Posted 7:37 AM by Floyd

It sure was nice of Eliot Spitzer to become embroiled in a prostitution scandal so juicy as to bring me out of semi-retirement. (Last logged into Blogger in December. Last son born in November. I'll blog about that too, someday.)

I often rehearse posts in my head before writing them down, and this figured to be a short missive, something like:

Remember when William Bennett empowered Las Vegas casinos, though perhaps not America, to the tune of $8 million? Now it's been discovered that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer patronized a high-priced prostitution ring. Spitzer was an aggressive and enthusiastic prosecutor of all sorts of real and imagined vice, including cathouses. He referred to himself as a "fucking steamroller"; it is as yet unclear whether this was his nickname among the professional ladies.

When Bennett was caught with his pockets inside out I wrote a post mocking his defenders. No need for that today; I can't imagine anyone defending Spitzer.

Consider my imagination defective! Turns out there are lots of folk willing to defend Governor Steamroller. For instance, Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon:

Who cares if Eliot Spitzer hires prostitutes?

Regarding all of the breathless moralizing from all sides over the "reprehensible," outrageous crimes of Eliot Spitzer: are there actually many people left who care if an adult who isn't their spouse hires prostitutes? Are there really people left who think that doing so should be a crime, that adults who hire other consenting adults for sex should be convicted and go to prison?

Just as was true for moral crusaders David Vitter and Larry Craig, there is unquestionably a healthy chunk of hypocrisy in Spitzer's case, given that, as Attorney General, he previously prosecuted -- quite aggressively and publicly -- several citizens for the "crime" of operating an adult prostitution business. That hypocrisy precludes me from having any real personal sympathy for Spitzer, and no reasonable person could defend him from charges of rank hypocrisy. And he should be treated no differently -- no better and no worse -- than the average citizen whom law enforcement catches hiring prostitutes.

...

Greenwald goes on at great length, and hundreds of comments pick up where he left off. One reason I blog less than I used to is that I am sick of the stupidity induced by partisan politics, and this post demonstrates many such failings:

* Conflating virtue with legality: I think that it should be legal for people to patronize prostitutes. That does not mean that I think it is right and proper for married people. Nor do I think that people in positions of power should engage in activities that compromise them. "Hey Steam, we were just looking at our guestbook and thinking -- wouldn't you like to arrange for my colleague to get a permit for a building he wants to construct? Perhaps you could stay there with Daniela when it's built."

* Defending against an attack that hasn't been made: I don't know whether Spitzer will be "treated no differently" by the law, and don't really care. I do know that it's a teeny bit more newsworthy when a john turns out to be a governor and crusading muckety-muck, rather than some two-bit loser I've never heard of. I do know that people who hold important office, public or private, do resign when embroiled in prostitution scandals.

* General fan-boy "my team is better than yours" stupidity. Lots of commenters complained about a Louisiana senator who was in a similar position -- he would have had to work hard to match Spitzer's accomplishments in the fields of bullying and incarceration, but never mind that now. Well, so what? My gut reaction upon reading such an argument is I guess both your parties suck.

If the powerful in government can terrorize and imprison the general populace with laws that they themselves are under no special obligation to honor, then we are more than halfway down the road to the Russian model of government, where one of the chief emmolients of public office is the immunity it provides against prosecution for crimes.

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Posted 9:43 PM by Floyd

(Has it been awhile? Yeah, it's been awhile. I got Kirchhoff beat by two months though.)

Am I the only one who doesn't give a damn about the Mitchell Report? Seems like every single person who writes on baseball, from FJM to your local sanctimonious newspaper hack, is unanimous in their condemnation of juicers -- they're cheaters, they're scoundrels, their records are illegitimate. Click on any online column and you can find a semiliterate comment along the lines of "THERE CHEATERS. NOONE SHOULD USE STEROYDS."

Am I alone in saying that taking steroids or HGH to improve performance is not cheating, not immoral, nothing even to be ashamed of? Let me posit this hypothetical: What if doctors called the soreness and fatigue after an athlete's weight regimen a specific syndrome, say "post-exertion corpora trauma", and prescribed steroids as treatment? (Steroids are, after all, medicines; they were prescribed for my son Jason when he had eczema at the age of six months. I told him it was flaxseed oil.)

