The Kindness of Strangers

So, just as in 2002, both England and the USA are out within 24 hours of each other. In fact, it’s been a tough few weeks for me, starting with Boston’s dramatic loss in Game 7 of the NBA Finals — which was actually even more gut-wrenching.

It’s undoubtably been said many times before: being a sports fan is fundamentally about disappointment, about getting used to losing. In every sport, every competition, every tournament, there is one winner, and the fans of every other team go home losers. Virtually every time you invest yourself emotionally in a team — and this holds for even the best teams — you will find your team losing. In fact, due to the nature of tournament play, the loss is often your last memory.

It’s brutal.

Of course, it’s those rare wins that make everything worthwhile, right? (… right?) And in that sense, I’ve been amazingly lucky in the last decade or so. Several of my favorite teams have won a handful of championships: UConn (’99, ’04), the Sox (’04, ’07), and the Celtics (’08). Even teams that I only tangentially root for have had remarkable success: UConn women (’00, ’02-’04, ’09, ’10) and the Patriots (’01, ’03, ’04). It’s been great. And still it burns, every other time.

Here’s a question. It’s tough to be a sports fan, given how often you’re disappointed, and it’s amazing that there are so many fans. No doubt some of the appeal is in etched in our DNA, that human optimism in the face of harsh odds that’s gotten us so far in everything else we do. (And makes us like slot machines…)

But not everyone likes sports. Are sports fans a self-selected group that has a stronger strain of this irrational optimism? Or is losing something you’re conditioned for as a fan, time after wrenching time? And if the latter, is this comfort with losing an ability that translates to other aspects of life? I’m not even sure it would be a good thing, but I’d be curious to know.

Anyway, here’s one good reason to watch sports: Donovan’s 91st minute GOOOOOL. Check out the commentator first before watching the video.

(^^^ listen to this)

(Oh, by the way, if you’re frustrated by the reffing, I can only point you to this post of mine from 2006. I have some new thoughts on the matter — mostly about how hard it would actually be to implement video replay for live-ball situations — but I think it’s still fundamentally right.)

Pinback is another band I like that you may not have heard of. Umesh has described them as the quintessential “AJ” band, since they embody a lot of characteristics that I like in indie-ish music.

They have three incarnations, all of which in their best forms are immensely listenable: the first and most unique is angular, with interesting rhythmic and harmonic constructions; the second is poppy; and the third is “indie”. Here are three respective tracks.

If you don’t like any of those three songs, then you won’t like Pinback. If you do like them, here are some more.

On a side note, it’s really irritating to have to share music via YouTube. I used to use Lala, but then Apple bought them and shut them down. If you look at my earlier posts, you’ll now find a bunch of broken links. I’m working on a longer-term solution…

Okay, so this has become a bit of a music blog — but only temporarily, I swear. I have a list of meatier entries to write, but I’ve been too lazy to get to them. And besides, music stuff is more fun.

So here’s something interesting. Check out these three songs. (Give each one at least a minute.)

Notice anything interesting? Yeah, that slinky descending baseline. Coincidence? Of course not. When I first bought these albums about a decade ago, I was flabbergasted. I looked into it, and it seemed that they all sampled the same song, Isaac Hayes’s “Ike’s Rap II” from 1972:

Ike is the man. I’m still amazed that the Tricky and Portishead albums — which came out within the span of a year — would sample the same song. Anyway, it’s a solid one.

Well, of course things aren’t so simple. At the time, I thought I had made a pretty interesting observation. Naturally, it turns out that there are entire websites devoted to tracking song samples, and I stumbled across one the other day. It turns out that the Beta Band song doesn’t actually sample “Ike’s Rap II” — it samples (or, more directly, rips off) a Gunter Kallman Choir cover of “Daydream in Blue” by the Wallace Collection from 1968! (And has its own same-year twin.)

It also appears that Ike himself may have sampled “Daydream in Blue” to create “Ike’s Rap II”! Well then. I can’t dig any further on that bass line, so props to the Wallace Collection for writing it. Of course, art is theft, and guess what, “Daydream in Blue”‘s main chorus (which is not sampled by any of the aforementioned songs) is itself lifted from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

Compare the chorus of “Daydream in Blue” (starting around 0:40) to the melody at 0:29 of this clip.

Of course, Tchaikovsky himself frequently quoted folk songs in his compositions, so who knows how far back that melody goes. As I always like to say, there’s nothing new under the sun.

Hrm, or maybe someone else might have said that first…

On Harper Simon’s charming eponymous 2009 album there’s a song called “Wishes and Stars” in which the last lines are “There are more wishes than stars/More wishes than stars”.

Now, Harper’s no astrophysicist, and besides there’s some poetic license involved there, but the claim piqued my interest.

