Raising Rockstar

HUGE spoilers ahead – but this storyline has been around for like, 4 decades in various versions – 2 tv series and middle school book series, anyways… Think Harry Potter without (most of the) boys. Author Jill Murphy began writing the series while she herself was still in high school, then putting the project on hold while she finished college. The current tv series is filmed in castles in the UK and Germany. I like it better than HP, because no one finds out they have inborn (magical) talent that makes everything easy for them, AND a secret bank account squirrelled away by their late parents, that allows them unlimited spending, all on the other side of Platform 9 3/4…  

(In case you’re wondering, then-13 year old Bella Ramsey was “discovered” the prior year on Game of Thrones, where she played the fierce and competent child ruler Lady Lyanna Mormont well enough to warrant GOT writers expanding her part.)

(Yes, she is killed in battle on GOT. No, I never otherwise watched GOT.)

A-nyway, at Cackles’ Academy, the girls get into all kinds of predicaments, the rivalries are fierce, the parental expectations riveting, the friendships heartwarming… and the mum-daughter-other daughter competition and sister love-hate relationships can touch a nerve. The manipulativeness of one of the high-achieving main characters in particular begs the question – if she had been a boy, would she have felt the need to come up with quite so many elaborate ruses to prove her abilities and self worth? Why?

All the time we’re watching Witch, I’m wondering if the creating-own-crisis-to-swoop-down-and-save-the-day storyline would have been feasible if instead this was a boys’ school. Answer is – I have no idea. A thing about Mars and Venus comes to mind. And so the story goes…) 

Mildred Hubble is a plain, ordinary girl living with her struggling single mum, until the day tubby and bespectacled Maud Spellbody crashes into her on the way to a middle school admissions test. Maud has broken her glasses, so Mildred agrees to help her get to the school. On Maud’s broomstick.

The school Maud is trying to get into turns out to be a boarding school for young witches. During the haphazard broomstick journey that ends publicly in the school’s fishpond, the girls become fast friends. Maud is convinced Mildred has magic in her ancestry as well, because she can see the magical things happening around her. She coaxes Mildred into trying for a spot at the school, and uses her old witching family name to wrangle Mildred a test seat at the last minute. Mildred goes along with it because besides liking Maud, if you make Witch you get a cat – and she’s always wanted a cat.

Mildred naturally bungles about failing everything miserably, and the girls’ subterfuge is soon uncovered, much to the teachers’ outrage. Maud is given a severe dressing down, saved only by the teachers’ memories that her alumni mother also got into well-intentioned trouble of similar sort. Mildred is quickly and unceremoniously dismissed. As she is leaving in utter disgrace, a coup occurs, leading to the ousting of the much-beloved (moderate) current school leadership based on technicalities of the old witching laws.

Unbound by the strict codes of conduct of the “real” witches, Mildred barges in, tampering with the extremist witches’ spell and swinging the balance firmly back with the original leadership, thus earning herself a legitimate admissions interview and, later, a probationary period at the school.

(I like how the writers think witches and potions are more believable in the plot than successfully faking your way into an admissions test and winging it to score a spot.. AND they don’t even live in Hong Kong :D)

Thus begin the adventures of the very worst witch in the world, as she attends Cackle’s Academy alongside daughters from some of the most blue-blooded old families in the Magic Council. She will come to bemoan her mother’s lack of witching education, and then resent that her mother “didn’t give (her) the right start in life,” resulting in her “always” being behind in witching studies. (HOLD ON – look out for the contrast further down, with the blue blooded witching family described later on…)

Never the star student, Mildred is often just one step away from being kicked out, but occasionally claims coveted prizes for unconventional creativity in her projects…. when she’s not being disqualified, that is – for faux pas or not following procedures within the witches code that the other girls have learnt all their lives. (Again, I like how realistic this is, for creativity of the sort that encourages wild departure from convention often also risks rebellion and maybe even anarchy, it can be a fine line and a fine balance, between the two. Everything’s a “package” of goods and bads <shrugs>) And so what happens to Mildred Hubble and her friends on their adventures is true enough to real life (despite all the broomstick flying) to be relatable, believable… and covertly inspirational.

At times Mildred really does get herself expelled. It reinforces that a lack of respect for (or knowledge of) rules is never without consequence. Indeed, one of her good friends Enid Nightshade has 17 previous expulsions under her belt – however, rather than being a poor student or a mean girl, she openly admits (rather than blames someone else, which another character, the high-achieving Ethel Hallow, frequently does) she deliberately gets into trouble because otherwise her rockstar celebrity parents are often on concert tours. A potential expulsion means they drop everything to come in. (Her dad wryly takes pride when it’s announced she’s second worst witch (Mildred being the worst) in school. Also interesting that it never crosses the minds of the Nightshades that their daughter might be stupid or mean (she’s not). Even more hilariously in one episode, it falls to good-intentioned Maud Spellbody’s plain ordinary non-celebrity dad to pull the biggest prank, thereby saving all three girls from expulsion following yet another well-meaning chapter of accidents. He does so right after telling his daughter he’s proud of her for coming clean about her mistakes.)

At other times, Mildred is blessed with compensating kindnesses arising in a roundabout way from her natural goodness of heart. For eg, she visits the school pond to pour her heart out, and is in general kind to animals. Unbeknownst to her initially, one of the old professors is living there as a frog and often encourages her to not give up. (He also eats flies as a human.)

Now for the good stuff:

Coming from one of the most established ancient names in magic, the Hallow girls have big shoes to fill – both parents are influential in the witching/ wizarding world, and Mum Hallow in particular attends many Magic Council meetings and expects nothing less than witching excellence from her daughters. (Disclaimer – Any resemblance to someone you may know is unintentional, I don’t know any families of three daughters of differing ages like this very well ok…)

Esmeralda Hallow, eldest daughter and headgirl at Cackle’s, is not just brilliant and hardworking, she’s warm, loving and selfless – leading to her exploitation by the extremist witches (despite the good witches’ best efforts, they are one second too late to save her), and resulting in the tragic loss of all her magical powers and therefore her necessary expulsion from the school, due to witching code.

Furious at the harm to her favourite daughter, Mum Hallow goes on a rampage at the Magical Education Council, nearly succeeding in shutting down the school. (Dad Hallow also at one point submits formal complaints and makes front page on the witching newspapers because among others Ethel is sent on school trip with the rest of her year to an enchanted wood that was dangerous, a century prior.)

Esme inspiringly goes from begging the school to hire her because she’s (very understandably) miserable as a mortal and cannot adapt to the non-magical world, to accepting the witches’ rejection of all non-magicals including herself. (Thus doing a better job than her mother, of coping with what has happened to her.) She takes up Netball – which she teaches her littlest sister to play the non-magical way, even as she receives ridicule from some of said sister’s friends, commanding both younger sisters’ respect, including that of fiercely competitive super-Type A middle sister Ethel – who regrets her animosity… only to come up with even more manipulations to try and get Esme her powers back)….. until the day Esme is forced to invoke a forbidden spell in order to save her littlest sister’s life, thereby regaining all her witching powers in the process.

A thing about having or not having (in this case) magical powers comes to mind – from this story depiction of Esme Hallow, d’you think her high achievements and the respect she commanded in school had tha-at much to do with her inborn magical talent? What about high-flying influential Magic Council-seated Mum Hallow? Bearing in mind (to the best of my knowledge) we are none of us witches, would you prefer to entrust a family and the raising of children or siblings to Esme… or Mum Hallow?

Sybil Hallow, youngest daughter, is timid and often in need of Mum Hallow’s or her older sisters’ protection and encouragement, despite her own abilities and cleverness. She is initially also hard pressed to decide which she is more afraid of – Going To New School, Staying At Home With Mum Hallow, or cats.

Middle sister Ethel Hallow is the real parenting cautionary tale story, and the art in the writers’ craft. She is incredibly talented, fiercely ambitious, yet forever striving to prove herself via various means of manipulation and subterfuge. At some point you realise the one person she is unable to impress and gain respect from…… is herself. Often, her manipulations hurt her and those around her, rather than help her cause. Her ego weakens her, detracting from her many capabilities and otherwise strong abilities, because she wants so badly to look good that she often blames others as a knee-jerk reaction for some pretty simple mistakes.

This denial takes her from strongest student by a very wide margin to losing the Top Girl In Year position to Maud Spellbody, who is an otherwise unremarkable girl, albeit from an old magicking family, just trying to do the best she can in school (and badly wanting some real friends along the way.) Ethel goes on to being seen as the annoying tell-tale and brown-noser no one likes, and the self-serving person who exposes the school to risk repeatedly, nearly bringing it down. Often, you don’t know whether to dislike her or feel really sorry for her and not want to watch her sabotage herself some more.

Beyond Ethel’s bravado is her deep-seated insecurity, she is the proverbial Mean Girl who is growing up dysfunctional. Her high flying mum doesn’t budget her time properly between the three girls, leading to “small” mistakes with devastating effects, like spending all her available time for Magic Mirror calls with Esmeralda and then having no time left for Ethel, or else staying home with Sybil during Ethel’s school events, and then lying to her middle daughter about it. Both eldest and youngest Hallow sisters even come to recognise that their mother doesn’t ever seem to have time for their middle sister. Their efforts to fix it are then rejected by Ethel, as her hurt festers and causes her to lash out at both sisters. What kind of mum d’you think Ethel is potentially turning out to be someday (if she chooses to have a family, that is)?

Because of her jealousy and competitiveness with her older sister, Ethel becomes instrumental in setting Esme up to lose her powers. She also bosses her initially timid younger sister, making Sybil do chores for her, and then as her younger sister learns to stand up to her, Ethel resorts to playing favourites among her younger sister’s friends, pitting them against each other to get them to do things for her. (I said this is good stuff right? Even Rockstar’ll watch a few minutes when he’s walking by!)

BUT…. all that drama is all in the name of a good show.

Actress Jenny Richardson who plays Ethel Hallow was born with a cleft lip, and has campaigned to fund corrective surgeries for kids whose families can’t afford them. She openly shares her baby pictures on social media to that end.

“Dad, they’re gonna make fun of me.”

“Son, they can’t make fun of you if you’re making the shot.”

– Exchange between ’60s pro basketball player Rick Barry and his dad. Rick Barry goes on to be one of the very few players who takes free shots in a way that makes him look very silly, but greatly increases his chances of scoring. Throughout his career, he would find to his amazement that almost no one else is willing to do the same…

Which would you choose: Looking “cool” but missing, or scoring almost every single time…. but looking silly while doing it? There is apparently some physics-related reason why if you shoot underhanded (“silly”) you have a better chance of making the shot, ceteris paribus, all other things equal.

Who cares? Looking cool is everything. Even if your personal vanity is one reason your team loses. (I’m serious. This is one of those crazy things about human nature – as you will see, we knowingly “reward” behaviours, thoughts and even people, that aren’t totally good for us, our goals, our teams. This is, among other things, advertising and marketing gold.) I’m not sure just how sarcastic I really intend to be with this.

Looking silly (in a derpy throw) is perfectly legal, btw. So how come players cared so much how they looked doing it, yet people seem to care a lot less how they look/ what others think when it comes to breaking rules/ cheating for real? Because people who “cheat” still “look cooler” than straight-shooting nerds?

WHO decided that?

(We did. Despite all the so-called “terrible” consequences, a lot of us would still secretly rather be egotistical cheating Lance Armstrong than Whatshisface, Guy Who Didn’t Cheat And Came In Second (meaning he pr-obably worked pretty hard too, y’know?) M-aybe not. Here’s a 2012 Business Insider article that lists various Second Places in various cycling tournaments that Armstrong won, who were also doping. S-o Whathisotherface, who maybe didn’t even make the top 10 (like, OMG this world.)

This drives me nuts, but probably not for the reasons you might expect. Not Really Sorry means Would Totally Do It Again means Waste Everyone’s Limited Resources To That End. (Hence my pre-occupation also with recidivism rates. The people who don’t think they did anything tha-at wrong are the worst to have back in a society. Not only do they justify away their misdemeanour (implying selfishness – they don’t care who else is hurt, including their own loved ones), they’ll just get smarter at not getting caught next time. Which wastes even more resources on these people. Effort to “help” someone who isn’t really sorry is effort robbed from someone else who needs, actually wants, and deserves help.)

<ends rant>)

Rick Barry describes how the first time he makes an underhanded shot, he gets heckled from the stands and called a “sissy.” In a standard basketball season, “sissy” Barry misses 9 or 10 free throws. In comparison, LeBron James shooting the “cool” way misses 150 free throws per season – wait for it – and it is still absolutely “professionally acceptable” (not to mention socially acceptable) to make this choice all the time. 

“Women are just as bad…” For Gladwell’s podcast, they spoke to Columbia University women’s basketball players – who were quoted demurring over making the “granny shot”. Columbia U has an admissions rate of ~6.1%, meaning 6.1% of all applicants are admitted. (For reference, Harvard’s is at 5.4%). No one would think any young women who attend Columbia U aren’t smart. But they’re still afraid of looking stupid.

