sharon's cover art (new yorker edition) part ii

This is kind of a follow up to yesterday's post in which I shared a The New Yorker magazine cover design Sharon made for her illustration class.

When I posted it, I was unaware that the class assignment was to create sketches of three covers. Since they could make the covers about New York City or about politics, Sharon chose to create one of each and one that combined elements of both. Also, because they were supposed to do "sketches" which would be edited and cleaned up after they get feedback from the instructor. And that's why they may seem not quite complete.

All three are below. Sharon also showed me what some of her classmates submitted. Personally, I think hers are better than any of the others. But I'm biased. Of course, the fact that I'm biased doesn't mean I'm wrong.

The New York element of this first one is obvious:

This one combines a rat (the official animal of the New York subway) with a sunflower (which is a symbol of Ukraine):

And back to the one I posted yesterday, the Ukrainian flag with lots of animals on it:

sharon's cover art (new yorker edition)

 Not much to say here except that I'm doing the proud show-offy dad thing.

Sharon's illustration class was assigned to create a New Yorker cover. The subject of the cover could be politics or New York. Sharon created the following:

the two storytellers

 A bit ago I posted about the storytelling class that Ethan and I were taking. Well, the class is over and the stories are told. Of the 13 people who started the class, nine stayed until the end. Here are Ethan's story and mine.

a part of my youth was wrong

We all have our memories from high school. I have vivid memories of the Zion Deli, which was on First Avenue between 15th and 16th Streets in Manhattan -- just around the corner from my High School, which was on 15th Street between First and Second Avenues.

I would, when I was occasionally feeling flush, go there for lunch. And I have told many people about that deli. Blair, for one, has heard me sing the praises of its sandwiches. Probably more times than she cares to recall. Of course, the deli closed in the mid-1980s -- not many years after I graduated from high school. And the high school moved to Battery Park City in the 1990s. So, well, that's that.

Anyway, I went looking on the interwebs today to see if I could find out anything about it. I couldn't find much except for this post in Ephemeral New York, a blog devoted to old-time New York. And what I learned shocked me. The place wasn't The Zion Delicatessen, as I had thought. It was Schwatrtzberg's Delicatessen. All those years, all those stories and conversations, and I never knew the correct name of the place.

My memories are a fraud.

claptrap for those who are missing mad movie parodies

 

A long, long time ago I can still remember how the humor used to make me smile.

Mad Magazine was an institution when I was a kid, and there was a long stretch of time that I fervently looked forward to each new issue. And one of my favorite features was the movie parody. So it's kind of amusing that I would, in college, become friends with Desmond Devlin who would become one of Mad's most prolific writers -- both in general and of the movie parodies in particular. And, in fact, he helped me make my first (and, sadly, only) sale to Mad.

Des and I were friends for decades. We celebrated life's milestones. We consoled each other upon losses. And nobody ever wore a yarmulke as peculiarly as he did at my wedding.

And Des had an uncanny knack for drawing me. As one example, back in the 1990's I wanted to brew beer -- I have no idea why, since I don't drink beer. I think I really liked the prospect of making labels for it. Anyway, Des suggested I call it "Piggyback," which was a reference to an inside joke from our college days. I asked him to create a drawing for the label. Specifically, I asked him to draw a picture of "me riding a pig." He agreed, though he had an unorthodox interpretation of the word "riding." To the right is a picture of the last existing label from "Piggyback Ale."

But I digress.

After nearly 70 years, Mad stopped printing new material last year. I believe their last issue is coming out (or has come out?) this year, but I'm too lazy to look that up. No more Mad means no more Mad movie parodies. So Des and artist Tom Richmond are teaming up to put out a book of movie parodies in the style of the ones that appeared in Mad. Des is among the most prolific writers of these parodies and Tom is among the most prolific artists for them. Des and Tom have probably teamed up to do more of these parodies than any other writer/artist combination. So the form is in good hands with them. They're crowdfunding the project, which is the point of this post.

Please support Desmond's and Tom's project. There's lots of perks you can buy -- in fact, for the right price you can pick a movie you want them to parody, and they'll do it -- complete with a picture of you worked into it. To support them follow this indiegogo link. Tell 'em Moish sent you.

the assignment not taken

UPDATE: I added an explanation of what a "kiruv organization" is.

