Invitation to a beheading
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Friday, September 19, 2008
I've decided that I'm not posting in eljay anymore until and unless they get rid of the ads that now appear on basic accounts to un-logged-in readers. For now, I'm going to blogspot: invitation-to-a-beheading.blogspot.com. I'll still be reading here.
AMENDMENT: I'm not posting publicly in eljay anymore (until and unless etc.). As it turns out, I'm not cut out to be a real blogger. Not that I'm cut out to be much of an eljayer, either.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 15. High today: 23.
Back to the Greyhound! This would be where we came in, but going the other way.
After hanging out around Laurier for much of three years, going in to work there is weird and amusing.
There was a guy on the Greyhound I knew vaguely from York--actually, he had a better idea who I was; my best guess was he was some guy I used to see in Kitchener--who told me that it was his first day at Laurier, too, and he volunteered something that was also amusing because I had been thinking this myself after my class today but I was wondering if it was just me: the students at Laurier seem more cheerful than the students at York.
I am pleased to report that the no-tail squirrel is still alive and kicking and I gave it three almonds today, which I hope don't kill it with salt. (How long do squirrels live, I wonder? This no-tail squirrel has been living with no tail for at least a couple of years now. I always see it within maybe a thirty foot radius of the same spot, unlike our half-tail squirrel that we see out the window here, which wanders across the road and down the street and up the alley--which reminds me that, a week or two ago when I was coming home, a rat was ambling down the sidewalk toward me. For a couple of seconds I hesitated to ponder whether I ought to tip my hat as we passed, but it sauntered into the bushes.) I learned today that the squirrels in Waterloo Park are incredibly attuned to throwing motions. Look like you're throwing something and little pointy heads pop up all around.
There is, again, a tortoise in the rabbit pen. Its name is still Crush, it is still six years old, and it still weighs thirty kilograms (or something).
There are still, as last reported by ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) pnijjar some time ago, no more emus. However, in the pen where there were emus, now there is a zebu.
(I always had the vague idea that zebus were some kind of zebra-cow. But actually, it turns out, zebus are basically any of those skinny humpy cattle from Africa and Asia. Thanks, Uncle Wikipedia!)
Today there was a heron in the pond. Last week there was a chipmunk beside the path around the pond.
Also in the rabbit pen: one very small half-naked baby guinea pig. I heard it before I saw it. I was looking around to see what this new loud bird was. The baby guinea pig is completely ridiculous looking and sounding and I wonder if something will eat it. I've always thought this about the rabbit pen: that's like a hawk feeder, isn't it?
Following the baby guinea pig around, I noticed a rabbit stretching up to eat some green stuff that looked like it was growing up the fence, so I went to inspect it, and actually it was clover that someone had stuck in the fence. Then this little kid comes marching over and asks, "Were you wondering who put that stuff there?" (Yes. I was wondering who put that stuff there. Was it that man over by the llamas? Was it that little dog? Perhaps it was the little baby Jesus.) "Was it you?" I inquire. "Yes!" he exclaims, and adds: "there's a naked mole-rat in there somewhere." "I think it's a baby guinea pig," I helpfully supply. This seems to dent his confidence, but only slightly, because: "My mom says it's a naked mole-rat." "Well, that's possible," I concede. He stuffs a clover flower in the fence and proclaims that the rabbits love these flowers[1]. His mother catches up and informs me that she has him weed the yard, and then he feeds the weeds to the rabbits. "It's a good system," I assess, and move along.
I have to say, as much as Toronto beats the hell out of KW in whole bunches of ways, that park is so vastly superior to the ravines over here as to make up maybe all the difference and maybe more. I think I may have seen a mouse in one of the ravines once; I'm not sure. The lack of interesting fauna in the ravines is really rather stunning. No rabbits, no raccoons, no chipmunks, no groundhogs, no snakes, no frogs ... so far this year, one hawk of some sort, one woodpecker hammering away somewhere, and apart from that, not even any interesting birds, not even any nuthatches, which I saw so many of last year.
I think I have figured out my basic hitting problem, and also Alex Rios's, and this basic problem isn't really anything about clearing your hips or weight shifts or keeping your hands back or anything like that. The problem is, you think you want to swing and hit the ball, but that's not what you want to do. You want to attack the ball. Here comes that ball; don't let it! Get the hell rid of that ball! Get out there and get that sucker and kill it! (This, I think, is related to "trust your stuff". This is something I'm just learning to do as a teacher.)
Relatedly, I am starting wonder whether "seeing the ball well" really means what most people take it to mean, which is "picking it up right out of the pitcher's hand". (Not that seeing a slow-pitched softball well is necessarily the same thing as seeing a 94-mile-and-hour fastball well.) The balls I hit well, the balls I get out there and attack, it's like they're freeze-framed when the bat hits them. The balls that sneak up on me and I just hit, they're there and gone and bouncing out to third base before I know where they were.
1. Ah, what do I love when I love you? I love you so much I could eat you up! Rabbits eating always make me think of this, my favourite bit of high philosophical comedy: "We can tell those who assert the truth and certainty of the reality of sense-objects that they should go back to the most elementary school of wisdom, viz. the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus, and that they have still to learn the secret meaning of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine. For he who is initiated into these Mysteries not only comes to doubt the being of sensuous things, but to despair of it; in part he brings about the nothingness of such things himself in his dealings with them, and in part he sees them reduce themselves to nothingness. Even the animals are not shut out from this wisdom but, on the contrary, show themselves to be most profoundly initiated into it; for they do not just stand idly in front of sensuous things as if these possessed intrinsic being, but, despairing of their reality, and completely assured of their nothingness, they fall to without ceremony and eat them up." (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit)
Current mood:  tired
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 19. High today: 27.
We did make it out to Roblin Lake today. We took the scenic route, Highway 2 from Pickering to Brighton: Ajax, Whitby, Oshawa, Courtice, Bowmanville, Newcastle, Port Hope, Cobourg, Grafton, and Colborne along the way. Highway 64 to Carrying Place and the Loyalist Parkway to 19 to Ameliasburgh.
The church is there, all right, ( unmistakeably. )
But now it's part of the Ameliasburgh Museum. Never located Purdy's house, or managed a clear view of the church spire two shores away, across Roblin Lake. Might have been easier on foot, with more time. But here's a view of the church spire--now the second-most prominent landmark in the area after the cellphone tower--( from across the Roblin mill pond. )
Here's a cemetary ( above the Mill pond )--which I'd have to say you'd have to kind of wonder about the physics and biochemistry of. (This was one of many cemetaries we passed along the way, which you don't see any of going by the 401. Going by the 401, you'd never know that anyone had ever been here, in this province, before you. Passing some familiar name somewhere--it might have been Wannamaker, which we saw in Ameliasburgh and again somewhere else, and which was the name of the owners of the store in Coe Hill, way up in the country north of Belleville, before it became Foodland or whatever, except I think it was some other name--I had the strange feeling that I too belong to a native tribe who once came, as native tribes came to this land in succession over the centuries, and whose time on this land has passed.)
The mill pond, incidentally, is at the end of ( Purdy St. )
The Roblin Mill, says ( this plaque, ) is now located at Black Creek Pioneer Village, next-door to York.
We sheepishly skulked about the ( Al Purdy Library ) for a few minutes. I would have liked to have a picture of the display case of Purdy's awards and whatnot and, directly beneath it, some video-game system with a sign saying you can play video games for 30 minutes or something. But I wasn't about to be that obtrusive while feeling so intrusive.
( Roblin Lake ) is bigger than I expected, given that it's not big enough to show up on road maps, or even google maps. Still pretty small--and with rocket boats rocketing around, boats that, twenty-five years ago, people would have looked at on Wollaston Lake, which might be ten times bigger or more, and wondered why on earth anyone would have a boat that powerful on a lake this small.
(My grandfather used to say, twenty-five years ago, that people would stop coming to the cottage, and stop driving their boats around the lake, because gas was too expensive.)
After Ameliasburgh, we drove over through Picton to Glenora, where we got the ( ferry ) to Adolphustown. I meant to drive around Hay Bay to try to find where my great-uncle's cottage was on the north shore, but the south shore turned out out to be much longer than I expected, so we just jogged up to Highway 2, and Belleville and Trenton, where we finally found dinner, suspect Pad Thai and reasonable Lo Mein, after determining that there is not nearly so much fish 'n' chips out that way as there was on the way out there.
Current mood: tired Current music: Dehumidifier
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 16. High today: 28. Hasn't made it to 30 in August, and looks like it won't. Looks like UW will top out at just a fraction over 30 for the summer.
The body of one young bird had not quite disappeared into the left-field subsurface today. I'll tell you, one thing that's less fun than beating a bunch of drunken goofs 31-1 is being so thoroughly out-played that you realize that if you played your best and they played their best thirty games in a row, you wouldn't win a single one. And on the vicarious side of things, Alex Rios got just enough on top of one of those damned Varitek-standing-up fastballs from Papelbon that the Jays will have to spend at least the next two days being "out of it" again.
There was not, in years gone by, such an obsession with deciding whether teams are "in it" or "out of it". I was about to blame The Blogosphere, but I guess the culprit is really sports radio.
Last week I strained a "lat" swinging at a pitch and missing. The other day I discovered that many more people now know what "lat" muscles are than did a couple of weeks ago, because of Michael Phelps. It struck me early on during the Olumpics that one thing the Olumpics are is a festival of esoteric knowledge. You have all these sports that nobody knows anything about and lots of people suddenly want to know what the hell's going on in them, and the television tells them, and then they feel smart. (It's like everyone had just gotten a dog. (This is what I have decided dogs are: dogs are knowledge-generation machines.)) But then I was watching the women's softball, and the two CBC commentators (one of whom, for some reason, was Hayley Wickenheiser, the hockey player) clearly did not know anything much about the game, and I realized that it could be that many or most of the commentators in the various sports are basically incompetent. Sports gerbils.
(A few weeks ago, someone called Jays Talk and asked Mike Wilner what his "qualifications" are to talk about baseball on the radio. Wilner stumbled around and said something about being just a student of the game, but the real answer is: he can talk and talk endlessly without stumbling. (Well, you know.) That he can talk and talk endlessly without saying anything obviously stupid or seriously offensive is also helpful. That he can coolly and rationally demolish every idiotic claim made by every idiotic caller, well, that's entertainment. (One thing that Wilner gets, which you just can't explain to people, is that if a team could be "in it" in a couple of days or a couple of weeks, then it can't be "out of it" today. Most people are apparently incapable of grasping this.))
Went to the Jays game on Friday, along with 20-some-thousand Massholes (as the constituents of Red Sox nation are unaffectionately known in the Jays blogosphere). I've been to games against the Yankees where there were a lot of Yankees fans, but this was the first Jays game I've ever been to where the crowd was not a Jays crowd. The Jays' front-office people like having the Red Sox and Yankees in town on weekends because of all the out-of-town ticket sales, but I wonder if packing the stadium with enemy fans might actually not be such a great marketing move. It's pretty freaking dismal going to a game and watching your team lose while everyone around you celebrates.
The Massholes showing up en massehole in Toronto is an irony of history twinned with the Jays being the first team to buy themselves a championship (and then another). Back in the day, it was hordes of Jays fans showing up in Cleveland and ... well, Cleveland, anyway. Though not so many as Yankees and Red Sox fans hit the road these days. Well, you know, what with the price of gasoline and the recession and all, I guess they can only afford to drive to Toronto for the weekend.
