The sole entry under the “See Also” heading on the Wikipedia page for smelling salts is “aromatherapy.” I don’t know if it’s the smelling salts people or the candle/incense people, but at least one of those camps should object to that.

I don’t think there’s a lot of overlap between the subset of people who read this blog and the subset of people who care about baseball, but whatever. I’m writing about baseball anyway. Really though, I’m sure you can make connections as to how it applies to other things if you want, things you find more relevant to your life. Football, maybe.

So here’s the deal: at the end of a given baseball season, they hand out awards to players for outstanding individual accomplishments of different types: some for pitchers, some for new players, some for hitters, for fielders, and so on. The most prestigious, for which all players are eligible, is the MVP, or Most Valuable Player. It’s like the Nobel prize of Major League Baseball, at least as far as specific players are concerned.

Baseball fans and “experts” like to engage in speculation about the eventual winner of this award, well in advance of the end of the season. The great charm of baseball, really, is the pursuit of hypotheticals, and this one is a classic. Debates are more engaging when there are camps and paradigms, and the MVP debate has them with gusto. I’d like to talk briefly about how the one I don’t belong to is silly and wrong.

What this comes down to, I think, is what is meant by the term value. At least I hope that’s what it comes down to, because sometimes I’m afraid it’s just a matter of widespread failure to think carefully about the situation, but let’s give the rubes as much credit as possible, at least for the purpose of discussion. Some would say that value is how much a player contributes to a team’s capacity to win ballgames. Other people seem to think value is some kind of interactive product between a team’s total accomplishments and the relative contribution of any one of its players, or something like that. The bottom line is that a lot of folks will insist that someone should not be recognized as the most valuable player if his team didn’t do well. These people make me angry.

I hope a brief metaphor will illustrate my position here. Let’s say that you and I collect baseball cards, and we go in to our local card shop and have our collections appraised. The shopkeeper says that all of the cards we have brought him are worth between a nickel and two dollars, with the exception of one card that’s worth ten. Now then, reader, I ask you: which is the MVC (most valuable card)? If your answer starts with “well, that depends on which collection is worth most in total,” I want you to go stand in the corner and think about what you’ve done. It’s the ten dollar card.

I can understand, sort of, the argument that “value” should reflect a players value in practice, to the specific team that employs him. Of course, this would actually lead one to vote for guys on bad teams, not good ones. If you have a team full of guys who should be playing in a corn field in Toledo, plus Babe Ruth, that team won’t do particularly well. However, if you take Ruth out of the lineup, they would lose virtually their entire capacity to score runs. Ruth is probably more valuable to them than anyone else is to his respective team, and Ruth is more valuable to his team than he would be to any other team. This is a perfectly reasonable standard, by which it is perfectly reasonable to name Ruth the most valuable player, even if Barry Bonds had a better season, but it was while playing for a team full of stars.

There are not legions of people out there that say the MVP should go to the biggest star on the most incompetent team, as this line of reasoning would support. There are, however, people who try to use this line of reasoning to support the case of players on the best teams. They seem to assume that the only variation in talent and productivity exists between people about whom they are speculating; Batting Bob and Swinging Steve are both great players, and one of them will be the MVP, but everyone else in the league is part of an army of mass-produced, identical automatons. In this case, sure, the fact that Batting Bob made the playoffs while Swinging Steve didn’t is admissible evidence, because they had the same thing to work with. We’ve controlled for all the potentially intervening variables. Of course, every single player has some different productive value, and no one player has the single-handed capacity to ensure the pennant for his team, so it really doesn’t matter what the teams did — you just have to figure out which player performed best over the course of the season. I really don’t think it’s that complicated.

Tags: baseball

Michel Foucault is
a hypochondriac and
power is the germ

Tags: procrastination

Hello, reader. Let’s play a game. Which one of the following movie premises is not like the other? Ready?

• Adam Sandler is in love with a girl, but the it turns out the girl is a golden retriever or something.
• Adam Sandler inherits like a billion dollars, but first he has to become a boxer or something
• Adam Sandler is an Israeli army guy, but then he goes to America because he wants to be a hair stylist or something
• Adam Sandler is trapped on an island and falls in love with a coconut*

Ok, I’ll give you a hint: three of these were generated by Awesom-o 4000, an intelligent robot that is actually Eric Cartman dressed up in a cardboard suit. The other one hits theaters this Friday.

Conclusion? Awesome-o exists.

