1) I wanted to heat up my leftover half-burrito last night and when I opened the aluminum foil I found the roll to be empty-- one of the children finished the foil and then put the box back-- and since foil is required to heat up a burrito ( I wasn't going to risk it in our brand new air-fryer) I had to go to the store and it was busy;
2) though I've only got eighty pages left, I'm not sure sure I'm going to finish my 54th book (2020 was a good year for reading books) because I might abandon it . . . it's a fantasy novel by J.K. Jemisin called The Fifth Season and the subtitle is "Every Age Must Come to An End" and it won the Hugo Award in 2016 so I thought it would be a fitting end to this weird and stunted year but it's a bit too apocalyptic and cruel and depressing . . . though it's set in an alternate universe of fissures and tsunamis and volcanoes and an oppressed group of "orogenes," people with the ability to sense and manipulate the wild and restless thermal and kinetic energy that is par for the course in this world-- they can quiet these disasters . . . or set them off-- now that I'm summarizing, I realize it is a pretty great book-- just painful-- and I will probably finish it because of the last kick in the balls from 2020;
3) it is raining and it is going to rain and it will continue raining until well into the New Year.
"How to Fix a Broken High Schooler in Four Easy Steps" is the second part of the Freakonomics two-part podcast on American education and Philip Oreopoulos, who sets up programs to help high-risk students succeed, summarizes four major reasons why students fail:
1) students are too focused on the present-- which describes my own children perfectly, even though I always tell them "think about the future," this simple maxim doesn't sink in-- they live in the moment, without any worry of the consequences of their words and actions;
2) students tend to overly rely on routine, and just keep doing what they've been doing in the past-- and this one does NOT apply to my own children, as they can't establish a routine if their life depended on it (see number one);
3) students sometimes think too much about negative identities-- they focus on what they're not good at or hang around with the wrong crowd (I think my boys might BE the wrong crowd);
4) mistakes are made more often in stressful situations or situations where there's not enough information-- and this is a tough one because my natural inclination is to yell at my kids when they're doing something stupid because they lack information, but the yelling causes stress and they don't listen anyway, so we're caught in a vicious cycle of ignoring them and letting them fail on their own (which they do with flying colors) or telling them how to think and behave, which usually results in yelling and stress and more mistakes . . . so essentially there's no hope as a parent, you can never do the right thing and you just have to hope that by reading lots of comic books, your kids will pick up enough literacy to make it in the world.
In December, SNL aired a sketch about the band Weezer. Some folks are sitting down to what looks to be a lovely holiday dinner party, but then the music algorithm randomly spits out Weezer's cover of "Africa." The quintessential Weezer debate ensues. Leslie Jones and Matt Damon get into it, vehemently. If you're a Weezer fan of a certain age, then you've tread this ground before. And if you're not, then the debate probably didn't make much sense. The rest of the dinner party can't understand why Damon and Jones are getting so hot and bothered. The best line in the sketch might be when Heidi Gardner asks: “Is this a thing people care about?”
The Atlantic promptly posted an article called "The Saturday Night Live Sketch That Sums Up All Online Discourse." The author, David Sims, completely mischaracterizes the piece. He tries to glean a general, modern lesson from the particulars, and he bungles it. His big takeaway is this:
If you know Weezer’s back catalog intimately, every silly reference made in the sketch lands, but if you don’t, it’s still effective. Because above all, this is a sketch about the way some people discuss almost anything these days—with feigned politeness immediately escalating to personal cruelty. Though part of the joke was that this Weezer disagreement was playing out at a dinner party, I was immediately reminded of so much online discourse, where part of the point is coming up with the most extreme reaction possible.
No offense Mr. Sims, but you can burn in hell. And drink my hot blood. This sketch isn't about how people argue online. It's not about "feigned politeness escalating into personal cruelty." The emotions here are totally valid, because Damon and Jones are arguing about something much more profound than Weezer. Deep stuff. They know it. I know it. And my buddy Kevin knows it. We've been having this identical argument since 2005. Since long before online discourse. Pre-Twitter. The Age of Myspace.
Is This a Thing People Care About? Yes!
Kevin and I have been having this very same debate since Weezer released their fifth album, Make Believe. The one with "Beverly Hills." Yuck. "Beverly Hills," which features on-the-nose lyrics, an awkward faux hip-hop delivery, and a talkbox solo. I pronounced the album terrible. I swore I would never listen to the band again. Kevin kind of liked it. He didn't love it, but he also didn't consider it the end of times for Weezer. He was more forgiving than me, but I had my reasons. I knew better. I had been burned before.
And so the debate began. A debate much bigger than Kevin and me, a debate much bigger than the cheesy crap that Weezer started to produce, a debate much bigger than all of our meager and insignificant lives (whether we have a 90210 zip or not). People will be having this debate far into the future. Kevin and I might download our consciousness into the singularity and continue this debate until the sun burns out (which you will see would be highly appropriate). Intelligent carbon-based life-forms on other planets are having this debate right now. It's a discussion about the permanence of character and identity. It's discussion about the possession of an eternal and everlasting soul. Where lies your essence?
In this debate, I always play the role of Leslie Jones. To infinity and beyond. And Kevin will eternally be Matt Damon. It's a post-modern musical version of Sartre's "No Exit."
Here's a quick synopsis of the two positions. They are, of course, allegorical.
Matt Damon takes the stance that Weezer is "doing some cool things right now." He's looking forward to the release of The Black Album. Leslie Jones does not agree. She believes the band "hasn't had a good album since Pinkerton . . . in '96." She believes that all "real" Weezer fans know this. The two of them get deep into the band's discography. Matt Damon presents himself as open to the band's new music. He listens to all of it. He's "ride or die." Cecily Strong says, "For Weezer?" She doesn't get it. She doesn't know what they're really talking about (but she shouldn't feel bad . . . neither does David Sims, a Senior Editor at The Atlantic)
Damon labels Leslie Jones "a purist" because Jones only truly respects Weezer's first two albums (Blue and Pinkerton). Like me, she will deign to "go all the way up to The Green Album" (which is Weezer's third album). The rest of their material is "corny." I agree.
Matt Damon tells her to grow up. Stop living in the past. Jones calls Damon a "grown ass man" and chastises him that he should know better. He should be able to recognize good art and bad art. Things get pretty heated and both Jones and Damon behave badly, but this is not about online discourse and the lack of civility in conversation. This is about something bigger. Something that excuses bad behavior. Something scary and frustrating and philosophical. Also, I can't begin to explain how accurately this reflects the argument Kevin and I have been having since 2005, since Make Believe. It's almost like the sketch writers have been listening on on us.
A Magical Moment of Consensus
Things don't end well-- Damon storms out-- but there is a magical moment just before Damon leaves when Jones and Damon's sentiments align. Damon yells, "Can we all just agree that Weezer is the best band of all time?"
Everyone else at the dinner party yells "No!" aside from Jones, who says: "Yes!"
