The Grey Album

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I received my copy of The Grey Album today. I ordered it off of eBay. The Grey Album, for the remaining few who haven't heard, is a CD in which the vocals from Jay-Z's Black Album were laid over samples taken entirely from the Beatles' The White Album.
DJ Danger Mouse, the perpetrator, sent out 3000 CDs to friends. The album would likely have spread through word of mouth, but EMI (one of the labels with rights to the Beatles back catalog) had to come out and issue a ceast-and-desist. That was like tossing dry grass on fire.
eBay sellers hawking the CD were also slapped with the legal notices, so now eBay contains dozens of auctions for "cover art" from The Grey Album, all bundled with a free "mystery CD". Gee, I wonder what that mystery CD might be.
It's sounds like a strange idea, but after thirty seconds of listening, The Grey Album sounds completely natural and, in places, quite ingenious. The old and the new. A long time ago in a galaxy far far away.

MI-5, FKA Spooks

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Finding a new TV show to love on DVD is a unique and joyous event. It means hours and hours of fun over many consecutive nights. For me, the current TV-DVD apple of my Trinitron eye is MI-5, formerly titled Spooks. It's one of those happy instances of the British sending over a superior TV series to the States via BBC (The Office being another sterling example).
Seasons one and two aired here on A&E as one combined season, but by the time I was hooked by the DVDs for the six episodes of season one, A&E had stopped broadcasting the show. My Tivo managed to snare just one measly episode. Waiting for the latest episodes to appear on DVD or TV is agonizing. If someone out there has season two (the original season two) on DVD, well please just send them over and let me know what my firstborn child's name will be.

Incremental analysis and football strategy

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Getting around to piles of old Sunday NYTimes lying around my place. Caught an interesting article about how Bill Belichick took work on incremental analysis (PDF) by David Romer to heart. Some recommendations: most teams go for the 2-point conversion too often, and it's worth going for it on 4th and short from almost anywhere on the field.
Good to see innovative quantitative analysis making an impact in sports beyond baseball.

Yankees chasing Maddux, also?

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Say it ain't so. The Onion article titled "Yankees Ensure 2003 Pennant By Signing Every Player in Baseball" is just one year off. Note this quote from the article:
Some 10 hours later, the final opposing player, Texas Rangers shortstop Alex Rodriguez, had been acquired by the Yankees, who bought out the remainder of his $252 million contract for $300 million.

I'm not sure what to call it when even the satire of the Onion fails to go far enough. The Yankees are that ridiculous.
Losing Maddux to the Yankees would be like a bad nightmare for Cubs fans still trying to forget about losing him the first time, to the Braves. He only went on to win the next 3 NL Cy Young Awards.
Maddux came out of the Cubs farm system. He deserves to win his 300th in Cubbies blue.

The latest Gladwell is online

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Malcolm Gladwell (forever to be known as Mr. Tipping Point) has posted his most recent New Yorker article online. It's a good read as I mentioned before. From Big and Bad: How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety:
In the history of the automotive industry, few things have been quite as unexpected as the rise of the S.U.V. Detroit is a town of engineers, and engineers like to believe that there is some connection between the success of a vehicle and its technical merits. But the S.U.V. boom was like Apple's bringing back the Macintosh, dressing it up in colorful plastic, and suddenly creating a new market. It made no sense to them.


Oil => Food => Importance of Middle East

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The centerpiece of the Feb 2004 issue of Harper's Magazine is a fascinating article titled "The Oil We Eat". Written by Richard Manning and derived from the thesis of his upcoming book Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization, the article blames mankind's move towards agriculture as its primary source of food for a whole host of environmental and social ills.
Who would have thought we'd ever be seeing mug shots of innocuous crops such as wheat, corn, and rice?
Some revealing excerpts:
Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature's offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts--the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.

