Briane Pagel's Blog: Thinking The Lions, page 4

Book 46: PS I got those Mac & Cheetos they were pretty good

(In case you're wondering how I'm doing on reaching 100 books; I need to be at 50 by June 30 to be on track. I am 1/2 way through four other books -- two audiobooks whose time expired before I finished them are on hold for me -- and have started another one, so I'm kind of on pace? Two of the current books are superlong.)

Faithful Place is the third book in my book club with Sweetie, and (completely unrelated to the fact that she hid the existence of a new snack food from me) I decided last week that I would go ahead and finish the book ahead of our club.

We started our book club last year, deciding we would read a chapter at a time and then talk about it. We picked Tana French's book to read because I'd just come across a review of her 5th book and it sounded good, so we started the Dublin Murder Squad mystery series at book 1, In The Woods.  We read through that one and its follow-up The Likeness and started Faithful Place a LONG time ago.  How our club works is that you read at your own pace but you only read the current chapter and then wait for the other person to catch up before discussing.  I had finished about the fourth chapter maybe 5 months ago? Longer? A while back. Sweetie, though, wasn't as into this book I think or at least not in the mood for it for the past half-year. I wanted to find out what happened, though, so last week I announced that I was going to go ahead and read the rest of the book and discuss it with her whenever she wanted to finish it.

She didn't really protest, but, then, that's the first time I've broken the We'll do this together pact. On other things -- TV shows, mostly-- that we've decided to watch together I've waited for her (or she's waited for me.)(With the exception of Lost, which she and Middle watched ahead of me and then gave away that my favorite character, Charlie, died in one of the episodes.)

Now, she keeps bugging me to tell her if she was right about who the murderer was, and I keep saying I won't tell her. (She's threatening to read it from the back forwards just to find out, which would be interesting to watch.)

(It might, in fact, be interesting to write a mystery from the back forwards, unwinding to each previous stage of the mystery. I wonder if it could be done and still be exciting. Challenge... considered.)

Anyway, Faithful Place is pretty good. I don't ordinarily go in for mysteries very much, because I am bad at solving them. (Pretty much everyone the detective interacts with is a suspect in my mind.)  But mysteries where the main point isn't the mystery can be entertaining, and that's what two of the three Tana French books are like so far.

To back up a bit, because the books all sort of interrelate: In In The Woods (the best one so far) a dead girl is found in a woods that developers are tearing up. Two detectives are assigned to investigate: Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox.  Rob, though, was involved in some sort of near-abduction as a kid right in those woods, and he can't remember what happened. That nearly derails the investigation as Rob slowly goes to pieces trying to figure out what happened to him and his two best friends.

The follow-up, The Likeness, has only Cassie from the first book. She's used by Undercover detective Frank Mackey to investigate a murder among some graduate students, infiltrating the group because she is a dead (pun intended) ringer for the victim; the cover story is that the victim was only seriously wounded and has returned to the home they all share.

Both of those stories are good. Sweetie liked (pun intended) The Likeness less than I did, because she found its premise pretty unbelievable.  In The Woods was fantastic, The Likeness just good.

Faithful Place is in-between. This one stars Frank Mackey, and has him heading back to the poor part of Dublin where he grew up when the corpse of his former girlfriend from his teen years is found in the abandoned house up the street from where he lived.  He and the girl were going to elope, but she never showed up on the planned night, so he left himself and spent the next 20 years thinking she'd run off from him, too.

The mystery isn't much of a mystery; it pretty quickly centers on one of three suspects and although late in the game there's some attempts at making two of the three seem credible there's never very much doubt who did it.  The better part of the book is not only the way Frank has to investigate -- he's not on the case, of course, and is somewhat of a suspect himself -- but how Frank interacts with his family, both the family he left behind in the poor part of town and the ex-wife and 9-year-old daughter he's got in the newer part of his life.  The story manages to show a dirt-poor group of Irish people in a way that makes them sad but not pitiful, and feels like a really great look at what life in Ireland is like for regular people.

