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.

What Defines Marriage?

I wasn't thinking about writing on this topic, but here it goes anyway. Current voting in California has Proposition 8 passing, due in large part to African Americans supporting the proposition, at a clip of 70 for to 30 against despite numbers exceeding 90 percent support for Obama. While Obama was not in favor of Proposition 8, he certainly didn't want to create negative ripples by committing to heavily to this. I doubt he made commercials supporting the defeat of Proposition 8.

Someone made the argument that marriage is between a man and a woman. Now, what was this argument based on? Judeo-Christian definitions? Is marriage a sacred institution?

Let's try this thought experiment. If a man and woman are married in a Hindu ceremony, would you consider their marriage valid? Most people would, right? Yet, Hinduism is quite different from Judeo-Christian tradition. People like to point to the US as a kind of Christian nation despite the fact that the founding fathers were interested in separation of church and state. Freedom of religion should also be freedom from religion.

People like to point to religious institutions as a kind of backing to marriage, and that religious institutions generally, though not exclusively, prefer to define marriage as between a man and a woman. This religious backing creates the weight of authority.

However, it's the legal form of marriage that carries weight because that's what allows spouses to have visitation rights, to have property rights, and so on and so forth. Some people call this legal form a "civil union". People have argued for removing marriage from legal usage so that, as far as legal institutions are concerned, civil unions are what's important.

The thinking is that when you say two people are married, then their marriage is given the sanctity of some religion. However, there are religions, even in the traditional Judeo-Christian structure, perhaps especially in such traditions, that permit multiple wives. Both Muslims and Mormons allow polygamy, though multiple wives is fairly uncommon among Muslims and mainstream Mormons have long since abandoned polygamy so they could be taken more seriously by mainstream Christians.

Consider atheists. Should a male and female atheists be allowed to marry? That their marriage conforms to what religion considers valid marriage should be inconsequential. Is there marriage being given the equivalent force of religion despite the couple not believing in religion? Most people would not have a problem with atheists getting married and would not nullify their marriage.

The religious form of marriage often has a legal counterpart. Thus, Christians who don't favor polygamy, have made polygamy illegal, despite, say, certain conservative Mormons who think it's their right to have plural wives. There is a great irony that Mormons have closed off one form of marriage (same-sex marriage) which would affect more conservative Mormons.

It just so happens that most religious traditions happen to only permit a single man and a single woman to get married, but just because a couple gets married doesn't mean that some religion has permitted this to happen.

Many years ago, many states had anti-miscegenation laws which basically said couples of different races couldn't marry. This was mostly due to the fact that white Americans saw African Americans as something less than human, and that mixing black and white blood would lead to impurities in the white race. Religious figures could find justification of these laws through some passage in the Bible.

At some point, the government said this was wrong, and no such law would be allowed. These days, most people no longer consider mixed marriages a problem and certainly not enough to make the marriages null and void.

So why the change in attitude? Did the Bible change between then and now? What happened, quite simply, was that people had some irrational dislike of interracial marriages, and found some justification that made their prejudices have the weight of religion. And yet, once the laws disappeared and people got used to the idea, the thought of mixed marriages being "wrong" is seen as folly. How did we ever think like that?

I would argue that in those days, people would say such interracial marriages brought down the institution of marriage, which was a polite way of saying they disapproved of such marriages taking place.

There are already gay marriages taking place now. Do people feel like this has made their marriage less worthy?

Finally, people talk about marriage as something sacred. It's something two people get together because of religion. If that's the case, why allow divorce? Divorce is an insult to the marital institution. Despite many Christians finding the notion of arranged marriages absurd, the fact of the matter is most Indian marriages do not end in divorce. If the couple doesn't get along, they still don't get divorced. Bollywood marriages, unlike their Hollywood counterparts, generally do last, and for decades. Hollywood marriages, one could easily argue, made it acceptable for people who feel unhappy in a marriage to split up.

And yet, no one much seems to say divorce should not happen. And how many single family households are there where the mother and father never got married before the woman had a child? Should that be illegal? Should the mother have rights? No one seems to question she should despite the lack of a marriage.

The reason no one cares is that heterosexuals get divorced (at least in the US) all the time and to take this right away, despite the way it reduces the sanctity of marriage, would be unthinkable. People want the option to opt out of marriage if they can.

Ultimately, while people claim gay marriage is something most religious traditions are against, there are so many attacks on marriage that happen in normal heterosexual relations that those should be considered illegal too. The fact of the matter is that many conservatives are uncomfortable with gays in general and find some convenient religious excuse to explain why gays can not marry even as they allow atheists to marry, even as they allow married couples to divorce, people to have affairs without legal punishment.

And really, these propositions are out there anyway mostly to get a certain kind of voter to come out and vote, one who doesn't fully understand all the details, and one who is likely to vote for one party over another. At least, that's how it worked in 2004. It turns out, however, in California, the Democrats were just as guilty of this because of religious conservatism.

It's not the religious sanctity that needs to be observed, but the legal one. Whether it be called civil unions or marriage, the legal form should be allowed.

The issue of gay marriage is somewhat odd because a few years ago, most people would tell you it wasn't even on the radar (or gaydar as the case may be) of gay political activists who felt that gay marriage was so far from being socially acceptable that it wasn't worth the fight. It was only because some conservatives made it a big deal that it got a big push.

Indeed, it's as far as it is now because of that push.

But here's the kicker as far as gay marriage is concerned. Too many people still see homosexuality as something that is a choice. Yet, how many people have willingly chosen to be gay. Has the percentage gone way up? If it was so "easy" to recruit, why aren't there far more gays now?

The percentage of gays is somewhere between 5 and 10 percent, possibly smaller. With regular marriages that are maybe 10 to 20 times more common, how exactly does gay marriage affect heterosexual marriage? Indeed, if it were allowed, would it not make people more accepting of others. People hate for no good reason, and yet, this is giving the weight of law to hate more.

The irony is that there are African Americans (and Latinos and Asians) who say "we're born black" and won't believe people are born gay because it's not hereditary with 100% certainty (and really, Obama is half-white, by that measure, and really didn't go through the traditional African American experience).

People who voted for Prop 8 thought there would be certain consequences or they certainly disliked the idea, and the irony is that the same prejudices often befell them, showing that being a victim of prejudice doesn't make you any more enlightened.

