All posts by Steve Stern

Lewis Hamilton, Nico Rosberg, random numbers, the A’s, and 9-11

Americana, Cars, Sports

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I want to talk about how random life is, but first a story about two childhood friends that have become enemies, Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton.

Rosberg and Hamilton became friends racing go-karts in Europe as young teenagers. Although they came from very different backgrounds and didn’t meet until they started racing go-karts, Rosberg was born into European racing royalty and Hamilton is a Brit who grew up in a lower-middle-class suburb of London, they were both very good at racing and met when they started racing at the inter-European level. They are about the same age and they became friends even though they were so different.

Nico Rosberg is the son of Keke Rosberg, a Formula One Championship winning driver and Gesine Gleitsmann-Dengel, a German interpreter. He considers himself German – speaks fluent German, English, French and Italian – and grew up in Monaco.  Lewis Hamilton is from a mixed race family that dissolved when he was two. He grew up with his mother and sisters and became very good at racing radio controlled model cars. Because of that, his father gave him a go-kart when he was six. When he was twelve, he moved in with his father to race. Nico looks like a Ralph Lauren ad and so does his wife, the daughter of a family friend he has known since childhood. Lewis favors a gangsta look, drives a purple Pagani Zonda,  and has dated – seriously, off and on – an American, Nicole Scherzinger who Wikipedia identifies as the lead singer of The Pussycat Dolls, a burlesque troupe turned-recording act.

In the words of their boss, Toto Wolff, These boys have calibrated their whole life…to win the Drivers’ Championship in F1. And here they go – they are in the same car, competing against each other for that trophy and one is going to win and one is going to fail. This is a new experience for them – a difficult experience maybe.

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I think – and I am far from the only one – that Lewis Hamilton is the best pure racecar driver in the world, but right now, Rosberg is leading in the championship even though Hamilton has won more races. That is because Hamilton has had an extraordinary string of bad luck. His Mercedes has had two race-ending mechanical problem and he had additional electrical problems in qualifying that forced him to start 16th and last for two races. He was forced out of the Belgium Grand Prix in an accident caused by Rosberg, and last week, in Italy, he had an electrical problem on the start. Out of the 12 races run so far, Hamilton has had problems beyond his control in seven of them and Rosberg has had problems in one.

It is easy to see a pattern here, but there isn’t any. It is easy to see a conspiracy of a German Team trying to help the German get the Championship, but I find it hard to believe they would pay Hamilton 32 million dollars a year not to finish races (and, when Hamilton doesn’t finish, his car doesn’t finish and Mercedes is also trying to win the Manufacturers Championship). Even people who don’t normally believe in conspiracy theories have a tendency to systematize random events.

When I was in college, I worked on several experiments with students watching Flat Worm Behavior. In an effort to get truly unbiased results, we assigned participants to different areas of the experiment on a random basis. Now, we can go on the web and get a random number generator, but then, in the olden days, we would use charts – for lack of a better descriptor – filled with lines of random numbers. Looking at the numbers, they often didn’t seem random. Often they would seem to have too many numbers that formed patterns or a chain of the same number that was too long to seem natural. That is the problem, true randomness has pseudo-patterns and we think of random as being patternless. True randomness often feels fake.

In the 2002 season, the Oakland A’s won the American League pennant with a season record of 103-59. That is a 64% winning average. but from August 14th to September 4th, the A’s won every game they played. They had a 20 game winning streak. No other team has done that since 1935 and before that 1916. If the A’s had their seasonal average during that period, they would have lost 7 games instead of having their streak. If somebody had been told to randomly list wins and losses so that the average was a 64% winning average, it is doubtful that they would have put a twenty game winning streak in the middle.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend sent me some information on 9-11 being a conspiracy. I am not much of a conspiracy buff because I think that life is much more random than people want to believe (although it has always amazed me that one of the most likely conspiracies – that of William J. Casey, then head of the CIA  who was rendered incapable of speech and then died just hours before he was going to be questioned about Iran-Contra – has never gotten traction; if the head of the CIA can’t fake their own death, who can?).

We are pattern recognizing creatures, all animals are, and in the case of a huge catastrophe like The World Trade Center coming down, there are lots of random parts. We try to make all the random parts fit into a pattern and that often results in fantastical explanations but I am convinced that the only conspiracy was between al-Qaeda and the sorry, mislead souls, who flew those planes.

