Northbound

Over the next 13 weeks (August 2 – November 1) I have decided to:

1. Stop writing this blog. (Big shock, I know.) Basically, all non-commercial writing (except for two book reviews I have committed to do) is off limits.
2. Get off (and stay off) of Facebook. (This one may be a little difficult – Facebook is that addictive – but I am going to try.)
3. Stop lying to myself about my weight. By this I primarily mean no “cheating” with regard to the scale I use, but it’s more than that, it’s about taking the health consequences of my actions seriously.
4. Commit myself to recording my food intake on Weight Watchers – even if I cheat, which I probably will, just because that’s how I roll and you can’t beat yourself up over that.
5. Having said that, no pastries, no matter how delicious, or other obvious big-dessert thingies.
6. No fast-food unless completely unavoidable, in which case, good choices are mandated (out with the Baconators, in with the sugar-free ices from Rita’s).
7. The above includes Five Guys. (I will not get emotional about not being able to go to Five Guys. I won’t. You won’t see me cry. Ever. I… *sniff*…. let’s just change the subject.)
8. This means, of course, bringing my lunch to work every day (including diet green tea).
9. And making the meals that I cook as healthy as I can manage.
10. And taking my fish-oil supplement every day, even when I’d rather not.
11. Write on the new novel every day, unless unavoidable due to whatever. Ideally this is 250 words a day, say, with a rough goal of one chapter a week. That’s a little over 22k words, which is more than what I have now, so that’s good.
12. Use downtime (commuting, mostly) to thinking about plotting and characters on the novel. This means that I can’t use that time for frivolous purposes, like rehearsing what I will say to Terry Gross when she interviews me about the book. (Don’t tell me you don’t do this.) I don’t have the luxury of unlimited time to sit at a keyboard and plan out plot points; I need to reprogram my brain to think about what I need to write about when I finally get ten minutes to write.
13. I have a book I need to read – something about how to change when change is hard, and that seems to be appropriate reading for this sort of thing.

And these changes are hard. Re-looking at them, they’re all about denying myself without anything much in the way of reward. I would rather not take the fish oil. I would rather read a Michael Chabon book I’ve read sixteen times before I go to bed rather than write something new for myself. I would rather read people’s Facebook stuff, even when it’s drivel, than do something productive and useful (or write drivel of my own, here, for the Eight People Who Read This Blog).

I am hopeful that I will emerge from this process thinner, wiser, more self-aware, and generally feeling better about myself. Either that, or I will try to drown myself in queso. I don’t know. I can’t say. But these are good decisions, positive decisions, and even if I do just a little bit of this agenda I will feel better than if I did nothing.

Except for the Five Guys.

Man, is this going to be tough.

If this is the only place I see you, I will see you in November.

Burglar avoids prison again

Christopher Lynch was told he would not have to serve the nine-month sentence if he kept out of trouble and complied with community service.

But the 22-year-old was found to have been in breach of the order in October last year when a further seven hours was added to 250 hours he was initially told to do.

Later that month he again twice failed to turn up for community service and then again in December.

However, after hearing that Lynch’s partner was going through a difficult pregnancy at the time a judge decided not to activate the suspended sentence.

Instead, Judge Douglas Field told Lynch to do six sessions of a motivational enhancement activity requirement, as well as continue with the unpaid work.

Contrast with:

Fines for dropping cigarette butts hit £2,400

Another litter lout faced total costs of £310 for dropping a chocolate wrapper in the town centre and refusing to pay the penalty fine at the time of the offence.

One woman, Jennifer Nash, 47, of Oakham Close, could not afford to pay the court costs and had to remain in the court building for the whole day by means of a punishment.

Far, far better to be a violent burglar in England than a “litter lout.”

What more does LeBron James want? How many yachts can he water-ski behind? What else is there – fame, fortune, championships – that he could possibly want? He has more money than God, access to any sort of beautiful woman he would like, worldwide status, a Nike contract, and… well, the mind boggles.

LeBron is very high up on what we might call the hierarchy of needs. There isn’t any material thing that he would reasonably want that he couldn’t get with the money he has. The question he must face is this: what does he value most? What does he truly want next for himself? The answer to that question determines where he will go.

CHAMPIONSHIP – If what LeBron truly wants is a championship, he should sign with the Los Angeles Lakers. They are, after all, the NBA champions. Stands to reason that LeBron would make them better. This would involve sacrificing a lot of money (the Lakers don’t have the cap room for a LeBron contract) and ego (because LeBron wouldn’t be the lead dog). But if all he wants is a ring, the Lakers are the place to go – and the creature comforts of Los Angeles aren’t bad, either.

