If I could go back and do things over I would definitely learn to play the tuba.

This is my new favorite thing.

You Are A Cog: Quit Having Fun Edition

The 0.02 seconds you spent looking at this picture
cost America $1.13.

Philosophers for thousands of years have discussed how to measure the value and meaning of life but here in 21st Century America we know that life = how many dollars you contribute to society.  When we are not watching what a Kardashian is doing, we are breaking down your existence into exactly how many dollars and cents you contribute to the GDP.

And, if you ever go out and have fun, especially a little too much fun, say the junk scientists at the Centers For Disease Control, who have run out of actual science to do, you are HURTING AMERICA EXACTLY AS MUCH AS IF YOU JOINED ISIS.

A new CDC "report" "studied" how much excessive drinking cost the economy from 2006-2010. This report has less "science" in it than you would find in a typical baking soda volcano, given that the report admits it's an estimate,  but it's still kind of making the news because, again, people=dollars.

The "study" looked at "excessive alcohol consumption," which it defined as more than 4 drinks in one session, or any drinks by people under 21 or who were pregnant. From there, the "study" gets less science-y. For example, you might ask "How did they know how many drinks were sold?" and you would find out that they estimated it:

The number of standard drinks per state was estimated by multiplying the number of gallons of ethanol sold6by the specific gravity of ethanol (0.79); weight of 1 gallon of water (8.33 pounds); and number of grams in 1 pound (453.59), and then dividing by the number grams of ethanol in a standard drink (14.0).7 The state cost was divided by the number of standard drinks. The per capita costs were calculated by dividing the state cost by the 2010 state population.8

They said SPECIFIC GRAVITY. It MUST BE SCIENCE.  By the way, according to Google

Ethanol is used extensively as a solvent in the manufacture of varnishes and perfumes; as a preservative for biological specimens; in the preparation of essences and flavorings; in many medicines and drugs; as a disinfectant and in tinctures (e.g., tincture of iodine); and as a fuel and gasoline additive (see gasohol).

Which only makes it worse because PREGNANT WOMEN ARE DRINKING PERFUME. Or something. Anyhoo, SCIENCE! And RESULTS!

Results

The estimated cost of excessive drinking in 2010 was $249.0 billion. This equates to $2.05 per drink or $807 per person. Lost productivity comprised 71.9% of costs, health care comprised 11.4%, and other comprised 16.7%. The cost to government was $100.7 billion ($0.83 per drink, $306 per capita

"Estimates" aren't science, but they are "SCIENCE." I am particularly concerned about the "lost productivity," which cost us Americans $179,084,900,000 in 2010 (estimated/science). You might not think that they broke down the lost productivity into categories, but these are SERIOUS SCIENTISTS PEOPLE so of course there is a table:

Lost productivity	179,084.9	57,219.0	134,035.4	13,666.6	2,290.0
Impaired productivity at work	76,858.6	25,440.2	52,614.1	1,924.3	—
Impaired productivity at home	6,218.0	—	4,256.6	205.0	—
Absenteeism	4,619.9	1,529.2	4,619.9	201.5	—
Impaired productivity while in specialty care	1,983.4	656.5	1,358.6	349.1	—
Impaired productivity while in hospital	228.4	75.6	64.1	6.4	2.6

My favorite is "Impaired productivity at home." Hungover stay-at-home moms who were too drunk from Book Club cost our nation 4 billion dollars in 2010. That is a LOT of laundry that didn't get done on Tuesday.  I KNEW letting women vote was a mistake.

They also broke it down by state, with the national average -- remember, averages tell you NOTHING about NOTHING, they are the least useful statistical measure -- being $3,500,000,000 per state, but California was way up at 10 times that, or thirty-five billion dollars lost in 2010. Californians must have been drinking gasoline, because of the drought. WACKY LEFT COASTERS. Plus probably Hollywood liberals and their wine coolers or something.

