2008 August | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Aug

nobody gonna take my car

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 9:08 am

Oh, man.

Friday saw the official debut of Flat Earth Theatre’s Night of Christopher Durang One Acts. A large and loud audience rewarded our efforts with laughs in all the right places. The newly minted Smithneys came to see it, along with Katie H. and Lisa B. from jiu-jitsu. I got flowers.

Afterward I dragged Skim, Rick and newcomer Viv and her boy from the theater to 90s Night. We met Belladonna, Perotti and Kate there, as well as LJ regulars two_stabs and damn it, sorry, forgot the other gentleman’s name. Oh, well. A remarkably beer-heavy and drama-free evening (aside from Perotti knocking a full beer glass out of Kate’s hand and down her pants) followed.

Since Michael Phelps brought tall skinny dudes back in style, I added some swimming to my workout on Saturday. I had forgot how fun it feels to immerse yourself in a body of water and let something denser than air support your weight. I had also forgot how hard swimming is, especially after a full workout. After as many laps as I could manage, I dried off in the sauna, took my time showering and had Burger King for lunch.

After another Flat Earth Theater performance that evening, I stopped in at Pete F’s birthday party at Tavern on the Square. I met folks I’d known in name only from IB, like Hannah F. and Jason C., and bought Pete at least one drink. The conversation turned to the Olympics, given its ubiquitous coverage. We agreed that the biathlon was a weirder event than the pentathlon – the pentathlon at least measures a broad cross-section, whereas the biathlon was apparently picked out of a hat full of slips.

Normally I’d crash at this point in the evening, but the niacin megadose I’d taken before Pete’s party carried me through to Katie Proulx’s final show at ImprovBoston. I had an excellent conversation with Michelle McN., debated the merits of Chinese Democracy with Marc Hirsh and shared pizza with Bobby S. In the wee hours, Will cranked the volume in the main theater and started a dance party while Clash of the Titans played in the background. Holy hell, that movie looks weird.

After the matinee performance on Sunday, Melissa and Fraley invited me over for Rock Band. I spent a few minutes designing a custom guitar player who looked just like me for their band, Style Merchants, and then proceeded to crap out on drums. And vocals. So we took a break for nachos and beer and Olympic boxing before diving back in.

My thoughts:

Train Kept A-Rollin’: “The song just started; how can I already have a guitar solo? Oh, well. Probably the last one.”
Highway Star: “These lyrics are pretty insipid.”
The Hand That Feeds: “Do you even need three people to play this song, or just one person playing three times?”
Maps: “Finally, a drum track easy enough for me to play.”
Gimme Shelter: “Raaaaaaape … MURRRR-daaaaaa ….“

Aug

I'm a leader at last, this a don you with

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 8:57 am

Clayton Bigsby: Hey, niggers! Turn that jungle music down! Woogie boogie, nigger! Woogie boogie!
Hip-Hop Fan: Did he just call us niggers?… AWESOME!

- Chappelle’s Show

“Ol’ Dirty Bastard, ‘Gimme My Money,’” I asked, covering the mic with one hand.

DJ Paul, who runs the karaoke at Asgard on Wednesdays, has the most extensive selection of any karaoke-jockey I’ve ever seen. I rarely have to check the book anymore; I just ask him for a song. I’ve been going there for well over a year at this point.

Paul shrugged. “I don’t have it. What’s your backup?”

Ten seconds later, the loop from Sugar Hill Gang’s “Apache,” stretched and down-pitched, blasted over the speakers. “I hope all of you like Nas,” I told the crowd (largely friends), “because that’s what I’m fuckin’ doing.” I pounded the shot of Canadian Club I’d just purchased and took off.

Now let’s get it all in perspective,
For all y’all enjoyment, a song you can step with
Y’all appointed me to bring rap justice
But this ain’t 5-0, y’all know it’s Nas, yo …

I struggled a bit with the last drops of whiskey for the first verse but picked up some horsepower. Even folks who didn’t recognize the song – or know it as well as I did, wandering into the crowd with my back to the screen – bobbed their heads in time.

