along my route who are driving like frickin’ maniacs for legitimate reasons. Even if the number of people in a crisis any given day is one in 10,000, that’s still 13 drivers driving like Donald Duck on some really bad acid. Statistically speaking, then, there’s a very good chance that some of the idiotic drivers I pass are in the middle of some kind of crisis that makes them throw out the rulebook.

Again, I’m not saying this is excusable driving behavior. But it really pokes a hole in the perception that the road is full of angry, arrogant drivers that are just cutting ahead of you to be assholes, doesn’t it?

No, I haven’t totally lost the few remaining marbles I possess. This site was hacked, sometime between yesterday evening and this morning. Looks like all they did was replace the index files in each directory. As far as I can tell, everything else remains intact. But unfortunately, I don’t have access to my backup files right now and so I can’t restore everything to full functionality quite yet.

In the meantime, please enjoy this photo of Marty Feldman.

I’m using a WordPress plug-in called Jerome’s Keywords, which puts a convenient text box for entering tags on your Compose page and then gives you lots of convenient functions to call them up on your blog. In addition to displaying the tags on the meta line, these tags also appear in the page’s meta keywords (which, contrary to what some people think, isn’t totally useless).

Why tagging? I’ve thought long and hard about the rationale for emphasizing tags over categories. Obviously tags allow more specificity than plain old categories do. Categorization is a vestige from the days when knowledge was limited by resources like everything else in the world. If you’ve only got one hard copy of your biography of President Kennedy to put on the shelves, you’re probably not going to create a whole section for Kennedy family history. You’ll probably stick it on a shelf labeled “U.S. Presidents” or “U.S. History.”

But on the World Wide Web, the shelves and the books are all virtual. Nobody has to print up a thousand copies of your screed on President Kennedy and physically file it on a thousand different shelves. We can create new shelves on the fly as soon as we think of them, and we can instantly file things on a thousand shelves simultaneously. (Or, more accurately, keep one copy of the book and create a thousand different pointers to it.)

Marshall McLuhan once said that “the medium is the message.” The exciting thing about this whole cheesily named Web 2.0 thing is that we’re just now starting to discover what kind of medium the Internet is. Just as early television shows were little more than theater productions captured on film, so the early web was little more than magazine columns and marketing brochures distributed through digital pipes. That’s changing now, just give it time.

(A sideline: I find it quite irritating that Senator Ted Stevens got so much heat and ridicule heaped upon him for calling the Internet “a series of tubes.” Not that I mind Ted Stevens getting spanked so much, because I think he’s a reactionary blowhard. But his analysis of the Internet as a series of tubes was basically sound, albeit lamely phrased.)

(Another sideline: As I’ve written before on my DeepGenre post The Mutation of Genre, I believe that genre is another vestige of limited resources that will eventually disappear. Meaning in fifty years, a massive catch-all term like “science fiction” won’t make much sense to anyone anymore. Instead you’ll be browsing exclusively through finer gradations like steampunk, alternate history, and medieval thriller.)

What this all means for the blog is: whereas before, only the pages sharing a broad subject matter like book promotion were tied together, now you can find all the articles in my blog related to pattern recognition, for instance, or the KGB Bar. You could have just typed “pattern recognition” into the Search box, of course… but chances are you wouldn’t have thought of it, and having a handy-dandy link makes you that more likely to pursue it.

So why didn’t I just expand the list of categories? Why not add just add categories for pattern recognition and Krokus and The Empire Strikes Back and all the other little things I talk about here? Because I’ve hedged my bets by keeping the categories system too. So you’ll still be able to peruse broad categories of my blog posts (e.g. film, technology, science fiction) as well as granular tag terms.

How long this arrangement is going to last I don’t know. Keep in mind that I’m still going back through the archives to tag old articles, so the process isn’t complete. Once I’m done, I’ll probably find someplace to stick a tag cloud too.

Let me know what you think of the tags so far.

After poking around a bit on the blog, I discovered that David’s part of a three-person team that produces the online comic strip The DADA Detective. (See the snippet to the right.)

It’s the ongoing tale of a hard-boiled detective hired by a rich heretical talking mime to find her missing duck, with the aid of the mad Doctor Victor von Phlogistein, who once created a geiger counter out of a muffin and who has a large hairy yeti as an assistant. Among the suspects in ze duck’s disappearance: Colonel Dijon; a dastardly masked fellow known as the Red Heron; and Peter Lorre.

