Senator Al Franken . . . Impressive!

Watch 2 minutes of Senator Franken annihilating the credibility of one of the "Family Values" charlatans. Yes, the Senator is impressive, but, in all honesty, this was easy work.

Alice Waters and Cheetos

I'm informed by TC, that Chez Panisse restaurant will celebrate its 40th anniversary soon. I was not invited. Here's why:

Dear T: I was not invited to the 40th Chez Panisse thang. Prob'ly cause I saw Alice Waters at a Milpitas 7-11 one night 'round Xmas buying a bag of Cheetos. At least she was about to buy 'em.

I said, "Yo, Alice! Don't tell me you jones on junk!"

"Oh, Greg, one of my most thoughtful and conscious diners, mentor to Michael Pollan, godfather to Fanny, I must say it's odd to see you here as well. How's Tina? I still can't put her pork loin with foie gras marmalade and toasts of escarole and faux shark fin out of my mind . . . but, no, I'm not 'Jonesing' as you so rustically put it. This bag of Chev -- oh let me look at the label again -- ah, yes, 'Cheetos' -- will be part of a demonstration in which we inveigh against filthy food. And you're here because . . . . ?"

"Alice, we go way back," I replied, "so don't try to turn the kitchen table on me and stop your lying ways. My dear junkie Alice, you got Cheeto dust all over your shit: your fingers, all around your mouth, a 'lil bit in your hair, and . . . oh-oh, on your palms, Alice, and you know what that means!" At which point she started to wipe her hands on a handsome sage-colored linen apron I'd given her years ago after she finally learned, with my instruction, how to kill and slaughter her own livestock. "On your palms, Alice! You should be 'shamed. Means you been stuffin' 'em in your moth, pushing them in . . . with your palms! BOTH palms to make sure nothing falls out. Oh, you're jonesin' Alice. Can't deny it. And as for me, I'm just here to get the Sunday paper for the restaurant reviews. I covered for Mark Bittman in Shanghai last week."

But she was not be be daunted. "Bullshit!" she screamed. "No one comes to Milpitas -- no one! -- except to hide their filthy consumptions. You certainly didn't come here just to get 'the paper'! And, besides, I can wash off this yummy Cheeto dust," whereupon she extended her tongue all over her hands and around her mouth, making it hard to understand her, "bu you gong nee mumfs ta take off tha fory poun uh Ding-Dongs and Bud gut!" Then after having sufficiently dog-cleaned herself, she stepped up to me and warned, "You may have made me, but I'll ruin you if this ever gets out to anyone!"

Well, Alice, it's out. And it's on. Turn me away at the 40th party if you dare.

g

Favorite Typo by a Student

I teach Russian Literature right now, Dostoevski and Chekhov, wherein we're regaled with matters theological quite a bit. Today, I've been given a paper in which Chekhov's "The Bride" speaks of the prospect of the how the "Kingdom of Heaven [might] descend on earth."

Except this glorious student, and I emphasize that s/he is glorious, wrote: "Kingdom of Heave."

Sounds like a fraternity to me. Or a heavy metal band.

I will forever cherish this typo.

Second Favorite Question Ever Asked of Me By a Student Followed by the Favorite Question

An encounter today with a student in my office:

Second favorite question ever asked of me by a student: Greg, I have a splinter. Do you have some tweezers?

Me: No. I used them on my wife's tick and forgot to put them back into my Swiss Army Knife I carry with me always.

Favorite question ever asked of me by a student: Do you know anyone at school who would have tweezers?

I then named 5 people who first came to mind.

Student: Thanks Greg.

Me: No, wait. . . . Do you really believe that I have a list of tweezer carriers committed to memory? I mean, I know I may seem godlike to you with some awesome omniscience, but . . . I'm not a god and not omniscient.

[pause]

Student: Alright. Thanks Greg!


Often, kids ask questions that seem to presume omniscience on my part, but it's not my presumed omniscience so much as it is the students' real lack of investigative zeal.

Watching the NBA Finals with Tina

First hoops game either of us had watched in maybe 5 years: Dallas at Miami, 1st game, NBA Finals. Tina's commentary:

"The neckline of that team's jerseys are, I'd say, rather feminine."

Moments later: "Whoa, the other team, too, with the feminine neckline! I'd call it a 'modified sweetheart neckline.'"

Then: "Long shots are still 'from downtown'? They still say 'downtown'? A long shot should be from the suburbs."

Dallas misses 4 straight shots: "They're terrible. They deserve to lose."

"Long Story Short"

Whenever someone interjects "anyway -- long story short" into a story, the story is already too long.

Official State Weapons! An Idea Whose Time Has Come!

I savor recent reports from Utah and Arizona whose legislative bodies have established an official state gun. For Utah, the Browning M1911 pistol because Mr. Browning grew up in Utah and was the son of pioneers. For Arizona, the Colt revolver because it's made in Connecticut and was used to help settlers kill off the ancestors of Native Americans living in Arizona. That's my guess anyway.

