Eric The Blue

Amy Schneider on Jeopardy!

I'm not a big enough Jeopardy nerd to have an opinion about who should be the host, or to hate (or approve) the idiosyncrasies of notable contestants, but I do record the show and then periodically binge several episodes, usually on weekends, and I just saw the game in which 40-day champion Amy Schneider was finally defeated. For the fun of it, and aided by the pause button—I'm obviously refuting my claim about not being a big Jeopardy nerd—I logged the correct and incorrect answers of Schneider and the contestant who beat her.  I suspect her performance was approximately as dominating as in many of the games she won. The guy who beat her, in other words, lucked out. Over the course of the game, Schneider gave 28 correct answers (and one that was wrong), while the eventual winner gave only 16 correct answers (and two wrong ones). This would be a recipe for amassing twice as much money as your nearest competitor, which results in "a runaway game": in "Final Jeopardy," meant to be climactic, the contestants can bet only as much as they've won, so if the leader has more than twice as much as the other contestants there is no drama about who will win. 

Just about all of Schneider's wins were like that, and quite late in the game that ended her streak she led the fellow who beat her by $22,400 to $4600. Ho-hum, another day at the Jeopardy office for her. But he then put a small dent in her lead with a couple correct responses before landing on the last Daily Double, which permits a contestant to bet up to everything they have on a single question. Happily for him, it was late enough in the game, and he was far enough behind, so that it was easy to see his only chance was to make a large bet. He bet everything he had, and his earnings shot up to well past half hers when he then answered correctly. He was now in a position to pass her in Final Jeopardy—another big bet, another right answer, and a wrong answer from her is all he needed, though Schneider's record indicated she was unlikely to be stumped.

The category for Final Jeopardy was "Countries of the World" and the "answer" was:

The only nation in the world whose name in English ends in an "h," it's also one of the 10 most populous.

This strikes me as a typical Final Jeopardy item in the respect that, while no one is apt to know the answer immediately, it's intended to elicit and reward educated assumptions—in this case, that a country among the ten most populous is probably in Asia. So you've got 30 seconds to find in your mind's map of Asia a country ending in the letter "h." The fellow in second place, who had $17,600, wrote the correct "question":

What is Bangladesh?

His bet was $12,000, lifting him to $29,600, a couple thousand more than Schneider, who wrote:

What is ???

It's so easy for a tremendous player to lose that it's a wonder someone could win 40 times in a row. If I weren't a fan, I'd assume that skill in Jeopardy, like being able to run fast or having an ear for music, falls along the bell-shaped continuum. Since the contestants are screened, they all must have minds packed with information and it should therefore be impossible for one of them to win 40 times in a row—especially considering that there's a degree of luck, as exhibited in the game Schneider finally lost. But a better model seems to be, say, Bobby Orr or Wayne Gretzky in hockey. The end of the continuum has outliers. It's not surprising that the outliers should play in the NHL, or get on Jeopardy. 

I imagine some right-wingers must be chortling about how Schneider, who earned just under $1.4 million on Jeopardy, is going to owe about $630,000 in federal and state (California) income taxes. It does seem that the tax code ambushes regular people on whom one year fortune suddenly shines. People who earn that kind of money every year can arrange things. You have to prove you're not "regular" by making that much over and over again before they give you a break.

A bill for a law in Oklahoma

If the prompt in a free association exercise were the above passage, from the draft of a proposed bill in the Oklahoma legislature, I think my response would be "Taliban."

Don't think I've ever before crossed ways with the phrase "recreational sexualization," but the author, sensing perplexity, helpfully clarifies: "any form of non-procreative sex." Maybe "recreational sexualization" was deployed because it sounds worse than "recreational sex"—which, admittedly, sounds pretty bad. 

I'm not sure, however, that "any form of non-procreative sex" is as clarifying as the bill's author thinks. For example, for purposes of the law, is a 60-year-old woman having sex "the old-fashioned way" in the same classification as yucky gay and transsexual doings? The procreative status is equivalent in each instance. At least the school library won't have anything in it of interest to a confused, searching kid. The inventory shall consist only of official information approved by the state legislature.