There’s something oddly charming about this strip. Milloway and co-writer Matt Wood have a gift for non sequitur, with punch lines that range from wryly amusing to laugh-out-loud funny. The artwork (courtesy of Stephanie Freese) is part Edward Gorey and part Charles Schulz. And the whole thing is just addictive as hell. I started clicking through and got to episode 60 before I even looked up. (Start with episode 1 and you’ll see what I mean.)

Still not convinced these guys have talent? Then you simply must check out their Chocolypse Now, a mash-up of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Heart of Darkness, including a candy-themed parody of T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men that made me snort up a mouthful of Coke Zero onto my keyboard.

I took the liberty of e-mailing David to try to get the scoop about the DADA Detective. The three behind the DADA Detective agreed to a micro-email-interview here on my blog. So here goes:

Q: Give me the quick and dirty background on the three of you.

A: Matt Wood, Stephanie Freese, and Dave Milloway have been good friends since college. Stephanie has a degree in painting. Matt and Dave are both English grads and comics nerds who somehow convinced Stephanie to get involved in illustrating a story that, god willing, will never again see the light of day. Despite that disaster, we’ve continued collaborating for nigh on 10 years now. Our work meetings get pretty silly sometimes, but we think that’s one of our strengths — our goofing around has produced our best ideas. See Chocolypse Now and the DADA Detective.

Q: You’re standing in an elevator when suddenly Neil Gaiman, R. Crumb, and Art Spiegelman all walk in. You tell them you’ve got this great online comic strip and they ask you what it’s about. What do you say?

A: Considering we like to tailor our pitch to our audience, we’d say something like: “It’s about a hard boiled P.I. hired by a talking mime to find a missing duck named Alistair. It’s kinda like if Philip Marlowe got drunk with Edward Gorey and decided to play a prank on Salvador Dali.”

Q: How long are you planning on keeping the DADA Detective going? Does the story have an ending?

A: I would say we’re close to half way through. Despite the absurdity, we do have a story with an actual ending that might even make sense, given it takes place in a town called Dadaville. Dadaism is more an inspiration than a guiding light. We’ve developed the story in broad strokes, of course, with lots of room for improvisation. That’s the fun of a serial, after all.

(There’s a much more comprehensive interview posted on Comixpedia that’s worth reading, too.)

(If you’re hooked, you can get the book at Lulu.com for the bargain price of ten bucks. Go throw these guys some love.)

During our week here, we’ve seen the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Chartres Cathedral, the Musée d’Orsey, the Musée Cluny, Sacré Couer, and Sainte Chapelle. (See the photo of the stained glass in Sainte Chapelle to the left.) Plus we’ve taken a boat tour of the Seine, bummed around Montmartre, eaten lots of cheese and pastries, drunken lots of wine, and played a few games of Scrabble. (Someone please back me up on this… “financee” is a word, isn’t it? Isn’t it??!?)

Some more of my (remarkably obvious) observations about the French:

1. Slow pace. The French don’t like to hurry. I knew this before I arrived, and was prepared for it. But what I wasn’t prepared for was that the French really really don’t like to hurry. We’ve had plenty of three-course meals that took two and a half hours. When we reached the front of the line for Saint Chapelle, it took an astounding three minutes for the woman behind the counter to swipe my credit card and hand us a pair of tickets. I couldn’t help but wonder if French businesses move at this pace as well. Are French suppliers losing bids because their salespeople take too long to submit their proposals? While one can’t always move at the frenetic pace of modern America (go go go go go!), one wonders how long before this attitude seriously bites France in the ass.

2. Gay pride. I’ve seen a number of openly gay couples walking around holding hands as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Which it is, for them, or at least it should be. Perhaps there’s a whole culture of homophobia that I’m not aware of — and, of course, one can only imagine what the attitudes are like in rural areas of France — but on the surface of things French culture seems remarkably open and tolerant of differences in sexual orientation.

3. The clash between the old and new. Periodically the French like to take something old (say, the Louvres, built in the 12th century) and plunk something shocking and new down in the middle of it (say, I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid, which has been sitting in the courtyard of the Louvres since 1989 — see the photo to the right). It all seems shockingly progressive for a country that’s so fiercely protective of its slowly dying language.

