2015 - year of the future

One of three 1985 Lorraines

If you are a fan of the Back to the Future trilogy, as I am, you don't need to be told that the year 2015 is very important in those movies' universe. So much so it has an entry in Futurepedia:

2015 is a year in the 21st century. 

By this time in history, technology had progressed as much during the 30 years since 1985 as it had during the previous 30 years from 1955 to 1985. Electronics were in virtually everything from clothing to garbage cans to make them move, talk and/or make electronic noises. 

Flying cars, once they were invented and perfected, had become so common that drivers no longer needed roads — except perhaps for short journeys. Skyways dominated the skies of central California and eventually the entire world. Cultural influences from other countries, particularly Japan, were more often seen in food and clothing. 

Life was lived at a quicker pace than before, in evidence by the speed that people walked down the street, the time it took to cook dinner, and the swiftness of court trials.

Although of course the Future won't actually arrive until October 21.

This French article, which I haven't run through Google translator, seems to be making an interesting point - that the actors who were aged 30 years with makeup for Back to the Future II actually look better in real life than they did in the movie. Although they kind of cheated for Lea Thompson, who actually had three different appearances in her character's future. In the movie her "real age" was set in 1955 and she was 30 years older in 1985 - first though she's the fatter Lorraine married to loser George McFly, but after Marty goes back to 1955 she's the trimmer, tennis-playing Lorraine married to successful sci-fi author George McFly, and then in BTTF II she's the glammed up cosmetic surgery-fied Lorraine married to Biff. The French article compares the real present-day Lea Thompson to the fatter Lorraine McFly.

And when I was doing the 4-mile run in Central Park on New Years Eve, I couldn't help thinking of this scene from BTTF III. It should be noted that it isn't clear exactly which "future" Doc is talking about - by this point in the trilogy his character, in this scene set in 1885 has already been to 1955, 1985 and 2015 - but presumably people are still running for fun in the BTTF 2015 as much as in 1985. He's obviously not talking about 1955 though - nobody ran for "fun" or even to keep in shape back then.

Cat lady blues

Commodified representation of human loneliness

I don't know if the problem is my personality, my age, or the age we live in but I find it so difficult to have friends anymore. I mean I have them, but so many of them are hopeless alcoholics, or have serious health problems or are flaky or moved far away. One friend I've had since seventh grade is now a Jesus freak. And I know a bunch of theater people  but you can hardly call them friends. You'll see them if you can do something for them, like put them in your production, but other than that, you'll never hear from them.

And dating is of course one failure after another. I suppose I could find company if I was willing to spend time with men I find unattractive-to-intolerable who want to get into my pants. Turns out I'm not that desperate for companionship yet.

So I hang out with my two cats a lot. I suspect I'm not alone since "crazy cat lady" is now a well-recognized trope. It's hard not to despair - I doubt it gets easier to find friends as you get older. Although I do cling to the notion that you aren't a "crazy" cat lady until you have lots of cats. I think having only two is still under the crazy line.

Meanwhile, it seems loneliness isn't only unpleasant, it's life-threatening.

Philosopher Brendan Myers believes that existential loneliness is the human condition. He's all about "pushing back the boundaries of loneliness a little bit." I became curious about Myers and found his web site.

The war on porn

Actually, no, there is no war on porn, but I have been struck recently by a bunch of people, non-Puritanical, pro-sex people, who want everybody to reconsider the use of porn, especially when it morphs into porn addiction.

I blogged about an adorable man a few months ago, and his TED talk called Why I Stopped Watching Porn.

Lately I found out about a web site called Make Love Not Porn, by a social media phenomenon named Cindy Gallop, know for her black apartment and her video talks on the subject of how porn is warping the sensibilities of the 20-something men she dates.

Gallop in turn is a huge fan of Don Jon, directed by and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a movie about a porn addict who recovers to have a relationship with an older woman played by Julianne Moore. It isn't anti-porn, but anti modern, high-tech Internet porn addiction.

And it is really, scientifically an addiction if this TED Talk The Great Porn Experiment is to be believed.

Are Black people more human?

In the past few years it has become fairly well-established that some modern humans have Neanderthal genes. However, there are two schools of thought on why that is. One is that Europeans homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals, which I think is the most parsimonious and therefore likely explanation, while the other is that the shared ancestors of humans and Neanderthals became genetically isolated, with southern African populations remaining virtually pure homo sapien and northern Africa and European populations expressing more genes that are also common to Neanderthals.

Here are some charts from New Scientist that tell the story.

But no matter whether you believe in the sex or no-sex theory, either way what this all boils down to is that the more recently your ancestors lived in Africa, the more likely that you are a pure homo sapien, undiluted with the genes of a separate sub-species of humanoid.

And I'd bet anything that if the situation were reversed and Africans were more likely to have Neandertal genes, race-obsessives like Razib Khan would use that fact to proclaim African inferiority, on the grounds that their genome is polluted by an extinct species.

I decided to check in with Khan's writings and see what he thinks about all this. It appears that he's something of a Neanderthal denialist. This is perhaps not surprising since he doesn't think highly of Neanderthals and of course if Africans have no Neanderthal, that would be a good thing:

Perhaps the difference between Neanderthals and behaviorally modern humans was less about large between group differences in individual level traits, and more about the fact than Neanderthals simply lacked the leadership cadre which behaviorally modern humans possessed. In this scenario most modern humans are just like Neandertals, lacking vision, drive, and proximate insanity. Neandertals would not have had their Alexander the Greats, but perhaps they would not have had their Adolf Hitlers.

