There hasn’t been a whole lot of news the last few days, and that always has me roaming around FARK and blogs looking at what people are yammering about. Digby brought my attention to a very interesting article in Gothamist, NYC Gay Pride Parade Welcomes Catholic League & “Straight Is Great” Sign. It is delicious.

Just as many liberals have been upset that the New York City St Patrick’s Day Parade wouldn’t allow explicitly gay participants, many conservatives became upset when other people pulled out of the parade because of its intolerance. After Guinness pulled out, Catholic League president Bill Donohue was hopping mad. In an effort to show how everyone is intolerant in their own way (Sounds like a song!) “he said he wanted to march in the NYC Pride parade, with a banner that says, ‘Straight is Great.'” Unfortunately, everyone is not intolerant in their own way.

March Director of NYC Pride, David Studinski, released a statement:

Other parade organizers have made similar statements including “pointing [out] that it’s ‘probably not the first time’ that a ‘Straight is Great’ sign has been shown in the parade.” But all this wonderful tolerance does not mean that the LGBT community is blind to what Donohue and his group are all about. In their statement, they included information about his beliefs and past statements:

Meanwhile, the Catholic League is busy working on a boycott of Guinness. Donohue said that the company has declared war on Catholics. He has a right to think what he wants, but that’s just silly. It is unfortunately, entirely typical of American conservatism with its constant feelings of persecution when people don’t provide them with special rights. It is the basis of the whole War on Christmas nonsense. But what is most clear in this whole incident is that the two sides are not equal. Everyone is not intolerant in their own way. And in the future, Bill Donohue will be remembered for his intolerance, not for any good works he may also do.

On this day in 1928, the very good neighbor Fred Rogers was born. But did you know that he got started in children’s television as a result of a child molestation conviction? You see, as part of his punishment, he was forced to do community service. This involved doing manual labor in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. But Rogers managed to organize the puppets and staged a coup d’etat. Most of this history is unknown because Rogers suppressed it. But if you check out the City Hall Records of Make-Believe, you will find that I’m right.

Not buying it? Would you believe…

The reason Mr Rogers always wore long-sleeved shirts was to hide his track marks. After taking over the show, the Heroin Dealer of Make-Believe got him hooked with free dope. From then on, the dealer was in control of the show. But this explains how Mr Rogers managed to stay so calm during the Genocide of Make-Believe and the later Race Riots of Make-Believe. It is widely reported that Fred Rogers died of stomach cancer, but it was really an overdose.

No? Would you believe…

Fred Rogers was a sniper in the Korean War with 18 confirmed kills. One time, he was attacked in his hideout and he ended up killing the attacker with his bare hands. After the war, he became radicalized, eventually going to the Soviet Union and finally killing John F Kennedy from his spot on the Grassy Knoll of Make-Believe. After Lee Harvey Oswald was nailed for the crime that he had committed, Rogers got therapy. His doctor recommend that he work with children and Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood was born.

No?

Well, all of these are common urban legends about the beloved children’s television star. I took a little poetic license. Normally people say that Rogers wore long-sleeved shirts to hide his military tattoos. And I generally “improved” the stories, which try to sound serious. The truth is that Rogers had planned to be a minister (he did eventually become ordained in the Presbyterian Church), but dropped out after first seeing television. He had a bachelor’s degree in music, so NBC hired him to work on some of its music shows. In 1954, he was hired by WQED in Pittsburgh to work as a puppeteer on the children’s show The Children’s Corner. And the rest is history. Or urban legend.

And here is a bit from his show that is the basis for another urban legend. Can you guess what it is?

Happy birthday Fred Rogers!

I was looking for something to watch on Netflix last night and after looking for a long time, I came upon Shakespeare Uncovered. It’s a six-part PBS series that dives into (more or less) one play per episode with a famous actor. The first was about Macbeth, which is probably my favorite Shakespearean play. It is certainly the play that works the best. But it was hosted by Ethan Hawke. I don’t know what it is about him, but he annoys me. And after five minutes, I was done with it.

