Vigor and Candor

Kumail on Letterman

2009-11-13T12:55:00.002-06:00

My friend and freshman year roommate Kumail Nanjiani will be performing standup on Letterman tonight. Kumail and I put together a standup night in Fall 2000 at Bob's Coffeehouse on campus at Grinnell college because we each wanted to try putting an act together. We followed this up with another show the following Spring, and then he went to Chicago after graduation, where he started climbing the ladder of standup comedy in Beef City. I ended my "career" after my third performance, when I visited Kumail and other Chicago-based Grinnellians in the Spring of 2002 and went to an open mic with him. He was by a wide margin the funniest person on stage that evening, and he has continued to swiftly rise from there.

He capped off his years in Chicago with a tour leg opening for Zach Galifianakis through the midwest, and with Unpronounceable, a one-man show about his experiences going from a traditional Islamic background in Pakistan to one of the most liberal colleges in the US. Then he moved to NYC, where he has performed constantly, appeared in speaking roles on SNL and The Colbert Report, was a writer and regular on Michael and Michael Have Issues, and recently had a feature article written about him in the NY Times.

Tonight he'll be on Letterman. There is one other scheduled guest, some other up & comer by the name of Mariah Carey. Check him out: he is very funny.

What I've been up to

2009-11-09T19:32:00.003-06:00

(Besides pining for lost corn dogs, that is.)

In case you didn't feel you had a good handle on how much of a geek I am, uh, batten down the hatches.

Back in August I mentioned the then-upcoming Principles and Practice of Engineering (aka Professional Engineering, or PE) exam I would be taking this Fall. Well, it happened, on October 23rd. Here's a peek inside the world of engineering.

I'm trained as a structural engineer. This is a subset of civil engineering, broadly and poorly defined as the technical design of spaces and places and ways to get between them. If I'd been a civil engineering major as an undergraduate, I'd have taken other civil courses, like transportation (roads and rails), geotechnical (soil and foundations), environmental (water and treatment thereof), and so on. I wasn't. I was a physics major, and went to grad school for structural engineering. So my only engineering classes were structural, or related to structural. But, to be licensed to sign structural OR civil engineering drawings in the State of MN (something my employers would like me to be able to do), you have to pass the civil, rather than the structural PE. [Note: my previous company does this differently. They ask their structural engineers to take the Structural I exam, which is 8 hours on structural engineering alone. I will end up taking some version of that in the future, since some states that aren't Minnesota require it to sign structural drawings.] So the upshot is that when it came time for me to take the exam, I was looking at being tested on a bunch of stuff I'd never learned before.

In the Civil PE, everybody takes the same morning session, a four-hour-limited survey of civil engineering topics, which is listed as breaking down something like this (CHARTS!):

So, of the topics, only the last three listed here are ones I have significant background in, totaling 1/5 of the session. In the four-hour afternoon session, you pick which broad topic (geotechnical, water, transportation, construction, or structural) you want to take, so my whole 8-hour day was to break down like this:Hurrah! I was nominally over 50% in terms of topics I had any background in. To increase my chances, I took a PE review course offered by the MN Society of Professional Engineers along with a coworker. It provided a nice introduction to all those non-civil topics, which was then reinforced with some practice problems and sitting down with a couple colleagues who both passed the test last Spring.

There are a whole host of regulations to ensure that engineers taking the test do not cheat. You cannot bring anything that can communicate wirelessly into the room -- they make you leave your phone in the car or check it with them. You cannot bring your own writing utensil or any loose paper. You can only have a calculator from their narrow list of approved models (one or two model lines each of TI, HP, and Casio). The test is open-book, with one limitation: anything you bring in has to be bound, and three-ring binging counts as binding. In the room, you can tell which people are structural engineers, because they bring luggage instead of a box or crate:

So that's eighteen references*, two TI-30XII calculators (one borrowed), the instructions for the calculator, my asthma meds (just in case), the admission ticket for the exam, and Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, in case I was looking for distraction at lunchtime. Most of the books aren't mine, but borrowed from the structural & transportation groups at my firm. I did not use all the references, but there were several questions I would not have been able to answer without having brought certain books. Incidentally, that white binder at the top isn't even all of the AASHTO bridge design spec. Just the chapters I thought would be useful. I'm glad I'm in the building business.

So how much does a rolling suitcase full of engineering books weigh? I enrolled the suitcase in Wii Fit the night before the test to find out. I selected for its avatar the Mii based on Robert Evans that I made a couple years back. The suitcase is 3' tall, which with a weight of about 78 lbs gives it a body-mass index of 43.11:

Pretty bad, especially if, as this suitcase, you're only two years old.

Anyway, I felt pretty good about the test, and will find out in another 6-10 weeks whether I passed or not. I'd say more, but I'd hate to have the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying accuse me of somehow publishing their secrets. I'll let y'all know if I get to put new letters after my name in a couple months.

