Fitness Follies: The heat really put a damper on things. Usually during the hot months I switch from running to cycling because it's much cooler, mostly because you are going fast enough to have a constant breeze in your face, but once you get into the triple digits, it's like a breeze from a blast furnace. Still, the cycling is going well. I was able to do the 40 mile Helluva Ride again this year -- always fun-- and I hope to get a 50+ miler in somewhere (or a half-century, if I want it to sound more impressive) before it gets too cold.
Swimming has slipped. It's just been difficult to get out to the lake with any regularity and with the heat, the crowds really put a damper on the swimming of buoy laps. It's no fun to accidentally deliver a forearm to some chubby dude wedged into a inner tube shaped like a duck, no matter how hard you try to smile.
I've also been keeping up with running to a certain extent. But more importantly in that department I was recommended to a place called The Running Institute, a physical therapy operation that focuses on runners. Since I was experiencing some brutal knee pain, I decided to let them put me through my paces.
All my life I have been told I am a supinator; I run on the outsides of my feet. I can stand on the little measuring device in the running store and it will show the weight distributed to the outside of my feet. Because of this I have always worn what are called "cushioned neutral" shoes. The idea behind these shoes is the added cushioning allows your foot to gently roll off the outside into proper neutral position -- it sort of passively guides your foot to roll inward to counterbalance your supination.
Now, at the Running Institute they don't play around with Mickey Mouse measuring devices or make guesses based on subjective impressions: they go right to the tape -- they video you and they look and the results with you. My videos caused people to go bug-eyed. Despite the fact that I load-bear on the outsides of my feet standing and walking, when I kick into a run, suddenly everything changes and I'm rolling to the inside of my foot (pronation). Honestly, looking at this video I was amazed my heel hadn't snapped in two at some point.
The upshot is that every shoe guy who has ever looked at me has recommended a shoe type that is the exact opposite of the one I needed; the one that encouraged my problem. But that was not obvious without the video.
From there the rest was easy. Go to the shoe shop next door (Running Fit). Pick out 5 pairs of shoes of the right type. Video me running on the treadmill in each pair. Pick the one that best straightens me out. For the record: Brooks Adrenaline GTS12.
I've only just started running in them but so far so good. We'll see if my knee pain subsides. For the revelation about my stride alone and comprehensive analysis, I would recommend The Running Institute, but most impressively you get a quick eval from a really high end running coach, Ron Warhurst, who's trained numerous internationally successful runners including the Beijing silver medalist in the 1500 and flag-bearer for New Zealand in London. He'll nail your worst inefficiencies in about 10 seconds.
A two session eval is not cheap, $175, but if you are at all serious about running, even recreational running, I highly recommend it. (Obviously this is for my Ann Arbor area homeys, but hey, if you want to make the trip...)
Tuesday, August 07, 2012
[Michigan] Glove Love
Glove Love: I'll be heading up to Mackinac next month, but others are commenting on Michigan summer travel already. Mario Batali, everybody's favorite fat Italian chef -- I could not count number of astounding meals I've had in his restaurants from Vegas to Manhattan -- declared Traverse City, Michigan to be his favorite summer destination for foodies. Familiarity might have something to do with that since he keeps a summer home up on the bay. (The original draft of this story referenced Batali's "ocean house." A poor commentary on the state of geographic education.)
Pure Michigan, the the State's travel PR organization, sponsored a north glove trip for Jaunted.com, one of the travel sites I follow. It's actually a sister site to Hotel Chatter, where I used to contribute in their early pre-corporate years. They got to:On behalf of all of us 'ganders, You're Welcome.
Pure Michigan, the the State's travel PR organization, sponsored a north glove trip for Jaunted.com, one of the travel sites I follow. It's actually a sister site to Hotel Chatter, where I used to contribute in their early pre-corporate years. They got to:On behalf of all of us 'ganders, You're Welcome.
[Sports] Flat Tour
Flat Tour: I continue my tradition of being the only North American who follows the Tour de France, and this year it was rather a dull one. The winner was Bradley Wiggins and he had the race pretty much sewn up in the first few days. It was his unless he snapped a femur and couldn't continue. He was head and shoulders above anyone else on the time trials and he clearly had the best team around him, including the guy who finished second, so it really was no contest. Normally if the top two guys are on the same team, there is a controversy over who should be number one, but that never got off the ground because the number two guy immediately said "I'm the number 2 guy; I'm here to support the number 1 guy, and that's that," or words the that effect.
Last year's winner, Cadel Evans, was clearly not in condition to compete, to the point that another rider on his team taking over the top dog spot from him. A couple of other possible contenders were sidelined with injuries. Blah.
Oh, there were bits and pieces of excitement. There were massive crashes for about five days in a row. Some of these crashes are action-movie vicious. Imagine being hurled out a car moving at about 30 miles per hour protected by nothing but a helmet and a layer of spandex. More amazingly, during one stage, in a monumental act of asshattery, someone covered a stretch of the road with tacks and nails. But this only served to highlight something I love about the Tour -- the sportsmanship. The leader, Wiggins, managed to avoid any tack-induced flats, but the guy who was at that point still considered a main rival, Evans, suffered two blowouts (as did many others). Wiggins, upon hearing of this, intentionally slowed down (and the rest of the field slowed with him) until Evans changed tires and regained his ground. The overriding principle being that you should not lose the Tour because of mechanical problems. You should lose because the other guy raced better. This is really quite unique in sports, to my understanding. I guarantee you no NASCAR driver has ever slowed down because his rival had mechanical problems. In no running race has anyone ever held up because a rival's shoelace snapped. It's just the purest example of old school sportsmanship. It's the sort of behavior that is long gone from the wider world.
Of course, you can counter that with all the doping that goes on cycling may also be the dirtiest sport in the world. But viewed narrowly, it's pretty cool.
Last year's winner, Cadel Evans, was clearly not in condition to compete, to the point that another rider on his team taking over the top dog spot from him. A couple of other possible contenders were sidelined with injuries. Blah.
Oh, there were bits and pieces of excitement. There were massive crashes for about five days in a row. Some of these crashes are action-movie vicious. Imagine being hurled out a car moving at about 30 miles per hour protected by nothing but a helmet and a layer of spandex. More amazingly, during one stage, in a monumental act of asshattery, someone covered a stretch of the road with tacks and nails. But this only served to highlight something I love about the Tour -- the sportsmanship. The leader, Wiggins, managed to avoid any tack-induced flats, but the guy who was at that point still considered a main rival, Evans, suffered two blowouts (as did many others). Wiggins, upon hearing of this, intentionally slowed down (and the rest of the field slowed with him) until Evans changed tires and regained his ground. The overriding principle being that you should not lose the Tour because of mechanical problems. You should lose because the other guy raced better. This is really quite unique in sports, to my understanding. I guarantee you no NASCAR driver has ever slowed down because his rival had mechanical problems. In no running race has anyone ever held up because a rival's shoelace snapped. It's just the purest example of old school sportsmanship. It's the sort of behavior that is long gone from the wider world.
Of course, you can counter that with all the doping that goes on cycling may also be the dirtiest sport in the world. But viewed narrowly, it's pretty cool.
Monday, July 09, 2012
The Month That Was - June 2012
The Month That Was - June 2012: I'm even later than usual this month. My excuse is that everything seemed to happen at the end of the month. I finished the book I was going to review, spent a weekend in NYC -- even the links I found are mostly from the end of the month. Let's hope I can break the cycle.
I'm still not writing enough on my special project (real soon now), with which I am hoping to test the Amazon Singles waters. The bulk of the work is done, I just need to proof it one last time, write an intro, and format it properly. I had really hoped to be done by now, but I had gardening to do.
For the record, it has been pushing 100 degrees every day for the last week and it looks like we are in for a blistering July. I'm finding dried frog husks in my driveway. We've been getting searing sunlight punctuated by short half-hour thunderstorms with tornado like winds, then we switch right back to tanning bed conditions. The storms take out the power lines so when it heats back up, people can't run their A/C. It's been a truly bizarre summer weather-wise. So extreme that it's been difficult to enjoy. Part of that is also due to the physical problems I've been having, but that will have to wait until next month.
[Good Links] Link Onslaught
[House and Home] A Supposedly Fun Thing
[Travel] New York Weekend
[Tech] My Next Things
[Books] Book Look: The Great Game
I'm still not writing enough on my special project (real soon now), with which I am hoping to test the Amazon Singles waters. The bulk of the work is done, I just need to proof it one last time, write an intro, and format it properly. I had really hoped to be done by now, but I had gardening to do.
For the record, it has been pushing 100 degrees every day for the last week and it looks like we are in for a blistering July. I'm finding dried frog husks in my driveway. We've been getting searing sunlight punctuated by short half-hour thunderstorms with tornado like winds, then we switch right back to tanning bed conditions. The storms take out the power lines so when it heats back up, people can't run their A/C. It's been a truly bizarre summer weather-wise. So extreme that it's been difficult to enjoy. Part of that is also due to the physical problems I've been having, but that will have to wait until next month.
[Good Links] Link Onslaught
[House and Home] A Supposedly Fun Thing
[Travel] New York Weekend
[Tech] My Next Things
[Books] Book Look: The Great Game
[Good Links] Link Onslaught
Link Onslaught: Your monthly set of curious links...
- A Pixar perspective on writing stories. Much of it I agree with, or at least it agrees with me.
- Slapping Mitch Albom. I admit to being an Albom hater, but I also don't deny that it's at least partially jealousy at how insanely well his weepy little stories sell.
- Detroit needs smart leadership, Detroit gets a councilman starting juvenile flame wars.
- Redskins tight end Fred Davis was accused of assaulting a woman named Makini Chaka, a self-styled celebrity promoter (aka, party girl), at a nightclub. In court, they both chose to be their own lawyer. Hilarity ensues. If I wrote this dialogue in fiction, everyone would call it implausible.
- To mark the release of the paperback version of his celebration of 1980's geekery, Ready Player One (reviewed here), author Ernest Cline developed and released and old style Atari 2600 video game. That, my friends, is as hardcore as it gets.
[House and Home] A Supposedly Fun Thing
A Supposedly Fun Thing: I never really pictured myself as the kind of guy to buy coyote urine. But that's the sort of person I am now. Fox urine, too. The coyote urine is for repelling deer, the fox urine is for repelling rabbits and chipmunks and such. (Although I am not clear on why coyote urine wouldn't work for all sorts of critters short of say, a buffalo. Come to think of it, wouldn't bear urine be best -- sort of the king of all urines?)
It is somewhat disturbing to note the ready availability of these substances, and it speaks volumes on the ability of the free market to satisfy society's needs.
It is incredibly disturbing to think that some internet pervert searching on "urine" might land on this post.
Such is the nature of homeownership. Owning a house may not make economic sense at present. It's more of a right of passage -- a common cultural touchstone. People who took to home ownership early in life often to despise its demands. It sucks money out of your wallet at an alarming rate and burns time even faster. And for what? The hope (now more tenuous than in the past) that you will get some back when it comes time to sell. It compels you to wonder what you are passing up for the honor of suburban life.
But here's the thing: No matter what you do, you will wonder what you are giving up. And if you don't you must lack imagination. At age 50, to see what I had given up meant to learn what the great masses of homeowners learn earlier in life, when they were seeing me spend all my free time and money travelling around, writing novels, staying fit and cursing because they had to spend all their money on a new roof. For me this has meant learning basic stuff like swapping out light fixtures, sharpening mower blades, taping, priming and painting, dealing with bug infestations, re-hanging doors, etc. Most importantly, I've learned to get a grip on when it makes sense to call for help and when it makes sense to take a shot at things yourself.
If it's something that is going to require expensive specialty tools or is a potential disaster if you screw it up or if it's just something you'll never do again, it's probably a good idea to farm it out. An example of this for me was installing a new sump pump. It was not expensive and I'm sure with a little research and trial and error I could have done it myself. But if I screwed it up I could have had a basement full of sludge. Plus, sump pumps last decades so once I got it in, the likelihood I would ever re-use the skills learned would be pretty small.
Alternatively, if it's something you are going to have to do regularly and the tools required are not too expensive, you should make it a DIY if you can. You'll screw it up the first couple of times (again, hopefully that won't be too expensive), but after that you're good to go. Mowing my lawn falls into that category.
Not that lawn mowing is particularly complicated. I used to mow lawns for money when I was a kid, but those were flat, little 1/4 acre plots. I have a solid two acres with chaotic slopes and contours. The first couple of times I did mowed it took me over two hours and patterns in the lawn looked like something Van Gogh painted. Now I have it down to under ninety minutes and I get the lines pretty straight. (Although it doesn't help that one of the local lawn cutting pros told me that his crew would consider it a failure if it took more than a half-hour.) I also learned how dull mower blades can cause healthy grass to look brown and dead and how hornets are not particularly fond of lawnmowers as a class of product.
It's all about failing and learning. That's huge for me personally, since it is something I have struggled with all my life: to not be afraid to fail. As I look back I see so many things that I could have done in my life had I not been afraid of failure. Actually, it was not so much failure as fear of other people looking down on me or belittling me or thinking less of me over my failure. And that is truly pathetic. My actual fear was not what I thought about myself but what other people would think of me. And the thing is, although I came to terms with the need to fail some time ago, I didn't until recently see the cause behind my own fear until the last couple of years as the house has made me try and fail with great regularity. The follow up would be to deep dive into why the hell I ever cared what anyone else thought in the first place, but that sounds exhausting to me and I'd probably end up blaming my childhood or something lame like that.
So as you can see, homeownership continues to be a philosophical and psychological adventure for me, which is just what one should have in one's life after living half a century.
Still, I could do without the urine.
It is somewhat disturbing to note the ready availability of these substances, and it speaks volumes on the ability of the free market to satisfy society's needs.
It is incredibly disturbing to think that some internet pervert searching on "urine" might land on this post.
Such is the nature of homeownership. Owning a house may not make economic sense at present. It's more of a right of passage -- a common cultural touchstone. People who took to home ownership early in life often to despise its demands. It sucks money out of your wallet at an alarming rate and burns time even faster. And for what? The hope (now more tenuous than in the past) that you will get some back when it comes time to sell. It compels you to wonder what you are passing up for the honor of suburban life.
But here's the thing: No matter what you do, you will wonder what you are giving up. And if you don't you must lack imagination. At age 50, to see what I had given up meant to learn what the great masses of homeowners learn earlier in life, when they were seeing me spend all my free time and money travelling around, writing novels, staying fit and cursing because they had to spend all their money on a new roof. For me this has meant learning basic stuff like swapping out light fixtures, sharpening mower blades, taping, priming and painting, dealing with bug infestations, re-hanging doors, etc. Most importantly, I've learned to get a grip on when it makes sense to call for help and when it makes sense to take a shot at things yourself.
If it's something that is going to require expensive specialty tools or is a potential disaster if you screw it up or if it's just something you'll never do again, it's probably a good idea to farm it out. An example of this for me was installing a new sump pump. It was not expensive and I'm sure with a little research and trial and error I could have done it myself. But if I screwed it up I could have had a basement full of sludge. Plus, sump pumps last decades so once I got it in, the likelihood I would ever re-use the skills learned would be pretty small.
Alternatively, if it's something you are going to have to do regularly and the tools required are not too expensive, you should make it a DIY if you can. You'll screw it up the first couple of times (again, hopefully that won't be too expensive), but after that you're good to go. Mowing my lawn falls into that category.
Not that lawn mowing is particularly complicated. I used to mow lawns for money when I was a kid, but those were flat, little 1/4 acre plots. I have a solid two acres with chaotic slopes and contours. The first couple of times I did mowed it took me over two hours and patterns in the lawn looked like something Van Gogh painted. Now I have it down to under ninety minutes and I get the lines pretty straight. (Although it doesn't help that one of the local lawn cutting pros told me that his crew would consider it a failure if it took more than a half-hour.) I also learned how dull mower blades can cause healthy grass to look brown and dead and how hornets are not particularly fond of lawnmowers as a class of product.
