The Eastern Frontier

March 1

2009-03-01T22:56:00.003-05:00

On the first day of March it is, of course, snowing. Honestly, I'm delighted. The elevated train through the falling snow lends a romance unavailable in Southern cities. And then... the snow melts, and it's brown, and awful, and the end of March can't come soon enough.

A foot is supposed to fall by tomorrow morning. Have I said recently that I'm glad I don't drive.

Went dancing in Williamsburg last night, the better part of an interesting evening. After stopping by a friend's house party, I couldn't reach Abbey on the phone. So I just went to were she mentioned they might be, in the Village. Nope. Not there. Thankfully it was only a short ride from there to the L stop in Brooklyn where I needed to be.

One thing I've learned is that I don't like to explain to people why I'm impetuous. I went into the city because I didn't want to go back to the apartment and just wait. But when Abbey called when I was already in the Village and asked where I was, I stopped for a minute and then very consciously lied about it, saying I was at my house. Why? I didn't want to explain that the party had broken up and I, in a typical bout of restlessness and frustration with not being able to reach somebody, decided to just chance it and go where my friends might be and figure out I was wrong later. I'm weird.

I sat across from the most perfect hipster boy ever on the train. Teal and pink backpack and coat, curled Snidely mustache.

The train home was another story. If you don't live here you might not know this, but the G is the most horrible subway line in transit history. But it runs right from Williamsburg to the elevated tracks outside my window. So I got on it at 4-something a.m. last night, willing to stand around for a while if it meant not paying a cab to get home. One comes without a horrible wait, and off we go. Then, about halfway to the house, the train stops at the Clinton/Washington station in Fort Greene. This happens now and then, but there's no way another train was in front of us. Trust me. I waited for this one long enough to know. So after 10 minutes of waiting and barely staying awake, I walk out of the car and see the conductors looking at something in the front. Line of sight clears the train and I see a mentally disturbed man down on the tracks, running back and forth and shouting at everyone to leave him alone. The cops come eventually, but they're trying to talk him down (or up, in this case) because they don't want to go down there. I leave, finally, walk through the snow in what I believe is the right direction and finally catch a cab home. It's just before 6 when I finally get here.

I hope I'm ready for a new week. Sounds kind of soothing after that adventure.

Wednesday

2009-02-25T20:27:00.003-05:00

I got nothing done today. Pretty much nothing. Buying some new white undershirts was pretty much the highlight of accomplishment. And I'm someone who thrives on accomplishment—I hate sitting still, and feeling like I'd didn't do anything.

But today was my first total emotional breakdown in the working-for-myself era. It all pretty much came together at once. I think I had a lot of leftover stress from the way last year ended, and not really having a break. Then today the Internet we borrow at home wasn't up, so I had to venture out. I'm not good at working at coffeehouses because I have to move around, and when I'm confined to an uncomfortable wooden chair while I slurp my caffeine, things go poorly. Plus, the first place had a wireless problem, which I didn't discern until already purchasing something, so that was $2 down the drain.

What else? Well, I'm waiting for three different freelance checks to show up in the mail. I'm always nervous about the mail since the building's new. I needed to do one interview for a PM story, but the pr woman put it off—again—until tomorrow. So I had nothing to do except find new ideas for future projects, which gets exhausting. So after lunch today I just fell apart and couldn't do anything.

Not bad, really. Feeling a little better, and still will probably publish more than $1,000 gross this week. But you got to give yourself a break or it forces itself upon you. I decided today I need a vacation, and will take one soon. Or a massage.

A Little History of the World

2009-02-09T13:54:00.002-05:00

One of my new favorite books; bought it on a whim this weekend. If you've never heard of it, it's the entire history of the world up to WWII, written for children. The German author didn't translate into English until the very end of his life, but the way he words things are simply marvelous.

To wit, his description of the conversion of the pagans: "In the end they paid a terrible price for their resistance: Charlemagne had more than four thousand of them put to death. The remaining Saxons allowed themselves to be baptized without protest, but it must have been a long time before they were able to feel any affection for the religion of loving kindness."

And, a personal favorite, talking about Neanderthal skeleton finds in Germany: "On another occasion, but still in Germany—in the Neander valley—a human skull was found. And this was also immensely interesting because nobody alive today has a skull like this one, either. Instead of a forehead like ours it just had two thick ridges above the eyebrows. Now, if all our thinking goes on behind our foreheads, and these people didn't have any foreheads, then perhaps they didn't think as much as we do. Or, at any rate, thinking may have been harder for them. So the people who examined the skull concluded that once upon a time there were people who weren't very good at thinking, but who were better at biting than we are today."

Marvelous.

New Occasional Blog

2009-02-04T17:22:00.003-05:00

If you're never been to BigThink.com, you should go—they have all kinds of short video clips of important and semi-people ruminating on important and semi-important things. Plus, now there's me, blogging for them on the now-and-then.

bigthink.com/andrewmoseman

Seen this week

2009-01-31T19:41:00.002-05:00

On an ad in the subway for "The Pink Panther 2," as a word bubble coming out of Steve Martin's mouth: "Steve Martin says 'Free Palestine.'" I wonder if he does.

On the way home, a Zipcar on Court Street lost the W and the H on their slogan, so it simply read, "eels when you need them."

I can't tell you how many times I have.

Rooftop Photos

2009-01-29T21:42:00.003-05:00

Good to be back in industrial Brooklyn. And there she is, from my rooftop.

I could see Manhattan from my roof, if not for that damned ugly structure.

Encouraging Sign

2009-01-21T21:11:00.001-05:00

I went to my neighborhood's cheap Chinese restaurant—every neighborhood has several identical ones—and lo and behold, there was not protective glass separating me from the employees. I could practically reach out and touch them. How refreshing.

It Amuses Me

2009-01-20T15:16:00.003-05:00

That the central theme of Big O's inaugural was growing up and taking responsibility, setting aside childish things, and what fills the TPM comments? Fighting over whether or not the speech contained true "bumper sticker" phrases like JFK's that people will remember.

Big O forgot one thing when calling upon the nation to grow up: THE INTERNET.

Across the Street from the Elevated Tracks

2009-01-19T17:32:00.002-05:00

At my new home, it is snowing lightly but constantly—warm enough to pack together but not so warm as to prevent accumulation. There is a street lamp outside my third-story window, emitting just enough to showcase the passing flakes that invisible above the light and pass into the night shortly thereafter.

The train is going by as I write this. Quietly, about to stop, and thankfully without squeaky breaks.

I have yammered on in the past about my idea of seasons—one ought to find just enough to both love and loathe about all four so that you welcome their coming and can deal sanely with their passing. Winter, naturally, most often needs a reinforcement of positives, and I thought of one the other day:

Winter is the only season when you don't mind the fact that time seems to speed up as you get older. Let time accelerate. Whatever it takes to get through the dirty, leftover snow, past Valentine's Day and into an April of longer and warmer days.

Ricardo Montalban, and a couple other thoughts

2009-01-14T23:47:00.003-05:00

I had forgotten until today, when I saw a 9-minute snippet of Star Trek II in memoriam of Ricardo Montalban's death, what a good film that is (unlike most in the Star Trek series.) The Trek movies became the classic example of something too familiar to criticize; I saw them so many times with my father that I could never critique them as films. But II is good, maybe even quite good, on the strength of Montalban.

Heroes are so boring. For the first time in a decade, I watched Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves this week. Again, oddly familiar from so long ago. And Kevin Costner plays the part ably, but he's so... bland. Morgan Freeman is decent. The only exceptional part is Alan Rickman, playing the hell out of the Sheriff of Nottingham. When you're 14 you follow the heroes, and a decade later you realize that the villains are so much more fun.

Say what you want about Shatner: at least he knew how to play a hero with some pizzazz.

Before I leave films, one last thing about Benjamin Button -- whomever made the decision to leave in the story-within-a-story construction was wrong. It drags out the film, and all you really get out of it is the scene where the daughter realized Benjamin is her true father, which isn't terribly dramatic anyway. And enough has been said about the weirdness of the Hurricane Katrina subplot. You want to see the right way to do the story within a story? The Princess Bride. I don't know how much total screen time Peter Falk gets with Fred Savage—it can't be much. But he carries those scenes; they matter.

Something else that's awesome—giant telescopes. Writing them for PM this week.

Blogofail

2009-01-11T15:43:00.004-05:00

Given the flurry of unfortunate events recently chronicled, the idea has struck me to create a blog dedicated entirely to failure. The Failure Blog, or The Fail Blog, seeing how "fail" seems to have usurped it predecessor as the Web noun form. These exist already, but it really brings it home when you use all your own personal failures. I've always thought that life is all the more bearable when you realize from a distance how ridiculous it is.

Saturday:
My two roommates and I make arrangement to meet three old friends at a showing of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Rob asks me if, on my way home from Target, I could purchase tickets for the 7 showing at the Court St theater. Certainly, I say, and pick up 3 for Button at Cobble Hill Theater, a wonderful relic of a small cinemahouse in our general neighborhood.

However, as Brooklyn residents are certainly aware, there is another theater on Court St--the United Artists giant giga-plex-o-plaza sits not more than few block north on Court, up into Downtown Brooklyn. Our friends meant that theater. So we all saw the same movie at roughly the same time, 0.4 miles away. FAIL.

Later, though, they met us at a BYOB Thai restaurant down Smith. Brown curry + vegetarian duck + BYOB = WIN.

Sunday:
For reasons I have yet to understand, Borough Hall stop of the F train doesn't connect underground to the Borough Hall stop for the 2/3/4/5. So you walk 2 blocks above ground. In any case, I figured out that transfer easily enough. Win.

I take the 3 to Grand Army Plaza to visit Brooklyn Public Library, which I believe to be open from 1 to 6. In fact, it is closed, rendering my trip across Brooklyn rather pointless. FAIL.

Back Home Again

2009-01-11T13:23:00.000-05:00

I suppose that if misfortune is going to strike you early and often, the least it could do is stick to a schedule.

October. October was all right. In October the worries lingered across the month, like you were paying them on credit. I had to find a new room to rent, but if I didn’t find it all in one day, the next day came with more of the same. I had no money and waited for checks to arrive in the mail, but again, long. Once a day to check the mail, the rest to think about something else.
Since then, however, calamity came like a few jolts of current or a pokes of a stick.

November 4: Election Night. Too much to drink. Too bad of a neighborhood. Too easy of a target.

Mid-December: Up the scary stairs, apartment door smashed gaping open. Inside the pickaxe leans casually, seemingly unashamed to be an accessory to robbery. My laptop is gone, and nothing else. It is time to move.

Jan. 5: The day after moving day. Rob and I spend the entire night of the 4th moving all our things into the new apartment, back near my old neighborhood but a nicer flat. It’s dusty and slightly unfinished, but we can handle that. Then Monday comes, and after 4 hours’ sleep on the floor I head off to work. I am freelance now, just writing, and could do a lot of work from home once the wireless is ready. Well, the landlord neglected to set up the new building with the phone company, so we’re stuck. Stuck without Internet at home.

Let me tell you this: if you’re a professional and you don’t have Internet at home, you’re nothing. Two years ago I had no laptop, no money, and I didn’t care in the slightest because I built houses all day and drank beer all night. But in New York, having to steal Web time at work or going to a friend’s--I might as well be wearing sackcloth. I am a digital bum.

At the very least, finding out that we can’t get Internet hooked up for a month answers one burning question: What was going to be January’s disaster. Now we know.

If anyone wants to enter the pool for February, it’s open.

Finally

2009-01-01T19:49:00.002-05:00

New apartment found. Now only the hurdles of hooking up every single utility, moving in a rush, finding a subletter for this room by month's end and getting back to work remain. Np, right?

Updates TK. In any case, it's nice that this is happening now - I can actually take all that ethereal wishing for this year to be better than the last and push it into something real.

So I got that going for me, which is nice.

Hyperbole Dept., 12/27

2008-12-27T16:43:00.003-05:00

Florida State has a football player who's a Rhodes Scholar. I think that's great. But you knew ESPN couldn't resist cornballing it as far as possible. In his typical weepy prestige style, Jeremy Schaap actually says--actually says--that if you rolled Deion Sanders, Mother Teresa and Einstein into one person, you might get this kid.

Hyperbole anyone?

Away Too Long, Reading on War

2008-12-26T00:14:00.004-05:00

And for that I apologize. I've been through two serious disasters since the beginning of November, including losing computer, and more than my share of bite-sized inconveniences. These will be rectified and recorded for your entertainment in due course. In the meantime, I'm back online. I spent my Christmas Day uploading all my old music to my new computer, drinking hefeweizen and watching a Sci-Fi Channel marathon of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Really, one could do worse.

Something that happened in the interim between my last post in November and now: For some reason, unbeknownst to myself or anyone else, I decided to read a 500-page book about the Civil War--Stephen Sears' Gettysburg. It was one of those books that was fascinating for the first third, boring for the second third as you wait for the good part, and trying at the end because you just want to finish it.

Reading about war in detail is eye-opening because most of us only get the Cliff's Notes version of war. We learned when the war happened, that Gettysburg was a deciding point, that someone named Pickett made a charge and another gentleman in a top hat commemorated the whole affair with a lovely speech. But reading about battles in 500-page detail takes you into the arena of people who read magazines about a war that happened 150 years ago, or dress up in blue or grey to stage it once again.

A few thoughts:

1. I read the bit about how Lee sent out his cavalry on an ill-advised mission to circle the Union army, only to lose them during the lead-up to Gettysburg and thus be deprived of his intelligence wing and left in the dark as to the state of his opponent. Then I rode the subway to work, and one of the ads in which they print literary quotes had one about how America was discovered by people trying desperately to get around it, and named for someone who played no part in its discovery. The passage then concludes, "History is like that, very chancy." Very chancy indeed. That is one of my new favorite quotes.

2. Thanks to the cavalry debacle, the pivotal battle in the pivotal war in our nation's history was won largely because Robert E Lee couldn't figure out just how many Union soldiers were over the next ridge--only a few, or the entire goddamned army. One of my favorite things about reading history is when people were confounded by problems that modern technology could solve in seconds.

3. History is a narrative, and so battle stories like to focus on individuals--even simplistic high school history classes inform their students on the leadership advantage that Robert E Lee and his lieutenants enjoyed over the revolving door generalship of the Union forces. But while Lee certainly made the lion's share of blunders, the entire reading of Gettysburg was, for me, a reiteration of the fact that logistics win wars much moreso than tactics. Really, the South would've had to fight a near-perfect war to prevail, just like the Japanese would've had to fight a near-perfect war to win in WWII. I learned during a story for PM that the Japanese hand-made many of the parts of their Zero fighter planes. That's not how you get it done.

Resources matter, which is yet another reason to be terrified of the future.

4. Reading the bloodbath page after page, it's even more staggering than the total figures they give you in history class--more the 600,000 for both sides, including disease and all that. But that's just a big number, and big number without context don't really mean anything. You can tell people that more Americans died in the Civil War than in any other conflict and people start to get it. You could tell them that the death toll was more than 10 times as much as Vietnam and it gets even clearer. But you really feel it when you read battle details, and a regiment loses 40 percent of its strength during one brutal assault. Thank you, artillery.

5. Color Guards--Has there ever been anything more futile? At Gettysburg, the slaughter is disgusting. Man after man would be pick up the flag, wave it around to say, "go ahead you Yankee bastards, fucking shoot me," and then get shot. Just like the overall deaths, it hits you much more heavily just how stupid color guards are when you read time after time after time of them getting mowed down like chaff.

This Is How It Starts

2008-11-17T20:35:00.002-05:00

It was a disappointing weekend. I came off a triumph at the end of the week of knocking a story assignment out of the park and impressing one of the PM editors, and felt like a little celebrating. However, I still don't know that many people in the City, and those that I do know didn't seem to be around or going out. So I spent a lot of time by myself, wishing I were out galavanting, which is a terrible feeling. Yesterday I was being nagged to clean up more around the apartment, and I suddenly had an interesting realization: I would rather be at work. It was Sunday evening, and I couldn't wait for it to be Monday.

There are those people who are workaholics because they're compulsively trying to get ahead, and I have something in common with those people. There are those who are are work all the time, and think about work all the time, because they can't possibly get everything done in regular hours, but this doesn't really describe my situation.

Rather, I like being at work because I'm good at it. Compare that to my current personal life, where I'm trying to meet more people but still have a very small friend/acquaintance base my age, and I'm a total success. At work I can phone up anybody and tell them I'm from PM and have a nice chat; off work I'm just somebody who drinks more than he should and wishes he had more people to go out with. I have to be honest with you here--I'm not that put off by the idea of becoming a workaholic, and longs as it leads somewhere. But I acknowledge on the surface that the idea is somewhat troubling, like my roommates are training for someday having a nagging wife that I don't want to go home to.

I kid, of course. They're good kids. And it feels to leave every night.

Today on the Subway, Saturday Night

2008-11-15T23:17:00.003-05:00

The college football selection was a little weak, and so is sitting around watching college football, so I instead viewed a cable showing of "American Beauty" this afternoon. I had forgotten about the dynamic between Angela, the beautiful but empty blonde, and Jane, the brunette who's too bright to hang out with her but gets stuck with her anyway because of high school girl power dynamics.

When I was riding the N home over the Manhattan Bridge tonight, there were two girls sitting on the opposite bench, probably around 10 years old, I guess. I realized when I was trying to figure this out that when you don't spend any time around children, you can't really tell from sight how old they are. I also realized that I wish provocatively-dressed underage girls would disappear, because even if you look at them for a second out of the corner of your eye, you feel dirty like Lester Burnham.

Both carried bags from the M & Ms novelty store in Times Square, but one was a blond pageant girl waiting to be, and the other was brunette, pudgier, nerdy glasses. As the train rolled on, the blond girl would get up every few minutes to check her perfectly straight hair in her reflection in the window. Time after time, idolizing herself, her mother with the same perfectly straight hair sitting and encouraging. I watched the brunette girl, all caught up in the other prepubescent girl's gross glamour, and I wondered how long it would take her to get bored with her friend.

Today on the Subway, Thursday edition

2008-11-13T19:44:00.002-05:00

Riding the A home this evening, I noted out of the corner of my eye that the black sticker on the doors, which warns you not to lean on the doors, didn't look right. Upon closer inspection, someone had covered all the words except "do" with a sticker that said, "teach the children." So the whole thing reads, "Do teach the children." It was a guerilla for some Brooklyn organization.

Then I noticed that Colin Quinn was in my subway car. He was the second past-his-prime actor I've ridden with on the subway -- the other day it was the guy who played Cypher in The Matrix. Oh 1998 -- I bet both of those guys wish you were still the current year. Colin just looked a little haggard, like a regular guy. About what you'd expect.

