Seven Red

1. The Coolness – Last week, we had Ellie’s birthday party at Little Gym. These things have gotten much more complicated since I was a kid, but maybe in a good way. I remember bowling birthday parties (these were always fun) and, of course, the ubiquitous McDonald’s Birthday parties (we still don’t know how we’ll handle that one if it comes up, since we do not patronize McDonald’s, or any other fast food, for that matter). But these gym birthday parties are pretty snazzy. They have all kinds of wacky gym activities for the kids, when they’re not running around just raging on all the equipment. It looks damn fun, is all. Today, we went to yet another gym birthday party for a friend’s four-year old. Ellie fell down while she was running around a circle, and I think she got embarrassed, because she wouldn’t participate in any of the other organized activities, and she generally got very sullen. Is that right? Can a three-year old be embarrassed? And then you suddenly look down and this little blob of scream has some well-developed internal consciousness, and concern for the thoughts of others, and a burgeoning sense of self and all that. When did this happen? And, of course, it signals the fast impending date when they are embarrassed by you, when your very presence in the room is almost unspeakably mortifying to them, rather than seemingly their greatest source of joy. And we’re supposed to handle that moment how? A friend of mine has even written a book on “cool,” on the concept of cool, but I want more on this: what’s supposed to happen to your own sense of cool when your kid thinks you’re decidedly un-that. Ah, well. Maybe we have a couple of years yet on that. But seeing her today, seeing her feeling embarrassed, the realness of that day was just out there, and you have to face it.

2. The Wackness – Almost a year ago, I wrote about The Wackness before seeing it, tying it back to my own memory of that crazy New York summer of 1994. We finally got around to seeing the film last night. Now, in my typically obnoxious pre-viewing reviewing, I sniffed at the premise of the film, suggesting that its Manhattan setting and characters wouldn’t allow it to capture the feeling of that summer particularly well. Not working class enough. Not Outer Boroughs enough. Let me be the first to say that I was wrong about that. It’s a wonderful film, dead-on in creating that mood, and I just loved it.  I mentioned in my previous post that that summer had a kind of fin-de-siecle feel to it, a general euphoria seemingly derived from a feeling that everything was coming to an end. Apparently, I’m not the only one that remembers it that way, because the film just nails this theme, a Catcher in the Rye for the nineties, perfect. Everybody smokes pot, drinks 40′s of malt liquor, writes graffiti (even Ben Kingsley as the nostalgic therapist), and dreads the cultural transformations being wrought by the Giuliani regime. It’s exactly right on all of this. Everybody stays out all night, chases something, thumps Biggie somewhere in the background, and makes mixed tapes. The main character’s love interest tells him something like “You look at things the wrong way — I always see the dopeness in things, but you always see the wackness.” Everybody talks like that, yo, even in their most intimate and sincere moments. That’s how we talked, ridiculous as it now seems. But that was ours. And then the meta moment, the pomo-ness of it all, with Method Man playing Percy, the Jamaican drug dealer, talking to Luke Shapiro the drug dealer, while Method Man’s verse in The What pounds behind the scene: Yo I gets rugged as a muthfuckin’ carpet get… We’re supposed to get it: hey, that’s Method man acting and that’s Method Man’s verse.  I’m not sure my response to this film is portable, given that that time looms so large for me as this phase transition, becoming more what I now am, maybe, and less what I was, and having to face that. Leaving Queens, and everything that was, but everything it was leaving us as well, and we knew it, felt it. A whole way of life, as Raymond Williams says. Something was over. I know this is maudlin. But that was ours. I’m surprised this film tapped into it so well. And it wasn’t as maudlin as this description of it; it was even smart, and not condescending. I said in my previous review that it was a comedy. It’s not. Not at all.

Byron Dorgan arguing against Gramm-Leach-Bliley, November 4, 1999.

