Monthly Archives: January 2016

How to Play Chess or at Least Understand It

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ChessWhen I was in grammar and secondary school, I found myself playing a lot of games of chess. I never won a single game. I had no idea what I was doing.

When it comes to chess, there are two kinds of people. First, there are people who know how to play. Second, there are people who know the moves. Explaining the moves is what passes for teaching the game. But this is not teaching. Imagine a similar approach to teaching tennis: one person serves, the two players hit the ball back and forth, the first one to hit the ball outside the lines loses; have fun!

I’ll admit: I’m a slow learner. But that’s really the critical element that distinguished the good grammar school players from the bad: a basic understanding of what the game was about. Someone who figured it out for themselves was necessarily a far better player, even if they weren’t a very good player in an absolute sense. And even they would be greatly helped by better chess instruction because it would result in them having better opponents.

When I was in graduate school, I decided to learn how to play chess. But I didn’t turn to any how-to books. I had seen them in the past and they made no sense to me whatsoever. Instead, I picked up a book of games by some chess grandmaster I had never heard of. And I studied those games. In particular, I went move by move and tried to figure out why the chess masters did not make the cunning moves that I had in mind.

If you’ve ever looked at these books, you will notice that there is very little annotation. What annotation there is is for moves that really good players would have questions about. The moves that I thought were correct were never what was played. And the annotations made no sense to me because they discussed issues that were far beyond me.

If you are playing chess hoping that your opponent will make a mistake, you are playing wrong. Chess, when properly played, is a game where you win or lose by inches.

But very slowly I was able to figure out why my moves sucked and why the masters moved the way that they did. And one day — quite suddenly — I understood chess as a game. That didn’t mean that I knew how to play. I still hadn’t started playing. But I got it. I could, for the first time, enjoy the game as a game. (For the record, I believe most people who watch professional sports understand those games at about the same level that I understood chess before my epiphany.)

Once I started playing the kind of people who had destroyed me when I was young, I saw the problem. They understood things like double attacks and traps. And at that point, the game was kind of funny. I would sit across from someone and they would set up a trap for me. And I could see it in their eyes: they were thinking, “Oh please! Oh please!” The truth was, they didn’t really understand the game much better than I had. If you are playing chess hoping that your opponent will make a mistake, you are playing wrong. Chess, when properly played, is a game where you win or lose by inches.

To give you an example, I happened to go to graduate school with a postdoc who was a really good chess player — a near master lever player, despite his drinking, womanizing, and research. He taught me much during the course of destroying me in game after game. But he told me a story about playing against Joshua Waitzkin (The kid in Searching for Bobby Fischer) at some point in a simultaneous exhibition. And my friend had found himself in the highly unusual position of having the advantage after about 20 moves. But my friend lost. And afterward, the kid (probably about 19 then) sat there with him and went over the whole game and each point where my friend made slightly less than the optimal move. That is the nature of chess.

But I still find it annoying that no one ever thought to teach me the game of chess. I was often forced to play in school. But it was a drag. It was like being forced to go to a museum where nothing was explained and no context was given. Chess can be an incredibly creative game. Of course, I never could have been much of a chess player. I’m just not that competitive. But being able to appreciate the game has been edifying, which is all I want from anything that I do.

Afterword

Some might think of Waitzkin going over the game after my friend lost to be something of a jerk move. That was not how my friend presented the story. The kid was at once showing appreciation for a player good enough to give him a bit of trouble and also providing him with a little chess lesson.

Image cropped from Esprit de Corps by Evonne. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

How to Write Like a Serial Killer

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WritingI love that title. It would make a good book title. But then I started thinking about what I would write, and it was mostly about what a fool the reader was for buying a book on writing. Don’t get me wrong. I love books on the finer points of writing. But I hate books about how to write in a general sense: “How to Write a Best Selling Mystery.” That stuff just disgusts me. The best writing advice is to stop reading whatever writing advice you are reading and go out and write!

Just the same, I think that the art of writing is fundamentally the art of reading. What writers most often lack is a sense of what is good and what is not. I remember many years ago, I wrote a short screenplay — for what would be maybe a 20-minute film. It was about this guy who was addicted to messing with telemarketers. I loved it. It was very funny with a great denouement. But a writing friend of mine hated it. I forget exactly what she didn’t like about it, but I am convinced that it was nonsense — something about realism, as though that matters in the least.

