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Clash of the Titans

The Australian Open is a funny event. Held in January where folks in the US and Europe are in the middle of winter, the Australian Open is held in Melbourne in the blazing sun. More than any of the other Grand Slam events of tennis (the French, Wimbledon, the US Open), the Australian Open (AO, for short) has surprise finalists.

Last year, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga came out of nowhere to reach the final beating Rafael Nadal en route, then the world number 2. The year before, Fernando Gonzalez of Chile made the finals. Players like Rainer Schuettler, Arnaud Clement, Thomas Johannson (who won), Marcos Baghdatis have reached the finals in recent years. If these names don't exactly roll of your tongue, no worries, mate, it's typical of the AO.

Men's tennis is usually a game of the young. The best players often blossom by 18 or 19 if not younger. Boris Becker won Wimbledon at 17. Mats Wilander won the French at 17 too. Pete Sampras won the US Open at 19. Rarely does a player who has been toiling on the tour blossom at 25. The exceptions are maybe someone like James Blake who, at 28, plays as well as he ever has. He's had a slow rise to top 10 and it's more a testament to his physical prowess than anything else.

So how did Fernando Verdasco suddenly play so well at 25? How did he push world number 1 Rafael Nadal, a guy who he had never beaten to 5 scintillating sets?

Although Nadal and Federer are known to be some of the best hitters in the game, it's rarely pointed out how mentally tough they are. Nadal, in particular, rarely has bad patches where he gets impatient and just lashes out. He's a disciplined player. What helps is just how tenacious he is. He continues to fight, to hit great shots, to run down balls that you don't think he will. As Verdasco said in the interview afterwards, Nadal makes you win the point several times.

Both players, however, are mentally tough and it explains why they are numbers 1 and 2 in the world. They rarely have bad lapses, which means they are always competitive.

There are players that hit a ton. Players like Tomas Berdych, who pushed Federer to 5 sets, or Ernests Gulbis, or even Fernando Verdasco. These players often lack in the mental toughness department. They get frustrated or nervous when they get down. They can't sustain a level of excellence it takes to win at the very top.

In principle, that's good for players like Verdasco. Verdasco suffered from several things that prevented him from moving to the top. First, his serve wasn't so good, especially his second serve. Part of that was nerves. He played an awful Davis Cup match that he won. Good that he won. Awful in that he was so nervous, he made lots of bad shots. He was only saved by his opponent playing just as bad.

Second was fitness. Verdasco's generally pretty fit, but to play at the best levels in tennis, you must be able to run all day. It means that today's players are less likely to have the longevity of players from the past where running shots down was not as important to the game as it is today. Almost every top player works very hard on speed and agility drills and fitness to run hours, especially in a tournament as hot as the Australian Open.

Most people felt, for a variety of reasons, that Nadal would win over Verdasco. The reasons were simple. Nadal had never lost to Verdasco. Nadal had had easy wins up to this point. Some felt Verdasco was just a weaker version of Nadal and Nadal simply did everything better.

I, however, did not think that. First, Verdasco's serve looked good against Murray and Tsonga, his two previous opponents prior to playing Nadal. The serve is key. With it, you win cheap points. Nadal returns well, but you can never underestimate getting a few free points off serve.

Second, Verdasco hits pretty hard. He ran both Murray and Tsonga ragged with his power hitting. Indeed, once he played Nadal, he hit nearly 100 winners in the match. That power works, even against Nadal. I felt his pace would help out.

Third, he beat Tsonga. It's one thing to upset a top player like Andy Murray. The great Roger Federer beat Pete Sampras in an early round at Wimbledon only to lose to Tim Henman in the next round. Time and again, a top player is upset by a lower ranked player and that lower ranked player bows out meekly to his next opponent.

This didn't happen to Verdasco. If anything, he looked more impressive against Tsonga, who was laboring in the heat and humidity to keep up with Verdasco.

It turned out to be more than correct. Verdasco opened up with a first set win in a tiebreak where he took an early lead. Basically, neither player had a whiff of a break point.

In the second set, Nadal had one break to win 6-4, and people felt, well, Nadal's going to roll. Indeed, Nadal broke Verdasco. But Verdasco broke back at love. Then Nadal broke again. And here's the surprise. Verdasco broke back again. They stayed even til the tiebreak where Verdasco made a few errors and Nadal took the tiebreak.

With a two sets to one lead, conventional wisdom says the better player would then take over and win the fourth set, often easily. The weaker player generally concedes he's given the best he's got, so that is that. The better player gains confidence, begins to hit more freely.

Except things didn't go as planned. The fourth set, which I saw none of, went to a tiebreak and Verdasco took that set rather unexpectedly.

In the fifth set, Nadal served first. Normally, this is an advantage. It means, once you get close to the end of the set, that a break by the player serving first automatically wins the set. A break by the trailing player means the leading player still has a chance to break back and tie.

Verdasco struggled to hold serve to 4-all. After ekeing out that win, he reached 0-30 on Nadal's serve and even got a look at a second serve which he promptly dumped into the net. 3 points later and Nadal had held serve and it was 5-4.

At this point, Verdasco serves and gets to 0-40 after some errors and a double fault. He then plays two aggressive points at net to get to 30-40. He misses the first serve, then, the second serve, well, it goes short. People said he choked. He served four double faults the entire match, two in the final game, and one at match point.

Will Verdasco take this victory as a stepping stone to a better future? Only time will tell. His game and mental resolve seem much better and if he can continue to play like this, he can be a solid top ten player.

Not bad for a guy of 25.

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Review: Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire is a film of the "World is Flat" era. Although Bollywood films have been around for years, they were beginning to register in the brains of Americans perhaps in the mid 90s. I had heard of such films from 1991 or 1992, but it probably took Americans until 1995 or so to get some idea of Bollywood films. Roger Ebert wrote about Bollywood when he went to visit India some number of years.

