Monday, November 26, 2012

Entry 146: Next Up, Entry 147

Went down to South Carolina this Thanksgiving weekend to visit the in-laws -- no time nor laptop for blogging, thus no entry.

I'll be back in a few days with a full entry, better than ever.  In the meantime, enjoy a clip from a classic that I watched (again) recently.  My friend JY was in town visiting, and we put this on with his 9-year old son in the room.  Perhaps not the best choice given that it ranks among the top movies for most f-bombs (I count 17 in the clip below), but whatever.  I saw worse when I was a kid.  I remember watching Porky's at a neighbor's house when I was about 6.  Now that is inappropriate. 



Saturday, November 17, 2012

Entry 145: Worst. Song. Ever.

Two days in a row I entered the gym in the basement of my office building to be greeted to somebody else's music blaring over the stereo -- so annoying.  The gym stereo needs to go the way of payphone, toward obsolescence.  We don't need it anymore.  Everybody has an iPhone or an iPod or some other portable listening device now, there's no justification for one person subjecting the entire gym to their (usually shitty) musical preference.  I keep meaning to take the power cable to my gym's stereo and hide it -- just put it behind the stack of ab mats or something like that (I tell myself it's not stealing if I don't take it out of the gym) -- but I never remember this when I'm alone in there.


The first day it was some hip-hop mix which is especially irritating because it's got that bump-bump-bump bass that just cuts through headphones like they're nothing.  The second day it was a "jock rock" ensemble.  You could tell the kid (by kid I mean 27-year old) who put it in made it especially for working out, like if you looked at the CD it would say "Get Pumped Mix" or something like that written in Sharpie.  It was terrible.  It had a bunch of songs by bands I don't like (Bush, Nickelback, Chevelle) and bad songs by bands I kinda like ("My Hero" by the Foo Fighters).  When the only decent song by a good band came on ("Fortunate Son" by CCR) he skipped it.  It was mainly fast, hyped-up songs, but it did breakdown with one slow song, and I believe it was meant to be my coup de grace, as it's a song I absolutely cannot stand.  In fact, it's my choice for Worst. Song. Ever.

Before I say what song it is, I need to lay down the criteria for Worst. Song. Ever.  It's fourfold:

1)  Bad, annoying beat.  It helps if it's a little bit catchy, as then it gets stuck in your head and bugs the crap out of you all day.
2)  Terrible lyrics.  Different ways lyrics can be terrible include, but are not limited to, pretension, awkwardness, and triteness.
3)  Saturation.  This one isn't really the fault of the artist, but it's a criterion nonetheless.  If you hear a bad song everywhere you go, it's much worse than a bad song you rarely hear.
4) Earnestness.  This criterion is very important and is often overlooked by others, in my opinion.  Some songs are intentionally bad for the sake parody or camp value or humor or something else along those lines (think "You Got What I Need" by Biz Markie).  These songs don't qualify as Worst. Song. Ever. because they aren't done in earnest.  They aren't missing the mark, because they aren't aiming for the mark.

Without further ado... I give you the Worst. Song. Ever.  "What It's Like" by Everlast.



Let's go through our list.

1) Check.  Although, to be fair, the beat is actually the best part of the song.  It everything else was good it would be a tolerable song.
2) CHECK, PLUS, PLUS!!!  Paul Krugman recently said of Paul Ryan, "He’s a stupid person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like."*  This could be said of Everlast, although the word "smart" should be replaced with "deep".  His lyrics are like poetry written by an uncreative, suburban wannabe-gangsta with a learning disability for a remedial junior-high English class.

I've seen a rich man beg
I've seen a good man sin
I've seen a tough man cry
I've seen a loser win
And a sad man grin
I heard an honest man lie
I've seen the good side of bad
And the down side of up
And everything between
I licked the silver spoon
Drank from the golden cup
Smoked the finest green
I stroked the baddest dimes at least a couple of times
Before I broke their heart
You know where it ends
Yo, it usually depends on where you start
  

The most amazingly terrible part is that his lyrics are simultaneously awful and self-congratulatory.  He makes himself out to be some sort of imbecile guru.

3) Check.  The song is nearly 15 years old, and I still hear it somewhat frequently.
4) Check.  Unless Everlast is some sort of Andy Kaufman-esque comedian, he's being completely serious.

So there you have it Worst. Song. Ever.

