Thanksgiving

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I was watching A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. Wikipedia says this first aired in 1973, though somehow, in my mind, I thought it was much older. More than likely, I thought it was from the 1960s. This meant the first time I remember seeing it was mere years after it first came out. I'd guess I'd pay attention to it for the first time by maybe age 10.

In the cartoon, Peppermint Patty, who is among several guests that have arrived at Charlie Brown's house for a Thanksgiving dinner. Charlie Brown has not so much invited the group of invitees as Peppermint Patty has invited herself (there's a sense that she only has a dad and not a mom) and in the process invited Marcie and Franklin. Linus and Lucy (and sister Sally) also show up.

Charlie Brown doesn't know how to cook so Snoopy does the "cooking", which involves toast, pretzel sticks, popcorn, and jelly beans. That is, snack foods and toast. Peppermint Patty is outraged. She wanted turkey. She wanted mashed potatoes. She wanted pumpkin pie. She wants cranberry sauce.

And her rant got me to thinking about Thanksgiving.

Recently, I was asked, by a non-American, what Thanksgiving is all about. My response was food and family. And while that's true, it doesn't quite reflect what the importance of food.

Most of us understand that Thanksgiving is a bit of a feast. Depending on the family, the dinner can be served at dinner time, that is around 6-7. The day is then spent cooking possibly elaborate dishes and can take the cooks hours to make.

The last 40 or 50 years have seen a decline and a minor resurgence of cooking. I remember hearing a story of a woman, whose name eludes me (and is unlikely to be recalled any time soon), who advocated to American housewives that far too much time was expended in the name of homecooked meals. So much time that it left very little free time to do anything else.

Indeed, you see cooking in many cultures as a woman's job and to spend 1-2 hours if not many hours is considered par for the course. I was invited to a post graduation party by a graduating student. He is Italian American as are his parents. Apparently, they are used to hosting large parties, and the mother is accustomed to making 8, 10, or more dishes for these parties. She pish-poshed suggestions at how much work went in to providing food for the guests. It was, she exclaimed, a pittance. She was used to cooking far more than that.

But once you go the route of eating out at restaurants or making microwave dinners, you've reduced the amount of time to cook from hours to mere minutes. And to go back is a pain. It's like asking someone who normally has a 5 minute commute to work to take a 40 minute commute to work. That 40 minutes is exasperating and interminable. You wonder what you did in your life to deserve this Sisyphean fate. Once you manage to reach work, then you must reverse the trip, and reverse, and on and on.

There are several ways to resolve this issue of cooking. First, you can let the restaurants do the work for you. Restaurants have already perceived a desire by those who don't want to slave over the food preparation, nor the cleanup. They create Thanksgiving dinner for them.

Some of these restaurants are reasonably ritzy and upscale, perhaps to appeal to the wealthy who can afford to have other people do the labor for them. It may not have the same intimacy of home, nor the Norman Rockwell idealism of family and laborers in the kitchen, but it's a ritual many feel compelled to go through.

There are certainly cheaper ways to achieve the same effect, usually involving getting turkey from the Boston Market and other side dishes. Boston Market wouldn't bother with this if every family felt the need to make everything from scratch. Other cultures that have revered the woman as cook would find the notion of letting restaurants do the work or getting canned foods as horrific.

And in a sense, Americans think that too. Of course, if pressed for an answer, an American would say the fast foods we get, the canned, the microwaved, the pre-cooked foods do not taste as good as expertly prepared homemade food. That's fair. But they are willing to make that tradeoff. Rather than spend years learning to cook a variety of different dishes and attain a level of mastery that allows the cooking to be shown off and repeatably so, the time saved from learning to cook, the money saved from not buying all manners of kitchen gadgetry, even the basic effort saved from not cutting up vegetables, slicing meats, preparing marinades and side dishes and desserts, is considered well worth it for quick meals that taste significantly worse, but still now awful. A price worth paying, most would say.

Due to the fast-food mentality of America and a greater gender equality starting from the 1970s feminist movement, there is a countervailing bucking of the trend, most often seen by males who find that guys like Jeff "The Frugal Gourmet" Smith (whose shows have literally been eradicated by other cooking shows and by insinuations that were never quite proven of his predilection for youthful lads) and Bobby Flay and Christopher Kimball and the Iron Chefs that, indeed, guys can cook, that it's not shameful. Quite the contrary, it's cool if a guy can cook. Women seem to appreciate that fact too.

Which brings us back to Thanksgiving.

Despite America's love-hate affair with cooking, Thanksgiving reminds us of a time, perhaps a time that never existed, when American families got together for a huge family dinner:



What occurred to me, after all is said and done, is that Thanksgiving is not merely about eating food, though it certainly is that, but it's about a way to tie some idea nationally. That it's about a mythical view of the United States. Amber waves of grain. Purple mountains majesty. Fruited plains. (Fruited plains?).

I got this idea, of all places, by the juxtaposition of a Facebook status, and the watching of the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. The status, by one Jeremy Pelzer, reads "Jeremy Pelzer likes turkey almost as much as pumpkin pie".

And that got me to thinking that these were two of the items Peppermint Patty wants in her Thanksgiving dinner. Funny enough, Peppermint Patty seems like she's grown up in a kind of broken household. She's a tomboy. She's from a single parent family. (Does she have an intriguing relation with Marcie?).

But she feels something is missing from her life. She is missing some of the "traditional" aspects of life. She looks at Charlie Brown and feels he is living that traditional life. That his family surely observes a traditional Thanksgiving, that surely he must eat breakfast that consists of waffles and pancakes and bacon and orange juice. She is surprised that Charlie Brown's existence is mundane. That he doesn't know how to cook (funny how the parents are completely isolated from his life) and that breakfast consists of cold cereal. Is this Schultz's criticism of how our culture has abandoned its ways? Does he merely weep for the convenience of life? The various Charlie Brown specials often focus on how we've lost our way.

I hadn't intended this to be about the despairing vision of Charles Schultz which is bizarrely offset by the magically unreal world of Snoopy. When Americans have lost their ways, only their dogs will remember to dream.

Nope, I wanted to talk about the unifying idea of food on the American psyche. It's not that we simply eat food. There is Thanksgiving food. There is turkey. There is cranberry sauce. There is mashed potatoes.

We don't necessarily follow it to the letter. It doesn't have to be the Norman Rockwell dinner. Indian families that have lived in the US may choose to remember their Indian heritage while still making a traditional turkey and stuffing. Vegetarians still like the idea of family, and certainly, side dishes play a major supporting role to Thanksgiving.

The choice of pies is wide. While pumpkin pie is considered seasonal, very Halloween, very Thanksgiving (it's really a pumpkin spice pie, but I digress), others might prefer a traditional apple pie or a cherry pie.

Sometimes the interpretation is a bit more post-modern: turkey cutlets sauteed in garlic-thyme butter, resembling Thanksgiving, but more petite, more French, more snooty, but honoring both a past tradition, and a desire to elevate humdrum American cuisine with more cultural refinement.

As I eat turkey and mashed potatoes (and this year, I used roasted garlic with Yukon gold potatoes and mashed it with a special masher), I realize that it's an experience shared many fold across the country. The variations on a theme still reveals an underlying structure and commonality of food and family. Whether that means anything, whether there's some insidious idea that we are "one nation" united through food, I don't know.

Thanksgiving is perhaps that one holiday that attempts to unite a country through food, and thus, relieved of religious significance like Christmas, there's something more wholesome about it. Christmas is about family too, but it's also about gifts. Thanksgiving is about sharing a meal, and that meal is shared not only by family, but in a sense shared by a large number of American families.

Much like the campus buildings, the lay of the campus grounds, the chill of the air during winter time evokes a common historical memory of alumni of a college, Thanksgiving also evokes a common historical memory, and the nostalgia for an idealistic America not withstanding, is a pretty amazing thought.

Charlie Brown Thanksgiving

The Charlie Brown Thanksgiving is less well known than the Christmas show. However, the themes are fairly similar. Although I didn't sit to watch the entire show, I watched the few minutes that seemed pretty important. For some reason, Charlie Brown is hosting a Thanksgiving dinner, though, it appears to be outdoors, during daylight.

And Snoopy is the chef. The Thanksgiving dinner consists of bread, pretzel sticks, popcorn, and jelly beans. Peppermint Patty, who is pretty brusque (and voiced by a guy in this particular show), is horrified. Where's the turkey? Where's the mashed potatoes? Where's the pumpkin pie? Charlie Brown feels he's let everyone down (this cartoon really mines pathos, a topic that is generally unheard of from comics aimed at kids).

At the end of the show, Snoopy had brought Woodstock to his doghouse, from which he fetches a table, some chairs.

Snoopy then brings out a covered platter, and he uncovers it.

And what appears?

A huge turkey! And tiny potatoes and veggies!

And who is thrilled about this?

Woodstock!

Woodstock who rubs his hands, or his wings that resemble hands, shows us his mastery of cutlery and slices the food, and uses the fork to eat the turkey.

