Author Archives: Tom Streeter

SARS-CoV-2 in the Time of Everyone Having the Same Idea for Blog Post Titles

Picture of biscuits I baked this morningSomewhere Gabriel Garcia Márquez is wishing people would actually read his book Love in the Time of Cholera rather than just making up riffs on its name for blog titles.

That said, dibs on One Hundred Years of Solitude.

To be honest, the fact that people are brushing off their old blogs is one of the better things coming out of all of this. Just yesterday (or was it the day before?) I saw that George “Loki” Williams (briefly of Cincinnati, now and forever in New Orleans) fired up his old blog. If you ever had one (or even if you didn’t) get off that book of faces or the tweet machine and give it a try. It’s therapeutic. Or maybe add it in to your mix.  There are lots of people I know who I’d read in a heartbeat. That’s a hint, if not a flat-out request. You have the time.  By and large, we all have the time.

…

So I made biscuits this morning. It’s the second time in a couple of days. Carla made up a huge batch of sausage gravy the other day (in no way a bad thing) and after finishing off the last batch I realized we had enough gravy left for another round. What’s notable about these (and why they rated a picture) is that these are the first biscuits I’ve made using something other than White Lily Self-Rising Flour in quite some time. Any of you who bake know that flour is one of those things that’s pretty hard to find right now.  The last batch exhausted the last of the White Lily I had, so this batch is using the venerable King Arthur All-Purpose and adding the baking powder myself. I’m very pleased with the results. The texture is a little different owing to the higher protein, but they rose well and were in no way tough. Grating frozen butter into the flour and worked the dough as little as possible did the trick. The next “test” will be some of my cinnamon biscuits.  Twice as much butter and 1/4 cup of cinnamon chips. They could probably be classified as scones (since there’s not that much difference between a British scone and an American biscuit anyway.  No egg.  That’s about it, as best I can tell).

…

The other thing I’m doing through all of this is coding what I’m informally calling the Events Engine for Hoperatives.com. It’s essentially going to be an interactive calendar for beer events around Cincinnati (and eventually elsewhere). I don’t want to go into too much detail because, quite frankly, talking about it can get tedious pretty quickly. Here’s the proof.

I’ve been working on it for a very long time (essentially full-time since Christmas), but the ball is rolling now. My programming skills had become very rusty over the years and an awful lot has changed since the last time I’d done anything seriously. It’s been as much an exercise in learning two programming frameworks (Laravel and Vue for those scoring at home) as well as trying to make something usable for all concerned.

I recognize the irony of putting a lot of effort into a way to advertise and track the exact kinds of public activities that none of us have any business doing right now. If there’s any gift I have, it’s timing. There’s a reason I like to say that the purpose of my life is to serve as a cautionary tale to others. It occurred to me the other day, though, that there may be some real use for this during this time.  Breweries are, for the most part, still making beer (thank the deity of your choice). Buying it can be a bit of a challenge, though. It’s not worth going into a bunch of details here, but I think I’ll be able to roll it out here in a couple of weeks in a limited way so breweries can advertise when and how they’re doing sales. It’s something that changes frequently, so the ability to update it quickly and forget it could be handy. It’s given me a second wind, if nothing else.

…

The purpose of all of this, of course, is to distract myself from the horror that’s coming:

100,000 deaths.  Or more.  The next month is going to be more awful than anything we’ve experienced in our lifetimes. The world is already different. After this there will be no going back. No one will be untouched. Someone I know and love is probably going to die very soon. Maybe more than one someone. And I won’t be unique in that. I’m hunkering down and I hope you are too, but I know everyone can’t.

Get some perspective on what 100,000 people means.  Fill up the Rose Bowl. Then kill everyone. You still haven’t hit 100,000 (you’re about 7,500 short). You can go over by about the same amount by killing everyone in either Neyland Stadium in Knoxville or Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa.  Given the shitty job their state governments are doing, they may not even have to leave their respective states to get that done.

(Never let it be said that I ever pass up a chance to point out how profoundly stupid Kentucky can be, but folks here — and I sincerely mean across the entire  political spectrum — have stepped the hell up.  Except Thomas Massie, Rand Paul, and the Turtle That Grifted, of course.  They’re eternal asshats).

