Fuck this year.

> All kinds of terrible things have happened this year.
>
> I am at MIA, with my mom and sister, about to board a plane to Rio. A few hours later, we'll be joined by my brother.
>
> I'll spend my birthday at a funeral for my grandmother, who died unexpectedly of a heart attack yesterday. She was supposed to be arriving in the U.S. this Sunday morning to spend the holidays with us. Instead, we have a few days there to do all the tedious and cruel legal shit that follows an unexpected death before scampering back to the U.S. to have a grandmother-less Christmas. After my last final, of course.
>
> I'm not a big birthday person. I don't ask for much. I would prefer, however, not to spend it in a cemetery in Niterói, giving my grandmother a place to rest next to her late husband.
>
> Repeat: fuck this year.

Of Election Results and Shame

The day after the midterms this year, I was in a weeklong meeting with people from a variety of different African nations. During these weeklong meetings, you tend to fall into a pleasant rhythm of amicable "ain't you tired of this thing too?" banter over a catered breakfast before spending the next 6 hours bashing your head repeatedly against a brick wall of language and document editing. The folks from Africa tell us what strange facet of America they've encountered via the airwaves the night before – "what exactly is it that the phrase 'G.O.P.' stands for? Who are they?" – or, "evidently, the issue of querying blood donors about polygamy isn't strictly an African problem! What is this 'Sister Wives' show I've seen?" – while those of us from the office try to provide answers and/or context.

The day after the election last month, our room was in a fairly distraught mood – not just because of the electoral teagasm, but partly because most of us in the room who live in the District aren't fans of Vincent Gray. The day before, he had given a smarmy speech with Marion Barry standing directly beside him. Gray ran a kind of unnecessarily divisive campaign against the incumbent, Fenty, who most people think did a pretty decent job (even if he came across as kind of an arrogant prick.) Gray made several insinuations that under Fenty, life in the city hadn't improved for all voters, and that it was time for a boom that would help the wards that were being left behind. Like I said, unnecessarily divisive from a racial standpoint, and demonstrably untrue from a spending standpoint.

This led of course to some of us explaining why Marion Barry was such an embarrassment to the city, and it may have even been implied that, for someone who had done very little to take care of his health, his longevity was fairly admirable if a tad irritating. This general subject of embarrassment then led to a comment about, sheesh, and now the teapeople will be representing the U.S. abroad, and their understanding of America is so dim that we have to wonder how they see the rest of the world.

"Embarrassing? You think you know embarrassment at your elected leaders?" asked one of the South Africans. Oh, right. Jacob Zuma now, Thabo Mbeki a few years ago. We nod and feel a little vexed to be making such a big deal out of a few teafolk. "And then there's L___!"

Indeed. Someone from Zimbabwe. She definitely has it worse, considering that Robert Mugabe is one of the worst people on the planet. Someone said, to alleviate the awkwardness, "I remember being in Zim in 1999, or so, and everyone was just so ecstatic because they thought…well, they thought he couldn't live much longer."

She answers, "Indeed, he is like your Marion Barry." After some more talk, she added a fairly somber thought – something to the extent of, "In Zimbabwe, you keep your head down and mind your own business. It's easy to die. It's very easy to die in Zimbabwe."

And that was all it took for us to realize that our problems are very much first-world problems. And this is in fact a helpful prism through which to view just about anything.

Example: My internet router at home needs to be powercycled more often than I'd like?

First world perspective: So, a box that gives me a fairly reliable and fast connection to the Internet from my expensive condo in a fairly posh neighborhood occasionally makes it so that I need to wait 30 seconds in order to get online with either my smartphone, one of my two laptops, or my ipad? It occasionally makes it difficult for me to stream some of the 600 gigs of media to a pair of expensive cherrywood speakers? Poor me. Life is SO difficult. I guess I'll simply retreat to the safety of my warm apartment, brew a pot of Peets coffee, and eat some of the abundant leftovers stored in my fridge, while I contemplate how difficult it is to be me.

Example: Drivers are so mean to pedestrians when it's snowing or raining!

First world perspective: Oh heavens! The well-paved streets on which I walk (safely at most times of day or night, I might add), to get to a form of public transit that, while flawed, is still better than the public transit in all but a handful of American cities, in order to get to my well-paid job in a building that is secure, where I have virtually all of the resources I need to perform the tasks assigned to me, are occasionally populated by inconsiderate drivers who occasionally fail to pause a complete beat at a stop sign for me to cross. LIFE IS SO UNFAIR.

It's kind of a big day for Fluminense.

Here's hoping that in a few hours, I'm crying tears of joy. Not like that other time.

Another chapter of...The Trumpeter Chronicles

I’m in the office kitchen, rinsing off a Tupperware container – still burping up Banana Leaves’ awesome baba tofu curry – when in walks the Trumpeter.

“So, did you have a nice Thanksgiving?” Trying to shift the conversation away from me while saying as little as possible, I say, “Yes, it was lovely. How was yours?”

“Well, [husband] and I went to a restaurant, and we had a great time.” I let this sit. “So, no cooking at home for you? Like everyone else does?”  She quickly tries to explain that for her, Thanksgiving is “all about turkey.” She qualifies this in a way that suggests that she believes it is odd to insist on turkey on Thanksgiving. “So,” I ask, “they did a special Thanksgiving menu?” “Well, yes, but what’s most important, is that they also had all their regular items. Which was great, because we decided we should go back there some other time.”

I let this sink in. She didn’t go out with her husband to celebrate Thanksgiving at a restaurant she knows, or even a fancy one, given the way she dresses (bag lady chic.) She apparently didn’t even specifically go out seeking a Thanksgiving meal from a restaurant. She just went to some random restaurant, where they happened to be serving turkey. None of this is all that weird, I guess, but it’s hard to capture context. For example, as she’s telling me this, do you know what she’s doing? She’s microwaving leftover McDonald’s French fries. About a half a serving, I’d say. Did she really set aside the second half of her fries the night before and decide she’d get a lunch out of them?

Sigh.  

don't you love it when...