Before I begin, let me acknowledge that I can be stupid.

This post is in response to a question a friend asked on Twitter. In a conversation on that platform I twote that I could have been at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's first induction ceremony -- but that I turned it down. He asked how that happened. The story is too long to put on Twitter so here it is.

Back in 1986 I was in college. I was majoring in math -- hoping to become either a professor or an actuary.* I was also working at a college newspaper and doing some freelance writing, hoping to -- well, honestly, I'm not sure what I was hoping for in the writing arena.** I had developed a couple contacts at Tower Records' Pulse!, which was a monthly publication distributed at Tower Records' outlets. I had done a couple articles for them -- nothing earth-shattering.

I was surprised when I heard from a publicist -- I don't recall who the publicist was representing -- about how I was going to be covering the first induction ceremony for Pulse! That was news to me. I hadn't tried to get such an assignment, and no one at Pulse! had mentioned it to me. And it was getting close to the event. I assume that Pulse! had someone else covering the event until something fell through and they needed a replacement. I was a more-or-less known quantity, I was located in New York, and I had a pulse.

As a young music fan who was getting into rock journalism, but was still a nobody in that world,*** I should have been thrilled. Opportunity wasn't just knocking; it was kicking the door in.

But there was a problem. I had already paid for a weekend Shabbaton sponsored by The Center for Return. The Center was a kiruv organization at my college. I think it was Lubavitch-run, but it certainly had Hassidic influence. For those not familiar, a kiruv organization is one that reaches out to nonreligious Jews and tries to influence them to be more religious. Or even to get them to perform one religious act. I had become friendly with the Rabbi there -- part of the years-long adventure I had in sorting out my ambivalence about religion.**** I couldn't go to the induction ceremony and the religious event. I had to choose.

I chose poorly.

When I first told Blair about it, she was shocked. What had I been thinking? I still don't know. But more than that, she is amazed that no one in my world told me that I should choose the induction ceremony.

Stoopid...stoopid...stoopid.

*spoiler alert: I am, in fact, a professor or an actuary.
**spoiler alert: I'm still not sure what I'm hoping for.
***spoiler alert: I'm still a nobody in that world. Probably more so than I was then.
****spoiler alert: I'm not a very religious person.

eight years time served

Recently, a Facebook friend asked me about my elementary school. "What was it like" were the exact words. WIth no context, that would seem pretty open-ended. But she was asking because it had come up that I went to a yeshiva day school. Specifically, an Orthodox yeshiva day school. So my interlocutor's interest was presumably in how it differed from public schools.

Certainly there are different types of yeshivas, and I can't as easily speak to those with which I had no experience. The ones I went to are what one might call "Modern Orthodox," though even that is not a well-defined term. At any rate, the two yeshivas I attended were Yeshiva Dov Revel (for grades one through four) and The Yeshiva of Central Queens (for grades five through eight). The two are somewhat similar, so I generally won't make an effort to distinguish between them.

At these schools, the day is split between "Hebrew" and "English." I put the languages in quotes because the former really means "all religious subjects" and the latter really means "all secular subjects." Typically, the morning would be devoted to Hebrew and the afternoon devoted to English -- though I recall one specific time when it was reversed. In the early grades each class had one Hebrew teacher and one English teacher, and they stayed in the same classroom. In later grades (seven and eight, IIRC, but I could be wrong) there was more specialization, and classes moved around for different subjects. In the later grades there was also optional religious classes on Thursday nights and Sunday mornings.

It may seem obvious to note that, with only half a day devoted to the secular subjects, students weren't getting as much time for them as their public school counterparts. To some extent that is true, though our school days were longer in order to partially offset the difference. We started earlier than the public schools and ended later. Except for on Fridays. Fridays were abbreviated because we had to get home in time to prepare for the Sabbath. This was especially true during the winter, when sundown (and therefore the Sabbath) arrived early in the day.

But aside from the Hebrew half of the day, religion still informed the English half. My sixth grade class put on a production of Oliver! for our play. And I remember that we had to change a couple of lines from "Food, Glorious Food," which is the opening number. The song's references to "hot sausage and mustard" and "peas, pudding and saveloys" were replaced with "hamburgers and mustard" and "peas, pudding and sauerkraut." We were not to even sing about nonkosher foods.

