'Twas was the month the Coronavirus grew from a curiosity across the Pacific to OMG the world is going to end. As of right now, the best response anyone has come up with is wash your hands a lot, but I wouldn't be surprised if inoculation are announced sooner than we think. I mean pretty much every virologist in the world is looking at this now. In the meantime -- I planning on getting it at some point. Folks in my age group are looking at about a 2% fatality rate -- better than anything you'll find in Vegas. I also have to hope that being physically fit pays off in the strengthened immune system it is supposed to provide. Meanwhile the stock market is taking a hit and, if I live, I hope to buy at the bottom.
[Rant] OK Boomers
[Movies] Flick Check: Midnight in Paris
[Books] Book Look: First and Last Men
[Baseball] Houston Asterisks
Monday, March 02, 2020
[Rant] OK Boomers
I was born in 1960. That makes me a late Boomer, assuming your definition follows the standard of "born between 1946 and 1964". My father served in WW2 and my mom was in the Waves, so the appellation fits.
Almost every claim everyone makes about Boomers is correct. We have had the cushiest birth in history, a notion first popularized in the deeply annoying movie, The Big Chill. The worst economic times we've ever seen was in 2009, now termed the Great Recession, which folks before us would have laughed at and which I took advantage of to buy a house at the bottom of the market.
We have done so well with money over the course of our lives that mass culture has been forced to follow us into old age. Have you noticed that Magnum P.I. and Hawaii 5-0 have been rebooted on TV? The most successful movie franchise of all time is based on comic books I remember from my tween years. How about the dinosaurs of Classic Rock still dominating the airwaves and raking in concert dollars?
We've also managed to preside over the gutting and degradation of just about every one of the institutions that supported us on our way to the top. If I were cynical I would call that pulling the ladder up behind us. Yes, Gen X takes some blame for this too, but they were just copying us.
About the only accusation that isn't true is that we've "ruined the planet". This is objectively false. By any broad measure the environment is better than it's ever been.
Wait! It gets better. The past few years have brought massive advances in the battles against cancer and Alzheimer's. That means most of us are probably going to live well beyond 80 and many of us will see triple digits. I have to laugh when I hear young people talk about Medicare for All. You're going to end up with half your meager paychecks going to cover our medical bills while we sit around and gripe about how you are ruining everything.
OK boomer? Not just OK, I'm doin' great.
Almost every claim everyone makes about Boomers is correct. We have had the cushiest birth in history, a notion first popularized in the deeply annoying movie, The Big Chill. The worst economic times we've ever seen was in 2009, now termed the Great Recession, which folks before us would have laughed at and which I took advantage of to buy a house at the bottom of the market.
We have done so well with money over the course of our lives that mass culture has been forced to follow us into old age. Have you noticed that Magnum P.I. and Hawaii 5-0 have been rebooted on TV? The most successful movie franchise of all time is based on comic books I remember from my tween years. How about the dinosaurs of Classic Rock still dominating the airwaves and raking in concert dollars?
We've also managed to preside over the gutting and degradation of just about every one of the institutions that supported us on our way to the top. If I were cynical I would call that pulling the ladder up behind us. Yes, Gen X takes some blame for this too, but they were just copying us.
About the only accusation that isn't true is that we've "ruined the planet". This is objectively false. By any broad measure the environment is better than it's ever been.
Wait! It gets better. The past few years have brought massive advances in the battles against cancer and Alzheimer's. That means most of us are probably going to live well beyond 80 and many of us will see triple digits. I have to laugh when I hear young people talk about Medicare for All. You're going to end up with half your meager paychecks going to cover our medical bills while we sit around and gripe about how you are ruining everything.
OK boomer? Not just OK, I'm doin' great.
[Movies] Flick Check: Midnight in Paris
It's been a long time since I saw a Woody Allen movie. I needn't recap the personal reputational crash he's experienced over the past decade or so (I remain agnostic as to its validity). Perhaps I should develop a policy on how to approach art by troublesome artists. Or perhaps I should chew glass.
Midnight in Paris is one of his magical-realist comedies. Set in modern day Paris, a writer engaged to an awful woman finds himself transported each night to the Paris of the 20s. He meets Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Dali, and a host of others. During the course of these adventures he comes to realize a) how awful his fiance is and b) how he can't live in a romanticized past. It's all very light-hearted, romantic, and delightful.
