picked up our $10 wizards tickets (msrp $40) at the will-call window, threw my id into the ticket envelope, then stairmastered up four escalators to our seats. the nba has perfected timeout entertainment: jumbotron kiss cam/dance cam/air guitar cam, trampoline slam dunk contest, half-court free-pizza-for-everyone shot, multiple dance troupes, and a truly impressive two-man cirque du soleil-style halftime show. too bad washington stinks at basketball. fingers crossed for
the human slinky next time.
tuned into
jon stewart's pulverization of cnbc, on par with his previous
crossfire dismemberment.
showed up at reagan airport, opened my wallet, couldn't find my driver's license, boarded the atlanta-bound plane with a passport, paced through the catacombs between short- and long-term memory to realize i'd thrown out that ticket envelope at the concession stand. made car rental tricky..
..but not impossible.
drank coffee. felt immortal.
fled west to tuskeegee, alabama: famous for awesome airmen..
duh music causes dancing causes shoe wear duh
spent the night at a friend's parents' home in auburn, a great way to turn one friend into three friends.
hooray our sports team won let's kill trees
visited an old friend in jonesboro. got an invitation to visit haiti also. accepted.
forgive the camerawoman. she's six.
read
nassim taleb's arguments that knowledge derived from statistical observation becomes derailed by unpredictable events too often to make mathematical modeling a valuable or honest pursuit. instead of presenting a series of disjoint anecdotes, i would've been more convinced if he had fought fire with fire and quantified distances between, say, the price of medicare in 2008 and the price of medicare in 2008 as predicted in 1990. he had a few good points about our species' disinclination to appropriately reward successful prevention (as opposed to finding antidotes after symptoms attack), but i wasn't sold on his thesis that
the problem of induction was grounds for an overhaul in social science methods.
3/19/09