This ancient silent movie adaptation of Dracula is set in 1838 in the fictional town of Wisburg and if there’s one thing you can say for it it’s that it certainly doesn’t fuck around with any of that silly “setup” crap. The first lines of actual dialog occur when our protagonist Hutter brings his wife Ellen some flowers and she responds by saying, “Why did you kill them… the beautiful flowers?!” One gets the feeling immediately that something is amiss. The second line of dialog occur in the street only a minute later. After exchanging friendly greetings with someone… (we know not who) Hutter is greeted with the words, “Don’t be in a hurry. No one can escape his destiny.” I’m sure this is a lot to digest for someone who only 2 minutes and 37 seconds before was happily standing before his shaving mirror.
An almost immediate observation on the silent movie genre is that in a bizarre way it leaves much more to the imagination than even reading the story. It’s clear from the action that a lot more dialog is occurring then the audience is privy to. Since actually conveying dialog in textual form requires the filmmakers to cut away to a printed card the use of words is pretty scanty. The primitive state of film-making is also glaringly obvious. Outside scenes appear in either blue and white or red and white while inside scenes are a happy brownish tone. The action scenes, such as when Orlock’s coach appears to retrieve Hutter, leave one laughing a bit with their almost claymation-like choppiness. Clearly we’ve come a long way to our HD DVD players.
Anyway, back to the story. Hutter is apparently on his way to work for Knock, the local real-estate agent. The film finds Knock reading a page of what is obvious gibberish but is apparently a letter from Count Orlock of Transylvania. He wants a home in Wisburg. Since he is of noble birth he of course has requested something abandoned and run-down. Something like the house just across the street from Hutter. Knock hypes Hutter up with promises of a “lot of money” and assigns him to travel to Transylvania to negotiate a deal. Hutter is ludicrously excited and runs back home to tell the wife, “I’m going to travel far away to the country of thieves and ghosts!” Ellen doesn’t bother to voice the worry that cascades most obviously across her face and so Hutter is off to his presumed doom. This will be a lesson to all of you young wives out there. Speak up, men are idiots.
Hutter eventually arrives in the Carpathians where one mention of Count Orlock puts the natives on their guard. Staying the night in a local inn he happens to find a copy of a tome on the subject of “Nosferatu” but poo-poos it with a hearty but unheard laugh. The next morning he finds natives who will drive him within sight of the castle but refuse to go any further on the grounds that the castle is “creepy”. I’d like to thank the makers of my particular copy of this movie for their BRILLIANT rendering of the movie’s subtitle cards from their original German into Leave it to Beaver-Style 1950s English. Creepy… unbelievable. ANYway… since the villagers won’t take Hutter to the castle he sets off on foot but no sooner does he step down than a coach arrives unbidden from the castle driven by someone who looks a LOT like the villain wearing a pointy hat. Wordlessly the coachman directs Hutter into the coach and then to the main gates of the castle.
Hutter is greeted inside by another man who has the same ghastly look as the coachman. He offers Hutter a meal despite the late hour. Our unwitting hero cuts himself slicing some bread leading our host to another bit of wonderously opaque dialog, “You’ve hurt yourself… The Precious Blood!” Said blood he of course licks from his guest’s hand. It should be noted that this is standard guest etiquette at Slaven dinner parties. To hell with band aids, we’ll drink the blood right off your bloody finger! After his snack, the host comes on to Hutter with the words, “Should we not spend a little time togther, my very dear friend? Sunrise is not far away.” This is also standard Slaven parlance for “get the fuck out, it’s late.”
Hutter awakes after a fade cut with a cut finger and a sore neck but is greeted with a fresh meal including wine but absolutely NO vanilla vodka. Very sad in my book. After his meal he goes outside for a morning constitutional and to write a letter home. He writes, amusingly, that “the mosquitoes are a real pest. I have two bites on my neck very close together.” Transylvanian mosquitoes ARE the worst in my experience. Despite the fact that no villager will come near the castle, the place does apparently get mail so our hero can send his missive and retrieve the incoming mail for Count Orlock. While giving our good Count the mail, he drops a picture of the beloved Ellen. Upon seeing her, the count remarks simply, “Your wife has a beautiful neck…” I can relate to the man’s viewpoint on women. Personally, I always look first at a woman’s kneecaps, then left pinky toe and then her neck but to each his own. Driven by lust, the Count agrees to buy the beautiful, deserted house across the street from Hutter. Definite stalker tendencies coming to the forefront there.
Hutter returns to his room and peruses the book he found at the inn for more details on Nosferatu. Somehow, after all his giddy chortling he finally starts to take things seriously and exactly 30 minutes into the film we find Orlock standing in the doorway in that iconic pose that we’ve ALL seen a million times. Hutter finally realizes that he’s in deep shit. Meanwhile Ellen is somnambulating on the balcony in a most precarious manner as her husband is again set upon by the Count. Hutter awakes to a seemingly deserted castle and finds his way IMMEDIATELY to the casket of the Count who lies with his face exposed to the sun. In horror, Hutter runs away and swoons but awakes in time to find the Count packing to move. The count exits via carriage and Hutter makes his escape.
At this point, the movie either takes a horrendous turn into the unfollowable or else the wine has finally taken hold. OK, so Knock goes a bit inexplicably insane and starts eating bugs. This is a callback to the Renfield character after which he’s based but in the context of this movie… makes NO sense whatsoever. Ellen, in response to all this, decides to go to the beach while wearing a long, flowing black dress. Meanwhile Hutter is recovering in a hospital and sets sail for home. It’s a bit odd that he didn’t need a ship to GET there in the first place but needs one to get back. OK, so Orlock has booked passage on a ship and the whole crew is taken out by a plague. The first mate goes below to hack open one of the boxes below deck for no reason and out pops Orlock. The first mate is horrified and jumps overboard while Orlock takes out the captain.
