In an article in the Los Angeles Times, they opined on Meryl Streep’s win. They concluded that a major factor was that actors playing real people usually win because the Academy can compare the performance to the real person. I also think it would be useful to compare the performance to to the nonperforming actor and this was a problem for Viola Davis.
I don’t remember most of Viola Davis’s parts and I don’t think that I am alone: the CIA Director in Knight and Day – which I sort of fast-forwarded through on the TV – a social worker in Traffic, a doctor – I have no idea what kind – in State of Play. (I do remember her as Mosella in Out of Sight but that only because Out of Sight is one of Michele and my favorite movies and we have seen it more than several times.) Going into The Help, I read about how everybody in Hollywood thinks she is great but I didn’t have anything to contrast her against.
Watching the Academy Awards, I did notice the stunning chick sitting on the aisle when Octavia Spencer got up to accept her award, but I had no idea it was Viola Davis. If only I had seen the real Viola before I saw her as Aibileen in The Help, I would have been much more impressed.
I am not sure how it happened – and it really does not make much difference – but Michele and I have been caught up in Linsanity. If you are blessed enough to not be caught up in this whole Knicks-Lin thing – or, maybe, cursed to not be following this feel good, heart warming, story of Linderella coming out of nowhere – there are plenty of places to get caught up on the background. As Sports illustrated says, Think of the singular demographic alloy at play. Lin, who’s worked endlessly on his strength and his jump shot in the past year, is a normal-sized, Christian, first-generation Asian-American. He’s excelled academically, faced racism on the court, been cut twice and sent to the D-league four times. Now he’s an NBA sensation amid the cultural diversity of hoops-starved New York. Opponents aside, who wouldn’t be a fan?
Anyway, we sat down Sunday afternoon to watch Lin and the New York Knicks play the Dallas Mavericks. A confession is in order here: I was in in Texas -while in the Army – in the early sixties and like anyplace in the South, it was not a good place to be a young man from California or any part of the North; I was also a 49er fan during the Montana years and Dallas was an arch rival; so I am pretty much anti-any-Texas-sports-team. Also, Lin played for Palo Alto High, maybe seven miles from our home, so we were defiantly rooting for him, but there was an underlying feeling that the bubble might burst any game now and the Mavericks were the best team in basketball last year. We would have been happy with a good, close, game.
It was a great game with huge swings in the scoring. In the end, the Knicks won and Lin was the reason. It brought up all the questions of how this kid could have been overlooked; how did the Warriors release him after a season? how did Houston? Because we are all racists, even if it sometimes plays out as anti-racists, the most obvious answer seems to be Because he is Asian. I don’t think that is the main reason, the real reason. The real reason is that Jeremy Lin was trying to fit into the Warrior’s system and he did that by not playing his game. During the game’s halftime, they played part of an interview of Lin by ABC’s Rachel Nichols, the interview starts about 3:50 into the clip below and, for me, gets very interesting at about 5:45 where Lin says , I was trying not to make mistakes, I was trying to fit in….this year I am going to make sure I do it my way.
It is one of the oldest lessons out there and one of the hardest to follow. It is as old as the Bible, Polonius said it in Hamlet, This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man, and they still say it in every self improvement book; be yourself. And it is so hard. When Lin had been cut by two teams, when he was afraid he would be playing in Europe, or on some unknown D-team, or maybe not playing at all; in other words, when he had nothing else to lose, he became true to himself, he started playing his game. His game, it turned out, that fit the Knicks system like a glove. By playing his game, by being true to himself, I suspect, he was able to play with a lot more intensity. His game, it turns out, includes a lot of assists and his generosity and intensity have transformed the Knicks. With Lin in they are less of a collection of outstanding players and more of a Team.
The San Francisco Police Department wants to us a couple of my photographs in their annual report and I am shocked. Not shocked that they want to use the photographs – well, actually, shocked about that too – even though I do think that it is a pretty good photo of the police at the 2011 LGBT parade – as they call it – but shocked that they found it. I put the pictures in my blog last June where they – apparently – lurked until the Office of the Chief of Police of the San Francisco Police Department found them. That is pretty extraordinary. Well, I guess, today, not extraordinary: just ordinary.
Still for me, shocking. A couple of weeks ago, I did a post on going to Sequoia Hospital for a daily infusion of the antibiotic daptomycin and two days later, the head nurse said that I should be careful not to show anybody’s name in my pictures. It turns out that Sequoia does regular searches to see what people are saying about them on the webs and then referred it to the nurse in the photograph. I know that whatever I put here is available to anybody, but it was still a surprise. And I had a moment of feeling slightly queasy, like seeing a cop car’s redlight going off in my rearview mirror.