On what grounds would we condemn this diagnosis? Would it be any more bogus than "erectile dysfunction"? Everyone knows perfectly well that the people who are prescribed Viagra do not have problems attaining erections, they just want a pill to give them a better sex experience. Or let's take cholesterol drugs. I recently saw my physician after a blood test showed borderline high cholesterol, and she discussed the option of lowering my cholesterol with drugs. Now these drugs are completely unnecessary. I could cut down on my intake of fatty foods, and exercise more; if I end up taking drugs to lower my cholesterol it's because I choose not to employ these non-chemical strategies.

One could easily imagine an alternate universe in which drug treatment is accepted, but surgery considered immoral and unnatural. In this universe, George Mitchell dumps on the "Tommy John 53", the list of pitchers who received ligament transplants in shady out-of-the-way clinics. The sanctimony would be of a different flavor, but just as revolting.

Clemens criticized several of the players named in the Mitchell Report as alleged cheaters. "I've got the same body parts I was born with. I didn't go to a South African doctor to have a tendon turned into a ligament. Mariano [Rivera] and [John] Smoltz can't say the same thing."

The use of steroids is not cheating. Steroids help athletes attain better results from bodybuilding. Good for them; so do nutritional supplements, and for that matter so does good weightlifting technique. (The current governor of California wrote a book on how best to pump iron; does reading such a tome constitute an unfair advantage?) Perhaps steroids help pitchers recover from the stress of hurling baseballs. Again, good for them; so do ice packs and massages and a proper throwing regimen.

(Cheating involves gaining an unfair advantage on one's competitors. Like for instance one Gaylord Perry, who doctored the baseballs he threw with Vaseline -- and who winked and giggled all the way to the Hall of Fame, with nary an ill consequence for boasting of his cheating in published books.)

The storm of abuse directed at steroid users is absurd and anachronistic; its perpetrators need to read some Vernor Vinge, or have a few quiet thoughts about the future of pharmacology. Are you outraged that Barry Bonds had a late-career surge because he was on the juice? Good luck in the year 2027 when your coworker takes pills to make himself smarter.

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Posted 9:29 PM by Floyd

Last May I played bridge with my wife in the Monterey Sectional. Last October I played a session with my friend Joel at the San Jose Sectional. Today I played a team game with Joel, Brian, and Scott at a regional in Santa Clara.

Scott and I get a chance to play Caroline Club about once a year, so of course we spent several hours discussing, in person, over the phone, and via email, several intricate changes to the system. We did not have any disasters, but we did not use the system much either.

We won our first match, but our next four matches were a narrow win and three blitzes. We had 27 victory points out of a possible 100. The next two matches were kinder and we finished with 62. (Naturally I was named captain so it was my name on the leaderboard that was defaced with these poor results.)

Some quick notes, in the form of awards:

Winner, Sticks and Wheels Self-Immolation Award: That would be me, for perpetrating the following auction at unforavorable with KJT2 QT65 Q JT87

P[1] - P - P - 1
P - 1 - X[2]

[1] Scott opens all hands with 10 or more points, so I know it's the opponents' hand
[2] Entries for the W,SaWSIA are closed for 2007

LHO pulled out the 2N card, then saw my double and his eyes got very wide. A blue card hit the table. Pass, pass to me. I bid 1 and LHO struck that. He led a high club and partner displayed:

97x 9xx Txxx 9xx

Wow. Look at all those nines.

But I managed to wriggle out for -500, winning 10 imps when Brian scored up six diamonds.

Winner, Avoidance Play Made When Tired And Not In Contention

At the end of a very wearying day we played our final match against our friends Len and Jo, who were at the other table. At our table was the expert Richard Meffley of Fresno. I held 9xxx JT Qx KJxxx. I passed, Scott opened 1, I responded 1, he raised to 2 and it was passed out. I told the opponents that his raise showed a balanced minimum, but Scott pointed out that he had a 15-17 hand since we play 12-14 notrumps in 3rd and 4th. As I said, it had been a long day.

Meffley led a heart, here are the two hands:

AQ87 AQ9x JT9 Ax

9xxx JT Qx KJxxx

I ducked and won the heart in hand. That meant I had only two side-suit losers, the top diamonds. I wanted to pull trumps, but not have the opponents pull all my trumps if they broke 4-1. So I led to the ace of spades and then led low from dummy. This would leave me with Qx left if either opponent had four spades. My caution was rewarded when RHO had KJTx; he could not attack spades so I made two on the nose.