That orange motherfucker in the White House is currently keeping himself half-erect by calling himself a “Wartime President.” Here’s a clue Skippy:  when your completely fucked-up response to an avoidable crisis gets nearly as many Americans killed as were killed by combat in World War I, you lost the fucking war.

Yeah.  I’m angry.  I’m always angry.

Wash your hands.  Stay inside.  Stay alive.  That’s your job.

Let me know if I can help.  That’s mine.

No-class Warfare

Image reading "Worth: Just because you're necessary doesn’t mean you're important"

Image from https://despair.com. Click the image to go to their site.

The Adderall-snorting walking-shitshow has a habit of saying the quiet parts out loud, doesn’t he?

Worse for who, asswipe? And besides Javanka, who the fuck do you mean by “we?”

Where did this quasi-literate shitnozzle get the idea that we give a flying fuck about his problems?  Let’s be clear:  he’s perfectly OK with you dying to pay for his sins.  He doesn’t have your best interests at heart. He doesn’t care who makes his Big Macs. Just as long as they get made.

You really want to go back to work?  You think the same people who steal your shit from the fridge are going to wash their hands when they do it? You want to be carried into the ER the day after your local hospital runs out of ventilators? Let me put it this way:  you have a better chance of getting COVID-19 than you do of winning the lottery. When you hear the words “save the economy,” just substitute “keep the same people in charge of your life” and see if what you’re being asked to do is really in your best interests.

It’s OK to ask “so what’s in it for me?” The scam only works if you don’t think you have a choice. You do.  You’re worth more than whatever your boss gets out of you.  Act like it. Your job is to stay alive.

You really want to die so this guy can live?

Shitnozzle shits on flag

Pity the flag.

Embracing My Inner Bubble Boy

Image of Heimlich from I left the house today for the first time in 12 days. It seemed very weird. I was running a bunch of prescriptions up to Walgreens.  I’m on more than a few meds and this run was the culmination of a months-long effort to get everything sync’d up. Don’t get me wrong:  I like the folks at the Walgreens drive-thru, but I was seeing them so often I felt like I should know the names of their kids and remember their anniversaries.

I’m one of those annoying people this whole societal shutdown hasn’t really affected.  You call it self-quarantine, I call it my preferred lifestyle. No paycheck?  I haven’t seen one since November. Going on the internet to see what part of society has collapsed today?  I’ve been doing that since it became clear the syphilitic shit-pustule was going to take up residence in the White House. I have no criticism for anyone who has freaked out, is now freaking out, or is scheduled for a freak-out at some unspecified time in the future, but that’s not me. I’m not going to say I knew precisely that this was going to happen, but I’ve been living with the full knowledge that something was going to happen that the semi-sentient cold sore wouldn’t be able to handle and he’d get a lot of people killed.

In my mind our condo is now filled with chickens coming home to roost and dropping shoes. None of this is a surprise. It’s actually a little bit of a relief. Hey, it’s my mind, so my metaphors. There’s a reason I’m on a lot of meds.

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I find this fascinating to watch. Some large percentage of what we do everyday — I can’t say how large, but it’s big —  is kabuki-theater bullshit meant to demonstrate to people who don’t give a shit about us that we “know our place.”  A lot of culture is defined by ritual. Most people are changing their rituals now. And it’s raising questions that don’t benefit the needs of people who’ve had it pretty good to date.

Somewhere I heard that if you want to establish a new habit, you should do it for two weeks. I don’t know if two weeks is somehow a magical timeframe, but I do know that you can incorporate new behaviors and cognitive models by forced repetition over relatively short periods of time.  I had a professor who called it “unconscious competence.” You might call it muscle memory.

This isn’t going to be over anytime soon. The last 12 days have been an eternity even to me, and I’ve enjoyed the hell out of it. We’re not near the end.  Hell, we’re probably not at the end of the beginning. It’s going to be fascinating to see what “perfectly obvious” social truths are going to be overwritten.

