June 20, 2002

Excellent Prospects

"So," said Miles gently, "after we shot up the police station and set the habitat on fire, what did we do for an encore?" -- Miles Vorkosigan, getting to the bottom of a sticky situation in Diplomatic Immunity

So I bought Diplomatic Immunity for my Dad for Father's Day, only to find out that he had already checked it out from the library. He said I could take the book home and finish it, then hand it back to him. What bad luck for me, eh? Anyway, the book's a winner, as far as I'm concerned. My one complaint is that Ekaterin didn't have much to do in this book, especially compared to A Civil Campaign. In this one she just leans down and kisses Miles at various intervals -- that's about it.

I am also listening to the Moby album Play over and over. Weird. Am I becoming some sort of electronica fan? Hmmm... well, I am getting paler these days, but I'm certainly not getting thinner and mopier. So maybe it's some kind of delusional behavior. I only buy about five CDs a year, so perhaps I need to fool myself into thinking that this was money well spent. Well, whatever. I'm digging it.

Page wanted me to make a correction to my previous account of our Burn Rate game from last week. Basically he felt that he and Justin got short shrift. Page, Page. Don't you get it? This journal is about me, me, meeeee! Ahem. Anyway, this week everything was reversed. Jay and I cratered our startups very early. Justin and I tangled several times, to my eventual detriment. I finally managed to hire financial whiz kid Ben Zhao, but then courtesy of Justin he had a "difference of opinion" with my other, less competent VPs, and headed back to the labor pool. I couldn't scrape together enough funding, and I went belly-up. Meanwhile, Page stuck to his tried-and-true "big government" strategy of building a giant organization with plenty of redundancy. Justin couldn't really attack Page with any "Bad Idea" cards, because Page's massive, idle engineering department had enough staff to handle pretty much anything out there. Eventually Justin slipped away, leaving Page as the victor. The take-home lesson: bloated, inefficient bureaucracy wins over all! Huzzah!

Finally, I'm trying to decide whether I like The American Prospect. Let me switch into Tevye-mode for a second:

• On the one hand, I really like their blog, Tapped. Tapped happens to be a committee, but for some reason I'm really fond of their habit of referring to themselves in third person present tense, as in "Maybe we should be hardened to this by now, but Tapped is always stunned around this time of year when the financial disclosure information comes rolling out..."

• On the other hand, they print hysterical drug articles such as this one that again repeats the tired old charge that the United States gave $40 million dollars to the Taliban for opium crop suppression. Hellooo? Did Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanity not thoroughly debunk this crap almost exactly a year ago?

• But on the other hand... they also give us articles like this one by William F. Gates Sr., cogently arguing that yes, we do need the estate tax.

• But on the other hand, we get this rather strange article by Garance Franke-Ruta about career women and fertility. Regardless of what one thinks of the article's target, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the fact is that Hewlett does have a point -- older women have a harder time conceiving children. Franke-Ruta's solution for this problem is to have older women marry younger men, because the age of the man also affects the odds of conception:

  Though your average 36-year-old female executive might not find it socially acceptable to date a 29-year-old man (or vice versa), she could still very happily work things out with, say, some nice, stable 34 year old.

  What a quaint assertion. Practically-thirty males are not allowed to date mid-thirty females? Sez who? And jeez, if your goal is to have kids, what do you care what other people think? I mean really.

But I think the "kicker" is this article about the peculiar hatred of American conservatives for soccer, which somehow magically combines one of my loves (the latter) with one of my, well, dislikes (the former). Here Sasha Polakow-Suransky explains how the the likes of the National Review have managed to score an own goal on the soccer "issue":

Perhaps the first evidence of conservatives' aversion to soccer appeared during the last World Cup in 1998, when denunciations of bourgeois, liberal, Clinton-supporting soccer moms graced the pages of National Review. Tirades against the inevitable hooliganism of the game were entertained in the right-wing press as well. Taken together, these seemingly divergent criticisms from soccer-bashers gave rise to the peculiar and ironic phenomenon of assigning a political label to what is perhaps the only sport known to have united fascists and communists, bosses and workers, and millionaires and slum-dwellers behind their respective national teams.

Excellent stuff. So I guess I'll have to keep TAP on my reading list. (And while I'm at it -- GO USA! And be afraid, Germany. Be very afraid.)

• But on the other hand... no... No! There is no other hand!