Of Tattoos and Careless Economics

A few days ago I wrote a post called The Straight Skin-ny, in which I lamented the proliferation of tattoos on otherwise beautiful ladies. Yesterday, Richard Cohen published a commentary in The Washington Post titled Ink-Stained Wretchedness that carried on my rant and took it in an interesting new direction.

Mr Cohen notes that "...the tattoos of today are not minor affairs or miniatures placed on the body where only an intimate or an internist would see them. Today's are gargantuan, inevitably tacky, gauche and ugly. They bear little relationship to the skin that they're on. They don't represent an indelible experience or membership in some sort of group but an assertion that today's whim will be tomorrow's joy." Interestingly, he also relates the mindset that leads people to let themselves be tattooed (live for the moment without thought for the future) to the mindset that got us into the current economic mess:

"The permanence of the moment -- the conviction that now is forever -- explains what has happened to the American economy. We are, as a people, deeply in debt. We are, as a nation, deeply in debt. The average American household owes more than its yearly income. We save almost nothing (0.4 percent of disposable income) and spend almost everything (99.6 percent of disposable income) in the hope that tomorrow will be a lot like today. We bought homes we could not afford and took out mortgages we could not pay and whipped out the plastic on everything else. Debts would be due in the future, but, with any luck, the future would remain in the future."

I have to admit I'd never thought of the mindset that leads one to get a tattoo as being similar to the mindset that draws one into fiscal irresponsibility, but it's an interesting comparison. Of course, if you get tired of a tattoo and you have enough money and a high enough pain tolerance, you can get it lasered away; debt, unfortunately, doesn't disappear as easily. I wonder if every member of Congress has some huge, garish tattoo saying something like "Spend now and let the grandchildren worry about paying the bill."

But enough about tattoos and fiscal irresponsibility. I'd just like to close with one more juicy line from Mr Cohen's article that ought to be posted in every tattoo parlor: "...Everything changes -- including, sweetie, that tight tummy with its "look at me!" tattoo. Time will turn it into false advertising."

Yep.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Doing the Right Thing

There are a lot of good things about living in the greater Washington DC area: museums, historical sites, theater, music, and good food, just to name a few.

Then there's the murder thing. Lots of people get murdered in DC. In particular, there's a community called Trinidad which has had so much violence that the police have instituted checkpoints around the neighborhood to search for weapons and wanted persons.

As you might imagine, this has resulted in howls of outrage from the residents of the community. They don't want checkpoints, they say, they want a steady police presence.

I can understand this. Speaking with absolutely no authority on the topic, I firmly believe that uniformed cops walking neighborhood beats are one of the best ways of keeping crime of all sorts down. The traditional "beat cop" who knows everyone on his turf and understands the "feel" of the street can establish relationships and levels of trust that police cruising by in cars can't manage. Nowadays it's called "community policing," and I don't think there's a better way for the police to support the community.

But a steady police presence only solves half the problem.

The same people who are loudly yelling that the mayor and the police aren't doing enough to get crime under control are the same ass-clowns who warn each other not to "snitch" - it's more important to show solidarity with your fellows, no matter how vicious and evil they are - than to help the police help the community by taking these psychos off the street.

What are you morons thinking?? You want the police to protect you, while at the same time you perpetuate the stupid idea that helping the police do their job is something dishonorable. If you believe this, you get the deadly environment you deserve.

The Supreme Court has done its part to help the situation by ensuring that even more guns can be pumped onto DC streets. Yes, it was the right decision from a Constitutional perspective, but as I've often written here, the Constitution was drafted in the 18th century and we're living in the 21st. Things have changed, and perhaps our quasi-religious tendency to worship at the festooned altar of firearms needs to be rethought.

But I'm a realist, and I know that won't happen in my lifetime...or in any other lifetimes that will be cut short by the easy availability, legally or illegally, of guns.

In the meantime, those of you who live in the high crime areas need to pull your heads out of your backsides. Bitching that the police aren't doing enough to protect you isn't going to do anything. Protecting the people who are killing your families will just keep the agony going. You may not love, or even like, the police, but they're your protection against the evil bastards who want to rule your streets and take your lives.