With a large number of Indians in the US, the advent of freely available video on YouTube and the like, Bollywood films are at least somewhat accessible in the US. I remember a few years ago, some company, I think DirecTV made a commercial with a guy sitting and dancing in his seat to a Bollywood film when the actor in the film stops acting and says "This is awful! You should be watching an action picture or science fiction!" and goes on to suggest DirectTV before continuing on with the dance. I thought that was particularly obscure, though very funny, tapping into a phenomenon few Americans were aware of.

India's impact in the popular imagination has come courtesy of the Internet age, which has meant a transformation of the world in so many ways. For example, the increasing access of the Internet to well-educated Indians has opened up the world to India, and this means more than entertainment. It also means access to software.

The open source revolution would not have been half as successful without the Web, which allowed you to get to the software. The computer revolution not only transformed the US, but it meant other countries could get involved, and thus was born, merely a few years after the browser, a huge Indian IT industry and the well-known call centers.

Slumdog Millionaire taps into all of modern India, though it focuses on a side of India that few people, including Indians, have seen depicted in Indian films. Most developing nations seem to go through a phase where film becomes extremely popular. At one point, Taiwanese were the most avid filmgoers. Eventually, film is replaced by television and the quality of television goes up, while films become less escapist fare and deal with topics that are more artistic and less wildly popular.

The common Bollywood film is escapism (Bollywood, so called, because its center is in Bombay, thus Bombay Hollywood, or Bollywood, for short). Due to the strong traditions of song and dance in India, infused through centuries of tradition, most films have their Austin Powers like moment where the lead actor and actress dance and "sing". I say "sing" because singing has been a tradition, and you don't let actors and actresses (a la Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter) do their own singing. Oh, no, that won't do.

Although the trend in American musicals, however rare they are now, is to let the actors do their own singing, when musicals were popular, it was common to dub other singers. Julie Andrews apparently sang for Audrie Hepburn in one film. In this case, though, it was one singing actress singing for a non-singing actress. In Bollywood films, singers whose faces never see the light of day, but whose name are well-known, e.g. Asha Bhosle, voice over famous actors who are asked to act and dance, but not sing their own songs (just as most actors would not play their own musical instruments).

There have been films set in India before, but usually, in stereotypical views of India, or from a mostly Western viewpoint, or from the long past.

Slumdog Millionaire explores the seedy underbelly of huge cities, termed "metros" in India, where large numbers of the extremely poor live in slums.

Interestingly enough, the film focuses on two Muslim brothers, Salim and Jamal. Jamal is the ostensible hero of the film, who is on the verge of winning 20 million rupees on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?. The film, as most people know, is told in flashback, as Jamal explains how an uneducated slumdog knows the answers to very difficult questions, and each answer reveals a dark period in his life.

You can appreciate the accuracy of some parts of the film if you know a bit of Hindi and have visited India. I was in Mumbai about two years ago, and there are kids who come to the taxis begging for money. I was told that if you have a baby, you would get even more money. The average well-to-do Indian is as unmoved by this experience as we are when we see beggars on the street. Americans are typically shocked, and want to give money to the poor Indians, which they are more than happy to take.

One of the scenes involves a child who sings well enough that his keepers decide to blind him purposely so he can fetch even more money. I will say I didn't see any blind child beggars, but I could see this happening.

Roger Ebert notes that these kids (Jamal and Salim) are scam artists and convince foreigners to take their shoes off so they can steal them. However, what he doesn't know is that various temples (like the Taj Mahal) require all visitors to go barefoot, with their shoes held at a central area and picked up at the end of the day. The idea, I believe, is more out of respect for the area much like Asians prefer you to remove your shoes before entering the main house.

You can hear terms like "chai walla" used in the film, which basically is a tea guy. Jamal works at a call center where he delivers tea to employees. When you have a country of a billion people, keeping them employed is a big issue, so small services like delivering tea to IT employees is one way to do this. It's considered a lowly job which is why the host of the game show makes fun of his background.

Mumbai is well known for dabbawallas. These guys pick up meals from the wives, lunch boxes called "tiffins" (apparently a British term, but like many British terms, only preserved in modern Indian English), deliver the meals to their husbands and return the boxes after lunch. The efficiency of delivering these meals for low cost to many employees is considered a marvel of logistical efficiency. These guys are also called "tiffin wallas" which means the "tiffin" or "lunch box" guy.

Knowing some swear words also helps. Sprinklings of "mother chod" or "chutia" (which is motherf*cker and c*nt) respectively add to the roughness of the film, something that again, would probably not be seen as much in Bollywood films which are generally family entertainment.

The film opens up with classic films by Amitabh Bachchan, who is India's most famous actor (at least, in Bollywood). His son, Abhishek, married Aishwarya Rai, called by 60 minutes as the most beautiful woman in the world. Unlike their Hollywood equivalents, movie star weddings are generally for life. There's no Elizabeth Taylor, seven marriage equivalent, in India where divorce is still practically unknown and where arranged marriages are still quite common.

Funny enough, Slumdog Millionaire does follow a convention of Bollywood films which is the main characters are in love. As much as arranged marriages are the norm in India, it doesn't make for good drama. Parental involvement with children is still huge, and one way it often manifests itself is through arranged marriages. Jamal pines for Latika, his childhood sweetheart.

I give credit to the casting director for finding little kids, especially the one that plays Salim, that resemble the adult version. I'd almost believe they cast the kid first and found a comparable teen to play the adult role.

Although a film set in India, there are Western touches, including Danny Boyle's very visual eye. He also portrays Westerners who are sympathetic to the slumdogs. This comes from an understanding of how the West perceives Indians (as tourists).

Boyle had music done by A.R. Rahman, a famous Bollywood compose, compose music for Slumdog.

The film ends in a Bollywood dance scene, though clear the actors are not dancers. This is done with the casualness of average people doing dance, which leads to a kind of realness, and is perhaps the cleverest way to keep an audience sitting through credits (for those that hate to do credits).