Sociologist Mark Granovetter labels it your “threshold”. The number of other people who need to do something before you’ll consider it. (He uses riots as an example, things like throwing bricks through windows. According to him, your belief system does not always overlap your “threshold.” In the moment, you’re going to do it if enough other people are doing it. Or… not doing it, in the case of “granny” shots. )

In Confessions of a Basketball Gypsy, Rick Barry says, “It’s almost incomprehensible to me that someone could sacrifice that… I wouldn’t accept that a teammate wasn’t going to play his hardest..” Simply put, his drive to be a stronger shooter is bigger than his worry about what others think of him. That’s a double edged sword: Barry is also so tactless his team mates have said, “If he went to the UN he would start World War III.” But get this – he includes in his own autobiography the negative things his wife and parents say about him. When asked about it, he shrugs, “I didn’t ask for editorial rights, let ’em say what they want to say.”

Here’s the method to the madness: Who is almost the only other person in the entire world of pro/ semi-pro basketball who takes their free shots underhanded? Rick Barry’s son, Canyon Barry (pictured far above.) In college basketball. (Read: College kid who doesn’t care what other college kids think about how he looks. No, I don’t think that’s easy. Canyon Barry graduated with a degree in Physics, is pursuing a Masters in Nuclear Engineering at U of Florida, and in the 2018/19 season, played professionally for Chinese club Hunan Jinjian Miye.)

HOW YOU LIKE THEM – No, I’m more a Proof Of The Pudding person. See, one of the most intimidating things I have ever read in a (Christian) parenting book is how kids have the most awfully fine-tuned hypocrisy-dar. You have to actually walk your own talk. (This is just terrible information.: “There is No Easy Way Out.” Their Marketing people must’ve had a fit.)

Even Mary Poppins let the medicine go down witha spoonful of sugar… If at midnight your 18 year old son is driving down a highway at 100 miles an hour with 2 of his friends, it’s not because he thinks it’s a good idea. It’s because he cares (too much) what his friends think about him. He’s got a low “threshold.”

“I felt silly – like a sissy – shooting that way…. I just couldn’t do it.” – Wilt Chamberlain

“Throwing like a sissy” earned Chamberlain the NBA free throw record he shares with Adrian Dantley** that remains unbroken today, and he still went back to Looking Cooler, Scoring Lousier.

If people know you are a particularly bad free thrower though, the other team will just keep fouling you every time you touch the ball, in the last minutes of the game – because you’re going to miss most of your free throws so it’s better to give you free throws than to let you have the ball any other way. (<shrugs> Why wouldn’t the opposing team foul you all the time? That’s their best way of defending their basket against you.)

Repeatedly deliberately fouling the other team is more “socially acceptable” than looking derpy making a free shot – am I the only one who thinks this is hilarious?)

 

Here’s another one: Every year, all the draft-eligible college players are put in a pool, and the 32 football teams out there take their pick. Obviously, the player who is picked first is the most valuable. But. How much more valuable? (There’s also a bunch of elaborate clauses that come with signing the first draft pick. This is not unlike the terms and conditions of structured investment products, and get this – there’s an actual market as well. How exciting is that? You can trade First Pick for say, 5 or 6 Second Picks.)

Can’t wait to say it: What if the price of First Pick is so bid up, what if you’ve paid so much premium on that first player upfront, it negates the benefit of having him? (This is the simple case of paying too much for something good, making it n-ot so good anymore.)

If the price of a First Pick player has traded up to 5 or 6 times the equivalent of a(n early) Second draft player. Does a First Pick at that price provide the equivalent value of 5 Second Picks?

Awhile ago, when trying to explain to Rockstar why attitude is so important, I used the easy go-to of Hollywood stars. At the time, Shia Labeouf* was highlighted as one of the most “profitable” actors to hire – he came in on time, was incredibly dedicated and respectful, despite not being very well-known at the box office (at the time.) He wasn’t the biggest box-office attracting name, but he was in the top 10 for profitability. 

In contrast is Lindsay Lohan not too long after her Parent Trap success.

Because of her hard partying (she was known to hit up 3 clubs in one night), she “had” to take the next work day off, or else simply didn’t arrive in any condition to film productively. (That’s not counting when she would get arrested for drunk driving.) It meant film crew had to work (and be paid) overtime, sets, equipment and venues had to be employed overtime, her co-workers hated her had to yes, work overtime. She was wayyyyy more famous and “bankable” at the box office than Shia, BUT all the extra costs incurred by her bad attitude soon made directors and producers think twice about hiring her. She was not profitable. (She also went from a net worth of about USD 30mio around the age of 18 to USD 100,000 at her lowest, and has admitted “I was ..19 with no one (in LA) to really tell me I couldn’t do certain things… and look where that’s got me now.” 

<pause>

Know why I care that my kids know (and care) how to be likeable? Because they may not always get to pick and choose their friends/ workmates/ partners, but when they do, I hope to give them their best chance at the choices they aspire to. Choice, as Peter Buffet (son of Warren Buffet) once said, is the biggest privilege in life.

(*In the interests of full disclosure – LaBeouf then went on to roles where he played high-as-a-kite characters and – you guessed it – took real drugs for those scenes resulting in times of “drunken disorderliness” and police arrests. Former co-actor Tom Hardy who was famously punched out cold by LaBeouf during one such movie production has openly still voiced respect for his work ethic. When LaBeouf got arrested for drunk driving around that time, went into rehab, came out and won some awards, he thanked the police officer in Georgia for arresting him that night.)

One More Footnote: Adrian Dantley who shares the NBA free throw record with Wilt Chamberlain played with custom-made lifts in his shoes because one of his legs is 2 inches shorter than the other. Yes and he had a career in pro basketball and shares an unbroken NBA record. 

Our “weakest links” in society aren’t the Have-Nots in the “talent” department, or even the ones with disabilities. They are the ones with the wrong attitude.

 

 

In Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell (who btw is a proud U of Toronto alumni) explores how we make mistakes all the time, some of them jarring or risky ones, about the people we meet face to face – regardless what we knew about them beforehand. Face-to-face interaction is supposed to critically help but instead too often critically hinders us – that means job interviews, first dates, business or diplomatic meetings… but then the book also devotes quite a few pages to suicide and sexual predators and I couldn’t read some of it without flinching, so BIG CAVEAT.  

In 2017, economist Sendhil Mullainathan went through 554,689 New York City defendant arraignment hearings between 2008 and 2013. Records indicated that human judges, evaluating the unique circumstances of each defendant, had released on bail some 400,000 people who appeared to have committed criminal offences and were pending trial. (Roughly, the judge looked at the defendant and formed an opinion – bolstered by professional experience and an ability to size up another human being – as to whether the persons released on bail posed an immediate threat to society.)

Mullainathan then built an AI system, fed it the same data, and had the computer pick 400,000 people from the same list to release. Obviously, the computer didn’t look those people in the eye, or look at their mums sitting in the back of the room (something human judges have said makes things particularly difficult when dealing with say, a 16 year old with a history of violence.)

(Lemme add my own two cents – long ago as a relative market freshie cutting my teeth on default probability software, toggling between the “private” model – where a company is evaluated for risk of demise (probability of default, insolvency) solely based on its reported financial statements – and the “public” one – where market-traded share price is taken into account – the difference in results can be freaking trippy. The only additional data inputted had been a publicly traded share price. In other words, market sentiment, human opinion – as influenced by news reports, rumours, mood swings, advertisements.)

So back to Mullainathan’s study – guess who won (ie put fewer people back on the streets pending trial, who then went on to repeat their crimes), AI Judge or Human Judges?

The difference in correct predictions re who would not repeat the offence while on bail was 25%. AI Judge released 25% fewer people who went right back to crime pending their trials. That’s a difference of 138,672 people over 5 years. 76 people released every day on bail in NYC who would go right back to their criminal offences. 

That’s not all. Human Judges missed 48.5% of the High Risk Group flagged by AI Judge. According to psychologist Tim Levine, human judges on average correctly identify liars 54% of the time. That’s only slightly better than pure chance. 

You know what that means, right? No, not NYC Issa Crime City. Not even Human Judges, Robots Are Coming For Your Jobs. It means the same thing as Whether AI Can Replace Human Chess Champions, whether Deep Blue puts us in Deep Sh*t: We need to go ask Sendhil Mullainathan what exactly he told AI Judge to do. Behind AI Judge was still a human economist. Presumably human economist consulted human judges before building his AI (y’know, since he is not himself trained in Matters Judiciary.) In other words, you still need humans to build and work with AI. You just don’t need humans to be the AI. Winning chess teams were not ones exclusively manned by computers or humans, they were the teams of humans with AI. More humans need to learn more ways of using computers. (No surprises that among the string of illustrious awards he has received is one from Infosys in 2018 for elevating the prestige of scientific research in India and getting more young people to choose the field.)

“We tend to think the problem is solved when we solve the technology problem… but the human problem still remains… This isn’t about the biology of people, it’s about the psychology of people.”

– Sendhil Mullainathan in Solving Social Problems With A Nudge

Here’s an old TED Talk by Mullainathan, that I still like because he talks about how we come up with many solutions for problems, yet across the board is the Last Mile Problem “because our brain is really strange” and as a consequence “people are really weird”)

While the first 999 miles are about science, there’s this “final mile” that involves people intuitively making the wrong decisions when executing the existing technology. Mullainathan highlights that the next step is Psychology, Marketing, Art and Scientific Method (ie Operational Capacity) in getting people to change their habits. He found for eg, that sending letters telling people say, how much energy their households were saving compared with their neighbours’ households (better OR worse than them) provided a boost in energy saving motivations. The letter. Not Yet Another New Technology. It points to (relatively far less glamorous) need for good execution of existing ideas, not just cutting-edge innovation. AND the money argument: The science costs a bomb. Massive research funding. The last mile costs… postage stamps.

Here’s another (true) story:

Practical, plainspoken former businessman-turned-widely-regarded masterly politician then-British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain once described another man he met in politics thus:

“…you would never notice him in a crowd.. and take him for the house painter he was…”

“…in spite of the.. ruthlessness.. I saw in his face, I got the impression here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word..”

“..(his manner) appeared to show the storm signals were up… (but) he gave me the double handshake he reserves for specially friendly demonstrations…”

Aristocrat and worldly-seasoned top student from Eton and Oxford Lord Halifax who became Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary watched the same individual rail about for 5 hours at their first meeting after mistaking him for a foot servant, then spent 5 days with him, then concluded he was “open to negotiating peace.” 

Dapper British diplomat Nevile Henderson met this man repeatedly as well, attending his rallies, concluding he “may have crossed the borderline into insanity… but he hates war as much as anyone.”

The person described above was Adolf Hitler.

The war all 3 experienced politicians didn’t see coming following their meetings with Hitler was the Second World War. 

Chamberlain’s successor Sir Winston Churchill on the other hand held the longstanding notion that Hitler was a “duplicitous thug.” Unlike Chamberlain, Lord Halifax and Henderson, Sir Churchill never actually met Hitler. 

In his book, Malcolm Gladwell observes that all 3 British politicians who encountered Hitler had had peace and productive discussion in mind (as Viceroy of India in the pre-war years, Lord Halifax had indeed negotiated brilliantly with Mahatma Gandhi.) Adolf Hitler however, had entered the same interactions from the very start with the intention to deceive. Against an “opponent” of that sort, you are better off not meeting them face-to-face. Faced with someone who never intended good, it makes human you far more susceptible to being fooled, than an AI.

When he looked him in the eye, Neville Chamberlain, arguably a man of honour, wanted to believe Hitler played by the same rules. And so when Hitler signed an agreement not to go to war, Chamberlain took him at his word. For someone who never intended to keep it, giving their word is the easiest thing to do. It took just 6 months for Hitler to renege on the agreement signed between him and Chamberlain. 

“If real life were like Friends (the sitcom), human judges would outperform AI…”

As part of their craft, Jennifer Aniston, Matthew Perry and the rest of the stars who flesh out the main characters clearly display on their faces the emotions being experienced (and therefore the thoughts that go with), as scripted by the writers of the show. Friends is transparent. In real life however, people with the intention to deceive portray on their faces and in their mannerisms what they want  judges, diplomats, investors etc to see, and there is a reason predatory people succeed: They’re good at deception. 

This also happens unintentionally:

“The phenomena that is at the heart of all modern controversies is people of different perspectives meet each other for the first time, and proceed to profoundly misinterpret each others’ intentions.” – Malcolm Gladwell. 

The Trobriands is a cluster of islands in the middle of the Solomon Sea, home to an isolated community of 40,000. Psychologist Carlos Crivelli and anthropologist Sergio Jarillo showed 6 photos of different facial expressions to urban primary school children, then showed the same selection to the Trobrianders. The kids interpreted all the facial expressions in line with how most of us urban adults would have, but to Trobrianders say, an “angry” face was thought to mean happiness 20% of the time, while 30% thought it signified fear. It’s not just one group of isolated islanders, the same huge discrepancies in interpretation of facial expressions happened with a group of fishermen known as the Mwani, and classicist Mary Beard explores this in Laughter in Ancient Rome.

