Chapter 83: Reflections on Time and a Bottle

Several weeks ago, now, there was a column in the New York Times that I kept here in a draft, intending to write about it. But I'm sure the sardonic stuff I would have "scribbled" here isn't what I'm writing now. Not that I don't feel the same way, I just don't feel that way ... now.

The Proof column, which is among those being sliced due to cost-cutting measures, is about alcohol and American life: a worthy topic of discussion, particularly in pubs and especially with intelligent people who can extemporize without spilling anything on the nicely lacquered bartop. But I'm writing this at about 7 a.m., after an evening in which the screams of babies literally drove me to drink — not much, and only after I'd gotten them in a safe place with their mother.

The article by Tim Kreider, which feels less like an op-ed piece and more like an essay in a men's magazine, still keeps me thinking. There are a couple lines I particularly like: "I don't feel middle aged — I just feel like I’ve been young a lot longer than most people" and "I’m a little appalled at all the time I’ve lost, but then, wasting time wasn’t exactly an unforeseen side effect; it was part of the fun. Of course it was; if drinking wasn’t so much fun it wouldn’t be such a widespread and terrible problem." And this is a classic: "As my metabolism started to slow down the fun-to-hangover ratio became increasingly unfavorable."

Truer comments may never have been written, and it takes a middle-age wastrel to write them. I'm not passing any judgement on this guy; it's quite possible he's accomplished more than I have. Indeed, he's got a column in the New York Times. And I'm fairly certain his words have found more readers than mine have — so far.

This man is approximately one full year older than I am. It seems to have taken him, perhaps, ten-twelve years more than it took me to realize that drinking like college kids isn't really much fun any more. And yes, it is "any less" fun. Neither is this blog piece a public pledge to quit drinking; such proclamations are only needed for those who want to be anonymous, and they know not to make public pledges — just private confirmations or acknowledgements.

Rather, I think of this as another morning, children fed and sleeping, cats fed and sleeping, wife unfed and sleeping, in which I don't have to say to myself, "My God, what have I done?"

Chapter 82.2: In Vino Veritas

I love finding inspiring stories about alcohol.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not in favor of inebriates running (or driving) rampant across America or the world, wreaking havoc on unsuspecting (or perhaps also drunken) neighbors, or destroying lives and families. But I'm all in favor of appropriate use of social elixirs to smooth out the rough edges of life.

Apparently, I'm not the only one and this idea is as old as civilization. In the New York Times the other day, an item was published in one of their blogs by a teacher whose students asked about the abundance of drinking in Homer's The Odyssey. Of course, Greeks weren't the only folks enjoying the fruit of the vine back then. It was common to drink alcoholic beverages, as the Times piece notes.

But Homer and others of his era also demonstrated that alcohol should be used in moderation — let me refine that: alcohol should be enjoyed, but used in moderation. Okay, maybe I'm editorializing a little about what Homer meant.

But I love the way the writer concluded his piece:

I wasn’t quite satisfied, and the question continued to bother me until, days later, I found a passage in “The Odyssey” that succinctly captures the complexity of the Greek attitude towards alcohol. Odysseus is speaking to a sympathetic swineherd, and though he is in disguise, the words have the unmistakable ring of honesty:


[I]t is the wine that leads me on, the wild wine
that sets the wisest man to sing at the top of his lungs,
laugh like a fool – it drives the man to dancing...it even
tempts him to blurt out stories better never told.

After two decades away from home, there must have been so much to say, so many bottled-up tales of friends lost and battles won. Somebody get the poor guy another round.

Chapter 78.6: My Kind of Fish Story

What's not to like in this fish story (except possibly fish)? Apparently a couple of enterprising young students were intrigued by a conversation around the dinner table. Their father, a scientist, was talking shop about bird DNA (and who doesn't?), when one of the teenage girls asked if genetic barcoding could be done on sushi. "Yeah, I think you could," he replied, "and if you did that, I think you’d be the first ones."

Sciencephobes take note: that's how ideas happen.

What the girls found out is that, in a small and admittedly limited sample, many of the seafood meals one may purchase in New York City are fishy to say the least. That is, they're mislabeled. Of course, being sensible and sufficiently conscious of the litigious society we live in, they refused to label the ne'er-do-wells where they bought the faux red snappers and white tuna (nothing said about blue fish; where's their American spirit?). But they did say kind things about one fish seller.

