BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: September 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
Unfortunate Noises
My downstairs neighbor moved out a couple of weeks ago, and after spending every day last week gutting the apartment, this week they've begun to restock it. When I say they gutted it, I am not exaggerating. They took out (and left piled on the back patio, where most of it still remains) the fridge, dishwasher, all the carpet, all the lightning fixtures, the ceiling fan, all the bathroom and kitchen cabinets, the sinks, the linoleum floor from the kitchen and bathroom, and possibly the light switches and doorknobs. It's like a Cadillac left in a bad part of town; there's nothing left but the frame; cement floors and bare walls, which are sure to be repainted the same colorless off-white that every other wall in every other apartment in California is inflicted with.
The stripping was pretty annoying, since they began at 8am, and they were not gentle. It usually sounded like they were using a crowbar and hammer to pry the ceiling loose, and since this was going on about 6 inches below my bedroom floor, no, I didn't find it all that enjoyable to try sleep through. Today was even better, since they were putting in new cabinets and cutting the faux-granite counter tops to fit, on site. Well, out on the sidewalk, directly below my living room window. I've never heard stone cut with a hand saw, and I doubt I ever will since stone is too hard and has to be cut with special tools in a mill. The faux-granite epoxy counters they put in apartments though, are just huge slabs of plastic. They can be cut with hand-held circular saws, though not without tremendous high pitched screeching sounds.
In a happy coincidence, today was the first day in about a week that it was cool enough to leave the windows open all day, instead of closing them and running the A/C. Nice that I had such a quiet, peaceful day to work on a novel and enjoy the peaceful, quiet suburbs.
Worse yet, it turns out that drinking too much red wine with leftover lunchtime pizza doesn't allow you to block out the sounds. At least I tried, damnit!
Adding to the fun, the couple that lives next door are moving out, in the slowest moving out process ever seen by man. Friday they had two big guys over to help, and they carried out the couch and bed and dresser and other large objects. I don't know how many they had; their apt is just a one bedroom like mine, but there certainly seemed to be a lot of trips moving past my front window and down the stairs. They didn't rend a truck, just stuffed the junk into the back of someone's pickup.
There were few signs of life over the weekend, but today the moving out continued, with the aid of the woman's mom, or so I judged by the similar appearance, ethnicity, and 30ish year age difference between her and my neighbor. (She's white, mom's white, husband's short and Hispanic.) I've seen at least 40 or 50 trips up and down the stairs, usually while burdened with hardly more than a shoebox, or a bunch of clothing on hangars. The husband just struggled down the stairs with two bulging trash bags full of uncrushed aluminum cans, FFS. Way to plan ahead, kids.
I have no idea how it can take so many trips for 2 people and an assistant to clean out a one bedroom apt, but I guess if you don't get big boxes at a U-haul store, don't pack stuff neatly into them, and don't get them all ready in advance, it can pretty well eat up an entire day/weekend, then spill over into a Monday spent grabbing whatever you can lay hands on and carrying it out to an SUV, thus requiring dozens and dozens of trips up and down the stairs carrying 10-15lbs a trip, instead of 10 trips with 60 pounds each. Up to, and including, bulky bags of aluminum cans you should have recycled last week, when you had nothing better to do.
It's silly too, since someone's always moving into this apt complex, and there are always stacks of perfectly good moving boxes in the trash area. I've got 25 or 30 of them (flattened and folded) in my storage space, scavenged from various stacks left out for free/trash in the year and a half I've lived here. I don't know when I'll move from here, but when that blessed day arrives I do know I'll rent a goddamned U-Haul, press some friends into labor, and do it all in one trip.
I think one bedroom apts bring out the worst in our "do it ourselves" instincts. No one tries to move a full house by themselves, or by borrowing a friend's truck, etc. You hire movers, since there will be dozens and dozens of big boxes, couches, beds, furniture, tools, small appliances, vacuums, dishes, lawn equipment, etc. You've got to spend weeks before you move and months after you move packing/unpacking and organizing, but no one in their right mind tries to do it by making a bunch of trips in some friend's pickup. And not just because when people move houses, they're generally moving further than across town.
A lightly-furnished two-bedroom might bring out similar DIY stupidity, but even then I think the necessity of renting a U-Haul would be evident. No one's got a friend with a pickup that will hold 2 beds, 2 mattresses, 2 box springs, dressers, etc, not to mention all the rest of the household furniture.
Which leaves one bedroom dwellers as the only ones who can try to get away with moving on the cheap. If you've got Ikea furniture and are handy, you could theoretically disassemble bulky objects like beds and tables, stack up bookcases and chairs and desks, squeeze in boxes of clothing and books and dishes, and move in several trips. Of course, as anyone who has moved in recent years will tell you, your stuff always takes at least 50% more space than you anticipated. But if you live not too far from where you're moving, and you have access to the new place at least a week before you've got to be out of the old one, and you don't mind the drive, and you've access to a truck for the big stuff, it's probably doable. It's not wise; it will consume dozens of hours of your time and keep you from doing just about anything else during the weeks beforehand, but it's doable.
Even then, I'd recommend renting a U-Haul. You can easily put an entire one bedroom apt into one of their smaller trucks, providing you've obtained big moving boxes and packed them wisely, and the money you'd spend on gas making a dozen trips will easily add up to more than the one day or weekend truck rental will cost. Not to mention the dozens of hours you'll save not making all those back and forth trips. I think psychologically it's better to move all at once, too. Plan in advance and spend an entire day packing. Get everything stored away, logically and neatly, leave out only the necessities, and then the next morning when you load it all into the truck you'll empty your entire apt in order. No running out of clean clothing since everything's packed, none of that "which box did I put the toaster into?" bullshit as you drag out your moving for a week. And when you get to your new location, you've got everything ready to unload and sort out. And you'll do it, since you need to unpack to go back to living your typically over-stimulated, utterly possession-reliant, modern Western Civilization lifestyle. Whereas if you move in pieces, you'll have the stuff you use most often out first, and will just leave boxes of other crap sitting around for weeks.
Oddly, given the obsessiveness of this post, I've not seriously thought about moving any time lately. I do consider it now and then; just because I don't currently have anything (job, relationship, college) really tying me to the Bay Area, and I could live just about anywhere else for far less money. Just for instance, there are countless nice 1 or 2 bedroom apartments in Denver for $500 or less a month. I'm paying $1100 for a nice 1 bedroom here, and there's nothing in the area for less than $900, unless you want to dodge bullets in Oakland or live way, way east by east east East Bay. (And rents were higher 2 years ago when I moved, before the housing bubble burst.)
I've got no reason to want to live in Denver, but there are plenty of other places in the country I could probably be just as happy as I am here. And even if not, $600 a month would buy a fair amount of happiness. Or at least massage whores and Tanqueray, which are just as good.
I've been trying to look away from the train wreck that is VP candidate Sarah Palin, but like the proverbial locomotive derailment, it's damn difficult. It was easy for a couple of weeks, when McCain's people kept her hidden and away from the media so she could cram for the VP debate and the eventual necessity of speaking on her feet and not just reading a speech off of a teleprompter. They've let her out a bit lately, but just for a quick interview with a kid gloves-wearing Katie Couric. The results were pretty much disastrous. Check out this bit of transcript, or see the full post for the video.
Couric asked Palin, "Why isn't it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries? Allow them to spend more, and put more money into the economy, instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?"
Palin, in a rambling and largely incoherent response, responded, "That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it's got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and getting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade -- we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We've got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation."
...Worse, if you watch the clip, you might notice that Palin was intermittently referring to notes. In other words, this is the kind of response she offers on a question about the Wall Street bailout with help.
I don't even know what to make of that. I'd make a comment about "a heartbeat away," but I don't think Bush could have answered the question much more coherently, and he is the heartbeat.
Still, comparing anyone's answer to something George Bush might say takes "grading on a curve" a bit far, so let's look a little more closely at Palin's answer to this fairly simple question. Her point is... um... yeah. Moose! Drill drill drill! Lipstick pitbull!
Most of her answers from the Charlie Gibson interview a couple of weeks ago were un-nuanced, regurgitated Republican talking points, but at least they were basically related to the questions. This one isn't coherent, and not only isn't it related to the question... I can't think of a question it would be related to? Honestly, what question could you ask that would make that answer seem appropriate? Near as I can tell she's advocating trickle down socialism. We're supposed to nationalize our failing banks without actually taking control of them; we just give an almost incalculable amount of money to the same rich people who ran their former financial institutions into the ground in the first place, let them go back to business as usual, and that somehow helps the rest of us. Kthx! Plz drive through.