Today on the subway

2008-11-12T20:52:00.003-05:00

Most of the way through Brooklyn on the A, there was an Afro-Carribean woman singing hymns. I tried to turn up my iPod as loud as possible, but to no avail, really -- she was quite loud, and my headphones are not. So over my Radiohead I could hear this woman, and then recognize the song from many years ago when I used to go to church -- "How Great Thou Art." I'm not a religious man, but I have to tell you, she was giving it all she had. It annoyed me at the time, but I came to admire her, at least a little, when I realized she was singing every verse and every chorus. And at the finale, when she reached the crescendo, her voice broke badly the way old women's voices do, but she hit the final note. Then, at the next stop, when nobody would yell out "praise the lord" with her, she insulted us and left.

Hey, Wouldn't You Like to See Something That's Not About the Election?

2008-11-03T22:20:00.001-05:00

Here's my room. In progress.

Marathon Man

2008-11-02T19:06:00.003-05:00

Brazil. France. South Africa. Denmark. Sweden Norway. Canada. Mexico. Japan. Germany. Poland. U.S.A. There may have been more, but I recall seeing at least these countries while cheering on the runners today.

It was marathon day today. I haven't checked to see who actually won the thing, because I don't really care. Marathon day is fantastic simply for giving you the excuse to root for people just trying to accomplish something. Children's sports are often tainted by the lameness of rewarding "participation," but the great thing about marathon day is that the sentiment arises naturally -- you really want everyone to finish the thing, and when they do, everyone's awash in good feelings. I went to marathon day in Boston in the spring, and the warmth of pulling for accomplishment that you know somebody else desperately wants just carries you for hours afterward. Call it second-degree runner's high.

Plus, it keeps you from thinking that election day is in two day. God, let it be over soon.

Slow Month that October.

2008-11-01T23:21:00.003-04:00

And unbelievable that it's already over. I moved, and pictures will come. Perhaps tomorrow, when the construction crew resumes their banging and shouting. Our apartment building is being refurbished, but only our place is currently occupied. Thankfully the landlord is a devoted Jew, and we have our Saturdays in peace. Amen.

My room, to be frank, is beautiful. I have an exposed brick wall on one side, high ceilings and lovely doors on either side. Arrangements are yet unfinished -- I bit the bullet and dropped a wad of money on a new IKEA bed and desk, but there's still the matter of my clothes and books sitting in piles on the floor, calling out for a dresser and shelf. One thing at a time, that seems to the way of it. Thursday they brought our countertop, and yesterday our sink. One day, not so long from now, we'll actually have neighbors, and not just the lonely but cheerful Mexican man who's paid to watch the door, since the door doesn't really work yet. I suppose that means that I live in a New York building with a doorman. What do you think about that?

iPod Playlists, Right and Wrong

2008-10-12T13:47:00.002-04:00

Sometimes the musical gods get it right, and other times, well...

Some weeks ago I was taking a night stroll through Times Square. Times Square is gaudy and touristy and unbearable during the day, but at night, it's still amazing. I have no interest in going to Vegas but Times Square at night makes me understand why people get sucked in there. As I walked up Broadway that particular night, just as I was under all the electric dizziness of the billboards, my iPod reached the crescendo of Tears for Fears' "Head Over Heels." If you've ever watched Donnie Darko, it should come as now surprise that this nearly forgotten bit of 80s culture can be strangely affecting, and this was exactly the right circumstance.

Fast forward to last Thursday. I'm riding home on the Q, and as I stare out the train window at the Financial District, the choir singing the fourth movement of Beethoven's 9th in my early reached the high point of "Ode to Joy."

Cruel world.

10/1

2008-10-01T22:28:00.002-04:00

I see that I've neglected the blog for a while. Such is life. I've been busy like busy working for Pop Mech, with a larger project in the works and a bunch of little assignments to do. So, I don't have a ton of after-work energy to devote to blogging, especially now that I have to find a new place to live. Ah well. I'll be back in force sometime; I might start my own personal home page once I get settled in a little, and migrate the blog over there. Til then, it's the same ol' for me.

I'm Going For A Walk

2008-09-20T20:17:00.003-04:00

Sometimes it's awfully nice when you can't go home.

The landlord is selling our house, which is unfortunate, and he showed it to some prospective buyers this afternoon. So I left the house in the morning and couldn't return until late afternoon. You can see a whole lot with 5 hours to kill in New York. It's like a world tour.

I went up to Park Slope first thing, the highly gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood to our east and north. Park Slope's yuppie-dom had never really bothered me as much as some; I certainly like going for walks in a place that's a little nicer to look at than run-down industrial Gowanus. Today, for whatever reason, it did. Possibly because I had gone up there yesterday and Thursday -- I had the two days off after leaving Discover -- and seen the black women pushing around white babies in strollers, presumably while the high-powered parents were at work. Possibly because a New York slice was $5.50 instead of the $3 it would be a couple blocks away, outside of the neighborhood. Possibly because of the $32 screen-printed tees at Brooklyn Industries, of which there are two stores in Park Slope. (Scoffs).

Ridiculousness aside, there are hidden treasures, including my barber shop. I hadn't been for a couple months because for a couple months I couldn't afford anything that wasn't at the very top of the priority list. It's a great place, though, run by a handful of old Italian guys. The first time I went they had the Yankees game on the radio. Today it was too early for that, so they had 50's crooners playing. Let me tell you -- there are both off-putting and soothing elements to your barber singing along to the Rat Pack as he trims your hair. My cut is a little too short; when it gets clipped too tightly the ovalness of my head becomes more evident. But no real complaints.

From there I went to the Lower East side, and then up to the Upper West side to read at Riverside Park. Not as different as they used to be, but still a pretty wide gap. In the Lower East side I felt like people were judging me because I wasn't dressed in high enough style. In the Upper West side I felt like people were judging me for eating Subway, and not something more expensive and/or organic. I suppose that would go for both places, though.

All in all, though, I know that I heard English, French, Swedish, and Japanese today, as well as a few tongues I couldn't pick out. I watched other people's kids playing baseball near the river. They were pretty good. It's getting plenty cool now, but that's ok, too. I have brandy now.

Fall

2008-09-16T19:43:00.004-04:00

I've been talking a lot lately about the coming of autumn, and how excited I am for it. It's not just the crisp air or the break from the long months of unreasonable heat. Summer, while providing ample opportunity for Fun at every turn, carries with it a lot of pressure. If you don't get in as much Fun as you reasonably could, passed up a few days at the beach or the park, you just wasted the Season Of Fun. And it won't be back around again for a while.

Autumn, by contrast, is low pressure. It's the perfect time to go for walks, and take pictures. Last night was Rob's last before flying to be with his fiance in France for a few months, so we all met up at the Riverside Park on the upper west side, four of us, and took pictures. And took pictures of each other taking pictures. I realized later it was a total cliched moment -- something out of a movie montage with four friends enjoying a day together in New York. We had some incredible Mexican food and I was so deliriously happy I couldn't have possibly been bothered.

I have a new job and am leaving DISCOVER. The temps are maxing out in the 70s. The sunsets are gorgeous. It's autumn in the city, and there's nothing you can do about it. Just look:

I'm feeling a little lingering sadness that Rob is gone, but that's OK -- it's autumn, and you're allowed to dwell on ennui if you want.

Soon, sweaters.

The Old John McCain

2008-09-11T10:06:00.003-04:00

I've made no secret of that fact that I think John McCain would be a bad choice for the Presidency of the U.S., and that in recent years he has backed away from the legacy of an admirable career to pander to the party base and use dirty tactics that were once used against him. But, since it's 9/11, I will like to something strong and admirable written by Sen. McCain, his 2006 foreword to Popular Mechanics' book that dispelled the "9/11 was an inside job" conspiracy theorists:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/3491861.html?page=3

Fantasy Camp and the Sarah Palin Effect

2008-09-04T19:53:00.004-04:00

I'm a fidgeter. I always have been. If there's a stress ball around, I squeeze it. In my room, when I'm not pacing, I've been known to shuffle cards for minutes on end. I do this not because I'm overloaded on caffeine, I one day realized. Rather, these nervous ticks subordinate; they exist in the service of one of my defining characteristics: I'm a daydreamer.

Jonah Lehrer wrote a piece for this weekend's Boston Globe that I instantly identified with. The creative mind needs idle time in which to go places, sometimes to dead ends and sometimes to good ideas. But if you're going to let your mind drift away, you need something to occupy your physical self, like shuffling cards, going for a walk, or taking a long drive alone. When I was younger, far too you to drive, this would get me in great trouble. While daydreaming, probably about sporting conquest, I paid exactly no mind to the whereabouts of myself, and so I would inadvertently trample my father's garden. He would come out and yell, and I'd be sorry, but in 5 minutes my mind was gone and I'd back at it. Not much has changed in 15 years, really, except that I don't have a front yard anymore, and my back one is made of concrete.

My daydreams these days follow a few patterns. In some of them I am professionally successful, in some personally. And then, in times when I'm sick of the city and the Midwestern starts to creep up, I have these awesome blue-collar fantasies. Often I am driving around in a Jeep, or Dodge Charger look-alike. I'm usually listening to the Allman Brothers or the Marshall Tucker Band. I am happy. In some of these dreams it's actually 1974 and my facial hair is mind-blowing; in some it's today. But in all of them I am the righteous picture of America, a man alone and satisfied.

I have these dreams because I, your humble Eastie, not so long ago lived a genuine blue collar life. I worked 8 to 5, building affordable community housing. When the clock struck 5 the night was mine; I didn't have any money, but I had food stamps, a serviceable car, a serviceable bike, and my record collection. I listened mostly to country and country-rock during this period because it actually rang more true with my life than anything else -- when I'd put on anything sly or urbane it just seemed out of sorts.

My life now is nothing like that, and it most likely never will be again. So when I get disillusioned with trying to make something of myself, I put the Allman Brothers Band on my iPod and let my mind drift back to a time when my life was simpler, and while I didn't have everything, things weren't so bad (at least in memory). This is exactly what we as a country are in danger of doing.

Slate on Tuesday worked out what I had been close to articulating but never able to -- Sarah Palin is a dangerous figure for those of us opposed to her because she appeals right to the heart of this daydream. In the case of her and the family, it's small town life in Alaska, with dignified, important blue-collar work like her husband does. It appeals to a time when someone without a college education had a good chance to land a well-paying Union job, which doesn't exist much in the Lower 48 anymore.

As the Slate headline reads, their life is enviable. But it's fantasy. Theirs is not the America most of us occupy. As Tom has duly noted on his blog, we are a nation primarily of urban dwellers, not small-towners, no matter what our national mythology might say. Yet because of that mythology we are a nation primed to accept the Sarah Palin story as something close to our heart, and electing a ticket that mentally resides in yesteryear.

Tonight John McCain will accept the Republican nomination for President in an ice hockey arena that has been reconfigured since last night into a "town-hall" style room. I suppose it's intended to allude to his maverick credentials, or his supposed populism. But the image is truly fitting because it hearkens back to a small town era that today dominates only our daydreams.

Original commentary to come soon.

2008-09-04T19:51:00.002-04:00

But first:

NYT Opinion: All the Sarcasm That's Fit to Print

2008-08-30T18:16:00.003-04:00

Tom yesterday directed my attention to this awful piece of writing by hack David Brooks. Don't feel bad if you can't get to the end of it -- it's one of the worst attempts at writing I've ever read in the Old Grey Lady.

Well, today they printed one by Gail Collins, Brooks' partner in "The Conversation," an ongoing feature. While not as jaw-droppingly awful as Brooks' piece, this one too begins with several paragraphs of pure sarcasm. Ok, you're saying, but isn't McCain's choice of a rookie governor from Alaska as his running mate the textbook example of something deserving this kind of mockery? Perhaps. But if your standard response to political maneuvering is nothing but bitter Gen-X mocking, when will you ever take anything seriously?

To cite The Simpsons, as is my standard practice: In that great episode when Homer joins the freak show at Hullabalooza, there are two slackers in the audience. After one makes some cryptic remark, the other says, "Dude, are you being sarcastic?" His friend replies, "I don't even know anymore."

Maybe the Times just launched this feature to appeal to the fans of Crossfire who've been missing that kind of escalation into absurdity since it was cancelled. (Though if they haven't been able to find it, they haven't been watching MSNBC or Fox News.) I don't know. As you may be aware, I have no problem descending into sarcasm or mockery. But all this saying something without actually saying it is getting to me.

It's easy, for instance, to hint at the importance of McCain's VP pick by alluding to his age. But let's just say it like it is: John McCain's VP pick is much more important than Obama's because there's a much greater chance that John McCain is going to die in office. Newsweek ran an interesting feature in May suggesting that the Senator is in quite good shape for his age, 72, but concedes that the stress of the Presidency is a lot different. Look at how fast Clinton and Bush went grey. McCain would be 80 at the end of a (god save us) second term. And this was a man who was beaten up daily in a POW camp for six years of his life, and has had skin cancer in the past. I don't have an economist on hand to tell me what the odds are that McCain would die in the next four or the next eight years, but I'd be interested to hear the numbers. Am I being tactless here? Maybe I am. But this is an important consideration.

I'm not saying that age means you shouldn't vote for McCain. Indeed, it's down the list of reasons why I don't want him to be President. But just for a second, drop all the political considerations of choosing Palin and focus on the facts: The man who would be the oldest President in American history has chosen someone woefully unqualified to take over for him in case he dies.

Sometimes saying things directly really is best.

Three Things

2008-08-28T20:53:00.002-04:00

1. I wrote a post today that hasn't gone up yet -- probably first thing in the morning -- about "Truman Show delusion," wherein people think they're being constantly surveilled, and everyone around them is an actor. Because of this, I have had "Private Eyes" by Hall & Oates stuck in my head all day, despite the fact that I never actually heard it.

2. Joe Biden's speech last night > John Edwards' four years ago.

3. It's amazing what you will forgive in the artifacts of your childhood. On a whim of nostalgia I rented a random disc of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," which I just started watching. My father didn't just love this show when I was younger, I'm pretty sure the VHSes he made of it are still in the entertainment center. That's right -- my mom and dad have an "entertainment center." They're old school like that. And while I'm on the subject, let me just say this -- I appreciate my own mother more and more every time I'm on the subway or in an elevator or standing in line next to some whiny 50-something New York woman who complains, complains, complains, and all in that horrible accent.

Back to Star Trek. Besides the corny special effects and occasionally forced dialog, a couple other things I never noticed when I was watching the show with my Dad. One, they have that feature on the enterprise where officers can ask the computer the location of a person on the ship, and it will just tell them. This has been the source of many great plot-lines involving shape-shifters. But don't they have any such thing as the goddamned right to privacy in the 24th century?

Second, what the hell does the transporter chief do all day? I mean, they're needed once a day, but when you see other people leaving the transporter bay, they just stay there. Do they stay all day, and just to future crosswords to pass the time? I mean, in the 24th century they're totally unnecessary anyway -- even when they're working, they just push a few buttons. When things go wrong, they usually can't fix it in time anyway. So isn't this a task that could be outsourced to the computer, or at the very least, an ensign? Plus, I don't think there's a chair in there. Which means the transporter chief stands around all day, doing nothing. What an awful life.

Third, "Star Trek: The Next Generation" is a terrible tacky name. It would've totally failed like other sequels if sci-fi fans had normal aesthetic considerations.

Yet, thought I may never be 12 and ignorant again, Star Trek will always get a pass from me, since I grew up with it.

I May Have Just Heard the Most Depressing Statement I've Ever Heard on Television

2008-08-26T22:09:00.004-04:00

The ABC political team, whom you may remember from such hits as "running a god-awful debate earlier this year," was chatting it up with Matthew Dowd in anticipation of Hillary's speech tonight. Dowd is a consultant who worked with Bush-Cheney 04. He, of course, did not like last night's events, and not just because he can't appreciate Ted Kennedy speaking despite his brain cancer diagnosis and Michelle Obama having a nice moment with her family. No, the problem with Monday night was that the Democrats didn't have a unified message yet.

Dowd says: "If you have multiple messages, you have no message."

No one, nowhere, has ever put the decline of public discourse quite so perfectly as that political consultant just did.

Can You Digg It?

2008-08-26T21:32:00.003-04:00

Big day today. I wrote a longer story for DISCOVER about the efforts of the future Olympic sites to go green, and be as environmentally friendly as possible. We published it Monday evening, it gathered a little momentum then, and then went big today as it was linked to on the front page of Digg.

Seeing your work on Digg is an interesting experience. At the first, it's really exciting -- you know that as soon as it hits the front page, many, many more people are going to see your work than would ever have seen it before. I don't have the numbers for you, as I'm just the intern, but it's a lot.

Also, thankfully, it didn't crash our site. That might seem like a negligent victory, but frequently in the last few weeks when one of our stories has brought in Digg traffic it has crashed the site. We're getting new servers this week. In the meantime, getting traffic is a mixed blessing - it's our lifeblood, but one too many visitors and we're not going to last. Then, this morning, the other server, which hosts our blogs, crashed as well. Bad few weeks for hardware.

Being heavily Dugg also reminds you of the reality of writing for the online -- that is, the ugliness, as has been much discussed on this blog. Some examples from today: If you look at the story, it's a summation of efforts by future Olympic hosts, but the headline is "Can Future Olympic Cities Go Greener Than Beijing?" Now look at the comments on the Digg story: Almost all of them are blunt responses to the headline, not the story. I know people read the story, or at least opened the page, as it's number one on the DISCOVER popularity list. And that's what makes you excited about being on this kind of aggregator Web site. But it would've been nice if people had responded to what's in the story, and not just used the hed as an excuse to shit all over China. I wrote the head, and I don't really care for the Chinese government, but it's disheartening when you feel like the people viewing your material aren't getting anything good out of it.

One of the few who actually responded to the text of the story called me an "idiot" because they thought I was saying the opening ceremonies in 2010 would be in Whistler, BC, rather than its cohost, Vancouver. I wasn't wrong; I suppose I just wasn't as clear as I could have been. Still, one of the things that I think is a hallmark of immaturity of discussion on the Web is somebody whose comment contains the phrase, "the author is an idiot because...," whether that slur is hurled at me or anyone else.

And yet, I feel bad about this dismissal. Not that I think I'm wrong about the commenter, but that in order to protect my own mental health from the anonymous legions on the Web, I have to dismiss them as nutjobs or thugs. Some certainly are, and there are a disproportionate amount of them among the frequent commenters. But having to imagine your audience as a bunch of wackos, to whatever degree it's actually true, sort of puts a dent in that whole "serving the public" mantra. Because really, at this point, my self-centeredness is a survival tool.

Oh well.

BS

2008-08-24T19:58:00.002-04:00

One of the featured stories on Yahoo right now: The winter will be especially cold. How do they know? So says the Farmer's Almanac.

I'm hard on trend stories, but at least they're something. Not The Farmer's Almanac

Technological...-ism.