* For the truly strong of stomach, here is the list of references I took with me, from left to right, top to bottom, as shown in the photo above:

The Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute Design Manual
The American Institute of Steel Construction Manual, 13th Edition
Civil Engineering Reference Manual (textbook from our class - crucial for the morning)
Practice Problems for the Civil PE
The Transportation Review Board Highway Capacity Manual
The AASHTO Bridge Design Specification (select chapters)
Kassimali: Structural Analysis
Nilson, Darwin & Dolan: Design of Concrete Structures
American Concrete Institute Building Code and Commentary (ACI 318)
The International Building Code (IBC) 2006, select chapters, and various reference and design aids I've collected
Minimum Design Loads for Buildings and Other Structures (ASCE 7) 2005
Notes and practice problems from the review class
Powerpoint slides and more notes from the class
Gere: Mechanics of Materials
American Wood Council National Design Specification and Manual
AASHTO: A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets (the "Green Book")
Masonry Standards Joint Committee Building Code Requirements and Specification for Masonry Structures
? & ?: Materials for Civil and Construction Engineers (I rarely use this book day-to-day, but I'm pretty sure it got me a point on the test)

Man, I'm glad I didn't have to pay for most of those codes and specs.

Requiem for a Corn Dog

2009-10-31T13:43:00.002-05:00

I know you all come here for posts regarding only the most important topics in the world. Who am I to deny you this vital commentary?

You may know that Melissa and I are big proponents of Morningstar Farms' line of fake meat products (especially the "beef" crumbles for making tacos, the "sausage" patties with a pancake breakfast, the Chik Nuggets, and the fake bacon to toss on a veggie burger), to the point that we've long joked that we should buy stock in the company. Unlike Melissa, I am not a vegetarian, but I enjoy their products. Less fat and cholesterol than the real thing, but still very tasty.

You may also know that I am a corn dog enthusiast, and particularly a fan of "Pronto Pups" at the MN State Fair. Back in college, my friends Whitney and Dan challenged me to try Morningstar's veggie corn dogs, claiming they were as good as the real thing. They were right. It was perfect: they were filling, fast-to-prepare, tasty, and healthier than a meat corn dog. During grad school, having a hot meal I could put together in 2:30 was a great boon, and I was hooked. Morningstar corn dogs became a staple food for me thereafter.

The corn dogs disappeared from shelves this past May, with the mini corn dogs remaining available for a short time after that. Then they disappeared, too, and there was no joy in corndogville (though probably still more joy than in Dogville). Google searches over the summer led to the news that Morningstar had recalled some of their veggie dog products due to problems with their production chain not meeting "good manufacturing practices." Then came news that all their veggie dog and corn dog products were "temporarily out of stock" while they remedied a supply chain issue. Meanwhile there remained a significant hole in my "I need to eat fast and get out of here ASAP" routine. A routine I was quite happy with, thank you very much.

Now I learn that all their veggie dogs have been discontinued. Argh! One niche blogger speculates as to whether this discontinuation could damage Morningstar as a brand. I don't know about that. After all, they still make a bunch of other great products (see above). At SuperTarget, for instance, Morningstar Farms products still take up most if not all of one stack of shelves in the freezer section. It'll take a good deal more erosion to get people to stop buying the remaining products, it seems to me. Plus, hey, they're owned by Kellogg's. Not exactly a small producer easily affected by the loss of one product.

That does, however, raise the question of why they're having such a problem getting a reliable supply of veggie dogs. Surely a company like Kellogg's can find someone to make veggie dogs without doing whatever their supplier was doing before. Hell, now that Reading Rainbow is off the air, they could just take the money they were using to sponsor LeVar Burton's entreaties to not rely solely on his opinion of literature, and spend it buying, I dunno, SmartDogs.

In the meantime, does anyone know where I can get my hands on some vegetarian frozen corn dogs?

Make your nerdy life nerdier!

2009-09-30T17:14:00.007-05:00

I've long been fascinated by the ways in which information can be represented graphically. I love maps, charts, graphs, and the like, especially when it is presented in unusual, inventive, or elegant ways. I'm a fan of the work of Edward Tufte, and if his seminars weren't bloody $380 a piece, I might consider going to one (he highlights the chart shown here of Napoleon's army's size during the Russian campaign of 1812 as perhaps the best "probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn"). Likewise, I want to read all of these posters in detail.

It may come as no surprise, then, that I am a visual learner, and like to make use of visual arrangements of information when trying to learn it. And the act of putting said information together myself only helps cement the information. Hence my Jeopardy notebook. But I find myself from time to time doodling lists, tables, or graphs to wrap my brain around something. To explain my own oddities better, I thought I'd share a few with you.

First, a simple one. I found myself at lunch one day for some reason reading about the history of the NFL in Los Angeles. When I was growing up, there were two NFL teams in LA, but both left for greener pastures when I was in high school. I could never remember which teams were where, when (especially since the Raiders were originally in Oakland, then went to LA for a little over a decade, and then returned to Oakland). I decided to make a little timeline:

OK, next is something to keep track of current events, specifically the 2009 AL Central pennant race between the Twins and Tigers. At some point I picked up the habit, inherited from my father, of marking up a Twins pocket schedule with wins & losses. So this is hanging up in my cube:

I added the pre-All-Star-Break record as a midsummer stock-taking of the team. Anyway, with less than two weeks remaining in the season, I decided to start keeping track of not just what the Twins do, but also the Tigers. Last week I stuck this on my schedule:

Green means good and red means bad. The blue number is the Twins' position in the standings relative to the Tigers. From here on out, the Tigers have the "harder" schedule, but when you're in the AL Central, everything is relative.