Across Vaughan Road, two streets away, they are sheathing the retirement home with new concrete. I would like to go to Roblin Lake to see whether there really is a church there, and so on. I don't know whether that is wrong of me. It's that time of year and time is almost up (but already I feel it coming around again, time continues its deepening, thickening, eternal recurrence. I wonder how this will go as I get older. Is all of time, eventually, happening at once? Does it all solidify into a mass that you can stand on, move around in, weigh in your hand?) My love for Al Purdy is so personal. I don't know whether that makes it cheaper. (I realized the other day that both of these great Purdy poems that I love--his two greatest hits, and I wonder if I'll come around to loving any more like that, but I'm always very cautious with this kind of thing--are concerned with forgotten ancestors.)
The rhythms of life: there were only two years when my family spent the last two weeks of the summer at Upper Buckhorn Lake, but I come back around to it every year. The area of high pressure moving in after the cold front this afternoon would kill the fishing for the next three days at least--Thursday and Friday are more promising for muskies at least, with the remnants of Fay supposed to pass through. All summer long, I step outside and feel how the fishing is. The first cold nights of August take me back to Wollaston Lake on the dock waiting for the Perseids.
This afternoon's cold front has me thinking again about the logics of fronts. The line of thunderstorms went through around 11 this morning; the dewpoint started dropping and the wind shifted between 3 and 4 this afternoon; but the temperature went from 26 at 3 to 27 at 4 to 28 at 5, because the skies cleared, allowing for more solar heating. This is one thing that makes fronts ambiguous--the range of temperature fluctuation within an air mass due to daytime heating and nighttime cooling is usually much greater than the average difference in temperature between air masses. Dewpoint is much more consistent (and also sets the "floor" for temperature--when the humidity drops on a day like today, I think of it as "the bottom dropping out" of the air), which is why I'm inclined to mark the passage of "the front" as the point where dewpoint starts dropping or rising. (I'd really be interestered in knowing how sharply the air masses are divided by dewpoint when you get up a ways from the ground. It took eight hours for the dewpoint to stop falling today. My guess is that the dewpoint doesn't fall all at once at ground level because air from the departing air mass gets snagged on the terrain--it can take a remarkably long time for changes in the weather to take hold of valleys. But I have no idea what's going on up in the sky.) Since the TV weatherpeople care not for dewpoint, they tend to give the impression that "the front" is the most prominent line of precipitation.
There are two Leonard Cohen songs with not-particularly-ambiguous anti-abortion lines in them. ("He's the revolution's pride, he's trained a thousand women just to kill an unborn child"; "Destroy another fetus now, we don't like children anyhow"; and there's also "Dance me to the children who are waiting to be born.") Every time I hear them, I wonder how many people cringe when they hear them.
Current mood:  incipient-headachy
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 20. High today: 27.
The weather this summer has made aggravatingly clear to me how much there is of the weather that I still do not understand. We've had an amazing amount of convective activity with not much in the way of heat or humidity at the surface (although it also hasn't been as cool as a lot of people think it's been; everyone's just gotten used to the idea, over the last few years, that we should be having record high temperatures all summer). Somehow, what we seem to have been getting, over and over again, is areas of low pressure sitting over us or just to the east, spinning cold air into the upper atmosphere over us, but not so much into the lower atmosphere. I don't understand how this works. It's annoying. One thing I'm starting to latch onto is how converging winds can create areas of low pressure without the presence of the temperature gradients that are usually responsible for low pressure. (Tropical storms often begin as "tropical waves", which are areas of converging winds that travel westward across the Atlantic from Africa.) When winds converge, the air's got nowhere to go but up.
Another thing that I have just somewhat recently begun to understand is how jet streams work. You often hear on the television that "the jet stream divides the warm air to the south from the cold air to the north". This is true. What's not so much true, as I am understanding things, is the idea that when the jet stream moves north and south, it drags the warm or cold air with it. As I am understanding things, this is exactly backwards--the narrow, fast-moving current of air that is a jet stream is created by the temperature gradient at the borders of air masses, together with the coriolis effect. But I've only seen this explained very briefly and without diagrams.
(I think probably my favourite example of people getting the logics of things backwards is the common belief that thunderstorms "break the heat". (There is actually something to this, in that storms mix air from different levels of the atmosphere, so that thunderstorms do often temporarily lower the temperature at ground level by forcing cold air downward at their perimeters. Often you'll see the temperature bounce down and up again by more than five degrees when a convective thunderstorm passes through on a hot day.) But when a cold front goes through, it's the colder air pressing against the warmer air that causes the thunderstorms; the thunderstorms don't cause the air mass to get colder. What's interesting about this is that understanding the thunderstorms to cause the cooling makes sense in terms of the temporal order of causation: the storm happens first, the cooling happens second; therefore, the thunderstorm causes the cooling. The logic is naturally appropriate to single observers who can't transcend their own perspectives, failure to do which is also responsible for the common belief that storms "double back"--it was stormy fifteen minutes ago, and it's stormy again now, so evidently "the storm doubled back" (although this also requires failing to notice that the present storminess didn't come from the direction toward which the recent storminess receded). (This is also at least in the same neighbourhood as the belief that there has only ever been one chipmunk--his name is Chippy--at the cottage.)
I've been thinking about logics lately. Not formal logics, or anything like that. Logics in a very broad sense. Something like gestalts, maybe. The lay-outs of situations. (Heidegger talks about how the Greek legein, to speak, from which logos is derived, originally has a sense of laying out.) Thinking how this seems like the essence of many if not most kinds of intelligence: peceiving the lay-outs of situations, how the elements relate, how they're arranged, their significance in relation to each other. Not calculating it, working it out--though that can get you through it. Perceiving it all at once. (This, I'm pretty sure, is something in the neighbourhood of what Hubert Dreyfus has always been on about about humans and computers playing chess--humans perceive the situation of the board all at once; computers have to work out each relation in sequence.) I'm bad with time logics, perceiving how the elements of my future are laid out. So I have to keep drawing little calendars to figure out, and remind myself (figure out again), how the weeks ahead will work, and I have to keep calculating how long the things ahead in the day will take so that I'm not late. But I'm very often running late, because the calculations are hacks and always miss all kinds of things.
(You could say that I'm always running late because I'm always avoiding things, but that, if it's true (which it probably is), just explains why I'm bad at time logics. Well, it explains in a manner of speaking. The mechanism is completely opaque.)
A lot of people can't write well because they don't perceive the logics of language. I have come to think that there's nothing you can do to teach people like that how to write well generally, although you can teach them tricks. (But the tricks are hacks and will often let them down. One trick that was given out in some class I was in somewhere sometime was that your sentences should always contain an even number of commas. This trick does hint at a certain element of language-logic, but it doesn't even usually work.)
Somehow, I think this is related to something Plato's on about with "recollection", or at least generally with memory and learning and knowledge, especially in the Phaedrus. One of the fantastic things about the Phaedrus is how the dialogue takes the overt thesis that writing is a disabling crutch that prevents learning and completely turns it on its head. You can only get what's going on in the Phaedrus by reading it over and over again. Phaedrus doesn't get what Socrates is doing to him in the dialogue because it's too hard to keep track of ideas at the pace of conversation. We can see what's being done to him because we can compare one part of the written text to another (e.g., when Socrates asks Phaedrus whether he had begun his speech by defining his terms and Phaedrus says that he did (and wonderfully well), we can go back in the text and see that, actually, he didn't, at all).
Theme of the Phaedrus: people generally know nothing because they can't remember anything. This is not because they can't remember facts (which are generally the objects of opinion and not of knowledge), but because they can't hold different particulars in their minds at the same time to be able to discern their essences. Being able to know things requires being able to perceive the logic of a situation. Working through a logic to get the right answer is insufficient for knowledge (but maybe working through a logic sometimes enables you to perceive the whole logic).
Today the Blue Jays and my softball team won by a combined score of 46-5. It's actually quite a bit more exciting to listen to the Blue Jays beating the Red Sox 15-4 (especially when the two Jays on my fantasy team combine for seven extra-base hits) than it is beat a bunch of drunken goofs 31-1.
I have not told you much about my fantasy baseball teams this year. That's probably a good policy. However, I would like to note that I presently resent the following players for continuing to play way over their heads, not on my team: Ryan Ludwick, Mark DeRosa, Jorge Cantu, and Edinson Volquez. I would also deeply resent Cliff Lee--I mean, even more than I already resent him for preventing Roy Halladay from winning a Cy Young this year--if anybody in my current league owned him. I will resent Ian Stewart if he continues to out-produce David Wright.
So, I finished bookifying my dissertation a couple of weeks ago, and it turns out that the answer was, if anything, that bookifying my dissertation meant that you would see less of me. I guess.
There have probably been many important things I have been meaning to say, such as that John McCain's campaign logo looks like the Thomson logo. Oh well.
Current mood:  okay
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 18. High today: 24. Pearson recorded thunderstorms for four straight hours tonight.
If the Greek letter upsilon had always been transliterated into English as "u", as is now the convention, instead of "y", then the Olympics would be the Olumpics.
Current mood: creaky Current music: Leaves rustling
Monday, July 21, 2008
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 20. High today: 25.
The stationary front that won't go away is still with us, or near us, undecided about leaving us. It rained out my softball game yesterday (BOOOO!), and has kept the temperature pretty tightly between 19 and 25, but mostly about 21, since Saturday. From 1 to 2 this afternoon, the dewpoint dropped from 18 to 14, but then jogged back up to 16; at the Island, it's back to 17, which is as high as it's been in the last 24.
Today, instead of beating on the weather gerbils, and since we have agreed not to do any baseball blogging for a while, let's beat on the baseball bloggers! Jordan Bastian, the Jays reporter and blogger for mlb.com, posted today: "It is stinkin' hot here in Baltimore. It's about as hot temperature-wise as it was in Florida, but here you feel like you're just wearing the weather. The humidity is unbelievable and this outdoor pressbox is like a sauna." So, you know, the claim that it's more humid in Baltimore today than it was in St. Petersburg yesterday sounds a little suspicious to me--could be, but probably not. Sure enough: at 6:54 today in Baltimore (13 minutes after he made his blog post), the temperature was 91F and the dewpoint was 62 (That's, like, 33C and 17.) At 6:53 yesterday in St. Petersburg, the temperature was 89 and the dewpoint was 72. (32 and 22.) So, yeah, pretty substantial difference in humidity--but substantially more humid in Florida.
Why does he think it's more humid in Baltimore? One obvious possible reason: baseball people love to talk about how humid it is in Baltimore, but not in St. Petersburg, because in St. Petersburg they play in a dome. Everyone knows it's humid in Baltimore, but everyone does not know it's humid in St. Petersburg. Interestingly, everyone also knows that balls carry well in the heavy air of Baltimore, and also that balls carry well in the light air of Denver, which is a Scientific Fact.
Actually, humid air is lighter than dry air, and that's also a Scientific Fact. You Could Look It Up.
Current mood: uncertain
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 24. High today: 31.