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Posted 9:38 PM by Floyd

Yeah, it's been awhile. (Or as Evan might say, I just made 150 unrelated daily decisions not to post anything.) In July and August Sherry and I flew to Scranton and Detroit respectively to show Jason off to my relatives. The fall was Sherry's turn, as she and Jason spent four weeks with her folks in Shanghai. I joined them for two weeks in November.

It started with a 13-hour flight, and once you're over that nothing worse is likely to happen to you, unless someone beats on you with a 2x4 made of hardwood. And it has to be hardwood; no way is getting whacked with a soft pine plank worse than spending eight dreary hours on a 747 and then realizing that you still have as much time left as a flight across America would take. I had an aisle seat, seven books, and an issue of Liberty Magazine in my favor, but toward the end of the flight I was dropping off while trying to read about particle physics, not the best combination.

One nice thing about trans-Pacific flights is when they come out with the warm towels before the meal and you realize that they're going to treat you like a human being.

I landed, grabbed the one large suitcase I had checked, and made my way out of the customs area. This was the week of the big tennis tournament in Shanghai, and I guess some of the stars were on our plane. I walked into a big contingent of scowling security guards, and off to one side were several pretty young ladies in sky-blue outfits chanting ... well, what I heard was "RANDY MOSS! RANDY MOSS!" But it seemed unlikely that Mr. Moss' lack of enthusiasm and dropped passes had made him many fans across the Pacific, and anyway he had not taken his dejection at being a Raider to the point where he would fly 7000 miles away from Oakland between games. I'm pretty sure that the baseball-capped fellow who was the object of all this adulation was Andy Roddick.

Sherry met me at the airport and we took a cab from Pudong (the site of the airport) across the river to Shanghai. One of the things that got me through the flight was the prospect of seeing Jason again, and fortunately he was still awake when we got home.

Sherry and Jason were staying at an apartment owned by her aunt, Daeema. A brief synopsis of family names: In Chinese, all close relatives are addressed by titles; given names are not used. The appelations precisely define the relationship; "Uncle Floyd" is extremely vague and could be applied to me by my sister's boy Scott or Sherry's niece Nunu. In Chinese, Scott would call me Dajo since I am his mother's oldest brother; Nunu would call me Gufu as I am her brother's older sister's husband.

If you have enough siblings, the titles are number-based, like Chaee, "#7 aunt" (which I have seen Sherry write in emails). Sherry's grandmother ("Abu") had ten children, six of whom live in Shanghai: Jedya (the #2 aunt), U-aee (the #5 aunt -- really #4, but the Chinese skip over that number since it sounds the same as "death"), Dajo (#6 uncle), Chaee, Shao-aee ("little aunt") and Arjo (the youngest uncle). (Daeema, the eldest, lives in Milpitas and went to China with Sherry; Sherry's mom, the third sibling, was visiting from Baoji in the north; Joaee (#9 aunt) lives in Australia; Baaee, #8, is deceased, but we will meet up with her later.)

These numeric titles can then be applied to "abu" (maternal grandmother) instead of "aee" (maternal aunt) for the next generation.

Here are "five abus" with Jason and his cousin Olivia. From left to right: Abu. U-abu, Shao-abu holding Jason, Du-abu holding Olivia, Cha-abu. From Olivia's perspective Jason's Abu is her Sei-abu, and Du-abu is her own grandmother. There will be a quiz on all this at the end of the blog post.



Daeema owns an apartment near the university and Ganghui Mall. It's a tiny place, maybe 800 square feet divided into kitchen, bathroom, living room/bedroom, and two other bedrooms. Two balconies on opposite ends were roofed and used as laundry room and kitchen preparation area respectively. One interesting habit that Jason developed during his stay was to have people show and name various vegetables; he even demanded to do this when he woke up in the middle of the night.

The apartment complex, from the outside:



Here's Jason using the bathtub:



I am always jetlagged when I fly west, and this was no exception. I had a lot of trouble sleeping, and still could not sleep for the next week -- I would sleep maybe six hours a night, and would be very tired in the late afternoon. At least I had access to caffeine. Just around the corner from the apartment complex was Ganghui Mall and its outdoor food court, with no fewer than two Starbucks. At 7 or 8 in the morning I had them practically to myself.

One of the restaurants in the food court was Italian and advertised this interesting combination of goods:



"Would you like a cappuchino pizza?" "Nah, I think tiramisu risotto sounds better." "I'll have the espresso pasta."

