Remains of the Day

The truth tickles

Jon Stewart contemplates Obama's health record.

As Chris Rock said about McCain, "How can you make decisions about the future if you aren't going to be there?"

More Stewart..."Nobody joins the Marines because they think they're going to fight fire monsters."

The media writes that young people get more of their news from The Daily Show than regular news channels, and the note that with a tone of disapproval, but who keeps the politicians more honest than the court jester? The Daily Show is our news outlet of choice because it, more than any other news show, says what we think, and does it with style and humor.

Musical notes

Valleywag offers the annotated Weezer Pork and Beans video. Below is the video itself, one of the more perfect viral videos in that it's a viral video that's about other viral videos.

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You can download a free 320Kbps MP3 of the new Sigur Ros single "Gobbledigook" from their website. It's off of their new album, releasing June 23, titled Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust. That means, uh, something in Icelandic.

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Chuck Klosterman selects the 10 musical artists with the "most dedicated, least rational fan followings":

1. Slayer

2. Tori Amos

3. Sublime

4. Kiss

5. Bruce Springsteen

6. Black Sabbath (particularly the Tony Martin era, for some reason)

7. Jimmy Buffett

8. Iron Maiden

9. Guided By Voices

10. Morrissey

The Body People

The NYTimes profiles Barack Obama's "body man" Reggie Love. Personal aide to Obama, Love plays hoops with the Presidential candidate, watches Sportscenter with him, and handles miscellaneous issues like food stains on the tie. Previously, Hillary Clinton's personal aide Huma Abedin garnered a lot of press attention--the NY Observer article titled "Hillary's Mystery Woman: Who is Huma?" practically described her as a superhero, a glamorous, cool, fashion icon.

Now that I'm on crutches, I'm ready to accept applications for my own body person. For the near future, the job will be more Driving Miss Daisy than pickup hoops, but the nightly Sportscenter viewing can commence immediately.

Tweet

Sometimes honesty is the best policy. Actually, more often than companies think, honesty is the best policy when it comes to problems. As in this post from a Twitter engineer about their downtime problems. The web is a giant rumor mill, and the longer companies hide the truth, the more people pile on, and at some point the web is both so vast and interconnected that it's like an echo chamber in which you can't control a story once it's picked up steam.

I signed up for Twitter early on, then ignored it for months as I didn't get much out of it, but I've come around to the idea of it as a really focused, stripped-down social networking application, albeit one that has not scaled gracefully.

Some have turned tweets into a comic art form:

New curse: "May Ry Cooder discover your people's traditional music."

More tweet goodness here.

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Orson Scott Card rips J.K. Rowling for her lawsuit against a small publisher for their book The Harry Potter Lexicon.

Some cool endorsements

PC World named its 100 best products of 2008, and #1 was Hulu. Seeing some of the other products on their list is humbling.

The Morning News posted its 2008 Editors' Awards for Online Excellence last week, and Hulu was noted under its "Favorite Harbingers of the Future". Longtime readers know I'm a faithful TMN reader, so it's a particular treat to see our site mentioned in their pages.

Arigato!

Rift between Sports Guy and ESPN?

Hmm. Maybe that explains the scarcity of his columns on ESPN recently. The timing of an appearance of his own blog is suspicious also. [via Deadspin]

If he chooses to part ways with ESPN, I'm sure he can find another sports outlet to foot his bills for flights out to random sporting events. Though it sounds like what he needs is to move from ESPN to the HBO-equivalent of ESPN, where he can drop the kid gloves on certain topics.

blah blah blah

I'm not picking sides on the debate about the impact of the web on journalism, but I do venture to say that stories like this would not have made the news prior to the rise of the web.

American Airlines to start charging $15 for the first checked bag. That's great, because I just adore flying those roomy coach seats. I I look forward to being charged to use the bathroom, charged to do the crossword on the in-flight magazine sudoku, and charged to rent an overhead bin for my carry-on luggage, too.

