Author: Ridley

Note: We recently returned from a vacation in Marfa, Texas. The internet is like water in this part of the country, in that it’s scarce, moves slowly, and is probably full of hidden stuff that will try to kill you. Ergo, I wrote this while we stayed out there as sort of a diary of our stay. I had more wine and beer than I normally do, and you’ll probably be able to tell which parts were written under their influence as I’m leaving them in.  Wednesay Wednesday morning in Marfa. It’s still cool in the shade, but that’s not going to be the case for much. I’m watching a kid chase a rabbit across the campground and hoping he trips and falls into a cactus or an ant hill.   Didn’t happen; justice is denied.   People in brightly-colored robes are emerging from most of the trailers. Most of the showers here are outdoor, some are communal. Some of ‘em are taking drags off of what are undoubtedly hand-rolled conventional tobacco cigarettes. Some are frantically packing their gear and hauling it out to the parking lot. Normal campground rhythms, if you’ve ever been to a campground.   Marfa is in the middle of nowhere, but its a particularly elevated nowhere. The high plains of west Texas are over four thousand feet above sea level. The air is dry and clean and not quite as oxygen rich as I’m accustomed to. There’s a good breeze, and we’d best enjoy it while we can because it’ll be still by mid-afternoon.   We’re moving slowly the morning, having dined like royalty on filet and mushroom grilled and cheap but delicious tempranillo. I no longer have the prodigious tolerance for alcohol I possessed in my youth, and recovery takes a little longer than it used to (although it is also a more certain and complete recovery as my wizened brain knows how to mitigate hangovers in ways my younger self could only dream of).   Out here, technology is garbage. My phone is in roaming and never stops alerting me to that fact. It turns out that Sprint’s unlimited data plan does not cover unlimited roaming, so my phone is just a camera for me right now. My Chromebook has all the capabilities you’d expect of Chrome in offline mode, which is to say. It’s barely a typewriter.   It’s a nice desk, though. But that’s what we came out here for, isn’t it? Getting away from it all may be a cliche, but that doesn’t mean it’s without its virtues. There’s a difference between ignoring frantic calls from your office and literally not being able to receive them. I’m tempted to set my phone to forward to one of the many bill collectors on my ignore list, but my karma’s bad enough as it is   It’s mid-afternoon now. We had a late breakfast at Marfa Burrito, and we’re feeling a little heavy again. Marfa Burrito is a must, unspoiled by tourism, cash only, and no English spoken. I suspect the ladies working behind the counter understand English just fine, but in their home, you’re going to speak their language. It’s absolutely worth the effort. For five dollars, you get one of the purest expressions of “burrito” you’ll ever experience.   We walked around the square and sat in front of the courthouse on benches donated by the Marfa rotary club. The birds around here are marvelous mimics. A dove does a convincing impression of an owl and there’s a grackle singing in a decidedly non-grackle-like voice. Most of the folks walking out of the courthouse seem happy. I’d wager there’s a marriage license or two in the plain manila folders they’re carrying.   We’re back at our home for the week, the Battleship, a 1950s Spartan trailer with more space some apartments I’ve rented. It’s where we spent the first night of our honeymoon and the folks at El Cosmico left us some prosecco on ice because, while this is camping, it’s the most painstakingly curated camping experience I’m aware of. What they’ve done is remove all the parts of camping that make it “real” but also make it “suck.” We can enjoy the good bits while the staff here does all the heavy lifting. It’s a fine tradeoff.   It may feel like a trivial thing, but sleeping in the middle of a hot day with a wall-mounted air conditioner on full blast is glorious. The room never gets really cold, but everything the blasts of air touch is chilly and delightful. It’s a sensation you can never get from central air, and it may just be the nostalgia of it that appeals to me, but I haven’t felt this relaxed after a nap in ages.   The local public radio station, 93.5, sounds like it’s coming in on an AM from somewhere else in space and time, has renewed my love of public radio. I listen to public radio at home, especially the music-only station,   Maybe it’s because Father’s Day is coming up, but I can’t help but think of my dad when I’m out here. He brought us out to Big Bend, which is just a couple hours down the road, several times when I was a kid. In his thirties and forties he threw down a very “outlaw country” vibe. He wore Western cut suits, listened to Waylon and Willie and most especially Jerry Jeff, and developed a taste for tequila. You had to squint a little to get it, but the look worked for him. He’d have loved El Cosmico, or at least;,the version of him from the mid-seventies sure would have. Just another thing about me that I belatedly inherited from him, a thought which makesme smile.   Tonight, I made marinated lamb kebabs that were an unmitigated failure. The marinade gave them a gritty texture that we attempted to remove by paper towel and even rinsing. The result of this reclamation effort was to remove the flavor while leaving the texture. As Willie said to the youngster, “They can’t all be winners, kid.” On the plus side, grilling pear quarters was a noteworthy success. We will never again speak of the lamb.   Thursday   Slept remarkably well last night even though I had dreams about traveling with my father….