Ah, so the film itself. Well, I had basically known the outline of the plot. Although the visuals are stunning, the history interesting, I just couldn't get into the main story. It probably doesn't help that Dev Patel is only OK as an actor. Also, the idea of using Who Wants to Be a Millionaire as the conceit was, I dunno, a bit too cute.

Even that idea is a commentary on the international spread of ideas. That show, along with Big Brother and American Idol (which was Pop Idol in the UK), have spread throughout the world. Using this show is a sly way to comment on this phenomenon.

I'm currently listening to Jai Ho, the song used to accompany the dance sequence at the end. It's interesting how they decide to let the woman sing in a "lower" voice. Bollywood songs have women sing in falsetto to sound even younger. It's so commonly done that I'm sure the average Indian doesn't even think that the women are singing so high. Admittedly, all the men sound alike. You never hear a gruff voiced or extremely baritone man sing a song in these films. This is one fallout of lacking singer-songwriters. Singers sing, and songwriters write song, so it creates generic sounding singers and songs.

So the film was good and gives a view of India I has only barely seen, though perhaps more aware of than those who haven't visited India. However, I had a tough time getting fully engaged in the story of Jamal's longing for Latika, since she is something of a weird distant memory, a little bit like Anakin's longing for Amidala/Padme.

I'd give it about a B, I think. Worth watching to give insight into India, and I'm sure some folks will love the way it ends.

Birth of a Nation

Barack Obama will be sworn in at about noon today as the 44th President of the United States of America.

It's a ceremony to be sure. Despite the economic times, much money is being spent to make sure this is a ceremony people will remember. People say it's the worst economic times since the Great Depression, but the depression has unemployment rates of 25% and another 25% were partly employed. The US is maybe 7-8% unemployed right now, which is high, but not like the Great Depression.

I was talking to an elderly Indian (from India) who felt that the significance of Obama being the first African American president was not that great since, in his mind, blacks and whites were pretty much equal now. Even if that were so, and it's hard to claim that for a variety of reasons, it's still significant that an African American is being elected given that none have been elected before.

The funny thing is this. Everyone knows he has a white mother. Everyone knows he was raised by his white grandparents. His father abandoned him. But many whites and even many African Americans look at Barack as African American. He simply has the facial features of someone African American, even if his values were shaped as much by growing up in white America as the next person.

Obama has, of course, embraced the African American culture. He moved to Chicago. He married someone with strong ties to Chicago in Michelle Obama. He joined an African American church before he left it. But it is as much an adopted culture as anything.

In the end, does it matter? Obama embodies this notion of unification of white America and black America, but he was elected by mostly ignoring the issue of race or to emphasize his white roots, given that he visually appears black.

And even if he is half-white, does it matter? As long as we perceive him to be African American, then he is.

One fascinating aspect of his Presidency is how he used Abraham Lincoln as inspiration. He started his campaign in Springfield. He took a train ride from Philadelphia to Washington much like Lincoln. Perhaps there's a bit of irony that it was Lincoln who was in far greater danger of being assassinated on his route to DC. We have reached a time where most people wouldn't even think of it, though I suppose it only takes a small number to carry out such a nasty act.

When FDR assumed the Presidency, he reassured Americans through radio, then a brand-new technology. In those days, citizens still respected the Presidency, and they were reassured by his words. These days, Americans are far more savvy, so far more cynical. They aren't swayed as much by words, and often feel a dissenting voice is their right. And this means conservatives! Bush would have been happy if he could have squelched dissent much like old time Soviet propagandists.

It's funny, but as well read as Obama is, surely he's read the Lincoln-Douglas debates with two candidates running for the Illinois senate (although Obama won, and Lincoln lost). In these debates, Lincoln was accused of being sympathetic with slaves and blacks which he vigorously denied. He felt that, in the forseeable future, blacks would not stand equal with whites.

Now that could have been political talk designed to get him elected. He could have changed his mind over the years as he became President and was President. But at least at one point in his career, he wasn't that noble person, that mythological figure. Obama knows, of course, that Americans view Lincoln as a myth and know very little about him.

Despite the accessibility of the Internet, the desire to read about Lincoln is far less than reading the latest installment of Harry Potter. We prefer to think of Lincoln as the man that freed the slaves, the President that presided over a Civil War, as Honest Abe, and finally as the President assassinated by a Southerner.

Would Lincoln have thought, some 145 years after his Presidency that the United States would have suffered a Great Depression, the civil rights movement, and elected a man born of an immigrant would be President? Perhaps he would have.

But we don't have to dream that. On the day after Martin Luther King's observed birthday, it's reality.

Idol Worship

American Idol starts in two phase. The first phase is the judges go to a select number of cities and listen to a bunch of performers. They get to go to Hollywood.

The performers usually fall into three categories: good to very good, not quite there, and awful.

You would like to believe that everyone that falls into good to very good gets to go to Hollywood, but I don't think that's the case.

For example, if you tried out, and you were an opera singer, a professional one, for that matter, and sang opera, out you'd go. Sorry, this is pop singing, not opera. And to that extent, folk singing is usually out, country singing is tolerated. Basically, your best chance to get in, for lack of a better phrase, is to sing "black" which means a lot of vibrato and extending out notes for a while.

Black singing is, in fact, so popular, that it has defined singing, at least, diva style singing. Thus, Celine Dion or Justin Timberlake, two fairly white individuals, sing in this style.

You aren't going to get people singing like Sufjan Stevens to make it on Idol.

Furthermore, there are folks that simply don't look the part. Every contestant that looks, for lack of a better word, inbred, i.e., not sexy, and indeed, far from sexy, has a bad voice. Why is that? Isn't it possible that one of these folks who don't look the part has a great voice?