And, speaking of food, I don't remember ever having a spelling bee. But I remember brakhah bees. A brakhah is a blessing -- in this context, a blessing said before eating food. There are five basic brakhot to be said before eating, with the precise brakhah determined by the food(s) being eaten. In a spelling bee, the contestant is given a word and has to spell it. In a brakhah bee, the contestant is given a food and has to identify the prayer said before eating it:

Judge: bananas
Contestant 1: ha'adamah
Judge: egg salad
Contestant 2: sh'hacol
etc..

In this mix, I was kind of an odd man out. It was assumed that we were all living in orthodox households, but I wasn't. In orthodox households, kids had already gotten some exposure to the Hebrew language before they started first grade. They were used to Orthodox prayer services. And they had parents who were familiar with the Hebrew topics and could help them with the religious homework. My parents didn't come from Orthodox backgrounds, and had minimal knowledge of Hebrew. In fact, they sent my sister and me to yeshiva because they wanted us to have the religious education that they hadn't gotten. But that put us behind the eight ball. My classmates, by and large, came in with more knowledge of the subjects and they had parents who could help them more.

As well, I was culturally out of step. Because my family wasn't Orthodox, I was getting a very different message at home than I was in school. My parents tried to work around the difference, but it sometimes bit me in the butt -- often because I didn't know when and how to keep my yap shut. My parents' line to me about religiosity was something along the lines of different people have different opinions about God, no one knows for sure who's right, and all forms of religious practice are equally valid. That was decidedly not the opinion of the teachers and administrators. I remember one time when a teacher told us that Orthodoxy was the only correct way to practice, and I contradicted him. Suffice to say that didn't go over well. Boys had to wear yarmulkes (small skullcaps) and tzitzit (fringed garments worn under the shirt), which were new to me when I started. Yarmulkes were too visible to forget. But I would often forget to wear the tzitzit, and would get in trouble if I was caught. "I forgot" wasn't an acceptable excuse. Wearing tzitzit was expected to be second nature. You wouldn't forget to put on pants before going out, so why would you forget to wear tzitzit?

Another issue was my friends outside of school. My neighborhood wasn't particularly Jewish, and it certainly wasn't Orthodox. It's important to remember that, within the Orthodox world, religion is ever-present. You wear a head-covering which reminds you of God. You have prayers in the morning, in the afternoon and in the evening. You pray before you eat and after you eat. And after you use the bathroom. But in my milieu, the religiosity that was supposed to permeate my entire life would necessarily take a break on weekends and during the summer. Well, not during the whole summer, since I did go to an Orthodox summer camp for several years. But that's another matter.

After the eight grade I went to a public high school. That decision was met by my teachers with disapproval, but I was adamant. And I was free.

Looking back, I know that I wasn't the only kid in the class from a nonOrthodox background. But at the time it sure seemed as if I was. And I never felt as if I fit in.

google reminds me of a faux pas...

Googling myself, I came across this on "Sproutology," a website devoted to the British band, Prefab Sprout.*

Back in 1985, working for a campus newspaper at Queens College, I attended a college press conference for Prefab Sprout -- or, more accurately, for their lead singer, Paddy McAloon. The band had just released Two Wheels Good, and Columbia Records was making a big push.

It was pretty standard as these events went, and I remember very little about what was said during the conference. My most vivid memory is from before the conference actually began. It was a faux pas I committed -- a completely unforced error. At least I learned to keep my mouth shut.**

But before I get into describing the error, let me tangent.*** As I was supposed to, I wrote up the press conference for Skyline (the paper I was writing for, then. I also sent information to Alternative Rhythms, which was a music 'zine I had done a little writing for. I don't recall what I sent them -- most likely the Skyline article, which was poorly written, but full of direct quotes. Sam Rosenthal, who was publishing AR, took quotes from what I sent, and wrote a coherent article.

Anyway, I had gotten to the conference early -- as I usually did for these things. There were two people there before me. A young man and woman who obviously knew each other quite well. They looked a little bit older than me, but I immediately assumed that they were also there representing a college newspaper. I went to another table to grab a press packet and mumbled something about how I should probably read up so I'll know who "these clowns" are. The two of them chuckled and resumed their private conversation. I sat in the front row with the press packet and a notebook.