Stop the ass-clownery. Do the right thing. Protect the children who need protection...not the vicious criminals.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

The Straight Skin-ny

Caution: "Typical Male" Alert!

Back on July 4th, CNN ran this online story: How Much Skin Is Too Much At the Office? It dealt with the problem of women (and, somewhat less often, men) who wear inappropriately revealing clothes to work. Most offices have dress codes that proscribe things like bare backs or shoulders, too-short skirts, or necklines scooping down to the navel for ladies; and muscle shirts, bicycle shorts, or ratty cut-offs for men. It's all part of projecting a professional image appropriate to the business.

Many years ago when I was living in Berlin, I was in charge of day-to-day operations of a US Government office which worked closely with German agencies to process refugees and resettlers from around the world. One day, I sent one of our staff members - a young lady - home to change after she appeared for work dressed in a hot pink track suit. Clearly, it wasn't appropriate dress for the office.

But what's appropriate depends, of course, on the venue.

One of the nice things (for a man) about competitive ballroom dancing as a hobby is that you get to spend a lot of time around lovely, fit ladies in beautiful dresses, showing a lot of skin. Latin dance costumes, in particular, can be pretty impressive for their very low costume-to-exposed-flesh ratios. It isn't necessarily all great, though.

For one thing, ladies apply makeup to to attract a judge's attention from across a crowded ballroom. At a distance, they look stunning. Up close, they can look like clowns. That's not a criticism, it's just one of those things they have to put up with for being the girl.

But the thing that really grinds my gears is tattoos on women. Now, I'm no fan of tattoos on anybody, men or women, but I think they can be particularly unfortunate form of decor on ladies. I think putting a tattoo - especially a large and garish one - on a beautiful woman is a bit like painting a handlebar mustache on the Mona Lisa. To me, it looks especially bad when the lady is wearing a beautiful ball gown for which she probably paid well over a thousand dollars, and her bare back and arms are sporting tattoos that make her look like a NASCAR entry.

Santa Cruz license plates (tattoos at the small of the back, which peek out over the waistband of pants or the bottom of a dress's back) are bad enough. Yesterday, though, at the Virginia State competition, there was a lady wearing a gorgeous gown with an extremely low-cut back, which exposed a huge, whole-back, multicolored tattoo. Maybe it's just me (and yes, I'm a curmudgeonly, middle-aged geezer-in-training), but I thought the combination was awful. The lady was beautiful, her dress was beautiful, her hair was done up just right, but for me the overall effect was ruined by the enormous tattoo, which didn't even complement the colors of the dress.

Sigh.

When I lived in Germany and was working on my Masters' degree, one of the assistants at our local library was a wonderful young lady named Renee who helped me track down all sorts of arcane references for my various research papers. Renee was the quintessential punk, with her hair a different (and vivid) color every week (often different on each side, or front and back, or with a contrasting racing stripe down the middle), safety pins as earrings (and I can tell you a very funny story about that), skirts little more than wide belts, and tattoos everywhere you could see. One of the funniest things I remember from that time was watching Renee work the checkout desk with the library director, Mrs B, who was the very stereotype of the librarian - elderly, wire-rimmed glasses, white hair pulled back in a severe bun, as conservative as you could get.

Now that was culture shock.

But I digress.

Ladies, before you get that tattoo, think twice. It really doesn't do anything for you. Spend the money on some jewelry or nice clothes, rather than on that body art that may end up being, in the words of Jimmy Buffett, a Permanent Reminder of a Temporary Feeling.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

P.S. - Letter-writing project update: John's letter is finished and will be mailed today, making me 4-for-5. Andrea, Amanda, and Mike have already received their letters, and I've received Andrea's reply. The letter to my daughter is next. Want a letter of your own? Send your snail-mail address to bilbo_the_blogger (at symbol) yahoo.com and I'll add you to the list. Act now. Scribes are standing (sitting, actually) by!

B.