We spent a fair amount of time at the mall. This may sound kind of lame, but when you're hanging out with a 14-month-old you're tied to his nap schedule and it's tough to get out for serious expeditions. And the mall is quite impressive:



Six stories, plus a basement with a very nice supermarket -- I was able to find lots of imported beers there. I also found yogurt, which was labelled "fruit cheese." The ground floor was mostly open space, and often would have models sashaying while pop music played. The second and fourth floors were primarily fashion; the third floor had a huge shopping area for kids' toys. The fifth floor was packed with restaurants, and the sixth had a movie theater and a gigantic bookstore. The bookstore had a decent English language section, and I was happy to pay something like $3.50 for 800 pages of Sherlock Holmes stories, and $10 for Boo Hoo, an account of a dot-com collapse.

We also did a little shopping. I picked up some nice dress shoes for $35 -- but I remember the store fondly not for the bargains but for the best example of Lorem Ipsum I have ever seen:



Presumably the English text is there to impress the Chinese shoppers. It wasn't going to mean anything anyway, so why not be explicit about it?

Asians have a reputation for pushing their kids to study hard; apparently you have to solve algebra equations to shop at the mall:



This is as good a time as any to talk about my fascination with Chinese iconography. Chinese signs are much more explicit and detailed than corresponding Western signs. For instance, here is the sign for the hotel elevator:



See, there's a person, and he's going up and down, and he presses buttons to choose a floor ...

Oh, and speaking of buttons to choose floors, a bizarre off by one error on that same elevator, brought to you by the people who decided that 1 AD should be preceded by 1 BC:



Here's a sign from the vicinity of the mall:



From left to right: "There's gonna be five signs so listen up. No trumpet playing, Yao Ming is 2.8 meters tall, no bicycles, and no cigarettes. Lit cigarettes. The ones you've got in your pocket are perfectly fine."

Sunday night Sherry and I left Jason in the hands of his doting great-aunts and departed Shanghai for Hainan. We flew China Southern Airlines, which was my second experience with domestic Chinese airlines (I flew Northwest in 2000). Instead of a jetway, you get bussed at breakneck speed to the tarmac and climb stairs into the aircraft. The flight to Sanya was about three hours, which of course felt like childs' play after the endless trans-Pacific journey. I was reading Not Even Wrong, Peter Woit's polemic against string theory. This book is very dense, at least for the physics non-professional, and I was nodding off as I read it.

Shanghai's weather was mild, much like the Bay Area in autumn. Sanya was warm and humid. A van met us at the airport and we had a 40-minute ride, which got us to our hotel, Tian Yu, well after midnight. We checked into our room on the second floor of the left wing of the hotel, and crashed.



The hotel had a long single axis parallel to the beach, with various restaurants, bars, shops, and meeting rooms off to the side. Behind the hotel was a grassy area and three pools. The center one was a complex network of moderate sized basins, most of them not very deep, with some hot tubs interspersed. The back of the pool was kind of a grotto, with an underground area having more hot tubs and opening into the deep section, where at certain times you could swing like Tarzan off a rope into a water. I didn't bother with it though; jumping off such a rope does not produce a graceful arc. Rather you fall off the end on a straight line into the water. There were stairs leading into the grotto, but off to their right were entrances into several water slides. These didn't run all the time, but when they did I could usually be found sliding into the water, shaking chlorinated liquid out of my nose and eyes, and scampering back up to the top.

Back behind all this and down about five feet was the beach itself. There were a few outdoor bars where you could get water, soft drinks, or beer.

There were hammocks slung over the grass. Unfortunately like all hammocks, when you get in them your body forms an uncomfortable V and your butt dangles a few inches from the ground. Not very relaxing.



Tian Yu was delightfully uncrowded and pleasant. The guests were maybe two-thirds Chinese and one-third European; Sherry said the place was popular with Russians and Koreans, and indeed there was a Korean restaurant. We ate all but one of our meals at the hotel. Breakfast was served as a buffet in a sort of coffeehouse just down the stairs from us, with hot Western food and some Chinese dishes. We ate at two Chinese restaurants, the Korean place, and had some wonderful noodles at a little cafe. Tian Yu had signs for "Ice Cream House", which caused me to joke "Those liars! I expect a house made from ice cream!" But the joke was on me -- the ice cream shop was still being built while we stayed there. For ice cream you had to go to one of the two indoor bars and get them to scoop some indifferent stuff out of a carton.

