6pm: The score stands at 34-34. In order to stay upright
and keep their strength, John Isner and Nicolas Mahut have
now started eating members of the audience. They trudge
back to the baseline, gnawing on thigh-bones and sucking
intestines. They have decided that they will stay on Court
18 until every spectator is eaten. Only then, they say,
will they consider ending their contest.
And then, disbelief:
7pm: What’s going on here? Once, long ago, I think that
this was a tennis match. I believe it was part of a wider
tennis tournament, somewhere in south-west London, and the
winner of this match would then go on to face the winner
of another match and, if he won that, the winner of
another match. And so on until he reached the final and,
fingers crossed, he won the title.
That, at least, is what this spectacle on Court 18 used to
be; what it started out as. It’s not that anymore and
hasn’t been for a few hours now. I’m not quite sure what
it is, but it is long and it’s horrifying and it’s very
long to boot. Is it death? I think it might be death.
42 games all.
Then, zombies again:
9.25pm: Last thoughts before I ring me a hearse. That was beyond tennis. I think it was even beyond survival,
because there is a strong suggestion (soon to be confirmed
by doctors) that John Isner actually expired at about the
20-20 mark, and Mahut went soon afterwards, and the
remainder of the match was contested by Undead Zombies who
ate the spectators during the change of ends (again, this
is pending a police investigation).
Still, if you’re going to watch a pair of zombies go at
each other for eleventy-billion hours, far into the night,
it might as well be these zombies. They were incredible,
astonishing, indefatigable. They fell over frequently but
they never stayed down. My hat goes off to these zombies.
Possibly my head goes off to them too.
It’s a crying shame that someone has to lose this match
but hey-ho, that’s tennis. The historic duel between John
Isner and Nicolas Mahut will resume tomorrow and play out
to its conclusion. Possibly. Maybe they’ll just keep going
into Friday and Saturday, Sunday and Monday; belting their
aces and waiting for that angel to come and lead them
home.
The great thing about the BBC commentary is that it’s exactly like checking in with your buddies at the local pub (bar, in the US’s case) and talking about the game. I think it really adds that sense of context that can be missing when it’s just broadcasters trying to appeal to a very large audience. It kinda serves the purpose of the weatherman — everyone can look up the radar picture and forecast on their own… but it’s nice to have somebody who knows the topic talk about it for a little while.
Oh, and once again I should have listened to Dan back in 2009 when he talked about the greatness of BBC liveblogging.
Norway’s state oil company, StatoilHydro, is
internationally recognised as a competitive commercial
player and one of the most environmentally and socially
conscious ones to boot. Since 1996, every krone the
government has earned from oil has gone into a savings
fund, which now totals some £240bn – more than a year’s
gross domestic product and equivalent to about £50,000
for each of Norway’s 4.8 million citizens.
Right now, that’s about $73,000 per person. Anyhow, that Iraqi was named Farouk al-Kasim, and moved to Norway in 1968 out of necessity: it was the only country that could provide medical care to his son. I find his quote at the end of the article particularly interesting:
Not everything in life has been good – but things have
mostly come in a fortunate order. It’s got nothing to do
with skill, it’s simply luck.
The romantic couples who have been together for half
their lives have something quite different from romantic
love. Johnson calls it “stirring-the-oatmeal” love – “it
represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to
find meaning in the simple, unromantic tasks … to find
the relatedness, the value, the beauty, in the simple and
ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama …
or an extraordinary intensity in everything” (pg. 195).
In a strange way, this is true love because it can be
everlasting, but this is not the love script that we are
bombarded with from every literary or entertainment form
in our lives.
This article talks about “limerence”, which was a new word for me; it means romantic love. We are all familiar with its intensity… and also how short-lived it is. A theory posits that limerence exists so that a couple is together long enough to support a child until it walks. The timing does seem to match up, but I wonder if limerence could even persist in the absence of the cultural trappings and traditions we have woven around nascent romantic relationships.
Recently, I was waiting in our dental school reception area to meet with Patient Financing and I opened up the February New Yorker. In it was a brilliant essay about the intersection of society and alcohol by Malcolm Gladwell, entitled Drinking Games. Gladwell’s anecdotal and anthropological evidence reveals that the effects of alcohol are not uniform — our reaction to being drunk is heavily influenced by… what we are expected to do when drunk. Here’s an awesome quote:
“Drunkenness is not disinhibition. Drunkenness is myopia.”
