Alan Cook's Blog, page 2

Statistics, Gambling and Coincidences

We can’t hide from statistics. They lie in wait for us everywhere. We can’t ignore them by repeating old saws such as “Figures don’t lie but liars can figure.” And eventually one statistic will make us all equal, namely that the death rate is 100 percent. So how do we use them to our advantage?

They, whoever they are, are always telling us we can beat the odds. For example, government bureaucrats inveigle us to play state-sponsored lotteries. If you think this is a good idea, read the book co-written by my brother: Selling Hope: State Lotteries in America, by Philip Cook and Charles Clotfelter. Sure, there are winners all the time, as pointed out by David J. Hand in The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day, but they won’t be you, and as a side note, winning large lotteries will ruin the lives of the winners.

One problem in trying to beat the odds is that you can’t predict which longshots will come in for you. My wife and I ran into our next-door neighbors at a line in London Heathrow Airport, and I ran into a member of the only University of Michigan NCAA championship basketball team, in California, while wearing a T-shirt commemorating that event. He rumbled “Nice shirt, and was gone before I could say anything.

Those coincidences would make David Hand yawn. Of course they happened. Or if they hadn’t happened to us, other coincidences would have. The problem is that of all the thousands of possible coincidences that could happen to us, we can’t predict which ones will.

In my mystery novel, Aces and Knaves, Karl Patterson, who may or may not be a compulsive gambler, depending on who you ask, knows all about statistics. He says, “Anything that can happen will happen eventually,” although he doesn’t necessarily apply this principle to his own life. He is shocked when he has an extended losing streak playing blackjack. Well, you wouldn’t think that Playboy founder Hugh Hefner could gammon a world champion backgammon player five games in a row, but he did.

Another of my brothers, Stephen, a mathematician, pointed out the fallacy in my father’s get-rich-slowly scheme. Dad’s idea was to bet low on an even bet, which, for example, can be found at a casino craps table. As long as you win you keep betting the same amount. If you lose, you keep doubling your bet until you win, which will make you even again. Stephen said that won’t work in the long run because you’ll either have to redouble your bet until you run out of money or you’ll exceed the house betting limit.

Okay, we’ve been talking about losing streaks (which could also be winning streaks), but remember that they don’t exist. Every roll of the dice, every hand dealt from a newly shuffled deck, every coin flip, is a new event, not connected to what happened before. If you flip an unbiased coin and it lands heads ten times in a row, the odds of getting heads on the next flip are still exactly 50 percent.

So what’s my point in all this rambling? Don’t try to beat the house, whether the house is a Las Vegas casino or a state lottery. And next time you run into your wife’s brother in Paris while you’re with your girlfriend, just smile and say, “I knew this was going to happen.”

Scams

We’ve all been the victim of scams. What’s that? You say you’ve never been scammed? Remember that the best scam is the one where the victim doesn’t know she’s been taken. At one time I would have said I couldn’t be scammed, but when I started to think back I realized that wasn’t true. I’ve not only been taken for money but for something as simple as being talked into singing a song for a caller who said she was from the telephone company and needed to test the line. Of course, I don’t answer my phone anymore.

Some of the scams we hear most about are the Grandparent scam (“This is your grandson calling. I’m being held in [faraway place with a strange-sounding name] and I need X dollars to get free. Please don’t tell my parents about this.”), and The IRS scam (“If you don’t send me money [by some weird and untraceable method] immediately, I’ll have you arrested.”).

I got a call from some guy in Olean, New York. When I didn’t answer the phone he left multiple messages saying he was from the Treasury Department and to call him back or all hell would break loose. The Treasury Department in Olean? Please. I grew up in Western New York and I know that the Treasury Department has never heard of any place in New York State outside of New York City, let alone put an office there.

Most of us have heard of Bernie Madoff who operated what federal officials call the “largest financial fraud in U.S. history.” They don’t include a much larger and longer running Ponzi scheme, Social Security, partly because it hasn’t come crashing down yet, and partly because the perpetrators will never admit to running a scam.

My novel, Fool Me Twice, is about scams. Why would a retired business professor and financial manager fall for a scam? Isn’t there anybody smart enough not to be taken by these things? I think the answer is that deep down we want to trust people. Of course, the people we want to trust take advantage of this.

