Eric the Blue

Mostly politics, sports, literature, arts reviews

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Nerdy Minnesotan

  • Snowflake can’t take the heat, fleas the kitchen

    I like to say that every accusation is a confession. The one that applies here is, “Snowflake!”

    She was asking hard questions! She wanted me to supply evidence for my crazy claims! So unfair!

    If Democrats are running ahead of Republicans in California, including in Los Angeles, the only possible explanation is that they’re cheating. That’s the idea, right? Considering that Republicans have the White House, the Supreme Court, both houses of Congress, and the governorship of more than half the states, it seems to me that the Dems are over-resting our super power. We’re adamant about Karen Bass being mayor of Los Angeles, but wouldn’t press enough levers to keep Trump from becoming president, twice.

    Sure, sure.

  • Some big numbers

    I’ve found that little kids are interested in numbers, especially big numbers. A big number could refer to the times I’ve had conversations more or less like:

    Kid: What do you do at Valley View?

    Me: I teach math to some of the older kids, 4th- and 5th-graders.

    Kid: Math?

    Me: Yeah.

    Kid: Ok, what’s 20 kerjillion plus 20 kerjillion?

    Me: [after a pause, as if deep in thought] That would be 40 kerjillion.

    Kid: [after a pause] Well, what’s 40 kerjillion plus 40 kerjillion?

    And it can go on like this for awhile. Fortunately it doesn’t occur to them to ask what’s 137 kerjillion cubed.

    Though old I still can experience a little gee-whiz-that’s-wild when it comes to contemplating large numbers. People talk about “exponential growth,” but what’s really boggling is how big the so-called factorials get, almost immediately. Five factorial, which means

    5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1,

    is only, as you can easily compute, 120. Ten factorial–10 x 9 x 8 etc.–is more than 3.6 million. What’s cool is that the concept of the factorial was developed to solve problems that come up here on earth. How many different ways can the 52 cards in a standard deck be arranged? That turns out to be 52 factorial. How big is 52 factorial? According to Warren Weaver, author of Lady Luck, a book on probability theory:

    If every human being on earth counted a million of these arrangements per second for twenty-four hours a day for lifetimes of 80 years each, they would have made only a negligible start in the job of counting all these arrangement–not a billionth of a billionth of one percent of them! You can see that to handle even the very mild case of a deck of 52 cards it is necessary to have some mathematical tools with which to work.

    A “tool” mentioned by Weaver concerns the following curious expression:

    n!∼2πn(ne)nn! \sim \sqrt{2\pi n} \left(\frac{n}{e}\right)^n

    In words, this says that if n is “good-sized,” then n factorial is approximately the product of the square root of 2 times pi times n and n divided by e to the nth power. There are two irrational numbers here, pi and e, the former being the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. If you think about it, that’s pretty crazy, too: what do circles have to do with factorials? Beats me. If you’re as big a nerd as I am, you can read the Wikipedia article on Stirling’s approximation, which is the name for the above expression. Warning: lots of calculus. You can also read AI’s answer to “What is pi doing in Stirling’s approximation” here. I did and still have no clue.

  • After the graduation ceremony

    Actually, I don’t think it’s true that “you can achieve anything if only you set your mind to it.”

    I can’t remember my last job title but for sure it wasn’t American League MVP. Not to compare myself to an exemplar of genius, but Einstein never found his Grand Unifying Theory of Everything, and moreover seems to have been 0-for-2 on happy marriages. Maybe he didn’t care that much about the latter, but he set his mind on the former. Failed anyway. All the other theoretical physicists were, like, “Poor guy’s lost his way.” Einstein! According to my daughter, some of her classmates are real knuckleheads.

    Poisoning the minds of the youth of America with happy lies. To me it seems that everyone with a plausible claim to being an “influencer” is just peddling bullshit.

  • Zoilo, 1939-95

    Because I “interact” with baseball posts, and am a member of such FB groups as Baseball in Black & White Pics, the algorithm sends lots of baseball stuff to my feed, and I was recently asked to write in the comments the name of the everyday shortstop for the first team I ever loved. So that would be Zoilo Versalles, the American League’s Most Valuable Player in 1965, when the Twins won the pennant and Zoilo batted .273 with 19 homers and 77 RBI. Sound a little light for MVP status? Yes, but he also led the league in plate appearances (728), at bats (666), runs scored (126), doubles (45), triples (12), total bases (308), and won a Gold Glove for his play in the field. Pretty good year. He never had another one, however. His career fizzled out, his life after baseball was a hot mess, and he died of heart disease at age 55. From his Wikipedia article:

    Versalles returned to the Minneapolis area following his year in Japan, but found it virtually impossible to make a living, partly because he had never learned English and partly because of the lingering effects of a back injury. . . .