 

 

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Obama, ISIS, war, and reality

Politics

Snowden-4 If he [Obama] does not go on the offensive against ISIS, ISIL, whatever you want to call these guys, they’re coming here. This is not just about Baghdad, not just about Syria. It is about our homeland, Lindsey Graham

In war, truth is the first casualty. Aeschylus

In a major speech a couple of days ago, President Barack Obama became the fourth President to announce that we are going to bomb Iraq. I’m not saying that we are in a state of 1984-esque permanent war, but the last president who didn’t send troops to fight overseas was Jimmy Carter (but only if we don’t count the failed rescue mission in Iran). Obama’s speech disturbs me, it seems eerily similar to Bush The Younger’s justification for preemptive war and I don’t know why Obama did it.

Yes, ISIS -or ISIL, if you prefer – is taking over parts of Syria and Iraq but that is not the end of the world. Yes they have brutally killed hundreds, if not thousands, of people, but they are not the existential threat to Western Civilization that we are being told they are. When Lindsey Graham hysterically says the sky is falling, he is just being overwrought, or is trying to make other people frantic (I have no idea which).

I don’t know much about ISIS but I do know enough to know that they are not going to load up onto some Islamic version of Liberty Boats and come over here to take over, any more than Saddam Hussein did. Yes, ISIS took  alot of ground in a very short amount of time, or, maybe more accurately, it has been a short amount of time that we have been hearing about them. Even more alarming seems to be that they have been taking over territory across national borders (borders Europe so cavalierly drew about a hundred years ago). Sure, they seem to be an especially nasty organization, or – at least – they have some very nasty members who take pride in publicly killing helpless people. And, yes, they seem to be almost miraculously successful, but they are not going to be sailing – or flying, or even marching – over here. There are lots of reason for getting in a war with ISIS – some of them may even be pretty good – but the fantasy that they are going to attack us is not one of them.

According to the New York Times, while ISIS may be built on bloodshed, it seems intent on demonstrating the bureaucratic acumen of the state that it claims to be building. Its two annual reports so far are replete with a sort of jihadist-style bookkeeping, tracking statistics on everything from “cities taken over” and “knife murders” committed by ISIS forces to “checkpoints set up” and even “apostates repented. They are trying to setup a new country, ruled by Sunnis, out of parts of two failed countries now ruled by Shiites. Yes, it is possible, maybe even likely, that some of the Americans and Europeans who went to – let’s just say – The Levant to join the battle and learn the trade of killing people, will try to go back to their home country to terrorize us. But, by and large, we know who they are. This time we are paying attention (maybe too much attention, maybe that is part of the reason they became radicalized in the first place).

I feel confidant that, if and when, a ISIS radical comes back into the United States, we can keep track of them. What I don’t have confidence in is our ability to pick a side in a Civil War and have that side become a functioning democracy. We picked Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to run Iraq and he, systematically jailed Sunni leaders, shut Sunnis out of power, and refused to pay tribal militias. In many ways, this is what paved the way for ISIS. We didn’t know Maliki was going to do that, we didn’t expect him to do that, he said that he wouldn’t do that, but he did. I cannot think of even one Civil War in which our side won (except, obviously the US Civil War).

We think that our agenda is so right that it will make a difference, but every side thinks their agenda is right. We are outsiders – with all that implies – and are regarded as such. Edward Luttwak  points out how outsiders become the other and are hated even by those they came to help. The very word ‘guerrilla…describes the ferocious insurgency of the illiterate Spanish poor against their would-be liberators, under the leadership of their traditional oppressors…King Joseph of Spain presented a draft constitution that for the first time in Spain’s history offered an independent judiciary, freedom of the press, and the abolition of the remaining feudal privileges of the aristocracy and of the Church. … Despite the fact that the new constitution would have liberated them and let them keep their harvests for themselves, the Spanish peasantry failed to rise up in its support. Instead, they obeyed the priests, who summoned them to fight against the ungodly innovations of the foreign invader. For Joseph was the brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, placed on the Spanish throne by French troops. That was all that mattered to most Spaniards—not what was proposed but by whom it was proposed. 

The rights and proper behavior that we find self evident is not necessarily self evident to Vietnamese, Iraqis, or Egyptians (or French, for that matter). There are people in all of those countries who do want us there but there are more that don’t. The people who want us there are mostly the people in power and, in the Middle east, they are the dictators.