Plato's lament is rooted in wheat agriculture, which depleted his country's soil and subsequently caused the series of declines that pushed centers of civilization to Rome, Turkey, and western Europe. By the fifth century, though, wheat's strategy of depleting and moving on ran up against the Atlantic Ocean. Fenced-in wheat agriculture is like rice agriculture. It balances its equations with famine. In the millennium between 500 and 1500, Britain suffered a major "corrective" famine about every ten years; there were seventy-five in France during the same period. The incidence, however, dropped sharply when colonization brought an influx of new food to Europe.
The new lands had an even greater effect on the colonists themselves. Thomas Jefferson, after enduring a lecture on the rustic nature by his hosts at a dinner party in Paris, pointed out that all of the Americans present were a good head taller than all of the French. Indeed, colonists in all of the neo-Europes enjoyed greater stature and longevity, as well as a lower infant-mortality rate--all indicators of the better nutrition afforded by the onetime spend down of the accumulated capital of virgin soil.
The precolonial famines of Europe raised the question: What would happen when the planet's supply of arable land ran out? We have a clear answer. In about 1960 expansion hit its limits and the supply of unfarmed, arable lands came to an end. There was nothing left to plow. What happened was grain yields tripled.
The accepted term for this strange turn of events is the green revolution, though it would be more properly labeled the amber revolution, because it applied exclusively to grain--wheat, rice, and corn. Plant breeders tinkered with the architecture of these three grains so that they could be hypercharged with irrigation water and chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen. This innovation meshed nicely with the increased "efficiency" of the industrialized factory-farm system. With the possible exception of the domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet.
For openers, it disrupted long-standing patterns of rural life worldwide, moving a lot of no-longer-needed people off the land and into the world's most severe poverty. The experience in population control in the developing world is by now clear: It is not that people make more people so much as it is that they make more poor people. In the forty-year period beginning about 1960, the world's population doubled, adding virtually the entire increase of 3 billion to the world's poorest classes, the most fecund classes. The way in which the green revolution raised that grain contributed hugely to the population boom, and it is the weight of the population that leaves humanity in its present untenable position.

More relevant here are the methods of the green revolution, which added orders of magnitude to the devastation. By mining the iron for tractors, drilling the new oil to fuel them and to make nitrogen fertilizers, and by taking the water that rain and rivers had meant for other lands, farming had extended its boundaries, its dominion, to lands that were not farmable. At the same time, it extended its boundaries across time, tapping fossil energy, stripping past assets.
The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure oil, not food. There's a little joke in this. Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food there is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot less energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten, a calculation that no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the Hummers and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in Iraq.
David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of being off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten years.

America's biggest crop, grain corn, is completely unpalatable. It is raw material for an industry that manufactures food substitutes. Likewise, you can't eat unprocessed wheat. You certainly can't eat hay. You can eat unprocessed soybeans, but mostly we don't. These four crops cover 82 percent of American cropland. Agriculture in this country is not about food; it's about commodities that require the outlay of still more energy to become food.
About two thirds of U.S. grain corn is labeled "processed," meaning it is milled and otherwise refined for food or industrial uses. More than 45 percent of that becomes sugar, especially high-fructose corn sweeteners, the keystone ingredient in three quarters of all processed foods, especially soft drinks, the food of America's poor and working classes. It is not a coincidence that the American pandemic of obesity tracks rather nicely with the fivefold increase in corn-syrup production since Archer Daniels Midland developed a high-fructose version of the stuff in the early seventies. Nor is it a coincidence that the plague selects the poor, who eat the most processed food.

There is another energy matter to consider here, though. The grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.