None of this is based on evidence of course, but since when did socio-biologists/evolutionary psychologists ever rely on evidence? Speculation has always been their favorite scientific method.

More recently Khan appears to hold out hope that Africans are less pure homo sapiens sapiens than current data might appear to indicate:

I assume that in the near future a lot of whole genome analysis is going to come out of Africa, with decent population coverage (yes, Sarah Tishkoff is probably going to be on the author line, so you can get a sense of which populations). The assertion that there is more genetic diversity within Africa than outside is often used to glib effect in my opinion, but in this case I think that this fact may be indicative of future career possibilities for human population and phylo genomicists.

Because Khan is such a bad writer - and I suspect the lack of clarity serves his real purpose, it's often difficult to get what he's driving at. It always helps to remember that he is absolutely obsessed with the concept of race, and of determining which races are intellectually inferior - although of course he's already made up his mind which one is the most inferior. It also helps if you've been studying the racial end of the evolutionary psychology spectrum and know that when they say "human biodiversity" it means, as Rational Wiki says:

• Human biodiversity or HBD:^[2] By being just one "bio" away from supporting "diversity" and by failing to mention race, human biodiversity is the most innocuous form of racialism, because it allows one to deny any racism -- because it's recognizing biodiversity, not being racist!

Khan is apparently afraid to tangle with his critics in the 3Quarks comments now, so instead he's retreated to flinging feces across the fence from his safe perch at the far-right Unz Reader. He says:

There is no Platonic sense where there are perfect categories with ideal uses. Rather, we muddle on, making usage of heuristics and frameworks which are serviceable for the moment. We lose our way when we ignore the multi-textured nature of the issues.

What this appears to mean is that Khan really has no clear definition for "race" and he's fine with that and we can "muddle on" without any concern for rigor or truth. In other words race is whatever Khan says it is. And anybody who expects more than that in the discussion is a wacko who expects pie in the sky.

Although he doesn't always use the term race, he sometimes likes to use the term group, as in:

Razib adds: Racist? God-that-I-don’t-believe-in I’m tired of this crap. I’ve addressed these issues before. I believe in equality before the law. But, I believe different groups probably have different aptitudes (not moral inferiority or superiority)-and the axiom of equality-that all groups have the exact same tendencies as our common evolutionary heritage, could cause serious problems when applied to public policy.

If you are going to declare that "groups" have different aptitudes from others, might it not be important to be clear about which individuals belong to which aptitude groups? Apparently Razib Khan feels like it's no big deal if there is no clarity there. Much like his writing.

Oh, and also, apparently right-wing Razib Khan has found agreement among the readers of his far-right web site that liberals are closed-minded hypocrites. Who could have seen that coming?

Razib Khan, America's favorite race-obsessed science writer

I had been ignoring Razib Khan recently, but I've been getting hits on this web site lately from the discussion board associated with 3Quarks - specifically a piece posted there that demonstrates Khan's usual obsession with "race."

Coincidentally, I was just recently wondering what the racialists thought of the recent NYTimes maps displaying ethnic/genetic breakdowns of Americans. My mistake was going to the blatantly racist American Renaissance web site, when I should have just gone directly to their hero Khan.

You get a sense of Khan's anxiety over the possibility of "race mixing" in the title of his Unz editorial American Racial Boundaries Are Quite Distinct (For Now).

This editorial is valuable in its crystal clear demonstration of Khan's extremist, unscientific approach to ethnicity - his use of the word "hybrid" -

I have known very few non-European hybrids with Chinese – one of my daughter’s friends had a Persian grandmother. She is considered an attractive girl because erm she’s attractive.

The scientific definition of hybrid is:

Hybrid

Definition

noun, plural form: hybrids

(general) Any of mixed origin or composition, or the combination of two or more different things.

(biology) An offspring resulting from the cross between parents of different species or sub-species.

(molecular biology) A complex formed by joining two complementary strands of nucleic acids.

adjective

Of or pertaining to the offspring produced from crossbreeding.

Humans are not separate sub-species. A proper use of the term "hybrid" would be human-Neandertal. Khan uses a colloquial definition of "hybrid" when he claims to be talking about science. That's how Khan does it - he plays fast and loose with science-based terminologies and there are enough people baffled by his bullshit that he gets away with it.

In fact, Khan is such a bad writer I can hardly believe he is paid any attention to outside the right-wing bubble - and of course the article reposted at 3Quarks comes from a media outlet of the right-wing Unz Review, which also publishes the thoughts of John Derbyshire on race. Derbyshire was fired from the National Review for being too racist.

Here is how bad Khan is - he wrote an article entitled Why race as a biological construct matters but in fact does not even address race as a "biological construct" in any scientific sense, and in fact what he really means is race as a sociological construct. But you could argue I suppose that since "race" is used to refer to humans and we are biological entities it's not a technical falsehood. But that's how Razib Khan writes - slippery and full of shit.

