Tsonga

There is a time when the top players look invincible. They play at a level that seems far above the norm. Even the occasional interloper who manages to play even makes enough mistakes that the occasional advantage won is offset by the silly errors, a case of one step forward, two steps back.

Such an event happened to James Blake who has had no success beating world number 1, Roger Federer. Blake has improved his game a bit, but he relies on the ability to overpower his opponent. No doubt, he was able to get a few good winning shots, especially his newfound down-the-line backhand which gave Federer all kinds of problems. Just not enough for Blake to win. Missed first serves compounded the issue.

Blake has been around for a few years now, and so people are looking to see if he can make that leap up. He's made gradual improvements, but it's tough at his level.

People often say that the players that beat Federer or Nadal will come from the junior ranks. They will learn to hit harder, to hit more bizarre shots, to have more mental resolve. They will draw inspiration from the best, and learn to beat the best. And, at the very least, the human body falters as it ages, and so youth may be served. Witness the surge of one Novak "Nole" Djokovic. Buried in the epic meetings of Nadal vs. Federer at the French and at Wimbledon was Djokovic making the semifinals of both, showing his versatility as well. Again, Djokovic is in the semifinals, and at the age of 20, may be the one that breaks through.

Occasionally, you get someone like Courier. In his case, he had a powerful game, on the same league as Agassi, but he was intense, had to hit all-out, and when things got bad, he hit harder, and missed more spectacularly. It took Jose Higueras to calm him down to harness that energy, so he could play his best.

Such players need time. It's usually more effective to harness a player that has wild talent than for a player who lacks talent to become a better hitter. Easier to teach smarts and fitness than to teach physical coordination and talent.

So it goes with Jo Wilifried Tsonga of France. The last Afro-French player of great note was Yannick Noah, who was mostly seen supporting his son, Joachim, a 7 foot tall NBA player, after his career in reggae singing. He won his one and only Grand Slam title at the French, his home country, and while he continued to play well, his game, for the big man he was, was not enough to challenge the best players of the day.

Tsonga is said to be distinctly Gallic, showing the flair of Noah or perhaps Henri Leconte, another talented Gaul whose inconsistent brilliance was never fully harnessed. With the decline of serve-and-volley, Tsonga's game of sneak and volley might be the modern day replacement.

Tsonga hits powerfully from the baseline and serves with enough power that Nadal found himself being outdueled from the backcourt. But rather than hang with Nadal when he was in trouble, Tsonga would head to the net, and time after time, show his delicate touch. Drop volleys so short that you might as well call them stop volleys.

Or as Bud Collins used to say "Eyedropper". Nadal had had his way with the best Finnish player ever, Jarkko Nieminen, which I suppose is like calling someone the best American soccer player ever. It's good, but still not the best. Where Nieminen managed to use his quickness and hustle to confound Kohlschreiber, the German youth that knocked out Roddick, he was being dealt body blows from Nadal, who pushed him around at will.

Nadal, on the other hand, was barely able to contain Tsonga. When Tsonga would rip an inside out forehand to Nadal's forehand (Nadal, a lefty), Nadal might discover, on his wild attempt to reach the ball, that Tsonga had reached the net, and was volleying his shot out of reach.

It's said that fitness training has made the difference. Tsonga used to rush into the net on a prayer. With stamina, he can now trade rallies, set up, and come in on his own terms.

To be fair, Nadal has never been that comfortable on hard courts, but no one expected Tsonga to play so well. Now he's in the final. Can he handle Federer or Djokovic? Or has this Frenchman made such strides that the question we should be asking is: can they handle Tsonga?

On Breakfast

Americans have been skipping breakfast for years. In the rush, rush to get to work, and not wanting to prepare anything elaborate, breakfast has become the forgotten meal. Breakfast has become simpler than ever.

The "traditional" breakfast of eggs, bacon, and toast, has given way to cereal and milk. Not nearly as appetizing, but really convenient.

Except it isn't. There's still many a person who jets out the door, and head to a McDonald's or a Starbucks for the bare minimum coffee to get them going in the morning.

This, after all the ads that used to tell people how you should eat a healthy breakfast before going out, that it helps you get through the morning. Everyone, in theory, understands this is so, but finds the necessity to head to work right off the bat as a time-saver.

But, in other countries, such as (the only country I ever bust out) India, breakfast is still seen as vitally important. People just don't feel right if they don't eat breakfast. And, rather than being the same repetitive cereal, day after day, Indians will often expect variety in breakfast, and not just for weekend changeup (typical Americans opting for pancakes if they choose to make it).

My feeling is that the decline of cooking in general has also affected breakfast. If you don't want to spend 30 minutes to an hour cooking, and would rather pick up something fast in 5 minutes, then even the effort to make cereal might feel too laborious.

In fact, Americans who do eat breakfast don't even think of variety. Too early in the morning. So, they make the same thing each morning. Variety, if it comes at all, might be in the choice of cereal, or the choice of flavored oatmeal.

If you had to reimagine breakfast, what might you do?

Heath Ledger RIP

Celebrity deaths in the US aren't the way they used to be. At some point in time, Americans were more innocent, or at the very least, more in awe of movie stars, and saw them as larger-than-life. While that's true, to some extent, today, people are likely to express surprise, rather than profound sadness or depression.

Heath Ledger, unlike say Bobby Fischer or Edmund Hillary, was still pretty young when he died, at the age of 28. Generally, people assume that actors that die young do drugs or have committed suicide. Since most of us don't know the actor as a person, we don't know what happened.

Some argue, perhaps quite rightly, that many others die, whether in Iraq, or other countries (why pick on countries that Americans are involved in) are treated with no fanfare. Clearly, this has to do with the sheer number of people who pass away, and that most of them are not that well-known, and in any case, we'd be terribly depressed if we cared about each one. So, we elevate celebrities. When they pass away, we pay attention.

There's not quite an equivalent of a female starlet of the 40s, especially on the male side. Heath Ledger seemed to fall in this category. When Mel Gibson came across the pond, there was suddenly an infatuation with Australians (although, as it turns out, Gibson was born in the US, but raised in Australia).

Then came a spate of Australians. Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Cate Blanchett, Hugh Jackman, and yes, Heath Ledger.

Despite being rather handsome, Ledger opted for roles that stretched his acting skills, while occasionally taking more conventional roles of a starring lead. When he was selected to be in Brokeback Mountain, many thought he'd be the weaker actor compared to Jake Gyllenhaal, when in fact, Ledger was the far stronger actor.

He recently played Joker in the lastest Batman installation, which has yet to reach the theaters.

Presumably, in the upcoming days, we'll hear more, and some people will be curious, and others will be disdainful of a mere actor that got newsplay because he died too soon.

Even so, it doesn't hurt to pay respect to his body of work, and to wonder what might have been.

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman

Perhaps the one thing that separates man from immortality is food. Well, that and air, and a few other vital necessities. After all, if one is immortal, food is no longer necessary, right?

But so long as people need food to survive, there's a sense that we might as well make this a pleasurable experience. Historically, women seem to do all the cooking. This doesn't prevent guys from cooking, and certainly great chefs of the world tend to be men, at least, when cooking moves beyond the perfunctory need to simple feed one's family, to an art form meant to satisfy kings.

I've been pondering a few things lately. One is arranged marriages. The first reaction for many Americans to arranged marriages is the shock that you'd let anyone, let alone your parents, decide who you should marry. Within traditional cultures, having your parents decide makes the most sense, however. They raised you, they tried to do what's best for you. Who else would even do a good a job as your own parents? One of the commandments say "Honor thy mother and thy father".

Still, many an American teen finds that they argue with their parents, who they feel have an old time view of the world. And what criteria would they have to pick a wife or a husband.

Indeed, that's an interesting question. To answer it, let's ask what criteria people normally have when they are trying to find someone to marry, or even minimally, to date. Usually, one highly desirable quality is attractiveness. It's perhaps no surprise that celebrities, whether they be athletes or actors, seem to pick women that are more noted for their beauty, almost to declare to the public at large, that they've acquired someone stunning. This can be determined by a simple glance.

What if they weren't so attractive? Perhaps a bit heavy-set? But they had a, you know, great personality (when anyone says "great personality", the implication is the person is borderline ugly--after all, why not get great personality, and attractiveness).

And those basic qualities, attractiveness and personality pretty much win out over a lot of things. Sure, you might prefer intellectual compatibility, and often that happens just because you are likely to meet people of similar backgrounds in whatever station of life you're in. But it doesn't have to be a necessity. Indeed, I find people who date where, say, the guy knows a ton about some subject, and his SO knows almost nothing of that subject. It doesn't seem to affect the relationship.

Let's now move this decision making to parents. What might they decide? For a parent of a son, it might be compatibility. Did she study what he studied? If he's an engineer, it might make sense that she is one too. Similar religion? Similar income level? Can she cook? Will she be nice to my son?

Indeed, if parents make the decision, than issues of politeness become far more important, and parents begin to place a premium on politeness for their kids. After all, if the kid is short-tempered, likes to argue, likes to criticize, this will make them far less attractive as mates (especially if women have such traits). Women must, therefore, bear the burden of modesty, yet show grace.

But what parent would want their son to marry a woman that couldn't cook? Surely, cooking must be a minimum requirement!

