Obama

My sister Joannie and my brother-in-law Mike are working on the Barack Obama campaign. He's the political darling of the country right now, with recent profiles in The New Republic (registration required) and The New Yorker (online this week only). Obama is running for Senate against Republican candidate Jack Ryan.
Oddly, Ryan has assigned one of his worker bees, Justin Warfel, to follow Obama with a camera, filming his every movement. Not very sporting. Ryan was once married to Boston Public and Star Trek: Voyager actress Jeri Ryan, and he's gone to court to fight the media's request to unseal their 1999 divorce child custody papers. Ryan says there's nothing to hide and that he's seeking to protect the privacy of his nine year old son Alex. The media claims the public has a right to know more about Ryan since he's seeking public office.

Conspiracy Theory

I have no idea if this short comic strip is grounded in fact, but it makes for great conspiracy.

Duping the cynical/ironic/postmodern viewer

MTV's Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica if a reality TV show that follows teen pop stars Nick Lachey (former lead singer of 98 Degrees) and Jessica Simpson in the first year of their marriage. It has in its first year become perhaps the most extreme example of reality TV which ridicules its subjects for the entertainment of its audience (surprisingly, there are exames of reality TV that don't). Jessica Simpson has quickly become a reality TV legend, offering enough ditzy, bubbly one-liners in her first season to merit a regular rotation in Entertainment Weekly's Sound Bites. And yet one can't help feeling that it's the audience that's being played, or perhaps even conned.
Cynical stares are corrosive, and those who plead guilty to such stares don't tend to hold our interest for long. Sure, it was fun to watch the disasters that were the Osbourne household and Anna Nicole Smith for a season, maybe even two, but ratings didn't and couldn't last because they were so openly and brazenly exactly what we wanted to expose them as. In fact, how can we even resort to irony (supposedly the scourge of my generation, a disease present in everything we write and say--see footnote 1), which capitalizes on the difference between appearance and reality, when the Osbourne's or Nick and Jessica are exactly what we wanted and imagined them to be? It's more fun to ridicule when the subjects resist arrest.
It's not surprising, perhaps. TV has always depended, in great part, on feeding us exactly what we want (see footnote 2). That's their entire modus operandi, and they spend millions on market research, testing dozens of new programs every season, to find the right buttons to press, and when they do, they press them until the buttons fall off. It's difficult for me to know when it was that my generation was supposed to have descended into this cynical, ironic, post-modern funk I always hear us accused of--perhaps it was the Vietnam War--but if that is our primary mode of discourse, then somewhere along the line TV finally realized that what drew our eyes and ears was an echo of our own cynical voices. TV has co-opted my generation's mode of irony.
And so, to complement hopeful, happy television shows (Friends, for example), we're flooded with television shows that expose people for the unpleasant, money-grubbing scoundrels we always knew they were. People stabbing each other in the back on Survivor, contestants whoring themselves for money or sex on shows like Fear Factor and Dismissed, celebrities revealing their pettiness and idiocy in tabloids or in reality shows like The Osbournes, The Anna Nicole Smith show, and of course The Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica. Even when these shows attempt irony, as Joe Millionaire does by exposing the reaction of women to a rich man who is actually poor, it is in a mean-spirited, duplicitous way, and since we are already so cynical, perhaps it isn't ironic at all that the women turn out to be gold diggers. They're exactly what we expect them to be.
