"Among the weblogs, the best coverage of the Churchill controversy has been in View from a Height..." -Dave Kopel, Rocky Mountain News
"In Colorado, the Rocky Mountain Alliance of Blogs is covering the hot GOP primary between beer magnate Pete Coors and former Rep. Bob Schaffer with a great deal more insight than the Denver newspapers." -John Fund, OpinionJournal.com
"The Rocky Mountain Alliance offers the best of what the blogosphere has to offer." -David Harsanyi, Denver Post
Got home last night to a new lawnmower still waiting to be used. Between the afternoon showers and the Campaign Coffees with Captains, it's been a lonely week for new hardware.
The Amazonians did deliver three offerings while I was at work, however. In The Gravest Extreme, by Massad Ayoub, and reputed to be one of the best primers about tactical and situational awareness in personal defense. The Denver Post may find it paradoxical that people carrying weapons aren't out there hunting big game on the mean streets of LoDo, but for most of us, it makes perfect sense not to want to shoot somebody. And no, not just because of all the paperwork.
Then there was the kochtopfe. A 10-piece cast aluminum with triple inner and outer non-stick layering. Of course, the "10-piece" business includes the tops, which it like saying that I have a three-piece car because the key and the gas cap aren't physically connected. And for some reason, the knobs on the tops were attached to the underside, and needed to be unscrewed and re-attached to the other side. They probably take up less room that way, but it's still the first cookware set I've gotten with some assembly required.
I gotta say, it's sturdy, heavier than cheap stuff and lighter than iron or copper, and the non-stick outside promises easier cleaning.
So we're finally moving the office. No, not putting it up on wheels and moving it across the parking lot. Given what happened to the roof a few weeks ago, the permit process itself would probably have to undergo Polar Bear review before that happened.
No, the whole happy lot of us is moving upstairs to a different conference room. I've working in offices (with and without office-mates), cubicles (with and without unendurably loud neighbors), at home, in coffee shops, and in quarters so temporary they'd make an army tent look like the Pentagon. But this is by far the weirdest set-up I've endured: 6 (now 5, soon to be 9) people in one conference room without walls, cubicles, or any semblence of privacy or climate control. Add to that the tendency to use the speaker phone when you're the only one on the call, and the room's transformation into an over-sized Easy Bake oven around 11:00 AM, and it wins the Environment Least Conducive to Productive Work running away.
Now we're getting ready to move upstairs into a larger conference room. There will be more space, and the opposite wall won't make you feel as though you're re-enacting the trash compactor scene from Star Wars. Since there are no windows, the room will be cooler, which will irritate some but which I find refreshing. We will have a clock, which, being that we're all contractors, we will occasionaly watch.
The hardest part wasn't the move itself, but the negotiations yesterday over the interior design. It was like the Paris Peace talks. We were literally talking about the shape of the table. Or at least, their arrangement. We all more or less wanted the same thing - a big horseshoe with a table for the projector in the middle, and then we spent 10 minutes moving them this way and, until they were just right.
There was a time when this sort of thing would have bothered me - just put them someplace and live with it! But now, I sort of accept it as the overhead of making everyone happy and feeling as though they've had a say. So I tend to stand there without much to say, which probably makes me look uninvolved. Oh, well. That's part of the overhead, too.
This came right after the Rosen interview yesterday. It's not often you get an hour to run free on the Blowtorch, with a chance to plug everything from the campaign to the blog, to the other radio show.
And then last night, the Colorado Union of Taxpayers spent about an hour on a briefing from legislative staff about the uses and misuses of Referendum C money. As with the Flatiron Building, what it looks like depends on where you stand, but it's pretty clear that the Legislature (and not just Democrats, unfortunately) has been playing pretty severe games in the expectation that they won't get caught.
So frankly, High Society last night was a much-needed tonic.
Today, Congress takes up a bill to prevent the use of genetic testing by businesses and insurance companies in hiring and insuring decisions. I can understand why fellow free-market conservatives would oppose such a bill, but in the end, I believe it's a wise move.
Some conservatives argue that the decision to use such information is a private matter, and to a large degree, they're right. Private insurance is private, and after all, why shouldn't employers and insurers have access to the best information available concerning the likely trajectory of their prospective employees' careers and health?
But the implications, given the world that we live in, of mandatory genetic testing - and make no mistake, it would soon become mandatory - for hiring and insurance are too troubling.
1) Basic fairness
As one caller to Bill Bennett's show put it this morning, I can choose whether or not I smoke, but I can't choose my parents. As conservatives, we believe in effort and measuring outputs. The widespread use of genetic testing measures inputs, and creates the possibility of another victim class, something we surely don't need. It also gives HR people another irrelevant piece of data to screen by, which appears to be the thing they're best at.
2) The Black Swan effect.
In his tremendous book, The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb notes the tendency of people to overrate the risks they can define, and to underrate the risks that are more diffuse. For example, when asked whether they'd rather pay for life insurance against their plane going down in a terrorist attack, or pay the same amount for insurance against the plane going down for any reason, people routinely pick the first more often than the second. This choice is clearly irrational, but it's how the mind works.
The same caller noted that you can have all the tests you want for cancer, but still can't account for someone getting hit by a truck. "Well, there's no test for that," barked the host, apparently not comprehending that that was the point.
