One Thousand Words, Part 6

My grandparents are in the center of this picture. It's the summer of 1977 on the day they first saw my sweetie. That's what the flowers were about. I'm standing next to my sweetie, the guy with the Jewfro. My mother is on the far left. My father took the picture.

My grandfather was a capitalist through and through, and he was amused about my living arrangements, sharing a house with my sweetie and two others. In his youth he'd seen the rise of socialism and communes. People in the 1960s thought they invented "free love." But it was in Eastern Europe in the 1910s and 1920s. Everything old is new again it seems. Anyhow, he smiled at me and said to me in Yiddish, "So you're living in a commune now I understand."

"It's not a commune, I'm just sharing a house," I tried to explain. He just laughed. My mother was worried about his response to my sweetie and I living together. He'd seen it all before. "As long as she's Jewish, it's fine with me," was what he said to her.

My uncle (on the far right) used to always greet me by asking, "How's my little glue sniffer?" But with the arrival of my sweetie on the scene, he changed greetings. Instead he would ask, "How's your hot honey?" He kept that line up for several years. My grandmother - who was certifiable for all my days - took to my sweetie instantly. "She's a tiny one just like me," she said to me. The Yiddish word she used to describe her was pitzeleh.

The office to my grandfather's junkyard is in the background, Waukesha Auto Parts. Waukesha is a small town, now a suburb, 20 miles away from Milwaukee proper. Back then it was a typical anti-Semitic German Catholic community. The junkyard was on the main drag at the eastern end of town. My grandfather lived in the back of the junkyard and of course had a mean as anything junkyard dog. My uncle and his family lived across the street.

This wasn't at all a residential area. I thought it was kind of nuts for them to be living where they were, surrounded by industry, far from any neighbors, and a good forty five minutes away from any Jewish community where they might fit in. But I never said anything except to my mom, who agreed. I'm know she lobbied for my uncle to move; I'm sure she did the same with her father.

In Waukesha, my grandfather was simply known as "The Jew." I don't think most people knew his actual name. Occasionally people would come up to me when I was a kid - I'd spend weekends there quite a bit - and say, "you're The Jew's grandkid, aren't ya," in that Germanic kind of sing song accent people in Southeastern Wisconsin have. They didn't mean anything by it, but I would cringe when it happened.

My grandfather and grandmother lived there until my grandfather was about 85 or so. Then he retired and they moved to a condo full of Jewish seniors, walking distance to some apartments my parents owned. My uncle continued to run the business. The little guy in the picture runs it now, my cousin.

My grandfather had an incredible constitution. When he was 75 or so, the magnet on the junkyard crane malfunctioned and dumped I don't know how many hundreds of pounds of scrap onto the ground where he was standing. His leg was shattered. Doctors told him he would never walk again. A year and a half later, he threw his cane away.

When he was about 80, his doctor told him he would soon contract diabetes. Upon hearing the news, he dropped 20 pounds in a month and drastically changed his diet for the rest of his days. This delayed the onset of his diabetes for several years. Then he'd inject himself with insulin even though his hands were by then horribly arthritic. His mind was sharp until the day he died. He was 92. My grandmother died three months later.

Uncle Stuey's American Top 40, August 27th, 2009

Here's the Jazz/AAA radio chart for the week. I haven't begun to listen to the new CDs listed here yet, but I will.

1 Jackie Ryan Doozy Open Art 2009
2 The Terence Blanchard Group Choices Concord Jazz 2009
3 Wilco Wilco (The Album) Nonesuch 2009
4 The Dead Weather Horehound Third Man / Warner Bros. 2009
5 NOMO New Tones Ubiquity 2006
6 Kurt Elling Dedicated To You: Kurt Elling Sings The Music Of Coltrane And Hartman Concord Jazz 2009
7 Joe Locke & David Hazeltine Mutual Admiration Society 2 Sharp Nine 2009
8 Cory Weeds Everything's Coming Up Weeds Cellar Live 2009
9 Triangle Forest Hostile Takeover Self-Released 2006
10 Bobby Broom Bobby Broom Plays For Monk Origin 2009
11 Roy Hargrove Big Band Emergence EmArcy / Groovin' High 2009
12 Robert Glasper Double Booked Blue Note 2009
13 Tamir Hendelman Playground Swing Bros. 2008
14 Sophie Milman Take Love Easy Linus 2009
15 Jon Mayer Nightscape Reservoir 2009
16 Bill Easley Hearing Voices 18th & Vine 2009
17 Kyle Eastwood Metropolitan Candid / Rendezvous 2009
18 Akiko Tsuruga Oriental Express 18th & Vine 2009
19 Levon Helm Electric Dirt Vanguard 2009
20 Jack Wilkins Until It's Time Max Jazz 2009
21 Grant Stewart Grant Stewart Plays The Music Of Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn Sharp Nine 2009
22 Willie Nelson American Classics Shangri-La / Blue Note 2009
23 Andy Martin Setting The Standard Drewbone 2009
24 The Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band I'm BeBoppin' Too Half Note 2009
25 Gary Burton, Pat Metheny, Steve Swallow & Antonio Sanchez Quartet Live Concord Jazz 2009
26 Gerald Clayton Two-Shade ArtistShare 2009
27 The Bob Florence Limited Edition Legendary Mama 2009
28 John Proulx Baker's Dozen: Remembering Chet Baker MaxJazz 2009
29 Joe Henry Blood From Stars ANTI- 2009
30 Freddy Cole The Dreamer In Me HighNote 2009
31 Christian McBride & Inside Straight Kind Of Brown Mack Avenue 2009
32 Spoon Got Nuffin [EP] Merge 2009
33 Mike Stern Big Neighborhood Heads Up 2009
34 Louis Hayes The Time Keeper 18th & Vine 2009
35 Eels Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs Of Desire Vagrant 2009
36 Alvin Queen Mighty Long Way Enja / Justin Time 2009
37 The Marco Benevento/Joe Russo Duo Best Reason To Buy The Sun Ropeadope 2005
38 Kenny Barron Live At Bradley's Sunnyside 2002
39 Jim Rotondi Blues For Brother Ray Posi-Tone 2009
40 Grizzly Bear Veckatimest Warp 2009