The Virginia State DanceSport Championships, 2008

Yesterday, Agnes and I took part in the 2008 Virginia State DanceSport Championships at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Reston. This is a major regional competition, featuring amateur and professional dancers from up and down the East Coast - there were more than 7,000 registered entries, although - happily - not that many people were on the floor at any one time.

We didn't dance as many heats as we normally do when we compete; this time, we just stuck to the five International Standard dances that I'm trying to master - Waltz, Tango, Viennese Waltz, Slow Foxtrot, and Quickstep - and we danced them both as individual heats and in a five-dance championship heat (all five dances back-to-back with minimum time in between...think of a terpsichorean pentathelon). Things were especially tough for Agnes because she was dancing not only with me, but with Phil, one of her other students, and the schedule was such that she ended up dancing ten consecutive heats - five with me, then five with Phil - followed by a short interval, then the five-dance championship with Phil, followed immediately by the five-dance championship with me. Her pantyhose had melted into her shoes by the end of the day.

You might think that this isn't too bad, given that each single-dance heat generally doesn't last more than about 90 seconds (as long as the judges need to score all the couples, but no less than 30 seconds). However, since you never know which judge will be watching you when, and what that judge will be looking at, you always have to try to be perfect...which, in my case, isn't easy. It ends up being a stressful, but ultimately fun and rewarding time.

But you don't want to read about it, you want to see the pictures. I may be able to post some video later, but the stills will have to do for now...

Here we are, before we've done any dancing. We thought it would be nice to have at least one good picture without sweat and odd candid expressions:


This picture was taken by our friend Laurie (Phil's wife). I thought it was interesting because it shows how the traffic can bunch up on the floor. In all of our single-dance heats, there were eight couples on the floor. The floor is pretty big, but everyone never fails to end up in the same place at the same time at least once per heat...


The judges are always watching like hawks, evaluating things like posture, footwork, floorcraft (how well you navigate around other couples and compensate for mistakes and places where you can't dance what you'd planned) whether you're dancing on rhythm, and your general "presence" - whether or not you look like you're having an orgasmically wonderful time while dancing everything perfectly. This picture shows judge Ron Bennett marking his scoring sheet as a couple glides past:


In this picture (I believe it was from our Quickstep heat), Agnes and I are rounding a corner of the floor in full flight. You can see the concentration on my face and - yes - sweat on my fevered brow. Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly never sweat in the movies. How unfair is that?

I loved this picture because I remember the moment Laurie shot it. We were zipping along and all of a sudden, there was another couple hitting a picture line almost right in our path. At this moment I'm thinking: "Where are they going? What are they going to do? Are we going to hit them?" As luck would have it, we missed them by a small margin as we zoomed past...


A happy-snap of Phil and Agnes in the on-deck chute waiting to dance their five-dance championship heat. Phil always brings extra teeth along for that handsome movie-star grin.

And the results? Phil and I each took second place in each of our single-dance heats (which, for a major regional competition, isn't bad). And in our five-dance championship heats, Phil took a second place while I took a first (I think it was a gift, but who am I to argue with the judges?). Here's the proud troupe at the end of the awards presentation:

Phil and I each got those nice, garish medals...Agnes, as the professional teacher, only got sore feet and the pleasure of dancing with two handsome fellows. I bought her dinner to make it up to her.

So that was our adventure at this year's Virginia State. We had a good time, saw some old friends, and managed to finish the day without falling down (although Agnes took an elbow right to the back of her head when another couple ran into her during one of her heats with Phil). I made plenty of mistakes, but still managed a respectable-enough showing that Agnes let me sleep in the house last night.

And sometimes, that's as good as it gets.

So today we're winding down, visiting the local grandchild, and generally getting ready to face the new week. On the upside, Harry Turtledove's new novel The Man with the Iron Heart goes on sale Tuesday (don't be standing in front of the door at Borders when they open, or I'll run you down). On the downside...well...we have to get past Monday to get there.

That odd sound you hear is me gritting my teeth.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Cartoon Sat... uh ... Friday

I won't be posting tomorrow, since Agnes and I will be at the Virginia State DanceSport Championships all day, so I decided to move up this week's Cartoon Saturday to Friday. It'll confuse Mike, but the rest of you should be okay.