And I do this all the time. On the practical side there are to-do lists and tables at work. On the self-interested side a calendar tracking Jeopardy contestants who qualify for the 2010 Tournament of Champions (Melissa and I are also keeping a spreadsheet on this one). And then there's the trivial. A hand-filled map of Minneapolis neighborhoods. Colored maps of the 2008 US Presidential primary and general elections. A spreadsheet of Brave New Workshop shows and casts since I started working there in 2001. Venn diagrams of classic rock band personnel. It is a disease.

Oh, I see, Hitler DIDN'T want to aggressively expand.

2009-09-02T17:33:00.006-05:00

Can we stop treating Pat Buchanan as a mainstream political figure?

Hey, while we're talking about the beginning of World War II, I feel that I should follow up my earlier complaints about the boringness of George Orwell's "blog" by saying that it started getting really good this summer. The past couple of weeks, in particular, have been absolutely fascinating, viewing the outbreak of the War from within the fog of the time. I'm intrigued to learn more about this nightmare as it plays out in real time, 70 years after the fact.

You can't go wrong by starting with yesterday's entry, which starts:

Invasion of Poland began this morning. Warsaw bombed. General mobilization proclaimed in England, ditto in France plus martial law.

If Poland had only been willing to bargain about Danzig, this would have all been avoided, right, Mr. Buchanan?

Update 9/3: Found a link to this excellent take-down of the Buchanan piece.
Other Update 9/3: Good lord, 70 years, not 60. This is why I don't trust my brain to do arithmetic for me by itself.

Irony, thy name is Bartiromo

2009-09-01T23:12:00.003-05:00

Via TPM, this clip has been making the rounds on Twitter with the tag #zingfail:

Brian Beutler points out a deeper irony about Bartiromo's zinger:

Obviously, the real punchline is that many of the people criticizing the Democrats' health care plan don't have the foggiest idea how any of it works. And Bartiromo in particular reveals--however inadvertently--that she thinks elements of the proposal make perfect sense. Yes, she's wrong to assume Weiner could buy into Medicare, and she's wrong to assume that he chooses not to because the coverage is sub-par. But ironically, the idea that Weiner should be able to buy into Medicare seems totally uncontroversial to her. And that, of course, is the whole point of the public option.

Relatedly, Factcheck.org has a breakdown (/takedown) of a popular anti-reform email that's making the rounds. And lest you label them as strictly partisan, know that they are willing to dig in on distortions on the left as well.

Don't bind their hands and hooves

2009-08-27T18:24:00.000-05:00

Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

More of why health care needs fixing.

2009-08-24T23:29:00.005-05:00

Via Balloon Juice, here's a piece from the Washington Post debunking many of the myths of health care quality in the rest of the industrialized world. This is one of the best, most straight-forward descriptions of the systems in other First World countries, in part because it doesn't rely exclusively on anecdotes, but has some data, too. The bottom line of the piece is that compared to our peer nations, the US spends more per person on worse care. The unique feature of the American system is the profit motive. We can do better.

As another example of the people who have fallen through the American system's cracks, here's one of the readers of Sullivan's blog writing in to the dudes caretaking during his absence. This guy's situation resonates with me since he's got asthma like I do. If, God forbid, I were laid off, and weren't able to find a new job before COBRA benefits expired, I'd be in his situation, perhaps paying $800/month out of pocket for inadequate care. Except I'd probably be more expensive, since I'm five years older than the guy.

Lie-driven anger winning again

2009-08-14T08:26:00.004-05:00

This really upsets me:

"End of life counseling" has been framed. No longer is it a neutral phrase that refers to a government-fostered enhancement of the doctor-patient dialog. It is now apparently so polarizing and so toxic now that the Senate Finance Committee is willing to strike a provision from its bill that would add a counseling benefit to Medicare. The Wall Street Journal reports that the measure will be excluded from the committee's mark because it has become controversial. As the Journal notes, "dumping the provision would thwart a broad effort in recent years by doctors and hospitals to encourage patients to plan for end-of-life care." That's as close as a newspaper can come to saying: what a dumb thing they're doing! The issue _is_ touchy -- but in the context of the health care debate, it has become, in just a few days, synonymous with an attack against the entire concept of health reform: that Democrats want to ration care. A question, though, for those Democrats and liberals who'll be angry about this: the response to Palin's remarks about "death panels" as well as to Sen. Chuck Grassley's repetition of the idea was swift and fairly unequivocal: it's not as if the pro-reform side didn't quickly rebut the issue with better facts. My sense is that fear-based emotional appeals set in more quickly than reason-based emotional appeals -- always have.

This is idiotic. Granted, there are several different bills right now, between the various committees in the House and Senate (something you wouldn't know to listen to, well, most people), but providing funding for counseling on end-of-life issues is terribly important. I've felt pretty strongly about this ever since the Terry Schiavo lunacy a few years back. Here's conservative Republican Senator from Georgia Johnny Isakson, speaking on the floor of the Senate in 2008:

I will talk about what we need to do in terms of Medicare eligibility. When somebody signs up for Medicare when they are 65 years old--you are supposed to go in 90 days before your 65th birthday; I am getting close, so I am looking at these things--I think you ought to be required to execute a durable power of attorney when you become eligible.