Confronting the Failure of Higher Ed at Georgetown

As readers of this blog know, I taught at a pretty good university for 15 years. I liked my office. I liked my parking. I liked quite a few of the students. I liked my research. But most of the rest was uniformly dreadful. As a result, I walked away. It was one of the better things I've done.

There is no doubt in my mind that higher ed is failing our nation. Strip all the rhetoric away, and you're not left with much. Universities and colleges are incredibly wasteful when it comes to research; good work gets done, but there is a tremendous amount of dross. I've heard people opine that this dross is necessary. They call it the pyramid effect. You need a base of worthless stuff to allow for the good stuff on top or something like that. This is simply a rationalization for a very inefficient system of providing this nation with intellectually captivating and sometimes societally useful tested ideas.

Then there is education. Universities and colleges do a less than stellar job educating undergraduates. Most students go through the motions. Most professors go through the motions as well. There is a lot of winking going on, a silent pact between undergraduates and professors that says I won't bother you if you won't bother me. There are over 10 million people enrolled in college. Most are simply biding time until they are 21 and can get a real job.

You generally cannot get those in positions of authority to publicly admit that undergraduate education is dreadful. They are winking, too. Privately, they may admit their institutions don't educate undergraduates well (at least they have to me). But put them in front of a microphone and they are non-stop cheerleaders for the wonders their education provides.

I said the word "generally." Every once in a while, the truth leaks out. That's remarkably what has happened at Georgetown University over the last few years. Actually, it began earlier in 1997 when a faculty committee issued a report on intellectual life on campus. It was an unvarnished portrait of a school big on parties and small on learning. Other schools no doubt privately have written assessments like this. Georgetown is not unusual in its party hearty atmosphere. Duke issued a similar report in the early 1990s. It was ignored. The party at Duke went on and still goes on.

What's unusual about Georgetown is that in 2007 a new committee reexamined the state of intellectual life and again lamented the lack of serious learning. Nothing much had changed over 10 years. The language was again blunt.

I've never seen a school seriously confront its wan education standards on a consistent basis even at the level of a campus committee. In 2009, Georgetown leadership went even further, creating a public document, A Call To Action. The idea is to somehow get people to try to find ways for both undergraduates and professors to take undergraduate education seriously. It's an admirable goal. But look at this document. The expectation is that by tweaking Georgetown's curriculum, education can be transformed. Also, look at the almost complete lack of public comment on this document. Does anyone at Georgetown aside from its provost and a handful of faculty members care at all about the absence of substance in undergraduate education at the university?

My read on this is that you have leadership at Georgetown desperate enough to want to change the status quo to go public about its woes. It is actually confronting its failure, which is certainly an admirable effort.

But the problem at Georgetown and elsewhere isn't in the curriculum. It isn't a programatic failure. It's an individual one. It's what goes on inside each classroom. The curriculum is beside the point. What is needed at Georgetown are professors who take their job as educators seriously and demand the work that their talented students can produce. What is needed at Georgetown are students who drink a few less beers every night and study an hour or two more.

The provost at Georgetown apparently also has a major problem that isn't about wan educational expectations. It's about several hundred professors who apparently don't care enough to even participate in a public discussion on how to improve their school. I don't know how Georgetown or any other college or university can somehow get their faculty to take their jobs as educators seriously. The wink-wink relationship between students and faculty has gone on for so many decades that it's entrenched.

As a professor from Emory once said to me, "It's like the old Soviet Joke: we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us. Except in college it's we pretend to teach and the students pretend to learn." I wish I had a decent idea on how to reverse this state of affairs. I don't. I give kudos to Georgetown's provost for at least trying even if I can clearly see that his efforts will lead to nothing of substance. I wish that there were more leaders like him.