How many wishes are there? Well, apparently about 100B people have ever lived on Earth. Conservatively overestimating, each person lived about 50 years (the data from 1960, and a pretty high estimate since people living now haven’t gotten all their wishes in yet. Historically, over the course of human history, the average life expectancy is likely much lower.)

How many wishes does the average person make? Let’s be very generous here. If we assume the average person makes a wish every 10 minutes of every waking hour of every day (yes… we’re whiners), we get

6 wishes/hour * 16 hours/day * 365 days/year * 50 years/life * 100B lives
= approx 175 quadrillion wishes.

Wow, that’s a lot of wishes. Not bad, Harper.

But, as Carl Sagan reminds us, and as Douglas Adams points out to amusing effect, the Universe is a big place. Our own galaxy alone has about 100 billion stars. It looks like there may be between 10 sextillion and 1 septillion stars in the Universe, or about a million stars for every wish. So go ahead and wish upon a star; there’s plenty left.

By the way, the album is quite good, catchy folk with a tinge of country. Here’s another star-oriented song:

For whatever reason, it has become fashionable to comment on how little Barack Obama has done, or on how poorly his presidency has gone thus far.

No matter happens tomorrow, I would like to state for the record that I think that Obama has done a terrific job in a challenging, adversarial environment and under incredibly difficult conditions. I got your back, dude.

OkCupid is a free dating website that has an outstanding blog. The blog is really interesting because the creators of the site mine massive amounts of user interaction data to expose preferences and inefficiencies, so to speak, in the dating “market”. They’re fairly rigorous with the analysis, though of course it’s hard to draw universal conclusions. Regardless, it’s a fun read and provides some insight into human psychology. (Only one entry is displayed per page, so make sure to view “Older Entries”.)

I’m happy that OkCupid is getting some recognition for the blog. It has an interesting history. Its creators (or at least their core) all went to college together. After college they founded The Spark, which was an awesome humor/quiz site. It got a lot of traffic, but I’m guessing it didn’t make a lot of money, since they then launched SparkNotes, which was a free alternative to Cliff’s Notes. It did really well and was acquired by Barnes and Noble. Now they’re on to OkCupid.

There are two reasons why I’m interested in their story. The first is that one of the founders, Sam Yagan, was my TA for both of my intro CS classes in college. He was awesome, and a major reason why I got into computer science in the first place. So I’m thrilled he’s doing well.

The second is that another founder, Christian Rudder, is one of two members of the band Bishop Allen. They write incredibly catchy indie rock.

Their first album, Charm School, is 100% great. Their second is okay, but the third, Grrr…, is a fantastic return to form, though not quite as consistent as the debut. Find them all here. Anyway, here are some songs – start your foot-tapping now! Bishop Allen is back, baby.

In the spirit of rekindling interest in old favorites, here’s another band that I loved, lost, and found again: Morcheeba.

Morcheeba’s first albums were fronted by the inimitable Skye Edwards, whose silky voice served as a great anchor for the Godfrey brothers’ combination of trip-hop and soul. Check out The Sea and Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day for good examples.

Skye left the band in the early 2000s, and they struggled to replace her, releasing 2005’s (pretty good) The Antidote with one singer — and touring in support of the album with a different singer.

I saw them live on that tour, and it just didn’t compare the electrifying Skye-enhanced set I experienced in ’02. My hopes for a strong future for Morcheeba were dimmed.

I recently picked up 2008’s Dive Deep, which witnesses the brothers trying a new tactic: instead of using one vocalist, they rely on several. The result is surprisingly good. Perhaps too smooth in places, but the overall feel is excellent. Here are two of my favorite tracks. (The latter features Cool Calm Pete; Grant would be proud.)

And while I’m throwing stuff out there, here’s an old gem from Paul Simon’s 1990 album The Rhythm of the Saints. It’s not even my favorite song on the album, but it showcases his intricate guitar melodies, evocative lyrics, and beautiful songwriting.

I’d also like to recommend my friend Max’s excellent radio show, The Golden Beet on KALX. He’s got several shows up on the site, and they’re all worth a listen.

As you may know, I like the band House of Freaks. About 10 years ago they led me to the excellent September 67 album Lucky Shoe, on which Bryan Harvey played on a few tracks. September 67’s principal member was Shannon Worrell, and I tracked down her (at the time) two solo albums, Three Wishes and The Moviegoer.* They’re both quality recordings, and strongly evoke that period of my life whenever I listen to them.

The girl who introduced me to House of Freaks in ninth grade also introduced me to They Might Be Giants at the same time, and I quickly became a huge fan. I lost interest with the release of the mediocre Mink Car album in 2001 (released on September 11th, actually), though I owned every album up till that point and listened to them religiously. For some reason or other, I checked up on them recently, and picked up 2007’s The Else a few weeks ago. It’s an amazingly terrific album. Here are two of my favorite songs.

