Eric the Blue

Mostly politics, sports, literature, arts reviews

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Nerdy Minnesotan

  • Life hack

    When I got home from school yesterday I compiled a to-do list for the weekend. Then this morning I got up at 6 and drove my daughters across town to their sportzing tournament in Blaine. Then I watched them play three games. Then we drove home, arriving circa 3 p.m. Then I played on my phone for around 90 minutes. I say “around” because it could have been two hours. Then I made supper for myself and the daughter who wasn’t attending the high school prom. When the dishes were clean, I revisited my to-do list. To be precise, I rewrote it, interspersing some tasks that I had completed earlier in the week, which I immediately checked off as done. I am now on my second glass of cheap red wine and hoping that it stops raining in Cleveland so that I can spend the rest of the night watching the Twins on tv.

    Reader, you don’t need a life coach. Just an Internet connection will do. Book mark “Eric the Blue” for a stream of ingenious life hacks. I think it’s important to rewrite the list as it’s a little fakey if the only crossed off items are the bottom ones.

  • Sportz notes

    Before tonight’s Game 2 against the Spurs, I might as well put the hex on the Twolves’ 38-year-old point guard Mike Conley, who, having earned favorable notices for his performance in the decisive Game 6 win over Denver, backed it up in the opening road win against the favored Spurs: in 24 minutes, he scored 12 points (on just 8 shot attempts), got 2 rebounds, passed for 6 assists, did not once turn the ball over, and played “pretty good” defense. With Edwards and Ayo both available tonight, his role will shrink, and the chances I’ll look like a dolt for praising him aren’t too high.

    But why should I fear looking like a dolt? Chris Finch only put T. J. Shannon in the rotation when injuries required it. All winter my teen-aged daughters have been grumbling, “Why is T. J. buried on the bench?” Now I have to listen to the Tolja-sos. Thanks, Finchie.

    I have so far failed at making these girls baseball fans, which is a shame, because in the summer there’s a game almost every day. It gives you something to do while awaiting senescence. (Come to think of it, it gives you something to do after that occurs, too.) But of course my kids are not worrying about what to do with themselves when their energies fail. If they were preparing themselves by being baseball fans, maybe they’d realize that Byron Buxton must be the most unappreciated sports star ever to wear a Minnesota uniform. Man, has he been on a tear: 11 homers in the Twins’ last 19 games. I saw today that his lifetime slugging percentage of .490 is, among Twins, behind only Harmon Killebrew, which means it’s not behind Rod Carew, Tony Oliva, Kirby Puckett, Justin Morneau, et. al. I would rate Byron a better fielder than Harmon (and everyone else who’s ever played for the Twins). He’s also above average as a baserunner. “But he’s always hurt!” No one ever says that about Mickey Mantle.

    Hard to make people happy. There are 30 teams in the NBA and for two seasons in a row the Twolves have been among the last four standing. Three more wins against the Spurs and they will have done it again. When people complain about them, it reminds me of how my mom would advise: “Think about other people once in awhile, maybe your own problems won’t seem so bad.” Yeah, right mom, think about fans of the Utah Jazz. Plus, they have to put up with the Mormons, or be one themselves, which would be unpleasant if you’d somehow acquired a taste for either coffee or liquor.

  • Seeing red

    My high school senior with her besties on the day they were encouraged to wear to school a sweatshirt from the college they’ll be going to next fall. Here was our conversation around a week ago, when she told me what she’d decided to do:

    Me: Who will you be pulling for when we play for the ax?

    Her: I can’t cheer against my own school.

    Me: I hope you love your mom because we’re done.

    Her: [Starts humming loudly the opening bars to “On Wisconsin.”]

    Well, it’s a swing state, so her first presidential ballot will weigh more than her dad’s. Thanks, electoral college, for the piss-poor consolation.

