Vigor and Candor

The Annotated Beukemix 2011

2011-12-18T10:14:00.000-06:00

Here are liner notes for this year's mix! As usual, the links are to mostly-representative versions of each song, which may not be the exact version in the mix. Be forewarned.

(HS = Horn section. TC = Twin Cities-based band or artist. HC = Hand claps.)

1. Infinity Guitars - Sleigh Bells
Shortly before the end of the year, Huge Theater's doors opened. On the original schedule was a weekly Fingergun show. Nels selected this song to be our run-up music. A college classmate of mine posted something online a while back, praising(?) Sleigh Bells for their dedication to the loudest, dumbest guitar riffs. That's true, but it's also effective: listen to this while you're trying to walk somewhere. You will get there 10% faster. (HC)

2. Omega Dog - The Dears
Upon hearing the chord at 2:38 (3:46 in the video), the Pink Floyd centers of my brain lit up like a Christmas tree in a way they haven't since hearing the coda of My Morning Jacket's "Off the Record." This song made me greatly anticipate the release of Degeneration Street in February. Too bad the rest of the album is nowhere near this good.

3. Love Debt - The Robinson Caruso Organization
(note: link is to a one-man demo version of the song on MySpace)
Yeah, so what? It's rare, the opportunity to put a song by the band you're in on a mix when you're a full-time engineer and have a kid. Anyway, this is a great piece of songwriting from Mr. Caruso / James Rone, and as the penultimate selection of most of our set lists, it's only gotten more anthemic over the few years we've been playing it. You should see us play it live. Also, buy our EP. And request us on the Current, often. I almost put this on last year's Beukemix, but the CD didn't quite make it out until after the first of the year. (HS, TC)

4. Federal Funding - Cake
Cake's latest album hit #1 on the Billboard album chart this winter, and had the distinction of being the lowest-selling number-one album since SoundScan started tracking in 1991. Like the Sleigh Bells cut, this song makes me want to get shit done. If I still had the time to go to the gym, this would be in heavy rotation. (HS)

5. Burn It Down - Sims
Heard this on the Current on the way to work one morning, and made this face. For you non-Twin-Citians, Sims is part of Doomtree, local hip-hop collective. (HS, TC)

6. You Make Me Smile - Aloe Blacc
Memo to James Rone: we should play this. I want to play these horn parts. (Aloe Blacc also made the mix late last year for "Femme Fatale.") (HS)

7. Booty City - Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears
Melissa and I went to Austin, TX to visit her Aunt in January 2008, and saw Black Joe Lewis open for Big Sam's Funky Nation at the Continental Club. I really enjoyed their set, but I don't think they played this song, because I would have remembered it. (HS)

8. Make Some Noise - Beastie Boys
Nothing on the new Beastie record stands out the way "Ch-Check It Out" did on To the Five Burroughs in 2004, but it seems less uneven overall. The video is stupid, stupid fun, as is the full-half-hour version "Fight for Your Right Revisited," though that may be primarily as a spot-the-comic-actor-cameo exercise. By the way: in what universe is Danny McBride the young version of MCA?

9. Dixon's Girl - Dessa
Dessa makes two members of Doomtree on the mix this year. I've seen her perform live twice, though never as a musical act: I saw her win a poetry slam at Kieran's Irish Pub in 2003, and she did a spoken word appearance with Huge Theater back when they were still the Oldest Established Permanent Floating Improv Theater in Minneapolis (Incidentally, it turns out she and I overlapped at SWHS). Anyway, her 2010 album had this on it, and it's good, not least because it's the only hip-hop joint I know with a beat built around a bassoon. The video can best be described as something like The Shining taking a ride in the car from "Karma Police."(TC)

10. The Beautiful Ones - Prince and the Revolution
I've been listening to Purple Rain for years, but I didn't really notice how amazing the climax of this song is until finally watching the movie this Summer. You've got to get through some goofiness to get there, though. The talking part verges on self-parody, and seems like it belongs in a Flight of the Conchords number. But you get to the coda, and it seems like Prince is going to slip in his own guts that he just spilt on the stage. Gross. Awesome. (TC)

11. Queen of Tomorrow - The Twilight Hours
Matt Wilson and (the recently-discussed-on-this-blog) John Munson, both previously of Trip Shakespeare, reunite on an upbeat song about being the loser boyfriend that the successful rock chick left behind in Minneapolis. This almost made the list at the end of last year when it was on heavy rotation on The Current, but I got more into it when I paid more attention to the lyrics this summer. This has to be an exhausting one to sing live. (TC)

12. Big Sky - The Hotrats
One of many reasons I was excited for Dan Hetzel's return to town was that in the past, he'd steered me in the direction of some awesome music. He did not disappoint. Hotrats is a side project by two members of the now-defunct Supergrass, focused on covers. Their album is full of great stuff, exemplified by this cover of The Kinks.

13. Golden Years - David Bowie
Another year, another Bowie cut. I definitely prefer early-70s Bowie to his Thin White Duke period, but Golden Years is a nice disco cut featuring some Bowie vocal acrobatics. Incidentally, in this Soul Train appearance, Bowie looks a bit like Eric Stoltz on Caprica. (HC)

14. Seven Days of the Week (I Never Go to Work) - They Might Be Giants
Now that there's a kidlet about, I felt it was time to finally look into the They Might Be Giants children's albums, and my brother was kind enough to hook me up for my birthday. This song is a standout from the Here Come the 123s! album, one that WILL be stuck in your head when you awaken in the night tonight, and for some days to come. Seriously, Melissa and I walked around singing this for the latter half of the summer. (HS)

15. Ballata Per Un Pistolero - Franco Micalizzi & Roberto Pregadio
I got the chance to work with Ferrari McSpeedy on their Fringe Festival show again this year, and it was "Once Upon a Time in the Suburbs," a timeless and mendacious story told by a grandfather to his grandson about the founding of an all-woman suburb in late-19th-Century Illinois. We used this bit of real spaghetti western score (gleaned from the Red Dead Revovler soundtrack) at the very end of the show. I really like the first half, but the second half becomes suddenly more earnest and optimistic for some reason. (HS)

16. Red Hot - Jurassic 5
Melissa and had a date night one evening in July when my parents took on Max for a few hours, and we spent part of our time having an impromptu dance party in the living room, scored by an old mix CD from our friend Jeanne. This song stood out. Sadly, a couple weeks later, Jeanne passed away in her sleep, apparently due to complications of her childhood-onset diabetes. She is deeply missed, but damn, she had good taste in party music.

17. Pavanne - Morton Gould
(note: video is a different performance from version on mix)
We played this back in Southwest High School wind ensemble my senior year. I loved the trumpet part, and to this day I play it almost every time I warm up on the horn. I've had a recording by Frederick Fennell and the Eastman Wind Ensemble for years, but really prefer this orchestral arrangement played on my mix by the Albany Symphony under David Alan Miller. It takes the piece slower (a minute longer than Fennell/Eastman!), which makes the whole thing seem more bittersweet, in keeping with the melancholy tone of the piece's B section. (HS)

18. Strange Apparition - Beck
I finally got another copy of Beck's The Information after having lost it several years back when I left my iPod on a plane. "Strange Apparition" sounds like a long-lost Rolling Stones cut, circa Exile on Main Street, if it had been re-engineered by Nigel Godrich 35 years later. The opening line and the piano in particular had me looking up the album notes to make sure it wasn't a Stones cover.

19. For 12 - Other Lives
This was a recent musical selection on the Filmspotting podcast (as were two Robinson Caruso songs, actually), to which you all should be listening. Host Adam Kempenaar explained that former co-host/current producer Sam Van Hallgren had submitted this song with the note that if Adam didn't like it, he would be 'dead to him". Sam is right: the song is really pretty.

20. Three More Days - Ray LaMontagne
My coworker Brian, who has been to a few Robinson Caruso Organization shows, recommended this and another Ray LaMontagne song to me as ones that reminded him of our style. I know LaMontagne is primarily known as a folk singer-songwriter type, but the stuff of his that I've really liked, like this song, is heavily influenced by 60s R&B. This one has a great horn part that sounds like a lot of fun to play. (HS)

21. Astronaut - Blitzen Trapper
This came on the radio one day recently while I was feeding Max lunch. So we danced.

22. Snow Days - The New Standards
John Munson strikes again, this time as part of jazz trio The New Standards, covering a Trip Shakespeare song (once again, please reference the previous post). Trip Shakespeare and Twilight Hours frontman Matt Wilson cameos to reprise the talking part. About a year ago, when Minneapolis was socked by Snowmageddon, Melissa's Aunt Tricia was visiting, and as we all looked at the feet of snow out the window that Saturday, we ate our pancakes, happy in the knowledge that we didn't have to go anywhere that day. The Current chose that moment to play the original recording of this song, and it was perfect. Sometime in the last year I watched this live version from last year's New Standards Holiday Show, and loved the addition of horns. (HS, TC)

FINAL SCORES
Horn Sections: 10
Hand Claps: 2
Twin Cities Bands/Artists: 6

Infographic: John Munson, Center of the Universe

2011-11-07T12:30:00.000-06:00

Figure 1. John Munson's Twitter Photo

Alright, it's been a while. Baby = busy. Facebook = easy place to put short posts and links to funny, interesting, or political stuff. Sorry. I do have some posts in mind for here, but in the meantime, it's time to get back to the intersection of culture and nerdery, where this thing started.

Pictured, right, is Twin Cities-based bassist John Munson. If you were listening to current pop music in 1998, you know his work because Semisonic's "Closing Time" reached #11 on the Billboard Hot 100 in that year, and #1 on their Modern Rock Tracks chart. Or you might know him because you're from the Twin Cities and have listened to Rev 105 or The Zone or The Current. On one of these stations you might have heard music by Trip Shakespeare or The New Standards or Twilight Hours. Munson is in or has been in all. He is also the music director for John Moe's show "Wits" on MPR. He is a busy man who has made some awesome music.

I sat down to create a diagram for keeping track of the bands Munson has been in, and the personnel of each (according to Wikipedia). Here it is:

Figure 2. Not a Venn Diagram.

(Nota bene, nerds: this is not a Venn Diagram. A Venn diagram has to show intersections of each and every set in every combination. So there would have to be someone who had been in The Twilight Hours and Semisonic, but no other bands, and The New Standards and Trip Shakespeare and no others, etc. The inclusion of The Flops and The Suburbs as sets also fouls the Venn-ness of this diagram.)

I wish I'd had this chart in 2001, as it would have helped me keep the Wilson brothers straight. I was at Broder's Deli with some high school friends for lunch one day that summer, and we were seated next to a guy who looked a lot like the lead singer of Semisonic. He was chatting with a friend about upcoming projects, including spending some time in Iceland working with Björk's producer. Being familiar only somewhat with the lineups of Trip Shakespeare and Semisonic, I was pretty sure Matt Wilson was the front man of the latter. When he got up, I asked: "Are you Matt Wilson?" "No, I'm his brother, Dan." "Oh, ok. Nice to meet you." When I got home, I realized my error, and took this as a sign to finally pick up a copy of their new album.

Incidentally, if anyone wants to get me two tickets to The New Standards' holiday show at the Fitzgerald some year and provide a babysitter, that person would be my new hero.

Another "why I've been busy" post, this time with an especially good reason

2011-02-25T13:57:00.000-06:00

Meet Max:

Ladies...

Maxwell David Beukema was born December 28, 2010, 11:56AM, 7lbs even, 20" long. He's awesome and adorable and we love him dearly. Now almost 2 months old, he's been visiting tiny chunks of the outside world and starting to try to get things into his mouth with his hands and eating lots and passing the 10-lb mark and staring at one of the cats and and learning to smile at his parents and getting his first cold which is tragic and heartbreaking and sleeping face down on his parents but otherwise on his back because that's how you keep babies alive.

Max LOVES the animals that hang over his changing table. So, so much.

Max has a pretty pony rattle that velcros around his wrist. I bet you don't have a pretty pony rattle that velcros around your wrist.

Remember to take a break if your arms go numb!

2010-12-22T00:19:00.001-06:00

MPR's Bob Collins had a link that caught my eye on his News Cut Blog today:

4) THE FUN OF SNOW DAYS
A Rochester Post Bulletin columnist makes a great point today. Kids don't have the fun of snow days we used to have when technology was in its relative infancy.

While the snow fell outside, we would go to bed with our radios within arm's reach. In the morning, as soon as our groggy little eyes opened, we would snatch the radio and lay huddled in our beds waiting for our school to be announced. The moment we heard the name of our town, we would fly out of bed and get dressed faster than we ever would on a regular school day. At that point, we would race back to the radio to listen for the next round of announcements. We just had to hear it a second time before we could celebrate with certainty.
It's also what introduced generations of kids to the value of radio.

I had the same experience in upper elementary school through high school (late '80s through the mid '90s), waking up excitedly to find out from Steve Cochran whether I get to stay home to eat my Halloween candy and watch TV. I have fond memories of epic sledding expeditions with friends in the neighborhood (I think it was on a snow day that my brother found $42 in cash in an alley we were trudging through), often followed by sessions in front of the Nintendo in soggy snow pants.

I wonder how many kids just don't listen any more, even those who, unlike the Rochester writer's example, don't have access to the internet. Melissa is a Minneapolis high school teacher, and her school told the faculty that last Monday a couple dozen kids showed up for class. That's a couple dozen who were not in proximity to an operating locally-tuned radio that morning. In my day [holy crap what am I becoming?], the radio in general, and KDWB in particular, seemed inescapable in the schoolyard culture.

This is the kind of thing about which I'd love to do a study: ask the students who knew about the snow day how they found out about it. It should be a longitudinal study, collecting data at the same handful of schools every time there's a snow day over a matter of decades (starting three decades ago). When I become independently wealthy, this is the sort of thing I'll do with my time, as well as funding a serious linguistic study investigating the origins of "Duck Duck Gray Duck" and its unique isolation in this state.*

* Please note: comments that claim or imply the "correctness" or "superiority" of childrens' games with the word goose in their names will not be approved. This dictatorship is benevolent, but I have my limits. Please note that I previously approved a spam comment because it was in Japanese Kanji script, and I thought that was cool. So that's how much I value your opinion on Duck Duck Gray Duck: less than Japanese spam. Sensitive much? Yes.

So... dentists aren't people?

2010-12-20T12:03:00.000-06:00

On the occasions that I walk through the St. Paul skyway to my car at the end of the work day, I pass by this dentist's office. The slogan (motto?) on the window always cracks me up when I read it or think of it. The ellipses here are the apex of comedic suggestion. Don't let your dentist get... too comfortable. Apologies for the blurriness:

The Annotated Beukemix 2010

2010-12-10T16:44:00.001-06:00

This year's Beukemix progressed a little strangely: I had an unusual number of candidate tracks before 2009 was even out. By the 5th of January, I already had seven tracks on the list -- one third of a typical mix. Not all of those songs made it on here, but the first quarter of the year is quite well-represented.

Here are liner notes! As usual, the links are to mostly-representative versions of each song, which may not be the exact version in the mix. Be forewarned.

(HS = Horn section. There weren't enough hand claps to justify a count this year, sadly.)

1. Home – Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
I know, I know. It's played out. But it's such a good song. I intended to put this one at the end of the 2009 Beukemix, having first heard it on The Current on a morning commute, but I forgot it at compilation time last year. I will say this: I cannot handle watching video of the group performing this song. Too earnest. (HS)

2. Prisencolinensinainciusol – Adriano Celentano
Saw the hypnotic, almost disturbing video for this song late in December, was hooked. At the time, it was bouncing around the internet as "this is what American English sounds like to Italians." Seems that might not be true. Apparently, Celentano, a comedian, wrote the song in the 60s about the difficulty of modern communication. It's gibberish, but may not be intended as gibberenglish. The older, black & white video suggests a hellish Logans-Run-esque dystopia in which you must dance ... to live! (HS)

3. Take It In – Hot Chip
Speaking of vague menace, here comes this song. Heard it first on The Current.

4. Love and Happiness – Al Green
The Robinson Caruso Organization got this song ready for our January shows, and I fell in love with it. The post-chorus has my favorite horn part of any of the songs we play. Amazingly, the evening I set out to learn this song, I had NPR on, and they were replaying Fresh Air interviews with Al Green and producer Willie Mitchell on the occasion of the latter's death, and they played it. As I was putting the chart on the music stand. (HS)

5. You Keep Me Hanging On – Diana Ross and the Supremes
In January I caught up with Pitchfork's Top 200 songs of the 1960s, which is a great list. This was one of several Supremes cuts on the list, and it inspired me and Melissa to an impromptu dance party in our garage upon our return from a Super Bowl party. Holland, Dozier & Holland do good work. Instrumentally, it's terrific, especially the opening guitar chatter, which reminds me of a less disco-y 3-2-1 Contact. I also love that Ross' vocals are double-tracked, and the two takes they used are slightly different, and don't always line up (perhaps in suggestion of the used woman's mental anguish). (HS)

6. This Will Be Our Year (Mono version) – The Zombies
Also on the Pitchfork list. I was previously unfamiliar with it, but I thought it was a sweet and beautiful and hopeful message. And the song was right. It was our year. [Note: upon final compilation, I discovered that there were supposed to be horns in this song. During the 1997 stereo mixing of the album (Odyssey & Oracle)—the recording I had—they did not include the horn parts. WHY WOULD THEY DO THAT? So I found the mono version. Enjoy.] (HS)

7. Sixteen – The Heavy
Heard this first on the Current, and wondered why Screamin' Jay Hawkins was getting so much rotation. (HS -- sax choirs count)

8. Perfect Day – Lou Reed
Produced by Bowie! I heard a lot of this in February because of this commercial featuring US snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler that aired repeatedly during the Winter Olympics. It's the prettiest song that's maybe about heroin that you'll ever hear. (HS -- it's subtle)

9. Tightrope – Janelle Monae
2010's Number One Summer Jam first came to me by way of my college friend Robin. Accept no versions of the song that do not include the Classy Brass, the Funkiest Horn Section in Metropolis. As my brother notes, this is the first time his and my year-end mixes have overlapped. (HS)

10. Birdhouse in Your Soul – They Might Be Giants ft. Doc Severinsen and the Tonight Show Band
A clip of this was in the TMBG documentary "Gigantic (a Tale of Two Johns)." For years I've wanted a recording. Thanks to the rippability of Youtube videos, now I have one! I can only imagine how incredibly mind-blowing this must have been to fans of the band in 1990. I carefully edited Jay Leno out of the copy on this mix. You're welcome. (HS)

11. Oh My God – Ida Maria
I love how, at the song's climax, the singer barely has control of her voice, and then finally lets go in a primal yell. Somebody in the liberal political blogosphere (ah, it was Matthew Yglesias) linked to this song in 2009, and I liked it. I next heard it this year upon the announcement of the track list for Rock Band 3. It took some effort to get a version without Iggy Pop clumsily shoehorned into it.

12. Strangers – The Kinks
On the 2007 Beukemix, I included the Kinks song from the Darjeeling Limited soundtrack that had most grabbed my attention, "Powerman." My attention has a short span, I guess, because "Strangers" really is the best of them. I was too blinkered to notice this error until Wye Oak covered the song for The AV Club's "Undercover" project this summer. This song is beautiful, especially the tom-tom heartbeat that is finally left, naked and alone, at the end.

13. Superfast Jellyfish – Gorillaz
Originally I was going to put "Stylo" on the mix, but I was a bit underwhelmed by it.* I got a copy of Plastic Beach, and was hopeful for something that would grab me like "Clint Eastwood," "Rock the House," or "Feel Good, Inc." Melissa and I were driving from Pismo Beach to Monterey, listening to the album, and when this one came on, I decided we had a winner. Still, every time De La Soul do a Gorillaz track, I miss Del. [*That said, do check out the wonderful and ridiculous video for Stylo.]

14. Never My Love – The Association
The Association are underrated; I offer the bass line of this sweet, gorgeous song as proof.

15. Bang Bang Bang – Mark Ronson & The Business Int'l ft. Q-Tip & MNDR
Every year there's at least one song that drops my jaw moments into the first time I hear it. This year, this is that song. The synthesizers remind me in a weird way of Alvin & The Chipmunks in the 80s. Q-Tip does a typically great job of making other people's songs awesome.

16. Georgia – Cee Lo Green
"Fuck You" is a great song, but it the internet's overenthusiasm made short work of its shelf life. Hilarious Grammy nomination aside, it's kind of a gimmick. I heard this one about the same time, and preferred it greatly. Soaring horns, a message of hometown gratitude, and Cee Lo singing his guts out. (HS)

17. Femme Fatale – Aloe Blacc
Robinson Caruso frontman James Rone linked to this one on Facebook a few months back. I was sold. (HS)

18. You're a Cad – The Bird & The Bee
Heard this in a California Pizza Kitchen where Melissa and I were having lunch and planning our baby shower after seeing The Social Network. Jotted down enough of the lyrics to google, and discovered that The Bird & The Bee would be making their return to the Beukemix.

19. Musica di Uscita (Per un Film) – Spaghetti Western String Company
This summer, Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls put together an EP of her ukulele covers of Radiohead. Exit Music (For a Film) jumped out at me, and I went back to the original, which I'd always liked, but now found emotionally devastating upon review. I planned to put that version on here. Then, the SWSC covered this at their final concert, bringing this already operatic song into opera's home language. I was going to put a rip of that live performance on here, but the band graciously put it on their farewall album (Farewell Verse), so here's a Minnesotan alt-bluegrass band covering Radiohead in Italian.

20. Palaces of Montezuma – Grinderman
I find this song very sweet, and enjoy the weird collection of literary and cultural allusions.

21. Whole Lotta Love – Tina Turner
The Current did a Thanksgiving Time Machine Weekend, and mistakenly lumped this cover in with 1969, the year of Zeppelin's original (a longtime favorite of mine). It's actually from 1975, but I forgive The Current, because they informed me of the existence of a cover of Whole Lotta Love by Tina Turner.