At about this point (and here I rely on other witnesses), a guy in his 20s walking by the Asgard’s open window stopped and stared open-mouthed. He had a knee-length T-shirt and a Celtics cap with a flat brim and the sticker still on it. Leaning through the window, he stopped his girlfriend with a hand on her elbow and pointed.

They shootin’! Aw, I made you look
You a slave to a page in my rhyme book
Gettin’ big money, playboy, your time’s up
Where them gangstas? Where them dimes at?

By the time the final verse rolled around, I’d loosened up fully and fit into the flow. I still hadn’t turned my head three feet to the right and seen the conversation transpiring just outside the bar, of course; that might have thrown me a bit.

“Made You Look” ends with Nas freestyling after the track shuts off, which the karaoke prompter doesn’t always transcribe. So you have to really know it and really sell it in order to cap the song well.

And I like a little sassiness, a lotta class
Mami reach in your bag, pass the fifth
I’m a leader at last, this a don you with
My nines’ll spit, niggas lose consciousness

The audience applauded, I handed the mic back. The whiskey swam in my head with an earlier Guinness, giving everything the arm’s length distance of a plausible dream. That was the end of it, I thought.

The young guy with the baggy shirt had now leaned halfway through the window and beckoned DJ Paul and I over. Confused, I followed.

“Yo, that was tight, man,” he said, clasping my hand and snapping off it. “That shit was all right. But I hear that coming out the windows, you got me wound up. Now I’ve got to get on that mic.”

“All right, man,” I said. “Go for it.” I’m used to people making exorbitant promises on karaoke night; you expect that sort of thing. What I didn’t expect was for the man to lope in through the front of the bar ten seconds later and make his way right to the back.

“Yo, rewind that,” he said. “Gimme that same track again.”

And this complete stranger proceeded to rap two tracks of his own devising off the top of his head while a dazed Cambridge audience – composed entirely of white people and Filipinos, I should add – watched and applauded. “I just wrote this one a couple days ago,” he said, between sets. “Still working it out.”

Having absolutely ripped it, he returned the mic to DJ Paul – and to thunderous cheers – and headed out. “Which one of you’s taller?” Paul asked of the two of us.

“How tall are you?” the rapper – whose name we’d since learned was Blacklight – shouted across the bar.

“Six five and a bit,” I said.

“Six four,” he said, with a shrug.

“So you won that contest, at least,” Paul said.

Looking back on the whole thing, I would think the whole thing was a dream if I didn’t have twenty close friends as witnesses. The whole affair had that shifting vagueness conferred by a pleasant buzz to begin with. But the situation on its face – some stranger off the street says I’m rapping all right, but comes in and takes the mic for two tracks of his own, and the DJ says it’s okay because I’m taller than he is – barely seemed real.

I got into economics because I love situations where two strangers can meet and trade and both walk away profiting. He got to work the mic in front of a crowd and show up a stranger. And I was considered worthy enough to be rapped against by a hungry pro at the game. A win on both sides.

I’m still not sure I believe it happened.

Aug

less than zero, less than zero

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

I have tried to hold off on political posts of late until I have recent news stories that make both presumptive nominees look dumb.

Starting with the Ruling Party: MarketWatch asks what qualifications a green Navy pilot and mediocre senator has to be President.

His campaign finance law failed to significantly reduce the role of money in politics. He failed to get a big tobacco bill through the Senate. He’s failed to change the way Congress spends money; his bill to give the president a line-item veto was declared unconstitutional, and the system of pork and earmarks continues unabated. He failed to reform the immigration system.

Every senator who runs for president misses votes back in Washington, so it’s no surprise that McCain and all the others who ran in the primaries have missed a lot of votes in the past year. But between the beginning of 2005 and mid-2007, no senator missed more roll-call votes than McCain did, except Tim Johnson, who was recovering from a near-fatal brain aneurysm.

McCain says he doesn’t understand the economy. He’s demonstrated that he doesn’t understand the workings of Social Security, or the political history of the Middle East. He doesn’t know who our enemies are. He says he wants to reduce global warming, but then proposes ideas that would stimulate — not reduce — demand for fossil fuels.

