My Theory On U.S. Presidential Elections

Have I told everyone my theory on presidential elections?

You’re not going to like it

Are you ready?

It’s entirely about charisma.

To make sure we’re clear on what charisma is, I’ll use the definition of the player characteristic from the first version of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons:

“Charisma is the measure of the character’s combined physical attractiveness, persuasiveness and personal magnetism”

In the U.S. because of our two-party system almost all presidential elections are between two candidates (1992 being a notable exception). In a two-candidate election the candidates will quickly stake out policy positions that more or less evenly divide the electorate. They want to differentiate themselves, so any open policy space will get filled in by one or the other.

So the only way to differentiate them is their charisma, which in an evenly-split electorate, is always enough of a factor to win 51% to 49% or whatever almost 50-50 split it turns out to be.

Let’s look at past elections:

1960 – Kennedy more charismatic than Nixon
1964 – Johnson more charismatic than Goldwater
1968 – Nixon more charismatic than Humphrey
1972 – Nixon more charismatic than McGovern
1976 – Carter more charismatic than Ford
1980 – Reagan more charismatic than Carter
1984 – Reagan more charismatic than Mondale
1988 – Bush more charismatic than Dukakis
1992 – Clinton more charismatic than Bush (and Perot)
1996 – Clinton more charismatic than Dole
2000 – Bush more charismatic than Gore
2004 – Bush more charismatic than Kerry
2008 – Obama more charismatic than McCain
2012 – Obama more charismatic than Romney
2016 – Trump more charismatic than Clinton

This also only applies during the TV age, so I’m not going back any further.

I’m sure there will be those that debate my charisma ratings. Go for it.

I can see you might argue Clinton was more charismatic than Trump, and that Nixon was pretty frickin’ uncharismatic in general.

I’m also completely aware that the popular vote doesn’t determine the winner and that two candidates have won while losing the popular vote. These same factor plays out at the winner-take-all electoral college state level.

But that’s it.

See you in 2020.

Blade Runner 2049

When I saw the original Blade Runner in 1982, it was the summer before my senior year in high school. I don’t recall very much about my initial reaction but I do remember not being blown away by it. I’m guessing I just didn’t understand it and probably was a little bored. When I was in college from 1983 until 1987 I discovered science fiction in a big way – I read Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, for instance, and started seeing more adventurous movies like Eraserhead, Brazil and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I don’t remember when I saw Blade Runner again but I’m sure I’d seen it a bunch of times on video by the time the Director’s cut came out in 1992. I saw that on the big screen in Seattle at the Egyptian Theater. I don’t remember if it was raining that night but let’s say that it was.

By then I’d become a huge fan. Blade Runner is both my favorite movie of all time and the movie I’ve seen the most times. I’ve enjoyed seeing the different versions and thinking about the whole is-Deckard-a-replicant issue, as well as comparing it to Dick’s source novel. The music and the visuals are legitimately incredible. It’s not a perfect movie – the love scene between Deckard and Rachel still makes me laugh out loud about how ridiculous it is. And Harrison Ford definitely approaches the point of blowing it by making you wonder how such an lunkhead could be a blade runner at all (although dropping the botched voiceover did help in that respect). The rest of the cast is pretty much perfect, however. And it has some humor mixed in – Taffy Lewis’ character, Leon’s questions in the first scene, J. F. Sebastian’s creations, Batty’s in-fight witticisms (‘that hurt’), and Bryant’s over-the-top noir cop parody. I think the humor is critical because otherwise the movie could have been downright depressing. The best dark movies, like Trainspotting, Dr. Strangelove and Fight Club, effectively use humor as balance.

Now comes Blade Runner 2049. After seeing Ridley Scott’s Prometheus I was seriously worried about the sequel. Prometheus was a frickin’ mess that I felt ignored way too many scientific facts to be believable. It looked pretty good but was sloppily written and was poorly connected to the Alien movies, which it purported to somewhat explain. I didn’t see Alien Covenant. When I read that Scott wasn’t going to direct Blade Runner 2049 and that Hampton Fancher was part of the writing team, I felt a little better about it.