It is at this point, that I completely lose the thread of the story. Orlock has presumably entered the neighborhood, the plague has taken hold. Hutter has returned home but his wife is worried and reading Hutter’s book about Nosferatu… OK, I have to admit that this movie makes no sense. Even when I was less distracted by the wine, it made little to no sense to me and lacked continuity. The town has turned on Knock which makes sense since he caused this mess by selling a house to Orlock, I suppose. Four minutes from the end, another iconic moment in movie history; Orlock is creeping up the stairs and all we see is his shadow. He’s closing in on Ellen… Oh the suspense! But wait! Orlock has failed to notice the sunrise! The cock has crowed and Orlock dies in most dramatic fashion! I failed to mention that Ellen read in the book that if someone gives willingly of their blood and distracts the Nosferatu from the coming of dawn then the villain shall be undone. Apparently that’s what I missed in this grainy dialog. In summary: yay. The forces of good prevail and the plague is ended with the death of Orlock.
Boy. That was a bitchin’ movie.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
What I learned Today: Lagrangian Points
While reading “Death by Black Hole and other Quandaries” I was reintroduced to a REALLY cool concept referred to as a Lagrangian point. You can read the long-winded Wikipedia version of this concept here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point.
The short and sweet description of this concept is that if you put an object out in space at a Lagrangian point then it’ll quietly just sit there forever. On the surface, yeah, I admit, this is pretty unassuming but think about it. In the vast majority of locations in the solar system if you set an object down it’s going to slowly make its way toward SOMETHING. Usually that something is the sun and anybody who’s had a sunburn knows that THAT is no fun whatsoever. So a Lagrangian point is the universe’s version of Free Parking. If you fly a satellite and park it at such a point then it’ll hang out there for a long time which in the grand scheme is damn convenient. These points have been used already by NASA for various long-term missions which you can read about in the Wikiepedia entry.
Executive Summary: Lagrangian Points – Solar System’s version of Free Parking. Mega-cool.
The short and sweet description of this concept is that if you put an object out in space at a Lagrangian point then it’ll quietly just sit there forever. On the surface, yeah, I admit, this is pretty unassuming but think about it. In the vast majority of locations in the solar system if you set an object down it’s going to slowly make its way toward SOMETHING. Usually that something is the sun and anybody who’s had a sunburn knows that THAT is no fun whatsoever. So a Lagrangian point is the universe’s version of Free Parking. If you fly a satellite and park it at such a point then it’ll hang out there for a long time which in the grand scheme is damn convenient. These points have been used already by NASA for various long-term missions which you can read about in the Wikiepedia entry.
Executive Summary: Lagrangian Points – Solar System’s version of Free Parking. Mega-cool.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Notes for “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives”
So now we begin…
Evolution is apparently no guarantee of success at even the simplest of tasks. When faced with a light which randomly blinks red or green, humans are regularly out performed by rats. If the light blinks green 75% of the time, rats and lower mammals will choose the food dispensing button linked to the green light every time, guaranteeing themselves success 75% of the time. Humans who take the exact same test tend to believe that they can perceive a pattern in the blinking of the lights and their attempts to outsmart the randomness results in a success rate of around 60%.
Humans are also easily fooled by the patterns of randomness in their daily lives. One example given is a group of Air Force pilots in training during World War II. Their flight instructor stated emphatically that his brutal methods of roundly and publicly criticizing his trainees when they did poorly was much more effective than praising them when they did well. His reasoning went something like this: When his pilots did well, if he praised them then the next time they went out they did much more poorly than the previous flight. If, on the other hand, he simply criticized them when they did terribly then their next flights were invariably better. What the instructor failed to realize was that the good and bad flights were merely statistical outliers. So if a trainee had an exceptionally good flight then chances are good that no matter what feedback he was given he would have a worse flight the next time. The same holds for the opposite case. This phenomenon is known as “Regression to the Mean”. As a general rule, exceptional outcomes are typically followed by more average ones.
The author is also obviously a big fan of sports and gives us several pleasant statistical tidbits from the sporting world:
* The odds that a player with Roger Maris’ career home run stats will break Ruth’s homerun record in any given year: 1/32. [So you Mantle fans can sit down a shush for a while]
* From a statistical viewpoint, the 7-game playoff series in many sports is woefully insufficient. If two teams A and B have a probability of winning 55% and 45% of their head-to-head games respectively then the inferior team will still win a 7-game series 40% of the time. You’d need a series of 269 games to really prove anything. Think your teams aren’t that closely matched? If the teams compete at 66% and 33% then the inferior team still wins 20% of the time and 23 games would be required to determine the true champion.
* Justin Wolfers analyzed the outcomes of 70,000 college basketball games and found that when compared against the point spread there was a significant surplus of games that ended just below the predicted point spread at the expense of those that ended just above the point spread.
The Greeks had no proper concept of the laws of probability and this may have at least partially had to do with the fact that they had no dice. Instead they have astragali, the heel-bones of sheep. To the Greeks, the result of every throw of the astragali was the direct will of the gods themselves. This belief persists in the NFL where every touchdown reception is still the direct result of divine intervention. [at least if the touchdown celebrations are to be taken at face value]
DNA evidence in the courtroom can identify a crime suspect with a probability of error of 1:1 Million to 1:1 Billion. What is not typically talked about is the fact that the incidence of laboratory error is 1%.
This author, like so many before him treats us to an exposition of the “Monty Hall Problem.” The issue goes something like this. You’ve given three doors with three prizes. Behind one is a brand new car and behind 2 are goats. You pick your door, it doesn’t matter which one and in response Monty opens one of the remaining two doors revealing a goat. So now there is one door with a goat and one door with a car. To make your chances of winning as high as possible, do you stay with your original door or do you switch? As it turns out, if you stay with your original door your chances of winning are 1/3. If you switch, however, your odds are an even 50/50. This result, to say the least, is TERRIBLY unintuitive. To make it clearer though, it’s useful to extend the example to 100 doors with 99 goats and 1 car. Just as before, you pick your one door and in response Monty opens up 98 doors revealing 98 goats. Now you’re left with your original door and the one tantalizing door that remains unopened. So do you switch in this situation? Hopefully the answer now is a “damn right you do.”
Geralamo Cordano (died 1576) was one of the founders of probability theory though like so many never really lived to see his work used or popularized. The technical bits of his work aren’t all that interesting but his life in general was an odd one. His mother was unwed at the time of his birth so she tried to abort him using an evil brew of wormwood, burned barleycorn and tamarisk root. This obviously failed making Garalamo a pretty lucky fellow (or his mother a pretty shitty pharmacologist). He died a pauper after his own son testified against him in some uninteresting civil matter or other just to get himself a plum job as a torturer with the inquisition.
