perfidy

For Buckethead, today is clearly “blog about stuff you’ve been meaning to blog about, but haven’t yet” day. Running with this theme, here is the story of last Saturday:

Ted, from Rocket Jones organized an outing to busy, cosmopolitan Woodbridge, Virginia to see the Class A Potomac Nationals of the Carolina League do battle with some other team I can’t be bothered to remember. (It’s single A ball, man. I can’t remember the names of major league expansion teams, fer chrissakes.) Mrs B., little B, and I found the stadium hidden behind some county buildings without too much trouble, and met Ted, his daughters Mookieand Robyn, and Goddess Dawn. Soon thereafter, we were joined by Nic and Victor. The weather was still nice, and things were shaping up into a nifty blog gathering. (Aside from cobloggers, these were the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th bloggers I’ve ever met.)

I went into the gift shop and discovered that the Potomac Nationals had only been in existence for about five minutes. Previously, they were the Potomac Cannons, and everyone in the shop was really pissed about the name change. So, I bought a deeply discounted Cannons logo hat, figuring that its totemic power should protect me from all ills while I was in the stadium. I got one for my mom, too, just to be super safe. Sadly, the hats proved to be of no use whatsoever.

We acquired hotdogs, beer and fires, and adjourned to the stands. One of the things that I love about watching minor league games is the intimacy of the setting. Minor league stadiums are usually about the size of high school playing fields. However, you don’t have to watch thumb-fingered pimply high school kids playing the game – minor league players often exhibit real skill. Of course, those players don’t stay in the minors, let alone single A, very long.

The first inning went great. The mini-Nats scored four runs to take an early lead. But then, the rain came. The skies had been threatening all evening, and mapgirl told me a couple days ago that it would rain, but why should I trust her, the weatherman or the evidence of my own senses? We beat a hasty retreat, along with all the other fans into the sheltered area under the stands, there to wait for at least a half hour. It was really starting to thin out when we decided that the lightning and rain were not likely to stop soon, and that we should come up with a plan B. (As it turned out, they did start playing again within the hour, and we ended up spending $9 a pop for an inning and a half of baseball. That’s a buck an out, people!)

Plan B was a chain Mexican restaurant over by the outlet mall. It should have been a simple matter to drive a couple miles down the parkway and turn left into the parking lot. However, given the rainy conditions and my own befuddledness, I would have missed the joint altogether. At the last minute, Mrs. B gave a hue and cry, and I cut across two lanes of (light) traffic to get into the turn lane. This maneuver left me just a bit in the middle of the intersection. After looking carefully out all three mirrors, and looking over my shoulder, I put Godzira our Xterra into reverse and backed out of the intersection and directly into Dawn’s car.

Not having read her account yet (I will after I finish mine) I don’t know what went through her mind. But as I leaped out of the car, someone seemed a little mad. Then, I realized who it was, and was able to croak out, “Hey, it’s you.” I have rarely felt so stupid and so relieved at the same time. What are the odds that, driving in a rain storm, you’d hit a car with a personalized plate referring to blogging? Happily, a further inspection from the safety of the parking lot revealed only minor scratches. This is a happy side effect of physical laws that prevent you from accelerating to any great speed before hitting an object directly behind you. I swear to god, Dawn, I really did look.

This trauma behind us, we settled in for beers, chips, salsa and guac. Much good conversation was had. We talked about baseball, boobs, high school and many other things before little B’s increasing sleepiness forced us to beat an early retreat.

It was great to meet everyone, and Dawn’s car. We’ll have to do this again, and hopefully we can escape without me running anyone over, or my son hitting Ted in the nuts again.

Later that same day, as we continued through the exhibitor tent, we encountered the 101st Airborne’s booth. There we met a very nice young sergeant, who offered to paint John’s face. Not in the sissy manner of most children’s activities, but with camo paint. Here you see the sergeant, and the result:

Murdoc:

Having gotten our fill of things military, the next item on the agenda was a protest on capital hill. When my wife was pregnant with John, she (being the kind of person she is) conducted a thorough, not to say obsessive research project on all things related to child birth and child rearing. Whilst examining the topic of breastfeeding, she got on some breastfeeding email list and they had informed her that they were mounting a PR event next to the Cannon House office building.

It seems that a representative was sponsoring a bill to modify the civil rights law to include protection for breastfeeding mothers in the workplace. Aside from, (I assume) a normal distribution of gender in the fifty or so children there with their mothers, my presence accounted for half of all male participants. Also present were a goodly amount of comfortable shoes, caftans and high tech child mobility devices. While I couldn’t hear anything the representative or any of the speakers said thanks to a substandard sound system, it was my understanding that the aim of the gathering was to amend the law to prevent breastfeeding mothers from being fired for using mechanical breastpumps in the workplace, and to provide tax breaks for companies that provide special rooms for that purpose. I suggested that they be called lactatoriums, but no one was impressed with my creativity.

I was very disappointed in my wife, however, when she removed the camouflage war paint from John’s face. She felt that it might offend some of the more granola-munchy of the participants. My view, based on personal experience, is that loving breasts and loving your country are hardly incompatible, but again my input was not well received. I got strike three when I was not interviewed by the attractive ABC reporter, and was hence unable to use my line, “While I have not had any personal experience with breast feeding in over three decades, I stand four square behind the woman’s right to breastfeed.” Breastfeeders may have won a great victory, but the experience was a bit of a letdown for me. 

The Volokh Conspiracy have a link to a new chess resource, The Chess Predator, which to my admittedly untrained eye looks to be very handy indeed. I'm not much of a chess player. I have never had the wherewithal to play moot games against myself to refine my tactics and strategic thought, and any success I may have had has been thanks to my ability to once in a while pull off a spectacular feat of half-accidental derring-do. However, Goodwyfe Johno periodically reiterates her intention to learn chess, and I periodically get talked into it. Next time, maybe it will stick.

One thing I never understood... when your horsey jumps your castle thingy, does it have to stay all on the black squares?

The Ministry has a funny feeling in its tummy as it announces the assimilation of yet another Minister. Patton, until his recent meltdown, was a prolific and insightful blogger at Opinion 8. But a crack Ministry team of commando psychotherapists, sufis, herbal nutritionists and daytime TV life coaches were (at great personal risk) able to pull him back from the brink. A refreshed, restored, loofahed, and shinily optimistic Patton is now ready to flaunt his unique blogging idiom under the banner of the all conquering Ministry.

To make Patton welcome in his new home, all readers are commanded to think of clever and mildly (mildly!) deprecating snippets to include in the random list of capsule bios that appear under every minister's name in the left sidebar. Any new links for giant fighting robots, zombies, and other species traitors should be sent to Patton, so that he can catch up with everyone else.

A little while back, my wife and her band were on a local morning talk show. Since their slot on the show was at 8:30, and I was still unemployed at the time, we decided to make a day of it in downtown DC. As we wandered toward the Mall, we (I) immediately noticed that there were military vehicles parked in the area between Air and Space and the National Gallery. Eager to look at the instruments of death lovingly crafted by our great nation’s scientists and engineers, the three of us headed toward the scene.