Does Woodstock not realize that he's participating in a form of cannibalism? Alas, for little kids, they probably won't even notice. I remember so little from the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, and I think many kids also forget much of it, only to realize, as an adult, that it's far more serious than you recall.

Charlie Brown holiday specials, at its very heart, is often about trying to get away from the glitz and commercialism of holidays (something that almost never gets discussed) and look to something purer. We get together for Thanksgiving, they say, not to have food, but to be with one another. Indeed, it's not family, but friends that gather together, a kind of idealism that seems to exceed how most people perceive Thanksgiving.

Watch it again and you'll see how it's not what you expected.

Unless you watch it every year.

In which case, it's exactly what you expected.

More Links

Some more random links:

• Hot Spicy Fish Soup recipe (Korean)
  
• Croatians taunt English team with doughnuts
  
• Nerdy Transformer Fan
  
• White Chicken Chili recipe
  
• Learn to hit the Federer Forehand
  
• Flip4Mac ScreenFlow (screen capture software)
  
• Federer hits forehand
  
• Mysterious DNA survives eons
  
• Tennis courts in Greenbelt
  
• Photoshop basics
  
• Tire Gauge Solution
  
• Learn Ruby on Rails from Scratch
  
• Judo guy
  
• Demand NAS
  
• Scott Blanksteen's photos
  
• Rails on the Mac
  
• Stanford Movie Theatre Guide
  
• Flylady (staying neat)
  
• Interesting Billfolds
  
• Many ways to tie shoelaces
  
• Hancock Pic
  

Learning Tennis

Oh so impatient are you!

You look at the title of this blog and your eyes avert away! Why is that? Was there some incident in your youth where you gazed at some dumb jock (and boy were they dumb!) who only cared about football or basketball but lacked the intellect to calculate the roots of a quadratic equation, that lacked the intellect to understand the causes of the Civil War, that laughably dreamed of a pro career where they would make money, a dream so improbable that perhaps ignorance of math was the only thing that sustained such folly, a folly as silly as Seward's? (You betcha!)

Tennis is one of the sports that you can, if you want, try to learn on your own. You can read books, you can have friends teach you, you can visit the courts frequently, or hit against the wall, you can admire the pros.

Even if you have a powerful intellect, one that reasons, one that thinks, until recently, until the Web, you really lacked the information you needed to play tennis well. You could, I suppose, record stuff on a VCR, if anyone has those gadgets any more, and play and replay and hit slowmo and hope to glean the mysteries of how to hit a forehand or a backhand, how to hit with spin.

Even with the Web as your ally, powerful search engines to narrow your inquiries, how do you interpret what you see. You want to run what is the equivalent of a physical diff.

What is a diff? In computer world, you often want to see the changes made to a text file, typically a computer program you wrote, but it could be a story you wrote in a creative writing course. A diff is a way to represent what was and what is. It looks a touch technical, and to the casual eye it is. The main lesson to draw is it summarizes what changed before to make it what it is now.

A physical diff then is the difference, in some general way, between the way your body does something and the way someone who does it "right" (as there are more definitions of right than we care about) does it. Because there are many definitions of right, we want to abstract one level up to point out what are the basic differences.

A diff of two text files, two programs, or two variations of the same story you've been writing is very exact. It's easy to tell the exact changes made. The kind of diff I'm talking about is much more akin to the difference between you and Hemingway, you and Shakespeare, indeed, you and any good writer. That level of abstraction is hard to capture in writing, but somewhat, though not wholly, easier in sports.

We can look at the general structure of how someone hits. They move their arm this way. Their wrist is this way. Their shoulders are that way. This is the sequence of things that happen.

We can learn by watching and imitating. But you may fail to see! You may not see all that there is to see. I didn't look at their legs! Was that important? Was that hop necessary? Why did they make this motion here, but not there? I don't get it!

The nice thing about tennis is that there are a handful of things to master, but you have to spend a lot of time getting the body acclimated to those motions.

But when it comes to learning something else, something useful, something like programming, there's far less to tell the would be programmer. Why is that? Admittedly, tennis has been with us for over a century. The knowledge we've gain about tennis has proceeded by leaps and bounds and is now accessible in a way never seen before until very recently. There are ways to look at our own game and analyze it.

But programming? Much younger. Still immature. And while people seem to know how to program just as people seem to know how to play video games, we don't yet know why. We don't have a good theory as to why. It doesn't make sense to us.

In the things we find most important, the learning of "real stuff", we are at an impasse. How is it that we don't even know how to program, that each of us finds our own way their and that perseverance, more than anything seems the key to guide us to a nebulous solution to the problem at hand?

In that respect, tennis seems more reassuring. There are answers, even if we must sometimes pay for such answers. These answers may change. The answers today may not be the answers tomorrow. The game evolves. The solutions evolve. Programming too may evolve perhaps far more dramatically than anything that happens in tennis.

I suggest that even as I learn tennis because I find satisfaction in learning tennis, that you think about how you learn something--anything. How does that happen, and why is that so hard to convey to the next person?

Control

I was recently asked by Justin what I wanted to do, that is, with my life. He had suggested, since I like to write, that I should write. Indeed, I think it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to write. One reason I started a blog was to write, and blogs give me an opportunity to write.

The one great feature of blogs is the audience. To be honest, I don't know my audience. Most people I know don't regularly follow my blog because it delves into topics that are alternately interesting and boring to them, and if there's a rut of articles that are boring to them, they simply pass it by, and then don't come back.

That's short attention span theater for you, but that's fine. I don't write for a particular audience, though I understand there is an audience. If there weren't an audience, I might choose to make my words more abstruse, my thoughts even less coherent than they are now. I wouldn't try to elaborate on certain ideas in more depth because I already understand it.

Some of my inspiration, and this is an odd inspiration, for my recent writing comes from one David Foster Wallace. I might not have cared that much about Wallace, who is well regarded as a writer, had it not been for two things. First, he died. That's a sad event for many Americans that cared about his writings.

Alas, death has a way of making certain people's lives stand out more as people start to eulogize the person, write about what made them special. It makes you wonder why they don't do this more often when they are alive. I believe Johnny Cash gained more fame after death than he had immediately preceding it, because people who just thought of him as another of those old country legends began to see a darker, more troubled individual, who nonetheless found love. People who otherwise wouldn't have paid Cash any heed began thinking "this is a pretty interesting guy" and gave his music a chance.

All on the account of him being dead.

The second compelling fact of David Foster Wallace was that he loved tennis. If he hadn't been so talented as a writer, or had he been more talented as a tennis player, the world may never have been graced with his words. Although he wrote huge tomes like Infinite Jest, he also wrote a great deal of non-fiction.

He understood he had an audience, that that audience might care little or know little about tennis or whatever subject he was talking about, and he was surprisingly willing to use his intimate knowledge of words and how to string them together to produce a compelling narrative and explanation of, well, tennis. And not just tennis, but any other of a myriad of topics. Beyond the need to simply storytell, Wallace also wanted to explain.

So I have to say, in what little capacity I've had to read Wallace's work, which is quite little, these few things have been, in no small measure, inspirational.

There's another thing that's inspirational and that's the TED talks. I remember bumping into TED talks maybe 2 years ago. This organization is what Republicans would term as elitist and what liberals would term as elitism of the best sort. You see, Republicans love the us vs. them mentality. The "us" are simple folk who are God fearing, who work hard, but obviously not hard enough that we cared about education and independent thinking and embracing the diversity of the world and, to reiterate again, about education. They're hard working in the industrious physical labor sort of way. That education stuff kinda flew over their heads, and so they weren't so hard working there.

Liberals, frankly, want everyone to be elitist, but not because they feel elitism is us vs. them. Frankly, liberals complain about the salt of the earth not because they want to be separate from them, but because they want them to open their eyes, to understand what education is really about. And when people say that the working class is uneducated, they don't mean that they can't do math or conjugate a verb. They mean they don't know how to analyze someone's argument, nor construct one of their own, nor find information on the Web (or whereever), not evaluate the truthfulness of the information. They don't find ways to stretch their understanding of the world. They don't question why things are a certain way. They don't question their own beliefs.

The idea that the beliefs you grew up with are the right ones is the essence of conservatism (with a small "c"). It is about familiarity and comfort drawn from what you've always seen and it's the disdain for people who tell you your life is all wrong. You can understand, to an extent, why people are reluctant to change when they see nothing wrong with how they live.

But I seriously digress.

If you've followed me this far, then I've perhaps tricked you, because I want to talk about something that is likely utterly mundane which is to talk about tennis.

Oh noes! You tricks me!

I'm not really going to talk about tennis in the way you think. It's not about how to hit a forehand or how I've learned to hit a better volley. It is the entire endeavor itself.

And it has to do with the word of the day: control.

Why are sports so compelling to so many people? To a person who doesn't watch sports, the odd fascination of people running around or hitting one another or trying to get a ball to do something that most humans can't even begin to comprehend so the eventual score changes. That seems utterly preposterous (ah, our love of extreme words to convey extreme ideas!).