They claim to favor "limited government."

Sports desk

We Packer-haters are all headline writers for a tabloid paper today.

"Niners jab Pack, Rodgers!"

"Rodgers Never Had A Shot!"

You hate to see it. 

Concerning Kyrsten

By now, every news editor in America must know that it's Kyrsten Sinema, not Kirsten, or Kristen, or Kristine, or any even more distant variant. But could any of them explain her strategy? Joe Manchin I get, he represents West Virginia, where sticking it to his own party is popular, but Sinema is an Arizonan and the state Democratic party has just censured her for preferring the filibuster to voting rights. Her approval rating among Arizona Democrats is so dismal—below 10 percent—that there's been speculation she might jump parties. That also doesn't make much sense, however. Sinema is openly bisexual, supports abortion rights, is said to be the only nontheist in the Congress, and voted to convict Trump in both impeachment trials. She's in the Senate, so by definition she's ambitious, but political orphans rarely win a party nomination for high office.

Do we have to consider the possibility that her stance is explained by devotion to lofty principles of governance? The filibuster seems like an odd choice of hill to die on. I will write checks to "Sinema for Senate" because I, too, worship the filibuster!  No one says that. In her public statements, Sinema has indicated that the traditions of the Senate require a bipartisan supermajority in order to move legislation forward. True, to a degree, but also laughable. A brief history of the current problem begins with the Supreme Court of the Republican party gutting the Voting Rights Act. This required only a simple majority of justices. Republican state legislatures then rushed into the breach and passed restrictive laws making it harder to vote. A simple majority always sufficed to pass the restrictive laws. Congressional Democrats, who are in the majority, want to reverse what the states have done, but now suddenly a supermajority is required. Revoke by simple majority, restore only by a supermajority. Sinema: "I'm cool with that."

Of course, the filibustering senators represent the same states that have adopted restrictive voting laws. Sinema will wait a long time for Republican senators to undo what other Republicans have done. It's obvious that the filibuster isn't an agent of bipartisan comity. It's an arrow in the quiver of partisan wranglers. 

Republicans who for the moment approve of Sinema's view of the filibuster say that the Senate is working as the founders intended. When someone says that the founders intended X, X invariably aligns with their interests but hardly ever with the founders' intent. The Constitution sets out rare instances requiring a Senate supermajority—for example, approving treaties negotiated by the executive branch (Article 2, Section 2) and conviction in impeachment trials (Article 1, Section 3). It clearly assumes, then, that for the ordinary business of legislating a simple majority should suffice. It's true that senators represent entire states and have a term of six years. But the longer term and broader constituency is intended to make the Senate less susceptible to a day's strong wind, which should be distinguished from the effects of a paralytic stroke. Here is Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 22:

To give a minority a negative upon the majority (which is always the case where more than a majority is requisite to a decision) is, in its tendency, to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser number. . . . The necessity of unanimity in public bodies, or of something approaching towards it, has been founded upon a supposition that it would contribute to security. But its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority. In those emergencies of a nation in which the goodness or badness, the weakness or strength, of its government is of the greatest importance, there is commonly a necessity for action. The public business must in some way or other go forward. If a pertinacious minority can control the opinion of a majority, respecting the best mode of conducting it, the majority in order that something may be done must confirm to the views of the minority; and thus the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater and give a tone to the national proceedings. Hence, tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good.

It's as if Hamilton peered far into the future, glimpsed Mitch McConnell and Kyrsten Sinema, shivered, and picked up his pen.

Memento mori

Toured a Memory Care Unit this morning, I wish just for the hell of it, and the experience may have operated on me like a subliminal memento mori as I just realized that, upon returning home, I served my kids the traditional Lutheran funeral lunch: ham sandwiches on little buttered buns (the kind that taste slightly sweet with a dusting of flour on top), in this case an unrealistically constrained selection of pickles and olives and other relishes, jello "salad," and a cookie—they're not old enough yet for coffee, no matter how weak it is. 

