Investing, Social comment

Let’s share a victory

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Some of you might know that I’ve got serious knee trouble, for which I’m undergoing rather unpleasant but helpful physical therapy. We have GEHA as an insurance provider, and they contract with an outfit called Orthonet to review treatment programs and approve care. My PT set up a plan of eight visits, which seemed logical to me: let’s do this for a month and see where we are.

I soon got a letter from Orthonet: they approved only seven visits. This mystified me. What was the logic? I called GEHA, who basically said I’d have to call Orthonet. I did this. The minion could not provide a responsive answer to this question: “Okay. My PT says I need eight visits. Your case manager evidently disagrees, thinking seven are sufficient. Explain the logic, please. What about my case prompted this case manager, who–unlike my PT–has not actually seen either of my knees, to decide that seven were all that were necessary?”

Of course, the minion served up the standard vaguenesses and horse hockey that are designed to baffle, confuse and frustrate people into just giving up. Evidently that’s their job: to get people to give up and accept less care. I advised him that none of that had answered my question, and that if he couldn’t answer it, then I wanted to speak to the case manager. This evidently was a very irregular request: to speak to the actual individual who decided that his wisdom was superior to that of the medical professional. I insisted.

Somehow, they got a case manager–if not my own case manager–on the line. He spoke in the rapid “I’m way too busy for this sort of thing” tones of someone who also has the power to take action and needs not to be slathered in protracted conversation. I asked him the same question. He said it was a good one, and that he didn’t know why. Very quickly, he agreed to resubmit the review recommending the eighth visit. There was zero fight. I thanked him and the conversation ended, goal achieved.

Now let us deconstruct the reality of all this, because while it would seem I should be very happy with Orthonet for giving me what I wanted so quickly, that is really not so.

  • My PT recommended a course of treatment. The minion’s first response to my question had hinted that they basically always approved one less of whatever was requested.
  • As a reflex, on the logic that Orthonet is contracted by GEHA to save it GEHA money, they therefore approved one less visit. The average person, less obstinate or confrontational than myself, would simply accept the reduced care. One presumes that if my providers expected this, they’d request nine visits so that I’d get eight.
  • Orthonet’s first line of defense against pests of my ilk is to have their toll-free line answered by people with minimal power, whose work is to spout gobbledygook. Most people are nice and do not like to be confrontational, and also won’t ask such a blunt question; they also won’t insist on a real answer. This should get rid of most people. Money saved. They will get less care, of course, but that’s the whole idea.
  • If however one remains politely insistent (thus not giving the minion a valid excuse to hang up), one will be routed to someone with authentic power of decision. This person is extremely busy and will take the easiest route, which is to concede. Okay, we lost this one, but that’s okay, we expect to lose one out of twenty. Nineteen savings, one loss, duh, winning.

Why I’m not satisfied should be fairly obvious: in the first place, a lot of my time was wasted. In the second, the only logic in play was money-saving. If the physical therapist had asked for sixteen sessions, they’d have authorized perhaps fourteen or fifteen. Had the therapist requested four sessions, they’d authorize three. There was no medical value in play. So yeah, I won a victory of sorts.

Some situations are just designed to screw you. It’s not personal. They screw everyone.

A long time ago, in a small Washington county seat, I took my first driver’s test. I’d heard that everyone who went to this testing venue flunked the first time. It was so with me. For example, he directed me to parallel park in a space without markers and with a parked vehicle only on one side, and ordered me to treat the space as if there were a car behind. He could thus automatically fail me on that part, on the grounds that he could say that my parking effort required room that would not actually have been available. All he needed was to find a few other fails, and I’d have to come back later and pay for a new test. That was his racket: keeping his job by keeping testing volume and payments high. Of course, being sixteen, I didn’t really have options, which he also knew.

Our greatest social parasites are not those we support with our tax dollars. They are those who automatically put people to more trouble and expense than is necessary in the hope/belief/knowledge that most people will just swallow it. Some people wonder why I fight things like Facebook profiling, web trackers, debit cards and nearly anything Google comes up with. This is why. I can’t make anyone else fight it alongside me. I can only make sure that the fight with me–if only me–costs the other side something.

Well, that and I can make sure the world hears about this Orthonet outfit, and its actual impact.

Editing/writing life, Sports

It was only partly a labor of love…

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…I admit that part of it was motivated by the desire to generate some passive blog traffic. Not all, of course, or even most. In the main, I picked it up because I wanted the information and didn’t want to wait for someone else to provide it for me.

I’m talking about the Baseball Name Pronunciation Project, of course, which I am developing on this site with the kind consent of The Baseball Reliquary, which owns the rights to the relevant research and intellectual property of the deceased Tony Salin, the author of the best baseball book you haven’t yet read (assuming you have read Veeck–as in Wreck, obviously). I began with Salin’s work, did a good bit of my own research, opened the doors to public input, and am continuing to hunt down credible pronunciations of past players’ names.

One of the most helpful tools has been Youtube. It has some old radio broadcasts, and one can look up the lineups and boxscore for that game and see who’s on the list. While I don’t 100% trust announcers to be correct, they are likely to be close–especially for members of the team they covered.

I’m still hoping to get some stiff corrections and input from the general public, and it may be so as the word gets out. Of course, if I knew one single very old major leaguer, I could solve a whole bunch of these–but I don’t. Or if I knew even one rather greying big leaguer. But I’m just not good at bothering people.

If anyone out there knows any old ballplayer who’d be willing to help out, please let me know. It would be a deed well done.

Homeownership, Social comment, Technology

A Craigslist salesbabble and rantbabble glossary

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With the large amount of commerce and commentary that emanate from CL of late, some trends of vocabulary have arisen to accompany it. Some already existed, but some are morphing or being invented. Language is dangerous on the propaganda principle, in that when the word is repeated often enough, the human mind inclines to take it more at face value. Glance at a Red Robin menu sometime, for example, and count the uses of ‘zesty,’ ‘hearty’ and ‘tangy.’ None of those really mean anything, except that they’re trying to convince you the food is good. Yet the overall impression you take from the reading is one of energy and strong flavor, simply because of the words they repeated.