The Evolution of Stick Food

A little ways back I went to the Wisconsin State Fair. It was delightful. I talked to the kids with their entries in the dairy cow barn and they were all so sweet, not an ounce of snark in them. I perused the prize winning handicrafts and vegetables. And of course there was food. Lots and lots of food. I tried to be picky. I sampled some very yummy goats milk fig ice cream, a buffalo meat burrito (half-size), some ostrich jerky, and washed it all down with some banana flavored milk (mixed with some chocolate milk from my sweetie). Oh I forgot, we split a baked potato and the spud shop.

What we didn't try was the latest craze at the Wisconsin State Fair, chocolate covered bacon on a stick. Bacon is definitely not my thing. Chocolate seldom excites me either. The combination sounds disgusting. Above you can find someone who tried the stuff. She wasn't impressed, but was happy to experiment using her taste buds. I did a very unscientific poll of people's opinions and basically if you were over 100 pounds overweight, you thought that chocolate covered bacon was great. Less fat meant an opinion of a definite thumbs down.

But for those in need of stick food who weren't morbidly obese, there was nothing to fear. There were plenty of alternatives. We've come a long way since corn dogs, taffy apples and cotton candy. There was also a reuben sandwich on a stick (minus the rye bread). There was macaroni and cheese on a stick (deep fried to hold it all together). Cheesecake (deep fried) on a stick was there as well.

I asked where this kind of stuff came from and was told that the Minnesota State Fair is the king of stick food. They were the ones that came up with chocolate covered bacon on a stick last year. Now it's spreading throughout the Midwest. This year, Minnesota had pig cheeks and pizza on a stick (not combined). I imagine those will be at Wisconsin Fair next year.

How did state fairs and carnivals become synonymous with fried stick food? I have no idea. I'm guessing that if you need to use a stick, you need to fry whatever you're going to put on that stick and stick food is simply an excuse to eat heavily breaded, fried stuff.

You can easily come up with new food on a stick that might be delicious (or not). Perch on a stick would be fabulous without a doubt (especially on Friday nights at the Fair). Stuffed pheasant on a stick might work too. How about shrimp cocktail on a stick? Or potstickers on a stick? Oysters on a stick? Herring on a stick? OK let's nix that last one. But maybe if you covered the herring in chocolate you'd be onto something.

One Thousand Words, Part 5

I just came back from our last trip for the summer, camping in the Sierras. Lots of fun. And with my new boots, not a single blister or lost toe nail. I'm a happy guy.

OK, this is one of my favorite pictures with my parents. It's the last vacation I took with them, winter of 1971.

First some background. That year, a friend's dad had a continuation of a mid-life crisis. He'd had a heart attack and chased after women half his age for a few years. But that wasn't the end of things. He pledged to his wife he was done with the womanizing and decided to buy a hotel in Jamaica. He was rich, but not that rich, which meant he became a partner in a small resort on an old plantation a few miles off the coast. The whole family moved. It was an incredibly selfish act.

My friend went to boarding school in the hills of Jamaica (right near where they make the Jamaican hot sauce, Pickapepper, a sauce that my sweetie and I still swear by). He slept on beds made of coconut husks, I kid you not. His geography teacher, an ancient retired British colonel, taught with a map of the old British empire. My friend learned nothing for two years although given the state of Jamaican basketball, he was - at five foot four with white-Jewish speed and jumping ability - a starter on the school's basketball team. I lost track of him over the years; last I heard he had gone ultra-Orthodox and was living in Israel.

So what does all that have to do with this picture? My parents decided to forget about Miami and visit Jamaica for winter vacation. They could get their first taste of the Caribbean. I could see my friend. The picture is taken overlooking Montego Bay. We stayed at some resort on the ocean; my parents thought the idea of a resort off the beach like my friend's father had bought was a ridiculous idea.

This was the last year my father was healthy as well. He was 52, about my age. He was as close to happy as he would ever be that year. He was still working like crazy, building apartments. He was vigorous and as you can tell by his belly, "prosperous." My mother would get on him about his big stomach. "I don't like to see that mountain!" She would say to him in Yiddish. My father had a birthmark on his stomach, a huge thing that looked like the hole in the atmosphere of Jupiter. In 1971, it had stretched like the rest of him to true Jupiter-like proportions. He could have cared less about his weight. Eventually, he would drop 20 pounds because his doctor told him he'd end up dead if he didn't.

We had a very happy vacation. Look at me with all of that hair! I'd get my hair cut once a year back then, on my mother's birthday. Jamaica at the time was fully developing its ganga, reggae culture and the Jamaicans loved my quasi-dread locks. The island was full of gang related violence. In the newspaper, you'd see picture after picture of 20 year olds in the obituary columns. I had no idea in a few years that drug related, gang culture would migrate to NY and LA, and then spread across the US.