But as an insecure writer, I took the advice and wrote draft after draft. And with each draft, it got worse and worse. And my friend never liked it because she just didn’t like the whole idea of it. By the end, it was a mess with far too much motivation and far too little fun. But it is a good example of the life cycle of a piece of writing. There were many drafts before I showed it to my friend. And that was the point at which it was as good as it would ever be. The problem with the following rewriting was that it was at base about making the screenplay into something it wasn’t.

This bit of it really struck me, “Contrary to mythology, it is not high intelligence that makes serial killers successful. Instead, it is obsession, meticulous planning…” Ah, I think I understand that! This is what writers need!

Knowing when to stop is critical to the writing process. You must know when something works. New writers tend to think that everything they write is golden. There is rarely any point in rewriting because they can’t tell what crap they are writing — even though they can often tell this in other people’s writing. This is what we can probably call “kiddie writing.” There’s an obvious solution to this: read a lot more great writing and write a lot more of whatever it is you are capable of.

But not knowing when to stop can also mean endless revisions — never stopping. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t tell what good writing is; it often means you can tell, but you just aren’t a good enough writer (Yet!) to accomplish the kind of work that you know is possible. This we can probably call “middling writing.” And I don’t mean to disparage it, because it is usually pretty good. It’s always important to read great writers, but clearly the issue here is to keep writing. But that means different writing projects, not beating a work to death trying to perfect it. If you find you are in your sixtieth rewrite, it is time to set it aside and try something new.

And that brings us to serial killers. I read an article the other day, 5 Myths about Serial Killers and Why They Persist. This bit of it really struck me, “Contrary to mythology, it is not high intelligence that makes serial killers successful. Instead, it is obsession, meticulous planning…” Ah, I think I understand that! This is what writers need!

In as much as I can write, it is because I have been writing like a serial killer for decades. I’m obsessed with it. I know lots of people who used to be far better writers than I was and now they have nowhere near my skill. It’s because they don’t care about writing like I do. And they are better off for it! But if you want to write, you need to write. And you need to write a lot.

In 1985, Frank Gilroy (father of Tony, Dan, and John) made a film called The Gig. It’s really good. Yet it is totally wrong about the way that expertise works. In particular, there is a trumpet player who has a nice cushy life. He’s a professional-level player, but he’s not interested in being a professional musician, because it sucks as a lifestyle. Then there is a clarinet player who practices and practices but will never play at a professional level. And there is a great line in the film, said by the one professional musician in the film to the clarinet player, “It’s not religion — devotion isn’t enough.”

This is a common idea that has been beaten to death by writers who really should know better. Now it is true that there are limits. Regardless of how hard I work, I will never be David Foster Wallace. But anyone can become a professional writer. You just have to be like a serial killer. It really has to matter to you. Being a natural doesn’t take you very far at all. But it might make you more inclined to do all the work that you need to do to become something really worthwhile.

Afterword

I always feel a little weird talking about this kind of stuff on Frankly Curious because the writing here is pretty much all first draft. This is stuff that I knock off without much thought. I usually have only the vaguest of ideas about what I’m going to write before I start. And if things go sideways, I usually let them. I’m actually a much better writer than any article here would indicate. But I’m not a great writer. What I am is a garden-variety professional writer. But people have been paying me to write for almost 25 years now — back in the days when I couldn’t write nearly as well as I do now — when my final drafts were worse than my first drafts today. It doesn’t take much to be a professional writer.

Image cropped from Pen Writing Notes via Pexels. Licensed under CC0 Public Domain.

Morning Music: Nick the Stripper

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Prayers on FireWell, I told you we would get to Nick Cave eventually. Kind of. Today we listen to another song by The Birthday Party. But at least this one is written by Cave. This song is off their album, Prayers on Fire. And it is called “Nick the Stripper.” I can’t say that it’s an example of good songwriting. But it’s a hell of a song.

“Nick the Stripper,” I would have to say, is post-punk. It has a great bass and drum part that is reminiscent of Gang of Four. On the other hand, the guitar is all over the place — post-punk at times and sixties San Francisco rock at others. Then there’s the great horn sounds. And Nick Cave’s unique contributions to singing that are not so much music as failed attempts at throat singing.

The whole thing is hypnotic and amazing. No wonder this group wasn’t successful!

TheBirthdayPartyPrayersOnFire. Licensed under Wikipedia.