So I switched to the third episode with Derek Jacobi doing Richard II. I figured that would be good. To begin with, the play is one of the better histories. What’s more, Jacobi is not only a great actor but quite a thoughtful analyzer and director of Shakespeare. Plus, I’ll admit, I just like him. And he did not disappoint. In addition to providing a good overview of the dynamics in the play, there was a lot of “inside the actor’s studio” stuff. Usually, I hate this kind of stuff, but it was great here. I don’t doubt this is largely due to the fact that the British take acting much more seriously as a craft than Americans.

There was one really strange part of the episode. Jacobi talks about how he doesn’t think that Shakespeare wrote Richard II or any of the other plays. He thinks that it was really Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who wrote the plays and Shakespeare was a director and “front” for de Vere. It just goes to show that you can be brilliant at some things and be totally clueless about others. Still, I find the belief rather charming. But what’s especially interesting is why Jacobi thinks this. He seems to have got it in his head that it couldn’t have been Shakespeare who wrote the plays. So he went shopping and the de Vere theory seemed the most reasonable.

The reason that he doesn’t think that Shakespeare wrote the plays is because there is so little documentation of his life. There are many ways to counter this. To begin with, we know just as little about Christopher Marlowe, who was as popular in his life and Shakespeare was during his life. We know more about Ben Jonson, but that’s due to one big thing: Jonson wrote a lot about himself. I’m afraid that Jacobi is falling into the trap of thinking that because we highly value Shakespeare today they must have valued him a lot back them. But it’s very clear that for Shakespeare it was all just a way to get money and status. Once he attained that he retired. All he was by the end of his life was another member of the nouveau riche. That’s great, but hardly something that the world is going to worry about documenting.

Anyway, the whole thing got me to find the BBC production of Richard II starring Jacobi. I found it on YouTube and it is quite good. Much better than most of those BBC productions:

I also watched the episode on Hamlet with David Tennant. It was interesting because it focused on many of the glaring holes in the play. But as always, instead of admitting that it just isn’t a well written play, these problems are taken as an indication of Shakespeare’s brilliance. Still, it was nice to see the play treated seriously enough for these problems to even be acknowledged.

If there is one thing that most harms Shakespeare it is the tendency to approach it as fundamentalists do the Bible. If all of Shakespeare is wonderful, then none of it is. To me, the highs and lows of Shakespeare are often sitting one right next to the other. In Much Ado About Nothing, we get a wonderful scene with Benedick and Beatrice following by the most insipid drivel from Claudio and Hero. We also gets loads of sexism and racism and Shakespeare’s signature suck up to the aristocracy. And mostly we get incredibly two-dimensional characters, or in the case of Hamlet, zero-dimensional characters. But still, much of it is transcendent. And Shakespeare Uncovered provides an easy and enjoyable entry into Shakespeare at his best. Or the 17th Earl of Oxford. Take your pick.

Update (20 March 2014 8:48 pm)

I have a cold so I laid down and watched another episode. This one with Jeremy Irons on the Henry IV plays and Henry V. It was pretty annoying. At one point, he interviews a young film director who just made Henry V. She said (roughly), “When I told people I was making the film, they all ask, pro-war or anti-war? I don’t see it that way. People do go to war.” And I thought, “Oh! Pro-war!” Indeed, Henry V is quite pro-war regardless of the epilogue. Consider how the Battle of Agincourt is done. It goes from the St Crispin’s Day Speech right before the battle. And then the battle is over and the French messenger comes by and says, “You won!” Get that? Rousing patriotic speech followed by victory. No despot could ask for better propaganda.

It does bug me that Shakespeare is fairly straightforward, yet people want to imbue him with so much complexity. He was not a man who questioned authority. This is largely why he became such a big export of the British Empire. Any given production can change the plays to fit its wishes. One can indeed create a production that is anti-war or pro-war with the same play. But that play, on the page, is pro-British, pro-empire, and pro-war.

The following video is brilliant and important. And it has puppets! Sadly, it sums up the current “religious freedom” debate. It is also accurate that increasingly, religious zealots think that hormonal birth control is a form of abortion. You know, I’ve been saying this for at least a decade (I’m not alone). Once the anti-choice crowd made abortion illegal, they would switch to birth control. Of course, they didn’t even wait that long. But the reason I knew they would transition to birth control is that I knew the reason they were against abortion. It has nothing to do with the fetus. It is about controlling women. Hormonal birth control has done more to give women freedom than anything since the 19th Amendment.

