“UCLA 51-Michigan 49. But anything can happen in the second half.” Isaac Chotiner
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Monthly Archives: March 2021
UCLA v Michigan @ 1900 Tonight
A lot of people my age were enthralled with the idea of UCLA because of the unprecedented success of John Wooden’s basketball teams.
When I moved into UCLA’s “Southern Suites” across from Rieber Hall when they opened in January 1981, I promptly put a poster of John Wooden and his “Pyramid of Success” on the bedroom wall I shared with Johnny Sun from South Pas (Pasadena for the uninitiated). The fact that Johnny moved to the U.S. from Hong Kong when he was 12 is no excuse for what he asked me a few months later, “Who is that on the poster?” “Shit!” I replied, “how the hell did they ever admit you!”
Nine months earlier, at freshman orientation, I made friends with a shy Asian-American student who for our purposes we’ll call “Ken”. As some of us shot hoops, Ken stood at a distance and silently watched. Somehow I ended up chatting with him and we palled around during subsequent activities. In addition, we took a Social Psychology class together our first year, during which Ken napped through a majority of the lectures.
Yesterday, from Japan, Ken one-upped Johnny Sun by asking a couple of questions about the absurd poster that celebrates UCLA’s surprising run in the NCAA tournament. It started innocently enough, “Whose beaming face is on the little cherubs?” But then things quickly escalated into Johnny Sun territory, “I’m glad I didn’t guess. I thought it was Joe Biden (you wrote ‘J brothers’).” And then he brought it home, “So Bill’s name has a silent J in front? Who are the 3 seated? Me thought the center was Justin Trudeau.”
And with that reference to the Canadian Prime Minister, “Ken” is the new leader in the Clueless UCLA Clubhouse (neither of them would get that golf reference).
So for Ken and anyone else similarly flumoxed, a brief explanation.
Left to right, Jules Bernand, Jaime Jaquez Jr., and Johnny Juzang, three of the best players on this year’s team. Thus, the “J Brothers.” The little cherubs. . . Bill Walton, not 46. And for extra credit, note the tiny Mitch Cronin just below and to the left of Bernard.
Ken, because I know you’re going to ask, Mick Cronin is the coach.
Go Bruins!
Are You 50 Years Old?
Or stupendous and sixty? Or sublime and seventy? Or extraordinary and eighty?
If so, I highly recommend two essays.
-
Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think by Arthur C. Brooks.
- How to Practice by Ann Patchett.
Both beautifully nudge the reader to contemplate the end-of-life. Patchett’s piece is the single best thing I’ve ever read on decluttering as an intentional act of preparing to die. If you think you might die someday, forget Marie Kondo, just sink deeply into Patchett’s story.
Patchett had me from the jump when she described the stages of life as “. . . youth, middle age, and . . . the downhill slalom.”
Ski on dear reader and read on.
Is This Sacrilegious?
What about this. . . In the “J-brothers” we trust.
Breaking With Biden
Why is President Biden framing geopolitics this way?
“I predict to you your children or grandchildren are going to be doing their doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded, autocracy or democracy, because that is what is at stake. Not just with China. Look around the world. We’re in the midst of a fourth industrial revolution of enormous consequence. Will there be a middle class? How will people adjust to these significant changes in science and technology? The environment. How will they do that? It is clear, absolutely clear … this is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies. That’s what’s at stake here. We’ve got to prove democracy works.”
Why do we have to prove democracy works? What’s wrong with sovereign nations choosing other forms of government that work well for them? What do we gain from trying to impose democracy on others who have no interest in it?
It’s ironic that Biden asks, “Will there be a middle class?” because China is rapidly building one while ours is shrinking. Would I want to live somewhere like China without the civil liberties I’ve grown accustomed to? No, I wouldn’t, but that doesn’t change the fact that many people are willing to live with centralized power as long as their quality of life is improving.
I prefer our inefficient democracy, but it’s ethnocentric to assume our form of government is better than all the rest. Maybe in 2089, Tiananmen Square II will happen and the Chinese people will force a change of government.
Until then, improving quality of life is all that matters. Instead of framing geopolitics as a zero-sum game between democracies and autocracies, we should focus on diplomacy, 21st century environmental policies, demilitarization, creating jobs that pay livable wages, and reducing poverty home and abroad.
Granted, this is nitpicking. Biden is off to a great start. What a refreshing reset. Nevertheless, no matter how successful he is over the next 3+ years, I will never vote for an 82 year-old for President.
Swimming Is A Different Animal
To run a faster 10k or half marathon or marathon, a person needs to increase their weekly mileage. Full stop. Interval training can help, along with improved nutrition and sleep, and resistance training; but the most important variable by far is increasing one’s weekly mileage.