The soldiers were very friendly and informative, and let my son sit in the driver’s seat of a MRLS, and even press the firing button. Sadly, the missiles were not live and we were unable to destroy the Department of Education, located only a couple blocks downrange. Here’s a pic of young John looking warlike:

But the interesting part was when we went through the big tent. The various services, agencies, departments, bureaus and whatnot gathered for Public Service Appreciation day all had booths in which they could tout their contributions to the nation’s security, safety and (in the case of the Marines and Airborne) general stance of extreme lethality and kickassitude. The Marines had a display of the various weapons that they use in persecuting our enemies. There were mortars, squad automatic weapons and at the end of the line, two corporals in charge of explaining and exhibiting an M-16 and its baby brother the M-4.

Being the kind of guy that I am, I asked the two what they thought of the new XM-8, proposed as a replacement for the M-16. Corporal #1 exhibited the extreme conservatism for which military establishments are famed:

“We fear change.”

He went on to opine that the new gun looks like his son’s super-soaker, and no right thinking Marine would want to carry one, though the pansies in the Army can do whatever they want. (I’m paraphrasing, but that was pretty much the thrust of his comments.)

Corporal #2 was more eloquent, but also more favorably disposed to the new weapon. He said that he had actually fired the weapon in Ashkanistan (his word) and was very impressed by the weapon’s recoil system.

“You can squeeze off three rounds on full auto before the barrel even starts to rise. Close groups, easy to handle. The only problem is, three rounds of five-five-six won’t put a jihadi down. Maybe if we could use hollow points or a soft nose bullet, the stopping power would be better.”

I asked about the 6.8mm round that was also being considered.

“That might be an improvement. But small caliber rounds don't work against fanatics.”

A hundred years ago, Marines had a problem with another fanatical insurgency, the Huks in the newly acquired Philippines. We invented an entirely new and larger type of handgun, the M1911 .45 semi-automatic, just because we needed something that would drop a crazed fanatic when the small caliber handgun just wasn’t hacking it. Perhaps it’s time to do that again. Shoot-to-wound strategies might encumber a reasonable army, where the enemy will spend time and effort to care for wounded comrades. Against frankly suicidal Moslem fundamentalists, reverting to a less nuanced shoot-to-kill policy might be a good idea.

And right thinking Americans aren't the only ones on this bandwagon. Via McQ, we find this Telegraph article:

Language, history, cooking and support for rival football teams still divide Europe. But when everything else fails, one glue binds the continent together: hatred of the French. Typically, the French refuse to accept what arrogant, overbearing monsters they are. But now after the publication of a survey of their neighbours' opinions of them at least they no longer have any excuse for not knowing how unpopular they are.

Well, that doesn't exactly beat around the bush, does it? But here are some of the meaty details:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Britons described them as "chauvinists, stubborn, nannied and humourless". However, the French may be more shocked by the views of other nations.

For the Germans, the French are "pretentious, offhand and frivolous". The Dutch describe them as "agitated, talkative and shallow." The Spanish see them as "cold, distant, vain and impolite" and the Portuguese as "preaching". In Italy they comes across as "snobs, arrogant, flesh-loving, righteous and self-obsessed" and the Greeks find them "not very with it, egocentric bons vivants".

Interestingly, the Swedes consider them "disobedient, immoral, disorganised, neo-colonialist and dirty".

I join McQ in puzzling over why "rude" failed to make the list. And smelly somehow missed as well.

The other night as I was falling asleep, I had what I believe to be two very good ideas for pinatas. (How the heck to you make an en-tilde in this freaky software? Do I need to spell it "Pinyata?")

First: the Adult PinYATA. A normal burro or other shape, but filled with plastic nips of liquor, condoms, and "toys." Hell, packs of cards and poker chips, too. Wouldn't that be a hoot for bachelor parties, birthday parties, or Wednesdays?

Next, the idea that made me laugh myself to sleep: the Revenge PinYATTA. On the outside, a normal grey papier-mache orb. Or why not gaily striped? That's the ticket. On the inside: shards of broken glass, twisted bits of rusty metal, filings, and used hydroponics. Take it to a party filled with people whose lives you wouldn't mind ruining, leave a Louisville Slugger leaning on the tree (for extra PiNNEYATTA Power!!), and make sure you have said your gracious goodbyes before the Revenge starts. The Revenge PINYAHTA: another fine product from the fine people at Mainway Toys.

If you'd have told me five years ago that when I was 30 I would be running a quick 5K at lunch and following it up with more than 300 abdomen-and-back-shapey moves, I'd have laughed you out of the room. Before last July, I had run a full mile exactly two times in my entire life. Now that's my warmup on heavy lifting days.

It is good to hate the French be in shape.

Is there a difference-- any difference-- between "writer's block" and "not having anything to say?"

The Supreme Court has acted in all our best interests, striking down state bans on interstate wine sales.

Ohio wine, here I come!. (Try the Pinot Gris. It's outstanding.)

Darth Vader has a blog. And you know what? It's actually really frigging good. Whoever the author is, he's into his work.

Loyal reader, historian, and smart dude NDR at Rhine River stretches his fiction muscles with this post commemorating the 60th anniversary of the capture of Adolph Hitler.

I enjoy counterfactuals, particularly ones that don't attribute tremendous consequences deriving from ridiculously obscure moments or personalities. Those stories seem more like vehicles for bored historians to advertise their dissertations, or to showcase how narrowly smart they are, than to tell a spiffy story. Gimme a good, "What if Dubya Dubya Two turned out differently" tale over, "What if such-such minor nobleman had married his mistress instead of murdering her" anyday.

I like the Geisel reference, too. I also don't believe that the country falling apart is peculiar, considering it had only existed for such a short time to begin with, and anyway was effectively bisected in our universe anyway following the war. Seems not too hard to imagine postwar pressures between populations being encouraged by the occupying powers, the better to keep "Germany" weak.

Anyway, it's a neat little read.

It is a reassuring thing for the newly re-employed to perform some (to him) absolutely simple, nearly automatic rote task and receive gushing, heartfelt praise for the sterling quality, integrity (nay, authenticity) and aesthetic verve of a 30-page security checklist composed almost solely of repeating table entries with check boxes for yes, no and N/A.

If I can keep this up, my long term employment prospect is looking rosy. Maybe tomorrow I can sweep them off their feet with a nifty template that saves them the trouble of formatting each document from scratch.

When the end comes, no-one can say we didn't warn them.

From deep underground in the safe embrace of the Ministry Bunker and Castratorium I report news that quisling scientists at Cornell have created simple robots that can replicate themselves. Just what we need. It's like giving your teenaged son out the door with $500, a suitcase of beer, a rented Corvette, the number of an escort service, and a .45 loaded with hollowpoints. You just watch what happens, humankind.

(Thanks to boing boing, who are watching the robots too.)

Boing boing also point out a story about an experimental robot that walks on pointe like a ballerina. Expected applications are for people who have lost a leg or both legs, and for modifying humans to fight on equal footing with the robot enemy that will one day walk among us. To defeat them, we must become a little like them.

Over at Begging to Differ, Venkat collects a few musings from around the inter-web on the subject of social security and investor choice, and asks the astute question, "they sound like they have it all figured out. I wonder why these people aren't money managers??"

