Eleven Magazine 6.5

By JoshPetersel in Eleven - Grills Gone Wild 0 Comment

Phoenix won a grammy today.  We interviewed Phoenix for our cover story.  We interviewed a grammy-winning artist for Eleven.  Holy smokes.

I thought I’d use my blog today as sort of a wastepaper basket.  We introduced a new feature to the magazine for February, titled The Neighborhood of the Month.  I wanted a spread, and ended up being alotted a single page, so the entire piece I wrote up had to hit the scrap heap.  Good thing there’s the internet, where space is about as scarce as Taylor Swift is awesome (read: not very).

Enjoy the new issue of Eleven, if you’re lucky enough to live in the area.

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Neighborhood of the Month: Soulard

I’ve run into Tom Gullickson at five different bars in the last four nights.  By a stroke of chance, or a stroke of luck, he’s inescapable.  And definitely not in a bad way.  At our second encounter, he buys a round of drinks for everyone still left at the bar (The Shanti) at closing time.  He doesn’t know who I am yet, just that I’m drinking beers with one of the GMs of his bar – who I’d only briefly met no more than 5 hours earlier.  I suppose that’s enough to put me (or anyone) in his good book.

This is a running theme I’ve heard from nearly everyone I’ve spoken to in the area.  People live in Soulard, work in Soulard, play in Soulard.  When I later caught up and spoke with Tom, he commented that “most places you go into you’re only a stranger once.”  In a similar conversation, Vedad, the owner of The Gyro House, says “everybody knows everybody.”  A lot of people don’t have cars – why bother, when all of your friends are within walking distance?

The revelation hit me like a sack of shitty Mardi Gras beads.  Soulard is like a big college campus for grown-ups.   And the remarkable thing is: of all the college kids I’ve talked to, nobody knows about this place.

For my first two years of living in St. Louis, Soulard only really existed for one 24 hour period each year: Mardi Gras.  Not that anyone would really complain about beads and cantalope-sized beers.  But it overshadows the fact that, underneath the gold, purple, and green regalia, there’s a neighborhood unique to any other place in St. Louis.

What’s Tom’s favorite thing to do in Soulard?  Bar hop.  He makes it into every bar in the area on a monthly basis.  And he’ll find someone to say hi to almost immediately upon entering.  Does he have a favorite spot?  Of course.  But he won’t tell me.  “I think people need to find their own.”  Could he share a favorite story about his time in the area?  Absolutely – he’s got dozens.  But like any good tale of drunken debauchery, you’d be hard-pressed to convince anyone to let you put a recap in print.

To point:  At Eleven, our inspiration for this expansion of the Neighborhood Watch is to nurture our curiosity about a part of our city that –admittedly, even us experts – didn’t know that much about, and hopefully, to impart the same spirit of adventure in you, the reader.  We created the section to celebrate St Louis as a unparalleled city full of unique places.  And also, more simply, as an excuse to go out drinking and meet new people.  Mission accomplished.

Broken Computer

By JoshPetersel in Words 0 Comment

Dearth of posts due to a broken laptop + magazine production cycle.  So let’s rapid update this mother.

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My laptop broke down for the 4th time in the last two years on Thursday.  This time, it was the video card.  Who knows anymore.

I had the unfathomable pleasure of calling HP’s phone support to explain the situation.  Pegged the over/under on time elapsed on the phone at 45 minutes, and then clocked in at 52 minutes before the ground level rep forwarded me to someone who could actually help.  I think I’m starting to get a flair for this.

Eleven advisory board member (and all around bad-ass) David Strom was kind enough to lend me a spare laptop he had handy.  It’s good to know folks in the industry.  Relatedly, I’m pretty sure David has been blogging since the invention of the internet.

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In the meanwhile, it seems as though I’m not the only one in the family with a flair for entrepreneurship.  Alyssa’s started a business sort of thing to raise money for Haiti….and even landed herself on Northwestern University’s homepage, including a video interview with the article.  And for posterity’s sake:

One little baby bead at a time.

Our grandchildren will see this.