I don’t want to get into the issues of employers controlling their workers. I’ve written before, Political Harassment in the Workplace. But mostly, it all comes down to the widely held believe that somehow employees have a choice to not work. While that may have been true back when the government was giving away farm land, it just isn’t true today. I discuss this in a little more detail here, Property Rights.

Before getting to the video, I just have to say something about the production. It is very funny and the puppets are cute as anything. But the puppeteers are terrible. When they talk, it looks like a bad dubbed movie. You could do as well with an on-off switch: turn it on when the puppet is talking, turn it off when not. Still, even it adds to the charm of the video about this most uncharming subject.

H/T: Digby

The other night I watched the Mozart’s Don Giovanni, a 1955 filmed version of what is essentially a stage production starring Cesare Siepi in the title role. He’s somehow perfect for the role, even though it is a baritone part and Siepi is a bass. The rest of the cast is equally good. But I was especially impressed with Otto Edelmann, who plays the part of Don Giovanni’s servant Leporello. It wasn’t that his singing was especially great. He just has a great stage presence and is perfect for the likable but easily led character.

What most struck me in the film, however, is not the production per se. It was simply that it was a theater performance. I’ve seen a couple of actual film productions of it. But I’ve always been a little disappointed because the cinematic qualities tend to distract from the experience. In particular, there is a good too much moving about in the play. For example, the play effectively ends in Don Giovanni’s house and that is the first time we’ve been there! Unity of time, it has. Unity of place, not so much.

In a proper film, there is a strong tendency to explicitly move from one scene to the next. But it isn’t just that. It isn’t enough for actors to just stand and sing. That would largely be boring, so directors have them moving to and fro. But on the stage, the characters are allowed to stop moving around and sing. And I thought it worked remarkably well.

There is another aspect of it. It’s all kind of silly. Don Giovanni is not in any way a realistic character. And the climax of the play is when the statue (of a man Don Giovanni killed earlier) comes to dinner, asks Don Giovanni to repent his evil ways, and than drags him down to hell. Moralistic talking statues work a whole lot better on the stage than they do on the screen. (The same thing can be said about the ghost of Hamlet’s father.)

So here is the whole thing via YouTube. I will have to check out other stage versions. It is, after all, a hell of a fun opera.

Over at New Republic yesterday, Danny Vinik wrote, John Boehner’s Ridiculous Excuse for Blocking the Deal on Unemployment Benefits. You probably know at least part of the story. And you can probably guess the rest. Extended unemployment benefits ended in December. This is a huge problem because we have a huge long-term unemployment problem. Well, after months of wrangling, the Senate has managed to put together a compromise bill that is expected to pass next week. Hooray!

But not so fast. Yesterday, House Speaker John Boehner announced that it was a no go. As Vinik notes, in the past, there have been two things that the Republicans have complained about. First, there is the idea that extended unemployment benefits make people lazy, refusing to take all those jobs that aren’t available. This is rubbish, but that hardly matters. What is more important is that while Republicans generally think this, only people like Rand Paul are going to make a big public deal out of it. The second thing Republicans always claim is that the benefits must be paid for. Well, this bill is paid for. (Note: as soon as Republicans are back in charge in Washington, this business of paying for everything will be gone gone gone.)

Now Boehner has two all new complaints. One has to do with a National Association of State Work Force Agencies report that claims the law would be unworkable. But it proposes a fix. The other is that it does nothing to strengthen the economic recovery. That one is a howler! Over the last three and a half years, the Republican controlled House has not been interested in anything that helps the recovery. Quite the opposite. Remember Sequestration that is still dragging down the recovery? And for that matter, letting extended unemployment benefits lapse is a drag on the economy. No: we haven’t gotten any legislation from the House to improve the economy, unless you think that 50 votes to repeal Obamacare would stimulate the economy. (It wouldn’t, although in RepublicanLand, it would do that and so much more.)

What these new demands from Boehner are really all about is the desire to cause as much pain and suffering on the American people as possible. As long as a Democrat is in the White House, the Republicans know that their best course of action is to harm the economy. The Democrats will get the blame, even though John Boehner has an effective veto on everything. What’s more, this gets into the whole “of course—if only” approach to legislative obstruction. Of course John Boehner is for extending unemployment benefits, if only these two problems were fixed. Note that one of the problems is open ended: create more jobs. He will say that anything that actually would create jobs won’t. And his idea of job creation will just be a bunch of Republican wish list items: tax cuts for the rich, spending cuts for the poor, more oil drilling. But even if somehow his demands were met, there would be another. There is always another.

