Tomato-basil is the new vanilla, part 1

Speaking of Sheen, if you want to see rage out of proportion, refer to something bland or boring as “vanilla” in the presence of my coworker Scott Berinato. Scott in years past worked at the ice cream stand at a local dairy where, allegedly, vanilla was the most expensive flavor to manufacture. And in fact vanilla itself turns out to be quite fascinating. It’s actually harvested from a hermaphroditic orchid that can only be naturally pollinated by a bee that only grows in Mexico! I take back three-quarters of the mean things I’ve ever said about Wikipedia.

Nevertheless, vanilla has indeed come to mean bland or boring. And in that light it seems to be the direction our culture is headed in certain respects. You see this pervasive creeping-towards-vanilla effect in all kinds of places. One pernicious area is in pop music, where albums by Britney Spears and J-Lo (shouldn’t that be pronounced Jello?) for example demonstrate a curious production technique that filters and mutes and fuzzes out the performer’s voice, such that for all you know I could be the person singing. Could (pre-meltdown) Britney sing? I assume so but I have never heard her do so. The brilliance of this technique, of course, is that the producers can just find any attractive person and make him or her a star without requiring any particular musical ability.

A second avatar of Milla Vanilla is white bread. I originally (without research) attributed white bread to some evil food scientist in the 50s. In fact, according to at least one source, long ago white bread meant good bread because it was harder to put in cheap filler. Nevertheless, the white bread I grew up eating – because I insisted on it, I’m sure – is so utterly devoid of taste and nutrition that it’s a wonder they call it food. It’s more of an industrial product.

Vanilla food, vanilla music. Happily, there are other signs of hope in the cultural landscape – I hope. I’ll get to them (and explain the title) in a later post.

Quorum sensing

My friend and former colleague Michael Fitzgerald has a new(ish) column with the NY Times. Interesting piece here about germs and how they communicate. Which in fact they may.

Evolutionary psychology, metaphor and so forth

Browsing for information about the difference between intuition and logical problem-solving, I wandered onto this interesting 2002 article about evolutionary psychology, which is described as a mashup of sorts. The application of physiology to sociology and psychology. Though that ‘s an oversimplification. Read the article for a better explanation.

Incidentally I found the collection of AdSense links associated with this article quite funny:

Anyway. I’m from an academic family. In fact I’m the only person in my immediate family without a PhD. (I’m so proud!) Academic research is at some level the reason behind “reassembler”. It seemed to me at one point that in order to get a PhD, one had to research and write a dissertation on an impossibly obscure topic – a tiny slice out at the fringes of the chosen discipline. “A morphonemic analysis of passive verbs ending in -it in Proto-Finno-Ugric” or some such thing. I found cross-disciplinary stuff more interesting and initially my honors thesis was going to be about the neurological basis of linguistics. Unfortunately I lacked, shall we say, the intellectual focus to execute such a topic. (I settled for Metaphor as a managable subject. Hat tip to My Brother the Real Linguist for pointing me to Metaphors We Live By. ) Anyway it’s interesting to take these deeply researched individual disciplines and start mixing them together.

Hope to find more about the original question (intuition versus logic). Particularly neural maps. Suggestions, anyone?

There and back again

Music is a huge part of the solitary road trip. Playlist to and from Parsipanny: A single CD of stuff I’ve bought on iTunes. Over and over again. (Maybe I’m searching for some sort of trance state through repetition.)

• Fell in Love with a Girl – White Stripes
• Smoothie Song – Nickel Creek
• Night Train – Bruce Cockburn
• Looking at the World – Mike Doughty
• Groovy Train – The Farm
• Big Electric Cat – Adrian Belew
• Stoppin the Love – KT Tunstall
• Cry on Demand – Gomez

Aside from putting Jack White first, there’s no reason for the order, but it works for me. If I’d thought about it I probably would have thrown Sabotage (Beastie Boys) in there – the most played tune on my iPod.

In previous years I’ve traveled with The Bends (Radiohead) and White Ladder (David Gray).