There's a ragged, broken-down cold front lying across southern Ontario, but it's only really evident if you look closely at the numbers, or if you look at the Weather Network's systems map, which I did because what happened to the numbers this afternoon was so screwy. The dewpoint at Pearson marched up steadily from 9 at 1 last night to 20 at 3 this afternoon, and then crashed back to 16 at 4 (with the wind swinging from SSE to NW), despite the temperature going up from 28 at 3 to 31 at 4. This made me suspicious because the dewpoint didn't drop at all at the Island, Waterloo, or Hamilton. But in Peterborough, from 1 to 4 this afternoon, it lost two degrees per hour, and at Lake Simcoe airport it dropped from 18 at 11 a.m. to 10 at 3 p.m. Now, tonight, between 8 and 11, it dropped from 20 to 14 in London--but it's only down to 18 in Waterloo, and while it's gotten down to 16 at the Island, it's been as low as 12 at Pearson. Peterborough, with the front well to the south, now has a temperature of 15, but a dewpoint one degree higher than Pearson's at 14. So, this is all a fascinating example of how ragged fronts can be in reality, as opposed to those nice clean blue lines on the weather maps.
More poking around on inflation reveals something pretty funny: since 1992 (and this effect is only evident since then), the CPI in the US has dropped between November and December in 11 years, stayed the same in four years, and risen once. Looks like maybe "seasonally adjusted" should be adjusted to account for Christmas sales.
I know, I know, baseball baseball baseball, but I have been meaning to say, and it must be said, and I am a bit surprised that no one on the world wide interwebs seems to have ever said it: DOESN"T ANDY PETTITE LOOK LIKE SNOOPY-VULTURE when he's peering in for the sign, especially from the stretch when he shoves his glove into his nose and it looks like a big long nose?
One more thing from the All-Star Game: somebody sometime said that A-Rod is the best player in the game, but Pujols is the best hitter in the game. This assumes that A-Rod is sufficiently superior to Pujols in some combination of defence and speed to make A-Rod an all-around better player. So, let's try to get speed out of the way first: A-Rod has 13 stolen bases this year; Pujols has 3. OK, no contest there. But A-Rod hasn't stolen more than 30 bases since 1998, and since 2004, A-Rod has four triples, while Pujols has six. A-Rod hasn't tripled since 2006, hasn't had more than one since 2004, which is really pretty amazing for a guy who's supposed to be fast, and especially for a guy who's supposed to be fast and who a) hits a lot of balls hard to right field, and b) has a home park with some of the longest power-alleys in baseball.
Having concluded that A-Rod is maybe a bit faster than Pujols and anyway a significantly better base-stealer but not in a way that would be particularly noteworthy if he didn't also hit a lot of home runs, let's look at fielding. A-Rod has had a below-average range factor every year since he's been a third baseman--remarkable for a converted shortstop, especially a converted shortstop who usually had an above-average range factor as a shortstop, and of course it goes to show how ridiculous it was to move A-Rod to third instead of moving Jeter to second, which Jeter would have happily done if he was the god among men that the Jeter Cult insists only bad people fail to recognize him as. But I digress. On the other hand, his fielding percentage has been a bit above average as a third baseman, which is also pretty amazing when you consider the case of yips he developed a couple of years ago that seemed to threaten to make him a DH for the rest of his career. Pujols, on the other hand, utterly destroys the average range factor for NL first basemen, year after year, with a slightly above-average fielding percentage. Of course, you can argue that third base is a more demanding position--it certainly is a position from which you can make more throwing errors--but look, the first baseman is involved in just about every infield ground ball in play, and even if missed scoops don't show up as errors, made scoops do show up in range factor. And if you want to say first basemen don't have to throw the ball, well, then, throwing is the thing that A-Rod is absolutely worst at, so, what?
So: A-Rod has a small but significant advantage in speed; Pujols blows A-Rod away in defence. Not only does A-Rod not have the speed and defence to make up the difference between his .972 OPS and Pujols's 1.074 this year (.312 BA vs. .350! 33/58 BB/K vs. 61/30!); A-Rod's speed and defence combined leave him further behind. QED!
And with one more reminder to HELP PROPAGATE THE CURSE OF YANKEE STADIUM, I am going to attempt to put my budding career as a baseball blogger on hiatus for a few weeks. A few days. Something.
Oh yeah, also: that thing Ryan Dempster does with his glove, twisting it back and forth, that is the weirdest thing I have ever seen a pitcher do with his glove.
That is all.
Current mood:  rushed
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 24, for the seventh hour in the last eight. High today: 25, in the eighth.
I was incredulous when loooooong-swingin' Jesse Barfield, the master of the strikeout on the low-and-away slider, became hitting coach of the Mariners. I have been irritated this year by the Jesse and Rance Talk About Hitting show that has used Jays games as its backdrop on CBC this year. But somewhere through all the gibberish and self-contradiction, something about staying closed and clearing your hips and I don't even know what anymore finally got through to me on Sunday, and I hit some balls impressively for the first time since, well, years ago. Thanks, Jesse!
When I was a kid, I sometimes imagined Jesse Barfield running the bases naked. Only Jesse Barfield. I do not know why. (FLAG FOR ADULT CONTENT Y/N)
Which reminds me that the other day I uttered the phrase "belly button plug" and L. said that was not sexy and I said I was not sure and that if I had a fancy livejournal I would make a poll as to whether "belly button plug" is sexy or not.
Anyway, I had to drop by this relatively early evening to say how touched I was when they wheeled Steinbrenner into Yankee Stadium before the All-Star Game tonight. That old man must be so sad that his team has to move out of his fabulous magical beautiful stadium because it is being eaten by termites.
That's why they have to move, right? The stadium is being eaten by termites? That is my understanding. So sad.
ADDENDUM I: Lidged! As soon as Lidge came in the game, I knew, if anybody can put an end to this game, and I don't care what shiny numbers he's got this year, it's Brad Lidge.
I was kind of abstractly hoping that they would run out of players, firstly because it would be awesome if Yankee Stadium spat out this stupid monstrosity of a game (which, despite its stupid monstrousness, was actually pretty awesome, the best one I've seen in years and years), and secondly because it would show up the irresponsible way Francona ran the game. But viscerally, dammit, I didn't want my game to be embarrassed, AGAIN.
ADDENDUM II: You know what there needs to be? THE CURSE OF YANKEE STADIUM. Do you know when the original agreement to build "New Yankee Stadium" was reached, Mandrake? Two thousand and one. How does that coincide with your post-20th-century World Series championship drought?
Current mood: uncertain Current music: ESPN radio
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 23: High today: 31. Close to the most rain I've ever seen in an hour around 7:30-8:30 tonight, complete with lightning strike across the street that I felt in my left ear for a few minutes.
I think we're ready to name the official Stupid Weather Gerbil Trick of the season: "Lake-breeze fronts". All thunderstorms are now caused by lake-breeze fronts, or else lake-breeze convergence zones if yer exter-fancy. Nothin' like a little learnin'. More of the same old same old: last week a weather gerbil reported it was "muggy" with the dewpoint at 10, and another said it was "humid" with the dewpoint at 14. I don't think there's any doubt that there's a significant correlation between sun intensity and people believing that it's humid: sun makes people hot, which makes them sweat, which makes them believe it's humid. The interesting question is, is there a stronger correlation between sun intensity and people believing it's humid, or humidity and people believing it's humid?
I wonder how long my enthrallment with StatsCan reports will continue. Anyway, last Friday, StatsCan put its monthly petroleum products sales report. Sales of gasoline were in fact down 3.2% between May 2007 and May 2008. That breaks a string of 13 months of year-over-year increases. Clicking through the "previous month" links takes you back to the report for December 2005; early in that 2.5-year period, gas sales were mostly declining.
An oddity from the GDP report from the end of June: GDP for the Canadian "mining and oil and gas extraction" sector was down 4% in April over April of 2007; it's declined in all but one month since November. Fastest-growing sector of the Canadian economy, April 2007 to April 2008: "accommodation and food services", at 6.9%.
Since "stagflation" is now in vogue and annoying me, yesterday I decided to see if the internets would confirm my impression that, when I was a kid, inflation was way the hell higher not only than it is now, but also than the numbers in what are supposed to be scary forecasts now. Inflation in the US, anyway, was indeed running above 10% from about 1979 to 1982 or 1983. What's really fascinating, though, is this: I guess it shouldn't be surprising when you think about it, but it's amazing to see not only the giant spikes of inflation, but also the big spikes of deflation, all the way up to the middle of the 20th century. Kind of makes you think that maybe the people running the economy do actually have some idea what they're doing--or maybe it's just that larger systems produce more consistent results.
There was a headline on the front page of the Star the other day saying "Ontario economy nosedives"--GDP contracted 0.3% in the first quarter of 2008. Imagine that! We're now as poor as we were IN THE MIDDLE OF LAST YEAR!
I've just seen that Jack Layton, or at least the NDP, following up the smashing success of his campaign to eliminate ATM fees, is now running a petition against Bell's and Telus's announced plans to charge for incoming text messages. (And I gotta say: they sure didn't leave Rogers squirming on the hook over the iphone business very long. Then again, today's story in the Globe was about how lots of Apple lunatics were probably going to sign up for the iphone plan anyway, so maybe that had already run its course. In any event, I'm thinking that maybe expensive iphones with expensive iphone plans are like Rolexes or whatever: being expensive is a feature, not a bug.) I was about to issue my usual complaint about treating corporations like political rulers, when it struck me: the weird thing isn't petitioning corporations; the weird thing is petitioning representative democratic governments. A petition, after all, is something that loyal but unhappy subjects send to the king, to let him know that the people are unhappy, since they don't get to express their unhappiness by electing a new one, and they're not motivated to overthrow him.
Petitioning corporations is a fitting expression of the acquiescence of their loyal but unhappy subjects.
And: I have managed to pick up another course at another school, thereby nearly doubling my projected income for the next year. Assuming no repeat of last year's shenanigans, this is definitely progress.
Current mood: thirsty Current music: Whir of distant air conditioners
Monday, June 30, 2008
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 18. High today: 22.
After a lot of soul-searching, I have informed management that I will not be waiving my no-movement clause, because my heart is here in Toronto with the team that wishes I'd go away. Which reminds me that Roy Halladay is a Mormon, and thinks he makes too much money. Like Mats, Roy doesn't say much. Actually, Roy says even less than Mats, and since he became a Grizzled Veteran, he usually seems a bit grouchy. But I think I may someday love Roy as much as I love Mats. Come to think of it, actually, Roy Halladay is the only individual player I have ever bought a ticket specifically to see--his last start of his Cy Young season. Payin' homage to the jeen-yus, man.
Further to the question How Poor Are We, Anyway?: I was walking up past the big old highschool (Central Tech?) at Bathurst and Harbord the other night, seeing how that thing is built like a castle, thinking how--I guess--you couldn't build a highschool that expensive today ... and why is that, anyway? (This is in the same ballpark as questions like, why is it we could do things like build subways four or five decades ago, but massive public works projects seem impossible today? And: why have train stations gotten progressively, and drastically, uglier over the last century? Actually, my favourite recently gathered example of this kind of thing is the beautiful old room at U of T, with little gothic hand-carved faces around the windows and stuff, which has a screen attached to an unfinished two-by-six bolted to the wall above the blackboard. But then, it's hard to tell whether that's not having any money or not giving a damn. But then again, not giving a damn and not having the money really aren't two different things. It's all a matter of what you care enough to spend your money on.) Why is it that we seem to have so much less money for things that we used to have so much money for? Well, because we've got so much other stuff to spend money on, right? (OK, as far as schools go, it's because our governments have so much health care stuff to spend money on. (For American governments, subsitute ... so many stadiums?)) Doesn't it seem like we have so little money because we have so much stuff to spend it on? But how can that be, when, theoretically, ideally, the money supply is supposed to track the supply of real goods--but, actually, these days, the money supply is supposedly outstripping the supply of real goods at a dangerous rate?