Seriously – what successes does McCain have to his name? Other than McCain-Feingold, whose limits on campaign finance he has now successfully evaded.

Backstroking to the Opposition Party’s side of the pool, I found this frankly baffling story in the news yesterday: Barack Obama wants to end income taxes on seniors who make less than $50,000.

The Obama campaign says the idea would give tax cuts averaging about $1,400 to 7 million seniors who are battling inflation with mostly fixed incomes. The campaign also says the plan would relieve millions of older people from having to file complicated tax returns.

[...]

Some of Obama’s allies in Washington think he’s onto a bad idea.

“Most low- and moderate-income seniors already owe no income tax. Among seniors with incomes below $50,000 who do owe income tax, a significant number have modest incomes because they are retired but possess substantial assets,” said Robert Greenstein, who heads the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank. “Given all the problems and needs the nation faces, targeting relief to this group isn’t a priority.”

The Tax Policy Center, a think tank run jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, gave the idea bad grades in a recent study of the two presidential candidates’ tax plans.

Seniors already get preferential treatment in the tax code. They can claim an additional standard deduction and only a portion of their Social Security benefits are taxed. Many don’t pay payroll taxes because their income is from investments rather than wages.

Most of the bad economics that I waste my time railing against, you could call Good Ideas Executed Poorly. Take the minimum wage, for instance. Raising the minimum wage does not help the people it purports to help. But at least it comes from a halfway reasonable premise. You want to help poor people, you raise the amount they get paid. It is, at least, goal-oriented thinking.

But cutting taxes on seniors to zero? What could that be other than pure pandering for the elderly vote?

The median net worth for a U.S. citizen over 65 is $174,400. That’s almost four times the median net worth of any 35-year-olds reading this, and eighty-two times the median net worth of most of you (25-34 age bracket). Seniors collect more benefits from the combined trough of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security than any other demographic. Seniors are one of the few classes in the U.S. who get more in state and federal money than they pay in.

It is not possible to sincerely believe that a 66-year-old woman making $48,000 a year needs further government bailouts and have that belief be informed by reality. No real data supports that. If that is your opinion, your opinion is wrong^*.

Holy hell – bailing out seniors who earn per capita GDP? Who comes up with that?

I’m in my cave if you need me.

____________
^* Show of hands – how many of you live on one of America’s coasts and make less than $48,000 a year? Do you pay for your own prescriptions? Is that $48,000 a salary or the result of investments? Congratulations – you’re proof that seniors are fine.

Aug

nothing else would fit right or seem so directly applied

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

Important Question: How do guys in suspenders go to the bathroom?

Needless Backstory: I lost the only belt I own in the confusion of tech run for the upcoming production of Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You and The Actor’s Nightmare at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown. I typically only own one belt, which I wear until it disintegrates. At that point I buy another one. The current item – wide, black, leather – I bought at a Marshall’s in the fall of 2001 if memory serves.

I own a pair of suspenders from that one time I dressed up as Malcolm Reynolds for Halloween^*. Fishing them out of my closet yesterday morning, I figured them out in about thirty seconds and hoisted up my pants^**. I wore them over a dark blue shirt so they don’t stand out too vividly. Just a neat little accent.

So I spent a great deal of yesterday discovering suspenders, and I think I like them. Sure, you have to spend a great deal of time adjusting them between sitting and standing, lest they hang too loose (while sitting) or jack your pants up to Milhouse-level heights (while standing). But the vertical line of the suspenders draws attention to my shoulders, which I’ve always considered one of my stronger features. I look like a serious man engaged in serious business, as opposed to a blogger doing community theater who just lost the one belt he owns.

But is there an easier way to step up to a urinal other than unhooking both suspenders and just letting them hang over your shoulders? It worked fine this time, but I wonder about future attempts.

___________
^* I never said I hate Joss Whedon. I said I don’t love him, a distinction which many online geeks miss.

^** Holding on to a pair of suspenders for nearly three years justifies every packrat instinct my friends tell me to abandon.

Aug

I'm super-super-strong

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 8:57 am

I got to see Superhoney at Johnny D’s on Friday, a rare treat. The crowd took a while to fill out but eventually took over the dance floor. They covered every inch of that cramped Johnny D’s stage and played all my favorites.