Eating vegetables raw is not always the healthiest way to consume them. Thank goodness. Also good news: eating vegetables with a bit of fat, for example in full-fat dressing, may help you absorb more vitamins.

Rebuilt, if not healed

Sorry for the light posting activity here. Last Wednesday, I underwent surgery to reconstruct my left Achilles tendon, and the past week was lost to all that came before and after that procedure.

My roommate dropped me off at the surgery center in the morning. A nurse at the counter upstairs handed me a clipboard and sent me down the hallway to fill it out, only I was on crutches, and the chief disadvantage of crutches, besides the chafing on your inner arm and chest just under the armpit, is that you can't carry anything. I tried grasping it with two fingers and dropped it twice while heading down the hall.

Once shown to the bed, a series of nurses and doctors came by. Eddie works at UCLA Medical Center, so he stopped by, and knowing someone in the hospital helps, if not in actual treatment effectiveness, then at least in personal attention and expectations you form about how attentive your doctors will be. For the most part, all the nurses and doctors I encountered at UCLA in the ER and in the surgery center were unusually friendly. Maybe it's the weather here.

The anesthesia for my surgery was a popliteal fassa block (I had to look that up, and I don't recommend clicking through if you're squeamish about images of Achilles tendon repair; I really wish I hadn't clicked through myself). It's local and numbs the lower part of your leg. They also did some sort of anesthesia for my upper leg as they put my thigh in some sort of balloon tourniquet for the operation.

My last pre-surgery memory was the anesthesiologists working on the nerve block. By then some happy juice had been injected into my IV, and I was off to see the Wizard, the wonderful wizzzzzz...

Waking from sedation is the best part of surgery. It's like waking from the deepest sleep of your life, like floating up from the depths of the ocean through layer after layer of tranquil oblivion. The first thing I noticed, because it was impossible not to, was the gigantic cast on my left leg, extending from my knee on down. My foot was locked in a downward angle, like a ballet dancer would be if up on her toes. The cast is not only thick but solid; the outer layer feels bulletproof. If I was flexible enough and could balance on my right leg like that last kung-fu fighter in Drunken Master 2, the one that fights Jackie Chan using only his legs, I could be a deadly fighter, bludgeoning my opponents to my cast. In a Tsui Hark wusha picture I'd have a nickname like "Iron Shin".

As long as the nerve block was doing its magic, all was good. My left leg was completely numb. At around 8pm I popped two Vicodin just in case, as I started to regain feeling in my leg. The pills made me woozy, and I lay down in anticipation of a good night's sleep.

At around midnight, I shook of my grogginess to get up to two more Vicodin. It was at this point that my troubles began.

I felt a throbbing pain where the surgery had occurred. I couldn't see where the incision had been made, but it felt like the pain was emanating from that spot. I downed the two Vicodin and waited for them to work their magic.

But the pain only increased. So I popped one more a few hours later. And then another. I lay in bed, sweating, clutching my leg, biting on my pillow, moaning, rolling around, trying to escape my body. At one point, my eyes watering from the agony, I grabbed my iPhone and started surfing the web, Googling "achilles rupture surgery pain" and found dozens of blogs devoted to the experiences of Achilles rupture victims. What I read was not encouraging, stories of some patients suffering agonizing pain for days following surgery. At 4am I called Sharon on the East coast, knowing my nephews would have her up and about at that hour. She suggested I call the doctor's office to change up my painkiller, see if it helped. His office didn't open for four hours, but her advice jogged my memory.

I had a bottle of Percocet left over from ACL reconstruction from some ten years ago. i wasn't sure if it was even good anymore, but at this point I didn't care. I hopped to my medicine cabinet and rummaged through it until I found that bottle. I downed two and lay down again.

A few times, I would be at the brink of dozing off, but no matter how exhausted I felt, the pain would grab me by the leg and yank me back to consciousness. I imagined this must be what it felt like to be one of those interrogation victims who were not allowed to fall asleep.

