The Only Winning Move

Well, they say a stopped watch is right twice a day. So I feel lucky to have been wasting time when one of these Yahoo! entertainment blog posts got it right. It’s a thing on which shows to watch and which to avoid, and it’s nothing like comprehensive, but Buffy makes the “must watch” list (and even mentions that season 7 was crap!), as does The Office. And by “The Office” they don’t mean the one that stars that doofus from that merely mediocre movie by the same people who brought you the simpering, snivelling, audience-insulting, lives-in-its-wife’s-purse WORST comedy of the 2000s. Nope, they’re talking about the delightfully uncomfortable, takes-it-too-far, absolute ace original UK version. Shows that correctly made the bad list include “Sex and the City” and “Battlestar Galactica.” OK, I admit, I’ve never seen “Sex and the City,” but my understanding was that as a penis-bearer I’m required to hate it, so I’m going with that until I see evidence to the contrary. What’s cool is that they get Battlestar right: brilliant show up to a point, and then it’s just absurd. I draw the line a little sooner than they did, but the point is that it started off great and then at some point before the close jacknifed into an overturned truck of cow dung.

Of course, it’s the Yahoo! sponsored blogs, so perfection is over the rainbow. “Lost” is listed as one of the good shows, which it isn’t, and even though I haven’t seen “The Sopranos,” I’m not going to let their blacklisting stop me from getting around to it someday. But credit where it’s due, eh?

Ted Kennedy is dead. YAY!

Sorry, but I’ve had about an earful of how noble and self-sacrificing this decadent ivy league fratboy supposedly was, and there’s only so much one can take. Ted Kennedy was a more articulate George W. Bush - a rich kid who would’ve been a Wal Mart manager without the family money and connections. Unlike Bush, Kennedy didn’t even manage to graduate from the ivy league school daddy’s connections got him into (thrown out for cheating!) and had to slum it at UVa instead. And also unlike Bush, Kennedy never even had a SINGLE fulltime job before having his political career handed to him on a platter by getting brother Jack’s Senate seat after he took off to go do that president thing. Bush skipped out on guard duty (”allegedly,” but OK, we all know it’s true); Kennedy actually got away with killing someone in a drunk driving accident. Kennedy was the biggest and most successful defender of the welfare state outside of President Johnson, which, by my standards, makes him the third-worst political figure (in pragmatic terms - I can think of dozens of people with more dangerous motives) of the 20th century. Few people have put more ballast on American prosperity than Ted Kennedy. However, since he’s a left-wing rich kid, the media thinks he’s a hero, and the same people who sneer at President Bush for accomplishing nothing on his own somehow think of Kennedy as a tireless fighter. Enough. As I’ve said in previous posts, I’m really sick of people being cynical about politicians in day-to-day conversation but then turning around and lionizing them the first chance they get. All the encomiums are part of the problem. If you want politicians to stop meddling in your lives, stop paying them with praise when they do it! So no, I’m not sorry to see him go. We’ve all got to die sometime, Senator Kennedy had a pretty good life by any standard, and it would be hypocritical of me to sit here and pretend that I thought he was a net good for the rest of us. He wasn’t.

His final hypocrisy, by the way, is all this crap about fighting to get the laws changed on the procedure for replacing him in the Senate. I can’t honestly believe the media is lapping this one up - which just goes to show that I’m naive in my own way too. But really people, in doing so Ted Kennedy was fighting to repeal a 2004 law that he had no problems with when it was passed (he lobbied to support it), and that’s because at the time John Kerry, the other Senator from MA, had a fighting chance of winning the presidency, and it would have been inconvenient to let then-governor Romney, a Republican, appoint the successor. Now that there’s a Democrat president and a paper-thin Democrat supermajority in the Senate and a Democrat governor in Massachussetts, Kennedy suddenly has a problem with the 5-months set aside for electing the new Senator, preferring, instead, that a snap election be held to essentially rubber-stamp his hand-picked successor. Give me a goddamned break. It’s not that I don’t expect politicians to act in this way, it’s just that I really wish We the People and Our Glorious Media did a better job calling them out for it. To read it in the funny papers, you’d think Kennedy was heroically acknowledging his deteriorating health and taking one for the team by being sure the people of Massachussetts get a say in choosing his successor. Pay no attention to the fact that they already do and it just doesn’t happen to suit Kennedy’s timetable anymore.

