NPH Has Moved

To www.notprincehamlet.com.

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The Scorn of The Conscientious Class

I'm smiling politely at the Trader Joe's checker, who has just recounted to her colleague that they got a "bad batch of bags." I require the paper bags today because I forgot our reusable ones. Because I came almost straight from daycare. Because I've been out of town for a week and returned home to a bare fridge. And because I use the paper bags--to collect my recycling.

Yet these are perilously flawed. One good tug, one corner caught on a door handle, and my oatmeal would have been covered in egg.

Nice catch, checker. You do the Joe proud. I am happy to be shopping here with my two year-old daughter on a sunny Tuesday afternoon in April.

I am not happy with the smarmy-smug commentary coming from behind me:

"All the more reason people should bring their own."

Whuck?

The guy behind me in line has just answered my noble checker's act of collegiality with a kick to the human shin. I turn to look at my accuser. He's tall, young, and has a perfectly crafted hairdo resting atop his chiseled-jaw-and-high-cheekbone head. He is positively Grecian. He's beautiful. I hate him.

If I am to be fingered as an environmental menace at the local crunchy grocery chain, must it be by such a specimen of mainstream success? Could I not be accosted by the 75 year-0ld retiree with his cans of soup and cat food? Where, on this judgment day, is the patchouli-scented protester with her mattes of unwashed hair?

And he smiles. He grins at me (I hate you I hate you I hate you!) as if the two of us are sharing a condemnation of a third party, THAT guy, who we both know is going home to take a 57 minute shower with every light on in the house. But we're not.

I'm the guilty party here. Bad citizen. Bad dad. Bad hair.

I stop at 7-11 on the way home, just so I can buy a pack of cigarettes, smoke one in the car, and toss the butt out the window. If the scorn of the conscientious class is to be my diet, let me first work up an appetite.

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I Was A Dumb Kid (4)

When I was a teenager and in college, I went with my parents and a girl I sought to impress to a lake in New Mexico. The drive from Denver took us over Wolf Creek Pass.

At the top of the pass, I made the decision (from behind the wheel of the girl's dad's car, mind you) that coasting down in neutral would be a good way to save gas. So into neutral the car went, and I rode the brakes all the way down the pass's 10,000 feet.

The burning smell at the bottom was unmistakable.

I was a dumb kid.

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I Was A Dumb Kid (3)

Being home for a few days has reminded me of this:

When I was a teenager I drove my 1982 Datsun 200sx from downtown Denver home to the suburbs. It began to overheat very early into the drive, but I estimated the driving time to be short, and since it was January, it was cold outside, so that should have helped. Still on the interstate and miles from home, a loud knocking noise starting issuing from the engine as smoke billowed from under the hood. I took the next exit, and the car died before it reached the bottom.

I trudged through the snow to an office park about 100 yards off the exit and asked the people inside to call my parents to come pick me up. A mechanic who was a friend of the family had the car towed to his garage the next day and reported to my dad with a mix of amazement and amusement that the engine had literally been burned up. The sending unit had literally melted.

As the engine melted, all I could think was, "Just get me home. Just get me home."

Dumb. Kid.

For posterity's sake, below is the ad for that car, God Rest It's Soul.

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I Was A Dumb Kid (2)

When I was a teenager playing baseball in the park with my friends, a carload of older kids pulled up and started to bully us around. When the leader of the bullies demanded the aluminum bat I was holding, I . . . gave . . . it . . . to . . . him.

Seriously.

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I Was A Dumb Kid

Mark Oestreicher tells a story in a recent book about wrecking his dad's car on a traffic island in a completely vacated mall parking lot when he was 16. It got me thinking of the stupid stuff I did when I was a teenager.

For example, when I was a teenager I stood an extension ladder on end by itself in front of a window. Of course, it crashed through the window.

When I was a teenager I filled the power steering fluid reservoir of my new Ford Maverick with motor oil.

When I was a teenager I broke the frame of said Maverick by making a sharp left turn on snow and doing a perfect parallel slide into the opposite curb. Then I drove the car for two more days.

When I was a teenager I made an early exit from a McDonald's drive-thru by driving directly over the top of the traffic island. I wanted breakfast, and they had stopped serving breakfast. What was I supposed to do?