As soon as the doctor's office opened at 8am I was on the phone. There was no magic solution, just the suggestion of switching to Percocet. My roommate went off to pick up my prescription (Percocet being an opiate, doctor's can't call in a prescription). She returned after lunch with the pills, and I gulped down two of them. It did little for the pain but added nausea to my symptoms.

At around 5pm, I stood up to crutch to the bathroom, and on the way back to bed I was staggered by a bout of lightheadedness, and I broke out in a cold sweat.

At first I thought I was feverish, but then I realized my blood sugar was too low as I hadn't eaten in a day and a half. I shouted for my roommate to bring me an apple which I devoured. In the evening, Christina and Eddie and Rob stopped by and prepared a lasagna dinner. I ate a few bites and then felt ill and had to lay down again.

The next night, the pain was still acute, but the drowsiness from the Percocet bought me an hour or two of sleep. By this point, I could start to feel my mind learning to compartmentalize the pain in a way, and I had a particularly heightened feel for how to position my leg for the minimum amount of pain.

My leg, ever since the surgery, seems to have built in accelerometers attached to pain release mechanisms. As long as it's elevated, there's little pain. Swing my leg upright, and as the blood flows down past my knee it brings the pain, a quick and sharp muscular pain.

Friday night, Christina stopped by, having purchased a little stool for my bathtub. On the back of the product packaging were photos of related products, like bathtub handgrips and handlebars to mount on your toilet. Very sexy stuff. But that stool. the Drycast Eleanor recommended, and the handheld shower head my dad installed for me have improved my post-injury quality of life more than anything. Prior to that, I tried taping a garbage bag to my leg and standing on one leg in the shower. Not only did that fail to keep my cast dry but it left me exhausted from exertion. As soon as I made it out of the shower I'd be sweating again from trying to maintain what must surely be an advanced yoga position. The Drycast resembles a sort of giant condom for your leg, and it's not sexy, but it's effective.

Friday night I slept for five hours continuously, the only mishap being that I slept past my pain medication alarm at 2am. I didn't sleep past the excruciating pain at 5am that woke me, and I didn't miss another pain medication deadline the rest of the weekend.

My bathroom has one of those apartment showers with the sliding doors. Because I can't put weight on my crutch leg, getting into the shower involves hanging from the top of the sliding door frame and swinging in like Tarzan and nailing the one-legged landing. Remember Keri Strug with her heroic vault, hopping around on one leg and raising her arms in a big V to salute the judges? That's me every day when I nail my landing in the bathtub.

And so that's where I am now. Pain under control as long as the leg's propped up. I can drive (my dad swapped cars with me as I can't hit the clutch anymore), but only for short distances as I don't think police would look kindly on me if I drove with my cast hanging out the driver's window. I still haven't found a great solution to carrying things while on my crutches, though I'm definitely eyeing these knee walkers. If only they didn't cost so much and look like, well, accessories for the elderly. Yep, I'm hobbling around with a serious injury, but I'm still cheap and vain.

I'm dependent on my roommate and friends to help buy groceries and to take me places where I might not be able to park close to where I'm going. Not that I'd recommend blowing out your ACL, but compared to the recovery period from an Achilles rupture, I'd much prefer an ACL injury.

It's not ideal, and this whole situation still forces me to count to ten at least a few times a day, but as consolation I'm considering cultivating the personality of an arrogant, brilliant, and blunt curmedgeon who pops painkillers like Skittles and has abnormally formidable deductive powers. Once I'm out of this hard cast I may even start walking with a cane.

Christmas comes early to Chicago

The Bulls get their pick of Derrick Rose or Michael Beasley in the upcoming NBA draft. Maybe suffering through such an awful season wasn't all for naught.

I vote for Rose. Let the healing begin.

Steps

I love Lebron, but this clip Eric sent me is hilarious. Lebron takes about 15 steps on the way to the basket. It's great that it's then show in slow-mo so you can see just how egregious a travel this is. NBA refereeing is difficult, but traveling is an easy call that they just don't ever make, like the phantom tag of second base in baseball.

