Entry 322: Sicknesses and Arguments

Came down with something awful Sunday evening -- stomach flu.  It wiped me out for a day, but I'm feeling much better now.  I though perhaps it was food poisoning, but it got S too, so it almost certainly wasn't food poisoning.  Whatever it was it was nasty -- violent vomiting, chills, aches, enervation, and ague (if you don't know this word, you need to do more crossword puzzles).  Thankfully it passed quite quickly.  My tummy still isn't completely settled, but it's no longer a Pandora's Box.

[You did not want to be around when the Evils from my internal Pandora's box were released, believe you me.]

So now I'm normal again, which is good.  Only when you are sick do you so pine for the mundanity of everyday life.  I could barely get out of bed Monday morning, and I was thinking to myself I just want to feel good enough to take my kids to school -- not because this is something I had to do, S picked up the slack (I returned the favor at night, when she got sick), or even something that I enjoy doing; it's just that I wanted to feel good enough so that I could do it.  It's my barometer when I'm sick.  When I'm healthy, I have dreams and aspirations.  When I'm sick my only goal is to get back to the ordinariness of my quotidian routine.

Although S and I got hit, the kids seemed to come out unscathed, which is also good.  Well, actually, it's possible that they already got it.  Lil' S2 has had a bug for about three weeks now, resulting in seaweed poo and a brutal diaper rash (now mostly gone).  S asked the doctor about it at a checkup, and she said it was "daycare diarrhea" and there wasn't much that could be done about it other than waiting for it to pass.  Shortly after he got sick, Lil' S1 also came down with something, but it just seemed to be the sniffles, and neither of them was completely decimated like S and I.  So, I dunno, maybe it's all related, maybe not.  Maybe S and I just needed to sleep -- like really sleep, like not-get-out-of-bed-until-noon sleep -- and our bodies knew the only way that would happen is to get sick.  Can your immune system take one for the team?  Who knows?

Other than getting really sick, things have been going pretty well.  I've been trying to workout and eat better -- you know, the typically struggles of the desk-job-working, nearly middle-age, white man.  It was SO much easier to do without kids than it is now with two hellions (or rather one hellion and one soon-to-be hellion).  I've joined a racquetball league, which is good, but for some reason I suck now, even though I used to be good, so that's a bit dispiriting, but it's still a good workout, although I can really only play once a week.  I've joined a gym as well, but again it's hard to go more than once a week, and even then, it's an ordeal because I usually have to bring one of the kids with me, usually Lil' S1, and he often doesn't want to go, and then when I make him, he bothers me about going to Target (in the same building as the gym) to buy him a toy, and if I don't do it then he pitches a fit, and it's not like the 19-year-old community college student at the gym daycare wants to or knows how to deal with him.  So usually I give in and just buy a little $3 action figure at Target to placate him, which I don't really like because (a) he's already spoiled enough, (b) our house is quickly becoming a repository for cheap plastic shit made in China.

Actually, I have to fair, last time we went to the gym, it was pretty nice.  Afterward we went to Panera and had a pleasant lunch.  (Nothing like undoing all the hard work you just did at the gym by eating half a loaf of bread.)  It was a good bonding moment.

["It's not a lizard, Daddy!  It's a rep-tool!"]

In other news S and I have been averaging about 0.8 fights per night the last few weeks.  We don't have one every night, but four out five seems about right.  It pretty much always boils down to the same things, for the same reasons.  The main thing is that we're both just tired and overworked, so we are cranky and things that would normally just be discussions or disagreements get turned up to 11.  Then we often start fighting about our fight (a meta-fight, if you will).  She gets upset by my tone, and I get upset because I don't understand why we are even having the discussion in the first place.

  

What happens is, S likes to ruminate about major life decisions.  She's also comfortable making what I consider big changes more frequently than me.  (I'm all about moving slowly and incrementally and savoring the process as I go.)  So she will bring something up, and I won't want to talk about it, and then she'll get upset, and I'll get annoyed.  And then she'll say that I never want to do anything, and I'll ask why she wants to bring this up now, when we have two small kids and are struggling just to find the time to do basic life maintenance like exercise and sleep.  And then... Well you get the idea.

S and I just see life differently.  The analogy is this: Imagine you are stuck in traffic, with no break in the immediate future.  There are two types of people: Person 1 wants to stay in the car and make the best of things -- turn on some good music, tell some funny stories, and ride it out, because he knows it's temporary.  Person 2 wants to pull off the road and go somewhere else for a while, maybe try some different roads.  The roads might  not get her to her destination any faster or be anymore scenic, but the experience will be something new -- something different.  I'm Person 1; S is Person 2.  And we've known this for a long time.  We knew it before we got married, and we knew that it's something we had to manage.  And we will.  But it's not always easy.

Alright, party people, that's all I got this week.

Until next time...

Entry 321: Stuff in the World

Time is of the essence today.  I have four periods set aside throughout the week during which I can work on this blog.  Usually at least one of them is open.  This week, however, they all got snatched up by "real-life" things.  During two of them I had to do work work -- things have been busier than usual at the office.  During another one of them I had to watch the kids because S had to do something, and during the final one I had to take Lil' S1 to a birthday party.  So now I'm in a mad scramble to get something up before somebody in my family figures out what I'm doing and demands my time be focused on them.  It could be any of the three of them.