For the record, by the way, I e-mailed StatsCan a few months ago and asked why they haven't adjusted the LICO formula in an abnormally long time; they e-mailed me back and said (without elaboration) that it's because they don't think the proportions (i.e., the percentage of average income spent on food, shelter, and clothing) have changed significantly.
On today's episode of Fun with StatsCan, I decided to look up the aboriginal populations of various portions of Canada. I was surprised, or rather shocked, to discover that the are more self-identified aboriginal persons in Ontario than in any other province, and by a fairly wide margin (over B.C.). I was also surprised that "census metropolitan area" with the largest population of self-identified aboriginal persons appears to be Montreal, with about 85 000. Winnipeg appears to be second, with about 76 000. Of course, since there are more than five times as many people overall in Montreal as there are in Winnipeg, Winnipeg blows Montreal away for aboriginals as a percentage of its population, 11.1%, to 2.4%. Toronto has about 26 500, which is about 0.5% of the overall population of just over five million. Edmonton seems to have the third-highest raw number of aboriginal persons, followed by Vancouver--but Vancouver's percentage, at 2.8, is the same as Fredericton's.
I've seen a couple of articles in the Star in the last couple of weeks concerning the fact that although people think they're driving less because of the Exploding Price of Gas, they don't actually seem to be. (Anecdotally, no one I know is driving any less, and this includes people who have negative net worths. But I know a very small sample of people.) It's pretty clear, anyway, that gasoline sales to The Average Driver are not yet in any significant decline. (A couple of weeks ago I was looking at some StatsCan gas sales figures that seemed to indicate a halting decline over the last several years, but they didn't differentiate between business and personal sales. It would stand to reason that higher gas prices would inevitably cut into sales to businesses, which can't afford to have their profits eaten away, but not necessarily to consumers, who are generally irrational.) Which finally prompted me to realize, today, how this really puts the lie to the widespread belief in The Great Gas Price Conspiracy (championed, in these parts, by Dan McTeague, an MP who has basically made a career of Fighting the Gas Price, but who seems, interestingly, to have fallen off the face of the earth during the recent run-up in gas prices). It's now evident that people will pay, oh, 50% more than they were paying when a lot of them were howling about price fixing--so, either the price fixers were complete idiots and used to fix prices way too low (and are probably still fixing the price too low--at any rate, the price of gas still hasn't tested the limits of demand), or the reason the price of gas always goes up and down in lockstep at neighbouring stations really is that profit margins are very slight and competition is extremely fierce.
While I'm waiting to get the Internet Tube back from L., here's something on Good Pitching Beats Good Hitting: last week, I went to a semi-pro game with a friend of mine from highschool, who I last went to a game with at Tiger Stadium in approximately 1994, maybe 1993. (Don Mattingly went 4-for-4, and the Yankees won something like 8-0.) First thing I noticed about these semi-pro players: they seem to average about three inches shorter than major-leaguers. That's always the way in any sport, it seems: NFL players dwarf CFL players; Team Canada towers over Team Germany in international hockey, and so on. What separates the men from the boys is that the men are built like supermen and the boys are built like men. But that's not the thing about Good Pitching Beats Good Hitting, which is, rather, this: my friend said, around the fifth inning, that the score in this game was a lot lower than your standard sandlot baseball game--and I said, that's because these guys are competent. They may not be anywhere near as strong and fast and whatever else as big-leaguers, but they're competent. They know what to do and they're well-practised in doing it. So, the pitchers don't walk the park and innings aren't extended on and on by errors. In baseball, as in hockey (as I was saying around here recently), competence favours the defence; if everybody's incompetent, the hitters just have to stand there with their bats on their shoulders and runs will score, as often happens in little leage games. Which gets me to wondering: are there sports in which competence doesn't favour the defence? I guess basketball is the most obvious one--if everybody's incompetent, nobody ever scores. In North American football, it seems, at first glance, like offenseive and defensive (in)competence would cancel each other out--except that all you need to do to score is hold on to the ball and run straight forward. If ya can't stop the running game, yer toast. So, probably, competence favours the defence there, too.
Anyway, the bottom line about Good Pitching Beats Good Hitting, it seems to me, is that there are conceivable pitches that are so fast or have so much movement (gyroball!) that skill as a hitter couldn't help you to hit them; the only way you could hit them would be to throw the bat out there and hope the pitch hits it in a good place. The question is, how close do actual pitchers and hitters come to that situation? What I can't figure out offhand is whether the question is hopelessly complicated by the fact that a good hitter gets out most of the time against an average pitcher anyway. (There's also the additional complication that a large part of good hitting is guessing what kind of pitch is coming before it's thrown.) Given that, what is the question? One possible question is: are there actual pitchers capable of throwing actual pitches so good that no actual hitter can ever actually hit them? But the answer to that question is: obviously not. So the question has to be something like: are there actual pitchers capable of throwing actual pitches so good that the best actual hitters can only hit them x distance from the sweet spot, with y bat speed, z% of the time? But how could you meaningfully fill in those variables?
Current mood: tense Current music: Japanese bigfoot movie
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 11. High today: 17.
Vancouver weather caught up with us, after about the thunderstormiest few days around here I could recall. Yesterday I saw a full horizon-to-horizon double rainbow for the first time probably since I was in highschool, and I saw something I've never seen before: the moon, waxing gibbous, rising from behind a receding cumulonimbus cloud. That was actually shocking: I saw it as a bit of the cloud puffing out, and then it was the moon. Another thing I saw today that I haven't seen in a long time: wild roses blooming, down in the ravine.
So, after only, I dunno, 2.5 years of serious job-hunting, I've made a short list. Not for a tenure-track job, mind you, but it's always good to leave plenty of room for progress. Also not for a Canadian job (which makes it a good thing that it's not for a tenure-track job). I would like to take this opportunity to note that no one is allowed to move (further) away from Seattle until I know that I will not be working there next year.
This is the sort of thing that, you know, should be pleasing. It is in fact pleasing when I think about it abstractly and not concretely. This news naturally comes the day after I've signed my "offer of appointment" for my 0.5 courses at York next year, and finally gotten around to opening an account at the credit union at York. Clearly, if I don't get this job, I just need to step up my measures to entrench myself at York, and then the job offers will come flooding in.
But enough trivia; back to the serious business of whether good pitching beats good hitting and all that. I hypothesized that the success of good-pitching teams at winning pennants and World Series relative to good-htting teams was due to good-pitching teams' generally being better at hitting than good-hitting teams are at pitching. However, the first bit of data I've collected doesn't particularly bear this out. Again using the years 2000-2007, American League leaders in runs scored averaged 5.75th in the league in ERA; AL leaders in ERA averaged 7.125th in runs scored. NL runs-scored leaders averaged 11th in ERA; NL ERA leaders averaged 9.25th in runs scored. So, overall, league leaders in runs scored averaged 8.375th in ERA; league leaders in ERA averaged 8.1875th in runs scored. Essentially the same.
One thing that does stand out from these numbers: teams that lead the AL in ERA or runs scored are usually aren't worse than mediocre in the other category; teams that lead the NL in ERA or runs scored are often lousy on the other side. This seems mostly attributable to two things: first, nobody dominates the NL like the Yankees and Red Sox (and, for one year, Mariners) have dominated the AL (although the Braves and Cardinals have done it for short spurts), and second, the NL has had three teams--Colorado, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati--with stats skewed in favour of offense by their home ballparks. Those three NL teams led the league in runs scored in five of the eight years, and finished no better than 11th in ERA; twice they finished 16th and last. Where the AL ERA leader's runs scored dips into the lower half of the league, it's generally Oakland, who play in what seems to be easily the most pitcher-friendly park in the AL (though it's still not as pitcher-friendly as San Diego, which accounts for a couple of the NL ERA leaders' lower-tier runs-scored placings).
To be continued! (Which of course signals that you will never hear anything about this from me again.)
Current mood: queasy
Friday, June 13, 2008
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 24. Going up to 30 or so. Gained nine degrees of dewpoint in the last nine hours.
Today's Special Matinée Edition is prompted by an article in the Journal for the Philosophy of Sports arguing that "good pitching beats good hitting" is a meaningless proposition. (I shit you not.) Basically, the idea is it's meaningless because good pitching and good hitting are relative to each other. Anyway, like any good progressive right-thinking 21st-century baseball fan, I regard this as an empirical question to be decided based on statistics provided by baseball-reference.com. (Someday I might get around to justifying this view.) Here are the results of my preliminary investigations:
In the major league seasons of 2000 through 2007, eventual league-leaders in runs scored played eventual league-leaders in ERA 135 times. (Note 1: This may be fewer than you'd expect, due to the fact that hitting and pitching leaders usually don't come from the same division--in fact, in the period under study, it happened twice: 2007 Yankees and Red Sox, and 2005 Reds and Cardinals.) (Note 2: For the 2001 AL, I used the 2nd-place runs-scored and ERA teams, because the 116-win Mariners led the league in both.) The head-to-head records of the eventual ERA leaders against the eventual runs-scored leaders in those 135 games is 68-67. Throw out the 2005 Cardinals' 11-5 record against the Reds, and the ERA leaders' record is 57-62. Runs-scored leaders won 8 season series against ERA leaders; ERA leaders won 7, with one tie.
However: AL champions from 2000 through 2007 placed an average of 4.5th in the league in runs scored, and 2.5th in ERA. (The last three AL champions in a row have led the league in ERA, and the last champion to finish worse than 3rd in ERA was the 2000 Yankees. Only one champion in the period, the 2004 Red Sox, led the league in runs scored.) For NL champions, the numbers are 5.125 and 4.375. (The 2004 Cardinals were the only runs-scored leaders to win the pennant, but there were no ERA-leading pennant-winners, and the 2003, 2007, and 2006 champions were 7th, 8th, and 9th in ERA.) Overall, league champions placed an average of 4.8125th in their leagues in runs scored, and 3.4375th in ERA. World Series winners finished an average of 5th and 3.875th in their leagues.
So, preliminary conclusion: the old baseball saw that good pitching beats good hitting isn't particularly true, but the old hockey and football saw that defence wins championships seems to be true for baseball.
Current mood: apprehensive Current music: Italy vs. Romania, in Italian. Incredibile! Uno-uno!
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 17. High today: 23. Up to 33 or somesuch yesterday. Coming back from Vancouver was like leaving Canada for the tropics.
I thought I might invert tradition this year and interrupt a long stretch of not posting with a stretch of posting from Congress (né Learneds). No such luck.
In Vancouver, L. saw her first beaver, I saw my first seal, and we both saw our first naked hippies. The beaver was resolutely attempting to stop up the outflow grate from the marsh it lives in, which is called Beaver Lake, which is fortunately only half a misnomer and not a complete misnomer as we judged at first glance. It was yanking out lily pads by the roots and plastering them with mud against the grate, over and over and over, while we, and a few other passersby, stood there a few feet away and watched and smiled. (Surprisingly, telling this story to people has elicited at least a couple of reactions to the effect that beavers are nasty and vicious animals. Having been acquainted at a distance with at least a couple of beavers over the course of a number of years, I'd have to say that, in my experience, beavers are most interested in staying the hell away from people--so the complete nonchalance of this beaver in Beaver Lake was also quite surprising.)
