Category Archives: Life

Life Politics Religion

I Am Tired of 9/11

September 11, 2011 – 11:42 am

Is it too soon to be tired of 9/11? Because I am.

I’m tired of not being able to bring my pinking shears on plane trips. I’m tired of conspiracy theories (except for ones involving reptilians.) I’m tired of pointless wars that waste trillions of dollars that could otherwise be funneled to unprofitable, politically-connected “green energy” companies. And I’m especially tired of having to refrain from referring to my penis as “the Top of the World observation deck” for fear of getting nasty looks from some girl who knows someone who knows someone who almost went to work that day.

I’m also tired of all the people constantly (by which I mean annually) exhorting me to “NEVER FORGET” what happened that day. All sorts of terrible things have happened to me over my life. There was that time I got tricked into watching Napoleon Dynamite, and then there was some sort of incident involving Nancy Drew’s dog, and there was even that one time that I almost got killed on 9/11. But after tens of thousands of dollars of psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, craniosacral therapy, sandplay therapy, and reiki work, I’ve learned that “NEVER FORGET” is pretty much the worst advice there is, with the possible exceptions of “Be yourself”, “Girls can’t resist a guy who can chug a bottle of Tabasco sauce”, and “Vote for Obama”.

That doesn’t mean I can’t remember some of the lessons of that event, like “avoid Manhattan” and “don’t ignore the ‘STAY HOME FROM WORK TODAY JEWS!’ phone message” and “don’t wait too long to see that tourist attraction, lest some Muslims hijack and crash an airplane into it.” But these are lessons to put into practice everyday, not just in early September, and not just in years that end in a 1. And the more you “NEVER FORGET” the last crisis, the less prepared you are for the next different one.

So, sure, wear your patriotic shirt and eat your patriotic foods and click “like” on the “Like this if you are watching this on September 11th” comments on patriotic YouTube videos. But while you’re busy trying to “NEVER FORGET” what already happened, I’ll be thinking up jokes for what’s happening next. Advantage: Joel.

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Joelene Life Personal Uncategorized Writing

If Trees Could Scream

May 5, 2011 – 8:16 am

So far parenthood isn’t all that different from non-parenthood. I still eat at the same five restaurants and drink myself to sleep at night and occasionally get peed on. I just now have a car seat wedged into an upside-down highchair, am less discriminating about my liquor choices, and try not to let “careless urination” incidents turn into fistfights.

Jack Handey once Deep Thought,

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

I suspect that Handey had an infant in or near his life when he came up with the preceding. Baby Madeline doesn’t necessarily scream all the time, but quite often she has no good reason.

Or possibly it’s just that her reasons are so opaque. The scream for “I’m starving” sounds a lot like the scream for “I couldn’t eat another drop.” The scream for “I have soiled myself. How embarrassing.” is pretty indistinguishable from the scream for “if you remove my diaper, I’ll pee all over you.” And the scream for “please bring me my Sophie the giraffe” is quite similar to the scream for “I hate Sophie the giraffe, and if you squeak her one more time I’m going scream (which you might not be able to distinguish from this scream, but so be it).”

When she’s not screaming, she’s pretty delightful, although so far she’s shown no interest in Hilbert spaces, Objectivism, the Priory of Sion, or any of the other myriad topics I’ve tried to teach her about.

For entertainment she mostly enjoys being sung the “Where’s the Tiger?” song, which seems to be the Indian version of “Frère Jacques,” which (I figure) gives me license to sometimes sing it as “Where’s the Cobra?” or “Where is Gandhi?” or “What is Dharma?”

I also downloaded a bunch of rock-songs-as-lullabyes compilations, but once she realized the Dark Side of the Moon ones didn’t sync with The Wizard of Oz, we both lost interest and abandoned the project.

Anyway, she is a funny kid, and grooming her to take over the world someday really cuts into my writing and blogging time. (Also, not sleeping on account of her screaming really cuts into my writing and blogging energy.) But I now have a good idea for a parenting book, and an auto-repair manual, and a short story about a kid who likes baseball but is no good at it, so I’ll try to ease myself back into writing. Also, I’ve been criminally neglecting promotion for the spreadsheet book, so if you want to push a few copies of that on your friends, that would be kind.

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Libertarianism Life Personal

Too Much Grope

March 4, 2011 – 1:50 pm

The last time I flew anywhere was January May 2010, which predated all of the “don’t touch my junk” craziness, toward which I’ve maintained an extremely passive sense of outrage.

Somehow I assumed that only some small fraction of travelers were getting X-rayed, but I arrived at Sea-Tac this afternoon and discovered that every security line was being routed through an imposing-looking “RAPISCAN” machine.