Dear George Lucas,

So then, about Indiana Jones 4…you’ve got to be kidding. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. I’d like to see the script that Ford refused to make. I don’t know, maybe this was his fault. Maybe that first script was better, and he sent it back to you riddled with post-it notes with messages like “more goofiness!” and “make this part sillier!!” scribbled on them. You know what though, I’m inclined to blame you, the man who could have left the world free of Jar-Jar Binks but instead chose not to. I want you to take a while and think about what you’ve done here.

Sincerely,
Geoffrey

P.S.
more Star Wars please.

Subject: FROM MR MIKES TO YOU (don’t use all caps.)
From: “Dear Sir/Madam” (put your name here, not a greeting)
Date: Mon, May 26, 2008 2:58 am
To: undisclosed-recipients:; (why? suspicious)

Dear Sir/Madam don’t you know who I am?
I am (a/the) manager of one of the leading company (which one? ) in South Benin. (runon) inIn my company, we discovered an abandoned large sum of money (US$14.7M) belonging to one of our Foreign Customer foreign customers, Mr. William Barnes, an American Nationality, a businessman,businessman who was involved in an air crash along with his family.:-( You can confirm from the website below. PLANE CRASH WEB SITE (don’t use all caps) http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/africa/12/26/benin.crash/index.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/egyptair/article/0,,196602,00.html. (website from 2003? use updated sources!) I am seeking for your Co-operation cooperation to front you as the beneficiary of the funds. (confusing…explain. why me? you come off crazy throwing this out for no reason) No beneficiary, No no other person knows about these funds neither operate nor has anyone operated this account since his death. (why not? doesn’t make sense) The Strategy strategy is to use our (”our”? who else are you representing? this comes out of nowhere) influence as managers of the company to approve you as the beneficiary and release the funds over to you. (do I need to pay you some of the money? What’s the catch?) So if you are interested please reply with your full name, Address, address telephone and fax (nobody uses fax anymore) number for further clarification. (clarify here!) You should contact me on my Private Email private email / mikeandree3@voila.fr (”.fr”? I thought you were in Benin?!?)immediately as soon as you receive this letter email. Trusting to hear from you immediately. (fragment, reword)

Yours faithfully
Regards. (choose one closing an use a comma after it.)
Mr. Mike Andree (If your last name isn’t “Mikes”, don’t call yourself “Mr. Mikes” in the subject line)

Your writing mechanics need some work. In particular, be attentive of your capitalization. Interesting usage of cnn.com, but as mentioned previously, please use a more recent article. Other than that, this email lacked originality…I felt like I had read this dozens of times before.

C-

I am of the opinion that making arguments of questionable validity does unquestionable damage to one’s position — it makes you look desperate, like you don’t have any stronger evidence to put forth. If you have really firmly established your strongest claims, then it might be time to move on to advancing the more debatable points in an attempt to win the fence-sitters with whom the secondary claims resonate, but I don’t know if just shutting up about them entirely is necessarily a bad idea in some circumstances.

Unfortunately, I see large chunks of the democratic party — specifically, the Obama chunks — engaging in what seems to me like shooting itself in the foot via this sort of weak argumentation. To be clear on where I stand in this arena, I can think of about six hypothetically viable Democrats whom I would prefer over Senator Clinton, with Obama near the top of that list. I have objections with several different elements of her campaign, and I think that by remaining in the race at this point she’s doing a disservice to the causes which I have no doubt she earnestly supports.

That being said, I would kindly implore everyone to please shut up about the comments she made regarding RFK recently. I don’t see what the big deal is, and there are many much more salient reasons to disagree with the woman.

Here’s a recap: Clinton, responding to inquiries about her continued presence in the race, noted that her husband didn’t wrap up the nomination until June, and that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June as well. Once word of these comments got out, knickers across the nation became horribly bunched. Here’s some AP coverage of the back-and-forth between campaign PR people, and here’s Gawker dealing in a narrative which I’ve seen several places, which is that Clinton’s motivation is the notion, already advanced by some, that Obama will be an unduly appealing target to potential assassins. This is not only unfounded (in my opinion), but a perfect example of the problems involved with trying to win support through tertiary arguments. On one hand, you’re probably getting your base all excited — and I’m talking about the Obama base here, attributing such tortured reasoning to Clinton — but everyone else is not going to uncritically accept the notion that she is so callous and fear-mongering as to rest her self-justification on the contention that Obama is as good as dead. This futility of message would probably be true irrespective of the actual evidence, but even more so in light of the fact that, taken in proper context, people can actually Clinton was making a rather benign (almost insipid, really) historical remark. Here’s a youtube video of the exchange in question.

