BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: November 2008
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Of writers and (publishing) success...
As my nearly-lifeless corpse makes another slow rotation on my personal, "lots of good story ideas; not spending the time to write them out properly" rope, I've gained some inspiration from a couple of other writers. Stephenie Meyer, author of the teen/romance/vampire series Twilight, and adult romance author Nicholas Sparks. Both are enjoying massive success with their work, and both entered my consciousness recently. Meyer's Twilight is getting a ton of attention since the first movie just opened to gargantuan business, and Sparks popped into my attention via a profile of him in Entertainment Weekly magazine. I'll start with Sparks, since he (and his work) are more easily dismissed.
The guy and his books had never penetrated my consciousness until last week, when I finally got around to flipping through a month-old copy of Entertainment Weekly that had been sitting (as that lame magazine usually does) beside my toilet. I used to subscribe to the mag, but the endlessly-deteriorating quality of the content (and the popular entertainment it chronicles) gradually sapped my interest. My subscription lapsed last year and I hadn't missed it at all. My surprise was therefore not entirely pleasant when new issues started appearing in my mailbox this Fall. I threw out the first 4 or 5 unopened, but eventually found myself flipping through the new issues, then hating myself for the 10 or 15 minutes I'd never get back. I've now taken to depositing them in on the toilet, for obvious reasons... I might run out of TP some day.
(Curious about their origin, I finally asked my dad. He admitted that he'd given me the subscription, since when he renewed his own subscription they'd offered him a free one for a guest. The odd part is that he hates the magazine more than I do, and has even less interest in pop culture. Yet we're both receiving them in the mail.)
The issue in question I'd saved for some months since it was the memorial Paul Newman issue. I wasn't saving it for sentimental reasons, since frankly, I don't know much about his non-pasta sauce career. I saved it since I hadn't looked through it yet, and (foolishly) thought the issue would prove informative. It was, in a way. I now know that everyone in Hollywood loved him, and that even his bad movies and mailed-in performances were among the best ever committed to celluloid. It was just the sort of hard-hitting journalism that had me thinking about resubscribing to EW at least oh, never, during the time my subscription laid fallow.
More interesting than Newman's pictorial hagiography was a profile of best selling author Nicholas Sparks, contained in the same jam-packed issue. I read it for purely professional reasons, and found it quite informative. I'd never heard of the guy, but I had heard of one of his books. He wrote The Notebook, which I've never read, but I did recall hearing of the movie adaptation, which I've never seen. Hey, it's more familiarity than I can boast of with most pop culture phenomenas.
The Notebook might be Sparks' most famous novel, but he's far from a one hit wonder. As the EW article proudly proclaimed, he's the author of 14 bestsellers in 14 years. See for yourself; its online, and from it I'll quote a couple of writing-related chunks:
A novel takes him a few months to conceive and then five months to write. He sets a daily goal for himself of 2,000 words. He writes for five to six hours a day and types approximately 60 words a minute, which he says leaves him with 54 minutes an hour to stare at the computer and six minutes to actually write. ''See,'' he says, with a friendly shrug of his shoulders, ''it's not an unbelievable pace.''
...Sparks admits to an ever-present cloud of worry hanging over his head. ''After every book I feel like the well is dry,'' he says. ''Well, that's it! Got nothing. Done. Washed up. Don't know what I'm going to do. Maybe I'll write a cookbook.'' But then he practices his standard method of formulating the skeleton of his next love story. ''Okay,'' he says, getting excited, ''I just wrote The Lucky One. So the next one won't be a military story. I know that right off the bat. These characters were in their 20s, okay, so the characters are not in their 20s. Okay, so if you're in your 40s, what are the dilemmas? Oh, wait, I've got Nights in Rodanthe coming out, and that's a love story with characters in their 40s, so if I come out with a book just like that, people will think I'm not original. Okay, what are the dilemmas that typically face 30-year-olds that I haven't done? Are we dealing with a woman who has put herself on hold for the sake of her career? Very common for women. See, you want something universal. So, hmmm, where does that go? Could be anything. Hmmm, let me do her biological clock. Hmmm, maybe she goes to her 20th high school reunion? Ah, yes, maybe she had a boyfriend? Was he ever married? Was he divorced, is he widowed? Does he have kids? What if this, what if that, what if this...''
I imagine a "serious" author would/should be horrified by that cavalier, soulless, automated approach to formulating the cookie-cutter characters and cliche plot of a novel. Even if it is a romance novel. And sure, it's as contrived and commercial as an episode of Pokemon, but Sparks is a business man, and a very successful one. Write for the audience, don't fall into a rut, give a wide variety of readers something to identify with in your work, and don't overthink things. I find it interesting to read a novel with quirky, unique, idiosyncratic characters, and I'm sure most people would say the same thing... but there's a reason countless crappy sitcoms and lawyer shows and cop dramas are on TV for 15 years; people enjoy familiarity. It's why most fantasy series start out brilliant and inventive and then tumble into a slow grinding progression procession that continues until their author's death. And sometimes after. People like characters they know, and characters who are like them, and characters they can identify with. Plus it's a hell of a lot easier for an author like Sparks to crank out a book a year if he's not researching disparate professions and creating characters he has to deeply psychoanalyze.
Who can argue with success?
As for Twilight, it's being hailed as a successor to the Harry Potter series, but that's largely wishful thinking on the part of publishing publicists. Twilight has sold a tiny fraction of HP, since it's got a tiny fraction of HP's appeal. It's essentially 90210 with fangs. Watered-down Anne Rice. Beautiful high school kids flirting and fighting and falling in love, but some of them are vampires, and they're oh-so tortured and immortal and pretty. Especially the boys.
Like all romance novels, even/especially the occult-flavored ones, Twilight is written to function as a form of female wish fulfillment. Insecure new girl in town falls in love with god-like vampire hunk, who sweeps her off her feet. Every woman feels ugly and unloved and stupid and clumsy at times, and according to the Amazon.com reviews, Bella certainly lives up to that. But she's not an ugly duckling, she's a Swan (Literally. That's the character's last name.) and the super hunky vampire falls in love with her and is devoted to her and fights for her and saves her from danger and he's perfect and dreamy and hunk, etc, etc. He might as well be a prince, or a pirate captain, or a any other romance novel lead of the type Fabio once posed for.
The conflict comes from evil vampires, and from the passion denied between the m/f leads. The hunky vampire dude doesn't want Bella to become a vampire like him (because living forever and being beautiful isn't worth having to go to high school and date stupid 17 y/o's for 113 years), so he can't really "take" her as he wants to. But she wants to be taken, since she wants to submit to his masculine perfection. Etc. As Ebert pointed out, it's basically an abstinence play, substituting blood sucking for sex. Why they don't just have sex, or why that's not enough to tide them over if they do, is unknown. (I might read the novel someday, just to satisfy my own curiosity, but I have not done so as of yet.)
What connects these two authors, besides their romance-styled writing (Sparks bristles at his work being called "romance" but I don't think Meyers is fighting the inevitable), is their success. And their workmanlike approach to it. I haven't read that much about Meyers' writing schedule, but Sparks' is inspirational. He, and just about every successful writer I know of, treats their avocation as a profession. Schedule a block of time every day, and spend it working. You don't get to surf the internet if you're not motivated, or blog, or watch TV. As Sparks says, he writes 2000 words a day, even though that only takes 6 minutes an hour to type.
There's a great line about writing that's always stuck with me. "The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair." It's unfortunate that this quote is the most famous thing its author ever wrote -- why couldn't Twain or Hemingway have said it? -- but the strategy is sound.
Stunning talent is not required to be a successful writer. In fact, it's arguably a detriment, since it will drive you to distraction trying to perfect every sentence. Workmanlike prose is better, since it's good enough for 95% of readers, it's faster to write, and it's much faster to (not) edit. If you know your rough draft is virtually as good as it's going to get, you save time on rewrites.
One interesting difference between these two authors is how their detractors revile them. The Notebook has 1500 reviews on Amazon.com, with a 4-star average. Of the 180 1-star reviews, most are brief, dismissive, and uncontroversial. They say it sucks, it's boring, it's trite and mawkish and sentimental, etc. But they are far from inspired in their insults. Most of the 1-star reviews or just one or two paragraphs, and can be skimmed in seconds. The book isn't bad enough to stir outrage amongst its detractors. Most offer surprise only that it's so popular, or that so many other people profess adoration for it. Few have more than 5 or 6 agree/disagree votes, and I didn't see any with more than 12 recommends.