If Friends was shown to Trobrianders, Mwani or Romans, they would have taken away something very different from the show. I’m just sayin’ – imagine what happens when say, Trobrianders, Mwani or Romans get into a staring match with… Angry Drunk Urban Person Inna Bar. Gladwell in Talking to Strangers addresses the terrible effects of too much alcohol on misinterpreted intentions in bars, it gets graphic, so I’m only going to say it’s amazing how much alcohol those promising students in top Ivies consumed, and then proceeded to place themselves in situations they could terribly regret. Like, make like Odysseus and tie yourself to a mast if you want to go near the sirens. Have a think beforehand (long. beforehand.) what your boundary is and never, never, never move that once you’ve started drinking.

And then I’ll tell you instead about the time I had a former boss from over a decade ago who was fascinated by Chinatowns and more… “obscure” bars in Asian towns. He told of one hapless person he read about who got into a staring/glaring match with someone who, unbeknownst to him, was a triad member. As he was leaving the bar late in the night he had his hand chopped off. The part that really got my former boss was when a local paper called the perpetrators “unprofessional” because they didn’t leave the severed limb behind. As in, apparently the “appropriate” or “proportional” response is to leave the hand after you chop it off so it can be re-attached. NO I HAVE NO FURTHER KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THIS beyond that my former boss (who is from Brisbane) was amazed the local news article had tut-tutted the hand’s disappearance. Not that it was chopped off to begin with.

Here’s a more easily-Google-able one about interactions that went terribly wrong. Amanda Knox is not a murderer, “just a little bit weird.” But “just a little bit weird” led to a murder conviction and 8 years in an Italian prison for the murder of her room mate, because her “strange” behaviours were interpreted by police officers as signs of guilt or lack of remorse, despite lack of any other evidence linking her to the murder AND in spite of substantial evidence including crime scene DNA incriminating another person. If you read some of their testimonial, just as in the case of the British Politicians Who Wanted To Believe No One Could Ever Choose A Terrible War, the people involved in the Amanda Knox Case Saw What They Wanted To See.

It’s where we need the Sendhil Mullainathans of the world. (Scroll below for a more recent talk of his, titled Think Better.)

Pull the Goalie!

Human personality can be assessed along 5 dimensions, of which disagreeable-ness is one of them. How willing are you to bend over backwards or in some other way tank your own cause, increase your own “chances of losing” something, just to not appear “disagreeable,” ie “silly” or “unconventional”? On a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is a Golden Retriever and 10 is Mr Spock, how “disagreeable” are you?

Clifford Asness and Aaron Brown, friends of Gladwell’s whom he describes as philosophers with “Disagreeability Factors” of 7 and 8.5, “test their offbeat theories with mathematical precision,” because it’s fun to espouse the absurd with a grain of truth. They found some jarring differences between what made sense mathematically for a coach to do, and what was socially acceptable (Math Is Fun!) and so they published a paper titled Pulling the Goalie: Hockey & Investment Implications.

In the last minute, minute-and-a-half of a hockey match, a coach of a losing team “typically” pulls the goalie and subs an extra player on Offense. The idea is that you increase your risk of losing the game (with a wider margin) in exchange for a chance to even the score, with the extra attacking player. Asness and Brown (who btw are also successful Wall Street money managers) however proved that in order to have a real chance at evening the score, if you are 1 goal down you should be pulling your goalie….. 5 minutes and 40 seconds before the final whistle blows. (And if you’re 2 goals down, you should sub your goalie with a whopping 11 minutes and 40 seconds left in the game). Wait for it –

NO ONE ACTUALLY DOES THAT. It’s too “disagreeable” a move for a coach. Say you’re the coach. If the gamble doesn’t pay off, everyone is going to hate you for making the call. Fans would be mad at you for making the game more lopsided (read: “boring” because of the wider goal margin -it doesn’t provide the optimal amount of entertainment for people watching the game), and players whose respect you need to command would resent your call because it’s easier to lose a close game than a “landslide” one. This greatly increases the “cost” of making that call.   

Now, Aaron Brown is obviously a quant, a maths guy. But here’s more about him – he grew up with a mum who had a Masters in Chemistry and a dad who had a PhD in Physics, and there was this time Dad Brown inherited a “strange contraption” from his Airforce employers. “Something” a brilliant-but-troubled predecessor had received a little bit of funding to build… Predecessor kills himself and no one knows what the many-tubed many-geared thing does, so Dad Brown volunteers to take it up… then puts it in his basement and tells his teenaged son (that’s Aaron Brown), “Hey, take a look if you want. Like its a box of Legos.“

Brown describes the time, “I stared at (mysterious machine) for hours and hours… it did something when you turned it on, but (his dad’s predecessor’s) notes were indecipherable and he’d burned some of them…”

They never figured out what the machine really did, “But this is how you raise a child with a Disagreeability Factor of 8.5.” Um, ok. For the rest of us plebes with no access to Mysterious Airforce Machines can we adopt a rabbit with a Disagreeability Factor of 8.5.

A-nyway. During the Seattle recession when he was growing up, Aaron Brown decided he needed a “marketable skill,” and taught himself poker. He goes on to describe how he discovers a “big money game in the basement of a local tavern” and that it’s not that difficult to be good enough at the games that he can win consistently. He says the “adults” let him win some money and walk back out, “but I was a shy kid, it took every ounce of courage I had to walk in there…. There are people who could have done that and it would not be a big deal, but for me it was the most traumatic event of my life.. I was 14.”

Know what I’m thinking? Seattle Must Be A Really Nice Buncha People! 😀 They’re nice to other people’s kids 🙂 Young Aaron Brown went on to Applied Mathematics at Harvard and an MBA from U of Chicago, becoming an established author on risk management and gambling-related issues, his website receiving several Forbes awards for Theory and Best Practice in Investing.

While the college students and young professionals in Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers stories were getting sh*t-faced and putting themselves in questionable situations, 14 year old Aaron Brown began his long and profitable career in probability games…. playing poker. In bars. 

Epilogue: 

 

Sendhil Mullainathan in Think Better describes replacing students’ 3rd period class with an experiment: Each pair of students is given a ball. One student is to take the ball from the other student. Lots of grappling ensues, and after 10 minutes the student trying to get the ball is asked, “Did you ever ask for the ball?” To which they reply “The other student would never have given it to me.”

And so they ask the other student, “Would you have given them the ball if they simply asked?” To which the reply, “Of course, it’s just a f-ing ball.”

Think Better… 

 

 

 

 

For my late father and all parents.

Around us at the time when I first got my driver’s license were youth who were… shall we say rather casual, about road safety: “I j-ust dropped my housekeys (while driving). When I looked up, the lamp post was rushing up to meet me.” I was 17, and with no mishaps, had passed my driving tests first try.

My father kept a plain notebook and pen in the glove compartment. Every time I drove with one of my parents in the car, I was to write down how much driving time I’d chalked up, and either parent would sign off. (Pop also printed calendars, splitting up various books he wanted me to read into 15 or 20 pages a day, where I needed to sign each day to confirm I’d read those pages. He threatened to quiz me. He only really did it once with one of the books and, satisfied, never did it again Thank GOODNESS ok, I really HATED the Math and English quizzes!! :D) Anyway, when I reached 100 parent-accompanied driving hours I would be free to take the car out myself. Until then, I was only to drive with a parent with me.

I never made it to 100 hours. Within the year, my parents were checking out dorm life at Catholic Junior College in Singapore for me where, my father happily noted, the rooms were bare and tiny, the showers didn’t have hot water, and because the building was old (this being pre-renovation in the 90s), all plug-in electrical appliances were banned because they tripped the electricity supply. Nonetheless, I had 2 friends who smuggled hot plates in because they wanted warm meals with rice, late in the night. (One girlfriend got caught. When the cooker was returned 10 days later, it still had the food in it 😀 )

The majority of kids around me were ASEAN or Indian or Chinese scholars, ie they were definitely no slouches at academics and no one was about to mess their future up. That is not to say they never got in trouble. Some boys in particular chafed at old hostel warden Father Tseng’s rules being “too strict” and in retaliation, they put an extra padlock over his garage door. He couldn’t get his car out in time for an errand and was super mad, threatening expulsion from the hostel. (He also got really good with heavy duty wire cutters. I remember noticing him from a dorm window once, stalking purposefully in his white robes towards his garage, daring anyone else to leave a padlock for him to find and hack up.)

He also extended personal credit to one of my roommates who had spent several days in a jail-cell for running away pending a parent custody battle. She was trying to find a quiet place to stay to study for the A-Levels. My original room-mate had expedited her own exams so she could enter uni a term early, and so her empty bed was perfect for my new room-mate, who was obviously seriously broke. (Today she is a much-loved public school PE teacher in Singapore, married with 3 kids.)  

I often thought (fine, was indirectly led to believe haha) my family weren’t very well off, financially. I remember worrying my parents couldn’t afford my government grant-subsidised Singapore university degree….. right up until I came home one term vacation to find a new imported car in the drive, alongside their regular one 😀 “THERE I was worrying you guys couldn’t afford my education!!!” “W-ell…. we never SAID that.” <looks at ceiling>   

I tell these stories because being able to recognise the difference between Tough Love, Just Love and Just Tough (No Love), is so important to the quality of your relationships.  Um… Just Love walks a fine line between becoming Just an Excuse to Take The Easy Way Out. For true worship, true honouring, true love is never without sacrifice or difficulty. It’s very easy to tell people whatever the hell they want to hear regardless of how bad it really is for them, if you don’t care what happens to them (kids – remember that, k?).

Life was never meant to be “easy,” because anything you intend to be useful you need to mould, shape, fashion, hone… thereby needing Refiner’s Fire. How else does one create blades, tools, countless objects that contribute to society, lift others up, save lives, delight, entertain, inspire? Otherwise it’s justa useless hunk of metal. Tough, unbreakable maybe. But virtually useless nonetheless. Doesn’t float. Certainly can’t fly. Oh wait, you need extensive metalworking to shape those wings, also an engineering degree, preferably from MIT, if you’re gonna work on the engine, various certifications if you’re going to fly the thing… because no one entrusts responsibility to the irresponsible or untrustworthy. Why on earth would they?

Now to Range. The Cult of the Head Start began long before we clocked it…

In 1969, a little girl was born to Laszlo and Karla Polgar of Hungary. Both school teachers who had come together over their frustration at a school system that was “one-size-fits-all,” the Polgars planned an “experiment,” during which they would nurture all the children they might have to brilliance.

The field of genius Laszlo picked was chess (because he felt progress would be easier to document). Soon, the Polgars added two more little girls, and fought the Hungarian police over the right to homeschool all three daughters. They won, and so the girls would have trainers for table tennis at 7am, breakfast at 10, and then chess the rest of the day. Once they (quickly) surpassed their parents’ expertise in the field, specialised trainers were hired.

The eldest of the girls, Susan, became the first woman to achieve Grandmaster status at the age of 21. Second daughter Sofia peaked one rank below at International Master, and the youngest, Judit, made Youngest Grandmaster Ever, aged 15 years and 5 months.

Dad Laszlo considered the “experiment” a success, suggesting that if his early specialization approach were applied to thousands more children, humanity had a real shot at curing cancer and AIDS. Hold. That. Thought..

Are You Tiger’s Parent… Or Roger’s? 

Golf superstar Tiger Woods has come to epitomise the High Achiever Born Of Deliberate Practice, the face that (proverbially) launched a thousand Early-Development-Of-Your-Child’s-Expertise parenting manuals (including one written by his own dad Earl). Earl Woods recognised the difference in his son from the early age of 6 months, and by the ripe old age of 2 years when other parents of toddlers were looking out for developmental milestones like kicking a ball or standing on tiptoe, teeny Tiger was driving a ball past the impressed faces of celebrity talk show hosts and tv commentators with a professional putter sized down to toddler height.

Tennis great Roger Federer is the pole opposite. His mum might’ve been a tennis coach, but not only did she never coach him, she was known to wander off for a chat while he played in tournaments. “He would just upset me anyway… He… tried out every strange stroke…. That is just no fun for a mother.” Daddy Federer was a huge stickler for just the one rule: Don’t Cheat. Unlike Tiger, Roger played soccer, basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis… and badminton over his neighbour’s fence. He’s also a pretty keen skateboarder.

I do believe if Mum Federer instead got really stressy, it might have limited young Federer’s learning depth and breadth. If Dad hadn’t enforced No Cheats, Son might not have worked at it hard enough to develop sufficient skill. Not… to be confused with legitimate shortcuts – “cheating” is a big no-no of mine, born of OCD. (Y’know, in case you thought it was about self-righteousness 😀 ) No it’s not. It’s OCD . As in, it costs too much to do. It’s a big freaking hidden cost.

Why? Because striving to chalk a “fake win” places the emphasis on the win instead of on the skill improvement. For kids, this is lethal, it will kill their ability to develop. If they are too afraid to fail, to fall, they don’t try enough. There is no other way to improve except to fail and to fall. Epstein talks about how a toddler learning to walk never cares that he/she falls. We care more and more about this as we grow up.