Therefore, someone has to step up and translate the CL salesbabble and rantbabble. This is the work of writers, who are supposed to contribute some of their understanding for the common good. Just plug in the real meaning for the term, and read the ad that way, and you are good to go.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! or ***** or any other sprayed punctuation: “Mostly hype, move on”

Action figure: “Toy I outgrew.”

Affordable: “Desperate.”

ANYTHING IN ALL CAPS: “Uninteresting; this is my way of trying to get your attention”

As is: “Pretty sure it’s got problems.”

Athletic: “I walked last week from my car to the grocery store. And parked far away!”

BBW: “Really fat.”

Bizop: “Scam.”

Build your brand: “Marketing is all on you.”

Collectible: “No one collects this.”

Cute: “Someone’s wife once liked it.”

Detail ‘orientated’: “Can spell, unlike me.”

Distinctive: “In atrocious taste.”

Flexible hours: “At our beck and call.”

Forever home: “Hoping the crockpot won’t come into play.”

Franklin Mint: “Worthless.”

Full service: “I don’t return phone calls.”

Gorgeous: “Meh.”

‘Grammer natzi’s’: “Literate individuals.”

Great find: “Wasn’t such a great find for me, so I want it gone.”

Great view: “You can see some buildings and a farm.”

Highly collectible: “No one ever did collect this.”

Homebody: “Don’t really like doing anything.”

HP: “Highly Prone…to problems.”

HWP: “Somewhat fat.”

Inkjet: “Money sink.”

Landscaping: “You must pester me if you plan to get me to do actual work and accept your money.”

Limited edition: “Didn’t sell to begin with. Except to me.”

Make offer: “I know it’s worth very little. I hope someone will offer me too much.”

Management trainee: “Powerless toady abused by customers and manager alike.”

McAfee: “I bought a real virus scanner, so I want to dump this useless one on some sucker.”

MLM: “Much Lucre for Me.”

Must see: “Bores most people.”

Needs repair: “In ruins.”

No frame: “Wasn’t even worth framing.”

Nonprofit: “Pay sucks.”

Or best offer: “I’m desperate. Lowball me. I’ll guilt you, then I’ll take it.”

People-oriented: “Must deal well with assholes.”

Price is firm: “I know it’s not worth what I’m asking.”

Rare: “I have no idea how rare it is.”

Runs good: “Has other problems you will discover later.”

Rustic: “Plain.”

Section 8: “Get your concealed weapons permit first.”

Seafood processor: “Trawler slave.”

Shabby chic: “Old junk.”

Socially conscious: “Cheap.”

Spacious: “Will hold all your crap.”

Timeshare: “I can’t believe I fell for that.”

Vintage: “At least twenty years old (for electronics, five years).”

Works great: “Will probably work long enough for you not to sue me in small claims.”

Worth at least twice that: “Worth half that, if even that much.”

‘Your a moran/looser’: “I lack all sense of comic irony.”

Investing

Destroying the Dow

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The Dow is ‘struggling toward 15,000.’ I don’t care, for many reasons, and you also should not care. You will be a smarter investor if you banish all knowledge of the Dow from your mind. Every time you see it, you get dumber.

Here’s a radical stance: the Dow could be construed as a form of ongoing terrorism, since (much like a bomb threat) it causes panic that need never be, and works to destabilize the economic underpinnings of society. It presents a widely accepted, grossly distorted picture of the market, and unfortunately, most of us are unwise enough to validate it.

I believe that the Dow Jones Industrial Average, commonly called the DJIA or just ‘the Dow,’ needs to be suppressed on the principle that free speech does not include the right to yell “fire!” in a crowded theater, nor make obscene phone calls, nor publicly advocate terrorist acts–if your free speech would cause unnecessary harm or panic, it can be prohibited. (It should also be suppressed because it’s stupid, even though policing the propagation of damaging stupidity has never worked. It would be a blow struck for brains.)

Two objections to this come readily to mind:

  1. “But it’s useful in some ways.”
  2. “You just can’t suppress free speech like that.”

1. No, in fact, it’s worse than useless, for it is misleading. It is based purely on share price (adjusted for splits since entry into the index), which is always an arbitrary number. Don’t believe me? Suppose a company goes public with $45 billion in market cap: $45/share for 1 billion shares. The company could just as easily have gone public at $90/share, issuing only 500 million shares.  Same market capitalization, double the Dow impact. That’s just ridiculous.

In terms of day-to-day movement, imagine that Dow component BS rises from $100 to $101, a very minor 1% change. Another Dow component, FY, rises from $10 to $11–an enormous 10% gain. Dow doesn’t care about how much market value was created or lost. Dow considers both movements to have the same impact.

And this gets even worse. The Dow serves mainly as a useful tool for the financial media to get us stirred up, increasing our consumption of…financial media! This is partly because it is a Big Number. Well, it was not always a big number, but we react just as we did when it was smaller. I was alive, adult (by age if not by maturity), and losing money (buying stupid investments with money I could not afford to lose) when the market wrapped around a tree in 1987. The Dow lost 508 points, a 22.6% decline for the day. That was nearly a quarter of its value. It closed at 1738.7. We’d all agree that over 20% is massive.

If you are paying attention, and picturing the headlines of the day, you can see that a 100-point shift in the 1987 Dow would still have been a large percentage change, and a loss of over 500 would be (and was) a catastrophic decline. I will now take a bullet for you: I will look at the current value of the Dow. As I compose this, it is at 14974. Suppose it had the ‘triple-digit decline’ of which the media are so eager to shriek: a drop of 100 points. That would be a decline of less than 1%; about 0.67%, a very normal daily shift, and nothing for any investor who thinks for him or herself to freak about. Okay, now suppose we had a loss of 500. It would be about 3.3%, certainly a big day, but something that happens now and then. I was reading financial media then, as I read them now. They react to ‘triple digit Dow’ nearly the same way. It is as if your doctor treated every mole on your body as melanoma until proven otherwise, even though most moles are just brown spots. You’d live in constant terror of a horrible death which most people would not actually suffer. You’d overreact. You’d probably have them all removed, traumatizing and scarring your entire body–for nothing. The only people who would benefit would be those helping to spread the panic.

Welcome to the market.

Of course, if our precious financial media focused purely on percentage change, we would be spared this problem. It will not, and why should it? Said media are in the business of getting you worked up, getting you to read and watch and not relax. Fear is their product. Why would they change their practices in the interest of market stability, to their own detriment? Care about society over self? Are you mad? This is Wall Street’s publicity arm. Don’t talk to it about anything but purest avarice that burns with a purple fire. Talking about them caring about anything above self and profit is like talking to Kim Jong Un about caring about freedom for North Koreans to criticize his regime.

2. Let’s break that down. Can you legally suppress it? You sure as hell can. We suppress or restrict free speech all the time, generally for good reasons, from the crowded-theater example to the fact that saying “Go to hell, judge, I don’t have to take your orders” will get you jailed for contempt of court. A person using free speech to disclose national security secrets will soon learn the limits of that free speech–and sensibly so.

But is it practical to suppress the Dow? On the grand scale, surely not. I mean, any fool with a spreadsheet can easily continue the Dow math, rename the index, and post it online. Prosecuting this in full would be impossible, especially since nothing is stopping some dude in Malaysia (for example) from calculating it and posting it on his blog, in defiance of US law–which is not in force in Malaysia, any more than Malaysian law could prohibit me from posting stuff that the Malaysian government might not like. Try and get the Malaysian government to get interested in investigating and extraditing him for something that isn’t even illegal in his country, and let me know how that works out for you.

Well, what could we suppress in practice? We could certainly prohibit major domestic media from publishing it, since they are the most visible. A few examples of reporters and executives thrown in jail would cause a lot of bleating, but you can bet Marketwatch (owner of the index rights) would can it, whining the whole time about the police state. This wouldn’t apply law uniformly, but we don’t do that anyway. Tons of people cheat on taxes; they don’t audit everyone, just the ones they believe cheated big time. Tons of people pirate intellectual property; the RIAA doesn’t sue everyone, just a few people to make the point. Tons of people speed on the freeway; they don’t all get a ticket, just enough to remind of consequences.

The most powerful argument against this, I believe, is the ‘you can’t legislate intelligence’ perspective. Let me make it myself: “So what you’re saying is that this should be banned because ignorant people tend to validate and react to it, thus doing dumb things, flogged onward by media who can benefit from that. Why complain? If you yourself are not ignorant, you have an advantage and should profit from it. Why should dumbness be protected from itself? Shut up and take their money, like I do!” The rejoinder is: “First of all, Dreamboat Aynnie, it’s not all about me or you. Second, the core problem is that the psychological impact of the Dow distorts reality for enough people, helped by our adored media, to create instability which in fact doesn’t exist. The overall harm to the national economy is serious, with potential for panic which need never be. The national interest is more important than yours and my ability to profit.”

I don’t much advocate attempts to nerf Darwinism in action; if you want to ride a motorcycle without a helmet, I’m okay with you risking having your brains bashed out. Here’s the problem: it is likely to leave you in Schiavo mode, slurping up enormous resources and starting a fight over whether to withdraw your feeding tube. Indirectly, I will be billed for your choice. If there were a way for me not to pay for your foolishness, I’d say go for it. In practice, there is not, and I resist paying that bill. Anti-tobacco advocates feel the same way, and one can hardly blame them. One of the most oppressive examples of this is the homeowners’ association, in which people say ‘you can’t do that because it will lower my property value.’ I hate HOAs. And yet…I do have the choice to live somewhere without an HOA. I don’t have much practical choice about not participating in the national economy. The principle may be similar, but the difference in scope matters. Some dumbnesses can be addressed with law, to some degree, and others can’t.

Here is what outlawing it would achieve: greater public awareness of how rotten the Dow is. Instead of passively acceding to the notion that the Dow is useful, the public would hear how worse it is than useless, and might at least begin caring less about it. Sure, the public should educate itself, just as motorcyclists should wear helmets. If this did not cause needless market instability, no action would be necessary–just as if all bomb threats were spurious and false, and we ignored them all, we wouldn’t need to prohibit them. Moot point. We don’t ignore them all, they are accurate just often enough to take them all seriously, and thus anyone making a bomb threat deserves all that the law can throw at him or her. In the same way, the ongoing random bomb threat that is the Dow needs suppression insofar as the law has power to do so, and to be considered as respectable and valuable to society as a bomb threat.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Fetishism in writing

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Here’s an area for improvement by literary critics as well as authors: fetishism. Not only do authors need to rein it in, but reviewers need to start calling it out.

Fetishism occurs when the author displays a pattern of preoccupation with some otherwise normally hidden or forbidden aspect of life. There are reasons the author would not want to do that:

Privacy. Maybe W.E.B. Griffin really shouldn’t have so openly advertised his fascination with the young, virtuous, occupied-with-life virgin who suddenly presents the story’s rake with her ‘pearl of great price’ (WEB’s favorite term), then immediately drops everything else in life and now desires to play house and begin spawning infants. What does that say about him? His perception of women? I wouldn’t wish to speculate too much. However, if that were my kink, I’d sure as hell be unwilling to broadcast it on the endcaps. To give Griffin credit, he has seemingly heard the critics and taken action. (To give him discredit, he’s now mostly letting his son ride his coattails, and the son is not the author the father is. Brian Herbert, take note.)

Predictability. When I pick up a J.T. Edson western, I know for sure that I’ll get some British culture superimposed on the old American West, and that’s one thing. It’s minor, but it’s part of his approach, and kind of novel to be on the receiving side of cultural ignorance. I also know that, before a certain point in the book, two women will start a physical fight. And yes, bodices/blouses/etc. will be ripped. His women will care more for baring each others’ bouncy dairy tackle than for kicking their adversaries’ butts. Not only does it give us a not-necessarily-wanted view into what sharpens J.T.’s pencil, it’s predictable. Thus, when you come to it, unless that’s your own personal kink and the whole reason you bought the book, perhaps you just roll your eyes and scan through it, eager to get back to the story. Or, if it offends you–and I can think of women who would get real tired of reading a man’s descriptions of relatively uncommon and unrealistic female behavior–you might just stop buying the books. Once you are onto an author’s pet themes, and you can tell in advance a certain amount of what you are going to get, some of the discovery is certainly pre-done.

Boredom. The trouble with any fetish, in writing or acted out for real, is keeping it fresh. Suppose you continue writing. You’ve decided you don’t need editors. Your friend’s critique just didn’t grasp what was cool about your style, so what does she know anyway? And throughout all your writing, you keep coming back to the trope of restraint. Your reader knows, because you write your most evocative wording when you take her into the mind of someone who cannot move. The problem is not just that every reader with a sixth grade diploma knows that you’re drawing deep upon your own fantasies. The problem is: how do you keep tying them up tighter, more elaborately, to keep it interesting for the fans? There is a creeping human tendency to freshen by intensity. Your reader expects some new kink every time, and is bored with the old tired ones. If you keep going this direction, you’ll contract what I call Hamilton’s Syndrome. It may bring you wealth, but it won’t create good books.

Hamilton’s Syndrome is my newly coined term for fetishism ratcheted up to the point where it overshadows the story. When Hamilton first began the Anita Blake series, she was brilliant. An appealing heroine, edgy motif, interesting and credible internal conflict for the protagonist–a heel-wearing, Schnauzerlike tough gal seeking to hold onto her humanity and beliefs. The fetishism was always around the edges of the story, but was sustainable; at least, I thought so. Then, some seven books in, Hamilton cut her heroine loose from humanity, slipped all those anchor cables. Eventually the story became secondary; the main focus was on monster hurts and wounds and problems, all of which could only be remedied by increasingly kinky and elaborate forms of sex with Anita. I recall one book in which the initial monster sex crisis took up the first third of the volume. Oh, and lust became a physical hunger for her, the fifth food group. The story is no longer even the point; the question posed by Hamilton’s Syndrome is, how can the kink-o-meter continue to ratchet up? How long can Hamilton top herself?

In my own writing, I watch for fetishism with great care. For one thing, I am intensely private. Consider that since this blog began, I have experienced serious life and health problems involving crippling pain, trauma and serious psychological shock and distress from which it may take me years, even the rest of my life, to recover. I never shared them here. Some may have leaked through, but not on purpose. It’s not that I’m ashamed; it’s that I believe I’m here to entertain, provoke thought, educate, and otherwise be fun to read. I am not here to back up the personal issues dump truck on you, fishing for support. Were I diagnosed with terminal cancer (for the record, I am not), I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t blog about it. This blog is part of my work (which is why, with regret, I can’t post the video of some Texans eating surströmming–too crude for work). I go other places to pour out my real troubles. Even alluding to them in this paragraph is an uncommon show of vulnerability for me. Well, I don’t think many writers compartmentalize as well, and some I believe lack compartments to begin with: a filing cabinet consisting of a large heap of papers.

So I guess the question the writer faces with fetishism is at least twofold: just how far are you willing to invite random people to analyze your mind (as I have done to Hamilton…she asked for it), and how are you going to keep people from either being bored with you, or poking fun at your blatant fetish? The ‘I’m a badass bitch, screw everyone, I do it my way, if you don’t like me and my writing, go to hell’ reflex answer is, of course: “Who cares what they think? I am after all a complete badass! And I post at least three times a day on Facebook trying to convince myself of it!” Well, here’s the problem: if you are writing to get paid, people have to want to buy your book. Thus, while you can’t let yourself obsess about what everyone thinks, you cannot ignore and dismiss your reader’s preference. Yeah, if you get paid, you do care what your reader thinks–and you aren’t such a badass.

Such are the paths down which fetishism leads in writing. Have I convinced you that you really would rather not be there? I would be especially glad for commentary on this topic. Am I treating fetishism too harshly? Is there an effective, sustainable way to work it in? We’re always told to ‘be ourselves,’ and here I am challenging that to a degree. Can you counter my stance?

Editing/writing life

Becoming a better writer

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When I talk to people about improving their writing, I sometimes wonder if some flaws are simply hard-coded, or if anyone can improve those through effort. As Pepper Martin said to his manager Frank Frisch, after the latter’s rant during a time when the team was just bad, “You know, Frankie-boy, I got a jackass back home on my ranch, and you can run him from sunup to sundown, and he still ain’t never gonna win the Kentucky Derby.” That’s not a putdown without including myself; it may be true in some areas for all of us. I am pretty sure I’m tone-impaired, for example, because much music that some consider stunningly wondrous just sounds horrible to me, and I can’t make any decent music at all myself. I am not sure I have the physical wherewithal to improve. Likewise, I could have tried for a degree in math instead of history, but could I have comprehended even calculus? It’s doubtful, considering my struggles with pre-calculus. So some of what I suggest, I believe, might simply be outside some folks’ ken. But I can suggest it, and if people are trying to work on it, they can decide for themselves whether a flaw is innate or badly learned.

Homophones. These are words that sound the same, but are spelled differently and have different meanings. A long list is here. Until you make time to differentiate ‘their’ from ‘there’ from ‘they’re,’ you will look bad. I don’t care if you mess them up in chat, but if you’re writing something people should want to read, you must get these right. A new grocery store opened just down the hill from me. It looked fairly downscale, and then I looked up to its opening day marquee: YOUR TO GOOD LOOKING TO SHOP ANYWHERE ELSE. The combination of slack-jawed, vapid flattery with such obvious lack of attention to accuracy grossed me out. I’ve still never spent a dime there. If they can’t muster a better public intro than most people’s standard chat and e-mail errors, that’s just sad.

Read a lot–and read good quality. If I write well today, it is for two reasons. The first, the technical correctness, came from heavy reading between ages three and seventeen. Even when I can’t tell you why something is incorrect, I nearly always know when it is, because I have read a great deal of correct writing. The second, refinement, also comes from lots of reading, and began when I went to college. This is where we learn to examine our statements for clarity, wean ourselves away from adverb overdose, push aside passive voice, and otherwise break the standard bad habits. Don’t assume that endcap bestsellers exemplify good writing habits; more often, they exemplify lazy pandering to a public that doesn’t know the difference and doesn’t care.

Punctuation. Look up the purpose of each mark, from the apostrophe to the hyphen. Check your writing to see if you use these correctly. Find the basics here. And if you do not, then…

Stop with ‘well, that’s just my style.’ If your style is bad, then it’s not an asset, and should be changed. Styles evolve. Don’t hug your weaknesses dearly to your heart, as if questioning them questions your validity as a person. Lots of great thinkers and people can’t write well.

If you write like you talk, stop. It’s not an asset, because people don’t read like they listen.

Never ask for critique you don’t want. Most requests for critique are actually requests for validation. These are unfair to the critic, whom you place in an impossible position. Your writing might not be very good. If it isn’t good, and you came seeking validation, your critic can’t win. If she tells you the cold truth, she just broke your dolly and crushed your dream, heartless snob that she is. If she uses all her own writing talent to find a nice way to tell you that your writing is bad, she expended much more effort than you had the right to ask of her, all for nothing, because you probably heard only the kind parts you wanted to hear. And if she lies, she was worse than useless to you, actually harmful to your development. Don’t ask for critique unless you want it for the sake of improvement, even if caustic. No worthwhile critic is needlessly cruel, but sometimes the simple truth is cruel in nature. You don’t ask a dentist to tell you that your tooth enamel and nerve will grow back, do you? Do you ask an orthopedic surgeon to tell you that your achilles will really only take three painless months to rehab, when in fact it will take a year of significant suffering?

The worst, the very worst, is when someone asks me to critique their child’s writing. Critiquing a child’s writing is an exercise in compassionate lying. The writing may be quite good for the child’s age, but it’s almost surely deeply flawed–obviously, since the child is developing English skills. Is it good for his age? I am not equipped to know; that’s the province of an English teacher (whose job is to provide age-appropriate critique), which I am not and could not be. Think about it. I have to lie. I have no other humane choice. Can we just agree, outside the child’s hearing, that asking this of me constitutes a request that I lie and say something is better than it is, for the sake of not crushing a little soul? That’s all I ask: to be relieved of the duty of honest sincerity, and that we all agree that I’m here to lie, and that by lying here, I’m helping and being a good guy. Neither you, your child nor I desire that I dissect it for real. Okay? If you want age-appropriate non-lying critique, best ask a professional educator who knows what is good for each age. I’m not qualified to do anything but lie.

Learn consistency of article, number, person and gender reference. This governs so much and weaves together. If you do not even know what this means, I’ll explain. If the subject is plural, and you later refer back to it, you cannot use the singular unless you are singling out one member of the subject group. This is why ‘they’ is an unacceptable substitute for ‘he or she,’ the eternal gender neutrality problem inherent in English, and probably the cause of more recast sentences than even passive voice addiction. If you describe an event in the future perfect tense, you can’t contradict the timing in the next sentence. Learning the tenses in English would be a good step, so here is a reference to study. Use of the right verb tense is a combination of literal common sense and knowing what the tense means.

Remember that narrative and dialogue are different. Narrative represents the storyteller’s viewpoint, or the story as seen through a character’s eyes. Dialogue is what people say, their actual words. Internal monologue (unspoken thoughts) is a form of dialogue. In dialogue, nothing has to be perfect; it simply has to sound like the speaker (or his/her thoughts). Part of crafting good dialogue is knowing how well-spoken the speaker is. The English can and should be as lousy as the speaker’s; the thoughts may be disconnected and inconsistent. It could make a travesty of this whole blog post, and be great dialogue.

Never follow any rule off a cliff. This one comes from C.J. Cherryh, one of the finest writers in print. There are times to break every rule, provided you know it well enough to break it. Here is what I tell writers: every writer gets a certain number of cheats per piece, defined as deviations from everything he or she is told not to do. Teachers instruct us to use some devices sparingly, especially adverbs, em dashes, semicolons, ellipses, passive voice, split infinitives, sentences ending with prepositions…you get the idea. When you hew blindly to a ‘don’t do this’ list, you do as badly as if you are addicted to overusage.

Cheat for a reason. Cheat for extra effect. Cheat because it will make a key phrase stand out. Any time you cheat, be sure the cheat pays its way. For example, I have used ellipses twice in this post. Under normal circumstances, I’d consider that slothful, but I believe both usages worked and paid their way. The second usage is questionable, if the definition of a cheat were ‘something I could eliminate through recasting.’ To me, that is not a definition, but a value test for most verbiage and literary devices. That is a tightening test more than it is a cheat’s value test.

Privacy, Social comment, Technology

How the Google data hydra begins to die

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I think I watched a head of the Google data hydra wither and die today–the second one in two weeks. It’s hard to predict the future, but this may have meant something for someone besides me.

What it is

Let’s define what this ‘data hydra’ is all about, and why I call it that. Here’s what Google does. It provides a very useful free service or software product to the public. The idea is to entrench that service to the point where it becomes a need, not a want. Here’s the catch: each of these services will phone home to Google on what you did, helping them to assemble a multi-faceted portrait of you for marketing purposes. Google can then sell advertising targeted at you. Some of it is camouflaged as stuff other than advertising.

You may not resent this. If you do, it doesn’t bother me; the choice is very individual. But if you do not resent it at all, the rest of this post may be of marginal interest. You may consider that it’s a voluntary business transaction in which we use the service in return for fair compensation of surrendering some data for their use. If so, you probably don’t think this whole subject is worth discussing. Okay.

The data hydra has tentacles. These fasten into your system and begin to report back. The best known are cookies, little data bits that can report back to Google from many non-Google sites. I don’t know what all they report, but I know that they want to remain on your machine between sessions. Less known are web trackers, little beacons that also may be on many non-Google sites. Thousands of web advertising companies use them, and most of you have no idea they are there. However, if you wonder how Facebook knows you just went to a site pertaining to travel to Bali, that’s how. Google, of course, uses them as ubiquitously as possible. A tentacle that presents Google with the richest harvest is actual applications and helpers that you download. If the thing is on the web, there are at least ways for you to refuse to let it work on your machine. If it’s on your machine, it can do whatever it wants, phone home any time it cares to. The most common would be Google Chrome (web browser; what’s better positioned to listen at your e-keyhole?) and Google Earth (surface view software). I’ve always loved it when people claimed that Google Chrome gave them better privacy. If anyone honestly believes that a Google application running on his or her computer will not make 100% sure that it has a backdoor saying ‘Google is the exception; Google gets everything’, that’s fine. You’re in the position of Native Americans signing treaties, pretty much, but have fun.

Everyone has to decide where his or her front line is, if there is to be one, in the battle with the data hydra. Or just do what most people do: say “screw it, who cares.”

My battle fronts

If you don’t use anything by Google, you still don’t shut out the data hydra, though Google would have to go further to profit from knowing what you read. I block all Google things that I can on as many sites as I can, selectively enabling some when it’s easier than fighting. Thus, everything from Google presents a decision: will I use it, and what will I tolerate in order to use it?

Google Chrome: will not use. I assume that if I use that, all other privacy efforts are defeated.

Google Earth: tried, uninstalled. Novelty application, but clunky and just isn’t very necessary.

Google Accounts: a key feature of all Google tracking. In their ideal world, you would always be logged into your Google account. Thus, as often as possible, they deny you features unless you login to a Google Account, in which case you are offered a richer experience. I have one, but I don’t use it very often.

Google Search: have long used, blocking all the cookies. Also have several browser add-ins to lie to it about my location, spam it with spurious searches, and otherwise feed it mountains of baloney. Still useful to me, though they are gradually making it worse, and driving me toward others.

Google Documents: probably the smartest trick Google ever pulled, with the potential to make Microsoft irrelevant. Offers cloud computing: ‘here, let us store your data; it will never get lost, and you or anyone you permit can access it anywhere.’ Of course, the big draw here is to make you login to a Google Account. Sometimes, they demand this just to view the document. In most cases, they demand it if you want to modify it. I fear this one the most, because due to my line of work, it’s possible I could be forced into doing Google’s bidding in order to get paid. Employers don’t care about your data hydra concerns–they do what’s easy for them, and if you don’t like it, find another job.

Google Groups: Google decided to simply swallow Usenet whole. Google Groups allow a fairly clunky form of collaboration and discussion, which can be as private as you wish. They were the cause of me creating a Google Account, because my RPG group was run by someone who embraced Google whatever and I wanted to be able to communicate and participate. However, I always hated this in silence, and I’ll admit that (years later) when they waited until I missed a session, turned it into a behind-the-back bitchfest about me, and kicked me out by phone call without the slightest phase of ‘here is what bothers us, we will face you honestly and give you opportunity to change your style,’ one of my consolations was that I never had to use the Google Group again. Easily dispensed with, unless your esoteric interest happens to exist in a Google Group.

Google Translate: will translate to and from some thirty languages, with passable accuracy. I have used it mostly as a dictionary. Bing has one that seems just as good. Recently, Google has been periodically breaking some of its features for people who block as many tentacles as I do. Today, I deleted GT from my toolbar. I wanted to do something, Google was refusing to load GT, and I decided I’d had enough.

Google News: aggregates world and local news, very handy for avoiding mainstream media’s ‘here is the story we order you to care about today’ manipulation. How do they decide what’s local to you? They look at your IP and figure out where you are. GN was the first of my Google uses to begin periodically breaking itself unless I gave it what it wanted. Happily, news aggregators are everywhere. I deleted the toolbar button several days ago, tired of dealing with ‘will it work for me today, or not?’. I don’t like its replacement’s layout as well, but it always works for me, and it gets my current location wrong enough that I can bear it.

Gmail: will not use. Obviously.

Google Toolbar: will not use, same reasons as Chrome. I’d rather comprise my own toolbar.

Google Maps: not needed. Alternatives are just as good.

Google Books: useful now and then in research, long as I can limit what they get.

Google everything else: not relevant to my world.

When you think about it, deciding to resist Google is a formidable task. Look at all that stuff. I don’t even want to use Google Anything ever again if I can help it, and they have even me caving in on some of it. By now, surely, you understand where they get all this information. Most of us give it to them because it’s easier than resisting. Basically, Google is like the annoying guy who has some redeeming features, who keeps subtly pressuring the woman for sex. The woman finally decides to get it over with, since he’s not that gross and she sort of likes him in some ways, and gives in. Google: analogous to the grey area between actual date rape and authentic consensuality.

What happened, then

Last week, I decided that if Google wanted to make News a crapshoot for me, I just didn’t need their version. Today, the same thing happened with Translate. Two data hydra heads, rendered meaningless for me, battle over. And it makes me wonder, because Google is sort of like a giant mudflow with enough weight behind it to seep into just about anything that isn’t solid, watertight and strong. It will continue to push: to offer new services, but exact a privacy toll for their use. When someone decides they just don’t need that particular Google service, Google loses a product. You are the product. You generate evidence of preferences, thus you create Google’s merchandise. Less use of anything from Google is what Google rightly fears. Thus, the day someone just stops using a piece of Google, a data hydra head is vanquished.

Google should pay us

So should Facebook. The default assumption, never questioned by most of us, is that Facebook and Google services represent fair trades for our marketing data. There are a lot of ways to look at this. “That was the deal, and you took it, so don’t renege. By refusing them all possible information, you’re stealing from them.” I guess if you see the world that way, most of my blog posts probably don’t interest you. My own way is simple: while Google and Facebook do the above, and probably specify their rights to do the above deep in the bowels of legalese-laced Terms of Service, they have never frankly disclosed all the data they mine, how they mine it, and how much money each of us makes them. They just kinda sorta did it the backdoor way. That’s not forthright business, so I reserve the right to be less than forthright myself. Telling the truth to deceptive people is a fool’s game; we are entitled to deceive the deceptive.

If they offered us real money for our data, telling us up front what they’d collect, that’d be different in my eyes. They won’t, naturally, because they don’t need to. We’ll give it away to them as the barter toll on the information highway, and since it doesn’t come out of our pockets, it doesn’t register.

What you do is your call. My goal is to use as little Google as I can get away with. If they want my data without resistance, they can make me an offer. Until then, I fence with the heads and tentacles of the data hydra, and for the most part, I think I win.

Adventures, Sports

Doubled off second on an infield fly

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In my thirties and early forties, I played adult baseball. Most of the people I played with were younger than me, which made it challenging, but for the most part I had a great time. Well, except for the torn cartilage, and the ruptured achilles, and a few other bummers. There were two comebacks, sort of similar to Jim Bouton’s career. I even learned to throw a knuckleball, as did Bouton, and in my last go-round wore his #56 as well.

You can’t play very much baseball for very long without seeing some humorous situations on and off the field. There was the time Frenchy, desperate for a toilet at Bellevue CC (which didn’t even have sani-cans), climbed atop a stack of old tires and had a particularly disappointing bowel movement in them. The league almost got kicked off using BCC’s field. There was Riggs, an old fellow and a great baseball mind who looked a little bit like Burleigh Grimes, especially when his face got all red and he complained to umpires. We would all be in the dugout making the Riggs complaint face and laughing. There was the time I got my very first print credit in a book, and told my team at practice. A couple of them spat sunflower seeds or chew, and I think one muttered, “Will it help you hit a good curveball?” They didn’t care. This was a baseball dugout.

One funny story had a tragic coda, and I wouldn’t have laughed about it in the same way for years had I known. When I was on the Rattlers in my early forties, we had a kid named Andy Hyde. Andy was one of those unpredictable loose cannons, and was not especially popular. He had a way of saying things that stung, making petty complaints, ignoring direction. He once tailgated me most of the way home on his motorcycle, so close that I had to resist the temptation to tap the brakes. One time I was watching July 4 fireworks with our catcher, Josh Langlois, and some of his friends. As we were walking back, we saw someone on a motorcycle being arrested. It was Andy; for what offense, I never learned.

Andy resisted base coaching. I don’t mean that he listened, then did something else. I mean that he yelled at you to shut up, complaining that he couldn’t run the bases and listen to a base coach at the same time. Well, in baseball, you kind of have to accept some coaching. Now, in case you aren’t familiar with the rule, in baseball there’s an infield fly rule. If there are less than two out with a force play at third base, and the batter pops up a fair ball in the infield, an umpire bellows: “Infield fly! Batter’s out!” It doesn’t matter whether anyone catches the ball; the batter is out. No runners are forced. If someone does catch the ball, however, the runners may tag up and advance at their peril, just as with any caught fly ball. (If they let it drop, the runners don’t have to tag up.)

One day I was coaching third base, with someone on first and Andy on second. Thus, if our batter popped up in the infield, this rule would apply. In such a case, the runners should hold if a fielder even looks like he might catch the ball. Sure enough, our hitter popped one up to second. The umpire called the infield fly rule–but Andy had taken off for third base on contact. He got 3/4 of the way to third base before finally paying attention to my very colorful exhortations to return to second. While a speedy base runner, not even most major leaguers could have come that far and then gotten back to second in time. Their second baseman made the catch, flipped it to the shortstop covering second base. Andy was out by at least five feet. Double play! It was one of the dumbest plays I’d ever seen. Perhaps the very dumbest.

Andy didn’t stay with the Rattlers that long, and we didn’t hear much about him after that. A few years later, our self-adopted daughter called with some very sad news. Not too far from her home in Burbank, late at night, Andy had driven his car up to a fenced transformer. He’d scaled the fence, climbed over the inclined barbed wire at the top, walked over and grabbed the transformer. As I recall, she wasn’t the one who had found him, and gods be thanked for that. There was no other plausible explanation except suicide.

I hadn’t really considered Andy a friend, but I felt someone from the league should be at his funeral. I wore my jersey. I learned that he had been a star athlete in school, but had battled mental problems in young adulthood. He heard voices, did erratic things, perceived dangers that didn’t actually exist. He had gone into the Navy, and it had worsened his condition to the point where they discharged him. For years he had struggled to see the world with basic clarity, hold some form of employment, and avoid letting his demons lead him into trouble. As for whether he climbed into the transformer intent on suicide, or simply perceived it as something other than thousands of volts of live current, that we can’t ever know. We didn’t know the world his mind knew. His family grieved him, though years of trying to help him had worn on them. He had been just functional enough to get himself into serious predicaments, without the clarity to extricate himself. Nice family, compassionate people; one could not watch and hear them without feeling some of their pain.

In a way, it’s still funny, simply because of the preternatural dumbness of getting doubled up on a play where all one has to do is stay put. But it’s more unfunny than funny, because now I know why he couldn’t listen to base coaches. They were just more voices adding to his clamor. He lived in a world of pain and fear and confusion, one none of us could see.

I guess sometimes we only later come to grasp the rest of the story. What it has meant to me, I guess, is that I should generally try to hold a part of my judgment back. There may be another 2/3 of the story I never knew.

Investing, Social comment

Most precious metal bugs don’t even believe their own philosophy

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It’s a beautiful day: silver and gold are burning. I believe that a reasonable price for silver is $12-15/oz, and that gold is reasonable at $600/oz. I don’t care what Mr. Market says; Mr. Market is an idiot. Don’t try and tell me how Mr. Market is wise, swift and sure, all hail Mr. Market. When some money market funds broke the buck, panicked investors fled to safe havens: to money market funds! That’s what an idiot Mr. Market is.

Would you like to know how to tell if a precious metal hoarder really believes his or her own philosophy? Most don’t believe theirs. Many bought piles of gold at $1800/oz and silver at $40/oz. The enormity of those prices tells me that the reason was not long-term profit, but fear of some Grand Calamity. I’ve had the same discussion with many of them, and I’ll share it with you.

PMB: *grumble grumble* “I don’t trust any banks or any government or any anything. It’s all going to hell. I’m going with gold and silver, it’s the only thing you can count on.” *mutter mutter about socialism*

Me (drawling a bit): “Okay. Mind if I ask you a question or two about your philosophy?”

“Okay, sure.”

“Cool. First off: are you still putting money in a 401K?”

“Well, of course! The job matches my contributions and I get a tax benefit!”

“Seriously. So you believe everything is going splat, but you still put money into this. You don’t even believe your own philosophy.”

Or, they may answer: “Hell, no! None of that is going to be around!”

Me: “Makes sense. I don’t have an issue with anyone’s philosophy as long as they believe it. So you are loading up on metals; fair enough. Without being specific, of course, can you tell me where the metal is, very generally?”

“Well, I bought it through Edward Jones.”

“Really. So you don’t even have possession of it?”

“Would you want all that in your house? Criminals are getting bolder every damn day! Anyone who isn’t afraid is an idiot!”

“Really. So in your apocalyptic scenario, with civil disorder and everything in collapse, you truly think you are going to be able to go down to your local Edward Jones office. And the pleasant receptionist is going to be at work, smiling, ‘Yes, Mr. Smith, right away, Mr. Smith.’ You do not even believe your own philosophy.”

Or, they might respond: “I got it at the metal trading place, and it’s in my safe deposit box.”

Me: “You’re serious? So let’s draw this all in a picture. It’s the day of the Great Collapse. You need your gold! And you imagine that you’re going to go down to your B of A branch and the smiling teller will gladly let you into the vault. What are you going to do when you find out that, under martial law, there’s a platoon of the regular Army guarding it with automatic rifles and fixed bayonets? ‘The bank is closed, sir. Please step back to the sidewalk.’ ‘But you don’t understand! I need my damn gold and silver!’ ‘Sir, this property is under martial law. I have authority to use deadly force. Now please step back to the sidewalk, or lay down on the ground with your hands clearly visible. I would rather not use that deadly force.’ You don’t even believe your philosophy.”

Or, they might respond: “Well, I’ve got it in a few locations, easily landmarked. All of them are within a day’s hike of each other, none are subject to being in the same nuclear blast, and none are endangered by significant natural disasters like floods.”

Me: “Okay. Sounds like you’ve thought this through. Just out of curiosity, what’d you buy?”

“Mostly 1-oz Krugerrands and 10-oz bars.”

“Seriously. So, how many cattle can you pasture at once in your yard?”

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

“Suppose we are on this post-apocalyptic barter economy and you want to use your metal to trade for stuff. How easy do you think it will be to make honest change using big gold to buy small amounts of food from farmers and ranchers? How fast do you think your stock of gold coins will evaporate at that rate? You really have not thought this through.”

Now and then I’ll meet someone who truly has thought it through. “I bought old US gold coins which were worn, selling close to melt, and a bunch of old US junk silver. Rolls and rolls of 1964 dimes, quarters, halves. Some wartime silver nickels. If things go to hell, I can barter and preserve my resources. If they don’t, what the hell; I can become a coin collector and hang onto some of the value.”

Me: “Okay. Then you’re doing the right thing for you. I hope it doesn’t all fall apart, but if it does, you’ve at least thought about what it’d mean. Good luck.”

Those are rare.

Book reviews

Current read: _The Kugler Dynasty_ by Studio Dongo

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This is the intro to a science fiction series about life afloat in pyramidal, functionally unsinkable cities. I liked it better than I’d imagined I might.

The author, whose real name is rather more conventional than ‘Studio Dongo,’ is known for a dry and slightly serrated sense of humor. Thus, I spent a lot of the story in one of those moments: “Okay, I think there is some deliberate gonzo comedy sprinkled here, but I’m hesitant to come out and call it that, because it might just be something else that I’m not a clever enough reader to pick up, so I’d better not pop off.” The diverse subplots dovetail well, and in a far less formulaic way than your typically predictable Dean Koontz endcap thriller (that you’d swear was outlined like a basketball tournament bracket).

About halfway through, the tale started to pick up for me. By three-quarters, I was excited to see where it would go. Other than the expected dovetailing (without which we’d be opening a can of ‘huh?’), I was left in enough doubt of what-happens-next to hold my interest. I like it a lot when books do that, and it’s not as common as one might wish. By the end, I was considering ordering the next book just because such good groundwork (open sea?) was laid for a lot of potentially interesting and exciting story possibilities.

I’d call it a four-star book that would rate a fifth star except for some portions with too much tell rather than show. That’s my own personal bugaboo: the first time I see “She felt…”, I’m now hyper-alert for such things for the duration of the read. It says a lot for the story that I liked it well overall, in spite of this aspect pushing one of my buttons.

Available in hardcopy at the link at top, or in e-version.

Blogging freelance editing, writing, and life in general. You can also Like my Facebook page for more frequent updates: J.K. Kelley, Editor.