    Versalles signed with the Minnesota Goofy’s, a professional softball team, and played for the team in their 1977 American Professional Slow Pitch Softball League (APSPL) season. . . .

    Afterwards, holding a series of menial jobs, he lost his house to foreclosure and was eventually forced to sell his MVP trophy, his All-Star rings, and his Gold Gloves. In addition to his back problems he suffered two heart attacks, underwent stomach surgery, and was sustained solely by disability and Social Security payments. He was found dead in his home in Bloomington, Minnesota, on June 9, 1995. An autopsy revealed that Versalles died from arteriosclerotic heart disease, or hardening of the arteries. Versalles was survived by his wife Maria, six daughters, and several grandchildren.

    Versalles was elected to the Twins Hall of Fame in 2006.

    His New York Times obituary mentions that he and Maria were separated at the time of his death. She lived only another two years: dead at 53, according to her obituary, “after a courageous battle with breast cancer.” Survived by all the same daughters and grandchildren. I wonder if some of them still reside in the Twin Cities.

    “No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.”

  • Coping strategies

    Track & field day for the 2nd- and 3rd-graders. I was sitting among the 3rd-graders as the gym teacher described one of the last events, the “distance run.” She explained the boundaries of the course, pointing out the landmarks around the edge of the big field that they’d have to run around,. When it was becoming clear just how far they had to go, the slightly chubby boy sitting behind me whispered to the kid next to him, “Wanna just walk it with me?” His comparatively lithe friend, out of either kindliness or a lack of ambition, immediately agreed to this proposal. They executed it, too.

  • Walt Whitman anticipates Memorial Day

    In Civil War times, before we commemorated Memorial Day, Walt Whitman, author of the self-published book of poems now known as Leaves of Grass, traveled to northern Virginia upon hearing that his brother George, a soldier in the Union army, had been wounded and was convalescing there. He found George, whose wounds were slight, but he was so affected by what he saw in the makeshift soldiers’ hospitals around D.C. that he pulled up stakes, moved to the District, and took a part-time job in the federal bureaucracy in order to bankroll his primary activity: working in the hospitals as a volunteer nurse practitioner. He talked to the sick and dying men, took down their dictated letters and made sure they were mailed, brought them gifts, often tobacco or fruit, read to them, changed their dressings, and generally made himself useful. Anonymous deceased soldiers would never know that their last comforter is now regarded as one of America’s greatest poets. In old age, after he’d suffered a stroke, Whitman wrote the prose memoir called Specimen Days in which he recalls his career as an unpaid nurse. He sometimes pastes in journal entries he’d made at the time, and reading it is often, in an understated sort of way, quite a lacerating experience:

    May, ’63. As I write this, the wounded have begun to arrive from Hooker’s command from bloody Chancellorsville. I was down among the first arrivals. The men in charge told me the bad cases were yet to come. If that is so I pity them, for these are bad enough. You ought to see the scene of the wounded arriving here at the landing at the foot of Sixth street, at night. Two boat loads came about half-past seven last night. A little after eight it rain’d a long and violent shower. The pale, helpless soldiers had been debark’d, and lay around on the wharf and neighborhood anywhere. The rain was, probably, grateful to them; at any rate they were exposed to it The few torches light up the spectacle. All around–on the wharf, on the ground, out on side places–the men are lying on blankets, old quilts, &c, with bloody rags bound round heads, arms, and legs. The attendants are few, and at night few outsiders also–only a few hard-work’d transportation men and drivers. (The wounded are getting to be common, and people grow callous.) The men, whatever their condition, lie there, and patiently wait till their turn comes to be taken up. Near by, the ambulances are now arriving in clusters, and one after another is call’d to back up and take its load. Extreme cases are sent off on stretchers. The men generally make little or no ado, whatever their sufferings. A few groans that cannot be suppress’d, and occasionally a scream of pain as they lift a man into the ambulance. To-day, as I write, hundreds more are expected, and to-morrow and the next day more, and so on for many days. Quite often they arrive at the rate of 1000 a day.