When I was a teenager I backed straight into a concrete-embedded light pole at 20 miles per hour in an empty parking lot.

When I was a teenager I at a whole plate of marinated onions on a dare.

When I was a teenager I stood on the hood of my friend's parents' car, putting two very noticeable dents in it.

When I was a teenager I tried to give my girlfriend a running piggy-back ride down the middle of the street. I stumbled and fell, and she had her face drug across four feet of asphalt.

That's only the tip of the iceberg.

Man, I was a dumb kid.

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Corporations as Uber-Citizens

Corporations as Uber-Citizens

Posted using ShareThis

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Windell Middlebrooks Update

Our guy has landed a recurring role on a major network sitcom. Check him out as Captain Duncook on the new incarnation of Scrubs on Hulu. Sterling College has never been more proud.

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Tradition vs. . . . Tradition

Mark Jordan has a helpful article over at Religious Dispatches about the "conservatives vs. liberals" or "tradition vs. innovation" narrative that drives most talk about church conflict, particularly conflict about sex-related issues. His core point is crucial. If heeded, it would change the way these debates happen. Here's the money quote:

What we are living through is not a fight between a pristine Christianity and the encroaching world, but a divide within Christianity over what exactly should count as tradition. It isn’t a fight between religious conservatives and activist revolutionaries. It is a deep disagreement inside Christianity over what conserving faithfulness means.

What conserving faithfulness means. What counts as tradition.

In common parlance, traditionalists advocate for a faithfulness that amounts to continuity and maintenance of "the way it's always been." Liberals conceive of a faithfulness that enacts values like justice and peace, drawn from a progressive activist culture.

Of course, "the way it's always been" is a matter of negotiation, as Jordan deftly explains. Furthermore, the values championed by liberals are religious in character and are pursued for faithfulness' sake.

The last time I took part in a church (Presbyterian) debate about the question of homosexuality, I noticed something new happening: most of the Bible quoting was being done by the progressives, those advocating a change in the "traditional" church understanding of sexuality. They were mining the tradition to suggest a faithful way forward. The conservatives, for their part, argued for church unity and the relevance of the church to contemporary culture, and in doing so relied heavily on sociological language.

The "religious" case was made by the liberals.

The pragmatic case was made by the conservatives.

Of course, the tradition won out, an occurrence that didn't need any debate to bring it about. I left feeling as discouraged as I've ever felt about the prospects for a meaningful discernment of the faithful thing to do. Jordan's insight makes me a little less discouraged, but only a little.

It's still an inter-religious fight over what constitutes faithfulness. And whereas progressives pay a thorough deference to the faithful intentions of their opponents, many conservatives are driven by the worst kinds of stereotypes about the intentions of liberals.

How would the character of the conversation change if traditionalists held a higher view of the faithfulness of progressives?

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The Cream of the Crop on the Podsednik Signing

They hate it, they hate it, they hate it.

"Any hope I once had that Dayton Moore knew what he was doing is gone." (David Pinto, Baseball Musings)

"If Dayton Moore were a writer he'd be Murray Chass" (Jeff Parker, Royall Speaking)

"This is yet another day in the past year that I wonder why I am a Royals fan." (Josh Duggan, Bleacher Report)

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Inside Dayton's Head

I like writing about the Kansas City Royals, especially their much maligned General Manager Dayton Moore. Even if you're not interested in baseball, there's something interesting happening in Kansas City.

For the last two seasons Moore has been denounced by baseball writers of a certain school for his roster moves: trading Leo Nunez for Mike Jacobs, trading Ramon Ramirez for Coco Crisp, trading Danny Cortes for Yuniesky Betencourt, signing Jason Kendall to a two-year contract, and on and on. And now those writers have another move to hate, the signing of veteran outfield Scott Podsednik.

The school these writers represent is the sabermetric school, which eschews the traditional measurements of a baseball players value (physical attributes like speed, arm strength, and power) in favor of a set of statistical measurements pioneered by Bill James. For these writers (many of whom work for the sabermetrics mother ship Baseball Prospectus), a player is worth what he has done, and what he has done can be accurately quantified by any number of staistical tools: does he get on base (On Base Percentage); does he hit for power (Slugging Percentage); does he give up many fly balls (Ground Ball/Fly Ball Ratio).