Eighty percent of the cost of health care to me, to you, and to anybody else happens in the last 60 days of life. More often than not, people are not in a condition to make a decision for themselves. Because of laws, and because we are a compassionate nation, the physician will keep you alive as long as he can. If you had a chance, you might rather say if I am being hydrated and given nutrition but will never become conscious again, I give the doctors the authority to make the appropriate medical decision. The money that would save is in the ``gazillions'' of dollars--if there is such a number. It would help us to manage that cost.

Isakson recently called the deathers "nuts" for claiming that the language in the bills would be "death panels" or forced euthanasia or anything of the sort. After being name-checked by Obama in his NH town hall, Isakson got some grief from Limbaugh and subsequently distanced himself from the President and the House bill. Now, his more recent statement brings up a more specific question. The language of the House bill (see section 1233, starting on p. 424) is fairly specific, and says that consultation on end-of-life issues shall be covered every five years, and talks about the various options that doctors shall include. Chuck Lane and others, including Isakson in that statement, have suggested that this incentivizes doctors coercing you into hospice care. I don't buy it. But if the problem is that the House bill gets too specific, fine, let's not adopt that portion of the language when this all gets worked out in committee.

BUT! as Isakson said on the floor in '08, lets make execution of a durable power of attorney mandatory for people signing up for Medicare. Make it clear that patients can say "I don't care how much sugar you have to grow to put in the IV drip that will keep me alive in a storage locker until they figure out how to thaw out Walt Disney and cure whatever I'm mostly dead from - do it!" if that's their desire. Don't remove all consideration of end-of-life stuff. Don't kill reform as a whole. Don't let this issue, especially this specific issue within the issue, be demagogued. Don't screw this up. Please. It's too important.

For more on this, read Jim Fallows' post on the media environment and how despite her history and the fact that the internet exists now, the claims of the (as far as I'm concerned) villainous Betsy McCaughey have once again come to define the debate on health care reform.

Facebook is stealing my page hits

2009-08-10T16:34:00.004-05:00

Here's a question for you tech types out there.

Back when I was writing Jeopardy posts, I wanted to make the process of adding links to this blog on my Facebook profile. So, I used the Notes Application to Import this blog. Then, every time I posted here, it was imported as a note on my Facebook profile.

Problem was, it imported the whole text of my post, plus photos, to Facebook. So people were reading it, but not here. Thus I had no way of keeping track of how many readers I had. So, I "un-imported the blog," and started manually adding a Link to each post when I posted it.

But the unimporting didn't take. Now, every time I post, I have to manually add a link and manually delete the Note. But I haven't really been doing it right, because I've ended up only deleting the Notes from my News Feed, but not the actual notes.

So: even though Notes tells me I don't have a blog imported, how do I get it to stop reposting my stuff?

Health Care: For Example

2009-08-08T08:24:00.002-05:00

Sullivan has been excellent on Health Care stuff this week. Here's a large chunk of a particularly remarkable email from one of his readers:

After about 3 hours I passed one of the [kidney] stones, and with a prescription for heavy-duty painkillers in tow, we left the hospital. Everything was fine until I received a bill 3 months later itemized as follows:

X-Ray: $765
CT Scan: $4294
Emergency Room visit: $4924
Total: $10063
The bill was a shock to me for two reasons. First, my insurance was supposed to cover this. After a long round of phone calls - during which a very rude hospital employee could not understand why I was upset at being charged $10,000 when I had insurance - I figured out that my insurance company's check had literally gotten lost in the mail. They sent another check and my bill was cleared. But this led to my second shock.
From my insurance company I received the following "explanation of benefits":
Total charge: $10063.00
Provider discount: $9571.00
Amount Payable: $442.00
How can something that would have cost me $10,063 cost my insurance $442.00 (not counting the $50 deductible that I chipped in). That's a 96% discount! To me, this shows two basic problems with our healthcare system.
1) Costs in our system are neither transparent nor fair.
I get that emergency room care is expensive, but a tray of bad lunch and a painkiller drip cannot cost almost $5000. I only saw the doctor for about 10 minutes total, and the nurse for all of 30 minutes. If I had been told that the CT Scan and the Emergency room care cost $5000 each, I'd have asked for a prescription and been off to the pharmacy. I wasn't told, however. I wasn't even give the option.
Further, the "Provider Discount" is jaw dropping. (Yes, I'll take the powder blue BMW 528i - only $2,000 with my provider discount!) My mother, who is a physician, told me that insurance companies are able to negotiate deep discounts by threatening to take their business (i.e. all the people they cover) elsewhere. This is something individuals can't do, so they get overcharged.

I've seen this repeatedly on lesser medical charges. Head-spinning.