What may work in large numbers for actuaries is unlikely to matter much in a hiring decision between two candidates, and focusing on information that we have, without understanding that it's swamped by all the information we don't have, may lead to worse, rather than better decisions. It's in many ways analagous to Modern Portfolio Theory, which makes all sorts of nonsensical assumptions about price movements, in order to reach beautiful and dangerously misleading mathematics.
3) Refusal to enter clinical trials for fear the information will end up in the hands of insurers;
Some will argue that insurers, aware that better drugs are to their benefit, will not misuse such information. But of course, better druges aren't necessarily to the companies' benefit. Whatever the actuarial results, competition will tend to force premiums down over time, regardless of conditions.
More importantly, there's Bastiat's Seen-and-Unseen. The insurance companies can, for the benefit of their boards and shareholders, point to concrete benefits from specific individuals they've denied coverage or increased premiums for. The benefits to them from better treatments are diffuse and distant.
Of course, one might also argue that this danger would lead the drug companies to guard genetic testing results like classified information, which might be comforting if the government didn't leak like a sieve.
MORE THOUGHTS: In theory, government would be well out of all of these arenas. It wouldn't regulate insurance as heavily as it does. It wouldn't distort the health insurance industry the way it does. It certainly wouldn't go around telling private individuals whom they could and couldn't hire.
And there's always the risk of frivolous class-action lawsuits lawyer-driven shakedowns, possibly on the basis of the very statistical anomalies the law is trying to read out of the system. For instance, it might happen that a plant shuts down in a part of the country where a certain gene, by virture of early settlement by a particular ethnic group, is prevalent. "Disparate Impact" might well be brought spuriously into play in such a case. I have to admit, I haven't studied the legislation closely enough to know what the legal standards will be for bringing suit.
Still, I think these things make it close, rather than tipping the scales the other way.
At the city animal shelter in Rogers, Ark., big, black dogs almost always make up the bulk of the animals put to sleep each month. Last month, 13 of the 14 dogs killed by the city were large and black - mostly Labs, shepherd mixes, pit bull mixes and Rottweillers, said Rhonda Dibasilio, manager of the city Animal Services Department.
Labs. Labs? Labs!?
What in the hell is the matter with these people? Don't worry, Sage. Dad still loves you, as long as he can pay the mortgage.
One of the thrills about working in a building with a roof under renovation is that thing constantly sounds as though it's going to come crashing down on you. Today, that could have happened.
I went off to a portrait shoot for the campaign, and came back to an evacuation. Apparently, a structural beam started to buckle, and they ordered everyone out.
You know, we're on a tight deadline on this project, but that's a hell of a way to get an extension.
I've always loved the Impressionists, so when I had a chance to go to the Inspiring Impressionism exhibit touring over at the Denver Art Museum. The show's fascinating, but more educating than inspiring itself.
This was my first time in the new wing, and I can't say it was a transformative experience. There is a diorama in the coffee-shop area, showing the arts district, and the new building stands out, looking like an alien spaceship, maybe an early Borg model. Once you're in the exhibit space, you're looking at paintings on walls one way or the other. The fact that the exterior walls militate against rights angles in somewhat annoying, but the artwork is still hanging on the flat part.
What was laughable was the weird, banal "public art" display of cycling digits. Each digit represents someone with something to do with this building, and the digits rotate at a speed represented by some number they chose. God forbid they have something at trite as actual, you know, portraits.
The exhibit itself was, as I said, more educational than inspiring. Its central conceit is smart: pair the impressionist paintings with other, older masters of a style that may have been the inspiration for the new guys. Thus, the title of the exhibit. The subject matter ranges from fruit to cleaning women to romantic rendezvous and family portraits.
It is indeed educational to see how the impressionists re-interpreted the original subject matter in their own styles. But so few works are actually striking, that the display comes across as a lecture in art history. That's a pity, as the examples are drawn from museums all over the country. I would have thought that such a broad draft would have yielded more first-round picks.
If you like that sort of thing, it's...that sort of thing. But if you're expecting to see a collection of the greats, you'll have to wait for another show.
Noted briefly: the new iPod touch will have WiFi and browser. It also means that streaming internet audio and video can now compete on a more-than-equal basis with TV and radio, except in rural areas. This is a huge deal. Combine it with localization of ads, and it means that someone like a Salem network could eventually dispense with radio stations altogether. The shows could be broadcast from - well, wherever - and the ad server could get either local or national content to the listeners in real time.
Old Man Summer is finally beginning to see a little weakening here. The humidity has been sealing in the heat until later, but it takes more and more effort for the sun to warm things up in the morning, and it has less and less time to do so. Yeah, the highs are still in the 90s, but they come later and later, and then drop off 30 degrees before sunrise. The whole curve has shifted to later in the day.
In the meantime, I've finally discovered a diner I can go to before work. It's called the 20th Street Cafe, and it look across 20th Street at the part of downtown that's been rebuilt. Which means it's on the side that hasn't. Still, it's quiet, friendly, they don't care if all I have is coffee. Sitting at a table in a restaurant and guzzling coffee while reading the blogs or working is a pleasure exceeded only by doing the same on that restaurant's patio. And there's a place in Aurora called "Dozens," which has a patio.
Meanwhile, at about 8:25, the police apparently decided to do away with a volatile substance by blowing it up. In a school parking lot about 100 yards from where I live. The ka-THUM is unmistakable for any other sound, and I went to the back door to see if I could see anything. Although, in retrospect, if I had been able to see anything, outside would probably have been the last place I wanted to be, since I would have seen the sun rising in the west.