Throughout the 50s and 60s, with women gaining more independence, being able to take jobs beyond secretary and teacher and nurse, another side effect was that women found themselves working 9-5, and at the end of the day, feeling fatigued, having to cook for their husbands after the daily job.

There was an industry set up to take care of these issues for women, from those who made frozen dinners, to canned foods, to fast food restaurants. And women began to embrace these ideas. It wasn't so important for women to know how to cook, and so many women simply didn't learn. In the meanwhile, as women gained some equality, this meant a larger rate of divorce, and a generation of men scared to get married, and also men who felt it was fine for a guy who knew how to cook.

All that to get to point I wanted to make, and that was my journey to cooking food.

A few weeks ago, when I was at my parents place, I watched a segment off a DVD of America's Test Kitchen. The episode was about two curry traditions: India and Thailand. I decided that the Indian curry wasn't so hard to make, at least, the way they showed it.

The basic recipe went something like this. Cut up some onions in slivers. Fry until brown. Add a ginger-garlic paste by using ginger and garlic in a mini food processor, then add that to the onions, add spices (a cumin, coriander, turmeric, salt mix), add yogurt, add water, and the meat (chicken, shrimp, or beef) and cook. Add cilantro.

When I tried this, the curry was pretty watery. So I got some advice to do things in a different order. Instead of simply creating onion slivers and cooking til brown, mince the onions very fine so it can be the thickener for the curry.

I took this one step further, because I'm lazy. I used a food processor to chop this to a paste as well.

So the new basic recipe I have is to create a garlic-ginger-chili pepper paste by using a food processor (next time, I'll use less water so this paste is thicker). Fry this up, then create an onion paste, and add that to fry up. After five minutes, add spices, then either yogurt or tomatoes (or both), and eventually add the meat to cook.

That's basically it.

The difference between what I did (based on a coworker's advice) was to first, move the frying of the garlic and ginger and chili peppers earlier on. The reason given was to make the garlic taste less strong by frying it longer. A second key was to make an onion paste. Traditionally, one would mince this up by hand into small bits, but it's so much quicker to use a food processor. I suppose you could still keep some parts of the onion as sliver so you can see it in the final result. I've yet to do this.

The only issue after that is what kind of spices to use. Minimally, the spices are cumin, coriander, turmeric, and maybe cayenne pepper (and salt, of course). Certainly, you can add up to another dozen different spices or herbs. You can get away with about 4-5 spices if you want your life simple.

I figure that's a reasonably good base to start learning Indian cooking.

Now, this isn't spectacularly quick, but it's probably quick by Indian standards. I can have something basically ready in 45 minutes. To be fair, a quick Indian dish would take that long too, but I'd say it take closer to an hour and a half to make proper dishes.

Hopefully, I can take that, and make some other variations.

Noah's Arc

Noah Hathaway was perhaps famous for two roles. He played the only kid in the original Battlestar Galactica, a science-fiction TV series, no doubt inspired by Star Wars. Taking bits from Christianity and the formation of the United States, it told the story of how the Cylons (robot creatures) destroyed much of humanity in some remote part of space, leaving (so it seemed) one battlestar (a battleship) and smaller ships running from destruction heading to Earth, hoping they'd find salvation there.

Hathaway was typical of kids cast in TV shows in the late 70s and early 80s. He had a moppet style hair, looking more girl-ish than guy, probably due to the fact that most casting directors are women.

He had one other "major" role: The Neverending Story.

They're showing a rather slow-paced fantasy movie from 1986 called Troll, which was made two years after The Neverending Story.

And, as many child actors, by the time they got to be less than cute, their careers ended.

What's the amusing part?

The name of his character in Troll.

Harry Potter, Jr.

Words Speak Louder

Here's an article by local Washington Post columnist, Michael Wilbon.

Some people who read my blog (so very few of you, overall) aren't much into sports. Americans are said to love sports as much as the folks of any other country, but that's not entirely true, and partly, I'm guessing, due to several factors. First, and perhaps most importantly, sports has been a divisive factor. People classified as "jocks" often make fun of people who aren't good at sports.

"Jocks", now that I think about it, is a pretty unusual term. Colloquially, a "jock" is also known as an athletic supporter. This is a weirdish undergarment contraption whose purpose is to prevent a man's reproductive organs from moving around too much during athletic endeavors. It's probably easier to make an analogy and point to a sports bra, which serves a similar function and prevents a woman's breasts from moving too much.

Presumably, if a man has larger than average testicles ("balls") such movement tends to cause pain if jostled around too much.

Having said that, people (at least, not me) don't think of jocks (athletic types) as "jocks" (athletic supporter underwear devices).

The stereotype of a jock is someone who is on a sports team, most stereotypically, American football, that has some dreams they might make it to the college level, and possibly to the professional level. Stereotypically, they only care about sports, and not about academics, and because of that, many are none too bright, and find harassing those who have less athletic skill amusing.

The point?

The point is that because of jock culture, and because they are many other outlets, from being a geek, to being a theater geek (someone who likes to do plays or the support work behind plays, such as lighting, etc), to yearbook, to a whole host of other activities find they can do perfectly well without sports.

Culturally, India is far more into its only major sport, cricket, and seems to not have a jock culture. Despite a large number of males who love to play cricket, none of their families generally think they can make a real living out of playing cricket, as only those on the national team make money, and the national team is maybe 10-20 players, out of a billion plus Indians. Without a jock culture, and with the average Indian more than happy to ignore work and take an unofficial holiday whenever an important cricket match is up, it's perhaps no wonder that the average Indian (male) is far more intently interested in cricket than the average American male is into, say, football.

But I digress.

My point is the article, and the article has to do with some reporter that talked about lynching Tiger Woods in an alley, meant, presumably jokingly. After all, what does a white woman who probably grew up middle class know anything about real lynching? Mike Wilbon puts down his credentials, saying he knows, first hand, well, second hand through his dad, about the issues of lynching, a term that still burns in his memory. One wonders, in another generation, when lynching is two generations back whether such terms will sear as much as they do for Wilbon.

Indeed, it's often because of this cultural disconnect that white Americans use this term and wonder why African Americans revile at it so much. To one group, it barely registers as anything, perhaps as something historical, and certainly doesn't have the visceral impact. It's just like how some people say "you almost gave me a heart attack" without realizing the full seriousness of such a thing, or "You're a retard" often without truly knowing anyone with mental retardation.

Presumably, the thought of actual lynching is somewhat abstract, as if read in a history book. And the actual word seems to matter. Tiger Woods being lynched as opposed to mugged or beaten up or some other word. It's not even the more evocative "string him up on a tree", though apparently, a noose was pictured. So it feels that these actions are fairly deliberate.

Funny enough, many African Americans have come to defend Kelly Tilghman, the white woman who uttered the phrase, especially many who know her personally. A picture of Tilghman graces the article, and, by American standards, anyway, she appears to be a rather attractive woman, which seems to be a huge asset in the sports reporting world. What's sexier than a woman that knows sports, can speak intelligently about it, and is borderline hot? What sports reporter, who often, more than, say, their hardcore news brethren, have to announce their sexuality, wave it like a proud flag, announcing, that yes, Tony Romo was right to go to Mexico with one-hot-what-does-she-do-exactly Jessica Simpson because testosterone is always a good motivator for male actions, what person like that might not introduce herself to Kelly Tilghman, get to know her personally.

Oh I don't mean that such reporters would do anything disgraceful. Do cops that pull over beautiful women and let them go with just a warning do so because they think they will bed them? In reality, they're happy with something much more mundane. They're happy to do a beautiful woman a favor, that this brought some happiness to them, and therefore brought some happiness to themselves.

Wilbon's careful to shove the blame to someone else to protect the person he cares about, and places it on some corporate entity. Maybe they wouldn't have been so insensitive if they had some African Americans working as part of their staff vetting such comments. What does it say that Tilghman, a person I've never heard of, who apparently counts many African Americans as her friends, didn't have the same advice. "I just didn't know". Is that the excuse? Perhaps she knew the firestorm it would bring, and that it would make her name more well-known, perhaps vilified for a while, but that's why it's good to have friends in high places.

But the point is not that either.

It's down to some retort that many of us grew up hearing.

Sticks and stones may break my bones,
but words will never hurt me

We say it, but it certainly isn't true. The "N" word is still potent enough that people feel the need to call it the "N" word, as it must be left unsaid, despite the fact that, in its ultimate irony, it makes the word even worse. I suppose there's even the "F" word (for "fag"), but not the "S" word (spic?), and so forth.

Dalits (the PC term for untouchables) are often derided in a culture that still permits those of higher castes to denigrate those of lower castes, showing the human propensity to de-humanize other humans (towel-heads, and such).

Do words matter? Indeed, they do. But it's a sad commentary that people can't get beyond words and claim it doesn't hurt them. The real issue is the insult hurler who feel the words can hurt, and often use them to hurt folks.

It's funny how this most revolutionary of human inventions, language, has the power to inflict as much pain (albeit of an emotional type) than sticks and stones, and in its own way, possibly moreso.

R-Fed

Janko Tipsarevic now knows what it feels like to be Alex Corretja. Alex Corretja had a chance to beat Sampras in the quarterfinals of the 1996 US Open, with Sampras puking his guts in the flower bed at courtside.

Tipsarevic showed nearly no nerves in five sets. Going down break point after break point, managing to fend off 15 break points, hitting big serves and big groundstrokes, trying to knock of Roger Federer. He took the first set, then the third set, and held even with Roger Federer.