Indeed, this creates interesting issues for someone like Obama. Liberals generally believe in the ability of people to do good for one another while conservatives generally believe more in survival of the fittest at least when it comes to making money and the right to discriminate, the right to impose religious values on others because people are sinful and need the weight of law to make them more like us. Indeed, conservatism is often about making others more like us, while liberals take the more challenging path of accepting people, for the most part, as themselves.

I think the key to changing views is more education. Religion seems to be against education because the goal of education, effectively, is to question authority, or to merely question. Galileo faced the wrath of the religious mighty because he dared question their view of the universe. Religion seems to say it's perfectly OK not knowing much, because it leaves the leaders in charge, and the masses pacified. Once people begin to ask "why should things be this way", they begin to make more informed choices.

And this is why, it seems, that with education, with questioning authority, we'll eventually come to see this period as a time of folly when people found reasons to hate others and dress it up in a gown of religious authority to make themselves feel better about their decisions.

The Reality of Obama

People always said about Bill Clinton that there was Bill Clinton, the campaigner, and Bill Clinton, the governor, and I mean that as someone who governs, even as the President. Bill Clinton, the campaigner, was always more successful than Bill Clinton, the governor, although he did eventually get quite a few things done.

Were it not for the OPEC crisis and Iran and Carter's lack of insider savvy in Washington, Jimmy Carter may have been one of the best presidents. He looked at alternative energy sources, helped nations that warred to achieve peace.

Obama comes in on a wave of hope, and some have already contended that there's no way that he can accomplish everything he says he will do (although some have also criticized that he hasn't actually promised too many specifics either). To be fair, compare that to "W". What things has he promised and delivered? Both he and his father governed war, so that it became the issue, and not the US.

I'll agree that we don't know how liberal Obama is. The fact of the matter is that he's not so charismatic that whatever he says, people do. This means he has to deal with the reality that the last 8 years, and really the last 20 years, have seen a move to the right, anchored by religious conservatives. Even the fiscal conservatives have to be concerned, although they tend to get away with it because they bankroll campaigns, and polticians aren't always so pure in their motivations.

Because of this, Obama will have to pick his battles carefully. When Clinton first came to office, the first two big issues he tackled were gays in the military and health care reform. Both went badly because there was huge resistance to them. The military was too conservative to listen to Clinton, and the medical lobby also didn't want reform of health care. This cost Clinton political capital (although, to be fair, he did win re-election rather handily).

It helps that Obama has a Democratic majority, but don't expect that Republicans won't try to fight this, as they have in the past. We'll see how committed McCain is to his promise of trying to assist Obama, as he is still a senator and seemingly more moderate than most Republicans (I feel all these years of Bush support was out of ambition to be President).

I think Obama will look to some safer topics like infrastructure reform as well as trying to phase out US involvement in Iraq. We like to flag-wave and claim the US only goes to war for noble purposes, but these wars aren't free, even as we borrow money to finance them. It will be hard for the economy to recover if the government keeps paying for an expensive war.

I'm surprised how many conservatives pronounced gloom and doom based on zero economic knowledge. They simply assert statements with no reason at all. This was the same kind of assertion of socialism, terrorism, Christian extremism. In other words, McCain's campaign was simply throwing as many names as Obama to see what would stick, primarily because McCain knew his ideas didn't resonate enough (he resorted to the same old, lower taxes argument that Republicans always trot out).

To combat this, I think Obama will look to using grassroots organization to move some of his "agenda" forward. This will be completely separate from the usual Congress stuff like the war or infrastructure reform.

Anyway, he's got a few months to set up a staff, and so it won't be for a few months into the new administration before we see what happens (the first big thing is who gets picked as his replacement as senator of Illinois).

Whither Prop 8?

Starting in 2004, one of the keys for conservatives to get elected was to put gay marriage on ballots. Often, these measures were conservative in nature, reaffirming straight marriage. The idea was often a twofer. Convince conservatives that if they didn't vote for conventional marriage, then this would open the floodgates and allow gay marriage and gay lifestyle to run rampant, and while such voters were being baited to come to the polls, they'd also vote conservative.

Except in normally very blue California, the current polls suggest Proposition 8 which affirms conventional marriage (ironically supported by a treasure trove of Mormon funding which lead to misleading ads) is likely to pass. This is even as many celebrities are against it, many leading Democrats are against it, and even Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is against it.

The problem is, alas, a lack of education. It is both a combination of fear and loathing for gay marriages from socially conservative Latinos and African Americans who voted increasing Democrat, despite not supporting many of the more socially liberal views. Indeed, were the Republicans not so reliant on race-baiting to convince conservative poor religious whites to vote against minorities, you could almost imagine African Americans supporting Republicans.

I can see the Republican party splitting in two directions. One is moderate Republicans which is heading to the center on social issues, but staying conservative on fiscal issues. The other way, which seems more likely and was spearheaded by Huckabee, is to be socially conservative, but still looking at supporting the poor. This side would have to embrace African Americans and Latinos. The problem, for now, is the lack of a charismatic candidate, and no, I don't consider Sarah Palin that person.

The key to real changes is improved education. Religious conservatives believe in loyalty to religion above all. If a kid lacks education, this seems a bonus, even if this makes people increasingly susceptible to the weakest arguments.

Gay marriage is a perfect example. Statistics show that LGBT people make up maybe 5% of the population. Even if every one got married, it's still a very small percentage of American marriages. Even so, there's a perception that being gay is a choice and that people can be "wooed" into it, even as there's really no evidence of this. This is that fear and people's general discomfort as well which they back by pointing to a religious tome to back their prejudices.

If Obama is to truly make the changes he wants, he really has to figure out how to make education more valuable to people, but that is tough. Education is a multi-year goal that not everyone agrees. While there is no guarantee that well-educated people are going to be more liberal (there are bright conservatives), the chances are still far better than if they are not well-educated.

To be well-educated is not about knowing more facts than the next person. No, it's about thinking critically. It's about listening to someone's statements and pointing out its inaccuracies. Too often, people listen to an argument and if it sounds good, they think it is good. They lack the mental acumen to see if the argument truly makes sense. Obama and his wife, with their training as lawyers, have learned to dissect arguments, argue its pro and cons. It's perhaps not surprising that Clinton was also a lawyer.

They've all learned, of course, that you can't present standard logical debate arguments to the average American who can't appreciate such arguments. Appeals are made to emotion. I'm moved by Obama's soaring rhetoric too, but it's true that emotion is just that. You can use it to lead and convince, but it leads and convinces with the heart, rather than with the mind.