FINAL SCORES
Horn Sections: 11 - a majority. Motion carries.
Accordions: 2
Clarinet: 1
Ukulele: 1

References to JFK's spinal cord: 1
Songs in Italian: 1
Songs in Italian gibberish: 1
Covers: 2
Songs whose choruses accuse you of keeping me hanging on: 2

Kind of a Huge deal

2010-12-06T11:58:00.002-06:00

Minneapolis now has its first dedicated long-form improvisation theater. Today will be a day long remembered. Huge Theater was founded in 2005 by five of the Twin Cities' most prolific improvisers as "an artist-led company dedicated to supporting the Twin Cities improv community through performance and education." Since then, they've produced dozens of shows including their own showcase "Huge Wednesdays," annual improvised monster movie "Creature Feature," "Overheard in Minneapolis," based on the website of the same name, and the Twin Cities Improv Festival. Coupled with all of this excellent output was a desire to create a home base for the artform in the city.

For about the past decade, as the improv community here has grown, there have been theatrical institutions that feature improvisation: Stevie Ray's and ComedySportz largely showcase short-form improv games, like you'd find on Who's Line Is It Anyway?, and the Brave New Workshop features improvised scenes and stories, typically as a chaser to their scripted satirical sketch comedy. If you were producing an improv show, you rented space, either from one of these theaters, or the Bryant-Lake Bowl, Intermedia Arts, The Varsity Theater, or something more exotic like a café with a performance space like the Acadia, or some weird café-gift-shop-theater hybrid like the Old Arizona. Huge and the members thereof produced shows at all of these locations in the past. Now, they have a place to call their own: 3037 Lyndale Avenue South (above), in the space formerly occupied by the Lava Lounge. From overpriced clothing to affordable, quality entertainment; definitely a major improvement to the neighborhood.

Huge started their lease at the beginning of September. Following a flurry of renovation, the theater opened its doors last night for its first performance, appropriately the Improv a-Go-Go (4 groups, one dollar, every week — beat that). They've got a full schedule, with seven shows, six days a week, all cheap and all good. So, go check out some shows and share in my congratulations to Nels, Jill and Butch (pictured) on this momentous occasion. I look forward to playing in the space myself. Thankfully, I don't have long to wait, as tonight is Show X, featuring these three, plus up to nine more of the city's best improvisers. We go on at 8, and the show is only five dollars.

That being said, I really want to plug the hell out of the show that happens on Wednesdays (8PM, $5). Fingergun's style, developed over a decade of work, has been described as "controlled chaos." Will we gang up on each other in scenes of reprisal and belittlement? Will there be an orphan boy dreaming of a better life? Will there be scenes about cops? Probably. We hope you'll come find out. Also, get yourself over to Fingergun's Facebook page and Like us. We're currently at 154 followers. If we get to 500 by the end of Christmas Day, we will release another photo like this one:

You're welcome in advance.

"could have a giant distorting effect on our politics"

2010-09-28T12:49:00.000-05:00

"Actual represents the actual distribution of wealth. Estimated is what people think the distribution of wealth is."

(Source: Matt Yglesias)

Wet Blanketry: The Twins

2010-09-21T09:45:00.004-05:00

I'm worried about the Twins. I hope I'm wrong.

But the Magic Number is 2! The Twins are likely to clinch the division tonight, the earliest they've done it since 2004 (I think)! Since August 26th, they've only lost 3 of 19 games! Jim Thome (pictured) has in the last month moved up a couple spots to 8th on the all-time Home Run hitter list!

So why am I worried?

Both the Twins and the Vikings have in the last decade been beneficiaries of being in the particular Division/Conference in which they play. When you lead your division against the likes of the Indians, Royals, & Lions, there's likely to be some grade inflation going on. And the Twins' record this year tells the tale. As of this morning, they are an MLB-leading 44-20 (.688) in their own division. Against the AL West they're an AL-leading 24-12 (.667). But against the AL East they're a measly 14-18 (.438) and in interleague play they only went 8-10 (.444). And it is from the AL East and the National League that their post-season opponents will come.

Think of it: if the Twins' record against the AL Central was their overall record, they would have already won 103 games. If they carried it for a season, they'd win 111, more than they ever have (best season was 102 wins in 1965). If their record against the East was their overall, they'd be, well, smack in the middle of their division, thanks to the bar-lowering of the Indians and Royals.

God, I sound like some asshole from ESPN.com explaining why Mauer or Morneau didn't deserve the MVP, or why Bert Blyleven should never be in the Hall. But given the Twins' postseason in this century, fatalism comes easy. And what worries me is that every time I watch the Twins play the Yankees, especially, that pessimism seems to come easy to them too.

The Twins' season had a big trough in the middle, starting in mid-May when they faced the Yankees and lasting until about the All-Star break. Their record in this period was 23-30, meaning that about 1/3 of the season produced half of their losses thus far. It was during this time that the bulk of their play against the AL East and all of their interleague games fell. So, did they suck then because they were playing against better teams, or was there something significantly different about the team? It wasn't Morneau's injury, because that didn't happen until a week before the All-Star game.

Conveniently, this is a rhetorical question, because I have the answer! The Twins played badly in that period of time not because of the might of the teams they face, but because they were simply playing poorly. There is definitive proof, demonstrated the evenings of June 1st-3rd. On those nights, the 2010 Minnesota Twins (.600 on 9/21) were swept by the 2010 Seatle Mariners (.383, same). There was clearly something wrong with the Twins at that time. QED!

Twins over Rays in 4, Twins over Yankees in 7 thanks to a dramatic extra-inning HR by Thome, Twins over Reds in 5, in the World Series with the lowest TV ratings of all time. Let's hear it now for the team that came to play!

Fox News says: Follow the money-- wait, no, not that way!

2010-08-25T12:13:00.001-05:00

In case you didn't see this elsewhere, when the Daily Show ends up doing actual reporting, it's pretty brilliant. Basically, Fox News is characterizing the Park51 project near ground zero as ill-intentioned because it has the financial backing of the Kingdom Holding Company, who they paint as anti-American. But the Kingdom Holding Company's owner is Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, AND is the second-biggest shareholder in News Corp., owner of Fox News. Hilarity ensues:

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Here's the Wikipedia entry on Al-Waleed bin Talal, an interview with him from Bloomberg/Businessweek, and a Forbes article from 2005, when bin Talal increased his stake in News Corp. (he was at the time at least #3 shareholder, perhaps lower) and voiced his confidence in Rupert Murdoch.

Update: Daily Finance was all over this connection a week ago, before Fox started specifically name-checking their co-owner's company.

Speech! returns to MN Fringe TONIGHT - more show music

2010-08-12T00:01:00.002-05:00

Photo by Alex Wohlhueter from the 8/7/10 MN Fringe Slideshow

As previously mentioned, Speech! returns to the Rarig Thrust stage tonight at 5:30 after four days of blissful slumber. I hope you'll be there. Since last we talked, the CityPages gave us a very nice writeup. Spoiler alert, as usual.

Speaking of spoilers, I wanted to write up the music used in the show as a companion to the playlist I posted the other day. What follows will be self-indulgent, procedural, and full of spoilers, so don't read it until after you've seen the show. Seriously, go see our show before you read this. Go.

Again, SPOLIERS AHEAD.

Alright.

Opening monologues: The Rolling Stones - Gimme Shelter
Mary meets Angela: Ennio Morricone - Theme from Navajo Joe (starting :17 into this clip)
Kate & Doug train: Des'ree - You Gotta Be (see also)
The Booze Demon: Bernard Hermann - Vertigo Suite: The Nightmare (we used Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the LA Philharmonic, not on Youtube. Here you can see the version from original movie)
Kate & Doug share a moment: Seal - Kiss From A Rose
Kate & Doug's final performance: Patrick Williams - Finale from The Cutting Edge*
Ending monologue and curtain call: Smashing Pumpkins - Today

* I would like to note, as a student of physics, that not only would the "Pamchenko" move be dangerous and difficult, but it's also physically impossible -- there's no way to get from the point A to point B they show in the movie. Incidentally, did you know there are not one, but two basic cable TV movie sequels to The Cutting Edge?

Fringe - 1st weekend down. Also: Speech! playlist

2010-08-09T23:36:00.000-05:00

Wobbles the Kitty, MN Fringe mascot.

Congrats to the MN Fringe Festival on another record opening weekend, with another ticket record broken. Congrats also to all the show writers, producers, directors & performers who put them together. Our show, Speech!, had a terrific opening pair of shows, with long lines and big crowds who quite seemed to enjoy themselves. As of this writing, we are in a tie for the second-most-reviewed show on the Fringe website. The Pioneer Press named us a must-see! And the notoriously dyspeptic Fringe Famous gave us a rare five-star review! Yowzah!

I'm really proud of the show and everyone involved, but of course it's not over! We have three more shows,Thursday at 5:30, Friday at 10, and Saturday at 7, the last of which features Audio Description for the vision impaired. Ten dollars to anyone records the Audio Description for me. Seriously.

(Incidentally, if you're going to click on the reviews above, you should know: OMG SPOILARZ ALERT! Really, many of the audience reviews and both of the press bits above give away several moments that would otherwise be a surprise in the show. As does Saturday's Fringe slide show, featuring some lovely shots from the production. Kudos, by the way, to Fringe Famous for spoiler-warning the reader.)

((Also incidentally, what have you seen? I've seen six shows so far, all worth your time for various reasons: The Quest, Bite Me Twilight, Zombie High School [biggest surprise in the bunch so far], Cosmo the Musical, Match Game Minnesota, and Mike & Matt. Melissa also saw Can Michael Come Out to Play, and loved it; I hope to be able to fit it in before we skip town later this week.))

Lastly, to keep you in the musically-contemporary mood for the show, here's the list of pre- and post-show songs lovingly selected for our little play. If you come to the show, chances are you won't hear them, because even though the music volume in Rarig is a little high (especially for folks near the sides and therefore the speakers), the pre-show level is definitely not. And there's definitely no time for this much music anyway. So here's what you're missing (and a YouTube playlist of all of them):

Pre-Show!

Green Day: When I Come Around
Montell Jordan: This Is How We Do It
Ini Kamoze: Here Comes the Hotstepper
Collective Soul: December
Sheryl Crow: Strong Enough
Stone Temple Pilots: Interstate Love Song
TLC: Creep
Elastica: Connection
Blessid Union of Souls: I Believe
Bush: Everything Zen
Dionne Farris: I Know
Freedy Johnston: Bad Reputation
Sponge: Plowed
Melissa Etheridge: I'm the Only One
Pearl Jam: Better Man

Post-Show!

The Toadies: Possum Kingdom
Soul Asylum: Misery
Madonna: Take a Bow
Hootie & the Blowfish: Hold My Hand

See you all on Thursday!

eYYYEEEEEEEAAAAAAH!

2010-08-04T08:51:00.000-05:00

Here's a little more 1995 flavor to get you in the Speech! mindset, this time from the whiny rock side of the fence. The Counting Crows' "The Rain King" ends with the ridiculous/amazing (take your pick) cri de coeur transcribed in the title of this post. Enjoy, and we'll see you Thursday night at 7 at the Rarig Thrust stage!

Fringe!

And a merry Fringe Festival to you!

2010-08-02T08:44:00.001-05:00

Hail the first week of August and the coming of the Minnesota Fringe Festival! Eleven days of theater binge! The hustle and bustle of the West Bank and its densely-packed theater spaces! The brightly-t-shirted volunteers! The quickie meals at Jimmy John's! The zero-to-five-kitty review ratings! I love it.

This year, for the first time since originating the role of the mayor in JAWS the Musical! ("You yell samurai, everyone says, huh, what?") in 2004, I am involved in a show. Ferrari McSpeedy invited me to direct their show, the first time they are working with a full cast for one of their shows. The show is called Speech!, and it is hilarious.

Drama. Comedy. Flower-print dresses. The world of the high school speech team has it all. Ferrari McSpeedy returns to Fringe with an almost-true tale of competitive forensics.

Fringe Festival favorites, Ferrari McSpeedy do away with their typical 2 person show in favor of a full cast for their new show about the world of High School Speech Competition. Set in 1995 in suburban Chicago, Speech! is a semi-kind of-autobiographical tale about a high school speech team and all of the drama, intrigue and inner demons that haunt them as they compete for spots in the State tournament. Speech! is sure to be a walk down memory lane for former speech competitors, or for that matter, anyone who ever attended high school.

You should come see it. Funny script, great cast, the top hits of 1994-1995; you can't lose.

We'll be performing it on the Thrust stage (above) in this Brutalist beauty, the Rarig Center (MAP!), which, with four stages, has become the epicenter of the Fringe in recent years:

There's a ramp next door. It costs money. Sometimes you can find street parking out on Riverview or beyond.

We've got five shows, all of them in good time slots, so check out our show page, come see the show, tell your friends, and give us some kitties!

Here's a little something to put you in the right time period:

"I'll say it again: Democracy simply doesn't work."

2010-05-14T13:02:00.028-05:00

All in favor of the amended Springfield-slash-pervert bill?

Stop the presses again: Congressional Republicans are a-holes; Congressional Democrats are cowards.

So the House Democrats were on their way to passing a science jobs and education bill (a re-authorization of a 2007 law, apparently). Clearly an effort to stem the United States' slippage in math and science education was a political victory that the GOP couldn't allow. But without a filibuster, what's a minority party in a lower legislative body to do? Force the majority to vote for or against something that generates sexy soundbites in an election year.

In this case, the Republican ranking member of the science committee made a motion to recommit the bill. This would have sent the bill back into his committee, delaying it for another round. The specific motion added language to the bill requiring the federal government not to pay the salary of any employee officially reprimanded for looking at porn at work. Which is all well and good, but gave the Dems two options:

Vote for the motion, which would delay the measure in another round of committee work (note that the science committee passed the bill 29-8, including GOP "ayes")
Vote against the motion, which allows the bill to be voted upon, but lets GOP candidates cut ads about how "Representative Walz voted in support of people looking at porn at work."

It's generally bad policy to bet against Democrats buckling like a belt, so of course half the caucus caved in and voted for. I hope all those Representatives with struggling high schools and high-tech research or industry in their districts are proud. The roll-call is here. Kudos to retiring Rep. Vernon Ehlers, PhD (nuclear Physics, Berkeley) (R-MI) for bucking his party on this one.

Please note that 15 years ago, The Simpsons presented such a situation as satire (see Act Three).

The Artcrimes of George Lucas: those prequels

2010-05-11T12:35:00.002-05:00

Hey, stop the presses, I'm a white 30-year-old male and I'm about to complain about the Star Wars prequels on the internet.

There's a guy on Youtube, with the handle RedLetterMedia, who specializes in video reviews of sci-fi movies. He came to prominence with his reviews of the Star Trek series, and has recently gained more attention for his lengthy takedowns of the first two Star Wars prequels and Avatar. Lengthy. Like 70 minutes for each of the Star Wars prequels. That length of time could be easily spent on a laundry list of nit-picks and internal inconsistencies, and while there's plenty of nits being picked, he mostly gathers his commentary into thematic sections around larger-scale ideas. Each is an indictment of what George Lucas has become and what he has turned the Star Wars films into. The bottom line that in the intervening 22 years between trilogies, Lucas traded art for commerce, story for plot, and character for plot delivery device. He illustrates most accurately how Lucas' characters do not behave as real people, but like blank-faced zombies, which isn't surprising given how little they had to act with and react to in the films. None of this surprises, but all points are effectively made. They should be required viewing for all aspiring film makers or critics.

RedLetterMedia's Phantom Menace Review
RedLetterMedia's Attack of the Clones Review
(Language and some imagery NSFW on both)

If you grew up loving Star Wars, both are worth watching in full, but if you must watch only selections, watch the first and last video of each. The reviewer, in the guise of his disturbing Harry Plinkett character, is incisive, funny, and devastating. It's safe to say that many Star Wars (and Indiana Jones!) fans lost a fair amount of respect for Lucas' sensibilities starting in about 1997. These reviews obliterated whatever was left of mine.

[The one complaint I have about the reviews is for elements of the Plinkett character. The joke is that he's a social maladjust who is definitely a kidnapper and is probably a serial killer. This got pretty tiresome in the Phantom Menace review especially, but was improved upon in the second, in which Plinkett and his hooker captive find a common bond in bitching about Attack of the Clones' awfulness.]

I really didn't like the prequels, but like many my age I convinced myself for a long time that they were maybe kind of sort of ok. I recently watched The Phantom Edit and its sequel, Attack of the Phantom, in which a professional editor makes very careful and thoughtful changes to both movies, improving both significantly. Watching those versions, I decided that there were indeed better films buried within Lucas' theatrical releases. But you can't really polish a turd, and the Phantom Editor, in his commentary, makes clear his own disdain for what George Lucas has created.

This was on my bedroom wall for 15 years.

For me, the worst thing about the new trilogy, besides everything, is that it shook my appreciation of the original trilogy. I grew up loving those movies, and long considered Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back among my favorite films of all time, even as I grew up and expanded my cinematic horizons. With how terrible Episodes I-III were, I started to doubt those earlier films, and wonder if maybe they were worse than I remembered. I avoided rewatching them. This is going to sound weird, but I found the RedLetterMedia reviews somehow helpful. They crystallized my thoughts and feelings about the Star Wars trilogies in a way that I hadn't quite been able to put into words. They affirmed the reasons I loved the originals, and the reasons why the prequels were different and worse. Thanks, Plinkett. I feel much better.

The upshot of all of this is that I've come to a decision: I'm going to get rid of my DVD copies of Episodes I-III. We've got limited real estate in our DVD cabinet, and I don't need that crap on hand for future viewing.

Jeopardy: Don't Dream It's Over

2010-05-10T12:22:00.001-05:00

Today marks the beginning of the 2009-2010 Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions. Though I qualified for the field of contestants, I will not be appearing, having been eliminated early this year. There were two major factors in my elimination: (1) there are three college tournament winners for this qualification period, since there have been two college tourneys since the last ToC and they have a leftover champion who couldn't do the last one because the Air Force said so; and (2) there was a quick pace of contestants, this season especially, who won 4 games and were done. Since the qualification ranks players by number of wins first and money second, even a powerhouse three-game winner like Kevin Joyce, who won a crazygonuts $111k in his three games, was eliminated. I should note that if they went by money first and then number of wins, Kevin would be in but I still wouldn't. Cue sad-sack "Christmastime is Here" music.

But: it's OK, because my Jeopardy! experience was one hell of a ride, and the achievement of a lifetime goal! Seriously, a little over two years ago I took the online test for fun, thinking it would be great to be on the show but with no expectations. And I was invited to audition, in my home city no less, and was invited on to the show on my first try. I went on, again with no expectations, and hoping only to not humiliate myself and maybe win a game. And I won three games and got to be in the contestant Hall of Fame, earning a hefty chunk of change in the middle of a tough recession. So, despite the opportunities (and there are plenty) for counter-factual games of "what if I'd remembered What's In My Wallet and won one more game?", I have very little to complain about, and far more for which to be thankful. Hooray!

The matchups for this week's Tournament quarterfinal games have been posted, and I'm excited to root for my fellow Season 25 players Liz Murphy, Justin Bernbach, and Stefan Goodreau.

"And after all, we're only ordinary men"

2010-05-05T16:09:00.003-05:00

The street vendor who first alerted the police to the Times Square Bomb is a Muslim immigrant from Senegal.

From Wikipedia: "In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess."

Contra the likes of Erick "I called a sitting Supreme Court justice a 'goat-f___ing child molester' and all I got was this lousy job on CNN" Erickson* and Rush Limbaugh, a desire to commit acts of terror upon the United States is not an essential characteristic of Muslims. Nor is Islamic faith an essential characteristic of terrorists.

I say this not to suggest that there is not a dangerous form of violent Muslim extremism that should be opposed and stopped. Rather, when you conflate that goal with a clash of civilizations, you're drawing the Us vs Them line in a way that excludes a lot of people on your team.

* underscores not original to the quote

Inlouriouser and Inglouriouser

2010-05-03T20:40:00.005-05:00

[UPDATED 5/4/10 SEE BELOW]

Been meaning to write this one up for a while. There's a feature on the DVD of Inglourious Basterds, my favorite film of last year, about Geraldine Brezca, who operated the clapboard for Tarantino during its making. She apparently enjoys introducing the takes with non-sequitur words and phrases, often with the effect of making actors laugh as the scene starts. Names of arthouse directors from around the world seem to be one of her primary idioms. So if you would find it amusing to hear a woman say things like "Emeric Pressburger" and "Wong Kar-Wai" in a disaffected tone and Italian accent, now's your chance. Thanks, YouTube!

[NOTE ADDED 5/4/10 12:17PM! Reader "Nels" writes to note that every single phrase or word she uses starts with the letter or letters in the SLATE number cell on the slate itself. Dumbly, I wasn't even looking at the numbers. So there is a method to her madness.]

Incidentally, there's another tradition on Tarantino's recent shoots, and that is for the actors to send greetings to Sally Menke, who has edited all of his films. I seem to recall that the Kill Bill DVD may also have had a "Hi Sally" reel on it:

Here's the thing: in the top montage there are at least a couple of shots being clapped that didn't actually make the cut into the movie. There are two in particular that I'm thinking of. The first is of Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz, as SS Colonel Hans Landa and August Diehl as Gestapo Major Hellstrom sitting next to one another watching a movie. I suspect that this scene was cut from the "German Night in Paris" chapter, and that they are watching "Lucky Kids" with Goebbels to evaluate Shosanna's theater.

The other is a shot of Eli Roth as Sgt. Donny Donowitz, sitting in a genteel living room in a stupid-looking suit and tie, smiling pleasantly and holding a cup of tea. Now, granted, I thought Eli Roth was the weak link among the cast, and would love to have seen the original casting choice, Adam Sandler, in the part.* But I'd also be interested in seeing this scene that was cut. The rough draft of the screenplay, which is available online, has it: before shipping off to Europe, Donny buys his baseball bat in his Boston neighborhood, then takes it to his Jewish neighbors to have them sign the bat in the names of their relatives still stuck in Europe under the Third Reich. The scene we see here is his sit-down with a Mrs. Himmelstein, played by Cloris Leachman, who also writes, and misspells "INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS" on the bat, giving the guerrilla unit and the movie their title.