In 1995, the German lottery pulled 6 balls from a set of 49 as it always does each week. This would not normally be news except that the result was exactly the same as one week in 1986. The chances that a lottery of this sort will pull the same numbers twice in this time period: 28%.
Blaise Pascal gave up mathematics and went into religious seclusion near the end of his life, presumably after pondering an enigma termed “Pascal’s Wager”. It runs something like this. Assume there is no God. In that event the best you can do is to live a life of debauchery and then you die and it’s over. Contrarily, assume there IS a God. If you live a pious life then you have gained an infinite reward of an eternity in heaven. If you don’t, then all you got, again, was a brief life of pleasure. So, if one assumes there’s a 50% chance that God exists, the risk that he does NOT exist is dwarfed by the INFINITE reward you can receive if he DOES exist. Therefore, you should just assume that he does and thus at least take a shot at your life of bliss for all eternity. It’s obvious from Pascal’s behavior after this revelation which path he chose…
In 1992 the Virginia State Lottery offered a prize of $27,000,000. The lottery is configured to 6 random numbers from a pot of 44, a mere 7,000,000 possibilities. An investment group in Melbourne Australia got the bright idea to buy 7,000,000 tickets, one with each number combination. After a massive logistical nightmare, 1.4 million tickets filled out by hand, the group was almost too late. They managed to only get 5,000,000 of the numbers submitted in time but none the less did win the prize and collect the jackpot.
Joseph Jagger took his statistical prowess to Monte Carlo in 1873 to turn himself a tidy profit. He and six assistants took careful note of the outcomes on six roulette wheels over a 2-week period. At the end of that time, it was found that one of the wheels had a distinct bias towards certain numbers. A few days later exited with the equivalent of five million dollars in winnings. He was eventually foiled when the casino noticed his turn of luck and began reconfiguring the wheels at the end of each night.
The Greeks had far too much time on their hands it seems. Zeno, yet another Greek philosopher, postulated that you can never actually go anywhere. His logic runs this way. In order to travel 1 meter, you must first travel half a meter. Before you can travel half a meter though, you must first travel a quarter of a meter and so on. Therefore, to travel any distance at all requires you to travel an infinite number of finite distances which would of course take an infinite amount of time. Zeno, it seems, was married to the Red Queen. You’ve got to run TERRIBLY fast just to stay where you are! The Greeks had far too much time on their hands it seems. [This Geeky Greek sandwich is known as ‘Zenos Paradox’]
Bernoulli originated the idea that in order to obtain a good estimate of something’s true value you must first obtain a large sample of data for analysis. Unfortunately, in practice his original formulae are a bit off and often require the ENTIRE dataset to be obtained before any certainty is obtained. [U.S. political polls under the original Bernoulli mathematics would require polling 80% of the houses in the country]. This concept is known as the Law of Large Numbers.
On the other side of the fence, Kahneman and Tversky coined the ironic Law of Small Numbers to describe the tendency of the human population to assign inappropriate significance to vanishingly small data samples.
People pay respect and homage to numbers when clearly they shouldn’t. One large example given was the business of rating wines. When asked about the system the editor of Wine and Spirits Magazine was quoted as saying, “On many levels the rating system is completely nonsensical.” His colleague at the Wine Enthusiast is no more enthusiastic as he states simply, “The deeper you get into this system the more misguided and misleading it is.” Apparently even at the aesthetic level things are no better. When subjects are presented with five bottles of wine whose contents are identical but have different labels and prices ranging from $10 to $90 they will invariably state that the $90 wine is significantly better. In a similar test, most can’t tell a red wine from a white wine that has food coloring added. Perhaps most damning of all, when wine experts were presented with three wines, two of which were identical, half the time they could not even determine which wine was which.
The human mind is very poor at detecting randomness even when it encounters it. In a string of 1,000,000 random 1s and 0s, for example, one should expect to find strings of hundreds of 0s or 1s in a row. Recently, Apple’s iPod received hoards of complaints about its shuffle feature. Customers complained that sometimes the same song was played twice in a row; statistically, a very normal occurrence even in large libraries. Apple has since revised their shuffle algorithm to be LESS random so that it’ll appear MORE random.
People have a fundamental and deep-seated problem with randomness because it messes with our need to be in control. Ellen Langer did a study with nursing home retirees. In one group the retirees were allowed to arrange their own rooms and pick a plant to take care of. In the other it was all done for them and they had no say in the arrangement of their rooms. After 18 months the mortality rate in the group that had no control over their rooms was DOUBLE that of those that got to pick their own room layouts. [This is a stunning conclusion but one that lends itself to sample-space bias. Sicker individuals are going to a priori be placed in the no-control group so this could be a total red herring.]
The idea of Confirmation Bias also tends to skew our view of events. If a situation arises about which we have pre-conceived notions then we will tend to fit the facts to meet our theory rather than viewing them with complete rationality. David L Rosenhan demonstrated exactly that when he sent 10 people, 5 of them doctors, into a psychiatric ward. He told them all to act completely normally but to claim only that they were hearing voices that were not there. All 10 were admitted to the hospital. After being admitted, the subjects dropped the pretence of insanity and went about their normal activities while in the mental ward. Despite the fact that the participants were acting perfectly normally the doctor’s notes for the patients reflected obvious psychosis. Every simple everyday action the subjects performed pointed at some mental condition or other. The subjects were eventually released from the hospital after an average of 19 days.
It’s not just enthusiastic wine enthusiasts who can’t make qualitative judgments on a consistent basis. In a recent music experiment 14,341 participants were given the chance to download 48 songs by bands they had never heard of. The test subjects were divided into 9 different groups. The first 8 groups could see the average rating of each song by previous downloaders and how many times it had been downloaded but only for subjects in their group. So what you ended up with was 8 distinct music microcosms that had no connection to each other. The 9th group rated the songs but they couldn’t see the ratings of anyone else. Ostensibly this was the group that was totally unbiased by the influence of other participants so these ratings were more akin to true musical quality. Unsurprisingly, the 9 groups differed wildly on their ratings for the 48 songs. One song in particular was a #1 smash in one group but a #40 bomb in another. The control group ranked it at #29. Apparently what happens is that some songs jump out to an early and random lead and this results in their popularity. The pop music charts have little to do with the actual quality of music it seems.
