WombatNation

I went to the gorgeous Grand-Lake Theatre in Oakland tonight with wife and friends to see Quantum of Winter Solstice. I was totally expecting an educational film on astronomy, so the guns, car chases and boring villains were quite the surprise. However, I did take solace in the kick-out-the-jams performance of the organ player who rises up from the orchestra pit with his Mighty Wurlitzer Organ and then descends again just before the movie starts. That’s something you don’t get at the 38-screen multi-megaplex at the suburban mall.

Spoiler Alert:

I accidentally wrote Soiler Alert, at first. But that would be more apropos to the Baby Brigade at the Parkway Speakeasy.

Bond movies often have intriguing villains and well thought out storylines that meaningfully build to a climactic conclusion. Well, before the bit where Bond gets busy with the beauty pageant contestant, martial arts expert, nuclear physicist, gun/knife toting woman he’s been fighting/flirting with for most of the movie. Quantum Solace, in contrast, seemed to primarily be about Bond’s quest for revenge over a dead girlfriend being played out indirectly against a poorly explained pack of bad guys who seemed to be wedged sideways into the plot because there simply “has” to be an evil cabal in every Bond flick.

And usually the axis of evil has cooked up some plan that will result in the annihilation of huge numbers of people unless they get paid a huge ransom. Or will simply result in the annihilation of huge numbers of people because the bad guys are unrepentant misanthropes. However, Dominic Greene of the bashful evil supergroup Quantum has his sights set a bit lower. In the midst of arranging for a military coup in Bolivia, he tricks the new dictator into agreeing to pay double the going rate for municipal water.

WTF??? That’s the frickin’ evil plan? Is Quantum the secret name of EBMUD? After all, they raised our rates. I don’t think it was double, though. Heck, the real life Aguas del Tunari consortium in Bolivia raised rates by 35% after taking control of the water supply.

There’s has been a long history of water issues in Bolivia. In fact, when the little bit of a plot that was there played out and revealed a dictator trying to come back to power, I immediately thought of General Hugo Banzer.

An amusing aside for me was that Greene ends up being left by Bond to die in the Atacama desert (footage was shot in Chile rather than Bolivia) with a can of motor oil to drink when he gets thirsty. Many years ago Sandra and I were stranded in the Atacama desert when the truck that our guide was driving completely broke down before dawn on the way to the geysers near San Pedro de Atacama. Fortunately, the driver’s thermos of hot tea was more refreshing than motor oil. We also had to walk only about 7 miles before being picked up and brought back to town.

Last Friday my wife and I celebrated our 15th anniversary by going to Linden Street Brewery for their Friday afternoon open house and then the Oakland Museum of California for the Best of the East Bay party. Both were excellent. Some of our friends brought a penne pasta salad with fresh-grated parmesan and grilled tri-tip on the Linden Street grill.

The Best of the East Bay party blew me away. It’s estimated that over 4,000 people attended. There were four stages with live bands playing all night. Lots of delicious foods and drinks (I enjoyed a very nice macchiato from Julie’s Coffee & Tea Garden) were available. The whole museum, except the parts they are refurbishing, was open. There was a mini skateboard park with ramps just below the sculpture gardens. Splash Circus was there with a roughly 35-feet tall tripod from which girls were performing acrobatics on ropes and fabric, a la Cirque du Soleil. Kid’s band performances, a guy typing out poems on an old typewriter, film screenings, bands like The Uptones and Flipper, and much more.

And most amazingly, we didn’t see a single security guard or policeman the entire time, and we also didn’t see a single sign of trouble anywhere. Everyone was in a great mood. So forget what you think you know about Oakland.

Saturday night we opened up a 1993 Boony Doon Le Cigare Volant. Lately I have had bad luck with some of my older wines being corked, but this wine was in great shape. It was very smooth and had a delicate cherry taste.

I have fond memories of Shiner Bock from when I lived in Austin, and I always have a bottle or two when I go back to visit my brother. I agree with Stan at Appellation Beer that while Shiner doesn’t make the greatest of beers, they are better than a lot of people give them credit for. I didn’t see the Helles anywhere when I was in Austin a few weeks ago. I’ll have to look for it next time.

The Bohemian Black Lager, which I had had before, was available at Artz Rib House. I developed an appreciation for Schwarzbiers during a couple of trips to Germany. The Bohemian Black has a very nice malty flavor, but lacks somewhat the intense roasted coffee flavor of the Schwarzbiers I tried in Germany.