On the other hand, the 1-star reviews for Twilight are impassioned. There are 2900 reviews in total, and the book has a 4.5 average, which is exceptionally high. Of the 291 1-star reviews, most are discourses. Multiple paragraphs long, they rip into the book like the star boy vampire into a fleeing hare (he only sucks blood from animals; that's how you know he's the good guy). Many of them have hundreds of recommends; the most popular one now is at, "498 of 600 people found the following review helpful." These people put effort and intelligence into describing why the novel sucks, and many of their pans are quite entertaining, and quite nasty. A number of them attack not just the book, but the author as well, calling the female lead a "Mary Sue" of the highest order. Here's a quote from one that's got 192 agreeing votes:
I may just sue Ms. Meyer as it is possible that she stole the fabric covered books I wrote my own fantasy novels in when I was 13 - this book is written in the exact same style. The protagonist is a "slender" brunette, apparently so lovely that boys fall over her as soon as she arrives at her new school, including a superior and (as we are continuously told so as to avoid actual description) "godlike" and gorgeous vampire who never bothered with any other girl until he was spellbound at first sight (and evidently, smell).
This is not a typical YA novel heroine considering most readers cannot identify or sympathize with someone so amazing and physically attractive. Then I took a look at the author... oh yes, I get it now. We have a term for this and it is MARY SUE. The author has made the main character a thinly veiled perfection of herself and provided absolutely no personality to the character. In fact, every character in this book is barely even a cardboard cut out - no one has any real personality beyond some fleeting stereotypes and everyone behaves predictably and completely unconvincingly. It is like reading "slash" fiction, as Edward only speaks in that way that only exists in slash - males do not act like this in real life, they do not poke you gently on the nose, beg you to tell them ALL about every minute detail of your life and treat you like a newborn baby. Only in slash.
One other quote, since it made me laugh. 169 people found this one helpful.
The plot revolves around Bella Swan, a Mary Sue whose primary skills seem to be having a martyr complex, attracting trouble, and falling down.
As I said, I haven't read either book, so I can't offer my opinion (and since I'm about 50 book and movies reviews behind, even if I did it's doubtful any of us would live to hear it). I do find it interesting how much their hate mails differ, though. Sparks' novels appear to be disposable pap; it's a romance novel, you go in knowing that, and no one expects too much. If you like romance novels, you enjoy them and get your kick. If you don't you dislike it and probably don't care enough to go on Amazon.com and vent. Twilight attracts a larger and far more passionate audience. It's a romance novel, but it's also a saga with a world fiction and a vast and devoted young (and not so young) female audience.
I wonder if the occult genre factors into the passion of the reviewers? Sparks novels are just real world, regular people doing regular things. They're not the usual Old West, Pirate Ship, Medieval Kingdom, fantasy romance novel setting. Twilight is ostensibly set in the real world, but it's got occult vampire magical elements, which puts it into fantasy, and therefore it brings out more love and hate in its readers? Or is the greater passion about that novel due more to the young adult skew, which means its readers are more likely to be teens with hotter emotions, plus more familiarity with the Internet and time to go argue for or against the novel on amazon.com?
Eloelable collection of enticements from TheAtlasphere.com, a libertarian Ann Rand fansite. They're all posted by men, needless (if you know anything about this "movement") to say.
dpvabc, Edmonton, Canada My name is Daniel. I consider myself to be a born-again egoist and I have dedicated the rest of my life to self-improvement. People see me as a socially inept loner because I tend to avoid superficial conversation but actually I love talking to people who like to think (the problem being I don't know very many).
Zak, Long Island, New York I am rational, integrated, and efficacious. So far, I’ve never met a person who lives up to the standard I hold for myself (except online).
I take my relationships seriously. I am simply not attracted to many of the women in this world. I do not "hook-up" with girls. I only kiss those who deserve, and so far I have only encountered one who did. I would love to find someone I can learn something from; someone who challenges me to think; someone I can feel like I've won, rather than lowered myself to.
Lewis, London, U.K. I love intelligent, sassy girls, particularly those working in consulting or investment banking (but other fields are great too). Really, nothing is hotter than an accomplished girl in a suit, as long as she is willing to settle down and have my children. I want a girl who will support my ambitions against the naysayers in society.
I'll forgo a whole objectivist rant today, and simply submit the men who wrote these personal ads as perfect case studies in 1) why it's a bad idea to derive a self-flattering, hermetically-sealed, reality-ignoring ideology from two of the worst novels ever written in the English language, and 2) when this is the type of person who's going to be drawn to it.
I used to be perplexed by the continuing prevalence (or even growing popularity) of various cults on this earth. Organized monotheisms, Scientology, Objectivism, etc. Couldn't/wouldn't people eventually see how silly their supernatural foundational myths and assumptions about human nature were, and how nonfunctional they were if practiced as written? Eventually, I realized that wasn't the way to evaluate a belief system. People don't choose or adhere to their religions or philosophies based on any logical, reasonable, rational, pros-and-cons system (especially not when the system itself pretends to do so, as is the case with the one these personal ad fellows ostensibly adhere to). People develop their personal beliefs as a reaction to the world around them, as seen when viewed through the lens of their own psychology. I won't say that no two people see the world the same way, but everyone interprets what they experience through their own mental filters, and two people can (and usually will) arrive at very different conclusions based on the same stimuli. Especially when the issue at hand is emotional or psychological. (The proper application of science and math can somewhat cut through this human coloring, but that assumes agreement can be reached on the input data.)
In that light, it's no surprise that people embrace belief systems that promise a happy immortality, or punishment of dissidents, or a destiny guided by fate (whether from the stars or Heavens), or what have you. Whatever a person needs, there's a religion or cult designed to welcome them in. Of course a belief system that tells people (most of them white, middle-class, and male) who are cut off (often intentionally) from family support and social activities that they are smarter and stronger than the lowly milling herds, rather than that they're a self-absorbed, anti-social loser, is growing in popularity. (Which isn't to say that such people necessarily are losers, just that that's been the label traditionally applied, which is why this is more of a rebranding than any larger change.)
There have always been plenty of people (predominately young men from and of the suburbs whose disaffected ennui allows them no appreciation of how truly blessed by privilege their lives are) who went through a phase that inclined them in that direction, but reality, or a girlfriend, usually snapped them out of it. Nowadays, thanks to the succor provided by the Internet, that's no longer the case. Thanks to the succor and guidance provided by the Internet, it's now quite possible to live an utterly mediocre life, while simultaneously maintaining a sneering contempt for the milling herd that is the rest of humanity.
Belief systems that encourage non-supernatural solipsism should remain a growth industry for the foreseeable future, especially with the worldwide financial distress providing additional incentive to scapegoat others for one's own perceived emotional and/or financial hardships.
Despite (arguably) being the main reason for Barack Obama's electoral triumph, former Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin just keeps delivering humor unto us, by virtue of, 1) the media's continuing interest in the soap opera/train wreck that is her life, and 2) her eagerness to keep talking on camera.
Writer and poet Julian Gough took notice, and he's started a (joking, I hope) campaign to draft Palin for the US Poet Laureate. His reasoning? Her fantastically um... creative... verbal utterances, which can almost be set to music. Where most of us see cluelessness and a desperate flailing to work her memorized talking points into her incoherent replies, Julian sees poetry. Here's what he created from one of Palin's long-form-tomatoe replies.
Africa, a poem by Sarah Palin
"And the relevance To me With that issue, As we spoke About Africa and some Of the countries There that were Kind of the people Succumbing to the dictators And the corruption Of some Collapsed governments On the Continent, The relevance Was Alaska's
Amazingly, this isn't an entire sentence. It's just an excerpt from the middle of one that was even longer, and more traumatic for any English teachers in attendance. Here's Palin, uncut:
"I don't know, because I remember the discussion about Africa, my concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue, as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska's investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars, I wanted to make sure that that didn't happen anymore."
Tell me you don't prefer the poetry version to that?
A selection of photos from my recent New Mexico vacation. These are all from my cell phone, and are included here as a delivery system for the captions, rather than for any artistic merit or eye candy-ness. I'll post some pretty pictures from my camera at some point in the future. Or not.