NPR reports that the Florida legislature would bar doctors -- especially pesky pediatricians -- from asking their patients if they own guns, guns being a possible health hazard, especially to children if the parents are careless with the care of guns. Governor Scott says that asking this question of parents constitutes a violation of their Second Amendment rights. Perhaps Florida will honor the loaded-and-unlocked-and-negligently-stored-danger-to-my-child-and-other-children-but-goddammit-that's-my-Second-Amendment-right-and-I'll-give-it-up-when-you-pry-it-from-my-child's-cold-dead-fingers official state gun.

But why just firearms? Why not the official state weapon? Some creative states might designate the pox-infested woolen blanket as the official state weapon. Others, in the South perhaps, the rope! New Jersey might honor cement. And, of course, Nevada would trump everyone with its official state armament: the hydrogen bomb!

Yoko Ono Advises the Beatles from Bed

Took me three years, I think, at a couple of pages here and there now and again, but I just finished Bob Spitz's excellent 860 page biography "The Beatles." If you know me, you know I'm a Beatles fan. My tastes have shifted more toward John Beatles than Paul Beatles (and I've a very, very limited interest in post-Beatles Beatles) and I read the bio mostly for insight into their song creation and musicianship. Of course, there's much more than that including their personalities, the business end, the impact of adulation and millions of dollars, the drugs, the drugs, the drugs, and the drug-induced psychosis, especially in LSD-addled John Lennon who added heroin after deciding to throw in his lot with Yoko Ono.

I couldn't help but make the following assessment: Lennon and McCartney seem quite objectionable as mates, friends, or bandmembers. Yes, yes, yes . . . great music, but deeply unattractive people those two. McCartney was, perhaps is, egotistical, controlling, self-serving, pretentious, disingenuous, and unctuous in the extreme. Lennon was worse: violent, volcanically angry, homophobic, probably anti-semitic, deeply inconsiderate, and drug-addled.

George and Ringo? Princes. And perhaps Lennon outgrew his demons before he died. Hard to say.

But Yoko, with whom I've always tried to sympathize, may be the most comically objectionable of them all.

Consider the following episode from Spitz's biography (which, I'd have to say, is not sympathetic to Yoko):

After marrying John, Yoko had suffered another of her several miscarriages and to heal she and John visited Scotland on holiday. This was around the time of the "Abbey Road" recordings. John had never driven a car before, and though quite stoned, he insisted that he be given an Aston-Martin to drive around the treacherous Scottish backroads. No one says "no" to a Beatle and so off he went with four people in the car including his son Julian by his first marriage and, of course, he promptly crashed the car into a deep ditch to avoid an oncoming car. After a brief hospitalization for superficial wounds, John and Yoko returned to London where John intended to head back into the studio with the Beatles. By this time, Yoko had been attending recording sessions for about a year despite the deep resentment of the other Beatles. Here's Spitz:

"With John's reappearance in the studio came Yoko, back at his side, ever conspicuous as an intruder; however, this time, there was an even more offensive twist: Yoko was pregnant again, with strict orders from her doctor to remain in bed while recovering from the car crash. In a characteristically aggravating gesture, she had Harrods [London's Bloomingdale's] deliver a double bed to the studio and instructed a [studio] technician to suspend a microphone above her head that would adequately furnish her comments to the band."

Elsewhere, Spitz reports that upon attending recording sessions with John, Yoko would presume to advise the band on musical matters. She would cut into discussions with a forceful, "Beatles should . . . " followed by her expert recommendations.

I very much enjoyed reading about John and Yoko's record, the "Wedding Album," in which one whole side of the vinyl album consists of John and Yoko screaming each other's name. Imagine!

Getting a Second Mortgage at an ATM

Went to my bank last week to withdraw funds from one of the two ATMs. I took my place off to side and a polite distance away from two women using the machines. A young man was already there waiting ahead of me on the other side of the women.

So I'm standing off to the side and I can't really see what either woman's doing. Occasionally, I see a hand reach in and back again, then in, then back. A hip or foot shifts compelling the young man and me to look up in anticipation of our turn. He and I make brief eye contact and look away like people waiting for a restroom at a popular restaurant. But the women at the ATMs continue their transactions.

After a while the line on either side of the women had increased to include several people including a mom with two small children who were running around, marring the banking decorum which exists even in this parking lot.

The women at the ATMs continued their business. We all looked furtively as the hands at the ATMs went in, out, in, out.

And then it suddenly occurred to me: Banks, like other businesses, work to cut down on labor costs -- after all, who goes to a teller anymore? -- so maybe these banks found a way to help people with more complex banking transactions . . . at ATMs!

I mean, what were these women doing at these ATMs? Getting a second mortgage? Setting up trust funds for their children? What?!!?

Does everyone now do all their banking on ATMs?

Does the Federal Reserve make money supply adjustments on an ATM?

Finally, after the women had apparently started a hedge fund at the ATMs, I stepped up to transact my humble banking -- a simple withdrawal of walking around money which made me feel like a beggar by comparison or, at best, a child bringing his piggie bank to the counter. But by the time I'd done so, I calculated that inflation, modest as it is, had eaten away 4% of the value of my earnings!

Groceries? Yes. Cappucino? No.

Spaniards Do Random

As you probably know, there are some sayings in other languages that, when translated literally, lose their intended meaning.