2008-08-21T21:08:00.004-04:00

1. So apparently Microsoft is hiring Jerry Seinfeld as the spokesman to help them save Vista. This seems apropos, given the Windows demographic. "Hey guys! Remember how much better the 90s were? Yeah, so do we."

I wonder if John Hodgman's contract with Apple has an exclusivity clause -- I mean, as has been pointed out before in places elsewhere, one the charms of the ads is that you end up identifying with him, even though you're supposed to go forth and buy a Mac. It'd be perfect for Microsoft to just steal him.

2. Dear ESPN: When you have a lead story about the death of former NFL player/Players Association Leader Gene Upshaw on your Website, and the top story in your video feeder is a still of Gene Upshaw at a podium, it makes it look as though Gene Upshaw has returned from the dead to give a press conference about his own demise. Or perhaps that of the Oakland Raiders.

3. On baseball: I don't care for this introduction of replay. It reeks of technological...-sim. And I don't care for that.

In all seriousness, watch this bit by George Carlin about baseball and football, and then you'll understand why a technological innovation like instant replay belongs in football, whereas we who love baseball first should stick by our human error. Really, I can't stand it when they pause a football game for 5 minutes to take a look at the videotape. At least when this happens in baseball you get to watch an argument between two hotheads. In football, they just stand around, listlessly.

EDIT: 4. I remembered the other thing that put me off today. There were at least two columns on Sports Illustrated today whining about how major league baseball players don't go to the Olympics, and therefore Olympic baseball is a crying shame, and nobody gets to see their favorite players in international competition there, it's just amateur hour.

Full disclosure: I'm totally engrossed in the MLB, and don't really care at all about the Olympics. Would that change if MLB players were there? No, because I'd be so annoyed at the breaking of the regular season, and the inevitable delay of the World Series into November, that I'd hold a grudge.

Look at soccer -- the world's game is played on every inhabited continent, unlike baseball, which is geographically compartmentalized. Yet nobody cares about Olympic soccer, which is an under-23 tourney with three exceptions allowed per team. They don't have to -- there's World Cup, and Euro, and African Cup of Nations, etc. Besides, all the big European leagues are starting up right now.

The MLB doesn't need the Olympics, and if people really care about international baseball, the World Baseball Classic is a perfectly fine place (and more importantly, time -- before the season) to contest it. It just seems huffy and self-centered to cry about the Olympics losing America's pastime. Also, this is one area in my life where I allow myself to slip into traditionalism -- I like the rhythm of the seasons, that the World Series happens in October and not November, which should be reserved for football and Thanksgiving. I don't mind a long midseason Olympic break in hockey, because even though I like hockey, it's not the tradition and statistic-fest that baseball is. At least not for Americans.

Once again, memo to sports fans: not everything is about you. If the college kids want to go play in the Olympics, let them go play. And if the IOC axes baseball, so what? You weren't watching, anyway. It's just an excuse to write another sappy SI piece. This isn't much difference than the plethora of bowls -- yeah, they're unnecessary, but what do you care? Nobody's holding a gun to your head. If you don't care to watch two 6-5 teams play a postseason, turn off the tube and spend some time with your family.

To Build and Maintain Those Robots

2008-08-18T22:29:00.003-04:00

I promise my life is not, as some have insinuated, just one giant Simpsons reference. But this post is. Two in fact.

1. The Simpsons "Behind the Laughter" episode -- the parody of "Behind the Music" -- the narrator says, "The dream was over. Coming up: was the dream really over? Yes it was. Or was it?"

Part of ESPN's headline directly after Michael Phelps won his 8th medal: "The unimaginable was imagined. But was it possible? Only Michael Phelps knew. But now the world knows."

2. The Simpsons episode "The Secret War of Lisa Simpson." At graduation, the military school commandant tells them: "The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots."

2008: 30 percent of our soldiers will be robots within a dozen years.

I'm all for blowing up machines and not people, but doesn't this even further point out the pointlessness of war? I mean, whoever is most willing to die for something is kind of a stupid way to settle things, but who can build the better robots is an even stupider, if more merciful, way to do it.

Debts and Drills and Bad Decisions

2008-08-16T20:17:00.005-04:00

Here's the situation: The guy who's room I've been subleting came on Friday and took away his desk and bed, the only real pieces of furniture here. So I'm sitting on the floor, writing on the laptop which sits upon the spare mattress, my sleeping arrangement until I think of something else/get a job. I am also taking pulls from a tall can of Coors original: that's right, "The Banquet Beer."

[I know who I am. No, no -- not a rube in flannel shirt who goes to the same Colorado bar and doesn't plan to "go changing." I am someone willing to drink any just about anything that resembles beer and can be gotten for 99 cents per 24-ounce can. Except Natural Light. I draw the line there. Above that line, the only differences between "American style lagers" are their advertising budgets, and I am in no fiscal position to quibble anyway.]

To the point, though: After reading a particularly self-pitying essay the other day, in which the author-who-shall-remain-nameless documents his non-existent writer's income and his near-romatic attraction to his outdated appliances, I had pledged not to go no at length about the artifacts of my own urban poverty without a good reason to do so. The reason is this -- I can't think about the future.

The immediate problem of finding post-internship employment is so consuming in its stress-energy requirement and so crucial in its outcome that I absolutely can't think seriously about the coming years of my life. This is helpful in some respects; for example, we're probably going to have to find a new apartment for November, but I've thought especially little about this coming problem because I just can't. I don't have the time or energy, and I don't have the perspective from inside my current cartoon-style whirlwind to address it.

This seems to be growing into a broad American reality. Rather than living at the margin simply being the domain of interns desperately seeking entry-level employment, more people are working too many hours, and the more affluent are still so debt-laden they often can't see past the reality of paying down their inflated credit card bills. More and more people living paycheck to paycheck means fewer and fewer people with the the time the clarity to consider anything beyond the next few weeks or months. Beyond the primary catastrophe this breeds -- the financial one -- I wonder if a nation of debtors and margin-livers can really make sound decisions.

The case in point is this: After listening in to a conference call with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and T. Boone Pickens yesterday, I wrote this blog post for DISCOVER about the increasing chance that the Democrats will cave and allow some offshore drilling in order to break the Congressional deadlock. To sum up: Offshore drilling is stupid, for reasons documented in that post, on this blog, and places elsewhere. But if allowing people to pursue their daydream that more drilling will actually affect change is the compromise that allows truly valuable measures like tax credits for alternative energy to pass Congress, then fine. It's a big investment of time and money (and national attention, of which we seem to be suffering from some sort of deficit disorder) for something that, even at its best, won't make a real dent in the oil market, and could have negative environmental consequences. But it isn't the worst thing that could happen.

The short-sightedness of the American public on this one has amazed me, however. One expects political candidates to bandy things like this about for political gain, but one must be disappointed in people for latching on to something that's so clearly a fantasy. But then I realized -- as a national on the margin, we have no where to go but over the edge. Should it come as some great surprise that people who can't afford any increase in their payments and still be able to make them should latch onto the promise that there's a pot of black gold under the rainbow of the ocean that's going to save us from high gas prices?

We should be doing everything we can to invest in new energy sources, because this is the problem that's going to define our way of life for the rest of this century, not terrorism as the President would have you believe. But we can't -- we can't think about making decisions that would help the country stay at the economic and technological forefront because we can't think more than a month into the future.

Offshore drilling is just a misguided distraction, but we should be even more concerned that our national inability to consider the future will lead us to other disastrous decisions, like tapping into the national oil reserves. Without backup, should oil-producing countries decide they don't want to sell to bully America anymore, we're up a bit of a creek. Sure, you say, but that's politically implausible, and even if it happened, we'd just load up the might of the American military's shock and awe, unload it on them Toby Keith-style, and help ourselves to their petroleum. Well, the American military's shock and awe is powered by petroleum. So besides just being a bad idea, tapping into reserves just to lower gas prices a few cents not only imperils the American economy, it also could weaken the American military, which with our economic hegemony on the decline is the one absolute superiority we hold over the rest of the world.

Chimps and orangutans might do it, too, but planning for the future is one of the hallmarks of human intelligence that sets it apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. Hopefully, we're not losing it.

Shoes

2008-08-14T11:05:00.002-04:00

Riding the New York subway makes you pay a lot more attention to them; there are people everywhere, but you're not supposed to make eye contact, so you stare up at the ads or down at people's shoes.

Two people next to me this morning on the F: First guy -- light blue dress shirt with the white corporate collar and tie, blue pinstriped dress pants, and flip-flops. Second guy -- relaxed in black t-shirt and jeans, but wearing white Nike sneakers with pink lace and pink swoosh. I envy him, though. He just looked not-that-great wearing those mid-80s Madonna fan shoes, whereas I would have looked awful.

President Dylan?

2008-08-13T14:07:00.001-04:00

I watched most of "I'm Not There" last night. Pretty good, not great. The thing that got me the most? Christian Bale's impersonation of Bob Dylan sounds remarkably like Jon Stewart's impersonation of President Bush.

Hello Again, World

2008-08-12T21:18:00.002-04:00

I've been busy.

First, bus trip to Boston this weekend. It's amazing how small-town welcoming it seems after a few months in New York City. When I have romantic delusions of settling down for a while and being utterly happy, the daydream setting it often Boston. The winter isn't as bad as you've been told. But the drivers are.

I left about a suitcase worth of things in my friend Nate's suite in Ashdown, and had to pick them up before they shut the old girl up for a couple years of remodeling. At the same time, he was moving out, prepping for an early September move into a new apartment. Godspeed, young man.

I got to see Schreier while I was up there, and have a couple beers. Bad vibe at Bukowski's, though. First, the ID man at the door didn't like me. He didn't like me, and asked to see my MIT ID after he noticed it in my wallet. Maybe he was a Harvard guy and didn't like MIT people, but he didn't look like much of a Harvard guy. Oh, and he was a doorman. Second, the girls at the bar ignored me for a minute before I got to order, despite the fact that they had no other customers. And third, Laura and I tried to sit down at one of the tables (there were 6 on only one other was filled) only to be told that in order to sit at the table, we would have needed to order our drinks there in the first place. ....yeah. I figure they must divide the place up and one waitress gets the tables, so she doesn't want to give away a place to somebody who paid their tip elsewhere. Still, that doesn't change the fact that four of the six tables in that dump were still empty.

Rest of the trip was good. Got to see Alaina, and surprisingly, Kim, who up and moved to Boston. I was tense on the bus ride home, but only because I combined too much Dunkin coffee with not enough food, and I had to haul a heavy suitcase through screaming teeny-boppers at Madison Square Garden in order to get on the subway. And some of the line were rerouted for the weekend, so instead of 2 subway lines, I was on 4 before I got home.

Shake it off and work on Monday, followed by an introductory job interview on Monday night, another this morning in which I had to perform a two-and-a-half-hour writing test (before going to work and writing all day), and then another one coming down the pipe on Friday. It's exciting; they've been going good. It'd be a lot harder for me to deal with the stress of job searches if I wasn't awesome and writing cover letters and interviewing with people. Still, ready for it to be over so I can take a deep breath, and afford better booze.

It's Monday, Time to Quibble Over Something Relatively Unimportant

2008-08-04T22:27:00.001-04:00

Bear with me.

As I write this, CNN.com has changed their quick poll -- right now it's about whose energy policy you favor, Obama's or McCain's. But a little while ago it was about reaching into the national oil reserve. Here's what bothers me and probably nobody else -- instead of just "yes" or "no" as answers, CNN, in an attempt to be appropriately cheeky for the Web, posted the answers as "yes, drivers need a break," and "no, it's just for emergencies." Again, they replaced that poll a minute ago so my wording might be slightly off, but you get the gist of it.

Why do they need to provide my rationale? I would be reading too much into this to say that this style of poll answers feeds into/is a result of our national political duality -- you either answer questions one way for one reason and you're a lefty, or you answer the opposite way for the opposite reason and you're a righty. On an intellectual level, there are other reasons that a person might vote either way. This is all really nothing more than the way of things on the Web -- you need to have some kind of attitude to attract that two seconds of attention it takes people to click on something. It still irritates me.

Now then, with that over, something that actually matters: there is no Band-Aid that's going to keep oil prices down, and all this suggestion that offshore drilling or tapping reserves or gas tax holidays are going to save us is irresponsible pandering at its basest. It's one thing to believe something that's dumb and destructive but can't be disproved, like that homosexuality is an "abomination" to somebody-or-other. This is something else entirely -- the perpetuation of a myth that even the most GOP-sympathetic economist could tell you is pure baloney.

I am not some socialist spouting. I want America to pull out of the recession with real vision, and that isn't going to happen drilling holes with 20th Century technology in a vain attempt to stave off the inevitable and pretend that the go-go cheap gas 90s will continue indefinitely, especially not while Europe, China and others take the lead in developing modern energy technology.

Put aside the fact that we don't actually know how much oil is under the ground, and that it's going to take a huge monetary investment to get it because we've already tapped out the easy-to-access oil, and that we won't see oil from brand new drilling for another decade, and that even if we could have it today it wouldn't make that big of a dent in our foreign dependence or the price. The real shame of floating these measures is that it allows people to continue the daydream, instead of trying to take the lead in the modern world.

And another thing!

(grumbling, followed by muttering)

Now that I've barked about that for a bit, it's time to retire for the night.

Two things that cracked me up today

2008-07-31T21:09:00.002-04:00

1. Out of nowhere, I got to walk a few blocks away from work to cover the red carpet premiere of "Fly Me to the Moon," a 3D animated movie about flies going to the moon. Buzz Aldrin was a voice in it, so he showed up and there was a whole lot of fuss. After waiting through all the TV interviews, they finally brought him over for the rest of us to talk to. I snuck in a question about whether sci-fi has inspired him as a kid, since that was one of the aims of this new film. He said it had. The weird thing was that I was in this group of reporters, and all the rest save maybe one were these super-young girls, probably stringing for People, and asking questions like, "Mr Aldrin, what's it like working with Kelly Ripa?" He said he didn't know -- he just came in, recorded his lines alone in a booth, and that was it.

It's not fair to blame those girls for being inane. Young starving reporters are just the foot soldiers of America's bad taste.

2. On the subway ride home, I saw this ad for the transit museum -- apparently you can buy silk boxers with the Subway map on them. As usual, my neighborhood was the crotch of New York City.

I then had a great idea for a terrible sitcom incident -- earlier in the episode one of the characters buy those boxers and everybody makes fun of him for it. Then sometime later, they all find themselves lost late at night and unable to find a subway map. Suddenly everyone turns to that guy with the look on their face. I'd have to write the situation well for it to be really funny like it is in my head, but I don't have time for that right now.

If I could have your attention please

2008-07-28T00:53:00.004-04:00

For the following:

That is all.

(Actually, I've been watching 80s videos and drinking Cold Duck for the last hour. Yes, I know it's Sunday. But I've been depressed all weekend and this is the happiest I've been in several days, so back off. :) I was thinking earlier that "Jessie's Girl" might be the greatest song in history...but how can you go against Men at Work? For further proof, see the AMAZING look on the lead singer's face at 2:24. That shit cracks me up every time.)

EDIT: You know what it really is that I love about this video? It's the exaggerated joy. You could write that off to it being from a different time, and indeed it was much more possible to get away with this in the 80s. Men at Work certainly spring from their era's ear. But this kind of aesthetic is the what you see from people who are wonderfully out of place -- foreigners with no particular sense of shame. It's almost so real it has to be badly translated.

Seriously, we'd never allow American men to show such unbridled joy as this video goes for, and despite it peculiarity, utterly achieves. When the 6'4" Brazilian starts pouring everyone beer -- don't you wish you were at that party?

Weekend Roundup

2008-07-27T15:28:00.002-04:00

It’s been a lost weekend, at least by my count.

As noted before, I tend to feel dissatisfied with time spent in a non-constructive way, even free time. I’ve been lying around the house this weekend, though, watching “The West Wing” and baseball and attempting to not to feel like a waste. As much as I love both of those things, it’s been hard. It’d be easier if I weren’t entering a period of enormous uncertainty regarding finding work and where to live.

I’ve been lying around because I got sick. Friday night. Either I had too much liquid and not enough food in my stomach, or the food I did have was tainted. Either way, I had to leave house party I’d gone to with my roommate, run off the subway because I was getting sick, throw up, and subsequently walk more than a mile home with vomit on parts of my jeans and shirt.

I don’t feel too bad about it, honestly, other than that I’ve stayed home much of today and all of yesterday trying to feel better. It wasn’t my fault, really, at least not as directly as the times I drank myself to puking when I was in college. And what’s finally become real to me is the flipside of New York loneliness – there’s no such thing as shame, because nobody knows who you are (unless you have a Seinfeldian neurosis and can't let things go). The people on the subway who saw me get sick will never see me again, and the poor sap who cleaned it up will never know me at all.

It’s very freeing.

Oh, and one last word on A Clockwork Orange. I rented and re-watched it this weekend while it was still fresh in my mind, and I still think it makes a better movie than book, for a few reasons.

A) It doesn’t get as preachy. I’ve said enough about that already.
B) The made-up language takes over the novella, enough that you have to re-read passages to understand them. In the film, however, it’s scaled back enough and there’s enough exterior context that it’s no problem, and helps create the aura very well.
C) The visual of Alex strapped down in the chair, and the music. People may yammer on about the virtue of books for making the reader employ his/her imagination – and there was, if you can believe this, a trend story in the Times today about the technology gap in how young people and old people read things – there’s no comparing reading about music to listening to music. I’m listening to Beethoven’s 9th right now, and I will fight anyone who says this is not the most incredible work of art created by anyone, ever. I’ve felt this way for some years now and foresee feeling the same way long into the future.

That was perhaps an overly aggressive statement. Forgive me. I'm feeling a big pugnacious now that I have my stomach back.

It’s 3ish on a Sunday afternoon, however, and I’m feeling much better. If only the rain would stop now, I’ll go outside for the first time in a while. If not…there’s still two unwatched episodes on my current disc of “The West Wing.”

To Conclude:

2008-07-21T22:47:00.002-04:00

I finished A Clockwork Orange. It's reasonably short. And I have to say that I think Burgess' American publisher was right. The 21st chapter is a letdown.

To summarize: If you remember the film, it ends with the spectacular line, "I was cured all right." So does the 20th chapter of the book. Old 21, cut from the American version, finds Alex with a new band of droogs, out causing mischief. But Alex starts to have the strange feeling that hooliganism isn't worth it anymore, and decides not to go out and do any ultraviolence that night. Walking alone, he sees Pete, a member of his former band, having dinner with a lady. It turns out that Pete grew up, got married, got some random job and is beginning to lead a swell little young adult life. After conversing with him, Alex decides that it's time to grow up himself, and that's that.