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So a lot happened this week in the world this past week.  The first, of course, is that Justice Scalia died.  You never want to cheer a man's death (Osama Bin Laden excepted), but the dispassionate truth of the matter is that this is a boon to many liberal causes.  It's already a big deal, but it could end up being a really big deal depending on how this year's election goes down.  I don't expect a replacement to be appointed by Obama.  The Republican-led Senate is unlikely to go for that, and frankly I can't really fault them -- if the situation was reversed, I wouldn't want a successor approved -- but the Democrat is at least a slight favorite to win the election, and in the interim, there are some Supreme Court cases that will likely end in a 4-4 tie in a manner favorable to liberals.  If Scalia were still on the court, he would almost certainly swing the vote to the conservative position.  The biggest one is probably a ruling on Obama's authority to limit emissions from power plants.  A few others are rulings about California teacher unions and how the state of Texas counts voters in a district.

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Another thing that happened is that the government got a court order telling Apple to hack an iPhone owned by that terrorist who shot up the Christmas party in California.  Apparently Apple has made their iPhones more secure in the wake of the Edward Snowden debacle, and the cops don't know how to break into an iPhone without the password.  Apple apparently doesn't know how to do this either and is balking at it (they're appealing the ruling), because it would require them to build a "back door" that currently doesn't exist, and that they don't want to build for customer privacy reasons.  In fact, as I understand it, the latest version of the iPhone, the 6, is so secure that Apple couldn't even break into it if they wanted to.  The terrorist had an earlier version -- the 5c, I believe -- and this apparently is hackable, but not with existing functionality.

I find this case fascinating, but every article I read or podcast I listen to about it, just makes me more confused.  Here are the (perhaps naive) questions I have about it.

1.  If the current functionality to hack the terrorist's phone doesn't exist, but everybody knows it can be built, can't a third-party figure it out?  Could the government turn the phone over to a group of independent hackers and say "do what Apple doesn't want to do?"  Does only Apple have the expertise and background knowledge to do this in a timely fashion?
2. One of the big reasons Apple doesn't want to do it is because they don't want this back door to exist at all.  The government says it's a one-off and will never be used again.  Apple says it will set a precedent and once something exists, you never know who will get their hands on it.  But if the back door is only possible because the phone is an older version, and under the newer version Apple couldn't build it even if they wanted to, then how would precedent be set?  Once everybody starts using the iPhone 6, it won't matter anyway, right?  It seems like some grandstanding on the part of Apple.
3. Is anything ever truly unhackable?  It's only unhackable until a hacker hacks it, right?

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Lastly, the primary races are really starting to heat up -- especially on the Republican side.  Trump continues to confound the naysayers and win votes.  Most the odds makers have him a bit better than 50-50, Rubio a bit worse than 50-50, and everybody else a long shot (with Cruz the only remotely realistic possibility among the long shots).  That seems about right to me.  I'm pulling for Trump.  I think he will get smoked by Hillary in the general election, and I'm loving the way he is destroying the Republicans' myths about their voting base.

On the Democratic side, it's still looking like Clinton all the way.  Sanders is certainly making it a decent fight, but despite his progress, Hillary is still a strong favorite.  Sure, a big upset could happen, but it would be just that -- a big upset.  I for one, really hope it doesn't happen.  I am not feeling the Bern.  I'm sympathetic to his ideals, but I'm a technocrat, and he isn't.  I want the pragmatists, the wonks, the empiricists, the nerds in charge -- I don't want ideologues, even those with whom I largely agree.

OK, that's it, gotta run.  Until next time...

Entry 320: On Coen Brothers Movies

The Coen Brothers dropped a new film recently Hail, Caesar!.  I haven’t seen it yet but probably will at some point in the not too distant future.  I see pretty much every Coen brothers movie.  They are one -- or two, I suppose -- of the only filmmakers, whose films I make it a must to see.  In fact, it's pretty much just them and Quentin Tarantino.  There are other filmmakers I like, but the Coens and Tarantino are the only ones I really make it a point to watch.  Incidentally, Tarantino came out with a new film himself relatively recently The Hateful Eight (which I also haven't seen, but want to) but in this post I’m going to talk about the Coen brothers because I am inspired by this article.

I think the author mostly gets it right, not completely right, but I would say more right than the voters in the readers' poll.  (If you vote at the end of the story you can see the readers' picks.)  Here's the “real” ranking, i.e., my ranking.  I haven't seen Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing, The Ladykillers, or Hail, Caesar!, so I can't rank those, but 13 out of 17 is enough to make the definitive list, right?  I think so.

The list:

13  Intolerable Cruelty
12  O Brother, Where Art Thou?
11  The Hudsucker Proxy
10  Barton Fink
9    Inside Llewyn Davis
8    True Grit
7    Burn After Reading
6    Raising Arizona
5    No Country for Old Men
4    Fargo
3    A Serious Man
2    The Man Who Wasn't There
1    Big Lebowski

And here’s some commentary broken down into category form.