While I might have blogged about this story anyway, the thing that made me most proud of these kids is that they're not pursuing science in college. Don't get me wrong, there's a dearth of good young American scientists coming up through the ranks — especially female scientists — so I'd have been happy to see them pursue the subject. But this means there'll be more curious, scientifically adept kids studying art, studying literature, studying history, studying economics.

As the article concludes, the wheel maybe coming around full circle.

In a way, Dr. Ausubel said, their experiment is a return to an earlier era of scientific inquiry. "Three hundred years ago, science was less professionalized," he said, and contributions were made by interested amateurs. "Perhaps the wheel is turning again where more people can participate."

Let's hope so.

Chapter 77.6: Why Did the New York Times Interview the Guy From Most Evil?

As a regular reader of the New York Times and an occasional viewer of television shows about cruel and unusual punishers, I immediately noticed a similarity between the man in a photo that accompanied a story about therapists to the megawealthy in today's Times.

The article discusses the unique needs of megawealthy patients in therapy, the challenges for psychiatrists and psychotherapists to treat them properly, and how the therapeutic needs of the megawealthy are changing.

But what the article didn't go into much detail about was why it was interviewing Dr. Michael Stone, who is a forensic psychiatrist who researches and categorizes the acts of killers, and is the main interviewer in Most Evil, which uses his taxonomy of evil -- detailing from those who kill in self-defense to serial psychpathic torturers who kill with torture as the primary motive. Also barely mentioned is the connection between the New York Times and the Investigation Discovery channel -- part of Discovery Networks.

I don't mean to suggest that anything illegal or unethical is going on; I don't think the people at the Discovery Network have any influence over the news room of America's most important daily newspaper. But Stone's place in the article is intriguing, to say the least.

In the article, Dr. Stone -- who is not the most frequently quoted interview subject, but is not exactly filler, either -- talks about the narcissism of the megawealthy patients. This seems in keeping with his study of murderers and psychopaths, but it seems like there should be more explanation for the lay audience why Dr. Stone is being interviewed at all. They interviewed more than a dozen therapists for the article. Why was Stone so prominent? He's described as "a psychiatrist affiliated with Columbia" and after the second jump it notes that he "is also known as a forensic psychiatrist and is the host of a show on the Investigation Discovery network."

I'd love to learn whether there are significant psychosocial similarities between the super rich and the super-psychotic. The article doesn't delve into this at all. And in the first few dozen comments that appeared, none of the published comments noted Stone's affiliation with Most Evil. Am I the only person who finds this intriguing?

If anyone could recommend some books for me to read about the possible connection between these seeming extremes of personality types (this is one area where I'd prefer nonfiction over fiction), please share them. This is fascinating.

Chapter 69.8: A Mathematician's Proposal

In my daily search for new and interesting news, I recently came across an interesting post on the site of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. It was written by a mathematician who was expanding on remarks Paul Krugman made in his blog about economics.

Krugman wrote, "I'll be using this space to present the kind of information I can't provide on the printed page -- especially charts and tables, which are crucial to the way I think about most of the issues I write about." Krugman then introduces a graph that presents a picture of income distribution in the country by displaying the share of total income earned by the richest 10 percent of Americans.

The mathematician, Michael C. Burke, then goes into an interesting discussion about Krugman's observations on the seemingly idyllic period of the 1950s -- the time during which "Middle Class America" became the symbol that it was for much of the '70s and '80s and into the '90s. America's golden period of equality. Krugman had supplied a chart of income distribution, which showed a relative flat period in which income was more equitably shared. In case anyone was unclear, such equality no longer exists in America. Since the 1980s -- the late '80s especially (and I suspect that has a lot to do with the tax reform act of 1986, though I'm no economist) -- the United States has seen its share of income diverge quickly. To show that this isn't simply about which party is in power, the Democrats were in power in Congress during the late '80s and the Republicans had their Newt Revolution in the mid '90s, when Krugman's "Great Divergence" occured; moreover, Reagan and Clinton were the presidents at those respective times.

But Burke has a broader comment to make. He calls for teachers -- especially college professors -- to redesign their curricula.