Anniversary Post: I Love Lucy Goes to the Hospital

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I Love LucyOn this day in 1953, a reported 72% households with televisions tuned into watch the I Love Lucy episode, Lucy Goes to the Hospital. It was one of those real life meets art things. Kind of. Lucy had given birth by cesarean section a few hours before the show aired. The show was actually shot two months earlier. I know if it happened today, it would be criticized for it obvious cynicism.

I’m deeply divided on the whole thing. On the one hand, social cohesion is important. It is good when a culture can share something positive like a fake birth on I Love Lucy. It seems the only time we are expected to come together now is when we go to war. On the other hand, it is really great that we can all enjoy the things that speak to us personally, without it having to be diluted to be widely appealing. According to Wikipedia “scripts for the episode were reviewed by a rabbi, a minister, and a priest in order to make sure it would not be offensive.” I love that they cared enough to not want to offend, but it seems excessive.

What’s strange to me, however, is that even with an endless range of entertainment choices, people still tend to gravitate toward the most vanilla “mass appeal” spectacles like American Idol. What’s with that? Are people by and large just that boring? I fear that they are. At the same time, I don’t want our cultural bonds to be based upon popular entertainment. This is why I think public education is important.

We should be bound together by our shared history — with absolute clarity of the good and the bad so that we don’t exclude anyone — most especially African Americans and native peoples. And we should be bound together by our responsibilities as citizens. There should be some notion of what it is to be a good citizen — and a bad one. But not only do we not have that, we don’t even have I Love Lucy — which was always a fragile reed to hang onto. But it was something.

ILoveLucyTitleScreen by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

Ineffability of Success; Necessity of Humility

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SuccessI wrote before that I was listening to the This American Life episode, 20 Acts in 60 Minutes. And one of the stories was about a sausage manufacturer that had moved to a new high tech facility, but found that their premiere product was not the same. It still tasted as good, but it was the wrong color. They tried everything, but they couldn’t find the problem. Eventually, they learned that the problem was an idiosyncrasy of the old factory. They manage to recreate the idiosyncrasy and got their old sausage color back. Hooray.

Ezra Glass noted that he liked the story because it showed that we don’t usually know the source of our success. That really hit me. I’ve found that to be so true in life. In general, if you are involved in some venture, you need to do a whole lot of things that are probably pointless. But you just don’t know what is important and what isn’t. For example, here at Frankly Curious, I’ve written about 7,000 articles. but there are just a few that have gotten much traction. What’s more, they are generally articles I didn’t think much about. I’ve never gotten a lot of traction for an article that I thought very highly of while writing.

Where we get into trouble — as individuals and as communities — is in thinking that we are a success because we are good.

This is why I continue to work this blog. I really don’t know what I’m doing. What usually makes for a popular article is a single person finding what I wrote to be interesting. If that person has a hundred thousand people following them, it makes a big difference. And then we are into Horatio Alger territory where what really matters is impressing “important” people — this traditionally leading to a good job and marriage to one their nubile daughters. But this isn’t the way I want to think about it, and it isn’t the way I think about it. You can’t think about it that way.

I used to do IT for a real estate investment company. And the head of sales explained the process to me as follows. There was no such thing as a great sales person. There was just a certain percentage of people who are open to your pitch. So you pitch to as many people as you can. And that’s how you make sales. Obviously, there is a skill element to it. But in general, you get that skill by giving your pitch over and over again. And that’s how I look at writing.

Indeed, it is the skills that I learned writing excessively here that led to my day job. Five years ago, I was a decent enough writer. But I wasn’t able to grind out a thousand palatable words on any subject at all in under four hours. But that’s not the main thing. The main thing is the grinding itself. It’s the constant working that leads to success. But obviously, not a lot of success — at least, not necessarily. And that’s because success is ultimately about luck. To whatever extent that we succeed, it isn’t something that we really control. And it was never my intention to write a lot to get better; it was my intention to write a lot because I enjoyed it.

Where we get into trouble — as individuals and as communities — is in thinking that we are a success because we are good. Perhaps you saw this headline at The Hill, Trump Takes Credit for Iran Prisoner Release. Trump is, in an important way, the perfect president for this country. He also represents the absolute worst aspects of who we are.

We could all of us use a great deal more humility.

Image cropped from Silhouette Success on Beach by Missy Schmidt. Licensed via CC BY 2.0.