You think being a vegetarian gets you out of jail? Think again.
Green eaters, especially vegetarians, advocate eating low on the food chain, a simple matter of energy flow. Eating a carrot gives the diner all that carrot's energy, but feeding carrots to a chicken, then eating the chicken, reduces the energy by a factor of ten. The chicken wastes some energy, stores some as feathers, bones, and other inedibles, and uses most of it just to live long enough to be eaten. As a rough rule of thumb, that factor of ten applies to each level up the food chain, which is why some fish, such as tuna, can be a horror in all of this. Tuna is a secondary predator, meaning it not only doesn't eat plants but eats other fish that themselves eat other fish, adding a zero to the multiplier each notch up, easily a hundred times, more like a thousand times less efficient than eating a plant.
This is fine as far as it goes, but the vegetarian's case can break down on some details. On the moral issues, vegetarians claim their habits are kinder to animals, though it is difficult to see how wiping out 99 percent of wildlife's habitat, as farming has done in Iowa, is a kindness. In rural Michigan, for example, the potato farmers have a peculiar tactic for dealing with the predations of whitetail deer. They gut-shoot them with small-bore rifles, in hopes the deer will limp off to the woods and die where they won't stink up the potato fields.
Animal rights aside, vegetarians can lose the edge in the energy argument by eating processed food, with its ten calories of fossil energy for every calorie of food energy produced. The question, then, is: Does eating processed food such as soy burger or soy milk cancel the energy benefits of vegetarianism, which is to say, can I eat my lamb chops in peace? Maybe. If I've done my due diligence, I will have found out that the particular lamb I am eating was both local and grass-fed, two factors that of course greatly reduce the embedded energy in a meal. I know of ranches here in Montana, for instance, where sheep eat native grass under closely controlled circumstances--no farming, no plows, no corn, no nitrogen. Assets have not been stripped. I can't eat the grass directly. This can go on. There are little niches like this in the system. Each person's individual charge is to find such niches.
Chances are, though, any meat eater will come out on the short end of this argument, especially in the United States. Take the case of beef. Cattle are grazers, so in theory could live like the grass-fed lamb. Some cattle cultures--those of South America and Mexico, for example--have perfected wonderful cuisines based on grass-fed beef. This is not our habit in the United States, and it is simply a matter of habit. Eighty percent of the grain the United States produces goes to livestock. Seventy-eight percent of all of our beef comes from feed lots, where the cattle eat grain, mostly corn and wheat. So do most of our hogs and chickens. The cattle spend their adult lives packed shoulder to shoulder in a space not much bigger than their bodies, up to their knees in shit, being stuffed with grain and a constant stream of antibiotics to prevent the disease this sort of confinement invariably engenders. The manure is rich in nitrogen and once provided a farm's fertilizer. The feedlots, however, are now far removed from farm fields, so it is simply not "efficient" to haul it to cornfields. It is waste. It exhales methane, a global-warming gas. It pollutes streams. It takes thirty-five calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of beef this way; sixty-eight to make one calorie of pork.
Still, these livestock do something we can't. They convert grain's carbohydrates to high-quality protein. All well and good, except that per capita protein production in the United States is about double what an average adult needs per day. Excess cannot be stored as protein in the human body but is simply converted to fat. This is the end result of a factory-farm system that appears as a living, continental-scale monument to Rube Goldberg, a black-mass remake of the loaves-and-fishes miracle. Prairie's productivity is lost for grain, grain's productivity is lost in livestock, livestock's protein is lost to human fat--all federally subsidized for about $15 billion a year, two thirds of which goes directly to only two crops, corn and wheat.

You'll have to buy the issue to read the entire article, or, for the time being, you can find a transcript online at the blog How to Save the World.