Note: I’m writing this on phone somewhere between junction and Fort Stockton on I 10. There will be errors. Also, there’s lot of Donald Trump. You are warned.   It may look as though I haven’t written anything in a while but that isn’t true. I’ve written three long posts, totalling close to six thousand words, about the increasingly likely end of the Trump administration. I haven’t posted and of them because events are moving so quickly toward that end that I can’t keep up, and damned if I can write about anything else until I get this out of my head. So here it is, in greatly shortened form and minus the Hunter Thompson-influenced but from the second draft: I think it’s almost certain that the Trump administration won’t last the full four years. Even without the mounting evidence of coordination between his campaign and Russian meddlers, there’s more than enough out there for Congress to remove him when they choose to do so.  My best guess is that the plan was to do so prior to the 2018 elections. Trump is so deeply unpopular that his removal by a Congress headed by his own party would be a huge boon for the Republicans running for re-election. The timeline may be pushed forward as the party will want him out of office before the Russia investigation bears any fruit and threatens to expand beyond the White House. Honestly, there isn’t much left of the Trump presidency in any meaningful sense. He failed to assert leadership in his first hundred days, leaving the Capitol with his tail between his legs and no legislative achievements. He’s abandoned leadership in trade to China in the Pacific rim and ceded leadership to Germany and France in Europe. We’ve reached the point where the White House had to release statements saying that the president’s tweets do not reflect his positions or policies. He is, by a wide margin, the weakest and most interesting president in my memory (and I remember the Ford adminstration.) Believe it or not, that’s the short version. It felt good to get that out and finally been done with it. Now I can enjoy my vacation in Marfa. I won’t even be able to watch Comey’s testimony on Thursday, and man, I can’t tell you good that feels.  -RK    

You may or may not have heard that Texas governor Greg Abbott went to the shooting range and made a joke about using his prowess with a gun to intimidate the press: Abbott proved a good shot and, proudly displaying the target showing his marksmanship, the governor joked, according to the Texas Tribune reporter and photographer who were within earshot, “I’m gonna carry this around in case I see any reporters.” Ha ha. The governor’s Mike Huckabee-esque sense of humor didn’t play well in the press (go figure), but some folks thought it was fake outrage since it was, you know, “just a joke.” Texas Monthly even went so far as to waste some virtual ink publishing a think piece headlined “Panicking Over Paper Cuts – The hysteria over Governor Greg Abbott’s joke at a gun range is ridiculous.”  I’m not going to pretend that Abbott’s joke was anything but a joke, but that doesn’t mean it’s the sort of joke the governor of Texas should be making. What if, instead of “reporters,” Abbott had joked about threatening “women,” or “Mexicans,” or “queers,” or “blacks?” Instead of Abbott making the joke, what if Obama had proudly displayed his shooting target and said “I’m gonna carry this around in case I see any Christians?”  It’s exactly the same joke. If you don’t see any problem with these variations, then so be it. If, however, you’re fine with what Abbott said but you’re upset or offended by the others, then you’re not ok with the joke; you’re just ok with the target. EDIT: Just in case you haven’t been paying attention, reporters have been under attack from politicians all over the country. Their crime? Doing their constitutionally-protected job.  