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Martin Gardner died this past weekend at the age of 95. In the scheme of things, not the worst age to die. He had time to accomplish many of the things he wanted to in life. And oh, the things he accomplished!

When you’re a brainy misfit kid, say around thirteen years old, too smart by half for your own good but utterly unable to connect with kids your own age, life becomes a kind of purgatory. You may have friends, but in some ways you find yourself completely alone.

But then one day you pick up a copy of “Scientific American”, and happen upon Martin Gardner’s column on Mathematical Games. And suddenly you are not alone. Here is a man — an actual, honest to goodness grownup — who shares your loves, your passions, your belief that there is beauty in the very fabric of the universe.

I remember poring over his columns for hours at a time, studying the beautiful puzzles, working them out, letting one thought lead to another until my mind had built an entire cathedral of meaning.

Martin Gardner was not afraid to be a nerd, an uncool intellectual, a mathematical devotee. He reveled in mathematical beauty, not with the jaded and self-interested eye of a grownup, but with a kid’s perfect enthusiasm, a pure unadulterated hobbyist’s delight.

I saw him speak once, when I was a teenager. I was thrilled to see my idol standing before us in person, and he did not disappoint. He talked of puzzles, of strange mathematical paradoxes, of delightful creations conjured from pure thought. I saw then that Martin Gardner was a brilliant overgrown kid, excited and inspired — as I was — by the sheer joy of problem solving.

He is gone now in body, but will forever be with us in spirit. I realize, in this moment of this man’s death, knowing how many lives he has touched, and how many young minds he has kindled, that this is not an occasion for mourning, but rather a celebration of a life beautifully lived.

As they walked the deserted streets in the gathering gloom, the travellers instinctively huddled together. Josh looked off into the distance, at the five ramparts around the city, each glowing with an eerie green light. He turned to the large demon. “Why does the city have five sides?”

Charlie shook his head. “Didn’t always. The city’s changed in all kinds of ways, and some of those changes are hard to explain. ‘Cause it’s not really the city — it’s more like the reality.”

Josh looked confused, and the big demon just shrugged and smiled apologetically. “Sorry kid, I’m no good with metaphysics.”

Sid chimed in helpfully. “Old Charlie’s probably a little out of his depth here. Hey Teach, can you help us out with this one?”

Mr. Symarian smiled sadly. “It is indeed as our large friend says. Since the arrival of She Who Sleeps, it is believed that this reality itself has been changing to reflect her dreams.”

“Wait,” Jenny said, “are you talking about my grandmother Amelia?”

If we attained true global peace, would we stop saluting flags?
If we knew the world would never end, would we still recycle plastic bags?

If we all were telepaths, would that take away love’s passion?
If we were by love at last fulfilled, would there still be any jobs in fashion?

If we could beam ourselves at will, would we love fast cars anyway?
If we knew that we could live forever, would we still cherish every day?

Around the central spire of the palace, the city was circular. There were five ramparts, spaced equally around the circle. Atop each of these ramparts was a flaming torch, eternally lit with a greenish flame the color of the sky. The travellers walked in silence through the seemingly deserted streets. Gradually the sky darkened, and the gloom settled around them like dust.

Charlie was the first to speak. “I remember back when these streets used to be full of life.” The large demon looked around with sadness. “It was like one big party here, and everyone was laughin’. I would come home at night through the crowds and it’d just feel great to be alive. I remember once, back when I was just a boy, my mom…”

“Your mom?” Jenny interrupted. “But you’re a demon!”

“Yeah,” he replied sadly, “You got that right. I am a demon. But I wasn’t always like this,” he said. “I had a life once — before I was, um, taken.”

“Taken?” she said. “I don’t understand.”

He shrugged. “Not sure I can explain it right, at least not till you understand more. Reality is, well, a kind of prism, and even truth itself can bend. That’s as true on your world as it is on mine. And wherever the light bends, we gotta see what it shows. Sure, I’m now a demon, can’t argue with that. Every bit as much as your teacher there,” he pointed toward Mr. Symarian, “is now human.”