If Prop 8 passes, it will be because a very blue California is still easily swayed by misleading ads, and even as they voted for Obama, they couldn't bring themselves to vote No to 8.

Obama himself wasn't willing to expend political capital to put his full support behind no on 8. In the end, he knew that was a powder keg that could have derailed his presidency before it started. Now he has to tread a fine line to figure out how to deal with this issue. Certainly, he's likely to avoid it for a while as he tries to pass other initiatives.

Consider the start of Clinton's administration where capital was wasted on gays in the military and for health care reform where strong opposition built up and Clinton had to back down. President Obama will look for safer ground before he tries something with more controversy.

Indeed, if he thinks he can win in 2012, then he may push all those initiatives to the second term, unless his first term goes so swimmingly well that he'll tackle issues few people thinks he will.

Still, I think few people would have thought gay marriage would have gained this much traction. It's not there yet, as it's still being used as a wedge issue to convince religious conservatives to vote conservative, and while certain states have voted against it, there's a possibility that, with the right Supreme Court mix, it could eventually be defeated through the courts. Indeed, court appointments will become a huge issue.

What Obama will do, I'm sure, is to use the grassroots organization to build support from the ground up even during his presidency, and may represent the most novel politician ever, if he takes advantage of it.

Now the question is how will he lead?

Obama 08

So I was driving home when I noticed this car ahead of me with the license plate Obama 08. Not a bumper sticker. A vanity plate. From West Virginia. In Maryland?

Weird.

Wonder if it bodes well?

Voting in the Morning

The Internet has revolutionized the way candidates run elections, from email to viral videos to raising money, the Internet is now a resource that modern candidates need to use.

The one place it hurts, for now, is the act of voting, which has a number of issues. First, is making sure people who are registered are voting, and those who vote are who they say they are. Wouldn't it be nice if people could bring in a laptop or pick up a special number and use that to vote?

This morning, I got up before dawn and made my way to the local Starbucks before I arrived at the polling place which was maybe 2 miles from where I live. I arrived just before 6:30, half an hour before the polls opened. I was probably, hmm, 50th to 80th in line, and it took me maybe half an hour to get in and then only a few minutes to vote.

It helped that the local party sends out fliers suggesting how to vote down ballot, that is for every other position past president and vice-president. I checked into this last night and happened to stumble on this flier and brought it in with me.

Half an hour still feels awfully slow when you are waiting to vote, but the whole process was pretty efficient. It was worth coming in early given the lines stretched out the door once I was done.

But imagine if we could all vote in parallel. There wouldn't be lines, and we wouldn't even have to take much time off work as long as we had access to a computer.

Well, I think I'm going to get a bit of a siesta before heading to work.

Hopefully, the news will be good this evening.

Secrets and Lies

I was listening to an interview on CSPAN radio with Richard Shenkman, author of Just How Stupid Are We? (the title is longer, but I'll just leave it at that). This is about the average voter and how uneducated they are with respect to politics. Even basic facts such as the three parts of government and how they work (legislative, executive, and judicial) are beyond many in the electorate.

The consequences are that the kinds of argument politicians trot out appeal to the basest instincts. Despite the easy access to information from the Web, many are uncomfortable finding information and are unable to distinguish good information from bad. Indeed, many suffer from the worst case of confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is a bias where you believe things that support your viewpoint, and ignore anything that doesn't. Thus, many are predisposed to believe that, say, the New York Times is biased because it likes Barack Obama and won't say enough negative things about him (or enough positive things about John McCain).

One of the consequences of the willful lack of knowledge is that some voters base their decision on who it affects. If Barack Obama "pals around with terrorists", well then he must be. If John McCain does the same thing, well, that guy isn't really a terrorist, so it doesn't count. Obama is inexperienced, but Palin is experienced?

It says something very poorly about the electorate when the something said about one party is awful, and the same thing said about the other party is irrelevant. In the end, the goal of politics is reduced to name-calling, insinuation of wrong, and sometimes flat-out lying. And why do such despicable acts happen? Because people are unwilling or unable to look up the facts.

Furthermore, they don't know how to question the "facts" presented to them. Many people take what's told to them at face value without even raising a question as to its accuracy. If Obama was a "terrorist", what act did he commit? How did he manage to get to the Senate? It boggles the mind that this charge could stick, and yet people believe it because they were told by people they "trust".

Perhaps a more potent example is the involvement of Iraq and Saddam Hussein in 9/11. After facts were revealed, it was found there was no connection between Hussein and 9/11. Even after Bush himself admitted there was no connection, there are still plenty of people who believe there is a connection. Why? Because looking this information is a pain. Because they are woefully ignorant about the Middle East. Everyone in the Middle East is the same to the average ignorant American. Most people don't even distinguish the two major divisions of Shiite and Sunni. Thus, all Muslims are the same and are, in their eyes, terrorists.

Interesting how only Colin Powell has been the only one to defend Muslims. Even Barack Obama, the uniter that he tries to portray himself, doesn't want to deal with that topic because it would be too much of a powder keg. Powell, with nothing to lose, can talk about that openly.

The desperation of tactics is perhaps no more acute than in North Carolina where Elizabeth Dole, desperate to keep her job, has accused rival Democrat, Kay Hagan, of being an atheist. Dole feigns ignorance saying that she only questions who Hagan is "pal-ing around with" rather than question her beliefs, but her ad was clearly meant to put doubt about her faith to a conservative electorate in North Carolina.

What you find out is how much people will tar their opponents with anything that will stick, even if it amounts to lying.

And that should disturb parents who like to teach their kids to tell the truth. Indeed, politicians seem fond of lying and then sticking to their lie and never admitting errors and then insulting any dissenters. Is that the kind of leaders we want?

But if the populace isn't better educated, better informed, willing to ignore slander and lies, then the temptation to use these tactics will always be there because they work, because a person unwilling to find out information for themselves will always leave themselves susceptible to insinuation and lies.

And that's a sad state of affairs

Closing Arguments?

I don't recall this term, closing arguments, being applied to a campaign.

Obviously, a lawyer term, the idea is the last thoughts these campaigns want to impart to the electorate. How much are people paying attention right now with days left to go?

The Politics of Hate

Politicians like to tell you they are going to run a respectful campaign. After all, they like telling people what they want to hear. How many people will admit to saying that they want to hear slander about their opponent?

And yet, time and again, politicians resort to negative ads because as long as the campaign season is, as lazy as people are to verify what is being said, that's how effective negative campaigning works.

