I attended a soccer game

Happy 4th of July. My wife genuinely wanted me to attend a Crew game despite knowing that soccer is squarely on the bottom of my bucket list.[1] I agreed to go to the game and promised not to complain (and I didn’t) as long as I was allowed to answer questions honestly, which led to extremely judicious questions. The MLS’s[2] Columbus Crew play in a beautiful new soccer-specific stadium, which is about a ten-minute walk from our condo. The walk was pleasant with the crowd flowing smoothly, joyously, enthusiastically anticipating the game.

Once the game started, my confirmation bias engine was running full tilt. It took 30 seconds to reach fruition, maybe 32 seconds. I’m not kidding, within the first half minute, a Philadelphia Union player went to the ground and starting flopping like a proverbial fish out of water. I have seen baseball players get hit the face with a 90+ mile an hour fastballs.  They don’t flop.  I have seen football players get hit so hard they had to leave the game never to return. They don’t flop. I have seen boxers get knocked into concussion protocol.  They don’t flop.  But man o man can soccer players flop. This guy flopped so beautifully, so artistically that the ref decided to give a yellow card even as the replay showed that there had been essentially no contact. The player who flopped so outrageously did not leave the match, they rarely do.

Then they played soccer as they often do, without any sense of urgency. The ball is as likely to be passed backwards as forwards. It rarely leads to progress, but the sense of control is (apparently) a reward unto itself. We watched all 90 minutes and saw seven shots on goal. For those without a calculator, that’s a shot on goal every 12.8 minutes. There were an additional 13 shots not on goal. My estimate-o-meter suggests that the average miss was 10 feet. Ten feet!!! A single air-ball in a basketball game (where the goal is 18 inches in diameter) and a visiting player will be mocked for the rest of the game. Missing a shot in soccer by 10 or 20 feet (where the goal is 24 feet wide and 8 feet high) = whatever, just another missed shot.

There was one penalty kick, which I had just been reading about in Think Like a Freak.[3] Statistics reveal that a penalty kick is successful 75% of the time. To have a legitimate chance to make a save, the goalie must guess and jump to one side or the other. They jump to the kicker’s strong side[4] 57% of the time and to the weak side almost 41% of the time. But – you say – those numbers don’t add up to 100. That’s because 2% of the time, the goalie doesn’t move at all and that’s because 17% of shots are aimed right at the center of the goal. (Those shots are 7% more likely to succeed than shots to the corners. Dubner and Levitt did the math, not me.) In the event, the shooter went to his weak side, the goalie guessed right, and the kick was shunted aside. He should have shot up the middle.

Before the game I was asked and predicted that the final score would be 1-0 Crew, the home team. Alas, I was wildly optimistic about how many goals would be scored. But I made the correct guess. According to bettingoffers.org.uk, which I didn’t look at until today, “the most common scoreline is 1-0 for either side,” 17.6% of all games, with the home team winning roughly 60% of the 1-0 games.

The game ended in a nil-nil draw, which purists probably love. Over 7% of English Premier League (the highest ranked league in the world) games end 0-0. Almost 49% of EPL games end with 2 or fewer total goals.

I’m never going to be a soccer fan. The last game I attended was my son’s final game during his senior year of high school in 2013. That nine plus year gap between games feels about right to for me. Nevertheless, I have a few positive takeaways from last night – other than the most obvious, spending quality time with my wife:

1. Fountain drinks come with free refills (though ice was hard to come by),

2. The post-game fireworks were a Fourth of July treat, and

3. It’s going to be another ten years or so before I can reasonably be expected to attend a soccer game.

For the record, please don’t try to convert me. It’s a lost cause. (Soccer doesn’t need me, it’s the most popular sport in the world.) I love baseball and know lots of people who don’t. That’s their prerogative and I never try to convince them otherwise. Because for them, they are not wrong. Equally, I am not wrong about soccer. And after last night, I have proven conclusively that I love my wife more than I dislike soccer. I did the math on that one myself.

[1] See 6.4.19 post of the blog for my version of a bucket list, spoiler alert: it’s a reverse bucket list.  I once met a friend at a pub to watch a world cup game and famously (no), notoriously (nope), petulantly (yea, that’s it) sat with my back to the game the entire time. The beer was good nice and cold.

[2] Major League Soccer is the 16th ranked league in the world according to https://www.globalfootballrankings.com/, slightly worse than the Swiss league (population 8.6 million) and slightly better than the Danish league (population 5.8 million).

[3] The book is by Stephen D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. They are outstanding writers and thinkers and I highly recommend two other books they wrote together: Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics.

[4] The strong side is the side away from the kicking foot. So – if you are right-footed, generally you will have more power and accuracy kicking to the left.

Quick comment on MLB divisions

We’re a little more than 40% of the way into the major league baseball season. The statistics and records are starting to matter.

I noticed today that four of the five teams in the American League East (ALE) division have more wins than losses. Two other divisions, the National League West and the NLE have three teams with more wins than losses. That’s hard to do by the end of the year because almost half of games are played within a division – and, of course, the winning percentage within a division is exactly .500.  For every division game, one team wins and one teams loses, for a net nothing for the division, though (again), of course, it is a net positive or negative for the teams involved.

I decided to do some quick math. I don’t think it proves anything, but it is interesting, and if I don’t post this tonight, the information will be obsolete by morning.

DivisionWinsPayrollMillions
(millions)per win
ALE1916773.54
NLW1817674.24
NLE1737534.35
ALW1575753.66
ALC1545493.56
NLC1525513.63

As you can see, the ALE has more wins than any other division. The NLW is a clear second and the NLE is a clear third. The other three divisions (the AL west and both central divisions) are clumped together, at a significantly lower level, in both wins and total payroll.