You may be wondering why it is that Republicans will allow nothing to get done when a Democrat is president, but Democrats do get things done with Republican presidents. It is quite simply that the Republicans are now a revolutionary party. What conservatives say about Obama is exactly what conservative extremists said about Clinton. The Republican Party is now almost nothing but those old conservatives bomb throwers. Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is now what the vast majority of congressional Republicans believe. You don’t negotiate with evil, you destroy it and that is why the Republicans now have this all-or-nothing approach to legislation.

Of course, Boehner isn’t exactly one of these revolutionaries—at least anymore. He’s calmed down a lot from the 1990s. I think of him more as the banality of evil. Like a lot of older politicians, he is only interested in hanging onto power for as long as he can. Of course, power that you wield only to hang onto it is not real power. I wrote about this before, Boehner’s Paradox of Power. So in the name of his futile efforts, the nation suffers. And as far as his caucus is concerned, that’s just great.

While researching today’s birthday post, I found the video below, Milton Friedman on the Gold Standard. It’s quite interesting. Just on the surface level, listening to Friedman talk, you could predict that he was a libertarian. He comes off as so smug, I really feel the desire to punch him in the face. Even when I was a libertarian, I couldn’t take his writing. But then, his mass market book (with his wife) Free to Choose is typical of popular libertarian titles. They are always so positive, like pep rallies in book form. “And once we have a libertarian society, we’ll all be happy! Goooo team!”

But this video gets to the heart of Friedman’s academic research. It is what got him the Nobel Prize. And it is what made him an oracle of the conservative movement. And he lucked out. He died in late 2006, just before the financial crisis that showed that while he wasn’t wrong in the specifics, he was wrong on the large scale. He came up with a wonderful narrative about the Great Depression that you can see in the video. Basically, the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression by not allowing the money supply to expand when foreign gold came into the country. The only problem is: no.

Notice: it isn’t that the Federal Reserve didn’t screw up. It did! But that wasn’t what caused the depression. It simply made the depression worse. It’s kind of like a guy with endocarditis in 1800. The doctors don’t know what that is so they just bleed him. The guy dies. Well, certainly the bleeding made things worse. But it was the endocarditis that killed him. Unfortunately, we didn’t know this for sure until the 2007-2008 crisis (or the 1990s if you were Paul Krugman). Then, the Federal Reserve did everything right. And to the surprise of conservatives everywhere, it wasn’t enough.

It turned out that Keynes was still the master. Friedman (who is more or less the conservative’s Keynes) spent his life toiling on a minor variation of Keynes’ theory. I said he was lucky to die when he did because he never got to see the scope of his work limited. But the truth is, we all missed out by not seeing him react. Because the fact is that over the course of his life, there were plenty of things that countered what he thought and it never made a difference. This is a problem with being brilliant: you can always justify things that push back against your theory.

This is really well illustrated in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. The second chapter deals with the relationship between Friedman and Chilean despot Augusto Pinochet. Now that relationship might be enough to show what Friedman was all about. He was, after all, supposedly dedicated to freedom. But apparently the thousands tortured and murdered by Pinochet didn’t matter. Regardless, what happened was that Friedman pushed “free market” reforms. When they just made the economy worse and more unequal, Friedman recommended what conservatives always recommend in these situations, “More of the same!” It was never that the free market reforms weren’t good policy; it was that there hadn’t been enough of them. Eventually, Pinochet was forced to liberalize some of his policies, because he might have been a despot but he wasn’t an idiot.

At this point in time, Milton Friedman comes off as kind of a liberal. The conservative movement has moved so far to the right that they want to abolish the Federal Reserve and go back to the gold standard. And when the economic crisis of 2007-2008 came, what did they say? They said the same thing that Friedman would have said, had he been alive. “The reason for the crisis was government regulation!” You may remember (although the argument is still floating around) that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac supposedly caused the financial crisis. And to top it off, they did it by giving those people loans. At least you can say one thing: Milton Friedman didn’t appear to be a racist.