It really says something about Abbott that I can write about another incredibly stupid thing he’s said and still not address his frankly awful positions on women’s health and sanctuary cities. No, I’ll leave those for another time. Instead, I’d like to take a moment to react to his inserting himself into the dispute between Austin and the big ride-sharing companies, Lyft and Uber. If you’re not familiar with the history of the dispute, I’ll give you the short version: Lyft and Uber prefer to operate in markets where they don’t have to play by the same rules as cab companies, so they attempt to get local laws changed in their favor so they have a built-in competitive advantage. In Austin, they wanted to use less-expensive methods of vetting their drivers instead of the fingerprint check required for cabs. So, they spent a crazy amount of money to get an initiative on the local ballot to carve out an exception for themselves. Despite having stacked the deck in their favor by having a confusingly-worded ballot question, having the election on a weekday, and being the only initiative on the ballot (not to mention running absurdly misleading ads), their exemption went down in flames. So they left. They weren’t forced to leave. They decided to punish the city for not giving them regulatory advantages over the competition. But they weren’t done with Austin, oh no. They decided to go over the city’s head and get a state law passed that would force Austin to give in to their demands. And, today, Governor Greg Abbott signed this law, and in doing so, stated:  Today I signed a law to overturn the City of Austin’s regulation that trampled freedom and free enterprise. He went on to say: “What today really is is a celebration of freedom and free enterprise,” Abbott said during a signing ceremony. “This is freedom for every Texan — especially those who live in the Austin area — to be able to choose the provider of their choice as it concerns transportation.” I’m not sure this qualifies as “Orwellian,” but it’s certainly a bald-faced lie. Greg Abbott is doing exactly what Republicans say they don’t want government to do: He’s picking a winner instead of letting the market sort it out. He just signed in to law a preferred status for ride share companies. Uber and Lyft wanted to change the rules to ensure they won, and Abbott was only too happy to help them. The “why” of it is up for debate. Uber in particular is a particularly odious company with a history of not paying the non-employees and of treating women badly, so it could be that he just sees in them a kindred spirit. Abbott is also reliably against anything Austin, so it could just be an act of spite. The sad thing is that these are the two least-nefarious explanations I can think of for his going against everything conservatives supposedly stand for.

I just finished reading Dying Light by Donald Griswold and it’s been a long time since I’ve been so conflicted about a book. Griswold’s a fine writer whose prose is polished and he gives his characters more life than many novelists, particularly the characters on the periphery of the story. I think he’s got a terrific novel in him, but Dying Light is not that novel. At its core, Dying Light is a fairly conventional redemption story. I’m not giving anything away by saying this as it’s perfectly obvious from the first few chapters that we’re looking at a successful, unhappy asshole who’s going to Learn An Important Lesson and come out a better man at the end. For my money, I think the change came too late in the story, and occurred too abruptly and completely. You know it’s coming, but when it comes, it occurs almost literally overnight and it’s such a complete change that the willing suspension of disbelief is severely tested. It’s a serious pacing problem, and it makes the final third of the book feel rushed and unconvincing. My larger issue may be one of taste, but it impaired my enjoyment of the book to the point where I nearly didn’t finish reading it. Griswold does such a good job of painting the point of view character as the kind of jerk who is proud of all the things that make him unbearable that I found myself wishing something awful would happen to him (the character, not Griswold). Benjamin is utterly devoid of empathy (until he suddenly isn’t) and living inside the mind of someone who doesn’t give a shit about anyone else is painful regardless of how well-written the story is.   Griswold does characters well. He manages to transform the Lisa character from a mere plot device into a well-rounded and interesting plot device. The world his characters move around in is real (it helps that I’m very familiar with many of the locations) and some of the side characters are a great deal of fun. There’s a lot of good stuff in Dying Light, but the payoff isn’t enough to make up for the fact that we spend a couple of hundred pages seeing the world through the eyes of Benjamin. I know guys like him, and man, I want to spend as little time with them and possible. -RK P.S. The image at the top of the screen doesn’t really relate to the post, but I loved the caption so much I had to use it somewhere.