I suggest that the next time you receive a call from a bogus grandson you say something like this: “George? I’m so glad you called. I need your help. I know you can find any piece of information in 30 seconds using your cellphone. I’m stuck on a crossword puzzle clue that’s asking for the year in Roman Numerals when the maternal grandmother of Henry the VIII’s third wife lost her virginity. Could you please help me out with this?”

If the caller jumps on it and gets you the information you’ll know that at least he is the approximate age of your grandson, and can act accordingly. If he refuses to do it, tell him to suck eggs and hang up.

Authoritarianism

I published my book, Freedom’s Light: Quotations from History’s Champions of Freedom, many years ago, but it is, if anything, more relevant today than it ever was. (E-book version available free at Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo.)

The leaders of our two main political parties have one thing in common. Most of them are authoritarians. Authoritarians are people who want to tell us what to do—and what not to do. We must not take a step without their permission. They are happiest when they are creating executive orders, taxes, laws and regulations that limit our ability to do as we wish.

Authoritarianism is the opposite of personal freedom, which is the right to do what we want to as long as it doesn’t hurt somebody else. The United States was conceived with the idea that its citizens have unalienable rights that can’t be taken away from them. Unfortunately, these rights have been eroded to the point where, instead of being the freest country in the world we are now well down the list.

People who support authoritarians are looking for a strong leader who can wave a magic sword and fix everything that’s wrong, but authoritarians see everything in black and white. They have no flexibility and want everybody to bow to them. Leaders like this end up making our world a whole lot worse. Lord Acton said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Big government promotes authoritarianism. George Washington, who was our first president but declined to be king, said, “Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is force. Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearsome master.” How many of today’s leaders would decline a crown? How many act as if they already have one?

Authoritarians keep us in a constant panic by hammering us about “threats”—which may be from other countries, our own people or natural forces—and which must be countered with drastic measures, including unending warfare, higher taxes and the right for government organizations to spy on us. All of these reduce our personal freedom. Should we give in? Benjamin Franklin said it best: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Authoritarians don’t like aspects of our Constitution. They don’t like free speech when it means that people can criticize them. They don’t like other parts of the Bill of Rights if these rights limit their powers. They wish they could alter the Constitution to suit their own view of the world—and to give them more power.

We owe it to our descendants to fight against those who would grab unlimited power and reduce our personal freedom. If we don’t, our children and grandchildren will live in a world of confining walls instead of unlimited horizons.

Writing a Memoir About Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling

This blog is about Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling, Traveling the World, and Other Adventures, by Bonny Robinson Cook. A giveaway of the book is on Goodreads May 1-29, 2016.

I have been bugging my wife, Bonny, to write her memoirs ever since she retired from Xerox in 2003 as a vice president. She started as a school teacher, and her career paralleled much of what is called the women’s movement. I was sure it would make an interesting story.

Years went by and nothing happened. I mentioned the book from time to time, hoping I could nudge her into action, but she didn’t nudge. She spent her time studying genealogy and DNA, and planning interesting trips we could take, which was fine, but it didn’t get the book I was sure had to be written—written.

Finally, I realized that in order to get the book written I would have to write it. That’s how I became a ghost writer. However, the book had to have her voice to be authentic. She wasn’t sure she wanted her story in print, especially some of the intimate details of her life. Well, okay, of course she would have the final say on what went into the book and what was left out.

We settled on how we could have a working partnership. I would grab her for a half hour when I could get her attention between looking for ancestors and working out at her health club. I interviewed her and scribbled notes furiously until I had a page or more. I knew what questions to ask her because I’d heard most of the stories before.

When I had enough notes for a segment 500 words or longer I would race to my computer and write it in Bonny’s voice, as closely as I could match it. Then she would read what I had written and make corrections and additions.

When Bonny saw the book unfold before her eyes she liked how it read, and she became more comfortable with it. People we talked to about the book said they wanted to read it when it was published. As a onetime salesman, I took that as a buying signal.

As the number of chapters grew we thought of additional events that should be included. Some of them I had written about, previously, in one form or another, such as how we met (by “computer” match in 1964 when computers weren’t even being used for that sort of thing).

We had to be careful about how we described other events. When we talked about some of the non-business activities taking place in the first places she worked as a programmer we couldn’t use names or titles of the people involved. Of course, the celebrity who pursued her when she sat next to him in First Class on a flight to Chicago had to remain anonymous. And she didn’t want the skinny-dipping episode put in at all.