*Krugman attributes the saying to Ezra Klein originally who said it about Dick Armey. 

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In other news, things have been going pretty good on the home front.  Lil' S is doing well, although he's currently got this condition called "cradle cap" -- dry, flaky skin on the top of his head (I call it "crusty crown").  It's medical name is seborrheic dermatitis, and it's apparently pretty common in babies.  It's nothing to worry about, but it looks kinda gross.  Oh well, he needed something to bring his cuteness down a notch (just a notch), he was too cute before, and it was overwhelming people.

He's been so-so when it comes to letting us sleep.  He still can't make it more than a few hours without waking up, but with three people -- I'm on evening night shift, S is on middle of the night shift, and S's mom is on morning shift -- we all manage to get enough sleep; not as much as we'd like, but enough.  It's hardest on S, because she's the only one who has to wake up from a dead sleep to tend to him.  We tried rotating shifts so that I take a 4 a.m. shift sometimes, but it's not very practical.  By the time I get up and get a bottle ready, he's already been screaming for five minutes and S is awake anyway, so it doesn't really work.  Also, it takes much longer to get him back to sleep with a bottle than it does with a boob.  So S gets all the really bad shifts.  I sleep through them completely.  I don't even know when she gets up.  It's not fair, I admit it, but until I learn how to lactate (which I don't expect to happen anytime soon) so it goes.


Anyway, I'll leave you with a math problem.  A coworker of mine sent it out in an email.  I solved it in about a minute and replied with the answer.  He wrote back, "Wow.  Nice work.  I had to Google it."  I wanted to write back, "I solved it in my head! I didn't Google it!"  But then it would have just made me look like I did Google it (overcompensation), especially since nobody ever said that I did, so I just didn't write back anything.  I can't help but wonder though, does he think I actually solved it, or does he secretly think I Googled it?  Hmm...

Here's the problem.  What is the angle between the hour hand and the minute hand when a clock reads 3:15?  (Note: it's not 0.)

Until next time...

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Entry 144: A Brief Election Recap and Other Stuff

Well, the election came and went.  Overall it was a huge win for "liberals" (I hate that term, but don't have a better one); Romney/Ryan, Richard Mourdouck, and Todd Akin all lost, Tammy Baldwin and Elizabeth Warren won, gay marriage passed in Maine, Maryland, and Washington, and marijuana decriminalization passed in Washington and Colorado.  For me personally, it was a very satisfying Tuesday night.  And perhaps the best part of it all is that the math-savvy analysts called the election almost exactly.  Nate Silver called all 50 states, Sam Wang called 49 out of 50*.  This is nice because it hammers home the point that the Republicans really are divorced from reality.  It's not liberal bias.

It's one thing to want your guy to win, it's quite another to believe your guy is going to win when all logic points to this being a very unlikely event.  It's not everyday we see a political experiment that has a definitive outcome -- most of the things we argue about in this country, the economy, immigration, regulation, etc. don't often lend themselves to resolutions that people (without advanced degrees in these areas) can easily and objectively assess.  The election is an exception -- no one can argue that Obama didn't win handily.  The people saying that the election would be close were resoundingly wrong, end of story.**

[I was very happy about Elizabeth Warren's win over Scott Brown in the race for Ted Kennedy's old seat in Massachusetts.  I think on the "Daily Show" Jon Stewart told Warren that he wanted to kiss her which is pretty funny.]

The good news is that now millions of Republicans are going to start questioning the critical thinking skills of their party leaders, questioning their stances on supply-side economics, climate change, and the deficit -- after all if the Reps showed themselves to be so inept at objectively recognizing the clear signs of this election, what else might they be getting wrong?  Oh wait, that's probably not going to happen.  I'm guessing very little is going to change with the Reps, at least not yet.  But we shall see.  Perhaps the most distressing part for the GOP is how the electoral college broke down this election.  Romney could have carried Florida, Ohio, and Viriginia, and he still would've lost.  The "tipping point" state was Colorado which went to Obama by nearly 5 points.  And keep in mind, Obama is the incumbent in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.  What would the results have been if everything was going swimmingly?  Obviously a lot can change quickly, I don't believe anybody can predict with any accuracy the sentiment of our country years in advance, but if, in 2016, it's anything close to what it's been the past four or five years, the Republicans are going to find themselves steep underdogs again.           