We begin with two takes on married life. Those of you who have been there know what I'm talking about...

And...


This is my kind of Human Resources office. If I ever change jobs again, I'm looking for this benefit...

One of our friends has gone through legal and financial hell with an inept, crooked contractor she hired to do some renovation work on her house. We all now know what "caveat emptor" means...

And finally, I sent this one to my daughter a while back...Leya, as a typical toddler, is often more interested in staying awake and getting into trouble than in prosaic things like naps...


Those of you who live in the DC/Maryland/Northern Virginia area and don't have anything else to do tomorrow may want to come to the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Reston and watch the Virginia State DanceSport Championships. Agnes and I will be dancing in the late morning, and I'm trying to round up a cheering section (I need all the help I can get). If you can't come, cross your fingers. I'll let you know on Sunday how it all came out.

Have a good day. More thoughts coming on Sunday.

Bilbo

Dietrologia

No, it doesn't have anything to do with losing weight.

I found the fascinating Italian word dietrologia in a book that I just finished reading - The Monster of Florence, by Douglas Preston. The book tells the story of the inept, often ludicrously mismanaged and ultimately unsuccessful 20-plus year search for a serial killer in the vicinity of Florence, Italy (the story of the search for the Monster of Florence was also worked into the plot of Hannibal, Thomas Harris's superb sequel to The Silence of the Lambs).

An Italian nobleman explained the meaning of dietrologia to author Douglas Preston this way: "Dietro - behind. Logia - the study of...Dietrologia is the idea that the obvious thing cannot be the truth. There is always something hidden behind, dietro. It isn't quite what you Americans call conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theory implies theory, something uncertain, a possibility. The dietrologist deals only in fact. This is how it really is."

I think dietrologia is an absolutely wonderful word that we desperately need in every language, right now. Today. Consider some of the things that some people absolutely believe, regardless either of overwhelming evidence to the contrary or the lack of the least amount of supporting evidence:

Polio vaccine is a CIA/Jewish plot to sterilize Muslim children (this one comes from Pakistan, where moronic clerics with ossified brains have caused a polio epidemic by convincing parents that the vaccine is an insidious Western weapon against Muslims).

The CIA and the Israeli Mossad actually carried out the terrorist attacks of 9/11 by firing a missile at the Pentagon and planting explosives in the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Having survived the attack on the Pentagon, I find this one particularly stupid and insulting.

AIDS is an artificial disease secretly created by the U.S. Government to eliminate blacks and other minorities.

Barak Obama is a Muslim.

I try to be a skeptical fellow and look for the real evidence behind bizarre claims like these. I try to keep an open mind, but I regularly visit The Urban Legends Reference Page (snopes.com), The Annenberg Political Fact Check (fact-check.org), and other myth-debunking websites, and try to read all sides of arguments before taking a position on a particular issue. I have even been known to change my opinions on issues (gasp - Bilbo flip-flops!).

Unfortunately, many people aren't so skeptical of wild claims. They'll believe anything, not matter how outrageous or stupid (see Michael Shermer's marvelous book Why People Believe Weird Things for an excellent analysis). Dietrologia is their religion. There just has to be some other explanation for the obvious, no matter how bizarre and stupid.

All together now, class - what is Bilbo's recurring mantra?

"Don't let anyone do your thinking for you."

The world is full of problems and the stakes are high on many fronts. You owe it to yourself and to everyone else to look for the truth, not to believe the first agreeable baloney you hear. Andre Gide once cautioned us to "Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it."

Listen to the man. He's on to something.

Have a good day. Eschew dietrologia. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Odds and Ends

Just a few unconnected comments and observations today...I can't get my poor, battered head organized enough to do my usual well-ordered screed.

The other day I lamented yet again about the reluctance (nay, refusal) of anyone in Congress and the Executive Branch to compromise in order to get anything done. Jessica Hagy, who blogs at Indexed, had a great illustration this morning of what we really need:


I think I'll e-mail copies of it to Mr Bush and all my Reprehensives in Congress. Perhaps it's simply enough expressed for them to understand.