  • Cultural anthropology at Target Center

    If you also are a casual student of the most prevalent fauna easily observed in different Twin Cities neighborhoods, maybe you’ll get as big a kick out of this as I did. The above photo of a court side trio was taken at last night’s Timberwolves game in Target Center. Someone posted it on social media with a terse comment:

    Mac-Groveland/Frogtown/Highland Park

    To which a user whose researches are conducted just to the west replied:

    Lynnhurst/Whittier/North Loop

    As for the game itself, I’d like to bestow a little praise on maybe last night’s least praised Timberwolf (of those who played). The team parted ways with Mike Conley earlier this season, then reacquired him for an NBA pittance (he’s reportedly being paid just over $1.1 million). I assume the expectation was that Conley would fill a seat on the bench and dispense sage advice to teammates young enough to compete, thereby giving color commentators a pleasant story line. But last night, with the team’s three best guards all sidelined with injuries, Conley found himself in the starting line-up for what realistically was a win-or-die-in-Denver home game against the Nuggets. The T-wolves closed out the series with a win, and Conley played a strong, or at least steady, game: 27 minutes, 7 points, 6 rebounds [sic], 3 assists, just a single turnover, and if Jamal Murray, who made 4-of-17 field goal attempts in the game, was relishing the prospect of an occasional break from having Jaden McDaniels inside his jersey, the box score suggests he was disappointed by Conley’s defense. The fourth oldest player in the NBA also has some cameos in the TJ Shannon highlight reel:

    The first sequence in this video explains which team won and why. Conley knocks the ball loose, Shannon beats everyone to it and charges up the court with the dribble. At the top of the circle, Denver’s Christian Braun (#0) is in position to try and stop the dribbler, but instead he steps to the side like a bullfighter and Shannon flushes it.

    Tell me again what Jaden said about the Nugget players? Maybe he shouldn’t have said it. Doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

    All three probably live in Shakopee. Still funny.

    UPDATE: I see that Princeton historian Kevin Kruse has posted the same pic on his Bluesky account with the comment:

    Lawyers/Guns/Money

    Since so far as I know Kruse has no connection to Minnesota, and also because having zoomed in on “Mr Frogtown” I see that he’s wearing a Knicks cap, I think this picture was actually taken at MSG, not Target Center, and that people from everywhere are in a 3-word caption contest that frequently has local flavor. Still funny, even if I have to give up on them being from Shakopee.

  • Say goodnight, Gracie

    When the Secretary of Health and Human Services recently defended his boss’s innumeracy with more innumeracy, my opinion of their mental fitness for their respective jobs did not suffer–it was already too low for that. It is nevertheless an amusing episode, especially perhaps for math educators accustomed to the wayward solutions of school children. To recap:

    A couple days ago, RFK Jr. was testifying in front of a Senate committee, and Elizabeth Warren, Democrat from Massachusetts, was giving him hell. She noted almost in passing that President Trump’s claim to have reduced drug prices by as much as 600 percent was laughable, since the drug companies would then be paying us for ingesting their products. Kennedy defended his boss by claiming that the president had his own way of calculating percentages. Honest! Sort of like the “alternative facts” of one of Trump’s former flunkies, only now alternative math. Next day, at a press availability in the Oval Office, he amplified the administration’s take on the math of percentages:

    One of the things I love about this is the reaction of the other administration officials as Kennedy explains what I’ll call “revisionist math.” Is that Dr Oz wearing a red tie and smiling and nodding while 6th-grade math is flunked in the Oval? If something costs $100, and it then goes up to $600, that is not a 600 percent increase: it’s only 500 percent. But Kennedy’s idea that if something first goes up by a certain percent, and then down by that same percentage figure, it lands right where it started is possibly even dumber. If an item costs $100, then goes up 50 percent, it’s at $150, and if it then goes down by 50 percent it lands at $75, which is not $100. One could understand middle schoolers being puzzled by this mystical phenomenon. Kennedy is the Harvard-educated Secretary of Health and Human Services for a country of 340 million that, in a phrase of journalism, is often described as “advanced.”

    The kicker is that Kennedy seems so eager to debase himself. He could have just stood and smiled like the other stooges arrayed behind their deranged boss, but he felt Warren hadn’t allowed him to explain revisionist math, and a day later he was determined to do it. If only he’d gotten a percent smarter overnight. After her 14th daft speech act, George Burns used to dismiss his wife and comedy sidekick by advising, “Say goodnight, Gracie.”

  • “Sometimes it Snows in April”

    It’s been ten years and two days since Prince died, which means it was ten years ago today that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played a scheduled concert at the Barclays Center, in Brooklyn. When the musicians took the stage, which was bathed in purple light, they opened with:

    I’m going to establish my standing as a music aficionado by stating that Nils Lofgren is highly skilled at the techniques of guitar playing. His hat, I think, is part of the tribute.