This Shiner ad that Stan linked to is also pretty great.

I also went to the Independence Brewing brewery when I was in Austin. The 1st Saturday of each month they give out free beer samples at the brewery. $5 gets you a logo pint glass, which then gets you free refills. They make very nice amber and brown ales, as well as a pale ale that sounds like it would be very similar to Sierra Nevada. I tried the Southside Special Ale and really wanted to like it, but just couldn’t get excited about it. Perhaps it was the “hint of cardamom” that was throwing me.

The tour was excellent and very educational, as you get to walk up close to all the brewery equipment and owner Rob will answer just about any question about how they brew their beer. Go to El Meson for lunch and then show up at Independence at about 1:15. The initial crush of people will have already gotten in and started on their first beer.

If you plan to see Control, the biopic of Ian Curtis from Joy Division, read no further if you don’t want any spoilers, other than to know that I highly recommend the movie.

After writing and recording a few incredible albums, Curtis hanged himself at the age of 23 in 1980. Years later when I read brief news articles about his death, I learned little more than that he was a depressed musician. Control (which was co-produced by his wife Debbie Curtis) clears up a lot of the mystery. Afflicted with epilepsy, Curtis was also trapped in a love triangle with a wife that he married while quite young and with an employee at the Belgian Embassy who wants to interview bands. He loved his wife and child too much to completely walk away from them, but he also loved Annik too much to leave her, even though he knew that the relationship was destroying his marriage.

Of course, one hopes Curtis’s wife didn’t just take the opportunity to rewrite history to make herself look better. In general, she did come across pretty well in the movie, although her husband’s mistress was also portrayed as a decent person who was scared of falling in love with Ian.

Some people have criticized Control because it didn’t focus enough on the band. Control isn’t the Joy Division movie, though. It’s a movie about the life of Ian Curtis.

I recommend also watching 24 Hour Party People for another perspective on Ian Curtis and Joy Division, although Curtis is portrayed more as an abrasive jerk in that movie.

One amusing bit of trivia mentioned at IMDB is that the actor who played Curtis also played the lead singer for The Fall in 24 Hour Party People. This is amusing, because in Control, Joy Division’s manager tells Curtis that things could be worse, he could be the lead singer for The Fall.

Just ran across Summize while catching up on the Lifehacker syndication feed. The main feature Summize provides is an aggregation of reviews of books, movies, videos and other products from blogs and ecommerce sites like Amazon. But the site is much deeper than that.

Recently Amazon started showing the breakdown of the absolute counts for each level of a 1 to 5 star product rating. This sometimes provides far more insight than you get from a single averaged value, especially when there are just a few reviews. Summize provides a similar breakdown via a color bar (red = terrible, green = great). When there are a small total number of reviews for a product, just a few poor ratings can have a significant effect on the overall rating. If you then look at the actual reviews, you might discover that the highly negative reviewers bought the wrong product and are mad, hated a feature you don’t care about, or are simply stupid. Same goes for reviewers giving very high reviews because they love a feature you could care less about.

Summize also provides a list of links to related items. For example, last night I watched MirrorMask, which was written by one of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman. Searching for MirrorMask brought up reviews of not just the movie, but also the illustrated film script, a book on the making of the movie, the soundtrack and more. Only one item was unrelated to the movie.

Links to other topics are also provided. For MirrorMask, links were provided to pages for Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, as well as to some of the actors.

Although Amazon and many other sites conveniently provide ratings on a 1 to 5 scale or on a different scale that can be easily scaled to 1 to 5, obviously most bloggers don’t provide numerical ratings in an easily retrievable format. It appears that Summize has developed an algorithm for parsing the text of the review and using sentiments expressed in the review (fantastic, sucked, godlike) to convert the review to a 1 to 5 rating. I’m assuming they are doing more than looking for adjectives to which they have assigned values, but, hey, even that might work pretty well in aggregate.

So, how do they make money? Product links on Amazon, for starters.

Obviously, they are pulling in a lot of data and have one some interesting stuff with it. I recommend digging around on the site on the trends page and elsewhere to see what they have done with the data so far.

I picked up a pair of Shure E2C earphones recently because I had read good reviews about them and they were super cheap during a sale at Amazon. I think I paid only about $40. So far, I’m very happy with them. Shure discontinued the E2C and E3C after coming out with a new line of earphones, so if you find them, they should be discounted.