Me standing on the bridge over the Rio Grande Gorge. There's no way to tell the scale in this photo, but trust me, it was a long way down to the water. Wikipedia says 800 feet (though any of us could go change it to something more appropriate), the Taos tour guide said something like 650 feet at the bridge, and my eyes didn't know, but thought it was fucking far. I love heights, so I greatly enjoyed walking out onto the bridge and leaning over. The best part was when big trucks came over (the main highway from Taos runs right over the gorge) and the two-lane bridge shook and swayed up and down, feeling a bit like the undulations of a water bed.
The whole area is high desert, and despite the son, it was cold in mid-November. Albuquerque, where we flew in/out, is around 5000 feet, and Taos and Santa Fe are higher still. This photo is from a road over one of the local mountains, which go up to over 10,000 feet. (There are some ski resorts in the area, though they mostly rely on man made powder, since it's cold, but there's not enough precipitation to provide sufficient real snow.) The highway isn't that high, but this was probably 8000 feet or so. There wasn't much snow, but every shady patch of hillside through the mountains had white remaining from the last storm, over a week before. This was the largest patch we saw.
Just some random photo of the high desert. Gray/brown hills and scrubby pine-like trees. It would be a pretty view if that guy would get his stupid head out of the way.
Santa Fe is weird, since there's nothing actually there. The whole town is just hotels, restaurants, souvenir stores, and lots of art galleries. The boutiques are loaded with art of more dubious provenance, and I saw a gathering of these cheaply-carved and painted pigs in several stores. I didn't much like them; they had teeth that turned their idiot grins into something a bit ominous. Reminiscent of the fate Mason Verger planned for Hannibal.
The pig photo was largely for the IG, while this one was purely for Malaya, whose bunny obsession was occasionally documented on these pages in happier earlier days. This hand-carved, cotton-tailed menorah scene was in the window of one of the countless expensive artsy-boutiques we saw in Santa Fe. I didn't tote up the total, not in US dollars or the myhrh/frankensense conversion rate. However, just the standing, adult Jesus bunny (who is clearly risking a disruption in the time flow by ret-conning himself into the scene beside his swaddling clothed-counterpart) was $2200, and the rest weren't much cheaper.
Just a little path down to a scenic viewpoint, in Bandolier National Park. Better yet, that dude didn't stick his head into the frame this time.
Amongst the (dubious) good of menorah bunnies, there was evil to be found in the art galleries. Case in point. Yes, it's a fucking bear. Snarling. Forever. The best part, if that word can be used in this scenario, is that the bear faces up and the table is glass. I couldn't help but envision the enjoyment one could garner by covering the surface with newspapers, then asking a guest to clear off the table for appetizers.
A typical jewelry display in any one of the hundreds of such stores we saw in New Mexico. This was one shelf of maybe 50 in this particular store with a selection along these lines. Semi-precious stones = FTW! For the numerous, at least.
A shot of what I've missed most since returning from New Mexico. The breakfast buffet in our hotel, which included a variety of donuts each morning. None of them were the best, but the powdered were pretty good since they were hard and crusty on the outside. Thee hotel also provided bagels, various types of cereal, strawberry and vanilla yogurt (good with granola cereal in them), toaster-style french toast and pancakes, and a huge platter of refrigerated, peeled, hardboiled eggs.
I've got quick notes for about 8 blog topics, so I'm just going to shoehorn several into each post this week, to get them up (instead of forever rotting on my notes page, where most of my potential blog posts have gone the past months). This time it's job applications and P.E. Obama.
So, jobs. Partially inspired by the IG and the eleventeen jobs she's had since I've known her, partially from the germination of a long time professional curiosity of mine, and largely thanks to the collapse of the US financial industry and the stock market it took with it, I'm looking for work in a bookstore. Seasonal, to make some extra cash between now and the new year, or perhaps longer, if it works out that way. It's not a career concept, at any rate.
I've applied to several local bookstores, and chains as well. My first choice was The Book Passage, a legendary Bay Area bookstore located just a few miles south on 101. They're not doing any seasonal hiring, unfortunately. Times = tough. Neither are a couple of smaller bookstores in downtown San Rafael, which leaves the big chain outlets. Borders and Barnes and Noble are the two in this area, and when I went into the Borders in SR on Friday, while doing my various back-from-vacation shopping, I was told that they don't take or accept applications in person at Borders, and can't even tell you if they're hiring. The only way you can get a job with them is to go to their website and fill out an application online, which is then transferred to the local store.
That didn't sound so bad. After all, I hate the slowness and inefficiency of handwriting, and I was dreading the physical waste of time that comes from physically filling out forms. So it was with some anticipation that I began the process on Friday night. That mood didn't last long. I'm usually a proponent of automation, but in this case it sucked. I'm talking a mouthful of sweaty digital donkey balls. Before I rant, I'll offer disclosure. Here's the Borders Jobs page where you can, "Apply for a Seller, Supervisor, or temporary holiday position." and see for yourself if I'm lying.
The first stages aren't bad. I much prefer typing my personal information over handwriting it, and the forms are pretty well laid out, aside from lacking an automatic field advance. So when you're entering your phone number, for instance, you have to hit Tab (or use the mouse) to move to the next box, when a smart form would automatically advance you to the next box when you've filled the previous one with the requisite numerals. A minor complaint, though.
Much more annoying was the inflexibility of the fields. My current employer is an internet gaming company located in the UK. Guess how much luck I had entering a non-US phone number into the form? Yes, that's right. It's impossible, since the UK number isn't divided up into XXX-XXX-XXXX like a US number. It doesn't even have 10 digits. And since the other fields for name and address only allow about 15-20 characters in each, I couldn't cheat and put the number after the name or company title. And since there aren't any boxes provided for additional information, there's basically no way to enter anything that's not a normal length/format US address or phone number.
Better yet, the entire online application never has any fields for personal input. It's 100% just-the-facts. Names, dates, locations, salary earned, etc. That's fine if you worked at a Starbucks down the street within the last couple of years. But if you've done unconventional employment, volunteered in a library, want to mention how highly computer literate you are, want to stress how much you read and have knowledge about books, that your previous job involved constant interaction with and sales to drunken football fans, etc... there's no way to do it. If I were a Borders store manager I'd hate to have to rely on that form to find my new hires, since it's so easily lied to or manipulated, and it can't do anything to whittle down the idiots and lunatics with acceptable resumes (fake or otherwise); people you'd need half a minute of face to face conversation to determine that their resume was going straight into the bin the minute they walked away -- assuming the act of affecting their departure didn't require mall security and the judicious use of a taser gun.
Needless to say, I'm bitching about this since their online application was singularly ill-suited to let me stress (what I think) are my strengths for the job. More annoying for anyone was the fact that the application only allowed me to select one location, when I'd be happy to work at any of their three stores in my general vicinity. I guess I'm supposed to fill it out again each time, for each store? On top of that, the "which position are you applying for" part was equally limiting, since it only allowed one to be chosen, and they had them needlessly segregated.
I'm trying to work in a bookstore. Ideally I'd be on the floor, helping idiots customers find their books, or recommending other books if what they want isn't available. As part of that job I assume I'd be responsible for looking things up on the inventory computer, checking in the back room, restocking shelves as necessary, etc. Or I might be working up front at the cash register, though I assume the people who do that are usually just cashiers who don't handle other bookstore tasks. I don't want to work in the Starbucks or Seattle's Best Coffee or whatever their "cafe" is called. I don't drink coffee, I don't know (or want to learn) the complicated ingredient combinations found in any of those 800 calorie desserts in a cup, and I really don't want to smell the steaming shit all day. If I wanted to work in a coffee store I'd just apply at Starbucks; there are 10 of those closer to my house than any bookstore, and they pay better too.
On the Borders application I couldn't say that. Not that I would have, at least in so many words. (One of the Barnes and Nobles I was going to apply to had no openings in the book section, but had immediate opening in the cafe. I wasn't interested, for reasons elaborated in the prior paragraph.) But I was flummoxed by the application form, which had different, overly-detailed descriptions of the job positions of customer help on the floor, store manager, assistant manager, cashier, stocker, and I think one other, something like inventory management. And no, of course you couldn't check more than one -- because there's no way the same person would want to do floor help, stocking, inventory, and maybe move up to assistant managing over time. Oh wait, that's what everyone there does now. Pity their application form has no idea of that basic fact.
All this was a pain, but I probably wouldn't have been moved to blog about it. What really put the whipped cream on the mochachino was the personality quiz I had to complete after the resume portion. Yes, really. There's a 99 question personality survey you have to fill out, which works like an idiot's version of the Myers-Briggs personality test. The test consists of 99 questions, all of which you must answer with strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree. I say it's an idiot's version of the test not since it's designed to catch idiots (though it might work for that purpose), but because it was clearly written by one.