If you ask someone that is going to vote Republican what they think about Obama, they'll have numerous negative opinions and say he's wrong for the country. If you ask an Obama supporter their opinion on McCain, they are likely to say the same thing. Indeed, most people seem to hate the opposing party's candidate more than they love their own.

Lest you think that this phenomenon is restricted across party lines, consider the rather lengthy primary between Obama and Hillary. At the end, Obama supporters hated Hillary and Hillary fans hated Obama. This wasn't a collegial competition between two friends, but two adversaries. The fact of the matter are the two voted quite similarly on a number of topics.

OK, so the one big difference was their stance on the Iraq War. Obama wasn't a senator then, although Hillary was. Nevertheless, he could point to his stance then (and there's a video of him saying he was against the war).

How can we solve this problem? One way, that would never work, is to allow the opposing parties to approve ads. However, if that were done, there would never be any ads allowed. These days, they try to force the candidate to say "they approve the ad" so at least the candidate can't claim ignorance that the negative ad was done without their knowledge (even if it was done without their knowledge).

Until voters can demonstrate that they vote for a candidate's positive side (and even then), then negative ads will continue to air. And yes, they air because they work, because people won't check whether these ads or true or not, and because they will make decisions based on your middle name.

Whereforth Politico?

Have you heard of the website, politico.com? Here's a website that reports on American politics, and has cracked a lot of interesting political stories including stuff about Joe the Plumber and the amount of money spent on Sarah Palin's clothing.

But where did they come from?

Less than two years old, many places, like Keith Olbermann, cite Politico showing its increased importance in the political discourse.

Has anyone heard of them prior to, say, 2008? Their reputation has increased from virtually nowhere and that's surprising.

Radio Days

Once upon a time, just before television, the way people would get their entertainment was the radio. Families would perch on their couches listening to shows. Shows like Gunsmoke and Bonanza, westerns that, like Star Trek, were commentary on today's society filled the airwaves. Many of the shows made the migration to television.

After the advent of television, radio evolved in other directions. In particular, radio excelled in a medium that was purely auditory. Music. Radio stations played music. Later on, as cars became more prevalent, as commutes got longer, and traffic jams contributed to the long journey to work, long as in time, rather than in distance, other things filled the airwaves.

Beyond music, sports shows with sports pundits became common. Men, who loved their sports on the weekends and Monday nights, could now get their fill of sports as they head to work and returned, listening to the opinions of sports broadcasters. On the flip side was the radio station of the elite, educated, the meritocracy built on intelligence and rational thought, namely, national public radio. This has been augmented by its political cousin, CSPAN for radio.

Thus, television became for the home, and radio became for the road. Indeed, for the average person that's less than an audiophile, the best radio they own, possibly the only one they own is in their car. Few people seem to invest in a nice radio the way they invest in a nice television. Indeed, the only other radio I own, and I barely even think of it as a radio, even though that is what it is, is my clock radio.

Why did that happen?

Indeed, why isn't my television also a radio? I should be able to pick up local stations and listen to the radio, possibly even as I watch television. Perhaps I would prefer commentary on some sports event from the radio rather than television (except, with many shows delayed by at least a few seconds, the audio and video would likely never match).

It's weird that I know how to get a decent television, but have no clue on how to get a decent radio.

And that's perhaps to my everlasting regret.

Tennis Update--Forehand

This is one of those posts that you can quickly check out on. While blogs have been compared to diaries, they are clearly different. The obvious public nature of a blog means that entries that are generally of little interest to anyone except the author would not likely see the light of day. Even so, blogs record content, so it does satisfy the need to have it etched somewhere semi-permanent. And you never know, someone might actually care enough to read it.

Basically, I've been trying to revamp my forehand, with some success. The first clue I was doing something "majorly" wrong occurred end of May when I finally made a video of me hitting tennis balls (I want to say "videotaped", and technically, I am using tape, mini DV to be precise, but I wish there were a better verb than this. The best one I've thought of is video'ed or video recorded).

In particular, I've generally fed the ball (that is dropped it in front of me so I could hit it) very near my right foot. This was because it was easy and convenient. However, because it's convenient, it was leading to a bad habit. In particular, I would get cramped hitting my forehand. Now, I never noticed this, not knowing any better.

Furthermore, I would have a few other bad habits. Rather than turn my shoulders, I tended to just reach back with my arm. To get a sense of this, raise both arms to you side, until you look a bit like a cross. Now, with one arm or the other reach back behind you as far as you can. You might manage 30 degrees or so.

In general, you should never have to reach back at all. Your arms should be roughly to your side, and instead of reaching back, you should turn your shoulders.

I'd also flip my grip in a funny way. Normally, as you take the racquet back (for a righty), the side of the racquet you hit the ball on will face to the right fence (the right fence is the fence to your right as you stare at the net). If you were to open your fist, your palm would face to the right fence.

Instead, I manage to contort my arm so my racquet face was aimed at the left fence. To imagine this, stand with your arms to your side like a cross. Have your right palm facing forwards, with your thumb up. Your fingers on the right hand should point to the right fence. There should be be no bend in your wrist.

Now bend your wrist backwards so that the fingers now point to the back fence and your palm now faces the right fence. Your hand and forearm now form a 90 degree angle.

Now (and this will be a little challenging). flip your hand upside down so the thumb points down. The back of your hand will now face the right fence, and the palm to the left. This is awkward, but easier if you begin to reach your arm behind your back.

This pretzel move is what I had discovered I was doing, and it came naturally after years of ingrained practice. Originally, my fix for it was to repeat the correct motion over and over.

While it worked whenever I wasn't hitting a ball, it failed miserably when I tried to hit the ball. Then I realize my hand orients the racquet, so I just had to think about the orientation of my hand. Even so, this was not a natural adjustment, and I would frequently have to think of my hand, palm faced outwards to the right fence.

Anyway, a week or so ago, I thought I had fixed this issue, and was working on a different problem I noticed.

My follow-through.

When you swing a tennis racquet, there is several phases. There is the takeback where you prepare and then ultimately bring your racquet back to point to the back fence behind you. Then, there is the swing until contact. That is when the racquet makes forward progress to hit the ball.

Finally, there is the follow-through. This is after hitting the ball until the racquet's momentum stops typically over the shoulder or with the arm wrapped around your other arm's biceps.

Although there are three phases to talk about, the entire swing consisting of threee parts should be one fluid motion throughout.