USATE rounds 5 and 6, and the little things

The US Amateur Team East is now in the books.

First of all, if you’re looking for information on who won, I have no idea. [Update: The winning team was Beavis & Buttvinik. Michael Goeller recaps the results from the NJCA site. Larry Christiansen's team finished 2nd. Defending champs Riordan & co. finished 5th. ] One of the ironies of the tournament is that it’s populated with so many strong players. If I heard correctly, 30+ IMs played this year, in addition to a dozen or so GMs. However, it’s difficult to pay attention to their games because you are absorbed in your own. Aside from noting the usual contingent of strong teams from UT Dallas hovering near the top, I’m not sure which high seeds avoided upsets.

Round 5 saw Simple Minds paired up again for the first time since round 1. My game:


Slater – Bob Seltzer (2275)

1.e4 c5 2.Nc3 e6 3.Nf3 a6 4.d4 cxd4 5.Nxd4 b5 6.a3 Bb7 7.Bd3 Nc6 8.Nxc6 Bxc6 9.0-0 Qc7 10.Qe2 Be7 11.f4 d6 12.Bd2 Nf6 13.Rae1 Nd7 14.b4 Bf6 15.e5 dxe5 16.Ne4 Bh4 17.fxe5 Nxe5 18.g3 Nxd3 19.cxd3 Be7

 20.Rxf7 Kxf7 21.Ng5+ Ke8 22.Nxe6 Qd7 23.Qh5+ g6 24.Qe5 Rg8 25.Nc7+ Kd8 26.Nxa8 Qd6 27.Bf4 Qxe5 28.Bxe5 Bxa8 0-1

Alas, I faltered at the end. My opponent was very kind and made a number of laudatory comments about this rook sacrifice. (He was less kind about 14.b4.) As best we could determine without Fritz, 25.Bg5 against best play would bring about a better (though possibly drawn) endgame for white.

Little thing one: I have mentioned the bathrooms a couple of times. It isn’t just me being a germ freak. During this round I took the long walk to a facility elsewhere in the hotel. I passed GM John Federowicz on the way out and he said “Good thing not many people know about this bathroom. Those other ones, it’s like a third-world country in there.” My conversation with the grandmaster.

Little thing two: The generosity of stronger players. My hat’s off to Larry Christiansen and Bob Seltzer. Larry in particular beat me without any effort, yet described certain aspects of the game as “unclear” instead of simply stating the obvious truth, which was that my play was absurdly bad. It doesn’t cost a GM anything to be gracious in this manner and it gives some small measure of hope to the downtrodden class players.

Round Six. I found a shot early in a modified Dutch-type setup. Winning a pawn, I offered my opponent a draw so I could hit the road. Still don’t know my team’s result in that round. But at some level, the scores and even the games don’t matter. What makes USATE the best tournament is the social aspect. Tim and Matt and Jim proved (as usual) great teammates. And thanks to 87 and 84 I made it back in time to read my daughter a bedtime story.

All’s truly well that ends well.

USATE round 4, and my peeps

Round four, the evening round on the second day of USATE, is when it starts to get really interesting. Before play starts, the 1100+ players assemble in the cavernous ballroom. Steve Doyle reads the teams selected as finalists in the Best Team Name competition; winners are selected by applause. This year’s winner was the typically heh-heh kinda funny “What Happens in Parsippany Stays in Parsippany”. I thought the semi-naughty chess reference “Britney Offers No Draws” was much more clever but so it goes.

After that, the skits. This year’s winner was the faux-Kazakh team, complete with little national flags at each board and matching t-shirts that say something like “Glorious Kazakh team searching for pussycat chess bitch Jennifer Shahade” (don’t blame me, I’m just reporting here) and a performance of the Kazakh national anthem as lovingly rendered by Borat. The stuff about potassium exports etc, the whole nine yards.