For instance, Professor Bainbridge (an actual economist) fisks a Los Angeles Times article by Peter Gosselin, saying:

nvesting is really rather simple. You park your money in no-load passively-managed index funds, weighted as heavily to equities as your risk tolerance can take, and then you get on with the rest of life. As Nobelist Clive Granger told Gosselin (not that Gosselin got the point): "I would rather spend my time enjoying my income than bothering about investments," which is exactly what passive investing allows you to do. If you need proof at length, be sure to check out the latest edition of Burton Malkiel's classic A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

By the by, Gosselin has tapped into (but not really understood) some of the learning on behavioral economics:

Analysts examining the actual behavior of individuals — as opposed to what most economists' theories predict — find that it rarely conforms to standard notions of what's rational. Instead, it often involves systematic mistakes that end up producing the very opposite of what people say they intend.

That's not exactly right, especially the adjective "rarely," but set that aside. As I wrote in a TCS column a while back, Richard Thaler, the leading exponent of the behavioral finance theories Gosselin invokes, has made a telling admission:

Mr. Thaler … concedes that most of his retirement assets are held in index funds, the very industry that Mr. Fama's research helped to launch. And despite his research on market inefficiencies, he also concedes that "it is not easy to beat the market, and most people don't." (Link)

So if personal accounts come down the pike, put your money in passively-managed no-load funds and forget about it. If the Democrats and their MSM allies like Gosselin manage to block personal accounts, put what little discretionary money Uncle Sam leaves you after taxes in passively-managed no-load funds and forget about it. In the long run, you'll come out ahead of the game with a lot less stress.

Well, yeah. Bainbridge is dead right: if you're not a professional investment manager, or if you don't have the time or inclination to keep yourself constantly updated as to what moves to make to optimize your market position, it's best to park your dough where it will do the most good for the least amount of work. Investing is simple... it's just not easy. But t's also easy, per Bainbridge, Galt, and Collier, to sit back and armchair-quarterback other people's best interests. It's even easier to look at, say, GM's pension plan and say "how stupid for them to fund pensions with debt!" Sure, it's clear now that that scheme didn't work out so well for the company or for GM's pensioners, but you know what they say about hindsight. Not that there's nothing to objecting to recent scandals and stories -- it is in fact dumb to invest your pension in the company you work for. But what do you do when, like my father-in-law, the company invests your pension in its own stock, and you don't get a say in that?

So it is that I am brought to wonder about Social Security and what's actually a solid idea. Maybe I'm being unspeakably naive, but I really do wonder have to wonder about these "private accounts" they talk so much of these days. They sound in theory like a decent proposal, but without more information it's not worth deciding whether they are a good idea or a bad one. Kind of like saying "yes, I would like a sandwich," but not knowing whether you're getting shit or salami.

I'm assuming that if private accounts ever get off the ground, the Social Security folks will have to offer a limited and relatively risk-averse basket of intrinsically diversified investment instruments to consumers (i.e., me and you.). But if we are held to investing our SS monies in, say, a limited group of mutual funds or even hybrid instruments containing a yearly adjusting blend of mutual funds and bonds like Vanguard's "Target Retirement" funds, then how much "choice" will we really have? As I see it, that's probably the best outcome for everyone, but it raises tough questions as to who gets to manage that money and how they will get paid. Harvard University recently weathered a controversy during which the money managers for their endowment got gigantic bonuses after a very, very good year. The controversy was over whether it was right for a private institution, whose income is dedicated to the future improvement of the institution only, has a right to pay money managers huge bonuses. On the "no" side, there's what I just said. Universities exist to educate students, and funds need to be carefully and dutifully put to that end. On the "yes" side, there's the very powerful argument that to attract and retain top managers who are more likely to achieve top returns, you have to pay them as well as they'd be paid at Fidelity or Goldman Sachs.

Who will be the government's money managers? Will those contracts be competed for by private firms? Will their fee structures and practices then be regulated by the government, making those contracts into golden handcuffs for the companies that win them? Is it right for the US government to funnel Social Security through private firms?

And what if the government's money managers work for... the government? Not only will we see the Harvard controversy writ in flaming letters ten miles high every time a good year comes around, but when's the last time a government bureaucracy excelled at anything productive? Just what we need... surly underpaid career bureaucrats with bottom-tier MBAs chucking our money into whatever's easiest.

But if we as investors are given more latitude to invest our gubmint pensions, is that better? I have asked, and been assured that, even if everyone in the country puts all the weight of their social security money into index fund account, it isn't enough to skew the market. That's a big market. But what happens if we are given more freedom to invest, and actually use it? In Sweden, every citizen got a telephone book sized pamphlet listing every single investment choice they could ever want for investing their state pensions. That turned out very poorly. If the menu gets too big, and no guidance is given, investors make wildly foolish choices. Even if we were offered a more modest palette of investment choices, what would the effects be of periodic "dumb" investor-driven SS-money gold rushes on small market segments that get a lot of hype? Will the emerging markets securities market and the small-cap widgets market periodically bubble and crash as overeager and underthinking investors move their money around? Not that most people will, probably. But the dim stars could ruin the game for everyone.

Hei Lun of Begging To Differ expects that whatever options we get, it will probably be something like we now get for our 401(k)s - a dozen or two dozen limited options keyed to different horizons and risk aversities. That would be perfect. But again, who will manage that money?

Me, I'm not a money manager because I don't have the quant skills, and because I spend too much time wringing my hands over naive questions like I've just posed. But naive as they are, I would really like to see them answered before I throw my support behind the President's, or anyone's, plan to overhaul Social Security.

One more thing. Some critics see the President's proposal to means-test Social Security payments as an attempt to frame Social Security as welfare. I hope that doesn't happen, and I really hope that pensions and welfare don't become conflated in people's minds. We're a rich country, and as I see it there's nothing wrong to lending a hand to old people who have worked all their lives and have nothing (or very little) to show for it.

I hope you all subscribe to the Atlantic, which is still the best magazine in the USA (with the possible exception of Cook's Illustrated, but that's not quite as general interest, y'see.). If you do, you can access this link. In the most recent issue of the Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens reviews a new biography of John Brown that argues that Brown was more important than previously thought in the struggle for abolition. Rather than being a crazy outlier, he and his band of dedicated fanatics were the ones who convinced the South that not all Yankees were effete jellyfish unwilling to fight for their principles. An interesting and intriguing thesis, but one I will need to read the book (soon!) to really pass judgement on.

But the internet being the internet, opportunities for greater things abound. The Atlantic was founded as a Progressive magazine in the Antebellum era and as a consequence have a rich trove of important and groundbreaking stories to share. (If you didn't know, Julia Ward Howe first published the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" in its pages.) What the Atlantic have done is to tie Hitchens' review of the John Brown biography to several pieces published in the magazine over the past 150 years, giving us sort of a capsule Atlantic-style historiography of John Brown's legacy.

The Atlantic helpfully supply links to two articles from their 1872 issues by Franklin Sanborn, a Massachusetts businessman who was one of a half dozen secret financiers of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. From 1879 come three interviews of Brown by William Addison Phillip, who met Brown in Kansas in the 1850s. Finally, from 1922 comes Gamaliel Bradford's piece, "John Brown," which attempted to cut through the myth and expose the man there behind. Taken together, subscribers can get a detailed view of how John Brown's legend and legacy has been preserved in the pages of one of the country's oldest and most staunchly progressive (in the old, good sense) magazines.

This is what the internet is for. Holy crap.

The Ministry's inboxes have been flooded recently with missives bearing anguished cries from our many readers. "Why," they ask, "has the Ministry scaled back on its unusually penetrating and insightful coverage of the current political scene? Where else can we go?"