Total team payroll is wildly uneven. The Los Angeles Dodgers spend the most, with a payroll in excess of $289 million. The Pittsburgh Pirates spend the least, a bit under $38 million. This disparity is impossible in the other three big leagues in our country (NFL, NBA, and NHL), because each of those leagues has a salary cap and a salary floor.

Here’s the really interesting takeaway: the (so far) clearly best division, the ALE, does not spend more per win than the three worst divisions. That is amazing – and subject to change.

The ALE is comprised of perennial spending juggernauts like the Yankees ($198 million) and Red Sox ($182 million), who are followed closely by the Blue Jays ($166 million). The ALE also has two teams who are usually at the bottom of team payroll: the Rays ($86 million) and the Orioles ($45 million, just above the sad sack Pirates). (All salary information is from one of the greatest websites of all time: baseball-reference.com.) The ALE’s overall spending is basically half-way between the high spending NLW and NLE and the other three divisions. (Flyover country – the two central divisions – almost always spend less money than the “coastal” divisions.)

What to make of this:  not too much, though I do feel sorry for the Orioles. They have a decent record, with 30 wins against 38 losses, and they play in the toughest division and have a miniscule payroll. I wonder what their record would be if they were in a weak division?

It’s not quite July and the season isn’t yet half over. But so far, game results suggest that the ALE teams are spending their money wisely and that the NLW and NLE teams may be overpaying, but at least they are getting wins.

Re-reading

Scholars don’t agree on what the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said or wrote about rivers. He might have said “on those who step into the same rivers, different and ever different waters flow down,” or “we both step and do not step in the same rivers,” or “it is not possible to step into the same river twice.” [1] But there is little dispute about the modern spin we put on his words. We believe that he said: “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man,”[2] or something similar.

As with rivers, so with books. Every time you re-read one, it and you are different. Here are a few of the many quotes about re-reading by literary greats:

Oscar Wilde – If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.[3] [Makes it difficult to assess upfront whether to read any given book]

Umberto Eco – I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.[4] [Not great for an author, he should have said you can’t judge my book without reading my other books.]

C.S. Lewis – Re-reading, we always find a new book.[5] [Here is the main point.]

I sought the quotes after recently re-reading two pieces of fiction that I first read many years ago. It was a good experience, though to be honest, I knew it would be. I have re-read dozens of books through the years. Frankly, a couple of times I re-read a book without realized that’s what I was doing.

The concept of re-reading being a valuable experience has been done to death – see the articles listed in the footnote for a sampling, so I’ll not belabor the point.[6] Instead, I’ll talk about my experiences.

I have purposely re-read the Lord of the Rings multiple times (see Wilde quote). I don’t seek new meaning, which is good because the book is little more than a fun romp through a fantasy world. But sometimes I find lines that resonate more than they did on prior readings. For example, in the Fellowship of the Ring, the hobbits and Strider were searching for Rivendell, a glorious well-hidden Elf realm, and being hunted by “the Nine,” extremely powerful, if dead, beings. When the elves realized what was happening, they dispatched help: “There are few even in Rivendell who can ride openly against the Nine; but such as there were, Elrond sent out North, West, and South.” [7] I want to know more about the awesomeness of those elves, yet we learn nothing else about them, not even their names.

More recently, I re-read The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy for the first time in 40 or so years. The story of Ilyich’s confrontation with the bitter finality of impending death strikes a bit closer to home for a man whose sons have graduated from college than it did when that man was a college student. I am definitely not the same man as when I fulfilled a requirement for some long-forgotten literature class.

It’s a short compelling novella, which well rewards the reader. Tolstoy sets the stage, describes the characters, and infuses them with heart and soul in a way that few other authors can. With Tolstoy, even though you are reading, you feel what is happening, much the way you feel a song like Rhythm of the Heat as much as you hear it.[8]

I also recently re-read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. After I explain, you may think that I “re-read” The Jungle. The format of The Jungle that I re-read is a graphic novel, which was adapted and illustrated by Kristina Gehrmann. A graphic novel is “a novel whose narrative is related through a combination of text and art, often in comic-strip form.”[9] Have you ever read one?  They aren’t comic books, well, sorta. Still, you should consider reading one.

I wouldn’t recommend a serious reader to experience The Jungle for the first time by reading a graphic novel, too much nuance and description is missing. But if you have read the book, if you already know the story, if you don’t want to devote a week or more to learning the gory details of the meat industry as it was existed 120 years ago, then a graphic novel is a great way to go.

Much is lost, but most remains. The difficult circumstances for immigrants and the gratuitous venality of the business owners are manifest. The horror of knowing that someone is taking advantage of you and that there is nothing you can do about is patent. Many details are conveyed in the illustrations, which bring the characters and surroundings to life without a surfeit of words.

Most of the graphic novels that I have read are independent entities, not derivatives. Berlin, a graphic novel by Jason Lutes, evokes the feel and flavor of the Weimar Republic much quicker than reading any of the many historical texts about that period. The same goes for 300 by Frank Miller, which tells the tale of the Spartans at Thermopylae.

Graphic novels aren’t necessarily grounded in history. The Watchmen series, by Alan Moore, describes a world with alternate superheroes, which contrast sharply with the heroes from the Marvel and DC universes, in both skills and personality. (They are strange.) Another bizarre world was created by Brian Vaughan: Y, the Last Man, in which a geneticist wakes up and realizes that he is the last male on earth.

Whether approaching a new world for the first time or re-engaging with an old book (for example, Fahrenheit 451), a graphic novel is a terrific way to both read and not read a story.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus

[2] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/heraclitus_107157

[3] https://quotepark.com/quotes/783556-oscar-wilde-if-one-cannot-enjoy-reading-a-book-over-and-over-a/

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/27/umberto-eco-people-tired-simple-things

[5] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/470196-read-and-re-read—re-reading-we-always-find-a-new-book

[6] https://the-artifice.com/reread-books-pros-cons-rereading/; https://www.mindjoggle.com/10-books-worth-reading-again/; https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/01/critically-acclaimed-books-atwood-ishiguro/621287/.