A while later, after other student journalists entered the room and as the press conference started, I learned that the man at the table was Paddy McAloon himself. He was incredibly graceful about the faux pas, and conducted the interview as if I hadn't just insulted him.

As a PS, I'll note that I wasn't enamored of PS' music. Stylistically, it never interested me. Except for "Faron" (which was listed as "Faron Young" on the British version of the album, which was titled Steve McQueen. I don't know why record labels do this. At any rate that one song sounded enough like cowpunk (which was just starting to interest me) to attract me. I still like it.Here's a liver version:

*I am not sure whether Sproutology is affiliated with the band, and I don't have enough interest to investigate.

**People who have known me since 1985 may question whether I actually did learn to keep my mouth shut.

***Yes, I know that tangent is not a proper verb. I don't care.

i hate when i forget math stuff

This is kind of frustrating. I was up last night trying to recall about a proof from grad school, and realize that I can't remember one important point.

Henri Lebesgue

The topic is Lebesque Measure. Specifically, the existence of nonmeasurable sets. It's a pretty fundamental question. There's all sort of stuff built up, starting with the basic definitions and rules. Then there's all sorts of stuff built up around measure, and theory. And, yes, I know the foregoing is a bit hazy. That's because it's been long enough ago that I don't fully remember what are matters of definition and what are results that are proven.

At any rate, with all that stuff around measure, it's good to establish whether there actually are sets that are nonmeasurable. It's not immediately intuitively obvious (at least it wasn't to me when I was a first semester grad student) that there are nonmeasurable sets. All the obvious ways of constructing sets -- take some intervals or single points. Take intersections or unions of them -- don't immediately work.

But I recall the basic construction. Start by splitting the unit interval into equivalence classes where two points are in the same class if their difference is rational. Then take one element from each equivalence class. That set, call it N, is nonmeasurable.

The proof that N is nonmeasurable relies on taking the union of all sets N+a where:
1) N+a is defined as the set of all numbers n+a where n is an element of N; and
2) a is a rational number in the unit interval.
Let's call that union U.

If N is measurable, then it has a measure which must be either zero or positive. Also, because N+a is just a translation of N, its measure is the same as that of N. Finally, N+a and N+b are disjoint for a not equal b.

So, what is the measure of U? We know it has to be finite because U is a subset of [0,2], which has finite measure. But if N has positive measure, then the measure of U, which is the sum of the measures of N+a (for all a in the unit interval) is infinite. Therefore N has measure zero. If N has measure zero, then U has measure zero. This is a contradiction.

And that's where I'm stuck. How do we know that U cannot have measure zero? I think it has to do with the assertion that U contains an interval, and therefore has to have measure greater than or equal to the length of the interval? Maybe it's that U is equal to [0,2], and therefore has to have measure 2? But how do we know that?

Help! Help, help!

the history of our cinema history class part i: prehistory

In his blog, Ethan talked about his perspective on the cinema history class we take together. So today is as good a time as any to present my perspective.

Back in 2010, Ethan was enamored of horror movies. And not just any horror movies. The kind of horror movies that some call "torture porn" -- movies that graphically depict torture. The Saw series were some of his favorites. I didn't like it, but I didn't want to forbid them. Blair found that Nassau Community College has adult continuing education classes in cinema history. Maybe that could influence his taste for the better. We signed Ethan up for the class in horror movies. Well, we wanted to, anyway. But he was under 18, and the college's website wouldn't allow him to register. So I registered myself. The plan was that I'd bring him to class. I'd show up early for the first class and explain the situation to the lecturer. Hopefully he'd understand.

And that was how we met Keith Crocker. As I would come to learn, Keith was a local film historian. He makes his living being involved with movies in a variety of ways. I'm not going to try, in the venue, to do justice to what he does. Suffice to say he knows movies.

