I just got back from a quick trip — helped my brother-in-law drive his car up to Seattle on Sunday, flew back down on Monday. My flight was delayed, so I bought a couple of magazines — a Harper’s and a New Yorker. When the folks picked me up from the airport, somehow the subject of the magazines came up. “What, too elitist?” I asked. “Worse, too East Coast elitist,” said Mom. Yikes! Of course, the joke’s on me and Mom, since the real East Coast elites probably read Granta or The London Review of Books or whatever the hell you read when you sincerely believe that it is only a tribe of 15,000 novel-readers on the Upper West Side that keeps fiction alive in America. Thanks for holding up your end, guys!

Of course, this raises the question — which magazines would a good West Coast elitist be reading? The only magazine I subscribe to is Newsweek, which is so hopelessly middlebrow^[1] that I can’t possibly have any useful insights on the matter. Mom suggested that a West Coast elitist would read People magazine as opposed to Us or In Touch. At first I thought, see, that’s a perfect example of the kind of overbaked East Coast smugness^[2] that we West Coast elites should be striving to avoid. But the unfortunate truth is that there’s no avoiding smugness, since after all, that’s what being an elitist is all about.

In fact, Mom’s little dig at People readers (a.k.a. Southern Californians) serves to illustrate the Basic Organizing Principle of West Coast Elitism: Uncoolness is centered in Anaheim, and the further up the coast you go, the cooler you get. Los Angeles feels superior to Anaheim, Santa Barbara feels superior to the greater LA basin, San Jose feels superior to all of Southern California, the Peninsula feels superior to San Jose, San Francisco feels superior to everything south of the Cow Palace, Portland feels superior to all Californians, and Seattle feels superior to everyone in the United States. The strength of the smugness field increases quadratically until eventually you cross the event horizon and slide irretrievably over into Canada; presumably the smugness singularity itself rests somewhere in downtown Vancouver, but this is the point where all modern theories break down, and no probes have ever made it back.

Anyway, given that New York City rules the publishing industry with an iron fist, maybe there is no such thing as a West Coast elitist magazine. But maybe I’m wrong. Any ideas? (Note that the key question is general West Coast elitism — if you just want to be a plain ol’ Silicon Valley Techno-Elitist, it’s fairly obvious which blogs you should be reading.)

1. And far worse than that, dull. How many covers of Jesus do we need per year, anyway?

2. Before I read that article, I was only vaguely aware of Death Cab for Cutie inasmuch as it was a sort of hipster insult. (Ex: “Oh yeah? Well, why don’t you go home and listen to your Death Cab for Cutie collection!?”) But after seeing Death Cab for Cutie disparaged twice on the first page — dude, where’s your editor — I felt an urgent need to rush out and buy every album they’ve ever made.

In what seems like a blink of an eye, Chuck Norris has become a true Internet Phenomenon. Is he a “straight-talking, no-nonsense American hero“? A Jungian archetype? A deity? There are no easy answers.

One thing does seem clear: much of this misplaced adulation stems from Norris’s ability to deliver devastating roundhouse kicks to the face. This, good people, perfectly encapsulates the long, slow decline of values in America today. What is with this emphasis on solving problems with violent kicking? Why do the youth of America think that the right thing to do when you’re angry is to lash out and kick someone? In short, whatever happened to punching?

Fortunately, Chris Sims of the Invincible Super-Blog has attempted to correct this imbalance with his wistful-yet-uplifting Ode to Punching. It’s good to know that some folks in this country still have their priorities straight, and I’m sure we can all look forward to some equally powerful works from this formidable young talent in the very near future. Ode to Stabbing! Explosions: a Retrospective! Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Bludgeoning! That said, if Chris happens to be planning a series on the ancient Japanese art of Kancho, let’s just say I’ll take a pass.

Chanukah just ain’t what it used to be, and this year was worse than usual. First, in response to the putative War on Christmas, our president quickly ordered a retaliatory strike on Chanukah. Not a good start.

Next, an innocent discussion at the lunch table led to a crisis of faith. I mentioned that I had always been fuzzy who the Maccabees were rebelling against. The Syrians? The Greeks? The Syrian Greeks? No, my boss said: the conflict actually was about the Maccabees (right-wing, hard-ass, traditionalist, rural priests) versus Hellenized Jews (liberal, effete, assimilated, urban professionals).