I spent a couple of days with my friend, and then split the rest of the time hanging with teen kids on the beach and Jamaican teens who'd take me around Montego Bay. I went to Negril with them, which back then was just a bare beach for the locals. I'd walk around with my harmonica in hand playing blues riffs incessantly.

On the beach, I found that the girls liked me. The Jamaican teens were intrigued by all the attention I was getting, which was news to me as well. They kept giving me advice about how to make moves and what to do. One time I was with a girl just at the pool and she mentioned that she was walking on the beach at night with a guy who had his hands all over her. I told this to the Jamaicans and they got all goofy and laughed. "She said that because she wants you to do it too." I was surprised by this assessment of her psychology. They said I was an idiot for not understanding women. So I followed their advice. They were right. I continued to follow their advice for the next week and a half.

My parents thought they were in heaven. The weather was always warm, not like in Miami. There were waterfalls to swim in and the scenery was lush with greenery and tropical flowers. I don't think they ever vacationed in Miami again. In future years they'd take Caribbean cruises over most winter holidays.

Much Ado About Health Care

The other day I went to Dianne Feinstein's office to talk about health care with a staffer. There were about 15 other people there. It was a depressing event. Basically, it's clear that health care isn't a big issue with Senator Feinstein. Her main concerns are that whatever gets passed shouldn't cost too much money and especially should not create programs that end up costing California money that it doesn't have.

We have created a bizarre and byzantine system in this country concerning health care. It's expensive. It results in high infant mortality and low life expectancy relative to other industrialized nations. It's crap. The only thing it's good at is treating people with exotic problems using fancy equipment at a ridiculous cost. When it comes to basic care, it's junk. It ought to be scrapped completely.

Why we won't admit that our health care system is junk is unknown to me. But I think it may be because we have created a system that reflects the ethos of this country. We hate government. So our system is private. We love toys. So hospitals buy millions and millions of dollars of fancy equipment. We love to sue. So we allow people to collect millions for wrongful medical practice in courts of law. We hate taxes. So we have companies provide medical benefits tax free. We are fearful of dying from some exotic disease so we're all for ridiculously expensive procedures that solve the one in a hundred thousand case of illness.

Our health care system is like a Harley. It's expensive. It's wasteful. It doesn't handle or ride well. But it looks impressive from a distance. It's great for the occasional times you want to go to 0 to 100 in a hurry. Like a Harley, our health care is distinctly American. And it's junk.

To attack our crappy health care system is essentially to attack the American way of thinking. Boundless optimism is always a good thing except in the case of health care. It leads to boundless costs.

This year our president decided to try and reform health care. It was a noble idea, but he made a few blunders along the way. First and foremost, he decided to let Congress write the laws for reform. Congress has been unable to create significant social welfare legislation in over thirty years. Time Magazine's Joe Klein says their ineptitude is due to the fact that this country is getting old. Apparently only fresh democracies can do anything right. But that's ridiculous. Did Congress have a "best used by" date of 1978?

No, what has happened is that lobbying money has completely corrupted Congress. I don't know how many hundreds of millions of dollars the health care industry has given Congress over the last several years. But asking them to write laws reforming health care is like asking the American Association of Prostitutes to right a manifesto on the value of marital fidelity. Neither has a clue.

Plus no one wants to raise taxes, which means there is no money for big programs. What you get are things like George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. These are unfunded mandates, laws that reflect what we'd like to do if we had dough. The corruption of Congress by money and the taxpayer revolt of the late 1970s has left this country running on fumes. If we wouldn't work so damn hard in comparison to other countries, we'd be in one huge mess. We scrimp on education, which hurts our economic competitiveness. We let health care be catch as catch can, which leads to major holes in treating our public and preventing disease.

Obama should have never let Congress near a bill until he had figured out what he personally wanted. The end result was that the GAO looked at what Congress was proposing and pronounced it unworkable. It would cost 100 billion a year of government money and do nothing to curtail health care costs. From that moment on, real health care reform was over.

Instead, what we now have is the theater of Obama trying to save face, the right wing trying to take advantage of Obama's misstep by demonizing him, and seniors scared to death that health care reform will come out of their hides. It makes for great news. But we aren't talking about reform anymore. We're just engaging in rhetoric.

A bill will be passed no doubt. More people will be insured than before. That's a good thing. Seniors will get less health care than before. That's a bad thing. But in the end our health care system will be much the same as it was before, crap.

Let's go from the general to the specific. I currently pay about 10K a year for my health insurance and doctors visits. My sweetie and I are perfectly healthy, lucky us. Our deductible is 5K per person. Our health insurance includes one annual exam less lab expenses.

Our costs are roughly double what they were five years ago despite being elevated to the lowest cost tier of health insurance (due to our lucky good health) and doubling our deductible. My routine urine analysis from my last annual exam was 700 dollars, up 500 percent from five years ago. When all is said and done with health care reform what will I be paying five years from now? I'd bet anyone 5K that my costs will be over 20K five years from now. My health insurance costs will be dramatically up. Because I'm older, I'll have more "issues," which means more doctors visits. I'm convinced that despite all of the rhetoric and shouting, this debate about health care is much ado about nothing.