It's all about failing and learning. That's huge for me personally, since it is something I have struggled with all my life: to not be afraid to fail. As I look back I see so many things that I could have done in my life had I not been afraid of failure. Actually, it was not so much failure as fear of other people looking down on me or belittling me or thinking less of me over my failure. And that is truly pathetic. My actual fear was not what I thought about myself but what other people would think of me. And the thing is, although I came to terms with the need to fail some time ago, I didn't until recently see the cause behind my own fear until the last couple of years as the house has made me try and fail with great regularity. The follow up would be to deep dive into why the hell I ever cared what anyone else thought in the first place, but that sounds exhausting to me and I'd probably end up blaming my childhood or something lame like that.
So as you can see, homeownership continues to be a philosophical and psychological adventure for me, which is just what one should have in one's life after living half a century.
Still, I could do without the urine.
[Travel] New York Weekend
New York Weekend: I had a brief respite from my incredibly sad dearth of travel this year with a long weekend in New York. The crew consisted of Miss Kate and Miss Anna, and Anna's friend Brianna. (What could be more exciting for a pair of 20-year-old girls than to be in Manhattan?). As usual, it was whirlwind.
Hovering over the whole weekend was the heat. We managed to choose one of the hottest weekends in history for this -- approaching, if not exceeding, triple digit temps. The radiation from the sun, the concrete buildings, and the asphalt streets made the city feel like a convection oven. In hell.
And yet, we were able to be outside quite happily for some stretches. This is no doubt on account of being in Manhattan which is always a thrill. We hopped a cab to Soho to check out an art gallery that someone we know was thinking of getting involved with, and followed that up with a walk on The Highline.
Not really momentous, but very cool nonetheless, The Highline is an elevated walkway built at least partially over the tracks of an old rail line. Cultivated with plants and flowers and providing a more detached view of the city than street level, it is a strangely serene way to walk through the Greenwich Village and Chelsea.
The next stop was Eataly, the tackily named Italian food palace. Eataly is a brainchild of celeb chef Mario Batali and consists of multiple Italian eateries along with extensive offerings in produce, wine, beer, kitchen supplies -- anything to do with food, dolled up Italian style. It's really quite a cool place. Perfect if you want to counter hop for vino, antipasto, pizza, pasta, pesce -- sort of a make your own tasting. There are also full service restaurants. Although very Italian, the food was much over to the lighter side, e.g. the delicious appetizer of a simple grilled artichoke and a creme sauce dip. Great fun place to eat. Highly recommended but my guess is that it is busy all the time. We were there at 3 on a friday afternoon and still had to wait for a table.
Pretty sweet. Those were the two new things I wanted to do in Manhattan this time around - The Highline and Eataly, and that was just the first day. Now it was back to the familiar. That evening featured a walk over to Columbus Circle for ludicrously expensive cocktails and the exceedingly posh Mandarin Oriental, while the young 'uns went off to be beaten down by Manhattan nightlife in the inevitable way 20-year-olds will be in a world where you need to be 21 to have any fun.
The next morning started with a walk in Central Park, before it got too hot to breathe. At the boathouse pond the turtles were out in force, including one particular snapping turtle of Loch Nessian proportion. This shell on this thing had to be approaching two feet in diameter and it had a tail like something out of the Jurassic. A mother duck brought her chicks over to snag some bread crumbs and the brute forced her to push her chicks out on to land for safety. A truly vicious looking creature. Dabbling one's toes is contraindicated.
We followed this up with a new restaurant discovery: Brasserie Pushkin. An exquisite looking place, vastly more sophisticated than the four sweaty tourists in shorts that stopped in for brunch (that would be us). The scrambled eggs with salmon, spinach, and caviar in a glass was one of the most flavorful things I have ever tasted. This place goes on the list for a future dinner adventure. But don;t miss brunch.
The last major event was, naturally, a Broadway show. The girls wanted to see Book of Mormon but that is sold out through kingdom come. We managed to snag four pretty good seats for Nice Work..if you can get it, which is about the perfect Broadway show to see if you only get to see a single show every year or so. A farcical comedy set in the twenties, tightly written but highly dependent for comedy on the delivery of the material and the actors, including big name Matthew Broderick, come through. The music is all Gershwin -- songs you know by heart. Theatre purists and aficionados could find a lot of fault I'm sure, but the Broadway producers know what people want. They want a fun show, lots of laughs, toe tapping tunes, something to chatter happily about afterwards at dinner, and a fun story to tell the folks back home. Nice Work... delivers on all counts.
And that was pretty much that. Like all my New York trips, it was a minor epic, over too quickly. We all scattered to various ends of the country (some of us got a ride to the airport in the hotel's Escalade -- thanks Doubletree). I felt lucky. It had been too long since I was in Manhattan, and sadly, it will probably be too long until I'm there again.
Hovering over the whole weekend was the heat. We managed to choose one of the hottest weekends in history for this -- approaching, if not exceeding, triple digit temps. The radiation from the sun, the concrete buildings, and the asphalt streets made the city feel like a convection oven. In hell.
And yet, we were able to be outside quite happily for some stretches. This is no doubt on account of being in Manhattan which is always a thrill. We hopped a cab to Soho to check out an art gallery that someone we know was thinking of getting involved with, and followed that up with a walk on The Highline.
Not really momentous, but very cool nonetheless, The Highline is an elevated walkway built at least partially over the tracks of an old rail line. Cultivated with plants and flowers and providing a more detached view of the city than street level, it is a strangely serene way to walk through the Greenwich Village and Chelsea.
The next stop was Eataly, the tackily named Italian food palace. Eataly is a brainchild of celeb chef Mario Batali and consists of multiple Italian eateries along with extensive offerings in produce, wine, beer, kitchen supplies -- anything to do with food, dolled up Italian style. It's really quite a cool place. Perfect if you want to counter hop for vino, antipasto, pizza, pasta, pesce -- sort of a make your own tasting. There are also full service restaurants. Although very Italian, the food was much over to the lighter side, e.g. the delicious appetizer of a simple grilled artichoke and a creme sauce dip. Great fun place to eat. Highly recommended but my guess is that it is busy all the time. We were there at 3 on a friday afternoon and still had to wait for a table.
Pretty sweet. Those were the two new things I wanted to do in Manhattan this time around - The Highline and Eataly, and that was just the first day. Now it was back to the familiar. That evening featured a walk over to Columbus Circle for ludicrously expensive cocktails and the exceedingly posh Mandarin Oriental, while the young 'uns went off to be beaten down by Manhattan nightlife in the inevitable way 20-year-olds will be in a world where you need to be 21 to have any fun.
The next morning started with a walk in Central Park, before it got too hot to breathe. At the boathouse pond the turtles were out in force, including one particular snapping turtle of Loch Nessian proportion. This shell on this thing had to be approaching two feet in diameter and it had a tail like something out of the Jurassic. A mother duck brought her chicks over to snag some bread crumbs and the brute forced her to push her chicks out on to land for safety. A truly vicious looking creature. Dabbling one's toes is contraindicated.
We followed this up with a new restaurant discovery: Brasserie Pushkin. An exquisite looking place, vastly more sophisticated than the four sweaty tourists in shorts that stopped in for brunch (that would be us). The scrambled eggs with salmon, spinach, and caviar in a glass was one of the most flavorful things I have ever tasted. This place goes on the list for a future dinner adventure. But don;t miss brunch.
The last major event was, naturally, a Broadway show. The girls wanted to see Book of Mormon but that is sold out through kingdom come. We managed to snag four pretty good seats for Nice Work..if you can get it, which is about the perfect Broadway show to see if you only get to see a single show every year or so. A farcical comedy set in the twenties, tightly written but highly dependent for comedy on the delivery of the material and the actors, including big name Matthew Broderick, come through. The music is all Gershwin -- songs you know by heart. Theatre purists and aficionados could find a lot of fault I'm sure, but the Broadway producers know what people want. They want a fun show, lots of laughs, toe tapping tunes, something to chatter happily about afterwards at dinner, and a fun story to tell the folks back home. Nice Work... delivers on all counts.
And that was pretty much that. Like all my New York trips, it was a minor epic, over too quickly. We all scattered to various ends of the country (some of us got a ride to the airport in the hotel's Escalade -- thanks Doubletree). I felt lucky. It had been too long since I was in Manhattan, and sadly, it will probably be too long until I'm there again.
[Tech] My Next Things
My Next Things: I need a new laptop. My trusty HP pavillion is on it's last legs. The fan is making tubercular heaves every now and then. It is woefully underpowered (it must be at least 6 years old). My original thought was to wait for Windows 8 so I don't have to mess with an upgrade but to their credit, Microsoft has stated upgrades from Windows 7 to Windows 8 will be about $40, which is pretty sweet. If I buy a new laptop, it will be from Microsoft Signature, a little-known business unit of Microsoft wherein you can purchase computers and have Microsoft "optimize" them for Windows. This "optimizing" generally amounts to removing all the crap freebies and/or doing a clean install of Windows with appropriate settings that the manufacturer is either ignorant of or unwilling to set on their own.
But yes, IF I buy a new laptop. That is no means a foregone conclusion. A tablet of some sort is in the running. The only problem with a tablet is that I need a keyboard. I have gotten so I don't really need internal storage on the go, I can keep all my docs in the cloud, but I do need a keyboard since I write things much longer than an email. [[Update: Microsoft Surface to the rescue?]] I couldn't do without internal storage altogether, but I could couple a tablet with an inexpensive desktop in my office to store my photos and music. Alternatively, I could move all my photos and music to the cloud, but I have an awful lot. I'm not sure how much that storage would cost, and frankly, it sounds like an exhausting project.
More worrying is my phone situation. I have a Windows 7 phone. Windows 8 comes this fall and it is not compatible, so unless I want to live with Windows Phone 7 for the foreseeable future, I'm looking at a phone upgrade. And if I'm going to do a phone upgrade, I may get myself off Windows phone altogether. It hasn't been a bad experience and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it, but there is stuff I don't like (like not being able to upgrade) and a lack of some key applications (e.g. Instagram, which I could totally dominate).
The fact is, despite the best efforts of Microsoft and Google, iStuff is getting increasingly hard to keep at arm's length. Suppose I bit the bullet and purchased an iPhone, an iPad, and an iPod nano. I would have to suffer with iTunes to manage my content, but apart from that, I would never have to do without an app or find myself incompatible with some peripheral or network. I could even mix up the colors to keep it interesting.
Honestly, when my phone contract is up, that's the odds on favorite. Android is running a close second -- that would be a Kindle Fire tablet, a top of the line Samsung phone, and I don't know what for workout music. Then of course, both Google and Microsoft are coming out with tablets, and Amazon is going to create its own phone...Why does everything have to be so complicated?
I think I'll just get a typewriter and be done with it.
But yes, IF I buy a new laptop. That is no means a foregone conclusion. A tablet of some sort is in the running. The only problem with a tablet is that I need a keyboard. I have gotten so I don't really need internal storage on the go, I can keep all my docs in the cloud, but I do need a keyboard since I write things much longer than an email. [[Update: Microsoft Surface to the rescue?]] I couldn't do without internal storage altogether, but I could couple a tablet with an inexpensive desktop in my office to store my photos and music. Alternatively, I could move all my photos and music to the cloud, but I have an awful lot. I'm not sure how much that storage would cost, and frankly, it sounds like an exhausting project.
More worrying is my phone situation. I have a Windows 7 phone. Windows 8 comes this fall and it is not compatible, so unless I want to live with Windows Phone 7 for the foreseeable future, I'm looking at a phone upgrade. And if I'm going to do a phone upgrade, I may get myself off Windows phone altogether. It hasn't been a bad experience and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it, but there is stuff I don't like (like not being able to upgrade) and a lack of some key applications (e.g. Instagram, which I could totally dominate).
The fact is, despite the best efforts of Microsoft and Google, iStuff is getting increasingly hard to keep at arm's length. Suppose I bit the bullet and purchased an iPhone, an iPad, and an iPod nano. I would have to suffer with iTunes to manage my content, but apart from that, I would never have to do without an app or find myself incompatible with some peripheral or network. I could even mix up the colors to keep it interesting.
Honestly, when my phone contract is up, that's the odds on favorite. Android is running a close second -- that would be a Kindle Fire tablet, a top of the line Samsung phone, and I don't know what for workout music. Then of course, both Google and Microsoft are coming out with tablets, and Amazon is going to create its own phone...Why does everything have to be so complicated?
I think I'll just get a typewriter and be done with it.
[Books] Book Look: The Great Game, by Peter Hopkirk
Book Look: The Great Game, by Peter Hopkirk: I picked this up because I was so impressed with last month's Trespassers on the Roof of the World. The style is similar (a good thing), highlighting individual stories of daring and adventure with a fair amount of bloodletting, all in the context geopolitical history.
"The Great Game" is a term popularized by Rudyard Kipling to describe the maneuverings of the British and Russian Empires for control of central Asia -- call it the area of modern day Iran, Afghanistan and portion of the other 'Stans (Turkmen-, Uzbek-, Kyrgyz- and Tajik-) -- from the mid-19th century through the early 20th.
The British motivations were actually quite simple. They feared for the safety of India from invaders. This fear waxed and waned with political fashion. When it waxed, they adopted a "forward" policy of directly influencing the tribal governments often through military intervention, or threats thereof. When it waned, they used bribes, promises of protection, and other forms of coercion to try to keep a wide cushion of influence between them and the Russians to the northwest.
The Russians were, even then, and enigma wrapped in a mystery. Their motivations remain speculative, but like the Brits, their efforts at expanding their empire moved in sync with internal politics. Often the Russian motivation was simple geographic (and therefore economic) expansion, or the same with the purpose of eventually giving them a southern coastal outlet. Sometimes the stated purpose was protect the indigenous population from the barbarities of British rule. Sometimes it was the Tsar's duty as protector of Christianity to do some aggressive protectin' in light of the fact that Russians on the fringes of their empire were often kidnapped and sold into slavery by plundering Muslims.
Where you point fingers of good and evil in this is almost certainly going to be a function of your existing prejudices rather than an objective reasoning, despite what you may think about yourself. For me, it was telling that lands and people that came under British influence were often quite better off, provided they could stomach the loss of self-determination. Native operatives and military personnel were often fiercely loyal to their British superiors, engaging in remarkable acts of heroism and self-sacrifice. The Russians, on the other hand, were arrogant pricks at best, and had no hope of ruling other than with the threat of violence.
But that's my reading. Hopkirk does a good job of staying as neutral as possible. He has researched Soviet historians on the topic and well as all the archives the British have on hand, although one must realize that much of this was shadowy intrigue -- not the sort of stuff you put on record.
The Great Game can almost be read as an adventure novel. Much of it takes place in some of the most remote points on the globe, and showcases people undertaking astounding hardships to reach destinations where they have no idea if they will be met with hospitality or beheading. If they survive they then find that situations have changed so much that the mission orders they received are irrelevant or have been overtaken by events. The men profiled in this book have to have been some of the most resourceful people who ever lived.
Hopkirk follows the key players through the years, identifies the political and strategic aspects of the Game and even passes along some personal insights gained from his travels in the area.
Should you read The Great Game? Yes...but, it is a long book -- nearly six hundred pages. Trespassers on the Roof of the World, the precursor to this book focussing on the Tibetan portion of the Great Game, is a good deal shorter. You may want to start there to make sure it is to your taste. If it is, do not hesitate to follow it up with The Great Game. It's a classic for a reason.
"The Great Game" is a term popularized by Rudyard Kipling to describe the maneuverings of the British and Russian Empires for control of central Asia -- call it the area of modern day Iran, Afghanistan and portion of the other 'Stans (Turkmen-, Uzbek-, Kyrgyz- and Tajik-) -- from the mid-19th century through the early 20th.
