Live-blogging the Superbowl

6:00

With the first quarter almost over, the Saints' defense is looking as tired as the beer commercials , giving major yardage to the league's worst rush.

The best thing about the game so far are, without doubt, the Doritos commercials.

6:40

No, Dr. Love, that commercial did not work. The TruTV one immediately after was much better, though.

As for the game, just when the Saints were starting to look like they'd make a game of it…

7:00

My favorite commercial from last year was the avatars commercial by Coke, but so far the best they've put forward is the Simpsons commercial.

The recession must be worse than I thought: Teleflora and another company recycled their ideas from last year's commercials.

(In case you're wondering whether I have anything positive to say, Queen Latifah's rendition of America the Beautiful was quite good.)

7:15

The first four minutes of the second half were exponentially better than the first half in its entirety. The commercials were better, too. I might enjoy this after all.

I'd insert a joke about playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony instead of The Who at halftime, but it isn't decent to make fun of the elderly.

7:45

Coke comes through with the best commercial so far. The Africa one, with the classical music (which is what made it the best, of course).

8:20

Best. Superbowl. Interception. Ever.

8:21

Best. Superbowl. Commercial. Ever.

Doritos, of course. Yeah, it's the thrill of the moment. The Coke one better (and the Google commercial was sweet as well; maybe later I'll like it best). But the guy in the Doritos armor was still great.

I'll nominate the Audi Green Police for worst one, hands down.

End of Game

For a lot of people in this area, the Saints were far and away the favorite, but for many either one would have worked, since Peyton Manning (the entire Manning family, in fact) is from this area. It was a similar dilemma a couple of weeks ago with Favre (an alum of my school) being the quarterback of the Saints.

Either way, it was a great game. When I was young, the announcers always made a big deal about a statistic that the first team to score was almost always the first to win. I didn't hear that today; perhaps the announcers made the comment when I stepped out of the room. I'm really, really glad to see that statistic defied yet again. But the Saints stayed in it, and deserved the win.

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PS I hope I never see another pantsless commercial again, let alone so many within the space of a few minutes. What an utter lack of imagination the advertising agencies displayed this year.

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Music that holds up well over the years

The other day in the car, I changed the radio station away from something my son was listening to. I have a rule that we only listen to "music" that (a) actually carries a melody, and (b) doesn't contain objectionable content. The first is to encourage my children to listen for beauty, rather than passion; the second is, well, obvious.

You don't understand, my son said, this is a new generation, and we speak with a new voice.

What, you think my generation's "voice" was anything worth writing home about? I asked. I hated 80s music even in the 80s.

(I don't know who deserves more pity: me for having a normal teenaged son, or my son for having a father who was never, by any metric, normal. For example, my folks did have cable, so I had MTV and knew what I was missing out on. The only music I ever really saw on MTV that moved me to buy an album was a song that moved me to borrow a friend's copy of The Delicate Sound of Thunder. I then bought A Momentary Lapse of Reason and went on from there to become rather a big fan of the group in question. I won't say who it is—Google will turn it up if you don't know—but I can't usually listen to that music now, either.)

As if on purpose, First Thoughts linked today to an article by Elizabeth Scalia on NPR's website that includes the following passage,

Nearly 30 years ago, we were told that Madonna was a "genius," particularly at marketing and reinventing herself, but time has not borne that out. Her music has held up well, but Madonna herself has been a dead-bore for decades…

Scalia writes about this at her website as well, and invited comment. It's likely no surprise that my comment starts with,

I can’t believe I’m the only person to read that article and think that Madonna’s music hasn’t held up well at all over the years… even retro 80s channels/stations don’t play Madonna’s hits with any higher frequency than others’ hits.

I'll admit I liked some Madonna songs in the mid to late 90s ("Frozen" comes to mind) but even then I was never moved to buy one of her albums, and I'm much less moved to do so when I hear one of those songs now than then. I don't even have to fall back on criterion (b) above; I just plain don't find her music all that impressive.

Ten years ago, Britney Spears was supposed to be the new Madonna, but that didn't end up well, and people aren't listening to her music these days either. I reckon they will in about ten to twenty years, for the same reason that radio stations play 80s music now, played 70s music ten years ago, and played 60s music when I was in high school: nostalgia is a powerful intoxicant, making us fancy something from our youth to be far better than it really was.