I should have copied some of the questions down while taking it, since I knew I'd want to rant about it later. I don't care enough to go back and fill out the resume again just to get to the test, but the questions were all indirectly job-oriented, and so ham-fistedly unsubtle that I frequently eloeled while reading over them. There were 99 questions, but actually there were only about 15. They just had 7 or 8 different versions of each, slightly reworded and scattered in random order. Most of them were about human interactions, and they said things like, "I get annoyed when people ask me questions." "I find people who ask questions annoying." "I enjoy answering questions." "I dislike helping people find things." "I think people are often annoying." "I enjoy helping people find things." and so on. Keep in mind that these are to be answered on the agree/disagree metric, so they're mostly statements. And keep in mind that they were written by an idiot, so lots of them got into double-negative confusion. Statements like, "I do not dislike tidying up disordered inventory." Um... maybe?
The dumbest thing about it was how obvious the questions were, in their intent. That was what I spent my agree/disagree box clicking thinking about. How much of a brown-nosing yes-man do they want me to be? "I sometimes find other people annoying." Well obviously everyone on earth is going to say "agree" to that one, and "strongly agree" if they're honest. No one with a cerebellum in their brain doesn't find other people annoying, at least some of the time. Equally obvious is the fact that the test is written to get idiots to honest themselves right out of a job. So by that right, you should say "disagree," even though you know, and the test-reader knows, you're lying. But should you say "strongly disagree?" Would the computer scoring algorithm be set up cleverly enough to red flag people who are so obviously and blatantly lying by saying the right thing? Probably not. Probably you should go all Smithers on every single damn question. I didn't, and combined with my lack of a resume that fit neatly into their preset fields, I don't expect that I'll ever hear back from Borders.
Fortunately, B&N has 4 stores in the immediate vicinity, not even counting the ones in SF (which I didn't, since it's just such a pain to get into the city and try to park somewhere for less than your actual hourly job wage), and while they have their application online, it's just a two-page PDF you can print off, fill out by hand, and take into a local B&N. Which I did. Four times. Saturday and yesterday, before a semi-date in the evening with the IG. The B&N application is straight forward, with space to put in appropriate comments, job skills, positions you're applying for, etc. Plus you give it to a real person, in person, and if they like you enough to not reject you out of hand, they'll call you to come in for an interview. Which is what I'll be doing tomorrow afternoon at two of the stores I applied to.
I'm not exactly excited, but I would like a decent part time job for a month or so. I also look at it sort of as market research. What books do people really want, how do they ask for them, how do they make up their minds about what to buy, which types of books and covers stand out to people, how do stores stock their shelves, what factors go into the books that get better placement (I do know that the recent releases on the big tables near the entrance are allocated by publisher payment), and so on. Plus, as with all "real" jobs, the frequent boredom and misery should serve as suitable motivation to get more writing done in my "spare" time, so I can earn a living with my actual skills, doing something I actually enjoy. That's the theory, anyway.
I might let you know, or quite possibly elect to say nothing more about it until after the holiday season (and my seasonal job) comes to an end. Lest I Dooce myself right out of the job I've just narrowly obtained.
Just to cram in something totally unrelated, you might enjoy the recent Sixty Minutes piece on the Obamas. It's just an interview, basically a puff piece, but it's interesting since Barack talks so clearly and cogently about the financial crisis issue. I also liked the personal stuff afterward. I'd never seen an interview with the future First Lady, and hadn't seen she and Barack interact at all. I follow politics pretty closely, but I do it online and concentrate on policy and positions -- I don't watch TV or personality stuff. So I was curious to see Barack and Michelle talking about personal issues, and doing it side by side on camera. Their couple dynamics, the way they tease each other about certain things, their pet jokes, their inside knowledge of each other, the old story about Barack's rusted out car and crappy Washington apartment... all fascinating, since I'd never seen any of it before. I took it as two real people talking candidly about their lives in an amazing situation. I'm sure an Obama-hater could see it as artifice and carefully packaged media-friendly bullshit. YMMV.
I must admit to some love for Obama's comments on the stupidity of the BCS and the lack of a college football playoff. They were prescient, since this year, like almost every year, we're most likely not going to have a clear choice for national champion. Well, if Alabama wins out they'll be the only undefeated team with a really hard schedule, and they'll deserve to be #1. But the choice of who plays them in the final game is a total dart toss, and if they lose then the top 2 teams will be entirely arbitrary, since everyone will have at least 1 loss, and the only undefeated teams will be from minor conferences who don't have the strength of schedule to rank in the top 5.
Here's the current top 9 in the BCS standings. These are the only teams with a legitimate claim to be in the title game. The #10 team now is Ohio State and with 2 losses and a weak conference schedule they're not in the conversation.
1. Alabama 11-0 2. Texas 10-1 3. Oklahoma 10-1 4. Florida 10-1 5. USC 9-1 6. Utah 12-0 7. Texas Tech 10-1 8. Penn State 11-1 9. Boise State 11-0
Texas Tech had a chance to make it a clear #1 vs. #2, but they just lost to Oklahoma (who had previously lost to Texas, who in true rock-paper-scissors fashion, had previously lost to Texas Tech). Florida is going to play Alabama in the SEC title game, and while Alabama is ranked higher, Florida looks better. If Florida wins that one, there won't be a true national champion. Oh, the polls will crown someone, but it'll be based on opinions and arguments and sentiment, not an actual winner on the field. You know, like in every other sport known to modern man.
Obama's argument is one I've advocated myself in the past. Put the top 8 teams into a mini-tournament, and find a true champion. This year it would be tough to pick the top 8, with 9 strong contenders, but several of those teams have another game, and might drop out of the ranks with a loss. At any rate, it's far better to have controversy over #8 vs. #9 to enter a tournament in which they'd have to win three games, than over #1 for the title between teams that have never played each other at all.
The biggest stumbling block to the tournament is the entrenched bowl game system, but that seems easily overcome. Just pick 7 bowls to host the games and rotate the games each year, so in 7 years every bowl gets to host an equal number of games from each round. Or if only 3 or 4 bowl games bid high enough, those host the semis and finals, while lesser bowls host the first round games. Which would, I'll point out, feature much more highly ranked teams than all but one or two bowl games do in the current system.
Or it could be done with fewer bowl games if there were more than one round in a given location each year. There's also an objection that the teams would play too many games, but that's pretty fatuous. It's not like anyone confuses the enrollees in the semi-pro football programs at these schools with actual students, and anyway, only 4 teams would play an extra bowl game and only 2 would play 2 extra games. Plus the games take place in late December or early January, when school isn't in session or the semester is just starting. Everyone knows you miss nothing the first week of a class other than a boring hour reading over the syllabus.
The real sticking point, unfortunately, is that there's no commissioner of college football to organize things and drive through sweeping legislation. There are a bunch of banana republic conferences with their own rules and allegiances, uncooperative bowl games, TV networks with long term contracts, and plenty of people who don't really care if there's a "true" national champion, so long as the TV ratings remain high and the alumni keep giving donations for new weight rooms and "loaner" vehicles for star athletes.
I've got a ton of stuff I want to blog about, but not enough time to do it in. Well, I have the time, I'm just spending it on other activities.
I was out of town all last week; Monday-Friday, on a mini-vacation in New Mexico with my dad. We stayed in Santa Fe, and also drove to Taos and did some desert hiking, lots of Indian good stores, ate excellent food, saw the James Bond movie, ate too much at the breakfast buffet, etc. Pretty fun trip, and it was nice to get out of the usual routine. I'll post photos from the trip at some point; my camera is bloated with them, and I've got a dozen or so from my cell phone that are more conversational or quirky than artistic and panoramic.
Later for that. For now, here's something about booze.
I've noticed this several times over the past couple of years, while I've been living alone again and drinking more frequently (Prior to living with Malaya I never drank other than a very occasional glass of wine with my dad.) I've debated it with the IG, but come to no strong conclusions. The phenomena is that I feel far drunker, far more quickly, when I'm drinking alone at home. A beer or a good sized glass of wine or some vodka in a Pepsi will often give me a nice buzz when I drink it while home alone. But similar, or larger, quantities of booze consumed in a public place, especially with other people, or even at home with a guest, doesn't go to my head.
