Entry 663: I'm Sorry, Dave, I'm Afraid I Can't Do That (Part I)

Fun fact: I've never actually seen 2001: A Space Odyssey. I do want to see it, as it's frequently on those "Best Movies Of All Time" lists. In fact, it was no. 1 on the latest Sight and Sound decennial directors' poll. I've heard from several non-movie-directing people that it's extremely slow, but slow doesn't always mean bad for me. Another Kubrick film, Eyes Wide Shut, moves like a watched pot, but I quite enjoyed it, anyway. It's slowness was an asset as it built up anticipation. Of course, the payoff in Eyes Wide Shut is a massive orgy. Maybe it's not as satisfying if it's somebody getting trapped in outer space or whatever it is happens in 2001.

Anyway, AI. That's the topic of this entry. It's on a lot of people's mind these days and has been since the release of ChatGPT last November. A large part of this collective contemplation of AI is concern over its deleterious impact on human life. Sam Altman, the president of OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, testified to Congress recently on the risks of AI; several podcasts to which I subscribe have devoted segments to the subject; and a coalition of alarmed tech leaders wrote an open letter calling for a pause on AI development.

I would hardly consider myself a tech leader (although I am director of R&D for a profitable tech company), but I have a different view on AI: I don't fear it. Now, I will admit that a large part of this could be "fear fatigue." There's only so much a person can worry about before they start to not care -- or at least before they significantly discount potential concerns -- and AI is very low on my concern triage. First and foremost, I worry about the safety and well-being of my children. Then, I move on to societal issues. In the short term, I fear an idiotic debt-ceiling stalemate that could lead to a government shutout/default, inducing financial hardship for millions of people, for absolutely no reason. In the medium term, I fear another Trump presidency. In the long run, it's going to take a lot more than a letter from concerned businessmen to unseat climate change as my principal concern. 

But it could be I'm wrong and AI should be feared. I mean, nobody can accurately predict the future, not even with the aid of AI.* However, I think I can make a decent case for the not-that-concerned position on AI, other than I just don't want to worry about this right now!

*As I heard somebody point out, AI is ill-suited to predict the future because it's completely trained on things that have already happened. Of course, so are humans if you think about it. In general, I don't think we will ever be predict the future with anything close to perfect accuracy. Even assuming the future can be predicted (a big assumption) doing so would require you to model the interaction of everything in the universe, which, it seems to me, could not be done without having a model as big as the universe itself.

AI fears can be broken down, I think, into three broad categories: 1) Massive human job loss; 2) exacerbation of existing social problems (misinformation, racial bias, plagiarism, etc.); 3) sci-fi movie-esque robot-caused apocalypse (War Games, The Terminator, The Matrix, etc.).

Let's consider each of these in turn.

Massive Human Job Loss

The Luddites are The Boy Who Cried Wolf on this one. We've been hearing for literally centuries about how the latest technology is going to render large segments of the human workforce obsolete and cause massive job loss. Not only has this been wrong every time, the exact opposite has happened, and technology has created jobs and grown economies, affording much of the world a level of wealth and comfort unimaginable when textile machinery began replacing humans in England 200 years ago.

With that said, the thing about The Boy Who Cried Wolf is that there is, in fact, a wolf at the end of the fable. It's possible AI is that wolf. But I'm skeptical. Machines are way better than humans at certain tasks, but humans using machines are better than machines by themselves, and I don't see why that would change with AI. You still need a human to an give AI proper instructions and to synthesize and interpret its results. The nature of work is absolutely change, but the gap between AIs will do a lot of the tasks humans used to do and human labor is largely no longer needed still seems quite large to me.

As with any new technology, some jobs will become obsolete, but new ones will be created. The industry around AI is going to be massive, and already entrepreneurial individuals are finding ways to get in on it. On one of the podcasts linked above, they discuss a musician (I can't remember her name) who's selling her style to anybody who wants to use -- like, people can use AI to create songs cribbing her work, but she gets a cut of whatever they sell. These sort of things -- in addition to a bunch of other things nobody's even thought of yet -- are going to become very prevalent.

Another thing is that human beings have the advantage that they are liked and trusted by other humans. There are certain things that we do only because other humans are involved. Do you remember the basketball shooting robot at the Olympics that almost never misses? Of course not, because nobody cares. (And notice there are always humans around to set it up.) Or think about flying. Technologically speaking, it would be relatively easy, I imagine, to make commercial airplanes totally self-flying, but I've never heard anybody seriously suggest this because human passengers like having a human pilot (two of them, actually) in the cockpit. That's also a reason why I've been somewhat bearish on the notion of driverless cars totally taking over. I'm not sure that we will sign off on a bunch of empty vehicles on the streets, considering a more palatable alternative -- cars that effectively operate themselves but still require a human in the driver's seat to handle unforeseeable events -- is already happening.*

*Another thing about fully autonomous vehicles is that there is a bit of a safety catch-22 with them. The only way people will accept them is if they are super safe and basically never hit pedestrians. But once pedestrians know this they will take advantage of it. Imagine an autonomous vehicle trying to navigate a city like New York if it has to stop every time it sees jaywalkers -- jackwalkers who know that it is programmed to never hit them. How long would it take to get across town? Can't you just see a passenger in a driverless Uber shouting out the window for everybody to get out of the way and nobody is listening?  