The British motivations were actually quite simple. They feared for the safety of India from invaders. This fear waxed and waned with political fashion. When it waxed, they adopted a "forward" policy of directly influencing the tribal governments often through military intervention, or threats thereof. When it waned, they used bribes, promises of protection, and other forms of coercion to try to keep a wide cushion of influence between them and the Russians to the northwest.
The Russians were, even then, and enigma wrapped in a mystery. Their motivations remain speculative, but like the Brits, their efforts at expanding their empire moved in sync with internal politics. Often the Russian motivation was simple geographic (and therefore economic) expansion, or the same with the purpose of eventually giving them a southern coastal outlet. Sometimes the stated purpose was protect the indigenous population from the barbarities of British rule. Sometimes it was the Tsar's duty as protector of Christianity to do some aggressive protectin' in light of the fact that Russians on the fringes of their empire were often kidnapped and sold into slavery by plundering Muslims.
Where you point fingers of good and evil in this is almost certainly going to be a function of your existing prejudices rather than an objective reasoning, despite what you may think about yourself. For me, it was telling that lands and people that came under British influence were often quite better off, provided they could stomach the loss of self-determination. Native operatives and military personnel were often fiercely loyal to their British superiors, engaging in remarkable acts of heroism and self-sacrifice. The Russians, on the other hand, were arrogant pricks at best, and had no hope of ruling other than with the threat of violence.
But that's my reading. Hopkirk does a good job of staying as neutral as possible. He has researched Soviet historians on the topic and well as all the archives the British have on hand, although one must realize that much of this was shadowy intrigue -- not the sort of stuff you put on record.
The Great Game can almost be read as an adventure novel. Much of it takes place in some of the most remote points on the globe, and showcases people undertaking astounding hardships to reach destinations where they have no idea if they will be met with hospitality or beheading. If they survive they then find that situations have changed so much that the mission orders they received are irrelevant or have been overtaken by events. The men profiled in this book have to have been some of the most resourceful people who ever lived.
Hopkirk follows the key players through the years, identifies the political and strategic aspects of the Game and even passes along some personal insights gained from his travels in the area.
Should you read The Great Game? Yes...but, it is a long book -- nearly six hundred pages. Trespassers on the Roof of the World, the precursor to this book focussing on the Tibetan portion of the Great Game, is a good deal shorter. You may want to start there to make sure it is to your taste. If it is, do not hesitate to follow it up with The Great Game. It's a classic for a reason.
Monday, June 04, 2012
The Month That Was - May 2012
The Month That Was - May 2012: I remain extraordinarily busy in my day job, which I will never discuss on principle. And I got practically zero writing done, which must change. And I got no travel in at all, which also must change. What I got done was alot of yardwork and lawn mowing.
I can't really complain about it. When I bought this house it was (among the more normal reasons) to intentionally take me out of my comfort zone; to understand what it was like to deal with all facets of home ownership. And though I gripe, it's been wholly positive, and a remarkable learning experience, just one that makes me curse regularly.
But summer is here, with it the light to 10PM. If I can confine myself to mowing the lawn every ten days or so, I should have enough time to actually do something -- to reclaim vestiges of my old carefree life. That sound you hear is God laughing.
[Books] Book Look: Leaving the Atocha Station
[Health and Fitness, Science] In My Genes
[TV] The Good, The Bad, and The Redhead
[Health and Fitness] The Un-running Man
[Good Links] Curious Linkage
I can't really complain about it. When I bought this house it was (among the more normal reasons) to intentionally take me out of my comfort zone; to understand what it was like to deal with all facets of home ownership. And though I gripe, it's been wholly positive, and a remarkable learning experience, just one that makes me curse regularly.
But summer is here, with it the light to 10PM. If I can confine myself to mowing the lawn every ten days or so, I should have enough time to actually do something -- to reclaim vestiges of my old carefree life. That sound you hear is God laughing.
[Books] Book Look: Leaving the Atocha Station
[Health and Fitness, Science] In My Genes
[TV] The Good, The Bad, and The Redhead
[Health and Fitness] The Un-running Man
[Good Links] Curious Linkage
[Books] Book Look: Leaving Atocha Station, by Ben Lerner
Book Look: Leaving Atocha Station, by Ben Lerner: Let me state outright that I like this book and enjoyed reading it. I want to make that clear because I'm going to say a lot of things that may sound disparaging, especially concerning peripheral topics. But this is a good book. Nicely written. Engaging in its own way.
This is story of a young American poetry student living on an arts fellowship in Madrid. He engages in the usual idiotic activities of youth along with equally idiotic young Spaniards -- the political and sexual posing; drugs and laziness and calculated disaffection. It's standard coming of adulthood stuff. If you've read Apple Pie (and you have, haven't you?) you've gotten my take on it. You could go all back to F. Scott and This Side of Paradise for that matter. In fact, when you include the expat American in Europe themes of Fitzgerald's other work you could see a good deal commonality here, if Lerner's lead character wasn't such a wuss.
The lead's primary struggle is with authenticity. His poetry is manufactured not inspired, but everybody seems to think it's something special. He lies without truly understanding why he lies, eventually realizing that life is often a stack of lies which you try to keep re-sorting in order to present yourself to your advantage. His inauthentic haunts him, making him feel half alive. Later, in the face of the terrorist bombing of the Madrid subway, he sees that everyone reacts tangentially, taking actions that they would have taken anyway and that are to the benefit of their self-image, but with the sudden sense that they are more real. Eventually he comes to a quasi-resolution that if everything is inauthentic, inauthenticity in itself is authentic. Kind of wishy-washy, but so is life and youth.
There are a lot of red flags, though. First, the story is at least somewhat autobiographical. Lerner, according to the book cover, is a poet whom spent some time in Spain on a fellowship. So we have a writer writing about a writer. That generally means that your audience is probably other writers, so it's not surprising that our lead ruminates and ponders the living hell out of absolutely everything. Lerner uses his poet's word skills to keep it intriguing, but honestly, the 958th time he would go twisting some trivial event into metaphysical significance I had to skip ahead a bit.
So it was decent read, but not really moving. What I really want to talk about is the blurbs on the cover. It's a reasonably well-known fact that cover blurbs are a matter of who you know, not who's read your book. Author's regularly pass along cover blurbs to friends or at the publisher's request, with the general expectation that the favor will be returned when the time comes. As such, I've learned to ignore them completely. It's interesting that even writers who would take a stridently principled stand against crass commercialism engage in this practice, which just goes to show how malleable our ethics are when self-interest raises its eyebrows.
Anyway, the blurbs on Leaving Atocha Station are really quite rich.
"A beautiful novel...not like anything I can remember." That's about as nondescript as they come, and not a little intentional uncertainty there -- meaning nothing specific about the work. This from the only person who could conceivably pass as a popular mainstream novelist, Jonathan Franzen. Not to be snarky, but this blurb sounds like it was written by Frazen's personal assistant. Or maybe some kind of review-bot.
"One of the truest (and funniest) novels I know of by a writer of his generation." -- Lorin Stein, NY Review of Books. Well it is certainly true in the sense of being heavily autobiographical and a good capture of young, pretentious idiots in search of authenticity. But it's not really that funny.
"A subtle, sinuous, and very funny first novel...Lerner is attempting to capture something the most conventional novels, with their cumbersome caravans of plot and scene and "conflict" fail to do." -- James Wood, the New Yorker. It's not that funny. Geez. And yes, it's short and quick reading, and without a lot of extraneous garbage -- a positive quality in a book, but not a new invention. See: P.G. Wodehouse.
"Flip, hip, smart, and very funny." -- Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air. IT'S NOT THAT FUNNY. Good grief.
"An extraordinary novel about the intersection of art and reality in contemporary life." - John Ashberry. While those things are hinted at in the novel, it's really more about -- and I may have mentioned this -- young people acting like pretentious idiots in search of authenticity. But this one is my favorite because here is a quote from the novel's lead character.
Should you read Leaving Atocha Station? Won't hurt ya. I can't imagine anyone truly hating the book. But there is a pile of stuff in there that only a writer could like. It's worth scanning the Amazon preview before you buy.
This is story of a young American poetry student living on an arts fellowship in Madrid. He engages in the usual idiotic activities of youth along with equally idiotic young Spaniards -- the political and sexual posing; drugs and laziness and calculated disaffection. It's standard coming of adulthood stuff. If you've read Apple Pie (and you have, haven't you?) you've gotten my take on it. You could go all back to F. Scott and This Side of Paradise for that matter. In fact, when you include the expat American in Europe themes of Fitzgerald's other work you could see a good deal commonality here, if Lerner's lead character wasn't such a wuss.
The lead's primary struggle is with authenticity. His poetry is manufactured not inspired, but everybody seems to think it's something special. He lies without truly understanding why he lies, eventually realizing that life is often a stack of lies which you try to keep re-sorting in order to present yourself to your advantage. His inauthentic haunts him, making him feel half alive. Later, in the face of the terrorist bombing of the Madrid subway, he sees that everyone reacts tangentially, taking actions that they would have taken anyway and that are to the benefit of their self-image, but with the sudden sense that they are more real. Eventually he comes to a quasi-resolution that if everything is inauthentic, inauthenticity in itself is authentic. Kind of wishy-washy, but so is life and youth.
There are a lot of red flags, though. First, the story is at least somewhat autobiographical. Lerner, according to the book cover, is a poet whom spent some time in Spain on a fellowship. So we have a writer writing about a writer. That generally means that your audience is probably other writers, so it's not surprising that our lead ruminates and ponders the living hell out of absolutely everything. Lerner uses his poet's word skills to keep it intriguing, but honestly, the 958th time he would go twisting some trivial event into metaphysical significance I had to skip ahead a bit.
So it was decent read, but not really moving. What I really want to talk about is the blurbs on the cover. It's a reasonably well-known fact that cover blurbs are a matter of who you know, not who's read your book. Author's regularly pass along cover blurbs to friends or at the publisher's request, with the general expectation that the favor will be returned when the time comes. As such, I've learned to ignore them completely. It's interesting that even writers who would take a stridently principled stand against crass commercialism engage in this practice, which just goes to show how malleable our ethics are when self-interest raises its eyebrows.
Anyway, the blurbs on Leaving Atocha Station are really quite rich.
"A beautiful novel...not like anything I can remember." That's about as nondescript as they come, and not a little intentional uncertainty there -- meaning nothing specific about the work. This from the only person who could conceivably pass as a popular mainstream novelist, Jonathan Franzen. Not to be snarky, but this blurb sounds like it was written by Frazen's personal assistant. Or maybe some kind of review-bot.
"One of the truest (and funniest) novels I know of by a writer of his generation." -- Lorin Stein, NY Review of Books. Well it is certainly true in the sense of being heavily autobiographical and a good capture of young, pretentious idiots in search of authenticity. But it's not really that funny.
"A subtle, sinuous, and very funny first novel...Lerner is attempting to capture something the most conventional novels, with their cumbersome caravans of plot and scene and "conflict" fail to do." -- James Wood, the New Yorker. It's not that funny. Geez. And yes, it's short and quick reading, and without a lot of extraneous garbage -- a positive quality in a book, but not a new invention. See: P.G. Wodehouse.
"Flip, hip, smart, and very funny." -- Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air. IT'S NOT THAT FUNNY. Good grief.
"An extraordinary novel about the intersection of art and reality in contemporary life." - John Ashberry. While those things are hinted at in the novel, it's really more about -- and I may have mentioned this -- young people acting like pretentious idiots in search of authenticity. But this one is my favorite because here is a quote from the novel's lead character.
...This strange experience of reading, the sense of harmony between rhythms of a reproduction and the real...this was what I valued in one of the only people I described as a "major poet" without irony, John Ashberry.That's so, so, so rich. The book features a blurb from a guy the book praises. Dear Mr. Ashberry, I just wrote a book where I describe you as "one of the only people I would call a 'major poet' without irony." Any chance I can get a blurb? Now that's funny. A novel about authenticity as performance art commentary on authenticity. Do you suppose that's what everyone is talking about?
Should you read Leaving Atocha Station? Won't hurt ya. I can't imagine anyone truly hating the book. But there is a pile of stuff in there that only a writer could like. It's worth scanning the Amazon preview before you buy.
[Health and Fitness, Science] In My Genes
In My Genes: I had my DNA genotyped. What that means is I paid a company to look for markers in my DNA that are known to relate to certain traits. Here's how it works: You hit a site called 23andme.com, send them money and they send you a little vial into which you spit. You enclose the vial into the supplied shipping material and then a couple of weeks later, you DNA has been read. Somewhat more robust than the gypsy palm reader over the pawn shop. You get extensive, and password protected, results online.
And really there is an astounding list of the results. Everything from disease susceptibility, carrier likelihood, miscellaneous traits, ancestry -- just a ton of interesting things you can learn about yourself.
Of course, you have to be careful about interpretation or you could be misled. Let's say the results suggest you have an elevated propensity to contracting Disease X. First you need to understand what that means. It means that when scientists looked at a certain population, people with specific genetic attributes showed a higher propensity for attracting Disease X. Note that it does not mean you have the genes that cause the disease. It is just a correlation that was observed, that's all. It could be like the relationship between eating ice cream and crime. (Old saw: There is a correlation between the amount of ice cream sold and crime. An unsophisticated person might conclude that eating ice cream is a cause of crime, but in fact it is heat that causes both crime and ice cream sales to rise.)
Also, you need to understand how confident we are in the correlation is. 23andme does a good job of this, using a star system. For example, four stars may mean multiple independent experiments have verified the correlation, two stars might mean that it was seen in one experiment but another was inconclusive, etc.
Then you need to understand the severity of the results. For example it could be that Disease X typically appears in .1% of the population, but in people with your profile it shows up in .2%. That's a 100% increase, but still a very trivial probability of attracting it.
Lastly, you have to understand that most things have both a genetic and environmental component. Personal example: my results indicate an elevated susceptibility to lung cancer. This is fascinating since there has never been any in my family that I am aware of, but the fact of the matter is that lung cancer risk for people who have never smoked is small so even though I have an elevated risk from a strictly genetic standpoint, from a holistic standpoint I'm still unlikely to get struck. In this case environment trumps genetics. (Note: Scientifically speaking, I may have just jinxed myself.)
Judging from the discussion boards at the site, the understanding of probability and correlation by the broader public is a well nigh non-existent. Tiny increases in probability are seen as definitive reasons for events that are more likely happenstance. Even a minor, unsubstantiated increase in risk is given as the source of a relative getting afflicted. I am convinced that instead of geometry and trigonometry, after you have your multiplication tables down, math education should focus on probabilities and statistics.
Anyway, although I found my results fascinating, I didn't see anything that will alter my life at all. It is possible that something along those lines could turn up, and more importantly if I were a parent or starting a family I would absolutely get tests done on myself and my spouse and children, just in case something turned up. Yes, it's a long shot, but it would be worth the comfort factor.
They also can, at your option, keep your results on file and use it to match up against any new or updated research going forward. I have no idea whether anything useful will come of it for me personally, but given that I have gene markers indicating a propensity for longevity, I'm pretty sure I'll find out.
And really there is an astounding list of the results. Everything from disease susceptibility, carrier likelihood, miscellaneous traits, ancestry -- just a ton of interesting things you can learn about yourself.
Of course, you have to be careful about interpretation or you could be misled. Let's say the results suggest you have an elevated propensity to contracting Disease X. First you need to understand what that means. It means that when scientists looked at a certain population, people with specific genetic attributes showed a higher propensity for attracting Disease X. Note that it does not mean you have the genes that cause the disease. It is just a correlation that was observed, that's all. It could be like the relationship between eating ice cream and crime. (Old saw: There is a correlation between the amount of ice cream sold and crime. An unsophisticated person might conclude that eating ice cream is a cause of crime, but in fact it is heat that causes both crime and ice cream sales to rise.)
Also, you need to understand how confident we are in the correlation is. 23andme does a good job of this, using a star system. For example, four stars may mean multiple independent experiments have verified the correlation, two stars might mean that it was seen in one experiment but another was inconclusive, etc.