The other big risk is this kind of cheating sneakily  instils insecurity – you think you CAN’T win except by cheating.. 

According to author David Epstein, there are many more high achievers who do it the Roger Way than who do it the Tiger Way – we just read wayyy more about the (relatively fewer) Tigers out there. Remember how much people freaked out about Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother? Epstein mentions her too – including her own observation in hindsight that second daughter Lulu dropped the violin despite showing enormous potential in it because the field was picked by her mother, not her.

Range is a book valuing the generalist over the lifelong specialist in the fields of professional sports, art or scientific research. Epstein, whose first child was born just months before the book’s publication, blames parents puts it,” Before this was even a book idea, I was interested in (early childhood) specialisation, and you cannot interact with that area without parents being front and center.” Oh Yay, Yet Another Book Counterintuitive To Contemporary Parenting Wisdoms.

**Jake Andraka, 15 year old who made testing for pancreatic cancer simpler by (roughly) patiently testing pancreatic cancer markers found in bodily fluids until he came to one which could reliably react to chemicals they could package on a piece of paper, not unlike in a standard pregnancy test where the second line on the test appears if your bodily fluid carries a certain hormone only present if you are pregnant.

The real need Andraka is filling however is the much less invasive way testing was made possible by his initially fledgling science project meant for a science competition – because getting people to go for scary invasive expensive testing early is a real hurdle. He may not come up with a “miraculous cure” for cancer of the sort Laszlo’s chess experiments hoped to achieve via extensive deliberate practice, but early detection saves many more lives, with existing cures. If testing is made as painless and cheap as buying a drugstore kit, many more people will do it. If you are dying of boredom at your part time Mannings sales asst job to pay for night classes or whatever, think this: You get paid to be in the store for hours and have a think what else could save a few more lives, makes this world just a little better. Rocket Science Phd Not Required, lookit what the 15 year old decided to do. We can all make careful exploration of the tasks we are given and do the creative best with the hand we are dealt. 

Energy you spend on a self-gratifying cheap shot to artificially make yourself feel better about yourself is energy you did not spend on something more positive – a first step, a thought, an idea – that could someday save another person, make someone else’s day a little better.. (You have the power to plant a seed, lift someone else up, make someone’s day – how could you ever have enough of feeling that good? 🙂 If you saw each seed in an apple as the potential orchard invisible, how could you ever say to yourself, “Nope, today I choose instead to be a downer to someone. Now, how many more life-saving, spirits-uplifting mindsets can I kill?”?)

Another inspired inventor I like to regularly go back to is Norman Borlaug. Presented with a fixed amount of land that grows a relatively fixed amount of crop, he changed the crop. He solved a terrible famine by breeding a new species of wheat – a strain that was disease resistant, with shorter stalks to bear heavier yield, so that more food could be produced in the same plot of land with the same number of plant crops.

Borlaug, a diversified athlete who eventually specialised in wrestling, credits sports as instilling the drive he needed to keep at the many permutations to develop Pitic 62 and Penjamo 62, the two early successful wheat breeds. (On the Ted blog, Jake Andraka says he tested some 4,000 proteins before coming up with the one that would facilitate manufacturing a drugstore cancer test.)

(Above: Borlaug on his school wrestling team and later in life coaching baseball. Pics from frogstorm.com and off the U of Minnesota website)

Borlaug Hypothesis, applied in the field of agriculture whereby an increase in productivity reduces the need for deforestation, is a personal inspiration: I keep thinking if you can increase the productivity and effectiveness of what you have been blessed with in this life, there are so many more increased positive outcomes (better relationships, you can be a better friend and team mate, etc etc) and a correspondingly decreased number of negative ones. Next time you watch a funny-yet-horrible Youtube about a potential Mexican Wall, think: Borlaug’s wheat transformed parts of Mexico from acute hunger in the 50s to becoming a net exporter of wheat in the 60s. A decade, not a lifetime. They had enough extra to sell. To feed their economy.

What if Borlaug hadn’t had the opportunity to dabble in plants and grasshoppers as a kid? (He grew up in a rural farming area.) What if he didn’t also get enough opportunity to play a lotta different sports?

In a city, we don’t normally think about plants getting sick, (in our case if we kill a house plant we go buy a new one from the shop 😀 ). But the same factors look very different to a farming community who relies on a crop for food and trade. Thing is, where d’you think all the neatly packed veggies, dairy, eggs and what-not began, before ending up in your city supermarket?

When crop sickens and the epidemic goes through entire acres of plants, they have to burn it down and start all over again. If land you naturally live on is bountiful, you have an economy. “Free food,” something to trade with. If the land will grow nothing (and let’s expand that metaphorically as well), what will a people do?

What do people living in the bountiful land do? Build a wall? If people are motivated enough (sadly, desperate), no wall keeps people out. Or they would die trying. If you helped your neighbour’s economy, you wouldn’t need the wall. Maybe someday they have something useful for you, too.

Among the many awards Borlaug received was the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. Peace. Prize. I mean sure, he deserves many accolades, among them is that he “saved a billion lives,” but did it occur to anyone else as interesting that esteemed Nobel Laureates would describe his achievement as “a contribution to world peace through increasing food supply”? 

In interviews, David Epstein mentions that he was particularly interested in the parenting style of the aforementioned Jake Andraka’s parents and how they had supported their son’s learning, observing they were “active enablers” – whenever their son displayed interest in a certain area, they simply went out and got all the materials to encourage his experimenting. What they did press him on however was to engage more with whatever was pique-ing his curiosity.

(They did however have to enforce a strict “Science downstairs only” rule because Jake and older brother Luke (himself an MIT THINK award recipient) burned out the microwave, gave a cousin E.Coli infection, had pet ferrets running around freely and constantly took delivery of various esoteric chemicals in the mail to feed their experiments. Jake wrote to 200 labs (he was rejected by 199) because when it got more intense he “couldn’t do cancer research on the kitchen countertop… my mum doesn’t like that.” But sure, he started out at home and they had to replace the microwave. No, I don’t particularly want to volunteer my microwave to be trashed either :D)

Anyway, back to Range. In his search to figure out what kind of dad he was going to be when his own baby is born (seriously. It comes up in his interviews), Epstein identifies two main areas where Head Starts are supposed to matter in particular: sports… and music. (His best seller prior to Range is The Sports Gene, about how while advances in technology have certainly assisted athletes in their training, high achieving athletes have come to stick to the sports their body types facilitate – for eg 7-ft tall people aren’t common in the population but they are common in the NBA.)

As for music, Epstein observes that Shinichi Suzuki of the famed Suzuki Method of music instruction did not attempt to play an instrument til he was 17. Suzuki did however have access to violins – because his dad had a violin factory – when Suzuki and his siblings fought, they would hit each other with violins. He attempted to play for the first time aged 17, trying to mimic recordings he heard, by ear. Which is why his methods are so powerful for young children developing an ear. (Am I the only one who finds this funny – famed technique of music instruction for Early Learners developed by Late Starter 😀 )

Here’s more funny stuff to end on: Today we all accept that the gravitational pull of our sun affects the orbit of the planets in our solar system, affects the speed at which they move. But did you know that before people knew that, German astronomer Johannes Kepler considered the possibility more distant planets had “weaker moving souls”? As he then approached the truth about gravity, he was resoundingly mocked by Galileo, for the “ridiculous notion” that the moon “had dominion over the waters.”

Galileo himself wanted to be a mathematician when he grew up, much to his musician dad’s disapproval – dad wanted him to be a doctor (so it’s not just the Asians 😀 )  Young G got “bored” studying Medicine, instead favouring Geometry – in church one day he caught himself watching the hanging candle chandeliers as they were pulled aside to be lighted, timing the swings against his own heartbeat, thereby coming up with the mathematical law of pendulum. My point is this – when was it ever decided that learning technical or mathematical stuff would be… excruciating? Part of music is mathematical – G Senior made groundbreaking discoveries in music theory, it wasn’t that much of a long shot that young G became a university Maths Chair at the ripe old age of 25 (But how hilarious is it, that Galileo Galilei’s dad thought his son was a “disappointment”?)

Because, “when they try out every funny stroke and shot… it’s just not fun for a mother. Or father.” Oh the “joys” of parenting… 🙂

Epilogue:

At my father’s wake, a particular flower arrangement arrived. I recognised the names on the card from having heard them in background conversations during my childhood, when my dad was home (he otherwise travelled often, into remote agricultural areas, in order to observe crops in their natural environments, test the soil, mix minerals, do grafting…) – because they had once worked with him on plantations out of Sandakan, Sabah….. 3 decades ago. Fondly remembered, loved, respected.

When life gives you lemons, read Lemony Snicket… 
OMG was that terrible? Ok let’s try that again:

“At times the world may seem an unfriendly and sinister place, but believe that there is much more good in it than bad. All you have to do is look hard enough.. and what might seem to be a series of unfortunate events may in fact be the first steps of a journey…”

Back in the late ’90s so the story goes, a writer named Daniel Handler decided children’s books were too cheerful. “I mean, all the “Harry Potter” series did was occasionally kill off major characters,” he said. Handler was a Jewish boy whose father had fled Germany and the impending Nazi invasion, thereby raising him early on with an awareness of the Holocaust, “…the idea that the world could go suddenly wrong, and that it had no bearing on what sort of person you were… affected my writings.”

The Unfortunate Events tv series carries a PG rating because of issues like arranged marriage to gain access to inheritance, terrorist-developed biological weapons, and much deadpan (albeit all in a “child-friendly” story universe.) While visually the tv series diverges from the books, the dialogue and especially the narrative is almost verbatim. A voracious reader all through childhood, Handler under the pen name Lemony Snicket is credited with the Unfortunate Events children’s book series that is now also a popular tv series:

“You cannot wait for an untroubled world to have an untroubled moment. The terrible phone call, the rainstorm, the sinister knock on the door—they will all come… In the meantime, it is best to grab what wonderful moments you find lying around.” – Lemony Snicket

“Sooner or later, everyone’s story has an unfortunate event… The solution, of course, is to stay as far away from the world as possible…” 

Snicket’s is a thing about life that we learn early on – it takes very, very little for Trouble to find you. Sometimes, even nothing at all. Because for Trouble, this is fun! Trouble’s going hunting! So we decided hunting season on us was over  we got a heavy sandbag  we learned that a high threshold for pain is one of the best assets one could have we recognised the utmost importance of resilience in parenting.

Ever thought, when things get competitive (which is like, always, over everything these days <rolls eyes>) if you want Trouble not to see you – you know what you gotta do? You gotta be lousy at everything. 

There’s this old(ish) Disney movie Real Steel* after the 1956 book “Steel” by Richard Matheson, set in the year 2020 when people no longer do awful damage to their own craniums but instead program robots to trash each other. (BBC’s Robot Wars, anyone?) During this time, 12 year old Max Kenton scavenges for parts in the scrap yard to build his own fighting machine after the one he and estranged dad/ washed out human professional boxer Charlie (Hugh Jackman) enter into competition is irreparably damaged. He then comes across an obsolete training bot designed to take terrible beatings so the much more impressive-looking fighting showbots that boast cutting edge technology can be fine-tuned. To everyone’s amazement, Atom The Training Bot makes it all the way to the proverbial finals. Because the people who design the Fighting Bots are still well, human – instead of packing the toughness, they have first aimed to impress. Dazzle. And so the bot designed to take a beating only has to be able to land a few solid blows of its own before Cutting Edge But Relatively More Fragile technology buckles.

(To elaborate on human nature missing that “weak spot” in the cool Fighting Bots – One of the hardest things to do when coming up with derivatives investment products was, arguably, practicing restraint. Firstly, setting aside a tiny bit of your profits to buy cheap protection (“cheap” = no one thinks you need it… so why not leave your structure unprotected since everyone thinks you’re not gonna need that (albeit very cheap) option hedge because that market event is “never” going to occur anyway. Secondly, it sounds cool to say you are the first house on the street to be able to offer the client this particularly complicated new product. That however may also mean an increased risk of getting scalped because you can’t easily check the pricing. It also means little liquidity and your counterparts quoting a wider price because they have few other places to hedge the pieces with.

In other words, to get to say you’re the first one literally costs you money. Meantime as sure as that apple hits the ground every time on this earth, you cannot afford everything in any “package” of goods and bads, strengths and weaknesses.
There are only so many hours in the day or ingredients to cook with or funding to channel into a particular area or even simply energy and brain power you might have at your disposal before you need to go lie down and recharge. Resources you spend in one area are resources you no longer have for another. When you want to win badly, go on the offensive, it’s not so easy to spend something on buffering up your defense.)

Anyway this Eminem’s music video ‘Til I Collapse featuring Real Steel movie clips. (Good on that bull for trashing “Ambush” bot; serves them right for using a real animal humph.) Bit of trivia: Eminem is known for studying dictionaries in order to beef up his vocabulary for writing rap songs. In case you thought multi F-word using gangsta rap mega stars don’t need to put in hard work 😀

Hey Trouble, had your shot? Ever wonder if the roles were reversed, how much pain you could take? Oh. You aren’t Trouble. Then that wasn’t for you. My mistake.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

– German Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemoller on the cowardice of certain German intellectuals and clergy following the rise of Nazi and their subsequent purging of specific targets (he includes himself; the above is his confession)

What can I say? Without (emotional, mental along with physical) toughness, all those carefully cultivated skills could end up for naught. Or worse. “Talent” might also make you a target. If you have any shred of ability, attractiveness, or some other.. “covetable asset”, you will probably soon learn that somewhere in this wide world there exist people who can find the littlest excuses to hate you, if they’re not well, using you. Because demons live among us!!! (Y-eah I tried. How can one not have a little fun. Where was I? Trouble will come for youuuuuu! :D)

There are only so many hours in the day. Time you spent bitching  at Starbucks is time you do not then have to beef up your own skills and resilience, do your homework, or even play a few video games <shrugs>

<pause>

Y-eah let’s leave Starbucks outta this. They are professionally required to provide good service and coffee. Without Judgement. (Poor Starbucks. 😀 )

About this time, I then came across the following microshort story on Bored Panda – a little like Screwtape, but in this case the humans need the demons to bring out the best in them:

(For real though kids, please don’t bring any more demons home, it’s already gotten messier in our world of late, and anyway who’s going to feed and walk them? No you may not park ’em all at Starbucks.)

And now back to Unfortunate Events (finally) and how we live in a fallen world:

“Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us… glimpsed the follies… misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother’s wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women..” 

While refusing to have the baby may not be feasible, for future reference if anyone sees HN clinging to me going, “Mummymummymummymummy” it’s likely because she has done something “naughty”, prompting me to request she stand further away from me so I can pretend she is not mine. 😀

<pause>

What could possibly have led you to believe you’d get good parenting advice here? Snicket’s is better:

“If you are allergic to a thing, it is best not to put that thing in your mouth, particularly if the thing is cats.”

Lemony totally gets it.

SPOILER ALERT

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Violet (aged 14), Klaus (12) and Sunny (baby) Baudelaire* find themselves orphaned and heirs to their parents’ fortune, their parents’ home burned to the ground.

*named after French poet Charles Baudelaire who among others wrote the macabre and not-for-children collection of poems The Flowers of Evil. Baudelaire was also primary French translator of English writer Edgar Allan Poe’s works, possibly inspiring the naming of the Poe character in the Unfortunate Events series.

Through many unfortunate events as they then encounter various characters ranging from well-meaning (but often dumb of no real help) to predatory and attempting to steal their fortune, the Baudelaires find themselves in many strange challenging situations. One of the most eye-opening things about this “children’s show” is the extremely down-to-earth truth that “well-meaning” and “good-hearted” is of no bloody use if it is not savvy enough. Evil runs rings round them in most frustrating ways in the tv series.

Thus, Violet must use her talent for inventing, and Klaus his extensive bookworm-y knowledge, to get themselves out of trouble. (Sunny… chews things or plays with dangerous animals, also throwing new light on various situations even as the older Baudelaire siblings have already begun to take more things for granted as grownups do.)

“It seemed to me that every adult did something terrible sooner or later. And every child, I thought, sooner or later becomes an adult…” 

The various crises the Baudelaires’ have to use their wits to escape from include a marriage onstage in a play that turns out to be legally binding (the documents used as stage props turn out to be real) in order to gain access to their fortune, the development of biological weapons in the form of botanical spores that cause deadly respiratory illness and Sunny also discovers that personality (and propensity) trumps simple ability, when evaluating a threat. W-hat’s that?

Sunny encounters the Incredibly Deadly Viper, assisting her older siblings (who have learned to distrust all potentially venomous snakes) with the epiphany that the huge snake, while equipped with deadly venom, is friendly and loves to play with children. Its keeper hauls it about in his arms like so much garden hose.

(On the other hand, the main villain in the film, Count Olaf, is neither particularly talented at inventing nor well read, nor does he manufacture his own deadly venom, but he uses others’ resources for his own gain. An interesting observation about nature and our blind spots – when evaluating a propensity to cause trouble or harm, personality overrides sheer ability. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t say, let my late 17kg Border Collie around the kids perpetually – just because she had the teeth didn’t mean she was always going to bite – in fact we paid attention to “training” the kids very early on to respect the dog’s need for space.)

As the episodes then progress, the Baudelaire children end up doing “terrible things” in the name of saving themselves. To be considered alongside the Complete History of Injustice, which the incompetent-but-well-meaning judge presiding the Baudelaires’ case clings ineffectively to, only to have Count Olaf wrest from her hands and burn. A powerful visual of the frustration people with a need must surely feel, at the perceived ineffectiveness of those in authority.

A reminder therefore, as you follow the powerful dialogue in the clip below, of the breadth and depth of so many, many varying shades of grey that make each party irrevocably convinced of their own position…… and of writer Daniel Handler’s own childhood influences that inspired him to create this series:

https://youtu.be/707LxTUvtMY

Epilogue:

“Wicked people never have time for reading. It’s one of the reasons for their wickedness… Well-read people are less likely to be evil.” Well d-uh. What did the different people spend their time differently on?

“No matter who you are…. what you don’t read is often as important as what you do read…Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another..”

It occurs to me that the narrator in the series bears quite some resemblance to the real “Lemony”; in fact, Handler has been so enthusiastic in his writing as to even change the lyrics of the opening credits every two episodes of the series… With the dialogue onscreen often word-for-word what is written in the books, d’you ever wonder why Handler doesn’t simply play himself onscreen? It implies that being in that role, being in front of the camera, is not what interests him, it is the writing itself.

 

ps: In the interests of full disclosure, there is a Real Steel game for Android and iPhone. Haven’t tried it yet..

“If the idea of illness can become illness, what else about our reality is actually a disorder?” 

The comic book superhero character of Legion albeit obscure is not new, he’s the sometime mutant son of Professor Charles Xavier of the X-Men. In the ’90s however, the Legion character with his…. issues was deemed “too much” for an audience that nonetheless would still accept superheroes like Batman and other troubled protagonists who are firm believers that ends justify means. 

(Kinda in the same way “everyone” used to blindly accept the premise of traditional Disney princesses “all” having absent mums and needing to be rescued by strong men… And then after that we all swung the other way and it’s now fashionable to have “strong girls who can’t be told what to do” ….and goodness knows how many more pendulum swings into extremes we’re going to have before we arrive at the path of moderation, which m-ight look a little like this: True strength is knowing when to yield (and sure, when to not – but most “strong” characters don’t have a problem not yielding 😀 )… It was Malcolm Forbes who said, “Authority is shared only when the sharer is sure of his.” No, not… easy. Is it just me who starts getting worried if something seems easy – wha’m I not seeing, in the risk-reward relationship??? 😀 )

A-nyway, it’s a sign of the times, the latest fashionable lead character is not a rich, brooding dude with commitment and ego issues (and his own Lego Movie), but one who struggles with mental problems, constantly reminding himself he is a good person and therefore deserves to be loved, constantly justifying his actions, constantly leaving a wake of casualties as he barges through life.

In case you’re wondering, Legion is written by experienced author and increasingly sought after tv writer Noah Hawley, who has described his talent, “I don’t write these stories for the rewards that come back to me. I write them because I have to write them. It’s a sickness on some level. It’s a compulsion…” He’s elaborated on that with Jimmy Kimmel, “It’s like Bill Gates losing money when he stops to pick up a USD 10,000 bill,” he has to keep writing. This raved-about series by FX (owned by Disney) was filmed in Vancouver and British Columbia, btw… and you previously saw “David Haller” in…. Downton Abbey. There is an Easter Egg innit where one of his “rational personalities” puts on a British accent 🙂 ) And now –

Spoilers. MAJOR. You have been warned. (Oh wait, this thing carries a 16-and-above PG rating anyway, mainly for the implied drug taking and scary nightmares. Legion at his “most popular” gains a following among the young, attractive, pliable minds by replicating the effects of recreational drugs, thereby earning him a large number of drugged-to-the-eyeballs groupies… (Legion could cure addiction! Except… that’s not as cool a superpower as shooting lightning bolts, flying, or being rich) …and yet he remains perpetually unfulfilled by the adoration of his breathless and beautiful following, instead constantly seeking to travel back in time to “fix things” – especially himself.)

So the story goes… Young David Haller has known all his life that he suffers from severe mental illness, driving him to substance abuse (so he can escape the nightmares), violence (because “they” told him to do it), and attempted suicide (so “they” won’t get him.)

Six years after being committed, David meets Sydney in the mental hospital. (Sydney appears to be in because she can’t stand being touched.)

As their friendship blossoms and they fall in love (yuck did I really type that) a bizarre disaster one day occurs – all the doors of the patients’ rooms disappear, leaving some frantic people trapped in doorless cells and others stuck in the walls. In the ensuing chaos, Syd saves David from abduction and likely execution by a government agency hunting down mutants who have uncontrollable power.

It turns out Sydney’s ability is to switch minds with whoever she touches. (Including cats. In later seasons Syd does things like hop into her pet cat to roam the hallways unnoticed.) Sydney is part of a mutant group known as Summerland, whose nemesis is the mutant-hunting group Division 3. When Division 3 comes for David, Sydney switches places with him to save him… but loses control over his powers, hence the bizarre casualties in the walls etc.

Through therapy at Summerland, David discovers he has grown up carrying around Amahl Farouk a.k.a. The Shadow King in his mind – a 2000 year old mutant who has skilfully honed his abilities to selectively erase and replace David’s memories after feeding on his – wait for it – negative mental energy.

“Whether the threat is real, the response certainly is, and it is often excessive…

…Ask yourself: What’s more terrifying – fear… or the frightened?”

Charles Xavier a.k.a. David’s dad duelled and defeated Farouk, only to have remnants of his Voldemort-esque psyche take up residence in baby David’s head. That’s pretty much the whole first season but with many jump-scares and disturbing moments – for eg David has fake memories of his dad reading a children’s book with strangely violent images every bedtime (The Angriest Boy is a most disturbing child’s bedtime story, created for the purpose of the show) –

Scary? The real Shadow King/Amahl Farouk however, is very much not. He’s an elegant and sophisticated older gentleman, king of a (fictitious) middle eastern country… and furious in the first two seasons that Charles Xavier “who doesn’t know a thing about our culture nor even speak our language” sees fit to pass judgement he, Farouk, doesn’t do a good enough job as ruler of his people. (Landmine alert. HUGE.)

 

Not surprising in Season 3 they kinda diffused that risky conversation by making it a clearcut good guy/ bad guy situation, adding scenes where Farouk turned the previous ruler into a monkey 😀 (well, stuck his predecessor inside the head of a monkey).

When the other Summerland mutants use their own powers to replay David’s childhood memories, trying to piece together the root of his mental illness, they initially don’t give the warm, sunlight-filled images of David-as-a-child running around with his adoptive sister and his beloved Beagle a second look. That is, until they meet his sister and she happens to mention David never had a dog. And so they search harder….

“Human beings are the only animal that forms ideas about their world. We perceive it not through our bodies but through our minds. We must agree on what is real. Because of this, we are the only animal on Earth that goes mad.”

The drug dealer who leads juvenile David astray is, in his archived memories, also a completely different person – instead of the abusive older man of reality, what David perpetually remembers is the face of his then-best-friend and partner-in-crime Lenny Busker (also one of the Shadow King’s victims.) This is one of my favourite scenes of Farouk wearing “Lenny mask” and dancing wreaking havoc through David’s childhood memories, including when he seeks therapy:

Aside from mind-boggling graphics and brilliant music videos that enhance the storyline, there is a larger theme of how we are all non-heroes – protagonists – and how, through the long endurance run that is Life, the characters in the show all go from doing terrible things to redeeming themselves to abruptly doing more terrible things in the name of noble purposes, to trying to save the world in the most fantastical ways, in a tv series that spans 3 seasons:

1) David Haller believes throughout his young life that he has severe mental problems. When he discovers he has super powers and the psyche of another mutant in his mind, he blames “the parasite” for his mental illness AND every bad choice he ever makes. He couldn’t control his powers because of this parasite in his mind. He turned to substance abuse because of this parasite in his mind. He is schizophrenic because of this parasite in his mind. His real parents didn’t want him because of this parasite in his mind. Eventually learning to control his powers after many casualties, David confronts his tormentor, the supposed root of all his problems, nearly killing him.

“Ever tried to un-mix the ingredients after you’ve made the soup?”

The soup is arrived at based on all the ingredients in the recipe. All. The ingredients. To go back and remove some of said ingredients is to change the result irrevocably, regardless whether it’s something you can perceive on your palate, regardless whether you can taste the difference in the end product. (Therein lies your wiggle room. And yes, you can change your tastes as well. For the better, also for the worse..) But it is a different product…

In final throes, Zombie-like Lenny explains to Sydney telepathically that David has spent his entire lifetime with him – Farouk – in his mind, never functioning without Farouk’s presence. Are they willing to take the chance that killing off the last remnants of Farouk will leave David unharmed?

Not wanting to take the risk, Sydney allows Farouk to inhabit her mind briefly in order to get him to disengage from David’s mind, which he has in a death grip – but then he quickly moves through her to possess one of their other teammates and escapes with his new host before they can contain him.

David hunts down Farouk, resulting in some trippy dream-sequence fights that happen in people’s heads – the eg below is when David is hooked up to something similar to Charles Xavier’s Cerebro and psychically pursuing someone who knows the location of Farouk’s physical body (which he wants to permanently destroy – great shades of Harry Potter), and is blocked by Farouk who is now wearing the faces of not just Lenny but also Oliver Bird (the bearded team mate Farouk possessed and escaped in).. And so, Dance Fight 😀 Hold out for the 90second mark…:

https://youtu.be/FzD1Ko7fFeo

(Some netizens think the old professor in the lab (played by comedian Bill Irwin) is the best dancer 😀 )

2.With newfound control over his powers, David begins to use them more and more questionably. Except now he doesn’t have the excuse of “parasite in my head made me do it.” Truth be told, David hasn’t had much practice in self-regulation, he has always had Farouk in his head. The end always seems to justify the means, his sense of right and wrong shifts bit by bit, until he reaches the point where he’s erasing Sydney’s memories when he does something wrong so she only remembers how sweet and innocent he was when she first fell for him. (Sound familiar? Isn’t that just a step away from what Farouk did to him?) He also uses his powers to make her always agree with him. His justification is, “I am a good person and I (therefore) deserve to be loved.” (Like, Whoa! Seriously trippy mind-game right…)

David’s misuse of his powers gives Farouk the ammunition to turn his friends against him, convincing them it is David who will end the world, and no one else is powerful enough to stop him. And so they wrestle.

“But my dreams – they are as empty –

As my conscience seeks to be…”

https://youtu.be/TcdaTzRu5ek

“No. More. Violence!”

“- Or what, more violence?”

David – Legion – now becomes the new supervillain and his friends reluctantly accept that in order to save the world David’s going to have to be either in therapy or taken down. In other words, his friends – esp Syd, after Farouk shows her what David has really done to her without her knowledge or consent – dupe him into locating Farouk so they can enlist Farouk’s help in containing him. David. (Yes, really. In fact it is only Switch in Season 3, having not yet been “wronged” by David, who refuses to help Farouk throughout, rationalising that David is after all still human.)

3. Disillusioned, David escapes his containment facility with best friend Lenny and sets up a giant drug den with a house-sized pig for his followers to suckle their drugs out of searches far and wide for mutants with time-travelling abilities, coming across Jia-Yi a.k.a Switch (played by Lauren Tsai*), a juvenile time-traveller-in-training just coming into her extraordinary abilities. What he wants is easy enough to understand – he wants to end Farouk before Farouk can ever duel Charles Xavier and possess him. (Ever thought David spends a lot of effort travelling back in time to undo his original circumstances and no effort living with what he’s got?)

*In interviews, Tsai has credited Youtube videos of Japanese reality show Terrace House with helping her at audition to get the part (Switch speaks both Chinese and Japanese and is almost completely deviant from the comic book Switch), and her self-taught (also thru Youtube) artistic skills were later incorporated into the Legion storyline as well..

With Switch’s help, David travels back in time and eventually decides to pick a big fight with his dad, that escalates into an intended fight to the death (because then he decides it’s the dad’s fault for giving him up, causing his deep seated insecurity and neediness) foiled only by the arrival of Farouk from the Future, to warn his past self.

So NOW we’re off to the races, and it turns out – as time goes by with David “free” of Farouk – that he does have multiple personality disorder for real. (Hence his nickname – Legion.) Except for some lapses during times of acute stress, he learns to lock away his other personalities almost perpetually. The idea however is that he is not exactly “pure of heart,” or for that matter even whole, and his disability is a pretty “taboo” one. In addition, at times the demons drown out his better angels, the other personalities overwhelming the main David psyche.

When he travels back in time and confronts the Farouk of the past who originally inhabited his mind when he was a baby, David uses his lifelong “weakness” to overwhelm and disarm him (Farouk, powerful mutant as he may be, doesn’t have multiple personality disorder :D)

Redemption, reconciliation… 

If you started out watching Season 1, all the things David has gone through, all the things perceived done to him by Farouk – this terrible predatory older man who uses such a powerful gift as his for such evil – you would never believe the role of Good and Bad guy could eventually become so reversed in Season 2, simply from David then being free of his inhibitor-parasite and able to use his powers fully. 

To love the “bad boy” almost proves Sydney’s undoing. The justifications for his actions, her struggle to end him, her losing her own mind to his mental illness….

https://youtu.be/CoMBjFYjN9k

 

In fact, David’s faithful bestie Lenny (the real one, not the Farouk-put-on one) at one point ends up killing herself in despair at his condition – a powerful visual reminder that even if you should be so “self-sacrificing” for whatever “noble cause” you are pursuing, unless you were truly alone in this world, you have to spare a thought for your (real) friends’ well-being as well.

David in his desperation to “fix things” uses Switch, the little juvenile time traveller, more and more cruelly, until her physical body begins to fall apart from the strain of overusing her powers. And still he keeps time travelling just one more time. If he can use her just one more time to fix just one more thing it’ll all be ok!

It’s why they tell you to put the oxygen mask on yourself first before you help others who need you

Farouk breaks free of the time cell Switch imprisons him in, and exits at the same point in time where David has now travelled – the fateful duel between Professor Charles Xavier and Former Farouk – to warn his former self. While David then takes on Former Farouk, Current Farouk begins a conversation with Charles Xavier…

“I lived in your son’s mind for 33 years… felt what he felt, thought what he thought….”

Over time, the host, the “victim,” the captive, changes his captor. 2000 years as a powerful mutant ruler who calls himself a god, it is the 33 humble years holed up in David’s mind with no physical body, even as David can hide nothing from him, when no “act” nor artifice nor vain notion would ever suffice, that moves the great Shadow King, eventually forever changing him. And it began, without a notion of where it would end, like so many things in real life.

“I’m not that guy who thinks he has all the answers. Writing is a way of communicating, and if enough people say, ‘I don’t get it,’ it’s worth looking at.”
– Noah Hawley

“Was I really this bitter and filled with hate? How petty you (now) seem,” Future Farouk tells Former Farouk, whom David has easily bested with the hand he was dealt in life – his “worst” card, the mental illness, becoming his trump.

And with hindsight, everyone gets their second chance. 

 

Have assignment, will brb…

—————————————————————————————

Cont’d from Part 1… Mark Baum and his little hedge fund team of nerds are on an investigative trip to decide whether there is a Housing Market bubble and they should take on that massive short position betting against it. So they start interviewing housing agents who refer them to the guys selling the loans, these jock Mortgage Brokers, in Dilbert-esque conversations.

Hedgie 1: So… you target.. immigrants. 

Mortgage Broker 1: …Their credit actually isn’t bad enough for him <indicates friend> –

Mortgage Broker 2: Trust me, I’m not driving a 7 series without strippers. No one on the (strippers’) pole has good credit and they’re all cash rich. 

Hedgie 2: I think I read somewhere Warren Buffet said that once.

Mortgage Brokers: Who’s Warren Buffet?

Hedgie 1: …..Does anyone ever get rejected (for a housing loan)?

Mortgage Broker 2: Seriously? They get rejected, I suck at my job.

Mortgage Broker 1: My firm offers Ninja Loans. No income, no job… I just leave the income section blank. (Come on), these people just want homes… 

(So these mortgage brokers are the people who will “save” immigrants and strippers from homelessness. Because Brutus is an Honourable Man.)

Oh, the carnage on culture, the over-use of alliteration… 🙂 In case you’re wondering why I get so fascinated, it’s because it makes absolutely NO. SENSE. Yet somehow, people like the creators of TMNT succeeded in producing a wildly popular pop culture reference. Out of absolute nonsense. What made TMNT fly, where Tattooed Teenaged Alien Fighters From Beverly Hills didn’t?

Turtles aside, take Chanel costume jewellery. What makes coated canvas, bakelite, base metal, glass – even if it IS gripoix – store and appreciate in value like gold (or diamonds*) – when so many countries’ currencies risk devaluation, “just because” it’s got the “Double C” Chanel logo on it?

Barter trade, currency, the keeping of value against depreciation, inflation, governments and politics, it’s all so exciting – what makes that price? We do. It’s all our fault 🙂 The Kardashians get no respect BUT Kylie Jenner surpassed Mark Zuckerberg as youngest self-made billionaire months ago. Who’s Kylie Jenner?

What can I say – Kylie Jenner, youngest half-sister to the Kardashians grew up with the most awful older sister role models, a ridiculous amount of money to fund irresponsible, tasteless behaviour, a dad who is now a woman – all of it under crushing media attention and a powerful social media platform, guaranteeing massive distortion of view. She was 11 years old when the infamous Keeping Up With The Kardashians began. In other words, she has a higher propensity than most girls to turn out pretty messed up. (But YES for the record I can’t stand 90% of their stuff and if you don’t have a childhood that confusing it should be even easier for you to not become a barely-dressed headcase right 🙂 )

Critics of the Forbes article argue she was born into fame and fortune and cannot claim to be self-made, whereupon her biggest car crash of an older half sister Kim Kardashian West (and her other car crash friend Paris Hilton) stood by Jenner to say she deserves the credit. I mean, I wouldn’t dress like them 99.99% of the time <shrugs>, but – Kim Kardashian herself was worth a “paltry” USD 350 million despite all the extreme drama. Her littlest sister about to oust Mark Zuckerberg as youngest billionaire, and she comes out in support. 

Before everyone screams at me for bringing up the Kardashians or in any way approving (of course NOT la, for me they’re like from another planet in some MIB spin-off, in which case I have more in common with Frank.)

Can I just point out that the previous holder of the Youngest Billionaire title, Mark Zuckerberg, and how the so-powerful-and-widespread-they-want-their-own-currency-Facebook came about wasn’t exemplary either. Nor was what happened to Zuckerberg’s then-roommate Eduardo Saverin before the conclusion of a painful court battle. They went to Harvard though. Does that make it all better?

Larry Summers, then-president of Harvard, was depicted in The Social Network movie as being extremely unsympathetic to several well-heeled students coming to him and “tattling” that Zuckerberg had stolen their idea. His screen response was “this is Harvard. Everyone’s always making something.” When asked for comment, the real Summers reaffirmed his position, “…If an undergraduate is wearing a jacket and tie 3pm on a Thursday afternoon… he either has a job interview or he is a first class @sshole. In this case, it was the latter,” regarding the the Winklevoss twins and their petition.

(The Winklevosses and fellow student Divya Narendra received ~USD 65 mio in settlement for their original Facebook idea. They were not happy. They were also mostly “blackmarked” from investing in other tech startups. However, they turned USD 11 million of the original Facebook settlement into some USD 1 bio by being some of the earliest investors in Bitcoin (BACK WHEN IT WAS INCREDIBLY CHEAP OK..). I guess I’d call that Well-Heeled Snobs Ticked Harvard President Off For Being Pompous About Being Right, Have To Go To Court. BUT They Didn’t Dwell, Kept Looking For Opportunities, And Became Billionaires Too. Comeback story here)

Quick further aside (to nix any potential gender-profession seeming-bias):

Y’know, in case you thought only people who look like pugs looks, brains and dedication all need to exist together as a constant, in any equation (more on that later)..

ANYWAY, back to Big Short. Ninja Loans, Strippers (censored below), And A Rise In Housing Prices So Rapid If You Had Gotten In AND Out It Would’ve Paid For That First Class Ticket To Get Drinks With Little Umbrellas Sticking Out Of Them In Bali . And the vacation home you were staying in. In case you wanted to go back. Or your friends wanted to. (Imma simple mama, don’t need a whole billion, y’know?):

It. Really. Was NOT rocket science. In yet another eg of how the Jarringly Obvious went unseen, very nearly everyone placed blind faith where they shouldn’t have – no, not re the instrument or asset class, but human nature. Steve Carell (Steve Eisman in real life) who plays Horrified Mark Baum above says, “When you start peeling back layers, it’s actually really, really terrifying.”

Saying “no,”and the people who “said no” (to horribly risky mortgages) looked wayyy less cool than the swaggering brokers who were behaving irresponsibly. Youtube is full of idiots jumping from building to building with cams attached to them – irresponsibility and bravado can look very cool – and Big Short has that, with VERY big numbers to boot. Money. (And there you thought numbers were boring..) Hold that thought…

In the Matrix movie franchise, leader of the human revolution against machines who have enslaved humans’ minds within a virtual reality world so as to harness the energy from their brain activity, Morpheus*, offers all would-be truth seekers a choice: to believe what you want, take the blue pill… but take the red one and discover what the world really is like, outside the one your mind thinks you live in. 

*Morpheus gets his name from the Greek god of dreams (there’s the method to the madness, all those Magnus Chase and Goddess Girls and Heroes In Training the kids read, that revolve around Greek and Roman mythology (and Rockstar can tell you the difference <cringe> hope of having any future grandchildren may now fall exclusively to our second born 😀 ) – so many things have their origin names in Greek/Roman mythology – drugs (morphine), spiders (arachnids), plants (Venus flytrap), shoes (Nikes), music (Calypso), several planets, etc etc) Btw – Scion Capital, the asset management firm “hobby” Michael Burry shorted the market through and made USD 725 mio from is named after his favourite Terry Brooks fiction, Scions of Shannara (#NerdsOfTheWorldRejoice!)

See, Burry’s original intended profession was Medical Doctor, until he was thrown out of an operating theatre for falling asleep on his feet while watching the attending surgeon operate, crashing into the patient’s oxygen tent thereby getting himself thrown out. (Oh, you thought you had a bad day at school?)

So anyway. Welcome to Wonderland… 

I can create for you a 100% principal-protected investment product that potentially returns 5000% on your initial investment. You won’t even need to risk your initial principal investment, that’s 100% guaranteed by the bank. I’ll even let you pick the bank you want to invest with – whatever AAA rated ultra-snobby financial institution you read about in the FT.

What’s the catch?

How come you think there’s a catch? 😀 Here’s how I did it – First, I placed your initial capital in a Fixed Deposit (or bond, EMTN, MTN or ABCP issuance program… based on your preference re documentation). With the interest/ yield, I bought as many lottery tickets as I could.

The catch is of course your chances of actually getting that return on your investment – in this case it’s your chance of winning the lottery. (Replace lottery tix with various derivatives, the pricing of which are tied to the probability you will get that return).

A ship in the harbour is safe…. but that’s not what ships were built for.. Yet neither do ships go out to sea without checking the weather report. What makes it a…. “derivative investment” instead of a “voyeuristic trip to your friendly neighbourhood Mark 6 outlet” is the extent to which you try to improve your odds of payout by reading the research. You rely on research. And ratings agencies. W-aait..

Your initial return is 100% guaranteed. After all, they don’t call it AAA for nuffin’, Muffin. (And Brutus Is An Honourable Man 😀 )

So which is scarier, “junk” bonds, the super-duper risky stuff, or AAA mega-investment-grade?

Welcome to the world of what happens when Aileen has too much caffeine – because lemme tell you how AAA is the scariest thing onna planet.

(No, not even blaming the rating agencies much – as mentioned earlier, if you think in terms of derivatives, then by default by the time “everyone” collectively agrees something is a bargain (or conversely a terrible mistake), you are already too late to take real advantage of it (or hedge against the disaster – the pricing for hedging that “terrible mistake” is basically the actual cost of making that mistake today, present valued upfront)…

There is some value in this view – if you generally think in this way, you would not see value in what is attractive right now – you would perpetually see value in flaws and imperfections and would instead be looking for an ability to improve… The world has enough people who vie for the immediately attractive/ high achieving, they will already be very well taken care of…

(What’s an easy sports analogy – coach has two players, one whose skills have been honed and sharpened, another who has never been trained. If they’re producing close to the same results, which would you pick? I’d pick the slightly worse-performing, never been trained one – yup because with the right training think where the diamond in the rough could go. When you add a massive competitive push for results on a regular basis and with a rigid time frame however, no one has the time to polish a bloody…. rock that you also have to convince everyone else is actually a diamond :D)

A-nyway, lemme get back to my I Hate AAA Rant. So AAA is an Absolute Safest Investment. Many more AAA investors are pensioners or in some other way the Extremely Risk Averse than those who take on say, non-principal protected equity derivatives where you can potentially lose everything you put in. The majority of people who were told something was AAA would happily sink wayyy more cash in it than if they had been told something was incredibly risky. 

Safe is worst than boring, it runs a much higher risk of being fraudulent. Know what I love about junk? No one pretends to be junk. In an email to investors, eccentric fund manager Dr Burry once described how his profile on Match.com had read, “I am a medical student with only one eye, an awkward social manner, and USD 145,000 in student loans”. His future wife wrote back, “You’re just what I’m looking for.” She meant Honest. 

Fake AAA is the @sshole who makes you buy them flowers and put out because they think they so damned hot you be dying to be seen on their arm at prom tell your bosses how much of your investment portfolio has their name innit. Think Enron. Entitlement is lethal. (But adrenaline legal! )

Since risk and reward are correlated, you get very little reward for the (apparent) very little risk you are taking. If you create a structure with these things in the pot, you have very little yield to work with. It’s not even just about getting more return, there is no meat with which to buy real protection, which you are really going to need if you bought Junk in AAA Sheep’s Clothing. Nor can I buy very many lottery tickets at all buy any derivatives with a decent probability of payout for yield.

The risky are like salt. They make your entire dish tastier, more interesting. At the same time, everyone knows you are not meant to make your entire meal salt, and no one would expect you to. (Think: How much of our investment and spending is coloured by what others think.)

At the end of the day, whatever your market, whatever your recipe, whatever your favourite Nerf weapon, choice of location for a home, structured investment product, anything in life, you will find you cannot afford everything in the package. You want the heavy, battery powered Nerf gun? You will have to give up mobility and be a sitting duck in your Nerf Battles. But oh, let ’em come, you got the most rapid shooting thing in the bunch. You…. can’t stand sitting still and want action? Can’t carry a big, ungainly piece of equipment around, everyone else gonna see you from a mile away.

Sure you like some salt, sugar, curry, bananas, chocolate and the extra cheesy Doritos things. Now try putting everything in one dish 😀

We used to watch House Hunting reality tv programs – the biggest standout is never the structure of the building, not even that much whether it’s old or new (more because of the wiring and other stuff related to safety than the aesthetic – as I always tell HN, you want to look pretty? Sure! That is the easiest***, lowest hanging fruit. The inside however, that’s not so easy to hack..) Structure and decor you can tear down and rebuild easy, especially when you’re living relatively in the middle of nowhere). The thing no one can hack – is location. 

AND the scariest bit is still yet to come…

So all that is AAA may not be gold. What happens if you then leverage – magnify – it. Which is how Dr Richard Thaler of behavioural economics and Selena Gomez come to illustrate how synthetic CDOs could inflate an initial USD 50mio mortgage bond product into potentially USD 1bio AND because of the “Dark Market” you never knew exactly how much that was, nor the conditions or documentations.  

(Hot Hand Fallacy however can be qualified with muscle memory. I mean, if you’re talking sports analogy… Not such a fallacy because muscle memory is real, I mean…)

Now, what’s the other thing we have left to assumption? When you get a “guaranteed” product, you probably assumed that guarantee was solid. If AAA can fail however (Ok, stop screaming) – if AAA can fail, even after your hard-fought battle to make the right investment call, think – your counterpart may not be able to pay you your winnings.

Rabbithole. Iceberg. 

This is why so many dealing room people, for all their logical…. math-ness, brashness, alpha-ness…. are superstitious. Religious. Almost 2 decades ago, in the dealing room in HSBC Singapore, I remember our then-head of the dealing room saying we had had a good year and – non-Christians please bear with him a moment while he leads the Christians in a prayer of thanksgiving.

You can financial-model til the cows come home, at some point you will realise the extent to which you are in control of nothing. (Go back and read the many ways in which one can blow holes in the way in which we assess market risk and ratings. Or anything, really.) They once said about the Titanic – unsinkable. Go back and see how they were raving in those days about that Marvel of New Technology (at the time) that was supposed to be Iceberg–proof. I remember hearing people quipping about “Iceberg Theory” – all these highly sensitive navigational instruments, just as the default probability calculators I was once sent to cut my teeth on pick up the tiniest of movements in risk – o.o5% increase in default risk, that kinda thing. But you hit a big enough Iceberg and it’s all going down anyway.

So you’ve seen the proverbial It’s-Cool-To-Sell-Scary-Mortgages, daredevil-jumping-between-tall-buildings videos. What happens next?

(Couldn’t find a shorter one – skip to minute 2.5 for the ending. The not boring, but horrifying numbers:

“For every 1% unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die…” Quora discussion here. Words are nothing without numbers. The reverse is also true. And at the end of it all, except for those two youths dancing around right after someone agrees to finally trade with them, even the few people who saw it coming and profitted immensely were not proud of it. No one was happy.

Epilogue:

There’s this scene in the movie where Brad Pitt helps the youths unwind their positions and take profit. He does so while on vacation, dumping some USD 200 mio in securities via wifi connection from a pub in Exmouth, Devon, “which smells like sheep.”

After that, The Powder Monkey pub where Pitt’s character Rickett (Ben Hockett in real life) offloaded the massive trade from 3,600 miles away liked to publicise how solid their wifi connection was 🙂

The difference between D’you Smell The Money Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) and the irresponsible, predatory mortgage brokers is rather like that of fictitious character Mike Wagner, COO and right hand to Bobby Axelrod, and the “sushi plebes” he yells at in the clip below (sorry bout the language – one thing they ALL have in common, the horrible language 😀 ), while dining with a Performance Coach (lika Psyche Evaluation Guy) he’s considering hiring to keep his traders in top form and mentally healthy.. (Axelrod is loosely based on real life hedge fund manager Steve Cohen – on a further aside, David Levien, one of the creators of the show, has estimated “at least 50” Wall Streeters have said a character in Billions is based on them):

(And then rather predictably “Wags” goes on a huge rant all the way down the sushi counter at the plebe “disrespecting” the sushi by among others speaking loudly on his cellphone 😀 well at least he remembered to lower back down his voice speaking to the chefs haha)

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble, it’s what you know that isn’t so.”  – Mark Twain, but also a bunch of other humorists. 

Incredibly apt opening for the movie. I feel the need to step up my own game <digs deep>: Those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music. 

To “short sell” in trading is to sell something you don’t yet own. Roughly, it’s a means of financing, like leverage, or borrowing money in order to invest for a bigger return than you could otherwise get, and it allows you to take on a much bigger position.  

You are betting that when you have to pay up your debt – “cover the short,” ie actually buy the thing you’ve sold before you owned it in order to make good on the sale, it’ll now be much cheaper. Instead of Buy Low Sell High, this is Sell High First, And Sell Much More Than You Have Money In Your Pocket To Buy, Buy Low Later (Hopefully!) It’s considered riskier (d-uh) and only for “sophisticated” investors, governed by various restrictions put in place to rein in the trigger-happy cowboys. You “short” when you believe something is priced too high, it’s where the phrase “don’t sell yourself short” comes from.  

A few people (financial journalist Michael Lewis estimates about 20) profited from betting against the US housing market, by seeing what no one else did. OR rather, what no one else could believe they were seeing. 20 people, out of the hundreds of thousands who didn’t see it. What was different about those 20 people?

I have a constant fascination with mispricing or rather, differences in opinion, of what something should cost. It’s in practically everything. No, don’t just think stocks, bonds, derivatives of. Think What Those Companies Produce – movies, clothing, toothpaste…. bottled water? Clean air? Like in HN’s one-time favourite movie, The Lorax – how clean air is sold by the people who keep pollution high.

So a prevailing theme is People Creating The Need/Problem So They Can Sell The Fix. (Bonus Question: Which superhero movie out now has a similar storyline?) It’s easy to be the Hero with a Fix when the problem was one you created in the first place.. (Mind. Blown.)

So anyway. The price of something, how valuable something is, how risky something is, the value and risk we place on something, is irrevocably tied to our personalities – and we all know what head cases we can be 🙂

I’ve said flippantly (from over a decade spread out in 7 bank dealing rooms, thanks to 3 mergers – 2 of ’em hostile, 5 reporting line changes in 3 years during the one that was not hostile) that lotsa dealing room professionals would’ve been “flagged” for things like ADHD, OCD, etc etc during their Early Learning Years, had they been evaluated by today’s benchmarks. Now go watch the main characters in Big Short 😀

Ryan Gosling, playing Mr D’you-Smell-The-Mon-ey investment bank Salesperson Extraordinaire Jared Vennett, appears to be the most “normal” (if arrogant and unapologetically self-serving). ONE sales guy, out of the thousands and thousands out there, who saw the market about to tank and created his own commissions opportunity (not… fake problem to fake-fix). He also offloaded enough risk from his bank employer’s books so he could hold the rest of his client trade positions long enough for the market to turn in his clients’ favour, legitimately. “Yes, I’m going to make an obscene amount of money from selling you this, but you won’t care because you’re going to make a huge amount of money too.” But no one would call him a hero. With a fix.

Make way, Jimmy, dis da REAL Bond Man: Jared Vennet (Greg Lippmann in real life) with his Jenga Blocks sales pitch. This the scene where a wrong number has led to Vennet (who works at Deutsche Bank) meeting this little hedge fund. Vennett knows he’s about to present a highly unpopular sales pitch. He’s also coming in having faced ridicule and contempt for his idea. Clock also the Asian Maths Specialist Who “Doesn’t Speak English”. (Seriously, even if Vennett’s Jenga preso bores you, stick around for the 2 mins 45 seconds mark in the video below when he trots out the Asian Person 😀 )

(I just think no one may be aiming for second place, BUT Second in Maths Competition With Interpersonal Skill Enough To Make That Meeting- Sell That Trade m-ight be worth more in life and salaries IF First in Maths is barely human anymore 😛 Also, of course the Chinese dude has a right to be offended at the racism….. but why not just use it to his advantage to close the deal haha)

As for the hardcore traders, they’re mostly nerds with various tics – Brad Pitt’s character in the movie is germ freaky and obsessive-compulsive, 2 hedgies have had devastating life tragedies they never talk about, 1 other hedgie is Special Needs AND lost an eye to cancer during his childhood… And then there are the 2 youth very patiently trading out of their dad’s basement, having grown the USD 110,000 startup money their dad gave them into USD 12 mio via the very humble strategy of buying cheap* options – losing very little at a time if they are wrong, but making much, much more, on the very few times they are right… It’s a similar frame of mind that helps them identify and short the housing market as featured in the movie; they then turned ~USD 15 mio into ~USD 120 mio – BUT they almost never even made it into the market in the first place, because they were so green and didn’t know what documentation needed to be in place to access the market.)

*”Cheap” because at time of purchase the market gave those conditions very low probability of occurring. (Mispricing!!) As more and more participants believe those conditions might happen, the options increase in value. So a general rule in financial derivatives is if you always go with what the majority believes (probability of what you are betting on occurring being the driving factor in pricing), your trade will always be “expensive,” not “cheap”. (Not… that some people don’t choose “expensive” anyway – but at least you need to know it’s expensive, and WHY you are choosing it.)

While The Big Short is based on true life, most characters requested some discretion – the only character using his real name is the “eccentric” fund manager Michael Burry – who has said openly he likely had a mild form of Asperger’s which was not diagnosed in his own childhood, a realisation he came upon after his own son has now been diagnosed with the same…

I’ve been told that people with Asperger’s “lack empathy” – Christian Bale, despite also playing Batman, of all things, is known for being a very dedicated method actor** – in this movie he plays Burry with absolute perfection, including the scenes showing him having the stomach to sit and wait through the terrifying calm before the market tanks exactly like he predicted expected, while holding a massive, massive short position.  (Just… barely. Producer Adam McKay says Burry still developed stomach problems from the position.)

AND – get this – with his boss and investors screaming at him about the position, Dr Burry locks in investor funds so they can’t take their money out before he is proven right.

If you didn’t have Asperger’s and your fund manager did this with huge amounts of your money, you would go batsh*t. 

**Bale has been known to put so much dedication and research into his roles that when playing former US Vice President Dick Cheney, well-known for his heart problems, his knowledge of heart attack symptoms in discussion while filming saved his director’s life.

Now, another (vaguely entertaining) think – how many (albeit undiagnosed) OCD, ADHD, etc etc grownup professionals are likely to end up in say, the education field? As opposed to those who make a living in say, trading? How many educators would make “good” traders? Would we want them to? If we looked at everyone through the same eyes though, we might fail to see some value, we might miss … opportunity. And that’s an awful waste.

The real Dr Burry has said in interviews that he felt no fear taking on the massive sell-short position, despite usually not trading in that way at all, because in that instant he was absolutely certain. 

The fund Burry was managing made ~USD 725 mio from the trades featured in the movie (Burry’s own share being USD 100 mio). Within about a year ~USD 730 mio had been withdrawn from the fund. No one was happy. Dr Burry calmly says, “There were people who made tens of millions off this (trade) and were still pretty upset.” 

How many Michael Burrys would’ve thrived in the education field? With little kids. Would we want them to? If we looked at everyone through the same eyes, we might fail to see some value, we might miss … opportunity. And – why yes, that’s an awful waste. 🙂

Most sophisticated investors weren’t looking carefully enough at what they were buying. How could they, you say? Because what they were buying was thousands and thousands of home loans that had been repackaged. Because “WHO reads thousands and thousands of loan terms and conditions?” Because “WHO doesn’t pay their home loan/mortgage?” Because no matter how smart we get with the things we make, the wonderful AND terrible truth is, the man behind the curtain is still we are still human.

As for the non-sophisticated investors – people ended up not having only one mortgage. Because the terms of the loans were either not explained clearly, or else misrepresented altogether. Some people had five mortgages. Y’know, that thing about borrowing in order to magnify your investment position – magnify the risk, magnify the return…

The late great Anthony Bourdain uses Fish Stew Analogy (yes I know this scene is also at the end of the Jared Vennett Salespitch video) to explain “asset repackaging:”

“No Fish Toe!” (Private joke ;D )

Most people didn’t check how old that fish was, they assumed when it went into the stew it was good enough. However Dr Burry’s first request of his fresh new hire with the shiny impressive Business School degree is to pull information on the thousands of mortgage loans that are dumped into the asset repackaging cookpot. This is met with raised eyebrows from both subordinates and superiors, because “No one reads them.” (Indeed, you would see in the movie that even to pull the information garners raised eyebrows from his freshie hire – and freshie hire is not even the one reading it, Dr Burry intended to read the loan terms himself.)

See, instead of glitzy parties, or car shopping (both of which he can more than afford), Dr Burry wants to read what others find “unreadable”. I. Know. Why would anyone prefer to read thousands of loan contracts over fighting to be the It Guy or Girl at a party? Because we are all different. Shouldn’t that just be awesome?? 

If you are someone who likes staying in, earphones blasting music only you can understand, to read thousands of loan contracts, aren’t you grateful for the fruitcakes who like to party so you don’t have to? 😀

This is how Burry discovers what two year olds know instinctively – that fish don’t have toes (except maybe in highly polluted areas). That you can’t “un-rotten” something by putting it in a pot (though you can legitimately create a great stew out of fairly good fish that is simply not sushi-grade). It’s not rocket science, it’s common sense, that fish don’t have toes. That people with shaky financial situations simply should not take out mortgages for 5 homes. (It’s NOT “free money”!!) It wasn’t the recipe. It was what everyone did with the recipe.

I used to describe the first Asset Backed Commercial Paper (similar to CDO) structure I was involved in as a freshie grad as “Art”. I still think so, and none of those structures blew up. They were handled by people who knew to practice restraint – when there was no fish available, they waited to make the stew. And those structures are still around today. It is not the structure itself that blows things up. (This the one thing I think the movie should’ve made a little clearer – but then the movie is about the structures containing US Housing Market loans.)

I have memories of former bosses who used to complain that they didn’t have enough proverbial fish to make stew with and couldn’t accept more investors’ money into the structure. (No they were not happy turning down investors’ money – who would be??) But no, they didn’t start putting starfish and sea snakes in it just to make up the stew 😀 I just never realised how significant it was, seeing them do that. Now I think it’s important to observe there are people out there who practice restraint when that is what is needed.

Then there was the former boss who advocated psyche evaluations for his RMs and had few other rules, just 2 big ones – 1) do some thing, (not too difficult because many “RMs” were semi-retired investment bank traders or self-made wealthy investors, who traded their own portfolios or those of their friends – that place was like an amalgamation of home offices where everyone shared floor space and opinions about everything from the markets to food to tv series and 2) no compliance/ regulatory issues ever. (So, obviously no crazy fish stews 😀 )

You got fired if you broke either of those two rules. Other than that RMs were flopping about in Juicys and house slippers with their in-case-of-meeting power suits and killer shoes stored neatly in their cubicles… which often also sported DVD players and massage chairs. It was about self regulation. 

The place no longer exists today, bought by an aggressive investment bank in one of the most well-known failed takeovers ever. Huh. Bet they hadn’t had their psyche evaluations. <eyeroll>

Shoulda just left us alone, we’d all probably still be there. Getting screamed at by Compliance (well, it’s almost part of their job description, we go too long without them saying anything we start to wonder if they are zzzz 😀 ), screaming inane songs on the violently rocking ferry out for fresh seafood.. though that last was… mostly our Taiwan team. Our Taiwan team were wild, loud, and proud of it – their craggy boss once fake strip danced at the company dinner while his subordinates threw money at him – that was actually my final round “interview”. Not surprising I guess, they wanted to see if I could “fit in”. Over a decade ago. 20-something me, eager to get a job – I guess I could throw money at a 50-something fully dressed Asian male to fit in, get a job…

End tangent. And post.

ps: Go back and look at that last again. Senior male boss in banking & finance industry – Asian, late 50s, mocking the banker stereotype on the dance floor, his “Sweet Young Thing” pretty female assistants slipping him folded dollar bills.   

Ok time for more play…

Inspired by the renewed interest in various weaponry floating around Rockstar now, from medieval European armour to the more exotic Asian stuff, that trend of fairly harmless (if you consider fidget spinners also fairly harmless) replicas of otherwise illegal exotic weapons. Think Balisongs (Rockstar has one off Amazon that unfolds into a haircomb 😀 ), Karambit, and I learned a new one recently – “Kunai” …

Not too long ago we realised how serious even grownups get about this when we subscribed to the History Channel, which airs a reality program known as Knight Fight:

(Personally I think the actual fights I happened to watch looked less “violent and bloody” than WWF wrestling (albeit the knight fight site likes to advertise it’s “bloody”) – because the armour they’re wearing is so tough and heavy the “knights” mostly lumber about, run into each other, and batter and break things with their swords or shields 😀 So occasionally, that’s also each other (but no one got very hurt in the couple prelim rounds we watched, they just fell over a lot 😀 …)

For many of the participants both the fights and the creation of weaponry are a very serious sport and hobby… which is when we give a shout out to the Society for Creative Anachronism. As in, something out of place in this time – like the Flintstones sending email, or medieval knights crashing about today, instead of say, playing the video game on their laptops. (We’re probably just one App away from designing the stuff on computer though 🙂 )

Most interesting thing (of many) I didn’t know, being fairly limited to the romanticised Knights of the Roundtable young-adult reader versions: We may think of knights as chivalrous today, but they were actually heavily armed thugs prone to violence. Professor Richard Kaeuper, author of various books on medieval chivalry, describes how the “code of honourable behaviour” extended mostly among the noble classes – but not to others. They were not “honourable” to those who were not nobles. The style of warfare in the 14th and 15th Century… laying waste to the countryside, terrorising locals.. was “…In a way… like mafia tactics. ‘You think (your king) can protect you? He can’t. Our king would protect you’.” (No d-uh, you are the one sabo-ing everyone else’s stuff huh..) History Channel article here.

Ok, so let chivalry be dead but let’s run into each other with armour on, that’s always fun. AND we can keep Colin Firth’s line in this one:

Samuel Jackson is an evil tech nerd tycoon who gives out cellphone sim cards promising free internet connectivity… and then at the right time he activates a frequency that affects your neurological waves, removing your inhibitions towards violence so you end up killing or being killed by other affected people around you (hence the R rating). In other words, Jackson’s “Richmond Valentine” has the same idea as Thanos in Endgame – the systematic culling of the population due to increasing scarcity of the world’s (or universe’s) resources. Only, instead of a giant gauntlet with gems, he hands out infected sim cards. (View your cellphone with suspicion right. Now. All the time I’m watching the Huawei Reality Show I’m wondering why none of those politicians put on the glasses and suit and-and worked out and got the haircut, and……. And yes, the Kingsmen all have knight codenames – Arthur, Lancelot, Galahad…)

Another popular program on the History Channel is Forged In Fire: Knife Or Death, where Bladesmiths Hairy And Beefy (most of ’em anyway, but there are a few women) compete to craft the best weapon. Contestants get thrown curve balls like scrapping metal off old cars in the heats, and then in the final they need to make a historically correct period weapon.

(In case you’re wondering what on earth people do with weapons-making skill – many of the contestants make cutlery for a living..)

(pics from Jamie Oliver- My Cuisine and sg.carousell.com)
It wasn’t too long ago when Park n Shop had the Jamie Oliver knife collection up for sticker redemptions and then you’d see the cashiers calculating pages and pages of the things… Ever thought who makes those knives? 🙂 Think carving blades for Thanksgiving turkey, and I’m pretty sure sushi knives would otherwise make scary deadly weapons..

Edged-weapons specialist, U.S. military contractor, martial arts instructor and knife designer American-born Philippino Doug Marcaida has an armed forces personnel pick up the newly-forged weapon and hack at boar carcasses, coconuts, ice blocks, or a mannequin that has dummy organs (and fake blood ready to ooze on cue – caveat!) and then almost always delivers the much-meme-ed line:

Except apparently because this still counts as a “family show” (I said, apparently), what Doug is really saying is:

This one’s probably lotsa mums’ favourite:

“Surrender Your Weapon.” That part is absolutely real. Even winners of the USD 10,000 prize for best piece at the end of the episode are not allowed to carry their weapons out of the studio because of the size of the blades 😀

More Forged In Fire trivia here.

According to Scholagladiatoria, Youtuber whose interests lie in European weaponry, movie producers often deliberately give their lead characters ridiculous-looking things just so they stand out onscreen. Most famous weapon inaccuracies:

 

AND with that, I saved the best for last – Boxwars: The Art of Destruction. This the medieval-inspired “sport” that has teams across Europe, Australia, the US and Japan constructing full ranges of battlegear using nothing but reclaimed cardboard and packing supplies.

Give the kids their video games, us grownups want the cardboard boxes.