It is time for a reply. For my part, the decline in politically themed posting stems mainly from the fact that, though I am to a certain degree wonkishly interested in policy and politics, I am more interested in sharing embarrassing stories from my past, interesting food or beverage experiences, and random musings on topics that actually have very little bearing on whether we all live or die. It's not just that Politics:Blogs::Keith Richards:Heroin, though that's a part of it. There are plenty of top-shelf bloggers out there reading bills, parsing doubletalk, and watching out for our collective asses. Obsidian Wings, John Cole of Balloon Juice, and the staff of Reason's Hit and Run are three such shining exemplars.

But - and let's be frank - politics is done to death. As anyone can see from reading the archives at Little Green Footballs, it is difficult to stare day after day into the abyss and retain a sense of scope. Every new dawn brings a fresh raft of stunning outrages-- which ones are for real? Which ones are not worth fretting over? It quickly becomes hard to tell.

For instance. Should I be concerned that Congress tacked legislation creating a national ID program onto an appropriations bill regarding money for the war in Iraq? Orin Kerr of the Voloks says "yes, but not too much." So why do I get the creeping horrors at the mention of Senator Sensenbrenner's name?

Should I be worried about Social Security? Alex Taborrok says "Yes!!!". Indeed, private companies can bail out on their pension schemes if they can't pay them, trusting that the Feds will pick up much of the tab. If the Feds can't pick up their tab, who do they bail to?

Should I be outraged that the NIH used foster children as guinea pigs for experimental AIDS drugs in the 1980s and 1990s? There are apparently glaring irregularities in how subjects were selected, monitored, informed, and tracked. Ah, but maybe it saved lives! Why does this remind me of Kazuo Isiguro's latest novel?

Should I care that Congress recently upped mandatory minimums for drug offenses, tacking on special extras if a crime was committed within a city block of a gun? Or if one of the perpetrators was thinking about guns? (Check this out, and see if you can spot the giant pit of stupid:)

"Mr. Forbes argued that critics who say jail time only turns juvenile offenders into hardened criminals overlooked the potential for keeping them behind bars when they are most likely to commit crimes. "The crime-probability ages are 15- to 24-year-olds," he said, "and if you take the person off the streets for that period then the statistics go enormously away in terms of perpetrating additional crimes."

I just don't know what to think any more, so I'm resorting to blogging about food, music, and the occasional footwear. Perhaps Minister Buckethead can take up the political side of things, and at least give me a wall to bounce my objections off of. That doesn't hurt when I do that, does it dude?

Before me on the marble slab that keeps our remote controls and magazines off the floor is a mug of liquid. Darkly roiling currents well up from deep within, disturbing the tranquility of a surface lightly stippled with irridescing dots of oils. It is a cup of decaffeinated coffee.

But Johno!?, you might ask in wonder? What happened to the solemn vows? What happened to the blood-oaths? What happened to the co-founder and manager of the coffeeshop that has so far given the Starbucks' empire a measurable fraction of its up-and-coming management team? Remember when you said that through your veins coursed the brown tears of the Bean? Remember that time in college you stayed up for eleven straight days, aided by your best friend and boon companion, coffee?

Yeah, so what? Somewhere along the way I turned thirty, the coffee in my veins turned to water, and I discovered that staying up all night at eighteen is a far cry from staying up all night at thirty, like running a mile is a far cry from running a mile with broken kneecaps. So, these days I tend to turn my penchant for stimulantary gourmandizing toward the heady and beguiling world of teas. There is an even bigger world of experience to discover, from the most plebian Assam blend to the most exotic monkey-picked Chinese oolong. Tea has some ancillary health benefits that I am only on the verge of imagining, my hands no longer shake, and when I sweat I no longer smell like I've bathed in gallons of Maxwell House.

So, decaf. Not all the time, not every day, but: decaf. When I want coffee but don't want the jitters: decaf. And sometime's it's just fine.

As we all know, decaffienated coffee is usually a sick joke. Coffee such as comes from diners, coffee carts, downscale restaurants and donut shops (including the mistakenly vaunted though perfectly inoffensive Dunkin Donuts coffee) isn't a beverage to be enjoyed so much as it is a caffeine delivery vector, different from the auto-antenna-cum-crackpipe only by the varying respectabilities of the stimulants in question. Now that's fine. But ask yourself: why would you drink that swill if not for the rush? If it's a crackpipe, why only pretend to smoke rock?

Decaf comes into its own only when the stakes get higher. You see, 8 oz. of diner coffee contains somewhere in the neighborhood of 180-210 mg of caffeine. Respectable, but not outrageous. By comparison, the same amount of a nice full city roasted Costa Rican or Papua New Guinea can contain 300 mg or more. Over the course of a 16-oz cup of joe, that's the same as having a whole extra cup of the regular stuff. Unless you're used to popping that much at once decaf becomes as much about portion control as it does about anything else. These days, if I were myself to dump 600 mg of caffeine right in the middle of my day, I would pass from "hyperactive child" to "cranky toddler" by dinnertime and spend the night sleeping fitfully and fighting off a bitch of a headache. If I had to guess, I would say that my years of wanton bean abuse in college and after have caught up with me.

But the point of all this was the coffee. The mug before me that is rapidly donating its thermal energy to the marble slab which keeps it stationary relative to the dominant local gravity well. This mug of decaf is delicious. It's a Colombian water-process decaf from Rao's Coffee Roasters in Amherst, Massachusetts, and I can say with total confidence that not only is it the best mug of low-octane I have ever tasted, it's very nearly the best mug of Colombian I have ever tasted. The Colombian flavor profile is all there, the medium body which balances a clear palate reminiscent of Costa Rican beans with an earthy tone like a good Brazilian, the bright caramel references in the nose and at the mid-tongue, the hints of spices at the back of the tongue, and a pronounced hint of cocoa in the finish. The decaffeinating process has undoubtedly dulled the flavors a little bit; the cocoa comes through a little more than it should since it rides the muddy note of the decaffeination, and the aftertaste doesn't linger like it should, but considering that this is a cup of decaf, and decaf can never quite be the same thing as the real dea, I can't complain.

Julia Child always said that it made more sense to live well than to merely live. She preferred one tiny sliver of buttercream-frosted carrot cake to an entire box of low-fat Snackwells, and I know what she means. If enjoying what you do gives your life texture and meaning, than doing what you enjoy is part of the point of life. For those who care about coffee, decaf is both like smoking an empty auto antenna and like eating a dozen Snackwells. Lucky for me, there's ways to cheat.

I am not under any contract for Rao's Coffee nor have they requested my services. I just happen to think that I owe it to the world to point out that the best coffee in the Eastern United States is available from them via a ruthlessly efficient and chipper mail order staff. Try their Kenya AA and their Brazilian Natural Dry high test, and their Colombian decaf; you'll be very, very happy you did.

The road I grew up on is a beaut to drive, the two well paved lanes running alongside a lovely lake in sweeping curves and gently undulating hills through the backcountry of Nutsack Township, Ohio. It also happens to be the best route from Stinktown to Nutsack Township if you don't want to take the highway. The result: speedway. Every summer you can sit on the porch and watch the cars shooting past at 60, 70, 80 miles per hour. Every winter you can sit indoors and listen for the crunch of metal on tree. The brother of a friend of mine once got busted by his parents as they passed him doing 110 the other way on the long slow curve past the lake; knowing that the police never patrolled that particular stretch of Ohio roadway, he asked them later, "Well who's gonna catch me... the squirrel patrol?"

