Book Writer Part I

Ok, I’ve always wanted to be writer, but don’t have the confidence that I could pull it off. Back in the seventies, I wrote a number of letters to the editor and almost all were printed. I know they were well written, not only because of the comments I received, but also because they were printed with virtually no editing in spite of the fact that a few were rather lengthy.

Back when Reader’s Digest produced condensed books, I subscribed to them. That was when I discovered that books could indeed be condensed without losing any of their readability and without taking away any details of the story. One time I got the original book and set it along side the condensed version and saw how the editors had gone through the book line by line, eliminating superfluous words and phrases. I was somewhat amazed by how much a book could actually be reduced without any loss.

So I’ve always had it in the back of my mind to do this myself. I mean, if I don’t have the confidence to write my own plots and characters, maybe I could make long books shorter, so that more people might want to read them. And even if they don’t, it would still be fun. There are many times that I’m reading a book, and I’ll be thinking of how it would read if this and that were cut out. Is this line necessary, for example.

This led to another thought. There are a lot of rather old books that were written in different styles than people are willing to read today. I know it’s common practice for some writers to update old books into modern English, so why couldn’t I do something like that?

A few years ago, I came across an old book in a used bookstore, which I bought for $2. It’s very long by today’s standards at 754 pages and it’s written in an old English manner. It has some of my favorite things in that it’s a novel about a Biblical character, in this case, Paul. It covers the entire time period from right after Christ ascended into heaven up through the time of Paul’s death.

When I first read through it, I rather assumed that the author must be Catholic because of the way Peter is exalted in the book. In fact, Peter is called the first of the disciples and was considered the head of the church. Of course, in reality, his brother Andrew was Jesus’ first disciple, and Jesus’ brother James was the leader of the church in Jerusalem. Throughout the book there is conflict between Peter and Paul, which was true, but in the author’s mind, at the end of his life, Paul finally acknowledges that Peter was right about everything all along and he bows down to him in Rome. Talk about a vivid imagination. So I thought that the best way to rewrite such a book would be not only to bring it up to date in language, but also to “correct” as many of the author’s misconceptions as I could.

Imagine my surprise recently, when I discovered that the author was a famous Jewish writer. In fact, before writing this book about Paul, he had written a biography of the life of Christ. For writing such a blasphemous work, he was ostracized by the Jewish community and called a traitor to his faith. The book about Paul, simply entitled “The Apostle,” was his follow up book. So now I’m faced with the proposition of “correcting” a very brilliant Jew, whose mind is obviously on a higher plane than mine could ever hope to be. What could be more pretentious than that?

So of course I started working on it.

Cut and Paste?

When I first started doing this, I could write something in Word, then cut and paste it into the blog. For some reason, it won't let me do that anymore. I have stuff written that I wanted to post, but unless I can figure out how to transfer it, I'll have to type it all over again.

I also can't figure out how to add a comment to Sarah's last post. It would have said, "Ditto to what Liz said," but whatever I tried, I couldn't seem to be able to do it.

Maybe I'm not cut out for this.

Cleveland Cavaliers

I’ve never been a big fan of the NBA. Generally, I would much rather see a college game, which is pure basketball, or even a game between two good high school teams. Nevertheless, I can appreciate the extreme talent that NBA players have, and it can certainly be highly entertaining to watch them exercise their skills. But that’s what it is, entertainment. It’s not actually basketball as played by the rules. I don’t know of any other sport where the rules take a back seat to the entertainment value.

Having said that, I have watched more games this year than probably the last 10-15 years combined. I am, after all, a Cleveland fan, and when Cleveland teams do well, I pay attention. And no Cleveland team in my lifetime has accomplished what the Cavs are accomplishing this season.

So now that the regular season is over, how will the Cavs fare in the playoffs? I would say that if they do not win the NBA championship, I will be more disappointed than I was in 95 when the Indians lost the world series.

The 95 Indians were a special team. There were a number of players who had career seasons that year. They had the enthusiasm of skillful youngsters combined with the maturity of seasoned veterans who had been there before. These three things combined to give us arguably the most exciting Indians team in history. But they were not the best Indians team in history. The 95 season was a magical season in which so many things came together at all the right times. The walk off home runs became infectious, and the players started to believe they could do it whenever they needed to. Who could ever forget Dennis Eckersly’s big “Wow” as he walked off the mound, having just been the victim of one. But when it came right down to it, the Braves proved to be better in crunch time.

The Cavalier’s team that reached the NBA finals two years ago also played over their heads, very much like the Indians that year who came within a game of going to the World Series. They played with more talent than they actually had, and they really had to reach back for something extra in the Piston series to even make it to the finals. So although it was very disappointing that they didn’t win a single game in the finals, just getting there was a great accomplishment.