    During his life, Whitman continually revised and enlarged Leaves of Grass. His Civil War poems are in the relatively late section called “Drum Taps” and, according to an editor of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, “are, with the pictures of Winslow Homer and the photographs of Matthew Brady, among the most precious records of the American Civil War.” Many are kind of long, and I’m too lazy to transcribe another long quotation, but here’s one of the drum taps, just four lines long, entitled “Look Down Fair Moon”:

    Look down fair Moon and bathe this scene,
    Pour softly down night's nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen, purple,
    On the dead on their backs with arms toss'd wide,
    Pour down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon.

  • Elmore Leonard’s world

    Sitting at home with a bad cold and Swag, one of Elmore Leonard’s early crime novels. Favorite parts are those in which the lucrative trade of armed robbery brings the low-level criminal team into contact with similarly affluent young men and women who work in the legitimate part of the economy. After just a few small jobs the robbers move from a motel to an apartment complex described by Leonard as follows:

    The third place they looked at was the Villa Monterey, out in Troy [a suburb of Detroit; Leonard’s fans sometimes refer to him as “the Dickens of Detroit”]: a cream-colored stucco building with dark wood trim, a dark wood railing along the second-floor walk, a Spanish tile roof, and a balcony with each apartment overlooking the backyard where shrubbery and a stockade-fence enclosed the patio and swimming pool. There was also an ice machine back there, a good sign.

    Stick said he thought it looked like a motel. Frank said no, it was southern California. He told the manager, the lady who showed them the apartment, okay, gave her the deposit and three months in advance to get out of signing a lease, and that was it. They got two bedrooms, bath, bar in the living room with bamboo stools, orange-and-yellow draperies, off-white shag carpeting, off-white walls with chrome-framed graphics, chrome goose neck lamps, chrome-and-canvas chairs, an off-white Naugahyde sectional sofa, and three dying plants for four and a half a month, furnished. Stick didn’t tell Frank but he thought the place looked like a beauty parlor.

    It hardly needs stating that Stick’s judgment, a cross between a motel and a beauty parlor, is the author’s. There are some “career ladies” among the residents who are cataloged upon being discovered by the new residents. For example:

    There was a dental hygienist by the name of Donna who had a boyfriend but wasn’t going to marry him until he made as much money as she did. She told them how much a dentist with a good practice could make and referred to net and gross a lot. Donna was way down at the bottom of Frank’s list of things to do.

    There is a kind of worldly weariness to the catalog:

    There was a redheaded girl, frizzy red hair and bright brown eyes, who wore beads and seven rings with her bikini. Arlene. She was a little wacky and laughed at almost everything they said, whether it was supposed to be funny or not. Somebody was paying Arlene’s rent, a guy in a silver Mark IV who came twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday at six, and was usually out by 10:30. Arlene said he was a good friend.

    Later, the criminals become acquainted with some of the male renters:

    There was a junior executive group at the Villa, a few guys with friends who were always coming over. Sometimes in the evening, after they’d changed from their business outfits to Levis and Adidas, they’d sit on the patio and drink beer. If Stick was out on the balcony he’d listen to them, see if he could learn anything.

    Usually it was about how stoned one of them got the night before. Or the best source of grass in Ann Arbor. Or why this one guy had switched from a Wilson Jack Kramer to a Bancroft Competition. Or how a friend of one of them had brought back eight cases of Coors from Vail. Then he wouldn’t hear anything for a minute or so–one of them talking low–then loud laughter. The laughter would get louder as they went through the six packs, and the junior executives would say shit a lot more. That was about all Stick learned.

    So . . . that was about all an armed robber could learn from the junior executive group. Swag was published in 1976–seems about right considering the decor at the Villa Monterey. Leonard (and Stick) were ahead of their time in being unimpressed. The landscape is that of a moral desert, no one to cheer for, unless you count Stick, an armed robber and regretful killer who sometimes thinks of his young daughter back in Florida, where he used to work for a cement company. Maybe my favorite Leonard book, The Switch, came two years later and features a genuine hero, the wife of a wealthy a-hole. She’s kidnapped, which is fine with the a-hole, as he’s having an affair and considering what to do about her: problem solved, temporarily. Another sign of his a-holery is that he’s a skilled golfer, the men’s champion of his exclusive country club. The world according to Elmore Leonard, where the women are often venal and the men often venal and stupid. I said The Switch might be my favorite: he wrote a novel a year for around 35 years and the dozen* or so with which I’m familiar are almost uniformly terrific.