Turns out we should all watch our backs. Loyal reader #0017/EDog sent me this link, a story of fear and squirrelling on the back of a high-horsepower Valkyrie hog that made me laugh so hard pizza came out my nose. Which hurt a lot.

Last week I wrote briefly about the importance of epiphany to music lovers. Careful readers of this weblog will know already that I'm a principled agnostic; principled in that I've given it a lot of thought, contemplated deeply both my navel and the nature of existence, and come to the conclusion that this whole God thing isn't my bag, though if at some future date something happens that undermines my deep skepticism (e.g. rapture, Cleveland Indians winning the World Series on the strength of their pitching) I am perfectly willing to reconsider my stance.

Even so, I do spend a fair amount of time thinking about religion and how people use the faith that they have. For a number of reasons both personal and intellectual, religion is a favorite object of my contemplation. It's also bit of a habit. Even though I'm not a particulary godly dude, thanks to vestiges of my upbringing I still go in for some aspects of Inner Light Protestantism and its reliance on ecstasy, abandon, and the ability of a person to be moved. After all, I'm from Ohio, where all that stuff was started. A good Southern Baptist sermon complete with choir and congregational participation gets me all worked up. Gospel music (viz. The Staples Singers, not that whitebread pop shit that passes these days) rings my bell but good. The ecstatic aspect of religion exercises a profound draw on me. The god part... not so much. But the transcendence of self? Yeah.

So, being not the godly type, I seek out ecstasy elsewhere - especially through music. It's only natural; I'm a music geek and spend the portion of my time not devoted to thinking about food, sex, politics, or the nature of other people's devotion on mental kabbalah like putting together the all-time greatest backing band ever (which would include John Lord of Deep Purple on the keyboards and Clyde Stubblefield of the JBs on drums, incidentally).

It occurred to me the other day that I have a fairly extensive collection of amateur-sounding rock and blues music that I like precisely because of the abandon involved in its creation. Somehow records that come across as incompetent and/or unhinged can appear under the right circumstances to be more right, more truthful than any display of great skill. On one level this sentiment is a shiney'd up version of the inadvertently horrible things that well-meaning liberals used to say about race records in the '50s ('Honeyboy Edwards is so good because he's so real! No intellect in the way of his emotions at all!'). And while the central thesis of such bigotry falls down as soon as you abandon race-based notions of intellectual capacity, in a larger sense there's something there.

Central to (nearly) any religious experience is the act of surrender; the faithful are asked to surrender their will, their ego, their trust, to a higher power who is in charge of making things work out okay in the long run. The same goes for music, if you're willing to seek it out. Some music lovers love to lose themselves in, say, a particularly excellent reading of Scriabin or Mozart. Some can check out entirely for the entire duration of an Anita O'Day album or a Coltrane solo. Through their dogged simplicity, the Ramones aimed to make pop music that was pure and true, and that was, broadly speaking, the defining mission of punk. On a different note, it's no longer even worth arguing over whether there's an ecstatic/devotional aspect to rock concerts (or whether they are more like Nuremberg rallies or church services) - what do you think all that screaming was about at Beatles concerts?

I personally can lose myself all kinds of ways, whether it be Beethoven, Mingus, the Cramps, or a Flaming Lips show, and indeed ecstatic transport through music is the closest I come to worship of any kind. I often prefer to take a shortcut and make the path to ecstacy easier by cheating. Some of my favorite music is downright dumbass dumb, and through being dumb achieves both greatness and enormous potential for ecstatic transport.

In fact the very song that sparked this entire meandering rant was a very dumb song indeed. It was The Contours' early '60s hit, "Do You Love Me (Now That I Can Dance)?" On the surface, that's a decided long shot for being a source of anything serious. First of all, it's a Motown recording. Even though it's early Motown, made before Berry Gordy had quite decided that smoothness was his guiding principle, the song still bears the mark of the Guiding Hand of Gordy. Second, it's a song about some dumb fad dances; the mashed potato, the twist, etc. Third, it's definitely a minor achievement when compared to apexes of Motown's art such as "Tracks of My Tears," "What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?" and "Mercy, Mercy Me." Fourth, it's just plain dumb.

But wait. What's really going on here? Why does this song inspire in me near-religous feelings of ecstatic release every time I hear it? I swear, it's precisely in being so stupid that it achieves greatness.

Listen. Some nerdy guy in too-short pants and a bad haircut is panting after a stylish girl who will never appreciate him regardless of what he does. She breaks his geeky heart right there in public. Uncowed, he goes off and learns some of the new hot dances of the day in hopes of winning her heart. At the next school dance, he corners her and begins showing her what he can do. "Watch me now!" he commands! He shakes it up! He shakes it down! He does the mashed potato! He does the twist! The whole time his face is frozen in a rictus-grin as his newly pomaded hairdo shakes out and out and falls in his face, as he sweats and sweats and sweats, as his hair sticks to his forehead and dark saddlebags form under his arms, as his freshly ironed white shirt comes untucked from his best wool slacks, as his new shoes leave black streaks all over the gymnasium floor. Ooh! He's hot! He's in the moment! Oww! He's slick! He's hep! He's in love with his own moves! Yeah! Yeah! And the whole time, he asks the girl over and over and over again, "Do you love me? Do you LOVE ME? DO YOU LIKE IT LIKE THIS?!? DO YOU LOVE MAH?!?!?"

Like Anthony Michael Hall in Sixteen Candles trying desperately to wow Molly Ringwald, yet shot through with some of the uncomfortably-awful-yet-strangely-excellent aura of the dance scene from Napoleon Dynamite, this kid - whoever he is - is trying far too hard at something he's probably pretty good at. But no matter what, this kid has definitely let go. He has transcended fear. He has transcended ego. He has transcended that which ties him to his sense of self and has dissolved himself in the purity of the moment, taking a leap of faith into the unknown for the sake of young sweaty love. Yea verily, our young hero possesses a singularity of motive and will to surrender that your most hardened jihadi would witness and envy.

On so many levels - the incongruity of the premise and the performance, the infectiously danceable beat, the enthusiastically off-key backup vocals, the various shouts, hiccups, and squeals that erupt as the singer begs to be noticed, "Do You Love Me" is as close as a song about the mashed potato could possibly come to speaking in tongues. I can identify completely with this scenario. As I recently documented at painful length, I grew up a dork, and the utter dorkiness of this song speaks straight to my soul. This, combined with the uplifting parable of our hero's Quixotic quest, push "Do You Love Me" into territory heretofore unexplored by Jesuit and Sufi alike. So, even though "Do You Love Me?" is in fact a dumb song about some dumb dances, it truly and honestly ends up feeling like touching the face of whatever god hears the prayers of the terminally unhip.

Today my son is two years old. After playing in the sandbox his grandmother gave him for his birthday, here he sits, just before holding forth on the tensile and shear strength of support elements in all sand construction. Later, in a similar pose, he lectured the family on the history of the sand castle, its persistence as an image of transience and instability, and its connection to the 'building on sand' metaphors in the theology of the Early Church Fathers.

In a comment to my economics post below, GeekLethal coins the term "onanomics" to describe that branch of economics that manages, through narrowly modeled, tightly construed conditions, to describe absolutely nothing of use. Good coinage.