Three Most Overrated Movies
1.  O Brother Where Art Thou?
This is easily their most overrated movie.  I wouldn’t even say it’s a good movie, but the readers have it in the top five.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but I recall it just being a hodgepodge of weird scenes.  There was no there there – no movie there.  That it is supposed to be based on The Odyssey does absolutely nothing for me.  There best thing about it by far is the soundtrack.

2.  Raising Arizona
Solid movie, but I watched it relatively recently and didn’t think it was nearly as funny as I remembered.  Part of this might be the pacing and style of comedies of that era -- the timing often seems slow when you watch them now.  Really great movies last the test of time, and this one doesn't quite hold up.  I put it in the overrated category because the author of the article ranked it no. 1, and it doesn’t even crack my top five.  It does, however, have one of my all-time favorite Coen brothers' lines in it.  A police officer is questioning the crusty old tycoon Nathan Arizona about what his missing child was wearing the night he disappeared.

Police Officer: What did the pajamas look like?
Nathan Arizona: I don't know. They were jammies! They had Yodas and shit on 'em!  

3.  No Country for Old Men
Great movie – just not Oscar-winning great (in my opinion; The Academy obviously feels differently).  That’s why I'm proclaiming this one overrated.  Fantastic individual performances (especially Javier Bardem), fantastic individual scenes (especially those containing Javier Bardem), but as a coherent, complete movie it came up just a tad short – the sum of the individual parts were better than the whole.  The buildup was fantastic, but there was no payoff, and I really wanted some sort of payoff.  I think they couldn’t write a good ending, so they did the artsy thing and just abruptly ended it.  To me, it felt much more like a copout than anything else.

Three Most Underrated Movies
1.  A Serious Man
I love this movie.  In fact, I think I might love this movie more than any other Coen brothers fan loves this movie, being that it barely makes the voters' list at all.  I have it as the Coens' third best all-time, ahead of Fargo by a sliver, because it’s more my style of movie.  I like movies about really interesting characters where nothing “exciting” happens, as opposed to thrillers.  The biggest knock on this movie, however, is that it does the thing I was just complaining about: it ends out of nowhere.  This wasn’t nearly as unsatisfying for me as it was in No Country for Old Men though.

2.  Burn After Reading
This one was much stupided than most other Coen brothers movies – by which I mean it was goofy and silly, not unintelligent.  But it was pretty fun (lighthearted, in a very dark way) and pretty funny.  So I put it in my top-10, higher than the author or the readers.

3.  The Man Who Wasn’t There
No. 2 on my list.  Billy Bob at his finest, with Frances McDormand also giving a boffo performance.  This has one of my favorite Coen brothers scenes in it of all-time.  The one where the woman comes to the barber’s door to talk to him about space aliens... You have to see it to get it.

Boringest Movie
Inside Llewyn Davis
Here’s how this went for me – drag, drag, drag, drag, kinda funny part, drag, drag, drag, drag, way too long song, drag, drag, drag, another way too long song, drag, drag, drag, another kind funny part, drag, drag, drag.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  Yet, weirdly, I didn’t think it was a bad movie.  I don’t think it was great, and I never want to watch it again, but it wasn’t bad.

Excitingest Movie
Fargo
Actually, it's probably No Country for Old Men -- I think I was much more rapt during that one -- but I already talked about it, so I'll give some love to Fargo instead.  Great, great movie, and the TV show is pretty solid too.

The Worst
Intolerable Cruelty
Honestly, I don't even remember much about this movie, but one of things I do remember is that I really didn’t like it.  I think it was one of those every-other-scene-is-a-plot-twist type of movies -- the conman is actually getting conned by his mark, but she’s getting conned by her friend, who’s getting conned by the conman's accountant, but the quiet old woman nobody suspects is conning them all, but the original conman knows this so he’s conning her, so on and so forth.  I really dislike those movies.  If everything is a plot twist then there are no plot twists, because the audience isn't expecting anything anymore, so there is nothing to twist.  Much like the abrupt non-ending ending, it feels like a copout.

The Best
The Big Lebowski
And frankly it's not even really close.  The Coen brothers mainly write comedy and Lebowski is by far their funniest movie.  In fact, in my opinion, it's the funniest movie ever.  (Or rather, I should say, it's the funniest comedy ever.  I think Pulp Fiction actually made me laugh more the first time I saw it, but Pulp Fiction isn't a comedy in the same way The Big Lebowski is.)  There are so many Lebowski scenes I could end on, but let's go with this one.  It's probably my favorite.



Until next time...

Entry 319: For the First Time in Three Years I Don't Really Give a Shit about the Super Bowl, So This Post has Nothing to Do with the Super Bowl

Some sad news from this past week: S’s grandma passed away.  Now, this is only sad in the way that it is sad anytime anybody dies – S’s grandma, after all, was quite old and had been severely enfeebled for the past few months or so – but it is sad nonetheless.  S’s mom sent her text about it Thursday night after she was already in bed.  I noticed the text on S’s phone as I was getting into bed, but her phone wasn’t showing the names of the people who had texted, only the numbers, so I had a brief moment of panic in which I thought the text was from S’s sister saying that their mom had died!  The text said “Avva passed away” and the only “Avva” I know is S’s mom, because it’s what Lil’ S1 calls her (it’s Kannada for maternal grandmother), so I was like “OH GOD NO!” Before quickly realizing that it couldn’t be about S’s mom because (a) S’s sister wouldn’t text this to S and then not follow up on it; (b) S and her sister calls her mom Amma, not Avva.

