Month: October 2018

A little economic analysis

I’ve been seeing a repeated commercial through the World Series about relief donations for hurricane relief from a major mobile carrier. They’ll give $10K per home run in the series, up from $5K per home run in the post-season generally. They’ll also give $2 per tweet with a particular hash tag, but I’ve never seen it trending¹, so we can probably assume that’s negligible.

It would be unusual to see as many as four home runs per game in the series, but even if it hit that, and even with a seven game series, you’d only be looking at 28 home runs. So, they are looking at a donation that is probably at an absolute stretch no more than $300K.

One thirty second spot of advertising for the World Series in 2014 cost $520K. Each night, there’s at least one thirty second spot and usually three or more 15 second spots, as well as mention by the announcers. There’s probably some bulk economics at work for this as a large ad buy, but I think it’s reasonable to think that they are dropping $1M per game.

If the series goes all seven games, that means they’ll have at a minimum spent more than 20 times as much to tell us how charitable they are than they are actually spending on charity. And that’s with me being very generous to the offense of the teams.

I’ve looked and this carrier has, like other carriers, provided free service to those affected by hurricanes in the past, as well as providing some support services in those areas to help people get chargers and phone use as well.

I’m glad this company provides those services. But I’d sure love to see them spend a lot more on the charity and a lot less making us think about their charity.

¹”But Brett, I thought you were off Twitter!” And I am, but I still maintain the Dev Game Club twitter and check it every so often even when watching the game. (back)

Softening the landing

Caveat lector: this post discusses the end of the book Bel Canto, so if you’d rather not know, you’ve been warned.

Today I finished reading Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, a book I had been reminded of because recently there’s been a film adaptation¹ and I had wanted to read it when it was originally out but I did not have the same amount of time to read then that I do now. I was happy for the reminder, through it on my holds at my local library, and picked it up a couple of weeks ago.

Reader, it is terrific. It’s everything I could want in a literary novel, cleanly written yet capable of deep insight, drawing you into these characters’ lives, allowing you glimpses of their soul. You kind of get lost in it. I even copied out a couple of brief passages to the notebook I carry around with me. It spoke to me, often. I may even give opera another try.

If you’re not familiar with the novel, it’s fiction based on real-life events. In late 1996, hundreds of people at a party in the Japanese Embassy in Lima were taken hostage by a little over a dozen revolutionaries². They were in a heavily fortified building and the standoff lasted for 126 days; I can remember it happening. As far as I know, the only hostage who died was killed when the military stormed the building. All of the revolutionaries were killed, and some of them were later determined to have been killed “extrajudiciously,” which is to say, they were murdered after having been subdued or having surrendered.

So, I knew where this book was headed. Talking it over with my friend who had also recently read it, I said that the process of reading it was like watching an enormous tree that has been cut through, to fell it, and much of the book felt like watching a moment where the tree was teetering before it fell. Except that here, that moment lasts the hours it takes you to read the book. And, more accurately, I felt that for a few hundred pages, I was that teetering tree.

As I neared the inevitable, I started to wonder how the ending would be handled. I thought a little bit about how I might end the book; I considered that I might end it just as the assault began, just cut it off entirely short, let the reader envision the violence. I thought maybe the book would end in the violence itself, with the shock of the survivors as they were rescued and witnessed the deaths of these people they had spent months with, who they had come to know and who had revealed surprises about themselves. Both would have been kind of staggering gut-punches.

Both of those endings and others like them seem to me to be maybe the very male way to end the book. To attempt to gain for the book a little more critical heft, leaving the reader in that state of being just absolutely drained emotionally by what they’ve read. I can even imagine the sorts of words the reviews would use: daring, unsparing.

Patchett took a different approach. She attached a very brief epilogue, the specifics of which I won’t go into but which look just a little bit forward. It’s hopeful, and it’s tender.

It’s also very generous to the reader. Having been through what we’ve just been through, in those final pages of the novel, just how gut-wrenching it has been, in part because of how it’s been building to its inevitable conclusion, Patchett gives us a moment of comparable grace. It feels like a more feminine approach, I think — it cares more for the reader, it gives you a glimpse of a future, a reason to go on. It doesn’t throw you to the wolves, it doesn’t leave you soaking in the pain.

I felt really well cared for in those last few pages, and I think the novel is better for them. I felt like the author was there with me, knowing the ache I had in the pit of my stomach, that sadness I was carrying with me as I was preparing to set the book down. I felt her holding me for just a few pages, helping me return to the world. Helping temper that sadness. Helping me go on. Reminding me that you can. We do.