    *In no particular order: 52 Pickup, Swag, Unknown Man No. 89, The Switch, Stick, Out of Sight, Maximum Bob, Glitz, Freaky Deaky, Out of Sight, City Primeval, Get Shorty, Mr. Majestyk, Rum Punch, and LaBrava–I guess that makes fifteen fourteen.

  • Color me cynical

    I tracked down today an interview I heard on NPR while driving to work one day last week. The NPR host, Michel Martin, was interviewing another Michel, Goodwin of the Georgetown Law faculty, on the Supreme Court’s recent decision in a case about mifepristone, the abortifacient that women living in states that have banned abortion can attain through the mail after a telemedicine appointment. Here’s how the interview began:

    Martin: Why do you think the Supreme Court kicked this particular can down the road by keeping telemedicine access to mifepristone while the case plays out?

    Goodwin: Well, there are strong interests here, including amongst the manufacturers, that this is a product that is kept in the marketplace. There are some that say this is because there are political interests that have been articulated about the midterm and real concern that if there were a different kind of ruling, it might intensify the Democrats’ ability to win midterm elections. The Supreme Court’s not a political arm of government, but many are saying that it’s acting very much like a political arm of government.

    Martin: Is that a cynical take, or do you think that there’s merit to it?

    Goodwin: That is a very good question . . . .

    It was the assumption that there is truth, and then there is cynicism, that cracked me up along I-94 in north Minneapolis and made me remember the interview now. Obviously the Supreme Court is “acting very much like a political arm of government.” It’s not entirely the Court’s fault. Sometimes in a democracy decisions have to be made. The Constitution does not allow the president to act unilaterally and the Congress, with its two houses, the filibuster rule in the Senate, close margins, and a rogue’s gallery of preening nitwits, has excused itself from the task. That leaves the Supreme Court to act as a kind of legislature of last resort, and they keep up the pretense by pretending that they’re interpreting the Constitution.

    Should a woman be permitted to have an abortion? Congress can’t decide, or won’t say, so the Supreme Court steps into the breach. The justices declare abortion to be a constitutional right, and then some years later different justices say no, it is not, and states can if they wish ban it. Senators and US representatives merely get interviewed about this and other matters on cable news shows.

    The ideological composition of the Supreme Court is thus one of the gravest concerns of our federal government. There are 435 gesticulating representatives, a hundred talkative senators, and just nine justices who call the shots. Luckily for Republicans, the composition of the Court is largely a matter of actuarial happenstance and the machinations of octogenarians like Mitch McConnell. It’s not as if the the people have voted to be ruled by the Supreme Court, let alone by the current one. Clarence Thomas is the longest serving current justice. He was appointed by H.W. Bush 35 years ago, in 1991. The presidential elections that have occurred over the period that the current Court came into power therefore go back to 1988. There have been a total of ten, the Democrats and the Republicans have each won five, and, in two of the five Republican victories, more Americans voted for the Democratic candidate. These circumstances have yielded a 6-3 Republican supermajority on the Supreme Court, which would be bad enough, but it comes with a built-in supermajority in the de facto legislature as well.

    Other factors that I’ve alluded to contribute to the charade. In his first term, Trump appointed three of the nine current justices. He had lost the national vote by 46 to 48 percent. The confirmation of judges is one of the few Senate functions to which the filibuster rule does not apply–a simple majority will suffice. Currently, there are 53 Republican senators, and they represent between 46 and 47 percent of Americans. The rest, about 53.5 percent, are represented by senators who caucus with the Democrats. This is possible because every state, no matter how large or small its population, has two senators. In the Senate, then, the “minority party” represents the majority of Americans. The same situation prevailed during Trump’s first term. So, with regard to Supreme Court appointments, a president who had lost the national vote nominated someone who was then narrowly confirmed by a Senate “majority” party that represented a minority of Americans. This happened three times. These justices will rule until they die, if they want. In fact their age and medical record are considerations when the qualifications of potential nominees are under review. I mentioned that Clarence Thomas has been at it for 35 years.