He says:

So there you have it. An underlying biological reality which is a reflection of deep history. It may not be real or factual, but it is consistent and coherent.

and later:

There is no Platonic sense where there are perfect categories with ideal uses. Rather, we muddle on, making usage of heuristics and frameworks which are serviceable for the moment. We lose our way when we ignore the multi-textured nature of the issues.

Laughably, this writer for a science magazine Discover feels that consistency and coherence is more important than reality or fact when it comes to what he chooses to call "an underlying biological reality."

And he's fine with heuristics and frameworks which are "serviceable for the moment."

How convenient for someone who wants to argue that "race" is a valid scientific category and who is too lazy to use the term "hybrid" in a non-colloquial sense.

We should not be too surprised that Khan is given this kind of leeway - many science writers rely on reader (and apparently editor) ignorance and their own bullshit artistry. Steven Pinker, a mainstream public intellectual is habitually sloppy, and likes to have things both ways, and just about the only publication that consistently calls him on it is The New Yorker. And when the New Yorker criticizes Pinker, he turns to Razib Khan to back him up.

And I thought the world of theater was full of assholes.

Yes I ran 4 miles at midnight

My daughter gave me a bunch of cold-weather running gear for Christmas, and my therapist thought it would be a good idea, so I participated in the Midnight Run in Central Park. My time wasn't great, but I was glad to complete the whole damn thing - it was quite cold and although my daughter gave me quality gear, my butt was freezing off because the gear had fairly light butt coverage. It took hours after I got home for my butt to warm up properly. Oy. But hey, at least I hit the ground running in 2015, so to speak.

The honest disdain of NYC theater people

You have to kind of almost admire the refusal of theater people in off-off Broadway to suck up to you in any way. I pay actors and stage managers typically much more than the usual fee to work for me and although I'm friends of theirs on Facebook, they generally have no interest in even pretending they are an actual friend.

One actor I've worked with for several years has made it blatantly clear that she has absolutely zero interest in any kind of friendship with me, in spite of my consistently treating her well. And the stage manager I worked with recently just posted something on Facebook talking about the great things she did this year and did not mention our project together, in spite of winning an award for it. And in spite of that, another actor on that same project clicked "Like" on that post. It's mind-boggling.

I mean I pay these people. I don't expect them to pretend to be my best friend but Jesus Christ you'd think for the sake of their own careers they would make a tiny effort. The utter disdain is absolutely breath-taking.

I really question more and more why I do this theater thing. It's incredibly expensive and by and large the people involved in theater are complete narcissistic assholes.

New years resolution: avoid theater people who disrespect me like the plague.

2014 Roundup

My more typical New Years Eve

Well 2014 was much better than 2013 if only because I didn't have a  major operation during the entire year. Actually it was better than 2012, too, when I was unemployed for six months. And 2008 - 2011 because I had a horrible job (and others agree) which, combined with major depression caused me to develop an anxiety disorder, which I'm still dealing with - but which is improved thanks to therapy.

In 2014 I managed to finally produce the full-length version of JULIA & BUDDY which I had been trying to do since 2011. I also completed a first draft of DARK MARKET about Ayn Rand and the 2008 meltdown, started my play about Marilyn Monroe, wrote a 10-minute play about the Bronte sisters. I also made almost serious money from ads on the NYCPlaywrights web site - I made twice as much money from the blog in December 2014 as I did in December 2013.

Also in 2014:

 >  The liberal media finally woke up to the perniciousness of Social Justice Warriors, thanks in part to the Feminism's Toxic Twitter Wars article in The Nation and to the ridiculous kerfuffle fomented by a friend of right-winger Michelle Malkin who goes by the Twitter handle of Suey Park and her moronic attack on Stephen Colbert. Followed up by the less well-known but just as significant "Jacobinghazi" in which the absolute awfulness of Sarah Kendzior became crystal clear.

And of course I have a personal interest in the SJW phenomenon, since I was smeared by SJWs way back in 2011 for daring to think that a song by John Lennon and Yoko Ono was not racist, and thanks to the collusion of Google and Tumblr, smears against me by SJW Mikki Kendall and SJW K. Tempest Bradford still show up at the top of Google search results on my name.

It should be noted that in spite of the name Social Justice Warriors, these people do nothing to promote social justice. They simply use good causes to promote their own careers, through endless Twitter wars and attacking liberals and feminists. I still have to wonder how much of the SJW phenomenon is sock puppetry by the Right, the SJW attacks are so ridiculously focused on the Left, virtually ignoring the actual perpetrators of social injustice on the Right.
But although the SJWs were called out in 2014 instead of universally lionized as heroes of the Left as they were in 2013, I also discovered that those who might be allies against Social Justice Warriors turned out to be just as fond of anti-feminist rhetoric, as when I found Doug Henwood attacking "bourgeois feminists" (whatever that is - I saw via Facebook that Henwood seems to live as bourgeois a lifestyle as anybody I've ever known) and discovered Will Shetterly supporting faux feminist right-winger Christina Hoff Sommers who has a long, long history of anti-feminist statements and is currently a "resident scholar" at the far-right, Koch brothers-supported American Enterprise Institute.

Leading me to conclude once again, as with the SJW vs. New Atheist war, that both sides are idiots. And feminism is as usual under attack from all sides. But on the plus side, I received a very nice email from Katha Pollitt for defending her against Kendzior's scurrilous attacks.

