There are a lot of great birthdays today and I’m afraid that many of them get short shrift, especially the older ones, many of which could have won the day. But we have lots of great musicians that I just didn’t want to miss out on adding some music here. And then, of course, the day goes to one of the greatest comedians, probably of all time. So onto the birthdays!

On this day in 1933, the great singer Lou Rawls was born. In the end, his most important work was the fundraising and consciousness raising for the United Negro College Fund, which he was highly involved in for the last 25 years of his life. But most people remember him for his gorgeous baritone voice, which is well on display in “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine”:

The great Philadelphia soul singer Billy Paul is 79 today. I mostly know him for his mega-hit “Me and Mrs Jones.” I was quite old when I figured out what the song was about. I was having an affair with a married woman when the song came on the radio and I thought, “Oh!” I can be slow. Anyway, I’ve always thought that “Me and Mrs Jones” would go together really well with “You’re Still a Young Man.” Regardless, Tower of Power does a great version of “Mrs Jones”; they’ve just never put them together. Anyway, here’s Billy Paul:

The great comedian Richard Pryor was born in 1940. It’s hard for people to appreciate today what a comedic innovator he was; I think he was the successor of Lenny Bruce. Here is a good compilation of his stand-up work:

Bette Midler is 68 today. With all of her work as an actor, I think people forget what a great singer she is. Here she is doing the best version of “Beast Of Burden”:

Singer-songwriter Gilbert O’Sullivan is 67. He’s kind of the Irish Harry Nilsson. Here’s his mega-hit “Alone Again (Naturally).” It’s another one of those songs I didn’t get until I was older:

The actor Jeremy Northam is 52 today. I’m a big fan of his. But it isn’t like he’s better than other English actors. As I point out all the time, the English train their actors better than we do here. But mostly I just think that Northam is one of the ideals of male beauty. (Antonio Banderas is another.) Here he is as Mr Knightley very cross about Emma’s interference in Harriet’s relationship with Robert Martin in Emma:

The comedican Sarah Silverman is 43. I’m not a huge far of her comedy. It tends to make me uncomfortable. But I really like her political videos like the following one, “Let My People Vote”:

Other birthdays: early Classical composer Franz Xaver Richter (1709); Rococo sculptor Etienne Maurice Falconet (1716); chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth (1743); wax sculptor Marie Tussaud (1761); mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky (1792); expressionist painter Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884); detective novelist Rex Stout (1886); actor Mary Martin (1913); and actor Emily Mortimer (42).

The day, however, belongs to the man of my childhood, Woody Allen, who is 78 today. When I was a kid, all three of his stand-up albums had been combined into a single double-album Standup Comic. I had it on a cassette and I listened to one side of it every night for at least a year. I think I had it pretty much memorized. Such was my devotion to this man. I also loved his short stories. I learned a lot from those—in particular, what I ought to read to be the intellectual that I considered myself to be. And, of course, there were the movies, which were and still are great. To this day, I still like his little films like Broadway Danny Rose and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion and even September. There isn’t anything he’s done that’s bad. But more important: there is nothing he’s done that wasn’t worth doing. Even when he fails, it is an honest artistic attempt. Allen and Martin Scorsese are the two great American filmmakers—men who never waste the audience’s time and never just go through the motions. Our culture is so much richer for both men. And in the field of comedy, I don’t know that anyone has compared to Allen. He is as funny as Chaplin with the technical prowess of Keaton. Here he is doing some of his best stand-up comedy:

Alright, that’s not enough. Check out this clip from Broadway Danny Rose. This is a single shot. The three of them are walking toward the camera. It’s a long shot and Danny (Allen’s character) stops right in a close-up when Lou says, “Like management.” That whole ending still makes me cry, “Acceptance, forgiveness, and love.”

Happy birthday Woody Allen!

One of the things I was looking forward to on Thanksgiving was watching The Heat with my family. I didn’t know anything about the film except that it starred Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy, both of whom I like. The beginning of it was typical enough. Bullock plays FBI Special Agent Sarah Ashburn, a very capable person with no people skills at all. Think: Miss Congeniality, but much less likable. I figured she’d learn through the course of the movie to be a decent human being. I was wrong. Soon we meet McCarthy’s character: Boston Police Detective Shannon Mullins. She is quickly established as a woman who has no regard for the law in her pursuit of a man trying to get a prostitute and another who is smoking a joint.

