The .Plan

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to muster much excitement about the Christmas holiday season. Not that I think it’s unimportant historically (i.e., the birth of little baby Jesus, although it’s not the central historical event in Christian theology) or that I don’t appreciate its worldly implications (i.e., I get to go home to see my family). But the season just kind of creeps up on you and then before you know it, it’s too late to send out Christmas cards, and the stores are way too crowded with nasty Christmas shoppers for gift-buying to be anything but a chore.

Like most kids raised in America, many of my most enduring memories of the Christmas season involve the television — namely the Christmas specials: Rudolph, Frosty, Sesame Street, and Peanuts. A few years ago, I bought the A Charlie Brown Christmas DVD, and I’ve been watching it around this time every year since. It doesn’t feel like Christmas until I do.

A few factoids about that show that I hadn’t known:

Melendez was brought into direct, and as with the Ford commercial, he gave the parts of the Peanuts kids entirely to children, many of whom had never acted. Getting them to learn their roles was a trying task, given that Schulz’s script had his characters regularly waxing philosophical and tossing off words like ailurophobia (a fear of felines, for the record). Melendez had to teach the young actors long portions of the script phonetically. “Sometimes they didn’t understand a word,” he remembers. “They’d say, ‘Just tell me how you want it said.’ Then they’d say it, and I’d turn to the engineer and ask if he recorded it. The kids were all startled when they got screen credit and happily startled when they started getting royalty checks.”
–Brian Heater, “The Lonely Tree: The Story of A Charlie Brown Christmas”, PopMatters, December 14, 2006

and,

In 1962, Guaraldi released “Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus,” interpreting music from the 1959 Brazilian film. To fill out a short album, he wrote a tune that was packaged as the B-side of a single. (About the same time, he grew a handlebar mustache, which became his signature look.) That throwaway tune was “Cast Your Fate,” which caught on with listeners and went on to sell 500,000 copies. It reached No. 22 on the pop charts — one of the last instrumental jazz tunes to be a crossover hit — and earned Guaraldi a Grammy Award in 1963 for best original jazz composition.
–Matt Schudel, “The jazzman who captured Charlie Brown’s wistful soul”, Seattle Times, December 11, 2006

I’ve been trying to go to bed 3 hours later each night, so that by the time I start my night float block this weekend, I will have successfully flipped my cycle so that I can successfully fall asleep on days. Boy, is tonight the wrong night to try to stay awake until 4:00 AM. The power has gone out once today, and the lights have been flickering on and off all night. Rain, rain, rain, 50 mph winds, even mudslides.

Cities in Louisiana can handle flooding, and Cleveland can handle snowstorms. But because the weather is so mild in Seattle, a little bit of adverse weather totally paralyzes the city.

Some snapshots taken by the Seattle Times photographer:

The police advise you not to stop if they wave you down in the middle of the night, but rather speed past them and drive to your nearest police station.

Your insurance is higher than the repayments on your car.

Rwandan refugees start leaving the country because the crime rate is too high.

The police ask you if they must follow up on the burglary you’ve just reported.

You no longer request anything, you “DIMUND” it.

You know what “vowlence” is.

A minibus taxi passes you, just to stop right in front of you.

Courtesy of Blog South Africa.

New blog — StupidChurchPeople.com.

In a kind of take-off of the age-old admonition “eat your brussell sprouts, don’t you know there are people starving in Africa?”, I used to remind myself of Botswanan AIDS orphans, or of Sudanese refugees with dracunculiasis, every time I caught myself complaining about something petty. I guess there may be people on the other side of the world who are telling themselves the same thing, sort of.

Fatuma Hussein cast a kind of sidelong light on this issue when she described the shock that she felt on arriving in America. Having escaped the horrors of the civil war and spent years in a refugee camp in Kenya, she was resettled, first, in suburban Atlanta, where she was sent to an all-white high school. “And I tell you,” she said, “American high school is the cruellest place I’ve been.”
–William Finnegan, “New in Town”, New Yorker, December 11, 2006

The equation that describes the quality of the female rear end, according to [David Holmes, a psychologist at Manchester Metropolitan University], is

(S + C) x (B + F)/T - V,

where S = Overall Shape (“including tendency to droop”), C = Circularity, B = Bounce Factor (not to be confused with “wobble”), F = Firmness (with perfect being “like a comfy bed”), T = Skin Texture and V = Vertical Ratio (the goal: “on the top-heavy side of symmetrical”). For the male rear end, the equation replaces bounce, circularity and vertical ratio with M (Muscularity), L (Leanness) and O (Overall Symmetry).