There is another entire performance that was apparently filmed and cut, that of Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung as Madame Mimeux, the previous owner of the cinema, ownership of which Shosanna inherits along with an assumed last name. The screenplay draft also includes the scene of their meeting, when Shosanna is homeless in Paris having fled the scene of her family's murder by Landa's death squad.

I do wish Tarantino was in the habit of putting more deleted scenes on his DVDs. He's given us a handful here & there in the past, but he's been weaning us: whereas Pulp Fiction's DVD included a handful of scenes removed from the movie, Kill Bill Vol. 2 included a single additional scene of Bill on an assignment, and now the Basterds DVD includes only extended versions of scenes that were in the final cut of the film. Considering that the cut that screened at Cannes early last year was several minutes longer than the theatrical release, I'd be fascinated to see the other bits, if only to see how shortening a movie can strengthen it. Certainly, reading the screenplay, you get the impression that even the over-the-top final product was an exercise in restraint for the writer/director and his overflowing brain full of movies.

*Incidentally, I'm very glad for the other casting changes that became necessary. Though I like Simon Pegg an awful lot, I'm very glad that his role ended up going to Michael Fassbender, who is terrific. And I cannot imagine Leonardo DiCaprio (!) as Hans Landa. Nor, I suspect, can Christoph Waltz.

Civil War revisionism

2010-04-13T12:18:00.000-05:00

As you may have heard in the news, last week the Governor of VA declared a Confederate History Month and neglected in the declaration to mention the labor structure that underpinned the entire economic model of the southern United States, defense of which was the goal of the Confederate States' secession, and which was oiled in the blood of a race. You know, or something. Anyway, people rightfully complained, another Southern governor predictably and depressingly doubled-down, and a political bloc, primarily of the right-wing and of the south, continues to pretend that slavery was a "minor" aspect of the Civil War and that the Battle Flag only stands for noble tradition and defense against "northern aggression."

Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I believe I've linked before (he's a liberal writer for the Atlantic), has written increasingly about the Civil War over the last several years as he continues to voraciously read books on the subject. I've only been reading him for about a year and a half, so I could be wrong, but I think this is a recent interest for him. In any case, he's been all over the more vocal resurgence of revisionism the past few weeks, and has written some good stuff, criticizing Gov. McDonnel's original declaration and, rightly, commending him for his later mea culpa. He aired some fascinating and sad comments from his readers. And now he's dug in to the psychological underpinnings of the Lost Cause. In the process, he wrote one of my favorite sentences I've seen in some time, the second the two I will quote here:

This is about a lancing shame, about that gaping wound in the soul that comes when confronted with the appalling deeds of our forebears. Lost Causers worship their ancestors, in the manner of the abandoned child who brags that his dead-beat father is actually an astronaut, away on a mission of cosmic importance.

Matthew Yglesias of ThinkProgress has also written some great stuff on the subject over the past couple weeks, as well. At the Daily Beast he wrote about the strain within the GOP that celebrates treason in defense of slavery, subverting that party's roots. And on his blog he commented on Ed Kilgore's suggestion of a Neo-Confederate History Month, which he points out would be quite bipartisan in its subjects.

Late-breaking addition: MS Gov Haley Barbour's history-ignorant proclamation of Confederate History Month!

That guy's the WORST.

2010-04-13T07:26:00.000-05:00

Just wanted to get this off my computer desktop. Found it in the comments section of a blog post on a sports site during the Olympics:

Not good with needles

2010-04-09T12:10:00.001-05:00

As a kid, I was never been particularly good with needles, and I had a mental hierarchy of the awfulness of encounters with them: the regular fingertip pinprick was Bad and Hated, but at the bottom of the scale. That such an easy needle prick was so disliked should tell you how I felt about shots, which were more loathed as needle gauge and depth and volume of injection increased. The worst of the worst, which thankfully I didn't often have cause to encounter, were long intravenous needles.

When I was in my mid-to-late-single-digits, I had to get a particular series of vaccinations, the first two about a month apart. My recollection is that these were thick needles buried deep into the muscle (such as it was) of the outer thigh. They sucked. Anyway, I got the first one, and hated it so much that the next month when I returned to the pediatrician for round two, I decided I'd had enough.

My pediatrician's office at the time was in a small round office building in Edina. This one:

View Larger Map

It was the former home of a savings & loan, and featured a center hallway that circumnavigated the building. The building was small enough that the doctors' office was the only tenant. This layout suggested a strategy: run.

It wasn't an elegant or complete plan, but it did afford me additional, precious, unpunctured minutes as I sprinted around the building. I don't remember whether I made it all the way around or perhaps made multiple complete circuits. You would think I'd be intercepted by my poor mother or the RN or an assistant if I crossed back in front of my assigned exam room. What I do know is that at some point, I realized that I couldn't run forever and made my next tactical move, ducking into a bathroom and locking the door.

Looking back, I can see my folly. If I had it to do all over again, I'd make damn sure that I was out of the line-of-sight of any pursuers or informants before I ducked in there. I'd have opened and shut the door in a smooth motion, as silently as possible, so as to not give away my location. I might have even selected an escape route that wasn't a dead end. But I speak with the benefit of rational hindsight and with years of experience watching the action movies and playing the video games that impart these important lessons to us in our adolescence. And I have the further benefit of better information -- how was I supposed to know they had keys to the bathroom?

Yes, there are plenty of things I'd have done differently if I had known better. I could have spared myself the indignity of being pulled out from under the sink of a darkened bathroom and held down by multiple assistants while the nurse administered the Hated shot. At the time I'm pretty sure I didn't know what my mother was so embarrassed about: she wasn't the one who got caught!

Some time later I got the third shot, and had mellowed enough to just deal with it. By my later teenage years I was just kind of squicked out by needles; Pulp Fiction became a favorite movie of mine, but the close-up interlude of heroin use and later adrenaline shot moment were all but unwatchable (incidentally, hatred of needles is an excellent barrier to entry of IV drug use, not that there weren't plenty of other deterrents). At present I certainly don't LIKE shots, I can reliably go into a zen-like state of acceptance when I have to get one.

PS: All apologies to my mother and to the 198x staff of Edina Pediatrics, especially those whose duties occasionally include twerp restraint.

"And then one day you find / [48 days] have got behind you"

2010-04-01T12:10:00.001-05:00

Wow, I made it through all of March without a post? Dang. Gotta get back on the horse.

In the meantime, here's the entirety of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon rendered with an NES sound chip: Moon8. I particularly like the rendition of "Time," which would be at home in a Mega Man game.

Hat tip: Jeremy Parish

What will be stuck in your head for the next two weeks

2010-02-12T12:00:00.001-06:00

Time for the Winter Olympics! I love the Olympics in general and the winter games in particular. Perhaps this is because the closely-spaced winter Olympics in 1992 and 1994 occurred for me at that age when your brain's connections are really forming, locking in associations and memories,* or because, to be honest, I was watching a hell of a lot of tv at that age, and saw much of these games. I also have the Minnesotan, growing-up-playing-in-the-snow thing contributing.

Anyway, if you're like me, you're going to be walking around with Olympic music stuck in your head for the duration. Back in the early 90s, I made a copy of a tape someone in my family (either my aunt or grandparents) had of music by film composer John Williams, performed by the Boston Pops under the composer's direction. I was already a fan of Williams' music for the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series, and knew his Superman theme. But listening to this tape, I learned about Williams' long collaboration with Steven Spielberg and the non-movie music he composed, including the first cut, the "Olympic Fanfare and Theme":

Williams composed this theme for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. It has become one of the most well-known themes for the Olympic Games in the US. As it turns out, NBC has an exclusive license to use Williams' music in their broadcasts. So when CBS covered the games in '92 & '94, this music was not used. Williams has had a long association with NBC: he also composed the "Mission" Theme for their nightly news.

At some point Williams re-arranged his 1984 theme as a medley beginning "Bugler's Dream" theme from a 1958 suite of sports music by Leo Arnaud. This has become the most prominent cut used among NBC's musical selections during recent Olympics. Arnaud's piece alone has apparently also been used by ABC when they've had the games.

Williams has composed a few other pieces of Olympic music, used to varying extents by NBC. First is "The Olympic Spirit," comissioned by NBC Sports for the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul. This is a sentimental favorite of mine from when I was in a brass quintet in high school and we played a fun arrangement of it. Here's the orchestral version:

When the Olympics returned to the US in 1996, it was time for another Williams theme. This one was called "Summon the Heroes," and has continued to be all over NBC's coverage:

I picked up the 1996 Olympics CD even before the games started, and listened to it during a college-shopping road trip with my family while they were going on. That coming school year I was to be the drum major of my school's marching band, and I ended up ordering the marching band arrangement of this piece and splicing it together with some of the other Olympic themes we had in the music stacks for our homecoming halftime show.

Williams composed one more Olympic theme, this one for the 2002 Salt Lake City winter games. It's called "Call of the Champions," and I can't say I'm familiar with it. If NBC uses it for their broadcasts, it's not in an extensive manner:

In 2006 during the Torino games, I noticed that NBC was frequently using one particular piece that I recognized, and remembered liking, but couldn't quite put my finger on. Then it came back in a flash of SIRE (sudden instant recall effect) -- it was the theme from the early-mid-90s FOX Bruce Campbell vehicle, the sci-fi/comedy western, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. The theme, by composer Randy Edelman, fits quite well with Williams' music, and has apparently also been used by NBC for the World Series and MLB All-Star Game when they carry those. I should note that the recording and arrangement of the NBC version are a little less cheesy than the one used in the original series' opening titles:

Finally, there will undoubtedly be at least one overplayed commercial during the Olympic broadcasts that you will have stuck in your head for some time. For me two years ago during the Summer Olympics, it was some local ad for a furniture or mattress store featuring a classic rock sound-alike. Can't remember what song it was imitating, or the store (unfortunately?). In any case, the repeated music is unlikely to be as good as the earworm of the 2006 crop, "Galvanize" by the Chemical Brothers featuring Q-tip, which was in Budweiser Select ads and quickly made it into that year's Beukemix:

*I remember hearing somewhere that there's a theory that because of the timing of neural connections, you are likely to maintain a lifelong affection for the music of your early teens, even if you later decide it was terrible music. Three words: "Informer" by Snow

The Beatles + Charts = an ideal post for this blog

2010-02-10T07:00:00.002-06:00

The Charting the Beatles project is a work in progress. They've put up samples of a handful of charts visually quantifying aspects of the Beatles' career. Coming just months after the release of The Beatles: Rock Band and the remastered albums, this is catnip for a nerdy Beatles fan.

The examples include:

a circular time line showing the band's working schedules over the years 1963-1966, remarkable for how packed your planner has to be in order to be a prolific superstar group
a set of charts showing the breakdown of musical keys on each album, which makes me wish I had gone farther in my music theory so it would mean a bit more to me
a chart of references to Beatles songs within other Beatles songs (sampled above) - I've seen similar graphs for intra-Biblical references
a set of bar charts breaking down authorship and collaboration in songwriting

I really like this last one for helping to get a handle on the Beatles' output. Unlike the Who, the Beatles had the good sense to grow to hate each other and never really reunite, and they left a rich but compact discography that fits on a poster: 186 songs recorded in the studio in 9 calendar years (just over 7 years of time elapsed).

I'm a little confused by how some of the collaborations and outside contributions are defined. These aren't the songwriting credits as published, otherwise most would be shown as 50-50 Lennon/McCartney. These are based on anecdotes, apparently mostly collected in one particular book. I'd like to note that the Wikipedia entries for each individual Beatles song are full of all kinds of interesting trivia about their writing. The Beatles material on that site is generally very detailed and seemingly well-sourced.

In the chart, contribution of an instrumental solo seems not to count toward the bars, or all four Beatles would be credited on The End, where here only Paul is. Similarly, Eric Clapton isn't credited for While My Guitar Gently Weeps. And Billy Preston's presence in the sessions for Let It Be and Abbey Road don't count, either. So, what do the handful of outside contributions indicate? Based on the pink in Golden Slumbers, I wondered if it was George Martin's composition/orchestration. But if that were the case, there would be some collaboration indicated for Eleanor Rigby, which, of course, is set just to a string octet composed and arranged by Martin.* Maybe the collaboration on Slumbers has to do with the old lullaby from which McCartney used some lines. But then, there are other songs that had that kind of inspirational origin. So I feel like maybe this poster needs some splainin'. Or at least some annotatin'.

The other feature of this particular poster is the measure of collaboration, represented by a red thermometer bar above each. No bar means a solo effort. Full bar means roughly equal participation by all Beatles. I do not understand how the scale works on these. If, like on She Loves You, there is equal partnership between Lennon & McCartney (which was fairly rare, especially after 1963), it seems to rate about 33% on the Collab-O-Meter(TM). Instinctively, I would expect this to rate 50%, since half the band is collaborating. Or, hang on, I get it: the primary songwriter is collaborating with 1/3 of the remaining available Beatles, and using this Beatle to his full potential on the project. So think of the Collab-O-Meter as "how willing was the main songwriter to let someone else in on it." That makes more sense.

Note that there were only two studio recordings for their main discography that had full songwriting participation from all. I would classify both as throwaways of a sort: the instrumental Flying, from Magical Mystery Tour, and the fade-in-fade-out jam Dig It, from Let It Be, which was literally clipped out of a longer session of effing around in Abbey Road Studio. This chart illustrates how truly Balkanized the Beatles were, especially as their careers progressed.

I look forward to more work from the Beatles Charters. I'll post it here as soon as I'm aware of it.

* Let me repeat that, since it is easily glossed over: the most popular rock & roll band in the world released, as a single, a song setting for vocalist with string octet. There are reasons that my ex-roommate Dan Hetzel refers to them as "the baddest mofos on the planet." Consider that the same Beatle who wrote that song also wrote songs like When I'm Sixty Four or Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da that even his nominal writing partner derided as "granny music," as well as Helter Skelter, just about the heaviest mainstream metal until Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath hit their stride shortly thereafter. Hetz is also fond of describing Paul McCartney having developed (earned?) laser vision at the time he wrote Paperback Writer. He damaged his laser vision by writing Fool On The Hill, and it finally went away when he wrote The Long and Winding Road. He was no longer infallible.

Maxwell Edison sure plays a mean pinball

2010-02-08T12:43:00.001-06:00

I missed the Who's halftime performance last night, as I was in transit, but I hear it was dreadful, even for people who like the Who. Sadly, this sort of halftime choice seems to be the norm: the last time there were halftime performers less than two decades out from their prime, they plum ruined it for everybody. Since 2004, we've had, in order, McCartney, The Stones, Tom Petty, Prince, Springsteen, and the Who. In fairness, I should note that I rather enjoyed Prince and Springsteen's shows, and neither could be accused of phoning it in. Especially not Springsteen and his bathing suit area.

Anyway, this brings up an idea I had after the passing of Who bassist John Entwistle in 2002. Consider the longtime lineup of the Who:

The Who, 1964-1978
Pete Townshend - lead guitar
Roger Daltrey - lead vocals
John Entwistle - bass, deceased, 2002
Keith Moon - drums, deceased, 1978

Now if only there were a spare British bassist and drummer lying around. Aha, found some.

The Beatles, 1962-1969
John Lennon - rhythm guitar, deceased, 1980
George Harrison - lead guitar, deceased, 2001
Paul McCartney - bass
Ringo Starr - drums

I know that it is much more than a hunch that this group must somehow form a family. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the Whotles:

The Whotles, 2010-?
Pete Townshend - lead guitar, self-incriminating research
Roger Daltrey - lead vocals, shirtless fringe vest wearing
Paul McCartney - bass, no-longer-futuristic tape loops
Ringo Starr - drums, allocated one solo per life of band

I've always said that the Whotles would only cover Led Zeppelin. Unfortunately, Ringo's not half the drummer John Bonham was, or Keith Moon for that matter, so they can't do Zeppelin or most of The Who's songs, and Daltrey is no Lennon, so let's go with The Kinks. The Whotles will only play Kinks songs.

Update: Publish or perish. I see others have long since beaten me to putting this idea online.

Congressional Dems: Sound off like you got a pair!

2010-01-20T13:41:00.002-06:00

I just sent this letter to my Democratic US Congressman on my lunch break. If you have a Democratic US Congressperson, and also support reform of the health care system, I urge you to do the same:

------------
Mr. Ellison,

I am writing to urge you to continue to push for passage of health care reform. This was a reason MN-5 sent you to Washington. If this fundamental promise is not fulfilled, and you vote to let the bill die, you can not count on my vote in 2010.

In the wake of Mrs. Coakley's loss yesterday in Massachusetts, the Congressional Democrats who have made public statements seem to be utterly demoralized. While the arrival of Scott Brown in the Senate will mean picking off a Republican vote for cloture in order to get anything significant done in that body, *health care reform must go on*.

The House can, and must, pass the Senate bill unchanged. The instinct of some of your colleagues seems to be that this special election was a referendum on HCR. It wasn't: it was a reflection of the economy, and of Coakley being a worse candidate than Brown.

If the House passes the Senate bill, some of the additional provisions of the House bill can be made individually, perhaps through reconciliation if they reduce the deficit. In this scenario, the House Dems will certainly need to defend the bill to their constituents, but at least they will have something to defend. The only worse scenario, for the country, our health care system, and for the Democratic caucus, is for the bill to be dropped. Because the only thing the electorate will hate more than a bill that needs defending is a waste of a year's legislative focus.

A vocal minority of the country may oppose this plan from the right. Another vocal minority may oppose it from the left. But the votes for doing at least much as the Senate bill does is a majority. It is time for that majority to speak. There is no drawing board to go back to. The Senate Republicans will assure that. This is likely the only chance in our generation to get this done. Please take that chance, and GOVERN.

I hope that this email is not necessary. I would expect a solid progressive like you to understand the stakes and the import of the moment. But then, I would have expected the same from Barney Frank and Anthony Weiner, and they seem to have formed the Curl Up And Die Caucus.

Please keep up the fight. The Republicans ran roughshod over the country with slimmer majorities in both houses during most of the Bush Administrations. Democrats must do the jobs they were elected to do.

I am about as reliable a Democratic voter as you can find, but I will vote for a primary challenger and may not vote at all for Congress if you do not fulfill your promise to fight for health care reform.

Sincerely, etc etc.

The Robinson Caruso Organization re-organizes

2010-01-08T13:55:00.002-06:00

If the last time you saw Robinson Caruso's ten-piece juggernaut play old-school soul & r&b, you saw me play with them, then, fella, you've missed out. While I was busy learning and regurgitating civil engineering, the Organization was busy doing more shows. One of them, outside on the Metrodome plaza the morning of the Vikings-Lions game in November (we play Motown songs, get it?), was a double-long set featuring all kinds of new (to the band) tunes.

Well, the RCO is back, and I'm back with them, and we've got two shows in the span of one week. Great googaly moogaly! No more of this one-show-a-month nonsense. We've got new (to me) original songs written by ~~James Rone~~ Robinson Caruso himself, and more classics from the likes of the Jackson 5, the Supremes, and Al Green.

Maybe you heard about the passing of Hi Records producer Willie Mitchell last week and want to pay tribute. BAMF! We're playing Love & Happiness. Maybe you want to buy a Robinson Caruso t-shirt. SNIKT! There will be those, there, too. Maybe you wanna do The Kangaroo. ONOMATOPOEIA! Now's your chance.

Two. Shows. TWO SHOWS!

ONE!
Friday, January 15, 2010
Fine Line Music Café
Doors at 8, Show at 9, RCO at 11 (so we're told)
$6, 21 & up

TWO!
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Lee's Liquor Lounge
Hip Replacement at 9:30, RCO at 10:30
$5, probably also 21 & up

Presented without comment

2010-01-02T12:00:00.000-06:00

Ended the year not with a whimper...

2010-01-01T20:28:00.004-06:00

Stay classy, National Review Online:
(Click here to see the original if you really feel like giving them the eyeballs.)

Happy New Year!

2009-12-31T21:16:00.003-06:00

I hope all of you in the mid-Atlantic and eastward are enjoying 2010. 2009 was a good year in a lot of ways, but difficult in others. I'm looking forward to a new year and a new decade, and in order to keep myself accountable, I present to you here three new year's resolutions I intend to keep for myself. There is a theme:

1. Bike to work (to downtown St. Paul from south Minneapolis) on Bike to Work Day.
2. Ride in Southwest Community Education's annual Midnight-to-Dawn bike ride.
3. Always get to the gym enough times each month to get the health insurance discount on my membership fee.

Hopefully having concrete goals (metrics!) rather than a vague notion of "work out more" will help me. Measurement is useful.

Someone from Grinnell linked to this piece on how to make resolutions, which I liked. It in turn linked to the One-Minute-Rule, which I really like and hope to implement.

Anyway, masturbatory self-improvement aside, I hope you all have a fine new year. Don't take any guff.

Good news, everyone!

2009-12-29T12:48:00.006-06:00

(Some of you may have heard about it in person or on Facebook. Apologies for the repetition.)

I got some good news on Christmas Eve. I received* a letter from the MN Board of AELSLAGID stating that they need $132, because that's the license fee to be a registered professional engineer in the State of Minnesota, which was pertinent because I passed the PE test in October! I guess the 36 hours of review class and 78 lbs of books worked. And my knowledge of things such as vertical highway curves (pictured) won't be tested again any time soon.**

This is all very good for a host of reasons, but here's an interesting one: because a coworker and I passed this exam, it keeps alive a streak at our company. In the history of our firm, no structural engineer in its employ has ever failed the PE exam or its historical equivalent. I mention the historical equivalent because the firm will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2010. So the pressure's off.

* ...and promptly dropped in the snow off my front stoop and had to retrieve with a pair of scissors...
** Note: if you have questions about vertical highway curves, I can recommend some people.

Obama joins the Advent Conspiracy?