Let me tell you something: you might think that you're not interested in totem poles, but being up close to the old massive woodiness of a totem pole (by which I don't mean the new and often brightly painted ones that you see here and there around Vancouver, but the old raw wood ones they have in the UBC Museum of Anthropology), you might find that it's really quite striking.
Vancouver after Saskatoon last year and coming from Toronto was very interesting in this respect: there is an aboriginal presence around Vancouver, as there is not in Toronto, which is very different from the aboriginal presence around Saskatoon (where, at a glance, there are more aboriginal people). In Saskatoon, the sense I got, and this is the sense you get about aboriginal people in Ontario, is that the aboriginals are a social problem: they're poor, many are addicted, they're living the legacy of oppression, carrying historical grievances. Around Vancouver, the sense is not so much of a poor and broken class and more of a culture interrupted. I guess, but I don't know, that this may be simply because there was a concentration of a particular kind of culture around southern BC--totem carving and potlatch. So there's this revival of West Coast aboriginal culture that started in the '60s or so. I have no idea how strong it is, but it's there. One thing I wonder about this as I'm walking around the Museum of Anthropology: the earliest totem poles they have are from the mid-19th century. So when did they start totem carving? ("Eskimo carving", I have heard, was a 20th-century invention. I've read that the southwestern peyote religion is only a century or two old.) Of course, wood is a perishable medium, especially when it's outdoors, but I wonder. And I wonder what it would be for, say, me to "revive my culture".
Every time I've gone into used bookstore in the last few years, I've looked for books by Al Purdy with either "Wilderness Gothic" or "The Country North of Belleville" in them. There was a Purdy book once, in The Bookstore Beside the World's Biggest Bookstore, but it didn't have those poems. In Vancouver, we went into three used bookstores, and the second had Wild Grape Wine, which has "Wilderness Gothic", and the third had Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets, which is a greatest hits book and has both (and was a "Canada Reads" selection in 2006, which makes it kind of surprising that I hadn't come across it in a used bookstore before), and also "At the Quinte Hotel", which the Tragically Hip made a video of--you might know it as the "for I am a sensitive man" poem. At the bookstore where I bought Wild Grape Wine--which was a hardcover (a "first edition", you'd say, come to think of it) and $15, which may be the most I've ever paid for a used book for myself--the guy behind the counter was talking with another guy about soccer (which people didn't used to to do in Canada, but now they do), and when I paid for the book he said he was glad that people were still reading Al Purdy, and did I know that Purdy lived in Vancouver for a while, and when Purdy lived in Vancouver he came in to this shop and gave this guy his card which said "Al Purdy, Bookseller", and that Purdy hoped that this would get him a discount. As L. and I were leaving, he was telling the other guy that the last time Purdy came in to the shop, he was with Steven Reid (or something like that--the famous Canadian criminal, bank robber or something).
The most impressive thing upon our arrival at UBC was the flowers--so many different colours of flowers, mostly flowering from two or three different kinds of bushes. And then a funny thing happened: after a couple of days of rushing back and forth between sessions of two different conferences, I realized that the flowers had disappeared, and I wondered if it was the flowers or me, and then in the last couple of days when the rushing stopped, the flowers reappeared.
I think the most amusing moment of my week--apart from the beaver, I mean--was when Gad Horowitz told me that I should be careful because I was sounding like Leo Strauss. "Oh, I'm quite conscious of that," I said. (In that particular paper, I was even consciously writing in the style of Strauss--although not reading it that way, which meant reading it with some "and"s and "but"s and "because of this"s thrown in. In Strauss's oracular style, every sentence is made to stand on its own, as if prepared to be read in fragments, like the pre-Socratics. Heidegger also writes that way.) The next morning I ran into someone lost on the road who wanted to go where I was heading, and along the way he told me--because I told him that I was giving a paper on the Charmides--that he had been Allan Bloom's TA at U of Toronto in the '70s when Bloom was "on the run from the black students union at Cornell". He said that Bloom chain-smoked in class and the students loved him although Bloom thought the students were all idiots.
This is the first year that I'm encountering people who have heard of me. I don't know where we're going, but maybe we're getting there. One thing that became apparent to me last week is that I am learning the steps of Plato well and the dance is joyful. (Of course there are those who think the dance is all wrong, but that's joyful too. Once you're really dancing, everything is joyful, getting knocked down and dancing on your back is joyful, and there are those who think your dance is all wrong but love it anyway because it's joyful, like the greybeard who grinned all the way through my Charmides paper.) Meanwhile, back on the ranch, word arrived that two more little job possibilities for next year were closed off. It's looking a lot like another year in the wilderness with one half course and a four-figure academic employment income, but who knows. The next six weeks, I'm bookifying my dissertation. I'm not sure whether this means you'll be seeing more of me or not.
Current mood: okay Current music: Colbert
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 4. High today: 13. Which is 14 degrees off yesterday's high. We still have not had as many days over 20 in May as we had in April. Could be frost on the pumpkin seedlings back in KW tonight.
Now that I have mostly forgotten about everything I was meaning to say, it's safe to start over. Actually, I only just popped in to say that L. was reading me some quotes from Leon Kass tonight, and I came to one of those realizations which suddenly explain things and seem so obvious that they make you wonder why you never had them before and whether this really is a realization or something you actually knew all along anyway, namely this: the reason that I have been trying and failing to be a conservative (by which I mean a conservative and none of the several varieties of liberals currently passing for conservatives) the last several years is that I'm inclined to agree with the diagnoses but find the cures worse than the diseases.
(But this is just another way of saying that my most basic inclination is the most basic liberal inclination: the right trumps the good, procedure trumps substance--left to their own devices, people will generally screw up their lives and be unhappy, but they ought to be left to their own devices anyway. (Though some of my opposition to conservative cures comes out of a more deeply conservative attitude that there's not a damn thing you can actually do about it anyway.))
You might also like to know that among the 24 "census metropolitan areas" for which StatsCan has consistent numbers, the median distance commuted to work increased in 19 between 1996 and 2006, decreased in four (Saint John, Montreal, Vancouver, and Victoria), and stayed the same in one (Winnipeg). In the Toronto CMA (roughly co-extensive with what is now popularly known as the GTA), the median commuting distance rose from 9.3 km to 9.4.
Last week, when the Globe reported on StatsCan's inflation report for April (which had food at 0.5%, compared to 1.8% overall), I discovered that you can't do anything about the people who believe that food prices are skyrocketing (such as the idiots on the Globe idiot board) because they believe there is a Massive Conspiracy to cover up the true rate of inflation, which is actually somewhere around 10% or higher.
Oh yeah, one thing I was going to talk about was the Two Days' Hate we had around here when the TTC union threw an unexpected fit of unionism, rejected its tentative agreement, and went on strike. I mean, the hate--it was astonishing. I eagerly await the next garbage strike. But what particularly gets me is this: what you heard in the hating (and still hear; as I found at my nephew's first birthday party last week, you can still hear the hate echoing) was that if the bus drivers want to be paid more, they should quit being such jerks. (Slightly related, my favourite signpost from the strike: the graffito, a picture of which appeared in the Star, spraypainted on the closed doors of a subway station, reading "IF YOU WANT $30/HR GO TO UNIVERSITY!". I also enjoyed the smashed windows in the emergency subway exit down in the ravine. THAT'LL SHOW 'EM!) Now, this is such a conventional bit of conventional wisdom--I should say, it somehow, sometime, became such a bit of conventional wisdom; it didn't used to be and I don't know when exactly it happened--that it took me a while to realize that, actually, I have been a periodically regular TTC user for many of the last twenty years, and if a driver has ever been a jerk to me, I don't remember it. What has made an impression on me is my fellow passengers being jerks, all the damn time, if not directly to the drivers, then at least on the busses and trains where their jerkishness is the driver's problem.
AND ANOTHER THING that reminds me of: cognitive dissonance. One reason people think the drivers are jerks is that the drivers fail to stop and wait for them when they're running toward the bus as it's pulling away. (A funny thing about this is that bus drivers often do start away, see people coming, stop, open the doors and let them on, and then pull away again, leaving behind new stragglers who are now angry that the jerks never stop and wait.) But something that people like to complain about about public transit generally is busses clumping together. Now, busses clumping together is going to tend to happen through the magic of statistics anyway. But it's especially going to happen if busses dosn't leave on time because the drivers stop to wait for stragglers.
The other cognitive dissonance thing: everyone was jumping up and down a few weeks ago about the fact that, according to another of the census-related reports StatsCan is periodically releasing, median income in Canada for full-time employment was only slightly higher in 2006 than it was in 1980. So, on one hand, we're upset whenever anybody else's pay goes up (including and especially people around the median, whose incomes will effect the median most directly, like bus drivers); on the other hand, we're upset when median pay fails to go up.
Finally, in other now-old news, and it turns out that it was not actually safe to start over, the CAW has agreed to wage freezes (in addition to concessions in various other areas) with each of the three automakers, so I guess we might be seeing if there's anything to what I was suggesting around here last month about autoworkers' contracts being bellwethers if not trendsetters for the labour market in general. (Well, OK, I actually just suggested trendsetters.)
Current mood: uncomfortable
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 18. High today: 19.
I was wrong about Sennett not mentioning Marx. There are three references in the index. There are two basic things he has to say about Marx. First, Marx doesn't respect the nobility of a life involving routine work. Second, Marx's theory of alienation predicts that people will rebel against stupifying work, but they don't. The first point is made in relation to the previous generation of workers. Sennett's schtick about the janitor who is his exemplar of the previous generation is that even though his work-life was meaningless in itself, the janitor is able to construct a meaningful narrative of his life, of which his reliable and modestly progressive career as a janitor is a part. The second point is made in relation to the "bakers" who work the machines that make the bread, and whose work requires them to understand neither bread-making nor the machines.
It's surprising that I hadn't remembered these bits, because the first one is very important for Sennett's scheme of things and also an important challenge to Marx, and the second seems to be something of a misunderstanding of Marx (although I imagine Sennett is a lot more familiar with Marx than I am). The important challenge is to Marx's premise that a flourishing human life requires, you might say, reversing the banishment from Eden. Sennett's view, I guess you could say, is more sympathetic to the "Protestant work ethic" view of the virtuous life, although, for him, it seems, it's not so much the case that life can be made good by the self-denial involved in alienated labour as that life can be made good in spite of it--not self-denial as an end in itself, but rational self-denial as a means to the end of building a life which is good on the whole, and which gains in virtue by overcoming the world's resistance to its achievement.
What seems to me a misunderstanding is the idea that Marx thinks people are motivated by alienation. Now, my Marx is still largely a product of my own imagination (though I have done a bit of reading lately), but I like to think that there are two basic aspects of Marx's critique of capitalism: there's a critique in terms of alienation, and a critique in terms of exploitation. Alienation of labour is what makes capitalism actually bad and damaging for human beings. Exploitation of labour is what makes capitalism "unjust" and, at its limit, motivates exploited labourers to revolt. Capitalist systems since Marx's time have done an excellent job of limiting exploitation and thereby eliminating motivation to revolt; they have also done an excellent job (and this, I have long thought, has been the real genius of capitalism) of making just about everyone complicit in exploitation (by turning just about everyone into an investor), and so utterly defusing the critique in terms of "justice" of capitalism per se. But this does nothing about alienation, which is the truly damaging thing about capitalism, and which doesn't motivate people to revolt.
Current mood: worried
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 14. High today: 22.