The last thing I'll say on this is just something I've been kinda thinking about. It's not like a fully fleshed out theory or anything and might be total nonsense. But here it is, nevertheless. Human beings are excellent generalists, which is one of the big advantages we have over machines. We're better at solving what Dave Epstein calls "hard problems," in which the rules and parameters are not clearly delineated. Our ability to generalize comes in large part from our lived experience. We are constantly taking in information and storing it for future use, and a lot of it is so effortless to us, we don't even realize we're doing it. Going back to driving, for example, a human knows better than to drive a car into a big metal object because we've all learned what big metal objects are and what happens when you drive a car into one. This is something we just know from life experience that a computer doesn't know without explicitly learning it. Of course, it's now not that hard to teach a computer these types of things -- and I'm sure Tesla programmers did just that after seeing the video -- but what happens when it's something else that a car doesn't know but is obvious to a human?

It seems to me that in order to largely replace humans you need machines that can generalize the way humans can. But what if there is no way to do that without actually living like a human? Nobody's entire life is uploaded on the internet, so any AI only processing data from the internet is going to be limited in this regard. Now, perhaps the sheer amount of data on the internet, and the raw processing power of a computer will eventually be able to overcome this limitation. But is that a certainty? Is it possible that maybe the only way to actually be as smart as a human is to, in effect, experience life as a human? What if in order to get AI to be as good at generalizing as a human you have to, in some way, have it live a "human" life? Like its programmers would have to "adopt" it and treat it like their child until it reaches "adulthood," and then it would have to have a mechanism to physically navigate the world on its own. You know, go off to college, graduate with a degree in philosophy, and then work at a coffee shop while it ponders going to law school. This type of AI still seems a long ways away, and it would have less marketability -- if something has to navigate the world like a human for 25 years (or what have you) before it is fully trained, it's a lot less valuable than one that has humanlike abilities to generalize out of the box.

Anyway, like I said, maybe this is all just bullshit, stoner-talk pablum, but it's fun to think about... Alright, I realize I bit off a tad more than I can chew with this entry, so I'm going to hit the other two items in my next post.

Until next time...

Entry 662: Mother's Day 2023

Happy Mother's Day, everybody. It's kinda a bullshit holiday,* but it's a nice bullshit holiday, and I find the older I get the more open I am to appreciating the nice bullshit holidays. It's hard to be negative about something whose purpose is to show gratitude to loved ones. When you're young you can afford to be cynical and snarky because you still have the promise of so many genuine moments ahead of you (and it's fun to be that way at that age). But as you get older, you start doing the mortality math, and it's like, I gotta start banking the nice moments now. I mean, it's not like death is right around the corner for me (at least I hope not!), but it's definitely time to start saving -- start saving those memories that mark a life fulfilled. 

*The bullshit holidays are Presidents' Day, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Flag Day, Columbus Day, and any holiday starting with "International" or "National" that you didn't even know was a holiday until somebody just told you: You know, today is International Faith Healer Appreciation Day.

Although, this year Mother's Day was a little weird because S just got back yesterday from a week abroad, and she was still a bit tired/jet-lagged and didn't really want to do anything. Plus, since I had just been with the kids all week alone, I think she felt too guilty to totally claim the day for herself. I wouldn't have minded though, honestly. The way I see it, she does a lot of the day-to-day family work, so the six weeks or so of the year I do alone with the kids just put us at even. Well, maybe now it puts me ahead a bit because I do all of Lil' S2's soccer stuff. But I dunno. It's tough to say, and it doesn't matter, anyway. The workload split of a couple doesn't need be to divided evenly; it just needs to be divided in a way in which both people are happy. And I think S and I mostly got that down.

In other news, I flew through the final season of Better Call Saul, watching all 13 episodes while S was gone. It was really good, and I think they did an admirable job of tying everything up nicely. Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston guest-starred in an episode that was about events from Breaking Bad, but it was kinda weird because Paul looks so much older now than he did at the time the original episode aired. He's almost my age playing somebody in his early-20s. That's tough to pull off even with makeup and a beanie cap pulled down close to the eyes. Cranston, however, pretty much looked the same. I think it's just easier to make a 67-year-old look like a 50-year-old (especially one who's supposed to be sick) than it is to make somebody middle-aged look college-aged. That's a very minor nit to pick from what is otherwise a great show, though.

