Eric The Blue

While watching Sports Center on Opening Day

Curtis Granderson is a Met?  I'm the kind of fan who has to get reacclimated each April.  It's not like when as a boy walking out of Metropolitan Stadium with my dad that stentorian voice would come over the P.A. system to announce, "THE TOTALS ON THE BOARD ARE CORRECT.  NEXT HOME GAMES, FRIDAY NIGHT, SATURDAY AND SUNDAY AFTERNOONS, JUNE 14, 15 AND 16, CARL YASTRZEMSKI AND THE BOSTON RED SOX, HERE AT THE STADIUM." 

I remember thinking it odd that we had to be told where the Twins' home games would be played, as if there was some other possibility than "here, at the stadium."  But what seems odd now, a relic from the receding past, is the way one player was shorthand for the franchise.  Kaline meant the Tigers, and Colavito meant the Indians, almost in the way that "Hollywood" is a stand-in for the U.S. motion picture industry.  When players went into the Hall of Fame, if they went into the Hall of Fame, it wasn't necessary to discuss which team's cap they'd wear in the picture for the plaque. 

I'm steaming toward 60 and think, naturally, that it was better back then.  That is the way with those of us who aren't in the advertisers' target demographic any more. 

Basketball. Baseball.

Boy, some highly entertaining games in the NCAA basketball tournament last night.  One of my wife's Facebook friends had a post concerning  how, late in the evening, when Michigan State versus Virginia was coming down to the wire in near perfect synchronicity with the Battle of Kentucky, she suffered whiplash jerking her eyes from her computer screen, where one game was streaming, to the TV.  My no longer secret thought about that was: Why didn't I meet her?

But basketball has never really figured out the foul thing, has it?  I mean the rules.  Almost every game that is close comes down at the end to one team fouling on purpose in order to stop the clock and get the ball back.  When the rules compel you to break the rules in order to have a chance to win--that, it seems to me, is the Absurd.  In two of last night's games, it was even more ridiculous than that, for the team that found itself behind and without the ball in the last minute of a tight game had committed so few team fouls that they had to foul several times before their opponent began shooting free throws.  As the trailing team fouled and fouled again, the seconds ticked away.  At the end of their games, both Tennessee and Virginia would have been better off if they hadn't committed so few fouls. 

Shouldn't you be rewarded for not having fouled very much?  At least, the opposite shouldn't be true.

When the NCAA basketball champion is crowned, it'll be time for Opening Day of the baseball season, which reminds me that the best game of all is not marred by such farcical happenings.  Behind in the ninth inning?  Play on.  Get a man to base.  Get another man to base.  Keep it going.  There is no other way. 

Bracketology

I'm not too surprised that Warren Buffet could stop feeling nervous about having insured Quicken Loans' billion-dollar payout for a perfect NCAA basketball bracket before the first round of the tournament was completely over.  The chance of a perfect bracket has been widely reported to be 1-in-9.2 quintillion.  The source of that incomprehensible number is 2⁶³, the exponent representing the 63 games in the tournament and the base representing the two possible winners of each of these games.  Since there is obviously not an equal chance of either team winning any particular game, I think this number is too high.  In the first round of the tournament, for example, a #16 seed has never defeated a #1 seed, so if you pick the #1 seed to win their first game in each of the four regions, and an unprecedented upset doesn't occur,  the number of all possible remaining outcomes shrinks to 2⁵⁹. 

But Buffet really wasn't taking any chance at all. The chance of someone winning was more theoretical than actual.  So it was just free publicity.  Plus, Quicken Loans, which got a lot of personal data about all the contest entrants, paid Buffet an undisclosed fee.

It's fun to try and gauge in a rough sort of way why Buffet wasn't actually taking a rash gamble.  Let's  consider the difficulty of predicting correctly the outcome of every game in the first round of the tournament.  There are 32 first-round games, so if you just guessed, the chance of getting every game right is given by 1/2³².  This denominator is 4,294,967,296.  At least it's small enough so that we have recognizable words for it: just under 4.3 billion.  I think I read somewhere that only one entry per household was permitted.  The population of the country is a little more than 300,000,000, and I'm pretty sure there are considerably fewer than half that many households.  But let's just observe that 150,000,000/4,294,967,296 is about 0.035.  So now let's assume that everyone wants Warren Buffet to have to pay out and that all hundred and fifty million competitors collude to cover as many different outcomes as possible--no duplicate brackets, in other words.  They still cannot cover even 4% of the possible outcomes.  If there was collusion among the maximum number of permitted entrants, how many of the 96-plus percent of uncovered outcomes would have included Mercer over Duke? 