...you drive to a different part of town that you only visit every couple of years - ahem, the DC DMV inspection station on Half Street - and when you come back to your own part of town, everything looks slightly unfamiliar and different? I can't explain why this happens, but I always find it exhilarating.

Emusic is not my beat, but I will fearlessly address something of no interest to anyone anyway.

"Gordon" does a much better job with emusic than I do, but here are some thoughts nonetheless:

One of the great things about emusic, which this catalog addition will irreversibly change, was the fact that you were somewhat limited in your choices. The fact that you had prepaid for the month or year meant that the money was essentially a sunk cost, and it allowed you to take chances that you otherwise might not have. With a $7.99 transaction cost, I would never have discovered a band like the Rural Alberta Advantage:



It's a lovely little indie debut - heartfelt, awkward, largely about failed relationships, growing old, and moving to a big lonely city. And it's an album that feels totally mine, because I stumbled across it on emusic and thought, "why the hell not?" It matched the number of downloads I had left for the month, and it was "use it or lose it." If they're competing for my attention with canonical things that I never got around to picking up - say, Neil Young, or Prince - I'm probably going to be more likely to spend those downloads on musical vitamins than I am on a wild gamble.

Of course, I'm blaming emusic for my own behavior here, but there was something really liberating about the emusic outlook, and the idea that you're choosing music from a slightly skewed catalog. The constraints were nice, actually, because it meant that I could be current on whatever pitchfork's flavor du jour was, and I could also get a little wacky:



Why the hell not, right? Plus, given the lengths of each track on the Lindstrom - Prins Thomas album, you were looking at a real deal. And this brings us to the other problem I have with the pricing scheme: Fela Kuti albums are no longer 2-4 downloads. Jazz albums - many of which are under 50 minutes in length and no more than 5-7 tracks - will cost the same as a 14-track, 65-minute long indie record. Theoretically. The upside is that, potentially, hip-hop albums will carry less of a penalty (given all the skits, non-musical tracks, etc.) A lot of these trends had actually started once emusic moved from downloads to credits, but I'm afraid that the move to actual dollar values will continue this trend. If a Fela Kuti album is 12 tracks, I'll look for a hard copy in the discount bin instead of getting it from emusic.

Citizens Against Government Waste Apparently Not Against Stupidity

I caught this ad on Sunday, right before “Meet the Press,” and found it to be pretty jawdroppingly ugly. But what I failed to realize was just how stupid the ad is.

 

To sum it up: CAGW believe that in a few decades, a random Chinese professor would interpret the collapse of the American economic empire the exact same way that a current teapartier does. WHO KNEW, right? It’s analogous to how Scalia knows that the right way to interpret the Constitution is exactly the way a Regan conservative would interpret it.

 

To review: China, who have a GDP of 4 point some trillion dollars, and enacted a stiumulus bill of 600 or so billion dollars, will be deriding the US’s foolish, 900 billion dollar stimulus? (The US GDP is, of course, in the neighborhood of 14 trillion.)

 

To continue: a Chinese political scientist or economist would mock the US not for deregulation of the financial sector, not for two unaffordable wars, not for fealty to a corporatist interpretation of the free market, but for borrowing from China? A country with a highly centralized economy dictated in stringent terms by the government would mock America for turning its back on practices that do not currently exist in China?

 

The ad doesn’t quite indicate whether this Chinese academic had his “come to Jesus” moment on free market economics, but a small government conservative think tank can dream, can’t it?

 

(Full disclosure: I got into an argument with a CAGW lobbyist a few months ago in class. Who was right about Stupak, huh? The one of us who said he needed support from single issue voters, or the one of us (ahem, me) who said maybe, just maybe, he really did oppose funding for ending pregnancies for purely moral reasons? Incidentally, what makes this story great is that he announced he wouldn’t run for reelection the day after our argument, proving me right.)

 

 

Concussy bruise!

No one asked for this, but you’re getting it anyway. This post-concussy bruise didn’t start to fill in, colorwise, until a few days after the incident. It started out with those pointy bruises you can see, in the shape of a semi-circular series of puncture wounds, not unlike a half-bear-trap, if such a thing were possible. As the days went on, it started to fill out with red hues, and then purple, on to black, and, finally, as the healing gets underway, a yellow tone suggestive of pus. Who wants breakfast???

Concussy

So, I went to a glorious Pavement gig on September 21 with none other than Herr Gordo. It was great catching up, having a raucous night in the city, and feasting on some Nobu afterward.

 

However, a concert that was largely about celebrating the work of a great 1990s band wouldn’t be complete without another kind of flashback – to the Dinkins days, as Malkmus jokes in the liner notes to the S&E reissue. Evidently, I took a vicious blow to the back of the head that left me feeling concussy (as in, memory loss, profound disorientation, etc) and bloody, and staple-y (9 in the back of the head to close the wound.) I got the staples taken out today, and lord do I feel better than I did at around 7 am last Wednesday morning, when I woke up in Bellevue with nary a clue as to how I arrived there.

 

What have I learned? Well, basically, beyond the need for caution and occasional modesty about my levels of alertness after scotch, I’ve learned that it’s absolutely insane to allow football players to get back into a game after a concussion. The experience of thinking a thought but not being able to integrate it into the rest of my brain was incredibly confusing. I would think of an obligation, or something I wanted to do in the not-too-distant future, and instead of having that thought “downloaded” (for lack of a better word) and integrated into the rest of my brain, into whatever I was doing, the thought would just kind of float out there, with no apparent relationship to me or to my thought process.

 

Not having any memories is sort of a blessing, from a PTSD standpoint. I’m still fighting with Bellevue to get a copy of my medical records faxed to my doctor – a process that is unnecessarily difficult and laborious given the flintiness of the hospital’s medical records staff. Given that my wife works in a hospital, she’s aghast at the exchanges we seem to have with Bellevue every day. It seems to unnecessarily add salt to the wound of what was already a pretty harrowing ordeal.

 

Oh, and there’s no way they should have discharged me that morning. My memory of the morning is very episodic – Memento-esque, if you will – and not at all linear. I don’t know what kind of operation they’re running over there, but it’s not one that appears to put a premium on patient safety…

The "real" America

So, here's a feeble attempt at returning to some semblance of regularly writing here, or at the very least, addressing one of the central topics of this blog: American-ness and non-American-ness.