In the meantime, the lawnmower repair shop called to say that the mower was fixed. Ahhh, just in time. Well, yes, really. It's actually nice to sit outside and type this stuff into the evening, and I'm planning on keeping it that way this time.
In the meantime, it's impossible to believe that Elul is a week old, and that Rosh Hashanah is only three weeks away. Some years I've really looked forward to them, other years I faintly dread them. These are intense holidays, devoted to introspection and self-examination, much of it unfavorable, fed by the onrushing fall. This year, given the variety of changes, it's likely to be even more intense.
Ah well, it's late, and tomorrow is a day full of debugging, tiling, and studying.
Am I the only one who's noticed the sign on the Astros' right-field wall: "H-E-B: Driving Prices Lower"?
Anyway, it's August, which means that Monsoon Season has arrived here in Colorado. Some afternoons, it's even possible to swim from work to the bus stop. It also means it's the perfect weather to start energy-intensive indoor home-improvement projects, like installing new kitchen flooring.
The first step in any project is, naturally, to buy stuff. So last night it was off to Lowe's to pick up the first set of tiles, some adhesive, and some assorted tools. As usual, the dog came along as company and entertainment for the other shoppers.
And the checkout ladies. Who spent so much time admiring How Big The Dog Is(TM), that they completely forgot to ring up about half the order. Don't look at me like that. What am I, a thief? Of course I took it back in and got it scanned. But it does suggest that 1) these women were somewhat less than fully-invested in the company's success, and b) the company paid way too much for those expensive exit-scanner that are supposed to sound like a nuclear attack at CTU when you walk out with an extra pack of gum.
This is the second time this has happened - the first being at Home Depot a few weeks ago, under similar circumstances. At least at Home Depot, they thanked me for my honesty rather than scowling at me for implicitly impugning their work. If I wanted, I could probably do the project for half the price by bringing the dog along and putting items on the bottom of the cart. But that would be wrong, that's for sure.
So Jonah Goldberg, as though he had nothing better to write about, decided to start the Dogs vs. Cats debate up again. Bill Bennett points out that while cats may be smarter, they're not, "on our side, like dogs are on our side."
If Dr. Wayne is right, wolves and people were togetherat the point when homo sapiens had just barely evolved from homo erectus...This means that when wolves and people first started keeping company there were on a lot more equal footing than dogs and people are today. Basically, two different species with complementary skills teamed up together, something that had never happened before and has really never happened since.
...
Fossil records show that whenever a species becomes domesticated its brain gets smaller. The horse's brain shrak by 16%; the pig's brain shrank by as much as 34%; and the dog's brain shrank 10-30%...Now archaeologists have discovered that 10,000 years ago, just at the point when humans began to give their dogs formal burials, the human brain brgan to shrink, too. It shrank by 10%, just like the dog's brain. And what's interesting is what part of the human brain shrank....in humans it was the midbrain, which handles emotions and sensory data, and the olfactory bulbs, which handle smell, that got smaller, while the corpus collosum and the forebrain stayed pretty much the same...humans took over the planning and organizing tasks,and dogs took over the sensory tasks.
So you think engineering isn't a craft, it's just a science, building on ever-accumulating knowledge that people can just look up? Guess again.
This is the second History Channel special on Alaska I've sat through today. The first featured a segment on the AlCan highway, built in 1942, during WWII. At first, the engineers simply cut through the forest. This exposed the permafrost to the sun, which promptly melted it, turning the road into mud. They solved the problem by putting down a mat of gravel and composite to shield the permafrost.
The second discussed the first attempt to build a road from Fairbanks to the North Slope, in 1969. At first, the engineers simply cut through the forest. This exposed the permafrost to the sun, which promptly melted it, turning the road into mud.
There's a reason governments like post-WWI Germany and Saddam's Iraq pay big bucks to keep their inactive weapons research teams together, even when they can't build the weapons. And there's a reason we'd be morons to accept Iran's unofficial suggestion that we let them get just to the brink of building a bomb.
Finally. Drought, dogs, and distraction turned what had been a gorgeous patch of green into a wilderness, inhabited by weeds big and nasty enough to peek in through open windows and demand after-dinner table scraps. Or the dog gets it.
So, in comes the Surge. Time to raze (or DIngo) the thing to the ground and start over.
For some reason, I decided to leaf through Herodotus last night. For those of you who suspect that there really is nothing new under the sun, I've got more evidence for you.
At one point, he has a Greek advisor to Xerxes explain that God is jealous of us, because death provides an out from our suffering. This idea formed the basis of a science fiction story by Asimov, where after death, those deemed smart enough are given an afterlife, and set to work on the project of finding a way for God to die.
Earlier, he relates a story of how Gorgo, the future wife of Leonidas, as a child, advised her father to leave the room in order not to be corrupted by the escalating amounts offered by a would-be briber. Of course, in Lincoln's version, he threw the guy out, claiming that, "Every man has his price, and you were getting awfully close to mine."
AIn't nothin' changed in America. We can almost get jobs we want. We can almost live whereever we went. We can pretty much get an education. But let me tell you, if they could, they'd put us right back into slavery, and we better wake up to that. Ain't nothin' changed in America.
Now this was from a black woman working as a clerk at the Post Office, to another black woman who was a customer.
Sounds as though she needs Black History Month more than most white people I know.