All of them, or for sure almost all.  And, remember, we are talking about the difficulty of submitting a bracket that's perfect for the first round only.

Books of the Bible: Leviticus

The book of Leviticus is read today by scholars, by weirdos like me who have determined to read the whole Bible, and, if cherry-picking skimmers count, by Christianist crackpots looking to excuse their homophobia.  The rest of the population has better things to do, such as washing the car.  Exodus began to suffer on account of the prevalence of the priestly source, and the trend continues in Leviticus, whose stolid readers are subjected to long passages concerning the elements of an acceptable animal or cereal offering, the remedies for ritual uncleanness of diverse etiology (such as those associated with "emissions" from the reproductive organs), sexual proscriptions enshrouded in euphemisms that may or may not be attributed to stiff translations ("uncover the nakedness of" means "have sex with"), calendrical considerations, crazy dietary rules that make distinctions between the flesh of cloven-footed animals that chew their cud and . . . etc., etc.

I suppose I should try and give the flavor of it, but I'd rather you just open and start reading at random. You will then almost surely see what I mean.  In what follows, I'll try to provide a quick tour of why it is arguably  necessary to include the weaseling "almost" in that last sentence.

Regarding the offering recipes: some are so bizarre as to be sort of intriguing.  (Something similar might be said of the whole book, if you wanted to defend Leviticus against the charge of uninterrupted dullness.)  For example, this

But if he cannot afford a lamb, then he shall bring, as his guilt offering to the Lord for the sin which he has committed, two turtledoves or two young pigeons, one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering.  He shall bring them to the priest, who shall offer first the one for the sin offering; he shall wring its head from its neck, but shall not sever it, and he shall sprinkle some of the blood of the sin offering on the side of the altar, while the rest of the blood shall be drained out at the base of the altar; it is a sin offering.

is usually, in the commentaries, put forward as an instance of God's accommodation of the less fortunate.  I, however, wonder what page after page of such bloody minute instruction says about God's character.  Why does it matter so much to him what animals are offered as a sacrifice and the manner in which the whole dumb procedure  is executed?  Of course it doesn't.  It matters to some people, the ones whose view of things comprises the priestly source to the Pentateuch.  A psychological theory for this material might point out that it is pleasant to imagine that your acts are pleasing to God, but to make it believable the tasks can't be too easy to achieve.  Thus the elaborate rules.  When we come to the prophets, we will see that, as with so much else, the Bible is many-minded on the topic of these offerings.  Amos:

"I hate, I despise your feasts,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings,
I will not accept them,
and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

It is hard to see how the book of Amos is not a gob of spit in the face of the book of Leviticus. 

Other highlights--the term is relative--likewise possess a certain interest either for a weirdness quotient or for their uneasy relationship with other Scriptural teachings.  An instance of the former:

And the Lord said to Moses, "Say to Aaron, None of your descendants throughout their generations who has a blemish may approach to offer the bread of his God.  For no one who has a blemish shall draw near, a man blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long, or a man who has an injured foot or an injured hand, or a hunchback, or a dwarf, or a man with a defect in his sight or an itching disease or scabs or crushed testicles; no man of the descendants of Aaron the priest who has a blemish shall come near to offer the Lord's offerings by fire; since he has a blemish, he shall not come near to offer the bread of his God.

Aaron was the first High Priest of the Hebrew people, and in the Oxford Annotated Bible this passage is glossed: "Just as the sacrificial offering must be unblemished, so the priest who offers it must be without bodily defect."  One wishes the editor had shed some light on what activities resulted in "crushed testicles" being sufficiently widespread in the population to earn a mention in this list of unacceptable deformities.   If nothing else, reading Leviticus helps one to see that Jesus's foes, several of whom criticized the company he kept, were not necessarily mean or obtuse--or, at least, if they were, could have countered that in that case following Scripture is mean and obtuse. 

