Some people read about a disease and immediately come down with the symptoms. If you ever meet a Minnesota housewife suffering from ebola, ask her if she subscribes to Discover or Scientific American before rushing her to the hospital.
The Solipsist suffers from a variant of this condition. It's not that we want treatment for imaginary physical maladies; rather, we find ourselves envious whenever we read about subjects of psychological trials. Just yesterday, we read of a longitudinal study on temperament that has been going on at Harvard since 1989: Babies' temperaments were classified as to their anxiety levels, and since then the subjects have been interviewed every four years or so to see if their anxiety levels remained consistent--in other words, whether anxiety was more due to nature or nurture. And we wanted in!
We always want in on these kinds of things. We envy the investigative journalist who gets to have his psyche mapped. We wish we could be poked and prodded in an effort to establish our levels of depression or euphoria or psychosis. We want to know whether we are the kind of person liable to start a self-indulgent blog or if our own sense of self-importance falls within normal parameters.
So, here's the deal, if any Sloppists plan to conduct psychological experiments, you need look no further for your first subject.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Friday, April 9, 2010
ULTIMATUM
Make "The Solipsist" a "Blog-of-Note," or the puppy gets it!
Hey, it worked for National Lampoon!
Thursday, April 8, 2010
You Blog What You Eat
No wonder we've never been named a "Blog of Note" (which for some reason has been "The House of Marrakesh" for the last several weeks)! We've foolishly strived to entertain the masses with clever comedic posts, thoughtful news commentary, and the occasional diatribe against our neighbors to the north. Turns out that what people are really clamoring for is. . . pictures of food.
Yes, the hottest craze in self-publishing is to maintain a comprehensive log of everything that one puts in one's mouth. (Well, maybe not everything, but you get the idea. . . .) Aspiring bloggers can gain a following simply by snapping a picture of every piece of food that makes its way into their alimentary canal--every meal, every snack, every piece of cracker found between the couch cushions, every piece of potato chip trapped in one's chest hair (well, not us, you understand, we're just sayin').
Rationalizations abound! It's about dieting! It's about health! It's about becoming a more thoughtful connoisseur of the finer things in life and the proper way to eat!
People, it's about obsessive-compulsive disorder. Admitting you have a problem is the first step. (Yeah, yeah, you could quit any time you wanted. . . .)
It's not even that original. Sure, the first person to have the idea was maybe onto something, but how many of these food diaries do we really need? Not any more than we currently have, certainly, so rest assured that the Solipsist will not be photographing his racist Wheaties breakfasts.
It occurs to us, though, that if people are fascinated by food, by seeing every meal that random strangers eat, then how much more fascinated would they be in seeing the end products of all these meals. So, folks, here we bring you the first photographic installment of a regular (you should excuse the expression) feature, "Soli-Poop"!
OK, so, this morning we had eggs and French toast, and the results, as you can see, were kind of--
ALL RIGHT, THAT'S IT! GIVE ME THE COMPUTER!
Hi folks. WOS here. You didn't really want the Solipsist to go on, did you?
He's been in rare form today. This is what happens when he's off from work--way too much time on his hands.
I'm in the process of looking for a job, and I'm looking into sales positions, something I've done before. Solipsist, "encouraging" me, tells me, "You're a great salesperson. You could sell space heaters to Eskimos."
ME: You mean, I could sell ice-makers to Eskimos.
Sol: Why would Eskimos need ice-makers?
ME: Now you're just being stupid.
Sol: No, seriously, that's mean. Why would you swindle poor little Eskimo families out of their hard-earned blubber earnings by making them spend money on ice makers?!? Don't you realize that they could just, I don't know, chip a little bit off the kids' bedroom door if they need ice? And why would they need ice anyway? I imagine their sodas stay perfectly cold just from the ambient temperature. . .
At this point, I threw an ashtray at the Solipsist. He got the message. But this whole "Soli-Poop" thing? No no no. We will be holding on to the computer for the rest of the evening. Check back tomorrow for, I hope, more appropriate ramblings.
Yes, the hottest craze in self-publishing is to maintain a comprehensive log of everything that one puts in one's mouth. (Well, maybe not everything, but you get the idea. . . .) Aspiring bloggers can gain a following simply by snapping a picture of every piece of food that makes its way into their alimentary canal--every meal, every snack, every piece of cracker found between the couch cushions, every piece of potato chip trapped in one's chest hair (well, not us, you understand, we're just sayin').
Rationalizations abound! It's about dieting! It's about health! It's about becoming a more thoughtful connoisseur of the finer things in life and the proper way to eat!
People, it's about obsessive-compulsive disorder. Admitting you have a problem is the first step. (Yeah, yeah, you could quit any time you wanted. . . .)