Sunday my friends Blake and Jenny got married down in Mashpee, which took a while to reach. RJ and I worried as we drove through black spatting storm clouds, but the weather cleared up quickly by the time we hit the Cape. And nothing beats the seashore right after the rain for a wedding. Blake and Jenny looked as unselfconsciously giddy as any couple I’ve ever seen. It proved, to my satisfaction, that you can have a formal wedding without having a stiff wedding. Everyone walks in a line and stands to the side and dresses really nice, but the officiant leads the congregation in a rousing chorus of “So Say We All” to bless the union. You’re wearing a bridesmaid’s dress; that doesn’t mean you can’t giggle.

Photos of me dancing may surface. I deny all of them pre-emptively.

Aug

he's a complicated man, and no one understands him but his woman

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 11:28 am

Bernie Mac
1957 - 2008
HE OUT THIS MOTHERFUCKER

He said, “Bern, why do black folks use the word ‘motherfucker?’” Let me break it down, what the word “motherfucker” actually means. “Motherfucker” is a word that black folks have been using for years. It’s about expression. Don’t be ashamed of the word “mother-fucker.” Because “mother-fucker” is a noun: It describes a person, place or thing.

When you’re listening to one of our conversations you might here the word ‘motherfucker’ about 32 times. Don’t be afraid of the word motherfucker. If you’re out there this afternoon and you see like 3 or 4 brothers talking, you might hear a conversation and it goes like this:

‘You seen that motherfucker Bobby? That motherfucker owes me $35 motherfuckin’ dollars! He told me he gonna pay my motherfuckin’ money last motherfuckin’ week. I aint seen this motherfucker yet. I called the motherfucker four motherfuckin’ times, but the motherfucker won’t call me back. I called his motherfuckin’ momma the other motherfuckin’ day; she gonna play like the motherfucker wasn’t there. I started to cuss her motherfuckin’ ass out, but I don’t want no motherfuckin’ trouble. But I’ll tell ya one motherfuckin’ thang: the next time I see this motherfucker, and he don’t have my motherfuckin’ money, I’m gonna bust his motherfuckin’ head!

And I’m OUT this motherfucker!

One of my favorite comedians of the last six years – clever, expressive, talented and apparently a joy to work with.

Also, we lost Isaac Hayes this past weekend. He should be remembered as much for his excellent work as ‘Chef’ on South Park as for his pioneering work in the soul and R&B genre.

Between Mac and Hayes, we woke up to a significantly squarer world on Monday morning.

Aug

a living study in demonology

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 9:57 am

Hey sports fans.

I finally checked out Mike’s in Davis Square, which has just tucked its chin over the “dive bar” hurdle but not quite cleared it. Big meatball subs dripping with mozzarella and imported beer in plastic cups. You could call Mike’s, if I may steal the most common line in an in-flight magazine ever, a “study in contrasts.”

I ended up here because I hadn’t eaten that evening (Thursday), and because I wanted to see the tail end of the Ravens squeaking by the Patriots in the pre-season opener. Kyle Boller surprised me by not disintegrating into his coordinate goo, but instead launching bomb after bomb to Derrick Mason for mad points. And our second-string D sacked the Patriots’ QB (not Tom Brady) six times and pulled three picks out of the air as well.

In other news, Brett Favre consented to his own perpetual embarrassment by coming out of retirement to play for the ~~Packers Vikings Buccaneers~~ New York Jetropolitans. People speculate whether he should have stayed out this season, or whether this will be his final season. I say: screw that noise. I hope he has four more seasons. Let him piddle his relevancy away with a series of demeaning second- and third-string roles for increasingly worse teams, until one morning he finds himself fighting for the backup job in Cleveland with Brady Quinn. The 21st Century needs a new Vinnie Testaverde – a homeless parasite of a man, wandering from stadium to stadium, delivering mediocre performances until his name becomes a punchline.

(Sorry; the man just tires me)

Last bit of sports news: I watched UFC 87: Seek and Destroy in good company on Saturday night – RJ, Brett, Will S. and Mike L. All of the fights entertained us a great deal – even the 0:12 second knockout between two Ultimate Fighter also-rans.

