And then there was one.

Week, that is. As in, there is one week left before I leave Boston and head to Chicago.

I missed posting this past week, mostly because I spent my spare time working on some projects when I might otherwise have been typing posts. I say this not as an excuse but as an explanation, the difference being excuses are meant to absolve guilt with the implication that the guilty party regrets their actions, whereas I’d probably do the same thing again and again if in the same situation.

That said, what have I learned and experienced lately?

--Until last week I had never seen a college student dressed as Abraham Lincoln (complete with suit, top hat, and beard) ride a Segway across a bridge. Now, I suppose I can only say that I’ve never seen it with a boat underneath a train underneath said lookalike underneath a plane, but that’s only because he was one bridge over from the only place in the USA where that actually could occur.

--Not having much social activities has let me get out jogging again, and I’ve gotten my standard trek down to about one hour to run 5 miles. I’m fairly pleased with that.

--I wandered out around the city this weekend and rode to the top of the Prudential tower. Though the restaurant my family went to in Vegas was higher, at 107 stories, the restaurant and bar on the 52nd floor here did still offer some nice views of the city; I attached some of them at the end of the post.

--The animated Clone Wars movie was terrible. As an irredeemable Star Wars fan my hands were tied, so last Saturday I walked into town and watched it. The basic concept was alright, but like every movie kinda meant for kids, there is at least one character (in this movie only one, but that was one too many) that is completely unrealistic insofar as behaving like someone their age should. In this movie, the child lead is intended to illustrate that kids can do the same things as adults. Not to sound too much like Maddox, but no, they can’t. Kids aren’t adults. That’s why we have those words for them, indicating they are different from that other group. Hollywood, stop thinking that to make a movie a winner with kids, you have to make the kid role in a movie completely unrealistic. Instead of making them wittier and smarter than the adults, make the boys love sports and the girls dolls or something (that’s not PC but oh well). Kids might believe and understand those characters. Adults might, too.

That’s all I really have for now. My plan will be to not consistently make people wait a whole week or more for posts, but who can say, right? I’ll post again soon, I hope.

Another Day, Another Journey

This past Saturday I resumed my meandering ways and got out into the city to visit some places I had marked on my to-do list; in other words, I visited the Sam Adams brewery. I did other things as well, but let’s start here, where in fact I started.

The brewery is located southwest of downtown Boston (in Jamaica Plains if any of you know the city). I rode the T (from MBTA, Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority; it’s what everyone calls the subway) down to the nearest stop and wandered the streets until I found it. After waiting for an hour and a half because the tours are quite popular, I got to wander through the brewery. The Boston site is actually the smallest brewery they own, with larger ones in Cincinnati, somewhere in New York, I think, and a new one somewhere else (maybe North Carolina?). They may have more also, I can’t recall. The others are used to produce their products for mass consumption, while the Boston site is for R&D. The guide we had basically said that this meant they use it to refine and sample new formula ideas, to brew competition beers, and when the tanks are empty the employees can sometimes just come up with their own ideas and give them a try, presumably with the understanding that anything great will be the property of Sam Adams.

We got to taste the barley and smell the hops they use for some of their brews, and then a complimentary glass and two free tastes of their products. We got the Boston Lager, their main brand, and the Summer Ale, their current seasonal. While getting to drink samples of these, we got told some of what the employees of the brewery do in the course of their jobs. I just don’t know if I could show up to a brewery and start tasting beer at 10:30am every day to make sure the product on the market is up to specs.

Wait, did I just type that?

I also got to try 2 concepts for a new product that they have. One was a coffee flavored stout (dark beer) that I believe was appropriately titled Coffee Stout, and the other had a hint of blackberries and was, also appropriately, called Blackberry Ale. How do you think they came up with the names? The tastes were set up so the tasters could vote for the one they liked better, so I voted (secret ballot, thank you very much; I voted for the Coffee Stout, though).

After that I went to the Museum of Science (it might have a real name but I don’t know it) where there was an exhibit on baseball. I was like a moth to a flame; once I saw the ad for it a few weeks ago a visit was inevitable. The exhibit (and the whole museum) was alright, mostly set up for younger people to try and get kids interested in baseball (and science, respectively). The one nice thing they had was a 60’6” cage with a padded wall painted with the plate half of the battery on one side and a radar gun. So I threw. Caveats:

1) I didn’t get to warm up.
2) I wore flip flops, so I wound up throwing barefoot.
3) I was wearing khaki shorts and a button up shirt, so I had a suboptimal range of motion.
4) I am a wimp.
5) I didn’t get to warm up (maybe if I repeat it you’ll forget #4).