The other day I found myself in a strange situation, talking to someone at Bethesda Naval Hospital. He was a Vietnam vet, and was classmates at the USNA with Jim Webb and Oliver North (whom he called "Larry North.") He actually told a fairly engaging story about how they all used to box each other, because they were in the same weight, and that Webb fought North in the USNA championship bout - a bit after North had completed a full recovery from a nasty leg fracture. Though Webb knew North couldn't turn to the side of his healed leg, he refused to sneak into North's blindside and give him the business. The rest of the boxers couldn't believe Webb was going easy on a guy with one functional leg. Amazingly, there's a reference to this fight on wikipedia.

Anyway, it turns out this guy's son-in-law is the famous cigar marine. And he is VERY proud of his son-in-law, who is evidently running for office on a cookie-cutter tea party-type platform.

The reason I'm talking about this chortly gregarious fella is because earlier I heard someone ask him if he'd left the United States recently, and he said, "No, I have not left the States. I haven't been to DC." I wasn't sure what he meant at first - was he acknowledging DC's non-stateness? If so, that seemed like a pretty unlikely political statement for this guy to make - but then it dawned on me that he was simply repeating the Palin-type trope about how there are real parts of America and not-so-real parts of America.

I thought about this as we packed up the Smart Car for some tailgating on Labor Day. We went to support Ms. AC's hokies in this debacle. (I should hasten to point out that the game itself was actually highly entertaining despite the result - several lead changes in the second half, etc.) We packed up some beers in the back of the car (there's actually storage back there.) We hopped in our little city car and drove out to some big stadium. We may not have had flags adorning our car, and maybe we mostly don't eat meat. Maybe our pregame music is NPR and rather than Bon Jovi, and maybe one of us wasn't even born here. No matter. What we were doing - packing up the car on a national holiday and heading to a football game - should be eminently recognizable to any American.

I thought of this guy as we loaded up the car, of his conception of America somehow excluding us. I can tell you that, in the parking lot, we chatted with strangers, answered (yes) questions about the tiny car we were driving, and even got chummy with some Boise State people. I still don't understand why our existence in America is any less real than anyone else's.

But which version of "The Office"?

This story is pretty undeniably cool, until you get to this paragraph:

To relax at night, Stafford said he has downloaded podcasts via Internet satellite phone by British comedian Ricky Gervais and episodes of the TV show "The Office".

Perhaps my lack of interest in the American version of "The Office" makes me an oddball. But if it's lame that this guy is watching "The Office" in the Amazon - which it is, I think - it's twice as lame if he's watching the American version.

And with that verdict, hopefully I set a new record in the "nitpicking an otherwise impressive achievement" category.

A song for your Wednesday

Delorean's "Ayrton Senna" ep is epic. Too bad they didn't take the high road and follow it up with an ep called "Nelson Piquet." (Wonder about the Venn diagram overlap of people who are into Brazilian Formula One drivers from the 1980s/1990s and people who like electro pop...?) This is off their follow-up album, which is still pretty good.

Linearity, jamming, and soccer.

So, I went to a Dave Matthews Band show, and while I wasn't necessarily super into the idea, I do enjoy some of the band's music. I was of course dreading the utter abundance of douchitude, but it wasn't terrible, crowd-wise.

What caught my attention was that this was very different from the other improv-oriented rock band that I like (Phish.) Phish structures their shows into two sets. No opening act, just about 2.5 hours total of Phish. The first set typically contains more songs, with creative soloing but not necessarily a lot of improv that changes the musical structure of a song. The second set, on the other hand, tends to have longer songs that are broken open and which completely depart from the song's original mold. This makes sense to me: you start with the familiar, you play around with it, and by the second set, you see openings, cracks in songs, that weren't there before.

One of the endearing things about Phish, though, is that sometimes they have no idea how to structure a show. Because these concerts are often held in sports arenas, a friend of mine once referred to them as "a sporting event for hippies." That's not entirely off, though I don't thing likening anything to a sporting event is pejorative (I think Doughboy did when he made that statement, though.) And sports in America are - generalization alert - largely about the ending of the game.

Michael Jordan, John Elway, Doug Flutie, a pre-injury 2006 Gilbert Arenas - they were all inspiring and engaging to sports fans because of late-game heroics. Even Landon Donovan gets on that list now, with the miraculous finish against Algeria. Now, what does this have to do with seeing Dave Matthews at Nationals Park? Well, for starters, the crowd was sitting down for most of the show. I like sitting just as much as the next person, even if it will kill you, but I also enjoy standing quite a bit. I'd say I'm 50/50 on the sitting/standing thing. But at a show? I believe firmly in standing.

So, I noticed that the crowd was basically very complacent - sort of like a first quarter basketball crowd, or a third inning baseball crowd. Why get up? Why get into it? What happens early doesn't matter. It's all about the finish. And of course, as it became clear that the band was playing the last song, everyone was standing and behaving as though they were at a rock show.

What this has to do with soccer is that, in the context of how much ink has been spilled over the question of whether there is something fundamentally un-American about soccer or not (whatever the hell un-American means, right? Harvey Pekar was radically American, and so is Dick Cheney) and one thing that I think most scribes have missed is that in soccer, what happens in the first minute can make all the difference. In American football, there are so many possessions (and the possibility for half-scores in the form of field goals) that a good team can put themselves in position to remain competitive. Same in basketball, where a team can go on a sudden 12-2 run and make a game suddenly competitive. But in soccer, there are no half-scores, and no linear progression.

Put differently: a good drive in football that takes you 80 yards down the field can get you 7 points or 3 points. Unless you mess up, you'll get one of the two. A great possession in soccer can only result in a goal or not result in a goal. There's no reward for good effort - there's only the goal or not the goal. Similarly, a goal scored in the first minute of a game can be decisive. If you believe that the important stuff needs to wait until the end of an event to take place, you may find yourself sorely disappointed by a game where you can be locked into a bad outcome in the first minute, and spend 89 hapless minutes fighting to change that.