    Here are a couple more of my favorite covers of Prince compositions that I’ve come across over the years. First, “When You Were Mine,” covered by Lake Street Dive:

    And Patti Smith–possibly her favorite Prince song is mine too:

    Should include one of him, himself:

  • In the news, barely

    Are there countries besides ours in which eight kids, age 3 through 12, can die in a mass shooting and the story lives in the national news for around six-and-a-half seconds? I suppose if the slaughter of kindergartners at that school in Connecticut didn’t elicit much more than a ho-hum, there isn’t any reason to think the latest “incident” would push us past some “critical mass” of “outrage and sorrow.” I doubt there is any such critical mass of outrage and sorrow. The opposite is probably closer to the mark. Mass shootings are like videos of horrific crimes that elicit in us a numbing response when played over and over again at trial or online.

    Not sure whether it was a day, or a week, before the Louisiana shooting that the former lieutenant governor of Virginia shot and killed his wife before turning on himself the gun that he no doubt purchased and carried for “self-defense.” This was around 3 o’clock one morning. The couple’s teenaged kids were asleep in their rooms when the sound of gun shots woke them. One of them made the 911 call. Too late. Once again, there was no “good guy with a gun” on the scene to stop the good guy with a gun and marital problems. Margaret Atwood’s maxim borne out again: “Men worry that women will laugh at them. Women worry that men will kill them.”

    I just googled “chance of gun used for self defense versus for suicide or against family member or intimate partner.” According to the AI “overview”:

    Guns are significantly more likely to be used for suicide or against family/partners than for self-defense. Research indicates having a gun in the home triples suicide risk and doubles homicide risk, while defensive gun use (DGU) occurs in less than 1% of personal/property crimes. Studies show 83 women are murdered by an intimate partner with a handgun for every woman who uses a handgun to kill an intimate partner in self-defense.

    I know what some of you are thinking. In that case, more women need to arm themselves! My own complaint is the undersense that, while rare, it’s a good thing when a gun is used in “self defense” against the perpetrator of a property crime. Whatever, the overview hurdles ahead:

    Access to a gun in the home increases the risk of suicide more than three-fold. In the year after someone buys a handgun, the leading cause of death is suicide. . . .

    An abusive partner’s access to a firearm makes it 5 times more likely that a woman will be killed. . . .

    People living with a gun in the home are twice as likely to die by homicide and three times as likely to die by suicide. . . .

    In 8 out of 10 defensive gun uses, the perpetrator is not armed with a gun.

    I guess the approved “conservative” response to that last data point would be that the perpetrators need to arm themselves, so that they can return fire during their burglaries and barroom disputes. The AI overview does not take up the matter of accidental homicides that occur when the genius who owns the weapon is petting it, or his kids get their hands on it.

  • Dumbest timeline ever?

    Lots of people say we’re living in “the dumbest timeline ever” but this isn’t true for those of us who, like me, have a hard time distinguishing Donald Trump from Jesus Christ (or either one from a medical doctor). The pope seems pretty sure of his judgment so maybe you have to be trained in theology and classical languages to discern the subtle divergences in character and message. But then you have to consider too that, on the other side of the question, our vice president also appears to be pretty sure of himself, to the point that he has warned the pope against speaking up thoughtlessly on doctrinal matters. On the side of the vice president we have the Secretary of Defense–or War, as he prefers–whose numerous invocations of Scripture include film maker Quentin Tarrantino’s made-up riff on an obscure verse in everyone’s favorite, the Book of Ezekiel. Pulp Fiction: even better than the real thing?

    It’s a minority view, but I’d like to put in a word for the opinion of a character in a Woody Allen movie who, after spending some time watching religious programming on tv (this is back in the day before Pentagon press briefings qualified), tells his live-in girlfriend that if Jesus Christ were to come back to Earth, land in America, and take in everything being done in his name, or in his defense, he (Jesus) would not be able to stop throwing up. When you think it over, this view seems more in line with the pope’s, and I think that’s the way I’m leaning, which is weird because I’ve had a vasectomy, but maybe this is after all “the dumbest timeline ever,” and in any event it’s even possible that I wouldn’t care in the least about any of this if Trump administration officials, including the top one, would just stfu.