Our author also relates one anecdote that jives perfectly with my notion that Bill Gates is just a normal schmuck like the rest of us who happened to just get lucky. The story goes somewhat similarly to this. Back in the day IBM came to Gates and said they needed an OS for their new personal computer. Gates initially balked at the idea and sent them to someone else. Well, the someone else apparently didn’t impress IBM much so they came back to Gates. Gates in the mean time had heard of a bit of software that might do the trick so he brought it up to IBM. After what must have been a comical bit of shrugging and “what do we do now” Gates obtained the software for $50,000 from this unnamed source, modified it slightly and then licensed it to IBM. The rest, it seems, is history. Gates didn’t do anything special. He just happened to be a software nexus of sorts. I gotta get me a nexus.
Vodka, it seems, is a masterfully marketed product. Despite the fact that it’s intended to be non-distinctive and neutral every vodka out there seems to make some weird claim to be unique. Ironically, when the New York Times put 21 vodkas to a blind taste test, the winner was the bartender’s cheapest, Smirnoff.
Publishing too is no stranger to the laws of luck. When the Sunday Times of London took the first chapter from two winners of the prestigious Mann-Booker prize for fiction and submitted them to publishers, not only did the publishers not recognize the pieces, 19 out of the 20 publishers rejected the books for publication. Gotta get lucky in this world I guess. Or maybe just verbose…
Saturday, June 07, 2008
Random Observations: Buying a Car
I've said before on this blog and in person to anyone who'd sit still long enough to listen that one of the biggest rules I try to live by is that of simply telling people the truth. That ranges from, "Dude, you really smell BAD and people are SO making fun of you behind your back" to "Honey, you are simply incredible and I'd do anything to keep you in my life."
I was reminded on Monday, however, of my one exception to this rule. Car dealers are exempt from the necessity of honesty and deserve as much spin and deception as you can possibly throw at them. Case in point... on Monday I went to trade in my wife's van towards the purchase of a smaller commuter car. The first car dealer I went to was very accommodating; we haggled out a reasonable price and I was quickly on my way. Ever interested in getting the best deal possible, however, I made my way to a neighboring dealer to perform the same task. After countless delays and negotiations this dealer arrived at a price $4,000 more than the other dealer. Seeing that this situation was clearly hopeless I thanked the salesman for his time, let him know that his price was $4,000 short of the offer he was competing against and made ready to head home. Before I could complete my exit, the salesman asked me to be patient and said he could work out a better price with the sales manager. To facilitate this he wrote out a little miniature contract in his awkward left-handed scrawl:
For the price of $XX,XXX plus tax, title and destination, I, _______, will buy this car today.
X ________________________
Then he asked me to sign his little contract. My reaction to this was a simple, direct, and blunt, "OK, I'm not signing your little contract; can you get me a better price or not? If you can, I will buy the car today but if you can't then just forget it." His response was to say simply, "Alright, I was just trying to help you out. I'll see what I can do."
After another 5 minutes of "seeing what he could do" he came back with half-priced all-season floor mats, a grand total of $121. So again I thanked him for his time and made ready my exit. However his bag of tricks wasn't done yet. He went on to enumerate all the reasons he thought I should buy from his dealership in checklist format:
Salesman: Well, you live on the south side so shouldn't you buy from us? We're closer.
Me: I can drive to the west side quite a few times for $4,000.
Salesman: You've used our service department before, shouldn't you buy from us?
Me: I bought my last Honda somewhere else and you didn't refuse to service that one.
Salesman: How about I throw in the floor mats for free?
Me: Um, $4,000 worth of floor mats?
So finally after 90 minutes of entertaining but pointless dickering I was left with my original offer. Why, simply, can't they say honestly, "we can't meet that price, thanks for shopping" and be done with it? Why must my time be wasted by these yahoos?
I was reminded on Monday, however, of my one exception to this rule. Car dealers are exempt from the necessity of honesty and deserve as much spin and deception as you can possibly throw at them. Case in point... on Monday I went to trade in my wife's van towards the purchase of a smaller commuter car. The first car dealer I went to was very accommodating; we haggled out a reasonable price and I was quickly on my way. Ever interested in getting the best deal possible, however, I made my way to a neighboring dealer to perform the same task. After countless delays and negotiations this dealer arrived at a price $4,000 more than the other dealer. Seeing that this situation was clearly hopeless I thanked the salesman for his time, let him know that his price was $4,000 short of the offer he was competing against and made ready to head home. Before I could complete my exit, the salesman asked me to be patient and said he could work out a better price with the sales manager. To facilitate this he wrote out a little miniature contract in his awkward left-handed scrawl:
For the price of $XX,XXX plus tax, title and destination, I, _______, will buy this car today.
X ________________________
Then he asked me to sign his little contract. My reaction to this was a simple, direct, and blunt, "OK, I'm not signing your little contract; can you get me a better price or not? If you can, I will buy the car today but if you can't then just forget it." His response was to say simply, "Alright, I was just trying to help you out. I'll see what I can do."
After another 5 minutes of "seeing what he could do" he came back with half-priced all-season floor mats, a grand total of $121. So again I thanked him for his time and made ready my exit. However his bag of tricks wasn't done yet. He went on to enumerate all the reasons he thought I should buy from his dealership in checklist format:
Salesman: Well, you live on the south side so shouldn't you buy from us? We're closer.
Me: I can drive to the west side quite a few times for $4,000.
Salesman: You've used our service department before, shouldn't you buy from us?
Me: I bought my last Honda somewhere else and you didn't refuse to service that one.
Salesman: How about I throw in the floor mats for free?
Me: Um, $4,000 worth of floor mats?
So finally after 90 minutes of entertaining but pointless dickering I was left with my original offer. Why, simply, can't they say honestly, "we can't meet that price, thanks for shopping" and be done with it? Why must my time be wasted by these yahoos?
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
Firstly let me say that about half-way through this somewhat slight slip of a book I was non-plussed to learn that it was an Oprah bookclub selection. See previous posts for my counter-cultural tendencies but in this case the content was dark enough to justify breaking my own rules. In short, McCarthy's "The Road" is the story of a father and son as they make their way across the U.S. after an unspecified apocalypse. The details of the plot in and of themselves are not all that interesting but the book does make several interesting points about the human condition.