It is easy to say that the sequel is too long but that in and of itself isn’t the problem. Christopher Nolan has made a career out of long, gripping movies. The overarching plot of a broken society with replicants and humans in conflict can easily support an epic movie. But it was the length combined with the other problems that ultimately left me disappointed in Blade Runner 2049. Visually it is indeed remarkable. The flights over the city and the outlying areas were totally convincing, and I was equally convinced by any exterior scene in the movie, just like in the original. Interiors, not as much. The original brought the dirt and decay from outside into the inside locations, and where there wasn’t decay like in Tyrell’s office and bedroom, it still felt like there was dust in the air. The interiors in the sequel felt more antiseptic and less interesting. I didn’t get the contrast.

And there wasn’t that all-important sense of humor. Maybe I need to see it again but I can’t remember one funny line in the entire movie. There was no dialog worthy of great literature like in the first movie – ‘Tears in the rain’, ‘It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker’, ‘If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes’, and so on. I think they thought that Niander Wallace might supply something like that but I didn’t feel it.

More? The original didn’t traffic in pointless future tech that was only designed to look cool in a movie and wouldn’t function in a future reality – a new replicant dropping out of a plastic bag on the floor and computer memory in a glass marble, for example. Other logical flaws bothered me, too. Where do the jukebox and holographic stage show get their power? What do the bees feed off of? Where did the dog come from, and was it real or a replicant?

The music left me cold. It was certainly dramatic, and I was happy it avoided the cliche of classical music movie soundtracks, but compared to Vangelis’ subtly dramatic work in the original it was like a sledgehammer.

Finally, the plot was interesting and had some twists to it, but in the end it was just too complex. The awesome thing about Blade Runner is that the plot wasn’t really that complicated. There was so much complexity in other aspects of the movie – sets, characters, psychology – that an intricate plot would have overburdened things. You start with escaped replicants landing on earth and their conflict with Deckard’s blade runner spans the whole movie. It is like a Raymond Chandler novel set in a dystopian future. It’s got the color of slimeballs, crazy cops, beautiful and dangerous women, and a desperate criminal mastermind bent on either life or revenge but it’s a linear plot that they all hang off. The plot of the sequel is also essentially a mystery but a much more ambitious one. It might have worked if you’d fixed all the other problems I described, but with them it can’t.

In the end, purposefully or not, the creators of Blade Runner 2049 ended up going down the same path as the original – it was an attempt at a blockbuster sci-fi epic that is too long and complex to please the mainstream audience that would allow it to turn a profit in its theatrical run. It’s a little ironic that I, a huge fan of the original, didn’t fall in love with the sequel. Maybe time will change my mind in this case, too.

h. p. lovecraft mini-reviews volume IV

all right, sorry about the break there, read a bunch of other books there for a while. we are now in the homestretch; these are the last five stories in the book.  to catch up, see volumes I, II, and III.

xxix. ‘the shadow out of time’ (1936) – this one was also intriguing because it takes place outside of the usual new england milieu, in australia.  has some fairly good descriptions of the ruins and a fair climax but in the end a middle-of-the-road piece.  **1/2

xxx. ‘the haunter of the dark’ (1936) – told second hand upon the narrator reading diaries of the deceased true protagonist, so suffers a bit from that distance.  no truly seen evil force here, so that again is a bit of detriment.  still, the descriptions of providence and the ruined church do have some power and there is an impressive list of books found in the belfry (necronomicon, kulten, etc.).  **1/2

xxxi. ‘the thing on the doorstep’ (1937) – has probably the best opening line from lovecraft’s entire oeuvre: ‘it is true that i have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and i hope to show by this statement that i am not a murderer.’  what follows is pretty good, tense stuff, and ties into the ‘the shadow over innsmouth’ with derby’s sinister wife coming from there.  it is well-served by a first-person telling and probably suffers most from a lack of detailed descriptions of horrors.  ***

xxxii. ‘the case of charles dexter ward’ (1941) – one of lovecraft’s longest works, and it takes a while to get going.  saddled with a perpetual lovercraft problem in that large portions are told as third person rememberances.  but the last 30 or so pages do redeem a lot of the previous turgidity – dr. willet’s exploration of ward’s lab and other secrets turns into a successive unraveling of multiple horrors and mysteries, with plenty of twists up until the end.  ***1/2