I stuck my computer and luggage and shoes on the belt and then cheerfully informed the TSA lady that I didn’t want to be X-rayed.

She gave me her best “are you fucking kidding me?” look, shunted me off to the side, and then told her compatriot “we’ve got an opt-out.” She said “opt-out” in the same tone that a teenager might say “mom, you’re embarrassing me.”

So I stood there and stood there and stood there, all the while my computer and luggage and shoes were sitting unattended on the far side of security, until finally the TSA lady from the next line over noticed me and asked if I was “an opt-out,” after which she fetched a male groper.

The groping itself wasn’t too bad. The TSA guy who did the groping was polite enough, I guess. The idea of getting groped bothered me, but apart from that it wasn’t particularly upsetting. I don’t, however, look forward to explaining to little Joelene why the TSA agent gets an exception to the “no one should ever touch you like that” rule.

Anyway, other than the first TSA lady’s look they didn’t give me much trouble for opting out. If any part of it was distressing, it was this: the whole time (~10 minutes) I was hanging around the security stations, not one other person opted out.

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Life Personal Writing

Spreadsheet Book Now Available

February 26, 2011 – 9:50 am

One reason I haven’t been posting here very much is that I’ve been scrambling to put the finishing touches on my spreadsheet manifesto. I’m pleased to announce that it’s now available:

I’m hoping this means more time to write about non-spreadsheet-related topics.

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Data Life Philosophy Science

Endogeneity, or “The Skill of the Brewmeister”

February 9, 2011 – 7:27 am

The latest OkCupid blog post is one of their more interesting ones:

No matter their gender or orientation, beer-lovers are 60% more likely to be okay with sleeping with someone they’ve just met. Sadly, this is the only question with a meaningful correlation for women.

Of course, once every dude starts asking this question on the first date and every girl figures out that her answer is a signal of how easy she is, the correlation will almost surely vanish. Even if a woman is willing to put out on the first date, that doesn’t mean she wants to advertise the fact early on. (It’s at least possible that I am out of touch with the youth of America and am wrong about this.)

Accordingly, I predict a brief surge in beer-lover questions (and guys trying to bring their first dates to Bierstubes, Bierhausen, Bierhalls, and the like), followed by the evolution of non-committal, correlation-breaking answers to “do you like the taste of beer?” like

  • Only if it comes from a big keg,
  • It depends on the skill of the brewmeister, and
  • I do like the taste of beer, but not on the first date.

If OkCupid were evil (which they probably are, now that they’re a division of IAC), they’d instead sell a limited number of subscriptions to this sort of information, so that dudes could use these questions without having to worry that the dating pool had been overfished.

If they were really evil (which they probably are, now that they’re a division of IAC), they’d report false correlations and then laugh at people who tried to put them into practice. However, I assume that if they’d done this they would have chosen a funnier question than “Do you like the taste of beer?”

I’ll explore this further in my next post, “The Only Question That Correlates With Whether Women Put Out Is ‘Did you ever find Bugs Bunny attractive when he put on a dress and played girl bunny?’”

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Life Personal Seattle

I Hate Running

January 15, 2011 – 4:21 pm

I hate running. I ran on the Cross-Country team in high school, primarily because I thought it would look good on my college applications. I was totally one of those kids who did things because he thought it would look good on his college applications. (Adopting a Cambodian orphan sounds like it might be fun, but it turns out it really cramps the high school experience.) Little Joelene will not be one of those kids, in part because I plan to spend the next 18 years casually instilling my views on the worthlessness of a college education, and in part because my understanding of the Mayan Prophecies leads me to suspect that colleges as we know them will cease to exist sometime around the year 2012.

In some sports you actually have practices where they teach you how to get better, but in Cross-Country our “coach” would tell us a route to run and then follow us around in her car (!) to make sure that we were actually running instead of (I guess) eating donuts or renting videocassettes or smoking. So I never particularly got better at running, although I guess I got pretty good at not eating donuts and not renting videocassettes and not smoking. (Similarly, when I took “Walk, Jog, Run” as part of my PE requirement at college, I got pretty good at hiding in the music school for an hour.)

Almost every cross-country meet was held in a hilly cow field somewhere in the South part of the county. We’d ride there on the school bus, run a lap around the cow field (which was what distinguished our sport from track), drink imitation Gatorade, and then ride the bus back. There was the usual locker-room cameraderie, like making fun of people’s genitalia and duct-taping less-favored teammates to a bench. I didn’t get duct-taped the first time, but the writing was on the wall, and so I quit the team and got a job tutoring SAT students instead, which lasted until the company founders took millions of dollars that were supposed to buy #2 pencils and vanished.