[7] Chapter 12.

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpqJxb_pNTM. Listen through the end to hear an especially compelling drum sequence (it’s half the song). Tip – turn it up as loud as you can tolerate.

[9] https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=graphic%20novel

Sports Names

I started thinking about sports nicknames when the St. Peter’s Peacocks defeated the Kentucky Wildcats. As improbable as St. Peter’s beating Kentucky at basketball seemed, imagine a confrontation between a wild cat and a peacock. I would definitely take the wildcats in a predator vs. prey bracket.

It is likely that the first sports teams (loosely defined) and nicknames, were based around Roman chariot races. Initially, there were four teams:  Reds, Whites, Greens, and Blues. By the time of Justinian (roughly mid-6th century), there were only two teams: the Greens (absorbed the Reds) and Blues (captured the Whites). The teams and their fans had become associated with opposing political and religious positions.[1] The Blues and Greens found common cause when taxes were raised and the leaders of the teams were arrested for dissenting, precipitating the Nika Riots.[2] Justinian exercised less patience and restraint than modern police forces; he sent the army into the Hippodrome, where they killed as many as 30,000 Romans. Think about what you would do if, at the next baseball or football game you attend, hundreds of armored, sword-wielding troops started stabbing and hacking away at the people in attendance.

There is no direct link between the Romans and the Ivy League, but

1.  The Romans had the Reds — the Ivies have Big Red (Cornell) and Crimson (Harvard),[3]

2.  The Romans had the Greens — the Ivies have Big Green (Dartmouth), and

3.  The Romans had the Blues and the Whites — the Ivies have two teams whose colors are blue and white (Columbia and Yale).

I think it’s just that colors are elemental. An extreme example (chosen at random, though I was seeking early professional baseball) is the 1878 version of major league baseball. The six teams in the National League were the Boston Red Stockings, Cincinnati Reds, Providence Grays, Chicago White Stockings, Indianapolis Blues, and Milwaukee Grays. By 1903, only three of 16 teams had a color in their name: White Sox, Blues, and Reds. Today four of 30 MLB teams have a color in their name. I’ll let you guess.[4]

The NFL’s 32 teams have no teams with a color in their name. Through the years they have had Maroons, Red Jackets, Yellow Jackets, Blues, and Reds (Cincinnati, of course), but since the Redskins (can I say that? – even in this context) became the Commanders (by way of The Washington Football Team), no NFL team has a color in its name. But what about the Browns? Turns out the Browns weren’t named for a color, they were named after their first head coach, Paul Brown.

It strikes me that “Browns” might not have been so accepted if it wasn’t a color and long associated with one of MLB’s St. Louis franchises. As far as I know, no other sports team in the country is named after a person.[5] I don’t think Cleveland football fans would have embraced the Cleveland McBrides (first owner), Modells, Lerners, or Haslams quite like they have the Browns.

Recently and with great publicity, the Cleveland Indians became the Cleveland Guardians and the Washington Redskins, an obviously pejorative term, became the Washington Commanders.  Miami University beat Washington in the name change game by about 25 years – morphing into the Redhawks in 1997.

Might there be other names that are ripe for reconsideration. The world of college sports is full of strange names, many of them under the radar because of the low profile that most schools keep. Who knew that the Arkansas Tech University men compete as Wonder Boys and the women as Golden Suns? Or that at Angelo State (Texas), the men compete as the Rams and the women as the Rambelles?[6] At the University of Arkansas at Monticello, the men compete as the Boll Weevils and the women as the Cotton Blossoms.

I could do this all day, having not yet made it through the As, but I want to focus on the Spartans. Around 300 high schools and over 20 colleges in the country are called the Spartans, most notably the Michigan State Spartans.[7]

The original Spartans were stone cold killers. Every Spartan male was a soldier and did not work because they had at least five times as many slaves (called helots) as Spartans. The Spartans had a simple way of controlling the helot population: when it got too high, they killed helots, as many as 2,000 at a time. Spartans may also have engaged in institutionalized pederasty, Plutarch certainly thought so, by assigning 12-year-old boys to an older Spartan for training.

The glorious stand of the 300 was real, but it was only possible because of slave labor back home. I wonder how many students, alumni, and fans realize how vicious the actual Spartans were. And I wonder how many other sports nicknames will be changed as we move forward. But mostly I wonder whether the Wildcats (Villanova’s version) will beat the Jayhawks (birds and cats again, though in this case, a mythical bird) and whether the Blue Devils[8] will beat the Tar Heels.

[1] The Blues allied with the ruling classes and religious orthodoxy and the Greens with the people and Monophysitism (a fascinating topic in its own right).

[2] The leaders were sentenced to be hung and a mass hanging was scheduled.  Only a few died before the gallows collapsed, after which the survivors were spared.

[3] The very first issue of the school’s student newspaper, called The Harvard Crimson for the past hundred plus years, was The Magenta. But the undergrads voted for crimson (in the late 19th century) and so it has been ever since.

[4] Answer:  Red Sox, White Sox, Reds, and Blue Jays. In the early days of the Cold War, the Cincinnati team changed its name to Redlegs because Reds was associated with communism.

[5] The Cleveland franchise was once known as the Naps in honor of star player Napoleon (“Nap”) Lajoie.

[6] Quick internet search suggests that “Rambelles” might have no other association in the world other than as the name of the women’s sports teams at Angelo State.

[7] https://masseyratings.com/mascots?m=Spartans

[8] MLB’s Tampa Bay Devil Rays dropped the demonic association in 2007 and are now simply the Rays, as in ray of sunshine, not flat fish. Duke has not been so inclined, although becoming the Blues would be very Roman of them.

