Eric The Blue

Jim Webb for VP?

Barack Obama will choose the running mate he likes best.  Of candidates frequently mentioned in media speculation, I think Jim Webb, the senator from Virginia, is the one I like best.  I'm disposed in favor of writers, and Webb is a good one.  Writing in the current New York Review, Elizabeth Drew observes:

Webb is a serious writer, not a politician who writes books on the side.  His first book, Fields of Fire, published in 1978, when Webb was thirty-two, is a sweeping, unflinching novel about Vietnam featuring two of life's losers who signed up for lack of anything else to do.  It conveys with stark vividness, and also a touch of farce, the stench, the filth, the fear, and the bewildering unexpectedness of fighting an elusive enemy in a jungle.  Fields of Fire has often been called the best book about Vietnam and likened to the war writing of Norman Mailer and Stephen Crane.

Webb's knowledge of warfare, like Mailer's, comes from firsthand experience.  He is a decorated--two Bronze Stars, two Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, the Navy Cross--Vietnam combat veteran who, before he left the Republican party and defeated an incumbent Republican, George Allen, in a 2006 Senate campaign, was probably best known for his service as Secretary of the Navy under President Reagan.  He was, like Obama, a prescient voice of reason on the invasion of Iraq.  On the op-ed page of the Washington Post, he wrote, in September of 2002:

America's best military leaders know that they are accountable to history not only for how they fight wars, but also for how they prevent them.  The greatest military victory of our time--bringing an expansionist Soviet Union in from the cold while averting a nuclear holocaust--was accomplished not by an invasion but through decades of intense maneuvering and continuous operations.  With respect to the situation in Iraq, they are conscious of two realities that seem to have been lost in the narrow debate about Saddam Hussein himself.  The first reality is that wars often have unintended consequences....  The second is that a long-term occupation of Iraq would beyond doubt require an adjustment of force levels elsewhere, and could eventually diminish American influence in other parts of the world....  The issue before us is not simply whether the United States should end the regime of Saddam Hussein, but whether we as a nation are prepared to physically occupy territory in the Middle East for the next 30 to 50 years....  These concerns, and others like them, are the reasons that many with long experience in U.S. national security issues remain unconvinced by the arguments for a unilateral invasion of Iraq.

As events unfolded, skepticism gave way to disgust, and it seems that the federal government's reponse to Katrina was for Webb the final proof of the Republican party's careless ineptitude.  The suburbs of Washington, D.C. in northern Virginia are growing rapidly, which is making the whole state somewhat more friendly to the Democratic party.  Webb's economic populism and Scotch-Irish heritage positioned him to win votes in the rural, mountain region of southwestern Virginia, and these factors, together with the infamous racial slur that slid off the lips of his opponent, put him over the top by fewer than 10,000 votes.

Virginia was last carried by a Democratic presidential candidate in 1964, but it is widely regarded to be "in play" in 2008.  Webb obviously won a statewide race in 2006.  Obama easily won the state's Democratic primary, and, according to the most recent polls, is even with or slightly ahead of McCain among likely Virginia voters.  The state's thirteen electoral votes would make it possible for Obama to win the White House with neither Florida or Ohio in his column. It is plain that Webb, who has speculated that he is the only person in the history of Virginia with a union card, two Purple Hearts, and three tattoos to win a statewide election, is strong where Obama is weak.  He might help Obama win the battlegrounds of Pennsylvania and Ohio in addition to Virginia.  If those three are all in his column in November, Obama will be the next president. 

There are, as with all prospects, arguments against Webb.  Michael Tomasky, who also likes Webb, summarizes the credits and debits here.  Finally, as long as we are talking about running mates, I should say, since I'm a Minnesotan, that it is fine with me if McCain taps our governor, Tim Pawlenty, for the second spot on the Republican ticket.  My mother likes him, which means that if he were a movie he'd be terrible. It is somewhat surprising to me that he is apparently on McCain's short list.  There is no sign that McCain has a chance in Minnesota, and even if he did, it is not clear that Pawlenty would help: in the Republican caucus here last winter, McCain was pasted by Mitt Romney--Mitt Romney!--despite the enthusiastic support of Pawlenty.  I guess Pawlenty is handsome, so in that respect he'd balance the ticket.