And then there's this:

I work for a national insurance company and it's my job to pay hospitals and clinics for services performed. Now when I say pay, you should think of that in air-quotes. Assume it takes a week for the bill to be routed to the right person in the right department at my company. Once the bill reaches the right desk it heads back out. Because before we pay a bill we send it to a 3rd party company who reviews it to see how much we "really have to pay" for the services. This is because every state has different guidelines about what services should cost. This takes a week. Then the bill comes back to us, and if there are no issues with the hospital's records in our systems we pay the bill then.
However, if there are any issues it comes to me.
It's my job to call the hospital for updated tax forms (because it's not enough that we know their tax id, we have to have a government form showing the number). Then I send the records to another company who updates our database with the information. This takes another week, or longer if I have trouble getting a hold of the right person at the hospital.
Finally, we pay the bill. During this time the hospital has been waiting to get paid X number of dollars. Only instead we'll be paying them Y because that's what the state says is the minimum we have to pay.
So while your readers are being charged $50 for asprin; my company employs an entire department just to shuffle bills around while they decide what they will pay the hospital for that asprin.
I like my job, but I would gladly give it up if it meant that this insanity could stop.

While it's true that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data," I've found this whole series very thought-provoking.

What the Health Care Bill Is Not.

2009-08-07T16:30:00.002-05:00

I know I'm suddenly overposting after weeks of no posting after weeks of little posting, but I wanted to toss a little bit of politics/public policy stuff up here. Hooray?

Anyway, there are a number of alarming statements being propagated about the health care bill bouncing around Congress that are false, and I wanted to spread the word in case [you] are confronted by someone who has been alarmed by an alarming falsehood. This largely comes from Salon.com's excellent piece on the subject. I understand also that the White House plans to put together a website modeled on candidate Obama's Fight The Smears site from last summer/fall.

ALARMING CONTENTION: This is socialized medicine, or a single-payer health care system.
ACTUAL SITUATION: It is neither. This is not proposing a British-style system (or for that matter, a Veterans Health Administration-style system), where the government is the sole employer and provider of health care services. Nor is it a Canadian-style single-payer system wherein the government is the only insurer. The bill, broadly put, is intended by supporters of health care reform to do two things: 1. get everybody insured either through private plans or an optional government plan; 2. to reform health insurance practices to improve care. Something to keep in mind is that we are already paying for government-(and rising-premium-)subsidized health care for the poor. It's called the emergency room, and it's way more expensive than getting people some basic preventative services and some occasional prescriptions.

ALARMING CONTENTION: The bill outlaws private insurance.
ACTUAL SITUATION: The bill requires that private insurance plans be sold through a health care marketplace designed to increase competition and help consumers find the best option for them.

ALARMING CONTENTION: The health care bill will spend tax dollars for abortions.
ACTUAL SITUATION: One version of the bill includes measures for paying for preventative care and screening, which may be provided by Planned Parenthood (who are emphatically NOT just about abortions, though a lot of people assume they are). The Hyde Amendment of 1976 prevents any Federal money from being spent on abortions.

ALARMING CONTENTION: The bill will force the elderly to forgo treatment and consider assisted suicide.
ACTUAL SITUATION: This is the one, along with the abortion bit, that I've heard the most of in the alarming rhetoric these last few weeks. It is not true. The bill would require that plans pay for end-of-life consultation if asked for by the patient. Many elderly patients do not have health care directives indicating what they would like to have happen at the end of their life if they are incapacitated and unable to voice their wishes. As such, a lot of time and money is spent keeping terminally ill patients nominally alive. As it is now, Medicare does not pay for patients to consult with their doctors to craft a directive. The bill is aimed at fixing this. Honestly, I feel like this part of the bill, more than anything, is something anyone this side of Bill Frist's cohort in the Terry Schiavo case should support. It reduces waste and is humane, giving the individual some choice in how much they do or do not want done to keep them barely alive.

Anyway, check out the Salon bit above, and if someone is repeating one of these stories, politely challenge them. Calm exchange of information is always preferable in a debate to, well, everything we've seen this week at the town hall meetings.

Also, check out the series of personal stories entitled "The View From Your Sickbed" that Andrew Sullivan's been posting.

So Say We All

2009-08-07T12:00:00.001-05:00

Improv colleague Tim Uren works for Fantasy Flight Games, a local board game publisher of international renown. FFG publishes the excellent board game based on the excellent recent version of Battlestar Galactica. This past winter and early Spring, I played several sessions of BSG with Nels and a handful of other folks, including Tim on a couple of occasions. Tim revealed to us that his company was working on an expansion to the game based on the Battlestar Pegasus (the Ship of Dicks, if you're familiar with the show -- seriously, everybody on that thing's an a-hole). And one weekend, we got a chance to play the prototype of the game. All the cards were inkjet printed and stuck in sleeves with Yu-Gi-Oh cards or some such. But the rules were largely in place. The new boards had been laser printed and pasted down on spare chunks of other games' boards. I'm pretty sure I'm still bound by the non-disclosure agreement until the expansion is actually released next month, but it was a lot of fun and I look forward to playing again.

Anyway, yesterday I was alerted to the fact that the rules for the expansion had been posted on FFG's site, and that I should look at the second-to-last page. Here's what I found (highlighting mine):
That's a sizeable chunk of the Twin Cities theater & comedy scene, right there. And we got to help them refine this thing. You're welcome, fellow nerds.

Purple Monkey Dishwasher

2009-08-06T23:15:00.001-05:00

Like Lovecraft's cyclopean creatures of the deep, Google continues to extend its suckered tendrils out of the blackness, grasping at humanity. One of their latest offerings is Google Voice, which lets you have a phone number of your choice, to satisfy some need that I'm not entirely sure I understand. Something about linking your phone numbers together. I guess if you've got your cell phone, home phone, work phone, etc., you can get the one number to rule them all from Google, and switch which phone that number will send people's calls to. I suspect that the condition known as iPhone Ownership puts you at risk for another condition called Google Voice Number Wanting.