Scott Galloway

Scott Galloway is ubiquitous. He appears is so many media that I can’t avoid him, not that I’m trying to. My introduction to him was in May 2018, when I read his book The Four.[1] It predisposed me to like him, so when a friend suggested that I listen to his podcast, I embraced the opportunity.

His podcast is called The Prof G Pod (Galloway invariably refers to his podcast as a “pod”) and comes in four chunks. The most consistently interesting is his lead-in. Each podcast starts with him riffing on some (usually) business subject. He is a professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business[2] and has an irreverent take on many topics. For instance, he considers Mark Zuckerberg, the most dangerous man in the world. He talks about big issues that are occurring, like covid and its impact on markets, on issues that should happen, like Peloton being acquired by Nike, or, well, really on just about any subject that strikes his fancy and impacts the financial world.

The most inconsistent piece of the show is also the largest: his interviews. Some are outstanding, best of breed. I especially like it when he discusses global issues with experts like Ian Bremmer, whose big picture look at the world is sensible and well informed. Another especially good one was with Dr. Sanjay Gupta about the lessons that we have or should learn from the covid-19 pandemic. But some are a bit too much in the weeds for me. He recently discussed the psychedelics industry – really, it’s an industry. And he often has guests who are involved in the crypto or NFT (non-fungible token) space, which is interesting writ large, but not when they delve into technical aspects of the technology.

The third part of the podcast is Office Hours. As any self-respecting professor should, he accepts, indeed encourages, questions and he answers them (according to him) impromptu. This part of the podcast is so popular that it has been spun into its own entity, so the podcast now has only three parts with the Office Hours chunk produced and available separately. More Galloway pod for the same money – none.

The final part of the podcast is the Algebra of Happiness, when Galloway talks about some aspect of personal life and its importance to general well-being. He is clearly devoted to his two sons and often asks guests about ways to be a better parent. Another fixture is to ask guests what advice they would give their younger selves. Niall Ferguson had two especially good answers: listen to young people (because they get trends) and read more.

That’s just the podcast. He also has Chart of the Week,[3] which highlights many different issues, including religiosity, college enrollment, love, and covid. The only problem with “chart” is that is comes with a mandatory (if short) video that explains the chart. I just want the charts, which invariably present interesting information.

He has another podcast Pivot that he co-hosts with Kara Swisher. I haven’t listened to that one – there are only so many podcast hours in a week. Chartable says they “make bold predictions, pick winners and losers, and bicker and banter like no one else.”[4]    

And he has newsletters and speaking engagements. And classes.  And No Mercy/No Malice.[5] He really is everywhere, including recently being added to the staff at CNN, which describes him as “a serial entrepreneur, business professor, and bestselling author.”

And I don’t think he does it for the money. I mean, sure he gets paid. But he has what he describes as independent wealth from various business ventures. This enables him a certain level of freedom, which he takes advantage of. He attacks any perceived injustice, but reserves much of his disdain for higher education, which he described as “one of the most corrupt cartels in the world.” He doesn’t tell us who else is on the list.

He believes the goal of higher education should be to expand opportunities, which makes sense to me. He does that himself by teaching at NYU and offering classes at Section4, his start-up that “is here to equip curious, ambitious thinkers with the business know-how they need to excel.”[6] And Galloway excoriates elite schools for not expanding opportunities, calling them “halo” or luxury brands and “ossified.” And he believes that the companies that hire their graduates “fetishize” the top 100 colleges and universities. He is nothing if not irreverent.

Galloway has many tics, most of which are endearing. For instance, when a guest has raised an intriguing argument, he prods them with “say more.” And he likes to say “if it sounds like I don’t know what I’m talking about, trust your instincts,” “if it sounds like a commercial, trust your instincts.” I agree that there is wisdom in trusting your instincts.

And through it all, the many venues and products for delivering content, Galloway offers up plenty of gems. For example: “The good news is I know how to get you rich. The bad news is slowly” and “if you aren’t paying and you aren’t the customer, then you are the product.” There is much to be learned, from both host and guest. Steve Schmidt described a way to make decisions, called the OODA loop – which stands for observe, orient, decide, and act. Galloway himself defines the valuation of a publicly traded companies as 70% narrative plus 30% numbers.

And finally, Galloway is self-deprecating to the core. He frequently comments on his youthful (and not so youthful) follies and says things like “I’m just getting started, elevator up, then elevator down. I don’t know what I mean by that.” And he describes his own forays into startups (and those of many others) as suffering from a proximity bias, meaning that rich white guys solve rich white guy problems because those are the problems they are most familiar with (think concierge health care).

Scott Galloway is informative, entertaining, and available is a format that is just right for you.  I recommend that you give him a chance to educate you.

[1] I wrote about the book on June 9, 2018 – see The Four is a great book — https://www.notesfromnokomis.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=844&action=edit&calypsoify=1

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Galloway_(professor)

[3] https://profgmedia.com/chart-of-the-week/

[4] https://chartable.com/podcasts/too-embarrassed-to-ask

[5] https://www.profgalloway.com/apple-thief/

[6] https://www.section4.com/about

I Don’t Care

I can’t remember how I discovered the song I Love It by Icona Pop, but I’m glad I did. It’s not a great song, unless you like electro-dance music, and maybe not even then, but it sure is catchy. You can watch the official video on youtube.[1] If you do, you will notice that they don’t play instruments or have a backing band. But they have a hypnotic beat and an easy-to-shout chorus “I don’t care, I love it, I don’t care,” which a live concert showcases.[2]

That line is wonderful. There is so much in life that just doesn’t matter that “I don’t care” could be a motto of our species. Obviously, there are important things, family, health, and many other things, but much of life evokes a shrug and an “I don’t care.”  For example, think about the last time somebody asked you where you want to go for lunch or who won the most recent reality TV contest.