This year’s team is different. They truly are the class of the league. They match up well in every position and they have a very strong bench. But the biggest thing they have going for them is their cohesiveness. They truly seem to love and respect each other, and there doesn’t appear to be a bit of selfishness in any of them. Labron won’t allow it. They mesh well together and they all seem to want to learn from each other. There have been a number of times in recent weeks when I have seen other players, such as Mo Williams and Anderson Varajao, split seams with Labron James like passes that had me rubbing my eyes to see if I had seen correctly.

They have only one glaring weakness. Whenever Ben Wallace is not in there, they have no one to guard the paint and other teams are able to drive on them at will and get a lot of easy layups. They were able to overcome that when he was injured by using a swarming type of defense and staying hot offensively, but it could be a problem in the playoffs if he is not healthy.

It’s foolishness, of course, to predict that the Cavs will win the championship. There are too many variables in a postseason that stretches to more than 8 weeks. But right now, there is no team that can beat them in a seven game series unless there are major injuries or they somehow lose their focus.

Rewritten Tax Code

Today president Obama promised to rewrite the tax code to make it simpler. He has appointed a committee to "study the problem" and report back to him by the end of the year. Really??? Why should it take that long to make something "simple?" There are already 1000 good plans out there to simplify the tax code. So even if he does come up with a plan, all that will be accomplished is that there will be 1001. (Note to literalists: I use the number 1000 to make a point, not because there are exactly 1000 plans.)

Personally, I favor a flat tax with absolutely no deductions for anyone for any reason except a healthy personal exemption for each person. And I only agree with that so that the poor would pay no taxes, as was originally intended when the constitutional amendment was passed. And if you're going to give an exemption to one, you have to give it to all if you really believe in fairness.

So every person in the country would be entitled to a personal exemption of, say, $10,000-$15,000. But every nickel above that would be taxed, No Exceptions! I think 10% would be a fair number. I imagine, but can't prove, that if every penny above the personal exemption were taxed at 10%, the government would probably take in at least as much money as it does now with its myriad deductions.

Of course, we need to be fair. The current tax monster would need to be phased out gradually since so many people have planned their expenses around the current system. So eliminating things like the mortgage deduction would cause more problems than it would solve if done cold turkey. But if say the current system were phased out a portion at a time over the next 5-7 years while the new system is phased in, people would have time to readjust their lives if necessary so as not to be dependent on the deductions currently available.

ncaa tournament part 2

About ten years ago I was laid up for a month. With nothing else to do, I spent the time watching every game of March Madness that was televised. I fell in love. This was basketball at its purest and finest. Not like the NBA where the rules only seemed to be whatever the officials decided they were on a given night. College players were expected to play by the rules, and the officiating was quite consistent. If a player got away with something, it was only because an official had missed it, and not because of who the player was, or how it might affect ratings.

Ever since then, I have always made it a point to watch as many games as I could each year, using vacation time on at least two occasions in order to be able to watch the finals.

Having said all that, I have always been amazed at the oddities the selection committee seems to come up with in regards to the scheduling of games. This year, both Utah and Arizona had to travel all the way to Miami to play against each other, and BYU and Texas A&M played each other in Philadelphia, among others.

So this year I decided to see for myself if it could be done better. First I searched the internet to see if I could find out exactly how the committee does its work. I found a rather detailed article in Wikipedia, which described the process pretty much as I thought it would be. Once the teams are selected, they are all placed in ranked order from 1-65, although exactly how they determine the ranking must be a state secret. The authors of the article seem stumped by it, as they point out how the committee so often snubs the Missouri Valley Conference when its teams are ranked in the top 40, and how Utah State was snubbed in 2004, despite being 25-2 and being ranked in the top 25.

The article goes on to describe how the top 4 teams get the number one seeds, the next four get number two seeds and so on. Then the highest number one seed is placed in the same region as the lowest number two seed (number eight ranked overall). By extrapolation, the teams with the following rankings would all be in the same region:
1,8,9,16,17,24,25,32,33,40,41,48,49,56,57,64. This is all exactly as I would have expected. The article then goes on the say that “adjustments” are made for a variety of reasons. Ah, Ha! A loophole! First, the top three teams in each conference must be placed in separate regions. This means that if the 1-65 ranking system would place the top two teams in a conference in the same region, one of the teams is reseeded and moved to another region. If a conference has more than three teams in the field, and two teams are in the same region, they will change the seeding so that they would not play each other until the regional final. This is not an absolute rule, if it contradicts another rule, but they will do it whenever possible. They will also change seeding to allow teams to play closer to home, if it does create too large a disparity in the expected performance of the regions. There are also other unnamed reasons the committee will change seeding.

In order to test this out, I needed to know what the 1-65 ranking was. I could not find this anywhere. I don’t know if it’s another state secret of the committee, or I just didn’t know where to look. So I tried to recreate it as best I could. It was not too difficult, actually. I knew that Louisville was #1 overall, so I could easily reconstruct that one. And I decided that Connecticut must be #4 overall, since they would play Louisville in the national semi-finals should both teams make it that far. The problem was not knowing who was #2 and who was #3 between Pittsburgh and North Carolina. I picked North Carolina as #2, but that was entirely arbitrary. If I was wrong, then half of the teams would have to be flip-flopped in my list, but all the flip-flops would only be one place change each, so it didn’t make a whole lot of difference. The biggest problem is that my list is actually a list of teams AFTER all the adjustments were made, not the original list.

To make a long story short, after I studied it from several different angles, and listed different possibilities, I discovered that, although I would have done things differently, for the most part, the brackets that the NCAA selection committee came up with cannot be said to be wrong. (Note how carefully I just worded that.) It’s just inevitable that some teams are going to have to travel a long way to play. I think the problem stems from having TWO first round sites way up in the northwest corner of the country when there are only a handful of teams within a thousand miles of there in the tournament. If they feel there must be two sites in the west, the it would have been better if one of them had been in, say, Utah, Colorado, Texas, or even Arizona. I realize the sites are chosen a long time ahead of time, but surely the NCAA has a general idea of the locations of most of the schools that are likely to be in the tournament. Only five of the top 16 teams in the field are located west of the Mississippi, and only two of those are west of the Rocky Mountains. In fact, in the entire 64 team field, only about a dozen teams are in the western third of the country.

I think the most important thing in bracketing is that the top 16 ranked teams be seeded properly so that if all 16 make it to the regionals, #1 would play #16 and so on. And just like in football, I think this seeding should be done using a set formula, not left to the “judgments” of people who may or may not have a vested interest in the outcome. Once that’s set, don’t make any adjustments. As far as the rest of the teams in the field, I think it makes little difference who plays who. If, in general, the lower seeded teams are playing the higher seeded teams, and the teams in the middle are playing each other, it shouldn’t make a whole lot of difference what their exact seeding is.

At first I was a bit upset at the fact that Cleveland State had to travel all the way to Miami to play, although I doubt the players considered that bad, and that Akron had to go all the way to Portland, Oregon to play. I figured it was just the usual “dissing” of anything Cleveland. But once I started making up my own brackets, I discovered that, because of their seeding, those were really the only two places they could have been assigned.

As noted above, two first round sites were up in the Pacific Northwest. Of the top 16 seeds, Washington and Gonzaga were assigned there, as being the closest top seeds. But that left two openings. As #2 seeds, Memphis and Oklahoma were allowed to play in Kansas City, so Kansas was sent to Minneapolis as the next closest place, and Missouri was shipped out west, probably because Kansas was ranked higher overall. It may seem a tad unfair that #3 Missouri had to travel while #4 Gonzaga got to play closer to home, but there just wasn’t anywhere else to put them. As far as the other western opening, it seems it would have to have been either Xavier or Wake Forest, and since Wake Forest was “needed” in Miami, Xavier got the call. Every other one of the top 16 did get to play closest to home. So it would seem that when all is said and done, I don’t have anything to really beef about, and there is not as much that I would change as I thought.

As for the two games I mentioned at the beginning? I would have sent Utah to Portland, and Illinois to Miami. I would have sent Arizona to Portland and Western Kentucky to Miami. I would have sent Texas A&M to Kansas City, and Maryland to Philadelphia. And I would have sent BYU to Kansas City and Clemson to Philadelphia.

ncaa tournament

Do the NCAA tournament brackets make sense to anybody? I mean, games played in Philadelphia as part of the West region, while games in Boise as part of the East region? Seven of the eight first round cities are in two different regions each. Minneapolis is the only city that is in only one region. Which means that Kansas and Michigan State were the only two teams in the entire second round that could scout their sweet 16 opponent. Then of course you had the oddity of the hated rivals Duke and North Carolina playing on the same court and on the same day, but in two different regions.

And of course, this says nothing at all about the absurd way in which teams are seeded and assigned, but that's a beef for another day.

Church Attendance

I just read a Cover Story article in USA Today which says that nearly all Christian denominations are losing ground. This caught my attention because I remembered reading an article in The Week recently which said that church attendance is up in the past year, and made the point that it is normal during economic downturns for people to start going back to church. When you actually read the USA Today article, you find that they are reporting on some study which compares denominational affiliations today with 19 years ago. The only reason I bring this up is because it seems to me that the editors of USA Today would have known about the fact of church attendance currently going up, and yet they chose to make this their lead story. Technically, the article was true, but it’s a great example of using the truth to deceive.