So I put two and two together, but then I found myself in the awkward position of having to decide whether or not to wake S up to tell her the bad news or just let her find out in the morning.  I decided on the latter under the better-to-be-rested-nothing-she-can-do-about-it-now-anyway rationale, but then she woke up on her own to use the bathroom, so I told her then.  Not waking her up to tell her is one thing, not telling her after she is already awake is another.  She called her mom, and they talked for a bit, and then she came back to bed.  Both she and her mother seem to be doing okay.  I mean, like I said, S’s grandma was really old, and all really old people die in the near future.  So it’s only tragic if you consider death (and by extension existence) a tragedy in and of itself -- I go back and forth on this one, personally.

[All that remains from the massive snow storm two weeks ago]

Speaking of S’s mom, we’ve been doing pretty well without her so far.  In some ways, it is good she left because it forces us to set a more structured routine with our kids and stick to it.  For example, Lil’ S2 was waking up a lot during the night when S’s mom was here, because she comforts him immediately every time he starts crying (she can’t help herself).  For her this isn't such a big deal, because if she doesn't sleep during the night, she can nap during the day, but we can’t roll like that, so we did cry it out, and now, not even a week later, he’s sleeping pretty soundly until about 7 a.m.  Well, actually, S gets him up around 4:30 and feeds him and then he sleeps until 7.  That’s an important piece of the routine that S would probably not want me to omit.  Also, Lil’ S1 has one fewer adult around to try to cajole into giving him what he wants.  That’s a good thing.  I’m always worrying that this kid is getting too spoiled.

But I’ll be damned if he doesn’t say some funny shit.  A few of my favorites: glubs (gloves); tow-food (tofu); scrapter (scraper, a type of truck in one of his books), and being-haive (“Daddy, daddy, can I watch something?  I’m being-haive.”).  He also has a memory like a black hole.  He just pulls in information and doesn’t let it go.  I’ve learned to give him the benefit of the doubt when he tells me something I think isn’t right, as often it is right and I’m wrong or I’m misunderstanding what he’s saying.  And now, when this happens, he follows it up with “See!  I told you!”  This bodes well for the future.  I would love to have a little know-it-all son.

In other news, I’ve been keeping tabs on the presidential primaries, which are getting pretty interesting.  On the Republican side, I’m firmly in the Donald Trump camp.  It is a sad state of affairs when the best candidate one of our two major political parties has to offer is an odious, xenophobic, chauvinistic farce of a man, but here we are.  I genuinely want Trump to win the nomination, and it’s not just because I think he would get crushed in the general election.  He’s legitimately the least worst candidate.  (Jonathan Chait lays out the liberals-for-Trump case nicely in this article.  I find his Schwarzenegger-Trump analogy a bit lacking -- Schwarzenegger never said anything close to as bad as Trumps ban on Muslim immigration -- but I agree with the bigger picture.)

On the other side of the coin, I go back and forth every few days, but I find, on the macro-level, I'm gradually gravitating toward Hillary.  I like Bernie Sanders, I think he's good for politics; I think he's good for the country; and I think he's been good for the Democratic Party; but I highly dubious that he would make a good president at this moment in time under these circumstances.  Maybe the presidency of the United States isn't the best place to lead a revolution because the Constitution specifically limits the powers of any one branch of government, and right now Democrats hold the power in exactly one of those, and that is highly unlikely to change for at least the next few election cycles.

Also, I don't like that Sanders and his supporters are constantly trying to portray him as the people's candidate and Hillary as the candidate for corporate, sell-out shills.  In reality, Clinton has a massive lead on Sanders among women, labor unions, and minorities -- that's hardly what I would call "The Man."

Anyway, I'm sure I will have more to say as the big election draws near, but for now, I must leave you.  Oh, one more thing, we started watching the show Fargo.  It's pretty good so far.  At the beginning they say it's based on a true story, and I wanted to find out how true the true story is.  So I Googled "Is the TV sh" and look what popped up!  This is probably the second most prescient Google moment I've ever witnessed.

Until next time...

Entry 318: Snow

Snow!

As forecasted we did indeed get a bundle of it -- two and a half feet to be more precise.  Most of it is still here, doing nothing but inconveniencing everybody.  It's blocking parking spots, taking up entire lanes of highway, making sections of the sidewalks unwalkable, and making people's feet wet and their eyes sore.  It's now that nasty yellowish-brown, sludgy snow, not the pure white snow that you here about in Christmas songs.