Difference b/t great and sucks

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Seinfeld does this riff in his standup routines on the fine line between "great" and "sucks". He contends there's not much difference. You go see a movie someone claims was great. It ends up sucking. He ends his routine thus: "Great. Sucks. They're the same thing. You buy an ice cream cone, and just as you go to take your first bite, the ice cream falls off the cone onto the sidewalk. What do you say? 'Great.'" Q.E.D.
For me, this weekend was an exploration of "great" and "sucks". I went out for my first ride of the season Saturday morning. It took nearly an hour just to find all the necessary gear: waterproof warm-weather clothing, bike pump, helmet and gloves, shoes, bike tool...ever since moving, there's always one thing each week I just can't find, no matter how hard I look.
My next obstacle was my cycling fitness level, or total lack thereof. It is damn hilly near my place. Just a short 20 mile ride nearly killed me, and the rest of the evening I could barely walk. The old 65th street hill, a good bellwether for my cycling strength, climbs up quick and steep from the Burke Gilman trail. It nearly killed me. My eyes were crossed and legs quivering as I passed over the summit.
Moral of this story? Gravity sucks. Literally and figuratively.
On a related note, the weather in Seattle from November to June? It sucks, especially from a cycling perspective. I don't mind riding in the cold, but rain kills. It chills your skin, decreases braking power, leaves your drivetrain covered in goop, and leaves the roads slippery. The weather from July through some of October? Great.
The Yankees got A-Rod. Without a doubt, that sucks. I hate the Yankees, but I can't blame them. They operate within the confines of the rules established by MLB, and they do it ruthlessly well. Hicks may have overpaid for A-Rod, but it was how he spent the rest of his payroll that caused the Rangers problems. A-Rod was playing unbelievably for them, but no single player can carry a major league team. That's the nature of a sport where nine players are on the field, starting pitchers can only pitch every fifth day, and batters can only bat once every nine at-bats. Tom Hicks is a wealthy baseball fool. Of very minor consolation is the fact that the Yankees are tarnishing A-Rod's legacy by putting him at shortstop, despite the fact he's a great shortstop while Jeter's defense sucks.
Baseball Prospectus did an analysis that indicated that if you took the best players from the Red Sox and Yankees and fielded an All-Star team from just those two teams, it would be nearly comparable to an All-Star team made up of the best players from all the remaining teams. And that was before the Yankees obtained A-Rod.
I love baseball, it's a great game, but that sucks.
Also, this weekend, the great Italian cyclist Marco Pantani was found dead in a hotel room at the age of 34. Pantani's duels with Lance Armstrong in the 2000 Tour de France were awesome, and if Lance never wins a stage at Mont Ventoux he'll look back with regret at giving Pantani that victory at the top of the bald mountain in 2000.
Jason Richardson's dunk in the NBA All-Star game, where he threw the ball off the backboard, caught it in mid-air, put it between his legs, and jammed it? Great.
Stanford men's hoops held off Cal (great), and Duke lost to N.C. State (great), so for the first time I can remember, Stanford may be a legitimate #1 in the AP Poll (really great). I'm looking forward to seeing them at Key Arena as the top seed in the West Regionals.
I watched the Korean movie Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance this weekend. Some of director Chan-Wook Park's other movies have shown a spark, a hint that he might become an accomplished stylist. The lives of the characters in this movie suck. It's not much of a plot synposis, but believe me when I say it's true. Suicides, electrocutions, stolen kidneys, accidental drownings...those are some of the happier moments. It's a flawed movie (it would be much tougher punch to the gut with a more coherent social critique), but Park has the chance to become one of Korea's great directors down the road. Hearsay has it he may have already attained that greatness with Oldboy, a movie I'm dying to see.
Finally, in keeping with the Korean theme, after a day of snowboarding at Crystal today, two carfuls of hungry skiers hit the Korean BBQ restaurant Mi Rak in Federal Way on South Aurora. It's a long way to go for Korean BBQ, but from time to time I get a craving for good Korean BBQ that just can't be satiated any other way. And unfortunately, the Korean food within Seattle city limits sucks, while the Korean restaurants on both far North (Lynnwood) and far South Aurora Ave. (Federal Way) is great. Those areas are known affectionately as North and South Korea. Mi Rak was awesome; we ordered, the food arrived literally two minutes later, we were done eating inside of twenty-five minutes, and I started breathing again about two minutes after that.
Sometimes there's a fine line between great and sucks, and other times it's a forty minute drive.

Yawr fi-yod

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I only seem to have the attention span for watching a reality TV show in its first season, when the contestants have no history to work off of and the rules of the game are still fuzzy. The first season is when the show is still fresh and pure, when the contestants aren't sure how to game everything. This TV season, that show for me is The Apprentice.
The show has the essential quality of the best reality television, and that is that the characters truly believe they're amazing even though many of them are actually ridiculous. You'd think that would describe Trump as well, but he comes off quite well in the show. I quite enjoy his boardroom firings, especially his explanations for why he's picking each week's victim. Chalk up another self-promotion coup for Trump, who manages, with just a few minutes on-screen each week, to be the star of a show ostensibly focused on the contestant vying to prostrate themselves before the Donald.
Isn't applying for one of these shows a post-modern rite of passage? Maybe I will apply for Season 2.