Yeah, no thanks. This man was the very model of the political establishment. If you’re serious about wanting “change,” it’s people like him that hafta go. 47 years in the Senate is long enough by any measure. 77 years on the planet is, well, not exactly the life expectancy of an ivy league rich kid, but for his generation it’s close enough. There is no loss to acknowledge here. Let’s just hope his successor is less successful.

Mr. Tweedy asks for opinions on where to draw the line on libel law. The link goes to an entry on his blog about a recent case where a minor league model is suing an anonymous blogger - apparently as a publicity stunt - for having posted some unfounded insults directed at her. The full story, for background, can be read here. The gist of it is that some blogger no one’s ever heard of posted some pics of her with captions that say things like “ho” and “skank.”

The circumstances of the case won’t cause too much headscratching. The girl is suing because someone called her a “ho” - an insult no one takes seriously here in the physical world when you say it to someone’s face - ONLINE. No one can seriously think this has damaged her reputation; she’s abusing the legal system. But there’s an important background legal issue here in that Google has been forced to hand over the Blogger’s email and IP addresses to comply with the frivolous suit. The question isn’t whether she’ll win her case, it’s whether there is a legitimate public interest in forcing third parties who might have some information about people making anonymous statements to identify those people when those statements are potentially libelous. A related issue - the one Mr. Tweedy seems to be interested in - is where to draw the line at libel/slander in the first place. What constitutes “harmful” speech when it’s just reputation that’s at stake?

Since he’s asking for opinons, here’s mine: there should be no libel laws. Libel and slander should be legal.

It’s not that I don’t get that reputation is important. In some careers it’s EVERYTHING. It’s just that I’m not sure it’s the kind of thing that falls under the purview of government. Some things are public responsibilities, some things are private responsibilities - reputation is admittedly kind of a grey area, but being the kind of person who tends to want to leave the government out of as much as possible this side of staying civilized, I guess my opinion won’t really surprise any regular readers. Here is some justification for anyone who has questions, though:

(1) The current legal regime is one-sided in the sense that celebrities can and do lie all the time to enhance their reputations, and I can’t recall a case of one having been sued or sent to jail for it. A gratuitious example: Britney Spears was sleeping with AT LEAST Justin Timberlake the whole time she was the poster child for the True Love Waits crowd. Even she herself now says so - which, if libel laws were fair, would mean that a lot of professional virgins would have the right to sue her since they bought her albums under false pretenses. But they won’t, they shouldn’t, and I don’t think anyone will have any sympathy for them if they try. So if celebrities can lie with impunity to promote false images that sell records, I don’t see what’s criminal about someone else lying to frustrate those same efforts. If it were a pharmaceutical company pushing ineffective drugs on the basis of faked studies, of course it would be fraud, and I think we can all agree that fraud should be illegal. My point is just to show that when you pump your intuitions, no one really thinks of smarmy self-promotion as fraud, exactly - at least not in the legal sense. Which begs the question why personal reputations need legal protection given that they’re apparently not otherwise regulated.

(2) Libel suits rarely undo the damage caused - which is another way they’re different from physical damage. In many cases, physical damage can be repaired, and the purpose of the suit is to fund the repairs. And in those cases where it can’t be (say, surgeon loses a hand in a car accident caused by a drunk driver), at least we can make a reasonbly accurate measure of what the damage is. Can we do that with reputation? I for one don’t think so. Public opinion is fickle, and it’s difficult to know how long tastes would have held constant if, say, Britney Spears had sued Justin Timberlake for stating in an interview that he’d banged her while she was still putting on her choir girl act. How many of her fans really decide to buy her albums based on virginity? How many of them would continue to value virginity enough to buy her albums on that basis into their 20s? What if there’s a big disco comeback and hedonism is in again and she no longer wants to be a square, only the terms of her lawsuit mean that she can’t now claim to have been a whore like all the cool kids are doing, only she does it anyway and it works out for her because she makes more money now than ever and can pay all the damages back? Arguably in that case Justin Timberlake did her a favor by unwittingly helping her reputation! All of which is to say that it’s very difficult to put a price tag on reputation, and I’m really not sure the courts are qualified to do it.