It's not even that original. Sure, the first person to have the idea was maybe onto something, but how many of these food diaries do we really need? Not any more than we currently have, certainly, so rest assured that the Solipsist will not be photographing his racist Wheaties breakfasts.
It occurs to us, though, that if people are fascinated by food, by seeing every meal that random strangers eat, then how much more fascinated would they be in seeing the end products of all these meals. So, folks, here we bring you the first photographic installment of a regular (you should excuse the expression) feature, "Soli-Poop"!
OK, so, this morning we had eggs and French toast, and the results, as you can see, were kind of--
ALL RIGHT, THAT'S IT! GIVE ME THE COMPUTER!
Hi folks. WOS here. You didn't really want the Solipsist to go on, did you?
He's been in rare form today. This is what happens when he's off from work--way too much time on his hands.
I'm in the process of looking for a job, and I'm looking into sales positions, something I've done before. Solipsist, "encouraging" me, tells me, "You're a great salesperson. You could sell space heaters to Eskimos."
ME: You mean, I could sell ice-makers to Eskimos.
Sol: Why would Eskimos need ice-makers?
ME: Now you're just being stupid.
Sol: No, seriously, that's mean. Why would you swindle poor little Eskimo families out of their hard-earned blubber earnings by making them spend money on ice makers?!? Don't you realize that they could just, I don't know, chip a little bit off the kids' bedroom door if they need ice? And why would they need ice anyway? I imagine their sodas stay perfectly cold just from the ambient temperature. . .
At this point, I threw an ashtray at the Solipsist. He got the message. But this whole "Soli-Poop" thing? No no no. We will be holding on to the computer for the rest of the evening. Check back tomorrow for, I hope, more appropriate ramblings.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
An Actor's Actor
Quick, without Googling, who has won the Emmy Award for Best Actor in a Dramatic Series for the past two years?
If you said Hugh Laurie ("House"), good guess. Wrong, but a good guess.
Try again? Jon Hamm ("Mad Men")? Another reasonable guess, but also wrong.
(Digression: We think Hugh Laurie deserves whatever accolades he gets. Jon Hamm, on the other hand, we don't quite get. The show is great, and he's perfectly fine in it. But he's essentially playing a cipher, a mystery man, someone that nobody can quite put a finger on. He plays it well, but this essentially calls for him to show very little emotion and to have almost no reaction to anything. So the part really demands that Jon Hamm say his lines clearly and look pretty. The Solipsist could do that! EOD)
The correct answer, in fact, is Bryan Cranston for the AMC series "Breaking Bad."
(Image from imdb.com)If you're not familiar with the series, "Breaking Bad" revolves around Walter White (Cranston), a low-key but brilliant high school chemistry teacher in New Mexico, who finds out (in the pilot episode) that he has lung cancer and, perhaps, two years to live. With a disabled son at home and a baby on the way, he decides the best way to stockpile cash to provide for his family is to manufacture methamphetamine. He partners with a drug dealer, a former student named Jesse (Aaron Paul), and soon, thanks to his expertise with chemistry, is producing the best meth that anyone has ever used. Along the way, he must hide his new profession from his wife and brother-in-law (who happens to be a DEA agent) and try not to get himself killed by the more experienced players in the meth trade.
The show itself is compelling, but what makes it work is Cranston. He is the proverbial "actor's actor." We never really understood what that kind of label meant--actor's actor, writer's writer, plumber's plumber (well, OK, we could guess what that LAST one would mean). Watching Bryan Cranston, though, we get it.
Bryan Cranston is certainly a good actor. What makes him special, though, is not so much his ability to "disappear" into a character (along the lines of someone like Sean Penn), nor is it his ability to craft a character through the careful accumulation of bits and pieces (along the lines of Johnny Depp). Not that Cranston doesn't do these things, but what he does as well as any actor the Solipsist has ever seen is commit to a role.
When we studied theater, the one thing every acting teacher advised was to "make a strong choice and commit to it." Since the Solipsist has never been a "method" actor, we always took this to mean that you should never let self-consciousness get in the way: If you're playing someone in physical agony, you better scream; if you're supposed to pick your nose onstage, you don't fake it, you do it (sorry).
In anything Bryan Cranston does, he does it 100% and with no hint of self-consciousness. When he played the father, Hal, in "Malcolm in the Middle," he was essentially playing a human cartoon character. This called on him to do things like dance around his living room in tighty-whiteys and imitate Indiana Jones while running through a big-box retail store. In "Breaking Bad," although it is a much more dramatic role, he has also found himself in bizarre situations: In the pilot, our first image of him is driving an RV while wearing nothing but a gas mask and underwear. He ultimately pulls over, composes himself enough to put on a shirt (he's lost his pants) and begins making a "suicide video" for his unborn daughter. It's a long story.