Monday night we went to a hotel down the street and partook of their buffet. It had a lot of seafood but from my point of view was nothing special. Then we walked back in the warm night.

On Tuesday we took a long slog through the beach, which borders various hotels and parks. After an hour the walk came to an end, at a Chinese military base with some soldiers visible -- presumably they were protecting Hainan from amphibious assault. While walking along the beach we saw some of the island's indigenous people, the Mao, who are similar to the Hmong and wear large hats or hairpieces. (One of the attractions advertised in the hotel was "indigenous peoples' stockaded village", but I have no desire to gawk at people stuck in the bronze age.) Which reminds me of a pet peeve, that of well-meaning liberals claiming that natives of Third World countries can improve their lot by "eco-tourism." Eco-tourism sounds nice -- look at all the pretty animals -- but does not develop an economy. Dirty unlovely factories lead to economic development. Tourism leads to low-paid workers carrying clean towels.

On Wednesday we flew back to Shanghai. We took the new Maglev train back from the airport -- around 20 miles in 8 minutes with a top speed of 200 miles per hour. We mostly followed alongside the freeway and blew past the cars. At one point the return train sped past us, and the combined speeds of the two trains meant that we could barely even see the other vehicle -- it flashed by so quickly that we didn't realize what had happened till after it was past.

The last few days in Shanghai were rainy. We spent Friday at the Shanghai Museum of Technology. This was an impressively large building, but the exhibits were mostly tuned to children. Also we shared the place with approximately 5,000 schoolchildren on a field trip.

During the past two decades Shanghai has undergone an enormous building boom. Sherry grew up in a five-story wooden building owned by her grandparents. We visted her 90-year-old grandmother (and many other aunts and cousins) and climbed a steep stone stair to the roof. When Sherry was little the top of her home was higher than almost anything in sight. Now the landscape is dominated by tall buildings. From the roof I counted such structures, and even though it was a hazy day with visibility limited to maybe a mile, 99 tall buildings (at least 10 stories) could be seen.

Near our apartment complex were several gleaming new condominium towers. The Shanghai developers adorn their towers with fancy tops, each one unique:











As for the rahter drab complex we were staying at, it was due to be turned into gleaming new condos -- supposedly the apartment would be demolished in December. (In fact it still stands.) When this happened Daeema would be handed a check for about $300,000 -- not much less than what I once paid for a condominium in one of the most expensive real estate markets in America! Remember this the next time someone tries to persuade you that capitalism is bad for ordinary people.

On Sunday we packed our bags and left for the airport. Lots of aunts and uncles went with us to help us with our masses of luggage -- 8 bags -- and of course to say goodbye to Jason and Olivia. We arrived at the airport two hours early. The line to the ticket counter took about 30 minutes, and I began to get restive and wonder what I could scrounge up for a meal while waiting in the terminal. Then was the customs line. There was a long line that split into several streams for the various officials at their stands, and I began to notice that our line was slow. It was definitely slower than the other lines. After about 45 minutes steam began to rise from my ears. (The whole thing was a pointless bureaucratic exercise anyway. I was going to be processed again when I reached San Francisco; what was the Chinese government going to do, not expel me from the country if they didn't like me?)

The official in our line was obviously incompetent, and at some point he must have gotten some help because our line finally moved. But by the time we made it through was close to departure time. We hurried as fast as our carryon and baby stroller would allow us to run, and made it to the gate as one of the last few people to board the plane.

We had five seats across a 747, four in the middle (Daima, Olivia, Sherry, Jason), and me on the aisle. Having a separate seat for Jason was a godsend, not so much because he needed his own place to sit, but because it gave us a staging area for our masses of baby stuff.

Jason slept through the first hour of the flight. The departure from China was enlivened by military exercises that clearly exasperated the pilots; first we were delayed, then we were not allowed to change course when the ride got very bumpy. But after that he woke up, and we could not get him to sleep. He was somewhat fussy, and we wound up carrying him throughout the plane; he liked to see the No Smoking signs and the little lights in the ceilings. Surprisingly while our 747 had eight bathrooms within reach, only one of them had a changing table. And Jason wasn't the only baby on board, so by the end of the flight we were cramming diapers into a very full trash receptacle.