Besides thinking about this stuff, I also overheard a great conversation in the men's room, but I'll save that for later.

This Merkin Life

Every now and then, I get to actually spend more than an hour getting to or from somewhere in a car, and my default setting is to check out a “This American Life.” We were driving back from Roanoke this past weekend – also known as the town in a place where every town is a town you know from a bluegrass tune, like Flint Hill – and Ms. AC chose this episode to listen to. The second story is unbelievably sad and moving, and when we got home and had a so-called “driveway moment” (though the “driveway” was actually Kalorama Road, but whatevs), I thought I was in for a lesson about the importance of not staring an episode of “This American Life” when you’re too close to home. Typically, if they have a downer story, there’s a third, uplifting story to follow, and I thought, “Oh, if only we had another 12 minutes of driving, we could let Ira Glass finish us off with an unlikely tale of bonhomie and wit.”

 

Long story short, we timed it right. There was no third story. Just this horribly sad one, which went on and on and on, and which grows increasingly weird and transgressive. You can get curious by looking at this picture, or, even better, don’t look at the picture now. Listen to the show first, and then click through to the picture. Stupid Temerlins.

Have I been gone for a while? You bet I've been gone for a while.

But I haven’t gone anywhere, really. Just been way too busy to carve out the time to do anything meaningful that isn’t either school- or home improvement-related. Also, the World Cup was kind of a time drain, but Brasil’s loss did give me the perfect excuse to watch the film version of “The Road,” which was lovely and truly inspirational when you hate humanity.

 

One thing I’ve been fighting for at work, for quite some time, is a fair and broad telecommuting policy. I could have secured a separate peace several months ago, but I kind of decided that I wanted to make my office a better place to work. And in the process – though it’s been miserable and I’ve been confronted with idiocy and small-mindedness at virtually every turn – is realizing that I’m sort of a company man. Not in the boomer “stay with one company forever” sense of the word, though that may come to pass…but more in the sense of enjoying the belonging-to-an-organization part of work.

 

To be clear, I hate most people, especially those in my office. And not having to suffer these kinds of people is exactly one of the things I envy the most about people who freelance. But what’s not for me is the feeling that I’m only in it for me. The organizational behavior, changing the culture of a place, trying to do a small thing to help senior management realize the world is changing – I really enjoy that part of things. I can’t quite say why.

 

Sure, it’d be nice to have more autonomy. But I have the obligation of going to work every day to thank for a number of friends (not to mention a spouse) and other adventures. So, even though at times it’s really bad, I’m having a moment of self-satisfaction with the fact that I work in a building with people. But please, let me get this telecommuting policy implemented already…

An immigration quickie

It's fairly embarrassing that I've never linked to this chart, which does its best to explain the legal immigration maze.

Something to remember when angry people in border states complain that people should come here legally. I'm not advocating for illegal immigration, of course - just pointing out that the current clusterfuck of a process, which results in a few tens of thousands of people becoming permanent residents every year, and a couple other tens of thousands being eligible to work here, is beyond broken.

PS. Hat tip to AF for reminding me of this a few weeks ago.

A worthwhile commute

I drive to work exactly once a week right now. On Thursdays, we get veggies from a CSA set-up delivered to my office, and since I don’t have class that night (at least till later this summer), everything works out pretty well. This means that I have very few commuter habits: I’m never sure what to listen to, which path to take, when to be in the left lane and when to avoid it. It’s exhausting, that level of decision-making, but every now and then you have a very rewarding commute – rewarding not because it’s especially fast or problem-free, but because it reminds you that live where you live and not somewhere else.

 

In my case, this morning, it meant seeing the following:

 

-seeing a middle-aged woman being dropped off by a gentleman caller in a very posh section of Kalorama, doing the walk of shame. I could tell because she was wearing an Ovechkin jersey.

-while caught in funeral traffic, catching the distinct whiff of a presidential motorcade not too far behind me.

-still in funeral traffic, listening to the new Trans Am album, and thinking about how great the music sounds when you’re surrounded by police cars, secret service SUVs, and sirens, sirens, sirens.

-STILL in funeral traffic, seeing Donna Brazile and…daughter, I assume?...emerging from a cab.

-people dressed to mourn, but behaving as though they are at an important society gathering – which, anyone who remembers Craig Crawford being interviewed by Imus around the time of the Reagan funeral will remember, they sort of are. Funerals, protests, and inaugurations: these are the events that infringe on our daily lives.  

 

I was stressed till I realized that being 20 minutes late to work would have no discernible impact on my day or on my relative state of anxiety. Life was good.

I both do and don't hope that this exchange defines grad school for me

Innocent youngster: Why did Stupak care so much? I mean, there aren’t even abortion providers in his district.

 

Solid liberal prof, nodding in agreement: For sure, it’s a setback for reproductive rights.

 

Me: But…I’m not saying I buy it, but if you buy the argument that it’s a moral issue, then, you know, consider it by analogy to slavery. Telling someone, “Don’t like slavery? Then don’t have one” doesn’t work, because you don’t want anyone to have slaves.

 

Snotty lobbyist from Citizens Against Government Waste who is incapable of sounding nice: Actually? It had, like, nothing to do with that? It was really funding? For his reelection campaign? He couldn’t afford to lose support from his pro-life donors. We always had him voting for it. We knew he was going to support the bill.

 

Solid liberal prof: Because he said months ago he would? Why didn’t you think the dynamics had changed? As he ratcheted up the rhetoric, he was really boxing himself in.

 

Snotty lobbyist: Well? Yeah, we knew. We just knew. I mean, the pro-life Democrats had to put on a show, but they were going to vote in block because no one wants to be the deciding vote. But, for him? It was really all about the reelection.

 

 

This exchange happened the day before Stupak announced he would not seek reelection.

 

 

 

If I notice that the most recent episode of "Lost"...

…featured two references to songs on side B of Bruce Springsteen’s “The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle,” what exactly about the statement dates me the most? The old Bruce album, or the fact that I remember that the songs referenced opened up side B of the album? And that side B of that particular album may be the greatest side in the history of rock?

morning-run talk

She: the physiological basis for ‘the bends’; the meaning of the term (ie, it’s hard to bend your joints when afflicted by it); nitric acid boiled into blood.