EGO – If LeBron wants to feed his ego, he should sign with the New York Knicks, for the obvious reasons. The Knicks are awful, and won’t be able to get that much better for awhile. He would be the straw that stirs the drink, the big fish in the big pond, the Toast of New York. And that would be about it.

MONEY – If LeBron is just about making the max dollars he can make, he’s looking at the New Jersey Nets, whose Russian billionaire owner can shovel largess his way. The Nets are, if anything, more woeful than the Knicks (to whom they play second banana). LeBron will win no championships in Jersey, will get fewer endorsements, etc. But he will go home and sleep on a mattress made of rubles every night. You know, if he wants to.

TRADITION – LeBron could, of course, sign with the Boston Celtics, but there’s no reason to do so other than continuing the greatness of the Celtic tradition – that, and it would make Bill Simmons’s head explode. There’s that.

COMFORT – If LeBron were to sign with the Dallas Mavericks, he would be guaranteed the cushiest locker in the league, his own private helicopter – basically, every amenity that there is, right down to having Mark Cuban serve as his own personal valet. And nobody would expect him to win anything, because it’s the Mavericks.

RIVALRY – Los Angeles Clippers? Doesn’t make sense to me, either, except he’d be fighting Kobe every step of the way for dominance. If that’s what he wants, more power to him.

LOYALTY – There isn’t a better reason to sign with the Cleveland Cavaliers. But there’s no such thing as loyalty anymore, and the first person to tell me that was you, Jerry Maguire.

LEADERSHIP – If LeBron wants to lead a young team, with a great player under his wings, he could do a lot worse than the Oklahoma City Thunder. But if “mentoring Kevin Durant” outweighs “living in a place where Oklahoma football is the greatest cultural attraction,” then LeBron is more of a man than anyone would have thought.

FASHION – Those new unis for the Golden State Warriors look sharp.

LEGACY – The smart basketball move would be, probably, LeBron going to the Chicago Bulls. But to make that work, long-term, LeBron would have to win seven titles to surpass Michael Jordan. Difficult, but not impossible. (And it would break hearts in Cleveland for generations, so there’s that.)

THE CHANCE TO PLAY GOLF WITH TIGER WOODS – The Orlando Magic.

THE CHANCE TO PLAY GOLF WITH MICHAEL JORDAN – The Charlotte Hornets.

THE CHANCE TO PLAY BLACKJACK WITH MICHAEL JORDAN AND TIGER WOODS – The Sacramento Las Vegas Kings.

ALTRUISM – What would be a better statement of LeBron’s values than taking the NBA minimum to play for the New Orleans Hornets and helping to rebuild the city? Nothing. Nothing at all. Not that he’ll do it, mind you, but it would be nice. Same rationale goes for the Detroit Pistons and lots of other depressed places you could think of.

POWER – Let’s say LeBron signed with the Washington Wizards, and, say, got an internship during the off-season with some Senator or other, and learned the ropes of politics at the same time he brought a championship to the District… well… I mean, if he were interested, if his mind went in that direction… nah.

FOOD – Lots of good places to eat in San Antonio. And Memphis. And Atlanta.

ICE FISHING – Or curling. They have both of those in Minnesota.

Realistically, it doesn’t matter to me that much what he does, only that it be done quickly. But the decision will tell us a lot about the man.

JON MILLER:  Top of the third, still no score.  The Yankees send Robinson Cano to the plate.  Cano’s having an MVP-type season, wouldn’t you say, Joe?

MORGAN:  Well, there’s MVP-type seasons, and then there’s Hall-of-Fame type seasons.  Cano is having a good year.  But as you know, Jon, I go to Cooperstown every year for the Hall of Fame induction.  And whenever I go there, I see guys I used to play with, guys that are also in the Hall of Fame, and it’s amazing how many of them, when they were playing, I said to myself, they’re going to be in the Hall of Fame one day.

MILLER:  Low and away to Cano, ball one.

MORGAN:  If you’re a Hall of Famer, you can definitely always recognize another Hall of Famer.  I played with Tom Seaver, and you watched Tom Seaver pitch, you knew he was a Hall of Famer.  You didn’t need any of this statistical nonsense they talk about nowadays to tell you that.  You just knew.

MILLER:  Cano takes another breaking ball in the dirt, two-and-oh.

MORGAN:  But you take a Davey Concepcion.  I played with him a lot of years, and he was a good ballplayer, but he wasn’t, you know, a Hall of Fame ballplayer.  He just didn’t have the bat speed, couldn’t get around on the type of fastball they were throwing in those days.

