Winners, Losers . . . And the Rest of Us
A dialogue you might enjoy listening in on. It started with a comment Ron left on the preceding post.
Ron: People don’t have a language for praising/understanding non-winners. They immediately think ‘loser’, and can’t understand people who just won’t play.
Ron: Something that has changed also is that we have given up any notion of a “good try” or “fair play” having any particular virtue. It is somewhat cynically assumed that winners “write the history” so who cares about playing fair!
I wonder how much of this “winnerism” is a backlash to an increased theraputic/egalitarian (hmmm… feminized?) culture?
The virtue of teaching people sports is that it shows you how to lose, and losing occurs a lot in life. But now we just consign losers to gehenna…
Amba: My father once pointed out that for every team that wins a baseball pennant, — ? — I don’t know the correct numbers now — 11? have to lose. He thought about writing a book called “Losing: A Baseball Odyssey.” Never did, though.
Ron: A great Hitter in baseball fails 7 times out of 10! Humbling…
But why do you think they take steroids…because a clean loser would still be thought of as a loser; we beat on winners who take drugs, but ignore clean losers. Being ignored in America is worse than being a villain.
Amba: There’s a big world of non-winners out there. We’re like dark matter.
Only the stars shine, but we’ve got mass, baby.
Ron: and Charm! and odd motion in the Z axis! err…skip that one.
Butter and Cheese
See,you wake up and you know what the post title is. It’s the big phrase at the top, the one people will read first. So you help them out, you show and not tell.
ooooooo
ahhhhhhh.
Now if I were writing a network news piece I’m practically done. I just have to jaw about what ever hobby horse I’m on, mention Edward R. Murrow, and I’ve got the “…itzer” part of some prize I’m supposed to win.
But we’re smarter chickens here aren’t we?
If this were a foodie blog, I’d have to be complaining about Danish butter distribution in Idaho.
If this were a health blog, I’d have to compare the dairy industry to IG Farben.
If this were The New Yorker, I’d have to use the word “avoirdupois” more than once.
And, lastly, if this were Vanity Fair I’d have to compliment supermodels on their moral superiority in choosing cocaine and cigarettes instead of butter and cheese.
Somehow, I now feel the need to talk about butter and cheese themselves, but why? We all know them; we may feel rueful about some of their aspects, but, hey, it’s not like they’re raising our taxes or invading other countries are they? (no, really…are they? No? Whew! You just don’t know who to trust these days)
While ambivalence is our mise en place here, (sorry, must’ve got some New Yorker on me) I’m going out on a limb and start the New Year by just flat out saying ‘Yay!’ to Butter and Cheese. My boldness is even giving me an attack of the vapors.
I hope my fellow Ambivaloids love something enough to wax on about here at some point this year… at their repose, of course!
Models are fine. People stink.
Gasp, a topic I have a fair amount of experience with! I’ve built tons of models, simulations of all kinds of things, as a part of my profession for years now. I even have a certain fondness for them. But I have to admit most of them are useless in practice, and frankly I’m glad I haven’t built any for awhile, for the problem is not the modeling of a system but the people who use it.
Look, why build a model? It allows you the ability to test hypothetical things and designs for a tiny fraction of the cost of actually building them. With the best models, people give you accurate data, make their assumptions explicit, and tweak, tweak, tweak the damn thing until it more or less works the way you would like to see. This would be about one project in fifty. A well designed model clarifies the mind and makes it clear to as many people as possible why you choose to build something in a specific way. Transparency, repeatability, and explicit thoughts and designs are what you should communicate with a model. But I can count the projects where that was so on one hand.
But how do I put this? People are lazy, vain, pompous liars who want a model to be some kind of Magic Ju-Ju that somehow make the stupid seem brilliant. Nearly every person who has hired me to make a model wants me to lie to somebody; it’s a lie with a technological sheen, so they can be unquestioned by people who don’t have contradictory models, which is nearly always the case. At least half the time people have made it very clear to me how my getting paid was tied to how pretty a lie I was able to give them. They never wanted to go through the process to begin with; they were just ordered to urk up a model which would make it look like they were serious.
