Fear and Loathing in NYC

F for Fail

2011-01-21T15:19:00.001-05:00

This morning the temperature here in Chicago was 1 degree. Not two degrees or zero degrees but one degree. Singular. It sounds odd to say it, so it got stuck in my head and I started to think about exactly what is a degree in this case. As I did so, I came to get rather angry.
One degree is one degree Fahrenheit, which is of course the scale we use in the US. This, along with our steadfast refusal to adopt the metric system, has always bugged me.* So today I decided to look it up and see just what a Fahrenheit degree is so I'd know why we as a country have been so stubborn. What I learned was ridiculous enough to make a blog post.
Go to wikipedia and look up Fahrenheit now. The system that we use in opposition to a worldwide standard (that is beautifully logical) is not only totally arbitrary but also the product of some science that is so sloppy I could have done it.
Apparently Mr Fahrenheit used two measurements to scale his system. The first is stupid but at least seems in some slightly way purposeful: he put a thermometer in a brine mixture to find his zero point. Why not use water? Good question. That would make too much sense and thus it would be Celcius like all the rest of the world uses. Better to complicate things by using a mixture the includes ammonium chloride, which wikipedia classifies "a salt." Not "salt," as in NaCl, but something else that is more complicated. The other point he used was not the boiling point (again, too sensible) but the level of the thermometer "when held in the mouth or under the armpit of his wife." The best part is that he intended this point (his wife's body temperature) to be the 100 point on his scale, only he was apparent a crack scientist and so the body temperature we all know today is 98.6. That's 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the scale not only created with two arbitrary points, but one of them ended up being wrong. He messed up his own scale, which was his invention. I'm having a hard time even coming up with an analogy for that.
There is more good stuff on the wikipedia page about how he went through some mathematical gymnastics adjusting his stupid scale so it would make sense. Honestly, it reads like a description of how little kids might get together and decide on how to split up their allotment of toys, with everyone having a different great idea.

*Almost all of the rest of the world uses the metric system, but we do not. Think about it in this way: we as Americans like to chastise other countries for backward thinking regarding religion, either by adhering to ridiculously fundamental laws or by operating fully as a church state. This is rightfully considered backward and improper. Well, as a lesser of two evils, it's far better to be backward when it comes to religion than when it comes to science.

Restrictor

2010-10-27T07:58:00.000-04:00

Do you know how when you are standing chest- or neck-deep in a pool, how it's harder to breathe because your lungs can't fully expand due to the pressure of the water? That's kinda how it feels for me to be jobless still. So many nice things have been happening lately, things coming together, and yet I can't relax and enjoy it like I should, can't fully inhale.
So, cloaked in that bit of happy, here are some of the nice things. We have moved into our new apartment and have almost all of the furniture already. The apartment is big and pretty nice too, and the furniture is.............adult (except for the cardboard box serving as the TV stand). The best part is that it's been cheaper than expected. I had mentally planned for $5,000 in apartment furnishings, which for us includes all furniture except for a small bookshelf, a small dining room table, a desk, and the mattresses. Because we moved out of NYC with so little stuff, lots has had to be bought, and having a large place to live means needing more things. For instance, we have two bathrooms, which is great, but that's two bathrooms to outfit. I now own a full set of towels that are mostly ornamental, that I will never use myself, and this feels strange.
I don't have a neat ledger covering everything but adding in everything from toilet paper to paint to the big sectional I'm currently sitting on, I think I'm just under $4,000. It's a big number to think about while unemployed, but we did a good job getting nice things so I feel good about it.
On the baby front, I'm happy to say that miss Lula can now turn herself over in both directions. I was watching her on the floor yesterday as she was in the middle of the long process of going back-to-front for the first time. She could get over onto her side pretty easily, and then rotate her trailing leg all the way over pretty easily too, so that her lower body was all facing downward. The big obstacle was her inside arm (if rolling toward her left side, then her left arm). Think about what it takes for you to get that arm out of the way when lying on the floor yourself. I was watching this process thinking about this and feeling pretty sure that she wouldn't have the strength to finish the roll because of the left arm. I am proud to say that she did not give up and kept struggling with it for several minutes (fair question is what does that say about me, that--assuming the endeavor was fruitless--I allowed my 3.5 month old baby to struggle in an uncomfortable position for maybe 20 minutes without helping). All the while I was watching, just seeing what would happen, sorta also waiting for the moment when she cracks and the sounds go from honest struggling with the effort, to full-on cries of frustration. Finally, like most things in life, it just sorta happened, the arm slid under and she made it all the way over. It really was something. To celebrate, in the hours since she accomplished this maneuver, she replicated the feat another 5-6 times. The lesson in parenthood here is that there is no turning back with a baby. She learns and does things like a boat going down a swollen river heading for a waterfall.

2010-10-19T23:51:00.000-04:00

Apparently it's been over a month and a half since I last posted. If I had a better sense of that fact, then maybe I'd have done something about it. Life intervenes. Actually, what am I saying? What I've been wandering through these last weeks hasn't been the same as what for the last near-decade I have known as "life."
Moving as an almost-30-year-old, with a wife and a little baby, is very different from moving to and away from college. Remarkable insight, I know. We're finally sorta completing the move this weekend by getting into our own two-bedroom apartment, a place with two bathrooms. I don't know what's a bigger life rite-of-passage: having a baby, or having two bathrooms. I can now have one toilet used exclusively for pooping. Also, one of the showers has one of those hose attachments that lets you take the showerhead off and move it around. This is superb for two reasons: first, let's just say that I can more thoroughly clean certain parts of the body finally; and second, I can take my baby into the shower with me as substitute for bath time. This second thing might seem odd, especially since my baby is a girl and I am a man, but there is a part of the trailer to the recent documentary movie about babies (I actually think it's called "Babies") that includes a quick shot of a man from the waist up hold a baby with one hand in a shower and using the handheld showerhead to clean the baby with the other. For some reason, I saw this trailer a million times, and every time I wished I could do that same thing. (And before you think I'm a weirdo freak for desiring sharing naked time with my baby, know that doctors recommend parents have as much direct skin-on-skin contact as possible when babies are very young. So it's creepiness, but with an alibi.)
Originally, I thought there were two bars within a one-mile radius of our new apartment but it turns out that one of the two is actually a family-style place that only looks like a bar with rows of wooden benches and a barfront that is only where you order your hot dogs/burgers/etc. I should have been tipped off when we walked by on a Sunday afternoon and it was closed.
On a related note, I recently learned that my new hometown of Evanston was a dry city until only 20-30 years ago, and also that you when you buy beer they can't let you take it out of the store without a bag. For a place that is so extremely liberal, they sure do cling to the essence of the old blue laws.
Ok, now instead of going on and on about all the changes in my life the last month, or the new things I've seen or done, or god forbid some of the details of my job search process, I think now I'm going to list some oddities or observations or just bits of found knowledge. Starting now:
Running on grass all the time is very nice.
I ride a bike on paved trails only a little more than twice as fast as I run. I thought it would have been faster.
People from Chicago pronounce the name of their city either Chi-cawg-o, or Chi-cwah-go, not the way that I've only ever heard it by non-natives: Chi-cah-go. Who's right?
Overlooking the soccer field at DePaul University is a giant, like 5-6 story brick mural of either the pope or some other high-ranking Catholic figure. He's not in a classic straight profile shot either, like a guy on a coin, but sorta cut off or cocked to one side, as though he's peeking around the building.
The Jews of Skokie build horrible huge houses that seem designed specifically to look terrible in their context, like a sledgehammer in the middle of a row of glass jars.
Job-searching is a very debasing activity. Not humiliating. I guess it depends on how much pride you have. I just find it debasing.
The Droid X is a spectacular phone that is a couple levels of technology ahead of its battery.
It is possible to live in Chicago in October and not unpack any pair of pants not belonging to a matching suit.
My NFL ratings spreadsheet has allowed me to go 41-26 over 67 wagers placed, for a net betting gain of $335 over the six weeks of the season.
Removing four of the bets made specifically to satisfy bonus requirements at the website, and 37 of 63 of those bets were for an underdog.
That's 59% of all bets for underdogs. Yes there is a lesson of success in there.
If a baby girl smiles at you, it means either that she's happy or that she wants your attention.
If a baby girl smiles at you and she is your daughter, it means she loves you.

Hitting the Homestretch

2010-08-31T15:35:00.000-04:00

A couple of big events have taken place in my transient life, but before we get to that, my baby girl has taken to smiling at us with frequency. And staring and actually interacting for long stretches of time. It is quite remarkable. Quite good.
Back to the news now. First, yesterday morning I had to buy a metrocard that isn't unlimited. I had to stand at the machine and mentally count up the number of subway rides I would take between now and September 17th. $45 is the most they let you buy at one time, and including the $6.75 free bonus you get at that level, and considering that a single ride is $2.25(1), I have 23 rides. This is less than the amount I will need, so since I am not accustomed to looking at the little display on the turnstile when swiping, I can guarantee that sometime around September 14th I will walk straight into a rigid turnstile, and hard too because after 7+ years here I am a pro at swiping quickly and smoothly and getting through as fast as possible.
The next thing is, to me, a big step in our transition. We went to the grocery store on Sunday and we only bought things we would for sure use in the next three weeks. No grabbing the bottle of green curry sauce cause it might be fun, no stocking up on penne because it's on sale, no acquisition of frozen foods of any kind, and no olive oil even though we are very close to being out of it and of course it's a staple. Planning a move, scheduling the rental, closing utilities accounts, haggling with the landlord about the timeliness of the return of the security deposit: these are all things you do because you must. They are part of a timeline and are done without emotion or a sense of context, like walking up stairs. A move doesn't affect you on a daily level really until it affects your stomach. Sometime in the next week, I want to make pasta with the delicious little mini dried ravioli that they sell at Trader Joe's, but since I didn't buy the meatballs I am stuck with plain marinara sauce. I also decided not to buy another jar of honey cause we'd never use it in three weeks and it seems stupid to move a jar of honey a thousand miles, so now when we make a salad it will be too vinegar-y for my tastes because I can't add honey.
I also now feel a stronger need to plan my meals. I know there are still two cartons of butternut squash soup, so I know we must eat it soon even though who in the hell wants butternut squash soup when it's 90 degrees outside?(2) There is also a jar of pre-made cheap-looking pesto sauce that I'll feel obligated to eat, even though why does jarred pesto sauce even exist?(3)

1. Inflation. It was $2.00 when I first moved here. Though, they say that the price of a slice of pizza mirrors the price of a subway ride, that it has been a close relationship over time. If this is true, then all you subway riders are in for an increase, because slices average about $2.50 right now.
2. Maybe we could eat it cold? I really love all types of soup and since I'm a normal human being, I really love the summer, but at least for me, the two do not go together at all. I will be a soup-cooking machine in Chicago.
3. Basil, oil, nuts, blender. It doesn't take any subtlety to make it, no perfect combination of exotic ingredients. To make things worse, the jar I have looks like an alfredo-y type of pesto. I hope it wasn't me that bought it, but I suspect it must have been like 99 cents or something and I couldn't resist. It is my dad's fault that I would do something like that. I promise to fight it.

Formulaic Satisfaction

2010-08-24T16:43:00.001-04:00

As you know, I have been cultivating and caring for something that is important to me over these last few months. Doing so has at times been frustrating, at times tedious, at times engrossing, but even so always I have enjoyed it.
Of course I am talking about my baseball ratings spreadsheet.(1)
In the last week or so, I've completed what I'm proud to announce is an accompanying spreadsheet that predicts the results of the playoffs. This second file is superior to the first in that it's almost wholly automated. I am required to enter data in just 48 total cells,(2) and the entire playoffs with its myriad possibilities and probabilities fills itself in for me.
I had been playing with this file mostly late at night or early in the mornings while watching the baby, and also some while at work since I was (conveniently, almost) stuck covering the reception desk twice lately. Yesterday was a beautiful moment, when I finally finished the column representing each team's chances to win the World Series. To test for bugs, I did a simple SUM of the column, and when I hit enter and the cell filled in with a clean number "1"............let's just say it felt good.(3) It meant that there were no real mistakes within the four-sheet file, that I'd done it right.

1. I think I'll always have a weird relationship with my first big sheet because definitely the one team I most associate with it is the Atlanta Braves. The Braves are currently leading their division by 2.5 games and are just 2 back of San Diego for the best overall record in the NL. But it wasn't always so. On May 19, they were in last place, already six games behind with a 13-18 record. But my sheet told me they were good. On May 4, my system told me they were the third best team in the league, just a hair behind the Phillies, and in fact it has told me at every checkpoint from April 22 through today that they were a top-3 team. The system never doubted the Braves, and so I found myself rooting for them to turn it around and then maintain their position.
This rooting for the Braves is odd for me, because as a sports fan I've more or less always hated them.(A) In the early 90s, I was a fully developing baseball fan, my little league career coming to an end and my analytical love for it still a decade away. At exactly this time, my Pirates happened to be winning, and doing so with one of the best players of all time, Barry Bonds. They won three division titles in a row and twice in a row finishing just a game shy of the World Series. Both of these losses came to the Braves, the second in especially tragic circumstances.(B) And even though he wasn't my favorite Pirate, even at my young age, I was well aware that he was easily our best player, the best in the league. He won three MVPs in a four year span. Most people forget this now because of his (alleged) steriod-fueled romp to four straight a decade later, but Bonds was totally robbed out of four straight in the early 90s. The one year he lost was 1991 and the player he lost to was Terry Pendleton, of the Atlanta Braves.(C)

2. There are eight teams that qualify for the playoffs. For each team, I must fill in the team name, the team rating (which of course I copy from the other spreadsheet), and the four individual pitcher factors for the rotation member (which of course I also copy from the other spreadsheet).
3. So here is what you really want to know, the odds for each team to win it all, based on current standings, in order:
Yankees - 24.0%
Rangers - 17.3%
Phillies - 17.3%
Braves - 12.5%
Rays - 11.1%
Twins - 7.0%
Padres - 5.8%
Reds - 5.0%

A. Outside of the usual suspects like Michigan, Notre Dame, and the Cleveland Browns, and maybe Dallas Cowboys, my list of hated teams has varied. As a kid, I hated the 49ers because I didn't want them to tie the Steelers' Super Bowl record. As a teenager, I hated the Pacers and the Heat (and even MJ and the Bulls for a little while) because they always had emotional playoff contests against the Knicks. As an adult, I've hated both the Patriots and the Red Sox for obvious reasons, and also the Seahawks for less obvious ones (oddly, I don't like bitterness, or complaining). My OSU alumni status required me to hate Florida in recent years.
B. I'll never forget you, Francisco Cabrera, you piece of shit. My dad had already bought game 1 World Series tickets for us that year. I've still never been to a World Series game, and Pittsburgh has not yet had another winning season. It's not the Curse of the Bambino, but in many ways, it's more pathetic.
C. Bonds had more than two more WAR than Pendleton, and double the WPA. If you don't know what those acronyms mean, I'm sorry.

2010-08-23T16:18:00.002-04:00

Do you want to see something awesome? Of course you do.

That is what happens when I have a baby. Data. We have it for every day of our baby's life starting with Day 4, July 12. You can get a pretty amazing picture of what it's like to raise an infant through the first six weeks just by looking at this chart. She fed from mom's breast 20 times in her fourth day. Think about that for a second. She dropped somewhat quickly over the next 8-9 days as she learned how to feed better, how to take in more during each feeding, and then stabilized into a very slow downward trend. At 6+ weeks now, she feeds between 7 and 10 times per day, which is pretty much exactly average for a baby that age. This makes me as a father feel good.
Another thing that is "supposed" to happen with babies her age is that they are supposed to start having few messy diapers as the digestive system gets more mature and learns how to not simply pass "shit" through. You can see this in the graph (though not perfectly thanks to the little increase in the last couple days, an increase that is attributable to grandma being in town and giving mom and dad a hard time and forcing more than the necessary amount of changes). Anyway, she has indeed had a real decrease from a previous level of averaging about 8 per day to 6-7 per day now.
The final line on the graph doesn't quite tell as big of a story, which really is itself the story. Lula's hours awake is the yellow line. Aside from one odd spike when she was awake for 14 hours at her one-month-old mark, her time awake has been very consistent. There is no real trend to the line, at least as presented here. If I were to have two plots of time awake--one for time awake during the day and one for time awake at night--then there would be a remarkable difference apparent. Starting 3-4 weeks ago, the time awake at night line would drop a lot, and for the last three weeks, the line would hover just slightly above zero. That is right, my baby pretty much sleeps through the night, and has done so since before she was even one month old. This is my first chance to parent-gloat and so I'm going enjoy it.

Changing subject here briefly, I have tried out some different forms of music with our little one to find out what she likes at this age. No, I am not going to assume that her tastes at 5-6 weeks will remain her tastes for life, and probably it's less about taste than simply about sound, but let's say that early results have been encouraging.
Most happily for me, she doesn't seem to react much at all to what would be considered kid's or baby music, the grating crap that comes out of kid toys. She enjoys the tune that comes out of her stuffed pink rabbit, but I think that's more a function of the rabbit and not the music. All the rest of that stuff goes under her head.
She pretty clearly likes jazz, especially Thelonious Monk, but including all that I've played for her. She is mostly ambivalent to Bob Dylan and the Beatles, but has a truly shocking affinity for Led Zeppelin and even seemed to enjoy the limited amount of Springsteen she heard before falling asleep.

A Mask

2010-08-06T13:33:00.003-04:00

I am looking for a job now. This is very necessary and very evil. Constant looking and what I will call relentless waiting. Because I have to sign up for many websites in order to look for or apply to jobs, my inbox is filling up with job "opportunities" from people I don't know. The problem is that all of these are crap, and most are computer generated, trying to get me to sell something for them. I am not a salesman. Sometimes they are trying to get me to apply to a very menial job or to sign up to their headhunting agency (which is a whole other story). Of all the email there has been only one that seems legitimate (it was accompanied by an actual phone message from an actual person), but I haven't made real contact yet so I don't know what kind of prospect it is.
Job-searching is about patience and persistence, but mostly it's about selling yourself and by extension lying. I am terrible at these things. I am terrible because it makes me very uncomfortable talking myself up. My whole approach to life is to simply get my things done as best I can and to let that speak for itself. I don't need credit and I don't need praise. Selling yourself requires generating your own praise and claiming credit often for things undeserved.
The paragon of the entire process is of course the resume. When making connections to other people, or in networking yourself through helpers, usually the only currency involved is a resume. Plenty of times when applying directly for a job you are given the opportunity to also include a cover letter, but the convention behind this is also far too formal to be worth a damn, and besides when dealing only with contacts cover letters are never used. It's always simply the resume.
It's a little intimidating and absurd that your whole professional existence could be reduced to a single page of words, or that your entire essence should be shoe-horned into something so formulaic.
Has anyone ever felt truly satisfied with their resume? I'd like to think that if you do your job well, and you contribute beyond simply what's in the job description--that you always actively apply your brain--that it should be impossible to boil down your value into an easy description. Part of this is the nature of the comprehensiveness of my job, but I find it difficult to succinctly even describe my current job. How am I then supposed to compress my experience into something that would be appealing to a recruiter?

I am not someone who makes great first impressions. I don't think I put people off--well, sometimes, but mostly not. I just am not a person that a stranger will walk away from and think "Gee that guy was really nice or really personable." For one thing, it's been my experience that a person who will cause that reaction is a horrible phony. I don't really enjoy or tolerate chit-chat, and that is basically what job-searching is all about.
I like to think that when someone deals with me, that there is always something more to me than I offer. I don't feel it's necessary to always supply the punchline or interject with a witty remark. It's ok to let a conversation flow naturally even if it doesn't flow directly through you, and even if you have something to add. Anyway, I am really just usually so confident with myself that I don't feel the need to show myself off or to attempt to create any kind of adoration in those around me.
My hope is that the more that people get to know me and the more they uncover the more they will like me. This approach isn't very compatible with looking for a job. And I can somewhat accept that, since it is me doing the looking and therefore needing to be proactive. It's just a necessary evil.
I'm not sure what my intent is in writing this post. I'm not trying to complain, and I'm not trying to offer a better solution. I guess I'm just haplessly describing a situation, putting something out there that I can re-read after successfully completing my search and landing a superduper job. For now I will go touch up my resume, which is kinda like perfecting a mask of myself with the intent of wearing it and making it seem like me. The world is really not ready or patient or interested enough to just see my real face.

Just that Obvious

2010-07-22T14:21:00.000-04:00

Having a newborn means never being certain of anything. She can't talk, and at two weeks old, she's not even developed enough to know how to cry properly to convey her needs. Having a newborn also means having an intense desire to comfort and care for the baby. These two things lead me directly to the internet for information of all sorts. Unfortunately, information of all sorts is exactly what I find.
Websites prey on the constant fear that is being a parent and try to use it to sell you things. They know that people will search around for any info on even the most innocuous things, so they will have content on everything imaginable, and they will say just about anything.
The other day I was looking around both for general knowledge-gaining purposes and because little Lula was not easily comforted and stayed up through most of a whole night. I stumbled upon an article on a big baby/pregnancy info site that seemed to promise helpfulness: "Twelve reasons babies cry and how to soothe them." I already knew about the main reasons for crying: hunger, tiredness, dirty diaper, and too hot/cold, but I sure didn't know twelve reasons, so I took a look.
Turns out this article is a classic example of an article seeming to contain helpful info but in fact being nothing but mere words and sentences arranged so as to give the impression of information. I think the article only exists to generate page clicks and provide a space for their advertisers. Of the twelve reasons, one was "Tummy trouble." This in addition to two covering hunger and needing to burp. The #8 reason that babies cry is, apparently, "Something small." Seriously, that is the heading for section #8.
But it gets better. Numbers 10 and 11 are, respectively, "Wants less stimulation" and "Wants more stimulation." Beautiful. Let me get this straight: I'm a concerned parent, trying to understand why my baby is crying. This helpful piece of literature is telling that it could either be too much or too little of the exact same thing. They're thorough, at least.
The best of the bunch though surely has to be #12. After wading through 10 and 11, how about coming to the big finish of the why babies cry article and finding that it is titled "Not feeling well"? The first line of this section is: "If you've met your baby's basic needs and comforted him and he's still crying, he could be coming down with something."
Brilliant. I think that kind of scientific breakthrough might be worthy of a Nobel prize. Really, it makes you wonder why the list had twelve reasons, when their final one is good enough to render all the others unneeded. Why do babies cry? Because they are not feeling well. Of course, that solves everything.

How Ya Sleepin?

2010-07-21T15:32:00.003-04:00

Here is a weird admission for you: yesterday, briefly, I looked at my baby girl not as a simple adorable and helpless little human being, but as something else. I saw her as a reason for me being awake when I didn't want to.
I don't need to tell you this is not a good thing. Children do not always behave perfectly. As they age they do all manner of regrettable things. It's my job as a father to take the broader view and always continue to support and encourage her to do the right thing and to do the best she can. In this case, "the best she can" is essentially zero since she's not even two weeks old.
I realized my error pretty quickly and felt the appropriate amount of internal remorse, but I thought this was a good thing to highlight because there will be infinitely more instances just like it, and I hope to view her fully as a (tiny) person when they happen, and not simply as a vehicle to whatever annoyance or discomfort she is causing me.

Shifting gears, I'd like to say some more about sleep. Sleep, or my daily status with it, is far and away the number one topic for people when conversing with me. It's the first thing anyone mentions when finding out I've recently become a parent. It's even the first thing people talk about who see me regularly, like they need to have their constant updates. The subject's ubiquity has gotten so that I despise talking about it now. I remember the summer after graduating high school the first and often only thing anyone ever said to me was to ask about how I was excited to go off to college. Then last summer after getting married, every single person felt the need to generically ask how was married life. These questions are all in the same family as "So, what do you do?" The asker doesn't care the answer, he only asks because it lets him put a checkmark on his invisible social norms list.
The other thing about these constant sleep queries is the implicit assumption that my life has been turned upside down and that I'm walking around in some catatonic state of sleeplessness. Interestingly, it's the same for both former parents and the wholly uninitiated. Apparently, there is something in our culture that causes "new parent" to irrefutably equal "not getting enough sleep."
After first acknowledging that every situation is unique, let me shine a little light on this bit of accepted doctrine. New parents* do in fact sleep, and often several hours in one night. We of course average fewer hours post-baby than we did pre-baby, but I'm pretty sure for most parents the difference is much smaller than consensus would have you believe. I touched on this already, but the problem is really the inconsistency of the sleep. You might get only a couple hours one night or your six total hours might be split up into 4 or 5 segments of differing length. You might fall asleep at 9pm and wake at 1am, then only get 45 more minutes the rest of the night. Indeed, this can wear on you, but the important thing is that it's manageable. It's not like any of this ever comes as a surprise to a new parent: you have at least 8 or 9 months to get mentally prepared. And you adapt, because you have human instincts. Sara and I now can quickly recognize a window of sleeping opportunity and will pounce on it, even if it's still daylight outside or if it means sneaking in 45 minutes sitting upright on the couch in the room with no air conditioning.
The other key ingredient is that you are a new parent. This is an absurdly exciting time in your life. You are full of endorphins. In fact, you actually enjoy being awake at 3:30am because it means that you are at least looking at but more probably actually holding your baby child, which is really what it's all about. Whatever parenthood takes away from you, it gives back in another way, enough to more than compensate.
Think about it this way, in which scenario would your overall being be more "up": when you are getting a consistent 7-8 hours of sleep every day and doing basically the same thing in your life that you always have; or getting an interrupted and irregular 4 hours of sleep but you've also got a tiny beautiful baby at which you sare constantly involuntarily smiling?
Am I tired? In the traditional sense, yes I guess maybe I am. But I've also got such a huge infusion of energy and general happiness that the question seems hardly relevant.

*Assume all of this discussion is concerning only dual-parent households. I really have no idea how single parents would manage at the beginning of a baby's life.

Midseason Baseball Update

2010-07-16T11:03:00.001-04:00

I hope that you will excuse that these are a couple days late (something about priorities), but I've completed my All-Star Break ratings update, this time with a full end-of-season projection. A couple weeks ago, I added a section to my spreadsheet so that it automatically spits out rest-of-season wins for each team. All I do is add those to the actual standings and I've got easy projections.
Anyway, here first is the American League. First column is the full season rating, second column is the rating weighted for recent performance (I've found this to be more accurate for future projection and so it's bolded), and the third column is the projected full season win total.

	Rating	Weighted	Season Wins
Yankees	.618	.617	101.4
Rays	.577	.580	95.7
Red Sox	.570	.566	91.9
Rangers	.539	.558	89.9
Twins	.538	.537	86.6
Angels	.523	.527	84.1
Tigers	.512	.523	87.5
White Sox	.513	.514	87.4
Athletics	.494	.505	78.3
Blue Jays	.486	.491	88.5
Mariners	.495	.484	69.7
Royals	.459	.461	72.8
Indians	.451	.441	66.4
Orioles	.429	.418	58.5

Next are the projected final standings with only the "games back" listing. Rounded to the nearest full game, of course.

AL EAST		AL CENTRAL		AL WEST
Yankees	--	Tigers	--	Rangers	--
Rays	-5	White Sox	--	Angels	-6
Red Sox	-9	Twins	--	Athletics	-12
Blue Jays	-13	Royals	-14	Mariners	-20
Orioles	-43	Indians	-21

WILD CARD
Rays	--
Red Sox	-4
Blue Jays	-8
AL Central	-9

Mostly straightforward here. You might notice how much Texas benefits from the weighting. Their schedule has been pretty weak lately but they have taken full advantage and Vegas has been happy to give them their due. If anything, the six-game cushion I'm predicting is too low since it doesn't know they added Cliff Lee.
The other interesting thing is the predicted three-way tie in the Central. Vegas still likes Minnesota, even though they are the laggards in the real standings. For what it's worth, I think I agree with them, as their rotation is fairly solid top-to-bottom, though Morneau being out for a long stretch might be enough to kill them in a tight race. Chicago has been one team that's mystified me all year. They look mediocre at best and yet Vegas has held out hope all year until finally the last few weeks they caught fire to validate the respect (that's why you trust the numbers over your own instincts every day of the week). None of the three teams is all that good, evidenced by the fact that any of them would be fifth in the East.

National League

	Rating	Weighted	Season Wins
Cardinals	.575	.563	89.3
Phillies	.566	.552	88.3
Dodgers	.543	.542	88.0
Braves	.546	.538	92.0
Rockies	.536	.527	87.0
Giants	.524	.522	84.8
Reds	.498	.512	86.1
Mets	.497	.509	85.2
Cubs	.522	.506	75.6
Padres	.491	.502	87.2
Marlins	.509	.499	78.8
Brewers	.505	.499	76.6
Nationals	.455	.477	72.7
Dbacks	.482	.466	67.6
Astros	.444	.446	68.2
Pirates	.419	.429	61.8

Projected Standings

NL EAST		NL CENTRAL		NL WEST
Braves	--	Cardinals	--	Dodgers	--
Phillies	-4	Reds	-3	Padres	-1
Mets	-7	Brewers	-12	Rockies	-1
Marlins	-13	Cubs	-13	Giants	-3
Nationals	-19	Astros	-21	Dbacks	-20
		Pirates	-27
WILD CARD
Phillies	--
Padres	-1
Rockies	-1
Reds	-2
Mets	-3
Giants	-3

From my perspective, much more interesting here. If you'll allow me, I have to say that these ratings have been extremely prophetic so far this season. They correctly predicted the rise of Atlanta, Texas, and the White Sox. If someone had been selling shares of those teams, I could have bought them at low prices in the past couple months and them sold them right now at huge profits. Alas.
I mention this because if my numbers are to be trusted there are some changes coming in the NL standings. Cincinnati, holding a small lead, is expected to finish three game up (though with the big caveat that the Cardinals have had some curiously weak lines lately, meaning that Vegas may be about to abandon ship on their league favorite). Similarly, it took a very long time, but it looks like Vegas finally believes in the Reds as at least a worthy pennant race participant. That's nothing compared to the tightest division in baseball, the NL West. All season, San Diego has been leading the pack. All season, Vegas has considered them pretenders. Finally, enough of the season has been completed so that the difference between results and expectations is close enough to expect the Padres to stay in the race right until the end. They have the misfortune of competing against two teams Vegas likes to make a second-half run, though, in LA and Colorado. The Dodgers especially should be a feared team, coming in with a weighted rating a full 40 points higher than San Diego.
Finally, Philadelphia is currently two back in the Wild Card standings, but are favored to win it. Adding in the Mets and Giants, and more than half the NL projects within three games of the playoffs.

All Filled Up

2010-07-14T14:32:00.000-04:00

A lot of people at work have very reasonably been asking me if I'm tired. I am a little, of course, but not exceptionally so. Our baby is really very well behaved so far in life.
It got me to thinking about being tired, though. Physically, it has been quite manageable. It's not really the lack of sleep that is the problem but the inconsistency. I think I'm still getting more than six hours per night, but it's broken up into pieces. Nothing I won't become used to in a little more time.
It is the emotional side of exhaustion and its effect on my metaphysical self that is more apparent to me. It is extremely tiring to be constantly looking out for someone else, to be constantly thinking of and caring for another's needs before your own. It is very tiring to always feel the relentless weight of responsibility.
This is something that human beings must mature into. A couple years ago, I didn't have it. Our instincts are to look out for ourselves, so that it's mostly effortless to live a life. It takes practice and an infinite level of devotion and commitment to another person to get used to behaving differently. I'm happy to be on that path, happy and proud to think about it becoming routine.
Some people live exhausting lives. They work hard, they don't sleep much, they go out and party a little too much. Burning the candle at both ends. The toll from this kind of (some might say reckless) behavior is almost wholly physical, though. You destroy your body, which is of course exhausting. But it is also fairly easy to do. You make the decisions for yourself, you live with the consequences, everything has its balance. It is your life and your life only.
Naturally, I had never known this before, but having a family brings out a unique kind of exhaustion that would better be called a comprehensive state of being, the kind that keeps your body and spirit sound. I think it is the true fullness of the human experience.

A Magnificent Forest

2010-07-12T11:13:00.003-04:00

Let's see, what to talk about today?
The World Cup ended sorta quietly, though Spain did win me about $70 with the win, so thanks. I haven't run for a while because I'm being cautious with a chronically tight hamstring. I got some good use out of the grill yesterday and was reminded again how delicious chicken thighs are and how foolishly infrequently I buy them compared to breasts. Oh, and last Friday I became a father.
Actually, here is little Lula on her birthday:

Just spectacular, isn't it? I can hardly believe that I get to go home every day and that little beauty will be there waiting for me.
It's weird, throughout the whole birth process, being at the hospital, then bringing her home and spending a couple of nights and days just watching her get used to things, there have been a seemingly infinite number of things that would normally cause me to think: that would make something interesting to write about. I suppose that if I had let myself slip out of the moment these last few days, I would have been overwhelmed with the desire to write some of this stuff down, or at least to make a mental note to do it later.
Here I am now finally taking a couple minutes to document the occasion and I can't see how much any of it really matters. Just details, like a stock ticker constantly running and spitting out numbers which are meaningless without the context. The context is everything. The wholeness of the experience is so vast and obviously significant that all else washes away. It's the opposite of the saying, "you can't see the forest for the trees."
Probably as the days pass things will be different, but right now I can't see the trees. Quite frankly, I don't really need to.