I'm guilty of being too cynical myself at times, and it's a voice that is common to young twenty-something bloggers who love to rant and rave about anything and everything. It's a way to preen in our superiority over the objects of our ridicule and to display our cleverness all at once, and so it's tempting, but it's also empty. Irony was once used as a form of protest and could stand on its own as a position, but negation without offering alternatives is simply empty.
Perhaps Jessica Simpson is actually a rocket scientist, but plays a dumb blonde in front of MTV's cameras to boost ratings for her show. After all, how could she, after watching season one, renew for a second season? Perhaps because she hears her fifteen minutes ticking away to oblivion and realizes that her only chance of holding the public's eye is not through her fading pop career but through her self-made caricature. Who's playing who here? Maybe Jessica's getting the last laugh after all.
You know that once it's unhip to be anything but ironic and cynical, then it's time to remember how to be sincere. I think I remember how.
Footnote 1: Worse than having my generation constantly blamed for being ironic is the chronic overuse and misuse of the word irony. Maybe my generation wouldn't be accused of being so ironic if everyone stopped labeling every damned event or statement as being ironic. Sometimes I can't even tell the difference among cynicism, irony, sarcasm, satire, and postmodernism. The blurred usage has got even me confused. It doesn't help that Alanis Morrissette's popular ditty "Isn't it Ironic" completely botched the definition of irony and profferred a slew of examples of irony, none of which were really ironic except under the broadest and loosest definitions of irony, ones which render irony somewhat meaningless and indistinct from misfortune or coincidence.
The most common case of mistaken identity is between coincidence and irony. Especially unfortunate coincidence. For example, someone who always carries breath mints in his pocket finally leaves them at home one day and then finds himself stuck with bad breath just as a beautiful woman wants to kiss. That's more Murphy's Law than irony, but many people would be tempted to say, "Isn't that ironic?"
In fact, it's probably giving my generation too much credit to call us all ironists. Many of my generation are just apathetic and/or cynical, but irony is a higher art form which few have mastered. Anyway, it's a topic which other folks have already covered in more detail than I.
Footnote 2: In this way, TV is no different than politicians, the latest and greatest example being Arnold Schwarzenegger whose election to the governorship of the 5th largest economy in the world has many people wringing their hands. Arnie read that state's discontents, echoed back their anger and desires (which he could gauge through polling), and rode that empathy and a poor economy to election. Clinton was a master of using polling data to adjust his campaign and elevate his approval ratings--by the time he reached office polling had become an art form. It shouldn't come as any surprise that Arnold won. After all, the most popular Democratic president in the U.S., by many measures, is Martin Sheen's Jed Bartlet on The West Wing, and he's just a fictional creation, so why shouldn't Arnold, an actor himself, and someone whose job in movies is to put butts in seats, attract more voters than a curmudgeonly Gray Davis, regardless of Davis' political experience?
The complaints about Arnie's victory remind me of the argument against using box office to judge the quality of movies: Just because Titanic was the greatest box office hit of all time doesn't mean Titanic . Just because a more people voted for Arnie than Gray Davis doesn't mean Arnie's an adequate, let alone superior, politician. A democratic vote isn't necessarily the best method to discern quality, just popularity.
On the topic of judging candidates, I find it ridiculously difficult to find objective information by which to evaluate one versus another. It's easier to find objective reviews of DVD players, or automobiles. Where's the comprehensive database of candidate's voting records, speeches, writings? There must be a way to remove at least some subjectivity from the whole process, lessen the influence of advertisements and PR. Perhaps the only passionate endorsements are partisan ones, but I'd like to think not.