On the flip-side of the coin, a show that isn't great: Ted Lasso. Although it might seem in direct conflict to what I wrote in the first paragraph, I'm finding it hard to hang with that show's saccharine this season. Also, I don't understand why they have so many story lines and so many prominent characters (some of whom arise from and then vanish into thin air) going at once. It feels like they are trying to stretch out the show's success for as long as possible and whenever you do that the product just gets thinner and thinner. Hey, here's an episode with Rebecca on a boat with a random Dutch for no reason whatsoever. Also, it's not very funny anymore. (The strings around the penises was just weird.) I might be done with that show. If S still wants to watch it with me, then I will, but I'm not going to suggest it anymore. Remember my ABE principle for TV shows: Always Bail Early.

Alright, short entry this week. I'm tired.

Until next time... 

Entry 661: Perfect Number

Coming at you a little later than usual with this entry. I meant to put something up this weekend, but I ran out of time. S is away, so I have the kids to myself, which usually means less free time, but that actually wasn't the reason I didn't post. I wasn't too busy with familiar responsibilities; I was too busy with math. Every so often, in this online trivia league I do, they put up a just-for-fun "One-Day Special" called "Pen and Paper Math," in which there are 12 pretty challenging math questions that you must solve using only pen and paper (hence the name). I've never done it before, because once I started one, and the first problem took me 15 minutes, and I decided that I didn't want to devote three hours to an online trivia quiz.

But recently I've been lamenting the fact that I don't really do math anymore (aside from checking the boys' homework). It's somehow been over 15 years since I last took a class and did pure math. I was a pretty good math student back in the day, but like with anything, your skills atrophy if you don't work them. So, I've been kinda looking for ways to work that math muscle (correcting long division mistakes just doesn't cut it), and this quiz seemed liked a good way to do that.  It went up on Friday and it wasn't due until Monday, so I thought to myself: S is gone. The boys have some activities out of the house this weekend, so you'll have at least a few hours alone. Just have a look. This is a good opportunity to see if you still got it.

I can report, I still got it -- kinda. I figure out eight of them, but I only correctly answered seven, because I didn't heed the first rule of trivia: RTFQ.* One of them I just got wrong (that's the rust), and three of them I didn't have time to deeply dig into (I didn't have that much free time). So, I didn't ace it or anything, but I didn't do too shabbily, all things considered.

 *Read the Fucking Question! The problem was to find the sum of the reciprocals of the divisors of a perfect number N, including N itself. I missed that last part, so I put that the answer was (2N - 1) / N. Had I seen it, I would have added an additional 1 / N, which would have immediately given me the correct answer 2.

Anyway, I did some other things this weekend too. I'll hit some of them in bullet-point form.

• The boys have gotten into Settlers of Catan, so we played that a few times. It's fun. It's something we can do together, and it's so much better than everybody staring at their own device. The boys aren't bad either. I mean, I won both games, but they understand how to play and make reasonable moves. A funny thing they do is they both announce their strategies: I'm gonna try to build a settlement on the wood port because I get double wood every time an 8 is rolled. At one point Lil' S1 was laying out his entire master plan, and I said to him, "If you tell us what you're doing, then we're gonna know how to stop you." And he replied, "Yeah, you're right," and then proceeded to tell us anyway.
  
  
•  Lil' S2 went over to a friend's house on Saturday night, so Lil' S1 and I watched a movie together. We were trying unsuccessfully to find something we both agree on, and then he said, "Hey, what about that movie you told me about once where these teenagers have go back in time to pass their history class." So, we watched Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Still holds up! Well, except for the requisite '80s-comedy gay slur. The thing is, they are kinda the butt of the joke there. They're dumb-asses -- that's their whole thing. Laughing at people for being ignorant is not the same thing as laughing at people they are being ignorant toward. I feel like that's an important distinction that a lot of people don't make anymore. With that said, I probably would've fast-forwarded past that joke if I remembered it was there.
  
  
• I ran nearly five miles on the treadmill in S's sister's building. Two of those miles I did in under 15 minutes. That's not, like, blazing fast, but it's pretty good for me. I forgot my earbuds, which made the experience so much more painful. Nobody else was in there for much of my run, so I just listened to music through my iPhone speaker. It was better than nothing, but not by much. Once you get used to that immersive sound, it's so hard to enjoy music without it.
  
  
• Lil' S2's soccer team, of which I am the coach, lost again this weekend -- I mean, nobody is supposed to keep score, but it's often obvious who won. After crushing our opponent in the first game, we haven't won since then. It's all just for fun, of course -- they're seven, after all -- and I shouldn't even be talking about wins and losses, but some of the teams have been together already for a few years, and they are all really good now. And it's like Great, I got the kids who read comic books on the sideline and act like they're robots on the field. Our game this weekend is at 9am too. That's a double-whammy -- not only do I have to wake up early (for me), I have to help set up the goals since we're the first game on the field for the day.
  

 Alright that's all for this post. Until next time...

