Close to the Center

Today is Mozart’s birthday so my writing soundtrack is Die Zauberflöte. I’m trying to be consistent and use the original language version of Opera titles. The world has not been consistent during my lifetime. Growing up it was always The Magic Flute but never The Rhine Gold. I still can’t say The Girl of the Golden West in Italian. I just looked it up, it’s La fanciulla del West; that’s not even a direct translation, it loses “Golden.” The Wise Madness style guide is stricter that common usage. I also prefer Greek to Roman names when dealing with mythology, that even extends to using “Heracles.” Hercules loses the irony of the hero’s name including that of his nemesis. Heracles means “glory of Hera.” It would be like Superman’s moniker being “Superlex.”

Now I’m listening to Symphony #40, orchestral music is easier to write to than opera. That’s not why I switched; the opera ended. I’ve been listening for hours. I just now got around to writing. Procrastination is my middle name. My parents were not good namers. I can’t hear #40 without thinking of Amadeus it was used in the ads for the play. I sat front row center and saw Ian McKellen and Tim Curry as Salieri and Mozart. Broadway was much more affordable then. My parents saw every opening back in the 50s; it cost no more than going to the movies in Manhattan. Those costs have diverged since then, though not as much as the salaries of upper management and the average corporate worker.

I had friends win two Grammy Awards last night! Not that I watched. Anaïs Mitchell won Best Musical Theater album for Hadestown and Aoife O’Donovan won Best American Roots Song for Call My Name as part of I’m With Her. I always wanted them to tour together along with Antje Duvekot as the unpronounceable tour. True to form the presenter said Anaïs’s name wrong. Worse, he mispronounced Hadestown. He thought it was two syllables. He fails presenting, Greek, and mythology. I can’t stop kvelling. When is one of you going to win an Oscar? How about a Pulitzer or Nobel? I have probably met more Nobelists than all the other awards combined as I used to frequent the New York Academy of Sciences.

I had another air-fryer success last night, the best roasted chicken thighs I’ve ever made. I always had trouble getting the skin crispy in the conventional oven. I know that all I had to do was get one of those racks to hold them over the pan, but I never did. In the air fryer the pan has holes in it, so it drains. As an added step I sprayed the skin with cooking oil, just a tiny amount. Now I’m pretty much addicted to this. I placed a baked potato under the chicken so the fat would drip on it. Schmaltz makes food taste better. Just don’t put it in my art.

I redid a study that I haven’t done in about eight years, calculating the closeness index of my friends. That’s a measure of how much two people’s social circles overlap. If Adam has A friends and Beth has B friends and they have M mutual friends, the closeness index is ^2M⁄_(A+B). The 2 is clearly not necessary but it fits with the way I originally thought of it, the harmonic mean of the fraction of mutuals for A and for B. Thanks to the 2 if the closeness index with yourself is 1. If the closeness index was 0.333 we’d know that that about a third of the friends of Adam are also friends with Beth and visa versa. The closer A and B are the closer to the truth this is. In general, you get higher indices the closer A and B are. That makes intuitive sense. Let’s say that both of Adams friends are also friends with Beth but Beth has 1,000,000 friends. That is not particularly close. That’s what I was trying to capture. They’d have an arithmetic mean of about 0.5 but the harmonic mean is only 0.000 to three decimals places.

OK so now that the math is out of the way who are my closest friends. When I used to keep this updated my closest friends bounced between John, Richard, Mike, and Carolann. Why do all the men have super common names and the woman is unique in my experience? There’s no reason but it’s curious. I thought that in the intervening years Carolann would have gained a clear lead as we socialize the most often and in the most places. I was right but she got surpassed by someone I wasn’t even FB friends with last time I did this, a dark horse candidate.

Jeff Lowe leads the list by a decent margin! I did not expect that. Maybe I should have as we always say that we know we’ll see each other soon when parting. So how do you explain that his wife’s index is only 0.025? I almost always see them together.

Not at all surprisingly everyone on my top 20 is a friend I met through music. It’s a network; we live in the same small virtual town. I wouldn’t call any of the top 20 a musical civilian though there are big differences in involvement. Twelve are musicians, six are presenters, all but Fred have been to NERFA, and they have all been to Falcon Ridge. Unlike previous versions of the list none of my Fruhead friends have cracked the top 20. As Fruvous broke up 19 years ago that’s not surprising. I’m surprised there are only three Chicks with Dip.

Some people don’t make the number of FB friends public so I can’t calculate the index for them. Some of my friends aren’t on Facebook. This list is not meant to be taken too seriously but I always find it interesting. If nothing else it reminds me of my friends. If you calculate your own index with me and it cracks the top 20 let me know.