Then you need to understand the severity of the results. For example it could be that Disease X typically appears in .1% of the population, but in people with your profile it shows up in .2%. That's a 100% increase, but still a very trivial probability of attracting it.
Lastly, you have to understand that most things have both a genetic and environmental component. Personal example: my results indicate an elevated susceptibility to lung cancer. This is fascinating since there has never been any in my family that I am aware of, but the fact of the matter is that lung cancer risk for people who have never smoked is small so even though I have an elevated risk from a strictly genetic standpoint, from a holistic standpoint I'm still unlikely to get struck. In this case environment trumps genetics. (Note: Scientifically speaking, I may have just jinxed myself.)
Judging from the discussion boards at the site, the understanding of probability and correlation by the broader public is a well nigh non-existent. Tiny increases in probability are seen as definitive reasons for events that are more likely happenstance. Even a minor, unsubstantiated increase in risk is given as the source of a relative getting afflicted. I am convinced that instead of geometry and trigonometry, after you have your multiplication tables down, math education should focus on probabilities and statistics.
Anyway, although I found my results fascinating, I didn't see anything that will alter my life at all. It is possible that something along those lines could turn up, and more importantly if I were a parent or starting a family I would absolutely get tests done on myself and my spouse and children, just in case something turned up. Yes, it's a long shot, but it would be worth the comfort factor.
They also can, at your option, keep your results on file and use it to match up against any new or updated research going forward. I have no idea whether anything useful will come of it for me personally, but given that I have gene markers indicating a propensity for longevity, I'm pretty sure I'll find out.
[TV] The Good, The Bad, and The Redhead
The Good, The Bad, and The Redhead: This season of Mad Men has been truly epic. Honestly, there are moments that will be discussed for years to come. Let's name some:
The most striking thing about this season for me is that it has really shown how my interpretation of the character Joan is 180 degrees off from just about everyone else's. Most seem to see her as a sympathetic victim. To me it looks like she started up with Roger again, got pregnant, knowingly passes the baby off as her husband's, whom she righteously tosses to the curb over his career choice, then most recently, prostitutes herself to become a partner in the company. Thinking back to season 1, she was a haughty, power-drunk, martinet to her underlings in the office while sleeping with the junior partner for the sake of money and influence. She's a horrible person. She is as much of a cutthroat mercenary as any of the men that everyone derides, but she gets a pass in the hearts of the fans. Why? I guess rack has its privilege.
- Zou Bisou Bisou
- The elevator shaft
- Orange Sherbet
- Sally is a mean drunk
- You only need three cats, then you're done.
- Don Draper, plumber
- Fat Betty
- Roger's trip
- Tomorrow Never Knows
The most striking thing about this season for me is that it has really shown how my interpretation of the character Joan is 180 degrees off from just about everyone else's. Most seem to see her as a sympathetic victim. To me it looks like she started up with Roger again, got pregnant, knowingly passes the baby off as her husband's, whom she righteously tosses to the curb over his career choice, then most recently, prostitutes herself to become a partner in the company. Thinking back to season 1, she was a haughty, power-drunk, martinet to her underlings in the office while sleeping with the junior partner for the sake of money and influence. She's a horrible person. She is as much of a cutthroat mercenary as any of the men that everyone derides, but she gets a pass in the hearts of the fans. Why? I guess rack has its privilege.
[Health and Fitness] Un-running Man
Un-running Man: Last month I was lamenting my running performance, all worried that I had suffered a performance backslide and had peaked and that my life was over and so forth. So to recapture my mojo I did a local 5k in a lovely old neighborhood called Burns Park. I did well -- ran at a 8:20 pace which is about my second best 5k pace (here the strong runners are laughing since that's a slow jog for them) and so felt a lot better. Now there is one more race -- the Dexter-Ann Arbor Half Marathon -- then no races for the summer as I focus on biking and swimming for cardio. {Update - I just completed said Dx-AA half. Personal best. Ending the season on a high note.}
More importantly I need to get back to lifting weights more frequently since I am getting weaker by the day from all this running and lawn cutting and fretting over trees and shrubs and flowers.
Next planned race will be in September up on Mackinac, assuming I don't break down and sign up for a good cause between now and then.
More importantly I need to get back to lifting weights more frequently since I am getting weaker by the day from all this running and lawn cutting and fretting over trees and shrubs and flowers.
Next planned race will be in September up on Mackinac, assuming I don't break down and sign up for a good cause between now and then.
[Good Links] Curious Linkage
Curious Linkage: The now apparently regular feature wherein you get to read what I liked:
A great description of how movies are changing to be more like their more successful little brother, TV.
If you are really pissed off at your significant other it can be very satisfying to dump all her stuff out of a truck in the middle of the Vegas strip. Of course, you can also expect to get promptly arrested. Good times. I miss Vegas.
How to bet sports online. This is a good and accurate guide, that doesn't cover up or overstate the potential risks. Doesn't make me miss Vegas any less, though.
Hej da to lifelong Red Wing Nik Lidstrom. If I had a fantasy career as a pro athlete, it would look a lot like his and end with me being thought of as well as he, both professionally and personally.
A great description of how movies are changing to be more like their more successful little brother, TV.
If you are really pissed off at your significant other it can be very satisfying to dump all her stuff out of a truck in the middle of the Vegas strip. Of course, you can also expect to get promptly arrested. Good times. I miss Vegas.
How to bet sports online. This is a good and accurate guide, that doesn't cover up or overstate the potential risks. Doesn't make me miss Vegas any less, though.
Hej da to lifelong Red Wing Nik Lidstrom. If I had a fantasy career as a pro athlete, it would look a lot like his and end with me being thought of as well as he, both professionally and personally.
Sunday, May 06, 2012
The Month That Was - April 2012
The Month That Was - April 2012: Well that was quick. At least it seemed quick. No idea what happened to April. I did no travelling. Nothing all that eventful occurred. (Interestingly, my friends did all the traveling this month and all I got was their lousy facebook updates.) It was all about my day job. I get a month like that every once in awhile. I'm hoping it doesn't happen again soon.
[Books] Book Look: Trespassers on the Roof of the World
[Books] Book Look: Holidays in Heck
[Health and Fitness] Running in Place
[Movies] Flick Check: Pittfest
[Good Links] Kitchen Sink and Links
[Books] Book Look: Trespassers on the Roof of the World
[Books] Book Look: Holidays in Heck
[Health and Fitness] Running in Place
[Movies] Flick Check: Pittfest
[Good Links] Kitchen Sink and Links
[Books] Book Look: Trespassers on the Roof of the World, by Peter Hopkirk
Book Look: Trespassers on the Roof of the World, by Peter Hopkirk: I read this as part of research on a writing project I am toying with for when I'm done with the current writing project I'm toying with, and I was mesmerized.
The stories concern the opening of Tibet to the outside world. Geographically isolated and inhospitable and relentlessly xenophobic, Tibet was one of the last great mysteries of the age of exploration. A dangling forbidden fruit, the intrepid came from far and wide to try to be the first ones to get a taste.
Much of this takes place at the peak of the British Empire and the major concern for the British was Russia. It was feared that were Russia to make inroads and alliances with Tibet, that would put India's northern border in peril. The earliest journeys were completed by Indian nationals, called “pundits", in the service of the Raj. These were astounding men who surreptitiously counted paces to measure distances over thousands of miles and used boiling water measure altitude. Even so, none ever made it to the ultimate goal, the Tibetan capitol of Lhasa.
Many non-English Westerners also tried to reach Lhasa for various reasons -- gold, evangelism, adventure and the royalties that would come from the books they wrote. These included at least two women. All were turned back. (A Japanese explorer, who for obvious reasons could pose as one who belonged, did make it for a brief time, but even he was eventually discovered.) The Tibetans, showing remarkable reticence, often simply blocked their paths for months and eventually offered guidance and supplies to make their return.
It took an armed expedition of some 5000 soldiers under British command, and no small amount of violent action, before the first modern white man set foot in Lhasa. Although originally suspicious and hostile toward the British for this action, the Tibetans came in time to become friends with the British, perhaps especially so because the alternatives for the technologically backwards plateau were so much worse, as they proved to be with the 1950 invasion by Mao's forces.
Hopkirk is the premier historian of “The Great Game" -- the cold war between Russia and Britain for control of Central Asia -- but he eschews the academic and weaves the facts into wonderful narratives. Whatever his bona fides as a historian, Hopkirk is a gifted storyteller. (In this way he reminds me a bit of Byron Farwell, whose work I've written of in the past. Both take history of of the dusty shelves with style and a tilt towards celebrating Imperial derring-do. This, I expect, sends purist historians into fits.) Should you read Trespassers...? Sure. It's a fascinating point in history that has relevance for the region today (Free Tibet!!) magnified by its telling through wonderfully written stories. I was sorry when I finished it. I need to pick me up some more Hopkirk.
The stories concern the opening of Tibet to the outside world. Geographically isolated and inhospitable and relentlessly xenophobic, Tibet was one of the last great mysteries of the age of exploration. A dangling forbidden fruit, the intrepid came from far and wide to try to be the first ones to get a taste.
Much of this takes place at the peak of the British Empire and the major concern for the British was Russia. It was feared that were Russia to make inroads and alliances with Tibet, that would put India's northern border in peril. The earliest journeys were completed by Indian nationals, called “pundits", in the service of the Raj. These were astounding men who surreptitiously counted paces to measure distances over thousands of miles and used boiling water measure altitude. Even so, none ever made it to the ultimate goal, the Tibetan capitol of Lhasa.
Many non-English Westerners also tried to reach Lhasa for various reasons -- gold, evangelism, adventure and the royalties that would come from the books they wrote. These included at least two women. All were turned back. (A Japanese explorer, who for obvious reasons could pose as one who belonged, did make it for a brief time, but even he was eventually discovered.) The Tibetans, showing remarkable reticence, often simply blocked their paths for months and eventually offered guidance and supplies to make their return.
It took an armed expedition of some 5000 soldiers under British command, and no small amount of violent action, before the first modern white man set foot in Lhasa. Although originally suspicious and hostile toward the British for this action, the Tibetans came in time to become friends with the British, perhaps especially so because the alternatives for the technologically backwards plateau were so much worse, as they proved to be with the 1950 invasion by Mao's forces.
Hopkirk is the premier historian of “The Great Game" -- the cold war between Russia and Britain for control of Central Asia -- but he eschews the academic and weaves the facts into wonderful narratives. Whatever his bona fides as a historian, Hopkirk is a gifted storyteller. (In this way he reminds me a bit of Byron Farwell, whose work I've written of in the past. Both take history of of the dusty shelves with style and a tilt towards celebrating Imperial derring-do. This, I expect, sends purist historians into fits.) Should you read Trespassers...? Sure. It's a fascinating point in history that has relevance for the region today (Free Tibet!!) magnified by its telling through wonderfully written stories. I was sorry when I finished it. I need to pick me up some more Hopkirk.
[Books] Book Look: Holidays in Heck, by P. J. O'Rourke
Book Look: Holidays in Heck, by P.J. O'Rourke: Good ol' P.J. You can always depend him for good humoured, but keen, insight. He previously documented his time as a correspondent in some of the most dangerous places in the world in Holidays in Hell. Now in his sixties and forbidden by age and spouse and good sense for pressing his luck in further in yet another hazardous rat hole somewhere, he's turned his attention to old late middle age in general and the family vacation in particular; trying but not terrifying, hence Holidays in Heck.
That's not to say the stories here are lightweight. Although there are entertaining tales of skiing in Ohio (yes, Ohio) and less than glowing reviews of a couple of leviathan museums (Field Museum in Chicago and the American History Museum on the National Mall), there is also a lengthy trip to China pre-Three Gorges dam, short jaunt to Kabul where he comes to the conclusion that nobody knows anything, and a two-part brush with cancer with mortality as the antagonist -- all carry weight but lightened by comedy.
It is perhaps not as high energy, ironic, or skeptical as his previous stuff, but that's also true to his years. If nothing else, P.J. is still everyman confronting an increasingly bizarre and incomprehensible world with wit and spirit and a deep appreciation of the absurd. Should you read Holidays in Heck? Heck yes.
That's not to say the stories here are lightweight. Although there are entertaining tales of skiing in Ohio (yes, Ohio) and less than glowing reviews of a couple of leviathan museums (Field Museum in Chicago and the American History Museum on the National Mall), there is also a lengthy trip to China pre-Three Gorges dam, short jaunt to Kabul where he comes to the conclusion that nobody knows anything, and a two-part brush with cancer with mortality as the antagonist -- all carry weight but lightened by comedy.
It is perhaps not as high energy, ironic, or skeptical as his previous stuff, but that's also true to his years. If nothing else, P.J. is still everyman confronting an increasingly bizarre and incomprehensible world with wit and spirit and a deep appreciation of the absurd. Should you read Holidays in Heck? Heck yes.
[Health and Fitness] Running in Place
Running in Place: At least it seems that way. Maybe even backwards. In wake of my plan a couple months ago to write more about my running/biking and other fitness activities, I have nothing good to report. I ran two races in April both of which were awful -- that is, my times were awful, the races themselves were terrific. One was the Big House Big Heart run which is a 10K through the U Mich campus ending on the fifty yard line of Michigan Stadium, which is deeply cool, even though the race was soaked in a chilling rain. The other was a 5-mile trail run through the Pinckney Rec Area - a real lung buster filled with hills so steep it's difficult to even maintain even a jog. Temperature at race the start was an unseasonably cold 39 degrees.
In both cases my times were significantly slower than the previous year. In the case of the trail race, so much so that I suspect that they mismeasured this year's route to longer than 5 miles. It's got me very rattled. I was feeling good with my time after the Sarasota Half Marathon in March and now I'm very down on myself. I suppose it's possible these were flukes, but another bad race or two and I am going to have to step back and reassess what I am doing.
The good news is I got my bike back from the shop after a tune up. Cycling season begins on the next warm weekend. Provided I don't have to mow the damn lawn and battle immortal weeds and killer wasps all weekend. Then after that swimming season, once the lake warms up enough.
[Movies] Flick Check: Pittfest
Flick Check: Pittfest: Three movies, all of which starred Brad Pitt, and all of which were enormously well received. I'm at odds with some of the general assessments, but I was impressed by Pitt in all three. The guy really is one of the best actors working. To me his career brings to mind Paul Newman, someone who was more famed for his looks early on but turned out to be a quality artist.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - A very sweet film. Beautifully shot -- every scene looked flawlessly composed. I'm not entirely sure what the film meant, if there was any intended meaning other than a Gumpian “life is like a box of chocolates..." It was just a nicely done, if a little slow, documentation of the bell curve of our lives, all brought into clearer focus by F. Scott Fitzgerald's gimick of someone who ages backwards -- born a child in an old man's body and ending a demented old man in a child's body. As you can guess some serious makeup work was needed, but not just to make Pitt look old, there are a number of sequences later on where they make Pitt look 20 (he must be pushing 50), which was a bit mind-blowing and made me wonder whether it wasn't done digitally after the fact. Anyway, decent flick. Sentimental without being cloying. I wouldn't go out of my way to watch it again, but I wouldn't go out of my way to turn it off either.
The Tree of Life - There are a number of religious and philosophical ideas floating around in this film, the main one being almost cliche: How can God let bad things happen to good people? I always found this question silly. Do people really adopt a religion and honestly believe their faith will somehow insulate them from tragedy? The Tree of Life explores this, interwoven with the question of grace versus nature -- the notion that when we pursue pleasures (ambitions and delusions of happiness) beyond an appreciation of our role in God's creation, we face disappointment and risk harming ourselves and others.