I had two “I don’t care” pop culture moments recently. I was reading The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. He is a terrific writer, skilled at evoking bygone eras. I greatly enjoyed his first two novels:  A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility. And I was really looking forward to The Lincoln Highway. Then, about 140 pages in, I realized I just didn’t care what happened to any of the characters. I didn’t care whether Emmett retrieved his stolen car or found his mother or married Sally. I didn’t care whether the indomitable Sally was revealed as anything other than an efficient hard working trapped-in-her-time domestic woman. I didn’t care whether the smartest, most mature eight-year-old in history ever showed his humanity. I didn’t care whether Duchess ever told the truth or whether Woolly expanded beyond his stock character role as a rich kid who doesn’t think money was all that important. None of it mattered to me. I did not care. So – I stopped reading the book.

It was highly recommended and, as mentioned, I like the author and was, therefore, predisposed to like the book. But there was no continuing once I realized I didn’t care. The second moment involved a movie: Don’t Look Up. It was also highly recommended and the creation of a well-regarded writer and director:  Adam McKay. The movie is on Netflix and has all-star cast. I mean ALL-STAR – Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Tyler Perry, Arian Grande, Cate Blanchett, and Merely Streep, among others. That is a cast full of famous characters.

The movie has strong comedic moments and an end-of-the-world message:  climate change will kill us all. But, somewhere along the line, I realized that I didn’t care how the movie ended. I got the point, I enjoyed the satire, the jokes, the stars, but how it was going to end did not interest me. I watched it all and got one more laugh during the credits, but really, I just wanted it to end. At 138 minutes, it could have sacrificed 20 or so minutes without losing anything of consequence.

Which brings me to today and the matchup between Georgia and Alabama in the College Football Playoff National Championship Game. I don’t care who wins. It will be one SEC juggernaut or another. It’s a rematch of a game that Alabama won handily a few weeks ago. Will Alabama beat Georgia for the second time or will Georgia prevail. Does anybody who isn’t a fan of one of the teams really care?

It’s not sour grapes because they deserve to be there. Georgia dominated a very good Michigan team and Alabama crushed an undefeated Cincinnati team in the national semi-finals. There is no credible argument that any other team should have displaced Cincinnati or Michigan. The 5th ranked team, Notre Dame, lost to Cincinnati; the 6th ranked team, Ohio State, lost to Michigan. The 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th place teams all had two losses. The four most deserving teams played and two of them were clearly outclassed and outplayed. Which means that Georgia and Alabama are the two best teams and should play in the championship game. But it doesn’t mean I have to care.

I’ll probably check the score from time to time and, if the game is close late, I may check in on it, but it won’t be must-see TV for me like most championship games are. Watching Alabama crush the soul out of another team that can’t run the ball or stop the run, is not fun (unless you are an Alabama fan). And watching an offensively challenged Georgia team rely on its punishing defense isn’t very compelling either (for anybody, probably not even Georgia fans).

I have nothing against either team.  I just don’t care which one wins.[3]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxxajLWwzqY

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvXrOE8pXk8

[3] Yesterday was the last day of the NFL regular season. I have several friends who are die-hard Cleveland Browns fans. We have a regular group text chain that banters back and forth during most Browns games. Usually comprising dozens of text messages about this or that play or player or season or whatever. Today, I sent a text about the game: does anybody care. Only three of five text recipients responded:  1. Nah, 2. not even watching, and 3. at the beach. I’m not the only one who doesn’t care. Life is too big and too complicated to care about everything. It’s not even possible to always care about the things you care about. These guys love the Browns, but today that wasn’t enough to make them care.

I Checked the List Twice

I didn’t read Around the World in 80 Books by David Damrosch, a professor of comparative literature at Harvard, but want to share the list of those books. They span the globe, illuminating various times, cultures, genres, and spaces. Damrosch  was born in Maine (I like that ) and hopes “that the range of books * * * and the varied approaches to them here, can illustrate the opportunities that an expanding literary canon offers us to open out our world.”

London:  Inventing a City

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes

P.G. Wodehouse, Something Fresh

Arnold Bennett, Riceyman Steps

Paris:  Writers’ Paradise

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

Marguerite Duras, The Lover

Julio Cortazar, The End of the Game

Georges Perec, W, or the Memory of Childhood

Krakow:  After Auschwitz

Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

Paul Celan, Poems

Czeslaw Milosz, Selected and Last Poems, 1931-2004

Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

Venice—Florence:  Invisible Cities

Marco Polo, The Travels

Dante Aligheiri, The Divine Comedy

Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron

Donna Leon, By Its Cover

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Cairo—Istanbul—Muscat:  Stories within Stories

Love Songs of Ancient Egypt

The Thousand and One Nights

Naguib Mahfouz, Arabian Nights and Days

Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red

Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies

The Congo—Nigeria:  (Post)Colonial Encounters

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman

Georges Ngal, Giambatista Viko, or the Rape of African Discourse

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

Israel/Palestine:  Strangers in a Strange Land

The Hebrew Bible

The New Testament

D.A. Mishani, The Missing File

Emile Habibi, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist

Mahmoud Darwish, The Butterfly’s Burden

Tehran—Shiraz:  A Desertful of Roses

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds

Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz

Ghalib, A Desertful of Roses

Agha Shahid Ali, Call Me Ishmael Tonight

Calcutta/Kolkata—Rewriting Empire

Rudyard Kipling, Kim

Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World

Salman Rushdie, East, West

Jamyang Norbu, The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes

Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

Shanghai—Beijing:  Journeys to the West

Wu Cheng’en, Journey to the West

Lu Xun, The Real Story of Ah-Q and other Stories

Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City

Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out

Bei Dao, The Rose of Time

Tokyo—Kyoto:  The West of the East

Higuchi Ichiyo, In the Shade of Spring Leaves

Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Yukio Mishima, The Sea of Fertility