When shopping with Nicole a while back, I saw a fondue pot and commented that it reminded me of my favorite childhood dinner. Things progressed quickly from there and we wound up treating my mum to a Mother’s Day dinner at the World’s Tiniest AirBnB. Or rather, we had the dinner on the patio because it turns out that the World’s Tiniest AirBnB plus a hot oil fondue equals a a very persistent fire alarm.  Anyway, it was a lovely night for it and I think mom enjoyed it almost as much as I did (it was my favorite childhood meal, after all). Mom is taking her health seriously and she was looking quite a bit more spry than when last I saw her. It was one of the nicest evening we’ve had with her in a long time, followed by what was one of the worst sleeping experiences I’ve ever had. The World’s Tiniest AirBnB was stocked with scented trash bags, and a couple of those in 300 square feet is a little overwhelming. The bed room had a 4 foot ceiling, a disastrous mattress, step, slippery stairs, and no night light. Oh, and there was no door on the bathroom. We did learn a few things in the process: 1) Mushrooms work great in a hot oil fondue. They’d probably be good in cheese fondue, too. Heck, I wouldn’t be shocked if they were good in chocolate.  2) Chromebooks tether to Android phones over USB easily, which probably shouldn’t have been a surprise. No drivers to load, no third-party programs, just hook ’em up and go. 3) Even good grocery stores have garbage tortilla ships. If you live within driving distance of an El Fenix, they’re your best option. If not, they’re still your best option. 4) There are people out there who steal basil plants off of people’s porches. I know, right? I didn’t think those people existed, but we returned home to find our basil plant, pot and all, had been taken from our porch while we were away. No other plant was touched. Weird, huh? All in all, I don’t think I’ve enjoyed visiting my mother so much in quite some time. She keeps saying she’s going to come down here to visit I have a stack of places I’d love to take her but, in my heart of hearts, I know she’ll want to go to the seafood restaurant shaped like a tugboat because of course she will.  -RK

A little disclosure here before I write about Keith Law’s new book, Smart Baseball: I spent several years in the shallow end of the pool of baseball statistical analysis. I worked for one team for a short time, did a little writing for the trade magazines, and a few other odd jobs in the business. I’m wasn’t an insider but I knew a lot of insiders and man, I wish this book had been available back in the day. It was a lot of fun, but man, reading this book, old hedge wizards like myself would be thoroughly out of our depth in today’s game. And honestly? That’s pretty cool Keith Law’s Smart Baseball is simply the best baseball book I’ve read this century. It’s clear, rational, funny, and extremely interesting. There are so many wrong turns Law could have taken here; he could have been pedantic or smug or delved so deeply into the technical aspects of baseball’s information revolution that it would have rendered the book impenetrable. Instead, it’s accessible and informative and a lot of fun to read. If you want to understand the relationship between baseball and baseball statistical analysis, this is the book. Smart Baseball is broken into three sections. The first concerns traditional baseball statistics and how they present a distorted image of value. It’s one thing to say that saves are a terrible stat, but Law presents a compelling case* backed up by just enough data to demonstrate his point. It’s bad enough that awards were (and are) given to the wrong players based on reliance on flawed numbers, but teams were making decisions based on bad data, and these decisions were costing teams money and wins. The middle part of the book is devoted to the current state of the art, the result of the revolution started by Bill James and Pete Palmer and their ilk. The early stat guys, “SABRmatricians,” were the ones who questioned the conventional wisdom of baseball and developed mathematical tools to better measure the value of players and strategies. The impact of their work cannot be understated. By the late nineties, more teams than not were making use of advanced stats. And now? Everyone’s doing it, and unlike the self-taught enthusiasts of the the turn of the century, today’s teams have full analytics departments and proprietary systems for parsing the numbers. The last section covers the baseball equivalent of the singularity: Major League Baseball’s StatCast. The amount of data produced by the in-stadium radar systems, ranging from the relatively