Federer, for his part, often generates far more unforced errors than one might expect. He hit some 80 winners, but was offset by 60 unforced errors, many off attempts to hit backhand winners.

Still, Federer was holding his serve pretty easily, and you felt that Federer, despite not having much success breaking Tipsarevic (except the fourth set), felt supremely confident holding his own, only having seen three break points all match.

The final score read 6-7, 7-5, 5-7, 6-1, 10-8. Tipsarevic had the game up in the fifth set, and at 8-8 all serving for 9-8, Tipsarevic went up 40-0, only to have Federer pull it back to deuce, and eventually achieve a break. Federer played a somewhat nervous game to win 10-8.

The fifth set looked like it would go on forever. Federer generally holding much easier than Tipsarevic, but having a hard time hitting good shots against Tipsarevic.

Still, this has to give Tipsarevic more confidence that he can play toe-to-toe with the best in the world. Still, you have to feel Federer didn't play his best, but still won. In particular, he made a ton of errors, despite serving a ton of aces (around 40 aces), the most ever in his career (he's no Kevin Curren or Andy Roddick, but can crank out a decent number).

This is where being number 1 helps. You have the kind of confidence to keep hitting good shots even when a player is playing as good as he can and not buckling until the end.

All in all, a fine match and a fine debut for the second best Serbian male tennis player in the world.

When I'm 64

It seems like so much ancient history.

Searching for Bobby Fischer came out in 1993, which is now 14 years ago. And that was some 20 years after Fischer battled Spassky in an epic match in 1972. People forget that he was only barely 30 when that match was contested.

It was the height of cold war. The US was trying to play catch-up, with the Soviets having dealt with the first blow with Sputnik, leading Kennedy to famously issue a challenge to put the first man on the moon. And the Russians, were they ever good at chess! Americans weren't even really so competitive against the powerhouse Russians.

But Bobby Fischer was an unusual one (did he even go by Bobby, or was it some holdover from Bobby Kennedy?). He was a star junior player, the youngest American to win a junior chess title (at 13). Fischer played good chess throughout the 1950s through the early 1970s.

His victory over Spassky was symbolic, giving Americans hope that during the cold war, when it looked like the US had the weight of the free world on its shoulder, that somehow Americans could beat the Russians at their own game.

Then, he disappeared. Not literally, but certainly from the chess world. He grew increasingly paranoid, and frankly, bizarre. He rarely stayed in the US, eventually becoming an Icelandic citizen.

He only surfaced once again to play Spassky in 1992. Spassky! Was the man still alive after all those years? It probably said something that he challenged an old competitor rather than the best the world had to offer. He didn't try to play Kasparov and any of the top competitors of the day. It only showed that he could still beat someone that was his contemporary after all those years.

And he'd go back to obscurity, where he'd tried to evade the law. The US, apparently, had a law, passed by Bush senior, that said its citizens couldn't visit Yugoslavia, where this match against Spassky took place, and the US wanted to arrest Fischer for this. While visiting Japan, the Japanese held Fischer waiting to extradite him to the US. At this point, Fischer appealed to Iceland to become a citizen, which did eventually succeed because they felt the US and Japan were unfairly persecuting Fischer (which in hindsight, it seems very true).

As much as Fischer was initially criticized for his remarks about Sept 11 (where he noted that the US got what it deserved, partly because of its actions in the world) as being a unsympathetic and un-American (and perhaps the reason the US government seem so intent on having him arrested), his observations, deemed a bit crazy at the time, seem to be much more mainstream (although the sentiment of his views still stick to this day).

And he was only 64 when he passed away, with the vast majority of the career he was so famous for, more than 30 years ago.


Will you still need me? Will you still feed me?
When I'm 64?


It seems, now, there's no longer a need.

Rest in peace, Bobby Fischer.

Tipsarevic

In the 80s, shortly after Borg retired, there was a spate of young Swedish tennis players that dotted the top 100 players. This, from a country that barely has 9 million people. 9 million! The United States has something like 250 million people, which is over 25 times as populous as Sweden.

And yet, Sweden cranked out players like Mats Wilander, Stefan Edberg, Anders Jarryd, Henrik Sundstrom, Joachim Nystrom, and perhaps half a dozen others. While these players claim to have drawn some inspiration from Borg, who was Sweden's star player from the mid 70s to early 80s (probably the height of tennis popularity, due, perhaps as much to an exhibition between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, as to anything else in the game).

But Borg was a loner. He played Davis Cup rarely, except at the beginning of his career, and kept his distance from most of the rest of the Swedes, who were all best buddies and rather modest about their considerable achievements.

This success was mostly confined to the men's game. You can hardly name any Swedish women players.

These things seem to go in cycles. The Spaniards have done well since the 1990s with players like Sergei Bruguera, Carlos Moya, and nowadays, world number 2, Rafael Nadal.

But the country du jour are the Serbians. The Croatians have done well, most notably, Goran Ivanisevic. However, their Yugoslav counterparts have only had a good player in Monica Seles, and she often hushed up about her heritage, as the Serbians, at the time, were into some ethnic cleansing, which is basically genocide.

But, you know, Americans barely register this kind of thing when there are no images being blared in their faces, and when it's, you know, over there, overseas. Americans are so American-centric that they barely pay attention to starvation in Africa, conflicts in Europe, atrocities in Southeast Asia.

Even as Americans have learned to become far more aware of the world, understanding this phenomenon called Bollywood, the burgeoning Indian film industry, being more PC, there's still a lot of the world Americans willfully ignore, with the news media more than complicit in this jingoistic fervor.

So, with these past events firmly in the past, Serbian tennis has enjoyed a resurgence. It's really hard to call it a resurgence given that Serbia was part of Yugoslavia, and Yugoslavia was the rebel child of the Communist countries, and many Soviet bloc countries avoided playing world tennis for many years, until the mid 80s, when players like Andrei Chesnokov, Andrei Cherkasov, and most importantly, Nathalia Zvereva, who famously waved a winner's check on national TV, a check she said she couldn't keep because of the Russian federation, which eventually yielded fewer restrictions, more take-home pay, and eventually, Russians back in the top ranks of tennis.

In those days, you had Bobo Zivojinovic and Monica Seles, and they were the forefront of Serbian tennis. These days, you have Novak Djokovic, but you also have Janko Tipsarevic who is giving Roger Federer all he can handle.

He looks a lot like a grungy Novak, with his funky glasses that resemble racquetball glasses, and his scraggly facial hair, almost as if Djokovic put on a disguise and came on court. Tipsarevic is three years older than his 20 year old compatriots.

Many Serbian players train outside of Serbia, having gone to Europe or the United States. (By the way, there have been a ton of challenges by Tipsarevic, who has won a surprising number of them).

While the men have fared quite well, the women have done even better for themselves. Ana Ivanovic is ranked number 3. Jelena Jankovic is ranked number 4. True, there's no other player til you reach about the mid 200s, but having two top ten players in the women's and three players in the top 100 (barely), with a population that's maybe a million people more than Sweden, and you realize that this is quite an accomplishment, especially as many have had to train outside of Serbia.

Occasionally, you have a player like world number 1, Roger Federer, who comes from a country (Switzerland), that is more famous for chocolates and cheese than for producing top players, and you wonder, where the heck are the other Swiss players? There's Roger, and that seems to be it (not entirely true, but other players pale in the glow of a dominant number 1).

But give this to the Serbs, they've got a lot of fight.

This is one reason (other than a nap late in the evening) that I'm watching a Federer-Tipsarevic match that has already gone to two tiebreaks, and one where Federer has ample chances to break, but hasn't fared really well.

Best Of Youth

A co-worker, whose probably about 30 or 31, noted that his sister was about 5 years younger, which would put her at 25. When you are an older brother, and your younger sibling is younger by that many years, there's, I'm sure, a perception that she's your baby sister, someone much younger. When you go to school, you note she's 5 grades back, and that's a lot of years.

He was telling this to another co-worker, just out of college, and figuring that
he is 7 years older. This, of course, means his sister is two years older than the recent college graduate. It's just that, after you reach about your mid 20s, then you look about the same age for some ten years, provided you don't lose your hair.

I've long since gone through that phase with my own brother who is less than two years younger. Given that I'm pretty old, my brother is likewise old, and so this exercise in age difference is even further pronounced. I'm starting to be in the neighborhood of twice the age of the college kid, so I don't even make the comparisons to my brother's age as this is now starting to be trivially different from my age.

I've been watching tennis since I was just a teen, which is now around 30 years of tennis. New players come around all the time, even surprisingly good players. The new player of last year was one Novak Djokovic.

Djokovic (pronounced, as best I can muster, as Joe-ka-vitch) looks pretty mature. Mature game, a bit of a joker, but ready to handle the pressures of being number 3 player in the world.

He's also 20.

Twenty!

I am pretty much twice his age. In some weird alternate universe, where I have some affair mid-college, and had a kid, that kid might be Djokovic's age now!

These days, I don't think about that age thing. I don't think about those college football players who seemed so old when I was an early teen are all about half my age.

And obviously, with these sports being a young man's game, it's only going to be more pronounced as I get older. But there's something that happens when you're closer to my age than 30, which is you start not to care. They are merely young, and you are merely old, and life goes on.