I'm not sure which I find more perplexing. That Clay Aiken has fans, or that some of them are surprised to find out that he's gay. If you join me on one or both of these counts, you'll probably enjoy some of the posts quoted from a Gayken fan forum in this post on D-Listed. One quote:
"I just feel rather silly now having spent the last 5 years drooling over and being fan girly for a singer I thought was straight and now finding out he is gay. It does change my perception of who he is and how I see him. We always called him our boyfriend and that won't be happening anymore."
Now you feel silly for spending 5 years drooling over Clay Aiken? Now? I mean sure, better late than never, but JFC.
BTW, for any new (hah!) readers who don't know my stance on homosexuality, I could care less if he's gay or not. I think his music is horrible and his fans are idiots, but the man's sexual preferences are entirely irrelevant to me.
The say that necessity is the mother of invention. By that token, financial desperation and bankruptcy is apparently the mother of lots of probably-illegal property and mortgage schemes. During the last few years, as the housing bubble was perpetually inflated by 100% loans and other crazed financial practices that (inevitably) crashed and may yet bring down the world's banking system, I occasionally received spam urging me to buy now before prices rose even higher, but it wasn't that common. Every week or two a couple such mails would slip past my junk filters, but they weren't anything that special. Their advice wasn't even that crazy. They might have been less enthusiastic than any realtors' organization, or the financial advice delivered daily on TV by respected, mainstream financial analysts.
Now that the house of cards has collapsed and the operators are golden parachuting out while the US tax payers are going to get stuck with $700b in a bailout, desperation has set in for those who were formerly making money gaming the system, and my inbox is bearing the brunt of their death throes. I'm getting several emails a day along these lines; all full of unclear promises and intentionally vague language.
Need a catalyst to increase your originations?
Need to separate yourself from the competition?
Contact us now and well reveal to you how to OVERCOME the interest rate objection that all borrowers have due to lowball marketing by the dreaded wholesale lenders.
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Once your client has paid off their loan (typically 7-10 years early) they can use their Bi-Weekly account on any loan product they wish for LIFE. They can even pass on their account to a family member.
We pay YOU! - 300 Dollars per enrollment AND we can show you how to add this easy option to every loan file just like Greg Frost and many other top producers do.
To see a YOUTUBE presentation FREE go here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul5w7eG8urE
ACT NOW and we'll reveal the secrets of overcoming the interest rate objection
I'm not even sure what this is selling. Something to do with lowering your mortgage payment or cutting the interest on it, apparently. I don't see how that's going to help people, since the problem for most is that they bought a house during a bubble (or recklessly HELOCed themselves into the red) that's now worth substantially more than they paid for it. And if they did it with one of those poison pill adjustable rate mortgages, they basically got 2 or 3 years of paying less than half price on their mortgage, in exchange for higher payments down the road. We're now down the road, and since (surprise) housing values didn't continue to increase perpetually, those people are fucked. They can't pay their mortgage once the discounted rate expires, and they can't sell since their house is worth less than they paid for it. I guess, in such dire straits, emails that provide a "catalyst to increase your originations" might be pretty tempting. Which is why various weasels are sending out a million of them an hour, half a dozen of which are slipping through my junk filters.
As for the housing/sub-prime/banking crisis, it's pretty simple. The banks were deregulated and instead of remaining solid, safe, financial anchors, they turned into used car salesmen. They wanted quick profits, so they junked all the sensible loan requirements and started throwing money to virtually anyone who could point to a house they wanted to buy. The banks had nothing to loose; since property always went up, they didn't care if people could afford their zero down mortgage, since they would just sell it to some other sucker in 18 or 24 months. It was nothing to give someone a loan for 80% of their mortgage, knowing some other bank would give them the other 20%, and then throw them another HELOC for $80k in 8 months.
The problem came when the carousel stopped spinning, the bubble popped, and there were suddenly millions of new home owners who'd taken out $600k, $150k, and $80k on a house they'd bought in 2006 for $750k, had appraised for $850k in 2007, and now found to be worth $450k. And falling. People who owe almost $900k on a house worth far less than that, who have almost none of their own money in the deal, and who are looking at a $7000 monthly payment on a house they could rent for $3000, aren't real likely to stick around. Ruined credit rating or not.
There are several examples a week of exactly this phenomena documented on the schadenfreude-soaked Irvine Housing Blog. It's a hell of an issue to resolve, since people are greedy, banks enabled their greed, and now tons of people are losing homes they couldn't really afford in the first place, or defaulting and costing the banks hundreds of millions of dollars a week. Allowing the banks to pay the price of their stupid loans by going bankrupt is the natural solution, but they would not do it in isolation, and their failures would create huge ripples that would probably bring down much of the rest of America's, and the world's financial system. Whee.
I hadn't read News of the Weird in months, and while clicking through the recent archives, I found this item too weird not to comment on.
David Steffen was convicted in Cincinnati in 1983 of murdering a 19-year-old woman and sentenced to death because the jury found that he also raped her, a violation that was an added devastation to her parents. Steffen confessed to the killing but vehemently protested for almost a quarter century that he did not rape her, and, finally, a 2007 DNA test of semen backed him up, disturbing the family even more (and calling Steffen's death sentence into question). In July 2008, the prosecutor learned that the DNA belonged to 55-year-old Kenneth Douglas, who is not a suspect in the murder but who was a morgue assistant in 1982 when the woman's body arrived and, said the prosecutor, had sex with it. Though the statute of limitations likely prevents prosecuting Douglas, the woman's parents seemed somewhat comforted that, after all, their daughter was a virgin. [Cincinnati Enquirer, 8-13-08]
So um... yeah. Aside from the issue of the guy being on death row for 25 years, what's up with the girl's parents? She wasn't 14. She was a grown woman, well out of high school and into the real world. Do parents really believe their 19 y/o daughters are a virgins? Furthermore, why would you want someone to die a virgin? Of course you don't want your daughter to be raped and murdered (as opposed to just murdered?), but why would you want her to have died a virgin? No, sex isn't the greatest thing ever, but it's usually pretty good, and it's at least interesting and different than anything else. There's a reason for the old joke cliche about people having frantic sex when they think the end is near; because everyone enjoys sex on some level, and you'd had to go out without one last go 'round. Odd that parents would be so eager to deny their own daughter that experience, in her all-too-brief life.
Since that was kind of a downer, here are a couple of others just for laughs.
The Panda Chinese Restaurant in York, Pa., was already in trouble in an early June city sanitation inspection, with demerits piling up because of accumulated grease, insects in the seating area and rotting lettuce, according to a York Daily Record report. Then, in the middle of an inspector's visit, he came upon a live snapping turtle in the restaurant's main sink. Said the inspector, "I had to sit down and gather myself before I could speak." The manager said he had seen the turtle outside and had brought it in for safety: "It was wrong that we put it in the sink." [York Daily Record, 6-11-08]
Unrealistic Expectations: Victor Rodriguez, 21, about to be arrested on a domestic assault charge in Bridgeport, Conn., in June, turned to his 9-foot-long pet python and, as police approached, shouted to the snake, "Get them!" (It remained motionless.) [Connecticut Post, 6-17-08]
The Slacktavist, a blog I enjoy only a passing familiarity with, has spent the past four years intermittently discussing the first book in the Christian Revelations-porn series, Left Behind. Each entry has covered just a few pages of the book, and it's taken four years to finish the discussion of a single book. I'd call the project a labor of love, except that the blogger clearly hates the book he's been so painstakingly deconstructing. Just about any entry from the series is worth reading, but the last post does some nice work summing up the entire pony show.
This brief chorus line stroll here on the final page of the book is only a trivial example, but larger examples of larger impossibilities can be found on every other page. This is, in fact, a major theme -- perhaps the major theme -- of Left Behind. The book is an unending series of events that it is impossible to imagine really occurring in the way they are described.
This brings us back to the failure of world-building we discussed last week. LaHaye and Jenkins almost never bother to tell us much of anything about the strange post-Event world in which their story takes place, and when they do provide details they turn out to be irreconcilable with details provided earlier. This lack of world-building in Left Behind is not an oversight, it's a necessity. The authors are presenting an impossible story set in an impossible world. The more they tell us about that world, the less convincing their story becomes. But they couldn't do more to describe such a world even if they wanted to because such an impossible place is indescribable, unimaginable.
I'm not merely suggesting that this story is outlandish or that it's premise is audacious. I like outlandish and audacious stories.
...But such outlandish settings must be consistent. Storytellers can make up their own rules all they like but, having done so, they have to abide by them. Otherwise, it's just nonsense.
And Left Behind, ultimately, is just nonsense. It makes up its own rules and then breaks them. And then it makes up more rules that require its other rules to be broken. Left Behind refutes itself.
The premise of the book is clear and clearly stated. The Rapture and all the other events foretold by premillennial dispensationalist "bible prophecy scholars" are all real and are all really going to happen. Soon. The book wants to show us the events of this cosmic drama acted out before our very eyes in a story that takes its plot from the authors' End Times check list.