Specious Atheist Arguments Don’t Mean a Thing

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Born Again AtheistElizabeth sent me to this very interesting Luke McKinney article at Cracked, 5 Atheist Arguments Which Aren’t Helping Anyone. It is written by my kind of atheist: one who seems constantly frustrated at the state of atheism today. Back in 1990, I started going to local atheist meetings in Portland. And they were filled with the most extreme group of oddballs you have ever seen. But look at atheism today: it is so much more “normal” and acceptable. So I think people now can be more delusional about it. They think the day when religion is gone is nigh. And they really do sound a lot like missionaries.

In the past, it was enough to know that Christians were silly and to find others who knew that too. But here’s a big thing, most arguments I got into in those days were extremely open-minded on my side. I would have loved for my Christian friends to have been able to convince me. Such cheap salvation! Just believe one silly thing and your life has meaning! Who wouldn’t want that to be true? Of course, on the other side of those arguments were always the most closed-minded of people. There was no way they were ever going to yield a point because they had discovered that One Weird Trick for endless ecstasy.

Atheists have decided that they should have faith in science. And that’s good! Science is about the best thing we have going. But it doesn’t provide us with ultimate truth. There are limits to science.

One of the most annoying things that Christians do is make really lame arguments. How do you know that heaven is real? It says right here in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” Oh, that explains everything. So I know that heaven exists because someone who thought heaven existed wrote it down in a book. This is the kind of closed-minded and closed-loop thinking that drives atheists crazy. And with good reason!

Today, there are far too many atheists whose thinking is every bit as closed-minded and closed-loop as the worst Christians. And a lot of atheist arguments are just a bag of tricks that they think just destroy Christianity or whatever other religion you want to talk about. The most annoying of these are the paradox arguments. I wrote about this before, No Contradiction in Genesis Eve Creation. My main point there was that paradoxes are found everywhere — even in deductive systems. And certainly the existence of the universe is a paradox, so why wouldn’t a creation story have paradoxes? (I then go on to show that there isn’t really a paradox to begin with.)

But the biggest problem with these kinds of trivial atheist arguments is that they really only address Biblical literalism: the most primitive kind of belief. And it isn’t just the smug Twitter atheists who do this. I’ve read atheist books by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and many others. And not one of them deals with religion as it is practiced by intelligent, thoughtful people. Now that’s fine! The vast majority of people do practice a kind of brainless fideism. But these same authors seem to think that their atheist arguments have wider currency. And they don’t.

What I hate in all things is hubris. (I hate it in myself most of all.) When Penn Jillette wrote his pathetic book God, No! his main argument is that we just don’t know and that we shouldn’t believe in things that we don’t know about. It’s a nice thought. But of course, Jillette is lying. Atheists are as certain of their worldviews as everyone else. And the vast majority of them have far more faith in science than they should have. They suffer from some a kind of literalist-like error regarding it, “Science says it; I believe it; that settles it.” Well, no. That’s the thing about science: nothing is ever settled.

Atheists have decided that they should have faith in science. And that’s good! Science is about the best thing we have going. But it doesn’t provide us with ultimate truth. There are limits to science. (If there are limits to logic, there are limits to science — see Kurt Gödel.) But with regard to the atheist debates, we are stuck with the fact that most religious people have just as much faith in science. Read Carl Sagan’s interview (pdf) with the Dalai Lama.

I complain so much about atheists because I expect better of them. When a Jehovah’s Witness comes to my door wanting to explain how we know that God loves me because John said so, I don’t much care because they are idiots. What I can’t tolerate is people thinking that just because they believe in science, they can make equally specious but atheist arguments.

Image cropped from ‘I’m a born-again atheist’ badge by Danny Birchall. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Morning Music: Happy Birthday

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The Birthday PartyLet us move on to the second album of The Birthday Party called, appropriately enough, The Birthday Party. And the song is “Happy Birthday.” It was a group composition when Nick Cave was starting to become the dominant songwriter (he never really did succeed in that regard). I love the song. Now you could listen carefully to the lyrics and come to the conclusion that it is a happy song. Many people think it is. But it’s not. When I was 17 years old, I wrote a song for a friend of mine’s high school graduation called, “Goodbye Graduate.” It was much more clear, with lines like, “You’ll get a wife and work for Dodge.” But “Happy Birthday” is about the same thing: aging and the fact that life just gets worse. Happy birthday!