Way to go, Alyssa!  All the bracelets are hand-made, and all proceeds are going straight to Haiti.  I hope she sends me a bracelet in exchange for the good press.  That’s the way the system works, right? More likely, asking for a free bracelent in the mail (even in jest) probably just makes me a terrible human being.

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I wish I had something more asinine, biased, and pointless to write about.  That’s all for now.  Maybe later this week I’ll ruin the magazine and do a sneak preview of an upcoming new Eleven feature that I’m really excited about.

Evaluating Movies

By JoshPetersel in Josh on Josh 1 Comment

To follow up on my earlier post on Avatar (and like my post on the underpants bomber, it seems I’m a step behind the crowd on this topic), I’ve broken up my internal system for grading movies into three simple tests.

1. The First Name Test. Unbelievably, Bill Simmons beat me to the punch and wrote about this very notion just yesterday.  From his article:

If you saw “Invictus” already, ask yourself these questions: Can you remember the name of one guy on South Africa’s rugby team other than Damon’s character? (I bet you can’t.) Can you remember the name of the coach? (You definitely can’t — we were apparently expected to believe this team coached itself.) … Did you learn ANYTHING about the team’s one black player, who should have been just as compelling a character as Pienaar? (Nope. I can’t even remember his name.)

Very simple: I’m looking for a compelling character with an engaging and unique story.  And call me crazy, but if I can’t even remember the name of the main characters, I find it hard to believe that the movie was worth its salt.

Excellent example: Old School versus Wedding Crashers.  Do you think (assuming you’re not a Vaughn/Wilsons/Stiller/etc. fanatic) you could name any of the central characters from Old School?  You should have answered Frank (Frank the Tank!) fairly easily.  Possibly Mitch (Mitch-a-Palooza) and Blue (you’re my boy!), too.  Now, how about Wedding Crashers?  I mean, I know Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, and Christopher Walken were in the movie.  But didn’t they effectively play themselves?

Old School passes.  Wedding Crashers, even if it didn’t have the soppy, cringe-inducing, awkward sequence at Vince’s wedding near the end, is a bust.

Do note – the first name requirement isn’t necessarily black & white.  Consider that, in Fight Club, we go 85% of the movie before realizing that Tyler Durden’s name is Tyler Durden.  How fantastic, realizing upon watching Fight Club for the first time, that you had never learned Tyler’s name!  Sometimes a movie is strong enough on its own that the first name test can slide (and we’ll get to this).  Or you’ll find the character memorable enough thanks to all of his other defining qualities that his name gets lost.  Think: Brad Pitt’s lead in Inglourious Basterds.  You know who Lt. Aldo Raine is as a protagonist via his distinguished mustache and delightful enunciation “naht-zis,” even though I feel his name gets muddled up (probably due to the very same heavy accent).  Heck – I had to look the name up on IMDB, and I only just saw the movie yesterday.

Double note – Bonus points for characters that I can identify with on a personal level.

For posterity’s sake, I’ll give this test a weight of two points.

2. The Callback & Re-Watchability Test. Many possibilities: First, I love it when a movie plays such fine attention to detail that it’s able to turn seemingly irrelevant details from earlier in the movie into significant plot devices.  Think: The ending to Citizen Kane (I really hesitate to post a spoiler here).  Or the ending to The Girl Next Door.

Second: I love being able to watch a movie for the second time, and pick up revealing details along the way that make repeated viewings just as enjoyable.  Think about Bruce Willis’ interactions with people throughout The Sixth Sense.  Or consider Back to the Future, where things happen like the name of the mall in 1985 changing from “Twin Pines Mall” to “Lone Pine Mall” after Marty knocks over a pine tree in 1955.  Great Scott!

Third: It’s of utmost importance that the movie have some line in the script that I can quote or riff about with my friends.  Again: Great Scott!

Back to the Future passes.  The Sixth Sense gets half credit, because Shyamalan had to go through a montage to highlight all of the subtleties (and should lose its half credit at that, after his success with Sixth Sense led to so many other awful works).

For posterity’s sake, I’ll give this test a weight of two points.