Obama!

Hillary Clinton would probably be the Democratic nominee for president if she hadn't voted to authorize George Bush to make war in Iraq.  Obama opposed the war from the start, and Dorothy Wickenden, writing in the current New Yorker, reminds us of the words of an unknown Illinois state legislator speaking in the fall of 2002: 

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

Wickenden reminds us, too, that five days later, in a nationally televised speech delivered in Cincinnati, President Bush declared that the United States faced "clear evidence of peril" and could not "wait for the final proof--the smoking gun--that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."  In the same speech Bush said:

Some ask how urgent this danger is to America and the world. The danger is already significant, and it only grows worse with time. If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today -- and we do -- does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?

John McCain, like Hillary Clinton, voted to authorize the invasion.  I suspect Clinton was positioning herself for the coming presidential campaign, and that McCain actually believed Bush.  (To this day McCain denies that the invasion of Iraq was a colossal blunder.)   We do not know now the most important questions the next president will have to decide, but we can form an opinion of the quality of the candidates' judgment.  On what turned out to be the single biggest decision of the Bush presidency, McCain (and Clinton) were wrong, and Obama got it right.

Religious nuts

My wife recently watched the 20/20 show about this crackpot.  Now Thursday, June 12, has come and gone and no Second Coming.  He is plainly a case for abnormal psychology. 

Lunatic Christians believe that Jesus will come again next Thursday to judge the living and the dead.  The mature, grounded believers decline to name a date.  Yet it seems to me that, if it is to happen, it has to happen on a certain day--a Tuesday in the fall of 2620, perhaps, or maybe on a Saturday in 2983.  I do not understand why a Thursday in 2008 is particularly crazy.  I suppose the real theological sophisticates realize the doctrine refers to a metaphor.

A story.

Long ago, there was a remotely located town populated mainly by devout Christians.  The location was so remote that the citizens feared that when the Second Coming occurred Jesus would not find His way to their town and they would be left behind in the rapture.  So they built some towers on the outskirts of town and hired a few of the local beggars to sit atop them in shifts.  Their assignment was to raise an alarm in the event of the Second Coming, so that some flares could be set off to direct Jesus to the town.

Time passed.  One day a stranger was passing through and walked past the bottom of one of these towers.  Noticing the figure at the top, he called up to him, and asked what he was doing.  The fellow told him the whole story about the remoteness of the town, the concern that the townspeople had about being left behind in the rapture, that it was his task to raise an alarm if he should see on the horizon signs of the Second Coming, etc.  When the traveler had the whole story, he asked the fellow how much he was paid for his work.  "Well," said the former beggar, a little embarrassed.  "The work doesn't pay much.  But it's steady!"

George Will's limited range of reference

In a recent opinion column, George Will mocks John McCain for having called the recent decision of the Supreme Court, allowing prisoners held at Guantanamo to challenge their indefinite detainment in habeas hearings, "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country."  "Worse than Dred Scott?" Will wonders, rhetorically.  And he proceeds to make McCain's statement ridiculous, as it plainly was, by mentioning the infamous titles of a few other famously poor decisions.

But he forgot one.

I heart Darwin

The claim that Darwin was, according to everything I know, a wonderful human being in addition to a great scientist is rooted in (a) the impression of his character created by his work and (b) the biographical snippets of which I'm aware, preeminently those collected by Martin Gardner in his essay "The Religious Views of Stephen Jay Gould and Darwin," which is included in his collection Did Adam and Eve Have Navels: Debunking Pseudoscience.

Years ago, in Survey of British Literature, I was obliged to read an excerpt from one of Darwin's scientific treatises.  It wasn't long, as reading assignments went, and I can't remember now what topic Darwin was discussing.  I remember feeling bored, so it probably wasn't sexual selection. Or, maybe, it was, for in the next many years I've become more familiar with Darwin's memorably colorless way of putting things--for example, "We should remember the fact given on excellent authority in a former chapter, namely that several peahens, when debarred from an admired male, remained widows during a whole season rather than pair with another bird."