It's possible, but I bet they never show them on TV. They don't want to admit to that kind of bias. Here's someone that's not attractive that would get voted out because looks matter and yet they have a great voice. Why don't they show these folks? Because they'd look bad, that's why.

So American Idol prefers that we laugh at these individuals who look and sing horribly, and implicitly tells the rest of the world that you have to look good, otherwise your talents are meaningless.

And that's a sad commentary about American Idol.

But no one much seems to care.

Clothes Make the Man

I was listening to NPR this morning and there's a buzz about what Michelle Obama, the new First Lady, will wear to the various inauguration balls (yes, plural). The fascination by the fashion industry and indeed by the average Jane means Obama must make her decisions wisely. She can't be too flashy, nor too expensive. She should exude class.

Men rarely run into this problem. The tuxedo has meant that most men can look pretty much alike and so therefore no one cares what Barack Obama will look like. It's interesting no one has pushed this concept so men can break out of the rather rigid mold.

But I don't want to talk about the clothing of the new President nor his wife. I want to talk about my own clothing.

Yesterday I donned a black long sleeve pullover of some sort with dark blue, let's call it black, pants. Black and more black. I was criticized by a co-worker for using a uniform color scheme throughout.

He recalled an incident when he was merely in the sixth grade and his fellow rugrats chided him for his lack of fashion couture. Ah, those 11 year old twits, thinking fashion when they should be worried about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or perhaps their multiplication tables. This made such an impression on his impressionable mind that he is now hyper-sensitive to this basic "rule" of clothing.

Most people have no problems with this, especially guys. They wear blue jeans and probably lack too many blue colored shirts. So it always contrasts well.

Indeed men's clothing are often so bland that the variations occur above the waist, where jeans will often suffice every day of the week.

And so it goes.

Working

I just caught a Subway commercial where they sing some tune about five dollar meals. In it, they show three men dressed as construction workers singing it. They alternate with two women who sorta look business casual as they sing their song.

Normally an ad I wouldn't think that much about.

But I did think about it.

Why construction workers? It's an occupation that has comedic values but also an occupation that is thought of as masculine (construction guys always seem to have overweight fellows, which may contrast with the healthy eating Subway prefers). In short, comedic and masculine.

Why not doctors or lawyers or whatever? Doctors have stereotyped clothing, but maybe people don't feel enough kinship with doctors. Lawyers don't have anything particularly lawyerly. Judges do, and that could be amusing.

Women? They didn't pick a particular occupation for them. They seemed to be singing in a mall in a business casual dress, something you might expect a secretary to wear, but nothing that screams out a particular occupation.

Why's that? There are a handful of occupations that have distinctive women's outfit, such as nurses and nuns. Why did they decide not to pick an occupation for these women? And why were they a bit thinner?

All these things have to be going through the minds of the advertisers. Why have a men-only group and a women-only group? Once you have three men, then one of them has to be African American, but the other two should be white. These decisions aren't made on a whim. There are rules for all of this stuff.

All from a Subway commercial.

The Pendulum Theory

I was at the tennis wall today trying to hit my backhand and finding, wow, couldn't seem to do it. A tennis wall, for those who are curious, is merely a wall that is very tall (one hopes) and has a line painted for the net (one hopes). It is used in place of hitting with another person or a ball machine. There aren't many good walls around, but I live near one. Hitting against the wall has many problems, but the one advantage it has is it's not a person. Therefore, you don't have to worry about irritating the person as you practice a shot yet again. You have time to sit, reflect, contemplate.

My purpose for being at the wall today was to work on my backhand. Although it may not be that obvious, there's more than one way to hold a tennis racquet. If you were to grab a racquet as it lies flat down, palm first, you would be holding it in a semi-Western grip (most likely). If the racquet were sideways so it was sitting on the edge and you put your palm on top of the racquet, then that would be an Eastern backhand grip.

I had been using a grip called the Continental grip, not so much because I wanted to use that grip on my backhand but because I was already using it for sliced backhands (this is where you hit a ball with underspin) and volleys (balls hit without bouncing, very close to the net).

I looked at a video Saturday night and either misunderstood it (very possible) or disagreed with the way they suggested I hold the racquet which might be described as a Western backhand grip. This grip is so rarely used for the backhand (sometimes it's called an extreme Eastern grip) that the name Western backhand is not that enlightening.

The Western backhand grip is actually a Eastern forehand grip flipped over to be used as a backhand grip. I realized I was holding it roughly in this style, and it felt awkward.

Once I figured out how to hold an Eastern backhand grip, I began fiddling with how my thumb should be placed. A racquet grip is usually just small enough that the thumb and index finger jockey for the same space. There are several ways to deal with it, and eventually I figured out how it is (roughly) done by players like Federer and Gasquet.

Anyway, the point is, I had changed my backhand grip and I wanted to try it out on court. The problem was that it felt awkward. Worse still, I was gripping it way too tight. Tennis is about staying relaxed, so I knew I had to loosen the grip some more. But I couldn't swing the racquet properly in a mini-tennis drill against the wall. It just felt wrong and I had no consistency.

Mini-tennis is when you hit tennis between the service line. The court has several lines. The two far lines parallel to the net are called the baselines. Halfway between the net and the baseline is the service line. If you play between the service lines, that's mini tennis.

Mini-tennis is meant to teach you to hit very softly while still practicing good technique. The idea is if you can hit the ball this softly with good technique then you should be able to hit faster balls with good technique.

I knew one problem was that I wasn't taking my racquet back enough. So I recalled some lesson that suggested that, and it helped a little. Now today was a sunny day, and on sunny days, I can see my shadow on the ground, which is a poor man's mirror. The shadow lets me see what I am doing in enough detail that it provides useful feedback.

So I began swinging the racquet a bit like a pendumlum. Back, forth, flipping my wrist at the nadir of the pendulum swing, so that when the racquet was reached the apex on my left side, the back of the racquet (where I'd hit my backhand) was facing forward (away from me), and when the reached the apex on my right side, the other face of the racquet (where I would hit a forehand with) was facing forward (away from me).

