2018: Year of YOG

My resolution for 2018 is to consistently involve myself in things that begin with the phoneme "yog" . . . I need to incorporate more yoga into my workouts because I'm not very flexible, I need to continue eating Greek yogurt in the morning because it has lots of protein and it's good for my microbiome, and I need to refer to my idol as often as I can, the king of the nonsensical sentence: Yogi Berra.

Ode to Talcum

I've just finished showering the dirt and grit and sweat and talcum powder off my body, accumulated from hiking twenty plus miles-- the exact distance is still being computed; our intrepid gang of ten dads hauled our asses through through Montclair, Glenridge, Verona, West Orange, Eagle Rock Reservation, Mills Reservation, Montclair State Campus and a bunch of places I can't remember, on an urban/suburban/dirt trail adventure, we walked from 9 AM to 6:00 PM-- and I walked over a mile to the train station at 7:00 AM; we saw a fox and Yogi Berra's mansion and the top of Eagle Rock and Thomas Edison's lab; in the middle of the day, we got soaked in the downpour, but we finally made it back to Montclair, had a delicious meal at Le Salbuen, took an Uber home, and-- because of an emergency baby powder purchase mid-hike and very liberal application of said powder, in many public locales-- including along busy roads-- I am happy to report that there was no chafing.

2016: More of the Same . . . Plus a Little More

In 2016, I resolve to continue doing more of the same-- this worked well for me in 2015-- and in addition, as a bonus, I am resolving to do two other things:

1) play more video games . . . and I've already got a head start on this resolution, as we got a Wii U for Christmas;

2) take over for Yogi Berra, because someone has to construct baffling aphorisms, and Yogi's dead, and when dead people talk, they don't say much (besides "AVENGE MY DEATH," which is way too straightforward for Yogi Berra).

Getting It Wrong

A logical guess as to who said "prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future" is Yogi Berra . . . but it was actually Danish physicist Neils Bohr, and he certainly hit the nail on the head -- humanity is always getting it wrong, very wrong, when we speculate on how technology and culture will evolve . . . to hear more on this topic, listen to the Freakonomics podcast called Who Runs the Internet?; coincidentally, last week one of my students showed the class the picture above and talked about how he loved looking at old visions of the future -- and, as Clay Shirky pointed out during an interview in the podcast-- we had the imagination to conceive all kinds of wild scenarios: flying cars and floating cities . . . but in all of these visions, women were still wearing aprons and stuck in the kitchen . . . we could imagine a mailman wearing a jet-pack, but not a female lawyer in a pantsuit.

Some Forecasts Are All Wet

Nate Silver's new book The Signal and the Noise: why so many predictions fail -- but some don't details his methods of assessing statistical probabilities of future events -- and he comes to the same conclusion as Yogi Berra: "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future" and while this advice isn't groundbreaking, his treatment of it might be . . . he reminds us that we have a fantastically large amount of information available now, yet the accuracy of many of our predictions don't necessarily reflect this added information-- we still can't sift "the signal" out of the chaos, and so we need to know what "noise" to ignore -- and often the most significant information comes either in the tiny details, at the "more granular" level or in the big story . . . at a largely philosophical level (his explanation on how Standard and Poor's and Moody's blew the CDO risk assessment and contributed to the financial crisis is excellent) and while his explanation of how he built PECOTA -- an algorithm designed predict the success of baseball players over the course of their career -- is engaging and fun, my favorite chapter so far explains the truth about weather forecasting: the National Weather Service does a great job, but Weather.com and your local weatherman have a "wet bias," because the worst thing a weather service can do is NOT predict rain . . . so if there is a 5% or 10% or 15% chance of rain, Weather.com will say that there is a 20% chance of rain -- to avoid the ire of folks who might get rained on when they didn't think that there was a chance in hell it was going to rain . . . and since rain makes such good TV, on your local forecast, if they predict a 100% chance of rain, the rain only occurs 66% of the time . . . it's kind of like setting your clock a few minutes ahead so you're not late for work . . . you're fooling yourself for your own good.