The plodding prose style does not measure up to that of the King James Version of the Bible, a work with which Darwin's are often compared, and I formed the view that the pedagogical intent must have been to shed light on the morose musings of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.  I found Darwin less annoying--he didn't make his points in chiming quatrains of iambic tetrameter--but he aroused no strong sensation in me.  I realize now that this was an unusual reaction, that it is necessary to choose sides, and, despite initial coolness, I am here to recommend, with enthusiasm, Darwin's.  The flip side of "plodding" and "colorless" is "meticulous" and "systematic."  Lurking behind that one unintentionally humorous sentence about spurned, bitter peahens is a tremendous evidentiary edifice founded upon acute observation and built up with the power of human thought.

I get a kick out of people who say evolution is "just a theory."  You never hear them saying the same thing about the notion that everything is made of atoms.  That is because they do not detect in the atomic "theory" a challenge to their religion or their politics.  Their numbers are legion, and they have worked up a controversy over evolution by pleasing each other, but not actual scientists, with a prolific assortment of bad arguments.  Underlying all the confusions, the red herrings, the couching of nonsense in impenetrable jargon, is the effort to reduce evolution, a scientific fact as fundamental and widely acceped as atoms, with proven applications to the practice of medicine that have benefitted many of its detractors, to the status of a mere personality cult.  Thus "Darwinist" and "Darwinism"--terms of derision meant to convey the idea that it's all a runaway one-man-show.

The faintest acquaintance with Darwin's work is a sufficient antidote.  It reveals not a polemicist but a scientist with a view of how nature works, and the case is made, slowly, methodically, comprehensively, convincingly, without resort to rhetorical flourish or the interjection of personal pleadings.  A hundred fifty years of scrutiny have resulted in adjustments, enlargements, revisions of details, practical (and successful) applications to diverse fields, the discovery of new areas for inquiry, and, excepting a few cranks and crackpots--every field has them--universal acceptance in the scientific community.

What we know about Darwin's character fills in the picture of a self-effacing man of science.  As a young student, he had prepared himself for ordination in the Church of England, and, as Gardner shows, quoting at length from letters and other autobiographical writings, he surrendered his faith incrementally and without fanfare.  The degree to which his scientific views influenced his religious ones is not really known.  His private writings, and also the great treatises on evolution, regularly betray the horror with which he regarded the suffering of sentient creatures.  He was deeply affected by the early death of one of his daughters, and was survived by his wife, a devout Anglican who, on her deathbed, worried that she would not be reunited in heaven with her skeptical husband.  He unfailingly regarded the religious faith of others with respectful reserve--out of concern for the sensibilities of people such as his wife but also on account of honest perplexity about the subject.  He was a most tolerant skeptic who, in a letter to the botanist Asa Gray written the year after The Origin of Species was published, summed up his position on "the religious question" by writing:

With respect to the theological view of the question.  This is always painful to me.  I am bewildered.  I had no intention to write atheistically.  But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us.  There seems to me too much misery in the world.  I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly crated the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.  Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed.  On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force.  I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.  Not that this notion at all satisfies me.  I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect.  A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.  Let each man hope and believe what he can. 

Darwinmania--and caveat

"Darwinian."  "Darwinist."  The coined adjectives are useful to God's culture warriors, for they suggest that evolution by natural selection is, essentially, a personality cult.  I yield to no one in my admiration of  Darwin, one of the great scientists of all time and, according to everything I know, a wonderful person as well.  But as we come up to the 200th anniversary of his birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species, let us celebrants remember that what we know about nature is bigger than a single man. 

Those who deny evolution are not brave iconoclasts daring to stand up to a run-away cult.  They are more like those who think the earth is flat.

Darwin was, as PZ Myers notes, a "brilliant fellow who revolutionized our thinking, but he wasn't the only one and he definitely wasn't the final word on evolution."  For an excellent review of Darwin's place among his scientific colleagues, and a clear-headed assessment of the nature of his achievement, see this excellent piece by Olivia Judson in The New York Times.  (PZ links to the same article in his post.)