On the surface, the book is a simple admonishment to the reader to appreciate the state of the world under the orderly governance of human law. The unnamed protagonists are assailed by cannibals, faced with the possibility of starvation and constantly on the alert for an untimely end to their fragile lives on the planet. All this is relatively standard for the post-apocalypse genre. What is very slightly unusual is the idea that in such a situation pockets of benevolence will persist. The father and son travel in search of "the good guys" who, we presume, will take them in. What is not clear is how the couple knows that such people even exist given that they haven't fallen in with them up to this point. Further, it's ironic that despite their claims to being on the side of "good" (whatever "good" can really mean in such a situation) they demonstrate benevolence towards the other human beings they encounter only begrudgingly.
To sum up, this is a fine example of the genre but not really one that introduces any grand new ideas. The standard plots and subplots apply in the same expected ways. A good introduction to the idea for those who may not have read the 1,000 books on the same topic which preceded it or been blessed with having watched the 20 TZ episodes that deal with the situation...
Sunday, June 01, 2008
The Neighbor's Gift
As I sat outside my house today I glanced over at my neighbor's house and realized there's an incredible irony just across our yard. Here; see if you can see it:
There! Isn't that awesomely ironic?! Oh... You don't...? OK; let me be a little more specific then.
My neighbor's done a lot of work on the exterior of his house and gone to a hell of a lot of trouble. I've seen him out there for hours pulling weeds and putting in borders and keeping everything watered. That's no small task let me tell you because I've watched him do it all. Note, however, that from his house he can't see even flower one. It's all on the other side of an opaque fence that's on the other side of a brick wall. If he wants to see the fruit of his own hours of labor he has to go and plant himself in the least comfortable place in his entire property, the drainage ditch that straddles the property line. But I, the lucky neighbor, get to enjoy his work every time I look out the window for absolutely nothing. I can sit on the patio and read a book and enjoy his hours of labor in complete comfort. In a very real way, those flowers are his selfless gift to the people around him because he certainly can't enjoy them very easily.
In a way, my neighbor's gift is an allegory for a larger life lesson. Just as my neighbor decorates his home with beautiful flowers he can't see, we all decorate our own lives with similar trappings that don't really benefit us directly. A kind smile shared with a stranger is utterly invisible to the giver. Kind and patient counsel given to a friend in need is an investment that may return nothing to the one who spent the time giving it in the first place. Ultimately, we must each decide if we're going to live our lives like my neighbor, erecting bowers of flowers for the enjoyment of others or letting our lots grow wild and weedy.Since Last We Wrote ... June 1st Edition
Alrighty then... it has been very nearly four months since last I wrote in this public missive to no one and to be QUITE frank and QUITE honest, if I tried to encapsulate the missing time and present it for your amusement I'm sure it would be utterly and completely unbelievable even to *ME*. At any rate, it must be said that I look back on the last few blog posts from January and February and rate myself a "right wanker" as they might say across the pond. I seemed to have been utterly consumed in a cloud of self-pity that's really quite disgusting to behold from my current position. Looking back on the blog posts of the past though, it is regrettable to me in the extreme that I don't keep a more private journal of my life's goings on as I'm pretty sure I've utterly forgotten those details that I failed to "belabor my readers" with so many months ago.
Today begins a new chapter; see if YOU can tell the difference...
Today begins a new chapter; see if YOU can tell the difference...
Saturday, February 09, 2008
Since last we wrote...
In many ways, I feel like a large bear who just awoke from a long, deep slumber and has shaken the snow from his fur to look about him on an unfamiliar landscape. In retrospect, I can't really be at all sure what happened over the past few months or what caused it but I think that now, finally, it's over. With the help of many dear friends including my greatest and dearest friend, my wife, I think I've come out of this funk a better and happier person. I will not bore you with the details certainly but I will share a few observations and experiences...
Last week at this time we went to my friend's wedding and it struck me as the sort of thing you'd see in a Lifetime Original Movie. Stuff this good just doesn't HAPPEN in real life. I'll let him write his own story in his own time but suffice to say that he married his elementary-school sweetheart after decades of separation. The lesson here simply seems to be that happiness doesn't just come to you; sometimes you have to wait for it and work for it but it's there to be had if you just keep trying.
Relatedly, you may recall that I had some concerns about the various spheres of my existence touching at this event. In retrospect, I'm not even sure what the hell I was worried about. My wife carried on with everybody I knew like they were old friends. When we got into the car to leave she seemed really excited to have met all the people I've regularly talked about for four years and said simply that "your friends are really funny." Clearly she had more fun than I did because I was wrapped up in my own silly concerns while she was just there to have fun and managed to do so with great ease. I can't help but wonder how long before my friends from work start calling up the house to talk to HER rather than ME.
Turning serious for a moment, I have to admit that in the past two months I have had to completely demolish my self-image and rebuild it from scratch. This morning my wife and I had a long talk and during the discussion it became clear to me that six months ago my self-image was basically still the one built for me during my childhood (see my autobiography Part 1). It wasn't really new information to me, I'd realized that much long ago but hadn't admitted it aloud to anyone. A lot of the problem over the past few months has been trying to rectify the conflicting ideas in my head. On one hand, my self-image said simply that while I might be an intelligent and articulate person, on a personal level I was more akin to a moldy sack of potatoes, that I had the social skills of a bowling ball with greasy finger holes. For 35 years this was all good. I continued to make no effort to get to know people and in exchange they dutifully ignored me (or more commonly were forced to ignore me after I ignored them). But then there came a break in the cycle. In a few specific cases I stopped ignoring people and instead turned myself toward them. I gave them my time and my attention and to my astonishment they reciprocated in kind. This too was all well and good until the conundrum was noticed. The results of my reaching out to people could not co-exist with my self-image. One or the other had to be explained away or revised. As I sit here I realize there are two paths away from this dillema because I've seen someone in my family take the darker path:
The dark path says that your self-image must be correct. If you believe you are unlikeable then who knows you better than yourself? It must certainly be so. But if the self-image is correct then that means the results of your experiment are wrong. There must be some REASON why people act in a friendly way towards you. What could they possibly want? Do they want my money? Are they going to rob me or break into my house? I had better keep these people at a distance because there's NO way they could really like me. They must have selfish motives of some sort... This is the path my mother took when she told me to "stop calling her god damn it". She cannot possibly rectify in her mind the conflict between the belief that she is a worthless lump of shit and the fact that I cared enough to call to see how she was doing. She has no choice but to corrupt my intentions with the belief that I worry only about how she spends my inheritance. To do otherwise would force her to amend her own concept of who she is.