But damn, they're young.

Programming is Easy

I was asked recently whether I thought I was a good programmer. I responded, it depends on what you mean by a programmer. I talked to some folks who told me "programming is easy". Somehow, I think their definition of what programming means is different from mine.

In particular, I think they thought programming was knowing loops, arrays, pointers, and functions. Except for a few really gnarly bits, those parts are pretty easy (though you can find people who find those concepts, especially pointers, very confusing, so if it weren't easy, they wouldn't even be in the conversation).

But suppose they were told, this program runs slowly, find out why. Is that programming? They might argue, no it's not, because it's not about writing code. It's about something wrong in a nebulous situation.

Or how about this code doesn't compile? Is that programming? Programs might not compile due to a syntax error. Or a missing library. Or something much weirder. But they might argue "I didn't write the code!". You might retort "but programming is easy, so can't you read what this person tried to do?".

In fact, if you learn programming, you often don't hit these "non-programming" issues. Oh occasionally, you do, but you might say "it's not programming" and expect someone else to figure it out for you. Most people would say you aren't much of a programmer.

Programming, in its purest form, is basically about computation and memory. You have a bunch of variables. You have ways to compute, compare, move the data around.

But reality is different. In particular, most programs require inputs. That might be from a user typing in something. Or it might be from a file. Or it might be a file from some URL. The file might be a video file and you need to decode it plenty fast or it jitters or drops frames.

The input might come from a GUI button. But something goes wrong. Are you willing to read the nasty source code that makes up the GUI to understand what's going on? Or do you say "Why can't these people get their code written right?".

Even if you think programming is about syntax, most languages have some implementation that doesn't work the way you think it does. You assume one thing, but that assumption is wrong (like a compare function returns -1, 0, 1 instead of negative, 0, positive) or you think a compare function returns a boolean. Or you use OR when you meant AND.

Look at C++ templates, and things can get really hairy. It can be difficult to comprehend why a C++ string is a parameterized type taking three (count them!) parameters. Here was a case where someone wanted strings to be both containers and strings. While this has some advantages in unusual situations, it makes the common case a pain in the neck.

And tracing code that uses dynamic dispatch? A pain. And threaded programs? Evil. And tracking memory leaks? Horrors.

All these are beyond the simple assignment statement, the simple conditional, the simple function.

The universe, don't you know, is made up of atoms. And yet, these atoms can behave in an incredibly complex way. For example, all of life. Or skip that. What about stars? Or black holes? Or dark matter? Or how clouds form? Physicists try to come up with theories on how stars behave. All from a bunch of atoms.

Programming might consist of simple stuff, but people can put them together in incredibly complex ways, and because millions of little operations can run in a second, it can be really difficult to determine what's going on. How do you know what the code is doing? In theory, you can follow each and every step, but like tracking hundreds of kids in a school, it becomes an exercise in futility.

Next time someone tells you programming is easy, you probably are talking to someone that's not very good at programming, and doesn't even know it.

Or they're working with a much different definition.

Or they're a genius.

But probably not.

Perfect Day

The above are three videos. The first is a fan video. It's not spectacularly well-done, but would some people enjoy it because it's "real", that the people in the video could be some cute girls you saw in class? The second one, done by the original group shows more professionalism, as might be expected from a professional band.

The tune itself is rather infectious, and I happen to like it, though I can see where it might get irritating after too many listens (apparently used in Legally Blond).

The tune reminded me of the third clip from Harvey Danger entitled Flagpole Sitter which had some airplay when it was popular. I couldn't have told you either the artist nor the song title. I had to search it via lyrics.

Currying Flavor

Oh, punning on the word "curry".

I've decided, given there are a few Indian coworkers, that I'm going to give a hand at making some curry dishes. I've tried cooking Indian food in the past, but usually, to mixed success. Many years ago, when I first tried cooking Indian food, I had no idea what the result should taste like.

I did get some practice because I had a Muslim Indian friend (more Indian, than Muslim, but that is belaboring a point) who often would cook dinner for me and another friend, provided we'd help him cook. This usually meant dicing onions very finely. He was pretty fond of beef, but Indians, at least the meat-eating variety, prefer the meat gets infused with spices. They're very sensitive to "raw" meat taste (or presumably, even cooked meat taste) which Americans, I would guess, are fond of, as they tend to only minimally spice their meats (salt and pepper being this minimal set).

Alas, despite the many times I assisted, I never quite remembered what went in the dishes. Onions, ginger, tomatoes were as much I vaguely recalled, and that it took quite sometime for the meat to take on the flavor of the spices.

Today, I tried a recipe from America's Test Kitchen, which is a PBS show hosted by Christopher Kimball. He's also the editor of Cooks Illustrated, a magazine that looks like other fancy cooking magazines like Saveur, but is really far more pragmatic, and engineering-oriented in its approach.

In particular, these guys don't just give you recipes. They tell you how they arrived at the recipe, having experimented with 10-20 recipes before finally settling on the one they illustrate. Do these always provide the best recipes? Hard to say. But the innovation of this magazine is to make you realize that experimentation is worth the effort when it comes to finding the right recipes.

My brother gave me Season 6 and 7 DVDs of America's Test Kitchen (I suggested it to him that I wanted this series since we've mostly given up on surprising the other person and merely get something they would like). In one of the episodes, they did two curries: Indian and Thai.

You'd think the Indian curry might be more challenging, but the Thai curry was quite complex.

Oh, I suppose I should explain something I've known for a while. There's no such spice as "curry". Curry is an amalgamation of different spices. Indians typically refer to such spices as masala, the most famous being garam masala.

Masalas can be made from up to a dozen different spices. They can be selected from: cumin, coriander, fenugreek, cardamom (two kinds, green and black), cloves, cinnamon (which is mostly for savory dishes, not sweet), turmeric (which gives curry its distinctive yellow color), asafoetida (also known as hing), nutmeg, fennel, mustard seeds. This isn't even hitting chilis and salt! Or "wet" ingredients like ginger and garlic (which they share in common with Chinese cooking).

Most Indian recipes can be rather daunting. The spice list itself can be 8 or more of the ingredients.

I try to find simpler recipes that require maybe 10 ingredients total, and can be cooked in under an hour.

I tried the rudiments of a shrimp curry recipe, but replaced the shrimp with chicken.

Here's the basic outline of the recipe. Take an onion, cut it into slivers (but not diced). Heat oil, and brown the onions, about five minutes. Add tumeric (1t), cumin (2t), coriander (2t), salt (1/2 t), then add 1/2 cup of yogurt, and a garlic/ginger paste (4 cloves, 1.5 inch ginger, food processed with about 1/4 cup water or less). Once this cooks, add cilantro (coriander leaves) and water (a fair bit) and a jalapeno. Sit for 20 minutes. Add shrimp.

I asked Isha for her opinion. She suggested that I mince the onions because slivers wouldn't create a thick consistency (chopped onions can create a thicker consistency). She suggested frying the chiles at the same time as the onions so the spiciness would be sure to be in there. She didn't care for the garlic-ginger puree, preferring to mince them. She also noted that yogurt and tomatoes typically serve interchangeable purposes, in particular, adding a tang to the dish.

I tried part of her advice. I added two jalapenos instead of one, and fried them with the onions. I did the puree only because I was lazy, and for the most part, that was pretty quick.

The problem I ran into? First, the dish wasn't particularly hot. Even with two jalapenos, I found it to be pretty mild. Second, I added a half cup of water, and that made the result pretty watery.

I might try using the food processor to create an onion paste, and give that a try, instead of chopping and mincing. Furthermore, I might try a hotter chili like a Thai chili.

It tasted all right, but still, something was missing.

Faith and Hope in Charity

I have a friend who works at a company specializing in charities. Not in any one particular charity, but in many of them. It's a little bit like Esurance, that website that allows you to pick one of many insurance policy (from, presumably, multiple companies). The idea is pretty simple. You pick the charity you want to give to, and you give to it. They serve as a kind of middleman, providing some Webby widgets that can be attached to a blog or somesuch.

Here's the problem. People don't like giving to charity. I mean, not with the same passion that they want to give to other things, such as food, electronic goods, even presidential candidates.

I suppose the problem with charity is that people want to know it's doing some good, and yet, they don't have so much time to really pay attention to how their money is actually doing. Then, there's the fact that most people prefer things that benefit themselves first before it benefits someone else in some far away country.

People are, however, willing to contribute if it somehow combines something they care about. For example, Dulles Airport sponsored a plane pull. You get a team of twenty to contribute about 20 bucks, and they can all have an opportunity to pull a plane maybe twenty feet.

It's an odd task, but something a team could do, and there's some fun, despite the oppressive heat. And you can say that you are doing all this for charity.

Somehow combining something fun with charity works better than simply giving money to charity. For example, many people like video games. So why not have a competition on the Web (say, Worlds of Warcraft) where you play in a tournament, and part of the proceeds go to charity? Or how about online poker with charity?

For that matter, despite the fact that most charities try to maintain a wholesome image, why not work with the porn industry? People love porn, and spend money like crazy. Is there a way to combine the two? It seems like an odd combination, but why not?

The point is that charity, in and of itself, is not hugely motivating to most people, and that people can be motivated by other things, and then have charity as part of that. It seems like you just need a bit of imagination to make that happen.