 

Me: Asymptotic covariances; the importance of homoskedasticity; hate of SAS.

 

But hey, at least we got out for a run.

In which I push music!

This is really Gordon's terrain (wiredformusic!) here, but I've been known to make the odd mix here and there, and being in grad school has awakened all the angst of being in high school and college, which were my prime mix-making years. I'm still working on an econ/public finance type-mix, but here are a few tunes that have made my quant playlist. There are a few missing tracks (Luna's "math wiz"! Lala doesn't think I own it, but lala, you're wrong about that, just as you're wrong about the Silver Jews not existing, and about me not owning "Supra Genius" by Soul Coughing or "Fractions and feelings" by Malkmus + Jix.)

Without further ado! The quant mixtape! Comments below.

Count me in: Songs about numbe...

1. 4 out of 5 (Soul Coughing)
Few bands spent as much time counting or listing numbers as Soul Coughing. Accordingly, they are something like the patron saints of this mix.
2. One (Aimee Mann)
Pretty self-evident.
3. Don’t tell me to do the math(s) (Los Campesinos!)
Every mix needs token bratty Scottish indie punk. Work on your algebra and stand out in the rain! Plus, the title reflects that charming British locution of calling it “maths.”
4. The Calculation (Regina Spektor)
“Counted up our feelings / and divided them up even / and it called that calculation perfect love.” HAHA, nice try, liar. Multivariate linear regression is the opposite of perfect love.
5. Plus Ones (Okkervil River)
Ah yes, the plus one. Because this song is explicitly about all the things that got left out of other songs that enumerate things (97th tear, 100th luftballoon), I think of it as being about the error term.
6. If you don’t like the effects, don’t produce the cause (Funkadelic)
Funkadelic goes right to the heart of the matter, don’t they? They bypass association entirely and go right to causality. This must be a bivariate model since they don’t touch on interaction effects. I’m hoping that at some point we’ll get to hear George Clinton’s thoughts on multicollinearity.
7. 100% Dundee (The Roots)
In evaluating Dundee-ness, it is clear that the Roots will not tolerate even the smallest alpha. This song mentions sigma, assumptions, and the phrase “lyrically calculus in this arithmetic hip hop metropolis.” It therefore makes math seem much cooler than it is.
8. 6’1” (Liz Phair)
Clearly what’s going on here is that the break-up in the song has caused Liz Phair to reparameterize her height variable, and she’s found that the recalibration gets her an extra 11 inches on her height measurement.
9. 123 goodbye (Elvis Perkins)
Abacus of the rain! Calculus of pain! It’s all there, and it’s all true. Elvis Perkins has written a couple of gorgeous songs about the death of his mom – she was on one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center in 2001. This is one of them.
10. My mathematical mind (Spoon)
My English lit mind does not see the breaks.
11. Neverending math equation (Sun Kil Moon)
Originally a Modest Mouse song. Love this cover. Google the lyrics because they’re good, and while Sun Kil Moon has this great mopey voice, he’s also completely incomprehensible.
12. Feelgood by numbers (The Go! Team)
Except going by numbers makes me feel bad. On the other hand, this song makes me feel decidedly good, so maybe you can feel good by “Feelgood by numbers.” Hmmm.
13. Two sevens clash (Culture)
Marcus Garvey predicted that on July 7, 1977, something epic or terrible was going to happen. The sevens would clash. The band Culture made this prediction famous, and the song was so popular that supposedly when the date rolled around, most of Kingston shut down. Schools, stores – all closed for fear of the sevens clashing. Nothing happened, but we certainly do put a lot of faith in numbers, don’t we?
14. 100% (Sonic Youth)
Much like the Roots’ uncompromising approach to Dundee, Sonic Youth will not accept any degree of alpha in their “love for dead roadie model.”
15. Casiotone nation (Soul Coughing)
Again, with the counting.
16. I wish I could go back to college (Avenue Q cast)
Because this is how Quant II makes me feel.
17. A day to God is 1000 years (RZA)
RZA takes on the delicate issue of scaling in data. Sure, it’s just a day to God, but it’s 1000 years for humans. Be mindful of how to interpret the coefficient on your time variable in this model because of thi scaling issue. And, bonus thematic tie-in: The Wu guys are five percenters, or at least use a lot of it in their lyrics. So, we’re back to Soul Coughing, the oroboros of quant music.
18. Count me out (The Del McCoury Band)
Yes, Del. Sing it.

Unstructured time

I used to think it was a knock on adult life to say that you would never again have the same kind of seemingly never-ending amount of unstructured time with your friends. Possibly this is true, though at this point in my life, I really don't know what I would do with unstructured time.

It's bad enough for me when Ms. AC leaves before me in the morning - something that had been previously unheard of in our conjugal existence, but which now happens at least three times a week. The extra fifteen minutes or so are pleasant enough - Sportscenter or Morning Joe or possibly even a few minutes of Saved by the Bell - but having to then develop my own routine for leaving the house is worse than death. I never remember to check to see if the many things that should be on/off/open/closed/cleaned/stored are in order. I leave, get halfway down the stairwell, and wonder if I locked the door. So I go back, check, find the door locked, and rush out of the building. Then, across the street, I wonder the same thing. Is the door locked? I do a quick mental calculus - Ms. AC won't be home till xx:xx, which would give the cats z number of hours to play in the hallway of the building, giving them a significant chance of escaping the building entirely. Turn back, go check door, realize I'm ten minutes late already, curse the cats, repeat.

Tonight, I got home at 9 knowing full well Mrs. AC won't leave her campus till 11 pm. So, I went for a run, got really sweaty, took a cold shower, and now...here I am. Baseball game on mute, listening to Bill Callahan, and...well, what the hell do I do? Should I recode some variables for my final quant project, read about health care and the profit motive, or just, I don't know, have unstructured time?