Watch and see (go two minutes and 53 seconds in).
This is why they are so passionate. They both truly, sincerely loved Weezer. Damon still does. Jones is conflicted. She qualifies her statement: "And then they became the worst band of all time." Damon still loves Weezer, while Jones loves what Weezer once was.
But aren't they the same thing?
Possibly. But probably not. We're talking about one of the stickiest philosophical dilemmas. A dilemma that involves consciousness, identity, art, and creativity. A dilemma that smacks of the infamous Ship of Theseus, but with something more malleable. You.
Are you your past self? What kind of relationship do you have with your past self? Is your brain the same brain you had in the past? Is your body the same body you had in your past?
This is why you have to excuse all the anger and arguing in the skit. Jones is reckoning with the fact that we have no soul, that we have no essence. There is no true identity. The old Rivers is gone. Damon is hanging on, but some part of him must realize that this is disturbing reality is true. Jones has simultaneously lost her faith in Weezer and in the divinity of the human soul.
Supposedly, most of our cells renew themselves every 7 to 10 years, but not the neurons in our cerebral cortex. We're stuck with them for life (and this is why we can get dementia). Other brain cells regenerate. But-- more importantly-- every time we remember something, that memory changes. Every time we recall something, we revise that thing. So in the biggest sense, our brains are not the same as they once were. Our memories do not accurately connect us to our past, they are creations of our present self. Yikes. The old Rivers Cuomo has been replaced, cell-by-cell, revised memory by revised memory. He's a living version of the Ship of Theseus. We are looking at a Doppelganger, a facsimile. Jones is not fooled. Damon is (or perhaps he doesn't want to grapple with this reality).
Is Weezer still Weezer? They've had a few line-up changes, including the loss of bassist Matt Sharp and the addition of guitarist Scott Shriner. But they are mainly the brainchild of Rivers Cuomo. Leslie Jones claims to know Rivers Cuomo "better than he knows himself." And she knows that he is no longer the Rivers Cuomo that produced Pinkerton and The Blue Album. She truly believes that Make Believe is make-believe. It's not genuine Weezer. I agree with her. Matt Damon is not so sure. He thinks Rivers is still Rivers. He's "into the new stuff." He encourages Jones to grow up and listen to some of it. He tells her that "she doesn't understand what Rivers is going through right now." He believes Rivers will suffer the ordeal, endure the crucible, and emerge hardened, annealed and even better than before.
What happens to our identity and our ideas over time? Do we have any sincere connection to our past selves? My guess is not much. I think we are always in flux. I am nothing like my twenty-two year old self. That guy was an asshole. He was also quite fast. But our athletic ability inevitably declines (except for Tom Brady, who -- according to my sources-- drinks a protein shake each morning laced with the blood and stem-cells of precocious toddlers).
While we physically decay, there's a case to be made that we should be getting better at things like music and drawing and writing and art (until we get dementia). Our artistic and cerebral skills should improve over time. But this doesn't always seem to be the case. Where is the Weezer that Leslie Jones once loved? And why hasn't the band improved with time, like a fine wine? Should she have the childlike faith that Matt Damon has? Faith that the past Weezer will return triumphant? Or is her skepticism more grounded in reality. I side with Jones. For whatever reason, Rivers is no longer (and will never be) his past self.
Jones and Damon are arguing over the existence and essence of the human soul. Is it eternal and unchangeable? Unable to be destroyed? And does it still reside within Rivers Cuomo . . . or did it evaporate when he moved to Beverly Hills? Was the soul of Rivers Cuomo make-believe all along?
Miles Davis said, "the key to creativity is a bad memory." I understand what he means. You have to keep changing, you can't get too attached to the past. Otherwise, you'll simply repeat it, in less and less sincere forms. You'll plagiarize yourself. You'll lose your soul. You'll sell your soul. I tried to find that quotation online-- to make sure Miles Davis said it-- and I had some trouble. I've been saying it to my Creative Writing classes for twenty years, but all I could find was this odd web page about painter Paul Solnes. So who said it? Perhaps Miles Davis. Perhaps not. But whether he said it or not, he lived it. Miles Davis constantly reinvented himself. The key to creativity might be to embrace the fact that we have no true essence, and we've got to keep moving on.
In 2012, David Remnick wrote an article about Bruce Springsteen, called "We Are Alive." Bruce had just turned sixty-two and Remnick marveled at his ability to produce new and relevant material. Bruce keeps figuring out how to remake himself. But the best thing in the article was what Remnick said about The Rolling Stones. I love The Rolling Stones. I love entire albums by The Rolling Stones. Some Girls and Exile on Main Street and Sticky Fingers. So many good songs on those albums. Remnick said that The Rolling Stones are now merely a high-end Rolling Stones tribute act, though they contain the same humans that were in the actual and legendary band. This may be the perfect example of the Ship of Theseus dilemma as an identity conundrum:
But, unlike the Rolling Stones, say, who have not written a great song since the disco era and come together only to pad their fortunes as their own cover band, Springsteen refuses to be a mercenary curator of his past. He continues to evolve as an artist, filling one spiral notebook after another with ideas, quotations, questions, clippings, and, ultimately, new songs. (David Remnick)
Most of The Rolling Stones are still alive, the same guys who wrote "Sway" and "Rocks Off" and "Dead Flowers" and "Gimme Shelter." Brian Jones died in 1969, just after he was booted from the band. Mick Jones didn't play with them for a long while, but other than that, they are intact. And all they can do is perform their old songs. Why? Why can't they occasionally write an amazing song? Why aren't they who they once were? It's frustrating and disturbing.
Remnick does raise the point that perhaps the Stones are mailing it in. They only get together for the money. This makes sense. he's probably right. But you'd think they would still want to write a few great songs when they do get together. Perhaps that is impossible without self-reflection, progress, and process. While Bruce Springsteen keeps evolving, the Stones became "curators" of their past.
Weezer is another story. Rivers Cuomo is working his ass off. He's got plenty of process. He's trying his damnedest to evolve. Listen to Song Exploder 70: Weezer for the details on how he wrote "Summer Elaine and Drunk Dory." Understanding all the work he put in makes me almost like the song. Almost. But it's still not "Surf Wax America." It's still ersatz.
Cuomo has spreadsheets of lyrics broken down by syllables and accents and prosody. Everything's tagged and searchable. He can "search for lyrics with five syllables and an accent." He's got Spotify playlists of cool old songs; he collects these songs and ruminates on them and finally dismantles them, unravels the chords progressions and the melodies so that he can transform the bits and pieces into something Weezer. He sings his guitar solos first. He eavesdrops and writes stream-of-consciousness journals and has been using the methods in Julia Cameron's classic book on creativity: The Artist's Way.
So why can't he knock it out of the park? Why can't he make another BlueAlbum?
I think I have one possible answer.