I had spent a fair bit of time on the takeback. This involved two or three things. First, I needed to stop pulling my arm behind my back. Second, I needed to orient my palm outwards and not flip the racquet. Third, I needed to rotate my shoulders more (which is related to the first point). The second part was the hardest to achieve.

When I swing, I often let muscle memory take over, and just focus on hitting, but when you're trying to retrain the mind to do something else, you have to consciously think (or in this case, consciously feel) the change. And it takes lots of repetition, and so far it hasn't felt completely natural.

I felt I had made progress on this, and was starting to focus on the follow-through, rather than the takeback. My follow-through has a bit of a herky-jerky movement, mostly due to the result of how fast I hit my windshield wiper forehand.

A windshield wiper forehand is a style of hitting the forehand where the trajectory of the racquet head (and the forearm) in the leadup to hitting the ball and follow-through looks like a windshield wiper, where the elbow acts as the base of the wiper.

The problem with that analogy are several. First, the elbow should not be stationary. This is more like a two-part windshield wiper. Imagine your windshield wiper is not a straight arm but has a bend in the middle (i.e., like your elbow).

There are two moving parts. The elbow serves as the base of the wiper (in a sense), and the shoulder moves the entire arm, including the elbow. It's tempting to just hit the ball with the forearm and leave the rest of the arm stationary.

Furthermore, people view the windshield wiper as symmetric. The path that starts the windshield wiper (at least, up until the racquet points face up) is mirrored on the way down. That is untrue.

The motion on the way down is complicated by the elbow also moving (to the left). Furthermore, once the racquet has moved so that the wrist straightens out (it starts at a 90 degree angle), then the wrist, more or less, stays straight. This is really hard to describe without a picture.

The result, in any case, is that most pros finish the follow-through to the left of their body (for a righty). In a sense, it's much like a comet whose path around the sun is severe near the sun, but elongated at other parts of the orbit. The follow through is most arced at the beginning, and the arc stretches out at the end.

I was working on that (somewhat unsuccessfully) when I noticed the takeback had broken down and I had regressed to hitting my old forehand.

Alas, it's disappointing, but at least I am aware of it.

Balls to the Wall

I had been contemplating titling this blog entry with something more noble, more austere. Something like The Wall. It reflects more of the tenor of the entry, but the title, despite it's provocative nature, is, quite literally, the subject of this monologue.

I was introduced to "The Wall", by my tennis buddy, Adam. The Wall is actually four walls, that reside at Cabin John, near a baseball field, adjacent to a sand filled volleyball field.

This Wall isn't meant for tennis. It's meant for the venerable sport of handball, which is seldom seen. The Wall towers nearly 20 feet high, much higher than typical walls which are, unwisely, only as tall as the fence that surrounds a court, and as many a tennis player will tell you, not quite tall enough to prevent the scurrying of an embarassed player out into grass or woods or worse to fetch a golden orb and bring it back from the elements.

So few people play handball that the Wall is free, most days, for tennis players to hone their strokes.

I'm new to the Wall. As common as tennis courts are, decent tennis walls are rare. And, as much as the Wall is meant to teach you how to hit a ball, it is not a real tennis partner.

Indeed, when you first meet the Wall, it's hard to control the ball. Balls hit against the wall come back quicker. It's not obvious why this is, so I'll explain.

Normally, when you hit the ball, it must make it from you to across the net. That distance is then doubled while on your opponent's side of the net. The ball must cross the net and reach the opponent, and then the opponent must hit the ball and the ball makes a return path back to the net. Finally, it crosses the net and bounces and you get a chance to hit it.

When you hit against the Wall, that doesn't happen. The ball doesn't really cross the net. It impacts the Wall. All the time spent in the territory of your opponent, that round trip time, is gone. The Wall reflects the ball back and you must react to it sooner.

And because the Wall is passive, not active. It doesn't impart spin, it doesn't hit a weak shot, and it likely moves the ball higher or lower than you expect.

It takes a while before you learn how to hit a ball against the Wall so that you don't hit too high, nor too low. Very often, beginners to the Wall, as some kind of rite of passage, must learn how to avoid sending the ball too high.

Furthermore, balls must generally be hit "down the line", which is basically in front of you, so that the Wall doesn't apply a bit of physics and take the angle of incidence and flip it as the angle of reflection, thus causing you to scamper across to fetch the ball again.

While this strategy works well in racquetball where you get the benefit of side walls to bounce off, in tennis, it means running.

The Wall encourages a bit of complacency. Many who seek the wisdom of hitting against the Wall believe the objective is to "Hit The Ball As Many Times As Possible". It is a game, after all, and the game is to hit over and over and over again. But because the Wall has peculiar behavior, the time that it robs you from hitting the ball most glaringly, the goal of hitting against the Wall often forces most players, unwittingly, to ease up on how they hit.

I've seen many a player that look quite good hitting against the Wall. The technique appears solid. They can get the ball back quite a few times in a row. But once they go to the court, their strokes are weak. They lack purpose. They may have steadiness, but they often lack the control to maneuver the ball to difficult positions on the court. The Wall encourages mostly straight ahead hitting. The variety and purpose of shot isn't something you can easily practice.

If you want power, you must resign yourself to the fact that you must hit the ball quite low and that no, you aren't going to hit ten shots in a row. Power, how hard you hit the ball, is an important component of tennis, and the Wall lulls you into treating it as a secondary consideration.

Once you get past the fact that the Wall isn't a truthful partner, then you begin to find some truth.

Tennis is typically played with two people, sometimes more. Even if your partner agrees to practice, there's always some burden. Is the partner good enough to hit a few shots in a row? Do they really want to practice with you? What if you want to hit 10, 20, 30 shots in a row to hone some shot down? And what if you actually have to talk?

No, the Wall, is a predictable opponent. Not as varied as a typical person, but predictable. You can hit against the wall 10, 20, 30 times, and it doesn't complain. And you have time to think.

Sport, most will say, is not about thinking. Or more properly, it is about transcending thinking. Just as drivers who worry about their arms being in 9 o'clock and 3 o'clock and who sit rather rigid and who worry about cars in their blind spots, and look a bit too uncomfortable their first few times behind the wheel, tennis players seeking to improve, to change the way the want to hit, must take time to think.

Once they consciously think of what the body should do, they strike the ball once, then again, then again. The mind understands the body needs time and repetition and waits for the body to "learn". The repetition builds a memory and the goal is for the recent memory to take over the older memory, to replace a worse stroke with a better one.