I’ve long thought the movie A Bug’s Life is the best all-around representation of the late-stage capitalism we live in.  The fact that Kevin Spacey is (allegedly) actually evil is just bonus .. kind of.  In a bad way.  A really bad way. Maybe we can not think too hard about that. Anyway, I’ve always wondered what it would take to trigger us ants to figure out the grasshoppers didn’t have our best interests at heart.

Folks?  I think the circus has come to town.

So stay safe. I’ve got emotional bandwidth to spare, so if you need to freak out to someone, I’d be honored if you’d choose me.  If I can help, I will. I’ll have no answers for you, but I’ll take you seriously. If you’re one of the people who actually knows how to get in touch with me I can assure you I really do care (performative social indifference notwithstanding).

Oh, and wash your damned hands.

 

Somebody’s going to get hurt

I honestly thought I wouldn’t say anything more about this. There have been way too many words written about it already and most of them have been pointless. I’m partly doing this as personal therapy, but I also want it as a record for when things go really wrong. My whole life has teetered somewhere between being a cautionary tale and screaming “I told you so!” at people who never learn. This is one of those times I fear it’s the latter.

I’m talking about the mess with the Astros, of course. What else can people talk about?  I’ve addressed what the team did and I stand by every word I said. I suppose that once the country you live in has descended into being a third-world-style kleptocracy, you’re going to be pissed off about the circuses because you can’t do squat about the bread anymore. Man, if only people got as upset about the Emoluments Clause in the actual Constitution as this… But that’s crazy talk.

Somebody is going to get hurt.  I don’t know if it’s going to be a player getting beaned by a pissed-off pitcher, somebody sliding in spikes-high into a base, or some dumb-ass righteous “fan” seeking a ballistic redress of grievances.  But someone is going to get hurt. The Outrage-Industrial Complex is going full bore.  We haven’t heard from the hotdog vendors at Dodger Stadium yet, but I’m sure it’s penciled in somewhere in The Athletics editorial planner. I bailed out of all social media back in November, and I’m so glad I did.  People are nuts. It’s just a matter of time before someone with an AK-47 goes looking for the basement of the basement-less pizza parlor where the Astros stored all those buzzers.

Here’s “the take” you’re unlikely to see anywhere else:  I don’t believe knowing the called pitch in advance helps the batter that much. Computationally the amount of information that provides versus the cascade of real-time calculations that have to be performed in order to place the bat on the ball is way too small.  If you can tease out the effect of that little information on the overall task of hitting, you don’t need to be worried about baseball; You need to be worried about your travel plans to Stockholm to pick up your Nobel in Medicine.

I know, I know, I know.  Every major league hitter is lining up to talk about how much it helps.  I’m sure they believe it.  Strongly. And we all know that the strength of an anecdotal personal belief constitutes reliable evidence of empirical phenomena.  Ask any Anti-Vaxxer or Biblical Literalist. They’ll be happy to explain it to you. In excruciating detail. Attribution Theory is a thing, y’all.

I’m sure knowing what pitch is coming helps.  Except for all the times that it doesn’t. Good luck finding the difference between the two. Sure, you might know slow or fast. But placement?  Trajectory? Break? And have I really stolen a sign if the pitcher actually throws the pitch to the backstop?  I’ll be happy to look at any evidence that it works, but I’m profoundly disinterested in the opinions of people who won’t wash their socks during a hitting streak.  For Jobu’s sake, think for a minute.

And, yes, I know about the L-Shaped screens for live BP. Of course no one actually got hit once in an entire season-and-a-half of systematic sign-stealing during actual games, but they … could have?  But remember:  it was only wrong if it was a pitch known in advance because of an electronically-stolen sign. Analog sign stealing isn’t illegal, it’s tradition. It’s only when those darn electrons get involved that things go wrong. So be selective in your outrage when a traumatic brain injury occurs.

It’s not that what the Astros did was right. I’ve explained what I see wrong in what they did, and how the punishment they were given was richly deserved. What I can’t — and won’t — accept without saying something is the degree to which people are willing to shut off their brains in order to be sanctimonious.

Somebody’s going to get hurt.  And when that happens, no one is going to understand how that happened. This is just my way of telling you that you could see this coming. Don’t try to say you couldn’t. And it will be your fault.  After all, everybody who’s calling for automatic lifetime bans for everyone in the organization is clearly fine with collective sanctions regardless of personal participation.