What drives sabermatricians batty about Dayton Moore's signings is that he shows a total disregard for their way of assessing a player's value. In fact, Moore has assembled the worst offensive roster in baseball as measured by the likes of Baseball Prospectus. Prior to 2009, this appeared to be paying off; the Royals increased their win total in three consecutive seasons. But the additions of Jacobs and Crisp in 2009 blew up in Moore's face, and the major league team took a major step backward.

Here's the dilemma, as I see it. Sabermetrics is quickly becoming the new conventional wisdom in baseball, and Dayton Moore continues to make moves with his major league roster that draw the condescension of sabermetric sages like Rob Neyer and Kevin Goldstein and Rany Jayzayerli, and even mainstream media columnist Joe Posnanski. So who's right?

Certainly the 2009 season put a huge feather in the collective Baseball Prospectus cap. But isn't a criteria for greatness independent thought? Would it not be disquieting for a major league executive to make personnel decisions to satisfy the theories of writers?

At the same time, is it not foolish to steadfastly persist in opinions that have been empirically demonstrated to be wrong?

It's the assessment of value that's a stake here. For the Dayton Moore's of the world, value is something you can see with your eyes and project into the future. Value is inferred, projected. It takes a certain kind of scout with an eye for the right attributes and "intangibles" (as an angry mob of sabermatricians shouts: "There are no intangibles!") to recognize value.

For sabermetricians, value is something you can mathematically measure by looking at past data sets. Value is measured. It can be analyzed by anyone with basic spreadsheet capabilities and rudimentary math.

I have strong sympathies with the latter view of value. At the same time, I'm rooting for Dayton Moore's moves to translate into success, if only to vindicate an open-ended, non-deterministic view of the world.

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Removador Recordings and Solutions

So, this guy called Yim Yames starts a record label to produce and promote undiscovered music. No news there.

Only "Yim Yames" is Jim James of My Morning Jacket, and the music is "Some of the coldest music you ain't never heard!"

This is Removador Recordings and Solutions, a roster of six acts that, with one exception, deliver on the label's promised obscurity. Well, one and a half. My Morning Jacket is, of course, on board, as is James himself, under the aforementioned Yim Yames moniker.

It's interesting stuff. For me, it's made all the more interesting by James' involvement in the Monsters of Folk collaboration last year, which was beautifully profiled by Under the Radar magazine.

Here's a guy who's an accomplished musician in his own right fighting the good fight for a collaborative ethos and promoting obscure talent, only because it's what he likes.

Cool. Cool.

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Netflix: Me Likey

Our family has used Netflix for five years now, with one brief interruption. At our most avid, we maintained a queue of four DVD's, two for me and two for mon amor. For over a year, however, we've been on the one DVD at a time plan, a plan that, since we don't have a t.v. or DVD player and therefore watch everything on our laptop, makes a lot of sense.

What makes even more sense is the option to watch Netflix content online, which we do as often as we can find something that doesn't suck. Just the other night we watched Doubt. The week before that The Princess Bride. Somewhere in the middle I spent a rib-tickling 90 minutes with SNL: The Best of Jimmy Fallon.

But the vast majority of online viewing content on Netflix is not worth the time it takes to watch. Perhaps that's about to change. From CNN:

In a groundbreaking deal for online movie rentals, Netflix and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment announced Wednesday that they have expanded their licensing arrangement for streaming movies, and Netflix now has licensing rights to more of the studio's catalog content.

I've long maintained that I would gladly pay subscription fees for online television content. Netflix is a model that works but that has been hampered by little quality in the content until now. If Warner Bros. can demonstrate that opening its catalog to Netflix subscribers makes money, then who knows what studios might come running to the table?

Of course, the catch is that Netflix has agreed to not offer Warner Bros. new releases on DVD (or Blu-ray) until 28 days after they go on sale. But I rent fewer-and-fewer DVD's and I consume more and more content "in the cloud" online, so I could care less about that.

Kudos, I say, to Netflix.