This retraining is not particular to tennis. Tiger Woods retuned his swing not once but twice in his career. He would spend upwards of a year training his body to swing a certain way, and only through hours of repetitions and thousands of balls struck would the motion chisel its way into his body so that the body would do its master's bidding.

I've gone in cool spring days, and in hot balmy summer days, and seen the changing of the colors of the trees nearby, whose golden leaves listter the court, and brought out the racquet, and bounced a few balls, and hit them against the wall, and again, and again, hoping to find a kind of truth, a kind of purity of swing and motion.

The Wall is a kind of monastery to which I head to, a place of quiet introspection. Monks seek time to themselves, to search for something, they often know not what. They hope to find wisdom and insight in solitude. They are left to their own thoughts, and hope to draw inspiration. Silence and time and a singular objective can create the kind of mix that allows for that.

Perhaps the goal of the perfect tennis shot, as mundane and comical as it sounds, is not that far removed from what monks seek. Perhaps the monks discover as I have discovered that there is no One True Swing, but that each of us forms our own truth, the truth that gives us comfort and satisfaction, and that it isn't really the attainment of Truth that we seek, but the journey towards truth that is ultimately what it's all about.

This journey is far from perfect. We may never obtain the Truth we seek, but we see ourselves getting closer. It is the distance reduced, the effort put forth, that while not entirely pleasurable, gives depth to our cause, our mission. Humans seem to crave a clear goal whose path to fulfillment is not so clear nor easy.

It is when we walk a difficult path, but know that each step is getting us closer, that ultimately makes us keep going. The destination may be a kind of folly, but the journey is what it is ultimately about.

And so the Wall, immovable, implacable serves a quite testament to that journey. And many more balls will be struck upon it. And through this repetition, this penance, one hopes to gain a little enlightenment.

Days of Being Young

Two days ago, I decided to get a haircut after work. Yesterday, I woke up early, around 7:30 in the morning, so I could get in line at the MVA, what some places call the DMV, so I could update my driver's license. I wanted it to reflect my current address. I had hoped, on a chilly Saturday morning, that the lines would be short.

Alas, it was not.

The line went around the building, and it seemed 100 people were ahead of me. Two people in front of me was a guy, perhaps in his late 40s, gray hair, dark moustache, wearing a biker shirt. Apparently, he was there to get a motorcycle license or possibly to renew it.

Bikers were made famous, I believe, from a documentary in the 70s or so about Hell's Angels. Bikers were made out to be rebels of society, groups to be feared for indiscriminate violence. However, as time passed, and fewer bikers were out riding in gangs, the notion of a biker has become more quaint. An outsider, yes, but this guy was remarking how he had withheld a driver's license from his son because he wanted his son to get better grades. According to him, this wasn't effective.

So much for biker stereotypes.

Just ahead of me was an Asian girl. She had brought her book describing the various traffic rules of Maryland. She was planning to take an exam to get her learner's permit. The biker guy was talking to her, asking how things were. I suppose I should have seen it as the casual conversation that it was, but it kept running through my mind that he was hitting on her (though, there really wasn't so much evidence of that except he was talking to her at all).

It hadn't occurred to me that the girl would have needed a ride there, but after a few minutes, her father showed up.

Apparently, she goes to the nearby Rockville high school, one Richard Montgomery, where my friend Adam is an alum. I had mentioned that he graduated around 1991 or 1992 and she pointed out that she was born in 1991. Ah, so young.

She was confident enough to talk to strangers, inquisitive enough to ask questions about college, and graduate school. I've seen the type, and perhaps been the type minus the bit of extroversion. Kids who look at their books, trying to cram facts into their heads, heading down the road of destiny that will take them to college. These are the high achievers of American society, the so-called elite that a McCain campaign so roundly decries.

At a time when most kids should be eager and ambitious in life, using their intellect to make good decisions, we seem happy to raise a generation of youth that are happy not knowing much, that listen to what's told to them, without questioning it, and more importantly, without the ability to question it. They prefer a night of drunken carousing rather than a night in front of the books.

Oh, they would argue, that people should have fun, but not at the expense of education. And most well-educated students do have a measure of fun too, and then they have real jobs.

Right now, schoolwork is this girl's life, and perhaps a few other extracurricular activities. Her life isn't so much different from the one I lived once upon a time, but things change as you get older. Priorities change. Life changes.

Still, for a brief moment, I was filled with a touch of nostalgia for days gone by, for a time when all that mattered was test scores, applications to fancy colleges, and leaving family for the first time. When I look back, it wasn't such a bad time, after all.

The Internet Economy

There have been a bunch of ideas on the Internet that, if you were to mention it to anyone 20-30 years ago, would have been laughed at, but because the Internet evolved the way it did, it has allowed the kind of use that no one would have expected.

Let's start with free email. Back in the day, when free email was available, you were limited to 10 MB or so of email space. Anything more and you'd have to pay for it. Let your email account stay idle, and it would get deleted. GMail, Google's mail, changed that. It offered free email with 1 GB of space, which was considered outrageously huge for the time. Needless to say, many companies had to fall in line.

Best yet, it was free.

But here's one that's even wilder. YouTube.

Think of a business that would allow any user, for free, to upload as many videos as they wanted. This has allowed people an outlet to make their videos available anywhere. With cheap camcorders, the most expensive part of the video making process is the computer itself.

Without the "free" part, a video site would have a tiny fraction of the videos it has now. That has its pluses and minuses. Because anyone can upload a video, a site like YouTube has tremendously more videos than it would otherwise. Free speaks to people like nothing else. That is both good and bad. It allows a great deal of freedom to video creators, but places an immense burden on the site to keep the presumably millions of videos accessible.

This notion of free, I'm sure, appeals to a great deal of computer types who would like to see all notions of digital stuff for free. Free songs, free videos, free software, and so forth.

Are we ready to see real content like that for free or not? Right now, the industry says no, since it wants to make money on content by "real" singers and directors and actors and so forth.

But the Internet has seen things as strange.

You never know.

Primal Fear

They've been showing Primal Fear, a film with Richard Gere, from 1996. This was the first big film by Ed Norton, who was pretty unknown at the time.

This movie is a nice showy role for Ed Norton, who plays a guy with a split personality. He's Aaron, who stammers and stutters and is sweet and innocent, and he plays Roy, who is psychopathic. The secret, revealed at the end, is the real guy, whoever is, is faking it.