    [Lol, I just asked the “AI Assistant” to “provide feedback” on the above and she quickly obliged: “This content presents a unique perspective that blends humor with serious commentary, but it can benefit from a more structured approach.” No, sorry, I’m done, the lack of structure is going to live on the Internet forever, and anyway I can console myself with the thought that the first reviews of “Song of Myself” were less favorable.]

  • Math with Mr J, edited by Mr J

    There’s a YouTube channel, “Math with Mr. J,” in which Mr. J presents lessons on common school topics in math. Here’s one I watched the other day, on dividing fractions, a topic that I’ve been working on with my fifth grade friends:

    These videos are sometimes used in classroom instruction, and I guess they’re ok: at least, a kid who remembers “keep, switch, flip” will likely answer correctly a fraction division problem on a standardized test, which seems to be the holy grail. (“X percent of students performing at or above grade level!”) But kids will be excused if they get the idea that math is memorizing tricks so that they can then jump through hoops held up by the authors of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment. In ethics, you can do the right thing for the wrong reason, in which case you don’t deserve the praise you might receive. In a similar way, you can in math get the right answer without understanding a thing. What’s going on when you divide fractions? Why does the trick work? Some kids might want to know. In what follows I’m warming up for Monday.

    What’s going on when you divide fractions isn’t really different from what’s going on in the “easy” problems, like, say, 35 divided by 5. If you write it like this

    35/5

    you can then simplify the fraction to get the answer, 7/1, or 7. If you pay $35 for 5 widgets, then each widget costs $7. So you get the answer by making the denominator (also known as the divisor) 1. You make the denominator 1 by multiplying it by its reciprocal, and of course you have to do the same thing to the numerator to hold the value steady. The problem then simplifies to multiplying the numerator by the reciprocal of the denominator, since division by 1 changes nothing. A specific case with fractions might be:

    Three-fourths divided by two-thirds can be written

    3/4 / 2/3,

    which equals

    3/4 x 3/2 / 2/3 x 3/2.

    The denominator now equals 1. Since division by 1 doesn’t change anything, the answer is in the numerator, and the numerator is the product of the amount being divided (3/4) and the divisor (2/3) “flipped” (3/2). This is why “keep, switch, flip” works. It’s math, not magic.

    To be fair, Mr. J does in a different video show what’s happening when one fraction is divided by another:

    Fine, but I think kids might be less confused if you carve up distance instead of area and ask them, “How many times does this fit into that?” For example, if you’re going on a trip of 35 units, and you divide it up into segments that are 5 units long, how many segments are there? (Seven, because “five fits into 35 seven times.”) Of course, things don’t always work out so neatly. If the trip is 37 units, and you divide it into segments that are five units long, how many segments are there? (“How many times does five fit into 37?”) The question doesn’t change when we’re dealing with fractions. If you’re going on a trip of three-fourths of a unit, and you divide it up into half-unit segments, how many segments are there? (“How many times does a half fit into three-fourths?”) We can visualize the answers to all these questions with number lines:

    Five fits into 35 seven times, so 35 divided by 5 is 7. Five fits into 37 seven times plus two-fifths of what would be an eighth time, so 37 divided by 5 is 7.4 (“seven and two-fifths”). A half fits into three-fourths one time plus half of what would be a second time, so 3/4 divided by 1/2 equals 1.5 (“one and a half”).

  • Art of the Deal, Updated

    On Sunday (Easter), our president announced:

    Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.

    Until I transcribed the message, I hadn’t considered the key stroking effort needed to produce “Fuckin’,” as opposed to “Fucking.” Doin’ his best to sound like Joe Pesci. Yesterday, elaborating, he stretched to hit some world-historical notes:

    A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran.

    Then last night, about 90 minutes before the threatened Doomsday in Iran, he made another announcement:

    Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks.

    This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE! The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all MILITARY objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning the Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East. We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate . . . .

    Several media outlets reported that Iran’s 10-point plan, which according to Trump “is a workable basis on which to negotiate,” includes:

    2. Continuation of Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz

    3. Acceptance that Iran can enrich uranium for its nuclear program

    7. End of all International Atomic Energy Agency resolutions on Iran’s nuclear program

    8. Compensation payment to Iran for war damage

    There are six others. If the game was checkers, Iran would be making kings of all its pawns, which is how the cultists know that Trump is playing a more subtle game.