I figured this rhythm of going back and forth in this manner would help my mini-tennis drill. I would swing forward to the wall as part of the pendulum, then as the ball went to the wall, I would start to swing the racquet back the other direction. That's the pendulum in the other direction.

I had just watched a presentation at TED, an organization that invites smart, engaging speakers to talk about interesting topics to other smart, engaged audience members. In this talk, Steven Strogatz talks about how, despite the increase in entropy (i.e., disorder), there is also a strong tendency towards order or synchronization.

To demonstrate this idea, he took two tiny metronomes, two bottles, a pamphlet, and placed the two metronomes on top. Although they were out of sync to begin with, the motion of the metronomes were synchronized by the surface. Here's an example with five metronomes getting synced up.

Anyway, that thought was in the back of my mind. The body wants to synchronize against something, and this pendulum idea would create that synchronization.

To be fair, I do have some idea how to hit a backhand. I don't know if this idea would work out that well for someone completely new to tennis who hasn't built up a lot of the muscle memory of hitting a backhand.

I decided to apply this to the forehand. However, with my forehand, I wanted to work my body more into the shot.

Too often, beginners in tennis think of tennis as a shot that is hit by the arm. They don't know how to get the body involved more. The reason you want the body to be involved more is momentum, and that of a physics variety. Momentum is mass times velocity. When you swing the arm, you may have great velocity, but you don't have great mass since the arm isn't very massive.

Now I've tried to figure out ways to get the body more into the shot, and it's been partly successful, though awkward too. My shots look very stiff, and tennis is, as I've mentioned before, about staying relaxed.

One way to stay relaxed is to do twists. To get an idea of this, put your feet about shoulder width apart. Put your hands on your hips. Rotate your shoulders and hips so that you face to the left. To do this comfortably, when you face left, you should lift your right heel up so that only the point of the right toe is touching the ground. The right foot should have rotate some so that the shoelaces point left.

Then, twist so you shoulders and hips cause you to face to your right. Your right foot goes from being on tip to being flat. Your left foot comes up on tip. Just go back and forth several times. That provides the pendumlum action.

Now add the racquet to this. As you rotate right (for a right hander) get the racquet to point straight back. As you rotate left, hit a windshield wiper motion. The whole body is involved in this motion. The shoulders, the hips, the feet, and the racquet. By practicing this pendulum motion, you are incorporating your body into the shot and it's done at a nice relaxed, repeatable fashion.

And that's my pendulum theory of tennis.

Backhand Thoughts

What's the difference between a blog and a webcam? Both are products of an Internet age, an age where privacy has given way to openness and sharing. Information, such as it is, is disseminated to those who care enough to pay attention.

The difference is a blog is a diary (at best). It is (or should be) an introspective perspective. It is a person talking about themselves, so you gain insight into how they think, how they feel, what's most important to them right at that moment. It is, by its nature, biased to the person presenting the information. Certain facts may be left out either by choice or lack of omniscient knowledge.

The webcam, were it situated in the same person's room, is a piece of technology that allows a viewer to see someone's life. Without sound, the day to day movements are broadcast and chronicled by those who choose to observe. Intention is lost. Thought process is lost. What seems like a person lying in repose on his bed may be someone wallowing in the depths of depression or deep in philosophic thought. The webcam reveals all and yet reveals nothing.

So it can be said of learning tennis. The tools that present itself is the equivalent of the webcam. It is the video recording of tennis professionals. It offers insight into how they do what they do. You can observe, and inspect, and scrutinize. But is it enough? Do you see enough? You can't feel what the players feel. How much information are you getting?

Lately, I've been thinking about the backhand again, and in particular, the one-handed backhand. This stroke seems sufficiently different from the two hander that the thought process doesn't seem the same.

It's very easy to perceive the one-hander has a motion that is initiated by the arm. The arm is the centerpiece in the action. For the casual observer, this feels very true. The arm is the most active part of the stroke.

And yet this hides the fact that it's better to think of the stroke from the shoulders and from the chest. Let it initiate the action. Let it be the source of the movement. By focusing on that part of your body, you involve the torso, so often called, the core, into the shot and let the arm do less work and therefore get less tired. The core, once involved, can assist the shot by providing mass.

Tennis is a game of momentum, but not the kind sportscasters talk about. It's not which team is playing well at the moment and capitalizing on play after play. It is momentum of the physics variety. Mass times velocity. The more you can incorporate the core, a difficult task because the human body isn't rigid, and even if it were rigid, it wouldn't help because the other component, velocity would be lost, the more mass comes to bear.

It is a delicate dance your body must go through, at once optimizing speed by letting your body be limber enough not to slow you down, and yet also working as a whole, so that mass is your friend.

If you understand how to initiate the action with the core, then you can decrease the amount of arm you need. This is a mistake many players make because they choose to re-invent the wheel. But what choice do they have? The information is not readily available. When you learn tennis, you often start from scratch, and despite the ubiquity of the Web and access to information, there's no easy way to find a definitive answer.

It's taken me a while to fully appreciate this, and only because I read it in a forum where someone whose life has mostly been devoted to teaching tennis made the point clear. The torso initiates the one-handed backhand and for much of the hitting, the arm is just along for the ride. It does, of course, play an increasingly important role the closer you get to actually hitting the ball, but again, that interplay between torso and arm, when does one end, and the other begin?

I use words when a visual would be helpful, something that, in effect combines the blog and the webcam. The two together offering not only insight, but a visual illustration.

Given the time challenges of making a video, I will now use words, as paltry a substitute as this may be, like Velveeta for Brie, a travesty, but the best we can do under the circumstances.

Stand in the ready position, and form a U with your upper arm making one side of the U, the forearm the bottom part of the U, and the racquet pointing up, the other side of the U. Turn your body to the left, enough so that eventually your back begins to point to the net.