Snow is like your roommate's hard-partying friend in college.  You know that guy.  He's a nice enough fellow, but a bit too much of a fuckup for you.  He doesn't actually go to school because he can't handle the responsibility and because he has two DUIs and a misdemeanor for fleeing arrest on his record (and the misdemeanor will go up to a felony if he doesn't stay out of trouble for two years).  Every now and then he comes to visit your roommate and you guys all have a party and drink and laugh and have a good time.  But by Monday, when, on your way to class, you are stepping over his prostrate carcass, passed out on your kitchen floor, fully clothed, with a half-smoked cigarette in his mouth, you just want him to go away ASAP.  That's how snow is.

[This is a cool picture of my street during a calm in the storm]

Actually, rereading that, that's not a great analogy.  How about this: Snow a is likely a beautiful woman who has emotional issues, and ...  Oh, screw it.  Snow is like snow.  It is very cool while it's falling majestically from the sky and blanking out your city like an eraser on a whiteboard.  But it leaves you with an awful mess and a huge headache in its aftermath.  At this point, it can't melt fast enough for me.

But Lil' S1 certainly enjoyed it while it was still fresh.  School was canceled Friday, Monday, and Tuesday, so we had five days with him home, which was trying, but the fact that we could put him in his boots and his snowsuit and take him outside for a few hours everyday made things much more bearable than they would have been otherwise.  Also, he could play with his little friend down the street, which was nice.

[My car the morning after]

One thing I don't like about the snow is that it exposes my inadequacies as a preparer.  I would be a terrible boy scout.  I never have the appropriate gear for a situation.  On Sunday we walked to our friends' house and our friend C is on his roof shoveling snow from it.  His walkways are already completely clear, and he's decked out in Gor-tex with ski bib pants and buff snow boots and all that.  Meanwhile, I'm wearing hand-me-down boots that my dad gave me, like, ten years ago (and that give me awful blisters), sweats over jeans, and a normal rain jacket.  Also, I don't even own a snow shovel.  I had to borrow his.  And then I accidentally broke it (still works though), so I had to tell him I will buy him a new one.  And then a small avalanche of snow slid off our roof, so I had to re-shovel the walk, so I had to ask a different friend to borrow his shovel, because of course I'm not going to ask somebody whose shovel I just broke to use it again.

But now everything is done.  We have a nice clear path from the sidewalk to our front door, and our car is completely dug out -- one of them anyway.  After shoveling for a few hours, I sized up the amount of effort it was going to take to dig out our other car, and thought, "nah... we can get by with one car until this stuff melts."  So the only thing I have left to do snow related is buy a couple of shovels -- one for my friend, one for me for the next time it snows.  Although, what I really should do is think about the things we're going to need in the summer and buy them now, while they are cheap and in stock.  Now that would be smart... I probably won't do that.

[Before and after, the after photo was taken today, a week later; still a lot of snow on the ground]

OK, a few quick hitters before I go.

-Election year.  After being very supportive of Bernie Sanders in the beginning, I'm now leaning begrudgingly toward Hillary.  A lot of the recent criticism against Sanders is ringing true to me.  It's not the electability factor (in our sharply divided, two-party system winning the primary of a major party automatically makes you electable, in my opinion).  It's that the finances of his proposals -- particularly with respect to health care -- don't add up.  And this is assuming he could pass them through Congress, which he obviously couldn't.

Also, it doesn't help woo voters like me, when Sanders and his supporters dismiss all criticism against him (even from people who big-picture agree with him) as "hatchet jobs" drummed up by establishment sell-outs and corporate hacks.*  This is the same noxious deflection that many anti-vaxxers use to defend their ridiculous positions.  Anybody who disagrees with them is ipso facto a slave to Big Pharma.

-Another thing I don't like about Sanders is that he talks about moneyed influence in much the same way Conservatives talk about big government.  That is, it's a bad thing, in and of itself, without further explanation.  But I think that's the wrong way to look at things.  Just as big government isn't necessarily bad, neither is the influence of money in politics.  Wasteful, inefficient big government is bad; the corruptive influence of money in politics is bad.  But neither of things is a certainty in all cases.

For example, on a recent episode of the podcast The Weeds the hosts make the point that moneyed interests are often times more practical and empirically-based than the general public and its elected leaders and that can lead to actual compromises and results that we wouldn't achieve otherwise.  Obamacare is an example of this -- the insurance industry was obviously a major reason why it passed -- and if you don't like Obamacare, then there is also the debt ceiling debacle.  Absent the influence of Wall Street, Republicans might have actually been stubborn enough to take us over the cliff.  Money is not ideological in the way humans are; its only goal is to make more money.  This can (and often is) a very bad thing, but it can be a good thing too.  (Big business often opposes discriminatory laws as well.)  It just depends on how we regulate it and keep it in check.

-I tweaked my shoulder somehow and shoveling aggravated it.  It's not enough that I'm going to go the doctor or anything like that, but it's definitely enough to annoy me.  That's one of the underrated bad parts about getting older: You're never completely injury-free.

-S's mom left us today.  S's dad has to get shoulder surgery (speaking of shoulder injuries) on Tuesday, so she has to go back to South Carolina to help him out.  She's coming back in a month and will likely stay until the summer, but this month is going to be challenging.  I've gotten used to sleeping uninterrupted until 7:30 every morning.  There goes that luxury.