    People seem shy about dropping the word “cynical” but really, when the topic is the Supreme Court, our federal government in general, and the status of what is often called in reverential tones “our democracy,” we need a word quite a lot less pale than that.

  • A night at the pops

    My daughters both sing in the school choir, and one night last week was the last concert of the year. It was billed a “pop concert,” as opposed to earlier ones that tend to be on seasonal themes, such as Christmas or, this year, a concert heavy on slightly veiled protest songs aimed at Operation Metro Surge. I missed “Hey Jude” on account of having to leave early to tend to a meat loaf baking in the oven, but I did hear “Wagon Wheel.” While eating the meat loaf I told the kids how much I’d enjoyed it and that Buzza–their designation for the choir director, perhaps because he seems to like “Dr. Buzza”–might have been pushing the envelope, considering the lyric:

    Caught a trucker out of Philly
    Had a nice long toke.

    My older girl laughed and said Buzza had encouraged them to sing:

    Caught a trucker out of Philly
    Told a nice long joke.

    Of course this had the effect of improving the singers’ enunciation:

    Caught a trucker out of Philly
    HAD A NICE LONG TOKE.

    Well, I doubt very many audience members were put off. I might be one of the few parents who’s never been in one of the cannabis shops that are popping up all over the place here in the People’s Republic of South Minneapolis. I’ve noticed that you can buy THC drinks at a neighborhood bar that I sometimes patronize–and typically have two Miller Lites before walking home. I know from skimpy experience that, like the character in a Woody Allen movie, pot does not “make me mellow”: it makes me ripen and rot. Here is a rousing live version of “Wagon Wheel” performed some number of years ago by Old Crow Medicine Show:

  • Memphis, the Supreme Court, and ‘political gerrymandering’

    The above is taken from the New York Times’s “An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2024 Election” and shows the outcome, at the precinct level, of the last presidential race in different neighborhoods of Memphis, Tennessee. The white strip with the dashed line is the Mississippi River, which is the border between Tennessee and Arkansas. Downtown Memphis is built up along the east bank of the river. Since it’s hard to make out the legend at the lower right relating to “Margin, in pct. pts.,” I’ll just observe that the darker the blue, the wider Kamala Harris’s margin, and it was pretty wide in the lightest blue parts of the map: for example, she won the area marked Chickasaw Gardens by 69 to 30 percent. To get the darkest shade, by far the biggest area on the map, Harris had to win by at least 75 percentage points: 87 to 13 percent, in other words, would get the second darkest hue.

    I got interested in the political landscape of Memphis when, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Callais case, Tennessee’s state legislature immediately adopted new district boundaries that placed different parts of Memphis within three different congressional districts. The stated purpose was to eliminate the only Tennessee district represented by a Democrat. It’s pretty easy to see why Memphis would have a Democratic representative. The area is so overwhelmingly Democratic that cracking it in two would run the risk of creating two districts in which a Democrat could win. To get all of Memphis into safely Republican districts required cracking it in three.

    The question is whether this is legal. If partisan gerrymandering was illegal, then of course congressional maps from sea to shining sea would have to be redrawn. The reason states such as Tennessee had not previously done what they’re now doing relates to the Voting Rights Act, which had been held to prohibit practices that dilute the power of minority voters, especially in southern states with a history of racial discrimination in ballot access. In Memphis, for instance, more than 60 percent of the population is African American, and in Tennessee, in general, whites vote Republican and blacks vote Democratic. So “partisan gerrymandering” that favors Republicans has the practical effect of diluting the political power of African Americans. Actually, “diluting” is too pale a verb. I mean, look at the above map. Once there’s been a congressional election under the new gerrymandered map, who will represent in Washington the views of the people of Memphis, a majority-minority city with a population nearly equal to that of a typical congressional district? No one. Their voice will have been squelched.

    The Supreme Court in its Callais decision said no problem, go ahead, and, with the Voting Rights Act neutered, it took Tennessee’s state legislature a New York minute to adopt new maps carving up the city of Memphis. The decision was 6-3, naturally. The court’s conservative majority is like a pulling guard for the Republican party’s end runs. The Chief Justice hates it when people criticize the justices for being political actors. He probably wouldn’t be so sensitive if it weren’t true.