Entry 660: Relationships

I've been thinking a lot about relationships lately, particularly opposite-sex romantic relationships. Relatedly, S and I just finished the latest season of Indian Matchmaking on Netflix. It's pretty good because there seem to be some actual lasting matches. For the first two seasons, the title should have been Indian Mediocre Dating. The reason there are so few success stories, I think, is because the matchmaker, Sima Aunty, doesn't put enough emphasis on physical attraction. She will match two people, and I'll be thinking to myself, just based on their looks, There's no way this will work, and sure enough it doesn't. I swear, like half the commentary on the show is participants trying to find polite ways to imply that their match wasn't hot enough for them. Rarely do they come right out and say it, but there's a lot of talk about a lack of a "spark" or bad "chemistry."

The starkest example of this came from this woman on the show named Arti. The best way to quickly describe her is a cross between Indian Matchmaking and Jersey Shore. She lives on Miami beach, wears tons of makeup, heels, low-cut outfits, etc., and Sima Aunty set her up with this perfectly fine, kinda soft-looking, normal dude. Predictably, their one perfunctory meeting went nowhere. So, Arti started using an app instead and found this guy whose profile looked like an application to a bodybuilding competition.* She met him, they started dating and got engaged. (They seem like a really sweet couple, actually.) I believe this is the first engagement from the show, and it came when somebody decided to specifically stop using the matchmaker -- not the best look for Sima Aunty.

*At one point, Arti was describing what she liked about his profile pictures, saying stuff like, I just thought he looked fun and that we would get along really well. And S and I are both like, R-i-i-i-ght... so the fact he has biceps the size of cantaloupes has nothing to do with it?

The success of Arti and her fiancé aside, it's probably not a good thing that we put so much emphasis on sexual attraction in finding a mate. But it is definitely a thing. I guess evolutionarily it makes some sense. When you die at 35, like our ancestors did, you gotta find a partner you want to procreate with a lot pronto. Our superficiality might have helped keep us from going extinct. One thing I noticed from the show is that women seem to care maybe just a skosh more about looks than do men. I mean, everybody cares, regardless of sex, but on the show they list the match-makees criteria, and when it's a woman there is almost always at least one physical criterion,* and for the men there is only sometimes.

*Often it's height. So many women only want to date tall men, and being that the average male height is around 5' 7", such a criterion immediately eliminates like 60% of the eligible pool.

Now, it could be that men just don't want to say how important looks really are, but I don't think that's it, because stats from dating apps, which are obviously very looks-based, tell a similar story to Indian Matchmaking. I heard that something like 10% of the men get 70% of the attention.* With women it's not like this. In fact, it's the exact opposite, and some apps put safeguards in place so that dudes can't just strafe the field hoping to get a hit, any hit, by sheer volume of attempts.

*I'm so vain that when I heard this my first thought was: I bet if I was on the apps, I'd be in that 10%.

Again, evolutionarily this makes some sense. From a purely reproductive standpoint, the best way for early man to pass on his genes was to spread his seed as far and wide as possible. For early woman, it was to find one virile man who could provide for and protect her and her offspring. In fact, in Carol Hooven's (very good) book T, she documents how roe deer exhibit exactly this type of mating behavior. The females all mate with the same small percentage of strongest males, and if you are a buck who can't get into that elite group (the males actually battle physically to determine who gets the females), well, that's just the way it goes.* At least roe deer don't have to worry about potentially violent incel groups fomenting online.

*She said that sometimes an outsider male will sneak up on a doe when her buck isn't around and try to mate with her on the sly. When I read this, my first reaction was, Yeah, good for him, before immediately thinking, Wait, no, that's actually terrible. Then I thought it's probably best to just not moralize at all when it comes to wild animals -- although what I just described is kinda the deer-version plot of Revenge of the Nerds. 

All this makes me think that maybe arranged marriage is actually the way to go. The idea there is that you dispassionately prioritize long-term compatibility and let the physical attraction develop over time -- and that does happen. Millions of couples can attest to it, and personally speaking, there are definitely women I found attractive only after I got to know what cool people they are. Plus, the success rate of arranged marriages versus "love marriages" speaks for itself. It's below 50% for the former and above 90% for the latter. Now, there are undoubtedly some confounding factors in play, but still, that's a huge gap. And the vast majority of couples I know who had arranged marriages -- and I know a decent number across the age spectrum -- seem no more or less happy, satisfied, supported, etc. than other couples I know.

With all that said, I totally understand why so many younger Indians, especially those raised in the US, are eschewing arranged marriage today. There's no way I would do it were I Indian (and somehow still me), and what's more, there's no way I would have given S the time of day if I wasn't immediately attracted to her (it was her shiny lip gloss that really did it for me). I got lucky that she was also a wonderful person. So, I'm kinda talking out of both sides of my mouth on this one. But that's exactly my point: Left to our own devices, the allure of physical attraction is almost impossible to overcome (especially when we are young) when choosing a potential life partner, even though we totally understand it's not a great criterion to weigh so heavily. Just because we are smart enough to know we are behaving like animals that doesn't always stop us from doing so.