The fans want to do something that humans would love to do, which is to control the outcome of the world, at least, to some small extent. And to the extent that sports is so popular, they delve into this make-believe world where they believe, with enough of their fellow fans, that if they fervently believe hard enough, it will come to pass. Does that sound familiar?

People are often asked, if they had one superpower, what would it be. I have no idea if non-Americans would answer this differently. Maybe they don't understand superpower in the way we understand it. They might imagine doing something they already do, like farming, but much better. Or they might imagine being rich. We're informed by our comics, and then only the earliest most rudimentary ones at that, to tell us what superpowers are and then because this question is hardly original, by the same answers people keep giving to the question.

The most common answers are: flying and being invisible. Flying appeals to our desire to be freer than we are now. Gravity's a bitch, don't you know. And walking is too. It takes us forever to get anywhere. Wouldn't it be nice to skip the cars and busses and be truly green, and fly to where we need to go? Of course, once you free your mind that way, you wonder what kind of sports you'd even have.

Being invisible appeals to our desire to know, our desire to hear things about ourselves or to observe people in their most unguarded moments. Needless to say, most people would probably have pretty mundane lives of them watching TV, them sleeping, them making something to eat, them eating. Only a few minutes a day, if even that, are salacious enough to follow unless the kind of person you'd like to stalk are into a huge amount of gossip every day, and you want to get into that dirt.

Being invisible is not entirely right because it means the possibility someone could hear you, could punch you out, and all sorts of harm to your physical self. What they mean is something more ghost-like, the ability to be wherever you want and then to otherwise not interfere with what you see so they get to be their most honest selves.

Anyway, these salacious moments would probably amount to catching them showering, or moments of self pleasure, or moments writing in unbridled (if clumsy) ecstasy. And for some, these happen too infrequently to be patiently hanging around waiting for it to happen.

But there is another kind of superpower people might want to have and it relates to control. How many people fantasize that some person might fall in love with them, or perhaps more mundanely, have sex with them? I need to digress a bit because there's an amusing bit with Ricky Gervais and Patrick Stewart.

Stewart is classically trained Shakespearean actor, but most people know him as the captain of the Enterprise from the second Star Trek series, Star Trek: The Next Generation. Gervais is visiting Stewart in his dressing room and Stewart is pitching an idea.

Stewart imagines he has superpowers and that is to magically make women's clothes fall off unexpectedly at which point he's taken a glimpse of "everything". Each show would primarily focus on this idea. Part of the amusement of this is how faux serious Stewart seems to take the idea and how much kid-like joy he gets whenever he says "but it's too late, because I've seen everything" while Gervais looks in mock horror at what sounds like the worst idea for a sitcom ever, but in deference to Stewart, he tries to look like he thinks it's interesting, but can't bring himself to that point.

In this sketch, Stewart is talking about godlike control. The ability to make the world conform to the way you want it to, albeit, in this case, with the minor ability to make women's clothes fall off. It's just short of being lewd, about being in control of the situation. and transforms what might be an ugly situation into something naughty. And only a wee bit naughty too. That way, it's palatable. The woman isn't being forced into actions against her will (though if you had such powers, you'd probably make her agreeable to the action on top of the action itself). In this case, she's embarrassed as well as being bewildered at the oddness of this hypothetical situation.

People understand that such powers don't exist, but it doesn't mean they don't want it. What lonely geek who, due to weight issues or lack of self confidence, doesn't imagine that some girl will eventually pay attention to them? Indeed, speaking of Star Trek, that series indulged in these ideas of fantasy with a recurring guest character, Reginald Barclay.

Barclay goes into a holodeck which is the best virtual reality simulator ever, and yet despite the fantastic-ness of this device, is hardly ever used, and lives his fantasies in them where he overcomes his stuttering and shyness and woo the only women that we ever see on board, namely, Crusher and Troi. It's funny how they decided to make the one fantasizing a male (why didn't they pick a fantasizing female? or why is Barclay straight?), but then they know their audiences, don't they?

Indeed, to indulge the fantasy powers even more, Barclay gets superpowers in one episode, in Star Trek's own variation of Flowers for Algernon (that book probably killed the name Algernon for use as a child's name, or maybe it was never that popular).

The kind of fantasies that Barclay has, G-rated as they may be, reflect the kind of fantasies many a teen has. They want to be liked. They want the popular ones to like them. They may resent those that seem to get the women as being assholes who, if they only got to know them better, would really appreciate them (this is something a roommate of mine said many years ago--I can only hope that he has had some success finding someone as that was 20 years ago).

The ability to find a significant other is a form of control. This problem is so challenging that societies have found other ways to handle it. Take it out of the hands of the people it involves. Namely, arranged marriages. For the rest of the world where arranged marriages aren't as common, the burden lies to the guy to try to find an appropriate mate, at least for those who think it's important. Because of our biological need to reproduce, certain incentives have been placed in our genetic makeup to skew this likelihood. People get horny, people get lonely. All these things make us more likely to want to find someone special.

But how to do it? Society also begins to produce imagery of who is desirable and who is not, and much of that comes from advertisers, but also from the film industry who must trot out their vision of beauty and talent to adoring fans, and the sports industry where wealthy skillful athletes are prized as desirable, to the entertainment industry (music, etc). Even to some extent, the business world, successful professionals, intellectuals, they all have some appeal to someone.

There are several factors (and I have to admit bias here, so I will tell a one-sided story) that appear to make men appealing to women. The first is attractiveness. Men find women sexy, and women find men sexy. Just not every man. Some men are very good looking and it overcomes nearly every flaw about them, in particular, if that person is very shy, or possibly, very rude.

Attractiveness can really be all over the place. The person need not be muscle-bound. Generally, people look at the face. Sometimes they want more, like a shapely body. But the face is king. Attractiveness can range the gamut of "hot" as in you'd want to go to bed with them immediately to the merely cute, as in you'd want to hug them and pinch their cheeks.

Another factor is personality. What if you find yourself not blessed with good looks where women want to talk to you just because of how you look? They can still like you a great deal because you're fun, you have lots of interesting things to say, or you know how to make someone feel special, or laugh, or you're supportive.

When you're not born with good looks and haven't frittered it away by gaining too much weight, then you have a huge problem that is, more or less, under your control. I say, more or less, because people have certain personality flaws. Some of the best looking people are awfully shy. If they were more outgoing they would have slept around with a lot more women (not that this should be a criteria for a successful life, but just saying).

But if you lack good looks, and you don't have to overcome incurable shyness, then one avenue available to you is making yourself more interesting, more desirable. Part of that has to do with doing things, either reading stuff, going to parties, what have you. It helps to be extroverted, and to be extroverted, it helps (though is not fully required) to understand how the world works, how to be funny, how to point out interesting stuff. It helps to have a good memory so you can regale people with something you read, or sing one of the hundreds of songs you've heard. Basically, this interestingness is a form of self-confidence, and for some reason, this is pretty compelling stuff to potential mates because it shows evidence that you can not only manage your life but possibly theirs too.

As I said, this take a great deal of awareness. If you love video games and crave them and read up all about them and that's all you can ever talk about, well, that's going to make you a lot less desirable, especially if you lack the looks too. Humor can be a way to attract folks, but how can you learn humor? It takes a lot of practice, it requires paying attention to the world, it requires a quick mind. Indeed, one thing you might notice about the funniest people is how smart they seem to be, and part of it is how quick their minds work because they spend a great deal of time trying to find humor.

But that's hard, isn't it? Hard to be funny. And when you're not good at it, wow, do you ever fall flat.

Now it turns out that people are often willing to settle. You don't have to look great, as long as the rest of your body is in pretty good shape. If you're not too short (and even shortness may not matter that much), but you are in physically great shape or at least decent, which means you have a decent height, and aren't particular chubby, and maybe even have nice chest, or nice arms, or nice ass, that can overcome even mediocre looks (and what's mediocre to you might be good enough for someone else).

There are some things about yourself that you don't control, namely, how tall you are, what you look like. There are things that are somewhat under your control, such as your sense of humor, how much you work out, how friendly you want to be. Personality is something that can be developed, but you're also born with a certain personality too, and the way you are raised has some influence on that.

Your personality affects things like how impatient you are, how willing you are to learn something, whether you think it's OK to get into fights or get into arguments, whether you mind offending someone. Your personality traits can make it easier or harder to try to develop the social skills that will hopefully win someone over, to essentially package yourself so someone will like you, and that can sometimes be through aggression on your part, where you try to really engage someone directly rather than to passively hope they will notice you.

We build these skills to try to do something that we wish could happen by magic. And that something must still lie in the realm of socially acceptable. For example, you might really think it's cool to be into leather and whips. Whoops, you've just eliminated a great deal of the population that finds that weird or worse, deviant. Or maybe you have a hunkering for three people to be involved. Again, too few people in society find that perfectly normal, and so all the smooth talking you do might not help you out. You have to seek a much smaller crowd and hang out with them.

Although we lack magic superpowers, we have some control based on our knowledge of the world, based on the personality we have, based on how we think people might find us charming or wonderful.

This talk of being more attractive to someone seems like an odd segueway to why I find tennis compelling.