James Merrill, “Prose of Departure”

Brazil—Columbia:  Utopias, Dystopias, Heterotopias

Thomas More, Utopia

Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism

Joaquim Maria Machada de Assis, Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

Clarice Lispector, Family Ties

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Mexico—Guatemala:  The Pope’s Blowgun

Cantares Mexicanos:  Songs of the Aztecs

Popol Vuh:  The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Selected Works

Miguel Angel Asturias, The President

Rosario Castellanos, The Book of Lamentations

The Antilles and Beyond:  Fragments of Epic Memory

Derek Walcott, Omeros

James Joyce, Ulysses

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands

Bar Harbor:  The World on a Desert Island

Robert McCloskey, One Morning in Maine

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

Hugh Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle

E.B. White, Stuart Little

New York:  Migrant Metropolis

Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

Saul Steinberg, The Labyrinth

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

I’ve read 24 of these books (bolded), some a whole lifetime ago, and none of them disappointed me, so I have high hopes for the other books in the list. For sheer fun, I recommend The Lord of the Rings, which details a raucous romp through Middle Earth, featuring a battle between good and evil. If you want to read a book quickly (to add to your total of books read on this list), I recommend One Morning in Maine, which is a children’s picture book. When Things Fall Apart does a remarkable job exploring what happens when a European culture supplants an existing indigenous culture—spoiler alert, it isn’t pretty for the natives. One book that I tried to read, and will not pick up again, is Ulysses (almost as unreadable as Carlyle’s The French Revolution). Another I am unlikely to read in toto is In Search of Lost Time; I have read one of seven volumes.

Most of these books were written in languages other than English and I cannot vouch for the existence or quality of the English translations. (The first two books I requested from the library are not in its collection, suggesting that they might not have been translated.) Given the constraint of only 80 books, there are some obvious gaps.  For instance, Korea and most of South America are not included.  Of course, it they had been, something else would have to be deleted. At a minimum, it seems that replacing Stuart Little with a Mark Twain book would improve the list.  

I just ordered The secret life of Saeed:  the Pessoptimist from the library because I love the “word” “Pessoptimist.” The summary from the library website states that Saeed’s “life is lived in constant fear, yet he is never without hope.” Despite knowing nothing else about the book or the word, that’s about what I would guess the mashup word means.

For future reference, if you’re trying to write a 1,000-word blog post, letter, or anything else, and you want to do it fast, include a 500-word list. Please let me know about any of these books that you especially recommend, otherwise I’ll have to attack the list haphazardly, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Merry Christmas

Baseball 2021

Tonight is the first time that the 2021 baseball season could end. The Braves have won three games, a fourth victory concludes the World Series. This is always a bittersweet day for me – exciting because there could be a new champion, sad because it will be a long wait until meaningful games are played next spring.

[The grand slam that Adam Duvall just hit makes it much more likely that the season will end tonight.]

I watched a lot of games this summer.[1] First, it was nice to have full summer of games after last year’s pandemic-induced truncated season. Second, the Red Sox played well, much better than last season, and a bit better than expected. The Red Sox were quite brutal last year, winning only 40% of their games, which was fourth worst in the majors (there are 30 teams). This year they won almost 57% of their games, which only six teams bettered.  

[The Braves 4-run lead lasted less than two innings, though they have regained the lead 5-4.]

But the turnaround was not entirely unexpected, even to non-fans of the Red Sox. There is a baseball website (indeed there are so many good ones that even I can’t read them all) called Fangraphs,[2] which predicts how each player will perform and, based on that, how many games each team will win. They predicted that the Red Sox would win 88 games; they finished the season with 92 wins.

Below is a chart that shows (according to Fangraphs) how each team fared against its expectation. You will see extreme variability. This is not necessarily a fault of the prediction system. It is common for teams that play well (in the first half of the season) to improve their team with trades and therefore win more games than would have been expected based on the season-opening roster. And – teams that aren’t playing well often make trades that weaken their roster this year, while (hopefully) strengthening their team in the future.

TeamPredictedActualWins over
WinsWinsPrediction
Giants7810729
Mariners739017
Rays8310017
Brewers799516
Cardinals799011
Dodgers9610610
Reds76837
Astros89956
Rockies68746
Athletics81865
White Sox88935
Red Sox88924
Tigers73774
Blue Jays89912
Phillies80822
Braves8988-1
Cleveland8180-1
Pirates6561-4
Royals7874-4
Yankees9692-4
Marlins7267-5
Cubs7771-6
Angels8477-7
Rangers7160-11
Mets9177-14
Orioles6752-15
Padres9479-15
Twins8873-15
Nationals8365-18
Diamondbacks7452-22

As you can see, the Giants massively exceeded expectations in winning the most games in the league. But the Dodgers, who were predicted to win more games than any other team also substantially exceeded expectations. And even teams expected to be bad can underperform. The Orioles and Pirates were predicted to have the fewest wins in the AL and NL respectively (seemingly perennially) and they both managed to underperform.

This chart is a proxy for how each fan base feels about their team. Those with an overperformance, like the Mariners and Reds, probably have pretty happy fans. Even though they didn’t make the playoffs, they were playing games that mattered deep into September. On the other hand, fans of the Padres and Nationals, who began the season with championship aspirations, are rather despondent.

Over or under performing is all well and good and might influence a fan’s psyche over the course of a season. But what really matters is making the playoffs, and eight of the teams that made the playoffs exceeded expectations. Only the Braves (one game fewer) and the Yankees (four fewer) made the playoffs while winning fewer games than expected.