Some highlights:

Cheick Kongo. Expect him to be a competitive heavyweight name in some later fights. He’s a big, tough dude who moves like a Ferrari.
Demian Maia. A skilled jiu-jitsu practitioner, he took down the ugly Jason MacDonald with a very proficient rear choke. Reach advantage rarely helps inside the grapple.
Condom Depot. One of the fighters had CONDOM DEPOT sprayed across the ass of his trunks, in an unfortunately suggestive sponsorship deal.
Light Flo Day. Boston’s own Kenny Florian took down Minnesota’s own Roger Huerta in a fantastic lightweight fight that went all three rounds. Florian has a pretty amazing arsenal – he kicks, punches and grapples remarkably well. He mentioned his soon-to-open martial arts school in Boston once, when Joe “Bro”gan cornered him after the fight; the ringside commentators mentioned it two or three times.
Brock Lesnar. That man is one blown knee away from a bouncing gig in Orange County.

Aug

let me put you in the picture, let me show you what I mean

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

Make some recommendations, Internet.

First: can anyone suggest an online photo storage site other than Flickr? As I approach my 200th photo stored, Flickr keeps pestering me to upgrade to Flickr Pro. Can anyone suggest a photo storage website that is free and will let me store more than 200 photos?

(I had a post on the spike touting the virtues of Flickr, too. Irony!)

Second: I’m thinking about getting a subcompact (or “ultracompact”) digital camera. I have my eye on the Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS; it has the features I want and a slim profile. The PowerShot SD850 IS also looks good. I only have two requirements – small enough to fit in my shirt pocket and not Sony. After that, if I can get something with decent battery life and minimal shot delay I’m happy.

I eagerly await your expert advice.

Aug

ten thousand years ago, crawling on the floor

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 8:45 am

Three anecdotes:

Driving to work the other day, I saw a car at the light ahead of me with the license plate TLW 862.

I thought nothing of it.
Driving to work the other day, I saw a car at the light ahead of me with the license plate JEP 401.
“Hey,” I thought, “those are my initials! And that’s my birthday! Why, the odds of that happening by chance are … over one in seventeen million! That’s too improbable to have happened by chance! That license plate must have been made just for me.”
While trying to reconcile the inescapable fact of the human race’s evolutionary origins, creationists have been known to say, “The probability of the chance formation of a hypothetical functional ‘simple’ cell, given all the ingredients, is acknowledged to be worse than 1 in 10^⁵⁷⁸⁰⁰.” That’s too improbable to have happened by chance! Therefore, the Universe must have been made just for me.

The difference between #1 and #2 illustrates the error shared by #2 and #3.

I owe the license plate analogy to Richard Feynman, who wasn’t talking about evolution at the time. However, he did make a point about resisting the temptation to let the “specialness” of the data bias your conclusions. Just because the data means something personally important to you does not let you reason backward to a theory that would neatly justify it.

If I see a license plate that’s a random jumble of letters and numbers, I make no associations. If I see a license plate that’s a random jumble of letters and numbers that remind me of my name and birthday, I recognize that. My mind forms an association. The data now has special significance to me. If I live in a uniquely paranoid world, I might presume that license plate was made just for me. Perhaps someone infiltrated the license plate printing press.

If I live on a planet that’s a sea of unthinking protoplasm, I don’t assign it any significance¹. But if I live on a planet that’s teeming with decision-making vertebrates, of which I happen to be one, I assign it a great deal of significance. My mind forms an association. The data now has a special importance to me. If I live in a uniquely paranoid world, I might presume that the world was made just for me. Perhaps someone lives in the clouds and makes elephants out of clay.

I could spend days talking about the problems with the creationist argument that the cell, or DNA, or the brain, have “too much complexity to have evolved by chance.”² But the chief problem comes from a skipped premise. The syllogism goes as follows:

The odds of the human species evolving by chance are one in a squillion.³
…
Therefore, God made us.

