“THE WORLD IS SO FULL OF A NUMBER OF THINGS….” The opposite of Beckett’s world view is the poem by Robert Louis Stevenson that my father used to recite often at the dinner table:
“The world is so full of a number of things
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”
from A CHILD’S GARDEN OF VERSES
CRICKET WASN’T ENOUGH TO MAKE LIFE WORTH LIVING. Last year, I submitted a play about Samuel Beckett (Samuel Becket Looks at the Stars) to the Chicago Irishfest festival of one act plays. It didn’t win, but I posted the script of the play here. The play touched on Beckett’s bleak view of life and his fondness for cricket. This review by Nicholas Lezard of the first volume of Beckett’s letters tells this anecdote about Beckett: “One recalls the story about his comment, made many years later, to a friend who was with him watching cricket on a sunny day and who had just said, perhaps forgetting to whom he was talking, that it was the kind of day that made you glad to be alive; ‘I wouldn’t go as far as that” was the (apocryphal) reply.’” (link via Instapundit and omnivoracious).
WHEN EACH UMPIRE MADE HIS OWN RULES. It’s not so long ago that each major league umpire had his own strike zone–and was proud of it. These strike zones were often lower and wider than what the rule book specified. Sometimes, those individual strike zones changed during a game. Pitchers spoke of “working with” the umpire to expand the strike zone. This wikipedia article on changes in the strike zone led me to this article from 2007 on how knowing the home plate umpire could help you bet the over/under on a game. Darrin Jackson, who played for a couple of years in Japan, has said that one of the big adjustments for Japanese players who came to the United States was to get used to the fact that the strike zone changed from day to day.
IMPROVING UMPIRE PERFORMANCE. I posted here in 2007 on umpire ratings for balls and strikes. An article in Baseball America (March 23 to April 5) says that major league baseball is going to install a new computerized camera system to evaluate how umpires call balls and strikes in all 30 major league parks this year. Up to now, a different system, called Questec, had been installed in 11 parks. Although there have been complaints—Curt Schilling once smashed a Questec camera with a bat–umpires have been doing a better job on balls and strikes and Questec probably deserves the credit. Before Questec, umpires were correct about 91.5% of the time. Last year they were correct 95.4% of the time. Apparently, the error rate is highest now in calling the high strike—but the definition of the high stike in the rules is pretty subjective.
SCAMS: FLOOD PREPARATION. The article by Pablo Torres tells about an athlete ” who invested almost $70,000 in an invention: an inflatable raft that would sit under furniture. The pitch was that when high-rainfall areas were flooded, consumers could pump up the device, allowing a sofa to float and remain dry.” The promoter came back with a request for an additional investment of of $500,000, but by this time, the athlete had obtained professional investment advice. Somehow I was reminded of the precautions against flood that are taken in Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale.”
IT’S NOT ONLY MADOFF: ATHLETES AND INVESTMENT SCAMS. This article from Sports Illustrated by Pablo Torre says that 78% of National Football League players have either gone bankrupt or are under financial stress within two years of retirement. For National Basketball Association players, an estimated 60% are broke within five years of retirement. Many of these men made millions of dollars during their careers. The biggest factor is bad investments (including real estate). Just as a number of Madoff’s victims were social friends, many of the bad investments by athletes result from investing with friends.
THINGS LAWYERS DO: PUTTING FEATHERS ON THE DOG. A wonderful draftsman I knew used to say from time to time about trying to draft so that an entity was—as an example– one thing for tax purposes and another for regulatory purposes or for accounting purposes: “I’m just trying to put enough feathers on this dog so I can call it a bird.” You could think of FNMA and Freddie Mac of a couple years ago as dogs with feathers.
DRAFTING TO DO TWO THINGS AT ONCE. FNMA and Freddie Mac were supposed to provide the best of two worlds–part private companies and part public. The government got a say in their policies, but they were not on the government balance sheet, not part of the national debt. They were able to take risks that a private company could not take because maybe the government would stand behind them. And then things changed and in some ways they provided the worst of both worlds.
LESSONS LEARNED: WINKS AND GUARANTIES. Kids, I think one of the lessons to be learned from the financial crisis is to extra cautious with assurances that are not guaranties. Annalisa saw a draft of a post on this subject a while ago, and asked why I had used the unusual spelling for “guaranty.” I was using the spelling to demark a legally enforceable obligation, as opposed to one that takes the form of assurances (for example, “We are sponsoring this or our name is on this or our reputation is behind this”). Trouble seems to come when there is a “guarantee” that is not legally enforceable. The government intervened to salvage FNMA and Freddie Mac. Were the obligations of FNMA and Freddie Mac guaranteed by the federal government? This wikipedia article cites the statutes which said that there was no guarantee, and then cites Nobel laureate Vernon Smith, the Economist and Alan Greenspan as referring to an implicit government guarantee. Investors had a lot of money at stake on whether there was a government guarantee. When people on both sides of a transaction don’t know a contract means, look out. Jack Schafer in Slate quoted the Washington Post that FNMA had the “nearest thing to a license to print money. The companies borrowed money at below-market interest rates based on the perception that the government guaranteed repayment, and then they used the money to buy mortgages that paid market interest rates.”
SCORN FOR LANDSCAPES IN OTHER CENTURIES. I posted here on Jackie Wullschlager’s observation that “Landscape in 20th and 21st century art is less than unfashionable – it has dropped off the radar screen.” Landscape was also held in low regard at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This review in the March 21 Economist of Martin Gayford’s new biography of Constable says that “Landscape painting ranked low in the hierarchy of genres, especially Constable’s kind: fields, mills, towpaths—mere ‘map-work’, scoffed J.H. Fuseli, professor at the Royal Academy.” I think a lot depends on how narrowly the subject of a landscape is defined. Constable himself, as the review points out, “once corrected someone who had called a painting of his ‘only a picture of a house’, by pointing out that it was a picture ‘of a summer’s morning, including a house.’” One reason for the power of Constable’s landscapes is his feeling for the subject matter. He wrote, “old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things.”
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English: Meaning and Culture by Anna Wierzbicka
The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, from the Revolution to the First World War by Graham Robb
The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Modern Library Classics) by F. Scott Fitzgerald