There's a part at the end of the book where I thought for a minute it was going to go off the rails. Without spoiling much, I'm going to simply say that authors need to tread carefully when they have kids do stuff that kids don't do. I'm no expert on kids but I've been around 9 year olds and I've never seen one --even a precocious one-- even one raised by a detective -- behave like the 9 year old in this book.  That almost in fact killed the book for me, except that the scene right after the awfully-written 9-year-old scene is so great that it pulled it back. By this point, three books in, I'm willing to let French have a really bad spot of writing. The scene read like it was an attempt to gin up some suspense while also revealing some information, and was hamhanded and overly precious at the same time.

Despite that one flaw, the book is pretty good, and worth reading even if you're not crazy about mysteries.

(And, Sweetie, since I know you read this sometimes, no I'm not going to tell you who did it.)  :P

I'm starting to think Sweetie doesn't know what marriage is all about.

So I'm sitting here tonight eating my 10:18 p.m. snack and I read on the Internet that MAC N CHEETOS is a thing that exists:



I mention that to Sweetie and she says... and I QUOTE:

"Oh, yeah, I heard about those the other day."

So I have been sitting around the past few days eating food that's not deep-fried macaroni and cheese coated in Cheeto dust while Sweetie has just been sitting on this information like it's no big deal.

I don't 100% remember our wedding vows but the promise to always tell your spouse about new deep-fried cheese-coated foods was at least implied.

As usual kids are why we can't have nice things.

I don't pretend to even have a functional grasp of Brexit and what it might mean for the world except that it probably doesn't mean chaos for the world.  But what I do know is that again, failing to vote has confounded expectations and messed things up.

In polls prior to Brexit the prediction was that "Remain" would win, and polls also showed that young people by a strong majority favored "Remain."  It was the oldsters who wanted to leave the EU.  As we now know, "Leave" won and it seems that kids staying home and listening to their record albums or playing action figures or whatever determined the result.  Overall less than 60% of young people in Britain voted in the referendum. (Source) Voter turnout in the 40s and up was as high as 80%. It seems pretty obvious that there was an direct relationship between "Remain" and "Youth," and an inverse relationship between "Youth" and "Actually Going To Vote."

Education was the second-best predictor of how people would vote, as generally speaking the less education a person had the more he or she was likely to vote to Leave. It's not immediately clear whether there was any correlation between level of education and likelihood of voting.

Consider that trend here in America, where we get nowhere near the 70+% turnout Brexit had. Here are some statistics:

The less educated someone is the more likely they are to support Donald Trump.

Hillary! has double-digit leads among voters under 40, but that lead narrows to six percent among middle-aged adults.

And Trump leads among senior citizens.

Polls right now show Hillary winning. Polls showed Brexit voting "Remain" right up until "Leave" won.

"If you had bought and played all of Pregame’s picks since 2011, you’d be down $1,359,432."

Back when I cared about football more, I used to have a sports blog and then posts on this site called "Nonsportsmanlike Conduct," the idea being that I knew very little about sports but liked them anyway.

One of the things I would do almost every week is make picks for the NFL games, and compare them to the so-called 'experts' picks. My picks were based on rules I would invent before seeing that week's matchups; I might say I'm going to pick to win the team which has a home city closest to the Mason-Dixon line, while the 'experts' on ESPN and the like would use their years of analysis and involvement in the game.

As you'd expect from the fact that I'm mentioning it, random chance and weird rules tied or beat the experts many weeks, and my overall record hovered around 60% correct, based on nothing more than picking based on, say, which team had a quarterback with a more quarterbacky name.

As it turns out, the 'experts' are still no more right than random chance, (and in fact are probably significantly more incorrect.  This article from Deadspin shows that "Pregame.com" makes money selling its sports-betting picks despite being wrong more often than not, and also makes money by being paid based on how many bets its customers lose.

In just about every sport, college or pro, Pregame’s picks are losing money. The data covers 49 touts who sold their plays during this period (not including those whose existences have been completely expunged from the archives, likeDavid Glisan, Mike Hook, and Stan Sharp), and of those 49, only 11 of them showed a profit. Of those gains, most were marginal and would be wiped out by standard fees. If Pregame’s experts followed their own betting advice, as Bell claims they do, most would be penniless.