Although his main character is still basically Woody Allen, thankfully he stopped trying to play himself as the romantic lead. I think his last shot at that was shortly after the turn of the century, which was about 20 years too late. Here he gives the role to Owen Wilson who does a great job of playing Woody Allen, but more subtly and thoughtfully.
Yes, it's a standard Woody Allen comedy. If you hate those, you'll hate this. Also, although the moral of the story is to live in the present, you'd be hard pressed to get the most out of it unless you were aware of some of the personalities from the 20s, otherwise you'll miss a lot of the clever portrayals. I especially liked Adrien Brody's Dali. If you're OK with Woody Allen and have a passing awareness of the personalities from Paris in the 1920s you'll, like me, find it a fine piece of light entertainment -- sweet and engaging. It's promptly paced and deftly filmed. It won the Oscar for best original screenplay. What more could you want?
Midnight in Paris is one of his magical-realist comedies. Set in modern day Paris, a writer engaged to an awful woman finds himself transported each night to the Paris of the 20s. He meets Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Dali, and a host of others. During the course of these adventures he comes to realize a) how awful his fiance is and b) how he can't live in a romanticized past. It's all very light-hearted, romantic, and delightful.
Although his main character is still basically Woody Allen, thankfully he stopped trying to play himself as the romantic lead. I think his last shot at that was shortly after the turn of the century, which was about 20 years too late. Here he gives the role to Owen Wilson who does a great job of playing Woody Allen, but more subtly and thoughtfully.
Yes, it's a standard Woody Allen comedy. If you hate those, you'll hate this. Also, although the moral of the story is to live in the present, you'd be hard pressed to get the most out of it unless you were aware of some of the personalities from the 20s, otherwise you'll miss a lot of the clever portrayals. I especially liked Adrien Brody's Dali. If you're OK with Woody Allen and have a passing awareness of the personalities from Paris in the 1920s you'll, like me, find it a fine piece of light entertainment -- sweet and engaging. It's promptly paced and deftly filmed. It won the Oscar for best original screenplay. What more could you want?
[Books] Book Look: First and Last Men, by Olaf Stapledon
The best word I can think of to describe Last and First Men is "intriguing". It is a "future history", a book -- written in 1930 -- that imagines the upcoming two billion years of man's development. It contains many fascinating ideas, along with a fair amount of silly fantasy. In broad strokes, Stapledon foresees humanity as forever moving through eras of rising from savagery, building civilizations of various stripe, only to eventually descend yet again, either through folly or mishap. It is essentially a manifestation of Stapledon's personal cosmology. As such, it's hard to call it an artistic work, it is more a work arm-chair philosophy, although a very accomplished one.
We start out roughly in 1930, just after WW1 and naturally we are treated to all the socio-political credences of the time -- that value of the League of Nations, for example -- including a fairly poor image of the United States, which eventually destroys Europe via chemical warfare, leaving the US and China to effectively divide the world. So maybe right for the wrong reasons. In time the First Men -- that's us, Homo Sapiens -- achieves a single world government, heavily religious, and in time destroys the world through something along the lines of an uncontrolled nuclear reaction, leaving mere remnants which descend into barbarism. What follows is the evolution of the species through various forms, seventeen more incarnations in all, the 18th being the Last Men. After 10 million years the Second Men emerge -- a new species. They build a great civilization which perishes in a seemingly endless mutually destructive war with Martians. The Third Men are experts at biological manipulation and end up creating Fourth Men, the species that eventually replaces them. Earth becomes uninhabitable for the Fifth Men so they must terraform Venus and wipe out an pre-existing sentient species there for their own survival. The Eighth Men face destruction as the Sun expands and thus create the Ninth Men, specifically designed to inhabit the planet Neptune, which will be in the habitable zone of the expanded Sun. Starting over from scratch, the Neptunians evolve through a number of species, gaining a hive mind capability and eventually the ability to send their consciousness back through time to earlier men. By the time they hit the 18th species, they are as close to perfect as can be imagined, containing the best of all that came before them. And still they are to be destroyed in an astronomical cataclysm. They manage to send viral seed out into the galaxy before they are destroyed and the End of Man finally comes after two billion years.
