Overheard on the NYC subway

Two British girls in a whole class of high-school students taking the 1 train uptown to 59th St.:

Did you know we're going to Central Park?

What's Central Park?

It's just a park!

Hamburger menu

From a chat with a customer service rep at my bank, in response to my question about how to link accounts:

Kathy: Access the "hamburger" menu on the top right corner.

John: Hamburger?!

John: I'm a vegetarian

Kathy: The selection right beside the gear. Three lines.

Kathy: It is a veggie burger.

John: OK

Good question, overheard at brunch

Why is it considered OK to emulate someone else's gender but not OK to emulate someone else's race or ethnicity?

Brunch conversation

Me: Do you want some of my watermelon?

My girlfriend: You're only asking me that because I'm black.

(At the highly recommended Americana Vineyards in Interlaken, New York, near Ithaca.)

Cafe conversation

From the table next to me at The Grey Dog in Manhattan:

— Is she young-ish?

— No, she's not that young. She's 24.

— But she's young-ish.

Great moments in verbosity

"Would all jurors with last names beginning with the letters A through Z please turn in your forms?"

Overheard at brunch

Roger Ebert has written that only in movies does someone go to a bar and just order a "beer" without being more specific. He calls it the movies' "Generic Drinker Syndrome." Well, I overheard this today at brunch in Yaffa Cafe:

Customer: "I need something to drink. Alcohol."

Waiter: "Mimosa? Beer?"

Customer: "Anything."

First date

"So, what's your sign?"

"Pisces." (Thinking: And the fact that you asked that question is my sign that we won't be having a second date . . .)


UPDATE: I posted this to Facebook too, and one friend responded:

Were you on a date in the 70s? (the decade, that is)

Another friend said:

Ask her what color your aura is, and how old you will live to according to the little creases on your palm. If she starts telepathically communicating with an invisible friend *AHEM,* "spirit guide," she's a keeper!

Seeing those two comments together made me feel like a character in one of the LA scenes in Annie Hall.

The secret to a (subjectively) long life

Be constantly bored. The time (and thus, your life) will seem to pass more slowly.

IN THE COMMENTS: My mom suggests an even better way: "chronic excruciating pain."

Overheard in a cafe in NYC

"Men are very single-minded. They only see what's right in front of them. Women are much more observant — they can see the world from different perspectives."

Isn't this rather paradoxical considering it was said by a man?

New Christmas

I just got back to Albany after a week-long vacation in Madison (part of why the blogging has been light in the past week). The family always spends Christmas together, but this time we had two new (to me) family members, my stepdad and stepsister. We had a lot of fun playing a game that can't be bought in a store, which we called "Word Storm." (I'll explain it in a later post so you can play it too.) We mixed some of our old Christmas traditions with some new traditions. We cooked dinner and breakfast together.

We watched a home video of our old family, shot with a rented camcorder in early 1987, when I was 5 years old. Though most of the video is unavoidably boring, I always watch it eagerly anticipating the occasional flashes of humor or insight. At one point, my mom asks me if I have a message for the grown-up John watching this in the future. My answer: "Travel all over the world." In another scene, she asks what I think of our family, and I respond, "I think we have a very nice family, and we have lots and lots of fun -- with the whole world being white." Huh? No, I wasn't raised by white supremacists; I was holding a white paper napkin up to the camera lens and joking about my state-of-the-art special effects.

I gave that answer with such gleeful enthusiasm that it's hard to imagine I was just saying what I thought I was supposed to say. Having Christmas in 2009 with a family I wouldn't have recognized even last year, I thought back to the young John -- how little he knew but also how important some of the things he knew were. I felt saddened to think: here we are, a very nice new family that could have been having lots of fun together for the past couple decades. I immediately corrected myself: no, that's impossible, things could only have happened exactly as they did. Whether they should have happened another way is irrelevant now. You can only go forward into the future. But you can still remember the things you knew when you were 5 years old.

"No one in our family can ever say anything obvious."

A quote by "John Althouse Cohen, age 8, c. 1989."


UPDATE: A commenter responds:

The obvious thing is usually the most important thing.

Well, I thought that went without saying.

The subtle art of flirting

We're sitting in a small cafe. A man is loudly making conversation with his waitress, asking her about a recent vacation she went on with a few friends:

Customer: Did you go to the beach?

Waitress: Yeah.

Customer: Did you go to the nude beach? HA HA HA HA!

Waitress: No.

I look at Danielle's notepad to see if she has any silent reaction. She writes in her elegant hand -- "That guy is..." -- then in big capital that take up the rest of the page -- "SUCH A DOUCHE!!!!"

"Nothing ... but it has something to do with white powder."

So that's what the kids are doing these days.

"Ask me why you deserve Hell"

An intense debate over Christian ethics on an American campus.

Reported and participated in by my girlfriend.

(Continued here.)

Kitchen quip

While I'm chopping garlic in the kitchen, my girlfriend, Danielle Pouliot, says:

I should make an all-vegetable children's book and call it Shallot's Web.

Just before I post this, I search and find out there's already a website: Shallots Web.

She says:

Dammit!

But they didn't use an apostrophe!

Overheard in Albany, NY: sotto voce by the espresso machine

Cafe worker 1: Did he say if he wants room for cream in his Americano?