2009-12-22T22:43:00.001-06:00

"Isn't there anyone [beat] who knows what Christmas is all about?!"

"Sure, uh... Charlie Brown. I can, uh, tell you... what Christmas is all about.

Uh, lights, please?

Let me be clear: there were, in that same country, shepherds. abiding in their fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night..."

Anyhoo, I don't think if Charles Schultz had studied 21st Century consumer trends and personally cast a group of kids with attitudes towards Christmas as much like Lucy ("I never get what I really want: real estate") or Sally ("All I want is my fair share. All I want [breathe] is what I have coming to me") as can be found, he could have set up and scripted this mayonnaise:

I actually prefer the unedited transcript. This exchange reads better than it sounds. A tip of the hat to Kotaku anyway, since that's where I saw this first.

If I don't post again in the next day or two, Merry Christmas, everybody.

If you're looking for something Christmassy, you should know that someone has posted the entirety of A Muppet Family Christmas on YouTube in HD. Enjoy!

Pinko notes

2009-12-10T12:00:00.002-06:00

Here's a handful of things that would have been dangerous (at least professionally) for me to have expressed during large portions of the 20th Century.

1. This video has been bouncing around the liberal blogosphere (I watched it at Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog). In it, Rachel Maddow picks apart the arguments of Richard A. Cohen, an author and therapist who treats patients who don't want to be gay. His writings have been repeatedly cited by the Ugandan proponents of laws to criminalize and severely punish (including the death penalty) homosexuality in that country. Maddow clearly disagrees with him, and does not mince words, but is well-prepared, specific and respectful, letting him defend himself and his work to the extent that he can. Imagine the alternatives, an O'Reilly or Olberman type, hectoring their guest without letting them get a word in, or an overly-deferential Meet the Press kind of exchange that takes the guest's qualifications and assertions at face value.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Update: SIDEBAR! Pastor Rick Warren, who has also drawn flak for his associations with the Ugandans pushing the anti-gay legislation, to his credit, has strongly spoken out against it.

2. The American Civil Liberties Union has lost the financial support for the next year of a major donor who would have been giving on the order of $20 million. The ACLU's annual operating budget is apparently only about four times that, so this is a huge hit for them. The organization is a truly non-partisan one; if you have political opinions of any kind, chances are they've been fierce defenders of and litigants against people with whom you hold common cause. They've taken up causes to the agitation of conservatives and liberals alike. But I am of the opinion that their work, to "defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country," is vital.

If you want to help support the ACLU, you can donate at their web site. As a commenter at Balloon Juice points out, if you give, you get to call yourself a "card-carrying member of the ACLU." And then George H.W. Bush can repeatedly point that out as if it's a bad thing when you run for president against him in 1988. I was a member for a year or two early in the decade. Perhaps it's time to re-join.

3. Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA) fisks the NYTimes op-ed by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) defending his amendment to the House health care bill regarding coverage of abortion.

What you like is who you are

2009-12-09T12:15:00.005-06:00

So suggests High Fidelity, which is apparently my favorite film of 2000. Specifically, Rob (John Cusack) says, "what really matters is what you like, not what you are like... Books, records, films -- these things matter."

You may already be familiar with Flickchart, a site that applies the mechanic of Kittenwar to the rating of motion pictures.* You are shown the posters of two films, and you click on the film you prefer. You do this a lot and it slowly, over time, builds a list of your favorite movies.

Sometimes, you are presented with movies that should never be compared (The Passion of Joan of Arc vs. Bio-Dome). Sometimes you are presented with a difficult choice based on which one you love more (a common one on the site for this is Ghostbusters vs. Back to the Future, which is easy for me: Ghostbusters by a mile). Sometimes, you can't decide which movie you dislike more (Star Wars Episode I vs. Episode II) Sometimes, because a particular movie just hasn't been put up against movies you prefer, it might stay artificially high on your list for quite a while. V for Vendetta is nowhere near my favorite movie, but it was positioned as such for about a week after I first signed on (it now sits at #283, which still feels stupidly high).

As my list took shape, I started to worry a little bit about the picture that was emerging. If what you like does define who you are, then according to Flickchart, I am a nerdy male in his late 20s or early 30s. Dingdingdingding!

I consider myself someone who enjoys movies and has sought to see a wide variety of films. Yet I am struck by how parochial my list of favorites is turning out to be. My top 20 matches in large part the current top 20 aggregated from all users both at Flickchart and at the Internet Movie Database (I do have my limits -- The Dark Knight or The Shawshank Redemption as the greatest movies ever?**); let's just say there is a high incidence of Tarantino and early Lucas.

Even looking year-by-year, I'm finding my favorites very predictable when considering the "nerd canon" of films. I'm feeling like I have a demographic predisposition.

I've decided that my second-favorite movies of these years tend to be somewhat more eclectic and unpredictable. So, subject to a handful of gigantic caveats***, here are my second-favorite movies of every year since I was born:

1979 - Alien
1980 - Airplane!
1981 - The Great Muppet Caper
1982 - E.T.
1983 - Trading Places
1984 - Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom [Seriously?]
1985 - Clue
1986 - Ferris Bueller's Day Off
1987 - The Untouchables
1988 - My Neighbor Totoro
1989 - Do the Right Thing
1990 - The Hunt for Red October
1991 - Beauty and the Beast [yeah, that's right]
1992 - Hard Boiled
1993 - Groundhog Day
1994 - The Shawshank Redemption
1995 - Seven
1996 - Swingers
1997 - Austin Powers
1998 - Dark City
1999 - Rushmore
2000 - Magnolia
2001 - Memento
2002 - Infernal Affairs
2003 - City of God
2004 - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2005 - Caché [which I've seen twice, but only on an airplane]
2006 - Casino Royale
2007 - Michael Clayton
2008 - Wall-E
2009 - A Serious Man

Based on these and my above comments, you may very well be able to extrapolate my favorite movies in many of these years.

Please share some of your second-favorite movies in the comments!

* A tip-of-the-hat to fellow Grinnellian Adam Kempenaar and his cohost Matty Robinson at Filmspotting for making me aware of the site.

** I realize I'm making a false equivalence of community-proclaimed favorite and "best," but that's unfortunately how Flickchart, at least, describes it. The IMDB at least just calls it "Top 250 as voted by our users."

*** Caveats:
1. Remember, these are in terms of "movies I enjoy and hold as favorites," not "movies I think are 'better' movies."
2. Several of my yearly lists aren't really settled yet.
3. Flickchart defines the release dates of some end-of-year Oscarbait movies as being the beginning of the next year. Thus they call There Will Be Blood, for instance, a 2008 rather than 2007 film.

Marriage Equality in NY

2009-12-03T12:00:00.002-06:00

I know you can't swing a dead cat on the internet today without hitting this clip of NY State Sen. Savino, but it is such a good speech that if one of you few who read this blog haven't seen it and watch it here, then the relink is worth it. As you may know, the NY legislature earlier this week voted to approve gay marriage in the state, as they have done twice before. Yesterday the state senate took up the measure. Sadly, it was defeated, 38-24.

Two of the more interesting reactions I've read to the vote are:

Here, a good overview of the vote and the background to it from Gay City News. I guess a number of Republicans had privately expressed their support for marriage equality. Not a single Republican voted for it. And several of the nay-voting Democrats have benefited greatly from gay support. As Andrew Sullivan notes, all but one (the Democratic Pentecostal minister from Brooklyn) of the Nay votes did not say a second word about their vote on the floor.

Here, where DougJ at Balloon Juice, a Democratic resident of a Republican-represented district of Upstate NY, expresses his confusion about why his otherwise gay-friendly Senator would vote against this. He correctly points out that fighting equality isn't just socially backward; it's economically backward.

The Annotated Beukemix, 2009

2009-12-01T12:33:00.004-06:00

Liner notes! As usual, the links are to mostly-representative versions of each song, which may not be the exact version in the mix. And the visuals may just be somebody's World of Warcraft interpretation of the song. Be forewarned.
Key:
HS = Horn section
HC = Hand claps

1. The Underdog – Spoon
I don't understand how this wasn't the opening track on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. The pounding opening track demands that you batten down the goddamned hatches, because here comes the album. (HS, HC)

2. Après Moi – Regina Spektor
It doesn't feature any of her trademark glottal stops and has less vocal bending than some of her songs. But it starts with just her and the piano and adds instruments, to a chamber ensemble at midsong and a full orchestra at the climax. And it's in three languages (including a refrain in her native Russian)! Sold! The xylophone bits sound very Saint-Saëns/Danse Macabre. (HS)

3. Watching The Detectives – The New Standards
Elvis Costello's original version of this song was spooky in its own way (thanks mostly to the backup vocals), but this cover is darker and more menacing. I know that the song has a meta-narrative to it, that the "she" who is watching the detectives is doing so on TV, but this version makes it sound more like she is a character in Twin Peaks. Cellophane-wrapped, indeed. The New Standards are a Twin Cities jazz combo made up of Chan Poling of The Suburbs (and Mr. Eleanor Mondale), John Munson from Semisonic & Trip Shakespeare, and Steve Roehm on the vibes. They've released two albums of pop music covers that I stumbled upon in the last days of 2008. They are excellent. (HC)

4. Ulysses – Franz Ferdinand
Another fine, clockwork beat from Franz Ferdinand. Seems to be more James Joyce than The Odyssey, although of course the former was informed by the latter. (HC)

5. I Feel It All – Feist
After hearing her on The Current for a couple years, I finally listened to The Reminder, and really liked it, in particular this song and 1234. I think 1234 went into the mix cd penalty box at some point in the past year, so I went with I Feel It All. (HC)

6. It’s Not My Birthday – The Fluid Ounces
Easily the best song on a They Might Be Giants tribute album called Hello, Radio.

7. Behind Blue Eyes – The Who
I always liked this song, but I learned to love it playing the drums on it in Rock Band. Keith Moon gets to sit quietly for several minutes as the song slowly builds, and then has a minute-long frenzy, and then stops.

8. Five Years – David Bowie
My favorite Bowie songs, from before he went to Berlin and shouted at microphones from the other end of a concrete room, are cinematic and emotionally exhausting. Like this one. Here are two excellent live versions: Bowie on TV in 1972, and with the Arcade Fire in 2006.

9. Use Me – Bill Withers
This year I joined the horn section of an R&B band. The band played this song, but it was one of only a few in our repertoire without horns. So why pick this one? The riff and the drum rim knocks at each chorus would be enough, but what puts this song over the top is the hand claps. There are three of them, and they occur once. The only song I know of with more effectively restrained use of hand claps is Elvis Costello's "Welcome to the Working Week," which has two, right at the end of the song. (HC)

10. Boombox – The Lonely Island ft. Julian Casablancas
This is the only really funny song off the Lonely Island's album that hasn't already been an SNL Digital Short. My favorite line occurs at the end of the bridge. (Not counting the drum-machine hand claps on this one.)

11. For Once In My Life – Stevie Wonder
The Robinson Caruso Organization rehearsed this song a couple times this summer. It may in fact now be in our repertoire (I've been on hiatus). I hope so, because it is amazing. (HS)

12. Flathead – The Fratellis
My friends Joe and Troy both repeatedly extolled the quality of the Fratellis. They're a Scottish band, practitioners of rock music that is fun and doesn't take itself too seriously (thanks, Allmusic!). I swear I'm not purposefully selecting songs that were in iPod commercials, and haven't even seen the one with this song. Honest. (HC)

13. Main Theme from Dark Of The Sun – Jacques Loussier
This was in Inglourious Basterds. It is good. (HS)

14. Reckoner – Radiohead
This song, especially the a capella break, stunned me into putting down the sandwich I was eating to give it my full attention. And I like sandwiches.

15. All My Friends – Franz Ferdinand
This summer, Pitchfork put together a list of the Top 500 songs of the '00s (with additions expected at the end of the year). The original of this song, by LCD Soundsystem, was #2 on the list (between Outkast's B.O.B. at #1 and M.I.A.'s Paper Planes at #3, both songs on past Beukemixes). I prefer the Franz Ferdinand cover, which was a b-side to the original's single.

16. Hey Bulldog – The Beatles
When The Beatles: Rock Band was released in September, this was the only song in the game I didn't know. It was also the first song the game selected for me to play. It's off of the Yellow Submarine soundtrack, and one of only two songs original to that album that are worth a damn (the other is "All Together Now."). I actually like the edit that the game makers made to the song: near the end, when McCartney yells "Quiet! Quiet!" the song ends immediately instead of fading out.

17. I Cut Like A Buffalo – The Dead Weather
This is the third distinct band featuring Jack White whose songs I've put on Beukemixes. He could've gotten on last year's for his duet with Alicia Keys if their song from "Quantum of Solace" hadn't sucked.

18. While You Wait For The Others – Grizzly Bear
Heard this on the Current. It's bass-heavy and atmospheric, and thereby right up my alley.

19. You Don’t Have To Be A Prostitute – Flight of the Conchords
My favorite song from the second season of FOTC (although Too Many Dicks On The Dance Floor and Demon Woman come close, too). In an interview, Brett describes the song thusly: "It was just doing a song like 'Roxanne,' but it's got a judgmental—it makes a lot of assumptions about the profession. Singing a song about prostitution, like 'I'll stop you from being a prostitute with this song.'"

20. Heaven Can Wait – Charlotte Gainsbourg ft. Beck
I added this to the mix last night after seeing the video on Andrew Sullivan's blog. The lyrics sound like classic Beck, and come to think of it, the visual oddities, which I guess are all actually culled from internet art images, could have also been taken from lines crossed out in the margins of Beck's notebook ("pancake astronaut skating on burgers"?). (HS)

21. My Lover’s Prayer – Otis Redding
Being in Robinson Caruso has deepened my appreciation for the output of Stax Records in general and Otis Redding in particular. I first sought out this song after hearing it on the Sopranos years ago. Over Thanksgiving, my brother-in-law was spinning songs on his laptop, this one popped up, and I decided it would be a fine way to end the mix. (HS)

FINAL SCORES
Horn Sections: 6
Hand Claps: 5
Horns win!

Obscure song bleg

2009-11-26T12:16:00.005-06:00

UPDATED! see below

I'm in California right now for Thanksgiving, having come out here a little over a week ago for a memorial for Melissa's grandmother Linda, who was a remarkable, funny, vivacious woman. Melissa and her mother have been trying to figure out a song that Linda was singing at Thanksgiving last year. We've struck out on Google, and so now I turn to you, dear blog reader, for assisstance.

We know very little, only a fragment of lyrics and melody. The words are probably only partially right. Any of us could sing the portion of melody (which is just sort of a repetitive stepwise thing) we know, but here are the lyrics, such as they are:

"He puts me on his income tax /
and writes me off as [beat] property improvement"

Any ideas? The subject matter almost suggests a Marylin Monroe ditty, but as I mentioned, our Google efforts have been futile thus far. So, if anyone knows anything about this song, let me know in the comments!

UPDATE 11/27
Via Facebook, fellow Grinnell alum and all-around great guy Evan Schnell has found it. The song is called "He Takes Me Off His Income Tax," and is from a broadway musical revue called "New Faces of 1952," which launched the careers of Paul Lynde and Eartha Kitt, among others. Some of the songs are from other shows, while some, including apparently this one, are original to the revue. Part of the shtick from the show seems to be that the woman singing it is interrupted every time she sings it, several times throughout the show. So the recordings available online are all medleys of that song plus another, it seems. Thank you, Evan, for saving the day!

Weeklypedia #20: Semiannuapedia

2009-11-16T12:05:00.000-06:00

Well, it's taken even longer than usual to put this quiz together (I started it on May 20th!), but here it is. Due to the longer time, it's also more disjointed than usual, and has some really stupidly obscure stuff in it. Trivial, you might say. The last three clues were all added in the last week, and are, I think, the strongest.

As usual, feel free to add your answers in the comments, and I've now posted the answers to my last quiz(es). With this kind of a gap between quizzes, it forces me to essentially play each quiz in order to write the answers.

1. After Hasbro bought Avalon Hill, makers of the game "Diplomacy," the pieces in that game representing armies and navies were replaced with metal howitzers and battleships, cast from the same dies used for pieces in this other Hasbro title.
2. BEFORE & AFTER: Star of "Munich" and "Hulk" who's a word game played with tiles stored in a bag shaped like a piece of fruit.
3. On July 3rd, 1940, a British Naval task force attacked and destroyed a portion of the fleet of this future ally, fearing that its ships would become part of the German Navy and demonstrating British determination to continue fighting.
4. Prior to the upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver, this was the westernmost location to host the winter games (Note: for these purposes, the international dateline is defined as the western end of the map).
5. As of 2009, it is the only country in the Southern Hemisphere to have hosted any Olympic games.
6. One of the two directors, other than Quentin Tarantino, to have directed films written by Tarantino.
7. It is a more common name for the typographic character called the asperand or amphora.
8. According to "Chicago" keyboardist Robert Lamm, this song's title refers to the time 3:35 (or 3:34) AM.

Kumail on Letterman

2009-11-13T12:55:00.002-06:00

My friend and freshman year roommate Kumail Nanjiani will be performing standup on Letterman tonight. Kumail and I put together a standup night in Fall 2000 at Bob's Coffeehouse on campus at Grinnell college because we each wanted to try putting an act together. We followed this up with another show the following Spring, and then he went to Chicago after graduation, where he started climbing the ladder of standup comedy in Beef City. I ended my "career" after my third performance, when I visited Kumail and other Chicago-based Grinnellians in the Spring of 2002 and went to an open mic with him. He was by a wide margin the funniest person on stage that evening, and he has continued to swiftly rise from there.

He capped off his years in Chicago with a tour leg opening for Zach Galifianakis through the midwest, and with Unpronounceable, a one-man show about his experiences going from a traditional Islamic background in Pakistan to one of the most liberal colleges in the US. Then he moved to NYC, where he has performed constantly, appeared in speaking roles on SNL and The Colbert Report, was a writer and regular on Michael and Michael Have Issues, and recently had a feature article written about him in the NY Times.

Tonight he'll be on Letterman. There is one other scheduled guest, some other up & comer by the name of Mariah Carey. Check him out: he is very funny.

What I've been up to

2009-11-09T19:32:00.003-06:00

(Besides pining for lost corn dogs, that is.)

In case you didn't feel you had a good handle on how much of a geek I am, uh, batten down the hatches.

Back in August I mentioned the then-upcoming Principles and Practice of Engineering (aka Professional Engineering, or PE) exam I would be taking this Fall. Well, it happened, on October 23rd. Here's a peek inside the world of engineering.

I'm trained as a structural engineer. This is a subset of civil engineering, broadly and poorly defined as the technical design of spaces and places and ways to get between them. If I'd been a civil engineering major as an undergraduate, I'd have taken other civil courses, like transportation (roads and rails), geotechnical (soil and foundations), environmental (water and treatment thereof), and so on. I wasn't. I was a physics major, and went to grad school for structural engineering. So my only engineering classes were structural, or related to structural. But, to be licensed to sign structural OR civil engineering drawings in the State of MN (something my employers would like me to be able to do), you have to pass the civil, rather than the structural PE. [Note: my previous company does this differently. They ask their structural engineers to take the Structural I exam, which is 8 hours on structural engineering alone. I will end up taking some version of that in the future, since some states that aren't Minnesota require it to sign structural drawings.] So the upshot is that when it came time for me to take the exam, I was looking at being tested on a bunch of stuff I'd never learned before.

In the Civil PE, everybody takes the same morning session, a four-hour-limited survey of civil engineering topics, which is listed as breaking down something like this (CHARTS!):

So, of the topics, only the last three listed here are ones I have significant background in, totaling 1/5 of the session. In the four-hour afternoon session, you pick which broad topic (geotechnical, water, transportation, construction, or structural) you want to take, so my whole 8-hour day was to break down like this:Hurrah! I was nominally over 50% in terms of topics I had any background in. To increase my chances, I took a PE review course offered by the MN Society of Professional Engineers along with a coworker. It provided a nice introduction to all those non-civil topics, which was then reinforced with some practice problems and sitting down with a couple colleagues who both passed the test last Spring.

There are a whole host of regulations to ensure that engineers taking the test do not cheat. You cannot bring anything that can communicate wirelessly into the room -- they make you leave your phone in the car or check it with them. You cannot bring your own writing utensil or any loose paper. You can only have a calculator from their narrow list of approved models (one or two model lines each of TI, HP, and Casio). The test is open-book, with one limitation: anything you bring in has to be bound, and three-ring binging counts as binding. In the room, you can tell which people are structural engineers, because they bring luggage instead of a box or crate:

So that's eighteen references*, two TI-30XII calculators (one borrowed), the instructions for the calculator, my asthma meds (just in case), the admission ticket for the exam, and Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, in case I was looking for distraction at lunchtime. Most of the books aren't mine, but borrowed from the structural & transportation groups at my firm. I did not use all the references, but there were several questions I would not have been able to answer without having brought certain books. Incidentally, that white binder at the top isn't even all of the AASHTO bridge design spec. Just the chapters I thought would be useful. I'm glad I'm in the building business.

So how much does a rolling suitcase full of engineering books weigh? I enrolled the suitcase in Wii Fit the night before the test to find out. I selected for its avatar the Mii based on Robert Evans that I made a couple years back. The suitcase is 3' tall, which with a weight of about 78 lbs gives it a body-mass index of 43.11:

Pretty bad, especially if, as this suitcase, you're only two years old.

Anyway, I felt pretty good about the test, and will find out in another 6-10 weeks whether I passed or not. I'd say more, but I'd hate to have the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying accuse me of somehow publishing their secrets. I'll let y'all know if I get to put new letters after my name in a couple months.