Jonah Lehrer wrote an article for the New Yorker in 2012 entitled "Groupthink." In it, he skewers the "brainstorming myth," the idea that spewing out a bunch of ideas is a valid path to creativity. There's something wrong with the "no wrong answers" approach. While it's fun to push for quantity over quality, and it feels positive to encourage freewheeling associations and censor all criticism, these methods don't produce good results. There's been plenty of research on this subject, and apparently working in a more critical environment is a better way to produce good ideas. There needs to be some constructive feedback and debate. Dissent is important; Charlan Nemeth discusses this in "Freakonomics Episode 368: Where Do Good Ideas Come From?"
The Lehrer article summarizes a research experiment designed by Brian Uzzi that explains a critical element in the creative environment necessary for achievement. Uzzi uses the idea of a "Q reading"-- which is basically how long and how well members of a team know each other-- to assess success.
Uzzi focused his study on Broadway musicals, which he calls a "model of group creativity." He studied the Q reading of Broadway musical teams from 1945 to 1989 and he discovered something exceptional. Broadway actors, producers, choreographers, lyricists, and stage managers tend to work together over and over. Broadway musicals are expensive. There's less risk if you know the members of your team. What Uzzi found was that teams with very low Q readings-- teams of artists that didn't know each other at all-- those teams were destined to fail. Q readings in the middle, teams comprised of a variety of relationships-- some old, some new, some in between . . . when the team was acquainted, these plays did the best. And when the Q reading was very high, when the team had worked together many times, then the chance of success went down again.
Total strangers don't work well together. People who have known each other so long that they can't criticize each other without taking umbrage and offense, they don't work well together either. In that middle ground, however, when people are professionally acquainted but not overly familiar, those teams succeeded.
The best Broadway shows were produced by networks with an intermediate level of social intimacy. The ideal level of Q—which Uzzi and his colleague Jarrett Spiro called the “bliss point”—emerged as being between 2.4 and 2.6. A show produced by a team whose Q was within this range was three times more likely to be a commercial success than a musical produced by a team with a score below 1.4 or above 3.2. It was also three times more likely to be lauded by the critics. “The best Broadway teams, by far, were those with a mix of relationships,” Uzzi says. “These teams had some old friends, but they also had newbies. This mixture meant that the artists could interact efficiently—they had a familiar structure to fall back on—but they also managed to incorporate some new ideas. They were comfortable with each other, but they weren’t too comfortable.” (John Lehrer)
I think this often holds true for bands. Michael Azerrad's book Our Band Could Be Your Life is a comprehensive and vivid depiction of post-punk Q readings. A band's first album is usually made after many months of touring and practice, so the band has gotten to know each other quite well (usually because they've been living in a van). But they're not so well acquainted that they can't surprise each other. First albums are often good because the band is in that sweet spot of the Q reading. They know their band mates well enough to debate and dissent, they can recognize the good ideas and toss out bad ones. As time passes, it's often all downhill. The Rolling Stones are no longer professionals in a working band. They are long-time friends. Once things get too comfortable (unless there's a major change, such as Johnny Cash working with Rick Rubin) then it's just going to be more of the same.
Why Is There No Sequel to The Big Lebowski?
Perhaps this is why the Coen Brothers can't make another Big Lebowski. It's why Pavement couldn't make another "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain." Once in a while, an artist creates something new and unusual and awesome deep in their career. Willie Nelson made Spirit and Teatroin the late '90's. Who knows what got into him? Maybe it was the weed. Radiohead does their best to break new ground with each new album, but most people still prefer The Bends and OK Computer. And these exceptions are the rare counter-examples that prove the norm.
This truism, that artists often peak somewhere in mid-career, seems to hold true for individuals as well, perhaps because every individual artist is ensconced in a nest of relationships and stimuli. Every human is part of a team. And when that network gets old and hackneyed, then things get stale. It's why Liane Moriarty's middle books (Big Little Lies and The Husband's Secret) are so damned good, and why her latest (Truly Madly Guilty) just seems to just be checking the "Liane Moriarity" boxes. It seems derivative. It's why Thomas Pynchon can't do it again.
It's tough to be your past self. It's even tougher to beat your past self, to out-compete that person. Especially when your audience is no longer their past self. They are older and smarter and more experienced. As Heraclitus said, "You never step in the same river twice."
Ride or Die For Strat-O-Matic Hockey?
My buddy Kevin is something of a completist. He reads all the Michael Pollan books. He listens to all of the Weezer and Radiohead albums. He collects things. He still plays Strat-O-matic baseball (and Strat-O-Matic hockey . . . Strat-O-Matic hockey?) He buys the physical cards every year for his Strat-O-Matic sports, even though he doesn't roll dice any longer. Even though the game is now computerized. He's ride or die for Strat-O-Matic.
Kevin feels the same way about Weezer and Michael Pollan. He's a fan of the artist. I'm a fan of the art. Once I don't like the art, I defect. I love Life's Rich Pageant and Murmur, not the band R.E.M. It's because I learned my lesson early on. More on this later. I hate R.E.M.'s Out of Time, even though it was made by the same humans that made Reckoning. "Losing My Religion" is the worst. The fact that Michael Stipe wrote "Talk About the Passion" and also wrote "Losing My Religion" has made me lose my religion, made me lose my belief in an eternal soul.
Strat-O-Matic Hockey?
I'm the opposite of a completist. I only want to listen to the best things. I read Omnivore's Dilemma, but I might never read another Michael Pollan book again. That was his high point. I'd rather listen to first-rate jazz than second rate Weezer. I'm a grown-ass man! I'm logical about it. Old R.E.M. is slightly better than old Weezer, and new R.E.M. is slightly better than new Weezer, but I'm not going to spend my time listening to new R.E.M. because it's slightly better than new Weezer. Instead I'll listen to first rate something else. I'll move on. In this case the newer stuff-- whether it's Weezer or R.E.M.-- is ersatz.
Kevin is loyal and faithful and believes that his favorite artists are still his favorite artists. They can do it again. I'm not so sure. I think we're a constantly changing-- our cells, our memories, our routines, our thought patterns-- and we are surrounded by a constantly changing collection of people. It's really hard to replicate a particular time and place. This may also point to the impossibility of loving a Weezer album again. I am a different person. I'm not in my twenties. I'm not childless and open to the infinite possibilities of the universe and both overly-confident and slightly scared of what that means. Pinkerton really nailed that feeling. But now I'm a grown-ass man. Perhaps that kind of music could never speak to me the way it did back then.
When my wife and I lived and taught in Syria, I played a lot of music with my friend Matt. We both loved Pinkerton and so we learned a bunch of those songs. They were hard to play and sing. Weird chord progressions and some high notes. Weezer was still rolling along. The Green Album had just come out and it was short but good. Catchy and driving. We were young and without children, living in a foreign country, and when we played "The Sweater Song," everybody sang along. It's a time in my life that's impossible to replicate, and it would be silly to think that it's even possible to do so. Matt and I were on exactly the same page, musically. We were in a "strange and distant land," a weird holiday of sorts. Weezer was our common ground.