This weekend, I was watching the Sunday news cycles when I saw footage of Laura Bush speaking at the yearly dinner they throw to persuade the White House Press Corps that they are something better than slime you scrape off a shoe. The networks all replayed that sorta-funny but really upsetting set of jokes where W is so dumb he once tried to milk a male horse, so easygoing he is in bed by 9, and so unsubtle that he likes to fix every problem on his ranch no matter how big or small with a chainsaw... which is why he gets along so well with Cheney and Rumsfeld. What? Did Laura Bush just call her husband cack-handed and dim, with a penchant for unintrospective bumbling and jerking off horses, and then play that for laughs?

Almost as good as last year when they did that whole "nope... no WMDs under here montage" with George looking under couches and in closets. Laff freakin riot.

Anyway, the word that popped into my head to describe Laura Bush's performance at the Press Corps dinner was "macrotesticularity." As in, "my, that was awfully macrotesticular of her to play our nightmares for laughs like that."

Bet you didn't know that a post about neologisms was going to degenerate into a takedown of the President's speechwriters, foreign policy, and taste for chainsaws, didja?

[wik] I should probably be clear here. I don't think the President is stupid. To begin with, that would mean that his opponents are even stupider than he is, and although there is ample evidence to support that thesis, all that can be proven is that his opponents are less smart, not that the President is stupid. Moreover, stupid men don't make President. Period. Now, that does not mean that George W. Bush is far to incurious and prone to what I would call lack of insight, but that's a matter of taste. Au chaque ses propres, you know?

But to make a funny out of the President's supposed lack of intelligence is neither funny, reassuring, or particularly worthwhile for anybody. If he's that stupid that he jacks off horses and can't be bothered to figure out why, say, Turkmenistan's Islamic crisis is different from Sudan's, that's horrible. If he's not that stupid than joking about how he is is just sort of tasteless.

[alsø wik] I should also be clear on another point. I thought Laura Bush was pretty funny; they were funny lines. Or as it occurred to me later, they would be funny lines in another context. Unlike certain moral majoritarians, I have no problem with the First Lady making horsejacking jokes, and unlike some uptight liberals, I think it's funny to laugh at the President while retaining some respect for the office. But my mind's subprocesses have been working it over the last couple of days, and at some point I began to realize that jokes about the President's smarts are weak, tired and lame. Where's Bruce Vilanch when you need him?

[alsø alsø wik] I should also also be clear that I really haven't spent very much time thinking about this. Reading this post over, I come off pretty uptight. In reality, I'm not all that bothered by any of this and in fact have spent far more time writing about it than I have fretting about it. So I'm going to move on now, and post something about robots or music or boobies, or robots with musical boobies.

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] Ohhh, but this is too good to pass up! Big Time Patriot of blogcritics recommends that we test the mettle of the FCC and lodge formal complaints about the hot man-on-beast penile manipulation talk aired on CSPAN. If a blurry accidental nipple is worth half a mil, what's the going fine for horse dong?

I can't believe I forgot about this. Tomorrow is the 35th Anniversary of the Kent State shootings. Although police had killed eleven black students at an Alabama university earlier that spring, well... back in 1970 it took four blue-collar white students to capture the nation's imagination. Wizbang (linked above) has links to several good informational resources about May 4, 1970 as well as a priceless photo and quote from KSU Prof. Glenn Frank urging the crowd to disband before more people get killed.

I'm from just outside of Kent. Growing up I could see, across the lake and over the woods, the tall tower of the University library from our front picture window. There's something mentioned in none of the histories of the KSU shootings that means a lot to me. My grandfather died seven years ago, before I had a chance to really talk to him about his life. You know; you just figure they're going to be around forever. There are a million things I wish I'd asked him about. Like the time he and my dad loaded up the Ford with crates of polio vaccine in Akron and drove it back to Portage County to set up a clinic in his office. Or all the times he flipped his car over cutting across fields on the way to deliver a baby or treat a farmer with a broken leg. He was a country doctor of the old school, trained to handle everything from cancer to obstetrics, and he was a trouper.

Or the times in 1970 when that semiretired doctor would come home shaking and furious from his work as a staff doctor at Kent State University. Sometimes student protestors would lock their limbs together in such a way that the police would have to dislocate a joint in order to break up the line; they were not shy about doing so. My grandfather was 'asshole' to the students, in his nice brown suit and tie, and to the cops he was a 'goddamn pinko fag sympathizer' - all because it was part of his life's work to reset a dislocated shoulder. He was a gentle man and a gentleman, and it no doubt cut him deeply.

My grandfather died before I could ask him about that hideous day in May when as the staff doctor on call he pronounced four young men and women dead and treated the bullet wounds of the survivors.

I miss my grandpa.

[wik] If you want a real head-trip, there is no better drug then the Portage County (Ohio) Record-Courier from the first five months of 1970. Without getting too deeply into it, here's the basics. Kent State was a practical school where mill and factory workers sent their sons and daughters so they would have something more waiting for them than a rivet gun at Lordstown or a stamping machine in Canton. Most Kent State students in 1970 were from this blue collar background, and nearly all of them were first-generation college students. Therefore, the understanding from their parents, speaking generally, was that they were there to better themselves.

Moreover, Kent the town in 1970 was an insular place. According to one book on the shootings, written in 1970-71, the only place you could by a Washington Post or New York Times in town was at the drugstore on the corner of Water and Main (it's still there.) If you got there early, that is, for one of the two copies they got in each day. News of war protests, student uprisings, and the like came to Kent filtered through the intensely conservative viewpoints of the editorial pages of the Record-Courier. Naturally, the good people of Ohio felt that war protesters were acting in irresponsible and un-American ways. Remember, this was well before any concensus of any kind had formed about Vietnam being a "quagmire."

When protests broke out on the campus of Kent State, the town was positive that outside agitators (from the Yippies and Black Panthers) had infiltrated the student body (this wasn't particularly true, by the way). As the protests grew in intensity, the irritation of the town grew more quickly. The sons and daughters of GM and Goodyear were smashing windows and singing songs and having group sex rather than studying. The diseases of the liberal East Coast seemed now to infect the heart of Middle America. James Michener's investigative book, Kent State: What Happened, and Why fanned these flames in the aftermath of the shootings with portraits of irresponsible, drug-addled losers sucking on daddy's money to blow off class and have dirty sex, all exemplified by a hippie-infested "House on Ash Street." (For what it's worth, there is no Ash Street in Kent.)

The "Letters" page of the Record-Courier tells the story first hand: the students deserved to be shot; the dirty hippies are a cancer to be cut out; why did the National Guard stop at four?; kudos to the Guard for keeping the peace; it's about time these punks were taught a lesson. As understandable, though chilling, as these letters might be, the sickening ones are from local people who put a dollar value on human life. In the days before May 4, students had smashed some windows downtown and graffitied and defaced some storefronts and public areas. One letter, I remember, put the $11,000 pricetag for some of the repairs as a fair price to pay for four lives lost.

Richard Nixon found his support among the "silent majority" he hailed as true Americans. The history of that majority has been written out of the popular recollection of the Vietnam era, as most of the "silent majority" went on with their lives without bothering to make lavish documentaries about them. Peace, love, hippies, Hendrix, and Easy Rider make it through to us, but my former neighbor spoke for a much larger part of America when she wrote in her letter to the paper that the "poor lambs" got what they had coming.

Die!

By My Hand!

I Creep Across the Land!

Killing Firstborn Man!