* For the truly strong of stomach, here is the list of references I took with me, from left to right, top to bottom, as shown in the photo above:

The Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute Design Manual
The American Institute of Steel Construction Manual, 13th Edition
Civil Engineering Reference Manual (textbook from our class - crucial for the morning)
Practice Problems for the Civil PE
The Transportation Review Board Highway Capacity Manual
The AASHTO Bridge Design Specification (select chapters)
Kassimali: Structural Analysis
Nilson, Darwin & Dolan: Design of Concrete Structures
American Concrete Institute Building Code and Commentary (ACI 318)
The International Building Code (IBC) 2006, select chapters, and various reference and design aids I've collected
Minimum Design Loads for Buildings and Other Structures (ASCE 7) 2005
Notes and practice problems from the review class
Powerpoint slides and more notes from the class
Gere: Mechanics of Materials
American Wood Council National Design Specification and Manual
AASHTO: A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets (the "Green Book")
Masonry Standards Joint Committee Building Code Requirements and Specification for Masonry Structures
? & ?: Materials for Civil and Construction Engineers (I rarely use this book day-to-day, but I'm pretty sure it got me a point on the test)

Man, I'm glad I didn't have to pay for most of those codes and specs.

Requiem for a Corn Dog

2009-10-31T13:43:00.002-05:00

I know you all come here for posts regarding only the most important topics in the world. Who am I to deny you this vital commentary?

You may know that Melissa and I are big proponents of Morningstar Farms' line of fake meat products (especially the "beef" crumbles for making tacos, the "sausage" patties with a pancake breakfast, the Chik Nuggets, and the fake bacon to toss on a veggie burger), to the point that we've long joked that we should buy stock in the company. Unlike Melissa, I am not a vegetarian, but I enjoy their products. Less fat and cholesterol than the real thing, but still very tasty.

You may also know that I am a corn dog enthusiast, and particularly a fan of "Pronto Pups" at the MN State Fair. Back in college, my friends Whitney and Dan challenged me to try Morningstar's veggie corn dogs, claiming they were as good as the real thing. They were right. It was perfect: they were filling, fast-to-prepare, tasty, and healthier than a meat corn dog. During grad school, having a hot meal I could put together in 2:30 was a great boon, and I was hooked. Morningstar corn dogs became a staple food for me thereafter.

The corn dogs disappeared from shelves this past May, with the mini corn dogs remaining available for a short time after that. Then they disappeared, too, and there was no joy in corndogville (though probably still more joy than in Dogville). Google searches over the summer led to the news that Morningstar had recalled some of their veggie dog products due to problems with their production chain not meeting "good manufacturing practices." Then came news that all their veggie dog and corn dog products were "temporarily out of stock" while they remedied a supply chain issue. Meanwhile there remained a significant hole in my "I need to eat fast and get out of here ASAP" routine. A routine I was quite happy with, thank you very much.

Now I learn that all their veggie dogs have been discontinued. Argh! One niche blogger speculates as to whether this discontinuation could damage Morningstar as a brand. I don't know about that. After all, they still make a bunch of other great products (see above). At SuperTarget, for instance, Morningstar Farms products still take up most if not all of one stack of shelves in the freezer section. It'll take a good deal more erosion to get people to stop buying the remaining products, it seems to me. Plus, hey, they're owned by Kellogg's. Not exactly a small producer easily affected by the loss of one product.

That does, however, raise the question of why they're having such a problem getting a reliable supply of veggie dogs. Surely a company like Kellogg's can find someone to make veggie dogs without doing whatever their supplier was doing before. Hell, now that Reading Rainbow is off the air, they could just take the money they were using to sponsor LeVar Burton's entreaties to not rely solely on his opinion of literature, and spend it buying, I dunno, SmartDogs.

In the meantime, does anyone know where I can get my hands on some vegetarian frozen corn dogs?

Make your nerdy life nerdier!

2009-09-30T17:14:00.007-05:00

I've long been fascinated by the ways in which information can be represented graphically. I love maps, charts, graphs, and the like, especially when it is presented in unusual, inventive, or elegant ways. I'm a fan of the work of Edward Tufte, and if his seminars weren't bloody $380 a piece, I might consider going to one (he highlights the chart shown here of Napoleon's army's size during the Russian campaign of 1812 as perhaps the best "probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn"). Likewise, I want to read all of these posters in detail.

It may come as no surprise, then, that I am a visual learner, and like to make use of visual arrangements of information when trying to learn it. And the act of putting said information together myself only helps cement the information. Hence my Jeopardy notebook. But I find myself from time to time doodling lists, tables, or graphs to wrap my brain around something. To explain my own oddities better, I thought I'd share a few with you.

First, a simple one. I found myself at lunch one day for some reason reading about the history of the NFL in Los Angeles. When I was growing up, there were two NFL teams in LA, but both left for greener pastures when I was in high school. I could never remember which teams were where, when (especially since the Raiders were originally in Oakland, then went to LA for a little over a decade, and then returned to Oakland). I decided to make a little timeline:

OK, next is something to keep track of current events, specifically the 2009 AL Central pennant race between the Twins and Tigers. At some point I picked up the habit, inherited from my father, of marking up a Twins pocket schedule with wins & losses. So this is hanging up in my cube:

I added the pre-All-Star-Break record as a midsummer stock-taking of the team. Anyway, with less than two weeks remaining in the season, I decided to start keeping track of not just what the Twins do, but also the Tigers. Last week I stuck this on my schedule:

Green means good and red means bad. The blue number is the Twins' position in the standings relative to the Tigers. From here on out, the Tigers have the "harder" schedule, but when you're in the AL Central, everything is relative.

And I do this all the time. On the practical side there are to-do lists and tables at work. On the self-interested side a calendar tracking Jeopardy contestants who qualify for the 2010 Tournament of Champions (Melissa and I are also keeping a spreadsheet on this one). And then there's the trivial. A hand-filled map of Minneapolis neighborhoods. Colored maps of the 2008 US Presidential primary and general elections. A spreadsheet of Brave New Workshop shows and casts since I started working there in 2001. Venn diagrams of classic rock band personnel. It is a disease.

Oh, I see, Hitler DIDN'T want to aggressively expand.

2009-09-02T17:33:00.006-05:00

Can we stop treating Pat Buchanan as a mainstream political figure?

Hey, while we're talking about the beginning of World War II, I feel that I should follow up my earlier complaints about the boringness of George Orwell's "blog" by saying that it started getting really good this summer. The past couple of weeks, in particular, have been absolutely fascinating, viewing the outbreak of the War from within the fog of the time. I'm intrigued to learn more about this nightmare as it plays out in real time, 70 years after the fact.

You can't go wrong by starting with yesterday's entry, which starts:

Invasion of Poland began this morning. Warsaw bombed. General mobilization proclaimed in England, ditto in France plus martial law.

If Poland had only been willing to bargain about Danzig, this would have all been avoided, right, Mr. Buchanan?

Update 9/3: Found a link to this excellent take-down of the Buchanan piece.
Other Update 9/3: Good lord, 70 years, not 60. This is why I don't trust my brain to do arithmetic for me by itself.

Irony, thy name is Bartiromo

2009-09-01T23:12:00.003-05:00

Via TPM, this clip has been making the rounds on Twitter with the tag #zingfail:

Brian Beutler points out a deeper irony about Bartiromo's zinger:

Obviously, the real punchline is that many of the people criticizing the Democrats' health care plan don't have the foggiest idea how any of it works. And Bartiromo in particular reveals--however inadvertently--that she thinks elements of the proposal make perfect sense. Yes, she's wrong to assume Weiner could buy into Medicare, and she's wrong to assume that he chooses not to because the coverage is sub-par. But ironically, the idea that Weiner should be able to buy into Medicare seems totally uncontroversial to her. And that, of course, is the whole point of the public option.

Relatedly, Factcheck.org has a breakdown (/takedown) of a popular anti-reform email that's making the rounds. And lest you label them as strictly partisan, know that they are willing to dig in on distortions on the left as well.

Don't bind their hands and hooves

2009-08-27T18:24:00.000-05:00

Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

More of why health care needs fixing.

2009-08-24T23:29:00.005-05:00

Via Balloon Juice, here's a piece from the Washington Post debunking many of the myths of health care quality in the rest of the industrialized world. This is one of the best, most straight-forward descriptions of the systems in other First World countries, in part because it doesn't rely exclusively on anecdotes, but has some data, too. The bottom line of the piece is that compared to our peer nations, the US spends more per person on worse care. The unique feature of the American system is the profit motive. We can do better.

As another example of the people who have fallen through the American system's cracks, here's one of the readers of Sullivan's blog writing in to the dudes caretaking during his absence. This guy's situation resonates with me since he's got asthma like I do. If, God forbid, I were laid off, and weren't able to find a new job before COBRA benefits expired, I'd be in his situation, perhaps paying $800/month out of pocket for inadequate care. Except I'd probably be more expensive, since I'm five years older than the guy.

Lie-driven anger winning again

2009-08-14T08:26:00.004-05:00

This really upsets me:

"End of life counseling" has been framed. No longer is it a neutral phrase that refers to a government-fostered enhancement of the doctor-patient dialog. It is now apparently so polarizing and so toxic now that the Senate Finance Committee is willing to strike a provision from its bill that would add a counseling benefit to Medicare. The Wall Street Journal reports that the measure will be excluded from the committee's mark because it has become controversial. As the Journal notes, "dumping the provision would thwart a broad effort in recent years by doctors and hospitals to encourage patients to plan for end-of-life care." That's as close as a newspaper can come to saying: what a dumb thing they're doing! The issue _is_ touchy -- but in the context of the health care debate, it has become, in just a few days, synonymous with an attack against the entire concept of health reform: that Democrats want to ration care. A question, though, for those Democrats and liberals who'll be angry about this: the response to Palin's remarks about "death panels" as well as to Sen. Chuck Grassley's repetition of the idea was swift and fairly unequivocal: it's not as if the pro-reform side didn't quickly rebut the issue with better facts. My sense is that fear-based emotional appeals set in more quickly than reason-based emotional appeals -- always have.

This is idiotic. Granted, there are several different bills right now, between the various committees in the House and Senate (something you wouldn't know to listen to, well, most people), but providing funding for counseling on end-of-life issues is terribly important. I've felt pretty strongly about this ever since the Terry Schiavo lunacy a few years back. Here's conservative Republican Senator from Georgia Johnny Isakson, speaking on the floor of the Senate in 2008:

I will talk about what we need to do in terms of Medicare eligibility. When somebody signs up for Medicare when they are 65 years old--you are supposed to go in 90 days before your 65th birthday; I am getting close, so I am looking at these things--I think you ought to be required to execute a durable power of attorney when you become eligible.

Eighty percent of the cost of health care to me, to you, and to anybody else happens in the last 60 days of life. More often than not, people are not in a condition to make a decision for themselves. Because of laws, and because we are a compassionate nation, the physician will keep you alive as long as he can. If you had a chance, you might rather say if I am being hydrated and given nutrition but will never become conscious again, I give the doctors the authority to make the appropriate medical decision. The money that would save is in the ``gazillions'' of dollars--if there is such a number. It would help us to manage that cost.

Isakson recently called the deathers "nuts" for claiming that the language in the bills would be "death panels" or forced euthanasia or anything of the sort. After being name-checked by Obama in his NH town hall, Isakson got some grief from Limbaugh and subsequently distanced himself from the President and the House bill. Now, his more recent statement brings up a more specific question. The language of the House bill (see section 1233, starting on p. 424) is fairly specific, and says that consultation on end-of-life issues shall be covered every five years, and talks about the various options that doctors shall include. Chuck Lane and others, including Isakson in that statement, have suggested that this incentivizes doctors coercing you into hospice care. I don't buy it. But if the problem is that the House bill gets too specific, fine, let's not adopt that portion of the language when this all gets worked out in committee.

BUT! as Isakson said on the floor in '08, lets make execution of a durable power of attorney mandatory for people signing up for Medicare. Make it clear that patients can say "I don't care how much sugar you have to grow to put in the IV drip that will keep me alive in a storage locker until they figure out how to thaw out Walt Disney and cure whatever I'm mostly dead from - do it!" if that's their desire. Don't remove all consideration of end-of-life stuff. Don't kill reform as a whole. Don't let this issue, especially this specific issue within the issue, be demagogued. Don't screw this up. Please. It's too important.

For more on this, read Jim Fallows' post on the media environment and how despite her history and the fact that the internet exists now, the claims of the (as far as I'm concerned) villainous Betsy McCaughey have once again come to define the debate on health care reform.

Facebook is stealing my page hits

2009-08-10T16:34:00.004-05:00

Here's a question for you tech types out there.

Back when I was writing Jeopardy posts, I wanted to make the process of adding links to this blog on my Facebook profile. So, I used the Notes Application to Import this blog. Then, every time I posted here, it was imported as a note on my Facebook profile.

Problem was, it imported the whole text of my post, plus photos, to Facebook. So people were reading it, but not here. Thus I had no way of keeping track of how many readers I had. So, I "un-imported the blog," and started manually adding a Link to each post when I posted it.

But the unimporting didn't take. Now, every time I post, I have to manually add a link and manually delete the Note. But I haven't really been doing it right, because I've ended up only deleting the Notes from my News Feed, but not the actual notes.

So: even though Notes tells me I don't have a blog imported, how do I get it to stop reposting my stuff?

Health Care: For Example

2009-08-08T08:24:00.002-05:00

Sullivan has been excellent on Health Care stuff this week. Here's a large chunk of a particularly remarkable email from one of his readers:

After about 3 hours I passed one of the [kidney] stones, and with a prescription for heavy-duty painkillers in tow, we left the hospital. Everything was fine until I received a bill 3 months later itemized as follows:

X-Ray: $765
CT Scan: $4294
Emergency Room visit: $4924
Total: $10063
The bill was a shock to me for two reasons. First, my insurance was supposed to cover this. After a long round of phone calls - during which a very rude hospital employee could not understand why I was upset at being charged $10,000 when I had insurance - I figured out that my insurance company's check had literally gotten lost in the mail. They sent another check and my bill was cleared. But this led to my second shock.
From my insurance company I received the following "explanation of benefits":
Total charge: $10063.00
Provider discount: $9571.00
Amount Payable: $442.00
How can something that would have cost me $10,063 cost my insurance $442.00 (not counting the $50 deductible that I chipped in). That's a 96% discount! To me, this shows two basic problems with our healthcare system.
1) Costs in our system are neither transparent nor fair.
I get that emergency room care is expensive, but a tray of bad lunch and a painkiller drip cannot cost almost $5000. I only saw the doctor for about 10 minutes total, and the nurse for all of 30 minutes. If I had been told that the CT Scan and the Emergency room care cost $5000 each, I'd have asked for a prescription and been off to the pharmacy. I wasn't told, however. I wasn't even give the option.
Further, the "Provider Discount" is jaw dropping. (Yes, I'll take the powder blue BMW 528i - only $2,000 with my provider discount!) My mother, who is a physician, told me that insurance companies are able to negotiate deep discounts by threatening to take their business (i.e. all the people they cover) elsewhere. This is something individuals can't do, so they get overcharged.

I've seen this repeatedly on lesser medical charges. Head-spinning.

And then there's this:

I work for a national insurance company and it's my job to pay hospitals and clinics for services performed. Now when I say pay, you should think of that in air-quotes. Assume it takes a week for the bill to be routed to the right person in the right department at my company. Once the bill reaches the right desk it heads back out. Because before we pay a bill we send it to a 3rd party company who reviews it to see how much we "really have to pay" for the services. This is because every state has different guidelines about what services should cost. This takes a week. Then the bill comes back to us, and if there are no issues with the hospital's records in our systems we pay the bill then.
However, if there are any issues it comes to me.
It's my job to call the hospital for updated tax forms (because it's not enough that we know their tax id, we have to have a government form showing the number). Then I send the records to another company who updates our database with the information. This takes another week, or longer if I have trouble getting a hold of the right person at the hospital.
Finally, we pay the bill. During this time the hospital has been waiting to get paid X number of dollars. Only instead we'll be paying them Y because that's what the state says is the minimum we have to pay.
So while your readers are being charged $50 for asprin; my company employs an entire department just to shuffle bills around while they decide what they will pay the hospital for that asprin.
I like my job, but I would gladly give it up if it meant that this insanity could stop.

While it's true that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data," I've found this whole series very thought-provoking.

What the Health Care Bill Is Not.

2009-08-07T16:30:00.002-05:00

I know I'm suddenly overposting after weeks of no posting after weeks of little posting, but I wanted to toss a little bit of politics/public policy stuff up here. Hooray?

Anyway, there are a number of alarming statements being propagated about the health care bill bouncing around Congress that are false, and I wanted to spread the word in case [you] are confronted by someone who has been alarmed by an alarming falsehood. This largely comes from Salon.com's excellent piece on the subject. I understand also that the White House plans to put together a website modeled on candidate Obama's Fight The Smears site from last summer/fall.

ALARMING CONTENTION: This is socialized medicine, or a single-payer health care system.
ACTUAL SITUATION: It is neither. This is not proposing a British-style system (or for that matter, a Veterans Health Administration-style system), where the government is the sole employer and provider of health care services. Nor is it a Canadian-style single-payer system wherein the government is the only insurer. The bill, broadly put, is intended by supporters of health care reform to do two things: 1. get everybody insured either through private plans or an optional government plan; 2. to reform health insurance practices to improve care. Something to keep in mind is that we are already paying for government-(and rising-premium-)subsidized health care for the poor. It's called the emergency room, and it's way more expensive than getting people some basic preventative services and some occasional prescriptions.

ALARMING CONTENTION: The bill outlaws private insurance.
ACTUAL SITUATION: The bill requires that private insurance plans be sold through a health care marketplace designed to increase competition and help consumers find the best option for them.

ALARMING CONTENTION: The health care bill will spend tax dollars for abortions.
ACTUAL SITUATION: One version of the bill includes measures for paying for preventative care and screening, which may be provided by Planned Parenthood (who are emphatically NOT just about abortions, though a lot of people assume they are). The Hyde Amendment of 1976 prevents any Federal money from being spent on abortions.

ALARMING CONTENTION: The bill will force the elderly to forgo treatment and consider assisted suicide.
ACTUAL SITUATION: This is the one, along with the abortion bit, that I've heard the most of in the alarming rhetoric these last few weeks. It is not true. The bill would require that plans pay for end-of-life consultation if asked for by the patient. Many elderly patients do not have health care directives indicating what they would like to have happen at the end of their life if they are incapacitated and unable to voice their wishes. As such, a lot of time and money is spent keeping terminally ill patients nominally alive. As it is now, Medicare does not pay for patients to consult with their doctors to craft a directive. The bill is aimed at fixing this. Honestly, I feel like this part of the bill, more than anything, is something anyone this side of Bill Frist's cohort in the Terry Schiavo case should support. It reduces waste and is humane, giving the individual some choice in how much they do or do not want done to keep them barely alive.

Anyway, check out the Salon bit above, and if someone is repeating one of these stories, politely challenge them. Calm exchange of information is always preferable in a debate to, well, everything we've seen this week at the town hall meetings.

Also, check out the series of personal stories entitled "The View From Your Sickbed" that Andrew Sullivan's been posting.

So Say We All

2009-08-07T12:00:00.001-05:00

Improv colleague Tim Uren works for Fantasy Flight Games, a local board game publisher of international renown. FFG publishes the excellent board game based on the excellent recent version of Battlestar Galactica. This past winter and early Spring, I played several sessions of BSG with Nels and a handful of other folks, including Tim on a couple of occasions. Tim revealed to us that his company was working on an expansion to the game based on the Battlestar Pegasus (the Ship of Dicks, if you're familiar with the show -- seriously, everybody on that thing's an a-hole). And one weekend, we got a chance to play the prototype of the game. All the cards were inkjet printed and stuck in sleeves with Yu-Gi-Oh cards or some such. But the rules were largely in place. The new boards had been laser printed and pasted down on spare chunks of other games' boards. I'm pretty sure I'm still bound by the non-disclosure agreement until the expansion is actually released next month, but it was a lot of fun and I look forward to playing again.

Anyway, yesterday I was alerted to the fact that the rules for the expansion had been posted on FFG's site, and that I should look at the second-to-last page. Here's what I found (highlighting mine):
That's a sizeable chunk of the Twin Cities theater & comedy scene, right there. And we got to help them refine this thing. You're welcome, fellow nerds.

Purple Monkey Dishwasher

2009-08-06T23:15:00.001-05:00

Like Lovecraft's cyclopean creatures of the deep, Google continues to extend its suckered tendrils out of the blackness, grasping at humanity. One of their latest offerings is Google Voice, which lets you have a phone number of your choice, to satisfy some need that I'm not entirely sure I understand. Something about linking your phone numbers together. I guess if you've got your cell phone, home phone, work phone, etc., you can get the one number to rule them all from Google, and switch which phone that number will send people's calls to. I suspect that the condition known as iPhone Ownership puts you at risk for another condition called Google Voice Number Wanting.

Perhaps that's why Nels got one. Early this evening, just before I left work, he asked me to be the guinea pig for his new number, and help him test out the message-taking feature of Google Voice. You see, if you enable it, GV will act as your message service. It'll record and store your call, transcribe it, and send it to you as an email. Clearly this needed a field test. And a challenging one at that. I left the following stream-of-consciousness message for Nels, including a Battlestar Galactica reference in a raspy voice, my last name, my company's name (initials), and several other proper nouns:

Ohh, Bill... They killed my Ellen. I am calling from [company name] and my name is Fred Beukema and uh, I don't know what else is a difficult word to say. Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice today which means she should be ready to serve on the court this fall and David Souter can retire to New Hampshire and his little cabin. Uh, bye.

Here's what Google thought I said:

yo so they shut my land i am calling from [company name -- they got it accurately] and my name is fred you come home and i don't know what else is a difficult would just say sonia some on your was confirm the supreme court justice today which means it should be ready to serve on the the court this fall and gave it to 210 your tires to new hampshire and we'll kevin bye

They're close, but the algorithm needs some polish, I'd say.

Incidentally, I think Souter's cabin looks like it belongs in an Evil Dead movie.

Until next time, this is Fred You Come Home, signing off.

The MN Fringe Festival and returning to the blog

2009-08-06T22:01:00.001-05:00

Whoo. Been a few months. Right now I find myself in the midst of the Fringe, having seen 16 shows so far (if the stack of stubs on my desk is to be believed), and at least a half dozen left to go. Favorites so far have included Sideways Stories from Wayside School, The Traveling Musicians, and Bard Fiction. I hope to put together a more lengthy post on the latter at some point. Also a post about having turned 30, as I did in July.