This is accomplished through the portrayal of a suburban family in the fifties with a tyrannical father (Pitt) that eventually falls to grief when one of the children is killed in Vietnam as a series of half dream-like flashbacks from the present day. Intermingled is a contrasting 2001-ish sequence summarizing the story creation from big bang, through star formation, through dinosaurs -- all in the hope of putting the individual drama in a universal perspective. Very experimental. It's quite admirable really. Rarely does a film attempt something out of the ordinary and even more rarely do you see a blatantly pro-religion film. And it's almost impossible to name another thoughtful pro-Christian, or at least pro-Judeo/Christian film (a fact that was missed in most reviews I have read).
Not surprisingly, Pitt nailed the portrayal of the father-bully. Overall, it was visually hypnotic at times but still, I found myself wishing they would get to the damn point. I think I'd pass on watching again. Films like this, and 2001 seem so overwhelmed by their own aesthetic that they believe it's their duty to offer grand insights, when they would be better off with a simple story.
[Addendum: After I wrote this, I discovered Roger Ebert has named it one of the ten best movies of all time. Um, no. Not even close.]
Moneyball - I am pompous enough to tell you that I read Bill James before you did, but never would I have guessed they could have made of movie about baseball stats. OK, the movie isn't really about baseball stats. It's about redemption. The larger philosophical plot is the triumph of the rational over the mythic. Sort of like Galileo versus the Church writ small. In this case the Church is the old boy network of baseball -- as hidebound and closed minded as the most fervent fundamentalists you could find. Galileo is played by Billy Beane who, when charged with building a winning team without money embraces reasoned statistical analysis to gain an edge.
From a personal standpoint this story had enormous appeal to me. I'm the guy who uses spreadsheets to make football bets in Vegas and just spent weeks pouring though the quantitative aspects of betting on thoroughbred racing even though I will not likely get much of a chance to do so. I don't wear a bike helmet because the statistical chances of it benefitting me are so small they don't outweigh the cost of looking like a dork. I think a Caribbean vacation in October is a good idea because the chances of actually getting hit by a hurricane aren't great enough to counter the discounted prices. I often wonder how much of my Diet Coke is statistically missing at the quantum level.
So you see, this is right in my wheelhouse. Especially, the part where the priests of the traditional myths smugly sneer about how wrong you are if things don't work out. Makes me wanna slap some heads.
Wisely, Moneyball is not about that conflict in a vacuum. It's about how it affected Billy Beane (Pitt) who stuck to his guns and brought quantitative analysis in sports into the mainstream. Beane was one of the most highly touted baseball prospects in history. He gave up a Stanford scholarship because the old-school scouts convinced him that he couldn't miss in the Bigs. He ended up never reaching his imagined potential, and living in years of frustration because of it. Had someone taken a more quantitative look at him, he wouldn't have had such crushing expectations placed on him. He would have gone to Stanford and possibly developed into a decent player with a satisfying, if unspectacular career. Instead, he had to cope day to day with being the guy who never lived up to expectations. Now a general manager, he was able to change the way things are done in baseball, through which he achieves a certain redemption, and a bit of proof that he wasn't a failure, he was just wronged.
If anything, he changed baseball too well. Now pretty much all teams use quantitative methods of player evaluation, so his edge is gone. The rich rule once more.
Despite its dry sounding topics, Moneyball is full of energy and wit. It not about the great mysteries of the life, just a good story told with good humor from start to finish. Pitt gets the chance to show his comic chops and does so extremely well. Not everyone can hang with Jonah Hill or Philip Seymour Hoffman in humorous crosstalk. Pitt does, while never leaving any doubt that he's the lead. I'd watch Moneyball again, for sure, and nod knowingly throughout.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - A very sweet film. Beautifully shot -- every scene looked flawlessly composed. I'm not entirely sure what the film meant, if there was any intended meaning other than a Gumpian “life is like a box of chocolates..." It was just a nicely done, if a little slow, documentation of the bell curve of our lives, all brought into clearer focus by F. Scott Fitzgerald's gimick of someone who ages backwards -- born a child in an old man's body and ending a demented old man in a child's body. As you can guess some serious makeup work was needed, but not just to make Pitt look old, there are a number of sequences later on where they make Pitt look 20 (he must be pushing 50), which was a bit mind-blowing and made me wonder whether it wasn't done digitally after the fact. Anyway, decent flick. Sentimental without being cloying. I wouldn't go out of my way to watch it again, but I wouldn't go out of my way to turn it off either.
The Tree of Life - There are a number of religious and philosophical ideas floating around in this film, the main one being almost cliche: How can God let bad things happen to good people? I always found this question silly. Do people really adopt a religion and honestly believe their faith will somehow insulate them from tragedy? The Tree of Life explores this, interwoven with the question of grace versus nature -- the notion that when we pursue pleasures (ambitions and delusions of happiness) beyond an appreciation of our role in God's creation, we face disappointment and risk harming ourselves and others.
This is accomplished through the portrayal of a suburban family in the fifties with a tyrannical father (Pitt) that eventually falls to grief when one of the children is killed in Vietnam as a series of half dream-like flashbacks from the present day. Intermingled is a contrasting 2001-ish sequence summarizing the story creation from big bang, through star formation, through dinosaurs -- all in the hope of putting the individual drama in a universal perspective. Very experimental. It's quite admirable really. Rarely does a film attempt something out of the ordinary and even more rarely do you see a blatantly pro-religion film. And it's almost impossible to name another thoughtful pro-Christian, or at least pro-Judeo/Christian film (a fact that was missed in most reviews I have read).
Not surprisingly, Pitt nailed the portrayal of the father-bully. Overall, it was visually hypnotic at times but still, I found myself wishing they would get to the damn point. I think I'd pass on watching again. Films like this, and 2001 seem so overwhelmed by their own aesthetic that they believe it's their duty to offer grand insights, when they would be better off with a simple story.
[Addendum: After I wrote this, I discovered Roger Ebert has named it one of the ten best movies of all time. Um, no. Not even close.]
Moneyball - I am pompous enough to tell you that I read Bill James before you did, but never would I have guessed they could have made of movie about baseball stats. OK, the movie isn't really about baseball stats. It's about redemption. The larger philosophical plot is the triumph of the rational over the mythic. Sort of like Galileo versus the Church writ small. In this case the Church is the old boy network of baseball -- as hidebound and closed minded as the most fervent fundamentalists you could find. Galileo is played by Billy Beane who, when charged with building a winning team without money embraces reasoned statistical analysis to gain an edge.
From a personal standpoint this story had enormous appeal to me. I'm the guy who uses spreadsheets to make football bets in Vegas and just spent weeks pouring though the quantitative aspects of betting on thoroughbred racing even though I will not likely get much of a chance to do so. I don't wear a bike helmet because the statistical chances of it benefitting me are so small they don't outweigh the cost of looking like a dork. I think a Caribbean vacation in October is a good idea because the chances of actually getting hit by a hurricane aren't great enough to counter the discounted prices. I often wonder how much of my Diet Coke is statistically missing at the quantum level.
So you see, this is right in my wheelhouse. Especially, the part where the priests of the traditional myths smugly sneer about how wrong you are if things don't work out. Makes me wanna slap some heads.
Wisely, Moneyball is not about that conflict in a vacuum. It's about how it affected Billy Beane (Pitt) who stuck to his guns and brought quantitative analysis in sports into the mainstream. Beane was one of the most highly touted baseball prospects in history. He gave up a Stanford scholarship because the old-school scouts convinced him that he couldn't miss in the Bigs. He ended up never reaching his imagined potential, and living in years of frustration because of it. Had someone taken a more quantitative look at him, he wouldn't have had such crushing expectations placed on him. He would have gone to Stanford and possibly developed into a decent player with a satisfying, if unspectacular career. Instead, he had to cope day to day with being the guy who never lived up to expectations. Now a general manager, he was able to change the way things are done in baseball, through which he achieves a certain redemption, and a bit of proof that he wasn't a failure, he was just wronged.
If anything, he changed baseball too well. Now pretty much all teams use quantitative methods of player evaluation, so his edge is gone. The rich rule once more.
Despite its dry sounding topics, Moneyball is full of energy and wit. It not about the great mysteries of the life, just a good story told with good humor from start to finish. Pitt gets the chance to show his comic chops and does so extremely well. Not everyone can hang with Jonah Hill or Philip Seymour Hoffman in humorous crosstalk. Pitt does, while never leaving any doubt that he's the lead. I'd watch Moneyball again, for sure, and nod knowingly throughout.
[Good Links] The Kitchen Sink and Links
The Kitchen Sink and Links: Getting to be a regular feature. It used to be I'd comment regularly on things I read in magazines, now links. Like all of history, the nouns change but the verbs stay the same. (Note: I've been blogging for over 13 years now. You'd think that would carry some sort of deeper meaning, but I can't think of anything.)
Roger Ebert's Top Ten Movies of All Time. I had less than stellar things to say about The Tree of Life above. I compared it disparagingly to 2001. Both movies are on Ebert's list. He also picked the wrong Scorcese (Raging Bull over Goodfellas) and the wrong Hitchcock (Vertigo over Rear Window). Even Apocalypse Now is overrated. The guy can craft a beautiful movie review but there's no accounting for taste.
Graphic depiction of Lake and Ocean Depth. Tongue in cheek, but very cool. I recently saw the Nat Geo special on James Cameron dive into the Challenger Deep. Gotta admire the guy's guts and drive. Still doesn't make Avatar or Titanic worth watching.
When Matt Millen punch the Patriots GM in the Head. For NFL fans only. If you know the personalities involved in this story it's hilarious. Millen: “I was a fool for doing that, but you react, so what are you going to do?" Interestingly, this was also Millen's approach to the Lions' draft.
Senitment Kills. This article is extremely dense so don't dive into it unless you feel like ruminating on the state of modern culture. But the upshot is that hyper-sentimentality -- the regarding of unfiltered emotion as self justifying -- is coarsening the world and often leading to hostility and conflict. There is lots of speculation and supposing, but I found this paragraph to be spot on: "The habit of thought that a pop culture of treacle and a pop culture of anger hold in common is that we needn't polish the expression of our private feelings and sorrows into a form that's relevant and useful, even to strangers and fellow citizens... We can take for granted that our treacle or our anger speaks for itself and presume the relevance of private feelings to public discourse. If, in fact, we're drowning in a public culture of meanness, it is one that the public culture of cloying sweetness unwittingly helped create." To which I would add, GET OFF MY LAWN!!!!
Alpha Males on TV. Glaringly obvious omissions: Tony Soprano, Sterling Archer.
Striking Historic Photos of New York City. Very cool stuff. Makes me regret not having been in Manhattan for almost well over a year. Time to plan a trip.
Trailer Park Superhero. On the other hand, there so much fun going on right here in the glove.
Roger Ebert's Top Ten Movies of All Time. I had less than stellar things to say about The Tree of Life above. I compared it disparagingly to 2001. Both movies are on Ebert's list. He also picked the wrong Scorcese (Raging Bull over Goodfellas) and the wrong Hitchcock (Vertigo over Rear Window). Even Apocalypse Now is overrated. The guy can craft a beautiful movie review but there's no accounting for taste.
Graphic depiction of Lake and Ocean Depth. Tongue in cheek, but very cool. I recently saw the Nat Geo special on James Cameron dive into the Challenger Deep. Gotta admire the guy's guts and drive. Still doesn't make Avatar or Titanic worth watching.
When Matt Millen punch the Patriots GM in the Head. For NFL fans only. If you know the personalities involved in this story it's hilarious. Millen: “I was a fool for doing that, but you react, so what are you going to do?" Interestingly, this was also Millen's approach to the Lions' draft.
Senitment Kills. This article is extremely dense so don't dive into it unless you feel like ruminating on the state of modern culture. But the upshot is that hyper-sentimentality -- the regarding of unfiltered emotion as self justifying -- is coarsening the world and often leading to hostility and conflict. There is lots of speculation and supposing, but I found this paragraph to be spot on: "The habit of thought that a pop culture of treacle and a pop culture of anger hold in common is that we needn't polish the expression of our private feelings and sorrows into a form that's relevant and useful, even to strangers and fellow citizens... We can take for granted that our treacle or our anger speaks for itself and presume the relevance of private feelings to public discourse. If, in fact, we're drowning in a public culture of meanness, it is one that the public culture of cloying sweetness unwittingly helped create." To which I would add, GET OFF MY LAWN!!!!
Alpha Males on TV. Glaringly obvious omissions: Tony Soprano, Sterling Archer.
Striking Historic Photos of New York City. Very cool stuff. Makes me regret not having been in Manhattan for almost well over a year. Time to plan a trip.
Trailer Park Superhero. On the other hand, there so much fun going on right here in the glove.
Sunday, April 08, 2012
The Month That Was - March 2012
The Month That Was - March 2012: Last month I lamented that I felt awfully busy but couldn't really come up with anything especially compelling to write about. This month, two travel stories and a tornado. Yes, a tornado. Followed by a heat wave that brought us into the upper 80s in mid March and which made me rush to make sure my mower was in shape in case I had to cut the lawn in March, which would have been infuriating. A very strange month.
I got a new draft of my current project complete before meteorological chaos broke loose. I am close to going public with it. When I do, you'll be the first to hear about it. Although, like i said, it's very esoteric. I'm also beginning research for a subsequent project, also esoteric but probably a good deal more marketable.
And I'm painting my kitchen yellow. You gotta respect that.
[Travel, Health and Fitness] Running in the Sun
[Dexter] It's a Twister
[Travel, Rant] That's Soooooo Cal
[Good Links] Linkapalooza
[TV] Tube State Boogie
I got a new draft of my current project complete before meteorological chaos broke loose. I am close to going public with it. When I do, you'll be the first to hear about it. Although, like i said, it's very esoteric. I'm also beginning research for a subsequent project, also esoteric but probably a good deal more marketable.
And I'm painting my kitchen yellow. You gotta respect that.
[Travel, Health and Fitness] Running in the Sun
[Dexter] It's a Twister
[Travel, Rant] That's Soooooo Cal
[Good Links] Linkapalooza
[TV] Tube State Boogie
[Travel] Running in the Sun
Running in the Sun: Every time I visit Sarasota I like it more. When I was young I loathed going down there (I have family to visit there). The heat was oppressive. It was filled with old people rushing the early-bird dinner specials. Maybe it's just been a slow process of discovery, or maybe the city has changed over the years, or maybe I'm starting to feel an affinity for those old people, but I think Sarasota is a killer destination. I visited for the usual reason, family business, but I was also able to coincide it with the First Watch Half Marathon.
It was to start at 7AM but we made the DST spring forward the night before, so it was the equivalent of 6AM. Of course one needs to be up earlier to prep for the race (pin on one's number, make sure one's MP3 player is functioning, eat a tiny breakfast and hydrate one's self, etc.) so one is operating on very little sleep.
Yes, I know, the snarky question is, Why don't you just go to sleep earlier the night before? Well, that's not how it works for me. I am constitutionally incapable of going to sleep -- sleep comes to me when it chooses and it is a creature of habit. It lives entirely in the past and assumes the future will be the same. Thus, knowing that I have the get up before the sun has no effect on my sleep habits. Sleep still thinks I'll be getting up at reasonable hour.
The whole event was wonderfully well organized. Simple gear drop off, obvious start line and pace runners. They even had folks walking around before the race offering Vaseline for those, ahem, sensitive areas. The race started on time. Everything was smooth, except for me. I managed to snap the arm band on my MP3 player literally 5 yards from the start. I ran the entire 13.1 miles with it in my pocket.
The first part of the race lead from the mainland across John Ringling Bridge and back, providing astounding views of Sarasota Bay. Sarasota Bay is as strikingly beautiful as any I've seen. Glistening condos and skyscrapers line the mainland with a big marina and sailboats moored up throughout. The architecture is all in the quasi-moorish Floridian style that perfectly meshes with the green gulf and the sun. My mother likes to tell the story of how she was driving down here from Michigan nearly 30 years ago and one look out at Sarasota Bay made her decide it was where she would settle.