Burgess' intention was to write a philosophical novel, and it holds together for a long time. But in the last chapter, he lets fly all his worst traits -- that is, he stops being a writer and becomes somebody trying to make a point.

You may remember a bit when Alex is in jail and starts to enjoy the Bible -- the Old Testament, anyway, and its stories of fighting and sinning and lusting, not the New, which is a bunch of "preachy talking." The phrase is worded a little differently in the book, but the point is the same. Burgess himself, having crafted a compelling novella through the point of 20 chapters, can't help himself and gives way to preachy talking. It's really not even the character Alex talking anymore, it's just Burgess writing in the weird Gypsy slang, trying to make a non-hopeful work conclude on a hopeful note. Admirable, but totally forced.

I hate to say this, but sometimes editors are right.

The Many Sins of Anthony Burgess

2008-07-19T17:31:00.006-04:00

Not to speak ill of the dead, but I'm going to do so. (Don't you just love it when people start their sentences with, "Not to ______," because you know that's exactly what their going to do.)

I began reading "A Clockwork Orange" today to kill the hour while I was at the Mexican laundromat down the street. This version, which the old inhabitant of my room left on the desk for the summer, contains one additional chapter, the very last one, which was cut from the version originally published in America. This was cause enough for Burgess in 1986, nearly a quarter-century after the novella's publication, to rant about the lost last chapter and everything else wrong with the world. Chris and I talked the other day about Jonathan Franzen's unfortunate self-pitying writer qualities, and Burgess manages to take them all to another power in the span of six and a quarter pages. How?

1. In his complaint that the American publisher cut the last chapter, he whines that this disrupted his numerical symmetry. The novella contain three parts of seven chapters; do the math and that's 21 in sum. 21, he writes, is a number of significance to the work because 21 is official year of coming of age. "Novelists of my stamp are interested in what is called arithmology, meaning that number has to mean something in humans terms when they handle it." Was he actually masturbating when he wrote that, or just fantasizing about himself?

You know who else is an arithmologist? Dan Brown.

2. Poor, poor Anthony Burgess complains that he has spent his life explaining to foreign audiences why the American version, and thus Kubrick's film, omit the original ending. You sad bastard.

3. Speaking of Kubrick, you might think that Burgess would be grateful for his rendering of "A Clockwork Orange" for popularizing the work to a whole new audience and making Burgess a name remembered into the 21st Century. Well, Burgess never lived to see the 21st century, and in the 20th he wasn't grateful at all. He complains that thanks to Kubrick, his name is tied to something he didn't consider to be in the upper echelon of his own work. In fact, he goes so far as to compare himself to Rachmaninov and JS Bach, whose most famous works are not their best.

Had he never ascended to his current pedestal of cultural relevance, Burgess would have probably still thought of himself in the company of great artists. But the very fact that Kubrick made him more famous than he could have been as just-another-author is one of the reason that Burgess is able to make this self-serving comparison in published form. But I forget -- logic isn't for novelists of his "stamp," arithmology is.

4. Burgess uses the rejection of his last chapter as a rejection of American sensibilities. His original book, featuring the 21st chapter redemption, was "Kennedyan," he asserts, because it believed in hope and progress. But lop off that ending and the book is now "Nixonian," he writes, "with no shred of optimism in it." Americans thought they were tougher and could deal with hard reality better than Brits like him, and he writes that "Soon they would be facing up to it in Vietnam."

I could write a whole subsection ripping apart the errors in this daydream section of writing. First being the delusion that Kennedy=good and Nixon=evil, and that Kennedy would have never let the Vietnam War escalate so far. A writer of Burgess "stamp" should know better, and if he did know better, shame on him for leaning on this too-easy rhetorical crutch. Same with the whole "I'm English and therefore have better sensibilities," bit, and implying that Americans got what they deserved with the Vietnam fiasco.

5. Even when he attempts to appear self-deprecating -- throwing out there the truth that writers aren't their own best critics and that people should decide for themselves whether the 21st chapter enhances or diminishes the novella -- Burgess says that he is really only talking to ".00000001 of the American population which cares about such things."

Burgess may need some kind of poetry to be present before he'll sully his hands with numbers, but I don't. So I worked out his figure. To put his number in a more palatable form, it's 1 out of 100 million.

Even if you assume a US population of 300 million, which is far more than it was 22 years ago when Burgess wrote this introduction, .00000001 of that number equals 3 people. I don't care for this kind of hyperbolic sleight-of-hand. Even if there were only 3,000 people in the country who care (there are many more, no matter what woe-is-me-authors want to believe), then he was off by 3 orders of magnitude.

When I get to the end I'll write about the book, and its conclusions.

A Milestone Has Been Reached.

2008-07-18T23:33:00.004-04:00

I got my first really great hate comment this week.

I wrote a blog post for DISCOVER about this kid in Australia who was diagnosed with "Climate Change Disorder" -- he thought he couldn't drink any water because we'd run out and humanity would be destroyed. I wasn't totally convinced it wasn't a hoax, and what really made me want to write about the story was that pundits picked up the easy "Al Gore is making people crazy" angle to say that global warming is all empty hype: If you're scoring their logic at home, that's [one funny anecdote=years of research being meaningless]. Frequent rhetorical trick.

Anyway, I made the post, pointing out that while this boy was probably troubled, that doesn't invalidate the world's concern over global warming. Pretty straightforward, really. It's here. Then scroll down to the rambling comment. It's immaculate, and has very little to do with the actual post, other than one sentence in which I say global warming is real and dangerous.

*

I bring this while thing up because I thought of it after I was briefly accosted while walking over the Brooklyn Bridge tonight. The central pathway runs above the cars; half the wooded walk is for pedestrians, half is for cyclists. I walked over to the east side to look toward Midtown, and unwittingly walked across the bike lane. A man made a turn around me and then yelled the obligatory "you gotta watch where you're going, buddy."

Let's get a few things straight: I'm not Ralphie from A Christmas Story, and I'm not your buddy. But I was not angry with this man. He's a New Yorker, so I excuse him the knee-jerk reaction to say something. It's like honking. The world around you is unfit, so you must register your disappointment, and what's more, be an asshole to drive home the correction. "You gotta watch were you're going, buddy." All right. Now I know.

When I starting pondering his urge to correct the world at large, I started to think about something that's been on my mind lately -- web hooliganism, and how easy it if for otherwise small people to beat their chests and play bully online. There are all the usual reasons, of course: the anonymity, the lack of face-to-face contact that would normally throw social mores in the way of our aggression, the relative ease of writing something down compared to actually saying it and getting it past that conditioned lump in your throat.

What occurred to me was this: New Yorkers are New Yorkers all the time, but the rest of the country is becoming New Yorkers online -- free from the shackles of propriety, people can no longer withstand the urge to correct the world around to some imagined one best way. And when somebody else can't resist the urge to correct them to their correct way, the personal attacks come.

My hating commenter might be the kind of person who's aggressively correcting in all phases of life, online and not. Or perhaps he's a very nice man in reality, and only online does he troll posts however tangentially related to global warming, looking to correct the world to his point--that climate models haven't been totally accurate, so global warming is a hoax.

I don't know.

The creators of Donnie Darko were wrong, by the way. "Brooklyn Bridge" is a much better phrase than "Cellar Door." Same "UM-pa-DUM" rhythm, more visually appealing. And don't get me started on alliteration.

A few disgusts from the weekend

2008-07-13T13:46:00.004-04:00

1. Advertising: Changing channels yesterday, I came across a Just For Men ad I had not seen before. You're probably familiar with this company's run of ads, all of which explicitly show guys with graying hair alone in their also-gray houses who then use Just For Men, and are subsequently out in swank bars with too-young blond women on their arms. Now they've gone from shameless to gratuitous. In the newest add, these two little girls, who will be revealed to be the subject male's daughters, are looking around the corner at him, one saying to the other something like "go tell him, go tell him." As they come across the room, Dad looks up from what he's doing, and the girls give him the box of Just For Men, saying it's time he gets back on the market because they want a new mommy. Cut to the ad pitch and promises, and then the final shot, where Dad is out on the town with a slightly more age-appropriate woman than the commercials normally feature. He takes a picture with his phone of himself and his date, and sends it back to the girls at home, who, apparently not being baby-sat, are all atwitter about it.

Yuck. You can watch this bullshit here:

2. Gen-X paternalism/naivety: Went to a co-worker's party last night, which was a good time. Her father works for Rockefeller University on the Upper East side, and so has university housing on the 35th floor of a tower right above the 59th St Bridge, with breathtaking views of Queens and Eastern Manhattan. They were traveling, so we had a party there. Great New Orleans style food that she spend the whole day preparing -- fantastic, actually -- and plenty of good spirits.

I left pissed off however. There was a gentleman there who was one of these "I know and care more than you do about the world's crises" artist types who had been going on and on about Mugabe and Zimbabwe. Because I was more that way at 15 than I am now, I associate political earnestness with immaturity. I accept this as a personal fault -- people probably should be more concerned about Zimbabwe and Darfur and Myanmar and every other political catastrophe than I am. That wasn't what pissed me off, however. As the party diminished to the last few people around a table, he and others of course drifted to the election, and in response to talk about Republican rule, I said "That shit is over." What I meant was that the current power Bush/Cheney/Rove power structure was on its way out, not that there was no chance McCain would be elected and be just as bad in a different way. Anyway, before I could say that, Mr. Self-Righteous jumped all over me because he thought I was some political polyanna who thought Obama was a lock to win and that this would change the world overnight. He and the other cliche at the party -- the guy who brings pot -- jumped on me explicitly because I was young, and they were so much smarter because they'd been alive for one or two more presidential elections that I had. Not feeling I needed to justify myself to these people, I chugged the rest of my wine, said polite goodbyes to the hosts and went home.

I am willing to acknowledge that I don't know everything -- like every other human past and present, the things I don't know could fill a million warehouses. And I acknowledge that I can learn a lot from older people, especially at work. But anyone with so little class, and so much need to pump up their own sad ego, that they explicitly say they're better than me because they're older is instantly dead to me -- I no longer have any interest in that person or what they have to say.

3. Hippie/Hipster Naivety: There's a trend piece in today's Times -- imagine that -- about lefties from Portland who are mad that Obama is moving to the center on some things. For the last time -- to be elected President, you have to find a way to appeal to the majority of the country, and one surefire way to not do that is to appeal to all the needs of whiny Portland lefties.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/us/politics/13liberal.html?_r=1&ref=politics&oref=slogin

Ok, now I'm going to enjoy the rest of my Sunday.

Back from Philadelphia

2008-07-06T22:23:00.002-04:00

Perhaps you recall my botched train trip between Boston and New York a month and a half ago, when I moved here for the summer--getting stuck in Rhode Island, finally rolling in to Penn Station at about midnight, the evening before my first day of work at DISCOVER. Well, you'd think that'd be just about enough, but then I decided to leave the city on the 4th of July weekend. Yeah.

To recap:
If you don't live up here, you are perhaps not aware that Boston, NYC, Philly and many of the other cities in the area are connected by relatively inexpensive buses that leave at all hours of the day. Many of these depart from their city's respective Chinatown and have something less than a sterling reputation for reliability. Still, I had a good experience my first time -- in early May, when I came down from Boston to inspect the apartment I now inhabit. Of course, it had not occurred to me that my first trip occurred on weekdays, and not only was this on a weekend, it was Independence Day weekend. Yeah. Well, Rob, Raphaele and I trekked down to NYC's ugly, foul-smelling Chinatown to attempt to board our bus, and... that's about as far as it got. Because of all the traffic leaving the city, and because the bus organizations are poorly run and possibly corrupt, they were impossibly behind. The already-narrow sidewalks were packed shoulder-to-shoulder with college students and the otherwise impoverished trying to get the hell out. Bus after bus came through, and I shoved with and back at the swell of humanity trying to force its way on, only to find out that bus was nonstop to DC. After about three similarly unsuccessful attempts, we gave up. The fucking tickets were only $10 anyway.

Before going back to Brooklyn and staying for the weekend, I induced my two cotravelers to head to Penn Station with me, just on the off chance that one of the other bus companies that runs from there would have a few empty seats. They did, as they were already packed. Finally we reached the Grand Street station to board the D for 34th St...and somebody pulls the emergency brake. So for 10 more minutes we sit, sweating, wondering if the universe would like to keep us and Philadelphia apart.

Not so. We made it Penn Station, only to find out we had no idea where the bus companies were, as they had no offices in the actual train station. We asked one of New York's finest, who had a Caribbean accent and spoke no English. After muttering something, perhaps that he had no idea what we were talking about, he points and says there's a bus around the corner. Sure enough, there was the Megabus loading station. The last bus to Philly had a handful of empty seats; the owner brought out a credit card machine, and we swiped. Two hours and forty minutes, $12 each, and several headaches and sore muscles from hauling luggage, we were actually going to Philadelphia.

The trip itself was actually much less eventful, which was kind of nice. We watched "Anchorman" and "The West Wing" and drank far too many beers. We walked historic old town and John told us all the ghost legends. As I had earlier promised, I delivered a rousing rendition of President Bill Pullman's speech from "Independence Day." Really, you should've been there for that.

Weekend Recap

2008-06-29T23:00:00.002-04:00

It was a good one. To recap:

FRIDAY: Andrew tired. Andrew watch "Weeds."

SATURDAY: It occurred to me that I had not been to Coney Island. I should have gone last weekend, when the Mermaid Parade took place. But I didn't get to it. So I went down to visit this weekend. Just took a walking tour, read a little by the beach. Thought, "I really need to come back here with other people." Went home, told roommates I had been there; they replied that we should have all gone together and made a day of it. I said, "Yes, now I realize that." I just missed the rain, too -- got on the train home just as the dark clouds erupted in what we all knew was coming, and it was all over by the time I got home. This good fortune when it comes to the weather would not last.

At night I went party-hopping with my roommates and friends. It was interesting. We visited this housewarming near Atlantic Center in Brooklyn. The air there was a bit...frosty. But there were free drinks, which we shotgunned on the roof of the apartment building. I had not shotgunned a beer in years. Much of it got on my shirt. After chowing down on some nice but over-sweet corn quesadillas, we hopped a cab to Manhattan, got Sparks and Blue Moon, and went to a Manhattan rooftop party. Sparks, mind you, is just disgusting. Man, that was bad. Beautiful location, but I didn't really know anybody and wasn't in the mood to meet more people, so I spent much time on the balcony watching traffic and calling old friends.

SUNDAY:

Slept in a little later than I wanted, but that was kind of nice after a whirlwind Saturday. Today's big event was the party in the pool -- there's this old New Deal-era pool in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, and they had a huge summer festival headlined by a free performance by the Hold Steady. I, however, got there really early, much earlier than was really necessary. The wait to get in was just awful, for the following reasons:

1. I was right by the ice cream truck. If you've ever spent any time near an ice cream truck, you probably remember the awful muzak songs they play. Well, this one parked right next to my place in line, and played its 40-second theme song over and over and over....
2. There were two kids behind me, not bad guys in general, but I think one was from the Columbia newspaper or something, because he kept reminding the other kid that he could get in anytime he wanted -- he knew a guy and he could get backstage anytime he wanted. He never did, of course, and his fucking friend kept crushing the empty plastic water bottle in his hand. Between that awful sound and the ice cream truck, frankly I think it's a miracle I did not snap.

3. It poured. They predicted isolated storms all weekend, and they were right. It was nice in the morning, then as I stood in line it darkened, and darkened, and then poured. I was soaked, totally so. Finally it moved on and they let us inside. The sun came out, I watched the opening act and people in the corner playing dodgeball way too seriously . Then it darkened, and darkened, and you know what happened next. It was only a shame because I had dried off in the meantime. Anyway, things improved after that. My roommate and her friend Katie showed, and we ran off to a bar to drink and dry off. That went well; and we returned just as the Hold Steady was taking the stage. Later we went to a place called the Alligator where you get free pizza with your beer, which is pretty spectacular. Now I'm home, prepping for a crazy kind of week we're going to have. I'll let you know how it's going.

Film review time.

2008-06-22T18:36:00.003-04:00

Hey-o.

Slow weekend here, really. Did some more walking and exploring in Manhattan. Today was the first day in a long time that I haven't ridden the subway -- went to the park earlier and read through some more of The Corrections and the Sunday Times. Now we're having a sunshower. I'm having pinot, dry in my room.

Saw a couple movies on my Netflix this weekend. Thoughts:

On The Darjeeling Limited

It's no different than being in a rock band, really. Fans want you to churn out something that's a new arrangement of the old mechanical parts that they loved to begin with; critics want something fresh and critically interesting. You, if you are like most artists, strive for a middle road that stays true to your own style and roots but ventures into new territory. I would say Wes Anderson falls into the first road. I am a fan, though, and therefore don't approach his work with a critical eye, frankly. It's comforting. No matter how many times I move and take weird deflections on my life course, Wes Anderson's movies will still feature the same kind of shots, the same mishmash of obscure classic rock influence on the soundtrack, the same sort of artifice in cinematography, many of the same actors, and the same note of upbeat sadness at the conclusion. I am fine with this. The Darjeeling Limited is a Wes Anderson film on a train, were The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou had been a Wes Anderson film in the ocean and Rushmore had been one at a prep school. This is a welcome bit of constancy in my life.

On There Will Be Blood

There is no way, absolutely no way, that you could put a Wes Anderson film in front of me with his name removed from the credits and convince me that anyone else had composed it. However, during my watching of There Will Be Blood, I had totally forgotten that this was Paul Thomas Anderson's long-awaited return to cinema. This was impressive to me, because at various time I took note of shots of incredible cinematography; then the credits rolled and I thought, "Ah."

The film is beautiful. All three of the 2007 nouveaux westerns, this one, No Country for Old Men, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, were nominated for best cinematography. It's not hard, frankly. If you're willing to take the expense and time to film in the West, nature provides the rest. However, the Assassination of Jesse James was for me the weakest of the three for me because it dwelled on that -- panoramic shots of the West are lovely, but that film's overindulgence makes it drag.

As far as No Country is concerned, I've been itching to see it again see the first screening concluded -- I feel like it's the kind of film that deserves a second viewing. But I can't shake the feeling that it beat out There Will Be Blood for best picture because the voters fell victim to the Crash awe. By that I mean this trend in recent pictures to show how several seemingly disparate narratives tie together to show how the world is linked. Syriana, Crash, etc. I read a review of Lions for Lambs yesterday suggesting that film was written in the same way. No Country is not expansive in its attempt to show the interlocking of the world, but it does dabble in it, whereas There Will Be Blood fixates on the psychosis of one man. Were Daniel Day-Lewis less of a virtuoso at depicting this particular kind of character on screen, the film would have totally flopped. In that, and in its insistence on analog filming and spectacle in a digital age, it is something of a throwback. I'm not saying that alone makes it a better film, in some fogeyish sort of way. I only wonder if it was treated on its own merits.