Religion and Motivation

When I used to teach, I would notice a few students who went to church. In particular, I'd notice that there seemed to be a larger than normal percentage of Catholics that did well academically. It made me curious why.

I don't have definitive answers as I don't spend a great deal of time researching this idea, but one big idea in Catholicism is confession. I don't know how often one must confess, but the idea, as I understand it, is to go the priest (I never get the official titles of religious figures correct, so replace it with the appropriate one as needed) and confess sins.

Ah, sins. Sins are important to Christians, but only Catholics (so far as I know) are into confessions. So if you're a good kid, a good Catholic kid, then you're always feeling guilty. Should I do this? Should I do that? You look at other kids, possibly even other Catholic kids, who are, in your estimation, sinning, and you have to craft some worldview that makes you wary when you commit sins, and forces a sense of guilt, and presumably condemns those that aren't nearly as observant as you.

I have a friend who always seems to apologize for things, mostly things he didn't do. He was raised Catholic, and so I have to feel that this sense of guilt and sin still influences his personality, even now.

On the flip side, there are those who are raised in such an environment, and basically reject it, finding all this sin and stuff rather silly, but presumably after a phase of where they thought it was sensible.

The other religion that seems to emphasize guilt, but mostly through culture, is Judaism. In this case, it's the Jewish mother, who says she slaves at the stove to cook you your dinner, while you live a life of relative ease. Don't you feel bad for your poor old mother, and so forth.

Does guilt work as motivation? I mean, it would be nice if people accomplished things because they were inspired, possibly even divinely inspired to do so, but is guilt of eternal fire enough to motivate good kids to accomplish what they need to?

Now, I don't want to say that religion is the only source of motivation to get things done. Certainly, there are people who have accomplished a lot despite a lack of religion. Yet, I've also met people who have accomplished a great deal, who themselves aren't particularly religious, but whose parents are, and who, for a period of time, were also religious, before they rejected it.

Would they have been as successful had they not gone through that? Had they not been raised religious, and then rejected it?

Having not been raised religious, it makes me wonder how religion has affected people, in terms of personal accomplishments.

I know. It seems weird to combine two things like that. Religion is, one presumes, supposed to enlighten you, in some fashion. Personal (academic) accomplishments seem, for the most part, a secular pursuit. But that was a thought I had sometime ago, and only now have had a chance to write about it.

Thinking in Tennis

In most sports, you spend the beginning few years or so learning mechanics, meaning, you learn to be conscious of what you do. Some people care about mechanics, that is, the exact motion that you make to be most effective. Others simply do, and sometimes they get lucky and they don't think much anymore after that.

I fall into the category of folks that think about my strokes all the time. My forehand is all right. I can get good topspin on it. However, I lack any power on that side, so I've watched various pros from Federer to Blake to Djokovic to Agassi trying to see what I'm doing wrong. Watching pros can only take you so far because it's hard to catch the minutiae of what they do. It helps to see it live where the full 3D effect can be seen, but even then, the speed is so fast you don't catch many of the tiny things that happen, which they might not be aware of.

For example, maybe a pro holds the racquet incredibly steady at impact, or they are more relaxed, or something. Those are things you really can't see.

So my main problem with my forehand is getting enough power on the shot.

My backhand is more of a mess. I'd like a pretty heavily topspun backhand too, but that seems harder to achieve. I hit it fine moderately flat, but for some reason, I'm into the topspin.

The latest thing I've read is to treat the two-handed backhand as an off-hand forehand (for me, a lefty forehand) with the dominant hand (my right hand) as a support. When I was learning it, I did the opposite, treating it like a one-handed backhand with the top hand for support.

But in hindsight, that makes no sense. If the forehand is more dominating, then you should learn to hit a lefty forehand.

It's going to take some time to learn that, but I'm hoping it will yield results. And to think, I've been thinking about the two-handed backhand the same way for years. I've never really given the idea of a modified lefty forehand as the way to hit a two-handed backhand.

Now to get on the court and give it a try.

If only it weren't raining.

Backhand Blues

Most of the times, I'm happy enough with my forehand. My main complaint is that I don't hit it hard enough. This isn't usually an issue, except on the rare occasion I'm playing someone with a good deal of power.

But my backhand.

I used to hit a one-handed backhand, then I switched to two hands. And I've tried so many variations. I remember reading about the Mats Wilander backhand. Whoever was commenting on it pointed out that it was basically a one-handed backhand with the upper-hand for support.

The above video advocates the opposite. Think of it as an opposite-handed forehand, with the dominant hand for support. Since I'm a rightie, I'd have to imagine a lefty forehand, and use the other hand for support. I think I'm planning to give that a try.

This is really the amazing thing about tennis. There's always someone that has some advice, and something you can try on the court. So next time I'm out there, I'm going to give it a try.

On JavaSchools

Joel Spolsky is at it again. He's commented on so-called JavaSchools. He says that the transition to Java as a language for teaching programming is producing worse software engineers. Boo hoo!

He points to these other guys that do work on Ada, who are interested in finding coders that do systems programming and security programming, and wouldn't you know, they don't have the right skills to be hired for this rather specific kind of programming. And like parents who complain schools don't do a good job of teaching, but feel no inclination to do any teaching themselves, these companies whine that the graduates being produced aren't up to snuff, but aren't particularly interested in making up the difference.

Now I like Joel. I've met him, and he seems like a nice guy. He doesn't seem full of himself. I understand where he's coming from. He sees the programming world a bit like the NBA. In the NBA, only the very best survive. Many people can't cut it, and they do rather badly, scraping by, making a living playing in minor basketball leagues in the US, or perhaps playing in Europe. He knows that the best software is written by the best of the best, and lucky for him, he doesn't have to pay NBA salaries to get this quality.

I'm sure he's never had to teach an intro course, where he's responsible for getting the students to learn as much as they can, given that some lack the intellect, the drive, the tenacity to be great programmers, where, given this situation, he must still try to get these kids to be the best they can be, even if this is far, far removed from what he wants.

Would he scream to the heavens "Don't you understand you're incompetent? You can't slam dunk. You can't hit a reverse layup. You can't leap from the free throw line to make a dunk. You can't do a no look pass. You have no coordination at all" or the equivalent of this for programmers.

The fact of the matter is that programming is tough, and that teachers of programming want to believe this isn't the case. I've taught classes where students are frustrated learning about pointers and memory management and recursion and design of classes and linked lists and trees. It is so difficult, so challenging. And they spend so much time trying to track down bugs. It's as if they were learning to drive a car, but the car had all these kinds of issues that force you to actually look under the hood and do all sorts of adjustments, all sorts of repairs, instead of sitting down and enjoying the ride.

Say it, Joel! Go in front of those students at Cornell, at MIT, at Duke, and tell them that half of them (at the very least) aren't worth your time. Tell them to find a new major. Tell them they should not be programming.

Oh, perhaps this isn't the case. Maybe he is sympathetic to the programmers that aren't at the top of the heap. That they want to make a living too, even if they aren't brilliant. Maybe he feels they can have a job, just not at his company. But now the JavaSchools, as he points out, don't have the experience he wants, and now, darn it, he can't identify them.

So what to do? What to do? If the schools won't teach them programming, then he has to. Ah, but only one man! How can he possibly teach, because he might need hundreds, thousands to be taught, before he finds the few he cares about. Clearly a waste of time.

Well here's the news. There are enough professors, enough teachers, who saw the amount of time students wasted trying to deal with memory leaks, trying to deal with complex data types, trying to find errors that Java made literally trivial, so they could finally get on to actually programming something meaningful instead of dealing with arcane issues of a language that wasn't so friendly, that I'm afraid they aren't going to go back to C++.

Java, whatever its flaws, has managed to allow students to program something meaningful, and were it super efficient, maybe Joel would be using it too.

At least he's not clamoring for people to code in assembly. Remember when people wanted students to do that too? Students don't understand the machine! They need to code in assembly! What a travesty that they are so far removed from the machine! The horror!

Joel can lament as much as he want, but his solution is going to have to come from somewhere else because teachers aren't teaching to the best, but to the average student, and the average student is going to do more in terms of something rewarding in Java than in C++.

Vangelis

When I was in middle school, what was then called junior high school, I watched a PBS series called Cosmos hosted by Carl Sagan. Sagan was an astronomer from Cornell, who had a peculiar, punctuated way of speaking. There were about a dozen episodes of this series that talked about the universe and man's place in it.

For a science show, it was almost a religious experience. Sagan famously believed that there were alien beings on some faraway planet, and spent his life trying to find life elsewhere. His show also chronicled scientists who sought to understand the universe including people that were not well-known to me, such folks as Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Christian Huygens, astronomers that eventually showed that the planets did not revolve around the earth but around the sun instead (though to be technically accurate, then two bodies revolve around one another with the foci at the center of mass).

Though some of his stories were a bit hokey, such as his bicycle ride at the speed of life, it was still a key memory in my formative years.

As important as the visuals and Sagan's narrative was the music, which created an otherworldly sound. I was only to discover, many years later, that the music was composed by Vangelis who famously composed the music to Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner. For as distinctive as his music was and still is, and for as steady a work as he's managed, he hasn't penned music for many other films of note.

Indeed, Blade Runner, as visually fantastic as it is, becomes a complete experience because of its music.

The visual effects, crude by today's standards, have a painterly quality, not like the CG effects that have become commonplace among today's shows about space and the stars.