Happy New Year! I suppose I could catch up on all the missed holidays, but at some point, you just write off lost time and get back to the cycle.
Back from an extended blogging vacation, relaxed, refreshed, and having missed tremendous amounts of major news, such as Iran's adoption of the Nazi salute and the goose-step. It's not as though you actually run out of things to say, but it's easy to see why blogging and talk radio are such a natural fit. Both of them consume tremendous amounts of material, and you'd better not repeat yourself too often, else you may as well just post links back to prior posts.
One of the interrupting events of mid-December was a long, quick drive back east to Long Island - driving a 26-foot truck. Now I like driving, especially long distances. Here to NY - ok. From the house to Wal-Mart - not so much. But I basically had two days to get the truck to Long Island, so I-80 it was. I'll say this for the Interstates, they have speed, which is just as well, since the things are routed away from anything you might want to stop and see, anyway.
In this case, it was also a chance to kluge together some interesting technology. DC-AC converters have come down dramatically in price, and I traded in my Comcast cable modem for a Sprint wireless card (although I still have my old wifi card for when I'm in a town lacking a digital signal but possessed of a wifi-enhanced coffee shop). Iowa may have wifi-enabled all of their rest stops, but that was just a redundant system as far as I was concerned. (That may be a red flag for all those governments putting money into muni-wifi. Or it may be an excuse to turn it into another stagnant public utility.)
So after having driven from Peru, IL to the exit for Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, I am reminded that half the so-called highways on Long Island don't take truck because they were built when the largest thing on the road was a drafthorse. I know Robert Moses tried his best, but there's not enough air in any tire to get a 12' truck under a 10' 6" clearance. This was at 1:00 in the morning, having driven 800 miles already, needing to have the truck at the door by 9:00 the next morning, and low on gas, and having drunk enough diet Coke that my back teeth were floating. Having crossed The Broncks, heading for the gloriously named Throgs Neck Bridge, no neighborhood was safe to empty and refuel in, and the refreshing early-morning traffic jam made changing lanes an adventure in itself.
Ah, the magic of technology. With only the guidance of a warning sign somewhere in one of the 45 highway-to-higway interchanges in the Bronx, saying, "Trucks - Expressways Yes! Parkways No! It's The Law!," I pulled up Mapquest on the laptop in the seat next to me, and had a full-screen GPS helping me find the Yellow Brick Expressway. This would have been completely impossible even three years ago.
Talk about making lemons from lemonade. I was at home the other day, receiving a new bookcase, and turned on the Retro channel (sorry, Jared) to see Man of La Mancha was on. There are only three conditions under which actors should be allowed to sing their own parts:
1. They can actually sing
2. Marnie Nixon isn't available
3. The film will be shown only at Galludet
The problem with Man of La Mancha is that it's already a little sappy and the "message" is a little trite by now. Sure, we all know about the power and limitations of believing in spite of everything. Maybe this seemed like really inspiring stuff during the Johnson administration, but 40 years and 4 revivals on you're looking for comfortable memories and singable songs, not "message."
Rex Harrison could get away with it because he knew enough to talk through his songs as Henry Higgins. He sings maybe three notes the entire musical. Other than that, he's either shouting ("Let a Woman in Your Life!") or musing ("I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face"), but the one thing he's emphatically not doing is singing. So you want Richard Kiley (who was in two of those revivals), not Peter O'Toole. (Ironically, Rex Harrison was supposed to create the role, but backed out and Kiley took over for him. Would O'Toole's efforts have looked better or worse by comparison?)
The non-singing-singing only works twice. Once when Sofia Loren is spitting "Aldonza" at poor Don Quixote, and again when the roughs are taunting her with "Little Bird." And even "Little Bird" sounds like the writers were aiming for "When You're a Jet" but didn't quite have the wings. Of course we're supposed to laugh a little when Quixote is made invulnerable by the Golden Spittoon of Mambrino. A little, though, not a lot. Richard Kiley's booming baritone makes you think, "Well, just maybe it'll protect him a little." All the soft focus in the world can't help Poor Li'l Peter look like anything but a sap.
The good news is that maybe the original cast album will be available as an MP3 now. After having relived the same mistake they made with DVDs, DAT, video tape, 8-track (ok, maybe not 8-track), audio tape, TV, radio, the phonograph and probably paper and the clay tablet, too, the recording industry has figured out that MP3s won't just go away if you ignore them long enough.
Snow. Cold. When they gang up on you, the roads turn into skating rinks. For the first time, I had to use the 4WD just tooling around town. Of course, the Jeep is rear-wheel drive normally, not front-wheel as I'm used to, but even 4WD doesn't help your braking all that much. It just means that you slide straight. The snow's still coming down even now, but tomorrow's supposed to be sunny, so perhaps there will be photo-ops anew.
So having finished the NASD licensing steeplechase, and not yet having renewed the Quest for the CFA, I've got a little time on my hands in the evenings, and I've decided that at least one of the adult ed classes at the shul must be for me. Last night I tried out the beginning Talmud class - the nth beginning Talmud class I've tried - and it went pretty well.
We're learning Tractate Makkot, and it deals in part with the penalties for perjury in civil cases. The basic rule is that if you lie under oath as a witness, and if that lie would have cost someone money, you owe that person damages equal to what you tried to cost them. So if you falsely claim that someone stole $1000, and that lie is uncovered and the claim denied, you owe the accused $1000, since that's what you tried to do him out of.