When Weezer's time was over, I had no problem abandoning them. I may have learned to defect so readily because of what happened when I was a teenager. I had a comically traumatic experience with my favorite band: The Cult. The Cult were the masters of creative transformation. The real version of Spinal Tap. They began as The Southern Death Cult, a goth/post-punk band in the spirit of Bauhaus. Then lead singer Ian Astbury teamed up with his artistic soulmate, Theater of Hate guitarist Billy Duffy and they stripped their name down to The Cult. In 1984, they put out the Dreamtime, a weirdly awesome brew of apocalyptic Wild West riffs, Native American chants, and tribal rhythms. A year later they released the cerebral-sounding college rock classicLove: an impeccably produced collection of droning, ethereal guitars and wailing reverb-laden vocals. The album with '80's anthem "She Sells Sanctuary." I totally dug that album, but the The Cult's next move separated them from the other alternative post-punk bands of the time. They hired Zodiac Mindwarp's Kid Chaos on bass, teamed up with producer Rick Rubin, and made Electric, a raw, stripped down freight train of a record. It was 1987. I was 17 years old, and the album spoke to me and my friends. We felt wild and violent and unhinged, and so did this album. We loved it.
I was ride or die for The Cult
This was one of the reasons I couldn't talk to girls. I really wanted to ask them whether they preferred the celestial sound of Love or the crisp overdriven guitars of Electric. The production values of Steve Brown or Rick Rubin. I wanted to know their opinion. It was a litmus test. Kind of like The Weezer debate. But this was not a thing most people cared about. Certainly not most girls. The only people that cared were my high school buddies, who liked The Cult as much as me. And we loved Electric. We loved moshing at the shows, we loved when Ian Astbury-- drunk-- clambered to the top of the speaker cabinet at the Felt Forum and couldn't get down. It was Spinal Tap embodied. Billy Duffy kept on soloing on his giant White Falcon Gretsch hollow-body guitar, hanging it over the crowd so you could touch it while he played, soloing and soloing until the roadies got Astbury down.
Then I went to college, and my freshman year The Cult released Sonic Temple. It was 1989. They got yet another drummer-- Mickey Curry-- and a new big-time producer: Bob Rock (who has produced acts such as Metallica, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, the Offspring, and David Lee Roth). I heard a couple singles from the new album on the radio and MTV-- "Fire Woman" and "Sun King"-- and while they sounded a bit over-produced, they still rang true, they still passed as genuine Cult songs (if a bit cheesier than the old stuff). I heard Astbury in an interview and he said he wanted to make "sonic landscapes," like the Fleetwood Mac song "The Chain." That sounded fine to me. "Sun King" certainly did that.
I bought the album on CD, though I didn't own a CD player yet. I could see the writing on the wall for cassettes (but I couldn't fathom that vinyl would make a comeback). My buddy Whitney and I went into a friend's room who had a CD player. Whitney knew I was a diehard Cult fan. He listened with me and watched me nearly shit my pants when I heard the corny strings at the start of "Edie (Ciao Baby)" and the goofy organ at the start of "Sweet Soul Sister" and the abominable a capella chorus at the start of "Wake Up Time For Freedom." I was disappointed. But I hadn't yet become a defector. I blamed Bob Rock. I enjoyed what I could from the album-- mainly "Sun King" and "Fire Woman"-- and waited patiently for the next one. I was young and dumb and optimistic.
Before Ceremony came out, in 1991, I made the absurd decision to have the logo from the Electric album tattooed on my ankle. I was ride or die for Electric. I liked it that much. And I had faith that The Cult would return triumphant.
Then I listened to Ceremony, and it broke me. I realized that these were not the same dudes that made Dreamtime, Love, and Electric. Nor was I the same person. I realized that, in fact, people weren't people at all; they were conglomerations of memories and molecules in a particular matrix of time and relationships. There was no continuity to anything. Ceremony was so fucking bad. It was derivative. It consisted of mashed-up versions of every lousy Cult song, squashed together, with cheesy super-slick production. Self-plagiarism of the worst kind. I defected. I learned my lesson. I eventually covered my Cult tattoo with another absurd tattoo (grist for another post).
By 1991, R.E.M. was dead to me as well. While I could tolerate a few songs from their 1987 effort Green, it was the same routine and timeline as Sonic Temple and Ceremony. "Stand" was "Wake Up Time For Freedom" awful, but "Pop Song 89" and "Orange Crush" were fun. But Out of Time, that whole album seemed ersatz to me. Not genuine R.E.M. I heard "Losing My Religion" and "Shiny Happy People" over and over on the radio. I was angry. I realized you couldn't go back to Rockville. What the fuck? What had happened to the artists I loved?
And then I got over it. I moved on. I discovered new stuff: Cake and Wilco and Ween and Beck and Underworld and Crystal Method and Tribe Called Quest. I got into jazz: Wes Montgomery and Grant Green and Charlie Parker and Jimmy Mcgriff and Jimmy Smith. I went back to old familiar stuff and realized I liked it more than I thought: The Rolling Stones and The Talking Heads and The Cure. I got into hip-hop beyond The Beastie Boys. I learned to find new art-- or art that was new to me-- instead of relying on my old favorites. Why bother being loyal when the cards are so stacked against success? Rivers Cuomo sang it on Pinkerton:
Why bother? It's gonna hurt me.
It's gonna kill when you desert me.
This happened to me twice before
Won't happen to me anymore.
Weezer
I'm no longer angry. I learned not to be offended when an artist I liked produced something shitty. That artist is no longer the artist they once were. It's not a betrayal. You're different, they're different, everything is different. The Artist Formerly Known as Prince got it exactly right when he renamed himself. I'm happy that people can come together at all, in any time or place, and create something of significance. It's really hard. And it can't last. Everyone has to be in the right space. There's some real vitriol out there about Rivers Cuomo and Weezer, but I'm just glad they made the Blue Album and Pinkerton (and the Green Album is decent, I just gave it another listen). You can't expect much more.
I was lucky enough to move in lock-step with The Cult and some other bands-- including Weezer-- for a few years, for a few albums. But what are the chances for that to continue? For you and the artist you love to evolve in the same way, so that you enjoy everything they make? Slim to none. It's just not feasible, for a variety of reasons. I was fourteen when The Cult made Dreamtime, and investigating punk-rock and goth and underground music. It was a perfect fit. A year later I had picked up the electric guitar and the droning riffs on Love were intriguing. Every budding guitarist in the '80's who liked alternative music learned the opening to "Rain" and "She Sell Sanctuary." And when I was seventeen and full of testosterone, The Cult put out Electric. Perfectly appropriate for me and my buddies. These albums are touchstones of time as much as they are of sound. They moved in parallel with my aesthetic sensibilities. That was a happy accident.
Our identity depends as much on who surrounds us as it does with what is within us.