B-Day

Top 10 properties in baseball, as determined by Baseball Prospectus. Interesting.
The past three days I've been neck-deep in baseball statistics, prognostications, and commentary, preparing for two rotisserie baseball drafts. Tuesday was round two of three of bidding in my sabermetric league, and soon as all the fast and furious bidding ended at 6pm I had to completely change my thought process for my rotisserie 5x5 league which was operating using a snaking straight draft. The players are valued differently in each instance, and the draft strategy is radically different because of the formats. Both are fun in their own ways--they're all just games which appeal to gamblers, stat-heads, numbers guys, and not least of all baseball fans. It's similar in appeal to playing the stock market, but more enjoyable because your financial future isn't in play. For those who think they know more about baseball than the next guy, it's a way to put a minor wad of money where your mouth is.
Preparing for all these drafts is mentally straining. The amount of information available is overwhelming, and absorbing it all can be maddening and also strangely enjoyable. Every next tidbit of information catches your eye, and you hoard it all away in the hopes of having that one insight which none of your fellow owners have caught onto. Today was the last round of the sabermetric league, and I'm glad it's over. I'm too competitive to take things like this lightly and it's mentally taxing.
Of course, it helps when you think you'll win.

Decision markets

It's interesting to follow the decision markets in general, but especially in turbulent times like these. The financial page of the Mar. 24 issue of The New Yorker highlights sites like Newsfutures, Iowa Electronic Markets, Hollywood Stock Exchange, and Tradesports, sites which allow you to buy and sell derivatives on just about any outcome imaginable, from how much a movie will make in theaters (traders give Head of State the edge over Basic this weekend, despite the fact that Head of State is opening in hundreds fewer theaters) to whether or not the U.S. will catch Osama Bin Laden in 2003 (currently trades at 35% probability).
Interesting, and accurate. The Iowa Electronic Markets routinely beats national polls in predicting presidential elections. The principles is the same as that governing the efficient markets theory: decision markets channel the collective energy and resources of a group of people with intense knowledge of and interest in a particular area of interest. That's why it's so difficult to beat the stock market.
Of course, when everyone is so wrong about something, that's also worth examining. Look at IMDb's poll or Entertainment Weekly's issue on who would win Oscars and you realize how big an upset Adrien Brody and Roman Polanski pulled off.

How we came to war

Someday soon, a whole series of politicians and journalists will rush books to the market analyzing the leadup to this war with Iraq. Until then, here's one interesting account in this week's New Yorker. Among the intriguing points noted is the now self-evident realization that the United Nations is really only empowered when the great powers of the world are in agreement (by the way, how did France get a spot on the Security Council? is it the same reason old golfers still get to play in The Masters?).
And the somewhat sobering thought that the current administration could care less what protestors are saying in the streets. They've filtered it out like so much low-decibel noise.

Strange

I can access every website from my Macintosh except for anything related to my own website, eugenewei.com. I can't grab my e-mail, can't ftp anything to my directories, can't even find the website through a browser. I have no such problems on my Windows desktop, and my Mac can surf to every other website. Anyone have any idea why that might be and, better yet, how to fix it? Winner definitely gets a nice dinner on me.

South America

Have just about put the finishing touches on a trip to South America to depart late next week. Planning multi-week travels can be hard work, especially given the wealth of information available on the Internet and the overwhelming number of permutations of airplane flights and itineraries one can assemble in a country as vast as South America. Having a budget to enforce helped to narrow things down, and I left one just completely open week in Cuzco in the middle of the schedule to give myself the freedom to just follow my whims while there in person. Should be fun. Will hike through frigid Patagonia, tour the Galapagos Islands, and trace the steps of the Incas to Machu Picchu, among other things.
Still, before I've even left a black cloud has appeared in the distance. Two days after I return from South America my leave of absence will come to an end. Three months hardly feels like enough time for a leave.

Still an assassin

Thanks to Sang, I got to see Jordan in his last game in Seattle the other night. Jordan's 40 years old but still a dangerous, effective player. He played tough, physical defense on Rashard Lewis, and despite not having the stamina to sustain an effort for the full 44 minutes he was on the floor, he paced himself as best as he could, and when the game was on the line he came through with an alley-oop layup and two fade-away jumpers that hit nothing but net to ice the game for the Wizards. Here's hoping he gets one last chance to work some magic in the playoffs.
Not the prettiest of games--the Sonics, who basically conceded they were going into rebuilding mode when they traded Payton and Mason, shot something like 37%. The basketball was bruised and battered from encountering so much rim, so little net.

The boy from Ipanema

That would be me last week. Right now I'm the really sick boy lying in bed in Seattle. I was up most of last night coughing like an alcoholic in his death throes.
On the one hand, vacation has reminded me that my body needs less sleep than I think. At the same time, a combination of sleep deprivation, dancing the samba, heat exhaustion, sun stroke, about ten pounds of beef at Brazil's most famous churrascaria Porcao (how do you write an "a" with a little squiggly over it?), and heavy alcohol consumption has weakened my immune system. I am checking myself into a detox institution in a brave, pre-emptive strike against alcoholism, obesity, and skin cancer.
On a side note, I love that the Brazilian lack of inhibitions extends to their food. Naming an all-you-can-eat meat buffet restaurant Porcao and placing a giant neon pig above the entrance tells customers to leave their guilt at home. It reminds me of Star Wars. Remember the overweight X-wing pilot who was part of the rebel assault on the Death Star? He was named Porkins, and yes, he was the first to die. Even as a youth this subtle yet open discrimination against the obese struck me as unjust.
Ah yes, Rio. A week of paradise. Rio during Carnaval is an American fantasy of what Brazil is like all the time, just as Brian de Palma's The Untouchables presents a glorified vision of what a 1920's gangland Chicago would be like in our imaginations. If Mardi Gras in New Orleans is the drunken frat party where usually pent-up Puritans release their inhibitions in a disgusting display of lewd behavior, Carnaval in Rio is the party you attend wearing your smartest tuxedo, but your bow-tie is hanging around your neck, undone, and underneath you've got a swimsuit on, or a feathered skirt, or a thong. Everyone in Rio is uninhibited year round anyway, so they don't need to go overboard a few days out of the year. They simply crank the knob up a few notches.
I'll have to jot down a few notes and memories in a bit, especially because I've decided that all of you need to attend Carnaval in Rio once. It's that much fun, and you can learn from my experience. You don't have to be some young, single swinger; it's fun for all ages, and couple-friendly. Unfortunately, a torrential downpour at the start of day two of the Samba Parade killed my Leica, so all I have in the way of photos are one (as of yet) undeveloped roll from some cheap disposable. Since Elijah's camera also malfunctioned, I'm taking it as a sign that no incriminating evidence was to be recorded. After all, Christ the Redeemer was looking down on us the whole time so I already felt guilty enough about the whole affair.