Here, in the USA, when we are confronted by some irrelevant piece of info in the midst of a discussion, those of us middle-aged and older might ask, "Dude, what's that got to do with the price of tea in China?" Those who are younger might insist, "Dude, that is soooo random."

In some Spanish-speaking countries, people respond to irrelevant info with, "Yo tengo una tía que toca la guitarra."

It literally translates as, "I have an aunt who plays the guitar."

But what is means is, "Dude, you want random? I got random."


(You may feel, if you've read this far, that this blog entry seems random to you. Well, it is an eclectic mix of things here, right? The eclectics of the world do seem distracted by tangents.)

Greatest Music Video Ever

I am going to post videos I've come across. Here's the first. It's from Japan. Lovely.

Etymology of "Genius"

Genius -- Comes from the Latin word of the same spelling for the deity which watches over each person from birth. This spirit gives one "wit and talent." The root of this is in the Latin word "gignere" which means "to produce" and that comes from the proto-Indo-European foundational word "gen" which means "to produce," too. So you can see how the word "genes" fits in here.

Going back to the idea of a deity which watches over each person from birth, consider the word "genie" which shares an origin with "genius." A genie guards over you and makes you look smart.


Genius without education is like silver in the mine.
-- Benjamin Franklin

Impact of Ayn Rand on Tea Party Folks

Maureen Dowd on the impact of Ayn Rand on the Tea Party folks in Congress like Paul Ryan:

"Indeed, Congressman Ryan has said the reason he got involved in public service was 'by and large' because of Rand, and he has encouraged his staffers to read Atlas Shrugged.

You’d think that our fiscal meltdown would have shown the flaw in Rand’s philosophy. She thought we could derive morals from the markets. But we derived immorality from the markets.

She wrote about Nietzschean superheroes who made things. She died before capitalism evolved into a vampire casino where you could bet against investments you sold to your clients, and make money off something you didn’t own or that existed only on paper."

Guy Kawasaki, on the iPhone

"$188 worth of parts, manufactured in a plant where workers tend to commit suicide, hitched to America’s worst cell phone network. But this is not how Steve Jobs pitches it"

Talking Money

This was presented to my students after they read and wrote about The Great Gatsby:

Many of you have a problem with “money.” You don't trust it; don't want to be too involved with it. You find it . . . vulgar. At the very least, you don't want to be defined by how much you have or how you use it.

Now, let’s stipulate that while some of us in this room may have considerably more family money than others, it is nonetheless the case that by comparison with most of the rest of the world, now and certainly throughout history, we are all filthy rich. So your high rise may be 20 floors taller than mine, but both of them tower over the shanty towns of the rest of the world.

And yet . . . we distrust money. I believe that the distrust of money is a luxury only the rich can afford because we can’t really imagine how we will ever go hungry or cold and by that I mean hungry and with no knowledge of when or from where the next meal or meals will come come. We take money for granted because we can. Remember, in this context, we’re all rich. Remember also, someone has ponied up $34K to have you go to this school when there are free schools all over the city. That $34K is more than most people will see in a lifetime. This is not meant to make you feel guilty . . . just responsible for knowing what’s up.

Money is not the problem. The problem is the stupid ideas we all too often have about money. The two – money and stupid ideas about money – are separable.

Some of you express a distaste for what is expected of you: go to college, get a job, make bank, raise a family, and the young ‘uns start it all over again.

Here’s another way to look at that process: Develop your intellectual talents because your brain likes a challenge otherwise you never would have learned to speak; apply your intellectual talents to an attractive occupation and trade those talents for the talents of others. I teach. I trade teaching for, say, dentistry.

Money is just a tool that allows us to trade skills efficiently. With money, I don’t have to find a parent of one my students to do the dentistry in exchange for my teaching. That would be an inefficient use of my time. I couldn’t teach as much and the dentist, in search of teachers, couldn’t . . . dent as much.

Developing your talents because it brings you joy is fine. Developing your talents so that you can apply them to the most profitable occupation available, is deeply dangerous. You run the risk of a lifetime, your only lifetime, consumed by boredom and little fulfillment.

I can’t imagine being a dentist. I’d maybe make more money, but I’d be bored to the point of depression after 10 years or less. I hope my dentist loves dentistry. If she’s doing it just for the money, I hope she learns to love dentistry. If she doesn’t love it or learn to love it, I pity her.

Now, also, don’t be too unrealistic about money. Some people say, “Do what you want and the money will follow?” That’s ridiculous. Nothing could be more ridiculous.

More accurately: “Do what you want and the money won’t matter as much . . . unless you’re also responsible for the lives of others . . . like your children . . . in which case you can either sacrifice the ‘what you want’ self-indulgence and maybe attend to your kids or you can work hard to convince your kids that money doesn’t matter.” So . . . let’s get real about money. And let’s not denigrate the man and woman who didn’t have the opportunity to develop their intellectual talents and must now work some soul-deadening jobs to give kids a chance to develop their talents and live a fulfilling life.

So give money a break. It’s the messenger. Not the message.

The Fulfillment Curve from treehugger.com.