4. Racial harmony. America likes to flaunt its supposed racial equality, but we all know that the seams in the racial patchwork quilt are visible and fraying. Here in France, however, you can find black, white, and yellow commingling in relative harmony, or so it seemed to me. In downtown Washington, you often see groups of black and white people walking in racially balkanized groups, as if gathered together for protection. In downtown Paris, whites and blacks all seemed to jumble together without a trace of self-consciousness.

5. …Except for the Middle Easterners. Take everything I just said about racial harmony and nix it where people from the Middle East are concerned. Though nobody says so, here in Paris they feel like second-class citizens. You routinely see Middle Easterners doing the menial service jobs — washing the dishes, picking up the trash, sweeping the floors — and as a result, they seem to band together in racially balkanized groups, as if gathered together for protection.

I’m back in Washington, DC later this afternoon, after which this blog will continue on its normal course of shameless self-promotion, humorous introspection, and sour grumbling about the state of the world.

Watch this space for a link to an as-yet-inexistent Flickr feed of photos from my trip to France. (Update: The Flickr photo set is up. Also check out the panoramic pic from the balcony of our apartment.)

I’ve never been to France before, or even Europe. In fact, I’ve never actually been outside the United States, with the exception of a handful of trips to Mexico and a cruise two decades ago.

So it must be of some sociological interest to someone to know the first impressions of a man visiting a foreign country for the first time. A few key things I’ve noticed about France, in no real order:

1. Sirens. You hear them constantly in Paris — perhaps it’s the rioting, which is supposedly going on in the suburbs as I write this — but that tinny, high-pitched, clown-hornish whine is completely foreign to my ears and keeps the French emergency vehicles from fading into background noise. The only place I’ve actually heard these sirens is in the movies, and they don’t seem quite real. Every time I hear one, I can’t help thinking that somewhere there’s a Muppet in trouble.

2. Small cars. Washington, DC isn’t the American capital of SUVs, but you still see plenty of them around. You can’t drive a mile without seeing at least a handful of SUVs and a pickup truck or two. But after 48 hours in France, I’ve seen precisely two of them. All of the cars here are ridiculously small, especially the one-person smart cars that make the Cooper Mini look gargantuan. It’s kind of refreshing to drive down the highway and be able to actually see more than two carlengths up the road. Or to stand on one side of the street and have an unimpeded view of what’s on the other side.

3. Different fixtures. The world is flat, or so Thomas Friedman says, but don’t tell the people who manufacture European doorknobs and toilets and electrical plugs and light switches and all the other ephemera that normally fade into the landscape of everyday life. I find myself in these endless reveries about the parallel evolutions of the elevator button, amazed at how these common devices can look so different from their American counterparts and yet still work so intuitively. It’s nice to know that American cultural imperialism hasn’t yet conquered the small things, that there are still European light switch manufacturers that have fallen beneath the notice of some faceless megacorporation across the Atlantic.

4. Smoking. People smoke in France. You see it on the street, in restaurants, in cars. (Observe, for example, this local bohemian seen loitering in a very narrow, French-looking street near a bicycle. I believe there was an accordion playing in the background too.) We saw the very disconcerting site the other day of a man lighting his cigarette as he was walking in to a restaurant. This kind of tobaccoism is still prevalent in the American South and parts of the Midwest, but it’s pretty much vanished from the so-called Blue States.

5. The weight gap. For a country famously full of gourmands (and a diet stuffed with carbohydrates and fattening cheeses), the French are a remarkably thin people. Perhaps it’s all that walking caused by the dearth of taxicabs and escalators. But nearly everyone you see falls under the U.S. Surgeon General’s definition of height/weight proportionate. The kind of abundantly, gloriously, fuckityouonlyliveoncely fat people that you often see in America are nowhere to be found here.

6. Brand-free streets. In the United States, you can’t walk down the street without getting visually assaulted by a group of thuggish brand names. Nike, Coke, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Gatorade, 7-11, Bank of America, ESPN. In Paris I expected a corresponding assault by thuggish French brands, but that’s not the case. You can look up and down major thoroughfares in Paris and see nothing but independently owned retailers. Shop windows don’t have the aggressively enticing displays here like they do in the States, so for example, convenience stores that carry Coke products don’t feel the need to broadcast it in three-foot-high letters.