And this, once you think about it, makes no sense at all. Aaron is a bright guy. But somehow he thought it was a good idea to play a mildly retarded fellow and join a church where he is subjected to sex video tapes.

I mean, why would he do this? The film only makes sense in that it tries to trick the viewer, and has a gotcha moment at the end. But the real answer makes no sense whatsoever.

Even so, it's a nice showy role for Ed Norton.

CSPAN is cool

CSPAN does something that every network covering the debate should do, and that is to display the question that is asked. If they would do this, you would see how much the politician evades the question being asked.

And believe me, they do a lot of evading. The average listener often forgets the question. So the networks should be obligated to put it up.

That is all.

String Theory

David Foster Wallace, not yet a month deceased, wrote a story for Esquire in 1996. Early on, he writes the following paragraph:

A tacit rhetorical assumption here is that you have very probably never heard of Michael Joyce of Brentwood, L.A. Nor of Tommy Ho of Florida. Nor of Vince Spadea nor Jonathan Stark nor Robbie Weiss nor Steve Bryan -- all ranked in the world’s top one hundred at one point in 1995. Nor of Jeff Tarango, sixty-eight in the world, unless you remember his unfortunate psychotic breakdown in full public view during last year’s Wimbledon

Notice Wallace is careful to use the hedge word "probably". After all, there might be tennis fans out there who pay attention to players that are ranked outside the top 10, or, as the case may be, outside the top 30.

As it turns out, I had heard of Michael Joyce, Vince Spadea, Tommy Ho (of which I'd say Thundercats, ho!), Jonathan Stark, Robbie Weiss. Steve Bryan, I don't recall so much. Jeff Tarango, yes, I've heard. The meltdown occurred when he accused an umpire, one Bruno Rebeuh, for having it against him. Tarango was a modern day John McEnroe, and like McEnroe, Stanford educated, and a tennis professional, but lacking McEnroe's stellar resume. His wife then was accused of spitting at the umpire. It was a bizarre scene, with lilting French accents from one Mrs. Tarango.

Vince Spadea manages to stay in the news. Spadea looked like one of those up-and-comers. He had played Agassi tough at a US Open, and I thought he'd knock him out. Recently, Spadea tried to make a bigger splash as a self-styled tennis rapper, two words that shouldn't go together. He was recently in DC playing at the Legg Mason. He's got a book about him where he talked about his dad. Tennis is filled with tennis dads, but mostly, they oversee their talented daughters.

They range from Stefan Capriati, to Richard Williams. Jim Pierce, Mary Pierce's dad, was so volatile that Mary's mother divorced him, and he was banned from attending WTA events. Until then, Mary always seemed so stressed. She was so much happier afterwards.

Surely, there are tennis dads that pressure their sons to succeed. Indeed, Andre Agassi fits the bill. He was something like Richard Williams in that he studied the game even as tennis was not his first sport. Sons of tennis fathers generally don't get as much press because the fathers typically disappear after they get good, so we don't see the over-protection. The closest to that might have been Michael Chang's mother, but even after a while, she stopped traveling with him.

Vince Spadea, as it turns out, was a product of a tennis father who trained all the Spadea siblings in tennis. Even as Spadea's older sisters showed talent, they lacked the heart of Spadea, and so it was Vince that held the mantle of Spadea success. In many ways, Spadea is as successful as his dad could have hoped.

Any one that rises to the top 30 has made a huge breakthrough, and even as they may toil in relative anonymity, they've proven themselves to be members of a tennis elite.

Because Wallace was a tennis junior, he understands how hard it is for players to reach the top. Wallace could easily have picked players ranked 300 or below. I've never heard of them. How long do their careers last? Can they afford to be on more than a few years. You imagine these are the younger players, early in their career, trying to work their way up the rankings. It would be hard to imagine, short of independently wealthy players, someone toiling at 500-600 all their lives. The cost of travel would be too prohibitive.

Indeed the top pros have perks beyond perks. If you're seeded (a seed means you get some protection in the draw from meeting other seeds too early--basketball is too nice letting the top seed always face the lowest possible seed at each round, where only a small fraction of players get seeded, so they could easily meet a high-ranked unseeded player), you get benefits.

You get free hotel rooms. You get free food. The perks go to the players that can most afford them. But, they also extend to doubles players. So the Bryan brothers, who don't have much of a ranking in singles, benefit from this. Although the Bryan brothers do fine for a living, they don't make the stratospheric income of a top 5 singles player.

When you're used to watching only the top players, your view is completely skewed. You don't realize what they do is so atypical. I'm sure the same thing happens in many sports. A basketball player who plays in college might look at a top player like Kobe and wonder how Kobe and do the things he does.

What's all the more remarkable, beyond the physical ability, is the mental ability. Top pros will find themselves in close matches, perhaps far more than they want, and yet, they manage to win nearly all the close sets. They lift their games, hit the extra shot, even get a lucky net cord, and win matches that they look like they should lose. Weaker players rarely do this.

People say luck favors the well-prepared. Luck seems to favor the talented too. At times, games, sets, hinge on little things. I was watching a match between Federer and Nadal in Miami. In every set, it looked like one player was dominating the set, but then a few points would get played, and momentum would completely shift. It happens in their matches time and again. Just when you think one is on the brink of disaster, they shore their game up just enough, and then they win the set.

Does this happen even among weaker players? I'm sure, yes, to some extent. Perhaps they can simply use their superior shot-making skills, or superior speed, or exploit a weakness of an opponent. There's still some hint that talent can win over smarts and mental strength.

Witness Fernando Gonzalez of Chile, who just whales at the ball. He's a man that seems governed by whim. When he's in the zone, he goes all out on his forehand. It serves him well when he plays well, but when the opponent is holding his own, Gonzalez has no plan B. He plays stupid in those situations, trying to go for bigger, less probable shots, and like a gambler deep in debt, his sense of odds disappears.

Few people understand the level of concentration, the level of confidence, and the level of physical talent needed to win at the very top. Concentration, and the ability to hit the shot when you want, plays a huge roll in winning. Chris Evert wasn't the most physically blessed player, but she could focus, and hit good shots even in duress, and if you weren't pressuring her, she could outsteady you, make you hit one shot, then another, then another.

Basketball seems to lack the concentration element, one that allows a player to keep hitting good shots, even as their opponent is doing the same, and win them at the end.