Leviticus is also, not surprisingly, the source of the following familiar ethical theory:

He who blasphemes the Name of the Lord shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him; the sojourner as well as the native, when he blasphemes the Name, shall be put to death.  He who kills a man shall be put to death.  He who kills a beast shall make it good, life for life.  When a man causes a disfigurement in his neighbor, as he has done it shall be done to him, fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; as he has disfigured a man, he shall be disfigured. 

A popular bumper sticker argues that this principle "leaves everyone blind."  It is also explicitly rejected by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:38).  In the light of this and many other examples that could be adduced, the claim that every word of the Bible is the God-inspired truth seems problematic.  If p, then not the opposite of p.

The 17th through 26th chapters of Leviticus, from which an-eye-for-an-eye comes, comprise the so-called Holiness Code, the only break in the long block of priestly material that makes Leviticus.  Scholarship is more certain that these chapters are an insertion from a different source than it is about the source of the insertion: it is probably an amalgam of miscellaneous laws that has been edited and added to by editors sympathetic to the priestly view.  (The eye-for-an-eye teaching is a prime candidate for being a priestly addition to the material.)  I think the honest, modern reader, if there were any, would find these chapters to be a puzzling mix of the high and low, the sublime and the stupid. I'll conclude by setting down a few excerpts from the Holiness Code.  See if you think they are in descending or ascending order of moral import.

You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. (18:22)

If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death. (21:10)

 You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord. (19:18)

When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.  The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. (19:33-34)

W.H. Auden, meanderingly

Here's something about the taxonomy of twentieth-century poetry that I don't get.  Why does T.S. Eliot, who was born in St Louis and educated at Harvard before spending most of his adult years working for a London publishing house, earn a spot in anthologies of both English and American literature, while W.H. Auden, who grew up in the English Midlands and attended Oxford before emigrating to New York and taking American citizenship in his 30s, is considered a strictly English poet?

And is there something about poets that makes them ashamed of the names their parents gave them?  I have to say that going by your initials must surely reinforce a prejudice that many people have against poets and poetry.  You know what I mean.  It's like what John Berryman said about "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," that there is something reductive in the very title since the name of the person singing the "love song" takes away something from our conception of a love song: he sounds too well dressed.

Auden is the subject of this essay in the current New York Review.  If you love reading and books, it's natural to be interested in the lives of authors, and often a disappointment to discover the familiar blots.  I kind of regret how little we know about Shakespeare the man and also that the things we do know include the fact that on a couple of occasions he used the courts to enforce the payment of relatively small debts owed to him.  Joyce seems to have been under the impression that, being a genius, everyone he knew should pitch in to support him.  Taking up this general topic, the critic Malcolm Cowley could think of no better defense than to claim, "No complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good English sentence."  I think I agree with that, though it is arguably just a disguised cliche. ("It's possible," say mothers, "to find something good to say about anyone.")

Anyway, it is gratifying to learn that Auden was a real prince of a man. Though it may embarrass some of the big-thinking wingnuts of his adopted land, he was an uncloseted homosexual and a Christian gentleman (and left-wing in his politics).  It is striking how many--Auden was one--of the leading lights of twentieth-century Christian practice have been all keen on Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr.  Maybe I should read them, but I think I will put it off till diagnosed with something dreadful. 

My favorite among Auden's poems that are taught in college courses is "Musee des Beaux Arts," and my favorite among those that aren't goes like this:

The Marquis de Sade and Genet
Are most highly thought of to-day;
        But torture and treachery
        Are not my sort of lechery,
So I've given my copies away.

But doesn't the penultimate line have one too many syllables--a flaw, if it is a flaw, that could easily have been corrected with the contraction "Aren't," which is to be preferred anyway on account of an informality that fits the context? 

I am sure I know better than Auden what recommends a limerick.

Cal and Lizzie

Sometimes I imagine the private conversations of the poet Robert Lowell and the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick, who were married to each other for over twenty years. 

Elizabeth: Should we have chicken or beef tonight?

Robert: Don't care. 

Elizabeth: There's also leftover Chinese.

Robert: In the white box?

Elizabeth: You are a refrigerator sleuth.