Anyway, some late night browsing led me to their Wiki site, which revealed that John Linnell’s wife, Karen Brown, produced Shannon Worrell’s The Moviegoer, and John actually played accordion on it! I had no idea; I had never bothered reading the liner notes to the album since they were handwritten and small. So I just checked it, and there he is. More amazingly, Bryan Harvey and Johnny Hott (of HoF) of also play on the album. So: Harvey, Hott, and Linnell, all on the same obscure, out of print CD that I’ve owned for 10 years and never knew. Dang.

* Impressively, when I view the album on Amazon, it’s out of print and only available for digital download, but Amazon reminds me: “Instant Order Update for AJ Shankar. You purchased this item on May 9, 2000.” That’s a good memory, Amazon! So “about 10 years ago” is pretty accurate. Amazon also lets me view the entire order, which also included Martin Sexton’s Black Sheep (excellent), Magnet’s Don’t Be a Penguin (nowhere near as good as their other album, Shark Bait), and Luna’s Bewitched (also excellent). All in all, a high-quality order.

I watched a LOT of the Olympics last week. Multiple hours a day, in many cases. Padding the several thrilling moments (Shaun White, short-track) and many exciting ones were hours of NBC-sanctioned tedium. I’m burnt out now. Let me know if something cool happens.

Let it be known that I love the Olympics. I love the competition, the variety, and the effort. But it’s a complicated relationship.

Way back in 2002, before I had a real blog, I wrote about the Winter Olympics on my old web page :

Also, the events are so specialized and esoteric that I have absolutely no confidence that the athletes at the Games are really the best in the world, in terms of potential. Of course, this is true for any sport, but at least for the Summer Olympics, many more people have tried the events. Every kid growing up in this country (for example) knows approximately how good a runner he is, but no one I know — not a single person — even knows anyone who’s ever tried bobsledding. Heck, one of my co-workers could have world-champion skeleton potential, for all I know. These Games just seem to have a much greater emphasis on privilege and association than the Summer Games or (especially) the World Cup.

That said (and I really had to get it off my back :), drama and courage were on display to an enormous degree at Salt Lake. It takes guts to put years of your life at stake for a minute-long race. Just being able to compete under such pressure (never mind attaining the skill to do a given event) is an accomplishment. I mean, I got butterflies when I lined up in high school cross country races. I can’t imagine what Michelle Kwan felt when she stepped on the ice for the long program.

Unsurprisingly, I still feel this way about the Winter Olympics: they’re more about privilege than they are about talent. (I have similar concerns about some events in the Summer Olympics, but less often.) A recent controversy about ski jumping reinforced this belief for me. The IOC decided not to have a Women’s Ski Jump event in the 2010 Olympics.

The IOC voted in 2006 not to allow women’s ski jumping into the 2010 Games, saying the sport has not developed enough and that it didn’t meet basic criteria for inclusion.

Really? So what qualifies as “not developed enough”? From the article:

As many as 1,000 women compete in ski jumping in 17 countries around the world, and about 100 are licensed to compete internationally.

Whoa. That’s all? Is that a joke? Another article corroborates:

Rogge said there are 164 registered women jumpers in the world… about 15 “technically very able” jumpers but the rest are not up to world standards.

Okay, so there are hardly any women ski jumpers. A bit scary that it was being considered for an Olympic event. Well, at least there must be swarms of men, since that event qualifies, right? Not exactly: the same article states that there are 2,500 men ski jumpers. That’s it! Now, there might be 2,500 registered men, and maybe 10x that amount unregistered. But that’s still an insanely small number.

More interestingly, the women are arguing that it’s not fair that many other medal sports have even smaller participation.

Supporters of women’s ski jumpers argue there are 135 women ski jumpers in 16 countries. This compares to other sports already in the Olympics like snowboard cross, which has 34 women from 10 countries; skier cross, which has 30 women from 11 nations; and bobsled, which has 26 women from 13 nations.

You might want to read that again, to convince yourself that your eyes aren’t tricking you. Sure, give these sports 10x for unregistered people, or even 100x — I’m pretty sure there were more high school cross country runners in my small home state of Connecticut. I don’t think any of them are competing for medals.

To be clear, I have nothing against Women’s Ski Jump in particular, especially with respect to Men’s Ski Jump. (In fact, one article states that the best American female ski jumper, Lindsey Van, recently set a course record, besting all males.) I just think all of these sports are pretty bogus, at least from a competitive perspective. There’s no doubt that the athletes involved put in an incredible amount of time and dedication. I’m just not nearly convinced that they’re the best talent in the world at what they do.