I'm also in the process of applying to take the PE exam this Fall, which promises to be a rather disruptive event (as it probably should be). I'm turning in my application tomorrow, as a matter of fact. So the first hard part will be over. Much harder parts to come. Woo-hoo.

I'll get back to some more substantial posts, uh, sometime. For now, though, a couple quick ones to cleanse the palate. Coming right up.

Why I Love My Wife

2009-06-19T07:23:00.000-05:00

Well, one example of why, anyhow. I'd originally written up this charming little three-line scene in the wake of the initial Swine Flu outbreak back at the beginning of May. Then I lost it in the shuffle. Since we're heading out of town for a friend's wedding (congrats to Nishant and Blythe!), I felt it was appropriate to celebrate love. Here goes:

One evening a couple weeks back, Melissa and I were chatting about the continuing news reports and press conferences regarding the swine flu.

M: The State epidemiologist was talking today about what people can do to protect themselves, and how to properly wash their hands. She said "We don't want you to just get them wet. You should sing Happy Birthday twice, you know." So I've been doing that. I've been singing Happy Birthday twice every time I wash my hands.
F: That's delightful! Who are you singing Happy Birthday to when you do it?
M: To my hands.

fin

Reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire

2009-06-17T16:27:00.004-05:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic posted a terrific link today that I wanted to share with you all. It's from Jourdon Anderson, a freed slave in Ohio, to his former master in Tennessee shortly after the Civil War. It is masterfully understated. Absolutely fascinating (click on the opening in the box below):

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Lunatic Fringe

2009-06-11T12:25:00.000-05:00

There's a phrase that was tossed around in the wake of the murder of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita a couple weeks back, and has now appeared again in conjunction with the killing of a security guard by James von Brunn yesterday at the Holocaust Museum: "sovereign citizen." Both gunmen were self-described Sovereign Citizens, and have left a trail of contacts and presence on right-wing fringe websites.

The first I'd heard of the phrase sovereign citizen was in this Washington Monthly article a litle over a year ago. It's a fascinating read: in recent years, more than twenty African American men charged with violent offenses in Baltimore have invoked their rights as sovereign citizens, claiming not to be bound by the illegal assertion of power by the United States Federal Government. The truly weird part is the origin of the concept, relative to the defendants: the Sovereign Citizen Movement is based in opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery. It claims that the 14th converted sovereign citizens, bound by English Common Law, into federal citizens, or something, and that the Government uses federal citizens as collateral in foreign debt (again, or something). Adherents further believe that there is a specific set of legal verbiage, presented in a certain order on certain forms, that can free you from your federal citizenship and return you to sovereign citizenship; this, it should be noted, is drivel.

Anyway, apparently tied to this is the concept of Posse Comitatus, Latin for "force of the county," which asserts that the supreme law enforecement power in the land is that of county sherrifs, and that the National Guard, federal troops, etc., have no power over the local sherrif. According to the Washington Monthly article, this idea derives from an act passed at the federal level in 1878 to take the teeth out of Reconstruction and prevent the government from protecting civil rights in the South.

Very strange and interesting, all, but not at all to diminish the tragedy of these murders. My sympathy goes out to the families of both victims.

Awful piece on marriage, gay and otherwise

2009-05-27T07:00:00.001-05:00

With a hat tip to Isaac Chotiner at The New Republic, whose post alerted me to this editorial, I'd like in turn to draw your attention to a terrible piece of writing on marriage. It's by one Sam Schulman at the conservative website/magazine The Weekly Standard, and is full to brimming with head-slappingly ridiculous claims about marriage between people of different sexes and the same sex. If you don't read all of Schulman's work, read Chotiner's post to get the flavor.

To be honest, I have a tough time with my feelings about the piece. On the one hand, my reaction is so strongly and immediately negative, and almost everything Schulman writes seems wrong in such a glaring, obvious way that it could be dismissed as a self-made straw man of sorts, an extreme outlier. At the same time, however, he lays bare a major undercurrent I've always noted in the arguments against marriage equality: the desire of social conservatives to preserve "traditional" gender roles in heterosexual relationships. How can you keep the work/homemaking spheres separated, after all, if the married couple in question is two ladies or -- added ickyness! -- two dudes?

The answer to those like me who believe in making your home life in the way that you and your loved ones see fit* is that you don't, or need not, keep the spheres separate unless you choose to do so for yourselves. And so, I look at a paragraph like this one Schulman cobbled together from the bones of the past, and after every sentence, I find myself flatly negating the statement he just made:

Even in modern romantic marriages, a groom becomes the hunting or business partner of his father-in-law and a member of his clubs; a bride becomes an ally of her mother-in-law in controlling her husband. There can, of course, be warm relations between families and their children's same-sex partners, but these come about because of liking, sympathy, and the inherent kindness of many people. A wedding between same-sex lovers does not create the fact (or even the feeling) of kinship between a man and his husband's family; a woman and her wife's kin. It will be nothing like the new kinship structure that a marriage imposes willy-nilly on two families who would otherwise loathe each other.

The assumtion of universality, the "one-size-fits-all" of his model of marriage is staggering. It's not that a groom might partner with his father in law, it's that he does. No he doesn't, Mr. Schulman. It's like he got his idea of family and marriage from all the old comic strips that newspapers only keep to avoid receiving nasty letters from septugenarians.

I feel that mentioning, as Schulman does, that he's been married thrice, is scoring easy points. Honestly, if I didn't think someone would read his piece and bring this fact up in a comment, I'd leave it out.

Anyway, I feel like today is a good day to celebrate marriages of all kinds, as it is Melissa's and my second anniversary. The first two years have been wonderful, and I'm looking forward to many pairs of years more!

* (So long as nobody is being harmed! Gay and non-traditional straight marriages are not a slippery slope to legal incest, bestiality, and polygamy.)

Calling Out, Around The World

2009-05-26T10:32:00.004-05:00

Summer's here, and the time is right to see The Robinson Caruso Organization! Old school R&B & soul! Live music!

I was recruited a couple months ago into the horn section of the Organization, and it has been a hell of a good time. We're playing a mix of new & old: original songs written by front man Robinson Caruso himself (James Rone), and hits from the likes of Al Green, The Temptations, Martha & the Vandellas, Jamie Lidell, Otis Redding, Bill Withers & Stevie Wonder. Our first show was last month at Bunker's, and if you go to the RCO Facebook page, you can see photos and videos from that event.

Show #2 is next Tuesday, June 2nd, at the Fine Line Music Cafe in Downtown Minneapolis. There's no cover, and you can go here to print some complimentary tickets in advance. Because you need comps for a no cover show? Here's the word from the Fine Line about the evening:

Darrell Julian 8-9:00
Robinson Caruso 9:15-10:15
Sexy Delicious 10:30-11:30
On Tuesday nights the Fine Line 2 for 1 on all drinks
AND our new kitchen will be open until 10pm serving appetizers, sandwiches, etc!!

So bring your appetite in addition to your dancing shoes...

Do Not Separate

2009-05-24T13:33:00.005-05:00

This weekend The Current (the local, hipstery non-classical, non-news NPR music affiliate, for those who are unfamiliar) is doing a "block party weekend." They're taking requests for artists, and playing three songs at a time for each. Last night as I was driving around, I called in to request some Bowie, unawares that they had played a Bowie set immediately before the Beastie Boys set that had just ended. Thankfully, they threw in "Under Pressure" at the end of a subsequent Queen set, so I at least got a little shot of the White Duke.

Later, I caught the tail end of a Led Zeppelin set, hearing the second half of "Black Dog." Afterward, the DJ listed the songs from the set, and said that we'd heard "Heartbreaker." Without "Living Loving Maid," I thought? What a letdown! Those songs go together. It's a direct segue. Had I been listening, I would have sung right along, expecting to go from "Heartbreaker! Heartbreaker! Heart!" to "With a purple umb-a-rella and a fifty-cent hat!"

(Incidentally, according to Wikipedia, the songs were never played together in concert, because Jimmy Page didn't really like the latter. Also incidentally, unless the song is in someway inspired by the writing of Tolkien, Zeppelin lyrics are properly quoted with exclamation points.)

Anyway, this got me thinking of other song combinations that are properly played together:

The obvious combination is that "We Will Rock You" and "We Are The Champions" need to be together, unless being played as short snippets at a sporting event. The latter can work on its own, but the first does not. Oddly enough, the original singles of these songs had them in reverse order. Topsy turvy!
I don't know that I've ever heard "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" without "With a Little Help From My Friends" or vice versa, but it sounds like a bad idea.
Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall, Part II" is just dull and repetitive without "The Happiest Day of Our Lives" coming before it. I feel the same way about "Young Lust" without "Empty Spaces." Boring. Like just about any individual track off of The Wall without its surrounding material, other than "Comfortably Numb."

There are other combos that I prefer, but aren't what I'd call necessary. For instance, the end of "Buddy Holly" feels like it should lead into the beginning of "The Sweater Song." And in the alternate universe where They Might Be Giants are a Top 40 hit machine, a DJ would never play "If I Wasn't Shy" off of Apollo 18, without immediately following up with "Turn Around."

Anyone else got examples of necessary or preferred song combinations?

Coffee is for Closers: a terrible board game, reviewed

2009-05-20T12:38:00.000-05:00

The following is a review I posted to BoardGameGeek.com of a game Melissa and I bought super-cheap back in January.

"To make a million dollars it takes more than skill and strategy," claims the cover of The Million Dollar Sales Game by Jim Madonna Marketing. Point of fact, if the game play is to be believed, neither of these things have anything to do with making a million, and pure, stupid luck is all you need.

My wife and I discovered this on the 75%-Off clearance games table at Barnes & Noble in January. This need not have been a sign of the lack of quality: they also had Acquire on this table, and we picked up an Onyx edition of Monopoly for $12.50. That night, over pizza, we tried out Million Dollar Sales.

We expected a variant on Monopoly, wherein we would have to use sales skills somehow to sell properties or goods, or deal with clients, distributors, customers, and competitors of some sort. What we got was Candy Land for salespeople.

You roll the dice, move your car, and do whatever your new space tells you, which may be a good or bad thing (either gaining or losing money, prospective customers, spaces on the board, or a turn), or a Stuff Happens card (which is a bad thing after drawing a card) or an Opportunity Knocks card (good thing). When you have five prospective customers, they may be traded for Actual Customers. When you pass the starting point on the circuit, you get rewarded based on how many customers you have.

The game involves remarkably little decision making. Really the only decision you make is whether or not to leave the main track for one of six Regional Customer tracks. These tracks slow your path to pay day, but each gets you a Regional Customer card, which counts as a customer on payday, and if you have all six customer cards, you get a bonus at that time.

The fact that the mechanics are so simplistic means that if the game is to be any fun, the fun has to come from the theme. And the theme is ham-handed. We quickly realized that this game is designed as a training tool for salespeople. The in-game text uses lots of sales jargon about listening and following up and creating a work plan and closing. All of this is presented in a lifeless and matter-of-fact way that generates exactly zero interest. It also doesn't attach any meaning to the actions described. You may be told that up-selling is a good thing, but you aren't told how you might do this as a real-life salesperson. So the game amounts to $40 flash cards without anything written on their backs [again, we got this on the bargain table; I'd be much angrier at the game if we'd paid $40 instead of $7]. I cannot imagine how this would be useful even if you were learning to sell.

The components in the box are very nice. Everything is glossy, printed in color on magazine-cover-like paper. The board is in full color and well-printed, and the cars are not cheap plastic. The dice are needlessly large. The box is well-arranged, with separate trays for everything and a clear plastic lid that holds everything in place to prevent contents from shifting.

The game was not without its cheesy entertainment value, mostly for meta-game reasons. The sheer ridiculousness of the presentation and the jargon made us laugh on several occasions, especially when a Stuff Happens card penalized me eight grand "just for being stupid." The salesspeak reminded me repeatedly of the play and film Glengarry Glen Ross and made me wish there was a vulgar, David Mamet-themed version of the game ("Mitch & Murray send Alec Baldwin to call you a c********r. Go back ten spaces." [link NSFW and family-unfriendly] Second place in this version would, of course, be a set of steak knives.).

So unless a phrase like "The Power of Listening Avenue" sends you into paroxysms of laughter, this game is eminently skippable. Even if you are trying to learn to sell, this game probably won't teach you anything of value. Go rent the movie and pick up some choice swears from Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon instead.

Poverty is expensive

2009-05-19T07:00:00.000-05:00

If you ever find yourself complaining about the "lucky duckies" at the bottom of the income scale who don't pay income tax, or feel that the poor just need to get their acts together to bootstrap themselves out of a bad situation, I urge you to read this article from the Washington Post.

Jeopardy: sense of scale

2009-05-05T07:00:00.001-05:00

The 2009 Jeopardy College Tournament is this week, and whoever wins it is guaranteed a spot in the 2010 Tournament of Champions along with previous College winner Joey Beachum (prevented by the Air Force from competing in the 2009 ToC), Liz Murphy, maybe Kevin Joyce, and maybe maybe me.

The official site now has a set of photos of the College players going through the process, and it shows a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff I was yammering about for weeks. Check it out.

So it's come to this: a LOLCat

2009-05-04T12:15:00.000-05:00

I promise not to make a habit of posting LOLCats, but this one is a classic, and one of my favorites ever. This rheumy- and cock-eyed, and seemingly insane Persian is infinitely amusing to me. I would be fascinated to see other pictures of this particular cat.

Caught by the (Copyright) Fuzz

2009-04-30T12:54:00.004-05:00

I wrote back in September that I had put a short film I'd made in college up on YouTube. Today I discovered that my little movie had been flagged because some of the audio content in it matched music belonging to Warner Music Group (WMG). This is true; it did feature, without permission or attribution, the first 37 seconds of "Whole Lotta Love" by Led Zeppelin. The consequences for this finding are low, as YouTube simply muted the video. Observe [warning: simulated gore and muted swearing (the latter was muted in the original as well, incidentally)]:

First of all, I'm not sure why the YouTube video I linked in the song title above hasn't been caught, while mine has. I used only half a minute of the song, whereas shotguy1 posted the whole thing. Sour grapes.

I do have the option of changing the music, either automatically through YouTube to a copyright-free piece of music selected from what they have available, or to something I provide. I could go the route that the very funny Cartoon Network show "The Venture Bros." has on occasion, and provide a reasonable sound-alike song. I actually know exactly how I would structure this sound-alike, but I don't have the means or know the right people to produce it. Nor do I care to go to the trouble.

My other option, which I also will not pursue, would be to try to make a claim of Fair Use of the music. I would probably lose this, and it would be idiotic to try because it would involve lawyering up against the #3 media & entertainment conglomerate in the world. My having produced and shown this movie at the Titular Head student film festival (which still shouldn't have a Wikipedia entry) in 2001 is likely not a problem: it was a private event and, it could be argued, was for an educational purpose.

However, out in public, you have to fulfill one of two major criteria to successfully claim fair use of copyrighted material: it has to comment on or criticize the material in its use, or it has to be a parody of that material. As this article shows, these are both tricky. In my case, my use of Zeppelin was not a parody. My movie is a parody, but of Mentos commercials and to a lesser extent Quentin Tarantino (NSFW), not the song "Whole Lotta Love."

I should mention tangentially that I think copyright law has run amok. It used to be that copyright on a creative work would extend long enough for a creator to derive financial benefit, thus encouraging creativity, and then expire, letting the world use the work as anyone saw fit. Recently, though entertainment lobbies have worked to repeatedly extend copyright to protect their profits. The late singer/songwriter and US Congressman Sonny Bono was a big proponent of such extensions, to the point that the copyright extension of 1998 was named in his memory.

Lawrence Lessig is a law professor at UCLA and specializes in copyright and digital media issues. He has repeatedly given excellent presentations on why indefinite copyright stifles creativity. Here's a shorter one (18 min):

One point he has made on occasion, which I think really puts copyright in perspective, is the fact that one of the biggest corporations to fight for the extension of copyright is the Walt Disney company. Several of Disney's most popular films were based on works that had expired from copyright at the time the movies were made, but would not have expired if today's copyright laws were in effect back then: Pinnocchio, Alice in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows, and The Jungle Book were all published within 100 years of their Disney film being made. What would art, theater or film be today if Shakespeare's plays had had their copyright repeatedly extended? Where would Disney be if the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault or Hans Christian Andersen had been able to indefinitely extend theirs?

In any case, my short-lived career as a provider of YouTube content appears to be over.

George Will to nation: "Get off my lawn!"

2009-04-20T12:40:00.001-05:00

George Will has been known for his willingness to take on conservative orthodoxy from time to time, be it the divisiveness of social cons self-identifying as "values voters," or the bizarre Constitutional contortions of the last administration, or criticizing McCain's actions in response to the financial crisis in September. So I generally consider him someone who does a fair amount of critical thinking. I disagree with him often, but the mere fact that he doesn't always toe the line means he's considering his opinions as he writes them.

Last week, though, he published a column that was just dumb, and really rubbed me the wrong way. It was 750 words on why the widespread wearing of blue jeans is "symptomatic of deep disorders in the national psyche".

Now, take your pick. You may think, as many conservatives do, that the big story of last week was the (to my mind, silly and largely off-message) anti-tax "tea parties." You may think, as I do, that the big story was the release by the Obama administration of the DOJ memos that laid out the program of torturing prisoners (I'm hoping to put a post together on this, soon, too). And there are still two actual wars and a variety of metaphoric wars against nouns (drugs, terror, etc.) going on. And a thing or two happening in the economy. But despite all that, Will decided the problem with America that most deserved his attention was the shameful practice of blue-jean-wearing. Now, the same could certainly be said of me: I could be writing about more important things, too. The difference is that dozens of bankrupt newspapers aren't paying for what I'm writing.

Here's the nub of his argument, with a couple edits including removal of some parentheticals:

Long ago, when James Dean and Marlon Brando wore it, denim was, Akst says, "a symbol of youthful defiance." Today, Silicon Valley billionaires are rebels without causes beyond poses, wearing jeans when introducing new products. Akst's summa contra denim is grand as far as it goes, but it only scratches the surface of this blight on Americans' surfaces. Denim is the infantile uniform of a nation in which entertainment frequently features childlike adults and cartoons for adults . Seventy-five percent of American "gamers" -- people who play video games -- are older than 18 and nevertheless are allowed to vote. In their undifferentiated dress, children and their childish parents become undifferentiated audiences for juvenilized movies (the six -- so far -- "Batman" adventures and "Indiana Jones and the Credit-Default Swaps," coming soon to a cineplex near you). Denim is the clerical vestment for the priesthood of all believers in democracy's catechism of leveling -- thou shalt not dress better than society's most slovenly. To do so would be to commit the sin of lookism -- of believing that appearance matters. That heresy leads to denying the universal appropriateness of everything, and then to the elitist assertion that there is good and bad taste.

No, you upper-class twit, the reason people wear blue jeans is that they are comfortable, cheap, widely available, easy to find in a good fit, durable, and easy to maintain. And as a side note, the playing of video games is not the mark of an unthinking mind any more than the enjoyment of baseball, for instance (And for the record, grouping all four Indiana Jones movies and the six Batman movies together is akin to grouping Miracle on 34th Street with Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, or, more to the point, George Will with Michael Savage).

And then, this:

This is not complicated. For men, sartorial good taste can be reduced to one rule: If Fred Astaire would not have worn it, don't wear it. For women, substitute Grace Kelly.

Great. If you'd be willing to personally subsidize my wardrobe, Mr. Will, I'll gladly start dressing like that other Fred. But until then, I'll remind you that people respond to incentives and, for the moment, cost, comfort and convenience have supplanted irrelevant, anachronistic shame as an incentive to at least this young, professional, video-game-playing, thinking voter.

Oh, and by the way, here's what Will had to say about Obama exactly one year to the week prior:

By so speaking, Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.

Pot, kettle, etc.

All of this, of course, reminded me of this great SNL sketch from the late 80s:

Weeklypedia #19: a Quizsplosion!

2009-04-08T12:15:00.000-05:00

OK, here's the latest quiz, with a couple of bonus quiz/puzzly things below. The answers from #18 will be posted shortly.

1. Of Kansas City, KS, Tulsa, OK, and Omaha, NE, it is the one neither furthest west nor furthest east.
2. Shortly before his father's assassination, Robert Todd Lincoln was saved from falling under a train by the brother of this man. The rescuer, considered by some the greatest American actor of the 19th century, was later comforted to learn he had saved President Lincoln's son.
3. This author, an intelligence officer in WWII, devised the never-used Operation Goldeneye, which would have maintained contact with Gibraltar in case it was invaded by Spain or the Axis.
4. The city of Charlotte, North Carolina, is named for the German Princess Charlotte, who married this British king the year before the city's founding.
5. In 1972, Nolan Bushnell co-founded this American video game company with a Japanese name.
6. In 1977, Nolan Bushnell founded this chain of pizza restaurants.
7. Sakura is the Japanese name for this flower, which blooms in late March in southern Japan, through early May in the North.
8. Before 1980, the last significant eruptions of this peak were a series of ash eruptions from 1831 to 1857.

Plus, a puzzle, in the style of Will Shortz on NPR Sunday mornings:
Take a two word phrase that would mean trite, meaningless statements made in a pique of anger. Move the first letter from the second word to the beginning of the first word to get a two-word phrase suggesting which parts of the globe you might want to keep your cargo ships out of. (Note: this puzzle was suggested to me by the name of a forthcoming posthumous novel by Michael Crichton. If you look this title up, it will spoil the answer.)

Plus, a very narrow trivia quiz that you can help me flesh out:
For each of the following songs, name the cable TV series that featured the song in the last minutes of its finale. Clicking on the song title reveals the answer and, if watched entirely, will spoil the series:
1. Don't Stop Believing by Journey
2. Breathe Me by Sia
3. All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix
4. Way Down in the Hole by The Blind Boys of Alabama
5. Any additions?