simply stuff like “how hard each ball is hit” to near-magical measurements of the spin on a pitch to…who knows? There’s more information in there than anyone really knows what to do with yet. Rather than examining existing data with increasingly finer-toothed combs, StatCast opens up a whole new world of data and there’s an arms race trying to make sense of it. It’s the “making sense of it” that’s the key and makes the whole store so compelling. Anyone can generate statistics; the trick is understanding what they mean and making informed decisions based on that understanding. Law’s book is by far the best explanation of the story of how analysis has changed the game for the better that I’ve ever encountered.  -RK   * Not that this is a terribly difficult case to make when you’re talking about saves…

It’s been quite a week. I can’t remember the last time I pulled an all-nighter for work. I mean that literally; there’s something about staying up all night and going to work the next day that isn’t conducive to remembering things very clearly. I’m a little surprised I’m still chugging along, although “chugging” might be overstating the case at this point. Anyway… I just finished reading Laurie Penny’s Unspeakable Things.  Penny writes best when she’s got some anger behind her eyes and Unspeakable Things finds her in fine, trenchant form. There’s something in the book to make any reader uncomfortable; she covers a broad range of what can be loosely grouped as “abuses of power and how those abuses affect people and especially women, people of color, and the queer community. Don’t mistake it for a book of feminist man-bashing; Penny has no time anything so cheap. That’s not to say that anyone who has benefited from the privileges of their birth is let off the hook. Unspeakable Things doesn’t shy away from turning on the bright interrogation lights and holding up a mirror to people who allow injustice to stand just because it doesn’t hurt them in any personal sense.  Books about now are tough. It’s difficult to write about things that still in the process of becoming history. Knowing how things play out makes it a lot easier to construct a narrative, and once the winners and losers have been sorted out, the passion of the heat of the battle is lost. Writing about now tends to be hyperbolic because it’s writing about a fulcrum and the writer often has a strong interest in the balance swinging one way or the other. There’s some of that in Unspeakable Things, but Penny tempers her righteous anger with deeply personal stories and dry-approaching-gallows humor.  In the end, it’s tale from the front of battles that have not yet been decided. I can understand why some people wouldn’t like it, but it’s not a book that was written to be liked.  -RK P.S. Nicole just put “Under the Sea” on and now it’s thoroughly lodged in my noggin. I think I could use a little sleep, huh?    

Because I’ve been under it. Getting over a cold reminds of those dystopian stories where everything is grey, no one feels any emotions, and everyone walks like a robot. Are those a thing? I could just be imagining it, but anyway, that’s what it feels like. I have no energy to do anything, even to get properly angry. I can’t taste anything, I have no enthusiasm for anything. I’m not even miserable; I just don’t care, or even the energy to care. Now, the good part is that Nicole is a grade A, Olympic-class pamperer-of-the-sick. When I’d get home from work (colds make you almost bad enough to miss work), I’d have a little nest of comfort on the sofa waiting for me. Frozen delightful treats await me in the freezer, multitudinous beverages are in the fridge, and a nice hot bath has been run. It’s not quite enough to make me look forward to getting sick, but as far as silver linings go, it ain’t bad. Sitting inert on the sofa has given me an unfortunate amount of time to binge-stream Seinfeld. I saw “unfortunate” because the show hasn’t aged particularly well in some respects. The laugh track doesn’t do the show any favors, there’s more yelling that there should be, Kramer is more “wacky” than “funny” most of the time, and the idea that papayas are too zany for normal people to eat was dated twenty years ago. Where the show continues to shine is when the four main characters are torturing each other. The glee with which they twist the knife into each other’s backs is a delight, and no one is better at it Julia Louis-Dreyfus.  Watching her grin while she’s making Jerry squirm makes me laugh every time. Her Elaine brings more energy to the show than the rest of the cast combined. I didn’t appreciate what she brought to the table when the show was in its original run.   