3. The Suspended Disbelief Test. Far and away the most important test, and if you really wanted to, you could make this test on its own the metric for evaluating movie quality.  To pass here, a movie must simply occupy my undivided attention for its entirety.  Shouldn’t that be easy?  Isn’t the whole purpose of movie-watching to escape from present reality?  I’d say so.

The problem is: nobody’s perfect.  Not every director can catch and correct every single minute detail, or contour his work to my perception of what’s reasonable.  An exceptional movie will completely ace it.  An equally exceptional movie might blow it – but I’ll be so caught up with everything else that it won’t matter.

Perfect example: The Dark Knight.  Cracked.com hits the nail on the head, and I’ll quote:

[The Joker plans] “First, we find two empty buildings. Without the cops noticing, we’ll secretly sneak in hundreds of drums of explosive liquids, and wire all of them to explode. Next, we’ll orchestrate an attack on the convoy transporting Harvey Dent. This will involve blocking busy streets, blowing police helicopters out of the air and launching missiles at the armored car. All of this will be done, not to kill Dent (though that could happen at any moment) but to cause Batman to intervene so that he will throw me in jail.

Then, while the whole town is on alert, we go ahead and have our henchmen kidnap both Dent and Rachel Dawes and strap them in with the bombs in the two abandoned buildings. Then I’ll send Batman after one of them, knowing that this will result in Rachel being killed and Dent being a certain distance from the explosion as to become grotesquely injured and disillusioned. Then I’ll blow up the jail without accidentally killing myself. Gentlemen, it couldn’t be simpler.“

Did it ever occur to you how obscenely asinine this plot is?  Even once?  But what’s more important: Does it even bother you now? No way! Who cares! Everything else going on the movie was so far-and-above absolutely freaking phenomenal, that knowing full-well how unrealistic this part of the plot was doesn’t affect my opinion of the movie in the slightest.

Without a doubt, Dark Knight passes.

For posterity’s sake, I’ll give this test a weight of seven points.  (What, like you didn’t expect this to add up to eleven? Details! Test 2! Stick with the program!)

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Some quick examples:

The Dark Knight: 2 (The Joker!) + 2 (“Where are they!?”, “Why so serious?”) + 7 (see above) = 11/11

Back to the Future: 2 (Doc!) + 2 (“Great Scott!”, “Hello, Butthead!”, Lone Pine Mall, ad infinitum) + 7 (without saying) = 11/11

Old School: 2 (Frank the Tank!) + 2 (Frank the Tank!) + 5 (The valedictorian just likes to carry a voice recorder around? Curious.  The frat doesn’t get in trouble for a brother dying at a frat party? Who cares!) = 9/11

Wedding Crashers: 0 (everyone’s playing themselves) + 2 (I don’t love the movie, but I’d settle on it if I was stuck channel surfing) + 0 (What happened to crashing weddings? Shouldn’t the title be “Weekend at Christopher Walken’s house? And again – the wedding scene at the end is horrendously contrived and nausea-inducing). = 2/11

Avatar: 0 (Stereotypical angry military guy with scars!) + .5 (I thought “Daisy Cutters” was funny, but that’s only really because I thought it was some kind of silly expletive, and not a military weapon) + 0 (Unobtainium? Papyrus font? Armored-helicopter-piercing bow & arrows? The protagonist asking the natives to unitedly help his sick friend after their home, king, and half of the population was just nuked to hell?  Nobody else was put off by any of this??) = 0.5/11

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Two other notes:

1. When applicable, test scores can overflow their alloted weights.  But overall score never goes above eleven.

2. A perfect score isn’t that hard to come by (and shouldn’t be!).  Nonsensical to nit-pick at details and percentiles and such, and wonder whether Shawshank Redemption was better than The Godfather.  There’s my wheelhouse of personal favorites, there’s good movies, there’s mediocre movies, and then there’s Avatar.

(heck – I had to look the name up on IMDB, and I only just saw the movie yesterday),

Winter Break

By JoshPetersel in Josh on Josh 0 Comment

I think the most important update is quite simple and straightforward:  We went bobsledding in Jamaica.  Seriously.

Yah, mon.

Remember these guys?