We asked Ellen, a friend of mine, to read the book. Ellen worked many years for the Daily Breeze before moving east and eventually working as an editor for the New York Times. She gave us valuable comments and suggestions, such as having an opening chapter that started things off with a bang. Being a fiction writer, I was used to doing that to catch the reader’s attention, and it made sense in nonfiction also.

Bonny had some trepidation about letting Richard, who was her boss much of the time she was at Xerox, read the book, fearing he might nitpick it to death. She finally sent him a copy, and was relieved when he loved it. He gave us tips about telling how Xerox was ahead of the technology curve—for example, offering a predecessor to cloud computing, and developing the first feasible print-on-demand technology for book publishers to use (printing only the number of copies needed instead of having to print a large number of books at one time that might not be salable).

I came up with several suggestions for names. Bonny didn’t want a long name, but I argued that in nonfiction the name must say enough to interest a reader. We finally settled on Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling, Traveling, the World, and Other Adventures, by Bonny Robinson Cook. My illustrator, Janelle Carbajal, supplied us with a great cover, and we were on our way.

Junk Science Used by "Good" People

Human beings are arrogant. We think we are a lot more important than we are. At one time we thought the earth was the center of the universe and we were the most important creatures living on the earth. Although some of us have grudgingly given up that idea, we still think we have a lot more power than we do.

For example, we think we have control of the weather on the earth. Although the earth has been warming and cooling, cyclically, for billions of years without our interference, all of a sudden we have acquired the ability to manipulate this.

In the history of the earth there have been periods of mass extinctions of animal and plant species, caused by cataclysmic events such as gigantic volcanic eruptions or collisions with asteroids. Some people say we’re experiencing an ongoing mass extinction caused by human beings. There’s no doubt that humans have hastened the extinction of some species, but are we causing a mass extinction?

Could it be that some of us use our version of scientific evidence to pursue our own political goals? Some people say the science of global warming (or fill in your own favorite cause) is settled. Science is never settled. If it were, the earth would still be the center of the universe. But new discoveries are constantly being made.

My new suspense novel, Good to the Last Death, takes a look at self-described do-gooders who may be doing a lot more harm than good. When Carol Golden’s husband, Rigo, disappears, she not only has to look for him but also elude the FBI at the same time since there is evidence she may have been involved in his disappearance.

She doggedly follows a faint trail, keeping her location a secret from everybody except her friend, Jennifer, a spy-in-training, who takes time off from her top-secret job to help Carol. What they find out is that an organization of “good” people dedicated to saving the earth from global warming and pollution may feel justified in carrying out activities reminiscent of the worst tyrants of the twentieth century as part of their solution, and that Rigo may be the first casualty.

The search for Rigo and the truth will take Carol from her married home of Los Angeles to the ruggedly beautiful Rocky Mountains near Denver, Colorado where an unusually hot summer (global warming in action or cyclical variation?) is fueling passions that may not be conducive to the long-term viability of the human race. Carol and Jennifer must have concrete evidence of wrongdoing and Rigo’s whereabouts before they can call in the FBI, but keeping themselves alive is going to be their first job. One misstep in the mountains can be fatal.

Grief--How Writers Get it Wrong

“Your father was just killed. I’m very sorry. Get over it.”

I’m paraphrasing, of course, but this is the way grief was handled in a television episode of “Hawaii Five-O” I watched recently. Steve McGarrett’s father (this is a flashback) is the first person to arrive at a murder scene. He confirms that the man is dead and then immediately says some version of the above to his young daughter.

My observation is that this is the way many writers handle scenes of grief. It’s easier to spot them on television shows than in books, since everything is netted out in a TV show. (“You’ve got one minute for the grief scene.”)

Another favorite phrase of the policeman/detective/relative/friend is, “Everything’s going to be all right.”

How ridiculous can you get? Of course, everything’s not going to be all right. Everything’s never going to be all right. You’ve just lost a loved one.

So how should a writer handle scenes of grief? I work as a volunteer listener at a crisis hotline where we take phone calls from people who want to talk about their problems. Many of them are grieving. We teach a class in listening for our new volunteers. Everybody should take this class, especially writers.

Our listeners handle calls from people who are grieving by listening to them. Grief-stricken people aren’t looking for advice; they want somebody to understand their feelings—to empathize with what they are going through. They want someone who is there for them, not preaching to them.

They don’t want to be judged about whether they are grieving properly. “You’ll get over it.”