The poetic words that described a universe, the music that lifted the sights above the ordinary, which seemed awfully silly when I was in college, now seems quaintly nostalgic, some 20 years after going to college.

21

The Washington Redskins had devoted the rest of their season to the memory of Sean Taylor, shot and killed in his own residence in Miami. They needed to win all the games heading to the end of the season, and with Todd Collins, a veteran backup QB, a guy who hadn't started a game in ten years, they won 4 games in a row, and barely made the wildcard.

They earned a trip to meet the Seattle Seahawks, a team that had beaten them two years ago in the playoffs. This year, they seemed a lot more solid, despite not playing the elite teams in their streak. Matt Hasselbeck (which everyone seems to pronounce "HasselBACK") is a very good quarterback. But really, what won it for the Seahawks was defense.

The defense harassed the Redskins, hurrying, hitting, and knocking down Todd Collins. The offensive line wasn't giving him the kind of protection he's had the last few weeks. Two years ago, Clinton Portis was contained by the Seahawks, and they did a good job containing him again. Unlike the game with the Vikings where they ran against a very good run defense, Portis never quite got on track, and Collins ended up throwing.

Still, after a half, with Seattle up 13-0, there was a sense that if the Redskins could get momentum, they could still come back. Two scores isn't awful.

Then, they scored 7. And then 7 more. And pretty soon, they were up 14-13.

Then, a weird kickoff where the Seattle players couldn't handle the bounce. The Redskins picked up the ball and ran it in for a touchdown. Or not. As it turns out, you can't advance the ball in what amounts to be an onsides kick (though in this case, an unintentional onsides kick, i.e., a regular kick that the defense didn't get a hold of).

So the Redskins had the ball on the opposing team's 14 yard line, and this should be, for any playoff team, a gimme. Great field position should mean a touchdown, and at worst, a field goal. And yet again, the defense held stout. The Redskins had to settle for a 30 yard field goal, and Suisham was there to deliver a 4 point lead.

Only the ball hooked just a touch, and there was no score, and so the Redskins hung to their 1 point lead, when they had a great chance to make it 8 points and take control of the game.

Instead, buoyed by their luck, Hasselbeck drove down the field to move the Seahawks up 19-14. The decided to go for 2 points to move the lead to 7 points, or the equivalent of a standard TD and extra point conversion. That was successful, and they were up 21-14.

But it was simply one score now, and it looked to be a dogfight to the end. Except Collins lofted a long pass on a play that Santana Moss simply gave up on, figuring the play was broken, and figuring Collins wouldn't dare make the pass. Moss's defender didn't think so, caught the pass, and blazed past a befuddled Moss, and weaved his way to the endzone. 28-14. And that huge turnaround blew the momentum from the Redskins.

Let's face it, the Redskins had their chances. They blew it by not scoring, and then by turning the ball over. To add insult to injury, they turned the ball over once more for a touchdown, and the Seahawks were up 35-14.

As much as the Redskins saw their 21 point victory last week as a sign of their fallen comrade, Sean Taylor, who wore the number 21, the number 21 appeared again. This time, in a loss.

The Redskins lost by 21 points.

Stereotypes

I was watching The Sports Reporters this morning. It's a bit of a misnomer. Perhaps they should be the Sports Pundits. Four guys talk about sports moderated by John Saunders.

I've seen Saunders for years now. He appears to be African American, and if we take the term "American" rather liberally, than he still is. Indeed, Saunders is from Canada. And so his sports desires (many sports reporters were once kids that envisioned being professional athletes when the discovered either they had a greater talent to write, or that injury prevented them from continuing on a promising career) were decided Canadian. In particular, in recalling the hockey event held outside, with snow falling in the stadium, he recalled, as a youth, he and his brother going out on an ice rink, and winning the Stanley Cup.

My admittedly biased mindset generally thinks African American athletes want to either play basketball or football or on the outside fringe, maybe, baseball. But indeed, a few want to be race car drivers, or golfers, or tennis players. Heck, even lily white sports like figure skating or swimming.

Many stereotypes have more than a grain of truth. Interview 1000 African Americans and the numbers would likely bear the biases I have. But it occasionally makes you forget that not everyone is American, and that not every person is inspired by the same sport.

The Evolution of Tennis

The Tennis Channel (or now just Tennis Channel) has been showing old Australian Open matches. Right now, they are showing Chris Evert against Martina from 1982. At that point, Evert had not won the Australian (that was her first win, and she'd win it one more time, and reach the finals a few other times).

At that point, Evert was still using a wood racquet, though it appeared to be a midsize wood racquet. Martina had already started playing with her Yonex rectangular racquet, and she was probably the most prominent user of this Japanese racquet.

The change in racquets really affected women's play. Evert didn't hit particularly hard, and she wasn't fast, but she wasn't so slow either. To be fair, Martina didn't serve so hard either, though she spun the ball wide due to her left-handed serve. And let's face it, until Mauresmo won Wimbledon a few years ago, Martina was the last true serve and volleyer that was any good.

There are several changes that happen to the game, and it's a credit to Chris Evert that she stayed competitive as it was happening. In particular, with the racquet change, people started to hit a lot harder. Originally, this was Steffi, but then Monica, Jennifer, Lindsay, Mary, and the Williams sisters. The women now hit with more spin as well, though not the kind of topspin shots the men do.

Of course, even as I'm critical of their games, they were still awfully good, and far, far better than many players today. By many players, I mean the average weekend hacker, or even the above average weekend hacker. Indeed, while I feel the women have improved their games, Chris Evert and Martina would probably be in the top 30, if they played at their peaks. The power would make it tough for both women to be successful, at least, at the very top of the game. Neither were natural topspin hitters, so adapting their games would have been tough.

Last night, they showed Henri Leconte play Mansour Bahrami. Bahrami is a player from Iran and I believe never played professionally, or if he didn, he was never ranked highly. But the guy had good hands and was humorous, and certainly holds his own against seniors, so I think that's the reason you see him play seniors, which otherwise, prefers to not allow players that weren't highly ranked to play (one could imagine a college player that never made the pros who still is in great shape, being able to beat the stars of yesteryear).

Leconte looks really old, but he still has great hands. The intervening years haven't really helped his consistency though. You forget when players had such marvelous reflexes because they don't play the net anymore.

Leconte had one of those unusual builds. He was all chest, and not much legs or arms. Huge upper body. But he didn't think particularly, and he was very much a rhythm player. On a given day, more like, on a given set, he could beat anyone. But he wasn't so consistent. People forget that Lendl, as hard as he hit, could trade 20-30 shots with players. He eventually beat Connors by just being more patient, waiting for the error.

Connors wasn't even as inconsistent as Leconte. Connors would make 15 shots in a row, but push him to 20 or so, and those flat shots, with such little margin for error, were prone to break down.

The flat shot has pretty much disappeared. Almost no one hits it now. I remember loving to watch Kimiko Date play. She was one of the few players who hit flat, and she'd take the ball so quickly off the ground, and switch direction so quickly that people couldn't keep up. But she was also a head-case. She wasn't as mentally tough as Graf or Seles, otherwise I think she'd be a solid bet to be in the top 3.

Really, the flat shot disappearing, the harder hitting due to big racquets and the disappearance of good serve and volley players (or even coming into net) has been the key changes to tennis, some (especially serve and volley) are disappointing to watching the sport.

Equal Time

Do you realize how many countries have had women prime ministers? It may be because prime ministers are selected by the party, and not directly by the people (to be fair, technically, the President of the US is also not selected directly by the people, instead going through an arcane electoral college--but it comes much closer than the parliamentary forms of democracy). Pakistan has. India has. England has. The US hasn't.

Indeed, the US has never elected an African American, nor someone Jewish, and until JFK, not even a Catholic. It's only ever had one bachelor president. Reagan was the first (and only) divorced President (he had divorced Jane Wyman).

This year, the Democrats two leading candidates are a woman (Clinton) and an African American (Obama) and they represent the most serious, credible candidates ever. Geraldine Ferraro was selected as vice president. I'm sure some woman has tried to run, but no one would take it seriously. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have run, but they were, for lack of a better word, too black to be taken seriously by enough whites.

Indeed, the irony of Barack Obama running (the son of a white woman and a Kenyan immigrant) is that many perceive him not black enough. And perhaps that irony is rich enough to say that maybe skin color doesn't matter (though one has to say, it does matter, that there is still some latent liberal guilt, but to be fair, that Obama is, at the very least, a pretty good writer).

The Republicans, as usual, are far from this, never having fielded a credible African American or woman (they could have had both with Condoleeza were her reputation any better than it is, or with Colin Powell, if he had tried running) for President.

Indeed, rabble rouster Mike Gravel, who sounded more like the rant from that 1976 film Network: "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!". He might have been more effective if he didn't look like some old coot from the 70s. It goes to show you that appearance matters.

Ron Paul, at the very least, sounds like he thinks about foreign policy, rather than blow off at the stack like Gravel.

Some people would complain "shouldn't we vote for the best person for President", meaning that we shouldn't vote for a person's gender or their race (meaning, they want to vote for someone white). The fact of the matter is that the best person to run is probably not running. Do we seriously believe that only these 16 or so candidates are the best choice to run the country? We might do far better off with someone who isn't so photogenic, or someone who isn't a politician of the usual order (senator, congressman, governor), even if the unlikely ideal of an economics Nobel laureate a la West Wing seems like so much fantasy.