-Somebody on Facebook just posted that it's supposed to snow another couple of inches this weekend.  Dear god, I hope they're wrong.

Well, that's about it.  Before we go though, how about another dose of Snow?!



Until next time...

*Here's perhaps the most illustrative passage when it comes Bernie supporters dismissing all criticism against them as illegitimate:

In addition to multiple barbs thrown by the New York Times‘ Paul Krugman, the Washington Post editorial board just recently unloaded on Sanders in a laughable hit piece called “Bernie Sanders’ fiction-filled campaign.” I call it laughable because the editorial’s opening argument, made with a straight face, suggests that Sanders is wrong to say Wall Street needs additional regulations because Wall Street has been thoroughly regulated. 

Um, okay. 

What the establishment’s collective Bernie Sanders freakout essentially boils down to is this: a candidate who now has a serious chance at becoming the next President of the United States is promising to give the power and wealth they’ve been hoarding back to the people they stole it from. And that scares the shit out of them.

Right.  Paul Krugman is scared shitless by Sanders' position of redistributing wealth from the top down.  That's why he's been relentlessly advocating for this very thing since I started reading him.  And the author doesn't even attempt to rebut WaPo's position that when Sanders is pressed about how he is going to afford all his social programs, his answers start to sound a lot like Republicans explaining their tax plans -- everything seems to rely heavily on questionable assumptions about growth and fiscal improvement.

Entry 317: Making a Hamburger

We finished the Netflix series Making a Murderer, and I have a few thoughts on it.  Oh boy, do I have a few thoughts on it.  Immediately after watching the final scene of the final episode, I started formulating these thoughts into a coherent narrative in my head, because I wanted to write a blog post about it.  And then, in doing some further reading, I came across this article, which basically makes the exact case I was going to make -- right down to the irony encapsulated in the final lines (the filmmakers doing the very thing they caution against, but on the other side).  So now I effectively cannot write the blog post I was intending to write, because it would just end up being an inferiorly written knock-off of the linked article.  Instead I will just give you a brief summary of my Making a Murderer thoughts.

It wasn’t a bad series.  It tells a fascinating story, and the problems the filmmakers address with the criminal justice system -- both in general and with the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office in particular -- are very real.  The way the cops get tunnel vision and go after suspects, seemingly without the slightest hint that they might be wrong, is highly disturbing.  So are interrogation techniques, in which investigators feed confused and/or scared suspects the story they want to hear, and then call it a confession when the suspect inevitably parrots it back to them.  (The hardest part of the series to watch is investigators coaxing a mentally slow teenager, with no council present, into admitting involvement in a very serious crime.)  Confessions, along with eye-witness testimony (which the series touches on briefly, in the beginning), are still bedrocks of our legal system, even though they have been proven to be much, much, much less reliable than we think.  That Making a Murderer demonstrates this in a powerful, intriguing manner is a very laudable achievement.

With that said, as illustrated in the first linked article, the series has major credibility issues.  The filmmakers cherry-picked the evidence they chose to show in a way that makes the state’s case against Steven Avery and Brandon Dassey seem weaker than it really was.  Further, they omit key facts from Avery’s background and the testimony of people who knew him that paint a picture of a man with strong proclivities for sexual assault and violence against women.*  Because of this I find the series very dishonest and even irresponsible.  It’s simply not the exploration of truth and justice that it presents itself to be.  For this reason, it ultimately fails its viewers in a big way.  If you haven’t watched it yet and you want to, you should.  But keep all this in mind as you do.

And if you wondering, I think – I don’t know, but I think – both Avery and Dassey were involved in the crime in some manner, and I further think that some of the evidence was “massaged” by somebody (or somebodies) in the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office.  In my opinion, there were enough improprieties in the defendants' prosecutions that retrials should be strongly considered.  Even “bad” people deserve fair trials.  And that could have been the message of Making a Murderer.  Instead they went a different way – a way in which doubt was not properly emphasized and innocence was strongly implied – and in so doing, I believe they ruined what could have been an excellent product.

On a macro-level, what it ultimately boils down to is a question I keep coming back to: Why can’t everybody think like me?  By this I don’t mean that I wish everybody shared all my opinions or liked all the things that I like; I mean that I wish everybody tried to look at things objectively and form opinions and make decisions based on neutral observations -- that is, based on reality rather than what one might want reality to be.  We couldn't get it perfect, of course, we all have biases, but we could do a lot better than we are doing right now.

The Right clearly is the worst offenders when it comes to this.  They are the side of ideology and religion, pretty much exclusively.  But there are elements of it on the Left as well.  I was reminded of this when I was checking out Facebook and came across a long thread about how we should boycott Girl Scout cookies.  The reason?  GSA has the audacity to -- get this -- believe in science.  Sigh…

GMOs and organic food and things of the like are something I’ve done a complete 180 on.  I used to think it made sense to shop organic and go for the “natural” brands and all that, but I’ve come to realize that it is probably pretty much all bullshit.  (Although I still do buy a fair amount of organic food, because I like to support local small businesses, which are often organic, and because there are certain organic brands whose products I think taste better.)  A friend of mine from high school – a Ph.D. in chemistry – frequently posts on social media about this topic, and her arguments are largely what turned me around on the subject.  Also, Bill Nye changed his mind, and that dude is usually spot on.