Also, it's very hot, and our building hasn't switched over to cool air, and though I am tropical in genetic makeup, I'm sick of being sweaty at home. New theory: when you're hot, go for a run, take a cold shower, hang out in your boxers drinking scotch, and write about it. It won't make you feel cooler, but the scotch will elevate your body temperature enough that you'll be less cognizant of the heat. Like ice cream in winter.

The bill...

So, it's been a busy week but I'd be remiss not to post some thoughts about The Bill, as we've taken to calling it - especially given that I am preparing for a class debate about Medicare and have spent an inordinate amount of time learning about the system. (Incidentally, while I'm not crazy about single-payer, reading about Medicare makes it seem much, much more attractive.)

Das Binky has a great post about why mandated insurance is such an important part of the bill. Jacob Hacker - quoted on these pages before - agrees that, while not perfect, the bill is a good first step.

And despite concerns about the constitutionality of all this "mandating" - there seem to be some pretty capable minds who say, yes, this is all fair. I tend to agree with them because to take the other side literally would make, say, a progressive tax scale unconstitutional, and we all know that courts have repeatedly asserted that a progressive tax scale falls within the constitutional provision to tax and does not run afoul of any equal protection provisions.

On a side note, it was particularly rewarding to see my prof - an alum of the Clinton health reform wars - so excited in class this past Wednesday. "We've been teaching this class for years, and this is the first time we've had an expansion of entitlements of this magnitude in the history of the class!" she crowed. Later, she interrupted herself mid-sentence to gush about how excited she was to be finally moving in this direction.

Which is very germane because, going back to Hacker, government programs are especially subject to path-dependence. Half of the genius of Hacker's book/dissertation is chronicling how little steps can significantly restrict the range of choices going forward. Given Hacker's involvement in the writing of the public option and his support for even this neutered bill, he evidently believes that this version will ultimately put us on a path toward a public option which is, of course, fine by me.

It'd be nice if the plan did a bit more. Cost containment is of course the biggest issue, and to the extent that Medicare is successful in containing costs, this is largely a result of Medicare's stinginess. When you pay 81% of the rate that private insurers pay, and you cover fewer services, of course your expenses per enrollee will be lower. But Medicare provides a useful baseline for private insurers to measure their own fees against for a good that is notoriously difficult to properly value. However, the arguments against the bill, near as I can tell from Paul Ryan's roadmap - are basically just variants of the same old "market market market" argument, and I really dare anyone to argue credibly that health care is a normal good, and that health care consumers behave like consumers of other products and services. Not to mention the fact that the Paul Ryan plan is just phooey, from a budgetary standpoint.

I'm not sure where the cost containment will come from until we are able, as a society, to tolerate care that's just good but not ideal. In reality, we always demand the best, the most up-to-date, the most sensitive - and all of that costs more. Unless we are willing to have an honest debate about marginal gains in efficiency compared to marginal increases in cost without someone yelling out "death panel!", I'm not sure how we'll be able to ultimately contain costs. Tort reform is, sure, a part of it (because tort reform also eliminates incentives to always offer the most up-to-date-and-super-expensive care, and lest it sound like I'm arguing for crappy care, I'll just say that if we demand the best and always the best, we should be willing to pay for it. If we are happy to get good enough, we should be ok with the mild loss of quality too. And ideally, we'd be able to put a price on that trade-off, though this is also, of course, notoriously hard to do in the confusing patchwork of American social spending.

RIP

Mark Linkous made a ton of beautiful music while he was alive. I remember driving through West Virginia about ten years ago and not being sure of what I was looking for. Listening to "Good morning Spider."

A few years later, I was seeing the Flaming Lips on the Yoshimi tour, and for the opening act, this weird guy came out and played a few songs by himself in front a weird projection screen. He wasn't announced before taking the stage nor was he officially on the bill, but by the second song I knew for a fact it was Mark Linkous. Everything I saw that night was consistent with the little that I knew about him - reclusive, shy, tentative. As the years went on and I heard more and more about him collaborating with fairly big names - Tom Waits and Danger Mouse, to name a few - I figured it was a sign that Linkous had realized he belonged, that he had peers, and I kind of tuned out.

The news of his suicide and the grizzly details are really hard to stomach. I rarely mean the phrase "rest in peace" literally, but I really hope Mark Linkous can.

Still beer o'clock!

But first, let's test your memory. Remember how I once wrote about the Audacity of Hops Inaugurale? No? Fine.

Maybe you remember that more recently I wrote about JJF having some Westvleteren? Oh, you don't remember that either? Fine. I don't know why I bother somedays.

Anyway, readers and fractions thereof, I stand before you today to tell you that worlds are colliding. (When two worlds collide, no one survives, no one survives...)

The guy who brewed the Inaugurale apparently is in Belgium? Or something? That's what his gchat status says. But more importantly, he has a beer blog, and what's the first post I see when I head over to his blog? Worlds colliding, people. Perhaps the Onion was right. I'm getting a real Jacob's Ladder vibe from all this, and it's not just because tonight is Lostnight. Be careful out there, kids. The reddest of reds, the bluest of blues - the saddest of songs I sing for you (if you're beer-less.)

Soundtrack for this post courtesy of the late Mark Sandman.

Eels! Again!

Slate has a great piece about the life of an eel, but of course, astute readers of Abstract Citizen (all 2.7 of you!) already knew all about it from this post. Right? RIGHT???

Jacob S. Hacker is a bad-ass.

Jacob S. Hacker has a not-for-the-layperson book about the public/private nature of the American welfare state. His main issues are illustrating the path-dependent nature of the evolution of these programs, and he highlights the importance of applying the same type of government/institutional analytical framework to non-governmental actors in the game. He shows how organized labor played a vital role in securing pension benefits for all Americans but acquiescent on the health front; he shows the ruthless AMA lobby fighting against national health care in the 1930’s – and perhaps most importantly, how private insurance flourished in the absence of a governmental program between 1935 and 1950. After this point, every subsequent debate about national health care has really been a debate about expanding “private” (heavily subsidized) health insurance.

Hacker more recently authored the public option that was left out of the Senate bill.