The insides of houses

On Election Day 2004 I volunteered to go door-to-door for Kerry in my neighborhood.  There was no effort at persuasion, except if you count our Kerry buttons.  In the recent past, the Democratic candidate has received about 80 per cent of the vote in our city, and the idea was just to get people to their polling place.

My memory of the day has nothing to do with politics.  The weather was beautiful in Minneapolis, and it was pleasant to be outside walking.  Most people were not home, but my other memory concerns the insides of the houses I'd glimpse on the relatively rare occasions when my knock was answered.  It was my neighborhood, and I knew my neighbors were not rich, but I was not poor myself, never had been, and I was somewhat taken aback by the sights I saw.  There is something about the look of poverty--a sort of threadbare messiness--that makes an impression upon those not used to it.  I went in a long, two-level apartment building two blocks from my place that I'd never given a second thought.  It smelled of fried food and the people I met--here, many were home--seemed nervous.  When asked whether they meant to vote, the talkative ones said they weren't citizens.

Since that day I've gotten married and moved about two miles away.  The neighborhood is different, and nowadays, when I see the insides of nearby houses, I am accompanied by my wife and other hip young people on a "home tour."  These occur in the spring, when people who have remodeled an old Victorian, or who are just proud of their house, open it up so that those of us with big plans and disposable incomes can see what might be done.  Generally the owner has prepared a "biography" of the home, and if there has been, say, a kitchen remodel, the contractor is on hand to answer questions and put his best foot forward.

In this very different setting my voyeuristic instinct requires new objects for attention.  I could really care less about their proud houses, but I do notice the art on the wall, the family photos, and, if there are any, the books.  Thinking back on it now, there is really a lot of C.S. Lewis--the pop Christian apologetics--and, given the evident affluent materialism of the owners, a (to me) surprising abundance of other treacly religious artifacts. 

I thought of all this again yesterday, because my wife was listening to a Green Day CD and mentioned that she thought the song "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" was meant as an answer to "that stupid footprints poem."  I immediately knew what she meant, because it is displayed on the wall of about a quarter of the houses on the home tour.  You know the one:  the speaker, having noted that in his darkest day the second set of footprints in the sand beside his own disappeared, accuses God of abandonment; but then God explains, in the last line, that it is the speaker's footprints that disappeared--for God was carrying him.

These sorts of sentiments embarrass me.  Who, without being false to their own experience of life, can believe them?  Unless you're just sort of dumb.  Here is the refrain to the Green Day song.

My shadow's the only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart's the only thing that's beating
Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me
'Til then I walk alone...

Bloomsday

Today is Bloomsday, so-called because June 16, 1904, is the day in which the action (except, toward the end, for the wee hours of the 17th ) of James Joyce's Ulysses takes place.  Joyce went on his first date that day with Nora Barnacle, his future wife, and she made quite an impression upon him.

The novel's fame rests to significant degree on its reputation as perhaps the quintessential modernist text in English.  Its difficulty is well known, as is its complicated publication history, brought on by the censor and Joyce's frank treatment of sexual themes.  But these elements tend to obscure the fact that the novel's subject matter--family life and the marital relations of a middle-aged Dublin couple--is rather unsensational.

In Dubliners, a collection of stories in which Joyce claimed to have intended "to write a chapter of the moral history of my country," the main characters become progressively older as we proceed through the volume, first young children, then adolescents and young adults, and, finally, in the last, longest, and finest, "The Dead," another middle-aged married couple, Gabriel and Gretta Conroy, take center stage.  It is really one of the best shorter works of fiction in our language, and I try to reread it every Bloom's Day.  In the course of the action (to summarize with gruesome sketchiness), the reader and Gabriel himself are made to feel his inferiority to one of Gretta's first suitors, who caught his death singing in the cold outside her window.  Gabriel, meanwhile, is the sort of fellow who thinks it very important to wear galoshes, and at the end of the story, alone with his wife in a hotel room after a party and watching the snow fall in the streets, slowly covering everything, his own sense of loss merges with the sadness of all life, its waste and futility.