Now we got all these folks here who know a lot more about this than I do, I must admit, who say, “Well, except we’re creating firewalls. We’ve got subsidiaries, we’ve got affiliates, we’ve got firewalls.” They’ve got everything except common sense. Everything except common sense. And everything, apparently, except a primer on history. I just wish before people would vote for this bill they’d be forced to read just a bit of the financial history of this country to understand how consequential this decision is going to be. Now, I obviously am in a minority here. We’ve got people who’ve dressed in their best suits, and they just think this is the greatest piece of legislation that’s ever been given to Congress, and we’ve got choruses of folks standing outside this chamber who’ve spent their lifetimes working to get this done, to say “Would you just forget all that nonsense back in the 1930’s about bank failures and Glass-Steagall and the requirement to separate risk from banking enterprise? Would you just forget all that? God, time has moved on, let’s understand that. Change with the times!” We’ve got folks outside who’ve worked on this very hard and who very much want this to happen and we’ve got a lot of folks in here who are very compliant, to say “Absolutely, let me be the lead singer.” And here we are.

We’ve got this bill, which—I’ll bet—five, ten, fifteen years from now we’ll be back thinking this bill like we thought of the bill passed in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s in which this Congress unhitched the savings and loans so that some little sleepy Texas institution can gather deposits from all around America and like a giant rocket become a huge enterprise and guess what? With all the speculation, and the S&L’s, and broker deposits, and all the things that went with it that this Congress allowed, what did it cost the American tax payers to bail out that bunch of failures? What did it cost? Hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars! I’ll bet one day somebody’s going to look back at this and they’re going to say “How on earth could we have thought it made sense to allow the banking industry to concentrate through mergers and acquisition to become bigger and bigger and bigger, far more firms in the category of too big to fail, how did we think that was going to help this country?”

I have not watched an entire college basketball game all year. In fact, I haven’t watched a complete basketball game in probably a few years. Here are the results of my brackets for the NCAA tournament, with the coming week’s games excluded:

All in all, not bad, I’d say. I could still have a complete sweep of the Elite Eight at this point, supposing all goes the way I thought it would (which I guess gives away three of my picks for the next round). But 24 out of 32 for the first round, and 13 of 16 for the second? Is that good? I don’t even know. It’s a little over 77%. It seems alright to me. I did better than most NY Times sports columnists.

I’m not a big gambler. I like playing poker, but even then, I play “tight,” which means I don’t gamble a lot. I’m alright with that. I never gambled on sports, and apart from a little sidewalk game we played growing up (called Cee-Low), I never really liked dice. But when I was growing up, all my friends bet sports, and one summer it was particularly out of control, with bets into The Book on hockey, on baseball, ridiculous. It does make the games more interesting, however, when you’re watching with people who have money down on them, and you’re wtaching not the raw score, but the spread. One thing I learned from this was that The Book is mostly right. That’s the principle here. In the East and South brackets, the 1 through 4 teams end up in the Sweet Sixteen. In the Midwest and West brackets, the 1 through 3 teams end up in the third round, with only minor variations after that: Purdue as the fifth ranked team gets through, and then you have the anomaly of twelfth-ranked Arizona getting in after the blow-up of Wake Forest. Lesson: The Book is mostly right. The key is to pick and choose the slight variations where The Book is wrong – harder in the first round than overall. But I did manage to pick a few even there (Maryland over California, USC over BC, and – my triumph thus far – Western Kentucky over Illinois). I picked Portland State over Xavier as a kind of wacky upset, but that effed up my East bracket. If I had kept to the principle, I’d be in better shape. The 8-9 match-ups are you-pick-ems, and I won some (Siena over Ohio State) and lost some (Oklahoma State over Tennessee). Note that both these games were extremely close, with Siena winning in the last three seconds of double-overtime, and the Oklahoma State-Tennesse match-up decided by only two points (74-72). Like I said, you-pick-em. Now, of course, it gets harder, since 1-4 and 2-3 match-ups are all kinda like 8-9 match-ups. This is where people who know far more than I do come in with injury reports and player-on-player match-ups, and all the other stuff that leads The Book to be mostly right. We shall see.

I’ve decided that I want to start cataloguing my general jerkness so that I can see it out there, and maybe stop being so much of a jerk. So from time to time I will describe an event from the day that had me acting like a total jerk. Hopefully, the very act of transcribing my jerk behavior will eventually force me to curtail it, even a little bit. So, my biggest jerk moment of the day.