MILLER:  Cano taking all the way, strike one.

MORGAN:  Now, I watch this soccer from time to time.  My kids are into it.  And I don’t know anything about soccer.  Other than you can’t touch the ball with your hands, I mean.  And they’ve got this World Cup going on, which I guess is like that World Baseball Classic, a little bit.

MILLER:  We have the World Cup on ESPN, coverage starts at 9:30, with Slovakia playing Uruguay.  Cano fouls this one off, back into the stands.  Count even at two-two.

MORGAN:  So I watch this America team in this World Cup, and I’m thinking, what I don’t see is any Hall of Famers.  I don’t see anyone who is going into Cooperstown anytime soon.  They’re not playing at the kind of Hall of Fame level that we did with the Big Red Machine.

MILLER:  Cano fouls off another offering, still two-two.

MORGAN:  Now, I never got the chance to play in this World Baseball Classic.  But I have to think that if I were playing out there, for my country, I’d step it up another level.  You know, leave everything out there on the field.  And I don’t see them doing that, these soccer players.

MILLER:  Long drive out to right for Cano, but curving…. foul.

MORGAN:  All these people talking about this Ultimate Zone Rating. They ought to take that into soccer.  Do some ultimate ratings for those guys, see how good they are.  Show that they’re not playing at that Hall of Fame level like I did for all those years.

MILLER:  This one is low and outside, count full for Cano.

MORGAN:  They need to get Sparky Anderson out of retirement and let him coach this soccer team.  I don’t think he could do any worse than what they got out there.  At least he could fire them up.

MILLER:  And this one just misses the corner.  Cano will go to first with the base on balls.

MORGAN:  Because soccer is just so boring, Jon.  I mean, really, it is.  Nothing ever happens.

Errol Morris, writing in the NYT, on unknown unknowns:

[Former Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld’s famous “unknown unknowns” quote occurred in a Q&A session at the end of a NATO press conference. A reporter asked him, “Regarding terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, you said something to the effect that the real situation is worse than the facts show…” Rumsfeld replied, “Sure. All of us in this business read intelligence information. And we read it daily and we think about it, and it becomes in our minds essentially what exists. And that’s wrong. It is not what exists.” But what is Rumsfeld saying here? That he can be wrong? That “intelligence information” is not complete? That it has to be viewed critically? Who would argue? Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” seem even less auspicious. Of course, there are known unknowns. I don’t know the melting point of beryllium.

And I know that I don’t know it. There are a zillion things I don’t know. And I know that I don’t know them. But what about the unknown unknowns? Are they like a scotoma, a blind spot in our field of vision that we are unaware of? I kept wondering if Rumsfeld’s real problem was with the unknown unknowns; or was it instead some variant of self-deception, thinking that you know something that you don’t know. A problem of hubris, not epistemology.

If it’s hubris, it’s the same sort of hubris that everyone encounters when they try to predict the future. As I write this, my beloved Texas Rangers are in first place in the AL West. (Ah, the bliss.) If you’da asked me, back in spring training, would the Rangers be a contender at the end of June, I would have said, “Sure, but a lot of things have to go right, like Rich Harden staying off the DL (hasn’t happened), Scott Feldman pitching like he did last year (not even close), Nelson Cruz staying healthy (two DL stints), Saltalamacchia and Davis contributing (both at OKC) and Frankie Francisco being effective (not).”

None of that happened, not a bit of it, and still the Rangers are in first place, thanks to the resurgence of Vladimir Guerrero (fairly unexpected),  high-caliber pitching from C.J. Wilson and Colby Lewis (as if) and good play from rookies (Borbon and Smoak finally getting hot) and cast-offs (Dustin Nippert, Matt Treanor).

In my way of thinking, the unlikely (impossible? illusionary?) success of the Rangers is an unknown unknown.  You don’t know how any baseball team will do in any given season; that’s why they play the games.  You may think you know that the Pirates and Royals will suck (past performance and all that) but teams can surprise you, can put together a good season and a healthy playoff run.  And you don’t know how injuries and poor performance will affect your club.  Combine those two unknowns, and you get an unknown unknown – how will the Rangers perform with multiple injuries and letdowns from their star players?  You can’t know; you’d be a fool to guess.

In the 9/11 context it’s even more obvious.  We knew that bin Laden wanted to hit the U.S.  What we didn’t know is where it would happen, when it would happen, who would be involved, and how they would do it.  Not knowing all four of those things – an unknown unknown unknown unknown, if you will – isn’t hubris.  It’s something nobody would have known, or even guessed.  You might have figured out that terrorists would go for the WTC again.  You might have figured out that there were X number of Saudi nationals running around with ties to extremist Islamic sects.  You might have gotten lucky and guessed the day somehow, or deduced the method.  But nobody could have figured out the whole package, and (using the word again) it’s hubris to say that somebody could have, or should have.