Wrong.

They are never going to get over it. The grief from losing a loved one is always going to be with them in some form.

There are supposedly five stages of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. That reduces grieving to something mechanical. “Get past these stages and you’ll be fine.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. People may go through these stages in any order. They may skip some, altogether, and return to others, even much later.

One television show that at least gets it partially right is “Crossing Jordan.” My wife and I came late to this show and watch it on Netflix. At least it has a grief counselor who listens to people who come into the morgue to identify a loved one. That doesn’t mean the show doesn’t fall into the trap of advice and judgment from time to time.

A writer who has a character consoling a person in grief, assuming that character is doing it correctly, would have the consoler do the following: really listen to the person who is grieving, acknowledge his feelings, empathize with him—but don’t preach, give advice or judge him.

Doing those things takes time, and television shows don’t have much time, but that is no excuse for getting it wrong.

I shouldn’t say this because I have relatives and friends who are therapists, but if everyone learned how to listen properly we wouldn’t need as many therapists.

Free Books

Why would an author give away his book? Aren’t all authors writing to make money? I’ve wondered about this for a long time after seeing the number of books that are available free as e-books. I’ve come up with a couple of reasons.

The first reason is why I’m giving away my book, Freedom’s Light: Quotations from History’s Champions of Freedom. I think everybody should be aware of its contents, especially young people. The book contains quotations by historical figures about personal freedom. On a daily basis we don’t think much about our freedom, even though we may be losing it “…an inch at a time.” As Dr. Walter Williams says. The people quoted, including Aristotle, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Anne Frank and Martin Luther King, knew what they were talking about. We need to be aware of what governments throughout the world are doing to our freedom before it is gone.

The second reason I came up with for giving away a book is that it can be a good promotional device, especially when you’ve written a lot of books as I have. If you like a book you get free, you may be tempted to read more books by the same author. I picked Aces and Knaves to give away because it’s a standalone mystery written in a breezy style, that people have said is fun to read. It’s about gambling and other hijinks, and takes place in Los Angeles and San Francisco. There’s a murder to solve, the characters are likeable (well, some are more likeable than others) and there’s some potentially romantic stuff as well.

For anyone inclined to check these books out, they are available as e-books at http://www.barnesandnoble.com, http://www.kobo.com and http://smashwords.com.

Blog on a Blot: Backgammon Anyone?

My new mystery/suspense novel, HIT THAT BLOT, has a backgammon theme, but since there don’t seem to be many backgammon players around I’m glad people are telling me it’s a good read even for those poor souls who don’t play the game.

Backgammon is a game of chance (using dice) with a strong element of skill. People who know the odds of certain events happening have a big advantage. My understanding is that it used to be much more popular in many places, such as the US, than it is currently.

I, myself, learned to play backgammon many years ago. I even read a book on backgammon and learned good opening moves and the chances of hitting my opponent’s checkers or getting hit. At that point I figured I was ready for a tournament being held nearby. I entered the advanced category instead of novice because the prizes were better. Of course, I was quickly handed my head by a bunch of Armenians who were born playing backgammon, but in spite of that I’ve been playing on and off ever since.

Not long ago I started playing backgammon on the Internet, using a Microsoft app that hooks up players from all over the world, and did quite well. This led me to the idea for a new Carol Golden novel, since Carol is a mathematician and likes to play games. In doing research for the book I discovered that the backgammon guru (or MFIC—don’t ask what that means) for the Los Angeles area is Patrick Gibson, a man I used to work with in a previous millennium.

I entered one of Patrick’s tournaments and got handed my head again, but I also found that I’m not that bad. I had some good games, although I lost the matches. So I wrote the book, making Carol a better player than I am. Then I had the hubris to add a series of appendices giving backgammon tips and a glossary of terms. The feedback has been positive, I’m happy to say.

Whether or not people play backgammon I hope they enjoy the book. But deep down inside I’m hoping to start a backgammon revival.

New York Book Signing with the Pros

Since I’ve been writing and publishing books for over 20 years, I’m used to participating in book signings, often with other authors. However, the book signing I was at on April 29th in New York City topped them all for fun and excitement.

The book being signed was Mystery Writers of America Presents Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War (isn’t that a mouthful?). It contains 20 stories by 21 authors, including me. My story is called "Checkpoint Charlie."