Guess who won?

So for a while I was having serious thoughts about not celebrating Chanukah, ever. Oh, maybe the Hellenized Jews had it coming, what with the sacrificing pigs in the Temple and all. But still.

Fortunately, a little more research revealed that there was more to the story. A couple hundred years later, the rabbis took the reins. And apparently, the early rabbis hated, hated Chanukah, because it was this huge celebration of the military victory of the priests. So the rabbis fixed up the holiday by inventing the miracle of oil and shifting the emphasis to be on the spiritual victory. This is why, if you ask little kids about Chanukah today, they can tell you all about the miracle of the oil and the lights, but they’re usually kind of fuzzy on the assassinations-and-bloody-reprisals part. I think this is the true lesson of Chanukah: the eventual triumph of wussy, lefty, scholarly types, using our evil powers of Postmodernism and Relativism and whatnot to rewrite history. Woo-hoo! Go team!

When I pointed this out to my boss, he responded by saying that this is the way Americans celebrate Chanukah, while in Israel they emphasize the old school interpretation — tiny force triumphing over overwhelming numbers, et cetera. I decided I preferred my blue state interpretation, and we left it at that.

Of course, my boss was wrong about one key point: real Americans don’t focus on the spiritual aspect of Chaunkah. We celebrate Chanukah in a uniquely American way, which is to say, by focusing on the commercial aspect. And that brings me to my third issue with Chanukah this year: the loot.

Don’t get me wrong… now that all the kids are grown up, it’s good to scale back the presents. And it’s nice to chill out a bit, not have to rush around getting everyone presents. Still, the nicest present I got this year was a large set of matching dinner glasses. Which would have been a fine gift, except I already have glasses. It turns out that my impeccable upbringing did not prevent me from bringing this up right away with the gift-giver. And so Mom and I had a conversation that went something like this:

“Look, you need a set of new glasses.”

“Why? I have a perfectly usable set of glasses.”

“Because none of them match. When we come over for summer barbecues, I end up drinking out of a glass shaped like a boot.”

“Oh, the Big Texan glass. But that one is… fun and kitschy.”

“You’re over thirty now, you should have matching glasses. Which reminds me, you also need new plates.”

“Why on earth — those are perfectly usable too, and they actually do match!”

“They’re all chipped!”

“Yes, but they were your plates, that’s why you handed them down.”

“Nevertheless.”

Fortunately my little sister broke the impasse by pointing out that next year, she would be out of school and in desperate need of glasses, plates, and silverware. And thus balance was restored to the Force, peace descended once again on the Goer household, and the all-important Lifecycle of Motley-but-Usable Kitchenware was permitted to continue.

So I’ve come around to liking the dinner glasses, although I am baffled why the manufacturers give you twelve regular glasses and twelve useless short glasses. At best, the short glasses only provide adequate fluid intake for persons under thirty pounds, and those persons have sippy cups. As far as I can tell, there is only one true market for short glasses: restaurants that choose to serve totally inadequate portions of orange juice at breakfast.

Come to think of it, if Chanukah wants to get back in my good graces for next year, a Miracle of the Restaurant Orange Juice would be an excellent start.

If The Onion is going to start writing thinly disguised stories about my life, they could at least pick someone more attractive to represent me. Is that too much to ask?

Rules for the promotion of greater office harmony:

1. If you decide to listen to iTunes at the office, make sure that you plug your headphones into the correct jack on your Powerbook.

2. If Rule 1 is not in effect, make sure that it takes less than thirty seconds for the thought to cross your mind, “Hmmmm, the sound is weaker and tinnier than I expected. I wonder if it’s coming from the built-in speakers?”

3. If neither Rule 1 or Rule 2 are in effect, make sure that you are playing something relatively hip or inoffensive. Which is to say not the high-pitched screeching of “Owner of a Lonely Heart“.

On the plus side, many of my coworkers who share their iTunes libraries have the same execrable taste that I do. Which means I can listen to Erasure or Alphaville or whatnot without actually having to buy those tracks and pollute my own hard drive. Excellent!

The writing team at my company is split between California and New Hampshire. I was feeling a bit punchy last Friday, which led to this email…

From: Evan Goer
Sent: Friday, February 04, 2005 12:57 PM
To: Tech Comm — US
Subject: Need assistance!