See that? In specific answer to the “party unity argument” (the notion that her failure to concede the nomination results most notably in continued infighting amongst democrats, which creates a net negative effect for democrats in general), she cites the precedent of two previous candidates on successful trajectories who were still active in their primary campaigns at this point in the year, who are not generally regarded to have caused serious harm to the well-being of the party. Her husband took a while to secure the nomination, and proceeded to win the general election. Bobby Kennedy was only stopped by his tragic and untimely death — i.e., he was still actively seeking the nomination in June, and the man is held as highly in people’s memories as anyone in the party’s history, probably.

The key thing, really, is that in this particular metaphor, Clinton seems to suggest that she is RFK. It’s not “RFK got shot and so will Obama,” it’s “RFK was still going strong and so am I”. She wants people to think she’s a noble proponent of principled stances, and that it’s more important for her to continue fighting for them than to concede; she would sooner be a martyr than a quitter, or whatever. Now, this is silly (because by most objective measures Obama is much more similar to Bobby Kennedy than she is, which might be where some of this confusion is coming from), evasive (because she’s really not addressing the dynamics of the current race and specific ramifications of her actions, just citing two superficially similar moments in history without analysis), and probably a little insensitive, but I think people are really overreacting on this. I mean, senator Clinton isn’t stupid — if she actually is pinning her hopes on the possibility that Obama’s parallels to RFK continue with tragic conclusion, she would have conceded gracefully and then arisen as the default replacement post-assassination, promising to carry on in the spirit of his legacy in these saddest of times, so on and so forth. Maybe she doesn’t want you to vote for Obama because someone will kill him further down the line, at which point his VP/running mate would take over, which a) stretches the RFK comparison and b) doesn’t resonate very well without a specific person to put in that backup role. I don’t buy it.

Going on about this makes it look like we’re splitting hairs. Some of the discussion is clearly being maintained by (relatively/allegedly) disinterested media outlets, but it wouldn’t have much cache if the Obama camp made a statement saying they didn’t think it was a big deal. Irrespective of the advancement goals for the Obama campaign, it’s really just irresponsible not to do a little digging to figure out what was going on with these remarks before lambasting the woman.

I suppose the take-away point here might be that Senator Clinton’s comments have resulted in drawn out, petty infighting between democrats, rather than using that time and energy to prepare for the fight with Senator McCain. It would seem as though there might be something to all this party unity business after all.

Some bitter old English professor has taken a break from yelling at kids to get off his lawn to pen a book about how whippersnappers these days are all stupid. I’m not sure he actually says “stupid”, at least on the cover, but I do think it literally says people under 30 should not be trusted. I am intentionally neither reproducing this person’s name nor providing links to his website or stories about him, because I get the distinct impression that the whole endeavor for this guy is about some combination of attention and money, and I refuse to be complicit in elevating his page rankings. Because clearly, a link from me is the golden ticket to world renown. Anyway, what I am going to do is respond to his points on behalf of the entirety of youthful humanity. This probably includes you; you’re welcome.

1. They make excellent “Jaywalking” targets

Bauerlein writes: “The ignorance is hard to believe … It isn’t enough to say that these young people are uninterested in world realities. They are actively cut off from them. … They are encased in more immediate realities that shut out conditions beyond — friends, work, clothes, cars, pop music, sitcoms, Facebook.”

I’m so sensitive about providing links to this guy because right off the bat I get the feeling that this dude is really hoping he’ll turn up in google searches made by Tonight Show fans. Seriously, what’s the point of this reference? It’s not particularly catchy, clever, or more informative than “they lack common knowledge.” Also, I don’t get the distinction between “world realities” and “immediate realities,” which provides the unnerving suggestion that my friends and music are not of this world. Also, ignorant people are everywhere. Give me a camera and an old box of trivial pursuit, and I can go make old people look stupid without any real effort. Of course that is assuming they aren’t too jaded to show enough trust to speak with me, what with my nefarious facey books and hi-fi pods and so forth.

2. They don’t read books — and don’t want to, either

“It’s a new attitude, this brazen disregard of books and reading. Earlier generations resented homework assignments, of course, and only a small segment of each dove into the intellectual currents of the time, but no generation trumpeted aliteracy … as a valid behavior of their peers.”

This is a horrible, sweeping overgeneralization. Mostly though, I really, really hope that the typo in this little diatribe about the decline of “aliteracy” is original to the author. I mean, you can’t make that up.

Anyway, I’m not convinced that any significant number of people actually trumpets “aliteracy”, and depending on how this guy is, I kind of wonder whether we might actually have higher actual literacy rates than he and his pals did when they were our ages. I don’t have any data to back that up, but I’m pretty sure that’s not really something he’s worried about. At all.

3. They can’t spell

Lack of capitalization and IM codes dominate online writing. Without spellcheck, folks are toast.