Retraction (Yogi Berra is NOT Dead)

Yesterday, in a cascade of self-referential meta-madness, I explained that it is very difficult to consciously create an adage in the style of Yogi Berra, and then I quoted a colleague who-- in a heated description-- inadvertently coined such a phrase (If you saw her, you'd know what she looks like!) but then--accidentally-- I penned my own Yogi Berraism, when I said that "Yogi Berra would be smiling in his grave" if he heard Katie's wonderful maxim . . . because not only is Yogi Berra is not dead (he's 86) but skulls are always smiling, so the metaphor doesn't really make sense . . . and I am hoping that this post doesn't kill Berra, because I've had a history of killing celebrities with my attention (the first song I ever sang in front of a class was "Delia's Gone" by Johnny Cash, and he died the next day-- which made my students extraordinarily happy-- and in college, I started reading Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene, and he was dead within hours, so I've definitely got some kind of voodoo magic . . . or a more logical explanation is that I am a prodigal consumer of arts and literature, and so over the course of my life it would be more odd if no one died that I was perusing at the the time).

Katie vs. Yogi

I have praised the laconic anti-wit of Yogi Berra, and I even tried to invent my own Yogi Berra-esque adage-- and I learned that it's not the kind of thing you can consciously create-- but once in a while someone says something so perfectly true and paradoxical, that you know Yogi is smiling in his grave . . . and so when my colleague Katie attempted to describe an extremely inappropriately dressed high school girl, she got so worked up about the sleaziness of the student's outfit that she passionately told us: "If you saw her, you'd know what she looks like!"

Unresolutions for 2011

I am proud to say that I successfully complied with my 2010 Resolution--  not once did I create an ersatz Yogi Berra quotation in 2010 . . . so I have kicked that habit; for 2011, I am going to pay homage to the great Geoff Dyer (who wrote the ultimate un-book, Out of Sheer Rage, which is ostensibly a biography of D.H. Lawrence, but actually a treatise on procrastination and motivation; he never actually writes the biography-- although it is found in the BIO section of the library) and instead of resolving to do things this year, I am resolving to not do things, and Geoff Dyer put this better than me in this passage-- you should read the whole thing-- but if you're lazy, he essentially boils it down to this aphorism: Not being interested in the theatre provides me with more happiness than all the things I am interested in put together . . . and so here is my list of things that I resolve to remain "not interested in" for the year of 2011:

1) The theater (expensive, time-consuming, and it's for old people);

2) Golf (ditto);

3) The NHL;

4) Reality TV (even Jersey Shore);

5) The phrases "It is what it is," and "You know what I mean";

6) Tron nostalgia;

7) Going to PTO meetings (thanks Catherine!);

8) Baking;

9) Organizing the crawl space (thanks Catherine!);

10) Oprah's Book Club.

Keeping It Yogi

Here's a real quotation said by a real administrator at our end of the year meeting, I think it does Yogi Berra proud: In order for things to happen, a lot of things have to get done (and this is so much better than my bogus Yogi Berra quotation but not nearly as good as my sincere apology for my phony Yogi Berra quotation).

A Very Contextual and Very Specific Resolution

Happy New Year . . . and, in the spirit of the future, I'd like to come clean about the past: that apt end of the year quote I posted yesterday was not said by Yogi Berra; I made it up, and it actually doesn't make sense at all, not even in a Yogi Berra sort of way (unlike the unerring logic of this Berra maxim: "Nobody goes to that place anymore-- it's too crowded") and so I'd like to apologize, and you'll be happy to know that I've made a New Year's Resolution and it is this: in 2010, I pledge to try my best not to invent quotations and speciously attribute them Yogi Berra, thus denigrating his good name.

Yogi Guru

Another perfect sentence not written by me, and an apt one to end the year on-- this one is attributed to the timeless quipster Yogi Berra: "I'll tell you about the future tomorrow."