Cafe worker 2: I'd leave a little room — he looks like he takes cream.

Sitting around the house on Christmas talking about a video game

"You have to kill all these penguins, but the goal of the game is just to save a penguin."

"I guess it's a special celebrity penguin."

IM on fatalism and time, ideas and plain language

An IM conversation (as always, this is quoted with permission from the other person):

what do you think of this sentence as an example of something in philosophy

gah

can't send it

["] Let Φ (a physical possibility structure) be a set of distinct but intersecting paths ji–jn, each of which is a set of functions, L’s, on ordered pairs <t, w> (<time, world situation>), such that for any Ln, Lm in some ji, Ln R Lm, where R is a primitive accessibility relation corresponding to physical possibility understood in terms of diachronic physical compatibility. ["]

there

obviously it's pretty cryptic because of all the symbols.

yeah but do you suspect intentional screwy cryticness

yes.

or do you think it's expressed cryptically for a good reason

that's possible.

there's legitimate philosophy that uses symbols.

yeah and i think you'd need to see the whole thing... did he work up to that

but if it's any philosophy area other than logic,
that makes me wonder:

why exactly was it so important for you to express it like that...

when you must know that drastically
narrows your potential audience?

“Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality”

and you can apply the same observation to
garden-variety philosophical prose that's
less layperson-friendly than it could be.

it's an academic thesis written by David Foster Wallace when he was a student

["] Wallace became troubled by a paper called “Fatalism,” first published in 1962 by a philosopher named Richard Taylor. The fatalist contends, quite radically, that human actions and decisions have no influence on the future. ["]

well that explains it: he's trying to impress profs.

yeah

"Your behavior today no more shapes events tomorrow than it shapes events yesterday. Instead, in a seemingly backward way, the fatalist says it is how things are in the future that uniquely constrains what happens right now. What might seem like an open possibility subject to human choice — say, whether you fire your handgun — is already either impossible or absolutely necessary. You are merely going with some cosmic flow."

that they have no influence on the future?!

hard to see how that could be.

normally a fatalist thinks "human actions
and decisions" are entirely influenced by factors
that are determined by the past.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/magazine/14wwln-Wallace-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine

so if he committed suicide, his whole life was shaped by that

Well that's a good example...

since the paragraph you just
quoted is easily comprehensible,

why not just say it that way
instead of with the symbols?

the article-writer is making it comprehensible for us

same point.

maybe because when you say it plainly it sounds patently absurd

same thing whether it's a NYT writer

or the original thinker who's clarifying the point.

I've sometimes thought this in law... require people to write very clearly because it's a test of whether they are right

well, it sounds like he's basically
saying time is an illusion --
everything exists at once.

(or, not even "at once" since time is an illusion)

which is what my blog post was about:

http://jaltcoh.blogspot.com/2008/11/reality-of-time-and-doodle-of-me.html

if they can't or won't say it clearly,
suspect error or fraud

You'd be calling into question a lot of
academic scholarship with that principle.

I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether that would be a bad thing or a good thing.


IN THE COMMENTS: My dad turns up a trenchant on-point quote from an essay by John Kenneth Galbraith called "Writing, Typing, and Economics." It's about economics but is easily generalizable to philosophy and other esoteric fields. Here's a more extended passage:

Any specialist who ventures to write on money with a view to making himself intelligible works under a grave moral hazard. He will be accused of oversimplification. The charge will be made by his fellow professionals, however obtuse or incompetent. They will have a sympathetic hearing from the layman. That is because no layman really expects to understand about money, inflation, or the International Monetary Fund. If he does, he suspects that he is being fooled. One can have respect only for someone who is decently confusing.

In the case of economics there are no important propositions that cannot be stated in plain language. Qualifications and refinements are numerous and of great technical complexity. These are important for separating the good students from the dolts. But in economics the refinements rarely, if ever, modify the essential and practical point. The writer who seeks to be intelligible needs to be right; he must be challenged if his argument leads to an erroneous conclusion and especially if it leads to the wrong action. But he can safely dismiss the charge that he has made the subject too easy. The truth is not difficult.

Complexity and obscurity have professional value—they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.

Additionally, and especially in the social sciences, much unclear writing is based on unclear or incomplete thought. It is possible with safety to be technically obscure about something you haven't thought out. It is impossible to be wholly clear on something you do not understand. Clarity thus exposes flaws in the thought. The person who undertakes to make difficult matters clear is infringing on the sovereign right of numerous economists, sociologists, and political scientists to make bad writing the disguise for sloppy, imprecise, or incomplete thought. One can understand the resulting anger.

I feel very strongly about all this.

UPDATE: Another variation on the theme.

Overheard conversations in a diner and cafe

1. Dad and his daughter (about 6 years old):

Daughter: What's my maiden name?

Dad: You don't have a maiden name -- you're not married. No, your maiden name is the name you have now. And don't ever change it! Don't take a guy's name. Don't let him trick you into it.

2. Two female college students talking to each other, interrupted by an old man sitting at the other end of the counter:

Student (to other student): He told me I need to "invest" my money.

Man (calling out): Invest it in what?

Student: I have no idea!

Man: The best way to invest your money is put it in a coffee can and leave it there. I have a friend who had $7,000 and put it in a coffee container and left it there for 2 years -- best investment he ever made.