Same with cycling. To improve one’s average speed, or to ride a faster 40k or century, improved positioning and aerodynamics help, along with training with faster people (aka intervals), and a lighter bicycle especially if climbing; but the most important variable by far is increasing one’s weekly mileage. “Ass time”.
I swim about 6-8 kilometers most weeks. Sometimes, when I can’t run or cycle due to injury or weather, I increase that. For a month or two. And the increase in volume has almost no effect. Instead of swimming 1:32/100 yards, I swim 1:31.
At my age, 59, almost every runner, cyclist, and swimmer is slowing down. The rare exception is the former burner who fell way out of shape and returned to the road or pool in their 40’s or early 50’s. I’m the opposite of that person. I’ve never been a burner, but I compensate for my lack of speed with a very deep cardiovascular base, the result of three decades of consistent training.
Because of my pedestrian starting point, I’m slowing down more slowly than my active peers. But I digress, back to swimming.
I actually defied the aging process a few years ago and got a touch faster in open water. How? By buying a better wetsuit. Free speed. Well, not exactly free, but you get the point.
Fast forward to my March 2021 Miracle of getting faster in the pool. Some context. I usually do 100 yard intervals in 1:29-1:33 depending on whether I’m doing them alone or with others and when in the workout I’m doing them. It literally takes me about 2,000 yards to “warm up” or the majority of my workout. A month ago, without my fast female friends pushing me in Masters, I was churning out sluggish 1:32 after 1:32 on 1:40 or 1:45.
Right now, I’m limited to 45 minutes at my local YMCA because of some sort of virus. I’ve gotten good at jamming as much as I can into the 45 minutes. Here’s today’s workout:
400y—6:15. 200y x 2—3:05, 3:04. 100y x 4—1:30, 1:30, 1:29, 1:28.
Paddles/bouy. 400y—5:50. 200y x 2—2:50, 2:50.
100y x 4 im, 1:41s on 2m.
Then, in the last 5-6 minutes, I did some easy 50’s and one final 100 concentrating on what I’ve been learning from YouTube stroke analysis tutorials. The easy 50’s were 43 on 1:00 and the easy final 100 was 1:26. Yes please, may I have another.
Mid or late workout, I can now do 1:28’s (on 1:40) all day long with the same effort I have been swimming 1:32s the last few years. That, in short, is the March Miracle.
From a running and cycling perspective that sudden improvement makes no sense, but swimming is a different animal. Especially when compared to running and cycling, swimming is super technical, if your stroke is flawed, no amount of volume is going to make much difference. It’s like golf, if your clubface is way open at impact, you’re going to hit a slice no matter how many balls you beat on the range.
Long story short, I’ve been watching a lot of stroke analysis vids on YouTube and finally some of the lessons are taking. Historically, bad muscle memory has blunted coaches’ occasional efforts to improve my stroke.
Somehow, a few stroke improvements have suddenly clicked. Primarily, truly finishing my stroke by gently rubbing my thumbs against my hips, rotating more by lengthening my stroke, and maintaining high elbows through the “catch”. Well, not really the last one. Yet. I’m still a serial elbow dropper. Which is kinda cool because that means there’s still more seconds to be found. And now I have more confidence I can integrate that change too.
In a few years I’ll report back on whether I have higher elbows. Or just tune in to the Olympic Trials in Omaha to see if I’m competing. Your choice.
The ‘Greatest Country In The World’ Has A Serious Gun Violence Problem
How do all of the gung-ho pro-gunners who reflexively say America is the greatest country in the world interpret this data?
Gun Violence Deaths: How The U.S. Compares With The Rest Of The World.
Most mind numbing of all, the gung-ho pro-gunners reflexively say America would be safer if more people carried guns. Every man, woman, child a gun?
Postscript:
Now
Image
Nomadland Reconsidered
This Joshua Keating critique of Nomadland is excellent. He starts off praising it.
“The film Nomadland, which cemented its status as the front-runner for Best Picture with six Oscar nominations this week, includes unforgettable characters and images. It heralds the arrival of a major directing talent in Chloé Zhao, nominated for Best Director, and features yet another masterful turn from Frances McDormand, nominated for Best Actress. But for anyone who has read its source material, Jessica Bruder’s 2017 nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, the film feels oddly incomplete. The filmmakers chose to jettison the book’s muckraking journalistic spirit and economic critique, ending up with a film that’s supposedly an examination of contemporary society, but feels politically inert.”
Lucid, critical, respectful, the phrases “oddly incomplete” and “politically inert” strike the perfect chord.