xxxiii. ‘the dream-quest of unknown kadath’ (1943) – i was prepared for this to be simarillion-like in its tedium, as that’s what i remember from reading it the first time.  but it does contain some great descriptions and interesting tie-ins.  randolph carter meets up with the disappeared richard pickman, for instance, and gets his bacon saved by the cats from ulthar.  there’s some good battle scenes with ghouls, toad-things and night gaunts, and some reasonably cool descriptions of flying through dream-land and space on the way to kadath, which he eventually reaches with the help of the crawling chaos, nyarlathotep.  but, ultimately a little long and tedious.  **1/2

my horse racing scheme

if you read my previous post on this topic then you know how horse racing odds and payouts work. the more a horse is bet, the lower the odds, and vice versa.

now, how does one make money at horse racing? obviously this like all other forms of organized gambling in which the odds are stacked against the player and for the house.  the takeout for horse racing, at least for win bets, is somewhere in the range of 15-20%, depending on the track. so this means that if you bet at random, you’ll steadily lose 15-20% of your bankroll until you have nothing. fun.

now of course, nobody bets at random, but unless you have some idea of what you are doing, you might as well be. there is no end of stuff written by and about people who think they can predict who will win horse races, using any number of methods. speed figures, pace, bounce, appearance, etc. you could probably read 1,000’s of books on the subject.

i say they’re all bullshit. seriously. in my opinion, any attempt to predict the future performance of a horse from their past performance is doomed to fail because there’s just not enough data for any particular horse. every track is different. every field of horses is different. i think anybody who claims they can do it is relying on the human mind’s ability to find patterns and draw connections, regardless of whether there is any true cause and effect.

obviously, this is just my opinion. there could well be a few people who are so knowledgable about horse racing and go to the track so many times that they can become very intuitive about outcomes. maybe.

it’s also made harder by the fact that the odds adjust based on who bets on what horse.  so there is no easy money because if there are things one person sees in a past performance, more than likely other people will see it, too, and then the odds will drop.

so now that i’ve painted that bleak picture, let me introduce my take on this: horse racing is truly unpredictable.  that’s why people still bet on long-shot horses; those horses sometimes win.  and even prohibitive favorites don’t always win.  but again, the odds on long-shots or favorites typically are good predictors of the true odds of those horses winning.  now, that may be true in general, but is it always true?

i began thinking about the possibility that some races might be more unpredictable than others.  if there were some races where the odds of the horses were not very close to the true probability of a horse winning, that might be an opportunity.  if you knew when favorites would be less likely than their odds to win, or long-shots more likely to win than their odds, then you could tailor a betting strategy to take advantage of this.

i’ve followed horse racing, with varying degrees of dedication, since 1988 or so.  i started by going to the free state raceway in laurel, maryland.  it was a harness racing track that ran at night, and is now shopping mall.  then i started going to the thoroughbred track in laurel and then to pimlico in baltimore.  i actually didn’t take betting that seriously, it was more for the atmosphere and diversion.  the track was a good place to go to see a cross-section of society.  there were nicely-dressed folks there along with the working class people, all more or less peacefully coexisting (except for the knife fight i saw at pimlico once, but that’s another story).

it was also a good opportunity to reconnect with some of my college friends since they lived up and down the east coast.  we could go various big races like the preakness in baltimore, the belmont stakes in new york, and follow the kentucky derby and the breeder’s cup races on TV or via simulcast.  one thing i began to notice over the years is that there were some shocking upsets in some of these races.  in the 1993 breeder’s cup classic, for instance, a horse called arcangues won at odds of 133-1.  in the belmont stakes, lemon drop kid won in 1999 at odds of 29.75-1, commendable won in 2000 at 18.8-1, sarava won in 2002 at 70.25-1, birdstone won in 2004 at 36-1, da’ tara won in 2008 at 38.5-1, and ruler on ice won in 2011 at 24.75-1.

it’s true that long shots win in all types of races, but if you could predict in advance in which types of races they were more likely to win, then you could have an advantage.  so i submit that races like the triple crown and breeder’s cup are like this.  why would that be?  for one thing, these are races where lots of non-experts bet – that means the normal expectation that the consensus of all the betters to be right in judging the likelihood of success will less likely to be true.  also, these races bring together horse from all over the country, and the world, so that there is even less evidence to compare horses than usual (in which horses usually run at the same track and may have faced the same horses before).  also, races like the kentucky derby and the belmont are run at distances that are not common, giving people even less evidence to use in predicting outcomes.  for example, the belmont stakes is run at 1 1/2 miles, pretty much the only race on dirt at that distance.  lastly, a lot of these races are run with very large fields; in some cases as many as 20 horses compete, which can only lead to more chaos and unpredictability.

so my scheme is simple.  bet on all long-shot horses with odds over a certain threshold.  i have no claim on being able to pick which long shot might win, so i’ll bet them all.  based on over a decade of empirical observations, i’ve decided to limit myself to the kentucky derby, the belmont stakes, and all the breeder’s cup races.  you might wonder why i don’t include the preakness in this.  i’ve observed that a long shot rarely wins that race – probably due to it being at shorter distance and generally having a smaller field than the kentucky derby.

i started with $200 before this years kentucky derby.  there were 10 horses with odds of 20-1.  as we now know, none of those horses won, so i am out $20 so far.  i’ll keep everyone posted as this progresses.  the next race will be the belmont stakes on june 9th.

note (5/9/22) – i did not keep up with this as promised, and obviously the results of the 2022 kentucky derby are relevant to this discussion.

h. p. lovecraft mini-reviews volume III

ok, now we’e getting to the longer pieces so these posts might become more infrequent.  if you’re catching up, see volumes I and II.

xix. ‘cool air’ (1928) – unremarkable although i suppose it is a good example of his non-cthulhu mythos works.  not much of a shock (he’s dead!) and too short and simple to be more than a taste.  no real back story on how the doctor was animated after death either.  * 1/2

xx. ‘the shunned house’ (1928) – generally pretty slow but is archetypal house-on-a-graveyard detective story which spawned countless other books and movies (‘poltergeist’, ‘the ring’, etc.).  and with a little bit of scary detail at the end it turns out it’s more than just a normal grave.  **1/2

xxi. ‘the silver key’ (1929) – great opening line: ‘when randolph carter was thirty, he lost the key to the gate of dreams.’  slight story but nice precursor to modern stuff like ‘inception’ in exploring the reality of dreams (the silver key is like the token in that movie?).  **

xxii. ‘the dunwich horror’ (1929) – another classic, about the warped whateley’s of dunwich, especially the horrible spawn, wilbur.  great stuff about wilbur researching stuff from the necronomicon in university libraries, and trying to steal it.  the trio of monster fighters armed with spells, guns and improvised devices was no doubt a real inspiration for the ‘call of cthulhu’ role-playing game.  some of the descriptions of whateley and the monster are gripping: ‘… deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye …’ and ‘foetid greenish-yellow ichor’. ****1/2

xxiii. ‘the whisperer in the darkness’ (1931) – overly long and sometimes boring tale of alien invaders.  told largely through correspondences, so loses a lot of punch.  cool how it took advantage of the discovery of pluto in 1930 by having the aliens come from a planet yog-sothoth outside the orbit of neptune.  presumably pluto was discovered before he wrote this, but cool to imagine how he might have predicted it.  uses phrase ‘fear and loathing’ before hunter s. thompson (although apparently it was used before lovecraft, too). ***

xxiv. ‘the strange high house in the mist’ (1931) – slight but interesting with some effective descriptions of craggy peaks and a house on a deserted mountaintop.  contains mention of dream world of kadath. **1/2

xxv. ‘dreams in the witch-house’ (1933) – too long and repetitive but with some creepy parts about kidnappings and murder by a witch and her familiar.  kind of cool how the protagonist is a miskatonic university student who skips class a lot and gets bad grades because of his obsession with the witch legends in arkham, and his renting of a room where earlier horrors supposedly took place.  lovecraft’s first mention of the book ‘unaussprechlichen kulten’, a necronomicon-like tome of occult history.  interestingly, conan author robert e. howard conceived ‘kulten’ and lovecraft borrowed it.  in the dream world the narrator encounters barrel-like creature with tentacles, not unlike the dunwich horror, or the old ones (described in ‘at the mountains of madness’). ***

xxvi. ‘from beyond’ (1934) – more like some of his earlier work: short with horror elements, but not well-delivered compared to later works.  nice detail about pineal gland being a vestigial sensory organ, and points for great name of protagonist: tillinghast. **

xxvii. ‘through the gates of the silver key’ (1934) – another tale of randolph carter, co-written with e. hoffmann price.  it’s sadly too long and long-winded to produce much excitement.  ends with him revealing himself in non-human form after a long period in an alternate universe.  it’s too bad lovecraft couldn’t create better tales around his one recurring character. **

xxviii. ‘at the mountains of madness’ (1936) – an amazingly ambitious and longer tale in which lovecraft takes his characters out of their usual new england setting and into the vast antarctic, to spectacular effect.  the first half is a fast-paced, suspenseful adventure leading up to the horrifying discovery of a dead group of great old ones by a polar expedition from miskatonic university.  lovecraft makes great use of the narrator’s point of view in that news of the discovery is heard over the radio, but then the communication goes silent.  this leads the narrator, and the reader, to nervously wait for details until they can catch up with the advance party.  then two men then venture further up into the mountains to explore a lost city, but unfortunately the narrative loses a lot of steam in a long-winded history lesson about the old ones deduced from murals and carvings found in the city.  it’s not without it’s interesting details, such as the battle on earth between the old ones and cthulhu and his ilk.  an entertaining comment is that the old ones, after the ice age, began spending winters underwater and summers in antarctica, like snowbirds.  it also tells the story of how the olds ones created the blob-like shoggoths as slaves, with unintended consequences.  this history is narrated for dozens of pages before things ramp up again in a mad concluding section, a messy coming together of the old ones, giant cave dwelling penguins and the awful shoggoths.  the shoggoths drive one man so mad he starts reciting boston/cambridge subway station names (south station, park street, kendall, central, harvard, etc.) based on the terrible resemblance in size and speed of the shoggoths to subway trains.  can’t wait to ride the red line in boston again and think about this.  lovecraft also has a clever tie-in to edgar allen poe’s antarctic tale ‘the narrative of arthur gordon pym of nantucket’, using cries heard in that story as sounds made by the old ones.  in other attempts to make the nightmare world seem more real the appearance of the old ones are compared to paintings by real-life artist and author clark ashton smith and the mountain landscapes are compared to works by artist nicholas roerich.  he also makes reference to the main character in ‘whisperer in the darkness’, wilmarth, another arkham resident, connecting his stories together.  while it could have been a stone cold masterpiece had it maintained the breakneck pace throughout, it is still an amazing piece of taut horror and adventure fiction. ****1/2

horse-racing betting – how it works

the popularity of horse racing is really taking off.

ok, that’s not true.  see this picture i took the last time i was in new york city:

horse racing, the sport of non-lazy gamblers, doesn’t seem to be attracting too many new fans.  the most popular horse races, such as the kentucky derby and the preakness, are those that combine day-long drinking, concerts, and extra long waits between races.  i myself haven’t been to the track in years.

but regardless of horse racing’s future, one of the most interesting aspects of it is how the wagering works.  i’d bet that most people, even those who’ve been to the track, don’t know how the odds and winnings are calculated.  the most simple bet is to just bet on a horse to win the race.  you bet a certain amount, and if the horse wins, you get back the amount you bet, plus some extra.  the amount extra is determined by the odds.  if the odds are 1-1, then you’ll win $1 for every $1 you bet if the horse wins.  so if you bet $1 on 1-1 horse, you’ll get back $2, $1 in winnings and the $1 you bet.  if the odds are 2-1, you’ll get back $3 for every $1.  5-1 returns $6, 20-1 returns $21, etc.

but how are the odds calculated?  if you’ve ever been to the track, you’ll have noticed that the odds change over time.  the winning payouts are calculated based on the final odds, not the odd at the time the bet was made.

once i’ve explained how the odds are calculated, it will be obvious why they change over time.  odds are based on how much money is wagered on each horse.  horses on which a lot of people bet will have low odds (like 2-1) and horses on which few people bet will have high odds (like 20-1).

let’s say that $1,000 was bet on a race with four horses, Whipping Boy, Sidney V, Lefty and Doofus:

• Whipping Boy: $100
• Sidney V: $150
• Lefty: $300
• Doofus: $450

so when one of those horses wins, the $1,000 is paid back out to the winning bettors.  If Whipping Boy wins, then $1,000 is paid out for $100 wagered, or $10 for each $1 bet.  That’s $9 in winnings and $1 to return the wager, so the odds are 9-1.  The odds for all the horses are:

• Whipping Boy: 9-1
• Sidney V: 5.66-1 ($1,000 paid for $150 bet, or $6.66 for each $1 bet)
• Lefty: 2.33-1 ($1,000 paid for $300 bet, or $3.33 for each $1 bet)
• Doofus: 1.22-1 or ($1,000 paid for $450 bet, or $2.22 for for each $1 bet)

now these numbers assume that all the money that is bet is paid back out.  this obviously never happens, except at kids’ birthday parties (your kids have betting at their birthday parties, right?).  so what really happens is that the track takes a percentage out before paying the money back out.  if the track takes 10%, or $100, then the odds will be:

• Whipping Boy: 8-1 ($900 paid for $100 bet, or $9 for each $1 bet)
• Sidney V: 5-1 ($900 paid for $150 bet, or $6 for each $1 bet)
• Lefty: 2-1 ($900 paid for $300 bet, or $3 for each $1 bet)
• Doofus: 1-1 or ($900 paid for $450 bet, or $2 for for each $1 bet)

and this explains why the odds change over time.  the odds are constantly recalculated as people make more bets.  so if more people bet on a horse as the race nears, the odds on that horse will go down, and the odds on the other horses will go up.

the genius of this system is that the track never loses money, since they always take their percentage before the payout and odds are calculated.  it also makes it so that the general consensus of the betting public on who will win is reflected in the odds of the horses.  it’s generally thought that bettors as a group can predict pretty well the true probability of a horse winning.

there are lots of other types of bets at the racetrack, but they all follow the same principle.  if you bet an exacta, which is betting on the winning and second-place horse in a single bet, then each combination of two horses (in order) has a separate pool of wagered money, and the payout for each combination is calculated in the same way.  same thing for trifecta (first three horses) and superfecta (first four horses).  for place (you win if the horse wins or comes in second) or show (you win if the horse wins or comes in second or third), it’s similar, except that the pool is split between two or three horses, lowering the payout.

hope that helps.  my next post will talk about some ideas i have for beating the system, without all the tedious research that real handicappers do.

h. p. lovecraft mini-reviews volume II

i am slowly making progress through my h. p. lovecraft collection.  here are some more reviews.   if you missed the first set they are here.  ratings are * through *****.

xi. ‘under the pyramids’ (1924) – ghost-written by lovecraft for harry houdini and is written as an autobiographical episode.  it’s kind of cool in that it could be read as true until it gets towards the end and gets weird.  it meanders a bit at the beginning with extended descriptions of egyptian tourism.  but it hits stride when the protagonist becomes trapped far beneath the pyramids and has to escape.  a scary conclusion includes origin of an egyptian icon.  **1/2

xii. ‘the unnameable’ (1925) – most interesting because it’s told from a writer’s point of view, but in general brief and not very scary.  *

xiii. ‘in the vault’ (1925) – short tale of undertaker terrorized by mistreated corpse.  nice irony and gruesome details. **

xiv. ‘the outsider’ (1926) – well-told, uniquely, from a monster point of view.  good punch at end.  ***.

xv. ‘the horror at red hook’ (1927) – atypical non-new england setting (brooklyn).  has satisfying beneath-the-streets underworld ending and nice build-up.  uses martense (family name from ‘the lurking fear’) as a street name.  ***

xvi. ‘the colour out of space’ (1927) – also atypical in that there’s no physical creature, but an alien force that comes on a meteor and poisons a rural farm.  builds slowly but reaches some good peaks of horror towards the end.  uses term ‘blasted heath’ repeatedly which is a good turn of phrase but turns out to be from shakespeare’s ‘macbeth’.  ***

xvii. ‘pickman’s model’ (1927) – he’s hitting his stride now.  set in boston so has some well-known settings such as the subway and north end.  more crisp style than some earlier works and great surprise ending.  although he should have chosen a title that didn’t telegraph the ending so much.  ****

xviii. ‘the call of cthulhu’ (1928) – deservedly classic tale, told in three parts.  the first two are introductory and set the stage for the third which contains actual contact with the titular creature.  only weakness is that the narrator is telling all the material second-hand.  interesting to see how similar the island rising out of the sea is similar his first story, ‘dagon’.  description of boat collision is classic: ‘… stench of a thousand opened graves …’. ****1/2

h. p. lovecraft mini-reviews volume I

it’s been a while since i’ve read any h. p. lovecraft.  i mentioned him to my son but thought i’d better preview them before setting a 12-year-old loose on them.  so i bought an anthology and got down to business.  here are some mini-reviews and ratings, the first in series.  the stories in the anthology are in chronological order, so you can see how he developed from his earlier, shorter efforts to the longer, more complicated ones.  this is the first 10, with ratings (* to *****)

i. ‘dagon’ (1919) – short, effective, with ‘too-terrible-to-live-with’ first person ‘dies-at-the-end-by-his-own-hand.’  good precursor to later ‘call of cthulhu’.  amazingly accomplished first story.  ***

ii. ‘the statement of randolph carter’ (1920) – short, first-person, not that effective.  about unseen underground creature, who can speak english (?) with a telephone conversation between carter and doomed friend under a graveyard.  *

iii. ‘the doom that came to sarnath’ (1920) – third person tale of a city built on lake, destroyed by civilization they dispatched a century before.  good descriptions, not much suspense or surprise. **

iv. ‘the cats of ulthar’ (1920) – short fable about cats and gypsies with somewhat gruesome but predictable ending. *1/2

v. ‘the nameless city’ (1921) – first person journey into ruined city with underground inhabitants.  interesting with some suspense but not a huge payoff.  first mention of abdul alhazred.  **

vi. ‘herbert west – reanimator’ (1922) – good creepy stuff with decapitated living bodies and ending with a graveyard coming to life.  marred by serial format (published in episodes in magazine issues); each section starts with too much exposition and re-telling of events from earlier chapters.  **1/2

vii. ‘the music of erich zann’ (1922) – short but quite good.  great mystery of street he can’t find any more and world outside window that changes when crazy music is played by title character.  monster not seen but works.  ***

viii. ‘the lurking fear’ (1923) – somewhat long-winded and meadering but with a reasonably creepy payoff.  kind of confusing plot, too.  also originally published in episodes but not nearly as annoying at ‘herbert west’.  **1/2

ix. ‘the hound’ (1924) – short, scary, but not particularly imaginative.  **

x. ‘the rats in the walls’ (1924) – nice violent conclusion and reasonably good lead up.  marred by black cat named ‘nigger-man’ being referred to constantly.  **1/2

the viral elevator fallacy

the people at the office building where i work have acquired some interesting elevator behavior.  i usually park in the garage in the basement and take the elevator up to the 2nd floor.  normally i would walk up the stairs to get some exercise but they lock all the doors from the stairwell side, except for the top floor.

i noticed that a lot of people who also take the elevator push both the up and down buttons when they need an elevator.  there’s only one floor beneath the one i park on; it’s just another garage level and these people are never going down.  so when the down elevator comes, they just get on it and go up.  one day i was standing there having pushed the up button only and somebody came in and told me that i should push both buttons because the down elevator comes faster.

sure enough, he pushed the down button, that light went out first and the elevator opened.  we got on, pushed buttons for higher floors and it went up.  i noticed subsequently that when you pushed both buttons the down one always went out first.  but since the elevator wasn’t needed on the floor below, you could take it up.  i began to notice that almost everybody who takes the elevator up from the garage presses both buttons, and have had several more people tell me this fact when i only pushed the up button.

but i don’t believe that it makes any difference in how fast you get where you’re going.  i think, for whatever reason, the elevator system always picks the down call to satisfy first when you press both buttons.  but the elevator that came for the down call would be the same one that came for the up call if you’d only pressed the up button.  i think this is a viral fallacy that has infected pretty much everyone who works in my building.  i did think about trying to explain it to people but i doubt it’s worth trying to set them straight.

by the way, after i wrote this i googled to see if i could find anybody else who reported this kind of issue.  i didn’t find any but i did find a site devoted to elevator etiquette.

and yes, ‘the viral elevator fallacy’ would make a great name for a band.

ps. after i wrote this i found an International Congress on Vertical Transportation Technologies.  anybody who attends that, please let me know if this issue comes up.

only slightly stale political cartoon