Anyway, I think that's all for this post. I was going to comment on this NYT op-ed by Jessica Grose, about how the work-leisure balance is skewed in favor of men in opposite-sex relationships, but I don't have the time. It's a topic I've thought about before (I remember reading a similar NYT op-ed a few years ago) and workload-balance between S and I is something I'm very cognizant of. Maybe I'll write about it next weekend as S will be on one of her work trips, so, having to tend to the boys on my own, I'll be commenting from a position of strength.

Until next time...

Entry 659: Huddled Masses

We spent most of this past week in New York City for the kids' Spring Break. I can say first-hand that reports of the Big Apple's transformation into a crime-infested hellhole are greatly exaggerated. It did not seem any different this time than any of the other dozen times I've visited over the past twenty years.* I heart NYC. It's got an energy like no other city I've been to in the world. I wish I had lived there at some point in my life. We kinda, sorta, maybe briefly entertained it back when S was at the UN. But the timing was bad, and it's an expensive place to raise a family. I mean, DC is expensive too, but it's not New York expensive.

*Although, I shouldn't be too glib. Recent reports have shown that some crimes, particularly shoplifting, have skyrocketed, causing consternation to business owners and residents in certain areas. Repeat offenses -- which some leaders, like mayor Eric Adams, say are a result of the state's relatively lax bail laws -- are a huge part of the problem. A topic for a different post.

Just visiting is expensive. You can't really get dinner for four at a restaurant for cheaper than $100, and the Subway fares add up when each ride is $11 for the family.* We can't complain too much about prices this time though, since we got lodging for free. S's sister Sw hooked us up big time. Her place of work owns (or somehow has some business with) hostels in NYC, and one of these hostels has a "penthouse" (a big apartment) that's reserved for employees. Sw was able to book if for us this week. S and the boys and I took the train up Tuesday, and then Sw came up on the bus on Thursday, and then we all took the train back yesterday. Also, my friend DK came into town from Hartford and stayed with us Friday night. It was super fun, but it was also exhausting. I started this post last night, but I quit after a few sentences because I realized I was typing a word and then reading it over and over again, forgetting I was supposed to finish my thought. That's when you know you are too tired: When you can't remember why you are awake. 

*It doesn't help when you swipe your card at the wrong gate because the conventions of the DC Metro are different than the NYC subway. For example, in DC you can access all trains in all directions of a station regardless of which gate you use to enter it. This is not so for the NYC subway. When went into the Rector Street stop to take the 1-train, only to realize we could only access the R-train. So, we left and dipped into the station for the 1-train... in the wrong direction. There was nowhere in the station to cross to the other side, so we had to leave and buy entry yet again. A trip that should have cost $11 cost $33. A Lyft would have been cheaper.  

 Anyway, here's a day-by-day recap of our trip.

Tuesday

We took the Amtrak, which is my preferred method of travel from NYC to DC. It can be expensive, but we got a good deal because we booked way in advance and left on a Tuesday afternoon. The main problem with the train is that it's kinda depressing to see what's become of Union Station. It used to be this super vibrant hub of DC, with tons of boutiques and bookstores and restaurants, but it's been gradually deteriorating as more and more people work remotely and more and more goods are purchased online, and then the pandemic came and sent this decline into hyperdrive. It's not totally dead -- there's still a little food court and a few shops -- but it's a shell of what it once was. There are a ton of shuttered retail spaces, and it looks kinda dingy and depressing.

I've heard tell of a massive renovation project (it's discuss in the linked article), which would be great, but it's only going to last if it's done in a way that doesn't require the levels of daily foot-traffic it used to see, because that's probably never coming back. I'd like to see something not too ambitious: A nice, clean, safe, train station. That's it. Just focus on that and the business will naturally establish themselves if you succeed.

My train movie was Tár, if you are wondering. Big thumbs up from me.

We got into NYC on the later side, so we just went to dinner and called it a night. We ate at an Italian restaurant, which is a rarity. S doesn't eat bread, pasta, red meat, or seafood (so she basically doesn't eat Italian food), and I like other types of food better than Italian food, anyway. But it is still nice as a change-up. I got this black noodle seafood dish, and it was quite tasty. The only problem is that I stained my shirt eating it. I should have done like those old Italian men in mob movies and stuck a napkin under my collar. Oh well, it was an old shirt.

Wednesday

We set out in the morning for a trip to Liberty Island and Ellis Island, and it was very cold. The sun hadn't real come out yet and the winds were swirling. One good thing about New York, though, is that you'll be thinking to yourself God, I wish I had a beanie cap right now. And then you'll look over your shoulder and see somebody at a stand selling beanie caps right next to you -- best $15 I've ever spent. S bought one on the ferry for $5, but waiting in line (or "on line," as New Yorkers say) to get onto the ferry was the most brutal part of the trip.