Maybe I'm Falling Out of Love with You, NY

2010-07-01T16:41:00.006-04:00

I've finally started to feel a little of the lame-duck effect as I walk around this city. Last night I think I committed to picking a firm moving-out date (whereas previously I had argued that we should wait to move until I have a job offer(1)). This afternoon I contacted a moving company to discuss logistics.(2) It's happening.
I've done a good job of focusing on the present with both my life and my job these last several months, so that I think not too much has suffered from the fuck-it-I'll-be-gone-in-a-few-months-anyway laziness. But now we are getting close enough so that lots of things I'm doing now I am doing for the last time. A couple weeks ago I was at Blue & Gold, our old regular spot (not to mention the "basement" of my apartment for over a year), and it occurred to me while there that since my friends don't hang out there as often that it would probably be the last time I'm there. Sara hates Williamsburg (can't say I totally disagree), and so when we got on the G train to head home from there last weekend, I felt like there was a decent chance I'd never be back. A few weeks ago at the office I had to work on rearranging the seating assignments in order to accommodate interns and the new class of employees (a rite of summer here), and of course I understood while doing it that it would be for the last time.
I hope this doesn't sound sentimental, because I surely haven't been getting misty during any of this. The point is that instead of just going about my business like always, the reality of the end has seeped into my consciousness, which thankfully feels at least as exciting for me as it does sad.
One thing that is negative about this is I have sorta stopped being excited by things happening around me in this city. There has been an empty storefront on a corner close to my apartment for a few months now. Lately it has started to seem apparent that this will open soon as a kind of diner. Normally this would make me happy on a very simple level, but when thinking about it I found myself unmoved because I wouldn't be around to enjoy it much anyway. They're expanding the waterfront park near me at the end of Atlantic, but what do I care? Apparently there is no longer a V train and the M is running differently, or some other nonsense. Usually I would be all over this news and have the new routes memorized in case of late-night re-routing necessities, but since those aren't daily trains for me, I'm not bothering to learn them.
It's not any one of the little facts, it's the accumulation of them that amounts to something, and that something is a curious but growing sense of apathy (for today), excitement (for tomorrow), and almost boredom (for my surroundings). Anymore, I'm just unimpressed, I suppose.

Guilty.

1. My prior argument being that I already have a steady income here, so why move to Chicago until I know I'll have a steady income there? On a philosophical level, it's obvious, but of course we don't live in that realm. There is real value to not living in limbo indefinitely, and as the months or even just weeks pass our future baby will be growing out of our apartment space. The last straw was when I decided that, in the event that I haven't acquired a job by our desired moving date, it would be much easier to keep looking if I'm already living in the correct city, and not forced to fly for interviews (also costly). And my lovely wife really doesn't like the idea of not knowing when we're leaving, which is important to me.
2. Almost exactly $1000 for someone else to move my stuff a thousand miles. Not terrible. Having an infant when planning a long-distance move complicates things immensely. Not to mention that it finally dawned on me the other day that when we actually drive ourselves there, we'll have to stop at least every 3 hours so Sara can feed the baby. I am the kind of person who will try to hold in a piss for hours so as to make the best time possible. Patience will be required.

Name Race

2010-06-24T15:03:00.001-04:00

Things I learned at the doctor's office yesterday:
1. There are no physical signs that point to labor being anything close to imminent.
2. If this baby proves especially stubborn, then Sara will be induced Monday evening, July 12, so that she will be born on July 13. So at least we finally have a strict latest-possible date.
3. Through billions and trillions of babies being born, and unfathomable medical advances, and totally comprehensive amounts of information available to everyone involved, doctors still don't know exactly when a child will be born. Depending on how precise you define "roughly," doctors still don't even know roughly when a child will be born. After her examination yesterday, the doctor admitted to us that Sara could go into labor today or she could fail to as late as 19 days from now. That's almost a three-week window.
Given this knowledge, I'm not going to think about the imminent possibility of it happening for a while longer, until next weekend if possible. I'll keep myself up on the signs and keep thinking about what I need to do when the time comes, but the waiting part I'm stepping away from. In fact, mentally I'm preparing for the arrival to be about two weeks from now.

The naming process is very nearly finished, more or less on schedule, I guess. It's weird, but thinking about this process reminds of a horse race or something similar. At first we had all these potential names and then slowly some faded from the pace. Early on, we had a front-runner emerge, and in fact lead the pack almost the whole way around the track. As the field winnowed, a pack emerge behind the leader From time to time a candidate would depart or appear in this pack, but for the most part this was the group from which our name would come. (We're not saying what our choice is, but I feel like I can say without checking with my wife what some of the rejected choices were. I won't give up the last few still on the table, though). Stella joined the pack relatively late but her run with the leaders proved short-lived. Veda snuck in for a time but never really had enough momentum. Ophelia was one of the first to loose the leading pace, and her etymological cousin, Cordelia, would later suffer the same fate. Viola and Ruby made such brief appearances that I'm not even sure if it happened or if I'm making it up. Uliana, a decided underdog, hung in long enough to get a pat on the back for a good effort. Penelope was running very strong initially, and had a fair amount of staying power, but then faded fast. Vienna came out of nowhere midway through the race, shot right up near the front, and then just as suddenly disappeared from the field. Finally, Josephine, a forgotten participant at the start, picked up steam all along the way, climbing into the top four or five and holding steady, was just never able to fully bridge the gap as two contenders broke away from the field.
While all of this was happening, our lone leader was strolling along, challenged but comfortable in the front. A couple of late arrivals materializing in the trailing pack, initially not distinguishing themselves much but holding strong. Then as some of the second pack started falling away, it become apparent that the two latecomers were legitimate contenders, biding their time until breaking free together to chase the leader. Maybe it was the tough job of constant pacemaking, but the leader started to tire just enough that the two were able to join her at the front for a pack of three. They stayed level for some time, the initial leader perhaps possessing a slim advantage still, when the crowd started to get wrapped up in the excitement of the two newbies at the front. At some point, almost imperceptibly, the longtime leader broke stride and slowly allowed the other two to make the pass. Getting and nearer and nearer the finish line, these two have been neck and neck, one holding the lead only as long as her stride leads forward, as the longtime frontrunner holds her position a couple lengths back but far ahead of the rest of the field.
Even though I'm really a participant, I don't know which will win, but just like any other observer, I'm extremely excited to find out.

A Shift

2010-06-15T16:14:00.001-04:00

According to the questionable accuracy of the due date, we're now just over two weeks from the big day. A week ago, Sara passed the milestone of officially being "full-term," which means that she could deliver the baby and it wouldn't have any premature complications. It's important in that it's the final prenatal hurdle to clear; the only things that could go wrong now are only related to the birth process itself. For someone like me, who tries very hard to keep my focus only on the things happening now that can be controlled, finally getting to a point of simply waiting is nice. For a few months, it was the constant and helpless fear of a miscarriage, along with the need for Sara to be extremely careful with basically everything she did. Then there were doctor visits and the accompanying tests, holding your breath waiting for the results to see if the baby would be born with all manner of diseases, disorders, or syndromes. Finally the much more unlikely prospect that the baby would come premature, with its attendant worries. Those are all passed now. And yet we wait more, now mostly clueless about when it will happen. We rewatched parts of the childbirth class DVD, the parts about going into labor, to refamiliarize ourselves with dropping, passing the mucus plug, effacement, breaking water, weight stabilization or even loss, dilation, and the change from Braxton-Hicks into legitimate contractions. I am confident that we will know when the big show has started in earnest, and when we need to remain patient. For now I try to remain patient.

Yesterday morning before going in to work I accompanied Sara to her weekly doctor appointment, this one with our primary obstetrician. For the first time ever I left with a palpable sense that it was actually going to happen, and soon. Sara had lost two pounds since the previous week, and three pounds in the last three weeks total. The doctor felt around quite a bit and estimated that the fetus was something around 6.5 to 7 pounds, which is almost exactly average as a final birth weight. She also took much more time in explaining to us all of the details of going to the hospital and even the prospect of having to be induced if the fetus proves stubborn. One thing that I can say is that through many of the earlier visits, the doctors will seem to answer questions on auto-pilot, not really investing themselves or sharing in the excitement of the patients, but now that we are so close, our doctor finally met us on totally equal emotional ground. This intensity was a little jarring to me. Now I finally feel the reality of what's going to happen. I understand what it's all about. Unfortunately I can't explain it quite yet, but perhaps afterward.
Going to work after all of this yesterday morning was difficult. I found it basically impossible to insert myself into the happenings of the office or even simply my own personal routines. I couldn't make sense of the business of my job compared to the active time bomb that was sitting inside my wife back at home.
Probably the fact that Monday was Sara's first weekday off for the summer magnified the sensation, but I had an extremely strong urge to be with her, and not actually to be with her to talk or whatever else but simply to be there, like standing guard. That seemed like my real job. I'm sure this will only get much much stronger after we have the baby. Here I have a wife who is more or less just sitting at home the next few weeks (?) waiting for amazing. She is not at all helpless but she is in a reduced state of ability and an increased state of discomfort. Rather like an honestly sick person. If you've ever had a wife or similarly important person to you come down with a sickness that forces her home from work, you might understand the feeling a little. You spend most of the day thinking of the little things you can do when you get home in the evening to make her feel better. It's very distracting, but a sick person is merely sick; what keeps her home is the end. A pregnant person is a prelude to something else. A pregnant person is basically the walking embodiment of empathy and anxiety.

June 15. I think I will try to forget about the possibility of Sara going into labor until at least the next doctor visit, which is June 23. At that point it would be very likely to happen within two weeks, and I can handle two weeks of being on edge. Three-plus weeks is asking a bit much.

The Perfect Bet

2010-06-10T09:23:00.007-04:00

What would you do if a fund manager was promising you a one-time 30% annual return? Setting aside a philosophical debate about "promising" a "return," you'd give him just about all of your savings as fast as possible.
I have a tip for you. All you need is the ability to withdraw a chunk of money and be ok with not having access to it for about four months. Actually, that makes this more like a 4-month CD. A CD with a 30% yield.*
Anyway, take as much money as you can temporarily live without and deposit it at sportsbook.com. Then go to the Baseball tab and find the link for "Stephen Strasburg Props." Put a check next to the box that says NO (-1000) under the "Will He Record a No Hitter During the 2010 Regular Reason." Wager all of your deposit on this bet.
Then all you do is wait four months and collect.
-1000 gives a 10% return. Bet 100, win 10. Simple. The perfect bet is real.

But allow me to break it down for you.

The most prolific no-hit pitcher ever, Nolan Ryan, had seven in his career, which spanned 773 starts, for a rate of 0.9% of all starts.
Sandy Koufax is second all-time, with four but in just 314 career starts, so 1.27% of all starts.
That's for a career. Additionally--looking only at the far outliers, and allowing for small-sample wildness--four times a pitcher has thrown two in a single season:
Ryan, 2 in 39 starts, 5.1%
Allie Reynolds, 2 in 26 starts, 7.69%
Virgil Trucks, 2 in 29, 6.9% (amazingly he went only 5-19 that year)
Johnny Vander Meer, 2 in 29, also 6.9%

Next, and very importantly, consider that Strasburg has an innings cap for 2010 of about 160. He's already thrown 62, so he's got less than 100 to go. That equates to maybe 15 more starts. One no hitter in 15 starts is a rate of 6.67%. So they've set his line at about equal to the greatest no-hitter seasons ever. We could have a long discussion about probability if you like, but the bottom line is you can never ever predict something to be the farthest outlier on the line. It's impossible.

That out of the way, there's more. In addition to an innings cap, Mr Strasburg will have a pitch max within each of his starts. This will be slightly more flexible than his year-long innings max but even being liberal you can assume that he wont ever be throwing more than 110 pitches, and the likelihood of him throwing over 100 is low, maybe 3-4 times out of 15. Here is a little secret: to throw a no-hitter you have to complete the game. This week he dominated the AAAA Pirates, but it took him 94 pitches to get through 7 innings. To finish the game at that rate, he'd require over 120. And that is not an uncommon rate of pitches thrown. Covering all of 2009, there were 4,860 starts made by pitchers. 152 times the pitcher threw a complete game. 97% of the time, a starting pitcher failed to complete the game. Even just applying this expected rate of simply completing the game, it takes an average pitcher 32 starts to compile one complete game. Again, Strasburg has only about 15 to work with, and we're only talking about complete games, let alone no hitters. For more perspective there, since the last expansion in 1998, there have been 21 no hitters in over 60,000 starts made. That's 0.035%, one in 2,857. It's ridiculous, utterly ridiculous, to think that one guy could have anything even remotely close to a 9% chance of throwing a no hitter in his next 15 starts. I don't care if that guy is a robot.

Adding these factors together, what is required of Strasburg to cause you to lose your NO no hitters bet is for him to equal the best no hit rates of all time, but to do so with both hands tied behind his back.
Anything is possible, that is a fact. But when gambling you can't consider the fluke possibilities, you have to focus on the most likely scenarios. When the break-even point for a bet is 9.1%, and the actual chance of it happening is easily less than 1%, then you jump all over it. It's the perfect combination really: an incredibly low chance of losing (well less than 1% that he gets a no-no), coupled with a payout that is at least ten or twenty times higher than it should be.

*Via Chase, the shortest CD they offer is for six months. The return yield is 0.50%, a mere 60 times lower than our proposed bet here.

2010-06-08T10:03:00.000-04:00

Who are these people that have the capability to be so demonstrative on their cell phones out on the sidewalks before 8:00am? Sure there are some real go-getter morning people in the world, but I'm seeing them in downtown Brooklyn coming out of apartment buildings, not downtown Manhattan outside investment banking houses. I guess some people just need to be seen right from the get-go. There is just no need for that.

I was reading something on a baby site yesterday. A few weeks ago, I moved over fully to reading about post-birth items, and one of them was titled something like this: "Caring for your newborn's umbilical cord stump." Caring for my newborn's umbilical cord stump. Obviously this is something that I'll need to remember to actually remark upon after I've experienced it, but just reading that line makes me feel like a character in David Lynch short film.

Sara asked me last night if we should take an old bedsheet and cover our couch with it, to protect against the baby's vomit. And so it begins.

We met with the fourth of five obstetricians at our doctor's office yesterday, maybe the most senior of the group. We might have been her last appointment of the day, and it's the only time we'll see her unless Sara goes into labor at a weird time and she's covering the shift, but this woman was almost jarringly blase about the whole thing. I think Sara could have told her that the fetus's hands were stabbing out through her stomach and stealing bits of food off her plate and she would have given us a glazed response: "Yeah sure, that's normal."
In a way, I like the idea of a somewhat grizzled doctor running the show, because if some shit hits the fan, then you know this woman will be ready for it, but on the other hand, giving birth is usually a long intimate process, and actually having a personality attached to the doctor is not a totally frivolous preference.

I really blanch at seeming to criticize her for this, because I'm not, and because curiosity and a zest for information are very good right now, but sometimes I wonder if she doesn't take too seriously the myriad pieces of advice or simple experiential stories offered to her by other parents. It's part of Sara's nature to really care what other people have to say, and rather not part of mine. That's ok, that's a simple difference that I hope I'm mature enough to accept (and even to accept that my approach is lesser). I guess it's the other parents that I silently have issue with. Just because you had/have a child, doesn't make you some expert. Your experience, while perhaps sometimes applicable to others, is only your experience and not the universal law. There are so many ins and outs to the whole process of making a baby into a person that I feel it's kinda self-centric to project yourself across wide spectrums of experience. (Heh. The spell-check is flagging that word "spectrums." At first I couldn't imagine why but then it dawned on me: damned Romans. "Spectra?" That, or the spell-checker's got more of a philosophical slant than I would have guessed. Anyway, I'm leaving it.)
I think people are always trying to find places where they can interject themselves and be listened to, or simply to feel like their opinion is needed or valued. It serves to glorify themselves, at least in their own eyes. Parenthood is one of those things that allows a lot of latitude for a person to feel like an expert, because every experience is unique, and because culturally it's hard to really criticize a parent, at least one that isn't leaving his kids locked in a parked car or something. But the thing most of the self-centered masses fail to consider before constantly sharing their expertise is that this extremely broad and universal uniqueness serves to undercut their preciousness. In terms of the rest of the world, there is nothing special about having or raising a child. It happens every day in all corners of the world to all types of people. It's not at all important to everyone else. It's important to you, to you it's a miracle and "the greatest and toughest thing you'll ever do" and all manner of hyperbole. To you. Not to everyone. Too few people understand this. No--too few people behave accordingly.

Simple Truth

2010-05-25T16:29:00.000-04:00

I've interacted with a lot of people in the last few months about pregnancy and having children. And since my wife is just about 35 weeks pregnant, I've spent just about that much time thinking about it myself. Just about the most important conclusion that I've come to is a very simple one, but that really should be repeated quite often, as it tends to get lost in the hubbub.
The point of pregnancy is not to be pregnant or to tell people you are pregnant. The point of pregnancy, of having a family, of childbirth, of everything, is to raise a human being and make sure he/she is as healthy and ultimately as prepared for adulthood as possible. That is the task. Every single tiny bit of the years-long process is about the child, not about you.
If you are a parent, or are in a relationship with a pregnant person, or are considering having a kid, and your motivation or desire is remotely divergent from that, then stop. You are not prepared do be the best you can for another person.
I've said it a lot (maybe mostly to myself), but you have to get your own life in order before you can even think about sharing a life with someone else. This is many times more important when talking about a child, something truly helpless and clueless.
Are you disciplined enough to stick to a workout of diet regimen? If not, don't have a kid.
Are you responsible enough to save money, even when it's painful or inconvenient? If not, don't have a kid.
Are you a person who is ok to always let the other person in an argument have the last word? If not, don't have a kid.
Are you mentally strong enough to sit and sweat for hours in a hot room because it's preferable for someone else? If not, don't have a kid.
Are you selfless enough to always choose the more difficult path so that someone else doesn't have to? If not, don't have a kid.
Are you ok never ever being the center of attention?
Can you handle the neverending stress of approaching life like Joe DiMaggio* every moment of your life?
Believe me, it's a little intimidating thinking about all of this, and I'm not so deluded to think that I'm some kind of zen master as it comes to every one of these points. But I am aware of them, and I am fully prepared to meet them.

*Always one of my favorite quotes/stories ever: supposedly some writer asked Joltin Joe why he was so professional, why he tried so hard every day, ran out grounders, always kept his uniform pristine, why he never let himself have an off-day, and his response was: "Because somewhere in the crowd might be a little kid who's never seen me play, and I owe it to that kid to show him how great I am."

Baseball Season Projections

2010-05-13T10:57:00.002-04:00

I'm back again with some results from the baseball ratings, and although I'm not sure how shockingly informative they will be, at least this time they're in a more accessible format: projected season win totals for every team.
As usual, these are current through right now.

AL East
Yankees -- 102
Rays -- 97
Red Sox -- 88
Blue Jays -- 77
Orioles -- 64
The Yankees continue to be the best team by a fair amount, so even though they currently trail Tampa in the standings, they should pull away at some point later in the year.
Boston is a very interesting case. They've played poorly and are already 6.5 back of Tampa and 5 back of NY. The system still thinks Boston is at least an equal to Tampa, but their early deficit plus slightly more difficult remaining schedule puts them well back. Even on May 13, their playoff chances can't be much higher than 25-30% at best.

AL Central
Twins -- 90
Tigers -- 81
White Sox -- 79
Indians -- 73
Royals -- 69
Minnesota is the best team and should cruise through the summer, because their only competition at the moment, Detroit, is playing over its head. In fact, the second-best team in this division is Chicago, and not by just a little. This shows you how important falling behind by five games is, even this early. Those games never come back.

AL West
Rangers -- 85
Angels -- 80
Athletics -- 77
Mariners -- 74
These results don't differ much from popular perception. Seattle has played terribly so far. They have one of the worst records in the AL and have played one of the easiest schedules. They are no great team, but they're better than 13-20, and my numbers don't even include much Cliff Lee. If they didn't lay an egg the first six weeks of the season, they'd have been a great darkhorse.

NL East
Phillies -- 91
Braves -- 87
Mets -- 80
Marlins -- 79
Nationals -- 75
My ratings don't like the Phillies, but love the Braves. A sharp observer would note than Philly is currently 4.5 games up on Atlanta, but my projection shows just a 4 game final edge. Yes, the system thinks Atlanta is better going forward. The same thing I just said about Seattle applies tenfold to Atlanta. They have been disappointing so far, but Vegas has not given up on them. Elsewhere, no, I'm sorry, Washington is not for real. If only they had more pitching.......

NL Central
Cardinals -- 96
Cubs -- 81
Reds -- 81
Brewers -- 81
Astros -- 68
Pirates -- 66
Here is your runaway best team in the NL, a team that is actually behind Philly in the real standings at the moment, largely because they lost three of four to them head-to-head last week. How can this be? Well, the series last week was in Philadelphia. Philly sent each of their best four starters out, while St Louis was without their ace. In spite of this, St Louis was favored in two games and was a toss-up in another. The only game Philly was clearly favored in featured their Cy Young candidate going against the Cardinals' 4th/5th starter. If the playoffs started tomorrow, I would bet large sums of money on St Louis to beat Philly.

AL West
Giants -- 84.7
Padres -- 83.8
Dodgers -- 83.4
Rockies -- 82.4
Dbacks -- 75
Easily the most exciting division, largely because it contains three solid teams, plus the one team that Vegas missed most badly on during the preseason: San Diego. Their lines from their first 18 games suggest a team that would win 76 games in a season. Their lines from the most recent 15 games suggest an 82 game winner. That is a huge difference for the Vegas folks who don't usually miss by much. The key here is not to get carried away by their 21-12 record and focus on the fact that even after Vegas has corrected their Padre lines, they're still just a .500 team. My ratings have LA and Colorado as the top teams here, with SF a notch below, and SD another notch below. The actual standings have exactly reversed that, which is why the full-season projection feature such a logjam. If I had to bet, I'd trust the numbers and go with the Dodgers.

I'm Going to Name My Baby "Cash Cow"

2010-05-11T17:28:00.001-04:00

Or "Manipulated."
As is well-documented, I am a master of sympathy (and empathy, and apathy, and any -pathies really). I care greatly for others. So I feel like my opinion counts extra when I tell you that a lot of pregnancy symptoms are a bunch of shit, none moreso than a man's supposed "sympathy symptoms."
For those unaware, in most pregnancy literature, there are prominent mentions of an effect wherein an expectant father will experience lesser, but similar symptoms as his pregnant wife. Nausea, sluggishness, food cravings, all the fun ones. The idea, I think, is that a man's empathy will actually trigger physical reactions in his body, so that he will share the experience of pregnancy more with his wife.
This is psychological bullshit, of course.(1) Its main intent as far as I can imagine is to help prop up the very lucrative industry that is pregnancy. I fought my way through a wedding preparation last year, dodging the endless financial sinkholes endemic to weddings all along the way, and now I'm wading through the other great unnecessary money-wasting industry in this country.(2)
There are many books and many websites devoted to pregnancy. Maybe 2% of the info contained inside them is of value. If you ever find yourself expecting a child, here is a tip: attend all your doctor visits and ask many questions at them. Make sure to ask the questions in such a way as to convey that you don't know much about the process. Your doctor will tell you everything you need to know.(3) All those books are there to make money, not to inform you of anything. And the really devious thing about the whole industry is that the books/websites/etc are not only meant to make you spend money on them, they are interconnected and meant to make you spend money on all manner of loosely related products.(4) It's like all the pregnancy-type companies are in cahoots. A rising tide lifts all boats, that sort of thing, and the pregnancy tide is a biggie.
Back to the point. No a man will not have diarrhea at the same time as his wife, not unless they ate dinner at a dicey Indian place the night before. No a man will not have back pain when his wife is carrying around the bowling ball in her stomach. This should be obvious, but since it's related to pregnancy, anybody will believe anything.
To take this a dangerous step further, I'm going to say that lots and lots of the pregnancy symptoms experienced by the actual mother-to-be are bullshit, too. I'm clearly not saying that pregnant women don't have plenty of experiences for which the word symptom doesn't do proper justice, but I am saying that the industry uses the curious and captive audience of pregnant couples as an excuse to claim just about every possible human malady is caused by pregnancy. In virtually every instance, the culprit will be the same: hormones. You can blame anything on hormones. Are you pregnant? Do you sing poorly? Hormones! Do you bite your fingernails? Does your poop smell like poop? Does swiss chard taste funny to you? Hormones! Sometimes, pregnancy hormones really are to blame, and that's all it takes to become a catch-all.
I really should take a second to mention how amazing Sara has been as it relates to all of this, before I say that I've been around other pregnant people who claim to have experienced all the symptoms when that's almost an impossibility. Sara has had her fair share of discomfort and inconvenience, but she's never taken advantage of her situation and she's never made up problems and blamed them on the pregnancy. This is because she is amazing.(5) Other women are not so amazing and other husbands are not so lucky.

1. It's a placebo effect of a placebo effect. A woman suffers from nausea not because she actually has to vomit (yes of course sometimes she will--I'm talking about the many other times when she doesn't really), but because she's been told to expect to have nausea. And then because she thinks she has nausea, the man is also supposed to think he has nausea. Quite a little trick.
2. How many billion dollars are pumped into our nation's economy thanks to weddings and chilbirth? A terrifying amount. If we ever get health-care fixed, this is the next big albatross of waste in the economy.
3. Here is something that no pregnancy book will ever tell you: you don't really need to know much of anything until you're well into the third trimester. There is a somewhat obvious list of foods that you should know not to eat early on. Any medication you take you should do what it says on the package and check with your doctor first. That's it until it's time to take your hospital tour, which is free. You can even get a very informative (and pausable and rewatchable) childbirth class via DVD and $15 is a lot less than $300 to do it live. You don't need to know anything else. Actually you don't need to know the stuff from the childbirth class, either, but it's comfortable to have the knowledge. Seriously, you're insurance company will be paying a ton to send you to 15-20 doctor visits, you might as well take advantage.
4. One example of this is in the aforementioned DVD, which is otherwise devoid of riff-raff. The doctor conducting the class takes a 10 minute break from actually spreading knowledge to talk very enthusiastically about why you should bank your umbilical cord blood. Banking cord blood is an industry unto itself, with competing companies and everything. She even mentions one company by name, and shortly thereafter that company's name and phone number appears on the screen. Thanks for that. Of course what they don't tell you is that there is no certainty that you'll ever be able to use this blood, and that it costs several thousand dollars.
5. I shouldn't bury this in a footnote, but this is one of those things that makes me love her more than ever. When I decided to marry her a little bit less than two years ago, I was completely sure that she was just the right person for me, that although we aren't exactly alike, that her things would fit with my things and it would be wonderful. What I could never have imagined then is that over time, other little things about her would present themselves to me that make her even more perfect for me. Since I try not to believe too much in intuition and mysticism, I can only attribute this to blind luck.

Less than Two Months to Go

2010-05-05T15:13:00.002-04:00

As of today, we are just 8 weeks away from Sara's due date. Only 20% of a pregnancy left. Not a lot of time, even though there is better than a 50/50 shot the baby comes late.
Someone asked me today if I was getting nervous. Somehow the question caught me off-guard, but no I'm not nervous, I'm still very excited. To do what I always do and compare something to my experience in athletics, I feel exactly like I used to before a really big race, but one in which my preparation was excellent. I'd start feeling excited and get that sensation in my chest but I'd be welling with confidence at the same time.
So you could say that I am ready, at least unconsciously. Literally, though, I am not ready. Today after work I'm stopping at Lowe's and buying the wood to build the baby dresser/shelf/changing table. Since I'm being nice to my neighbors and restricting myself to sawing on a weekend afternoon, and since I need to apply a couple coats of paint, I don't expect to be finished with it for two or three weeks. That leaves us with more than enough time, but of course Sara is unhappy that it wasn't done last month.
Another thing I have noticed about myself in the last couple weeks is that I've been more naturally industrious. I've been very easily disciplined and systematically getting things done, both at work and home. This wasn't a purposeful change, it just happened.

I can't speak for Sara exactly, but I think our name brainstorming has mostly come to an end. We have two or three names that I would be happy with, and one specifically that I seem to be settling on. I still want to be open to others, and I want to try to come up with some possibilities that aren't names in the traditional sense. Nothing blatantly absurd, but there doesn't need to be some fixed amount of sound and letter combinations that are accepted as "names." Names like Hazel or Willow or Brooke came from words that weren't just names, so why not new ones? Anything can be a name, because a name is the most arbitrary thing in the world.

Fun with the Ratings

2010-04-30T13:04:00.000-04:00

Before I get to the pitcher factors, I'm happy to say that I've upgraded the ratings, and they are clearly the better for it.
As it turns out, regressing the ratings 50% toward preseason projections was much too conservative, so now they're only being regressed 30%. The Vegas lines, which remember are the sole inputs of my system, are so good that even just 20 games worth of lines is enough to produce a very clear picture of team value. The ratings now have a much truer look and I don't have the bunching problem I mentioned the other day.
Secondly, I was doing my opponent adjustment wrong. Not to get into it too much, but for example, I had the Yankees' unadjusted rating of about .600 being adjusted down despite the factor that their opponent rating was .530, which is obviously not right.
The last thing I've cleaned up is to finally add in opponent values for interleague games. I had debated what to do with this. Because the AL is vastly superior to the NL, some additional adjustment beyond home-field seemed necessary, I just wasn't sure what it should be. Some searching let me know that the adjustment should be between .050 and .060 per team, meaning an NL team should be deducted and an AL team given that much. This is a big number. For instance, adding in the deduction, the best NL team, Philadelphia, when playing the AL is only as good as Milwaukee. Or going the other way, Kansas City versus the NL becomes as good as the Angels. Anyway, after explaining all that, I decided not to add any adjustment at all. All AL teams play the same number of interleague games (18), so it wouldn't matter. And in the NL, twelve of the teams play 15 games, while only four play 18. Those last four teams are the only ones who'd be affected by an adjustment, and it would be just .050 per opponent over just three games, which equates to a shade under .001 per game. I decided this wasn't worth the effort. Create your own damn system if you feel otherwise.

Here then are the fixed ratings, updated through games played last night.

Yankees .619
Red Sox .574
Rays .550
Twins .538
Rangers .522
Angels .514
White Sox .510
Mariners .497
Tigers .495
Athletics .487
Indians .477
Royals .454
Blue Jays .453
Orioles .451

Phillies .5752
Cardinals .5748
Braves .554
Dodgers .550
Rockies .540
Cubs .524
Brewers .512
Marlins .5093
Giants .5092
Dbacks .506
Padres .482
Reds .480
Mets .476
Astros .447
Nationals .438
Pirates .426

The Braves are the one team that looks clearly odd. They are in last place with an 8-14 record, and have lost 9 straight games, and yet they're not terribly far behind the two best teams in their league according to my numbers (you could just as easily say "according to Vegas" here). So let's look a little closer at them.
Their lines have been coming down lately, but not hugely so. Their schedule has been very difficult, averaging .542, second-toughest in the league. In four recent games played at St Louis, they were actually the favorite in one of them. In a three game series at home vs Philly, they were somewhat large favorites in both of the non-Halladay games. I don't know what to say, other than I fully expect their rating to come down in the coming weeks.

Now, on to the pitcher factors. I say "factors" and not "ratings" because these are not ratings of each pitcher's quality, but just a measurement of how each pitcher affects his team's rating. In spite of this, the list I'll unveil in a second is still largely intuitive on its own. This owing to the fact that usually good pitchers play for good teams, and--within each team's pitching staff--there is usually a pretty similar drop-off from the top guy on down to the replacement starters, so that while Zach Greinke is awesome and the Royals are poor, so too is Dan Haren awesome but his teammates weak.
Each rating is based on 100. (Mostly for looks. They ought to be based on 1.00, really.) To adjust an individual team line, just multiply the pitcher factor (Lincecum is 1.25, not 125) by the team rating. Simple.
The top ten from each league:
AL
1. Felix Hernandez 120
2. Zach Greinke 120
3. Justin Verlander 112
4. CC Sabathia 110
5. Brett Anderson 108
6. Ricky Romero 107.5
7. Shaun Marcum 106
8. Jake Peavy 105.5
9. Mark Buehrle 105
10. Matt Garza 104

NL
1. Tim Lincecum 125
2. Roy Halladay 121
3. Johan Santana 115
4. Dan Haren 114
5. Ubaldo Jimenez 113
6. Adam Wainwright 113
7. Chris Carpenter 112
8. Josh Johnson 112
9. Yovani Gallardo 110
10. Ricky Nolasco 108
10. Cole Hamels 108

For completeness, there are four pitchers with factors below 90: Kris Benson, Todd Wellemeyer, Dan McCutchen, Chris Narveson and the worst: Dontrelle Willis. Vegas hates them some Dontrelle Willis, so much that his mere presence in the Tigers rotation increases the factors of every other Detroit starter by a point or two.