Jeopardy: Potpourri

2009-04-07T12:48:00.002-05:00

To close out Major Jeopardy Blogging Operations, here are some Jeopardy-related bits that fell along the wayside. The first three are answers to frequently-asked questions.

1. How the little interview bits with Alex work
When you audition, you fill out a set of five sample stories that might be good for the contestant interviews during the show. These are only used at the audition, I'm assuming to see how you respond to questions and how you deal with talking out loud in front of others.

When you're booked, in addition to the ten-page non-disclosure and release form (which says you won't spill the beans about any show results, lest they take away your winnings, and allows them to use your image from the show in perpetuity throughout the universe on any media in existence or yet to be invented (really)), you fill out more stories and questions and other little tidbits. What's an unusual talent or trait? I enjoy using phrases that went out of style half a century ago. What's one of your earliest memories? I bit a kid at Chuck E. Cheese. Any interesting travel experiences? I went to Space Camp with Chelsea Clinton. And so on.

When you arrive in the green room, contestant coordinator Tony Pandolfo has a card with four of your stories selected from the many, many nuggets you've provided. He will ask you to select one of them to be highlighted. On my first day, Alex was not going with what people had selected. This is not uncommon, I guess, so you have to know what's on the card and be ready to chitchat about any of the stories. I had picked the story about writing for The Onion, and he didn't get around to it until my third game, after talking about Al Italia losing my luggage and talking about improv on national TV.

2. What I'm Doing With My Winnings
Details haven't been worked out, but roughly the following:

Taxes.
Other taxes.
Bills.
A second bathroom, upstairs.
A nice TV. Not too big.
Misc.

That'll probably cover it.

Also, they tell you to expect your winnings from 90-120 days after taping (so, end of April to end of May), but the sheets you sign for your prizes in each game say it may be as late as 120 days after airing (end of July). So I haven't joined a sushi of the week club just yet (incidentally, if I ran such a club, Unagi would be the sushi of the week every week except for special weeks reserved for Otoro. Om nom nom nom.).

3. What are the eligibility requirements referenced in the end credits of the show?
I don't think I know all of them, but they include: being 18 years or older, not having appeared on any other game show in the past year, not being a candidate for public office (interesting note: John McCain was a contestant back in the Art Fleming days before he went to Vietnam), I have never been convicted of a felony, I'm not being paid to plug anything, I'm not competing against anyone I know without telling the producers so beforehand, and so on.

Back in the 80s, a woman named Barbara Lowe won five games and thus qualified for the Tournament of Champions, but before the ToC came around, it was discovered that she was ineligible to play on the show (I think because she'd been on another show under a different name in the preceding year). I believe her winnings were withheld, and I know she wasn't allowed in the Tournament.

4. Shameless Self-Promotion: The Online Jeopardy Community
There are two sites that track what's going down on Jeopardy on a daily basis. The first, which I've referenced before, is the J! Archive, which posts every clue every day, and basically allows you to read the entire game from start to finish, and track each player's every move:
Game One
Game Two
Game Three
Game Four

Second, Game Show Kingdom is a fellow blogspot blog that recaps various game shows every day. Their summaries are like SportsCenter highlights, with a mix of fact and commentary. Each entry has Jeopardy down near the bottom:
Game One
Game Two
Game Three
Game Four

5. Shameless Self-Promotion: The Press
I've gotten ink in a handful of random locations, including the US Congressional newspaper The Hill (due to my opponent Meg being a staffer for Sen. Lautenberg). But I wanted especially to mention one in particular, which was that my Great Uncle Cork in Michigan was very sweet to send a notice to the Grand Haven Tribune about my appearance.

6. One more random story
During the pre-rehearsal meetings on the second day, one contestant went into the restroom in the green room, and came out looking a little frantic. This person ran to their bag and pulled out a stack of flash cards. Somebody asked if anything was wrong.

"I can't remember who wrote Heart of Darkness!"

The rest of the room chimed in with "Joseph Conrad," and this person was relieved when they found the card they were looking for, confirming they'd covered this.

I think we all knew the feeling: that one piece of information we would need would elude us at a crucial moment. I know I wish I'd flipped through my wallet just before I went on again.

Barring my getting into the Tournament next year, that's the end of the road for my Jeopardy experience, for now. Thanks to all the far-flung family, friends, classmates, friends, and acquaintences who have cheered me on and sent their congratulations. I've tried to reply to any direct questions I've received, but I'm sure I missed some along the way. In any case, thank you for your support, and for reading.

Typically sporadic posting on a variety of nerdy topics will resume presently.

More Public Policy: Marriage Equality

2009-04-06T20:41:00.006-05:00

Big congratulations to Iowa (state of my beloved alma mater and its terrible web page) for taking a major step for equality on Friday with the State Supreme Court decision that restricting marriage to heterosexual couples violates equal protection under the law.

This has been covered in more depth by better-informed correspondents elsewhere, but I wanted to share a couple of things:
1. That this happened smack in the middle of the Midwest is wonderful, and makes me hope for a positive effect in neighboring states (*coughMinnesotacough*).
2. The way things work in Iowa, this cannot be easily dumped in the next election cycle by a public proposition for a constitutional amendment. Amending the Iowa constitution is much more difficult than California, where Prop. 8 needed only a simple majority to pass.
3. More specifically, the SOONEST an amendment could be voted on by the public would be 2012, and that presupposes that the current state legislature act on it now. Which isn't going to happen, because Democratic Majority Leader Mike Gronstal will not play ball. This is great:

So it looks like this will stand for a while. Hotbed of liberals, that Iowa.

Meanwhile, in Vermont, the state legislature is in the process of passing marriage rights for same-sex couples, and the Republican governor has vetoed it, because it would be a "distraction" from more important issues in this time of economic trouble. Zuh? That veto may be overridden tomorrow, but the vote looks pretty tight.

Update! They did it! Well met, Vermont! VT is now the first state to achieve marriage equality legislatively. So, no talk about activist judges overturning the will of the people here...

A public policy sidenote

2009-04-04T17:02:00.003-05:00

This is why providing health care to those who do not have it is in the public interest, mine and yours:

AUSTIN, Texas – Just nine people accounted for nearly 2,700 of the emergency room visits in the Austin area during the past six years at a cost of $3 million to taxpayers and others, according to a report. The patients went to hospital emergency rooms 2,678 times from 2003 through 2008, said the report from the nonprofit Integrated Care Collaboration, a group of health care providers who care for low-income and uninsured patients.

Ridiculous. Unless we were to turn people away at emergency rooms (which we should not), under the current health care system, this will keep happening. The system is broken.

Some simple math: this care cost an average of $55,556 per person per year, on the public dime. These nine patients were each going an average of once per week. There has got to be a way to provide better care to these nine and the thousands upon thousands they represent nationwide in a way that would be more cost effective and cheaper to the taxpayer. I'm not dumb enough to suggest I know what the solution is, but we can't afford the status quo.

Jeopardy: Another day, another dollar? Game Four!

2009-03-30T22:00:00.013-05:00

Part of an ongoing series. Written before this episode aired.
Contains spoilers of tonight's episode.

It was January 28th now. Happy birthday to my brother and to Rakim. Early to rise. Repeated Tuesday's breakfast routine, including listening to some Ennio Morricone to start the day right. There was a whole new crew of people with garment bags in the lobby, in addition to Heather and John returning from yesterday. On board the bus, we returners answered questions about the game. This continued while we gathered in the waiting area in the Sony parking structure and waited for more folks to arrive. I was slightly embarrassed to be in the middle of repeating something funny Glenn had said on Tuesday (that you should be sure to add a verb when writing your Final Jeopardy question -- you don't want to be the guy who wrote "WHO THOMAS EDISON" on TV), when Mr. Kagan himself arrived.

In the green room I was sent straight into makeup as Inta had been the day before while Maggie once again held court and got everybody up to speed. We went through our morning rehearsal, and I was delighted that the crew was warming up the screens on the game board using the following clip from Animaniacs, which had been one of the study songs on my iPod:

Back in the green room, the challengers were named. Anne from Stow, MA (shoutout to Whitney Davidson), a new contestant, and John from Kansas City, were called out. John was the contestant I'd spent the most time chatting with, who admitted he was itching to go up against me in a game. We all shook hands and headed out.

Fourth Hometown Howdy: "Hey, Twin Cities, this is Fred Beukema from Minneapolis, and I'm the returning champion on Jeopardy. By the time you see this, we might even have another Senator!"

If only that were true.

Today's was a tough board, and both Anne and John were solid on the buzzer. I committed the cardinal Jeopardy sin of flat-out guessing on a question, in Military Abbreviations. The answer was what the tactical abbreviation C2 stood for, and, influenced by being in the middle of Battlestar Galactica, I asked "What is Condition 2?" Ooh, sorry, they were looking for command & control. Command & control.

This is the game in which I started swearing under my breath when I got Daily Doubles. There came a point where it seemed like every time I got one, it was in a category I didn't like. In any case, I really hope the mic didn't pick that up. In the oblique "famous people as aerobics instructors" category, I knew that Indiana University was the tease-out clue, but I wasn't connecting the Kinsey Institute with IU, and all I could come up with was Bobby Knight.

[Hindsight addendum — Just watched the show when it aired, and here's a piece of advice for any future Jeopardy contestants: do not be afraid of a True Daily Double if it's in a category you like. I could have done some real damage in that "THE" Nation category. But given that I was not seeing clues I liked in recent DDs, I was staying conservative.]

Overall, this game felt like a question of survival more than anything, and I could feel it slipping away from me. I knew this had the potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, so in Double Jeopardy took it an opportunity to shake off what had happened so far and focus on my buzzer timing. I had been trying to anticipate the Go! Lights, but was locking myself out more often than not. So I stared very intently at each clue as it was read, keeping the Lights in my peripheral vision, and let video game reflexes run the buzzer. It helped, and at the end of regular play, I had managed to eke out a lead.

I'm very happy that I managed to do that, but it was not enough to shut Anne or John out. It would all come down to Final Jeopardy. The category was revealed, and while I don't remember the exact name, I'm pretty sure it was "Painters." Now, let me draw your attention back to this unfortunate bit of foreshadowing from a few weeks ago, my Jeopardy studying to-do list. The circled items, unfortunately, represent things I didn't get around to before heading out:
Art. Blerg. If I could have safely done so, I would have bet very little or nothing. But the others were close enough that I'd have to bet enough to cover either one of them doubling their score.

Anyway, the clue boiled down to "On March 30th, 1746 in Spain, and 1853 in the Netherlands, these two painters were born." So I started thinking of painters. The Spaniard was surprisingly easy, as Goya (pictured, left) was the only big one who fit the time period. At this point, I think there was smoke coming out of my ears. Now, the Dutchman... Hm. Well, there's Rembrandt. I don't think that's right, he's older. Same with Vermeer. Bosch is way too old. De Kooning is too late... and so on. All of this missing the obvious 19th Century Dutch painter. You know, the one who did most of his work in France and cut his ear off and was played by Kirk Douglas in that movie and painted Starry Night, which is on one of the credit cards that was in my wallet in the green room at that exact moment. Running out of time, I went with Rembrandt (pictured, upper right).

John got Van Gogh, if I remember correctly, which meant I now knew I was wrong, and had to hope Anne got one or the other wrong. She didn't, so I knew I'd narrowly lost a very tough game. In the only bit of post-game chatter I recall, Alex commented on this being a hard game and how the writers expected Goya to be the harder part of the FJ clue. I likened my brain to a car refusing to turn over on a cold morning.

I signed for my $2000 consolation prize and Melissa and I smiled at each other. I grabbed my stuff from the green room, as did John, and we joined my family and friend Pete in the audience. We decided to stick around and at least watch the games taped before lunch, especially since Heather was likely to be up, and we wanted to cheer her on.

Everybody loses on Jeopardy eventually, even if it's Ken Jennings in his 75th consecutive game. While it's easy to be philosophical, it doesn't make finally bouncing out any more fun. This isn't really about the money, or the competition, or the fact that Alex seemed excited that I was winning (just before the last game started, I overheard him chatting with someone behind the game board, and the only words I recognized were "Beukema Week." Aw.). Actually, it was all those things, too. But most of all, I just wanted to keep playing. The game is fun. I want more, just as Bob Harris said he did.

Now, here's the thing. As Alex explained at the beginning of today's show, with three wins I became the first person to qualify for the next Tournament of Champions in 2010. The top 13 players between now & then, by number of wins, will join two College Tournament winners in the competition.

It's going to be a long year.

Next Jeopardy blog: Leftovers!

Jeopardy: Game Three!

2009-03-27T22:00:00.001-05:00

Part of an ongoing series. Written before this episode aired.
Contains spoilers of tonight's episode.

Hometown Howdy: "Hey Twin Cities, this is Fred Beukema from Minneapolis. Circle me, Bert: I'm the returning champion on Jeopardy." Other than Melissa, nobody in the studio had any idea what I was talking about. A couple of the coordinators asked me about it when they came to stand by the lecterns during the first commercial break.

In my interview bit with Alex, I talked about my time writing headlines for the Onion back when I was a senior in high school & first-year in college. This is the headline I specifically referenced.

Also, after lunch, I mentioned to Tony, the contestant coordinator who handles getting the biographical information to Trebek, that Alex had been mispronouncing my name all day. Tony said something, and Alex got it perfectly, but unfortunately, Johnny Gilbert had now picked up his previous pronunciation. Gilbert re-recorded my intro during the first commercial break.

First off: yes, I know lamprey. But my brain wasn't releasing information to me at that moment.

Meg and Peter had me on the run. My buzzer timing felt off pretty consistently, and one or the other of them was beating me on the buzzer as often as (or more than) I was beating both of them. Categories that I loved, and was excited to play (mythological couples, especially, all of which I knew) passed me by, mostly answered by others. I'm relieved I got the volcano one right, as I was feeling iffy on that. I think I'd happened to read something about Hawaiian volcanoes in the prior weeks of January.

Other than a brief lead at the first commercial break, I think I was perpetually behind in this game. By the end of Double Jeopardy, I was in second but within range of Peter. Trebek revealed the Final Jeopardy category: "19th Century Construction," and Peter tipped his hand: "oh, man," he said, only nominally under his breath. I knew that my winning would depend on him getting this wrong. For my FJ wager, I'd have to assume that he would. I bet to prevent Meg overtaking me if she doubled her score.

Thankfully for me, his worry about the category was borne out. Although the Suez Canal did float through my mind as a 19th-Century construction project on the Sinai Peninsula, canals don't usually get names that sound like titles of artwork. The only major, modern construction project that fit the name was the Statue of Liberty.

This was the end of the day's taping, so as I got off stage, I signed the paperwork for each game's winnings. Three games, $69k. Wow. Neat! I don't think it had hit me yet. Looking up at Melissa, it looked like it had hit her. Stopping back in the green room to gather my things, Heather and John mentioned they'd come up with a new nickname: "the Twin City Terror." Sounds like a serial killer, but it made me laugh.

As we stepped, blinking, out of the building into the sun, I was congratulated by various audience members. Hugs and congrats from Melissa's family and from my college buddy Pete, who lives in LA and I was only now able to say hi to, although he'd been in the audience all day. This was the first I'd been able to interact with Melissa since leaving the hotel in the morning. She was mostly speechless, other than the occasional "wow!" Hadn't hit me yet, although I was chuckling from time to time.

Upon returning to the hotel, I called my parents and brother to share the news. It still hadn't hit me, although the chuckling had expanded into full-on jags of periodic laughter. That night Melissa and her family and I went to a nice Italian place in Santa Monica to celebrate (I'm glad I didn't know their slogan was "Life is a combination of magic and pasta" until just now: barf).

We went to bed earlyish again, and I had to check myself: I wanted to win two more now, get to the five episodes that used to mean retirement from the game, a car, and an automatic invitation to the Tournament of Champions. That way lies madness. Game at a time, I recited, play the game that's in front of you, and don't think of outcomes or expectations.

Mostly, though, I was having a blast and just wanted to keep playing the game, regardless of winning.

Next Jeopardy blog, to be published after Monday's game: A new day of taping, and game four!

Jeopardy: Game Two!

2009-03-26T22:00:00.001-05:00

Part of an ongoing series. Written before this episode aired.
Contains spoilers of tonight's episode.

My second Hometown Howdy, less thought-out than the previous game's, will not be shown on the Jeopardy website:
"Hey Twin Cities, this is Fred Beukema from Minneapolis. Let's see if I can make it a twin win as the returning champion on Jeopardy."

Kinda dumb. Ken Jennings is lucky they only had to record one Howdy back in his day.

I remember less about my show with Mark and Sonia than my first. I don't think I could name for you any categories or questions from this game, except the Final Jeopardy, which I misremembered as being from the previous game. I'm sure when I see this one on TV, it'll all come rushing back. The image I do remember from this episode is of being in a buzzer battle with Sonia, and being happily surprised when the red lights on the backside of my lectern would light up.

I hadn't really dealt with my bunched right sock during the break, so once again, my toes went numb on and off throughout the game.

And once again, I was lucky to get myself into a lock game going into FJ. Today's response (again, pictured) wasn't as immediate as the previous one. My first instinct was to wonder if there was some Pope from the era in question who had actually spoken out about indulgences. That didn't sound right, and the obvious answer popped out of the soup between my ears.

Holy cow: now I was a two time Jeopardy champion! This was beyond any expectations I had for myself when I went out to the show, and it was a lot of fun.

Now it was lunchtime, and the remaining contestants were cheerfully competitive. They had come up with a nickname for me (“The Hammer”) and jokingly (?) took out contracts with each other to take me down. We were sequestered with the contestant coordinators in the Sony canteen for lunch, which was delicious. The grill had a lot of options, made to order. My turkey burger was delicious, but I wasn't really hungry. We chatted about where we were from, our jobs, stories we'd heard from previous contestants, and about our phobias. Several claustropobes and acrophobes in the group, if I remember correctly. I mentioned I'd been working on some water tower projects, which have the unique distinction of having tight, enclosed spaces sitting at the top of 100ft+ drops. Yeesh.

Peter, Meg, Heather and John, the remaining contestants, had all seemed particularly formidable in the rehearsals, and this was reinforced by our brief after-lunch practice. My adrenaline was starting to wane and I was losing on the buzzer more often. Upon our return to the green room, I learned the last show of the day would be against Meg and Peter, who had learned that morning that they had a mutual friend. Heather and John would be back the next day, along with a new batch of contestants.

In the meantime, I prepared myself for what I expected to be a rough game.

Next Jeopardy blog, to be published after Friday's game: Game Three!

Jeopardy: The Big Show

2009-03-25T22:00:00.000-05:00

Part of an ongoing series. Please note that this entry was written before the episode aired.

First, we recorded our Hometown Howdies (NOTE! This link will expire on Monday, 3/30). I’d heard that KARE 11 in the Twin Cities never, ever uses them, so I knew content was fairly unimportant. The weekend prior, on the Filmspotting podcast, hosts Adam & Matty had recited a scene from Purple Rain for their Massacre Theater segment. Thus:

“Hey Twin Cities, this is Fred Beukema from Minneapolis. Now that I’ve purified myself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka, I’m ready to take on Jeopardy.”

Everybody says this, because it’s true, but Alex Trebek is as nice and as dryly goofy in person as he is on TV. As a contestant, you don’t get much chance to interact with him beyond what’s shown on the show. As far as we can tell, he lives in the corner of the studio behind the game board. The moment when he walked out to start the game ranks as one of the more surreal in my life. “Hey, I know that guy! That’s Alex Trebek. Wait, he’s talking to us…”

I don’t think it will (have) be(en) shown, but the moment the categories were announced, a smile spread over my face. The first category was The Sopranos, which was a favorite show of mine over the near-decade that it intermittently ran. Also in the first set was a Before & After category, which I find challenging but fun. This was going to be enjoyable.

When the episode airs, I plan to keep track of two numbers: (1) how many times I was able to get a question on a rebound after someone else got it wrong and (2) how many times I was saved from giving an incorrect response by someone else beating me on the buzzer. My memory is foggy, but I recall benefiting from both.

The game itself is fast, addictive, and fun. Play accordingly. I had to immediately laugh off any incorrect response or any longer stretch of getting beaten on the buzzer. Otherwise all I could expect would be a tail-spin. I was still pretty nervous, and I think that nervousness gave me an edge on the buzzer, although I found that the toes of my right foot went slightly numb during the game due to a slightly bunched sock, which was distracting.

During the first commercial break, Trebek came around to take pictures with me and Beth. When he lined up with me, he started repeating my name, like he was trying to place something. “Fred, Fred, Fred, Fred, Fred… Flintstone!” They took the picture. I want to note that he made that same concerned-looking face with every contestant we saw go through the show.

In Double Jeopardy, I was glad for the other sopranos category, this time about opera singers. My Dad is an opera/classical guy, and I’m a classical guy, so I expected at least a couple questions to be in my wheelhouse. Beverly Sills I knew because she was on the Muppet Show, and I knew her Bubbles nickname because a copy of one of her books sat on top of our piano for as far back as I could remember. And the only reason I’ve even heard of Leontyne Price was because my uncle put a song by her on a Christmas mix tape 25 years ago, which we listened to every year, and 6 years ago I scraped the same mix together on CD for my family. So I happened to have looked her up at that time.

In addition to the friendliness of the show’s staff, it’s important to know that your fellow contestants, and their families, are probably also awesome. My group cheered each other on from show to show, and the families did the same. At some point, while Melissa was nervously leaning forward during the game Sonia’s father patted her on the shoulder: “It’s gonna be ok. He’s doing well!”

Through the game, I managed to build up some momentum. I don’t remember whether I got a Daily Double in that first game or not, but I tried very hard to keep my eyes off the scores unless I was wagering. When I looked up at the pre-Final Jeopardy commercial break, I was delighted to discover I had a lock game: as long as I wagered sanely, I’d won.