Using your left arm, lift the racquet so your forearm eventually gets to shoulder height. Use your left hand to lower the racquet behind you, until the racquet head points to the right side of the court (were you facing the fence, it would be to your left). The racquet is nearly completely behind you from the perspective of your opponent.

Rotate your body so the racquet travels 180 degrees around and strike the ball, then lift your arm up as if you are holding a torch for the Olympics way up high.

There are other factors to consider. How high is the ball? If it's low, you bend your knee more and stay down more. If it's high, you lift up your leg and get on your tiptoes. Different situations demand different setup.

This is what makes tennis challenging. There are many situations to take care of under the name "backhand". This is why hitting thousands of balls is needed, so the body learns how to cope with such variety. But behind all of that is the basis for the shot, the skeletal framework by which all variation sprouts from. And this is what you often need in sage advice so you make the move that the pros do, not the one that is easy to see from the eye, but the one that is felt from within.

Musings on Tennis

I look at India and find their fanatical devotion to cricket a contrast to the devotion of Americans to sports. Americans love their sports, don't get me wrong. There are plenty of passionate watchers who spend their weekends perched on sofas to watch groan men dressed in modern day gladiatorial armor, run as fast as they can to hit someone as hard as they can. And fans can be mesmerized at this, reeling off stats, exclaiming how sick a particular play was, lamenting the bone-headed play.

Still, it feels like the love of cricket is pervasive throughout India, especially among men, though women certainly enjoy it, perhaps as support of their men, much like the wives that make the trek with their husbands to a weekend college football game, even as they can hardly explain the rules of the game. They know enough to see a big play or a touchdown, and can celebrate those moments.

This pervasive love of cricket seems to stem from the lack of what I call the jock mentality. The jock culture in the US is where the athletes are heroes and make fun, that is deride those that lack athletic skills. Such kids often seek solace in geekier pleasures, whether it be computers or anime. Perhaps the love of Japanese culture is an indirect indictment of the culture of America. Anime lovers envision a world that is different from the one they grew up in and reject traditional American culture.

Indeed, such kids, having grown up with jocks have an antipathy to sports. They don't care about it, they don't watch it. Perhaps, at a minimum, they might do something that's not quite sports, like ballroom dancing, or something that doesn't involve team, such as running or hiking or biking. These pursuits are at least healthy and still reject sports as whole.

Indians don't seem to have this issue. Maybe kids are magnanimous when it comes to cricket. No matter how poorly you play, you'll be allowed to play and enjoy it. The key is having fun, and not making fun of those who play badly. You just need a few people who are willing to defend those that aren't skilled.

Or maybe it's how the whole country shuts down when an important cricket match is on, so playing cricket equates to getting out of work, so even if you don't care about cricket deeply, you like the idea that it means a respite from the daily grind.

I can't say, while I grew up, that I recognized the jock culture in our school. Perhaps it was there, but because of the way our school segregated the smart folks from the more academically challenged, I didn't encounter those folks every day.

Tennis had its heyday in the US during the 1970s. Not only did Americans dominate the 1970s with players like Jimmy Connors, Chris Evert, and John McEnroe, but there were rivalries with players from other countries, like Martina Navratilova (who became naturalized) and Bjorn Borg.

Tennis was driven in popularity during the height of the modern women's lib movement, a movement that has been squelched by a brilliant if evil counterreply by Republicans who equate feminism with lesbianism, an accusation that seems to work just as well on women, if not more so, than men. During the time, Bobby Riggs, in his 50s, and once a top player in men's tennis, challenged then, number 1, Margaret Court to a match. With his dazzling array of spins and slices, and his trash talking, poor Margaret Court got completely rattled and lost easily.

Billie Jean King, then a leader for women's tennis, knew she had no choice but to play Riggs. She played him smart, and didn't allow Riggs tactics to rattle her, and it gave such a lift to women's sports that its repercussions are felt to this day.

And it boosted the popularity of tennis like no event since Olympic skater Nancy Kerrigan got whacked on the knee by hooligans hired by rival Tonya Harding in a soap opera that was too weird to be true, and yet was true.

Tennis managed a resurgence of sorts as McEnroe and Connors were finishing up their last hurrahs in the early 90s, to be replaced by the greatest group of Americans to play in quite a while. This group was lead by Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras but included Todd Martin, Michael Chang, and Jim Courier.

During this whole period, I'd go out and play tennis occasionally. The height of my tennis playing was from 1989 to maybe the mid 1990s. In those days, the best you could do to learn to play tennis better, short of taking lessons, was simply to play more. There was no Internet. The books that were out there were simplistic.

Even when the web came out, there was no YouTube. YouTube and its brethren have become a kind of second web revolution. Sure YouTube contributes a ton of crap to the general viewer, and occasionally, viral videos spread like wildfire in a dry California summer, with no apparent rhyme or reason. From the deeply baritone singing of Chocolate Rain, to the desperate pleadings to "leave Britney alone", to Charlie, the laughing baby that bites the finger of his older brother.

In all of that, you can find pretty much lessons on anything. Want to learn how to parallel park? Watch YouTube. Want to cook? Do the same? For anything you could possibly want to learn, there's some chance someone put videos up on YouTube. The quality may not be good, but it's often there.

This has lead to a minor revolution of tennis. Perhaps it's affected other sports, but I can't say for sure because I simply don't care enough about those sports to comment.

In particular, YouTube, and various pay sites have been the source of many slow motion videos of professional players giving tools to the net-savvy tennis player to inspect how the best hit tennis balls.

Although I've seen some videos dozens of times now, there are always small details that I'm missing. And there are details that are not readily visible to the eye such as a waist rotation.