*duggaDUGduggaDUN-DAH* I'm Creeping De-eath!

... and so on. But for reals. A group of UK adventurers are currently in the Gobi desert in search of... no shit... the Mongolian Death Worm.

Known to the locals as Allghoi khorkhoi (Mongolian for intestine worm due to its resemblance to a length of cow’s stomach), the blood red creature is much feared.

Three to five feet long, the Death Worm is said to lurk beneath the sands, emerging only at certain times of the year to spread fear among the desert dwellers. The nomads insist that the beast can spit a corrosive yellow saliva that acts like acid and that they can generate blasts of electricity powerful enough to kill a full grown camel.... Expedition leader, cryptozoologist Richard Freeman thinks it’s death dealing powers are apocryphal. . . .

What kind of animal is the Death Worm? Freeman has a theory. “I don’t think that it’s a worm at all. True worms need moisture. I think it is a limbless, burrowing reptile, probably a giant member of a group of reptiles known as amphisbaenas or worm lizards. These are a primitive group of poorly studied animals. They are not snakes or lizards but are related to both .I think the Death Worm is a giant member of this group.”

The team plans not only to catch the creatures but bring them back to England alive! They intend to force the Death Worms up from their burrows by damming local streams and flooding small areas of the desert.

It's times like these when I realize that I have made certain wrong decisions in life. Although it's a good life, with a roof, a wife, and this nifty striped tie I'm wearing, well... something is definitely missing. Here I sit in a nice beige office block while a team of Brits and their Mongolian guides streak across the high desert in Land Cruisers in search of a fearsome and deadly creature of legend.

However, it turns out I am lucky in one way. The expedition is sponsored by the

Exeter based Centre for Fortean Zoology, the world’s only full time, scientific organization, dedicated to the study of mystery animals. Past expeditions have included hunts for the Chupacabra, a blood drinking, nocturnal beast from Puerto Rico, the Naga, a 60 foot crested serpent in the jungles and caves of Thailand, and Orang-pendek, an ape man in the unexplored valleys of Sumatra.

I did some digging into the Ministry's archives, and I found out something ve-ry interesting. It seems that the Ministry played a hand in founding the Centre, with funds made available by the liquidation of our Kandahar branch office in the early 1990s (yes... it is vital the Ministry retain a presence in such troubled places to monitor the activities of evildoers, but it's amazing what a few unsuspected Stinger missiles in the hands of fanatics will do to a modest office flat, okay? Lesson learned, moving on.). Given that we have graciously allowed the British Government stewardship of the organization during the CFZ's search for the Chupacabra and the Naga, we respectfully request that any live specimens of Mongolian Death Worms be delivered forthwith to the Ministry Bunker and Castratorium. We need a little something for our moat.

[wik] I might also add... Shai-Hulud!!

I'm going to continue the amateur econoblogging, this time courtesy of Loyal Reader #0016/EDog.

DEMOCRATIC
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful.
Barbara Streisand sings for you.

REPUBLICANISM
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?

SOCIALIST
You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.

COMMUNIST
You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.

CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.

BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
Under the new farm program the government pays you to shoot one, milk the other, and then pours the milk down the drain.

More below the fold.
AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one.
You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when one cow drops dead. You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you have downsized and are reducing expenses.
Your stock goes up.

FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.
You go to lunch and drink wine.
Life is good.

JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains.
Most are at the top of their class at cow school.

GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour.
Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.

ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows but you don't know where they are.
While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman.
You break for lunch.
Life is good.

RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have some vodka.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You have some more vodka.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.

TALIBAN CORPORATION
You have all the cows in Afghanistan, which are two.
You don't milk them because you cannot touch any creature' private parts.
You get a $40 million grant from the US government to find alternatives to milk production but use the money to buy weapons.

IRAQI CORPORATION
You have two cows.
They go into hiding.
They send radio tapes of their mooing.

POLISH CORPORATION
You have two bulls.
Employees are regularly maimed and killed attempting to milk them.

BELGIAN CORPORATION
You have one cow.
The cow is schizophrenic.
Sometimes the cow thinks he's French, other times he's Flemish.
The Flemish cow won't share with the French cow.
The French cow wants control of the Flemish cow's milk.
The cow asks permission to be cut in half.
The cow dies happy.

FLORIDA CORPORATION
You have a black cow and a brown cow.
Everyone votes for the best looking one.
Some of the people who actually like the brown one best accidentally vote for the black one.
Some people vote for both.
Some people vote for neither.
Some people can't figure out how to vote at all.
Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which one you think is the best-looking cow.

CALIFORNIA CORPORATION
You have millions of cows.
They make real California cheese.
Only five speak English.
Most are illegals.
Arnold likes the ones with the big udders.

Late last week I came upon a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research that caught my fancy, called Rockonomics: The Economics of Popular Music. The abstract reads

This paper considers economic issues and trends in the rock and roll industry, broadly defined. The analysis focuses on concert revenues, the main source of performers ' income. Issues considered include: price measurement; concert price acceleration in the 1990s; the increased concentration of revenue among performers; reasons for the secondary ticket market; methods for ranking performers; copyright protection; and technological change.

For economists, this is actually a pretty interesting idea; I don't know of any solid studies that exist on the economics of the music biz.

However, I hadn't reached page two before I found something so egregiously lazy and wrong that I had to put the paper down and stop reading. Authors Marie Connolly and Alan B. Kreuger, both of that cidadel of Rock known as Princeton, of course have to start their paper by defining what the "Rock and Roll Industry" is in the first place. Leaving aside the incredible conceptual and grammatical slippage inherent in categorizing popular music over the last few decades as "The Rock and Roll Industry," the coauthors do a pretty good job of nailing down what their sample set will be:

Here, we will define popular music as music that has a wide following, is produced by contemporary artists and composers, and does not require public subsidy to survive. This definition rules out classical music and publicly supported orchestras. It includes rock and roll, pop, rap, bebop, jazz, blues and many other genres. What about Pavarotti? Well, we warned you that the border of the definition can be fuzzy. If the three tenors attract a large following and are financially viable, we would include them in the popular music industry as well.

So far so good, except for the weird decision to separate out bebop from jazz, and the continued insistence on using "rock and roll" as the defining paradigm of blues-based (mainly) white-people music as though Billy Joel can be comfortably put in a basket of commodities alongside Minor Threat.

But that's where the going gets really nutty. The authors write,

Why is popular music worthy of a handbook chapter? There are several responses. . . .[F]or many fans popular music transcends usual market economics and raises spirits and aspirations. In this vein, for example, Bruce Springsteen once commented, “in some fashion, I help people hold on to their own humanity, if I'm doing my job right.” Dewey Finn, the character played by Jack Black in the hit movie, School of Rock, went even further, immodestly claiming, “One great rock show can change the world.” The rock and roll industry arguably started as a social movement intended to bring about political, economic and cultural change, as much as it did as a business. Certainly, popular music is an important cultural industry. [My emphasis]

Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. "Rock and Roll" did not arguably start as a social movement yadda yadda, unless by "argument" you mean "irritatingly lazy statement that will cause people to argue with you." "Rock and Roll" did not start as a social movement except in the fusty cheap-pulp pages of Rolling Stone compilation books full of lazy mythologizing and glory-days reminiscing about the time in 1967 when the Airplane played that one benefit for the Diggers that raised some cash for some homeless people to eat with. Leary was there too! With LSD! Ahh...those were the days! What was the explicit sociopolitical agenda of "My Ding-a-Ling?" Or of the film soundtrack extract "Rock Around the Clock?"

