Isegoria

Jennifer Senior explores why parents hate parenting:

There was a day a few weeks ago when I found my 2½-year-old son sitting on our building doorstep, waiting for me to come home. He spotted me as I was rounding the corner, and the scene that followed was one of inexpressible loveliness, right out of the movie I’d played to myself before actually having a child, with him popping out of his babysitter’s arms and barreling down the street to greet me.

This happy moment, though, was about to be cut short, and in retrospect felt more like a tranquil lull in a slasher film. When I opened our apartment door, I discovered that my son had broken part of the wooden parking garage I’d spent about an hour assembling that morning. This wouldn’t have been a problem per se, except that as I attempted to fix it, he grew impatient and began throwing its various parts at the walls, with one plank very narrowly missing my eye.

I recited the rules of the house (no throwing, no hitting). He picked up another large wooden plank. I ducked. He reached for the screwdriver. The scene ended with a time-out in his crib.

As I shuffled back to the living room, I thought of something a friend once said about the Children’s Museum of Manhattan — “a nice place, but what it really needs is a bar” — and rued how, at that moment, the same thing could be said of my apartment. Two hundred and 40 seconds earlier, I’d been in a state of pair-bonded bliss; now I was guided by nerves, trawling the cabinets for alcohol.

My emotional life looks a lot like this these days. I suspect it does for many parents — a high-amplitude, high-frequency sine curve along which we get the privilege of doing hourly surfs. Yet it’s something most of us choose. Indeed, it’s something most of us would say we’d be miserable without.

Watching the World Cup, it’s hard not to notice what Steve Sailer calls the unbearable whiteness of soccer:

I’ve been following the World Cup since Pelé went out with a bang in 1970. Over the decades, the rhetoric that quadrennially accompanies the soccer championship has grown ever more strident in its insistence that the reason most Americans find soccer less than galvanizing as a spectator sport is that they… fear diversity!

In reality, soccer, both at the international superstar level and at the park league level in America, is whiter than football, basketball, or baseball.

For example, the last World Cup was won by Italy’s all white team. In America, this would be considered scandalous.

Let’s look at ESPN’s list from earlier this year of the “Top 50 players of the World Cup.” The five best players in the world — Lionel Messi of Argentina (who is of Italian descent), Christiano Ronaldo of Portugal (a Tim Tebow-lookalike), Wayne Rooney of England, Kaka of Brazil (who is from an upper middle-class family), and Xavi of Spain — are white.

Out of the top 10, eight are white and two from West Africa. Out of the top 50, the proportions look similar. Judging from their pictures, I would say 10 are black, one is mostly white but clearly part black, and the other 39 look more or less white. None of the top 50 are East Asian or South Asian, and I don’t see any that are as mestizo-looking as, say, Diego Maradona, the star of the 1986 World Cup.

In contrast, only one American-born white guy has been selected to the NBA All Star game in the last half dozen years. Most of the prestige positions in the NFL other than quarterback are dominated by blacks.

Of the soccer top 50, 24 are white guys from the six sunny powers of Spain (9 of the top 50), Italy, Portugal, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. In other words, almost half of the global soccer superstars are Southern Europeans. As baseball discovered back in the days of Joe DiMaggio, it doesn’t really hurt your sport’s popularity to have stylish Mediterranean guys as stars.

Whiteness is even more predominant in American soccer participation rates. From the late 1960s onward, white middle-class parents started to notice that soccer was a fine sport for their children to play, especially now that football and basketball were coming to be dominated at the highest levels by, well, by… uh, you know… And at this point countless conversations I’ve had over the years with very nice liberal white soccer parents typically break down into uncomfortable gesticulations as they try to not quite come out and say that soccer in America has been, to a large degree, White Flight in Short Pants.

Rachel Ullrich explains why Mexico’s disallowed goal was offside:

When showing replays, commentators pointed out and graphics demonstrated that there was a South Africa defender (it was Steven Pienaar, by the way) positioned on the back post — whom they claimed kept Vela onside.

It’s true that Pienaar was there, and just behind Vela where he stood by the opposite post. But the relevant position was that of South Africa goalkeeper Itumeleng Khune, not Pienaar. Khune had run off his line to try and intercept the corner kick, leaving Pienaar as the last defender in front of the goal.