I contrast playing tennis with racquetball. Racquetball is played indoors in a large room. The goal is to eventually have the ball hit the front wall. Once it does that, the opponent must also hit the front wall before the ball bounces twice. Now, you don't have to hit directly to the front wall. It can hit the side wall or ceiling or back wall first, but it must eventually make it to the front wall without hitting the ground.

Since the front wall is huge, and swinging hard or high will typically get you to the front wall, then you can play the sport with bad technique. Nearly anything you do is good enough. That moves the sport away from technique and more to strategy with the goal of trying to hit the ball so your opponent can't run it down. Because the penalty of bad technique is low, there's little incentive to improve.

Ah, but what is technique? Technique, at least as it applies to hitting sports, is how you hit. What are the mechanics of what you do to swing a racquet to hit the ball. The better your technique, the more power you get, the more accuracy, with less effort.

The key to tennis is understanding some physics. Not a lot, mind you, but a little. In physics, momentum is mass times velocity. Physics also says momentum is conserved. Though it's simplistic, this says that the momentum of one mass can be transferred to the momentum of another mass. Thus, the mass times velocity of a player hitting a ball is translated to the mass times velocity of the ball being struck.

There are two basic ways to make a ball go faster. Hit faster or hit with more mass. Now you might imagine there's no way to hit with more mass. The racquet weighs what it does. However, if you merely swing with your arm, something that seems obvious in tennis, then you will only have the mass of your arm plus the racquet behind the ball.

If you can involve your body more, that is use your torso and your legs, you can increase the mass. However, that requires timing your body movements just right so you can bring that mass to bear. This is why diminutive Chinese women can hit harder than a muscle bound guy. It's not purely about muscle, it's about using the rest of your body to bring additional mass to the momentum equation.

Not to say swinging fast isn't also important, because it is. However, the faster you swing, the more likely that you are to swing incorrectly. It can take a great deal of time before you gain enough coordination to swing fast and swing accurately so you can take advantage of the other part of the momentum equation.

Much of this is simplistic explanation because the body, the racquet are all complex masses. They aren't simple balls of steel whose behavior can be explained simply in physics. As a player, you need to think about how your body moves until muscle memory ingrains it properly.

My strokes, now that I've seen them on video, are more rigid than most. This has lead to an awkwardness in my technique, so I've spent time observing the pros trying to find someone that I can emulate.

At first, this someone was Novak Djokovic. Ah, but his motion was a bit complex. So I sought a simpler model. Roger Federer. But as it turns out, although his motion was simpler, it still had a hitch (which I won't go into). Finally, I settled on Andy Murray, world number 4, who has a simple motion I like and have been trying in the last month or so to imitate.

They say the proof is in the pudding. In this case, the proof is in the video camera. With that, I can see what I am doing and see how close I am to achieving what I want to do. If I had full time to devote to this, I might be able to get there much quicker, but alas, I have to make money to make it possible for me to pursue this lark.

As I've watched the pros and read more, I see more and more. It just takes a while to translate that to my own game.

I don't know that there is quite the equivalent of this in the intellectual world. You can't see someone thinking so much, but you can observe how someone hits a ball. And while this makes the task of imitation easier than imitating a mental genius, it is still, by no means, easy.

These days, I've been working on the beginning part of hitting a ball. This is called the takeback, or at least, I call it that.

You can break down hitting the forehand into about four parts. First is the ready position. This is a stance you take as you wait for the ball. Usually you hold the racquet grip with the right hand, the throat of the racquet with the left. As soon as you identify that it is coming to your forehand, you rotate your body to the right and eventually drop the racquet so it points to the back fence. This is called the takeback.

The takeback I am imitating requires that I lift my elbow up to shoulder height, have my upper arm and forearm at 90 degrees, causing my racquet to point up to the sky. The racquet face is pointing to the right. Then, I drop my forearm so my arm is more or less straight, all the while the racquet face points to the right.

The motion from the racquet being fully back to the moment the racquet hits the ball is called the swing-forward. Or at leas, that's what I call it. During this phase, I rotate my body to the left, hit the ball. My shoulders should be square on, that is parallel to the net or a little left.

The rest is follow-through. It is from the point of contact until the racquet is wrapped over on my left side. I continue to rotate left, arc my right arm from right to left, bend at the elbow, and let the racquet go to the left of my body.

Although the ball has long since gone, the racquet head speed being propelled by a loosely relaxed arm is so quick that the arm must continue to move before it can properly decelerate. A long follow-through means your arm doesn't slow down and cause the ball to likewise slow down. It provides a minimum speed.

When I focus on my tennis, I invariably pay the most attention to the takeback, mostly because that starts the motion up. I have spent 6 months working on that part, and it's been a long journey.

So why do I do it? I don't have a good answer for that. I believe it's a challenge between my mind and my body. I feel I can make my body do a certain thing if I work at it long enough. It's strange to think of the mind and body as adversaries. Certainly without the body going on its merry way and doing what it does without interference from the mind, we wouldn't live. And yet, the mind feels, to some extent, that it can make the body do what it wants.

That's what I feel too. I know it takes a while for the body to listen, so I try to be patient.

Perhaps it's like Buddhist monks who learn to slow their heart rates or chop bricks. If your mind really wants to do it, it can. Many people use their mind for mental pursuits such as solving equations. But it can also be used for physical pursuits.

The funny thing is the mind initially dictates what is to be done, but to get good, eventually the body must react without mental interference. The body simply knows what to do. It has ingrained its responses, and the mind directs it minimally. It is like the parent to the child.

So that's where things stand. An ongoing journey to tennis enlightenment.

Milk

Unless you've watched your fair share of American documentaries, you probably have never heard of Harvey Milk. In the last few years, the topic of gay marriage has come up. The notion that evangelicals and the right discovered this topic that appeals so strongly to the base that they will come out in droves to vote is not something that's ten years old. It dates back to the 1970s.