Sorry girls, no marshmallow topping on the "salad," this was merely a simulation inspired, additionally or alternately, by the news that Louie Anderson died today. I'll be in need of the Memory Care Unit myself when I forget his TV debut with Johnny Carson. He walks out on the stage, allows everyone to take in the sight of him, begins, "Sorry I can't stay long, I'm between meals." 

"I went to McDonald's so all the statistics have changed." 

Coen bro does Macbeth

The entity usually referred to as "the Coen brothers" has always seemed like one person to me. I know that Frances McDormand is married to one of them, I have no idea which, but presumably the brothers are distinct persons to her. Now that one of them, I guess Joel, has written and directed a film version of Macbeth maybe I'll achieve some clarity myself. McDormand plays Lady Macbeth in the movie and I see now that she's Joel's spouse. A household proprietorship instead of the familiar brotherly one.

I'm a little puzzled about some of the conventions surrounding the film project. It's said the movie was "written and directed by Joel Coen," which must mean that, in addition to directing, he's responsible for a script that's adapted from the play written by William Shakespeare in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Yet reviewers, sophisticated ones, often make it sound as if the thing dropped from the mind of Joel Coen. Here is Joyce Carol Oates.

(as the child speaks brightly & is allowed to be "cute," in the sole playful scene in the entire film, I thought: Coen is preparing us to think this little boy is real, before he's savagely murdered.)
(a transparent move, yet still effective.) https://t.co/Pb0q33FnJZ

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) January 14, 2022

The scene she describes, whether "out of place" or not, wasn't invented by Joel Coen: it's Act IV, Scene 2 of Shakespeare's play. The murder of Macduff's family serves no political or strategic purpose, which may contribute to the impression that it's extraneous, "spliced in." But the senselessness is the point. Macbeth's first murder followed an agonizing scene of moral deliberation. The boundary once crossed, however, there's no more reasoning. He's self-aware enough to diagnose his own disorder:

                                        I am in blood
Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.
Strange things I have in head, that will to hand,
Which must be acted ere they may be scanned.

This speech had begun with a bit of wayward information dropped, as it were, unintentionally:

I hear it by the way; but I will send;
There's not a one of them but in his house
I keep a servant fee'd . . . .

"Keep a servant fee'd"—that is, pay them to spy. He succeeds to the throne after killing the king and his profit on it is that he takes up residence in a nightmare world of paranoia and madness. He tries to escape by committing more and more murders, the consequent slaughters making less and less sense. In general, Shakespeare's savagery receives short shrift, and a movie version that elided the slaughter of Macduff's family would be contributing to the trend. The scene in which Macduff receives the news is brutal. What we call "toxic masculinity" is one of the play's themes. His wife had tempted Macbeth to act on his foul ambition by taunting him, "When you durst do it, then you were a man." Macduff, told of the slaughter of his family, is advised by a third party to "Dispute it like a man." 

MACDUFF:
He has no children. All my pretty ones?

Academic criticism

One thing that has been so consistent throughout this pandemic is that I've never been able to count on our institutions for much, whereas friends, neighbors, and family have helped me when I needed it the most.

— Jennifer A. Frey (@jennfrey) January 16, 2022

The tweeter is a philosophy professor. Going back to college days, I've had trouble comprehending the members of her profession. I love my friends and neighbors, but none of them developed the vaccines. As for extended family, if I listened to them I'd probably have injected myself with horse dewormer and drunk my piss as a booster. 

Friendly family competition

 

In Scattegories, the letter was "f" and for "reasons to be late" younger daughter writes, "Fat, so couldn't run fast." Another category in the same round was "ways to say yes." Older daughter writes, "F yeah!" I check to make sure she didn't spell it out, then deny her a point on the ground that "F" is spelled "eff." Defeat is worse than death because you have to live with defeat.

She hits back when the category is "TV shows from before you were born," chortling that "Dad has no options!" They laugh uproariously. The two of them collude to vote down some of my sketchier answers and the older daughter wins the game. F.

National divorce settlement

When some Texas pols started running their mouths about seceding from the Union, I remember thinking it would be a crap deal for the residents of Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, and El Paso. The talk about a national divorce seems to have spread, but, as the geographic division is not by region, as in the 1850s, but rather by metro areas versus outlying territory within states, I couldn't imagine what the family court settlement might look like. Now someone has produced the above map, as if to help my imagination along. 