As I finish this, the shock has dissipated but the thrill remains. And here is the other picture.
Last week, I had a dizzy, nauseous spell – eposode as I don’t like to call it – and went to my doctor. Then, on the next day, to my cardiologist. It turns out that I have Atrial Fibrillation – and I don’t think that is the right way to put it, although I am or I caught Atrial Fibrillation is certainly wrong – and I am now wearing a new Holter monitor. A Holter monitor records heart activity over a period of time. In this case seven days, my first one was for twenty four hours and was so big I had to wear it on my belt – this one is just stuck to my man boob and it lasts for seven days. Ain’t progress grand.
Speaking of progress, for some reason – maybe because a large percentage of doctors are conservative – the medical profession has resisted computerizing records. I am 71 and my files would require a wheelbarrow to carry around if most of them hadn’t – fortunately – been lost. The file at my cardiologist is probably about an inch and an half thick and I have only been going to her for about four years and she is only one doctor. As an aside; What we really need is a chip similar to the chip our cat has but that is going to be a real fight. I see over atLast Days News– where they tell us that These End Times Prophecies are 100% Accurate! In case you had any doubts- that a The Bible says those who take the 666 Microchip will receive the Wrath of God.I am not a Christian and I am not much of a believer in the Bible as an authority but if it really does mention Microchips, I will be instantly converted. End aside.
Anyway, on to Obamacare and computerized records. This week, both my doctors – well, I have more than two, but both doctors I went to – are deep into switching over to computers and it already seems to be paying off. My primary doctor entered her notes into the computer and my cardiologist has them the next day when I go to her office. I leave the cardiologist with a printed list of instructions rather than oral instructions and an hand scribbled prescription. I have a question about my meds and call the cardiologist, her assistant looks up my files at his desk, and in about fifteen second gives me my answer. Last month, he would have had to call me back.
By the time Obama leaves office five years from now, I suspect that few people will still want to revoke Obamacare.
My theory is that the further the people making the law – or rule – are from the people having to obay the law, the more arbitrary the law and the more likely it will not relate to what is actually happening on the ground. The borders of almost all states west of the Mississippi are an example.
Most of these state borders are straight lines following a compass heading totally ignoring any relationship to the topography. Because the people drawing the lines way back in Washington had no idea of any topographic detail. They didn’t know where the streams or mountains were so they couldn’t care. California where our northeastern border runs from some arbitrary point in the Great Basin near Goose Lake, due south to Lake Tahoe, is typical. That corner of California, about the size of New Jersey, is on the Nevada side of the mountains from the rest of California and would have been in Nevada if the people dawing the lines had lived anywhere near the lines being drawn.
A couple of days ago, Michele and I went on a short walk in the Thornwood Open Space Preserve. When we got to the parking lot, I noticed that the Handicap Space was little used and it re-booted my gripe about bureaucratic rules. Having Handicap Parking at the trailhead for a walk that handicapped people can not make is stupid. That is not to say that the people who made sure the handicap space was there are stupid but that the law – made from afar – is stupid.
I do not think that this applies only to government it applies equally, maybe even more so because there is less chance for recourse, to big business. Just think of trying to get something changed through a big bank or insurance company. The rules override reasonableness. I suspect it is even more frustrating to the person charged with enforcing the law that they know does not fit the situation.
Ironically, these arbitrary rules hurt more than they help.
First, they make the enforcer stupider and more likely to make a mistake. When I first started my own building company, our lender was Wells Fargo Bank and our lending officer was a local guy. (His brother was a real estate broker, so the real estate biz was in their blood.) When we wanted a loan for a project, we had to convince him. Wells trusted him to make the right decision and he was responsible to know the project and know that it would work.
Now there are twenty five times as many rules, the decision gets kicked up to a committee and – if the project meets all the requirements – it gets passed with none of the decision makers having to actually visit the site. Nobody really has a vested interest in the project working. That is part of the problem that lead to the bank failures.
If the lending officer – who now is really only a data collector at a large bank – follows the rules and the project doesn’t work, nobody is to blame, they all followed the rules, after all. The rules are made to make the lending environment safer but they really make it more dangerous. Everybody knew there were stupid loans being made, but nobody cared.
Second, this arbitrariness pisses people off and builds disrespect for the government or company. People are more willing to cheat; to design a project to fit the rules rather than be successful. In schools, it becomes teaching to the test rather than educating students.