¹Reading it, it seemed like a film adaptation would be a tough job, one that would need a truly visionary director to find the heart of and communicate, like a Schnabel or a Todd Haynes or others along those lines. Although I understand why they chose the director they did, because of superficial similarities between this and a show that director executive produced, Mozart in the Jungle. Looking at his film credits, I think it’s safe to suspect that this was a cynical, near-Oscar-season kind of attempt at a prestige grab and I am going to pass. Overall it seems critics have not been tremendously kind. (back)

²Generally speaking, they are referred to as terrorists in what few articles I’ve read. I’m not really comfortable with that term, based on the events. Absolutely they took hostages, and did exchange gunfire with the military, but were not notably violent towards their hostages. I’m not sympathetic to their violent acts by any means, but terrorism is the inspiration of fear as the tactic, and this was more like a negotiating tactic. (back)

An unexpected trip

We hadn’t been dating very long, though we had started sleeping in the same bed, from time to time.

Her dog was just a puppy, still, but a big breed, more than 60 pounds already. Energetic and exuberant and proud of some of the privileges he had. Including sleeping on the bed, which there wasn’t as much space for when I was over. More reason to claim it as early as possible.

We were getting ready to go to bed at her place. She was adjusting the sheets or something, and the puppy decided that her presence in the bedroom meant it was his time to get up on the bed.

He jumped, leading with his skull. Her forehead was in the way. Skull met brow and it opened up three quarters of an inch along the ridge of her eyebrow. I wasn’t in the room, but I heard her yell, and by the time I got there it was already running down her face and she was staunching it as best she could.

Maybe not a million-to-one shot, but somewhat long odds.

We got in touch with her daughter, who in her sociology work had seen this sort of thing from time to time. She thought that it would need to get looked at.

In the end, we agreed. Ice hadn’t slowed it much, it was clear it might need stitches or glue. We went to the hospital. At ten o’clock at night. An apparent couple, the woman with a facial wound and the man unharmed.

At every stage they tried to separate us, and eventually I realized why. When we first came in and filled out the paperwork, they asked her to join them in another room and she said, no, he can stay with me. When we were in an examination room, the nurses would ask if maybe she’d rather just be alone with the doctors. The doctor did, too. And the nurses did again. I say it like it was a handful of times, but in retrospect each step probably had a couple of different ways of trying to separate us. So that the truth could be known.

I don’t think it was the first time they tried to separate us that they thought I had hit her. It may not have even been the second time. Certainly by the third time it had dawned on me the assumptions they had made. They had seen it all before. I definitely hadn’t.

She ended up with a bunch of stitches.

I ended up a bit queasy at having been thought to be the cause.

Here’s what I didn’t do. I didn’t go on the offensive, once I realized what they were insinuating by trying to separate us. I didn’t let any anger burst out of me. I didn’t accuse anyone of anything. I didn’t shout, or get red in the face, or tighten my lips, or sweat, or demand anything of anyone, or ask barbed questions like whether the doctor ever hit his wife.

I just realized what they so often dealt with. I appreciated what they were trying to do. Sure, I felt some shame, that they thought this of me. But the demographics were not in my favor — white guy, late 30s to early 40s — I got it, once I got it. She understood it a lot sooner than I did, which is why she kept explaining that it had been the dog that had done it.

It hadn’t stopped them asking.

It was subtle enough that it took me awhile to even realize what they were trying to do, to separate us so that she could tell them I had hit her. Even if I hadn’t.

But that was what they saw. And a lot of indignant male partners, husbands or what-have-you, who didn’t want to be separated. Who didn’t want her telling her side of the tale.

She’d say later that I went above and beyond the call, that night, early in a relationship. I didn’t feel that way, even though I had realized what was going on, and had mentioned it to her even as we waited for a doctor to come in and put in the dozen or so stitches. I felt it was just what you did — you’re with someone, they get hurt, you go with them.

I guess she meant the assumption that I had been the cause. It was a reasonable assumption, though, however wrong it had been in that case.

When I see a man railing against how awful and unfair it is that they be questioned? I think: that’s a guilty man. Because the rest of us, if we’ve been paying attention? We know the score. We know why the questions get asked. We might feel a sense of shame that someone might think that of us, but we also know: they don’t know us. They know the statistics, and they know their personal experience. Their personal experience is: it’s never a fall, or a door walked into, or good-effin’-christ a dog? Are you kidding me? It’s the man who brought them in.

The systems which question aren’t wrong. They are born from experience. It’s the rage, the “how dare you,” that is wrong. That’s the guilt talking.

In the end, the scar was nothing. It faded within a year or so.

The understanding, on both of our parts, that stayed. She knew it already. It was my turn to learn.