One thing I find interesting is that Wikipedia refers to The Birthday Party as a “post-punk” band. How exactly is The Bithday Party post-punk? They sound very punk to me. But then Wikipedia insists upon calling every impressionist painter you’ve ever heard of as post-impressionist. Anyway, this song sounds like a lot of California punk from the late 1970s to me. But just remember, the boy in this song was eleven years old. That means he’s 47 years old now and his life sucks! Or he died of liver failure like one of the writers.

Tomorrow I might get to an actual Nick Cave song. In the mean time, enjoy this one:

Birthday Party album cover by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

Bill O’Reilly Endorses Bernie Sanders!

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Bill O'ReillyBill O’Reilly claims that he is going to move to Ireland if Bernie Sanders becomes president. He says that he is not willing to pay 90% income tax. This is strange because Sanders has said on numerous occasions that he will not raise income tax rates that high. At the 14 November 2015 Democratic debate, Sanders was asked how much he would raise the top marginal tax rate. He responded, “We haven’t come up with an exact number yet. But it will not be as high as the number under Dwight D Eisenhower which was 90%… I’m not a socialist compared to Eisenhower.”

So how is it that “I will not raise the income tax rate to 90%” becomes “I will raise the income tax rate to 90%”? Well, it comes from the man who I have come to think of as the heart and soul of the Republican Party: Donald Trump. Back in October, he was at a rally in Richmond, Virginia where he called Bernie Sanders a communist. And he said, “He’s gonna tax you people at 90 percent.” It must be true, it was on the television.

But television works both ways, and Politifact documented Sanders’ statements going back to 2008 where he has said that he wouldn’t go up to a 90% marginal tax rate. Based upon what I know of Bernie Sanders, I think he would like to go back to a top marginal tax rate that we had under that communist Richard Nixon (70%), but that he’d be thrilled just to get it back what it was under that pinko Ronald Reagan (50%).

If the top marginal tax rate went up to 90%, Bill O’Reilly would not be paying his taxes to “that guy.” He would not even be paying his taxes to the US government. He would be paying his taxes to the American people.

There are several things to note about all this. As Martin Longman has pointed out, “Even if Sanders wanted that kind of tax reform, he’d never be able to accomplish it. He couldn’t accomplish it even if the Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress and had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.” Despite what idiot conservatives like to claim (but only when a Democrat is in the White House), we do not live under a dictatorship. What really matters in this case is that Sanders thinks that taxes on the rich are way too low, and this is a belief that even most Republicans share. Scary?! I don’t think so.

Part of the problem, of course, is that most people don’t understand marginal tax rates. I still hear urban legends about this guy who got a raise but ended up with less money because he got pushed into a higher tax bracket. Sorry folks, that ain’t the way our tax system works. (Note: this does happen to the poor, as I discussed before, Catch 22 for Poor in America.) But certainly Donald Trump understands marginal tax rates. But it’s like his bigotry: I don’t think he’s a racist; he’s a demagogue — which is far worse.

But at least Bill O’Reilly is being honest that Sander’s mythical 90% tax rate would affect him and not the nation as a whole. But I was really bothered by exactly what he said, “I’m not going to pay 90 percent of my income to that guy. I’m sorry. I’m not doing it.” This is typical of conservative thought and it is something that enrages me. Oh how conservatives like to talk about patriotism, but when it costs them one red penny, they are an island unto themselves.

If the top marginal tax rate went up to 90%, Bill O’Reilly would not be paying his taxes to “that guy.” He would not even be paying his taxes to the US government. He would be paying his taxes to the American people. He would be doing it because that is the price we pay for living in this country. It is the price that Bill O’Reilly pays for living in a country where he can make millions of dollars per year. If he had been born in Zimbabwe, he would have died poor and young of typhoid. Patriotism isn’t putting a yellow ribbon on your car and cheerleading every war that comes along. Bill O’Reilly is at best what Thomas Paine called a “sunshine patriot.” I would go further, I would call him a traitor.

But I think there are tens of millions of people in the US who would vote for Bernie Sanders for the single reason that Bill O’Reilly would go away. Sanders could not have received a better endorsement than this one. Unfortunately, O’Reilly is lying (as usual). He wouldn’t leave this country. To start with, he would have to renounce his US citizenship, or he would still have to pay the taxes. Once there, he would find that his income would plummet; he would no longer be making the $18 million from Fox News. And without that platform, his best selling books would become distinctly midlist. And as it is, his taxes would still be north of 50%.