Here's one thing the study doesn't remark on but which is worth considering: while all you hungover mommy bloggers and government workers were napping at your desks on Thursday morning instead of contributing to the bottom line like God wants you to, COSTING ME MONEY via tax dollars or something, what about the people who MADE ALL THE MONEY THE NIGHT BEFORE?  Is there a study out there on how much binge drinking contributed to last night's economy?  Considering the effects of overtipping to impress the group of girls at the next table, or the effect on the US' jobs index when the entire car of people stops and gets $32 worth of Taco Bell at 3 a.m.? What about the bump in the bottom lines of the companies that make aspirin, '5 Hour Energy' and McDonald's Egg McMuffins? I submit that binge drinking is what is keeping our economy AFLOAT.  Just think: if your wife DIDN'T get too drunk last night to wax the floor today, would she have ordered all that stuff off of Amazon while she was lying in bed not caring if little Abigail was flunking out of 4K? PROBABLY NOT.

Anyway, the important thing is that once again 'science' has created a system of useless charts and bogus estimates to tell you what you're doing wrong with your life.  Plus in the 5 minutes you spent reading this you could've patented something and grown our economy by $12.82 (estimate, 2010 dollars), you worthless slug.

PS While the CDC was doing this they were admitting that their flu vaccine worked only 23% of the time last year but claiming this year it's totally going to be better guys. As soon as they get rid of that hangover.  HEY MARV DOESN'T RETIRE EVERY DAY WE HAD TO MAKE AN APPEARANCE AT THE PARTY AT LEAST.

Picture of the Day

I'll get back to more regular posts in the future. Here's a picture I took while on a ride with Mr F the other day:

Poor writing about someone everyone says is a poor writer, who may or may not be a poor writer but is certainly a jerk.

At this point, with all the griping, I don't know what to think of Jonathan Franzen's writing anymore. I remember liking The Corrections and being disappointed by Freedom. Now everyone says Purity is drivel, everyone other than those who say it's brilliant.

But I do know what I think of him as a person, and he is so awful that I no longer will bother to worry about him as a writer.

All because I happened to read an interview with him in the Financial Times, one I probably wouldn't have even stuck with if it hadn't been for the weirdness of this sentence:

It is nearly 2pm when the door opens and the great American novelist makes a modest entrance. He’s in an old navy fleece.

Is he in an Old Navy (TM) fleece? Or is he in a fleece that is a very dark shade of  blue and also appears to be aging, made by some indeterminate manufacturer?

The interview gets weirder from there.

the waiter, evidently excited to be given something to do at last, is bearing down on us, pad in hand. “I would love some still water if I may, please,” says Franzen, all politeness and diffidence. “And maybe something along the lines of a Diet Coke?”

A quick search for "still water" on the Internet finds nothing to suggest what kind of drink it is. The interview took place at The Gore Hotel, where the menu does not have "still water" but does have "Judy Garland" tea, which is tea with rose petals. 

After some griping about the 1 percenters and New York restaurants, it's pointed out that Franzen is a 1%er himself.

“I am literally, in terms of my income, a 1 per center, yes,” he says, his eyes not on me but on the empty table next to us. “I spend my time connected to the poverty that’s fundamental to mankind, because I’m a fiction writer.”

Do you know where the 1% starts? $400,000. Only the top 1% of Americans earn $400,000 or more per year. I once wrote a post that suggested that nobody should be allowed to earn more than $200,000 per year. I stand by that.

The interviewer notes that Franzen writes about wealthy white people. Franzen fights back by pointing out that the interviewer is quoting Flannery O'Connor.  Apparently Franzen has won this round.

While I smart, he goes on: “I’m a poor person who has money.”

The mystery of the fleece is solved:

Franzen doesn’t spend anything. The fleece he is wearing is 10 years old. He doesn’t like shopping and hates waste. Upstairs in the fridge in his hotel room are the leftovers from meals, all of which he will eat in due course. His only luxury is expensive [sic] for birdwatching.

His other "only" luxuries are the cleaner he overpays.

“I don’t like to hire people to do work that I can do,” he says. So that means he does his own dusting in the New York apartment he shares with his girlfriend? Franzen looks slightly shifty. “We do have a cleaner, although even that I feel some justification because we pay her way more than is standard and she’s a nice Filipino woman who we treat very well and we’re giving her work.”

In America today you can justify anything by saying it creates jobs. Weirdly, overpaying the Filipino maid convinces the interviewer of Franzen's poor-man bona fides:

In a way this middle-class guilt is sweet.

The man is worth $10,000,000. 

Asked about whether he understands why people hate him, Franzen gives the classic jerk answer:

“Well, I have to acknowledge the possibility that I’m simply a horrible person.”

People who tell you upfront that they are horrible people appear to think that somehow excuses their being horrible people. It does not. It makes you worse.

How horrible is Jonathan Franzen? So horrible that he feels it was unfair of people to take it the wrong way when he said that we should just go ahead and stop even trying to do anything about climate change:

He tells me about a piece he wrote in the New Yorker in March about climate change and bird conservation in which he managed to alienate everyone, including bird watchers. “I pointed out that 25 years after humanity collectively tried to reduce its carbon emissions, they reached an all-time high last year; further pointed out that the people who say we still have 10 years to keep the average temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius are, charitably, deluded or, uncharitably, simply lying. And, therefore, maybe we should rethink whether we want to be putting such a large percentage of our energies into what is essentially a hopeless battle.”

When I was a self-satisfied smug jerk in college, in 1993, I had an 'environmental dynamics' class where I did a report on how there should be more, not less, beef cattle. I thought I was shocking and provocative and etc etc. I was 24 and naive. Jonathan Franzen has no similar excuses.

Jonathan Franzen doesn't like the internet. If he did, he could have quickly found (as I did) this chart showing that in some years our carbon emissions actually shrank. Who knows how bad things would be without the measures taken? Also: saying we haven't stopped it don't bother trying technically means that everything from speeding to cocaine to murder should be legal.   "Maybe we should rethink whether we want to try to stop murder what with the way people are still murdering each other." -- Jonathan Franzen, thinker.

Other writers, maybe unaware of the fact that Jonathan Franzen thinks the planet is doomed so why bother, hate him for more practical reasons:

I ask if he saw the review of Purity in the Financial Times , which called it “middlebrow”. He says he never reads what people write about him. “I don’t know what ‘middlebrow’ even means. I think it’s threatening to commercial writers that someone who’s selling well is also getting literary respect, and it’s threatening to literary writers who don’t sell that somebody who’s literary also is getting commercial success.”

Other things Jonathan Franzen hates: agriculture.

 he explains how the agrarian revolution was a mistake and argues we were happier as hunter-gatherers. 

Can that thought be conflated into modern-day terms, in a confusing way that will quickly be abandoned? Let's see:

With the internet, he implies, the same may apply. Is he really saying people were happier before the internet? He ducks the question and says instead: “I wasn’t. But I didn’t start feeling happy, really, until my forties.”

I lived in pre-Internet and post-Internet times. I do not miss the pre-Internet days. I like having information at my fingertips, even if sometimes that information is "Man, is Jonathan Franzen a douche."

Consider the next paragraph, right after Franzen has just said he didn't start feeling happy, "really" until his forties:

Happiness for Franzen is slightly problematical. He has often said the best writing comes from discomfort. He has had his share of pain — he has referred to the unhappiness of his 14-year marriage to writer Valerie Cornell — so I wonder, if he had always been as happy as now, would he . . . He cuts me off. “I was,” he says. “I was a smiling, smart, healthy, straight, Midwestern American male who went to decent public schools, what we call public schools, and an excellent college. I had everything it took.”

So he was happy? Or he just had everything you need to be happy but still wasn't? Before you can ponder that too much, you get into his guilt about his parents:

In a way, the thing I feel worst about is writing about my parents, even though I did all my writing after they were dead. It has more to do with their not having had an education that would have enabled them to appreciate what I was doing and why I was doing it.”

The thing Jonathan Franzen regrets most is that his parents were too stupid to appreciate the things he was writing about them and why.

The waiter brings him a bowl of fruit salad so large he looks at it in dismay, as if fearing the inevitable waste.
“Would you like a little bit of this? Even just one bite would help,” he pleads, shovelling fruit on to my plate.

I would punch him right now.

This part I don't even get, other than to suspect (the way I always do around everybody) that somehow I am the butt of the joke:

I wonder if he would have written anything quite as dark if he had children himself?
Franzen sighs. “I’m sure everything would’ve been different. Maybe I would’ve been retired and working on a historical novel about the civil war and teaching fiction at Portland State University if I had had kids.”
I get the reproach, but it’s only later that I get the snobbery. 

Then you get into the really bad stuff:

There was a time, though, when Franzen wanted to have kids. According to the Guardian, for a while he considered adopting an Iraqi orphan so he could get to know young people. Was that true? “The story was the work of a nasty personage,” he says, then tells me what really happened. “There came a point when I was struggling with my fourth novel and I suspected the reason was that I had lost touch with the world, that I came from a strong family, and maybe I was meant to be a family man. But it’s a long way from that to adopting a war orphan to study young people. It fed into what everyone wanted to believe, which is I am an absolutely horrible person.”

So did Jonathan Franzen consider adopting an Iraqi war orphan so he could connect with young people? Yes. He readily admits it in this interview with The Guardian, but says that the idea only lasted about six weeks. Now he appears to be saying that someone is just spreading terrible lies about him. Only they are not lies, and the 'someone' is himself.

The interviewer does not point out that Franzen himself spread the story about Franzen's adoption plan, instead lobbing him a softball that Franzen somehow still takes to a terrible place:

He seems so weary of all this that I ask if he finds fame a burden. Has success made him less nice? No; he says it has made him less angry, and much less envious. 

The thing is, there's really nobody out there to envy, for Jonathan Franzen:

These days if anyone else writes a good novel, he doesn’t feel upset; he is glad. The only trouble is that it hardly ever happens.

The interviewer reminds him of how his 2003 girlfriend had written an essay on how jealous she was of the success of The Corrections.  Franzen, had their roles been reversed, wouldn't have been so upset, but only because women are beneath him:

 If the boot had been on the other foot, Franzen says he would have felt differently, partly because he roots so seriously for “whoever I’m living with” but also because he is usually only competitive with men.

Other things Franzen hates: using then as a conjunction:

He has written a whole essay on the evils of “then” as a conjunction, which strikes me as entirely baffling.
I try out a sentence: “Jonathan Franzen leaned forward, then he leaned back again.” What’s wrong with that? “That’s just a run-on sentence,” he says. “What you will find in bad English prose is, ‘He leaned forward then spoke again.’ ”
Sounds OK to me, I say. “Read my essay,” he says.

The takeaway:

Lunch is nearly over, and there is one more thing I want to ask him. He has said that all decent novelists are changed by every book they write. So how did Purity change him? He stares at the table for so long with his eyes closed that I wonder if he has gone to sleep.

Seriously. I am not a violent person but I'd punch him again. I wasn't going to put in how he changed but then I decided that you pretty much have to read it:

“How I changed was I realised that I really am a fiction writer, I don’t have all that many years, and that I’ve got to find a way to write another couple of novels.”

I really did like The Corrections, but I don't even want to read Purity. Not only was Freedom such a colossal dropoff from The Corrections that I couldn't really conceive of reading his next book, for fear it would be so terrible it would suck pleasure from other, better books I've read, but after reading this article, I don't think I could suffer through the book, lest I start counting how many thens were in it, and keep having to picture Jonathan Franzen, head bowed over his 'still water' with a weariness borne only by those people so poor as to have enough money to hire a cleaning lady.