The offside rule reads that a player is offside if he is “nearer to his opponents’ goal line than both the ball and the second-last opponent (the last opponent typically being the goalkeeper).” Usually when an attacking player runs past the “last defender,” the goalkeeper remains in the net — meaning the “last” defender is really the second-to-last defender.

In the case of Friday’s game, the goalkeeper was not there behind the defense. The second Vela passed Khune in the middle of the box, he was offside, regardless of Pienaar’s position at the post. It was an intelligent call from the referee and his assistant in a complicated demonstration of a complicated rule.

The rule’s not so much complicated as bad. Goals and breakaways are rare enough that any rule that calls back half of them is ugly.

Thank Zeus it’s Thor’s day:

Last week we had dinner at a quiet restaurant on the Oregon coast, and sat near two people that were obviously on a first date. (“So, do you have any siblings?”)

When their conversation took an interesting turn, we couldn’t help but listen:

“You’re an atheist? How can you not believe in God?”

“How can you not believe in Zeus or Thor?”

“That’s stupid. Those are old folk-tales.”

“They were God! You’re dismissing others’ beliefs, calling them folk-tales? So you’re also an atheist for most gods that have ever existed. I just go one further.”

“I’m not an atheist!”

“You and I are almost identical in our beliefs! If history has named, say, 520 gods, you don’t believe in 519 of them, I don’t believe in 520 of them.”

(long pause)

“What do you do on Christmas or Easter, then? Do you feel weird as a non-believer?”

“What do you do on Thursday?”

“Huh?”

“Thursday was named after Thor. It’s Thor’s day. Do you feel weird as a non-believer?”

“That’s not fair.”

“All the English days of the week are named after gods, sun, and moon. Look it up on Wikipedia. It’s wild.”

“Why are you so into this?”

“I’m not. Spent maybe 20 minutes on it, tops. I’m not on a mission to dis-prove God any more than you’re on a mission to dis-prove Zeus. It’s really no big deal to me.”

“So, I guess we’re not compatible, huh?”

“Of course we are! I like you a lot. And we do agree on 519 of the gods, so we’ll just not mention that last one.”

“OK. Deal. I like you a lot, too.”

(long pause)

“So what’s your favorite band?”

“Oh, God.”

If you’re reasonably smart and well adjusted, you probably have little feel for how odd you are, because you’ve grown up in a reasonably smart and well-adjusted family and surrounded yourself with reasonably smart and well-adjusted classmates and co-workers.

A GP attachment in Killarney, Ireland convinced one young doctor that his tutor was right — people’s lives are more like soap operas than anyone realizes:

Let me preface this by saying that Killarney isn’t inner-city Baltimore or anything. It’s a beautiful, quaint Irish tourist town, where playing fiddle music in pubs is still a growth industry, and people say “ass” and genuinely mean donkey.

And yet…

Seventy-something woman comes in with some bruises. Her daughter married a guy, the guy turned out to be a crazy abusive husband and tried to kill her, she flees the country. Now the guy keeps attacking the woman to try to beat information about the daughter out of her.

Forty-something woman comes in, asks the doctor if her twenty-year-old son can be committed to a mental institution. He’s been doing all sorts of drugs and attacking people and stealing stuff and now he’s threatening her. He’d been living with his girlfriend until the girlfriend realized he was a good-for-nothing criminal and kicked him out, and now the son is demanding to move back in with the mother, who’s understandably terrified.

Guy comes in for routine blood work, I take a look at his history. He was hospitalized for attempted suicide after he invested all his money into opening his own business just before the big economic crash. Ended up on unemployment, decided to end it, failed, now sits at home wondering what he’s going to do with his life.

Guy comes in, he’s always wanted to be in the army. Went through all his training, got in an accident that lost him the use of both his legs. Told he can’t be in the army and stuck on disability for the rest of his life.

Seventeen year old girl comes in with a headache…that’s a pregnancy. Sixteen year old girl with nausea…that’s a pregnancy. Eighteen year old girl comes in terrified because she got really drunk over the weekend and she knows she had sex with someone but she can’t remember who… wants a pregnancy test. Pregnancy pregnancy pregnancy pregnancy oh and guess which European country doesn’t allow abortion?