Here’s the thing. Even I can get into a movie like Dirty Harry, because the cop is being an asshole in pursuit of a serial killer. This shtick doesn’t work in a comedy when the “bad guys” are unfaithful husbands and kids getting high. But Mullins is worse than that. There is a whole tiresome back story about how she sent her own brother to prison because he was on drugs. She justifies this to her family by saying, “Well none of you got him off the streets!” That’s really amazing. Prison is probably the worst place to get someone off drugs. For one thing, there are plenty of drugs in prison. But more important, after people have felonies on their records, they don’t have a lot of employment (or many other) choices. So after getting out of jail, her brother is likely to be thrown in with the same people he was with before. And this turns out to be exactly what happens in the movie. (Of course, there is no realization in the film that Mullins “solved” her brother’s problem in the worst way.)

Another extremely repellent aspect of the movie is how it dumps all over FBI interrogation. The FBI has the best system for doing interrogations and they are highly successful. But in our pop culture world where 24 is how real men interrogate, the FBI system is wimpy and ineffective. It depends upon rapport-building and also what’s called tit-for-tat. There is a wonderful example where “one terrorist surrendered valuable information in exchange for a heart transplant for his child.” But in The Heat, being an asshole was always the key. They don’t need no stinking effective negotiation techniques!

The film goes on to have exactly the villain you expect. In terms of the “police story” aspect of the film, it is just a series of cliches from movies, but mostly television shows. And at the very end, the villain acts totally stupidly as though all he wants to do is kill the lead characters and doesn’t need to worry about then being arrested. It also uses the myth that air embolism will kill you. This is injecting air into the blood stream. It will kill you, but it would take about a hundred full syringes of air to do it. Regardless, if you managed to succeed at that, the two cops who had been shot to death in the same room would probably raise red flags.

While watching the film, I was reminded of a great comedy The Man with Eugene Levy and Samuel L Jackson. In that film, Jackson plays the McCarthy part: he is really not likable. But instead of teaming him up with a straight laced cop who gets poisoned by his influence, he is teamed up with a sweet, morally heroic dentist. In the end, it is Jackson who learns valuable lessons about life. And this is the fundamental problem with The Heat. The characters start off being unlikable and end up even more so.

This is not to say that the film isn’t funny. McCarthy is funny despite the material. But it isn’t nearly as funny as it would have been if the script had done anything to make me feel that the characters were redeemable. Bullock, on the other hand, was miscast in this film. She puts in a fine performance, but it never seems to gel, and she doesn’t have much to do in the movie other than be outraged and finally won-over by McCarthy.

Look: it would be different if there weren’t real cops acting like they were above the law. But I read about them every day of the week. Hundreds of thousands of people’s lives are destroyed every year by this kind of behavior. So when I see it being held up as an ideal, it gets my back up. Things I would normally find amusing I just bristle at. And that was especially true after the negotiation scene. My advice: rent The Man

Afterword

Of course, The Heat received generally good reviews from the “critics” and did huge box office. The Man was panned by “critics” and did almost nothing at the box office. But I predict that people will quickly forget The Heat. For one thing, how long will it take before people get tired of Melissa McCarthy’s one character act. (Identity Thief was pretty good, but it was exactly the same thing.) For another thing, The Man ages well, and I think it’s silliness will appeal more as people’s preconceived notions about Samuel L Jackson fade away.

Update (5 April 2014 6:01 pm)

I mistakenly wrote above that Eugene Levy’s character in The Man was a dentist. He was actually a dental supply salesman.

On this day in 1803, the great physicist Christian Doppler was born. He is the man who explained the Doppler Effect. This is what you hear when a train passes by you. As it approaches, the frequency of the sound is high and while it moves away from you the frequency of the sound is lower. It’s really simple: as the train approaches you, the sound waves get bunched together and so they have a higher frequency. Think of a guy on top of a train throwing baseballs at you every second. They would hit you more than once a second as the train is approaching and less than once a sound as the train departed.

Doppler wasn’t looking at this problem at all. He was looking at stars. He noted that if a star was moving toward us, its color frequency would be higher and thus bluer; if it was moving away, it would be be redder. It would take Einstein’s work 52 years after Doppler’s death to fully work out the theory.

