On Hiatus For a Week

My First Female Doctor

When it comes to choosing my primary doctor, I'm a true bigot. I have a preference for ethnic types. No they don't have to be Jewish. Besides, most of those Jewish children of immigrants who used to become doctors are now getting MBAs and going to Wall Street (at least that's true for the boys). But it helps if they are immigrants or children of immigrants from places in the Middle East or the Mediterranean. I feel they understand me just a little better. I view my body as just another machine. I want a good body mechanic who doesn't talk to me about wellness and try to fill me with phony cheer, which is what I find your standard American doctor tends to do. I don't want a doctor off in lalaland. I want someone attentive, thorough, and who understands this is business.

For example, I had a doctor for a few years, the son of Greek immigrants. He asked me if there was anything wrong the first time I met him. I told him not really, but that I was under a lot of stress. He looked at me dismissively and said, "Stress? You think you're under a lot of stress. No way you compare to me!" He went down a list of all the things raining on him. "You got anything that bad?" I shook my head. "I didn't think so." Then he poked this and that, shined a light here and there, took a blood sample and an hour later I was out the door. Now that's my kind of doctor! Unfortunately, he moved.

So no short names like Dr. Smith and Dr. Jones for me please. And no female internists either. OK, I'm not just a bigot. I'm sexist. But again, there is this need to have someone with some understanding of what I'm about. For example, that urge a man has to scratch his balls first thing in the morning is a bit of an abstract concept for a female doctor (that's too much information I know) . Plus, I went to a female ophthalmologist a few years ago and she flirted with me, chatting it up and doing the arm touching thing repeatedly. I felt like I was at a bar. Down girl, was my thought. I wanted an eye prescription not a fling.

For the past few years, though, I've been struggling to find a decent doctor. There's a shortage of internists in my neck of the woods, and trying to find someone with a long last name who is also male has been impossible. I went to two different guys with WASPY names. Meh. One was a total burnout. You could tell he couldn't wait to get on the golf course at two o'clock. The other spent maybe five minutes with me each time I went for my annual check up; he should run a drive through service.

I needed a change. I looked down the list of people with available slots. There were none with those long names I prefer who were male. But there was one female doctor who fit the bill on the surface. She sounded all business on her bio and had a long Polish name that I hoped she could actually pronounce correctly.

I bit the bullet and arranged an appointment with the female internist. I walked in a little nervous. She looked a lot like those girls I went to cheder* with so I felt a little comfortable. I asked her how to pronounce her name. No she didn't pronounce it the right way and it was clear she had no idea how to pronounce it the right way. But she was very thorough and very conscientious. I was impressed. Very professional. Next time I see her and she asks if anything is wrong, I'll mention stress. And if she gives me this look that says "you think you've got stress sonnyboy, you don't even know what the word means," I will be in heaven.

*Orthodox Jewish religious school.

Back to the Previously Solved Case: On Bestsellers

I admit that I'm a total snob. I'm anti-hip. I'm anti-buzz. I assume that if something is popular, it must be terrible. That's true in music. That's true in movies. That's true in books. In books, for years I went by a fundamental rule: if it was in the top 10 of the NY Times bestseller list it had to be garbage; if it made it into the top 20 it was highly suspect.

A couple of years ago, though, I picked up a copy of The Book of Edgar Sawtelle. From the first page, I was hooked. Man, that guy can write a great sentence. And the story, oh my. That was a first rate work of fiction, one of the best I'd read over the last few years.

After that book, I chided myself. Edgar Sawtelle was a top 10 bestseller for weeks on end. This "avoid bestsellers at all costs" rule of mine was not only snobby. It was also stupid. The popular buying public doesn't consist of 100 percent idiots. Surely, there must be lots of good books out there that happen to sell a ton. So I decided to experiment. I was going to include bestsellers on my reading list. As of last week, though, I'm going back to the previously solved case. After two years of reading (and trying to read before tossing away) some popular books, I've hit the wall.

Some of the brain damage caused by my reading bestsellers could have been predicted in advance. Going Rogue for instance was the big kahuna of bestsellers over this time period. Oh god. That book had zippo intelligence. I even tried to read a Stephen King and a Dan Brown book. Neither author could write a decent sentence if their life depended on it. I lasted 50 pages on each before I decided both authors produce the literary equivalent of toxic waste.

I tried to read books that got great reviews and were decent, but not spectacular sellers as well. For example, one of the top 10 books of the year for 2009 according to the NYT was Lit by Mary Karr. Oh lord. It's one thing to be a drunk and write a book about it. It's quite another thing to be an emotionally unattractive and unsympathetic drunk and write a book about it. Then there was another top 10 book according to the NYT, Gate at the Top of the Stairs by Laurie Moore. Talk about tedious and rambling. Moore forgot that a novel without a real story is simply a character sketch. At least both of these authors, though, know how to write. They have great rhythm and diction.

The final blows to my head were books that I guess I'd call pseudo-intellectual examinations of social behavior. There were two books by Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers and Blink. Gladwell may be the best b.s. artist writing in the English language today. He uses Google heavy research and standard plot devices like misdirection to create grand theories that have lots of holes in them. But he is such a gifted b.s. artist that at least it's kind of fun to read.

Then along came Superfreakonomics by Levitt and Dubner and I truly hit my limit. Their approach to proving anything is to try to impress upon the reader the following: we're real smart and know how to use computers to run regression models so you have to believe everything we say no matter how outrageous. CO2 isn't a significant cause of global warming. We can change the surface temperature of the Atlantic Ocean. We can engineer climate by sticking a hose in the stratosphere (read that sentence again please and laugh). Chemotherapy doesn't work. The list goes on. This book would insult the intelligence of an amoeba. It's not economics. It's not science. It's just a couple of whacked out nut jobs with big egos writing down anything that comes into their deranged heads.

Stick me with a fork I'm done. Forget bestsellers. For the new year, I picked up Nothing To Envy by Barbara Demick. Last I checked it was #600 on the Amazon ranking list. Now that's more my style. And it's a great book, honest. There's a gripping story and solid writing in one book, imagine that! I'm modifying my fundamental rule, though. It's now, "If it's a bestseller it's almost always bound to be garbage and even if it is good, there are enough great books out there that barely sell that I should have rachmoonis* for their authors and read them instead."

*Yiddish for showing extreme compassion

Adventures in Giving the Public What It Wants: Music

Every once in a while a tune of my own will appear on shuffle play on my iPod. It's funny when it does happen. I have thousands of tunes on that thing and only about 20 are mine. When my tunes come on, they are easy to ignore and it's not because I've heard them so much that I'm numb to them. It's because they are almost always significantly quieter than what comes before or after. Their loudness is at the level of recordings made in the 1980s or earlier.

Before the 1990s, the idea behind the signal processing that goes into the final step to making a finished audio product - it's called "mastering" - was to enhance sound without losing too many of the variations in loudness that are one reason music is inherently interesting. That's how I still like my tunes mastered even though it's out of fashion.

Nowadays, mastering is done to simply make the music loud. Why? Because loud music sells. Sometimes loudness is pushed to such an extreme that actual signals are clipped and distorted. There's is recent discussion about this phenomenon here.

This emphasis on loudness began with the beginning of rock and roll, more specifically with the recordings done by Phil Spector. He's known for inventing the "wall of sound," thick beds of rhythm and harmony in the background of his girl group singers from the 1960s. But Spector also decided to forget about high fidelity and push volume to an extreme. His recordings are simply an awful, painful listen from the standpoint of audio accuracy. But no one seemed to mind back then. People were listening to 45s on little portable record players and AM radios. If there was distortion in the original recording, who cared?

For the next 30 years or so, there was a quiet battle between audio engineers - who wanted the music they made to sound accurate - and record companies, who wanted to sell as much music as possible. There also arose a group of "audiophile" listeners, who had fancy stereos and turntables. They too wanted accurate sound. The sound freaks won out for decades. But in the 1990s, their influence eroded. Why? I think I know why. The advent of mp3s, shuffle play and the iPod changed everything.

In the days of old, consumer taste in music was driven by what radio played. If radio stations nationwide spun a tune a lot, it sold. If they ignored a tune, sales were zero. Radio stations have equipment to ensure that all music played comes out at the same volume. They even out the variations in mastering. There is no advantage to having a loud recording except for the fact that when radio station programmers listen to music before they decide to play it, they too tend to be influenced by loudness.

In the post-mp3 age of music, radio does not drive consumer taste. Instead it's mostly word of mouth. Everybody already has a radio station worth of songs on their own portable music players. Radio is superfluous. When a consumer listens to music on their mp3 player or iPod and one song is considerably softer in volume than the others, their tendency is to ignore that music. If they ignore it, they don't tell their friends about it. If they don't tell their friends about it, it doesn't sell. The public likes it loud. They don't seem to care if loud means the audio signal is lousy, and dynamics are completely lost. They want it loud all the time.

Since about 1995, record companies have pumped up the volume on all of their new records, and remastered old recordings for the express purpose of making them louder. It sounds awful to me. It sounds awful to all musicians. But musicians aren't the ones downloading music to their iPods in huge numbers. It's the general public. In the end, record companies are simply giving the public what it wants.

There is a myth out there that corporate America has become detached from consumer preference. I'm sure you can find isolated examples where that's the case. But when it comes to music, it just isn't so. People want simple songs with simple words sung by sexy young people. Record companies know this and that's what they deliver. People want those songs loud as can be. Record companies do that too.

Please don't blame record companies when you turn on your iPod and you start to get a headache because the songs - even the songs you love - all sound screechy. Blame the person next to you listening on his or her iPod on the commuter train to work. He or she has lousy taste. It's sad to say this, but when it comes to music, bad taste and bad sound sell.

*As an addendum, I've added what the sound looks like for three recordings, a 2006 classical recording of Mahler's Fifth (sounds great), a 1994 mastering of Elvis Costello's Alison (not half bad), and a 2009 mastering of Elvis Costello's Sulphur to Sugarcane. Look at how much clipping there is in 2009. There are no real dynamics. It sounds like absolute crap. And that's on the good side of what's done today.

A Fine Romance

I have one thing I own that I still use that dates back to 1979. It's a green REI daypack with a leather bottom. My sweetie has repaired it a couple of times, but basically it's indestructible. I would have an SLR camera as well, but someone stole it way back when. I bought a replacement - basically the same model - back in 1982, and I still use it occasionally. It has a great portrait lens. That's the lens that was used on the photo of the young version of me and my sweetie in the picture on the left.

That's it. I don't live in the same town. I lived in Denver for most of 1979. I do have the wedding suit I wore back then. I forgot about that! But there is no way possible I could fit into that thing (no teasing now, please). It's way in the back of my closet with the wool vest my sweetie made for me to wear that day.

A lot of things have come and gone since 1979. There are a lot of pictures that have been taken along the way, too. In quite a few of them on my right hand side - why not on my left I have no idea - my sweetie is there, smiling. She smiles a lot better than me, always has. Lately, I've decided that I need how to learn how to smile in front of the camera, that I need to somehow show my inner happiness on the outside. It's a lot of work for me to do that! I'm not there yet. But I'm getting closer.

The two photos above are separated by 31 years. That's a lot of time I know. When I think of that time span I get a little dizzy. Thirty one years ago today, my sweetie and I were in O'Hare airport trying to get home after our wedding in Chicago. It snowed about 20 inches the day of our wedding. I know, I know, getting married in January in Chicago? Are you crazy? No, just exceedingly optimistic. We should have gotten married in Key Largo not Chicago.

We sat in the airport hoping to get home. Everything was delayed. The airport was packed. We sat on the tile floor, waiting for our plane and eating wedding cake. It doesn't sound romantic, maybe, but it was. Eating your own wedding cake anywhere is romantic.

In 1976, my sweetie and I were staying in Maine at the house of a guy who was 90 years old. He had a great library. I pulled out a copy of Leaves of Grass from the shelves. First edition. Signed "To my great friend." That friend was the old guy's father.

I was cleaning out his refrigerator and there was this little rock hard square of something in the back wrapped in aluminum foil that had been there for I didn't know how long. I have a thing about bad food. My grandmother was oblivious to the mold in her fridge and would regularly pull out stuff for me to eat that I thought would kill me. I pulled out that little rock hard thing and the old guy shouted, "Don't throw that out!"

I was taken aback. "What is it?"

"It's my parent's wedding cake."

"What?"

"On their anniversary every year, I cut off a little piece, eat it, and soak the rest in rum for the next year."

"It still tastes good?"

"You have no idea."

I put the cake back in the fridge. That night upstairs in a little bedroom with slanted ceilings and roses on the wall paper I told my sweetie that I loved her for the first time.

One liner of the day

Get Your Official Republican Ring Tone for 2010 here:

It's Time To Tax The Politicians

In the NY Times the other day, there was an article about Obama considering a tax on banks. The positive effects would be two-fold. It would raise revenue that would ease our deficits. It would discourage risky behavior on the part of banks. That's all well and good. But we need more sources of both federal and state revenue. Obama should consider not just taxing banks. He shouldn't have to travel all the way to NYC to get tax money. Obama can find it in his back yard. We should be taxing politicians.

Every year politicians receive donations from individuals, corporations, and PACs. In presidential years, the total of all reported donations now exceeds four billion dollars.* That's almost double what it was in 2000. Efforts at campaign finance reform have been ineffectual at reigning in the corrosive influence of money on politics. In 2016 it's likely that donations will be roughly double what they were in 2008.

Since we cannot control the flow of money into political coffers, we might as well take advantage of it. Let's tax it. Such a tax would have two advantages. Like a tax on banks, it would raise revenue to offset deficits. It would also decrease the net amount of money spent on the silly and distorted advertising that defines political campaigns. The public would be subject to less lies on TV than it would without a tax. Who doesn't want that?

How much money would be raised by a tax on political donations? Not much initially. Assuming a tax of 30 percent on donations of 200 dollars or more, the revenue would be about 2 billion dollars in 2012. But as the estimates above show (assuming a nine year donation doubling rate), what is small now will turn into something big in a few decades. We'd be generating tens of billions of dollars in the not-so-distant future. Plus it's a progressive tax because donations tend to come from the wealthy. It sounds like a win-win situation to me. I can't think of a single downside.

*This is a rough estimate based on reported individual donations (those in excess of $200). It includes an estimate of PAC donations, but does not include the activities of 527 organizations. There may be more donated money out there that I don't know about.

Uncle Stuey Votes For The Grammys

Here are Uncle Stuey's votes this year. My rule was that if I couldn't listen to a single song in a category for more than 30 seconds without getting bored, I wouldn't vote.

Record of the Year: No vote
Album of the Year: No vote
Song of the Year: No vote
Best New Artist: No vote
Pop Female Vocal: No vote, the vocals are all so over-processed and compressed that it's impossible to judge
Pop Male Vocal: Love You So, Maxwell, guy can sing
Pop Duo: Sara Smile, Hall and Oates, sounds like it's a live recording from around 1980, almost as good as live Al Green, best song Hall and Oates ever wrote
Pop Collaboration: Baby It's Cold Outside, Norah Jones and Willie Nelson, almost as good as Ella and Armstrong, but not quite, sweet though
Pop Instrumental Performance: Besame Mucho, Herb Alpert, I'm always in the tank for Herb Alpert even though musically Bela Fleck is more interesting
Pop Instrumental Album: No vote
Pop Vocal: Breakthough, Colbie Callat, sounds so much like Sheryl Crow circa 1988 that it isn't funny, but this is what pop music is about
Pop Vocal Traditional: No vote, there are no doubt tons of CDs out there in this category better than the ones nominated
Female Country: Solitary Thinkin', Lee Ann Womack, not a great voice, but sweet phrasing, which is rare in female country vocals
Male Country: High Cost of Living, Jamey Johnson, in a better world this guy would be a country music god
Male Country Duo: Brooks and Dunn, Ronnie Dunn is probably the only big time country star who can actually sing
Country Instrumental: Mansinneedof, Sarah Jarosz, extra half point for youth although the Greencards once gave me free parking in a Nashville lot
Country Song, High Cost of Living, Jamey Johnson, see discussion above
Contemporary Jazz Album, No vote, this is all easy listening junk not jazz, not even close to jazz
Jazz Vocal, Desire, Tierney Sutton, my homegirl and this is her best CD so far
Contemporary Blues, Live: Hope At The Hideout, Mavis Staples, that voice is made to sing the blues and the rougher it gets the better it works
Contemporary Folk: Live, Shawn Colvin, a kind of reprise of Live 88 from oh so long ago, one of the few performers who can carry a large crowd with just a vocal and guitar
Musical: New Cast, West Side Story, not much to choose from here, but this is such a fantastic musical and Broadway performances today almost always have people who can really sing
Note that most of the Jazz categories weren't cleared for member listening, which is a true shame

In Praise of the Fair Weather Fan

This weekend the Green Bay Packers will be in the playoffs. I'm a Wisconsin native. In that state, there really is only one sport and one team. Sure there are sports like basketball and baseball. But that's what you do to pass the time when there isn't any football to watch or play and there are no trades in the news. Football is the Father in Wisconsin. The Packers are the Son. And Vince Lombardi is the Holy Ghost.

Now I happen to not like football. I did when I was a kid, certainly. But I haven't lived in Wisconsin in over 30 years and as an adult I find the sport far too violent for my taste. That said, this weekend I'll put on my cheese bow-tie and watch the Packers play. Why? Because they are doing well. And I am an unabashed fair weather fan.

When the Packer do well I root for them wholeheartedly. When they do poorly, that cheese bow-tie goes deep into my t-shirt drawer and I don't even bother to watch or listen to the games. As far as I'm concerned that's how everyone should be.

I don't understand this following a team through a losing season stuff. When someone says to me after their team has won some major championship, "I was there in the lean times, the tough times," I smile wanly and think, "Why?"

The Packers are a professional sports team. They get paid well for being professionals. And losing is well...unprofessional. Would you buy stock in a company full of losers? Did you stick with GM and Lucent through good times and bad? No. Only a fool would do that. Sports are entertainment. Losing is not fun to watch. End of story.

There are real things that I need to stick with, good times and bad. There are people to love. They go through down times and it's what I do during those down times that define me as a human being. I can be a source of support and encouragement, an all around mensch and stand up guy. Or I can be a jerk. It's up to me.

But a sports team? Please. These are trifles. I support teams when they are winning. It's a fun thing to do. I ignore them when they are losing. They aren't worth the bother. It really is the right way to behave, no doubt about it. But enough is enough of this writing. I've got things to do. Now where is that damn cheese bow-tie of mine?

One Man, One Guitar

Scene: The interior of a suburban tract home with berber carpet, a large blonde oak coffee table, poster art on the walls that's just one step up from what you can find in a college dorm room, a huge overstuffed brown fake suede L-shaped couch with accent color stuffed chairs. A middle age man with a flannel shirt, jeans, Nikes, thinning gray hair too long by today's standards, aviator glasses, and a teddy bear paunch sits in one of the chairs. The room is filled with family members and friends of this man, most sitting on the carpet. A woman on the couch, most likely the man's wife, speaks.

Wife: "Every one of us loves you here, but this can't go on."

The man, clutching a well worn aqua blue 1963 Fender Stratocaster, his fingers on the bridge making an E minor 9th add 6th sus, his favorite chord: "You don't understand."

Wife: "We do understand. It's taken over your life. It's destroyed your relationships with those that have loved you."

The people continue with solemn looks to beseech the man as the sound goes to a voiceover.

Narrator: " Every year this scene is played out in hundreds of thousands of homes across America. A man ruined by an obsession. His friends and loved ones gathered to try to get him to change. But now there's hope."

Scene: Headquarters of Guitaraholics Anonymous, a man in his fifties with frizzy hair, a leather jacket, silver rings on his fingers, and a Keith Richards signed scarf, sits behind an enormous walnut desk.

The man in the leather jacket: "I was just like all those other guys in guitar shops with an itchy credit card, buying every sweet ax in sight that gave me a little guitar high. I lost my wife, my kids, my friends, no one trusted me. I'd lie, steal, do anything to get one more guitar."

Narrator: "This man, Bjorn Hanner, founder of Guitaraholics Anonymous, creator of its famous 12 string program for recovering guitar purchase addicts, has saved countless lives."

Bjorn: "It came to me in a dream. Like, you know, well, uh, I only had two hands. How many guitars could I really play? And then I heard a voice telling me, the voice of an angel, "One man, one guitar." That's our motto. That's how I started.

Narrator: "GA is dedicated to removing the scourge of guitar buying addiction, something that seems most common in white males between the ages of 40 and 60. One man, one guitar is its goal. And strum by strum, it is succeeding."

****

I note that next week the annual guitar heaven known as the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) Convention will take place in Anaheim, California. As a recovering guitaraholic (I haven't bought a guitar in over two years), I will definitely stay away. It would be like an alcoholic walking into a club that had a two drink minimum. But I'm sure that responsible buyers will have a fantastic time.

Another Lesson in Humility

I don't really believe in humility. My view is that it's perfectly fine for you to be obnoxious about your talents as long as you can back them up. On the other hand, you damn well better know you have those talents before you start to strut. I will never strut when it comes to crosswords, that's for certain.

I've been doing the NY Times crossword puzzle for about three months now. I work on a puzzle for a maximum of 45 minutes. Early on, that meant I could get through most or all of the Monday puzzles, and most or all of the Tuesday puzzles (they get progressively harder with each day). Now it means that I can do all of Monday, all of Tuesday, almost always all of Wednesday, usually Thursday, and very, very rarely all of Friday and Saturday. Usually, it's quickly clear with the Friday and Saturday puzzles that they are simply too hard and I quit in five minutes. Sunday puzzles aren't hard, but they are just too long to bother.

But how well do I do compared to most players? The answer is awful! Today I found out that I can race against the clock on the NY Times web site (it's a "privilege" you get as a subscriber) and compare my time to others. I did the above puzzle in 19 minutes and 45 seconds. Where does that put me? In 385th place out of 400. Some people solved the puzzle in less than 3 minutes. I couldn't have even typed it out that fast if I had known the answers in advance. I've been completely put in my place! I am an illiterate oaf. I just might call an end to my efforts at solving crosswords. Not only do I not believe in humility. I also don't believe in doing things for which I have no talent.