Groupthink, like we see in the climate people, I think is the norm, and no model will override that. When language comes up with a fool-proof way to prevent lying, then many, many things in human life will go much better than they do…
We’re all Barbara Bel Geddes to someone
Ok, so they’re working on my toilet. I’d like to think they could finish it, but since Saturday they haven’t done that. My landlord was willing to let me use the toilet in the empty apartment upstairs but…that one’s not working either. So…she gave me the key to her late fathers house two doors over. It’s such a small house that the bathroom is more a Deco Privy then the mini-spas we now expect bathrooms to be.
Now don’t get me wrong, this whole thing pisses me off (ahem) but the comic ineptitude of it all made me smile. I was in a good state as I drifted off to sleep with my Netflix playing in front of me, which was my mistake because I fell asleep to… Vertigo. If it had been Freaks, or Saw XXIV or any Bergman movie I’d have sawed enough logs to make a Pythonesque Lumberjack happy, but nooooooo, I had to let Hitchcock enter my half-awake mind with Vertigo, with nary a john in sight. Through this Freudian dream-fog two, well, three thoughts emerged:
1.) I need to write a psycho-history of plumbing. But some more lucid part of my mind said, “umm…no you don’t.” That part of my brain won.
2.) I need to invent a suit with little tiny sound chips at various points that we could somehow activate with our emotional reactions so that no matter where you are you could have a Bernard Hermann soundtrack to practically anything that might happen in your life. Wouldn’t that make life more enriching? If you hear those Psycho string stings though….
3.) How painful and hard it was to watch Barbara Bel Geddes in her pining for Jimmy Stewart! Yikes, she even paints herself into the painting that Stewart is obsessed with, with just ticks him off! So that’s my question: Have any of you ever had any unrequited love for someone? Or have you ever been the object of someone elses love that you did not return? How did those things go, badly, dramatically, what? Ever stay friends with someone after you’ve both decided that you’re not in love with each other?
UPDATE: Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah! The plumbing, almost a week later, is restored! Boy, you would think “asshole” and “toilet” would work together like hand and glove or butter and cheese…as it were…but no, it’s been a struggle of nothing but cursing and grunting. But now with the king upon his throne, progress will commence.
What I love about where I live – an invitation to a series.
I have a lot of internet folks I know, and some of them I have a vision of what they look like as people, some through their Twitter avatars, some through their blog pics. But I rarely know much about where they live! This leads me to imagine a lot of things, most of them fanciful! For example, I know Amba doesn’t live there anymore, but I see her in a West Village apartment, one with several problems, but with at least two really, really cool features. Like what? Oh, say a great 19th century fireplace, or a super doorman, or a fantastic view, or a fabulous Master Bedroom. Something like that. If the Chrysler Building had apartments, she should have one with one of those chrome eagle heads as a patio overlooking midtown. Yow, the thought of it!
I propose a series where you write about what you love a lot where you live. Now, I don’t want people to concentrate on the city or state or region they’re in; more their domicile, the house or apartment where they hang their head at night. Got a cool armchair, a neat appliance you take pleasure in, a wall that has just the right color, a cool skylight? That’s what I want to hear about. This doesn’t mean you can’t talk about your city or region or your weather, but connect it to your home, not just “it’s nice and sunny here.” See where I’m going? Let’s share the love…and I’ll start us off.
1.)I have a great view out my living room window. I live on top of a golf course, with a street and a small park between a line of trees that are supposed to keep wayward shots on the course, but every year the Golfoids drop a few balls off my porch awning onto my front lawn. I’ve been saving these orphans for over 20 years. To what end I don’t know, but when I figure it out…it’ll be fantastic. (Don’t golf myself) The trees are lush and the whole view is incredibly soothing. The window faces west, so I get to bid the sun adios every day… I get to see hordes of birds (or bats?) up in the trees take off at dusk for lotsa mosquito killing duty, even nicer.
2.)I live on a corner with another house on only one side. Surprisingly quiet, even though I’m only a mile from downtown.
3.)I have a gigantic lilac bush that runs down the whole side of the house to the end of the lot. It only blooms for a short time in May, but for a month I open my bedroom window and sleep in the perfume of lilacs, and the scent eventually fills the whole house… fabulous!
4.) Location! 40 feet from my front door is the bus stop, highly useful when your ride is semi-functional as mine is. Within a block: A 24-hour pharmacy, a good mainstream grocery store, and a great green grocer, jammed packed with an excellent collection of stuff. I can exist without the car if need be, even in the winter when I sometimes get snow-locked in.