We try to develop our minds, but doing that is honestly quite hard. What we're trying to do isn't clear. Something about physicality, the controlling of our own bodies, to make it do something that has no evolutionary advantages, but only because we find it fun and because it's tough.

Why are video games compelling? Because the more most of us work at it, the better we get. There is satisfaction when we achieve the goals we set for ourselves, and those goals, with enough time and skill, seem attainable. Far more attainable than some of the real world goals which involve, well, people. We don't know what to do to achieve the goals we want with other people. Some of those goals are probably far from realistic, summed up by a song called "Jesse's Girl" where the protagonist wishes he could have "Jesse's girl".

I have to digress there to recall a story from college. I knew a guy who had a thing for this girl. Problem? She already had a boyfriend (and I knew a guy who had a thing for this girl who already had a fiance!). What did he say? I bet I could beat up her boyfriend.

I told him to imagine this scenario. She is with her boyfriend walking down the street under pale moonlight murmuring words of idle affection. Then, out behind a tree (you need the surprise factor), you jump in front of them, point your finger at the boyfriend, and then proceed to beat the everliving tar of his now rather befuddled and soon to be bloodied boyfriend. After the ensuing mayhem, she rushes to your side and says "My Hero!".

I've embellished this more than is reality, but, heck, it's my story.

But that's about control. He didnt tell me that he'd be more interesting, more compelling, more exciting, more of everything for this girl so she'd be smitten and change her mind (after all, isn't it kind of silly to just say that that guy saw her first so he gets dibs, or maybe it her that saw him first).

Being more interesting is tough. How do you do it? How long does it take to get there? Why do some people fail more miserably at it than others? Is it there whiny voice? Why do people persist in having whiny voices when they should know it turns people off? Why does it turn people off?

Many questions.

Instead, he opted for the solution that made the most sense to him, or really, had the most opportunity for success if the world simply worked the way he imagined. He'd punch the guy out. It reduced the problem to something totally ridiculous, but made the goal realizable were the rules simply changed this way.

With tennis, I look for a measure of control. One reason that I admire sports is to watch people who have attained a high level of control, and partly they can do that because the sport succeeds, that there is some reason to waste your time doing this because money can be made, because there's a population that care enough to watch it, and cares enough to get better at it themselves.

And tennis still has secrets. Some of these secrets reveal themselves in slow motion. Perhaps like some people find conspiracy theories compelling because they like the idea of knowing something that everyone else doesn't know and doesn't believe (and with good reason), I believe there are lots of things in tennis I don't know and that with study and practice, I could learn and get better at. In this respect, it's like playing a video game except I play the same game over and over, simply trying to get better at it.

Although control is illusory, there is an appeal from gaining some small measure of control, something rewarding. It sounds dastardly, but it isn't.

It is the way of the world.

Caste Makes Waste

I have a friend who pronounces "caste" that rhymes with "waste", so this blog entry would rhyme. Even so, it should rhyme with past, mast, last, etc.

Many Bollywood films would have you think that love marriages are the norm. While they have become more common, arranged marriages are still far more common than not. Bollywood films have an opportunity to tackle some tough topics, but many fans see these films as escapism and aren't prepared, except for the more literate crowd, to see something more politicized.

I was reading the following article about an inter-caste marriage, one between a Rajput and a Dalit. Dalits are the names given to the untouchable caste, still the lowest caste in Indian society. They are meant to handle cleaning of toilers, the handling of the dead, and so forth. They are considered unclean.

Arranged marriages have generally been more about status, according to the article. You marry some person that is appropriate to the family. Lest you think this is completely unheard of in the US, it wasn't so long ago that wealthy families would expect their children to marry other children of wealthy families. You didn't simply marry someone, you marry their family.

So I imagine a Bollywood film that starts off like any other traditional film of boy meets girl. Everything is good, song and dance, but it is eventually revealed, say, that the woman is a Dalit, and then slowly his family becomes horrified and wants nothing to do with her. They try to get someone more caste-friendly, but the son is uninterested, and eventually, despite pleading from the son, they feel that it is necessary to kill her, and there's a stoning scene.

Anyway, it would get pretty intense towards the end, so that the viewer is made to face these issues. Perhaps, with the prodigious Bollywood film output, a movie like this has been made, though I would imagine it would be difficult.

Just a thought.

Links

Lots of cooking blogs here:

• Best Cooking Blogs 2008
  

Revulsion

I just blogged about embarrassment. It's one of those odd emotions that isn't particularly celebrated because it isn't at the extremes. It's not joy. It's not hatred. It's not funny. It's not sad. And yet embarrassment probably weighs more in many of our day-to-day decisions than these other emotions which are generally not extreme.

It's why we have restrooms with stalls. It's why people sometimes avoid using public showers in gyms preferring the more complex ritual of wearing gym appropriate clothing then scurrying home to privacy. This usually adds quite a few minutes to everyday proceedings, but is considered worth the added measure of avoided embarrassment.

On the flip side, if there is such a thing, is revulsion. Revulsion, in this case, is a much stronger word than I want to use, but is the sense you get when you think "eww!".

Perhaps the strongest sense of revulsion for some is sharing food. Someone makes, oh I don't know, a bowl of macaroni and cheese. Or better yet, a bowl of cereal. Then, you are asked to eat it. Using the same spoon. At what point do you go, ewww! Ok, let's say you get to use a new spoon. Would you still say, ewww!

I was once with several Indians eating at Cheesecake Factory. While they could have all ordered their own milkshake, instead only one was ordered for all three. This has to do with another sense: frugality. If you choose to be frugal, then you might be less repulsed because sharing makes more sense, and that sharing extends to food.

Once one person ordered a milkshake, the rule became "anyone who thinks it might taste good should have an opportunity to taste it" (which overrules "if it's so good, then get one yourself" which is not invoked because it costs too much and is too much food). And because revulsion is not as big a problem, several straws dipped into the same milkshake, and much joy was to be had.

Americans would react two ways. One is "ewww" because of hygiene. The second reaction comes, oddly enough, from homophobia. Two people who are in love might overcome their revulsion to things unhygienic. Perhaps their love blinds them to the fact that something that would gross them out with strangers is OK with someone you care about. For whatever reason, Americans think of lovers sharing drinks, so there's something vaguely gay about two or more guys sharing the same drink. And Americans males tend to be quite homophobic, or view certain actions as homosexual even as other cultures see it as no big deal.

Revulsion isn't also about food sharing, but applies to intimacy. Many people can get to a level of intimacy because they are turned on by someone. This feeling often overcomes two related feelings: embarrassment and revulsion.

I knew a former housemate, and really, this could apply to many, many people I knew who found the idea of going to gym showers as somewhere between embarrassment and revulsion. On the one hand, we imagine the following thought experiment, a kind of experiment that probably never entered the brain of one Albert Einstein, father of thought experiments.

In this case, you imagine a gym shower near some locker, and to create some sense of embarrassment, I'll be a participant and you be the one using the facilities. To reduce the ewww factor, I'll be clothed, and you won't. You might still find this situation uncomfortable. You don't like the way you look. You don't like that others are looking at the way you look. Classic embarrassment, and perhaps to some extent, a secondary embarrassment if you feel the other party is somehow enjoying things too much, perhaps at your expense.

This reaction is different from someone who sings well or who plays well or who can share their intellectual acumen. In such situations, admiration is permissible and not the least bit embarrassing, indeed, it's rewarding.

Now, we can add the eww factor. Other folks are now using the facilities in the same boat as yourself, and society conditions you, especially males, to saw ewww. The male body is repulsive. This typically stems from a kind of homophobia American men grow up with but is combined a bit with embarrassment plus revulsion.

But to show you that the revulsion is not purely homophobia, because it isn't, we can rerun the thought experiment this way. If you're a straight guy, the gym scene would have involved unclothed men, and the thought is that these men are likely not the finest athletic specimens, and even if they were, well, ewwww!

Let's replace these unclothed men with unclothed women! Again, the strong sense of revulsion American males are trained to have about other males when they grow up has a flip side. They automatically assume that the women involved have mistakenly left their Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition and have entered their shower facilities. They might even overcome their embarrassment because, wow, such hot women must surely be frolicking around without a care in the world.

Much better situation.

Much.

Ah, but let's tweak this experiment. If a guy thinks that the reason he doesn't want to be in a room of showering men because they would be obese, bad, and generally eww, we can do the same in this thought experiment.

Out you go, you Twiggy like women, you buxomous babes. Replaced with people who are a few pounds heavier with a few more sags, puffs on the cheeks, and suddenly, the notion is ewww, I don't have any desire whatsoever to see you? But wait, sir, aren't you heterosexual? Why, yes, but these women are (looks both sides before talking to you) fat whispered in hushed tones. Ah yes, not the erotic specimens that would bring fire to your loins.

OK, so let's not pester you about how society denigrates the overweight, claims weight can be controlled, and has perfectly logical
reasons for the biases (but really, it amounts to making excuses). After all, women with more ample hips were seen as models of beauty in the Renaissance.