This was repeatedly demonstrated while in New Mexico with Dad, since I never felt buzzed at all, despite having a big glass of wine or a beer with every dinner and several lunches. The first night there I had a very nice Syrah with an expensive dinner, and then drank 2 plastic cups of wine back at the hotel, since Dad picked up a bottle of a not very good Zinfindel at the Whole Foods near our hotel. I felt sleepy, but that was to be expected, since I'd gotten up early for the flight. But I wasn't buzzed, when I'd have been reeling from that much booze at home with no one but the Jinxers around to companionship me.
I tried again the last day there. A Dos Exes with an excellent Mexican food lunch, that I didn't feel at all. Didn't expect to, though. I tried harder later, since Dad's flight out from the Albuquerque airport was @ 5, and mine wasn't until 7:30, delayed until 7:45. I was bored enough that I ended up in the sports bar near my gate, where I got a Heineken on draft. $7, but at least it was huge. A pint, I think. Certainly larger than a usual bottle/can in the US. I sipped that over an hour while reading American Gods, and despite my empty-since-lunch stomach, I didn't feel any buzz at all. I wasn't alone, since there were a lot of other people in the bar, but I wasn't interacting with anyone, and was sitting in a corner booth reading, which is just as inactive an activity as I'm usually engaging in at home when one beer will buzz me.
One more bit of evidence came in October, while at Blizzcon. One night there we had a site get together dinner at the Rainforest Cafe. It was pretty unmemorable, other than being a chance to meet the one Diii.net reader who showed up (a few showed up from the WoW site, and there were people who ran other gaming sites, so we had a group of 17 or so). My beverage was memorable though, since I got one of those jumbo cans of Fosters. The 750ml cans. They hold the same quantity of liquid as a wine bottle, albeit at a much lower alcohol content, but I'm sure one of those, equivalent to nearly 3 bottles of beer, would have me reeling at home. Drinking it over a long meal with much conversation in a restaurant, I felt nothing.
The counter example; first day back from New Mexico was Friday, and I had to run errands and buy food since I had nothing left to eat. I splurged, and wound up with two loaves of Italian bread and a big platter of mixed cheeses from Costco. To accompany that I opened a bottle of white and a bottle of red, since I've got a lot of wine on hand thanks to my dad's largess and the case I brought home from my San Diego visit while down in SoCal for Blizzcon last month. I had a small glass of each, enjoying the Sauvignon Blanc much more than the Shiraz, while eating most of a loaf of bread with cheese and deli turkey slices on top... and I was fucking hammered. Sleepy, felt dopey, couldn't work for an hour afterwards. Yet I know if I'd had that in a restaurant or a wine bar, while on a date of whatever type, I wouldn't have even known I'd been drinking.
Maybe this explains a lot of drunk driving? People are in a bar or club or having dinner with friends, talking, interacting, mentally active, and they don't feel buzzed, or not that buzzed, so don't think much about the several drinks they put down. Whereas if they had that much on the couch at home while watching rugby, football, or some other sweaty, tight-pants'ed, and somewhat homoerotic sport, they'd be like, "I am soooo fucked up." And wouldn't feel safe to drive a blender, much less a motor vehicle.
I enjoy art and museums, though I don't get out to partake of them nearly as often as I'd like to. I did this week though, and on Tuesday I went with the IG to see a touring show of Afghanistan art treasures. This one, and I advise you to enjoy this quote, since the backstory is a lot better than the show itself.
In 1978, on windswept plains of northern Afghanistan, archaeologists unearthed tombs of ancient nomads that had been sealed for two thousand years and discovered an extraordinary trove: some 22,000 individual pieces of gold buried with the remains of six Bactrian Central Asian nomads. Within months of this discovery at Tillya Tepe, the country descended into war, and the so-called Bactrian Hoard disappeared into legend once more. Twenty-five years later, in 2003, Afghanistan surprised the world by announcing that the priceless artifacts had been located intact in the presidential palace bank vault in Kabul. They had been rescued, along with other masterpieces of the National Museum, Kabul, and protected in the intervening years of turmoil by a group of selfless Afghan heroes who have come to be known as "the key holders."
That anything is left is amazing, as various news articles about the recovery make clear. The museum staff hid everything they could in 1979, when the Soviets were poised to invade. Other stuff was hidden years later, before the Taliban took power, and everything that wasn't hidden has since been destroyed or looted. Most of the original "key-holders" were long since dead, but they had passed on their burdens to friends or relatives, and much of the collection was reassembled in 2004, after the US invasion/liberation had largely settled into place. Other stuff was discovered after the Soviets rolled in, when they had some archeologists rooting around the country.
I don't know how much of it is in the traveling exhibition that's now at the SF Asian Art Museum, but I'm going to throw in the "bear riding a bicycle" metaphor again, since the amazing thing about the show is that it exists at all. It's inspiring that anything was saved, but at the same time, it's a pretty disappointing collection, on artistic or historic merits.
Most of the pieces are very small, or are just fragments. Or both. There are a bunch of vases and bowls and cups that are jigsaw'ed together from dozens of shards, and they're far from complete. The carved statues are tiny, wooden, and half-rotted. The pieces of gold are just in loose piles. Captions say they were all sewn onto glorious gowns, but those are long since gone, so now they've got these glass-topped, coffin-like display cases that you expect to see Lenin in, in which all the gold bits are spread out in a vaguely dress-like shape. All the gold bits are identical, and were clearly mass-produced in some sort of mold. They looked like something you'd buy in a bag of 25 from Michael's.
The preservation aside, most of the art isn't very good. There weren't any great Afghan artists, and though there was some prosperity and cultured cities in the Roman days, the area was a trade route, and their cities weren't rich or powerful or established enough to nurture their own artesians. As a result there's nothing original or unique; just imported Roman stuff from Italy or Egypt or elsewhere along the Mediterranean (so say the captions on the pieces). There were some locally-produced pieces, but they were indistinguishable from the imports, and none of it was notably gorgeous. Broken chunks of pillars with Roman writing scratched into it, shattered vases, miscellaneous rings and bracelets that would have looked cheap in a pawn store window, piles of coins, etc.
The less-broken stuff was even simpler. They had a bunch of earthenware treasures, but they were just clay pots and lids. I'm willing to grant their age and preciousness, but they would not have stood out from anything in the rejects drawer in a ceramics class at a community college.
All this said, it wasn't a horrible show, and I didn't regret going. Nor did I heckle the Bronze Age swap meet quality of things while there. In fact, though the IG and I amused each other with some whispers at the time, it wasn't until we left the Afghanistan area and rode the escalator up to the third floor, where the permanent exhibits begin, that she broached the, "That sort of sucked, eh?" issue.
One thing I did like; the leogryphs. Those mythical animals figured on several pieces, and the caption describing them was funny enough that I took a moment to text it to myself so I'd remember to blog about it. No, not a hippogryph, which have an eagle's wings, talons, and head, with a horse's body. The Afghanistan art had leogryphs, which vary in their descriptions online, but are either stylized lions, or are lions with eagle heads and sometimes wings.
The ones in the art show were better, and also funnier. They were described as lions with parrot beaks and eagle wings. Think about that. Parrot beaks and eagle wings? They couldn't be like, really large parrot wings? And if you were picking your animal body parts, wouldn't you rather have a sharp, deadly eagle's beak and slightly slower parrot wings, rather than the other way around? I pointed out that description to the IG, then spent the rest of the day cracking her up by pointing out other art, like the statue with a horse that had zebra legs, or the mural in the Indian wing that featured elephants with the hips of a rhino.
One sad postscript: while looking at the articles from back in 2004 on the art discovery, I saw this picture in the gallery attached to the National Geographic article. I frowned and thought, "pity they didn't have anything that nice in the show." But then I clicked back to that image a second later, and remembered that they actually did have that piece. It's just been smashed now; the entire face is gone, and there's just a stump of a neck and the rest of the round frame. The caption on the piece said it had been vandalized and destroyed beyond repair, but I assumed that was long ago, or by the Soviets or the Taliban during the early 2000s.
Apparently not; the piece was I perfect repair in 2004, so at some time since then, perhaps during one of the Taliban uprisings that have erupted since Bush removed most of the troops from Afghanistan and sent them to Iraq, they wrecked some portion of the museum and destroyed this one gorgeous piece.