[From Nate Silver's blog.]

A question that's been on many people's mind since Tuesday is: What can the Republicans do to turn things around?  Certainly not mocking climate change a few weeks before a series of devastating storms is one thing, toning down the rape-children-are-God's-will rhetoric and the fight against contraception are others, taking a more progressive (and realistic) path on immigration is yet another.  But the main thing, in my mind, is to quit treating people who are struggling to find work and make ends meet as if they're inferior beings.  It's one thing to promote personal responsibility and hard work (values that just about everybody can get behind regardless of politics).  It's quite another to make people who were laid-off during a terrible economic crash -- people who were good at their jobs and did nothing wrong, and now can't find work because they're just isn't enough work to be found -- feel like trash.  Many unemployed people aren't moochers trying to sponge off the John Galts of society, they're people who got hit in 2007, and have since been crowded out of the slow recovery.  If you disagree with my assessment ask yourself this: What were all the "moochers" doing pre-2007?  If Mitt's "47%" just want free rides, then why were they working before the crash, why weren't they living off the government's dime then?  The obvious answer: they want to work, but can't, because our economy currently isn't allowing it.***

[Also very happy gay marriage passed in my home state.  The first time it has even been approved by vote (along with Maryland and Maine).]


Here's an excerpt from writer Matt Taibbi's blog expressing a similar sentiment.  I actually don't really like Taibbi's style.  Something about it rubs me the wrong way, but I think the general message he's delivering below is spot-on.

Similarly, the fact that so many Republicans this week think that all Hispanics care about is amnesty, all women want is abortions (and lots of them) and all teenagers want is to sit on their couches and smoke tons of weed legally, that tells you everything you need to know about the hopeless, anachronistic cluelessness of the modern Republican Party. A lot of these people, believe it or not, would respond positively, or at least with genuine curiosity, to the traditional conservative message of self-reliance and fiscal responsibility.

But modern Republicans will never be able to spread that message effectively, because they have so much of their own collective identity wrapped up in the belief that they're surrounded by free-loading, job-averse parasites who not only want to smoke weed and have recreational abortions all day long, but want hardworking white Christians like them to pay the tab. Their whole belief system, which is really an endless effort at congratulating themselves for how hard they work compared to everyone else (by the way, the average "illegal," as Rush calls them, does more real work in 24 hours than people like Rush and me do in a year), is inherently insulting to everyone outside the tent – and you can't win votes when you're calling people lazy, stoned moochers.    

OK, that's all I have time for.  I have to hit up a quick run (to work off all that candy I've been munching on from our seemingly endless Halloween variety pack) and then get ready to see the movie Argo.  I guess, this election recap wasn't so brief, and I didn't really get to any "other stuff".   Oh well.

Until next time...


*And he wasn't even really wrong on the one he didn't call.  He said Florida was a "coin toss", which it basically was, but guessed it would go to Romney, which it didn't.  That's the thing about setting odds, if you say something is 50-50, your odds aren't right if you can pick the winner every time.  Your odds are right if you can pick the winner half the time.  On a similar note, the past two presidential elections Silver called 101 out of 102 states (plus D.C.).  It makes me wonder if he's underselling the odds of a state going the way he favors it to go.  Of course the number of swing states in that sample is much, much smaller than 102, it's probably less than 20, and it's hard to say anything definitive based on that size sample.  I'd have to study it more, which I'm probably not going to do, so I'll just leave it as something I'm curious about.

**The popular vote was kind of close, but the electoral college wasn't, and obviously it's the latter that determines the president.

***By the way, the Reps have a very strange message concerning jobs.  On the one hand they say "don't blame the government blame yourself", on the other hand they attack Obama for stifling job growth.  Which is it?

Saturday, November 3, 2012

Entry 143: It's the Most Electionful Time of the Year

Hurricanes and elections are what's on everybody's mind these days.  Here in DC, we certainly didn't feel Sandy's wrath head on.  It stormed, we lost power for a night, and that was that.  It felt like just a "normal" storm although the pictures below that I took yesterday in Rock Creek Park tell a different story. 