The anti-gay movement found an unlikely leader, one Anita Bryant, a Christian singer and promoter of orange juice. Raised a Baptist, she fought against anti-discrimination laws saying that gays did not deserve equal protection for employment. In other words, it was fine for gays to be fired for being gay.

At that point, there had been no openly gay official elected.

Harvey Milk ran as supervisor, which is a kind of city representative for several years. Although he could court the gay vote, he really needed a coalition to be successful, so he recruited union workers, the elderly, African Americans, etc. Although he ran and lost three times, the fourth time was the charm as redistricting gave him enough votes to get elected (the election used to be city wide, rather than different parts of the city voting for the person that might best represent their interests).

At the same time he was elected supervisor, so was one Dan White who grew up Irish Catholic and ran on more conservative grounds, despite living in the fairly liberal city of San Francisco. At first, Milk tried to work with White, but when he realized it was not in his interests to do so, White greatly resented what he perceived as backstabbing and chose to oppose every action Milk proposed.

White eventually resigned his position because he felt the salary he made was too little to support his family. However, the conservative police encouraged him to ask for his job back. As the sole conservative supervisor, other supervisors, including Milk begged the mayor not to give White back his job. The mayor agreed. White decided to sneak into the building through an unguarded window (even at the time, there was a metal detector to enter the facility) and proceeded to shoot and kill the mayor and then shoot and kill Harvey Milk.

White then turned himself in to the police. A sympathetic jury let him off with manslaughter, moved by his plight. He spent five years in jail. When released, he wanted to move back to San Francisco though was advised not to do so. In 1985, White killed himself through carbon monoxide poisoning in a car in his ex-wife's garage.

The film, despite my summary of history, mostly focuses on Milk, as it should.

He's not made out to be particularly saintly, but a man who feels that gays needed to be more proactive. While most gays in San Francisco were willing to let change occur slowly, Milk, who loved the publicity of campaigning took a more direct route.

The problem with telling a story like Milk is that a person's life is not easily summarized in two hours. There's a bit of a clunky voice-over, in this case, Milk reading into a tape recorder (which is based on something Milk did). Then, you have to pick and choose what events to cover, including two boy friends (the activist/politician Scott Smith and Latino, Jack Lira), and various campaign bids.

When you want to be reasonably truthful to history, then there are speeches that need to be used near verbatim. Of course, one takes a few liberties. In the film, Lira kills himself as he did in real life, but in real life, Lira had already split up with Milk though certainly still liked him.

Gus Van Sant is generally an experimental filmmaker, more so than most in mainstream filmmaking. Despite that, he occasionally makes blander fare, telling a more straight-forward story. These would include films like Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester.

Van Sant does have a few visual flourishes. At one point, Milk is running away from someone he perceives is out to attack him. To achieve this visual effect, the entire background is blurred until you just see hazy lights and the shadow of a person.

Van Sant uses his trademark "following camera" used as early as Elephant where the camera is behind a person's head as he walks down hallways, and occasionally in front of his head as he is walking. This is used when White goes to find the mayor and Milk.

Although it is a film about a gay man, the gay scenes are not particularly explicit. In particular, there are no frontal nudity scenes. Most of the scenes are usually close up kissing, usually much closer than conventionally filmed scenes.

The film has a pretty simple theme that it tries to get across. It starts when Milk complains that at the age of 40, he's not accomplished anything in his life that he's proud of. By the time he's nearing 50, he is able to get himself elected as city supervisor, which is surprising given the year is 1978, a scant 30 years ago. Despite the progress in the gay movement and the changing public perceptions, this is still very recent.

His death stirred tens of thousands of people to mourn, bringing candles out into the street.

So how was the film? Well, it is clunky in parts, because of the need to tell important parts of his life. Van Sant does what he can to keep things light and humorous and not perpetually angry.

Sean Penn does a masterful job at creating Harvey Milk. Honestly, if you wanted to get an actor that looked like Milk, you'd probably hire Hank Azaria. Penn, nonetheless, does a great job. The funny thing is that Milk didn't have a gay campy voice where Penn chooses to play him with a slight affectation, perhaps to increase the believability to the audience, who might otherwise not feel Milk was gay enough.

And there may have been a point. Perhaps Penn felt that people might like Milk more if he didn't sound gay, but that they should like him regardless. So by voicing him this way, audiences would have to accept Milk despite a potential dislike of the way he speaks (as portrayed by Penn). Or maybe he just wanted to up the level of difficulty in portraying Milk.

The other capable acting comes from Josh Brolin who plays Dan White. Early on, Milk suggests that White may have been a closeted homosexual, although this is never played up beyond that mere suggestion. Brolin captures how wired up White is, unable to make friends, wanting to do something for his constituents, feeling backstabbed by Milk who found himself wanting to help White, but feeling that he couldn't.

The good thing about historical films is what they teach you. Admittedly, this may not make for the best drama. Indeed, the acting is stronger than the plotting and pacing of the film, although the film gets stronger towards the end.

Although a lot of progress has been made in gay civil rights, the film shows, in the backdrop of today's politics, that in some respects, some things, especially scare tactics, have not changed. Where the film had a political happy ending (the defeat of Prop 6 to prevent gay teachers from teaching), real life did not match that (with Prop 8 passing).

Overall, a good well-acted film but not a great film. Good for its historical insight and even handling of the characters. B.

Links

One link today:

• Foodie at Fifteen
  

Thanksgiving

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

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

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

And her rant got me to thinking about Thanksgiving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings us back to Thanksgiving.

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlie Brown Thanksgiving

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

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

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

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

And what appears?

A huge turkey! And tiny potatoes and veggies!

And who is thrilled about this?

Woodstock!

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

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

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

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

Unless you watch it every year.

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

More Links

Some more random links:

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

Learning Tennis

Oh so impatient are you!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Control

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

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

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

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

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

All on the account of him being dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I seriously digress.

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

Oh noes! You tricks me!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many questions.

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

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

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

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

It is the way of the world.