Hero

One could wait until November or December, or whenever Miramax decides to release Hero here in the United States. Or you could just buy the all-region DVD and watch it next week.
Party at my place.

Homework

It's a good sign when I'm travelling so much I can't even keep up with all the photos to scan and the journal entries to record. I still haven't finished posting my recollections and photos from my trip last year to the Tour de France, let alone New Zealand and Australia and Rio. I did finally finish scanning pics from Christmas 2002, and I added my memories as well.
My family is awesome, and Christmas 2002 was perhaps our best yet. If you ever get the chance to go on vacation with me and my huge extended family of siblings, I highly recommend it. You will have ridiculous amounts of fun, and we may adopt you.

Next let's get the spammers

Dubya has done one thing which the majority of America will approve of. He signed legislation creating a national do-not-call list. Telemarketers calling someone on this list can be fined up to $11K for calling someone on the list. It should go into service this summer, and citizens can put their name on the list over the Internet or by dialing a toll-free number.
Telemarketers complain it will devastate their business and have sued the FTC, claiming the legislation restricts free speech. My heart goes out to them. Plus, I'll have fewer chances to practice Chinese with the telemarketing reps from the long-distance companies who are hoping, because of last name, that I'm a middle-aged Asian who immigrated to the U.S., speak English as a second language, and will do anything when it's offered to me in my native tongue.

Don't get too high on our politicians, though

Of course, at the same time, many of our senators are spending time pushing through name changes for food in the House cafeterias. Upset with the French refusal to support the U.S.-proposed U.N. resolution, a few legislators led the change in names from french fries and french toast to freedom fries and freedom toast. That sounds like a great use of time.
Let's hope this doesn't ruin my trip to France in July for the Tour de France. I'll need some of those French citizens to help push me up Alpe D'Huez.

George

It's fascinating to watch Bush and his administration in this whole confrontation with Iraq. Oh, to be a bug on the line during some of the phone calls from Washington D.C. to the heads of state of all the other members of the Security Council.
Give Bush credit for one thing. He's not exactly taking the most popular route (though perhaps a majority of American are pro-war; it's hard to tell since the anti-war camp is so much louder). As Phil mentioned while we were sunning on Copacabana Beach, the traditional rule of politics is to hoard political capital to generate more of it for elections. Bush is just burning through it and using it to push his rather unpopular agenda.
I watched Journeys With George on HBO about two months ago, and in it I saw a Bush who wants to be liked. I saw someone who might have been president of his fraternity, chummy, joking around, a charmy smarmy jock-turned-investment banker type. Now Bush is angry, frustrated, irritated, and he's on an island. How un-political of him.
It must be frustrating for Bush, Rice, Powell, Rumsefeld, and all those folks, watching Iraq dilly dallying on compliance with resolutions that were passed over 10 years ago, hiding behind the U.N. Saddam is a lunatic for goading the U.S. like this, but he probably enjoys it. Of course, if you're the playground bully, the big man around the block, it's not exactly sporting to let some scrawny punk goad you into pummeling him. And when your fists consist of the world's greatest military, it's not humane, either.
No reasonable person really ever wants war, especially when alternatives exist. But I'd like to see Saddam stripped of his power a year from now. When some crazy dictator in North Korea is testing nuclear delivery mechanisms and when Seattle is the biggest U.S. city within theoretical range of those mechanisms, more than the usual grey clouds are casting a pall in the skies overhead. I'm ready to head back to the Southern hemisphere to work on my tan.

And so it begins...

On my 29th birthday, I gave myself...a 3 month leave of absence from work. Mostly what I feel is overwhelmed by all the possibilities. I'm ready to just start diving into everything, but first I need to slow down and get a plan in place. My appetite for life is bigger than my stomach for it all.
Mom and Dad sent me a book from my wishlist called Setting Up Your Shots: Great Camera Moves Every Filmmaker Should Know. I think I'll stay up late glancing through that, all while blasting my favorite version of La Boheme, my favorite opera. Everytime I listen to it I feel like I'm waltzing through some crowded, festive European street, falling in love with the world. What I most treasure having again is the time to stay up late reading. So many books, so much time. Who would've thought.
Regret minimization--that's the framework for living life which Jeff always talks about. I don't regret this one bit.

Irony

George Bush passed a bill through Congress yesterday that replaced all affirmative action programs in education, business, and government with pure meritocratic systems. Today he was replaced as the President of the United States.

Condi, Colin, and George and affirmative action

The whole Michigan affirmative action flap is intriguing for having revealed a spectrum of opinions among the Republican party. George is against the affirmative action system at Michigan, while Colin Powell is for it. Condoleeza Rice? Stands behind George Bush, though no one knows what she herself thinks.
Condi is a tough lady. When she was the Stanford Provost I heard her address an entire room of angry students who were protesting something having to do with treatment of minority students. She held her ground and shot down a few students with some sharp words. She's an imposing and impressive speaker in person. Still, I get the sneaking suspicion she's always serving, never acting on her own or willing to stand on her own merits.
Affirmative action and issues of race are the most intriguing of America's issues because people on each side of the debate either view it as the most American or most un-American of policies. American because it encourages diversity and creates opportunity for those who might not otherwise receive such opportunity, or un-American because it judges people by more than just pure merit and diminishes opportunity for some. When I debate the issue with my friends, most of whom are very tolerant and accepting people, it's easy to see where both sides come from.
I myself am in favor of affirmative action, for many reasons. First of all, I'm really shocked that more people aren't outraged that Trent Lott and Strom Thurmond, overtly racist senators, held their posts until just recently with little or no press coverage. For years they were among the most influential leaders of this country. I'll admit I didn't know much about Lott, though I knew Thurmond because he was such a fossil. We are naive to think that racial discrimination doesn't pervade the most hallowed corridors of this country. That Bush would actually curry votes by speaking at a school that bans inter-racial dating and get away with it indicates perhaps that we've become too complacent about racism.
Trent Lott's speech at Thurmond's birthday didn't draw a lot of coverage by the mainstream press in the days after. A bunch of bloggers were the first to jump on it and draw attention to his incendiary quips. Maybe the nation thinks that listening to rap music and seeing folks like Eminem adopt black culture indicates that we've achieved some racially integrated nirvana.
Secondly, the most common argument against affirmative action is that it allows students with lower SAT scores to take positions from students with higher SAT scores. I've yet to meet one intelligent person who considers the SAT an accurate gauge of their intelligence, let alone the worthiness of others to attend a school or bring something of value to that community. Strangely enough, we find it's absolutely okay to allow someone in with an absurdly low SAT score if he/she can throw a football accurately or play basketball really well. Because of course they contribute so much to the campus before they take off after two years without a degree to make their millions in the pros. Everyone always seems to think affirmative action means hiring a bunch of uneducated, incompetent minorities into positions which they're unsuited for. In fact, studies have been done on college admissions which show that being it's often the environment which foster students' performance more than their own individual talents. In a groundbreaking study which researchers have been unable to replicate (for obvious reasons), a statistically significant percentage of the entering class at a college in Texas were chosen specifically from the bottom 10% of that year's applicants. Researchers followed their performance over the next four years and compared it with that of their classmates, who were hand selected by the admissions committee and deemed to the most promising of that year's applicant pool. It turned out that the students from the bottom 10% of the applicant pool were, by any conventional set of measures, much more successful than their other classmates.
Third, everyone argues that affirmative action is not perfect, that occasionally some white, American male will be shafted, and that therefore it needs to be abolished. To argue this point assumes that all admission programs, interview processes, and all such programs are perfect. If anyone knows of such a perfect hiring program, please let me know. I'll pass it along to Amazon, they'll hire nothing but the exact best people for the rest of this century and the worth of my stock options will rise a hundred fold and I'll retire to some foreign country with the title of Sultan.
I do think some instances of affirmative action are too severe. But to accuse affirmative action of being as bad as the problem it attempts to cure is intellectually lazy. Affirmative action achieves more good than bad. To compare it to racism, with the trail of tears and tragedy and bloodshed it has left behind our country's footsteps, is some type of math in which someone missed a few decimal points.