[M]y larger point here is that the content of our thoughts and the depth of our understanding are dependent on the tools we bring to the task. What we think is intertwined with how we think. And the ability to think in terms of quantitative data, in terms of tables and graphs, is indispensable for understanding our modern world. This should be part of what we teach all our students -- not just students in selected courses or selected majors.

With that aim in mind, I would propose that we begin by redesigning our freshman and sophomore writing programs in order to place a significant emphasis on working with quantitative data, and on the visual representation of that data. We write, after all, to figure out what we think. And we ask our students to write so that they will learn how to think.

This is not the first time I've heard this argument, but I think Burke proposes it well. I don't work as a professor, though I was trained as a teacher, and I've toyed with the idea of tutoring math and English on the side -- perhaps as soon as next fall. Burke is right, in my opinion, but I'm not sure whether his direction is the right one; I think he's right that we need to inform our youth better about how to think and how to recognize absurdities in mathematical "answers." But I think it goes beyond teaching freshman.

I heartily recommend that everyone read John Allen Paulos's book Innumeracy. He cleverly points out how badly most Americans -- not simply students -- handle simple math problems. Percentages, probabilities. He helps readers recognize the flaws in their reasoning. If we can teach a couple generations of Americans how to reason, boy that would help improve our state in the world.

Chapter 67.2: That Kind of Weekend

So many beers, so little time. Nice piece on Maine beers in the New York Times.

Chapter 60.52: A Vicious Hit

Murray Chass pulls no punches in this piece about the hypocrisy of baseball, which is now fighting to rid itself of steroids (after ignoring/overlooking/avoiding) that subject for at least ten years but avoids things like alcohol, which kills far more people.

In light of Josh Hancock's death, for which alcohol appears to have been a major contributor, Chass excoriates Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa, who was caught asleep at the wheel earlier this year with his foot on the brake at an intersection after drinking too much. LaRussa doesn't help himself with some of his comments about how reporters might try to turn Hancock's story into something "not all sweet" (I have a question about context, but I'll leave it for another time).

As someone who enjoys a wee dram or to crack open a cold one from time to time, I have to say that Chass's comments are sobering. It's hard to argue he's wrong; alcohol is not only a controlled drug but also is attributable to tens of thousands of deaths every year -- and probably contributes to the health problems of a million or more individuals. These are tragic truths, and Chass is right to call attention to them. He also could have enhanced his information about how smoking (cigarettes, cigars, pot) and smokeless tobacco also have held too comfortable a place in baseball and can be traced to the deaths of millions of people each year also. These things would be true.

I think there's something else at stake to the sport of baseball with steroids, however. We're not merely talking about a substance that threatens the health of the players, which is clearly bad enough, but it also undermines the integrity of the game. Alcohol is not a performance enhancer. Chass is comparing apples and oranges.

Driving while intoxicated is illegal, and those who are in the public eye who are caught doing that deserve to be ridiculed for their actions. I feel sad for those who die due to their stupidity in driving drunk and I'm angry about those who die because of the stupid people who drove drunk and caused their deaths. But the institution of motorized travel isn't completely undermined by drunk drivers. I know that sounds ridiculous, but the apples are apples. While some people choose not to drive because of the myriad dangers involved, that is all about personal choice, just like the fans who decided not to return to baseball after the labor strike(s).

I care about the game of baseball, and those who attack its integrity -- the admitted gambler Pete Rose, the admitted steroid user Jose Canseco, the alleged steroid user Barry Bonds -- all take a little piece of the game away. A game that was very helpful to them and enabled them to be wealthy. With great wealth comes great responsibility. I believe Pete Rose should not be voted into the Hall of Fame. Jose Canseco doesn't deserve to be there either. Barry Bonds? He may go down as a more tragic figure than Pete Rose, because what Bonds accomplished before he seems to have started juicing warranted Hall of Fame status, so he didn't really need to enhance his ability; he was already an all-time great. Now? ... well, I wouldn't vote for Bonds if it were up to me. (Of course, Rose was an all-time great too, but he broke an established, very well-known rule. That moron should have known better, but he thought he was above the game.)

Would I get into a car with Billy Martin or Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle or Hack Wilson or Whitey Ford or any of the other baseball greats who were later exposed as heavy, dangerous drinkers? Not a chance in hell. But I probably would have enjoyed watching the games they were involved in, because they seemed a bit more pure than what we were exposed to during the late 1990s.

Perhaps I'm deluding myself. There's probably a pill for that.