 >  The Rise of Ayn Rand Awareness - in the past I have been amazed by how many people - educated and, I thought, well-informed people had no idea who Ayn Rand was. But I think more and more people are aware of her, partly because some prominent Republicans are followers of hers, including Rand and Ron Paul and Paul Ryan. And just this past month she's been getting lots of publicity lately thanks to this story: Ayn Rand helped the FBI investigate whether ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ was commie propaganda. And one of the New Yorker's most viewed blog posts of 2014 was a parody Ayn Rand Reviews Children’s Movies. So this is definitely the year to produce DARK MARKET - if I can manage it financially or find a producer or co-producer.

 >  My dating life - I actually had one in 2014, although it was a string of indisputable failures. The one guy I might have liked well enough to be intimate with turned out to live in a pit of filth in Brooklyn, and was shameless enough to invite me into it. I had a date last night with a guy who claimed to be 58 but who finally admitted to being older, although he never said how much older. At least 60. He really liked me though, enough to inquire, as I was about to go through the subway turnstile at the end of the date, "when was the last time you had your pussy eaten really well?" I guess since I have mostly been dating guys under 30, I assumed that making such explicit statements on a first date was an issue for younger guys. Coming from a guy who is at least 60, it's just gross. I mean, if it was a really hot guy saying that on a first date, maybe it would be tolerable. But I really doubt there is any 60 year old guy in the world attractive enough to qualify as really hot. Certainly not this guy. You would think he'd have enough restraint and gravitas at that age not to bust out with something like that in a freaking subway station. Some people never grow up I guess. My therapist says the best way to meet people is through activities that you like, but I haven't had any luck through the world of theater. So many men in theater are gay, and the ones who are not gay, and at all attractive, are in too much demand from the straight female actors. Oh you goddam teasing actors. And it's just as bad if not worse with directors. And almost all straight male playwrights I know are creeps.

 >  Jury duty - my first as a citizen of New York. It was a hell of an experience and I hope to get a play out of it, TWELVE ANGRY JURORS FROM QUEENS, but so far I've only gotten a few pages written. 

 >  Running - this was my real success story. I have run more in 2014 than in my entire life. Two official 5K runs, and almost weekly runs of 3 - 4 or even 5 - 6 miles. And I plan to start off 2015 right by running in the NYRR Midnight Run tonight. My daughter has me in training for a 10K for 2015 and she's even talking half marathon. Wow. Running, like all endurance physical activities, can be very unpleasant, but I keep doing it because first of all, I get to spend time with my busy daughter, but also it seems like every time I look in the NYTimes there is another article about how running and other exercise keeps you young:

How Exercise Changes Our DNA
Now new research reports that the answer may lie, in part, in our DNA. Exercise, a new study finds, changes the shape and functioning of our genes, an important stop on the way to improved health and fitness.

Got a Minute? Let’s Work Out
According to a lovely new study, a single minute of intense exercise, embedded within an otherwise easy 10-minute workout, can improve fitness and health.

Run to Stay Young
Running may reverse aging in certain ways while walking does not, a noteworthy new study of active older people finds. The findings raise interesting questions about whether most of us need to pick up the pace of our workouts in order to gain the greatest benefit.

Does Exercise Really Make Us Smarter?

Still, the findings are strong enough to suggest that exercise really does change the brain and may, in the process, improve thinking, Mr. Stothart said. That conclusion should encourage scientists to look even more closely into how, at a molecular level, exercise remodels the human brain, he said. It also should spur the rest of us to move, since the benefits are, it seems, not imaginary, even if they are in our head.

What’s Your Fitness Age?
Dr. Wisloff and his colleagues offer free exercise suggestions on their website. But he said almost any type and amount of exercise should help to increase your VO2max and lower your fitness age, potentially increasing your lifespan.

How Exercise May Protect Against Depression

Exercise may help to safeguard the mind against depression through previously unknown effects on working muscles, according to a new study involving mice. The findings may have broad implications for anyone whose stress levels threaten to become emotionally overwhelming.

Running 5 Minutes a Day Has Long-Lasting Benefits

Running for as little as five minutes a day could significantly lower a person’s risk of dying prematurely, according to a large-scale new study of exercise and mortality. The findings suggest that the benefits of even small amounts of vigorous exercise may be much greater than experts had assumed.

Want to Be More Creative? Take a Walk

For almost every student, creativity increased substantially when they walked. Most were able to generate about 60 percent more uses for an object, and the ideas were both “novel and appropriate,” Dr. Oppezzo writes in her study, which was published this month in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Well that's enough for now - I find it pretty compelling.

Now I'm off to run in Central Park to mark the beginning of 2015.

Ring of Fire

So true, John Oliver

I plan to run in Central Park at midnight myself.

On the virtues of availability

Rom-Com project update

We are up to 92 "romantic comedy" submissions for the NYCPlaywrights Take Back the Rom-Com project and of those, 57 have failed utterly at being both romantic and comedic - and most failed on both counts.

I do have to wonder if at least some of the blame should be attributed to all the crass, stupid, and sometimes even misogynist movies of the last 20 years that have been labeled "romantic comedy."

Case in point, the hideous, horrible "Love Actually" - here is a great takedown in The Atlantic: Love Actually Is the Least Romantic Film of All Time.