I’m sure you’ve seen the “How A Libertarian Tips” image making the rounds on this world wide web, but if not, here ya go:   Let’s get the obvious out of the way here: This statement in no way relieves a server of the obligation to report this money as a tip. The intent may be good, sort of, but the libertarian is inviting the server to just ask for an audit. It turns out there are no simple tax loopholes, regardless of what libertarians might tell you. However, if you were to try this dodge (which I do not recommend), there are a couple of problems with the execution as depicted above. The most obvious one is that writing “Taxation is theft” on the tip line is an invitation to further investigation. If you want to make it look as though you aren’t leaving a tip, it would be smarter to just write “0.00” on the line, or, if you absolutely must embellish the scam, write “bad service” or something that doesn’t make it obvious that you’re trying assist the server in avoiding paying taxes. The second problem is a bit more arcane, but bear with me. I have a lot of experience with IRS reporting with regards to tipping. One of the things that the IRS looks at when trying to determine if a server is under-reporting their tips is the difference between their average tip percentage on credit cards versus their declared average tip percentage for cash. If a server is making 20% tips on credit cards but they’re only declaring 5% for cash, that’s a red flag. Any gap larger than 3 percentage points will get you some raised eyebrows.  Here’s where it gets tricky: The sale is classified not by how the guest paid for the transaction, but by how they tipped. By leaving no tip on a credit card sale, that sale now goes into the “cash” side of the equation. If you insist on trying to pull a fast one on the IRS (and really, please don’t put a server in that position), leave $0.01 as the tip and then the rest as cash. That will lower the server’s overall tip percentage on the credit card side and thus the percentage of declared cash tips that will look suspicious to an auditor. However, let’s end this with a big ol’ bummer: There is no magical “minimum percentage” a server can declare that will keep them on the good side of an IRS audit. The law is that you have to declare 100% of your tips. There’s no loophole. I get that taxes suck, but please don’t be tricked into thinking that calling tips a “gift” will magically get you out of paying them.

Given the current state of affairs at 1600 Pennsylvania, it’s not surprising that there’s a lot of talk about revolution in the air. How can the left rebuild itself from the wreckage of the 2016 election? I’ve heard some good ideas, I’ve heard a few great ones, but I’ve heard one very bad idea over and over: “The revolutions needs to focus on fixing the structure of the economy and not get bogged down by distractions like abortion or bathrooms or BLM.” Any leftist movement worthy of the name includes radical social justice as a top priority from day one. I am appalled by how many people I know who think that these “lesser issues” can wait until the big work is done. If the pitch to women, to people of color, and to the LGBT community is “Help us fix the problems that we think are important first, and then we will take a look at your issues,” why would anyone believe that? If you’re saying that social justice issues are distractions, you have already sent a pretty clear message that you don’t think these concerns are important.  If that’s your idea of a revolution, you can leave me out.  P.S. I read this after writing this post. It’s a description of a Democratic event that ran up against pretty much exactly what I’m talking about: “This is very raw,” said Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, conceding that “after the presidential election, there is still this ongoing debate about identity politics versus economic opportunity.” I don’t agree with the phrasing, and I certainly don’t agree with the idea that the two are, or even can be, mutually exclusive. A system that is economically unjust is going to be socially unjust, and a system that’s socially unjust is going to be economically unjust. We’re adult human beings; we can focus on two things at once.