So right, I hate running. But Ganga likes running and so every month she signs us up to run in the Magnuson Series. I don’t train, and I don’t practice. I just show up every month and run my 5k and then go to Jak’s and eat Sweet Southern Steak Hash with fried eggs on top and then go home and take a nap and pretend like I’m not going to have to do it all again a month later. After the first couple of times I knew that physically I was perfectly capable of running 5k, which has made every subsequent race more of a mental exercise. I have a lousy sense of timing (which is probably why none of the bands I drummed for ever made it big) and so I never know how fast to run, and so each month I pick someone who seems to be running a reasonable speed and try to keep up with him or her. (This morning it was “Asian kid in the yellow shirt,” to whom I attribute sole blame for my subpar time.)

Running requires music, and alas the only music player I have right now is my iPhone, and the only way to get music onto the iPhone is using iTunes (please someone tell me I’m wrong about this), and most days I’d rather stick a pen in my eye than use iTunes, which means that there’s very little music on my phone, and in particular there are only 3 running-appropriate albums: “A Night at the Hip-Hopera,” “Blood * Sugar * Sex * Magic” and “Them Crooked Vultures,” all of which I’m super sick of. Maybe next time I go to Home Depot I’ll pick up a day laborer and pay him to get the rest of my music onto my phone, but I only have another 6 months left on the AT&T contract, so maybe I’ll just keep exercising to “A Night at the Hip-Hopera” until then and then get one of those newfangled Zune Phones.

They say that once you start running you’ll start to develop this really awesome feeling afterward and it will totally become part of your life and you’ll crave it and you won’t be able to get through a day without thinking of it. I sort of understand this, as it kind of describes my feelings toward fried eggs, which I only started eating about a year ago in order to defuse Ganga’s constant “but you don’t even like eggs!” objections to my plan to raise chickens. Nonetheless, I can’t imagine any way to associate this feeling with running.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that I hate running, although I really do like fried eggs.

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Life Personal

Lessons Forgotten

December 20, 2010 – 8:36 pm

1. Recently I gave a talk at Ignite Seattle on “How to Be Funny.” For the most part the talk went well, although I had technical difficulties. To be clever, I had put an animated GIF on one of the slides. This somehow caused Powerpoint to get “stuck” showing that slide while (in its head) still advancing the remaining slides on schedule.

So by the time I realized the slideshow was stuck and asked them to “advance” it manually, it was actually several slides ahead, which ruined the punchline of one of my jokes and made it so I had to get them to manually rewind by several slides.

(This never happened when I was practicing the talk.)

While I was dying on stage, I was suddenly struck with the realization that this had happened to me before and that I should have known the rule “NEVER USE AN ANIMATED GIF IN POWERPOINT.” I have no idea when this happened to me before, but I’m pretty sure that it did and that I forgot about it until it bit me.

2. Every month Ganga signs us up for a 5K race at Magnuson Park. This Saturday she wasn’t feeling well enough to run, so I gave her my keys so she could sit in the car and listen to the radio. Because she is not particularly good with cars, I warned her to make sure to turn the key to “accessory” and not “run.”

I finished the race and returned to the car and tried to start it. It failed to start, and all the gauges started vibrating like crazy. I iPhoned these symptoms and found nothing. I looked under the hood and found all sorts of weird crap on the battery terminals. Thanks to a faulty prior, I assumed these symptoms (the vibrating gauges and the battery crud) represented some sort of fried electrical system thanks to a key in the “run” position.

So, I called my insurance company to see if I was covered for a tow (I was) and then we waited an hour for the tow truck to arrive. When the driver got there, he asked me if I’d tried to jumpstart the car. No, I told him, since I’d assumed something was deeply wrong with the electrical system. He thought it was worth trying, and in fact it worked. The battery crud, he suggested, was just normal battery crud that could be dissolved with some Coca-Cola. This turned out to be the case, although I’m still anticipating some sort of bad consequences from pouring Coca-Cola under the hood.

While I was driving home and reprogramming the radio and kicking myself (for I have jumper cables in my trunk and could have gotten a jump at any time instead of calling for a tow truck if I hadn’t fixated on an incorrect diagnosis), I remembered that my old blue car had also had a problem with battery crud, and that jumpstarting always worked on that car.

In my defense, the old blue car always “tried” to start and never exhibited the strange “vibrating gauge” behavior. (And then its transmission failed and then its timing belt broke and then I got rid of it.)