Twenty-something woman comes in a few weeks after splitting up with an abusive boyfriend. She’s thrilled that she finally got the courage to tell him to stop destroying her life. Gets some routine blood tests and a routine urine test, and… yeah, she’s pregnant too.

Sixty-something woman comes in with heart palpitations, is asked if she has any family history of disease. There’s the brother with psoriasis, the sister with Addisons, husband who died of a heart attack, both her parents died of cancer, her daughter got another rare syndrome, and then she proceeded to list off practically every disease in the textbook along with the relative of hers who’d had it. As practically the only healthy person in the family, she’s got the responsibility for caring for all these people. And now it looks like she’s got a dangerous cardiac arrhythmia.

Guy comes in, he’s married to a woman with a mental disorder. She had to be committed to the hospital a few times, but they stuck together and managed to save their marriage. Now he’s coming in for the sake of his five year old kid, who’s started having major behavioral problems. Wants to know if the disorder is hereditary. And yeah, it is.

This isn’t even counting all the usual alcoholics, people stuck in unhappy relationships, parents who hate their kids, kids who hate their parents, people who are unemployed and unemployable, people who are literally too stupid to understand that they need to take medication and so who end up getting very sick from easily curable disease, drug users, welfare moms, people with stalkers, old people who spend their entire lives in some tiny lightless apartment drinking tea without any friends or family.

Shannon Love calls this xkcd strip, Why Zombie Movies Don’t Begin in Texas.

The problem with the simplicity movement, Charlotte Allen says, is that its proponents — namely the writers in Real Simple magazine — mistake simplicity, an aesthetic lifestyle choice, for humility, a genuine virtue:

Genuine simple-living people —  such as, say, the Amish — are not part of the simplicity movement, because living like the Amish (no iPod apps or granite countertops, plus you have to read the Bible) would be taking the simple thing a bit far. Modern simplicity practitioners like Jesus (although not quite so much as they like Buddhist monks, who dress more colorfully) because he wore sandals and could be said to have practiced alternative medicine, but they mostly shun religious movements founded in his name.

Thus, simplicity people are always eager to tell you how great the Amish are, growing their own food (a highly valued trait among simplicity people), espousing pacifism (simplicity people shy away from even just wars), and building those stylishly spare barns (aesthetics rank high in the simplicity movement), but really, who wants to have eight kids and wear those funny-looking hats?

For similar reasons, genuinely poor people don’t qualify for the simplicity movement, mostly because of their awful taste in everything from beer to bling to American Idol. Tattoos, flatbill caps, Ed Hardy T-shirts, and chin piercings are not the stuff of the fashion pages in Real Simple.

Hunting is usually taboo in the simplicity movement because it involves guns (hated by the professionally simple) and exploitation of animals (ditto). However, if you’re hunting boar in the upscale hills ringing the San Francisco Bay so as to furnish yourself a “locally grown” boar paté, as does Berkeley professor and simplicity movement guru Michael (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) Pollan, or perhaps to experience an “epiphany,” as another well-fixed Bay Area boar hunter recently told the New York Times, you’re doing a fine job of returning to the simple life.

Simple doesn’t come cheap:

In their 2007 book, Plenty, Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon, who had vowed to spend a year sticking to the 100-mile locavore eating radius (and, as freelance writers, had plenty of time to put together meals that lived up to this promise), discovered that they were spending $11 per jar on honey to substitute for $2.59 sugar and that one of their locally foraged dinners cost them $130 and more than a day to prepare.

(Hat tip to Foseti.)

Underground achitecture requires a bit more effort than a wood-frame house:

Bill hired family members to begin constructing the steel domes, and hired earth moving equipment to remove the top of the hill. The domes were created by erecting a number of vertical steel trusses in a circle and connecting them with 3/8 steel rod spaced at 8 inch intervals. Vertical rods were then welded between the trusses to form a grid of 8 inch squares. The next summer a concrete pad was poured with rubber tubing laid throughout for in-floor heating. The steel frames were moved into position, connected together and covered in expanded metal lath.

Once the metal frame was completely covered, Gunnite concrete was sprayed over the entire interior surface, and trawled smooth. The inside layer was concrete mixed with marble powder to form a smooth white surface . The exterior of the house was covered in a waterproof tar, buried in dry sand and a membrane layer of rubber sheeting was placed over the entire area to act as an umbrella to keep the sand mass dry. The sand mass is crisscrossed with air ducts that circulate warm air from the solariums located at either end of the house. Topsoil was then replaced over top of the membrane, covered with grass seed and gardens and now must be mowed on a regular basis.