Yet the more we watch, the more we read, the less convinced we become that such a series of events could ever occur. Not because they're too outlandish, but because they contradict and preclude one another. We cannot accept the authors' assertion that A will be followed by B and then by C, because A renders B impossible and C could never take place in a world in which B had already happened.
This is the great and insurmountable failure of Left Behind. It set out to be a work of propaganda, a teaching tool meant to demonstrate -- the authors would say to prove -- that the events it describes could and indeed will really happen. Yet their attempt to present a narrative of such events instead demonstrates -- I would say proves -- that these events could not and indeed will not ever happen. It proves that the weird and contradictory events of their check list could never happen in a world anything like the world we live in, or in any other imaginable world. It proves that their supposed prophecies will never, and can never, be fulfilled.
It's an interesting criticism. After all, anyone can glance at one of the Left Behind novels and see that they're horribly written, with leaden prose and terrible dialogue and boring characters, but none of those faults have ever stopped a book from being successful. It's far more revealing to consider that the entire world fiction of the Left Behind book(s) is undone... by itself. The books were written by godly hacks; we knew that, but I assumed the mythology of the books worked and developed cleanly. Apparently they fail even at that?
On a related issue, it's always amazed and amused me that people will eagerly lap up substandard entertainment offerings, whether books, movies, TV, or music, so long as they purport to come from a religious perspective. I don't mean actual televised sermons or televangelists, but works of fiction, in whatever medium, that are modern updates of Christian lore. If the Left Behind books had invented a new mythology they'd have sold about 500 copies, since they're written poorly, and there's no logic or consistency to their story. The same goes for most Christian music, movies, etc. And, I assume, for Muslim, Mormon, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, etc, entertainment, in various locations where those faiths are ascendant.
It's an interesting issue; that humans are willing, even eager, to consume sub-par entertainment so long as they feel it will not contradict, or will actually reinforce, their operational dogmas. I guess it's logical; if you buy into the metaphysical claims of religion X or Y, then it's more important that you stay true to those than that you consume entertainment that's actually entertaining.
While surfing idly this evening, I somehow wound on up the BoxOfficeMojo list of worst grossing, wide opening films ever. That is, movies that opened on more than 2500 screens (in the US) and made the least money. It's a fascinating collection, full of "tip of the memory" type names. Films I almost remember hearing about, or maybe seeing a trailer for; but not quite. Others don't even generate that much mental near-friction. I look at the name, I paste it into the search box on MetaCritic and look at a synopsis and some reviews, and I'm still left with a scowling, WTF expression. (As seen below.)
Who made these movies? How did they get on 2500+ screens, which means they had major ad campaigns, without me having any memory of them? I'm not that big a movie fan, and I pretty much ignore family movies and chick flicks, but I watch a lot of trailers online, I see a lot of ads on websites, I used to read Entertainment Weakly regularly...
It's understandable when the movie came out 6 or 8 years ago, since I know I've just forgotten. But when the movie was released a few years ago, or last year, or even last month? The worst performance ever goes to The Rocker, which opened on nearly 2800 screens, and earned $2.6m for the weekend. If you're too stoned/drunk/lazy to do the math, that's about $930 per screen, for the weekend. You figure that's $7 a ticket (It's around $10 most theaters in the Bay Area, but we'll include matinee discounts and kid's prices.) So let's be generous and say 150 tickets sold, per theater, per weekend. The movie probably had 4 show times per day per screen, over 3 days. So 150 / 12 = 12 people per show. Nothing like seeing a "comedy" with a full house to boost the laughs!
Backtracking slightly, I only know The Rocker was a comedy since I researched. When I first saw the list, I noted it, then returned, then clicked the link to the movie's page. My thoughts ran as follows, "What was that date? 08/20/08. Wait... that's August 20th. This year. That's one month ago. What? The biggest flop in the history of widely released movies was just last month? Why don't I have any idea what this movie is? Oh... I guess that's only logical, really."
I still had no idea what it was from the Box Office Mojo page, which had a poster for ease of recognition. I had to search the name on MetaCritic to be sure it was real. It was, and I read the synopsis, and I still had no idea what it was. It wasn't until I read one of the reviews (which aren't that horrible, surprisingly) that I got a grain of recollection. I actually seen a trailer for that film, at some point this summer. It looked horrible; some kind of School of Rock/Spinal Tap rip off with one of those pudgy, white, late-30s manchildren losers Hollywood "comedies" have lately grown so found of vomiting onto the screen. He was almost a rock star 20 years ago, and now his nephew, or something, has a band and they need a drummer, and he joins up and wacky, acid-tinged hijinks ensue.
Clearly I wasn't alone in thinking it looked stupid and immediately forgetting it, given the record breaking opening weekend, and total gross of $6.2m, or less than 1/3 of the production/marketing costs.
At least some memory of that movie came back to me, eventually. Others on the list rang no bells, even after I researched them. Even when they flopped within the past few years. Lucky You? Rumor Has It? Firehouse Dog? Raise Your Voice? Zoom? The funny thing about each of those, once I attempted to refresh my memory by reading the synopsis on MetaCritic, is that they all reminded me of some other movie. None of them seemed in any way original; they were all rip offs of some other successful film, or at least looked like it, and I think that might have been the secret of their failure. Potential viewers saw a trailer or an ad, saw nothing new or exciting, and mentally filed it as a lame derivative of some other, similar, more successful, not necessarily any good, movie. Most of them have really bad titles, too. Generic, non-evocative, or instantly forgettable.
Perhaps the king (queen?) of that is this film, which didn't make the list since it only opened on 1121 theaters. It was mentioned in an article about the weekend with the highest number of wide releases, which was last Oct 19-21. Unsurprisingly, most of them fell through the cracks, led by the bet-losing title, Sarah Landon and the Paranormal Hour, which starred no one you've ever heard of, and which features a perfect image on the MetaCritic page. I inserted it earlier in this update. That's the film's "star," I assume, and she's (helpfully) making exactly the face most of the rest of us made when we read the title of the movie. It earned $858,415 total in the US, had no international release, and made $586,283 its opening weekend, on 1121 theaters. That's a whopping $522 per screen! Enough to make The Rocker seem like a hit, in comparison.
One of my neighbors in my apartment complex has a new tiny little doggie. It's relatively cute, as such things go, but it's very skittish and scaredy and (naturally) yappy. It's a hybrid dog, one of those labradoodle-like combinations, but one with a far less cutely combinable name. It's a Shi-tzu, Pomeranian mix. Yep. Just try to blend that one. Pomer-tzu? Shiteranian? Tragic.
This morning, whilest out tending to my fading patio garden, I saw an old lady walking along the sidewalk, with a couple of little dogs of her own. I don't know what kind. I don't care what kind. They were under 10 pounds, and therefore entirely lacking in function or dignity. She paused on the sidewalk, and looking up at my neighbor's back patio (which was around the corner from where I could see), said, apparently to her dogs, "Oh look at him. What a cutie!"
Her dogs naturally looked nowhere and at nothing, since they had each other's asses to sniff. But apparently the Shiteranian was out on the back patio, and it must have looked down at her, since it started yarping, and that drew the attention of her dogs, which looked up and started bapping, and for about 30 seconds there it was a veritable rat dog symphony.
I'm not much of a dog fan, under any circumstances, but what I would have given right then for a 4th dog to appear, one that weighed more than a new born human, and one equipped with a real bark. One powerful "woof!" would have reduced those those three noisy, pet-like objects to trembling puff balls, and restored a proper equilibrium to the universe.
Alas, no such rescuing Lassie appeared, and I had to do my best to ignore the ongoing dogerwauling until the old lady dragged her hyperactive, bewigged rodents out of visual range. Worst of all, the whole incident reminded me of the utterly surreal teaser for that abomination of a talking dog movie. I saw Wall-e with Malaya a few weeks ago, and as is always the case when viewing a Pixar movie in theaters, the trailers were a uniquely-horrifying ordeal. Those literally function as birth control; I can't imagine any couple sitting through 15 minutes of previews for things like Chimps in Space, Bolt, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Madagasgar 2, and not thinking, "Maybe we could wait another year or two before bringing something into our home that would keep the DVD player constantly humming with such fare." Sadly, no such disinclination seems to give potential rat dog owners pause, and they (the owners and their odious livestock) are therefore spreading like a particularly unpleasant, noisy, furry plague.
Like most other ills in modern America, this can probably be blamed on celebrity culture. The masses see semi-fictional characters like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears toting around their overbred, mutated canine-like accessories, and thus a viral meme takes root. The official site for the chihuahua movie (click this at your own risk; it's psychedelically-horrifying) has an appropriate disclaimer along the bottom of the page.