This quote is from that turning point - where the future of the American health system had been decided by means of subterranean politics and the tax code. Not all at once, of course, but this is the point at which we know where the path is leading...

There was, in short, every sign that private health insurance had won out for employed Americans, just as there was every sign that Social Security would remain the core provider of retirement income.

No votes on this outcome had been taken. No grand alternatives had been put to citizens for a test. Indeed, judging by the debates that did transpire after 1950, there were no real choices to be made. Private insurance received ever more costly subsidies. Yet defenders of the voluntary way denied that government was implicated at all. Some Americans were well served and others were left out, but discussion of winners and losers was lost in the celebration of private progress and the complexities of tax tables. Americans had found themselves caught up in a fierce battle over national health insurance, but the increasingly privileged place of private insurance in the American social welfare regime prompted little debate at all.

And I love this quote, which perfectly sums up the role of the American government in health care in the 20th century:

The federal government had first built up the technological prowess of the medical complex, then become a generous subsidizer of private health insurance, and then finally stepped in as a largely passive financier of private medical care itself.

Cheery thoughts for a cold Friday afternoon.

Carnaval

Beyonce is in Rio, and apparently pulled off some nice moves at a samba school. My dad complains: "Why is our misery chic?"

But carnaval is underway, people, as evidenced by what a friend of mine reports hearing someone shouting on the street in the wee small hours of the morning yesterday:

"She can be fat! Or she can be ugly! But what she cannot be is BOTH fat AND ugly."

Ah, carnaval...

The problem with snow days...

...is that they're a string of Sundays, but what we really want is a Saturday. So, we've been in a state of suspended Sundayness for the past 4 days (including the real Sunday) and we may have another Sunday or two ahead of us. Hmmm.

Beer o'clock

In addition to the Jerome story, here are two more beer tales to warm your malty, hoppy hearts:

Tupper's is back! My wedding beer is back!

And JJF sends this tale from the rockier parts of the country, though it takes place in the city of broad shoulders. Enjoy the background story, if you don't know it, and the appropriately floral description of the beer itself, knowing you will probably never try it yourself:

I got a fantastic surprise that you’d appreciate for Xmas: my brother-in-law handed me one of two bottles of Westvleteren 12 he brought back from Brussels earlier in the year. Not sure if you’re familiar, but it’s been rated as the best beer in the world by numerous publications over the past couple decades. Supply is the issue – they only sell it at the abbey, and even then only in small batches to folks who have local driver’s licenses. Apparently one of John’s classmates (he was there for his MBA program) ended up driving to the abbey and bribing a local to purchase a couple of six-packs. I’m not sure how much he spent, but it was well-worth it for sure. The brew is technically a Quad, which I’d describe as a supercharged Dubbel. Dark, very little carbonation, doughy yeast on the nose, lots of brown sugar / dark fruits on the tongue, and a surprisingly smooth, almost creamy finish considering the ABV (10+%). Highly recommended if you ever have the opportunity to try it.

Jerome David

I had lunch on Thursday in a place called Urban BBQ. It's located right next door to a purveyor of fine beers that had a truly impressive selection of craft ales. Not knowing what I was doing, I picked out a Mont Blanc blond, a six of 14er ESB, and a Belgian-style ale from Argentine made by a brewery named "Jerome." (I got the Cerveza Diablo.)

As we made our way to the front to pay, one of my friends found out from his phone that J.D. Salinger had died.

I got home that night and thought about that famous Jerome some. I drank the Jerome ale. I had much too much homework to do, but I still set aside some Friday metro reading - Seymour, An Introduction.

A lot of people talk about how the last novella in the Glass family saga is dark, disjointed, and of course, serves as the final coda for Salinger's most challenging and (to some) infuriating characters. I always enjoyed "Raise High the Roof Beam" and "Seymour" because of the tone, the playfulness, and Salinger's refusal to put any meat on Seymour Glass's skeleton. But as I reread it this time, I also realized that there's something else that happens in "Seymour": it's Salinger erasing himself shortly before he disappeared. Here he confuses his own biography with Buddy Glass's and suggests that Salinger's body of work is in fact Buddy's.

At this point, it doesn't seem to me merely chummy to mention that I've written about my brother before. For that matter, with a little good-humored cajoling I might conceivably admit that there's seldom been a time when I haven't written about him, and if, presumably at gunpoint, I had to sit down tomorrow and write a story about a dinosaur, I don't doubt that I'd inadvertently give the big chap one or two small mannerisms reminiscent of Seymour - a singularly endearing way of biting off the top of a hemlock, say, or of wagging his thirty-foot tail. Some people - not close friends - have asked me whether a lot of Seymour didn't go into the young leading character of the one novel I've published. Actually, most of these people haven't asked me; they've told me. To protest this at all, I've found, makes me break out in hives, but I will say that no one who knew my brother has asked me or told me anything of the kind - for which I'm grateful, and, in a way, more than a bit impressed, since a good many of my main characters speak Manhattanese fluently and idiomatically, have a rather common flair for rushing in where most damned fools fear to tread, and are, by and large, pursued, by an Entity that I'd much prefer to identify, very rougly, as the Old Man of the Mountain.

RIP.

First "holy shit" moment in public policy

So, the scuttlebutt about social welfare spending in the US is that the American welfare state is small – somewhere around 15% of GDP whereas for European and in particular Scandinavian countries, it accounts for about 30% of GDP.

Well, some people have long argued that the way in which OECD used to compile this info (measuring direct government spending) doesn't capture the American reality. Check put page #28 in this document
(it’s actually page 29 in the .pdf, but because of the cover page it’s numbered 28.)

You see that the US leads all countries in what is called private social spending. This takes up a couple of different forms, but mostly it means tax revenue that the federal government is foregoing. What does this include? Well, tax deductions, for one.

While spending on section 8 housing is a small percentage of government entitlement programs, the revenue the government gives up on mortgage interest deductions is huge. (And who does that benefit? The little guy or the medium guy?)