After verifying that I'd be in the blue country, I became absorbed in the map's details. First thing I noticed was the thin ribbon of blue stretching westward along Minnesota's southern boundary and then into South Dakota. It's a county map, and these are not blue counties. But it appears the mapmaker was determined to create contiguous nations: that is, if you're anywhere in the blue, you can get to any other place in the blue without having to pass through foreign territory, and same if you're anywhere in the red nation. No islands, in other words, and the narrow strip of blue across southern Minnesota is just a bridge connecting the blue Twin Cities with the blue Denver metro: a fortuitous result for a friend of mine, about the only male liberal in Rock County, Minnesota's southwestern-most county, which voted for Trump by 68 to 30 percent. My countryman, before and after the divorce!

Things work out less well for the Democrats of Dallas, the capital city of the red nation even though its county voted for Biden by 65 to 33 percent. No islands, so Dallas gets the color of the surrounding sea. And it looks like I might need a passport to see the Twins play the Royals in Kansas City, notwithstanding that Jackson County, Missouri, voted for Biden by 60-38. Too bad, Kansas Citians, maybe some of our foreign aid will find its way to you. 

By chance, I saw this map, which aroused my curiosity about election returns in different venues, on the same day that Trump insisted, in an interview on NPR, that there'd been "massive fraud" in the 2020 election. The interviewer, Steve Inskeep, did a decent job of confronting him with facts—a good enough job so that Trump hung up on him. It would be hard in an interview, but I'd like to hear the conspiracy mongers explain the uniformity of the 2020 election result when compared to the result four years earlier. Trump kept telling Inskeep stuff like, "You gotta take a look at what happened in Wisconsin" and "You should see what they're finding out in Pennsylvania." But there wasn't anything happening in these states that wasn't happening everywhere else, too. Four years after Trump lost the national vote to Clinton by 2.1 percent, he lost to Biden by 4.5 percent. So he slipped, in the aggregate vote, by 2.4 percent. In Wisconsin, he slipped by just 1 percent. In Pennsylvania, he slipped by 2 percent. He went backwards by 3 percent in Michigan and by 4 in Arizona. These states performed like the rest of the country did, but the modest shifts changed the result in the electoral college, and thus they were beset by "massive fraud." Does Trump think there was "massive fraud" in Kansas, where he did 5 points worse than in 2016? How about in Alabama, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wyoming? He did 3 points worse in all of them. You can look these things up. He did 2 points worse in South Carolina, but still won it by 12: a fair election in the Palmetto State, as anyone can easily see, "but you wouldn't believe the stuff they're finding in Pennsylvania" (which also shifted 2 points toward the Dems). 

Keeping calm, sort of

I sometimes wonder whether, in another time and place, I could favor the conservative party. There's something about the phrase, "conservative temperament," that appeals to me, deeply. I associate it with the Londoner's mantra during The Blitz, "Keep calm and carry on" (while the rubble is bouncing around you). I would have opposed the Vietnam War but I can't imagine myself at a protest chanting, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" I'd be at home watching a ballgame or reading a book or walking the dog (or watching TV news and cringing). 

But in our country, during my lifetime, for whatever reason, it's mainly the conservative party that practices the paranoid style, from Joe McCarthy in my pre-nativity to Fox News and Donald Trump in my dotage. Communists! Socialists! Ebola! The caravan! Critical race theory! Boys in the girls' bathroom! It would be hard to tell what they were hollering about even if they weren't foaming at the mouth. Wearing a face covering during a pandemic is the end of the world, an unconscionable infringement on their liberty. A lot of it is too bizarre to remember. I can't now recall which deceased South American dictator was manipulating the voting machines. Is it a chip, or some kind of serum, that is included in the vaccines in order to achieve what heinous end? 