To any aspiring actors out there, we simply encourage you, if ever faced with an acting challenge that makes you feel uneasy or embarrassed, take a page from Bryan Cranston. Make the strongest choice you can think of. And commit to it.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
The Pursuit of Perfection
One of the joys of baseball is every game's potential for the spectacular. Even a contest between last-place teams--or between seemingly mismatched teams--could feature a player hitting for the cycle (a single, double, triple and home run in one game), or a no-hitter, or that rarest of baseball gems, a perfect game.
In a perfect game, a pitcher allows no base-runners: 27 men come to the plate, and 27 men return, defeated, to the dugout. In over one-hundred years of major league baseball, there have been 18 perfect games. 18! There have been about three times as many blue moons.
But what makes baseball so enchanting is not just the (vanishingly remote) possibility of seeing a perfect game, but the fact that baseball, unlike virtually any other field of human endeavor, can manifest perfection. Is there such a thing as a "perfect" film, novel, or painting? You may say, "Yes," but this is a subjective judgment. People argue about the merits of even the academy's "best" movie of the year; how likely are they to reach consensus about perfection.
Even in the realm of sports, baseball is unique in this regard. There is no such thing as a "perfect game" of football or basketball. What would that even mean? Shutouts in football are fairly common, but a defense that allows zero points has not achieved perfection. Presumably a defense could allow its opponent to gain zero yards, but that be attributable at least as much to offensive ineptitude as defensive excellence. Football does, in fact, have its own form of perfection in the oddball statistic popularly known as the "quarterback rating," an unwieldy formula whose maximum value is 158.3. We won't bewilder you with the actual formula itself; suffice to say that no one understands it. And any field of endeavor where perfection is represented by the number 158.3 can hardly be taken seriously.
Basketball? The only way you'll ever have a shutout is in the event of a forfeit. And, as with football, if a defense were somehow able to shut out the opposition in a regular game, it would be a testament to lack of offensive skill more than anything else. If the Lakers played the Solipsist's old yeshiva basketball team, they would allow no points, but they would not be lauded across the land. Some might say that Wilt Chamberlain played a perfect game when he scored 100 points. A spectacular result, to be sure, and a mark that may never be broken, but perfection? What if he had scored 102?
Olympic gymnastics and figure skating can result in "perfect" scores, but these, too, are at least partially subjective judgments. And perfection leaves something to be desired if it depends upon the scoring vagaries of the Soviet judge.
The only other sport with a legitimate claim to perfection is bowling. If you bowl a 300, you can reasonably say that you could not have done any better. But all you really did was the same thing over and over again. Strategic considerations are minimal. No, for the purest expression of perfection that you are ever likely to see, nothing beats the simple mathematical elegance of 27-up and 27-down.
In a perfect game, a pitcher allows no base-runners: 27 men come to the plate, and 27 men return, defeated, to the dugout. In over one-hundred years of major league baseball, there have been 18 perfect games. 18! There have been about three times as many blue moons.
But what makes baseball so enchanting is not just the (vanishingly remote) possibility of seeing a perfect game, but the fact that baseball, unlike virtually any other field of human endeavor, can manifest perfection. Is there such a thing as a "perfect" film, novel, or painting? You may say, "Yes," but this is a subjective judgment. People argue about the merits of even the academy's "best" movie of the year; how likely are they to reach consensus about perfection.
Even in the realm of sports, baseball is unique in this regard. There is no such thing as a "perfect game" of football or basketball. What would that even mean? Shutouts in football are fairly common, but a defense that allows zero points has not achieved perfection. Presumably a defense could allow its opponent to gain zero yards, but that be attributable at least as much to offensive ineptitude as defensive excellence. Football does, in fact, have its own form of perfection in the oddball statistic popularly known as the "quarterback rating," an unwieldy formula whose maximum value is 158.3. We won't bewilder you with the actual formula itself; suffice to say that no one understands it. And any field of endeavor where perfection is represented by the number 158.3 can hardly be taken seriously.
Basketball? The only way you'll ever have a shutout is in the event of a forfeit. And, as with football, if a defense were somehow able to shut out the opposition in a regular game, it would be a testament to lack of offensive skill more than anything else. If the Lakers played the Solipsist's old yeshiva basketball team, they would allow no points, but they would not be lauded across the land. Some might say that Wilt Chamberlain played a perfect game when he scored 100 points. A spectacular result, to be sure, and a mark that may never be broken, but perfection? What if he had scored 102?
Olympic gymnastics and figure skating can result in "perfect" scores, but these, too, are at least partially subjective judgments. And perfection leaves something to be desired if it depends upon the scoring vagaries of the Soviet judge.
The only other sport with a legitimate claim to perfection is bowling. If you bowl a 300, you can reasonably say that you could not have done any better. But all you really did was the same thing over and over again. Strategic considerations are minimal. No, for the purest expression of perfection that you are ever likely to see, nothing beats the simple mathematical elegance of 27-up and 27-down.