We continued across the bridge and past Bird Key -- a little bay island that with homes of the rich and famous -- and one loop of St. Armand's Circle, the high status shopping and dining hub, at least as far as us tourists are concerned. Exiting the bridge at the mainland there is the 26 foot tall "Unconditional Surrender" statue -- a giant reproduction of the famous Life magazine cover from the V-J Day. Some think it's gaudy and stupid -- I think it's fun. So does everyone who gets their picture taken under it.
From there up Highway 41 to the Ringling Museum grounds. Another unheralded beauty, the Ringling Museum is a fine art museum, if a little heavy on pre-Renaissance works, but the grounds do not disappoint. They are beautifully landscaped with Banyan trees and gardens throughout. I only know this from previous visits becasue this was about the ten mile point in the race, so I was not really up to sightseeing.
The course then wound through a quiet residential area before returning to 41 and the finish. I was good for the first half of the race -- felt pretty strong, but by mile eight I knew I was in for a slog to the end although by that point I also had no fears of not finishing. My final time was 2:10 and that included a potty break. At the finish there was a big shiny medal awaiting everyone, bands were playing happy music and there was ample food and drink -- although the lines were quite long. Nicely done all around.
I didn't linger. I wandered back to the Hyatt, just a half mile or so away and hopped in the nice cold pool to soak my aching joints. I'm glad my first half-marathon was a positive experience, but I don't know if I'd ever want to step up to a full one. There comes a point where running ceases to be about physical fitness and more about pain endurance. For me it seems to be in the 8-10 mile range. A real marathon, 26.2 miles, would be a lot of pain to endure.
Race aside, I was able to have at least one new Sarasota experience: O'Leary's Tiki Bar and Grill, a real old school waterfront bar. Pub food, great hot dogs, plenty of drinks -- the tables were busy at 2 in the afternoon and the bar was packed. And that view of the bay. A definite must for future visits.
Powder sand beaches, the vacation home vibe on Anna Maria Island, Mote Marine Aquarium. All sorts of cool stuff in Sarasota. And Sanibel Island is only a 2 or 3 hours away. This is what these Florida coastal cities do. You sneer at them when you're young. Then, after a decade or so, you mellow and decide they aren't too bad. After another few years you really start to like them. Next thing you know you're sitting at the early-bird dinner in socks and sandals, griping about the damn tourists. Circle of life.
It was to start at 7AM but we made the DST spring forward the night before, so it was the equivalent of 6AM. Of course one needs to be up earlier to prep for the race (pin on one's number, make sure one's MP3 player is functioning, eat a tiny breakfast and hydrate one's self, etc.) so one is operating on very little sleep.
Yes, I know, the snarky question is, Why don't you just go to sleep earlier the night before? Well, that's not how it works for me. I am constitutionally incapable of going to sleep -- sleep comes to me when it chooses and it is a creature of habit. It lives entirely in the past and assumes the future will be the same. Thus, knowing that I have the get up before the sun has no effect on my sleep habits. Sleep still thinks I'll be getting up at reasonable hour.
The whole event was wonderfully well organized. Simple gear drop off, obvious start line and pace runners. They even had folks walking around before the race offering Vaseline for those, ahem, sensitive areas. The race started on time. Everything was smooth, except for me. I managed to snap the arm band on my MP3 player literally 5 yards from the start. I ran the entire 13.1 miles with it in my pocket.
The first part of the race lead from the mainland across John Ringling Bridge and back, providing astounding views of Sarasota Bay. Sarasota Bay is as strikingly beautiful as any I've seen. Glistening condos and skyscrapers line the mainland with a big marina and sailboats moored up throughout. The architecture is all in the quasi-moorish Floridian style that perfectly meshes with the green gulf and the sun. My mother likes to tell the story of how she was driving down here from Michigan nearly 30 years ago and one look out at Sarasota Bay made her decide it was where she would settle.
We continued across the bridge and past Bird Key -- a little bay island that with homes of the rich and famous -- and one loop of St. Armand's Circle, the high status shopping and dining hub, at least as far as us tourists are concerned. Exiting the bridge at the mainland there is the 26 foot tall "Unconditional Surrender" statue -- a giant reproduction of the famous Life magazine cover from the V-J Day. Some think it's gaudy and stupid -- I think it's fun. So does everyone who gets their picture taken under it.
From there up Highway 41 to the Ringling Museum grounds. Another unheralded beauty, the Ringling Museum is a fine art museum, if a little heavy on pre-Renaissance works, but the grounds do not disappoint. They are beautifully landscaped with Banyan trees and gardens throughout. I only know this from previous visits becasue this was about the ten mile point in the race, so I was not really up to sightseeing.
The course then wound through a quiet residential area before returning to 41 and the finish. I was good for the first half of the race -- felt pretty strong, but by mile eight I knew I was in for a slog to the end although by that point I also had no fears of not finishing. My final time was 2:10 and that included a potty break. At the finish there was a big shiny medal awaiting everyone, bands were playing happy music and there was ample food and drink -- although the lines were quite long. Nicely done all around.
I didn't linger. I wandered back to the Hyatt, just a half mile or so away and hopped in the nice cold pool to soak my aching joints. I'm glad my first half-marathon was a positive experience, but I don't know if I'd ever want to step up to a full one. There comes a point where running ceases to be about physical fitness and more about pain endurance. For me it seems to be in the 8-10 mile range. A real marathon, 26.2 miles, would be a lot of pain to endure.
Race aside, I was able to have at least one new Sarasota experience: O'Leary's Tiki Bar and Grill, a real old school waterfront bar. Pub food, great hot dogs, plenty of drinks -- the tables were busy at 2 in the afternoon and the bar was packed. And that view of the bay. A definite must for future visits.
Powder sand beaches, the vacation home vibe on Anna Maria Island, Mote Marine Aquarium. All sorts of cool stuff in Sarasota. And Sanibel Island is only a 2 or 3 hours away. This is what these Florida coastal cities do. You sneer at them when you're young. Then, after a decade or so, you mellow and decide they aren't too bad. After another few years you really start to like them. Next thing you know you're sitting at the early-bird dinner in socks and sandals, griping about the damn tourists. Circle of life.
[Dexter] It's a Twister
It's a Twister!: Having lived in Michigan for over half a century, tornado warnings barely register. They come along all the time and the net result is usually a thunderstorm and maybe a brief power outage. I've never actually seen a tornado. In fact, I used to argue that there was no such thing, that they were really a combination of government conspiracy and special effects. So when they pulled us all off the floor of the health club and made us wait in a more protected area until the warning passed, I thought it was all a bunch of nervous nellying and made for my car.
Do you remember Jiffy Pop? The little foil tins with built in handles that you would shake over the stove until it blossomed into buttery popcorn goodness? Remember the machine gun sound it used to make when the popping it reached its peak? That's what the hail sounded like on my car.
I crawled toward Dexter and noted where the lights were out. Traffic was backed up beyond belief. Sirens were going off. It was almost dark and I was able to see some big trees uprooted, but again, I just assumed there was some minor damage and the power would be out for a while, but it quickly became clear that traffic was not moving at all. So I turned around and headed for work where there is an industrial strength generator and a dedicated T3 line so that we may never be disconnected from the internet.
The tornado had touched down at Hudson Mills -- a Metropark where I very often run, about two miles from my house. It followed a main artery (Dexter-Pinckney road) which would spend the next week closed off while debris was cleared, took a sharp left to follow along some railroad tracks, demolishing several small building, ripped right past my old condo -- my tenant figures it was 50 yards away at most -- and proceeded to barrel through the neighborhood next door, where I have many friends and colleagues, destroying multiple houses entirely and making many more uninhabitable. Wow.
I drove about 12 miles out of my way and circled home through unobstructed streets to verify that a) there was no damage to my house (there wasn't) and b) the power was in fact off (it was). Having done that, I bolted for nearby hotel for the next couple of nights. I have done the whole rough-it-when-the-power-is-out numerous times in my life and I feel no compelling need to do it again, so yeah, when everyone else was struggling, I crashed at Weber's and got some pool time in. Sue me.
The next day the results were in. Check out some photos. Amazingly not only did nobody die, there was not a single injury. The worst hit neighborhood was called Huron Farms, the adjacent neighborhood to where my old condo is. So many homes had blue tarps covering the roofs that people started calling it tarp-city. There were state troopers stationed at both entrances making sure nobody could enter the neighborhood that didn't have a good reason, such as looters or gawkers, but it also served to keep the traffic down because so many vehicles and service trucks were on the job already that you could barely get around. As the current slumlord of my old condo, I got in. Luckily my building only suffered some lost siding.
But looking around I saw nobody crying or complaining. Folks were smiling, passing information along about where to get supplies and who heard what about when the power was coming back. The local Busch's grocery store came through big with free bottled water and offer to store perishable food in their freezers. Chainsaws were going. Truck beds were being filled. Kids were out running around and playing, probably debating whether losing their roof was worth it for the days off school. Various groups started funds and drives and such. Major insurers parked trailers nearby to handle claims. The local congressman toured the scene, but I don't think anybody cared all that much.
I'm not one to be terribly sentimental, but I have to say my little town did an admirable job. Almost as soon as the tornado passed, folks were picking up the pieces without any angst. There was no disorder or insecurity whatsoever. I'd be willing to bet that before the year is out the great tornado of 2012 will be little more than a good tale to tell.
Personally, I suppose I may have to admit that something more than special effects was at work.
Do you remember Jiffy Pop? The little foil tins with built in handles that you would shake over the stove until it blossomed into buttery popcorn goodness? Remember the machine gun sound it used to make when the popping it reached its peak? That's what the hail sounded like on my car.
I crawled toward Dexter and noted where the lights were out. Traffic was backed up beyond belief. Sirens were going off. It was almost dark and I was able to see some big trees uprooted, but again, I just assumed there was some minor damage and the power would be out for a while, but it quickly became clear that traffic was not moving at all. So I turned around and headed for work where there is an industrial strength generator and a dedicated T3 line so that we may never be disconnected from the internet.
The tornado had touched down at Hudson Mills -- a Metropark where I very often run, about two miles from my house. It followed a main artery (Dexter-Pinckney road) which would spend the next week closed off while debris was cleared, took a sharp left to follow along some railroad tracks, demolishing several small building, ripped right past my old condo -- my tenant figures it was 50 yards away at most -- and proceeded to barrel through the neighborhood next door, where I have many friends and colleagues, destroying multiple houses entirely and making many more uninhabitable. Wow.
I drove about 12 miles out of my way and circled home through unobstructed streets to verify that a) there was no damage to my house (there wasn't) and b) the power was in fact off (it was). Having done that, I bolted for nearby hotel for the next couple of nights. I have done the whole rough-it-when-the-power-is-out numerous times in my life and I feel no compelling need to do it again, so yeah, when everyone else was struggling, I crashed at Weber's and got some pool time in. Sue me.
The next day the results were in. Check out some photos. Amazingly not only did nobody die, there was not a single injury. The worst hit neighborhood was called Huron Farms, the adjacent neighborhood to where my old condo is. So many homes had blue tarps covering the roofs that people started calling it tarp-city. There were state troopers stationed at both entrances making sure nobody could enter the neighborhood that didn't have a good reason, such as looters or gawkers, but it also served to keep the traffic down because so many vehicles and service trucks were on the job already that you could barely get around. As the current slumlord of my old condo, I got in. Luckily my building only suffered some lost siding.
But looking around I saw nobody crying or complaining. Folks were smiling, passing information along about where to get supplies and who heard what about when the power was coming back. The local Busch's grocery store came through big with free bottled water and offer to store perishable food in their freezers. Chainsaws were going. Truck beds were being filled. Kids were out running around and playing, probably debating whether losing their roof was worth it for the days off school. Various groups started funds and drives and such. Major insurers parked trailers nearby to handle claims. The local congressman toured the scene, but I don't think anybody cared all that much.
I'm not one to be terribly sentimental, but I have to say my little town did an admirable job. Almost as soon as the tornado passed, folks were picking up the pieces without any angst. There was no disorder or insecurity whatsoever. I'd be willing to bet that before the year is out the great tornado of 2012 will be little more than a good tale to tell.
Personally, I suppose I may have to admit that something more than special effects was at work.
[Travel] That's Sooooo Cal
That's Just Sooooo Cal: I don't get L.A. Just don't see what's so special. But that's just L.A. proper. I do get Southern California. From Orange County all the way down the coast to San Diego the beach towns (actually cities) and parks and crashing waves and sunset views are a delight. So a beach house in Laguna Beach to celebrate Miss Anna's 20th birthday was just fine with me.
It was chilly though. In that paradigm of sunny climes, I seem to have the bad luck to visit during atypical cold spells. I remember one trip to San Diego where it got too cold to even walk on the beach. A trip to L.A. for the Rose Bowl a few years back was another chilly one. Now this trip -- high never reached much more than 65.
But even with a nip in the air there's no denying how pretty and shiny So Cal is. We spent our days wandering the beach -- spotting dolphins and seals -- sampling the local restaurants, chatting over drinks, and enjoying the view from the beach house balcony. I must admit that in search of heat, we did decamp one day and take the two hour drive to Palm Springs where the temperature was an appropriately deserty 90. A splendid time was had by all; no of us wanted to leave.
So I started the month in Florida and ended in Southern California and loved both. Should we compare and contrast? Why not.
As far as the ocean is concerned, since I have never learned to surf, I have to give the edge to Florida. I don't think the Pacific ever gets warm enough to swim in for pleasure, but bobbing about in the Atlantic or the Gulf in high summer is an existential joy for me. The beaches in FL are powder perfect, but the views are better in SoCal. Both have a big coastal city that I would avoid (Miami and L.A.) but the surrounding areas of those cities are sweet. SoCal has San Diego and I don't think FL really has a counter to that, St. Pete maybe? SoCal has an image of being easy and laid back, but I did not find it so. It is younger, more active, and more crowded than FL. FL has the Deep South and Caribbean influences to keep it more lackadaisical. SoCal is a desert climate, Florida is sub-tropical. Gotta give SoCal the edge on mosquitoes, no debate. Gotta give FL the edge on cost of living.
I don't know. FL is a two and half hour flight for me. SoCal is beyond four. It sounds like a small difference, but when you are in your third hour in the middle seat, and you realize you could already be checked into your hotel in FL it seems larger. Luckily I don't have to choose. Miss Anna spent a year in the worst place in Florida and is now in the best place in SoCal, so her choice would be obvious. Me I just don't know, but I suspect when retirement time comes, that cost of living thing might loom large.
For now, I'll take both.
It was chilly though. In that paradigm of sunny climes, I seem to have the bad luck to visit during atypical cold spells. I remember one trip to San Diego where it got too cold to even walk on the beach. A trip to L.A. for the Rose Bowl a few years back was another chilly one. Now this trip -- high never reached much more than 65.
But even with a nip in the air there's no denying how pretty and shiny So Cal is. We spent our days wandering the beach -- spotting dolphins and seals -- sampling the local restaurants, chatting over drinks, and enjoying the view from the beach house balcony. I must admit that in search of heat, we did decamp one day and take the two hour drive to Palm Springs where the temperature was an appropriately deserty 90. A splendid time was had by all; no of us wanted to leave.
So I started the month in Florida and ended in Southern California and loved both. Should we compare and contrast? Why not.
As far as the ocean is concerned, since I have never learned to surf, I have to give the edge to Florida. I don't think the Pacific ever gets warm enough to swim in for pleasure, but bobbing about in the Atlantic or the Gulf in high summer is an existential joy for me. The beaches in FL are powder perfect, but the views are better in SoCal. Both have a big coastal city that I would avoid (Miami and L.A.) but the surrounding areas of those cities are sweet. SoCal has San Diego and I don't think FL really has a counter to that, St. Pete maybe? SoCal has an image of being easy and laid back, but I did not find it so. It is younger, more active, and more crowded than FL. FL has the Deep South and Caribbean influences to keep it more lackadaisical. SoCal is a desert climate, Florida is sub-tropical. Gotta give SoCal the edge on mosquitoes, no debate. Gotta give FL the edge on cost of living.