I can't think of what the left-wing equivalent of all this rot might be. Mail-in voting, early voting, same-day registration? Most votes wins? Please get vaccinated and wear a mask in crowded indoor spaces?  A Supreme Court, the composition of which is not the consequence of Mitch McConnell's maneuverings and an actuarial lottery? I know, the BLM protestors, some of them seem pretty touchy about race, it's hard to imagine why considering our country is so pure and just. If one day they invade the Capitol to keep the Congress from certifying a Republican victory, that would be a mark in the other column, but it hasn't happened. 

If you don't "fight like hell," Trump told his supporters on Jan. 6, "you won't have a country anymore." Maybe it's an instance of left-wing hyperbole to suggest that "not having a country anymore" would be the consequence of them winning that fight. But it's not like the President of the United States could not submit his election complaints to the appropriate courts. He did, and he lost. It wasn't his lawyers that he was now urging to "fight like hell."

Walking

About the time we got a dog who likes to go for walks, I downloaded a pedometer on my phone. I was curious about how far different routes we take might be and I also wondered how many steps I take that aren't related to dog-walking. I can now tell you, for example, that playing 18 holes of golf, with a cart, seems to require around 4500 steps. If the dog and I walk north on 1st Avenue, east on 47th Street, south on Stevens, west on 49th, north on Garfield, and back home via 48th, that's about 3200 steps. 

The app asks you to enter a per-day step goal. I entered 8500, only because I've heard that  devoted walkers often shoot for 10,000 and I thought, well, 85 percent of "a lot" might be good for me. And it turns out to have been magically appropriate: not too much that I can't make it, not so little that I automatically get there every day. I usually check to see where I'm at while climbing the stairs to bed, and almost unfailingly it says something like 7,922 or 8,240. I'm Type A enough so that I'm not inclined to turn in when 8500 is that close, so I end up walking a kind of modified figure-8 around my bedroom till the bar turns green and lights flash. As I stroll about without going anywhere, in slavish devotion to achieving my wholly artificial "goal," the dog lays on the bed, like a normal creature, and considers the sights with what looks to me a lot like puzzlement, or maybe it's disdain. 

Two video clips

 

Remember, around a week ago, when Trump, in front of a live audience with Bill O'Reilly, endorsed the coronavirus vaccines and was rewarded with a smattering of boos from the assembled faithful? In the above video, his fan girl Candace Owens explains why Trump is so benighted as to believe in vaccines. It's indescribable. He comes from a time "before TV" (and the Internet) and just believes what he hears about the efficacy of vaccines. "Believe it or not," she says, mystified, he still gets his news from "mainstream" outlets and is unable to conduct his own research at "obscure websites." No wonder he thinks vaccines work! In her telling, the lack of obscure websites tempted Eisenhower voters to get vaccinated against polio. We all know how that turned out! There's no "corruption," she assures her fellow travelers; he's just old-fashioned, not hip (like her).

Donald Trump: not dumb enough for Candace Owens. Maybe she's going to run against him. 

She was a couple years ago the headlining speaker at the annual dinner of a local right-wing think tank, Center of the American Experiment. Tells you what you need to know about those Thinkers of Big Thoughts. You can keep watching for more of her schtick, above, after she's done dissecting Trump's superannuated ways. "Seamless," as the think tank's publicist enthused.  

My other notable video of the day is an old Antonio Brown. (You have to click "Watch on YouTube.") He's making a great punt return. After he's crossed midfield and is approaching the other team's 40-yard-line, there's nothing but open field ahead, especially if he veers toward the left sideline. But instead of scoring a touchdown, he veers toward the middle of the field, so that he can kick the punter in the head. Hard to believe that trouble is still finding him.

 

 

Postscript: Joan Didion

The good thing about authors being mortal is that their deaths provide such people as me with an opportunity to read about them in leading journalistic outlets aimed at the general reader. Suddenly, in other words, you don't have to seek information out. This lasts for a few days, maybe a week.