This involves some “challenges”:

The design must be well thought out in advance because any changes would be difficult or impossible once the earth was replaced. Upgrades for things like phone, cable and power must be in place at the time of building. Square furniture and appliances do not fit in a round room, there are no corners to stick lamps, and hanging pictures is tricky.

All of these obstacles were overcome with ingenuity and creativity. Each room has buried conduit, through which which wires can be passed, connecting it to the other rooms and the utility room. The arched doors were all hand made by Richard VanHeuvelan, as well as the cupboards, desks and countertops to fit in with the curved walls. Four Seasons Solariums originally used on either end of the house have been replaced with energy efficient stud and drywall rooms with large bay windows. Funiture for the living room was created by Wolf Meuller of Curved Space in Toronto and fits in perfectly with the eliptical architecture. Even the Refrigerator is round, it rises from the countertop at the touch of a button, like the one in Fly Away Home.

None of this is cheap:

A word of caution if you wish to pursue building a house such as this the costs are higher than building conventionally because it involves moving tons of earth and a great deal of work by skilled artisans.

Al Fin suggests waiting out the apocalypse underground:

Underground houses are better suited for survival of massive nuclear, biological, or chemical catastrophes — if advanced preparations are made. Proper air and water filtering and recycling are critical. If residents must stay underground for longer than a few months, the ability to grow food underground becomes more important.

Heating and cooling loads are minimal when living underground, but fuel and power needs for cooking and hot water must be planned for.

One of Gretchen Rubin’s revelations from her Happiness Project is that people do not spend enough time thinking about how money could buy them some happiness and instead fall prey to the expensive gym membership effect:

The expensive-gym-membership effect is when you pay money for something in order to force yourself to make time for a priority.

Because you want to make yourself go to the gym, you pay a lot for a membership, with the thought, “Gosh, this costs so much, I’ll feel like I have to go to the gym!” Guess what. You won’t. The expensive-gym-membership effect is how gyms stay in business. They can’t afford to have a treadmill for every member, but they know a lot of paying members will never show up.

The effect is more general than that though:

Merely spending money on something doesn’t do much to push you along. You have to decide to make an activity a priority. Probably the reason you’re not taking long baths isn’t because you don’t have the right bath oil, but because you have three kids and no time. You buy the bath oil as an expression of your desire to change something in your life – but that purchase won’t do it.

What does it take to be a genius? Some combination of talent, drive, and luck:

In Murray’s tabulation, the six most influential composers are Beethoven and Mozart (tied for first), followed by Bach, Wagner, Haydn, and Handel.

You’ll note that they were all born in German-speaking countries in the 17th through 19th Centuries. (In fact, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven were all in Vienna at the same time in the spring of 1787. Haydn and Mozart were friends, Haydn became Beethoven’s teacher, although they didn’t get along, and whether Mozart and Beethoven ever met is still disputed.)

It seems unlikely that all the best compositional talent in human history happened to be born in a small fraction of Europe over a fairly short spell.

Indeed, in most fields, the greats generally emerge during specific efflorescences. The advantages of being in the right time and place can be immense, especially before electronic communications.

Think of the difficulties besetting a hypothetical 19th Century American with the innate talent to have been a leading orchestral composer. For instance, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony premiered in Vienna in 1808, but didn’t make it to America until 1842, by which point it was old hat in Europe.

Moreover, after first hearing Beethoven’s Ninth in 1846, American critics complained that his famous “Ode to Joy” melody sounded like “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” America just didn’t quite offer the kind of cultural atmosphere helpful toward becoming a great art music composer. Instead, 19th Century American prodigies such as Stephen Foster, John Philip Sousa, and Scott Joplin took the lead in less august forms of music.

And, yet, the notion that golden age German-speakers enjoyed some genetic advantages in musical talent is not implausible. Their music-centered culture would have encouraged assortative mating among the musically gifted.

Most famously, the The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians lists 80 distinguished musicians from 1550 to 1850 with the surname of “Bach.” (Nobody knows how many descendants of the clan’s daughters bore other last names.) They weren’t stars until the generation after Johann Sebastian, but they did all right for themselves.