Although I do have a beef with this article - the things he considers "quibbles" I consider pretty damn significant, and why this movie isn't merely a failed "romantic comedy" but a scourge upon the earth:

There are plenty of other aspects of Love Actually with which one might reasonably take issue: the frequent references to how much women weigh, the recurring motif of men wooing their much-younger subordinates, the movie’s peculiar conviction that weddings and funerals ought to be livened up by (respectively) the Beatles and the Bay City Rollers, and so on.

It's the misogyny, stupid.

The fact that this movie is considered a romantic comedy Christmas classic leads me to believe that the world is brimming full of insensitive, oafish, misogynist, stupid people.

And that my therapist is right.

Not sure if that helps...

Christmas lights in the New Jersey suburbs

  ME
I feel awful about this, I hate to admit it - it's so arrogant - but I secretly think most people I meet are idiots.

  MY THERAPIST
Most people ARE idiots.

Peak Car

Like all Americans my age, my life has been greatly influenced by private car ownership - mine even a tad more than usual since I was once a driving instructor.

I've been re-watching Ric Burns' series New York: A Documentary Film, and one of the big themes is the (temporary) decline of New York City thanks to the rise of car ownership, and Robert Moses' attempts to criss-cross highways all over Manhattan. One of my favorite segments of the series is the story of the forces of Robert Moses versus Jane Jacobs and the anti-highway forces headquartered in Greenwich Village.

The car has been such a huge force in my life, it hardly seems possible, and yet empirical evidence seems to indicate that we've passed "peak car." The Atlantic ran an article last year called The Decline of US Driving in 6 Charts.

Here is one of the charts:

The Average Driver Travels 1,200 Fewer Miles Each YearAmericans are also spending far less time in the cars they do own. The average U.S. driver traveled 12,492 miles in 2011, down about 1,200 miles, or 9 percent, from our mid-aughts peak.  

Even with population growth, the country as a whole is barely driving more than during the recession.

So why did this happen? Few articles that I've Googled offer any reasons, but I remember about 12 years ago I was arguing with an ex-boyfriend that the age of the suburbs was over - I maintained that people would start moving back to the city again. And a big reason, I thought, and think, is female economic independence - that factor that is reshaping the world, but which, I believe, gets almost no attention from pundits and sociologists because female economic independence is considered a woman's issue and therefore not of much interest to important people (i.e. men).

Suburban homes are conceived as little kingdoms with each man the king of his domain and the women and children subjects. Female economic independence is a huge contributor to the end of this kingdom concept. Also as suburban houses become larger, they require more and more money and effort to maintain - something only the rich, in McMansions, can afford. Working women no longer have the time to devote to better huge homes and gardens in the suburbs. Also working women have fewer children, so you no longer need a big house and a big yard.

And then there is the cultural wasteland of the typical suburb. When my family moved to Bensalem, PA, a suburb of Philadelphia, there was not even a public library nearby. The first library I ever stepped inside was in northeast Philadelphia, taken by my best friend Laura's mother, the only adult I knew who read for pleasure. My parents were/are both basically hostile to intellectual pursuits - flat out Philistines. The culture-free suburbs are/were their idea of paradise. My mother in particular was very upset when we moved to Pennsauken, a New Jersey town (for economic reasons). But I was thrilled that we moved to a house within walking distance of a library.

My hunch about the decline of suburbs is supported by this article in the Economist:

...the OECD, a rich-country think-tank, expects that by 2050, 86% of the rich world’s population will live in urban areas, up from 77% in 2010.

Another factor in the decline of driving must surely be the rise of the Internet - people can now work from home easily, and although it does threaten the power of middle-managers and so used less than it might otherwise be, there's too much temptation to use it when, for whatever reason, one can't make the commute - and even middle managers take advantage of that option.

When I was growing up, cities were doing so badly that my assumption as a kid was that cities were the places that poor people lived. Rich people lived in the country. But as soon as I was a teenager, my friends and I were always heading off to the nearest big city, Philadelphia, to see free open-air concerts and to go to the art museums and the midnight movies.

The Burns documentary lays the blame squarely on the federal Title One "slum clearing" legislation and the Title Two low-cost, single-family mortgage aid legislation, and the federal highway system. The documentary focuses on New York City, but it's always been said that Camden New Jersey was a vibrant city until the highway system made it possible for Philadelphians to motor right past it and into the farm land of New Jersey where they set up suburban communities - my sister lives in one of these and I was just there for Christmas. A mile from her home there was a highway that contained, one after another of chain stores and fast food places. An absolute suburban wasteland - I don't know why she wants to live there, but then she has about as much use for the arts or culture as my parents, so it makes sense. Of course we had to drive to get there.

I will not buy CFLs if I can help it because they are hazardous

The noble, non-toxic incandescent bulb

I never paid much attention to the new compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) which are being used more and more in place of the incandescents until I broke a CFL. Then I discovered that CFLs are classified as hazardous waste. So when you break an incandescent bulb, your biggest hazard is glass shards. So you sweep up the shards, throw them in the trash and go on with your life. Not so with CFLs - these are the steps that the EPA itself recommends if you break one:

Before Cleanup

• Have people and pets leave the room.
• Air out the room for 5-10 minutes by opening a window or door to the outdoor environment. 
• Shut off the central forced air heating/air-conditioning system, if you have one.
• Collect materials needed to clean up broken bulb:
  • stiff paper or cardboard;
  • sticky tape;
  • damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes (for hard surfaces); and
  • a glass jar with a metal lid or a sealable plastic bag.