We can replace these women with women of experience. Yes, you know what I'm talking about. Cougars. Grrr. Sure, they're a little gray, but for their age, maybe not so bad. Maybe they remind you of your, oh no. Noooo! Mother? Ewwwww! Grandmother!!! Stop it! Ewwww!

Perhaps we don't like to think about a locker room full of the geriatric set because they are SO old, but really, it's because we associate nudity with eroticism, and with advertisers realizing sex sells, they only want to promote teenagers and twenty-somethings and preferably early 20-somethings, lest they remind you that they might be your parents.

This sense of revulsion seems so strong that people are repulsed even as they get older. These women ought to be more age appropriate, but somehow the idea they were ewww when you were young isn't quite gone when you are older.

So revulsion typically comes from two sources. One is hygiene. There are some cultures, like Japanese culture, that might find even more things ewww than Americans, but Americans generally want everything to be ultra sanitary especially when it comes to food, but really, restrooms kinda fit the bill too.

The second eww has to do with how Americans especially American males equate nudity with eroticism and so either you like someone's body (i.e., they are sexy) or on the flip side, they are ewwww! Because you can't imagine making love to them. Even if that thought is not explicit, it is implied that this is the reason you'd rather avert your eyes.

The emotions of embarrassment and revulsion seem much prevalent than other more celebrated emotions. They are hard to write great plays about because they don't lift you up, nor do they make you particularly sad, and yet, they have a profound influence on the way you run your life.

Embarrassment

When we think of the panoply of human emotion, hope, fear, anger, sadness, one of the ones that seem really low on the totem pole is embarrassment, but it governs much of human behavior. It's the reason people close the doors on bathrooms, why people wear clothes, why people are reluctant to tell you about their relationships.

Indeed, for the most part, we all know that people have relationships and these relationships often, though not universally, involve sex. Some folks like to be loud and irreverent and will either tell made up details of their sex life or possibly accurate details. Given how important people find it in their lives, it's rather amazing that they feel so embarrassed by it.

Perhaps they think that what they do is too vanilla. They feel it's like a competition. I have to be better at it than my neighbor. I have to do it at least as often as my neighbor. It's almost like raising kids except most people are generally content that they do enough. OK, they might not be as rich as the jet set who can send their kids to private schools, but they're content sending kids to the local public school.

Perhaps they feel they don't do it enough. Some people are simply a lot less horny than others. This can be a result of medication or physiology. It can also be that the couple is simply less interested than they once were with each other.

Perhaps they feel that they are into far more kinky stuff than most people realize. That nice couple? They like to use handcuffs? She likes to be spanked? Oh dear!

The embarrassment is not confined to relationships.

Once upon a time, many high schools, even middle schools, had teenage kids of the same gender take showers with one another. I suspect this was due to the military. The military probably thought people should be in good athletic shape just in case they need to serve in the army. For cost cutting measures, they had very simple setups for showering facilities. Since the army used to be all-male and males were supposed to be OK seeing their buddies in the buff, there was no arrangement made to create separate stalls to, yes, avoid embarrassment.

At some point, towards the late 80s, parents started getting scared. I don't want little Tommy to see my little Bobby in a shower. I don't want Sandra to see Holly without clothes. We're encouraging potential homosexual behavior!

The funny thing is that athletes, who are considered the most masculine (or feminine) the toughest and often a bit homophobic, were still required, as part of their sport to shower in groups. Athletes got used to the idea. But the shy nerd became fairly paranoid at the idea. I don't want that person to see me.

Of course, there's not a particularly strong reason why this embarrassment should be except we are taught this when we are young. Most kids don't understand why they need to be embarrassed, but over years of being told to cover up, they start to feel that they don't want others to notice them, and this is even the case if they are particularly well-endowed or have large bosoms or generally shapely figures.

It's perhaps resulted in something that is particularly odd, which is an outgrowth of this embarrassment but has little to do with it.

The jock culture.

I know a few folks that don't do anything particularly athletic. They prefer video games. They prefer anime. They prefer more sedentary activities. In their minds, participating in athletics means agreeing with jocks that thought they could bully other kids, who traded intelligence for athletic skill, and who felt that those that weren't athletic were unworthy.

This ignores the fact that many of the athletes that fit into this category fell into two sports: football and basketball. Those in track and field, those in soccer, were probably a lot less likely to engage in this jock culture machismo. I could be wrong though since I never experienced the jock culture.

Remember the kids who went on a killing spree in Columbine? One reason were the jocks at the school. The flip side of the jock culture was the fact that women, or young girls really, seemed to prefer the self-confident athletes rather than the neurotic geek who seemed awkward when hanging out with women.

Even if athletics have benefits, being healthy, being strong, learning to make your body do what you want it to do, excelling at something different from the mind, many shun athletics because of these jocks.

I was recently at our tiny little gym at work, and the guy felt a bit of discomfort being there. He didn't want to lift weights. No, that seems wrong. But why?

Except I was in that same boat. I felt that the weights were something that muscle boys did, the Arnold wannabes, who wore skimpy bikini thongs, and were greased like a maypole, nary a hair to be seen on chest or legs. This was not who I visualized myself.

That view was silly too. I don't think of myself at a bodybuilder or a powerlifter, but I do lift weights to work out. Not as often as I used to, but nevertheless.

I know people who went to the gym, but otherwise, avoided the lockers. They'd put on their gym clothes prior to arriving at the gym and headed home to shower because they both didn't want to see and didn't want to be seen. Embarrassment. Logic should say that this attitude doesn't make sense, but embarrassment is not logic. It is a learned behavior. It is shame. It is lack of comfort. And it seems like it shouldn't be the case. Already people have poor self images, and this simply exacerbates it further.

If you can get beyond embarrassment then you can worry about more important things.

Less is More

Try harder. Give it your all. Bring your "A" game.

In sports, more effort is supposed to yield better results. That, or desire. You have to want it more than your opponent. If you win, then you "wanted" it more. Occasionally, you hear "maybe I wanted it too much" in a loss, a statement uttered by Arthur Ashe in a loss to Ilie Nastase. Both were tennis players, by the way.

When people think effort, they think muscular power, strength. Whether I realized it or not, I would tense up when I hit shots. I would clench my muscles. This happened without me fully realizing it.

Recently, I hurt my wrist. It was shortly after I was frustrated the way I was playing and started to hit harder. But due to bad technique or something, I ended up hurting my wrist, and it's hurt for a few months. So about a month ago, I decided to go to a doctor and he recommended I see a physical therapist, which I did.

The physical therapy has helped with the pain in the wrist and shoulder some, but more importantly, it's helped me become more aware various muscles that are tight, and just how tight they were. It was easy enough to tell. I just put my hand on my muscles, and they would feel hard as rock. And I was told they shouldn't feel that way.

I took a tennis lesson recently, and the recent observation harped on an early observation. Relax! But what does relax mean? Now that I'd done some physical therapy and begun to realize how I was tensing up, I had some idea of what I needed to do to relax.

I felt I wasn't getting my arm in a proper position, that it felt kinda rubbery and unformed. However, I was hitting at least as hard as I was when I was tensed up trying to hit hard, and that was more energy and looked like more effort. Certainly, it felt
like more effort.

I wanted to go back to the tennis wall and try it again today.

Except today wasn't yesterday. Yesterday was warm enough that the weather was heading north of 70 which is unseasonably warm. Today snapped back to brisk chilly weather in the 40s. It was windy. But at least it was sunny.

It's weather like this that tests the resolve of sports nuts, those who venture outside because they have a desire to hit against the ball, and can't wait until the weather is simply warm enough. There's sun. There's an opportunity!

So I went up to the wall, probably a little over a day after I had last been there. Yesterday it had been nice and warm, but I had five or ten minutes before it was getting ready to sprinkle and managed a few more minutes after that before conceding, heading back to the car, and the rains coming down again.

Today, no rain, but wind, blustery wind. I put on a jacket on top of my rugby shirt. It would provide marginally better protection.

My first few shots lacked power. I would frame the ball. Framing the ball is when you hit the ball on the frame instead of the strings. This is generally ineffective.

As time passed, I sensed myself getting tense again, and then not hitting with power.

Relax. Do less. Do less.

Finally, I was getting some of the rhythm I had yesterday. Don't tense the muscle. Keep it relaxed. The pace was starting to flow. I was getting pace again, and I was pleased I hadn't forgotten what to do.

Although it was still cold, and I was beginning to feel it in my face, I still wanted to pick up balls, and strike them again, remembering the lack of tension.

After what was maybe 20 minutes, I decided I had enough. The cold was winning, the light waning, as sunset would soon dim the skies, the sun dropping, dropping, dropping below the horizon.

It's strange that people have discovered this rather contrary idea, that being more relaxed, not trying as hard, will allow the body to relax, and in relaxing, allow it to move faster, hit harder, with less effort. It sounds preposterous, like a diet that allows you to eat all the food you want, and still lose weight.

Still, it seems to work.

I continue to think Zen thoughts. Peaceful, relaxed thoughts.

So I can smack a fuzzy yellow ball.

Whack!