Projection keyboards

One of the latest cutting-edge technologies is the projection keyboard, for use with PDAs. Red lasers project an image of a keyboard on any flat surface, and you can type on it. Personally, I think these will be less than ideal because typing depends so much on tactile feedback to know where to place your fingers, when you've made a mistake. But for big buttons and switches it would be convenient. For example, if I could just project some volume controls on my desk for my stereo at home, or light switches for all the lights in my room, I wouldn't need to wander around my room while working.

More man vs. machine

Garry Kasparov is challenging Deep Junior to a chess match this Sunday. Amazingly, you can buy Deep Junior for home use and stage your own epic battle of man versus machine. You can even buy a copy of Deep Fritz, which battled world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik to a draw in October.
Sometime if you're really feeling lousy, something you can do to cheer yourself up is to go into an online chess site and challenge someone to a match. Then turn on Deep Junior or Deep Fritz in the background and have the program play your opponent while you use all of Deep Junior and Deep Fritz's moves. After you've kicked some uppity chess nerd's ass, you'll feel a strange sensation come across your face. A smile.

3,764 miles

Scott called on Saturday. He finished his bike ride from Florida to San Diego. 3,764 miles! What a stud. That's more miles than I drove in my car last year. Scott should swing by our place soon, and when he does I'll be tempted to ask him if he wants to go for a bike ride, and I can't tell if that will be funny or not.
Speaking of which I finally saw one of those anti-SUV ads which blame SUVs for funding terrorists. Yes, there are lots of reasons why we'd all be better off with fewer SUVs on the roads. SUVs have proven to cause more auto fatalities (studies have shown that SUVs don't make you any safe, and at the same time people who aren't in SUVs are more likely to die when you hit them with your massive vehicle), they do get much worse gas mileage, and that does contribute in part to America sending money to Iraq and Saudi Arabia which are terrorist friendly nations. Still, the reactions of most people who've seen the ads lead me to believe that the shock value may turn off too many people to be effective in motivating action.

Bureaucracy Part II

The Sunday NYTimes has an article about how Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, acknowledges the the FBI has to be reorganized to have any chance to fight terrorism effectively. Mueller took the position Sept. 4, just a week before the attacks, so he isn't likely to be implicated as part of the organizational problems he admits exist. Still, give him credit for being brave enough to confront the facts; it certainly isn't the way to win new friends in an organization you've just been designated to head.
It's not going to be easy. Given that counter terrorism puts communication and coordination at a premium, the idea that FBI agents can't send e-mail from their desktop computers is absurd.
Importantly, sacrificing all of our personal freedoms and privacy does not necessarily have to be part of the counter-terrorist solution. The facts seem to indicate that the FBI and CIA had enough information to detect trouble. Being able to monitor all of our personal activity without sufficient suspicion of criminal activity, as Ashcroft has allowed the FBI to do by easing domestic spy rules, smacks of desperation or even worse, an attempt to capitalize on a nervous public to seize undue powers of surveillance. William Safire of the NYTimes mused in an op-ed: J. Edgar Mueller.
A related problem is that most of the nation's best and brightest don't consider working for the government because of the bureaucracy involved. Some people I know do so anyway, with hopes of serving the public any way possible. Fewer than that actually put up with it for a lifetime.
Republicans and Democrats are standing up from the dinner table and throwing dinner rolls at each other, pointing fingers. Democrats are saying the White House knew more about 9/11 than they're letting on. Republicans are saying the Democrats are out of line and unpatriotic for undermining faith in the government with their accusations. Political crap. It's clear the government and lots of national agencies didn't work together optimally. Instead of trying to use this issue to win votes, they should do a post-mortem and figure out how to work together to fix the problem.