There are some big names. Jeffery Deaver and Raymond Benson, who edited the book, are the only Americans to have written James Bond novels. Other authors include Sara Paretsky and J. A. Jance, and Californians T. Jefferson Parker, and John Lescroat.

When I heard the book signing was going to take place on April 29th at the Mysterious Bookshop in lower Manhattan, I didn’t think I’d be able to go. But where there’s a will… My wife, Bonny, and I grew up in the East, although we’ve lived in California for over 50 years. We have carloads of relatives on the East Coast that we try to visit periodically. Perhaps April and May were the right months to do that.

We landed in Boston, and worked our way south through New England, including a stop in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, where Bonny grew up. Do you know anybody who keeps track of all their high school classmates? That’s right—she does.

We arrived in Manhattan in the morning, and promptly ditched our rental car in a parking garage. That evening it cost us $55 to get it out of hock. We took the C train (remember Duke Ellington’s classic song, “Take the A Train”?) to Central Park and visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We saw five Vermeer paintings, and found out he painted more than one girl wearing a pearl earring (remember the movie, The Girl with a Pearl Earring?).

The book signing started at six p.m. in the cramped quarters of the store that has shelves of books going up to the high ceiling, with ladders on tracks and rollers to retrieve them. Thirteen of the 21 authors showed up, and lots of book lovers. Wine and beer were served. Bonny ran around taking pictures.

It was a big occasion for the store, which has a close association with Mystery Writers of America. MWA was presenting their Edgar Awards to the best authors that week in Manhattan.

The 13 authors sat around a table, and for a while we signed books as fast as we could. I was sitting next to the editors, Jeffery Deaver and Raymond Benson. They would sign first and pass the books on to me. Deaver, who has signed thousands of books in his life, has perfected his signature so that he can do it in less than a second. Benson is also a very fast writer.

The books began to pile up beside me, as I am slower at writing my name. Gayle Lynds, a former Californian, was taking bets on when my stack would fall over. Vicki Doudera, who sat on the other side of me, said she had planned on wearing a pink dress to the signing, but her 19-year-old daughter said, “Nobody wears colors in New York.” She wore a black and gray dress.

We must have signed a hundred books at the table. Patrons who had purchased their own copies would thrust books over our shoulders to be signed, interrupting the assembly-line process, and making the stability of my growing pile more precarious.

Finally, we had finished signing the books that the store provided to us, and we were free to mingle with the other authors and patrons. It was fun to meet fellow authors who had stories in the book.

Jeffery Deaver had placed one of my short stories in an anthology he edited some years ago, and I met him in California once. I enjoyed seeing him again.

Authors not in the book, who were in town for the Edgar Awards, showed up. I shook the hand of Robert Crais, a Southern Californian being presented with the Grand Master Award from Mystery Writers of America.

After we left the bookstore we had trouble finding our motel in New Jersey, but that’s another story, and didn’t dampen the fun we’d had.

Are We in Dystopia Yet?

I have written 13 stories for my grandsons, Matthew and Mason. The first one to be published in book form was Dancing with Bulls. I have now published a second story as a book. I call it Pictureland.

The inspiration for Pictureland is a painting on the wall of my living room. It is a twilight scene in a city, with buildings, pedestrians, an incongruous horse pulling a cart, and a light rain falling. It looks like a pleasant place to be.

Looks are deceiving. It’s actually a place without a constitution or laws, where tyrants practice mind control, and have implanted chips in the heads of the residents. When Matthew and Mason enter Pictureland on a whim, with help from Amy, a girl in the picture, they don’t know this, but Amy quickly clues them in.

There are multiple paintings represented in Pictureland, and the residents include not only the people in the pictures but also those living in the surrounding areas, as imagined by the artists. Most of them are “good” people. A few are not.

Matthew, Mason and Amy set about trying to get rid of the tyrants before the three are thrown into the Bloody Tower (which is in a picture of the Tower of London) and possibly, in the case of Matthew and Mason, executed by having their heads cut off, a la Anne Boleyn.

This is an adventure story, and the boys certainly have adventures, but there may also be a (gasp) moral. Can we recognize our own world in the book? At least, we don’t have chips in our heads—yet (although I know of some folks who think they do), but if the powers that be know where we’re going, everyone we’re talking to and all the websites we’re visiting, isn’t that almost the same thing?

I’m reminded of what Lord Acton said about power corrupting. Have we given too much power to too few people? Think about it.