During Cleanup

• DO NOT VACUUM.  Vacuuming is not recommended unless broken glass remains after all other cleanup steps have been taken.  Vacuuming could spread mercury-containing powder or mercury vapor.
• Be thorough in collecting broken glass and visible powder.  Scoop up glass fragments and powder using stiff paper or cardboard.  Use sticky tape, such as duct tape, to pick up any remaining small glass fragments and powder. Place the used tape in the glass jar or plastic bag.  See the detailed cleanup instructions for more information, and for differences in cleaning up hard surfaces versus carpeting or rugs.
• Place cleanup materials in a sealable container.

After Cleanup

• Promptly place all bulb debris and cleanup materials, including vacuum cleaner bags, outdoors in a trash container or protected area until materials can be disposed of.  Avoid leaving any bulb fragments or cleanup materials indoors. 
• Next, check with your local government about disposal requirements in your area, because some localities require fluorescent bulbs (broken or unbroken) be taken to a local recycling center. If there is no such requirement in your area, you can dispose of the materials with your household trash.
• If practical, continue to air out the room where the bulb was broken and leave the heating/air conditioning system shut off for several hours.

If you have further questions, please call your local poison control center at 1-800-222-1222.

And please note, there is no public service announcement system that I am aware of that lets people even know that the disposal of a CFL bulb is very different from the disposal of an incandescent bulb. Who knows how many people have breathed in and/or disbursed mercury vapors because they had no idea.

And then there's disposal of a burnt-out CFL bulb - again, you are not supposed to just throw it in a trash can, you are supposed to take them somewhere, because they are toxic.

New research from scientists in California and South Korea, published yesterday in Environmental Science and Technology, shows that while compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) and LEDs have better energy efficiency than incandescent bulbs, they compare unfavorably when you look at their potential toxicity (at the end-of-life phase) and resource depletion...

I find it appalling that not only are CFLs much more toxic that incandescent bulbs, but that this information is so poorly communicated at a time when incandescent bulbs are being phased out.

Governments around the world have passed measures to phase out incandescent light bulbs for general lighting in favor of more energy-efficient lighting alternatives. Phase-out regulations effectively ban the manufacture, importation or sale of incandescent light bulbs for general lighting. The regulations would allow sale of future versions of incandescent bulbs if they are sufficiently energy efficient.

Keep Your Skirts Down Mary Ann

Monroe was definitely not a natural blonde. I've never seen such an explicit
image as this one from the subway photo shoot - it's from this German web site.

Another piece of music that I plan to use in my play about Marilyn Monroe is Keep Your Skirts Down Mary Ann, which, although published in 1925, appears to be in the public domain, at least according to archive.org. The song is much less famous than "All By Myself" by Irvin Berlin, and was not recorded by Fitzgerald - it's a slightly risque novelty song, not a classic by an American master - but I think it's pretty appropriate considering that the famous photo shoot of Marilyn's skirt being blown up over the subway grate was considered by many to be a critical component of the demise of Monroe's marriage to Joe DiMaggio - allegedly DiMaggio was very upset by the whole thing - although it appears that it was Monroe who actually filed for the divorce.

I have been unable to find a transcript of the lyrics so I guess I'll have to do it myself. The song is set up as two women with Irish brogues, Mrs. Clancy and Mrs. McCann talk about the daughter of one of them, Mary Ann (so I guess her name is Mary Ann McCann har har) who then shows up herself to argue over her sartorial preferences with her mother:

Mrs. McCann
How do you do, Mrs. Clancy? 

Mrs. Clancy
I'm well thank you, Mrs. McCann and how is yourself? 

Mrs. McCann
Sure I'm all in after the week's wash. Me daughter Mary Ann alone gives me enough to break the back of me. 

Mrs. Clancy
Well after the looks of her today, your wash will be much lighter next week. I'm just half seeing her coming down the street and all I can say is I'm just glad all my girls are boys. Here she comes now. 

Mrs. McCann
Well well will you look at her. (Unintelligible. "Hand gunner"?) 

(sings) 

Mary Ann Mary Ann 

Mary Ann
Yeah? 

Mrs. McCann
I'm ashamed your name's McCann 

Mary Ann
What's the matter, Mamma dear? 

Mrs. McCann
Mary Ann come over here. Faith is that the dress your bought? 

Mary Ann
Don't you know they wear 'em short? 

Mrs. McCann
You'll get pinched if you get caught. 

Mary Ann
Well whaddya want from me? 

Mrs. McCann
Keep your skirts down 

Mary Ann
Aw 

Mrs. McCann
Keep your skirts down 

Mary Ann
Gee 

Mrs. McCann
Keep your skirts down, Mary Ann 

Mary Ann
Aw, applesauce
Gee I have a lovely dimple on my knee. 

Mrs. McCann
Don't I know it.
Faith it wasn't put there for the world to see.
Keep your skirts down.  

Mary Ann
Whaddya mean, down? 

Mrs. McCann
You know what I mean. When you sit down, if you can.
You'd make any man in town a nervous wreck 

Mary Ann
Why? 

Mrs. McCann
Remember you can wear your beads around your neck. 