There's a fantastic artifact from The Cult discography symbolic of this theme: that our identity depends as much on who surrounds us as it does with what is within us. The Cult recorded an earlier version of the songs that eventually became the hard-driving Electric. These tracks are called The Manor Sessions. They were produced by Steve Brown, the same guy who produced Love. If you like The Cult, then these are fascinating tracks.
It's the songs from Electric but they sound like B-sides from Love. The band decided these recordings didn't reflect their new direction. They enlisted Rick Rubin and made the "real" version of Electric. And it was all about the production. If The Cult had stuck with Steve Brown and made another album that sounded like Love, I would have liked it. I like The Manor Sessions. I would have liked The Cult, the same amount that I liked Jane's Addiction and Guns N' Roses and Soundgarden and The Cure and Danzig. A lot. But I wouldn't have gotten a Cult tattoo. That Electric album that spoke to my me and my friends in a very special way when we were high school seniors, when we were drinking beer, driving around, doing vandalism-- that album almost didn't exist. You can actually hear what it could have been. If this had been the case, we would have driven slower and done less vandalism. Maybe we would have been more cerebral and sensitive. We certainly would have been different. It makes me realize a piece of art is so dependent on the circumstances. It's a product space and time and relationships. It's a miracle that it ever works at all, that a bunch of sounds could mean so much. And it's greedy to think that it can be repeated, especially by the same humans at another time, in another place, when everything is different. Weezer is never going to make another Blue Album, and that's okay.
I'm doing something annoying and pretentious right now, but it fits perfectly with this philosophy. My family is taking a trip to Costa Rica this summer, so I started brushing up on my Spanish. This led me to search for some great Latin American alternative albums. I stumbled on some fantastic stuff. Cafe Tacuba's highly regarded Re. Los Amigos Invisibles' funk album The New Sound of the Venezuelan Gozadera. Soda Stereo's alternative classic Sueño stereo. And Jessico Megamix byBabasónicos (a band regarded as the Argentinian version of Beck).
Listening to this music is like stumbling on buried treasure. These are the best albums by these bands. You can tell they are in the Goldilocks Zone for Q reading and creativity. It's a real treat. And I'm learning some interesting Spanish idioms (such as Cómanse a besos esta noche. . . you can eat kisses tonight?)
So no more ride or die for me. I'd rather listen to some nearly incomprehensible first rate Latin American music than second rate stuff from my favorite bands. I've embraced the Miles Davis philosophy. I have a shitty memory, and it keeps me moving. I'm not going to wait for lightning to strike twice when I can search for a fulgurite.
I'd like to apologize to David Sims for "escalating to personal cruelty." I don't actually want him to burn in hell . . . but I do want him to read this and understand the true significance of the SNL Weezer sketch, and the true significance of the Weezer debate. It's about the continuity of our identity, and the truth might be disturbing. There might not be any continuity of our character. Our soul might be an illusion. There's an up side to this. Change is not only possible, it is inevitable. I'm in a better place now. I've dredged up lots of memories, and my brain has revised them. I've listened to a bunch of old music and it's made me nostalgic. I'm nothing like the guy who started writing this post. That guy was a little disappointed with Weezer. That guy was angry at David Sims. That was my past self. But nearly six thousand words later, this new guy, this new Dave, he knows better.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is smart-- and he won't let you forget it-- and while there's some fascinating stuff in his new book Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, it's hard to know what to believe and what not to believe, and the book is definitely abrasive and fragmented, but he will get you thinking, you're just going to have to do more research to flesh out what he's saying . . . here are a few things that struck me:
1) Taleb prefers the Silver Rule to the Golden Rule . . . the Silver Rule is sort of the Negative Golden Rule: "Do not treat others the way you would not like them to treat you," and Taleb prefers it because it is more Libertarian and less restrictive-- the Silver Rule encourages you to mind your own business-- you're not doing things unto others and guessing what they would like . . . it lines up nicely with our First Amendment rights;
2) Taleb really hates Steven Pinker and all the non-mathematical non-stock-trading intellectuals associated with him, and while Taleb claims there are major statistical problems with Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature, this claim doesn't seem logical and more of a sour grapes character assassination attempt and Pinker has a reasoned and rational rebuttal to Taleb's jealous and rather weird claims . . . Taleb wants to apply his "Black Swan" reasoning to Pinker's thesis but Pinker has already anticipated this in his book . . . it's a fairly strange obsession and I don't really get his hatred of intellectuals, aside from the fact that he considers them the ultimate evil because they make pronouncements without having "skin in the game" and contribute to the "monoculture" of thought;
3) Taleb thinks we should take a more statistical, skin-in-the-game look at politics offers a great reminder of how important scale is in determining our values and morals:
"A saying by the brothers Geoff and Vince Graham summarizes the ludicrousness of scale-free political universalism . . .
I am, at the Fed level, a libertarian:
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist . . ."
4) Taleb likes to throw around the fact that he's Lebanese and grew up in Lebanon, and he frequently mention the many religious groups and sects that live there and in Syria-- I find this interesting because I lived there-- but I can see how the explanation of the dynamics of the Druze and the Shi'ites might grow tiresome to some audiences . . . I think he likes these examples because he's a big fan of the "the Lindy effect," he likes rules and institutions and foods and objects that have survived a long time-- the Lindy effect is the "theory that the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy" . . . so things like the cup and the Ten Commandments are going to be around a long time because they've been around a long time . . . these are the kinds of rules and books and thoughts that Taleb trusts-- including advice from your grandmother and superstitions-- because they have weathered the test of time . . . he's not a progressive and he loves the fact that Trump got elected, confounding all the liberal, pseudo-intellectual types;
5) Taleb is at his best when he's talking about probability . . . he explains (hypothetically) that while terrorism and people falling down in the bathtub may take the same number of lives in any given year, why we have to treat terrorism so much more seriously . . . because it would take an incredible statistical anomaly to double bathtub deaths, but it only takes a major event or two to exponentially increase the deaths from terrorism . . . terrorism has the potential to reveal "unknown unknowns" or "black swans" or whatever you want to call them, but things can happen on the long tail that take many many lives . . . so he gets into the idea of how much tolerance we should show the intolerant, and when it comes to Salafi Islam, he believes we should be showing them no tolerance, because they have the potential of creating those kind of black swan events that pseudo-intellectuals-- who are too liberal-- don't assess with the correct amount of risk . . . it's something we all have to think deeply about, and it's the most important part of his reasoning;
6) on a more positive statistical note, he argues against Thomas Piketty's extreme take on economic inequality, and uses an idea called "ergodicity" to show that people move all over the map as far as where they lie in the income ladder over the course of time . . . so any one person might be in the top ten percent in one part of their life, then in the middle, then maybe at the bottom; I'm not sure I understand all the math, but it's an interesting take . . . although it seems that salary isn't the real culprit in income inequality, it's acquired wealth-- which is why I like Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax . . . I would never want to put words in Taleb's mouth, because he's so unpredictable and irascible, and I doubt he would like a wealth tax, but it does fit more into his worldview that acquired wealth doesn't have any risk to it, so it might as well be taxed and used for infrastructure or schools or clean energy or something interesting;
7) in the end, I wish there was more math and less railing against some imagined intellectual class with no skin-in-the-game . . . Taleb really believes that entrepreneurs should be venerated and I agree with him . . . it's much easier to be a salary-slave and the longer you do it, the more skin-in-the-game you have to protect your job and your reputation, but that doesn't mean you can't do good work; it's worth reading Taleb's books, but you just have to take everything with a grain of thought and take your time with each page and idea and think about what he's saying and if it really holds water.
Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America's Most Dangerous Amusement Park is a tribute to a bygone era-- a time when the United States was less litigious; a time when hazing, heckling, and ethnic slurs were still regarded as good fun; a time when New Yorkers were a good deal grittier than they are now; a time of freedom and individuality; and a time when a good-hearted but slightly demented man named Gene Mulvihill could single-handedly build a shrine to action, danger, adventure, drunkenness, good times and fun on a mountain in New Jersey; the story is told by his son and despite the broken bones, open wounds, electrocutions, drownings, paralysis, comas, and death-- or perhaps because of them-- Andy Mulvihill appreciated working at Action Park and taking part in the family business; the bonding that occurred between the lifeguards at the Wave Pool-- in between pulling out twenty to thirty idiots a day-- is legendary . . . Dazed and Confused, Fast Times at Ridgemont High type stuff . . . and the chapter by chapter description of the evolution of the park-- from the Alpine Slide to the Cannonball Loop to Motor World to the Wave Pool to an authentic German Beer Hall to Surf Hill-- is the weird history of the obverse Disney World, a place closer in tone to Jurassic Park than the Magic Kingdon . . . this is a book that will make you proud to be from Jersey-- I odn't remember ever going to Action Park itself-- but I did go on an Alpine Slide in the Poconos (which was also installed by Gene Mulvihill) and rode to fast and flew off the chute . . . which can happen, when YOU are in control of the ride . . . the book also reads like a theme park version of Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment . . . there was something about this mix of New Yorkers and New Jerseyans-- many of whom couldn't swim well-- that made them want to ram speedboats into each other, jump off cliffs onto other people's heads, t-bone folks with Lola racers, get drunk, throw garbage everywhere, shit on the floor, race down dangerous slides (water and land-based) and basically ignore danger and forget to assess risk; a must read if ytiou are thinking about travelling back in time to the 80's and opening a shrine to personal autonomy.
I am certainly a hypocrite. There's no question about that. But I'm still entitled to my thoughts and opinions, even if they contradict my actions. Sometimes a compelling idea outstrips the operating system of the brain that tries to install it. So you get some cognitive dissonance, some contradictory behavior. And it's not unbecoming. It's not annoying. It's inspirational.
I occasionally eat pizza that's been left on the counter overnight. Despite this, I still believe I am an inspirational figure. A figure who has done some reading, checked his sources, and just wants to pass on that information. But it's information no one (especially my wife) wants to hear. She may be able to shut me up on this topic in the house, but she can't stop me from blogging about it.
I can find nothing to contradict this Golden Rule of food safety. Despite this, I am BANNED from discussing this topic in my house. Censored! The Danger Zone!
For the record: it's not a sin, it's not a waste, it's not a criminal offense. If food has been in "the danger zone" for more than two hours-- and the "danger zone" is defined as 40 to 120 degrees Fahrenheit-- then you should toss it. Your food has become a Petri dish of exponential orgiastic bacterial procreation. The bacteria population on this food is doubling every twenty minutes.
No one wants to hear this. Including my wife. Everyone wants to "pack up the sandwiches" that have been sitting out for five hours (slathered in mayonnaise) because it would be "a waste" to throw them away. And no one wants to read (or hear) about exponential bacteria growth. And you can't smell bacteria, even when they're hastily copulating.
Bacteria going at it . . .
Though I know this rule, I admit I'm a bundle of contradictions. I eat food off the floor; I double dip chips; and when I'm at a barbecue, I certainly eat food that's been sitting out too long. But when I do this stuff, I do it with the knowledge that I'm rolling the dice. And I know what the result might be. My wife should know as well. We lived in Syria for three years, where food safety is not a priority, refrigeration is poor, human excrement is used as fertilizer, the water is not particularly potable, and fly-covered meat is often displayed hanging in the window of the store.
Some Syrian meat just hanging out . . .
We suffered every kind of intestinal distress in the book. I got giant intestinal roundworms. We had frequent bouts of diarrhea. But those memories have faded from my wife's mind. I have included some bonus photos of Syrian butchery and meat at the end of this post (they are not for those with a weak stomach) to show you how lucky we are to have such hygienic food in America. I doubt my wife will look at them or take them to heart.
My wife thinks it's strange that I'll scoop out some yogurt into a bowl and then realize I have to feed the dog, so I'll put the yogurt into the fridge for the few minutes that it takes to feed the dog. I don't want the yogurt to to get warm while I'm doing the chore. She thinks I'm insane. I think I just truly appreciate the miracle of refrigeration. In the good old days, people used to die from drinking milk.
The people in the English department are split on this. Some people are grossed out by food that has been left out. Stacey just doesn't care. She'll eat fried chicken that's been sitting on an end table all night (being licked by her dog). Her opinion: what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I get it, but I need to do more research on public opinion. I need talk to some of the science and health biology teachers and see what they think.
But like I said, I'm a hypocrite. I'm not afraid of being critical of other people who I think are behaving too obsessively about food safety.
The Illustrative Anecdote
Thursday night, a bunch of us were sitting outside at Pino's, quaffing beer and bourbon, eating gourmet chips ( provided by the Deatz . . . thanks Deatz!) when a woman walked up to the table and offered us fresh baked cookies. They were leftovers from a political function happening inside. You shouldn't take candy from a stranger, but this woman seemed trustworthy.
Everyone grabbed a cookie. And then things got embarrassing. My friends were just bonkers for these cookies. Grown-assed men, giggling over treats. It was weird and sad and silly. Pathetic, really. Especially because when I bit into my cookie, I realized those dark blobs weren't chocolate chips, they were raisins. It was the most deceptive (and disgusting) of cookies: oatmeal raisin. Yuck.
But everyone loved them. I couldn't harsh the buzz. I couldn't criticize the cookies. The guys were writhing in ecstasy while stuffing chunks of raisin-laden oatmeal into their pie-holes.
So I palmed my half-eaten cookie, reached into the gourmet chip bag for a chip, and left it behind. Voila! Now I didn't have to explain why I didn't finish my cookie. It was hidden in the chip bag. The chips were pretty much finished. Everyone's hunger was sated. No one would ever find me out. I didn't have to go on some weird rant about expectations and raisins. I could let the party continue, unimpeded by my grouchiness. Like a child slipping vegetables into his napkin and then surreptitiously tossing the napkin into the garbage, I had-- rather immaturely-- disposed of something I found unappetizing, without causing a scene.