Hi all,

It looks like I’m going to be rooting for the Pats (aka “The Good Guys” aka “The Ego-less Team Players” aka “The Flying Elvises”) in this Sunday’s Superbowl. However, the problem is that I don’t think one can successfully root for the New England Patriots without using proper diction. So I’ve been practicing with phrases such as:

“You cahn’t beat da Pats, Braydee is wicked pissah, best QB evah.”

Is that reasonably accurate? Any thoughts on vocabulary, intonation, …? I don’t have much time to get this all down before the big game!

advTHANKSance,

Evan

Among the various responses, this one was my favorite:

From: B
Sent: Friday, February 04, 2005 1:47 PM
To: Evan Goer; Tech Comm — US
Subject: RE: Need assistance!

Evan,

As I am not a New Englander by birth, I think I can help you out with a few things I have picked up over the years. Here are some pointers:

• Instead of calling your friends by their Christian name, call them ‘broth-ah’ or ‘kid’. For example, “What’s up, brothah?” or “Can you pass me those nachos kid?”

• If you do not yet have one, try to befriend someone with the last name of Sullivan. To be a true New Englander you must have a friend you can call ‘Sully’.

• I know this is unlikely, but should you be in an area with snow… Act like you are SHOCKED that it is snowing… As if snow in the middle of January was absolutely the last thing you would have ever expected.

• Regardless of snow, make sure to keep the conversation on the weather. What did it do today? What did it do yesterday? Does today’s weather remind of sometime 7 years ago when it was also cold out? Etc. Also, make sure that no matter what you have asked for in the past, you must complain about the present. If it is hot, say you wish it was cold. If it is cold, say you wish it was hot.

• If you run out of weather topics, talk about traffic and directions. Impress your friends with a new shortcut you found, dazzle them with tales of long commutes.

• Not only buy scratch tickets, but actually know the numbers of the individual games. Instead of asking for a “Pot-of-Gold, Lucky Horseshoes, and an Aces High.” You should be able to go into any corner store and order a “5, 18, and a 23” and know exactly what games you are getting.

• Learn the complete lyrics to both the Foxwood’s and 1-800-54-GIANT songs. (The wonder of it all!!!)

• Know that the Green Monster is NOT a Sesame Street character.

• Jimmies are chocolate only. Sprinkles are multi-colored.

• Throw out all of your jelly and replace it with Fluff.

• Know that REAL chow-dah is thick and creamy. NOT red and watery!

• Last but not least, just enjoy the fact that New England is home to the WORLD CHAMPION NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS AND BOSTON RED SOX!!!!!!!!!…. And if all else fails, say something crude and vulgar about the Yankees!

I hope this helps. Have fun.

Good things about Numb3rs:

• David Krumholtz has the right mixture of cuteness and geekiness to carry the show. Not that I’m qualified to judge the former.^[1]

• The show has a nice demonstration of how random patterns are harder to construct than you might think.

• When taking notes on his brother’s lecture on serial killer behavior patterns, Krumholtz uses the ∃ notation for “there exists.” I used to do this when taking notes for non-science classes. (“For all democratic governments, there exists a unique principle…”)

• ohmygod it’s Natalie — I mean SABRINA LLOYD!!!!

Not-so-good things about Numb3rs:

• The “3” is not even remotely l33t.

• Peter MacNicol’s character is just as annoying as he was on Ally McBeal, and he makes a surprisingly unconvincing physicist.

• “Let’s have a show about a mathematician hero and premiere it right after football. Then let’s move it to Fridays at 10!”

As a side note, is it just me, or have commercials gotten totally weird? I haven’t owned a working TV for nearly three years, and most of what I have watched has been Tivo’ed shows or shows-on-DVD. Now that I have emerged from my cocoon, it seems there is a bewildering array of prescription pharmaceuticals and other medical products available for purchase these days. Is that just CBS, or is that true for all network TV? One commercial simply instructed us to follow our doctor’s instructions when taking Zocor. But what the hell is Zocor? And why do we need commercials to remind us to take it according to instructions? We are a very strange nation.

Did I mention Numb3rs has Sabrina Lloyd? This is important, worth mentioning. Thank you.