Whew. As I read that, it sounds awfully trite, but it's not. It's really a springboard for observations about the nature of humanity. When species come into conflict it is often for reasons of class or narcissism. Aesthetic sensibilities and art persist in almost every species in some form or other, as does spirituality and prophetry, often intermingling. We find species suffering from collective guilt, which is not surprising for an author for whom WW1 is a recent affair. Sexuality remains and gets weird, and if you know anything about sexuality in the 1930s, that won't surprise you either. The Fifth Men are so thoroughly automated that their lives consist mostly of leisure (sound familiar?) bring a whole new raft of issues. Collective consciousness is explored as is atomic energy. Stapledon's take on human nature persists to the very end.
Still it is limited in ways. There are virtually no individuals and so no character arcs; I suppose you could say it is a biography of man so there is the arc of humanity. And like all science fiction, it cannot separate itself entirely from the concerns of the day in the time of the author's life. Still Stapledon does better than most at that. Even without individuals the book is humanistic.
A greater shortcoming is that Stapledon does go on. I often say most books could be trimmed by 30% with no loss to the reader. In Last and First Men it's probably over 50%. Descriptions get overly involved and repetitive. He writes with good style, but often it feels like he's spewing content to no end. This may be part and parcel without having character arcs to provide constraints.
Should you read Last and First Men. Probably not. It is really only for folks who might like to dwell on the nature of humanity and hyman motivation. Compared to traditional fiction, it is a setting without a plot. It is too ambling to be philosophy, to broad to be hard sci-fi, and too fantastic to be predictive. Still, like I said, it is intriguing. Though I spent more time thinking about what to think of it, than of the content itself.
We start out roughly in 1930, just after WW1 and naturally we are treated to all the socio-political credences of the time -- that value of the League of Nations, for example -- including a fairly poor image of the United States, which eventually destroys Europe via chemical warfare, leaving the US and China to effectively divide the world. So maybe right for the wrong reasons. In time the First Men -- that's us, Homo Sapiens -- achieves a single world government, heavily religious, and in time destroys the world through something along the lines of an uncontrolled nuclear reaction, leaving mere remnants which descend into barbarism. What follows is the evolution of the species through various forms, seventeen more incarnations in all, the 18th being the Last Men. After 10 million years the Second Men emerge -- a new species. They build a great civilization which perishes in a seemingly endless mutually destructive war with Martians. The Third Men are experts at biological manipulation and end up creating Fourth Men, the species that eventually replaces them. Earth becomes uninhabitable for the Fifth Men so they must terraform Venus and wipe out an pre-existing sentient species there for their own survival. The Eighth Men face destruction as the Sun expands and thus create the Ninth Men, specifically designed to inhabit the planet Neptune, which will be in the habitable zone of the expanded Sun. Starting over from scratch, the Neptunians evolve through a number of species, gaining a hive mind capability and eventually the ability to send their consciousness back through time to earlier men. By the time they hit the 18th species, they are as close to perfect as can be imagined, containing the best of all that came before them. And still they are to be destroyed in an astronomical cataclysm. They manage to send viral seed out into the galaxy before they are destroyed and the End of Man finally comes after two billion years.
Whew. As I read that, it sounds awfully trite, but it's not. It's really a springboard for observations about the nature of humanity. When species come into conflict it is often for reasons of class or narcissism. Aesthetic sensibilities and art persist in almost every species in some form or other, as does spirituality and prophetry, often intermingling. We find species suffering from collective guilt, which is not surprising for an author for whom WW1 is a recent affair. Sexuality remains and gets weird, and if you know anything about sexuality in the 1930s, that won't surprise you either. The Fifth Men are so thoroughly automated that their lives consist mostly of leisure (sound familiar?) bring a whole new raft of issues. Collective consciousness is explored as is atomic energy. Stapledon's take on human nature persists to the very end.
Still it is limited in ways. There are virtually no individuals and so no character arcs; I suppose you could say it is a biography of man so there is the arc of humanity. And like all science fiction, it cannot separate itself entirely from the concerns of the day in the time of the author's life. Still Stapledon does better than most at that. Even without individuals the book is humanistic.
A greater shortcoming is that Stapledon does go on. I often say most books could be trimmed by 30% with no loss to the reader. In Last and First Men it's probably over 50%. Descriptions get overly involved and repetitive. He writes with good style, but often it feels like he's spewing content to no end. This may be part and parcel without having character arcs to provide constraints.
Should you read Last and First Men. Probably not. It is really only for folks who might like to dwell on the nature of humanity and hyman motivation. Compared to traditional fiction, it is a setting without a plot. It is too ambling to be philosophy, to broad to be hard sci-fi, and too fantastic to be predictive. Still, like I said, it is intriguing. Though I spent more time thinking about what to think of it, than of the content itself.