Left and Right

As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry (over here), conservatives began to use the media to peddle their points. When Clinton was in power, they were the attack dogs, criticizing anything they could criticize. When Bush was in power, they were apologists for the government, repeating talking points that were dished out to talking heads that were trotted out as so much propaganda.

The left (and really, it's the American left, rather than the left as Europe knows it) had no counterprogramming. The stuff that existed was shrill and horrid, the equivalent of Rush Limbaugh. While some viewers/listeners gravitated to that, it was never as accepted by the NPR crowd as it was in "real smalltown America".

The first two shows to begin to provide alternatives were The Daily Show and The Colbert Report who used comedy and a crack team of researchers that would comb through the media content and point out the tactics being used by the right and make fun of it because these tactics were so simple-minded, and yet, sadly, so effective, because no one was prepared to connect the dots and show this kind of propaganda.

These were on the air quite a while before the next two shows became more popular, especially in the year leading up to the campaign. They are MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The Rachel Maddow Show.

The reason these two shows succeed where previous ones have failed is that the right tries to find something, say, Obama's idea for some kind of local militia, and then demonize it, say, by comparing it to Nazi Germany. Fox News is always good at making one side look bad, but pretty bad at making themselves look good.

The left, by contrast, typically finds outrageous things said by the right, and finds evidence that it is ludicrous. This is now being handled by the blogosphere and various reporting agencies. They were the ones able to sift out Palin's wardrobe excesses, or Palin being pranked by Canadian comedians who convinced her that she was talking to French president Sarkozy.

The reason that Olbermann and Maddow are intellectually more satisfying, though not as much as Stewart and Colbert, is because they refute arguments, and find evidence to do so. The right simply asserts X is bad. They haven't created the equivalent of the "truth squad" that finds out the details of things. The right is in the demonization market. Find something, and make it sound evil.

There was a recent convention of Republican governors where some felt they needed to rework the message to have a more populist appeal. The attack machinery, which served them well for so many years, has been deemed ineffective. However, with its past success, you can't imagine Republicans will give it up, especially if they are losing. Thus, ads by Elizabeth Dole and Chambliss spew vitriol hoping the public will fall for it. At one point, they appeared to do just that. While I have doubts that the public is getting much smarter, these shows do at least provide some defense against the lies and spin provided by the right.

At the very least, some of that should reduce down with a change of presidency. Sure, this will cause the right media to crank up their messages of hate, but at least there are shows that counter that, and it seems they are gaining in popularity.

Links

I thought I'd use my blog to record links of interest to myself:

• Game Rooms
  
• Star Wars Pumpkins
  
• 280 Slides
  
• Learn Ruby on Rails
  
• Railroad
  
• Cooking Biryani in a Rice Cooker
  
• Copy tree in Python
  
• Mannequin Pis, a restaurant
  
• Alton Brown Buffalo Wings
  
• Chicken Biryani
  
• What Ruby Has That Python Doesn't
  
• Python setup scripts
  
• Why Ruby is my favorite language
  
• Closing Time for USA at US Open
  

The Shadow Knows

I remember reading about an old time radio show called The Shadow. Old time radio shows, at least American ones, were influenced, I believe, by old time stage acting, which wasn't particularly good. People spoke a certain way that didn't feel at all natural. Acting was wooden, the characters boring. The Shadow fit this mold. The catch phrase was The Shadow Knows!.

If memory serves, it was a show about some guy who was trained in Asia, who could hide in shadows and track down bad guys. He used hypnotism to cloud men's minds.

Anyway, this is really an article about tennis. One big complaint I have about learning tennis is the lack of immediate feedback. I can't see how I hit right away. I have a camcorder to record my shots, but there's a delay as I rewind and watch it again.

I usually hit against a wall when I practice. My ideal setup would be a large (very large) television screen that sits about 10 feet above the ground, protected with some plexiglass like they have in racquetball courts. There would be a camera pointed at me, and so as I swing, I can watch myself as it happens. Another variation would be hitting against a mirror with a plexiglass protection. The problem with a mirror is that I would be rather far away so I'd find it hard to see details, but since I know what I'm looking for, it would be good enough.

Yesterday or so, I wanted to add one thing to my forehand that I've not been paying attention to lately. My non-dominant hand. Bad tennis players, which is nearly everyone you see playing (well, at least half), primarily use their dominant hand/arm to hit the ball. For a right hander, it is their right hand/arm. For now, let's assume I'm talking about righties.

If you watch a bad player, you generally see several problems with their game. First, they use their arm too much, and don't rotate their torso. One way to see this easily is to pay attention to their shoulders. The less it moves when hitting, the worse a player they are. I have this problem, so I end up using more arm than I should.

Second, they don't use any spin or if they do, it's underspin on both forehands and backhands. It's especially considered a weakness on the forehand to hit only slice forehands, although some crafty guys hit it to good effect.

Third, they have little follow-through. The follow-through is the part of the tennis stroke after the ball is hit. If you ever watch football, you'll see someone trying to tackle (knock down) the quarterback. Many times, the quarterback takes one or two steps and the defensive guy runs right past him. Why? Because that guy is so intent on running so fast and hard so he can really hit the quarterback hard. Pain is a part of football, and defensive guys are taught to inflict pain. The defensive guy can't stop himself because he has so much momentum built up.

Same thing with the follow through. When you are hitting the follow through, your arm should literally wrap around your waist or neck. That's how fast your swing should be. It's not intuitive because most players don't think about hitting the shot that hard that it would require the arm to be wrapped around themselves. But it's needed to provide pace.

The fourth mistake, and this is usually the one you see the most often, is failure to use the left hand. All pros and good players use their left hand. It's used to assist taking back the racquet, to help rotate the shoulders properly. The problem? It's really hard to use the left hand on the forehand.



Watch former number 1, Roger Federer's left hand. It's in front of his body. Typically players will do this, and then as they rotate their bodies, their left arm will pull into their body, as if they were doing a bicep curl with their left arm (but more lazy). The only major player to not do this is John McEnroe who had to have the laziest looking strokes ever. He just leaves his left arm hanging down and never does anything with it on his forehand. Otherwise, unless the player is rushed, they use their left hand to set up both their forehand, and if they hit a one-handed backhand or a slice.

The left hand is used primarily to get the racquet back quickly, but also as a way to change grips although most pros can change grips by simply flipping their racquet. This is why you see players with the nervous habit of spinning their racquets with one hand. They've learned to spin it and "catch" it with the right grip.

I've always found it difficult to use my left hand on my forehand. First, you end up moving your left hand about parallel to the baseline, basically pointing to the left, much like the picture with Federer above. This is, plainly put, awkward. Then, as the ball comes close, you are supposed to point to the ball with your left hand.

At this point, you are rotating your body very fast to the left, and like a figure skater spinning, you pull your left arm close to the body, typically left hand near your left nipple (there, I said it!) while the right arm and body twists fully around.

It's a complex motion, more complex than the backhand. You can see why so few recreational players learn to use their left hand.

However, even if you can't do all those things with your left hand, there is one thing most players can manage to do.



As you lift your racquet, you can hold it with the left hand as Federer does in the picture above. This makes it easier to control the racquet as you take it back.

I decided to add that part to my game today, after watching a Federer slow motion video. Here's such a video:



In particular, pay attention to his left hand. He keeps it on his racquet a long time before letting it go. He uses it to rotate the racquet and help rotate his shoulders (really, he rotates his shoulders to his right, which causes the arm and racquet to rotate right too).

Finally, due to watching some videos, I noticed I would take my racquet back so it pointed to the back fence. To be honest, this is not a real problem. So many players do this, including world number 3, Novak Djokovic, that I shouldn't worry if I do it.


But I don't want to do it!

I mean, Federer doesn't do it, so I'm trying not to do it. It's this d**n muscle memory. I have no problem shadow stroking the shot I want to hit (shadow stroking is when you swing without hitting a ball). But when it comes time to hit the ball, the muscles react a certain way, and voila, I find myself taking the racquet back a la Djokovic.

That's when I discovered something.

Oh yes.

Today was partly cloudy, but at an opportune moment, the sun peeked its head out. This cast a shadow of me on the court. I could then see myself hit by watching the shadow on the ground. I do this from time to time. Since I can't easily see myself hit the stroke (it goes too fast, the angle is not right to see it), seeing the shadow is a decent substitute.

What I realized was I need to swing forward as the racquet barely drops. I tend to drop the racquet a bit, and it goes behind me. By abbreviating the stroke, and moving the racquet forward as it drops, I find I can hit harder, and closer to the way I want to hit. Not perfect, but at least in the right vicinity.

That was good, because the last 2-3 weeks, I had lost some of the power I had hitting the ball. Much of this loss of power came from trying to fix the way I was setting up on my takeback. I had been trying to hit it like Roger Federer (again). But I recently found a video of Scot, Andy Murray. I used to want to hit the way he hits although at the time, I had no idea Murray hit like this. It was pure happenstance that I was looking at his video recently, mostly due to his recent success.