The games are practically an anti-climax. Paired down again (surprisingly), Simple Minds manages a 3-1 win over “Rookfellahs”. My promising Dutch position dissolved into a draw; by that time I think my opponent’s position was probably better. Tim played a crushing and beautiful bishop sacrifice to win his game. Matt swindled a draw with a really clever sacrifice in a busted position. [Update: Matt's posted the critical position on his blog. Nice shot, Matt. Still waiting for pictures ... !] Jim capped it off with a win on fourth board.

But back to the sights and sounds. To crib from Principal Rooney’s secretary in Ferris Bueller, the geeks, the pinheads, dweebies, nerds, gearheads, loud-eaters, loud-talkers, close-talkers, the unwashed, they’re all here, mixed right in with the lawyers and options traders and consultants and so on. In between rounds they sprawl on the floor, congregating around big chessboards in the hallways, playing blitz chess, reviewing games, berating or congratulating themselves and their teammates and opponents. Burying themselves in giant tomes of chess opening analysis. Rudely bringing soup and sandwiches to the board during games, such that the overwhelming ambience of our third round game was provided by the nearby Russian guy’s sausage and peppers sub. Tomorrow, when everyone has to check out of their rooms before the last round begins, the hallways will become nearly impassable, the chatter nearly deafening, and the smell in the bathrooms unspeakable. And yes, these are my people and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Intermezzo: The media according to Sheen

Once I finish the chess tournament I’ll have some time to process and blog about (the nonconfidential parts of) the training course I attended this week. But the highlight was clearly a presentation by Rob Curley, Internet Punk. Rob is new media journalism on steroids, amphetamines and Red Bull. (Not literally, I hope.)

Possibly under the influence of a pear martini at Henrietta’s Table, I realized that Rob’s work is like Jimmy Neutron’s knuckleheaded sidekicks Carl and Sheen. Sheen is great fun because of his manic embrace of trivial matters. If the world is about to end, Sheen will fret mostly over missing a particular rerun of Ultra Lord and cough up some gem like “Why Oh Why couldn’t world end on a THURSDAY!”. Curley has a wonderful knack for finding great drama in places we’re conditioned to overlook or dismiss. Case in point: Full bore, nonstop , World Series-level coverage of little league games for a local paper in Kansas. If you’re not part of the league, your knee-jerk reaction is to say “ridiculous!” But if you’re in the league, it makes perfect sense.

Sheen would be proud.

And I should watch less television.

USATE round 3 and chess food

USATE uses a reasonably byzantine system for figuring out who plays whom in a given round. It’s called Accelerated Pairings. Organizers use this system when there are too many players in an event and the likelihood exists that multiple teams will achieve a perfect score. (Imagine if the 64-team NCAA basketball tournament only had four rounds. You’d still have four undefeated teams remaining at the end and no clear winner.) The system is incredibly hard to explain but the basic concept is that you take strong teams who’ve lost a round and pair them against weak teams who still have a perfect score. Most of the time that strong team is going to win and help you reduce the number of perfect scores.

Point being, our team played stronger opponents in rounds one and two than we would have using a normal pairing system. In round three, they stop using accelerated pairings. The result for us was a significantly lower rated opponent. Team name: Really, really, really. (Really.) Young guys, which is often trouble. I managed to win in under 30 moves though, playing the white side of an offbeat Caro Kann line.

One of the major keys to success in a long chess tournament is sleep. Winning (or losing) a short game provides a valuable opportunity for us oldtimers to take a nap. Another key: eating well. No fast food. Vegetables, chicken, fruit, pasta in moderation. A nervous stomach full of McDonald’s fatty junk is a recipe for disaster. Parsippany has some options in this regard. Sadly, the little hole-in-the-wall Italian joint I usually visit is now under new management and no longer up to snuff. Today I just grabbed lunch at the cavernous Minado sushi buffet. Minado always amuses me because the entire staff is clearly Latin and their knife skills are sorely lacking. They should spend an hour before every shift learning to make sushi in the right shapes and sizes. Maybe they spend their training time focusing on cleanliness and not cutting off their fingers, so for that I must be grateful.