Apply this to a loan. You claim that Bob borrowed $1000 for 30 days and now needs to pay it back. Bob claims the loan was for 10 years. What would your lie have cost him? Not $1000, since everyone agrees that he needs to pay that back anyway.
In fact, you'd owe Bob what he would have been willing to pay to have the money for 10 years, minus what he'd be willing to pay to have it for 30 days. I'm not sure how they would have calculated this back in 200 CE, but nowadays, you'd just apply the short-term and long-term interest rates to determine the value of having the money on hand. (There are halachic issues with charging interest, but set those aside for the moment.) In short, the raabis understood, at least at some level, the notion of opportunity cost and the time value of money.
Pretty neat, huh?
Less neat is this week-old piece from the Denver Post about minority enrollment at CU. Since this is a report about a report (a Boorstinian pseudo-event of the first order), objections to the diagnosis and prescriptions are anticipated and dismissed:
The study accused flagship universities of blaming their low diversity on inadequate state funding and the K-12 system.
Instead, they should direct more financial aid to low-income students, recruit minority students more aggressively and focus on helping minority students succeed in college, the report said.
Unasked by the reporter or by the CU administration: of the Colorado high school graduates who qualify as "minorities" under their definition, how many can actually read at 12-grade levels, and why is it CU's job to remediate this problem?
It's almost Thanksgiving, and the lights are coming out for the month. Office buildings and government buildings have started with the displays, and it does actually add some cheer to the month. The Denver City and County Building has the gaudiest display in town. Although they don't have a sound and light show.
Even the sunset cooperated. There were high clouds, but not the wispy cirrus kind. Serious stratus-types. The wind had pushed them out away from the mountains, clearing the way for the sunset, and sculpting them into the wildest shapes, the kind of thing you'd see in a 1960s version of Mars. So with the setting sun, you got the edges of the clouds highlighted in the descending rainbow: white to yellow to orange to pink to purple. With the city lights starting to poke through the dusk, the whole show was worth twice the price of admission.
I remain convinced that our holiday schedule is badly out of whack. New Year's comes barely a week after the solstice, which isn't accidental, but still leaves about 8-10 weeks of cold, dark, and wet before the wildflowers start to peek through. The lights have been taken down, and the whole months of January and February have the air of a hangover. Some of the smaller towns have winter festivals of various kinds, but these are highly localized, tightly contained by the surrounding mountains.
If you're Jewish, you get the relief of Tu B'Shevat and Purim (with a hangover of its own), and unless you're in Israel or certain sections of New York, it's not like it spills out into the streets, or has weeks' worth of buildup of its own. Chinese New Year comes in January as well, but outside of New York and San Francisco it barely registers, and even there, for most people who aren't Chinese it just signifies a one-day interruption in the sale of cheap electronics.
There are holidays in January and February: Washington's Birthday, MLK Day, Valentine's Day, Lee-Jackson Day, but they're all either too private or too earnest, first-rank people, but second-rank holidays trying a little too hard.
And then Hosting Matters went down. Seems as though I was sharing space with another blogger, and the server just wasn't big enough for the two of us. After HM relocated him to another server - no doubt violating myriad sections of the Geneva Convention in the process - things picked back up.
Election Day was, in most senses, very pleasant, although I wouldn't say it ended well. I started out by waiting in line an hour to vote. Some people weren't so lucky. Others weren't so persistent. And it was the remainder that put the unknown Cary Kennedy into the Colorado Treasurer's office over the eminently qualified Mark Hillman. I didn't actually get to use the new and improved electronic voting machines, each personally programmed by Karl Rove, but maybe next time.
(Last night on Backbone Radio, we interviewed Jim Spencer, who compared Mayor Hickenlooper's abdication of responsibility to what he imagined Mayor Daley Pere would have done. In fact, Mayor Daley Pere would have had the ballots filled out and counted beforehand.)
Fortunately, there was a Standing-in-Line Center right near DU, where I was to lecture Prof. Christina Foust's class on politics and communications. Students don't get to see real live conservatives in their natural habitat very often, and I don't get a chance to speak uninterrupted very often, so that part was a win-win.
In fact, the class was pretty typical of college classes. Some of the students were more engaged than others, with a few carrying the question-burden for the rest. Most listened attentively for most of the time, and a few were off planning that evening's entertainment. On the whole, though, I thought it was a fair discussion. The students were intelligent but not treacherous, and the class was certainly not the ambush that one hears so much about on college campuses. While I tried to bring it back to blogging & its role in the conservative movement, the students seemed more interested in discussing politics and some economics, so we stayed there most of the time.
I have to admit, I fumbled one question rather badly. One girl asked why we should care if Western Europe went Muslim. I responded, truthfully enough, that while we were good at building airplanes and world financial centers, they seemed good at crashing airplanes into such centers, and that the two were not morally equivalent. There was, of course, a better answer.
I should have asked her if she, as a woman, wanted to go to graduate school in France, only to find that the pre-landing announcement included instructions for donning the burka before deplaning at the Ayatollah Khomeini International Airport in Paris, that her student experience would include a relatively constant low-level fear of gang rape, punctuated by brief, but high, moments of such tension, and whether or not the murder of her classmate by her brother, for the crime of dating that cute Christian fellow across the aisle, would constitue sufficient reason for not wanting France to lose its intifada.