If you've meant to try Ulysses, but feel intimidated by its reputation, I'd suggest you start with Dubliners.  Read "The Dead" carefully and remember that, despite all the publicity surrounding his modernist methods, Joyce's theme of themes concerns the problems of these older married couples. 

Free associating about .400

Speaking of batting .400, everyone knows that Ted Williams was the last to do it--in 1941, when he batted .406.  On the last day of the season, with his team, the Boston Red Sox, scheduled to play a doubleheader, Williams had 179 hits in 448 at-bats, so his average stood at an even .400 (actually, to five places right of the decimal point, 179/448 equals .39955, but that would have gone in the books as .400).  I've read--I'd be interested in hearing from someone who knows whether it's true or just part of the Williams legend--that the Boston manager offered to hold Williams out of the doubleheader that day in order to preserve his .400 average.  Williams is supposed to have said something along the line of "Nuts to that" before taking to the field, where he cracked out six hits in the two games, raising his average to .406.

Chipper Jones, should he be standing at .400 before the last game of the season, may be more sorely tempted than Williams was to sit it out.  In the history of baseball up to 1941, a .400 average had been attained in quite a few seasons by many different players and had not, therefore, attained the nearly mystical status that all the dry years since 1941 have endowed it with.  Which raises the question: why hasn't anyone batted .400 for almost 70 years?

The best answer to this question has been offered by a paleontologist.  In "Losing the Edge," one of the essays collected in The Flamingo's Smile, Stephen Jay Gould advances the idea that a .400 batting average may be regarded as an outlier in a distribution of all batting averages.  If in the course of time baseball strategies are perfected and the play becomes more regular, then variation within the system will decline, and outliers will be drawn toward the mean.  It is not that Rogers Hornsby or Ty Cobb towered over the best batters of my lifetime.  It's that they had the advantage of playing when the game was still young, before every pitch and hit was tracked and fielders and pitchers--and batters too--had not yet adopted optimal strategies backed by a history of experience and research.  In 1897, when Wee Willie Keeler batted .424, fielders did not position themselves according to the meticulously researched tendencies of different batters.  The 1897 outlier would, under the conditions of modern competition, not stand out so far from the mean.

The scientist in Gould must of course test his hypothesis.  It turns out that the amount of variation within the system of batting averages has indeed declined considerably.  For example, in the 1890s, the decade of Wee Willie Keeler's .424, the difference between the average of the five highest averages and the league average was 91 points.  This figure became, in the next decade, 80, then  83, 81, 70, 69, 67, 70, and, in the 1970s, 68.  For the difference between the lowest averages (of those who played regularly) and the league average, the numbers are smaller but exhibit an even greater percentage decline.  

Gould's is a good theory and widely applicable.  We are ourselves, as collections of atoms, extreme outliers that over the course of just 10²  years settle back toward the dull mean.

A geek watches "Baseball Tonight"

So I'm watching "Baseball Tonight" on ESPN the other day.  John Kruk and another fellow are discussing whether Chipper Jones, of the Braves, has a chance to bat .400 this year.  Kruk thinks not.  He points out that Jones is hitting .420 right now, so if he goes 2-for-5 his average goes down.  Kruk thinks that is too much pressure.  No one can sustain it.

The argument seems to me another of those ordinary pathologies of reason that infect people trying to think straight about probabilities.  Every day that Jones, from a starting point of .420, goes 2-for-5 boosts his chance to finish the season above .400.  Sure, a 2-for-5 day lowers his average, but it also lowers the average that he must hit over the rest of the season and still land at .400.  Suppose--I don't know whether it's true--that Jones was batting .440 on 10 May before sinking to .420 on 10 June.  Isn't it clear that, despite his drop in average, he now has a better chance of batting .400 for the season than he did a month ago, and that if he is batting .404 on 10 September he will have a better chance yet?

To be fair to Kruk, his argument seems to mix psychology with math, and only the math part is flawed.  But the psychology depends upon the bad math.  Those pulling for Jones to bat .400--including, presumably, Jones himself--should not be alarmed if, as the summer proceeds, his average slowly dips toward .400.  The on-air personalities on "Baseball Tonight" were not discussing Jones's chances of batting .400 in April.  They are now, and they'll be talking about it more in August if he should go 2-for-5 every game for the rest of June and July. 