Mary Ann
Aw Pete's sake 

Mrs. McCann
Keep your skirts down
Keep your skirts down 

Mary Ann
They're goin' up 

Mrs. McCann
Well keep 'em down Mary Ann.
Mary Ann, Mary Ann, sure you'll never get a man. 

Mary Ann
Oh I'll grab one never fear 

Mrs. McCann
Mary Ann just listen here
Men like the old fashioned kind 

Mary Ann
Mamma dear, you're way behind. 

Mrs. McCann
Sure you'll make em lose their mind. 

Mary Ann
Well what am I gonna do? 

Mrs. McCann
Keep your skirts down

Mary Ann
Aw 

Mrs. McCann
Keep them way down 

Mary Ann
Gee whiz 

Mrs. McCann
Keep your skirts down, Mary Ann 

Mary Ann
You make me tired
I might catch a fellow with my stockings rolled 

Mrs. McCann
All that you will ever catch will be a cold
Keep your skirts down 

Mary Ann
Aw whaddya mean down? 

Mrs. McCann
Keep 'em down, when you sit down, if you can 

Mary Ann
Nowadays you must dress like this to win a lad 

Mrs. McCann
Hmm, faith I didn't do it and I won your dad. 

Mary Ann
Well he was no bargain. 

Mrs. McCann
Don't get fresh.
Keep your skirts down. 

Mary Ann
They're goin' up! 

Mrs. McCann
Well keep em down, Mary Ann

I never really thought about it before, but I was surprised that the phrase "gee whiz" has been around since at least 1925. The song is pretty silly but the graphic that accompanied the sheet music is quite beautiful. It seems that graphic design for sheet music was at a generally high level if this page is to be believed.

All By Myself

One of the themes of my play about Marilyn Monroe is solitude. And one of the high points of her life, in my opinion, was her support of the career of Ella Fitzgerald. Put those two things together and throw in the fact that the song "All by Myself" by Irving Berlin was both covered by Fitzgerald and is in the public domain, and I have myself a signature song for this play, which I will have Monroe sing.

My version will be done with a single piano though and not be swinging like Fitzgerald's version.

It has been claimed that Fitzgerald was unable to work at the nightclub The Mocambo due to the color bar, but according to the Wiki on Fitzgerald:

It has been widely reported that Fitzgerald was the first Black performer to play the Mocambo, following Monroe's intervention, but this is not true. African-American singers Herb Jefferies, Eartha Kitt, and Joyce Bryan all played the Mocambo in 1952 and 1953, according to stories published at the time in Jet magazine and Billboard"

The play MARILYN AND ELLA which I discovered via this Wiki article promotes the notion that Monroe helped integrate the nightclub. What Monroe's intervention - she promised the nightclub owner to show up for Fitzgerald's performances - did for sure was help the career of Ella Fitzgerald.

More gripes about the Rom-Com project: we must honor the patriarchy

I reviewed another batch of submissions for the NYCPlaywrights Rom-Com project and at this point only 28 plays have made the cut - I had to reject 48 for not being romantic comedies. So almost two-thirds of the submissions are being rejected.

One way I can tell it isn't going to be a romantic comedy is when the playwright attaches the play to an email that says something like "this isn't your usual romantic comedy." That always means it isn't really a romantic comedy but the playwright figured if they call it a romantic comedy they'll fool the reader into believing it is one.

And about a quarter of all the plays have annoyingly specific ages listed for the characters - which happens plenty but much more often if it's a play with a sexual theme - and the man always has to be older than the woman. Not significantly older, more like two or three years older. For instance one play specified the man was 53 and the woman was 50. Now maybe on a cellular level there is a noticeable difference between someone who is 50 and 53, but in terms of anything else there is virtually no difference. Certainly not in casting. Which means the only reason the playwright specified those ages is so it is clear that the man is older. Because in the idiotic, regressive, antiquated mind of the playwright, it can't be a real romance unless the man is older. Even if only by a few years. The rules of the patriarchy must be honored!

God forbid that somebody think that the man was 50 and the woman was 53!

Of course in the world of online dating it does make a huge difference to men, but there the 53 year old men consider themselves slumming if they contact a 43 years old women. Hell, most of them think they're too good for a 33 year old woman. So making the woman a mere 3 years younger is completely pointless.

I was going to say that the big problem as that most of these playwrights don't know what "romance" means - they don't distinguish between love and lust for instance. But actually, they don't know what "comedy" means either. At least not in the Shakespearean sense, in which, even if there aren't a lot of jokes at least there's a happy ending. Half these plays don't even have a happy ending, much less actual comedy. So most of the plays are failing for both reasons - they are neither romantic nor comedic.

At least we have 28 that make the cut. We're only going to pick 10 at the most. And the deadline is almost a month away.

Downtown Train

Too Big To Fail

I finally got around to watching the movie version of Andrew Ross Sorkin's "Too Big To Fail" about the 2008 financial meltdown. Part of my ongoing reference search for my play DARK MARKET.

The movie pretty much aligns with what I understood about the meltdown, but it had some details that I hadn't known about - and I actually thought they might have been placed into the movie for dramatic effect. I'm a little wary of Sorkin after he done Krugman wrong. But after Googling, discovered they were not:

Hank Paulson pukes from the stress as recounted in Vanity Fair:

And with that Paulson ducked into the private bathroom adjoining his office, closed the big paneled door, and audibly, violently, and repeatedly threw up. He emerged a moment later as if nothing had happened, but in a few minutes he did the same thing all over again. I asked if he wouldn’t rather stop, and resume our conversation another time. “That’s O.K.,” he said. “I’m just going to go through this all. I won’t remember it. You know, I barely remember the details now.”