As someone once said about academia, the fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small. That's what's happening with heath care today.

One Thousand Words, Part 4

Oh my god, was I young. This was about February 1977. I'm drying my hair after washing it in the kitchen sink. The pink towels, if I remember correctly, came from Holly's grandma. We'd have them for another ten years at least before they finally wore out. Those things were virtually indestructible.

Holly and I were living together for the first time. We rented a house next to the Vilas Park Zoo, walking distance to campus in Madison, and found two roommates. The house was a cute clapboard thing and it had no insulation. In the winter you could feel the cold air coming off the windows and walls. At full blast, the furnace could only keep the house heated to 62 degrees. Our heating bill was over 100 dollars a month, which was an astounding amount at the time. The landlord had lived in the house as a kid and his mother lived in it before us. We were his first tenants ever. When I told him about the heating bill and the fact that the house was never close to warm, he came over with a bottle of vodka. "This ought to help you," he said.

It was finally getting warm and so we were happy. When we moved in together, Holly's parents weren't exactly ecstatic. In November, Holly's mom came with a pair of twin bed sheets as a present for Holly. She was about to hand them to Holly and then the realization of our living together made her stop. "I guess you won't be able to use these," she said and then broke into tears. I didn't know what to say to Holly's mom at the time.

My dad's view was unique. He pulled me aside one day and said, "I don't understand how you're making out."

"What do you mean?" I said.

"Well, you gotta pay your rent and her rent. How can you afford that?"

"Oh no, I'm not paying her rent. She's paying that."

"You mean she's living with you and she's paying her rent, too?"

"Yeah, that's right." My dad broke out in a huge grin. He patted me on the back. I suddenly understood what he was thinking. My son is getting free nookie. It was as if I'd won the lottery as far as he was concerned. "That's my boy," he said.

We had one female and one male roommate. The female was from back East. We'd rotate cooking for dinner every day. She couldn't cook worth a damn, but she was very wholesome.

For half the year we had a male roommate who was a Ph.D. student in food science. He owned only two albums, both Audobon Society records full of bird calls. He'd play those things all the time. The announcer on the album would identify the call - the yellow toed warbler, let's say - and then you'd hear the tweet of that bird. He'd come back from the food science department with all this goat stuff. We drank mostly goat milk. We had goat ice cream. Sometimes he'd come back with strange test products, margarine, cheese, you name it. He was a character.

The food science guy was always making sprouts. He'd put a jar in the oven to grow them because the oven was a little warmer than the rest of the house. During my turn for cooking, I'd frequently turn on the oven without checking for the sprouts. He'd get p.o.'d. Whenever he went to campus, he'd say, "Gotta go to goo." Holly and I still use the word "goo" for "school."

The previous two years, I'd been living on cream of wheat for breakfast, yoghurt and fruit for lunch and broccoli and kasha with bowtie noodles for dinner. I never ate out because it was too expensive. My weekly food bill was 10 bucks. This eating arrangement in our house was a step up for me.

I'm in the living room in this picture. Holly is taking the photo. I bought the plant in the background for Holly for a Hanukah present that December. I called it the "fuschia with a futchah." I said it was a symbol of our relationship. One week later, bugs invaded the thing and all the fuschia's leaves died. Holly nursed it back to life, but it was still pretty ratty. We'd give the plant up in another year. Our relationship fared much better than the plant. So much for symbolism.

How Many Baseball Players Were Juiced?

In 1988, Kirk Gibson hit one of the more memorable home runs in a World Series game. It was the bottom of the ninth. Gibson, injured to the point that he could barely walk, came in to pinch hit for the Dodgers. A future Hall of Famer for the A's was on the mound. Gibson guessed back door slider. He guessed right and hit a walk off home run.

As an A's fan, I watched that game with quite a bit of interest. Sometime around then, the movie based on Bernard Malamud's novel The Natural came out, which has an amazing home run sequence. Someone put the two together, and Kirk Gibson's hit became The Natural or Roy Hobbs (the main character in The Natural) home run in baseball lore.

If you watch the replay of that hit today, it's clear that something doesn't compute. Gibson should be pathetic at the plate. His legs should be useless for driving a pitch. I don't care if he guessed right on that slider, no normal human being could have clobbered that ball some 380 feet with just his arms. But Kirk Gibson wasn't normal. He took a steroid, cortisone, so he could, at least for one at bat, use his legs. Kirk Gibson wasn't cheating by the way. Cortisone use was and is legal in MLB.

Was Gibson using other steroids at the time? No one was testing. His body broke down at a young age, 31. He was a big guy, but not huge. I'm guessing the answer is no. At the time not many players were using steroids. By the 1990s, though, a lot were. How many is a lot? We can get a vague estimate by looking at a simple measure of power, the number of home runs hit per ball game, over time.