I still have no idea why the car worked just fine in the morning and then went completely haywire an hour later. Perhaps it will remain forever a mystery.

3. I wonder what other important lessons I’ve forgotten.

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Education Life Personal

Correlation and Causation

September 27, 2010 – 9:24 am

Another day, another plan to spend more money on education:

President Obama said on the “Today” show Monday morning that American students attend school a month less than kids in other countries — contending that the school-year gap puts them at a competitive disadvantage in the global economy. “The idea of a longer school year, I think, makes sense,” he said, when asked if kids should go to school year-round.

The logic here is pretty sound:

A) Other countries have longer school years.
B) Other countries produce more “competitive” graduates.
C) Therefore, we need a longer school year.

There are a number of other attractive policy prescriptions that follow from the same reasoning. For example, here’s a similar plan to increase standardized test scores:

A) Asian students eat more rice than non-Asians.
B) Asian students do best on standardized tests.
C) Therefore, we should feed our students more rice.

–

Just so we’re clear, it’s certainly possible that spirit-crushing, year-round education is in part responsible for the “competitiveness” of other countries’ graduates. It’s certainly more likely to be true than it would be if we observed that countries with year-round education produced “less competitive” graduates.

Nonetheless, in the absence of a clear causal mechanism, it’s possible that there are other differences between those countries and ours that are much more reponsible for any differences in “competitiveness.” Maybe they have smarter students, or they don’t put lead in their school lunches, or they don’t make their 8th-graders play “concussion ball” in gym class. It’s always worth checking to make sure you’ve got causality correct before you eliminate summer vacation.

–

Another key plank of Obama’s proposed reforms involves “evaluation of teachers based on their students’ test performance.” This is fine, I suppose, if you want to define a good teacher as one whose students perform well (or perhaps better than they used to) on tests. It’s not clear to me that this is the best criterion, but I never paid a whole lot of attention to most of my teachers anyway, and I always liked best the ones who taught interesting things and who let me sleep in class when I was tired.

And in some ways this aspect of the debate seems silly, because back when I was in school everyone knew which teachers were good and which weren’t. We didn’t need Value-Added Analyses or Professional Observers or DNA Tests, we just knew. Everyone knew. Students knew. Parents knew. Other teachers knew. Everyone knew.

Not that it mattered, since you didn’t get to choose your teachers. Sure, if you signed up for Latin then you were going to have the Latin teacher, and if you signed up for German then you were going to have the German teacher, and if you signed up for Calculus BC then you were going to have the Calculus BC teacher.

But when you signed up for 10th grade World History (which you would, since it was pretty much required) you were going to end up with a crapshoot of a teacher. Maybe you’d get a good one, maybe you’d get a bad one. (I got an awesome one, who insisted that Turkey was a de facto US colony since we had missile bases there, and who let me sleep in class, but that was pretty much just dumb luck on my part.)

The same was mildly true in college, where freshman science and engineering majors had to take a year-long “survey course in the humanities.” Since there were lots of science and engineering majors, there were lots of course sections of HUMA 101 and 102, taught by anyone who couldn’t talk his way out of it.

My first semester (Bible, Plato, Homer, Virgil, Canterbury Tales, etc…) was taught by a Women’s Studies professor from Germany who always brought her “friend” to class and who made most of the works about Women’s Studies. (Our crowning achievement, if I may brag, was that we convinced her to let us bring in a boom box and listen to “Achilles Last Stand” as part of our discussion of the Iliad).

My second (Shakespeare, Descartes, Kant, Flaubert, Kafka, etc…) was taught by a Continental philosopher who used terms we didn’t understand like “cathectic” and “I-thou duality” and hated every paper I wrote except for my final one, a giant clusterfuck of buzzwords tying together Kafka, the Tower of Babel, “modernity” [another of his favorites], and all sorts of other bullshit that I made sound like one of his lectures as much as I could. (I still preferred him to the first professor, though.)

Neither of them really instilled any sort of appreciation in me for the stuff we read, whereas the “American Literature of the 1970′s” course I took (“There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge.”) was taught by a grad student with no agenda other than that he really loved the books, and so I grew to love some of them too. It was, as you might guess, not a required course, and if it had turned out terrible I might well have dropped it.

The HUMA courses, though, were both required and capped at ~20 students, which meant you needed to fight for a slip of paper with a time that worked for you and then just put up with whatever luck-of-the-draw teacher that worked out to. I guarantee you that if there were any actual choice involved then the first teacher’s class would have (after a semester or two during which institutional knowledge was being generated) been routinely empty, as it deserved to be.

