Quite the Racket

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(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

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

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 (!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.