And Hank Paulson literally knelt before Nancy Pelosi:

“I didn’t know I was going to be the referee for an internal G.O.P. ideological civil war,” Mr. Frank said, according to The A.P.Thursday, in the Roosevelt Room after the session, the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., literally bent down on one knee as he pleaded with Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, not to “blow it up” by withdrawing her party’s support for the package over what Ms. Pelosi derided as a Republican betrayal. 

“I didn’t know you were Catholic,” Ms. Pelosi said, a wry reference to Mr. Paulson’s kneeling, according to someone who observed the exchange. She went on: “It’s not me blowing this up, it’s the Republicans.” 

Mr. Paulson sighed. “I know. I know.” 

It was the very outcome the White House had said it intended to avoid, with partisan presidential politics appearing to trample what had been exceedingly delicate Congressional negotiations.
Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Senate banking committee, denounced the session as “a rescue plan for John McCain,” and proclaimed it a waste of precious hours that could have been spent negotiating. 

But a top aide to Mr. Boehner said it was Democrats who had done the political posturing. The aide, Kevin Smith, said Republicans revolted, in part, because they were chafing at what they saw as an attempt by Democrats to jam through an agreement on the bailout early Thursday and deny Mr. McCain an opportunity to participate in the agreement.

I remembered what a dumbass move it was for McCain to show up and try to get into the middle of the tense Senate negotiations in order to try to score points for his failing presidential campaign, but this movie makes him out to be an even bigger asshole than I remembered. That was pretty enjoyable.

And the filmmakers clearly love Warren Buffet - they not only cast Edward Asner, everybody's favorite lefty uncle, to play him, but they portrayed him at one point in an ice cream parlor with his grand-daughters, taking a call begging for his help.

I enjoyed other aspects of the casting too - I'm a big fan of Tony Shaloub, who played John Mack of Morgan Stanley, and Dan Hedeya was unrecognizable as Barney Frank - last time I remember seeing him was as the creepy ex-husband of Carla Tortelli on "Cheers." I also did not recognize William Hurt, who played Paulson. He looks more like Paulson than my memory of what William Hurt looked like. And Paul Giamatti looks much more like Ben Bernanke than I would have expected.

I also enjoyed the part of the movie when Paulson was on the phone with Christine Lagarde, then the French Ministry of Economic Affairs, Finance and Employment, and just as Lagarde did in real life in the documentary "Inside Job" the actor portraying Lagarde pronounced is name "honk." It's the little things.

A good deal of the movie takes place in September 2008, and I checked this blog's archives to see if I was talking about it - and I was:

I worked in the investment bank's Compliance department - the department that was charged with making sure that the bank's securities holdings met regulations all over the world. And as I watched the computer programmers wrestle with ways to track the securities holdings, to see if they were in compliance with the regulations I realized that when it came to exotics - they really could not. Because basically an exotic could be virtually anything the investment bank wanted it to be.

It still blows my mind - I had come to this realization about the massive amount of unregulated trading going on a few months before the shit started to hit the fan in March 2008. I was shocked by the idea that a stock market which I thought was well-regulated was in fact the wild west.

Luckily I was reading Krugman's blog religiously even back then, to get some insight into what was going on. And I did email one of his columns to Jamie Dimon in March 2008. I never got a response though.

I also recently saw "Margin Call" which was pretty good, although not as entertaining as "Too Big." It also has a cast of big deal actors like Kevin Spacey and Demi Moore. And in both of these movies - and probably every other movie on the subject, there comes a time when a character is asked to explain what all this trading stuff is all about, "in English." I thought the bit in Too Big was pretty good:

Men crossing their legs

The movement to get men to stop hogging so much space in the subway by spreading their legs wide has made it to prime time - the New York Times has an article about it - and apparently the MTA is going to do a campaign about it:

Taking on manspreading for the first time, the authority is set to unveil public service ads that encourage men to share a little less of themselves in the city’s ever-crowded subways cars.
The targets of the campaign, those men who spread their legs wide, into a sort of V-shaped slouch, effectively occupying two, sometimes even three, seats are not hard to find. Whether they will heed the new ads is another question.

I was calling it "mansitting" myself but whatever you call it, it is an obnoxious practice. And predictably, some men justify the practice on the grounds that their junk is so huge and delicate. Which inevitably lead to this tumblr:

Men defending their balls - a superpoem.
The following is a crowdsourced poem, its lines excerpted from the messages of men writing in to defend their balls. Please read it as a continuous composition. The poem will be updated periodically. Thank you for your time.

Related to this justification is the notion that men don't/shouldn't/can't cross their legs. I was reading a bunch of comments on an article that the New Yorker posted to Facebook, about some right-wing French creep - here is the article on the New Yorker's site.

One of the Facebook comments critical of the right-wing creep was: Said the Frenchman who crosses his legs like a girl.

Fortunately there is a tumblr presenting evidence that plenty of manly men (and Truman Capote) are capable of sitting with legs crossed without losing their man card.