So why is Morris so down on the unknown unknowns?  He asks his interview subject about it:

The notion of unknown unknowns really does resonate with me, and perhaps the idea would resonate with other people if they knew that it originally came from the world of design and engineering rather than Rumsfeld.

Ah, you see, consider the source.  I have to remind myself, from time to time, that a thing is right even if Joe Biden says it.  If it’s true for me, then it’s true for anti-GWB haters like Morris.

I was prepared to be real happy for Henning Mankell, although I didn’t actually know his name at the time. He wrote the Wallander books that got turned into a pretty good BBC mini-series by Kenneth Branagh. And it looks like he just hit the jackpot:

“The question is, after everybody reads ‘Hornet’s Nest,’ what are they going to do?” said Stan Hynds, a book buyer at Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vt. “I’ve got this funny feeling that every publisher is going to come out with the next Stieg Larsson.”

Well, maybe not every publisher — but a lot of them.

Scandinavian crime fiction has been popular among serious mystery readers for decades, but even best-selling novelists like Henning Mankell are not yet widely known in the United States.

Well, good for him. But then I looked him up on Wikipedia:

Mankell participated in the Protests of 1968 in Sweden, protesting among other things, the Vietnam War, the Portuguese Colonial War and the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Furthermore, he got involved with the society Folket i Bild/Kulturfront which focused on cultural policy studies. During his stay in Norway, he got in contact with the Norwegian Workers’ Communist Party and took an active part in their actions.

Okay, so he’s a Commie. Lots of people are. I still go to see Sean Penn’s movies. But…

Henning Mankell was on board the MS Sofia, one of the boats which took part in the aid flotilla which tried to break the Israeli embargo of the Gaza strip. Following the Israeli armed forces’ boarding of the flotilla on the morning of 31 May 2010, in which 9 flotilla members were killed, Mankell was deported to Sweden. He subsequently called for global sanctions against Israel. He is currently considering to halt the Hebrew translations of his books.

Looks like he just lost a reader. Maybe a lot of them.

That Dilbert Guy:

The Adams Complexity Threshold is the point at which something is so complicated it no longer works.

The Gulf oil spill is probably a case of complexity reaching the threshold. It was literally impossible for anyone to know if the oil rig was safe or not. The engineering was too complex. I’m sure management thought it was safe, or hoped it was safe, or hallucinated that it was safe. It wasn’t possible to know for sure.

OK so far as it goes. But remember, the iPhone is so complicated that no one person could build one, and you can get my twin babies to operate it (well, the bubble-popping app).

This I thought was egregious:

It’s not an accident that the recent leaders of China have been trained engineers. They’ve done a great job in an immensely complicated situation. Engineers are trained to deal with complexity.

Yeah, right:

In China, cracks are appearing – in the neighbourhood of the massive Three Gorges Dam, the country’s great prestige project, and also in the Great Internet Firewall of China, enabling the ominous news to leak out. Three years ago stories were already emerging in the Chinese media about landslides, ecological deterioration and accumulation of algae further down the river. And less and less effort seems to be made to plug the leaks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/magazine/06Squatters-t.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

We slipped around back and sneaked in through one of the few windows that wasn’t boarded up. Technically, we were breaking and entering, but this didn’t seem to worry Kit. As I strained to see through the murky darkness, he pointed down at the filthy wall-to-wall carpeting and said cheerfully, “We would probably pull everything up and have wood floors.” I nodded appreciatively. Kit explained he wouldn’t be living here alone. His plan was simply to get the house started, and then he’d hand it over to a group of female friends who were hoping to start an all-girls squat.

Kit and I walked through the house all the way up to the third floor. The rooms were strewn with junk — empty peanut-butter jars, a discarded sink, old underpants, even a trashed payphone. Kit pointed toward a broken window. “I don’t mind a breeze here and there,” he observed.

After leaving the house, Kit spotted two young women across the street who appeared to be his future neighbors. He sauntered over them. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” he asked. “We’re looking into this house; do you know who the owner is?”

The women shook their heads.

“Can I ask you a question?” asked one of the women.

“Sure,” Kit replied.

“Why are you walking around barefoot? Are you crazy? With all the crack vials and needles here?”

Kit glanced down at his bare feet and then explained with a smile that he always watched his footing.

Ha.  See!  You can’t beat Charles Darwin, he always wins in the end.

So the nice woman at the maternal health thingy tells you that your wife is going to have twins.  Okay.

Are you breathing?  You should breathe.  In.  Out.  In.  Out.  Like that.

Okay.  That’s a start.

Maybe you have kids already, in which case, I don’t have very much to tell you.  Our twins were our first (likely to be our last as well).  If you have kids already, then you’re at least prepared for the noise and the sleeplessness and the inconvenience and suchlike.  That stuff is standard.  But if you haven’t been around kids much before, and you find out you’re going to get two of them, at once, well then.  Listen up.

1.  You’re going to be responsible for a lot of the baby care.  It’s just a fact.  There is going to come a time when your wife is in the shower or something and you’re going to have both babies screaming in your ears for ten minutes, and you will wish you were sitting in some Jamaican all-inclusive resort instead, drinking rum punch and watching bikinis.  Actually, scratch that, because I feel like that the whole time.  You will wish you were sitting in a quiet room, maybe at the car repair shop, drinking a lukewarm cup of hot chocolate and reading a Newsweek left over from 2008.  Or something like that. 

The point is this – as much as you might think that you can push off a bunch of the messier parts of the childcare experience onto your wife, you can’t.  You shouldn’t, of course, but with one baby, you can.  With two babies?  No.  You’re going to do diaper changes, you’re going to clean up vomit, you’re going to help feed babies, you’re going to get spit up on.  Explosively.  Accept this.

2.  Be aware of your own incompetence.  You don’t know how to do any of this stuff, probably.  Maybe you do – if you have older kids, you should, and if you’re a good uncle or older brother of something you may have had experience.  Probably not, though.  My own personal recommendation here is Happiest Baby on the Block, which is not incredibly well-written and is more than a little cheesy, but is invaluable in providing a) the mental model for your child’s first few months and b) giving accurate, helpful things you can do when one or more babies is crying uncontrollably.

3.  Be realistic in what you’re giving up.  Not here even talking about sex, or sleep, or the obvious stuff.  I figured that, when I was at home the first six weeks, that I would get some writing done, or at least some query letters.  No.  Not a word.  Or I don’t think so; that whole time period is kinda fuzzy.  I think I read some e-mail.  I learned how to play Madden with a baby sleeping on my shoulder.  That was pretty much it.

I went to work on Fridays, and left my wife alone with the babies all day.  That didn’t go well.

Let’s see.  Breakfast; we gave up breakfast for awhile.  Get breakfast bars at Costco, that’ll help.  In fact:

4.  Get a Costco card.  I am not saying to get everything at Costco.  There was stuff that was cheaper at Babies ‘R Us and diapers.com.  Formula was cheaper at Costco (and you’re a lot more likely to need formula with two kids than with one, don’t kid yourself about that).  Costco has big-ass carts that can fit two babies in them.  Go to Costco.

5.  Get a minivan to handle all the stuff you will buy at Costco. (self-explanatory)

6.  If you get more than one diaper bag, get them in different colors.  That way, when your wife wants you to hand her the diaper bag, and you say which one, and she says the black one, you don’t have three different black ones to choose from.  Trust me on this.

7.  You will eventually be able to take your kids out in public.  This is good news.  There will be a while where you can’t, and that’s OK, but one day you will want to, and you’ll be able to.  (We liked the wire-framed stroller with the ability to snap on the car seats – you can put the babies on the stroller without waking them up.  Highly rated feature.)  Do not despair. 

8.  There are three kinds of people in the world.  One kind just ignores you, and that’s fine.  One kind makes brief comments (“Oh, so cute”) or sarcastic put-downs (“Double trouble,” or “Bet you got your hands full”).  The other kind is trouble.  These are people who are aggressively pro-baby in some way (twelve year-old girls are like this, and grandparents with grandbabies they hardly get to see).  They will make your life miserable.  They will ask you damnfool questions, one after another.  They will want to know their names.  They will give you all sorts of advice, none of which you should listen to (unless it strikes you as helpful). 

And that doesn’t say anything about the kids themselves, or your wife (who is going to be working way harder than you and deserves more support than you will be ever able to give her, all for kids who are going to grow up to hate her one day).  And that doesn’t say anything about housework ( you are going to have to do some, or subcontract it – I do both).  Maybe there will be more to come, who knows.

If Tom Friedman is willing to call out the President of Brazil and the President of Turkey for snuggling up to I’m-a-Dinner-Jacket, why isn’t he willing to call out President Obama by name?  The only difference seems to be that Obama is bright enough not to get caught getting his picture taken with the Iranian despot.  Friedman is willing to criticize “the U.S.” and “the West,” but not Obama personally?  Explain.