This is by far his most valid point. I am a poor speller, and I don’t really have to be a good one most of the time, so it isn’t getting much better. I don’t really know why this means we aren’t to be trusted — again, keep in mind that that’s the actual operative thesis, with our stupidity being merely implicit.

4. They get ridiculed for original thought, good writing

“On MySpace, if you write clearly and compose coherent paragraphs with informed observations on history and current events, ‘buddies’ will make fun of you,” Bauerlein says. Wikipedia writing is clean and factual, but colorless and judgment-free. Often the most clever students, with flashes of disorganized brilliance on MySpace, switch to dull Wiki-writing formats for school papers, he says. “If we could combine the style and imagination of MySpace with the content of Wikipedia, we might get good stuff.”

I have never noticed this, anywhere. We’re definitely not talking about people in general under age 30, or if we are, then this guys is just full of it. We might be talking about people under like 15 or so, because I’m losing touch with those kids; also, we might just be talking about stupid people, which would lead us to the conclusion that stupid young people are stupid. It could also lead us to the conclusion that all young people are stupid (untrustworthy — whatever) if we’re willing to make unfounded broad generalizations about millions of people.

Please note the further usage of tangentially-related but popularly-web-searched terminology here.

5. Grand Theft Auto IV, etc.

The stats tell the story here. First week’s sales: $500 million. The sales of GTA dwarf movie premieres, CD sales, or, Bauerlein notes, book sales. All that video use, Bauerlein says, has hurt in the classroom, too. Thousands of Massachusetts public school graduates are ending up in remedial reading and writing classes in college, according to a Globe story.

You can’t just throw out two facts and say that one caused the other. Usually when people do this it takes a form that has some degree of face validity, but this really jumps out as a horrible non sequitur. I mean, come on, GTAIV hit shelves a few days ago, and this guy is referencing a story about how kids in one state are experiencing a long term shift towards remedial reading? There isn’t even the wildly unfounded accusation that GTA causes kids not to read; there’s just the unstated assumption that this is true.

What’s more, GTA requires a great deal more imagination, critical thought, and problem solving skills than movies and CDs, and ditto except for the imagination part with respect to books.

Hey, do you thing GTA IV might possibly be something people might be googling these days?

6. They don’t store the information

“For digital immigrants, people who are 40 years old who spent their college time in the library acquiring information, the Internet is really a miraculous source of knowledge,” Bauerlein says. “Digital natives, however, go to the Internet not to store knowledge in their minds, but to retrieve material and pass it along. The Internet is just a delivery system.”

First of all, I’m not sure how well this dude stored his math information, because I’m only 23 and I vividly remember not having internet access. I would love, LOVE to see some actual data on this information absorption hypothesis, because it’s certainly plausible — just totally and horribly unsubstantiated here. Maybe it’s in the book, but I’ll never find out. Not because I don’t want to read this trash, just because my friends will make fun of me if I do.

7. Because their teachers don’t tell them so

Or because their parents don’t check their bedrooms at midnight to halt the instant messaging…”Kids are drowning in teen stuff delivered 24/7 by the tools, and adult realities can’t penetrate,” Bauerlein says. Another factor: “It’s the era of child-centered classrooms and self-esteem grading.”

Ok, for those of you keeping score at home, we now have “adult realities” along with the “world” and “immediate” varieties. So the idea here is that people are afraid to tell their precious little snowflakes that they’re stupid, and the snowflakes would be too busy txting to listen anyway. Apparently we’ve stopped trying to demonstrate what’s wrong as if any effective evidence had come to bear at this point, and simply start making an argument about why the situation doesn’t change. That’s ok though, he’ll probably wrap up this list with some nail-in-the-coffin argument about what an idiot I am, and I’ll have to go back and rethink this whole thing.

8. Because they’re young

Do you remember how stupid you were when you were a teen-ager? Or all that you didn’t know — and thought you did? And the skills you gained by holding back on foolish comments? Oh, the now-old guy in this picture? He once wrote: “I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now.”

Or maybe not. Maybe this list will just end some borderline meaningless tautological nonsense. To the extent that there’s anything substantial to what he’s written here, it actually directly contradicts his point that the “problem” he “observes” is generational rather than a life-cycle effect. The picture he’s talking about was of Bob Dylan, and I don’t really get the quote. I kind of wonder if Bob might not have been just the teensiest bit high when he wrote that, but whatever.

So then, that’s 1 decent reason, 5 bad ones, and 2 fake ones for why young people are morons. I’m sure that book is a substantial contribution to the field of knowledge.

Say there friends and foes, look what I bought at a British market in Mission Hills yesterday:

That’s right: haggis…in a can.

Now I just have to decide whether I want to eat it…