Study confirms what most Netflix renters already know

This Harvard Business School paper confirms a phenomenon most Netflix renters are familiar with. People feel like they should rent Citizen Kane or Born Into Brothels, but those DVDs sit on the TV collecting dust while rentals like Must Love Dogs or Mr. and Mrs. Smith get watched and returned lickety-split.

The study notes, however, that this disparity lessens over time as people finally realize that what they want is not to have to think.

We predict and find that people are more likely to rent DVDs in one order and return them in the reverse order when should DVDs (e.g., documentaries) are rented before want DVDs (e.g., action films). This effect is sizeable in magnitude, with a 2% increase in the probability of a reversal in preferences (from a baseline rate of 12%) ensuing if the first of two sequentially rented movies has more should and fewer want characteristics than the second film. Similarly, we also predict and find that should DVDs are held significantly longer than want DVDs within-customer. Finally, we find that as the same customers gain more experience with online DVD rentals, their “dynamic inconsistency” is attenuated. We interpret our results as evidence that myopia has a meaningful impact on decisions in the field and that people learn about their myopia with experience, allowing them to curb its influence.

Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation

With the fourth Indiana Jones movie just around the corner, this seems timely. A legendary amateur filmmaker shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark has been been floating out there for many years now, with occasional film festival play and a decent amount of press coverage.

The first 10 minutes are available at YouTube now.

A writing professor once told me that if I typed out the entire text of James Joyce's "The Dead" that his soul would inhabit mine. Perhaps this is the filmmaking equivalent?

How it all went down

Everyone who hears about my basketball injury asks how it happened. There were no video cameras there, but imagine me as Chris Paul and this is an eerie video replay of the shot I hit just before my Achilles exploded.

T-minus one day until I go under the knife. I am ready to get it over with and start on the long rehab process. The thought of not being able to run or jump or exercise until sometime in February or March of 2009 is driving me crazy. No NY Marathon in November, no golf trip with the boys this summer, no snowboarding next winter, no running along the beach in Santa Monica, no hitting tennis balls with coworkers.

I need something, and I'm not sure what it is yet, to dissipate my agitation, or I'm going to lose my mind.

The Fall

Trailer for The Fall by Tarsem. Showed its head at the Toronto Film Festival back in 2006 but didn't get picked up by distributors, but now, with David Fincher and Spike Jonze throwing their names behind it, a theatrical release looms.

I wonder who chose to go with just plain "Tarsem" instead of "Tarsem Singh." Was it Tarsem himself, or a third party? If one of my movies makes it to theaters one day, can I just have "Directed by Eugene" flash on screen at the start?

Innovators and innovation

Lots about innovation this past week. The May 12 edition of The New Yorker was the Innovators Issue, and one of the better ones in recent memory.

It features an article by Malcolm Gladwell, ostensibly about Nathan Myhrvold and his company Intellectual Ventures, a sort of idea-generating patent-filing machine, but really about the radical idea that innovation or innovative ideas may not be as rare as we think, may not be the result of genius and eureka moments. Can you capture innovation or ideas merely by dedicating time and resources to searching for them?

The issue also features a profile of someone who I've never heard of but whose work I've undoubtedly seen dozens if not hundreds of times: Pascal Dangin, the world's foremost digital retoucher of fashion photographs.

Vanity Fair, W, Harper’s Bazaar, Allure, French Vogue, Italian Vogue, V, and the Times Magazine, among others, also use Dangin. Many photographers, including Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, Craig McDean, Mario Sorrenti, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, rarely work with anyone else. Around thirty celebrities keep him on retainer, in order to insure that any portrait of them that appears in any outlet passes through his shop, to be scrubbed of crow’s-feet and stray hairs.