I've now seen 4 of the 5 movies nominated for best picture last year, all but Atonement. I will disregard that one anyway -- it could be good, but I'm not really willing to consider anything co-starring Keira Knightley a serious Oscar contender. Not yet. Anyway, of the other three prestige dramas, No Country, There Will Be Blood, and Michael Clayton, I can easily say I thought There Will Be Blood was the best. Those films are sufficiently similar to be measured on their own terms. But how is one supposed to compare There Will Be Blood, a two-and-a-half hour festival of darkness, to Juno? The latter may be just as good a comedy as the former is a drama. But I don't know that it even works to put them in the same category. That is, I don't think Juno ever really had a shot; the nomination was simply a way for the committee to say, "Hey, we think this movie is pretty good."

Rain has stopped. It isn't too hot. The Brewers are 7 games over .500. Life's all right, for now.

EDIT: Oh, and I forgot to mention, I had happy hour on the company's dime this week at a rooftop bar on Broadway. Just saying, it was cool.

Saturday Afternoon at the Met

2008-06-15T23:30:00.002-04:00

Hey all.

The New York heat wave has broken. After High 90 and humid last weekend through Tuesday, it has slowly cooled, and now tonight, after occasional rain, it's in the high 60s. Beautiful.

Went to the Met for about four hours yesterday afternoon. Good day trip. Took forever to get there, though, but that's the weekend subway for you. Took the R train and then the D, because it was the first to show up. But to get to the upper East Side you have to transfer to 4, 5, or 6, and only 6 stops near Broadway/Lafayette, which is where the D stops. And the 6 is local, so we stopped at every stop in Manhattan. At some point, probably Grand Central, a whole troupe of kids from a church youth group in Columbus, GA (it said so on their aquamarine T-shirts) got on and crowded the train car. On the way home I stopped by the World Trade Center site for the first time, which was weird, because now, almost 7 years later, it's just a construction site. But let me get back to complaining: from Lower Manhattan I took a 4 train to Borough Hall, but they decided it would be a fun time to close the Brooklyn-bound R, so I wandered around downtown Brooklyn until I found an F train.

Now that that's out of my system, I can say this -- the Met is awesome. Went through the Greek and Roman exhibits, Africa & Oceania, Pop Art, European paintings, and just had enough energy to see the Egyptian relics before my feet said "no more." Once they did, I did my long route home and then watched Juno and a whole disc of Weeds. Good day.

A few things I remembered about museum-hopping:

We will be remembered by the things that persist. For the Greeks & Romans, it's temples and statues. We think of them as white marble because the paint did not last.

You can only look at historical artifacts and appreciate works of art on their own merits while standing up for so long before you just want to say "take me to something famous." The Greek statuary and vases were interesting because I now know a fair bit about Greek history. But once my legs were getting weary, I walked through rooms of painters I didn't know so I could see the Van Goghs, Monets, and Davids. Like this one. That painting is amazing.

Museums, as sort of an obligation, feature rooms of tiny still lifes about the size of sheet of paper. Ok, neat. You made a small painting of something. But this is art; size matter. The Met has a smaller study of Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, but you need to see the huge version at the Art Institute of Chicago. Without the grandeur, it's just a cute painting.

Blogging here and blogging there, blogging blogging everywhere

2008-05-31T13:23:00.004-04:00

This writing rhythm might become the default pattern for a while. Given that I make my 10 to 6 “living” blogging for Discover, I’m usually game for something different when I get back to the house in Brooklyn, or still working. Either way, mid-week posts could be few and far between. Also, there may be an exposed wire in the house, because when it rains, as it is this afternoon, the internet fades in and out.

Life is good, I suppose. I’m getting fairly good at my job. Typically I’m expected to find stories to write about for Discoblog, which takes a chunk of time. But it’s fun, I get to write plenty, and I’m going to start working on ideas for larger online-only stories as well. So that’s exciting. And if you have good ideas for science stuff you want to read about, you should tell me. In addition, I perform a number of intern drudgery tasks, like putting in hyperlinks to outside sources in magazine articles when they go online. However, those kind of paint-by-number activities can provide a nice break from thinking though stories.

The newness of New York has started to recede amazingly quickly as I’ve grown accustomed to packing into the same subway and cubicle. In the middle of an office away from windows you can forget you’re in Manhattan in short order. Frequently I walk out of the office onto 5th Avenue and think, “Oh yeah. Here I am.”

Thankfully the city is enormous, so I won’t run out of things to find anytime soon. Last night I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge for the first time, which is just as gorgeous as you’d imagine. Then I walked through lower Manhattan listening to country music to preserve the feeling that I’m a foreigner here. And wandering randomly in a northward direction I accidentally found little Italy, which was having a carnival. Funnel cakes, bright lights, shouting carnies. The whole bit. There’s no better feeling than an unguided journey consummating in something big. I felt like I was in “Big Fish.”

But let me rein in my gush. I would love to stay in New York at the end of the summer, if it turns out to be at all possible. And when you’re standing on the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk looking down the length of Manhattan, it seems like living anywhere less spectacular would be sufficiently unsatisfactory to be avoided at all cost. The nice thing about New York, though, is that there are enough foul smells, over-packed subway cars, ridiculous rents, and unsavory individuals to keep the thought of greener pastures in the back of your mind. Leaving in August would be a downer, but there’s always the awfulness to boost your spirits.

Well, I have to go -- the World Science Festival is here in the city this weekend, so I'm going to NYU to see a presentation on science & sports. May be blogging it Monday for work. Take it easy, world.

The Long Week is Over

2008-05-24T20:41:00.002-04:00

That's right. It's Saturday night, and I'm sitting down in the living room of my apartment for the summer, finally taking a breath. Just to recap:

The last time I posted I was in Kingston, Rhode Island, stuck at an Amtrak. I don't know whether Amtrak ever actually repaired that train, but they didn't do it while I was in Rhode Island. After 3-plus hours of sitting idly, an empty train came from Boston and carried us away. Instead of the original 7:20 p.m., we arrived at Penn Station around 11:45. I started work the next morning.

Work, is good. I update Discover magazine's Discoblog about twice a day, writing blurbs about weird science. I fill in the magazine stories that go online with links to other relevant sites. I might get to do some longer bits of writing soon. So that's good.

Most of the week I've been stressed out about where to stay, so it's nice to be free of that burden for a few months. I stayed with Rob Sunday and Monday, paying my debt by helping his roommate move a couch. Just give me something I know how to do.

Tuesday and Wednesday I stayed with a girl named Jenna D who I met on couchsurfing.com. The site exists to help people who want to travel on the cheap and meet new people connect with their potential hosts. She was the only one who ever responded to me. Like most Web communities, it seems, couchsurfers aren't interest in rookies, or people who don't have a bunch of "friends" and references on their page. That aside, Jenna was sweet and great. We had beers at a bar near the Carroll St station and talked about the oddity of our situation -- either one of us could have been crazy, theoretically, but we weren't. I paid my debt by bringing her Brooklyn Summer Ale.

Thursday night I stayed with Andrew G, a Discover intern from NYU. He is still in school, moreso than I am, which means besides working 10 to 6 at Discover, he's in class until 9. The plus side of that is that he lives in a NYU dorm in Downtown Brooklyn, where his 21st- story room has a beautiful view of lower Manhattan. And they haven't even forces a roommate on him yet.

Now I'm at my place. I met Rob for drinks last night, which ended up with us back at his building watching his downstairs neighbors playing Grand Theft Auto IV, but more importantly, with me taking Bart's second ticket to the Mariners-Yankees game today. The Yanks won, 12-6. It was cool to go. Yankee Stadium isn't mind-blowingly gorgeous like the newest stadiums in the majors, it's just a place where a ton of cool things went down, so I'm glad that I visited. My majors league ballparks count is now up to 4, with eyes on Shea and Philadelphia's Citizen's Bank Park for later this summer. The giveaway at the Stadium today was packs of Yankee Legacy baseball cards, featuring famous events from the stadium's history. I got the pope. I kid you not. The pope -- he's all about giving mass and all. And I got the Ali-Norton fight, so that was cool.

The long weekend was well earned. Hope everyone else is feeling good.

Stuck in R.I.

2008-05-19T00:47:00.001-04:00

Here are my unedited remarks, written while stuck on a broken train for three hours today:

It’s 4:30 on Sunday afternoon, the 18th of May, and I am outside Kingston, Rhode Island, aboard a train that is not moving. The Amtrak operators seem to have misplaced the piece of equipment that connects to the electrical power source. Perhaps we ran a little to close to an overhanging tree branch.

This is an in auspicious beginning to the already questionable execution of a life transition. Tomorrow is my first day as a Discover magazine intern. But I cannot move into my sublet until a week from tomorrow. The apartment worked out really well – friends of a friend live there, I don’t have to sign any lease paperwork, it’s reasonably priced for Brooklyn – except for this one thing. I have been trying to keep myself pepped up to get past this. It will be good fodder for writing, I tell myself, and so I have begun a chronicle and I sit here going nowhere. But first the clouds roll in as soon as I leave Boston and then the train breaks down. I choose to interpret these events not as omens portending gloom for the near future, but as more evidence that American train service is a disaster.

A woman just came on the intercom to say that we’re going to be here for at least an hour. I would say the fix is in, but I don’t think the train workers want to be stuck in rural Rhode Island any more than I do. I’m going to keep writing, because frankly, I’m not good at waiting. Ask anyone who’s spent any time with me and they’ll tell you I’m fidgety. Can’t help it. Have to have something to do with my hands or they’ll bounce out of control. I shuffle cards. I tap fingers I drink beer too fast out of sheer love for the physical act of drinking.

Sitting still is often the worst when it comes to transportation. Frequently I walk long distances rather than wait for the bus, even when there is no doubt that this action will take longer. Nothing is more disheartening than unchanging scenery. This, I think, is the truth that carried through people of centuries past who traversed long distances by horse or by foot. They made slow progress, but relatively consistent progress. Sailors have almost certainly gone mad for the same reason – making uncertain gains against an endless and visually undifferentiated sea.

Speaking of buses, I could be on one right now, and probably one making progress toward New York City. I paid considerably more not only because I prefer riding the train, but also that I have four bags, two more than what the Chinatown bus lines permit. So I am sitting with few prospects of motion as the direct result of an ugly tweed suitcase full of shirts and ties. Though to be fair, the Chinatown buses have been known to catch fire, and while I am bored, I am not singed.

There is a crying baby across the aisle. I have the White Stripes on my iPod. So this is certainly not the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

The conductor and his assistant are making another pass down the length of the train, with the same look of strained confusion and feigned confidence you get from too many men standing over the open hood of a broken down car.

*

It’s 10:15. We’re in Bridgeport. By about 11:30, I should be in Penn Station, where I’ll switch to another train, the metro, to go to Rob’s house. And maybe then, finally, sleep. Multi-step travel is always mentally exhausting, even when you don’t waste 3 hours in the middle of nowhere because a piece of metal bent in the wrong direction. I was so relieved when the train finally started again; now I’m just anxious. I’m even too anxious to be nervous. When I get to Brooklyn I won’t remember this being as bad as it is. The worst always recedes into memory; perhaps because I’m been raised to put a polite Midwestern smile on things as soon as they’re over.

12 hours from now I’ll be at work. I don’t know how to properly feel about this. But on the plus side, if I’m not mentally all there tomorrow, I have a better excuse than simply that it’s my first day. I’m ready for the universe to have some mercy on me, a tired newcomer.

One day.

2008-05-17T20:18:00.003-04:00

My MIT days have now drawn to a close, unofficially. Officially I don't get my master's until I complete the internship at the end of the summer. But yesterday I presented my thesis, and tomorrow I move to New York. If I weren't listening to Zeppelin's "Tangerine" right now, I'd probably be more stressed out about that.

It ended with a bit of a thud, pressure up to the last few minutes of prepping and giving the presentation, and then the immediacy of moving. I suppose this is just delayed institutional gratification; come September when I actually graduate and maybe some friends and family can make it here, it'll feel more like an accomplishment. But having climbed this mounting feels like nothing in particular with starting work again Monday.

So it goes. I think as soon I get into New York for real, and especially when I can move into my room, I'll reach a level of enthusiasm that will propel me through. As it stands, I'm just looking forward to being gone from MIT, but not Boston.

I found out recently that an old friend is going to have a kid soon. This is just further reminder to me that I ended up on the career-first track without really thinking about it. This seems to happen to me, perhaps as an unavoidable side effect of my world view. Things just kind of happen to me, like moving to New York. At least they're good things, often.

Gotta go see if I can watch game 2 of the Brewers/Red Sox doubleheader today. Favorite two teams going at it.

Clothes Circuit

2008-05-14T20:57:00.002-04:00

Big day today. I recorded the last bit of narration I'm going to record for our TV project. I picked up my train tickets to New York, packed some of my stuff, prepped a presentation, and I bought shoes. Elissa and Chris purchased me a gift certificate to Berk's swank shoe shop in Harvard Square. I just got up after almost a month, what with all the other things to do. But I bought these Born leather shoes, which are amazing.

I, a man of meager possessions, now own $100 dress shoes and $100 snow boots. Because without a sound foundation, who are you?

Also, I am wearing a shirt with this logo today:

Because it's the coolest sports logo there is.

And Shannon gave us all this today:

The classy design is key. This could really be pretty lame, but it's not. It's cool.

Almost there

2008-05-13T21:10:00.002-04:00

Our television assignment is concluding this week. People don't believe me, but it will get done.

It's a week of goodbyes, I suppose. Went to Alaina's house party in Somerville over the weekend. Had some margaritas. Caught a drunken schoolteacher who drank a couple too many, tried to do a handstand and nearly fell into the TV table and set the house on fire. Went to a bar over by Northeastern with Schreier last night. I must admit, the bar in her building is cooler than the bar in my building, though we do have some sweet karaoke.

Narraganett: a damn fine lager.

I don't have a whole lot to say right now, I suppose. I have realized about myself that I need a little transition time between things, but am not going to get that before I start in New York next week. So, to compensate, I have partly checked out this week. It's almost over. Thank goodness. I can't tell whether I will continue on in my bitterness at MIT or eventually, once I've departed, I will give way to fondness of memory. Misery always seems more charming when it's past.

A few stray thoughts from the past week, all collected

2008-05-05T17:53:00.002-04:00

1. I was out on Killian Courtyard earlier, soaking up the fact that it's probably the nicest day thusfar this year. Killian is a massive green surrounded by the older buildings, the ones with famous scientists' names engraved up on their friezes. It leads up to a colonnaded entrance in front the great dome on Building 10, meant to echo the Pantheon. There was a picnic to celebrate the end of the year. There was free food, so everyone came, grabbed their turkey wrap and bag of chips and either scurried like rodents back to the lab or sprawled out in the sunshine.

I stayed and ate, and came back a bit later to study. Only I found myself unable to -- as soon as I sat down, I caught the sound of guys with guitars and cheap bongo drums playing songs about Jesus. If you've ever been around Southern Baptists, the sound is unmistakable. And really, the only thing worse than That One College Guy playing guitar on the green is more than one, and more than one playing earnestly. Even when I was a College Guy With A Guitar, I kept it inside.

2. So I rode the bus to New York on Thursday. On the Interstate I mostly listened to the iPod and stared out the window, my usual travel practice and the reason I will do anything to keep from having an aisle seat. The only car that passed by that I remember was a silver Lexus SUV -- the blonde teenage girl in the pink hoodie texting like mad while her mother drove the Lexus. The chilling distance was clear in the next lane over. And I thought, "Well, if that doesn't say 'Connecticut,' I don't know what does."

3. This was actually the first time I had really, truly been to New York. I think we had a layover at JFK when I was a kid. I've made a habit of flying Continental, whose hub is in Newark, from which one can see the New York skyline. But never been. It had always existed in my imagination and in bad TV. As we came over the Manhattan Bridge shortly after sunset and all the lights of the city shone, I felt an steady feeling of nothing but pride for Western Civilization. If our industrial splendor destroys the environment, I thought in that moment, it'll have been worth it.

4. I am become an East Coaster. I'm not sure how to feel about this. After a decade or more of only rarely leaving the "flyover states," I realized I have quickly become one of those people who lives out here and works out here and gives little regard for where I was before. Though I've always wanted to become some version of what I see in myself now, it's still a bit...unsettling that it just happened, and that's it.

I know a guy...

2008-05-03T19:48:00.002-04:00

It's always good to know a guy. Mine is Rob, whose old friend from Omaha needed to sublet a room in her Brooklyn for the summer. So I am the recipient of this good fortune. I took the $15 Chinatown bus down to New York Thursday night -- the Fung Wah, which did not set on fire. The place is pretty close to the subway line, it's barely more expensive than my dorm room here in Cambridge, the fellow whose room I'm taking is very nice and it's in an area of Brooklyn that's been nicely redeveloped. Oh, and down the block from the apartment there's a 24-hour combination Dunkin Donuts/Taco Bell/KFC. This spells trouble. And if that and all the rest weren't enough of a sign that I should jump on this opportunity, one of the girls who lives there homebrews.

So that's exciting. In two or three weeks I'll be down there. Now if only the thesis and TV projects would finish themselves.

Green and Greener

2008-04-27T20:13:00.002-04:00

Here's one thing I've begun to more completely appreciate about the Internet: it can connect you to fellows with the same peculiarity. A bright shining example of that is the ROFL conference taking place at MIT this weekend. I can only assume they have spoken the whole time solely in LOL-cat. In anticipation of their coming, the Weekly Dig, one of Boston's alt weeklies, apparently published a whole issue with headlines and photo captions in the lousy-grammar new language.

I, however, want to talk about Sporcle. I love Sporcle. I now go there once a day at least to see what new tests they have created. If you're not familiar, it's a site, sporcle.com, that features games where one attempts to name everything on a list. Name all the Ivy League schools, name the Greek pantheon, name the James Bond movies. Go there at the risk of a few hours.

You may not realize what a draw this is for me. But all my life I've been a trivia dork and a great one at that. Plus, I've always had a weird neurosis of trying to name lists like this. Earlier this year I was attempting, while bored, to name all the clubs of the English Premier League. Now, that ridiculousness is mechanized at Sporcle. I was sucked in by the periodic table test, and besides a time-eater, it's actually helping. On my first try I named 53 elements. A few more attempts, a memory scheme and a little personal madness later, I've gotten up to 98. This may in truth not be a truly useful skill. But at least it makes you feel like you're accomplishing something while you twiddle away an hour, and if you're like me and feed off accomplishment or the feeling thereof, that's big.

For the record, I can ace the Presidents, all four pro sports leagues' memberships and several others. And I expect a cut of their ad money for raving so glowingly about it.