Where are the idealists? Probably unable to muster the support of the savvy pols that are running, who know how to glad-hand, craft their words, kiss babies, and negotiate in back rooms. Indeed, Ron Paul, perhaps as uncommon as his ideals are, comes as close to anyone who sticks to some principles, even as they may not always be so palatable to many, and is single-handedly trying to reverse the neocon stranglehold of the Republican party, eschewing big-government intervention new world order for liberterian, stay out of our lives ideals.

And the public, of course, can't really be bothered to spend a few minutes learning about each candidate, perfectly content for the media to winnow the field so we can concentrate on two people rather than 8 per party.

This administration pushes the view of democracy, often hoping the word has meaning and inspiration to the grand masses, even as it strips rights in the name of security, and doesn't believe that the wisdom of the masses is often not particularly wise.

Even so, the US makes progress a little at a time. Let's hope that this trend overcomes, that two steps forward and one step back is still a net of a step ahead.

The Small Things

When it comes to elections, many of us focus on so-called "big issues". The war on Iraq (if it can be called that). Abortion. Equal rights. Universal health care.

I'd love someone who would focus on small things that could help individuals. For example, think about how I find out what my gas bill is or what my electric bill. They get some guy to go around and look up a meter once in a month. Why can't I go on the Internet and find out what my bill is at any moment of the month. Like the minutes in my cell plan, I want to know minute-to-minute what I'm spending on stuff.

And why is my heating so inefficient? Or AC? If buildings were built inside of another, I suspect it would save me even more money.

For any appliance, you can imagine it running more efficiently. We have cars with as good gas mileage as they do because California required it, and this forced the car industry to deal with it. Otherwise, many companies seem pretty happy being wasteful, doing what is profitable rather than what is right.

Look at how much we have to spend to stay connected: cell phones, Internet, television, and so forth.

There's a bunch of small things that would impact us more directly, empower the citizenry, but these issues strike at the oldest companies who enjoy profits, but don't necessarily see the benefit of making it better for us all.

Things might be better if we'd only care to make it better.

OBC

Steve Spurrier spent ten plus years as head coach of the University of Florida Gators football team. He only spent two years as head coach of the Washington Redskins. But it shows the difference between a big NFL team and a big college team.

Steve Spurrier grew up in Tennessee, but was not recruited by Tennessee. Instead, he went to Florida where he became quarterback of Florida. As quarterback, he won the Heisman Trophy, kicking a field goal(!) to win a game (he had done some kicking in high school).

When he came to Washington, people made fun of his Southern accent, as they seem to do throughout the country, except, of course in the South (and sometimes even there). Spurrier also brought two phrases that became part of the football vernacular. He brought "old ball coach" (he was the OBC) and "pitch and catch" using baseball terms for throwing the ball.

Even now, years after he left the Redskins, you hear the phrase "pitch and catch" to refer to throwing the ball. Much like "Mother of all X", the phrase derived from "mother of all wars", a phrase attributed to Saddam Hussein (now hardly ever heard, but in its time, a particularly evocative, though strangely foreign way of phrasing the Iraqi confrontation).

They just showed Heath Shuler in a bowl game introduction of the players. Heath Shuler was Peyton Manning before Peyton Manning, but where Manning had a career (to say the least), Shuler was a bust as a Redskins, and eventually decided to go into real estate and then into politics. He looks a heck of a lot like Roger Clemens though.

Today's New Year's and in addition to ringing in the new year, there's a bunch of bowl games (college football games) for teams that did well enough to qualify. January 1 games (and later) are considered the prestigious games. Tennessee plays Wisconsin.

Happy New Year, 2008!

Well, I had every intention of being asleep through New Year's, but it didn't turn out that way.

In any case, happy new year to all. It's 2008!

Movie Review: Private Lessons

Around 1980, a film (if you can call it that) called Porky's came out, and the success of this teenage raunch film lead to a series of other films following similar themes, mostly of teenage boys lusting after teenage girls. In Porky's, for example, teenage guys manage to sneak peeks into a girls showers, and hilarity ensues.

During the spate of such films, there was Private Lessons, about a rich teenage boy whose chauffeur has some plot to get money from the son while the father (the mother doesn't seem to be around, probably divorced) is out of town. He has a foreign woman (apparently a Dutch actress whose acted in a series of Emmanuelle films) try to seduce the teenage boy. There's something creepily unnerving about this

The plot itself is almost totally ludicrous, and seems to only serve to prop up the main point which appears to be to get the woman naked and have the boy sleep with her. The guy seems a bit like Fred Savage, and so it is awkward to see this happily smiling boy being seduced by an older woman, who, for her part, plays it sympathetically. Because it fit in with other movies of the genre, and because the rest of the film seems so sitcomish, it almost hides the fact that such a film could hardly be made today, given the backdrop of teachers sleeping with their students.

Indeed, were it not for its laughably dumb idea, it's perhaps one of the few movies that attempts to explore older woman, younger man relationships, if you can call it an exploration. Another film that somewhat explores this issue is Beautiful Girls, which, on top of exploring a town where no one much seems to leave, where people relive high school glory (an issue also dealt with in Friday Night Lights), explores the fascination of Timothy Hutton's character with a precocious Nathalie Portman who plays the teenager next door.

In movies like that, and, say, American Beauty, there's some sense that the guy knows that he shouldn't be attracted to teenaged girls half his age. Private Lessons, having the genders reversed, treats it as some adolescent fantasy, and is borderline sitcom about it. About the only realistic aspect is how scared he is to do it initially, which gives the film several more opportunities for he and she to get together.

European films tend to look at this rather seriously, say, The School of Flesh (though the male is a bit older in this film, and has a considerably darker history, than the wide eyed innocent of this film).

Fundamentally, it has the same appeal as Porky's, namely, teenage males that want to see nude women, and yet, wraps this in a plot that would ordinarily be far more subversive than what actually makes it on the screen, and while that hardly redeems the film, it makes it a little less than completely forgettable, and one imagines, under surer hands, it would be quite a bit more offensive or offending than it already is.

On the Edge

Jaime claims there's a useful character trait called edge that attract women to men. Edge is a funny word. You can think about it being the edge of a step, or the sharp edge of a razor. When applied to personality, it has something to do with sharpness, which means someone who isn't necessarily super-nice. He suggests that if you're too accommodating, women won't like you.

While Americans, not being used to arranged marriages, have either become used to playing the game of attracting women (given that men are expected to take the initiative) or have to deal with being single. Given that the first seems preferable to many, you then have to assess yourself. Men seem attracted to the physical. Is the person hot? Or cute?

However, do women respond similarly? There's some indication that the answer is both yes and no. Cute/hot doesn't hurt. Indeed, you can be shy, but if you're perceived as good looking and don't have off-putting personality traits, then that's usually not a deal breaker. But if you're so-so looking, then it might help to have some other personality feature that makes you more attractive.

For example, our society values extroverted people. What is an extrovert? That's a good question. Most people would say they are outgoing, and that's true, but perhaps a better definition is that an extrovert generally does not like to be alone. To be fair, introverts can also feel this way, but the point is extroverts find the company of people to be invigorating. I have a friend who says she's "shy", but the reality is that she's an extrovert. Generally speaking, she wants to be with people, and that's partly insecurity talking, rather than simply being gregarious (which she is too).

For some reason, being too friendly, too nice scares people. It makes them think you're particularly needy, and being needy means you want people to do things for you. Yet, many women are the ones that are used to being needy. When parents raise children, sometimes they let girl's needs overwhelm them. Where they would be more stern with boys, saying boys don't cry, boys should be tough, they don't apply this same standard to raising girls, and this can mean women who find themselves wanting guys to keep them happy.

Of course, this is a bit of a generalization. Plenty of women that are plenty independent, and don't need guys to keep them happy, and plenty of men that are plenty insecure that want women to solve their problems.

Point is, is Jaime right? He's got a buddy and they've been friends for so long that perhaps he doesn't pay attention to the fact that the guy is 130 pounds, and that is voice is pitched up really high, and that while highly intelligent, he isn't the model of masculinity. Jaime says he lacks edge, and edge would make him more attractive. While this is true, I point out that Jaime has a quiet, shy friend that's about to get married, and he doesn't seem particularly edgy. However, what he lacks in edge, he makes up for in being fairly cute by comparison.

In other words, you might have to make up for deficiencies, and there's some evidence to show that this can be done. Some women admire power, which is why, as hideous as Steven Tyler seems to be (he's the lead singer to Aerosmith--look him up), he probably has more than his share of women.

There appears to be at least two different axis to consider. How cute/hot are you, and what's your personality/station in life. The two can offset one another. You can be pretty good looking but have an intense personality that causes people to feel uncomfortable. You can be good looking, but be shy, in which case a suitably aggressive woman might work out for you.

Of course, I'm biasing this conversation to heterosexual relationships. When it comes to gay relationships, I wonder if more superficial aspects are at hand. It's been said that men prefer porn over women because men are strongly aroused by the visual. Gay men, therefore, are strongly motivated by how someone looks, and despite presumably, higher IQs (loneliness can facilitate studying, presumably), emotions still win out.