“Mr. Symarian?” Josh broke in, looking at their teacher in alarm. “You weren’t always human?”

“Perhaps,” their teacher said, smoothly changing the subject, “We can continue this fascinating discussion another time. As you can see, we have arrived at our destination for the night.”

It would be interesting to expand the notion of the Subversion Clock to include other aspects of everyday life. A motion sensor could be placed in every room of a house, and assorted mechanisms installed in the walls, doors, windows, cabinets, floors, closets, and miscellaneous nooks and crannies. Anyone entering a room would encounter a perfectly ordinary space. However, whenever the motion sensor in a room detects that nobody is present, various changes start to occur.

Towels might change color, or wallpapers vary in pattern. The woodgrain of the doors might mutate from one visit to the next. The picture on the mantel could change in both content and position. A throw rug may appear on the bedroom floor one day, only to be gone the next time you enter. Window curtains might change to slats, or vice versa.

There are so many possibilities for the inconstant house, so many opportunities for play. And of course the best changes would be the little ones — those that require attention to be noticed. It should not be too obvious that the height of a picture upon a wall has changed, or that a trim little mustache has appeared in that old black and white photo of grandpa during the war. And the pair of old work boots which one day turns to a pair of lady’s shoes should be discretely tucked away in a corner of the library.

Much of the fun would be in designing the house in such a way that the underlying mechanisms remain unseen. There should be no tell-tale strings or wires to trip over or to catch the light. Plumbing fixtures, bookcases and alternating styles of furniture should rotate cleanly around a central hinge, so that the unseen version disappears behind the nearest wall.

And of course, upon entering any room, one should see one of those subversive clocks, always reliably set to a new and unpredictable hour.

The distance to the gleaming city on the horizon must have been greater than it looked, Jenny thought. It seemed like countless hours since the travellers had begun crossing the vast plain, as the magnificent skyline on the horizon gradually grew larger. There were long stretches of silence, with no words passed between them.

At last Josh turned to Jenny and said, in a still quiet voice “have you noticed something?”

Jenny was startled out of her reverie, and jumped in surprise at the unexpected sound of a voice. “What?” she said. “Noticed what?”

“We’re not hungry. And we’re not thirsty. And this has been going on for, like, forever.

Slowly Jenny nodded her head. “Yeah, that’s weird.”

“Not weird, precisely,” came Mr Symarian’s voice. “It’s the curse, you see. The effect is centered upon the city you see before you. It begins just outside the city itself, and pervades the countryside for a considerable distance in each direction. Within the affected region, time itself appears to change. Two weeks or more can go by, and it might seem to be the very next day. Or the reverse.”

At this Sid chimed in. “Yeah, like the little lady said,” he grinned. “Weird.”

A century ago people didn’t take movies seriously. The view of the intelligentsia (the kind of people who took books seriously) toward films was roughly akin to the view many people now have of interactive media such as computer games. This parallel came up today in a discussion that touched on both computer games and the history of romantic tragedy.

Take, for example, Sidney Carlton, who is initially presented as a self-absorbed wastrel in “A Tale of Two Cities”, yet ends up being willing to sacrifice his own life so that another man (a man he detests) can live on happily with the woman he himself loves. It is perhaps one of the most moving examples of self-sacrifice in all of Western literature.

There are many other examples of “beautiful tragedy” — whereby the hero makes a noble decision that personally destroys him, and yet (in the mind of the reader/viewer) affirms a kind of transcendent and redemptive dignity of humanity. Many film noirs starring actors like Robert Mitchum share this quality. The hero willingly chooses death, knowing that this is the act which will redeem his/her soul. The tradition dates back to antiquity, and continues on today in films like Eastwood’s “Gran Torino”.

I participated in a discussion today about the relationship between tragedy and interactive media. At some point I raised the question of whether such scenarios of redemptive sacrifice — with their attendant echoes of emotional catharsis and existential affirmation — could exist in interactive media such as computer games.

Of course this is not a straightforward question. The agency of the player complicates things considerably. How can you truly be moved by the decisions a character makes if you yourself might be responsible for that character’s choices? Yet one could argue that there would be enormous resonance in presenting a player with a set of decisions in which the ethical or psychological “win” involves a powerful self-sacrifice for the sake of a loved one, or just for the sake of what is true and right.