But back to what I'd wanted to talk about -- Earth Day. Now that it's gone, I've lost a lot of my anger. That's a problem for me. It's good in everyday life that I'm no good at holding grudges, I suppose. But it means that I need to write something angry right away.

Also, I've changed my mind. It had annoyed me how pop Earth Day had become, now that green is in. MIT and any other university has their slew of Earth Day activities, sometimes stretching over days, enough that we're now really celebrating Earth Week. Frats are green. Corporations are green. The commercial that really cracks me up in the Chevron ad in which they insist they can be part of the solution. I don't believe them, necessarily, but that's not what gets me. Their slogan is "Human Energy," which makes me think of Soylent Green or Sweeney Todd every time I hear it.

I had feared it become a kind of compressed Lent -- a time of year that you feel bad about something and try to act better. As Earth Day becomes institutionalized, I fear that it either becomes a nation-wide guilt trip or a chance to pat ourselves on the back for saving a few plastic bottles. Recycling and self-loathing just aren't enough. I have become increasingly convinced that only change on the broad national or international level of government policy will really make a dent in turning things around for the better. But perhaps Earth Day is good for that. Perhaps the hand-wringing, or at least the thought of greening, is helping to prime the public for the hard reality of sacrifice that might lay ahead. Personally, I don't observe Lent and I don't care for sacrifice. In my ideal world it's not necessary, we invent not slight better but rather far superior technology through vision and leadership and keep on living American life in the fast lane. And I hate guilt trips. A friend who will remain nameless jumped all over me the other day for going out the side door of our house, because instead of the double door at the front it's a single that lets out heat. The equal of the 60W light bulb, according to him. This condescension filled me with the urge to go take recycling containers and dump them in the trash. And I'm something of an environmentalist.

So I've changed my mind on Earth Day. There's nothing wrong with asking people to just do a little, as long as it's a primer for asking them to do a lot.

Please excuse my absence, again

2008-04-23T19:20:00.004-04:00

I don't really have a good excuse for not posting. Once I got this far down the priority pole, I just haven't had an energy to do it. Things are going pretty well, for the record. I celebrated my 24th while I was gone. Thanks to everyone who sent wishes and cards. You rule. And I'm feeling good about it -- I think 24 is pretty solid age to be -- you can start to put undergraduate nonsense behind you without anyone really expecting any big yet, and you're a few years away from your late-20's personal crisis.

It seems that the Democratic nomination race is still happening, although I have totally lost interest. Wake me up when you people make up your minds.

My thesis project is nearing completion, which is nice. If I had to do any more major revisions on it, I don't know if I could. And we're in the middle of TV, which as I have probably noted before, is...interesting. I've been down on it. But we shoot tomorrow and Friday, which means the end of the pressure to have everything together for this one day. But it also means the beginning of the grind of actually producing the short film. We'll see how that goes. Without yelling, I hope. Most of the stress in my life now is trying to loan out a little more money so I can afford to move/survive for the summer, and trying to figure out where and how to live in New York City. Trying to be optimistic, though, that once that's settled on TV is on its way toward completion, I'll actually get to feel excited about the summer.

I feel like after just a prolonged leave I ought to have something wise to say, like I've been wandering in the wilderness. But I don't have anything. I'm just waging the war of attrition.

Coming later, maybe Sunday -- why I hate Earth Day, which seems to have grown into Earth Week or something.

There are posters

2008-04-08T20:35:00.003-04:00

up all over the house today. They have some kind of happy smiling baby pandas up the top, and then big bold letters saying. "CHINA is a friend to the world. Beijing 2008." Just thought you should know how Chinese kids living in the states feel.

I am fine with the protests. It is easy, because I don't care about the Olympics anyway. But what's made me concerned in the last couple of days is the widespread objection to it, especially in the media. They have nothing to say about Tibet. I understand. It's a bizarre and awful situation, but not unique in the world. What's troublesome to me is that they regarding protesting in itself as something off-putting and terrible, and this is a bad attitude. There are myriad things in the world that need protesting, so much so that protesters get caring fatigue and others get fatigues from seeing protests. But you can't just adopt the, "oh, you hate to see that" attitude about a protest. Life is ugly, or at least disappointing, and there's nothing wrong with saying something about it.

Trend story alert!

2008-04-08T00:06:00.003-04:00

This could become a running theme.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/education/06philosophy.html?em&ex=1207713600&en=6690d92b7d7470f8&ei=5087%0A

No wonder I don't understand my own generation -- they respond to hard times in a difficult world by taking philosophy. This is just the sort of "oh, that's interesting" piece that tops the Times most e-mailed list. And sure enough, there it is.

I don't mean to pick too hard. It's hard to apply narrative structure to human existence without fudging the truth (something a philosophy major really ought to have taught you).

I just watched the NCAA basketball championship and marveled yet again at what a large amount of chaos rules the game -- a missed free throw bounces to the right rather than straight back or to the left, resulting in an offensive rebound and another chance to score rather than a defensive rebound and the end of the possession. And then analysts look at these things, these affairs decided by a few moments and a couple points, and declare one team better than another. Kansas isn't better than Memphis. They just won this game, and that's it. It's incredible how powerful the narrative reach extends in sports. I heard Billy Packer mentioned as the game went to overtime that KU had "been there before," because the Jayhawks played in an overtime championship -- 51 years ago. Billy was alive then. The Kansas players, I'm afraid, were not.

Back to the Times. During my personal revolt against journalism, when I got to the point of intellectual maturity to deconstruct it, this kind of b.s. story turned me away enough to take a study abroad sabbatical and try to figure out what to do. It took another large step in intellectual maturity to realize that everything is a construction, and if you hold that against everything, you're left with nothing.

So now I'm in journalism, a social construction, writing about science, another social construction. I accept this for what it is.

This does not, however, take a story like this off the hook. It begins with a selection from our 'banned leads' list, the "this ain't your daddy's _______" brand of cliche. But thankfully, between all the quotes about how philosophy really gets at the heart of the everything we do. Perhaps. And this story has a some decent numbers, 50 to 100 percent increases in philosophy majors at a few schools, and a much more slight increase in the number of philosophy programs. That's fine. But the heart of trend stories' true evil is that they make sweeping claims on the basis of these kinds of statistics and a few catchy quotes from whomever they happen to find. There are more philosophy students than there were in 2002, so it's obviously the Iraq War casting a gloom over our entire generation and making us question the world.

I got a sociology minor as an undergrad, but I think this is why I found myself pulled to the hard sciences.

And then there's the ending:

"Jenna Schaal-O’Connor, a 20-year-old sophomore who is majoring in cognitive science and linguistics, said philosophy had other perks. She said she found many male philosophy majors interesting and sensitive.

'That whole deep existential torment,” she said. “It’s good for getting girlfriends.'"

It's not terrible -- it's too easy. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- if it comes to you too easily, there's probably a reason.

The Week in Review

2008-04-04T23:49:00.002-04:00

Sorry I've been away. I finished my taxes, so check that off. If there is a silver lining to owing the federal government tons of money for education loans, it's that you get to take a tuition deduction for transferring said funds to your educational institution of choice. I spent the rest of the week plugging away on the newest draft of my thesis, working up a revision of a 1,500 word essay, plotting a web site project for my elective, and generally being cranky.

I did get to see Tom Brokaw on Wednesday -- he gave a campus lecture on the future. It was terribly short and didn't dig much below the surface -- mostly his point was that we have lot of neat technology, but it doesn't mean shit if we don't use it for the betterment of humanity. Bravo, sir. Mostly, it was just damn cool to be listening to him. I had the same reaction I always have at an MIT public event when the speaker raves about the honor of speaking here in front of such a brilliant student body. I look around the room, and then, "Oh, you mean me?"

It occurs to me that in a month and a half I will be going to New York. And on goes time.

I.R.Sick of this already and haven't even started

2008-03-30T13:29:00.002-04:00

Gotta work on my income taxes today. Then I need to put some finishing touches on a 1,500-word essay for tomorrow. Thankfully, I already wrote most of the word count. It's tough enough to be insightful on demand, and then there's trying to be insightful after a day of fiddling with tax forms. But it's got to happen sometime.

Sideways

2008-03-26T00:25:00.004-04:00

I just re-watching "Sideways," which I had not seen since it was in the theaters. It took some effort. Ashdown's copy is scratched, so it freezes up during the double date scene. Besides the technological malfunction, I could not get around the while snobbery and the utter loathsomeness of Miles' character. For better or worse, I grew up in a family that shunned public conversation of anything that could lead to awkwardness, so my social awkwardness tolerance is low, low, low. After a short walk I made myself return to finish the film.

I noticed funny things, like how much the world has changed in four years. They buy gas in California for $1.71 a gallon. And the Hitching Post restaurant still has a pay-phone in the back. Not only that, but Miles remembers his ex-wife's phone number by rote. Of course, that isn't unusual for his character to focus on that sort of minutia. But when this movie came out was right about the time I got my first cell phone, and by extension, stopped remembering phone numbers. Anything that I knew before that moment I still remember to this day. Any phone number that has come into my life since then just exists on a computer chip on my phone. I'd be lying to say there wasn't part of me that missed having to know those things.

And this: I almost wish Miles were not redeemed. The beautifully crafted story arc makes you love him by the end even though he's gripped by the same sorts of loathsomeness he always was. It quits at just the right peak. But let me say this: there is value in having negative role models in your life. I remember when they first showed AFI's list of the 100 Greatest Films on television. One of the talking heads, during the discussion of "Citizen Kane," talked kiddingly about how they were going to treat their friends right and not end up miserable and alone like Charles Foster Kane. I don't think that I'm Miles, but I see some of the worst parts of my personality in his character. So I reveled in his self-perpetuated misery, mostly thinking, "My God, I'm glad I'm not him. May I never live to be so unhappy as he."

I wonder whether Thomas Haden Church is an underrated actor or is, in fact, Jack in real life.

I wonder what Sandra Oh was actually beating up in the parking lot fight scene. It's cleverly shot, so you never see Jack's body double, only her flailing and Miles recoiling in disgust.

Miles neurotic booze binges were a little played out by the end, but it makes it worthwhile when he actually doesn't self-destruct after the wedding. Anyway, the important point is that the scene where he pours the wine-spitting jug all over himself will go down as one of the best comedic scenes ever written.

Marge Simpson

2008-03-24T00:17:00.003-04:00

I feel partly sheepish that nearly all of my cultural allusions come from The Simpsons, but I just can't help it. I spent so many days looking forward to that hour of afternoon/late evening reruns that were about the only decent programming available on my rabbit ears. Now all the sight gags and one-liners are just stuck up there.

Have you ever seen the one where Marge finds the pink Chanel suit at the outlet mall? If you haven't, it leads to her joining the country club. In order not to look poor, she uses her sewing machine until late hours of the night to alter it so it looks like a different suit, since she can't afford a new one.

The way I feel right now is some derivative of this. This weekend I accepted an internship in NYC that I could never have gotten if I had not come to MIT. But for all this time and effort set into self-improvement, I'm still a graduate student with no cash to speak of. The sun came out for the weekend, so yesterday I strolled around Jamaica Plain and today and I strolled through Allston. At some point along the line I took a look at myself and saw this: my Sketchers have blown out the sides from too much walking, my favorite pair of jeans feature a burgeoning hole over the left pocket, my pea coat, which I repaired over the holidays, has lost another button, and my year-and-a-half-old glasses have just about had it. And I am in no position to do anything about any of this, unless I borrow some more of Mister Sam's money, which I undoubtedly will.

Ah, to be young and broke. How romantic..and simultaneously disheartening.

This Development is a Step in the Right Direction

2008-03-21T20:41:00.002-04:00

One of the big big life items weighing upon my shoulders has relented -- I accepted an offer today to intern with the online edition of Discover. Pretty excited. After more than a decade of Oklahoma, Nebraska and Wisconsin, I'll now live in Boston and New York back to back. And then there's the money situation. But that worry is for another day; for today I'm just happy that I finally know where I'm going to be two months from now, and that somewhere is fantastic.

It's spring break this upcoming week, which will be a pleasant break. No, I'm not going anywhere. I'm uncool and broke. Rather, I'll have plenty of time to undertake the massive revisions on my thesis, as well as try to find some more money, get some shoes that aren't falling apart, and the like.

Culture Clash

2008-03-18T22:27:00.003-04:00

I was running on the treadmill earlier, and listening to the new podcast of "This American Life." They devoted to the entire hour to this tangled Southern family saga of kidnapping and deceit. While I'm on the elliptical, listening to something white people like on my iPod, something else white people probably like, the guy on the treadmill was watching "Beauty and the Geek" with the sound way up. You want the feeling of clashing culture, trying jacking up the sound of public radio so you can hear it over some idiot college girl complaining about her purse, or whatever it is they complain about.

At least I had my iPod. Last time somebody had Fox on the TV and the lie-detector show came on "The Moment of Truth." I just quit in the middle of my workout and left. It seems funny to me, people who are smart enough to be MIT grad students but watch dreck like that. But I suppose I have sports, the mindless entertainment in my life. Less than two weeks until real baseball!

For the record, my Final Four: North Carolina, Wisconsin, UCLA and Pittsburgh. Nobody's giving the Badgers any respect, so I will.

Sunday night

2008-03-17T00:15:00.003-04:00

I've been gone again. As some of you are aware, my friend Rob's little brother was murdered in Omaha a few days ago, which has stopped me from writing much. I thought a lot about it, but there isn't that much to say.

I have progressed to the point that I can talk about it, and not be afraid that makes it more real. So I'll say what I can think of.

Obit stories are always full of glowing descriptions about the best of people, and I think that's great. My first reporting teacher, a short man who cast a long shadow, always described reporting as something like standing on a high window with the chance to throw roses or crap on the people down below. "Try to throw more roses," he used to say. That statement goes a long way in explaining why I never, never, never want to be a cops reporter.

Thomas' was full of glowing details, and rightly so. But the lasting memory I have of him was from this past New Year's Eve, when friends and I stopped off at the home to say hello. Tom was glued into some video war game, stubbornly resisting Rob's efforts to get him off so we could play Wii Tennis. When I heard Tom had been killed, this is what made me the saddest: he, like me, had been an 11-year-old know-it-all, but he, unlike me, would never have the chance to grow into something else.

I caught myself once before I added "for no reason" on to the end of "Tom had been killed," as people sometimes unwittingly do. As if there were ever a good reason to kill a sixth-grader.

For the first time in some time, I wished I were religious. Just because "I'll be thinking about you" doesn't carry the emotional weight of "you'll be in our prayers."

I managed to get my work done this weekend, at least the minimum I needed to attain. But it's hard to surmount this truckload of cosmic ennui. As has been copiously noted in occasional self-pitying posts, I'm here in Massachusetts away from my friends, just doing "personal development," or whatever you'd like to call it. But in the wake of such a barbaric action, everything I'm doing seems terribly irrelevant.

It's hard to straddle that line, the one between allowing yourself to be properly devastated by the horrific and giving into existential malaise.

But I love you, Rob, if you're there.

Working on Radio

2008-03-12T16:20:00.003-04:00

After spending blocks of time Saturday and Sunday trying to fit bits of audio together, and especially editing the out the "umms" and "uhhs" in quotes, I have a bigtime new respect for those who do this on a regular basis. It took forever for us to make 3 minutes and 45 seconds of radio feature on our first try this weekend, and we have another this week. Thankfully, I found a story that's interesting, chock-full of audio opportunities, and most importantly, appeals to my inner 8-year-old, which is most of who I am. We're developing a feature about some of the MIT baseball players who do research in the sports innovation lab. Some of them are working with a grant from Rawlings to develop better catchers' chest protectors. I don't know whether we'll be able to get sound of them firing the cannon at a mock-up torso, but it'll still be fun.

I love the format, now that I've been on the production side for the first time. It's something I always wanted to do but never got around to. And it re-ignited my desire to listen to lots of public radio. I had to laugh, then, when somebody pointed me to Stuff White People Like, and it of course is on there. That blog is a good meme, though it's sort of like The Onion in that the headlines and photos are sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, but the text is utterly unnecessary. What I don't understand are the people who apologize in the comments section, or say "Yeah, I'm guilty, Ugh." I understand white guilt about the genocide of Native Americans and about slavery. But are white people -- by which they actually mean urban liberal young white people -- just so used to apologizing for themselves that they feel instantaneously guilty when someone points out that they like Apple computers and expensive coffee? They hint at this through many of the posts that relate to guilt about the world, but on post 100 they should just list "Feeling bad about their fair skin" with no text or pictures, and end the series. You know, go out on top.

Gotta go read about Roman history, and probably do a load of other things I've been neglecting.

Jump Ahead

2008-03-09T18:55:00.004-04:00

I have returned from a lengthy stroll over the Longfellow Bridge and through the North End, which I took for several reasons. First, it's a much more interesting way to get physical activity than going around and around on an elliptical machine, although god bless them because running has always made me fell terrible. Second, it's likely that in little more than two months I won't live in the Boston metropolitan area anymore, and because of my constantly cloistered status there's plenty of the city I've not even seen. I bought a discounted student ticket on the T for March, not because I use it enough for the monthly pass to be a good deal, but rather to supply impetus for me to leave MIT more frequently.

Third, and most importantly, it's spring forward day. I recall hating this day when I was in high school; one lacks the maturity at such an age to appreciate that the sacrifice of one hour's sleep is a measly price to pay for the coming of the warmer months and longer days. Both are important. It was 40 and sunny when I walked, a perfectly nice afternoon. But I can feel it's now that it's March, we can't be that far from the first block of 55-degree sunny afternoons, and their nearness is too tantalizing to bear. And I don't think people properly appreciate the spiritual effect of sunlight -- I love living in the North, but nothing's more depressing than getting off work to find utter darkness greeting you. The Swedes, a warm and effusive people on the long high-latitude summer days, revert to their more typical emotional hibernation when it's dark.

But yesterday the sun set at 6, and today the sun set at 7. The world never changed, the day didn't get any longer, but today feels a world apart. If you ever doubted relativity, eat that for lunch.

Wednesday

2008-03-05T22:57:00.002-05:00

Taking a moment to chill after another long day. I have a test tomorrow in my elective class, which is devoted to the topography of ancient Athens. I'll do fine. It's an interesting class, but it feels odd to have a test. I haven't had an honest-to-god college "test" since my last UNL course in summer 2006. I guess it's important to stay in touch with your past. I, after all, have been cutting it out rapidly -- after a heartwarming stroll down memory lane the other night, looking at pictures of drunken undergraduate me, I went in today and removed the link to my profile from all of them. Growing up, as you may have already determined, is a drag.