After more than ten numbing hours in the air we touched down, and when we landed and taxied Jason started bawling. He didn't calm down till we were in the customs line. We somehow managed to drag our eight pieces of luggage to the parking area, where Sherry's cousin and friend had driven two cars to pick us up. Soon we were headed home, with many more hours to kill before we could go to bed.

I never seem to have my camera when there is something really interesting to record. During one of the rainy days in which we stopped by Sherry's grandma's, we took a side trip to a Buddhist temple to honor Sherry's Baee (#8 aunt). Baee died from cancer ten years ago, a few months after Sherry started school in America. Sherry had paid a fair amount of money to have her aunt honored in this temple. It was a short taxi ride from her grandmother's, and we took Jason there.

The temple was a very utilitarian place. It looked to have been some sort of business or warehouse, which would make sense given Communist attitudes toward religion. The whole place sort of spiralled around. We walked ahead into a large anteroom, then to the right through a courtyard, and made another right into a temple with a side room and an open yard on two sides. We bought incense and prayed to the Buddha: Light the incense, hold it in clasped hands in front of you, bow three times. The whole thing was very simple and unadorned.

Americans like to believe that their culture is base, tawdry, and commercialized, that other cultures have much more meaningful social or religious experiences. Yet the Chinese went to the temple in the same perfunctory way that I used to shuffle off to church when I attended Catholic schools. The monks wore orange robes and did not act as though they were in the throes of a mystery too deep for Westerners. They looked like they were doing their jobs.

The focal point of the temple was the side room in which the dead were honored. I had expected a little display, maybe some flowers or a statue on a table, but Sherry's aunt was represented by a little black-and-white picture, one of hundreds on the walls. I thought of the dead, about how each one had parents or siblings or wives or husbands or childrens or grandchildren, all of whom had spent a good portion of their lives with that person, all of whom had stuck a picture and a few scribbled words on the wall next to a tiny black-and-white picture. Is this all that life leads to? You die, and sometimes the people that you love will remember you.

And sometimes they will not.

1 comments

Posted 11:25 PM by Floyd

Holy crap, the St. Louis Cardinals really are going to win the World Series. Not because they won Game 1 on Saturday, but because Bruce Jenkins says they will lose.

Anyone who doubts Jenkins' value as contrarian indicator should ponder the following nuggets of wisdom from the aforementioned column:

That was a fabulous final pitch thrown by the Cards' Adam Wainwright, an absolute freeze-'em curveball that left Carlos Beltran helpless. Still, on an 0-and-2 count with the World Series on the line, you have to swing at that ball. There's no excuse for ending a playoff series with the bat on your shoulder.

That makes sense, because if Beltran had swung at a pitch out of the strike zone, and missed, or popped up, or grounded out, Jenkins would have been right there to pick him up. I mean, he would have been right there with a patented Jenkinism-of-the-ages like "no truly great hitter, Ruth or Mays or Jackson, would have taken a weak swing at a bad pitch, 0-2 count or no."

In a classic seven-game Series in 1934, the "Gas House Gang" Cardinals of Pepper Martin, Ducky Medwick and Dizzy Dean beat the Tigers of Greenberg, Charlie Gehringer and Schoolboy Rowe (they knew how to dole out nicknames in those days).

Sucky nicknames, but yes, they could dole out nicknames.

Can't imagine the A's hiring process continuing without Billy Beane at least considering the best man for the job, Dusty Baker. He's headstrong, and likes to take complete charge of a club (with good reason), but he's exceptionally easygoing, having survived prostate cancer, Steve Bartman and the Chicago media with his health and dignity intact

Slaphla cthalma ... thcuthe me ... dow here on the thloor thomewhere ...

Ok. I found my jaw and reattached it. Does the San Francisco Chronicle employ fact checkers? Baker disdains on-base percentage, Beane thinks it is the most critical offensive skill in baseball. The A's are full of up-and-coming young players; Baker likes to ignore them to start veterans with no hitting ability that he develops an irrational attachment to. (As one wag on a baseball blog said recently, "Dusty Baker the A's manager? Say hello to starting left fielder D'Angelo Jimenez.") Baker is a big-name manager who will command top dollar, the A's have no money (and wouldn't waste it on a Neifi Perez-loving lunatic even if they did). Baker shreds pitchers arms, the A's pay attention to hurlers' pitch counts.

Baker and Beane are powerful, strongminded men with firm beliefs about how baseball should be played, and those beliefs do not align in the slightest. To suggest that Beane should hire Baker is absurd.