This called for an immediate addition (and subsequent subtraction) from my bucket list.  Suppose I could call it here, but for kicks, let’s dabble a little more.

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I realize I told a lot of people I would be going to the Bahamas this break.  Pardon my haphazard attention to detail.

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Passing through security on the way out of the country, I had this thought:  Isn’t it silly how we still have to take our shoes off to be put through the x-ray machine?  Have they found one dangerous shoe yet?  Richard Reid sure managed to ruin things for everyone.  Then I thought:  Wouldn’t it be grand, in some last-ditch effort for humor while on my deathbed, to lace some explosives into my jeans and catch a flight, thereby forcing everyone to remove their pants in the same jolly arduous process?

Of course, upon my return I found out about the underpants bomber.  He’s not only beaten me to the punch, but has gone a step further into his undergarments, and has even apparently convinced the TSA to implement a whole slew of new security measures that miss the point entirely.  What a poor sport.

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By the way, anyone buying the story about the bomber’s parents calling the US government prior to the attack is an imbecile.  How many phone calls could the CIA receive every day in regard to things like “my son is going to put explosives in his underpants!”?  And if the government is to take every called-in threat seriously – why even bother crafting and implementing elaborate bomb schemes?  If you’re Captain Terrorist, why not simply hire a team of enthusiastic telemarketers? (Relatedly – boy oh boy, am I going to be on some kind of government watch list once this post goes public.  Maybe you will be too for reading it.  Sorry.)

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Also on the plane ride over:

Alyssa: What language do they speak in Jamaica?

Josh: Jamaican.

Alyssa:  Is that really a language?

Josh: Yah, mon.

…I kill myself sometimes.

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I finished off two books over break.  Here are some thoughts –

Bill Simmons’ The Book of Basketball: A bit polarizing for me, considering my high opinion of Bill Simmons, and low opinion of the game of basketball.  (Just noticed this, by the way – my blog currently ranks 4th in Google for the search string “basketball sucks.”  That’s damn impressive.)  I always thought basketball was simply a matter of which superduperstar could dunk the ball the loudest and most frequently (among other silly rules and techniques).  Turns out, I didn’t really understand what Simmons calls “the Secret.” I won’t ruin it for you.  The revelation wasn’t earth-shattering, but I’ve got a little more respect for the game now.  A sliver.  Pending further review – it’s in your hands now, LeBron.

Tom Hodgkinson’s How to be Idle (via Kevin (thanks!!)):  A perfect book to read while on a vacation in which one’s sole purpose is to do nothing.  Simply because I got to implement in practice nearly all of Hodgkinson’s recommendations of how to enjoy doing nothing.  Sleeping late, sitting in bed, enjoying a hangover, long lunch breaks, you name it.  One quote I particularly enjoyed: “There is no fun in doing nothing, when you have nothing to do. (Jerome K. Jerome)”

…Which of course reminds me – I’ve got tons of crap to catch up on before heading back to work next week.  Happy holidays, everyone!

Attention to Detail

By JoshPetersel in Josh and the Arts 0 Comment

http://gizmodo.com/5430268/i-spent-300-million-on-this-movie-and-all-i-got-were-these-lousy-papyrus-subtitles

We went to see Avatar yesterday.  The subtitles came on, I shot a knowning smirk to Matt, and in an instant, a blockbuster action/scifi turns into a high comedy.

I’m no film buff or critic.  But frankly, I’m not all that impressed with the idea that James Cameron was able to use a bottomless pit of money to create a movie with slight aesthetic advantages over its predecessors (in contrast, look what we’ve been able to create with pocket change), especially when it’s attached to such a wishy-washy script.

What a waste.  How unfortunate to see what could have been a landmark film mired and lost due to poor attention to detail.

Lost Phones and Facebook

By JoshPetersel in Josh surfs the Internet 0 Comment

No, fortunately, I didn’t lose my phone.  Or drop it in a puddle of beer, or worse, in the urinal while trying to send a text message.  Or drunkle it away (Brian’s invention, my definition).  No, it’s in fine standing on the kitchen table.