(3) Related to the previous point, sometimes bad publicity is good publicity - as, indeed, seems to be the case with this model. No one knew her name before she became an internet senstaion, and the only reason she’s an internet sensation is because some blogger who’s name we STILL don’t know posted some insults that no one heard and fewer still cared about until she delivered them to the press herself. Name me one other “crime” where the perpetrator is as often as not doing the victim a favor.

(4) There’s something really philosophically icky about referring to damage to reputation as personal harm - because it implies that people have a right to be thought about in the way they wish. But not only is it impossible to police thoughts, it’s immoral - not to mention hugely uneconomical - to even try. If we can all agree that the model in question doesn’t have the right to demand that I think of her as an appropriately selective mate, then where did she get the right to control the information on which I base my conclusions? Sure, some of the information on which I base my conclusions about public figures will inevitably be false or misleading, but the more I actually care about the truth of the matter in question, the more I realize that and take into account that “you can’t believe everything that you read,” and take it on myself to do some fact-checking. What most libel suits I’m familiar with amount to is two sides arguing over the right to the opinions of the gullible. Which leads to the next point, which is:

(5) There’s also something creepy about the government acting as an official fact-checker in personal disputes. Granted, again, that this is inevitable in a lot of cases. If you come onto my property and kill my cat and I take you to court, the police will have to do some spadework, fine. But when it’s over things like some model’s sex life? PR is a private, not a public, responsibility. If your reputation’s been sullied, you’re in luck because this is a free(ish) country and professionals are available for hire to work on your PR for you.

(6) I have trouble imagining a real libel case anyway. In all cases where it’s worth it to someone to sue someone else for having “lied” about them, then only because the thing being “lied” about is crucial to their livelihood in some way. And if something is a cornerstone of your professional reputation, then you’ve either done the work to protect it (i.e. hired professional PR or generally held up your end of the bargain by actually being what you claim to be and leaving a trail of evidence to that effect), or the accusations are true. In the first case, there’s nothing the court can do for you that you can’t already do for yourself. In the second, there’s nothing the court should be doing for you at all.

(7) There is, of course, the First Amendment and an associated tradition of generally protecting speech in this country. That isn’t to say that all speech in all cases should be legal, just that there is, or should be, a huge burden of proof on anyone attempting to claim that some kind of speech is harmful enough to warrant an exemption from constitutional protection. I’m as certain as the day is long that that burden can’t be met in this case. There are just too many grey areas, and ties go to the People in constitutional cases.

(8) It’s hard to slander someone without a ring of truth on your side anyway. Telling brazen lies with impunity was difficult even before the Information Age, but it’s as good as impossible now. Getting up and saying something about someone that’s obviously not true only makes you look ridiculous. For anyone to risk slander in the first place, they have at least some facts, or some current of public opinion, on their side before they start. This isn’t, it seems to me, a fact born of fear of slander laws, it’s just something that’s in the nature of the PR game. Calling Mike Tyson a wuss isn’t the same thing as saying it about Mike Stipe. I have a point in the second case, but in the first I just look like an idiot. I’m not really sure, therefore, what the courts of law add to this process that the court of public opinion isn’t already policing.

And I guess I could go on, but you get the point. Reputation is just a bit too “squishy” to qualify as a legal concept for me. It’s not that I’m completely incapable of imagining a case where lying about someone’s reputation could cause them real harm, or that I believe that no one could show me one if I were. It’s just that I think when you ask the government to start policing something you have to be aware that there is always a payment (in loss of freedom) for this, and you need to be sure the tradeoff is worth it. Pretty clearly in the case of libel and slander it’s not. In most cases, libel and slander suits don’t serve any real legal purpose, they’re simply extended theater for the PR game the actors were already playing. That handful of cases where the laws do some good, and where the situation is clear-cut enough that there are no unintended legal side-effects, don’t seem worth the intrusion into speech rights that slander laws necessitate. The intensions behind slander laws may be good, but the potential for abuse and the cost to constitutional liberties are not worth it - especially since it isn’t even clear that slander laws act as much of a deterrent to defamation in the first place. In most cases when someone is being defamed, there’s either something to the charge, or they don’t care and the attack doesn’t stick.

