OF A GOLDEN AGE

◘ Man names 4.68-carat diamond ‘Sweet Caroline’ — Oh, yeah. My friends know how I feel about this song. (I hate it. I hate it a lot.)

◘ Andrew Sullivan documents twelve lies Sarah Palin has told on the record. Also, the writer of Palin’s acceptance speech is Matthew Scully, author of the landmark animal-rights book Dominion. Sullivan points out the irony, since Palin has such a terrible animal-rights record. I guess Republican Party ties override the Christian imperative in this instance?

Thanks to Netflix I finally watched Transformers, which was, yes, completely freaking awesome. Let’s observe the high points.

• Seamless, breathtaking CGI. Robotic characters move, interact, and throw their weight around convincingly.
• Shia LaBeouf. Yes.
• The gorgeous girl who plays his love interest. I rarely find actresses to be really beautiful.
• A lot of explosions.

Last night my supervisor held his birthday party at a bowling alley and bar in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood.

A nerdy colleague took his turn and put a lot of mustard on the ball, which curved almost into the gutter before it came back for a strike. He turned, made a braggy face, and said, “That’s how you get it done. The straight line.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “That wasn’t a straight line, more like — ”

Then we both said, “A parabola.”

“I feel pretty confident saying we’re the two biggest nerds in this company,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, “without a doubt.”

My literary hero and shortlisted celebrity dream friend, Anne Lamott, has this to say on the Palin/McCain ticket.

“Laughter is carbonated holiness. It is chemo. So do whatever it takes to keep your sense of humor. Rent Christopher Guest movies, read books by Roz Chast and Maira Kalman. Picture Stick Freedom in his Batman underpants, having one of his episodes of rage alone in one of his seven bedrooms. Or having one of his bathroomy little conversations with Froth Moonshine. (Bless their hearts.) Try to remember that even Karl Rove has accused him of being a lying suck.”

I’m trying, I’m trying.

Today at work I got a powerful urge to cook, which I find really relaxing and therapeutic sometimes. Lately my head’s a mess! I feel better when the kitchen is too! All psychology.

Here’s what I made. It’s really easy.

2 yellow squash
2 zucchini squash
1 bag fresh baby spinach
1 package whole white mushrooms
1 red bell pepper
1 pound of tomatoes
Fresh garlic
Fresh basil
Salt and pepper
Olive oil
1 lb ground turkey (I used “Italian seasoned”)
Pasta, preferably small shapes instead of long and thin
Parmesan cheese

Finely chop all the vegetables, the basil and the garlic. Coat the bottom of a pretty big pot with olive oil and turn it on medium heat. Throw in vegetables, basil, and garlic and cook for 10 or 15 minutes.

Throw it all into the blender or food processor. Blend until smooth but not totally homogeneous. I did this in batches because my food processor is eensy. Taste the sauce and add salt and pepper to your liking.

Cook the ground turkey. Cook the pasta according to its directions and drain. Mix the ground turkey into the blended sauce. Serve over pasta, sprinkle with parmesan.

Makes a lot. I put at least 7/8ths of it in containers and into the freezer.

As Martin posted much better than I would, Sarah Palin’s over the barrel for using her personal Yahoo! email account to conduct state business.

This situation speaks for itself in a way inimitable by any commentator or humorist.

Oh man. Surprisingly, the Akira movie lived up to all the expectations set by critics.

Yesterday, thanks to my friend Mabel, I got to bow a piano. The bow was made of strands of fishing line tied and taped to pop tabs on each end. Mabel fed the bow through the strings, so essentially you play one note at a time by bowing all three of that key’s strings inside the piano.

The sound was different than I expected, really warm and ringing, because you’re playing multiple strings tuned to the same note. Also, something about the strings and the bow activated a lot of partials — the notes in any given key’s harmonic series, which form a pattern kind of like a natural-log curve. When you play a G, for instance, the harmonic series ascends roughly like this:

G – G (one octave up) – D – G – B – D – et cetera . . .

So the foundation is the G you’re playing, but each other tone sounds simultaneously, which is what gives the sound its round, full quality. These are also called overtones. The reason for this is that no string ever vibrates in only one pattern, but rather many patterns at once.

Oh, it’s getting nerdy in here.

College remains a divisive economic issue that pits haves versus have-nots, so to speak, with an enormous cost gap between most state schools (especially the satellite or branch campuses, which usually cost less) and private schools. When I insist to some of my state-schooled peers that my private education ended up costing the same as theirs, they remain unconvinced. The thing is, private schools have a lot more freedom to give discretionary scholarships, and that’s the saving grace.

Anyway, that’s not the point of this post.

One of the high “extra” costs in education is the textbook, arguably the biggest racket in the biz. When I teetered on the fence about taking the full plunge into a math major, what finally tipped me was the preposterous $150 price tag on a real analysis book the size of my old copy of Ramona Quimby, Age 8. In the other sciences and hard-numbers fields the cost can be even higher, especially for heavy, dry, cumbersome books most students will not consult again after the class ends.

With these traditional textbooks, each new edition has just enough added material that professors usually require the newest (most expensive) release. This is one serious benefit to the study of literature, where besides issues with translation for Old English or international works, my shitty 50¢ copy of To the Lighthouse is just as good as the one at the bookstore. However, classes that use Norton anthologies have the same problem as other textbook-reliant disciplines.

My favorite way around this was a creative-writing teacher who put together her own photocopied reader for the first half of our course. She then let us each select excerpts or short works to use in the second-half reader, and these drew upon our eclectic taste and studies: traditional and contemporary poetry, segments of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, nonfiction from multiple disciplines. No one had to wonder at the inclusion of any piece since the person who included it was there to explain. It had the most grounded, democratic rationale of any course I’ve taken.

A friend recently told me he’d chosen to illegally download an eBook of a text instead of purchasing an overpriced hard copy. It reminded me of a math class where I bought an Indian-produced second-rate paperback text off the internet and, much to my pleasant surprise, found it comparable and completely usable. These kinds of go-arounds are the subject of this New York Times article on the chokehold of the textbook industry, drawing an analogy between educational publishing and prescription drug companies. Zing! I love it, and the analogy will connect with anyone who’s ever been thrown over the barrel by these opportunistic bastards.

I know, that doesn’t make sense. Let me explain.

Twice this week I’ve read an article describing a challenge to the notion of average. This is not your typical self-esteem-based averageness discussion, but rather a more mathematical one posed just now by this New York Times article:

“If all the children, like those in Lake Wobegon, are above average, how could the school be failing?”

Yeah, seriously.

What gives here is that average, as a concept, blends an entire population into one. Compared with children at poor New York schools, these kids in Brooklyn Heights are doing well. However, the gist of the article is how they’re failing compared to their relevant peer schools and even the children’s own test scores. Amazing that they’re far enough above average that their individual scores decline during the year but remain above average.

It reminded me of a BMI site I was reading the other day (can’t find the link again) where it said that even at the 50th weight percentile you are still overweight. In anticipation of a lot of angry women eager to be average, the site points out that since 55% of Americans are overweight, average is also overweight.*

Do we adjust average to fit the population better, or do we consider the population to be a failure? Average test scores on the ACT and SAT have gone up in staggering proportion since the 1960s — are we, um, smarter? Because I don’t think we are, the same way I don’t think a women’s size 12 today is the same as it was forty years ago.

* I don’t know the statistical validity of these claims, but they function here as illustration anyway.