Monday, April 5, 2010
A Link from ACOS
We're a little drained today. Had our first Mr. Met sighting of the season, which is always a bit unsettling. The Mets won, but we still fear we're in for a looooooong summer.
At any rate, Another Cousin of Solipsist sent us this link, which we think sums up some of our feelings on education quite nicely. Enjoy!
What Teachers Make
At any rate, Another Cousin of Solipsist sent us this link, which we think sums up some of our feelings on education quite nicely. Enjoy!
What Teachers Make
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Easter
In honor of Easter, we have resurrected our old format--or something pretty close. We also thought we'd share one of our favorite jokes:
Old Man Rabinowitz owned a hardware store. As he was getting on in years (what? You think his parents named him "Old Man"?), he realized it would soon be time to pass the business on to his son. He decided to give the young man a trial run.
"All right, Boychik," he said. "I'm going to take a little vacation. I'm going down to Florida for a couple weeks. You do whatever you think is best for the store while I'm gone."
"You got it, Pop."
So Old Man Rabinowitz went off to Florida. Two weeks later, he came back. On the way home from the airport, riding in the back of a taxicab, he saw a billboard. On the billboard, twenty-feet high, was a picture of Jesus Christ on the cross. At the bottom, in huge letters, the sign read, "THEY USED RABINOWITZ NAILS!"
Well, you can imagine the old man's reaction. He nearly had a heart attack in the cab. He told the driver to take him to the hardware store immediately. He found his son and grabbed him by his collar. "What are you thinking?!?" he screamed. "You're going to get us closed down. Ha! Closed down if we're lucky! You're going to get us killed! You can't say 'They used Rabinowitz nails'! Are you some kind of idiot?!?"
"I'm sorry, Pop. I just figured, y'know, with Easter and all, that it would be a good promotion."
Old Man Rabinowitz looked heavenward. "'A good promotion,' he says. My son is a moron!" He took a moment. "OK, look. I don't know what to say. You're obviously not ready to take over for me."
"Pop, please! Give me another chance!"
Old Man Rabinowitz thought. "Ach! I'm so upset right now. . . . All right, look. One more chance. I'm going to go visit your Uncle Shmuel in Chicago for a couple of weeks. When I come back, we'll talk. And what's the first thing you're going to do?"
"I know, Pop, I know. The sign is coming down."
So Old Man Rabinowitz went to Chicago. Two weeks later, he came back. In the backseat of the cab, he nervously looked out the window. As the billboard rose into view, he gasped. He saw a cross with a crumpled body at the foot of it. In big letters at the bottom, he read:
THEY DIDN'T USE RABINOWITZ NAILS!
Old Man Rabinowitz owned a hardware store. As he was getting on in years (what? You think his parents named him "Old Man"?), he realized it would soon be time to pass the business on to his son. He decided to give the young man a trial run.
"All right, Boychik," he said. "I'm going to take a little vacation. I'm going down to Florida for a couple weeks. You do whatever you think is best for the store while I'm gone."
"You got it, Pop."
So Old Man Rabinowitz went off to Florida. Two weeks later, he came back. On the way home from the airport, riding in the back of a taxicab, he saw a billboard. On the billboard, twenty-feet high, was a picture of Jesus Christ on the cross. At the bottom, in huge letters, the sign read, "THEY USED RABINOWITZ NAILS!"
Well, you can imagine the old man's reaction. He nearly had a heart attack in the cab. He told the driver to take him to the hardware store immediately. He found his son and grabbed him by his collar. "What are you thinking?!?" he screamed. "You're going to get us closed down. Ha! Closed down if we're lucky! You're going to get us killed! You can't say 'They used Rabinowitz nails'! Are you some kind of idiot?!?"
"I'm sorry, Pop. I just figured, y'know, with Easter and all, that it would be a good promotion."
Old Man Rabinowitz looked heavenward. "'A good promotion,' he says. My son is a moron!" He took a moment. "OK, look. I don't know what to say. You're obviously not ready to take over for me."
"Pop, please! Give me another chance!"
Old Man Rabinowitz thought. "Ach! I'm so upset right now. . . . All right, look. One more chance. I'm going to go visit your Uncle Shmuel in Chicago for a couple of weeks. When I come back, we'll talk. And what's the first thing you're going to do?"
"I know, Pop, I know. The sign is coming down."
So Old Man Rabinowitz went to Chicago. Two weeks later, he came back. In the backseat of the cab, he nervously looked out the window. As the billboard rose into view, he gasped. He saw a cross with a crumpled body at the foot of it. In big letters at the bottom, he read:
THEY DIDN'T USE RABINOWITZ NAILS!
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