Personally, I choose to amend myself and I will openly admit that it's INSANELY hard to do; typically I'm a relatively self-effacing person so it's difficult for me to look at myself and admit that it's just possible people might enjoy being around me. But given recent developments it's really the only reasonable conclusion I can come to. This is also not to say that it's over. It's a task of Herculean effort to tear apart one's very soul and piece it together again in a more amicable form but I am determined to do so because I've seen the darkness and pain of the alternative. More important even than me, I suspect, to this effort is my wife. As I look back over the past few weeks I realize more than ever how deep is her devotion to me and can't help but believe, now more than ever, that she was the greatest and best Choice I ever made in life.
Now normally, I would stop a blog entry right there. Big emotional and devotional crescendo right there at the end to carry with you around the house as you do laundry and chase the kids. Well, not today, boys and girls. Today we cleanse the palette a bit before we go because life lesson #65 for this month is that people don't like to be the victims of constant negativity. This is a trap I fall into often with people. When I'm describing something I tend to be complete and hit it from all angles. I'll exclaim the positives and then at some point roll around to the trivial negative points, if any, and give a nice, rounded picture of whatever I'm describing. I'm just about totally convinced that people just don't want to hear it. The alloy of 90% giddiness and 10% negativity somehow works out to be "well that sucked."
Lastly, and I think most importantly, is the realization that the key to life isn't what you do... or where you are... or what you happen to be eating at the time but rather who you're with. People, it has become clear, are the fuel on which life runs.
Last week at this time we went to my friend's wedding and it struck me as the sort of thing you'd see in a Lifetime Original Movie. Stuff this good just doesn't HAPPEN in real life. I'll let him write his own story in his own time but suffice to say that he married his elementary-school sweetheart after decades of separation. The lesson here simply seems to be that happiness doesn't just come to you; sometimes you have to wait for it and work for it but it's there to be had if you just keep trying.
Relatedly, you may recall that I had some concerns about the various spheres of my existence touching at this event. In retrospect, I'm not even sure what the hell I was worried about. My wife carried on with everybody I knew like they were old friends. When we got into the car to leave she seemed really excited to have met all the people I've regularly talked about for four years and said simply that "your friends are really funny." Clearly she had more fun than I did because I was wrapped up in my own silly concerns while she was just there to have fun and managed to do so with great ease. I can't help but wonder how long before my friends from work start calling up the house to talk to HER rather than ME.
Turning serious for a moment, I have to admit that in the past two months I have had to completely demolish my self-image and rebuild it from scratch. This morning my wife and I had a long talk and during the discussion it became clear to me that six months ago my self-image was basically still the one built for me during my childhood (see my autobiography Part 1). It wasn't really new information to me, I'd realized that much long ago but hadn't admitted it aloud to anyone. A lot of the problem over the past few months has been trying to rectify the conflicting ideas in my head. On one hand, my self-image said simply that while I might be an intelligent and articulate person, on a personal level I was more akin to a moldy sack of potatoes, that I had the social skills of a bowling ball with greasy finger holes. For 35 years this was all good. I continued to make no effort to get to know people and in exchange they dutifully ignored me (or more commonly were forced to ignore me after I ignored them). But then there came a break in the cycle. In a few specific cases I stopped ignoring people and instead turned myself toward them. I gave them my time and my attention and to my astonishment they reciprocated in kind. This too was all well and good until the conundrum was noticed. The results of my reaching out to people could not co-exist with my self-image. One or the other had to be explained away or revised. As I sit here I realize there are two paths away from this dillema because I've seen someone in my family take the darker path:
The dark path says that your self-image must be correct. If you believe you are unlikeable then who knows you better than yourself? It must certainly be so. But if the self-image is correct then that means the results of your experiment are wrong. There must be some REASON why people act in a friendly way towards you. What could they possibly want? Do they want my money? Are they going to rob me or break into my house? I had better keep these people at a distance because there's NO way they could really like me. They must have selfish motives of some sort... This is the path my mother took when she told me to "stop calling her god damn it". She cannot possibly rectify in her mind the conflict between the belief that she is a worthless lump of shit and the fact that I cared enough to call to see how she was doing. She has no choice but to corrupt my intentions with the belief that I worry only about how she spends my inheritance. To do otherwise would force her to amend her own concept of who she is.
Personally, I choose to amend myself and I will openly admit that it's INSANELY hard to do; typically I'm a relatively self-effacing person so it's difficult for me to look at myself and admit that it's just possible people might enjoy being around me. But given recent developments it's really the only reasonable conclusion I can come to. This is also not to say that it's over. It's a task of Herculean effort to tear apart one's very soul and piece it together again in a more amicable form but I am determined to do so because I've seen the darkness and pain of the alternative. More important even than me, I suspect, to this effort is my wife. As I look back over the past few weeks I realize more than ever how deep is her devotion to me and can't help but believe, now more than ever, that she was the greatest and best Choice I ever made in life.
Now normally, I would stop a blog entry right there. Big emotional and devotional crescendo right there at the end to carry with you around the house as you do laundry and chase the kids. Well, not today, boys and girls. Today we cleanse the palette a bit before we go because life lesson #65 for this month is that people don't like to be the victims of constant negativity. This is a trap I fall into often with people. When I'm describing something I tend to be complete and hit it from all angles. I'll exclaim the positives and then at some point roll around to the trivial negative points, if any, and give a nice, rounded picture of whatever I'm describing. I'm just about totally convinced that people just don't want to hear it. The alloy of 90% giddiness and 10% negativity somehow works out to be "well that sucked."
Lastly, and I think most importantly, is the realization that the key to life isn't what you do... or where you are... or what you happen to be eating at the time but rather who you're with. People, it has become clear, are the fuel on which life runs.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
It's All Fun and Games Until...
Tonight the Tattered Thread household hosted the monthly euchre party. The concept is a relatively straightforward one: 12 people get together (plus interested spectators) and play euchre, exchanging partners and tables in an intricate dance after every 10 tricks. Four rotations later, a winner is determined based on total points and a small amount of non-existent money changes hands.