If you do pick up a pair, be sure to set aside at least 15 minutes to try out many of the foam and flexible sleeves that come with the fit kit. The first 5 or so I tried fit terribly. Then I tried one that didn’t look too different from the others, but the fit was great. In order to take advantage of the excellent sound isolation and bass response of these types of earphones, you need the tips of the earphones to fit snugly in your ear canal, but not too snugly that it hurts.

I enjoed using them around the house, but the E2Cs made their biggest difference when I used them on an airplane flight. They eliminated most of the background noise and allowed me to listen to my audio player as a reasonable volume. With my previous earbuds, I had to crank up the volume really high to overcome the engine and other people noise. They do such a good job of filtering out external sounds that I almost missed the announcement to turn off personal electronic devices.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

My copy of the book is the first edition, but I highly recommend getting the second edition. The authors added a lot of critical comments and corrections in the second edition. Or, if you already have the first edition, you can do what I did and browse through the updates in the second edition while at a book store.

One of the comments in the second edition directly addresses one of my biggest issues, i.e., the incredibly fawning intros to each chapter. Levitt is clearly a smart guy and doesn’t really require any further build up. However, each chapter begins with a couple of glowing paragraphs from the NY Times that describe how Levitt walks on water, cures the infirm, turns crappy CW sitcoms into The IT Crowd, and turns an incompetent US President into … Okay, not even Steven Levitt can save George Bush from ignominy.

So, who is the unmentioned author of those excerpts from the Times? Why it’s his co-author, Stephen Dubner. But don’t let this stop you from reading this great book. Just don’t waste your time on the chapter intros.

The introduction to the of the book sums up the theme of the book quite nicely – “Why the conventional wisdom is so often wrong”. Over six chapters the Steves present very convincing arguments, backed up with lots of data that has been carefully statistically analyzed and vetted, why some familiar claims that have been made in the media are not only not accurate, but often completely wrong. They received quite a bit of backlash for this book, primarily, it seems, from people who read articles about it rather than reading it for themselves. Obviously this puts a lot of pressure on you to not just read my review, but to also read the book. Sorry. I believe that Levitt honestly is not trying to push any moral beliefs on anyone. He’s just looking at the data as impartially as he can and describing what his analysis tells him.

One chapter I found fascinating was titled “Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?”. An earlier chapter was titled “How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real Estate Agents?” (very popular with the National Association of Realtors), and this chapter could have similarly been titled “How Are Drug Gangs Like Multi Level Marketing Companies?”. A grad student named Sudhir Venkatesh collected a significant amount of data, at a not insignificant risk to his life, on the Black Gangster Disciple Nation (not connected in any way with WombatNation) in Chicago. The conventional wisdom is that the risk of a gang member dying early is offset by the all the money they can make. Otherwise, why would they do it, right?

Well, Levitt’s retelling of Venkatesh’s research reveals that the marketing done by the drug gang recruiters isn’t that much less misleading than that done by recruiters for multi level marketing companies. Why the MLM marketers don’t die, of course, they generally make far less money than the recruiters say they will, and sometimes they even end up owing the companies money. Although I see a lot of corollaries with the org structure of MLM companies, Levitt compares them with McDonald’s. But back to the drug gangs.

The people at the top levels of the drug gangs do make a lot of money. But, it really is just the people at the very top. The top 2.2% of the gang that was studied took home over half the money. The guys at the bottom made less than the minimum wage and the people above them were making $7 per hour. It’s important to note that if a gang member were active in the gang for the entire four years for which Venkatesh was able to collect data, that gang member’s chances of ending up dead during that time were 1 in 4. Hmmm, the risk seems to outrun the reward just by a little bit.

But just like how many people get sucked up into some MLM companies that border on being Ponzi schemes, the foot soldiers who are signing up have no idea how badly the odds are stacked against them. Of course, many of them are in situations where they feel they might not have any other options.

And if the book isn’t enough for you, there’s plenty more freaky stuff on the Freakonomics blog at the NY Times.

Waiting for Fidel by Christoper Hunt

My wife bought this book for me a few years ago when we were doing a lot of international traveling. It never made it to the top of my reading stack, but this summer I was looking for a relatively small paperback book to read while taking BART and MUNI to California Victory matches in San Francisco. I’m really glad I decided to choose Waiting for Fidel.