I’m not sure exactly how something like this could be pulled off, but I do think that it’s a key question, if we are looking at computer games as a medium that might, at some point, take its place as a serious forum for cultural production and reflection, just as films have come to take their place alongside the novel.

I came up with an idea for an art piece. It looks just like an old-fashioned clock, complete with ticking second-hand. And as long as you are in the room, it behaves just like any other clock, advancing steadily, one second at a time.

But this clock comes equipped with a highly sensitive motion sensor. It can use this sensor to determine when there is nobody in the room. As soon as the room has become devoid of people, the clock starts to advance quickly.

This means that the next time somebody enters the room, the hands of the clock will have been reset to some completely random time. And yet, to anybody looking right at it, it always behaves in a perfectly normal way.

In essence, the clock acts as a subversive agent, playing with our expectations of how clocks are supposed to behave, and turning those expectations upside down. Insidious in a way that a mere broken clock could never be, the clock becomes an agent not of order but of chaos. Essentially, this “subversion clock” is a wolf in sheep’s clothing — not so much a time keeper as a time destroyer.

It would be especially fun to have one of these in every room.

Today I started going through all of my blog posts for the last two and a half years. And I am finding the result to be a bit overwhelming.

You, dear reader, do not actually see the back-story, the sequence of real-life events that are transformed here into words on a page. There are secrets here — necessary secrets. There are real identities, off-stage happenings and behind the scenes action, a host of players you do not know directly, but can only intuit through the prism of these posts.

When I read the sequence of posts myself, through the backward telescope of time, I see these secrets revealed, in all of their blaze and messy magnificence. I see arguments in my life, unavoidable rifts. I see that on this day the bombs fell, on that other day a birthday was mis-remembered.

Each event is grist for the mill, just one thread among many. Perhaps the weave of these threads, all these slivered echoes of reality, form into a single reflecting tapestry, or maybe just a rag and bone shop of the heart.

There is something uniquely personal about creating a mix tape, although there are perils in the enterprise. Of course I don’t literally mean “mix tape”. The use of actual magnetic tape went out with the aerochronometer and the autogrammatatron. Tape eventually gave way to writable CDs, which were in turn replaced by flash memory sticks. Recently these too have gone the way of the velociraptor.

The current fashion is to refer your loved one to a page on Facebook, with links to YouTube videos, since (as everyone knows) the proper way to show affection in the modern age is to steer one’s beloved to a social network, where they can admire your taste in music while selling their identity to a giant soul-sucking corporation that will forever track their every move and their reduce their very existence into a money-making commodity.

In modern times, this is what is known as “romance”.

Back in the old days, somewhere in the now distant “burning onto CD” era, I made a mix tape for a friend which happened to contain Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat”, followed immediately by the Gorillaz’ song “Clint Eastwood”. I know it’s an odd pairing, but it works. In fact, it works very well. In one of those magical confluences of musical alchemy, the first of these songs flows into the second with silken perfection. At the time I thought little of it.

The problem is that now, every time I hear “Famous Blue Raincoat” — in fact every time I sing “Famous Blue Raincoat” — I get to the end, with those poignant lyrics “… sincerely L. Cohen.”, and in my mind the Gorillaz song immediately starts up. I’m not complaining, mind you. I like hearing the Gorillaz’ “Clint Eastwood”. It’s a great song, and a fine example of its genre. But it sort of alters the mood, if you see what I mean. Imagine if every time you got to the end of “Pachelbel’s Canon” your mind were to suddenly jump into “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” by Iron Butterfly. Would you ever be able to resist giggling uncontrollably at friend’s weddings? I know I wouldn’t.

But I’m counting my blessings, since things could be worse. In fact, there are serious worst case scenarios here. Imagine if every time you finished listening to Jeff Buckley’s recording of “Hallelujah”, you were to find your mind jumping to the Alvin and the Chipmunks version of “I’m Too Sexy”.

That would truly be tragic.