She probably would have just blinked at me. Clearly some students - like the Air Force ROTC cadet in the front row - understand what we're up against. For some others, it just requires too much imagination.
After that, a whirlwind trip to Charlotte and Dallas for a company visit. I can't talk much about the company visit just yet. I will, however, put in a plug for Gleiberman's, Charlotte's answer to the East Side Kosher Deli. Very good food, very pleasant service (although at a slightly Southern pace), and Malta. No, Malta.
And then last week, the server went down and recovered.
For those of you who thought maybe I was in my tent sulking after Black & Blue Tuesday, no such luck. I'll have an update at some point, but it involves, lecturing, voting, travelling, eating, and a few other -ings.
Did something unusual for me Saturday night - went to a party. I'm one of these people who dreads parties, and usually ends up having a good time, much to my surprise. One of the guys at the shul is turning 40 - poor sap - and his wife threw him a party with the whole minyan. Instead of welcoming him to the club, I felt like telling him, "you go on ahead, I'll catch up." In the event, it was fun seeing people in a setting other than lunch or kiddush.
So naturally, going to bed early, I also got up early - like around 4:00. This has been happening with some regularity, and I can't say I'm exactly thrilled. But I used the opportunity to take the dog down to Castlewood Canyon State Park for a more adventurous early morning walk. This was ill-fated from the get-go. The park doesn't open until 8:00, but the "Park Closed - Save Yourselves - Turn Back Now" sign doesn't indicate that, it just blocks the way. I probably could have found a place to hang out with a cup of coffee to kill the time, had I known. As it was, we both had to settle for the regular dog park.
So I came back home, removed a tree branch from a phone line, and rode the bike for 40 minutes. After 20 lbs., I've hit the Dreaded Plateau. You just have to keep reminding yourself that it's ok, that weight loss is pretty much an arithmetic problem - if you're expending more calories than you're taking in, you will lose weight. I'm sure in a week or two, I'll break out again, and drop what seems like 5 lbs. in a week. Of course, if I were a Democrat, I'll either be calling for a starvation diet or to just drop the whole enterprise altogether. Fortunately, I'll be listening to my inner Rumsfeld.
There was the Cowboys-Redskins game. For 59 minutes, I truly understood what it was like to be a Redskins fan in the 60s. The team missed everything - passes, blocks, tackles. They actually covered a punt at the goal-line so well that the Skins cover guy had time to turn around at the 1-yard-line and catch the punt. It skittered between his legs into the end zone. They should have added an arrow through the head of the logo at midfield.
With 30 seconds left and the score tied 19-19, the Skins kicker, who was lucky to keep the ball in the stadium, missed a 49-yard field goal. The Cowboys drove down the field to give Vanderjagt a 35-yarder of his own with 6 seconds. I stand up and walk to the TV, ready to bury the team & the season, and to leave the house. Well, Vanderjagt must have been liquored up, because the Skins block the kick, take it down to the Dallas 45, get a 15-yard face mask call, and kick a 47-yarder of their own to win the game.
Bill Parcells must hate Joe Gibbs.
So, out to the cafe to work until the show. Except that neither Panera nor the adjacent Peaberry can get their Internet connections to work. I do what I can offline, and finally turn myself in here at the station.
Someone left the following comment on the Blogcritics.org version of my One Night With The King review: "The Christian Bible is the same as the Hebrew Bible except that the Christian Bible includes the New Testament." Right. And the United States is the same thing as North America except for Mexico and Canada.
This afternoon, a company we're covering had an earnings conference call, and I need to write an update. I will point out that some people apparently don't know how to spell, even if you spot them the entire word. I've been saying, "S-as-in-Sam-h-a-r-F-as-in-Frank" for so long it really it one long, hyphenated word. Apparently, for some people hearing it for the first time, "F-as-in-Frank" sounds like, "P." And so on the Newport Q3 2006 Conference Call Transcript I will forever be "Joshua Sharp." *Sigh* Perhaps she was just translating it from the Yiddish.
It's earnings season, and I also need to upload a bunch of our updates to First Call and Bloomberg, so it's going to be light blogging, I think.
Working on a new song, and a couple of possibly original insights into the Islamsts. Otherwise, nothing much going on.
My father was in town visiting for the weekend, so we had a chance to drive up to Loveland Pass (snowy, windy, closed) and around the Dillon Reservoir before the show. He actually made it to the studio, but ESPN and Don Imus notwithstanding, radio isn't the most exciting thing in the world to watch. Sadly, he refused John's invitation to sing.
He was expected, but not until Friday evening, so when the dog started up at 3:00 AM Friday morning, the house was a scene of much confusion. Turns out the he decided to save a night's hotel room and turn I-70 into his own private Le Mans de 24 hour. I wasn't feeling terrific to begin with and I'm afraid his first day here was spent mostly reading the paper and watching me drink tea.
The bad news is that he headed back this morning. The good news is that there's hope, after all. Just remember: "When dangling, use participles."
I can't say I'm a big fan of diagramming sentences. I do think that the best way to write well is to read a lot, but only after you learn to operate the machinery, and grammar is the machinery. Grammar isn't the engine, but rather the stick shift. Get it right, and you've got both power and control at your disposal. Screw it up, and you've stripped the gears and burnt out the head gasket. Stretch a metaphor too far, and you sound like a pompous moron. Some people figure this stuff out early. We call them, "writers." Some people never quite get the hang of it, and we call them, "editors."