Finally, some errata from the pitching numbers.
- The Braves' opening day starter, Derek Lowe, is only his team's fourth-best. Their best is actually their youngest, Tommy Hanson.
- Barry Zito's resurgence is not lost on Vegas. His first start rated around 95, but his most recent is up to 102. Mike Pelfrey of the Mets has had a similar increase, but to a lesser extent.
- Going the other way and getting worse: Rich Harden, John Maine, and sorta Jake Peavy.
- Jon Lester has overtaken World Series Hero Josh Beckett as the ace of the Red Sox.
- Vicente Padilla, Joe Torre's genius pick to start opening day for LA, is very nearly the Dodgers' worst starter.
- The recently-demoted-to-the-bullpen Carlos Zambrano was still very clearly rating as the Cubs' best starter.
- The most balanced pitching staff is pretty obviously the Reds, with four starters rating between 99 and 101, and the fifth is a rookie who overall rates at just 94, but his most recent game scored a 100. Honorable mention to the Angels, with all five between 97 and 102.
- The biggest possible mismatch within leagues would be Roy Halladay at home facing Pittsburgh's Dan McCutchen. Philly would be expected to win that game over 83% of the time. For an interleague game, CC Sabathia at home against McCutchen would produce a win expectation of over 88% for the Yankees.

Quite the Racket

2010-04-27T12:35:00.006-04:00

This past weekend, I got into a small argument about the lottery. It was part of a larger discussion, but the key point was me telling the other person that playing the lottery is a very foolish thing to do if your intent is to actually win money at a reasonably fair rate, and that because a lot of poor people who don't know any better play the lotto regularly, it in effect functions as a tax against the lower class. My opposition in the argument was saying how the lotto is a good thing both because it's revenues help to fund public schools, and because it gives those same poor people some hope to win.
The point about state lotteries funding schools is true--they do--but so is the fact that a huge majority of people who play the lottery are low-income, so it's sorta impossible to argue that of the lotto income that funds schools, most of it is being paid by low-income people. That's a hidden but clear tax against anyone who plays the lottery. This has been said many times before, and I don't think my fellow arguer disputed this.
The point that bothered me as an analytical thinker was the one about how playing the lotto is a losing game, that the numbers are stacked against you. My assumption had been that of all the money coming in to the state for the lotto, they skim some off the top and pay out to the schools, then they skim a little more to cover the expense of running the lotto, and then the prizes constitute the rest. This is in fact how it works. What shocked me when I did some simple investigating this morning was how small the prize money is as a percentage of the intake. I'd assumed it might be something like 80-90%. Most sportsbooks will pay out around 91% of their income, keeping just 9% for themselves. Casino games have similar pay-out rates, if usually slightly higher (more fair to the player) even. Many slot machines actually pay-out much higher, up to 99% (mostly because the cost to operate them are so low--no dealers, etc).
According to the website of Mega Millions, the largest interstate lottery in the country, they pay out a ridiculous 50%. Stop and think about that for a minute. Playing the lotto is exactly like playing a 50/50 raffle, and those pretty obviously primarily exist as fund-raising tools. People who play them know that their buy-in is going to fund the school band, or the volunteer fire hall, or whatever else.
But people who play the lottery are not doing it to help fund others, in their minds when they buy the tickets, they are trying to win for themselves. Again, remember who buys most of the tickets. These people can't afford to be so charitable. Often, what they hope they're buying are literally tickets out of poverty.
And the system is only paying out 50%.

Let's do a math exercise to fully illustrate how stupid buying a lottery ticket is.
Assume one hundred $1 lotto tickets are sold. You buy one of them. Assume then that you're chance of winning is one-in-one hundred, or 1%.* Using the Mega Millions structure, the prize available to you is $50. You have a 1% chance of winning that prize, so your expected return for each $1 investment is 50 cents. On top of that, Uncle Sam will tax the winnings up to or around 50%. So your expected return drops to just a quarter. I don't need to tell you that this is epically bad.
Indeed, when you buy a lottery ticket, you do have hope to win a much larger prize. As a one-time, isolated occurrence, this could be considered a fun and harmless act. But done repeatedly, and spread out over millions and millions of people, it's just flabbergastingly stupid.

For the record, here is where the Mega Millions website says their ticket sales revenues go:
50% -- "goes back to the players as prizes."
35% -- "support government services in the member state." Here is your school funding.
15% -- "goes to retailer commissions and lottery operating costs." Here are bodega guys getting a tiny sliver, and the funding of all those terrible commercials, and rich people getting richer.

Finally, here is another factoid I encountered when searching. According to the Ohio state lottery website, the per capita play for all lottery games was $202. Let's guess that half of all people never played the lotto, so the share for those who did rises to $404. Let's then guess that half of those who played did so for less than $50 total (that's one per week still). The share for the remaining 25% of the population rises to over $750 per. And 25% is a horribly liberal guess as to the active lotto players. If there are 10% of the population that regularly plays the lotto, then those people are spending on average over $2,000 per year, even after subtracting out scratch-off winnings. If you want to pursue it more, you could guess that of these regular players, a lot are at poverty level and make less than say $20,000 per year, so that they're spending at minimum 10% of their gross income on lotto tickets.
This is not a small thing.

*I know that in big number-picking lotteries, the odds are independent of the number of entries, that you always have X% chance of getting 6 random numbers to match. I also know that multiple people can win the same prize in them. For the sake of the example, it will be easier to do it as though it's raffle-style. Anyways, the odds in my example above are far higher, since Mega Millions' odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 175,711,536.

My Baseball Ratings

2010-04-26T15:20:00.000-04:00

Emphasis on the "My."
You remember a post several weeks ago, the one where I described my gambling epiphany, where I extolled the virtues of a purely objective analytic approach? Yes, of course. I was happy because I had found such a system, and put it to fairly successful use during the end of the college basketball season. But that system only worked for that sport, and of course that system was completely stolen, mostly from Ken Pomeroy's ratings.
So now that college basketball is over, and I've promised not to make subjective bets, I basically have to sit on my hands until the fall, when I could try stealing another system, this time applying it to football. Of course that's not a preferred course of action for someone like me, especially with probably my favorite sport--baseball--occurring daily over the next several months.
Baseball is a tricky sport to handicap, but it does provide about 15 games per day, and its every-day nature does force books to produce lines on extremely short notice, so the chances that a rogue line appears and blesses me with a wonderful edge opportunity are high. I only needed to find a rating system to do the work for me.
This would seem an easy task, what with the proliferation of high-level statistics and statistical analysts working on the game. Alas, most all of the work being done is for "legitimate" purposes, or, more often, on the individual level, not the team level.
As I thought about it, I came to believe that I could just create my own rating system, or at least I thought I would enjoy trying. What follows is the surprisingly satisfactory result of this effort.

My first choice in creating the ratings was to use actual closing gambling lines. I get them from Pinnacle, which runs a site that is the go-to spot for intelligent gamblers (no, I don't have an account there, so I officially am still not "intelligent"), largely because their lines are so good and fair. For each game played, I convert a team's moneyline into a win%, then adjust that based on home-field advantage. I then just average all the individual game ratings to produce an overall team rating. This is pretty simple, converting to an opponent-neutral requires more work. For each team, I had to input their schedule, and add a formula to the spreadsheet to automatically adjust the opponent's rating, again factoring in home-field. Once I took the time to enter this stuff once, I never have to do it again.
All that gives me both a team rating and an opponent rating for each team. To combine the two and create the master rating, I weight the team rating twice as heavily as the opponent rating, then regress the team rating toward it's preseason projection and the opponent rating toward an average opponent (I haven't yet decided how much to regress these, but for now I'm using 50%. If that is right--and it seems pretty good--then I'll just need to lower the amount as the season progresses).

Now that that is out of the way, let me reveal the actual results. First, the National League, updated through right now:
1. St Louis .54841
2. Philadelphia .53803
3. Atlanta .53528
4. Los Angeles .53119
5. Colorado .52630
6. Chicago .51071
7. Milwaukee .50699
8. Florida .50060
9. Arizona .50055
10. San Francisco .49811
11. Cincinnati .48843
12. New York .48437
13. San Diego .48317
14. Houston .46747
15. Washington .46143
16. Pittsburgh .45581

The great thing about the rating is that it doubles as an expected winning percentage, neutralized for home-field, against a theoretically .500 opponent.
To my eye, it looks like the extremes aren't quite extreme enough. St Louis would finish a 162 game season with just 89 wins given that percentage, and Pittsburgh with a relatively robust 73 (though you'd need to subtract one or two from PIT's total there because they wouldn't face a purely .500 schedule, just because they won't benefit from playing their sorry selves. Still, the numbers look just slightly too centralized). Over time I think this will work itself out, especially after I start regressing less, and anyway, if your system has a slight bunching problem rather than an outlier problem, then you're in much much better shape.
Here is the American League:
1. New York .56907
2. Boston .55092
3. Tampa Bay .53248
4. Minnesota .52342
5. Texas .51473
6. Los Angeles .50679
7. Chicago .50555
8. Oakland .49436
9. Seattle .49213
10. Detroit .48937
11. Cleveland .48890
12. Kansas City .47113
13. Baltimore .47070
14. Toronto .46143

A quick look at these and we can get an instant sense of where our gambling opportunities lie.
- Oakland jumps out. They're currently in first place, but still I think most people think they are terrible. Their pitching is actually quite good, and bookies know this. In fact, depending on neutral pitching matchups, Oakland playing at home ought to be favored over Minnesota every time, and over even Tampa some of the time.
- The Yankees are very very good. There is necessarily some public bias in the ratings, because lines are often goosed in favor of popular teams. This doesn't happen as much at a book like Pinnacle, but it's still there. It's instructive, though, to know that they've played the toughest schedule in the AL so far, they've been the favorite in every game but the three at Boston (this includes series at Tampa and at LA), and that even their individual game lines playing at Boston produced close to 50-50 expectations.
- The Florida Marlins, Atlanta Braves, and Washington Nationals are three teams all in the same division who rate higher than expected. This despite the fact that Philly is very nearly the top team. The NL East is for real. Washington has played the toughest schedule thus far in the NL, tougher even than the Yankees mentioned above. The Marlins have played 12 road games already, but were actually favored in six of them, including one against Philly and the first two games of the season at the Mets (special wow-factor that they were favored at NY on opening day, opposing Johan Santana). I've got two eyes on them for the time being.
- Easiest schedules so far: Phillies at .450, Detroit and Toronto at .477. Compare these to Washington at .546 and the Yankees at .532. Phillies have essentially played all games against Pittsburgh, while Washington has played all games against a team like St Louis.

I still need to add a category for future schedule strength. This will actually allow me to create predicted end-of-season standings, very valuable for futures betting on division winners. (I can tell you now without even having created these that Washington at 25-1 to win the NL East, while definitely a long shot, is just as definitely a positive value bet. To be positive value, the Nats would need to have just a 3.8% chance of winning the division.)
In addition to futures, this system will of course work for individual game lines. Just take the teams' ratings plus apply a personalized factor for each starting pitcher, and you've got a perfect line to compare to the bookie's offering.
I'm actually almost done figuring individual pitcher factors, too. I'll report back in the next couple days on that, since there are some interesting results. I'll also try to report back with observations and updated ratings, plus a report on the gambling results, once I feel confident enough to start placing wagers (I'm not far away).

Fandom

2010-04-22T17:07:00.000-04:00

The quarterback of my favorite football team was suspended six games the other day. Suspended 3/8 of a season. Suspended, essentially, for being a disrespectful, slightly sociopathic asshole.
You could argue all you want over whether this punishment was just (and, at my instigation, my friends and I have been doing just that the last couple days), but I'm not here to do that.
I'm more interested now in what it means to be a fan of a team. Jerry Seinfeld had a joke where he said that rooting for sports teams is like rooting for laundry. Of course he's got a good point. Another team's villain could tomorrow very easily become your team's hero, and your opinion of him would change accordingly. I've heard many people hope for scandalous events to befall the star player of a rival team, not so much so that the player would be distracted and then perhaps fail, but to give the fan a more tangible reason to dislike him. The cliche of a player who is hated by seemingly everyone except fans of his own team is well-known.
I think a lot of this is made possible by the simple fact that football is a team sport, and fans can have loyalty not just to a specific player or a specific team, but to a more inanimate franchise, which is of course usually tied to the fan's hometown.
A lot of Pittsburgh fans have been upset in the last few years because the team's offense has been skewed toward passing. This is because Pittsburgh has a history of being a rushing team, and its fans identify not just with say the 2008 version of the team, but with the whole history of the franchise. It doesn't matter to them that their line can't run-block, or that their top running back is no good, or that the personnel dictates passing to be a good idea, because the team they root for usually runs the ball.
Even though I think this way of thinking is completely stupid, I do have sympathy with the idea. If you don't have something tangible in your team's identity to latch onto, then you really are basically just rooting for laundry.
Back to the main point, though--the suspended quarterback (who'll be referred to as as "Fathead" henceforth).
A Pittsburgh fan such as myself has two recent championship seasons, and Fathead was instrumental to both. Thus, for the most part, Fathead is/was rather beloved by the team's fans. No surprise there. As a player, he has his flaws, but they have almost always been overcome. As a person, he also has his flaws, but they have been kept innocuous enough so as to disregard. Not anymore. In light of his recent sexual assault accusation, lots of negatives stories have filtered out about the man, so much so that even though man of these are unfounded anonymous rumors and he's never been officially charged with anything, the breadth and the consistency of them paints a pretty clear picture of an genuine asshole (if not a criminal). So much of an asshole, in fact, that unless I'm mistaken, he's the first athlete to be suspended for substantial length without charge or conviction, and without doing anything to specifically harm his team, just sorta to besmirch the league itself.(1) So, we're talking about a real prick.
How am I supposed to feel about the prospect of rooting for this man? Should I support his return, because he wears the right color laundry? Should I support him because of the good experiences he provided me with during those two championship seasons? Should I support him because I've been supporting him for 6-7 years now? Should I hate him because he got suspended and therefore hurt the team? Or should I jeer him because he's an asshole? Does it make me a hypocrite, or worse, if I don't?
I think it's those last two questions that are the most interesting. Relating only to personal judgment and not the games themselves, is there really an arbitrary line over which an athlete can pass to cause a fan base to turn on him? Of there must be, but for cases which don't include a criminal conviction, it's hard to define. If a player were exposed as a blatant racist,(2) would that do it? What if a hidden camera followed him around and found out that he never recycled, always left his lights and AC on, and constantly spit on sidwalks? What if he never reciprocated with his friends and bought a round? What if he privately sold a car or something else expensive that he knew to be a lemon? What if all of the above?
Football is intrinsically a team sport. It isn't like baseball, where you can boo the first baseman who abused his pregnant wife, while still cheering for everyone else. If you boo the quarterback during a game, you're essentially booing the whole offense. (I suppose you could do the fantasy-football thing and hope for him to have a terrible game while the team still wins.)
Ultimately, none of this matters, of course. The team will succeed or fail on their own; your support will mean almost nothing. Most of the players are mature individuals who will handle this bit of sociological justice effectively. I think as a fan, the best thing for me is to let the players sort it out. If they come to the defense of the Fathead and want to move forward as a complete unit, then who am I argue.(3) Presumably, the aspirations of the players are the same as me: to win. If you are rooting for a team for a reason other than to hope for it to win, then you're really wasting your time. If it's only about the pageantry, don't pick a side. If it's mostly about feeling good morally and ethically, don't get invested in sports. Sports at its best is a perfect capitalist structure, a perfect meritocracy. Don't be a socialist when it comes to being a fan. Most importantly, don't delude yourself into thinking you care about much of anything other than winning.

(Now, if you'd like to hear my current, personal opinion on the Fathead matter: I'm willing to forgive and to root him to help my team win, but that's only because I don't really believe that he "raped" that girl. If I did, then this would be more of a black-and-white case, and I'd want the team to get rid of him, pronto.)

1. The best comparison I can think of is Milton Bradley, the baseball player, or Terrel Owens, both of whom were suspended just for being assholes. In their cases, though, their behavior was directly disruptive to their teams, and in fact it was their teams that did the suspending, not the league. Fathead's case is closer to a steroid suspension really, because it incites the league to act and to punish to maintain a show of decorum and justice for the public. But then there is still the issue of steroids being an offense against the integrity of the game, while Fathead's actions were just an offense against human judgment.
2. John Rocker is a perfect example here. I can't remember exactly, maybe a Braves fan can refresh me. I know they were ultimately glad to see him go.

Of This World

2010-04-19T10:04:00.003-04:00

I pass a homeless person almost every morning on my way to the subway. I'm almost endlessly fascinated by homeless people, so let me share this.
I assume she is a woman, but it's hard to tell because she wears the same layers of street-grey sweatshirts with a knit hat pulled fairly low. She pushes a shopping cart that seems always to have about four or five garbage bags stuffed full of empty cans and bottles. The garbage bags are always full, which makes me wonder if she ever cashes them in.
The interesting thing about this woman is that, just like me walking to the subway, she has a routine. In fact, she seems to stick to her routine better than I do, such that I can judge my punctuality by where on the street I see this woman. She comes from somewhere to the north of Borough Hall, stops at the bagel cart on Boerum just south of Joralemon, buys a doughnut (which I'm sorta confident is always a bavarian cream), then walks it and her bulging cart down to between State and Atlantic. She stops here, leaving her cart on the street side of the curb, because there is a large concrete stairway that juts out from the front of this building, the kind that comes out and has a landing which then itself splits down to either side and takes up half the sidewalk space. She chooses the stairs that split to the south and sits down in the shelter there on the lower steps and deliberately unwraps and eats her doughnut. When finished she goes on to Atlantic and turns east, thereby ending our fleeting cohabitation.
The time it takes her each day to pass through the same portion of the world as I do is maybe 20 minutes. The time it takes me to do the same is maybe 5 minutes, but then as I said I'm not as punctual as she is, and my appearance along that stretch of Boerum could be anywhere from 7:55am through 8:20am. There is no way that this woman is not timing her moves.
Does she have a watch? Where did she get it? How does she replace the battery? There is an obvious answer here--that she could very easily just look up at the clocktower near Atlantic Terminal and find the time--but that doesn't answer the deeper curiosity: why check the time at all?
Why does she hold to this schedule? The doughnut-seller will be at that corner for several hours, so it's not like she has to restrict herself on account of him. In the summer months, there is daylight for a very long time before 7:45am, so it can't be that she simply wakes up with the sun and gets her breakfast.
She has to be consciously regimenting her day, perhaps just for it's own sake (sanity?). I'm going to make a gross assumption here, but I don't think she has much of a reason to follow a rigid schedule on any given day. Maybe a soup kitchen serves lunch during a certain window in the middle of the day, and maybe she knows a restaurateur who gives her food at a general hour, but these aren't the kinds of appointments that must be strictly attended at exact times, nothing such that she would do the same things every morning within less than five minutes difference from day to day.
I think that this woman, when she wakes up every morning, knows from habit and experience how much time she has in that day. She must have a few things that she knows she will do, such as buy that bavarian cream doughnut, but outside of those, what happens? Presumably she collects cans, but there is hardly a schedule for that.
What I'm perhaps awkwardly trying to get at is that this woman makes a conscious effort to keep herself on a schedule. Her brain is still organizing. She hasn't totally checked out from this world. And yet there she is, utterly homeless, not the kind who exhorts people on the subway. I've never seen her with another person. Aside from the doughnut guy, I don't think I've ever seen her acknowledge the existence of another human being. This is a person who has been homeless for a long time. And yet she seems to have the same kind of approach to a day as any one of us more-fortunate people. She has her own unknown purpose, but still she has it.
I'm not really sure what the point is for me writing all this. The more I think about it, the more questions seem to pop up. Why, mostly. I guess that's what it means to be fascinated by something.

A Quote about Perspective

2010-04-16T14:17:00.002-04:00

Apparently, Bob Feller thinks Lou Gehrig was something of a drama queen.
Years ago, Feller was asked what he thought about Gehrig's famous quote ("Today......I consider myself...........the luckiest man....on the face of the earth") and he responded thusly:
"He's wrong. I am. I'm still alive."
Well, then.

Rigorous Fealty to an Idea

2010-04-08T17:41:00.000-04:00

This is from an article in this month's The Atlantic magazine. The whole article is basically an in-depth profile of Timothy Geithner, and it's worth reading. I'll give you the passage below mostly without comment, only saying that it's usually helpful to take a measured response to situations, especially those that are rather complex. That the current news culture in this country behaves in just the opposite manner is disappointing. That most of the population follows right along is far worse.

Geithner plainly has no patience for what he describes as the obdurate unwillingness of colleagues to subordinate their desire for superficial impact to the larger vision. “That’s exactly the dilemma,” he said. “The stuff that seemed appealing in terms of sharp discontinuity, Old Testament justice, clean break, fix the thing, penalize the venal, would have been dramatically damaging to the basic strategy of putting out the panic, getting growth back, making people feel more confident in the future—solving it without putting trillions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money at risk unnecessarily.”

All of this is extremely interesting because of what it seems to reveal about each man: Summers, whose knock has always been that he’s an academic trapped in a world of theory, has become the politically minded one, while Geithner, the savvy realist, now evinces rigorous fealty to an idea. But it’s even more interesting for what it says about Obama. At every turn, he has sided with Geithner.

In late December, the Commerce Department reported that the economy grew at a rate of 2.2 percent in the third quarter, ending four straight quarters of decline. (That figure leapt to 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter.) Then, later that day, Obama told The Washington Post in an Oval Office interview that the most important thing he’d accomplished in his first year was “to ensure that the financial system did not collapse.” Then Geithner went on NPR and stated flatly that there would be no double-dip recession—by Washington standards of caution, a provocative move. Even with unemployment high and anger at Wall Street intense, the mood at Treasury is quietly exultant because the imminent possibility of another depression has disappeared and growth has resumed, all at a fraction of the cost estimates being bandied about last year when it still looked like the government might need to take over large banks.

Geithner likes to point out that after a year on the job, he’s spent $7 billion recapitalizing financial firms while private investors have put up $140 billion. TARP money is being repaid faster than anyone imagined, and if Obama gets the $90 billion tax on big banks he proposed in January, it could eventually be recouped. It’s likely that the cost to taxpayers will be much less than the 5 to 10 percent of GDP that the Cleveland Fed says is typical for a crisis, and possibly as little as 2 to 4 percent—about the cost of the much smaller savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s. A recent Treasury study indicates that it could be less than 1 percent. By any reasonable standard, this would be an impressive achievement, and it would owe a great deal to Geithner’s strategy.

And yet, a year into his presidency, the overwhelming criticism of Obama is that he is taking too much control of the economy and spending too much money—which must really sting, because by avoiding nationalization and its colossal costs, he has probably saved an incredible sum. “We’re getting killed from the right and from the left on the basic strategy,” Geithner told me. “The right argues that we unnecessarily socialized the entire financial system. The left says we wasted money on things they’d have rather used to help real people directly. As you might understand, I have no sympathy with either. Neither critique is right. To the right, I would say: ‘No, the strategy we adopted was overwhelmingly designed to try to make sure that private markets came and took us out of this as quickly as possible. That was a conscious choice, a shift in strategy, and a more pro-market approach that will help us deal with our fiscal challenges.’ And to the left, I would say: ‘And that saved the taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars that you can use to meet the main challenges we face as a country—health care, education, infrastructure, and our long-term deficit.’”

Hot Air

2010-04-07T17:16:00.001-04:00

Weathermen are worthless. Something I love to do when people ask what the weather will be like today is to say: "Like yesterday, just a little different." Sure it's nice to know whether or not to expect rain, but it's extremely rare for a temperature swing from one day to the next to be at all relevant.
Weathermen know they possess minimal value, and so they have figured out over time how to make themselves seem more important. Go to the TV listings for The Weather Channel sometime. Here are some of the names of shows to be broadcast in the evening this week: "Storm Stories," "Storm Riders," "When Weather Changed History," and Joe Versus the Volcano.(1) They need to remind us constantly of those rare instances of extreme weather so that we live in enough fear that we feel compelled to ask them when to expect the next Big One. Here's a tip: expect the average.(2) Expect small changes from day to day. It doesn't take a specialized degree to record those, it takes a thermometer and at least one functioning eyeball.
I was thinking about this because it's hot today. It was also a little breezy. Why don't we ever hear reports about what the wind chill is in summer? Or the heat index in winter? It's because those would only serve normalize any extremes, whereas the way they do it of course accentuates extremes. If it's July and the temperature is 82, then that's no big deal, but if the humidity makes it feel like 94, well shit, now you can get people talking. But that's not the whole story, though. Maybe the wind is also blowing, so that if you apply the winter wind chill factors to the heat-indexed temperature, then maybe the true "feels like" reading becomes something like 84. Back to where you started, not being really concerned about the weather.
Try not to forget that weathermen are like people in infomercials: always making a big fuss about something, always try to sell you something that you don't need.

1. Yes, Joe Versus the Volcano. I'm just as amused by that as you are.
2. As someone has increasingly viewed the world in a probabilistic manner, this is yet another area where people are stupid. Did you ever notice how in the 10-day forecasts that weather.com publishes, that the temperatures on the last couple days will always return close to the average? Of course. They don't know much more than you what it will be like more than a week from now, so they just make sure their predictions are essentially copies of the historical average.

Last Trip

2010-04-02T11:15:00.003-04:00

I spent three-plus days in Chicago this past weekend, mostly just to visit cause it's Sara's spring break but also to attend our baby shower organized by her sister. I was one of four males attending this shower, all of whom were immediate family members. Baby showers just aren't attended by men. I'm not here to argue that, but I do wonder why we as a gender have been so easily spared them. The main point of a baby shower is for the guests to give baby-related presents to the expectant mother. Since only women can actually have babies, it makes some small sense that only women will give gifts to them, but what if a woman doesn't have very many female friends, what if more than normal of her closer friends are male? Does she then forfeit the ability to receive as many gifts? And what if you are a male and one of your best friends happens to be a woman, does she even invite you to her shower, or do you attend? Being a best friend, of course you'd be both expected and happy to give your friend something, but for this case the arbitrariness of your gender seems to confuse things.
A baby shower is even more simply a vehicle for gift-giving than is a wedding shower, and naturally wedding showers are attended by both men and women. At least at a wedding shower, there is a semi-reasonable desire for guests to meet whichever of the couple that they might not know; this doesn't apply for a baby shower, which is attended by all of the woman's friends who she'd presumably hang out with anyway. The whole point is the gifts. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if I were a woman with a single bank account, I think this is one double-standard that I'd actually be pissed about. Glass ceilings, sure, but we're talking about the tight financial noose of the baby shower.

In other Chicago news, this trip had an odd vibe to it in that it's the last time we'll be there together until we've moved there. (I will be making a couple solo trips out to job-hunt, but not with Sara.) There was a little more realism when we walked around a prospective neighborhood or we talked about what we liked about a place. It's also the first time I've been there since Sara got pregnant, so my perspective has changed. In both of these aspects, I'm much more fully prepared to make this move.
We've been pretty set about moving out there this summer for a long time now, but in most of those plans, it was more just an idea or a suggestion, with plenty of room for me to be hesitant or to harbor inhibitions. I guess this trip finally got me fully on board, finally sold Chicago to me.
As we talked about what aspects of a neighborhood were appealing to us, I even started to become more and more willing to live in her hometown of Evanston, rather than somewhere inside the city itself.* I'm going to be 30, with a new baby, so what's the big difference in living in a trendy neighborhood for me? Being in Evanston vs being in Lakeview or Wicker Park or Lincoln Square or wherever is basically just a difference of 15 minutes of commuting time for me to get to work. I'm not going to be going to bars with the same frequency, so moving from having 50 within a mile of my apartment to maybe 10-15 doesn't really matter to me. One of the things I've learned about NYC is that unless you're really getting after it, the bar scene here is really governed by the law of diminishing returns. The real difference between a spectacular bar city like NYC and any other only really manifests itself to someone like me in the variety of options available. You want to play bocce inside? How about sit outside in a 2,000 person (more? I don't know) beer garden? Maybe indulge in a microbrew tasting menu for dirty cheap just down the block? You want to have several different options of places to buy cheap growlers? You want to play pool for free? You want a top-scale cocktail bar? The diviest dive there is? Maybe a place with free pizza, or hot dogs, or popcorn, or cheese? Maybe pitchers for $4 and tons of sports on Sundays? Any kind of rooftop? A shoeless boardwalk bar? A Czech bar, a German biergarten, a Japanese sake house, a Puerto Rican place, a Chinese speakeasy...............this is the greatness of going out in this city, that I can have literally whatever I want. But I just listed a lot of different desires, and I'm not going to want all of them very often, maybe just once a year or less. More often, I'll just want to go to a regular place. Removing this smorgasbord of opportunity will maybe affect my life once every month or two, and that's not even really considering that Chicago isn't exactly limited to just strip-mall bars or Applebees.

Back to my point. I'm happy about our move and I'm mentally ready. I'm also extremely well-equipped for having a baby. Literally, I mean, we now have in our tiny apartment basically everything we might need to care for this baby, and we're still about three months away. There is an infant car seat in my closet where I used to keep sweaters. There is a diaper pail tucked under our table, a changing pad back behind our kitchen storage, a couple sheep's worth of clothes in the bedroom, and much more, even a stroller (currently collapsed). Three months will prove to be about enough for three people to be living in our little place.

* In some ways, this represents only a label, as Evanston is connected on the city's transit line, so it's not like some kind of car suburb. That the city line is drawn where it is as pertains to Evanston-v-Chicago, it's a wholly arbitrary. Rogers Park, the adjacent neighborhood that sits inside the city line, is actually a much less desirable place to live. The real difference in this case of city/"suburb" is that since Evanston is very traditionally liberal, the taxes are higher there, but that in turn successfully leads to better public services. Since we'll at least initially be renting, that tax burden won't really trickle down to us quite as much as it would to an owner.

Going Soft

2010-03-24T14:03:00.001-04:00

First, my wife is out of town and when I finally see her again, eight days will have passed. This is a very long time to be without someone you spend large chunks of every day with. It messes up your rhythms and affects pretty much everything you do in a day. I had potato chips for dinner one night. I used the same pot to cook with multiple times before washing it. I spent a couple of entire evenings without speaking. I left a pile of dirty clothes out on the floor. I watched the MLB Network for about three straight hours one night. I slept right in the middle of the bed and rolled around at will. Wild, I know.
In spite of all this blissful debauchery, I would much rather have her around. I was gone when she left for Chicago last weekend, so she left a little note for me taped to the bathroom mirror. It didn't say anything profound or hugely romantic, was just a normal note saying she'd miss me. I've left it hanging all week as a little reminder, a small inconvenience that I have to deal with when using that mirror, one little tiny thing to keep me connected to her presence in a much stronger way than simply speaking together on the phone ever could.
Second, a few days ago, I found myself watching some show about animals struggling to reproduce. I mean struggling to carry on their genes, not struggling to have sex. There was a thing about how an octopus mother* will gently and methodically blow water over her many eggs to keep them from accruing algae, and something else about a tree frog carrying her tiny tadpoles one at a time up a huge tree so they'd be safe. For obvious reasons, this really got to me. I am a human being with innumerable advantages in this world as compared to these animals, and in a few more months I'll start the same "struggle" as them in trying to protect and nurture a new life. It's nice to be reminded how much effort some creatures will put into parenting, so that there is really no excuse for me given how much easier it will be than having to climb a massive tree several times a day with my baby on my back.

*Did you know that after its eggs hatch, a mother octopus dies? This also got to me. I used to love Hemingway and even in my most cynical phases the ending to A Farewell to Arms always seemed terribly heartbreaking to me. In fact, multiple times I've stopped and reiterated to Sara that should anything dangerous happen relating to this baby being born, should any kind of crazy situation arise where her health is ever put in jeopardy attempting to keep the baby safe, then I'd stop it in a second.

A Little Bit of Shame in the Health Care Bill

2010-03-23T09:57:00.004-04:00

I don't know if you've heard, but the Democrats seem to have successfully hoodwinked most of America into allowing poor people to systematically harvest our organs. On top of that, they deviously exploited a loophole that allowed them to pass a bill with a horribly un-arbitrary simple majority, instead of the happily more nuanced 60%.
I haven't been on pins and needles following this whole drama along the way, so thankfully the NY Times site has a couple of handy "interactive graphics" that explain the House and Senate bills, though beware the caveat that as far as I can tell neither says anything about death panels.
The one that focuses more on the differences between the bills contain a delightful little passage detailing a House bill addition:
MEDICARE PAYROLL TAX: Would impose an additional 3.8 percent tax on capital gains, dividends, interest and other “unearned income.”
Heh. "Unearned income." You can argue all you want about the responsibility to the robustness of the overall U.S. economy and the admirable foresight required to actually receive capital gains, dividends, or interest, but you have to enjoy that someone has labeled these as "unearned." I agree that probably these incomes shouldn't be penalized because they are there to exploit by those capable to exploit them, but I wholly support calling a spade a spade here. Those incomes are not actually earned, they are exploited. It's like finding a $10 bill on the sidewalk. "Unearned."
Awesome, which leads me to my other curiosity: who is responsible for those quotation marks around "unearned income?" Was it someone at the Times? I doubt it. Was it Democratic congressmen, who actually wrote the phrase into the legislation? Maybe. I'd like to know though, because it was a very deliberate choice.

(On a more serious note, as with anything debated in a political setting or with political consequences, there are multiple very intelligent arguments to made for or against either side. It costs too much, it's socialism, we're behind the rest of the world, government is too big already, the current system is broken anyway, etc etc. But there is one simple immediate effect of this that I think can't be ignored no matter your stance: 32 million of the 54 million uninsured Americans would gain coverage. Isn't that really the most important thing? "I'll have to pay more for prescriptions, I might have to wait longer to see a doctor, I won't be able to pick and choose what I want all the time," and on and on. So what if the new plan isn't perfect? It's a huge and difficult issue and will take decades to successfully implement true changes, so you have to start somewhere. It would be easy for me or you to take a principled stance in favor of more thought or more discussion or more discretion on this matter (and we'd almost always be right). We can afford to do this. We can waltz into a hospital and be treated at little cost to ourselves almost whenever we want, but there are a lot of people who can't (54 million, evidently), and those are the people who probably ought to be considered first.)