Still, Bernie Sanders becoming president would really piss off Bill O’Reilly. And if I weren’t already a Sanders supporter, that would be enough to make me one.

Image licensed under fair use.

Republicans Are Not Interested in Solving Problems

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Marco RubioIt was just the other day that I was writing about how boring politics is. And the fault is entirely the Republicans’. There’s really nothing to discuss. There are no proposals for fixing problems. I mean really: the Republicans are not interested in any problems. It is all faith based politics. Their approach to guns is the perfect example. We can’t do anything about them because doing even the smallest thing would destroy some kind of vague ideological purity. But when it comes to guns, I don’t so much care because even the changes that liberals propose are unlikely to improve matters.

But on the economic front, it’s downright funny. Marco Rubio is running around the country talking about all his new ideas and how we must vote for him because he’s young and “the future.” And his ideas are that we ought to do exactly what Ronald Reagan did. There’s a big problem with this. Even if you think that Reagan’s policies worked great, they haven’t worked great since then. There are diminishing returns. It might well be true that cutting the top tax rate from 90% to 70% had a big effect. But will cutting it from 39.6% to 30.8% have as big an effect? I think the case is much stronger that it will have the opposite effect: we are now at the point that giving rich people even more money hurts the economy.

Noah Smith talked about this last year with regard to deregulation:

So… maybe Free Market Nirvana would get us there. Maybe. But it seems to me that even beneficial types of market liberalization, like every other policy improvement, are subject to diminishing returns — the low-hanging fruit gets picked first. The Kennedy tax cuts seemed to produce a burst of growth, the Reagan tax cuts a more modest bump, and the Bush tax cuts basically nothing. There’s no reason to think the same isn’t true of deregulation.

But this is what Rubio and the rest of the Republicans have on offer. And the point is not that cutting taxes would improve the economy. It is just that they are ideologically committed to cutting taxes because helping the rich is just the right thing to do. It’s like the “small government” obsession that Republicans have. They can’t give you a reason why small government is good. It is just an article of faith that it is good. Of course, they don’t actually believe in small government. They just say they are as a justification for cutting programs that help the poor and middle classes and spending more on programs that help the rich.

Conservatives are not interested in solving problems. In as much as they engage with them, it is simply to stop anything from ever being done about them.

Yesterday, Paul Krugman wrote, TINA and the ACA. It’s about how yet again, the Republicans have failed to come up with an alternative to Obamacare. It all comes down to what I’ve been talking about for year, Obamacare is the conservative policy solution for our broken healthcare system. So it is no surprise that they find it impossible to come up with a conservative alternative to it. They are against doing anything at all — on principle.

Every idea they’ve ever come up with in the past was only proposed defensively. They wanted something they could hold up to stop a more liberal plan from being enacted. This is the basis of Jonathan Chait’s Heritage Uncertainty Principle. If a policy doesn’t involve helping the rich or hurting the poor, the Republicans really aren’t interested in it. That’s a depressing fact about modern American politics.

So we liberals can get together and talk about different approaches to solving problems. But conservatives are not interested in solving problems. In as much as they engage with them, it is simply to stop anything from ever being done about them. What a sad world they live in. And what an awful world they are trying to create for all the rest of us.

Morning Music: Nick Cave

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Door, DoorThe first band that Nick Cave was in was The Birthday Party. They were a punk band of sorts out of Australia in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They were one of those bands that weren’t directly successful but had so much talent that they were nonetheless hugely influential. I want to highlight a song off their first album, Door, Door. Now officially, the album is by the band “The Boys Next Door.” But they were, in fact, The Birthday Party.

The song is, “Shivers.” It is not a Nick Cave song. It was written by the band’s guitarist, Rowland S Howard (although all the songs were credited to the whole band). He wrote it when he was only 16 years old, which is kind of annoying. But he died young, so I guess I will forgive him. It is a very funny song, in the Nick Cave sense. That is to say that I’m not sure that it’s meant to be funny. It does render very much what it’s like to be dumped when you’re 16 years old. But it seems self-aware — that it understands just what a silly song it is.

Boys next door-door door by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

Anniversary Post: The Goldbergs

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The GoldbergsOn this day in 1949. The Goldbergs first appeared on television. It was the first situation comedy to be on television. It was the brainchild of Gertrude Berg. It started as a radio show in 1928. Berg wrote, directed, and starred in it from the start. It is a show about a Jewish family where Berg plays Molly Goldberg, a stereotypical Jewish mother.