From 1989 to 2004, the number of home runs hit per game increased by over 50 percent. The graph above shows a smoothed version of the time history. Home runs per game were essentially stable in quantity from the 1960s to the early 1980s. Then something happened to cause home runs to rise. I don't know exactly what it was. Neither does anyone else. But one thing about that era was that talent levels were low. Expansion had increased the number players in MLB. But potential black players were increasingly avoiding baseball. Latin American scouting wasn't as prominent as it is today either. The lack of uniform talent created a situation where major league hitters were increasingly facing minor league caliber pitchers.

By the late 1980s, the Latin pipeline was fully established. Talent levels were more uniform. My guess is that this change helped to cause the drop in home runs per game at the end of the 1980s.

Then something else happened. We all know what that something else was. A lot of players started to use steroids and other performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). For some of them, their home run production increased by about 80 percent. If this level of performance increase applied across the board, the increase in home runs (assuming that the increase was all PED related) suggests that about 70 percent of all offensive players were juiced during the steroids era.

That number is similar to the claims made by Jose Canseco, one of the fathers of steroid use in baseball. Another admitted user, the late Ken Caminiti, stated that about 50 percent of players used PEDs. This number seems reasonable, probably more reasonable than 70 percent. Other factors besides PEDs increased home run production. The 1990s saw the construction of newer ballparks designed for more home runs. Players - steroid users and non-steroid users - began to abandon the age old wisdom that weight lifting hurts ballplayers by adversely affecting their flexibility. The ball might have been juiced as well.

Others put the estimate of steroid users lower. I remember reading estimates of around 25 percent usage from Dave Duncan, long time pitching coach, and a similar estimate from long time manager, Lou Piniella. These two have a vested interest in the reputation of MLB and their estimates are probably too low. But let's call 25 percent a lower bound.

Here's another gage of steroid use. Over the last 10 years or so, 10 players have reached the 500 home run plateau. Seven of them are known to have used PEDs. Put all of these estimates together and somewhere between 25 and 70 percent of all offensive ballplayers used steroids during the 1990s to the early 2000s.

The current news is filled with slow leaks of the 100 or so ballplayers who test positive to steroids in 2003. But the number of PED users was undoubtedly many times more than 100 back then. The question isn't who used steroids. The more appropriate question may be who didn't.

Imagine being a ballplayer back then. Baseball is a very competitive and lucrative sport. If you were a minor leaguer or MLB player back then, you would have seen guys with ripped physiques hitting monstrous home runs. You would have seen former singles hitters like Bret Boone become All Stars. If you had wanted a career in the major leagues, what would you have done? Your boss was doing nothing to discourage steroid use. The owners wanted to see more home runs. The fans wanted more home runs. It's a no brainer.

A lot of players thought this way back then. I don't blame them. Imagine a tax system with no enforcement. Imagine laws without a police force. Without enforcement, rules are meaningless.

I happen to not like steroids in baseball. It's not because I'm concerned with "the integrity of the game." It's because I like games where defense and pitching dominate. Once you add PEDs to the equation, most games turn into atrocious, silly affairs where even great pitches get hit for dingers. Before the steroids era, coaches used to tell their pitchers, "Throw strikes. Babe Ruth is dead." In the 1990s, PEDs created a lot of unlikely Babe Ruths.

Let's go back to that game in the 1988 World Series. It's the bottom of the ninth. The Dodgers are down by one. One man is on. There are two out. Gibson limps to the batter's box to pinch hit. The count goes to 3 and 2. The A's future Hall of Famer, Dennis Eckersley, throws a back door slider. Gibson guesses back door slider.

But lets change one thing. This time Gibson isn't on cortisone. What happens? It isn't hard to figure out. Gibson swings and hits a lazy fly ball to right field. Game over. There is no magic. In a steroids-free world, gimpy ball players don't hit home runs.* That's baseball the way it should be. Cortisone made a hero out of Gibson. It did the same thing for Willis Reed in the NBA finals of 1969. The PED era of the 1990s made a lot more heroes and created a lot of cartoon games full of improbable feats. And way, way more than 100 players were involved in these cartoons.

If you look at the graph above, you can see that while home runs per game tailed off a bit after mandatory testing, the numbers remained historically high. Why is that? Well of course players do lift weights routinely nowadays, but no more so than in 2002. And of course, ballparks are more home run friendly, but the changes have been minor.

What's left? It's probably true that a good number of players still are using. They just aren't getting caught. It's likely that the number of users is significantly smaller than it was in 2002. How many still are using? My guess, and it's just a guess based on the graph above, is that the number is somewhere around 15 percent. The steroids era is to some degree likely still with us. It's been twenty years since coaches routinely told pitchers, "Throw strikes. Babe Ruth is dead." My guess is that they'll never be able to say such a thing again.

*In a steroids-free world, Jose Canseco doesn't hit a grand slam off a good pitch to give the A's four runs in that game either.