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The Use of Doctrine

A colleague in ministry expressed doubts today about the doctrine of the Trinity. His squabble with it is the way it's used, which he's found to be inevitably heretical. It is very difficult to speak of God as three-in-one, to teach and preach intelligently as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit without lapsing into any number of "misstatements" of God's nature (insert obligatory nod to the provisional character of all of our God speech here; also insert here the qualification that the use of language is only one part of an equation that also includes its truthfulness or faithfulness).

Modalism is the heresy my colleague hears every time Trinity talk takes place. It is inevitable that people will talk about the different "jobs" assigned the unique members of the Godhead (the Spirit empowers; the Son saves; the Father creates; and so on), whereas one of the marks of Orthodox trinitarianism is the maxim that if one member of the Trinity does something, the other two, by participation, also do it.

For my colleague, this hangup is cause to rethink using Trinity language at all. He gets the doctrine. He can explain it to you all day long; he's just tired of having to. My on-the-fly reply was that just because something is difficult to explicate doesn't mean we should abandon it. Perhaps it means we should use it all the more.

I've thought about this throughout the afternoon and evening, now, and it's clear to me that I use lots of theological language not because it speaks to me personally, but because it's what I was taught. My teachers, though, were faithful men and women who had years behind their convictions and had been taught them by faithful teachers who had themselves been taught, and on and on down the line. I'm okay with that. I'm not sure if I should be, but I'm okay with affirming something I can't explain beyond, "That's the church's traditional teaching," or "That's our best understanding of it." I'm programmed to doubt that contemporary humanity could do it any better than the Patristics who hammered it all out so many centuries ago.

I'm not compelled to find different language because what we have is programmed for confusion. Is that a shirking of my ordination vow to "serve the people with . . .imagination . . . and . . . intelligence?"

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Year-End Music Review: The Albums

Road To My Love - Ana Egge

I started this quest for a musical genre with the album as the most basic unit of musical biology in mind. This post, the "album-of-the-year" post, is exactly what I had in mind last January.

Adult Nights - Wild Light

As the year took shape, though, and my musical discovery habits evolved, the album became less and less prominent. When you're looking for music all the time, starting from the assumption that you know nothing and seeking to discover new artists, then you don't spend very long on any one album. Instead, you obtain the album, stash it away, and move on to finding more.

Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix - Pho...

There were a few albums, though, that I came back to throughout the year. At pretty much any point, I could put one of these albums on and listen to it from beginning to end without feeling compelled to skip anything.

These Four Walls - We Were Pro...

Another way of putting it is to say that I would buy these albums and pay full price for them, and I would recommend anyone do likewise. And when these artists put out their next album(s), I will most likely buy them before hearing them.

Middle Cyclone - Neko Case

These albums paint a picture of a music listener drawn to the reliable conventions of pop music. That recognition disappoints me, even though these albums stand on their own and, in some cases, can't be confined to any one genre.

The Briar Patch - Freddy & Fra...

My albums-of-the-year list is what it is. I think this project, rather than creating new musical tastes and sensitivities, simply brought what was already there out into the light. And I'm fine with that.

Love At the End of the World -...

It's interesting to me to note that only three of these albums contain a song that made my "songs-of-the-year" list. In the case of "Middle Cyclone," "Love at The End of The World," "Road To My Love," "Time to Die," and "Adult Nights," the total package is greater than any one of its components. And that's an achievement in itself.

Time To Die - The Dodos

Listen to these albums. Add them to your collection. They're good.

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Year-End Music Review: The Songs

My quest for a genre nearly ran aground in the last quarter of the year. Family and work responsibilities mounted, and, frankly, I started to question the maturity of such an endeavor. I have satisfied myself on the latter point. Enough said.

Yet a certain fatigue set in as well, owing to the sheer volume of content that comes out every week (always on Tuesday). The online media landscape allows a neophyte like myself to sit in the presence of indie music's high priests, but nothing can replace time and experience as the arbiters of quality in music. My blunt tastes are being formed every day.

I plan a couple more year-end posts, lifting up the albums I liked the best and the blogs I used to find them. I'd also like to share some thoughts about the vehicles I have used to acquire music, since what I'm using today is not what I started with, and may not be what I use six months from now.