It seems to me that when we do help, provide air support for example, we actually made the side we are supporting weaker. I think that Obama knows this, his speeches, in the past, have indicated that, but the pull of war, as the universal answer, is strong. That is sad, we are not what I want my country to be but, even under Obama, war has become the solution to almost every problem.

Breaking Bad and living in the moment

Television

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Michele and I are binge watching – more or less – Breaking Bad. There are 62 episodes, so, at two or three episodes three or four times a week, it takes a while. After watching about thirty hours over three or four weeks, I am in sort of a fugue state in that I also notice that I am – sometimes – projecting  Breaking Bad on my everyday world much like I did when I binge read The Trilogy of the Rings (three times, over five years).  I am starting to dream about the characters, especially Jesse, and think about them at random times.

I want to write about how good Breaking Bad  is, but I think, Michele and I are the last ones to see it so everybody already knows how good it is. Still, it is good in ways I hadn’t expected. Every show starts with a bit before the credits – and having some of the letters in the credits framed like elements on a periodic chart is a nice touch – and that opening bit is almost always a surprise. Sometimes the opening bit is surreal, sometimes it is part of the plot, in order, and sometimes it is part of the plot but an out of order flashback or out of order jump forward.

With a name like Breaking Bad, I should have expected a morality play, still I am surprised at how much of a morality play it is. Actions have consequences and, like a Shakespearean tragedy, so does Walter White’s character.  Emily Nussbaum over at the New yorker sums it up best when she says Walt is a monster…everyone from Jesse to Skyler to Mike articulate the problems with Walt’s arrogance and his stunning dishonesty, self-pity, and control-freak arrogance and, yet, he is right, he truly is the smartest guy in the room. When he does something particularly brilliant it is hard not to marvel at how smart Walt is and cringe at the same time.

The show is violent and dark, but it is never perverse. We are – or were – watching the Bridge but the violence, to me, is off putting. Not off putting because it is violent, but off putting because the violence is so perverse. Breaking Bad is not that way, the violence has consequences, it is not gratuitous.

Maybe it is just because we are bingeing, but Breaking Bad seems more thought out, as a complete story, than any other TV program I can think of. Often a show will start great and end great but the middle just seems like filler. It is as if the authors had a story arc but, when the show got renewed and required additional chapters, they added additional chapters in the middle that don’t add to that overall arc. For example, the Russian mafia guy in the forest in The Sopranos was intense and dazzling but never moved the overall story. If that happens in Breaking Bad, I haven’t seen it yet.

Lastly, I didn’t expect the show to be an ensemble piece. I thought Breaking Bad would be about Walt but it is deeper and richer than that. In many ways, TV is more creative than movies  right now and I guess that makes sense when you consider that the story in is about 45 hours long. It means that nothing has to be left out.

If by any chance you haven’t seen it, check it out.

The allure of the 50s race car

Cars
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1959 Maserati Tipo 61 Birdcage

I have a whole slug of pictures of the 2014 Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion – 488 to be embarrassingly precise  –  enough so that I feel obligated to come up with a way to use some of them. To say something or show something about the day I haven’t said five or six times already. Something that doesn’t bore even me. That got me pondering as to why Malcolm and I go back every couple three years, after all the cars are pretty much the same year after year. Malcolm keeps saying that it is like going to a museum and it is, but a museum that we have been to many times before.

It must be similar to someone going to a concert, expecting their favorite group to sing their favorite songs. This mythical someone is going for the familiar with, maybe, one or two new songs added in. These races are the same. There are all the old favorites and, every year, there are a couple of cars that neither one of us had ever seen in real life. The old familiars, my favorites, would be the late 50s sports-racing cars that I lusted over as a high-hormone teenager when I was old enough to go to races on my own.

I want to think that these cars really are the most beautiful cars ever made. Their lines flowed so smoothly and they looked so aerodynamic. That was before aerodynamics became a science, so looking good counted alot. It was also a time when the fiction that these were regular cars anybody could drive was still practiced – much like the Olympics were pretending everybody was an amateur – so they have headlights, doors, a windshield, and two seats. I first took Michele to these races in the early nineties partially because I wanted to introduce her to two old friends in particular, the Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa and the Maserati Tipo 61 Birdcage. Now I think I may have over sold them, driving down to the races, and I may have given Michele the impression that the Ferrari and Maserati were real street cars not pretend street cars because Michele’s first reaction was something along the line of Are you kidding me? You think that is a great look car? It doesn’t even look like you could comfortably drive it. 