But I did get a Facebook invite today for a phone dropped in the toilet.  And a friend lost her phone to the otherwise exhilarating David Guetta concert earlier this week.  And one of Zach’s friends destroyed his phone’s screen in a bout of debauchery last night.

The whole Facebook event thing worries me.  Not that Facebook doesn’t already have access to an obscene amount of personal and private information, but that folks regularly create events asking their friends for their phone numbers.  I’ve never fully understood the true harm in letting a stranger know my phone number, but I inherently feel like it’s not necessarily something I’d like to give away for free – or at least, allowing access to people who aren’t looking for me specifically.

Case in point: I just typed “phone” into the Facebook search, and filtered to Events.  To no surprise there’s over 500 pages of “I lost my phone and need your number” or whatever cutesy spin on that that folks like to use.  And just like that, I’ve got ten to a hundred phone numbers per page, with a first and last name attached, a decent guess on location based on area code, a decent guess on demographics based on profile picture, and best of all, a few of their friends’ names and corresponding information.  Cakewalk for telemarketers:  “Hi Chris, your friend Robert Johnson recommended I give you a call and that you’d be interested in….”

And I can only imagine how much of a huge, huge underestimate 500 pages is.

My phone number is available on my Facebook profile page, which is public.  And on the Press Releases and Media Kits that Eleven Magazine distributes widely.  I hope that if someone is looking to speak to me personally, they’ll be able to do so.  But I’m quite skeptical about leaving my number out for vague general consumption in the cloud, like so many other users are doing.

Obvious solution for you:  If you’re invited by a friend to one of these “events,” just take out your phone and call them!  That’s the point anyway, isn’t it?

Playing the Percentages

By JoshPetersel in Josh for Business, Josh plays Sports 0 Comment

Through Bill Simmons’ latest column, I found this awesome math & probability article on ESPN detailing Bill Belichick’s controversial 4th-and-2 play call last week.  I thought I’d touch on it with some thoughts from a business/decision making/organizational-supply-chain-management perspective.

Context:  Patriots’ ball on their own 29-yard line, winning by 6 points, just over two minutes to go.

Objective: Maximize Patriots’ probability of winning the football agme.

Decision Tree:

Read: I didn't feel like stealing a fresh copy of Photoshop

Thought I’d dust off Microsoft Paint for a change

How to read this:  Belichick has to decide whether he wants to go for it on 4th-and-2.  Each circle represents a point of action that’s out of his control (it’s in Tom Brady’s), and each square represents a point where the ball changes hands (it’s in Peyton Manning’s).  If Belichick decides to Punt, he gives Manning control – and if the Colts score, the Patriots lose.  If Belichick decides to Play, he gives Brady control.  If Brady converts (and further, if they hold the ball), the Patriots win.  If Brady doesn’t convert, Manning takes control, and if the Colts score, the Patriots lose.

How to interpret this:  As per the article, if the Patriots punt and give the Colts the ball deep in their own territory, the Patriots’ probability of winning is 79%. Or in other words, there’s only a 21% likelihood that Manning can take the ball all the way downfield in around two minutes and score a touchdown.  (Though, given how Manning has been playing this season, you could argue this is a lowball estimate.)

But if they play, we know the probability of converting based on empirical data is 55.7%.  And assuming the Pats are able to convert the 4th down (putting us at the top-most circle in the diagram), there’s a 92% chance that they’ll be able to hold the ball for the win.  If not, the Colts have a 34% likelihood that they’ll drive for the touchdown – giving the Patriots 66% odds of winning in that situation.

Working backwards: Putting the ball in Brady’s hands gives the Patriots a 55.7% chance of winning 92% of the time, and a 44.3% chance of winning 66% of the time.  Their overall odds of winning the game by giving Brady the ball, therefore, are 80.5% (92*.557+66*.443).  Which is better (sliiigghtly) than letting the punter do his thing.