By Wednesday evening the city was pretty much running again, and Halloween celebrations went on as normal.  We took Lil' S trick-or-treating, by which I mean we put him in a zip up giraffe outfit and pushed him around the neighborhood with some friends (I asked some of the kids we encountered if they knew what he was, and they guessed a cow, which was pretty funny.)  Our friends have a two-year old, and she was good for about three houses before she got tired, so it was a pretty brief excursion, which is fine.  There were a lot of kids out in our neighborhood, but we didn't get any trick-or-treaters at our place (my parents, who were in town visiting, we on candy-passing-out duty, in case).  We live on a very busy street, and although there's a big sidewalk, there's no real incentive for parents to take their youngsters up to the main street when there are plenty of houses to hit up on the less-trafficked side streets.  So now we have a giant bowl of candy that I've been dipping into a little bit each night.  I've been eating it according to my Official Mixed Bag Candy Power Ranking which is as follows.

Tier 1: Like
Twix
Snickers     

Tier 2: Kinda like
Kit Kat
Reese's Peanut Butter Cups (a little overrated)
Nestle Crunch (a little underrated)

Tier 3: Like only in a pinch
Milky Way (would be ranked higher if not for the existence of Snickers, whenever I eat a Milky Way I think, "Where are the peanuts?", it's such a let down)
Almond Joy
Peanut M&Ms

Tier 4: Don't really like but will eat anyway, because they're there and I hate wasting things
Regular M&Ms



I haven't gotten to Tier 3 yet, I've been mainly working on Tier 1, but I've worked in some Tier 2 as well.  S, to her credit, hasn't been touching it at all.

So, let's talk about the election.  It's on Tuesday (as if you didn't know).  Finally!  I think the entire nation is feeling a bit like Abigael Evans right now.


[Hysterical!]

Nate Silver is now giving Obama an 83% chance at winning, and he's actually a bit bearish compared to Sam Wang who puts the president's reelection as a near certainty (between 98%-100%).  Wang sums up the reason he's so high on Obama in this quote, "To put it into plain English: If state polls are accurate on the whole, then Obama will win."  The bold is his.  So basically, he (and Silver) are banking heavily on the state polls being accurate, which they have been in the past (for the most part), and that's why Obama is such a heavy favorite in their eyes.  When you break it down state-by-state, it's really hard to find a likely path for Romney to the requisite number of votes in the electoral college, even though in national polls it's a virtually tied race.  (There is an apparent disconnect between the state polls and the national polls, which both Silver and Wang try to reconcile.  Neither one believes it's all that likely that Obama will win the presidency while losing the popular vote, rather they seem to think the most probable explanation is that the national polls are undervaluing Obama a bit, as state polls have traditionally been more accurate.)  

As you might expect, many Romney supporters don't believe the analyses of people like Silver and Wang, and they have done their best to discredit them, which is very hard to do, because they're doing mostly basic and transparent mathematical modeling based almost entirely on data collected by other people (namely the pollsters).  There's nothing particularly shady or nefarious or partisan to their work.  This hardly means their models are beyond reproach, but it does mean attacking them for being left-leaning and partisan doesn't really make much sense.  What's really going on is: a) Lots of "pundits" have a vested interested in Romney doing well or in the race being a tossup, so they want to create this illusion, even if it's not reality, and b) Lots of "pundits" don't understand basic math, so they don't want to give any credence to mathematically based arguments, because it will make their own reasoning less credible (the "shut up, nerd" argument).  As somebody who does understand basic math I can say that the sentiment behind b) is unfortunately quite prominent is many parts of our society.  But so it goes...

[I loved this movie as a kid, which is why I shall never watch it again.]

Anyway, we will get the bottom of everything on Tuesday, hopefully, and hopefully it will be an Obama victory, if only to shut up all the mathophobes of the world, as it's almost a certainty that if Romney wins they will claim this essentially invalidates the work of all election modelers predicting an Obama victory, even though it doesn't.  I mean, Silver is giving Romney about the same chance at winning the presidency as the chance of rolling a 1 on a die.*  Does rolling a 1 seem so inconceivable?  And if a roll does come up 1, does it mean that anybody who said the roll had a much better chance of coming up something other than 1 was wrong?  Of course not, but that's how it will be spun.  Look, I don't know anybody who can see the future (except the cyclops in the movie Krull, and they could only see their own deaths), improbable things happen sometimes, let's all just hope, nay, pray that Romney winning isn't one of them.

Well, that's it.  Until next time...                               

*Wang's odds for Romney are more like rolling double 1s with ten-sided dice, which obviously, is much less likely, but still well within the realm of possibility.