I spent my whole day today on our group radio project, which I'm excited about. I've always tried to dig deep and summon my radio baritone when I want people to take me seriously. And I've always written, sometimes unconsciously, with the spoken word in mind, which is why my writing comes off as stylized. Same old troubles, though -- I spent the day trying to get MIT or Harvard people to agree to a short interview about the rising price of oil. Some people were gone, some were busy, some referred me to others who referred me to others on the opposite coast, which does me no good. Things are going to come together, despite my hand-wringing, but I've haven't gotten any better at coming to grips with that. We journalists are charged with providing some perspective on this world, but too often we haven't got any ourselves. And sources aren't obliged to return my calls or let me interview them -- we live by goodwill, and so often we have little of it to give.

Tomorrow I'm going to hit the phones again, and then take a test, lord help us, and then we're going to a Boston gas station to get interviews about high gas prices. People, if you haven't heard, are upset.

What's your favorite part about the leader?

2008-03-04T14:08:00.002-05:00

He knows when to walk away. That, and his rugged good looks.

It is finished.

2008-03-02T20:14:00.000-05:00

Actually, that's not remotely true. But I turned in the first draft, so that's something. Time for a short mental break.

Sorry for the post gap

2008-03-01T14:50:00.002-05:00

The first draft of my thesis is due Monday, so I've been semi-off the grid for a bit. See you all again soon.

I've finally decided my future lies

2008-02-25T22:51:00.002-05:00

When I took some time off this afternoon, Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" was on VH1's Classic Albums documentary series. Great album; I have it on vinyl at home. And that's a pretty good series. They interviewed the players, but they also sit in the studio with the techs and talk about how the sound is put together. So I put what Elton I had onto my iPod and listened to it while I walked to Central Square to buy brandy.

I started thinking a lot about the structure of the music, and here's something I realized. And when I realized it, I fell in love with Elton John even more.

The song "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" begins with a simple, lovely piano chord series that resolves itself on the tonic. But the rest of the song is restless - it makes you feel like it's about to resolve, and then when he sings "Rooooaad" really high, the music goes in a different direction. It's unsettled, which directly parallels the theme of the lyric about being out of place.

"Candle in the Wind," by contrast, is about being cut down in the prime of life. But the major key resolves itself very warmly, as if an attempt to come to grips with that.

That's the kind of loving care and attention to detail you can only get from a gay man.

Gattaca

2008-02-24T14:12:00.003-05:00

I went down to the TV room last night to get away from my thesis. Intended on switching back and forth between the #1 v. #2 Memphis-Tennessee game and whatever else is on. But despite my newfangled interest in the Boston Celtics and therefore the NBA, I still can't get interested in college hoops, even on a high level like that game or on personal level -- the Huskers won a big road game in the afternoon, but I couldn't maintain interest in the contest itself. So I ended up watching most of the Klitschko fight on HBO out of the curiosity of having not seen a live heavyweight fight since boxing committed commercial suicide and put everything on PPV. Then a bunch of folks came down to watch Gattaca.

I stayed; I'd never managed to see it before. Pretty good.

It's funny to me that MIT people love this film. It's great sci-fi, which gives it a leg up on everything else. But like a lot of the genre, it's also vaguely anti-science. Remember the tagline: "There is no gene for the human spirit."

One reason for the love is that MIT militantly self-identifies as a meritocracy. And so Gattaca, where your particular breeding spells our your lot in life, is the future extension of Harvard, which a lot of MIT folks see as a birthright or legacy sort of place. But Gattaca's selectivity is an elaboration of the same kind of health science NASA uses to select astronauts: you don't want somebody with a chance of heart problems go into space, as Ethan Hawke's character wants to.

In that sense, Gattaca is the grandparent of the same kind of troubled conscience that exists today about looking at the genetic difference between "races" -- science is inadvertently going to tell us things we don't want to hear, or make it possible to justify segregation or discrimination on the basis of genetics.

"There is no gene for the human spirit" leads to Stephen Jay Gould's compromise, that religion/spirituality/romanticism and science occupy "non-overlapping magesteria." That's a fancy way of saying they answer different questions. But the human spirit or the soul or consciousness comes strictly from the workings or neurobiology. So what's to say that once neuroscience climbs out of its infancy and does more to figure out the brain that it won't get to the point of explaining consciousness, and all the products thereof? I think this is what gets to people about Gattaca -- even scientists don't want to live in a world utterly devoid of romance.

One Billion Dollars

2008-02-23T21:51:00.003-05:00

I was driving around Boston this morning in the Zipcar, buying groceries for the grad student brunch again. And, I was thinking about wrecking the car. Not in any morbid fashion; it's just a perfectly logical thing to think about when you're driving in the city. Mostly I was curious what I would do -- it's terrifying to wreck you own car, I should know, but it seems to me that it'd be weirder to wreck a rented car. "Wow, I just put $20,000 up in smoke.

And then I read this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/22/AR2008022202774.html

If you're going to spend $1B plus on an aircraft, it can't wreck. Ever. I don't care whether you have to hire a crew to repair it every day.

And how to you feel if you're the pilot? You just destroyed $1 billion of taxpayer money. But then again, the President has wasted many billions on the war, and extended the national debt even more, and that simpleton seems to sleep at night.

New room, snowy Boston

2008-02-23T15:08:00.003-05:00

Big snowstorm last night. I had been waiting for one; the bay windows in my new room looked like an ideal place to chill and watch it fall.

Sunny again today, with the remnants hanging on as decoration. Here are some photos of my room, and then out the window.

From the doorway

The fake fireplace and my desk

If you nose up to the right part of the window, you can see to Back Bay

Through branches, toward the financial district

"Hi, I'm an ancient radiator, and I make a lot of goddamned noise while Andrew is trying to work."

"Rag and Bone"

2008-02-21T22:04:00.003-05:00

I love this song. Only the White Stripes have both the chops and the charm to write a great hard rock song about going garage sailing.

I got really excited about the eclipse last night, calling both Alex and my Mom and Dad to talk about it. Eclipses are great. But here's what depresses me about them:

Everyone can relate to an eclipse. Songs, Pink Floyd albums and surely many other endeavors have been named in their honor. Scientists have used them to test hypotheses about all sorts of things. Mostly, they're just really cool. I mean, did you see that thing last night?

But we know most of what there is to know about an eclipse, if not nearly all. It shouldn't be a surprise that during the Enlightenment era, scientists went after the things right in front of them. The Sun, the moon, the laws of motion. The things with which man has had an intimate relationship for millennia. So now, much of that stuff has been found out.

This worries me. Am I doomed, if I stay in science writing, to mediating between the public and the universe of minutia -- quantum mechanics and microbiology -- and the macro -- astronomical phenomena way the hell and gone away from Earth? It's hard. You might care about medicine stories because they affect your life, or astronomy stories just because they're gee-whiz cool. But you don't really relate to those things because they don't exist on the human scale. You don't relate to ultraviolet light, even though it can hurt you, because you can't see it.

There is plenty of opportunity as the ends extend into perpetuity. But sometimes you just miss those high school school physics experiments.

Don't Settle

2008-02-20T15:22:00.001-05:00

Both Slate and Salon today have stories about how Obama won the Wisconsin primary, one with the head "White Men Jumped," and the other with "White Men Can Jump -- to Obama."

Further proof that if something comes too easily, keep thinking. It probably came too easy to somebody else, too.

Steroids and Sordidness Aside

2008-02-19T21:04:00.002-05:00

I'm excited for baseball season. There won't be real games for more than a month, and everyone is on the juice, but I'm still excited. I won't kid myself by trying to pump up any moral outrage -- I'd punish Hillary for her campaign tactics by not voting for her long before I'd punish baseball by not watching or going.

It was once said that baseball is 20 minutes of action spread out over three hours. In that way, it's the truest of American sports to life - small bursts of activity in an ocean of inactivity and routine. Even the building blocks of life, atoms, reflect this. There's a tiny bit of mass in the nucleus, surrounded by a whole lotta nothin'.

Relaxing, a little.

2008-02-17T20:02:00.003-05:00

Just got some Hefeweizen, and sat down to enjoy the National Basketball Association All-Star Game. I don't care about the all-star game. But it's good to have a break.

Yesterday was a little absurd. First, it was cold. Damn cold. I had an interview with Nature at 9 am over at the AAAS conference. The interview was great. But the conference was in Back Bay, so I had to walk over the bridge in the morning, where it was an 8 degree wind chill. The temperatures had been much milder this winter, so I suppose we had it coming. After that I was mingling in a symposium about biofuels that turned out to be really helpful for my thesis project. Then, in the afternoon, we attended the main internship fair.

That was...odd. It was speed dating format, with about 18 interviewers and four times as many students. So they herded us like cattle and numbered us off, then let us sign up by number for other numbered slots to meet with recruiters. You got five minutes with each person, enough to give the same spiel about yourself and maybe get in one different question. I think I did well, but in five minutes how the hell are you supposed to know? Each of them met something like 20 to 25 people, so they're probably going to forget most people. Meh. It's actually all right, because it makes follow-ups and application materials that much more important. And I'm much better at cover letters than five-minute interviews.

Then today I worked on my thesis. For five or six hours. Actually I got a lot done in the vein of organization and structure, and rewrote a key section. But it's hard to feel like you accomplished that much when the word count really doesn't move over six hours. It's amazing how long it takes when you really care about quality -- I can bullshit pages of academic work in an hour, but it hurts me when I'm working on professional-type projects to put anything to paper that I know isn't that good. So I'm doing an interview in the morning and doing more of the same all day. It feels good, I feel confident that I'm improving in trying to throw together such a big project. The other thing that's really helping is that I've now moved to my own room. It's important to have private space. If you live in a double room, even when the other person is gone, some part of them is there in your mind. You're never truly alone when you live in a double.

Off-Off- White

2008-02-14T14:06:00.004-05:00

I have officially moved into my new room. It's great. It's on the third floor instead of the sixth, it's a single instead of a double, it overlooks the Mass Ave/ Memorial Drive intersection and the over the river to Boston instead of overlooking the alley that leads to the student center. I am pleased -- I feel a whole degree better on life now that I'm settled into my own private sanctuary. I think I'm going to go to great trouble decorating it, just so it's a very Zen location, as opposed to the blank austere walls that populate much of the Institute.

Here's the one thing I don't like: they painted all the woodwork the same off-white as the walls. This is one trend in design that I absolutely can't stand. Wood looks great. Even fake wood looks great. Good wood is like Sean Connery -- it's dashing and smooth when it's young, and handsome with character when it gets older. And unlike people, you can refinish it if you want to.

Paint makes wood boring, and then it cracks. So you have to repaint with the same color, or strip it back down. One day in Americorps I spent and entire morning scraping shelf paper from a drawer with a razorblade. Don't do this, people. Respect the natural look. It looks great.

Now I have to add all the color I can by myself, because the entire room is white (mutters). Do your country and yourself a favor and take an aesthetic stand against this nonsense.

Heisenberg

2008-02-11T21:08:00.000-05:00

Here's an almost done version of something I had to write for class, explaining what the hell the Uncertainty Principle is:

***

Perhaps warrior-poet and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld most deftly defined the many kinds of knowledge. There are “known knowns,” the things we think we’ve got a handle on. There are “unknown unknowns,” ideas or phenomena we’ve never even thought to investigate. Let us not forget “known unknowns” – information we know is out there but have not discovered.

Scientists thrive on the last kind. Experiments attempt to solve known problems. In the process, they uncover the questions people never thought to ask. Once scientists ask the right question, they restart the process.

That’s the textbook version. Behind it lies an ethos that, taken to its logical conclusion, presumes science can uncover all the rules that govern the universe. Unknowns shall become a thing of the past. Eventually.

In 1927 Werner Heisenberg cut into that foundation. He was already a noted physicist working with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, Denmark, to open up the new field of quantum mechanics – the study of the properties of subatomic particles like protons, neutrons, electrons and their constituent parts. But that year he made his namesake contribution to science, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. And he proposed a different kind of scientific knowledge – the known unknowable.

A simple version goes like this: It is impossible to know both the location and the momentum of a particle. In order to measure the location, one must slow down the particle, causing it to lose momentum. That’s not the only way to phrase the Uncertainty Principle, however. The same thing occurs with measuring the time of an event at the quantum scale and the energy involved – you can’t tell both at once.

So in a universe of quantum mechanics governed by Heisenberg’s principle, scientists must work with probabilities. Unable to know both momentum and position, they settle for a blurrier vision, perhaps that there is a 70 percent probability the electron is in a particular field at a particular time. They could shrink that area and derive a more accurate picture of the electron’s position, what mathematicians would call narrowing the “probability distribution.” But there’s a trade-off: the more you know about the position, the less you can know about the momentum.

This presented a bombshell of a philosophical break with the past. Classical physics presumed an absolute reality outside of subjective interpretation. Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity allow different viewers to perceive reality differently, but they perceive the same universe.

Classical physics also depended on causality – one thing causes another, every action has a reaction. Quantum mechanics makes no such promises. Consider baseball – a .300 batting average means a batter gets a hit in three out of every ten official at-bats. But that doesn’t mean he will or won’t get a hit in his next at-bat. That’s how Heisenberg’s principle works with physics. A radioactive atom may have a 70 percent chance of decaying in the next hour, but that’s no guarantee that it will. 70 out 100 atoms will decay, but which 70? Who knows.

The Uncertainty Principle even included this bit of post-modernism: the act of observing something changes the thing itself. Heisenberg’s initial explanation provided the example of a microscope – it uses photons of light to view an election, but hitting the electron with a photon of light changes the electron. At first glance, it seems that with better tools, scientists could get around this problem. Not so, Heisenberg says – uncertainty is a quality of the universe itself. To pull off this bit of mental gymnastics, he and Bohr abandoned the old arguments of realism. There are no states of absolute position or momentum in quantum mechanics – their existence depends on how a person chooses to measure them.

For many this looked like malarkey rooted in metaphysics. Einstein was among them. To his death he could not reconcile Heisenberg with his own conception of elegant cosmology. As former Cambridge University physicist David Lindley writes in "Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science," Einstein felt the Uncertainly Principle “was a sign of human inability to comprehend the physical world, not an indication of something strange and inaccessible about the world itself.”

In the modern era, however, Bohr and Heisenberg have won out. That’s because uncertainty isn’t simply some marvelous bit of modern philosophy – it works. The probabilities inherent in the Uncertainty Principle can tell researchers the likelihood a particular radioactive atom will decay, or a particular electron will jump to a higher energy level in an atom. But it can’t tell you which one, or when, and that’s the essential trade-off. Uncertainty balances the equations. It doesn’t answer the big questions. As Lindley wrote, “it’s not hard for scientists to use quantum mechanics without indulging in philosophical worries about the nature of the universe.”

Sunday/Monday

2008-02-11T00:09:00.000-05:00

I took enough of a stress break tonight to watch "The Chronicles on Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," somewhat out of curiosity and somewhat out of obligation. I remember in 4th grade that my teacher, Mrs. Rakestraw (what a horrible name) read it to us a little each day. Seemed pretty good. Those things are best when you're young enough not to realize you're being indoctrinated. I didn't mind the movie too much until they got to the point of re-enacting the crucifixion, which I had to fast-forward through. "The Passion of the Christ" for children. Great.

Of all the potentially lousy messages available to children in this film, this is the one I'd like to be a curmudgeon about -- those kids, our heroes, get to be the rulers of this magical land in the end. But they do almost nothing to earn it. Their mere presence seems to set in motion an unavoidable destiny. The little brother who betrays them comes back into the fold, but really does nothing. The girls, Mary Magdalene and whomever else they're supposed to be, ride on Aslan to free the frozen people, but don't contribute much. And Peter is a lousy military commander -- affairs are in dire straits until the lion shows up with reinforcements, kills the witch and saves the day. I suppose this reinforces the Protestant doctrine that faith and not works impresses God, but come on. For all their tactical futility, the English children are rewarded with the rule of all Narnia.

Saw "Mystic River" this week, too. Much better, and set in Boston.

Back in the full swing of the semester again. I applied to an internship at "Nature" today, and will be doing more of the same, culminating in the science writing internship fair this coming Saturday. My elective class is about ancient Rome and Athens, but focuses specifically on the topography and buildings, so that should be interesting. And I just finished a first draft of an essay about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. If I like the end version, I'll post it here.

So Nebraska voted for a Black man.

2008-02-09T20:33:00.000-05:00

Dig.

For the first time in ages, Nebraska, usually taken for granted as a red state, made a big contribution to a national election. And they voted bigtime for Obama, 2 to 1.

I'm proud. That's it. I wish I were there to participate in it, but that's ok. I heard it was a great experience, and I'm glad everyone went.

Go Nebraska!

So long, Uncle Mitt

2008-02-07T19:35:00.000-05:00

So Grandpa Fred isn't Reagan and you aren't either. Big deal. It's really better for you this way: Considering you went from being a moderate to become governor in Massachusetts, then changing to a hardline conservative to win the Republican nomination, by the time you eased your stances enough back the other way to become president, you'd be exhausted.

You did a great job, though, in becoming cannon fodder in this clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZjtFNktPLA&feature=related

Other than Bill Richardson's reference to opening talks with the Soviet Union, this is by far my favorite debate moment. I do not agree with John McCain on very much. I'm not going to vote for John McCain. But you have to respect him, especially for putting a schmuck like Romney in his place.

EDIT: I forgot to include this, from McCain's wiki page. It's one of the great slams of all time. When he ran for Senate the first time, the other Republicans called him a carpetbagger because he hadn't lived in Arizona very long. Finally, he got pissed off and said this:

"Listen, pal. I spent 22 years in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Navy. We in the military service tend to move a lot. We have to live in all parts of the country, all parts of the world. I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the first district of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi."

Come on, America.

2008-02-04T21:01:00.001-05:00

I WANT TO BELIEVE

42

2008-02-04T00:36:00.000-05:00

As you may or may not be aware, some people contested a football game this evening, Super Bowl 42, or Super Bowl The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. A bunch of other people watched, presuming the contest held the meaning of life. Some thoughts:

1. I haven't been outside, but the mood of the city seems more like quiet shock than real rage. After so many years of tragic failure or just plain ineptitude, some Boston sportos have in recent times grown so used to success that they were blindsided by the Pats finally not winning. A lot of people just never considered the possibility that this Patriots team could ever lose, and now have this sort of befuddled look, like "We lost? What do you mean we lost?"

2. It's nice that fate has several narrative structures from which to choose. Everyone assumed after New England's miraculous escape against the Baltimore Ravens that metaphysical destiny simply would not allow this team to lose. I felt that way watching them, even when they struggled in the playoffs. But one could feel the winds of change during the SB, and it turns out the fate-script was the old-fashioned "look unstoppable and then derail over the last hurdle."