But without belaboring the point, here is a random collection of the songs I discovered in 2009 that I listened to the most, shared the most, and sit atop my playlists entering 2010. To qualify, a song on this list has to have been sought out for its own sake repeatedly during the year.

This is no countdown; more like a cloud. A cloud of musical goodness. What it says about me and my genre I can't say. Maybe you can.

Best Songs of '09

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Cutting HIs Losses

Last November I defended Royals' General Manager Dayton Moore in his acquisition of Mike Jacobs, a move roundly panned by baseball writers reputable and obscure alike. "Dayton Moore isn't stupid," I scolded. While I stand by that assertion today, I also am forced to acknowledge that those writers aren't stupid either. The Jacobs trade clearly stands out as the worst move Moore has made since taking over as GM in June of 2006. Anyone could have seen this as early as May of last season.

Including Dayton Moore.

So now the Royals have released him. Unconditionally.

Thankfully, his contract was only for one year, so it's off the books. But that's little consolation to Royals fans who watched a Leo Nunez-less bullpen give away 7th and 8th inning leads all summer while Nunez (Jacobs' trade opposite) racked up 27 saves for the Marlins.

I'll still defend the trade on the grounds that Moore was trying to inject some power into a woefully weak major league lineup, and Jacobs appeared, if not an unlikely contributor, a potential one. Moore's behavior this off season indicates that he's given up on the major league roster; he knows it's going to be awful in 2010, and he's willing to take his lumps in exchange for amateur players filed away in the minors (see the team's acquisition of 19 year-old Cuban defector Noel Arguelles).

Moore is entering his fourth full season as a major league GM. I'm comfortable with acknowledging that he's still learning the job. It's an impossible balance, with a small market team like the Royals, between cultivating a healthy long-term farm system that won't produce big league results for three-to-five years down the line and actually improving the big league roster. I think last year showed Moore that the worst of the best free agents available in any off-season are still worse that the best of the worst players in the farm system.

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Rushkoff on Tiger

In the latest Daily Beast:

in spite of our increasing familiarity and comfort with the Internet, most of us still have pitifully little idea of the fossil record of data we leave trailing behind us every day, all the time. Until, of course, it is too late.

Read the whole piece here.

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Stop Building Fences

Below is the copy of a letter I sent to Senators Feinstein and Boxer regarding their recent "aye" vote on the question of 700 miles of new reinforced fencing along the U.S./Mexico border.

Dear Senator Feinstein/Boxer,

You recently voted in the affirmative for an amendment to H.R. 2892 requiring the completion of at least 700 miles of reinforced fence along the southwest border before December 31, 2010. I am writing to express my disappointment at your vote and to urge you to reconsider your stance on the question of border fencing.

Having recently returned from a church youth group trip to Tucson, AZ and Nogales, Mexico, I have personally seen the blight that these walls are to the landscape. The Sierra Club Borderlands Campaign has thoroughly documented the damaging effect of border wall on animal species, vegetation, and community infrastructure. Lengths of border wall are ugly and damaging to the otherwise picturesque landscape of the American southwest.

Furthermore, these walls are ineffective. One Border Patrol spokesperson has referred to them as "Speed bumps in the desert." Professor Wayne Cornelius of the University of California San Diego studied the efficacy of border walls for over a decade and concluded: "the border enforcement build-up seems to have made no appreciable difference in terms of migrants’ ability to enter the United States clandestinely.”

I urge you to reconsider your support of new lengths of border fence. While supporting these new additions helps classify a legislator as "tough on security," the evidence shows that this is not a security issue; you won't find a single Border Patrol agent who has apprehended someone with terrorist intentions. The high price of these fences make their construction, while lucrative for contractors, devastating and irresponsible for the federal government, especially in a time of financial crisis, when health care providers, schools, and other essential social institutions are suffering from a lack of funds. Please reconsider how you vote on this issue, and vote "nay" on any new border fences.

Sincerely,

Not Prince Hamlet

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Album of the Year Nominee: Eulogies, "Here Anonymous"

This discovery came through KCRW. I heard "Day to Day" on the radio in my car and later found the cd in the great used record shop in town for $7. "Here Anonymous" is the first Album of the Year nominee to be procured via hard copy, ie on an actual disc and not an mp3 download.

Here's "Day to Day":

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