So given the choice, I say we strike slander from the books. Clear and consistent protection for speech freedoms is more important than a fussy devotion to absolute fairness. This tradeoff has existed as long as the republic has, and I don’t see any reason to flinch about it now.

Don’t look now, but Kim Dae Jung has died at 85. It doesn’t seem to be getting much coverage over here, but in other parts of the world - read: East Asia - he’s a household name. Kim was one of the “three Kims” of the troubled 1970s in South Korea - one of the two championing democracy (the third, Kim Jong Pil, wasn’t exactly opposed to it). Partly because of his resistance to the dictatorship of the late President Park, but more for his Sunshine Policy of rapprochment with North Korea (pursued during his term as president of South Korea), Kim Dae Jung was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000.

OK, it’s a custom not to speak ill of the (recently) dead, but I think if you get the luxury of choosing your legacy you have to live with it. The 2000 Peace Prize wasn’t the stupidest one they ever awarded (Yassr Arafat anyone?), but it WAS one of the many examples of political meddling by the committee. And the Sunshine Policy itself IS raving idiocy.

The idea is to have a Korean version of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik - a way of dealing with East Germany. It goes like this: be nice to the East Germans so as to keep ties between the counties open. More ties means more information from the West means more dependence on the West means no complete communist stranglehold on economic and political life in the DDR. In the context of Germany, it worked brilliantly. But Korea is not Germany, and I don’t have to go into all the reasons why the batshit insane de facto theocracy that sits on the other side of the most heavily fortified border in the world can’t be bribed into playing (relatively) nice the way Honnecker’s government could. With East Germany you got something for your money. OK, it wasn’t totally tangible all the time, but it was there. North Korea is just a giant money black hole. You put the money in, they spend it on more weapons and buy mud with the change, and meanwhile no one is even allowed to own a cellphone to talk to relatives in the South. Brilliant.

I get that brinkmanship with North Korea is scary. But here’s the difference between a statesman and politician. A politician just wants to do what will make people like him. A statesman knows you can’t always blink. Jimmy Carter, if you’re wondering, is a politician, despite what the European press would have you believe. And North Korea, in case you’re wondering about THAT, is one of those situations where you shouldn’t blink. It should be obvious to everyone that our North Korea policy is a huge failure. Maybe it’s time to cut the aid off completely.

I don’t guess Kim’s dying will have much effect one way or the other since he had been in poor health for a long time and wasn’t doing much in the way of public engagement over the last decade. But hey, it can’t hurt!

Recently I’ve been watching House - a show I passed on as it was airing, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a straightahead medical drama - a genre I hate - that contains no elements of scifi or fantasy - the genres I love. It’s brazenly formulaic. The same shit happens every week with little to no connecting story arc (though, to be fair, there’s also no reset button - episodes reference previous episodes without continuity errors). All told, not something that sounds like my cup of tea. But this one’s ace, as it turns out, because it has Hugh Laurie in the starring role, he’s perfect in it since he’s more or less playing himself as he is offstage, and, given what kind of guy House/Laurie is, it’s an hour-long gratuitous snarkfest. It’s meant to be a medical mystery show (House is patterned in some ways after Sherlock Holmes), but it works in many ways more like an edgy comedy. House may not be one of the greats, but it’s certainly entertaining.

I’m almost done with Season 1, and thought I’d share my favorite moment. House has lost a member of his staff and has to replace her, and so he and friend/colleague Dr. Wilson (yes, as in “House and Wilson,” aka “Holmes and Watson”) are interviewing a bunch of people whom House has no intention of hiring. Here’s how he passes on one of them:

Dr. Spain: You know, I really admire the way you don’t care what anyone thinks. You just do what you want, the way you want.

Wilson: So, you went to Hopkins for both undergrad and med school?

Dr. Spain: That’s right.

House: [looking at Wilson] He’s in a band.

Dr. Spain: You into music?

House: Totally. What kind of music do you play?

Dr. Spain: Um, mostly blues, you know. James Cotton, some original stuff.

House: [pops a Vicodin] Oh, dude. You are so hired.

Dr. Spain: Really?

House: Not a chance.

Dr. Spain: Why?

House: Tattoo. [Dr. Spain turns his right arm to reveal a kanji symbol on his forearm.]

Dr. Spain: Wow. I thought you’d be the last person to have a problem with nonconformity.

House: Nonconformity, right. I can’t remember the last time I saw a 20-something kid with a tattoo of an Asian letter on his wrist. You are one wicked free thinker. You want to be a rebel? Stop being cool. Wear a pocket protector like he does and get a haircut. Like the Asian kids who don’t leave the library for 20 hours stretches, they’re the ones who don’t care what you think. Sayonara. [Dr. Spain leaves.]

Wilson: So should I go through all the resumes looking for Asian names?

House: Actually, the Asian kids are probably just responding to parental pressure, but my point is still valid.

Yeah, OK, not terribly believable stuff, but man is it gratifying. Just thinking you’re hot shit isn’t, by itself, any more annoying than being lazy or stupid or spitting a lot or being a really inconsiderate driver. What gives hipsters courtside seats on that extra-warmed bench in Hell is this collective delusion they all suffer from that they’re doin’ their own thing when in fact they’re classic middle management. It’s like being in a frat but without the honest contract and associated guarantee. Only on TV do you get one to put his devotion to the Church of Nonconformity bluntly enough to get sent up for it - but hey, that’s what TV is for!

Paul Graham’s essays are really hit-or-miss, but his second-greatest hit - that one about nerds - is a gem. The basic point is that every kid wants to be popular, and nerds are nerds because being popular is a HUGE amount of work, and you only have time to be really good at one thing, and they’re more interested in being smart. The reason I liked the essay is because it doesn’t try to paint nerds as noble rebels like so many other similar commentaries. Graham’s under no illusions: nerds want to be popular, just like everyone else, they just don’t want it badly enough to actually have a shot at achieving it. Right. And if nerds aren’t popular because they’d rather be smart, then it implies that what’s keeping hipsters from being popular is … laziness. The hipsters are the kids who couldn’t be bothered to make a real go at being popular either, but in their case it wasn’t because there was some other substitute that they wanted more, it was just that they didn’t understand why it should be an effort at all. Were they not born awesome enough that people should come to them and admire them? Apparently not, they discover upon entering junior high, so they settle for the next-best thing - which turns out to be like the first-best thing, except less honest about what it is. But this has a side-benefit: the lack of honesty about the fact that the “hip” crowd is also a crowd with enforced dress codes and music tastes does give you a little bit of wiggle room. After all, to maintain the illusion that you’re being open and accepting to everyone, you have to actually do a little bit of it from time to time. And so everyone in the “hip” crowd gets to have a quirk, something that’s off limits to criticism, just to show how non-conformist they are. You know, one of them watches Sesame Street religiously, the other one has an 8-track collection, yet another one listens to Anne Murray and even goes to her concerts. Play your hand cleverly and your quirk can be something that you actually like, though - so you’re getting something for your second-class status. But in the end, being a hipster is work too, which is why there are also hipster Christians (if you’re unsatisfied with your position in the straight-ahead hipster hierarchy, you can always be a youth group leader). And of course it’s no great mystery why all hipsters go on to be Socialists. The reason why Buffy’s Cordelia Chase was always a sympathetic character - contrary to high school drama cliche - was because she had open eyes and a work ethic. Hipsters have neither - and insofar as Socialism is the politics of kidding yourself about where money comes from as an excuse for not working as hard as you should it fits like a glove. (That Cordelia gets replaced by Anya Jenkins , an unabashed capitalist, when the character got sent to Angel is surely no mistake.)