Robert: Harriet is having trouble with word problems in algebra.  How old is the Chinese?  You think it's okay?

Elizabeth: Can't remember.   What are you doing over there, anyway?

Robert: An exercise. Can you bring me a whiskey?

Elizabeth: An "exercise"?

Robert: Yeah.  I'm trying to write an mproved version of "Lycidas."  But I could really use a whiskey.

Elizabeth: You're crazy as a voter in Kentucky. 

And so on.  Actually, I've rarely wondered about the table talk of these two, but yesterday, dipping into John Updike's More Matter, I stumbled upon his review of the Writers at Work interviews, in which he quotes Hardwick replying to a question about her being "fortunate":

As I have grown older I see myself as fortunate in many ways. It is fortunate to have had all my life this passion for studying and enjoying literature and for trying to add a bit to it as interestingly as I can. This passion has given me much joy, it has given me friends who care for the same things, it has given me employment, escape from boredom, everything. The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

And I thought what an elevated life she led.  Maybe.  It must usually be a mistake to imagine that somewhere the fit and fair have found each other and are living in a way that would arouse the envy of all.

Getting exercised in the morning

The gym I exercise at before work is remodeling.  One consequence is that most of the TVs are shut off and anyone who wants to pedal a recumbent bike is now sentenced to watch Fox & Friends.  Only those who watch always or never will doubt how terrible it is.  I might have to start swimming again, or lifting weights. 

Elizabeth Hasselbeck: she hasn't gotten any less daft since her days on The View, which I watched in 2008 while home from work on new-parent leave.  She's the kind of woman who gives hot blondes their bad name.  And who are the grinning gargoyles who frame her on the couch?  They don't care for the Affordable Care Act, I can tell you that.  They talked of little else before Obama let Putin invade Crimea.  Today they interviewed some guy with a pet-related business who, but for the ACA, would have hired a bunch of new workers by now.  While the horrors of Obamacare were being bemoaned, the screen showed pictures of the cute pets who will not be receiving the care they deserve. 

Not enough employees!  But can't hire new ones!  The ACA is a jobs killer!  The CBO has run the numbers!

It seems that people can now quit jobs they held because it was the only way to get affordable health insurance.  Fox & Friends think nothing could be worse.  Freeloaders!  Want to go to the doctor?  Get a job.  Also, President Obama is ignoring the crisis in the Crimea in order to focus on the coming midterm election.  They all shake their heads.  Used to be a great country, then we elected this Kenyan. After the break, they will  explain why Hillary Clinton is probably the one person  more responsible than Obama for what's going on in the Crimea.

it's almost as if Fox & Friends assume everyone watching must be stupid.

A modest proposal from 12 years ago

Encouraged by our IT Department to remove "personal files" from a drive on our work computers, I found the following old LTE--letter to the editor--from April of 2002.  It was a response to this article in the Minneapolis newspaper.  My letter wasn't published, but dang it, I have a blog now, and I'm copying it in to help fill out the picture of my disgust with the administration of Bush the Younger.  It's possible that I'd been reading Swift around this time, too.

To the editor:

An April 22 news story--"Welfare debate: what to do next?"--mentions the Bush administrations's effort to enact new laws encouraging welfare recipients to marry.

While the initiative is without question well intentioned, I suspect that the outcome of matrimony for the poor is about what it is for the rest of us--sometimes favorable, sometimes not, the devil residing in the details of the available options and the particular choices made.  It's even likely that market forces conspire against the interests of the marriageable poor.

As people transact their affairs, seeking under the gentle auspices of an invisible hand to maximize their advantage in life, a kind of winnowing action brings together able and attractive people possessed of bright futures, thereby leaving those with fewer assets to scavenge among picked-over remains of which they are themselves a constituent part.  Lord knows we all try our best, but in competetive markets nothing succeeds like success, or fails like failure.

So although conservatives have a lot of sound advice for the poor, extending "get a job, any job" to "get a spouse, any spouse" has the potential to append a crippling exponent to already meager fractions.  What the poor need is not "any spouse" but the particular kind often possessed by compassionate conservatives who, if my incomplete knowledge of their habits can be trusted, tend to find their soul mates at slick colleges charging in excess of twenty thousand dollars per year [ed comment: dated material]. 