Subjectivity of wind chill

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Last week, I wondered how wind chill was measured, so I Googled the term and discovered after some research that there is no agreed-upon method to measure wind chill. In fact, scientists aren't really sure how to measure how cold it is. A few years ago, the validity of the widely used wind chill chart was called into question, and shortly thereafter the National Weather Service published a revised chart which purported to eliminate the exaggerations of its predecessor.
It just goes to show that it doesn't matter what the thermometer reads. When you're cold, you're cold, and it doesn't matter what anyone else says.

Harvey

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I'm about halfway through the hard-to-put-down Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film. Writer Peter Biskind paints an unflattering portrait of Harvey Weinstein, to be sure.
I have mixed feelings about Weinstein and Miramax. On the one hand, they've raised the profile of plenty of films that might otherwise have never gotten widespread theatrical distribution. In the process, Harvey and his brother Bob have created one of three movie studios whose brand means something to moviegoers (all of them were under one roof at one point, Disney and Pixar being the other two, though Disney's brand has muddied over the past decade). The other studio logos are like postmarks; they don't provide any clue as to the nature of the content inside the envelope.
On the other hand, Miramax routinely butcher movies they purchase from overseas markets (voice dubs of Miyazaki animated films being one example that always leaps to mind), and they also delay the U.S. release of foreign films for such a long time that eager cinephiles are left to seek out DVDs from other countries or to languish in thirst. For example, in this interview at Salon.com, Harvey expresses pride at having delayed the video release of City of God for so long, claiming it helped the movie to retain its buzz and perhaps led to its 4 Oscar nominations. I saw this fabulous movie over a year and a half ago, and it still hasn't come out on DVD (its street date has been pushed back more times than I can count), and now it's finally getting a limited release in theaters. Why does Miramax deserve credit for keeping this movie tucked away in its back pocket all this time? Ridiculous.
If you haven't seen this movie and it comes out in your area the next few weeks, do go see it, though.

Charlie Brown the existentialist

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A thought-provoking analysis of Charles Schultz's Peanuts comic strip as existentialist.
Ultimately, we exist in an abandoned and free state. We are responsible for our actions, and since Sartre argues that there is no God to conceive of a human nature, we are responsible for our own creation.
How does this apply to Peanuts? Like the existential human in a world of silent or absent deities, Schulz

Long Bets

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First come predictions. If someone challenges a prediction and the challenge is accepted, it becomes a bet. It may seem like you have to be some bigwig to take part in a bet, though the rules don't mention anything about it. This is Long Bets, and some of the predictions and bets are fascinating and thought-provoking. And then you have Ted Danson betting that the Red Sox will win the World Series before the US men's soccer team wins the World Cup (I think he's right).
I'm thinking of challenging this one: "Brooke Shields will be be a recipeint of the Kennedy Center Honors for her lifetime contributions to American culture through the performing arts, within the next fifteen years."

Bring our boys home

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How sad is it that some of our greatest pop cultural artifacts are relegated to finding a home on DVD in Region 2, in PAL of all formats? Yes, I'm talking about Airwolf and Knight Rider. It isn't enough that David Hasselhoff had to flee into the arms of Germany to find the public's embrace? Now we're showing Edward Mulhare, Ernest Borgnine, and Jan-Michael Vincent the door, too?
What's next, Michael Keaton doing commentaries in French? Oh, the horror.

The world's most expensive coat rack

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A Rocky Balboa statue is currently going for $3,000,000 on eBay. But don't worry, the seller is offering free shipping, so it's quite a bargain. But do note, "To place a bid of US $15,000.00 or more, you'll need to provide a valid credit card..."
For that price, these days you could get Sylvester Stallone himself to come perform at your kid's birthday party for the next ten years.