1. Although if I did, it’s not like there would be anything wrong with that.

Every Wednesday, we all assemble at a local bar before our weekly poker game. Usually the bar is busy, but tonight it was packed. How packed? Packed enough that our regular waitress was nowhere to be seen, and we had to settle for a random server and… ordinary service. The indignity of it all! It’s probably worth mentioning that on only slightly less hectic nights, our regular waitress has been known to greet new arrivals at our table by smiling and immediately setting down a beer from her tray. Someone else’s beer, that is. Now that’s service.

Now, the patrons of this bar are not the most rabid sports fans in the world. Just your typical 25-45ish Silicon Valley types in jeans and khakis and polo shirts. No ‘Sox paraphernalia in sight. And yet… everyone was going wild after every big Red Sox play. Three thousand miles from Boston. Heck, the South Bay is not exactly thick on the ground with people who even pay attention to the American League at all.

Is there anyone outside of New York and its environs who doesn’t despise the Yankees?

I’m back! For the record, I had planned to come back with a cute little piece about my recent computer woes. But rather than focus on my personal stupidity, this entry is going to focus on stupidity in general.

Via Mark Pilgrim‘s “b-links”, I ran across this lovely little piece titled, “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity“, by economics professor Carlo M. Cipolla. I must say that this article is a remarkable example of its genre. The author hits us right away with his First Law of Human Stupidity:

“Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.”

Always and inevitably! At the same time! Wow. What the heck is wrong with all of us? It sure is hard to understand how everyone could continue to underestimate the number of stupid individuals, what with the sheer numbers of Smart Persons taking time out to warn about this pressing problem and all. From UC-Berkeley Economics Professors to angst-ridden teens, there’s really no shortage. In fact, there are enough people churning out such warnings that we really ought to give them their own designation. Call them, “Meta-Stupid”.

Basic Law of Meta-Stupidity #1: Meta-Stupid people believe that almost everyone else is stupid.

We might naively (stupidly?) expect that this amounts to a not-so-subtle dig at the reader. If most people are stupid, doesn’t that mean the reader is probably stupid? No, no, don’t worry — if you’re smart enough to travel in the same intellectual circles as the Meta-Stupid person, to read his or her oeuvre, there’s an excellent chance you’re not stupid after all. Think no more of it.

Now, what does “most people are stupid” mean? It means that rather than drawing the Line of Stupidity at, say, the 5% mark, or even the 30% mark, the Meta-Stupid person is pulling the line far, far to the right. “The people at the 50th, 70th, even the 95th percentile are all profoundly stupid,” says the Meta-Stupid person. “Only a select few peers and I make the cut.” In other words, whatever stupidity is, the criteria for not having it are rather stringent.

And if that’s true, if the vast majority of people really are so stupid, that’s actually pretty disturbing, isn’t it? After all, I had always thought that a complex modern society had to be composed of hundreds of millions of complex people. People who work, pay rent, create, raise children, pay taxes, vote, live, love, hate, die, and even tie their shoelaces all by themselves. But no no, that’s all wrong. Our society consists of nothing but hundreds of millions of stupid drones. Everything would fall apart if not for a tiny minority of super-men, heroically banging away at their keyboards, focusing their super-brains on… whatever super-brains focus on. Let’s hope they keep doing such a diligent job. Or failing that, let’s hope that “stupidity” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Basic Law of Meta-Stupidity #2: Meta-Stupid people mean different things by “Stupid”.

When a Meta-Stupid person uses the word “stupid”, he or she could mean any of the following:

• “People who disagree with me politically or philosophically”
• “People who are novices in an area in which I am an expert”
• “People who dislike me,” or the closely related, “People who don’t understaaaand me”

Finally there’s the tautological,

• “People who do stupid things”

Definition of stupidity to be left as an exercise for the reader. Our UC-Berkeley professor friend defines it thus:

[The Third Basic Law of Human Stupidity]: “A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.”

And here is where I confess: I am a stupid person. I have caused losses to other people, deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. In fact, definitely incurring losses. Worse, I’ve even done more than one stupid thing in my life. And in the next half-century, there’s a good chance I’ll do something else that’s stupid. Who knows, maybe even two or three things. Heavy doth the mantle of stupidity weigh.