I therefore propose government action to encourage compassionate conservatives to marry the objects of their compassion.  Perhaps the population could be divided into "marriage groups" based on such factors as educational attainment and household income of the family of origin.  There could then be a direct transfer of public money to new households formed by the union of mates from unlike, noncontiguous marriage groups.  The arrangement is admittedly deficient in romance but the divorce rate proves people need to be more practical anyway.  

On a superficial level, my proposal may appear to conflict with the conservative mantra of "lower taxes," "limited government," and "personal responsibility."  I can even foresee that one or two conservatives inclined toward bombast might lament "the intrusive reach of the nanny state into the realm of matrimony" as well as "the elevation of gold-digging to federal social policy."  Yet their views on subjects ranging from the entertainment industry to presidential cavorting suggest that, when the stakes are high, American conservatives stand ready to put an activist government at the service of the public good.  

Besides, the initiative is mainly President Bush's.  I'm only trying to nudge the government's matchmaking activity in a direction that will boost the social utility of civilization's most important institution.

 

Power outage

Over at the Power Line blog, John Hinderaker, who is so perpetually out of breath that his brain has not received any oxygen since Reagan was president, cites the results of a National Science Foundation survey showing that "51% of Democrats do not know that the Earth goes around the Sun once a year!"  To me, this seemed high, so I clicked "National Science Foundation," to which he had attached a hyperlink, expecting to be connected to the "study" itself.  Instead, I was connected to another blog post about the "study."  When I clicked on the hyperlink in that post, I made it to the website of the NSF--and received the message, "The page you tried to access does not exist on our site OR an internal error has occurred."

Yes, an error has occurred.

The blog Hinderaker links to is the Volokh Conspiracy, which is written by a group of right-wing law professors.  My theory of the case is that Hinderaker's knowledge of the "study" is second-hand and limited entirely to what he read in this one blog post.  So what does the Volokh post say?  One thing it doesn't say is who was interviewed and how their political affiliations were determined.  One thing it does say, but which Hinderaker chose not to mention, is that 38 per cent of Republicans also failed this solar-system test.  Maybe the headline should be more general: "Americans exhibit stunning ignorance of basic scientific knowledge."

Hinderaker also does not report what the "study"--I keep putting it in quotes since I'm not sure it's real--found about Republicans and evolution.  From the Volokh post:

The Republican and conservative refusal to recognize evolution is well known, but the extent of it may not be. As if the numbers for all adults (48 percent) aren’t depressing enough, only 28 percent of conservative Republicans believe that humans evolved from earlier species. In the next three spots are 32 percent of Republicans believing in evolution, 34 percent of conservative Democrats, and 37 percent of conservatives. (For comparison, 28 percent of fundamentalist Protestants believe in evolution, as do 27 percent of those who believe that the Bible is the literal word of God.)

At the other end of the spectrum, the political group most likely to embrace evolution is moderate Independents (68 percent), followed by liberal Democrats (66 percent) and liberals overall (66 percent).

It's interesting, I think, that the Volokh author, Jim Lindgren, a law professor at Northwestern, is plainly appalled by the overwhelming rejection of evolution by his fellow wingers.  It's enough, almost, to disqualify him as a winger.  He might have added, though, that while it's easy to name prominent Republican politicians who reject evolution, there aren't any Democrats in high places who don't know that our Earth goes 'round the sun--four times in a presidential term. 

And, speaking of what Republicans think about evolution, here is John Hinderaker himself on the subject:

Modern leftism has always been anti-religious at its core. The three great intellectual movements of the nineteenth century, founded by Marx, Darwin and Freud, were all rebellions against the European religious tradition. Marx sought to secularize history, Darwin to secularize biology, and Freud to secularize human nature. All three movements pretended to be scientific, but in reality were pseudo-science. Hostility to religion was their essence and their motivation.

So, in the world according to Hinderaker, evolution is "pseudo-science," Darwin was not one of the greatest scientists but just a crusading atheist, and those who don't mark their ballots as he marks his have a monopoly on scientific illiteracy. 

I only wish he hadn't left us wondering about the identity of the mathematician responsible for having secularized the calculus.