Last season, "Daily Fantasy Football" leagues were exposed as rackets in which employees used insider knowledge to bet on other sites, making thousands of dollars at the expense of people like you.  Once the lawsuits started, laws started being passed legalizing the corruption. (Daily Fantasy ended up as exempt from Internet only through a misunderstanding of how popular it would be and a bit of chicanery on the rulemaking that got it exempted, partially involving a lobbyist lawyer who had helped get the exemption then taking a leave of absence from his firm to work for the Bush White House drafting the rules that would affect the law he'd just lobbied for; the entire story about that is fascinating and you can read it here.)

I'm not anti-gambling, although I'm not much of a gambler. I play the lottery from time to time and once spent $20 in Las Vegas on the slot machines.  I still sort of regret spending that money, though, since I view gambling as entertainment and the money as being disposable: if I gamble I no more expect to get my money back than I would if I paid the $20 to see a movie or buy a book. I expect, rather, to get $20 worth of entertainment, which is why I do it so rarely: I don't find it entertaining enough, dollar-for-dollar.

But the bottom line is that Pregame.com's advertising, as well as the claims made by Daily Fantasy leagues and the hidden machinations that make it almost impossible to win mean that they are not 'gambling' and should be illegal.  They aren't gambling because you really cannot win; they should not be legal because there are numerous prohibitions on false advertising, deceptive trade practices, and swindles.

Pregame’s picks are sold with a suggested bet size, either one, two, or three units, where in this case one unit—in gambler-speak—equals $100. So Pregame’s total loss equates to nearly 3,100 one-unit bets. Take out the pushes (where you neither win nor lose) and free plays, and despite numerous examples of fudged records, Pregame’s roster picked around 51.67 percent against the spread, not enough to beat the vig. Flipping a coin would have been a more cost-effective strategy.

Generally speaking, you can't win.  ALL gambling is set up to favor the house: Vegas slots, Indian casinos, state lotteries, and Pregame.com and Daily Fantasy included.  The odds are against you, so don't count on it for money.  Even if the daily fantasy sites weren't a racket using insider information to scam you (at least last year), the top players are people who wager in the hundreds of thousands and use sophisticated algorithms to trounce you. The top Rotogrinder player last year was a data scientist who bet $140,000 a day.  Most winners field dozens of different lineups, playing the bets like hedge funds are supposed to work -- betting on the longshot that makes thousands rather than the predicted winner.

If you want to bet on sports, bet on sports. Don't pay 'experts' to steal your money from you and give you advice. If they knew enough to win regularly they wouldn't be manning phones on Saturday morning telling you to take Tennessee with the points. They'd bet themselves into paradise.

Instead, they're doing what hucksters and snake-oil salesman have always done: playing on your gullibility and trust of 'experts' to get you to give them the money they can't earn honestly.

Ready ... aim... fire!

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Polar Bear!

"I got into acting for the same reasons I went to Morocco and became a lawyer: I didn't have much else to do."

Way back when I put a lot of time into posting stuff and almost nobody read it. So periodically I will repost stuff from years ago so that nobody can read it now, either. This one was from June 15, 2008.










All the world's a stage and one man in his time plays many parts. Most of my parts involve resting now.
You have to work very hard to irritate people who are doing yoga, but Sweetie and I and The Babies! did just that the other night. Without even trying, and, in my case, without even noticing.

Thursday night was one of my nights to work out this week. I try to work out every third day. That's way down from what I used to do. When I was healthy and young, I worked out every day. It was easier for me to work out every day then because I was healthy and young, and because I really had no other life to speak of. The days when I worked out every day, jogging 5 or 6 or even 16 miles at a crack, were also the days when I was not seeing anyone, when I wasn't working very much, and when the entire furnishings of my apartment consisted of a lamp, a mattress, a couch, a desk, and a tape player/radio. You can only read and/or listen to "Mad Radio 92.1" for so long before you have to go do something, and so I worked out a lot back then, jogging and biking and even rollerblading until I gave that up because rollerblading isn't as much fun once you've scraped off most of the right side of your body in a luxury subdivision.

I was never a great rollerblader, anyway, but I liked it because it gave the feeling of running while not actually being like running. Rollerblading might have been the first of many, many activities that people tried to trick themselves into thinking were actual exercise when they were not. Everything from the "Abdomenizer" to "Tae Bo" has been passed off as being as good as running, when it's not. But in the exercise department, "as good as" can only mean one thing: as much work as. So if you're doing an exercise that is less physically demanding than some other exercise, then it's not as good as that other exercise.