I don't know. FL is a two and half hour flight for me. SoCal is beyond four. It sounds like a small difference, but when you are in your third hour in the middle seat, and you realize you could already be checked into your hotel in FL it seems larger. Luckily I don't have to choose. Miss Anna spent a year in the worst place in Florida and is now in the best place in SoCal, so her choice would be obvious. Me I just don't know, but I suspect when retirement time comes, that cost of living thing might loom large.
For now, I'll take both.
[Good Links] Linkapalooza
Linkapalooza: Just some random links of personal interest to me and potential interest to you.
Toyota fights back. Toyota has had a helluva time. First there was the unintended acceleration hoax. Then the earthquake/tsunami in Japan. Then the flooding in Thailand that crushed their production. So when the ambulance chasers at CNN decided to gin up a hit piece they slapped back. Good on 'em. Goodwill has real value and having built up decades of it with people like me, it's now paying off in hard times.
UnVegas. This Vegas blog post hits all the low points and misconceptions about Vegas. Good reading for the uninitiated.
Founding Mea Culpa. Can the confessional tell-all craze that dominates modern biography and memoir be traced back to good ol' F. Scott? Three essays published at a low point in his life and four years before his death were a documentation of personal pain, and also a bit bitchy. Too bad he didn't live long enough to experience the rehab craze.
Death to Umwelt. Brilliant suggestions for seeing further (metaphorically) than you do now. This is not new age-y stuff, just common sense exercises for opening your mind.
Detroit becomes a ward of the State. -- Early in the month the WSJ outlined the problem. Now the State of Michigan has pretty much taken over the city, albeit agreeing somewhat vaguely to shell out anywhere from 50-200 million in assistance, depending on which estimates you believe. Bottom line: Detroit has been misgoverned for over five decades and they can't even pretend that they are capable looking after themselves anymore.
No privacy in public. It appears Facebook/Twitter/YouTube is killing Spring Break. Rule for life: Never do anything in public you wouldn't want to see on the Web. Funny, I would have guessed shame was an outdated concept.
Toyota fights back. Toyota has had a helluva time. First there was the unintended acceleration hoax. Then the earthquake/tsunami in Japan. Then the flooding in Thailand that crushed their production. So when the ambulance chasers at CNN decided to gin up a hit piece they slapped back. Good on 'em. Goodwill has real value and having built up decades of it with people like me, it's now paying off in hard times.
UnVegas. This Vegas blog post hits all the low points and misconceptions about Vegas. Good reading for the uninitiated.
Founding Mea Culpa. Can the confessional tell-all craze that dominates modern biography and memoir be traced back to good ol' F. Scott? Three essays published at a low point in his life and four years before his death were a documentation of personal pain, and also a bit bitchy. Too bad he didn't live long enough to experience the rehab craze.
Death to Umwelt. Brilliant suggestions for seeing further (metaphorically) than you do now. This is not new age-y stuff, just common sense exercises for opening your mind.
Detroit becomes a ward of the State. -- Early in the month the WSJ outlined the problem. Now the State of Michigan has pretty much taken over the city, albeit agreeing somewhat vaguely to shell out anywhere from 50-200 million in assistance, depending on which estimates you believe. Bottom line: Detroit has been misgoverned for over five decades and they can't even pretend that they are capable looking after themselves anymore.
No privacy in public. It appears Facebook/Twitter/YouTube is killing Spring Break. Rule for life: Never do anything in public you wouldn't want to see on the Web. Funny, I would have guessed shame was an outdated concept.
[TV] Tube State Boogie
Tube State Boogie: Just like that, Luck is dead. It pisses me off for a number of reasons. First, that it was done for purely PR purposes. PETA and others objected to horses dying on the show, despite the fact that they could not find a hint of mistreatment and the blindingly obvious fact that people associated with the show all seemed to have a near spiritual admiration and love of the animals. HBO (cowards) couldn't be troubled to write a press release to defend the show. Second, because I had gotten attached to the characters, especially the four amigos. Third, and most importantly, because it was the only show on TV that didn't use drama like a bludgeon to get your attention. Watching Luck was like listening to Bill Evans after a Metallica concert. The situation just sucks all the way around.
In fact the entire era of great TV may be over. Over at Grantland they lament that the recently returned Mad Men is the last vestige of the Golden Age of TV that began with The Sopranos back in 1999. Setting aside the promise of the the final season of Breaking Bad starting later this year, it's hard to argue with that.
The best of what's left are shows like Game of Thrones and Spartacus, both of which manage to squeeze out some fair drama, but deliver it with the uranium fist of sex and violence. Beyond that we're left with fare such as True Blood, Dexter, The Walking Dead -- all of which thoroughly depend on the attraction of the lurid as they are devoid of any dramatic value whatsoever.
Ah, well. All good things...and so forth.
Still, it's worth reminiscing with an oral history of the Sopranos (now five years gone). Perhaps TV will rise again, hopefully in my lifetime.
In fact the entire era of great TV may be over. Over at Grantland they lament that the recently returned Mad Men is the last vestige of the Golden Age of TV that began with The Sopranos back in 1999. Setting aside the promise of the the final season of Breaking Bad starting later this year, it's hard to argue with that.
The best of what's left are shows like Game of Thrones and Spartacus, both of which manage to squeeze out some fair drama, but deliver it with the uranium fist of sex and violence. Beyond that we're left with fare such as True Blood, Dexter, The Walking Dead -- all of which thoroughly depend on the attraction of the lurid as they are devoid of any dramatic value whatsoever.
Ah, well. All good things...and so forth.
Still, it's worth reminiscing with an oral history of the Sopranos (now five years gone). Perhaps TV will rise again, hopefully in my lifetime.
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
The Month That Was - February 2012
The Month That Was - February 2012: Short shrift this week, in honor of the short month. I was looking back at the month trying to figure out how come I had so little to write about and I found no good answers. I only read one book, that's part of it. No travel to speak of, that's another part of it. A couple of big house projects, but I have been trying to hold off on peppering you with house maintenance posts.
Maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe I should start expanding my topics. Things I spend time on that I don't write about are my fitness obsession, house projects in detail (I make casual mention), and football (in season). There are probably others, but those come to mind immediately. For unknown reasons, I have convinced myself that nobody is really interested in that stuff. But in reality, I have no reason to think anybody would be particularly interested in anything I write here, so why would those topics be different? This place is exactly what it says in the title. A monthly diary. It documents some events or opinions that I found interesting. I fully expect its eventual best use will be jogging my memory about times passed when I am pushing 90. Or maybe, a thousand years from now, some brain-in-a-jar will read it to see what life was like for someone in the previous millennium.
If this were a commercial site, it would be a disaster. Commercial sites need laser focus to have any hope of succeeding. Since this is just a personal hobby that I happen to make public, why not get even broader and more eclectic? So be it. Starting next month the list of potential topics grows.
[Tech, Rant] One Bad Apple
[Books] Book Look: Beyer on Speed
[Movies] Maybe I'm Spoiled
[Music] Rest in Peace, Davy
Maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe I should start expanding my topics. Things I spend time on that I don't write about are my fitness obsession, house projects in detail (I make casual mention), and football (in season). There are probably others, but those come to mind immediately. For unknown reasons, I have convinced myself that nobody is really interested in that stuff. But in reality, I have no reason to think anybody would be particularly interested in anything I write here, so why would those topics be different? This place is exactly what it says in the title. A monthly diary. It documents some events or opinions that I found interesting. I fully expect its eventual best use will be jogging my memory about times passed when I am pushing 90. Or maybe, a thousand years from now, some brain-in-a-jar will read it to see what life was like for someone in the previous millennium.
If this were a commercial site, it would be a disaster. Commercial sites need laser focus to have any hope of succeeding. Since this is just a personal hobby that I happen to make public, why not get even broader and more eclectic? So be it. Starting next month the list of potential topics grows.
[Tech, Rant] One Bad Apple
[Books] Book Look: Beyer on Speed
[Movies] Maybe I'm Spoiled
[Music] Rest in Peace, Davy
[Tech, Rant] One Bad Apple
One Bad Apple: I have worked diligently to keep myself free of Apple products and the entire ecosystem. This has not been an arbitrary or capricious act of defiance. I am not a big fan of Apple interface designs. They are visually and stylistically striking, but below the surface they strike me as very rigid and limited. For example, iTunes Music Store is a complete disaster. It is so busy putting flashy, resource hogging graphics in my face that I can't efficiently find the music I want. I buy MP3s almost exclusively from Amazon.
(As a side note, this problem is not exclusive to Apple, but the entire internet. You land on a page and it takes forever to load because it's trying to pick up 500k of graphic ads from 10 different sites while running God-only-knows what javascripts in the background, when the only thing valuable to you is the 5k of text information that you have to search to find because it is swamped by the bling. Infuriating. Notice that apart from my books there are no graphics on this site. There's a reason for that.)
I also had a bad experience with the one Apple laptop I ever owned. The CMOS went south after about a year. I was able to diagnose this myself just from investigating things on the web. When I brought it in for repair, I informed the asshat techs of this but they didn't listen to me and claimed to fix it by re-installing the OS (or however they described it) and charged me $50. Naturally it went dead again a couple of days later because IT WAS A CMOS ISSUE. I'm still bitter about this.
Perhaps most importantly I never got used to Apple's way of doing things. Perfect example: Most of what I do is work with text in one way or another. In Windows you have both a backspace key and a delete key. The backspace key does what you would expect: removes the character to the left of the cursor. The delete key removes the character to the right of the cursor. There is simply no way I am going to be able to survive in the world without these functions. Well, on Macs, the delete key operates like the Windows backspace key, which is a minor issue, but there is no key that operates like the Windows delete key. There is a keystroke combination that does, but keystroke combos are a pain and should only be used for oddball tasks, not basic in-line editing. Now I know there are machinations that allow you to get around this somehow (maybe keyboard remapping of some sort) but why make me go to the trouble? Or more properly worded, why would I pay a premium for a Mac to go to the trouble. This, like the one-button mouse, is just the Apple Way, and if you are one of the faithful, it is axiomatically correct. Except it's not, is it?
Tangentially, I'm not one of those dirty hippies who goes around seeing corrupt corporate evil everywhere, but Apple is pretty cutthroat in some of the legal battles they engage in, even with small time violations of perceived property rights. There is clearly the underlying, unspoken belief in that company that you, the customer, must yield to them for your own good.
But there is simply no denying the success they have had. Back in 1999 I got into a debate on some internet board (back when I was idiot enough to do that sort of thing) and argued that Apple would be out of business in five years. That was before the iPod was even a gleam in Steve's eye, so I feel justified in my prediction. I mean, who knew? Now they are looking at something like trillion dollar market cap. It's making them harder to ignore.
At the moment, I can easily ignore iTunes. Like I said, I get my music and other media from Amazon. But what if iTunes e-books catch on. Right now my books are available as e-books on Kindle only. Will I be forced to accept iTunes at some point?
For now my Zune players are serving me well. I have a 1st gen 30 gig that holds pretty much my entire music collection, and a 2nd gen 8 gig that I use solely for running. Both have been solid, but they won't last forever, and I do lose out on beneficial recent developments in battery life. Zune players have been discontinued. If one or both fail, will I have recourse besides the iPod? I suppose I could load stuff on my Windows Phone, but it couldn't hold my entire music collection, which is a luxury I appreciate when travelling. I would also be hesitant to use my phone as a workout aid. It's one thing to sweat into a hundred dollar MP3 player. It's another to sweat into a $400 phone.
The iPad has no viable competitors at the moment. For now, I have no need but I can see the attraction of them and they are starting to crop up at meetings at work. Hmmm.
I feel fairly safe on the phone and laptop front. I'm really liking my Windows Phone. And Windows 8 is coming for laptops, if I ever feel the need to replace my beat up old HP. (Microsoft's plan to keep Windows and Windows Phone tightly locked is looking like it might pay off.)
But Apple still looms large, casting a giant shadow over my technological needs. It's getting harder, not easier, to stay clean.
(At the WSJ, a recent op-ed on Apple as an investment has some simlar sentiments.)
(As a side note, this problem is not exclusive to Apple, but the entire internet. You land on a page and it takes forever to load because it's trying to pick up 500k of graphic ads from 10 different sites while running God-only-knows what javascripts in the background, when the only thing valuable to you is the 5k of text information that you have to search to find because it is swamped by the bling. Infuriating. Notice that apart from my books there are no graphics on this site. There's a reason for that.)
I also had a bad experience with the one Apple laptop I ever owned. The CMOS went south after about a year. I was able to diagnose this myself just from investigating things on the web. When I brought it in for repair, I informed the asshat techs of this but they didn't listen to me and claimed to fix it by re-installing the OS (or however they described it) and charged me $50. Naturally it went dead again a couple of days later because IT WAS A CMOS ISSUE. I'm still bitter about this.
Perhaps most importantly I never got used to Apple's way of doing things. Perfect example: Most of what I do is work with text in one way or another. In Windows you have both a backspace key and a delete key. The backspace key does what you would expect: removes the character to the left of the cursor. The delete key removes the character to the right of the cursor. There is simply no way I am going to be able to survive in the world without these functions. Well, on Macs, the delete key operates like the Windows backspace key, which is a minor issue, but there is no key that operates like the Windows delete key. There is a keystroke combination that does, but keystroke combos are a pain and should only be used for oddball tasks, not basic in-line editing. Now I know there are machinations that allow you to get around this somehow (maybe keyboard remapping of some sort) but why make me go to the trouble? Or more properly worded, why would I pay a premium for a Mac to go to the trouble. This, like the one-button mouse, is just the Apple Way, and if you are one of the faithful, it is axiomatically correct. Except it's not, is it?
Tangentially, I'm not one of those dirty hippies who goes around seeing corrupt corporate evil everywhere, but Apple is pretty cutthroat in some of the legal battles they engage in, even with small time violations of perceived property rights. There is clearly the underlying, unspoken belief in that company that you, the customer, must yield to them for your own good.
But there is simply no denying the success they have had. Back in 1999 I got into a debate on some internet board (back when I was idiot enough to do that sort of thing) and argued that Apple would be out of business in five years. That was before the iPod was even a gleam in Steve's eye, so I feel justified in my prediction. I mean, who knew? Now they are looking at something like trillion dollar market cap. It's making them harder to ignore.
At the moment, I can easily ignore iTunes. Like I said, I get my music and other media from Amazon. But what if iTunes e-books catch on. Right now my books are available as e-books on Kindle only. Will I be forced to accept iTunes at some point?
For now my Zune players are serving me well. I have a 1st gen 30 gig that holds pretty much my entire music collection, and a 2nd gen 8 gig that I use solely for running. Both have been solid, but they won't last forever, and I do lose out on beneficial recent developments in battery life. Zune players have been discontinued. If one or both fail, will I have recourse besides the iPod? I suppose I could load stuff on my Windows Phone, but it couldn't hold my entire music collection, which is a luxury I appreciate when travelling. I would also be hesitant to use my phone as a workout aid. It's one thing to sweat into a hundred dollar MP3 player. It's another to sweat into a $400 phone.
The iPad has no viable competitors at the moment. For now, I have no need but I can see the attraction of them and they are starting to crop up at meetings at work. Hmmm.
I feel fairly safe on the phone and laptop front. I'm really liking my Windows Phone. And Windows 8 is coming for laptops, if I ever feel the need to replace my beat up old HP. (Microsoft's plan to keep Windows and Windows Phone tightly locked is looking like it might pay off.)
But Apple still looms large, casting a giant shadow over my technological needs. It's getting harder, not easier, to stay clean.
(At the WSJ, a recent op-ed on Apple as an investment has some simlar sentiments.)
[Books] Book Look: Beyer on Speed, by Andrew Beyer
Book Look: Beyer on Speed, by Andrew Beyer: In my somewhat quixotic quest to better understand thoroughbred handicapping, this book popped to the top of everyone's suggested reading list. I can see why.