The video below is great. Cenk takes apart Toure of The Cycle. Go ahead and watch it because I agree with everything Cenk says, but I want to approach it from a slightly different perspective.

Toure is making the standard Democratic argument that we have to nominate conservatives so they will win. As Cenk points out, this just sets up a situation where the Democrats are Republican Lite, “Republican vs Republican? The Republican always wins!”

But the essence of Toure’s argument is that when we ran liberals for president, they lost. This is probably the biggest Democratic myth. It is our version of the Republican myth that Bush the Elder lost because he raised taxes and now no Republican will ever agree to raise taxes. The Democratic myth is based upon three elections: 1980, 1984, and 1988. The 1980 election is fairly hard to analyze because a lot of stuff was going on. But one of those things is that the economy was not doing well. In 1984 and 1988, the economy was booming. The single most important factor in presidential elections is the economic trend.

Look at it the other way. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the presidency. Why? Not because he was a conservative Democrat from the south! And it wasn’t because Bush the elder raised taxes a small amount. It was because the economy had tanked. Clinton won re-election in 1996 because the economy was doing very well. Ditto for Gore in 2000, but with two caveats: (1) the economy had really slowed down; and (2) we don’t live in a democracy when elections are close. Bush won in 2004 because the economy was improving. Obama won in 2008 because the economy was in crisis. And he won re-election in 2012 because the economy was improving, even if slowly.

So the “liberals are unelectable” narrative is wrong. The narrative should be, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The problem is that many Democrats want to believe that we must run mushy centrist candidates to win. Democratic elites do not want to shake things up because they represent the interests of the upper class. This is why journalists who are quite liberal when it comes to identity politics are generally pro-globalization and anti-union. I don’t know where Toure stands in this group, but he is singing its song.

Earlier today, over at New Republic, Leon Wieseltier wrote, The Emptiness of Data Journalism. It is yet another attack on Nate Silver for his comments about the superiority of what he does versus what opinion journalists do. And it is by far the best that I’ve read. I’ve always liked Silver and I was totally in agreement when he attacked the insider-based campaign coverage. It was true that if you want to know how people are going to vote, the best thing to do is to ask them. Asking the campaigns might make for entertaining reading but it doesn’t provide useful information. But now Silver is claiming that opinion journalism writ large is similarly useless. Wieseltier calls him on this.

Paul Krugman also called out Silver—in two posts. The latter is more interesting, Further Thoughts on Hedgehogs and Foxes. In that, he noted that data alone don’t explain anything. They must be applied in a context with a model of what’s going on. We don’t, for example, care about the inflation rate because any inflation rate is good or bad. In an under-performing economy, higher inflation is usually a good thing. In a booming economy, higher inflation is usually a bad thing. What’s more, different levels of inflation affect people differently. The data alone mean nothing and I dare say someone like Silver is likely to apply unstated assumptions about such data.

What I was most struck with in Silver’s interview was his description of opinion columnists, “It’s people who have very strong ideological priors, is the fancy way to put it, that are governing their thinking.” The implication is that Silver is not burdened by such “ideological priors.” I know from experience—and this is one of the biggest problems with American journalism—that anyone claiming to be objective should be watched closely. What such claims mean is, “I’m totally unaware of the huge amount of baggage that I bring to everything I do.”

Krugman linked to an amazing article from a year and a half ago by climate scientist Michael Man, FiveThirtyEight: The Number of Things Nate Silver Gets Wrong About Climate Change. It’s a relatively long article and very much worth the time. But the basics are that Nate Silver may have just looked at the data, but his analysis was way off because he did what supposedly non-ideological centrists always do: he figured that the bad global change work by a marketing professor (You read that right!) was equal and opposite to the work of thousands of climate scientists of the past three decades.

I’ve been wondering what the new Five Thirty Eight was going to do. I understand statistical analysis of sports. And I understand political polling. But what about the rest? And if Silver really thinks he can get good data on important policy issues without understanding the subjects, he’s a far sillier man than I had thought. Wieseltier may have it right in his conclusion:

I’m afraid that Wieseltier nailed it.