Perhaps that's why Nels got one. Early this evening, just before I left work, he asked me to be the guinea pig for his new number, and help him test out the message-taking feature of Google Voice. You see, if you enable it, GV will act as your message service. It'll record and store your call, transcribe it, and send it to you as an email. Clearly this needed a field test. And a challenging one at that. I left the following stream-of-consciousness message for Nels, including a Battlestar Galactica reference in a raspy voice, my last name, my company's name (initials), and several other proper nouns:

Ohh, Bill... They killed my Ellen. I am calling from [company name] and my name is Fred Beukema and uh, I don't know what else is a difficult word to say. Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice today which means she should be ready to serve on the court this fall and David Souter can retire to New Hampshire and his little cabin. Uh, bye.

Here's what Google thought I said:

yo so they shut my land i am calling from [company name -- they got it accurately] and my name is fred you come home and i don't know what else is a difficult would just say sonia some on your was confirm the supreme court justice today which means it should be ready to serve on the the court this fall and gave it to 210 your tires to new hampshire and we'll kevin bye

They're close, but the algorithm needs some polish, I'd say.

Incidentally, I think Souter's cabin looks like it belongs in an Evil Dead movie.

Until next time, this is Fred You Come Home, signing off.

The MN Fringe Festival and returning to the blog

2009-08-06T22:01:00.001-05:00

Whoo. Been a few months. Right now I find myself in the midst of the Fringe, having seen 16 shows so far (if the stack of stubs on my desk is to be believed), and at least a half dozen left to go. Favorites so far have included Sideways Stories from Wayside School, The Traveling Musicians, and Bard Fiction. I hope to put together a more lengthy post on the latter at some point. Also a post about having turned 30, as I did in July.

I'm also in the process of applying to take the PE exam this Fall, which promises to be a rather disruptive event (as it probably should be). I'm turning in my application tomorrow, as a matter of fact. So the first hard part will be over. Much harder parts to come. Woo-hoo.

I'll get back to some more substantial posts, uh, sometime. For now, though, a couple quick ones to cleanse the palate. Coming right up.

Why I Love My Wife

2009-06-19T07:23:00.000-05:00

Well, one example of why, anyhow. I'd originally written up this charming little three-line scene in the wake of the initial Swine Flu outbreak back at the beginning of May. Then I lost it in the shuffle. Since we're heading out of town for a friend's wedding (congrats to Nishant and Blythe!), I felt it was appropriate to celebrate love. Here goes:

One evening a couple weeks back, Melissa and I were chatting about the continuing news reports and press conferences regarding the swine flu.

M: The State epidemiologist was talking today about what people can do to protect themselves, and how to properly wash their hands. She said "We don't want you to just get them wet. You should sing Happy Birthday twice, you know." So I've been doing that. I've been singing Happy Birthday twice every time I wash my hands.
F: That's delightful! Who are you singing Happy Birthday to when you do it?
M: To my hands.

fin

Reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire

2009-06-17T16:27:00.004-05:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic posted a terrific link today that I wanted to share with you all. It's from Jourdon Anderson, a freed slave in Ohio, to his former master in Tennessee shortly after the Civil War. It is masterfully understated. Absolutely fascinating (click on the opening in the box below):

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Lunatic Fringe

2009-06-11T12:25:00.000-05:00

There's a phrase that was tossed around in the wake of the murder of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita a couple weeks back, and has now appeared again in conjunction with the killing of a security guard by James von Brunn yesterday at the Holocaust Museum: "sovereign citizen." Both gunmen were self-described Sovereign Citizens, and have left a trail of contacts and presence on right-wing fringe websites.

The first I'd heard of the phrase sovereign citizen was in this Washington Monthly article a litle over a year ago. It's a fascinating read: in recent years, more than twenty African American men charged with violent offenses in Baltimore have invoked their rights as sovereign citizens, claiming not to be bound by the illegal assertion of power by the United States Federal Government. The truly weird part is the origin of the concept, relative to the defendants: the Sovereign Citizen Movement is based in opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery. It claims that the 14th converted sovereign citizens, bound by English Common Law, into federal citizens, or something, and that the Government uses federal citizens as collateral in foreign debt (again, or something). Adherents further believe that there is a specific set of legal verbiage, presented in a certain order on certain forms, that can free you from your federal citizenship and return you to sovereign citizenship; this, it should be noted, is drivel.

Anyway, apparently tied to this is the concept of Posse Comitatus, Latin for "force of the county," which asserts that the supreme law enforecement power in the land is that of county sherrifs, and that the National Guard, federal troops, etc., have no power over the local sherrif. According to the Washington Monthly article, this idea derives from an act passed at the federal level in 1878 to take the teeth out of Reconstruction and prevent the government from protecting civil rights in the South.

Very strange and interesting, all, but not at all to diminish the tragedy of these murders. My sympathy goes out to the families of both victims.