His main critique:
“These are people who are adamant that they are not victims, have chosen the lifestyle they lead of their own free will, and are grateful for the opportunities they get. This is admirable in some sense, but in the case of modern nomadism, it’s part of the problem. As Bruder’s reporting shows, one of the reasons companies like Amazon like to hire retirement-age “workampers” for physically demanding jobs that seem better suited for young bodies is that they “demand little in the way of benefits or protections. … Most expressed appreciation for whatever semblance of stability their short-term jobs offered.” The scrappy, no-complaints stoicism that makes these people appealing movie characters also makes them extremely exploitable.”
Keating convinces me that a very good film could’ve been even better.
How Not To Care
If you look even a little bit, the growing population of homeless men, women, and children in Olympia, Washington are easily visible; mostly you’ll find them close to the social service agencies they depend upon, like the Salvation Army and the Thurston County Food Bank. An enormous tent and tarp community stretches all along the western edge of Capital Lake on Deschutes Parkway SW. It looks like a refugee camp you might find in Northeast Africa, but worse because there’s no UNHCR to create some semblance of order. More accurately, picture Miami post Hurricane Katrina. Many more live in tents and tarps among the trees that line the Woodland Trail and the I-5 freeway.
The classic argument between the Individual Responsibility folks, “they have to take responsibility for their bad decisions” versus the Systemic Forces folks, “the growing numbers of homeless who succumb to combinations of poverty, addiction, and poor mental health are entirely predictable given our ‘winner-takes-all’ economic system coupled with our anemic social safety net” shows no signs of abating. Nearly all of the Individual Responsibility folks respond to homeless men, women, and children with a mix of resentment and anger. At the same time, a gradually increasing percentage of the Systemic Forces folks are exasperated as some natural areas are lost and downtown grows less clean and safe.
So why, as the population of homeless men, women, and children rises; does it seem like our collective empathy decreases? Even among a lot of decent people who have demonstrated empathy in their past for others less fortunate than them?
Mired in resentment and anger, we leapfrog caring about our fellow citizens’ pain and suffering because we don’t know any homeless person’s story. We don’t know where they’re from, what their childhood was like, what hardships they’ve had to endure. Not knowing any of those things makes it much easier to assume they’ve made a series of bad decisions. And that until they start making good ones, they get what they deserve.
Local papers don’t have the resources to tell their stories anymore. And even if alternative papers tried, would we read them when we don’t even really look at our homeless neighbors? As if they have leprosy, the best we can do, it seems, is a quick glance.
The secret to not caring about the homeless is not knowing anything about any one homeless person. Not learning their names and not looking at them helps too, but mostly, it’s avoiding learning how and why and where things went off the rails.
Irrespective of one’s religious views or politics, it seems increasingly common to castigate “the homeless”. Because they remain an abstraction.
This proven strategy works equally well in other contexts too. For example, the same approach to not caring works for the growing number of Central American immigrants gathering at our southern border. Many Fox News hosts are absolutely giddy over what the gathering numbers of desperate immigrants mean for Biden’s approval ratings and the midterm elections because they don’t know any of their stories. There are laws to be enforced and political gain to be made, nevermind their pain and suffering, their humanity.
Yesterday, I screwed up. And mistakenly read this story in the New York Times.
A Violent End to a Desperate Dream Leaves a Guatemalan Town Grieving
In doing so, I was introduced to Santa Cristina García Pérez, a 20 year old, one of twelve Comitecos who were massacred by Mexican police near the U.S. border. I learned Christina was one of 11 siblings who hoped to make enough money in the U.S. to. . .
“. . . cover the cost of an operation for her one-year-old sister, Angela Idalia, who was born with a cleft lip. . . .
She wanted to save Ángela Idalia from what she thought would be a life of ridicule, relatives said.”
I doubled down on my mistake by taking my time to truly see all of the Comitecos mourning their friends and family. Powerful images of profound loss, one after another. Including one of Ricardo García Pérez, Cristina’s dad, placing a bottle of water next to her casket. . .
“. . . so that Ms. García’s spirit did not suffer from thirst on its journey to the next life.”
I wasn’t the only one learning about the Comitecos. The Times explains:
“The killings have stunned the community, spurred a wave of international media attention on Comitancillo and an outpouring of financial support for the victim’s families. Among other acts of largess, donations from nearby communities in the region and from the Guatemalan diaspora have paid for Ángela Idalia’s first surgery to repair her cleft lip and have enabled the García family to build a new house.”
That’s one more vivid example that when most people see someone suffering, look into their eyes, learn their name, and something about their life journey; they can’t help but care. And help.
In contrast, the homeless in my community remain an abstraction. An abstraction most of us are determined to keep at a comfortable distance. Given our mounting resentment and anger at this abstraction, we keep asking, “When is someone going to do something?”
Pressing Pause 