The musicality of the Bachs wasn’t an accident. The Bachs usually married daughters of other families in the church music business, girls who were musically literate enough to copy scores for them.

For example, Johann Sebastian Bach’s first wife (by whom he had seven children, two of whom became famous composers) was his second cousin. After her death, his second wife (by whom he had 13 children, two of them prominent composers) was the daughter of a well-known trumpeter and herself a singer of some renown.

How could he afford that?

Well, there were a lot of jobs for musicians. In the early 16th Century, Martin Luther had exuberantly advocated vocal music for the masses, which necessitated professional leadership.

As we are discovering about human evolution, you get more of what you pay for.

Foseti has decided to listen to some of the great religious works, like Milton’s “Paradise Lost” — and they’re beautiful:

I’m fully persuaded by many of the arguments made by the religious in favor of religion. I would prefer to live a religious society (I’m speaking Christianity and Judaism here) than an nonreligious one. Art is better in a religious society. The average person is probably better. The list goes on. I’ll grant all those things.

My hold up with religion is that I just don’t believe in a God that alters things in the world and judges cosmically-meaningless human actions. I’m willing to go to church on Sundays, if it helps keep the average dullard a believer — I just don’t believe. Too much pro-religion writings focuses on the arguments of the strident atheists and not on the metaphysical stuff which would probably do more to help convince the marginal atheist.

Summertime is the fighting season in Afghanistan:

Late spring advents a resurgence in Taliban activity, possibly an effect of the surplus labour capacity made available after sowing, this would reconcile the reduction in activity from October onwards, coinciding with the harvest.

During the winter, climatic conditions most likely tempers insurgent activities and thus also lowers NATO casualty rates.

And the Lord said unto the Rabbit, goeth and hideth eggs, and so didst the Rabbit.
— Lepus 3:16

All the fun things about Easter are pagan, Heather McDougall says:

Bunnies are a leftover from the pagan festival of Eostre, a great northern goddess whose symbol was a rabbit or hare. Exchange of eggs is an ancient custom, celebrated by many cultures. Hot cross buns are very ancient too. In the Old Testament we see the Israelites baking sweet buns for an idol, and religious leaders trying to put a stop to it. The early church clergy also tried to put a stop to sacred cakes being baked at Easter. In the end, in the face of defiant cake-baking pagan women, they gave up and blessed the cake instead.Easter is essentially a pagan festival which is celebrated with cards, gifts and novelty Easter products, because it’s fun and the ancient symbolism still works.

Early Christianity made a pragmatic acceptance of ancient pagan practices:

The general symbolic story of the death of the son (sun) on a cross (the constellation of the Southern Cross) and his rebirth, overcoming the powers of darkness, was a well worn story in the ancient world. There were plenty of parallel, rival resurrected saviours too.The Sumerian goddess Inanna, or Ishtar, was hung naked on a stake, and was subsequently resurrected and ascended from the underworld. One of the oldest resurrection myths is Egyptian Horus. Born on 25 December, Horus and his damaged eye became symbols of life and rebirth. Mithras was born on what we now call Christmas day, and his followers celebrated the spring equinox. Even as late as the 4th century AD, the sol invictus, associated with Mithras, was the last great pagan cult the church had to overcome. Dionysus was a divine child, resurrected by his grandmother. Dionysus also brought his mum, Semele, back to life.

In an ironic twist, the Cybele cult flourished on today’s Vatican Hill. Cybele’s lover Attis, was born of a virgin, died and was reborn annually. This spring festival began as a day of blood on Black Friday, rising to a crescendo after three days, in rejoicing over the resurrection. There was violent conflict on Vatican Hill in the early days of Christianity between the Jesus worshippers and pagans who quarrelled over whose God was the true, and whose the imitation. What is interesting to note here is that in the ancient world, wherever you had popular resurrected god myths, Christianity found lots of converts. So, eventually Christianity came to an accommodation with the pagan Spring festival. Although we see no celebration of Easter in the New Testament, early church fathers celebrated it, and today many churches are offering “sunrise services” at Easter — an obvious pagan solar celebration. The date of Easter is not fixed, but instead is governed by the phases of the moon — how pagan is that