I’d never heard of it before yesterday, so I found a couple of episodes to watch. It’s a bit hard to call it a comedy since it doesn’t have much in the way of laughs. It is pleasant enough. But weird. You can definitely see how I Love Lucy would have impressed people. Just the same, The Goldbergs actually had a longer run.

I don’t know quite what to say about The Goldbergs. I’m curious what other people think of it. But I can’t quite recommend watching this episode, “The New Landlord,” from the first season. I can see how it is supposed to be funny. And it wouldn’t be hard to rewrite it to make it work. It is, after all, a standard kind of comedic set up where Molly finds herself in a bad situation and just makes things worse and worse. It’s like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, but before the mechanics of the process had been worked out.

Still, The Goldbergs is very sweet. No one is evil. I suspect it is very much what most people wanted to watch coming out of the World War II.

TheGoldbergs by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

The Vile and Un-American Reality of Shark Tank

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Shark TankI’ve been a big critic of Shark Tank — the venture capital (VC) “reality” show. It’s interesting that I seem to be one of the few people around who has a problem with the very idea of the show. Most of the “sharks” on the show are not what I would consider entrepreneurs. At best, most of them are deal makers. To me, an entrepreneur is someone who comes up with a new idea and brings it to market. It isn’t about money. I would call Richard Stallman an entrepreneur and never call Mitt Romney one. And most of the “sharks” are just people who used other people’s ideas to enrich themselves.

So I find it annoying to watch many actual entrepreneurs stand up, cap in hand, asking their rich “betters” for a little money to move their businesses forward. And I really don’t like the way that the “sharks” are presented as gods. Look at the way the set of the show is designed. Unlike other “reality” contest shows, the “sharks” (judges) are not seated behind a desk where they might, I don’t know, take notes. No, instead they sit in comfy chairs like they are the Council of Nine on Mount Olympus. Or, if you want to be a bit less fanciful: like a king listening to subject requests.

The average deal ends up with the “sharks” taking a 39% share of the company. But in the real (non-television) world, the number is only 15% (or 30% for preferred equity deals). So the show screws the actual entrepreneurs.

But I’ve also had a practical problem with the show: it is not how venture capitalists do their work. Most interactions with VCs are done on paper. It is far more about management teams than it is about what may or may not be the next big thing. You don’t get to talk to a VC until you’ve been checked out pretty thoroughly, because they don’t want their time wasted. But I heard something from Mark Cuban that made me feel that at least this aspect of the show is okay. When asked what happens after a deal is made on the show, Cuban said, “We get the opportunity to do due diligence. Sixty to seventy percent of my deals close.” (According to Inquisitr, Two-Thirds of Shark Tank Deals Never Close Off Air.)

Ah! So they do this work afterward, because it is a television show. That makes sense and it makes me feel that the show is much less of a fraud than I had thought. But this brings up something I discussed before, Herd Mentality on Shark Tank. One of the common things that happens on the show is that they argue about the valuation of the company that is being pitched. If the due diligence gets done after the deals are made, then the valuations that the “sharks” put forward with such assurance are indeed nothing but guesses — guesses that just so happen to benefit the sharks.

I found a very interesting article from a couple of years ago by George Deeb at Forbes, Comparing Shark Tank To Venture Capital Reality. He made some back-of-the-envelope calculations about how much money startups got and how much their valuations were. He compared those on Shark Tank with VC deals that did not take place on television. (Note: the data are not completely compatible, but it’s close enough.)

The average deal ends up with the “sharks” taking a 39% share of the company. But in the real (non-television) world, the number is only 15% (or 30% for preferred equity deals). So the show screws the actual entrepreneurs. A big part of this is that there is incredible pressure on them to make a decision now, now, now! As as I discussed in the article above, there is a lot of shaming that goes on, “How dare you question the combined wisdom of the sharks!” The implication is that if one of the sharks is willing to back a company, the entrepreneur should take it — no questions asked. In point of fact, actual VC negotiations go on for months and even years.

Shark Tank is still a vile show. It tells Americans exactly what they do not need to hear. It’s kind of the thinking person’s Lotto. It is more show than reality. But if you look at it the right way, it is a great illustration of what’s wrong with America. The “sharks” have no information about the companies before they start, yet they speak like they are experts. That’s what the rich in America are all about. They might as well be the kings of old. And this is not what I was raised to think that America was all about.