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The FujiFilm FinePix 2600Z

I want to write a brief review of my digital camera. Good luck finding this camera in any store; they don't make it any more, let alone sell it. Amazon currently offers three used models for sale at $50, but as with most things in technology, the manufacturer moved on.

So the camera is a FujiFilm FinePix 2600. It offers 3x optical zoom with a 2MegaPixel image at highest resolution. It comes with a slot for a SmartMedia card—not an SD card: it's that old. It takes videos up to 20 seconds long, albeit without sound.

I first bought a 2600 in 2001, when they cost about $300. A year or two later, I dropped it on the floor of the kitchen where I lived, thereby breaking it. I wanted to buy another one, but already they were no longer available, since FujiFilm had moved on to the SD cards, so I bought a refurbished one on EBay (I think). I took better care of it, and it still works great.
By today's standards, 2MP and 3x optical zoom might seem inadequate—a cheap mobile phone will do better these days—but they aren't. They're perfect for most photos, even up to 8x10. I have contributed several photos to Wikipedia, and they all look great.

For me, that's the single biggest quality of this camera: the images look great. Members of my immediate and extended family have more recent or fancier camers, but they don't take very good photos in my opinion. I can't say what it is—I hate the cliché, but there really is a certain je ne sais quois about the photos taken with my camera.
My son, for example, has a two year-old Kodak with all kinds of whiz-bang features, including sepia-tinted photos. It's slim and lightweight, with a large, bright display on the back. It probably uses less energy, and its SD cards can hold an enormous number of photos.

In comparison, my FinePix looks something like an early 80s home computer must seem when placed next to a modern laptop. But you couldn't pay me to use the Kodak: no matter where we jiggle its settings, the photos always look far less vibrant than the FinePix's. About the only good photos the Kodak does take are the black-and-white and sepia photos. It takes reasonable videos, I guess, but when I want a good photo, I go hunting for my camera.

I wouldn't dare extrapolate from one camera to an entire brand's range, and I'm sure Kodak makes great digital cameras, but if I'm still happy with a ten year-old camera, is something wrong with me?

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The Eucharist: the Body's self-sustenance

The second reading today, about the Church as the body of Christ, sent my mind wandering a bit, and it occurred to me that we can infer from this an interesting explanation of the Real Presence. Someone has probably said this before—it wouldn't surprise me if my subconscious was dredging up something I've read long ago—I just hope that, if so, I'm dredging up something correct, and not marring it by my choice of words.

All of us are members of the Body of Christ, in the corporal sense of the word "member": each with his or her role. Just as the members of a body need nourishment, so do the members of the Body of Christ.

Unlike a human body, the Body of Christ does not need external nourishment, but is nourished by its communion with the Head, Christ our Lord. For example, when someone fasts completely from food, the body takes no nourishment outside itself, but converts fat into nourishment: it is internal to the body, but external to each member that is nourished. Likewise is the Eucharist not external to the Body of Christ, but from itself. That said, the analogy goes only so far: a human body loses part of itself by the conversion of fat into nourishment, whereas the Body of Christ converts nothing; rather, Christ, our Head, draws our nourishment from the inexhaustible fountain of divine grace.

So this communion, which we receive in the Eucharist, is a communion with the real, glorified Body and Blood of Christ. As occurs with the nourishment of a human body, each member receives something external to oneself, for none of us is a source of grace; Christ alone is. However, we do not receive a different Body of Christ, as if there could be such a thing, let alone do we receive grace that is external to the Body of Christ: we receive grace from the Body itself, which by union with the divinity is self-sufficient. So people who see the Eucharist as a kind of physical or spiritual cannibalism are quite mistaken: a cannibal receives something external to oneself, but when the Body of Christ receives the Eucharist, it receives itself, not something external to it—external to the members, but not to the Body.

I am not really competent to explain it much further, if even this far, so I'll stop here.

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What do Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts have in common?

Easy: they were three of the largest of the original 13 states. Smaller states like Rhode Island, Delaware, and New Hampshire so feared the power of a Congress that was purely representational that the writers of the Constitution created the Senate precisely so that smaller states could obstruct the ambitions of larger ones.

All three, moreover, have contributed important statemen and presidents to our nation. Between them, Virginia and Massachusetts have contributed almost a third of the men who have served in the land's highest office. New Jersey has sent only one man to the White House, Grover Cleveland. Unless you count Woodrow Wilson, who was no one to sneeze at, and in any case was born in Virginia.