[My name is Jonas, DC's in the red... Thanks for all you've shown us, your weekend is dead...]

Anyway…

In other news, it is supposed to snow here in DC on Saturday – like big-time snow, like two-feet-of-snow snow.  Of course, I remember a time when I was at UMD, and a snowstorm like this was predicted, so they canceled school the night before the storm was supposed to hit, and then not a single flake fell.  The truth is, we aren’t very good at predicting the weather.  Actually, that’s probably a mischaracterization.  The real truth is likely that future weather is a random event of which there is no certain outcome, and so the best we can do is assign probabilities to possible outcomes -- and the thing about possible outcomes is that they aren't definite.  (I remember hearing once in an academic talk that meteorologists actually do a pretty good job of estimating these probabilities – like roughly half the time they say there is a 50% chance of rain, it rains.)

I think this fact (that future weather is a random event) is part of the reason why people think meteorologists are more wrong than they are.  If somebody sees an 80% chance of rain, and then it doesn’t rain, they think the forecast was wrong.  But that’s not necessarily true, because the forecast allowed for a 20% chance of not raining – and any particular day of no rain could be part of that 20%.  The way a forecast is wrong is if its percentages don’t match up with reality over a large sample -- like if a meteorologist said there was an 80% chance of rain 100 times and out of those it only rained 30 times, then one could safely conclude the forecasting model is wrong.  (And by the way, this isn’t restricted to weather, people don’t understand randomness and statistics in many fields.  As a sports fan, this frequently drives me crazy.)

But back to this weekend.  I’m definitely not looking forward to such a snowstorm if it actually materializes.  Snow is fine if you don’t have anywhere to go and you don’t have young children.  But with a hyperactive three-year-old and a little baby to boot, heavy snowfall is going to be dreadful.  What are we going to do?  There are only so many snowmen you can build before you get cold and run out of dry clothes.  And Lil’ S1 already watches too much iPad.  And he already gets on our nerves if he’s inside for more than three minutes.  How are we going to survive three days?  It’s not even fun to drink (a snow day staple in the good ol’ days) because you know you are going to have to wake up at the crack of dawn to the sound of somebody crying in your ear (usually one of my kids… occasionally my wife).  Ugh... Kids... they kinda ruin everything, huh?

Anyway, that’s about all I have time for today.

Until next time…


*To me, the most egregious omission of evidence is the fact that Dassey told the police that he helped Avery remove the battery from the victim’s car, and then they found Avery’s DNA under the hood.  So much was made of blood samples linking Avery to the car – were they planted? – I felt totally cheated finding out later that even without the blood they could place him at the car.  The filmmakers responded to this (and other questions), but not in a very thorough or convincing manner.  They Tweeted that they omitted it because it was "disputed evidence" and "less significant."  But (a) pretty much all evidence in a criminal trial is disputed -- it's the defense's job to dispute it; (b) it's highly significant because it ties Avery to the car and it corroborates something Dassey told investigators, which they also omitted.

Also, the series really should have gone further into Avery's past.  Even if they didn't know about the stuff with his ex-fiancée there was plenty of stuff out there (I mean, it's never even explained WHY everybody in the area hates him so much).  Apparently Brendan alleged that Avery touched him inappropriately, and there were accusations that Avery molestated other family members.  The series doesn't mention this at all.  (By the way, the entire Avery family sounds like a bunch of sick fucks.  Makes me wonder what was going on in their childhood, and it also makes me wonder if the sympathy I felt for Avery's parents while watching the movie was well-founded or not -- in most cases you reap what you sow.)  And when they mention anything sordid about his past, they do so very briefly.  At one point in one of the early episodes, they quickly flash a letter on the screen he wrote to his ex-wife, in which he threatens to kill her, and then don’t say anything else about it.  And I remember being confused, and thinking, “Wait, did he just write to his wife that he’s going to kill her?”

Entry 316: Is There Life on Mars?

Is there life on Mars?  Probably not.  However, there might be in the relatively near future.  But I'll get to that in second.

First, I want to pay tribute, in my own small way, to David Bowie, who died of cancer about a week ago.  Bowie was probably number one on my list of "Artists I Love But Don't Own Much of Their Music."  Somewhere I have a Bowie's greatest hits album that I bought about 20 years ago, but that's about it.  I don't own any of his studio albums, and I haven't downloaded any of his songs individually.  I just kinda picked up Bowie along the way -- like, somebody burned me the Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou soundtrack and he has some good songs on it (including the eponymous "Life on Mars").  Or when I worked at The Sports Authority one summer, they would play the same prepackaged mixed tape over and over throughout the store, and David Bowie's collaboration with Trent Reznor "I'm Afraid of Americans" was on it (odd selection, huh?).  Then there is Queen's "Under Pressure," on which he makes a guest appearance.  (It's a song I hear randomly all the time, but still one I really like.)  And, of course, his bizarre "Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy" duo with Bing Crosby.  I first started listening to this song ironically, because it's such an unusual pairing and the video has that ridiculous, campy intro, but after a while it grew on me, and I legitimately like it now.  They actually harmonize really well.  I guess that's what happens when people have genuine talent -- even when they make something incredibly cheesy, it still comes out really good.