[Baseball] Houston Asterisks
I have to imagine there are a lot of broken hearts in Houston. As you know I adopted the Astros as my fan-away-from-home team when I started spending time in Houston and going to the games. My proper team is, and will always be, the Tigers so at least I am somewhat insulated from the fallout from the cheating scandal -- although not the slightest bit insulated from 98 losses in '17 and '18 and 114 (!) losses last year.
Well, at least they were honest losses.
Nope, that doesn't help.
Anyway, in case you haven't been paying attention, the Astros were revealed to be blatantly cheating via illegal sign-stealing during their 2017 World Series victory year. Naturally, once word got out, accusations, some highly speculative, compounded. Indignation spiralled, not all of it self-serving. I won't recap everything here.
What is going to be fascinating to me is what happens going forward. The MLB players are complaining that the punishment wasn't enough; that the Series and other awards should be stripped and maybe even rewarded to offended parties. Pitchers who got sent down to the minors after poor showings against the Astros are now martyrs. Pete Rose applied for reinstatement claiming his transgressions weren't as bad. The new Astros manager has asked MLB to take steps to protect the Astros from physical retaliation, both on- and off-field, when they are on the road. Honestly, the Astros might be grateful for the coronavirus as a distraction.
One thing is for sure, as we saw with the steroid scandal, everyone involved is tainted for life. The Astros organization has probably a decade before it recovers, in reputation, competitiveness, and financially. Much depends on how their fans react. If there is a chill in the air in Houston towards the Astros, that points to a long time until recovery. Most of the current players will have to have moved on before things begin to normalize. Would you buy a jersey with the name of a known, admitted cheater on it? You might cheer their achievements but would you pay top dollar for a box seat? (Contrarianism: If you are dedicated to the Astros for life, now might be a good time to purchase season tickets. They may never be cheaper.)
The Astros players may never recover. Have a bad year and everyone will think it's because you stopped cheating. Have a great year and everyone will be suspicious that something shady is going on. Endorsements will plummet. Your wikipedia page will be riddled with references to the scandal. And should you be good enough to be considered for the Hall of Fame, don't hold your breath. Worse this will affect your family right along with you.
Maybe it would have been kinder for MLB to strip them of their prizes and suspend the players. They could have at least claimed to have paid their debt and maybe started with a clean slate. As of now they are doomed to be walking asterisks.
Well, at least they were honest losses.
Nope, that doesn't help.
Anyway, in case you haven't been paying attention, the Astros were revealed to be blatantly cheating via illegal sign-stealing during their 2017 World Series victory year. Naturally, once word got out, accusations, some highly speculative, compounded. Indignation spiralled, not all of it self-serving. I won't recap everything here.
What is going to be fascinating to me is what happens going forward. The MLB players are complaining that the punishment wasn't enough; that the Series and other awards should be stripped and maybe even rewarded to offended parties. Pitchers who got sent down to the minors after poor showings against the Astros are now martyrs. Pete Rose applied for reinstatement claiming his transgressions weren't as bad. The new Astros manager has asked MLB to take steps to protect the Astros from physical retaliation, both on- and off-field, when they are on the road. Honestly, the Astros might be grateful for the coronavirus as a distraction.
One thing is for sure, as we saw with the steroid scandal, everyone involved is tainted for life. The Astros organization has probably a decade before it recovers, in reputation, competitiveness, and financially. Much depends on how their fans react. If there is a chill in the air in Houston towards the Astros, that points to a long time until recovery. Most of the current players will have to have moved on before things begin to normalize. Would you buy a jersey with the name of a known, admitted cheater on it? You might cheer their achievements but would you pay top dollar for a box seat? (Contrarianism: If you are dedicated to the Astros for life, now might be a good time to purchase season tickets. They may never be cheaper.)
The Astros players may never recover. Have a bad year and everyone will think it's because you stopped cheating. Have a great year and everyone will be suspicious that something shady is going on. Endorsements will plummet. Your wikipedia page will be riddled with references to the scandal. And should you be good enough to be considered for the Hall of Fame, don't hold your breath. Worse this will affect your family right along with you.
Maybe it would have been kinder for MLB to strip them of their prizes and suspend the players. They could have at least claimed to have paid their debt and maybe started with a clean slate. As of now they are doomed to be walking asterisks.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)