Being one of the nerds Graham talks about, I’m happy to confirm his theory. I DID want to be popular in Junior High, but I was unwiling to work at it because being smart was more important to me. Being popular meant having really dull conversations with really silly people with absolutely no guarantee that it would pay off. And I think, in retrospect, that at least some of “them” felt the same way - the difference was, exactly as Graham suggests, that the payoff was worth it to them in a way that it wasn’t to me. The hipster option wasn’t really available at the preppie paradise that was my junior high, but it was in high school, and at first it seemed like a good compromise. But the illusion got blown off pretty quickly. I’d been taking ribbing from my friends for listening to the Bee Gees for 2 years. Sean Mackay lets slip that he likes them too and suddenly it’s hip retro? Clearly these people are playing by the same rules but with a cheaper set of toys.

Just like pimp wear is royal garb on the cheap, being a hipster is popularity on the cheap. And like all cheap things, it’s to be recommended ONLY when you know you’re being economical. Carob is not chocolate, soymilk is not milk, tofurkey is not turkey, and hipness is not popularity. If you’re playing the hip game because you have better things to do with your time, fine. Excellent, in fact. But if you’re playing it because you couldn’t be bothered to put in the overtime it takes to be popular, you’re a pathetic life failure and I have no respect for you.

The fun of House isn’t the medical jargon (which you can’t follow and probably isn’t completely accurate anyway), or trying to solve the mystery (which you can’t since they withold clues), or keeping up with the characters (since there’s so little to keep up with). It’s watching Dr. House send up annoying people in poliically incorrect ways. I’m glad they got around to taking a shot at hipsters.

I never had a freshman 15, at least, not as a freshman. I DID gain a lot of weight in my last two years of college, but not enough to worry about. In high school I was a steady 145; by the time I graduated university I was a steady 154. It wasn’t worth exercising or giving up drinking about.

Grad school, however, has been a completely different beast. In response to stress my second year here at IU I gained a huge amount of weight (about 10lbs.) that I never quite got rid of. That was in Fall 2004. I made a pretty successful stab at it Summer 2007, but then I started dating, and then school started, and I soon ended up back where I was. I’ve been making steady trips to the gym the whole time, but school things tend to get in the way.

That was until one day this past spring when I looked at the scale and found myself 79.7kg. That’s 175lbs. for the metric-challenged. And hey, I’m metric-challened too - but I do body weight in kilograms because (a) I started measuring/worrying about my body weight for the first time while living abroad (Japan) and (b) it’s cruder as a scale (1kg = 2.2lbs), and so better-suited to the slow pace of exercise-based weight loss. (When you measure in pounds you bounce around all the time - kg seems more consistent.) That really put the fear of God in me, and so since then I’ve been making an all-out effort. It’s a two-year plan (I try to be realistic about how long it really takes to lose weight via exercise - dieting is not really an option for me since I LOVE to eat!): I originally wanted to get down to the 75kg range this year and then down to the 72 range next year - i.e. about 10lbs. this year and another 6-7 next year. However, I’ve been doing so well that it’s been revised to 73kg by the end of this year, to drop to 70kg (i.e. back to my post-undergrad 154 weight) next year.

So I’m pleased to report that over 88 days at the gym I’ve lost down to 75.1kg - almost exactly 10lbs! I’m calling success here because I posted two consecutive days at 75.1. No doubt that will go back up again when I weigh again tomorrow. Indeed, I graphed and did a regression analysis on my weight trend, and the regression line suggests I “should” be more like 75.8. Maybe I should actually wait until the regression line calls my average weight 75.1, but whatever. I’ve lost 10lbs. since spring and seem to be on track to keep it off. That means another 2kg/4.4lbs before Christmas to meet my revised goal. It seems quite doable!

The moral of this story is that losing weight is a real bitch without fad diets, which I refuse to do. Which is huge incentive not to let myself get back up into the 77-79 range again EVER. Once I sunk below 77, I swore I would never be that heavy again. The plan for next year is to reset the limit at 74. Once I’m in the 70-71 range that I’m ultimately aiming for, I’ll do light exercise 3-4 times a week only (right now I’m putting in 6 days a week at the gym, and recently going sometimes twice a day), and use 74 as a kind of tripwire - going back up to the 5-6 day regime if that happens.

Here’s the progress graph. Weights are only for days I went to the gym, so it’s 88 trips to the gym rather than 88 total days. The actual timespan is something like the last week in April to last Friday.

From a conversation from the other day, I ran across a pretty cool analogy for inflation.

Say you’re trying to lose weight. And say you drink a lot of beer. Now, my personal philosophy on weightloss is you exercise like mad and don’t worry too much about calories, but a lot of people do it the other way around. They count their calories religiously and use that to define a minimum for exercise. So, say you’re one of these people. One temptation you might succumb to is to lie to yourself about how many calories there are in beer - to discourage yourself from overdrinking, to stay “on the safe side.” So, you look it up online and find that beers range from 120 to 190 calories a bottle. Since you’re not exactly sure about your own brands, you “play it safe” and decide to count beer as 250 a bottle. Which is good, right? Because then if you set a calorie limit for yourself for the day, the fact that you overestimate how much is in beer will make it less likely for you to go over your limit.

Here’s where the catch comes in. Suppose you eat a one-off thing for a couple of weeks that you didn’t give a fudge factor to when you started calorie counting - like Hershey’s Kisses maybe. Read the bag and Hershey’s Kisses are about 25 calories a pop. So, according to your inflated beer price, you can eat 10 of them for every one beer you don’t drink. AH, but there’s the rub! That beer count is actually A LIE. In reality, a beer is only equivalent to probably 7 Kisses. And yet, there you are blithely eating 10, thinking that foregoing your evening beer makes it all OK. Keep this up a couple of weeks, and you may start to wonder why your weight isn’t dropping as quickly as you expected it to - or even as quickly as it was the week before. Heck, maybe it even stopped dropping at all!

Inflation is that kind of thing too. Just like lying about the calorie “price” of beer can cause you to overestimate how much candy you can eat without breaking your diet, lying about the price of money causes all kinds of estimation errors in how much general goods and services are worth in terms of each other. The Fed hands out more paper money, and everyone thinks they can afford more than they really can.

Ah, you say, but what if I KNOW that, and so I add a fudge factor to each new food that I decide to start eating? So, instead of believing the bag and calculating Kisses at 25 calories, I know that I’m in the habit of lying to myself and so I call it 35 instead. OK - well, obviously that’s better. It’s more realistic. And in fact if we divide 250 - the bogus beer calorie count - by 35 - the bogus Kiss calorie count - we come up with the right number of 7 Kisses. So in this case, it all comes out in the wash, and you haven’t done yourself any harm.

The problem with this as a general rule of thumb, though, should be obvious. It was just lucky that we happened to fudge Kisses at the “right” rate to get an accurate count of how many there are to a beer. If we’d done 30 instead of 35, for example, we’d have eaten 8 or even 9 Kisses. Still better than the 10 from before, but more total calories than we expected to be eating all the same. The point is that if you make a habit of lying to yourself about things, it gets harder and harder in subtle ways to know what the truth of stuff is. And when you think about compounding these misestimations not over the weekly calorie intake of a single individual but over the entire mass of transactions that make up a multi-trillion dollar economy, it’s easy to see how a couple of fudges here and there can quickly get pretty expensive.

We as a society are obviously in the situation where we’re aware that we’re systematically lying to ourselves about what prices are. Nearly everyone calculates with an inflation rate of 3-5% in mind when they make investments, draw up payrolls, etc. And most people have grasped the idea of buying in bulk now to save money later. But 8 Kisses is still one more than you should be eating, even if it’s not as bad as eating 10. Just like a little bit of anticipated inflation is still worse than no inflation at all. Fudging about everything is more consistent than only fudging about some things, but nothing is as consistent as just calling things like they are.