Cold front through this afternoon, a brief shower and a rumble of thunder; hourly dewpoints from 2 p.m.: 13, 10, 9, 5, -3, -5, -6, -3, -2. But still no major shift in the blocked pattern coming until the weekend. The temperature maps have been remarkable the last few days--a bulge of blue from the Northwest Territories down to the Dakotas, and a finger of red from the South up to James Bay. Could be some snowflakes here next week, though. Could be some snowflakes in the middle of May--you never know.
The latest thing The Media have come up with to make me crazy is stories about the rising price of food. Of course, it is true that, worldwide, food prices are rising, catastrophically in some places. But since the news is now all about You, The Consumer (or You, The Taxpayer), the stories--at least, two of the three I've seen on the television--have to say something about how it's Hitting You In The Wallet. This, to me, living in Toronto in the middle of a grocery price war (driven by Wal*Mart's attempt to monopolize all aspects of low-end retail), is obviously insane, but I did wonder whether the price war is confined to Toronto (though one of the local stations ran a web poll asking whether you have changed your eating habits in response to rising food costs, and 44% of respondents claimed they had ... come to think of it, I wonder what kind of response they would get if they asked whether you missed work due to the recent TTC strike)--until the March CPI report came out from StatsCan last week, showing that the rate of inflation for food is running a full percentage point below the total inflation rate. There has, in fact, been pretty close to zero inflation in food prices in Canada over the last year: 0.4%. I would bet that, in Toronto, there has been deflation. (Incidentally, there has been Canada-wide deflation since last year in the "Clothing and footwear" category (in which the CPI, which has 2002 as its base=100 year, is currently at 96), and in "Goods" generally as opposed to "Services" (the latter of which is up 3.3% over last year, which I guess is due to wages rising above inflation--which you would expect they would have to, given that most of what we buy is now made by people in other parts of the world who make much less than us). Inflation in Canada is currently being driven by two things: energy (5.4% over last year, 143.2 relative to 2002) and housing (4.1%, 120.1).)
For those of you from out of town, there was no recent TTC strike. The hysteria leading up to the strike deadline coupled with the ongoing hysteria over the state of the US economy got me to thinking how preemptive North American society has become. I don't remember everyone getting as freaked out over the actual TTC strike that lasted a few days when I was in highschool as everyone did over this potential TTC strike. And given all the gnashing of teeth about The Economy, the fact that we're still not sure there is or will be a recession at all, is, really, unbelievable. (Something I read somewhere recently was claiming that the US economy indisputably has been in recession in per capita terms for at least one quarter, but that we conventionally talk about recessions in terms of total GDP because the total is what matters in geostrategic terms.) This must be partly due to the ubiquity of The Media these days. But I also have the feeling that everyone these days thinks of themselves as living right on the precipice--like, if you miss a single day of work because of a TTC strike, your world will come crashing down. (You compleekayted leetle man!) I get this from my students, this anxiety dripping off of them. But at the same time, they pass up so many easy opportunities to help themselves succeed. I get this from myself.
The other interesting thing about the TTC non-strike, a particular aspect of the massive public outpouring of hatred for the TTC employees, is the outrage at the employees getting 3% wage increases in each year of the contract. People expect that this will make the TTC more expensive for them, that it will set a precedent for other city workers that will force tax increases, and so forth. What's interesting to me about this, since I've been looking up numbers on wage inflation in Canada over the last sixteen years, is that people seem generally inclined to oppose everyone else's wage increases, especially when they're above the rate of inflation. But, presumably, wage inflation benefits most people. I mean, this appears pretty simple, but maybe it's over-simplifying: either the prices of goods will inflate faster than wages, or wages will inflate faster than the prices of goods. If the prices of goods inflate faster, then more money will flow toward capital in the form of profit on goods. If wages inflate faster, then more money flows toward labour. Presumably most people make most of their money on labour and not on capital (though I'm really not sure if this is true anymore in developed economies; anyway, people these days seem disproportionately interested in their capital investments), so presumably wage inflation benefits most people. If any given inflationary wage increases the likelihood of further inflationary wage increases (though that's a big if), then most people's long-term material interests are served by other people's inflationary wage increases, even if their short-term material interests are damaged by them.
Which brings me to What's Wrong with Pennsylvania. Clinging and bitter Obama brought Thomas Frank back with a vengeance to bookforum.com, which brought to my attention for the first time Frank's acrimonious exchange with Larry Bartels, which, it turns out, is really fascinating. In 2005, Bartels gave a paper (pdf) at the American Political Science Association using stats to argue that poor white voters weren't really abandoning the Democrats on "values" issues (and that only southern poor white voters were abandoning the Democrats at all, and that this is to be accounted for by the breakup of the southern Democratic monolith). Frank replied (pdf), saying among other things that Bartels had misread what he meant by "white working class", and that "without a college degree" was a better definiens than "poor". So Bartels re-did (pdf) his paper using that definition, and came up with results that look even worse for Frank: white Americans without college degrees regard the Democratic party as being well to their left on economic issues, and regard both parties as being to their right on social issues.
The Slate article that led me to all this (but which unfortunately says that Frank's response to Bartels was to the final paper) suggests (or quotes someone drawing the inference, or something) that "working class" white folks like the Republicans better than the Democrats on economics because they don't regard themselves as being downtrodden but rather are "aspirational". I think there's a very simple way to understand why working class people, however you define "working class", don't like redistributive economic policies: the most immediate and obvious effect of redistributive economic policies is that they take money away from you. What you get back indirectly is much less impressive than what you pay directly, even if you get a lot more back indirectly than you pay directly. This is fairly obvious in general, but it really crystallized for me a little while ago when my grandfather (who acquired most of his money as a capitalist, but spent his working life on the shop floor, starting from nothing) said something about how some guy probably supported some tax hike because he was rich and could afford to pay it. I suspect this is strongly representative of the economic views of "working class" people broadly speaking: taxes are more onerous on poorer people than they are on wealthier people, because wealthier people can afford to pay them more easily. (I doubt it makes much difference to this view how progressive you make the tax system, since if you regard yourself as among the less well off, all taxes are onerous, since your income is too low to begin with.)
However, notwithstanding all that, there's a glaring problem with Bartels's analysis, no matter which definition of "working class" he uses, which is that one of his measures of people's views on economic issues--and he doesn't use many measures to begin with, because there aren't many consistently to be had--as opposed to social issues is their views on social and economic affirmative action for black people. Frank ridicules Bartels for including this as an economic issue rather than as a social one; Bartels's response is something to the effect that it's evidently an economic issue because "working class" white people's responses are in line with their responses on other economic issues and not on other social issues--which seems ridiculously circular. Now, evidently, you could throw that category out altogether and it wouldn't make any difference to Bartels's conclusions. What it would do is leave Bartels's with only two indicators of people's views on economic issues, which would seem to call the statistical significance of his findings into question. What makes this interesting is the acrimonious subtext of the Bartels-Frank exchange: Frank starts out by saying sarcastically what an honour it is to have his work cut up by an Ivy League egghead from Princeton, and he accuses Bartels of "class-baiting" him. Frank the folksy pop-sociologist claims that Bartels's bloodless stats don't reflect the real world--they might as well be about the moon, he says; if you want to know what's really going on, you need to get out there and get a feel for things. Bartels the political scientist assumes that people's feels for things can be wrong, and people's feels for things can be proven wrong quantitatively. Personally, I'm sympathetic to both sides. But here, both of them come out looking bad. Bartels's quantitative conclusions are impressive, but if you look at how he arrives at them, it's questionable whether the numbers actually mean what he says they mean. (This always horrifies me when I'm trying to come up with quantitative representations of complex phenomena--students' performances in courses, for instance, or my Incredible Waste of Time last fall. When you come up with the final numbers and chart or graph the breakdowns and the trends, they look real and hard, and it is horrifyingly easy to forget all the sloppiness and uncertainty that went into coming up with them.)
Frank, on the other hand, reeks of ressentiment; his response looks like classic pop-intellectual academy-anxiety. Turns out he has a PhD from the University of Chicago. Good grief.
Here are a couple of Interesting Facts which I have been meaning to note for a long time. First: the unemployment rate in the US, and presumably also in Canada, is arrived at by telephone survey: somebody from the government calls and asks how many people in your household are working, not working but looking for work, etc. Second: since the Montreal Canadiens fired Bob Berry in February 1984, they have hired nine permanent head coaches. The only one of those with any prior NHL head coaching experience was Jacques Demers. (Looking that up again just now, I have discovered some more Interesting Facts: Guy Carbonneau was preceded as both the captain of the Canadiens and as their head coach by Bob Gainey. He was succeeded as captain by Kirk Muller, who is now his assistant coach.) This may say something to the Toronto canard that teams in hockey pressure-cookers like Toronto need coaches with lots of experience. Then again, it may not: another notable fact about that list of nine head coaches is that eight of them have been Quebecois (the exception being Pat Burns, who was a cop in Hull, Quebec before he was a coach, and so presumably also spoke fluent French), and three of them have been former Habs hero players. Speaking of Habs heroes: I felt shame as a Leafs fan the other night when the camera scanned the crowd in Montreal and showed the royalty of both Quebec politics and Montreal hockey (two-in-one with Ken Dryden). When the Leafs are in the playoffs--I'm pretty sure that did used to happen sometimes--we get like Mike Myers in the crowd.
Current mood:  late
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 17. High today: 22.
The warm season is here. Everyone blew the forecast for the last several days--the forecast going into the week was for one warm day on Wednesday, followed by the cold front that dropped Regina from 28 on Monday to 8 on Tuesday. But an area of high pressure unexpectedly materialized around New York state, blocked the cold front from ever getting here, kept pumping warm air into Ontario, and by a chain reaction allowed winter to set back up across Alberta and Saskatchewan. What's amazing about it is that, in the age of multiple computer models, you basically never see blown forecasts like that anymore (although the conventional wisdom will, no doubt, forever have it that The Weatherman Is Always Wrong).
What I said, the last time I was saying stuff, about wondering whether I do enough to have anything to say was supposed to lead into talking about going to see Howard Adelman that day. Howard Adelman (who is red-linked in Wikipedia, in the entry for Rochdale College; I'm thinking I might get around to doing something about that) was giving the first annual Howard Adelman Lecture at York's Centre for Refugee Studies, of which he was one of the founders (maybe the founder). Although I was only around him for a year, Adelman has almost certainly been my biggest intellectual influence--though the "intellectual" qualifier risks understating the case. There is what he taught me about Hegel and the bible, which has informed my understanding of all kinds of things. (I've just recently come to realize how Adelman prepared the ground for my reception of Strauss, variously in his esoteric readings of Hegel, in his ongoing argument that reason doesn't move politics, and in his Platonic interpretation of American politics as a contest between a party of appetite and a party of virtue, which has broken down as the pursuit of appetite became a virtue). But there is also the example of his life: it seems that if there's anything that it occurs to him he ought to do, he does it. In addition to being an academic, he has travelled the world to investigate refugee and genocide situations, and for the last ten years he has had a weekly TV show. (It's called Israel Today; it's one of the local Christian channel's CRTC-mandated bits of multicultural programming. It's extremely interesting. It's on as I write; he's interviewing someone about pewter bas-reliefs of biblical scenes.) He is staggeringly busy. I actually think about everything he does from time to time when I start to wonder how I'll ever find the time to do anything else when I'm teaching more than one course. And I think about a long e-mail he sent me once about American Beauty, stoicism, and epicureanism--for some reason, after a talk of his I'd gone to, I sent him an e-mail about the dope-dealer kid being a stoic, and he had replied about why the kid was actually an epicurean: I think about the fact that he took the time to send a student this long e-mail about a film and philosophy, when he had so much else to do. I think about that when my students write e-mails to me.
The thing about Adelman is that it seems that if it occurs to him that something ought to be done, he does it. He told a story at the Adelman Lecture last week about how, in the '80s, Canada was accepting refugees from southern Sri Lanka, but not from the north--but people were coming from the north, claiming that their lives were in danger. So Adelman went there, to see what was going on, and found that a war was going on in the north, and reported it, and so Canada started accepting refugees from the north. But what started Adelman's involvement in refugee issues were the Vietnamese "Boat People", and it was a story he told last week about this that I wanted to put down here. I don't know how this came about, but it came to pass that a rabbi, a priest, and I don't know who else met at Adelman's house to draft a letter to encourage the Canadian government to accept more Vietnamese refugees. Somehow, some bureaucrats from Immigration found out about this meeting, and showed up at his door. They told Adelman's group that they had been looking for groups of people to sponsor Vietnamese refugees, but hadn't been able to find anyone willing to do it except the Mennonites and the Dutch Reformed Church. So Adelman's group agreed to sponsor some refugees. Now, the story is this: a grad student of Adelman's happened to be at the meeting, because he wanted to talk to Adelman about his thesis. Unbeknownst to Adelman, the student was a stringer for the Globe, and the student filed a report on the meeting. In the following weeks, Adelman did 155 interviews for newspapers, and he says not one of the news stories reported that the bureaucrats had come to him; every one of them spun the story so that the government was being prodded into action by citizen activism, when actually citizens had been prodded into action by activist bureaucrats, whose efforts had mostly met with apathy.
(There's a CBC radio interview with Adelman here. Being on dial-up, though, I'm getting five seconds on, five seconds off. But the bit where the interviewer asks Adelman what he can do to help, and Adelman asks him where he lives, is priceless: this is what Adelman does; he takes you seriously, no matter who you are, and he assumes that every theoretical possibility is an actual possibility. And now I see that the York propaganda site has a blurb in its archive here, which doesn't reverse the citizen-government roles.)
It turns out that Charles Taylor's review of Lear's book is online here. (The New Criterion hatchet-job is here.) I see that in the online version, the reference does say "The Corrosion of Character" and not "The Conservative Character". Anyway, I finished reading Richard Sennett's The Corrosion of Character last night, after reading several reviews of Sennett's new book, linked off bookforum.com, yesterday. The Corrosion of Character is a short and meandering read. Sennett teaches sociology; the book ranges through philosophy--ancient, modern, and postmodern--and literature. I wish it would have said more about the idea of character and why it's important, but I get the impression from the reviews of the new book that all his books are one long project, so each one may inevitably seem incomplete. There are about four stories (which, he says at the outset, are somewhat fictionalized, which is worrying from time to time) he keeps coming back to in the book. One is about the son of an Italian immigrant Sennett had interviewed in, I guess, the '70s or so. Sennett contrasts the steady career-orientation of the father with the episodic work-life of the son, and suggests that the father's life was objectively worse but the son is, in many ways, and maybe overall, unhappier with his life. Another is about the owner of Sennett's favourite pub in New York, who goes off in middle age to work for a marketing company. Theoretically, the marketing company wants her accumulated expertise about how people drink, but actually everyone in marketing wants to re-make the world and isn't interested in people's experience of the world as it has been. Another story is about a group of IBM programmers who were laid off in the great downsizing of the early '90s. That story is all about their coming to terms with the fact that they can no longer think of their lives in career terms, which involves their being forced to give up on being invested in involvement with their communities and associated values like loyalty. (The book begins with a discussion of the etymology of "career".) The most compelling story is about a bakery in Boston, which Sennett says he has studied over a couple of generations. When he first studied the bakery, its workers were all Greek immigrants. Their work was hard, messy and hot manual labour, making bread by hand. They felt oppressed by their work, by their bosses, and by Boston society at large, but they felt a cameraderie with each other. When Sennett returns to the bakery in the '90s, its operation is entirely automated. The workers don't make bread anymore; they work the machines that make the bread. Often the machines malfunction and wreck the bread. Sometimes the machines break down, and the bakery is idled while they wait for the technicians to come in. What makes the story compelling is that while the Greek bakers found their work oppressive, they identified with it. The new workers also find their work oppressive, because they don't understand it and it's always going wrong (though, apparently, it's going right often enough and fast enough that it's still more efficient economically than it was formerly), and they don't identify with it at all; they don't think of themselves as having any future in baking; they assume that they'll be doing something else as soon as they can find something else to do, though they don't generally know what that will be.
The main theme of this book is that the nature of contemporary capitalism has us always starting over. I was thinking about this in relation to Marx's fantasy in The German Ideology that, when communism does away with division of labour, we'll be able to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, herd cattle after dinner, and criticize in the evening. "The new capitalism"--already when I was in highschool we were hearing about how we would all have seven different careers--makes Marx's fantasy real but in a perverse way. What's perverse about it is highlighted by the alienation of the bakery workers. For Marx, alienation and division of labour go together. Marx says that the essential division of labour, and the source of alienation in capitalism, is the division between intellectual and physical labour. Human beings create themselves and come to know themselves through their work. (This is an idea that I came to from Hegel, through Adelman. Marx thinks, or at least is thought to think, that his materialism turns Hegel upside-down, but, thanks to Adelman, I see Marx as emphasizing the materialist moments in Hegel.) Work actualizes human potential: the idea of the thing is potential; the thing made is actual. When labour is divided and there are bosses whose job is to direct the material labour of others, the labour of the individual no longer actualizes the potential of that individual but the potential of some other person or people. (Here Marxism can be seen to have a much more profound individualism than liberalism does.) Alienated from the things you work on, you're alienated from yourself. Putting that together with Sennett's book, we could say that building your own self requires a single, freely chosen, career of work. (Sennett says that he's a disappointed socialist; I don't think he mentions Marx in this book. He appears to be less of an individualist, less concerned with building your own self--he is indeed more of a conservative, it appears.)
So many other things floating around ... here's one, because the moment will pass otherwise: I would bet any money that today's game between the Red Wings and the Predators was the first game in the history of the NHL if not of any kind of hockey played anywhere in which there was exactly one goal on shots taken from each of the offensive zone, the neutral zone (bad bounce), and the defensive zone (empty net). There's also an excellent chance that this game had the highest average distance of scoring shots in any NHL game ever; the average scoring shot was taken from about centre ice. (It's possible that there have been games where a team needed a win and not a tie, pulled its goalie with the score 0-0, and the only scoring shot of the game was an empty-netter from the defensive zone.)
Here's another: the Star's lead story sometime last week was about a group urging the government of Ontario to commit to reducing poverty by 25% in five years, as the British government did some time ago. Funny thing about "poverty" in Canada: by "poverty", people generally mean "below Statistics Canada's 'low-income cut-off'" (LICO), but StatsCan is very careful never to refer to the LICO as a "poverty line". The history of adjustments to the LICO is very interesting. The LICO is a certain percentage of household income spent on food, shelter, and clothing. When it was created in 1968, it was pegged at 70%. According to the Canadian Council on Social Development, StatsCan pegged it there because they determined (using data for 1959) that the average household spent about 50% of its income on essentials, and they decided to peg the LICO at average + 20%. In each of 1973, 1980, 1986, and 1992, StatsCan adjusted the LICO downward, as the average household expenditure on essentials declined. But they haven't adjusted it since 1992, when it was set at 54.7% (as the average household expenditure on essentials was 34.7%). I don't know why not, but it appears that something very interesting, and which might be embarrassing, would happen if it was adjusted again today: the LICO would probably be set below what the average was when the LICO was created (i.e., the average household in 1959 would be considered "low-income" by the new standard).
Anyway, the Star article noted that the LICO for a single person (in Toronto or Ontario or whatever) is currently supposed to be $17 000 and change. Two things strike me about this. First, I have only once in my life had an annual income higher than that (and while I am not actually single, I am officially. Of course, for most of my adult life, I've been a student (though my income has been much lower since I've stopped being a student than it was for the last eight years I was a student). I don't know how students are accounted for in poverty accountancy). And, of course, I am very much not poor. (Point being that income is an extremely blunt instrument for measuring how well-off people are.) Second, if you want to reduce poverty by 25% in five years, the easiest way to do it would be to gather the 25% of people below the LICO with the highest incomes, and cut them cheques for the difference between their incomes and the LICO. (Point being that catchy things like 25-in-5 can make for asinine policy.)
In case you're wondering, I do wonder whether I'm annoying you by taking up so much space on your friends page.
Current mood:  anxious
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 8. High today: 11. Nearly 20 yesterday; supposed to be 5 tomorrow.
I am glad that the Tibetans have brought to our attention that the Olympic torch relay is a Nazi invention, so that the purity of future Olympics will not be sullied by Nazi torch relays.
Here is something I find very odd about the current Olympic business: the refrain that the Olympics shouldn't have anything to do with politics. If the Olympics didn't have anything to do with politics, there would be no Olympics. Nobody is going to fund shot-putters and lugers if they are not bringing glory to their polities.
(A couple of weeks ago, I was hanging around a student gathering-place at York because it looked like a couple of groups were squaring off for an Israeli-Palestinian fight--an Israeli group had built a replica Security Fence in part of the space so that they could impress upon passersby the virtues of the Security Fence, and a Palestinian-looking group was assembling near them, and there was some sort of TV camera floating around. But it turned out that the Palestinian-looking group was actually there for a demonstration on behalf of a former York student who was being deported. A middle-aged woman approached me and gave me a leaflet and asked me to sign their petition. I told her that I had thought that the two groups were squaring off for a fight. She told me that, no, what the group she was with was doing had nothing to do with politics; it was just about doing what was right.)
It's hard to get over the whiff of hypocrisy hanging over the half-maybe-sort-of-boycott stuff. Imagine a real boycott of China, like South Africa: there goes the world economy. But, well, so what, right? Why not have our Tibetan cake and eat our fabulous cheap crap too? What's the point of keeping your hands clean?
There's the idea around that you can get to the Chinese by offending their honour--so, we don't need to even think about an economic boycott, because the real way to stick it to 'em is to bring shame to their Olympics. It is remarkable that a post-Marxist country could be driven by thumos and not by appetite.
I've been thinking for a long time now that HRC has no chance of coming back if she keeps seeming tired. If she was an athlete, I'd say the thing that seems to be costing her the contest more than anything is poor conditioning--she wore out fast. But I wonder now, and this is bugging me: how much does her being a woman have to do with my perceiving her as seeming tired? Women aren't allowed to get away with all kinds of things that men are allowed to get away with, and being tired is one of them. Having a hoarse voice, looking pale, bags under your eyes. John Kerry was born tired, right?
I often feel like women are pretending to do things that are traditionally male things to do. I get this feeling from female sports broadcasters and commentators all the time. I'd be a bit more worried about this if it wasn't for the fact that I sometimes get the same feeling from some male sports commentators. (Like on the sports panel Paikin used to have on Studio 2, which I referred to as the "sports dorks" segment.) But yesterday I was listening to some guy on the radio--it was some sort of scientician, and he was talking in that condescending, sing-song kind of way that people talk in when they apparently don't take what they're saying, or at least the task of saying it, all that seriously but are rather concerned with the performance of saying it--and it occurred to me that if it was a woman talking in that sort of way, I'd probably immediately have the feeling she was pretending, whereas with the male voice I don't get it automatically. But it's hard to tell. It would stand to reason that a lot of women would feel self-conscious doing things that women aren't expected to do, and when you do something self-consciously, you look like you're pretending--in a way, you are pretending.
While I'm revealing my inner sexism, let me say that I enjoyed this article on Ivy League chastity crusaders quite a lot, particularly the part where the female co-president of the Junior Anti-Sex League is shocked and horrified that the male co-president actually has to battle with himself.
In my second-year Renaissance Literature class, the (female) prof assigned us to read a couple of poems by a female renaissance poet(esse). Then in class she told us that she had had us read them to show how boring they were, and that they were boring because renaissance women--at least the privileged ones in a position to be writing poetry--didn't do anything, and therefore did not have interesting experiences, and therefore did not have anything interesting to say. This is something that I worry about from time to time--that I may not have anything interesting to say.
I noticed recently that the APA's "advice for jobseekers" blurb advises that you'll be better-positioned if you have an area of academic expertise outside philosophy. I find this surprising, and I think it's probably false generally (though true in specific and mostly faddish areas). Job-strategics aside, it's a tough question: how good a philosopher can you be if you don't commit yourself fully to philosophy? How good a philosopher can you be if you do commit yourself fully to philosophy? The answer is probably "it depends". There are kinds of philosophy that seem as if they can operate without extra-philosophical concerns. The most obvious of these is logic--but it pains me that so many people don't understand that logic is not a self-contained and magical system but a description of how the things we can say fit together.
I have been meaning for months now to say something about Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope, and the Crow Indians. Well: Radical Hope is Jonathan Lear's book about what happened to the Crow Indians and their last chief, Plenty Coups, during and after the time of the end of the buffalo. It's a book of philosophy, not of history; it relies on history done by others. Lear is concerned to explain what Plenty Coups could have meant when he told an anthropologist that after the buffalo disappeared and the Crow went onto a reservation, "nothing happened'. Lear's story is that what it means to say that "nothing happened" is that the integrated form of life that gave meaning to anything any Crow Indian did had ended; the telos or teloi of Crow life was gone, nothing the Crow did was for anything anymore, and so the future-directedness of their lives was gone: time, for them, was over.
I mentioned in the fall that I'd gone to a talk by Lear about this stuff. I read the book a couple of months ago. Last week, I read a hatchet-job in The New Criterion, not on the book, but on a review of the book by Charles Taylor that appeared in the New York Review of Books last spring. The hatchet-job was hacking at Taylor--the ivory-tower egghead, scholar of the philosopher Hegel--for mourning the end of Crow life, when actually Crow life was awful, and it's better for it to be over. The main point is not that Crow life was awful for the Crow, although the hatcheteer implies that too; the main point is that what Crow life was mainly about was war.
This is one of the things that fascinated me about Lear's talk and his book: he is describing and analyzing what is a tragedy from the point of view of the Crow, but from just about any modern Westerner's point of view (or at least any modern Westerner who is publicly taken seriously), the Crow way of life was awful--the Crow were awful. It fascinated me at the talk because he gained the unreserved sympathy of the lefty-liberal audience for the plight of people who, if they were simply told what those people did, they would think were monsters. (This reminds me of the unpopularity of Habermas's proposition that preserving cultures is not a good thing per se; there are cultures that ought to die out.) But, of course, neither Lear nor Taylor says anything in favour of the Crow way of life or even of preserving it (which, obviously, was impossible anyway); they're concerned, with varying emphases, with what happens when you take a way of life away from people. The practical thrust of Taylor's review is that we ought to find some way of anticipating cultural collapse and helping people whose cultures have collapsed into a new one--but this in light of the fact that our efforts hitherto have generally been more harmful than helpful.
There is no clear practical thrust of Lear's book. In the question period at the talk, the question was raised whether there are analogies to be drawn with the holocaust. I have a hard time now even seeing why that's a good question. I have been interested lately in the fact that Jews seem to have retained their religion-rooted culture (and even the religion-rootedness of their culture) despite widespread lack of belief in their god, which Christians have not managed to do very well at all. (I have lately been fond of thinking that post-Christian Westerners are the first people who ever repudiated their culture because they no longer believed in their gods.) To me, the interesting question is whether we Westerners generally are in the position of the Crow at the meltdown of their way of life. (The interesting question about the book is whether Lear intends to raise this question.) Lear says that everything the Crow did had meaning because it was directed toward the hunt or toward war. The example he gives is that a woman stirring a pot over a fire could say, when asked what she's doing, that she's preparing for the hunt. When there are no more buffalo, when asked what she's doing, she could say that she's not doing anything. (How often do we reply, when asked what we're doing, "nothing"? Ask kids what they're doing and they'll almost always say "nothing". Is this meaningful?)
At the talk, which was last fall when I was unemployed and feeling absolutely uncertain of my academic future, I was thinking about how, when I left the talk and went back over to the library to read, it would not be clear for me what I was doing--I would be reading philosophy as part of some future-directed project, but with the future uncertain, it would be uncertain whether there even was a project. If there was no project, then, reading in the library, I could be said to be doing nothing. (There is this vertiginousness to academic work, which must be the same for any work in which one might play for mortal stakes, from the fact that it is largely accidental whether or how much one is paid to do things that one would do or would want to do anyway--and if one is not paid to do them or not paid much, then one is in some senses only killing time, while the same work, paid, is work and ennobled.) (This was also at the time that I'd just found out that that bit of work had been taken away from me, so I was fighting that venom, and I didn't like that my reaction to what Lear was saying was personal--he was talking about cultural devastation, and I was thinking of it in terms of my petty situation. "If thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door," I thought, and I keep thinking.)
Taylor explicitly, but not too emphatically, brings out the implications for the (post)modern West. He refers to a book the title of which I was quite sure was The Conservative Character but which appears to actually be The Corrosion of Character, which I'm reading (at the same time as I'm fitfully reading Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History) now. Taylor basically says that we've so gotten used to being in the situation of the Crow at cultural meltdown that we can't recognize it as being bad for us, nor can we recognize cultural devastation when we see it--we see it as liberation. But Taylor hasn't so gotten used to it.
There is much else to be said, but, well: for someone with so little future, I'm always getting there too quickly.
Current mood: late
Monday, April 7, 2008
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 6. High today: 12.
L. and I watched Clerks II yesterday. It has a lot of words. I wonder a) what movie has the most words of any movie ever made, and b) what feature-length movie has the highest word density? "Tastes like piss and flies" is, anyway, the funniest thing I have seen since I first saw Garfield Minus Garfield. Garfield Minus Garfield is the funniest thing I have seen since ever.
There's only snow left on the northeast-facing slopes of the ravine, and on the paths where it's been packed down. A winter's worth of dog-abandoned tennis balls has emerged. The golden-crowned kinglets are back--I think they must be the birds I was never able to identify last fall; it could be that I'm getting a better look at them now because the grass isn't hiding them. And the chipping sparrows, and the red-winged blackbirds, and the woodpeckers are no longer pecking solo but hammering away at each other. It was a good evening for watching the earthlight on the tipped-over moon. The wind was cold today like the wind can only be cold when it's warm. It's not quite the warm season yet, but it's getting there more days than not.
I woke up this morning to a, hmm, discussion, debate, frame-job, concerning the homework issue which has become burning lately for some reason and caught fire this week because somebody at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education released some study saying that kids have too much homework and it's interfering with their family lives and so forth. I saw a blurb in the paper the other day on this; it said that the study's authors said that young children should have as homework to talk with their parents. This probably tells you something about the study's authors. (I guess the way the education wars shape up these days is like this: the parents think everything's the teachers' fault, the teachers think everything's the parents' fault, and the policymakers think we just need to get the teachers and parents to work together.) Anyway, I find this whole homework business remarkable because it turns the picture of the world I grew up with on its head: as a kid, I knew that the way the world worked was that my parents and my teachers were on one side, and I was on the other. (This is not to say that there wasn't plenty of evidence to the contrary; it's just that no amount of evidence could be sufficient to shake this world-foundational belief.) But this homework business indicates that parents--at least, the squeaky wheels who are getting all the grease these days--see themselves on the side of their kids against the teachers. The teachers, I take it, are like the government, and homework is like taxes: no matter how much you have, you should have less.
This afternoon I went to a talk about video surveillance. The speaker was arguing that we (i.e., we leftists) should quit trying to get privacy laws enacted, because The State always gets exempted from privacy laws so privacy laws only restrict what we can do and not what they can do. Instead, we should subvert surveillance by practising sousveillance! Go to your local Wal*Mart and record them! See how they like it!
Part of the homework frame-job was the host getting a guy from Finland on to say how wonderful Finland is despite not having any homework, so that the American "expert" would realize that he is wrong when he says that kids do not have too much homework. But the guy from Finland didn't want to talk about homework, which he obviously thought was not an issue; he wanted to point out that in Finland teachers have master's degrees and are well paid and highly thought of in society, and that in Finland everyone wants kids to be educated for the good of Finland in the world. The host was not interested in or prepared for this diversion, but it was not a diversion. The point is, in Finland, people take themselves to all be on the same side. Here, we are all at war with each other.
I think I said a few years ago, while the hockey lockout was going on, that it had occurred to me that the players by now have the financial werewithal to run the league themselves, but they couldn't do that because they wouldn't be able to agree on how to distribute the money: you can't divide things amongst yourselves in an inegalitarian way without creating conflict amongst yourselves. So they need to have somebody over above them, who they can all hate together, to distribute the money unequally. It occurs to me today that we, at least we North Americans, all need the government for much the same reason. We can all harmlessly hate the government (and everyone who looks like the government, including teachers and bus drivers and Eljay Inc.) together, and blow off most of the hatred we would otherwise harmfully focus on each other.
Speaking of Eljay Inc., the last question in the question period this afternoon was: "What do you think of Facebook?" (The speaker's answer was "I'm too old for Facebook!" I think she was likely younger than me. No more than a couple of years older.) I had been thinking of this myself. I saw another thing in one of the papers yesterday about some kids somewhere making a facebook group devoted to hating their teachers and saying outrageous things about them--and the principal or whoever gets into the group, and a whole production ensues. This is a lot like how the internet makes it easier to get caught plagiarizing. Before kids started stealing googlable stuff from the interweb, it was virtually impossible to catch them plagiarizing. Before facebook, if you wanted to have a discussion group on your teacher's fat ass and how you will remove it and feed it to her, you would have it in the far corner of the schoolyard, or in your basement, and no one would ever know that you, like all the other children, were a psychopath.
What the questioner was actually interested in, though, was the whole exhibitionism thing. Which, you know, I can't really find interesting. Adolescent kids display themselves to strangers, like monkeys showing off their genitals. It's how you get out of the troop that raised you and start your own. The media change, but the basic principle stays the same.
It's the sudden season, spring:
Blooms are bursting from the snow
They've spent the winter pent below,
Growing there impatiently
To save up time for when they're free.
Daffodils three inches tall
Before you know they're up at all.
All around the birds are back
As if there'd never been a lack.
Birds chase down the falling sun
And up again where they'd begun.
Meanwhile, we forget them here
As soon as they're no longer near.
But, around comes life again.
We don't appreciate it then;
Only on some later day
When it's already underway.
It's the sudden season, spring.
Current mood: late
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