Owning a pet is a major responsibility. Dogs require daily care and constant attention. Before bringing a dog into your family, research the specific breed to make sure it is suitable for your particular situation. Learn about and be willing to undertake the serious responsibilities of dog care. Always consider adoption from a reputable shelter or rescue program.
What would you give to see that tattooed across Paris Hilton's forehead?
Two videos that made me laugh today. Basically unrelated.
Opening sketch from Saturday Night Live, with two of the performers doing Sarah Palin and Hilary Clinton. Not a bad sketch, but seems like it could have been truly awesome, with some more clever writing.
I've been online long enough to know that nothing, no matter how obviously sarcastic, satirical, or unbelievable, will be taken seriously and literally by some people. That said, I still can't believe how many posters on the You Tube thread about this one seem to think it's making a serious, pro-belief argument. Even if they are You Tube commenters...
Jinx eats only dry food. Friskies, usually. I've read enough about the crap (by product cereal filler and sprayed on grease for taste, mostly) they put into commecial pet food to wish I could feed her real food, like they tell you how to make on those hippie organic they-are-our-companions pet sites. There are recipes to blend up raw meat and cereals and animal organs and all kinds of other stuff for optimum nutrition. You can make a ton and freeze the extra for later feedings, so it's not like you're spending more time (maybe $) on your ass-licking feline's meals than your own, but it's still a far greater effort than just opening a 50 pound bag of Friskies and pouring it into a self-refilling feeder. Maybe someday when I can afford it, etc.
She eats the dry food happily enough, and gets table scraps semi-frequently, though not as often as in her first couple of years, since I eat meat far less often than I/Malaya did when we lived together. She's gotten pickier, too. (Jinx, not Malaya. Well... her too, I guess. Hence me here, and she there.) Jinx used to eat bread crumbs, popcorn, soy milk, ramen noodles, and virtually any kind or quality of meat we'd give her. She still enjoys some of those, but these days she'll often beg for something she ignores once a morsel of it is provided. She also gets a can of tuna, or just the juice from it, once in a while, and enjoys that quite a bit. Oddly, she's not a big fan of actual wet cat food. She won't eat the usual foam-rubber looking canned type at all, and when I give her one of my dwindling supply of cat food in a pouch, she'll lick up the juice, but generally ignores the shaped meat-chunk pellet things. Not that I can much blame her on that one. They look awful.
One thing she does love, without reservation, are cat treats. She loves the Temptations variety, in any flavor, but has never failed to prrffff and chirp about and leap for and run after any other brand I've picked up at the $.99 store. I usually feed her 10 or 12 at a time, every other or third day, and she loves it. I shake the jar I keep them in, and she perks up and runs over and rubs anything nearby. She'll bark of brrrowfff a bit if she's especially excited. When I feed her I do it one treat at a time, and always by throwing them. She loves to chase them down and chomp them as quickly as she can, and she'll run back to me after each throw if I make her wait. Her swatting instincts are displayed to good measure during this ritual, and quite often I'll toss one over her head, she'll leap and bat at it, and knock it across the room like a drunken volleyball player.
A typical session has her knocking away and losing 2 or 3 of the 10 or 12 I toss her, and I'm sure when I move out of this apartment and pack up all the furniture, I'll find a good handful of these things behind the bookcase and couch. Often I'll see Jinx digging under some piece of furniture, or pawing around a corner, then happily chomping the treat she's just located and dragged into biting range.
She eats Friskies too, and can easily be tricked into running after one if I throw it like a treat, but when she catches it she sniffs in surprise, then turns and withers me with a glare of disgust; fair payment for my treachery!
So, two questions. What's in the treats that makes them so much more delicious, and why don't they just make Friskies (or other bulk cat food) taste like treats?
Personally, I think it's a conspiracy. A kind of mutual non-aggression pact between the cat food companies. They all make some basic model of cat food, and they all sell treats, which are about 50x as expensive, by weight. Obviously the treats have a vastly higher profit margin, so it's in their interest to have treats taste much better than regular dry chow. After all, if Jinx didn't bark and run around and leap for them, I wouldn't keep buying them to feed her.
All the cat food companies know that cats like treats better. They clearly have the technology to make tiny dry pellets of food that cats like, and that cats love. Why doesn't one company just make their regular bulk food taste like the treats? Cats would love it, would refuse to eat other brands, the company would sell more, make more money, etc.
Two reasons: First, it would be a short-lived coup, since the other pet food companies would follow suit. Second, it would destroy the treats market, which is, as formerly noted, far more profitable than the dry chow. Therefore, it's in the best interest of Purina and Nine Lives and all the others to keep their dry chow just good enough that cats will eat it, but not so good that it approaches treats quality, since that would bring their whole house of cards crashing down.
On the other hand, it's possible that cats only like treats so much since they're scarcer. If I poured a whole bowl full of them Jinx would gorge, but after a day or two would she get sick of them? Maybe they're like chocolate or ice cream or dessert wine; incredibly tasty in limited quantities, but overpowering (for most people) in volume.
Alternatively, the treats might actually be better quality food. Maybe they've got more meat by products in them, maybe they're less chemicals and fat spray, and as a result cats like them better, and they cost most to manufacture. Surely not 50x more, but enough more that selling them in 25 pound bags would make them cost far more than current cat chow. Of course there are "gourmet" types of dry cat food that do cost much more than Friskies and other generic bulk bags, but I always figured that was just marketing. Same crap + boutique brand name + fancy label = perceived value. Like Grey Poupon; dijon mustard isn't much more expensive than regular yellow mustard, but by selling it in tiny bottles for $5, rather than big bottles for $2, people decide that it tastes better. Gladwell has a fascinating chapter on that in Blink (or maybe it was one of his speeches I read, and I'm conflating the two.)
And with that, I going to give Jinx some treats and go to bed.
Elections, Politics, and the Sliding Scale of Judging Human Performance
The Sarah Palin for veep thing is still going on, and despite the fact that virtually everyone who isn't currently writing a right wing blog realizes she's entirely unfit for the office. It's become a surreal situation, as the election debate is now her vs. Obama, with McCain almost a forgotten man (which is almost certainly a feature, not a bug, since voters like McCain more the less they see/hear about him). Since Palin has no political accomlishments and no relevant experience, Republicans are fantastically unpopular after 8 disastrous years of Bush, and the national political media has become Gawker-esque in their obsession with personality issues over complicated things like... policy.
This is nothing new; it's been the Republican play book for years, since Karl Rove used it so successfully to get Bush semi-elected twice. He "won" in 2000 since the media portrayed him as a folksy class clown type you'd want to have a beer with, while Al Gore was too intense and pointy-headed and intellectual. Bush was reelected in 2004, despite terrible approval ratings (which have only descended since) when the media portrayed John Kerry as elite and French-like and rebroadcast all the Swift Boat slanders of his Vietnam heroism. (That may go down as the most amazing turn of political events in American election history. That John Kerry, a well off young man who volunteered to serve in Vietnam, was wounded in battle, and received several combat decorations for valor, was slandered for his service... while running against a war-mongering president and vice president, both of whom used family connections to dodge the draft. It boggles the mind. Even 4 years later.)
So, now we're in 2008, Bush's two terms are up, and since not even Republicans would suggest that Dick "Shotgun" Cheney step up a level and run for president, the horse race was on. John McCain won it, somewhat surprisingly, since he was the most moderate (at least by reputation) of the candidates, and therefore the one least embraced by the party base. He was competing against Barack Obama, a much younger and more vigorous man, a legendarily-gifted public speaker, and a very strong campaigner who had just pulled off a huge upset by outworking and politically outsmarting the entrenched front runner, Hillary Clinton. The contrast between the candidates was quite clear, and despite Obama's two major shortcomings (in terms of being elected in America), black skin and an Islamic name -- he was narrowly or substantially leading McCain in every poll, and massacring him in the unscientific "enthusiasm factor."
Democrats, and tons of new, young voters, were itching to vote for Obama, and against the Bush legacy. Democrats were obliterating Republicans in new voter registration and campaign donations, Obama couldn't book venues large enough to hold the people who wanted to see him speak, and the slimy tactics of smearing him as a stealth Muslim and unpatriotic were losing their effect outside of the fever swamps. McCain, on the other hand, had been the least popular of the Republican candidates with the right wing fringe fanatics who push the publicity and internet debate, and they didn't like him a great deal more as a presidential candidate, despite his working for their support by flopping (back to the right) on every issue he'd ever supported to earn the "maverick" reputation the media so adored him for.
McCain had clearly hoped to win by holding the right wing base and appealing to moderate voters. That's how he won the nomination, since the fringe makes 99% of the noise, but is numerically only 20 or 30% of the Republican voters. They hated him, but all the regular people and lower-information voters remembered him from previous campaign runs and punched his ticket. Indications were that McCain was leaning towards ex-Democrat Joe Lieberman for his VP, in an obvious attempt to get moderates to vote for him. Lieberman was Gore's VP back in 2000, before he lost his mind and went all neocon after 9/11, and while he's now very right wing on "national defense" (funny how the Bush Doctrine turned that term into an oxymoron) he's still essentially a liberal on social issues (like McCain used to pretend to be).