The islands were pretty much as you would expect. I'll post some pics below.

At night, we met a few of S's old friends who live in the area for dinner. I got a fried chicken sandwich that was covered in pickles and sweet-hot sauce. It was so good, but the portions were too big. I ate about three-fours of it and felt like chicken sandwich was oozing out of my pores for the rest of the night. It's like, can you knock 25% off the price and just give me half as much?

Thursday

Speaking of meals and prices, we had a super expensive dinner Wednesday evening. We met up with S's and Sw's childhood friend N at a very chichi Mexican tapas restaurant and really ran up the tab. Now, there were six of us, but it was only the four adults who ate. The boys didn't like anything on the menu. S kept trying to coax them into eating things, but I was like Why? Why have them choke down expensive food they won't enjoy, when we're just going to end up buying them mac n' cheese and croissants at the market when get back to the apartment anyway? Come to think of it, they did have a few mini tortillas and Lil' S2 ate some (delicious) steak, but that was about it. They also couldn't be bothered to eat because we let them bring their Nintendos. Unlimited screen time in exchange for adult conversation without being bothered every ten seconds -- it's a deal you sometimes have to make.

Before dinner, S and the kids met some of our DC friends who happened to be in the area at the museum in Night at the Museum. I met everybody at Central Park afterward, and we bummed around a bit. I noticed that of our friends it was just the husband with his kids, so we had the following conversation.

Me: What are you guys doing in the area?

Him: Visiting my mother in Jersey.

Me: Oh, where's L?

Him: She doesn't like my mother.

Me: Fair enough.

I made everybody go to Strawberry Fields, which couldn't have been less interesting for the kids -- or the other adults, for that matter -- but I wanted to see the IMAGINE star. It really is crazy how the Beatles still resonate with the public over 50 years after they broke up. I mean, John Lennon died in 1980 and people are still memorializing him on a daily basis. On a random Thursday in April, there was a crowd of people paying respects, putting flowers on the star, buying art featuring his likeness, playing and singing his songs. It's more surreal than yellow matter custard, dripping out a dead dog's eye.

Friday

During the day we took the boys to the Museum of Mathematics, which was much more exciting for the kids than it was for me. I was thinking it was going to be a real museum of math, in which I would see old text books and learn about old mathematicians and stuff like that. But instead it was a lot of games and activities tangentially related to math. See if you can walk this maze without making any left turns. It reminded me of a place I used to go as a child in Seattle called the Pacific Science Center. It was fine.

At night, I met DK at Yankee Stadium, and we took in a ballgame. (Nosebleed seats -- they were the cheapest thing I purchased all week.) This is the first game I've been to since the institution of the pitch clock, and I gotta say, I love it. The game goes by at such a better pace, and you can attend a game and get home before midnight. We even had time afterward to take the train back to Manhattan and watch the end of the Knicks game at a sports bar, which was fun, as the city is nuts for the Knicks right now. Also, I got some Korean barbecue tacos, and they were delicious.

It was really nice to see DK and catch up. We don't live that far away, but we only see each other like once every two years. He's got three kids, at least two of whom, I've never met. I kinda botched it on this trip. If I had been more on top of things, we could've stayed one more night, and he could have brought his family, and we could have spent Saturday together. Actually, come to think of it, what happened is, I originally wasn't going to go on this trip at all -- it was just going to be S and her sister and the kids -- so I wasn't initially part of the plan. I came in later; I didn't really botch it.

Saturday

I must say, however, it was very nice to come back on Saturday and not Sunday. I'm all about the buffer day. No movie on the train this time for me. I didn't sleep well in the apartment (even with earplugs and white noise New York is a loud city), so I spent most the ride laid back with my hat over my eyes. I wasn't really sleeping, but it still felt good.  

Until next time...

Entry 658: No, Ace, Just You

We watched Stand By Me last night as a family. It's not quite age appropriate for the boys, but I wanted to watch something decent. I get so tired of watching The Secret Lives of Lego Emoji 4 or whatever, and I almost never get to pick the movie, so this time I had them watch three trailers (the other two were The Nutty Professor and Bend It Like Beckham) and they kinda surprisingly picked Stand By Me. I forgot how much fucking cussing is in that movie. Every other scene those goddamn boys are dropping f-bombs and calling each other pussies, and there are multiple references to tits. It doesn't really bother me if the kids hear that type of language, but it bothers S, and I can just feel her silent condemnation of my movie choice boring through me with every swear Gordie LaChance and Chris Chambers utter.