Hey, I don’t make the rules. But I’m perfectly fine applying the ones you make for others to you.

Damn it PJ

Carla and I are wrapping up a week’s vacation and tonight we got blindsided by awful news. PJ Neumann, co-owner of Boomtown Biscuits & Whiskey, has passed away. Out of respect to his family’s privacy at a time when things are nuts and everyone is trying to sort things out I don’t want to go into details, especially considering I don’t have many of them anyway. From my perspective they’re exactly that: details. The only thing that matters is that he’s gone. And I don’t like that one bit.

Most people who knew PJ knew him better than I did. To me he was one of Carla’s favorite students ever. I don’t say that lightly. There aren’t that many. She’s been teaching for a very long time and you could fill up a pretty good-sized zip-code with them and have some left over. But there are a few that took up residence in her heart. PJ was definitely on the short list.

That’s not supposed to be in past-tense, damn it. This sucks.

We would be out somewhere on the town and if it was someplace PJ worked (Rock Bottom was where it started) we’d make sure to see if he was working. Or we wouldn’t know he was working and he’d see us and come over. The next morning or sometime later Carla would just blurt out “It was so good to see PJ.” And I’d agree. He seemed like a good guy.

We celebrated our 21st wedding anniversary this past July and we decided we wanted to have our meal at Boomtown. I’d never been there, but I’d heard so many good things from so many people. I spend much of my time in a daze and, while I knew PJ was involved in the management there, I’d somehow completely spaced on the fact that he co-owned the place. I’m an idiot sometimes.

The minute we were through the door PJ was there to greet us. While we had a really nice server who was well up to the job, PJ kept coming over to check in on us. It was during one of these interludes that he touched my life in an important way that will stay with me for the rest of mine. It’s probably going to sound silly, but I find life to be a largely meaningless trek from one moment to the next that occasionally gets interrupted by something worth getting out of bed for.

For me, one of those things is biscuits. (Cats are another). I don’t know if that make me simple or complicated, but it’s a part of my personal ontology. I’m 56 years old and I still haven’t made my best biscuit yet. The food scientist Shirley Corriher has an extended riff on how “tender-flaky” biscuits are a holy grail that can happen, but the odds are stacked against you. I’ve tried — and subjected Carla to — dozens of techniques. Some even came close to working.

I’d been making some good progress, and one time when PJ came out that night we started talking biscuits. Understand something: this is a restaurant that has the word ‘biscuit’ in the name. He could have copped an attitude. He could have gone the “secret recipe” route and what could I have really said? But he didn’t. He shared a technique I wasn’t aware of and has been transformative to doing a thing that makes me happy in a world where not much does.

Freeze the butter. Grate it into the flour, including some between each layer when folding.

Oh. My. God. Good low-protein flour (rhymes with “White Lily”), frozen grated butter and impatience (so you don’t work the dough too much). I’ve still not made the best biscuit I ever will, but I’m closer now than I was before. And I have PJ to thank.

We were talking about going back down sometime. I so wanted thank him in person for the hint. Now I won’t be able to and I’m equal parts pissed at him and sad. Carla is gutted. I’m gutted. Dude, you’re supposed to be here. I’m a casual acquaintance, really. I cannot begin to comprehend the pain for those who were really close. My heart goes out to all of you.

We touch the lives of everyone we meet. Most of the time it’s a good thing and we’re utterly unaware of it. PJ was a good guy and the world was better place with him in it. I doubt he knew. One never does. Keep his family and friends in your hearts. There’s an awful big hole in all of their lives now.

Thanks PJ. I’m thankful for what I learned and I wish I’d learned more. Rest well.

Forever an Astros Fan

The hammer dropped the other day when I wasn’t looking. The long-awaited report and sanctions against the Houston Astros dropped on Monday. Hinch is gone. Luhnow’s gone. Money and draft picks are gone. Any sense of proportion about this whole thing was gone a long time ago, so nothing much changed on that front.