Anyway, R.I.P. David Bowie.



In other news, I was listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson's Startalk podcast the other day, and he had a fellow on named Bas Lansdorp, who heads a nonprofit called Mars One, whose mission is to put human beings on Mars by 2027.  I don't think this will happen, but I do find the project fascinating all the same.

What makes Mars One different from any previously proposed Mars missions is that Lansdorp doesn't plan on bringing his astronauts back.  He wants to create a permanent colony on Mars.  This has advantages -- apparently a return trip is where a large percentage of the difficult and the cost lies -- but it has the obvious disadvantage in that the colonizers might get to Mars, run into problems and die.  There are huge logistical obstacles to keeping people alive indefinitely on Mars, and we probably don't have the technology to do this.

Yet.

To me, that is the key word: yet.  When President Kennedy announced in 1961 that man would walk on the moon by the end of the decade, I'm sure not all the technology existed.  But eight years later his pronouncement came to fruition, because smart people developed the technology that needed to be developed and other smart people solved the engineering problems that needed to be solved.  Why can't smart people do that for a Mars mission too?

One obvious answer: money.  Putting people safely on Martian soil, if even possible, is going to cost billions and billions of dollars, and Mars One doesn't appear to have that much money.  In fact, according to Wikipedia (see above link), they have less than $1 million.  One of Lansdorp's solutions to this is to make the Mars mission into a TV show and sell it to a network, which, I don't think is a terrible idea, but it is problematic for a few reasons.  For one thing, this is essentially turning the mission into a reality TV show, which denigrates it in many people's eyes (right or wrongly) because of our perception of reality TV.  For another thing, what happens if things start going badly, like, really badly?  Is the public going to tune in to watch a group of explorers die in space or starve to death on another planet?  Actually, they probably would -- I would -- it would beyond fascinating, but the backlash would probably set back any future Mars missions for decades.

It was very interesting to listen to the commentators on the podcast.  Not including people involved directly with the Mars One project, there were three people with technical knowledge -- Tyson, Bill Nye, and a former NASA astronaut name Mike Massimino -- and it was two-against-one.  Both Nye and Massimino dislike the Mars One project -- or, at least, look upon it askance -- and Tyson was kinda in favor it.  I'm with Tyson.  Mars One is mostly getting shit on; people in the media have called it "unrealistic", compared it dismissively to the TV show "Big Brother", and even labeled it a "scam" -- but I think this criticism is mostly off-base.

1.  If it's unrealistic, then let's work to make it realistic, like the countless other major engineering feats that seemed impossible at first blush.  The steam engine, rail travel, homes powered by electricity, the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, Apollo 11, driverless cars, rockets that can land -- how many of these would people have believed 10 or 20 years before they were invented?  If we only did things that were "realistic," we would never do anything cool.  One thing I noticed that we do as a society is we say "that will never happen" to a lot of things, and then when they actually do happen, we just kinda shrug our shoulders and get on with our lives.  And then after that thing becomes the new normal, we move on to the next thing that can't happen.  This is most prominent in politics, but I think it applies to technology as well.

2.  The TV show aspect of Mars One strikes me more as a means than an end.  If there was a better way to raise funds, it might not part of the deal at all.  (In fact, Lansdorp has said before that he hopes a multibillionaire will come along and fund his project.)  And why would it be a "reality TV" show?  Why couldn't it be a legitimate documentary style series?  I mean, if people actually did land on Mars, and it was broadcast to the masses, can you imagine that moment?  It would be the most watched event in the history of the world.

3.  After listening to Lansdorp and one of the finalists to be on the maiden voyage, I definitely don't think it's a "scam."  If you think it's a pie-in-the-sky idea, fine, but to call it a scam involves an element of underhandedness that I don't think is there.  So far as I can tell, Lansdorp has been very transparent with the intent and expectations of the mission.  I mean, he is telling people there is a decent chance they will die; it's not like anybody is being tricked.  Personally, even if I didn't have a family, I don't think I would ever consider taking a one-way trip to Mars, but I think I would think about it.

I guess the bottom line is, I'm not saying that I believe in Lansdorp and that Mars One is going to succeed, but I am saying I would like to see it try.  If it all goes horribly wrong, and everybody drifts off into space, so be it.  The crew is signing up for that possibility, and our history is littered with noble pioneers who died trying.  Plus, think if they actually do get to Mars, even if they starve to death within two months (which is what many experts believe), it will be one of the most remarkable accomplishments in human history.  Sure, it will be sad if a crew of young people die before their time, but look at what they got to do.  I mean, we are all going to die -- would you pick to do it at age 85 in relative anonymity in a hospital with tubes stuck into every limb in your body, or would you do it at age 35, a hero to millions, on a planet on which no human had ever set foot before you arrivied?  I would probably pick the former, but I know a lot of people who would pick the latter, and I don't think it's crazy, by any means.

Okay, that's all I got.  Until next time...