Seriously, that’s it. What’s the second premise? “One in a squillion’s just too big to ever happen?” Says who? If we can conceive the number “one in a squillion” – if we can do the operations to write it down on paper, and it’s not an ~~irrational~~ imaginary number like the square root of -1 – then who’s to say the universe can’t contain it?

This illustrates the logical fallacy of petitio principii, also known as “assuming to be true the conclusion that you’re trying to prove” or “begging the question.” Creationists presume a specialness to the datum of human existence, then reason backward from there. In so doing, they skip a premise, in the hopes that once the numbers get too big to think about we’ll just stop paying attention. But logic doesn’t work that way. Neither does the universe.

Creationists don’t have a monopoly on this error. I just have the most fun pointing theirs out.

_____________
¹ Hell, I don’t assign anything any significance – I’m just a prokaryote!

² Briefly: biologists don’t assert that “humans evolved by chance,” because the forces of natural selection, sexual selection, genetic drift, etc. are not “chance,” in fact they follow some pretty orderly principles, maybe you’d like to read about them sometime in a 9th-grade textbook; also, it’s ridiculous to speak of the state of the world as a one-in-a-squillion outcome, as that supposes that the universe is a die with a squillion other faces, or a test that’s been run a squillion other times, which I have no problem asserting but doesn’t come from the Intelligent Design handbook; also, what is “too much” complexity?; also, humans did not spring onto the scene as full homo sapiens, but rather descended from an enormous daisy chain of species, many of which have odds – using ridiculous creationist logic – of much less than one in a squillion of showing up; also, you’re stupid.

³ I have never heard the same number quoted on any two creationist websites, unless they reference each other. I know it’s a bullshit number anyway – they just start multiplying things like the number of proteins in a DNA strand until they get an impressively large number and then stare at it slack-jawed – but I’d like it to at least be consistent bullshit. Could you rubes get your act together? Have a conference call or something.

Aug

street lights, people

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 8:48 am

Reading the news makes you stupid:

The study, released this week in the journal Obesity, suggests that by the year 2030, nearly every American will be overweight or obese.

Currently, figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the prevalence of obesity in adults at about 66 percent. But lead study author Dr. Youfa Wang of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore says that if current overweight and obesity trends continue, 86 percent of Americans could be overweight or obese by the year 2030.

Even more troubling, the authors note, “By 2048, all American adults would become overweight or obese.”

If you ever wonder whether someone does Real Science or Play Science, look for words like all, none, always, never in their press releases.

I suppose it must be exciting, living in a world where scientitians can predict with confidence what the American social order will be like in 40 years. I know I sure couldn’t. I would imagine that most Americans living 40 years ago – meaning, the summer of 1968 – would not have predicted that a black man would have a serious shot at upsetting a three-term U.S. Senator for the Presidency. I don’t think anyone in the pre-Apollo 11 era could have predicted the cellular phone, the desktop computer, the iPod, the hybrid car, Viagra or DVDs. I doubt anyone contemporary to Vietnam could have predicted Watergate, the Iranian hostage crisis, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Whitewater hearings, the razing of the World Trade Center or the Colts leaving Baltimore.

But that guy! Man, that guy has it figured out!

I present a short list of things that could end the obesity “epidemic” any time in the next 40 years:

Congress cuts back on or repeals sugar and corn subsidies, damming the flood of high fructose corn syrup down America’s gaping gullet;
Gas prices decline to the point that Americans can indulge in the luxury of “eating local” – that’s right, eating local does not reduce your carbon footprint – thus consuming more leafy greens.
A scandal on par with Enron shakes the Coca-Cola corporation, savaging the cola products market.
A mutated pox wipes out swaths of genetically engineered corn across the U.S.
Dow Chemical discovers an easily reproduced substitute for sodium, the most common food preservative.
An outbreak of Mad Cow disease scares America off of beef for 3 to 5 years.
All the currently “obese” people die off.
Nuclear holocaust? Alien invasion? The Second Coming? Really, anything.

Anyone who tells you with confidence what will happen forty years from now has just lied to you. Treat them as you would any other liar.

Edit: As several folks reminded me, you can easily guarantee all of America will be obese in 2048 by simply changing the definition of obesity.

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