While watching this video, pay attention to the racquet face. As he takes it back, you can see it point to you. If Murray were holding a large hand mirror with the racquet face being the mirror, you could see your face nearly the whole time. Many players, including Federer, end up pointing the racquet face down when the racquet goes back as far as it will go. Murray doesn't do that, and it keeps his racquet motion simple on setup.

At first, I was planning to emulate more of Federer, because I felt Federer deliberately gets his racquet face down, before lifting it up, but that was more quirky to hit than I expected. So although I do that even when I don't intend to, I just think I'm hitting like Murray does, and it simplifies how I think of my forehand.

The other thing I started to do, to gain back power was to rotate my body. Basically, to get power in a tennis stroke, you think of yourself like a baseball player. A baseball player does a great deal of body rotation to generate power. Indeed, they user their whole body, legs, body rotation, etc. It's not simply swinging the bat with the arms. This allows a baseball player to generate a lot of power.

Similarly, you can think of golfers. Golfers also learn to rotate their entire torso. They turn their body away, then rotate into the shot. This is what you want to do in tennis too. Let the torso initiate the body rotation. Without this torso rotation (also called the core), it's hard to get power. Finally, you have to be pretty loose.

One part of my forehand that's turned out reasonably well is the follow through. I used to follow through in front of my body. When I learned to hit a windshield wiper motion, I'd think of it like a windshield wiper, that is occuring on the plane of the windshield.

However, the windshield wiper really requires rotating the arm so the elbow sticks out more, and you finish the wiper to the left of your body, not in front of you. I had been working on the follow through a great deal, and while I did that, I completely forgot about the technique on the setup of my forehand. If I were to break up the forehand, I'd say it's the takeback (the part of the strokes from seeing the ball, to getting the racquet back roughly pointing to the fence), then the swing forward, then the follow-through. The swing forward is the swing from the furthest back point up to hitting the ball. The follow through is the swing after hitting the ball.

There are several things I want to work on. First, I want to use my left hand more in setup. I have an idea how to do this, watching Federer. Second, I want to get the Andy Murray motion down a bit smoother. Third, I need to keep reminding myself to accelerate the racquet forward sooner than I expect, and not to take back the racquet as far back as I think I should. Basically, as the racquet begins to drop, I need to start accelerating forward. Ironically, all that abbreviated motion seems to create more power than my longer strokes.

The other thing I need to do is hit that same stroke much slower. I find the exercise of hitting hard, then slowing it down helps me to smooth out the stroke. If I just power the shot, I get too tense and too tired as a result.

Indeed, I've noticed, as a result of my physical therapy, that I clench my shoulder too much when I swing. I'll need to consciously remind myself to relax that shoulder. One thing good about physical therapy is that it's made me more body aware. I wish I knew about this earlier and that it didn't take an injury to make me learn about my body from a tennis point of view. I've been told I'm too tensed up when I play, but without enough body awareness, I didn't know how to relax properly. I'm still not there yet, but at least I'm more in tune with my body tensing up.

All in all, given that I thought my stroke was completely awful this morning, I ended up the day feeling a lot better about the motion. Now it's a matter of repetition and making sure I don't fall into bad habits.

That's mostly what writing this blog entry is about.

Here's a summary:

• Don't take the racquet back as far as you think
  
• Use the left hand to set up the racquet on takeback
  
• Think of a windshield wiper motion in the takeback to emulate a Murray setup. Try to maintain the correct grip.
  
• As the racquet drops down, begin to accelerate forward.
  
• Rotate the body quickly as the racquet drops. This initiates the forehand.
  
• End up with the elbow in front and the racquet off to the side and behind
  
• Pull the left arm as you rotate
  
• Don't tense the right shoulder on racquet acceleration in the swing forward stage.
  

Exit Stage Right

Back in the Clinton days, there was a surge in conservative, neocon media. This came primarily from two sources: Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. Basically, they became full time apologists for Republican misdeeds and full time attack dogs against Democrats. What they discovered, ironically, is something very Soviet. Propaganda.

Remember when Americans would criticize the Soviet press for giving a one-sided account of everything. They would rewrite history so it better suited the leadership. They pointed at the freedoms of the press, the right to elect more than one candidate. This was used to foster a hate of the Soviet Union. At the very least, it was helpful that the average Soviet citizen, or at least the average Muscovite is so intensely cynical, that they understood what BS was being fed to them.

Somehow, it occurred to folks that these same propaganda techniques that were used then could be used in the US. Who woulda thunk?

And since then, the level of news discourse has been dragged downhill. Edward Murrow would be horrified. As a man who brought integrity to news, who questioned the McCarthy witchhunts, he brought a new medium to the public and gave it credibility. He'd likely wince at both what's happened to news, especially the tabloidization of news, but worse, the conservative media echo chamber which takes everything out of context, and spews it to the public because enough of the public would rather hear stuff than verify any of it is true. Is it surprising that the last two Democratic candidate for President (Kerry and Obama) were the "most liberal" in all the Senate. Funny how that always happens.

It's like there's a Mad Libs of conservative tactics, and they fill in the name of the current candidate and attack them. So and so is a liberal, weak on defense, a socialist, wants to raise your taxes, wants to takes your guns, etc.

This has caused politics to devolve into the way it is now. I was listening to some PBS television special called The Conservatives, which, by the way, is incredibly difficult to search for. There should be some way that I can search for all programs PBS has aired in the last few months. It's sad how much keyword searching dominates search so I can't locate this piece of information.

During this interview, they talked to a moderate Republican senator or congresswoman or some such. OK, I finally found it, partly because PBS has it titled as something different. It's called: 2008: A Republican Reinvention and the person was Christine Todd Whitman, former Republican governor of New Jersey.

In the interview, Whitman says the party was so concerned about getting elected that they found hot button issues to talk about, usually abortion and gay marriage. The purpose was to use these topics to draw out the vote. Whitman points out that these topics, while highly emotional, are rather distant for most Americans, as many are not involved in gay marriage or having abortions. She feels the Republican party needs to address issues of concern to the average American.

The one thing that's changed in this election cycle is the growing response from the left, though they spend most of their time pointing out errors from the right. The right spews propaganda, and the left finds way to deflate it.

Oddly enough, the first place to do this with any serious effect was The Daily Show. Jon Stewart is a very intelligent guy. His staff would find how Republicans used talking points issued to anyone talking to the media, to create an echo chamber, where phrases are uttered and repeated, to control the media. Essentially, the equivalent of Soviet style media without the Soviet control of the media. Why are such talking points necessary? Why are the exact phrases needed to be uttered by every individual representing the party?

Except no one much noticed for a while, until Stewart's team made fun of it. He also made fun of politicians saying one thing a few months ago, then saying something completely the opposite now. We all know politicians lie, but wow, the amazing lengths at which they go to lying. And the funny thing? The people who listen? They'll tell you they are honest folks. And when you point out that these Republicans have changed their stories, their suspension of disbelief is beyond belief. They simply treat it as conspiracy, and won't listen to obvious evidence placed in front of them.

In particular, many conservatives complained about sexism in the attacks of Palin, but were perfectly willing to criticize Hillary. Rove praised Palin's experience as mayor and governor, while denigrating a potential VP pick for Obama, governor Tim Kaine of Virginia, who has been governor more years than Palin, and mayor of a larger city (Richmond) than Palin. The hypocrisy of this was unbelievable, as was Fox News's reporting of this.

After Stewart, came Stephen Colbert who produced a faux conservative TV show, The Colbert Report. Again, the point was to point out the follies of Republicans.

It's not that there weren't attempts to combat Rush Limbaugh. Democrats trotted out Air America to compete. It was that the competition was as painful to listen to as the conservative version. The humor in The Daily Show offers a sophistication that is completely missing from conservative diatribes. This appeals to the snobby, elitist, but well-educated Democrats.

However, shows are now popping up that provide a left leaning contrast, though, for the most part, they are more palatable than the conservative ones because they spend most of the time debunking Republican tactics, rather than spewing invented crap. These shows are Countdown with Keith Olbermann, who also criticized Hillary, by the way, so he's not completely flag-waving for Democrats and The Rachel Maddow Show, which has elevated in popularity immensely due to her charms and insights. Indeed, though it's well known she's a lesbian, she's so good at what she does, people don't think about it much, and thinks about what she says.

To be fair, these shows serve a purpose that is sad. They are there to harness the power of the Internet, and point out all sorts of inconsistencies from conservative media sources. Although the Internet also provides this resource, it's so much less pervasive than television. This allows people who read about "palling around with William Ayers" to find McCain "palled around" with Gordon Liddy, and it was David Letterman who pointed this out!

Ultimately, one hopes that this kind of silly "make-up" stuff will leave politics altogether, but the only way it happens is if people read up on stuff, instead of letting folks tell them the truth.

Indeed, with the recent gay marriage California proposition, people spewed out how marriage has been a certain way forever. They did no research on this. They just felt it must be so because they see evidence around them, from their own marriages, to their parents, to their grandparents. Marriages were often arranged. Certain marriages were once illegal (blacks and whites). Polygamy has been seen as OK by certain religions. Again, the pure lack of research based on the "obviousness" that this is the way it's always been is the kind of political naivete that this country doesn't need.