Making a fetish of grammar is an unappealing but probably necessary phase for anyone who takes it seriously. I'm glad to say that I am now more likely to be confused than morally offended at mistakes in parallel construction, for instance. More like to roll my eyes than to cringe at people who think "it's" is possessive. According to his daughter, Clifton Fadiman had taken to correcting restaurant menus on red ink, although not to actually grading them. This seems to me going too far. Subsequent patrons deserve the levity of seeing chicken described as "foul" just as much as you do.
Strunk and White (or, Strunk and White) get it about right - the important thing is to be understood, and grammar should aid, not inhibit, that quest. If you're spending minutes on end trying to shoehorn your idea into a 4th-grade teacher's idea of proper grammar, you might want to tear up the sentence, or the idea, or both, and start over.
The other advantage of my Dad's visit was that I had a chance to introduce him to a couple of my best friends in town. Both Dad and Dov have a virtually inexhaustible fund of stories, so they were able to keep each other entertained. You might think I was bored by hearing two sets of stories for the multipleth time, but in fact, it just keeps me sharp listening for something new. In my Dad's case, it turns out that a couple of bank robbery stories (cut it out: he used to work at a bank, not rob them) that were separate had somehow merged into one in my retellings. With them untangled, I now have two stories instead of one.
I also spent Shabbat reading a couple of essays by my favorite essayist, Joseph Epstein. If there are any books by Epstein you don't possess, fix that. Now. I don't save and display emails, but I was delighted to get a reply to a fan email I sent Mr. Epstein telling him that the only reason I had bought a particular number of the Weekly Standard was one of this essays.
Most of his stuff is somewhat light, a little wisful. But his essay defending Mencken against charges of anti-Semitisim is serious business, even if he seems to have lost his lonely argument with the rest of academia. The judgment was so swift and so decisive, even if so unjust, that in the 15 years or so since the controversy over his diaries erupted, Mencken has been quietly dropped from the journalistic pantheon by the same people who've squandered all the capital he spent his career building up. Any biopic is unthinkable, since he exists now only as a caricature of a curmudgeon.
It wasn't enough to shut down the city - although I did seem some plows in search of accumulation yesterday afternoon. It was enough to collapse the as-yet-still-assembled sukkah. I had planned to take the thing down Monday evening, but events, as they say, overcame. So of course, it finally collapsed in a heap of plastic, PVC, and tinsel. The truly amazing part is that the whole thing didn't just turn into a giant Pick-Up-Stix project when I backed the Jeep away from it this morning. Trees still dry from the summer went down, too. There was one blocking Ogden at Speer this morning.
It never stuck to the streets, but this morning, the clouds burned off to show white foothills for the first time this year. That's starting to melt already, too, but it's a warning that Winter's here, and he means business.
Naturally, the sodding is just going to have to wait until Spring, if it happens at all. I may still rent a tiller on Sunday and try to till, seed, and weed-kill the back yard, and see what comes up in April.
So I'm sitting here in the Cherry Creek Panera, trying desperately not to stare at the girl in the actual tin foil hat. It looks like a colonial-era wig, only made from folded sheets of aluminum foil. Once upon a time I would have gone up to her and asked her what bet she lost.
I also notice that, for some reason, Panera seems to have switched from classical to jazz. This isn't a step down, but it's at least a step...over. It changes the feel of the place, to a little more hip and a little less civilized. I'm not sure why it was necessary; when I've been here during lunch, they draw an SRO crowd with plenty of high school students not scared off by the sounds of violins and brass.
In other change news, it'll soon be ok for me to get more than an emerency couple of gallons at the 7-11 downhill from the house. 7-11 has announced that it's dropping Hugo Chavez's personal ATM, Citgo, as its gasoline supplier. I've been boycotting Citgo for years, and now I'll probably have a chance to support semi-local Sinclair. It's actually based in SLC, but everytime I drive through Wyoming, I drive past a gigantic Sinclair refinery ("The Most Modern Refinery in the US!", which it was when the sign went up). It's local oil, made from real Wyoming dinosaurs, yessir.
Boston City Councillor Jerry McDermott want to take down the Citgo sign overlooking the Green Monster, although with the Saux having missed the playoffs, it's a moot point for a few months, anyway. And independent Mass. gubernatorial candidate Christy Mihos wants to dump Citgo as his gas supplier for his convenience stores. The Boston Globe, naturally, doesn't get it. They still want to accept Chavez's gift of oil for the poor, so maybe they should change their motto to, "Ain't Too Proud To Beg."
I've also put up a new section on the site, which I may be expanding over time. It's a collection of anti-Hitler political cartoons, along with a little commentary and discussion. Sooner or later, maybe sooner, I'll put a link to it on the homepage. For now, this is the ony way to get there.
The Instaprof notes that cursive may be joining shorthand in the Bourne From Which No Penmanship Returns. Most answers in bluebooks now tend to be block printed rather than written. Shorthand is long-gone, a victim of the boss's abillity to type his own memos now, and I suspect that even long written answers will be passe soon. The Palm Grafiti was a clever intermediate step, but you'll notice that manufacturers started attaching keyboards to their PDAs as soon as they could figure out how to.
Reynolds notes that beautiful script is a small loss, but in fact, penmanship has been deteriorating for well over a century. If you can dig up a hand-written letter from, say, 1900, look at the writing, and you'll see that the script is so elegant it's almost unreadable by the modern eye. Losing script altogether is the next step in functionality.