The great film director and choreographer Busby Berkeley was born in 1895. He created such iconic musicals that his name has become a descriptive term. I always assumed he was gay, but that was really silly. You can tell by the way he shoots women that he loves them. And plenty of them! He was married six times! Here is “We’re in the Money” from Gold Diggers of 1933:

The writer C S Lewis was born in 1898. He is best known for The Chronicles of Narnia. I’m not a big fan. But I’m really interested in his Christian apologetics. Some time ago, I came up with an idea, Jesus: God or Nut? The idea is that Jesus claimed (or at least heavily implied many times) that he was God. So he was either God or some deluded guy. Well, I later found out that Lewis made this exact same argument in favor of Jesus being God. I guess the idea is that no reasonable person could claim that Jesus was insane. Personally, a man who walks around telling people the end is nigh has more than a few screws loose.

Other birthdays: naturalist John Ray (1627); the first female physics professor at a European university Laura Bassi (1711); philosopher Andres Bello (1871); composer Gaetano Donizetti (1797); Russian Neoclassical painter Alexander Brullov (1798); neurology pioneer Jean-Martin Charcot (1825); Rocky’s crazy mother Jackie Stallone (92); the great musician John Mayall (80); actor Diane Ladd (79); musician Chuck Mangione (73); the great wrestler Jerry Lawler (64); comedian Garry Shandling (64); the great filmmaker Joel Coen (59); comedian Howie Mandel (58); actor Andrew McCarthy (52); actor Don Cheadle (49); and actor Tom Sizemore (49).

The day, however, belongs to the great jazz composer Billy Strayhorn who was born on this day in 1915. He is closely aligned with Duke Ellington and it is sometimes hard to decouple them. Strayhorn is the ultimate artist; he didn’t especially want recognition. And there are clearly times where he should have got full credit but only got partial or none at all. But there is no doubt that he needed Ellington who really did treat him well. Here is the man himself playing “Take the ‘A’ Train”:

Happy birthday Billy Strayhorn!

People sometimes ask me why I cook with chicken so much. I think it is a stupid question. You might as well ask why someone eats bread or rice. Chicken is the easiest meat to cook with because it has relatively little flavor. Other meats need to prepared in such a way that compliments their distinct flavor. I think of other meats as I do broccoli. Have you ever noticed how broccoli isn’t generally used in soups? It’s flavor is too distinct. You really have to cook especially for it, whereas potatoes or cauliflower go in pretty much everything. Ditto for chicken. And as someone who likes making sauces, chicken is just easy.

Chicken is also cheap. Pretty much all beef, pork, and sea foods are more expensive than boneless chicken breast. Ground beef is slightly cheaper. So why not cook with chicken? In general, I don’t see the need to try different meats. After all, I am always doing something different with it. It isn’t like it is fried chicken every night. (It is actually pretty much never fried chicken. And it is only chicken about twice a week anyway.)

I am not alone in this respect. According to data collected by Matt Yglesias, Americans eat almost seven times as much chicken as they do turkey. He notes:

He is certainly overstating this for effect. For one thing, I know that Andrea claims to really like turkey. And it is certainly true that part of the reason we don’t cook more turkey is that it’s a pain. They are big and who needs that much food except on Thanksgiving and Christmas? And turkey is more expensive. But it is also true that if turkey were distinctly better than chicken, people would go to the trouble of preparing it.

When I think about the dishes I usually make with chicken, they are things like cashew nut chicken and chicken pot pie. I rarely make a whole chicken, although chicken stuffed with saffron rice is really great. Only one dish I make is even associated with turkey: chicken tetrazzini. I don’t think this has to do with the fact that turkey parts aren’t commonly sold. I think it works the other way around. There is nothing special about turkey. So given the choice of buying smaller chicken parts for less money and larger turkey parts for more money, people go with the former.

So when it comes to America’s kitchens, the turkey stays around for one reason only: tradition. And if that works for people, great. As for me, I don’t need to hassle with a big bird that mostly tastes like the chickens that I cook with on normal days. On special days, it should be something like beef with a red wine demi-glace. But since I’m not cooking today, I only get the beef. But at least it isn’t turkey.

Look at that fetching bird! Do I want to harm a feather on its body? Of course not! Especially after what happened to my chicken Fred. But what’s with this tradition of presidents pardoning turkeys? To begin with, a pardon implies a crime. What did these turkeys ever do to deserve a death sentence? Perhaps it is a good metaphor for our society where punished crime is mostly something you are born into. Born poor and black? You may need a pardon before you are through. Born rich and white? Forget about it! You’re untouchable.

Yesterday, President Obama pardoned a turkey named Popcorn. I think we can all agree that no animal with a name should ever be killed and eaten. But Obama noted that the pardoning of Popcorn was not one of the important jobs of a president. I might take exception to that statement. After all, much of what a president does is provide photo opportunities for the press. We don’t have any royalty to do that job here, so he’s stuck with it. And he knows this. He even prepared a joke for the event.

But it bothers me. Obama seems to take his obligation to pardon turkeys a good deal more seriously than he takes his job to pardon human beings. As Think Progress notes, Obama has increased his pardons from zero last year to 17 this year. “But those few pardons did not change his record of the lowest clemency rate in modern history.” Obama is also the deportation king. He is also the drone civilian murder king. If I agreed with him about any of these policies, he’d be my hero. As it is, not so much.

Looking back on the history of turkey pardons, we naturally land on the conservative icon Ronald Reagan. He didn’t actually pardon any turkeys himself. But at the end of the Iran-Contra scandal, he was asked if he would pardon the criminal Oliver North. Reagan deflected the question by joking about pardoning some turkey named Charlie. Most likely as a result, George Bush Sr started the tradition the first year of his term.

So we can see the whole turkey pardoning business as an example of how the media get sidetracked from important business to trivial photo opportunities. The Iran-Contra Affair was a very big deal. I have absolutely not doubt that both Reagan and Bush were involved in it. And it represents a far worse crime than anything that Nixon ever did. Yet it came to nothing. And it made Oliver North, who absolutely should have been tried for treason, into a conservative hero. But then, being a conservative hero comes pretty cheap. All one have to do is publicly shit on everything that America is supposed to stand for.

I don’t mean to suggest that Obama has done anything so terrible—at least to Americans inside US borders. But his record is far from stellar. And I am really tired of hearing people apologize for him. Somehow he just can’t be liberal because he’s black or because he used drugs or because he’s a Democrat. (That’s a great irony in US politics: conservatives can’t be liberal because they’re conservative; but liberals can’t be liberal because then people might accuse them of being liberal. The horror!) Regardless, Obama is fooling himself if he thinks he will go down in history as a great president. People might point to Obamacare. But like with Johnson, they will be scared away from his conservative governance and the bad economy. And no one will care at all about the turkeys.

Oh my! Matt Yglesias is back to talking about Star Trek, The Star Trek Economy: (Mostly) Post-Scarcity (Mostly) Socialism. It is based upon some recent work by another unapologetic nerd Rick Webb, The Economics of Star Trek, which is ridiculously long for such a silly article. Is it unfair of me to note that they are way over-thinking this stuff? Well, it cannot be any worse than the pain I felt from pulling my hair out reading this stuff.

It isn’t that these aren’t smart guys with interesting ideas. But as someone who has attended two—Count em: two!—Star Trek conventions, I know that nothing they have to say hasn’t been thoroughly discussed inside the bubble. The Star Trek universe is basically a socialist construct. There is no money and everyone has everything they need. But, Webb notes, “There is absolutely, obviously, still private property in the Federation.” Yes there is. There is Picard’s family winery. There is Sisko’s Creole Kitchen. There is Quark’s bar.

There is a reason for this: Gene Roddenberry was not a deep thinker. Let us consider Quark, because it is the best example of the problem. He is a Ferengi, a stupid race that is obsessed with money. Roddenberry wanted to make a point about unregulated capitalism. But this created characters who are so one-dimensional that they stood out even in the simplistic word of Star Trek. According to Wikipedia, “Ferengi culture is so devoted to unregulated capitalism that concepts such as labor unions, sick leave, vacations, or paid overtime for workers are considered abhorrent, because they would interfere with the exploitation of workers.” If that’s the case, the Ferengi would have no workers. Everyone would be independent contracts. (This is, by the way, what conservatives today are calling for without realizing it.)

Star Trek is above all genre storytelling. It not only needs salons for people to gather in, it needs proprietors to stand behind the bar are be wise (Guinan) or funny (Quark) or sweet (the Bar Waitress in Star Trek III). Similarly, occasionally our intrepid heroes will have to hire an independent ship as Bones tries to do in that bar scene in Star Trek III. And that gets to a very important truth about making television series: regardless of where you start, the day to day needs of producing 24 shows per year will back you into a corner. In the end, you will need an apologist of greater ability than William Lane Craig to make any sense of it.

