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.”

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.

One of the things I despise is the lazy journalistic shorthand that ascribes the foolish and self-destructive things that people do to unnamed, unidentified “demons.”  Case in point:

20. Michael Jackson Dies: Mysteries surrounding Jackson’s pedophilia charges disappear as the issue of doctors overprescribing demanding, drug-addicted celebs takes the spotlight. That’s a bad thing and ultimately a very good thing. But the worst part about Jackson’s death is that he was the world’s greatest living musical genius who gave in to his demons.

Michael Jackson didn’t have “demons.”  Nobody has demons.  Demons don’t exist.  (Cf. Mark 5.)  There’s no such thing as demons. Attributing negative personal behavior to demons is about as helpful as attributing it to the balance of our bodliy fluids, the malign influence of the planets, or George W. Bush. Demons didn’t make Michael Jackson give wine to underage children (for the probable purpose of seduction). Demons didn’t drive Michael Jackson to get plastic surgery to the point where his nose fell off. Demons didn’t make Michael Jackson a drug addict. Demons didn’t make his last few albums suck. Saying that Michael Jackson has “demons” is just a lazy way to say that he was unable to control his impulses – but it’s worse than that, because it negates the concept of responsibility. Anyone who says that his demons made him do something is saying that he doesn’t want to admit responsibility for his vile ways.

Just a quick Google search today:

• Milton Bradley opens up about his inner demons.  BS.  Milton Bradley has demons like I have a million-dollar contract to play baseball.  Demons didn’t make Milton Bradley not be able to hit anymore.
• Donny Osmond:  Marie dealing with her own demons after son’s death.  Marie Osmond’s son committed suicide.  That’s sad, and we should have sympathy for her.  But the suicide of a loved one isn’t a demon, or anything close to a demon.
• Downey beat personal demons.  Yeah.  Robert Downey Jr. took all that blow in the Eighties… and Nineties… and Two-Thousands because of demons.  Please.
• With Wall, Wizards can start fresh, avoid draft demons.  The Washington Wizards made horrible draft picks.  Demons weren’t responsible for those.   Michael Jordan was (well, for Kwame Brown).
• Tragedy revives decades-old demons.  Okay, this is a sad story, but the dead people who died in the plane crash are dead; they’re not haunting anyone.
• Those Internal Demons, Hard To Shake.  Actually, I have no idea about what this is supposed to be about, but demons don’t make anyone do interpretive modern dance, or write about it.  Or I hope not.
• Hand washing dispels the decision demons.  No it doesn’t. 
• Will Jonathan ever be able to beat his demons?  No.  But he might try not drinking for awhile, see how that works out.
• Ecuador’s oil demons.  Be careful when you pump that next gallon of gas; it might be… haunted!
• “Edge of Darkness” illuminates Mel Gibson’s inner demons.  So that’s why it didn’t do so well at the box office – it illuminated the demons.  You shouldn’t do that.
• Twins need to beat demons of the East.  Or, you know, the Yankees.

Bottom line:  “Demons” is a cliche, and a bad one.  Stop using it.

I decided that it would be much more useful (and much less painful) to list the stuff that I did in a given month, rather than the stuff that I should have done and didn’t do.  Obviously, there’s a huge (hyuuuuuuge) to-do list behind this, but it’s more positive to be positive, or so I think.

• Cleaned out garage.  This means that all of the tile stuff is downstairs for mosaic projects (if and when I find time), all the dirt and leaves and grass have been swept out, all the cobwebs are gone, and all of the stuff on the shelves is more-or-less straightened out.  A good day’s work.
• Took down the Christmas tree.  Got everything downstairs, too.
• Fixed the big hole in the wall.  Right before Christmas, I was walking a big bag downstairs; I missed the last step and sent the bag swinging into the wall.  I patched the drywall with spackle, and it looks OK.
• Repaint downstairs bathroom wall:  Don’t want to get into details, but there was some damage to the paint in the downstairs bathroom, and I put the first coat down yesterday.
• Query letters:  I have four or five out (with one insta-rejection); waiting to hear back on some of those before sending out a couple more.  If these don’t pan out, then it’s back to the drawing board.
• Got pictures hung up:  the ketubah from our wedding, and the new baby picture we got.