We may spend little per capita on welfare programs, but not once you consider that there’s a child tax credit in the tax code too. Similarly, we have two big sources of income that are not taxed: health benefits (which are considered part of your income in European countries and are taxed – so every dollar you get in health, the Swedish government gets, say, 25 cents of the money back that it’s giving you. It’s just a book-keeping thing that OECD statistics don’t capture very well.) The other is your pension plan – your employer is giving you a ton of money that, as long as you wait till you’re a certain age to use, will not be taxed as income.

So, the issue isn’t that the US spends little, it’s that the US spends weirdly, disjointedly – if you buy the argument that foregone revenue to the fed = federal spending. (Most people do, and I include myself in that category if you limit the rationale to this area of discussion. The problem here is the presumption that the lack of revenue is a form of spending. Then isn't not spending also a form of revenue? Didn't the U.S. then make billions of dollars by not heeding Lieberman's call to bomb Yemen? Also, the Ron Paul-types will object to the presumption that government has any right to my income in the first place – how dare they count money they’re not taking from me, which is rightfully mine, as foregone revenue? In any case, next time you look at your pension plan statement, thank the federal government for not taking a chunk out of it, and thank yourself and all the other taxpayers for allowing you to do that.)

Now, there’s a good argument for enacting social policy through the tax code. For one, you can encourage things you’d like to see – people buying homes and having kids – without setting up a whole separate office or program to administer it. It’s cost-effective in that sense – it’s just one more line on the tax form, and the IRS is already set up to look at that form anyway.

Now, the big problem with spending federal dollars this way is that administering benefits through the tax code is inherently regressive. This is the lightbulb moment for me:

If you’re taxed at the 36% marginal tax rate, each additional dollar of “income” via pension plans or health benefits that does not get taxed is worth 36 cents to you, right? If they taxed you on those dollars as income, you’d be losing 36 cents on the dollar. Yay for you and the high wage earners! But what if you are at the 22% rate? You’re already making less, and you’re “saving” less – only 22 cents – from not having those dollars taxed as your income would be. Inherently, administering benefits through the tax code means that those who are well-off will benefit the most, those who are so-so off will only benefit so-so, and those who don’t itemize to begin with or who can't wait a whole fiscal year to get a government entitlement are up a creek.

Now, think about the fact that many of these programs, as currently set up, date back many many decades. Think about the babyboomers, about the greatest generation, about the expansion of the middle class, and about how those interests have developed over time. Government spending is path-dependent – once you’ve carved out a trail of spending, it becomes easier to justify that path as the way to spend money.

First-movers, in economics-speak, have tremendous advantages: they stake out a claim to that benefit, and once they’ve benefitted from it, financially, they are better armed to fight for the preservation of that benefit. When you start to think about US social spending in that light, you begin to see that our strata of the middle class has a lot to gain from this system, and that we would lose a lot from a more progressive way of spending (ie, direct government spending.)

And while this may all be painfully obvious to some people, I didn't put it all together until just over a week ago. Which goes to show just how grad school can make you smarter, I guess.

why doesn't the iphone have a setting...

That keeps wi-fi mode but turns off all phone-like features? Airplane mode means no wi-fi, and when you’re out of the country and don’t want to pay roaming, you turn off airplane mode to use wi-fi at your own risk (god forbid someone should call or send you a text while you’re trying to check email.) Who do I hate for this? Apple or AT&T?

 

 

 

This is what happens when you have a conversation with some random person at a brewpub and become facebook friends.

You find that you are "friends" with this kind of brilliant, nuanced person:

I'm annoyed today because I found out that Stupid Democrats of NJ want to pass a bill in which illegal aliens get to go to college on OUR (NJ) tax payer dollars!!

Can we say WTF?!?

Now, if we are going to allow them to apply to a NJ school - OK.... Are we setting them up to be caught and departed? NO!!! Why would I want my tax monies going to stupid illegals who shouldn't be here unless they come through the proper channels (which would make them LEGAL aliens)???

We all know that this isnt a set up to catch them, we know that we are going to give them free education as well as free medical (if the other stupid bill gets passed).

Is this country that fucking dense?

Oh!! and as for other Obama- What a fucktard! Lets give all them terrorist rights??? Lets allow them access to a lawyer.. so that they remain silent!!! Nice fucking job Obama...

I bet if it was his daughters in peril he would be fucking water boarding the shit out of these terrorist...


Im not a Bush supporter, but you alllll know if Bush was President, these fucking terrorist would be in Guantanamo Bay being water boarded until they spoke! We would have information on those 300 possible future terrorist the underwear bomber was talking about until he was read his RIGHTS!


Stupid Democrats choose an ultra left wing idiot as Presidents.... Hope having civil union rights was worth terrorist having fucking rights.
(FYI- im all about gay and women rights.... But not at the cost of security... I rather a mean republican or not so left wing democrat-- that scares the shit out of the other nations)

Those are my thoughts!

De-friend, de-friend.

Guanabara

It's always interesting, that flight down to Rio. I feel like there are several different versions of me on-board: Brazilian-born yanks fighting their way home for the holidays. We are of course yankee-fied in different ways, to different degrees, but there's a feeling that we're on this long commute back at the end of the day.

Rio is peaceful. We are quoting Jobim - New York is shit, but life is great. Rio is great, but life is shit. I probably got that wrong.

Amusing too how quickly we forget that the heat and humidity are oppressive. It's hard to envision doing anything, but we trudge outside, almost killing the sweet dog Gabriel in the process.

Pictures to follow, eventually.

Today we had home pedicures - you can get any service in Rio performed at home, don't you know. At night, we cozy up in the A/C with dad's blu rays and some wine. Or, for me, Macallan 18. One of these days we will break the go-to-bed-at-3-am-wake-up-at-noon cycle, but not just yet.

Mostly, we hope Monday arrives soon, so most people can go back to work and we can enjoy mostly empty beaches. We are going to the Botanical Gardens today to avoid the beach crowds and get some good walking time in before we collapse in a sweaty puddle at Porcao.

The colors, though. It's easy to forget just how many colors you see routinely here. Even when they are tiny and red, like the speedos on a heavy-set older man, or tiny and yellow, like dental floss bikinis on a blonde - but especially when they are greenish and faint, like the african palm trees out front that grow for twenty years, blossom once, and then die.