Still not convinced you should go down to Vegas and lay a wager on the Cards? There's more!

There was more than a little Rickey Henderson in Jose Reyes, the Mets' superb leadoff man, this season. He runs wild, hits for average, goes deep, and can ignite a dugout with a winning personality far more consistent than Rickey's.

Here are links to the Baseball Reference pages for Henderson and Reyes. Armed with this data -- yes Mr. Jenkins, that is a word native to the English language -- we can examine how much of Henderson is in Reyes.

2006 was Reyes' second full season. He played in 69 games in 2003, in 53 games in 2004. In 2006, his age 23 season, Reyes posted the following numbers:

.300/.354/.487 (.841 OPS), 19 HR, 64 SB, 17 CS = 79% success

Rickey! broke into baseball in 1979, also at the age of 20, playing 79 games. I'd like to use his third year, and second complete season, as a comparison, but that was the strike year and Rickey! played only 108 games. So we'll factor it to the 153 games that Reyes played this year:

.319/.408/.437 (.845 OPS), "8.5" HR, "79.3" SB, "31.2" CS = 72% success

Reyes has more pop, and stole fewer bases but with more success. (In 1982 Rickey! would swipe 130 bags, shattering the stolen base record.)

So:

He runs wild,

Check. Also I should be fair and note that Reyes had 17 triples. Rickey! had 7 in 1981, which was as many as he would ever hit in his career.

hits for average,

We'll see if Reyes continues to hit .300. Rickey! wound up with a career BA of 0.285. (Is that "hitting for average"? For a corner outfielder?)

goes deep,

Check, in 2006, although last year he hit 7 out.

and can ignite a dugout with a winning personality far more consistent than Rickey's.

No no no, I have a firm grip on my jaw this time. How is this like Rickey!? Does Reyes gripe that he wants days off? Does he refer to himself in the third person?

And he gets on base.

Right? I mean we all know how Rickey! could work a walk and had a .401 career on-base, right?

In 2006, Reyes' breakout season or career year, he finally posted an above-average on-base percentage. In 2005 Reyes had a 0.273 "batting for average" and a 0.300 OBP. Reyes has been in the majors four seasons, 1837 at bats, and has taken 98 walks. Double-digit walks in three seasons' worth of at-bats! Rickey! took more than 100 walks in seven different seasons.

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Posted 9:37 PM by Floyd

In one episode of the classic 60's spy comedy Get Smart, Maxwell Smart confronts a KAOS operative who has the drop on him. "At this moment, 400 armed men are surrounding this building."

The KAOS villain responds, "Mr. Smart, I find that very hard to believe."

"Would you believe ... 200?"

Max was the bumbling naif par excellence, but even he had the proper instinct about how to revise unbelievable figures. Not so the British medical-cum-Baathist agitprop journal Lancet, which followed its nonsensical October 2004 surprise (that the US war on Iraq had killed 100 thousand people), with its October 2006 surprise. The latest unbelievable figure is that 650,000 Iraqis -- 5% of the population -- have died since Saddam fled his palace. At this rate Lancet can attempt to sway the critical 2012 elections by claiming that 3 billion people have been killed in Iraq -- perhaps as a result of low airline fares inducing half the world to migrate there.

The left has a history of cheerful innumeracy ("a liberal is someone who cannot do arithmetic and is proud of it" -- Robert Heinlein), and really one need do little more with this rubbish than point at it and laugh. Where are the bodies? Surely one would expect the number of wounded to be several times the dead -- where then are the 15 or 20% of Iraq with shrapnel, bullet, or concussion injuries? Where are the mass emigrations that would flee such carnage?

There are many criticisms one can make of the survey. The most damning, from Rants and Rayguns:

According to the phony survey, they recorded 629 deaths since the start of the war (p4 of the PDF). In 545 cases, they bothered to ask for death certificates, and for those 545 requests, 501 times they were shown the death certificates. So Mr. Pittelli notes, at least 80% of all the deaths in the sample (501/629), and possibly as many as 92% (501/545) were recorded by the government. Let's repeat that: According to the anti-war propagandists who are responsible for this blatant dishonesty, 80 to 92% of all deaths in their sample were recorded in the Iraqi government's own official figures.

What this means, as Pittelli points out, is that the official death figures should record at least 80% of the deaths since the Iraq war. Taking the bogus figures at face value, simply for the sake of argument entertainment, I calculate the estimates based on official figures should be between 314,000 and 867,000. They aren't. The "official figures estimate" is about 49,000.

To take the Johns Hopkins/Lancet figures seriously, you have to believe that the Iraqi government recorded deaths occurring since the invasion with an accuracy of at least 80%, but then suppressed 85-94% of those recorded deaths when releasing official figures, with no one blowing the whistle on them. You also have to believe that 85-94% of the dead bodies were unnoticed by the MSM, the funeral homes, and everyone else trying to keep track of the war casualties..

Alternatively, you have to believe that the Iraqi govt. only issues death certificates for 6-15% of all deaths, but this random sample got 80% certificate hits by pure chance.

Also consider the objections raised by notropis:

1. "In 16 (0.9%) dwellings, residents were absent." When or where can you conduct a survey and find over 99% of the potential respondents at home? ...

(Further puzzling is the statement: "Households where all members were dead or had gone away were reported in only one cluster in Ninewa and these deaths are not included in this report." Does this mean that in only one cluster were any vacant houses encountered? I can find more than that in upscale suburbs of Minneapolis.)

2. Only "15 (0.8%) households refused to participate." Now this could be a sign that Iraqis are concerned to get the truth of their plight out, and that's great. But putting this together with (1) above, we find that in a remarkable 98%+ of the potential households, the head of household or spouse was available and willing to answer the questions (according to the methodology, those were the only ones surveyed.) And this result was achieved, according to the article, on the first pass, without ever re-contacting a household, which the survey teams deemed "too dangerous."

3. In reading the methodology, the impression is given that the surveyors did an incredibly thorough, careful, and considerate job in their work. Yet we read that the teams each consisted of four individuals, who “could typically complete a cluster of 40 households in 1 day.” Now, it’s not clear whether the teams stuck together, or split up into 1s or 2s, but, given time for travel, and assuming 8 hours of surveying time available in a day, if they worked in pairs (which would make the most sense, one male and one female), we find that they spent less than half an hour (24 minutes), on average, per household, yet we're assured that the following protocols were strictly observed:

"The survey purpose was explained to the head of household or spouse, and oral consent was obtained. Participants were assured that no unique identifiers would be gathered. No incentives were provided. The survey listed current household members by sex, and asked who had lived in this household on January 1, 2002. The interviewers then asked about births, deaths, and in-migration and out-migration, and confirmed that the reported inflow and exit of residents explained the differences in composition between the start and end of the recall period. …. Deaths were recorded only if the decedent had lived in the household continuously for 3 months before the event. Additional probing was done to establish the cause and circumstances of deaths to the extent feasible, taking into account family sensitivities. At the conclusion of household interviews where deaths were reported, surveyors requested to see a copy of any death certificate and its presence was recorded. Where differences between the household account and the cause mentioned on the certificate existed, further discussions were sometimes needed to establish the primary cause of death."

And further on, we read that official death certificates were produced for 80% of the deaths recorded, all in an average of less than half an hour per interview.

To conclude: Figures are unbelievable bullshit; methodology, also unbelievable bullshit. And the journal Lancet is pretty much unbelievable bullshit as well. You don't have to dislike leftards to object to Lancet; consider that it pushed an instantly-discredited study that claimed the MMR vaccine is linked to autism.

And Lancet apparently is willing to defend any overthrown ruler by claiming that his removal caused mass mayhem. In September Lancet published an analysis of Haiti after the overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, claiming that of 8000 murders and 35,000 rapes, none could be blamed on Aristide's Lavalas family party. Trouble was, one of the study's authors quoted herself writing in another name -- and had worked at a Haitan orphanage where she befriended Aristide. (Also, the study was criticized for exaggerating the number of deaths and crimes. Imagine that.)

That's enough writing for tonight. I'm off to prove that the Detroit Tigers' American League championship was accompanied by one million excess deaths in the state of Michigan.

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Posted 9:25 PM by Floyd

Sherry and Jason and I went to Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. It's a great little amusement park for people of any age. $7.80 bought Jason four kiddie rides, on a boat:



a train (twice)



and a little dragon plane that soared up to six feet above the ground if you pulled back on a joystick:



No pictures of the dark Chevvy Trailblazer with license 5HQN577, which passed me on double yellow lines on Route 1 heading into a blind curve. The Darwin Awards aren't all they're cracked up to be, buddy -- not that it would be fair to win one while killing someone in a headon crash.

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