Anyway, my point is that everyone knows which teachers are good and which aren’t, and all this talk of “testing” and “value-added analysis” and whatnot is just a way of pretending that we don’t. If you were to let students and parents choose which teachers they wanted, I bet things would get sorted out really quickly.

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Life Personal

Reflections on the KTRU Transmitter

August 17, 2010 – 9:06 am

I like radio more than most people do. I only ever listen to it in the car, of course, and I don’t actually drive very much, but I try to plan trips to coincide with favorite programs like Saturday’s “Lunch With Led,” Monday’s “Think Pink,” Thursday’s “Save the Wave,” and Friday’s “Ask the Seattle Archbishop Your Inane Doctrinal Questions.”

My undergraduate college had its own radio station, KTRU. No one listened to it except for the girl on our floor who dressed all in black and wore Skinny Puppy t-shirts, mostly because the music was programmed by DJs like the girl on our floor who dressed all in black and wore Skinny Puppy t-shirts, whose musical tastes (like those of the other DJs) were best described as “inaccessible.”

When Skinny Puppy was a new DJ she got the all-important 3-5am shift, and one night Cesar and I stayed up really late so we could listen to her show on a novelty radio that was designed to look like the Tropicana orange. We quickly decided (partially on account of the late hour, and partially on account of the lousy reception, but mostly on account of the “inaccessible”) that we’d rather listen to “Kilroy Was Here,” which for the rest of our college career (and beyond) we continued to prefer to KTRU.

Of course, it was always my dream to be a radio DJ, but my proposed “Huey Lewis Hour” was received coldly, as were “Joel Sings Karaoke On-Air,” “Dramatic Readings of Ayn Rand Stories,” “Men at Work at Work,” “The Best of Rush Limbaugh,” and the eerily-ahead-of-its-time “Who’s Hooking Up With Whom?” Eventually I turned my attentions to campus politics and making fun of things, one of which turned out to be probably the most valuable skill I learned in college.

Most students cared less about the radio station itself than about its black and yellow “ktru 91.7fm rice radio” stickers, which could be cut and pasted to make clever political statements like “death from above” and “lovett sucks” and “keep houston unbearable.”

Alas, all inaccessible things must come to an end, as today Facebook brought us the news that the KTRU transmitter has been sold to the University of Houston, who astutely noticed that while Houston has both a “Tejano” station and a “Super-Tejano” station, there’s still a huge market opportunity for a “Mega-Tejano” station.

Apparently KTRU will keep “webcasting” online. This doesn’t really help the 4 people who listen to KTRU over the airwaves, although maybe their hurt feelings will be soothed when the proceeds from the sale are used to acquire something useful, like a commemorative statue of Edgar Odell Lovett.

Nonetheless, there is a larger issue here, and that’s that colleges shouldn’t change things from the way they were back when my Facebook friends and I attended. I’m pretty sure this is an idea we picked up from older alumni, who always seemed disappointed to learn that we no longer continued their cherished traditions, like the “Charles Manson Party” and the “Stagflation Ball” and “sex.”

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Life

Bicycle Race

July 29, 2010 – 8:00 am

This weekend I am participating in a charity bicycle ride. This is hilarious on several levels: primarily the “charity,” “bicycle,” and “ride” levels. (The “participating” level is pretty funny too.)

I’ve got my trusty old REI bicycle, an aftermarket memory-foam seat designed to stave off groin-numbness, an iPhone full of motivational music (mostly A Night at the Hip-Hopera on repeat), some ugly pink battery-powered speakers from Best Buy, some ugly “for kids” handlebar pouch to hold the speakers and my keys and wallet, the cool Schwinn helmet I bought back when I was briefly the custodian of Mateo’s Target bike, a weird eyeglass-mounted rearview mirror that’s probably more distracting than it is helpful1, a tight-fitting (and consequently gut-enhancing) bike jersey with rear elastic pockets that feel too unfamiliar to trust, the completely-inappropriate-for-serious-cycling Keen sandals I trekked all over India in, and a huge variety of performance-enhancing drugs like Singulair and Benadryl and Claritin. My goal is to ride 50 miles on the first day and 300 miles on the second, although I also have secondary goals of not getting hit by any trucks and not getting car-doored.

If I don’t come back, avenge my death.


1. The first time I tried it, all the people I was riding with asked me how I liked it. “Well,” I offered, “you know how sometimes you get an extra sense and it takes a while for your brain to figure out how to integrate its inputs with your pre-existing sensory data?” Not a transhumanist in the bunch, it turned out, and so they all looked at me like I was crazy.

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