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1958 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa Scaglietti Spider
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1960 Maserati Tipo 61 Birdcage

Now I realize that these sports-racing cars are probably an acquired taste. That attitude doesn’t dampen my adoration, however. Maybe it is really about the time, the late 50s, my late teens, when everything was possible. Maybe late 50s sports-racing cars actually are more beautiful than newer racecars, more sensual. Probably both.

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1954 Maserati A6GCS Spyder
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1963 Ferrari 250 GTO Berlinetta
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1955 Aston Martin DBR2 & 1957 Maserati 450S
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1959 Lotus 17 in front of a 1958 Scarab (1972 McLaren M8F across the street)

In the late 50s, and probably even now, Southern California was the epicenter of American cardom and I had just moved down there to go to college. I used the opportunity to go my first big time race, the Los Angeles Times Grand Prix. It was a National Championship Race, at Riverside Raceway, on October 12, 1958 and it drew the crème de la crème. The Aston Martin Team would be there with their top driver, Roy Salvadori; Jean Behra would be there, driving a Porsche factory 718 RSK; Jo Bonnier from Sweden would be driving a factory Ferrari; and lots of famous Americans would be there. Phil Hill, the first American to win a Formula One Driver’s Championship would be there in a Ferrari Team car along with Carroll Shelby, later of Cobra fame, driving a Maserati, and famous Indy drivers like Bobby Unser, Ak Miller, Roger Ward, and A.J. Foyt. I had been to some local races at Vacaville and Stockton and, even, Laguna Seca, but Riverside was in a different league (so to speak).

Southern California was also where hotrods were invented and some hotrodders turned to making real road racing cars. There were lots of local hotrod guys at Southern California races and the 1958 Riverside races would not be an exception. One car that I didn’t show Michele when we went to the Monterey Historics was the Mark 1 Scarab, because they are as rare as unicorns. The first time I saw a Scarab was that day at Riverside.

The Scarab was the love child of Lance Reventlow, on paper, the quintessential playboy ( his mother, Barbara Hutton, was one of the richest women in the world and his father was a Danish Count, Kurt von Haugwitz-Hardenberg-Reventlow, Lance was beautiful, rich, famous, and married Jill St. John). But he was very serious, especially about racing. Reventlow spent a year racing in Europe and then came back to Southern California to build his own race car. He hired Troutman and Barnes, local hotrodders par excellence, to design and build the new car.

I remember it was hot, in the 90s, and by the end of the day I remember being sweaty and grungy and tired but my strongest memory – even though I had come to Riverside to see the Europeans – is of Chuck Daigh driving that Scarab away from the European factory teams and everybody else. The car was stunning, even more beautiful than the Europeans, and clearly an American hotrod with its Chevy engine’s booming V8 sound. As rare as it is, as American as it is, it is – for me – the quintessential 50s Sports-racing Car.

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Scarab Mk. I Sports Roadster

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“Israel Claims Nearly 1,000 Acres of West Bank Land” NYT, 8/31/14

Uncategorized

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I’m not sure that I even know what to say about this except that the Israelis are not even pretending to be serious about peace. This is land that Palestinians are living on near Bethlehem and according to the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, The announcement follows the cabinet’s decision last week to take over the land in response to the June kidnapping and killing of three teenage Jewish boys by Hamas militants in the area. I guess that it is just a case of Lebensraum but, still it makes me sad.

I think that I will just quote Emily Hauser, a Jewish activist, and leave it at that.

On hope, losing.

The Ten Stages of Losing Hope:

Stage One – You have hope, but wow. Things are bad.

Stage Two – You have hope, but sometimes you’re not sure why.

Stage Three – You refuse to give up hope. Despair is a luxury.

Stage Four – Your heart clings to hope even though your head tells your heart that it’s a fool, and with increasing frequency.

Stage Five – You believe that you have lost all hope, and then something terrible happens, and you lose a little bit more, which means you must have had some hope left to lose.

Stages Six, Seven, and Eight – Repeat Stage Five, each time with a smaller sliver of previously unsuspected residual hope.

Stage Nine – You genuinely have no hope left, but you continue to behave as though you do, because you believe that the performance of hope has value.

Stage Ten – You give up.

As regards Israel/Palestine, I reached Stage Ten in February. For that and other reasons, I’m going back to school next week to get a second Masters Degree, this one in Library and Information Science.