If I recall correctly, Keith was teaching several cinema classes at the college:

• the history of horror films
• old comedy teams
• Spaghetti Westerns
• filmmaking

He was, pretty much, teaching each of these classes each semester. Ethan and I started taking all of them (well, all except the filmmaking class) over and over again. The classes would meet four times*, for two hours each. During that time, Keith would talk about the genre -- the history, the influences, the people involved. He also displayed bits of memorabilia from his personal collection, and (in the comedy and horror classes) show Castle Film Digests, which were abridged versions of the movies. Essentially, they would show the beginning and ending of movies, along with some of the material in the middle. It was enough for the viewer to get the point, but not enough to get the full nuance or to understand the characters. Keith would show us a reel of several digests. I distinctly remember the abridged version of The Invisible Man.

Ethan and I probably made things marginally more difficult for Keith. With repeat customers, he started trying to find ways to make the class a little different each time. Which is to his credit. He could have easily kept the classes the same. No one could reasonably criticize him for that. But, as a teacher, he felt it was important to give us new material. At this point, I was probably simply that annoying guy with the kid who kept trying to chat with him after class.

But those digests had piqued my interest. I started thinking that it would be great to have some kind of in-depth class where each session focused on one movie. There would be an introduction. We'd watch the movie, and then discuss it. I mentioned the idea to Keith on more than one occasion.

I like to think that that's how Keith got the idea. Maybe it is. Maybe not. But at any rate, within a couple years -- I think it was 2012 -- Keith invited Ethan and me to be inaugural members of his home-taught film class.

*For some reason, I think the Spaghetti Westerns class only met twice. Maybe I'm wrong. I dunno. But it's not a material concern. There may be other immaterial mistakes in the information above. Maybe I have a year wrong, or something like that. But nothing materially important.

suzy saxon and the anglos -- now more digital than ever!

UPDATE: I modified the second paragraph to better reflect what I meant when I wrote it.

One of the bands I really loved back when I was in college was a kind-of new wave rock group from Richmond, Virginia, called Suzy Saxon and the Anglos*. Before I go on, here's a video of their single, "Boys in Dresses."

A female singer fronting a band of men in the early eighties, the Anglos drew the inevitable comparisons to Blondie or The Pretenders. But there was a certain roughness -- almost grunginess -- to their guitar sound that I found energizing. With that, they were much better, at least to my taste, than those other new wave bands. "Boys in Dresses" (video above) was one of the standout tracks on their impressive debut album, Guilt by Association. Another was "Get Out of My Stomach." Just typing that title brings the chorus back to my mind:

Get out of my mind.
Get out of my stomach.
Get out of my life.
You're not my kind. No way!

Mind you, I'm typing this all by heart -- no checking of reference materials. Finding out about the Anglos, getting (and reviewing) their record, interviewing Suzy for an article, seeing them in concert...those were some of the great experiences I had running the music section of a campus newspaper.

Why do I bring this up now?

As I am wont to do, I was playing around in Youtube, and absent-mindedly typed their name in. I found the video above. And the memories came flooding back...

The video was posted by Mad Dog, which I recognized as the pseudonym of the Anglos' producer/raconteur. Mad Dog also owned and ran Brat Records, the label that put out the album ("By Brats, for Brats" was the slogan, IIRC). So I posted a comment. And Mad Dog responded. They've been digitizing the band's material and posting it on Soundcloud. It's here, in case you're interested. And, if you have any taste in music, you are interested.

Mad Dog also said they'll be digitizing the vinyl -- the group's first three albums -- Guilt by Association, Scream to Be Heard and A Deal's a Deal, were never released on CD, or in any digital form. As far as I know, anyway. Which is a shame, because there's so much great material there. But now there's hope. I really can't wait to hear their cover of Cat Stevens' "Wild World" again.

Now, can someone who understands the interwebs better than I do tell me how I can buy the downloads of this?

*It's late now, so I won;t bore all y'all with the details of how I came across them. Hint: It involved my role as Music Editor of Skyline.

david santos, r.i.p.

Sometimes it seems as if you have all the time in the world, and you can get to something tomorrow. Or next week or next year. And sometimes you find out that your time is up.

I just found out tonight that David Santos, one of my roommates in grad school, passed away. This didn't happen today or yesterday. Or last week or last year. It happened in 2011, so you can figure out that we haven't stayed close through the years. But David was one of the people that I've been figuring I'll catch up with eventually. Eventually... I guess not.