Golf, on the other hand, is all concentration, and lacks the physical movement and reaction time that tennis needs.

Football has some of these elements, but not over and over and over again, except for possibly the quarterback.

The top players are often where they are because of superior physical talent, but certainly they are there because of their superior mental tenacity, the sheer mind over muscle getting their bodies to do exactly what they want.

Wallace on Tennis

You know that David Foster Wallace knows something about tennis when, in his article about Roger Federer, he credits whom with being the father of modern day power tennis?

Bjorn Borg? Jimmy Connors? No, Ivan Lendl.

If you've never followed tennis, you may not be aware of the Czech player who, for many years, seemed like the Darth Vader of tennis. Tennis has produced its share of striking women players, and I mean their appearance, in addition to their quality of tennis. The 70s didn't exactly produce male studs.

Connors and Borg, who were the top players of their day, were considered reasonably good looking for their time. Connors wore his long hair over his ears, much like the Beatles. Borg wore his hair even longer. And it seemed, unlike Agassi, something Borg preferred to do, rather than a stunt to promote an image.

Lendl, on the other hand, was Eastern European, with dark hair, sunken eyes, and for a while, crooked teeth. Early in his career, he had a nasty habit of spitting all the time. Over time, he stopped spitting, his teeth got straightened, but many still considered him ugly, and as many people liked players like Kournikova for their beauty, they disliked Lendl for his lack thereof.

Furthermore, as Lendl sought to be number one, he saw how McEnroe would argue with the chair umpire and realized that he, too, needed to argue, even as it made McEnroe unpopular, and it didn't help Lendl either. McEnroe was perhaps the premier serve and volleyer of his day. He would charge the net, but early in his career, Lendl showed the kind of blistering power that marked his game. Lendl wasn't above pegging a player on the passing shot, a legal shot that makes it difficult to volley, but considered, in polite company, in poor taste. Lendl would learn to remove that shot from his game.

There were several keys to Lendl's game that lead to its influence over the modern game. His huge forehand was number one. Lendl frequently hit his shot down the line and frequently ran around his backhand to hit inside out. To do this, Lendl would move left. But instead of striking the ball with his backhand, he would continue to move left, then hit the shot with his forehand, but with the same target as his backhand, that is, to his opponent's backhand (assuming his opponent was a righty).

He ran around the backhand because he had a powerful forehand.

Much like Babe Ruth may have hit so many home runs because he tried, Lendl went for winners, because he could. Although bigger racquets have been blamed for causing the increase in power, Lendl actually used quite a small racquet, at 72 square inches. Had racquets been limited in size to about 80 square inches, Lendl still would have had his power game.

The revolution that marked the advent of power tennis may have had more to do with graphite racquets than oversized racquets. Sampras and Edberg used a racquet at 85 square inches, a significantly larger size than the 72 that Lendl used (the old timey racquets were 66 square inches, so Lendl used something only a touch bigger).

Power tennis was going to come whether or not the large racquet did. Case in point. Jimmy Arias. Few people remember Jimmy Arias because his career was so short. Jimmy Arias used the same racquet as Borg, the Borg Pro, which was a classically sized racquet. He had a huge forehand, but an awkward backhand. Ultimately, his diminuitive size hurt him.

Although Lendl epitomized power tennis, it's likely that it would have come anyway. Lendl's began playing his brand of power tennis starting around 1979. He would begin to play superlative tennis around 1982, when he beat McEnroe seven times in a row. Lendl would hit winners off the ground.

Connors hit hard, but his goal was like the classic Aussies. Get to net, and cut the point off. Borg was a steady baseliner willing to run down shots all day long.

Mind you, Lendl didn't hit with flurries of winners like modern day Federer or Nadal. He was raised on European clay, and could rally from the backcourt with the best of them. Like Borg or Wilander, Lendl could and would rally 20-30 shots. But as he improved, he learned to go for winners. He showed it was possible to do this, and it changed the way tennis was played.

It took a while for women to get to that level. For women, the player that made the huge breakthrough was Steffi Graf. Martina rushed the net, and her serves kept opponents off balance. She'd win quick matches because they couldn't pass her. But Graf would overpower her opponents from the baseline. Her biggest nemesis would come in one Monica Seles. Where Graf had a huge forehand, her backhand was an accurate slice, but one she rarely hit winners off of. Strong enough that it was hard to attack her backhand, it was not strong enough to win outright points.

Monica Seles, on the other hand, hit two hands on both sides, and so she didn't have real weaknesses except her speed. Graf was simply a much quicker player than Seles.

It wasn't long after Lendl began showing how power tennis would be played that a series of other players joined in. In the early days, they would have been Boris Becker, then Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras. The Bolletieri bunch were actually power hitters that included Jimmy Arias, Aaron Krickstein, before Agassi broke through. Even Ecuadorian, Andres Gomez, was a formidable power hitter with a huge lefty hook.

Really, in those days, you could play a game that was more Borg-like or more classic. Edberg played a classic serve and volley game, becoming the most elegant and precise volleyer of his day, an oddity among Swedes, who preferred to hit from the backcourt. His huge kick serve became a model for others to follow, and while his serve eventually became a liability as others managed to serve harder and harder, Edberg played good tennis for over 10 years, basically from 1983 to 1993.

Wilander was really a throwback. He lacked the power of Lendl, but was quick enough to run down Lendl's shots, and was consistent enough to give Lendl fits. Lendl may have hit winners from the baseline, but not tremendously often. Wilander had his best year in 1988, but then his decline was huge in 1989. Somehow, he managed to stay in the game even through 1994. He was Borg with a lot more variety and thinking.

By the time 1990 rolled around, players like Sampras and Agassi were redefining the game once again, going for even more winners, until you get to 2002 when Federer, then Nadal started their rise. Gone were the days when top players could have weak groundstrokes but big serves and volleys. A player like Roddick, with a huge serve, should be a great serve and volleyer, yet, his game is played from the back, like many of his contemporaries.

It's amazing a top serve and volleyer like Federer can't actually play serve and volley, so he must resort to playing off the ground. He's perhaps the most accomplished serve and volleyer to rarely play that style anymore, partly because passers are so good that he can't do it, partly because he's fantastic off the ground as well.

David Foster Wallace understood a lot of the history of tennis especially tennis in the 1980s and onwards. I grew up watching tennis and would agree with his assessment of tennis. Of course, he used far more eloquent words in his summary of tennis, but he had the tennis acumen to point it out.