Christopher Hunt spends a lot of time blending in with locals and comes away with a perspective that would be extremely difficult to obtain by most visitors to Cuba. While he is clearly enamored with Cuba, he doesn’t hesitate to point out the flaws in their economic system and the suffering that is ever present. While some of the suffering is due to the American embargo, Cuba definitely lost out big by betting big on a losing horse (the Soviet Union) and Castro appears (even back in the late 90’s when the book was written) to be far out of touch with the realities of day-to-day life and the high levels of corruption throughout much of Cuba. Still, it sounds like the majority of Cubans are incredibly kind and warm-hearted and they make for wonderful hosts.

After a couple of failed attempts to meet Castro in Havana, Hunt decides to follow Fidel Castro and his fellow rebels’ 30+ day march across most of the length of Cuba (I don’t know why I thought Cuba wasn’t that long of an island, but it is) en route to overthrowing Fulgencio Bautista in Havana. His adventures while following in the rebels’ footsteps make for fascinating reading. Although most of the Cubans he meets are relatively poor, they offer to share whatever they have with him.

Along the way, Hunt learns many terms that help to Cubanize him. A regular part of Cuban life is queuing up in lines, so the phrase everyone says as they approach a queue is “¿El último?”, in order to find out who is currently at the end of the queue. This is, of course, not to be confused with “El Máximo”, which is a nickname for Castro. When commenting on the regular challenges Cubans face each day, they often sigh and simply say “La Lucha”, or “The Struggle”. Other useful slang terms include wanikiki – money, fula – dollars, jinetero – grifter, jinitera – prostitute, and el fuego – the act of grifting.

One interesting bit of trivia is that the Communist daily political newspaper Granma is named after the boat the rebels used to land at the Eastern tip of Cuba, or as Che Guevara described their arrival, “This wasn’t a landing, it was a shipwreck”. But why was the boat called “Granma”? Well, they had purchased it from an American who had given it the affectionate name for his grandmother. Imagine if they had bought the “Luna Sea”, “Obsession”, “Wet Dream”, or “Miss Behavin’”.

I plowed through a bunch of books this summer and swore to myself with each one that I would post a book review. It’s not like I spent all summer just watching episodes of Robot Chicken, The Simpsons, The Venture Brothers, and Ghost in the Shell. Sure, that took up 80% of my free time, but I engaged with literature at times, too.

So here’s a partial list of reviews to potentially look forward to, or not, in no particular order:

• Waiting for Fidel by Christopher Hunt
• Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
• Cycling’s Greatest Misadventures edited by Erich Schweikher
• Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach
• Too Much Coffee Man’s Parade of Tirade by Shannon Wheeler
• Murder Mysteries by Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell

I also read reasonable sized chunks of several technical books, but I’ll probably spare you those. I mean, do you really want to read about how I used Fedora Linux by Chris Tyler to better configure my desktop and laptop? Yeah, I didn’t think so, even though it is a useful book.

Tonight I was lucky enough to see Sonic Youth perform their 1988 double LP masterpiece Daydream Nation at Berkeley Community Theater. I’ve been a huge fan of Sonic Youth ever since Bad Moon Rising was released in 1985. My favorite Sonic Youth album is Sister, but Daydream Nation is a very close second.

I’m often disappointed by live shows by rock bands, as performances are often rote copies of the studio versions, filled with distracting visuals totally unrelated to the music, or confirmations that a band has minimal talent and is totally dependent on studio engineers. With Sonic Youth, though, the live performances are a fantastic complement to the released recordings. Fortunately, the sound quality in the theater tonight was also very good, instead of the stupid over-amped distortion foisted on the crowd by half deaf audio engineers at many shows. Sonic Youth are absolute masters at controlling feedback and twisting it into amazing sounds.

Afer performing Daydream Nation beginning to end, the band left the stage and then came back for a five song encore, which they then followed with a double encore with an additional song. When they came out for the first encore, Thurston made a couple of funny education-related comments, since the theater is part of a high school (though this theater was a thousand times better than the one at the high school I went to). After a humorous dig at our dim-witted President, Thurston announced that they were now going to play all of Sticky Fingers. He then said something like, “Be sure to watch Lee [Ranaldo]. He’s going to do the Mick Jagger chicken dance.”

Thurston, Lee and Kim all seemed to be having a great time on stage. Since they brought up a friend to also play bass during the encores, Kim was freed up to just sing on a couple of the songs while dancing around on stage in her super cool shiny black and silver dress. She even jumped down into the crowd in the orchestra pit and danced around during the last bit of the final song.