But the science of management and organizational behavior deals with way more than just numbers.  There are an infinite number of intangibles.  On the one hand, this basic calculation doesn’t consider dozens of other minute possibilities (consider that the Pats convert the 4th down but then can’t hold the ball – we’d still need to figure out the odds of the Colts driving to score).  Or maybe Belichick had a feeling that his punter wouldn’t be able to kick effectively (I’m envisioning the second-to-last play from the movie The Replacements – skip to around 7:30), and that therefore, the win probability from punting the ball was strikingly lower than it seemed at the surface.  Who knows.

But most importantly, it’s awfully tough to justify at what was probably the most critical point in the Pats’ game – if not, their entire season.  Belichick wagered big – and lost big.  There’s already been a ton of fallout from fans, press, and I can only imagine, from the players too.  A good manager should know that sometimes the highest-percentage play isn’t always the smartest – sort of like how you probably wouldn’t bet $100 for a 1-in-1000 chance to win 100,001.  You win overall (by a dollar!) if you make the bet every time, but maybe you’re better off taking the safe route and pocketing the $100.  Or, in Belichick’s case, saving face and letting Manning win the game instead of losing it for himself (@2:00 in).

Scrabble

By JoshPetersel in Josh on Josh 2 Comments

What’s the highest possible score in a game of Scrabble?

Kevin and I had a little discussion over the Safety Words show at the Firebird last night about the wordsmith elitist board game.

Basic internet research draws forth the following results:

1) Here’s the World Record for the highest-scoring Scrabble game to occur, with 1,320 points on the board (yes, apparently, they have world records for silly junk like this).  But that’s nothing…

2) One site points out that you can feasibly, yet in the most unlikely of scenarios, score 1,962 points – not in a game, but in a single turn.  Poor Guy-Who-Played-Jinneyricksaw.  I bet he thought he had the game wrapped up.

A much more difficult question, however, is the maximum number of points possible over the course of an entire game.  Given the structure put forth by the rules of the game (limited set of letters, limited set of board space, limited permutations of letters as per the Scrabble dictionary), I propose that a maximum is possible.  Calculations become tricky when considering that adding a single letter to the end of a word constitutes an entirely new word score (such as turning Jinneyricksaw into Jinneyricksaws, in our last example).  I’d envision, therefore, that the final board would ultimately look like a giant square of uniform Scrabble letters, whereby each word played would not only result in a bingo, but create seven new words in the perpendicular direction.

The simple approach:

  1. A scrabble board has 100 pieces, with an average piece score of 1.87
  2. The center row (turn 1) has a double and triple word score. Working along the right edge, each row besides the two above and two below (turns 2,3,4,5) has a double word score.  The top and bottom rows (turns 14 and 15*) each have two triple word scores. I’d die if I tried to include letter multipliers too.
  3. Players will take turns playing bingos horizontally, while collecting parallel words.  The game lasts 15 turns (14 plays of 7 tiles plus one play of 2 tiles).
  4. Final score: 1949.81.  Which isn’t even as good as the single-word score earlier.  Although it doesn’t consider that turn 15 (which should be on the 9x multiplier) is only two letters long, or that there are letter multipliers, or that words with higher letter scores should be saved for those 9x’s.

The difficult approach: Players start by playing two-tile words, building an even square, and rather than collecting the greatest number of bingos possible, collecting the greatest number of parallels possible.  The center letter alone (hopefully a Q or Z!) becomes part of 29 distinct words vertically and horizontally, and will ultimately count for 480 points alone (counting for the initial double-word score and the two 9x board-length words created along both axis.  Knowing this to be the most valuable letter, and assuming this to be the most valuable piece of Scrabble real estate, we can come up with a theoretical maximum of possible points at 48,000 points (480*100).

But we know that not every letter sits across the double-triple word scores, and not every letter counts for 10 points.  So a more realistic estimate might be that each letter will become a part of 29 distinct words (which is inaccurate, but might roughly cancel out the effect of not considering word- and letter- bonuses), and that given the board with sixty-eight 1-point tiles, seven 2-point tiles, eight 3-point tiles, ten 4-point tiles, one 5-point tile, two 8-point tiles, and two 10-point tiles, the maximum possible score in any game of Scrabble is approximately 5,423.

Thoughts? Evidence to prove me wrong? Amazed at how silly this is? Let me know.