If you've ever tried to use your laptop computer while traveling, or in a local wi-fi hotspot, you've probably had the experience of having some clownhead trying to peek at your screen. You can spend a lot of money on a filter that prevents people from viewing the screen at an angle, or you can use a spiffy wallpaper like this one...


My office is going to open a branch in China. We've had the first sign made already...


According to a recent article on the CNN website, some scientists believe humans will eventually merge with machines. These scientists, who call themselves transhumanists, "...anticipate an era in which biotechnology, molecular nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence and other new types of cognitive tools will be used to amplify our intellectual capacity, improve our physical capabilities and even enhance our emotional well-being...The end result would be a new form of "posthuman" life with beings that possess qualities and skills so exceedingly advanced they no longer can be classified simply as humans."

I may have more to say about this tomorrow, but as far as I can see, people are already merging with machines...consider the idiots who wear their bluetooth devices or chatter on their cell phones 24 hours per day; lazy slobs who can't travel more than 15 feet without taking the car; and drooling loons who are hopelessly and helplessly tethered to the coffee machine, video game, PC, or television set. I rest my case.

Start crossing your fingers now...Agnes and I will be competing in the Virginia State DanceSport Championships on Saturday. If you'd like to know what I look like dressed in a tuxedo and sweating in terror, come on out and watch. Pictures next week, maybe.

That's all for now. I'll have a more coherent post tomorrow. Promise.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Numbers From the Amazon

I've written in this space before about my discomfort with numbers and economic theory. German and Russian grammar, no problem...macro- and microeconomics, and my head starts to smoke. I'm a verbal and visual person, not a numeric one.

I especially don't understand "generally accepted accounting principles." It just doesn't make sense to me that two equally competent (?) CPAs can take the same set of numbers and, using different accounting methods, show that a business is either very profitable or on the edge of financial ruin. This was parodied beautifully in the stage show and film of "The Producers," where the police raiding the offices of Blum and Bialystock find two sets of ledgers: one labeled "Show to the IRS;" the other labeled "Never Show to the IRS."

All of this is my windy way of getting around to sharing with you this fascinating article that one of my co-workers passed to me yesterday - MIT-led Team Finds Language Without Numbers. According to this story, a team of researchers in the remote Amazonian jungle has found a small tribe whose language has no words to express the concept of "one" or of any specific number.

It's difficult for a 21st century Western person to come to grips with a society that doesn't need numbers, since numbers rule our lives. Nevertheless, in the context of the Piraha tribe's world, there's no particular need for specific numbers...all they apparently need to express are relative concepts like "some" and "more."

This reminded me of one of the curious aspects of counting in Russian. In this language, nouns are declined (change their endings to reflect their grammatical use in the sentence) through six cases, singular and plural, and numbers are expressed using three different cases: for instance, a child might have one toy (nominative singular), but would have two, three, or four "of toy" (genitive singular), or five or more "of toys" (genitive plural). The same rule applies to any larger number ending in 1, 2-4, or 5-0. There's also a Piraha-like construction called the "partitive genitive" - if you ask for "some" of something, you ask for it in the genitive singular, as in "give me some of bread."

But getting back to the Piraha and their language without numbers...

It occurs to me that this is a language that is particularly suited to modern economics. Since numbers aren't real any more, why not use a language that doesn't have them? Think about it: can you get your head around, say, a government budget in the trillions of dollars, with individual departments spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year? When you worry about making the payments on your $25,000 clunker, can you comprehend spending a half-billion dollars on a single airplane? Josef Stalin once supposedly said that one death was a tragedy, but a million deaths was a statistic...is this why we can accept the horrific death tolls in Darfur and across the Middle East with nothing more than a weary shake of the head?

The Piraha will probably someday regret being discovered by the MIT researchers. I expect that 50 years from now, they'll be wearing suits and wielding ATM cards and worrying about mortgages on their mud-and-wattle huts. They'll have traded exotic jungle diseases for ulcers brought on by economic distress.

They'll need enough, have some, but want more, just like the rest of us.