The film still totally holds up though. I think everybody liked it (even S). It doesn't feel dated in a way a lot of those '80s movies do. Maybe it's because it was already set in the past or maybe it's just a really well-made film (or both). The scenes with John Cusack really got me -- like, legit choked up. All the performances are so good. It's really sad to think about what happened to each of the actors who played the main kids. River Phoenix, who stole the show at, like, 14, died of an overdose before he turned 24; Corey Feldman has had his own substance-abuse problems and his career has been a punchline for decades; and Wil Wheaton has talked openly about how being a child star frayed his relationship with his parents and adversely affected his emotional development and mental health. At least Jerry O'Connell seems to be doing okay. He's got a hot wife, two kids, and loves fantasy football -- sounds a lot like somebody else I know.

You know who else is amazing in that film? Kiefer Sutherland. He plays the sneering villain absolutely perfectly. (This is the best scene in the movie by far.) I was watching him wondering why he didn't become a bigger star. I mean, he's had a very good career, but if you were to name the defining actors of the last 40 years, you'd probably go though a couple dozen names before his. My theory is that he has a condition some male celebrities get called Malady of Advanced Test of Time (MATT). It's basically a reverse late bloomer syndrome. They go from having an ultra-magnetic, je ne said quoi sex appeal when they are young to looking like a normal dude you'd see in line at Starbucks when they are only slightly older. You can compare the two pictures below of Kiefer Sutherland to see what I mean. Don't get me wrong, he's still a good-looking man, but he's a good-looking man like that one dad at the PTA meeting is a good-looking man -- somewhere along the way, he lost "it".

 

 

Some other celebrities who suffer from MATT: Matthew Perry (the namesake), Prince William, Vince Vaughn, and Bobby Brown. Now, you might be thinking: C'mon, man, that's just called getting old. But that's not it because a lot of celebrities get old but don't suffer from MATT -- Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Mick Jagger, and Denzel Washington, to name a few. And notice that they are still all A-listers. I think I'm on to something here: Celebrities who stay super hot have more successful careers. I gotta publish this in an academic journal somewhere.

Anyway, since I'm talking about actors anyway, let's end with five actor connections. These are people I recognize in movies or TV shows from other movies or TV shows, but the connection doesn't always dawn on me right away. Whenever this happens, I make it a point to not look them up my phone because I want that satisfying aha moment when it finally comes to me.

5. Arturo Castro: Broad City, Yes Day

This seemed like a deeper-cut connection when I actually made it a few years ago. Now, he's more famous and pops up in things all the time. He's also in Weird: The Al Yankovich Story (which is pretty funny) and even has his own show on Comedy Central.

4. Odeya Rush: Goosebumps, Lady Bird

S and the boys watched Goosebumps recently, and I poked my head in for a few minutes and was like I know that dark-haired girl. It took me a few minutes, but it dawned on me that she was the snobby teen from Lady Bird. She's very striking, which is okay for me to say because she's now 25-years-old.

3. Jeremy Davies: Rescue Dawn, Lost

I was particularly proud of this one because I made the connection almost completely from his voice. He has this raspy mumble that he does in Rescue Dawn, and it reminded me of his character in Lost.* He was also in a famous (infamous?) Subaru commercial, and he later gained some renown for his work in the TV show Justified.

*Coincidentally, I think the first episode he was in of Lost was the last one I watched. Given how poorly the final episodes of that show went over with fans, I feel totally justified in not watching the full series. In fact, it's now a general philosophy of TV watching. Once I feel a show starting to go south, no matter how beloved, I bail. I highly recommend it. You might miss out on the occasional renaissance, but that is far outweighed by time saved and consternation avoided from not having to watch bad TV. Lost, Homeland, The Office, Silicon Valley, Sex & the City -- all shows I happily walked away from. I'm very close to getting there now with Ted Lasso.

2. Josh Brener: Silicon Valley, The Last of Us

I admit, I cheated on this one. I used my phone. I heard the The Last of Us is intense (it is) and requires the viewer be in a certain headspace. I recognized an actor in the opening scene of the series and knew I wouldn't be able to get into that headspace unless I figured out who it was. When I finally learned the actor's name (it took a bit of googling) and saw he was also in Silicon Valley, it was like, Ah, yes, Big Head! Of course. I should've known that!

1. Maria Dizzia: Louie, Orange is the New Black

Louie CK might be a creep (he did at least one very creepy thing), but he is funny, and I really liked his show back in the day. I somewhat recently came across a scene, completely randomly, from an episode in which he's dating somebody, and although I had seen it before, I watched the entire thing solely because I wanted to place the actress in it. By the end of the scene it came to me: Piper's best friend in the first season of Orange is the New Black. This happens a lot, where I'll look back on a clip I've seen before, and recognize somebody in it from something I saw later. I didn't know who they were the first time I saw them, so I didn't recognize them then, and I didn't recognize them in the later thing because they had such a small part in the first thing that I didn't remember them from it. I could probably put together a decent sized list of people who fit this bill just from old Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes. But I'm not going to do this now because I'm done with this post.