Awful piece on marriage, gay and otherwise

2009-05-27T07:00:00.001-05:00

With a hat tip to Isaac Chotiner at The New Republic, whose post alerted me to this editorial, I'd like in turn to draw your attention to a terrible piece of writing on marriage. It's by one Sam Schulman at the conservative website/magazine The Weekly Standard, and is full to brimming with head-slappingly ridiculous claims about marriage between people of different sexes and the same sex. If you don't read all of Schulman's work, read Chotiner's post to get the flavor.

To be honest, I have a tough time with my feelings about the piece. On the one hand, my reaction is so strongly and immediately negative, and almost everything Schulman writes seems wrong in such a glaring, obvious way that it could be dismissed as a self-made straw man of sorts, an extreme outlier. At the same time, however, he lays bare a major undercurrent I've always noted in the arguments against marriage equality: the desire of social conservatives to preserve "traditional" gender roles in heterosexual relationships. How can you keep the work/homemaking spheres separated, after all, if the married couple in question is two ladies or -- added ickyness! -- two dudes?

The answer to those like me who believe in making your home life in the way that you and your loved ones see fit* is that you don't, or need not, keep the spheres separate unless you choose to do so for yourselves. And so, I look at a paragraph like this one Schulman cobbled together from the bones of the past, and after every sentence, I find myself flatly negating the statement he just made:

Even in modern romantic marriages, a groom becomes the hunting or business partner of his father-in-law and a member of his clubs; a bride becomes an ally of her mother-in-law in controlling her husband. There can, of course, be warm relations between families and their children's same-sex partners, but these come about because of liking, sympathy, and the inherent kindness of many people. A wedding between same-sex lovers does not create the fact (or even the feeling) of kinship between a man and his husband's family; a woman and her wife's kin. It will be nothing like the new kinship structure that a marriage imposes willy-nilly on two families who would otherwise loathe each other.

The assumtion of universality, the "one-size-fits-all" of his model of marriage is staggering. It's not that a groom might partner with his father in law, it's that he does. No he doesn't, Mr. Schulman. It's like he got his idea of family and marriage from all the old comic strips that newspapers only keep to avoid receiving nasty letters from septugenarians.

I feel that mentioning, as Schulman does, that he's been married thrice, is scoring easy points. Honestly, if I didn't think someone would read his piece and bring this fact up in a comment, I'd leave it out.

Anyway, I feel like today is a good day to celebrate marriages of all kinds, as it is Melissa's and my second anniversary. The first two years have been wonderful, and I'm looking forward to many pairs of years more!

* (So long as nobody is being harmed! Gay and non-traditional straight marriages are not a slippery slope to legal incest, bestiality, and polygamy.)

Calling Out, Around The World

2009-05-26T10:32:00.004-05:00

Summer's here, and the time is right to see The Robinson Caruso Organization! Old school R&B & soul! Live music!

I was recruited a couple months ago into the horn section of the Organization, and it has been a hell of a good time. We're playing a mix of new & old: original songs written by front man Robinson Caruso himself (James Rone), and hits from the likes of Al Green, The Temptations, Martha & the Vandellas, Jamie Lidell, Otis Redding, Bill Withers & Stevie Wonder. Our first show was last month at Bunker's, and if you go to the RCO Facebook page, you can see photos and videos from that event.

Show #2 is next Tuesday, June 2nd, at the Fine Line Music Cafe in Downtown Minneapolis. There's no cover, and you can go here to print some complimentary tickets in advance. Because you need comps for a no cover show? Here's the word from the Fine Line about the evening:

Darrell Julian 8-9:00
Robinson Caruso 9:15-10:15
Sexy Delicious 10:30-11:30
On Tuesday nights the Fine Line 2 for 1 on all drinks
AND our new kitchen will be open until 10pm serving appetizers, sandwiches, etc!!

So bring your appetite in addition to your dancing shoes...

Do Not Separate

2009-05-24T13:33:00.005-05:00

This weekend The Current (the local, hipstery non-classical, non-news NPR music affiliate, for those who are unfamiliar) is doing a "block party weekend." They're taking requests for artists, and playing three songs at a time for each. Last night as I was driving around, I called in to request some Bowie, unawares that they had played a Bowie set immediately before the Beastie Boys set that had just ended. Thankfully, they threw in "Under Pressure" at the end of a subsequent Queen set, so I at least got a little shot of the White Duke.

Later, I caught the tail end of a Led Zeppelin set, hearing the second half of "Black Dog." Afterward, the DJ listed the songs from the set, and said that we'd heard "Heartbreaker." Without "Living Loving Maid," I thought? What a letdown! Those songs go together. It's a direct segue. Had I been listening, I would have sung right along, expecting to go from "Heartbreaker! Heartbreaker! Heart!" to "With a purple umb-a-rella and a fifty-cent hat!"

(Incidentally, according to Wikipedia, the songs were never played together in concert, because Jimmy Page didn't really like the latter. Also incidentally, unless the song is in someway inspired by the writing of Tolkien, Zeppelin lyrics are properly quoted with exclamation points.)