In any case, the question I'm pondering is whether edginess is important. I believe there are two keys: attractiveness and personality. If you're deficient in one, it helps to be proficient in the other. And, there's also how interested you are in this most basic of human pursuits. I was watching the film Into the Wild and one issue that comes up is how much McCandlesss, the guy who wants to go to Alaska and live in the wild, is willing to be in a relationship. Apparently, not so much. Clearly, if you don't care about relationships, then issues such as edginess don't particularly matter.

And I'm willing to bet many of these issues are purely cultural. Go to another society, one that, say, prefers arranged marriages, and all the shyness in the world might be compensated for by parents who do the legwork for you. And since many more people are shy than not, then this seems to be, to some, a nice option. Let someone else worry about it.

But in the US, where such options are not readily available, and where women have options, and where men are still expected to make the first move, and where men aren't always attractive, then maybe a little edge makes you more successful in the game of relationships.

History in the Making

Tonight, the New England Patriots made history. They went undefeated, the first team since the Miami Dolphins to win all games in a season. They went 16-0. New England faced four tough challenges in their way to an undefeated season. The Indianapolis Colts had a lead, before New England managed to get a win at the end.

The Philadelphia Eagles and an inspired A. J. Feeley nearly had a win, with a late turnover giving New England a chance. The best chance came from a team that has since spiraled into awfulness, namely, the Baltimore Ravens. Ray Lewis, an alumni of the University of Miami, was mourning the untimely death of Sean Taylor, also an alumni whose murder shocked the NFL. The Ravens literally had the game in their hands, but a costly timeout, and a penalty on a fourth down, let the Patriots off the hook.

And the Giants, the last obstacle to the Patriots, took a 12 point lead with Eli Manning looking better than he has all season, only to have the Patriots come back, and then take a 3 point lead, then a 10 point lead, before the Giants scored a touchdown with about a minute to go, needing to recover an onsides kick, which didn't work out.

But the Patriots, like many of the sports pundits, will tell you that this is great, but not enough. What's important is the post-season, to win the Superbowl, and who would doubt they could do it?

This year has lead to several teams with gaudy records. The Colts have two losses. The Cowboys currently have two losses. The Packers have three losses. The Jacksonville Jaguars look really dangerous too, with four losses. Everyone feels the Patriots will have their work cut out for them. They are likely to face the Jaguars, followed by either the Colts or possibly the Chargers, and then the winner of the NFC.

Without those three wins, the team will feel that there is something remarkable, but not something that would surpass what the Dolphins did which was to go undefeated (albeit with a shorter 14 game season) and win the Superbowl as well.

The next month or so will tell whether the Patriots continue their run to the Superbowl or not.

Echoes of Another Country

If you yell out, into a canyon or cave, you can hear the reverberations come back, in an echo, an echo that resembles the original sound, but it's not the original. It's distorted.

Apparently, the brass band, during the 1800s or so, became a staple of the British military, and as the British empire was in full force at the time, they brought brass bands wherever they went.

In particular, they brought it to India, who also came to like the brass band, even if they didn't care for the notes, and Indian-ized the sound. The gallantry and formalism soon made brass bands popular for Indian weddings, so much so that that, in parts of India, the size and dress of the brass band shows the wealth of the groom.

And as British brass bands look to survive, they've benefited from the migration of Indians throughout the world, and requests that British brass bands come and play in weddings in England, when many thought they'd make a living playing parades, as the opportunity became available.

Here's a link to the NPR show, Studio 360, for the Indian brass band, an echo from another country.

Why Starbuck's Isn't Evil

For several years now, I used to go to the local coffee house. Named College Perk, presumably mimicking the name of the coffee house in Friends, it would serve the artsy crowd and others who craved a coffeehouse experience.

It's not perfect, by any means. The road leading in is unpaved, and legions of cars that drive over its uneven, potholed surface might wonder if giving in to pavement might not make everyone's life a bit better.

I drank there because it was convenient, and it wasn't Starbucks. To be honest, I don't have anything against Starbucks. I felt without Starbucks, there might not have been a coffee revolution in the US, and that coffeehouses might never have made it as they have now.

People used to say there's a McDonald's at every corner. Now, they say Starbucks is at every corner, and it's true. They're everywhere. I heard about them in 1990, when you couldn't find one almost anywhere, and even the people both raved and ranted on Starbucks.

Here's a story which shows that, quite the contrary, Starbucks has actually helped small, independent coffeehouses thrive, even those that are literally next door to Starbucks. Somehow, coffee drinkers aren't beholden to Starbucks. That may be what drive them to one Starbucks or another, but if there's a quality coffeehouse nearby that offers a different atmosphere, people are willing to give their loyalties there.

So I don't feel so bad that Starbucks has taken over. I only regret that there aren't some other small coffeehouses conveniently nearby. In the meanwhile, I now go to a local Starbucks where I know a few folks by name (hi to Spencer, John, Meg, Matt, and Andrew).

Searching for Wireless

My parents don't live much in the Internet age. You and I might be able to surf endlessly on the Web for hours at a time and call that entertainment. My parents are old school. They prefer to read newspapers. Their concession to modern society is getting Chinese programming, which they can now do via Dish TV.

Even this is a minor concession. Most content providers, filled to brim with channels, give people a small tool to try to manage the plethora of channels called a guide. The guide is tiny, sporting a few channels at a time, but it lets you know what's on, to the extent the stations don't change the shows on them last minute.

Parents don't use that. They have a card, and that card tells them what channel is what. Guide is a foreign concept, and they haven't adopted it yet. It's not they aren't smart. They're plenty smart. It's that they aren't particularly adaptable. The generation of computer users, especially savvy ones like you and me, that find some mild entertainment from blogs, are able to navigate the minefield of modern UI design that tries to instill in us the necessity to do something new.

What software exists out there that doesn't require a tome the size of the Torah to use? How much of this software is discoverable? We have "wizards" to help us install stuff, but no wizards to help us use stuff. Indeed, we must learn how to use our software.

Recently, I was looking at my DVDs telling me how to use my camera. What camera is that? It's a Nikon D40. This camera, so reviews tell me, has one of the best UIs of any camera out there. The folks at Nikon have tried hard, and it seems successfully, to make a usable digital SLR. Let's face it, people wade through f-stops (seriously, folks, get rid of this term and replace it with something like depth-of-field, or something more intuitive and useful) and ISOs and zooms. I learned this stuff when I was in junior high or high school. And yet, with the digital revolution, I have to learn about white balancing and SDs vs. Compact Flashes vs. Sony's idiosyncratic MemoryStick.

I suppose I could use the dial-up, but I've become helpless to wireless. I want to open my laptop and go. I want it to connect to the Internet effortlessly. I want downloads that sing. I'd love to say that we live in a country of free Internet, but only pockets exist, and only the hours they are open.

Airports are the place that suffer the most. Most places aren't Portland or Ithaca with their enlightened view of free wireless Internet for all. Portland does one better and has it free in many spots within the city.

It's funny that old school was 15 years ago, before the Web became what it was, before we had real bandwidth. How many people live lives on the Internet now? How many can live without surfing to a reddit or a Digg or their favorite sites? It's a small number, but it grows, and puts a significantly larger number of people in the have-nots who wonder how someone can stare at a computer that long, how someone can derive entertainment from bits flying across the air.

So here I am at Panera, connected for a moment. For no one can explain the Matrix.

You have to see it for yourself.

Best "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" spoof

The RailsEnvy guys do the best parodies of the PC/Mac ad, partly because they don't even bother focusing on Macs and PCs.

Courier-Sampras

The Tennis Channel is showing reruns of old Australian Open matches, presumably to whet our appetite for the upcoming Australian Open in January. I just saw parts of the match between Sampras and Courier from the 1995 quarterfinals. I don't think I ever saw that match before.

In the fourth set, Courier was up two sets to one, and up a break. He had won the first two sets in tiebreaks. To be honest, this is a match Courier should have won. And despite Sampras coming back to win in five sets, it didn't seem that well played.

Courier seemed to have a pretty simple strategy. Attack Sampras's backhand. Sampras had, by that point, learned how to hit a reasonably consistent backhand, even if he couldn't exactly hit winners. Sampras was not really on his game, and made a few errors, but somehow, Courier, who had been playing a shade better, simply got nervous, began missing a few shots, and boom, Sampras breaks and wins the set.

This has to be frustrating. You look at Sampras, and normally, he plays pretty good for some games, and then really good to engineer a break. In this case, it was more like Courier made a mental slip, and didn't take advantage of his opportunities.

Courier had a reasonably decent cross court backhand, but I was surprised he didn't try to take his backhand up the line a few times to surprise Sampras. He must have felt a bit shaky going up the line. Generally, it is easier to go crosscourt than up the line, but if Courier didn't get a good angle, Sampras could have run around the shot and hit a decent forehand.

I'd have to imagine Courier had to be really discouraged with that match, realizing Sampras wasn't playing that well, and Courier was playing well enough to win.

I'm now watching a match from earlier this year. It's Safin vs. Federer. It's in the fifth set, and Safin is up break points. This is from two years ago. Looks like Safin eventually wins this one. Safin was always such a streaky player. If had his head on straight, we might be talking about Safin as one of the best players, not Federer. Safin's not as smooth as Federer, but his backhand is actually rather smooth, and his serve can be impressive.

When Safin is on, I'd rather watch his game than, say, Sampras's game.