On that front, one last note. Everyone's heard of, and recoiled at, the barbarity and stupidity of the Taliban destroying all the ancient art and statues in Afghanistan; most notably when they blew up those millennia-old Buddhas carved into a mountain. But few know why they did it. They were following Islamic law, by taking a very fundamentalist interpretation of the Second Commandment. (Or the first, depending on which religion's sorting you go by.) The one about not making or worshiping any idols. That's the same reason most modern day Muslims consider depictions of the Prophet verboten.
It's funny how different religions (and their sub-cults) interpret the same ancient texts, and how those beliefs evolve over time. Catholics, for instance, have made an intense fetish of idol worship, especially of the Virgin Mary. They're also quite fond of every sort of religious art, elaborate crucifixes, etc, as the Vatican's treasuries demonstrate. Yet Muslims, whose religion is a slightly more modern rewriting of the same ancient Talmudic traditions, have come to an entirely different conclusion, one they feel strongly enough about to blow up priceless ancient treasures, or burn Danish embassies over. And yeah, there's a ton of politics and culture overlaid on that, and Islam didn't forbid artwork of Mohammad until several centuries after his death, etc. But still, this sort of human application of ambiguous ancient writings is what makes the study of religions interesting. Rather than just depressing.
After the museum, we went back to the IG's new apartment to hang out for a while, and play with her pussy. She drove me to my car in Berkeley, since she'd driven into the city in the morning and I'd parked and taken BART over in the afternoon. So by the time I got to her apt she'd changed out of the black leggings, denim mini, black jacket she'd worn all day, and was wearing a t-shirt and red house pants. Tight, butt-hugging house pants that made me all too aware of exactly what I was missing.
As for her pussy... predictably enough, now that he's settled in, the lack of regular visitors to the IG's apt has turned him into Jinx. The first day he was there, when I helped the IG bring home the kitty, he was scared for an hour, but then walked around everywhere, exploring and sniffing. After that he gained confidence, and spent the last half hour of my visit rubbing the IG, me, and the floor between us. He was like tennis spectator kitty, moving from side to side constantly, rubbing everything, sprawling, purring like a motor boat, etc.
Since then he's seen few people other than the IG, and has taken to spending most of his time under her bed, at least when visitors arrive. Jinx-like. The IG didn't like his slave-name, so her sister re-christened him "Sid" when she met the cat a couple of weeks ago. I approved of the name, despite my usual aversion to giving human names to animals. However, I immediately elaborated on his moniker, giving him a title. "Sir Sidney of the Underbed" is what I call him, and he certainly lived up to that billing during my visit. Like Jinx, he doesn't seem to be frightened: he's not recoiling or hissing or anything. He just prefers to be not seen and not heard and not touched while anyone other than the IG is in the apartment. And he's found that moving to the rear corner of the bed and crouching there, in silence, accomplishes all three goals fairly well. If people just didn't have that habit of dropping down and peering at him, all would be well.
Actually, he's not so adverse to being touched. I was able to lie on the bed (insert "on the IG's bed, stroking her pussy" joke here) and reach down the back side by the wall, and could easily pet Sid from there. He didn't object, or even move. He just sat there, and even arched his back into my hand. He just didn't want to come out and be petted properly. The IG dragged him out eventually, and we spent a few minutes stroking and cooing over her new cute little pussy, but as soon as we let him go he eased his way back under the bed, returned to the corner, rotated, and settled down, positioning himself where he could best keep an eye on our feet.
I don't think his behavior will last forever; he's been out of the pound for less than a month, and is still settling in. Plus he's an adult cat; he lived his first 5 or 6 years with a different family, and then spent 3 months at the pound in a tiny cage in a room with lots of other cats and weird people who poked at him. In another month or two he might have adjusted and then I'll be able to visit the IG's apartment, and will find her pussy ready, willing, and eager to submit to my affections.
Fascinating and informative article by Michael Lewis about the ultimate collapse of Wall Street, brought about (at last) by the insane financial models created by the mortgage industry. I'll quote from the opening, since it sets the tone very well, but the whole article is an A+, and more than worth reading. It's interesting, and it gives a lot of insight into the what's and why's that went into creating the current financial crisis.
To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital -- to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn't the first clue.
I'd never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous -- which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people's money, would be expelled from finance.
...In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility.
The article goes on to weave together a tale of incompetence, greed, group-think, jaw-droppingly lax regulation, Ponzi-esque pyramid schemes marketed as AAA-rated investments, and much more.
On a local level, every bank was basically throwing mortgage loans at anyone who asked, while knowing the only way those loans could ever be paid back was if the lendees were able to flip their bubble-priced houses to some other other would-be flipper. Which is fine, in theory, but who was the 2nd (or 3rd, or 11th) flipper getting their ever-increasing mortgage loan from? At some point prices had to flatten out, or decrease, and what then, when the people getting the loans were clearly not able to afford the actual monthly payments? It's easy to see why individuals didn't think about that, or chose not to think about it, but financial institutions are supposed to be staffed by economists and people trained in finance. They're not supposed to play the housing bubble casino and hope for the best. (This is an easy question to answer; just look at the opening of Lewis' article and consider that he got a job with a large and prestigious investment firm. Then imagine the sorts of clueless fools your local bank had on the staff, or the boiler room home loan companies you used to see ads for on late night TV?)
Those (inevitable) losses were enough to ruin the credit ratings of countless now-houseless buyers, and to severely impact the profit margins of the stupid banks who gave them the loans. None of that would have brought down Lehman Brothers and the rest, though, nor would it have precipitated the stock market crash that has cost most investors 30-50% of their net worth over the past few months. That doom required the enthusiastic madness of Wall Street firms inventing new ways to profit by, and multiply the effect of, the reckless mortgage lending practices. Lewis spends much of his article examining that issue, through a profile of Steve Eisman, one of the very few investors who saw the crash coming well in advance.
Whatever rising anger Eisman felt was offset by the man's genial disposition. Not only did he not mind that Eisman took a dim view of his CDOs; he saw it as a basis for friendship. "Then he said something that blew my mind," Eisman tells me. "He says, 'I love guys like you who short my market. Without you, I don't have anything to buy.'"
That's when Eisman finally got it. Here he'd been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren't enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors' appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman's bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn't create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league's stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. "They weren't satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn't afford," Eisman says. "They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That's why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that's when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?"
This particular dinner was hosted by Deutsche Bank, whose head trader, Greg Lippman, was the fellow who had introduced Eisman to the subprime bond market. Eisman went and found Lippman, pointed back to his own dinner companion, and said, "I want to short him." Lippman thought he was joking; he wasn't. "Greg, I want to short his paper," Eisman repeated. "Sight unseen."
The whole issue remains impenetrably complicated (especially what needs to be done to fix it), but this article helped me understand. More. Better yet, this post by Kevin Drum was where I saw the link initially, and in the comments some clever financial types do what they can to explain things in semi-laymen's terms.
Dawn came at around 6am this morning, and as I sat typing away, I noticed an amazingly colorful light falling across the venetian blinds that cover my front windows. I got up to look and to open the blinds so light could fall upon my kitchen jungle, and was amazed at the color of the morning.
There was a layer of high cirrus clouds up at least 15 or 20,000 feet, but down lower, just a few thousand feet up, was a puffy dabbing of tiny cumulus clouds, looking like the proverbial flying armada or cotton balls. They were, in the slanting eastern light, absolutely dipped in orange and pink. A very warm salmon color, and like celestial disco balls they were refracting that light and casting it down upon San Rafael, and presumably upon the rest of the North Bay.
I went out onto the back patio to take in the gorgeous light, and noticed streamers of heavy ground fog, running along the forested hillside across the highway, where I sometimes ride my mountain bike. That fog was light gray, almost white, and billowing and blowing along like streamers before a fan. Not breaking up though, just flowing and roiling like a horse's mane, beneath the salmon clouds, with the dawn sun slanting over the dewy hills, and beneath the high, patchy layer of slate-bellied cirrus clouds. The air was crisp, cool, and humid, and very clear. And since it was very early on a Saturday, there was almost no one about. Even the nearby Highway 101 was fairly quiet, and after a moment's contemplation of the beauty of nature, I threw on a coat, grabbed my wallet and keys, and rushed out to my car.
I had to drive around a bit, to get out into the glorious morning and see the fog before it dissipated. I knew the bay would be hidden, and I wanted to drive along the winding road through China Camp and see the foggy bay, and the sunrise peeking over the forested hills of that small state park.
So I did.