The numbers you plug in to the equation come from a list of descriptions. To calculate B for Bounce: “After one flick it wobbles for 30 secs” gives you a 2, whereas “during aerobics it doesn’t even quiver” gives you a 5. And so on.
–Rebecca Skloot, “Tushology”, New York Times Magazine, Dec 10, 2006

The Joneses have always been tyrannical. It’s just that the New York City version is more tyrannical.

Manhattan became overcolonized, then overpriced… Old neighborhoods became financially inaccessible, so new ones were carved out. Now the Upper West Side is swallowing Harlem. The flow from Brooklyn to Manhattan has reversed course. The meatpacking district, once synonymous with “the district in which meat is packed,” became synonymous instead with cool, then not cool—and it all happened in about three weeks…

This is driven in part, of course, by money—priced out of Manhattan, you turn to Brooklyn; priced out of Brooklyn, you turn to Queens—but also in part by that anxious feeling you get when you’re attending a great party, but you can’t help hearing that there’s a louder, more raucous party going on down the hall… to live here now is to endure a gnawing suspicion that somebody, somewhere, is marveling and reveling a little more successfully than you are. That they’re paying less money for a bigger apartment with more-authentic details on a nicer block closer to cuter restaurants and still-uncrowded bars and hipper galleries that host better parties with cooler bands than yours does, in an area that’s simultaneously a portal to the future (tomorrow’s hot neighborhood today!) and a throwback to an untainted past (today’s hot neighborhood yesterday!). And you know what? Someone is. And you know what else?

Right now, that person just might be living in Jersey City.
–Adam Sternbergh, “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Cool by Now”, New York, December 11, 2006

The Wall Street Journal polled several academic “happiness researchers” to see what can be done to maximize happiness. Suggestions:

• Relishing the day
  
• Minimizing commute time
  
• Hanging out with friends
  
• Buying memories
  

Having lots of choice might seem like a good thing. But in fact, it can lead to unhappiness.

Consider a study conducted by professors Jane Ebert and Daniel Gilbert. Participants were allowed to choose an art poster to take home. Some were told that, if they didn’t like the poster, they could exchange it for another. Others were told their decision was final.

“Who was happiest with their choice?” asks Prof. Gilbert of Harvard University. “Those for whom the choice was irrevocable. When options are open, the mind generates debate. When options are closed, the mind generates satisfaction.”

This insight spurred Prof. Gilbert to limit his own choices. “It made me realize that I ought to propose to my girlfriend,” he says. “Sure enough, now that she’s my wife, I’m happier.”
–Jonathan Clements, “The Pursuit of Happiness: Six Experts Tell What They’ve Done to Achieve It”, Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2006

Related reading:

• Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
  
• Gregg Easterbrook, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse

Much of my work brings me into partnership with people who would describe themselves as being on ‘the left’. Unfortunately, most of them have blinders on when it comes to acknowledging good work by those who would describe themselves as being on ‘the right’. So it gives me good cheer to see the Los Angeles Times post this surprising editorial:

The focus on AIDS by evangelicals isn’t new, but Warren is taking it to a new level. Though churches were initially and inexcusably silent on AIDS, attitudes began to shift as AIDS declined in the United States while growing in Africa. Pressure from his Christian base may have been a factor in President Bush’s 2003 decision to start an initiative against AIDS, devoting $15 billion over five years to fight the disease. Now, Warren aims to increase church involvement.

…Bush and his Christian supporters seldom get the credit they deserve for their role in the global fight against AIDS. U.S. spending on the disease overseas has risen more than tenfold under Bush, while Christian groups have given unselfishly to the cause. Churches, in fact, run health clinics in much of rural Africa; without them, stemming AIDS would be all but impossible. So praise the Lord and pass the antiretrovirals.
–“Christian Conservatives vs. AIDS”, Los Angeles Times, November 30, 2006

How can you not love this city?