Daily Doubles and Final Jeopardy make me more nervous than the regular gameplay: you can’t avoid guessing on something you don’t necessarily know. I could have wagered more than I did, but I remember deciding to stick with a couple thousand (or something) in case I got a stumper. Having a lock game is the rare case in Jeopardy when you can look at your score and think of it as actual money. Lit is a bad category for me, so I decided to play it safe and only bet $2k, though I could have safely bet a bit more.

That the FJ question (pictured, right) ended up being pretty straight-forward was a nice little bonus. So now I was the Jeopardy champion, with winnings over $20k. That’s ridiculous, I thought, and imagined bills disappearing.

After Final Jeopardy, they bring the contestants to mid-stage for the awkward chitchat. I have very little recollection of what we talked to Alex about at the end of my games.

After the taping, they immediately un-mic the winner and scoot them back to the greenroom while the 2nd- and 3rd-place contestants sign their prize forms. On the way out, I snuck a glance at Melissa in the audience, who was beaming/stunned. I gave her a subtle thumbs-up before heading out of the studio.

So at this point, I'd achieved the two things I set out to do in my appearance:
1. Avoid humiliating myself.
2. Win a game.
Sweet. Everything from here on would be gravy.

Back in the green room, I made a quick stop in the bathroom before changing jacket & tie and heading back to the makeup chair. The next players had been selected, and it was Sonia and Mark. We all got wired for sound, and headed back out to play.

Next Jeopardy blog: Defending champeen!

Weeklypedia Quiz #18: Barely Legal

2009-03-20T11:37:00.002-05:00

Trivia! The last quiz's answers will be up shortly.

1. This author, who died in 2009, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice, for the third and fourth books in a tetralogy.
2. The back of a coin is called the reverse; the front is called this.
3. Having lost one US presidential election, this candidate returned eight years later, "tanned, rested & ready."
4. During a performance of the play "Henry VIII" in 1613, cannon fire set this London landmark ablaze.
5. In "Postcards From The Edge," Meryl Streep stars as a fictionalized version of this actress/author, known primarily for an iconic science fiction role.
6. In the Godfather movies, the appearance of this fruit is often a portent of violence or death.
7. The University of California Santa Cruz's mascot is this fruitily-named mollusk.
8. This bank was originally founded in California by two American Express executives, though it is legally chartered in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, somewhat closer to the location its name suggests.

"Fruity Mollusk" is the name of my next improv team, by the way.

Speaking of Fruity Mollusks:

Actually, I guess the cereal isn't fruit-flavored. It's a trap!

So, that happened...

2009-03-17T22:00:00.001-05:00

And of course my eyes were mostly closed.

March 25th!

Photo courtesy Jeopardy! Productions, Inc.

Jeopardy: From Sony Pictures Studios, this! is!

2009-03-17T12:00:00.000-05:00

Part of an ongoing series.

The stage is big and blue and cold. I was happy to find that the individual panels of the game board are bigger and closer to the podium than they seem on TV. That said, I was still glad I'd recently had my glasses prescription updated. They taught us how to use the light pen for writing our names and playing Final Jeopardy (write big and slow). We went through a full game in real-time with Glenn as host and with contestants rotating in and out to give everyone a feel for the flow and the signaling device (keep your thumb on the button and eliminate any wind-up motions when you ring in; I liked bracing the bottom of the buzzer against the desk).

When a clue is revealed, Alex reads it, and when he's done, a guy at the production table flips a switch that activates the signaling devices as well as a series of small white lights running up either side of the game board. These are the so-called "Go! Lights." If you ring in before that guy flips that switch, you're locked out for a crucial quarter of a second, and someone will beat you if they know the response. Bob Harris practiced, and advocates, Jedi Mastery of the Go! Lights: anticipate Trebek's last syllable, pause imperceptibly, then ring in. Ignore the lights, in other words, and feel the timing. I found during practice that this usually made me ring in too early, that a couple decades of video gaming had my reflexes to the point that I was better off watching for the lights to ignite.

To the left of the game board is a big flatscreen TV (you can see its corner in the photo above), on which they play video clues. Above this is a hole in the wall behind which are the two cameras that point at the players head-on. Above that is the scoreboard. When you see someone looking up and slightly to their left during a Daily Double, they're checking out the scores. It's a good idea not too look at the scores too often during gameplay; the more you're thinking about the scores, the less you're playing the game.

(If you're a visual learner, check out these photos from the set during the 2004 Tournament of Champions. The details have changed a little, but the relative positioning of everything is the same.)

Here's roughly how a game goes down: the contestants will be mic'd and marched out to the lecterns. Each contestant will record short and long Hometown Howdies. A guy with a handheld camera will tape some goofy little promotional bit that may or may not be used. Johnny Gilbert will announce the show number and taping and air dates. The music and CG intro will play and Johnny will introduce the players, including the returning champ's winnings (they ask new players to applaud the champ), and then Alex (applauding for the host is a good idea, too). Alex will say a few words, then get the game started with the champ selecting first. After about 15 questions is the first commercial break, during which time Alex will stand with the new players for a souvenir photo to be mailed later (as much as 90 days after taping, which is when they send prize checks). During breaks in general, Alex will re-record clues to correct for pronunciation as necessary, and then chat with the audience. The contestant coordinators will come out at this time to bring water bottles to the players and hang around in case you need to puke or contest a ruling on a question. Also, the makeup artist will come to see if you've gotten shiny.

During the third commercial break, just before Final Jeopardy, you make your wager based on the scores and how you feel about the category. They give you scratch paper and a marker to do math, and will apparently stop the show if you need more time to crunch numbers. If you write something with the light pen but want to change something, they will reset it for you. Once you're satisfied, you lock it in with a button on the screen. Once everybody's ready, they will change the screen for Final Jeopardy response input, and tell you whether the response will start with Who or What, so you can write that during the break. I guess they got tired of having to disqualify people for not answering in the form of a question during FJ. At this time, Glenn will remind everyone that when they're answering, they should add a verb, so they won't end up with "Who George Washington?" on TV.

Back from commercial, and then a 10-second Closed Captioning ad, most likely for eggs. Then Alex reveals the clue, and the Think Music probably starts. If for some reason the music cart doesn't play, the stage manager will yell out ten-second intervals (I was glad to not have to witness this option, as it sounds stressful). If your pen doesn't work, you're to use the Sharpie to write on a card in front of you that's got WHO pre-scrawled on one side and WHAT pre-scrawled on the other. Thirty seconds, and the Think Music, are over. Responses and wagers are revealed, a champion is crowned, Alex shakes hands (unless, as the week before we taped, he's still too injured from dropping a jackhammer on his foot. Yes, really.), and while commercials roll, the contestants are lined up by Alex for awkward chitchat during the credits.

Rinse, repeat. Five times a day (usually), two days a week, a couple weeks a month.

So. They ran us through a fake version of all of that in real time, and then a more relaxed run-through without all the rigmarole to get everyone comfy with the game. Between auditions and rehearsals, it seems, they burn a lot of practice questions.

Now, three hours after we got on the bus at the hotel, we were led from the studio. Upon our return to the greenroom, two contestants were announced to face Inta, our returning champion from Ontario. I was not one of them, so I joined the rest of the pool in the audience, scrupulously avoiding making contact with my family and friends in the audience. The auditorium seats about 130 or so. The podiums on stage are angled so contestants can only see the half of the seating reserved for tourists and others who are just there to see a game. Friends and family are seated in a section roughly at 9 O'Clock for the players, with the contestant pool quarantined in the front section adjacent.

Watching the March 9th episode was a trip. Playing along with the show from this perspective is exciting in a way watching at home isn’t, but also nerve-wracking as you watch some categories fly by that you wish you’d gotten and some you’re glad you didn’t. I tapped my thumb on my knee, trying to keep my buzzer timing down. Peter from Philadelphia and I muttered answers under our breath, very quietly.

The game was good. All three players were competitive, though Barry from had a rough time with the Daily Doubles he uncovered. There was at least one stoppage at the uncovering of a Daily Double, at which time they turned the contestants around so they wouldn't be exposed to revealed information while The Powers That Be could fiddle with the gameboard software, which had hit a slight glitch. At the end of the episode, Dana from Georgia had won. Alex announced that she would have a couple weeks to relax while the show went to Vegas for the Tournament of Champions. The contestant pool chuckled bitterly, as we knew better.

Robert approached the front of the risers and announced that Beth and I would be facing off against Dana in the next game. So we were hustled off to the green room for bathroom breaks and makeup touch-up while Dana did a quick change. Ten minutes later, we were led back to take our places on the stage.

STAY CLAM!

Next Jeopardy blog, to be published on or after March 25th: My game.

Jeopardy: in which I ride a series of shuttle buses

2009-03-14T21:34:00.002-05:00

Part of an ongoing series.

Last time, I was obsessing over Final Jeopardy betting strategy. And was on the plane heading to LA.

The night we got in, January 26th, the night before my tape date, I was reasonably nervous, but trying to stay frosty. Waiting for the shuttle at the airport, Melissa and I eyed the other folks standing at the curb, trying to guess if any were also contestants. Another couple got on the shuttle for the Radisson Los Angeles Westside (pictured), the semi-official hotel of Jeopardy. It turned out that Sonia was indeed another contestant, and had flown out from Boston with her boyfriend. She seemed nice and also frostily nervous.

As we arrived at the hotel it was getting late for us Central Timers. We ate in the hotel's bar as I flipped through the notebook, wondering what I was going to wish I'd studied more. Melissa's parents had driven down from the Central Valley to cheer me on, too. Once they'd arrived and said hello, we went to bed. In the morning I assembled my multiple changes of clothes for potential back-to-back tapings, ate some breakfast (yogurt, granola & fruit — no good being jittery!) and we went down early to gather with the other contestants for the shuttle to the studio. Sizing-up of the competition was inevitable. People in nice clothes without any makeup on eyed each other before tentatively introducing themselves.

Sonia's parents had come out to see her play, and her mother was determined to discover who among the people in the lobby were there for the show. She would report back to the handful of us who had already introduced ourselves, with debriefings like, "he's here for the game, but he doesn't seem very talkative."

The shuttle arrived and the lot of us with our business clothes and garment bags and un-made-up faces said goodbye to our loved supporters and piled in. There were nine of us, not a full day's pool of contestants; I figured others must have been arriving separately. While "Yellow Submarine" played on the driver's radio, we discovered that almost everyone in the van had taken or, in some cases, taught a statistics class. Two contestants found that they had a fairly close mutual friend through connections in Washington, DC. People casually mentioned places around the world they'd traveled or lived for a time. Everybody was impressive. I figured I was probably screwed but continued to force myself to let go of expectations, of results. I’d come to LA prepared to bounce out with the $1000 third-place consolation prize and the experience to talk about. I recommend this mindset. At the same time, I wanted, really badly, to win at least one game.

We arrived at Sony Pictures Studios' Overland Ave gate, and were ushered into a waiting area in the parking ramp. Another contestant arrived on her own. We went around the circle and introduced ourselves. John from Kansas City. Peter from Philadelphia. Beth from Tulsa. Heather from North Carolina. Dana from Georgia. Inta from Toronto. Meg from Washington. Sonia from Boston. Barry from New York. Fred from Minneapolis. Pretty much everybody from the eastern half of the continent; odd, I thought.

Contestant coordinators Corrina and Glenn, who you may remember from the audition, arrived to herd us onto another short bus. They welcomed us and began The Morning Orientation. Turn off your phones. If you absolutely need to make a call, a staffer has to listen in. No wandering around or talking to anyone who isn't a contestant coordinator, another contestant, or someone who has been introduced to you for a specific show-related purpose. And so on. We drove a few blocks through the narrow streets of the former MGM lot, and pulled up next to Pat Sajak's big giant head on the side of a building (Wheel of Fortune tapes next door and shares some staff with Jeopardy). Our bags were poked by security while we walked through a metal detector. Finally, we were ushered into the green room, which I think I remember as purple. I could be wrong about that.

One of the most important things for you to understand about the experience is that everybody involved with the show is really, really nice. Warm, friendly, and funny. You may learn this during the audition process, but it’s really driven home in the morning meetings. The contestant coordinators are all there to prepare you to win money from their bosses, and they love their job. We were greeted by Robert James, who had given me The Call in December, who now asked if Melissa was going to be there. Tony Pandolfo, who splits his time between Jeopardy and Wheel, started confirming the pronunciation of people's names and rattling off the biographical sentences that would be on Trebek's card, asking for us each to highlight a preferred story. Maggie Speak arrived to hold court and get us ready to play.

We were each directed to a pile of release forms with a Jeopardy pen on it. We were encouraged to start coming up with our Hometown Howdies, greetings that our local stations could play to announce our imminent appearances before our air dates. It is my understanding that KARE 11 never uses these. Meanwhile, we were rotated through the makeup chair and Maggie ran through a description of everything that would happen in a given game. Maggie's terrific, and brought us as close to being at ease as eleven people (Mark from Detroit had been caught in traffic) about to be tested on national television can be.

Maggie introduced Inta, who was our returning champion. Inta had been out the week before, and had won the last game of Wednesday's taping (you can read Inta's winner's blog here, for the time being -- she is all class). Inta would be at the first podium for the first game. All new contestants would be drawn randomly from the pool by the compliance company that oversees the gameplay. We would only be taping four shows that day, as they had taped an extra celebrity game in Vegas while they were out there for the Tournament of Champions earlier in January. So six of us plus Inta would play today. The remaining two would be guaranteed to play on Wednesday.

We were instructed to have fun, and to keep the game moving. They know that everybody likes to say "I'll take [category] for [dollar amount], please, Alex," at least once, but to try to keep it brief after our first selection. They encourage shortening category names, and always naming categories before dollar amounts. They don't require sticking with one category—some players were known for bouncing—but do ask that you signal that you're moving to a new category, so their cameras can catch up. Some categories are required to be taken in order, and we'll be informed if this is the case. Mispronunciation is generally ok, as long as it doesn't change the consonant sounds. Misspelling in Final Jeopardy is also alright, as long as it doesn't change the sounds of the word. Giving an answer, any answer, is always preferable to giving none. As I mentioned last time, they discourage playing for ties. And so on.

After the morning talking-to, I could now say I’d had my makeup applied by Vanna White’s makeup artist, and we were moved to the stage to rehearse. My nervousness grew.

Next Jeopardy blog: In the studio!

Cookies are for closers

2009-03-12T21:39:00.001-05:00

I watched this clip with my brother a week ago on one of the Sesame Street Old School DVDs.

My new phrase of choice:
"got to do something to pay the cookie bill."

As much as I love the clip above, this next one's more of a timeless classic. When Jim Henson and Frank Oz worked together, you could tell they were having the time of their lives. That they usually worked their mistakes into the scene only made it better.

Hey there, lamp; that's a nice shade!

In other words...

2009-03-11T07:00:00.000-05:00

I prefer:
"Stuff found on things Clemens had."

More fun with news copy:

Wikipedia Quiz At Seventeen: Janis Ian Edition

2009-03-10T15:27:00.003-05:00

Trivia time! #16's answers are posted.

1. Eustace Tilley is the monocled mascot of this magazine.
2. The Director's Guild of America authorizes its members to substitute this pseudonym for their own names in their credits to protest the treatment of their film by the studio.
3. Pitcairn Island was settled in 1790 by mutineers and crew from this ship.
4. A line of plants, especially fruits or vegetables, that is grown organically from seeds older than 100 years (or predating WWII, depending on who you ask) may be labeled with this handed-down adjective.
5. This Mexican port is called "Four Times Heroic," having withstood siege or occupation from the Spanish, French, and twice from the Americans.
6. If you're trying to figure out the possibility of a recessive trait appearing in offspring of parents who carry the gene, you might construct this diagram, named for its biologist inventor.
7. He proposed a Hierarchy of Needs in a 1943 paper. The bottom tier is physiological (food, sleep, breathing, etc.), the top, self-actualization).
8. Of the original 12 companies listed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1896, it is the only one still in existence today.

Bonus! Pop cultural version of the last clue (answer is the same):
8. Contrary to its portrayal on a sitcom, this corporation is not a subsidiary of the Sheinhardt Wig Company.

Discussion question for grammar nerds:
In clue #7, between the words "top" and "self-actualization," should I have used a colon or semicolon instead of a comma?

Jeopardy: Strategery, or: Don't hate the player, hate the game

2009-03-06T19:11:00.002-06:00

Part of an ongoing series.

In tandem with studying potential Jeopardy content, I familiarized myself in Jeopardy strategy in December and January. The J! Archive was particularly helpful for this, as it has every clue and their outcomes from almost all of the show's seasons available for browsing. It also has a long glossary full of game theory and strategy, including guidelines on how you should bet in Final Jeopardy! under a variety of conditions. Head-spinning.

I eventually came across a description of the game pictured above, which was the first and thus far only three-way tie in the history of the show. You can watch their FJ! on YouTube (WaMu Files For ChapLev). I wondered what the game-leader (Scott Weiss, left, a computer scientist) had been thinking with his wager. Typically, if you're leading enough to potentially outpace the other contestants, you bet enough to get to 2x(their current score)+1 so you win. My first thought was that he'd done it for the sake of the uniqueness of the tie. It's neat to be a part of something like that.

But then I realized that the rules of the game, and by extension the nature of competition, might incentivize going for the tie. Here's how prizes work on the show:

First-place player gets to keep the money in their score, and gets to play again in the next day's show.
Second-place player gets $2000 regardless of winnings.
Third-place player gets $1000 regardless of winnings, which only partially defrays the cost of traveling to the show if you got on a plane to get there.
If there is a tie for first place, both or all three players keep the money and get to play again.

So if you're in Weiss' position, and you bet the whatever+1, all you're doing is screwing the other players out of $14,000 and $15,000. You jerk. But, if you play for the tie and everybody gets the question right, then you've just made two new best friends AND you get to play your next game against two players you've already been able to beat once. The benefit of this is hard to estimate. Reading Prisoner of Trebekistan left me with the impression that any known quantity with regards to who your opponents will be is greatly beneficial, both psychologically and strategically. Otherwise, you might end up with what Bob Harris calls an "Ivy League Serial Killer," who can get all the really obscure crap regardless of who might beat him or her on the buzzer (excuse me, Signalling Device).

(Of course, in the later rounds of a Tournament of Champions game, this rule does not hold, as the poor guy on the left in this video learned all too well. I would've been in the same boat here, incidentally, answering the FJ! handily but being useless on this particular tiebreaker.)

Now, skipping ahead somewhat in the narrative, I learned when I was actually at the show that The Powers That Be actively discourage ties. They were certainly excited about the three-way tie due to its novelty, and if you go into FJ as the leader with exactly twice the score of the person in second, it doesn't make sense to endanger your lock-tie with a non-zero wager. But, they screen thousands of contestants a year, and turn away most of them. They want to move as many people through the show as they can, and any game with two winners cuts in half the new players in the next game. So they encourage playing for the tie+1.

Back to me approaching my tape date... I watched the show daily in the weeks leading to my tape date. The week before I went out to California, there was a five-day winner named Matt Kohlstedt (a graduate student originally from La Grange, IL, pictured, borrowed from PioneerLocal). Kohlstedt had two very interesting FJ situations wherein (1) he was not in the lead going in, (2) everybody got it wrong (triple-stumpers), and (3) he won by $1 or $2 with wagers that were not obvious choices to me. I decided that it would behoove me to understand them before I appeared on the show, so the day I left, I copied down the FJ scenarios of these two games in my book, and on the flight westward, I reasoned my way through them.

I believe Matt's logic was roughly this:

I'm not in the lead
The people ahead of me are most likely going to make rational wagers to cover their nearest opponent doubling their score
If they get the question right, I will lose
I can't guarantee that I will get the question right
Therefore, the only way to win is to assume that the people ahead of me will get it wrong, and base my wager on what their wager is likely to be

Look at the January 20th game. Matt's in 2nd going in, with 10,000 to Rebecca's 11,800. Matt figures Rebecca will bet 8200 to tie him if he doubles. So he assumes she'll lose 8200, and bets just enough that if he loses too, they'll tie at 3600. This almost happened, except she played for the win+1, and lost by $1.

He did it again, two days later. Here Matt is in third with 6400 to Luis' 12,200 and Chris' 15,000. He figures Chris will bet 9400 to cover Luis doubling up. So he bets enough that if everybody's wrong, he'll cover Chris by a dollar. It ended up being $2 in this case, because Chris also played for the win+1. (Note that in this case, if Luis hadn't overbid 8800, and instead bet between 2801 and 5600, he'd have won. Matt's gambit is less likely to be successful, it seems to me, from third place.)

(Matt Kohlstedt will be in this year's Tournament of Champions, which begins airing on Wednesday's broadcast. Watch for him, as well as for Deborah Fitzgerald, right, a retired government employee from McLean, VA, who is a friend of my Aunt's.)

This is crafty stuff. On the flight, prime ministers and countries on the Equator competed for headspace, along with Matt's strategy, the crush, and the 2/3, 3/4, and 4/5 rules. But mostly I tried to stay frosty.

Next Jeopardy Blog: To The Studio!

Ka-Baam! Returns, Thursday (tomorrow) Night!

2009-03-04T15:07:00.006-06:00

Note! Show time corrected, see below!

And while we're talking comics:

That's right, true believers!! KA-BAAM!! is every four-color fantasy writ large and on-the-spot by a cast of Minneapolis' most heroic improv comedians! Every week, audience suggestions will inspire the origins and adventures of three never-before-seen heroes in a comic book story that will never be seen again! The Golden Age will be reborn with the deadliest of villains, most ridiculous of brawls, and a comic book artist capturing the characters in a comic book cover, drawn live and unique to every performance!
The first Thursday of the month, *10:00* PM at The Bryant Lake Bowl!
Produced by Huge Theater.
Directed by: Nels Lennes
Starring: Fred Beukema, Rita Boersma, Hannah Kuhlmann, Nels Lennes, James Moore, Tom Reed, Michael Ritchie, Jen Scott, Troy Zimmerman
Tech: Butch Roy, David Lipkin
Special Comic Art: Christopher Jones