Anyway, this got me thinking of other song combinations that are properly played together:

The obvious combination is that "We Will Rock You" and "We Are The Champions" need to be together, unless being played as short snippets at a sporting event. The latter can work on its own, but the first does not. Oddly enough, the original singles of these songs had them in reverse order. Topsy turvy!
I don't know that I've ever heard "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" without "With a Little Help From My Friends" or vice versa, but it sounds like a bad idea.
Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall, Part II" is just dull and repetitive without "The Happiest Day of Our Lives" coming before it. I feel the same way about "Young Lust" without "Empty Spaces." Boring. Like just about any individual track off of The Wall without its surrounding material, other than "Comfortably Numb."

There are other combos that I prefer, but aren't what I'd call necessary. For instance, the end of "Buddy Holly" feels like it should lead into the beginning of "The Sweater Song." And in the alternate universe where They Might Be Giants are a Top 40 hit machine, a DJ would never play "If I Wasn't Shy" off of Apollo 18, without immediately following up with "Turn Around."

Anyone else got examples of necessary or preferred song combinations?

Coffee is for Closers: a terrible board game, reviewed

2009-05-20T12:38:00.000-05:00

The following is a review I posted to BoardGameGeek.com of a game Melissa and I bought super-cheap back in January.

"To make a million dollars it takes more than skill and strategy," claims the cover of The Million Dollar Sales Game by Jim Madonna Marketing. Point of fact, if the game play is to be believed, neither of these things have anything to do with making a million, and pure, stupid luck is all you need.

My wife and I discovered this on the 75%-Off clearance games table at Barnes & Noble in January. This need not have been a sign of the lack of quality: they also had Acquire on this table, and we picked up an Onyx edition of Monopoly for $12.50. That night, over pizza, we tried out Million Dollar Sales.

We expected a variant on Monopoly, wherein we would have to use sales skills somehow to sell properties or goods, or deal with clients, distributors, customers, and competitors of some sort. What we got was Candy Land for salespeople.

You roll the dice, move your car, and do whatever your new space tells you, which may be a good or bad thing (either gaining or losing money, prospective customers, spaces on the board, or a turn), or a Stuff Happens card (which is a bad thing after drawing a card) or an Opportunity Knocks card (good thing). When you have five prospective customers, they may be traded for Actual Customers. When you pass the starting point on the circuit, you get rewarded based on how many customers you have.

The game involves remarkably little decision making. Really the only decision you make is whether or not to leave the main track for one of six Regional Customer tracks. These tracks slow your path to pay day, but each gets you a Regional Customer card, which counts as a customer on payday, and if you have all six customer cards, you get a bonus at that time.

The fact that the mechanics are so simplistic means that if the game is to be any fun, the fun has to come from the theme. And the theme is ham-handed. We quickly realized that this game is designed as a training tool for salespeople. The in-game text uses lots of sales jargon about listening and following up and creating a work plan and closing. All of this is presented in a lifeless and matter-of-fact way that generates exactly zero interest. It also doesn't attach any meaning to the actions described. You may be told that up-selling is a good thing, but you aren't told how you might do this as a real-life salesperson. So the game amounts to $40 flash cards without anything written on their backs [again, we got this on the bargain table; I'd be much angrier at the game if we'd paid $40 instead of $7]. I cannot imagine how this would be useful even if you were learning to sell.

The components in the box are very nice. Everything is glossy, printed in color on magazine-cover-like paper. The board is in full color and well-printed, and the cars are not cheap plastic. The dice are needlessly large. The box is well-arranged, with separate trays for everything and a clear plastic lid that holds everything in place to prevent contents from shifting.

The game was not without its cheesy entertainment value, mostly for meta-game reasons. The sheer ridiculousness of the presentation and the jargon made us laugh on several occasions, especially when a Stuff Happens card penalized me eight grand "just for being stupid." The salesspeak reminded me repeatedly of the play and film Glengarry Glen Ross and made me wish there was a vulgar, David Mamet-themed version of the game ("Mitch & Murray send Alec Baldwin to call you a c********r. Go back ten spaces." [link NSFW and family-unfriendly] Second place in this version would, of course, be a set of steak knives.).

So unless a phrase like "The Power of Listening Avenue" sends you into paroxysms of laughter, this game is eminently skippable. Even if you are trying to learn to sell, this game probably won't teach you anything of value. Go rent the movie and pick up some choice swears from Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon instead.

Poverty is expensive

2009-05-19T07:00:00.000-05:00

If you ever find yourself complaining about the "lucky duckies" at the bottom of the income scale who don't pay income tax, or feel that the poor just need to get their acts together to bootstrap themselves out of a bad situation, I urge you to read this article from the Washington Post.

Jeopardy: sense of scale

2009-05-05T07:00:00.001-05:00

The 2009 Jeopardy College Tournament is this week, and whoever wins it is guaranteed a spot in the 2010 Tournament of Champions along with previous College winner Joey Beachum (prevented by the Air Force from competing in the 2009 ToC), Liz Murphy, maybe Kevin Joyce, and maybe maybe me.

The official site now has a set of photos of the College players going through the process, and it shows a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff I was yammering about for weeks. Check it out.

So it's come to this: a LOLCat

2009-05-04T12:15:00.000-05:00

I promise not to make a habit of posting LOLCats, but this one is a classic, and one of my favorites ever. This rheumy- and cock-eyed, and seemingly insane Persian is infinitely amusing to me. I would be fascinated to see other pictures of this particular cat.