"Rock and Roll," to use the authors' term, started for two reasons: for artists to get paid, and for artists to get laid. Just because the martini set thought Lead Belly's singing was perfect for their Worker's Struggle don't make it a movement. Just because Bruce Springsteen writes bad poetry about factories and bad cops doesn't make it a movement. No matter what it might from time to time temporarily become (and rarely for long, or to much end), the music business has always been a business, whether the incentive for the performer is increased social capital, a tangible good, or currency.

I don't mean to shovel all my vitriol on these two well-meaning economists, but it really bugs me that every time a new discipline discovers that music is worthy of study they feel compelled to try to reinvent the Stratocaster. In this case, it's as if dozens of journal articles, hundreds of books, and thousands of published interviews don't already exist in the popular press, musicology, sociology and history-- articles that have long since evolved a highly refined set of assumptions about the history of popular music that no longer have much room for arbitrary handwaving about Rock And Roll as a Social Movement For Uh Making The World Better And Stuff. That's high school term paper thinking. In internet terms, these authors have not RTFFAQ and are acting like total n00bz begging to be pwned. QED. DOA. SOL. etc.

Rock and Roll changes lives because people hear the music and are compelled to do something. It's internal; it's individual; it's atomized, ephemeral, and (unfortunately for economists) almost totally unmeasurable. Rock and Roll does not, NOT NOT NOT, change lives because an artist sits down in the studio and says, "today, I'm going to change the world." That's what got us "We Are The World! A paper on the economics of the concert industry need not even go down this road if it aims to be taken seriously.

As for the rest of the paper, I haven't been able to pick it up again thanks to my lingering irritation. The lesson for today is: even the most revolutionary theses can be derailed by lazy hand-waving in the introduction.

The Universe is a demanding place. It was not enough that I spent most of a year groveling before HR drones, dutifully following up on every lead, no matter how tenuous, sending emails and trolling through the nether recesses of internet job postings. I had to demonstrate that I really, really wanted to work.

Last week, I started applying for McJobs. While I have been getting the occasional short term techwriting gig – a week here, a week there – the work was not dependable enough to provide any kind of financial security. So I figured a yob at Kinkos would provide a steady, if not large, amount of income to even out the feast and famine of intermittent contracting. Among the fine institutions that I petitioned for work was the local video store.

Last Wednesday, I accepted their kind offer of employment and free movie rentals. The Universe, now convinced that I was serious about the whole work thingy, turned the work spigot to ’11.’ Thursday, I had an interview with Northrop Grumman. Whilst I was interviewing, I got two calls offering short term contracts. Friday morning, Northrop offered me a job at significantly more than I was making last year. Today, I fully expect my last two interviews to call back and offer me work; and just to rub it in, I bet someone I talked to half a year ago will call back and say that the position I interviewed for is now open, and can I start yesterday.

Not that I’m complaining. After very nearly a year of blissful unemployment, I am ready to get back to the daily hassles of interminable commuting, smelly coworkers, cramped cubicles and (this is the important bit) the bimonthly ego validation of shekels in my checking account. The long drought is over, and now I need to google for whomever is the patron saint of unemployed and desperate white collar IT wage slaves.

He gets a candle and a beer.

Rockabilly weirdo Hasil Adkins is dead. I wish I had more to say about him, but all I have to go on are rumor, innuendo, and one indelible song I treasure as part of my collection. I always meant to see him play, always meant to buy a ticket if he ever came around, but now I can't. He lived in near total obscurity. He never had a hit, he never had radio play. What he did have was a fucked-up way of playing guitar and singing that sort of combined the berserk ravings of Screamin' Jay Hawkins with the unmedicated sincerity of Wesley Willis (rock over Chicago... Be A Pepper, Drink Dr. Pepper). He had perfect pitch, yet sung like he was on quaaludes and sometimes strung his guitar with fishing line. When he was a child, he heard Hank Williams on the radio and assumed in the way that children do that Hank was playing all those instruments himself, so li'l Hasil taught himself to play several instruments at once.

Fat Possum Records has a good one of his, that you can buy here, and Amazon seems to have available a compilation that contains his harrowing early '50s hit "She Said."

There's not much I can say that will convince people that they would get something out of music as strange and periodically unpleasant as Hasil Adkins, which is a shame. I have a Fat Possum compilation from the mid-1990s with Adkins' "Your Memories" on it, and I am periodically compelled to pull the disc out again and reaffirm my devotion to its wonders. "Your Memories" is a dirgelike piece in which Adkins chokes chords out of his guitar as he weeps, moans, and mutters a lovers' lament. Is she dead? Is she gone? Was "she" a pet? The whole performance seems like it should belong on some Smithsonian Folkways archive recording from the Harry Smith collection - here it is on a compact disc recorded with modern-ish equipment and converted to a series of finely-grained ones and zeroes, and yet it seems to seep out of the speakers like oil from some forgotten hollow in the West Virginia Hills. It's too real, too raw, too wierd in a high lonesome way, to really belong to the age of digital.

I have at home a collection of Irish folk music recorded for the Tradition label in the 1940s and 1950s before the Irish backcountry was really too tightly tied into the rest of the world. Some of the numbers are familiar enough; bodhrian drum, fiddle, pennywhistle, maybe a broadchested lad belting out threats against the Black and Tans. But others - others - are otherworldly experiences. You can imagine a middle-aged Irish lady with excellent Gaelic and only fair English standing in her chicken yard. She prepares to sing by clasping her hands behind her back like she was taught in school. She closes her eyes, turns her head so her mouth is as close as possible to the microphone. She begins to sing a song that sounds like it was handed down intact through the long years from before the coming of the Christian Monks. She sings in English but the words are unintelligible. She sings in key but the scale is wrong: flat where it should be natural, unsettled where it should resolve. The entire weight of Irish particularity; their pride, their strangeness, their history of glory, of murder, of revenge, of drowned children, of not enough to eat, of exiled lords and foreign wars on Irish soil hangs by this one thin thread of song.

West Virginian native Hasil Adkins kept spinning that thread right up until yesterday.

Over the weekend the Goodwyfe and I caught the filmic version of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Was it good? Weeeellll.... it didn't suck. There were some brilliant bits and it was lovely to see Douglas Adams brought to the screen with his point of view and wit intact, but the whole thing didn't really hang together particularly well. See it, but at a matinee or at home.

Considering that a fairly large proportion of weblog readers are also Douglas Adams fans, I will refrain from tossing spoilers out here. I will just quickly note a couple real highlights: Sam Rockwell plays Zaphod Beeblebrox as a fuddled and slap-happy George W. Bush, down to the tipsy smirk and the West Texas accent (and gives Trillian the opportunity to speak the line, "Buttons are not toys!"). Somehow, it really really works. Martin Freeman from the BBC's The Office is pitch perfect as Arthur Dent, and Alan Rickman is perfect as the depressive robot Marvin. Magrathea, the Infinite Improbability Drive, the Vogons and their penchant for brutal yet stifling bureaucracy, and the British ability to stand in line like no other race in the galaxy are all pretty much perfectly done.

Pretty much, if you don't mind seeing one of your favorite books interpreted lovingly as a semi-disconnected series of sketches a la Monty Python, be my guest.