Carla and I are traveling and I wasn’t paying attention to any news. Carla told me later she saw it, but decided to let me find out on my own. That was good. I was having a good day Monday. I was having a good day yesterday, too, but on Monday the news would have been an intrusion while yesterday I was poking my head up to see what was going on in the world. I seldom assume what’s going on in the world is it’s going to be good, so it’s not like I wasn’t prepared. It didn’t upset me. It was never going to.

I read the report (that link is a PDF, by the way). I think it’s fair in the same way I think Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich’s reporting in The Athletic has been excellent (I’m not linking to specific articles because I don’t know what they do and don’t have behind the paywall). I hate what I read, but I’ve never hated that it was written. They did good work. I don’t know if they’ll be recognized for what they wrote — awards are screwy things — but good for them if they do. Rosenthal has been very clear (and studiously ignored by everyone) in his stance that the problem with the use of technology to decode pitcher’s signs isn’t limited to the Astros. The difference between the Astros and everyone else is that Mike Fiers decided he didn’t want to get Christmas cards from anyone on the Astros anymore. This doesn’t happen without Mike Fiers deciding to settle some score he had in his head. (When are you sending back the money Mike? It’s tainted, right?). The cheating isn’t what distinguishes the Astros from other teams, it’s the fact that someone was willing to drop the dime on them.

This, to me, is the most important paragraph in the nine pages:

Some Astros players told my investigators that they did not believe the sign-stealing scheme was effective, and it was more distracting than useful to hitters. I am neither in a position to evaluate whether the scheme helped Astros hitters (who were unquestionably a very talented group), nor whether it helped the Astros win any games. There are so many factors that impact the outcome of games that addressing that issue would require rank speculation. But for purposes of my decision, regardless of whether the scheme was effective or not, it violated the rules and, at a minimum, created the appearance of unfairness, and for that, it necessitates severe discipline.


In re Houston Astros Decision
Page 5

That really is the crux of the matter. Anyone who lived through that season knows we were a much better road team than home team in almost any meaningful statistic. We could all see something changed when we came home and it’s pretty hard not to argue now that people were changing their approach at the plate. The report says Hinch broke the screen twice. Carlos Correa’s ribs got off easier with his masseuse. He clearly wasn’t happy with it. What I’d like to know is what really stopped him from shutting it down. We’ll never know. I’m most disappointed in him, but I suspect he feels the same way. After the warning came down from the Commissioner’s Office, Hinch and Luhnow should have shut it down (given that it was too late to shut it down before warnings became necessary). They didn’t, and that’s why I can’t get too upset about the consequences. The suspensions were justified and I can’t fault Crane for firing them both. Hinch took the hit. Luhnow blamed the players. I think that says all that needs to be said about their characters. (And Taubman? Fuck that guy. He was employed several days longer than he should have been. And despite Crane’s defense of them, he needs a new Media Relations department).

So what have we learned? Players will seek an edge wherever they can find it (whether it works or not) and senior management can range between spineless and malevolent. When I was younger I saw with my own eyes a senior member of the Baseball Operations Office run halfway across the Astrodome to make the ambulance coming to get the stricken J.R. Richard turn around and come in around the warning track. The guy is literally dying and this jerkwad is worried about the already-worn-out Astroturf. So pardon me if I remain standing when I hear that front offices are a snakepit just before getting hit by a feather.

The thing that has driven me nuts about this whole thing — and is literally the reason I closed all my social media accounts — is the reaction of “fans” that hang out there. This “Say it Ain’t So Joe” attitude is tiresome at best, and sociopathic at worst. They could dissolve the team, burn the stadium to the ground, behead Orbit and plant his head on a pike in the smoking crater where the pitching mound used to be and Joe from East Bumfuck still won’t be happy about it.

“But they knew what pitches were coming!”

“Gee Mr. Psychic, Arnoldis Chapman is going to throw you a fastball. Go ahead and hit it.”

I never knew how easy it was to hit major league pitching until this happened. Apparently it’s pretty damned simple. Don’t get me wrong: knowing off-speed vs. fastball is a good bit of info to know when you’re going to the plate, though in principal it’s OK for you to know that. You can steal signs all day long. There just can’t be any electronics involved. There were and there have been consequences. But STFU with all this “tainted championship” crap. Your head is closer to your taint than you are to any demonstrable evidence that this was more help than hindrance.