What I completely don't understand is how we manage to get along. If you look at the group on paper, the only real common thread that ties it together is some connection to teaching (all the participants are 1st or 2nd degree friends of Kathy's) but that thread doesn't seem to actually come into play very much. There is some amount of low-level "shop talk" but not enough to account for even 10% of the actual interaction. No, somehow if you put 13 people in a room and give them something to do they'll find a way to entertain themselves together. From a purely logical standpoint I simply can't fathom it. Even more puzzling to explain is the fact that I manage to participate in it in some positive way but could not for the life of me tell you how. I just do not understand frivolity. I can apparently do it (not all that well mind you) but I just can't explain it.
Now, it was all fun and games until ... the "internet video" screening. I should mention that these get-togethers do have at times a somewhat adult thread running through them. This is natural of course whenever adults get together but sometimes it can run horribly amok. I won't state which of the many "worldwide internet fad videos" we watched (as a group) at one of our guests suggestion but suffice it to say that it was, by far, the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. It was personally difficult to resist the temptation to vomit on my own floor. If I'd been standing over someone else's floor I might not have tried so hard. This is exactly the reason you invite hip young people to your parties. They know all about this... wait a minute... maybe that's why you DON'T invite... Any rate, no harm done except for the large, brown stain on my eternal human soul.
The one thing I'm not overly thrilled about is the choice of activities. Despite the fact that the party is billed as a 'euchre party' the cards actually seem to have very little to do with it. In fact, in the past when we've had substitutes for missing players who were actually intent on the game, they were a detriment to the enjoyment of others. Playing cards is really more of an excuse to get together than a reason to do so and while the structure of the game forces a regularly timed mingling, in the end it gets in the way and creates moments of awkwardness. Depending on how the rotation works out, you may end up stuck at a table for 20 minutes with the 3 least compatible people in the room or you may find the people you enjoy the most stranded at a distance for the entire night. This was a much more enjoyable format BEFORE we'd done it a dozen times and got to know each other well.
There is also a bit of a quandary on the topic of alternative party activities. During one of our monthly club meetings we were short of the necessary quorum for the usual game by a significant amount so we played charades instead. This, in my opinion, was an order of magnitude more enjoyable than euchre. Where euchre divided us, charades brought us all together to play and have fun as a unit. What is odd about this is that many people simply refuse to play and I'm puzzled as to why. Technically speaking, being a reserved person I shouldn't play a game that requires me to get up in front of other people and act the apparent fool but for some reason I enjoy it. It forces me to crack open my shell and let the world see what's inside. Having brought this up to others though it seems like it's actually the more outgoing people who refuse to play and I have absolutely NO idea why. You would expect that being in front of people and having their undivided attention should be natural to someone who is extroverted. Several in our group though flatly refuse to even attend if charades is the game of choice. It makes me question the true nature of what it means to be extroverted; why am I, socially clam-like as I am, willing to expose myself to the universe in this way while more outgoing people are not? Is this a universal trade-off that I've failed to notice until now?
Even further from the original topic of this post, this makes me question the entire dynamic of friendship and interacting with people. I've always viewed extroverted people as open people who are out there to be befriended by anyone. They were, in my mind, always ready to share of themselves and that's what made them everyone's friend. Introverts were clams that you had to pry open with a screwdriver. They were hard to get to know and you had to really work at it.
It seems clear to me now though that it's actually the opposite. Outgoing people put a good face on it, they have a version of themselves that they show to the world and is available to anyone who merely wants to take the time to look. This is not to say that the face you see is fake, it's certainly them but it's only a part. To get to the heart, the true self, of an extrovert you have to first dig down past those outward layers. The hardest thing about this process I suspect is knowing when you've actually finished. How do you know when you've finally gotten to a person's true feelings? Is it when the office clown suddenly becomes serious? Perhaps when the pious man admits he has doubts? I just don't know but it's certainly an adventure trying to find out.
Anyway, it's officially 1 A.M. and I've suddenly realized that this post that took you a whole five minutes to read took me two and a half hours of typing and analysis to generate. I'm not sure I've come to any new conclusions except that there are some people I'd like to try to get to the very heart of (but won't know when I get there). Further, I'm going to nag my wife to schedule a charades party and invite every person I can think of. Then we'll see who shows up and who doesn't... Then those of us who do show up can psychoanalyze those who don't.
What I completely don't understand is how we manage to get along. If you look at the group on paper, the only real common thread that ties it together is some connection to teaching (all the participants are 1st or 2nd degree friends of Kathy's) but that thread doesn't seem to actually come into play very much. There is some amount of low-level "shop talk" but not enough to account for even 10% of the actual interaction. No, somehow if you put 13 people in a room and give them something to do they'll find a way to entertain themselves together. From a purely logical standpoint I simply can't fathom it. Even more puzzling to explain is the fact that I manage to participate in it in some positive way but could not for the life of me tell you how. I just do not understand frivolity. I can apparently do it (not all that well mind you) but I just can't explain it.
Now, it was all fun and games until ... the "internet video" screening. I should mention that these get-togethers do have at times a somewhat adult thread running through them. This is natural of course whenever adults get together but sometimes it can run horribly amok. I won't state which of the many "worldwide internet fad videos" we watched (as a group) at one of our guests suggestion but suffice it to say that it was, by far, the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. It was personally difficult to resist the temptation to vomit on my own floor. If I'd been standing over someone else's floor I might not have tried so hard. This is exactly the reason you invite hip young people to your parties. They know all about this... wait a minute... maybe that's why you DON'T invite... Any rate, no harm done except for the large, brown stain on my eternal human soul.
The one thing I'm not overly thrilled about is the choice of activities. Despite the fact that the party is billed as a 'euchre party' the cards actually seem to have very little to do with it. In fact, in the past when we've had substitutes for missing players who were actually intent on the game, they were a detriment to the enjoyment of others. Playing cards is really more of an excuse to get together than a reason to do so and while the structure of the game forces a regularly timed mingling, in the end it gets in the way and creates moments of awkwardness. Depending on how the rotation works out, you may end up stuck at a table for 20 minutes with the 3 least compatible people in the room or you may find the people you enjoy the most stranded at a distance for the entire night. This was a much more enjoyable format BEFORE we'd done it a dozen times and got to know each other well.