These days, the three states aren't especially large. They have roughly the same number of Representatives in the House: 10 for MA, 11 for VA, and 13 for NJ. As such, statewide elections in these three states rarely attract national interest. Everyone knows that New York and California are where all the important stuff happens. After all, they have large populations and many more representatives, and the news media is concentrated in those two states, so it's not as if these three middling states should be of national interest, right?

…uhm, right?

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The only one at your side both then and now

A priest gave me a bit of wisdom the other day that I think worth sharing. A paraphrase:

You cannot change the past; do not dwell on it. Say a prayer for those whom you may have offended long ago; perhaps God has brought them to mind precisely because they need prayer. Offer your regrets to the only one who was at your side both then and now, and ask him to guide your future.

The context of what I was discussing with him probably matters. If I had been talking about "grave matter", the advice might well have been different!

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Another reason to move to Mississippi

According to US News & World Report, Mississippi is the second-best state at giving as many students as possible an above-average education.

Well, no, not really. But it can look that way if you don't pay attention to too many details. On page 75 of the January 2010 issue, we find a table that ranks schools. When sorted by the column, "Silver or better (% of total)", the list looks like,

1. Connecticut

2. Massachusetts

3. California

4. New Jersey

5. New York

…

45. Mississippi

46. Kansas

47. (tie) Hawaii, North Dakota, Montana

No surprise, right? (Two states, Nebraska and Oklahoma, weren't ranked.)

But, look! Another column is labeled, "Bronze or better (% of total)". What happens when you sort the list by that column?

1. Hawaii

2. Mississippi

3. West Virginia

4. New Mexico

5. Arkansas

…

45. Florida

46. (tie) Maryland, Minnesota

48. Ohio

49. Nevada

See, Mississippi is ranked second!

Say what?

I don't consider Mississippi a third-world country, but neither do I think its schools are that impressive. More to the point, there has to be a reason that U.S. News decided to rank by silver or better instead of bronze or better (or gold or better), n'est pas?

The criteria appear on p. 77.

• For a bronze medal, a school had to meet two criteria:
  1. Whether each school's students were performing better than statistically expected for the average student in the state. This includes reading and math scores, throwing in some voodoo statistics related to the percentage of economically disadvantaged students.
  2. Whether the school's least advantaged students were performing better than average for similar students in the state. Here, "least advantaged" translates to black, Hispanic, and low incomce.
• For a silver medal, a school had to achieve a certain score on USNWR's college readiness index, which is determined by the school's participation rate in AP or IB tests and their performance on that test.
• For a gold medal, a school had to place in the top 100 scores on the college readiness index.

In other words, the gold and silver medals are based on national exams which earn students university-level credit. So these criteria are valid for a national comparison.

A bronze medal compares results in a state, and is good news for the school that receives it. But it's nearly meaningless for a national comparison except (perhaps) inversely. That is, one could argue instead that the more bronze medals a state has in proportion to the number of schools, the worse a job the state is doing at educating its children.

How? To win the bronze medal, a school has to perform better than average for the state. A high proportion of bronze medals in the state implies that a high proportion of schools are outperforming the others in that state (not in the nation). This implies disparities in educational attainment: instead of all schools doing more or less okay, a few schools are doing very well, while the rest are doing "average for the state, or worse" (and quite possibly a high proportion are doing much worse).

I suspect that the people who ran these numbers were aware of this, which is why they ranked by Silver or higher, instead of by Bronze or higher.

Having said that, if you actually visit the web pages of some local high schools, they write under "Test performance" for AP & IB, "Not applicable" or "Not available", respectively, which looks weird. I'm guessing (and this is only a guess) that if your school was merely bronze, they didn't post this information. I've only seen it for silver or higher. But I haven't looked that much.

Oh, well. My son's school isn't on the list; private schools don't count, I reckon. My old high school isn't on the list, either.

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In news that probably won't affect my career whatsoever, UNSWR also ranks my grad school among the top 50 in the nation for both math and computer science.

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If you're going to do something, do it well

A conversation between my wife and me.

Are you ashamed sometimes of America when you are abroad?

I'm not, but some Americans are ashamed when they go abroad.

Why?

Well, they still believe the old Soviet propaganda.

Какой propaganda?

That we're the single greatest cause of evil in the world.

Это не propaganda. You should be proud of yourselves at being the best at something.

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