Magic Johnson + Michael Jordan =

Zinedine Zidane, widely considered the best soccer player in history. Magic called him Magic and Michael combined. Soccer has a lot of big-name stars. I don't play soccer or follow it much, but names like Beckham and Zidane and Figo ring bells.
Zidane has the build I wish I had. 6' 1", 172 pounds. Runs 9 miles in a typical soccer match. It's World Cup time. Between my junior and senior years at school I saw Brazil play Russia in World Cup at Stanford Stadium That was likely the craziest sports crowd I've ever been a part of. By the end of the game I was singing Brazilian chants and jumping up and down and passing people up and down the stands. I don't remember much of the match, though I do remember Brazil won.

Clackety clack clack

You know what I want? Someone to write a program that creates the sound of a typewriter as a type on my computer. Writing on a computer is just too quiet. If someone invents that, please let me know.

When bureaucracy kills

Democrats are jumping all over the current administration for failing to take action on evidence that foretold Sept. 11. But it's unlikely that blame will be so easily assigned, nor is it going to be so easy to solve. We joke about the bureaucratic nature of government, but in this case it was deadly. These terrorist attacks have revealed some fundamental fissures in our democratic organizational structures--(another reason it's too early to declare democracy the end point of civilization).
Seymour Hersh writes a solid account in this week's New Yorker of how the government had various pieces of information which, if raised at the right levels and combined with other pieces of information, might have formed a cohesive, shrill warning that fatal attacks were imminent. But turf battles, lack of inter-organizational communication, and complacency killed the story.
When I encounter bureaucracy in a corporate environment, the cost is projects not delivered on time, competitive strikes not countered, and ultimately lost profits. In the government, the stakes are so high it's frightening. Irving Janis introduced groupthink as a fundamental cause for poor decision-making in the Bay of Pigs, the tragic Challenger Shuttle launch in 1986, the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Thirteen Days chronicled one of the most commonly hailed instances of a government avoiding groupthink to avert an international crisis: the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Some reporter will probably come out with a book which seeks to chronicle all the reasons why the government missed Sept. 11. Let's hope the government figures it out before the book is published.

Inevitable nuclear attack on U.S.?