Someone in McCain's campaign realized that wouldn't work, since it wouldn't reverse any trends. McCain wasn't going to steal Obama's support amongst the moderate voters, and he wasn't going to compete in the election if he didn't get the right wing base fired up and score some media coverage. He needed someone young and energetic, and he needed an outsider. Just picking another ranting Christian white male politician, like the dozen he'd defeated in the Republican primary, wouldn't get anyone's attention. So, in what's turned into a move as politically savvy as it was functionally preposterous, he tapped the obscure, inexperienced, but culturally conservative, fire-breathing, right wing female governor of Alaska as his VP. While this led to some hilariously bald-faced hypocrisy on the part of various Republican talking heads, it's got a real possibility to swing the election in McCain's favor.
In any normal situation, picking someone clearly unprepared for the job of VP, especially to serve under an elderly president with a very checkered medical history, would be enough to terrify even the party loyal. In this day and age, when the Republican base cares only about ideology and not results, it's actually seen as a benefit.
The fun thing is to switch the roles, or the political parties involved. Imagine if an older white male Democrat had won the nomination, and trailing in the polls, had flailed for a life rope and decided to pick a younger, little-known female to be his VP, (Aside from the fact that this already happened.) then thrust her onto the national stage without adequately vetting her background. And imagine that she was a liberal female, from some obscure corner of the country, who no one had ever heard of before. And imagine that as soon as she was in the national spotlight, one scandal after another came to light.
She displayed a voracious appetite for pork as the mayor of her tiny town, left it deeply in debt, tried to ban books, and fired the town librarian. Her husband, who she insists on CC'ing in on state business, is a member of a wacky fringe pro-treason/secession party. She's being investigated for a variety of ethical issues, including pressuring a government official to fire her sister's state cop ex-husband, and then firing the official when he wouldn't bend to her will. Her money-grubbing only increased as governor, and she never met a pork project she didn't like, including several that landed her on the avarice list compiled by her now-running mate, back in his mavericky, anti-pork days. Better yet, in terms of inciting fury from the "family values" conservative base, she selfishly endangered the health of her unborn daughter, putting her career first by making speeches and flying cross country while 8 months pregnant and leaking embryonic fluid. And she's got a teenaged daughter who's unmarried and knocked up by the school jock.
I think it's fair to say that woman would be incinerated by the national media, led by the right wing media. Sanctimonious aging white male hypocrites like Rush "Dominican Whores" Limbaugh and Bill "settled out of court" O'Reilly would devote their their entire shows to slamming her inexperience, her criminally negligent mothering, the damage her first slut daughter, baby daddy boyfriend, and bastard grandson would do to the nation's morals, etc. And if the woman's only real defense against these denunciations was that they were being mean to her because she was a woman... they would simply turn up the volume and use that as further argument against her. As they did when Hillary obliquely complained about the sexism and double standards she was facing in her primary campaign.
Needless to say, none of this has happened, since this particular woman is a right wing Republican herself. More surprisingly, the fact that virtually her entire bio and resume would doom a liberal female are actually working as selling points for her. Those things humanize her and make her more middle class and help people identify with her. It's basically the whole, "George Bush is the candidate you'd want to have a beer with" argument, in a dress. Competency, experience, professionalism, knowledge, temperament, statesmanship... everything we're supposed to value in a president or vice president is not supposed to be applied to Sarah Palin, since she's not just another old white male Republican.
I've had theory I've been meaning to write about for years. I'm not going to get fully into it today, but it postulates that humans use a sort of sliding scale of ability vs. type, when judging performance. It's about expectations. For instance, if a model, or an actor, or a jock gives an interview and doesn't completely mangle the language and seems to have a thought or two in their heads, we're impressed. Whereas we would simply expect that (or a higher) level of competence from a college professor, or a journalist, or some other thinking profession.
Example: Angelina Jolie. Everyone thinks she's brilliant since she's a statuesque beauty, she can speak with composure while on TV answering softball questions from a star struck reporter, and she does those UN humanitarian missions that largely involve looking radiant while posing with emaciated refugees. It's as if her entire life prior to about 2003, when she was on drugs, fucking every guy in Hollywood, drinking Billy Bob Thorton's blood and getting a giant tattoo of his name on her arm, etc, didn't happen. Or more to the point, those years actually make her seem smarter now, since our initial impressions of her were "big-lipped stupid slut actress" and now that she's not embroiled in regular scandals, has a pretty husband, and is making a lot of babies, she's a role model.
Example: Tyra Banks. This might be somewhat less true now than it was a few years ago when I was initially formulating this idea and talking it over with Malaya, but back then Tyra had just started her own talk show after a few guest hosting show appearances and some visits on Oprah. She was horrible. She wasn't anything approaching a journalist, she was clearly quite stupid, she couldn't speak very well, etc. But she was a famous ex-supermodel, she was very pretty (after several hours of makeup and hair work), and she exuded some level of personality. So the media kept saying she was good, and that people liked her, and her show became a hit based largely on people admitting that her show wasn't really any good, but that it was a lot less bad than it might have been.
Example: Shaquille O'neal. Circa 2004 he was the best player in the NBA. He'd won three straight championships with the Lakers, he was a scoring and rebounding monster, and an unstoppable force on the court. The most talented "big man" in the game. And he was, but judged objectively... he wasn't actually any good. His success was based entirely on him being physically gigantic. He was coordinated and agile and athletic... for a 7 foot, 350 pound man. Only the fact that he was taller and stronger than almost everyone else made him successful. If you took his basketball skill set and put it on a guy who was 6'6", he couldn't have cracked the starting rotation at a junior college, much less starred in the NBA. Shaq couldn't make a shot beyond 8 feet, he had no fade away, no hook, no drop step, nothing. He was just power to the basket, and the fact that he was historically awful at free throw shooting did much to limit his effectiveness in close games, since his team couldn't give him the ball in crunch time or the other team would just foul him. Eventually smart coaches realized it was better to just "hack a Shaq" him even without the ball, an approach Shaq frequently rewarded with 8-22 free throw shooting efforts.
Announcers used to rave about Shaq when he occasionally dribbled and ran, but think about that. The man was earning $20m+ a year to play a game that he'd played every day of his life since about age 6. And we were supposed to be impressed that he could semi-adequately perform one of the most basic elements of it? An ability possessed by 95% of 5th grade boys on earth? What kind of grading on a curve is that? It's the sliding scale of human performance.
Sarah Palin encapsulates this. She'd have no career at all if she were a Democrat, since most women politicians are, and therefore only the really talented or charismatic ones rise to high positions. But since she's a Republican, and a fundie/right-wing type, and she's not a empty-eyed, jowly white male squeezed into a shiny suit, she's a revelation. It's the same reason Ann Coulter and (especially) Michelle Malkin are famous and successful. Neither of them are actually any good at what they do, and when white males try the same angry, attack politics they pursue, it usually takes them nowhere. There are tens of thousands of white men pursuing the same niche market, and very few of them make a living at it. Men doing that screaming, five-minutes-of-hate shtick are that are seen as angry and scary, and while the base might embrace them, they get little cross over or national appeal. But when pretty (?) women (?) dance their way through the same routine, it's novel and fresh and interesting. And less threatening, scary, and angry, as well.
Which brings us to now. Two months until election day, and once again, despite the best efforts of Obama and most of the liberal blogosphere, we've got an American presidential election that's almost entirely devoid of content. The right wing blogosphere is doing all it can to concoct utterly disingenuous daily outrages, and while the national media is growing less willing to continue their false equivalences, and having more trouble ignoring the slimy, substance-free campaign McCain is running, they're institutionally predisposed against doing their duty and flatly calling a lie, a lie. And even if they did, I don't know if it would matter. After all, it's not like anyone's supporting McCain/Palin for logical, scholarly, policy-based reasons. That's the whole point.
For a final digression, Kevin Drum recently posted on something I found very interesting. Where will this lead? Most of us, myself included, are only looking as far as the election. What happens afterwards, though?
If McCain wins, he'll face a Democratic congress that's beyond furious. Losing is one thing, but after eight years of George Bush and Karl Rove, losing a vicious campaign like this one will cause Dems to go berserk. They won't even return McCain's phone calls, let alone work with him on legislation. It'll be four years of all-out war.
And what if Obama wins? The last time a Democrat won after a resurgence of the culture war right, we got eight years of madness, climaxing in an impeachment spectacle unlike anything we'd seen in a century. If it happens again, with the lunatic brigade newly empowered and shrieking for blood, Obama will be another Clinton and we'll be in for another eight years of near psychotic dementia.