I'm aware that most fashion photographs are worked over in post-production, but seeing an example of Dangin's work in the actual print copy of the issue surprised me with how much he actually alters body parts and features. Manipulating the truth, or giving the public what it wants?

But playing with the representational possibilities of photographs, and the bodies contained therein, has always aroused the suspicion of viewers with a perpetual, if naïve, desire for objective renderings of the world around them. As much as it is a truism that photography is subjective, it is also a truism that many of its beholders—even those who happily eliminate red-eye from their wedding albums—will take umbrage when confronted with evidence of its subjectivity. Eastlake was responding to the distress of certain members of the London Photographic Society over a series of photographs taken deliberately out of focus. More recently, Kate Winslet protested that the digital slimming of her figure on the cover of British GQ was “excessive,” while Andy Roddick griped that Men’s Fitness exaggerated his biceps, saying, “Little did I know I have twenty-two-inch guns and a disappearing birthmark on my right arm.”

To avoid such complaints, retouchers tend to practice semi-clandestinely. “It is known that everybody does it, but they protest,” Dangin said recently. “The people who complain about retouching are the first to say, ‘Get this thing off my arm.’ ” I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

Also profiled: Grant Achatz, head chef at Alinea, one of the more famous restaurants in America, and perhaps the most famous outpost of the molecular gastronomy movement in the U.S. I ate at Moto many years ago, just before Alinea was set to open, and already there was a several month waiting list for Grant Achatz's first restaurant of his own.

Achatz is trying to fight his way back from tongue cancer, a particularly devastating illness for someone who depends so heavily on his sense of taste. I'd still love to eat at Alinea which, along with French Laundry and El Bulli, are the three restaurants that top my dining hitlist.

Achatz is putting out the Alinea Book, a cookbook, this fall.

Lastly, and not from The New Yorker, was this popular article (free registration required to read it) from McKinsey Quarterly, an interview with Pixar's Brad Bird about how he and Pixar foster innovation.

A great interview, from which a few points stood out to me.

Brad Bird: In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

This is true in so many walks of life, from the office to the film set to the locker room. What's difficult about achieving this, though, is that it's so easy for senior management/directors/coaches to be oblivious to the morale of their companies/cast and crew/teams. This is perhaps most true for the business leader.

The very nature of being senior management insulates one from the troops. The most common shape of a modern business org. structure is a pyramid, which is designed for efficiency of downward communication, but not for the reverse. CEO's sit in gilded offices on the top floor of ivory towers, and access to them is restricted by intimidating assistants. The power structure in companies means that even if morale is down, no one lower down on the org. structure is likely to be honest in front of the CEO or the head of their division for fear of being seen as a malcontent.

It's a real challenge. It's not easy for the top dog to be just "one of the guys" to use an old and somewhat sexually dated saying. I'm reminded of Henry V in Shakespeare's play, on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, disguising himself as a commoner and walking around his camp to both gauge and raise the morale of his men. He does so with the recognition that it's the only way his men will speak honestly with him. In fact, the first question posed to Henry V as he wanders in disguise is from a sentinel, Pistol:

Discuss unto me; art thou officer?
Or art thou base, common and popular?

It's an interesting choice of words, "common and popular," and it speaks to the difficulty of being both powerful and popular, derived from the Latin populus for "the people."

Then there’s our building. Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. He realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.

On the Hulu development team, we've tried to counteract both the insulation and communication issue by all sitting in one communal cube farm. Everyone, regardless of title, has the same setup. So far it's worked out great.

First of all, there's a collegial feeling fostered by all sitting together. Communication is sped up; rather than fire off e-mails, many exchanges can be handled by simply strolling a few feet to a colleague's cube, or just by swiveling a chair. News travels really really fast in dev heaven, the nickname of our little office neighborhood. Many times, one of us overhears a conversation between some colleagues and can jump in with a suggestion or solution.

If our setup weren't enough to encourage interaction among the team, we also set up central snack or food areas in the center of dev heaven to encourage more foot traffic and casual encounters. We keep several rolling whiteboards in the area to allow for quick, mobile meetings or brainstorms.