I was quite happy with the Red Sox season. They led their division for 74 days in the middle of the season. They won 46 games against teams with a winning record, only three teams won more. They dominated teams with a losing record, going 46-22, but this highlights a huge inequity in baseball scheduling. The Giants and Dodgers, who led with majors with 107 and 106 wins respectively, played 99 and 100 games against teams with losing records, at least 30 more games against weak competition than the Red Sox.

[The Astros now lead 9-5 in the eighth inning, which almost certainly means there will be a game six in Houston.]

To top off the season, the Red Sox played their archrivals the Yankees in the AL wildcard game and prevailed. Then they played the top team in their division in a best of five series. The current playoff system is relatively stupid. It rewards teams who win a weak division more than teams, like the Dodgers, who won the second most games in the majors. And in this case, it forced the Red Sox to play the Rays, whom they had already played 19 times.

Quick fix for playoffs system, no wild card game. Only the top four teams make the playoffs, without regard to division, and all series are best of seven. (I may have written about this before. If I did, it bears repeating.)

The Red Sox beat the Rays in four games and then fell to the Astros in six games. Then I started rooting against the Astros, who are something of a pariah team based on a cheating scandal from a couple of years ago. I’m looking forward to seeing how the Red Sox tweak their roster during the off-season.

[Astros won 9-5.]

And I’m looking forward to at least one more World Series game this season.

[1] Major League Baseball sells a cable package for a bit under $200, which provides access to almost every game played every day of the season, and which I consider about the best money I spend every year.

[2] https://www.fangraphs.com/depthcharts.aspx?position=Standings

An Old Idea

One of the benefits of moving from a house to a condo, beyond reducing yard work to zero, is getting rid of 20-plus years of accumulated stuff. We retained plenty, but feel liberated from the tyranny of useless possessions. While going through files, I found something I wrote so long ago that it was typed physically on paper. A reference to the Family Leave Act suggests that it was written after 1993, but before I acquired my first PC. Rereading it all these years later reminds me of how naïve I used to be. (Some things really don’t change.)

I offer this old piece of writing without alteration, except for a couple of obvious typos.  Consider it a prelude to something else I’m thinking about – finish date uncertain.

Individualize Social Security

The current state of our Social Security (“SS”) Trust Fund (so called) is a disgrace. Our elected leaders (elected, yes; leaders, no) have chosen to use this money, tens and hundreds of billions of dollars earned by tens of millions of hardworking Americans and supposedly saved and reserved for their personal financial well-being as if it were current income.

Our Congress and Presidents have been and continue to spend our savings.  Everyone knows what happens when you spend your savings (especially if you’re counting on them to last):  your investment income decreases, causing your savings to decrease at an accelerating rate (as you spend to make up for the earnings shortfall) resulting in an inescapable downward spiral. Every school child knows that if you constantly raid the piggy bank, it will never fill up. Why then does our Congress spend our long-term savings for current expenses? And more importantly, what are we going to do about it?

I propose a simple straight-forward approach. A plan that is easy to understand, quite a contrast to the proposals of Congress.  Does it ever occur to you that Congress prefers to hide behind big words and indecipherable laws? Do you realize that virtually every time Congress passes a law telling us what to do, they exempt themselves (Family Leave, Equal Employment Opportunity).  But, I digress.

I propose that we lump SS taxes in with all the other taxes and fees that the government collects. They are currently collected and considered separate funds; in reality, they aren’t. This change in accounting will simplify discussions concerning the federal budget and reduce the underhanded attempts to explain why we have surplus SS taxes and why we are spending instead of saving the surplus. In typical fashion, Congress says: “we are saving” and “we do have a SS Trust Fund.” And, in fact, we are buying US government bonds with the SS surplus.  In actuality, the government buying bonds from itself is like putting money in a mattress and paying yourself interest every month.  It is a very difficult way to get ahead.  When will Congress and our various Presidents stop playing word games?

According to my plan, we now have one pot of money from which we pay all government expenses.  Simple, straightforward, unlike Congress.  I now propose that we systematically reduce the amount of money paid into this pot for the next fifteen years.  Under current law, all employees put 7.5% of their pay into SS and all employers also put in 7.5% of their employees’ pay, for a total of 15% of our total salary.  I propose that we reduce this by 1% per year for the next 15 years. At the end of the period, there will no longer be anything called a SS tax.

The federal government will continue to pay all of its SS obligations (it has to keep some of its promises).  The only difference is that these payments will come from general funds, not from a fictitious trust fund. So far, so good.

Now for the radical part:  as we are eliminating SS taxes, I propose that the funds freed be used to establish Mandatory Retirement Accounts (MRAs), separate from all other retirement plans and accounts. Thus, in the first year of this plan (and please excuse the simplicity of the analysis), 14% of your pay would go to help pay SS and 1% to an MRA, in the second year 13% of you pay would go to SS and 2% to the MRA.  After 15 years, all 15% would go into your own individual MRA.  You would manage and be responsible for your own account.  No withdrawals would be possible until the age of 60.

Obviously, there are many details to be worked out.  For instance, who will maintain the accounts? How will SS be phased out for those who have already paid in substantial sums? What happens if someone invests poorly? Even so, the plan has the significant benefit of reducing some of the double speak emanating from Washington; of treating SS for what it is: current expense; of reducing the influence of government interference in our retirement planning; of reducing government influence period. No doubt you can think of benefits that I have not considered.

The most difficult aspect of the entire program (other than enactment) is to keep Congress from changing substantive portions of it in the future.  I apologize for chiding Congress so much, but really, do you think they care more about us or about getting re-elected.  It is time someone legislated for the benefit of the country, not just a narrow parochial interest.  Where are the far-sighted citizens who want to help all of us (as our founding fathers did in the revolutionary period), not just the people they know or collect funds from?