I first met David when I started grad school in the fall of 1987. We were both entering the PhD program* at the University of Michigan, and were going to be living in the same dorm -- Baits Stanley on the North Campus. He had gone to the University of Chicago as an undergrad, and had a much stronger background than I did. He and I were in the same real analysis class that first semester, and his help and encouragement kept me afloat.

In our second year, David and I were renting bedrooms in a private house near the Central Campus. I don't think we ever had any more classes together (after that first semester real analysis), but he still always made time to offer me helpful hints on my homeworks.

David had a very quick wit, and always saw connections between seemingly unconnected things. And I always enjoyed his company.

After I left grad school, I only saw David a few times. He occasionally visited New York with his then-girlfriend, Margie, and I was always eager to catch up with them. The last time I saw David was at the wedding of two other friends in Chicago. After that, we fell out of touch. I think we had a conversation in the late 1990s, but I don't recall much in the way of details.

It's been a long time since David was a part of my life in any real way, but I still feel a sense of loss. The world was a better place with David than it is without him.

Here is a memorial website.

Rest in peace, friend.

*Just to make sure no one thinks I am misrepresenting myself, I never did finish the PhD.

a lesson learned too late

On Facebook, recently, I saw some discussion about a couple of professors I knew when I was in grad school at the University of Michigan. One of the professors discussed was M.S. Ramanujan, whom I had had. In that thread, I mentioned that I had my own Ramanujan story, but that I would post it on my blog. So, here it is.

But before I start, let me note that my father had taken a class with ramanujan when he was an undergrad at the UM. That's neither here nor there.

So, it was my first semester as a grad student, and I was taking a class in real analysis with Ramanujan. On the midterm, we were asked to prove disprove the following:

The set A union B is measurable if and only if both A and B are measurable.

We were allowed to assert without proof anything that had been proven in class.

My solution was simple: Let A be a nonmeasurable set of reals. Let B be A's complement. A union B is the set of reals, which is measurable. But neither A nor B is measurable. Therefore the statement is false. QED.

I only got half credit for my solution, which really angered me.

Professor Ramanujan argued that I got half credit because I only answered half the problem. Despite presenting the problem as one statement, he had intended it to be interpreted as two statements:

The set A union B is measurable if both A and B are measurable.

The set A union B is measurable only if both A and B are measurable.

I had proven that the second statement was false, but had not said anything about the first statement. Therefore I only got half credit. Ironically, the first statement is much simpler to handle, since we had proven it in class.

I argued with Professor Ramanujan that I should get full credit; he had presented the proposition as one statement and asked us to prove it or disprove it. I did so. His response was that, if I want to be a hardass about it, he's sure he could review my paper and find points to take off elsewhere. I dropped the argument.

Looking back, I have mixed feelings about it. I was certainly right in at least one interpretation of events. Of course, as one of my classmates pointed out to me, in the name of elegance, I should have written into my answer something along the lines of "Of course, as proven in class, if A and B are both measurable, then their union is measurable."

But the bigger point that I didn't understand is that it didn't really matter. In high school and in undergrad, grades on tests were crucially important, as the final grade would be some well-defined average of scores and tests and homeworks. In grad school, the professors had much wider latitude to assign grades based on how well they felt the student knew the material. So the extra points for restating such a trivial result didn't really matter.

Live and learn.

a lesson i still remember

It was in my seventh grade English class. Our teacher, Mrs. Hirschhorn, assigned us an essay to write about a hero.

At the time, I was a huge baseball fan. Strike that. I was a huge Mets fan. That's a distinction I may expound on in another post if I ever feel like it. At any rate, I was rabid. Tom Seaver was my favorite player.

For those who are unaware, Seaver was the first true superstar the Mets ever had. His acquisition by the Mets (through an odd sequence of lucky events) is often cited as the first fundamental step in turning the team from a motley crew of lovable losers into a respectable club (and the 1969 champions). I won't spend the time here cataloging Seaver's achievements and awards. Suffice to say his career to that point was impressive.

So I wrote my essay about Tom Seaver. I was proud of it when I wrote it. In it, I expounded on what a great ballplayer he was -- I mentioned his awards, his one-hitters, his achievements as one of the era's power pitchers.