There is also a bit of a quandary on the topic of alternative party activities. During one of our monthly club meetings we were short of the necessary quorum for the usual game by a significant amount so we played charades instead. This, in my opinion, was an order of magnitude more enjoyable than euchre. Where euchre divided us, charades brought us all together to play and have fun as a unit. What is odd about this is that many people simply refuse to play and I'm puzzled as to why. Technically speaking, being a reserved person I shouldn't play a game that requires me to get up in front of other people and act the apparent fool but for some reason I enjoy it. It forces me to crack open my shell and let the world see what's inside. Having brought this up to others though it seems like it's actually the more outgoing people who refuse to play and I have absolutely NO idea why. You would expect that being in front of people and having their undivided attention should be natural to someone who is extroverted. Several in our group though flatly refuse to even attend if charades is the game of choice. It makes me question the true nature of what it means to be extroverted; why am I, socially clam-like as I am, willing to expose myself to the universe in this way while more outgoing people are not? Is this a universal trade-off that I've failed to notice until now?
Even further from the original topic of this post, this makes me question the entire dynamic of friendship and interacting with people. I've always viewed extroverted people as open people who are out there to be befriended by anyone. They were, in my mind, always ready to share of themselves and that's what made them everyone's friend. Introverts were clams that you had to pry open with a screwdriver. They were hard to get to know and you had to really work at it.
It seems clear to me now though that it's actually the opposite. Outgoing people put a good face on it, they have a version of themselves that they show to the world and is available to anyone who merely wants to take the time to look. This is not to say that the face you see is fake, it's certainly them but it's only a part. To get to the heart, the true self, of an extrovert you have to first dig down past those outward layers. The hardest thing about this process I suspect is knowing when you've actually finished. How do you know when you've finally gotten to a person's true feelings? Is it when the office clown suddenly becomes serious? Perhaps when the pious man admits he has doubts? I just don't know but it's certainly an adventure trying to find out.
Anyway, it's officially 1 A.M. and I've suddenly realized that this post that took you a whole five minutes to read took me two and a half hours of typing and analysis to generate. I'm not sure I've come to any new conclusions except that there are some people I'd like to try to get to the very heart of (but won't know when I get there). Further, I'm going to nag my wife to schedule a charades party and invite every person I can think of. Then we'll see who shows up and who doesn't... Then those of us who do show up can psychoanalyze those who don't.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Black and White just make... Gray
For various reasons, over the past month my life has been composed primarily of dizzying heights of absolute bliss and depressingly abysmal lows. I haven't laughed so much or enjoyed life so much in any of my recollectable history but conversely, I don't remember having been so randomly worried, depressed or pissed off either. Overall it has been a great few weeks but I tend to think I'm handling it the wrong way; I'm mixing the black bits of life with the white bits and getting gray rather than keeping them separate and enjoying them in their purer forms.
For example, today I went out with some co-workers who are, as has been mentioned, very pleasant and at least similarly-minded people. For some reason I can't fully explain though, something in the course of the day pitched me into the very depths of fury. I had a name for the target of my rage but it wasn't exactly justified or completely comprehensible, even to me. Yet as ineffable as it was, this blackness consumed what was otherwise a perfectly pleasant situation. I'm still a little surprised that we went to lunch without the actual guest of honor (ok, not surprised, horrified) but be that as it may it was no reason to let unrelated fury consume me so. It wasn't constructive; nothing was gained whatsoever. Yet consume, it did and everyone felt it.
Then just as I was about to come down from that stratospheric fit of annoyance I arrived home to find a message on my home answering machine from my boss's boss. It seems that while I was meeting with the rest of the department one of my customers called my boss's boss's boss to complain that I hadn't resolved the issues they had reported just a mere three hours ago while I was in a meeting. Further, they complained that they hadn't heard from me all day. This was especially surprising since we had one phone conversation and exchanged six emails in the morning before the meeting but be that as it may, this was officially an emergency of the highest caliber. The appropriate response is, of course, to panic so I spent the next four hours snapping people's heads off, being a general asshole and trying to sort out problems while all the interested parties had long ago gone home for the weekend and stopped worrying about whatever was so important before. This bit of black ink in my life consumed the entirety of a Friday night.
If it were just me wrapped up in this, that would be fine. I can suffer alone. But it's not just me, there are other people involved in every step of this, some of whom I love and care deeply for. From my puzzled lunch mates to my family they all suffered in some way whether they just took the time to inquire after my mental state and offer words of encouragement or made me dinner. I feel bad that my ink splattered on their lives; people have enough ink of their own to deal with.
For example, today I went out with some co-workers who are, as has been mentioned, very pleasant and at least similarly-minded people. For some reason I can't fully explain though, something in the course of the day pitched me into the very depths of fury. I had a name for the target of my rage but it wasn't exactly justified or completely comprehensible, even to me. Yet as ineffable as it was, this blackness consumed what was otherwise a perfectly pleasant situation. I'm still a little surprised that we went to lunch without the actual guest of honor (ok, not surprised, horrified) but be that as it may it was no reason to let unrelated fury consume me so. It wasn't constructive; nothing was gained whatsoever. Yet consume, it did and everyone felt it.
Then just as I was about to come down from that stratospheric fit of annoyance I arrived home to find a message on my home answering machine from my boss's boss. It seems that while I was meeting with the rest of the department one of my customers called my boss's boss's boss to complain that I hadn't resolved the issues they had reported just a mere three hours ago while I was in a meeting. Further, they complained that they hadn't heard from me all day. This was especially surprising since we had one phone conversation and exchanged six emails in the morning before the meeting but be that as it may, this was officially an emergency of the highest caliber. The appropriate response is, of course, to panic so I spent the next four hours snapping people's heads off, being a general asshole and trying to sort out problems while all the interested parties had long ago gone home for the weekend and stopped worrying about whatever was so important before. This bit of black ink in my life consumed the entirety of a Friday night.
If it were just me wrapped up in this, that would be fine. I can suffer alone. But it's not just me, there are other people involved in every step of this, some of whom I love and care deeply for. From my puzzled lunch mates to my family they all suffered in some way whether they just took the time to inquire after my mental state and offer words of encouragement or made me dinner. I feel bad that my ink splattered on their lives; people have enough ink of their own to deal with.
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