Needless to say, our Meta-Stupid professor’s definition needs a little work.

First, the definition doesn’t explicitly account for expectation values (a rather surprising omission for an Economics professor). For example: speeding and tailgating is stupid, because it increases your chance of death for very little benefit. Nevertheless, even if you’re a terrible driver, there’s a good chance that you’ll make it through your entire driving career without dying in a heap of flaming wreckage. So if you’re one of the people that makes it to age eighty, does that make you smart?

Second, some stupid actions actually do benefit others. Consider someone who runs up a massive credit card debt buying stuff they can’t afford, and ends up having to pay off tens of thousands of dollars at exorbitant rates. Pretty stupid, right? And yet lots of other parties benefit. The merchants that sold the stuff to the stupid person. The people who manufacture the stuff. The credit card company that accepts the payments. The bank that takes over the loan when the person consolidates their debt at a lower rate. Lots of benefit all around — and so by the above definition our credit card person is, well, not stupid.

Third, the way the definition is written, it’s one-strike-you’re-out. I don’t know who these non-stupid people are, but I want to find them. And follow them, and gather at least one or two of the golden bricks they shit.

Basic Law of Meta-Stupidity #3: Meta-Stupid people tend to say profoundly stupid and self-refuting things.

Nothing brings out the stupidity quite like calling most of your fellow human beings stupid. It’s kind of like being a grammar fascist: as soon as you harp on someone, someone else will point out three errors in your own post. It’s the Pot-Kettle effect. Incidentally, that’s why I haven’t been ripping on Professor Cipolla for his piss-poor prose. (Whoops!)

[The Fourth Basic Law of Human Stupidity]: “Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.”

Huh.

1. If I were a non-stupid person, wouldn’t I never “underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals?” After all, if I failed to do this, I would be causing losses to myself and others. And therefore by definition, I would be stupid.

2. If most people in the world are indeed stupid, then what, pray tell, is protecting me from “deal[ing] and/or associat[ing]” with them, at least some of the time? Must be those mile-high walls of adamantium surrounding Stupid Country, keeping us all safe from Stupidity Rays.

Moving on…

[The Fifth Law of Human Stupidity]: “A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. The corollary of the Law is that: A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.”

Oh really? The most dangerous? Let’s see. If I encounter a “bandit”, he is always going to beat me up and take my stuff. If I encounter a “stupid person”, at best he is only sometimes going to cause losses. Again, our economics professor blithely ignores expectation values. Weird. My friend Eric’s older brother Bob studied math and computer science at UC-Berkeley, and Bob just loves probability and expectation values. Maybe it’s a departmental thing.

“Although convinced that fraction of human beings are stupid and that they are so because of genetic traits, I am not a reactionary trying to reintroduce surreptitiously class or race discrimination.”

Gosh, that’s a relief. But a few lines later, we get:

[The Second Basic Law of Human Stupidity]: “The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.”

Wild. So on the one hand, stupidity is genetic. But wait — stupidity is independent of any other characteristic of that person. Except their parents, I guess.

Well, anyway. You get the idea. I think Mark sums it up best in the title of his link to the Stupidity page: “The only power stupid people have over you is when you let them waste your time.” Truer words were never spoken. I’m going to bed.

According to the New York Times, the Catholic Church and the Episcopal Church
are busily swapping members:

“It breaks my heart,” said Shari de Silva, a neurologist in Fort Wayne, Ind., who converted from Episcopalian to Catholic this year. “I think the Episcopal Church is headed down the path to secular humanism.”

Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing religious Switcher commercials. “… It was a really good Church! But then I found out that they had, like, consecrated a gay bishop. It was kind of… a bummer.”

Hey, in case anyone was wondering: Reform Judaism has been ordaining gay rabbis for over ten years, and many rabbis are happily performing commitment ceremonies. (See here for summaries of the CCAR‘s and UAHC‘s official statements on homosexuality.) Of course, there are a few disadvantages to becoming Jewish. Gefilte fish, for instance: definitely an acquired taste. Chanukah gelt: almost invariably made from the crappiest grade of chocolate available. And then there’s the small matter of pretty much everyone in the world trying to kill us. But aside from that, being Jewish is a hoot! Our literature over the last century or two pretty much speaks for itself on that regard.