Mrs. Hirschhorn. wasn't kind to the essay. I don't remember what grade I got -- or even if the essays were graded as such. But her comments were to the point, even though she didn't address the quality of the writing itself. She told me that she had no doubt that Seaver was a superb ballplayer. But, she asked, what can I point to show that he's a good person. That stung. I resented Mrs. Hirchhorn's reaction. But, decades later, the message she was trying to convey has stuck with me.

Thank you, Mrs. Hirschhorn, wherever you are.

how did you appreciate me today?

I really miss the Ypsilanti Press. Ypsilanti, Michigan, is a small city sitting between Ann Arbor and Detroit. The Press was a crappy little newspaper, overshadowed by the Detroit papers -- the Free Press and the Daily News. And it was even overshadowed by The Ann Arbor News. And, if I am not mistaken, it stopped publishing more than 20 years ago.

But I loved it because it seemed that they would print any stupid letter I sent them.

And, remembering one of those stupid letters, I say I hope you've spent today as it was intended -- appreciating me.

you're just a bayesian

I was discussing probability with a colleague, and the conversation reminded me of an incident in college.

For the purpose of this narrative, I will present a lot of verbal exchanges using quotation marks. That is just a convenience for the purposes of telling the story. Except for the final punchline, I don't remember what was said verbatim.

In a probability class, the professor was introducing us to the concept of hypothesis testing. She asked us: "If I flip a coin 100 times and it lands on heads each time, how likely is it the it's a fair coin?"

What she meant to ask -- and it was a long time before I realized this -- was, "If I have a fair coin, and flip it 100 times, how likely is it to come up heads each time."

The difference may seem subtle, but it's crucial. The answer to the question she meant to ask is (1/2)^100, which is tiny. But the question she actually asked cannot be answered without more information.

She expected a straightforward answer, but I said that it depends.

"On what?"

"On how certain you were that it was a fair coin before you started flipping it."

She insisted that that was irrelevant. It was really unlikely that I had a fair coin if I flipped it and got heads 100 times.

"If I pulled it from a drawer of coins, and I know that half -- or even 1% -- of the coins in the drawer are double-headed, sure. But what if I have absolutely perfect knowledge going in that it's a fair coin? Then, even after 100 heads in a row -- or 1000, or 10,000 -- I still know it's a fair coin."

We went back and forth for a while, restating the question and related logic. I didn't realize what she had meant to ask. And she had gotten so caught up that she didn't realize her mistake. Eventually it became clear that the discussion wasn't productive. And she had to move on with the lesson.

"Oh, you're just a Bayesian" she told me...

three things i learned in school that i will never forget

Here are three things that I learned in school and will never forget.

A Talmudic Principle:
"אין רצוני שיהי פקדוני ביד אחר" It's pronounced "Ain r'tzoni sh'y'hey pikdoni b'yad acher." Literally
translated, it means "I didn't want my property to be in someone else's hand. This was a sentence from eight grade Talmud class. I don't remember which book of the Talmud we were in. The topic was who is responsible if a person's property is damaged while being held by a second person. Say, for example, I have your bicycle and it is damaged or lost. Do I have to pay you for the loss? The answer, of course, depends primarily on two questions:

• Why am I in possession of your property? Did you lend it to me to use? If so, am I paying for its use? Or am I  holding it because you need someone to take care of it? If so, are you paying me for the service?
• How did the object get damaged or lost? Was I careless? Was it normal use? Did I lend it to a third party?

That last question is where the concept (quoted above in Hebrew) comes into play. Unless I got your permission to pass on your property to the third party, the rules are very much against me.

Why do I remember this one concept when I don;t remember any other line of Talmud? Because our teacher, Rabbi Atik, insisted that it's really important. SO he got the whole class to chant it over and over again. Then, while we were still chanting, he stood us up and marched us up and down the hallway, into every classroom.

The Central Bank of the Soviet Union
It was the "Gosbank." In college, I took summer classes. One summer I took an economics class in money and banking. One question on the final asked for the name of the central bank of the Soviet Union. I didn't know, so I took a wild guess. "First Commie Savings and Loan" I wrote. I got it wrong, but the professor told me the answer. Had I remembered the answer from studying the text, I probably would have forgotten it by now. But in the event, I will always remember.