Language notes

Much as I love watching Twins baseball games on television, listening on the radio affords even higher pleasures.  Untethered to the tunnel of space before the TV, you can putz around, prosecuting small tasks, and the low drone of the play-by-play, night after night, blends slowly into the whole pleasant experience of summer.  A downside: the games are broadcast by KSTP radio, so between innings and during pitching changes you sometimes have to hear promos for Joe Soucheray's "Garage Logic" show.  One supposes, though it is hard to believe, that the snippets played for the promos are Joe's proudest moments.

One of the Twins broadcasters is Dan Gladden, the former player.  Shouldn't a baseball guy know not to say, for example, "Justin Morneau leads the team with 40 RBIs batted in"?  (RBI is an acronym for run batted in, and no one would say that Morneau has 40 runs batted in batted in.)  Gladden does it repeatedly, however.  Now I see that LaVelle E. Neal III, who covers the Twins beat for the Star Tribune newspaper, is capable of setting down this "sentence": "It was the first time since Cincinnati's Alex Ochoa against Arizona on April 8, 2001, that one sacrifice fly drove in two RBI."  I've read it over a couple times to make sure it is correctly transcribed.  I hope he was under deadline and that the newspaper does not employ copy editors.  

As long as I'm fault-finding, here is a sentence in an email that everyone who works for Hennepin County recently received from their ultimate boss, the County Administrator:  "A variety of factors--decreasing state and federal funding, falling property values, increasing fuel costs, the rising cost of salaries and benefits--are severely effecting our ability to do business as usual."  Maybe one of the recipients he is thinking of laying off could send him a link.  

Is it unfair to draw conclusions about character from the way someone uses words?  Then I am unfair. Slovenly language betrays a sloven, and the converse is true also, as this small tour de force from the incomparable James Wolcott demonstrates.  And another.  But my opinion on this matter is perhaps a self-serving one, for my wife, having recently googled me, reports on two blog responses to one of my editorial effusions.  The high-spirited, intelligent one is a rave, while the pan is from a manifest sloven.  See if you don't agree.  Intelligent.  Sloven. 

Personal

My wife, probably the only regular reader of this blog, has a complaint.  The posts are boring, she says.  I should write something "personal."  Okay.

We have two daughters, one four months old and the other, who has my wife's brand of DNA but is unburdened by my own, five years.  I know that, by evolutionary theory, I should be more interested in the 4-month-old, a very complicated receptacle for many of my genes and, therefore, my principal hope for a pale form of immortality.  So far, however, she's comparatively short on personality.  I intend to read up on babies and language acquisition, because I am intrigued by the coo babblings that emanate from her when she's awake and not bawling for her mom, and I have an idea that it is a very interesting subject.

But the other one!  I love to behold her from a short distance.  The thing that comes to mind is the passage in one of Keats's letters about glimpsing

a stoat or a fieldmouse peeping out of the withered grass--the creature has a purpose and its eyes are bright with it--I go amongst the buildings of a city and I see a Man hurrying along--to what?

My stepdaughter is the stoat, ever alert, eyes bright with purpose.  Her latest passion is the other kids in the neighborhood.  Many are just a little older and were subjects of her careful study before she made some tentative advances.  These were not always successful and, for me, painful to watch.  Once, failing of nerve while approaching some girls skimming along on those foot scooters that seem all the rage, she simply lay down and assumed the fetal position in a neighbor's front yard.  Oblivious, the bigger girls whisked by on their scooters, and, utterly defeated, my stepdaughter rose and trudged home.  Her look then was more like that of the man amongst buildings--

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe. 

--but that is rare.  She luxuriates in language and loves deploying her expanding repertoire of colorful expressions.  The effects can be comical.  Her maternal grandfather, a beefy Minneapolis firefighter, is routinely referred to at our house, at least by me, as "Big Dan the fireman."  So the last time we visited she tried it out herself and, receiving a somewhat startled look, explained: "That's what Eric calls you!"