You really should read the article: Gladwell is a brilliant story-teller. Incidentally, the topic ties into a conversation with Mykala a few days ago. It began when I was biking home from the rec and school, and I considered what Past Alex would’ve done with such a cloudy yet not rainy day. It was in the upper 60s and the sky was quite gray. The answer to my question caused me to almost be overcome by a sense of loss: I would’ve played basketball with my friends. It’s not that I can’t physically play basketball (though I would imagine I’d be quite rusty), it’s more: I’m “homesick for a place that no longer exists”. Those carefree days are fading fast from memory; sometimes you feel those sands of time in that hourglass running through your fingers. Anyhow, that homesick phrase is from the movie “Garden State” and it has sometimes been called by the German word “weltschmerz”, though that word actually has a more philosophical and less navel-gazing-y meaning. Anyhow…
Growing up means more responsibility — you take responsibility for your actions, right the wrongs you do unto others, help others, honor commitments, show up to places on time. And with that responsibility… you lose the carefree feelings of youth. You still have fun, but within a structure, before your bedtime, within the limitations adults must place on themselves. And so sometimes you’re sad that those times of youth are gone.
This all relates to the alcohol because of a comment Mykala made: “Maybe people drink so they don’t have to think about tomorrow, so they can forget about adulthood for a little while.” I thought this was quite perceptive when I heard it, and Gladwell’s comment about the “myopia” of drunkenness fits in with it perfectly.
Ultimately, I think I know how to deal with the melancholy that accompanies nostalgia for youth: cultivate an environment for my own children where they can experience such wonderful, carefree, days.
Tony Hsieh’s article Why I Sold Zappos reveals just a fraction of how much he has learned in guiding his company, Zappos, from near-bankruptcy to a recent acquisition by Amazon. I think I’d like to read his book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose since I hope to run a business a decade from now. Check out this quote from the article, just mixed in with everything else:
… Zappos’s policy of paying new employees $2,000 to quit if
they’re unhappy with their jobs.
When I read this, I actually said aloud: “How can that work?” It sounds like it would make employees want to leave. Then, I thought about it: it does make employees want to leave! If Zappos isn’t a good fit for someone, this money kickstarts their aspirations to find a job that is a better fit. They’re not wallowing in employment inertia, poisoning the workplace environment because they hate their job. Thus, the former employee leaves happy, and Zappos gets to find another person to fill the position. However, the money says something to the employee up front: we want to make you happy to work here. After all, Zappos can’t be hiring someone each month, then paying $2000 “severance”. Interesting.
Our cities and communities are armed to the teeth to bust
pot and cocaine dealers, and be prepared for the
extraordinarily unlikely chance that they will be
involved with terrorism. Meanwhile, a huge number of
vulnerable kids are being violated and abused every day.
Might we also consider what would happen if some of
police departments’ firepower were aimed at pimps? If
cops broke down doors of pimps that abuse kids with AK
47s in the dark of night in full combat gear? Might that
not help slow down sex trafficking (not that I think it
is a good idea to use that kind of police tactics in
general)? But where are our priorities?
Drugs cause some serious problems in our society. But in terms of destroying lives and disrupting the coherency of neighborhoods, I wonder what is worse: drug kingpins or pimps of unwilling teenage prostitutes:
Here is what veteran reporter Dan Rather has to say: “In
covering news for more than 60 years, I’d like to think
that few stories shock me anymore. But this is one of
them. We ran across it late last year and the more we dug,
the more disturbing it became. Eighty-year-old men paying
a premium to violate teenage girls, sometimes supplied by
former drug gangs now into child sex trafficking big time?
You’ve got to be kidding. Nope. That’s happening and a lot
more along the same lines.”
I think the article makes a valid argument: eliminating the trafficking on craigslist gives politicians something to brag about, but it doesn’t address the actual problem. Far too few resources are allocated to fight this awful problem, and pushing it off craigslist means it ends up on other websites, which are not likely to cooperate with the government.
North Korean TV only broadcasts hagiographies of the two
leaders and pictures celebrating the country’s army,
model farms, model villages etc.
Our minders had probably
never seen any other kinds of news item or documentary
about their country or the rest of the world.
They were
not allowed to, and they could not, because no-one has
access to the internet in North Korea.
You can see the full episode by Sue Lloyd-Roberts at the BBC. The starvation is shocking (the army had to drop their height requirement because widespread malnourishment meant they had to reject too many applicants), but the extent to which the government controls the population’s access to knowledge has truly unreal consequences. Here is an entire population that does not actually know what they are missing because they have no accurate information about the outside world. That this can go on in 2010 indicates we have not come as far as a world as we think.