3. I assume everyone will spend the next week mocking Bill Belichick for running off the field in failure before the actual end of the game. What caught my attention more was Tom Coughlin. Even as he enjoyed the Gatorade bath and the last few seconds tick away, drill sergeant Tom looked tepid. Perhaps he simply isn't capable of anything more than a smirk. But as I watched him, I felt bad. I mean, this man had devoted his entire life to working 80-hour weeks, screaming at players, getting mocked by the media and nearly losing his job last year. Today is the greatest day of Tom Coughlin's life, the apex of all that sacrifice, and he looked...tepid. I imagine him going home tonight, having a glass of wine with the wife and going to bed, dreaming of doing battle next season.

Coaches of championship teams always say the next season that the championship doesn't matter anymore and the team has to forget about it. But I bet insane coaches like Belichick and Coughlin forget almost immediately. Maybe they take a week to celebrate reaching their life's pinnacle, but the blood lust reawakens and nothing is ever enough.

4. One last word on religion and sports. If there really were a God, He would find football repugnant. So when players on both sides are praying for his blessing, he's actually yelling back, "Stop hitting each other!"

5. I'm more saddened by back-to-back Mannings winning the Super Bowl than I am by the Patriots' loss. If Hillary wins in November and serves out a full term, it will reach 24 years we'll have had either a Clinton or Bush in office. This family nonsense has got to stop.

6. This isn't the first year I've complained about what a soulless schmuck-fest the Super Bowl is, but I'll pat it on the back for this reason: The Super Bowl always makes me feel great that the football season is finally over. Autumn and early winter are always a struggle for me; I grew up with football and feel attached to it, but frequently find myself repulsed and wishing to be above it.

It fits in nicely with my hypothesis on seasonal rhythm. You never want to become so attached to one season that you mourn its passing. Love each one for what it brings, but hold enough contempt in your heart that you're glad when it's gone. Football is the same way. Now, at the end of the season, I'm glad it's gone.

Brewer and Patriot

2008-02-02T19:21:00.000-05:00

I just realized that those are both the nicknames of pro sports teams I support, in addition to coming together to form the Sam Adams slogan.

In celebration of having a little pocket money again -- I finally got what Ashdown owed me for renting Zipcars and for working the front desk -- I bought some Sam Irish Red. Hadn't had it. It's...ok. But it's one more check mark on my mission to sample of every kind of Sam Adams beer. Support your local brewery.

Here's an up-to-date personal ranking of the styles:

1. Cream Stout. There's no way to tell you the true brilliance of this beer. Sometimes a person feels like Sam is churning out new styles just to add to their resume. Then you buy a six of cream stout, pour it slowly into a glass and say, "Oh fuck yes."

2. Hefeweizen. The smoothness of this blend would convert even the staunchest non-beery.

3. Boston Lager. It lulls you to sleep sometimes -- most of the time, default beer is not good. If you want fancy, you look for fancy. Leinenkugel's, the pride of Chippewa Falls, WI, churns out a handful of different brews, but their original in indistinguishable from any other American lager. Budweiser, despite what they try to tell you through billions of dollars in advertising, is swill.

Seriously -- have you seen their new ads with the guy from the Daily Show? The worst one is where he says that in an American lager you can't hide flaws, where as in an "import" you can. Import is just a stand-in for anything besides Miller, Coors and Bud in their world. Clearly, Budweiser knows their audience -- people who don't actually know anything about beer. The Miller Brewery tour was similarly dreadful. Like Elissa said, "You know what else is crisp and clean? Water."

But Sam's basic brew, the Boston Lager, is a surprising delight. There's nothing special about it, except that it's exceptional. I should trademark that and sell it to them.

4. Black Lager. I hadn't really had a beer quite like this before -- it's just as black as a stout or porter, but not nearly as thick. Almost a sweet taste behind the darkness. Sort of like me.

5. Winter Lager. Nicely spiced, a hearty brew. It's no Uff-Da, but what is?

6. Boston Ale. A nice derivative of Boston Lager. Good, but not great. I remember that Boston Ale was one of the few American beers available in System Bolaget, the Swedish state-owned liquor store, and it tasted fucking fantastic compared to Swedish beer, which was strong but all tasted exactly the same. So bonus points for that.

7. Honey Porter. Pretty good. Same mix of sweet and dark as Black Lager, but with a little twist.

8. Oktoberfest. OK. Berghoff's is better.

9. Irish Red. I'm a little disappointed; the redness, in both color and taste, is muted. It's a niche taste, but that's no excuse.

10. Brown Ale. A perfectly drinkable beer, well balanced. But brown ales are my absolute favorite beers, so Sam's gets docked because it could be so much more. It's no Fat Squirrel, I can tell you that.

11. Cherry Wheat. Unlike some, I have no problem with fruited beers. I like many. I like this one. But it's a little to rich and sharp to leapfrog its cousins.

*Beers I have not tried, or have not tried in a long time:

Sam Adams Light. What's the point, really?
Pale Ale. Same question. If you're spending nearly twice as much to buy Sam instead of Pabst, why would you buy pale ale?
White Ale. Could be good. But really, same question.
Scotch Ale. One of my favorite kinds of beer, so I'd love to try Sam's.

More ratings to come!

It's Time to Play "Which of these ideas is the dumbest."

2008-02-02T12:27:00.000-05:00

As many of you know, I'm a sucker for elaborate yet stupid ideas. Sometimes, you just get on a roll. On the way to Omaha with Lee, Marypat and Jacob over break, we spent much of the trip talking about forming a band whose lyrics were all subliminal messages encouraging people to buy life insurance. Protect your loved ones!

All you need is a spark. Then, it was me telling them about John going to a job interview to sell life insurance for New York Life. Today, it was a girl about my age in line at the grocery store; she and her boyfriend were buying supplies for a dinner party and she asked me if I thought it would be a good way to kill time before dinner to have guests build structures out of marshmallows and toothpicks. I said I'd love it, but most people who aren't me would think it was stupid. Still, she seemed like the kind of girl who'd have friends that would take to it, so I advised here to go ahead. This lead to an extended conversation between Will and myself about the manner and limitations of such a structure. I won't bore you with the details, but I realized you'd need toothpicks with a length of the square root of 2 to act as diagonal supports inside your toothpick cubes.

We had nothing else to do in the Market Basket line, which raises an important point about the rottenness of adulthood: The portion of your brain that needs to be free in order to mull over dumb ideas is occupied by worry about the logistical details of your life. That is, unless you're one of the truly blessed people who can set aside worrying to think about marshmallow replicas.

Back to the title of the post. Here are two recent stupid ideas:

1) Down the block from me, at the corner of Mass Ave and Albany, there's an old bar called the Paradise that appears to have been closed for some time now. It's right across the street from the plain white hemispherical concrete bunker that houses MIT's nuclear reactor. The Institute does not, as a pointed rule, advertise the existence of the nuclear reactor. But it's there. Don't worry, it's safe.

Anyway, if I had money to throw away, I'd buy the Paradise and convert it into a nuclear-themed tavern. It would be called The Splitting Atom, so that hard-working scientists could say things like "Hey, you want to get a pitcher at the Atom later?" I think it sounds good.

With enough success, the Atom would become a brewhouse and make our own blends. We might have a wheat beer called Uranium-235 or a Half-Life Stout. I'll invent some kind of noxious cocktail that makes you surly and called it the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

There's already a bar further down the street called the MIracle of Science, which has the fission logo on it, but we'd put them under.

2) I would like to create a video game that's a hybrid of Dance Dance Revolution and Rock Band, where instead of playing plastic instruments together to recorded rock songs, you and your friends form a boy band and must learn to dance together. On the screen is a character who's your choreographer, who bitches you out if you're not all together. There are bonus levels wherein you must learn to navigate through a crowd of screaming teenage girls and how to lip-synch properly. When you break off as a solo artist and start cutting tracks with Timbaland, you win the game.

Ok, which is stupider?

Good thing I worked out yesterday

2008-01-31T19:18:00.000-05:00

I considered going down again tonight, running and lifting a bit while watching either the Celtics game or the Presidential debate. But I don't want to watch the Presidential debate. I've already made up my mind and nothing can dissuade me; the only thing that can happen is that I will re-ignite into hatred of Hillary. I don't want that. Obama is pulling closer and could certainly win, but at the same time by enthusiasm blooms, I also want to steel myself for the possibility of having to vote Hillary. Deep down, I don't want to stop loving Bill because of his campaign tactics, and I don't want to abstain from voting out of bitterness. There would be worse things that a McCain presidency, but all the same, I'd rather not have my cousins continually shipped to combat zones in a pointless war.

But that's not why I skipped my workout. Out of gratitude for editing his brother's grad school entrance personal statement into something that sounds like it was written by a native speaker, my roommate, Ke Jia, started offering me booze. To my credit, I was polite and only took a small amount. And then just now he came over and filled my wine glass up right to the brim with a pretty good French cabernet. So I guess I'll work out again tomorrow.

I've been pretty good overall, and have stuck to my plan of exercising about every other day since I came home mid-month. After a vacation of too much food and not enough accomplishment, I feel pretty good about what I've done -- in two-plus weeks back in Boston I've already dropped quite a few pounds (I don't have a scale so I don't know how many), I've decided on a lot of the places I'm going to apply for an internship, I've done some more lab observation and today prepared most of my presentation for next week's class.

Despite going on an accomplishment splurge, I feel rather empty a lot, for this reason: MIT graduate school is a place for people who have the will, or at least the stubbornness, to work on their stuff pretty much constantly. It's not that I'm not driven, it's that, as said before, I'm no good at being a true believer anymore, even in writing or science or writing about science. And trying to sustain this level of mental intensity mostly with person pride is a tall goddamned order. I overheard the woman who works the front desk the other day, who is not a student, telling someone who is that MIT students have no perspective on life. It's no coincidence. Whatever your program, MIT is a place where you're encouraged to be unreasonable, to give over other parts of your life in pursuit of your research or your writing. All high-profile universities are like this, but MIT has a special chip on its shoulder, trying to prove itself as a meritocracy in the face of perceived Harvard entitlement two miles down the road.

At home I felt imbalanced in favor of sloth, and now I feel imbalanced in favor of aloneness. So it goes.

Johannes Gone

2008-01-29T20:21:00.000-05:00

After a few months of haranguing, the Twins finally traded Johan Santana, pending his approval and signing a contract extension with his new team-to-be, the New York Mets. I like this deal a lot, for the following reasons:

A) It's good for the Red Sox. They nearly pulled the trigger on this deal, which might have weakened the team in the long term by dealing 4 stud prospects, but would have pulled them way the hell and gone out in front of the American League field, at least on paper. I went back and forth on whether I wanted them to do this; it's almost irresistible to picture a player of Santana's caliber in your team's colors, but I really like Jacoby Ellsbury and some of the other young players, and now the Sox are keeping them. After buoying Boston sports lately -- David Ortiz, Kevin Garnett and Randy Moss all came from prior glory in the Twin Cities -- Minnesota could have have screwed the Sox, but thankfully...

B) The Yankees didn't get him. Admittedly, it's nice to see the Yankees taking some pride bringing up some talent through their farm system rather than simply acquiring every high-priced veteran in sight. That's especially true now that they have Joba Chamberlain, who pitched at Nebraska while I was in school there. And their championship teams in the 1990s were built on young guys and a mix of wily veterans. You will note that A-Rod, Jason Giambi, Bobby Abreu, Carl Pavano and others of their ilk have not won a championship in pinstripes.

That said, I think the Yankees should have done this. With the trade and automatic extension, they would have forked over a lot of players and money, but they'd have the premier pitcher of our time locked up for the next five years. For the first time in a long time the Red Sox have pulled ahead of the Yankees, and a Yankee acquisition of Santana would have instantly closed that gap. So essentially the two teams enter the new season just where they left the last one -- the Sox re-signed Schilling and Mike Lowell, the Yankees re-signed A-Rod but no new pitching studs, so the advantage still lies in Boston's corner.

Plus, it's a big ol' middle finger to Rudy Guliani.

C) It's good for the National League. I have turned my interest in the Red Sox into fandom in the time I've lived here. But my first loves have all been in the NL. And the poor senior circuit is having a rough go of it -- they haven't won the All-Star game since I was in middle school, and the have only three of the last ten World Series championships -- 2001 Diamondbacks, 2003 Marlins and 2006 Cardinals.

Economically, it makes sense. The Red Sox have been escalating payroll to keep pace with the Yankees, and now teams like the Tigers and Angels realize they have to spend more and acquire bigtime guys to compete in the AL. That pulls up even teams like the Royals who have little chance of actually winning -- they don't want to be embarrassed, either, and encourage their fans to stop coming to games. So the Royals have to spend more money simply to tread water relative to their peers.

There's no arms race in the NL. The big-money teams, like the Mets and Cubs, don't rack up nearly the payroll as AL teams. They don't have to. All you need to do is have just enough talent to win the National League, and then take a roll of the dice in the World Series. That's what you've seen in the last decade: although the AL teams are superior, anything can happen in 4 to 7 baseball games, so sometimes the NL team pulls it out. The Mets have been spending more lately, to their credit, and so have the Cubs, although they're still the Cubs.

This is why I think the Mets 2007 collapse might be the best thing to happen to NL competitiveness in some time. The Metropolitans lost a 7-game lead with 17 games to go to the Phillies, and watched the playoffs from home. So now they want to ramp up the team, and they did it in a big way by acquiring Santana in principle today.

Alex and I have frequently bemoaned the plethora of small market teams in the NL, and their propensity to dump good players to the AL once they become too expensive. The Florida Marlins, of course, are the prime guilty partners, having exported Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis this off-season, Josh Beckett, Mike Lowell, Luis Castillo and others after the 2003 championship, Kevin Brown and Gary Sheffield after the 1997 season. Then there are the formerly great clubs, like the Reds and Pirates, now stuck in small-market purgatory. There are the Giants and Dodgers, not sure how much money they can really spend, and how much they need to spend in order to compete in the watered-down National League.

But if this becomes a greater trend, and the Mets go big, then the Cubs, Cardinals and Dodgers have to try to go big to keep up. Then the Brewers and Nationals have to spend some cash to keep their young players around in order to keep up. Then, some great day, the National League will start to resemble its former glory.

D) Santana now gets to take his rightful place as a big-market star, without the insane pressure of pitching for the Yankees.

I heard Buster Olney on ESPN earlier saying he thought this was actually the 4th-best offer the Twins had been presented, after the two from Boston and New York's. So another blunder by Minnesota. But they boxed themselves into a corner -- everyone knew they had to trade him, or he'd bolt after the season and they'd get nothing for him. So things worked out great for the Sox and Mets, indifferent to lousy for the Yanks and Twins. And I'm just fine with that.

Bruins v. Sabres

2008-01-28T15:09:00.000-05:00

Going to the Bruins game a week from tomorrow. Pretty psyched. Marc Savard did score the winning goal in the last minute of yesterday's All-Star game for the Bruins. I'm not a big Bruin fan, but I hockey is one of the great sports to watch live. And our seats are in the very last row, but it's the very last row directly over center ice, so our view will be better than it was for the Celtics game.

Well, This is just about fitting

2008-01-28T01:03:00.000-05:00

I may have mentioned this before, but it's 1 am, I have another hour to sit here at the Ashdown front desk, Mountain Dew is keeping me awake and it needs to be said.

I worked every day last year from 8 to 5, sweating myself crazy outside or doing repetitive, frustrating tasks inside, making $6.50 as a poor government servant. In an hour tonight I've done nothing but play online Scrabble and get the storage room key for a guy, and I make $9 at this job.

It makes you feel weird, like you should be doing more. I've felt that way all through January, actually -- I have done a couple interviews and written a couple thousand words for my thesis, but this lingering dread hangs over me, whispering that I should be doing more and I'll regret my current pace come spring. Mostly, I still haven't mastered this free-writer's life, where a certain amount of work must be done by nobody's chaining you to the desk. I hope I feel more comfortable this coming semester. I think I will.

On the plus side, I am going to be able to finish observing my lab this week. I've been hanging out with neuroscientists, and their dogs. Tuesday I'm going to observe work in the MRI control room, and if there's time, I'm going to ask them if they'll scan my brain.

Gotta get on the phones tomorrow and harass people who haven't returned e-mails. Sounds like fun, eh? It never really gets easier for me. Since emerging from a social cocoon after high school I've gotten a lot better with people, at least people I know, or people whose opinions aren't that important in the long run. But I still lock up with nerves before calling people I've never met for stories.

On the other hand, it's hard to be down about a world where that picture of Barack Obama in a cowboy hat exists.

Howdy Folks

2008-01-27T10:56:00.000-05:00

I'm Barack Obama. What time is chuck?

I think the markets are up today, Jim

2008-01-26T13:24:00.000-05:00

Bringing my coffee and computer down the TV room to watch Chelsea v. Wigan just now, I passed the common kitchens in on each floor with its own TV tuned to something different. One was on CNN, which had some woman's head over the banner "It's the economy...," surely beginning their day-long mind-numbing coverage of the South Carolina Democratic primary.

Thinking again about that John Meacham interview on the Daily Show, I think I figured out the right way to verbalize my distrust of economic prognosticators and forecasters. I can have nothing but academic admirations for actual economists, who try to make sense of rather abstract concepts and realities complicated by the fact that humans don't use what economists would consider perfect judgment. My reaction to talking heads on TV talking about "the economy" is twofold:

1. You don't actually know what "the economy" is.
2. Even if you have some idea, you don't know what it's going to do.

What they seem to think it is is a series of numbers -- the stock market, the housing numbers, the fed's interest rate -- that taken together tell you how "the economy" is doing.

Balderdash.

During his Daily Show interview, Meacham said (correctly) that the media applies a narrative to the candidates based on the last happening, and if that doesn't hold out in the next primary, they invent a new one. That's not in itself a colossal problem; just like scientific papers draw a structure of order from a chaos of data, news stories apply narrative to otherwise discordant events. That's why elections are so much fun for them to cover -- like a sporting event, they will, in time, have a definitive result. The economy, however, will not. Yet it's treated as if it will, because that's the news paradigm.

Here's what economics coverage reminds me of: I was listening to a Brewers game on the radio last summer, and it was out of hand by the 6th, so Bob Uecker started telling stories, which is a beautiful thing in itself. (If you don't know the name, Bob Uecker played Harry Doyle, the Indians broadcaster, in "Major League." In real life, he's a baseball hall-of-famer and calls Brewers games.) So Uecker starts waxing about the really old days, before he was even in broadcasting, when technology certainly wasn't was it is today. Announcers couldn't go to the games and broadcast live back to their listeners. So they'd do "recreations." It was simple -- they'd take the line score of the game, which said what each batter did for the whole game. And the recreationist announcers would make up the details -- balls, strikes, managerial fits, groin pulls -- out of thin air. The people listening at home hadn't seen the game, so no one could prove you wrong. It was sheer entertainment.

That is what economic analysts on TV are doing. They can say anything they want about "the economy," so long as it matches up with the numbers in front of you. The whole business is so complicated that nobody at home can prove you wrong.