Nothing in the exercise department is as physically demanding as running. Here's what's as good as running, in the exercise department: running.
Although I ran a lot, I didn't like running all the time -- because it was hard-- so I would occasionally mix in rollerblading because it was "as good as" running. It was hard, even then, for me to understand that claim. Rollerblading was nowhere near the amount of work that running was. One of the general rules of life: nothing with wheels on it is as difficult as something without wheels. On the other hand, rollerblading was 17 million times as terrifying as running, again because of the wheels, so maybe those two were supposed to average out to being as hard as running, because the fright would

People always claimed that rollerblades could be stopped. People lied. Rollerblades were and ar e unstoppable. I generally dealt with the problem of not being able to stop rollerblades by rollerblading on flat surfaces: the campus of the college I attended, parking lots, the hardwood floors of my apartment, etc. On specific occasions, I dealt with the problem of not being able to stop rollerblades by falling down, not always on purpose.

The fall that led to my quitting rollerblading occurred just a few days before opening night of the play I was in that summer. That was the other thing I did, back then, to kill time: I exercised, and I acted. I got into acting for the same reasons I went to Morocco and became a lawyer: I didn't have much else to do.

"I didn't have much else to do" explains virtually every major accomplishment in my life, as I sit here and look at it. I suppose it's lucky for me that we didn't have cable TV or the Internet when I was a kid or I'd never have gotten out of my parents house (which would be a problem, given that they sold it about 20 years back. But I bet the new people are pretty nice and would have liked me.)

Not having much to do one summer, I decided that I would be an actor and began trying out for parts in local plays. That required me to memorize a Shakespearean monologue, which makes twice in my life that I've had to memorize a Shakespearean monologue. Let's check the stats:

Number of times I have been required by society to memorize a Shakespearean monologue: Two.

Number of times I've been required by society to know how to save someone who's choking or having a heart attack: Zero.

That says something about America. Or me. Or my role in America. I just know it. But I can't say what it says because the only answers I know are found in the various Shakespearean monologues I've memorized.

Here's another thing I've memorized: the book So Big, starring Elmo. So Big is Mr F's favorite book, because he likes to wave "bye bye" when Elmo does and he likes the [SPOILER ALERT!] fact that Elmo "pops up" and is SO BIG at the end of the book. We read So Big about three times a day; sometimes we read it twice in a row, even though you'd think that it wouldn't hold quite such a thrill once you know the ending. We've read it so often that we're on the second copy of the book; the first got torn apart, understandable what with all the excitement of Baby Elmo standing up and Baby Elmo drinking from a cup.

I can recite So Big by heart. That, too, says something. It says something about the general direction my life has headed since college that I used to memorize Shakespeare and now I can just as easily quote Elmo. ("Baby Elmo sings: la la la.)

Then again, I tend to think that Shakespearean monologues and So Big have roughly equivalent market value for lawyers, so I'm probably doing as well as I ever was. And the Babies! don't get as much of a kick out of my Shakespeare quotes. Maybe they would if Shakespeare popped up at the end. (How big is Shakespeare? SO BIG!)(That might make Shakespeare more palatable to almost everyone.)

I had successfully memorized my quote and turned that into a small part in the play Brother Truckers, which ran for four days at a theater nowhere near anybody. A few days before opening,  I went out rollerblading because having landed a part I again had nothing really to do; I only had about four lines in the play. Don't look down on me for that. That one old lady got an Oscar for having, like one line and slapping Denzel Washington, didn't she? Didn't she? I'm going to remember it that way anyway, so there you go: I'm right, and there are no small parts, only small actors.

Except my part actually was a small part and didn't actually require me to even be at all the rehearsals, so I was rollerblading on a beautiful summer day and, feeling daring, had decided to get out on the road a little bit, just a local actor out enjoying the sun, and I started heading through a rich subdivision where no doubt some day I would live after getting my Oscar or whatever award it is they give to small theater productions, and I was cruising down the road and getting faster and faster because it was on a slope, until I reached the critical velocity where I no longer was enjoying the activity but was devoting most of my energy to figuring out how and when I would stop, when that decision was made for me by a patch of hot asphalt, which caught one rollerblade but not the other, sending me skidding along the road on my left side for a long time and scraping off roughly 100% of my skin.

