What is easy about pie?

Several months ago it briefly looked like the University of Chicago might be on the list of schools to which Archer, our high-school senior, might apply. In the end he did not, but he got far enough to learn the application requirements, which include writing an essay on one of several creatively chosen topics, including, “What if the moon were made of cheese?” and “It’s said that history repeats itself, but what about other disciplines?”

I liked the sound of one prompt so much that I immediately sat down and wrote my own essay on the topic: “What is so easy about pie?” I didn’t show it to him until after college-application season was over, not wanting to unduly influence him.

What is easy about pie?

Nothing! It is a simpleminded lie — the pie lie! — meant, perhaps, to give comfort in a cruel and indifferent world. “Easy as pie!” “Santa Claus!” “American exceptionalism!”

I turn to no less an authority than the great Carl Sagan, who said:

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Does that sound easy to you?

Even granting the existence of the universe — the gravity crushing hydrogen into helium in the heart of the sun, and binding the Earth to its orbit; the vast web of interdependent organisms deriving their life energy, ultimately, from that nuclear fusion; the evolved apes with the means to harvest that life for flour, sugar, cinnamon, butter, and apples — even granting all of that (and that’s a lot to grant), it’s still not easy, as the columnist Megan McArdle pointed out in a recent essay for the Washington Post, “Can America save its national dish?”:

In 2019, more than 50 million Americans used frozen pie crusts, and more than 40 million used the refrigerated kind. Even though store-bought crust is terrible.

Yet commercial bakeries don’t do much better.

Why would we Americans use terrible store-bought pie crust if pie is easy? Why can’t even commercial bakeries get it right if pie is easy? Easy: pie is not easy.

Take special note of McArdle’s title, and now consider Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, which states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” If pie were at all easy, wouldn’t Americans save it? Of course they would; but Betteridge, McArdle, and Sagan say they will not.

Pie is not easy. But then, nothing worthwhile ever is.

2021-and-done

When the year fails to acquit itself well, it is my self-appointed duty to compensate with witticisms and clever observations. (Previously.)

  • Not everything in 2020 was bad.

    Not everything in 2021 will be good.

    Also, it's foolishness to assign credit or blame for events to the calendar.

    Still happy to have 2020 behind us. Happy new year!

    • Continue reading “2021-and-done”

The Santa Corps

You better not pout
You better not cry
You better not shout
I’m telling you why:
The Santa Corps is coming to town

It’s made up of moms
And also of dads
Uncles, aunts, siblings
Students and grads
The Santa Corps is coming to town

It numbers in the billions
With no centralized control
Its geographic center
Is of course at the North Pole

No toy-making elves
No reindeer-drawn sleigh
There’s no need for magic
It just seems that way
The Santa Corps is coming to town

(Previously.)

The Dudley

When I started high school, my dad gave me his old combination lock to use on my locker: a vintage Dudley. It stood out among the identical modern Master locks that most of my classmates had, and I was proud of it.

That lock followed me to college, where it sat mostly unused until I decided, some time in my senior year, that I was getting flabby and needed to start exercising. At that point I began swimming laps regularly, and I used the lock to keep my swim things in a locker at the gym.

I graduated, but I remained at college for work, and I started dating Andrea. (Today, that woman is my wife.) She took more and more of my attention, of course, and I got to the pool less and less often. Still I kept my swim things in the locker there.

At the end of the spring semester, 1989, everyone had to clear out their lockers for the summer. It would have been easy to do − my office was just on the other side of campus − but not yet having learned how to balance work, girlfriend, and other responsibilities and pursuits, I kept putting it off. When I finally got to the pool I discovered I was too late. The lock had been removed and the locker emptied.

I didn’t care about the swimsuit or the towel. But I was devastated to have lost the lock. I thought of it like an heirloom and was consumed with guilt. I live with the echoes of that feeling even today.

The good news is that that lesson is part of what helped me shape up into a more responsible adult.

Trying hard, and failing, not to make a 2020 hindsight joke

Seldom has a year been more unloved
Or with such relish on the trash-heap shoved.
(Previously.)

The spirit of the season

‘Twas the night before Christmas
In, I think, ’82
And for once, the day came
With no things left to do

The gifts had been bought
And been wrapped in advance
To relax and be still
We at last had the chance

We sat in the living room
Candle-lit, calm
And chatted like grownups
Not a boy and his mom

The Christmas decor
Caught the flickering light
It sparkled and gleamed
As we talked through the night

Our tone, as we spoke
Was hushed and subdued
Neither one wishing
To spoil the mood

It’s my perfectest mem’ry
Of how Christmas could be
I wish peace like this
To my friends and fam’ly

Artlessness of the deal

Just under the wire this year.

The sentiment in this song may or may not be true, but that it can at least be seriously entertained is a soothing balm after the one I had to write four years ago.

He better watch out
He better not cry
He better not pout
I’m telling you why:
Donald Trump is going to jail

He’s making a list
Of who’s done him wrong
The DA’s indictment’s
Equally long
Donald Trump is going to jail

He laundered mobster money
Paid bribes, committed fraud
Grabbed Justice by the pussy like
She was just another broad

He might have had lots
Of friends in the joint
But all of his pardons mean
He’s disappoint
Donald Trump is going to jail.

(Previously.)

The theater

One day, while I was working at Transmeta, the company announced its new President and CEO. A few days later, we found out what his first order of business was: to lay most of us off.

This was just fine with me. Going to work for Transmeta was a mistake. It was much too long a commute and, as should have been obvious from the start but was now crystal-clear, the company wasn’t doing very well. In the scant few months I worked there, they neither used me well nor taught me anything useful. In the end, the main things it did for me were to provide some security and stability while Andrea and I awaited the birth of our first child, and allow me to say that I was Linus Torvalds’ coworker for a while.

Anyway, at a surprise all-hands that morning, they asked us all to go back to our offices and await our turn to be called into a room to find out whether or not we still had our jobs. One by one I watched glum coworkers carrying boxes of their belongings out the door. When my turn came and I got the “bad” news – including that my being laid off was accompanied by a generous severance package – it was all I could do to conceal my glee.

I packed up my things, put them in the trunk of my car, and left. But it was still early in the day, and I was now facing weeks or months of homebound childcare as Andrea and I swapped roles and she became our main breadwinner for a while. I figured I’d better take this one last chance for a little time to myself. So on my way home I pulled off 101 to take in a movie at the Century Cinema 16 in Mountain View. It was K-19: The Widowmaker, of which the best that can be said is that it gave Harrison Ford the chance to replicate the dubious feat that his “movie dad,” Sean Connery, had achieved a decade earlier: portraying a Russian submarine commander, unconvincingly.

Fast-forward six years. I wrap up my (much more rewarding) tenure working at Danger when the company decides to sell itself to Microsoft, and I decline to come along for the ride. Danger wasn’t quite as far a commute as Transmeta had been, but it was still far enough that the same movie theater was only a stone’s throw away. So after I surrendered my security badge on my last day, I returned there for old times’ sake. The movie was better this time too: Cloverfield.

Seven years later, and my time at YouTube draws to a close. YouTube is even closer to home, but my work there does occasionally require me to be at the main Google campus in Mountain View – just a few blocks’ walk (or ride on a multicolored Google bike) from the Century Cinema 16. As I figured it, that movie theater helped launch me from Transmeta into a better gig at Danger, and again from Danger to a still-better gig at YouTube. If I broke this new tradition it would clearly be at my peril. So I arranged to be down at Google HQ in my last week and, before leaving for the last time, stopped at the theater for Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck (which was great).

And the theater did not disappoint: soon after, I began what turned out to be the most-rewarding job of my career to date, becoming a blockchain expert at Chain.

Chain lasted in one form and another until January of this year. (That’s another story, for another time.) And although the geography no longer made sense, I wasn’t about to miss a stop at the theater to mark the final day of Pogo. This time I saw 1917. And I once again credit this with landing me my current job at Coinbase.

Lei(a)tmotif

Listen to this beautiful piece of music.

It’s a concert arrangement (as opposed to an actual film-scoring performance) of the theme music that John Williams composed to represent Princess Leia in the original Star Wars. It appeared on the original 1977 double-LP and was the only such piece included. Actual film-score music was sacrificed to make space for it.

I can still remember the vague bafflement I felt listening to this track at age ten, getting my first inklings of both the depths of emotion that existed and that music could move you to them.

It is tender, it is haunting, it is sweeping, it is achingly romantic. It is, in short, everything that Princess Leia herself—pragmatic and hard-edged—is not.

Star Wars is inarguably a towering achievement in film-music composition. So how did John Williams get Princess Leia so wrong?

One possibility is that it’s not Princess Leia’s theme per se, but rather the theme for Luke’s adolescent romantic idea of her.

Another possibility is that George Lucas wanted Princess Leia to be more traditionally feminine than the script or Carrie Fisher’s performance allowed, so the music does the extra lifting required.

But the real reason, I suspect, is that John Williams was working through the recent sudden death of his young wife, Barbara Ruick, and the composition is his public expression of love and grief.

Now listen again. I won’t judge you for choking up.

[Informed in part by The Soundtrack Show podcast.]

Yegging him on

It is a good day when Steve Yegge has a new rant to read.

Yegge is a veteran software engineer whose career runs strangely parallel to mine. We overlapped for a short time at Amazon in the early 2000’s, and a few years later at Google. More recently we both worked for companies enabling mobile payments in Asia. We’re both opinionated bloggers (each of whom has name-dropped the other), we’re both Emacs partisans, and we’re both anguished by how Google’s technical superiority is matched by utter cluelessness in product design and marketing.

Where Yegge outshines me by far is in his entertaining, informative, impassioned, and dead-on-accurate rants. His most famous one is probably his Platforms Rant, which was meant to be Google-internal only but made headlines when it was posted publicly by mistake. In that one he implored Google to invest more effort into making its products, which were increasingly “walled gardens” with inflexible feature sets dictated by competitors, into platforms that would allow others to build onto them, the way Amazon was doing. This rant came in the early days of Google+, when many of us within Google were expressing concern over its product design and the lack of any useful APIs that would allow an open ecosystem to develop around it. Ironically, his rant was a Google+ post, and it was the product design, in part, that led to its being misposted publicly. Also ironically, Google+ is now dead—arguably from the very causes Yegge and I and others identified back then—taking his Platforms Rant post with it. (However, it’s preserved in other forms around the net; just google [yegge platform rant].)

In his latest rant he again improves on one of my own frequent refrains: that Google keeps giving you shiny new things and then keeps yanking them away. Like me, he’s a user of Google Cloud Platform products; like me, he is increasingly frustrated by how often those products require you to rewrite your own code to adapt to Google’s changes; and like me, he is entertaining abandoning Google Cloud Platform for this reason, in favor of the more stable (if less technically excellent) Amazon Web Services platform.

Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You