We keep one or two communal offices nearby for those times when people need to do jump on conference calls or make personal calls. It's not the conventional setup for development teams, what with Peopleware extolling the virtue of private offices for every developer, or even for normal companies, but in a startup that needs to stay nimble and move quickly, it's been a plus for us.

One last point from the Brad Bird interview:

Brad Bird: Walt Disney’s mantra was, “I don’t make movies to make money—I make money to make movies.” That’s a good way to sum up the difference between Disney at its height and Disney when it was lost. It’s also true of Pixar and a lot of other companies. It seems counterintuitive, but for imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus.

Amen.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars trailer

Not the most expressive of animated faces, but then again, there weren't many of those in the last three Star Wars movies either.

Criterion Blu-ray DVDs coming

From the Criterion newsletter:

Our first Blu-ray discs are coming! We’ve picked a little over a dozen titles from the collection for Blu-ray treatment, and we’ll begin rolling them out in October. These new editions will feature glorious high-definition picture and sound, all the supplemental content of the DVD releases, and they will be priced to match our standard-def editions.

Here’s what’s in the pipeline:

The Third Man
Bottle Rocket
Chungking Express
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Last Emperor
El Norte
The 400 Blows
Gimme Shelter
The Complete Monterey Pop
Contempt
Walkabout
For All Mankind
The Wages of Fear

Malcolm Gladwell's new book: Outliers

Malcolm Gladwell's upcoming new book has been listed at Amazon.com: Outliers.

It ships Nov 18, 2008, and I've already 1-click'd it. Amazon needs an even more premium shipping service than Amazon Prime, maybe they can call it Amazon Optimus Prime, that ships books to customers before they're even released.

My first patent

Cool, I actually got awarded a patent. That patent is the basis of what is now Amazon's Flexible Payment Service. It's humbling to be on the same inventor list as some of those names.

A who's who of Achilles tendon injuries

A list of famous people who've suffered severe injuries of their Achilles. Gives me some comfort that most were able to come back strong.

The oddest entry on the list: Brad Pitt tearing his Achilles while playing Achilles in Troy. There you go. Yet one more thing that Brad Pitt and I have in common.

Go Speed Racer

One of the catchier theme songs around...

The first season is up at Hulu, with the rest following closely behind, all 52 or so episodes. I have fond memories of watching this some lazy summer afternoons as a child. At an early age, I had gadget envy, what with the Mach 5 having a bunch of buttons on its steering wheel, each of which would activate some whiz-bang function.

Hulu also now has Versus' weekly cycling recap show Cyclysm Sundays. Now that I'm felled by my torn Achilles tendon, watching or hearing about any sport is like grapefruit juice in my eye, but I do have fond memories of cycling as the sport that brought me back to a mental and physical whole after blowing out my knee back in 1998.

Last, another good new add: the 2008 National Heads-Up Poker Championship. Hulu now has all the full episodes of this year's tournament. This episode has Phil Ivey heads up against Johnny Chan.

Achilles heel

I spend over 6 hours in UCLA's ER today, waiting to see someone who could put my leg in a splint and to get a pair of crutches. Too much TV may leave you thinking ER's are thrilling places, with severely injured patients being rushed in on stretchers, oxygen mask pressed to their faces, clothing drenched in blood. Or, when they aren't embroiled in life-and-death situations, TV depicts them as a collection of odd and colorful patients mingling with attractive and earnest interns who are hooking up in closets when they aren't learning lessons about life from their cases.

The truth, as anyone who's had to go the the ER knows, is far far less glamorous. After checking in, I waited about a half hour before they sent me into a see a nurse who took my blood pressure and asked me why I was there. I explained that I was pretty sure I'd ruptured my Achilles tendon.

She tapped away at her keyboard, then paused, wrinkling her brow.

"How do you spell Achilles?" she asked.