The guys went inside to hear the band, leaving Paul and me at the table. We chatted for a bit, and then Paul reached into the gourmet chip bag for a chip and he pulled out my half-eaten cookie. He was disgusted. Appalled. I had contaminated the entire bag of chips! It was like I put my whole mouth in the bowl!
I mocked him for his squeamishness. We were at the pub! It was men's night! We were drinking and eating! It was my half-eaten cookie, not some random, unknown entity. Me! My mouth germs were fine!
Paul wasn't having it. And while I continued to berate him, I understood his position. Because I am a hypocrite.
Bonus Photos
Proceed at your own risk . . .
Eid al-Adha in Damascus
The next day, the flies came in droves . .
It's hard to find fresh camel head in Jersey
How long can you leave a cooked head at room temperature?
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.
If you had your druthers (and you were a white man) where would would you choose to hang out on a Friday evening in the late 18th century?
The Turk's Head Tavern, a venerable London establishment located at 9 Gerrard Street-- just off the Strand-- would be a good choice.
This is where-- starting in 1764-- intellectual and artistic notables such as Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Edmund
Burke, David Garrick, Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith met regularly. Quite a crew.
Leo Damrosch describes this era in his tour-de-force book the Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age. He also includes a group excluded from club membership, but constantly present in these lives: the women.
Especially the prostitutes.
Boswell frequented a lot of prostitutes. And he recorded the encounters in his journal, which his wife would sometimes inadvertently stumble upon and read. He had a very forgiving wife.
Boswell is the author of Life of Johnson, which is considered to be one of the greatest biographies ever written. A game-changer. It is a highly entertaining book. Boswell is Dr. Johnson's drunken sidekick and records everything that the great man says and does. But there's much more to this pair than meets the eye.
Damrosch
thinks Boswell may have been bipolar. His mood swings are wild. He often self-medicates with copious amounts of alcohol and "promiscuous concubinage." Dr. Johnson exhibits symptoms of OCD, depression, and rheumatoid arthritis-- which leads him to become an opium addict later in life.
This is one of those books that I started thinking full well I wouldn't finish. But I made it all the way through, mainly because of Boswell's misadventures. Stuff like this:
Boswell seldom frequented the brothels around Covent Gardens. His usual practice was to rush out into the night after having plenty to drink, pick up a streetwalker, and grapple with her briefly in one of the parks or some dark alley. he may have enjoyed the sense of risk.
Boswell really struggled with his inveterate transgressions. He wanted to believe "in an authentic core of self," but David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature taught him otherwise. Boswell was happiest just going with the flow of impressions and perceptions of the moment, which made him such an amiable companion (but often a buffoon). Boswell's biographer insists that he wasn't a full-blown alcoholic-- because he could abstain from alcohol for long periods of time (as did other members of The Club . . . overindulgence and sobriety seem to be a pattern that has been around for a long time). But there are a lot of blackout injurious episodes that sound like they happened at a fraternity party.
After consuming five bottles of claret with just one companion, "I walked off very gravely, though much intoxicated. Ranged through the streets till, having run hard down the Advocate's Close, which is very steep, I found myself sudden bouncing down an almost perpendicular stone stair. I could not stop,but when I came to the bottom of it fell with a good deal of violence, which sobered me much." A later fall damaged his ankle so badly he was hobbling around for months.
Boswell is constantly swinging between intellectual pursuits-- the law, writing, and pondering free will and determinism, and concupiscent and inebriated episodes, such as getting caught by his wife while fondling a "fresh, plump, and comely" fifteen-year-old.
While Johnson and Boswell are at the heart of the book, I really liked Damrosch's portrayals of David Garrick and Edward Gibbon. Garrick was the greatest actor of the age, and he perfects a naturalistic style that was quite different from the typical strutting and speechifying player of the time. "He could make every thought and gesture seem perfectly spontaneous." This sort of acting was appreciated by the critics, but out in the country, "naturalistic acting would strike provincial audiences as no acting at all. Garrick is also remembered for organizing the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769, which put Stafford-upon-Avon on the map and demarcated when Shakespeare went from being a competent playwright to a god. It also rained so much that Damrosch's description of the event smacks of a festival that happened two hundred years later: Woodstock.
For all their curiosity and intellect, Johnson and Boswell were men of their time. Johnson could often be religiously and politically conservative. His take on the American settlers was: "They are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging." Oddly, Johnson sympathized with the Native Americans more than the colonials (though he didn't think the colonists should give them their land back). He felt the same about the Irish, and Irish rights. Rebellion was to be punished severely, he explained to Irish clergyman Thomas Campbell. When they had the chance, the British should have burned the Irish cities and "roasted you in the flames of them." Boswell wrote a weird poem extolling slavery, in which he surmises at the end "For slavery there must ever be, while we have mistresses like thee!" And both Boswell and Johnson loathed Edward Gibbon, who wrote the classic historical treatise History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. They found this work scandalous because Gibbon was skeptical about the spread of Christianity due to miraculous events. Gibbon argued that there were plenty of "secular explanations" for Christian promulgation. Boswell and Johnson referred to Gibbon as "The Infidel." This is too bad, because Gibbon changed how history was written in the same way that Boswell changed how biography was written. They laid bare the sources and the journey to knowledge, the personal references and ambiguity that accompany all non-fiction writing, which many authors tried to hide under the guise of omniscience.
Damrosch's tour of the times is accompanied by many historical pictures. There are color plates in the center and various drawings, caricatures, portraits, and sketches throughout. This helps set the scene so much. The book alternates between great doings and anecdotes, so you get compelling portraits of men who are certainly great, but also flawed and silly (at one point, there is a description of Dr. Johnson imitating a kangaroo). And this is the same time as the framers were writing the Constitution. King George III actually makes a brief cameo. So it's a great view of what was happening on the other side of the ocean, as we were preparing to rebel. And there are a lot of prostitutes. What's not to enjoy?
Internet quizzes have become incredibly popular, both as a "data mining tool" and a method of humble-bragging on social media, so I've jumped on the bandwagon and created a quiz of my own to promote the illustrious Sentence of Dave brand; answer the following question and you'll find out exactly what kind of sentence you are . . . to begin, simply choose the phrase that best describes your character:
1) charming and slightly manipulative risk-taker;
2) neurotic worry wart;
3) aimless and lazy couch potato;
if you chose #1 then you are an incomplete loose periodic sentence with several gerunds and a subjunctive clause . . .
if you chose #2 then you are a run-on with several appositives, a sequence of anaphora, and a smattering of ellipses . . .
and if you chose #3 then you are an awkward fragment with inversions, synecdoche, and a mixed metaphor . . .
please pass this along to your friends so they can determine "the facts about their syntax" and achieve internet fun and enlightenment like you did!