At the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting, famed investor Warren Buffett told gatherers that some sort of nuclear attack on America is inevitable. "It will happen," he told shareholders at Berkshire Hathaway's (NYSE: BRK.A) annual meeting. "Whether it will happen in 10 years or 10 minutes, or 50 years... it's virtually a certainty."
Of course, he made those comments in the context of discussing the insurance industry (among Berkshire Hathaway's holdings is General Re, the insurance company, which like other property casualty insurers lost billions of dollars in the wake of Sept. 11).
Now plenty of people have already predicted such things, but Buffett gets attention because he's the second richest man in the world. Soon after Sept. 11 I had thought the same thing, that we now lived in a world where the U.S. would always be under attack, but in the past few weeks it had faded from my mind like the insane relative locked in the basement. But Buffett brought it back into the foreground, and it made me think a couple of things, none too profound in their own rights, but I wanted to set them down anyway.
One: our world is screwed up. You have people killing each other the world over and it's been happening for as long as people have been around. Sure, I'm in meetings all the time where I hear the statement, "Reasonable people can agree to disagree," but still, it doesn't mean you have to blast each other to kingdom come. Every day I read about Israelis and Palestinians engaged in urban warfare, bodies piling up, and I wonder how reasonable people really are if they agree to disagree at that level?
I'm at a point in my life where I feel like I can go most places in the U.S. without worrying about racism or crazy religious fanatics running into a restaurant where I'm eating with twenty pounds of C4 strapped to their chest. Am I more enlightened or just damn lucky I grew up in the company of more reasonable people (probably the latter)? I've traveled the world, met lots of people my age, and I've liked most all of them. I can't believe that we're born with such capacity for violence. We're definitely not saints at birth, either, but where along the path of life do we decide that there's some idea worth killing someone else for? What type of ideas have that type of power? I find it especially frustrating when the nature of the conflict is historical in nature. Some of this generation must feel like
Romeo and Juliet trying just to have a good time without the Montague and Capulet family rivalry hanging over their heads.
Two: What am I doing to contribute to world peace? I admit to not being the world's shining example of public service and social activism. I'd like to think my social conscience is late-blooming. Being a middle manager in a public corporation that sells stuff--is that enough? What's my lot in life? I used to look askance on a career in politics but I can understand now why it appeals to so many. I also understand why lots of extremely wealthy people (the Ted Turners of the world) dive headlong into politics late in life.
If there's a chance that a nuclear bomb could incinerate me or people I love tomorrow, two alternatives present themselves to me. One would be to quit my job and figure out a way to stop the madness. That path is likely strewn with the corpses of poor idealists who got frustrated starting from the bottom, couldn't pay rent, and got out. Not all of us have the bank of a Ted Turner. Two would be to call the world senseless and just go off and do all the things you've ever wanted to do and wait for the end. Search for big love, the big wave, the big mountain.
Jason and I were chatting yesterday about why a corporate drama would never draw well on television. The general public at large doesn't care because it's not life or death and it's not situational comedy. If the show's not set in the courtroom or the emergency room or on the mean streets where bad people carry guns and no qualms, it's not worth sacrificing a prime time hour, including commercials, to watch it on television. Maybe it also lacks the drama or urgency to build a career on.
I have a mid-life crisis every other week these days.
You can certainly understand why millions of people just want to spend a few hours of their weekend watching Spiderman. The darkened theater is a cocoon of escapist dream stuff. This world would be unbearable without our entertainment industry.
On a lighter note, People Magazine released their annual fifty most beautiful people list, and I once again failed to make the cut. Okay, I could understand losing to some of those people, but Jimmy Fallon? Puh-lease. I'm funnier and better looking than him.

Common language

Karen Hughes, arguably George W. Bush's top aide, is moving back to Texas so her son can attend high school there. She was often credited with ensuring that Bush spoke in the language that the regular Joe can relate to and understand.
It's often argued that one reason Bush defeated Gore in the last election was that while Bush's speeches and quotes were often inarticulate, Gore's speech was condescending, highbrow, and lacking in charisma. Clinton was a powerful politician because he managed to merge the good points of both sides.
Speaking of resignations, there's some tabloid-style intrigue going down at the Harvard Business Review. Protests, affairs, divorces, Jack Welch, journalistic integrity under fire. Anyone who discounts the price of being famous is naive. What you get in exchange for your wealth and fame is the chance to deal with random press and amateur weblog gawking.

Crank

Everyone is cranky. Coworkers, rotisserie baseball managers, random strangers... I'm starting to get cranky, too. I wanted to flip out today, but I managed to count to ten. Maybe it's lack of sleep, or the long and lousy bout of winter weather, or just a general need for a vacation. My patience is running very thin this week. I could feel the frown on my face growing all day, like the gradual tightening of a violin string, or the rising pressure in your ear as a plane lifts off.
I need to cool off, because blowing up is rarely productive, and not something I admire in others. But more than ever I'm realizing why I need parts of my life that are my own, cordoned off with barbed wire and rabid dogs.
One, two, three, four, five, six...

Articles

Lots of excellent articles at Salon.com. Here's an interview with Michele Zanini, a security expert who makes some interesting recommendations about how the U.S. should fight these terrorists.
Some books which are rising the charts at Amazon.com in the wake of this disaster:
Twin Towers: The Life of New York City's World Trade Center
The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama Bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism
This article at Yahoo indicates that names of suspected terrorists with ties to bin Laden were found on passenger rosters of the hijacked planes. But no name was given, just "a government source."
Another analysis of why the buildings collapsed, noting that the terrorists hit the buildings in the perfect spots. Any higher, or much lower, and the buildings would have likely survived.
In many ways, the people who built those two towers, and the buildings themselves, are heroes. The buildings held up long enough that many people could escape. This despite being hit by a massive 200 ton commercial plan. Then, when the buildings finally fell, they collapsed inward instead of toppling over onto surrounding blocks.