Another nurse took my paperwork and then dropped it into a file bin attached to the wall. The bin was labeled Tier 4/5 and was packed with what appeared to be the paperwork for 15 or 16 other patients, mine slotting at the end.

"Intimidated?" asked the nurse, with a laugh.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"By all the papers ahead of you," he said. "Don't worry, you're fast track."

I never thought to ask what that meant, though I hoped it was something like the Fast Pass service at Disneyland, where you get a ticket that tells you what time to come back for a ride in the park, helping you to avoid waiting in line for hours. But no, my fast track status didn't seem to confer any special advantages.

I spent about three hours siting in a wheelchair in a waiting room that smelled of, well, the dozen or so other patients snoring away (a few appeared not to have showered anytime recent, so the scent I'm referring to wasn't exactly like "lavender breeze" or some Williams-Sonoma liquid soap scent). I couldn't get a single bar of cell phone reception the whole time I was in ER, so I spent a lot of time reading the magazines I'd brought with me.

To their credit, quite a few of the people who did help me out in the ER were friendly, even cheerful. They moved me from one spot in the hallway to the next, parking me (in the wheelchair) at random spots. I felt like Keri Strug being passed around in that ESPN commercial.

When a doctor finally saw me, he quickly confirmed my suspicions, using the same test I'd done on myself the previous night (I believe it's called The Thompson test). They put my leg in a splint, handed me some crutches, and finally, I staggered out of that ER, starving and stir-crazy, and struggling to shut out the nagging thought that the one thing I'd need over the next year was a quality that seems to have slipped away from me bit by bit over the years, and that is patience.

The one positive thought I held onto tonight, as they confirmed my diagnosis, was that at least I wasn't a horse, like Eight Belles. I don't know if horses have Achilles tendons, but I suspect if I was a horse, I'd have been put out to that great pasture in the sky.

Margin of victory

From a chat with John Hollinger on ESPN today:

Will (NYC): I agree that some close games are 50/50 but those are in the minority. A big part of being a great team is the ability to show heart and win the close games. It's called performing under pressure and that is something that Boston showed they may be lacking greatly. That is why people are less confident in their chances.

SportsNation John Hollinger: (3:37 PM ET ) A lot of people believe that, but it isn't true is just overwhelming. Look at any team that was together for a number of years, even the great ones -- Jordan's Bulls, for instance -- and you'll find that the closer the score, the closer they are to .500. In other words, in games decided by two points or less they'd be almost exactly .500, even a team like the Bulls; in games decided by 15 points or more they'd be nearly 1.000. It's a fallacy that the good teams win the close games; the good teams win by 20. The lucky teams win the close games. There is no team in history that's been able to defy the correlation between scoring margin and wins over an extended period.

Statistical analysis has indicated the same relationship between luck and records in close games in baseball. It's a result that seems contrary to our intuition, which is that certain players, like the Jordans or Bryants, give some teams an edge in crunchtime. I believe in that idea generally, but still think that having Michael Jordan was that rare exception that did give the Bulls an edge in close games.

Speed Racer

My roommate took me to a BAFTA screening of Speed Racer last Saturday. I didn't know what to expect, having only seen that trippy trailer once, but walking into the cacaphony of a Saturday afternoon screening packed with really young kids should've clued me in to the target audience, of which yours truly was definitely not a member.

This is a kids movie. A kids movie. Not like a Pixar movie, which people of all ages enjoy, but a kids movie, one that left me feeling nothing. Watching the CGI-heavy auto races reminded me of watching me of watching that canyon race in The Phantom Menace. In both cases, I didn't feel anything, not a sense of speed, or danger, or excitement. Maybe it's the immateriality of digitally drawn surfaces, or the highly-attuned ability of people to sense when the physics of collisions and motion of digital vehicles are just not quite true to life.

There are some interesting visual touches that caught my eye. Some shots with a close-up of a face in the foreground and figures in the other half of the frame in the background seem as if they were shot with a split diopter, both sets of people being in such sharp focus. It's as if the DP was trying to imitate the flat, deep focus look of animation like that in the original TV cartoon series.