From Yahoo! - a double rainbow in Charlotte. Which is only cool ’cause I’m from there and miss it…

So today is, by some measures, Hip-Hop’s birthday. Of course, there are other candidates too, and I’m nothing like an expert on this, so I won’t try to argue it one way or another. I’ll just note that the 11 August 1973 date comes from a party that Kool Herc and his sister threw outdoors. And that Herc is supposedly the man who invented “the merry-go-round” - a technique of having one record playing the break section of one song on one turntable while cueing the break section on a second record to pick up when the first one finishes. Before all the portable sophisticated mixing equipment we have today, this was a homespun way of extending the cool (read funky, danceable) bits of your favorite songs indefinitely (put the same record on both turntables…). Only … well, he didn’t. Read some history and learn something interesting: Francis Grasso had been doing this since the late 60s, in fact. And actually, he probably picked it up from Terry Noel (whose job he stole at Salvation), but slipcueing and beatmatching seem to have been contributions of his own. The problem with saying all this out loud, of course, is that Francis Grasso is mostly associated with Disco - and that doesn’t really fit with Hip-Hop’s image much. Nevertheless…

Of course, both disco and hip-hop were originally fragments of the DJs’ imaginations and fingertips: In the early days, it was the respective DJs’ taste that determined what was or wasn’t a disco or hip-hop record. Like all twins (it’s up to you which one sports the pencil mustache and wears the black leather jumpsuit a la Michael Knight’s evil twin in everyone’s favorite episode of Knight Rider), hip-hop and disco share the same DNA - the break, the short section of a record where most of the instrumentalists drop out to “give the drummer some.” … However ridiculous the imagery may have been, disco was fixated on a romantic vision of the good life - the syrupy strings and lush chorales were the aural equivalent of the soft-focus boudoir photography. Hip-hop, on the other hand, was about the here and now and self-determination; there was no time to waste on romance.

That’s Peter Shapiro on their shared roots. To be fair - Kool Herc’s gym parties seem to have been in part an anti-Disco scene. Before there was really Disco or Hip-Hop, granted, but both were in their infancy at the same time (1972), and Herc didn’t feel at home in the crowd of somewhat older sophisticates that what was to become Disco appealed to, so he started throwing parties for the younger, less successful people that would become the Hip-Hop crowd. Call them Disco dropouts. What’s essential to Hip-Hop isn’t the break mixing, but the choice of tracks for the break - and all the shouting and rapping over it. That sound probably did originate with Herc and people like him (not that I would be the one to ask). But that doesn’t make it any less funny to remind the Hip-Hop crowd on this one of its plausible birthdays that Hip-Hop and Disco are joined at the , erm, hip. And no, not just because the Sugarhill Gang sampled Chic - it goes back to the roots. Including the invention of modern DJing in the first place - which is Disco’s contribution, not Hip-Hop’s.

What I am annoyed about today:

All the naive people who think that Bill Clinton personally saved those two freed journalists in North Korea by showing up to have his picture taken.

Honestly, people - here’s the way this works. The State Department has a list of things it wants, and its slightly-more-evil twin in Pyongyang has a similar list, and wonks from one side plot strategy and wonks from the other side plot strategy, and then they get on “the Horn” (or whatever it’s called now that it’s the internet) and play what amounts to poker over the course of several months, and they send really super-subtle signals about what would be acceptable. And in the case of super-corrupt pseudo-theocracies like North Korea where the entire political structure depends on just how impressed everyone is with Kim Jong Il at every ticking tock, usually what it takes to get an about-face from the Big Guy is some celebrity - say, a former president - going over there to ink what’s already been agreed to. This is done to give cover for Kim Jong Il - to save face for all the bluster he has to take back. Bill Clinton’s stellar negotiating skills had, in all probability, less than nothing to do with this because Mr. Clinton himself, in all probability, did precious little negotiating.

At least, that is how I understand these things to work. And that is how I understand anyone with half a brain to understand these things to work. So why do some of my friends on Facebook - one of whom is a journalist, no less - actually buy this crap? Everyone talks a good talk about not trusting politicians, but it’s downright scary how few people behave as though they mean it.