Anyway, everyone gets three throws, and with a wide variety of ages, from kids barely into live pitching (who got to throw from closer) to people who were actually adults (I don’t count me as being an adult yet), most of the people were bouncing one of the floor, one off the ceiling, and the other would hit either the radar gun which was off to the side or the back wall about where the batter’s head was painted. Regardless of speed, they weren’t going to get anyone out. As it turns out I wouldn’t have gotten anyone out either, but that was due to the speed component of velocity and not the direction component; all three of my throws hit the painted catcher’s mitt. The highest velocities I saw there were two teenagers who bounced every throw; one hit 62 for his best, the other reached 59. I was third for the time I was there, hitting 49, 50, and 51 for my three throws. If I had been warmed… I’m just saying.

After that, I went to a location recommended by the Florida folk: the Bull & Finch Pub. This is the pub used as the inspiration for Cheers. I had a few beers and ate dinner there, and it was decent and reasonably priced. I didn’t get any Cheers gear, but that’s only because I don’t know the show that well and I’m not really that kind of souvenir person.

So that was the weekend. The head of the program employing me is finally in Cambridge from his summer visit to the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, so I’ll be getting busier in the upcoming weeks (note: I am considering that a good thing). He has mentioned the possibility of continuing some of my current responsibilities even after I leave Cambridge, so I may have an easier time than I thought keeping in this circle.

That’s all I have for you today. What’s new with everyone out there?

Oh, here are a few pictures for everyone.

This one was for my brother, who should be amused. If not, he’s wrong.

This is the Museum of Science (it stretches across the river) as seen from the Longfellow Bridge to its south. Yes, that is a baseball design to symbolize the exhibit. Yes it’s awesome.

This is the exterior of the Bull and Finch Pub (Cheers).

This is the yellow flag that flies outside the Bull and Finch Pub to ensure everyone knows that they should enter.

It’s been a while.

I promised to myself that I would update this once a week or so, and the way that I would make sure to do that was to make sure to post on whatever fun activity the weekend held for me. Since the weekend is my chance to get out and explore, my weekends should be fairly busy and thus post topics would abound.

This plan fell through this past weekend, though, as halfway through my wanders around Boston rain seemed imminent. I started walking back home to try and escape the rain, but alas it was not to be and my journey ended completely soaked.

So nothing really interesting to report from MA this week, unless people are just dying for my reviews of some of the local restaurants or interested to know about the route I’ve been jogging lately. No offense, but I wouldn’t want to learn about those things from my friends so I won’t force those on unwilling readers.

So there it is. Not all of these can be masterpieces (or, for the more critical reader, not any can).

Art, for art's sake!

Nice to see my brother’s unorthodox pragmatism at work. (See here for details.)

I followed another suggestion by a former Massachusetts resident and went to the Museum of Fine Arts on Saturday. Owing much to quiz bowl I’m sure, I have always loved art museums (so long as it isn’t modern art; ugh) and so it didn’t take much prodding for me to want to go to this one.

I managed to get there the second-to-last day they had a visiting exhibit detailing Spanish art during the reign of Philip IV (or was it III? I don’t remember, but I think it was IV; this is why I wasn’t the art person on the QB team). Basically, this was from El Greco to Velasquez. There were a lot of great pictures by them and other artists that I had never seen, but I didn’t need quite so many side-commetaries on the audio guide that discussed Catholicism (the Inquisition, Counter-Reformation, and sometimes even the impact these things had on art commission!). Then again maybe not everyone knows enough about my faith, so who am I to complain?

In all the other sections visitors are allowed to take personal photographs so long as the flash is disabled. So I did. Some highlights are below. The best piece permanently in the collection, though, was a John Singer Sargent piece called The Daughters of Edward D. Boit. An online image of it can be found here.
(By the way, if you like art and have never spent even one whole evening searching through Mark Harden’s Artchive , then you are lying about liking art. If you can’t waste an evening looking through there, no one can help you appreciate art.) Imagine this painting about 6 feet on a side and you’ll understand what it was like to see it in person. The audio commentary on it was pretty good, but rather than ruin the MFA’s racket I’ll just say one of the commenters said it was among the 6 most emotionally complex paintings in American art history in his opinion. I have to agree.

After the museum I went to a restaurant, the Barking Crab, that had been recommended to me by my friend Laura. I sat at the bar next to a group of five that just ordered tons of food and a few of them were willing to chat with me about the city, giving me advice on things to do (namely, places to take a girl to impress her. That’s valuable coin for a 24 year old.). They also shared a crab leg with me, giving me my first real taste of crab meat. Had they done this before I ordered my chicken sandwich, I might have gotten the crab bucket instead. Then again at $30+ for 5 legs, I might not have gotten it. My sandwich was really good too, though, so a big plus to Laura for the suggestion.

That’s mostly it for me. Other than Saturday, the only sunny days in the past week and a half were Friday and today, so of course after work I went jogging to enjoy the weather. I don’t know why I feel the need to jog, seeing as (for example) I walked a total of somewhere between 11 and 13 miles on Saturday while visiting these places (cheaper than the subway and good exercise, though the subway is a great deal here).

Everyone please keep my friends Blake and Travis in their thoughts/prayers this week. They both just finished law school at the UofA and are taking the Arkansas Bar exam tomorrow through I think Thursday or Friday. Man, am I glad I don’t have a professional exam after I’m done with grad school. Other than that whole dissertation thing, I suppose. And comps. Damn, maybe I’m not getting off so easily.


Without further ado, the images and my thoughts. I put the famous artists (or at least the ones I remember from quiz bowl; isn't that enough?) on this post, plus one sculpture I liked.



Claude Monet, La Japonaise. The plaque said he was making fun of a contemporary French fetish for Japanese things. Having friends who have something similar, I couldn't help but love this picture.



Preston Singletary, Raven Steals the Moon. I don't usually like anything made after maybe 1940, but this is from 1963 so go figure. I just love the smooth, finished look; the detail on the moon portion; and the contrast between the heavy, dark presence (via the red and black) of the raven, and the ephemeral, light presence of the moon. The long, sleek raven's head gives a sense of motion, much like Constantin Brancusi's Bird in Space, but I dislike Brancusi's work because it only tries to suggest motion. Brancusi's work lacks the form of a bird, whereas Singletary suggests motion without sacrificing form. Form is a very important part of art.



Jean-Antoine Watteau, La Perspective. I always remember not remembering Watteau in quiz bowl, and true to form I couldn't remember what I couldn't remember him for having done (in the words of Sports Night, that was a truly spectacular sentence). True to form, I had to look up that he was a (French) Rococo artist. This isn't one of his most famous works, but I saw the name, remembered the past, and took the shot.



Rembrandt van Rijn, Reverend Johannes Elison. Rembrandt painted this. There's your exposition.



Gilbert Stuart, John Adams. Stuart is considered one of the foremost portrait artists in American history, and he can be considered without American peer in the Revolutionary War era. Given that this is Boston, the Adams family should be expected to be found here, and so it is. A former president and founding father painted by one of the best American portrait painters? Yeah, I needed a copy.

Odds and Ends

Unfortunately for my desire to get out and into Boston more, rain has persisted the past few days. In fact today was the first sunny day all week, so of course I spent it in an office and then going jogging instead of getting out and really enjoying it. Alas and alack.

So that said, I haven’t got much to post. I moved into the studio I’ll be using for the last 2/3 of my stay in Cambridge, and I’ve got some pictures of it. The room is fairly large and the futon is fairly comfortable, making my only complaint the lack of an air conditioner.






As for work, I’m finally spending most of my time doing things other than data collection; I’m getting to do actual statistics (read: economics, as that’s what it’s turning into). That makes me feel both better for my employers for getting value for what they’ve employed and better for myself as it makes it more likely something worthwhile will come out of my stay (such as perhaps another paper on which to put my name? We’ll see…).

So with nothing much to say I decided to post something I wrote 2 years ago and just found again. I heard again a song from a few years ago about putting yourself in another person’s shoes and decided I had just heard that phrase once too often. My personal diatribe against is as follows.

One of the great equalizers in moral arguments is that it is impossible to understand another's decisions unless we walk a mile in their shoes. As generally seems to be the case in such arguments, this platitude is used especially to excuse the morally questionable decisions that another person makes. The reasoning behind this platitude is that if we found ourselves in the same situation as the person in question, then we would have at least considered as a possible course of action the very thing we are decrying as immoral.

The problem with this argument is that we are always asked to walk the mile that has them in this trouble, in the precarious position; more often than not, could we choose a mile to walk in the person's life, we would choose to start before they got themselves into the trouble most likely by another action we question. And this is the argument's flaw—it asks us to grant as a hypothetical premise that we failed to follow our code of morality, and then asks us whether we could deny that breaking our code of morality is a reasonable option.

The argument is supposed to show that morality is non-absolute, that in certain circumstances even the strongest adherent to a moral code can admit it (unfairly, to the arguer's eye) restricts our choices. What it actually shows is that we will be much less limited in the future if we only bind ourselves now to our moral code. Asking, for instance, if a girl should be allowed an abortion because she got herself pregnant and having the baby would ruin her life can be circumvented entirely if we teach her to follow a morality in which sex comes after she is in a position to care for the potential child. Asking if I should harm someone to help me escape after I rob a store can be circumvented entirely if I am taught to follow a morality in which I do not rob stores.

Chesterton spoke of moral codes as a set of walls, as did many of his contemporaries. But where they referred to the confining walls of a suffocating moral code, he recognized them as the invigorating walls of a liberating moral code. We are children playing on a cliff-top, he said, and we build walls that we may relieve our fear of falling. Liberate us from these walls, then, and you risk liberating us from our freedom. For the walls shelter and protect us, defining a place where we might with furious passion live our lives to the fullest. But if the walls are removed, so too is the furious passion. We become, instead of children playing lightheartedly in our place of safety, a huddled mass edging back from the cliffs afraid that we might fall.

In this modern time we hear grand and glorious, perhaps vainglorious, exaltations of liberty and freedom, and the speakers of these statements entreat us to move to unbridled liberty, the cure-all, the elixir of life, the silver bullet of their philosophy. But this freedom of action is bound by the necessity of feeling the consequences of these actions. These consequences can be avoided very simply by avoiding the actions that cause them. The morality decried as restrictive and primitive by these champions of liberty does indeed limit what we may do; but by limiting what I may do I free myself of what I must feel.

Freedom costs a buck oh five (or $15 for audio)

On Saturday this past weekend I took the advice given by both some family friends and my old department head and I went on the Freedom Trail. The trail is a walking path throughout the city of Boston that carries one to various sites related to the Revolutionary War (RW), hence the name Freedom Trail.

There are two options: guided tours, led by a person dressed in RW-era clothing; and an audio tour that can be rented and enjoyed at a personal pace. Always feeling embarrassed for people dressed as though they lived 200 years ago, especially if they try to impersonate someone who did (look, Mr. Ben Franklin/George Washington/Samuel Adams impersonator, it’s never funny to ask what this newfangled “electricity” or “telephone” is; it’s just sad and embarrassing), I went with the audio tour for an extra $3. I could have it out for up to 8 hours so long as I dropped it off at the last location (apparently some people give up halfway through; losers), but I walk a little quickly and didn’t feel like wasting an extra $30 for a rushed tour of some of the buildings. My only complaints were 1) I should have brought a water bottle; 2) I shouldn’t have worn flip-flops to walk the 2.5 mile journey (notice a pattern?), and 3) the audio guide had way too much Edward Kennedy, in terms of his talking on the guide or his being talked about on the guide.

To ensure that you can find your way even with the tour, the city has created a path through the sidewalks, a red-line on the sidewalk that leads you along the way. This, in conjunction with a map, keeps one on the path and points out the next audio item. At one point the path goes over a bridge, so I had to take photos of the bridge it went over to show my sister, who has had to drive over one like this. The experience is a little scarier when you are on foot and can feel the grate shaking as cars, trucks, and busses speed by on the “road” portion of the bridge.



I don’t want to go into details too much, because I hope everyone who visits will go on it and enjoy it themselves. I’ll show a few pictures of the sights at the end of the post. Afterwards, I walked most of the way back to the start because (I’m an idiot? Come on, I know you thought it; so did I) I didn’t know where any subway stops were and I wanted to try some suggested food. Accordingly, I went to an area in the harbor where 2 suggestions had been made, the Daily Catch (by my old boss) and the Barking Crab (by my old office-mate, Laura). After flipping a coin, I went to the Daily Catch (sorry, Laura; your places are on for these next few weeks, though). I got to try grilled swordfish for only the second time in my life, and it was even better than I remembered.

So that was Saturday. Sunday I went to church, watched The Dark Knight, and then did some weekend work to make up for a foolish mistake I had made during the week. And that was my weekend.

I can make it anywhere...

If we define "making it" as surviving my visit and having enjoyed myself, then yes, Mr. Sinatra, I can make it anywhere. This past weekend I bussed down to New York City to hang out with a friend and had a great time.
My personal thoughts on city life can generally be summed up with "it's not for me." I've always felt that the city adds complications to life that are best avoided in suburbia, where I've basically always lived. Having spent a few days in that city and adding it to my time in London, though, I'm starting to reevaluate that. I still prefer the freedom that comes with living in suburbia, and I somewhat paradoxically think everyone should live like that, but I can see why people enjoy the city and desire to live there.
Describing what all we did would take more time than I feel like. We hit sights and ate good food and generally enjoyed ourselves. But more than just the things we saw (and yes, photographed), the really fun parts of the trip were hanging out with my friend and some of his. I've long thought people and their interactions with one another are the most important worldly thing, and so meeting new people and getting to know them is always a pleasure (an unexpected sentiment from an introvert, but there it is). Especially nice was getting to meet someone else who will be at NU next year; now I know in advance someone with whom to just relax and have a good time.