Once again I’m writing from the couch in the teacher’s lounge. I miss having an office. I’m alone now so I can get things done. Have I done anything exciting since my last post? I made up the precalculus midterm. I was a little out of practice and had to recreate some of my methods of having problems come out nice. I didn’t have to work very hard at that. They all have theory behind them. I’ve always had it in the back of my mind to write a book of tricks for problem writing from algebra through introduction to calculus. Nobody teaches you these things.
I just had the most excitement of the week I lost my phone. I looked in the small room that I usually use to be alone. I had to leave there as it was needed for a meeting. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t in my classroom either. The way this couch is made nothing can fall between the cushions, Instead of panicking I let my brain work. I had my phone in the small room. I was charging it. I figured that when I grabbed my things when I vacated the room I put my phone in my bag with the charger. I was right. It’s a good thing that in addition to being an idiot I’m also a genius and can sometimes figure out a way to compensate for my idiocy.
It’s really sad how little live music I’m hearing. On Saturday I went to see Kemp Harris at the Common Ground Concerts in Dobbs Ferry. I’m a volunteer there, part of the family. I had seen Kemp at NERFA and again when he did On Your Radar but I have never seen him do a full set before. He’s greeeaaat (Imagine Tony the Tiger saying that). Call Kemp legion as he is a multitude. He’s a blues man, a cabaret artist, a singer of protest songs, and he covers the greats like Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan and makes the songs his own. He knew people in the audience from an annual UU musical retreat on an island off Maine. He used some of them as his chorus. I’m never a fan of Dylan’s Christian period but Kemp made me love You Have To Serve Somebody. I shouted “Amen!” at the end.
I’m glad I’m writing about Kemp now. It reminded me to program him on next week’s Gord’s Gold. At the show I added a note of what songs I want to play. This week’s show is for Halloween. As you might have guessed I love Halloween and go all out. Unfortunately I can’t use movie clips on Folk Music Notebook but I will when it’s archived on Mixcloud. You’ll hear from the 1931 Dracula and Frankenstein. There will be a songs about Halloween, songs of vampires and monsters, macabre tales of murder and death. Child Ballads can be very creepy. I’m so looking forward to this. You pretty much have to listen.
The in school excitement was a party! One of the deans is retiring. That meant cake! It was half chocolate and half yellow. Guess which half I took from.
I have written of my hypothesis that people that are vocally against baseball analytics are overwhelmingly Trump supporters or Republicans. It makes sense, as the party and especially ex-president have cultivated disdain for expertise. That is not why I believe it’s true. It’s why I came up with the hypothesis. Since then I have checked on the politics of those who rant against analytics and have found only four exceptions in the rule over a period of years. In the NLCS John Smoltz said something particularly egregious. He said and I’m paraphrasing, “You can ignore all the stats that show that pitchers do significantly worse the third time through the order. They never let pitchers do it any more and so pitchers don’t know how to do it, not like in his day pitching.” This is of course utter nonsense, they discovered that there’s a third time through the order penalty is the reason they started taking pitchers out after two times. The penalty has always existed even when men were men. I was not the only one outraged by this idiocy. An author in Baseball Prospectus wrote a piece called, John Smoltz Made Me Write This.. The best part was showing that Smoltz himself did worse the third time through the order just as much as modern pitchers. But that’s not the point. The point is that I checked Smoltz’s politics and he is a Republican and he’s MAGA enough to refuse to get a COVID vaccination.
People who know nothing about a field will simply assume the experts are idiots and are missing the obvious things that they see. The reality is that they either misunderstand what the experts actually do, or they don’t understand that those things are not only not obvious, they aren’t true.
Tonight I’m off to my first Knick game of the season. They are playing a bad team, Charlotte Hornets and so are heavily favored. The Knicks are off to a fast start, 2-1 but they have only beaten bad teams. All the predictions slot them at finishing a little below .500. The only route I can see to them ever becoming good is a new coach that will let the young guys with potential play. I don’t see that happening.
Wise Madness 