More observations later on in the trip. That is, if I don’t get too caught up in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, which I had the good fortune to find (in English!) at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore.

The first time you hear the rules, the game sounds like a sexist piece of politically incorrect frat-boy mischief — and, okay, there is an element of that. But once you’ve played a handful of times, you realize that this game isn’t really about sex at all; it’s a potent way to examine how we make choices and deal with opportunities.

Here are the basic rules for “Ten Women”. (Or, at least, here’s how I remember and play the game.)

1. Sit or stand in a public place where there’s plenty of pedestrian traffic. Mall, airport, movie theater, baseball stadium, it doesn’t matter.
2. Take a careful look at the next ten women who walk by, one at a time.
3. As each woman passes, you must decide right then and there whether that’s the one woman out of the ten you get to go to bed with.
4. Once that woman has passed you by, you can no longer choose her. You’ve lost the opportunity forever.
5. If you pass on the ninth woman, then you’re stuck with the tenth, no matter how unattractive she might be (by whatever standards you use to judge that).

Sounds juvenile, right? Sounds sexist? Indulge me here. Keep reading.

“Ten Women” is about women in the same way that blackjack is about laminated pieces of paper with pictures and numbers on them. It’s really about taking risks and making gambles. It’s about learning to make quick decisions and not regretting your mistakes. The people — like the cards — are just tokens.

Still think the game is sexist or objectifying? Then think about this: imagine these ten women are ten stocks you might buy. Or ten colleges you might enroll in. Or ten potential employees you might hire. Ten properties you might buy. Ten potential spouses. (Did you make the right choice marrying your teenage sweetheart, or should you have waited to see if someone more compatible came along…?)

Make your choice, and make it now. Remember, you can’t change your mind. Time marches on, opportunities disappear. You can’t unchoose.

The blackjack comparison is actually quite apropos. In both games, you’re making a split-second decision based on the scantest evidence. For blackjack, you’re guessing whether the next card will get you close to a score of 21 without going over, based on the known cards in the deck. For “Ten Women,” you’re guessing whether the next woman will be attractive, based on the general composition of the crowd and the type of place you’re parked at. The next person who walks by might be the most desirable woman in the history of the world; she might be, well, that woman’s polar opposite.

(The big difference between blackjack and “Ten Women,” of course, is that with the latter there is no definitive valuation system. In blackjack, a seven of spades is a seven of spades, period. But how do you judge whether a person is attractive or not? Can you necessarily make the leap between attractiveness and sexual compatibility? What part does personality play in the equation? And so on.)

The great thing about “Ten Women” is that you can very easily tweak it to apply to any gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, or demographic. You can define your own parameters of victory. Remix the rules and call it “Ten Men,” or “Ten African-American Women,” or “Ten Gender-Neutral Height-Challenged Persons of Asian Descent” if you’d like. Or take out the prurient aspects altogether and aim for the tallest or shortest person out of ten.

You’ll be amazed at what half an hour of this game will reveal about your personality and your character. What criteria do you use to make spur-of-the-moment decisions? How quickly can you make choices? Are you a gambler that passes over the mediocre Women #1-7 in the hopes of landing your perfect mate in Woman #8, #9, or #10? Are you a conservative soul who sticks with the nice-but-unremarkable Woman #3? Do you choke up with indecision and wind up with Woman #9 or #10 every time?

Play the game with a friend, and you’ll be amazed at what the game reveals about the inequities of society. Sometimes you start playing “Ten Women” right when a bus full of [insert your least sexually desirable demographic here] starts unloading passengers. You’ve got a losing hand, the cards are stacked against you, and there’s nothing you can do but minimize your losses. Meanwhile, your friend starts counting right when a group of [insert your most sexually desirable demographic here] walks by, and he’s got the pick of the litter. Life is unfair.

In The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, Bronson uses the game to discuss the pitfalls of the software industry.

It was like shipping software [he writes]; if you chose not to ship, you couldn’t ever get the opportunity back … The relevant question never goes away: Do I ship now, entering the market before my competitors, thereby gaining early market share? Or do I wait, improve my program until it’s the best on the market, and steal market share with a superior product?

There are all kinds of ways you can apply the game of “Ten Women” to your life. The metaphors you use are up to you.