It was a lovely drive, though not so beautiful as I had hoped. The pink light was lost before I reached the park, since the land along the bay was swathed in mist. I could hardly see the water from the road, even though it's seldom more than 30 meters away, over marsh or grassy hillside, and I didn't see the sun since the hills rise up 1000 feet or so along there, putting the western lee deep in the shadow. It was a great drive though; the road was empty save for a few early morning bicyclists, and I rolled along the very windy course (the google map images do not do it justice) with the course to myself. I went all the way through the park and followed the road around the point back towards San Rafael proper.
Passing through the east side of town at 7am on a Saturday was interesting; the traffic lights were blinking red, the strip malls were deserted, and the only people I saw were dog walkers and a few other early morning commuters. Much of that area of downtown SR is residential and long established, even though it's just a block from 3rd Street, a very busy road with a Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, an Elephant Pharmacy, and other stores of the type that white people like. All of those blocks north of 3rd and east of 101 are (huge) tree-lined streets, old (for California) and stately houses with grassy yards. It's not exactly picturesque, but it's at least quaint, and on a sleepy Saturday morning, with the trees going golden and auburn and virtually no other cars on the road, it was a very pretty drive.
I wound my way through that part of town, moving semi-aimlessly, just enjoying the golden early morning light and the clean air. It rained heavily last weekend and early this week, and though it's been sunny and cool the past few days, the air has remained very clear and clean, as it gets after a hard rain. I drove with my window down, despite the morning cold, since I couldn't stand to have even fairly-clean glass blocking my view of the trees and gardens and old brick walls and root-cracked sidewalks.
Finally, as the day's inexorable advance began to negate the fairy tale lightning of the dawn, I drove back home, taking a circuitous non-freeway route. I've been back for half an hour now, and other than being moved to type this out, while battling (with mixed success) an uncharacteristic urge to lapse into florid prose and torrid metaphor, I'm just been looking out the window, gazing up at the cloudy eastern sky, and thinking.
What am I doing with my life? Why do I work so hard on non-essential nonsense while ignoring the important things? Do I actually want to spend time with and open my heart to the various women I'm sort of considering dating? Do I want to continue living in the North Bay? In the Bay Area? In California? Do I want to apply to a selection of writing graduate schools before the December 31st deadline? Why can't I take more concrete steps towards achieving my large goals, instead of growing distracted by momentarily-engaging minutia? And so on. Pity I'm not doing this at 24, instead of now.
Actually, I did it at 24 too, come to think of it. Let's hope for progress by 44, shall we? In the meantime, at least it's a beautiful morning.
I glanced at the Amazon.com best seller list tonight, for the first time I can ever remember, and was surprised and amused by one development. Books by "the president elect" occupy slots #1, 3, 11, 12, and 24, out of the top 25. I have no idea if that's been the case during some/most of the campaign, of it's a surge this week thanks to the election result, but it's an admirable achievement.
The bestseller list also made me curious about the Twilight Series, by Stephanie Meyer. I've never heard of it/her, but she's got 4 books in the series, and they're sitting in slots 5-8, so clearly she's doing something right. Book 4 came out in August, and clearly her series has reached a tipping point of public awareness that's propelled the whole series onto the best seller list. From a glance at the description of book 4 I'm not interested in reading them (young adult, romance, occult, love between a gothy-hunk vampire and a human girl), but I try to stay at least peripherally aware of trends in popular fiction. Being as I still harbor ambitions of becoming, or at least surfing, those trends.
In other Obama news, an astonishing number of videos showing spontaneous outdoor, late night, election eve celebrations have popped up on You Tube. I watched a few and wished I'd been there. That's my main regret about this election; that I didn't have any one to share the excitement and happiness with when the results were coming in Tuesday evening. Every video with some guy hugging an ecstatic woman, (especially when she's hot) made me wistful. I can has politically-aware girlfriend?
Sadly, while there were countless movies of happy people clapping, cheering, and milling around on downtown streets in the wee hours, I couldn't find many of what I wanted to see; footage of people reacting when the announcement was made. (Which happened at 8pm PDT, seconds after the California, Oregon, and Washington polls closed, when Obama's victory could be absolutely projected.) There are a ton of videos of the 100,000 people celebrating in Chicago's Grant Park when Obama was projected the winner, but it doesn't seem like anyone else had a big group in front of a TV, with a video camera running, at 8pm PST.
I want to see the moment when hopeful expectation turns to disbelieving joy and excitement, rather than just the party hours afterwards. Ones like this, please. Moar!
Also, Obama held his first press conference since being elected president. He opened with a short speech about the economy, then took questions on a variety of issue for about ten minutes. I watched it out of curiosity, and found it enjoyable. As virtually every blogger I read said about it, even aside from generally agreeing with his policies and approaches, it's just damn refreshing to see the President of my country talk without dreading what he's going to say and how he's going to say it.
After so many years of wincing at Bush's halting teleprompter reading and inarticulate efforts to go off of his prepared remarks, it was almost amazing to see an intelligent, articulate, thoughtful man, in a nice suit, stand behind a podium and without any notes, speak intelligently on a variety of issues. He didn't just retreat to some glib version of his campaign speech either, like a smarter version of Palin. He actually engaged each question, giving it thought and replying honestly. Which isn't to say he didn't spin the answers towards a desired conclusion; he is a politician facing an enormously difficult task, after all. But the difference between this press conference and Bush's infrequent, highly-scripted efforts, was astonishing.
Every time Bush spoke in public, I felt like I was watching a special ed student who had somehow wound up delivering the homecoming address. I didn't want to be there, I really didn't want him to be there, and yet there we were. I had to root for him on some level due to our common origin, and watching him stumble through the English language was kind of inspiring, in a bear on a bicycle sort of way, but like a session in the dentist's chair, the best part of the experience was always the moment of cessation.
Somewhat improbably yet very predictably, Obama's unremarkable remarks spurred numerous news items. An off the cuff description of himself as a "mutt" turned into a racial bellwether, an amusingly tongue-in-cheek reply about the issue of picking out a first dog (that the written reports of convey in leaden, mangling fashion) became an animal issue, and an amusing aside about not wanting to conduct any Reagen-style seances could have turned into news had Obama not defused it by preemptively calling Nancy Reagen to apologize.
The seances remark was actually pretty funny, not that the news reports on it share that opinion. Obama was asked if he'd spoken to any previous presidents, and he said yes, that he'd talked to all of them. He amended that after a second by saying with a laugh, (paraphrase) "Well, all of the living ones... I didn't conduct any seances like the Reagens." It was amusing, but probably an example of him being too smart and too self-aware of his own language.
I do that sort of thing myself at times; realize something I've said could be interpretedly weirdly, (like Obama realizing "all of them" could be misconstrued) and then immediately try to cover for or explain it by adding a self referential joke. It's usually unnecessary, since people wouldn't have taken the odd meaning anyway, and probably wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't drawn attention to it with the additional remark. But when your brain is going really fast and you're thinking a sentence or two ahead of what your mouth can keep up with, you realize the import of what you said after the words have emerged. And sometimes you want to amend them, however unnecessarily. And sometimes that amendment gets you into more trouble than the initial comment ever would have.
Besides, as the news articles are scrupulously careful to point out, the Reagans never held any actual seances; Nancy just had a personal adviser/mystic who consulted astrology to set auspicious dates for most of Reagan's major events and initiatives, amongst her other counseling duties. Hillary Clinton, when she was the first lady, came closer to holding seances, when she did some new agey stuff about channeling inspiration from Eleanor Roosevelt. It's funny that most people laugh at Hillary's guided visualization technique, or smirk at Nancy's selecting dates based on an utterly discredited Greek mythology about the stars, and yet no one bats an eye when President Bush (and Obama, and McCain, and Clinton, and...) claim to receive inspiration and guidance from closing their eyes and talking to an invisible Hebrew sky god invented and largely popularized in Bronze Age Palestine. This is the 21st century, right?
It's dawn on election day, it's shortly after my usual bedtime, and I'm totally tempted to have a Dr. Pepper (from a bottle, of course) and stay up all day reading about Republican voter blocking efforts until election returns start coming in this evening. However, I will be sensible and go to sleep soon, cause then when I wake up in the afternoon I can see the good and/or bad news already determined, thus saving myself the tension and stress of living through it live.