The Joy in Riding the Wave

2010-03-11T09:38:00.001-05:00

I said multiple times yesterday to "trust the system" and to remove emotion from the gambling experience, so as not to negatively influence my otherwise-sound wagering habits.
Well that's all very true, and that's how I'm navigating this stretch of wall-to-wall basketball games. But an important thing that I failed to note is that this system doesn't remove emotion from the equation, at least not post-bet, meaning I'm still very susceptible to the exhilarating and depressing swings that come with success and failure. I can still watch and follow with a fan's rooting (and sporting) interest, and betting on so many games each day serves to make every day like a first-round-NCAA-Tournament day, where it seems that every basket has actual meaning.
As prophesied yesterday, I had an up-and-down day with the wagers. I started off hitting four of my first five bets, for a net gain of $19. Then I lost my biggest bet of the day, a $44 loss, followed by a small $5 win. I had two games left and was down $20 for the day. Bad news was my last two bets were only about 50/50 shots each. I figured a split there and I'd only be out $20 for the whole day, not too bad. Of the first of the late doubleheader goes very poorly, my teams falls behind and never ever makes it interesting. The final game wasn't starting until 11:45pm though and as much I really wanted to follow that one live, I decided to turn in.
When I woke up there was a little anxiety over that last game. It represented a $45 swing in my daily performance, and my team was only a 52% likely winner. Surely karma would be coming back to get me. Surely I had to know what happened. Surely I was extremely happy to find out they'd pulled out a four-point win. Way to go, Cal Poly Mustangs, for overcoming a six-point halftime deficit and putting me in a very good mood this fine Thursday.

(All this after a net losing day yesterday, too. Thanks mostly to that big $44 loss, but moreso really to my 1-2 record in swing games. One thing my system has is inherent risk for large losses. A large portion of my bets sees me taking favorites, sometimes big favorites. It's hard to win much money on these games without making large bets. In order to bet on an 80% likely winner, I'll usually need to put up something like $20 to win only $7. The system also likes to tell me to place larger wagers on teams I'm only about 55-60% likely will win. The good news here is that I still have an edge and I'd stand to win virtually the amount that I put up, but of course if the numbers hold true I'll lose these bets almost half the time. You just have to stomach it.
To use yesterday as an example, I made nine bets. Three of them were basically gimmies, with expected win% of 85% at minimum. I actually lost one of these, but still broke even on them because the loser was the lowest bet amount. Three of the bets were medium favorites, with win% expectations between 69-81%. I won all three of these for a $26 gain. The last three were a little under 60% likely to win individually. I lost two of these and very nearly all three. But my net result was -$45. You see how the losses hurt more than the wins help.
Remarkably, I've been slightly unlikely on these swing games since starting the system, with just a 6-8 record in games where the price I bought was within 10% of a 50/50 shot. My financial balance on these 14 50/50 shots is -$149. That's a lot. So while I've had overall good luck, my small amount of bad luck on these highest-value games has balanced out the luck factor quite a bit.)

Diaperpalooza

2010-03-10T17:32:00.000-05:00

(I'll say up front that maybe this is a stupid post at the moment. Very high jinx potential. Maybe I should wait for the wave to crest. But kind the whole point is I don't believe in voodoo or superstition, so here we are.)

A few months ago, in order to try to erase that sad scrunchy face that Sara would get whenever I talked about my sports bets, I attempted to reframe the conversation. I spoke of the winnings in terms of diapers. A diaper costs roughly 25 cents. So if I won a $20 bet, then I'd say "We won 80 diapers today." Notice also the use of the word "we." I wanted to make her feel less icky about me gambling online while expecting a baby.(1) Also--genuinely--I wanted to convey to her that any winnings I might produce would go to the baby and not back into my personal pot.
This strategy has been about as successfully as I could have hoped. No, of course she doesn't ever support my degenerate efforts, but at least to a small degree she shares in my excitement with winning. Or at least she is happy when I have good gambling news, as opposed to rejoining with something like this: "That's great, maybe doing something legal would set a better example for our unborn."

That out of the way, I'm on a hot streak right now. "Hot streak" there being slightly misleading, because it connotes that it's been mostly about luck or guessing. I've got a system now. It's come from a couple months of relative immersion in the world of smart (analytical) sports gambling. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I find it all incredibly fascinating. I'm much more addicted to the theory behind exploiting an edge than I am to actually exploiting it. This might not be 100% healthy, but it's many times moreso than simply rolling the dice and hoping to win.

Anyhow, to the system. It pertains to college basketball and contains two components. First is a strong rating system. Taking a poll amongst your friends doesn't count. Neither does reading up on the subject and trying to rank teams yourself. From my extensive research on this matter, the best college basketball rating system is put out by Ken Pomeroy. The second, and equally important component, is a betting calculator set by the Kelly Criterion. The rating system will tell what team is most likely to win and the calculator will tell you how much to wager. Case closed.
The trick to the system is to trust it and to not think about it. If kenpom says that Ohio State is 78% likely to beat Illinois, and your betting website is offering OSU at only a 70% rate, then you take OSU, no questions asked, no subjective judgement allowed.(2) Elimination of the subjective element is of paramount importance. It prevents you from getting emotional and reacting foolishly to a hot streak or to a single unlucky loss. It prevents you from being just another gambler, basically. The computers are smarter than you are, so trust them.
--Important aside here. You ask, if the computers are smarter than me, then why shouldn't I also assume that the bookmaker is smarter than me? Shouldn't those cancel out? Yes and no. Bookmakers are usually even smarter than computers, this is true. A lay person will never beat a bookmaker on his own over a large sample size, and in theory a single computer should not either. Thankfully for me, it's not that simple for the books. They have to take into consideration public opinion because if they set a "true" line that disagrees at all strongly with public opinion, then they'd really be opening themselves up to risk, which they of course don't want to do. So, the books will shade their lines toward public opinion, meaning there is still room for value to be exploited. To a smaller degree, books will also sometimes put up initial lines just to take the temperature of the public; they will offer a line they know is off just to see what happens. Or they might not devote enough attention to a line by the time they put it up, so in the time it takes them to correct it, there is a window of opportunity.(3)
Let's talk for a minute about edge. Edge is really the key to the whole thing. Most point spread bets are sold at -110. This means you pay $110 to win $100. It also means that you need to win more than just half your bets, you need to win 52.4%. This is not insignificant. If you bet all 16 NFL games some weekend, and go 8-8, you did not break even. You lost. If you bet $10 on every game, you'd have won $80 but also lost $88 for a net of -$8. If you only go about 50% over a long time, the loss total adds up. That most people don't consider 50% a loss is probably what amounts to much of the money Vegas makes.
So a -110 bet requires a 52.4% likelihood of success to be a winner over time. If I have a system that tells me a team being sold at that price has a 60% likelihood of winning, then--voila--I've got a 7.6% edge. I should bet. This works across all types of wagers. My system only spits out a win% expectation for straight-up bets. It doesn't work for point spreads, so I don't bet on point spreads.(4) In every game where I have an edge, I run the numbers into the Kelly calculator, which requires inputs for the bet price, the win expectation, and your total bankroll. This last factor is basically what determines how much it tells you to bet. The Kelly criterion is meant to be "maximally aggressive," but it's not meant to bankrupt you overnight. If your edge is small, then it will tell you to bet small; if it's big, then it'll tell you to go big. It does the heavy mathematical lifting so I never have to worry about being bold or being timid.
Which brings us back to the point: trust the system. It's a very liberating thing, actually. I used to make bets based on personal preferences, maybe including stuff I've read or stuff I attempted to discern using some statistics-oriented sites. I would make almost all my wagers the same amount. I knew nothing about exactly what my edge was or when to hit the gas and when to hit the brakes. Of course I was going to lose over the long run.
Yes, I keep fairly detailed records of my bets. During the whole NFL season, I went exactly 42-42 and finished up about $30 (this thanks to often taking underdog moneylines, which pay out more than even of course. It also is thanks to getting lucky and winning $160 just on the Super Bowl). For college football, I went 39-46 and lost $113. Factor in my initial $300 deposit plus the free $60 bonus the website gave me, and after the Super Bowl, my balance was $291, but it fluctuated a lot in-season. Twice my total balance dropped below $60, and at one point it was over $500. I scuffled with college hoops too, running about -$80 before fully implementing the system.
As of right now, taking into account pending wagers, my balance is $415. Since starting the fully objective and analytical system one week ago, I am up $189.77. This is slightly higher than would be expected, because I've also benefited from some luck, but a majority portion of it is legit. Over the 58 bets placed during this time (yeah I know, it's a lot), the average price given me corresponded to a 68.8% break-even line, meaning my bets would have to win at least that often to break even.(5) The expected win% of these games based on the kenpom preditions was 75.2%. So you can clearly see that my average edge over this sample is 6.4%. That's good. My actual win% was 79.3%. I've been more than 10% better than the break-even line, which pretty easily explains why over 58 bets I'm up $189. Some small regression might be in order, but I'm extremely confident that over the next 58 bets I place, I will do better than 10% worse than break-even, meaning that in the end I will finish up.
The mutually happy part of this whole story is that next Monday I will be making my first-ever online gambling withdrawal. Depending on how the system fares between now and then, I expect to withdraw close to $200. That's 800 diapers. Over the first year, a baby will go through on average about 8 diapers per day. Those 800 diapers would last 100 days, or at least as long as we will be living in NYC after the baby comes. So, thanks to daddy's adoption of the system, baby girl folger will be shitting for free in NYC.

1. Granted, this is something I did think about. But then the money I deposited was from my personal stash and not our family's, and also I did so well before she became pregnant. Gambling online requires an upfront deposit, so in a sense the money was lost right from the get-go. Finally, by the time we were safely into the pregnancy, my initial $300 investment was down to like $100, so at that point, what's the use cutting and running? Might as well stick around and try to bump it back up to even.
2. Just yesterday I broke this rule of doubting the system. UConn was playing St John's in the first round of the Big East tournament. The system said that St John's was a 50/50 shot to win the game, and my suggested bet amount was $35 at a price of +170, meaning I would stand to win about $60. But it didn't look right to me. I couldn't believe St John's was as good as UConn. I let subjective analysis (UConn was playing without their coach for a few games, St John's was really playing at home in MSG, UConn is playing for an NCAA tourney bid, etc, etc) talk me out of trusting the system. So I didn't bet. This is the only time since starting the system that I overruled an output so deliberately (I have nudged my bet amounts slightly up or down based on my perceived risk avoidance, though). I'm sure I don't have to tell you that St John's won the game by 22. Of course they did. This "loss" made me angrier than all the others I've suffered combined, and I didn't even technically lose any money. I lost the opportunity to collect $60. Because I didn't trust the system.
3. This paragraph is actually why it's often better to bet on obscure games. Books don't pay as much attention to them and so you're more likely to get a line that is off. Obscure lines are also more susceptible to shifts in movement based on small samples of bettors, so not as many idiots can move a line farther in your favor than if the whole public is watching it. Just last Friday, I made plays on all of the following: Yale, Hofstra, Citadel, Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Harvard, Drexel, Bradley and Long Beach St. My first wager Saturday was on Stony Brook. Trust the system.
4. I've placed at least 75 straight moneyline bets since my last point-spread bet. No, I'm not missing them, thank you.
5. This is roughly true, because a loss in a -700 line is not the same as one on a -130 line. Over a large sample though, this is a good shorthand.

Being There

2010-03-08T11:58:00.001-05:00

We're less than four months from Sara's due date. We're a little more than seven months from our approximate moving date, which doubles as my job-quitting date. I'm maybe four-five months from starting to send out my resume and about five months from thinking seriously about going to Chicago for interviews. It's this last thing that has me just very slightly concerned.
I'm not "worried" exactly, since I know that when the time comes I will have the confidence and the ability to find a suitable job, but right now, this far away from the process, there is space for me to be concerned. I blame this wholly on my upcoming fatherhood, meaning that I wouldn't be concerned if it were just me I'd be supporting.
When we move, our baby will be about three months old. Sara will have no insurance even before the move. I will have mine, but that will end as soon as I quit. There will be COBRA to float us along, but that's not ideal and I hear it's not cheap. Me finding a job will be about more than just income, it will be about protection. For once, I will have to concern myself with benefits. I'll also have a real sense of urgency.
When I was on my last job search, I was right out of college and so the mere idea of urgency was a little foreign. I searched in earnest for a while, but it wasn't until I approached my self-imposed deadline that I bothered much with really getting it done, and then even when I did, I wasn't very picky. This time I will have to be picky. I will also have to find something relatively quickly. You can see how this might create a conflict. I want to have a high-paying job with good benefits, but I will be under pressure (both the real kind and the unnecessarily self-imposed) to take whatever I can get.
There is also the important matter of availability. For me to get a job that pays higher than my current one, it's quite likely that I'll have to take on both added responsibility and added hours, with the former being basically a prerequisite. The problem here is that with a newborn at home and a wife that will at some point be trying to re-enter the workforce herself on a part-time basis, I will have a very very strong desire to be home to help and just to enjoy my family. I have no desire to be one of those dads who gets home late and is too tired or too preoccupied with thoughts of work to be of any use. My priority will always be my home first and my job a distant second. (Not something I'm going to put on a resume, but that's a shame, because isn't that kind of loyalty/devotion/responsibility something that a company would value? Sure it is, just not in the bottom-line corporate world we live in, where all employees are meant to wholly exist to serve the company. At least that's how it works in NYC. Maybe Chicago will be different. Probably not.)
One of those TLC home-improvement shows was on the other day. One of the couples doing a full renovation had a newborn child, and the father was doing most of the renovating himself. The work was so comprehensive that they couldn't live in the house during, so for multiple months the mother and child stayed with a family/friend. During this time, the father worked his full-time job, then spent the evenings away from his family renovating the house. I will always admire a man willing to make that kind of sacrifice, but I'm not sure at what point it would be an acceptable trade-off for me. I don't want to ever be a hands-off parent. I don't want to ever leave my wife to care for the kid alone, even if I'm away doing something to make us more comfortable in the future. Some people can do it, but I'm not sure to what extent I can. I'm thinking I'd have to figure out an alternate solution if I were ever in the same situation.

How to Be Great

2010-02-25T13:11:00.000-05:00

Installment Three: Buy It

This will be disconcerting for all my fellow middle-classers out there, but yes of course you can buy greatness. "Greatness" perhaps not being the perfect word, but I've got a theme going here in case you couldn't tell.
I'm talking about vision. Not 100% of the time, but lots of it, I can see better than just about anyone, and the way that I've "achieved" that was to buy it.
Two and half years ago I had laser eye surgery, surgery that not only did away with the poor vision I used to have, but also took me past normal and into a heightened level of sight. I'm talking past 20/20, into the realm of 20/15 and even 20/10. It feels good, a hell of a lot better than the struggle I put up with to have contacts in my eyes.
Of course there are some slight drawbacks to the surgery. My eyes are much more sensitive to drying, and since I don't like to put drops in as often as would be optimal, my vision can tend to fluctuate, not just daily but minute to minute. Sometimes it seems like I can even feel my vision sharpening as I look at something, which is different. The weather can affect my eyes, too. Large temperature swings can put me slightly out of whack for a few minutes, and extreme humidity can do the same but more muted and for longer.
I will put up with all these little things though because (in addition to their being both minor and inconsistent problems) sometimes the pendulum swings back the other direction. Maybe a week ago I had one of those experiences. I was walking in downtown Brooklyn toward the train on a sunny afternoon and it seemed like there was no end to the sharpness. I didn't stop and count the blocks but what caused me to notice was the fact that I could make out the different parts of the little pedestrian stick man on the walk signs from several blocks away. Thinking about it now, it seems impossible, but my memory places me just below Atlantic Ave, and clearly seeing the sign at Joralemon or even beyond.
So, you too can have robot eyes, as some of my friends used to (not always genuinely) call me shortly after the surgery. You just have to pay for it. Simple enough, right? At least a lot easier than pumping up thousands and thousands of free throws.

It's a Girl (!)

2010-02-24T16:27:00.005-05:00

It has occurred to me a few times that what I write here about the pregnancy and my feelings about this new parenthood might have some benefit to posterity, and that potentially some day in the far future, my daughter will be able to read this. I don't of course write "to" her--because that would be weird--but sometimes I do understand that she may see it. That maybe makes what I'm about to say sound even worse.
I admit that I was a little disappointed when we first found out that our fetus's gender was female. That was three or four weeks ago, and only now am I completely sure that any and all disappointment has vanished. I'm very happy with our future girl and I can hardly remember that I was disappointed in the first place. I no longer think about any differences due to it being boy or girl or anything like that. It is a girl and it seems silly to think about it being anything else. But initially I had a strange reaction to finding out the news.
The last big thing to be anxious about in a pregnancy (beside the birth of course) is when you find out the gender, which is at 18 weeks, plus or minus a few. I was certainly very excited, so for one thing after we found out I had that normal post-anxious-excitement letdown. I guess that made me feel like I was more disappointed than I really was. Still, during the many weeks after becoming pregnant and before finding out the gender, unconsciously I mostly imagined it being a boy. I think as a man that when you first learn you're going to be a "father," your instinct is to think "son." That's what all fathers once were, after all. Probably this contains selective bias, but it has always seemed to me that a boy has a special relationship with his father, moreso than mother-daughter, mother-son, or father-daughter. What I'm saying is that there was a fairly strong default setting in me regarding expecting a boy.
The more important factor which caused me to hope for a boy relates to Sara. In her family there is something of a curse or whatever you might call it, so much so that it is something they openly talk and joke about. The women only produce girls. Sara's mother is from a family of just two girls. Her aunt had two children, both girls. Sara's mother had two girls. Her sister thus far has two kids, both girls, naturally. I don't believe in voodoo and am a religious follower of stats and probability so the idea that there is something fishy that causes her family to only have girls seems totally implausible. If a doctor doesn't confirm it, I won't believe it. Sara is not as staunchly scientific as me, though, and she has said many times that she wants to have boys (I'm sure she's very happy to have a girl, but for some reason she's shown a desire for male offspring). Being a wonderful husband, I am of course sensitive to her desires. So if she thinks that she's "doomed" to only produce girls, I want to be able to comfort or reassure her. What this all means is that it would have been much easier to have a boy with the first one when there is no pressure, so that the voodoo idea isn't allowed to get inside her head and create an unnecessary sense of anxiety about any future pregnancies. Basically, we are happy to have either a boy or girl with number one, but with any subsequent kids we will start caring much more that the little fetus be recognized as male.
I don't really want to be one of those couples that allows themselves to be disappointed by news of the gender of their fetus. There was a family in my church when I was younger that had 4 or 5 boys in a row to start. Every time the woman got pregnant there was more and more finger-crossing that this would be the time a girl came. Finally it happened, but being in the middle of that would be maddening to me. The specter of there being a girl-dominant gene inside Sara would make this anxiety multiply. So there you go.
Anyway, here we are now, 22 weeks in, more than halfway, and I'm happily looking forward to our future girl. I won't think much at all about having a boy until after she's at least a year old probably, if even then. It's way too early to consider something like this, but I'm actually starting realize that I wouldn't mind having three kids instead of always assuming it would be two (I come from two and so does Sara so it would seem that is the natural way). So whatever potential anxiety I talked about just now would really be deferred at least for a handful of years, so far in the future that it's irrelevant right now. Which it is.
In other baby news, Sara has decided to knit a blanket for the baby. I think this is a fantastic idea (I bought her the yarn for Christmas, after all). She had an excellent question a few days ago, though, wondering since she was spending so much time working on something for it, what was going to be my pre-birth baby-bonding exercise? Hmm. I can't make it a fast runner, that would already be in the DNA. I can't teach it how to appreciate baseball statistics. I can't organize or coordinate for it. I can't rationalize for it or break something down with logic and without bias. I could write something for it or to it, I suppose, but like I said I don't really like the idea of writing to it, and it would feel a little too Hallmark-y to purposefully write something for it. These are some of things for which I possess skill. Finally, I think I've decided that I'm going to build it a dresser. This is sorta cheating, because we need to buy a small dresser to store things anyway, so it's more a present for Sara and me. Nonetheless, it gives me something to do nominally for the baby, something to spend time on and therefore presumably something for me to do that is fatherly. In this way, it is wonderful, and I very carefully and even more pridefully will do it.

How to Be Great

2010-02-22T16:01:00.000-05:00

Installment Two: Focus

Michael Jordan did many amazing things as an athlete. Before he ever dreamed of playing for the Wizards, back near the peak of his abilities, he had a career scoring average of 32 points per game, the highest all time. Someone asked him how he could possibly score so many points, every single game, over and over again. Being a kind of genius, he didn't fully understand the incomprehensability of his feat and said something to the effect of: "Easy. I break it into quarters. It's just eight-eight-eight-eight." Indeed. No one is amazed at scoring eight points in one 12-minute quarter, so why should it be so hard to do it again and again? Focus.
MJ never allowed himself to relax in his pursuit of greatness. He had the strongest focus of anyone to the achievement of his goals. It wasn't good enough to get three straight quarters of eight points each, he had to have all four. And then he had to do it again, every game, it never stopped. It takes an amazing focus to combat your natural laziness, or to deal with the myriad obstacles that will crop up to derail this stoic approach. And yet he did it, for years.
Michael Jordan is of course an extremely rare talent, not just physically, but mentally with his determination and focus. Mere physical mortals though, can honestly strive to replicate some of his focus. You've got to start small.
When most people start shooting a lot of free throws, they will count their results per five shots, or ten shots, then make an observation of what's just happened: "Ok, that was 7 out of 10, 70%, not bad but a couple of those makes were a little sloppy." Then the person will try another ten and make another mental judgment. After some time and practice, this person's goal will be to make all ten in any ten-shot set. They will have built up the focus to make perhaps ten in a row before relaxing. Let's say then that a person succeeds and hits ten straight. What will likely happen then is that they will push on and keep shooting until they miss. The problem here is that their brain has been coached to focus for only ten shots at a time, so if they start mentally counting 12, 13, 14.......then very soon they'll be out of their element. What a person needs to do is stop and start over with a new set, while forgetting about the first ten. Eventually math probability will take over and the person will miss a few, but they'll keep their focus much easier by breaking the greater achievement into smaller more manageable ones.
When I was at the top of my shooting groove, I was recording with pencil and paper every 100 shots, and making around 95 of them. Of course keeping focus for 100 repetitions is too much to ask, even for a shooting savant such as myself. So I broke every 25 shots into sets, with the goal being to miss only one per set. This amounted to 96 out of 100, which is almost exactly what I made at my peak. (Of course this makes you wonder what more the brain would be capable of. With more practice and a revised goal of missing just one out of 50, could I then have made 98%? Who knows. As it turned out, I didn't devote enough time.) Counting 25 at a time required focus, but it also helped to instill extra confidence. It's one thing to say ok I'm going to hit 24 out of 25 shots right now, it's another to have to slowly do it one at a time. Mentally I knew I had to make at least the first ten shots in order to have a good chance to go 24-for-25. Of course I would pretty much always make those first ten, because I knew I had to, and because I was able to focus on the larger goal at the same time so that the single shots were merely inevitable. Before I knew it, I'd be up around 20, when it would take enhanced focus to make the five more to close off the set. Do that four times, voila, one hundred.
Of course no person is a machine, so it's never quite that easy. I plowed through robotically for a long time, but when I got up to about 80 in a row, the specter of what I was approaching started to become palpable. This is when you need to turn up your focus even more, since it's not good enough to overcome the banality and sheer volume of the task; you've also got to control your nerves and your brain.
There is a very small zone between being too tense and being too nonchalant, but that is the zone of focus you need to find. You're not merely shooting a basketball at a hoop, but you're also not letting your whole existence ride on the result of each individual shot. It's about trusting yourself as much as anything, and of course tuning out all the things that can cause problems.
I was able to do all this and keep chugging along, crossing over the magic 100 barrier and not stopping like I normally would but letting the string play out. Of course after I achieved it I started to ease up and my focus started to fall away. That I made 16 more after hitting 100 is a testament to the muscle memory I had built up more than anything, because my head wasn't locked in anymore.
Focus is a slightly tougher thing to master than repetition, but it is master-able nonetheless. Some of the trick is truly convincing your brain that what you are doing is the most important thing, so any random stimulus doesn't affect you as greatly as it otherwise might. I think that most of it is in your approach to the problem, having the ability to focus on pieces of the whole, and the discipline to hold that focus for a long period of time.

How to Be Great

2010-02-22T08:46:00.001-05:00

Installment One: Repetition

When I was eighteen, I once made 116 consecutive free throws. In no attempt at modesty, I'll pause and make clear that this is a very impressive accomplishment. I've never met anyone who has ever made that many in a row. Still, the point of my writing now is to convince you that it's achievable with the right mental and physical approach.
Again, 116 free throws is a lot. I didn't have a watch on at the time, but since I was rebounding the shots myself, it may have taken a half hour. Doing pretty much any activity with binary results and producing the same result every time for a half hour is not easy.
What I'm trying to say is that in order to be able to hit than many in row, you've got to lower the mathematical improbability. You've got to take lots and lots of shots. It was early spring of my senior year in high school when I pulled off this feat. During the last period of my school day, I had what was called Senior Release, which was available to seniors with good enough grades and effectively shortened our days by about 50 minutes. In addition to that, because I was a successful athlete and pretty well-liked by the school's administrative types who for the most part doubled as sports coaches, I was able to rig my schedule so my Senior Release period was preceded by a Study Hall that was "taught" by an assistant track coach. Basically I had over 90 minutes of time to kill every afternoon at home before returning for track practice. Since I was a good kid and it never occurred to me to use that time indulging in illegal activities, and since the weather was just getting warm enough to be outside, and since I loved just shooting basketballs, I would shoot free throws.
It helped that I was fairly good with free throws to begin with, but shooting for an hour or more pretty much every day, made me much better. Additionally, since I'm a kind of compulsive stat-keeper, I kept a sheet of paper inside the garage and recorded my results for every 100 shots taken. It was not uncommon to rack up four or five hundred per day, and on the weekend sometimes more. Do that for a couple months, and your results will only get better and better. I got to the point where I was 95 or more out of 100. My total percentage from the beginning and covering many thousands of shots was 92-point-something percent. But there was a groove I was in near the end when it was hovering around 96%.
Just making pure assumptions on the math here, but if you're hitting around 96% every 116 shots, that means you're missing fewer than five per, which means that a perfect 116-for-116 result wouldn't require a huge improvement in standard deviations above the mean.
Repetition. Doing the same thing over and over again so that you get good enough at it to make the seemingly impossible become less impossible. This is achievable for anyone, whether or not you've got a beautiful Reggie Miller release like me or not.

Prestige and the Olympics

2010-02-19T14:46:00.006-05:00

While watching the Olympics this week I found myself accidentally in an argument with my wife. Accidentally because I thought I/we were just talking and then suddenly I realized too late that it was an argument. She knew this sooner than I did.
The point of the argument started with the idea of what is or isn't a prestigious sport/event, and it morphed into me being arrogant and biased (that's the part that I didn't realize, and the only part that I cared to dispute). I'm going to ignore the second part for now cause that's not really interesting to other people, but the first I think is.
People don't take the Winter Olympics as serious as the Summer Olympics. This is for a lot of reasons, but primarily we of the general populous can sniff out legitimate sports and are instinctively attracted to what we feel are more popular or "important" sports. We like to be a part of a larger interest, and we blindly seem to accept preconceived notions about what we ought to consider important. Just look at the Super Bowl. The Olympics of course are a perfect example of this too.
Who would ever care about a 16 year old girl jumping around on a beam? There is no intrinsic value in that activity to other people, and, more importantly, it doesn't really relate at all to anything we do in our regular lives or any of our sporting pastimes. And yet, every four years a large chunk of not only the American population, but also the world's, stops and cares about 16 year old girls jumping around on a beam. I'm going to go way out on a limb and say that the percentage of the population that either regularly participates in beam-jumping or watches same, is infinitely smaller than the amount that care once every four years. I think that's interesting.
It's especially interesting with the Winter Olympics, because those sports are usually much more exclusive or foreign to most people than are Summer sports. I heard an announcer mention that a U.S. female luge competitor was from Lake Placid, NY. Of course she is! How many luge tracks are there in the whole country? Salt Lake City and Lake Placid, for sure those two because they've hosted Olympics, but where else? Further, why would there be more than that? As a mere observer of the Olympics, it seems to me that the whole point of luge is just to be an Olympic sport. Its end is the same as its means, so for me it's hard to justify its existence.(1) It's not a recreational activity.(2) It's not even a regular competitive activity in the U.S., outside of perhaps a concocted national competition or something similar.
Even the WO sports that aren't utterly contrived are relevant only to very small minorities. Sure, most people have done it at least once, but who ice skates regularly? Cross-country skis? Ski jumps? How are any of these tied at all to most people's human experience? Alpine skiing is the only individual sport that can claim semi-regular recreational participants in non-trifling numbers. Even the only sport that functions as a high-level professional undertaking--Hockey--stands as the little stepchild of the major pro sports.
I think I saw it in Sports Illustrated, but somewhere there was a map diagramming where all of the 200+ members of the U.S. team are from. All but a handful are from the Northeast, the Upper Midwest, or California. That's ridiculous. It makes perfect sense, too, which makes the whole thing even more ridiculous. Here is a list of the top all-time WO medal winners, in order, along with their rank by world population:
Germany -- 14
Russia/Soviet Union -- 9
Norway -- 116
USA -- 3
Austria -- 92
Finland -- 112
Canada -- 36
Sweden -- 88
Switzerland -- 94
The southernmost of those is of course the U.S. Basically, if you live anywhere in the world south of Chicago, you'll never have a chance in the Winter Olympics. Sounds pretty fair, right? Sounds like the kind of thing that the whole world ought to unite to celebrate, right?

Ok, I've gotten slightly off-topic. I meant to discuss what is or isn't a prestigious Olympic sport/event. I'm going to define this by the perspective of the entire world, not just the U.S. So basketball could never count. Or swimming, which happened to be Sara's suggestion when asked what the most prestigious sport was. Outside of the U.S. and Australia, most of the world is much more ambivalent about swimming. Rightly so, since you've got to have the money to have access to pools. Also, you can't count soccer. Even though it's the world's most popular sport, the Olympic soccer competition isn't taken nearly as seriously.
To think of what makes something prestigious, imagine that you are a prospective father of an unborn child. You are told that your child will grow up to become an Olympic champion, but you can choose which event. What would be the most popular answer for people all around the world?
Really, it's no contest as to what is the most prestigious Olympic sport: it's clearly track & field.(3) In fact, I just perused the list of Summer Olympic sports, and it's not even close. It's almost more prestigious than all the other sports combined.
So what about the premiere event of the Olympics? Using logic, the answer must surely be the men's 100meter dash, but I'd be more willing to listen to arguments on other specific events. Maybe the men's or women's all-around gymnastics? Maybe something from swimming? Maybe the 5,000meter run, or the 1500? In my opinion, it's definitely the men's 100meter, though.
While I'm at it, just off the top of my head, let's make a list of the most internationally prestigious events in both the Summer and Winter Olympics.
Summer events
1. Men's 100m run
2. Men's 1500m run
3. Men's decathlon
4. Women's all-around gymnastics
5. Men's all-around gymnastics
6. Men's 5000m run
7. Men's freestyle swimming, 50 or 100m
8. Men's marathon?
9. Men's wrestling? any weight class
10. Modern pentathlon. Just kidding.
Winter events
1. Men's downhill skiing
2. Women's figure skating
3. Men's figure skating
4. Men's hockey
5. Men's speedskating? any distance
6. Women's speedskating?
7. Men's slalom skiing?
8. Men's 4-man bobsled?
9. Men's team cross country skiing?
10. Snowboard cross. Just kidding.
These look pretty sexist. What can I say? Sorry? Also, the Winter list is obviously much more of a crapshoot. Probably hockey should be higher, maybe even #1. Skiing is really popular all around the Winter Olympic countries, though, and the downhill is legendary.

1. Boy, without intent, but I'm putting on an it's-vs-its clinic in this sentence.
2. No, luging is not the same as sled-riding. Not even in the same ballpark.
3. Or, as official Olympic programs refer to it: athletics. Doesn't get any purer than that.

Stuff Your Sorrys in a Sack

2010-02-12T09:32:00.003-05:00

This morning a guy deliberately stopped a full elevator car from closing so he could rush in at the last second. He knew it was already full but acted like he didn't. I was on this car, and when the guy got on he said, "Sorry, sorry about that guys." There was at least one woman in the elevator. It was first thing in the morning for me so I could be wrong but I think I showed no reaction to this (stopping a car like that is basically innocuous but still in the coda of big office building work, it's considered a dick move). No one else reacted to him either. I was looking glassily ahead at nothing when the guy, who was now standing right next to me, looked deliberately right at the side of my face and said "Sorry about that." Thankfully my floor was the first stop and so I didn't have to maintain it for long, but at that I very purposefully ignored him. What was with that follow-up apology? Jesus, dude. Some people are so freaking concerned with how their are viewed, even but total strangers they may never meet again, that they unwittingly create the problems that they're so anxiously trying to avoid. I hate these people. Just chill the fuck out, man.