Our representatives need to do what is right for the country.  It is not always possible to please everyone, however if decisions are made based on the aggregate good for the country, everyone would benefit.  This new no-SS plan is good for the country, though it will adversely affect certain individuals and that concerns me.  But the overall good vastly outweighs the negative impact, which can be alleviated by other in-place programs.

Wow!  I was quite self-assured back in the day.  I like to think I’m a touch more nuanced now.  As most of you know, George W. Bush broached the idea of privatizing SS during his presidency – it went nowhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_debate_in_the_United_States. Based on this recent article posted at the Motley Fool (https://www.fool.com/retirement/2020/02/15/the-surprising-amount-of-money-congress-has-stolen.aspx), perhaps it’s time to revisit the concept . . .

Shoe Dog

In 2016, Shoe Dog, a memoir by the creator of Nike, was published, authored by Nike founder Phil Knight. The story picks up early in Knight’s adulthood, after he had graduated from college (Oregon) and business school (Stanford). Despite some pretensions to a less than affluent upbringing, Knight was able to convince his father to fund a trip around the world. This occasioned the first use of one of Knight’s conceits:  that he isn’t (wasn’t?) good at selling. And not for the last time, Knight was able to persuade someone to do something despite his belief that he had zero chance of success.

I read the book based on two recommendations:  Warren Buffet and my son. That I didn’t love the book does not diminish the affection I have for either of them. The overall tale is compelling:  a nimble (and at time mendacious) little company is always on the edge of doom, buffeted by hostile bankers, predatory competitors and, at times, rapacious suppliers. If that story line interests you, read the book, you will enjoy it, even though the book ends well short of Nike’s period of dominance.

If you’re a bit less credulous, you might not like it so much. I was constantly on hyperbole alert. Upon spending the night in the Philippines, but lamentably not in the hotel suite preferred by Douglas MacArthur, Knight wrote: “I vowed. One day I shall return.”[1] One of his earliest hires, an accountant named Delbert J. Hayes, was, in Knight’s eyes, “the best accountant in the [Portland Price Waterhouse] office,” which is entirely possible, who “made accounting an art,” which is not.[2] Prior to meeting a man named Sole, who was the protégé of a “genuine, head-to-toe shoe dog” (undefined), Knight stated “Given the man’s reputation, I was expecting some kind of godlike figure with fifteen arms, each one waving a wand made out of shoe trees.”[3]

Knight’s memory is both stupefyingly good and astonishingly bad. Writing 58 years or so after the fact, he recalled meeting his wife-to-be and especially “one long moment of eye contact that kept [him] awake that night.”[4] One of his employees was such a good negotiator that Knight wrote “Every time, Strasser walked away with more than we’d ever hoped.”[5] Great memory remembering “every time,” and hyperbole or a clear case of not hoping for enough. At other times, Knight’s memory fails him, for instance when he was responsible for getting kicked out of a club, but couldn’t remember why. Or when his colleague Johnson, who writes letters about everything, suddenly shows up at a meeting (from across the country) and nobody understands why he was there. Or when a colleague (Bork) was no longer working at the company and Knight can’t remember whether he quit or was fired.

Knight’s memory got me thinking about my own and feeling a bit empathetic. I have some very specific memories, for example:  my kindergarten teacher telling us to cross our heart “with the hand you write with” before reciting the pledge of allegiance. But otherwise, although I know certain things about that year, I have no other specific memories. I know the names of many of the other kids who were in my class (small town), but I don’t remember anything any of them did or said. So maybe I should be a bit easier on Knight. But – no, his memory is just too selective and too self-adulatory.

Knight also left too many issues unexplained. He comments throughout, and his bankers complain throughout, that the company was growing too fast for its equity. I understand the issue, having taken a class on cash flow analysis back when I worked for a commercial bank, but Knight never explains it – and it’s not that hard. The problem is that a growing company can be profitable but have so much money tied up in inventory and accounts receivable that it has no cash to pay its bills.  One freaking sentence somewhere in the book would have shown why he couldn’t (at times) pay his bills, but he didn’t do it.

There were too many forced sports or war metaphors. Some were just plain stupid.  Some were both forced and stupid. He had a meeting with Onitsuka, his supplier. He had been to the company before and had always met in the same conference room. But this meeting was in a newly designed and furnished conference room, which “was like prepping for a meet at Oregon State and learning at the last minute that it had been moved to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.”[6]

I should be kinder to an old man who is reminiscing about the good old days and spinning a yarn about the birth of a company that retains considerable prominence. But then, Knight should have more respect for facts. He wrote about a typhoon that “completely wiped away the Japanese islands of Honshu and Kyushu.” Honshu still very much exists and, at 88,000 square miles, remains the largest island in Japan. He also describes Saco, Maine as a little town in the backwoods of Maine.  Actually, Saco (pronounced socko) is neither small nor in the backwoods, it’s on the ocean and, combined with sister city Biddeford, comprises the second biggest metro area in Maine. Did anyone edit this book?

I could go on and on, but have been harsh enough already.[7]  Even so, the book has a sense of urgency and wonder that compel the reader to root for Knight and his “crazy idea,” which incidentally made him the 25th richest person in the world.[8]

[1] P. 32. Allusions to history, and particularly to war, abound throughout the book.

[2] P. 82. He never gives any examples of how Hayes’s artistry.

[3] P. 186-188. Ok, this example is obviously intentional exaggeration, but to what effect?

[4] P. 123. I don’t know either Mr. or Mrs. Knight, but this seems like matrimonial pandering.

[5] P. 307 At least he gives an example of Strasser’s negotiation style.

[6] P. 99 The conference rooms were in the same building, not almost 900 miles apart like Corvallis and Los Angeles.

[7] For a very different (laudatory) review of the book, see https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2017/03/16/in-his-brilliant-history-of-nike-phil-knight-expertly-explains-economics/?sh=372c38c8361a

[8] https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/