In fact, I still write cursive most of the time, a decision that dates back to college. My own handwriting used to be unreadable to the modern eye, too, or any eye for that matter. Growing up I probably had the worst penmanship withing 50 miles of DC. The only reason it wasn't a greater radius is that I'm sure there was some senile nonegenarian in Baltimore who could barely scratch out his request that the soup be smoother next time. I write left-handed, but I throw, kick, and bat right-handed, so maybe that has something to do with it.
My handwriting was so bad (how bad was it?) it was so bad, that my 8th-grade Geometry teach, Mr. Allison, used to grade down my homework assignments because he claimed he had to work too hard to read all those right answers. Didn't help when I started spending an hour lettering them. Didn't help when I switched to ink. B. B-. 100%. B+. In the long run, the grade wasn't that important, but these were high school grades now, and if I wanted to get into Virginia, A's were going to have to be the order of the day. I wasn't going to let some frustrated calligrapher stand between me and Cavalierdom.
The only thing that helped was when I started typing - yes, with an Underwood electric typewriter, typing, my assignments. I typed out the proofs (you know, rule you're using on the left, logical result on the right, like an accounting T-chart). I used an underlined ! for "perpendicular," and an underlined / for "angle," and went back and drew in the "T". Not being a complete idiot, I penciled the solid-geometry drawings, then traced them over in ink. Finally, "A's."
My handwriting was pretty much the same through the first couple of years in college. Third year, I read a column by George Will about the virtues of fountain pens (I suspect another one is forthcoming on the heels of this article), and went out and got a cheap $10 model at Rose's. I liked it, so I got myself a more expensive Schaeffer model a few months later.
So I had the dream-to-write-with pen, one you couldn't really print with, and I decided to slow down and upgrade my handwriting to match. Write slowly, and everything falls into line. The first time a checkout girl complemented me on my handwriting I almost asked her out. I was 25, and I can honestly say it was the first time in my life I had heard the words, "wow, that's really nice handwriting." The only reason I knew she wasn't making fun of my was that I asked if she were.
So, another buggy-whip skill mastered just in time.
Unfortunately, the sodders won't be here until the 17th of October, so Sukkot will have to take place in the embarassing wilderness that the back yard has become. At least there aren't shards of broken glass, but I will have to clean the place up from the dog's various deposits of toys and, ah, dog deposits.
But that's tomorrow. Today, it's get ready for Yom Kippur. Naturally, for a fast day, the bagel store was hoppin'. As usual they had brought in some extra help for the day, and as usual, they didn't know any of the prices or the clientele. No matter. For a staff trying to deal with a bunch of Jews, they were doing pretty well.
From there, it was on to a nice, long walk with the dog at the dog park. Cherry Creek Reservoir has a hugh off-leash area, and while Sage used to play with the other dogs, now he mostly just enjoys the chance to run freely and smell everything without being dragged along on a rope. He did manage to find a chocolate lab his size to play with this time. He dutifully tried to dominate him, and the chocolate let him get away with it for a while before running away and seeing if Sage would give chase.
I apologized to the owners for Sage's behavior, but they said they didn't mind, and actually were laughing at their own dog's failure to hit back. I give them credit. Usually, I'm a little embarassed by Sage's need to show every other dog who's boss, but the real problem isn't with the other dogs, it's with the owners who seem either offended or threatened by it. The other dog will have one of three reactions. Either he'll put up with it indefinitely. Or she'll take it seriously, get her hackles up, and let Sage know that he should at least spring for dinner and a movie. Or he'll start playing himself. Any of these reactions is ok, and the dogs will generally figure it out. If a dog is the type who won't figure it out, he shouldn't be off-leash at a dog park. But I've run into owners who've gotten really angry at this stuff, and one jackass who actually started throwing tennis balls at Sage.
Tennis balls! Why didn't I think of that? Perfect! Let's punish a dog who's playing with our dog by rewarding him with a game of fetch! In that case, it wasn't just the guy's dog who could have used a little socialization.
No today's idiots were of a different order. Now the sign clearly states that Motorized Vehicles are not allowed. Fair enough. There are horses out there, dogs who think they have the unfettered right of way, little kids who aren't exactly known for situational awareness. Yet some mother thought it was perfectly fine for her little tyke to go riding around in the big-wheels version of an ATV. I could have outrun the thing, when her little angel does what boys do and tries to catch that little dog with the short legs and bad hearing, she's gonne regret it.
The other was a comment I heard on the way out of the park: "Gee, I hope she's not in heat again..." Gee, I hope she was talking about her dog. Or maybe not. I had Sage's doghood snipped off before he had a chance to miss it, but why on God's green earth would you bring a dog in heat to an off-leash dog park unless you wanted a lot of company? And this in a country with mandatory sex ed in the schools.
Then it was on to a tour of the Evil Big Box stores: Wal-Mart and Home Depot. I still think the liberal hatred of Wal-Mart doesn't have anything to do with unions, health benefits, cheap generics, or leaning on suppliers. I think it dates back to their unwillingness to carry certain books, magazines, and CDs on the theory that, well, they didn't want to carry them. The Left went ballistic, screaming, "censorship," when in fact, if they had the least bit of imagination, they would have been screaming, "business opportunity." Or at least attending shareholders meetings.