But for the most part, I felt uninvolved, even bored. There are times when I find I can't enjoy something targeted towards a younger audience and feel, well, old. But in this case, it's not me, it's you. Or them. Or it.

Forever stamps

Should you buy forever stamps (ones that cost 41 cents but can be used forever)? Looking at historical stamp prices versus inflation, the answer is no.

But I tend to buy stamps in bulk anyway, just to avoid having to go to the Post Office to wait in a long line, so the next time I do that, why not buy forever stamps rather than regular stamps?

Snap

Even never having injured my achilles tendon before, I'd heard of enough instances of the most dreaded of injuries to the Achilles that it's the first thought that ran through my head after I landed in a heap and felt the searing pain. It felt as if one of the other pickup hoops players had kicked me really hard directly in my left achilles tendon (I'd later read online that this is one of the symptoms of that injury that I thought if I never pronounced might not be true).

But the web has made amateur doctors of us all, and as soon as I hopped back to my sofa at home, I did a Google search for "ruptured Achilles tendon symptoms" and went to one of the lists of symptoms.

Check.

Check.

Check.

Check.

Check.

Of course, I'm no doctor, I just did a quick stay at the Internet Holiday Inn, but I'm 97% sure that my left Achilles completely ruptured when I landed on somebody's foot tonight. You can actually see and feel the spot where the tendon is no longer connected.

And so for the second time in my life, I'm facing major surgery on my left leg and months of rehab to get back to doing things I enjoy, like basketball, cycling, running, tennis, and other such sports. Right now, I'd even settle for jumping, or even just plain walking.

In general, I think I'm pretty level-headed. But I've got to be honest, I'm feeling more than a little dejected right now.

To the victor go the spoils

Joel Spolsky, at the end of his recent "Architecture Astronauts Take Over":

Why I really care is that Microsoft is vacuuming up way too many programmers. Between Microsoft, with their shady recruiters making unethical exploding offers to unsuspecting college students, and Google (you're on my radar) paying untenable salaries to kids with more ultimate frisbee experience than Python, whose main job will be to play foosball in the googleplex and walk around trying to get someone...anyone...to come see the demo code they've just written with their "20% time," doing some kind of, let me guess, cloud-based synchronization... between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can't think of a single useful thing to build for us, but they need another 3000-4000 comp sci grads next week. And dammit foosball doesn't play itself.

Now that's a business strategy I hadn't thought of: using your vast financial resources to essentially corner the market on programming talent. Hah.

I don't know what Microsoft and Google have all their developers working on, but there's no doubt that it's a great time to be a developer. After English, or perhaps before it, the most valuable language for a kid to learn is a programming language.

In all seriousness, it's more than money that makes Google such a formidable recruiter of technical talent. There's a mythology, and feeding into it is the 20% time, the foosball, the free meals, all of that. The same mystique attaches to a company like Pixar. It's not cheap, and the companies invest heavily in it, but it pays back in recruiting efficiency.

And it helps, of course, to be the market leader.

She & Him

I caught She & Him at the Vista Theatre on Monday night. She & Him are actress Zooey Deschanel and indie music star M. Ward, touring in support of their first album together, Volume One.

Their music is simple and has a nostalgic charm. Zooey is not going to compare to Matt on musical talent--if real-life guitar skills transferred to the videogame world he'd be dominating people on Guitar Hero--but she has a strong, clear voice and that same sweetness that she's showcased on screen. They both have a relaxed, confident stage presence that draws the crowd over to their side.

On the "do they sound better on CD/MP3 or do they sound better live" question, based on this concert it's the latter. M. Ward die-hards may feel a bit short-changed that he doesn't sing as much in this collaboration, but I'm not familiar enough with the oeuvre of M. Ward to know what I missed. Live, their sound is bigger and richer than on CD.