When I clicked recently on "Joan Didion didn't play golf, but her writing had qualities for which all golfers should strive," I wasn't expecting anything like this, in GOLF Magazine. I think he's trying to imitate her style? He hasn't altogether succeeded, but he does get at a frequent effect, which is that of a directness that is simultaneously sort of disorienting. She's nervous, a little jumpy, even if the individual sentences are poised. At the comedy club, if you think you know where the joke is going to land, and then it lands somewhere else, that is a sign of a good joke. Didion's sentences are like that. Some of her obituarists, trying to describe her style, give the impression of having entered "mordant" or "incisive" in a thesaurus, in order not to repeat another obituarist, but the golf journalist—he did something different.

Inevitably individual works are mentioned and described, and it may be that my taste is lacking, for it seems that my favorite, "Sentimental Journeys," about the Central Park Jogger case from 1989, is never mentioned. A 29-year-old Ivy-educated woman with a Wall Street job and an apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side was assaulted and raped in Central Park while jogging after dark. Didion observes, in what resembles a thesis statement near the beginning of an essay that runs to more than 40 pages in her collected nonfiction:

Later it would be recalled that 3,254 other rapes were reported that year, including one the following week involving the near decapitation of a black woman in Fort Tryon Park and one two weeks later involving a black woman in Brooklyn who was robbed, raped, sodomized, and thrown down an air shaft of a four-story building, but the point was rhetorical, since crimes are universally understood to be news to the extent that they offer, however erroneously, a story, a lesson, a high concept.

In the essay, Didion describes the erroneous "story," "lesson," or "high concept" that made the case a sensation. Here is a sample of her exposition. The first sentence refers to the fact that the victim's name was not published in media reports, though it was known on Centre Street (a metonym for the administration of justice in NYC, as it's home to the Municipal Building and more than one courthouse) and north of 96th Street (the southern boundary of Spanish Harlem, where most of the suspects lived).

That the victim in this case was identified on Centre Street and north of 96th Street but not in between made for a certain cognitive dissonance, especially since the names of even the juvenile suspects had been released by the police and the press before any suspect had been arraigned, let alone indicted. "The police normally withhold the names of minors who are accused of crimes," the Times explained (actually the police normally withhold the names of accused "juveniles," or minors under age sixteen, but not of minors sixteen or seventeen), "but officials said they made public the names of the youths charged in the attack on the woman because of the seriousness of the incident." There seemed a debatable point here, the question of whether "the seriousness of the incident" might not have in fact seemed a compelling reason to avoid any appearance of a rush to judgment by preserving the anonymity of a juvenile suspect. . . .

This emphasis on perceived refinements of character and of manner and of taste tended to distort and flatten, and ultimately to suggest not the actual victim of an actual crime but a fictional character of a slightly earlier period, the well-brought-up virgin who briefly graces the city with her presence and receives in turn a taste of "real life." The defendants, by contrast, were seen as incapable of appreciating these marginal distinctions, ignorant of both the norms and the accoutrements of middle-class life. "Did you have jogging clothes on?" [prosecutor] Elizabeth Lederer asked [defendant] Yusef Salaam, by way of trying to discredit his statement that he had gone into the park that night only to "walk around." Did he have "jogging clothes," did he have "sports equipment," did he have "a bicycle." A pernicious nostalgia had come to permeate the case, a longing for the New York that had seemed for a while to be about "sports equipment," about getting and spending rather than having and not having: the reason that this victim must not be named was so that she could go unrecognized, it was astonishingly said, by Jerry Nachman, the editor of the New York Post, and then by others who seemed to find in this a particular resonance, to Bloomingdale's.

Plainly my strategy is just to give an example of her distinctive voice rather than trying, and like most everyone else failing, to describe it, but I would point out how effective that last sentence is—the way its cadence is slowed by all the subordination, a build-up to the withheld kicker, "Bloomingdale's." Didion's skepticism about the propriety of naming the juvenile suspects was warranted. They were convicted at trial in 1990, the same year Didion's essay was first published in The New York Review of Books, but the convictions were vacated in 2002 after a man whose DNA was a match for semen collected at the scene confessed and provided authorities with details of the crime. The original defendants sued the city, which eventually settled for more than forty million dollars.

“There were, early on," Didion had written, "certain aspects of this case that seemed not well handled by the police and prosecutors, and others that seemed not well handled by the press."