They shouldn’t have done it. One of my favorite books from my time teaching in Media Informatics at NKU is Bernard Suit’s The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. It’s a philosophical exploration of games and how they work written as a dialog between the Grasshopper from the Ant and the Grasshopper fable and various characters who question him about his … well .. lifestyle choices. It’s a serious work wrapped in a playful package (and it occurs to me that I’ve written about it before). Everything in the book flows from his definition of a game:

To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs […] using only means permitted by rules […] where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means […] and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity […]. I also offer the following simpler and, so to speak, more portable version of the above: playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.1

Suits, Bernard. The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia . Broadview Press. Kindle Edition.

The Astros were guilty of two things: doing something counter to the rules and doing it in such a way that showed contempt for the idea that rules need to be followed in order for the game to be a game. A rap against the Astros front office has long been that it was run by management consultants who didn’t understand that the point of playing baseball is to accept that there are things you just aren’t allowed to do because … The Game. Suits called it the Lusory Attitude and it was the key to understanding the difference between playing a game — any game — and every day life. But for Baseball to start going nuclear — lifetime bans and stripped titles — they’d have to show that routine violations of rules are rare and swiftly punished. I swear on Javy Molina’s chest protector that I have my doubts that would hold up in court. MLB gets to decide how it handles this since they set the rules. And now they have. Feel free to adopt your local independent baseball team if that isn’t pure enough for you. (You actually should adopt your local independent baseball team anyway).

I was an Astros fan before many of the people who were involved in this were born. And they’ll be gone someday, as will I. God willing and the creek don’t rise2, the Astros will still be there. My personalized license plate reads simply “Astros” and will continue to do so. I will continue to wear my 2017 Astros World Series Championship hat with pride, and will politely tell you everything I don’t like about you in excruciating detail if you say a goddamned thing to me about it. I will judge you. And I won’t be nice about it. You wanna play? I’ll play. Bring it.

And get back to me about the sanctity of the rules the next time this happens:

Also in 2017…

1 What I left out of the quote were his use of terms that he clearly explains elsewhere, but would be more distracting than helpful since they have very specific meanings that can’t be explained quickly.

2 Literally. Global warming? Heard of it?

Can Christmas please be over already?

It’s been a weird Christmas. I think it’s the fact that Thanksgiving came so late and also that the world is basically a hellscape. It’s kind of tough to get into the holly-jolly mindset when every morning feels like “what fresh hell is this?” Turnout at all my events have been a little lower than usual (with one notable exception).

This weekend I’m doing two more “Pictures with Your Pets and Santa” sessions at Feeder’s Supply in Walton. And then that’s it. Done for the season. Ironically, last weekend at Feeder’s was the one event that beat previous years. The money goes to support the Boone County Animal Shelter, so if one is going to go right, that’s the one I’d pick.

One first for me this year: Someone brought in a python for pictures! It was extremely cool. Here are a couple of shots. I look a lot more nervous in the second shot than I felt. He stuck his head right up against my nose and I was really taking it all in. And check out the bow!

Mini Spoiler-Free Review of “Knives Out”

I remember a time they used to make movies like this fairly frequently. Now we’re in sequel-and-remake Hell, so this film doing well is important. Go see it. It’s both A Good Movie™ (in the Scorsese-sense) and fun. Actual laughs. Actual suspense. Great misdirection. Every performance — no matter how much screen-time — excellent. It’s a throwback in terms of quality and style but this is a movie definitely set in today.

True to the genre? Yep. Formulaic? No. I will say Daniel Craig’s low-country accent takes a couple (but only a couple) of minutes to adjust to, but it’s true to establishing his character. If it weren’t for those piercing eyes, you’d forget who he was. In a cast full of powerhouse box-office names, the movie lives or dies on the performance of Ana de Armas. I’d say “remember her name,” but I suspect we’ll all be seeing a lot of her, and that’s a great thing.

I’ll watch it again. And I bet I see something I missed before.

Can’t recommend it enough.