A cool fact about circles

Suppose you have two circles. One is inside the other, but they share one point. Now, consider a
string of circles in the space between these two circles. The circles in the string touch each other, and also touch the two main circles. The points where the little circles meet are all contained on yet another circle.

I remember this because of the complex analysis course I took in my second semester of grad school. The last question on the midterm (or was it the final?) asked us to prove this. As the professor was handing out the test papers, I saw the diagram on the last page, It looked complicated and scary. I went into a panic and started saying "Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh shit!" over and over. At some point I looked up and saw that the professor had stopped handing out papers and was staring at me. To this day I don't know if he was annoyed or amused.

The irony is that that question is the only one that I got completely right. It was a simple construction using linear fractional transformations.

a bet i almost didn't win

A week or two ago, I wrote a post about Alex Rodriguez and the fact that his ending his baseball career with fewer than 700 home runs means that I get pizza. That post was here. Now, it's possible that I jumped the gun. A-Rod didn't actually retire. It's possible that he'll play next year and manage another four homers. He has said that he'd like to get to 700.

And this all reminds me of a bet I made more than a quarter century ago. I won that bet, though at one point it looked like it might end in a draw, all because of the San Andreas Fault.

It was the spring of 1989, and I was in my final semester of grad school at the University of Michigan. The school is in Ann Arbor, just a stone's throw from Detroit. For whatever reason, I said something disparaging about the Tigers. My friend, Rod, overheard, and insisted that they had a good team. So good, in fact, that they would win the World Series. As an aside, let me note that the Tigers finished that year in last place with 103 losses. Anyway, Rod was so certain of the Tigers' greatness that he bet me that they would win the series. Ten dollars. Even odds. He didn't even make me pick a team. It was the Tigers against the rest of Major League baseball. To this day I don't know what Rod was thinking.

Anyway, come the fall, I went back to Ann Arbor for a visit. The Tigers were firmly in last place, mathematically eliminated from the playoff picture. No sooner did I enter the commons room where math grad students hung out, then someone (was it Joe?) suggested that Rod should just pay me. Rod demurred. The Tigers being eliminated from the series wasn't enough to ensure my victory. He pointed out that, by the terms of the bet, I didn't win unless someone else won the series. If no one wins, it's a push.

It seemed silly to me, there had been a World Series winner every year since 1905, and there was no reason for 1989 to be different. But Rod had a point, and I accepted the fact that I'd have to wait another month and a half to get my money.

And that was the year of the earthquake. As the Giants and A's prepared for Game 3, an earthquake struck San Francisco. The series was postponed, and there was talk about canceling. In that event, I wouldn't have won the bet.

from the prehistory of joey thumpe

In the early 1990s I made a hobby out of writing letters to celebrities, politicians and captains of industry. I wrote these letters under the name "Joey Thumpe," for which I assumed the persona of a crackpot. I saved these letters (and the responses I received) in several volumes.

In a conversation at work, I casually mentioned that I had used the pseudonym. A little later I got an email from a colleague with a link to one of my early letters. This was a letter I wrote (as Thumpe) to the Michigan Review in 1998. It's the second letter in the picture at right. I vaguely remember it, though I don't recall why I bothered writing it. Probably just to see how far I could push the envelope. At any rate, this predated the crackpot letters that I would write as Thumpe a few years later. I hadn't yet developed my alter-ego's personality. So I guess this is a bit of the prehistory of Joey Thumpe.

Enjoy.

transgender rights and my college athletic career

Questions are swirling about transgender rights, and the world of school athletics is not immune, as demonstrated by these stories from Alaska and the IOC.

It reminds me of an incident from my freshman year of college. As a reporter from one of our campus newspapers, I was covering a Jello-eating contest. There were separate competitions for males and females, and for some reason there weren't enough female contestants. Now, to be honest, I don;t know why they needed to have a minimum number of contestants (at least, beyond one). If there are only x contestants (with x>0), let them compete. But no. They needed one more. And I was asked to compete. In the women's competition.

Always game, I did it. And I won. For years, I jokingly told friends that I had been the Queens College women's Jell-o-eating champion. Of course, people laughed, and it was all good fun. But now, if I tell people, it takes on a different meaning...