I feel silly mentioning this, because the plot of the show dealt heavily with race relations, but watching "Memphis" last night, I experienced the black-movie-theater effect while in a Broadway theater. It was awesomely amusing. I'm not talking about whooping and "No she didn't!" and all that flamboyance, but several times during the show a few scattered people, including a couple just about 10 feet away, let loose with seldom-heard-at-live-theater exclamations. The first time a woman shrieked I giggled because I was amazed that she could be so amazed at such a fictional scene. I didn't realize until after a few more, when I did the half-turn and realized that it wasn't just a jittery individual but a member of a different race doing her very best to uphold a stereotype. At that point I couldn't stop laughing.
During intermission of the show, Sara started talking to the couple sitting next to us, the woman was also a teacher at her school, though in a different department or level because it didn't seem Sara knew her. We were all standing at our seats and they were talking and I exchanged a half-awkward look with the guy before doing a couple not-just-nervous-fidgeting-but-probably-looked-like-it stretches before giving up and sitting back down, where I was mostly obscured by Sara from the couple. Is it such a horrible thing of me to not put up the little social effort there? Is it so horrible for me not to be interested? I really don't care if the other person doesn't find me interesting. If I know an interaction will last no longer than five minutes and I have the option either to engage or not then I will always choose not to. I'm very socially lazy, which I think rubs people the wrong way. Though it shouldn't, unless these people are willing to accept that their offense-taking itself represents some irresponsible and ugly self-centrism. I guess that's a roundabout way of me justifying my aloofness. Whatever, it's true.

Save Yourselves

2010-02-11T09:44:00.001-05:00

On the only-80%-full 4 train this morning, I saw a woman reading the Daily News. The cover said "CHILD'S PLAY," and the sub-headline said something about how the city was "almost" back to normal today.
You may not have heard, but we got a little snow here the last couple days. That's sarcasm. The media blitz over this pretty standard winter event is embarrassing. I heard a group of three Australian guys in the elevator making fun of the wall-to-wall coverage of the snow on the news. Australians, for godsakes.(1) The storm is long over and the sun is out this morning, but I think the weather service is still trying to predict another 5-6 inches of BLIZZARD.
On Tuesday night, weather.com's special weather alert stated that until Thursday AM, total expectation was 10-16 inches. On Wednesday at about 9AM, when we had to that point only received perhaps an inch or two, it was the same. Wednesday at noon, maybe 2-3 inches total, and they upgraded the forecast to 12-17 inches, plus added a few disclaimers stating (paraphrase): "It may seem like the storm is over but it is not. Conditions will severely worsen. This is only the lull before the big one. Death. Destruction. Plague. Make sure to tune in to The Weather Channel for tips on how to survive the fallout."
I woke up this morning and there couldn't have been more than 6-7 inches in Downtown Brooklyn. Midtown is the same, though because of the shovel brigades from the office buildings, the sidewalks are already dry here.(2) So, spread out over about a 24 hour period, we received no more than 8 inches. I'm very confident that at no period did we ever exceed an inch per hour.
City public schools preemptively canceled classes yesterday. Sara's private school called Wednesday off as early as lunchtime Tuesday. I wonder how stupid these administrators feel today. Everybody loves a day off, sure,(3) but some discretion, please. It's a little snow. Not volcanic ash. Not a swarm of locusts. Not a tornado or a tsunami or an earthquake. Snow. I experience much greater annoyance getting around in heavy rain/wind than in a half-foot of snow.

1. I checked wikipedia. Trying to find a geographically diverse set of Southern Australian cities, I chose Perth, Melbourne, Canberra, and Sydney. Only Canberra ever receives any snow, but: "Light snow falls in the city in one out of approximately three winters but is usually not widespread and quickly dissipates." Here is what it says about Sydney: "Snowfall was last reported in the Sydney City area in 1836."
2. I've heard that snowfall within the predicted amount occurred in areas outside the city, that these areas received 2-3 times as much as we got here. I don't really know what to say. 8 million people live inside the city. I assume 100% of city schoolchildren and parents live inside the city. With some reasonable delays, all the commuting options have been running fine throughout.
3. Hell, I left the office early, at about 3:15 yesterday afternoon. The doom and gloom reports left the office virtually empty, so why stick around? One of my bosses sent multiple emails urging us to go home and avoid the fury.

Hamsgiving IV

2010-02-10T10:29:00.003-05:00

Yeah, fuck it, I'm using roman numerals.
I haven't talked about Hamsgiving yet, which is odd. Odd because I normally run out a liveblog of the occasion and odder because we hosted it at a bar this year, which added to the complications about tenfold. The weird thing though is that in spite of the prep, it was less memorable this year, at least for me. I did leave earlyish, so maybe I missed some things, but then everyone leaves early on Hamsgiving. You don't start drinking at 1:00 and expect to go all night. I should say, not anymore at least.
The big news is that our celebration was overrun by the Idiotarod. Dave said it first when breaking the news to me: that it was really the worst-case scenario. The fairly obscure and extremely out of the way bar we chose, Wunderbar on the fringe of Long Island City, which holds about 100 people with some comfort, just flukishly happened to be double-booked with us and a group of worked-up, aggressive and drunken fools. A few hundred of them. I've thought about it some since then, but I still haven't been able to think of a worse group to have "sharing" a space with Hamsgiving, especially starting as early as they did, like 4:00pm. I remember standing there outside the bar, tending the grill right after Dave broke me the news, and looking down the sidewalk a few blocks away, seeing the first few people snaking their way towards us. I'm sure it sounds hyperbolic, but the uncomprehending shock very legitimately paralyzed my judgment. I guess I'd be no good in a war, because my response to this stimuli is just too slow.
The truth of the matter is that the Idiotarod-ers weren't really as bad or as numerous as expected. In the heat of the moment we were forced to have our guards up, which knocked down the enjoyment level a little, but in actuality their presence ended up being almost a wash. They inconvenienced us for sure with our food spread and with their thievery, but having a huge number of people added to the "party" and their dumb-ass costumes provided entertainment. They did eventually force us to relocate and perhaps lose a few of our attendees, but we did end up getting slightly cheaper beer, plus use of a large grill, plus free cleanup, all without having to pay the bar a cent. That worked out ok. We should have even left much sooner, but whatever. I was happy with my shirt, I was happy with the Polish sausage guy on First Avenue, I was happy with the grill, I was happy with the drunkenness, I was happy with the ham and all the other great meat efforts this. The only thing relating specifically to the holiday that disappointed me was that in the confusion of the crowded bar I didn't get to sample as much of the food as I'd have liked. And I never did get a meat sweats shot.

Before I go on with this unorganized post, I want stop and focus on something very negative. it doesn't have to do with Hamsgiving exactly but more humanity in general. Sometimes I'm too much of an idealist I guess, but I was really disappointed with a couple of people that day. First is obviously the manager of Wunderbar. This guy never told us about his double-booking of a huge group. Ultimately he didn't ask for the bar fee and he sorta tried to make things up to us at the end of the night, but that definitely doesn't excuse his motives or his deceit throughout the process. It was just blind greed. (I think I should be proud that encountering this still shocks and appalls me, right?) I know a businessman needs to concern himself with business, but doesn't anyone have a conscience about money anymore? Maybe the capitalist system is to blame, I don't know. There isn't really any incentive to ever do the right thing, and the right thing very often isn't the most profitable. That's counter-intuitive. The simple fact is that if we knew he had double-booked us with the Idiotarod, we would have never gone there, no questions asked. And he knew this, and he knew we would be paying him $250 plus bringing in around 75 people to buy his drinks all day. So instead of doing the right thing and being honest with us (actually, doing the right thing would have been not even booking the Idiotarod in the first place), he said fuck it and followed the dollar signs. I should note here that Wunderbar isn't exactly the kind of place to pack in customers, and that really it was us that was doing him a favor from the get-go, giving him a shitload of business that he never would have had, so you really might have expected him to be grateful for it. There was a ton of room for us to have our party in relative peace and for him to have a very profitable day. But I guess when you have a whole tub of ice cream in front of you, if you are a dumb fucking robot then you'll just eat the whole thing, no matter what effect it has.
It was a similar story when we relocated to LIC Bar, a bar that I like. The bartender though was a raging bitch. Initially she cut us some slack and let us use their back room (which we didn't actually need but at the time was empty) until another scheduled group came in, but again, we instantly produced 50+ (I was drunk at this point so have no real idea how many people we had) people when before us she had about 10-15. You'd think she would be happy, but no she wasn't really shy with displaying her opinion that she was being more inconvenienced than anything else. 50 people x 2 drinks per hour x $6 per drink x 2-3 hours = $1500. You are a bar owner. On a normal day you have 10-20 customers drinking at the rate stated, between 4-8pm, then you have 25 people from 8-11, 50 from 11-12, and 15-20 from 12-2am. This is all just very rough, and I'm sure I'm being liberal with the numbers for LIC Bar. Anyway. Round the numbers a little and add them up, so that on a normal weekend night, you make a little more than $2000, including tips. When we walked in the door, we almost doubled her income expectation. Fuck that woman. I understand we should be happy we found a home there, but it was LIC, we could have stopped at basically any place and had plenty of room. She was very lucky that we happened to choose her, and really amazed me with her sense of entitlement. She found a hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk but got pissed that she had to bend over to pick it up.

So I said earlier it was more complicated this year, and it was, but I really hope that doesn't discourage people. Most of it was our fault in procrastinating with the planning, and then latching onto a half-assed idea of using a bar. Using a bar by itself is not a half-assed idea, but locking in on the specific one we chose for no really good reason probably was. With more lead time, and probably a slightly higher expectation concerning booking fees, we could very easily find a more convenient and more upfront location.
Two big things have happened in the last year: no one lives in a big shitty apartment with outside space anymore, and no one has the ability to just accept a trainwreck mess of an apartment afterward anymore. Plus, the pool of partygoers keeps increasing. Using a bar is really the only reasonable option for future years. We've got to get started earlier and we've got to treat it like a legit event with contracts and such, not like an informal agreement amongst us and the bar manager.
I say this all directly, but the fact is that I likely won't have much if any involvement in the planning for Hamsgiving V, since I'll be in Chicago. It's no guarantee I'll be able to even attend, although right around that time would be about perfect for my first visit back to the city. I guess I'm just really hopeful that the perceived stress of staging this event--especially when outside factors are conspiring against us--doesn't outweigh the actual enjoyment of the celebration. I hope it doesn't get in the way of things.
I do know that whether I'm able to attend next year or not, I'm going to initiate a Hamsgiving West in Chicago for sure. It's a perfect city for it, too.

A Showy Weekend

2010-02-08T09:45:00.004-05:00

On my way to the train this morning I passed a woman on a phone in the middle of a seriously heated argument with someone. Yelling, repeated phrases, even a little unconscious foot-stomping. My question is: who in the hell has the energy to get that angry at 8AM on a Monday morning (the Monday after the super bowl, no less), all while standing outside in 25 degree cold? In the words of my father when I was an unstoppably energetic little kid: go run around the block a couple times, that'll settle you down. (Incidentally, that could have been the start of my running career, since frequently out of spite (yeah, little kids can have spite) I'd take him up on it.)

Friday, I went with Sara to see "Fela!" (exclamation theirs). We also had dinner at Bar Americain, which is one of Bobby Flay's restaurants. The restaurant was very good but not very great (Sara liked it more than me). The mayonnaise for the fries might have been the highlight, which is not the point of a semi-fancy place I don't think. We split an excellent crabcake that came with a remarkably good slaw, though the single crabcake cost a fairly ridiculous $19. I got the porterhouse cut pork chops, which were good. I'd never seen pork in that cut style before, so kudos there. It's a sloppy cut though, and a pork chop is not nearly as big as its beef cousin, so it was maybe a little more work than was necessary. Nice almost melt-away consistency of the meat though.
The show was at the very least interesting. I've now seen three very different broadway shows in the last 14 months. The first, "Pal Joey," was a revival of a pretty classic old-style show, the kind with the almost awkward stop/starts for songs and dances. Not my favorite. The second was a sort of very contemporary update of that classic form, "In the Heights." This was still not really in my wheelhouse, but it was very energetic and entertaining so the audience experience was distinct. "Fela!" isn't really like the others. It's not a standard "broadway show," instead more of a thought-provoking musical concert with staged interactions and realistic but heavily (and interestingly) choreographed dancing. That's the good. The bad is that--in this novice's eye--pretty much every facet of the show was just slightly lacking. The story was dramatic but not hugely so, the lead actor was entertaining and talented but not quite charismatic or engaging enough (this is a big problem, actually), the production started trying to be uniquely interesting but then sorta gave up, and the music was all very good but ultimately the songs were fairly weak. It's only been three days but I can't recall any specific tune from the show. Excellent and very danceable ambient beats but not a whole lot more. The best part of the show for me was the set and the visuals, especially in the second half when it gets mystical and the lights go out and there are about 4-5 layers of visuals with glowing dancers and even an odd sense of magnetic light. It's tough to describe it all but I think it was spectacular.

The second show of the weekend was entirely different. Saturday night, Lyndhurst, NJ, Medieval Times, dinner and tournament.
Before I say anything, I'd like to note that it's really hard to form a natural opinion about this spectacle because anyone experiencing it for the first time carries such massive preconceived notions going in. I'd also like to disclaim that I absolutely promise to keep my mouth shut any time in the near future that my friends and fellow attendees enthusiastically talk about it. I've thrown cold water on positive memories in the past, so I'm trying not to do it now.
Anyway, the whole thing was a little disappointing for me. There were indeed knights on horseback and sometimes aggressive swordplay and stupidly long bits of blustery proclamations from the "king" and others. And we did actually have to eat bone-in chicken with our hands. And they had big novelty-sized beer vessels. And we got to wear silly paper crowns. Basically everything else was underwhelming.
No one was in character except the participants during the actual show. Waitresses, cashiers, bartenders: they were all just normal people acting normally. Even the participants spoke to us as themselves after the show. I had thought the whole experience was the show, that people would be playing characters the whole time? I guess not. I can't believe I'm complaining that it wasn't nearly campy enough, but I am. I wanted to feel embarrassed by the awkwardness of the spectacle throughout, but it only succeeded in that accidentally, whenever the "king" spoke (the guy had the most ridiculous nerd-voice ever, and he wasn't doing it on purpose).
I was almost offended when they passed out individually-plastic-wrapped towelettes after dinner. What's the point of eschewing one modern convenience only to indulge in another? I looked around briefly after being given mine and then did what any 21st century man would do when surrounded by aborted disneyfied half-assedness: I accepted the fail and indulged.

Dragging in the Void

2010-02-02T13:26:00.001-05:00

My weekend hangover has been a little bit more vicious than usual this week. Probably because of the anticipation and then execution of Hamsgiving weekend (post upcoming), which included three days of drinking and walking long distances in bitter cold.
Not so long ago, when my life revolved not around a loved one but two consecutive off-days per week, I suffered weekend hangovers pretty regularly. Mondays were not fun. I'm not even really talking about physical hangovers (because those would happen on Sundays usually), but the emotional letdown. Much keeping with the hair-of-the-dog effect, a lot of times it seemed like the only cure was another weekend (fortunately our good friend Time ensured that I was never out of stock), and this one is only beginning to show signs of letting up mostly due to the Super Bowl coming up, and my current devotion to creating prop bets for our pool.
I only mention all of this because I haven't had a weekend hangover in a long time. Part of that is simply not getting after it as hard on weekends anymore, but a much bigger part is Sara's steadying influence, plus the not-insignificant fact that lately my life has had much larger anticipatory events than simple weekends. From the time I was engaged, I had about one year of steady build-up with wedding and honeymoon plans. Smaller cycles of months and weeks were washed under by the higher tide of the wedding. Then I had the afterglow from that for a while, and in short notice, Sara became pregnant and it kicked into another gear.
I have to say that--outside of a 2-3 week period of intense honeymoon prep--the depth of education/preparation for a pregnancy just blows away anything wedding-related. And this is how it should be. You get lazy and ruin a wedding and you've got one bad day and a few weeks of residual damage, but you fuck up a pregnancy and you've got a lifetime.
Starting in late October when I found out she was pregnant, through the pretty recent past, I immersed myself in all kinds of pregnancy- and baby-related things. How fast does a fetus grow? Why is a diaper pail different from a simple garbage can? How heavy is a 3-month-old baby? Is it really necessary to take four giant pills per day? Will it hurt my child's rap career to be born in Manhattan instead of Brooklyn? There is almost no end to the topics you can research in this area, and I only barely ever restrained myself. I think we have finally moved into a down period in this regard. We're 6+ weeks since we've told everyone, so that novelty is gone. We've had enough doctor visits so that they're becoming routine (so much so that I'm actually skipping one today). We're far enough into the pregnancy that we basically already know everything we need to know, so the actual labor and delivery is the only thing left (for me at least. Sara gets to deal with the restless nights, back pain, etcetc. Sorry about that). We're not close enough so that we can actually start buying things for after the baby arrives. And, sometime in the last few weeks, I've stopped automatically knowing how far along she is. She's almost 19 weeks now, but I had to stop and think about it.
I guess what this is all about is waiting. Nine months of a pregnancy is a long time, but given all you need to do, both internally and externally to prepare for that huge life change, it can be intimidating and seem like not long enough. Not right now, though. Right now it just feels like a time void between now and June, like I know my life will change and I'm ready for it but it's not here yet. I'm just waiting for the future to happen, a future that I mostly already know, which is weird.

Stimulating Television

2010-01-26T12:20:00.000-05:00

Lately I've developed a mild addiction to Man vs Wild. I don't feel compelled to seek it out, but if I'm scrolling and it is on, I am unable to not watch it. I think a new season has just started so the show is more visible, though just from watching the episodes, you'd never know if it was the newest or the oldest in the series. I'm not actually sure how they plan to keep running new episodes, actually, since it seems like every one follows a predictable pattern, and it's hard to tell the difference between the survival skills he displays whether in the Amazon, Panamanian, Chinese, or any other random jungle locale.
The thing that I noticed not long ago as I was watching one of them is that it isn't actually a how-to show. Sure it is somewhat informative, but for a show who's premise is teaching the viewer how to survive, it contains precious few moments of teaching. The real point of the show is to entertain, of course, to show Bear Grylls doing nasty things like eating snakes or rubbing mud in his ears, or wild things like jumping off a 50ft cliff or swimming under an ice sheet. I'm not saying they're not in there, but to actually ingest usable survival skills while watching the show, you have to be attuned to them and to already have a little knowledge of wilderness techniques to begin with. This from a show who's whole reason for being is presumably to teach.
What I'm getting at here is that there are shamefully few shows on TV that a viewer can learn anything from. There is a whole goddamn network called "The Learning Channel," but they fill up their hours with crap reality shows about midgets and irresponsibly pregnant women. Every so often there is something medical that might pass off as informative, but even then it's more by accident. Why is it that there are so few places to learn things on TV? Why does it all have to be for simple entertainment? Ideally, the informative shows would also be somewhat entertaining, but you never see any of these "entertaining" shows provide anything informative.
The only place where you see consistently informative programming (I means shows that are conceived and executed with a consistent focus on teaching) is cooking shows. Why nowhere else? Cooking shows aren't ratings gold or anything, but they've been around and heavily watching for a long time, prominently enough to sprout a whole network devoted to them. Their informative nature doesn't prevent them from succeeding as a business model. So why nothing else?
I feel like the History Channel used to be better and providing useful programming, but over the years has turned into the same kind of crap you see everywhere else: dedicated not to really captivate a viewer and give him a reason to watch TV, but more to simply hold his attention while he happens to be watching TV anyway. Someone is surely pulling the strings here. Some focus groups must tell network people that it's better for ratings this way. That's bullshit laziness.
The market for substantive TV is there. I know I'm not alone.

A Folger By Any Other Name

2010-01-21T15:05:00.005-05:00

We know now with almost complete certainty that Sara's fetus is a girl. Which is bad news because of the names that she has been floating my way. The girl ones have all been pretty terrible.
We decided that we wouldn't put much effort into names until we knew the gender, so I guess now the floodgates are open. The only thing that we ever did talk about was two names that we both liked: Theodore and Macdougal. Both boy names. Macdougal comes with a whole story involving her pet name for me, while Theodore has been my pick for a while. Both names are solid. Not totally unique but also not exactly popular. They pass the sound test, and work well with Folger. They also both shorten very nicely, to Ted/dy(1) and Mac. But again, they're both boy names; we don't have any legit girl names ready to go.
There are three names that Sara has liked enough to present to me prior to this gender-unmasking: Minna, Matilda, and Veda. Maybe you find those names attractive; I do not. The first one is to pay respect to a relative of hers. Fine, use it as a middle name. Matilda is just an ugly name(2), and Veda sounds like the name of one of Capt Kirk's conquests on Star Trek. I looked up Veda and it's an Indian name, as in India. I actually like Indian names(3), especially for girls, I just think my wife happened to pick out one the worst ones.
I'm sure we'll find a nice name for our future girl, it just seems a lot more difficult at the moment. Assuming you are not going the traditional route, girl names seem more complicated and diverse than boy names. Maybe I'm inventing this, I don't know. I actually like using masculine or neutral names for girls. Names like Dakota or Murphy or Bill. (Just kidding on the last one, wouldn't that be something.) It feels like cheating, and it's just my lazy brain playing tricks on me, but I actually really like Theadora for a girl. The shortened forms aren't as good though: Dora or Thea, I assume, with Thea being either "thee-ah" or "thay-ah." Not bad, but not perfect either. The big problem is that if we use Theadora now, we couldn't use Theodore on a future boy. No, we're not going to be those weirdo parents who name their kids all similarly (though Dora and Teddy disguise their root similarities nicely).
It's a lot to think about.
I used to be really good to coming up with fake names to be used as aliases. You'd think that skill would translate to baby-naming, but I'm not sure it does. My favorite personal aliases are Mordecai Sinclair, Sebastian Parker, and of course Chuck Swanson. Those are A+ names. They also don't include the one name that is a prerequisite for our kid: Folger. Folger is not a perfect surname to match first names with. Phonetically, it's kinda heavy with the g in the middle. I've never had a problem with my own full name except that if you use the long form it does whatever is the opposite of "rolls off the tongue." It seeps into the tongue like leaves in a compost pile. We'll need to keep that in mind.

1. Here is where we had an honest disagreement. We both like Theodore, but Sara was somewhat adamant that the diminutive should be Theo, while I was just as adamant in favor of Teddy. My main point of argument: you can't have a white kid going by Theo. A white adult, most definitely, but not a kid. "The Cosby Show" pretty much killed that for all caucasians. Plus, doesn't Teddy just sound awesome for a little boy?
2. No offense to Ryan or the waitress at Bondi's, who is herself not ugly.
3. I had an honest infatuation with a girl for a couple years a while back, and while she was certainly very attractive, hindsight forces me to consider that a big part of it was her awesome name: Rajika. That is an attractive name.

Another Kind of Love

2010-01-19T16:24:00.000-05:00

Last week Sara was on the phone and her sister put on her two girls (our nieces). Sara--not on speakerphone--talked to them briefly and then said "I love you" before hanging up.
This might not be thought-provoking to you, but it really was to me.
If I had been on the phone then I would not have ended the conversation that way; in fact, it never would have even occurred to me to end it so. Part of this is because the two nieces are 2 years old and nearly 4 years old, so they were around both before the wedding and even before I really knew Sara. Also, they live 800 miles away from us and I've spent less than ten days in their presence at this point. I don't know them all that well and they don't know me much either. In fact, though they are very warm with Sara they mostly react to me like I'm a hairy-faced unfamiliar adult, which is exactly what I am. The older one is old enough so that she warms up to me after some time, but the younger is definitely not there yet.
And yet this is my family now. After we move to Chicago next year, they will be close family that we see often and regularly for an indefinite amount of time. They will become friends and frequent play-partners with our unborn children.
"Love" is an appropriate word to use, then, if you think about it in this macro sense, but that doesn't change the awkward feeling that I would have when presented with it in the moment. There are different kinds of love, and I'm not just talking romantic vs familial. There is the inner love that we effortlessly produce for other people, and there is also what I'd call the outer love that is part of circumstance that we pull from to give to other people. The love I have for Sara comes from within me that I created (or that her presence or my belief in her wondrousness created in me--deep romantic love can never be fully explained in words), while the love I have for any family member came originally from our shared environment.
My own aunt and uncle tell me that they love me, and nothing seems odd about that. They are family that I've seen consistently throughout my life. Of course we feel a love for each other.
Is it ok that I don't currently feel love for my young nieces? Is it ok to grow into it? I think it should be. Think about it another way: if you are either recently-wedded or have had a partner for a few years, how would you feel if one of your in-laws passed away? If you have not had the time to build up the natural feelings of love for the person, how do you react?
I guess I honestly wonder about this, because my disposition with regards to this stuff is reservedness. I don't quickly come upon love, and when I find it (with one big exception--thanks, wife) I am slow to acknowledge it, especially verbally.
I am a classic midwesterner is this regard. My mom always says she loves me at the end of phone calls, but I rarely return the comment (in fact Sara always pesters me to say it so I do it more often now). I of course love my mother. I have always loved her outwardly and very early on in life I learned to love her inwardly, too. But still I don't always like to offer it up: "I love you."
When my mom talks to me on the phone she does so via the speaker so my dad is almost always there too. At the end of the call, he hardly ever adds his own "I love you." My father of course loves me. But he doesn't always like to offer it up. When he does, I find it more amusing than comforting, because he'll deliver the words in a louder, clearer voice, almost like he's reassuring himself that he says it often enough, changing his cadence as an involuntary way of marking a change in substance, like a writer using CAPITAL LETTERS.

I feel like I need a summary of this post. Everyone loves their parents because they're mom and dad, but not everyone really loves them because they love them; but presumably every husband loves his wife because he really loves her.
A man can let his heart find him a woman, but not a set of parents.
To truly love a person is to not need to use empathy to have emotion for him. I think this is how you know if you love an in-law or a relative.
Is it ok to love a relative only as a relative and not fully emotionally?
Is it normal or acceptable to fully love some relatives and not others?
Does biological immediacy require clean demarcations of emotional attachment, or would it be normal to love a distant relative more than an immediate one?
Is there an initial grace period with new relatives to let love build naturally, and if so roughly how long do you have before wondering if it might not happen?

Stress and Irritability and Marriage

2010-01-13T16:19:00.000-05:00

When I went out to get lunch today I encountered a giant asshole trying to hail a cab. I mean like how people do it on TV, running toward the street and screaming "Taxi!" over and over. No one actually does it like that in real life, not even when they are in a big hurry. But this guy was different. He came bowling around the corner toward Park Ave, with his fat ass and big black jacket and flowing brown scarf, all big-faced and jowly with longish wavy hair slicked straight backward, like an asshole. He was maybe 50 and was also dragging one of those suitcase-on-wheels that assholes use in midtown to display to the world extreme pride either in their own laziness or their ability to acquire worthless and frivolous items. On top of everything, the two cabs that he was soliciting from 30 feet away were both very clearly about to be occupied by other more timely and discreet individuals.
As I saw this sorry scene develop, a real rage built up inside me very quickly and I had a sudden fantasy of picking up my walking speed and ramming the fuck into the guy's chest like a linebacker, just laying him out and watching his crap go sprawling while the crowded sidewalk full of people mocked him. I even had to physically bite my tongue to suppress the violent urge, something that I find myself doing every now and again.
So my question then is have I become a more stressful person? I don't remember ever really having to bite my tongue as a way of diffusing frustration. Is it possible that my lifestyle has finally gotten to be stressful? My disposition for all of my life has included the least amount of stress that I think any person has ever felt. I'm extremely reserved and patient and generally unconcerned of all outside stimuli. I always assumed that this was just a permanent character trait, something that I was born with, so that the idea that this might be slowly changing is interesting to me.
I think a general assumption would be that, if anything, a person's stress levels would decrease as he ages as he becomes more confident in himself, settled in his life, and generally wiser or more experienced. Maybe that is true in a linear sense, but from a little personal experience I can add to this, such that maybe the stress level through life is more of a bell curve.
Now that I am positively married I share most of my life with a reasonable person, which over time reinforces itself so that more and more I have interactions with a like-minded person (my wife). Also this thing called love will cause her to perhaps agree with me more often than normal. The effect that this seems to slowly produce with me is that I don't have as much patience with things or people that I find to be irrational or sociopathic. In addition, the amount of time I have to share with the world around me has been greatly reduced due to the added time I spend with my wife. This means that I'm much less patient with a person who I feel might be wasting my time, and can add to my irritability. Any enemy of logic has more often become a real enemy of me, instead of just a curiosity or a source of amusement.
I guess what I'm saying is that it seems that marriage has indirectly caused me to be a more stressful person.

Film Review: Crazy Heart

2010-01-12T14:06:00.002-05:00

Two weeks ago I saw Crazy Heart, and now I'm finally going to share my thoughts. It should be noted that I didn't need to wait this long: it wasn't such a powerful experience that I needed to fully digest it before producing a reasoned response. It was just laziness.
Usually at the end of the year there are a whole list of awards-bait movies that I want to see, but this year was different. There was Crazy Heart, and then maybe Nine, though I've soured a little in my excitement for that one. That's it. Congratulations on being uninteresting and uninspired this year, movie industry.
Anyway, for a person who liked The Wrestler so much just a year ago, it's impossible for me not to compare Crazy Heart to it. A washed-up entertainer slumming around trying to reclaim past glory, while having hit-and-miss experiences with family/lovers, all held together by a dominating performance by the lead actor. Yes, Jeff Bridges really is pretty great in this. Unfortunately for the film, nothing much else about it rises above the level of average.
First, like a lot of people, I will always have a special fondness for Bridges thanks to his appearance as The Dude. (There is actually an obvious but great homage in this movie about thirty minutes in involving sunglasses and a trash can.) His Dudeness though tends to help obscure or marginalize the fact that he really is a good actor with interesting abilities, which are on full display here. He plays simple about as well as anyone, and by "simple" I don't mean dumb but rather uncomplicated. This is a lot tougher and nuanced to act out than you might at first think. One way to think about it is to conjure the stereotype of Oscar-bait roles: handicapped or other obviously-challenged people. Jeff Bridges excels in roles that are just the opposite: people who project no dominating characteristic, other than simply being themselves. That he may have succeeded in this task so much as to be an Oscar contender is all the endorsement you should really need.
Aside from Jeff Bridges, I can't really recommend much else in this film. It stands up as an average one, not a failure or anything but only notable for his presence. Unlike The Wrestler, there was nothing in it's style or delivery that I found interesting, and its ending was ridiculously inferior. As a side note, I'll comment briefly on Maggie Gyllenhaal, who is weirdly cast as Bridges's love interest. She seems to be a pretty trendy actress right now, someone for whom it is fashionable to say you really love and respect as a thespian. I don't see it. She's not bad or anything, and is perfectly capable of giving you a passable performance, but I've never been impressed. She seems to still be fairly young so maybe she'll become something worth talking about, but as for right now let's not make her out to be something she isn't. She's kinda like a less-accomplished female Matt Damon.
My final note here is only slightly relevant to Crazy Heart. Robert Duvall plays a small role as the friend of Jeff Bridges's character, and while he does a typically fine job with it, the role is small and the character is not very interesting or essential to the story. Ultimately forgettable, though that's not Duvall's fault, which brings me to my point. It's time for Robert Duvall to get a big lead role in a film, a role that should either be written specifically for him or that fits him like a glove. Duvall has been an excellent actor for a long time and I'm not sure he's really fully gotten his due. Even better, in his later years, his on-screen persona has really taken on a life of its own. I'd like to think that Duvall was choice #1A for Tommy Lee Jones's character in No Country for Old Men, because he would have been perfect for it. He's gotten to the point in his career where he doesn't even need to act much if you give him the right role. I mean that as complimentary, not like how you might disparagingly say the same thing about Denzel Washington. Duvall has an irrepresible screen personality, and he's clearly capable of using it to dominate a film.
So after I mentioned most of this to Sara she went to IMDB to check him out, and reported back to me that Duvall is scheduled to play the role of Don Quixote in an upcoming film. I can only hope that his part is the lead, because that actually sounds like exactly the kind of forum I'm hoping for.

Random Observations

2010-01-08T15:07:00.000-05:00

1. I have a perhaps irrational hatred of Jack in the Box commercials. First, I don't get the Sleepy Hollow-like "pitchman." Why the stupid spherical head with the crooked hat on a normal body? What could be the meaning of that? I don't like his eternal smugness either. I'm not an advertising expert, but I can't think smugness field tests very well among fast food customers. Even the way he constantly gestures out with his hands the same way every time no matter what he's saying annoys me. I'm not sure I've ever seen a Jack in the Box store, but I'm sure that if I did, I wouldn't eat there. Assholes. You know who wasn't smug? Dave Thomas.
2. Colt McCoy's interview after the game last night was damned impressive. Either he's going to win an Academy Award for acting in his second career or he was as honest as I've seen an athlete in an interview in a long time, and the context made it all the better. The guy's whole career basically built up to that one game, and he goes out on a fluke injury five plays in, then he watches his team look helpless only to mount an ultimately failed comeback? Amazing. At this point, there is still nothing more than a lot of speculation about what happened or especially why he wasn't able to return, so I won't comment on whatever sinister or conspiratorial events were taking place in the training room that required his father's presence (ok maybe I will, because you have to at least wonder if ol dad was summoned because he could have played through the injury but it would put him at a greater risk in the future; ie he would be hurting his chance at more money in the draft). That aside, McCoy managed to answer every question both honestly and with the necessary acknowledgments of the other team's superiority. He did this while pausing to choke back emotion, emotion that didn't get in the way of his responsibility in facing the questions. That's a man that is fit to lead. I always figured him to not quite have the goods for the NFL, but maybe he's got a sneaky Brees-type career in him after all.
The secondary comment I have on this is about the interview itself. I generally hate postgame or halftime interviews with any athletes (especially the literally breathless ones given to track athletes--ridiculous), but I guess I'll put up with hundreds of worthless ones if it might eventually lead to something like McCoy's. That actually added to the broadcast in a meaningful way.
3. I have a friend who won $150 on one bet on last night's game. I won $20 on the same bet. This, along with general overconfidence and delusional thinking, is why I always end up losing overall when gambling online.
4. Jon Heyman is a dickbag. Read this and tell me you don't agree. There is a similarly stupid article on SI's site from Dan Shaughnessy, but I'd rather bitch about Heyman. They both are purposefully ignorant writers who are way over on the wrong side of history, and curiosly proud of it. Arrogant, actually. But that's just the baseball Hall of Fame vote. What makes me pity Mr Heyman even more is that he is one of a handful of guys who, over the last couple months of baseball's offseason, has constantly put out articles and statements and twitters trying to scoop about which free agent is signing with which team. Basically, Heyman's status as a journalist is that he is one of this small group of guys who comes up with these scoops. I'm sure the job is tough--he has to make phone calls pretty much constantly and always keep up on the latest gossip (let's face it, that's all that it is), but it's also totally unecessary and irrelevant. Maybe 10 or 15 years ago, there may have been an honest need for a guy to tirelessly monitor a group of contacts to stay informed, but in 2010 there is this thing called the internet which happens to have shrunken the news gathering timeline to zero. So what I'm saying is that scoops are a total relic of the past. The only thing that benefits from Jon Heyman being the first to report that Mike Cameron signed with the Red Sox is Jon Heyman's ego, because if he didn't report it, then someone else would have, usually within minutes. It's mid-December and you are a baseball fan. you learn that Mike Cameron has signed with the Red Sox. Really, what good is this information to you? What good is it to you right now? It's worthless. You could be lost at sea and only learn about the signing a month later and it would really make no difference. The whole enterprise of digging for scoops in the baseball offseason bothers the hell out of me, so when I see one of the posterboys of it write such haughty uninformed garbage as Heyman does in that article, it really gets me.

Reaching Out

2010-01-07T23:57:00.000-05:00

Here is what happens when your wife is pregnant: when you go to CVS, in addition to buying such normal items as sponges and milk, you also buy a stool softener for her constipation (it is what it is, which isn't always pretty), a long-handled shower brush for when she isn't able to reach everything anymore, and a can of mixed nuts to help keep her vegetarian protein levels up.
We had our third visit with the obstetrician on Tuesday. She was in her 15th week(1). That's early in the second trimester. We will continue to see this doctor every four weeks for a few more months. I say "we" because I've attended all three so far. From what I gather, the standard is usually for the man to attend the first visit and then the big "anatomy" visit somewhere around the 18th week, when they do the only important ultrasound and you learn what the gender is. Sara is happy to have me at these visits and so far I've been happy to go, even though the last two have mostly been simple check-ups, consisting of "how are you feeling?" a weight check, and a quick look for the fetal heartbeat, followed by answers of any questions or concerns from us. I'm pretty sure I'll be skipping at least the next visit with this primary doctor. The big anatomy visit, conducted by a separate doctor in a different facility, is in just two weeks, and though we're going a little early so I'm worried we won't be able to find out the gender, I'll be attending that one for sure.
There was really an amazing amount of excitement leading up to our first visit, when Sara was only 6 weeks along. Probably unsurprisingly I'll say that I was waiting for some confirmation at that first visit because it didn't seem totally real yet. The doctor brought out the ultrasound and, not knowing what to expect(2), I was actually a little unimpressed. The doctor didn't hesitate calling it a baby when looking at the black circle in the sea of grey noise on the screen. She moved around the internal ultrasound probe, and the black circle moved around and sure I could see a few whiter smudges or streaks inside the circle, but nothing comprehensible. Finally she stopped moving it around and got out her pointer, making tiny marks on the screen in a couple spaces and claiming that she could see the heartbeat. Now, I was sitting across the table about eight feet from the screen, so I didn't see squat, but then she printed out the image and gave it to us. Sara framed it, naturally, but I still didn't see squat. I'd hate to say it was disappointing, because I had no real idea what to expect, so maybe I'll go with "underwhelming." There was nothing human in that image, and barely anything biological, only if you had an active imagination.
The second visit was different, both in my expectations (lower) and the results (wow). This time, the doctor did the more classic external ultrasound, and after some brief abdomen searching, there it was. A very noticeable fetus(3). It seemed almost implanted to the edge of the black circle, like it's back were pasted to it, and the head and neck were pretty distorted, but it had an honest-to-goodness body. The real kicker, though, was the arms. They were fully extended, like grabbing for something. By this time, with Sara at 10 weeks pregnant, I'd seen a lot of ultrasound pictures online. I don't think I ever saw one with outstretched arms. For me, those arms were important. Without them, the image was still mostly inert and abstract, but with them it became animated and very human. For the first time, I could see it and imagine that it was something, that eventually I would be able to touch it and speak to it. Pretty great.

1. I just learned that you don't say it like that, you count it like you do a person's age. So in her 15th week, she's just 14 weeks along. As of today, she is 15 weeks pregnant. 15 weeks and zero days, though you don't say how many days. Anyway.
2. My aggressive online research-gathering hadn't yet begun at this point.
3. Let me be extraordinarily and unnecessarily political now. As a pretty staunchly pro-choice individual, I think I'm going to try to stick with the nomenclature of "fetus," instead of lapsing into calling it a "baby." This will be difficult to sustain, so forgive me and try to remember the intention I'm laying out now. Pretty much the only logical (religious concerns are never logical) argument for a pro-life stance is to draw a hard line around the killing/life issue. So for you to call something that doesn't have independent life a "baby" would be misrepresenting it. Sure, if you have no intent of aborting it, then eventually it will become a baby, but so long as it's in the womb it's still a fetus. So that's done then.

Happy New Year!

2010-01-04T17:04:00.003-05:00

Today was welcome back to work day for most of the people around my office. And since today is January 4th, it also means that it was "Hey! Happy New Year!" day for most people. "Happy New Year" as a greeting stikes me as very stupid, but when delivered in conjunction with an overall huge sense of excitement and energy by a person who has not worked in 10-15 days and therefore wants to burn five minutes mindlessly talking to you every time he/she sees you, then it can drive me crazy. First, to me that greeting loses it's novelty around 6pm on January 1st, so to hear it over and over in that forced chirpy way people deliver it in workplaces three days after the fact is too much. Second, I've been back in the office for a full week, people. I don't want to share details on how my holidays were anymore. I had a whole week to do it at work plus a whole three-day weekend to do it amongst friends and social acquaintenances. I don't want to do it anymore. Finally, and maybe the worst aspect of a seemingly banal phrase, "Happy New Year" has only one acceptable response, and of course that response is: "Happy New Year." What's the goddamned point, exactly? Yes, your vocal chords can pronounce four syllables in our shared language, and so can mine. I'm glad we just sorted that out. At my alma mater, Ohio State, there is a pastime among students and especially graduates to greet each other by spelling out the letters O-H-I-O. The first person calls out "O-H" and the second person responds "I-O." I hated this. I hated this from the first time I heard it. Even in the company of friends when a friend will start this greeting (to be fair--often out of spontaneous sports-watching excitement) I will go out of my way to ignore it or even say something disparaging about it. If how alumni choose to distinctly greet each other were the top criterion for choosing a school, then Ohio State would have been near the bottom of my list. The point here is that "Happy New Year"* is basically the same thing as "O-H-I-O." They're like telling a knock-knock joke but without the punchline. Terrible, stupid, a waste of time. Worst of all, people use them as excuses to pile on fake enthusiasm where it has no business.

*I'm excepting all exclamations within 15 minutes of midnight on New Year's Eve, of course. That's about the only time when it makes sense, and doesn't require a rejoinder.

The Empty Office

2009-12-31T08:33:00.002-05:00

1. This has been a special week. At least twice I've been able to pull of the subway double, when I'm not required to touch anything in the train during either my morning or evening commute. Of this is because the trains are empty and only saps like me have to go in, but still it's a nice feeling walking out of the station in the evening knowing I never had to take my hands out of my pockets.
2. One reason I enjoy #1 is that I don't like to wash my hands any more than necessary in the winter. Hands get dried up bad enough in cold weather, so I don't need constant wet-dry exchanges to add to the problem. Another reason this has been a special week is work. It's been me and about 6 other people every day this week, so I haven't encountered much traffic in the restrooms. Which of course means that I am free to use my own discretion with hand-washing after. Which of course means that usually I won't do it.* I think an impossibly perfect day would be combining the subway double with not having to wash my hands at work at any time. This would be herculean, because I drink lots of water during the day and urinate at least 4-5 times at work every day. It should be noted now that I do feel obliged to wash my hands at work from time to time. I stock the pantries every morning and my conscience does require that I wash up before touching other people's cups, straws, juice bottles, etc. But again, this week has been different and I've only had to do mild restocking twice. Both times occurred first thing in the morning and since I haven't been strap-hanging, I haven't had to wash my hands before doing it. The emptiness of the office hasn't forced me to go back to the pantries later in the day.
3. The last awesome thing about the office being empty is that I'm free to just let fly with the farts. Normally, I restrict my cheese-cutting to a couple infrequently-used locations on our floor, a small supply closet and the freight elevator area. I will never--as long as I can control it--drop ass in the hallways. Never except for this week. Quite the little moment of freedom to let one go as I please.

* I've covered this before, but I've had a longstanding curiosity with automatic hand-washing after peeing. Especially in the winter, my genital region is always cleaner than my hands. The joke I used to use is that I ought to be washing my balls after peeing cause they came into contact with my hands. It was brought to my attention some time ago by a person who'd heard my opinions that the comedian Patton Oswalt did a bit pretty much exactly like what I said. On a similar note, Paul Scheer's character used the word "sucktard" on an episode of "The League" this fall. I should absolutely be receiving royalties checks.

It

2009-12-29T16:52:00.003-05:00

So the big new news around this blog that has actually prevented me from writing as often over the last couple months is that in about six more months, I'm going to become a father. Yeah. And I thought hearing myself referred to as a "husband" sounded jarring.
We've known about this development since late October, but keeping with societal expectations, we waited until a couple weeks ago to start telling other people. So for almost two months I've carried around this huge bit of personal news that I was unable to share in any format with almost anyone (our parents and siblings excepted). This was awkward for me. Not so much socially--actually conversing live with other people--but via email responses and especially sitting here typing in this space. There have been many times when I've read something preposterous (and I've read a lot about babies/pregnancies already) or something crazy occurred to me, that I have really wanted to share it on the blog, what seems to be the natural place for such things.
Now that all is in the open, I find myself leaning toward another impulse: restraint. Having a baby is not only a slightly more personal event than most, but it's also something with which most of my friends and acquaintences have little to no direct relationship with, so turning now to regular baby-prep talk would seem irresponsibly self-involved. Also, the long history of parents or parents-to-be behaving in an embarrassingly haughty and superior manner tends to make me a little more afraid of seeming anything like that. Sure, this new life will necessarily become the most important thing in my life, but I guess what I'm saying is that it doesn't have to become a club that I metaphorically beat everyone around me over the head with. For me it is of supreme importance; for others it is merely another facet of who I am when they see me.
It's another huge barrier being placed between my private and public lives. First it was general maturity and self-recognition, then a big one was marriage and devoting a much larger piece of myself to a single person instead of a community, and now this. There is nothing wrong with having a clear distinction between public and private selves. Some people can live long lives without them, but for most it's perfectly instinctual. As long as we are always honest, we are who we are, no matter where we are or who we are with. It's just the natural discipline to keep our business separate that changes. We don't talk about our fantasy football teams or our pass-out drunk stories with our mothers. We don't talk about our fathers' health problems with our seldom-seen college friends. And we don't usually talk about the jewelry we buy for our wives with our daily friends. These details can occasionally be interested across barriers, but more often than not they aren't. Striking a healthy balance among these things is an interesting life change for someone like me.
Back to the topic at hand: I don't figure to start talking about babies or kids very often in conversation unless prompted to do so first. But this blog I will handle differently. I'll let it come out naturally. Invariably, I will use it as a main topic, but just as clearly I will stop myself and make sure it's interesting or relevant to anything first.
This brings me to a thought about just what this blog's purpose is, both for me and for you. A couple years ago I think I wrote mostly for a faceless audience and consciously tried to entertain. This of course fed both my ego and my artistic side. I still try to do this from time to time but more lately--as my "life" has seemed to finally start in earnest--there has been a kind of desire for posterity from me, as though I only want to get it all down so I have a record of it. This type of content can still be interesting, but in a totally different way than simple entertainment. I guess the goal of everything remains the same: to try to show what it is like to be me, what it's like to live my life and, most importantly, simply what it is like to see the world from my perspective. A lot of people have been 29 and married and white and male and expecting a child, but I never have. So we'll see.

A Sport as We Know It

2009-12-18T15:13:00.008-05:00

I have been meaning to write about football injuries for a long time now. No, this is not about concussions, though the recent increase in interest toward concussions--both from the public and within the sport--is a very good step in the right direction. It's incredibly obvious that repeated blows to the head, which are of course common in football, will shorten and handicap a human being's life. I don't need to explain why that is a huge concern.
Actually what has interested me for a while is sudden traumatic injuries. Paralysis, severe ligament damage, broken bones of all variety, and the body generally being made to move in ways it wasn't meant to move.
Background: I don't like watching people get hurt. MMA is displeasing to me, for example. When an athlete hyperextends a joint and they show the replays on TV I will always look away.
In a violent sport such as football, serious injuries are unavoidable. The participants and the audience accept this. But lines can be crossed. Football players have become more and more efficient implements of violence, and faster moving bodies produce more dangerous collisions. The whole sport is seemingly on an unstoppable path toward true self-destruction. I mean, literally, someone is going to get killed, on the field, during a game, in front of millions of TV viewers. I can't possibly be the only person who realizes how inevitable this is? Secondarily, I can't possibly be the only person who thinks this is wrong?
Watch a clip of an old football game sometime. Even as recent as the 1970s will do. Don't watch the game, but the players. They were so much smaller and moved so much slower and collided with each other so much gentler (relative term). People still got hurt, and sometimes seriously, but the imminent mortal danger that I'm talking about wasn't there. A guy like "Mean" Joe Greene was famous for being a big and nasty guy. He was 6'4" and weighed 269 pounds. Ben Roethlisberger, the Steelers current quarterback, is 6'5" and weighs 241. Football is a game played today by entirely different kinds of athletes.
To illustrate this point in another way, watch a lightweight boxing match sometime. Then watch a heavyweight contest. Different worlds. It's hard for the lightweights to knock each other out, even though they are both so small, because they're just not strong enough. But if you matched a heavyweight versus a lightweight, the heavyweight would seriously struggle to beat the little guy, even though his power advantage is massive. Why? Because he's probably not fast enough to land a solid punch on the more nimble lightweight. Today's football players are like an unholy mixture of the two boxers: both big and strong enough to inflict damage, and also fast enough to compound that force.
I guess a lot of this is obvious. The reason I decided it was a pressing concern has nothing to do with it, though. The clearest risk in football today is the failure of helmets to stay on heads. It used to be you rarely saw a player's helmet pop off on the field, and when you did, it was more of a blooper, something to laugh at. Hey, look at that player without his helmet, haha. Now, through either poor design or--most likely--poor attention to actually buckling them on properly, helmets seem to come loose on every other play. Of course players are taught to be tough and to finish plays, too. I think you can see what I'm getting at. Someone is going to die on the field, perhaps soon. Someone's head is going to get split open, literally. Hey players: there is no glory is getting your head split open. It doesn't make you tough, it makes you dead.
So the combination of helmets coming loose and players--through evolution, constant weightlifting, and of course steroids--morphing into deadly instruments themselves, will surely lead to what will be called tragedy. I guess the question is: who will care? Will the games go on? Will changes be made, instantly or over time? Will TV productions change at all? There is definitely a gladiator effect in play with today's NFL, from both the players' and fans' aspects. An important thing is to understand, as a fan, how you feel about this complicity. Are you ok having your players die on the field? If not, would you support mandatory increases in time missed after injuries (such as with the ongoing concussion debate), or even changes in the rules? If you are conscientious about this issue at all, then you would have to be fully in support of anything that increases safety. So, while I'm at it, let's see if I can come up with anything.
(disclaimer--these might be terrible ideas.)
Possible solutions to the NFL's upcoming death problem:
1. Fewer players. Perhaps 9-on-9 instead of 11-on-11. Fewer players means less hitting and more space. Naturally offense would increase substantially, but that's something we'd have to deal with.
2. Bigger fields. This is just a corollary to #1. The only downside here is that with more space, some players might actually have more room to build up speed and then actually hit harder.
3. Mandatory weight limits. A radical idea, sure, but maybe no lineman could be more than 310 pounds, no linebacker more than 260, and no running back more than 235. The relationship between size and speed and violence is a geometric one, so that a reduction of any would have a potentially large impact, pun intended.
4. Full-scale steroid and hormone testing. Obviously.
5. Increased pad protection. This would not only help protect players from hits, but it would also slow them down and make their hits less dangerous. This is my favorite solution so far. In the absence of #3, this would have a similar if less drastic effect.
6. Bigger penalties and bigger fines. This is my least favorite solution because it bastardizes not just the game but the players themselves. (Oddly, this is the solution that is closest to the NFL's current approach. Go figure.) But you could make unnecessary hits penalized up to 50 yards or more, and fines could be raised almost limitlessly, until the players finally got it.

The unfortunate reality of some of these improvements is that it would reduce competitiveness. But maybe that itself is a larger issue. Maybe the NFL, in so long dancing with the devil that is violence, has let itself go too far, so that the only way to save itself is to turn itself into something different. I mean, maybe they have crossed the point of no return with regards to player safety.

(Now, a personal note. I am a fan of the Steelers. They have been a franchise famous for tough football and aggressive often violent defenses. During the 1970s, they also apperently helped proliferate the use of steroids to exacerbate the violence problem. Maybe my favorite Steeler of all time is Troy Polamalu, a man who's freakish athleticism and reckless play renders him bascially incapable of staying healthy. A human body just isn't equipped to handle his level of physical ability. Finally, probably my most admired Steeler of my lifetime is Hines Ward, a man often called the dirtiest player in the league because of his deliberately violent hits, and a man who has been brutalized himself more times than I can count. Of course one of the reasons people, including myself, love him is that he bounces right up from these nasty hits with a smile on his face every time, as though he enjoys the violence. I am sure he does enjoy it. But how is he any different from a Roman gladiator and how are we any different from the bloodthirsty fans? Hines Ward's life after the age of 60, if he makes it that far, will be pathetic. Sure, it is the path he has chosen, but what does it mean to have helped and supported him along that path?)

UPDATE: If you agree with any of this, you ought to check out Part II of ESPN.com's Malcolm Gladwell-Bill Simmons email exchange. Or at least one little section of it, as it's very long. Amazingly, it was published the very same day as my blog post here and more amazingly it contains some very similar arguing points (one of them even mentions weight limits, for crying out loud). You'll just have to trust me as a non-plagiarist. I guess it's a good thing though: this stuff is a more present concern to more people, so the chance is just slightly higher that positive changes are possible.

Why Not Just Carry a Boombox, Asshole?

2009-12-17T10:12:00.003-05:00

Here's something that bothers me. People--like the girl this morning--riding on the subways (it could be any confined space, really) wearing headphones with their music turned up so loud that it distracts nearby people. I'm not talking about merely being able to hear the noise, or even being able to make out the tune, I'm talking about so loud that it's distracting, like they put the ear nodes in backwards or something.
I despise very loud music so being in the proximity of one of these ultra-loud headphone people grates on me like fingernails on a chalkboard. It's not just the noise, either, since I have gotten good over the years and tuning out music. It bothers me more that the people between the headphones really think it's necessary to play their music that loud. Can they be so socially oblivious to not know that the loud scratchy treble-fest that emanates out from their headphones is annoying? I think that some people are that oblivious, which is itself quite enough to elicit some deserved scorn. The worst ones, though, know exactly how loud their garbage is to the rest of the world, and do it anyway. Psychologically, I'd like there to be a study done on what motivates these people. Surely for some they think it's cool. For others, it's attention-seeking. No matter the reason, a person who consciously will play his headphones that loud and knows the consequence is a person that I hate. And hate is not something that should be spread around indiscriminately, so I really would like to understand what the fuck is wrong with these people. (Then, once these specimens are effectively cataloged, they can be properly sequestered. That's what science is for, right? Not helping the misfits but keeping them away from the blessed few?)

Fear

2009-12-11T11:52:00.004-05:00

It's in the title of the blog, after all. Even if the title is just vague pastiche, I still might as well slip a little in.

I never had any intention of writing anything about Tiger Woods. I try to stay as far away from celebrity crap as possible, after all. Something does not become interesting to me merely because it happens to a famous person, and very rarely are the things that happen to famous people in any way relevant to my own existence.(1) But this Tiger story just won't go away. It's become almost fascinating, even to me.
Of course, I'm not going to get into any of that stuff, because even if gossip trash becomes fascinating to me, my take on gossip trash will never be interesting to anyone else and I will never ever subject people to it.
So then what am I doing here writing now? Fear--I am acknowledging fear and how Tiger Woods scares me.
First, I will commit the sin of making an assumption about a famous person that I actually have no idea about. For illustrative purposes, though, let's go with it. Tiger Woods seemed like he had his shit together, so much so that if you find out that in fact, he did not at all have his shit together, you'd wonder how can anyone have his shit together? If this seeming paragon of austerity can be exposed in such a comprehensive way, how can a mere mortal expect to succeed in life?
That's being a bit heavy-handed, but my point is that you can't take things for granted in this world. I am not a philanderer. Just the idea of cheating gives me the willies. I think I have extremely strong self-control, stronger than anyone I know actually. I can say with complete confidence that I will always be completely faithful to my wife and my future family.
But. How can I really be so sure? Humans are human, after all. Mistakes are made, and if you crack open that door even a little, it's not hard to slowly let it slide open completely.
That is the lesson I take from this Tiger scandal: fear. Fear of what anyone, including myself, is capable of. I need to be mindful of that and to always be prepared to answer to anyone. It's almost like being a role model for yourself.

1. Weird, I know, but I don't do drugs, don't fly in planes more than a handful of times a year, don't have my picture taken anonymously, don't spend much time on beaches more exotic than Rockaway, don't dress well, don't have a publicist or an assistant, don't wear big sunglasses, and don't go to clubs or indulge in bottle service. Also I don't have grudges or fueds and don't have a dysfunctional family. Oh, and I'm not bisexual, as far as I know, because I've never been in an orgy or even in the same room with other people having sex.

Magic Victims

2009-12-09T08:52:00.011-05:00

I was watching something about the Madoff scandal last night (yeah, I don't really know why either). It reminded me about how angry I used to get when the scandal first broke and all those news pieces came out with such pitiful stories of all the people who lost so many millions of dollars.
First, am not a completely arbitrary cynic. I appreciate that any loss of money by any person is unfortunate, even if we are talking about a billionaire losing one million dollars. It's an extreme example, but for him, it's a tiny amount, though it's still a loss. That said, the key for this man is not to focus on the million lost but the $999,000,000 that he still has. The million is not important. The 0.1% loss is.(1) This is the first extremely important to remember when hearing about all the huge monetary losses in this scandal. A large chunk of the "losers" were very very wealthy to begin with.
Second, and most frustrating to me, is the issue of dividend payments and annual returns.
Madoff began his scheme most likely in the late 1980s. At that time, the Dow Jones was at about 2,000. A year ago, when he was jailed, it was over 8,000, but just about a year before that it was at 14,000. The point here is that over these 20 years, the stock market as a whole increased between 400-700%. For a fund that was "successful" enough to lure as many big fish as Madoff's you would have to assume he was claiming better-than-average returns and thus beating the simple Dow numbers.
So, now, who wants to play with Excel?(2) Actually, first we need to make a few assumptions. The first I will make is that our initial investment into Madoff's fund is $1,000,000, mostly because it's a round number. Secondly, for illustrative purposes, I'll assume this investment is made in 1989. That is in the fund's youth and also allows us to have a full clean 20 years of investing. Next I assigned a 10% annual rate of return and a 5% annual dividend payment. I'm no CPA so all I did was google and find that these are roughly standard amounts. In fact, after thinking about it for a second, I added another column for 15% annual returns, due to the market success over the period.(3)
In cell D4 I inputted 1,000,000. In cell D5 (representing year 1990 here) I inputted "=(D4*1.15)-(D4*0.05)." This covers the 15% increase less the 5% dividend payout. Our $1,000,000 becomes $1,100,000, a nice increase, plus the $50,000 we pocket in the dividend. You play this out for twenty years and the total account balance goes over $6 million. But remember that because this is a ponzi scheme that number is meaningless because there were no actual trades to increase the fund value, so the effective total of the balance in 2008 is not $6 million but actually $0.
In a lot of the reports about huge losses but the Madoff victims, the numbers cited were either this $6 million or if they were trying to be more simply truthful, the initial $1 million, plus any inflation adjustments, if they were being especially diligent.(4)
In addition to this D column of my spreadsheet, I also have another column which sums the dividend payments only. After 20 years, this amount totals $2,863,749.97.(5) Yes, really. This is how rich people get richer. A mere $1 million almost tripled, and that's just the dividend payments. Most importantly, pertaining to the Madoff "victims," this $2.8 million is real money that was given to them. This is some of the money that those rich people--sorry, "victims"--lived on. If you can follow the basics of a ponzi scheme, you also realize that this money was stolen. Old Bernie and his wife weren't the only ones getting fat off the poor souls who invested in his fund, many many of the actual investors were profiting as well. If you want to be fair about it all, you'd have to go and find the earliest investors and repossess their precious luxury items too.
Even for those folks who weren't early investors, any returns or payments they were receiving were fraudulent. They were living a lie. Sure, they were lied to, but they went right along with it because anyone likes a free buck. The only true victims were those people who only joined the scheme shortly before he was shut down (though I imagine for them the paper trail would be easier to follow and they might have a much better chance in court to recoup their losses).
It's a simple statement, but one that bears repeating for people dealing in the market: you can't make assumptions. You can't lose money you never actually had.
If you walk down the sidewalk every day and find a twenty dollar bill in the same spot and pick it up and use it every day, then whatever you buy with that money is a tangible benefit to having found it. But then what if you find out that some foolish person had purposefully left that twenty there every day for someone else to pick up. Obviously this person should not leave his money out on the sidewalk like that, but still if you pick it up it isn't yours. Perhaps you haven't officially "stolen" the money, but ethically you have deceived and manipulated someone and benefited at his expense. I'm not sure how you could be innocent in this case, let alone have the audacity to call yourself a victim when the fool stops leaving his twenty on the sidewalk.(6)

1. For comparison's sake, if you are a middle-class schmo who invests $10,000 in the stock market and you lose 0.1% of it, then you would have lost $10. Sure, it's a loss, but come on, now. We're not calling this a tragedy.
2. For work, I've been dabbling more and more with excel sheets, and curiously I've got to say I enjoy it a little. Figuring out how to best write a simple function to capture what I'm looking for tickles my efficiency bone. And using copy-paste over and over and watching the numbers fill themselves in is oddly satisfying. Of course--disclaimer--I am a complete novice, and only really know how to use the SUM and AVERAGE functions.
3. A 10% return increases our intial million by 250% over the 20 years, while a 15% return increases it by 600%. The latter here would be the more likely for an exclusive and successful fund such as was this one.
4. Even this is not so simple as I'm making it, because you could technically argue that in addition to the real million dollars lost, there is also an opportunity loss, since if they weren't investing with a crook like Madoff they could have been doing so legitimately and actually made money. In this case, the loss amount would be somewhere between $1 million and $6 million. I personally think that's a bit unfair because anyone can claim "losses" this way. Just because you aren't winning doesn't have to mean you are losing. There a tons of investors who don't make large returns or even any returns; these people can't complain about "unfair losses" any more than a traditional gambler can.
5. I have another two columns that track what happens if the person, instead of pocketing the whole dividend, keeps only 25% of it and reinvests the rest. This is perhaps closer to the truth for the financially savvy investors, but I'd hardly say it was the norm. You've seen the interviews with lots of these people. They don't often strike me as responsible about their wealth. For your curiosity, the dividend re-investors make only $1,139,392.96 in dividends over twenty years (still higher than their initial investment), but their total fund balance is an enormous $12.2 million. While I'm at it, lowering the annual return estimate to 10% would change the total balance to $2.56 million without dividend reinvestment and $5.0 million with reinvestment. The total dividend profits would be $1.65 without reinvestment and $0.62 with reinvestment at this 10% return level.
6. Again, this is a simple analogy. To be more fitting, the person picking up the twenty would have to also be leaving something like $18 on another sidewalk and have another person "steal" that from him. The point is, whether or not you know at the time that you are stealing from someone else, that doesn't change the fact that someone is being stolen from. And that outrage is hardly an appropriate response when the too-good-to-be-true stealing ends. Shame is closer to it.

Self-Preservation

2009-12-04T10:02:00.001-05:00

Some son of a bitch fruit seller is trying to gain my acquaintance, and I'm not at all happy about it.
There is this pretty standard guy with a pretty standard sidewalk fruit cart who sets up on Boerum between Joralemon and Livingston, right in the path I take to the train every morning. I have a fairly rigid fruit-buying regimen: I get all of it either at the corner grocery store (which is excellent, by the way, corner of Court and Pacific) or at a sidewalk cart near my workplace. It doesn't make a lot of sense for me to stop at a place on the way to the train and have to hold the fruit during the whole trip, so I've never given a thought to actually buying fruit from this guy in Downtown Brooklyn. I made the mistake of making eye contact with him a couple times within a week, though, and the guy must have realized that I walk by his cart every day at the same time and figured he might have a potentially steady customer. That is all fine by me, but he's taken to saying "good morning" to me most days now. The first time it took me off guard but my social instincts prompted a return greeting. The second time he said it I was in a stream of people and was able to act like I wasn't paying attention. The third time was this morning, when I was walking alone, staring ahead, conscious of his prescence, and simply ignored him. I'm going to continue with this action until he gets the idea. I don't begrudge him trying to warm up to a person in order to increase his sales. That's his job. But I also don't like being guilted into buying fruit. Me and this guy, we are not friends. I don't want to be friends and neither does he. I carry on in accordance with this fact; he does not. And so it must be.
This situation is not dissimilar to another one I've found myself in several times in my life, that of the unintended uninvited romantic interest. Clearly, I'm an attractive figure for people. Perhaps not as clearly, I'm very rarely interested in others. Most often what I've done when a potential paramour begins to make her true intentions known (almost never overtly) is simply to ignore that person, or at least ignore her more than would be natural given whatever level of social acquaintance we had before the development of the crush. This might be a touch immature, but it is effective. And, because the person isn't viewing you or the situation in an unbiased manner, she won't be offended by the ignorance, so her image of you won't be tarnished by what are really kinda rude actions by you. Assuming you are disciplined and patient (two skills I possess), it's just a matter of time until the nuisance disappears and things carry on with you no worse for wear.
It's about controlling the borders of the land of you. Some people have bigger fences than others.

Gary Patterson's False God

2009-12-02T18:41:00.002-05:00

I don't usually get off on nitpicking idiot statements, but this story really hits on a few of my interests and drives me nuts at the same time. Here then are my comments interspersed with the story:

On a day when Gary Patterson received a contract extension through 2016, the TCU coach stated that the Horned Frogs can win a national championship despite not being in a BCS conference.

Mr Patterson, you have done a nice job with your team this year, but the ridiculous things you're going to say in this article pathetically prove that you have no business receiving a 7-year contract extension.

And he thinks they can do so without a playoff system.

No, you can't. You're like a black person voting for George Wallace.

Patterson, whose contract included salary increases for his assistants, maintains that he's in favor of the bowl games and not a playoff system.

"Is it easier to win one game for a championship? Or to have to win four?" Patterson asked. "If you have a playoff, you practice and get on a plane and play. And if you lose, it's over. If you go to a bowl game, you're there seven days and the kids can enjoy a place and get rewarded."

Let's set aside the stupid comment about his players enjoying themselves at a bowl game since that's irrelevant and he knows it. He pretty clearly is admitting here that his teams will never be good enough to win a title through a playoff system because it would require them winning multiple games against top competition. He knows that it's far more likely for his team to catch lightning in a bottle and upset one elite team than it is win four in a row. This proves he understands probability. Good for him. I can't get past the fact that he knows his teams aren't good enough to be considered legitimate national champions and that he feels it's ok to continue the current system because it leaves the door open for a non-legit champ to sneak in.

Patterson noted that there's still a chance his 12-0 team -- TCU's first undefeated squad since 1938 -- could play for a national title this season. For that to happen, No. 4 TCU would need Nebraska to upset No. 3 Texas in the Big 12 Championship on Saturday at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington.

Then, the Horned Frogs would need the BCS formula to work in its favor.

Good luck with that, Gary. But hey, that's the way you want it. Go ahead delude yourself.

"We had a vision nine years ago of reaching a BCS bowl and going to a national championship," said Patterson, who is 85-27 after completing his ninth season. "A lot of people laughed and shook their heads and said, 'Well, that's nice.' We're now crossing that threshold.

"We feel like we're very blessed. I do not feel like our work is done. We still have a mountain to climb, a championship to win."

Patterson, who has led TCU to five 11-win seasons in the last seven years, believes that playing for a national title is as much about reputation as anything.

Of course. Which is exactly why a system that was created by the big schools for the big schools will never benefit a non-reputable program like Texas Christian University.

"You have to show that you can play with everybody consistently," he said. "You have to establish you can do it every year."

Last season, TCU finished No. 7 in the Associated Press and USA Today polls, the highest-ranked two-loss team in the nation. If the Frogs win a BCS bowl this season, they could begin 2010 in the top 5.

Gary wouldn't have a clue about this because he's an idiot, but that would be unprecedented, by far. The highest preseason ranking for any non-BCS school in the BCS era (since 1998) is 14th. TCU could begin 2010 in the top 5, sure. I could swim across the Atlantic Ocean in 45 minutes, too.

That means fewer teams to leapfrog on the way to a possible BCS national championship berth. TCU started this season 17th in both polls.

Told you so.

Patterson said even though TCU is not in a BCS conference, the program is gaining national respect and is proving it can play in the big games.

"Ninety percent of the teams [in the BCS] don't have an opportunity to win a national championship," Patterson said. "It's the same 10 teams. We've now gone to a BCS over 80 percent of the Big 12, 80 percent of the SEC, 80 percent of the Big 10. We've achieved something that all those other teams talk about because they are part of a conference that can get there. We've now jumped over a hurdle by going to a BCS game."

Gary, first, you're talking gibberish so who knows what you're actually saying; second, you don't know what the hell you're talking about. Since 1998, there have been 94 slots open for teams in BCS games. 90 of those have been filled by BCS teams. There have been 22 berths into national title games, and of course all 22 of them have gone to BCS teams.

Those 90 berths from BCS teams have come from a total of 37 different schools. 37 schools out of the 65 total BCS schools. That's 57%. 11 different schools playing for a title, out of 65. That's 17%.

The three non-BCS schools that have taken the four total non-BCS team berths (TCU this year will be the fourth non-BCS and 41st overall school) come from a pool of 52 non-BCS schools. That's 6%. And 0 title game berths is 0%.

Patterson quickly said the BCS bowl wasn't official, as bowl pairings will be announced Sunday.

"We're going into houses and everyone knows about TCU," Patterson said. "The only thing that was held over our heads was we couldn't play in a BCS game or play for a national championship."

Patterson believes strongly that isn't the case anymore.

Ol Gary is saying that he prefers a system that has never ever given a team such as his even a chance to win a title. He's using blind faith that this system is different now, even though you could find zero evidence this is true and even less of a motivation from those who control the system to change it. I think this is similar to Ralph Nader saying he loves the two-party US political system because it gives him, a third-party candidate, the best chance at winning an election.

If, however, the system itself were something like a 16-team playoff, which is what Gary uses as the opposing view to his dear simple 1 vs 2 BCS title game, then teams like TCU would have far more access (I know, anything counts as "far more" than zero, but we're playing Gary's game here). In the BCS era, 12 times a non-BCS school has finished in the top 16 of the final BCS standings, which is presumably what would be used to populate a playoff. An unaffiliated committee might actually have granted even more spots. But that's at least 12 chances for the little guys. 12 opportunities to "play for a national championship," which is the whole point of what Gary is saying here.

Go Skin

2009-12-02T11:00:00.003-05:00

Yesterday afternoon I was hanging up our office holiday(1) decorations and I was thinking about clothing. I was wearing a sweater yesterday on top of a buttoned t-shirt,(2) and since I was going to be working with pine needle-covered items I naturally removed the sweater before starting. Naturally, as in I didn't even think about as I was doing it. In fact, none of this occurred to me at all until I was finished and washing my hands and I noticed those tell-tale red dots on the insides of my forearms. You see, if I had been wearing the sweater, then those dots wouldn't be there, but then I probably would have numerous nicks and pulls in the fabric, which would be almost unfixable. Instead, I had very small spots on my skin that would disappear within hours.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but what I'm getting at here is that our skin is plenty strong and durable on its own, much moreso in fact that the clothes we spend so much money to cover it.
One thing I learned over time as a runner is that if it is raining and the temperature is remotely warm (anything approaching 70 degrees), you are much better off running shirtless because your skin is far better at dealing with water than any textile. This is only worth mentioning because for most people their approach is just the opposite: to put on more layers of clothes when it rains.
Our skin is pretty impressive on its own. Protection from cold is really the only biological reason to ever wear clothes.(3)(4) Remember that as you're standing in a mall looking at all the ridiculous price tags this season.

1. I put up a fake pine tree and decorated it with lights and ornaments. I also put up pine-roping things and draped them in the elevator lobby. These are "Christmas" decorations. There is no reason to act otherwise. I don't really mind respecting others by using the "holiday" designation when referring to the season in general, but I do get a little pissed when someone says we are not supposed to call things what they are when what they are is "Christmas." Next time I hear someone call something a "menorah," I will correct them and say, no, that is in fact a "holiday candle."
2. At this point in my life I know both that wearing button-up t-shirts is scorned and that I will never ever stop doing it. Try to think about the many times in your life that you've been happy to have a sleeve buttoned tight around your wrists. Anytime I wear a fully-sleeved shirt, I will always just unbutton the wrist and roll up the sleeves anyway. Give me comfort.
3. Shame or embarrassment are not a biological reasons.
4. Socks and shoes being the only exception.

Here We Are Now

2009-11-20T10:12:00.000-05:00

On November 20, 2007, Sara and I met for our first date at a restaurant in Ft Greene called Olea. It's on Lafayette St just a couple blocks from the school she was teaching at that year. It's a simple but thoughtfully put-together place with actual cushions on the chairs and pew seating along the walls. The noise level is somewhat quiet but not in a stifling way, and the lighting is moderate. The food is good and the menu encourages you to order tapas. Basically, it's a perfect place to have a first date. I had never been there before, and--prior to last night--I had never been there since.
In addition to working up street on Adelphi St, Sara also used to live in the vicinity, maybe a 15 minute walk away. That was one job and two moves ago for her, though, and so neither she nor I ever had a reason to be in the area. However, since she both liked the restaurant and is a sentimentalist, she always wanted to return. Last night we finally did.
I am not to be confused with a sentimental person, but it was certainly a nice experience to relive what turned out to be a very important moment in my life. I say "what turned out to be" because it wasn't at all so obvious at the time. I'm going to go ahead and speak for her a little now, but we didn't have anything like the love-at-first-sight experience(1). And then, while we both had a very nice time at the first date, it was far from apparent that we were on the march toward a lifetime together.
I'm fairly certain that her basic motivation for approaching me was to help move on from her previous relationship. Two years later, my motivation is still unknown to me, but whimsy no doubt played a large role.
The point is that there's more than one way to skin a cat, and sometimes the cat still gets skinned even if you aren't trying.
Too often people too strongly use either societal generalities or their own experiences or to explain or understand others. I really enjoyed re-doing our first date last night, not because it reinforced my love for Sara, but because it reminded me how delicate and unpredictable fate can be. There was an impossible sequence of extremely tenuous events that unfolded just perfectly to leave us in the happy place we are today. I met her when I'd just turned 27. Perhaps 60 years of my life then were laid out before me, on the basis of very little. So much of who we are is castles made of sand. No, I'm not being rueful, I'm being impressed. And feeling very fortunate.

1. We didn't first meet at the restaurant, of course. That happened at a bar called Moe's four days prior, but that connection was far less memorable. I mean that literally, since I was quite inebriated. In fact, when she texted me the next day I did not initially remember her at all and only after great effort was I able to recreate what I (fortunately, I can now say) deemed to be her cute face.

The Man Who Scoffed at Everything

2009-11-13T09:49:00.000-05:00

I try to avoid the fanboy-type posts but that's probably what this is.
I used to be a pretty big Food Network addict. When I lived alone and had only 6 channels, every night my default station was Food Network. I had my favorites, but really I watched everything they aired(1). It was good because not only did it entertain me but usually it also inspired me to actually cook things, and specifically to cook things better. Cooking appeals to me for two very fundamental reasons: because it's basically an unreachable pursuit of perfectionism, and because after a certain point you can mostly just wing it as you go.
Anyway, marriage and devoting time to things outside of myself and whatever else has caused me not to watch Food Network as much. Also, quite frankly, watching the same type of those shows gets tiring. The only ones I still watch are "Good Eats," and the contest/straight cooking shows like "Iron Chef" and "The Next Iron Chef"(2). I watch these because Alton Brown is still ridiculously informative, and because I like watching the absolute pros during "Iron Chef." And, because I love Jeffrey Steingarten.
Steingarten is the lumpy grey-haird frequent judge of "Iron Chef" and constant judge of "The Next Iron Chef." And he's a son of a bitch. He talks with an arrongance and a lisp as though he forgot to swallow his oyster, and I can't pin down if either are at all affected. He's the most knowledgable and nasty judge I've ever seen on those shows. He's like what Simon Cowell could be if Cowell didn't always operate as though he were his own media empire.
There is always one truly great moment of every "Iron Chef" episode: when the Chairman unveils the secret ingredient with his hyper-aggressive arm-waving style, followed by the super-intense bulging-eyed stare from one contestant to the other. It's all pure theater(3) but by god I can never get enough of it. Someone should make a youtube video of just all the secret ingredient reveals one after the other. I would be mesmerized.
The more times I watched "Iron Chef," the more I realized that there was often another great moment of many shows, the moment when the judges are introduced and Jeffrey Steingarten is one. That's right. Part of the reason I watch this very competitive cooking contest show is to see a somewhat obscure judge. To my great enjoyment, he usually tears to shreds whatever celebrity-type judge they have with him, but I've also seen him and Bobby Flay butt heads numerous times during the food presentations. He's a very tough critic who doesn't seem to care what others think, and he doesn't begrugde people their inferiority. I like that.

1. I even watched the one show that even then I hated: "Unwrapped." Mark Summers used to be awesome when I was nine and he was on "Double Dare." Now he's very lame and unbelievably annoying. He's the host/narrator of "Unwrapped," which is basically a half-hour version of the Mr Rogers segments where he tours the factories, except the only factories Summers tours are ones that make licorice or peeps or fritos--junk food. Summers&co apparently missed the fact that what made Mr Rogers's forays into industry were great because they were so short (yes it gets boring just watching a machine assembly line) and because his target audience was dumb little kids. I should mention now that "Unwrapped" usually airs around 10pm. However, none of this is what makes me want to hurt myself while watching the show. It's Mr Summers's delivery. He can't go more than three or four words without making a huge inflection, like he's constantly doing a radio advertisement for a big sale at a used car lot. Watch one episode and you might not notice, watch a handful over a week and you definitely will, watch a dozen and you'll want to slap that son of a bitch every time his smiling face appears in that old-timey diner booth surrounded by jujubees.
2. I always thought you were supposed to italicize TV series and quotate individual episodes, but just now did a check of nytimes.com and they are quotating series. I've got my eye on you, Sulzberger, don't lead me astray.
3. For instance, The Chairman isn't actually the nephew of the Japanese Iron Chef guy. He isn't even Japanese and he's just an actor named Mark Dacascos who was born in Hawaii to a Hawaiian-Filipino father and an Irish(!)-Japanese father. Sorry to crush that illusion.

Internet Entrepreneur: Me

2009-11-10T12:09:00.003-05:00

And now for something quite different. I have an idea for a website. This might absolutely amaze you, but it would be a social-network type of site, where people have friends or followers or whatever. But unlike all the bullshit you get on those sites, mine would contain only one thing: links to people's personal calendars.
Take the upcoming thanksgiving holiday. If I wanted to know what my friends are doing then, I could simply login into the site and open up their calendars. No need for multiple emails. If I am staying local and I see that any of them are going out of town, then I don't bother with including them in the planning.
Sometimes when I'm thinking about upcoming events (such as holidays or big sporting events or just a happy hour) I wish I could just post my plans and/or my desires for all to see. It would save me lots and lots of time. Also, like the more traditional social sites, it would also serve as a way to keep other people informed. It would helpfully eliminate the seeming infinite status updates such as: "watching Mad Men," "sleeping in on a dreary Saturday," or "wishing I were at the beach." Really? No one fucking cares. There is way way too much crap on those sites, so that it all becomes white noise.

My site could be color-coded, too. Green events would be scheduled and confirmed. Blue events would be something you are looking forward to but have no plans for. Yellow events would be tentatively scheduled. Black events could be private. Then if one of your friends joins you in an event, their little icon or name or whatever would appear in that box as well. Of course you would be able to invite people into these events, too.
Many of my friends have talked about going to Madison Square Garden to see the Buckeye basketball team next Thursday night. People could go to my page and open up that date and see the game listed in its proper time and color-coded yellow because I don't yet have a ticket. There would also be a few of my friends' names. Then if a couple names who I would assume should be there are not, I could go to their pages and find out why. If the time is open on their pages, only then would I need to send an email just to them. If their pages are occupied at that time, then I would know why they won't be at the game. So simple. So organized. It helps both you and your friends. It lets people be self-centered. It lets people be pervy and leer at other people's calendars.
I only need a name (YouCalendar, YouCal, InLife, MeLink, etc--these are weak but you get the idea). And much more net savviness than I will ever have.

Josh ______ Folger

2009-11-09T15:35:00.001-05:00

While I can find no good reason to go into any detail here about what happened yesterday(1), there is something of note for me to report. I changed my name today. Legally and everything.
Today being my 29th birthday, it is also the day my New York state driver's license expired, and so naturally I waited until today to get it renewed(2). I used this opportunity to enact the plan I decided on while waiting in the airport heading to my honeymoon: to change my middle name to Mallett, which is my new wife's maiden name. So now as far as the state of New York is concerned, I am Joshua Mallett Folger. And she is Sara Mallett Folger. Synchronicity.
In a previous generation, a wife assuming her husband's last name was relatively automatic, but over the years more and more womyn, for a variety of good and silly reasons, have made more and more choices to keep their given names into married life. I'm not going to pass any judgement on that, but I will say that it really meant a lot to me when Sara decided that she would take my name.
For something so ultimately arbitrary, it's a rather big life choice, and I don't take it lightly that she made it. For me (us), it's a commitment not just to each other, but to the new family that we have become. We are now the Folgers. Our kids will be Folgers. I know this might seem trifling to someone inexperienced in this way, but it's an amazing feeling.
So I got to thinking a little. Sara had a lot of identity in her previous name--Mallett--so what she did was drop her old middle name and keep Mallett as her new middle name. And if she was prepared to sacrifice part of that old identity in order to help make a new one with us, why shouldn't I? There is a family history in Mallett, a history that I am now also a part of. My middle name up until about 11am this morning was Ryan. Ryan is basically just a name(3), so why not drop it and embrace a piece of Sara's family history, even if mostly just symbolically?
I'm not the same person I was before I met and married Sara, so why not let my name reflect that? Sara doesn't have to be totally modernized with her name choices, but neither do I have to be old-fashioned.

1. After five weeks of rolling along at a reasonable pace of about five NFL bets per week, which were coming back at an exact 50% success rate, something unknown to me caused me to place 13 bets this week, just in time for a gigantic outlier of a 15% success rate performance. Of course. The gambling gods are still paying me back for one of the greatest days of my life: Friday, March 21, 2003, when as a college senior I watched from inside a couple of Las Vegas sportsbooks as my first eight bets of the day all won, and only the shot of the tournament by Drew Nicholas stopped me in the ninth game, which was UNC-Wilmington to win outright on a line of +390. I had my very own cheering section of degenerate gamblers who were actually pulling for me, and not simply the teams on the tv screens. Quite an experience. Sure beats looking down at a blackberry app as it refreshes with steadily worsening news of failure.
2. Did you know it costs $80 to get a license renewal? When the woman told me that, I asked if the name change caused the price to go up and she said no that was the basic cost. A license is valid for only five years. That's $16 per year. I think we ought to charge more to Jersey and Connecticut people who drive into the city, so people like me who only require a license for ID don't have to pay so damn much.
3. This isn't 100% forthright. Ryan was a normalization of Reinhart, which was my paternal grandmother's maiden name. So while it isn't technically devoid of meaning for me, it was a far far weaker bond that Sara had with hers. Anyway, I never ever used Ryan.

2009-11-02T17:44:00.001-05:00

1. Yeah, I know. Thanks to every person who saw me Saturday for reminding me that Ohio State actually did in fact cover that 44-point spread. 45-0. With trick plays and on-side kicks. Sometimes you eat the bear........

2. Not only did I not have a costume to wear for Halloween this year, but I also got tired and decided that a trip to the netherlands of Williamsburg would be too much of an effort at 11:00pm on a Saturday. Granted, I had to work and was up at 5:50am that morning, but still that is pretty bad. I've got my third straight working Saturday this weekend, but perhaps after that I will be able to return to some normal level of social activity.

3. I almost feel like I should apologize to most of my friends before I say this but as of now I don't consider It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia to be a good show anymore. I vocalized my opinion a month ago that I felt like a few of this season's episodes were pretty weak. Then I saw a good one and resisted the urge to overreact. At this point though, I've seen six or seven episodes of this season and I think that's enough to pass judgement. It needs to go away and let us fans enjoy the goodness that it was. I'm not sure how to explain that it's possible, but the show is both trying too hard and mailing it in at the same time. I've found myself noticably uncomfortable (not the kind of uncomfortable that is cool from the show being edgy but from it being bad) several times this season. They clearly don't have enough good ideas to get through a whole season, and unfortunately the idea of a two or three episode TV season is unacceptable to people who make those decisions.
I'm going to keep recording the episodes this season and watching them when I get around to it but I've abandoned hope that I'll get anything as good as I used to, and I'm not going to lose any sleep if I miss an episode or two entirely.

4. Yesterday was the New York City Marathon, and since I'm a poor supporter of things even personally interesting to me, I didn't watch any of it, even though it passed just three-quarters of a mile from my apartment, and I was awake for all of it. I don't know, I did laundry.
But Sara did go, and she told me something that will never ever fail to disappoint and agitate me. Apparently, not only were people using electric-controlled wheelchairs during the race, but the crowd was also cheering these people on.
A long time ago, I came to peace with wheelchair divisions in marathons: a marathon is a hugely inclusive event, and not just a race for fast long-distance runners, so including a division for wheelchairs and having them start early so they don't get in anyone's way is perfectly fine. Sure, succeeding at pushing a wheelchair for 26.2 miles isn't even close to the same accomplishment as running the same distance, but the purity of the race is still there, so bully for them.
HOWEVER.........a wheelchair that is electrically-powered is just ridiculous. Not only that, but it's offensive to every other regular wheelchair participant, and especially the thousands of bipedal participants.
I understand fully that large marathons in 2009 often devolve into little more than parades, but still within those floating happy masses are many many people who are pushing themselves physically--much slower than those at the front of the field, but inside their weaker bodies the punishment they are inflicting and the stress they are struggling to overcome is at least in the same ballpark. If you are being powered along in an electric wheelchair and accepting the admiring cheers of all the supporters along the way, then you are really just a soulless embarrassingly self-centered asshole. Thousands of people wouldn't turn up, and the city wouldn't block off miles and miles of roads to traffic, and big companies wouldn't pay millions of dollars to sponsor the race, and many many countries arond the world wouldn't pay attention if the "New York City Marathon" were just a parade or a contest for people in electric wheelchairs. The reason this person received a warm response was thanks to the great effort and sacrifices made by so many other people.
I'm doing my damnedest not to analogize this situation. To do so is my wont, but in this case I think it would almost subtract from the absurdity.
Again, I don't care if this person was the reincarnated carcass of Pat Tillman, or an AIDS patient just hours from death, or Mike Bloomberg's adopted daughter who was saved from a North Korean sex slave trade. Any of that would be totally irrelevant. He/she had no business in the race. The marathon is about achievement--physical achievement--and the presence of an electric wheelchair debases the whole damned thing. It disgusts me immensely. Assuming this person had an actual number, someone at the NY Road Runners, or ING, or whoever allowed him in, should either be fired or never allowed to work with the marathon ever again, and then subjected to Reality courses, the same way drunks are required to attend AA, or domestic abusers might have to attend anger management classes.

A Little Harmless Fun

2009-10-30T16:24:00.000-04:00

A sports and gambling list:

1. Fuck you, Cliff Lee. You owe me 60 bucks.

2. My Ohio State Buckeyes are 44 point favorites this weekend at home vs New Mexico State. As far back as the data goes (1984), that is the biggest spread ever for OSU. And Jim Tressel still coaches for us. Yes, yes I am definitely wagering money against us. No, no I don't have even a shred of guilt at the moment.

3. As I've been saying for a few years now, the Big Ten is not very good and continues to get worse. Not only is it bad (most of the national media continually reports as much), but it is actually even worse than most people assume. Name recognition of the schools is the only thing separating the Big Ten from the ACC and--gasp--the Big East. It used to be we would argue with SEC folk over which was the better conference. The Big 12 has replaced us there (although the Big 12 ain't no great shakes right now either). The proud Big Ten is no better than the fourth-best conference this year, and every year anymore. Let's take a look at the Big Ten's games this year against other BCS conferences:
Illinois--lost to Missouri, a below-average Big 12 team
Indiana--got crushed by Virginia, an average-at best ACC team
Iowa--beat Iowa St and Arizona, a terrible and average, respectively, team
Michigan--beat Notre Dame (not a BCS, I know)
Michigan St--lost to Notre Dame
Minnesota--squeaked by Syracuse, a terrible Big East team, and got smacked by Cal, an average Pac 10 team
Northwestern--lost to Syracuse
OSU--lost at home to USC
Penn St--beat Syracuse
Purdue--lost to Oregon, a solid Pac 10 team, and Notre Dame
Wisconsin--way to go, Wisco, you didn't schedule anybody.
The totals: 13 games, five wins, eight losses. What's worse, the best performance belongs either to Michigan beating ND at home by 4 or OSU losing, at home, to USC.
That's fucking terrible. Vegas has mostly caught on to this, but since the Big Ten has more alumni than any other conference, the lines haven't totally reflected just how bad the Big Ten is. We'll just have to wait until bowl season, when Big Ten teams lose again as big underdogs (last year, six of the seven Big Ten bowl participants were at least 7 point underdogs).

4. As bad as the Big Ten is this year, the SEC is that good and more. It used to pain me to give any credit to this motley collection of institutions, but for god's sakes it is far and away the best conference. Almost all 12 teams are pretty good. The conference is so deep it's like playing an NFL schedule. But the most remarkable thing is that you might look at the standings and not exactly agree with me. That's because Florida and Alabama are off-the-charts good. Either of those teams could beat any other team in the country nine times out of ten on a neutral field. Sorry, Texas people, it ain't gonna happen this year. You're not even as good as Oklahoma was last year and look what happened to them. I hate them more than any team not called Michigan or Notre Dame, but Florida and Urban cocksucker Meyer have put something together that is obnoxiously unfallible. How Michigan beat them in a bowl game a couple years ago is a total mystery. They are stinking good. I'm not going to try to hope or convince myself otherwise anymore.
Alabama though might even be more impressive. In seemingly no time, they've become a juggernaut. And they play good defense. At least if I have to see Florida be dominant, I can unashamedly root for Alabama as a legitimate foil.

5. So yeah, I am gambling online again. Been at it for about five weeks now and am almost exactly at even right now. Started with a $300 deposit, received a $60 bonus for free, and currently I am sitting at $357.04.
I'm keeping track of all my bets on a nice spreadsheet. For instance, in that time, I've made 47 wagers, going 24-23 for a % of 51.1. For the football games, my average result vs the spread (or the O/U) is positive .60, meaning that I've beaten the spread by a little more than a half point per game. That doesn't sound like much, and it isn't, but any measure like that will tend strongly toward zero.
In college football games, I'm 10-8. With NFL, I'm 9-9. All the rest are baseball bets: 5-6.
Because of the vig (usually 10% extra that the house collects on lost bets), you need to go at least 52.4% with your picks to break even. I'm treading water with less success because my winning bets have so far been for slightly more money than my losing ones. In other words, be ability to place a proper amount of confidence within my bets is good so far.
As a control, since week 2, I've also been making picks without betting on every NFL game, plus ever Over/Under. Through 172 picks there, I am 90-79-3, or 53.3%. What this tells me is that I have not been getting particularly lucky with the specific games I choose to bet on. That's good. What is bad, though, is that I've left money on the table by not betting on enough games to let that 53.3% fully work for me.

6. Big lesson I've learned from gambling so far: baseball is too volatile to bet on a game-by-game basis. I won two series-long ALCS bets that were too obvious to pass up, but I've also been getting beat betting on individual games. The distribution of baseball scores is just too wide and random.

7. I fell asleep last night at 10:00pm while watching game two of the World Series. I woke up 15 minutes later and finished watching the game, but wow was that pathetic.

8. My plan with the gambling is as soon as I get above $500 with my balance, I'm withdrawing $200. Then at that point, the remaining $100 from my initial investment could be written off and the price of the enjoyment in gambling. In other words, the $300 that would be left in my account, I'd feel free to wager without worrying about losing it. That is how you win, by the way. You can't be afraid. For instance, one of the obvious ALCS bets I mentioned above was over/under 3.5 runs being the highest margin of victory in any ALCS game. The line was -200, meaning you have to wager twice as much money as you would stand to win, or $20 just to win $10. This was the clearest and most obvious bet maybe I've ever seen. I know the downfall of many a sports gambler is the bet that absolutely couldn't lose, but shit, there was no way that bet could lose. And yet the -200 line scared me off enough so that I could only stomach wagering $80. Because I was uncomfortable losing more than $80 in one bet, my winnings were restricted to $40. If I had already crossed the $500 balance level and been playing with house money, I may have put all of it on the line on that bet. And I would have won, of course. Everyone wants to win. Not everyone can be fearless with losing. Psychology plays such a huge part, even if sports gambling.

9. Last Sunday at about 12:30pm I was looking one last time at the NFL lines and I had a very confident feeling. I had already made three bets and was thinking about adding a few more. I wish could tell you know why I was feeling good so I could know when it returns, but I was feeling very good. I couldn't decide which games to add to my slate, though. Also, Sara was clamoring to go to the grocery store and I wanted to be back in time to see the start of the Pitt-Minn game. So instead of holding up the whims of my wonderful wife, I decided screw it I've already got three bets I'll be ok. So what happens? My picks go 18-6. Of the seven 1:00pm games, I hit six, all but one in blowout fashion. Of the three games I actually bet on, I went 2-1. Serviceable. But not the massive windfall I might have had. We got that butternut squash, though, by god.
The lesson here is clear and obvious: gambling and wives don't mix.

Vows

2009-10-26T17:25:00.000-04:00

Here, in the interests of both posterity and sentimentality, are the wedding vows that Sara and I gave to each other on August 8th, 2009. (Both of them are completely sic'd meaning that I didn't edit any mistakes because a mistake on a normal day is just another beautiful thing on your wedding day.)

Sara:

I was never someone who dreamt about what their future spouse would be like, and I certainly was never anyone who dreamt about weddings. And so when I found you that fateful night at that bar in Brooklyn I didn't recognize you as the man I would want to be with forever. But the moment when I did was not long after. Since the beginning of our relationship you have shown me love and committment in a way I didn't even know how to dream about. When trying to think about why I love you and how to articulate it all I can say is that I love you for all the parts of you. I love your patience, your dry humor, your skills in the kitchen, how you take care of things, how you plan everything and how you surprise me every now and then with your spontaneity, your frugality, your intelligence, your interest in numbers and statistics, I love you for all these and all of the other parts of you. It is because of all of these parts of you that I am standing here today.

You are everything to me.

As we move into our next wonderful stage of life together I promise to continue to make you laugh, to try to be patient, to support you and let you support me. I promise to continue to work on our relationship and I promise to wake up every morning grateful that we have made this choice to be committed to each other for the rest of our lives. I promise to love you no matter what challenges the future may hold. I promise to always try and make our life together exciting. You are and always will be my number one.

Josh:

Even though I may now be nervous,
The reason I'm standing here today
Is how peaceful and comfortable
You have always made me feel.
Right from the start
You made my life seem suddenly real.

I love you so much.

Thank you for coming into my life
When I was most ready.
Thank you for opening your life
To me and our future family.
Thank you, Sara, for opening my eyes
To how very easy love can be.

I have always loved you so much.

I love you because you're always happy.
I love you because you're so neat.
I love you because you call me lovey.
I love you because you have pretty feet.

I will always love you
Because you are you
And I am me
And that's all we'll ever need.

I will always love you.

Now, finally:
Thank you so much my baby
For allowing me
To fulfill my destiny
Of becoming myself.

Your husband, with love, forever.

A Lesser, Better Me

2009-10-24T10:04:00.001-04:00

But first, a Film Review. It's been over a week now but I saw Synechdoche, New York. This isn't of any consequence, but it actually was the last Netflix I watched before canceling my subscription.
I don't have anything groundbreaking to say about the film, but I was both impressed and disappointed by a few things. First, this being a Charlie Kaufman script, the plot was very complex. The problem with this one is that the oddities and meta-isms didn't really serve to advance the overall story much. The whole didn't equal the sum, that kind of thing. I'm also not really sure how confident I am in this assessment, but I think the almost-beyond-reproach-at-this-point Philip Seymour Hoffman was not very good in this film. He had a tough task in trying to carry this scattered story as a kind of anti-heroic lead, but still he didn't succeed. He's a kind of scumbag, which seems to be more and more revered in artistic pursuits lately, and he never really created much more. I felt sorry for him, but never ultimately cared.
Now, some things that I liked. Since I often watch from the point of view of the writer, Charlie Kaufman's movies are always somewhat personally exciting for me. This one was no different. If not autobiographical it was clearly and fundamentally at least a self-referential story, and the most interesting thing he did was to strip away most of the facade the story, leaving underneath a display of both the simple process of artistic creation and the whims of the author. If 8 1/2 is a masterpiece of directorial metafilm, then this would be it's less focused and, to borrow a usage from the film, less-Karamzov screenwriting counterpart.
Most fascinating is the realization that all the actions around the main character are fantasy, that everyone is acting just as he wants them to. Women plainly ask him if he wants to have sex with them. His side jokes are almost perfectly set up for him by the settings or the other characters. People often tell him exactly what they are thinking, but only in ways that advance our understanding of the main character, not the speaking characters. A character is even created whose sole purpose is to follow him around for 20+ years so he can understand himself better. I'm in real danger of pretension here, but these are all the things you think about when you are living your life if you're also thinking about writing. You see the world as just another character to be crafted and adjusted in the story of your life. You want your attractive young stage talent to be infatuated with you. You want the secretary-type at your office to have seemingly no other interests in the world besides you (she is a mere desired object for you, so why should she have a deeper history?). You want to indulge in your neuroses, be they mortality, sexuality, or whatever. You want to believe that you can encapsulate your whole world in fiction. And all of this is exactly what Kaufman, as a writer, lets himself do in created this film. He took all of this totally went with it. No matter if he fails or creates uncomfortable films, you must always completely respect him when he commits himself to a theme or a concept. He's also starkly in the minority on this, which makes him stand out even more.

Now that I have that out of the way, let me get to the more seriously personal part of this post, an indirect impression I had after watching this film. The main character is, like many characters before him, concerned mightily with death (and of course with it's sister emotions loneliness and longing). In the end he seems to perhaps accept that he does in fact have an interest outside of himself, but that unfortunately for him she has already died. That's classic theatric tragedy.
As I was left with this, my mind, as it will almost always do, turned to thoughts of myself. Through so much of my life, I have had a harsh fundamental pride in being in command of myself, of owning who I am and how I emote. I've never feared events because I have had my shit in order. Why worry about fate if you've taken care of yourself? This is no small thing.
Well I can announce now that things have changed. In the last couple years the solid-fucking-brick walls of me have been slowly and utterly breached. The foundation is still set in granite, but the house is laid open. (Down, metaphor.) I have a wife, and she has made me vulnerable. In almost every possible way, this is a wonderful thing. For one thing, complacency can be dangerous. And in the great flow of humanity, cohabitation and the blending and sharing of two sets of emotions is an exaltant and ultimately necessary advancement.
And yet she will always be my achilles heel. I don't meditate on this with any frequency, but I now fear death. Selfishly, I fear her death. I and we are far too deep into each other. I fear what would become of me without her. It's the only thing in my life that I'm unsure about, that I can't even think to control, that instead owns me.
And still I happily submit. It's more than love. It's biological.
Like I said, this is a new thing for me.

A Very Short Story

2009-10-20T17:42:00.001-04:00

The Flaw

She wasn't sure if she liked him, but still worried about what he thought. She'd learned to be self-conscious about being the kind of person who talks to empty spaces instead of faces.
"I hope he doesn't think I'm not interested," she thought to herself.
He tried to make a real effort to seem a good listener, but still he was distracted.
"I hope I'm not visibly sweating," he thought, "because this pretty girl doesn't seem to want to look at me."