I'm not going to offer a full review of trader and quantitative analyst turned philosopher and power-lifter Nassim Nicholas Taleb's new book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, other than to say that it is evocative, provocative, bold, brash, learned, and contemptuous -- and if you are at all involved in finance, then you have probably read -- or at least know about -- his previous book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable . . . which explains not so much how financial collapses happen, but how to prepare and even profit from them (as Taleb did with his hedge funds) but I'm using his ideas for more selfish reasons; he often uses the restaurant business to flesh out his "anti-fragile" metaphor, as "restaurants are fragile; they compete with each other, but the collective of local restaurants is anti-fragile, for that reason . . . had restaurants been individually robust, hence immortal, then overall business would be either stagnant or weak," and you can see where this is going -- subsidies and intervention will actually destroy the health of a working system . . . and while logical folks know that opening a restaurant is risky business (though not as risky as urban legend has it) we love the fact that people keep trying, and Taleb explains this in his typical hyperbolic fashion: "in order to progress, modern society should be treating ruined entrepreneurs in the same way we honor dead soldiers, perhaps not with as much honor, but using exactly the same logic" because this person has taken heroic risk that is beneficial to others . . . but BEFORE this happens, please patronize the following restaurants, because they are inexpensive, awesome, and BYOB . . . I don't want them to become fallen soldiers . . .
1) El Gallo Giro 2 . . . a Mexican joint on Route 1 in Edison, just past Open Road Honda . . . they have awesome mole sauce and you can get enchiladas with pork or chicken or chorizo smothered in the stuff, their burritos are ridiculously huge and their tacos and guacamole are fantastic as well, this is our replacement for Taqueria la Juquilita, which changed hands and isn't as good as it once was;
2) Cafe La Terrassa, in New Brunswick, which has a new menu and a new take-out menu . . . this place is amazing, but slightly off the beaten path and never as crowded as it should be, and I will be really pissed off if it doesn't make it, so I am relying on you to eat there (and these reviews are totally unsolicited, as I have received no food, drink, coupons, sexual favors, or preferential seating for my favorable opinions).
Sentence of Dave has often discussed risk assessment . . . it's difficult to decide what to worry about in a world where so much unfiltered information is so readily accessible . . . and so I will place you on the horns of another anxiety-filled dilemma: should you worry more about Individuals Tending Towards Savagery, a radical Mexican anti-technology group that praises the writings of Ted Kaczynski and recently bombed two Mexican nano-technology professors at the Monterrey Technological Institute, or should you worry about their prediction: that nanotechnology research will result in the creation of nano-cyborgs, which will be able to self-replicate automatically without the help of humans and eventually form an exponentially increasing "gray-goo" that will smother all life on earth?
I haven't played with Chat GPT in a while, but it rained today-- resulting in no tennis practice-- so I got to screwing around and I asked it a question inspired by a Beatles lyric and this is the pablum I got . . .
Yes, "Why don't we do it in the road?" is commonly interpreted as an invitation for sexual activity. However, engaging in sexual activity in public, especially on a road, is illegal and can be dangerous for a number of reasons.
First and foremost, engaging in sexual activity in public can lead to criminal charges for indecent exposure, public lewdness, or other related offenses. Additionally, it can be unsafe as there is an increased risk of being caught by law enforcement or pedestrians, as well as potential injury from passing vehicles.
In short, it is never advisable to engage in sexual activity in public, including on a road. It is important to prioritize personal safety and follow the laws and regulations set forth in one's community.
Bill Bryson, in his new book At Home: A Short History of Private Life , gives several pages of startling statistics on the most dangerous place in the house (and the second leading cause of accidental death in the United States, behind car accidents but ahead of shark bites, flesh-eating viruses, and impalement) and if you guessed the kitchen or the bathroom, you are wrong . .. the most dangerous spot in your house is the stairs (and if you've seen the excellent documentary series The Staircase then you may have known this already) but I find this paradoxical because having stairs in your house is good for your heart and heart disease is the leading killer among men and women in the United States . . . so do you live in a ranch and miss out on the benefits of walking up and down stairs every day . . . or do you risk mishaps and live dangerously . . . I don't know the answer, but mainly what I wish is that we had an English word for this French phrase: 'esprit d'escalier, which generated the plot of a fantastic Seinfeld episode.
Another year, another book list . . . I read forty books in 2019-- a number which seems about average-- and for the most part, I kept it eclectic: fiction, non-fiction, genre stuff, graphic novels, economics, history, and even some self-help. My friend and fellow English teacher Kevin pointed out that I don't read enough books by women. While I definitely consume some chick-lit every year, he is right. Only six of the forty books were by women authors (but several of the books by men are about women, so that should count for something). I might remedy this in 2020 . . . but I might not. Books are one of the few things in life that you have control over. If books by women appeal to me, I'll read them. If not, Kevin can fuck off. I did go down a couple of rabbit holes. I read the entire Remembrance of Earth's Pasttrilogy by Cixin Liu . . . and it wasn't easy. I'm quite proud of this and highly recommend these books to diehard sci-fi fans. I also read four mystery novels set in Wyoming. I don't know how this happened, but I really enjoyed the Longmire stuff by Craig Johnson.
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe.
This selection may be a result of the serial positioning effect, but the best book I read in 2019 is the last book I read in 2019.
The book is about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, mainly during the 1970s and 1980s, but there is a frame story that is completely topical. The story is scary and compelling and violent and incredibly researched. It will dispel any romanticized notions you have about the IRA. The British are portrayed as no better.
These books provided a lot of material for me to write about. If it wasn't for books, my dog, my wife, and my absurd children, this blog would have died long ago.
Thank you books! 1) The Fifth Riskby Michael Lewis 2) An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green 3) The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu 4) God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State by Lawrence Wright 5) Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America's Strangest Jail by Rusty Young (and Thomas McFadden) 6) The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu 7) The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry 8) The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester 9) Death's End by Cixin Liu 10) Atomic Habits by James Clear 11) Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and The Drug Company That Addicted Americaby Beth Macy
Yesterday, at the pool clean-up day, there were a number of people who wore masks-- though we were outside and certainly crowded in any way-- but they gathered hedge-clippings and disposed of them with bare-hands, though I warned them of the poison-ivy; this was a contradictory and ironic mistake in risk-assessment . . . they should have uncovered their face and covered their hands (I wore gloves of course) but I wisely kept my mouth shut on this issue . . . I didn't want to jeopardize my guest passes and free sandwich.
Yesterday, when we returned from a day at the beach, there was a cryptic message on the phone from my grandmother (this isn't unusual as no one in my family ever leaves anything concrete on an answering machine, they always demand a call-back) and when I called her back she told me she wanted to give me some money for my fishing trip, but I told her not to drive over because there was a downed telephone pole on Route 1, and so she asked me if Catherine had fifty dollars . . . and if Catherine did possess fifty dollars, then she was to give the money to me, and then my grandmother said that she would give Catherine fifty dollars; although my wife said this was the funniest thing she had ever heard, I held my tongue while I was on the phone because fifty dollars is fifty dollars and I wasn't going to risk losing the cash with a sarcastic comment about the logic of a financial transaction.