I don't mean "roughly" as in "approximately." I mean it was scraped off roughly.

If you saw that play I was in -- if you were one of the 20 people-- then I apologize if "The Prosecutor" moved a bit stiffly and did all his accusatorial pointing with his right arm. It was not my first interpretation of that character.

Nowadays, I'm even less likely to want to go through that kind of workout. I know all about "no pain no gain," but I can't think of what it is I gained through that fall, and I know I lost a lot, mostly in the skin department. Plus, with my more hectic life now, I don't have all the time and energy and youthfulness and extra skin I need to keep working out like I used to. So now, I try to work out about every third day or so, which makes it easier to fit in my workouts around my busy schedule of not actually ever doing any work in my office and then complaining about how nothing ever gets done.

Another thing that I've found makes it easier to fit in my workout is changing my workout. I haven't changed my basic attitudes towards exercise: running is still the best exercise and I still sneer at people who try to say that something is as good as running. I'll never change that. Once I form an opinion, it's set. I think that most people waste a lot of time and energy changing their opinions all because someone presented a bunch of "facts" and "logical reasons" why they should change their opinions. If my opinion was right once, why wouldn't it be right forever? You don't see other things that are right being changed, do you? Nobody goes around saying that the law of gravity really ought to be re-examined given what we now know about this or that. (Although if they would re-examine the law of gravity, it might help me get back to rollerblading.) So my opinions about running, like my opinions about what constitutes good music and what foods are edible, have stayed constant for decades. (The opinions are, in order: "it's the best exercise," "the song 'Sit Down' by James," and "Doritos.")

What has changed is my opinion about cross-training. Cross-training is where it's at. Nowadays, it's all about cross-training. To stay in shape, I can't just go running all the time, I've decided; I need to mix in some other activities, activities that may not be as good as running but which are valuable because they "work my body in different ways" and "exercise different muscle groups" and do all that other stuff that the doctor says when I've stopped listening because I'm still fixated on the part where he said I need to lose 40 pounds and I'm wondering if I should point out to him that I had my car keys in my pocket when I was weighed and that probably skewed things a bit.

So I've begun cross-training, taking some days off from running, and I've got to tell you, I love it. I love it mainly because of the different activities I can now count as "exercise" and consider myself a healthy person for doing. Here are the activities I mix in as part of my extremely strict cross-training regimen:

Playing basketball one-on-one against The Boy.

Playing "Police Bees."

Yardwork.

Doing some sit-ups while I watch "The Daily Show."

and, most recently,

Taking The Babies! to the health club to play with them for a while because it was raining and I wanted to get out of the house and thought that the club would be pretty empty only it wasn't so we ended up just walking around the track but the boys got antsy and loud so the lady who was teaching a yoga class at that exact time on the area the track went around got on her little yoga-headset and said over the PA that the 'people on the track have to be quiet because we have 10 minutes left' so we gave up and got in the car and went for a drive instead.

That was my workout Thursday night, an integral part of my cross-training regimen. I have to say, I felt great at the end of it. I felt great because it was really a very low-impact workout and also because I hadn't actually heard Yoga Lady yell at us over the PA because to try to quiet down Mr F, I'd taken to swinging him around as I walked to make him laugh, and he was laughing, so I missed the announcement about just how much we were disturbing Yoga Lady; Sweetie had to tell me.
It should be obvious, too, that walking around a track while swinging a 35-pound toddler around is actually a very good workout. You can find out for yourself by buying my new exercise video: Walking Around a Track While Swinging A 35-pound Toddler Around... To The Oldies!.
If you order your copy today, I'll throw in a bonus DVD of me reading So Big! Opening and closing that pop-up at the end is almost as good as running.

Things You Don't Have To Worry About But We Do

Mr F and Mr Bunches are 10. Each night, when they go to sleep, we close their bedroom door and latch it shut with a hook. Their windows in their room are duct-taped shut with about four rolls of tape each. We have a baby monitor in there so we can hear if they wake up and do anything.  Each of the doors that lead to the outside of our house have a chain with a padlock on it and the keys are hidden where it would be hard to reach them.

Other doors to other rooms are also closed with a hook-and-eye, placed as high up as they can be.

"Don't you think that's excessive?" people sometimes ask us, as we wait to see if we can get some help for the very expensive cost of putting bars over the windows, and try to save for a therapy dog that would help keep Mr F from wandering away so quickly. We pay $30 a month for a GPS bracelet he wears so that if does ever get away again the police can quickly track him. We give updated pictures every now and then to our local police department.

"Don't you think that's excessive?" people repeat.

Last Sunday an 8-year-old boy with autism, nonverbal and fascinated with water (the way Mr F is too) got up sometime after 2 a.m., piled two bean-bag chairs up and unlocked the door to get out. He was last seen 1 1/2 miles from his house on a security video. Police found his pajama bottoms (he was wearing Captain America PJs) but haven't found him yet.

When we go to visit someone, one of us, Sweetie or I, follows Mr F around wherever he goes; only one parent gets to socialize at a time.

"Oh sit down," people say. "It'll be fine."

On New Year's Eve a 5-year-old boy with autism wandered out of his aunt's house during a party. Police found him dead in a canal, his tablet 30 feet away. He left barefoot and without a coat, with temperatures in the 20s.

The Strongest Little Boy In The World

'People in debt don't start companies and innovate, don't take chances, don't claim political rights."

Wolf Richter: These Debt Slaves are the Government’s Largest Asset Class, and It Will Haunt the Economy for YearsPosted on June 16, 2016 by Yves SmithRichter’s post confirms what Matt Stoller foresaw in 2010 in A Debtcropper Society:

A lot of people forget that having debt you can’t pay back really sucks. Debt is not just a credit instrument, it is an instrument of political and economic control.It’s actually baked into our culture. The phrase ‘the man’, as in ‘fight the man’, referred originally to creditors. ‘The man’ in the 19th century stood for ‘furnishing man’, the merchant that sold 19th century sharecroppers and Southern farmers their supplies for the year, usually on credit. Farmers, often illiterate and certainly unable to understand the arrangements into which they were entering, were charged interest rates of 80-100 percent a year, with a lien places on their crops. When approaching a furnishing agent, who could grant them credit for seeds, equipment, even food itself, a farmer would meekly look down nervously as his debts were marked down in a notebook. At the end of a year, due to deflation and usury, farmers usually owed more than they started the year owing. Their land was often forfeit, and eventually most of them became tenant farmers.They were in hock to the man, and eventually became slaves to him. This structure, of sharecropping and usury, held together by political violence, continued into the 1960s in some areas of the South. As late as the 1960s, Kennedy would see rural poverty in Arkansas and pronounce it ’shocking’. These were the fruits of usury, a society built on unsustainable debt peonage.Today, we are in the midst of creating a second sharecropper society….Today, the debts do not involve liens against crops. People in modern America carry student loans, credit card debt, and mortgages. All of these are hard to pay back, often bringing with them impenetrable contracts and illegal fees. Credit card debt is difficult to discharge in bankruptcy and a default on a home loan can leave you homeless. A student loan debt is literally a claim against a life — you cannot discharge it in bankruptcy, and if you die, your parents are obligated to pay it. If the banks have their way, mortgages and deficiency judgments will follow you around forever, as they do in Spain.Young people and what only cynics might call ‘homeowners’ have no choice but to jump on the treadmill of debt, as debtcroppers. The goal is not to have them pay off their debts, but to owe forever. Whatever a debtcropper owes, a wealthy creditor owns. And as a bonus, the heavier the debt burden of American citizenry, the less able we are able to organize and claim our democratic rights as citizens. Debtcroppers don’t start companies and innovate, they don’t take chances, and they don’t claim their political rights. Think about this when you hear the calls from ex-Morgan Stanley banker and current World Bank President Robert Zoellick and his nebulous mutterings pining for the gold standard. Or when you hear Warren Buffett partner Charlie Munger talk about how the bailouts of the wealthy were patriotic, but we mustn’t bail out homeowners for fear of ‘moral hazard’. Or when you hear Pete Peterson Foundation President and former Comptroller General David Walker yearn nostalgically for debtor’s prisons.

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I got this on Naked Capitalism.