I went to Blockbuster before picking up Ellie, cuz it’s Friday night, and my readers well know that that’s how we roll. The Blockbuster was strangely empty for 4pm on a Friday, and they had signs all over noting a special on movies, so I guess they’re hurting. In any case, there was only one other customer in there, a guy in his late-30′s, maybe early-40′s. He was walking around looking at the movies, but he had his cell phone, and was describing various options to a woman he kept calling sweetie. I know it was a woman because I could hear her voice through the cell. He was describing options in great detail. A lot of them. Madagascar 2. My Winnipeg. Miracle at St. Anna. That’s just the M’s. Detailed descriptions of each, together with explanations of the other films that the actors had been in, or recommendations from other people they both knew. It was driving me fucking crazy. I know I must have whispered shut the fuck up under my breath about three times. Then he got to the S’s, and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. Sign-doshe, he kept calling it. “Sign-doshe, New York. It’s called Sign-doshe, sweetie. Sign-doshe, New York. It’s with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, sweetie. Yeah, the bad guy in the Mission Impossible. Yeah, the creepy guy. Sign-doshe. I dunno. Sign-doshe New York. I heard it was amazing, sweetie. Sign-doshe.” He decided on the film, so returned the last copy of Bill Maher’s Religulous to the shelf, near where I was standing. “Are you looking for a copy of this?” he asked nicely. I nodded. Sure. Then it was jerk time:

“Sin-ek-duh-key,” I said. “It’s sin-ek-duh-key. Synecdoche, New York.”

“What? Oh. Thanks! Hey sweetie, I was pronouncing it wrong. Some guy just corrected me.” (That’s right, that’s right, it rhymes with “corrected me!” Sin-ek-duh-key) “I feel stupid. It’s sin-ek-duh-key.”

I guess on the scale of anti-social behavior, correcting the guy on an admittedly difficult word is somewhere lower than, say, ripping that cell phone out of his hand and smashing it under my foot. But it’s still pretty dicky. God, I’m terrible. And moments after such episodes, of course, I think, wow, I was just a total fucking dick to that person. Sometimes even during.

My colleague posted this story on Facebook, about Facebook. The premise is that thirty-somethings have a far different relationship to Facebook than “Millenials,” or whatever the fuck they’re called. The writer learns this when she finds out about her husband’s life as a teen through his Facebook friends. Here’s what she says:

And it seemed as if half of them confessed crushes on him. These were girls frozen in his memory with teenaged breasts, AP English minds, and a sense that anything was possible. Like this one girl from seventh grade. She friended my husband on Facebook and then reminisced about the day his family moved away. She had put on her favorite dress, painted her nails purple, and worked up all her courage to hug him good-bye. “Isn’t that SO funny,” she wrote, “How silly we are as kids.”

You’d think I’d be mad, or at least threatened by all this nostalgia. But I wasn’t. For a split second at least, my husband was less familiar to me, and I mean that in a good way.

Wouldn’t this story have been more interesting if the husband had turned out to have been some misogynist dick or something? And people were friending him just to tell him to fuck off, finally? Instead, she learns that he was like, totally hawt and cool and all the girls loved him. Is she experiencing nostalgia, or straight-up regression?

You may remember my description of the ancient equipment I worked with at Madoff, posted here. I put it like this:

The operations department – where I worked – had an old dot-matrix mega printer, a preposterous machine roughly the size of a mature rhinoceros. The full time people would run these reports, then they’d come out of the printer, then we’d have to separate them, collate them, staple them, fold them, put them in envelopes, and finally run them through a Pitney-Bowes, all manually. Oh, I shouldn’t forget: since the printer was, even then, this ancient relic probably bought second-hand from the fucking Phoenix Program, it spit out the paper on turning wheels, with those absurd little punched-out circles on the paper edges supposedly aligning everything, the kind you still see on some government forms. So, before collating, stapling, folding, inserting, and stamping, we also had to rip the alignment edges off the reports. Thousands of them. Of course, since the giant dot-matrix was ancient, and since this technique for printing things was never very smart in the first place, the damn thing kept misfeeding, so somebody had to stand by the printer all day preventing and correcting the misfeeds, which usually occurred when more than, say, six consecutive reports were printed in a row. Thousands of reports.

I just read this article, in which some other employee discusses the goings-on on the 17th floor (where I worked, in the heart of the fraud, or as the article calls it, the “nexus of the Ponzi scheme”). He says the following:

The employee says he only saw the 17th floor, where the fraudulent Investment Advisory operation was located, about two times. He noticed the out of date computers and the old-fashioned dot matrix printers which printed out paper with green and white stripes. The computers he saw were about 15 years old, including one system that “is not even around anymore—miles away from modern Windows technology. And the statements I’ve seen from victims don’t look like my statements from Fidelity. They had primitive typefaces, as though they had been typed on a typewriter. Nobody sends statement like that, so maybe it was done to create the illusion of old-fashioned transparency.”

He learned that those who staffed the 17th floor were less than knowledgeable, often uneducated, often appeared incompetent. “There was this one guy, who had worked there his whole life who generated the statements but he would often not get them out on time.”

There is no doubt in my mind that I was printing and sending out the fraud statements. You should also notice, if you read the article, that I didn’t exactly change all the names in my account…

Ellie is three today. On Saturday, we’re having a full on party at some place called Little Gym. I don’t know what that is, but I suppose they roll around on the floor for an hour, then eat cake or something. Sounds OK to me. Today, we had a members-only Seven Red party before and after daycare, with Ellie getting her presents from the grandparents in the morning, and getting her favorite dinner (spaghetti) and a cupcake for dinner. We’re ragin’ over here, I tell you! I will be putting more pictures up once we get the Little Gym party done, but here’s a teaser from the private jam session. Three-friggin’-years. I can’t believe it, really.

Ellie says hi to her grandmother, who presumably doesn’t visit this site to read my rants and ramblings. So, from time to time she gets a giant, blue-eyed smiley face for her troubles.

But, on the same note, a pet peeve of mine. I’m fine with calling grandparents “granny” and similar such endearments. Ellie calls her grandmothers “Granny” and “Nonna.” (Ellie’s “Nonna,” by the way, is 100% Irish, but that’s another story). That’s great. I had a grandma and a nonna (my nonna was 100% Italian, while my grandma fled Ireland in the 1920′s). But when I refer to either of my grandmothers in conversation with people outside my family, I always use “my grandmother.” I get totally weirded out when I’m speaking to some adult about something and I hear “Oh, my gramgram used to make that dish.” Your gramgram? Really? It’s a little familiar. But this strikes me as a very strange rule I’m applying. So, say Ellie is talking to me, twenty years hence. It would be perfectly fine for her to say “Is Granny back from her waterskiing junket yet?” If, on the other hand, she was talking to her med school colleague, she should say “My grandmother is waterskiing in Antigua.” Not “My granny is waterskiing in Antigua,” cuz that’s just weird. Hell, when I talk to my brothers I still refer to my mother as “Mommy.” But I don’t refer to her as Mommy to anyone else in the entire friggin’ world – not even to her. I remember making this case once to a woman from the South, and she got all sniffy like “It’s a Southern thing.” OK, maybe. Am I the only one bothered by this? Am I the only one who cringes when otherwise reasonable adults tell me about their Nanna or their Pop-pop?

Yaargh. Curmudgeon! Yaargh!

After long delay, some reports from San Francisco, where I attended the dreaded CCCC conference this year. I will say this: I did not see a single bad talk. I will be taking Thank You gifts from the field for my previous taxonomical snark, which apparently whipped everybody into shape. You’re welcome, 4C’s. But on to the real topic of this post, Bourbon & Branch. This little speakeasy-style cocktail bar is, as the title says, made of win. So I’ll offer a little review.

You can get into Bourbon & Branch one of two ways. You can make reservations for a two-hour slot ahead of time, in which case you’ll likely get a table (or really, a booth), or you can seek a kind of general admission, in which case you’ll be placed in the “library,” which you access through a secret panel in the wall of the main room. Am I corny as hell, or is that cool already. Hell with you: I was impressed. But Drinking Buddy (DB) and I went the reservation route, so we had a booth from 6-8. We rang the bell, whereupon a hostess asked us for the password, previously communicated when we confirmed the reservation. It’s all very hush hush.

Since it was still light out, B&B seemed remarkably dark, but really well done. You walk in to the main bar room, where piles of fresh lemons, limes, and oranges are arranged on the bar. Appearance: velvet red floral wall paper (see the web site for the design) under a shiny pressed tin roof, small yellow-lit lamps at each high-seated wooden booth, a snazzy pinstripe design on the booth padding, along with severe tapered mirrors on the walls that match the tapered wooden tables: they’re doing the 20′s posh thing, and doing it well. Sound: subdued jazz playing at just the right volume, and ranging from some 20′s songbirds and early Tommy Dorsey to as late as Astrud Gilberto doing some popular Bossanova numbers, with the heavier accent on the older, pre-war stuff. When you get to the booth, a waitress hands over one hefty cocktail menu that also includes the house rules: no photography, no cell phones, smoke out the backdoor (unlock it and relock it when you come in), and don’t even think of ordering a “cosmo.” They actually have it in quotations like that, as if the thing can hardly be said to exist. The waitress also brought over two glasses of water and a small drink for us while we looked over the menu; I think it was champagne with bitters.

The menu is itself impressive, with the whole back-end focusing on scotch and whiskey and such. I just don’t do the scotch thing (hell, I hardly do cocktails), so I focused on the first part, which was subdivided into house specialties and classics, with, again, the accent on a particular respect for cocktail history, pre-war. Each cocktail listing comes with both ingredients and an explanation, so cocktail know-nothings like me can feel comfortable. The waitress also advised us of a non-menu cocktail for the evening. I started with the non-menu cocktail, a “Kentucky Buck,” consisting of strawberry-infused Four Roses Bourbon, bitters, lemon, and ginger beer. It was yummy. DB started with an Old Fashion, also delicious. For my second drink, I went classic, with a White Lady. It was Tanqueray 10, Cointreau, lemon juice, and egg white. I have to tell you that I was a bit nervous about the egg white, since I’ve seen the foaming action go so often wrong, but this was really perfect. In fact, if pressed, I’d say that the White Lady I had at Bourbon & B ranch was the best cocktail I’d ever had, period. DB, who drinks more cocktails than I do, concurred, raving about it. For his part, he ordered a Blood and Sand, which was good, but maybe a little light on the orange juice. I was essentially done at two, because we still had beer drinking to do later at Toronado (on Haight). But DB went for one more, a Black Manhattan, which was the house version of a Manhattan with coffee bitters. I had a sip: yum yums.

And then we were done, but that was perfect for somebody like me. The atmosphere and the time limit make the usual shenanigans you see when people are drinking cocktails more or less structurally impossible, so you actually enjoy a few good cocktails like a good meal. It was a very pleasant experience. More on SF in the coming days. One thing that did strike me in Bourbon & Branch is that she would just love the place, and meanwhile, she’s home eight-months pregnant while I’m cavorting around drinking cocktails. I have to get her down to a Chicago version of this thing when she gets through all this baby-birthin’ business. She’s gonna be ready for a drink.

Blah blah blah:

• she no longer works for troubled (American) Giant Financial Institution. Now she works for Giant Non-American Financial Institution. Doing more or less the same thing. Her team stormed out when they had another offer.  You basically don’t tell anyone you’re leaving until the day you leave, at which point you walk up to the Ops manager with a resignation letter and say “I’m going to such and such a place; please forward my personal belongings.” And storm out. This is the established protocol for what the industry calls “walking across the street.” I like this idea, and think there should be more of it.
• Cheap eats: Just around the corner, a kick ass Vietnamese bakery where I get a grilled pork sandwich (called Banh Mi) for $3.62. That’s Chicago on a shoestring. Yums.
• I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with Diego’s “Rescue Pack.” For those of you who don’t watch, Diego is an animal rescuer who goes on many advetures, well, rescuing animals. Whenever he gets in a particularly difficult jam, he calls on his handy “Rescue Pack,” which is a talking orange backpack he carries around, and which can only be “activated” by loud shouts of Activite!, in Spanish. Once activated, the Rescue Pack offers a set of options for escaping from the current dilemma. So, if the mischievous Bobo Brothers (two troublesome monkeys) cause an avalanche with their monkey business, the Rescue Pack – after a musical number that, in a disturbingly catchy tune, notes that the Rescue Pack is “coming to the rescue” – will offer up a bicycle, a dune buggy, and a sled, leaving you, the viewer, to choose which solution will most effectively deliver Diego from the monkey-caused snow event. And thus suddenly materializes a sled from the Rescue Pack, and Diego goes sledding down the avalanche to safety. Now I’m sure various child psychologists have their hands all over this thing and have determined that the choice between the means of escape promotes creative problem solving and all that. So I get the whole options thing, but it troubles me for three reasons. First, I’m a neurotic who gets worked up over stuff like this, but that’s a given. Second, it violates the most basic principles of Aristotle’s Poetics by building a deus ex rescue pack into every episode (as did the old Bat Man, but that’s another story). Finally, it gives the kids the idea that there’s an easy solution for every pressing problem. But, really, fourth, it confirms Aristotle’s argument for me, in that I am troubled by the deus ex machina for the same reason that Aristotle was really troubled by it. Formally the deus ex machina is an annoying and cheap device that disrupts the unity of the composition (the action should make sense internally, so you can’t build up an impossible situation only to rescue it with a new device that hasn’t yet been introduced into the ensemble). Fine. Every first year English major knows that. But I think Aristotle is, like me, more annoyed by the pedagogical force of the deus ex machina, in its reassurance that every problem, no matter how grave, comes packaged with a magical solution. This type of thing is deadly for a society, is the point.  So I’m troubled because I agree. But maybe, fifth, I’m really troubled because my father used to mouth sarcastic comments at stuff on teevee when I was a kid, and it absolutely drove me into a silent rage. He’d never just let the show be a show, and I hated that. And yet here I find myself saying stuff like “Oh, here comes the Rescue Pack…and a magic raft just in time to save Diego from the flood…what a miracle…” just as Ellie is yelling activite! activite! trying to get the damn Rescue Pack to open. So maybe, to set Aristotle aside and make it a Mommy-Daddy-Me thing, I’m really troubled because I’m turning into my father. Oedipus at last!
• I believe that once a car reaches ten years of age, it becomes eligible for a nickname. Not before.
• “The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fuck the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
• If you’re looking for about the most depressing show on television, try The First 48. The premise is simple: most murders are solved within the first forty-eight hours, so this show follows homicide detectives in several cities as they investigate a murder – for the first forty-eight hours. Now, I’m a great lover of the murder show, whether it be an hour-long drama, the various “real forensics” shows, a two-hour Dateline special on some trial, or documentary like Paradise Lost or The Staircase. I will basically watch one of these shows at any hour of the day or night if I’m not busy, and I know this is a population effect, since now they have a network through which I can do just that (the Investigation Discovery Network). Point being, I know me my murder shows. But TF48 really takes the cake. What you learn watching the show is very simple: most murders are over piddling bullshit, done by sad people to sad people, done by dumb people, hastily, stupidly, and wretchedly. You learn that most suspects are identified not by wacky, futuristic DNA techniques, but by people calling in and reporting tips. You learn that most murders are solved not in some gotcha interview, but by the suspect simply confessing, without much pressure, with no lawyer present, and seemingly without regard for the complete wreck of their own lives. People kill each other over nothing – a silly drunken argument, three or four hundred dollars, or petty beefs escalated past any reasonable levels, poorly planned robberies gone awry, some agitated moment that soon passes. They leave obvious clues at the scene, and when I say obvious, I mean their own fucking cell phones. They tell everybody they know about it, and someone invariably calls the police. They tell ridiculous and non-credible stories before succumbing and confessing. It’s pathetic, in the classical sense. But the show is a good antidote to the other murder shows, which almost always include some complex plot or other that has to be untangled and leads to a complicated and suspenseful trial. These really do stand out because they are the exceptions, these “exciting” storylines. But mostly it’s just ugly and sad.
• On a brighter note, I’ll be reporting next week from my old home town of San Francisco, where I’ll be attending the annual 4C’s conference. You may have noticed that I only offered 15 of the Top 20 4C’s Presentation Mistakes last time, so I’ll be on the look-out for more. Hell, I may even commit some to fill out my list. Don’t kid yourself: the paper’s ready to go; I’m just fine-tuning the handout. But just to annoy my audience, I will be starting my presentation with a QUIZ. I was inspired by an internet quiz that asked you to determine whether the person in a picture was a porn star or a Fox News reporter. I scored 4 out of 10. Yeah, I groove like that.  So, Number 16: administering pointless quiz at the beginning of a presentation? Maybe! Stay tuned.