2009-10-16T09:15:00.003-04:00

Fuck you, winter. I'm not afraid of you and you can't bully me with this crap. High temps of 40 degrees in mid-October? That's not fair--taunting, 15 yards. I'm taking the kick back past midfield, you son of a bitch.
(ps- nice touch with the barely-above-freezing rain. Some sadists might throw some horrible unseasonable cold at an unsuspecting region, but you finish the job with a nice cold rain.)

You know what else is agitating? I went into the McDonalds near my workplace yesterday for the first time in a long while, and discovered that McChicken sandwiches are now priced at $2.29. $2.29! It's just a skinny piece of breaded chicken between two pieces of white bread. Only two or three years ago at this same location, the McChicken cost $1.00. So apparently McDonalds' Madison Street manager doesn't understand the concept of a recession.
I used to go to this McDonalds regularly when I first moved here and didn't have a lot of money. Back then, it was a legitimate deal. They had a real value menu which I ordered from exclusively: 5 McNuggets, Small Fries, the aforementioned McChicken, and even a double cheeseburger for $1 each. That last one was the real steal. I don't think they were making too much profit selling double cheeses for $1. And so of course I exploited that inefficiency. I was (still am, but less so) a big lunch eater and so a standard order would be one of each of the items I listed, but when I was particularly hungry, I'd go with two or three doubles plus a nuggets and maybe a McChicken. I weaned myself off the fries after a while. The McChicken to me was always the luxury item of the four, the one I'd order with a hint of frivolity, mostly because it was so much less of a deal than the double cheese, or even the five nuggets.
So imagine my surprise yesterday when I instinctively ordered one McChicken and one double cheeseburger (see, more responsible eater now), only to afterward look up at the board and see that the double now costs $1.99 and the McChicken $2.29. There are 360 calories in the McChicken and 440 in the double cheeseburger. Either there has been a global fowl shortage that I don't know about, or El Diario recently ran some articles about hombres finding twenty-dollar bills in their chicken sandwiches at McDs.
Paying more for a McChicken in this case actually offends me. There must be a reason for it, but knowing that only makes it worse. $1.99 is still not a bad price for a double cheeseburger; I will pay that now and still feel ok about it. If I had to put a fair price on the McChicken it would be maybe $1.49. Where does the extra 80 cents come from? This is McDonalds for crying out loud. There is transparency. I can literally see all the ingredients being piled on the sandwich while it's being made.
Anyhow, I shouldn't care so much what the fair price of a McChicken is. I shouldn't be eating them often enough for it to matter. Just this once, in fact. Even when making a late drunk-stop, you'll never see me with a McChicken again.

Cleveland Is the Worst

2009-10-15T15:58:00.001-04:00

Totally Pathetic. I mean in the nice way. The dictionary way: evoking strong pity and compassion. Pathos.

I was watching a documentary the other night about the Colts moving away from Baltimore in 1984, and naturally about how tragic that was for Baltimore.(1) It was a good documentary in that I related to the story and it caused me to think. Though the first thing I thought was: this still pales in comparison to when the Browns moved out of Cleveland. So I stewed on that for a second and the next thing I thought was: good lord, Cleveland is by far the saddest sports city there ever was, and people have never come close to appreciating the depth of that fact.

Chronicling the woe and frustration of cities and their sports teams is a favorite pastime of sportswriters. A couple generations of Boston writers made their careers off the "cursed" Red Sox, and with the recent proliferation of endless lists in various journalistic mediums, there have been plenty of efforts to capture the futility and the tragedy of certain cities (ESPN actually had one recently that ranked Cleveland #1). Still, none of these has ever given Cleveland its due, so to speak.

Let's get right to the facts, then. Cleveland has three major pro sports teams. The Browns debuted in 1946 and joined the NFL in 1950, the Cavaliers in 1970-71, and the Indians in 1901 along with the rest of the brand new American League. Through 2008, in 203 seasons,(2) these teams won six championships: the Browns in 1950, 1954, 1955, and 1964, and the Indians in 1920 and 1948. You may notice that the most recent of these occurred 45 years ago. If you (unfairly, but it helps the theme here) throw out the Browns' four titles because they came before the Super Bowl era and therefore before the modern era (really no one ever counts pre-Super Bowl titles when listing football championships), then you are left with the Indians' mere two wins in 187 team seasons. That's epic. 185 times out of 187, Cleveland fans have had their hopes crushed. That has got to wear on you.

But it gets better (worse). Since 1965, Cleveland has won zero titles in 128 seasons. They have played in exactly three championship finals, losing each of course. If you assume that the average league size in those 128 seasons is roughly 25 teams, then simple randomness would dictate five titles won and 11 top-2 finishes. For comparison, let's use Boston, another well-known (formerly) tragic city. Even if you subtract the last ten years of huge success, plus the dynasty 1960s Celtics from the equation, Boston still racked up seven titles and nine runner-ups since 1965. How about another city? Minneapolis: since 1965, two titles and seven runner-ups. Seattle: one title and three runner-ups, but in only 108 team seasons. Finally, Houston has just two titles and three runner-ups in 122 seasons, something that surprised me because you don't hear much moaning about poor Houston team performances. No one else really comes close for both longevity and futility.

So we've established that Cleveland sports teams have the worst record of success in the country, but it's not just failure to win titles that tears at the soul of the Cleveland sports fan. It's the thing which originally spurred this post: relocation.

The way Cleveland connects with its Browns may not be the strongest bond between fans and team across the four major sports, but if not, it's certainly in the discussion.(3) A real description of what I'm talking about might be difficult, but one way to look at it is to consider which teams' potential moves would be most devastating for their fans. Of all of the 15 teams I listed below in #3, as far as I know, none have ever come even remotely close to moving in the last half-century, with one exception. The Browns moved and then didn't exist for three years. After that they were replaced with an expansion team that won just 54 games in its first ten seasons, including a 3-18 record against their main rivals. In just the fifth season after the team moved, it won the Super Bowl for Baltimore. The man who moved the team, Art Modell, has almost been voted into the Hall of Fame on a couple of occasions. Any one of these facts is just impossible. The Browns are the ultimate star-crossed football franchise. And they just up and left the city. Unbelievable. Unconscionable.

And that's just the Browns. For anyone under the age of about 50, the main identifiable thing about the Indians is the movie Major League, which used the omnipresent culture of Indians losing and their general status as a joke as an essential plot detail. No one really complained about this. In fact, of the Indians fans I know, most actually took the fictional Indians' success in that movie as a point of pride. In 1997, the Indians went into the bottom on the ninth inning in Game 7 of the World Series with a lead. They were two outs away from winning it, and ended up losing, to a team in just its fifth year of existence. Only the 1986 Red Sox have ever come closer to winning a World Series and lost.

The Indians have the second-longest current title drought in baseball.
The Browns have the second-longest current title drought in football, and are one of only two teams (Detroit Lions are the other) to have been in existence for every Super Bowl year yet never participate in one.
The Cavaliers have the fourth-longest current title drought in basketball, and trail only the Suns by two years in terms of longevity amongst teams who have never won a title.

This is serious futility, people. I haven't even mentioned Ernest Byner, Jose Mesa, Craig Ehlo, or any of the endless string of terrible Browns first-round draft picks.(5) You add all of this to what is by far the most tragic franchise relocation ever, and no other city should even be in the discussion. Cleveland fans at this point are almost beyond reproach. They've suffered enough, so that it's just not funny anymore.

(Two caveats to this whole thing: 1) Lebron James. If he stays with the Cavs and wins about 5 titles, then that will make up for a lot of things and change the discussion completely. If they lose again this year and he leaves, then you can just chalk up another big notch in Cleveland's sorrow belt. 2) The Ohio State Buckeyes football team. They've won two titles since 1965, have been wildly successful for many years, and are currently sporting a five-game winning streak over their desperate rival. I mention this because most Cleveland fans also root for OSU. Takes a tiny bit of the edge off.)

1. The documentary about how good a business decision it was to move the team because Indianapolis gave the Colts a great stadium deal and the metro area was better positioned to financially support them would never get made, even though it's almost always true.

2. I'm not counting the Browns first four years as members of the All-America Football Conference, because it disbanded after four years and the competition was subpar (though they did win the title all four years, for what it's worth). I also didn't count the 1901, 1902, 1902, and 1994 baseball seasons, because there was no World Series played in those years.

3. Here would be the list of what I think are the top fan-team bonds, in no order: Browns, Steelers, Packers, Red Sox, Yankees, St Louis Cardinals, Canadiens, Maple Leafs, and Celtics, with the Cubs, Bears, Knicks, and maybe the Eagles and Red Wings forming a close second level.
4. I just learned via wikipedia that Dan Rooney was one of only two owners to oppose the Browns' move to Baltimore, and that, during the last Steelers home game of the Browns last original season, Pittsburgh fans wore orange armbands to a game against the Browns as a show of solidarity with their tragic brethren, and finally that during that year, protests were held in Pittsburgh by Pittsburghers against the move of the franchise. That's at least mildly impressive. No matter what kind of horrible things rival fans say to each other, when it comes down to it, they need and respect each other.
5. Let's step away from the theme of sympathy for a sec and have some fun at Cleveland's expense. Here in order are the Browns first round draft picks starting with 1999: Tim Couch, Courtney Brown, Gerard Warren, William Green, Jeff Faine, Kellen Winslow, Braylon Edwards, Kameron Wimbley, Joe Thomas, and Brady Quinn. That's ten players. To date, they've accounted for a total of four Pro Bowls, and played just 39 seasons with Cleveland. Only three are still with the Browns, and three are out of the league entirely. Basically you have one good player (Thomas), 3 or 4 servicable starters (Winslow, Wimbley, Edwards, and Faine) and crap.
Now here are the Steelers first-rounders over the same time span: Troy Edwards, Plaxico Burress, Casey Hampton, Kendall Simmons, Troy Polamalu, Ben Roethlisberger, Heath Miller, Santonio Holmes, Lawrence Timmons, and Rashard Mendenhall. Also ten players. To date, they've accounted for one Super Bowl MVP, 11 Pro Bowls* and played 51 seasons with Pittsburgh. Seven are still with the team, and just one is out of the league.* All but two are currently starters.

*Burress got his Pro Bowl with the Giants, and I'm assuming he'll come back to the NFL, post-jail.

Citizen Hero: Blue Suit Man

2009-10-13T09:47:00.004-04:00

I'm heading to work this morning standing waiting to cross Livingston Street. I'm up on the edge of the curb and to my left is a nerdish little man pulling a rolling suitcase and wearing a blue faintly-striped suit. A youngish woman is walking holding hands with her perhaps 4 year old son, and has done a terrible job of judging the light change, so that the green for oncoming traffic hits as she's only barely just crossed the middle double yellow line. First in line on both lanes of held-up traffic are city buses. Blue Suit Man sees the woman (blatant and harmful jaywalker at this point, inconveniencing scores of people, but let's not focus on that cold fact) and child and defiantly reaches forward toward the nearest bus and outstretches his hand, exhorting it to stop ("remain stopped," I should say, since naturally it was motionless to begin with) with unflinching seriousness. He doesn't move his body, however, and so during his moment of chivalry the woman and child are always nearer the danger of the bus than he is. The stopped bus driver never acknowledges Blue Suit Man, probably because he never saw him. Neither does the woman once she makes it onto the sidwalk, as it's likely she didn't either.
I saw you, though, Blue Suit Man. I know what a true gallant you are, you feebly aggrandist dickbag.

I'm More of an Addict

2009-10-07T16:00:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I had an odd run. I didn't feel all that well and the knee that I stupidly smashed up this summer was feeling a little tighter than it has in the last few weeks. I wasn't going more than five miles and I was on one of my stock runs (from work up into Central Park, turning around at the garbage pickup spot along the bridle path). The weather wasn't even very notable: just a nearly setting sun and cool but not cool enough to be invigorating. I consciously started out slower to try to let the knee loosen naturally, I don't very much like to run slow. It was one of those runs that seemed to exist solely to provide me and excuse to write down "4.5" and "C-" on my paper.(1)
But then about a mile into the run something happened. My legs started behaving as though they belonged to someone else. They just loosened up and felt instantly more powerful. I was running high and picking up my feet with no effort. I honestly had to deliberately slow myself down because I didn't trust this sudden feeling of power.
It doesn't happen often but it happens often enough. The sensation of your brain being disconnected from your legs, of your legs taking over and dominating, dragging you along for the ride, is completely sublime. I won't say it's why I run in the first place, but it is definitely one of the reasons I run now as a 28 year old likely past the point of ever seriously racing again. It's maybe the one thing more than any other that addicts me to running.
I saw Chariots of Fire for the first time maybe a little more than a year ago. It was an ok movie but nothing really special and nothing that terribly inspired me to want to run any more than another movie. But it did have the single best explanation of running that I've ever heard. A woman (she's a singer) is talking about how she loves singing, and asks her companion, one of the main protagonists of the film, if he also loves running. He responds: "I'm more of an addict."
This is it. This strikes to the very heart of the relationship a runner has with his avocation.
Sure I like running a lot, but I'm more of an addict. I don't love it. There are those primal physical responses my body gives me that force me back to the sidewalks and the dirt paths, cause me to cross through levels of pain and discomfort in a curious but faithful attempt to reproduce the magic. Not to aggrandize the effect, but it can't be altogether different from a coke-head's mindless pursuit of another snort; no matter how many bad hits he suffers, he keeps clawing back.
I suppose there are some people who love running, that not everyone must be like me. But I have known enough over the years to suspect that in fact the connection many have is less emotional and more psychological and of course physical.

1. Yes, I keep a log. No, it is not much at all like the kind you see a recreational marathoner or a serious collegian keeping. I used Excel to print out three months' worth of calendar per printed page. Each day's box is just big enough to fit in a notation for the run's length, the letter grade I give to it, whether I worked out at all that day, whether I did leg exercises, and whether I did abdominal exercises. The best day possible, would contain these notes started from the top left and going clockwise around the square (assuming a six mile run): 6, A, A, L, W. It's a quick way for me to keep track of my fitness and of course an easy way to stay focused on being fit. I devised this system back at the turn of the year and made up calendar blocks for the whole year, but only followed along for about the first four months, before restarting with it in September.In five-plus months of logging runs, I've never given a run a grade of A. I've only ever given made two or three A minuses. I've also never given any Fs either. Until I get into better shape, the good- or badness of my runs is still rather limited.

There I Go

2009-10-06T17:35:00.000-04:00

I guess this is the first time I've mentioned it. Had my ten-year high school reunion last Saturday and myself and the wife(1) made the trip back to Steubenville for it.
I'm not much for reunions, obviously. I sometimes don't even enjoy spending time with my current friends, let alone my rarely-spoken-to friends of over ten years ago, let further alone my don't-now-care-for-nor-did-I-even-ten-plus-years-ago classmates. Two things caused me to buy the plane tickets, though: Sara was curious, and one particular legit friend from that time requested the presence of a few people cause her parents moved out of the area and doesn't ever see anyone during the inevitable holiday meet-ups. Mostly, I wanted Sara to whet her appetite for all things relating to my stunning history, and especially I thought it would be hilarious for her to see a real live Ohio high school football Friday night.(2)
Once the plans were made I developed my own sense of curiosity and hope. Curious about how this very specific almost-right-of-passage experience would measure up to all the stereotypes, and hope that I'd walk away with a funny story or two.
I ended up rather disappointed, in a sorta comprehensive sense. Sure, I got to spend some time over two nights with the few people I actually enjoy seeing now. And any brief trip to my hometown is nice on its own. But the reunion itself was anticlimactic, subdued, overpriced, and just plain boring. Not boring in that I got bored, because I entertained myself, but boring on its own.
A small part of this might be my fault: I joked with a friend that we'd compete to see who could talk to the smallest amount of people, and to a large extent, upheld this goal. Only a couple times did I make a point of walking up and saying hello to someone, and even in most group settings I didn't bother to engage everyone there. But what was weird to me is that lots of other people there were doing barely more. Most everyone just kinda stayed in their groups. No one got obnoxiously drunk that I could tell. No one made a scene, no one chucked a drink in someone's face, no one let loose with any pent-up angst like the ex-girlfriend of Jerry's in that Seinfeld episode about George's chocolate-stained shirt. No one seemed intent on making up for lost slut time. No one was embarrassingly fat. No one was embarrassingly bald.(3) No one was walking around trying to brag about owning a yacht or inventing the E-ZPass. Everyone just sorta minded their business, like good midwesterners.
The food was bad but that was no surprise. The drinks were only free for the first two, then average-priced. The music was set to play nothing but late-90s hits, which was novel for about four songs but then got real old, especially when I heard the same song twice.(4,5) This cost me and the wife $75. Maybe I've got too much uppity NYC in me now, I don't know.
I did experience a moment of serious fascination after the official reunion ended. Most people decided to follow each other to a nearby bar called the Triple Play Cafe, located in the middle of a strip mall, just a couple doors down from K-Mart. The Triple Play Cafe is everything you might imagine, right down to the Guinness in a plastic cup and amazingly the same DJ working as handled the reunion, saying things like this before songs: "This one goes out to Indian Creek's class of '99." Anyhow, the fascinating aspect was that lots of people showed up at the bar who weren't at the reunion. At first I thought, well that's odd. Then I naively wondered why they come back into town just to go to a bar? Then I realized, shit, some of these people probably were embarrassed about going alone and so didn't, or, worse, simply couldn't afford the $75. Then it occurred to me that most of them were still locals and were just doing what they'd normally do on a Saturday night. A couple may have even turned around on their bar stools and wondered why in hell so many of their damn former classmates were there. Once my thoughts on the subject had come full circle, I came to somewhat envy those people, because here they were enjoying themselves on their own terms in a bar without having to go through the motions of a reunion and it's un-free-ness; but also to pity them because perhaps this amount of old classmates being back in town would represent a high point for them.
I can't decide if that thought is hugely condescending and presumptuous of me. I don't know the facts of their lives now anymore than I did a month or a decade ago. I didn't change much at all as a person from spending 12 years with them as a youth or spending a couple hours with them as an adult. I think that's the main thing I'll take away from the reunion experience.
Also, don't expect to see me at the 20, 30, 40 or 50th ones.

1. This might be the first time I've ever used the phrase "the wife" in print, or whatever this typed medium would be called. I'll let you decide and prepare accordingly, but I'm pretty sure I'm the type of guy to use that phrase a lot.
2. I was told my school would be playing at home last weekend. I was either lied to, or the AD selfishly switched up the schedule and left me with nothing. The only HS football tidbit I got was looking out over the outskirts of Pittsburgh as we descended below the clouds and toward the airport at about 7:00pm, seeing the little oases of lights denoting a football stadium in the throes of local pride. I spotted at least five or six.
3. You know my take on this, that "embarrassingly bald" is an oxymoron. I mean in the eyes of society.
4. Seriously, DJ-dude? The same song twice in a three-hour gig? On a related note, why in the hell do people still pay DJs to work events like this? Pay someone a small fee to rent and set up some speakers/amps and make a simple playlist. It's 2009, why do we need a live body pressing play or flipping records? These guys should go the way of typewriters.
5. I had no idea, but apperently my class song was/is "Turn the Page" by Bob Seger. Yeah. How would you feel if these were the same people that voted you Most Likely to Succeed? It's not even a big-fish-little-pond situation, more like sorta-average-sized-fish-little-pond.

No Dress Codes Allowed

2009-10-02T09:22:00.003-04:00

I'm probably treading into unwelcome waters now but fuck it. I'll keep it confidentially vague. I have access to Outlook calendars for several of the higher-level guys at my office (it helps me to know when they are around the office and therefore what needs they will have that I should look out for, not just for the voyeur/hackeryness of it). On the calender for a guy tonight is a personal dinner appointment where his secretary has written in "business casual attire." This notation about proper/expected clothing appears in most of his dinner engagements, and please remember that these are personal dinners, not business or client related.
What I'd like to say relating to this bit of knowledge is: I sincerely hope that at no point in my life--no matter how flukishly wealthy or important I may ever become--will I ever require someone to consistently inform me what the proper attire is for my personal dinner appointments. First, I hope never to have another person subjected to scheduling my dinner-dates with my wife. Second, I hope never to frequent establishments often enough that expect me to be specificly nicely dressed. And finally, I hope that, even if I find myself regularly in nicer places, I will not ever be worried about how my dress will compare to those around me.

One More

2009-10-01T10:16:00.000-04:00

I heard something on the radio this morning that's inspired me to make a notable addition to the list from yesterday. Notable enough that it gets its own post, and not just an editing addition to yesterday.
Captain Sully.
The radio blurb this morning was about how today will be his first flight (piloting, lord knows he traveled via plane since the incident for media engagements and what not) since the famous landing on the Hudson River in January.(1) Of course they carried on the tradition of liberally using the word "hero" in describing the man.
Now let's get this straight. What he did was impressive and admirable but not heroic. He was just doing his job, for chrissakes. I checked his bio and he joined the Air Force in 1969, so he's been piloting planes for at least 40 years. I'm pretty confident that any person licensed to fly commercial airplanes has the expertise to successfully land a plane on a smooth body of water, let alone one with 40 years of experience.
The act of flying is inherently dangerous.(2) People have constantly claimed that he saved the lives of the 155 people on board in January. If you accept that as truth you must also accept that every single pilot who ever captains a plane and lands it successfully then saves the lives of all passengers. This is not heroic, this is what these people do for a living. They take off, they usually kick it into autopilot for several hundred miles, then they land. Over and over. Oh, sometimes there is turbulence and they have to take it off autopilot.
Let me step back and say that clearly it's tougher to land a plane on water with no wheels than on land with wheels, but again, I'm sure all pilots are put through in-case-of-emergency training so that they know how to land on water and on non-runway land. I'm also not going out on a limb by saying that landing a plane with no engine power must be tougher than with, but then of course I'm sure they are all trained at that too.
And now a sidebar complaint about "heroes." A man doing his job is not by itself heroic, no matter what that job is. If heroism enters the equation (debatable but acceptable), then it exists only when the man decides to embark upon a career such as aviation, or firefighting, another profession that is constantly called heroic. It's a noble pursuit. It is admirable. It is not heroic.
Maybe my definition is just a bit stricter than others.

1. The radio blurb finished up mentioning that if anyone wanted to take his first flight back, you are out of luck because the flight is sold out. If there was any earnestness in that statement, then I really don't know what to think of our human society. To think someone would take a flight from NYC to Charlotte purely because it's the first one for the pilot after an eight-and-a-half-month layoff is beyond ridiculous.
2. Dangerous, meaning there is always a chance of death, not dangerous because death is likely. Sorta like walking on the yellow part of the subway platform while a train is coming into the station. But not dangerous like walking through a minefield.

Understanding Island

2009-09-30T16:18:00.002-04:00

I have opinions like everyone. I don't think I get any more passionate about my opinions than a normal person. But I do tend to judge others based off of my opinions, and probably do that more than a normal person. This is likely due to the fact that I can be rather arrogant about things, that I'm very sure of myself.
In my own defense, I will not lapse into true arrogance about something unless I've gone over it in my head a few times and come to the conclusion that I'm just right, damnit, more right than you at least.
But lots of times these arrogant judgments aren't fair, or they are simply hurtful. Even in some very rare instances they may actually be wrong. Gasp. Sometimes I introduce an objective opinion into a subjective field. Sometimes I judge someone/something when it's not needed or welcome. Sometimes my opinions might just innocently diverge from another's, in which case a judgment(1) is both unnecessary and unwelcome.
The reason I'm thinking about this now is that I was reading something I think yesterday and John Cusack was mentioned in terms of how everyone like him. Well, I can't stand John Cusack. I don't like really any of his movies (particularly the 80s ones that he might be most famous for), and I don't really like any of his roles. People seem to think that he would be a nice guy in real life based on his acting. Setting aside for a second that that's a pretty stupid assumption to make, I feel like he'd be insufferable based on the same thing. It seems my personal opinion just severely differs from that of the general population. I might be tempted to make a judgment about the general population because of this (and have done similar things in the past, to be sure), but really why? It's ok for me to hate John Cusack and for everyone else to love him. Lots of times, there may be a subliminal explanation for this divergence, but not always.
On a vaguely similar note, I had an argument with Sara a week or two ago about the movie I Heart Huckabees. It seems she is a big fan, and she made me watch it when it was randomly on TV. I was less than impressed. Actually, I thought it was pretentious garbage, and offered this opinion to Sara, who naturally took some offense.
I say "naturally" because, while it's perfectly ok--actually very healthy--to engage in dissenting conversation about one of the arts, it's usually(2) not ok to do so as arrogantly as I did in this case. I led off with the judgment and never really backed off to the opinion, and that's an important distinction to make in a lot of cases.

Anyway, in the spirit of all of this, I thought I'd come up with a small list of topics in which my strong opinion/belief/judgment differs strongly with most people. I do this as a way of highlighting that yes it is ok to have differing viewpoints and not have anyone be "wrong," but also as reinforcement to myself to be more forgiving and benevolent.
So here, in no particular order, are some things I (sometimes improbably) have a strong but very minority opinion about, and where there is nothing wrong with that.(C) I only make a note where necessary:
1. John Cusack
2. Coffee -- don't drink it, can't stand it.
3. Music -- I've talked about this before, and I guess I'm still not completely ready to give up the idea that my viewpoint isn't a little more enlightened than others, but I include it here in a spasm of benevolence. To recap: hearing other people talk about music is utterly noxious to me. I appreciate it only for its innateness.
4. Tabasco sauce -- I love spicy things, but think the flavor of this is repulsive.
5. Sketch comedy.
6. Doctors -- not impressed.
7. Champagne.
--I just now realized that all of these so far are things I don't like--
9. Tofu -- no, really, it's not too bad.
10. Facebook/Twitter -- no.
11. Guinness -- if this is in fact an acquired taste, then I am in complete ownership of it.

A. You can't tell because this thing automatically highlights spelling errors and therefore notified me of the problem, but right here I spelled that word wrong for the second time in the same paragraph. That's almost unforgivable.
B. I don't care, if you try to claim that Ron Howard is as good a director as someone like Kubrick, then yes I am fully permitted to humiliate you. There is a line below which vaguaries don't exist. But then, I don't usually waste time in engage people making such dumb claims, so maybe this is moot.
C. Here is a list of things where my minority opinion is correct and the popular one is just flat wrong, and yes there is something wrong with the populous:
1a. Ron Howard -- hack.
1b. Tom Hanks -- overrated, very. Also frequent collaborator with 1a, which is a black mark.
2. American Idol/Reality TV in general
3. Celebrity worship -- I would say "obviously," but the fact that I think I fall in the minority about this rather amazingly means maybe not so obvious.

Meek New World

2009-09-24T17:32:00.002-04:00

In a second, I'm going to be the five-billionth person to talk about technology and how it's changed our lives. So, you know, brace yourselves for innovation.
As has slowly become more and more apparent, my natural inclination is to introversion. This is only fractionally surprising because I had about a 6-7 year run starting in college during which time I was pretty legitimately extroverted. Basically all my life before and after this sustained bout of openness has been what I now clearly deem to be my true state of being.
It's not that I don't like people or that I don't enjoy being around them, it's just that usually I don't need other people, and in fact I not-infrequently prefer to be totally alone. Additionally, in most instances when a decision could be made to do something either more or less socially, I will almost always choose the "less."
Anyhow, this fancy thing called the text message just happens to allow me to much more easily be myself.
People surely remember what it was like to communicate without text messages. You actually had to speak to someone else, like verbally. And you had to listen at the same time. It was weird. And awkwardly intimate. If someone was your friend, you had to call him on the phone to make plans to see him, plus you'd inevitably have to exchange pleasantries while doing so. There would be no sports or asinine commercials on the TV to use as a social crutch. And assuming you were trying to get together more than just one other person (again, the group setting to be used as a social crutch), you'd have to repeat this verbal conversation several times, likely even more than once for a couple of individuals. The horror, indeed.
My own personal timeline with this is a little bit undescriptive because wholesale texting started not too long after I left college and clearly my social dynamic was changing a lot at that time anyway, but I can pretty easily say that I communicate directly with far more people now than I did pre-text.
As long as you don't engage in many one-on-one dinners or conversations with people, it's much easier to maintain seemingly meaningful friendships in the texting world. I'm probably a little outside the meaty part of the bell curve on this, but think about your own list of regular communicators. I dare you to tell me that you would talk all of those people as regularly if you actually had to talk to them every time. No chance.
When you are in college, you have lots of "friends" who are such largely because of ease and proximity. They aren't actually your friends, because as soon as you or they move away you stop talking to them. Sure, it's easy to reconnect every once in a while and you would probably still get along fine, but they aren't on your speed dial. There are certain people who are your friends in college who truly are your friends and you in fact do keep in at least semi-regular contact with them afterwards, but there are more who you don't.
The text message allows a lot of those people who are fringe friends to stay in your inner circle. They aren't simply proximate friends like in college but their existence is your life is just as lazy for you. Because you don't have to really invest or engage or share those awkwardly intimate moments of direct one-on-one verbal communication, your dissimilarity or true standing with each other never has to be confronted. The text message lets us all be cowards. Which is fine with me, as long as I don't have to tell you that to your face, with actual spoken words.

Value: The Other Fat Gene

2009-09-21T14:20:00.002-04:00

I have some kind of an imbalance that predisposes me to gaining weight, at least later in life. No I am not talking about genetics and my dad's 5'9" 225lb frame. I'm talking about my neverending desire for efficiency, in any situation.
I've been trying to eat a little healthier and get in better general shape lately. The workouts and such have been a slight success so far, and I've managed to cut down on the bad foods a little bit, but the problem I continue to unconsciously have is portion size. I eat like an orphan, like I don't know when my next meal will be. When I'm standing over the stove, looking into a pot of boiling water, mentally deciding how much pasta to put in, the only thing I'm thinking is: don't have not enough. Too much is ok, but for some reason I feel like it would be a grave tragedy to have just a little bit less than I need, that the missing 150 calories would kill me. And then after I've invariably made too much (but not quite enough to set aside a full leftover portion I could take to work for lunch), instead of saving the remainder for a side to eat the next day, I will pile it on my plate just to ensure nothing goes to waste.(1)
So anyway, I was sitting at a diner on Saturday afternoon looking through the wondrously massive menu and facing a quandry. The breadth of options and combinations was making it very difficult for me to decide just what was the most amount of food I could get for the least amount of money.(2)
When I'm at a diner I've never been to before, I like to order a turkey club with fries, and if I'm feeling frisky a bowl of soup, just to see what kind of establishment I'm dealing with, and also because I like all of those things. Well, since my trip to Baltimore/Philadelphia, this time I was guaranteed to get the mozzarella sticks,(3) but in addition to that, the Apollo Diner on Livingston Street had a turkey club with fries, pickle, and slaw for I think $9.69. So I was all set to get those two things, but then I noticed that they also have a philly cheesesteak with fries and a cup of soup for $10. I'd sacrifice the pickle and slaw but also get a cup of soup for just a small amount more. So then I started thinking I ought to get the turkey club as planned and then just add a whole bowl of soup, because a cup of soup is really small and you need a bowl if you really give a damn about value. In rationalizing this decision I reminded myself that while a cheesesteak is certainly delicious, it's actually a little smaller than the turkey clubs you get at diners, and my wife interrupted by being reasonable and reminding me I'd have plenty of cheese in the mozzarella sticks. True enough. I'd have plenty of everything, in fact, and that's the whole point of this. What kind of a human being ever needs to come close to clearing his plate of turkey club and fries, let alone a whole order of cheese sticks, to say nothing of an entire bowl of soup? At 2:00 in the afternoon, probably half of the turkey club and just a handful of fries would be appropriate. But then you'd have half a sandwich of waste, and not get the goodness of the cheese sticks.
My brain looks at a restaurant menu like it would a Sam's Club store. It's rarely ever taste or desire that guides my order, but the opportunity for a deal. Why buy three 24oz bottles of ketchup for the same price as one 128oz tub? Why buy two six-piece chicken mcnuggets for the same price as one 20-piece? The 500+ calories contained in the extra eight nuggets is just the delicious side effect of my successful efficiency, at least until I get on the wrong side of 30, when it will become a delicious fat effect.

1. I remember my dad used to be the same way about not letting food go to waste, and I used to passively fight him on it all the time. I hated leftovers, and I had an irrational fear of food being spoiled. But most of all I had (and of course still have) a literally unhealthy love of potato chips. I loved them so much that I hated to eat even remotely stale or smashed up or otherwise imperfect chips. And so I was always opening a new bag before the old bag was totally empty. This drove him nuts, naturally. The point is, I better start pre-conditioning myself toward compassion and understanding right now because I will probably end up seriously abusing any wasteful kids I'm destined to have.
2. This little game leads me to mistakes like the one I committed Friday night on the way home, when I ordered both a large fry and two Big Bufords, because the Bufords were 2 for $6, or something like $4 for one. For just $2 extra I could have a whole extra sandwich? Yes. But not so good directly before sleeping.
3. Seriously, how good are mozzarella sticks? Does it count as a guilty pleasure, just eating fried cheese? And am I wrong, or does it seem that this mighty appetizer has unfairly gotten labeled as a mere kid food?

A Very Short Story

2009-09-18T15:46:00.002-04:00

She was tall and lean with a wide sweep of hair falling obediently across the left side of her face. In the mirror she observed it as her right side. She dressed quickly but thoughtfully. When all else was done she slipped on her green flip flops matching her large green straw handbag. Her long unpainted toes hung just barely over the front of the too-small shoes. She didn't want anyone to notice her imperfectly long feet.