So is there anything we can learn about potential economic systems from Star Trek. No. It’s just a fantasy. Start with a time when there is no scarcity. And put on top of that the hierarchical system that we have today. What do you get? A mess! And the idea of the end of scarcity is ridiculous anyway. At one time, just having enough to eat and a fire to sleep near was the good life. Now I think I’m suffering if the house gets below 60 at night. And what about that wine that Picard’s brother makes? Are you telling me that transporter beams (which would kill you) that can recreate perfect human beings could not store the information of great wines to be dispensed whenever? Please! Picard’s brother had a winery because a screenwriter had a good idea for a story.

In fairness, Yglesias’ apologia for the Star Trek economy is much better than Webb’s. And he is right: in an economy where everyone is given what they need, everyone is in a position to do what it is they want—to self actualize. And if we must think about it, that is probably the way to do it. But there are larger problems: a lot of people who work on starships do a lot of grunt work. (Why? Because they are basically submarine stories!) And they rarely get to “go ashore.” Why would they do that? It makes no sense. But then Star Trek, bless it’s heart, makes no sense.

Afterword

Also: I have a problem with Picard’s tea. First, if one could have any tea, who would pick Earl Grey? I saw Stewart lecture at a Star Trek convention, and he went out of his way to ask fans to stop sending him Earl Grey tea. He said he really wasn’t fond of it. Of course! No one who is into tea likes Earl Grey. Yes, I will drink it. It was clearly put in the show by some American who had no real knowledge of tea. So he thought, “I can’t use ‘English Breakfast,’ because it sounds odd. How about ‘Earl Grey’? That sounds English without pushing the point too much!” Second, there is his instruction, “Earl Grey. Hot.” What does that mean?! Does he sometimes order it, “Earl Grey. Luke warm”? And what temperature is “hot”? Earl Grey should be steeped at 90°C. Everything else is so exact in Star Trek—like Spock’s tired, “We will arrive in approximately 9.4236719 hours.” But not here. Well, I guess “hot” is good enough for tea—at least when you’re an American television writer with no real experience with the stuff.

On this day in 1874, the historian Charles A Beard was born. He was a progressive who saw the history of America through the lens of class conflict. This view has fallen out of favor. But his idea applied to the founding of the country seems correct. He argued that there were two revolutions. First, there was the revolution that we all know and love and that is immortalized with singing and a bit of dance in 1776. But there was a second revolution about who should rule. There were those who wanted at least a proto-democracy, as advocated by people like Paine and Madison. And then there were those who wanted a new aristocratic rule, as advocated by people like Adams and Hamilton. I think we can all agree that the results of that revolution are much more a muddle compared to the whole England business.

Beard is also know for his four sentence “lessons of history.” They are more poetic than useful, but I think I glean some insight from it.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power.

The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.

The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

Martial arts expert, actor, and hunka hunka burning love Bruce Lee was born in 1940. To be honest, I’m not a big fan of his movies. They are fun but that’s about all. He was, however, a fascinating man with the kind of jumble of beliefs that come being very smart but effectively an amateur intellectual. And I think those the very best kind of people. He was very interested in eastern philosophy of the Krishnamurti kind. But he was also quite clear about his atheism. He was only 32 when he died and as far as I’m concerned, we still don’t know why. The cause of death was cerebral edema (accumulation of fluid in the brain), but I don’t think it is likely to been because of the medication he was on. It’s sad. He should still be with us.

Other birthdays: astronomer Anders Celsius (1701); playwright Fanny Kemble (1809); science fiction writer L Sprague de Camp (1907); author James Agee (1909); illustrator Josh Kirby (1928); film director Kathryn Bigelow (62); Bill Nye the Science Guy (58); and author David Rakoff (1964).

The day, however, belongs to the great guitarist Jimi Hendrix who was born on this day in 1942. Was he really the great guitarist in all history as Rolling Stone would have us believe? Well, I don’t know about that. But he is one of the greatest. And he was also a fine songwriter. And he was a great showman. When you get right down to it, his guitar playing is just blues with a fantastic ear for beautiful melodies. What I think really threw him into another category is his use of the wah-wah pedal. You can really hear it on “Voodoo Child” here in Woodstock:

Happy birthday Jimi Hendrix!