5.)My den is small, but it’s like a fighter cockpit of what defines me. All my main stuff is close at hand, in a system that I know by heart but couldn’t really explain to someone else. Everything is almost just arms length away, so when I need something…bang, I don’t have to hunt for it.
6.)The media room sets the tone for the work day. I can’t work/exist in pure quiet, so something is always cranking away out there. Somedays the Ramones, or Scarlatti, or Brian Eno, otherdays, I have Pulp Fiction or Dr. Strangelove on a loop all day long. When I need a break, I check and see how Jules and Vincent are doing or if Major Kong can get those damn bomb bay doors open…When I’m really cranking on work, it’s a “Beatles day” where my studio outtakes of the Fabs grind away while I’m trying to debug some crazy piece of C++ code…they’re working, I’m working, and George Martin is telling me it sounds wonderful to him. Am I in Studio Two at Abbey Road? I lose track, and that too is…sublime.
7.)Between the den and the media room…the kitchen. I love to cook, and can’t see why I just can’t do everything at the same time…so I do! I miss sitting in an office cubicle as much as…well, no I don’t miss an office cubicle one teensy tiny iota! Eating, cooking, working, snoozing…I do them when I need to do them, and clocks be damned! The house lends itself to this big time.
Chime in with what you love about where you live!
A Guest Post by Ron, a.k.a. @KngFish
(Hostess’s note: Soon as Ron gets his new computer, he’ll join the crew and will be posting directly.)
______________________________________
And…now it’s October?
So in early September, I thought I had a bit of flu. I did not. I also thought I had some kinda muscle cramps because at one point I couldn’t hold up my own weight and slumped on to the kitchen floor. That should have been a clue, but hey, I’m getting’ old and I’m fat, so I thought it came with the territory. It did not. So when I couldn’t get off the bed, I decided to call 911 and let the ambulance take me away. What I had was Legionnaire’s disease, and my kidneys were in the process of shutting down.
Because I’m here writing this, you can take a guess that that did not happen. But, for the first time in my life at 51, I’ve spent most of the last month in a hospital room, much of the time losing fluids like crazy. The disease makes you lose those cells which provide oxygen to the muscles (hence the weakness) in pretty big numbers in an attempt to overwhelm the kidneys which would normally process them, so ‘weak as a kitten’ was the norm for me. It took quite some time to get those cells out of my system, and I’ve been getting 7-8 liters of fluid a night through an IV to jump start the kidneys and get them working again. I think at the moment they are working fairly well, but follow up visits to my docs will let me know for sure.
How did I get through it? It was hard for me at first, as I have had no hospital experience. But I got into the technical descriptions of what was occurring to me, and I bugged the docs with more questions because I wanted to know. Hell, I’d have run my own lab tests if they had let me. At one point, in a complex explanation, one of my docs said “We’re all just bunches of chemicals”, and I oddly found that reassuring. Earlier this week, they let me out, because they felt I could keep up with the demands of my kidneys just through drinking. So far so good.
But the reactions of people…that’s been something I’ve not been really ready for. For most of my life, those human interactions of warmth and support have not been in great abundance. ‘Family’ has been an abstract term to me, not a source of solace. But through this crisis, I feel more 3 dimensional, more than a bunch of chemicals…I can’t even describe it, it’s more a collection of sounds and a set of anchors to a world that exists past a hospital bed. If I had the right partner, I’d be channeling Astaire and dancing, putting it on film, and sharing it all with you.
And there are more of you than I thought possible, starting with the owner of this blog right here. Well, to be really fair, I must start with my friend Miki, who has been my fighter, my support, my rock in more ways than I can count. No matter how hard I try to write something to say how much I love and care for her as my friend (and the wacky children, too!) I get so emotional that words seem slow and ham-fisted in articulating that love. And Amba, many of the Althouse Commentariat, who only know me through comments and tweets, and friends….every single one of you is a mensch. I would name names, but some I think wish to be in the background. No matter, I know who you are and I give you as much thanks and love as I can.
For all of my flaws as a person, something I see in myself now that I’m very happy with is the desire to return the favor to each and every person among you. It’s amazing that so much love and support has come from people whom I’ve never met, and may never meet, just due to financial constraints. Thanks, cubed to all of you.
Ron, of Fluffy Stuffin’
Ambiance 