One Thousand Words, Part 3

The date is my brother's bar mitzvah party, summer 1964. Everything you'd want to know about this event is in this picture. It's the most Jewish photo I have. Look at my dad shoving a ridiculously large piece of cake into his mouth, his lips and chin covered in frosting. He's probably had a shot or two of schnapps. His face is glowing. My father loved a simcha (Jewish event of joy). He knew how to party. He loved to dance and certainly loved to eat. And this was the first real simcha our family held.

My father wanted to show off it's true. We didn't have a lot of money at the time, but this event was important to both him and my mom. About 200 people were invited if I remember correctly, a mix of greener and American Jewish families my parents knew from business, synagogue, the Jewish Community Center and the neighborhood.

In Europe, Bnai Mitzvot were no big things. But America was different. Aside from a desire to show off, this event also represented a real effort on the part of my parents to try to assimilate and "act like Americans." In general, my parents weren't at all interested in assimilation and were more than proud of their background; they felt that in terms of culture most aspects of Jewish life in eastern Europe were superior to that found in the US.

It was my first event ever where I wore formal attire. I'm the little guy in the white tux. My brother is the big guy in the white tux. I'm getting a knip in bekl, a pinch on the cheek from the cantor, who presided over the ceremony. Look at my face. Do I look happy? Nooooooo. Actually, I had a great time at this event. But that particular moment was the low point. This is just a great shot, no doubt about it. The photographer for this event was fantastic.

But those pinches. They were awful things. If you were a kid, they were both painful and humiliating. The physics of it was simple. The adult - sometimes a relative, sometimes a stranger - said something like the following "eyir sayt oys a zoy zees, ich daph rasin oop a shtikl oyf fun bekl" (he looks so sweet I have to rip off a piece of his cheek) reached down, pressed the knuckles of his index finger and middle finger into your right cheek, squeezed the knuckles shut, and pulled. The pain was instant. It was supposed to be a sign of affection. But usually it was more than that. It was designed to put you in your place. It really was.

Humiliation was intrinsic to growing up in European Jewish culture. It's hard to explain, but the idea was that you were expected to rise above it, to develop a thick skin and confidence. You were knocked down and challenged, but you were expected to pop right back up. This kind of conditioning happened in the home. It happened in school. They beat you silly, literally. But it wasn't about breaking your will. It was all about toughening you up. The love was there. The expectation was that you were so good and talented that you needed to face adversity. Not everyone responded well to this approach, that's for certain. It worked for me.

I can't help but note that there is a huge discrepancy between the Yiddish world I knew and the nostalgia-laced thing you find in most books on Yiddish culture. The tendency in America is to sugar coat every aspect of shtetl life and focus on the cute turns of phrases and clever curses of Yiddish language. In contrast, the culture in my experience - and in a lot of ways I grew up in a shtetl airlifted to America in 1949 - was tough and practical. It was a no-nonsense thing. When people tell me that Israelis are different than their shtetl-based ancestors in their toughness, I just have to disagree.

OK, back to matters at hand. The guy giving me the knip, the cantor, was a character. He spent most of the night staring at all the women's boobs and even the boobs of the thirteen year old girls. He was brazen about it. My mom told me many years later that he didn't just look; he usually was keeping busy with one or two housewives when he wasn't singing. When I was in my teens, I aspired to be a cantor, but my role model wasn't this guy. Actually, it was Richard Tucker the opera singer. I had a problem, though. I was an atheist. I ultimately decided that being an atheist and a cantor were orthogonal. Later on I found out that many big name cantors in Europe before the war had, like me, no belief in God whatsoever. If had known that at the time, I might have kept up my singing and studies. In this case, my ignorance was a good thing.

Uncle Stuey's American Top 40, August 6th, 2009

Here's the AAA/jazz chart for the week. There's some interesting stuff down at #40. Joe Henry is one of my favorites and his new CD comes out in a couple of weeks; you can download a cut via his website and it sounds pretty damn good. The Low Anthem is kind of a countrified Over the Rhine.

1 Jackie Ryan Doozy Open Art 2009
2 Grizzly Bear Veckatimest Warp 2009
3 Joe Locke & David Hazeltine Mutual Admiration Society 2 Sharp Nine 2009
4 Wilco Wilco (The Album) Nonesuch 2009
5 Fahir Atakoglu Istanbul In Blue Far And Here 2008
6 Eels Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs Of Desire Vagrant 2009
7 The Beastie Boys The Mix-Up Brooklyn Dust / Capitol 2007
8 Fruit Bats The Ruminant Band Sub Pop 2009
9 Christian McBride & Inside Straight Kind Of Brown Mack Avenue 2009
10 Neko Case Middle Cyclone Anti / Epitaph 2009
11 Jon Mayer Nightscape Reservoir 2009
12 Elizabeth & The Catapult Taller Children Verve 2009
13 Levon Helm Electric Dirt Vanguard 2009
14 Gary Burton, Pat Metheny, Steve Swallow & Antonio Sanchez Quartet Live Concord Jazz 2009
15 Bobby Broom Bobby Broom Plays For Monk Origin 2009
16 Son Volt American Central Dust Rounder 2009
17 David 'Fathead' Newman The Blessing HighNote 2009
18 Grant Stewart Grant Stewart Plays The Music Of Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn Sharp Nine 2009
19 Kurt Elling Dedicated To You Concord 2009
20 Akiko Tsuruga Oriental Express 18th & Vine 2009
21 The Resonance Big Band The Resonance Big Band Plays Tribute To Oscar Peterson Resonance 2009
22 Regina Spektor Far Sire 2009
23 Moby Wait For Me Mute 2009
24 Alvin Queen Mighty Long Way Enja / Justin Time 2009
25 Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears Tell 'Em What Your Name Is! Lost Highway 2009
26 Gerald Clayton Two-Shade ArtistShare 2009
27 Phoenix Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix Glassnote 2009
28 One For All Return Of The Lineup Sharp Nine 2009
29 Louis Hayes The Time Keeper 18th & Vine 2009
30 Sophie Milman Take Love Easy Linus 2009
31 Steve Earle Townes New West 2009
32 Ben Harper & Relentless 7 White Lies For Dark Times Virgin 2009
33 Atmosphere When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold Rhymesayers 2008
34 Frank Glover Politico Owl Studios 2009
35 Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong The Complete Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong On Verve Verve 1997
36 Various Artists Jazz Vocalists: Hear & Now Concord 2006
37 The Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band I'm BeBoppin' Too Half Note 2009
38 David Gray Draw The Line Mercer Street / Downtown 2009
39 Elvis Costello Secret, Profane And Sugarcane Hear 2009
40 Grant Geissman Cool Man Cool Futurism 2009
40 Joe Henry Blood From Stars ANTI- 2009
40 Miike Snow Miike Snow Downtown 2009
40 The Low Anthem Oh My God, Charlie Darwin Nonesuch 2008

Lake Wisconsin

Right now I’m at the southern end of Lake Michigan, a lake that I fondly remember from my childhood. I can see the skyline of Chicago in the distance. The water here is a little warmer than it is in my hometown of Milwaukee. The waves are gentle today. All in all it makes for a great swim.

But even on wonderful days like this, I’m irksome. It’s my nature. And as I look at this wonder of a body of water, a childhood complaint of mine suddenly fills my brain. Why isn’t this thing called Lake Wisconsin?

There actually was a huge lake at one time that has been labeled Lake Wisconsin by geologists. It dried up thousands of years ago. But look at the map above. Much of the current Lake Michigan is bordered by Wisconsin. Those people “on the other side” somehow got naming rights. I don’t get it. It was a power grab that should be rectified asap. From now on, I’m not just going to complain, I’m taking action. It’s Lake Wisconsin from now on. You’ll never see the “M” word after the word “lake” in my writing ever again

Oh I know. You can make the argument that more of the Lake Wisconsin shore is bordered by Michigan. But that situation is a fluke. The upper peninsula (aka the UP; its residents are called yoopers) of Michigan is what gives that eastern state the edge in naming rights. Most people in Michigan don’t even know that the UP exists. Recently, some Michigan state officials left the UP off a come-to-Michigan tourism ad. It wasn’t the first time the state has done something like this. Sheesh. Talk about lack of respect.

Not only should the lake that separates the two states be called Lake Wisconsin, but there is no reason for the UP to be part of Michigan. I’m sure Wisconsin would give the yoopers a better deal. Do they really want to be burdened with the detritus that is Detroit? I would think not. The UP isn’t even contiguous with Michigan like it is with Wisconsin.

I know that yoopers are in general dissatisfied with how Michigan treats them and have made some effort to make the land a state of its own. They shouldn’t waste their breath and paperwork. Wisconsin is where they ought to be.

Wisconsin could buy the UP, kind of like when the US bought Alaska and Louisiana. It would be a worthwhile investment. All those trees. All that fishing. Fantastic cross country skiing. What’s there not to like? Plus did you know that Houghton in the UP has one of the finest universities in the world for the study of volcanoes. I don’t know how this happened – a volcano hasn’t existed in the UP for a couple billion years – but it did. I’m certain Wisconsin would salivate at the prospect of having a volcano research program of its own. Doesn’t Wisconsin Tech have a nicer ring to it than Michigan Tech? Sure it does!

If Michigan won’t sell the land, I’ll gladly sign up to lead a militia to take what is ours. I’m sure, borrowing from Dick Cheney, that (unlike Iraq) we’d truly be welcome with open arms as heroes and liberators. Those yoopers have suffered long enough under the yoke of their non-contiguous neighbors to the south. Wisconsinites understand you. Wisconsinites won’t ever leave you off their state maps. Come on over to the western side where your true friends are!

Together we can share in the beauty of our own lake. Just remember that given prevailing western winds all the crud of Lake Wisconsin ends up on the Michigan shoreline. Who would want to be associated with that?