The problem? It's hard to educate people to think. School is a many year process, and certain religious groups would be happy if you never learned to think because eventually you may question the religious underpinnings. A film was made called Idiocracy where a guy who isn't particularly bright eventually finds himself in the future and realizes he's the smartest guy around, because everyone else has become idiots.

One can only hope, and really that's all it is, because the US population is still mostly the way it was a few years ago, that change is coming to the populace, that is tired of such inane politics and tired of being lied to by people who find it's more important to win campaigns (and then accuse others of "doing anything to win" when they are more guilty of it themselves) than to help Americans.

I think history will eventually point to this era and wonder how such a thing could even happen, how we could find people that would lie and distort because the public would believe anything they said. That time can come none too soon, and we can replace this folly with something resembling rational thought.

Forehand to the Fore

I'm basically in the field of software engineering. Perhaps unlike many people in the field I find it vaguely dissatisfying. I've always felt that programming trafficked in the arbitrary. I'll give a recent example.

I was trying to run some script in a Linux/Unix environment. For some reason, it wouldn't do anything. The explanation for the problem? In Windows, if you hit the return key while typing a document, it inserts two characters in the file: a carriage return and a linefeed. This is just the way Windows does things.

But in Linux, they've decided two characters is silly, and they use the single newline (the linefeed is really a newline). Linux itself is stupid. When it sees the carriage return, rather than ignore it, it panics and does nothing. I'm anthropomorphizing, of course, but that's the gist of what's going on. So, rather than Windows finally doing what Unix/Linux does, there's this mismatch that makes everyone aware of what a mess the two systems are.

Programming is full of arbitrary rules like this. People say Ruby is a language that follows POLS, that is, the principle of least surprise. Most programming environments are simply surprise after surprise with people following their own standards and thus creating a myriad of mess. Let's face it, I'm guilty of this too. Given my druthers, I'm unlikely to research what others have done, and make my own way, thus contributing to the mess. Sometimes I think software needs to go through an approval process and if it fails, you have to go back and fix it. And this approval process is external to the company. Given how secretive most companies are, we're doomed to mediocre, poorly written, idiosyncratic software.

This is perhaps why I like sports. The goals are often very simple, and yet the achievement very difficult because there is no one right answer, and yet, what's going on is fairly transparent.

In particular, my latest obsession has been the forehand in tennis.

If you've never played tennis, let me briefly tell you a little about it. First, I hope you know what a tennis court looks like and what a racquet look like. I want you to visualize yourself standing at the baseline. That's the line parallel to the net that the players stand at. It's probably 30 feet from the net. Your shoulders are parallel to the net which means you are facing the net.

Now put your hands straight down, your palms gripping the outside of your legs. Then, pull your palms away until it's maybe 2 feet from your body (on your side), where your hand is about waist height, your arms straight. Essentially your arms form an upside down V. Let you hands point basically down, your palm facing the net.

For sake of simplicity, let's assume you are right handed. Suppose someone tosses the ball to your right hand. You bat the ball with the palm so that it faces the net. That would be the forehand.

Now imagine someone tosses the ball to your left hand. Take your right hand and move it to where your left hand is as if you are clapping. This would likely mean you turning your shoulders left to make this clapping motion. When the ball is heading to your left hand, which is now covered by your right hand (as if you stopped at the motion of clapping), bat the ball with the back of your right hand toward the net. That's the backhand.

Most people find the forehand more natural, even though the backhand is simpler and mostly involves pushing away, while the forehand involves a more complex pulling motion.

In modern tennis, the forehand is king. If you're likely to hit a hard, powerful shot, it's going to be the forehand. There are many great forehands, very few great backhands. These days, many people hit their backhands with two hands, using their left hand and right hand in concert.

This style, almost unseen prior to the 1970s, has become the prevalent way to hit the backhand, a result of many youths learning to play when they are young, and that a two-handed shot can deal with more difficult shots (the high backhand) and be more accurate down-the-line. The one-handed backhand means you must learn at least two shots, the slice for when you lack the time to set up, and the topspin, which is the power shot.

To me, the backhand is a simpler shot, having less mechanics. I could be wrong.

Instead, I've obsessed over the forehand.

You think this is a trivial pursuit. The goal is indeed trivial, but the pursuit challenging. How do you hit a hard forehand? The thoughts have changed over the years.

Throughout the 1960s, tennis players had simplified the hitting motion as much as they could. They didn't believe in much spin, now a key component to the modern forehand. They didn't believe in a loop motion, where modern players carve out a C motion to increase racquet head speed.

Instead, the racquet was taken straight back so it pointed to the back fence and then, in a fairly straight motion, the racquet was brought forward until eventually the racquet pointed to the net about shoulder height, while the weight was transferred from the right foot to the left foot in a stepping motion. This weight transfer was the secret to power in the classic game.

The modern game has players typically standing with both feet side by side about shoulder width apart, parallel to the baseline. The player rotates at the waist to the right, then create angular momentum by twisting the waist so the torso moves from facing the right to facing the left. The body plays a role, but the way it gets involved is a twisting motion.

Most weekend players don't realize how much the body plays a role in power. People say momentum is mass times velocity. If you swing mostly with the arm, then you are using less mass. If you can coordinate your body so that your torso twists at the same time your arm moves, indeed, so your arm acts like a catapult where your body is the spring, then you will add more mass behind the shot, and thus create a more powerful shot.

Still, there are other factors involved. They involve the arm itself, how far away from the body to hit, whether the arm should be straight or have a bend, how the wrist is oriented, how you hold the racquet, what angle it forms.

If I were to show you a video of a top player, say Roger Federer, in slow motion, I could point out any of a number of things that he is doing. If you were to imitate Roger Federer, and believe me, it would only be an imitation, you would become increasingly aware of the most minute details.

How much of a role each of his idiosyncrasies plays in his overall power is unclear. To be sure, each professional has their own quirks, some of which may simply be comfort, an extraneous motion that has been added after years of hitting hundreds of thousands or millions of tennis balls.

Despite the variation, there are common aspects that great modern tennis players use, including how smooth the racquet moves, how the follow-through is achieved, how the racquet face is oriented as the racquet accelerates to the ball, how the weight is transferred. There is a core basic structure to the modern forehand, which doesn't resemble the forehand hit, say, by players in the 1930s, like Big Bill Tilden or Rene Lacoste, who had a different conception of how the forehand should be hit.

I realize, watching video, that I didn't know this core structure, and it took watching a lot of pro players, then watching myself on video, to realize how herky-jerky my motion was. Also, I needed someone to point out how stiff my body was, how tense it was.

Tennis, like many sports, is not without a sense of irony. While players like to think of the sport like bodybuilders think of lifting weights, with aggression, with muscle, the fact is that muscling the ball tends to slow down your shot, and that the secret is being relaxed and moving your body quickly, in concert, while being relaxed. The relaxation allows the muscles to move more quickly, not impeded by stiffness.

I picked Roger Federer mostly because he was number 1, and compared to current number 1, Rafael Nadal, his forehand motion is very simple. His motion isn't as simple as, say, Agassi, who was known for his compact setup, and serves as role model to many a player. The modern player has added a lengthier setup, including Federer and Murray, and often have a very large torso rotation starting the motion with the chest facing the right fence and ending up with the chest facing the left fence, thus a full 180 degree of rotation. Such drastic torso motion was uncommon in the 1950s, but has contributed to the modern forehand.

You would think a guy my age (40) would not care to learn a new forehand after having played the game this long, and yet I've always tinkered with my forehand over the years, trying to imitate this pro or that. Only recently have I realized I lacked the proper tools and the proper way to watch pros to make anything close to a realistic imitation.

With YouTube and dedicated fans, you can now get access to a whole host of videos of pros hitting in slow motion. That combined with your own camcorder has created a way for a player to analyze pro strokes and compare it to their own. Realize that we lack the fine motor control of a top professional and thus we can't even begin to approach the accuracy or the raw speed that they can generate.

Even so, you can get the basics right and that can help out your shot tremendously.

I find that I am fighting muscle memory. I want to hit the forehand a certain way, and the body wants to do something else, and I have to figure out how to trick the body to make it do what I want. It's not easy, indeed, I've spent months trying to get the motion right.

It requires constant re-checking. What is Roger Federer really doing? What am I really doing? Does a certain motion that he does really work for me or not? I have to give myself a chance to learn how to hit, and this involves hours spent at a tennis wall. The tennis wall isn't ideal as it doesn't replicate what a player does. It's a poor man's substitute, but it doesn't get impatient, and it is free. So it serves its purpose (a tennis wall is a wall that has a line painted so simulate a net).

Ultimately, the proof is the quality of ball hit, but I also feel that part of it is the swing path. Not only do I want to hit an effective forehand, but I believe an effective forehand comes about due to a nice pretty stroke. Thus, I want both. So I keep laboring, analyzing, tinkering, and hoping to achieve a goal of a nice forehand which I can eventually just ingrain and not think about much.

Always a work in progress.