Until next time...

 

Entry 657: Taxes And Other Stuff

If you are wondering why I didn't post anything last weekend, it's because I was in Stamford, CT helping to administer the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. You can read about it here, if you so desire. It was a whirlwind weekend, in which I arrived at the hotel at which the event was hosted at 3:30 pm Friday afternoon, left on Sunday at 2:00 pm, and did not set foot outside in between. It's a bit like entering a portal into a different, much nerdier world. It's fun.

But it doesn't last long, and before you know it, you're back in your real life, dealing not with witty word games and cool puzzles, but with real-life things like taxes. S and I filed ours this week, and we got hammered this year. Now, I know that complaining about how much you pay in taxes is the second most annoying form of humblebragging,* but it's not so much that the total amount was high. It's that it was way over what we were projecting. Expectations, see. What happened is, S changed her retirement account, and although it will save us money in the long run, it costs us money now, and we weren't prepared for exactly how much. It caused us some serious Turbo Tax sticker shock.

*The most annoying form is the guy who talks about how much better and more attractive his wife is than him: Can you believe this super hot, successful woman picked a schlub like me? Really outkicked my coverage, huh, dude?

Every time we do our taxes, I get instantly irritated about what a racket it is and how confusing it all is. If it was up to me, taxes would be a simple step function. Like, on your first $30,000 you pay 0%, on income between $30,000 and $60,000 you pay 10%, between $60,000 and $100,000 it's 20%, and so on. If you get high enough, like above $1 million, you're paying 50%, and if you get super-duper high, like $1 billion, you're paying 75%. If you only make $250 million on your second billion, I'm okay with that. In my world there would be no deductions or shelters or anything like that -- everybody could figure out what they owe in under five minutes with nothing other than a calculator -- and the money that would be saved on filing administration could be redirected to policing high-level fraud.

As a small example of the ridiculousness consider that this year we weren't able to e-file our DC taxes -- we actually had to print them out and mail a hard-copy. The reason: We installed an electric car charger on our house last year and claimed it as a deduction. Why would that prohibit us from e-filing? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I guess the DC government is like, You did something that ostensibly helps the environment, so we need to balance that out by wasting a bunch of paper. I say "ostensibly" because it's actually kinda difficult to figure out how one's individual actions affect the environment. There are usually too many variables to account for. You can read this article, for instance, on single-use coffee pods (K-Cups). It talks about how their wastefulness of material is counteracted by their efficiency of energy, and it's not totally obvious how that tradeoff works. I was thinking about something similar the other day when S ordered a bunch of products marketed as environmentally-friendly from Amazon. Assuming that they even are better for the environment than other products, are they still better if they are delivered to us by a gas-guzzling Amazon truck? I legit have no idea.

That's why I don't use eco-friendliness per se as a criterion for my consumer habits anymore. I'm much more focused on waste. We subscribe to a composting service, in which once a week somebody comes around and collects our table scraps. Is it good for the environment? I don't know, but it feels better than dumping food down the disposal. Same thing with bottled water and plastic grocery bags. Avoiding these things might have downstream effects I'm not considering,* but at least I won't have a bunch of empty plastic bottles and bags to dispose of.

*For example, with plastic grocery bags, a lot of people use them as trash liners, and so once supermarkets made them less available, people started buying actual trash liners which are thicker and use more plastic.

Anyway, happy Easter, everybody. I actually forgot it was Easter until my bro texted me. It's one of those Christian holidays we celebrated when I was growing up, even though we were an areligious family. I have fond memories of Easter, but it doesn't mean anything to S, so we rarely do anything for it now. Well, this year we had some people over, but that was just by chance. One of S's friends was in town with her husband and kids, and so they came over for breakfast before their flight home. I did up an egg scramble with peppers and onions, and S made potatoes and muffins, and I gotta say, it came out quite well. S also hand-squeezed orange juice for the kids, which I object to, but I usually keep such objections to myself. Again, it's a waste thing. (Just eat the fruit as is!) It takes like a dozen oranges to get a small carafe of juice, and you end up throwing away (or composting) 75% of the fruit. With food prices what they are these days, it's also a waste of money. S knows this and has cut down on her juicing significantly, but she still busts it sometimes, and I just live with it, because you gotta pick your battles and orange juice is pretty low on my list of things I'm willing to disturb my marriage over.

We also went out to a movie last night sans kids, which is a rarity. We saw Air, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It's not, like, amazing cinema. It's probably not going to win any Academy Awards or anything that, but that's part of its charm. It reminded me of the type of movie you'd see on a Saturday night thirty years ago -- just a solid, entertaining film. It has a decent script, a few stars, and the entire thing is over within two hours. There are no super heroes or CGI, and it doesn't try to teach us anything meaningful. It seems like so few movies like that get made anymore, and if they do, they don't get released in the theater.

Alright, that's all for now. Until next time...