I'm going to get sidetracked right off the bat here, because Beyer is dedicated to objective analysis of gambling, something that only a minority of gamblers pursue, and certainly no casual gamblers. But it is something dear to my heart, partly because I spent a small amount of time trying to do just that for betting football games (with marginal continued success) and partly because my personal self-delusion is that I value the rational, objective understanding of reality to such and extent that it differentiates me from the vast majority of my fellow human beings who only dimly perceive the underlying probabilistic tendencies of life. In that vein, reading Beyer was like reading a kindred spirit, albeit one vastly more accomplished than myself.
Beyer is the man behind what are known as Speed Numbers. Speed Numbers came along a few decades ago as a result of what I presume to be one of the first efforts to objectify the outcome of thoroughbred races. What Speed numbers did was give handicappers a way to compare horses from race to race while controlling -- somewhat -- for track and race conditions. Previously, racing "knowledge" consisted of half understood nuggets of wisdom, vague impression, and overgeneralized anecdotes. In time, Speed Numbers were widely published and any easy value they provided the handicapper was lost. Remember, the gambler is always looking for circumstances where public opinion is at odds with reality. If just a handful of people use Speed Numbers they provide a tremendous advantage over those that don't. If everybody is using them, they provide little or no advantage over your fellow gamblers.
Beyer on Speed was written as a direct result of this. Beyer faced the question of whether there was any real value in his creation anymore. This in itself is admirable. Here is someone with a enormous amount of sweat and emotion invested in his creation. I suspect the majority of people in such circumstances would dig in and argue tooth and nail for the continuing validity of their ideas even to the point of turning rhetorical back flips and scaling peaks of self-delusion to do so. Not Beyer. He is nothing if not objective and that requires a willingness to accept reality however painful.
But Beyer doesn't come to the conclusion that Speed Numbers give him no edge. He comes to see the edge is in how they are used. Beyer calls this the "conceptual approach" which can be summed up as follows: First, run your numbers and do you quantitative homework. Next, with a good understanding of the shortcomings of your numbers (what they will and won't represent), evaluate each situation and adjust your wagering accordingly. The primary function of this book is to demonstrate what Speed Numbers do and don't represent and to survey to other sorts of info that come into play. Beyer surveys key concepts of pace and track bias in some detail, illustrating the sorts of adjustments he makes for them.
Rich with anecdote and experience, Beyer deserves yet more high scores for talking about his losses and failures as readily as his successes, including a particularly devastating loss in a pick-six. This is important and it's part of what makes the book seem so genuine. Losses will always be more frequent than wins and handling them psychologically (and financially) is the key to survival.
As I said, I drew comparisons to my gambling efforts with football, although it's clear horse racing is a very different animal. In football, instead of having access the entire race and interactions of ten or so horses, you have to worry about interactions of two sets of eleven men all with specific assignments that only indirectly relate to the goal. Not to mention you will never see everything because full field game films are only available to NFL insiders and TV coverage necessarily gives you only a portion of any action. But the quest is the same -- try to quantify the process as much as possible and use your objective results as an advantage over the rest of the public, who are mislead by their own (very human) observational weakness and bias.
It's a strange topic of interest, I know, and I might do well to navel-gaze long enough to understand why I am so attracted to it. But should you read Beyer on Speed? Well, if you have an interest in thoroughbred handicapping then absolutely, but you probably already have (it's something of a classic in the field). If you are strangely attracted to objective methods of gambling like I am, then absolutely. Otherwise, although exceedingly clearly written and pretty much devoid of jargon, I gotta guess it wouldn't be of little interest to the uninvolved reader.
As for me, I loved the hell out of it.
I'm going to get sidetracked right off the bat here, because Beyer is dedicated to objective analysis of gambling, something that only a minority of gamblers pursue, and certainly no casual gamblers. But it is something dear to my heart, partly because I spent a small amount of time trying to do just that for betting football games (with marginal continued success) and partly because my personal self-delusion is that I value the rational, objective understanding of reality to such and extent that it differentiates me from the vast majority of my fellow human beings who only dimly perceive the underlying probabilistic tendencies of life. In that vein, reading Beyer was like reading a kindred spirit, albeit one vastly more accomplished than myself.
Beyer is the man behind what are known as Speed Numbers. Speed Numbers came along a few decades ago as a result of what I presume to be one of the first efforts to objectify the outcome of thoroughbred races. What Speed numbers did was give handicappers a way to compare horses from race to race while controlling -- somewhat -- for track and race conditions. Previously, racing "knowledge" consisted of half understood nuggets of wisdom, vague impression, and overgeneralized anecdotes. In time, Speed Numbers were widely published and any easy value they provided the handicapper was lost. Remember, the gambler is always looking for circumstances where public opinion is at odds with reality. If just a handful of people use Speed Numbers they provide a tremendous advantage over those that don't. If everybody is using them, they provide little or no advantage over your fellow gamblers.
Beyer on Speed was written as a direct result of this. Beyer faced the question of whether there was any real value in his creation anymore. This in itself is admirable. Here is someone with a enormous amount of sweat and emotion invested in his creation. I suspect the majority of people in such circumstances would dig in and argue tooth and nail for the continuing validity of their ideas even to the point of turning rhetorical back flips and scaling peaks of self-delusion to do so. Not Beyer. He is nothing if not objective and that requires a willingness to accept reality however painful.
But Beyer doesn't come to the conclusion that Speed Numbers give him no edge. He comes to see the edge is in how they are used. Beyer calls this the "conceptual approach" which can be summed up as follows: First, run your numbers and do you quantitative homework. Next, with a good understanding of the shortcomings of your numbers (what they will and won't represent), evaluate each situation and adjust your wagering accordingly. The primary function of this book is to demonstrate what Speed Numbers do and don't represent and to survey to other sorts of info that come into play. Beyer surveys key concepts of pace and track bias in some detail, illustrating the sorts of adjustments he makes for them.
Rich with anecdote and experience, Beyer deserves yet more high scores for talking about his losses and failures as readily as his successes, including a particularly devastating loss in a pick-six. This is important and it's part of what makes the book seem so genuine. Losses will always be more frequent than wins and handling them psychologically (and financially) is the key to survival.
As I said, I drew comparisons to my gambling efforts with football, although it's clear horse racing is a very different animal. In football, instead of having access the entire race and interactions of ten or so horses, you have to worry about interactions of two sets of eleven men all with specific assignments that only indirectly relate to the goal. Not to mention you will never see everything because full field game films are only available to NFL insiders and TV coverage necessarily gives you only a portion of any action. But the quest is the same -- try to quantify the process as much as possible and use your objective results as an advantage over the rest of the public, who are mislead by their own (very human) observational weakness and bias.
It's a strange topic of interest, I know, and I might do well to navel-gaze long enough to understand why I am so attracted to it. But should you read Beyer on Speed? Well, if you have an interest in thoroughbred handicapping then absolutely, but you probably already have (it's something of a classic in the field). If you are strangely attracted to objective methods of gambling like I am, then absolutely. Otherwise, although exceedingly clearly written and pretty much devoid of jargon, I gotta guess it wouldn't be of little interest to the uninvolved reader.
As for me, I loved the hell out of it.
[Movies] Maybe I'm Spoiled
Maybe I'm Spoiled: I did something I so rarely do. I actually watched a couple of movies. They were both state of the art Hollywood productions but they also exemplify everything that is wrong with the industry.
Drive -- I didn't believe Ryan Gosling as a sullen tough; he looks like a paperboy. And that jacket that was clearly formulated to be iconic was just poofy. I really didn't believe in his instant devotion to the hyper-sympathetic single mom and daughter. Have movies given up on developing relationships? Rather than actually show their feelings develop, it was as if you were just handed the two characters and then told they had fallen for each other through longing looks and symbolic acts. Maybe I'm spoiled by TV where you can take a whole season or more to get a couple together, but I was left with the impression that the only reason they fell in love was because it said to in the script. I didn't believe the cliched stunt man mentor who turned out to be a bad guy, or the cliched ex-con trying to do right in an unforgiving world. The action scenes were cool and sharp, but they were way too few and far between. So much of this film was just people silently staring at each other. It could have been called Mood.
Secretariat -- At least I liked this movie. It wasn't terribly good, but I still liked it. It followed a strict formula designed to push emotional buttons, and it succeeded to some extent. Maybe I'm spoiled by the magnificently nuanced dialogue that you can hear in TV shows such as Luck and Spartacus or Justified, but the words handed to these actors were abysmal -- pure cheese. The acting was dutiful, with the exception of The Malkovich, who can deliver pretty much any lines with style. The plot: a steadfast woman in man's world; no one believes in her but she shows everyone, from her husband who doesn't want to risk their future of their children to the loudmouth macho types in the horse-racing game. Honestly, it's a strange lesson: It's OK to risk everything, including your family, because your personal emotional satisfaction is the most important thing. Alrighty. Still, reliving the Secretariat's Belmont race was cool, even in dramatically exaggerated form. (Note: Andrew Beyer -- see the book review above -- measures that to be the greatest performance ever by a thoroughbred by quite a large margin.)
These movies, though passably entertaining and unfailingly professional productions, exemplify everything that is wrong with the movies. No chances were taken, the actors seem small, the scripts are filled with simple language and narrow, crudely drawn characters. Again, maybe I'm just spoiled by how great TV is, but these were two very well-received and critically acclaimed movies and they simply fell flat. You could throw themes and plot points and cardboard characters in a machine and it would manufacture films like this. I think it'll be a while before I give movies another chance.
Drive -- I didn't believe Ryan Gosling as a sullen tough; he looks like a paperboy. And that jacket that was clearly formulated to be iconic was just poofy. I really didn't believe in his instant devotion to the hyper-sympathetic single mom and daughter. Have movies given up on developing relationships? Rather than actually show their feelings develop, it was as if you were just handed the two characters and then told they had fallen for each other through longing looks and symbolic acts. Maybe I'm spoiled by TV where you can take a whole season or more to get a couple together, but I was left with the impression that the only reason they fell in love was because it said to in the script. I didn't believe the cliched stunt man mentor who turned out to be a bad guy, or the cliched ex-con trying to do right in an unforgiving world. The action scenes were cool and sharp, but they were way too few and far between. So much of this film was just people silently staring at each other. It could have been called Mood.
Secretariat -- At least I liked this movie. It wasn't terribly good, but I still liked it. It followed a strict formula designed to push emotional buttons, and it succeeded to some extent. Maybe I'm spoiled by the magnificently nuanced dialogue that you can hear in TV shows such as Luck and Spartacus or Justified, but the words handed to these actors were abysmal -- pure cheese. The acting was dutiful, with the exception of The Malkovich, who can deliver pretty much any lines with style. The plot: a steadfast woman in man's world; no one believes in her but she shows everyone, from her husband who doesn't want to risk their future of their children to the loudmouth macho types in the horse-racing game. Honestly, it's a strange lesson: It's OK to risk everything, including your family, because your personal emotional satisfaction is the most important thing. Alrighty. Still, reliving the Secretariat's Belmont race was cool, even in dramatically exaggerated form. (Note: Andrew Beyer -- see the book review above -- measures that to be the greatest performance ever by a thoroughbred by quite a large margin.)
These movies, though passably entertaining and unfailingly professional productions, exemplify everything that is wrong with the movies. No chances were taken, the actors seem small, the scripts are filled with simple language and narrow, crudely drawn characters. Again, maybe I'm just spoiled by how great TV is, but these were two very well-received and critically acclaimed movies and they simply fell flat. You could throw themes and plot points and cardboard characters in a machine and it would manufacture films like this. I think it'll be a while before I give movies another chance.
[Music] Rest in Peace, Davy
Rest in Peace, Davy: Up until about third grade I was the shortest kid in class. Even shorter than all the girls. (I have since turned out to be average height, exactly.) Anyone who was in a similar situation knows the trauma involved in that. But Davy Jones was the shortest Monkee, and we had the same first name, and frankly, we even looked a bit alike. That helped.
I loved the Monkees. I can still name their first five albums from memory: (1) The Monkees, (2) More of the Monkees, (3) Headquarters, (4) Pieces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, (5) The Birds, The Bees, and The Monkees. All of these were rife with brilliant pop songs of the sort that come along only once every few years. Very few bands have ever put together such a brilliant oeuvre. I have, ever since, been a sucker for perfectly crafted 3 minute pop songs.
Anyone one of those five albums is would be a pop masterpiece today. Yes, I know that the songs were all written by the top songwriters money could buy. And the musicians were the best session players money could buy. And the producers were under marching orders to make something marketable. But think about that. Can you imagine any corporate interest trying something like that today and generating anything like the quality of music?
Their sound was hugely influential on the best popsters of the '90s -- the Shibuya-kei style from Japan. And given modern production values, their music would match up easily with the best pop of the last 10 years -- say, Barenaked Ladies and Fountains of Wayne, for example. The songs are as exuberant and energetic as they were 45 years ago. If anything, doing that while under corporate control only makes the achievement greater.
Davy was the face; the cute boy all the girls could crush on. He could sing (but not as well as Dolenz); he could act and even dance a bit; he lacked the musical talent of Tork and especially Nesmith, but he had a friendly charisma and seemed to brighten the atmosphere.
He always wanted to be a jockey (interesting that horse racing has come up in three of my posts this month), but his natural charm led him into acting and that was that. Never was a bad word said about him. His good and unassuming nature were roundly praised upon his death.
Of course, people like me don't actually mourn Davy Jones proper. We express gratitude for the positive affect he had on us. What we really mourn is the loss of our ability to experience the feelings he facilitated in our childhood (even the trauma of being the shortest one in class) and, by extension, our own mortality. I would never wish my youth on anyone, but there are things I miss: the revelry of playing catch all afternoon, conquering a video game, or a hearing a familiar Monkees song. Those activities are still possible but they will never be enjoyed so thoroughly. That innocent vitality, like Davy, is gone forever.
I loved the Monkees. I can still name their first five albums from memory: (1) The Monkees, (2) More of the Monkees, (3) Headquarters, (4) Pieces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, (5) The Birds, The Bees, and The Monkees. All of these were rife with brilliant pop songs of the sort that come along only once every few years. Very few bands have ever put together such a brilliant oeuvre. I have, ever since, been a sucker for perfectly crafted 3 minute pop songs.
Anyone one of those five albums is would be a pop masterpiece today. Yes, I know that the songs were all written by the top songwriters money could buy. And the musicians were the best session players money could buy. And the producers were under marching orders to make something marketable. But think about that. Can you imagine any corporate interest trying something like that today and generating anything like the quality of music?
Their sound was hugely influential on the best popsters of the '90s -- the Shibuya-kei style from Japan. And given modern production values, their music would match up easily with the best pop of the last 10 years -- say, Barenaked Ladies and Fountains of Wayne, for example. The songs are as exuberant and energetic as they were 45 years ago. If anything, doing that while under corporate control only makes the achievement greater.
Davy was the face; the cute boy all the girls could crush on. He could sing (but not as well as Dolenz); he could act and even dance a bit; he lacked the musical talent of Tork and especially Nesmith, but he had a friendly charisma and seemed to brighten the atmosphere.
He always wanted to be a jockey (interesting that horse racing has come up in three of my posts this month), but his natural charm led him into acting and that was that. Never was a bad word said about him. His good and unassuming nature were roundly praised upon his death.
Of course, people like me don't actually mourn Davy Jones proper. We express gratitude for the positive affect he had on us. What we really mourn is the loss of our ability to experience the feelings he facilitated in our childhood (even the trauma of being the shortest one in class) and, by extension, our own mortality. I would never wish my youth on anyone, but there are things I miss: the revelry of playing catch all afternoon, conquering a video game, or a hearing a familiar Monkees song. Those activities are still possible but they will never be enjoyed so thoroughly. That innocent vitality, like Davy, is gone forever.
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