With such a hotly competitive presidential election, I've heard little about congressional elections, but the Democrats made huge gains in 2006, narrowly taking control of the House and Senate, and President Bush and Republicans have only gotten less popular since then, in the opinion pols I've seen. The consensus seems to be that the Democrats are almost certain to at least hold their advantage, and are most likely to pick up numerous additional seats in congress.
If Obama wins, he'll have a clear mandate for change, and since he's campaigned on a lot of issues, he'll get right to working on them, and will have legislative support. If McCain wins, he'll not only be opposed by two very hostile houses of congress, but since his campaign has no issues, and those it does have are perpetuations of things Bush did that people have come to hate, what will he do? Seriously? What will he do? I have no idea what he wants to do domestically, but even if he had some major agenda, there's no way the Democratic congress would go along with it. McCain's first response to international disputes is to start a war, but I don't think he'll be able to talk the country into another one at this point, even if the military had the capability to fight it, after 7 years of being overextended in Iraq. There are major problems with the economy, but McCain is uninterested in that and he'll just follow the institutional Republican approach by trying to cut taxes on the rich and praying that invisible market hands fix things. Which sometimes works, but isn't exactly proactive, and in any rate, isn't doing anything. Which was my question.
It looks like the last 2 years of the Bush Administration will be entirely bereft of notable events. Aside from the Telecom Amnesty plan that legally erased the criminal sale of our privacy to intrusive federal authorities, is there a single important piece of legislation, or other act of political consequence, that's happened since 2006? When's the last time anyone saw Bush? I don't remember anything involving him since that chest bumping he did at the Naval Academy Graduation. Can you imagine 4 more years of this? It's looking like you might not have to imagine it. You might get to live through it. Buy a fiddle. Rome's smoldering.
As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I've been enjoying a recording of a Chris Cornell acoustic concert. I had this song on repeat all evening, and during it my mood went gradually from "great song" to "heart broken" to "fiction aspirations." It's a yearningly beautiful, terribly sad love song. Here's a good quality recording of it from You Tube, or you can just download the whole album and extract the mp3, though you didn't hear me say that.
It was originally a Temple of the Dog song, but I think this version is a substantial improvement over the original. The acoustic guitar is just accompaniment, bringing Chris' vocal performance more to the front, and he's a better singer now, than he was in 1990. And perhaps he's learned a bit more about heartbreak and yearning in 20 years?
Read along with the lyrics as you listen, if you are so inclined. I'll get to the fiction inspiration below them.
You call me a dog well that's fair enough it aint no use to pretend, you're wrong when you call me out I can't hide anymore I have no disguise you cant see through
You say its bad luck To have fallen for me What can I say to make it good for you You wore me out, like an old winter coat Trying to be safe from the cold
But when its my time to throw the next stone I'll call you beautiful if I call at all
You call me a dog You say that I'm low cause I've slept on the floor Out in the woods with the badgers & wolves You threw me out cause I went digging for gold And I came home with a hand of coal
But when its my time to throw the next stone I'll call you beautiful if I call at all And when it's my time to call your bluff I'll call you beautiful or leave it alone
You call me a dog Well that's fair enough It doesn't bother me as long as you know Bad luck will follow you If you keep me on a leash and You drag me along
repeat chorus...
I feel these lyrics and emotion so profoundly, when I play the song loud and really listen to it. It tells a story; it doesn't just repeat the same chorus or verse a bunch of times, and it's got a cleverness and almost a plot twist with the wordplay in the final lines. It's not exactly autobiographical for me, but I think anyone who has ever loved and lost (which is anyone who has ever loved), or even just really, really wanted to love, and been denied the opportunity, can take something personal from this one.
It's archetypal. I will use a variant of this plot in a novel, some day.
My takeaway lesson isn't exactly what the lyrics convey, though. I feel it as a narrative of a man who loves a powerful woman too much. He's devoted to her, and she enjoys his devotion, but treats him like shit, while using him for her own purposes and needs. Eventually, someday, through the vicissitudes of fortune, their positions reverse, and she's the one down in the mud. He's got the power over her, others are urging him to take revenge, or to leave her to die. He's envenomed for vengeance, she's resigned to her fate, or bitterly defiant. But as he takes the stone in his hand, and raises it (metaphorically) to crush her... he hesitates. He can't do it. He still loves her. Perhaps now more than ever, with her vulnerability finally on display.
I don't see a happy ending to this tale, if you're wondering. There's no redemption of her, or validation of his love. He doesn't win her over. She takes the reprieve he offers and uses it to escape, or perhaps to restore her former power. She might even take a crueler revenge on him, for daring to spare her; to insult her by showing her mercy in her moment of shame and weakness.
The genders of one, or both, can of course be reversed without losing any of the essential archetypal power of the fable.
I recently read Malcolm Gladwell's two best sellers, Blink and The Tipping Point, and found them fairly underwhelming. Both were interesting and entertaining and informative, but they didn't have any real stickiness in my mind, or coherence in themselves. They were just a bunch of interesting anecdotes and statistics, but they didn't coalesce into a unified, persuasive whole.
And sure, that's a pretty high standard for any book to meet, which is probably why I didn't think they were that great; my expectations going in were rather high, after hearing great things about them for so long.
That said, I will highly recommend this video. It's a speech he gave in 2005 in which he talks about the usefulness (or not) of elite university educations. He argues that they're not very useful at all, and makes a pretty compelling case. His main point is that elite colleges, like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc, aren't anything special at turning students into successful adults. The reason most people who come out of those colleges succeed is that those colleges only admit people who are very likely to succeed no matter where they go to college. Gladwell's comparison, which took a while to make sense, is to modeling agencies. They don't make people beautiful or turn them into models; they simply select people who are already beautiful to join their crew of models.
So it's not that Yale does something to students during their 4 or 5 years that makes them achievers, it's that Yale gets to select the cream of the crop of 18 year olds, and since they only pick the best ones, of course the majority of the ones they pick will be successful. It's a selection bias.
Gladwell has a lot of data points to argue his conclusion. Among the most interesting was when they did matched pair studies on students who were accepted to elite universities, but didn't go there. They couldn't afford it or wanted to stay closer to home or whatever. Their salaries, 10 and 20 years after college, were essentially identical to the those of students who were just like them at 18, but who did go to the elite schools.
That surprised me.
The selection bias part was obvious, once Gladwell pointed it out, but I believed the whole, "The connections you make in the school will propel you to success." logic you so often hear espoused as dogma. As he argued, active, motivated, likely-to-be-successful people make contacts wherever they are, and you can meet plenty of people who will further your career at any college with reasonable academic requirements.
Anyway, check out the video. It's about half an hour and the sound quality is pretty good. This is the sort of thing I listen to while cooking or doing housework, and it's informative and far more entertaining than say, watching Mtv. (More on that below.)
For a change of pace and value, here's the Mtv VMAs in 2 minutes, by Best Week Ever. I recommend you not click it, if you're like me and haven't watched Mtv since about the time Beavis and Butthead were still on. It will bore you, but will also provide a useful reminder of why you no longer watch Mtv.
I made it through 45 seconds, my twitching mouse finger finally descending on the stop button when the Pussycat Dolls won something other than best transvestite novelty act. At least I'd heard of them, though. Some accountant-looking guy named Chris Brown won best male video, which they showed immediately after Britney Spears won best female video, and my surprise at that, "who the hell is he?" moment was all that kept me going after Britney's silver astronaut pity fuck.
This weekend I've been listening to what I thought was an Audioslave acoustic concert. That's what it said when I downloaded it, anyway. Once I looked it up I found that it was actually Chris Cornell (the lead singer of the now broken up ? band) doing his solo thing, and that one of the songs from the acoustic concert was featured on his solo album, which was released earlier this year. (Which I was surprised to see in the Chris Cornell folder in my music folder; when the hell did I download it, and never get around to listening to it?) Since that song was a cover of Michael Jackson's Billie Jean, and was a song I found notably awesome and very distinctive, and since I found a very good audio version of it on You Tube, I thought I'd share.
The funny thing is that in the comments on the You Tube page, some people mentioned a David Cook version of the song = FTW. I'd never heard of the guy; I would have said he was that smirky white boy comedian everyone over the age of 23 hates, if I had to guess. I soon learned otherwise; he was an American Idol contestant who did his own semi-soulful version of Billie Jean on the show. (This year? Earlier? No idea. I'm guessing he didn't win, since I usually hear the names of the winners at some point.) Through the magic of You Tube, I was able to witness his 2 minute version, as had 4.5million people before me. Here you go:
It's not horrible, as I automatically assumed it would be, given its genesis, but it's nothing special. He's not a bad singer, and could probably perform serviceably on most material, but for a song that gives a vocalist such a potential showcase like this one, he did nothing memorable with it. He's just a white guy with a white guy voice. He needs to start smoking or something, since his voice is vanilla. No rasp, no edge, no soul, and he's either lacking in emotional depth or can't channel it into his vocals, since there's no intensity or tone or inflection to his singing. He doesn't modulate very much, and he sounds overly-tutored and rehearsed in the way he holds the notes and does his octave changes. It's mechanical. Unspontaneous.
Which is, of course, why he was a hit on American Idol and is now worshiped by legions of 14 y/o white girls from the suburbs. Since he's kind of soulful and seems faux-deep, but isn't actually, since authenticity and intensity would scare away the teenie-boppers who like this safe, watered-down style of pop.
Back in January, the IG and I had a conversation about her future plans, and where and how and if a boyfriend would fit into them. She was tempted and torn by the notion, and the man who was postulating it, but she'd only been single for a couple of months at that point, and hadn't been happy with how her last (and previous) relationships had gone. She felt she was too busy with full time school and two part time jobs, and that she couldn't fit a boyfriend into that, at least not with the quality of relationship she wanted. She'd felt like her previous boyfriend was almost a long distance relationship, even though he only lived 15 miles away and they often saw each other at school, and she didn't want that again.
She rescinded that rule for about a week around Valentine's Day, and we had a lovely date and a lovelier follow up date at my apt one day, but she came to her senses before March began, and held her ground through the rest of the spring. We saw each other all the time, and traded phone txts and emails and talked now and then, but it was purely as friends. (Obviously she knew I had ulterior desires, if not motives, and we'd joke about it from time to time, but it wasn't as if I was actively trying to seduce her or pressure her into anything.)
In early summer, before she went away for 2+ months on an internship, we had a conversation much like the one we'd had in January, with a similar outcome. I really couldn't argue with her logic; she was going to be out of the country from late May until early August, when she got back she was going to do some other traveling, she had to help her younger sister move down south and get set in college, and then her own fall semester started in late August. At that point (now) she'd be back where she was in the spring; full time student, working at least two part time jobs, with a lot of friends to find time for, and no realistic time for a boyfriend. (And that's how things have turned out.)
She wasn't leading me on or stringing me along; she never asked me to wait for her, or flirted and then shied away, etc. Quite the opposite; she kept encouraging me to find a woman who was looking for a boyfriend, and offered me advice on good ways and places to meet women. I didn't take her advice, but I did make some efforts to meet women over the summer. I even met some, but none that worked out. I think I mentioned it on the blog at some point, but mostly on a lark, while semi-drunk late night on my June 20th birthday, I posted a personal add on Craig's List. It didn't go well.
I didn't get a ton of weird spammers and scammers, as I'd expected. That would have been better. What I got were several replies from women who were around my age or "a few years older," and while two of the four were fairly interesting to talk with via email, when they got around to sending me pictures I was, frankly, horrified. Thrown for a loop, as they say. I never met any of them in person, or even talked to them over the phone, and I disliked myself for simply ending the conversations as abruptly as I did, but the pictures... *shudders at the memory*
I'm not going to post any of the photos here, and I never told them my real name or used my regular email or mentioned my blog, so I'm sure none of them are reading this now, which is why I can honestly say that the experience made me question my heterosexuality. Not that it almost turned me gay; more like, "If all women looked like that, I'd just be celibate."
I've never been unhappy alone, and I hate hanging out in clubs or bars, and I'm not into spending time with people I don't enjoy spending time with. As a result I haven't dated that much or had that many girlfriends, but by chance or design, I've been pretty fortunate in the quality of women I have ended up with. No Victoria's Secret models, but none who weren't at least "pretty" by any conventional scale, and none who were anywhere above "plump." Usually closer to "slender." More importantly, I realize in retrospect, they all were young, and looked it. I've dated women older than me, but I was in my early 20s then, and in more recent years they've been younger, if only by a few years. On the whole though, I've never dated a woman who didn't get carded any time she went near a bar. I still get carded, for that matter.
The women who replied to my CL personal were not ugly, and they might even have been pretty. But they were clearly nowhere near slender, and most crucially, as I discovered to my surprise, they looked old. Not elderly, probably not even past 40, but when I received emails with photos, I immediately thought, "I'd be dating my mother." Which isn't a plus, in my judgment.
My reaction was way off base, of course. My mom is over 60, and while she was a beauty pageant winner in her youth, and she looks good for her age, these women were clearly decades younger than she. But after spending half a year hugging, occasionally kissing, and regularly looking into the face and eyes of the beautiful, size zero, 22 y/o IG -- that after spending four years with the beautiful and typically youthful-Asian-looking Malaya, I couldn't make the jump to secretary-haired, soccer mom type white women in their late 30s. It was day to night. Or at least day to very late afternoon/early evening.
It was partially my fault; I'd neglected to include a desired age range on my post and hadn't lied about my own (very much), so women within hailing range of it felt within their rights to try their luck with a hunky younger man. *cough* They just happened to be women who looked their age (or perhaps they were well-preserved 45 y/os?), while I look well under my own, (I never felt out of place ferrying the coed IG around the Bay Area) and (apparently) look for even further under my own, when it comes to picking women.
That realization, I think, is part of what made the CL personal ad experience so traumatizing. I hadn't really thought about age when placing the ad, and hadn't considered that an issue of importance in picking a girlfriend. I just assumed that if I got any replies, they'd come from youthful, possibly-attractive women in their late 20s or early 30s, and that the deciding factors for us dating would be compatibility, conversational aptitude, hobbies/interests, appearance, etc. Instead I wound up talking to a couple of women who seemed fun and youthful and lively (and a couple who did not) and when I saw their pictures I reacted like the evil businessman who drank from the fake Holy Grail in Indiana Jones 3. Or, to be more accurate, I reacted like Elsa did in that scene, when faced with the evil businessman after he'd sipped from the fake Holy Grail.
I didn't just take it as "Oh well, bad luck on the personal ad replies. Better luck next time, and for good measure, use a more reputable, user-vetted service than CL." I took it as an existential dilemma. Was I supposed to be attracted to that? Is that what I had to look forward to? After all, even if I married one of the IG's classmates, in 10 or 15 years, they'd be that age. (And girth. And looks.) Was I doomed to a pathetic, Hefner-like existence, using my fame and fortune to trade up through a decades-long parade of interchangeable, 25 y/o dipsy blondes, while steadily transforming into a Crypt Keeper-esque homunculus?
Except that I don't have fame or fortune, or like blondes.
I don't know. Perhaps. I chose not to grapple with that dilemma in June or July, and quite likely it was what drove me to enjoy (so much) my summertime interaction with the IG. She was a thousand miles away, but she had cell phone service and plenty of free time to chat, and we traded numerous txts every day, talked for an hour at a time two or three times a week, and got to be quite close, even though we were far away. One thing we didn't do was flirt, or phone sex, or anything along those lines. It was very platonic; she'd tell me about the crazy people she was interviewing for her summer project and her annoying boss and the small town she was going stir crazy in, and I'd talk about things on my end, and we'd cheer each other up.
I had no reason to think things would change between "us" when she returned, and when she talked about hoping to keep her schedule lighter in the fall, and that she wanted to save more time for socializing and not be dashing to or from school or work every minute, I didn't believe it. I believed that was what she thought, and what she wanted, but I knew her well enough to feel certain that activities would rapidly fill her time, that she'd get another job, and that even if she found a roommate and moved out, as she kept daydreaming, that process would drag on and the end result would (somehow) have her even busier than before.
Nevertheless, when we got together for an evening last week, with dinner and much conversation on the agenda, I felt myself growing ever more enchanted, and eventually had to ask her the same question. Of course I got the same answer, but with even more nuance. She didn't have time for a boyfriend, and furthermore she'd given it a lot of thought and decided that her next relationship would be really special. Not just someone to spend romantic time with, but a sort of trial engagement. Someone she would rearrange her schedule around, focus her social life on, perhaps even live with.
All of which is fine and even admirable, but it's not going to happen for at least another year or two, and what she's looking for then isn't what I'm looking for now. I've never thought she was the woman I would marry (and I'm sure that impression, gender-flipped, is mutual), and even if she wanted that right now, I'm not sure I would be willing to provide it. I don't want to leap back into a full time, living together, pseudo-married situation. I want to have a serious, monogamous relationship, but I don't want to live together, or see each other every day, or not have other friends, etc. I want a fun, intelligent woman to do some cool activities with, talk to regularly and get to know, romance and date, and spend a night (or two) with each week. Basically what I have with the IG now, plus a little more time, and sex. And she wants that with me, minus the sex. In fact, that's basically what she has with me now, minus the sex and plus a ton of other friends pulling on her time.
As a result of that Sunday conversation, and its (inevitable) outcome, I was in a very glum mood Monday, angry and resentful Tuesday, and more or less back to normal Wednesday. I wish things were different, but the IG's answers and desires have been consistent all along, and now that I know where things stand and see that even if she had more free time it still wouldn't work... I can move on. Which brings me to the title of this post.
I was running some errands yesterday, and several times while touring Costco and Target, I saw things I knew the IG would like, and thought about sending her a photo, or a txt, and then realized there was no point in doing so. I still care about her, and want to see her as a friend, but the fact that I'm no longer trying to win her over for romance has entirely changed my attitude and outlook. Why would I make an extra effort to remotely include her in my activities? She's off doing her own thing. I'll text her if something interesting comes up, or I'm stuck in line at Costco, waiting to buy peaches that will turn out to be grainy and inedible; but the urge I felt all spring and summer to keep her apprised of my situation, to send her funny or encouraging txts, to keep track of what she was doing so I could remark appropriately at the end of the day... it's gone. And I find that very odd. How quickly, how switch-flickingly it ended.
It's genetically and biologically understandable; when the sex drive is engaged humans will do effortful things we'd never otherwise consider, but it's weird to see it in myself. Especially when I wasn't consciously thinking of the IG in that way. Sure, I wanted to fuck commence romantic activities with her, especially when she returned from her summer job 10 pounds lighter and even prettier, but it wasn't like I was sitting around txting her with a boner. (Not literally or figuratively. My phone buttons are way too small, for one thing.)
I knew it was very unlikely that she'd change her mind about having time for anyone to be her boyfriend, even/especially me. And I never consciously thought I was waiting for her, or trying to convince her to change her mind. And I didn't give up looking at and thinking about other women. And yet... my desire for romance with the IG was clearly a substantial motivating factor for most of my behavior over the past few months, given how differently I feel now that that dream is dead.
I still like her and want to spend time interacting with her; we might this weekend see the movie we were going to see last weekend, before we decided that we had too much to talk about and would rather spend our evening doing that. But I've not thought much about her the past couple of days, the idea of her spending her free time with her other friends doesn't give me the feeling of lost opportunities, I've felt no compunction to send her my usual string of chatty and engaging txts, and I'm just not viewing the world through the same prism. Yesterday I looked at the huge homecrafts warehouse store by Costco and my eyes slid right past it. It wasn't until later that I realized that I hadn't thought, as I had every time I saw that barn for the past near-year, "I should bring the IG here sometime -- she loves that girly decorating/sewing pattern stuff."
I'm not really thinking about finding someone else/new/different, at least not yet, but I think that thought will come. It did in mid-June, 4 weeks after the IG had departed for her summmer working vacation, but I don't think it'll take that long this time. Monday evening I spent my 2 hours in the gym sweating and scowling and cursing under my breath and thinking how happy I'd be to never be attracted to another woman ever again. Tuesday and Wednesday's gym sessions I was kind of in a fog and not thinking clearly about much of anything. Yesterday evening though, I was quite aware of two young women treadmilling their way towards fitness, and as I churned up the 20 minutes/120 flights on the stepmill that serves as my warm up exercise, I found myself thinking how much fun it would be to have a fit woman to workout with. Not to mention the enjoyment of sharing a shower and trading massages afterwards. Yes, hope, and erections, spring eternal. Even if chemical assistance is required.
Just clicked a webpage ad out of curiosity, and was appalled by the scam they're running. The ad was something like, "Take our online IQ test. 90% of people can't pass it!" It led to this site, with an embarrassingly easy ten question quiz. It's nothing to do with intelligence, the questions are pure trivia, and they might be challenging for oh... 10 year olds? How often does a leap year occur. What is sound measured in. Are tomatoes vegetables or fruit. Etc.
There are only ten questions, and after I clicked through them I wound up at the Get Results page, which asks me to enter my cell phone number to get my results. And then you read the fine print which runs for about 15 lines across the bottom of the page:
By entering the PIN code on the PIN submit page, you acknowledge you are subscribing to the service offered and that you will continue to be billed until you cancel the service.
The service, apparently, involves sending you additional quizzes with questions so interesting you could hardly get through 10 of them online. For free. I wonder how many people, kids mostly, this sort of scheme ensnares? Enough that they can afford to post ads leading to it on Facebook, at any rate.
I'm way too excited about this. I meant to make one or two sample images, and in half an hour I'd turned out 11, 4 of which I deemed substandard or too dirty to post, and trashed. I should have saved them to post here? The 7 I did post are up in the contest gallery as samples.
Yes, it's an LOL Diablo contest. (DiabLOL?) Take any image from Diablo games, slap on a "can has cheezburger?" type caption, and submit it. I await the results eagerly. I enjoyed the 4 "Caption This" contests I ran last week, but this one is just too ripe for amusement. Plus I'm hoping to turn it into a perpetual, long term site feature, so this is a good way to kick start it. Here are a couple of the samples I slapped together. They're far from brilliant, but I laughed anyway. Of course I'm easily amused by LOLcaptions.
Volumes have already been written about Sarah Palin, McCain's laughably-unqualified choice for VP, a choice that was apparently entirely poll-driven and based on McCain's crush on a woman he'd met twice in his entire life. She's a hard core right wing Christian fundamentalist; a woman from well outside the mainstream of American political and social views, and even if that doesn't bother you, she's manifestly unfit to be VP, much less the proverbial heartbeat from the presidency. Fortunately, it's not as if McCain has a history of health problems, including cancer, and if elected would be, at 72, the oldest man to ever take office as US president. Oh wait...
At least Palin's selection has enlivened an otherwise tedious political race, as journalists dig through her very brief career and come away uniformly amazed and appalled at McCain's judgment in selecting her as his running mate. Palin's entire political experience was a short stint as the mayor of some podunk hicksville town, and a year and a half as the disinterested-in-policy governor of Alaska, the state with the 4th smallest population in the US. And that's not even getting to the good stuff, like her pending indictment for influence peddling in getting her sister's ex-husband fired from his job as a State Trooper, her past membership in an Alaskan secessionist movement party, her former job as the director of corrupt and disgraced senator Ted Stevens' fund raising group, her support of the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" boondoggle, the fact that her underage daughter is five-months knocked up by her boyfriend (who the press release amusing referred to as her future-husband), and much, much more.
This might be my favorite tidbit yet, though. It's from an Alaskan political blog, posted in 2006 when Palin was running for governor. The blogger sent a questionnaire about social and cultural issue to all the candidates. Two of whom answered. One of them was Palin, and her replies are quite enlightening. She's doctrinal on all the right wing "family" issues; anti-abortion, against real sex ed, for the (proven to be ineffective) abstinence only sex-ed (as her 17 y/o daughter's bulging belly testifies), etc. The funniest one is this:
11. Are you offended by the phrase “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not? SP: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.
This answer is clearly meant to be red meat to the Republican base, but I'm curious. Does she really believe it? I'm sure she supports the policy she advocates, but does she think what she said about "good enough for our founding fathers" has some historical accuracy? Since it's incorrect on multiple levels.
Most obviously, the US Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 (by a socialist who wanted to include "equality" and "fraternity" but knew it wouldn't be adopted if he did). It did not contain the phrase "under God" until those rhythm-wrecking words were awkwardly inserted in 1951, during the height of Cold War paranoia and anti-Soviet propaganda. Neither the pledge, nor the "under God" part, has anything to do with the Founding Fathers, by a good century.
More generally, the US constitution is probably the most famous secular document in existence, and it was certainly the first national charter in human history to not mention any specific religious dogmas, (there are several vague, theistic mentions of a "creator") and to explicitly remove any religious qualifications for citizenship or the holding of public office. That's covered thoroughly in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
It seems likely that Palin will be dumped long before the election, at the rate things are falling apart, but even if she's sent back to Anchorage in disgrace, at least her selection will have provided two benefits. (Three, if you count the amusement factor.) First, it's proven a useful tool for shining light on McCain's rash, impetuous nature (and his volatile temper will be revealed as calls for her to be dumped from the ticket grow louder). Second, it's drawing the fringe rightwing types out into the bright light of the media's attention, and the more regular US citizens see of the true beliefs and behavior of the American Taliban type fundamentalists, the sooner they'll be discredited and removed from public society.
The Bush Administration is overrun with such people; their ideology over reality approach is largely responsible for the disaster that the US occupation of Iraq descended into, the unconstitutional politicization of the US Attorneys' Office, our almost incalculable national debt, and a host of other political blunders. But the Bushies were run by savvy political operators like Karl Rove, who were good at presenting a sane face to the compliant press, while they skull-fucked all non-rich Americans behind the scenes. McCain's handlers are clearly less competent, at least in these early days. Let those of us who hope for a better tomorrow join in raising a ceremonial bottle of sauce to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, in prayer that McCain's guys won't have 4 years to learn better how to manipulate and scheme.