No predictions from me; I mostly read mainstream news and leftstream bloggers, so all I've seen are weeks of poll returns showing Obama with a huge lead, has an enormous edge in registering new Democratic voters, gets 100,000 people to his rallies while McCain struggles to get 5000 when 3000 of them are elementary school students who were bused in for the afternoon, etc. And the opinions and analysis I read are either ravingly insane right wing fantasies about the slightly left of center Obama being a Manchurian candidate for a bunch of African Nationalists or else bomb-throwing radicals from the sixties that no one had heard for 40 years before this election, or left wing opinions about why it's right and just that Obama has a huge lead (or at least why it's right and just that McPalin has a huge deficit). With this input, I'm in no condition to make any objective predictions, but then again, neither are 99% of the other people out there, including almost all of the ones who will be blabbing away on cable news all day.
I'll be shocked if Obama doesn't win pretty handily, but then again, I thought Al Gore would win in 2004 too, so factor that into my predictive ability if you must.
For some election day humor, I just saw a link to this last night, after 27 of the 28 days had been posted, but they're funny enough to recommend anyway. Some comedy blogger posted, every day for the past month, a two-minute video of himself riffing crazy attacks on Obama. They're amusing, satirical attacks, kind of like reverse Chuck Norris facts. I'm sure they're scripted in advance, but the guy's delivery is pretty good, making them sound desperately improvised. The best of the 28 days highlight video has a number of LOL moments, and it's embedded below. I think I like the, "Barack Obama has a little straw and he sneaks up and slurps down your drink whenever you're not looking." one the best.
Update: Obama in a landslide. Just as the polls predicted. Watching his victory speech now, and it's okay, but nothing amazing. I'm listening with one ear while hoping the Secret Service did their jobs on the crowd tonight. An awful lot of gun nut, neo-Nazi types out there, and this kind of historic event could certainly galvanize their desperation.
As for Obama's speech, interesting tone to things. It was not a celebration, and I didn't see relief. He looked almost burdened, and aside from thanking people who helped him get elected, he focused largely on the future. This was much more the first speech of a president than the last speech of a candidate. And one who takes his new job very seriously. (Who knows what a field of shit he'd stepping into.)
Earlier, it was a classy concession speech by McCain. He seemed sincere. Certainly more sincere than he was during most of his attempts at pleading for understanding in stump speeches, when he had the glassy eyes and awkward, fake smile. Horrible, dishonorable, deplorable campaign he ran, but as much as the media has long loved him, I can easily see the whole "John McCain is a decent man who was just forced by his advisers to sling dirt and take the campaign into the mud." meme reborn.
McCain's all-white audience was surly and angry; eager to boo Obama and very reluctant to applaud any of the "let's pull together" homilies. Their biggest applause, by far, was when he mentioned Sarah Palin. She's definitely got the support of the dead enders and the radical fringe who remain willing to vote Republican, but I can't see how that helps her. She'd get their support in 2012, but all the moderate republicans and middle of the road, "maverick" voters that came to McCain don't like her or others from the fundie wing of the party.
No sighting of Palin, at least not on the MSNBC live video feed I'm watching, but I found a picture of her elsewhere online.
Update 2: Obama's speech wrapped up very well, after a slow middle section. More of that soaring rhetoric the right wing commentators were so despairing of all during the campaign. Turns out it might not be a bad thing for a politician to inspire people with his words, eh?
Also, when some of Obama's family came up on stage after his speech, along with Biden's and local politicians, there were more black people on the stage at his event than were in the entire convention center where McCain's concession speech took place. (Not counting the kitchen staff and valets, of course.)
Perennial doormat (in college football) Texas Tech is off to their best start in school history. They're undefeated, 8-0, and on Saturday they vastly outplayed (and very narrowly defeated) the #1 ranked University of Texas, a success that certainly won't hurt their national ranking, which was a disrepectful #7 going into Saturday's action.
I enjoyed their victory (remotely; highlights on TV at the gym and on the internet, since I still don't watch TV) as I do most underdog successes, and the game's result prompted me to dig up and reread this fascinating NY Times profile of Texas Tech's unconventional outsider of a head coach, Mike Leach. The profile is by Moneyball author Michael Lewis, and it was written back in 2005, when Leach was first enjoying some national recognition for his success at Texas Tech.
As the article makes clear, Leach is very much an iconoclast, though I refuse to believe he's as much of a borderline idiot savant as Lewis portrays him. Four years ago, his offenses were rewriting the record books and most other coaches were still tut-tutting and tisk-tisking for his incredibly pass happy approach. I don't think there's much of that going on anymore, with most of the other teams in the Big 12 conference (and quite a few others around the country) now emulating his "spread" style of offense, a change that has completely altered the college football landscape.
The article is long, well written, and a great read, even/especially if you don't give a damn about US college football. Everyone likes underdog stories about the outsider finally getting a shot, and proving all the old boys wrong. Right?
Looking for fresh coaching talent, Schwartz analyzed the offensive and defensive statistics of what he called the "midlevel schools" in search of any that had enjoyed success out of proportion to their stature. On offense, Texas Tech's numbers leapt out as positively freakish: a midlevel school, playing against the toughest football schools in the country, with the nation's highest scoring offense. Mike Leach had become the Texas Tech head coach before the 2000 season, and from that moment its quarterbacks were transformed into superstars. In Leach's first three seasons, he played a quarterback, Kliff Kingsbury, who wound up passing for more yards than all but three quarterbacks in the history of major college football. When Kingsbury graduated (he is now with the New York Jets), he was replaced by a fifth-year senior named B.J. Symons, who threw 52 touchdown passes and set a single-season college record for passing yards (5,833). The next year, Symons graduated and was succeeded by another senior - like Symons, a fifth-year senior, meaning he had sat out a season. The new quarterback, who had seldom played at Tech before then, was Sonny Cumbie, and Cumbie's 4,742 passing yards in 2004 was the sixth-best year in N.C.A.A. history.
...Schwartz had an N.F.L. coach's perspective on talent, and from his point of view, the players Leach was using to rack up points and yards were no talent at all. None of them had been identified by N.F.L. scouts or even college recruiters as first-rate material. Coming out of high school, most of them had only one or two offers from midrange schools. Sonny Cumbie hadn't even been offered a scholarship; he was just invited to show up for football practice at Texas Tech. Either the market for quarterbacks was screwy - that is, the schools with the recruiting edge, and N.F.L. scouts, were missing big talent - or (much more likely, in Schwartz's view) Leach was finding new and better ways to extract value from his players. "They weren't scoring all these touchdowns because they had the best players," Schwartz told me recently. "They were doing it because they were smarter. Leach had found a way to make it work."
...
Mike Leach, 44, entered the locker room with the quizzical air of a man who has successfully bushwhacked his way through a jungle but isn't quite sure what country he has emerged into. "When you first meet him," Jarrett Hicks, a junior wide receiver, told me, "you think he's an equipment manager." Leach's agent, Gary O'Hagan of I.M.G., who represents dozens of other big-time college and N.F.L. coaches, put it this way, "He's so different from every other football coach it's hard to understand how he's a coach."
...Each off-season, Leach picks something he is curious about and learns as much as he can about it: Geronimo, Daniel Boone, whales, chimpanzees, grizzly bears, Jackson Pollock. The list goes on, and if you can find the common thread, you are a step ahead of his football players. One year, he studied pirates. When he learned that a pirate ship was a functional democracy; that pirates disciplined themselves; that, loathed by others, they nevertheless found ways to work together, the pirate ship became a metaphor for his football team. Last year, after a loss to Texas A.&M. in overtime, Leach hauled the team into the conference room on Sunday morning and delivered a three-hour lecture on the history of pirates. Leach read from his favorite pirate history, "Under the Black Flag," by David Cordingly (the passages about homosexuality on pirate ships had been crossed out). The analogy to football held up for a few minutes, but after a bit, it was clear that Coach Leach was just... talking about pirates.
Texas Tech hosts the #9 team next week, then has to play @ the #3 team the week after that, but if they make it through both of those, they'll very likely be #1 or #2 in the nation, and bound for the national championship game against Penn State or Alabama. (Both teams that have won about 500% more titles than Texas Tech has ever dreamed of winning.) And that, would be fun. I'd probably endure an evening in a sports bar, to watch that one and root for the other, other team from Texas.
I got motivated to revisit the old days, and turned out a Diablo 3, Halloween-themed short story last night. It's posted now on the D3 site, and you can read it here. I'll add it to the fiction section on this site at some point, although that section, like reviews and other things, is kind of in limbo now since I need to redo the whole back end of this site along with reskinning everything. I keep putting that off, while also putting off adding new content, since I'll just have to redo it when I redo the scripts and layout. Yes, it's an ugly cycle.