Update (19 March 2014 3:29 pm)

I never said that I was original. Ryan Cooper wrote, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight and the Dangers of Being Ideologically Neutral. He said very much what I said:

A couple of days ago, I had an epiphany. We are talking about God all wrong. I still find fascinating the question, “Why does the universe exist?” And a nice short answer to that question is: God. We could have different words for it. But any words or phrases are going to be disappointing. I even have a problem with “the reason for existence.” That implies something I don’t believe: that existence has a cause in the same way that, say, a forest fire has a cause. So I’m fine with God and I’m fine discussing God as him or her.

Where I part ways with the theists is in the conception of God. They all believe in a god with some form of consciousness. What’s more, most of them believe in a god that loves them. Now here I’m not talking about people who explicitly anthropomorphize God. This is understandable, but talking about such thinking is committing the straw man fallacy. Sadly, the vast majority of atheist argumentation is against this kind thinking. It seems to me a waste of time. So I will waste no more on it.

A more sophisticated argument is that God’s love can be seen in the gift of existence. I will admit, I kind of like this idea. Existence is a mixed bag, but even a “short, brutish, and nasty” existence is still an amazing thing. And to be given the opportunity to not just exist but to reflect on that opportunity does strike me as the greatest gift imaginable. (Admittedly, the problem here is with my imagination and not the greatness of possible gifts.)

But the problem with this notion is the idea of intention: that God created existence with me in mind. That strikes me as a height of hubris. And it is unscientific. We know, for example, that we share almost all the same genes with the other great apes. In the end, we aren’t that different from alligators and honey bees. And if you really want to push it, there is nothing that especially distinguishes us from swirling clouds of dust in distant galaxies.

The only way any of this makes sense is for one to fall into solipsism. If I’m all that really exists then maybe God really does love me. But even that isn’t clear. And regardless, solipsism has always struck me as an intellectual trap. It’s akin to thinking that the creation myth is true and that God just planted all that evidence for natural selection just to throw us off base. It is entirely possible, but it is also an entirely useless way of looking at the world. The same logic could be used to never get out of bed or never again eat because nothing exists anyway.

So what I think is that what defines an atheist is not the status of his belief in God but rather the kind of god he believes in. I assume that all atheists accept that there must be some reason or mechanism for existence. Even Lawrence Krauss as an explanation, “Nothingness is unstable.” Personally, I find this definition of God far too concrete. But we would agree on the essence of God being some kind of intentionless process. So we have our gods, they just aren’t anything that would be recognized by theists. And, of course, our gods are totally open to change with new data in a way that theist gods are not.

Afterword

This article is based upon my assumption that the only purpose for a god is to explain existence. Most theists don’t believe that. In fact, I dare so most theists don’t even think about the existential question. But other than that question, I don’t see anything. Science is capable of explaining everything else.

Good morning friends! I’m getting a late start today because I’ve been working very hard on a technical project and I was up really late last night. But it should be a normal day here. I’m trying to be more organized. So there will somehow be five or so posts today.

Yesterday, Andrea sent me to the following video, “Ballad of a WiFi Hero.” It is based on a story by Mike Lacher. It portrays a simple IT procedure as a chivalric quest. But there are two sides of this. First, the truth is that when people have a technical problem they can’t solve, a tech really is like a knight in shining armor. This is why something like Geek Squad is so evil, because desperate people go to them and mostly get abused. Face it, Best Buy is there to sell them stuff, not to fix broken stuff. And their techs are idiots.

On the other side of things, technical work is usually trivial. Once and a while you come upon something that really is challenging. But mostly, people are really grateful for work that you do think is trivial. Of course, things change quite a lot when you are charging them. That’s where we get to Best Buy and Geek Squad. Since people don’t know what techs are doing, they focus on store fronts and uniforms. And their ignorance costs them. But sadly, it also costs us.

A common narrative goes like this. Customer goes to Geek Squad. Customer is charged $195 to be told that their system is destroyed and they need to buy a new computer. Customer comes to us. They plead poverty because they just wasted $195. We take pity because we are bleeding hearts. We only charge them $50 to fix their computer. The next time they have a computer problem, they go to Geek Squad. Wash, rinse, repeat. Why doesn’t someone just stab me in the eye?

This video is narrated by H Jon Benjamin, of Bob’s Burgers fame. Interestingly, Benjamin has a very strong chin while Bob does not. This video is very funny: