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Battle of the Sexes

Boston Skeptic — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:00:00 GMT

There are a lot of differences between males and females. These differences are especially hard to notice when the males and females are dolphins, or squirrels. When it comes to human beings, one of the main differences is that women talk about their friends when they aren’t around but never tell their friends to their face that they think they have a stupid boyfriend, or that they thought their makeup made them look like a vampire. Men frequently won’t even notice that their friends have a girlfriend, or that they are wearing any specific clothes.

In my family in particular, the biggest difference between my wife and me is the way we approach having visitors. I love having visitors and would invite company to our house every week if I could. Early in my marriage I invited eight people to dinner all at the same time without first asking my wife, which she liked about as much as she’d have liked it if I blindfolded her and took her on a 10 day back country skiing trip in Alaska against her will.

My wife says I love having company because I “do nothing” to get the house ready for their arrival and “have no idea what it takes” to prepare a home for guests. She would be the first to admit that by doing nothing, she means I vacuum, clean the kitchen and put away the four weeks of laundry that I’ve folded and left on our guest bed instead of putting it away in my closet.

She would also admit that what she believes what it takes to properly prepare one’s home for company, is to make it appear as if nobody lives/have never lived, in the premises. She does this by carefully staying up all night the day before company arrives, and stuffing all clothing, personal belongings, books, games, mail, shoes, tooth brushes, food, hats, mittens, into one of two closets, into every available drawer, and underneath anything where it can be fully obscured and where it is certain that for at least five days after our company leaves, I will not be able to find it.

When I protest about the punitive nature of our home preparation and say that her cousin, or my parents won’t be offended if they know that we brush our teeth or wear sneakers she tells me that I don’t understand what it’s like to be a woman, thereby highlighting another difference between the sexes; the fact that men, when called out for an illogical stance by their wife or anyone else, resort to name calling or subject changes, whereas women, in the same situation, immediately state that men don’t know what it’s like to be a woman which makes no sense, but which ends all conversations.

At this point I’ve pretty much stopped inviting people to our house. People rarely invite us anywhere so it’s hard for me to say whether this removal of anything that might indicate the interests or personality of occupants is standard practice. This is partially a function of living in a city where it’s always easier to meet people out at a restaurant, but it may also be related to the fact that some of my wife’s friends could actually be vampires. If I ever get invited to their house I’ll know just where to look for clues.

If It's Not Worth Having - Better To Have It Now

Boston Skeptic — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:38:00 GMT

Recently, while at a theater waiting for a movie to start I was treated to a confusing animated short film that had no words and involved farm animals. The film, which ended up being an advertisement for Chipotle, was accompanied by a mediocre(er) recording of a mediocre song “The Scientist”, by Coldplay. The friend who’d joined me for the movie was so thrilled with this version that he pulled out his iPhone, accessed an “app” and determined that the cover was being played by Willie Nelson, and downloaded the awful version of the song for a mere $1.29, all before the two-minute film ended.

This experience reminded me that today’s instant-access technology is bad for people who like to buy things and can’t afford them and that I like Chipotle more than I like Coldplay and that I like just about anything more than Willie Nelson, but it also caused me to think back to 1992, when I went through an intense three-week process that involved four miles of walking, $15.95 and seven conversations with a guy who smelled like wheat germ in order to obtain the cassette of the Fu-Shnikens.

The Fu-Shnikens, for those who have forgotten, were a rap trio most famous for their names Chip Fu, Moc Fu and Poc Fu and the glut of moderately annoying hip hop songs they produced containing frequent use of the sound “Fu”. Their most famous song is undoubtedly “True Fuschnick” which sounded like a Yiddish term for an annoying child, but which was actually a song that contained the lyrics “When the mic is gripped, in ridobidobip bip da be bong de dang, Bo!”

I first heard this song while at sleep-away camp and even though it was the musical version of the Dodge Omni, I felt about it the way that my parents’ generation felt about “Satisfaction” or the way New York Times columnists felt the first time they saw the green grass at Yankee Stadium in a tedious Ken Burns documentary.

The biggest mistake I made when leaving camp was that despite the fact that I had learned all of the lyrics to True Fuschnick, I managed to leave without being certain of the name of the artists. Since Al Gore was still skulking around in the Senate I was forced first to write a letter to a friend of questionable reliability asking him for the name, and second, to walk to the record store to sing a few bars to the clerk in hopes that might recognize it.

In 1991 I had very little understanding of what it meant, socially, and in terms of musical taste or awareness, when someone smelled of incense, or wore a Phish tee shirt and a winter hat in the summer, but needless to say, he was not familiar with the song.

I don’t recall how I ultimately learned the name of the Fushnickens, but will never forget the day I got a call from the store informing me that my special order had arrived.

I played the cassette dutifully over the ensuing months to mixed reviews from my friends and parents and ultimately shelved it in favor of some more meaningful tunes, such as “The Power” by Snap, which made strong political statements with verses such as “It's gettin' it's gettin' it's gettin' kinda hectic, It's gettin' it's gettin' it's gettin' kinda hectic. It's gettin' it's gettin' it's gettin' kinda hectic. It's gettin' it's gettin' it's gettin' kinda hectic”.

Looking back I’m not certain whether today’s fast-moving world is so bad after all. There is some danger to being able to acquire things at a moment’s notice with the touch of a button before you have a chance to figure out if it sucks, but on the flip side I’m not ready to go back to the day when a guy could invest 35 hours obtaining a song that contained the word “aggarniffum”.

SHY NO MORE

Boston Skeptic — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:50:13 GMT

I keep waiting for the social media trend to fizzle. I keep thinking this will happen because it feels about as meaningful as jam shorts and snap bracelets and both of those faded within a school year, even though I kept wearing jam shorts for about three years after they were no longer cool. If I’d been betting on the demise of Twitter and Facebook I’d have lost a considerable fortune but no lack of success in betting against these two trends would have discouraged me from betting against another recent trend; female-only exercise classes in public places.

It used to be, way back in the early 2000’s, that women were embarrassed to go to the gym, and generally sat around talking about they hated going to the gym where they’d be ogled by “meat head” guys. My wife, and every other woman I’ve ever talked to about the gym before 2010, professed the fact that she was “grossed out” by working out in the sight of men.

In fact, this sentiment was so pervasive, that no less than three national companies were started devoted to providing women with their own, female-only gym experience. This new breed of gym was about 400% more expensive than the comparable coed gym, was free from “sketchy grunting men”, and offered most of the same equipment, though nobody really ever knew because their wife or girlfriend would say “do they have that machine at your gym that does those thingies” and when you’d say “your lats?”, they’d say “I have no idea, are lats in your legs? I don’t think we have that one. Is yours purple?”.

If you’re a member of a gym, or live near a park, you’ve probably already become acquainted with this new phenomenon whereby large groups of middle aged women, who in years past, wouldn’t have been caught dead on a beach, or wearing anything that showed any skin, have taken to engaging (apparently by their own free will) in very large, very loud, group workouts, in public, usually under the strict command of a very large and often tattoo covered man who (if you happen to get close to them because one of your dogs ran into their circle at the water fountain) they proudly proclaim “totally kicked our ass”.

Near our house the women mostly run around carrying tree stumps and paint cans and tires and one another with the trainer walking slowly behind and yelling at them. Then they gather at the most visible point in the park and do some kind of modified push-ups.

Initially I thought it must be specific to my park that women were paying $30 per session to wear tights in public while being screamed at but I recently witness 13 or so similarly clad women doing jumping jacks on the roof of the neighboring building as I and three hundred other people looked out from our desks. This week, I was floored when I arrived at my gym (full of admittedly sketchy, grunting men) to salsa music blaring over the speakers upon a crowd of women ranging in age from 19 to 72, who were proudly prancing around in the middle of the gym, at rush hour, engaging in various forms of borderline erotic dance moves, about 85 feet away from a large room generally dedicated to such shenanigans.

I generally fancy myself a person who is at least partially aware of what is going on in the world but will be the first to admit that I’ve been sleeping on this apparent feminist uprising. Even though I’m late to the party I’m glad to see it. I assume like most exercise phenomena it won’t last, but my hope is that it will remove the stigma of co-ed gyms, at least long enough for us to cut our family gym budget by about 80% and allow us a chance to figure out if the blue machine at my gym is the same as the purple one at hers.

A Cure for Boredom

Boston Skeptic — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:50:00 GMT

When I was in high school I always complained about being bored. Now that I’m older I realize that I would have been bored living anywhere because it wasn’t so much that there wasn’t anything to do in Vermont, but rather, that aside from blaming one’s lack of popularity on one’s ten year old foster brother being allowed to roam free at soccer games and pretend- bite my female classmates, there wasn’t anything to do for any 17 year old.

Where we lived, one of the main things to do was drive our cars in oddly-shaped laps around the town, mostly in search of other teenagers. Sometimes, we would see other teenagers and would stop and stand near their car and discuss how there were no parties going on. Sometimes we would discuss throwing eggs at cars, which sometimes lead to actually throwing eggs at cars, specifically, the car driven by an older kid named Andy who for some reason, nobody respected, even though he was pretty nice.

Sometimes, after making several laps without spotting so much as any person between the ages of 14 and 27, we would do a different loop around my neighborhood. This loop gave us an opportunity to shoot paintballs at a truck owned by a guy who one of my friends believed may have been involved in the theft of his dirt bike seven years prior, and more importantly, a chance to break the Clarendon Street Record, which involved driving as fast as possible down an arrow-straight residential street in whosever 130 horsepower Japanese economy car we happened to be driving, and then talking about how much faster we could have gone if we had been driving one of any number of cars which we believed to be “sweet”, such as Dusty's absentee father’s Mitsubishi Diamante, which allegedly had a sunroof.

The record was held by a fairly clean cut and prematurely professorial guy called Dan who allegedly drove his father’s white Camry 80 or 81 miles per hour. The belief around town was that one of my brothers also had a near-record in a gray Corolla, but this story was never confirmed, and was often confused with another story about when he attempted to break the record on a weekend afternoon and one of the neighbors called my mother to complain in either a loud voice or a New Jersey accent, depending upon my mother’s mood when she tells the story.

In 2000, I nearly lost my life in pursuit of the record while a passenger in my friend’s car, a recently-purchased Audi, which was genuinely fast, but which we regarded as approximately a lot nicer than it was. One evening we went for a ride and several times my friend took corners, mostly alongside a river, at speeds that were usually reserved for things attached to a rail. I was genuinely petrified, but disguised my fear in a zealous appreciation of his driving, in much the same way some of my classmates at college paraded fanatical heterosexuality in hopes of masking their appreciation of men.

That night, after watching some dreadful movie, my friend urged me join him for a try at The Record. I resisted, allegedly on grounds of fatigue and on actual grounds of fear, but ultimately agreed to one shot at fame. Though his car put forth a strong effort, my friend was unfamiliar with the rules, which involved taking one’s foot off the gas several hundred yards before the end of the street and eventually, pressing the breaks to avoid smashing into the living room of the house that sat on the side of the street that ran perpendicular to Clarendon where the people who lived there were watching Letterman. While blaming me for the accident was enough to make his parents dislike me forever, it surprisingly did not change the fact that his vehicle was imbedded in the front of a house or that he lost his license for 18 months, and he ultimately moved to Manhattan, where even people with clean records don’t have cars.

A few years back, I broke the record to surprisingly little fanfare while I was staying with my parents after my first year of law school. The record fell quietly, during a private ceremony involving my motorcycle, which easily broke the record in 3^rd gear, leading me to believe it may even be faster than a Diamante. It didn’t feel as good as I thought it would and until now I haven’t shared the accomplishment with anyone. Mostly because I didn’t want to disappoint Dan Hall, but also because the only chance I had to tell him was when I saw his brother at a bar, but he was wearing overalls and looked pretty weird so I decided to take a few laps instead.

Sweet Sounds of Mediocrity

Boston Skeptic — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:46:07 GMT

The other day I was riding in the car and found myself listening to what sounded like Top 40 songs and was temporarily suspended in a place where I simultaneously liked the music I was hearing, but also knew there was something strange about it. It was catchy, and had all of the general lyrical qualities associated with dime-a-dozen romantic radio garbage (“you are everything” “I need you” etc.) but it had a distinct overall crappiness and badness to its fit and finish that made it clear that it was not conventional music.

As I listened further, I noticed that my gut feeling was correct and that this music was Christian music, or more accurately, Overtly Christian Music. I call it this because there are plenty of songs which have spiritual undertones, or even overtones, but which never include the word “thee”.

A few years ago a friend of mine who works in music publishing told me that the Christian music market, while moderate in size, was very profitable. I can believe this because I was raised in what I would call a "pretty religious family" which meant that in our comings and goings we often crossed paths with "zealot isolationist families" who sent their children to Seventh Day Adventist school even though they didn't know what Seventh Day Adventism was.

By the time I was in middle school, we started going to a Presbyterian church, which is the O'Doul’s of Protestant denominations. The starkest difference between our old church, where they sung hymns that likened being a Christian to being in the military off of overhead projectors, and the Presbyterian church is that at our old church, people who got divorced were asked to leave, and at the Presbyterian church, the only woman who stood up to say she was sad that “the gays” had gotten the right to be ministers in the church never returned when she realized nobody agreed with her.

One of the main advantages of being part of a religious family that was not uber-religious, was that I knew kids who were subjected to considerably more restriction than I was in terms of their general day to day living and I was frequently in a position to feel cooler than them because I was allowed to listen to music that didn't suck.

Occasionally, the kids who were only allowed to listen to bad Christian bands that nobody had ever heard of would try to turn the tables by wearing a tee shirt to school bearing the image of some alternative looking guy with a headband and try to pass it off as conventional. This trick would never work in the days of the internet but back then, I will admit that there were one or two days that I coveted Matt Nelson's tee shirt bearing the names of some White Rappers for Christ.

This decade's version of Overtly Christian music stays true to some of the many themes that marked the genre in its early years. These themes are: letting oneself be at the mercy of God, asking God to take oneself, apologizing to God for one's shortcomings, reminding God that you are nothing without God, and imploring God to grab hold of some part of your being and make it clean.

I'm not sure where this obsession with mortal imperfection came about but it's a troubling trend and might have something to do with our inability to balance a budget. If you attend a church, take a gander at some of the lyrics of the “old standards” as my mother would call them, which are the songs that were playing when the world was made. There is scarcely a mention of human frailty and much more of a focus upon God's ability to save the wretched, and heal the wounded and socialize with different breeds of Angels. This may be due in part to the fact that these songs were written by God himself, but I think it's more about the fact that today's lyrics would sound cheap even if accompanied by a harpsichord.

Tow Me To L.A.

Boston Skeptic — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:46:07 GMT

About once a week something happens that makes me threaten to move back to Vermont. Usually, the something that happens is getting stuck in traffic or getting a letter that says I can’t renew my car registration until I pay some kind of excise tax to the City of Boston, which is different than the one I already paid to the State of Massachusetts. Sometimes I just get annoyed at having to pay exorbitant rent to live in a place where a bagel costs four dollars. Sometimes, such as when my car gets towed, I threaten to move to Los Angeles.

In Boston, like many urban areas, parking is in short supply. Such short supply, that one of my friends recently paid more than a million dollars for an apartment which came with two parking spaces. This wouldn’t seem to be too much of an aberration except for the fact that the spaces are located conveniently in the basement of the building, which is located approximately one mile from his actual house.

We have only one parking space at our house, and frequently, for one reason or another, we end up parking our car on the street to make room for a company car, friend, or relative. One of the risks involved in parking on the street is having someone smash the grill on your car in a way that your fiancé doesn’t notice, but that makes you lose sleep, but the other, central concern, is that of parking tickets.

In my family, there is a specific process that we take the minute we get a parking ticket which involves trying to hide the ticket from one another, in hopes that it will go away on its own. When it fails to go away on its own, we eventually remember it when we get another copy of it in the mail along with a notice that tells us it has increased because of our failure to pay.

Sometimes, such as when you are given a ticket for parking in a space with signs that are confusing, you can dispute the ticket at city hall by engaging in a simple process of taking a half day off of work, going to city hall, sitting on a cold cement bench, and eventually being told by someone who is either a lawyer or not a lawyer that the ticket was properly given. While you seldom win these contests, they do present a great opportunity to act very off put, or potentially slam your fist in indignation just before you pay the fine.

One big deal in Boston is street cleaning, which is, as far as I can tell, a racket between our fat bozo mayor and some of his cronies who run tow lots, to raise lots of money which they can then spend on going out to dinner. In a city like Boston, street cleaning makes about as much sense as Sarah Palin and in reality, happens very infrequently, despite the fact that all city streets are wiped clean for 8 hours per month specifically for this purpose.

Once in a great while, during the two four hour periods designated on the signs, an old-looking machine will plod down the street with a brush that sometimes rubs the ground and pushes dirt, pine needles and dunking donuts napkins into the street, where they are blown back against the curb by passing motorists three minutes later. Very occasionally, the same machine drops a stream of water on the pavement, which is probably supposed to turn the dirt into mud, but which instead, leaves a damp skid often associated with dragging a leaking bag of trash across the floor.

Whether or not the city actually engages in this mission critical activity, the tow companies are there, waiting for the clock to strike the magic hour where they can begin towing unsuspecting excise, income, property, and sales tax payers to a lot, which is usually located 17 miles from their home in a neighborhood where nobody pays any taxes.

Today, when our car was towed we immediately traveled against the flow of traffic to a neighborhood that contained many cars with tinted windows. When we arrived, the mayor’s buddies informed us that they only accept cash, which we went to fetch at a laundry mat that looked like it would achieve its best use as a crime scene.

Just as my fiancé emerged with sufficient cash to free our Volvo I determined I had forgotten the keys. Tired, unshowered, and grumpy, we made the 40 minutes schlep back to civilization along with the 400,000 or so poor saps who make this awful commute each day. An hour and a half of traffic jams may sound like an awful thing to most of you, but I consider it practice for California!

Wii (and by "wii" I mean "I") are the Champions

Boston Skeptic — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:46:07 GMT

My wife and I got a Wii for Christmas. In addition to being about a dozen years behind the people of Japan, I realized that I am not even the first member of my immediate family to get a Wii. Oddly, that award goes to my brother Seth, who has no cable television and did not own a cell phone until 2009 but who acquired a Wii in the same inlaw-related process by which I acquired mine. In what is sure to be another record, ours is the first video game system owned by either my wife or me in a combined 53 years of living – most of which took place during an era in which some of my friends had subscriptions to Nintendo-specific magazines.

Despite my parents’ aversion to electronic games, my humble beginnings as an infrequent video game participant and the fact that I have never heard of a Play Station, I became, for a period of 3 months, the single best player of Tony Hawk Pro Skater in all of Bentley College. While rapid, my rise to greatness was not without its problems. Most of the problems related to the fact that I was ignoring girls, not going to class, and sometimes forgetting to eat dinner or lunch because I was sitting in a beanbag chair alongside my roommate Josh discussing the plausibility of rail sliding the rafters of the warehouse, and whether or not such a move would be better or worse, strictly from a point-getting standpoint, than a traditional rail slide around the entirety of the empty pool and whether we would find the game more or less awesome if it were more realistic in the sense that "skateboarding the sport" is mostly underwhelming and more about counterculture and baggy pants, or tight pants, or whatever is the opposite of normal pop-culture at the time, than it is about doing awesome tricks.

In the past month we have used the Wii a great deal, and by “we” I mean that I have used the Wii. I have a battery operated lobster swimming around on my desk as proof that I won the bowling tournament we hosted on New Year’s Eve, a bruise on my elbow as proof that my wife doesn’t understand the intricacies of Wii tennis, and have played enough Tiger Woods Golf that I can readily shoot well below par at Pebble Beach, even with my 78 year-old avatar who I created to have near-fetal-alcohol-syndrome-skull-width, and excessive age spots. If it were possible to play Wii effectively from a seated position, I would be worried about developing another addiction.

I recently had a discussion with a man in his 40’s about my addictive relationship with the few video games I’ve used, and was surprised when he advocated their extreme use by his children. To support his position, he referenced an unspecified study or studies that he claimed showed that children who spent a lot of their time playing video games were more likely to succeed in math and science. I have not read this study, but imagine it also concludes that the same children would not be good at sports, and would not gain the interest of women until such time as they stopped playing video games, or made enough money by being good at math to make people forget they were lame.

My Tony Hawk career came to an abrupt end in May 2000 when I threw up at around two in the afternoon and wasn’t able to say with certainty that my nausea wasn’t related to my having just played 9 hours of electronic skateboarding without rising for any reason. Surprisingly, the video-game related guilt I felt on that day was second to that which I felt in 1998 when I was late to a hockey game because I got engrossed in a game of computer mini golf, which was not even half as fun as actual mini golf, with my older brother who was visiting for the holidays. I was so late that I missed warm-ups and was forced to skate without a cup, having left it behind in my haste to reach the rink. Despite my painful history, I don’t need studies, or even guys pretending they read studies about the value of videogames to convince me that they can do some good; especially for children who would otherwise be playing dungeons and dragons. The Wii, for example, represents an unparalleled opportunity to bowl a 250 on behalf of a man whose arms are not connected to his body; an amazing feat, though admittedly not as transformational as a game that makes skateboarding seem exciting.

Greetings from Vancouver!

Boston Skeptic — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:46:07 GMT

Greetings from Vancouver! Actually, I’m not in Vancouver, but neither are the Olympics, so who’s counting? I did spend nearly 8 hours watching Sunday’s events with my wife and have provided a summary of the three events I found most intriguing.

Nordic Combine:

For those of you who think you missed this event, think again. Odds are, you were probably watching it but had no idea that it was going on because the combination of ski jumping, and cross country skiing held several hours apart makes as much sense as a competition involving walleye fishing in April and ice climbing in February. The announcers explained that the field of athletes from which to draw competitors for this event is surprisingly, extremely small. The reason for the dearth of competitors, they said, was that one would need to live within 20 kilometers of a ski jump to have enough opportunities to practice enough times to be competitive on the World Stage which from the looks of it, is about three opportunities. It also seems that one major deciding factor in one’s propensity to be a dominant Nordic Combine participant is having any interest whatsoever in using the ski jump even if it is, for example, 1.5 kilometers from one’s house.

Most of the athletes admitted to being bad at one or the other aspect of the event which is not surprising given that one is essentially a circus act, and the other is a test of endurance. This year, an American won a silver medal – the first won by an American in the storied history of the Nordic combine. History would suggest that the event should explode in popularity as a result of this notoriety, but since the sport combines a boring type of skiing with flying 300 feet off a ramp like you were shot out of a cannon, all bets are off.

Luge:

Luge is not a new sport by any means but is one that should be watched each time as if it was the first time. Conveniently, the fact that it involves grown men who look exactly the same sliding down a tunnel on large ice skate wearing Adidas socks making no movements that can be associated with a living person makes it very easy to feel as if one is watching it for the first time, each time.

This year, sadly, a young man died while doing some practice runs for the main event. The most unfortunate part of this accident aside from the tragic loss of a 20 year old boy, was the fact that the announcers spent the entirety of the competition talking about the fact that the death resulted in the shortening of the track by nearly two football fields, which changed the whole dynamic of the race from being a complicated sport about strategic thinking and quick reaction time into a race that involved indistinguishable men sliding down a tunnel on a large ice skates. The leveling effect of the track shortening, according to the announcers, essentially reduced the competition to a “paddling” contest, which is the part where the guys use their hands to get started.

The highlight of the announcing was when they ridiculed a 38 year-old Italian for what they regarded as a “sloppy” performance which they noted was vastly different from his typical “precision accuracy” and then failed to mention that his “awful” run had netted him the best single time in the competition and a silver medal. This run and related analysis was a strong reminder for all who were watching that luge is essentially a science fair project involving different sized marbles and a ramp.

This year, the competition was won by a 20 year-old from Germany, but the most popular competitor was from India, who the announcers noted had formerly been part of India's storied giant slalom tradition but decided he wanted to try luge one day and since nobody else in India had access to a 2,000 foot refrigerated ice tunnel, he was able to be the worst at not one, but two, Olympic sports.

Biathlon:

This oldie-but-goody involves the highly correlated skills of marksmanship and cross country skiing. My mother in law believes it was a sport that evolved from the Native American traditions of walking around in the woods and shooting things with a bow and arrow but I suspect it originated during the same brainstorming session where someone suggested the Nordic Combine, which in all likelihood, was the meeting where Winter Olympic Officials were talking about how stupid it was that the Summer Olympics got to hand out a medal for every time anyone jumped in a pool.

The biathlon is not much of a television sport because instead of focusing on the confidence needed to lay on the ground and fire a .22 while wearing a one-piece stretch suit on national television, NBC spent most of its time focused upon the variability of the snow conditions, which caused only one athlete to fall and zero guns to discharge.

My mother in law told me she used to think the biathlon was silly too, until she tried to write a check shortly after exiting a Pilates class, which I have not tried, but which is apparently very difficult. If she could just figure out how to work snow into the equation I think the Olympic Committee might have a new addition for the 2014 games! Look out Michael Phelps.

Life on the Cusp

Boston Skeptic — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:46:07 GMT

I grew up on the cusp of many things, technologically speaking. I assume that the same could be said for any generation but I would submit that the discoveries of my youth were greater than those of my parents' youth, such as skim milk, and sneakers with ankle support.

My seventh grade class, for example, had two computers that had the Internet, though only a few nerdy kids used it, and mostly they sent pen pal letters to kids in Germany. In fact, computers weren’t really a big deal either. A lady named Judy would come in to our class once in a while in third grade and show us how to make a green triangle named “Turtle” move around on a screen using only the keyboard, and one kid had a laptop which weighed approximately 38 pounds that he got permission to bring to school in 6^th grade because he was supposedly dyslexic but mostly because needed it to play flight simulator.

By the time I was in high school, email was fairly common but the students at my school took a while to grasp its ultimate value. For most of my freshman year, people mainly used email to communicate with people who were sitting six feet behind them, ideally to send messages about certain girls’ reputation for promiscuity. By sophomore year, we were able to use the Internet for more substantial feats such as attempting to download pictures of Cindy Crawford.

During little league, one kid’s dad used a cell phone, which was pretty awesome because at the time, rappers were still talking about cell phones in their rap songs in the same breath as expensive cars. I thought it was awesome, but I remember my mother and some other parents thinking it was “rude” and “ridiculous.” My father was a very early cell phone user too, but he had a bag phone which his employer had given him, and which he kept jammed way under the seat, for use only in emergencies, such as the emergency when we had to call into WEEI while in Boston for a Celtics game and say that we were not supportive of the players’ union in the baseball stalemate, or the nightly emergency of having to call my mother to tell her he was on his way home, even though she already knew he was on his way home.

When I started college, computers were a very big deal, such a big deal that I recall one of the dads on one campus tour demanding to know if the college allowed students access to “data resources” through the network, which he regarded as very important. After he made this statement he looked around at the rest of the parents with a very satisfied look but since nobody had ever heard of data resources, or a network, nobody said anything, and eventually my father asked if omelets would be available every day or just on weekends.

At my school, students were allowed to use network resources, mostly to share music and pornography. Napster was invented in the fall of my freshman year, which allowed the sharing of music among people who were not in the same place. This presented an opportunity for my roommate to stay up all night trying to download versions of songs he regarded as “sick” such as wordless piano songs played over constant base drum beats. An offshoot of this craze was that Greg, the industrious geek on my floor, began burning CDs for residents for a mere five bucks, or approximately 14,000 percent profit.

Greg’s roommate was also a computer shark of sorts only instead of making obscene profits off of copyright theft; he parlayed his skills into expulsion from school. As it turned out, sneaking into people’s computers and deleting papers, even if through a fake porn file which they voluntarily opened, was deemed unacceptable by the powers that be.

Near the end of my first year my Resident Assistant also fell victim to computer fraud of sorts when he bought web addresses relating to local universities and threatened to fill them with raunchy pictures unless certain large amounts of money were paid for their return. Incidentally, the president of our college did not hold blackmail of superior institutions is such esteem and he too was removed.

Today I’m just another member of Tech Generation but as I look on my childhood I’m glad to have lived during the transition. Just imagine all of the trouble we’d have caused with access to data resources!

An Epidemic

Boston Skeptic — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:46:06 GMT

This week the Boston Globe contained an article about the second career of famed Red Sox pitcher, Curt Schilling. Those who didn’t watch every game of the 2006-2008 baseball seasons and missed Schilling’s non-stop plugs will be surprised to know that Schilling owns a video-game production business that is, not totally shockingly, potentially going to be a massive disaster. He started the business in the off-season following the 2006 season and cited his hard work on the endeavor as the central cause for his “100 pounds overweight arrival” at ’07 spring training, which was about as welcome a development to Sox Brass as the fact that he called his company “Green Monster Games”.

The story of the professional jock turned entrepreneur is not a new phenomenon. In fact, 15 minutes of internet surfing will provide enough stories of profligacy and stupidity to plaster the interior of a half-built 80,000 square foot indoor soccer and rock climbing facility in suburban Boston, which incidentally, is exactly the prop used by former Boston Celtic Dana Barros in his "make most of my money dissappear" trick a few years back. www.boston.com/sports/basketball/celtics/articles/2006/05/30/barros_attempts_to_rebound_from_failed_business_venture/

In the recent past Ron Artest decided that his one in a million physical gifts that allowed him to make 50 million dollars in 4 years while doing things such as punching his boss in the face, slapping his wife, and being arrested for starving his Great Dane to death were simply not enough and decided that his skills would transfer nicely into the world of music, specifically into the production of some of his own songs that he marketed from his car window on the way out of the players lot during the NBA playoffs and which he informed members of the media were "more of a priority" than his pesky basketball career. http://www.bvonsports.com/2009/11/23/ron-artest-music-/

By now most people have heard the story of the rise and fall of Lenny Dykstra who managed to retire from a successful career as a steroid user and baseball player with the Phillies with almost no money, then managed to make about 50 million by opening a chain of car washes, then somehow did enough investing or paid enough money to get CNBC’s Shameless Jim Cramer to say that he was “one of the best stock pickers around” which lead to some network entering pre-production on a television series about the Lenny Dykstra Empire, which had to be cancelled before it aired because he managed to go broke in about 18 months by employing said stock picking strategy and also putting most of his wealth into publishing a magazine targeted at professional athletes with articles about issues of wealth management which surprisingly didn't do very well. Ultimately, he found out he was totally bankrupt when a news camera showed up at his house where he had no furniture or belongings except a photograph of a German Sheppard which he claimed he was going to buy for $10,000. http://deadspin.com/5302008/lenny-dykstra-lets-the-world-know-hes-flying-higher?autoplay=true

Bronson Arroyo also tried to walk and chew gum when he was a thoroughly underwhelming pitcher for the Red Sox. He took a short-money arbitration buyout from the team and attempted to close his earning gap by capitalizing on his overrated looks and terrible guitar playing and singing to cut a record full of “almost exactly like the album cut only crappier” cover tunes which turned out to be a harder way to get rich than getting traded to the pathetic NL Central where a 165 pound frame and a 12-win season get you $25 million guaranteed. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6732328266441465611#

Mike Tyson and Cecil Fielder shared a level of irresponsibility that make them hard to touch on the All-Century Cash Hemorrhage Team, but the all-time best athlete-turned –anything-other-than-sportscaster is Oscar De La Hoya, who for a brief period of time, decided that he wanted to be a leather-pants-wearing Latino crooner in the style of Enrique Iglesias only without the looks, or any ability to carry a tune, or even hit a note. Through pure serendipity I happened to catch his performance of “Run to me” live on Tonight with Jay Leno in 2000. This performance remains one of the funniest things I’ve seen in my life and thanks to the splendor of the internet, the music video it spawned can now be one of the funniest things you have seen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d89IFcJD07A Despite a level of creative/artistic badness that is virtually unrivalled, Oscar’s foray caused only minimal damage because he had enough sense to listen to his image counselors who told him that he should stick to throwing punches.

I get the sense that Curt won’t be so lucky. I get this sense because Curt has never let common sense or the opinions of others assist him in not doing or saying things that are stupid. I also get this sense because the Globe piece quotes Schilling as saying he has invested “most” of the money he ever made in this business such that his family will live or die, with the success or failure of the company he now (for some reason, probably the reason that the Red Sox sued him for a bazillion dollars) calls 38Pitches Studios. All we can do now is wait, and be thankful this attempt at relevance doesn’t involve leather pants.

The Christmas Letter

Boston Skeptic — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:46:06 GMT

The Christmas Letter is one of the oldest human traditions and the product of the innate desire to share one’s accomplishments with others, even if they don’t care about you, or the fact that your daughter is one of the better cello players in her age group. The first recorded example of Christmas letters was back in the Cave Man Days when nobody had thought of Christmas yet but people were sitting around thinking that they needed to take a break from chasing mastodons and throwing rocks at each other to ponder the mysteries of the universe, such as why they were walking around in the freezing cold with nothing on their feet. In those days, some cave people had more than others, so the ones with extra animal heads would leave them on other people’s doorsteps, which was a perfect way to say “we have extra stuff” without being of any help or comfort to the neighbors.

The tradition went along like that for a while but really took shape thousands of years later when Americans stopped worrying about wolverine attacks and typhoid fever long enough to be nostalgic and decided that others in the country would be interested to know how many bushels of wheat they were able to thresh without any machinery.

By the time I came around, the practice was commonplace and each year our mantel was flush with cards from scores of people my parents knew, or had once known, including one from an acquaintance who offers 2,000 word essays each year that include the title of every book he read in the preceding year (complete with italicized parenthetical commentary!), detailed accounts of his visits to fellow college glee club members who live in New Jersey including the size and location of the hot tub in which they sat to discuss how much fun it had been to be in the glee club, a dozen or so awkward comments about his second wife and her gardening prowess, and ultimately, some uncomfortable information about his daughters dating men who already have children.

With such a thorough introduction to the niceties of Christmas lettering, I was thrilled to begin my tradition in 2007. At the time I had a live-in girlfriend and figured that in this day and age that was sufficient stability to warrant updating people about my life. My rules are that the letter must contain at least one item that makes my wife uncomfortable, two things that make my mother uncomfortable, and as few facts or serious sentences as possible. I found my first edition Christmas letter the other day while sorting old files and noticed that I ended the letter with a not-so-subtle dig at then presidential contender John Edwards. Unfortunately I didn’t have any notion that he was cheating on his cancer stricken wife, or lying about fathering a child with a new-age skank so my cracks about his "son of a mill worker" shtick and “two Americas” jive now seem relatively benign.

I started the Christmas card tradition for the selfish reason that I hoped my card would prompt my friends to reciprocate so that I would be able to enjoy the scores of letters that have given me so much entertainment in my youth. Sadly, I have not reaped nearly as many letters as I have sown, either because people think my letters are stupid, or more likely, because I’m not as nice as my parents and never gave some pain in the ass guy the impression that I liked him well enough that I wanted to get a letter from him about his second-wife and how nicely she sponge painted the garage (If I believed in reincarnation I’d think she’d been an interior decorator in a past life!) after she sold her condo and moved into his when they decided to get married.

The truth is, I’m not drawing nearly as many letters as I would like at this stage of my life, and most of the ones I get are tasteful updates from my extended family who all subscribe to the “no pictures of yourself after you have children until they get married or have children” rule and who generally avoid too many details about their son’s lacrosse exploits.

Thankfully, my parents are still pulling serious volume at home in Vermont which means that I get to relive my youth on my first ski trip of each New Year. There’s something magical about The Christmas Letter; something reassuring about the fact that certain people’s delusions persist from year to year, and something amazing about the fact that the people who were in the glee club with this clown 40 years ago are still inviting him in their hot tub.

Following Rules - Changing Minds*

Boston Skeptic — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:46:06 GMT

When George Bush was in office, the State Of The Union was fun to watch for a number of reasons. The first was that it allowed viewers all of the benefits of getting to see Dick Cheney's disgusting face and trademark grimace on national television for more than an hour without having to listen to any of his misplaced smugness or other bullshit. It was also fun because it was an opportunity to see George Bush’s cognitive shortcomings in stark relief, such as when he tried to say polysyllabic words or when he used his patented "say something and then say "in other words" and then say almost exactly what you just said" rhetorical construction.

What I love most, though, is that it is predictable. It is predictable in that it is always split into three sections; the section that explains whatever the biggest issue of the day is, along with some reasons why it is either worse, or not as bad as the general public thinks, the section where the president introduces bold and seemingly ridiculous/irrelevant policy suggestions, and lastly, the section where the president yells a series of one-off pronouncements about things that excite his party.

For Bush, the first section was all about war, the fact that we were attacked on 9/11, and how incredibly dangerous the world was, and how Jesus, or God, or someone had come down from the mountain and told him that he was to bestow freedom upon every person on the earth, as long as they weren't gay. The second section, contained his push for the colonization of Mars and immediate creation of hydrogen sport utility vehicles, and the last bit contained about a dozen or so references to how government should have a limited role, specifically the role of writing checks to private companies to do all of the work the government would otherwise do and lots of other work and non-work that the government hadn't done before.

The minute Barack Obama was elected I started thinking about how cool it would be to hear him give a State Of The Union, mostly because of his “slow-lightning fast-slow” cadence but also because I knew it would be a rare chance to simultaneously have Joe Biden in front of the camera, and an absolute guarantee he wouldn't say anything that would make me want to hit him with a tire iron.

In keeping with the formula, the first twenty minutes of tonight’s speech were devoted to jobs, specifically, their creation. According to the President, the road to full employment is paved with $4,000 tax credits for small business, moderately harsh language directed at financial institutions, and an end to the partisanship and bickering that, along with no term limits and the fact that PACs and corporations can get weasely senators such as Joe Lieberman to do anything, have stifled progress.

The latter half of the first section was devoted to health care, and included the president’s charming, self-deprecating and persuasive plea to his colleagues to continue the conversation, and his direct acknowledgement that he is “partially” to blame for the fact that most Americans don’t understand the nature of his proposed reforms. One imagines that some other part of the blame known as “all of the rest of the blame” could be placed upon Harry Reid, who, despite having an unprecedented bullet-proof majority, managed not only to be bossed around by a Senator from Nebraska, but also reached new heights of ham-handedness when he managed to disrupt his own pathetic progress on the matter by getting to spend an entire week trying to explain why he used the word “negro” in relation to the president in a year that was not between the years of 1860 and 1940.

In the “bizarre suggestion” phase, Obama did not disappoint, suggesting a three-year freeze on spending, beginning in one year, on everything except for defense spending, health care, social security, social programs, programs for the blind, poor, elderly or pets or stimulus plans, or basketball courts in the White House. Judging from ovation from the badly-dressed Republican delegation this proposal will be met with more support than his other suggestion, a way to change student loans that either makes them free, or partially free, or eventually free.

Stage three was also by the book and contained requisite shout outs for the repeal of don’t ask don’t tell, childhood obesity and immigration which would have seemed important if they hadn’t been totally overshadowed by the presidents’ amazing interaction with his wife that confirms two things 1) the president and his wife do have sex 2) they will not be having sex tonight.

It’s a new day America. Sure we’re still fighting two stupid wars and pretending that the middle class still exists, but for the first time in at least thirty years, the guy in charge is certifiably cool.

*due to today's early publication, there will be no publication on Sunday - the next column will appear Wednesday 2/3

Had Them Coming and Going

Boston Skeptic — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:46:06 GMT

During college my parents kept me on a pretty strict allowance that provided me with just enough money to get by, but which limited my off campus entertainment to riding the subway and eating pizza. I was so worried about my budget that I can recall nearly every penny I spent during my freshman year, including the 7,000 or so pennies I spent on three pairs of khaki pants with draw strings in lieu of belt loops that I thought looked amazing but which I now realize looked awful if you weren’t riding around India on an elephant.

Some kids I knew at school had awesome jobs such as working at the front desk of the fitness center, but most of them got their jobs as a sort of back door division II scholarship, or as part of need-based financial aid for which I did not qualify. At the time I had very few usable skills and even fewer friends so I ended up taking a job as a “Bentley Ambassador” which is a lot like being a tour guide only with a silly name.

The woman in charge of the program was a chunky lady named Christine (or possibly Stacey), with spiked hair who was uncomfortably spunky and who always wore some kind of a fleece jacket indoors and who, I imagine, held scrap booking parties on the weekends. Before I was given license to influence potential students I was made to shadow another, older, student named Brian who I knew because he wore a suit to class for no reason. His favorite part of the tour was the school’s stock trading floor, where he became very animated, and explained that numbers in red were bad and frequently offered important facts such as the total number of stairs on the campus.

I liked giving tours, but quickly tired of the overbearing fathers who tried to flirt with their own daughters by asking stupid questions and making fun of my haircut. These fathers always had a good laugh when they asked me to make my case for why my school was better than other, similar schools in the area that they assumed I knew all about since their names all annoyingly began with the letter B.

When tours failed to keep up with my evolving consumer tastes, I decided to try working in Bentley’s call center. Our call center, though not in India, worked like many others, in that it consisted of tired-looking individuals making phone calls to people who were eating dinner. The boss of the call center was a guy named Nate who looked like he fell out of a giant puppet in an anti-war protest. Nate had fewer things in common with the student population and its alums than did just about any other person on earth, but he was always on time and generally kept his hair in a neat 47 inch pony tail.

When we made calls we were supposed to act very excited about what was going on at Bentley and were given a script which was designed to be a sure fire way to sway reluctant alums. The suggestions, which were designed to stimulate conversation, included such sure things as: "you were an accounting major? That’s great to hear, so am I! Do you have any advice for someone who is currently an accounting major?"

We were supposed to say these things even if we weren’t an accounting major and we got paid more if we were successful at securing pledges. Nobody had more victories than a guy named James, who was a sullen guy who looked like he should be selling video games to jaded teenagers but who routinely lapped the field by sitting low in his chair and speaking so softly it was unclear if he was talking at all. I thought I would be great at the job because I am happy talking to people I don’t know but I failed to predict just how awkward it would feel to say things like “oh, I see here you were a marketing major” in front of cute girls named Joanna.

My first big ticket job came during my senior year where I was offered a position in the school’s economics and finance lab, where I assisted struggling students with their economics homework and listened to my professor who’d gotten me the job talk about his desire to return to Greece where the women were significantly more likely to find him attractive.

It’s tough to say which job I liked the best because each had its own strengths. I doubt if I’ll ever have to recall various facts about Bentley’s campus or be required to help my children understand the relationship between inflation and unemployment, though I’m certain that pretending to be an accountant will eventually come in handy.

The case for small dogs

Boston Skeptic — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:45:54 GMT

My wife and I have two dogs. Their names are Wallace and Bleecker and they are so small that we have a genuine fear that they might be eaten by a hawk. Depending upon what day you ask my wife, Bleecker was named for Bleecker Street in New York, or for the Simon and Garfunkle Song “Bleecker Street” which is named for Bleecker Street in New York. I came up with Wallace’s name while watching a show on Animal Planet about a fat kid named Liam from England who had a pony named Wallace who was having issues with biting Liam. As luck would have it, the horse was expressing aggression because Liam was hitting it and pulling its hair. After all of this was caught on tape, the boy’s mother came up with a solution to everyone’s problems which sadly, did not involve letting the horse kick Liam in the teeth, but instead rewarded him for not physically abusing his miniature pony by serving him “crisps” which is almost as pretentious a name for potato chips as Wallace is for a pony, or a 6 pound dog.

The only downside to our dogs other than vulnerability to raptors, is that they are subjected to endless small dog discrimination, mostly from people who have Labradors or some other kind of dog that sheds and jumps all over company and knocks everything over with its tail and takes up too much room in a car but whose owner insists is “just the best family dog”. I think black labs are boring and have never met a golden retriever who I liked well enough to justify getting its hair all over my clothes but I’ve never had the stones to say it to a dog owner’s face and recognize that even annoying dogs are wonderful creatures. What’s amazing to me is how people criticize small dogs in front of me, even after they’ve seen that my dogs are cuter and easier to handle than their ridiculous golden retriever which they refer to as a “golden” because it makes it sound cooler than what it is, which is a dog that is as rare as daylight and will definitely suffer from hip displasia.

One of the best parts of dog ownership is being privy to a host of dog-related discussions. One of my favorites is when I talk with prospective dog owners. Men, in particular, have all kinds of preconceived notions about dogs that they think are original, and always feel the need to mention. Most often, men say they want “at least a medium sized dog” because “they don’t want it to be too fragile” which sounds like the kind of thing you’d be worried about if you were getting a dog as a boxing partner. They never say it, but the insinuation is that wimpy dogs like mine could never keep up with the manly lifestyle of taking walks around the block or riding in a car that they have planned.

Another favorite is some variation of the “I need a dog that will be able to climb mountains with me” remark. This wistful idealized vision of dog ownership that involves the guy fighting for his survival with his trusty dog at his side is usually espoused by people such as my wife’s uncle who drive Audis and climb two mountains a decade. It’s also these people who make clichéd comments about me, a man of large stature, being emasculated by my dinky dogs, despite the fact that I could whip their ass while their trusty labradoodle was running around rolling in mud puddles and not coming when it’s called.

At our dog park I heard a grown women who wears work out clothes at all times and sends her kids to cello lessons and who I’m sure doesn’t work, referred to my dogs as “puntable”, which she thought was very funny. Notwithstanding the abject cruelty the name congers up, the notion that anyone would promote animal abuse, in jest or otherwise, would be surprising, if it didn’t come from a woman whose biggest thrill was attending yoga.

My dogs aren’t perfect; Wallace occasionally pees on the floor if we leave him home too long, and Bleecker is occasionally a wimp and makes me carry him on walks when he gets road salt in his feet. But by and large my dogs are obedient, affectionate, don’t smell, don’t shed, and are phenomenal companions, which is more than I can say for any large dogs I’ve had or any large dogs owned by at least 65% of people I’ve known in my life. As much as I’d like to believe it, their wonderful behavior isn’t a result of my dog training but rather my subtle 40x size advantage which plays a significant role in establishing my role as their leader and engendering their adoration. True, my dogs will never pull a sled or climb the high peaks, but neither will yours, because you aren’t going to climb the high peaks, and even if you were you’d realize you were going out to dinner after or staying in a hotel somewhere and bringing the dog will be more of a pain in the ass than it's worth.

Safe investments in scary times

Boston Skeptic — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:45:54 GMT

In an economic crisis such as ours, a lot of people are talking about what you can do to survive in your financial life. On CNBC there is a woman named Susy Orman who, in addition to being annoying, is a woman. Suzy is able to draw upon her experience as woman to help other women be better investors in the women’s economy, which apparently exists aside from the regular economy. Orman is popular, because apparently, some women find being patronized by fellow female better than having to listen to regular investing advice from men.

A popular segment from Orman’s show is called “Can I afford it”, and is a bit that women would find totally offensive if conducted by a man, but where, as the name suggests, a women named Donna might call in to ask Suzy whether or not she can afford a Bichon Frise puppy. Donna says the puppy costs $400 and is worried that if she buys the dog she will be unable to put her children through college. Suzy’s first step is to remind Donna that the cost of a puppy doesn't stop at $400. Next, she performs the difficult math of adding up food costs and veterinary bills and telling Donna that if she can afford $300 a year, she can “probably” afford the dog as long as her husband doesn’t lose his job.

Another thing experts love to talk about is the “flight to quality” which is a term financial experts give to the fact that when corporate stock is doing poorly, people buy gold because it has "intrinsic" value. Mostly, though, people buy gold when things go badly because that’s what their grandfather told them to do. I suppose the theory behind this notion is that if the rest of the economy went up in smoke and we had roaming gangs and 40% unemployment, you could trade some gold for a rolling pin, which you could use as a weapon.

In fact, gold's obvious lack of intrinsic value has played out so frequently through history that its downsides should not be hard to understand. Anyone who’s been through the 12^th grade remembers how a gold-centric view of the world served the Spaniards, who spent most of the 17^th century making sure they would go from being greatest power on the planet to basically irrelevant except for making excellent ham and being home to several bars that claim to be Hemingway’s favorite place to drink.

History suggests that the Spaniards’ grandfathers might have told them about the flight to quality in the 14th century, and that the Spaniards took them seriously. So seriously, in fact, that they started wanting gold even when times were good, and eventually traded guns and things that could be made into guns in exchange for gold. Also they stole gold, and acquired gold through some small-pox related dealings. When push came to shove, however, the people with guns were surprisingly, able to defeat the Spaniards, whose strategy was mostly weaving tapestries out of gold and riding around on horses that were covered in 2,000 pounds of armor.

It probably isn’t fair to blame Spain’s precipitous drop in world standing upon its thirst for gold, because they also got involved in some notable religious wars. It’s also worth pointing out that they were, for some reason, under the rule of inbreds from Austria who had enormous lips and thought that Spaniards would have great success fighting with their neighbors which was not a good idea at the time because people still hadn’t realized the French were sissies.

Many of the experts that write and talk on the subject of financial matters in a bad economy tend to focus on being responsible. In Boston there is a guy named Rick Shafer who for some reason, has his own radio show even though he has a voice for coal mining. Rick’s idea of responsibility includes owning a Hyudai, which he can’t pronounce, and saving between 30% and 80% of one’s income, depending upon how little one likes one’s children. Rick's cleverest idea, however, is to keep a savings account with a mere 6 months of expenses just in case something goes wrong, like for example, being broke every month like just about all of his listeners.

Assuming the Worst Case Scenario, it would be hard to say which approach is correct. In fact, there's a part of me that thinks the best idea is to buy another puppy; if only Suzy took calls from men.

When life gives you lemons, prime the furnace yourself

Boston Skeptic — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:45:53 GMT

My wife and I have the least efficient home in history. On a good month the cost of heating our 1,100 feet is roughly the same as the lease payment for a Ferrari.

One of the reasons it is so costly is that the furnace is 200 years old. The other reason is that our house is a carriage house, or more accurately, a barn, which two men turned into a little house 35 years ago when it was the 70’s and people were doing things like living in their cars and doing stained glass work in exchange for meals at a church, or walking up to people’s houses in Brookline and asking if they could live for free in their garage if they promised to turn it into an apartment. And since it was the 1970's, the people who owned the houses were all for it.

As a barn, our house has lots of unexplained quirks such as holes into the basement and ceiling, feeding troughs in the corners, and hayloft-bedroom that has either zero insulation in the floor, zero insulation on the 12 foot cathedral ceiling, or both.

A few times since we’ve moved in, we’ve tried to squeeze a few extra days out of our tank of oil and ended up in a situation where my wife is angry with me because she has to take a cold shower or get her hair wet in the sink and blow dry it to make it look like she took a shower like I did when I was in the 4^th grade when the cool kids started taking showers every day. Running out of oil sucks not only because it means an angry wife and no shower and no heat and general unpleasantness, but because it means having to pay the oil delivery people extra to come and prime the pump, $35 to be exact.

This has only happened once. Actually, it happed another time but we were on our honeymoon and hadn’t yet realized that our “perpetual water heater” uses significant fuel to heat water even when nobody uses the water for 16 days so I don’t count it against us. Last week it happened again. I noticed the tank was low one afternoon and called the Oil People. The Oil People told me my options were to pay a $75 fee for emergency delivery in addition to the obnoxious price of oil, or to wait until the following morning and get the regularly obnoxious price. I opted for the later, and left for my monthly card game, which is held in a humidor and involves a certain degree of cigar smoking. When I returned from my game I was disappointed to find the water was cold, for the obvious reasons, and because I cannot get in bed with my wife after smoking a cigar indoors without first discarding all of my clothing outdoors or in the basement, and then taking a lengthy shower, which still doesn’t really get the smell out of my hair, and definitely doesn’t get the smell off my hands.

When I got back from work I noticed my tank was full but my furnace was idle and called the Oil People and inquired as to how quickly they could come out and restore my heat. The woman informed me that I could get someone out for a service call but that since it was not going to accompany my oil delivery, it was going to cost me $90. I had some choice words for her and threatened to find another oil source, which, it turns out, is virtually impossible when you rent your home.

Feeling stuck, and knowing that I had to come up with something before my wife came home, I meandered to the basement to have a look at the problem. Knowing something about machines, I viewed several wrenches and tools in my toolbox, and then touched approximately all of the various valves and hoses until I found what I thought was the oil line. I then located what I thought to be a bolt, which I turned with my hand in either a counter clockwise or clockwise fashion until a steady stream of brown liquid began squirting directly over the plastc cup I had carefully placed beneath the hole and all over my hands, shoulders, legs, pants, and the floor. Once I had determined that the substance was oil, I jumped to my feet, wiped off my hands and then pushed the button to fire up the furnace. Bingo!

The actual act of priming my furnace took roughly 50 seconds, and even factoring in the odds of blowing my face off or burning down the house, I still think it was worth it, especially since it’s not my house. I suppose $90 isn’t the end of the world, but you have to stand for something, and if your hands smell like cigars there’s nothing like a half gallon of fresh heating oil to mask the scent.

Commute This

Boston Skeptic — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:45:53 GMT

Commuting is one of my least favorite things. In my case, I have two choices for how I may commute. The first, is to ride with my wife. If I wish to ride with my wife, I must be prepared to be late, and to admit that it is nobody's fault, unless my wife gets up late, needs to dry her hair, and losses the keys and races around the house looking for them, in which case, I am required to admit that it is my fault.

If I wish to be accountable only to myself, my lone option is to take the subway. Boston's subway is regarded as “decent” in the spectrum of mass transport options, but since this tranche on the spectrum also includes Miami's carnival-rideesque monorail which exists solely to create the appearance of “urban bustle” during opening scenes of movies, Boston's “T” still sucks.

I live on the Green Line, which is the slowest of the lines, and which has a healthy mix of old cars that frequently do not work, and newer cars, which work, but due to train physics, are frequently stuck behind the older, broken, trains. The newer cars arrived a few years back and though they appear to be much larger than the existing fleet, are actually smaller than the old cars, which were made in France, 100 years ago, when Babe Ruth and Paul Bunyan were the only people over 6 feet tall. Since I am not an engineer (the fake kind who drives trains, or the real kind of builds them) I can't give a scientific reason for why the new cars manage to be smaller than the old ones, but I think it has something to do with the fact that the new cars have a staircase built in the middle of them which eats square feet and causes all those standing atop the staircase to feel like they are standing in a basement.

A lot of people like to ride the T because they like to “people watch”. People watching, for those who don't know, is an activity which began about the time people stopped spending all of their time worrying about catching leprosy and involves watching other people in stressful situations, and chuckling to yourself about their pleated khakis. Sometimes, people watching changes from a mere amusement, to an act of self-preservation when, for example, you are on your way to a constitutional law exam and a person next to you on the train begins singing Polish folk songs in an extremely high voice. Hypothetically, this person might become so enraged by the fact that she thinks someone else is singing the Polish folk songs that she will tell them to shut up, repeatedly. When the person refuses to stop singing, you might look around to see how you will defend yourself if she decides you are the person singing, just as she throws a scalding hot cup of coffee on your lap.

In a small city such as Boston, there is a good chance that you will get to commute alongside an annoying co-worker, who lives one stop beyond you. If you are fortunate, the train will be so crowded that he will be forced to stand way on the other side of the train car, and shout to you for twenty minutes about the fact that he can't find a job until he gets off and you go one stop further to make sure he doesn't know where you live, even though, in a moment of weakness, you told him you would join his poker game.

If you have to wait for a train where I live, you must stand outside in whatever mother nature has to offer, but if you are lucky enough to be underground, there is a great chance you'll have your experienced sweetened by the charm of street performers. Boston's Government Center, is the epicenter of the city's music scene. On a good day in the summer, one could conceivably hear a Equadorian man play Simon & Garfunkle cover tunes with pre-recorded synthesizer accompaniment and a guy playing certain notes of guitar over top of a tape recording of Joe Satriani playing different notes on the guitar.

On days when I'm on my way to work in a crowded car, sweating through my undershirt, smelling the mix of feet, body odor, and cologne I have to wonder if I wouldn't be happier living in some sleepy suburb. But then I think about the suburbanites who are stuck, all alone, in their SUVs, drinking coffee, listening to Imus, and I decide that I would definitely be happier living in some sleepy suburb. Sure, I wouldn't be so close to Fenway Park, but if I'm going to be blamed for being late, I might as well have a leather seat.

Decay

Boston Skeptic — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:45:53 GMT

I have a so-so relationship with dentists. For the last four years my relationship with dentists has been less so-so, but only because I haven’t had dental insurance so the closest I came to a dentist was when I skied with one at Vail for a week in 2005 and rode a chairlift with a different one at Sugarbush in 2007.

My early childhood included an episode best described as “jumping off a couch and smashing my teeth on a coffee table” which set the stage for a lifetime of dental difficulty. As a young boy I had a mouth full of cavities and a black front tooth that I displayed proudly in every photograph taken of me between 1983 and 1990. I’ve always maintained that it was this tooth, or the fact that she was a closeted-lesbian, which lead my high school girlfriend to tell me that what she liked most about me was that nobody else thought I was good looking.

As a young kid I went to a dentist called Dr. Marshall. Dr. Marshall was enigmatic and arrogant and said short sentences such as “cuspid” and “suction” while holding his hand out for the help of one of his ever-giggling assistants when he came into the room for thirty seconds at the end of every visit. I spent so much time in Dr. Marshall’s office over a four year period that I developed a mild interest in the music of Yanni.

My dislike for Dr. Marshall at a young age was mostly based upon nose hair and coffee breath, but by age 20, was tempted to drive 3 hours to Vermont and choke him with gauze pads when I became a victim of his 12 year-old handiwork. I was packing my bags for a spring break when I realized that the front of my face was swollen, slightly, to the point where it appeared I was a soccer ball under my upper lip. Curiously, no amount of Bud Light or pain pills obtained from a skinny guy named Alex did anything to reduce the swelling so I found myself on the phone with a Honduran dentist who was the only man willing to work on my mouth at 7am on a Sunday so that I could get to my plane in time. While his English was less than perfect I recall him using the words “should be in prison” when describing the mess Dr. Marshall had made. As it turns out, when treating a dead tooth and a severe infection, the right method of treatment doesn’t involve covering it with a temporary cap, failing to inform the patient or his parents that a root canal is required, and then forgetting about it for ten years.

After I returned from my vacation I paid several visits to an endodontist, who is a dentist who other dentists complain makes too much money. This guy used assorted intoxicants in his work so I don’t recall much from my time in his office but thousands of dollars later I had another fake front tooth that is not quite the right color and feels weird and works as a constant reminder of what I would like to do to Dr. Marshall if I ever see him doing anything but driving around in a Range Rover.

All had been quiet on the dental front until about a week ago when one of my molars split in two while I was engaged in the strenuous tooth-related task of sitting in my car and pointing at a building. I was overcome with fear at having to pay for whatever dental nightmare was to follow and thrilled when I obtained enough care to stop the pain for a mere $90 at the hands of moderately skilled second year dental students at Tufts University. My dentist-in-training was a guy named Isaac who had the acne of a 15 year old and the soft hands of a pipe fitter. Isaac worked under the tutelage of a guy named Dr. Oldium who appeared to be in his 80’s and referred to Isaac as “Ethan” at least 7 times while telling him to hurry up, or coming by to redo all of Ethan’s work which was either incomplete or ineffective.

Initially, I thought I might have made a poor choice when Isaac was ready to discharge me in my pain-induced deliriousness after failing to identify the problem tooth despite my excellent description or the fact that half of my tooth was gone and I was bleeding profusely. I continued to think I had made a poor choice when he drilled my tooth with the care most people reserve for trying to punch a hole in leather with a screwdriver. When he was finished, Isaac informed me that despite his efforts there was a very good chance I’d need a root canal “within a year”. Dr. Oldium for his part, told me the work they’d done might last 50 years.

I’m not sure where the truth lies. The saying would suggest somewhere in between, but I assume the saying was written before there were dentists. My plan is to have it checked periodically because I can’t take another Dr. Marshall experience, and have come to realize that I can’t rely upon serendipitous skiing-related dental interaction to keep me safe.

Building Christmas memories, $10 at a time.

Boston Skeptic — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:45:53 GMT

I spent Christmas with my wife’s family this year. In addition to attending Roman Catholic mass and eating Manhattan clam chowder, the main difference between my family traditions and hers is that most of her family is local, which means they have enough people around on Christmas for a Yankee swap. Only my wife’s family refers to the game as, “Chinese grab bag,” which I assume has its roots in some negative stereotype about the way that Chinese people share gifts, but has become nearly politically correct as nearly everything up for grabs in the game is made in China.

I love this tradition because while I grew up with many Christmas traditions, none of them involved as much confusion or shouting, except the tradition where my father made us all line up by age in the hallway on Christmas morning and my mother would yell at my father because her hair was messy and she didn’t want to be in the picture. Some years, when my grandparents were visiting, my father would make his mother get in the picture as well, which she hated.

In Chinese grab bag, everyone takes a number. This number establishes the order in which people open gifts. The people at the end of the game have a higher probability of getting the gift of their choice and the ones at the beginning have a high probability of getting a scented candle which is a crappy gift even in a game that contained a 3 liter bottle of grape soda. The rules of the game are murky, subject to interpretation and bickering and are too complicated to explain, but generally, they facilitate a disorganized movement of gifts from player to player until someone is stuck with a book about making balloon animals and someone else is stuck with 5 worthless lottery tickets after feeling very excited about having ended up with them.

The key to playing the game effectively is to involve several strong-willed people such as myself, who, despite the fact that nothing is the game is worth more than $10 and most of it will end up left at Grandma’s house, get visibly upset when someone tries to steal the same gift twice in one round, or steals back the fart machine that someone took from them a few minutes prior.

Three years ago was my first experience with the game and I brought a beautiful pair of jumbo Chinese-made lion slippers from Wal Mart. They were somewhat of a hot item and I tried to win them for myself but instead, ended up with 6 pint glasses that said “bling” on the side of them. The proud owner was my wife’s teenage cousin who used her late pick to steal them right off of my feet. The following year, I had another crack at the lions when the cousin reentered them in the game because much to my dismay, she hadn’t even taken yet worn them or removed the tags.

This year, my wife and I had Thanksgiving with my family, which meant that the Chinese Grab Bag Steering Committee had to meet without us. We heard a review of the minutes from mother in law who said that someone moved to establish clear rules for the upcoming game and that the motion was seconded and affirmed by almost everyone but that eventually there was so much disagreement about what the rules should be that everyone sort of dropped the conversation.

With so much uncertainty leading into the game, my wife and I decided to play it safe, she by offering a matching orange coffee maker, iron and toaster, and I, by cruising a dollar store and picking an epic assortment of expired silly string and private label soft drinks as well as a Spiderman watch and other plastic toys that were guaranteed to break almost immediately.

Prior to the start of this year’s game we found rules on-line and printed them out before some of the more competitive participants arrived. The main change was the institution of the safe-haven for the 4th "owner" of any gift. Though there was some hand wringing at the notion of a codified gaming experience, everyone grew to appreciate the structure and we ended up with an organized game that contained minimal voice raising but had all of the cogitation we have come to expect from some of my wife’s deliberate relatives.

I enjoyed this year’s contest but think I’ll push for the dissolution of the rules in next year’s event. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the peace and quiet, or coming away with a two-tone CVS pocket knife with built-in LED light, but I think the real meaning of Chinese grab bag is lost when the fourth person holding the lottery tickets is able to take refuge in the rules and doesn’t have to worry about ending up with a pot holder.