And maybe those are all the numbers we ought to have.

Have a good day. By the numbers. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Storing Toxic Stuff

While searching for a topic about which to write this morning, I found this very interesting Los Angeles Times article I put into my blog fodder file back in May: Yucca and Gitmo and What They Share, by Jonah Goldberg. It's a prime example of the wonderful piece I wish I were smart enough to write myself. Take a minute to read it. I'll wait.

The point of Mr Goldberg's article is this: there are two places our government has chosen to store deadly items.

Yucca Mountain, Nevada, is intended as the permanent repository for nuclear material so deadly that it will be toxic for tens of thousands of years (my blog post with the all-time record for number of hits - Don't Dig Here! - dealt with the problem of designing signs to warn people of the danger of this site far into an unimaginably distant future).

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on the other hand, is the temporary repository for people perceived to be so deadly they can't be imprisoned anywhere else (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramsi Bin al Shibh, and other mass murderers, for example).

Both sites are the subject of moves to close them down and prevent their use, and both sets of arguments ignore critical realities.

If we never allow Yucca Mountain, located in one of the most remote and inhospitable corners of the country, to open and store deadly radioactive material, how do we store the stuff? The nuclear industry advertises itself as a clean and environmentally responsible alternative to oil and coal, but we've got to store the deadly by-products somewhere...and nobody wants it in their back yard, no matter how far away that back yard is.

If we close Guantanamo, we've still got to put the inmates somewhere. Many of them can probably be released and of those, some will probably be pissed off enough to go back to killing Americans. But some of them are so toxic that, like radioactive waste, they'll be deadly forever. What do we do with them? In most cases, their home countries don't want them back, preferring to leave the problem on our hands. Do we try them as criminals? Take them out back and shoot them? Drop them into a vacant oubilette (look it up) somewhere and forget about them?

I wish I had the answer to both problems, because both are critically important. And both Yucca Mountain and Guantanamo are routinely condemned by people who offer no realistic alternative to them. I don't care if you object to either one, that's your right. But if you don't have a better alternative, shut up and color.

If I were king, I think I'd kill two birds with one stone: I'd open the Yucca Mountain repository tomorrow and use one of its galleries to house the people from Guantanamo.

That wasn't so hard, was it? We'd have all the deadly stuff in one place, and the evil bastards from Guantanamo can read their US Government-provided korans by their own light as they glow in the dark.

No need to thank me...I'll just bask in the glow of knowing I solved two intractable problems.

So to speak.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

The "Smell of Compromise"

I found myself once again spun up this morning by a story on page A4 of this morning's Washington Post: Recent Bush Victories Smell of Compromise.

Smell of compromise. That's a very revealing choice of words.

Decaying corpses smell. Limburger cheese smells. Old sneakers smell.

When was it that compromise - the time-honored art of giving something to get something, what you're willing to offer up in the quest for forward movement - became something that smells?

Commentators smarter and better informed than I have often lamented the poisonous partisan politics of modern Washington, in which principled compromise is equated to craven selling out of one's principles. Seeking opportunities for compromise in the national interest, rather than stubbornly insisting on parochial interests, is turned by political bloviators into charges of "flip-flopping" on issues - a deadly charge that politicians fear like the plague.

A White House spokesman is quoted in the story as saying, "I don't think we've become more conciliatory than we've ever been. We're going to stay on the right side of our principles. If we can get these things done and not compromise those principles, then of course we are open to compromise. We have always been open to that."

What a shameless crock of caca de toro.

If everything is a principle that one has to "stay on the right side of," then nothing will ever be done. If everything is critical, then nothing is critical.

Mr Bush, the self-annointed "decider," has little interest in compromise. He relies on unlimited executive privilege and power to force his views on those who don't agree with him. In his lexicon, compromise is defined as "doing it my way."

As long as we continue with the ridiculous condemnation of compromise...as long as politicians on both sides of the aisle demand to know why everyone else is "lying"...we're not going to solve any of our pressing problems.

Remember to vote for Nobody in November. At least Nobody will admit that he's unwilling to compromise.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo