Senatus Populusque Romanus

I was aware that there are Roman reënactors out there - I once happened upon a site explaining how to make your own legionary shield - and so was not entirely surprised to find that someone out there is selling legionary banners. What did surprise me was hearing from the shop owner that they're big sellers. It's just a small shop in Pittsburgh's South Hills, and the flags are locally made by some guy, but I guess it's the miracle of the internet - they're the #2 hit when you Google "Roman legionary banner".

Innumeracy

In some crucial way, then, Playboy gave what was previously considered pornography a kind of dignity. It was a deeply limiting, dingbat dignity, to be sure, but to allow the mid-century American woman any identity beyond that of mother, virgin, or whore increased her available social options by 25 percent.

Or, you know, 33%.

Sigh.

From an otherwise decent review of a new book about Playboy and its role in America's postwar cultural shifts.

Caloric Information on Menus

Ezra Klein has written a lot about various initiatives to introduce calorie info on menus - generally on menus for chains, so that every hole in the wall in the country doesn't have to send off samples to labs. There's all sorts of accusation of nanny-statism and such, but the bottom line is that, when eating out, we don't have a crucial piece of decision-making information.

So, just as an anecdata point, I was at a Steak n Shake yesterday (I was out beyond the suburbs and had to get lunch), and was trying to decide whether to get a shake (IMO the burgers are meh, but the shakes are pretty good). At first I thought I'd save some money and just get a soda*, but the sodas there are crazy expensive ($1.79!), so I figured, "Well, for an extra buck...". Then I started to think about calories (especially in winter, when I hardly get to ride my bike, I try to ease up on intake). I would have loved to know exactly what the hit was on the milkshake, since it's not like a 20 oz. soda is low-cal, but the menu didn't tell me, and so I just went with the Coke. But I wished I could have made an informed decision.

* I really don't enjoy that kind of food without a highly caloric beverage; that's just how it is

Dibs

The recent cold snap in the American southeast seems to be abating with significant, but not catastrophic, results for agriculture. But, for the record, if another cold snap follows and Florida faces a lost year of crops, I think it will be known as the Ice Bowl, to match the Great Recession.

Ezra Klein just threw up in his mouth.

I've been reading your chats for about the last two months, and I'm not quite sure what to make of you yet -- whether you're a straight shooter, or pushing an agenda. One columnist I do believe I get unbiased economic analysis from is Robert Samuelson.

From yesterday's chat.

Robert Samuelson is a shameless hack (as are most of the Post's columnists). I can't imagine what went through Ezra's head when he read that chat question.

Where I should be today

I've mentioned it here before, but because it's on my mind, here's a nice story about Bill Mazeroski's epic, Game 7, World Series-winning homerun, which was struck 49 years ago today, at 3:36 p.m., about a mile and a half from where I sit. As I type, a few dozen faithful are gathered there around a boombox playing a tape of the game. In half an hour, they'll cheer, and 17 years of losing, and half a century of aging, will be washed away.

My 2010 Pirates Forecast

Just for the record. I'll probably revisit this next April, once we know what happens in the offseason.

Oh, and to establish a baseline: my prediction for 2009, emailed to a friend on Opening Day, was 72 wins if the pitching held up, 62 wins if it didn't. The pitching has been OK this year (although it could be argued that Snell and Gorzo together represent a failure), but of course they traded away all but 2 of their most talented position players. I don't think I'm on the hook for having foreseen that last spring.

If the Pirates start 2010 with this group of starters (including, possibly, Clement coming up to platoon with Garrett Jones at 1B), I expect them to play at a sub-.400 pace – that is, about 100-loss baseball. Improvements due to youth development and Doumit returning at least somewhat to form should make this a team that can score at least 3.5 runs/game, which should get them within sniffing distance of 60 wins (note that a team with 3.5 RS/game and 4.5 RA/game is a 61 win team). I expect aggregate performance from the starting pitchers to about match what we’ve seen the last 3 months; the big question mark is the bullpen, which is costing us something like half a run a game relative to a mediocre pen. If Neal Huntington cobbles together a professional pen around a resurgent Hanrahan and Capps, then I think we could get above .400 – if nothing goes wrong. If Jones turns into a pumpkin, if Cedeno regresses, if Doumit misses 2 months again – if anything along those lines happens, then I think we could comfortably be on pace for 110 losses.

That said, I don’t see any way that the whole season plays out like that. Among Tabata, Alvarez, Lincoln, and Alderson, I expect at least one to reach the bigs and make an impact. Depending which one it is, that’s worth 5-10 wins. In other words, if none of the better players on the existing roster blow up (due to injury or general failure), I expect to see ~95 losses, plus or minus 5.

To do much better than that, either 2 of the MiLers need to make an impact or Milledge and/or someone else needs to take a big step forward (or a FA needs to really pan out). I think it would take only a couple things going wrong to do much worse than that: 110 losses is in reach if none of the minor leaguers step up.

Architects as Problem Solvers

A professor of mine who was also the onetime head of the CMU architecture department used to say that architects are, primarily, problem-solvers. She had a well-worn talk on the topic, titled "The Twelve Professions of Architecture," outlining all of the different jobs for which architects are well-suited (only a couple of which look like what we think of as "being an architect"). But the thesis was that (and I apologize for my 15 years later paraphrase) the skillset of the architect is only incidentally building materials and the like; it's primarily and fundamentally problem-solving.

I'm currently involved with a couple of projects (one only potential right now), both sprucing up existing, pretty crummy commercial/industrial buildings. The Equipment Co. is in a really nondescript cinderblock building, constructed in 3 campaigns on 3 lots with 3 different wall heights and no consistency in window sizes or symmetry or any of the other things we rely on for making buildings look "good." My job is to figure out — within a tiny budget — some way to make it look good anyway.

The Appliance Co. is in a crumbling old building, once kind of Tudor-ish, with a 1950s storefront that is also crumbling, plus aging and outdated GE and Frigidaire signs. How to make it look good?

There are various other constraints, but those are the nuts of the problems (note that I've already done a lot of sifting through issues to identify the key components that need to be solved). The Appliance Co. is actually pretty easy — take out the clutter, pull the whole thing together with a cornice above the storefront height, and use all new materials above (stucco) and below (??) the cornice. Easy peasy. The Equipment Co. is really really hard. Even if we reskinned the whole thing, it's still a mess compositionally. So what I need to do is to think about ways of tying things together or, alternately, acknowledging differences. One way to do this is through almost-literal "narrative" — part of the building is offices, the remainder is shop space. Use materials and colors to explicate that. Another way would be to impose a "narrative" — define a line, even if it doesn't correspond to any function, and use that to establish what gets metal panels and what gets paint.

But my point is that building-knowledge is only incidental to the problems I need to solve here. My first task is to identify the moving pieces that make up the problem — where does the sign go, how do we direct visitors to the office door? — and the next task is to identify the narrative that will tell me how to place the pieces. And while the architect's problem-solving skills are honed for dealing with buildings (both as objects and as containers of space), they are readily applicable to broader sorts of problems. I've actually long though that it would be good to have more architects in politics: the job already includes some of the prerequisites (public speaking, flattery of the rich), but, more importantly, the problem-solving approach is radically different from that of lawyers, who of course dominate American political life.

A few notes on the Pittsburgh Story

The coming of the G-20 to Pittsburgh is really all anyone can talk about around here (well, aside from Troy's knee). Over at Pittsblog, Mike Madison has been running a series with his take on what has happened to make Pittsburgh the subject of so many glowing national and international stories over the past year or so. Now, Mike is much more of a skeptic - especially regarding Pittsburgh - than I am, but I think his take is sound and worthwhile, if hardly definitive. One post in particular, I felt obliged to comment on, more or less as follows:

A couple notes to what I think is a basically correct argument, about the myth that Pittsburgh has thrived after deindustrialization by dint of hard work and "grit.":

Mike's point about sitting around waiting for Big Steel or Big Something Else to save the city is a really important one. In 1994 I was interning for a regional heritage/tourism org and talked to some fellow interns who were living in Johnstown for the summer. They described to me the crowd in local bars as "old men sitting around waiting for Big Steel to come back." Even then - 15 years ago - such thinking was a thing of the past in Pittsburgh. I'm sure there were a few bars like that, but they were a relic, not the dominant way of thinking in the city. Instead, the focus was on how to turn the new things we were doing (biomed, robotics, computer science) into the Next Big Thing. There was always the underlying, ancient mindset of hoping for the next Carnegie or Westinghouse, but the social and political discussion in the city was all about moving forward. As a concrete example, I'll note that, when the Hazelwood works were going down a few years later, there was interest from an outside company in building a modern coke works there, and the reaction was overwhelmingly negative. I can't vouch for the reaction you'd get in other parts of SWPA or elsewhere in the Rust Belt, but it was clear that, by the late 90s, the city had decisively abandoned the Big Steel mindset.

The other thing I want to talk about is "grit." I guess it depends how you define it - there's a certain bullheaded, romantic notion that I agree is inapt to describe what has happened. But there are 2 quotes that I think are relevant for describing the Pittsburgh mindset. One is from Laurie Graham's "Singing the City," and I don't have it exactly, but it's to the effect that, in Pittsburgh, there's a sense that a desk job is what you get if you don't want to work. Now that's a very blue collar, outdated way of thinking, but I also think it has left remnants in the region's workforce: outside employers are often pleased at the productivity they find at their Pittsburgh locations, and I think it ties back to the idea that jobs are for working at, in a very practical, hands-on way. The other quote is actually about Chicago, but I think it applies equally here (and surely throughout the Rust Belt): "I've always been impressed by people from Chicago. New York is talk and LA is flash, but Chicago is work." The gist is similar, but it clarifies exactly what Pittsburgh is not about: talk and flash.

Mike writes, "I know a lot of enthusiastic and energetic movers and shakers, in the arts, in the neighborhoods, in politics, and in entrepreneurship -- and they aren't 'gritty' at all" Well, I know the same kinds of folks, and I disagree with his characterization. To me the clearest example is a local reading series that has a serious national reputation (they are booked well over a year ahead, and have to turn down requests from established authors). Its founders are from the region, but not the city, and lived away from here for a long time before coming back and, soon after, starting this series. And in conversations with them (they're close friends), the distance they see between themselves and their counterparts in places like NYC and SF is clear, and it's precisely around the kind of issues I'm getting at. The acclaimed NYC reading/performance series The Moth came to town recently, and it was oozing with self-congratulation in a way that frankly disgusted my friends. The Pittsburgh reading series is all about getting top-flight talent and presenting it in a comfortable, cheap, and unpretentious setting; the New York reading series is all about letting everyone know how great the NYC reading series is.

I could list other examples - from the arts, from the neighborhoods - but I think you get my point. The reading series and its founders aren't "gritty," but they sure are Pittsburgh.